Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I: History and Its Betrayal (Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism) 3030948579, 9783030948573

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I History and Its Betrayal Walter B. Weimer

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors David F. Hardwick, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15722

Walter B. Weimer

Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I History and Its Betrayal

Walter B. Weimer Washington, PA, USA

ISSN 2662-6470 ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-030-94857-3 ISBN 978-3-030-94858-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Pattadis Walarput/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the personal and intellectual memory of Friedrich August von Hayek

Preface

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it —Edmund Burke

Nearly a century ago the interventionist economist John Maynard Keynes, in the book for which he was most famous, had this to say about the role of earlier ideas in shaping the affairs of humanity: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood . Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Mad men in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.… In the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest but, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil . (Keynes, 1936, pp. 383–384)

vii

viii

Preface

The ideas of Keynes himself were equally subject to the influence of “some academic scribbler of a few years back,” and those ideas have turned out to be very wrong and very dangerous. They are dangerous because they represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the position from which they arose, a misunderstanding which has enormous consequences for how those “civil servants and politicians and even agitators” have come to believe that the world ought to be organized or governed. Keynes and recent twenty-first-century advocates of his and similar progressivist views have come to believe with all their hearts and souls that they know how to control the social and political and economic orders for their own benefit (and according to their beliefs, also for the benefit of everyone else). They wholeheartedly believe that since true or classical liberalism was good, they know how to make it better. Convinced that they understand and can control the order of society and the economic marketplace, they have agitated for the replacement of liberalism by what has come to be called progressivism. And all of this is done in the name of achieving “the greater good” in a “scientific” manner. To assess such views these volumes examine philosophical, political, and psychological topics. Politically they examine the doctrine of liberalism, and trace the shift in that doctrine from classical liberalism to the contemporary dominance of progressivism, a view which is totally antithetical to the insights of the original liberal position. Philosophically they overview a dominant conception of reason and rationality (and its apparent failure) that has led to that shift to progressivism and away from liberalism. Psychologically they examine several conceptions of the nature of humankind, and attempts to show that seemingly contradictory ones are variants of the same position. From an interdisciplinary standpoint they examine the overlap and interdetermination of political, psychological, and social views, arguing that what we know about spontaneously evolved complex phenomena shows the untenability of the progressivist reinterpretation of “liberalism” and the dominant models of “rational” behavior in society. The villain in all cases is a particular conception of the nature and power of explicit rationality—a received view (i.e., one that, as a dominant position, is taken for granted) that assigns far more power to conscious reason

Preface

ix

and explicitly directed or coerced behavior than it is capable of achieving. Politically this conception leads to the view that we can consciously shape and control society and our values to fulfill certain goals by the redistribution of resources and wealth, and the direction of scientific research. As a consequence this view leads inevitably to the substitution of “social” justice for freedom (or self-direction) and real or individual justice. Psychologically, it leads to a conception of humanity as rational epistemic agents who are in control only to the extent that all the factors governing our behavior are made subject to conscious organization and direction by explicit reason. Methodologically, it leads to the idea that there is a method, the scientific method, that leads to proven knowledge claims when correctly applied. Therapeutically, it leads to the idea that adequate treatment of our contemporary neuroses and alienation, stemming from the existential predicament and alienation of modern humanity, consists in intervention with algorithms (either behavioral or cognitive) to make the “client” fit a preconceived model of adequate adjustment or “rational” behavior. Against this false conception of reason and its role in our affairs, which I have called rationalist constructivism, and the pretense of method and knowledge, which is the substitution of scientism for science, history shows that far more adequate and informative conceptions of rationality, reason, and method (as well as the nature of humanity and our attunement to the environment) have been available in numerous areas, often for millennia or at least centuries. Those conceptions, which emphasize the spontaneous evolution of complex orders, the nature of freedom and the rule of law, the tacit dimensions of cognition and society, the parallels between science, society, and cognition, and much more, must be studied to see how superior views were abandoned or distorted by the rise of rationalist constructivism and scientism stemming from the progressivist movement from the period of the Enlightenment to the present. This first volume takes an historical approach to show that many advances in philosophy and scientific methodology have repudiated rationalist constructivism and scientism, while at the same time developments in social or “moral” science areas (such as economics, linguistics, psychology, and political “science”) have unwittingly and uncritically accepted and fostered constructivist doctrines. The net result

x

Preface

is that the social studies and humanities are contributing to the destruction of humanity and society rather than advancing our understanding of either. We have come to the point that, through intellectual error, our best intentions have been leading us to disastrous consequences. We have unwittingly paralleled the case of the apocryphal immigrant lady who, when confronted with a question on an immigration form that asked “Do you advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence?” thought carefully for awhile and then wrote down “force,” because she reasoned that it was somehow more civilized than violence. Our society is now rephrasing the question to “Do you advocate the destruction of civilization (including democratic government and the spontaneous order in economics) through ignorance or error?” In this case, since none of us want to admit our inevitable ignorance, we check “error” as the more “reasonable” alternative. But both ignorance and error it is, and has been—at least on the part of the “intellectuals” of the last several centuries who have shaped public and political opinion. It has been the educated intellectuals, the intelligentsia, or secondhand dealers in ideas as Friedrich Hayek called us, who have rushed to embrace rationalist constructivism, invariably for what they feel are the most humanitarian of reasons. This book overviews why and how this has happened, and what we need to learn to guard against the engineering mentality of the tribal organizer—whether in business, politics, or increasingly, in science and “liberal” public and private education. The message of the chapters that follow will not sit well with many “intellectuals” and those who are “educated” in the recent tradition of Western (largely British and American) academia. They have been conditioned to be “scientific,” and thus sympathetic to “liberal” social and political activism, predisposed to embrace any new cause and to despise any tradition, while having grown up calling themselves “liberals.” Those who feel they already know how to cure society of its ills and inequities will waste little time dismissing the views that are argued for here. The easiest way to oppose a position is to damn its pedigree, and they will lose little time in doing so. That is why we must devote considerable space to the history of the ideas that are involved. We need to see that the attitude of the rationalist constructivist is in fact an atavistic throwback to

Preface

xi

the tribal organization of primitive societies rather than being the “scientific” and “rational” path to the future. We need to see that the labels constructivists so quickly attach to classical liberalism—such as fascist, reactionary, atavistic, class-based, and whatever—actually apply to their progressivism instead of to classical liberalism. When we examine the tenets of progressivism it becomes obvious that they would lead to a sterile utopianism that in fact prevents any progress. But some goals and genuine humanitarian interests that led to progressivism need not be abandoned simply because the progressivist program can lead only to disaster. Progress can indeed occur, but it depends upon understanding the liberal distinction between planning to achieve conditions which will maximize the possibility of growth and progress if any is to occur, and the constructivist attempt to deliberately plan progress itself. It turns out that the best way to actually be a “progressive” is to be a classic liberal. So to the progressivist who “already knows how to plan progress” I urge consideration of a remark from 1650 of the only dictator in British history, Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think it possible ye may be mistaken.” It turns out that the theory underlying progressivism is straightforward intellectual error. It rests on obvious mistakes. Those mistakes betrayed the principles and framework of liberalism. This volume overviews why that is so, and how to begin to change our direction back into something that is actually beneficial to humanity—back to the original conception of liberalism (a task fleshed out more fully in Volume 2). So to re-emphasize, by a liberal I mean an individual who adheres to the original formulation of the theory, based upon the concept of liberty as freedom from unnecessary restraint, ensured and provided by an evolving context of largely tacit constraints, including the rule of law binding equally upon all members of society, and the concept of private property as that which is within the individual’s protected sphere of control. This conception is antithetical to the now much more common progressivist usage of “liberal” to denote one who thinks freedom has been redefined as freedom from want, and the law to now mean legislation directed to achieve particular ends specified in advance, so that equality is no longer defined correctly as equality of opportunity for all under the rule of law but rather as equality of outcome guaranteed by

xii

Preface

legislation. This latter conception is correctly called rationalist constructivism and progressivism. The progressivist-constructivist position will inevitably return our society to tribalism and primitivism, despite the good intentions of its advocates. We can begin to see this by focusing on an example that at first seems to be quite far from the center of such controversies: the historical development of alternative approaches to psychology and language from 1920s and subsequent behaviorism, in contrast to the 1960s rationalist revolution in linguistics. We will see that when examined more closely and historically, central issues involved in that now seemingly distant academic controversy are actually crucial as examples to understanding the issues between progressivism versus liberalism in contemporary social and political thought and policy. That history, and a restatement of classical liberalism, is overviewed here in Volume 1. Washington, USA

Walter B. Weimer

Acknowledgments

These volumes exist because of conversations with Friedrich Hayek about the nature of liberalism and its relationship to the nature of an adequate conception of knowledge and the human mind. More than any other single theorist he saw clearly the inadequacies of traditional approaches to those issues and problems, and pointed to the direction in which more tenable views could be found. What follows is in the main an update of themes and positions he elaborated. Preparation of the texts that follow has been aided by input (in many cases, over many years) by the work of and conversations with the late F. A. Hayek, the late W. W. Bartley, III, the late D. T. Campbell, and more recently the late Steven Horwitz. I also thank my former economics students Professors William Butos and James Wible, clinical psychologist Dr. Neil P. Young, the members of my Hayek seminars, and especially Professor John Anthony Johnson, who provided a near pageby-page critique and commentary. I must also thank Elizabeth Weimer for copyediting and critical commentary, my wife Suzanne Weimer for putting up with the project, and Leslie Marsh for wanting it in the Palgrave Macmillan series he edits, and for his considerable assistance while shepherding it into print. xiii

Epigram Source Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

F. A. Hayek, (1978) New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, Page 20. G. Himmelfarb (Ed.), (1948) Essays on Freedom & Power by Lord Acton. Page 196. F. A. Hayek, (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, Page 30. G. de Ruggiero, (1927) History of European Liberalism (Translated by R. G. Colingwood), pp. 21–22. H. Saint-Simon, (1953) Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Translated and edited by F. M. H. Markham, Page 21. F. A. Hayek, (1973) Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, Page 33. B. Russell, (1931) The Scientific Outlook, Page 203. B. Russell, (1927) Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell , Page 245. B. Russell, (1926) Freedom in Society, in Harpers Magazine, 1926

xv

xvi

Epigram Source Acknowledgments

Chapter 5

Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

B. Russell, (1944) Reply to Criticisms. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Page 727. B. Russell, (1918) Proposed Roads to Freedom, Page 99. N. Chomsky, (1971) Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, Page x, xi. B. F. Skinner, (1974) About Behaviorism, Page 221. F. A. Hayek, (1944/2003) The Road to Serfdom, Pages 19– 20. W. T. Fitch, (2010), The Evolution of Language, Page 468. Bob Dylan, (1964), Song title: The Times they are A’changin. Harry Chapin, (1988) Last of the Protest Singers. A. Ferguson, (1767/1995), An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Pages 8–9. D. Hume, (1875), Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Page 21. D. Hume, (1875), Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Page 19. A, Smith, (1776/1977), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Page 18. D. Hume, (1875) Essays Moral, Political and Litrary, Page 23. K. R. Popper, (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Page 125. A. N. Whitehead, (1933) Adventures of Ideas, Page 32. F. A. Hayek, (1976) Law, Legislation and Liberty Vol. 2, Page 109. Pericles Funeral Oration is in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.37. 1–2. 37.2. E. Burke, (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France. (In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 3. Page 456.

Contents

1

Introduction Terminological Distinctions Scientific Methodology The Rise of Progressivism Epistemology and Liberalism How Should One Write (or Read) History? A Note on the Focus of These Volumes References

2

The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages The Greek Heritage: The Rule of Law The Greek Heritage: Totalitarianism The Roman Contribution The Middle Ages and the Dichotomy of Natural and Positive Law

1 5 7 8 10 13 14 16 17 19 23 26 27

xvii

xviii

Contents

The Twist in the Meaning of Natural Law with the Rise of Rationalist Constructivism References 3

4

5

6

The History of the Conflict: Descartes, the Enlightenment, and Positivism The Cartesian Projection of Anthropomorphism into the Cosmos Hobbes’ Leviathan: Society as Singular Rousseau and the Social Contract Saint-Simon and the Organization of Man The Hubris of Constructivist Reason: Comte, Sociology, and the Paradox of Positivism The Influence of Positivism References

30 34 37 38 39 40 44 46 51 54

History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist Interpretation of Classical Liberalism Locke’s Political Philosophy David Hume as a Tory Historian Adam Smith as an 18th-Century Country Gentleman Malthus and Darwin as Antithetical to Liberalism Continental Liberalism The Nineteenth Century and the Rise of Progressivism References

55 56 59 60 61 63 65 70

The New Enlightenment: Russell on Organization and Socialism Russell and the Case for Socialism Freedom Versus Organization Competition Versus Organization Another Look at Property as a Human Right References

73 75 76 78 81 87

The New Enlightenment: Chomsky on Cartesian Linguistics and Anarchist Socialism Chomsky’s Lasting Contributions to Linguistics The Goal of Linguistic Theory

89 90 93

Contents

Cartesian Linguistics Cartesian Methodology and the Growth of Knowledge Social and Political Thought: Progressivist Libertarian Anarchism References 7

8

9

The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System The Behavior of Organisms Skinnerian Methodology Behavioral Technology Beyond Freedom and Dignity, or Before? References

xix

95 100 105 111 113 114 118 119 122 133

The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road Progressivism Tried to Turn Liberalism into a Conservative Defense of the Status Quo “Liberalism” and Social Action Bentham and the Sacrifice of Liberty for Security Means Versus Ends in the Cosmos of Society The Engineering Mentality in World Government The Organization Mentality and the “New” Rights of Humanity Big Business and Multinational Organization The Organization of Science Research The Switch from “Economic” Marxist Socialism to Marxist “Cultural” Class Warfare References

135

Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric Rock ‘n Roll was a Change, but it didn’t Change Very Much The Times They are a Changin’ Once Again Constructivist and Socialist Ideals in Protest Rhetoric Let’s Live for Today Nostalgia for Old Time Rock ‘n Roll References

169

138 141 146 148 150 151 154 155 157 165

170 180 181 184 186 198

xx

10

11

Contents

Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study of Spontaneous Social Orders The Law of Liberty: Justice must be Blind to the Particular Reason and the Indispensability of Our Ignorance Language as a Rule-Governed Grown Institution Convention as Separate from Natural and Artificial: Ferguson and the Results of Our Actions but not Our Designs What is “Natural” in Terms of Natural Law and Natural Rights? Competition as a Discovery Procedure and a Mechanism for Evolution Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand Government by Opinion Versus the Power of Majority Will The Bankruptcy of Constructivist Rationality: David Hume and the “Proving Power” of Reason References Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume The Selective Nature of Traditional Interpretations of Hume Empiricism, Induction, and Inference Reason does not Drive Our Behavior The First Nonjustificational Theory of Law and Society Why Abandoning Justificationism is Crucial to Philosophy References

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition: Order, Knowledge, and Tradition Order, Knowledge, and the Framework of Tradition Evolution of Society and Spontaneous Order The Fundamental Problem of the Social and Biological Sciences: The Economy of Knowledge Science and Knowledge

199 201 209 210

212 215 217 220 222 223 231 233 234 236 240 241 243 249 251 252 253 257 258

Contents

Benefits and Drawbacks of the Game of Catallaxy The Rules of the Market Drawbacks of the Game of Catallaxy The Breakdown of Traditional Standards and Rationality References 13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition: Methodological and Conceptual Issues Methodological Individualism Constructivism and the Conspiracy Theory The Social Order can Never be Reduced to the Psychological The Tacit Dimension in Society, Science, and the Individual Evolutionary Epistemology was an Outgrowth of Liberalism References

xxi

259 262 264 266 274 277 278 279 284 285 288 294

References

297

Index

309

1 Introduction

It is not, as may sometimes appear, the progress of science which threatens our civilization, but scientific error, based usually on the presumption of knowledge which in fact we do not possess… We can now aim at the goals which the present state of science has brought within our reach thanks only to the governance of values, which we have not made, and the significance of which we still only very imperfectly understand. F. A. Hayek

Philosophy—especially epistemology and the philosophy of science— has been dominated by an approach based on the ancient Euclidean conception of geometry and a particular conception of the nature of human knowledge acquisition. Together they have fostered a conception of science as based upon what is presented to our senses as experience (phenomenalism and empiricism) and a conception of science based upon physics as governed by “the” experimental method in combination with deductive logic. Everything that could be called a science, no matter what domain was involved, had to fit this model. This presents a problem when one considers social and life science domains such as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_1

1

2

W. B. Weimer

psychology, economics, political philosophy, and biology. Progress in such fields has been much slower than in physics and chemistry. How can we explain the retarded nature of such fields, or the difference in type of results? The usual answer is that they are immature, not yet scientific, because they have not adopted the rigorous method of the hard sciences. But what if the nature of what constitutes “science” has to be very different in those areas? What if the subject matter and the nature of the knowledge we can achieve in those areas is fundamentally different from what we can achieve in physics? What if they require an evolutionary approach to epistemology instead of the justificationist one proposing that knowledge is “justified true belief?” Especially if the latter position is actually pre-evolutionary and static? What if most conflicts between the various schools of thought dominating the social domains were actually just squabbles about how to fit the classic science model? Look at psychology as an example of seemingly diametrically opposed schools that are actually variants of the same approach. Mid-twentieth-century psychology was dominated by a clash between two apparently polar opposite views—behaviorism and transformational grammar influenced mentalism. The previously dominant approach was behavioristic, empiricist, inductivist, steeped in the traditions of “hard” physical science, and similar well-known “-isms” and emphases. Challenging the dominant approach was one that was virtually polarly opposed: it was mentalistic, rationalistic, deductivist, and steeped in the tradition of humanities and social studies. With regard to substantive theory and research in psychology and linguistics there appeared to be no middle ground, either as a matter of historical fact or even as a conceptual possibility. Academic discussions, however, are not only isolated from the larger literary and intellectual world, but are often concerned with issues that seem esoteric and removed from the pressing concerns of everyday life: politics and the future of society dominate that larger world, and it happens that the majority of individuals who were then and are now acquainted with proponents of the above views, such as Chomsky for the rationalist approach to linguistics or Skinner for behaviorism, were familiar only with their “literary” work (in political activism, utopian literature, etc.) and had little if any inkling of their substantive or

1 Introduction

3

“scientifically reputable” views. In this larger world their utopian views for the reconstruction of society, although far apart on numerous issues, were more obviously similar than their professional views. The question naturally arises as to whether this was accidental or not, and whether there is any relation between the sociopolitical and substantive views (both within such theorists’ positions and also between them). Usually it was maintained that the answer is “No,” there is no essential relation between the political and theoretical views, and hence no need to even inquire about commonality between them. Chomsky, for example, began Language and Responsibility (1979), by stating “There is no very direct connection between my political activities, writing and others, and the work bearing on language structure, though in some measure they perhaps derive from certain common assumptions and attitudes with regard to basic aspects of human nature” (p. 3). In fact there is indeed a direct connection between such theorists’ scientific and political views, and that connection is precisely that they do derive from “common assumptions and attitudes” about basic aspects of “human nature” and social organization. Seemingly polar opposites such as Chomsky and Skinner, as well as the great majority of twenty-first -century researchers, share essential tenets of the same position, called rationalist constructivism, and it is their endorsement of the constructivist approach to rationality and the justificationist view of scientific inquiry that provides a framework for understanding not only their political views but also important features of their substantive psychological and social doctrines. Without denying their considerable differences on the various “isms” noted above we must explore the extent to which those surface differences mask an underlying communality. Chomsky and Skinner are representative rationalist constructivists, very much in the progressivist camp, and thus far closer together than is often acknowledged. The classical utilitarian socialism of Skinner’s utopia, and the libertarian or anarchist socialism of Chomsky, are both variants of the progressivist approach as well as paradigm exemplars of rationalist constructivism. There is an alternative conceptual framework, both in philosophy, social and political thought, and substantive psychology and economics, that is opposed to both these seemingly opposed variants of “liberal”

4

W. B. Weimer

progressivism. That is the approach stemming from classical liberalism. We must develop it in detail and oppose it to progressive positions. This alternative position stems primarily from the Scottish moralists of the eighteenth century, and was represented most clearly in the twentieth century in the writings of F. A. Hayek. It has been not only very unpopular, but invariably regarded as outmoded and no doubt even reactionary: after all, it defends the principles of methodological individualism, freedom (as freedom to do instead of from want), and the spontaneous and unplanned growth of the market order and other selfregulating systems against progressivist collectivism, egalitarianism, and planned interventionism. Another factor is often ignored: indispensably related to the social and political differences is the nature of the epistemology they presuppose. Here we must note the empiricist inductivism of Skinner, and the seemingly opposed neo-Peircean abductive inference model of Chomsky, in order to criticize both from an evolutionary epistemology (as represented by D. T. Campbell, who coined the term in his 1974) and structural realism (represented by Hayek, Bertrand Russell [especially 1948], Grover Maxwell, and Weimer). At another level of analysis we must specify the psychological nature of humanity—here we need to overview the mentalistic rationalism (nativism) of Chomsky, the empiricist environmentalism of Skinner, and criticize both from the standpoint of evolutionary realism and cognitive psychology (due to Hayek and many others). Superimposed on all these levels must be the methodological and meta-theoretical domain in which the substantive argument against rationalist constructivism and scientism ensues. This will lead to an examination and specification of what the “social” studies consist in, and the sense in which the study of such complexly organized social phenomena constitutes “science” that is fundamentally different from the hard sciences such as physics. The physical science model is completely incapable of dealing with the domains of living essential complexity. Indispensably functional since life began, the social domain can never be understood or explained as nothing but physical phenomena on the physical science model of inexorable “laws of nature.” All the issues examined are related to values and value judgments about what constitutes appropriate courses of action both for the conduct of scientific inquiry and for the future of civilization. We are

1 Introduction

5

necessarily assessing the adequacy of several specifications for “utopian” society in the psychological models of humanity as individuals and as members of the social groups upon which they are built. We must show that despite the noble intentions of the progressivist positions epitomized by Chomsky and Skinner (and in economics by Keynes and other interventionists), such positions are not only incompatible with central features of their own psychological models of humanity but would lead to results that they and their followers would deplore. Thus criticism of their values will be only to argue that they are inconsistent with and incapable of being realized on the basis of what we presently know about the nature and organization of complexly organized phenomena such as human beings, the market order, and civil society. Their psychological theories and epistemic views, however, can be shown to be inadequate. They are refuted by theoretical and empirical research that is readily available even though ignored or misinterpreted by progressivists. For example, while Chomsky focused upon the centrality of rule-governed behavior and creativity or productivity in thought and action within the individual, and the tacit dimension of individual competence, he never came to grips with the problems of group selection and evolution. In contrast, Skinner was well aware of the tacit social origin and determination of individuality, but either ignored or was unaware that the abstract nature of that determination (its rulegoverned productivity) completely refuted his particularistic account of individual “operant behavior.”

Terminological Distinctions Let us sketch initial definitions for some of the less familiar terms that will often be employed. Foremost is rationalist constructivism. Here I borrow from F. A. Hayek, who studied manifestations of the view extensively, and whose earlier terms such as false individualism, false rationalism, constructivism, Cartesian rationalism (and several others) can be grouped together as aspects of rationalist constructivism. A brief definition is this: the desire to regard as rational and scientific only those aspects of behavior, culture, and society which are the result

6

W. B. Weimer

of conscious human invention or design. It is thus a preference for institutions designed by humans to fulfill particular purposes and a tendency to regard as irrational and needing to be replaced by conscious design all those spontaneously formed systems that are not the result of conscious or rational planning. It also interprets those spontaneous orders commonly regarded as successful as though they were in fact the result of conscious design. Over four decades ago Hayek noted that rationalist constructivists assert that we no longer need to trust our future to a system which we do not determine beforehand, because no single person would be responsible for the ultimate outcome, and that would be “irrational.” They make this as a demand that all the “grown values” not visibly serving their approved ends, but which are necessary conditions for the formation of the abstract order social orders, should automatically be replaced. The conventional or “grown” is to be replaced by commands to achieve particular ends. This position tends to equate explicit knowledge of particulars, and the ability to control them, with power. Since, following Francis Bacon hundreds of years ago, knowledge has been equated with power (to gain control), the rationalist constructivist defines the political concept of freedom as power also: the power to realize our desires becomes identified as liberty, and the absence of coercion merely the negative side of freedom, to be utilized only as a means to the “positive” freedom of power as control, or freedom from restraint. Since we now possess a considerable amount of knowledge (especially as technology) about humanity and society, the rationalist constructivist considers it a moral imperative to use that technological power to remold society and our political institutions for what he or she regards as worthwhile purposes. This is what underlies the leftist-progressivist demand for more and more power for a larger and larger government composed of social engineers to achieve its chosen goals such as egalitarianism, freedom from want, the welfare state, social justice, etc. Their twenty-first-century demands have recently substituted “equity” for equality, which is exactly what Marx based the theory of communism upon in the nineteenth century. Scientism is similar in its tenor. Scientism refers to the pretense of knowledge (especially about complexly organized phenomena), and consists in the assertion that the methods, techniques, and types of

1 Introduction

7

explanatory models developed for the study of the relatively simple (in the non-pejorative sense of being less complex) phenomena that are the subject matter of the hard or physical sciences will also be adequate to provide the full understanding of complex individual and social phenomena. Scientism is a positivistic and reductionistic attitude that claims, in advance of studying the problems of the social and psychological domains, that they can be exhaustively covered by the techniques and methodology of the physical sciences. Indeed this position defines as scientific only those aspects of complex domains that can be made to fit the natural science explanatory model based upon rigorous experimental control and deductive explanation. Scientism thus claims that the methodology of scientific research is no longer any sort of issue, that “the scientific method” will address everything of consequence in the “disreputable” and obviously quite “immature” social disciplines. Exactly what may constitute this glorious method varies from account to account, but it is usually a variant of the inductive logic or confirmation theory proposed by logical positivism and its later successor, logical empiricism, in the last century.

Scientific Methodology Scientism dovetails with rationalist constructivism by equating scientific understanding of a domain with the achievement of a full knowledge of the particulars of the domain, and the demonstration of explicit predictability and control of those particulars. Thus the claim is that science possesses a method which leads to a sufficiently exhaustive specification of the particular data points of the domain to ensure that the rationalist constructivist ideal of explicit predictability, and hence control, can be met. No system will be considered rational or scientific if it fails to achieve this result, and only those that are “rational” can be considered to be scientific. As Bertrand Russell exemplified it nearly a century ago in The Scientific Outlook (1931), “no society can be regarded as fully scientific unless it has been created deliberately with a certain structure to fulfill certain purposes” (p. 211). Scientistic methodology

8

W. B. Weimer

attempts to distill the essence of things into as few preformed categories as possible, to ignore the richness, variability, and especially the history of individual circumstances in favor of concrete common features which can be subtracted out from large samples. In practice it leads to a reliance upon whatever can be easily quantified as definitive of a given domain, and to a reliance upon mathematical systematization and statistical precision rather than theoretical understanding. In psychology its most ardent practitioner was B. F. Skinner, who felt that our behavior could not be rational unless we were aware of and explicitly chose the contingencies of reinforcement that he felt completely controlled our thought and behavior.

The Rise of Progressivism Liberalism underwent a radical transformation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the result that its present connotation of “leftist” or “progressive” endorsement of increased governmental control and regulation to achieve “social justice” and “equality” (as evidenced in, e.g., interventionist economic policies, the growth of the welfare state, government control of education and scientific funding) has become exactly what was opposed by the original liberals. Classical liberalism was diametrically opposed to the tenets of progressivism. The classic (or old) liberals, stemming from the tradition of Locke and the Scottish moral philosophers, argued that government should be strictly (constitutionally) limited in its powers, since individual freedom (and equality of opportunity) can result only if everyone, including the government, is equally subject to the rule of abstract law, while allowing freedom from constraint in the protected individual sphere. The liberal conception of justice is abstract—or better commutative—and denies the possibility of achieving distributive, or so-called social, justice in a free society. This tradition was adulterated, largely by the injection of utilitarianism from Bentham (through John Stuart Mill), and by positivism and planning from Comte and the French Saint-Simonians to the point that by the 1870s freedom had been reinterpreted as having command over (usually through an increase in governmental coercive powers) the

1 Introduction

9

means of achieving particular ends. By the time of the formation of the Labour Party in England this socialist conception, which confuses freedom with power and substitutes freedom from want for freedom of opportunity, had become predominant. The progressivist or “reform” movement retained the old liberal label , but before the beginning of the twentieth century it bore little resemblance to classical liberalism except in the name. Thus, in the oft quoted remark of Joseph Schumpeter (1954): the enemies of the system of private enterprise, as an unintended compliment, have thought it very wise to appropriate its label. What happened was obvious with hindsight. The original liberal program, in combination with the tremendous technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution, had produced immense improvement in the population, well-being, and material wealth of everyone in the countries in which it occurred. Seeing this great improvement the intelligentsia turned its attention toward attempting to deliberately achieve progress (or increase the speed of progress) in particular limited areas with which they were concerned. They took the power of the liberal social order for granted , and attempted to control how that progress occurred. This is how freedom from want and control of outcome replaced the original liberal conceptions. We shall argue in favor of the “old” or classical conception of liberalism against collectivist and anarchist socialism by showing that what is known about the nature of human beings, the conceptual abilities of the mind, and the structures of society make it impossible for the goals of any such collectivist doctrine to be achieved by fallible human beings. It is the fallibility of our knowledge, and our inevitable ignorance of the majority of particular “social” phenomena, that provides the strongest argument for liberalism and against the constructivistic and scientistic views represented by Chomsky in linguistics, Skinner in psychology, Keynes and the socialist interventionists in economics, justificationists in philosophy, and all the other progressivists in politics. This bears out what Edmund Burke perceptively noted in 1790 in Reflections on the Revolution in France—when men play God, they actually behave like devils. That has been the consequence of blindly following progressivist programs.

10

W. B. Weimer

Epistemology and Liberalism Epistemically the key feature of classic liberalism is that it takes advantage of an economic insight: the division of labor in the economic market system entails a corresponding division of knowledge. The marketplace is a spontaneously developed order that has evolved into a distributed information processing system. The market, like language, makes infinite use of finite means: it enables one to further individual aims without possessing all the knowledge of particular circumstances that went into the determination of momentary monetary prices. Thus the function of the market is that of a knowledge transmission system that enables individuals to further their private aims without being required to know an overwhelming welter of particular details. All that is required is that an individual knows the momentary price of whatever they are interested in. It enables us to take advantage of our inevitable ignorance of all the factors that determine prices (rather than becoming paralyzed by that lack of knowledge) because it operates according to abstract regulatory principles rather than momentary particular whims. Such a system of abstract determinations or constraints allows for the occurrence of unforeseen consequences when an individual makes use of knowledge of monetary particular information that he or she alone possesses— that is, since the system is not constrained in advance to fulfill certain particulars, it permits genuine novelty or “creativity.” How an individual fares in the market order can never be predicted in advance—any more than what new sentence an individual will choose to utter next. Thus the freedom provided by the equally applied constraints stemming from abstract general rules constitutes the essence of liberty in the political sphere and the basis of economic individualism, or so-called “free” enterprise. And as we shall detail later, precisely the same principles of organization are at work in language, cognition, and behavior. The primacy of the abstract over the empirical particular is characteristic of all phenomena of organized complexity in the social and psychological realms—indeed in all functional domains in which life occurs. This inevitable and indispensable tacit dimension (to use Polanyi’s, 1958, 1966 classic turn of phrase) of the operation of complex systems such as mind and society means that we can never substitute the limited

1 Introduction

11

conscious powers of an individual or group (our explicit rationality) for the functioning tacit order unless we are willing to restrict the operation of that complex system to the inferior capacity of a single person’s (or committee’s) conscious mind. Just as Polanyi argued that we know more than we can tell (that our tacit powers exceed those of our conscious awareness), the liberal argues that the tacit dimension of social and cultural organization is greater than our individual intelligence can ever encompass. The superior power of an abstractly organized social system is precisely that it utilizes knowledge that transcends the capacity of any individual mind, no matter how well-informed or benevolent or morally guided it might be. Such an abstract, impersonal system is productive or creative (as the linguist uses the term) precisely because no individual is in control of its operation and, therefore, no one could predict how it will respond to a particular case. The attempt to impose conscious or “rational” control upon such a system, no matter how noble or socially “just” the intent may be, will result in the loss of that productive or creative capacity upon which the growth of both knowledge and society depend—it will restrict the system to functioning in already known ways that cannot exceed the capacity of the planner involved. Such restriction loses the unintended consequences of our action, those phenomena which Adam Ferguson referred to centuries ago as the results of human action but not design, upon which all progress in society and the learning of novel things in the individual depend. The utopian desire to rationally plan society’s future thus stifles all creativity—which is the indispensable mechanism of progress. The progressivist utopia must actually be stagnant if it is in fact realized, and attempts to secure it turns out to be attempts to turn back the clock to the organization of tribal society. Progressivism, not its alleged “conservative” alternatives, is the road to reaction and primitivism. The key liberal insight in social theory is that growth cannot be planned in advance. How then can social progress occur? Social progress occurs as an unintended consequence of our individual attempts to adapt to an ever-changing world. In that sense it is an evolutionary phenomenon—exactly analogous to the growth of knowledge and science—there is no algorithm or scientific method that yields new knowledge. It is a matter of group selection and change rather than just

12

W. B. Weimer

the isolated “creativity” of a given individual. Science is equally tacit in practice, a matter of learning from exemplary puzzles in Kuhnian normal science (rather than explicit or consciously rational theory), and as such it is a matter of Popperian totally unsupported conjectures that are held in check by the winnowing effect of experience. Progress or growth cannot be planned in advance, because what we learn can never be exactly predicted in advance. Genuine scientific revolutions do occur, and they can never be “planned.” All we can attempt to do is to create conditions in which new knowledge will result from our actions. We need an evolutionary theory of knowledge acquisition that specifies how to create an abstract system that fosters growth and progress even though we cannot plan the particulars of its occurrence. In both science and society we must learn to plan for the possibility of progress (by setting up conditions in which it may occur) rather than by attempting to plan specific items of progress. The liberal utopia remains entirely “negative” in the crucial sense that it specifies no program of particulars that must be achieved. We must learn to take advantage of complexly organized information and knowledge creation, processing, and transformation systems that have evolved with us and that have led us to what little knowledge we do in fact possess, in both science and society. It should not be surprising that we must discuss aspects of evolutionary epistemology, not only for the psychological individual, but for science as a phenomenon of organized complexity, and for society as a whole. There our argument is that the problems and principles of operation are fundamentally the same in all those areas, and that the pictures that emerge in the separate areas of cognitive psychology, evolutionary epistemology, the methodology of scientific research, and social theory, are virtually identical even though the subject matters are different. We must overview that structural similarity, and translate (so to speak) the lessons of research in one field into the others. If successful, such an overview, although admittedly selective, will show the extent to which prevailing progressivist attitudes in these separate disciplines are actually refuted by achievements in them all. The engineering mentality of rationalist constructivism, with its emphasis from Francis Bacon on knowledge as power, Russell on organization, and John Dewey on freedom as absence of want, is an attempt to return to the

1 Introduction

13

face-to-face organization found in the tribe. Any society that exhibits productivity and creativity (of both the individual and culture) in the face of the unknown and unforeseen (the Great Society of Adam Smith, the Open Society of Karl Popper, or the Abstract Society of F. A. Hayek) can never be engineered or specified in advance. That we should ever have attempted to do so stems from the abuse of reason by rationalist constructivism and the pretense of knowledge in the justificationist scientism that has increasingly guided the “intellectuals” of the academic and activist arenas of our society.

How Should One Write (or Read) History? As either reader or writer, we need a theory of history, an historiography, in order to even begin to supply an historical record. There are an infinitude of things that have happened in the past and any historical account must inevitably be highly selective and directed to fulfill the aims and purposes of a particular writer, and thus will ignore anything else. This is the problem of factual relativity, which is as ubiquitous as it is frustrating to the desire to provide a definitive record. If one were given the direction “Observe carefully, and write down all the facts you see” nothing would happen. Without knowing what a fact is—without having a theory to tell you what constitutes a fact—one can “record” nothing at all as factual. A comparable problem faces any reader of an historical account—how should I interpret this very selective account? Why believe that this writer’s presentation is sufficient, even for the limited purpose he or she has specified their account provides? Since this book makes indispensable use of the historical record of liberalism and constructivist thought we should be clear, to the extent that one can, on the adequacy of its account of history. It is a commonplace that history is written by the victors and not by the losers. Political history of the world is concerned with who won what battle and what resulted from it. This is always a rational reconstruction based upon what the victors want history to record and to point toward, and it is not necessarily an accurate account of what happened. Intellectual history faces the same problem. Even the history of science

14

W. B. Weimer

is typically written as if it were a cumulative record of small bricks patiently and constantly added to the great edifice of knowledge, each of which always pointed to where the resultant Cathedral of science is as of today. Omitted are all the dead ends, experiments that did not work, theories that turned out to be false, and in general all the “human” side of the practice of science. It came as quite a shock in the middle of the twentieth century when students of Karl Popper, such as Joseph Agassi (1963) and Paul Feyerabend (1962, 1965a, 1965b), joined Thomas Kuhn (1962/1970, 1977) in pointing out that science had revolutionary periods comparable to those in social and political history. This forced us to examine the historiography, the theory of writing history, to more adequately understand how the practice of science by actual researchers occurs, and in so doing came to produce an account that is more reflective of actual practice. There is no perfect or definitive history of any subject, least of all liberalism and the views that are its offshoots and misinterpretations. What I claim for the accounts that follow is that they are consistent, portraying a coherent and complete picture of the classical doctrine as it has developed over the centuries, and a factually accurate account of the interpretations and misinterpretations that have been made by those who would “improve” or supplant the original doctrine. The purpose of this book is to argue that most such attempts at “improvement” have instead both misunderstood and destroyed the original meaning of the doctrine, and, if their practices were put into effect, would lead us back into a primitive form of society modeled upon the tribalism and central direction from which we have managed to escape in the last few thousands of years. So I put the so-called “burden of proof ” on those (progressivists) who would argue that my account is incorrect. Show me a coherent argument refuting what I have said and I will gladly correct it.

A Note on the Focus of These Volumes Our focus is primarily upon the concepts of liberalism and rationalist constructivism. I must clearly state at the outset that liberalism arose as a theory of the organization and structure of human society, based

1 Introduction

15

upon what is now called the theory of spontaneously organized (or “grown”) complex phenomena. It is not in itself a political theory. Political theory deals with how society should be governed. It is also not an economic theory—economics deals with the utilization of scarce (or economic) resources. But liberalism’s tenets are quite compatible with many essentials of so-called Austrian or “free-market” economic theories. While it is compatible with the Austrian emphasis upon micro instead of macro phenomena, it is not compatible with the “a priorism” and “subjectivism” (as opposed to objective theory) emphases of some recent Austrian approaches, any more than it is compatible with economic interventionism into market orders a la Keynes, or the political interventionism of socialists such as Marxists. Both a priorism and interventionism are constructivist positions, and that type of extreme rationalism and constructivism is what these volumes argue against. Thus while we will utilize and applaud Scottish, Austrian and similar defenses of liberalism, we cannot endorse any form of economic or political interventionism, even when proposed by theorists who are otherwise within the “old liberal” camp with regard to other issues of social theory. Another problem to note at the outset is that posed by socialism, a buzzword from the 1820s to the present. There are far more socialists than those who realize it or call themselves as such. Many progressivists endorse essential tenets of socialism without realizing either it, or its consequences, or calling themselves socialists. Socialism proposes that collectivist control of the “means of production” should organize society and politics. Collectivism inevitably means a dictatorial control (top-down, hierarchical, rationally planned, however one formulates it), whether exercised by a single individual or small group planning board or (originally) all “the workers.” Communism extends this “control” of production to ownership of the means of production by the collective (originally specified as the “workers”), but this inevitably becomes a dictatorship by those who “plan,” always “in their name and interest,” for the bulk of the others. Thus the key feature of socialist “control” is that it inevitably devolves into collectivist dictatorial command by explicit, and allegedly consciously rational, sovereign authority. The chief problem for any socialist dictatorship is the distribution problem—how to parcel out the “just desserts” to the “workers” in a “fair” or “equitable” manner

16

W. B. Weimer

(since the only argument for socialism is that the spontaneously evolved free market order based upon private property rights and ownership, stigmatized as “capitalism,” is alleged to distribute unfairly). In contrast, the market order does not, since it is completely impersonal, “plan” either for or against anyone. Nor does it distribute—it provides only information to participants who make their own choices and “control” their own actions. The freedom of markets is freedom to choose, not freedom from wanting or needing. Markets depend upon the rule of law applying equally to all, not upon the conscious wisdom of a collectivist “distributor” of goods. The chapters that follow elaborate these and more fundamental contrasts in many different forms in many different fields.

References Agassi, J. (1963). Towards a historiography of science. In History and theory (Beiheft 2). Wesleyan University Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1962). Explanation, reduction, and empiricism. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Scientific explanation, space, and time (pp. 22– 97). University of Minnesota Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965a). Problems of empiricism. In R. G. Colodny (Ed.), Beyond the edge of certainty (pp. 145–260). Prentice-Hall. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965b). Reply to criticism. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Boston studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 3, pp. 223–261). Humanities Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. Harper and Row. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday. Schumpeter, J. (1954). History of economic analysis (E. B. Schumpeter, Ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choice it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other, the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition. It must stand or fall according to its choice, whether to give the supremacy to the law or to the Will of the people; whether to constitute a moral association maintained by duty, or a physical one held together by force. Lord Acton Political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.… All institutions of freedom are adaptations to this fundamental fact of ignorance. F. A. Hayek

The conflict we are concerned with has existed far longer than the “academic scribblers” that Keynes referred to nearly a century ago. It has existed in one form or another throughout the history of Western civilization. One way is associated with a faith in conscious or explicit © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_2

17

18

W. B. Weimer

reason, trusts the wisdom of a “philosopher king” or benevolent dictator, and has eventuated into more recent doctrines of utilitarianism, planned utopianism, positivism, progressivism, legal positivism, even anarchist socialism. This rationalist constructivism and collectivism can be traced to ancient Greece, to Sparta and Lycurgus the Lawgiver, and has eventuated in the last century to such institutions as the United Nations and the Club of Rome. Perhaps its most well-known recent exponent and social philosopher in the popular press was Bertrand Russell, regarded by many as the “philosopher of the twentieth century.” Opposed to that tradition is a position which distrusts the power of conscious reason, emphasizes the fallibility of knowledge and social institutions, respects tradition, and has eventuated into liberalism, methodological individualism, the theory of evolution, and the quest for an open or free society. It was championed in recent generations by Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, F. A. Hayek, the Austrian school of economics, the Mont Pélérin society, and others who value liberty over organization. By sketching some of the themes from the ideals of Athens versus Sparta down through history to the Mont Pélérin society versus the Club of Rome we can flesh out the development of rationalist constructivism and see how it opposes liberalism. We can see that the historical opposition is unchanged to the present day. This chapter is directed toward the great dichotomization of the world into natural or conventional, and the conception of human reason and its role in conduct that arose as a result of that bifurcated view. Once the ambiguity of that dichotomy between natural and conventional becomes clear it will be obvious in what senses Adam Ferguson’s introduction in the eighteenth century of a third category—of the results of human action but not rational design—both led to the first actual theory of social evolution and also destroyed the rationale underlying rationalist constructivism and progressivism. History is inevitably “rational reconstruction,” written from the present looking backward, and intellectual history thus depends upon the present conceptual framework of the historian. An important figure’s portrayal of history (in secondary source form) consists in what he or she chooses to emphasize as of historical significance (and equally important, what to leave out as insignificant), and thus it is more informative as a reflection of the theorist’s views than as a statement of independent or

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

19

“objective” history. Bertrand Russell’s (1945) A History of Western Philosophy is an excellent foil for our purposes since his views represent the zenith of rationalist constructivism in the epitome of a “hardheaded” twentieth century scientific philosopher. The views he proposed have become unquestioned background assumptions of the current age. We will use his account to show the unquestioned reliance upon constructivism, and subsequent distortion or omission of conflicting views, that has come to represent the “enlightened common sense” of the times. That such constructivist doctrines can be divorced from substantive theory is shown by Russell’s “late” epistemology of structural realism, which is at variance with the history and social philosophy that coexisted beside it. The tacit power of rationalist constructivism as a common background presupposition is further indicated by the fact that Russell, one of the clearest and most astute thinkers of the twentieth century, did not realize that his epistemological right-hand did not follow his political “leftist” one. Against this prevailing rationalist constructivist interpretation we must retrieve the origins of liberal thought in political theory, psychology, and social and political philosophy. To the claim that this account reflects only my biases (or class status, etc.) the response must be that historical accounts are always theoretically motivated, and that their assessment parallels that of other scientific theories. Although a sketch, it is sufficiently informative of the genesis of twenty-first-century views to expose their inadequacies, and thus to refute the constructivist account.1

The Greek Heritage: The Rule of Law Solon of Athens and Lycurgus of Sparta were law “makers” that have come to represent the traditions of democracy and totalitarianism. That the rule of law was primary was never questioned by the Greeks: the questions were, primarily, what is to constitute a law, and who should rule according to which laws. The Athenians relied upon a constitution, developed over time in trial and error fashion, to embody the wisdom of many men and women. Lycurgus, an admittedly mythical amalgam (see Russell, 1945, chapter XII) was in contrast honored for having designed all of Sparta’s laws to fit a single guiding plan. In contrast

20

W. B. Weimer

the Athenian program is prototypic of the liberal conception of laws as emerging from piecemeal engineering, that is, corrected by experience over time; In contrast, the Spartan program of rationalist constructivism and progressivism emphasized the superiority of explicit rational insight and deliberate planning over experience and correcting errors. Superimposed upon this is the issue of sovereignty, which brings out the point that democracy becomes totalitarian if the majority will retains absolute power. The question then becomes whether the rule of law applies equally to all, including those governing, or whether the rulers (majority) are “above” the law. This famous passage from Xenophon (1918) captures this contrast: “But the great number (of the assembly) cried out that it was monstrous if the people were to be prevented from doing whatever they wished.… Then the Prytanes, stricken with fear, agreed to put the question–all of them except Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus; and he said that in no case would he act except in accordance with the law” (p. 73). The limitation of the powers of government by the rule of law applied equally to all individuals underlies the liberal ideal of freedom—where freedom is defined as freedom from coercion by the arbitrary will of others. Pericles’ famous funeral oration put it that if we look at the laws: “they afford equal justice to all in their private differences;… The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life…we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes” (As found in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Sects. 2.37.1–2.37.2). This is the basis for the conception of freedom as equal protection under the rule of law. Against this either a tyrant or an unrestrained democracy (an individual or a collective) could abolish freedom by usurping sovereign power. The character of laws that apply equally to all would necessarily be abstract and impersonal—they would refer to general conditions (that any individual could encounter) rather than specify particular ends to achieve. In contrast, the laws of a sovereignty with specific aims to achieve will be concrete specifications of what one must do to achieve the specified results. The abstract rules of conduct, the general and seemingly contentless rules, will tend to be “negative” prohibitions of general classes of conduct. The concrete legislation of a sovereign or dictator will tend

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

21

to be “positive” directions to achieve particular specified ends. Thus the contrast is roughly “Don’t make certain kinds of mistakes,” versus “Do this in this specified situation.” This difference was reflected in educational policy. Athenian education covered general learning, while Spartan education taught efficiency and obeying orders immediately and without question. The collectivist mentality of the Spartan was quite willing to sacrifice freedom in order to achieve a desirable end—as in winning a battle. In the collectivist framework freedom tends to become redefined toward what results from achieving those specified goals. Which approach is “better?” At issue is which means to use to achieve a common end. Ultimately that question asks which form of law maximizes progress and best organizes a society. The “negatives” seem to be disorganized in comparison, but consider the question of whether the laws are natural or conventional. The Greeks distinguished natural (physei) from conventional (nomo) and deliberate decision (thesei ). Since laws are not physical objects, we now ask whether they are conventions arising over time or deliberate products of reason. The myth of Lycurgus answers thesei, and claims that as a strong point in its favor. The Athenian tradition is ambiguous, because the collected products of many lawgivers over time can be either the result of conscious human design or it can be conventional—the result of human action but not design (in other words, the unintended consequence of our actions). This contrast between unintended convention and deliberate decision, which was never very clear to the Greeks themselves, led to conflicting and confusing interpretations. One can see an example of this in the philosophy of the Stoics, which many modern commentators (who do not understand this ambiguity) regard as obscure and paradoxical. Stoic doctrine stressed the moral responsibility of an agent for his or her conduct, and also stressed the possibility of learning to act in accordance with moral rules. But the Stoics refused to identify moral worth with the content of any particular action, and indeed maintained that the same acts could be either right or wrong depending upon their circumstances. Their criterion for appropriateness was “in the things according to nature,” by which they meant according to their following general rules. Most modern commentators, who confuse nomos with thesis, have regarded the Stoics as “paradoxers” for emphasizing that action is

22

W. B. Weimer

morally good or bad according to general rules, because such constructivist commentators do not find the distinction between conventional and deliberate to be clear. Bertrand Russell provided an instance of the confusion: “The logic of the school led to doctrines which were softened by the humanity of its adherents, who were much better men than they would have been if they had been consistent. Kant–who resembles them–says that you must be kind to your brother, not because you are fond of him, but because the moral law enjoins kindness” (1945, p. 256). Russell thought they must have been better than that. “I doubt, however, whether, in private life, he lived down to this precept (ibid., p. 256).” Instead of this constructivist interpretation, favoring momentary gutlevel feelings over dispassionate analysis, it seems obvious that the Stoics were emphasizing the difference between general rules of conduct and specific prescriptions to perform particular ends. They were doing this by studying examples of “particulars” that were determined to be just only because they strictly adhered to abstract principles. For Russell, virtue consists in a will in agreement with nature (see ibid., p. 254). There is no paradox here at all—unless one assumes that just conduct can be determined only by an agent’s deliberate plans. Like Russell above, such theorists try to drive a wedge between humanity and action that is in accord with general principles, in order to glorify personal warmth and kindness (how our gut feels) in opposition to cold and impersonal moral law. Justice for the constructivist must be particular, personal, social, and indeed “feeling” and kind, rather than abstract, impersonal, and “cold.” In contrast the Stoics thought of life more as a game, in which skills and happenstance or chance combined to determine the outcome. In this game of life merit consisted in playing the game well regardless of personal involvement, that is, independently of whether the momentary stakes were large or small. The Stoics recognized the personal and warm qualities—benevolence and face-to-face contact—but they did not attempt to base their social and moral philosophy upon them. They were struggling for a conception of just conduct, moral behavior if you will, that was applicable not only within the face-to-face organization of the small band but also in the larger (and in comparison) frighteningly impersonal abstract society that was taking shape in the Greek Golden age.2

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

23

The Greek Heritage: Totalitarianism We have discussed justice and the rule of law in the context of distinguishing natural from artificial. The Athenian tradition, exemplified by Pericles and Socrates, leads to democracy and the accumulation of wisdom gained over generations as the essence of just rules of conduct. The Spartan tradition, exemplified by Plato as much as Lycurgus, despises democracy as weak and inefficient, and substitutes a strong centralized government that, since it is given sovereign power, is inevitably totalitarian. Since World War II it has been increasingly acknowledged that Plato, no matter what his other philosophical merit, was the father of totalitarianism in political theory. The first volume of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was titled The Spell of Plato, and it is a sustained attack on the Utopia that Plato proposed as the ideal form of government. Russell’s History, published in the same year (1945), devoted considerable space to Plato’s political thought, and in an equally critical vein. This remark set the stage for the twentieth-century reinterpretation of Plato: Russell wanted to “understand” him, but to treat him as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism (see Russell, 1945, p. 105). Plato’s Utopia is to be ruled by an aristocratic class that has control over the economy, education, legislation, and religion. From this class the philosopher-King, a “modern” Lycurgus, will rule the affairs of all, as a benevolent despot. Popper (1962, Volume 1) noted that: His fundamental demands can be expressed in either of two formulae, the first corresponding to his idealist theory of change and rest, the second to his naturalism. The idealist formula is: Arrest all political change! Change is evil, rest divine. All change can be arrested if the state is made an exact copy of its original, i.e., of the form or idea of the city. Should it be asked how this is practicable, we can reply with the naturalistic formula: Back to nature!…the primitive state founded in accordance with human nature, and therefore stable; back to the tribal patriarchy of the time before the Fall, to the natural class rule of the wise few over the ignorant many. (p. 86; in the 2013 one volume edition, p. 83)

24

W. B. Weimer

Plato’s concept of justice reflected this desire to arrest social change and return to the past, to the organization of the tribe. The Republic, subtitled On Justice, makes justice an attribute of the ideal state rather than of individual conduct. Platonic justice consists in each individual performing the job that has been set for him or her by the state. There is no equality under the law in the Republic, for justice requires instead that inequality be enforced—the ruler must rule, the slave must slave. Justice becomes acting to effect particular prescribed ends specified in advance, and the rule of law, in typical Spartan fashion, legislates prescribed forms of conduct. Thus Plato’s republic, like Sparta, is sterile in the sense that no unforeseen changes could legally or justly occur; the ship of state is a clockwork mechanism that can do nothing but monotonously tick off the same measures over and over. Platonic perfection is timeless in this static sense. The only political issue Plato must resolve is who should rule to affect this unchanging and perfect tribalism. To answer this Plato proposed institutions—in the form of authoritarian educational programs—to build the fully qualified philosopher who is to be the philosopher-King. Recall that Plato’s task was identical to that facing the Stoics: to ensure stability in the face of ever-changing developments. But whereas the Stoics tried to come to grips with the developing abstract society by emphasizing the primacy of abstract conventions as the essence of the rule of law, Plato sought to alleviate the suffering and alienation that resulted from social change by turning back the clock, to return to the face-to-face organization of the tribe, and to positive prescriptions for particular ends as the essence of the rule of law. The ideals of his utopia were drawn from a fanciful conception of a state of nature that it was thought “must-have” prevailed in a glorious mythical past. The concept of a state of nature (or the “original” state) requires examination. Up until the eighteenth century the concept of the original state of man as one possessing a conscious awareness of organization was common to virtually all thinkers. Even John Locke assumed that the state of nature and the original social contract must have been drawn in the light of reason. Until the eighteenth century, anthropomorphism prevailed in all accounts: the state of nature exemplified in the “original” social contract was thought to be a result of conscious decision on the

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

25

part of those who participated (as in Rousseau) or it was a result of divine decision by God (as in Vico). Thus in this backdrop the “enlightened” thinkers chose to anthropomorphize society on the image of man rather than on the image of God. Plato’s lawgiver is thus a secularized God, far greater than ordinary mortals but definitely not yet divine. The power and wisdom of the demigod lawgiver, who mythically creates the first social institutions, is thus far beyond the capacity of ordinary (or as Hobbes would say, rude) men or women. Plato’s problem is how to preserve this wisdom and power against the inferior ideas of “ordinary men,” as well as to guard against the loss of civilization in libertarian (or direct democratic) anarchy. His solution was appealingly simple: make the state, as an embodiment of that superior wisdom, sovereign over the individual. Rule by a benevolent despot, Plato proposed, is superior to power usurped by a “rude” tyrant or anarchy. In this manner positive prescriptions for organization redefine liberty and justice as doing what is required to benefit the state, and the whole attitude becomes backward looking, an attempt to live up to or recapture the imagined past glory of nearly divine knowledge and organization. This looking backwards is found in other aspects of Plato’s philosophy, as for instance in the doctrine of anamnesis or recollections as a mechanism for how we do not need to have “learned” about abstract entities (there is no need for learning, only remembering). In such a framework the slogans Popper attributed to Plato, such as “arrest social change” and “back to nature,” become obvious and intelligent prescriptions that are congruent with his idea of common sense. Against this background of so-called “common sense” it becomes obvious what a remarkable break with tribal tradition and popular opinion was made by the Athenian tradition of Pericles and Socrates. Rather than looking to past achievement, the Athenian tradition looks for future growth and progress, and sees in individual liberty a mechanism which can lead society as a whole far beyond the limits of achievement of any single individual or conscious plan. The insight that the growth of both knowledge and our reason depends upon the “free market” interaction of individuals and their ideas is a precious heritage that history indicates must be rediscovered, often quite painfully, by succeeding generations. The purpose of this book is to urge its present rediscovery,

26

W. B. Weimer

before the enlightened “common sense” of the progressivists leads us, as an unintended consequence of their views, back to the tribalism and totalitarianism of the face-to-face society.3 It is not the “conservative” liberals who endorse primitivism, but instead the supposedly scientific and progressivist thinkers.

The Roman Contribution The Roman Empire was a curious admixture of ideas that flourished in Athens and Sparta. The sheer size and population involved were unprecedented in the ancient world, except perhaps briefly with the conquests of Alexander the Great. As a result of its increased size and complexity Roman civilization was forced to be practical and technical instead of theoretical and philosophical, and its importance in the history of ideas consists primarily in attempts at systematization, codification, and preservation of available doctrines, as well as the genesis of new technology (e.g., Galen’s contributions to medicine). Politically the Romans represent the attempt to impose stable government on diverse cultures and conquered enemies. The contrasts and conflicts between the rule of law as the will of a tyrant and general principles emanating from a legislature are easily discernible. The problem of liberty was very real in the increasingly decentralized and spontaneous society of the empire, and the alternating responses were the denial of freedom whenever a powerful Emperor usurped sovereignty, or, by those influenced by Stoic doctrines, a conception of liberty resulting from a framework of law. As Stoic representatives, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero were explicit that Roman law should be impersonal , applying to all to protect the individual from arbitrary coercion and thus a loss of freedom. The Stoic emperors tried to treat all subjects consistently, and thus to treat them, in consequence, equally. They were forced to do this by the sheer impossibility of legislating particular commands to cope with the multitude of conflicting demands made throughout a diverse empire. The Stoic doctrine was forced upon them as a practical necessity by the complexity of governing a far-flung and ever-growing Empire.

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

27

But Cicero especially increased the confusion by translating the Greek term nomos, referring to the general principle of law in the abstract sense, as lex, the law of particulars emanating from a legislature. This in effect re-identified grown convention and evolved patterns with the arbitrary ruling of a lawgiver (or group of lawgivers), and led to the medieval confusion about natural law.

The Middle Ages and the Dichotomy of Natural and Positive Law In the second century A.D. Aulus Gellius rendered physei and thesei into Latin as naturalis and positivus, and this distinction has entered most European languages as that dichotomy between natural versus positive law. With his arbitrary restriction of terminology, disregarding nomo or convention entirely, the stage was set to construe all human action dichotomously as either natural or the result of deliberate design. Conscious and rational determination were opposed, in either-or formulation, to unconscious and irrational (or merely physical and biological). This dichotomy forced theorists aware of the unconscious and unplanned aspects of nomoi to talk in terms of “natural” laws and natural rights of man, while those who focused upon the human-made aspects of nomoi had to (mis) assimilate everything to positive law (as Cicero had done). In any event, the net result was to contrast positive law with innate or divine (supernatural) law, and to lose sight entirely of the evolutionary approach to law underlying the concept of nomos. In the twentieth century this false dichotomy resulted in the doctrine of legal positivism, stemming more recently from Comte and epitomized by the logical positivist philosophers of law Hans Kelsen (1945, 1957) and Gustav Radbruch, which asserted that all law must be the product of legislation—that anything else is “arbitrary” custom. Thus anything passed by a legislature is automatically legal, and nothing the legislature could do would ever be illegal or unjust. Legal positivism is a recent rationalist constructivist doctrine, and it goes directly against the traditional notion of civil or common law, which is not the product of explicit legislation. Legal positivism does so because of the quest for absolute

28

W. B. Weimer

“rational” control and thus does not recognize any “grown” or spontaneously arisen position as “law” at all. The unintended consequence of this doctrine is that nothing can contradict or challenge any act of legislation. Whatever a ruling body says is the law, and that “saying” can never be challenged. In contrast to legal positivism the Athenians had an elected body, the nomothetae, that effected changes in the rules of just conduct by means of a complicated procedure. In Athens it was not legal to alter a law by a decree of the assembly—anyone attempting to do so with subject to the famous “indictment for illegal proceedings” (see Jones, 1954). Nonetheless, the desire for popular sovereignty led to clashes with the rule of law—as the earlier quotation about Socrates illustrates. The people of Athens could and did become tyrants by abrogating the rule of law in favor of absolute power to rule. In this clash we find the first explicit discussion of the power of general law as opposed to the particular will of the ruler. The later Roman law, as exemplified by Justinian’s codified compilation, leaves little room to interpret law as the product of explicit legislation. The Roman jurist was a law finder, not a law creator. The decisive role was played by legal scholars, the jurisconsults, rather than by judges. As in Athens earlier, the body of Roman civil law grew up through a gradual articulation of prevailing conceptions of justice rather than by any conscious legislation. It was only at the end of this long process of development that the Emperor Justinian took the already available results and codified them. In an ironic twist of fate, later legal positivists misinterpreted Justinian’s code as a model of law “created” by a single ruler (Justinian) and as expressing his “will.” A similar mistake was made by German literary scholars who regarded the Brothers Grimm’s scary children’s stories as having been written by them rather than as a codification of errors from already extant stories that exemplified moral lessons about inappropriate conduct that children should not put themselves in danger by emulating. Nevertheless, during the Middle Ages the law was recognized as far older than legislation, as given independently of human will, as being discovered and not made. Indeed, it was not possible to consciously make

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

29

law; that was almost a sacrilege, as Kern (1939) noted. A particular judgment in court, a particular inference from a general and established legal rule, was to the medieval mind not distinguishable from the legislative activity of the community. Both types of cases were concerned with finding a law that was hidden in custom, but already existing, never created. There is, in the Middle Ages, no such thing as the “first application of a legal rule” (see Kern, p. 151). All law is old; “new law” is a contradiction in terms. The English common law tradition parallels this conception. The private law in England consistently opposed the attempts by the monarchy to use their sovereign power by being a barrier to all excess power, including especially the King’s or Queen’s. The freedom of Britain by the eighteenth century was not a matter of the “separation of powers” between the legislature and the executive, but rather: “The law that governed the decisions in the courts was the common law, a law binding upon and developed by the independent courts; a law with which Parliament only rarely interfered and, when it did, mainly only to clear up doubtful points within a given body of law (Hayek, 1973, p. 85).” In this sense a sort of separation of powers had grown up in England, not because Parliament made “legislation,” but because “it did not: because the law was determined by courts independent of the power which organized and directed government, the power namely of what was misleadingly called the ‘legislature’” (ibid., p. 85). In contrast, on the European continent, the power of the monarchy became gradually absolute, and the usurpation of sovereignty by monarchs was completely successful. Part of the success was due to reinstituting the idea that the law is the product of the deliberate will of the ruler, i.e., by assimilating the power to lay down the law to the much older powers that rulers had been acknowledged to have in organizing and directing government apparatus. Thus even though the “natural law” doctrines survived, the ruler gradually came to reinterpret and replace, rather than clarify and codify, the natural law rules. The judge as a law finder, as an institution of the spontaneous order of society, was replaced by the monarch-as-legislator in the framework of a taxis or organization.4

30

W. B. Weimer

The Twist in the Meaning of Natural Law with the Rise of Rationalist Constructivism The Spanish school-men at the end of the Middle Ages returned to “natural” to encompass the aspects of society that were conventional but not deliberate. Returning to the Athenian usage, they opposed Cicero and the later Roman tradition, unfortunately adding to the confusion of history. But it appears that their emphasis was upon the inevitability of our ignorance of all the consequences of action. As Hayek (1973) noted: Naturalis became a technical term for such social phenomena as were not deliberately shaped by human will. In the work of one of them (the Spanish Jesuit), Luis Molina, it is, for example, explained that the “natural price” is so-called because “it results from the thing itself without regard to law and decrees, but is dependent on many circumstances which alter it, such as the sentiments of men, their estimation of different uses, often even in consequence of whims and pleasures.” (p. 21)

Such speculations upon what is involved in the determination of the just or “natural” price of goods, and why it cannot be rationally specified in advance, united the study of law and economics, and set the stage for the study of social phenomena as the results of spontaneously evolved orders of actions but not designs. But before that occurred historically in systematic fashion, the term “natural law” completely changed its meaning in the main Western intellectual tradition. Rationalist constructivism changed the concept of reason and the concept of natural law so that both fit under the Roman heading of positivus. Previously reason had meant the capacity to discover what was (or was not) in accordance with established rules, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, or justice and injustice. Reason had been the application of intellect to choosing in accordance with rules. The Cartesian tradition changed the definition of reason into the capacity to construct (not discover) rules by deduction from premises. The method of Cartesian doubt in conjunction with deductive logic made reason a power to prove or to establish truth. In the process, a “natural” law was turned into a rule of reason, i.e., a construction by the

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

31

proving power of the mind, rather than a spontaneously grown result of action but not deliberate reason or will. This inversion of the meaning of natural law made its takeover by legal positivism a foregone conclusion. In the framework of legal positivism the judge does not discover law, he or she instead deduces it from reason via Cartesian common sense. Hans Kelsen’s legal positivistic doctrine of “the pure theory of law,” the idea that the legislator creates the content of law, is an almost inevitable result. An equally inevitable result is simply that the lawgiver is absolutely sovereign. Current arguments for the “unlimited” form of government, i.e., that democracy is rule by the will of the majority with no check from a constitution or independent legal code, are straightforward extensions of this positivistic framework. But that gets ahead of the historical progression. Prior to examining that, we need to examine the Cartesian tradition, to see how anthropomorphism and the hubris of reason submerged both our understanding of the nature of liberty and the structure of society.

Notes 1. The brief glimpse of history offered here is totally incapable of substituting for serious study of the history of liberty and freedom in the works of its original authors and its most competent compilers. One must balance every line presented here to suit my overview purposes with the volumes of others; not because my presentation is wrong, but rather to see that it is in fact tenable. Many twentieth-century background works are relevant, including (but not limited to) the following: F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979); J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952); R. G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (translated by R. G. Collingwood) 1927; H. Wheeler, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy (1966). Among nineteenth-century authors the following are indispensable: A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1945); Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1967), and Renaissance to Revolution

32

W. B. Weimer

(1961); J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations On Representative Government (2001). Among the classic or “Scottish moralist” thinkers of the eighteenth century: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1888), An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751/1998), and Political Discourses (from 1752); Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (from 1767); John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1998); Second Treatise of Civil Government And A Letter Concerning Toleration (1975). Among European continental liberals, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (originally in 1788), and Critique of Judgment (of 1790); H. von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government (1854). 2. Compare this remark by Lord Acton, a devout Catholic, who regarded the Stoics as having laid the groundwork for both the Catholic Church and liberalism (1907): It is the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation to despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views of life bridge the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian state, and led the way to freedom. Seeing how little security there is that the laws of any land shall be wise or just, and that the unanimous will of the people and the ascent of nations are liable to err, the Stoics looked beyond those narrow barriers, and above those inferior sanctions, for the principles that ought to regulate the lives of men and the existence of society. They made it known that there is a will superior to the collective will of man, and a law that overrules those of Solon and Lycurgus. (p. 24)

Except for Acton’s lapse into anthropomorphism about a “superior will” this is an accurate summary. The constructivist mentality could never comprehend this interpretation. Parenthetically, this also shows the extent to which Stoic doctrine paralleled the Athenian doctrine of the law finder, and opposed the Spartan militaristic command structure of a law maker. A problem for the later Romans was the difficulty of integrating the Stoic attempt to

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

33

provide equal treatment to a spread-out empire under their Spartan militaristic governing structure. 3. The “common sense” view of Greek thought against which I am arguing is primarily the position of Plato (and to considerable extent, Aristotle). Their position is fundamentally opposed to the evolutionary conception of nature, humanity, and morality. Eric Havelock (1964) caught their approach, and the extent to which it embodies the rationalist constructivist ideal of the human mind existing apart from the natural order in judgment of it, in this passage, speaking of Plato and Aristotle, who denied that there had been any significant development: To understand man, you fix your gaze on what he should be. For in a sense this is what he always has been–a species apart from the brutes, rational and moral, intelligent and just. If man’s practice did not fit this theory, then man was to be corrected and educated till it did. For the norms by which his behaviour is governed, while they lie within the cosmos, lie outside history and process. They are as eternal as the cosmos itself. (p. 26)

In this framework it is clear that Aristotle, the forefather of the modern notion of distributive justice, is merely following up the tribal leader (throwing out pieces of meat to individuals according to their “individual merit” or “just” desserts), who was the model for Plato’s philosopher-King. Against that static and ahistorical view Havelock attempted to retrieve an evolutionary viewpoint that was empirical and anthropological rather than consciously rationalistic. His description fits well with the liberal tradition: There is a radically different conception which views human codes of behaviour less as principles than as conventional patterns, embodying not eternal laws written in the heavens or printed on man’s spiritual nature, but rather common agreements elaborated by man himself as a response to collective need. They are the rules of the game by which he finds it convenient to live, and, as such, they are subject to change in development as the game of life itself becomes more

34

W. B. Weimer

complicated.… Morals and law can be viewed in this way a posteriori as a kind of second language, part of the historical process, which like language itself never reaches finality. Their validity is temporal, not eternal. (ibid., p. 29)

Havelock’s work went a long way toward putting Plato in perspective, and in retrieving the evolutionary and conventional approach (clear in his emphasis upon the “rules” of the game) to law and morality from constructivist history. While this latter account devastates the myth of a Golden Age and the notion of a consciously decided social contract, Havelock was not clear that the conventional realm is a distinct third category separate from and between natural and artificial, and often wrote as though these conventions of morality were the result of deliberate decision by individuals conscious of the full consequences of their actions. He never studied Adam Ferguson’s (1767) An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 4. A taxis is an organization consciously directed to given ends, whereas a cosmos is a spontaneously evolved order or structure that results, in the case of society, from human action but not design. Thus a judge is an institution that functions within a cosmos to determine (or to discover) what constitutes justice rather than to make justice. In a taxis a lawgiver or legislator serves this latter function, becoming a law maker, and what would be called a “judge” is merely an administrative bureaucrat who applies the legislator’s will (the made law) to particular cases.

References Acton, L. (1907/1967). The history of freedom and other essays. Macmillan. Now in the public domain. Havelock, E. (1964). The liberal temper in Greek politics. Yale University Press. Hayek, F. A. (1973/2012). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 1: Rules and order. University of Chicago Press. Now Routledge Classics.

2 The History of the Conflict: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages

35

Jones, H. M. (1954). Republican humanism. Social Research, 21, 159–178. Kelsen, H. (1945). General theory of law and the state. Harvard University Press. Kelsen, H. (1957). What is justice? University of California Press. Kern, F. (1939). Kingship and law in the Middle Ages (S. B. Chrimes, Trans.). Basil Blackwell. Popper, K. R. (1950/1962/2020). The open society and its enemies (2 vols.). (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row. Now Princeton University Press. Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Xenophon. (1918). Helenica, I, vii, 12–16 (C. L. Brownson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes, the Enlightenment, and Positivism

To the Cartesian school belong almost all the exponents of the higher and middle culture of the eighteenth century: the scientists,… The social reformers, drawing up their indictment against history as a museum of irrational uses and abuses, and endeavoring to reconstruct the whole social system. G. de Ruggiero It is obvious that when the new scientific system has been constructed, a reorganization of the religious, political, ethical, and educational system will take place. H. Saint-Simon The desire to remodel society after the image of individual man, which since Hobbes has governed rationalist political theory, and which attributes to the Great Society properties which only individuals or deliberately created organizations can possess, leads to a striving not merely to be, but to make everything rational. F. A. Hayek

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_3

37

38

W. B. Weimer

The previous chapter concentrated on the nature of the law and opposing conceptions of rational behavior and social organization that underlie the opposing conceptions we are examining. The Cartesian tradition is usually taken to mark the beginning of the modern era, the transition from the vestiges of medieval thought. The Cartesian mind represents the Renaissance rejection of all traditional or accumulated knowledge and custom in all fields—law, social organization, science, epistemology, all areas of intellectual endeavor. For the Cartesian, to say of a doctrine that it is supported only by tradition is automatically to have the reason for rejecting it in toto. Culture and tradition represent the accumulation of error , not of wisdom. Genuine knowledge results only after the application of the method of Cartesian doubt, which means that defensible knowledge claims must be intuitively obvious to the Cartesian trained intuition. Epistemologically, knowledge must be reestablished upon this firm foundation, and all such proven doctrine must then be organized into a rational body of knowledge extending into every aspect of nature, mankind, and society. All traditional authority must be weeded out and repudiated; instead, the authority of reason must become sovereign. Cartesian rationalism is, in effect, nothing more nor less than the thesis that explicit reason and the logic of deduction are sovereign in all domains. Since this is so, it follows automatically that we should consciously direct all aspects of our behavior and our society, and failing to do so is to give in to irrationality.

The Cartesian Projection of Anthropomorphism into the Cosmos Descartes’ originality lies mainly in sharply separating reason from the rest of the natural order. At the seemingly small expense of creating the Enlightenment form of the mind–body problems, Descartes provided both an ultimate epistemic authority against which to assess knowledge claims and also a method of analysis for truly scientific inquiry. The Cogito argument, in combination with the method of skeptical doubt, effectively removes reason from the realm of nature and places it outside the natural order (as the equivalent of an Archimedean lever or ultimate

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

39

authority) to judge that order. This is literally a projection of humanity’s conscious reason outward from its individual basis in a single person upon the entire order of the cosmos. Rational deduction from explicit premises as the means to truth, and the only means of knowledge acquisition, results in anthropomorphic projection of human reason outside nature. Cartesian reason is not a result of the natural order but rather an all but divine assessor of its merit. The Cartesian philosophy is a milestone in justificationist philosophy, and it has been examined extensively and thoroughly refuted in that context (see Bartley, 1984; Popper, 1963; Weimer, 1979). We shall return to Cartesian “method” later when discussing scientism and positivism, but to continue on the topics of liberty, law, and the organization of society, we must note that Descartes himself seemed not to care about this area and proposed little in social or political doctrine. We may turn to his English contemporary Thomas Hobbes as representing Cartesian social philosophy, noting in passing that Descartes definitely looked at Sparta as an enviable example of constructivist thinking. His A Discourse on Method (1960) noted that the greatness of Sparta “was due not to the pre-eminence of each of its laws in particular… But to the circumstance that, originated by a single individual, they all tended to a single end” (p. 11).

Hobbes’ Leviathan: Society as Singular Hobbes was an empiricist, but otherwise nearly identical to the rationalist Descartes in outlook, including a love of mathematics. The Commonwealth, called by Hobbes Leviathan, is the assemblage of all people according to Hobbes’ version of the “original” social contract. Hobbes began by assuming that humanity is naturally brutish; as Russell (1945) put it: “All men are naturally equal. In a state of nature before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire domination over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From the conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life “nasty, brutish, and short” (p. 550).

40

W. B. Weimer

Humanity can escape from the state of nature by combining into communities that are subject to central authority, by means of a social contract made among themselves. Hobbes supposed that a number of people came together and agreed to choose a sovereign to exercise authority and thus end the universal state of war. This is supposedly a conscious covenant made by citizens (who thus become citizens instead of individual brutes) with each other to obey any such ruling body as the majority shall choose. Having made this one decision, their political power ends, and the citizens lose all rights except those that the government in its sovereignty may decide to grant to them. This “Leviathan” becomes, as Russell noted, a mortal God. Russell brought out the manner in which Hobbes was led to portray a forced choice between natural and artificial organization in this passage: “Hobbes considers the question why men cannot cooperate like ants and bees. Bees in the same hive, he says, do not compete; they have no desire for honour; and they do not use reason to criticize the government. Their agreement is natural, but that of men can only be artificial, by covenant” (ibid., p. 551). Hobbes grants sovereign reason to the people only in their first choice of a sovereign. After that they are totally dependent upon the sovereign’s will, and have no choice whatever in selecting his successor. Hobbes allows the individual to resist submission to the sovereign only in the right of self-defense, which he considered absolute, even against monarchs. In all other instances submission to the sovereign is made “reasonable” because only the sovereign can protect the individual from the state of nature. Hobbesian reason demands that the individual relinquish power to the sovereign in order to guarantee the stability of social institutions.1

Rousseau and the Social Contract If Hobbes is the English political “son” of Cartesian constructivism, a second, French offspring is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s writings in the 1750s and 1760s were roughly 100 years after Descartes’s death. In the interim the change from foundations of “modern” philosophy (in the work of Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and other classic figures) and modern

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

41

science (Kepler and Galileo, Harvey, culminating in the achievements of Newton) to the beginning of modern thought had been effected. The new science and the new learning broke further and further from the ancients and scholastics, and replaced the classic traditional authorities with those provided by science. The commonplace view was that the new scientific knowledge resulted from men and women daring to use their own intelligence (‘Sapere Aude: Dare to know!) to change and enlarge the traditional picture of the world. The period of the Enlightenment, in short, had arisen. The entire intellectual world was literally “dizzy with the success” of scientific achievement—science and the “proving power of reason” literally were the Enlightenment. The educated man or woman of the world felt it a moral obligation to continue the growth of enlightenment, especially with regard to humanity and the human condition. Criticism and the critical “method” were used to attack superstition and blind tradition everywhere. As historian Peter Gay (1973) put it: “The philosophes of all countries and all persuasions were lyrical in their single-minded praise of criticism. They likened it to the surgeon’s knife that cuts away the cancer of superstitions, to the fresh breeze that blows down the screen of tradition, to the beam of light that penetrates the gloom of accepted nonsense, to the blow that levels the grim citadel of unreason” (p. 17). That is the attitude which led the Enlightenment to shift the focus of philosophical inquiry from the earlier fashion of metaphysical system building and cosmological speculation on the grand scale down toward epistemology and psychology. Thinkers of the Enlightenment were concerned with the nature of “man as a subject” possessing knowledge and also as the major ingredient of society. The English tradition concentrated upon epistemology (the theory of knowledge and how it is acquired) as a matter of the individual (as is obvious in their book titles, e.g., Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World ), and built social theory upon the foundation of an individual psychology (as did some Germans, notably Humboldt and Kant), while the French tradition either was unconcerned with or borrowed any available psychology (usually Cartesian materialistic physiology based upon a machine model), focusing instead on the (re) organization of

42

W. B. Weimer

society. Rousseau represented reason in the service of feeling and emotion (passion) within the otherwise materialistic French tradition. The attitude of the philosophe toward political and social philosophy was one of “let’s clear up this mess once and for all” by applying the cold light of Cartesian reason to it. The results reflected constructivism as it was developing just before the French Revolution. Rousseau began The Social Contract (in 1762) by stating, without any analysis (since it was a “clear and distinct idea” to his reason) that the social order “must be one founded upon covenants. The problem is to determine what those covenants are” (1968, p. 50). This supposition was common to almost all thinkers until the middle of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau provided this related formulation of the social pact: “each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole” (ibid., p. 61). Rousseau changed Hobbes’ Leviathan into the collective will of all citizens. The purpose of the social contract was to ensure individual liberty: “How to find a form of association which will defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution” (ibid., p. 60). Rousseau was the apostle of French libertarianism; he wished to remain a libertine, as free and unconstrained as possible, and throughout his life denounced all traditional rules of conduct, preferring to judge for himself each new occasion “on the basis of its individual merits.” His uniqueness as an Enlightenment philosophe consisted in this extreme libertarian individualism. His idea was that freedom is absolute only when it is totally relative: relative to the common purposes and will of the collective. And the organization of society according to the rational will of a lawgiver is the framework in which this freedom occurs. The rules of society must either be the inventions of the human mind, or that of a superhuman intelligence. In this framework Rousseau’s lawgiver became more divine than mortal. Consider these ideas:

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

43

A people, since it is subject to laws, ought to be the author of them.… Individuals must be obliged to subordinate their will to their reason; the public must be taught to recognize what it desires. Such public enlightenment would produce a union of understanding and will in the social body, bringing its parts into perfect harmony and lift the whole to its fullest strength. Hence the necessity of a lawgiver. (ibid., p. 83)

Here Rousseau claimed that the people as a collective should author the law, yet since they are ignorant, the lawgiver (who is educated by Cartesian reason) must do so instead. This lawgiver is an engineer of society who lays out the blueprint and designs the machinery: “the lawgiver is the engineer who invents the machine; the prince is merely the mechanic who sets it up and operates it” (ibid., p. 84). To be effective the lawgiver must possess divine wisdom, and attribute the authority of what he says to the gods. “A sublime reason, which soars above the heads of the common people, produces those rules which the lawgiver puts into the mouth of the immortals, thus compelling by divine authority persons who cannot be moved by human prudence” (ibid., p. 87). How this wisdom of the “divine” lawgiver can arise among the merely mortal people was, of course, never addressed. What is the goal of law? It is freedom and equality. “Freedom because any individual dependence means that much strength withdrawn from the body of the state, and equality because freedom cannot survive without it” (ibid., p. 96). But Rousseau was far from an egalitarian. He did not require every citizen to be equally wealthy or powerful or endowed. All that is needed is that whatever power there is always be in accordance with the law (the will of the collective), and no citizen so poor as to be forced to sell him or herself. He felt that the general will should be indestructible and united in pursuit of the common good so long as all citizens consciously place it above their personal interests. It is only when a state is “badly constituted” that people will enact decrees which have private interest as their only end. Thus good public assemblies will always attempt to ascertain the state of the general will through questioning, to keep the populace united behind it. That there is indeed an identifiable general will is simply never questioned by Rousseau. His Cartesian common sense

44

W. B. Weimer

held that there must be such an entity, and it is therefore only a matter of ascertaining what it is that is the practical problem of government (that is why assemblies must “question” the populace). No doubt the lawgiver, who is the educator of society in the manner that the tutor educates the youth in Emile, has an accurate picture of the general will, and frames his laws accordingly. But for the rest of the citizenry it appears that Rousseau leaves them suspended somewhere between divine guidance by a superconscious being and their own ignorance. Perhaps that is only natural, considering the emphasis Rousseau placed upon libertarian individuality. His whole philosophy was a conflict between the Cartesian quest for rational organization and planning, and the desire for libertine anarchy. The novel solution was to force the individual to accept freedom, i.e., plan the extent of personal liberty. By the next generation that organization mentality will have triumphed over Rousseau’s libertarian sentiment, and Henri Saint-Simon will abandon freedom in any form for planned social justice.

Saint-Simon and the Organization of Man One way to characterize the French tradition is to note the insistence that freedom can be achieved only if society and government are products of conscious organization and planning. To the philosophe, the lack of organization is not freedom, it is chaos. Thus Rousseau, even though a professed libertine, required the lawgiver to impose upon individuals the organization of freedom—humanity must be forced to be free. In contrast Saint-Simon was the early nineteenth-century apostle of positive organization, the father of the idea of the planned economy as the means of promoting social well-being. He inherited from the philosophes, especially from his tutor d’Alembert (and also Condorcet), the faith in the power of human reason to change the world. This change he proposed to bring about through the conscious organization of society to achieve particular ends specified in advance. Thus he changed the theoretical political questions of the day into practical psychological, political, and economic considerations, with the curious admixture of a “positive religion” thrown in as an attempt to unite religion and politics into a

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

45

common moral fervor. Instead of liberty and freedom, Saint-Simon’s concern is equality and distributive justice. Consider this comment in his pamphlet “The Organizer,” originally written in 1819: The scientists, artists, and artisans, the only men whose work is of positive utility to society, and cost it practically nothing, are kept down by the princes and other rulers who are simply more or less incapable bureaucrats. Those who control honours and other national awards owe, in general, the supremacy they enjoy, to the accident of birth, to flattery, intrigue and other dubious methods. Those who control public affairs share between them every year one half of the taxes, and they do not even use a third of what they do not pocket personally in a way which benefits the citizen. The supposition shows that society is a world which is upside down.… In every sphere men of greater ability are subject to the control of men who are incapable. From the point of view of morality, the most immoral men have the responsibility of leading the citizens toward virtue; from the point of view of distributive justice, the most guilty men are appointed to punish minor delinquents. (1953, pp. 74–75)

Saint-Simon was a pamphleteer or provocateur with little personal influence at the time except through his student Auguste Comte, who took up, in 1813, the task of the construction of the “positive philosophy” Saint-Simon had abandoned. His concern was far removed from the “abstract” questions of the nature of liberty, justice, political authority, etc. Instead his focus was upon the administration of society, regardless of the particular governmental form. Looking back upon the failure of the French Revolution of 1789 Saint-Simon saw as the greatest mistake that its architects did not ask who “are the men most fitted to manage the affairs of the nation?” (ibid., p. 78). His thesis was that Cartesian common sense forces us to recognize that they are the scientists, artists and industrialists, and the heads of industrial concerns. These are the organization men who should be charged with the task of running the society. As he said, “they would have reached the conclusion that the scientists, artists and leaders of industrial enterprises are the men who should be entrusted with administrative power, that is to say, with responsibility for managing the

46

W. B. Weimer

national interest; and that the functions of government should be limited to maintaining public order” (ibid., pp. 78–79). Apparently it never occurred to him that the butchers who led that revolution would no doubt have concluded that they themselves were the ones most suitable for “managing the national interest.” Indeed Saint-Simon never doubted that there is a definite and specifiable public interest, and his concern was only for how it should best and most equitably be administered. He is the forerunner of the modern “engineering mentality,” the descendent of Rousseau’s lawgiver as the engineer of government, and the spiritual Godfather of the socialist’s central planning board. Like the modern socialist he attempted to divorce politics from economics and the “national interest,” arguing that it is more important to direct the resources of productivity for the advancement of national interest than to worry about the particulars of politics. Not surprisingly Saint-Simon greatly impressed Karl Marx, and he was the only French utopian theorist that Marx did not dismiss as a dreamer.

The Hubris of Constructivist Reason: Comte, Sociology, and the Paradox of Positivism Comte broke with Saint-Simon by endorsing the thesis that the political reorganization of society could be affected only after the reorganization of all knowledge to provide a positive foundation upon which to plan the social reorganization. Comte devoted much of his life to organizing all extant knowledge, at least as a sidelight to his attempt to formulate the method of all positive knowledge acquisition. This, in combination with a hierarchical conception of the sciences, led him to “invent” the new science of social physics, which was later called sociology by constructivists, as the crowning glory of his positive methodology and the capstone of all positive science. His views represent the triumph of the engineering mentality over reason and ongoing evolution in both methodology and social theory. That he failed to see the paradox of his anthropomorphic solution to the problem of anthropomorphism in

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

47

the “positive science of mind” is perhaps accounted for by his obsessive concern for practical application. Consider how method came to triumph over any actual substance. Comte shared, with his contemporary Hegel, the thesis that the study of society must be aimed toward constructing a universal history of all humanity, as a necessary sequence of the development of humanity according to deterministic laws. He became convinced that the way to achieve this historical understanding was to apply to the study of social phenomena the Cartesian method of the natural sciences. He contended that the universal history would lead to the “laws of nature” for human development. His “positive” stage of natural science abandons all attempt to specify causal accounts or metaphysical rationalization (i.e., explanation) in favor of purely descriptive systematization. Thus we must cease to treat mankind anthropomorphically, and treat humanity as if we knew as little about people as we know about inanimate nature. That this is a paradoxical approach never seemed to dawn on him. Instead, he elaborated methodological positivism: “the fundamental character of all positive philosophy is to regard all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws, whose precise discovery and reduction to the smallest number possible is the aim of all our effort” (Comte, 1893, p. 16). The emphasis of positivism is upon the direct correlation among immediately given “facts,” and the statement of their relation in the simplest dependency relationships (descriptive laws). But what is a fact? All Comte could find for an epistemology was naïve phenomenalism: facts are immediately available to our direct experience. Hence we were told that true observation, to avoid anthropomorphism, must be external to the observer. Thus introspective knowledge is denied by Comte: the “famous internal observation is no more than a vain parody of it” (ibid., pp. 402– 03). The unity of all sciences is established with the application of positive method to the recalcitrant social phenomena. The general characteristic of this method “is to abandon, as necessarily vain, all search for causes, be it primary or final, and to confine itself to the study of the invariable relations which constitute the effective laws of all observable events” (ibid., p. 599). So science is nothing but description of facts that are available to Cartesian common sense, and they are held together by simple descriptive laws.2

48

W. B. Weimer

Comte’s sociology is at the pinnacle of his hierarchy of the sciences as the study of the organization of society and the “laws” of the evolution of mind. These features are said to require the results of all the other sciences, and it is in that sense that sociology crowns the positive “hierarchy.” Comte’s positivism leads to the assertion that, in social phenomena, the “whole” is in fact better known than its parts. As he said: There exists necessarily a fundamental difference between the whole of inorganic philosophy and the whole of organic philosophy. In the first, where solidarity between the phenomena,… Is little pronounced, and can only little affect the study of the subject, we have to explore a system where the elements are better known than the whole, and are usually even alone directly observable. But in the second, on the contrary, where man and society constitute the principal object, the opposite procedure becomes most often the only rational one, as another consequence of the same logical principle, because the whole of the object is here certainly much better known and more immediately accessible. (ibid., p. 258)

This inversion of procedure is put forth as an “obvious” axiom, with no discussion or explanation. As such it repeats the paradox of phenomenalism, asserting that entities beyond phenomenal experience are “better known” than the experiences upon which they are based. Consider why. One aspect of the hierarchy of science that Comte emphasized is that as one ascends the hierarchical scale the phenomena become more complex, and more subject to modification by human action. Simultaneously they become less perfect and more in need of human control and regulation. The complexity of organisms is an example, and as Hayek (1952) noted, Comte had “nothing but contempt for people who admire the ‘wisdom of nature,’ and he is quite certain that a few competent engineers in creating an organism for a particular task “would do infinitely better” (p. 176). Consistently applied, this means that human society is the most complicated and therefore most imperfect of natural phenomena. This leads to obvious paradox: the human mind, the most imperfect of all phenomena, has according to Comte at the same time the unique power to understand and control itself. This is simultaneously the paradox of positivism and the hubris of reason in the engineering

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

49

mentality. To the social engineer the collective is more objective and real than the individual, and yet the engineer can grasp it completely with his or her limited individual mind, and rationally shape its further growth. How this was to occur was never discussed. Marx never discussed it either. The watchwords of positivism are order and progress; knowledge must have a practical use in the shaping of society. Comte’s dynamic sociology is an instance of this. The basis of this theoretical scheme is the putative law of the three stages which human civilization “must” necessarily follow. Like Hegel, he anthropomorphizes society as a whole into a single developing organism. Historicism, as elaborated by Hegel and subsequently Marx, is the result. But note the “paradox” (here only a substitute term for blatant contradiction) in the whole approach. As Hayek put it, “The idea of recognizable laws, not only of the growth of individual minds, but of the development of the knowledge of the human race as a whole, presupposes that the human mind could, so to speak, look down on itself from a higher plane and be able not merely to understand its operation from the inside, but observe it, as it were, from the outside” (ibid., p. 179). This belief asserts that the products of the process of mind can be comprehended as a whole, in their entirety. So it must be possible that the individual mind, looking at these results from the outside, “can then directly connect these wholes by laws applying to them as entities, and finally, by extrapolating the observed development, achieve a kind of shortcut to the future development” (ibid., p. 180). Comte’s reasoning leads one to the feeling that the human mind can lift itself up by its own bootstraps by standing apart from itself, as Archimedes would have to stand outside the earth to move it with his fulcrum and lever. From Comte this notion flows through Hegel to Freud (as one who can understand the entire human mind) and indeed Watson and the subsequent behaviorists. This is also the central idea of the so-called sociology of knowledge, the link between (constructivist) sociology and “socialist” ideals in the popular mind, and perhaps the ultimate hubris of reason, the early twentieth-century claim of those influenced by the logical positivists, that socialism is scientifically justified and therefore inevitable.

50

W. B. Weimer

Comte’s social thought took up its Saint-Simonian origins. While it was necessary for Comte to make a revolutionary break with earlier (to his mind obviously incorrect) views in laying down the principles of positive philosophy, he felt that that would not be necessary in the future, since as a result of his travails all knowledge had been reestablished on a “firm” foundation. His next task was to set up the new intellectual government, which will control the gradual evolution not only of knowledge but of society by the rational allocation of relevant resources. Thus only competent scientists will be allowed to decide social policy, and society will achieve liberty by following the dictates of science. Since freedom has been redefined to mean organization to this engineering mentality, it follows that true liberty is nothing more than “a rational submission to the preponderance of the laws of nature” (1893, p. 147). This is organization by another name. Not surprisingly the earlier students of society, such as the economists, were merely “pretending” to be scientific. No positive contribution could possibly come from them since they had not been trained (as was Comte, at the École Polytechnique) as true scientists: “almost invariably lawyers or literary men, they had no opportunity of discipline in that spirit of positive rationality which they suppose they have introduced into their researches” (ibid., p. 194). So Comte naturally concluded that “they must obviously be incapable of applying a method in which they had no practice to the most difficult of all analyses” (ibid., p. 194). Comte, like Hegel, was quite willing to substitute the arcane teleology of an organismic philosophy to explain the growth of society beyond the powers of individual reason, and to ignore Adam Smith’s account in terms of an “invisible hand” as an “unscientific” explanation. Historical determinism leaves no room for rules of conduct (moral rules) that transcend our individual reason. To this type of Cartesian intellect there is nothing given as an unconscious background to our thought that provides a framework from which to judge moral issues. Since he felt that all rules of conduct were authored by one or another individual’s reason, Comte could literally not conceive of any alternative to a system of demonstrated positive morals except a system designed and revealed by a divine being. And given this choice he would have preferred those rules which he had engineered to those given by a deity.

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

51

The Influence of Positivism Positivistic doctrine influenced social thought, in gradually increasing fashion, from the early middle of the nineteenth century. One line of descent from this is in “hard” science and methodology, where Comte’s phenomenalism and methodological prescriptions passed to Vienna, first in the later part of the 1800s in the hands of Ernst Mach (particularly in his classic, The Analysis of Sensations, 1902) and then into the philosophy of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle in the 1920s (and also from the physicist Mach into the then new quantum physics popularized by Bohr and his followers). Another line of descent affected philosophy of law, and was represented in the “pure theory of law” or the doctrine of legal positivism stemming primarily from Hans Kelson (as a literal straightforward application of Comte’s idea of superiority of “demonstrated morals” in the thesis that all law is the product of deliberate legislation). A third collateral line merges with the historicism and organicism of Hegel, eventuating in the historicism of Karl Marx, and the subsequent Marxist-Leninist brand of collectivism that came to be called communism. Still a fourth influence was exported to England through the sympathetic interpretation of Comte provided in the mid1800s by John Stuart Mill. Through Mill, who followed Bentham, the “positive” organization of society became the chief problem of liberalism, arising along with Bentham’s doctrine of utilitarianism, to supplant the older problem of freedom. With this switch the mentality of the engineer, using the “divine power of the scientist,” proclaimed the age of organization, and the systematic dismantling of liberalism in favor of social organization and social justice was the all but inevitable result. Consigned to the dustbin of history was any understanding of the lesson of Socratic Athens, the Stoics, the natural law theorists, or the classic liberals who even though quite contemporary, were regarded as old fossils. Instead of coherent theory and principle, the pressing concern for expediency was all that was considered. In the England of 1885, F. C. Montague could write “the reconstruction of society, not the liberation of individuals, is now the most pressing task” (p. 16) as a representative spokesman of the “new” liberalism, as though it were only an “obvious” extension and improvement of the classic doctrine.

52

W. B. Weimer

Notes 1. Hobbes differed from Descartes in one important respect, and in a manner exactly analogous to the way in which his direct intellectual descendent Fred Skinner differed from that of the direct intellectual descendent of Descartes, Noam Chomsky. He denied the existence of a separate mental “substance” and all that it has come to imply. Descartes regarded the world and all living creatures except humanity as strictly deterministically controlled. Human reason, standing apart from this remorselessly controlled order, could come to understand it (by Descartes’ method of skeptical reasoning from indubitable premises), but could never violate it. The human body as a machine could be understood, and perhaps reengineered to function more efficiently, but it would still operate according to deterministic natural laws. Only human reason was creative, and because of its embodiment in mind as res cogitans, it stood outside the natural order of determinately predictable events. In opposition to this view Hobbes, like Spinoza, denied this, by identifying reason or thought with “nothing but” speech, dismissing any idea of res cogitans as left-over Scholastic metaphysics. For Hobbes (and Skinner) a science of society is possible only if mankind is also determined completely by natural laws, and Leviathan expresses his conception of how natural laws govern the course of individual and social behavior. Like Descartes, however, Hobbes implicitly accepts the idea that reason (understanding) can stand apart from the natural order and ascertain the principles of its operation—this is what makes him a rationalist constructivist. It is the extension from the idea that reason can understand the natural order, to the idea that since reason itself is natural, it must therefore be able to understand itself that epitomizes constructivism. Thus Hobbes, as a rationalist empiricist who believes that deterministic science can formulate the laws according to which humankind and society operate, is the spiritual father of Comte and the positivistic tradition and its more modern exponents such as Watson and Skinner in twentieth century psychology, and many artificial intelligence theorists of today. The Chomsky-Skinner feud in the second half of the twentieth century was therefore a “family affair” about only the details

3 The History of the Conflict: Descartes …

53

of how to effect a thorough rationalist constructivist explanation of mankind. This is why Hobbes and Spinoza are often cited as precursors to Skinner, and also explains the parallelism between Hobbes’ allowance to the individual of only one “free” choice ( to sign his or her life away in the initial social contract, and therefore to submit to the will of the sovereign forever) and Skinner’s insistence centuries later that humans can only choose which schedule of reinforcement will “control” their behavior. Clearly both Hobbes and Skinner are inconsistent unless “free will” can be defined in terms of strict determinism. This cannot be done, however, if determinism is identified (as both these theorists do) with predictability rather than merely being constrained by principles of regularity. The rules of behavior are not inexorable laws of nature, but neither theorist had any inkling of that. 2. Note that the idea of a completed science with known laws requires that there be no novelty and no accidents. So when Comte described certain factors in human behavior as accidental he was being inconsistent—there can be no accidents in the fixed-for-ever law determined realm. H. B. Acton (1971) put the point succinctly against Comte: “The trouble with accidents, byproducts and new conceptions is not that they are difficult to predict, but that it is and must be impossible to predict them. For in predicting accidents, byproducts and new conceptions the predictor would already have made the discovery or formed the new conception and would not be predicting” (p. 91). This is the reason why science-fiction is always fiction, and not science. In emphasizing his practical approach Comte found himself in a similar position, of advocating the conceptually impossible as part of his rational methodology.

54

W. B. Weimer

References Acton, H. B. (1971/1993). The morals of markets and related issues. Liberty Fund. Bartley, W. W. III. (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court. Now Cricket Media. Comte, A. (1893). The positive philosophy of August Comte. Trubner. Originally Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1800. Internet Archive, Open Library. Gay, P. (1973). The enlightenment. Simon & Schuster. Hayek, F. A. (1952). The counter-revolution of science: Studied on the abuse of reason. The Free Press. Popper, K. R. (1963/2014). Conjectures and refutations. Harper & Row. Now Routledge Classics. Rousseau, H. (1968). The social contract. Penguin Classics. Text in the Public Domain. Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Saint-Simon, H. (1953). Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) selected writings (F. M. H. Markham, Ed., and Trans.). Macmillan. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist Interpretation of Classical Liberalism

The pleasure of planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy; whatever can be constructed according to a plan, such man will endeavor to construct. Bertrand Russell Reason and the scientific temper of mind are more necessary to the world than they ever were before, because all the creeds and habits which repose upon irrational authority have broken down. Taboos, religious beliefs, and social customs are the source of order among uncivilized tribes, in so far as any order exists among them; and they remain the source of order through successive stages of culture, until at last the skeptical intellect shows their absurdity. Bertrand Russell Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: the fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. Bertrand Russell

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_4

55

56

W. B. Weimer

Alternatives to rationalist constructivism were easy to find in the aftermath of Descartes and Hobbes. At the end of the seventeenth century a position arose, stemming from such diverse sources as John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government of 1690, published just after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688; the Dutchman Bernard Mandeville, in The Fable of the Bees of 1703 and The Origin of Honor in 1732; the Italian Giambattista Vico, in The New Science of 1725, and the common-law theorist Sir Matthew Hale (see W. S. Holdsworth, 1924). These and more writers defended the wisdom of traditional institutions against the constructivist account of rationalism. Because they were articulating an opposing concept of rationality the constructivists thus incorrectly refer to them as the beginners of the “anti-rationalist” tradition that opposed both the actually irrational “positive spirit” of the Enlightenment as well as the irrational aspects of the Romantic movement. In England this anti-constructivist rationalist tradition eventuated in the Scottish moralists in the eighteenth century led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, with the aid of Josiah Tucker, James Millar, Edmund Burke, and many others (see Hamowy, 1987). On the continent Kant, von Humboldt (On the Sphere of Duties of Government in 1792) and the poet Schiller ably represented classic liberalism, as did the earlier Frenchmen Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws in 1748) and the later de Tocqueville (in the famous Democracy in America of 1835). This chapter examines how twentieth-century rationalist constructivists, exemplified by Bertrand Russell, systematically distorted the views of this original tradition of liberalism. While Russell’s views are obviously unique to his blend of socialism and scientism, his dominant themes are representative of rationalist constructivist accounts. Ignoring any other pioneers, such accounts usually begin with John Locke.

Locke’s Political Philosophy Locke is a transition figure. Perhaps the earliest writer who can still be regarded as part of the contemporary “modern” age, he combines

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

57

doctrines that are both startlingly modern and strangely old-fashioned. How much of his views were original is a moot point. Russell (1945) regarded him as unoriginal, having merely distilled the zeitgeist in clear and timely fashion. Politically Locke is the father of constitutionalism, the theory that governmental power should not be sovereign, but rather held in a system of checks and balances upon absolute power. The Constitution of the United States is, although almost 100 years later, the finest flower of Lockean ideals, and the separation of powers and the inalienable rights could have flowed directly from his pen instead of Thomas Jefferson’s. Locke’s tremendous improvement upon Hobbes was the realization that the social contract binds both individuals and governments, creating a sphere of rights and responsibilities that both must discharge. The “sovereign” is not a factor in Locke’s theory: the individual has the right to overthrow the government if it fails to fulfill its contractual obligations, or attempts to usurp powers not delegated to it in the Constitution. It is not dissent that threatens society; rather a society which suppresses dissent threatens itself . In this respect Locke went back to the Athenian Greeks, and the conception of a king as judge instead of legislator, i.e., one who rules by interpretation of the law rather than construction of it. His addition to this ideal was the system of constitutional checks and balances to ensure that rule is by interpretation of the law rather than decrees which then have the force of law. If there is any social “contract” it regulates the governors as much as those governed. Russell had fun with Locke, pointing out his alleged unoriginality, theological passages, reliance upon the concept of natural law, and the concept of private property. Consider some of his misinterpretations, which seem to show that the constructivists simply cannot conceive of rational and intelligent opposition to their Cartesian common sense. Anyone who opposes them must be irrational and devoid of that “common sense.” Ethics and “natural” law are prime targets. Russell labeled Locke’s ethics (basically, the notion that humanity is ruled by self-interest) as utilitarian, and thus deemed it inconsistent with his individualistic doctrine of natural rights: “Locke’s ethic, as we saw, is utilitarian, but in his consideration of “rights,” he does not bring in utilitarian considerations” (1945,

58

W. B. Weimer

p. 627). Russell asserted that laissez-faire and the rights of men originated in the belief in natural law (p. 624), and that in its “absolute” form, the doctrine that an individual has certain inalienable rights is incompatible with utilitarianism, i.e., with the doctrine that right acts are those that do most to promote the general happiness (see p. 628). Thus he could dismiss Locke’s ethics in this manner: “almost all philosophers, in their ethical systems, first lay down a false doctrine, and then argue that wickedness consists in acting in a manner that proves it false, which would be impossible if the doctrine were true. Of this pattern Locke affords an example” (p. 617). This conclusion follows if, like Russell, one neglects that Locke was not a Benthamite utilitarian (who would regard utility as an end in itself ), but instead regarded utility as a means and not an ultimate end. That point simply escaped Russell. Natural law does require the law to exist prior to human commands, but for Russell this can only mean that it must be God-given, so he proceeds to attack the imagined “theological” element in Locke. Russell never read nor cited Ferguson (1767), and never considered the results of human action but not design. Russell repeatedly alleged that Locke makes moral rules depend upon God and not convention. Commenting upon Locke’s claim that “the government of our passions is the right improvement of liberty,” Russell claimed that it depends, seemingly, on a doctrine of rewards and punishments in the next world. God somehow has laid down certain moral rules, and those who follow them go to heaven (see p. 613). Bentham is held up as a superior thinker because, as a “free thinker” (not religious), he substituted the human lawgiver for any god (p. 614). Locke’s idea of the social contract is acknowledged to be far more modern than the traditional theory that God bestowed a ruler’s power, but Russell points out (p. 633) that it is, of course, a pre-evolutionary account. Property is central to Locke’s views, and it is attacked as inconsistent and incompatible with Russell’s views of liberalism.1 Locke held that the chief end of men uniting into sovereign “commonwealths,” thus putting themselves under government, is preservation of their property (see p. 632). Russell pointed out “contradictions” in his views, and then concluded with this innuendo that “no doubt” he was impressed

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

59

(as all the men of his time were), by the gains to civilization that were due to rich men, chiefly as “patrons” of arts and letters (see p. 637). Russell was more impressed with the theory of checks and balances, but summarized Locke’s contributions by claiming Locke’s political philosophy was “adequate” and “useful” until the industrial revolution, but that since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the most pressing problems. Russell held that the “power” of property, as in vast modern corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke. Therefore single “separate” citizens have no actual power and independence—like they had in Locke’s speculations (p. 640). So Locke’s great political “defect” (passed to his disciples) from Russell’s modern point of view, was their worship of property (see p. 646). Russell assumed that property was land or the machinery of production, and did not understand that Locke was concerned with property abstractly, as “that which lies within an individual’s protected (by law) sphere.” Thus the constructivist qua socialist simply dispenses with the centrality of property and any attempt at nonutilitarian ethics as being hopelessly primitive and out of date.

David Hume as a Tory Historian Russell discussed the subsequent influence of Locke’s philosophy, and asserted that it was of minimal political significance until the French Revolution of 1789. As he put it: In England, the philosophical followers of Locke, until the French Revolution, took no interest in his political doctrines. Berkeley was a bishop not much interested in politics; Hume was a Tory who followed the lead of Bolingbroke. England was politically quiescent in their time, and a philosopher could be content to theorize without troubling himself about the state of the world. (p. 642)

Let us note the total extent of Russell’s treatment of Hume’s nonepistemological writings. We may do so by acknowledging his three sentences. The first two claimed Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which

60

W. B. Weimer

is divided into three books, dealt, respectively, with the understanding, the passions, and morals. For Russell, what is important and novel in his doctrines is in the first book, which he confined himself to (p. 660). Indeed, despite numerous citations to Hume’s skeptical challenge to inductive inference in his voluminous writings, I can find no evidence that Russell ever even bothered to study Hume on the passions and morals. Part of the evidence for that assertion is the sheer stupidity of his third and final sentence, that Hume’s History of England (published in 1755 and following years) was devoted to proving the superiority of Tories to Whigs and of Scotsman to Englishman. Russell felt he did not consider history worthy of philosophic detachment (ibid.). And Russell did not even consider it necessary to defend this assertion, and effectively wrote Hume out of the history of social and political thought. His sole merit was taken to be the consistent skeptical power of his intellect, at least in the province of epistemology. Russell could conceive of Hume only as the skeptic who demonstrated the absurdity of culture and tradition. We shall have to retrieve Le Bon David , as the French called Hume, from constructivist obscurity in later chapters (especially Chapter 11).

Adam Smith as an 18th-Century Country Gentleman The author of The Wealth of Nations must not have been a philosopher according to Russell—his name does not even appear in the index of his History. Russell was aware of Smith, at least a version of him that had filtered through philosophical radical and progressivist readings. Russell’s earlier Freedom Versus Organization (1934) provides one paragraph on Smith, but no more because he was an earlier theorist than the period dealt with in that book (1814–1914). Russell acknowledged that Smith was important, but claimed that he had taken over the doctrine of laissezfaire from the French constructivists. Then he attacked Smith as a person: ... He is a pleasant old gentleman, with the comfortable eighteenth century characteristic of holding no doctrine more firmly than a gentleman should. He did, however, believe, within the boundaries of

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

61

common sense, that the interests of the individual and of society are, broadly speaking, in harmony, and that enlightened self-interest dictates the same conduct as would be dictated by benevolence. (1934, p. 76)

This may be compared with the treatment provided by Jacob Viner (1966), who quotes Smith writing from 1749 as actually originating laissez-faire (in exact English paraphrase), and not as the “originator” of free trade but instead as a codifier of available common doctrine on trade. Clearly both accounts cannot be correct, and that is all we need to emphasize here. Rationalist constructivism writes its own history, and ignores what does not fit its Procrustean bed. We will see the same tendency in Chomsky’s rewritten history of his antecedents in the theory of language, such as the Continental liberals and von Humbolt, in the next chapter.

Malthus and Darwin as Antithetical to Liberalism Russell devoted (by comparison) considerable space to Thomas Malthus, author of the Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus’ work toned down the optimism of the earlier liberals by claiming that population increases in excess of available food supplies must have been held in check by either moral restraint, misery, or vice. Thus starvation, plague, war, and the host of “disasters” play an important role in limiting the number of people, and in particular, the poor. If this were not so their rapid multiplication would lead to the impoverishment of all, and the starvation of those that the local lands could not feed. This Russell interpreted as an elitism that can be used against the liberal doctrine that all men should be equal. To do so Russell conveniently forgot that what liberals actually held was that since no two individuals are ever exactly equal, that fact alone entails that all should be treated exactly equally under the rule of law. Russell saw Malthus as having toned down Benthamite radicalism into a cold and unsentimental position, emphasizing prudence as the sole moral virtue to be stressed. Although he represented a contemporary version of the Benthamite position instead

62

W. B. Weimer

of Malthus, Russell felt that technology has at least partially mitigated Malthus’ pessimistic conclusion, at least in the West, and that further organization of production can ameliorate the problems of the Orient as well. Darwin is mentioned as having gotten the idea of natural selection (see p. 726) from Malthus (instead of the correct statement that he had found it, in essentials, in the earlier Scottish moralist school), and Russell then pointed out what he took to be a paradox: Darwin was a liberal, but his theory was not liberal. “Darwin himself was a liberal, but his theories had consequences in some degree inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal, and that the differences between adults are due wholly to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species” (ibid., p. 726). A further problem is whether, given evolutionary continuity, all animals are not also equal. Russell had fun here: “I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favor of Votes for Oysters. An adherent of evolution may maintain that not only the doctrine of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals” (ibid., p. 727). This interpretation is quite informative, in that it shows how thoroughly Russell had abandoned liberty for the holy Grail of equality. The old Whig liberals did not claim all men are born equal except in the sense that the rule of law should apply equally to all. Overextension of environmentalism, in the associationistic doctrine that all intellectual differences are the result of educational history, is a later result, more characteristic of J. S. Mill and Bentham. Russell’s target was more correctly James Mill telling his son John Stuart that he had no special abilities that other young men did not possess, but rather a superior education (see the autobiography of J. S. Mill by Stillinger, 1961). What Russell was pointing out is actually an inconsistency in the early egalitarian tradition, and not a problem for the classic liberals at all.2 They knew that it is precisely because men are indeed unequal that they must be treated equally by the law if they are to be at liberty to pursue their own individual interests. They also knew that the rights of man are the result of the simultaneous

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

63

evolution of culture and reason. Furthermore, if oysters were social creatures, exhibiting the complex social and intellectual abilities characteristic of humanity, then they would certainly deserve to be enfranchised. But as a matter of fact since only humans show the conventional and intelligent behavior underlying social and political organization, they are (at least presently) the only objects of the “social” sciences. One must note that while many other species have social organization, nothing on this planet has political organization except humanity. Thus the social insects, for example, are studied in biology and comparative psychology, but not in politics and economics.

Continental Liberalism Russell did not discuss Ferguson, Tucker, Millar, Burke, or any other “social theorists” in the liberal or liberal-conservative tradition in his History. He did mention two prominent continental thinkers, the Frenchman Montesquieu, and the German Immanuel Kant. Montesquieu is mentioned in half a dozen places, but his views are never actually discussed. All Russell alluded to was his endorsement of the system of checks and balances to limit the power of government, and the idea that his modifications of Locke are found in the American Constitution. Kant comes in for more thorough commentary, although his ethics and liberalism, as opposed to his reply to Hume on induction, are treated as of as little significance as Hume’s social and political thought. That is to say, they are not discussed at all. We have already noted Russell’s disparagement of Kant in connection with Stoic doctrine in Chapter 2. There appear to be two reasons, closely related, why Russell felt uncomfortable with Kantian ethics. First, he did not understand the difference between the negative character of general rules of conduct, which, since they are necessarily abstract, can never prescribe the particulars in which “the good” consists, and on the other hand, prescriptions for positive action. Thus he noted that Kant’s ethics is nonutilitarian, and assumed that that alone constitutes an “obvious” inadequacy. Second, he did not think the general rules approach to just conduct aims at “improving” the world, and as a good progressivist

64

W. B. Weimer

he found that to be lamentable. Consider that latter point first: “Kant himself was… kindly and humanitarian, but the same cannot be said of most of those who rejected happiness as the good. The sort of ethic that is called “noble” is less associated with attempts to improve the world than is the more mundane view that we should seek to make men happier. This is not surprising” (ibid., p. 645). The reason why it is not surprising is that “the men who thought happiness the end of life tended to be more benevolent, while those who proposed other ends were often dominated, unconsciously, by cruelty or love of power” (ibid., p. 645). Russell had in mind the nineteenthcentury German romantics and idealists, but that simply indicates he could not distinguish between liberalism and Romanticism. The cult of power (as found in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) is completely orthogonal to liberalism (although it is still compatible with an overextension of libertarian anarchism): all it has in common with liberalism is the denial of happiness as the goal of moral behavior. This did not appear to occur to Russell. We shall look at why anyone would think that happiness is a “moral” goal later, in the discussion of utilitarianism. What of the progressivist desire to reconstruct the world? Here it is obvious that Russell was correct: Kant and the liberals are, literally by definition, not progressives. Where Russell and Kant differ is precisely on the desirability (and/or morality) of intervention to change the world, and as a constructivist it was “obvious” to Russell’s Cartesian common sense that the very “humanitarian” Immanuel Kant was inconsistent for no reason other than that he was not a progressivist. For Russell a humanitarian must, by definition, be positive in method and progressivist in outlook. It was apparently inconceivable to Russell that for Kant a humanitarian could be neither. The inadequacy Russell saw in the general rule approach of the categorical imperative shows in several related points. First, it is a natural law doctrine; and as Russell put it, this principle (that every man is to be regarded as an end in himself ) is a form of the doctrine of the “Rights of Man” (see p. 705), and later that the “essence of morality” is for Kant derived from the concept of law; for (although everything in nature acts according to law, only a rational human (or other) being has the power of acting according to law, which is to say, by Will (see

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

65

p. 710). Having disowned natural law doctrines earlier, Kant is exhibited as a typical example of such a position and rejected accordingly. Second, Russell regards the general or abstract rule model as insufficient because it is not “positive” enough. He held that it is necessary, but not sufficient, for virtue. To get sufficiency Russell felt one must move from Kant’s purely formal point of view in order to take some account of the effects of actions. Kant, however, stated quite emphatically that virtue does not depend upon the intended result of the action, but results only from the principle of which it is a result. If this is conceded, nothing more “concrete” than his maxim is possible (see p. 711). Thus Russell regarded the categorical imperative which states “Act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a general law,” or “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law” as merely formal and thus by definition incomplete, and thus also incapable of leading to progress.3 Russell’s conclusion would automatically follow if social organization could be returned to the limited tribal or face-to-face society, but it cannot follow in a spontaneous order, a cosmos (order existing independently of any human will) instead of a taxis (arrangement deliberately produced by man, thus by the “will”). The other famous German liberals, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Schiller, are not even mentioned in Russell’s History.

The Nineteenth Century and the Rise of Progressivism At the end of Chapter 3 it was noted that progressivism had supplanted liberalism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. There we outlined the French positivistic tradition through Comte to today, noting Marx as an outgrowth of positivistic doctrine and the earlier thought of Hegel, and also noting the tendency toward reconstructing society to achieve specific ends such as equality and organization rather than liberty and freedom. The comparable English tradition, stemming from Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and philosophical radicalism, will be

66

W. B. Weimer

examined in chapters below, to reconstruct how twentieth-century rationalist constructivist doctrines became what they are. We must now break from historical continuity, to jump closer to the present, as a strategy to show the extent to which liberalism was never refuted but simply ignored and then abandoned, along with the insights of the eighteenth century study of society. That abandoned social theory will be considered in Chapters 8 through 13 below; for now let us turn to some twentiethcentury progressivists as the fathers of the received view of the present period. Chapter 5 begins this task by looking at the social and political philosophy of Bertrand Russell, who substituted happiness for the goal of ethics and organization for freedom in the study of society. We can end this chapter with an intellectual footnote on the pleasure of planned construction in Russell’s thought. Russell was first and foremost a mathematician, and crucially, as a thinker was guided by what the late nineteenth-century zeitgeist conceived mathematical reasoning to be. The beginning of classical mathematical thinking began with the Greeks and had its first great success in the work of Euclid, who formalized geometry as an exact “science” starting from seemingly indubitable first principles—axioms, which are literally indubitable first principles—and by deductive logic reached certainty in its conclusions. This was the justificationist ideal of what science should be: certainty for knowledge claims, obtained from indubitably true premises by the syntactic symbol manipulation procedures codified as logic. Russell’s goal was to extend the success of Euclid from geometry to all of mathematics, and to include deductive logic as the basis of everything mathematical. That was the goal of the monumental Principia Mathematica (with A. N. Whitehead of 1913). The grand program of the Principia was an “almost” success. It looked, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, like a little more work would put the prize in hand. Unfortunately the quest was shown to be a pipe dream by Kurt Gödel in the 30s, when he showed that for any “interesting” mathematical system there would always be theorems within its system that could not be proved to be true consequences of the axiom set. So the dream of classical “science” as axiomatic reasoning from Cartesian indubitable “clear cases” went out the window, first with the failure of the logicist program to reduce mathematics to logic, then

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

67

the impact of the Gödel incompleteness proof, and finally with ascendancy of the Cambridge development of “inductive” logic as opposed to classical deductive logic. This is another way of looking at the failure of classical justificationism, and the retreat to “merely probable” conclusions, as when the Vienna positivists took over the failing British effort by adopting Comte’s attitude to the empirical or physical sciences when now reconfigured as based on an “inductive” logic (see Chapters 10 and 12 below, and Chapter 7 in Volume 2, on the breakdown of traditional standards of rationality). Russell never changed his attitude toward the ideal of knowledge. Having imprinted on math as the quest for certainty he preferred the mindset of “the pleasure of planned construction” (as in the epigraph) for the nonmathematical realm. That is the way in which he became the zenith and the nadir of constructivist thought. The zenith was the Principia, the nadir the continuation of that approach to progressivist socialism even when the program of the Principia failed. Consider these representative statements of his thought “I may well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses” (Principles of Mathematics, 1903, p. 11). So all inference is deductive. And later, according to Russell’s method (what he simply called “analysis”) the point of philosophy is always to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating as a premise, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it (as he stated in the lectures that were published as The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, in 1918). Here was the Cartesian Clear Case again. And now its restatement as a methodological directive for philosophizing: “The supreme maxim of scientific philosophizing is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities” (quoted in Hawes, The Logic of Contemporary English Realism, 1923, p. 110). This is a statement of the rationalist constructivist ideal: remove all reality—what is empirical, or grown or found or spontaneous—and replace it with sanitized, contentless purely logical construction. Russell’s brain was to be a proxy for Laplace’s demon.

68

W. B. Weimer

In old age when the hope of the Principia had faded, Russell remained bloodied but unbowed, nearly admitting that the justificationist quest for certainty was his religion: I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept, were full of fallacies, and that, if certainty were indeed discoverable in mathematics, it would be in a new field of mathematics, with more solid foundations than those that had hitherto been thought secure. But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise, having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. (in Portraits from Memory, 1956, p. 53)

None of this translated to his social and political philosophy, which remained firmly rooted in the certainty of his formative Cartesian common sense of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Russell’s fear of property, as an evil of the capitalist and laissezfaire tradition, permeates his History. However, he does not bother to explain why he regarded property as an evil to be overcome in that volume. The argument, noted briefly in Chapter 5 below, is that a land owner or rentier has no economic function other than to collect rent. Thus the rentier is paid for no labor, and therefore, Russell assumes, can be regarded as making no contribution to society. In thinking this way Russell implicitly accepts the labor theory of “your hands have to be dirty” for any value (despite his denial of its tenability on other points: see Russell, 1934, pp. 105ff.).

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

69

Since he tacitly equates “contribution to society” with physical labor (somehow getting one’s hands dirty, or “real” work or hard labor), he thinks the landowner performs no function in society since he or she contributes no labor. Therefore private property is an archaic notion, obviously defended only by tradition and the aristocracy in order to maintain their “unfair” privilege and social position. Interesting, then, that Russell as an intellectual got his “hands” no dirtier than writing. But Russell considered “creation” as more noble than possession of goods—as in the epigram to Chapter 5 below—so apparently he remained “noble” after all. 2. Egalitarian doctrines are thus a remnant of pre-evolutionary thinking. The substitution (for liberty) of equality of position and results that the progressivist desires is in direct conflict with either Darwinian or social evolution. So-called social “justice” harks back to the mythical “original society” directed by the philosopher-king that Plato desired to replace the tribal chieftain. Its first discussion, as distributive justice, is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The fundamental incompatibility of constructivist and evolutionary views hinges upon the fact that evolution has no goals—nothing has been designated in advance as being survival worthy. Evolution is a matter of trial and error winnowing out of the unfit, not a certification of the fit. Evolution depends upon negative constraints rather than positive prescriptions of what must be achieved (see Weimer, 2020). 3. There is an unreconciled tension between Russell’s advocacy of formalism as an indispensable tool in mathematics and logic and his disappointment with Kant for endorsing “merely formal” ethics. Despite his familiarity with the power of mathematical construction according to abstract rules of determination, Russell apparently could not fathom how the same kind of rules could function in the real-world social domain. This is perhaps due to his view that the problem is one of conscious social organization rather than spontaneous generation of (self )organizing social structures. Kant, on the other hand, had thought the matter through and decided on a “merely” formal approach that had nothing to do with the positive prescription of happiness. As Cassirer (1945) said, in differentiating Kant’s view from that of Rousseau:

70

W. B. Weimer

Kant no longer believes that civilization, even in its highest perfection, can bring about the happiness of mankind, and he no longer asks it to. For him civilization has another law peculiar to itself. It is not the source of happiness, and its meaning does not even consist in providing men with intellectual satisfactions. It is rather the setting in which man is to test and prove his freedom. And he must undergo this test ever and again. Here the mature wisdom of Kant coincides with Goethe’s: “He only earns his freedom and existence, who daily conquers them anew”. (pp. 42–43)

In one sense the purpose of this book is to show the superiority of Kant’s (and Hume’s) view over Russell’s, and to remind a generation that has forgotten—because of its sense of entitlement—that we must all indeed earn our freedom each and every day, since it is a standing obligation that can never be achieved once and for all. Evolution does not “certify” the living as survival worthy. A free society must be fought for every day, and will be lost as soon as complacency arises.

References Cassirer, E. (1945/1963). Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two essays. Harper & Row, Princeton University Press. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An essay on the history of civil society. Cambridge University Press. Hamowy, R. (1987). The Scottish enlightenment and the theory of spontaneous order. Forward by Ian Ross. Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series (R. H. Popkin & R. A. Watson, Eds.). Southern Illinois University Press. Hawes, R. P. (1923). The logic of contemporary English realism. Longmans, Green. Holdsworth, W. S. (1924). A history of English law (7 vols.). Little, Brown and Company. Malthus, T. R. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. J. Johnson (Originally published anonymously).

4 History Rewritten: The Twentieth-Century Constructivist …

71

Montequieu. (1748/1777). The spirit of the laws (Vol. 1). English translation 1777. Online Library of Liberty. Russell, B. (1903/2009). The principles of mathematics. Cambridge University Press. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd, and Taylor & Francis. Russell, B. (1934/2009). Freedom and organization, 1814–1914. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Russell, B. (1956/2021). Portraits from memory. Simon & Schuster, Routledge. Stillinger, J. (Ed.). (1961). The early draft of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography. University of Illinois Press. Vico, G. (1725/2002). Scienza Nuova. The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744 Edition) (L. Pompa, Ed., and Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Viner, J. (1966). Adam Smith and Laissez Faire. In J. M. Clark, P. H. Douglas, J. H. Hollander, G. R. Morrow, M. Palyi, & J. Viner. Adam Smith, 1777– 1926. A. M. Kelley (originally 1928). Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59.

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell on Organization and Socialism

I note with pleasure that he [a critic of Russell’s social views] sees no necessary connection between my views on social questions and my view on logic and epistemology. I have always maintained that there is no logical connection pointing to the example of Hume with whom I agree so largely in abstract matters and disagree so totally in political matters. Bertrand Russell I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another. Bertrand Russell

It is possible to examine background “contemporary” instances of progressivist thought against a cluster of themes and issues that have been repeatedly interwoven into previous chapters. The twentieth-century views are “sophisticated” variants of progressivism, having learned from history that one or another of the classic programs was erroneous or unworkable. Thus they present a curious mixture of brashness and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_5

73

74

W. B. Weimer

despair: they brashly propose a sophisticated blueprint that is “sure to work” if only their directives are followed completely, and are desperate to convince us that the choice is between adopting their particular view (electing them as benevolent despots) and the collapse of civilization. Quick to point out perceived flaws in earlier doctrines, they are oblivious to comparable ones in their own views. Almost invariably their defense hinges upon simple faith in one or another ultimate goal which, in the light of their Cartesian common sense, is so “obviously” justified that no critical appraisal is ever considered to be necessary. Criticism is de rigueur for others, but inconceivable for their own views and values. This chapter begins to look at this attitude and approach by examining more of the social and political philosophy of Bertrand Russell as an instance of rationalist constructivism. In Chapter 6 we indicate how Chomsky’s political writings, while similar in many of their presuppositions, depart from Russell, and then look at Chomsky’s politics in the perspective of his contributions to linguistics and psychology. Chapter 7 examines Skinner’s utopian writings in the context of his psychology and conception of scientific method, with a brief look at similar views in practical politics and business. We shall see that Russell is in many senses a contemporary Cartesian rationalist incorporating egalitarian and social justice notions grafted upon touches of Hobbesian empiricism, Chomsky is Cartesian rationalism with touches of the extreme libertarianism of Rousseau, and Skinner is equally Hobbesian materialism and determinism in conjunction with positivism and method that Comte would be proud of. What all have in common is a reliance upon socialism and collectivist organization (planning) as a means of dealing with the fundamental problems of equality (and hence, of distribution) in the planning of progress for the future growth of society. All reject liberalism because of its perceived failure to plan the particulars of progress. All agree that liberal doctrines are too “vague” and lacking in specifics to be of any practical use. Russell outlined the case for this position in philosophy, psychology, and social theory by focusing upon the problem of organization in society.1

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

75

Russell and the Case for Socialism Russell’s method of philosophical analysis carried over from his academic work to his social and political views. In both his procedure (which he called, too simply, the method of analysis) was to start with a situation as clearly given, and work backward to a theoretical explanation that rendered that given clear case an obvious occurrence. Having done so, he would clearly state the theory and then layout for inspection what he perceived to be the consequences. In this procedure, as in his mathematics, both what he took to be first premises and ultimate facts requiring a principled explanation were incapable of “proof ” or verification. There was no allowance for doubt about them at all, since they “followed from” his Cartesian common sense. In themselves, the premises were never subjected to criticism: he merely accepted them, and his reasoning was designed to get the audience to accept his conclusions if one accepted his premises. Thus Russell’s popular writings exhibit a common axiomatic pattern, consisting in the exhibition of things he took to be clearly evident, and the consequences of taking those propositions to be evident. The reasoning is “If this is so then one must think (and act) as I specify;” and since the readers were supposed to be imbued with enough Cartesian common sense to see the obvious merits of the initial position, Russell’s argumentative structure simply laid out, as logically as possible, what he took to be the consequences of accepting “self-evident” premises. His case for socialism exhibited this pattern. As Russell (1935) said, “I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except the tiny minority of the human race” (p. 122). Thus his goal is to increase happiness (achieve Benthamite utilitarianism), and socialism is taken to be the “obvious” means to do so. There are two distinct facets of Russell’s social thought, identifiable by the audience to which his writings are addressed. His academic audience works are systematic presentations of his interpretation of recent history and the consequences that follow from that interpretation. A major work in the popular press category is Freedom Versus Organization (1934), written in collaboration with his third wife and former

76

W. B. Weimer

babysitter, Peter Spence. The views presented there provide a framework from which his later History (1945) was written. Russell’s political views are disclosed on virtually every topic covered, and we have reviewed some of that material in earlier chapters. This second facet is found in the innumerable books, essays, and reprinted works that constitute the bulk of Russell’s writings aimed at the public—the popular press and “potboiler philosophy” that earned him a living except in the handful of rare instances when he briefly held an “academic” appointment. Let us summarize themes in Freedom Versus Organization to see how Russell came to regard socialism as a self-evident successor to classical liberalism and philosophical radicalism. The academic views were identical in most respects.

Freedom Versus Organization Russell’s account of history proposed that classical liberalism (emphasizing the problem of individual liberty) was unable to cope with the rise of capitalism, and the subsequent rise of socialism was a necessary response to the problems of organization in industrial society to which capitalism had led. The Industrial Revolution renders early liberalism, based upon agrarian and individual shopkeeper notions of enterprise, obsolete. The nineteenth-century progressivist political position was due to the cooperation and interaction of “industrial Radicalism” with eighteenth-century ideals from the Scottish moralists of democracy, individual liberty, and intellectual enlightenment. Capitalism won emancipation from feudalism, but reduced the ideal of “freedom” to that of “free competition.” But then after a period of unregulated lawless excess, competition becomes nation-wide monopoly, with the result that the nation or state becomes a partner in competition, and the rivalry between nations replaces that between private firms. Hence economic nationalism.2 Then we find that: Eighteenth-century liberalism, with which industrial Radicalism at first coalesced, thus sinks into the background. Industrial capital becomes

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

77

conservative, and the impulse to progress becomes more and more confined to the proletariat. For the proletariat, the “individual liberty” of the Jeffersonian is useless, owing to the economic power of the employer. It follows that, as progressive politics becomes proletarian, it loses its eighteenth-century elements: organization and equality take the place of liberty. (Russell, 1934, p. 225)

The key to Russell, as so many contemporary progressives, is the last phrase: the idea that organization and equality are the “logical” successor concepts to liberty, because of the large growth of industrial society and technological progress after the Moralists wrote about liberty and freedom in the 1700s. Robert Owen, the humanitarian industrialist who tried to organize the factory system along socialist lines in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was the first to perceive the “modern” problem. As Russell saw it, after quoting Owen as the first to recognize our modern problem, to be a Luddite and rail at machinery is useless. But “if the matter is left to the free play of the old economic forces, a mechanized world is one in which labor is impoverished and enslaved. This evil can only be prevented by deliberate planning, not by a policy of laissez faire” (ibid., p. 157). Russell’s constant bugbears of the “old” system are the notions of private property and competition. He never lost an opportunity to rail against these “heinous” evils. How did they become the bane of the organization man? Russell’s case against private property stems from Ricardo’s theory of rent (not his theory of value, which was later taken up by Marx). Ricardo held that the rental value of a piece of land was the amount by which the value of the crop (or shop, or office) that it can “produce” exceeds the value of that which could be achieved on the “worst” piece of land (in the case of farmland, a plot which would produce income only equal to the cost of farming it, which would have no rental value at all). Russell the socialist took the “obvious” next step beyond the orthodox Ricardo: Economic rent is not paid to the landowner in return for any service that he performs; it is paid merely for permission to produce wealth on his land. By the labor of others he is enriched, while he need not lift a

78

W. B. Weimer

finger; his economic function is merely to receive rent, without in any way adding to the national wealth. (ibid., p. 105)

Russell felt that it was obvious that the private ownership of land should be abolished, and all rent paid directly to the State. Ricardo did not draw this conclusion because it is absurdly false. It was drawn, however, by Karl Marx and by Russell, as an “obvious” aspect of collectivism and organization.3 Parenthetically, one might note that this notion of rental value has not been current for a long time. It has been supplanted by the recognition that all trade or business activity involves an exchange of property rights, and that paying rent is thus a matter of the rental price (per unit of time) for hiring the services of someone else’s property, whether it be land, capital (improved land, buildings, machinery, etc.), or even labor. Thus the “function” of the owner of property (land, building, whatever) is not merely to receive rent, but to provide the means necessary for production. Russell never comprehended this.

Competition Versus Organization Competition is an evil to Russell because it interferes with “rational” organization and leads (again, following Marx) inevitably to monopoly and the tyranny of the (Darwinian) fittest survivor. As he said: Industrialists… could increase their wealth by combining to extract favors from the State; they thus competed as a national group against national groups…. it was an economically inevitable development.… The men at the head of the vast monopolies in America still profess to believe in competition—meaning, however, competition for jobs on the part of those who wish to be employed by them. They still believe,… that competition is the only possible incentive to industry. This belief has become harmful, since it interferes with organization where this would be more efficient than unregulated competition. (ibid., p. 143)

Russell viewed competition as appropriate only in the earliest stage of industrial democracy, arguing that political thought had not kept

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

79

pace with the increasing concentration of authority (in the nineteenth century). He held that “Theory, in so far as it had succeeded in molding institutions, was still divided between monarchy and competitive democracy, the first essentially pre-industrial, the second appropriate only to the earliest stages of industrialism” (ibid., p. 447). Russell’s ultimate conclusion was that the liberal policy of absolute sovereignty between nations leads to nationalism as organized competition (monopoly and cartel formation) within the State, but anarchy in the competition between sovereign (even if nationalized) states. His thesis is that socialism within the state and liberalism between them must be replaced by organization at all levels, because with national organization from socialism and international freedom from liberalism: The world brought itself to a condition threatening to the very existence of civilization. Organization, with modern industrial and scientific technique, is indispensable; some degree of freedom is a necessary condition both of happiness and of progress; but complete anarchy is even more dangerous as between highly organized nations than as between individuals within a nation. (ibid., p. 450)

The nineteenth-century’s failure, to Russell, was that it created no international organization. Russell’s position represented the triumph of organization over both intelligence and spontaneous order. Unable to appreciate the growth capabilities of a self-organizing spontaneous order, or the difference between a taxis order of production and what we will later call a catallactic or cosmic structure, Russell adopted socialism as the “obvious” solution to the problems of organization and equality. Socialism can, indeed, be defined as the systematic attempt to replace any spontaneous cosmos with a taxis, to substitute an economy proper (allocation of means in accordance with the unitary plan of a leader) for the game of catallaxy (the impersonal and abstract market order with no plan) first described by Adam Smith. Russell felt it obvious, and therefore not in need of any critical scrutiny, that organization to effect “social justice” is the only rational way to achieve peace and progress. (One should note parenthetically that there is no “color” line in Russell’s conception of “social” justice. He was concerned with the plight of the

80

W. B. Weimer

downtrodden worker, regardless of their skin color or area of origin, and for him “social” meant to except the capitalistic owners.) Thus his popular and political writings constantly state, rather than argue any case for, his interpretation of history as the case for organization. No matter what the subject matter, the premises, and conclusion remain the same. Consider this discussion of currency and banking in the light of the organization approach: “it is obviously to the general interest of the business community as a whole to have a stable currency and security of credit. To secure these two desiderata, it is obviously necessary to have only one central bank in the world, and only one currency, which must be a paper currency so managed as to keep average prices as nearly constant as possible” (1935, pp. 73–74). No matter what the subject matter, no matter what the problem, the approach is all but invariant: planned construction—deliberate management—must be substituted for laissez-faire or the world will end tomorrow in chaos. Planned construction requires a top-down organization controlled and dictated (there can only be one central bank) to all by a single supreme leader. That is what is “obvious” to the organizational mentality of constructivism. This position was shared by all the members of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, including especially the economist John Maynard Keynes. For Keynes it was “obvious common sense” that a single source (clearly his enlightened Cartesian common sense) should manage the economy from top to bottom in an enlightened and “rational” society. The Keynesian approach to economic interventionism anthropomorphizes the economic activity of a nation based upon the model of a single family or individual intellect. The intervention in market affairs which Keynesians advocate is the management of the economy to fulfill their particular purposes—exactly analogous to the nineteenth-century attempts of the utilitarians to provide “the greatest good” for “the greatest number.” It simply never occurred to the constructivist and utilitarian mind of Keynes (or his followers) that it was not possible to possess either the knowledge of the “goods” or goals of the entire population or that they would be in conflict with one another and thus could never be achieved by a single policy. And I am being very literal when I assert that Keynes thought that he should manage for all. He said that to his great rival Hayek. When Hayek was forced to share quarters with Keynes

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

81

at Cambridge as a result of the bombardment of London (which Keynes very graciously provided) during World War II, they discussed whether or not the policies Keynes had advocated in his General Theory were in fact general or merely momentary. Keynes admitted to Hayek that his “general” account had been merely a tract for the times, aimed at the problems caused by the worldwide depression in the 1930s, and he added that there was no need to worry (or write a detailed rebuttal as Hayek feared he would have to do), because he (Keynes) would set the record straight with new policies when the war was over. Since Keynes died suddenly soon afterward, there was never any correction, and Keynes became a martyr whose views were fossilized and continued unchanged by his loyal disciples (e.g., Joan Robinson). That is a partial reason for why it has taken so long to overthrow his particular interventionist approach.

Another Look at Property as a Human Right Private property rights do not conflict with the currently popular doctrine of “human” rights. Property rights are nothing more, nothing less than the rights of any and all individual humans to use and to exchange specified goods. Private property rights protect individual liberty. The stronger the system’s basic property rights, the greater the protection for individual liberty. Any restraint or restriction on private property rights will shift the balance from impersonal attributes determining when property can be transferred (usually by consent in the open market) to more personal (and hence, arbitrary and unpredictable) attributes, and thus toward behavior that has a predetermined, usually political, motive. Some of the clearest discussion of the notion of property and its indispensability to the functioning of society are found in Alchian (1965), and Alchian and Demsetz (1973). This is discussed more fully in Chapters 8 and 12, and then Chapter 4 in Volume 2. We can summarize some points here. The first is that there is absolutely no conflict between property rights and “human rights.” The reason why is because property rights are

82

W. B. Weimer

human rights. A property right is simply the exclusive authority to determine how any given resource is used. There are three basic elements to private property: first, the exclusive right to determine how resources are used; second, the exclusive right to some services if they are provided by the resource; and third, the right to exchange that resource or economic good at mutually agreed terms (the right of transfer by consent). Taken together these elements create what seems to be a paradox: when we call property “private,” it is in fact based upon decisions that are actually public. This is obvious because if an owner of a property right chooses to sell it, the highest value obtained will be determined by competitive (i.e. public) bidding for that right. If an owner chooses to sell it for a private reason or motivation, to restrict it from public bidding only to his or her particular preference, he or she will not get that highest price that would be determined by competitive bidding from the public, but will have to settle for what someone of their choice will pay. Exchange on the free market requires that the personal status and attributes of individuals competing for that resource are of no concern—their influence can be offset simply by adjusting the price. Such property rights make any sort of discrimination more costly to undertake. If a landlord has the right to set a rental price, a minority tenant can rent that property (and avoid discrimination) if they are willing to pay that price for rental. Even if the landlord would prefer someone else, the landlord would lose by taking the preferred tenant at a lower price. The landlord who takes a preferred tenant thus pays for the price of discriminating against others. In the common situation of rent controls, which are intended to make it “easier” for minorities to obtain housing, individuals who would willingly pay more to do with that property what they wished are prohibited from doing so. In the case of socialist ownership, in which property is controlled by bureaucrats who have no actual ownership interest in it, their rights to make decisions about how to best allocate resources are completely restricted. Socialist managers do not gain when the values of the resources they happen to manage actually increase, and they do not lose when those values fall. Not surprisingly, this means that they have no incentive whatsoever to heed changes in values of the resource that would be obvious when values are determined by market forces. Here is a simple example: consider a socialist manager of a collective farm. By

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

83

working extra during the harvest, he could make (strictly, for example, $1 million a week) in additional profit for the collective. But if neither the manager nor those workers on the collective will gain personally—if they are not entitled to keep even a portion of that additional profit— the manager will simply go home early and let the crops rot. Everyone loses in such a situation: the manager, the farmworkers, and the citizens who have less on the shelves as a result. Socialism guarantees everyone will lose something when compared to a “capitalist” market based upon recognition of private property rights. Despite his obvious mathematical brilliance Russell literally could not comprehend this, since he could not see beyond the notion that property is “evil.” Today’s avowed socialist champions choose to ignore the whole situation, as did U. S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who happily collected a small fortune for his “private property” book ownership rights when the book he published in his name preached the “superiority” of socialism for the masses. Like other would-be oligarchs, Sanders apparently felt that socialism is to work for his pocketbook but not for yours. Property is for the shepherds, not for all of you sheep.

Notes 1. Any attempt at explicating Russell runs into the difficulty that with respect to his serious philosophy he changed considerably over a 60 year period, and often in a back-and-forth fashion. With respect to his serious philosophy his last major work provided his own clue as to how to interpret his views. As he said in the preface to Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948): “The Prophet announced that if two texts of the Koran appeared inconsistent, the later text was to be taken as authoritative, and I should wish the reader to apply a similar principle in interpreting what is said in this book” (p. vi). (Original preface entirely in italics.) So this tells us to assume that Human Knowledge is definitive, and to ignore his earlier phenomenalism and the intermediate stages (a point he emphasized until his death). Presumably the same thing would apply to his social and political philosophy, and to the numerous “potboiler” or popular press books

84

W. B. Weimer

and articles he wrote in order to provide a living. However, when these latter works are examined, there is no change—the socialism he defended in his autobiography in the 1960s was the same socialism, defended for the same reasons, that he had embraced in 1900. While this makes criticism of his social philosophy easier, it also indicates that it was uncritically carried over from his formative youth, and as such, never given any more serious critical scrutiny than most young adults give to views they have imprinted upon—which is none at all. 2. The issue of state-sponsored capitalism, in which a sovereign nation state (such as China) takes over (at least some of ) the market order within that country in order to direct outputs to achieve particular political (not economic) purposes, is an increasing problem in the twenty-first century. This is slightly different from the Bloomsbury group thinking, exemplified by Keynes, who felt that he could manage for the best interests of others. Dictatorships, however, change from the Keynesian approach of managing for others to managing the country for their benefit alone. Totalitarian regimes, such as Russia and China, have nearly complete control of what can be produced and at what prices it can be sold. This enables them to selectively “corner the market” for a given product by subsidizing its manufacture, thus allowing it to be sold at less than the cost to other nations. This intervention in the international market order will allow that State to take over market share from producers in other nations, eventually making the remainder of the world dependent upon their supply of that product after having driven the other suppliers out of business. This is the modern version of what Adam Smith and the moralists argued against as mercantilism, which is simply the domination of markets by manufacturers or suppliers agreeing to act in unison to drive out competition. What is unique here is that the government of the country—often under the direction of a single dictator-oligarch—has total control of that industry within its borders. This is what gives that country an unfair competitive advantage over the actual free market trade between nations who do not so intervene. There is no doubt that the practice is dangerous from a political standpoint, and it is difficult to deal with from the standpoint of

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

85

usually available diplomatic practices. But this is not a failure of liberalism or the market order per se, and would be a problem even if every country in the world were controlled by some form of top-down or taxis organization. It cannot, as Russell and other progressivists do, be used as an argument against market-based economics. 3. Russell’s hatred of property is an indication that he simply did not understand how it arose or what function it served. A lifelong pacifist with strong Quaker beliefs (shared with his first wife Alys), Russell saw war and strife and competition as resulting from fighting over property. So why not abolish the concept of private property, and have “the state” own everything? Would that not eliminate the motivation for war? The answer, of course, is that it would not, but it would definitely decrease if not abolish the economic and intellectual output of the society adopting such a position. That could increase the liklihood of war, as when the impoverished nation decided to use war (as organized theft) to recoup its losses, or when a “winning” nation decided to decisively vanquish a now weakened enemy. Russell could not conceive of such possibilities. Everyone was supposed to be too consciously rational for that. Private property is the protected sphere of an individual, that area in which she or he retains individual liberty or control by choice. In order to be able to choose to do anything with one’s resources and abilities one must presuppose the concept of property. If the concept were abolished (and with it the concept of transfer by consent or contract) no one would do anything except as a result of coercion. There would be no entrepreneurship of any kind. Most importantly for Russell the intellectual entrepreneur, there would be no progress or growth of knowledge unless it was forced by “the state.” He would have been out of business, unable to sell his period potboiler books in order to support himself. Whether he could have pursued his goal of achieving happiness in that condition would be an open question. The perceived opposition or contrast between property and happiness played an important part in the wording of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was one of the first to vacillate between the two. Having studied the thought of the Scottish moralists he apparently had at first included “life, liberty, and property” in the text. But

86

W. B. Weimer

coming under the romantic influence of the French constructivists, and desiring an up-beat and optimistic formulation, he changed the wording to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In so doing he lost track of the fact that property is indispensable for liberty. He also lost track of the fact that happiness is not the sort of thing that can be pursued. Happiness cannot be a goal to be chased. It is an after-the-fact accompaniment of certain forms of behavior, and what it consists of can never be specified in advance, achieved for once and for all, or even known to be the same from individual to individual. Jefferson might have done better had he formulated it as a negative rule, as the attempt to eliminate unhappiness. But apparently he did not read Ferguson, who said that the first law of morality is negative in character, prohibiting certain classes of behavior. Jefferson is an interesting figure. Idealized by the left because of his constructivist leanings (as when John F. Kennedy said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”), there was until recently little mention by the left of his ownership of slaves— and the fact that he was proud of the profit he made by selling them, having calculated it nearly to the penny—or the fact, long hinted at, that he had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings (see the research report on Jefferson and Hemings, 2000, in Jefferson Monticello, IV, Research Findings and Implications; also Lee, 2013). Jefferson, like Lincoln, needs to be studied more and venerated less. He will be found to be, like John Stuart Mill, far less “intelligent” than presumed, and far from consistent, easily led astray by momentarily popular views that, like socialism, “sound good” but promise the impossible.

5 The New Enlightenment: Russell …

87

References Alchian, A. (1965). Some economics of property rights. Il Politico, 30, 816– 829. Alchian, A., & Demsetz, H. (1973). The property right paradigm. The Journal of Economic History, 33(1), 16–27. Jefferson Monticello, IV (2000). Jefferson and Hemings: Research findings and implications. Lee, S. E. (2013). Reconsidering the Jefferson-Hemings relationship: Nationalist historiography without nationalist heroes, racial sexuality without racial significance. Political Research Quarterly, 66 (3), 500–515. Russell, B. (1934/2009). Freedom and organization, 1814–1914. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1935/1997). Religion and science. Thornton Butterworth. Now Oxford University Press.

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky on Cartesian Linguistics and Anarchist Socialism

This paper [And Never the Twain Shall Meet or Language and Politics Chez Chomsky] is to critically examine Chomsky’s argument that his linguistics,…is a matter of ‘science’, his politics a matter of ‘personal hopes and aspirations’, and his analysis of [the] mechanism of indoctrination,…a matter of ‘trivial scientific analysis’. J. K. lele and R. Singh

Noam Chomsky is famous for having revolutionized linguistics, although precisely what constitutes “the Chomsky revolution” is subject to debate, both in terms of the methodology of research and the empirical particulars involved. Descriptively the previously dominant approach, structuralist linguistics, was superseded by his transformational grammar approach within a decade. Concurrently, he changed the course of cognitive psychology and new fields such as psycholinguistics, by attacking the neobehavioristic theory and research that dominated psychology, and in particular research on language. Both during and after the revolution he confounded friend and foe alike by claiming that his views were not revolutionary at all, but rather an attempt to reintroduce and bring up to date © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_6

89

90

W. B. Weimer

ideas that had once guided theory and research. This chapter examines how he reflects prior constructivist views.

Chomsky’s Lasting Contributions to Linguistics What Chomsky claimed to be reviving were mentalism in linguistics (as opposed to the behavioristic denial of the explanatory or factual utility of all nonphysical or non-behavioral concepts), and the rationalist approach to science as deductive and systematic rather than inductive and empirical. He subsumed both mentalism and rationalism under the rubric of Cartesian linguistics, and claimed that it is the Cartesian tradition he was reviving and updating. Without considering specific contributions to technical linguistics, it appears that the lasting lessons of Chomsky’s revolution can be summarized under roughly a half dozen headings. Chomsky would claim that all these are implications of the Cartesian rationalism or mentalism which he championed: 1. The surface-deep structure distinction. Chomsky reintroduced the Humboldtian distinction between “inner” and “outer” form of language as a contrast between the surface form of an utterance, which is available as empirical data in the study of language, and the underlying or deep conceptual structures that must have been present in the mind of the speaker-hearer in order for the surface forms to be what they are. Deep structure is fundamentally abstract in the sense that it is never observed in the surface of language, but rather must be inferred from the particulars of surface forms to account for their generation by the speaker or their understanding by the hearer. 2. A related distinction is between a speaker-hearer’s competence and performance. Competence is the idealized capacity of the speakerhearer as a rule governed language using system, and it is only partially reflected in observable performance, which is subject to all sorts of human frailties such as memory limitations and losses, misfluences, lapses in attention, etc. The intent is to distinguish the capacity of the speaker-hearer in an idealized situation in which transitory and

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

91

nonlinguistic factors that can mask his or her linguistic competence are disregarded, from the less competent model of the language user that we would form on the basis of nothing but observed performance. Chomsky’s point is that one must acknowledge that the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of language vastly exceeds either his or her prior learning history or performance limitations, and that linguistic theory must reflect language competence, leaving the limitations on performance to the biological and psychological domains. 3. Chomsky called attention to the reality and centrality of productivity or creativity in language. As the linguist uses these terms they refer to the ability to make infinite use of finite means, and to either utter or comprehend in novel but appropriate fashion. This is the fundamental fact of novelty within language. Although there are a finite number of words in any language, the number of sentences that can be created, in which a speaker-hearer can produce or comprehend, is literally indefinitely extended. This is, once again, the sense in which our knowledge of language is vastly greater than our prior learning experience can ever address. Creativity is rule governed—the ability to make infinite use of finite means implies that we generate sentences according to rules that must have specifiable mathematical or “generative” power. Creativity or productivity according to rules that permit recursion is an insight that combines the earlier mentalism and linguistics with Chomsky’s familiarity with modern mathematics and logic (as well as the beginnings of automata theory). 4. Once one understands that the productivity of natural language requires specification of the nature and generative power of the recursive rules underlying it, it becomes obvious that certain kinds of grammars (as theories of the structure of language) or psychological models (as theories of the competence of the speaker-hearer) can be dismissed as in principle incapable of explanatory adequacy, if one can show that they do not have the capacity to generate structures found in natural languages. This was the reasoning underlying Chomsky’s rejection of finite state grammars (in Syntactic Structures in 1957) and phrase structure grammars (after Paul Postal’s “Mohawk proof ” in 1963) for linguistics, and for rejecting all associationistic models of mind in psychology.

92

W. B. Weimer

5. Closely related to point 4 is the necessity of introducing far more powerful rules for the generation of natural languages. The transformational approach takes its name from Chomsky’s conception of transformational rules, the term borrowed from Zelig Harris, but fundamentally changed to mean rules capable of operating on strings of symbols of specified types rather than rules operating on single symbols. This type of rule was never considered in prior linguistics formulations, and was equally foreign to psychology. 6. Chomsky argued that semantic and functional analyses of language were not the major focus of explanatory models and linguistics. Instead he proposed the primacy of syntactic analysis, at least in explanatory strategy, and the dependence of semantic factors upon syntactic structuring. The grammar of language, or its form (formalmathematical structure) was thus singled out as the prime focus for research and of more importance as a level of analysis than programs which focused upon phonemic or morphophonemic considerations. From this arose the famous syntax-semantics controversies concerning the nature of the “ultimate” deep structural entities, with Chomsky claiming that they are ultimately syntactic, against the opposition generative semantics approach emphasizing semantic primitives. From this cluster of concepts stem most of the other “revolutionary” distinctions and concepts that are now commonplaces of the linguistics and cognitive psychology armamentarium. Of this list perhaps the most famous is recognition of the existence of deep structural ambiguity, denoting a string (of surface entities) that is ambiguous as a result of representing two different derivational histories (in language, two different sentences), instead of either lexical (word) ambiguity or surface structure ambiguity (which can be resolved by different parsings of the given surface constituents, requiring no “looking back” over the derivational history). Methodologically Chomsky reintroduced the “rationalist” strategy (of the mathematician) of deducing conclusions from theoretical premises (taken as axiomatic to the Cartesian intellect) to give “clear cases” of language data in place of the prevailing positivistic conception of building block accumulation of certified “facts” from careful inductive

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

93

inference. This switch to deductivism is what enabled Chomsky, with the aid of explicit attempts at formalization of concepts, to utilize the strategy of asserting that by pushing a model to its theoretical limits one could see its limitations in explicit fashion, rather than resorting to tedious and never-ending empirical research and ad hoc modification to address specific cases. In effect the claim is that deducing explicit consequences from theoretical models enables their falsification and thus could lead to their rejection and replacement. In contrast the inductivist procedure of gathering confirming instances could never falsify, but only lead to ad hoc (actually, post hoc) modifications (such as talk of probabilities of responding) or restrictions. This is what is involved in his distinction between descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The concept of a “clear case,” as something “obvious” to the Cartesian intuitions of the native speaker-hearer of a language, as the ultimate data base of linguistic analysis, is what makes the rationalistic deductive approach a mentalistic one. Let us pause to see how Chomsky conceived the task of linguistics (and thus ultimately cognition). We can then trace his historical reconstruction of the Cartesian tradition, and finally cover his “quite sophisticated” conception of scientific method. With these technical points as background it will be clearer how his social and political views both stem from and interrelate with rationalist constructivism, and how, analogously to Russell, his substantive contributions to philosophy and science effectively refute his political views.

The Goal of Linguistic Theory Chomsky wanted to return inquiry to the task of explanation, to abandon the descriptive or taxonomic approach that stemmed from the positivistic prescription that science is the collection and systematization of “facts” and inductions based upon them. Behaviorism, as the direct application of logical positivism to psychology, was seen as scientism and superficial analysis: “the ‘behavioral sciences’ are merely mimicking the surface features of the natural sciences; much of their scientific character has been achieved by a restriction of subject matter

94

W. B. Weimer

and in a concentration on rather peripheral issues” (Chomsky, 1968, p. v). Concerning human knowledge and epistemology, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (1971) argued that the study of human psychology has been diverted into side channels by unwillingness to tackle the problem of how experience is related to knowledge and belief (see p. 47). This was caused by an uncritical acceptance of naïve empiricism as a correlate to inductivist methodology. In their place Chomsky returned to rationalism and deductive methodology. “It is a curious fact that empiricism is commonly regarded as somehow a ‘scientific’ philosophy. Actually, the empiricist approach to acquisition of knowledge has a certain dogmatic and aprioristic character that is largely lacking in its rationalistic counterpart” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 207). This led Chomsky to idealization: Cartesian “clear cases” in data, and the ideal speaker-hearer. It is the sole means of “proceeding rationally,” he said in 1977, p. 54. You must study ideal systems, and then you can ask yourself in what manner these ideal systems are “represented and interact in real individuals” (Chomsky, 1977, p. 54). The resulting deductivism enters straightforwardly: He feels it is reasonable to regard the grammar of language ideally as a “mechanism” that provides an enumeration of the sentences analogously to the way in which deductive theories give an enumeration of a set of theorems (see 1967, p. 369). The advantage of deductive formalization had been stressed from the very beginning, i.e., the preface of Syntactic Structures: “by pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding.… More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed” (1957, p. 5). What the grammar is to explain is what traditional grammars, prior to structuralist taxonomy, were to assess: “the goal of a traditional grammar is to provide its users with the ability to understand an arbitrary sentence of the language, and to form and employ it properly on the appropriate occasion” (Chomsky, 1964, p. 16). Thus the fundamental fact to be explained is the creativity or productivity of language. Chomsky argued that creativity, although recognized since the time of Descartes, could only be understood quite recently, with technical devices for expressing recursive processes that were not available until much more recently.

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

95

In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt’s sense) make infinite use of finite means) has developed only within the last 30 years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics (Chomsky, 1965, p. 8). In that sense, Chomsky’s revolution is nothing more than the resurrection of creativity as the central problem of language, and the realization that it is a matter of rule governed generation of sentences. The other major points outlined above follow rather directly from this fundamental insight, in combination with Chomsky’s methodological preferences. For instance, mentalism and competenceperformance: “mentalistic linguistics is simply theoretical linguistics that uses performance as data (along with other data, for example, the data provided by introspection) for the determination of competence” (ibid., p. 193). Competence was taken as the primary object for linguistics to study. Likewise, the concept of transformational rules follows from “pushing” to see the inadequacy of phrase structure rules.

Cartesian Linguistics Even this cursory overview of the nature of linguistic analysis is sufficient to show the Chomsky made the sharpest possible break with the explanatory and methodological framework of his immediate predecessors. Without assessing this approach here (indeed much of it fits into contemporary nonjustificational philosophy, which I have defended in many locations), we must consider now how he assimilated his approach to an “enduring” tradition stemming from Descartes. After the unexpected success of Syntactic Structures Chomsky reconstructed the historical underpinnings of his approach, both to show its historical legitimacy and to emphasize that structural linguistics had ignored the rationalist tradition he represented. Starting with the realization that Wilhelm von Humboldt had emphasized the creativity of language, and that the much earlier Port Royal Grammer of 1662 made the surfacedeep distinction, he traced out a coherent scenario for the development of those views that he had emphasized. By the publication of Aspects in 1965 Chomsky’s work had taken a distinctly historical cast: the preface

96

W. B. Weimer

of Aspects refers to Humboldt, and the first chapter is introduced historically. In another monograph, Chomsky (1964), he also followed an historical format, as did the later book Language and Mind (1968). In the interim the “solely” historical Cartesian Linguistics appeared in 1966. The designation “Cartesian” is interesting because Chomsky admitted that Descartes made only scant reference to language in his writing (see 1966, p. 3). The reason for the label is that Descartes is the earliest figure of importance that Chomsky could find who made essential use of the creativity of language—specifically in his postulation that the possession of creativity is the decisive factor separating “rational man” from the “automaton” beasts. This enabled Chomsky to simultaneously attack behaviorism in both linguistics and psychology, and empiricism in philosophy. First the claim that Descartes emphasized this: It is “The diversity of human behavior, its appropriateness to new situations, and man’s capacity to innovate—the creative aspect of language use providing the principal indication of this—that leads Descartes to attribute possession of mind to other humans since he regards this capacity as beyond the limitations of any imaginable mechanism” (ibid., p. 6). This leads to his contemporary claim: “Thus a fully adequate psychology requires the postulation of a ‘creative principle’ along side of the ‘mechanical principle’ that suffices to account for all other aspects of the inanimate and animate world and for a significant range of human actions and ‘passions’ as well” (ibid., p. 6). Indeed, Chomsky rewrote history to claim that the famous Cartesian mental substance, the res cogitans, was really a descriptive term for linguistic creativity (in Language and Mind , pp. 5–6).1 Chomsky takes Humboldt to be the theorist “most forceful” in developing creativity and in attempting “to develop a comprehensive theory of general linguistics” (ibid., p. 19), and cites him as emphasizing the notion of “form” in generative process (1964, p. 17), and of the idea of making infinite use of finite means (1968, p. 15). Chomsky (1977) candidly noted that Humboldt is not really in the Cartesian tradition at all (see p. 78), being more a German Romantic (actually, a German liberal), but he placed him there because of the emphasis on creativity in his writing (see also his 1964, p. 27). From admissions like this it became clear that Chomsky was willing to rewrite history so that anyone

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

97

emphasizing creativity or the surface-deep structure distinction would be assimilated to the Cartesian tradition, regardless of their actual views. This is a “clear case” of the victors in a revolution rewriting history to fit their views. There are some important contradictions in Cartesian Linguistics. For example, on page 59 we were told that the central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics is that the general features of “Grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind.” Yet on page 100 this is been transformed into “the general assumption” that “the surface organization of a sentence may not give a true and full representation of the grammatical relations that play a role in determining its semantic content,…” and later that a theory of grammar “is sketched in which actual sentences are derived from underlying ‘deep structures’ in which these relations are grammatically represented.” Either creativity or deep structure can receive pride of place, but not both at once. In other locations Chomsky portrayed the nativist approach to language learning, emphasizing innate structuring and “ideas” as the “central” feature. If either of the latter two aspects are emphasized then the notion of “Cartesian” linguistics becomes far less tenable. And as a matter of fact it is untenable if Humboldt is taken to be its major representative. Humboldt was a liberal political theorist (which Chomsky completely overlooks) who happened to be imbued with an optimistic outlook for society so long as it is structured in such a fashion that progress will be maximized. He emphasized the infinite possibility of mankind’s potential achievements. Humboldt was a “natural rights” theorist, well aware of the conventional aspect of civilization and the necessity to plan for progress rather than to plan the particulars of progress. Since Chomsky’s framework could not countenance this, Humboldt is assimilated first to Marx (with quotations from Marx but not from Humboldt) and then to the libertarian Rousseau (again with copious quotations from Rousseau but none from Humboldt: see his 1966, p. 91). Chomsky’s quotation of Humboldt in the text (pp. 24– 26) is selective, emphasizing only the “optimism” that is compatible with Rousseau. It would be far more correct to regard Humboldt as Kantian, but Kant, who was far from a rationalist constructivist, is conspicuous by

98

W. B. Weimer

his near total absence from Chomsky’s writings. Kant is not mentioned in Aspects, and I find no use of his views in Cartesian Linguistics (his name appears on pages 62, 69, and 73) or Language and Mind (lack of even a name index in either is not helpful).2 Thus we can begin to see one important manner in which his political views, in combination with rationalist constructivism, constrained Chomsky’s substantive theory: history is written to ignore alternatives. We shall discuss Chomsky’s omission of other views, especially those of Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper, in other locations. To return to Chomsky’s Cartesian view however, we should note his position on nativism in language learning. Chomsky characterized the Cartesian tradition as emphasizing innate “mechanisms,” “principles,” “theories,” and “ideas” as necessary preconditions to experience and knowledge. Aspects refers to the long-range task of developing an account of this innate linguistic theory that “provides the basis for language learning” (p. 25), and later stated that the rationalist approach “holds that beyond the peripheral processing mechanisms, there are innate ideas and principles of various kinds that determine the form of the acquired knowledge…” (p. 48). We will see that under the pressure of evolutionary thinking this emphasis on extreme nativism was considerably modified.3 That same page refers to a condition for innate mechanisms to become activated is that “appropriate stimulation be presented.” Thus it is clear that something (or things) is innate, but exactly what that is, is quite murky. In terms of the formal theory, what the mind brings to language learning is whatever “aspects of the base structure are not specific to a particular language,…” (p. 117). Cartesian Linguistics tells us that the principles of language and natural logic are “known unconsciously” and that they are in large measure a precondition for language acquisition rather than a matter of “institution” or “training,” is the general presupposition of Cartesian linguistics (p. 63). And this leads us to a psychology that is a kind of “Platonism without pre-existence” (ibid., p. 63). These strong assumptions of the rationalist tradition have eliminated any necessity for any “sharp distinction between a theory of perception and a theory of learning. In both cases, essentially the same processes are at work; a store of latent principles is brought to the interpretation of the

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

99

data of sense” (p. 65). This leads to a Socratic maiutic conception of the acquisition of language, in which language learning is the unfolding of innate capacity in the presence of a sufficiently rich environment, and language “teaching” becomes an incorrect formulation if instruction or drill or reinforced trials are involved. As Aspects (1965) put it: Applying this rationalist view to the special case of language learning, Humboldt (1836) concludes that one cannot really teach language but can only present the conditions under which it will develop spontaneously in the mind in its own way. Thus, the form of a language, the schema for its grammar, is to a large extent given, though it will not be available for use without appropriate experience to set the languageforming processes into operation. Like Leibniz, he reiterates the Platonic view that, for the individual, learning is a matter of… drawing out what is innate in the mind. (p. 51)

Parenthetically, please note that “one cannot really teach language but can only present the conditions under which it will develop spontaneously” is an exact parallel to the classic liberal thesis that one can not plan the particulars of progress but only create conditions in which it might be able to occur. Chomsky did not realize that this is obviously evolutionary, and thus opposed to explicit “clear” Cartesian reason and his “preformed” theory of the mind. Even though a grammar for language is a theory, Chomsky maintained that the child learning language is not constructing a scientific sort of theory. Aspects is explicit, almost militant, about this: “It is a matter of no concern and of only historical interest that such a hypothesis (about initial structure rich enough to account for language acquisition) will evidently not satisfy the preconceptions about learning that derive from centuries of empiricist doctrine” (p. 58). From this the heart of the Cartesian position: “These prescriptions are not only quite implausible, to begin with, but are without factual support and are hardly consistent with what little is known about how animals or humans construct a ‘theory of the external world’” (ibid., p. 58). Responding specifically to this issue in an interview (1977), he held that the important thing is to determine the deeper principles and the “detailed structure of various cognitive systems,…. If one finds that these systems are acquired in a

100

W. B. Weimer

uniform manner with very little specific structure, very well. But for the present at least it seems to me that quite different conclusions are indicated” (p. 84). The stance on language acquisition as virtually totally innate is an obvious aspect of rationalist constructivism. Once one recalls that Cartesian Reason stands outside the natural order and appraises it, and that for Descartes language is the res cogitans, the essence of reason, it becomes clear that the Cartesian view is actually incompatible with evolution and functional specification of the adaptive role of language. Language as reason (with a R) cannot evolve, but must rather have already existed: it is to be “prior” to adaptation, and causes it rather than evolving with it. This point will be examined more fully below; for now only note that it is a most direct and literal instance of rationalist constructivism in Chomsky’s psychology. What we shall see later is that what must be removed from Cartesian linguistics to make it a branch of cognitive psychology (as Chomsky asserted that it must be on the first page of Language and Mind ), is precisely Descartes’ rationalist constructivism. With that caveat let us consider the methodology of research Chomsky endorsed, to see how it portrays the rationalist-empiricist controversy.

Cartesian Methodology and the Growth of Knowledge Chomsky had two research methodologies, one embedded in his serious linguistics, and the other found in his social and political views, when commenting on scientific inference. Consider them in turn, and then see if the preachment squares well with the practice. Syntactic Structures was a good example of the implicit practice. Begin with the nature of data. Here Chomsky was explicit: intuitions of clear cases, either in introspection or interrogation of informants, is the basis of linguistics. His strategy is, like Russell’s, to assume intuitive knowledge of the grammatical sentences of English and then ask what sort of grammar will be able to do the job of producing these in

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

101

some “effective” way (see 1957, p. 13). This assumes that we can recognize, with no tutoring, a class of grammatical utterances and another class of non-grammatical ones. It is the job of the grammar to decide, by constituting a principled theory, about the potential third class of intermediate cases. So a number of clear cases, then, will provide us with a criterion of adequacy for any particular grammar (see ibid., p. 14). Chomsky’s methodology is explicitly falsificationist—he wants to be able to reject incorrect grammars. The strongest possible proof of the inadequacy of a linguistic theory would be to show that it literally cannot apply to some natural language. A weaker, but sufficient demonstration of inadequacy would be to show that the theory can apply only in a clumsily fashion (see ibid., p. 34). Thus falsification is an ideal, and if not attainable then simplicity as a convention representing falsification will suffice as a substitute. Chomsky attempted to conclusively refute rivals, although he was well aware of the conventional agreement required in testing. Thus he is what has been called a “naïve” falsificationist rather than a “dogmatic” one (see Weimer, 1979). He endorsed the early Popperian notion that theories are conjectures rather than inductive generalizations, and thus there is no “confirmation theory” or “inductive logic” of theory generation: how one arrives at a grammar—by intuition, guesswork, partial methodological hints, reliance on past experience—it is possible to give an organized, formal account of useful procedures of analysis, but it is unlikely that these procedures can be formulated rigorously, exhaustively and simply enough to qualify as a practical and mechanical discovery procedure (see 1957, p. 56). Considering this was published before the English translation of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery became available in 1959, and prior to Conjectures and Refutations (1963), its congruence with Popper’s views (as for example in Popper’s “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance”) is remarkable. Another Popperian point was Chomsky’s realization that statistics are impotent to deal with complex phenomena in their particularity. He knew that a structural analysis cannot be understood as a schematic summary developed by “sharpening blurred edges” in a statistical picture.… Probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure (see 1957, p. 17).

102

W. B. Weimer

This insight is of crucial importance in the study of phenomena of organized complexity, and it corresponds to Hayek’s slightly earlier (1955) distinction of explanations of the principle in contrast to explanations of the particular (see Hayek, 1967, 1978). Views expressed in Chomsky’s explicit methodology statements are similar but not identical. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom and Language and Responsibility (1979) ignore the liberal Popper entirely in favor of Bertrand Russell and the neglected American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Chomsky was also sympathetic to the philosophy of the “later” Russell in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). In that period Russell all but abandoned empiricism in favor of (quite Cartesian) “postulates of scientific inference,” and instead of “justifying” putative scientific knowledge claims began to ask what conditions would be required if we are to possess knowledge at all. Russell’s problem became that of explaining why, if we have any genuine knowledge of reality, we seem to have such great facility for achieving it. That is, if we have significant knowledge at all, the relative frequency with which our attempts to achieve it have succeeded must be very high indeed, because the possibilities of failure are literally infinite—for any body of data whatever, it is easily provable that an infinite number of theories will be compatible with the data and in conflict with each other (see Maxwell, 1975). The constraints on the possibility of knowledge led Russell to a position that acknowledges the innate structuring of the organism, and Chomsky saw that as consistent with his rationalism, and considered the study of language as clarifying these issues (1971): knowledge and belief results from innate mechanisms, or genetically determined maturational processes, interacting with the social and physical environment (see p. 21). So the study of language was proposed as the empirical battleground. The problem is to account for whatever system is constructed or generated in the mind in the course of this interaction. Chomsky’s claim is that the part of human knowledge which has, so far, lent itself most readily to such an approach is the system of human language (see p. 21). But Chomsky really preferred the views of Peirce to those of Russell, as he made clear in an interview (1979). Chomsky felt he was almost paraphrasing Peirce:

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

103

Peirce argued that to account for the growth of knowledge, one must assume that “man’s mind has a natural adaptation to imagine correct theories of some kind,” some principle of “abduction” which “puts a limit on admissible hypothesis,” a kind of “instinct,” developed in the course of evolution. Peirce’s ideas on abduction were rather vague, and his suggestion that biologically given structure plays a basic role in the selection of scientific hypotheses seems to have had very little influence. (p. 71)

Chomsky also asserted that “almost no one” had tried to develop Peirce’s ideas, despite the criticism of inductivism by, for example, Popper. Chomsky then asserted the neo-justificationist view that nondemonstrative inferences are “only rendered probable” (for the untenability of this see Weimer, 1979). Chomsky would have nothing to do with the idea that explanation is different in the social sciences from the natural sciences. On this he follows positivism explicitly (despite his opposition to probability “explanations” in Syntactic Structures). Discussing the then current use of Kuhn and Lakatos as having gone beyond the “artificial” models of verification and falsification, he noted that those models had exercised “a dubious influence on the ‘soft sciences,’ as the latter did not rest on the foundations of a healthy intellectual tradition” (ibid., p. 73) that could guide them. He thought it useful to study the model of the natural sciences to recognize how “at critical moments of their development, they have been guided by radical idealization, a concern for depth of insight and explanatory power rather than by a concern to accommodate ‘all the facts’” (ibid., p. 73). Thus he emphasized what we shall discuss as the problem of “explanation of the principle,” but scientistically assumed it could be explained on the axiomatic model of the simple physical sciences. What can one say about this methodology? On one hand it is more contemporary and quite sophisticated in comparison to Skinner’s view— indeed it makes those views ludicrous. On the other hand, it is clearly a rationalist constructivist grab bag of incompatibles, in which many points are either incorrect or were better said by more “liberal” theorists. The implicit model, with its emphasis on falsification, explanation of

104

W. B. Weimer

the principle instead of the particular, and similar notions is quite defensible. But the Cartesian ideal of clear cases is nonsense, both in terms of the evidence supporting the “theoretical contamination” of observation (see Weimer, 1979) and in terms of research in psychology. For example, examining the issue of clear cases specifically, Spencer (1973) showed that there is lack of agreement both among naïve subjects on intuitions of grammatical reality, and only 50% agreement between naïve subjects and linguistically sophisticated ones. Thus “clear cases” are theory dependent, dependent upon individual subjects, and far from “clear.” They cannot, therefore, serve as a firm “basis” of linguistic knowledge. The problem is that faced by any phenomenalism as a theory of knowledge: the “given” cannot be “taken” for what the theory requires. Cartesian phenomenalism cannot be taken seriously as a basis for scientific knowledge (see Note 3). Concerning the rationally reconstructed or explicit model, perhaps the most obvious point is that Chomsky’s views were tailored to fit theorists who share his social and political progressivism. Thus he even forgave Russell his empiricism because his later philosophy, dealing with Hume’s “mere animal belief,” can be rendered as nativistic. Peirce was certainly the “father” of the concept of abduction, but the whole tradition of evolutionary epistemology is both predecessor of and successor to his early views. Thus it is surprising that Chomsky ignored the views of, for example, Popper (as in the Schilpp volumes of 1974), who claimed his evolutionary views as the central feature unifying his falsificationist methodology. But Popper, of course, was a liberal, tracing his heritage to Kant (and the ancient Greeks), demolishing Descartes along the way. The same could be said for Chomsky’s conception of tacit knowledge, so obvious in his three cardinal ideas of creativity, competence, and deep structure. Chomsky never mentioned Michael Polanyi in print, despite the fact that “the tacit dimension” was then known to every philosopher and psychologist as Polanyi’s preserve. One as historically inclined as Chomsky could not simply be ignorant of Polanyi’s views—there had to be a conspiracy of silence here, for if such theorists were merely wrong, they would at least have been mentioned as such. But Polanyi’s sin was to have almost single-handedly demolished the progressivist “science for social use” movement during World War II (see Polanyi, 1951), and

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

105

to have written Personal Knowledge as an extension of his liberal views on science and society. His focus on our inevitable ignorance and the necessarily unconscious aspects of mental functioning are incompatible with the views of Descartes which claim that what is tacit can be brought to consciousness (as Chomsky claimed, see his 1966, p. 109), and his political views are anathema to the progressivist engineer. Indeed it would appear, from a perspective external to the Cartesian one, that all that is tenable in Chomsky’s methodology is better cast in a framework diametrically opposed to his own.

Social and Political Thought: Progressivist Libertarian Anarchism Chomsky’s writings on social and political issues fall mainly into two categories: denunciations of ongoing policy, and criticism of American military involvement in other countries; or presentation of relatively intellectual explications of his own views. We ignore the former because it would be too hard to separate the values involved from the arguments for them, and will consider the latter only. For expository purposes we overview Chomsky’s views on Russell, and then look at his position in contrast to Russell’s. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom was the first Russell Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge. That Chomsky was invited to deliver these lectures is all one need to note to confirm his reputation as the leading representative of the “progressive left” in 1970. We can begin by examining Chomsky’s perspective on those aspects of Russell’s thought that he chose to cover. Chomsky introduced Russell as a libertarian, and claimed Russell “inclined” toward libertarian concepts of education and social organization (see 1971, p. 54). Later, he said that anarchism is the ultimate ideal to which society should approximate, but for the present, Russell regarded some variant of guild socialism as a reasonable prospect (see pp. 59–60). He then introduced Russell’s views on socialism as being about the liberation of the creative impulse (Chomsky’s favorite, the notion of creativity or productivity) and the reconstruction of society to further this end. Social democratic ideals, concerned with freedom,

106

W. B. Weimer

require the organization of economic production and distribution, and social planning must be under “direct” democratic control in both the workplace and the community if socialist ideals are to be realized (see pp. 60–61). Chomsky’s major citations are to Russell’s earlier social and political views—his main references range from 1916 to 1923 (the only exception is an excerpt from Russell’s Nobel Prize lectures of 1950). Note the sharp contrast on this to Russell’s later epistemology, where endorsement is limited to his last work. Not surprisingly, Russell’s later social views repudiated his earlier ones on most of these points. As indicated previously in Chapter 4, the theme of organization, and the desire to turn society into a fully organized and directed taxis, conquered Russell before the 1930s. This led him to oppose libertarian and anarchistic views in politics and education. First, Russell opposed any unlimited sovereignty or freedom, as that between nations: “this anarchic exultation of national self-assertion lead logically to the outbreak of war in 1914, and must continue to lead to wars…” (1934, p. 446). Second, between individuals, Russell opposed the Rousseau inspired romantics and the anarchist communists, such as Chomsky’s favorite, Bakunin, because he recognized that “liberty, if pushed to its logical conclusion, involved anarchy,…” (ibid., p. 228). Consider now the triumph of organization: “As the world, through technical progress, has become more unified, it has become increasingly an obstacle to progress to allow absolute independence to separate nations: nations, like individuals, will have to learn to submit to government. In this respect, as in various others, the philosophy of liberalism is too anarchic for the needs of the modern world” (ibid., p. 234). To anticipate Chomsky’s own views, Russell had this to say about Marx and Bakunin. “What ever may be thought of Marx’s methods, there can be no doubt that his programme was more practicable than his rivals, and based upon a sounder estimate of human nature” (ibid., p. 187). What of progressivism in education? Here Russell was famous for starting his own school because of the rigidity and irrelevance of the traditional approach. Nevertheless he could not countenance “libertarian” views here, but rather emphasized the necessity of discipline and instruction. As he said in Portraits from Memory (1956):

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

107

I thought what is called “progressive education” in most schools deficient on the purely scholastic side. It seemed to me, and still seems, that in a technically complex civilization such as ours a man cannot play an important part unless in youth he has had a very considerable dose of sheer instruction.…I am not a believer in complete freedom during childhood. I think children need a fixed routine, though there should be days when it is not carried out. (pp. 9–10)

Once again Russell’s prime desideratum, the organization mentality, triumphs over libertarian doctrine. Chomsky’s views are thus actually quite antithetical to Russell’s. This is implicit in his contribution to a centenary volume honoring Russell, Essays in Socialist Humanism (1972), in which Russell’s name is not even mentioned. The heroes of that essay are Rocker, Bakunin, and Paul, and the title, “Anarchism,” denotes exactly what Chomsky defended. Chomsky ignored Russell in order to give the fullest possible development of each individual unimpeded by government or any other restraint. Quoting Bakunin on “liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature” (p. 35), he claimed that “these ideas grow out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence,… that freedom is the precondition of acquiring the maturity for freedom…” (p. 35). Chomsky felt that only the extreme individualist socialism continues the emancipation of humanity that began with the Enlightenment. Ultimately, “it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order” (p. 35). Thus Chomsky’s socialism is the most “liberal” variant possible—it is the only “sophisticated” position that he has not yet seen to be refuted. His endorsement of Bakunin is largely because he sees him as part of the “Cartesian” tradition that compares the “laws of individual nature” to the creative aspect of thought (see ibid., p. 41). In that it appears that we have a key— creativity, Creativity becomes “anything goes.” Chomsky’s chief concern in language is translated into libertarian lack of restraint in politics. But in language, creativity is always rule governed and hence constrained.

108

W. B. Weimer

Apparently the rule governed nature of creativity in language had to be dropped entirely in the move to social and political theory, and the romantic individualism of Rousseau added in its place. The framework of lawful regularity provided for language (and argued to be necessary for its creativity) is totally absent from Chomsky’s social and political views. It is hard to imagine a more blatant instance of self-contradiction and inconsistency. Chomsky was emphatic in his denial of the more conservative progressivist doctrines, likening them to empiricism and the engineers. Speaking of the Bolsheviks and the idea that the radical intelligentsia must imprint social consciousness upon the proletariat tabula rasa, he claims: “This set of beliefs corresponds very well to the demands of the technocratic intelligentsia: it offers them a very important social role.… For that empiricism is quite suitable. So from this point of view, it is perhaps no surprise that denial of any ‘essential human nature’ has been so prominent in much of the left-wing doctrine” (1979, p. 90). This argument, of course, does double duty by damning Skinner’s behavioral engineering as well as Russell’s organization. Once again, “rational” laissez faire individualism (anarchism) in society is to trump empirical organization, even though his scientific contributions show the exact opposite in the “organization” of the rule system of language. In sum, Chomsky’s social-political position is a combination of an anarchist laissez-faire and Rousseau’s romantic individualism, given a “substantive” addition by the Cartesian tradition of creativity, but without the newer addition of his own understanding of creativity as rule governed. The motivation to endorse his view is quite strong, sufficiently so that Chomsky was willing to distort Russell’s views to make them congruent when it is necessary to praise him as being in the “correct” social class and historical tradition. That motivation is to deny the engineering mentality of the organization man (clearly Russell’s most belabored point), and its alleged “control” (in the Skinnerian sense) not only in the shaping of society but also within the individual. Egalitarianism is his ultimate commitment, because his nativism regards all individuals as equal—we are all born competent to speak. Precisely what is lost in the social formulation is the substantive achievement for which Chomsky was famous as a linguist. In that sense, it is fair to

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

109

say that Chomsky’s substantive contributions dealing with rule governed creativity effectively and decisively refute his entire social and political framework. How a competent thinker could be this inconsistent is a moot point—perhaps in this case it is the matter of an “inherited” social radicalism having been lovingly and carefully nurtured and embraced in his teenage years and thus never subjected to critical scrutiny (indeed, Chomsky deliberately picked Harris as an intellectual mentor because of his anarchist-socialist views). Chomsky is “critical” only within his family of socialists because they are not “romantic” or libertarian-anarchist enough, and also critical of the totalitarian technicians. But there is no evidence he has ever even considered the existence of true or classical liberalism: his remarks in that regard are limited to “it is obvious…” dismissals of unexamined views.

Notes 1. The classic form of the mind–body problem, as a Cartesian contrast between two substances, is an ontological pseudo-problem. Chomsky noted that Descartes’ motivation for distinguishing a separate substance (the res cogitans) for the mental phenomena was to completely remove reason with a R from the physical order. The ontological separation of mind from body (as opposed to the epistemic separation) is the ultimate statement of rationalist constructivism, and the reason why Descartes was the epitome of the position. If reason did indeed stand outside the natural order in this manner it would be plausible to assume that it could come to understand the natural order in its entirety. And if interaction is deemed acceptable, that (as Comte later asserted) could rationalize Reason controlling the subsequent development of the natural order. But for Descartes that was a flight of fancy. Having no conception of rule governed creativity, Descartes could not know about creativity in behavior (as opposed to in language and thought), and could not entertain the idea that mere animals could exhibit creative behavior. Thus Chomsky pointed out that Descartes’s theory is false, but far from an irrational or baseless one. Nevertheless, by failing to examine the evidence carefully

110

W. B. Weimer

Descartes created a false mind–body problem and the false Cartesian version of constructivism all in one move. The only evidence of the “uniqueness” of language (and hence of mind) from the natural order is due to inadequate sampling of data, and today the view has been discarded. There is no evidence whatsoever to support a claim that reason stands apart from the spontaneously evolved physical, psychological, and social orders. It is a part of that order even though it is functional rather than physical. 2. Selective historical reconstruction is inevitable, and it may appear picayune to question Chomsky’s references, but my argument against his historical reconstruction is that it requires that opponents be misassimilated to the Cartesian tradition. Chomsky adopted the strategy of “mention” as opposed to “use” of an author. By merely mentioning an author without quotation or definite citation Chomsky implied that he was elaborating their position. He employed the strategy with Kant, who is difficult to quote out of context. Chomsky did not ignore the Kantian tradition, he merely mentioned it rather than using it. All but one or two of his references to Kant just mentioned his name. Chomsky had no use for Kantian views except in the limited case of his categories of the understanding, which fitted in with his nativist epistemology despite the fact that Kant’s particular categories are incorrect. In other respects Kant, like Hume, refuted the Cartesian approach. Thus Humboldt, an acknowledged Kantian, had to be cited out of context (on creativity and the possibility of human achievement) to make it appear as if he were in the Cartesian mainstream. 3. Chomsky began by considering language to be the equivalent of Descartes’ mental substance. He honestly believed that the theory of language was innate or built in to human cognition. His presentation of this doctrine vacillated between asserting ontological or epistemic emergence, but it is clear that a very strong emergentist doctrine was present in either case. And having all along asserted that his views were compatible with evolution, he later faced a problem when confronted by actual evolutionary theory and results. Critics could assert, quite correctly, that his views were not compatible with evolution. Evolution does not show large (qualitative) jumps when

6 The New Enlightenment: Chomsky …

111

examined in detail. It is always very slow, even when exhibiting downward causation (Campbell, 1974a, 1974b) to account for extreme specialization. Thus he has had to water down the Cartesian substance view into one compatible with actual evolution. His more recent students (e.g., see Fitch, 2010, especially pages 20–24) have reinterpreted his views in order to accommodate this change. The problem is to account for both evolutionary continuity, on the one hand, and functional discontinuity on the other. Fitch and others have done this by talking about the faculty of language in a broad sense to try to accommodate both perspectives. But the point to note is that the extravagant doctrines Chomsky began with are now being dismantled and explained away, even by his followers.

References Campbell, D. T. (1974a). “Downward causation” in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. Macmillan. Campbell, D. T. (1974b). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 413–463). Open Court. Now Cricket Media. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton & Company. Chomsky, N. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory. Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1966/2009). Cartesian linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (1967). The formal nature of language. In E. H. Lenneberg (Ed.), Biological foundations of language. Wiley. Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chomsky, N. (1971). Problems of knowledge and freedom. Pantheon. Chomsky, N. (1977). Essays on form and interpretation. North-Holland. Chomsky, N. (1979). Language and responsibility. Pantheon. Fitch, W. T. II (2010). The evolution of language. Cambridge University Press. Hayek, F. A. (1967). Studies in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis).

112

W. B. Weimer

Hayek, F. A. (1978). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis Group). Maxwell, G. (1975). Induction and empiricism: A Bayesian-frequentist alternative. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 106–165). University of Minnesota Press. Polanyi, M. (1951). The logic of liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted by Liberty Fund. Postal, P. (1963). Limitations of phrase structure grammars. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall. Russell, B. (1934/2009). Freedom and organization, 1814–1914. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Spencer, N. (1973). Differences between linguists and nonlinguists in intuitions of grammaticality-acceptability. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 83–98. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

“Man is born free,” said Rousseau, “and is everywhere in chains,” but no one is less free than a newborn child, nor will he become free as he grows older. His only hope is that he will come under the control of a natural and social environment.… All this will be possible not because those with whom he associates possess morality and a sense of ethics or decency or compassion, but because they in turn are controlled by a particular kind of social environment. B. F. Skinner

With the demise of neobehaviorism as an explanatory framework for experimental or “hardheaded” physicalistic psychology (due principally to the revolution in linguistics and cognitive psychology stemming from Chomsky) the discipline became increasingly polarized between advocates of the “new” cognitive approach and the remaining behavioristic faithful. The only surviving behaviorism that still clings to the name is the most primitive variant, so-called radical behaviorism, the acknowledged “theoretical” leader of which was B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s approach represented a more modern variety of Comte’s positivism and scientism © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_7

113

114

W. B. Weimer

within rationalist constructivism, exemplifying the engineering mentality that searches for system in simple dependencies among a few variables, in a descriptive rather than an explanatory framework. Echoing the fictional television program detective (“Just the facts, ma’am”) theoretical constructs are few and far between, and the Skinnerian system relied primarily upon physical science “control” and “contingencies of reinforcement” to “explain” responding (calling learned behavior operants, and classically conditioned responses respondents). To the question of why anything did (or did not) occur, the answer is always the same: environmental control and contingencies of reinforcement “strictly determine” it. To the question of what are abstract entities such as morality, liberty, freedom, knowledge, etc., the same answer is given: they are merely words for operant behavior under the control of contingencies of reinforcement. Conceptually speaking Skinner’s “system” is exhausted by pleonasm and positivism. The question for the psychology of science, history, and the methodology of research boils down to this: why would such an approach, vacuous conceptually and methodologically at variance with all the history of science, have captivated the social sciences? How could a small, vociferous band of engineers claim that theirs was the true scientific method, and the only genuine science of behavior, and also convince others of their claims, when their weight of numbers never constituted a majority except perhaps for a very brief period when the various “neo-” factions included them among their members? A large part of the answer lies in the pervasive power of rationalist constructivism, as a position that “sounds good,” with the engineering mentality (called “humanitarianism” by progressives) of the intelligentsia. This becomes clearer when the “system” is examined as an exemplification of constructivist thought. We begin to see this by looking at Skinner’s substantive views, and then moving to his utopian social theory.

The Behavior of Organisms To understand Skinner one must begin with Bertrand Russell, at least in Russell’s. “Potboiler” Philosophy (1927a). As Skinner said in the second volume of his autobiography, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979, p. 10),

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

115

he had been converted to the behavioristic position by Bertrand Russell. Skinner read Russell’s review of The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, and noted Russell’s reference to John B. Watson’s Behaviorism. “And after reading the review, I bought Behaviorism and, a year or so later, Russell’s Philosophy.… It begins with a careful statement of several epistemological issues raised by behaviorism considerably more sophisticated than anything of Watson’s (ibid.).” Skinner read a little more than the first third of the book, but stopped when Russell expounded his own views (tentative realism, after having begun to abandon phenomenalism). Thus Skinner ignored Russell’s refutation of behaviorism: “I stopped reading when I reached it. I therefore missed the last third, in which Russell undertakes to disprove the behavioristic part by talking about ‘the man from within’ (ibid., p. 11).”1 Skinner’s career was in essence an attempt to deny that there is any “man within the skin,” and in so doing to deny the creative aspect of behavior, or indeed its initiation from within the organism. As he noted, his is primarily a response psychology, not a stimulus-organism-response one, and that entails that the control of behavior is entirely environmental: contingencies of reinforcement as environmental (or social) events determine the behavior of organisms. Nothing more is needed. As Skinner noted in his 1976 preface to the paperback reprinting of The Behavior of Organisms: The Behavior of Organisms is often placed, quite erroneously, in the SR tradition. The book remains committed to the program stated in my 1931 paper in which the stimulus occupied no special place among the independent variables. The simplest contingencies involve at least three terms—stimulus, response, and reinforcer—and at least one other variable (the deprivation associated with the reinforcer) is implied. This is very much more than input and output, and when all relevant variables are thus taken into account, there is no need to appeal to an inner apparatus, whether mental, physiological, or conceptual. The contingencies are quite enough to account for attending, remembering, learning, forgetting, generalizing, abstracting, and many other so-called cognitive processes. (Skinner, 1976, p. xii)

116

W. B. Weimer

Thus Skinner wanted a descriptive psychology of nothing but cooccurrent relationships. It does not matter what “intervenes” inside the skin of the organism. That would have no explanatory relevance to “overt” behavior. What is important is not the nervous system (which Skinner, a student of the physiologist Crozier, never denied), but the correct ordering of events into a system of behavior. The task of science is to regularize or organize behavior by improving control: “improved experimental control has yielded much smoother curves.… All these advances were facilitated by a formulation which emphasized behavior rather than supposed precursors of behavior and observable variables rather than inferred causal states or processes (ibid., pp. xii–xiii).” In this framework everything becomes a matter of behavioral control by contingencies of reinforcement. Nothing else is allowed. If the behavior is not regular or reliable enough the experimental paradigm is manipulated and the subject constrained even more completely until “smooth” responding is obtained. The “irregular” behavior is simply discarded, rather than studied—it “must” be under the “control” of nuisance variables. Everything becomes a contingency: “if teaching may be defined as the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement under which students learn… (pp. xiii, xiv),” is reasonable, then why not consider culture “as a set of contingencies of reinforcement maintained by a group,… (1974, p. 223),” and accept that “a culture so defined controls the behavior of the members of the group that practices it (ibid.)?” Once one gets the hang of how easy this is, it is all but impossible to stop. All these forms of knowing (knowing how, that, about, etc.) “depend on a previous exposure to contingencies of reinforcement (ibid., p. 152).” All personal “feelings” are due to nothing but schedules of reinforcement (see his 1974, pp. 64–67). So is verbal behavior: verbal behavior is just behavior. It has a special character because it is “reinforced” by its effects on people—usually first other people, eventually on the speaker himself (see 1974, p. 99). Even science is nothing but the product of contingencies: he thinks the “laws of science” describe “contingencies” which prevail in the external environment independently from any deliberate human action (see ibid., p. 138).

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

117

The account passes the point of absurdity when our behavior becomes subject to “contingencies” to which we are not exposed: A person who is following directions, taking advice, heeding warnings, or obeying rules or laws does not behave precisely as one who has been directly exposed to the contingencies, because a description of the contingencies is never complete or exact (it is usually simplified in order to be easily taught or understood) and because the supporting contingencies are seldom fully maintained. (ibid., p. 139)

Skinner will have nothing to do with rules governing language. His treatment of language and reason is straight out of Hobbes: Grammatical behavior was shaped, then as now, by reinforcing practices of verbal communities in which some behaviors were more effective than others, and sentences were generated by the joint action of past reinforcements and current settings. But it is the contingencies which “govern the use of language,” not rules, whether or not they are extracted. (ibid., p. 141)

Reasons, of course, are merely shorthand ordinary language expressions for contingency controlled relationships. Understanding is similar: he thinks we understand what a writer says in the sense that we can now formulate the “contingencies the writer describes” more exactly or respond to them more successfully (see p. 157). And one can be sure that methodologists would be surprised to learn that the “facts and laws of science” are descriptions of the world in the sense of prevailing contingencies of reinforcement (see pp. 158–159). Evidently physical nature is determined by schedules of reinforcement. Indeed, apparently the only thing that exists in the physical world are schedules of reinforcement. Clearly Skinner intended his account to be “objective” and therefore material or physical, but he defines reinforcement operationally as whatever increases the probability of responding. But what is responding? Physically specifiable movements of organisms. So surely biology tells us

118

W. B. Weimer

that organisms are merely Hobbesian automata, constituted of entirely physical parts in motion. Denial of creativity or productivity within the organism is central to Skinner. He solved the problem it poses by appeal to random or chance mutation as an aspect of natural selection and evolution: “As accidental traits, arising from mutations, are selected by their contribution to survival, so accidental variations in behavior are selected by their reinforcing consequences… And creative thinking is largely concerned with the production of ‘mutations’ (pp. 126–127).” We learn to be creative in that we learn to set up those conditions in which “random variation” is likely to occur, for example, in a dialogue. The source of creativity, in other words, is an external : reinforcement for chance or unexpected variation. Rule-governed creativity, as in language, is simply ignored by Skinner: given an infinitude of environmental contingencies and random mutation one need never countenance internal direction of productivity. His goal is an entirely surface structure specification of co-occurrence relationships as a descriptive account of physically specified behavior.

Skinnerian Methodology Skinner was always a Machian positivist, as he said explicitly in The Behavior of Organisms. His system: May be characterized as follows. It is positivistic. It confines itself to description rather than explanation. Its concepts are defined in terms of immediate observations and are not given local or physiological properties.… Terms of this sort are used merely to bring together groups of observations,…They are not hypotheses, in the sense of things to be proved or disproved, but convenient representations of things already known. As to hypotheses, the system does not require them—at least in the usual sense. (p. 44)

Thus it should not be surprising that it was a student of Skinner’s who emphasized the distinction between purely intervening variables

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

119

and hypothetical constructs in psychological methodology (MacCorquodale & Meehl, 1948). For Skinner the only thing that can “intervene” is nothing more, nor less, than a shorthand data summary—a pure intervening variable. Thus Skinner consistently maintained that no theories of a sort postulating unobservables are necessary. Theory as any explanation of an observed fact which appeals to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, or described in different terms, and measured (if at all) in different dimensions (see 1950) is strictly Verboten, as his essay “Are Theories of Learning Necessary?” spelled out. Thus knowingly or unknowingly Skinner denied the legitimacy of all of modern physical science, as well as all biological and social science that extends beyond taxonomy. His appeal to genetics as a mechanism of evolutionary selection is thus illegitimate according to his own criteria of method. Skinner held that the essence of science is to describe, not explain, and explanation is not in any sense reduction to the familiar (the “observations”) but rather the other way around. Science explains by subsuming the familiar to the unfamiliar, as many references familiar in Skinner’s lifetime made clear (see Weimer, 1979, Chapter 10). Literally no one except Skinner endorsed this outmoded conception, and thus it is now nearly impossible not to appear flippant in discussing a position which, if advanced as a scientific theory, has been refuted and replaced everywhere, and if advanced with its usual metaphysical fervor is simply self-contradictory. Chomsky was perfectly correct that Skinner’s “theoretical terms” are vacuous over extensions of ordinary language, and are totally devoid of either explanatory significance or descriptive adequacy. Nothing here but pleonasm and pontification.

Behavioral Technology If there is literally no scientific substance to radical behaviorism what, then, drew adherence to the “system”? The answer is the apparent success of technological application of “behavior modification” principles outside of the Skinner box in the laboratory. Here we have the triumph of the engineering mentality so pervasive in “the man of system.” Knowledge as power to control , as first emphasized by Francis Bacon, and the

120

W. B. Weimer

early twentieth-century progressivists such as John Dewey (“liberty is power, effective power to do specific things” and the “demand of liberty is the demand of power” (Dewey, 1935a, p. 41) has replaced understanding and true liberty. It would be foolhardy to deny the success of techniques of behavioral control: extensive data in areas such as skills development, child “management,” and some adult forms of variant behavior cannot be denied. But one can correctly deny that the applied literature is a consequence of Skinner’s “theory.” Since the theory is vacuous circular definition there is no direct connection whatsoever; rather, the technology would never have gotten off the ground if researchers had not initially believed that Skinner did in fact have a theory. Nonetheless the results do not “follow from” and therefore cannot support, radical behaviorism. The technological “application” indeed opened up a vast data domain that some explanatorily adequate theory must eventually come to grips with. But that actually explanatory theory will not be Skinner’s, nor any variant of it. The importance of the technology is that it provides an illustration of how, by attempting to push control to its extreme limits, one may turn a cosmos into a taxis. The key is the issue of rigid or total control. Consider the so-called Skinner box (correctly first called the air crib, which, literally, is Skinner’s only contribution to science and the essence of the technology of control). What this enclosure does is to turn a cosmos into a taxis, by strictly limiting in advance the otherwise open environment and constraining response capabilities of the organism to those selected in advance by the experimenter. Since the experimenter designs the box to study a particular behavior defined upon the apparatus variables and already known to occur (at least in “shapable” form) in the cosmos, it achieves its “control” by either eliminating or ignoring sources of productivity or rule-governed creativity—that is, by constraining a spontaneously generated order into one designed to fulfill particular purposes specified in advance. If the organism attempts to be creative, i.e., if it “emits” novel responses, they are simply ignored—they are not counted, acknowledged, or rewarded. Nothing happens unless behavior does whatever is necessary to close a microswitch or send an electrical pulse in the apparatus (the ultimate “functional” definition of a response). Then things that the investigator is interested in counting are

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

121

allowed to occur (because of the “operations” of deprivation and reinforcement). But consider what would happen if the organism were not motivated (deprived) in advance—satiated rats and pigeons do not run or peck: they sleep, or explore, groom, or do a thousand and one things other than learn their experimenter appointed task in the box. Small wonder that such a constrained taxis denies the occurrence of variability or creativity—it was ruled out from the very beginning, under the guise of achieving “smooth” or “regular” results. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor used to argue against behaviorists, it is not surprising that one can do some things with both hands tied behind his or her back, but it is foolish to base a science on the assumption that one would “respond” in the same fashion if both hands were free (or indeed, that one would choose to perform that task at all). In that sense the cognitive and psycholinguistic arguments against “functional specification” of responding were arguments against constraining a cosmos into a taxis (and then arguing as a result of that constraint that no spontaneous orders exist, since, strangely, only taxes were observed). Chomsky’s emphasis upon intuition of clear cases and competence becomes, in this regard, an injunction to examine the spontaneous order of language without the constraints of the engineering mentality to limit it to a taxis phenomenon. Analogously, investigation of productivity in other (and animal) behavior, stemming primarily from Lashley’s (1951) paper on serial order, has been an indication that even the Skinner box only succeeds in creating an orderly and “predictable” taxis if one counts the experimenter’s requirements for responding rather than actually looking at what the organism is doing. But the source of appeal, to repeat, appears to be the promise of control so dear to the organizational and engineering mind (recall Russell’s comment, the “pleasure” of planned construction). Skinner’s contribution is a procedure for creating control, to reduce a cosmos to a taxis, in conjunction with an elaborate a priori scheme about what behavior one should arrange to allow to occur. Once one moves beyond the laboratory the extension to real life, for example in clinical psychological application, becomes problematic almost immediately. While some situations appear to be “controlled” by the appropriate reduction to a taxis, others do not. Thus Skinnerian social learning theory, as was exemplified by Bandura (1969) and associates, increasingly moved to

122

W. B. Weimer

incorporate theoretical variables that are “mentalistic” and “intervening” into the orthodox Skinnerian position in order to cope with real-life complexity (see Bandura, 1977). Had the Skinnerian system actually worked there would have been no need for such extensions, which constitute refutations rather than refinements of the original dogma.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, or Before? Skinner’s utopian schemes are, as he noted, straightforward applications of his “system.” Beginning with the novel Walden Two (reprinted in 1976) originally published in 1948 he has consistently proposed the wholesale replacement of all social institutions by “scientifically engineered” ones. Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and that reissue of the novel attest to the popular impact of his views—at least outside psychology, primarily in literature. Needless to say, his position enthralls the engineering students, appalls the “softheaded” humanists, and is all too familiar to true liberals and methodologists. This section explores the curious admixture of insight and error jumbled together in these writings to see what, if anything, can be salvaged (albeit from another framework), and how the position exemplifies scientism and rationalist constructivism. The motivating theme is obvious, as in these new introductory remarks to Walden Two (1976): “What is needed is not a new political leader or a new kind of government but further knowledge about human behavior and new ways of applying that knowledge to the design of cultural practices (p. xvi).” So what we need are more Skinner boxes, and the power to force people into them. Speaking of the budget of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, he said that “an experimental community like Walden Two is health, education, and welfare! The only reason we have a vast federal department is that millions of people find themselves trapped in overgrown, unworkable living spaces (p. xiv).” Note two things here: first, the emphasis on big is bad and small is beautiful; second, “living space” is a euphemism for a Skinner box—as is the community that Walden Two represents. Thus it

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

123

appears that Skinner intuitively preferred a closed taxis because the alienation that inevitably results in the abstract cosmos could be eliminated by returning to the values and limited space of the face-to-face or tribal organization of society. As he said: The bigness of a large city is troublesome precisely because we meet so many people whom we shall never see again and whose commendation or censure is therefore meaningless. The problem cannot really be solved by delegating censure to a police force and the law courts. Those who have used behavior modification in family counseling or in institutions know how to arrange the face-to-face conditions which promote interpersonal respect and love. (ibid., p. xi)

With the exception of the data claim in the last sentence the description of the problem is quite correct, as the alienation of the abstract society is a genuine problem (see Volume 2, Chapter 5). The question is whether the taxis mentality can deliver what it claims to do in presuming to plan progress by returning to primitivism. Skinner solved this problem (to his satisfaction, at least) by attempting to reduce everything to a taxis. We are admonished to move beyond “outmoded” concepts like freedom and dignity primarily because, since they apply only to action in a spontaneously organized and decentralized society, they have no place in the Skinner box of Walden Two. Skinner accomplished this reduction by denying the existence of the abstract entities and values that reside in any cosmos. His reasoning was simple: since he could not find them inside a Skinner box, they must be ordinary language terms referring to the outside (environmental) controlling relations set up by the experimenter. Hence once again everything can be reduced to a matter of “control” by contingencies of reinforcement. Thus “freedom is a matter of contingencies of reinforcement, not of the feelings that contingencies generate (1971, p. 35).” He felt that we can no longer afford freedom, since it implies that its’ opposite is control, and Skinner wanted to argue that its essence is control—but control by the “right” contingencies: “the problem is to free men, not from control, but from certain kinds of control.… To make the social environment as free as possible of aversive stimuli we do not need to destroy that

124

W. B. Weimer

environment or escape from it: we need to redesign it (ibid., p. 39).” Who will do the controlling and thus constitute the “grand controller in the sky” has always been a problem, of which more in a moment. For now consider dignity, which as a term of praise or blame, denoting responsibility for action, is apparently inversely related to our awareness (pardon the term) of the circumstances controlling action. This provides an opportunity to once again attack the autonomous inner man: “We not only praise, commend, approve, or applaud a person, we ‘admire’ him, and the word is close to ‘marvel at’ or ‘wonder at.’ We stand in awe of the inexplicable, and it is therefore not surprising that we are likely to admire behavior more as we understand it less. And, of course, what we do not understand we attribute to autonomous man (p. 49).” Never mind that this is factually false—for example, we admire a skilled athlete not for the inner man (likely to be vain, shallow, and egotistical), but for his skilled performance, and we praise a brave man for risking his life to save his family even when we know his controlling “contingencies.” Responsibility is a matter of acting according to general principles in specific circumstances.2 But Skinner would have us believe that: It is in the nature of scientific progress that the functions of autonomous man be taken over one by one as the role of the environment is better understood. A scientific conception seems demeaning because nothing is eventually left for which autonomous man can take credit. And as for admiration in the sense of wonderment, the behavior we admire is the behavior we cannot yet explain. Science naturally seeks a fuller explanation of that behavior; its goal is the destruction of mystery. (ibid., p. 54)

Thus we are urged to move “beyond” freedom and dignity to a “scientific” analysis of control and counter control.3 The question of who should exercise control is dealt with in the text of Walden Two. Frazier, speaking for Skinner, asserts that since the technology is well advanced, the only question is whether control will be for the benefit of mankind or in the hands of a tyrant (which means, a traditional authority). His view (see Skinner, Walden Two, 1976, p. 241) is

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

125

that the techniques of behavioral control are just in the wrong hands— the techniques are used for personal aggrandizement in a competitive, market order. In the case of psychology and education, behavior control techniques are being used “futilely” for corrective purposes. So Skinner’s question is, has anyone got the “courage” (his literal term) to take up and “wield” the science of behavior for the good of humanity? From his standpoint, we not only can control human behavior, we must (strange that he feels a fact can entail an obligation) do so. So his characters wrestle with “who’s to do it, and what’s to be done?” Skinner never managed to answer this. He constantly reminded us that “we cannot choose a way of life in which there is no control. We can only change the controlling conditions (1974, p. 209).” Somehow the Cartesian Reason must step outside the natural order to control the environment so that it will in turn control us—but who controls the controller? Skinner answered by resurrecting Hobbes’s answer: the culture, Leviathan, is the ultimate controller. But Skinner cannot, on the basis of his account of culture as a taxis, explain how this can even arise. To understand how culture can shape the growth of reason requires that we understand how both function as spontaneous orders, and that refutes Skinner’s positive program, which is based upon treating society as a giant Skinner box in which all other Skinner boxes are embedded. In short, Skinner was quite correct in the claim that the “design” of behavior implies: “Control, and possibly the question most often asked of the behaviorist is this: who is to control? The question represents the age-old mistake of looking to the individual rather than to the world in which he lives… No one steps outside the causal stream. No one really intervenes” (1974, p. 226). He was well aware that it is the impersonal social order that provides the context of constraint for behavior. The implication of this quote, however, is diametrically opposed to his sociopolitical prescriptions. What this claim implies refutes Skinner’s entire program. Neither Descartes (and Hobbes), Skinner nor Chomsky, can step outside their particular Skinner box to either understand the entire order of “mankind” in all its particularity or to control its future growth. To put it in different terminology: Skinner was correct when he asserted that without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Clearly, if consciousness is a social product. It is not

126

W. B. Weimer

only not the special field of what he calls autonomous man, it is not within a solitary man (see ibid., p. 183). Culture is definitely a grown order, the result of human action but not design. The autonomous man Skinner attacked in this regard is in fact the Cartesian or Comtean positivist who claims that Reason stands outside that spontaneous order in order to judge, understand, create, shape, reinforce, or otherwise modify it. All modification, all growth, is internal to the spontaneous order.4 But his claim that culture is a Skinner box, or taxis, is totally contradictory to what was just admitted. Skinner cannot recognize the social nature of society and also assert that society is a taxis. He is contradicting himself if he thinks that society is both cosmos and taxis in one. That is, the position above is simply incompatible with his assertion that “a culture is like the experimental space used in the study of behavior. It is a set of contingencies of reinforcement,… (ibid., pp. 173–174).” That is why Frazier’s claim that he is both the engineer of Walden Two and its product is self-contradictory: it confuses a taxis with a cosmos, with being inside the order and standing outside of it. It is not the case that Frazier can “engineer” the Skinner box today so that it will be adequate for novel and unforeseen tomorrows. This is not an empirical issue, as Skinner has Frazier assert (p. 239), but a foregone conclusion. Understanding the reason why leads to the topic of positives versus negatives in rules and learning. Skinner constantly argued that he was “benign and progressive” for emphasizing positive reinforcement (and the learning of particulars) over aversive control and taboos or prohibitions. In shaping behavior he asserted that the term “error” does not refer to any physical dimensions of the consequences, even those called punishment. He implies that “learning occurs only when errors are made” is false (see Skinner, 1968, pp. 7–8). This is naïve physicalism and a taxis mentality with a vengeance. Such “positive learning” can occur only in a taxis, in which the desired outcome (or the correct answer) is known in advance (or specifiable to the extent that its occurrence can be recognized)—after all, the experimenter has to know which responses to reinforce or no learning will occur. Positive knowledge, to switch to another context, is entirely a matter of Kuhnian normal science puzzle solving. It does not work for revolutionary periods. Reinforcement or knowledge of results

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

127

is informative only when it enables the subject to hone in on the desired result. It is like getting another word in a crossword puzzle—it is “positive” in that it constrains the remaining possibilities into a smaller and smaller set. Positive reinforcement or “learning” works only when a finite range of alternatives is specifiable in advance (when particular results are to be achieved). Positive learning does not occur in a spontaneous order, such as revolutionary science (as opposed to normal science puzzle solving) or in social evolution, or in the market order of society. Here one is not filling in a crossword puzzle with clearly specified blanks but rather playing an indeterminate game according to rules (like chess or poker), and a positive result, as Popper emphasized in methodology, is never confirmation but only an indication that one’s hypothesis is not yet refuted. All learning in a cosmos is a matter of the refutation of particular hypotheses or conjectures: spontaneous orders permit us to know when we are wrong, but not that we are ever correct. Thus Frazier the taxis engineer cannot positively specify the future development of a society at all. The rules of social conduct are fundamentally negative, a matter of prohibitions of unjust conduct rather than specification of prescribed particular behaviors. Consider a moral taboo such as “Thou shalt not kill” in this regard. It prohibits one class of behaviors without saying anything at all about what either one can or must do. It allows productive behavior, and indefinite freedom of action, rather than limiting behavior to particular outcomes specified in advance. Skinner and Frazier cannot have it both ways: if social orders are spontaneous, then the positive Skinnerian system is straightforward intellectual error, despite the “noble” intentions of its creator. On the other hand, if Frazier reduces society to a Skinner box he automatically takes his place alongside the Hitlers and Stalins of history. The man of system, unfortunately for the engineers and bureaucrats, simply cannot handle spontaneous order and creativity. Adam Smith (1759/2006) summarized Skinner’s plight writing in 1759, only145 years before Skinner was born: The man of system,… is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any

128

W. B. Weimer

regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it; he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chessboard have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chessboard of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (p. 247)

Notes 1. Skinner missed Russell’s point entirely. It is not “man from within” that refutes behaviorism, but the physicalism which the behaviorist presupposes as his starting point. Russell pointed out that, if physics is accepted, the data of science, the “hard, objective, physically specifiable bits of behavior” that Watson and Skinner presupposed, are actually mental constructs. As he put it in the part that Skinner did not bother to read, the behavioristic position faces a dilemma: Either physics is valid in its main lines, or it is not. If it is not valid (or at least close to the truth), we know nothing about the movements or nature of matter. Now physics is the result of the most serious and careful science we possess, and if it is valid, it tells us that any physical process starting either inside or outside the our body will, if it reaches the brain, be different if the intervening medium is different. So what happens inside the brain and nervous system is not connected directly or even accurately with what happens elsewhere. As an inevitable result, our acquaintances (and resultant perceptions) are therefore “infected” with subjectivity on purely physical grounds. So if we assume the truth of physics, what we know most “indubitably” through our perception is not the nature of or movements of matter, but certain

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

129

events in ourselves which are variably or indirectly connected, with the “movements” of matter. The “objective” study of behavior is inevitably and intrinsically based on our “subjective” processes. Failing to understand any of this, Skinner dismissed it as ramblings about “the man within.” But the behavior of Skinner’s rats and pigeons can only be inferred by the help of physics, and is by no means to be accepted as something accurately knowable by direct observation. Thus behaviorism, insofar as it is a “scientific” theory at all, is refuted by physics and physiology. It can be held only as an undefended (and in fact indefensible) metaphysical dogma, and requires one to abandon the scientific conception of the world in so doing. Russell later (1948) developed this position into structural realism, and Maxwell (1975) and I (Weimer, 1973, 1979) have elaborated it further. It is amazing that the residual Skinnerians, with no evident knowledge or understanding of epistemology, still cite Russell with reverence as a precursor to Skinner (see Thyer, 2007). Skinner could endorse behaviorism, then, not as a realist but only as a conventionalist stratagem; not, in other words, as a scientific theory that is true or false but only as a positivistic dogma. As such it has as much scientific credibility as, say, the ontological “proofs” for the existence of God. But then again, for the radical behaviorists, the dogma of the doctrine is God. The behaviorist position is actually quite Cartesian, depending upon the acceptance of naïve phenomenalism as an indubitable basis for knowledge. It is no accident that Descartes, Comte, Watson, and Skinner are all naive phenomenalists: it is part and parcel of the “common” sense of Descartes. The idea of reason standing apart from the natural or physical order and presupposing that what is given to it is phenomenal experience is not tenable. The given in experience cannot be “taken” to be exactly as it appears. Phenomenalism confused (because it cannot distinguish) appearances with reality: it makes what Herbert Feigl called the “operationalist’s fallacy” of confusing the evidence with that which is evidenced. Once one learns to avoid this fallacy there is literally no motivation for either Chomsky’s “mentalism” based upon “clear cases” or Skinner’s “behaviorism” based upon what we can “see” the organism to be doing.

130

W. B. Weimer

Realism, in other words, refutes both mentalism and behaviorism in so far as both are variants of phenomenalism. Representational realism rules by default. The strategy Skinner relied upon to avoid this obvious refutation is the thesis of descriptivism—the claim that “science” is only a description of its domain and not an explanation—and hence “theories” of learning are not necessary. What he did not realize was that he had a highly theoretical notion of what constitutes a description. He had, in other words, a phenomenalistic theory of what constitutes description. Unfortunately for descriptivism, it is either a vacuous metaphysical dogma and hence irrelevant to science, or it is not, and is then a false theory. Thus we reach the same result—the Skinnerian is either refuted by all the remainder of science and common sense, or is merely singing with the other angels on the head of a pin. 2. One is responsible for behavior, and worthy of praise or blame, not because the controlling contingencies are unknown to us, but rather because the behavior is in accord with one or another rule of conduct that is acceptable to the society in question. This is seen most clearly in cases of conflict between rules that would lead to different courses of action. Similarly, acting in accord with general rules in particular circumstances in which the “contingencies” go against the principles is indeed the acceptance of moral responsibility: recall that it cost Socrates his life in ancient Athens. Skinner’s view simply disregards the fact that conduct is rule-governed rather than contingency controlled. Indeed, the Skinner box environment in which control is externalized removes any possibility of praise or blame. As Skinner noted (1971) “when we punish a person for behaving badly, we leave it up to him to discover how to behave well, and he can then get credit for behaving well. But if he behaves well for the reasons we have just examined, it is the environment that must get the credit (p. 62).” Once again this is an attempt to reduce the spontaneous cosmos to a directed taxis, and to substitute particular commands (of the environment or experimenter) for action in accordance with abstract principles (where we properly do receive credit for behaving well or badly).

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

131

3. There are interesting claims with regard to economics and politics in Skinner’s “system” (in addition to those on psychological topics), for instance, on supply and demand: Experimental analysis of behavior has “clearly shown” (so he said: see 1976, p. x) that it is not the quantity of goods that counts (as the law of supply and demand suggests) but the contingent relation between goods and behavior. Unfortunately for Skinner the law of supply and demand says nothing about quantity at all: it refers to market relationships, not to production of goods. It relates primarily to the prices obtained for goods in the market. A consequence of increasing demand is that more goods will be produced and sold, and at higher prices; of decreasing demand, and consequently that lower prices and fewer goods will be brought to market. Skinner’s “analysis” has done nothing one way or another to alter this relationship, because the economic “law” applies to spontaneous market orders, catallaxies, instead of Skinner box organizations or taxes. The economic relationship will not obtain except in a catallaxy—the market order—thus one should not be surprised if it does not appear in the restricted space of a Skinner box. Skinner came closer to the mark on morality and justice, when claiming they raise an additional problem in identifying their reference. The behavior we call moral or just is a product “of special kinds of social contingencies arranged by governments, religions, economic systems, and ethical groups (1974, p. 269).” Moral behavior and just conduct certainly are cultural concepts that have evolved over time, the result of our action but not our conscious design (as Skinner’s formulation implied), and it is the task of science to understand how this has come about and determine how we can continue to evolve. Unfortunately Skinner’s “solution” is nothing but a statement of (part of ) the problem to be explained. Personal liberty is a comparable problem for Skinner, and the engineering approach to bring freedom about by “forcing us to be free” as Rousseau attempted to do (and as the Skinner box contingency situation mirrors), is the paradoxical result. Freedom comes to mean nothing more than acting in accordance with the commands of the “environment.” That is to say, freedom is now acting in terms of compulsion. This is exactly opposite to liberalism, which recognizes

132

W. B. Weimer

the “controlling” dimension of the environment but restricts liberty to the absence of arbitrary coercion, such as the attempt to turn a cosmos into a taxis. Thoreau, with libertarian leanings and as an environmentalist, would be the first to repudiate Skinner’s totalitarian new Walden. 4. Skinner’s reliance upon an evolutionary model raises problems within the system. Like Chomsky, the conceptual underpinnings of his view are fundamentally static and pre-evolutionary, in Hobbesian and Cartesian attempts to treat complex phenomena as simple centrally directed orders. But evolution, whether biological or cultural, requires a decentralized, spontaneously generated order—a cosmos instead of a taxis. Thus Darwinian biology and genetics (whether Mendelian or modern) cannot really be used by Skinner for his model of “selection,” and the claim that the “experimental analysis of behavior is a rigorous, extensive, and rapidly advancing branch of biology,… (1974, p. 255)” cannot be accepted. Evolution is problematic for Skinner for no other reason than that it ranges over genotypes (alleles) which are not “observable”: all we see in animals are phenotypes. In making the surface-deep structure distinction (exactly like language in transformational grammar, because the genetic language is in fact a true language—see Pattee, 2012) geneticists have acknowledged a structural mechanism capable of generating indefinitely extended numbers of different exemplars of the same underlying concept and thus individuals of the species). Thus the form of the explanatory framework for the genesis of species is the same as that of explanatory theory in linguistics, and it is not a “basis” for any alleged purely descriptive account. Furthermore, the evolutionary “selection mechanism” is fundamentally competition—survival of the fittest—rather than the “peaceful planning” that Skinner favored for the “design” of culture. Competition, it should be noted, is not based upon “punishment” and “aversive” control, but upon cooperation in a market ordering. Thus Skinner’s biological and evolutionary model of man is in obvious conflict with his attempt to pull man out of that evolutionary milieu in order to “direct” future growth. Skinner’s position is essentially static—it presupposes no further evolutionary development is

7 The New Enlightenment: Skinner and the Search for System

133

necessary, but rather only peaceful rearrangement of what is already available. Consider Frazier, who voiced Skinner’s view that we are in the “throes” of a change to positive reinforcement—moving from a fixed pie competitive society in which one man’s reward is another man’s punishment (because if one gets a reward from a fixed number of them, someone else loses it) to a cooperative society in which no one gains at the expense of anyone else (see 1976, p. 245). That sentiment cannot be based upon even cursory knowledge of a competitive theory of evolution (whether cultural or biological), as in “the effect (group practices) has had survival value in the process of cultural evolution, since practices evolve because those who practice them are as a result better off (1971, p. 165).” One cannot evolve in a positive reinforcement program—one can only develop what one already has. In this attempt to step outside of evolution and the natural order to plan progress by positive reinforcement Skinner joins Hobbes and Descartes in the quest for godlike knowledge and power (control). Only by possessing such a magic “demon” (whether Laplace’s or Maxwell’s or some as yet unknown one) could the task be successful. One can transcend evolution only when change has been completed (or been arrested, as Plato attempted). Until then we are stuck in an unknown and constantly challenging world in which competition is both a discovery procedure for knowledge and the best available means of cooperation in society.

References Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of behavior modification. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall. Dewey, J. (1935a/2000). Liberalism and social action. Capricorn Books; Rowman and Littlefield (Prometheus). Lashley, K. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior (pp. 112–135). Wiley.

134

W. B. Weimer

MacCorquodale, K., & Meehl, P. E. (1948). On a distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables. Psychological Review, 55 (2), 95–107. Maxwell, G. (1975). Induction and empiricism: A Bayesian-frequentist alternative. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 106–165). University of Minnesota Press. Pattee, H. H. (2012). Laws, language and life. Springer. Russell, B. (1927a/1960). Philosophy. W. W. Norton. Russell, B. (1948). Human knowledge its scope and limits. Simon and Schuster. Skinner, B. F. (1938/1976). The behavior of organisms. Appleton-CenturyCrofts. Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. Meredith. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. Alfred A. Knopf. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Random House. Smith, A. (1759/2006). The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford University Press; Dover Reprints. Thyer, B. A. (2007). On the possible influence of Bertrand Russell on B. F. Skinner’s approach to education. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40 (3), 587. Weimer, W. B. (1973). Psycholinguistics and Plato’s Paradoxes of the Meno. American Psychologist, 28, 15–33. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

The very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline. Because of the success already achieved, … It became more and more widely accepted that further advance could be expected not along the old lines within the general framework which had made past progress possible but only by a complete remodeling of society. It was no longer a question of adding to or improving the existing machinery but of completely scrapping and replacing it.… Interest in and understanding of the existing society rapidly declined; and, with the decline of the understanding of the way in which the free system worked, our awareness of what depended on its existence also decreased. F. A. Hayek

How did we get so quickly from true liberalism to progressivism and the desirability of big government intervention and control? One would assume that, given the prevalence of collectivist and rationalist constructivist views in twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, liberalism must have been refuted long ago. Then it would be plausible to assume that its basic ideas had been untenable, not merely unpopular, and that current work would be directed toward refining progressivist doctrines to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_8

135

136

W. B. Weimer

render them more and more effective. Instead, progressivism in practice has led to economic chaos and to the passage of never-ending legislation lobbied into existence by one or another special interest group in order to ensure that their group would become more equal, more entitled, according to their “undeniable merit,” than any other interest group. The practical experience of well over 100 years of failure of this approach to improve anything has not deterred the faith of the progressivist thinker in further progressive thinking—despite the fact that by now all the classic doctrines of the nineteenth century, that were the initial basis of progressivism, are invariably regarded as untenable and outmoded. The retreat to sophistication from those views, so evident in the “advanced” views of Russell, Chomsky, and Skinner, has abandoned nearly every means thus far tried, but the hope for progressivist utopia remains intact. Indeed, progressives have often used “classic” liberal arguments against, for example, Marxism and Bolshevism, that they have literally not known were already readily available, since they are disinclined to study the works of “reactionaries” and are thus unwilling to admit the correctness of other positions that could have arisen from an external perspective. So they have been forced to continually “reinvent the wheel.” The contemporary progressivist takes pride in being rational, but does not emphasize being critical . These self-styled intellectuals and less “educated” reformers especially believe that only their version of enlightened common sense, rather than critical assessment, is all that is needed to straighten out social and political situations. Consider Chomsky’s (1979) patronizing attitude: “in the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to face the facts and to be willing to follow a rational line of argument. Only Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly distributed, is needed…” (p. 5). Progressivism has been accepted uncritically, because it has been “obvious” to the “Cartesian common sense” that progress must be achieved at all costs. With the inevitability of gradualness, it has come to the point that no one argues against such a “just” cause unless he or she is part of the well “established” structure, concerned only to preserve their (obviously illegitimate) privilege (for example the new variation of Marxism, now cultural rather than economic, adopted this strategy from Marcuse [1969] and Gramsci, with the worldwide collapse of socialism as

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

137

an economic position in the 1980s). As a result the theoretical advance of progressive thought has been quite slow, for each thinker must live a lifetime’s experience before entertaining the possibility that he or she could be wrong. Having become immune to external criticism, the modern progressivist no longer bothers to assess alternatives critically. Instead, alternatives are simply dismissed. When (and if ) disillusionment comes in advanced age it usually comes as a declaration of personal failure, as an individual’s betrayal of the noble principles, a failure to live up to the position, rather than what it is—a repudiation of progressivism itself. This is one reason why positions that contemporary progressivists advocate are actually views that were proposed long ago—often as much as a century and a half ago. With no awareness of history, there is no realization that they are not being daring pioneers, but only reinventors of the wheel. In this respect progressivism resembles justificationism in philosophy. Because both positions are self-stultifying, dooming even the most able and sincere practitioners to failure, there is a pervasive aura of skepticism and existential despair even in the brashest positions. Each writer argues for a forced choice between his or her path to utopia, as the successful way, and inevitable failure and the end of the world as the only alternative to adopting their views. Even Russell, who constantly altered his philosophical positions, never considered doubting the merit of his “common sense” goals and programs. Such “sophisticated” theorists admit one or another devastating criticism of constructivism or collectivism or socialism, but assume without question that their position survives it unscathed. What really happened to liberalism? Was it refuted, or simply abandoned? I can find nothing that constitutes its actual or even seriously attempted refutation, although there are claims to the effect that it is “obviously” not practical, or that it is “obviously” necessary to supplement it with some proposal. What appears to have happened is that liberalism was simply abandoned as a result of the joint influences of utilitarianism and the resulting change in definition from liberty as freedom of choice to the concern for “freedom” from want and social justice and positivism in social studies. The problem is that the switch was itself a reactionary one—leading away from an abstract society based upon the catallactic

138

W. B. Weimer

order of the market, demanding instead that we “evolve” backward to the organization of the tribal or face-to-face society. The progressive, not the true liberal, is a reactionary who wants to return to a less complicated way of life in which delimited particular goals can be specified and achieved. Utopia would be much more primitive and limited than its advocates have comprehended. The quest for equality and social justice can only be achieved if society is restricted to the structure of the tribe or small corporation, turning away from that of the abstract order of the market. Instead of the advance the progressives envision that the adoption of their program would constitute, there are cogent arguments why it must lead inevitably backward. They center around the inevitability of our ignorance in complex phenomena, and the conditions required for the emergence of novelty and growth (in both knowledge and wealth). But first let us consider the case as progressivism has put it.

Progressivism Tried to Turn Liberalism into a Conservative Defense of the Status Quo Progressivists proposed that the liberal conception of spontaneous order was inevitably a defense of conservative political views. If the organization of society is the result of spontaneous ordering processes, and if we could not rationally or explicitly improve upon those ordering processes, then the liberal doctrine becomes nothing but a defense of the status quo, no matter how bad that may be. In this interpretation it becomes a form of historicism, deterministically linking the history of society to a series of consequences of factors that were already present in the past. Indeed, Karl Marx’s philosophy of historicism made considerable use of the “second-generation” Moralist philosopher John Millar to develop his conception of social institutions as deterministic, as necessarily the product of forces over which people have virtually no conscious control. Thus even near contemporary historians of the liberal tradition have argued that:

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

139

The anti-rationalist aspects of the theory are thus quite consistent with the view that we are ultimately impotent to improve the social arrangements in which we find ourselves. A social theory which appears compatible with the broadest possible individual freedom thus can also provide a theoretical justification for the most restrictive political and legal arrangements. The Scottish thinkers… appear to have been unaware of the full import of this implication. (Hamowy, 1987, p. 34)

So to the progressivist the position will inevitably lead from the liberalism of Hume, Smith, and Ferguson to the traditionalism and conservativism of Edmund Burke, who said things such as: It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. (Burke, 1790/2009, p. 200)

But Burke was smarter than the progressivist interpretation. He specifically noted that one must have a model or pattern available in order to improve upon that which is there already. His argument was against the French constructivists, who, in their zeal, embarked upon the wholesale destruction of French society without an alternative view, rather than actually “improving” the situation. The French revolutionaries had no model other than destruction of the monarchy and aristocracy. Burke did not say the situation could not be improved, he was saying that it can only be improved by what Popper later called “piecemeal” engineering or tinkering, with small changes and then waiting to assess their effects. This crucial point is lost upon constructivist thinkers of any era: The theory of spontaneous order, thus construed, inevitably militates against any program of comprehensive reform. If the social arrangements we have inherited are the result of a slow evolutionary process brought about by trial and error and if the reason embedded in these arrangements is beyond our comprehension, then we must accept them despite our ignorance of their purpose or our inability to appreciate their value. (Hamowy, 1987, p. 35)

140

W. B. Weimer

From this the constructivist draws a false conclusion: all institutions, even those “that appear to be socially injurious for patterns that initially seem undesirable are theoretically exempt from sudden and extensive change. Thus, suttee in India, the binding of feet in China, slavery in the southern states, all could claim the protective shield of tradition” (ibid., p. 35). The classical liberal reply is that this is nonsense. The examples Hamowy discussed are the impositions of governments or tribal authorities upon existing society—the result of totalitarian structures of tribalism—and have nothing whatever to do with the spontaneous ordering processes of a larger (no longer tribal) free society. There is nothing wrong with abolishing those “governmental” or tribal interference processes, but even that desirable end cannot be achieved instantly. It will take time to gradually replace them, and we must check to see that we do in fact make things better, not worse. It is certainly the position of classical liberalism that it “militates against any program of comprehensive reform.” That does not mean that it is equivalent to “conservatism.” Conservatism is a purely negative doctrine that opposes all change. Liberalism, correctly interpreted, argues that reform must be directed toward small, incremental changes which are then checked against what happens in society in order to see that they have effected results that do not have detrimental unanticipated consequences. The very idea of “comprehensive reform,” as an immediate rationalist constructivist replacement of something in toto, is what it argues against. It argues against this “comprehensive” reform position because that will inevitably result in unanticipated consequences that will interfere with the functioning of the overall social order rather than improving it. The liberal position is that one cannot change something that affects all of society all at once. That sort of top-down control can only be imposed in a taxis organization, such as tribal society. It cannot occur in a social cosmos without losing the power of the abstract order by turning it into the less comprehensive structure of a taxis. So the issue can be stated simply: what sort of change actually benefits society? Liberalism asserts that it must be relatively small and incremental in nature rather than overall and comprehensive.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

141

Comprehensive change can occur only in a taxis structure with nothing more than top-down control. In an overall society constrained by abstract rules that are essentially negative prohibitions to certain forms of action rather than commands to perform particular actions, one cannot attempt to impose comprehensive changes without inevitably producing unintended results that will not be beneficial. And comprehensive or top-down changes can provide no mechanism for control to remove those harmful effects. That message has either been systematically misinterpreted or ignored entirely by constructivists who want to plan the particulars of progress. How and why did that happen? To see, we need to sketch the twentieth-century progressivist interpretation of liberalism, and then examine factors in the nineteenth century that twisted the older liberalism into socialism and progressivism.

“Liberalism” and Social Action John Dewey’s (1935) little book Liberalism and Social Action is typical of the “enlightened” thought that, current from the World War I War Industries Board, has dominated America since the 1930s and 40s Roosevelt New Deal era. That new deal (from a very marked and stacked deck) gave us what Woodrow Wilson earlier proposed as the “new freedom” of freedom from want. Thus it substituted the questionable concept of social equality for liberty, and proposed the theme, inspired from the centuries’ earlier writing of Francis Bacon, that freedom is power. Progressives lost no time in proposing a new “renascent” liberalism, (to use Dewey’s term), as socialism plus technological know-how to achieve freedom from want. Dewey’s monograph illustrates how this change, which Dewey correctly saw to be the then current attitude, was being rationalized. Gradually a change came over the spirit and meaning of liberalism. It came surely, if gradually, to be dissociated from the laissez faire creed and to be associated with the use of government action for aid to those at economic disadvantage and for alleviation of their conditions. (Dewey, 1935, p. 21)

142

W. B. Weimer

How did this come to pass? How was the progress of the market order abandoned for a return to the tribal chief throwing out your daily chunk of meat? Dewey contended that the impact of the Romantic movement, with its appeal to “gut level” emotionality, upon the views of Bentham and J. S. Mill, in combination with “positive” social science research and experimentation, had shown that a static historical relativism was underlying the classic doctrine. Creating a new historical (and historicist) myth, he asserted the earlier “liberals lacked historic sense and interest… It blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence were themselves historically conditioned, and were relevant only to their own time” (ibid., p. 32). The old and now inadequate liberalism perceived the enemy to be governmental intervention against the freedom of the individual. But Dewey (echoing Russell) saw the problems of the later nineteenth century as the problems of “social organization and integration” (p. 28), and the new progressivist liberals as fostering the idea that the state has the responsibility for “creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities” (p. 26) that they possess. When the social emancipation is achieved, “the mass of individuals can possess actual as distinct from merely legal liberty” (p. 27). This “actual” liberty is defined in the concrete in terms of “a program of measures moving toward this end (ibid.).” So government now has a “responsibility” other than protecting one from coercion—it is now responsible for creating institutions for personal self-actualization in some unspecified sense. Thus the new, “dynamic” liberalism that is historically relative to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century “modern” times must use government (the State with a capital S) to create or structure institutions to bring about positive goals stated in advance in order to achieve actual liberty instead of “merely” legal liberty (freedom of choice as freedom from oppression by government or other force). This switch literally is the rationalist constructivist faith in conscious reason to remold society in any manner that it sees fit. Dewey saw this as absolutely black and white: Because liberals failed to make a distinction “between purely formal or legal liberty and effective liberty of thought and action, the history of the last 100 years is the history of nonfulfillment of their predictions” (pp. 34–35). And since for Dewey knowledge is power, the engineering

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

143

mentality now clamors for emancipation from want, since they claim the knowledge, and hence the power, to do so. Dewey backed up his position by showing that the associationistic atomism of earlier liberals is too individualistic to be adequate as a psychology. Recalling his earlier criticism of the concept of a reflex arc (1896), he denied their associationistic psychology, asserting that the idea of intelligence as Something that arose from the association of isolated elements, sensations and feelings, left no room for far-reaching experiments in construction of a new social order. It was definitely hostile to everything like collective social planning. The doctrine of laissez faire was applied to intelligence as well as to economic action, although the conception of experimental method in science demands a control by comprehensive ideas, projected into possibilities to be realized by action. (1935, p. 43)

Thus the constructivist confused “science” with deterministic control (as exemplified in Skinner). Dewey also asserted, with absolutely no documentation, that the psychology of the classic liberals was politically motivated: “a political weapon devised in the interest of breaking down the rigidity of dogmas and of institutions that had lost their relevancy” (p. 42). Perhaps Dewey referred to the criticisms of “mercantile man” throughout Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which the Scottish moralists regarded as retrogressive. How anyone could interpret the careful analysis of custom provided by the Scottish moralists in this fashion is beyond my comprehension, but it is clear that Dewey was totally ignorant of the social theory stemming from Mandeville through Hume, Smith, and Ferguson that undergirds liberalism. That shows clearly in his assertion that the sciences of “society, the controlled study of man in his relationships, are the product of the later 19th century” (p. 44). Dewey was unable to comprehend any alternative to the guidance of society “either by mere precedent and custom or else by the happy intuitions of individual minds” (p. 45).1 Dewey’s anthropomorphic projection of mind into society is clear in his conclusion: “It is the tragedy of earlier liberalism that just at the time when the problem of social organization was

144

W. B. Weimer

most urgent, liberals could bring to its solution nothing but the conception that intelligence is an individual possession (ibid.).” He simply had no awareness or understanding of the results of human action but not design, and the distributed nature of intelligence in the spontaneous market order. Dewey’s “intelligence” is only the group or collective will of society. Dewey had no conception of society as a decentralized system to transmit knowledge. He asserted with no discussion that there does not “now exist the kind of social organization that even permits the average human being to share the potentially available social intelligence” (pp. 52–53). Thus he denied the existence of the central function of the spontaneous market order—the transmission of knowledge and goods— entirely. Dewey would like to “free” this potential “intelligence” with progressive education programs: Liberalism for him is “committed” to the use “of freed intelligence” as the method of directing change” (see p. 56). Dewey wished to alleviate insecurity, which he claimed no longer rose from conditions in nature but is found instead in “institutions and arrangements” that, as social, are within deliberate human control (see p. 60). At this point the engineering mentality delivers the familiar claim: The crisis in democracy “demands the substitution of the intelligence that is exemplified in scientific procedure for the kind of intelligence that is now accepted.… Approximation to use of scientific method in investigation and of the engineering mind in the invention and projection of far-reaching social plans is demanded” (pp. 72–73). Dewey would have us reject the classic liberal thesis that the individual’s action in accordance with private ends leads to any social well-being, saying we must reverse the perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end (see p. 90). The general thesis for which he had been arguing is neatly summarized in this passage, which again is merely asserted rather than argued for: The only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled and used in the interest of the effective liberty and the cultural development of the individuals that constitute society. Such a social order cannot be

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

145

established by an unplanned and external convergence of the actions of separate individuals, each of whom is spent on personal private advantage. This idea is the Achilles’ heel of early liberalism. The idea that liberalism cannot maintain its ends and at the same time reverse its conception of the means by which they are to be attained is folly. The ends can now be achieved only by reversal of the means to which early liberalism was committed. (p. 54)

I have discussed Dewey’s little book in detail only because it is totally representative of progressivist thought throughout the entire twentieth century. It is informative in the extent to which bold claims are advanced (as scientific) with absolutely no support other than their appeal to progressivist “Cartesian common sense.” It is likewise typical of the engineering mentality that lays the blame upon (lack of ) correct education—on this issue Skinner, Chomsky, and Russell would wholeheartedly agree with Dewey. It is also typical that Dewey can see no possible alternative to his conception of liberalism for the nonviolent remodeling of society. The naïve faith in the positive power of science and technology is likewise nearly universal—Russell and Skinner would concur readily, but Chomsky would have some reservations (only because of the relatively recent realization that technology does not always lead to social advance, and that inductivism is not the method of science). I could as easily have examined the views of dozens of other positivistically inclined social “scientists” such as Otto Neurath or Ernest Nagel, or economists such as J. M. Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Samuelson, J. K. Galbraith, Paul Krugman, recently Thomas Piketty, or similar thinkers. Dewey was chosen primarily because he was (and is) very well known not only in philosophy but equally in academic and applied psychology and progressive education, and his views have now receded just far enough into the past to have become authorless. They are now part of the ideology of “Cartesian common sense,” provided for us by the intellectuals in their capacity as secondhand dealers in ideas. This position has become the generic father of current “academic scribblers” that Keynes referred to, as we noted in the introduction.

146

W. B. Weimer

Bentham and the Sacrifice of Liberty for Security Again and again we have referred to Bentham and J. S. Mill as father figures in the abandonment of liberalism for progressivism. Now we must see how and why this was accomplished. I believe that the why question can be answered quickly: Bentham was essentially a conservative who feared change and unforeseen events to such an extent that (following reasoning close to that of Plato’s) he abandoned liberty for security. Having redefined liberalism to be security, the door was open for socialism as an “improvement” over the individualistic doctrine. How this was accomplished is equally straightforward: it was brought about by simple intellectual error—acceptance of the anthropomorphism and scientism at the heart of rationalist constructivism. Russell’s History makes the point on Bentham’s motivation succinctly. As he (1945) said, referring to Bentham’s aims of civil law: “It will be observed that he does not mention liberty. In fact, he cared little for liberty” (p. 775). Bentham the conservative lawyer did not like the libertarian rights of man of the French Revolution, and hated the violence and chaos that resulted from that episode. Russell noted “Bentham’s ideal, like that of Epicurus, was security, not liberty. ‘Wars and storms are best to read of, but peace and calms are better to endure’” (p. 776). The doctrine of utilitarianism, with its emphasis on the positive achievement of happiness, is likewise a security blanket notion. By switching the emphasis from the individual to “the greatest number” and then definitionally fusing greatest good with greatest happiness a social and collectivist position became inevitable. Thus the abandonment of liberty for security and the substitution of an anthropomorphized “greatest number” for the individual had to lead to an egalitarian socialism. But Bentham and Mill were less than cognizant of the implications of their own doctrines. Indeed they assumed that their incorporation of romantic ideas (in J. S. Mill’s case)2 into liberalism were straightforward modifications. They saw their originality in the attempted application of utilitarianism to numerous practical cases.3 When true socialism arose (following Robert Owen in the 1820s) James Mill reacted quite intensely. Russell quotes one letter: “Their notions of property look ugly;… They

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

147

seem to think that it should not exist, and that the existence of it is an evil to them.… The fools, not to see that what they madly desire would be such a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring upon them” (p. 781). Russell’s tone throughout this is interesting, because as a later socialist who completely bought into the Benthamite idea of the goal of happiness (and the fear and hatred of property), Russell rejected the halfway house of early utilitarianism without ever considering that James Mill’s scathing remarks (presciently directed against Russell’s views of a century later) have never been refuted by socialism. Russell was on the other side of the great divide, a child of the times that had by then simply abandoned classical liberalism and embraced collectivism with literally no critical appraisal at all. Initially, virtually no one took utilitarianism seriously (save Bentham and the Mills). What caught on was Bentham’s rabid scientism, in claims of being the first positive social scientist, in “calculation” of utility values, etc., and the switch to collectivism underlying utilitarianism. Thus modern progressives are ambivalent about the philosophical Radicals, praising them for being enlightened (that is, socialist) but ridiculing the allegedly practical doctrine of utilitarianism. Russell’s early collaborator A. N. Whitehead was interesting in this regard, for although well aware of the spontaneous evolution of complex phenomena, he remained a socialist for “humanitarian” reasons (one of the reasons his interaction with Russell lasted as long as it did!). Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas (1933) said this about “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”: Evidently this phrase has a meaning, at least sufficient for us to take it as a rough guide to action. But when we use the formula as a criticism of the other points of view we are entitled to ask what it means. The “Happiness” is evidently a recurrent, and it is differentiated into grades of intensity, so that one occurrence may be more intense than another in point of Happiness. But what is meant by the addition of the Happinesses of different occurrences? There is no occurrence with the Happiness of this additional sum. At least, if there be such an occurrence, it ought to be indicated in the principle, and this indication will lead us in the direction of the discarded Platonism. Again, we must know the relation of the endurances to the occurrences in order to understand the principle. As usually employed, the phrase refers to the greatest number of men. It

148

W. B. Weimer

therefore refers to endurances and not occurrences. But can we really correlate the happinesses of three short-lived men with that of one longlived man? (pp. 47–48)

This discussion concluded one begun earlier about Bentham and Comte in which Whitehead asserted that “most of what has been practically effective, in morals, in religion, or in political theory, from their day to this has derived strength from one or another of these men” (pp. 43–44). Since utilitarianism is impossible to achieve, I assume Benthamite socialism and Comte’s scientistic positivism were what Whitehead regarded as “practically effective.” In historical context that at least is correct: their views have been widely influential in spite of their untenability and impracticality. Let us look a little more closely at the literal impossibility of Benthamite utilitarianism.

Means Versus Ends in the Cosmos of Society It is now commonplace that calculation of Bentham’s utility values can never be carried out. But why this must be so remains less well-known, even though it was becoming clear as long ago as the Stoic doctrines on the blindness of justice with regard to the particular case. It is simply this: in the complexly ordered spontaneous systems of society, in which the economic game is one of catallaxy, only the conduct of the players but never the end result can be considered just. The appropriateness of conduct must take allowance of our inevitable ignorance of particulars in complex situations: this is the ultimate basis for acting according to rules of conduct. If we knew all the particulars there would be no need for rules of conduct, no need for morality at all, and hence no need for utilitarianism as a “solution” to some problem. What the Benthamite doctrine tries to achieve (in its calculation of particulars) is a state in which it is a superfluous doctrine: if one possesses all the knowledge of particulars necessary for such calculation there is no longer any need for rules of conduct. And Benthamite calculation does so, and retains its plausibility only by ignoring the inevitability of our ignorance.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

149

The essence of rules of conduct is that they label kinds of actions in terms of their possible effects, even though those effects need not be foreseeable by the individuals involved. Rules thus have a function in maintaining an overall order, but rules do not have a purpose. Rules evolve and become relied upon because they have been adapted to the solution of recurrent kinds of problems that the overall social order must face. The knowledge which has given a rule its specific formulation is not knowledge of particular future effects but rather knowledge of the recurrence of kinds of problems or situations. Utilitarianism focuses upon particular future effects, and its calculation problem becomes insoluble because those particulars are never fully specifiable (because there are an infinitude of particulars is only a complication on top of this). Thus utilitarianism is a theory professing to account for a phenomenon which is an (evolved) body of rules by completely eliminating the one factor, ignorance, upon which such rules necessarily rest. Consider Hayek (1976), who found it amazing: How serious and intelligent men, as the utilitarians undoubtedly were, could have failed to take seriously this crucial fact of our necessary ignorance of most of the particular facts, and could have proposed a theory which presupposes a knowledge of the particular effects of our individual actions when in fact the whole existence of the phenomenon they set out to explain, namely of a system of rules of conduct, was due to the impossibility of such knowledge. (p. 20)

The utilitarians never grasped the significance of rules as a necessary adaptation to the inescapable ignorance of most of the particular circumstances. It is that local knowledge, which the individuals alone possess, which determines the effects of our actions. So the utilitarians “disregarded the whole rationale of the phenomenon of rule-guided action” (ibid., p. 20). Why they did this is obvious with hindsight. The utilitarians were conservative rationalist constructivists first and foremost, and liberals only secondarily (or if at all). Unable to tolerate the diversity of a pluralistic society, and the inevitable uncertainty that would result, they attempted a “rational” unification, to create a monistic society with

150

W. B. Weimer

calculated benefits. In this their situation greatly parallels that of Plato— the turmoil of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Western Europe must have been comparable to that witnessed by Plato in Athens. Like Plato, the “new” liberals diagnosed the malaise as due to rapid and unforeseen social change; and like Plato, they proposed to arrest change by harkening back to the organizational structure of the taxis. The new liberals, of course, thought they were going to plan progress—to create governmental institutions that would yield specific benefits—rather than to just arrest change. Since progressivists genuinely believed in the positive, both in the power of reason (with an R) and in positivistic social science, the true liberals who opposed these progressivist changes were regarded as reactionary, and motivated to defend their acquired privilege and status quo. Thus liberals were labeled as conservatives. The price of “progress” seemed cheap to the positivistic reformers; all that was necessary was the substitution of a former means (utility) as an ultimate end, and the scuttling of abstract regulatory principles. This move only required the constructivist denial of individualism in favor of society as an anthropomorphized single being (as in Leviathan or Walden Two), and the success of a positive program for determining merit. That this in turn necessitates the abandonment of liberty for social welfare and collectivism seemed of little consequence, a small price to pay, and thus a fair trade. One could, like Dewey 100 years later, rationalize all this by claiming the primacy of some imagined “actual freedom” over “mere” legal freedom. The engineering mentality of l’ esprit positif prizes control far more than actual liberty, or even than progress itself. This is why a constant theme of the last chapters has been that of the quest for organization and control. The ultimate outcome of the attempt to control, however, is complete stagnation—which at least Plato had the courage to admit.

The Engineering Mentality in World Government What we have discussed so far appears to be rather remote, in the sense that the positions are essentially academic, and have not dwelt upon the

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

151

practical affairs which we face in our ordinary lives. Now it is necessary to show how the seemingly esoteric and remote academic discussion has come to affect our day-to-day lives. We can do that by showing how the central rationalist constructivist theses have come to be incorporated into “practical” affairs. Recall that Russell unquestioningly accepted the “progressive” contention that classic or Lockean liberal views for the world as a whole would result in chaos. He thought the “principle” of laissez faire among “sovereign” nations leads inevitably to war and chaos, and thus rational organization must be imposed at all costs. Thus he would have been dumbfounded by the possibility of proprietary community based upon contract rather than force, as MacCallum (1970) shows occurs in real estate voluntary cooperation (see Chapter 8 in Volume 2). Russell’s thinking is a commonplace of our era, and it has been found everywhere from the United Nations to the Club of Rome and to the pontifications of the local “progressive” candidate during an election. But we can close the present discussion by noting the presence of rationalist constructivism on the larger world stage as well as on the restricted academic and intelligentsia-oriented one. Here the arguments take on a very practical cast, as for instance in the currently pressing problems of environmentalism (for the last three quarters of a century primarily concerning the limits of resources and destruction and pollution of our ecosystem by technology and population increase) and health and education (such as public health and welfare, and the governmental control of education and the technology of instruction and therapy).

The Organization Mentality and the “New” Rights of Humanity In the latter half of the twentieth century the engineering approach of Dewey and leftist politicians added “positive” rights to the older, negative rights of mankind. The intellectual movement was from “freedom to” do what one intended toward “freedom from” want. This was effected through formal adoption, by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Classic

152

W. B. Weimer

bills of rights have been based upon the liberal requirement of the elimination of injustice as a necessary requirement of government. They are thus complementary to general rules protecting individuals, and indeed are redundant if the latter are spelled out completely in appropriate form. Freedom of assembly, speech worship, occupation, etc., are such instances. But starting first with Wilson and then with Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States, more positive “freedom from” proposals were advocated. The U. N. Declaration continued this particularization to the point of genuine absurdity. As citizens of the world we are now supposed to have claims to “just and favorable conditions of work,” and “just and favorable employment,” to say nothing of the right “freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits.” Furthermore, everyone “is entitled to the realization… of the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and free development of his personality,” and everyone is said to be “entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration are fully realized” (for more complete discussion see Hayek, 1976, pp. 101–106). If this entitlement is what “freedom and dignity” have come to then one can certainly sympathize with Skinner’s plea that we move “beyond” them. But not surprisingly this declaration of rights is based upon exactly the same confusion as in Skinner’s system—the inability to distinguish a cosmos from a taxis. Whereas Skinner wanted to reduce the cosmos to a taxis in order to plan progress, the U. N. “humanitarians” simply confused the cosmos of society with an organized taxis. That is, those “rights” the U. N. proposed have meaning only in a taxis, where it is the responsibility of an individual or organization that can act to fulfill particular purposes to provide them. But society has no particular purpose—we are not members of an “organization” or business corporation called society, because society is neither conscious, willful, nor responsible, and simply not an agent of any kind. It is not an entity that can act to fulfill purposes. Justice does not impose any duty upon other individuals to provide particular goods or services for any of us; rather, justice requires that they do not do us injustice, such as interfere with our property or our person. No one would claim, for example, that we have a “right” not to have our houses burn down after a lightning strike or our rivers flood

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

153

after a storm, because it is no one’s duty to secure that they do not by controlling the weather. It is meaningless to speak of rights as claims upon no specific individual or organization, or upon the spontaneous order of society as a whole. Indeed it is worse than meaningless to speak of rights when no one has or could have the power to fulfill the claims involved. It is pernicious nonsense to speak of rights as claims against society as a whole—which, not being an agent, cannot think, act, reason, be responsible, or anything else that an individual agent can do. Hayek summed it up in a single sentence: To see the most comprehensive authority which man has yet created undermining the respect it ought to command by giving countenance to the naïve prejudice that we can create any state of affairs which we think to be desirable by simply decreeing that it ought to exist, and indulging in the self-deception that we can benefit from the spontaneous order of society and at the same time mould it to our own will, is more than merely tragic. (p. 106)

The tragedy is the extent to which the last several generations who have grown up in Western society have become accustomed to this atmosphere of positive social and economic “rights” as entitlements, for it has created the new form of socialism—the welfare society that has become the greatest and most senseless burden ever undertaken by an allegedly rational and civilized group. Government can now do nothing but dole out more favors to more and more special interest groups, because, due to their “undeniable merit” and the entitlement of their positive rights, they must be “made equal” or they will no longer support their “representatives” for reelection. When “rights” become handouts from bureaucrats in exchange for votes they are no longer rights but rather just plain undisguised bribes. The demand for “social justice” and the resulting welfare state are bringing about a totalitarian collectivism as a matter of practical expediency. The bureaucratic equivalents of Skinner’s grand controller in the sky do nothing but dispense “positive” reinforcement tokens at the expense of our economy and our freedom, which is now “free” only in a truly “token” sense.

154

W. B. Weimer

Big Business and Multinational Organization Russell wanted organization to unite the world’s governments, to make them subservient rather than sovereign. But subservient to whom? Russell did not have in mind the extension of national or state-sponsored monopoly, so incorrectly called “state capitalism” by progressives, to the multinational corporations that now dominate the Western world. Yet the organization mentality of the big businessmen (and recently, businesswomen) operates according to the same blueprint of the progressives—the world must be turned into a taxis in order to save it from itself. A clear instance of this is provided by the Club of Rome’s neoMalthusian arguments on The Limits of Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). Founded by prominent businessmen, the Club of Rome is an international lobbying Association aimed at organizing the world’s resources and production in an ecologically “progressive” instead of destructive manner. Not surprisingly their rallying cry is to save the world (because there is “only” one world) from the terrors of unplanned and therefore cancerous and chaotic growth. If only we will appoint them the world’s chairman of the board and chief executive officer, they will plan our progress for us, since we are so obviously incapable of doing so while we remain unorganized and competitive. The motivation of the Club of Rome was as laudable as Russell’s—its members want to eliminate war, poverty, disease, pollution, nuclear and population proliferation, and provide a “safe” environment for planned (i.e., noncompetitive) growth. That their program rests upon rationalist constructivism and scientism, however, has not gone entirely unnoticed: consider Sandbach (1978): Policy recommendations to limit population, houses, cars, and so on, on the basis of ecological calculations aimed at elucidating the ecosystem’s carrying capacity, imply that political consensus may be achieved through a comprehensive, objective and value-free scientific analysis. It is this view that seems distasteful to the many, whether they be on the left or right of the political spectrum, who still cherish the ideals of liberty. The rulers of the new Utopia, with its orderly harmonious world, would not be Plato’s

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

155

philosopher kings, nor Skinner’s behaviorists, but ecologists aware of the inter-connectedness of natural and social systems. (p. 503)

Need we note that those ecologists who are to be the new dictators just happen to be the executives of multinational corporations quite anxious to eliminate competition in order to secure a monopoly for their own concerns? There is no doubt that there is only one physical planet Earth: we have only one world to save. But if the price of salvation is the destruction of the spontaneous cosmos and the imposition of an engineered taxis, can it be worth saving? Is it not instead the case that “the imperatives of the multi-national firm and the international economy require a change in the world’s political organization, and that such a change is implicit in an acceptance of the limits analysis (Golub & Townsend, 1977, p. 202)?” Why should “the world” want these particular dictators?

The Organization of Science Research The UNESCO and Club of Rome examples may seem remote to practicing social or physical scientists. If that is so I submit it is due to their inability to perceive their own surroundings. The welfare state is here, now, “Right here in River City” in academia. Consider the paperwork explosion resulting from the constantly increasing governmental legislation to regulate the “particulars” of research, to tell you as a researcher the few remaining things you are permitted to do (as a sidelight to prohibiting anything that “discriminates” anything). The legislated mandates for equality that have proliferated in Western countries have literally prohibited all discrimination (and thinking, it should be remembered, is a form of discrimination), not only in action but in cognition. That the capacity to discriminate underlies our ability to think has to be re-emphasized. We have lost the capacity for critical assessment of our disciplines and their future research in our unquestioned acceptance of the legislated organization mentality approach to education and research. By reducing our institutional structures to taxes we have lost the

156

W. B. Weimer

ability not only to perceive but to appreciate the benefits of cosmic structures. By allowing science to become totally dependent on governments for funding we have abandoned its character and direction to unelected bureaucrats who care only about keeping their own jobs and retirement packages, and thus do nothing that is not completely sanctioned by the political correctness of the moment. In this environment a scientific “revolution” becomes nothing but a momentary unexpected result within ongoing normal science-funded research. The takeover of science research by government funding stems primarily from the (one time) necessity to gear up for fighting a war. This first occurred over one hundred years ago in the first world war. The second world war greatly increased not only the total amount of money directed to applied or technical science, but also the intensity and fervor with which it occurred. War directs a country in top-down taxis form: everyone has a specified role to play, and a task to accomplish. The spontaneous order of society was put on the back burner. And what better way to ensure that this guided research or taxis mentality continues into the future than to have a “cold” war follow immediately after the conclusion of a “hot” war? It did not matter that Eisenhower had presciently and carefully warned about the power of the emerging “military-industrial complex,” fighting communism (or what was perceived to be communism) and engaging in the media designated “space race” guaranteed that military research would take over an enormous part of the budget and specify particular programs to be funded. With the growth of governmental entities such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation it was clear that scientists no longer directed their own research. They had become totally dependent upon a burgeoning group of unelected bureaucrats who were directed by legislative mandates to achieve certain results. For the last century scientists have become increasingly dependent upon working for others. At this point so many generations have grown up doing this that they literally cannot conceive of any other way of doing science than to apply to funding agency XYZ for a grant to perform task ABC that fulfills some obvious (at least to Cartesian common sense) necessary social goal specified in the grant proposal. Even basic research—science for the sake of science—has to be

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

157

disguised in a grant proposal as performing some supposedly necessary social goal. Not surprisingly this situation (the only alternatives being competing governmental dictates, while we are merely helpless employees) and its infiltration into society in general, has not set well with the “disaffected intelligentsia” who produce and feed the professional agitators (at least during their youth) who take it upon themselves to say how horrible society with its endless wars has become. On the one hand they want to return to the security of a taxis organized society in which everyone knows their place and has a task to perform (in exchange for having their basic needs and wants—as well as what ever they can dream of—satisfied by the benevolent tribal leader), but on the other hand, they do not like the increasingly impersonal society of the military-industrial complex that is occurring around them despite their best efforts to prevent it.

The Switch from “Economic” Marxist Socialism to Marxist “Cultural” Class Warfare One way to ignore those problems was taken by Herbert Marcuse, in redefining the failed variant of socialism called communism into its twenty-first century form of so-called critical race theory. Serving as one of Keynes’s “ancient academic scribblers” (at least to the current generation of “woke” college students who don’t even know his name), Marcuse managed to shift the foundations of socialism from a failed economic doctrine to a cultural class warfare doctrine, and in so doing became what the media called “the father of the New Left”.4 A member of the so-called Frankfurt school with its “critical theory” (although it is certainly not critical, and what it is a “theory” of has never been at all clear), Marcuse combined an idiosyncratic version of psychoanalysis with the hermeneutic approach (as a sadder but wiser ex-justificationist), and concentrated on what he called “repressive tolerance.” This led him to an interesting but false view of capitalism. Correctly noting that capitalism is a consumer instead of producer-based economic theory, he thought that the individual worker (he had no concern for anyone except workers,

158

W. B. Weimer

not realizing that capitalism is not a class “system,” and that it contains more than “workers”) had become a slave to the commodities of mass production and lived a one-dimensional commodified way of life. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man said capitalism had created false needs and a false sense of consciousness geared to nothing but consumption (the one “dimension” of capitalist life). How should one resist and then overcome this alienating and dehumanizing state? Marcuse’s answer was simple: attack the “class” culture of the capitalists—use violence against the horrible capitalist oppressors. Use “liberating tolerance” (i.e., violence and suppression) to marginalize and eventually replace the views of the horrible capitalist class. How to do this? Take over the media: With the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge: in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined.… (Marcuse, 1969, p. 95)

So if the would be Marxists (but remember, now they are just cultural socialists and “freedom fighters”) can capture the news media and dominate the educational establishment they will be able to become the new oppressors (exactly as Castro was then doing in Cuba), and thus pave the way for the totalitarian dictatorship Marcuse and other Marxist “intellectuals” thought was necessary. This is how their use of Orwellian 1984 Newspeak and Newthink come into play: Restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior--thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

159

of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly “deterrents,” of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc. (ibid., p. 101)

And later: “It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise” (ibid., p. 110). Note the fixed pie fallacy thinking, presupposing that one group’s “rights” being bigger means that another’s must be smaller, as slices from a fixed size pie would entail. But rights are not slices of a pie, and there is no reason not to enlarge everyone’s at the same time. Here we have the new (which is exactly the same as the old eighteenth-century French revolutionary) “moral justification” for violence against the society you do not like. And, perhaps with tongue-in-cheek, he adds this: “To be sure, this is censorship, even pre-censorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media” (ibid., p. 111). So the conclusion of this gibberish (and objectively that is what it is—there is no “moral” justification for violence here, there is no suppression of views if the news media is actually free to report, there is no long-term suppression of new results in science, etc.) is that it is all right, even necessary and desirable, to remove basic freedoms and “human rights” (such as speech, assembly, etc.) from groups (always labeled as “classes”) you do not like in order to favor those you do: Liberating tolerance,… would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left…. It would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word (ibid. P. 110).… The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e. the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth… This oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. (ibid., p. 113)

160

W. B. Weimer

This is what has become of John Dewey’s “freed intelligence.” It is now an instrument of systematic oppression of what you do not want to be heard and evaluated objectively against the facts relevant to it. Reality no longer can intrude against the metaphysical haunted universe doctrine of the New Left. Tolerance no longer exists as an objective situation, it is now a Newspeak word for those indoctrinated in the new socialist religion of intolerance. It takes little “intelligence” to see that Marcuse’s position can only lead to a series of endless culture wars.5 When the “oppressed” left gains a critical mass of adherents the Right will become the new oppressed “class,” and will then be licensed to use the same dirty tactics against the Leftist oppressors, and so on ad infinitum. But “critical” theory, being totally averse to actual critical scrutiny, never considered this. Like Keynes with his tract for the times so misleadingly called the “General Theory,” this rationalization was meant for only one time use. Its impact on society depended upon the coincidence with the war in Vietnam and the struggles of desegregation to bring violent social issues to the fore, and thus to seemingly legitimate destructive militant opposition to any status quo. The socially disaffected tend to grasp at any straw in the wind, and this is what the protest generation of the 60’s willingly did. Long repudiated views were dressed up as the quick-fix shining hope for the future,6 and took over through a built-in subversive network of naive and receptive minds: the disaffected and alienated youth. But how could the self-styled “oppressed” make their protests heard? Whereas in the time of Comte or Saint-Simon (or even Bentham) it was both possible and feasible to be a pamphleteer, or a Hyde Park Sunday prophet on a soap box, those occupations no longer existed by the twentieth century. But if they had no one to read a pamphlet, nor anyone to attend the equivalent of a Hyde Park speech on a Sunday afternoon, they did have an acceptable social outlet for their disaffection. They could sing, and others could listen to their songs of protest. Let us consider that twentieth century form of rationalist constructivism in the next chapter.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

161

Notes 1. Dewey and his followers had problems of consistency that they did not recognize. The battle cry of the “renascent” liberalism was the freedom from want, and the faith that their Cartesian common sense would allow them to remold society however they wanted in order to provide that freedom. But no animal species is ever “free” from wants and needs, and the drives that psychology was just beginning to seriously study have propelled us in our journey from the near starvation of the small group into greater and greater population increases and intellectual achievements. As Bronowski (1978) stated, we are inherently curious, always questing and driven, the descendents of Genghis Khan and plundering warriors, not of peacefully coexisting and uncurious gatherers or proto-farmers. But Dewey and the reformers provided no psychology capable of underlying such achievements. And in a similar vein, it is hard to conceive how we would suddenly have the capacity to totally remold society and ourselves—which very clearly requires a blank slate similar to the naïve empiricist tabula rasa conception of mind—without a clear and adequate conception of how society was to be reconfigured in order that the blank slate has the right messages written upon it. If those messages did not come down to us from some God on high then they would have to be supported by a very complex nervous system, which is simply incompatible with the requirement of a blank slate to be totally remodeled at will. Saying that the messages were obvious to their Cartesian common sense simply begs the question at issue. These people are not thinking, they are just venting their raw emotions. 2. J. S. Mill incorporated not only the residual ideas of classic liberalism and the radicalism of Benthamite utilitarianism but also the continental tradition of planning to achieve social equality from Saint-Simon and Comte. Liberalism in his thought was gradually submerged by the constructivist combination of positivism and utilitarianism, no doubt due to the influence of his domineering wife Harriet Taylor. His Autobiography (Stillinger, 1961) contains numerous passages that show how, gradually but inevitably, he lost

162

W. B. Weimer

sight of liberal ideas in the tumult of the nineteenth century. Consider how he incorporated the French planners. He said the writers: By whom more than by any others a new mode of political thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school in France. In 1828 & 1830 I became acquainted with some of their writings.… I already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political. But the chief service which I received at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by Comte, was that I obtained a much clearer conception than before of the peculiarities of an age of transition in opinion, & ceased to mistake the moral & intellectual characteristics of such an age, for the normal attributes of humanity. (pp. 137–139)

Note that Mill could not conceive of any scientific model for the social domains other than what was developing for physics. This attitude was common to those who had not read, or actually comprehended, the Scottish moralists. After digesting the French constructivist position for a while this is what Mill took it to be: Their criticisms of the common doctrines of liberalism seemed to me full of important truth; & it was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited & temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property & inheritance as indefeasible facts & freedom of production & exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by the St. Simonians, by which the labour & capital of the community would be managed for the general account, every individual being required to take a share of labour either as thinker, teacher, artist or producer, & all being classed according to their capacity & rewarded according to their works, appeared to me a far superior kind of Socialism than Owen’s; their aim seemed to me perfectly rational, … (ibid., pp. 139– 40)

Like most socialists Mill could not comprehend how private property was an indispensable basis for not only social organization but the genesis of knowledge. He also assumed that there was no problem

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

163

in attempting to specify what exactly constituted being “rewarded” according to an individual’s work or “merit.” Apparently he felt that some sort of Benthamite calculation procedure could determine exactly what the “just reward” for a given bit of behavior was to be. The gradual abandonment of liberalism for social equality and the abandonment of justice for the distributive conception climaxed in Mill’s famous essay, On Liberty, originally published in 1859. From that point on socialism dominated English thought. In it true liberals, such as Lord Acton and Viscount Morley, came increasingly to be seen as reactionary, representing the ideals of a bygone era now out of touch with the pressing problems of the progressivist movement. This is how the principles of liberal social order were sacrificed on the altar of expediency for goals that are impossible to reach. 3. The issue of practicality is a key. Being “practical” calculators the utilitarians wanted definite answers to specified problems. In that regard Bentham attempted to “correct” Hume’s views on utility. Everett (1931) noted that Bentham felt Hume’s idea of utility “was a vague one, as it was used simply as synonymous with conduciveness to an end, and with no intimation of happiness as connected with the idea” (p. 47). That is, Hume viewed utility as a means to an end , rather than a common attribute of different ends as Bentham did. Bentham thus turned utilitarianism into a quest for happiness or goodness as the ultimate end, and helped to switch classical liberalism into constructivist progressivism as a result. In the twentieth century Bartley’s (1984) approach to rationalism, a comprehensively critical position, was likewise attacked as being quite “vague,” because it insisted that criticism is a means to the end of rationality, and that like any general purpose tool, its specific use (or shape) in a given case cannot be specified in advance. What counts as criticism cannot be specified in advance once one breaks the definitional fusion of criticism within justificationism to the attempt to prove or deduce. Bartley’s formulation reversed the justificationist concept of criticism as an end in itself, and made it a means to the end of rationality (see Weimer, 1979; also, Group D: Philosophycal theories of rationality, in Absolute Values and the Creation of the New World , no editor, 1982). Thus it takes a position that is structurally analogous to the Scottish moralists’ views on

164

W. B. Weimer

liberty and justice, and is quite compatible with the known facts of the tacit growth of liberty and reason. Furthermore, it requires an abstract framework of negative prohibitions rather than specification of positive particulars to be achieved. Practicality cannot be conflated to the possession of an instant rational assessment procedure that gives definitive results when applied to all possible particulars. Nothing can be practical in that sense since nothing can ever be “instantly” assessed to be rational. 4. Marcuse was really a pamphleteer, not an intellectual innovator. The general line he took was already criticized by Popper in chapter 19 of the Open Society where he noted “the way in which the moderate wing has systematically used the ambiguity of violence as well as that of power-conquest is even more important. It has been developed especially by Engels,…” (pp. 158–159). Then he noted “Engels’ tactical doctrine, and, more generally, the ambiguities of violence and of power-conquest, make the working of democracy impossible, once they are adopted by an important political party” (p. 160). This is what cultural Marxists count on and aim for —it is the intent of the entire “woke” movement. 5. Scholarship is an issue here. A Wikipedia article on Herbert Marcuse “quotes” (but with no page citation) the following passage for the “Liberating tolerance” quotation in the text: liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, Social Security, medical care, etc.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

165

While this brings out clearly the extent to which subversion and potential violence are promoted by Marcuse, it is not what is in the 1969 revised version of his original essay, which is what I have quoted word for word in the text above. 6. The Marxist “critical” approach, stemming from Gramsci and Marcuse, is the “old academic scribbler” viewpoint underlying the twenty-first century “critical race theory” movement that ostensibly started in the work of black civil rights activists and legal scholars such as Derrick Bell, especially in Race, Racism and American Law (1973). Bell adopted the idea of the inevitability of class, in the form of skin color, and the inevitability of the attempt at repression by the dominant “color-class.” Combined with Marcuse’s notion of “liberating” through repression of the enemy, one has critical race theory. Small wonder that it became so appealing to those being constantly taught that they are “entitled” to what others were presumed to have. H. L. Mencken put it clearly: socialism is the presumption that you are entitled to take what others have worked for. More adequate treatments of this racist theory (I cannot stoop so low as to call it “critical” in any sense) are found in the works of Thomas Sowell (1995, 2009, 2013) and J. D. Hill (2009, 2013, 2021). Some further points will be discussed in Volume 2, but only, as here, in relation to constructivist underpinnings and the present Cartesian common sense of the “intelligensia.”

References No Editor. (1982). Absolute values and the creation of the new world order. The International Cultural Foundation Press. Bartley, W. W. III. (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court Cricket Media. Bell, D. A., Jr. (1973). Race, racism and American law. Little, Brown and Company.

166

W. B. Weimer

Bronowski, J. (1978). The origins of knowledge and imagination. Yale University Press. Burke, E. (1790/2009). Reflections on the revolution in France. Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. (1979). Language and responsibility. Pantheon. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Dewey, J. (1935/2000). Liberalism and social action. Capricorn Books, Rowman and Littlefield (Prometheus). Everett, C. W. (1931/2009). The education of Jeremy Bentham. Columbia University Press. Online by Cambridge University Press. Golub, R., & Townsend, J. (1977). Malthus, multinationals, and the club of Rome. Social Studies of Science, 7 (2), 201–222. Hamowy, R. (1987). The Scottish enlightenment and the theory of spontaneous order. Forward by Ian Ross. Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series (R. H. Popkin & R. A. Watson, Eds.). Southern Illinois University Press. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 2: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press. Hill, J. D. (2009). Beyond blood identities: Post-humanity in the twenty-first century. Lexington Books. Hill, J. D. (2013). Civil disobedience and the politics of identity: When we should not get along. Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, J. D. (2021). What do White Americans owe Black people: Racial justice in the age of post-oppression. Emancipation Books. MacCallum, S. H. (1970). The art of community. Institute for Humane Studies. Marcuse, H. (1964/2006). One-dimensional man. Beacon Press. Now Routledge Classics. Marcuse, H. (1969). Repressive tolerance. In R. W. Wolff, B. Moore, & H. Marcuse (Eds.), A critique of pure tolerance (pp. 81–123). Beacon Press. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth: A report of the club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind . Universe Books. Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Sandbach, F. (1978). The rise and fall of the Limits of Growth debate. Social Studies of Science, 8, 495–520.

8 The New Enlightenment: The Abandoned Road

167

Sowell, T. (1995). The vision of the anointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy. Basic Books. Sowell, T. (2009). Intellectuals and society. Basic Books. Sowell, T. (2013). Intellectuals and race. Basic Books. Stillinger, J. (Ed.). (1961). The early draft of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography. University of Illinois Press. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Whitehead, A. N. (1933/1967). Adventures of ideas. The Free Press.

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

Music is a human universal, and although difficult to define, precisely because of its magnificent cultural variability, it involves a generative system, pumping out an endless set of (meaningless) structures, formed by hierarchically combining a small set of primitives.… W. Tecumseh Fitch The times they are a changin’ Bob Dylan song title (in 1964) He’s the last of the protest singers, Selling truth and commitment, He don’t get much work these days Harry Chapin (in 1988)*

All copyright and acknowledgment notices for all the lyrics in this chapter are found on page 186.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_9

169

170

W. B. Weimer

Progressivism uses many rhetorical strategies to imprint its messages upon the mind. Since the young and inexperienced have had very little of what is known as life experience they provide a ubiquitously available and easily influenced audience for its doctrines. The youth of a new generation easily become imprinted upon exposure to “obvious” themes that are common in their formative years. If we ask to what extent the overt and implied lyrics of recently popular music have reflected the progressivist viewpoint (and has therefore misled those who listen), the answer is apparent. Being naïve they are excellent targets for constructivist positions, because their limited experience is to them their “Cartesian common sense.” Having lived under the thumb of adults who have told them “do this, don’t do that” literally all their lives, they are primed to rebel when they can be on their own for a little while. They are naturally predisposed to be what we all call “disaffected youth.” How can they have their voices heard against the wishes and directives of the older generation? After all, their clear and distinct perspective is very different from that of their adult overlords who bombard them with “don’ts.” What can they do to show their rebellion? They can turn to their music, one of the things that adults do not seem to begrudge them, and listen to the words that their talented contemporaries and younger adults put into their ears through the lyrics of their songs. Let us look at some representatives constructivism and progressivism in that rhetoric. We stress at the outset that this high-level overview is far from exhaustive or complete. It is an introduction to an area of research that should be studied in the future.

Rock ‘n Roll was a Change, but it didn’t Change Very Much It is informative to examine the rhetoric of protest in the popular music of an era in order to glimpse how the ideas of Keynes’s “academic scribbler from the past” have filtered down to the Cartesian common sense of the rock and roll era. The music industry changed from being

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

171

adult oriented to teenage and young adult oriented in the mid-twentieth century when AM radio stations changed their programming from “easy listening” big-band oriented material hosted by pleasant but anonymous and soft-spoken men (there were virtually no female radio personalities to be found of the 1930s to 50s) in the mid-50s to a different format that was soon dubbed “rock ‘n roll,” stemming from a 1955 record by Bill Haley and the Comets that made the term famous. This change coincided with the change in format from the large and expensive long playing 78 RPM album disc with 6 or so dance song orchestral instrumentals with occasional vocal accompaniment by one artist to the then brand new 45 RPM record that played a single song (almost invariably a vocal with much smaller instrumental backing, often only drums and a guitar) that lasted only two minutes and some seconds. This switch in format enabled the presenter, now called a DJ (for disc jockey) to announce the name of the tune and to change records and artists to a new tune and new artist almost instantly. With this new and much cheaper format postwar youth, soon to be called the “baby boomers” because they were born immediately after World War II, found a format directed to what they perceived to be their unique existential predicament. In the privacy of their rooms (or, when available, their cars) they could listen on the radio or buy their own record collections. In that mileau protest in a song became a commonplace. These songs are thus an easy to study repository of progressivist and constructivist “common sense” messages.1 As such they almost certainly did more to shape the thought of many generations (especially with subsequent new technology such as compact discs and internet videos) than did any formal course of instruction in the educational systems to which they were exposed, or to any then current academic thinker. A look at the lyrics of a few songs of protest (at least in what was considered mainstream outlets) shows some of the dominant themes that had filtered down into the popular mind from “those old scribblers” when they were put into song lyrics. The common themes usually began with the obvious evils of racial discrimination and its effect (exemplified by Strange Fruit, released in 1954 by black blues artist Billie Holiday), and then ranged to the horror and uselessness of war (as exemplified in

172

W. B. Weimer

War recorded in 1970 by Edwin Starr), through to the inability of restrictive traditional and even progressivist education to dent unemployment (as in Another Brick in the Wall [Part 2] by Pink Floyd in 1979), punctuated with ambiguous positive and negative criticism of a country (Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. of 1984), leading to somewhat dejected pessimism (as in Bruce Hornsby, The Way It Is of 1986). Sandwiched in between this rejection, angst, and indecision is a clear example of rationalist constructivism (following the dictates of Russell) to abandon property, the desire of (and for) the welfare state to have a free lunch at your expense but not mine, the failure to understand the importance of negative rules, the desirability of anarchist libertarianism, and much more—all of which was found in Signs by the Five Man Electrical Band of 1971. This whole period was summarized in 1970 by The Temptations as being just a Ball of Confusion. At first the protests were against “man’s inhumanity to man” in the still prevalent form of racial discrimination and prejudice. One should note that the protest movement began with something that was commonly accepted—the evils of war and racial discrimination. Familiar from first hand visions of the evils of war, the idea is advanced that someone is being victimized, held down against their will and enslaved by “the man.” The haunting words of Strange Fruit alternate lines that are innocuous, describing southern “pastoral” life, with jarring and painful images: blood on the leaves and blood at the root black bodies swinging in the southern regions strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

No one who was familiar with the lynchings, crop and home burnings, and general intimidation below the Mason-Dixon line could mistake what the song was about. It continued with intermixed lines about the scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh then the sudden smell of burning flesh Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

Ending with the allusion that this was a strange, bitter crop to harvest.

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

173

Painful to listen to, lyrics such as these found their way into the small and intimate settings of the left-over speakeasy, now a night club lounge or cabaret. From there it was a difficult path to a recording studio unless the artist willing to sing the song was famous. Even in that case (Holiday first recorded this in 1939, but it wasn’t allowed on the airwaves) there was almost no attempt to sell copies once it was recorded. But there is no doubt that this was a very powerful form of protest, effective on those who were not prejudiced but perhaps unaware. Shortly after this was recorded Eisenhower would order school integration in the South and the long tolerated reign of discrimination would begin to end at last. But the point to emphasize is that the protests started with the repudiation of what was, from the standpoint of liberalism, the systematic deprivation of what the Moralists would have called a “natural” right—freedom to possess one’s own body and to pursue “life, liberty, and property.” At this juncture there was agreement between liberal and progressivist. Then things became murky in comparison. A side effect of Eisenhower’s programs was that black artists quickly became accepted into mainstream music in the new rock ‘n roll genre. Because of the Cold War situation, and its eruption into hot wars in various parts of the world, resistance to the draft to conscript soldiers soon became the main focus of protest lyrics. With that in focus attention soon turned to an examination of war itself. Here the conclusion was quickly reached that war never did any good, wasn’t anything more than organized theft anyway, and was somehow never for any morally defensible reason. Consider Edwin Starr’s lyrics indicating that war is destruction of lives that are innocent and leads to tears: to thousands of mothers’ eyes when their sons go out to fight and lose their lives

And later asks which side was the “best.” concluding with “I can’t hear you.” In the 50s and 60s the United States engaged in two wars, which it decisively won on the battlefield in one case and decisively lost in the court of public opinion in both cases. This was aided by the fact that the

174

W. B. Weimer

“win” in the first case was apparently halfhearted, centering on nothing more than stopping communist aggression. In the Korean war (now euphemistically known as the Korean conflict since Congress never made it official) the objective was simply to stop the communist onslaught from overrunning South Korea. In the case of Vietnam, the United States inherited an impossible to win war from the French. Thus under the best of circumstances and given the best interpretations possible these conflicts cost a fortune in men, money, and matériel lost forever. It is not surprising that disaffected youth lost any sense of moral compass in these cases. With no historical background in their brief experience, and a fear of the draft, they wanted no part of any military action for any reason. All the more reason, so it seemed, to distrust their elders. So at this point, the protest score, in the eyes of the youth of the era, was 2–0 in their favor. The distrust carried over to all traditional institutions and programs, whether good or bad. This attitude even carried over into distrust of public education. In the 60s and 70s there was a push in the Western world toward so-called progressive education (thirty years after Dewey). The idea was that the old ways of teaching, involving drill and repetition and memorization of basics was not effective, and led students to a rigid and inflexible outlook (exactly the opposite of what so-called progressive education thought it was going to instill) on the problems they would face when they were out of school. At this time there were also a considerable number of economic problems to be overcome. Old industries in the United States and Great Britain, such as the steel industry, were dying out. The problem was twofold: government interference in terms of regulation and taxation upon the industry, and labor unrest because labor unions demanded more and more salary increases for workers who did less and less, while other parts of the world were producing the same products for lower and lower costs and were thus taking over market share. So more and more jobs were lost. The steel industry nearly died as a result, and the majority of it left North America for foreign shores. Unemployment in steel and similar industries reached levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. At this point even progressivist education was trumped. What good was education if there was no job available to use the skills one had been taught?

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

175

Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) echoed a common theme that this was somehow due, as Dewey had argued, to a failure of education. The message is anti-establishment practice, and in favor of “something” else. But what else? Here laissez-faire becomes anarchistic. This is how Pink Floyd suggested we do not need any traditional education: we don’t need no thought control no dark sarcasm in the classroom teachers leave those kids alone

And it wouldn’t matter anyway, because when you come right down to it, all in all you’re just “another brick in the wall.” Education, since the “old” approach had failed, should simply be abandoned. Humanity, seen as constituted by identical bricks (literally physical objects) instead of unique subjects, had become about as alienated as one can get.2 This theme that the problems (whatever problems one chose to examine) are due to a failure of tradition and education possibly arose from two factors. First, it seemed that racism could be “cured” by better education, both in the sense of providing good education to those who had been discriminated against, and also to those who had been doing the discriminating, to educate them not to do it. Second (actually opposed to the theory behind the first factor), education had somehow been all about all the wrong things. After all, drugs and “free love” were wonderful, and the older generations and the educational establishment had said that they were dangerous and ruined lives; working hard was said to be the way to succeed (and one certainly couldn’t do that if there were no jobs to work at); some wars were supposed to be necessary (and they were too young to remember the Second World War, so when told about it many of them began to deny history, reaching the absurdity of claiming that the Holocaust had never happened). Given this sort of background one can understand common sentiment that about all you could do was follow drug gurus such as Timothy Leary and drop out after tuning out, and get high on something, anything that was available. So now (if you are still counting) it is disaffected youth 3, establishment 0.3 It should not be surprising that a sense of ambivalence and ennui would take over. Born in the U.S.A. is an example of a classically

176

W. B. Weimer

ambiguous protest song that can be seen from one perspective as supporting the possibility of growth and progress, and from another equally obvious perspective, as listing and condemning inadequacies and prejudices of Western society. The beginning is ambiguous—it could go either way. Beginning with being born in a dying town, it says: the first kick I took was when I hit the ground you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much till you spend half your life just covering up

But the other refrains are far from optimistic, focusing on prejudice, lack of jobs, lost loved ones, and having nowhere to go. First is prejudice. After noting a run-in with the law4 : so they put a rifle in my hand send me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man

When he gets out of the armed services the then universal lack of jobs comes into focus: hiring man says “Son if it was up to me” went down to see my V. A. man he said “Son, don’t you understand”

Then a note that his brother was killed in the war: I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong they are still there, he’s all gone

From there it’s a short step to Sartre’s No Exit: Ten years later he is still drifting: nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go.

What do we make of this? While the music and the boisterous chorus refrain “I was born in the U.S.A” are loud, indeed raucous, and seem

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

177

to be up beat in terms of the notes themselves there is little reason to suspect that Springsteen, self-confessed as a leftist, was being charitable about the prospects of improvement. His later written comments have said it is not correct to interpret it positively: this was a condemnation of life in the United States. The irony and sarcasm had slipped past the establishment. Only those who are oblivious to the problems could be fooled into interpreting the song in a positive vein. And youth was there, far from oblivious. So now it is 4–0 for the disillusioned; what have they gained? One prominent response to that question is “Not much–that’s just the way it is.” On the airways two years after Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Hornsby’s 1986 hit, The Way It Is (in the optimistic [for the adults] second term of the Reagan administration) saw no improvement and was quite willing to glorify the simple art of marking time even though change was clearly desired. Tackling the problems of poverty and discrimination, his refrain is that’s just the way it is. Nothing has changed, the socialist utopia is still far away. There is only a faint trace of hope that things might change. Standing in line, marking time waiting for the welfare dime ‘Cause they can’t buy a job The man in the silk suit hurries by as he catches the poor old ladies’ eyes just for fun he says, “get a job” That’s just the way it is some things will never change

Here we have the common theme that “the rich” do not care about the plight of “the poor.” They are only interested in the impersonal cooperative endeavor of making money, and have no time for the explicit benevolent cooperation of face-to-face contact and aid. What about discrimination? We are told that nothing has changed: Said, hey little boy you can’t go where the others go

178

W. B. Weimer

‘Cause you don’t look like they do Said, hey old man how can you stand to think that way Did you really think about it before you made the rules? He said, “Son That’s just the way it is Some things will never change That’s just the way it is Ah, but don’t you believe them”

And then, Well, they passed a law in ‘64 To give those who ain’t got a little more But it only goes so far Because the law don’t change another’s mind When all it sees at the hiring time Is the line on the color bar, no, no

Perhaps this sort of thinking is what underlies the prevalent idea of the left, stated as obvious and undeniable fact, that there is “systemic racism” in the country (it doesn’t matter which country, just fill in the blank with where you are). So here we are at the score of 5–0 for the disaffected, but the scoreboard of life has not changed much at all: it still reads establishment 1, protesters 0. At this point the rhetoric of protest has simply become self-sustaining—protest singers just protest, and it does not matter really very much what they are protesting against. The sole point is to disagree with the establishment, whatever that establishment may be. All in all we appear to be in the position summarized beautifully by the Temptations back in 1970: the whole thing is just a “Ball of Confusion.” As the Temps concluded: People all over the world are shouting end the war and the band played on. Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

179

Great googa mooga, can’t you hear me talking to you, just a Ball of Confusion that’s what the world is today Let me hear you, let me hear you, let me hear you Ball of Confusion that’s what the world is today

How did we get there? Earlier in the song there are some hints: Vote for me and I’ll set you free rap on, brother, rap on Well, the only person talkin’ bout love thy brother is the preacher And it seems nobody’s interested in learning but the teacher

Later we have: Politicians say more taxes will solve ev’rything, and the band played on. Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows.

So here we have recognition of genuine confusion. The politician wants to increase taxes and government but the reality check is that that has been done many times, and each time things get worse. It’s hard to see how “vote for me” is going to somehow free anyone except to require them to pay more taxes. That is a rather confusing form of freedom. We can thank the Temptations for being very clear about how completely unclear the mixed messages had become. Progressivism had loosened all the bonds that held the earlier social structure together. The problem in a nutshell became that no one could know where anything was going because society had abandoned, to ever-increasing degree, any semblance of a stable framework of expectation under the rule of law. The law, in conjunction with other essential constraints noted in Volume 2, Chapter 8, has to provide a level playing field so that all players have an equal expectation of being able to achieve their goals when playing the game of catallaxy. But the law itself was now completely disrespected— instead of being a stable framework of expectation it was interpreted as an enemy of personal freedom, as something to be circumvented and ignored. And if one of the essential constraints of social organization is “disrespected,” why not do the same for them all? Give up on the original liberal agenda entirely, and try its enemies—socialism and communism.

180

W. B. Weimer

I must emphasize again that we could have looked at literally hundreds of other songs, all with lyrics with similar implications and conclusions, all with relatively catchy and enjoyable instrumental accompaniment, and thus, a crucial requirement for entering young peoples’ heads, easy to sing or hum along to, that were equally reflective of progressivist and constructivist themes. All I assert is that those noted in this chapter are representative.5

The Times They are a Changin’ Once Again In the twenty-first century the folksong and the pop music rhetoric of protest have all but disappeared from radio airwaves. Indeed, radio itself has all but disappeared, replaced by computer-assisted internet streaming. Aging performers still make appearances before live audiences, and are still popular, but those audiences now have gray or white hair that is usually shorter than what they had “back in the day.” The youngsters—those of the age originally targeted by rock and roll—are conspicuous by their absence. They have taken their disaffection elsewhere—to the internet and the now ubiquitous forms of social media, where the anonymity and lack of accountability allows them to post things they know better than to say out loud, and that they know are not really true. Now the dissent is found in homemade videos and personal rants posted on one or another internet media site, and in the form of “opinion” commentary in the news media. Indeed, what is usually reported as “objective news” by the media is usually a thinly disguised rant in favor of one position or another. Concomitant to this change in location of the expression of dissent were changes in what constituted popular music. Actual rock ‘n roll gave way, from the 1970s through the 80s, to a partial return of the band era (disco) in which groups added instruments (often electronic ones) and what had been the background music now often loudly supplanted the vocals, which in their turn became the new background accompaniment. At the end of the 80s nothing of classic rock ‘n roll was left except covers of old songs by younger artists. At that time (after being superseded by “progressive” rock) it had also begun to be supplanted by hip-hop and rap. While

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

181

there is considerable protest sentiment in rap it has degenerated almost completely into obscenity, with the result that there is competition to see who can be the most vulgar and obscene, which now constitutes the “protest” in itself. When there is any recognizable protest content it often centers around issues of “social justice,” but that topic requires a separate discussion. So while the music was timeless, the audience was not. Their context had changed.

Constructivist and Socialist Ideals in Protest Rhetoric Occasionally a song that dealt with the more political aspects of then contemporary society would become very popular. Signs was a clear example of that, deliberately crafted by the lyricist to reflect what the audience wanted to hear. The Five Man Electrical Band realized they did not like being told what to do: they wanted to be “natural” and unfettered by convention and seemingly irrational regulation: Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

This is the yearning for the myth of the Golden Age, the apocryphal time when all humanity was “free” of external constraint or regulation, when there would be no directing signs. Three hundred years after Ferguson destroyed this myth, that information had not yet filtered down to this generation. Nor did they have any understanding of the indispensability of negative rules of order—the difference between a positive prescription that says you must do this, and negative ones that say don’t do something. The information provided by either type of “sign” was assumed to be equal, and in all cases, bad. But “Do this” constrains your behavior completely. It requires you to in fact do whatever it says and not to do anything else instead . In contrast, the negative “don’t do this” does not require that you perform any particular action at all . It leaves you

182

W. B. Weimer

free to choose—you can do or not do whatever you want—as long as you do not violate that prescription. Thus there is an enormous and fundamental difference in the kind of constraint imposed by these two classes of rule. Freedom is a matter of conforming to the don’t do’s” whereas compulsion is a matter of the requirement to follow the do’s. Signs is one of the few songs6 that explicitly deals with the socialist fear and loathing of the concept of private property: And the sign said anybody caught trespassin’ would be shot on sight So I jumped on the fence and-a yelled at the house “Hey! What gives you the right?” “To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in” “If God was here he’d tell you to your face, man, you’re some kinda sinner”

If this approach were taken seriously, and the concept of property ownership and with it that of transfer by consent were wiped out, then all economy and the catallactic order would cease to exist. If no one had any claim to ownership then nothing could be bartered, and nothing could be purchased from the market order, with the result that no one could possess anything—least of all the freedom to do as one pleased. Civilization as we know it would not exist. What would immediately happen is that the strongest would take (which is to say steal) everything from the weak, and instead of the desired freedom for everyone there would be universal slavery for all who were not the very strongest. Instead of a return to the Golden Age we would have what Hobbes so clearly described as life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” This is exactly the opposite of what the lyrics hope for. The right of the property owner denigrated in the lyrics above consists of his having proof of ownership of the property according to legally accepted principles of transfer by consent. That being said, you have no right whatever to either “jump on his fence” or to invade his protected sphere by screaming at him. That fence is an indication of clear title to the property (having been transferred by consent from the previous owner) and it delimits his protected sphere from that of others and from agreed-upon rightsof-way to which all have access, such as roadways and public buildings.

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

183

The owner must give others permission to enter his property—you do not have any “right” to trespass upon it. This is followed by a libertarian argument against discrimination: Now, hey you, mister, can’t you read? You’ve got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat You can’t even watch, no you can’t eat You ain’t supposed to be here

Today, in the aftermath of Covid 19 it would be hard to argue against public health regulations, and almost everyone would realize that without proper attire one “can’t eat” or even “be here.” Seemingly “discriminatory” regulations are often necessary to keep the peace of the ongoing order—i.e., to allow the spontaneous order of actions of individuals to continue to occur. The extreme libertarian argument of “no regulations at all” underlying this verse would again lead to the dissolution of civil society, and the inability to form any consistent expectation of what someone’s behavior would produce in others. Note that the issue here has nothing to do with skin color or “race”: what is at stake is only whether or not an individual or business can regulate the conduct of those who come within its protected sphere. Do they still have private property rights?7 And according to The Five Man Electrical Band we cannot overlook the evil of money and the obvious necessity of the welfare state in which big government pays all the bills and everything becomes a “free lunch.” But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all I didn’t have a penny to pay So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign I said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinkin’ ‘bout me. I’m alive and doin’ fine

The hypocrisy here is clear—no one ever got in for free to a Five Man Electrical Band concert without paying legal currency or bartering something of agreed value (such as agreeing to write a favorable review of the concert). While it might be okay in the context of a religious and charitable gathering to avoid payment when they are “passing the hat” because

184

W. B. Weimer

someone donated—i.e. they already paid for—the good or service in question, it does not work that way in secular society. Because of the concept of private property and all that stems from it there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone, somewhere, even if they are not obvious to the recipient, has in fact paid for what is given to an individual “for free.” Food (as a representative material good) is not universally present and equally available to everyone on the surface of the planet. It is a scarce (or economic) resource, for which work and effort must be expended by someone. It is an intrinsically economic entity. Providers of scarce or economic goods or services have every right according to the rules of civil society to receive payment for those goods and that effort. If you just “take” economic goods you have engaged in theft. Money is not some sort of evil—it is nothing more, nothing less, than an accepted medium of exchange that is utilized for payment when individuals freely exchange goods and services. In order to disregard that aspect of society one would have to rely upon the whim of some all-powerful tribal leader to actually be beneficent and provide for you what you require or desire to have. Welcome back to slavery within tribal dictatorship. You are now back to the Hobbesian situation of having one free choice. But unlike what Hobbes proposed, your choice is to obey the dictator at all times or die as an outcast.

Let’s Live for Today Small wonder, given what we have overviewed as background, that the prevailing attitude of both disaffected and mainstream youth in the tumult from the 50s through the 70s was to throw up their hands and ignore it. Especially among the affluent locations an attitude of primary narcissism supplanted any concern for actually thinking about what was happening in society. Rich and poor alike listened to and delightedly sang the lyrics of the rhetoric of protest, and they took the sentiment it expressed as background to their actual lives. The effect of the lyrics sank from their conscious awareness back into the tacit background of their thought. It became, as Keynes had long ago suggested, part of their obvious Cartesian common sense. They had no awareness whatever of

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

185

the “academic scribblers” who had proposed the themes their popular music provided them, and they did not care. They were straightforward hedonists, living off a world that provided them with all their basic needs (either from the largess of their parents, or from the taxpayers’ largess due to the burgeoning welfare system). Their motto was found imprinted on a T-shirt from that era: “Life is uncertain, so eat dessert first.” We don’t know anything but handouts, and we expect them to continue forever. That is our right—our entitlement. We can’t think beyond the moment of today. And after all, love is free, so who cares? This sentiment is what is represented in the 1967 hit of the Grass Roots, Let’s Live for Today. As Rob Grill sang with crystal clarity: When I think of all the worries People seem to find And how they’re in a hurry To complicate their minds By chasing after money And dreams that can’t come true I’m glad that we are different We’ve better things to do May others plan their future I’m busy loving you

And now the message of ultimate narcissism: Sha la la la la la live for today Sha la la la la la live for today And don’t worry ‘bout tomorrow, hey

And later: We’ll take the most from living Have pleasure while we can

So why should we worry about the future? Leave it to someone else (the horrible capitalists chasing after money). We have nothing to do but

186

W. B. Weimer

be self-absorbed. Let’s assume that our lives have no consequences for ourselves or others and that we can do anything we want and that everything we desire will always be freely available. The fable of the ant and the grasshopper has no relevance—after all, it was just a fairytale to scare small children. From this perspective even the Temptations’ message that it’s all a ball of confusion from three years later had no meaning, even though listeners delighted in dancing to its catchy beat while they sang it’s to them apparently meaningless refrain. No wonder our present society has now tacitly built-in the assumption that bigger government must be better, since it will “obviously” provide bigger handouts for the welfare of all. We don’t need anything more than Government (with a G) to take care of us from cradle to grave. We don’t have to worry about anything: we can just follow Rob Grill’s lyrics and live for today. After all, we all know we are entitled to that. Paying for it just isn’t our concern. Let “the rich” and the corporations do that.

Nostalgia for Old Time Rock ‘n Roll By the end of the 70s the once youthful baby boomers could look back and reminisce about their “good old days” (as indicated in Note 3). By that time a folksinger who crossed over into popular music, Bob Seeger, had a popular hit entitled “Old Time Rock ‘n Roll ” in a 1978 album. During a period of relative political stability the soon to be oldtimers, who didn’t think much of the then fashionable but sanitized and emasculated dance music of the Disco era, would tap their feet (if their rheumatism allowed) to these lyrics: Just take those old records off the shelf I’ll sit and listen to ‘em by myself Today’s music ain’t got the same soul I like that old-time rock ‘n roll

There was no need for much variation in the lyrics. This refrain seemed to repeat indefinitely: Still like that old-time rock ‘n roll

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

187

That kind of music just soothes my soul I reminisce about the days of old With that old-time rock ‘n roll

When asked what they liked about that earlier era two things seemed to be fondly remembered. They agreed that the music was timeless to them then, but that they had changed—grown up and gone in different directions. But there were recurrent themes. First, the lyrics were meaningful and catchy and made you think, and second, the backbeat accompaniment was lively and carefully fitted in with the words. In short, the packaged product was very well received, since it put meaning and emotion together. When asked what lyrics were meaningful, the themes of my first love and losing him or her and how wonderful or painful it was were immediately recalled, followed by the assertion that they were such carefree times. Beyond that it was sometimes noted that they had provided a framework for understanding their life experiences, giving vent to their hopes and fears for the future. It was in that latter sense that, unknown to them, the “ancient academic scribblers” that Keynes had warned about had entered their lives, and in so doing have shaped the politics of the present. The key is in our emotionality (discussed in more detail in Volume 2, Chapter 5). The young began their lives in the caring and sharing mutual dependency of family life (even if only one parent was present). This is the framework of our mammalian ancestry, a heritage extending over two hundred million years. This is the framework of emotion— our most primitive feeling and affective tone, the basic good or bad, friend or foe, comfort or discomfort of reptilian and mammalian life, the first way in which meaning emerged. These primitive meanings or passions—in emotions, feelings, and moods—are prerational (or perhaps better, arational). Growing up requires the abandonment or careful control of those primitive feelings, in order to become civilized, and thus to be a member of society (as noted more fully in Volume 2, Chapter 6). We rebel against this, and want the comfort of primitivism, But we know from our first experiences in the larger world that we cannot return to it—that is a

188

W. B. Weimer

major basis of teenage angst, and the rebellion against the older generation. We all want to return to the golden age of comfort and happiness. That is why cradle to grave socialism is so appealing. We give up our reason to indulge in our emotion. Just as David Hume said, reason is a slave to the passions. When we explore Hume’s insight we see that this constructivist conception—of the indubitability of the “clear and distinct” Cartesian intellect and its prescriptions—is a snare and a delusion that will lead only to disastrous results if one tries to remodel society according to such blueprints. The next four chapters explore in more depth the Moralists’ evolutionary insights against the constructivist rationalist apriorism, and the more adequate theory of society (and in Volume 2, the individual) that results from it.8

Notes 1. Our focus must be extremely selective. Of the many tens of thousands of songs of this era the majority are not protest songs at all. They may lament a lost love or some aspect of the problems of youth (as in The Ponytails song, Born Too Late), but a considerable number of them are simply happy themes set to a fast beat (as in Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, which gave the movement its name in 1955). Also present are accounts of parent-teenager constant tensions, as in Carl Gardner’s Coasters song Yakety Yak in 1959, the delightful lyrics of which begin: Take out the papers and the trash Or you don’t get no spendin’ cash If you don’t scrub that kitchen floor You ain’t gonna rock and roll no more Yakety Yak (Don’t talk back)

I do not mean to imply that the majority of such songs were protest songs (except perhaps in protesting the generational age gap), but rather, when social-political protest songs are found, the majority of them exemplify one or another progressivist-rationalist constructivist theme. Many of the songs just glorify an imagined lifestyle,

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

189

often centered around the mythical creation called “Southern California” (as in the myriad beach music songs of the Beach Boys, and the amazing creation of that mythos by John Carter and Gillian Shakespeare, who wrote in 1974 the song Beach Baby, sung by Tony Burrows and a group of studio musicians, from the middle of England, without ever having been anywhere near California!) It was clearly the best song the Beach Boys never did. For a perspective emphasizing protest in folk songs instead of rock ‘n roll see Dunaway (1992), and a Wikipedia article, entitled Music and Politics. Surprisingly, few scholarly articles treat the rhetoric of protest, usually in university theses that are little known (Miller, 1997; Quirk Cort, 2013; Wilkowski, 2015) or in less cited journals (Barnett, 2016; Bindas & Houston, 1989) or in archival materials (the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has sections on “social justice and gender and sexuality” in their Library & Archives section). I also do not include here the occasional times when rock lyrics have been used as an accompaniment to terroristic or horrible acts in either films or real life. One could note that the film “Reservoir Dogs” has a scene that is given a bad portent by a popular song (Stuck in the Middle with You, by Stealers Wheel from 1972), and the same for the song “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News of 1986 for “American Psycho.” And in late December of 2020 an RV was detonated in downtown Nashville after the former number one song of Petula Clark in 1964, “Downtown” was broadcast from that RV. With lyrics that are in the main upbeat, that song also had a melancholy streak that was nearly a mirror image to Springsteen’s Born in the USA, and was also often interpreted without acknowledgment of that embedded opposed theme. Popular music from the rock ‘n roll era up to the present has also featured prominently in the wildly popular The Sopranos series on HBO television as background “mood” music, often presaging an unpleasant occurrence. Utilization of popular music as a central focus (indeed part of the plot) began with the pioneering work of George Lucas, in American Graffiti, in 1973, which dealt with what happened to a group of teenagers in the course of one night. Worthy of study on their own right, such episodes are beyond our scope.

190

W. B. Weimer

2. Also in 1969, Zager and Evans expressed that alienation in an apocalyptic vision that traveled by thousand year intervals into the future in which we will disappear: Now it’s been 10,000 years Man has cried 1 billion tears For what he never knew Now man’s rain is through But through eternal night The twinkling of starlight So very far away Maybe it’s only yesterday

Here there is at least a hint that somewhere else in the universe we could possibly do better. 3. In the early 70s rock ‘n roll became self-conscious, and in some songs took on an historical perspective in which it in effect joined Zager and Evans (from Note 2) and judged its own reign to be over. In 1973 a nostalgic song came out with the whimsical title Crocodile Rock, written by Reginald Dwight (after several name changes, by then called Elton John) and Bernie Taupin. This was a lament for a lost era, fondly looked back upon by the now much older (at least a couple of years!) and (from their perspective) wiser songwriting duo. First the nostalgia: I remember when rock was young Me and Susie had so much fun Holding hands and skimming stones Had an old gold Chevy, and a place of my own

And then the sad awakening: But the years went by and the rock just died Susie went and left me for some foreign guy Long nights crying by the record machine Dreaming of my Chevy and old blue jeans

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

191

There is certainly anxiety here, but other than a protest against aging and the loss of naïveté there is no constructivist rhetoric in such songs. 4. The teenage rebellion theme of breaking the law is a commonplace. But Springsteen here uses that as an introduction to discrimination (against the “yellow” man). Many other songs deal with breaking the law, but not as an act of protest or racial discrimination. An example would be a 1965 hit I Fought the Law by the Bobby Fuller Four. Here the operative lyric is: I fought the law and the law won I needed money cause I had none I fought the law and the law won

And these lines repeat all but endlessly. But here there is not even much of a hint of teenage rebellion, and certainly nothing of the beat generation attitude of Paul Newman’s character in the movie Cool Hand Luke. 5. Since everyone in the known universe (and perhaps beyond) has heard of the Beatles it may seem surprising that I have not included any of their song lyrics. One problem is that the Beatles changed significantly over time according to their popularity. At first they were simply joyful celebrants of the rock ‘n roll idiom. Early songs such as “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand ” are all but indistinguishable from similar offerings from the nearly indistinguishable British group The Dave Clark Five, who had hits such as “Glad All Over ” and “Bits and Pieces.” After their instant success the Beatles came under the influence of many music styles and questionable philosophies (as evidenced in their Nehru jacket pseudo-intellectual period in India). During the period from their sampling of drugs and Oriental philosophy until their breakup, some songs dealt with political protest rhetoric. One such song was Revolution, the “B” side of their wildly popular “Hey Jude” in 1968. It shows (especially) John Lennon’s nonviolent persona in a rebuke to the would-be (bomb throwing) revolutionaries then taking over the college campuses. Several lines note that while we all want change for the better, and want to call that change evolution, when that “evolution” includes

192

W. B. Weimer

destruction (as Marcuse was then advocating in his Liberating Tolerance essay), you can count lyricist Lennon (and presumably the rest of the Beatles out). And the counterpoint repeated refrain emphasizes that taking such a course means that everything is going to be all right. Whether this mild mannered message would have had any effect at all—especially in France where many young females dreamed of helping Chairman Mao and listened intently to every word from Noam Chomsky (as popularized in a film by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967 called La Chinoise)—is rather doubtful. A little later (1971) came the enormously popular Imagine, from the album of the same name, written by Yoko Ono and John Lennon. This work managed to incorporate many constructivist themes that fill the quiver of progressivism with arrows. It paid tribute to peace and unity while including anti-religious sentiment, hedonism of the present, the myth of the past golden age “living in peace,” the hatred of property, and extolling tribal unity of purpose and the “simple” life. If I had actually included Beatles lyrics it would have made the quotation permission fees prohibitively expensive, by increasing the “most favored nation” cost as described in Note 8, so I have had to paraphrase them instead. 6. Another song (in this case from 1970) showing the hatred of property was Share the Land by The Guess Who. As usual the assumption is that “we” can just abolish private property and distribute land to those who are “in need” of it. This lyric is repeated over and over: Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand (Shake your hand) Maybe I’ll be there to share the land (Share the land) That they’ll be given’ away When we all live together, we’re talkin’ ‘bout together, no

As well as the endlessly repeated refrain: (Shake your hand, share the land)

Like the earlier Fabian socialists (and Bertrand Russell), these songwriters simply assume that it is possible to abolish the concept (and

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

193

hence existence) of private property with no ill effects, and that everyone will live together happily in a communist commune. There is never an indication that they had thought about the unintended consequences that would follow from attempting to do this. And not surprisingly, the numerous hippie communes that sprang up in the 50s–70s era usually disbanded after a few years, and most participants, disaffected with the failures of communal life, took their disaffection back to the society they had tried to abandon. At least Russell acknowledged the problem, and had the state (now a god with a capital S) own everything. In such a case everyone is equal in having no rights left, having abrogated them to the all-powerful State. The result then became the paradox of laboring for the State in order to benefit others rather than one’s self. 7. These issues are not settled, and it is clear that there can be conflicts between commonly accepted rights and entitlements. Then the courts have to step in to decide how to interpret the text of whatever legislation exists on the subject. An instance of this now playing out before the courts concerns whether or not an individual’s (or their company’s) “right” to religious freedom and noninterference therein trumps more recent laws enacted to prohibit discrimination. Hence we have litigated (and will continue to litigate) such issues as whether or not a privately owned bakery can refuse to provide a wedding cake celebrating a homosexual union when such an occurrence is contrary to the religious beliefs of the bakery owner, or whether he or she is forced by antidiscrimination law to violate their religious belief. This is an unsettled issue, and it will no doubt take more litigation before a definitive precedent emerges. No doubt there will be more litigation on similar issues (such as whether or not there is a “right” to abortion and whether a doctor with religious beliefs contrary to abortion can be “forced” to perform one anyway). Issues which pit the rights of the individual against those of society as a whole are a never-ending source of income to the legal profession. But this is how the common law gradually emerges over time. 8. The discussion of education in Volume 2, Chapter 6 notes that our educational system is almost totally lacking in market order constraints, being based not upon the supply of and demand for

194

W. B. Weimer

educational products and services but rather on guilds and cartels and gate keepers whose interests are antithetical to the consumer of educational services (the student) and the taxpayer or parent who must foot the bill. Exactly the same situation occurs in the music licensing industry, in which a small number of music publishers as rights holders (not song writers or original performers) determine what the costs are for others to have the right to reproduce lyrics (either as performers or, as in this chapter, in print for commentary). It is a feudal system based upon many socialist principles. Consider one prominent example. The industry guild has what is called a “most favored nation” status requirement that if one wants to license more than a single song lyric (or part thereof ), then all the rights holders involved in all songs must be compensated equally. If you quote 10 lines from one song and only 4 words from a second, both rights holders (or fractional groups thereof, as is often the case) must agree to receive the same amount of compensation for each song—thus shortchanging the larger holders who were quoted more fully (and thus overcompensating the smaller ones). This is exactly the same as the socialist approach to education (or racial discrimination, etc.) in which even though students start from different positions (educational levels, intelligence, etc.) all must arrive at the finish line at exactly the same time, so that all are equally “winners.” This is the opposite of a “fair” race or competition in a market order, where all would start from the same start line at the same time and the goal line would be crossed first by an actual winner, who has no obligation to share the outcome with any of the others. In the licensing game fairness is the socialist conception of equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. This is the rainbow fish theory of equality noted in Volume 2, Chapter 8. * The following lyrics are used by permission of ALFRED MUSIC: Last of the Protest Singers Words and Music by HARRY CHAPIN Copyright symbol 1981 STORY SONGS, LTD.

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

195

All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved Signs Words and Music by LES EMMERSON Copyright symbol 1970 (Renewed) UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC., GALENEYE MUSIC and SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC. All Rights on behalf of itself and GALENEYE MUSIC Administered by UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved The following lyrics are reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC: Another Brick in the Wall Words and Music by Roger Waters Copyright symbol 1979 Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd. All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission Ball of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today) Words and Music by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong Copyright symbol 1970 Jobete Music Co., Inc. Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Crocadile Rock Words and Music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin Copyright symbol 1972 UNIVERSAL/DICK JAMES MUSIC LTD. Copyright Renewed All Rights in the United State4s and Canada Controlled and Administered by UNIVERSAL – SONGS OF POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL, INC. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission I Fought The Law Words and Music by Sonny Curtis Copyright symbol 1961 Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC Copyright Renewed

196

W. B. Weimer

All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved In The Year 2525 Words and Music by Richard Evans Copyright symbol 1968 and renewed by Zerlad Music Enterprises Ltd. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Let’s Live For Today Words and Music by Michael Julian, Giulio Rapetti and Norman Shapiro Copyright symbol 1967 by Universal Music – MGB Songs Copyright Renewed International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Share The Land Words and Music by Burton Cummings Copyright symbol 1970 Shillelagh Music Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Manageement (US) LLC All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Signs Words and Music by Les Emmerson Copyright symbol 1970 Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, Unichappell Music Inc, and Galeneye Music Copyright Renewed All Rights on behalf of Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 All Rights on behalf of Galeneye Music Administered by Unichappell Music Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Strange Fruit Words and Music by Lewis Allen Copyright symbol 1939 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation

9 Rationalist Constructivism in Protest Song Rhetoric

197

All Rights outside the United States Controlled by Edward B. Marks Music Company International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Used by Permission War Words and Music by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong Copyright symbol 1970 Jobete Music Co., Inc. Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered bt Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved The Way It Is Words and Music by Bruce Hornsby Copyright symbol 1986 Zappo Music All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Yakety Yak Words and Music by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller Copyright symbol 1958 Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved The following lyric is reprinted by permission of Peermusic III, Ltd.: Old Time Rock and Roll Words and Music by George Henry Jackson and Thomas E. Jones III

198

W. B. Weimer

References Barnett, B. A. (2016). Rush’s lyrical rhetoric of oppression and liberation: Extending “freedom songs” into the progressive rock genre. Relevant Rhetoric, 7, 1–17. Bindas, K. J., & Houston, C. (1989). “Takin’ care of business”: Rock music, Vietnam and the protest myth. The Historian, 52(1), 1–23. Dunaway, D. K. (1992). Review: Folk protest and political music in the United States. The Journal of American Folklore, 105 (417), 374–379. Miller, H. K. (1997). “The times they were a-changing”: A study of popular protest songs, 1963–1970. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/ studentwork/2839 Quirk Cort, M. E. (2013). The power of lyrical protest: Examining the rhetorical function of protest songs in the 2000s. Rochester Institute of Technology. http://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses Wilkowski, C. (2015). Use of rhetoric in 1960s protest music: A case study of Bob Dylan’s music. Rollins College Honors Program Thesis. http://scholarshipr ollins.edu/honors

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study of Spontaneous Social Orders

Society appears to be as old as the individual, and the use of the tongue as universal as that of the hand or the foot. If there was a time in which he had his acquaintance with his own species to make, and his faculties to acquire, it is a time of which we have no record,… Adam Ferguson Men are necessarily born in a family society at least and are trained up by their parents to some rule of conduct and behavior. David Hume Few enjoyments are given us from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor, and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society; hence justice derives its usefulness to the public; and hence alone arises its merit and moral obligation. David Hume It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_10

199

200

W. B. Weimer

address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantage. Adam Smith By this means the idle, as well as the busy, contribute to forward the progress of arts, and bestow on polished nations that air of superior ingenuity, under which they appear to have gained the ends that were pursued by the Savage in his forest, knowledge, order, and wealth. Adam Ferguson

This book argues that the principles of liberal social order are consequences of a now well-developing theory of the evolution of spontaneously grown complex phenomena. Wherever a requisite degree of complexity is found in the natural, biological, and social domains, the nature of our understanding and the principles of operation for those phenomena will be fundamentally different from those of simple (noncomplex) phenomena. All these complex phenomena are similar in essential respects, and the lessons learned in one domain will usually have counterparts in the others. Thus I am arguing that the study of spontaneously grown complexity in social and political thought dovetails with and aids our understanding of the methodology of science, the nature of epistemology and cognition, therapy and adjustment, and more. In all such cases we are dealing with a cosmos (or cosmic structure) that can neither be understood as nor reduced to a taxis. The historical sketch in previous chapters traced the rise of the taxis or organizational approach, as an aspect of rationalist constructivism and scientism, and the gradual abandonment of the lesson of liberalism that overall human society is a spontaneous cosmos. While the lesson was gradually lost in mainstream political and economic thought it has, however, reemerged (often in only fragmentary form) in other areas, such as linguistics, cognitive psychology, the methodology of science, and even the theory of rationality itself. The common themes in these seemingly unrelated disciplines have not as yet been adequately recognized—except by a handful of interdisciplinary researchers, the most insightful of which was Friedrich Hayek. Aside from the dilemmas of specialization, the only reason I can find for this lack of understanding is the pervasive

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

201

presence of rationalist constructivism, which has distorted and disguised the individual fields, as well as obscured any motivation for seeking a common context of constraint underlying them. But that common context arose during the eighteenth century, primarily in the work of the first modern social theorists, the so-called Scottish Moralist “philosophers” and the continental thinkers whom they influenced. This chapter begins to retrieve an outline of content for that lost history, both in order to exhibit the communality of issues and to set the stage for bringing these insights into the present. We start by discussing eighteenth-century “liberal” views in a number of fields and topics, beginning with law and ending with social and moral philosophy. First, historically and perhaps conceptually, is the abstract and impersonal law of liberty, which delimits freedom, and with it property, in society.

The Law of Liberty: Justice must be Blind to the Particular Law is perhaps the oldest social study, and the one least known outside its own specialized field. Yet this field, in exploring private law (what the English call common law) learned major lessons earlier than other disciplines. Those lessons can be summarized under the heading of the primacy of the abstract in cosmic structures. Individually they involve such things as the inevitability and simultaneous indispensability of our ignorance of particulars, the negative character of rules of just conduct, the conventional rather than natural or arbitrary nature of morality, the discipline provided by abstract rules, and the interplay of learning and culture in evolution. Taken together these factors characterize an individualism that is not libertarian (whether on the left or right), and a conception of reason that whittles down the claims of the false or Cartesian and romantic enlightenment. We can overview this in the common law by examining the abstract nature of justice. Consider some terminological distinctions that underlie the separation of tribal versus abstract organization of society. We must begin by distinguishing two fundamentally different types or sources of organizations

202

W. B. Weimer

(and thus organizational principles): the organization of a tribe or a hierarchy, on one hand, and the organization of a spontaneous order on the other. In a tribe there is a specifiable locus of control, a leader or central authority, whereas in a spontaneous order there is no single “ultimate” control source, as different individuals or structures may be active and “take the lead” at different times. An absolutely crucial point to note is that while spontaneous orders and tribal or centrally directed orders can coexist, their principles of organization are fundamentally different. We are most familiar with directed or centrally controlled organizations such as tribal society and the modern company or corporation. Here there is “top-down” control from a chief or chief executive officer over the overall direction of the tribe or company. In the law there is a similar situation, in which a legislative body or law giver decrees or presents legislation directing conduct to achieve particular behaviors. In the majority of our interactions with others we are operating in this sort of control framework, which Hayek (especially 1973, 1976, 1978), borrowing from ancient Greek terminology, called a taxis structure. In a taxis structure all law is actually legislation, invariably written down to control behavior to achieve particular ends, and in the Greek terminology is a thesis, or directive, of what action to take. Hayek defined thesis to mean any rule which is applicable only to particular people or in the service of the ends of rulers. In a spontaneous order, an evolutionary structure that evolves and changes over time according to abstract rules of determination, the concept of law is fundamentally different. Here it is law with a capital L, what the Greeks called Nomos, in distinction to the directives to achieve particulars of legislation. Hayek defined nomos as a general rule of just conduct applying to an unknown number of future instances and equally to all persons in the objective circumstances described by the rule itself. Nomos is fundamentally abstract and negative in character, concerned to delimit what mistakes one must avoid making without prescribing definite particulars to perform. Law (nomos) constrains but does not determine. It is a set of abstract constraints upon an evolving order of great complexity that allows the order to continue functioning, to keep the peace of the order, so that it can continue to exist as an ever-changing structure. The most familiar examples are our codified taboos and prohibitions to action, such as “Do not commit murder” or “Do not block the way

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

203

of inquiry in science.” These negative constraints specify nothing more than what conduct one must not engage in, and in so doing allow for freedom—creativity or productivity in the genesis of novelty—instead of limiting behavior to instances foreseen in advance. Thus these negative constraints allow the order to continue to function without limiting it to particulars to achieve, which would turn the spontaneous order back into a taxis. The most important insight of the liberal tradition with respect to law is that justice is a property of spontaneous orders, a result of negative rules of order being followed, and not of thesei or legislative commands by a dictator or legislature. Humanity is gradually realizing that the Law is a necessary condition for the formation and preservation of the spontaneous order of actions that constitutes the conduct of individuals in society. In the abstract, law, in the classical sense of nomos, the impersonal rules of just conduct in a society, involves the setting up and application of boundaries that prescribe protected domains of individual conduct within which men and women are free to pursue their own ends without colliding with, or infringing upon, each other. The aim of all law (tacit or explicit, common or private, and statute or public) is to keep the peace, which means to preserve the functioning of the ongoing spontaneous order. One must distinguish purposes from functions. Law is purposeless except for that general function: preserving the function of the ongoing spontaneous order. No society can deliberately give itself common laws—they must evolve by trial and error to determine how individuals may pursue their own separate interests without colliding. In that sense no law or norm can be judged in isolation—what is important is its consistency with the body of remaining laws prevailing in the society. Thus the life of the law (when laws refer to abstract rules of conduct) is, in the oftenquoted remark of Oliver Wendell Holmes, not one of logic but one of experience. Law is the result of evolutionary processes, a product of our conduct, as well as a constraint upon it. Justice is a matter of following those grown laws, and just conduct is that which obeys the negative prohibitions to actions the laws specify. The task of rules of just conduct is to inform individuals in general terms what to expect in their interactions. Laws provide a framework for inference and expectation to guide our conduct. In that task they

204

W. B. Weimer

are comparable to the psychological problems of inference and cognition and to the methodological problem of the acquisition of knowledge in science. The adequacy or inadequacy of laws can only be judged by their effects on the ongoing order of actions, which is a trial and error matter. Legality and rationality can emerge only in hindsight. We can never predict their effects in advance due to the creative nature of the unanticipated consequences of actions in a cosmos. The most stability we can achieve in a spontaneous order occurs when individuals are allowed to use their constantly changing knowledge of particulars for their equally changing purposes in an order secured by laws specifying to all persons which circumstances must not be altered or infringed upon by others, and which one must not alter oneself. Thus the rules or laws under which individuals act (whether they are tacit or available for rational reflection) constitute an adaptation of the society as a whole to its environment and to the common or general characteristics of its members. In order for an individual to survive in that social environment he or she must conform to that pattern of adaptation. Otherwise they would be outlawed, which is literally to be put outside the law of that society. In common parlance the most likely place to find discussion of rules is within sports or games. Games and sports exhibit both nomos and thesis regulation. The particular rules of the sport specify what must be done to win the game. These are thesis directives—such as put the ball through the hoop to score 2 points in basketball. But games, or more properly gamesmanship or sportsmanship, require an abstract framework of constraints that are nomoi. These abstracts or general specifications delimit how the game can be played in a sportsmanlike manner, and they involve negative prohibitions to curtail certain classes of conduct— for example, do not commit fouls on members of the opposing team, do not cheat by stealing signals from the opposition, etc. The rules of sportsmanship are required, very literally, to keep the peace of the order—to provide a context of constraint in which the particular positive rules of the game in question are played. They are the directives that say do not cheat or unfairly take advantage of others—never exhibit bad sportsmanship or evade the “positive” rules. Thus they are nomoi, abstract negative constraints that allow gamesmanship or sportsmanship to continue to exist, and in so doing to permit particular games to be played.

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

205

The institution of property, which we may define as that which is contained within an individual’s protected sphere, is the basis of the law of liberty. This is the most important domain to which law applies. The law determines private property to the extent that it makes it possible to determine from particular facts to whom particular things belong. Property is thus an institutionalized form of expectation that enables one to act consistently (according to general rules) in society. (We shall also see that it is an indispensable part of a knowledge transmission system, analogous to the price mechanism in a market order.) Thus Russell’s collectivist attempt to abolish property, if successful, would demolish the individual’s protected sphere and greatly decrease the regularity that we could expect in interactions with others because one could no longer reliably predict how individuals would behave in given situations, or whether there would be any consistency at all in an individual’s behavior the next time a similar situation arose. In short, Russell’s (and so many others’) view would lead immediately to chaos and anarchy, and the breakdown of any regular or ordered society. John Locke knew this, as this famous passage from the Essays indicates (first in 1689): Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name of “injustice” is given being the invasion or violation of that right, it is evident that these ideas, being thus established, and these names annexed to them, I can as certainly know the proposition to be true, as that a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles. (1975, p. 264)

Even Bentham understood the indispensability of property, when he said that property and law are born together and must die together (see 1931, p. 113). And later, Lord Acton said this in 1907: “a people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom” (p. 297). By the time of David Hume it was possible to refer to three fundamental “laws of nature” for society: stability of possession (private property); transfer by consent; and performance of promise (contract).

206

W. B. Weimer

These are “laws” of (social) nature in the sense that they constitute institutions that are indispensable to the maintenance of the ongoing order of society. They are nomoi. Hume was not originating, but merely codifying, long-established doctrine. Consider these earlier comments of Sir Matthew Hale in 1673, arguing against the Cartesian Hobbes: To avoid that great uncertainty in the application of reason by particular persons to particular instances; and so to the end that men might understand by what rule and measure to live and possess; and might not be under the unknown arbitrary uncertain reason of particular persons, has been the prime reason, that the wiser sort of the world have in all ages agreed upon some certain laws and rules and methods of administration of common justice, … (W. S. Holdsworth, 1924, p. 503)

The quest for a secure (regular, not certain or fixed in all particularity) framework in which to exercise one’s ingenuity requires the establishment of rules of the game by which all must abide, or the game disintegrates into chaos. If the permissible moves are indefinitely large in number, the rules cannot be particular, referring to possible moves—we could never think of them all in advance, and we could never remember them. Hence the rules of the social game must be general, referring to abstract principles rather than to individuals or to particular moves. David Hume put this with admirable clarity in the Inquiry in 1751: All the laws of nature which regulate property as well as civil laws are general and regard alone some essential circumstances of the case, without taking into consideration the characters, situations, and connections of the person concerned or any particular consequences which may result from the determination of these laws in any particular case which offers. They deprive, without scruple, a beneficent man of all his possessions if acquired by mistake, without a good title, in order to bestow them on a selfish miser who has already heaped up immense stores of superfluous riches. Public utility requires that property should be regulated by general inflexible rules; and though such rules are adopted as best serve the same end of public utility, it is impossible for them to prevent all particular hardships or make beneficial consequences result from every individual case. (Hume, 1998, p. 122)

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

207

This is the primacy of the abstract in the organization of civil society: Nomos, the law of liberty, aims at the maintenance of an ongoing spontaneous order evolving toward (but never actually achieving) a dynamic equilibrium, and as such, can never countenance the particular case.1 Nomos is also, as Adam Ferguson observed in Institutes of Moral Philosophy, negative in character: “the fundamental law of morality, in its first applications to the actions of men, is prohibitory and forbids the commission of wrong” (Ferguson, 1785, p. 189). The inability to compromise a uniform rule of conduct to take account of the particulars in the given case leads us to the point of emphasis found in our section heading: justice must be forever blind to the particular, or it cannot be justice at all. This result must occur because justice, even though it pertains to an individual’s conduct, is not an individual notion. David Hume was clear on this as well in 1751, in the Inquiry Concerning Morals: The benefit resulting from [justice] is not the consequence of every individual single act, but arises from the whole scheme or system concurred in by the whole or the greater part of society. General peace and order are the attendants of justice, or a general abstinence from the possessions of others; but a particular regard to the particular right of one individual citizen may frequently, considered in itself, be productive of pernicious consequences. (p. 121)

Similarly, his Treatise put the point in this fashion: A single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest; and were it to stand alone, without being follow’d by other acts, may, in its self, be very prejudicial to society.… Nor is every single act of justice, consider’d apart, more conducive to private interest than to public;… But however single acts of justice may be contrary, either to public or private interest, ’Tis certain, that the whole plan or scheme is highly conducive, or indeed absolutely requisite, both to the support of society and the well-being of every individual. ’Tis impossible to separate the good from the ill. Property must be stable, and must be fix’d by general rules. Tho’ in one instance the public be a sufferer, this momentary ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule, and by the peace and order, which it establishes in society. (Hume, 1888, p. 269)

208

W. B. Weimer

Thus justice is neither an individual or personal nor a particular public notion, but rather a matter of general or long-term public utility. On the continent Kant took up this notion, and consistently developed the negative and end-independent character of the rule of law.2 Given this framework for the rule of law, the idea of social or distributive justice, as the parceling out of rewards on the basis of particular merits, is literally an atavism, a throwback from the abstract and impersonal cosmos to the more primitive face-to-face organization of a tribal society (see Hayek, 1976). Social justice could occur only in a taxis, created to fulfill particular purposes that are within the oversight capability of the tribal leader (or the central planning board) in order to fulfill particular functions in the given case. Hume overviewed the case against such “particular justice” beautifully in the Inquiry into Morals (1957): But were mankind to execute such a law (of distributive justice), so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity and from the self-conceit of each individual, that no determinate rule of conduct would ever result from it; and the total dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence. Fanatics may suppose that dominion is founded on grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth; but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers and teaches them, by the severest discipline, that a rule which in speculation may seem the most advantageous to society may yet be found in practice totally pernicious and destructive. (p. 24)

It would appear that our present age is only about three centuries behind in understanding Hume on this point. Hopefully enough people can shake off the taxis mentality of rationalist constructivism in order to learn the lesson once again, before the fragile order of civilization collapses under the weight of those who judge each case solely on its individual merits with respect to particular outcomes and confuse nomos with thesis.

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

209

Reason and the Indispensability of Our Ignorance The primacy of the abstract also constrains the potential of reason where one deals with a spontaneous order of high complexity. Faced with a spontaneous order one single mind can never hold all the knowledge of the particulars involved, any more than one single individual could be in all the locations at which particular knowledge would exist within the order. Thus it is both physically and conceptually impossible for any single individual to take in all of the spontaneous order in its particularity. We are forced, in both our finite understanding of such phenomena and in practical action within the social order, to rely upon general rules. This is why the Cartesian intellect can never succeed in standing outside the natural order to grasp it. The Cartesian ideal of reasoning, strict logical deduction of particulars from first premises, can deal with only some aspects of mathematics, but never with the totality of an individual’s or society’s constantly evolving and changing actions.3 John Locke saw this point in 1676, and argued against the Cartesian constructivists from the study of natural law: By reason … I do not think is meant here that faculty of the understanding which forms trains of thought and deduces proofs, but certain definite principles of action from which sprang all virtues and what ever is necessary for the proper molding of morals… Reason does not so much establish and pronounce this law of nature as search for it and discover it.… Neither is reason so much the maker of that law as its interpreter. (in von Leyden (Ed.), 1954, p. 111)

One cannot proceed as the Cartesians wished, in more geometrico, but must be empirical and discover the laws of society and morality as one discovers laws in the physical sciences. The empirical rule of law in science is comparable to the empirical rule of law in society. Kant extended the rule of law (where law means general principles) to ethics, emphasizing the necessity of the general and abstract character of all rules that guide the conduct of a free individual. The categorical imperative is a statement to that effect. Kant based his views on Hume,

210

W. B. Weimer

who had argued in the Treatise that “The rules of morality, … are not conclusions of our reason” (ibid., p. 551). They precede our reason and guide it. They are instead the outcome of the practical experience of humanity, enshrined in our social order rather than deduced from some Cartesian intellect.4 As Hayek (1960) noted, “Like all other values, our morals are not a product but a presupposition of reason, part of the ends which the instrument of our intellect has been developed to serve” (p. 63). This inevitability of both our partial knowledge and the momentary givenness of our framework of values means that although we can attempt to improve them by piecemeal changes we can never replace the system as a whole and start afresh. The Cartesian or Comtean attempt to start with a blank sheet would end with nothing at all upon it. By now it should be obvious that the case for liberty and individual freedom rests upon a recognition of the inevitability (individual and collective) of our ignorance of the consequences of our actions. Liberty is what allows rule-governed creativity: it leaves room for the unexpected and enables us to act on our momentary local knowledge of particulars. We prize it because it allows us to achieve results that we could never have predicted nor have had any expectation of reaching. It is the weakness of men’s minds, or in Hume’s phrase, the narrow bounds of human understanding, that forces us to act according to general principles and ignore the chaos of infinite particularity. When we do so we tap the power and force of a tacit structure that contains and transmits knowledge that is indefinitely beyond the capabilities of any finite single individual, and thus transcends the limitations inherent in our personal particularity.

Language as a Rule-Governed Grown Institution Although it applies to individuals the law is a social institution. Likewise our reason, an instrument of individual psychological adaptation, is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Language, as the primary medium in which individual reason enters social activity, and through which our awareness of social institutions has developed, seems to bridge the gap

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

211

between individual and social phenomena. Looked at from the perspective of the reason it is the highest flower of man’s adaptation to his inevitably social environment. Looked at from the social standpoint, as a medium of communication, it is a matter of convention. The Cartesian tradition focused upon creativity and competence as an aspect of (individual) reason, and tended to ignore both the adaptive capabilities and conventional aspects of language as a social system. Theorists in the liberal tradition saw all three aspects of language and emphasized their interrelationship. Adam Ferguson noted the characteristics of linguistic competence as clearly as Chomsky did, but nearly two centuries earlier: The peasant, or the child, can reason and judge, and speak his language, with a discernment, a consistency, and a regard to analogy which perplex the logician, the moralist, and the grammarian, when they would find the principles upon which the proceeding is grounded, or when they would bring to general rules, what is so familiar, and so well sustained in particular cases. (1767, pp. 50–51)

Ferguson also noted that language acquisition is a matter of the unfolding of capacity according to tacit rules, and only minimally a matter of learning in the empiricist sense of any sort of induction from particulars. A lawyer, Sir William Jones, noted the common deep structure underlying language in 1786. Speaking of the obvious affinity of Greek and Latin to Sanskrit, he held that both European languages are related to it by “a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the form of grammar, then could possibly have been produced by accident: so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists” (1807, p. 34). Somewhat later in the nineteenth century Samuel Bailey defended a similar nativist interpretation of cognition (particularly perception), and MacNeill (1970) used his view as support for the then “new” psycholinguistics position. Bailey, like von Humboldt, was a liberal, not a Cartesian.

212

W. B. Weimer

But in addition to competence, creativity, and deep structure, language as a convention—in other than the sense of arbitrary and subject to change “at will”—was an insight of extreme importance. To see its significance we must examine the Moralists’ conception of convention in society.

Convention as Separate from Natural and Artificial: Ferguson and the Results of Our Actions but not Our Designs Perhaps the single most important aspect of the primacy of the abstract in social orders has been the insight of Adam Ferguson that the mythical social contract could never have represented an “original state” for humanity. By dispensing with both of these anthropomorphic fictions (the contract and any original state) he was able to extend a theory of convention, first promulgated by David Hume, to the evolution of society. Ferguson is the first coherent evolutionary social theorist, the first to emphasize the artifactual realm and its importance to organization in distinction from the “natural” and the “deliberate” or consciously directed, and it is from his insight that the first social science developed (well before the self-serving paternity claims of rationalist constructivists such as Bentham, Comte, and Marx). The essence of the insight is summed up in this sentence from Ferguson’s History in 1767: “Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (p. 187). This third , conventional, class of phenomena, called by Hume artifactual as opposed to either artificial or natural, enables one to take an evolutionary approach to spontaneous orders that appear to be guided by reason to a goal foreseen in advance. The institutions we have that seem, as if by some providential direction, to lead to what is best for our purposes have evolved alongside our reason and structured our adaptation to the environment. Humanity did not create society—we have

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

213

always been in a social environment, as we are now. As Ferguson said in a later work (in 1792): The first object of concert and convention, on the part of man, is not to give society existence, but to perfect the society in which he finds himself already by nature placed; not to establish subordination, but to correct the abuse of subordination already established: And that material, on which the political genius of men is to work, is not, as poets have figured, a scattered race, in a state of individuality to be collected together into troops, by the charms of music or the lessons of philosophy. (p. 262)

Let us explore this insight in relation to the theory of convention proposed by Hume in the Treatise. Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Morals provided a concise account of this concept of convention that shows it to be simultaneously intrinsically social, advantageous, and tacit or unconscious: Two men pull the oars of a boat by common convention, for common interest, without any promise or contract; thus gold and silver are made the measures of exchange; thus speech, and words, and language are fixed by human convention and agreement. Whatever is advantageous to two or more persons if all perform their part, but what loses all advantage if only one perform, can arise by no other principle. There would otherwise be no motive for any one of them to enter into that scheme of conduct. (1998, p. 123)

Thus, conventions are not promises or conscious agreements, but rather actions that, when performed by two or more individuals, increase the selfinterests of all . Conventional behavior is advantageous if engaged in by the majority of the society, but of no advantage if performed by any individual alone.5 As the expression goes, it takes two to tango—if one individual with one oar tries to row a boat, it will go around in circles instead of the desired direction. Hume cited Grotius, an earlier legal theorist, as having developed this theory implicitly. Hume quoted Grotius extensively, and one point relates back to property: “we learn how property developed into private property: it was not through a single

214

W. B. Weimer

act of the mind, for people could not possibly know what others wanted as their own and consequently keep away from it, …” (ibid., pp. 123– 124). In this regard not only property but justice and injustice are social conventions. As Hume (ibid.) said, “Had men lived without society, property had never been known, and neither justice nor injustice had ever existed” (p. 124). Common interest induces individuals to regulate their conduct to one another according to generally observed rules. Now the import of Ferguson’s phrase should be clearer, especially when it is put in fuller context (1767): Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. If Cromwell said, That a man never mounts higher than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects. (p. 187)

This means that it is absolutely necessary in any spontaneous order in which an individual’s actions have consequences which he or she cannot completely specify in advance that one submit to the anonymous, seemingly blind and unreasonable, demands of society. This submission is absolutely required in order to keep the ongoing spontaneous order functioning—to keep the peace of the order—even though it entails accepting, without question, numerous rules of behavior for which no reasons are given. Furthermore, one must also be ready and willing to adjust to changes in the ongoing order, to take advantage of one’s momentary knowledge and skill to improve one’s fortune and opportunity, even though the causes of the situations involved remain totally unknown. Our ignorance is absolutely indispensable to society: were we to attempt to understand at every step the tacit framework of conventional determination that structures its existence, the whole complex phenomenon would break down. Our social behavior is no more the original product of our conscious reason than is our bodily skill in processes such as respiration and digestion.

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

215

Our social orders have evolved along with humanity. They have not been consciously designed by humanity. Not only that, but our reason has evolved along with the social orders. Mankind did not first have reason and then create conventional orders such as language and society—they all develop together as a result of a complex interplay during evolution. As Ferguson aptly put it (ibid.): The artifices of the beaver, the ant, and the bee, are ascribed to the wisdom of nature. Those of polished nations are ascribed to themselves, and are supposed to indicate a capacity superior to that of rude minds. But the establishments of men, like those of every animal, are suggested by nature, and are the result of instinct, directed by the variety of situations in which mankind are placed. Those establishments arose from successive improvements that were made, without any sense of their general effect; and they bring human affairs to a state of complication, which the greatest reach of capacity with which human nature was ever adorned, could not have projected; nor even when the whole is carried into execution, can it be comprehended in its full extent. (p. 279)

All our conscious reason can ever do is modify selected aspects of the entire social order, while the remainder of that order remains tacit. We can no more plan society afresh than we can plan our language afresh, or adopt some artificial language in place of natural ones. The framework of tradition is inescapable in a cosmos. That is another aspect of the primacy of the abstract, so clearly exemplified in convention which, although the result of our action is not the product of any conscious design.

What is “Natural” in Terms of Natural Law and Natural Rights? At this point we can understand a terminological problem that has plagued both the development and acceptance of liberalism. Before it was clear that there was another choice, theorists who wished to emphasize the fact that abstract and impersonal concepts such as law (with

216

W. B. Weimer

a capital L) and moral rules were not in fact the product of deliberate conscious decisions were forced to employ the term “natural” as the only commonly available contrast to artificial or deliberate. These things arose “naturally” in the sense that no conscious intervention occurred. Thus to those thinkers, especially John Locke and the early students of spontaneous order, it was only “natural” to emphasize natural laws and natural rights in opposition to the rationalist tradition (again, exemplified by Descartes). Although the terminology stemmed from the ancient Greeks, the distinction between a cosmos, in which spontaneous ordering is the rule rather than the exception, and a taxis, the deliberate result of conscious direction and planning, was not available to the Scottish moralists. Hence when discussing grown institutions and the spontaneous ordering principles they represented, they were forced to use “natural” as the only available term in opposition to deliberate and consciously constructed. After Ferguson’s distinction of the third category of conventional, as the result of human action but not design, there was no need to employ the term natural with respect to law or so-called human rights. Natural laws and natural rights are not in fact natural, which properly means the result of physical processes, but rather the conventional results of human actions over many generations of evolutionary history. That which is conventional is semiotic, thus biological and evolutionary, and not physical or designed deliberately. Thus whenever one sees a term such as natural law or natural rights it is correct to interpret it as a convention resulting from the interaction of individuals through evolution over time, and not as a product of “nature” whether it is interpreted as purely physical or deliberately designed. Nomos, as the rule of law in a spontaneous order is inherently conventional, the result of human action but never human design. Similarly, the so-called “inalienable human rights” such as found in the United States Declaration of Independence and similar documents, are likewise considered to be “inalienable” not because some super being—an all-knowing God or a Laplacean demon—was their source, but rather because they have evolved over a long period of time and have gradually become accepted as such. When we attempt to articulate such things as “inalienable” rights we are in fact attempting to make consciously explicit and clear what is already available to us in the spontaneously evolved order of society.

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

217

When we see such terms as “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property” what is meant is that they are commonplace to all members of the society and accepted without general questioning. Nothing further should be read into terms such as “inalienable” or “natural” or “rights.” It is only philosophers, who attempt to articulate consciously and explicitly what is involved in such terms, who continue to confuse the issue by blurring the distinction between natural, conventional, and artificial.

Competition as a Discovery Procedure and a Mechanism for Evolution A spontaneously organized complex order can never be quiescent—it exists only as an ongoing pattern of activities. Thus such orders must always be in a state of change, with general principles of operation holding in check (maintaining peace) the tendency toward revolutionary restructuring that results from the unforeseen consequences of particular actions. But change is one thing—evolution another. How can a spontaneous social order such as society evolve? The answer is simple: by creating and then feeding upon the growing knowledge and reason of the individuals that compose it. Individuals can learn, both consciously and unconsciously, and what they learn (when exhibited in their behavior) can modify the ongoing order of which they are a part. The mechanism of biological evolution, familiar since Darwin’s Origin in 1859, has been understood to result from competition, between and within species, for survival in an econiche. The process involves sexual selection in which, topologically, the fittest survive to breed the next generation. Sexual intercourse contributes to the biological evolution of the species and social intercourse provides the mechanism for the evolution of society. Competition between individuals to fulfill their private self-interest is a learning experience through which the social order evolves. As a result of the unintended consequences of our actions to fulfill our self-interest the entire society can benefit. Progress can occur through competition. As Ferguson said (ibid.):

218

W. B. Weimer

The latest efforts of human invention are but a continuation of certain devices which were practiced in the earliest ages of the world, and in the rudest state of mankind. What the savage projects, or observes, in the forest, are the steps which led nations, more advanced, from the architecture of the cottage to that of the palace, and conducted the human mind from the perceptions of sense, to the general conclusions of science. (p. 13)

Ferguson was candid in his appraisal of the combativeness of humans, and in the ease with which wars arise between nations whose citizens perceive a threat to their self-interests from the actions of another group. His picture of society is cold and bloody in comparison to the mellow hopes of the Romantics, and one can clearly see in his account what Tennyson saw in nature as red in tooth and claw. Perhaps as clearly as any, Ferguson (ibid.) saw war as having been necessary for the shaping of society to its present form: Without the rivalship of nations, and the practice of war, civil society itself could scarcely have found an object, or a form. Mankind might have traded without any formal convention, but they cannot be safe without a national concert… The intellectual talents of men have found their busiest scene in wielding their national forces, to overawe, or intimidate, or, when we cannot persuade with reason, to resist with fortitude, are the occupations which give its most animating exercise, and its greatest triumphs, to a vigorous mind; and he who has never struggled with his fellow creatures, is a stranger to half the sentiments of mankind. (p. 36)

Taken out of the evolutionary context one can see how Russell was led to fear and hate competition in society as a result of his involvement in the world wars. And one can likewise sympathize with either the businessman or housewife who longs to escape the competitive rat race of modern society. There is no doubt that unchecked competition, without adherence to a framework of rules like those of the market order, can become a bloody sword that cuts society to pieces, destroying the fragile order of civilization. But competition is a double-edged sword, and the taxis mentality that attempts to do away with it by organization cuts off the possibility of

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

219

growth and progress from it as well. Competition has a very positive side, that need not lead to destruction, and would be lost if competitive orders were suppressed. The positive side is the mechanism of growth and progress. Ferguson saw the positive side of competition as clearly as the later Darwinians: These observations seem to arraign our species, and to give an unfavorable picture of mankind; and yet the particulars we have mentioned are consistent with the most amiable qualities of our nature, and often furnishes a scene for the exercise of our greatest abilities. They are sentiments of generosity and self-denial that animate the warrior in defense of his country; and they are dispositions most favorable to mankind, that become the principles of apparent hostility to men. (ibid., p. 35)

The positive aspect of competition comes into play when we consider the division of labor (a point taken up in detail by Ferguson’s friend Adam Smith). As Ferguson (ibid.) put it, “The accidents which distribute the means of subsistence unequally, inclination, and favourable opportunities, assign the different occupations of men; and a sense of utility leads them, without end, to subdivide their professions” (p. 277). Who could anticipate or plan the various occupations that individuals have specialized in, in a division of labor brought about by utility and accident? The advantage of the division, of course, is obvious—division of labor increases the productivity of labor. Individuals’ activities “are made, like the parts of an engine, to concur to a purpose, without any concert of their own: and equally blind with the trader to any general combination, they unite with him, furnishing to the state its resources, its conduct, and its force” (pp. 278–279). To elaborate: “In coming to this mighty end, every generation, compared to its predecessors, may have appeared to be ingenious; compared to its followers, may have appeared to be dull: And human ingenuity, whatever heights it may have gained in a succession of ages, continues to move with an equal pace, and to creep in making the last, as well as the first, step of commercial or civil improvement” (pp. 279–280).

220

W. B. Weimer

Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand Spontaneous orders operate with negative feedback as a controlling mechanism. Even though our actions are entirely individually motivated, insofar as they occur as components of a complexly organized cosmos, it is inevitable that they feed back into, and hence control and are controlled by, the order as a whole. Thus the actions of an individual can benefit the society as a whole, through no intentions on his or her part. Bernard Mandeville emphasized this at the beginning of the eighteenth century (it is to him that we owe the term, division of labor) in the lines, the worst of all the multitude did something for the common good, found in his poem The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest, in 1705. When enlarged into The Origin of Honour in 1732 it became a scandalous success in the prevailing rationalist climate of opinion and influenced Hume. By 1741 in the Essays (1875) Hume argued that “Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest” (p. 117). After similar statements in the Inquiry and Hume’s other writings Ferguson took the notion to the level of the division of labor in occupation and specialization within occupations. Adam Smith, combining Ferguson’s specialization of self-interest with his knowledge of the market order and the rule of law, arrived at the doctrine of the invisible hand. Smith was not a “natural liberty” or unrestrained competition advocate. He understood that the economic system rests upon the rule of law in politics and the general and impersonal regulation of the market order. As he said in The Wealth of Nations: “that security which the laws in Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labor, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish, …” (1976, p. 49). The market can be secure to function only when it is subject to the rule of law. There must be an equal playing field. When the market does function, i.e., operates according to the rule of law that constrains all who participate to restrain from circumventing it (keeping the playing field “level” for all), the result is beneficial to the society as a whole. Smith, following Hume and Ferguson, knew full

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

221

well the beneficial effect was conventional in the sense we have described above. This is brought out in the famous “invisible hand” passage in The Wealth of Nations, which is worth studying in full (ibid.): As every individual … endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (pp. 447–448)

In contrast to the French constructivists, Smith and the evolutionary social theorists emphasized the indispensability of well-constructed institutions within a given framework of general rules. Smith was even a protectionist for certain industries, arguing that certain trade barriers were necessary to allow unhampered market functioning. Such situations had to be determined by examining the given case. It was laissez-faire in the hands of the French rationalists that led to “anything goes” libertarianism, and the anarchy that those such as Chomsky now champion, not the Scottish moralists. As an antidote to libertarian anarchy as unconstrained individual “freedom,” consider this rebuttal by Ferguson from 1792: Liberty or freedom is not, as the origin of the name may seem to imply, an exemption from all restraint, but rather the most effectual application of every just restraint to all the members of a free state, whether they be magistrates or subjects. It is under just restraints only that every person is safe, and cannot be invaded, either in the freedom of his person, his property, or innocent

222

W. B. Weimer

action … . The establishment of a just and effectual government is of all circumstances in civil society the most essential to freedom: that everyone is justly said to be free in proportion as the government under which he resides is sufficiently powerful to protect them, at the same time that it is sufficiently restrained and limited to prevent the abuse of this power. (Ferguson, 1792, vol. II, pp. 258–259)

Liberalism is simply not “individualistic” in the everybody-for-himor-her-self sense.6 That false individualism is solely a product of the Cartesian rationalist constructivism that flowered after the writings of Rousseau. It crept into the British tradition only after the reversal of means and ends in Benthamite utilitarianism created a false individualism (in conjunction with the false psychology of associationism).

Government by Opinion Versus the Power of Majority Will If the majority will rules, government is totalitarian, and the only difference from the tyranny of a king or an individual dictator is that there are now many despots. Liberalism requires the strict and absolute enforcement of the rule of law, and as was just emphasized, the theory of the market order developed by Smith is equally based upon unfailing observance of rules of order. If this is so, then how can self-interest govern without lapsing into totalitarianism? The answer is provided by distinguishing between rule by majority opinion from the majority will . Only rule by majority opinion is the rule of law; the latter situation is unlimited rule by individuals (tyrants in the plural) over the remainder of society. The law of liberty, nomos, is a barrier to the usurpation of power, and while perfectly consistent with rule by law according to majority opinion it is totally opposed to rule by momentary majority will. Opinion does not prescribe particular goals to be achieved—will, however does prescribe particulars to be achieved. Liberalism is concerned to limit the coercive power of government to that required to maintain the peace of the spontaneous order of society. The form of democracy compatible with liberalism accepts current majority

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

223

opinion as a method of deciding which of several policies in accord with the rule of law will be followed. Majority will as totalitarianism creates a “law” forcing the society to do as the majority dictates (recall Chapter 7, note 6). There is no necessary connection between self-interest as the primary motivation of individuals and the majority will. Indeed, it is the other way around; as Hume noted in his Essays (1875), “Though men be much governed by interest, yet even interest itself, and all human affairs are entirely guided by opinion” (p. 125). Another word for opinion is expectation, or anticipation, because all our opinions are formed by the expectations we have as to what the effects of conduct (our own conduct and others) will be. The liberal tradition is simply antithetical to any form of unchecked power—it repudiates a democracy that is sovereign, i.e., one in which majority will rules, as much as any other form of despotism or totalitarianism. Of all the eighteenth-century moralists none saw this, and the danger of power corrupting a just ruler, better than Edmund Burke. His writings are full of comments such as the idea that the greatest tyrants of history began their reigns in the fairest manner, and this “unnatural power” corrupts. This understanding of the danger of power was again summarized in the last part of the nineteenth century by Lord Acton in the maxim, now common property to all who reflect, that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The primacy of the abstract in the rule of law condemns the libertarian and the dictator as equally abusive of freedom under the rule of law.

The Bankruptcy of Constructivist Rationality: David Hume and the “Proving Power” of Reason Perhaps the greatest blow struck against the “false enlightenment” of the Cartesian and romantic traditions was Hume’s analysis of the nature of reasoning about cause and effect. By examining the manner in which we infer causal relationships Hume simultaneously formulated the nowclassic problem of the justification of induction as a source of knowledge,

224

W. B. Weimer

and also subsumed or subordinated reason (no longer with a capital R) to the “passions.” Hume pointed out that we do not see cause and effect, all that we see in our experience is the constant conjunction of events. Causality is the result of complicated inference, it is not given in a clear and distinct idea to Cartesian common sense. His “mitigated skepticism” (as the Abstract to the Treatise called his position) reduced (so the philosophes thought) our empirical knowledge in both science and common sense to “custom” and habit, or to mere animal belief . Thus he demolished the so-called proving power of reason for matters of fact— outside the realm of pure mathematics and logic reason is impotent to prove “truth” or to establish knowledge. In his first Inquiry (concerning human understanding) in 1748 he put it this way: “The only objects of the abstract sciences, or of demonstration, are quantity and number, and … all attempts to extend this more perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere sophistry and illusion” (1955, p. 171). The inability to justify the status of inductive inferences as genuine knowledge knocked into a cocked hat the pretentious schemes of the metaphysical system builders of all schools, but most especially those of the Cartesian constructivists who had set reason apart from the natural order, to judge it and to know how to reshape its progress. Hume utterly destroyed this program by the simple expedient of making reason a slave of the passions (of instincts and “sentiments”) rather than their master. In this move the Scottish moralists anticipated the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin for biological speciation and by twentiethcentury thinkers such as Hayek, Popper, and Campbell for society. Furthermore, it mattered little whether one had been an empiricist or an intellectualist: both approaches were rendered obsolete at once by Hume, because both assumed reason to be the master. Neither Descartes nor Hobbes survive the fires of Humean skepticism. Hume’s skepticism is only with regard to the illegitimate overextension of the “proving power” of reason. He did not accept Pyrronian skepticism, and argued against it exactly as one would argue against philosophical solipsism: it is fine for sitting in the armchair, but impossible to maintain in practical affairs and in the conduct of life. Numerous critics, assuming that Hume must be a Pyrronian skeptic, accused him of the same inconsistency, because they felt he can have no alternative

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

225

guide to the conduct of life than explicit reason. This criticism misses Hume entirely, since he did not himself denigrate habit or custom, but rather regarded it as the essential factor guiding our behavior. In this regard he was one of the first evolutionary epistemologists, and the first to emphasize both the tacit and social determinants of human behavior and inference. Thus Hume substituted the psychology of inference and expectation for constructivist reason as both the motivating force of our practical affairs (both behavior and practical “reasoning”) and the source of our scientific knowledge. Despite the fact that reason cannot justify any sort of “mere animal belief ” as knowledge (or not), we still possess it and we are guided by it in nearly all our affairs. It is in this context that Hume studied the practical issues of politics, economics, and psychology. What the proving power of reason could not guarantee could be known, if at all, only through patient and systematic empirical research. Thus Hume was forced to study what is today known as the tacit dimension of humanity and society in order to account for how our behavior appears to be organized, coherent, and explicitly rational (conscious) when in fact it is usually due to very pervasive and powerful, but quite unconscious, factors. Little if any of this filters through the distorted historical accounts of Hume that have been provided either in philosophy or the social sciences. Thus it is worth retrieving him in the context of more current developments, which we shall begin to do in the next chapter. Then it should be clear that Hume is not only one of the greatest figures in the development of liberal philosophy but in all the moral sciences as well.

Notes 1. Nomos, the law of just conduct pertaining to the protection and maintenance spontaneous order of society as a whole, must be clearly distinguished from thesis, the “law” (more correctly, the legislation) of organization. Nomos only limits the range of permitted actions, but never specifies a particular action that must be achieved. Nomos is constituted by negative rules of order that tell one what actions one may not perform, because to do so would fail to “keep the peace” of

226

W. B. Weimer

the social order and, if followed by others, would lead to the eventual dissolution of society as a spontaneous order, restricting it instead to a directed taxis or tribal organization. Examples are found in so-called moral rules, such as “do not commit murder” or “do not commit adultery” and “do not steal from others.” In contrast, thesis is the law of executive order or a legislative body command that directs individuals or institutions to achieve particular ends. Thesis is the law of positive, usually written legislation—what is on the law books a court uses, i.e., the commands of an organization charged with the regulation of the conduct of affairs supervised by governments. The government is, by definition, a deliberate organization set up to govern, and to do so it requires a set of regulations to effect its positive programs and procedures. Thesis, the law of legislation, serves this function. Examples of thesei are “you must pay your parking tickets,” “you must obtain a marriage license in order to be married,” and “all dogs must be licensed.” A thesis can often appear to be interpreted as a negative prohibition: “do not speed.” But no state or municipality has a law that states “do not speed.” In order to be enforceable such a law must state particular terms and conditions that apply: “do not go over 15 miles an hour in a school zone during school hours” or “do not drive in the wrong lane, which must translate (in North America) to you must drive in the right side lane.” Nomos, although not always written or formally codified, also requires an organizational structure to enforce its negative rules of just conduct. But that organizational structure has nothing to do with the government. Thus the laws of procedure and organization of how the courts operate are thesei in the service of nomos. The structure in which nomos is embedded is the society as a whole, not a particular court system. The difference between the two is clear if one considers how the laws are applied. One cannot execute or carry out a law of just conduct as one can carry out a positive instruction. Nomos merely limits the range of permitted action—and thus what it requires can never be accomplished as a definite and finished task but must forever remain a standing obligation. Thus there can never be a “positive” formulation of nomos, actually entirely reformulating its negative character. Consider the so-called

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

227

Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have done unto you— which means “never do unto others what you would not have done to you,” and as such creates a standing obligation which no positive prescription of particular actions to accomplish can ever definitively achieve. Nomos is a never-ending directive. Thesei can be executed or determined to be satisfied (and a court can determine whether or not one has been carried out correctly), and they are the responsibility of an executive or administrator or legal system to see that they are carried out. Thus Nomos is private law, conventionally and usually tacitly enforced throughout the society (the law of conduct of individuals), and thesis is so-called public law, the explicit law of organizational regulation. During the last 200 years the distinction between the two types of laws has been systematically blurred by the constructivists and advocates of “social” justice. One might in fact define the current conception of social justice as the error of assuming that the general welfare can be served only by public law (of positive legislation) and not by private law. In fact it is the other way around: the benefits of the spontaneous order do more for “public” welfare through the individual’s conduct than can ever be achieved by an endless series of executive commands to interpret the market order (see Hayek, 1973, Chapter 6, especially the section “The transformation of private law into public law by ‘social’ legislation”). At first this was done to prevent discrimination against groups who had had less power to prevent laws which had favored certain groups like landlords, employers, and creditors, against renters, employees, and those who borrowed. Legislating equality of treatment in such cases has nothing to do with the question of whether the application of such general rules to particular situations might have results which are more favorable to one group than to others. As Hayek said: Justice is not concerned with the results of the various transactions but only with whether the transactions themselves are fair. Rules of just conduct cannot alter the fact that, with perfectly just behavior on both sides, the low productivity of labor in some countries will bring about a situation where the wages at which all can get employment will be

228

W. B. Weimer

very low—and at the same time return on capital will be very high— and where higher wages could be secured to some only by means which would prevent others from finding employment at all. (1973, p. 141)

But when this concept of “social” legislation was seamlessly extended to cover the concept of “social justice,” this Made it necessary for governments to treat the citizen and his property as an object of administration with the aim of securing particular results for particular groups. When the aim of legislation is higher wages for particular groups of workers, or higher incomes for small farmers, or better housing for the urban poor, it cannot be achieved by improving the general rules of conduct. (ibid., p. 142)

This is the framework in which justice as equality under the rule of law was perverted into social justice as the favoring of certain groups over others. 2. Kant’s philosophy of law appears to be identical to, and perhaps borrowed from, David Hume”s views. In legal philosophy Kant sticks to the categorical imperative as a negative test of just conduct. However, his ethics uses the categorical imperative as a premise in an a priori deductive scheme from which he attempts to deduce a positive content for moral rules. This attempt to turn a test of justice in the law into a premise from which to deduce a moral “system” is a disaster, and it should be clear why: one cannot deduce thesei from nomos, any more than one can complete the achievement specified in nomos. Kant’s attempt is a category mistake as Ryle (1949) used the term. Like most of his a priori or transcendental speculation it is an untenable vestige of rationalist constructivism’s ideal of a strictly deductive and complete picture of the universe. That axiomatic approach plagued science and philosophy until it was overthrown (at least in science) by Heinrich Hertz’s introduction of the hypothetico-deductive approach to theorizing. Axioms are found only in mathematics (and perhaps logic), never in science or other branches of philosophy.

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

229

3. Deduction, as a matter of the transmission of truth from premises to a conclusion (and retransmission of falsity from conclusion to premises), works for either particulars or general statements (recall that classic syllogistic logic has general conclusions in some of its forms). When applied as a model of explanation the same result obtains. While it is clear that a mathematical “system” is explained as a deductive structure with axioms as premises and theorems as derived consequences, it must be noted that when dealing with indefinitely extended domains (infinite totalities) the conclusions are never particulars but rather generalizations encompassing particulars. Thus the model of explanatory coverage can be Cartesian, but the scope of coverage cannot. This is why Hayek abandoned the hard science or social physics model in favor of explanations in the realms of essential complexity providing only specifications of general principles. We simply cannot explain the particulars if there are an infinite number of them. All we can hope to do is show the general principles according to which a given set of particulars can be “subsumed” and in that sense explained. 4. The extent to which the Scottish moralists influenced German thought is seldom noted. Everyone seems to know that Kant’s Prolegomena acknowledged that Hume aroused him from his “dogmatic slumbers,” but it is not often remarked that Kant was of Scottish descent on his father’s side, or that he was constantly in contact with British businessman such as Green and Motherby who came to Königsburg because of its strategic trade location. Nor is it wellknown that Christian Garve, one of the most famous philosophers prior to Kant’s spectacular rise, translated Ferguson’s History and Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and also promoted Hutcheson, Kames, Steuart, and others. Ferguson, on a visit to Germany, was voted into the Berlin Academy of Science. Jacobi, the friend of Goethe, repeatedly cited Ferguson in his correspondence and novels. In one passage published in 1792 he has the leading character remark that reading Ferguson marked a turning point in his life. Goethe himself read and admired the Moralists and held them up as a necessary corrective to German Romantic philosophers, whom he regarded as failing to “lay hold on life” in balancing romanticism and empiricism, at

230

W. B. Weimer

least in the fashion that the Scottish thinkers did. Herder and Schiller, often regarded as romantics, were in fact quite widely read, and often use the liberalism of the Moralists, even if their residual romanticism could not endorse all of the empiricism. Marx, particularly after “taking up residence” in the British Museum in 1850, was greatly influenced by Ferguson, Smith, Millar, and others. 5. Apparently unaware of history, the zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé coined the term stigmergy in 1959 to account for the phenomenon of the regulation and control of emergent collective activities in social insects. The presently accepted definition is that it is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, of agents or their actions. The concept has made some headway in zoology and biology as a way of getting beyond ideas such as that insects swarms or colonies constitute super organisms or collectives. The basic idea is very simple: traces left as modifications made by individuals in their environment may feedback on them. As two recent authors say of social insects: The colony records its activity in part in the physical environment and uses this record to organize collective behavior. Various forms of storage are used: gradients of pheromones, material structures (impregnated or not by chemical compounds), or spatial distribution of colony elements. Such structures materialize the dynamics of the colonies collective behavior and constrain behavior of individuals through a feedback loop. Stigmergy also solves the coordination paradox: individuals do interact to achieve coordination but they interact indirectly so that each insect taken separately does not seem to be involved in a coordinated, collective behavior. (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, 1999, p. 111)

Unfortunately this zoological conception seems not to recognize that the present members of the “society” or group of insects have been shaped, through downward causation (as Campbell, 1974a, 1974b, has shown), into the behavior they exhibit. The zoological conception seems to be entirely within a given generation rather than an actually evolutionary or across generations account. Thus it is not of much use to the Moralists unless one likes fancy words. What Ferguson meant

10 Retrieving History: Liberalism and the Study …

231

by the results of human action but not design has little to do with our having made marks or changes to the physical environment that were then physical stimuli or controls of subsequent behavior. 6. One can look at the optimism of Humboldt in a different light once he is put in the Kantian liberal tradition that inherited the Scottish moralists’ idea of progress through evolutionary development. The famous phrase later taken by J. S. Mill in 1859 to open his essay “On Liberty,” is not so anarchist libertarian when placed in a context of rule-governed growth. Humboldt had said, “The grand, leading principal, toward which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” (p. 5). This is a clear statement of the moralists’ conception of evolutionary individualism, emphasizing the maximization of individual liberty for social evolution. It was later further elaborated and discussed on the Continent by Wundt (as in his 1902). Likewise, the other quotations that Chomsky employs in Cartesian Linguistics (1966) around pages 21– 27 to paint Humboldt as a libertarian anarchist are similar distortions of Humboldt’s view. Humboldt was a Kantian greatly influenced by the romantic tradition, but never either a Cartesian or an anarchist.

References Bentham, J. (1931). Theory of legislation 111–13 (C. K. Ogden, Ed., R. Hildreth, Trans.). Harcourt, Brace & Co. Campbell, D. T. (1974a). “Downward Causation” in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. Macmillan and Company. Campbell, D. T. (1974b). Evolutionary epistemology. In The philosophy of Karl Popper (P. A. Schilpp, Ed., pp. 413–463). Open Court Cricket Media. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An essay on the history of civil society. Cambridge University Press.

232

W. B. Weimer

Ferguson, A. (1785/2010). Institutes of moral philosophy. Gale ECCO, Print Editions. Ferguson, A. (1792/1978). Principles of moral and political science (2 Vols.). Garland Publishing. Hayek, F. A. (1960/2007). The constitution of liberty. University of Chicago Press. Now Rutledge Classics. Hayek, F. A. (1973/2012). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 1: Rules and order. University of Chicago Press. Now Routledge Classics. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 2: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1978). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press; Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis Group). Holdsworth, W. S. (1924). A history of English law (7 Vol.). Little, Brown and Company. Hume, D. (1739/1888/1978). Hume’s treatise of human nature (L. A. SelbyBigge, P. H. Niddich, Rev.). Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1748/1955/1999). An enquiry concerning human understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Also 1955, Edited by C. W. Hendel. Hume, D. (1751/1998). An enquiry concerning the principles of morals (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Clarendon Press. Jones, W. (1807). The works of Sir William Jones Vol III (L. Teignmouth, Ed.). John Stockdale. Locke, J. (1689/1975). Two treatises of government. Cambridge University Press. MacNeil, D. (1970). The acquisition of language. Harper and Row. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind . University of Chicago Press. Smith, A. (1759/1976). The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford University Press reprint. Theraulaz, G., & Bonabeau, E. (1999). A brief history of stigmergy. Artificial Life, 5, 97–116. von Leyden, W. (Ed.). (1954/2002). John Locke: Essays on the law of nature. Oxford University Press.

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue. David Hume It is the task of social theory to explain how the unintended consequences of our intentions and actions arise, and what kind of consequences arise if people do this that or the other in a certain social situation. And it is, especially, the task of the social sciences to analyze in this way the existence and the functioning of institutions… and of social collectives. Karl R. Popper

Many figures in the development of philosophy were also significant contributors to law, social and political thought, history, economics, and even psychology. That fact is usually lost today upon specialists in the separate disciplines. David Hume is a case in point—while well-known for one or another point in different fields, he is all but unknown as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_11

233

234

W. B. Weimer

an integrated thinker who touched upon all the moral sciences (today called the social sciences) as part of a coherent account. Hume’s program consisted of both negative and positive tasks. The negative tasks revolve around demolishing the false enlightenment that put conscious reason on a pedestal. In that regard he exhibited the bankruptcy of eighteenthcentury rationality and scientific method, and created the modern form of the problem of induction, and in so doing removed cause and effect relationships from the realm of empirically given Cartesian facts. Hume the skeptic is usually regarded as having contributed little in the way of positive programs to replace the over-exuberant ones demolished by his methodical reasoning, and, as noted in prior chapters, was usually dismissed by constructivist historians after listing his “negatives.” Thus it comes as a surprise to many to find that there is much positive merit in his overall views—which constitute the beginnings of a coherent evolutionary epistemology and theory of society, a framework all but unknown to traditional philosophy and social science histories, which paints a very different picture of him. Equally unknown to traditional philosophy is the fact that Hume was one of the founders of evolutionary epistemology, and as such the first systematic theorist to call for the development of a psychology of inference and expectation. What follows is far from an exhaustive account of his views, as our emphasis is on how major themes are relevant to the development of liberalism.

The Selective Nature of Traditional Interpretations of Hume Traditional justificationist philosophy portrays Hume as “nothing but” a skeptic whose persistent probing into rationalist method disclosed the problem of induction, and relegated causality to “nothing but” constant conjunction of ingredients in our experience. When combined with his contention that the self is not a substance as Descartes had claimed but rather “nothing but” a bundle of sensations it is not surprising that Russell’s History would propose that:

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

235

Hume’s philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of 18th-century reasonableness. He starts out, like Locke, with the intention of being sensible and empirical, taking nothing on trust, but seeking whatever instruction is to be obtained from experience and observation. But having a better intellect than Locke’s, a great acuteness in analysis, and a smaller capacity for accepting comfortable inconsistencies, he arrives at the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing is to be lernt. There is no such thing as a rational belief. (1945, p. 672)

Thus rather than rational in the sense of justified, man’s behavior becomes a matter of “mere animal belief.” In this framework our highest intellectual achievement (according to traditional accounts), our explicit reason, takes a backseat to the tacit domain and to what is usually called emotion (or feeling) and autonomic nervous system functioning (the passions). At this point the psychologist steps in, and learns that Hume is the thinker who completed the transformation of British empiricism into British associationism. Hume’s psychology, which was a naïve British associationism not unlike his predecessors such as Berkeley and even Hobbes (and much less developed than his later contemporary Hartley), provided an account of how the appearance of rational and well-ordered ideas (such as the doctrine of empiricism) can arise from “nothing but” the principles of association. Thus Hume accounted for mere animal belief in terms of the “laws” of associationism (resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect). Note especially that this makes causality and induction psychological, and not logical, phenomena. Thus Hume removed the means by which we acquire knowledge from the realm of reason and demoted it to a “mere” accompaniment of psychological processes. But the now well-known insufficiency of associationism ensures that Hume will not be further studied by most contemporary psychologists. Philosophical and psychological primers and histories dismiss Hume’s social and political philosophy, and his economic views, as unoriginal (if they are mentioned at all). As noted in Chapter 4, Russell

236

W. B. Weimer

mentioned his “other” views as suffering from carelessness and inattention (1945, p. 672) and regarded his history of England as biased. Few other histories of philosophy discuss Hume’s social and economic views. In psychology the situation is equally bad: for example, E. G. Boring’s famous text (possibly the most widely read history of psychology in the twentieth century) does not discuss his “moral” philosophy at all. Indeed if mentioned at all it is to express puzzlement, as though somehow Hume just didn’t quite fit together: “Hume’s psychological philosophy combines in a peculiar way a number of conceptions which, in modern psychology, are normally in an antagonistic relationship” (Robinson, 1981, p. 236). In stark contrast are views of Hume in economic history. Here Hume, a pupil of Frances Hutcheson and correspondent with Montesquieu, is regarded as the other famous pupil of Hutcheson beside Adam Smith, and also a pupil of James Oswald, who was most responsible for the birth of economics as a discipline. As a book by Schabas and Wennerlind recently put it, “Unlike his monumental Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) that failed to gain recognition during his lifetime, David Hume’s book on economics, Political Discourses, was immensely successful. Over the next twenty-five years it underwent ten English editions and about a dozen translations, and over the next two centuries it continued to be read and valued by prominent economists” (2020, p. xiii). How could one man’s views be interpreted so differently by different fields? From a contemporary perspective we can put Hume back together as an evolutionary epistemologist and theorist of the growth of human institutions by considering the implications of his seemingly disparate views.

Empiricism, Induction, and Inference Since Hume is often regarded as the first positivist we can begin by indicating that his views actually provided devastating refutation of the positivistic conception of “the” scientific method. Hume’s attack on inductivism was updated by Karl Popper in his famous Logik der Forschung in 1934 (Popper, 1959) and subsequent writings. Let us

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

237

note the relationship between Hume’s consistent metaphysical empiricism (not positivism!) and associationism and inductivism, to see how Popper’s position was an outgrowth of Hume’s. Empiricism is the doctrine that “knowledge is a deliverance of sense,” that the origin and foundation of all knowledge is the sensory experience of the observer. The empiricist is the one who will look to see how many teeth a horse has rather than intuit or deduce from first principles what the answer should be (as did the Greek intellectualist or rationalist). Empiricism as a metaphysical doctrine thus leads directly to a methodology for the acquisition of knowledge: inductivism. Inductivism claims that knowledge is built up (induced) by the accumulation of sensory experiences, that our theoretical systems are founded upon and result from the accumulation of observational “facts.” Inductive “method” is the philosopher’s term for how this is supposed to happen. Associationism is the “quasi-psychological” doctrine that the mind “works” by knitting together (associating) basic mental elements (historically “ideas” or “habits,” more recently “habit strength”). Hume’s critique of the validity of inductivism forced empiricism to abandon its pretense of grand philosophical method for much cruder psychological support— that is the import of the thesis that knowledge is “mere” animal belief (psychological association) rather than proven or deductive truth (via some inductive “logic”). Popper’s Humean attack on empiricism was twofold. First, he agreed with and reinforced the arguments against a “logic” that induces theoretical knowledge from facts by showing that “observation” and sensory “experience” are in fact theoretically determined and not “given” as Cartesian clear and distinct phenomena. The conceptual nature of facts, removing its objectivity and foundational features, turns empiricism upside down, forcing one to a theory of the organism in order to account for how we construct facts. Popper’s second line of attack on empiricism denied its account of the nature of knowledge as proven assertion. For Popper (especially his 1963), knowledge is a matter of conjectures, literally guesses or anticipations, that are never justifiable (or verifiable, proven true, etc.). Our empirical knowledge is thus tentative, subject to revision, forever. We can never prove “for certain” except in the contentless domains of logic and mathematics. Instead our “empirical” science, which deals with indefinitely extended

238

W. B. Weimer

content domains comparable to cosmic structures, advances by “refuting” theories that do not accord with the evidence when we construct a situation to test them. Conventions of testability and falsifiability allow science and knowledge to grow in the total absence of any inductive logic of confirmed or positive instances. This is exactly what is involved in evolution: evolution is tentative forever, always subject to refutation (extinction), and thus proceeds in the total absence of any certain method leading to eternal survival. Hume’s use of empiricism was an attempt to delimit, or demarcate, the limits of scientific knowledge apart from axiomatic logic or Euclidean demonstration. Hume (1955) argued in the Inquiry that “It is only experience which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another” (p. 172). Thus he was led to demarcate science from other concerns, such as metaphysics and theology, by its utilization of empirical or experimental reasoning in this famous passage (ibid.): When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number ? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence ? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (p. 173)

That early twentieth-century positivists took this as an instance of the verifiability theory of cognitive significance (their theory of scientific meaning) and therefore assumed that Hume agreed with them that metaphysics is meaningless nonsense. This is not correct. It would be more accurate to say that science is not metaphysics (and vice versa) but not that speculation, or conjecture, is therefore “meaningless.” This is comparable to Hume’s well-known denial of innate ideas, which seems incompatible with admitting innate passions (feelings). When reason is characterized as a slave of the passions it is even more confusing. Here the resolution comes in noting that Hume’s account of the genesis of behavior and cognition is primarily innate and social (unconscious or

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

239

socially conventional) supplemented by reason or conscious experience. We can indeed learn, and all learning is ultimately based upon experience—but the structure of the organism, which is innate, as well as the structure of social institutions, determines belief and even the ultimate particulars of the association of “ideas.” We need not be conscious, or reasoning, in order to learn: reason, for Hume, is a grown or evolved product of our interaction with culture and convention. Within one generation all learning is experiential, whereas over the history of the species it becomes internalized or innate. His denial of innate “ideas” is only for specific contents (individual ideas) within a lifetime, which he argued strenuously must instead come from experience in the world. Thus he was an empiricist during the individual’s lifetime but a nativist for the evolutionary history of the species.1 There is no inconsistency here. Hume’s conception of the organism’s nature and acquisition of knowledge can and must be updated. For instance, Hayek (1952) developed a theoretical psychology to explain how an organism constructs not only its theories but also its sensory experience in a nonjustificational, noninductivist fashion. In so doing The Sensory Order adopts much of Hume’s critique of inductivism without endorsing associationism, or sensationalism, effectively updating Hume’s psychology to the midtwentieth century. Hayek rejected empiricism by a consistent application of its own basic idea: Precisely because all our knowledge, including the initial order of our different sensory experiences of the world, is due to experience, it must contain elements which cannot be contradicted by experience. It must always refer to classes of elements which are defined by certain relations to other elements, and it is valid only on the assumption that these relations actually exist. Generalization based upon experience must refer to classes of objects or events and can have relevance to the world only in so far as these classes are regarded as given irrespective of the statement itself. Sensory experience presupposes, therefore, an order of experienced objects which precedes that experience and which cannot be contradicted by it, though it is itself due to other, earlier experience. (p. 172)

240

W. B. Weimer

This sort of physiological a priorism and the tacit dimension of neural organization argue simultaneously against empiricism and for realism. This is also Hume’s position. Consider now Hume’s critique of inductivism as a reductio ad absurdum against the justificationist conception of knowledge, and the myth of a method of scientific inference that yields justified knowledge outside the realm of logic (demonstration). Hume regarded all that we call knowledge, in science and common sense, as a matter of animal “belief ” that cannot be justified. He was, very literally, the first nonjustificational theorist in Western epistemology. This shows clearly when one looks at the “other” Hume, the social and political theorist. Doing so requires another look at the limited role of reason.

Reason does not Drive Our Behavior In book III, section III of his Treatise Hume said something that has become one of his most often repeated citations: the idea that, as he put it, reason is a slave of the passions. Internet citations of this passage, and purported interpretations of it, vary incredibly in their understanding of what he meant. The statement had nothing whatever to do with either Hume’s empiricism or his associationism. It was primarily a statement that explicit reason, what was supposed to produce the so-called clear and distinct ideas of Cartesian common sense, was a product of tacit processing that had already occurred within our nervous systems. As such his point was that there was not an inevitable opposition between such tacit processes (called in that era the passions or feelings) and conscious reason. This is what he wanted to deny: Every rational creature, it is said, is obliged to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, till it be entirely subdued, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle. On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded; …. (Hume, 1888, p. 414)

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

241

This crucial point will be examined later, especially with regard to the problems posed by the alienation and malaise of living in our increasingly abstract and impersonal society (in Volume 2, Chapter 5). Before doing so we must examine in more detail how the nervous system functions, and the role of tacit processes in both the individual and society. We shall see that the autonomic nervous system in conjunction with the biotic aspect of (especially) our digestive system and aspects of our genetic structure are central to understanding why we respond to impersonal organization in the manner in which we do. But here we need to look at the philosophical import of Hume’s views on law and social organization.

The First Nonjustificational Theory of Law and Society Hume’s “philosophy” of law is very clearly nonjustificational. It abandoned the quest to justify a knowledge claim entirely. It is based upon the primacy of general rules of conduct that develop in gradual social evolution, and which can be corrected by trial and error, but never be proven or justified, nor derived from some ultimate authority. Law and morality are not justificational for Hume if for no other reason than the minor role assigned to the conscious intellect (reason without an R) in their evolution. Reason can correct the system of law or just conduct by testing and pointing out inconsistencies, but it cannot justify it as valid or “true” for all times and cultures. Furthermore, the correction process itself is slow, occurring over time, so there can be no possible “instant rational assessment.” The observation that justice is blind to the particular, that “merit” does not always (indeed, only rarely) coincide with justice, is a denial of any justificational theory of instant rationality. Thus there is an obvious sense in which there is a tension, and perhaps some inconsistency, between Hume interpreted as an academic philosopher and Hume as a social theorist of “practical reason.” He is a transitional figure retaining some justificationist conceptions for some things, but abandoning them in others. What we study of Hume’s thought in the psychological areas is usually the two major errors in

242

W. B. Weimer

an otherwise coherent and tenable system—his empiricism and associationism. But if Hume’s empirical psychology of the individual is wrong (because it is based upon associationism as a mechanism of the mind), his conjectures about the empirical psychology of society need not also be dismissed as incorrect. What one must realize is that in this latter realm Hume was struggling toward the first reasonably adequate nonjustificational theory of society, even though his explicit epistemology of the individual remained a “traditionalist” justificational position. In politics and morals he abandoned the quest for ultimate sources of knowledge and gave us perhaps the first comprehensive statement of liberalism— i.e., as both a political doctrine and a theory of spontaneous organization in society. Hume was the major precursor to Darwin in ethics and social theory. His doctrine was the survival of the fittest among human conventions (artifacts, in the terminology later used by Ferguson) and the insight that what is innate or entirely tacit in the behavior of individuals of the present generation arose through experimental trial and error that need never have been conscious or rational in prior generations. Society as we know it could only have arisen because we have learned to obey certain general rules of conduct. This, again, is the relation between law and liberty: freedom occurs only when all are equally subject to the rule of law, and government is a matter of laws and not of men or women. While Hume was naïve by contemporary standards in his psychology and strict empiricism, he left a rich legacy in other matters. The task of social theory as elaborated in the epigram from Popper stems directly from Hume’s approach. In a crucial sense this book consists of little more than elaborations of Humean insights into the evolution of society and the principles of formation underlying complex spontaneous orders, the tacit dimension of cognition and the generation of behavior, the abstract and “negative” aspects of general rules and prohibitions to action in social orders, evolutionary and non-inductive epistemology, the relationship between “determinism” and “free will”,2 and the theory of rationality. If we can understand Hume’s liberal insights into these issues it is possible to escape the bankruptcy of eighteenth-century rationality that is exhibited in the rationalist constructivism of our current “enlightenment.”

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

243

Why Abandoning Justificationism is Crucial to Philosophy The substitution of an attempt to criticize a position instead of to attempt to prove it to be true may not seem to be of much importance. After all, we have been told to be “critical” by philosophers for thousands of years. But what had been meant by critical was always to attempt to prove a position to be true. Once proven or certified by the “critical” procedure, it was accepted as forever valid. To this day the vast majority of philosophers believe that knowledge—if it is genuine—is to be defined as “justified true belief.” Justificationism as a metatheory is the conceptual fusion of knowledge with justification and truth. That framework requires that any putative knowledge claim be “tested” against some accepted standard of justification and once that has occurred it is “certified” or considered “proven true” for all eternity. The history of philosophy up until Hume was the history of wars between putative justificational authorities—the deliverances of sense experience for empiricists, the deliverances of rational intuition, as in Cartesian “common sense” for idealism (and rationalist constructivism is a form of idealism), experiential “awareness” for phenomenalism, and so on. All these positions defined rational behavior as requiring a putative knowledge claim to be submitted to their ultimate test procedure and having passed it before one could act upon it. If one held a belief that had not passed the test, shown its mettle to be accorded the status of a justified true belief, it could only be held irrationally, as an irrational commitment to an “unproven” position. From this framework it becomes impossible not to judge Hume, who denied the possibility of knowledge being justified by any such procedure, as merely a paradoxer or more charitably, a total skeptic who denied that any knowledge was possible. And that is correct—if the justificationist conception is exhaustive of the nature of knowledge, then none exists outside the purely syntactic structures of mathematics and logic, and they have no relation to empirical reality at all. What Hume showed (along with other moralists such as Ferguson) was that justificationism is fundamentally incompatible with evolution. There is simply no way to reconcile a conception of knowledge, based

244

W. B. Weimer

upon Euclidean geometry as deductive certainty enduring forever, with the occurrence of anything that evolves. If evolution occurs, there is no fixed or final certainty—nothing lasts forever. Once one recognizes that evolution is “a fact of life” on this planet and throughout the universe it is no longer possible to be a justificationist. Even if one waters the position down to the current neo-justificationist variation, claiming that knowledge is not “certain” but instead merely “probable,” the position cannot be defended. It does not matter whether one attempts to prove certainty (a probability value of 1) or to prove a probable value (ranging between 0 and 1). What can no longer be defended at all is any putative “proof ” procedure, regardless of whether it assigns a value anywhere between 0 and 1. That is what the “justification” actually is. If evolution exists and knowledge changes, then no justificationist conception can ever be held. Evolution has no guarantees—no individual, no species, and no knowledge claim—lasts forever. Everything is tentative, subject to change or replacement as a result of the winnowing forces within its econiche. Seeking knowledge is, like seeking justice, a never-ending task that can never be achieved once and for all.

Notes 1. Popper’s account of how his views relate to Hume was concisely stated in his essay “Science: Conjectures and Refutations” (1963). It is worth examination. His strategy stemmed from his evaluation of Hume: “I found Hume’s refutation of inductive inference clear and conclusive. But I felt completely dissatisfied with his psychological explanation of induction in terms of custom or habit” (p. 42). Popper argued that Hume’s psychological theory, based upon association through repetition, must lead to an infinite regress due to the impossibility of explaining stimulus equivalence. As he noted: The central idea of Hume’s theory is that of repetition, based upon similarity (or “resemblance”). This idea is used in a very uncritical way.… We ought to realize that in a psychological theory such as Hume’s, only repetition-for-us, based upon similarity-for-us, may be

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

245

allowed to have any effect upon us. We must respond to situations as if they were equivalent; take them as similar; interpret them as repetitions.… Thus they are repetitions only from a certain point of view.… But this means that, for logical reasons, there must always be a point of view—such as a system of expectations, anticipations, assumptions, or interests—before there can be any repetition; which point of view, consequently, cannot be merely the result of repetition. (Popper, 1963, pp. 44–45)

Thus there is an infinite regress in prior expectations leading to repetitions, and Hume’s account of inductive behavior must be explanatorily vacuous. Popper argued in opposition that we obtain knowledge in a noninductivist manner, solely by refuting incorrect conjectures—the “theory” borrowed from the psychology of his mentor Karl Bühler: (see Bartley, 1974; Weimer, 1974) of trial and error, or in Popper’s terminology, conjectures, and refutations. Popper argued that the logical problem of induction: Arises from (a) Hume’s discovery… That it is impossible to justify a law by observation or experiment, since it “transcends experience”; (b) the fact that science proposes and uses laws “everywhere and all the time” …. To this we have to add (c) the principle of empiricism which asserts that in science, only observation and experiment may decide upon the acceptance or rejection of scientific statements, including laws and theories. (ibid., p. 54)

Popper argued that in fact these principles do not clash, because a “tentatively” accepted theory is never inferred, in any sense, from the empirical evidence. There is neither a psychological nor a logical induction. “Only the falsity of the theory can be inferred from empirical evidence, and this inference is a purely deductive one” (ibid., p. 55). This is the basis of Popper’s famous slogan that we learn from our mistakes, in the detection of erroneous theories. This is the only form of learning that Popper allowed: as he said in the Preface to the second

246

W. B. Weimer

edition of Conjectures and Refutations, part of my thesis that “all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes” (p. ix). Thus Popper’s answer to Hume is that “Hume showed that it is not possible to infer a theory from observation statements; but this does not affect the possibility of refuting a theory by observation statements” (ibid., p. 55). Several things require being noted here. First, both Popper and Hume are faced with exactly the same infinite regress with regard to psychological theory—Popper merely substituted expectation for repetition and begged all the psychological questions at issue. It remained for Hayek (1952) to show how classification and abstraction could result through the evolutionary development of the nervous system. Second, note that the theory of the organism, as well as numerous developments in methodology, refute the principle of empiricism. There is no motivation to be an empiricist in any traditional meaning of the term. What remains in science is a convention of empirical testing of hypotheses. Third, Popper’s improvement is due to recognizing the logical asymmetry between modus tollens, the (syllogistic) logic of falsification, and the invalid interpretation of modus ponens called affirming the consequent, as a purely logical relation between statements. As Popper (1974) indicated: “I do not think that the theory of knowledge, or of scientific knowledge, is in its turn an empirical science, and testable or falsifiable in the sense in which, I hold, empirical theories are testable” (p. 1036). It is, of course, hard to see how a convention of usage could be testable, unless one were to look at the practice of science, which Popper simply refused to do. That is not surprising, since empirically speaking Popper’s theory of knowledge acquisition is false. It is false as an invariant methodological prescription, because science can and does progress from theory to theory (at least occasionally) in the absence of refutation. It is false as a theory of the acquisition of knowledge, for there are cases in which we learn from the “illogical” positive instances (as in Kuhn’s [1970] normal science learning from exemplars in a taxis framework). Popper’s “negative” learning thesis can be retained, however, for one very important realm: all spontaneously organized or cosmic orders

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

247

(as opposed to taxes). In a cosmos falsification is the only “positive” knowledge we can achieve: we can know that we are wrong (granting conventions for testing), but never that we are correct. This is exactly analogous to rules of just conduct being “positive” only in ruling out injust conduct, but not specifying the infinitely extended domain of particulars that remain “just” as a result. On the other hand, in a taxis (as for instance in a crossword puzzle) positive information is positive in the sense of eliminating alternative possibilities. Normal science exemplary puzzles are usually analogous to the crossword puzzle situation—what one learns from them is like filling in words in the puzzle. Thus the success of each normal science period is the successful achievement of temporarily turning a cosmos into a taxis. That is also why no normal science paradigm (or Kuhnian “disciplinary matrix”) will ever cover everything within its domain. No taxis can substitute for a cosmos, because it is only a matter of time before the unforeseen consequences of taxis specified actions points beyond the taxis to the surrounding cosmos. In that framework a scientific revolution is the attempt to more adequately capture the cosmos, now clearly visible at the “anomalous” fringe of the taxis, with what is in fact a better taxis. This is also why truth in science can never be known as such: even if our theory did correctly specify the cosmos, we could never know that that was the case. 2. The determinism–indeterminism, compulsion–freedom issues have little actual import for the moral sciences. Terminologically, we usually assign responsibility for conduct if an agent—a subject of conceptual activity—can be said to have been in control of it, and withhold the attribution of responsibility for conduct that is not under the agent’s control. When looking at behavior the key feature is regularity in specifiable situations or rule-governed conduct. We assign responsibility to an agent whose behavior is explainable in terms of consistently following rules. (As Hume pointed out, for just conduct the rules are general and “negative.”) In ordinary language “rule-governed” is synonymous with determined; hence Hume argued that determination is not only compatible with free will but indeed presupposed by it. As he said in the Inquiry Concerning Understanding: “ Where would be the foundation of morals if particular characters

248

W. B. Weimer

had no certain or determinate power to produce particular sentiments, and if the sentiments had no constant operation on actions? … It seems almost impossible, therefore, to engage either in science or action of any kind without acknowledging the doctrine of necessity, and this inference from motives to voluntary action, from characters to conduct” (p. 99). This approach is common in law, ethics, indeed all social sciences, and was given a “modern classic” formulation by Hobart (1934). If determinism is given a strict interpretation in terms of predictability and invariant causal relationships then the doctrine is falsified by modern physics. Popper (especially 1959, 1974) has argued that indeterminism is similarly compatible with “free will” as voluntary action (see also Popper & Eccles, 1977). If strict prediction and control are taken to be the essence of determinism then it is falsified throughout the social domain by the brute fact of creativity or productivity in behavior. Thus Skinner’s insistence that determinism is the essence of science merely indicated his total ignorance of science. A major insight from the Chomsky revolution (and an unintended consequence) is that the Post languages approach to rulegoverned creativity (Post, 1943, 1965) shows clearly that complex systems such as language can be rule-governed and hence quite regular and “responsible” even though the given result is novel and hence, unpredictable. Creative systems are unpredictable in any precise sense of the term. But they are still explainable, and can be rendered intelligible by theories comparable to transformational grammars for language. One consequence of this is that the nature of knowledge can no longer be identified with the capacity to predict. Prediction is only one form, an extreme, deterministic one, of anticipation or expectation, and it is never applicable to phenomena of organized complexity. Thus, for example, Hayek’s (1948, p. 51) claim that all knowledge is the capacity to predict was incorrect—it should be restated as the capacity to anticipate, where “anticipate” covers conjecturing general principles that could generate an infinitude of particulars without implying strict deterministic prediction.

11 Retrieving History: The Legacy of David Hume

249

References Bartley III, W. W. (1974). Theory of language and philosophy of science as instruments of educational reform: Wittgenstein and Popper as Austrian school teachers. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Method and metaphysics: Methodological and historical essays in the natural and social sciences. D. Reidel. Hayek, F. A. (1948/1996). Individualism and economic order. University of Chicago Press; Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1952). The sensory order. University of Chicago Press. Hobart, R. E. (Pen name of D. S. Miller) (1934). Free will as involving determination and inconceivable without it. Mind N. S. 43(1690), 1–27. Hume, D. (1739/1888/1978). Hume’s treatise of human nature (L. A. SelbyBigge, Ed., Revised by P. H. Niddich). Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1748/1955/1999). An enquiry concerning human understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Also 1955, Edited by C. W. Hendel. Hume, D. (1752/2018). Political discourses. Creative Resources/Gale Research, Inc. Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Popper, K. R. (1934/1959/1992). The logic of scientific discovery. Now Routledge Classics. Harper & Row. Popper, K. R. (1963/2014). Conjectures and refutations. Now Routledge Classics. Harper & Row. Popper, K. R. (1974). Intellectual autobiography and replies to my critics. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 3–181, 961–1297). Open Court; Crickett Media. Popper, K. R., & Eccles, J. C. (1977). The self and its brain: An argument for interactionism. Springer International. Post, E. (1943). Formal reductions of the general combinatorial decision problem. American Journal of Mathematics, 65, 197–215. Post, E. (1965). Absolutely unsolvable problems and relatively undecidable propositions-account of an anticipation. In M. Davis (Ed.), The undecidable: Basic papers on undecidable propositions, unsolvable problems and computable functions (pp. 340–433). Raven Press. Robinson, D. N. (1981). An intellectual history of psychology. Macmillan.

250

W. B. Weimer

Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Schabas, M., & Wennerlind, C. (2020). A philosopher’s economist: Hume and the rise of capitalism. The University of Chicago Press. Weimer, W. B. (1974). The history of psychology and its retrieval from historiography: Part 1. Science Studies, 4, 235–258.

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition: Order, Knowledge, and Tradition

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. Such ideas cannot be grasped singly one by one in isolation. They require that mankind advances in its apprehension of the general nature of things, so as to conceive systems of ideas of elucidating each other. Alfred N. Whitehead The Great Society arose through the discovery that men can live together in peace and mutually benefiting each other without agreeing on the particular aims which they severally pursue. The discovery that by substituting abstract rules of conduct for obligatory concrete ends made it possible to extend the order of peace beyond the small groups pursuing the same ends, because it enabled each individual to gain from the skill and knowledge of others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly different from his own. F. A. Hayek

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_12

251

252

W. B. Weimer

The legacy of David Hume is an intellectual climate of opinion in which it has been possible, by refining and correcting themes that he and the Moralists advanced, to repudiate both justificationism in philosophy and rationalist constructivism in political and social theory, and thus to repudiate the most prevalent forms of scientism and the pretense of knowledge of how to control and to shape society. But in recognizing the nature and limits of the “proving power” of reason and by restricting conscious reason to its limited role in human affairs, we began to see the actual nature of human knowledge and its manner of acquisition, and also the growth of society as a spontaneously evolving structure. We have begun to see the outline of a rational theory of tradition, a theory that explicates the evolution of the complex phenomena of humanity and society, as well as its institutions. We are beginning to realize that the evolutionary history of our species and the psychology of the individual parallels that theory of complex phenomena. We need to look at some features of that framework, to see how principles of liberal social order dovetail with the methodology of scientific research and the psychology of cognition. By introducing themes from various fields it will become clear that liberalism in social and political philosophy is the other side of the coin that is called fallibilism in philosophy of science, methodological individualism in the social studies, and the field of evolutionary epistemology.

Order, Knowledge, and the Framework of Tradition What humanity has become can only be understood in an evolutionary perspective that relates the principles of order according to which human interaction occurs to the development of knowledge in both social and individual situations and the benefits and drawbacks of the market order. We need to study how these aspects of social and intellectual tradition have evolved in the manner that they have, and show some implications that result for our understanding of social phenomena. We must address what constitutes rational conduct in the increasingly more abstract and impersonal society that is both the glory and the bane of contemporary

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

253

existence. We begin by noting the evolution of society as a spontaneous order formed by abstract principles that constrain but do not limit development. The key is to understand how freedom arises within a context of constraints. Novelty and freedom occur when rules of order are followed.

Evolution of Society and Spontaneous Order Hayek (1967) noted one important reason why Hume’s views were misunderstood and have not been acted upon. “The explanation lies largely in an accusation which with some justice has often been leveled against Hume, the accusation that his philosophy was essentially negative. The great skeptic, with his profound conviction of the imperfection of all human reason and knowledge, did not expect much positive good from political organization” (p. 120). It is a truism in the history of science and philosophy that a sociological “paradigm” in Kuhn’s (1970) sense will not be abandoned unless there is an alternative that can address the domain at least as successfully, and also provide new insights. Destructive criticism alone, no matter how devastating, rarely overthrows an entrenched view. Hume’s criticism has been universally recognized as devastating, but few saw in it any positive program. Against this attitude this book has argued that there is a very positive program in the essential “negatives,” and we claim that the abstract ideals which we all desire, such as liberty and justice in society and progress and truth in science, have always been essentially produced by negative constraints upon our conduct rather than positive goals to be achieved. When one understands the primacy of the abstract within (and the evolutionary nature of ) social organizations (including science) it becomes clearer why prohibitions to certain classes of action and the absence of prescribed particular goals can specify a positive (but not prescriptive!) program, in the sense that what is important is to secure a framework that allows certain possibilities to occur in unforeseen circumstances. We have presaged this argument in the discussion of freedom as bound by abstract rules rather than enforcement of specifics; now consider it in the context of the twin notions, stemming from Mandeville

254

W. B. Weimer

and Hume, of the evolution of society and the development of spontaneous order. No one has seen this more clearly than Friedrich Hayek, and what follows is largely a summary of his account. The evolution of society is historically obvious but virtually invisible at any present time. The evolutionary selection of rules of conduct operates through the viability of the social order as a whole that it produces—if the resultant order is stable and productive, the rules will be selected for because individuals who followed them have survived. Thus the system of rules of conduct must develop as a whole, and a given individual within a society (social order) will have little knowledge of anything beyond the particulars with which he or she is acquainted. At each state of development the overall prevailing order determines what effect, if any, changes in the individual’s conduct will produce in that overall order. As individuals we can judge and modify our conduct only within a social group framework which, although the product of gradual evolution, remains for those of us within it a relatively fixed result of evolution. This dynamically evolving framework becomes, very literally, a context of constraints that appear to those within the order as fixed and invariant. Thus in summarizing to ourselves the effects of the social system upon individual conduct we arrive at a set of particular descriptions of conduct, largely in terms of prohibitions to action, which instantiate abstract rules of which we are unaware either of their formulation, effect, or survival value. As Hayek (1967) remarked, we are like the “primitive” studied by anthropologists: The individual may have no idea what this overall order is that results from his observing such rules as those concerning kinship and intermarriage, or the succession to property, or which function this overall order serves. Yet, all the individuals of the species which exist will behave in that manner because groups of individuals which have thus behaved have displaced those which did not do so. (p. 70)

Thus it must be recognized that each individual man or woman is an inherently social animal. The higher cognition that finds its expression in explicit and conscious rationality, while undoubtedly a great flowering of humanity’s achievement as an individual , is the product of our

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

255

cultural evolution and not the designer or creator of that evolution. Mind and culture developed (and are continuing to develop) concurrently, not successively. They have come into existence together. With the development of culture a tradition, in the form of (often implicit) rules of conduct that existed independently of any of the individuals who learned to follow them, began to govern human action. As Ferguson noted, we are the result of human action but not our design in our social structures. These learned rules have formed the basis for relatively successful prediction of regularity and the anticipation of the consequences of our action upon the environment and upon others. What we call reason gradually emerged when we became aware of the capacity to model the environment that was provided by that framework of learned rules of conduct. Reason, as modeling, allows the individual to become a more adequate theory of his or her environment, to form an increasingly more conscious and explicitly formulated theory than could be available to the individual were he or she to remain in isolation. As Hayek (1979) put it: It is therefore misleading to represent the individual brain or mind as the capping stone of the hierarchy of complex structures produced by evolution, which then designed what we call culture. The mind is embedded in a traditional impersonal structure of learnt rules, and its capacity to order experience is an acquired replica of cultural pattern which every individual mind finds given …. Mind can exist only as part of another independently existing distinct structure or order, though that order persists and can develop only because millions of minds constantly absorbed and modified parts of it. (p. 157)

This leads to an inversion of the cause and effect relationship presumed to hold between the society as a whole and the individual. The complex social structure will exist because individuals, who were selected by an earlier stage in the complex structure of society, do what is necessary to secure its continuation. The context of constraint, the overall social structure, is what sets limits on the permissible conduct of any individual in the order. The system is avowedly teleological in after-thefact analysis, even though there is no single creator (or central planning board) for whom the system exists or whose orders it follows. If we restrict

256

W. B. Weimer

the definition of teleology to situations in which the aim or goal is specified in advance, then society simply cannot be teleological. It is directed, or better self-directed and self-produced (autopoetic as Maturana [1980] pioneered the term), but not toward any particular goals foreseen in advance. This is the sense in which Adam Smith’s famous remark in The Wealth of Nations, that the individual is led to promote an end which is not part of his or her intentions, must be understood. There is no “invisible hand” of a creator (or surrogate such as a sovereign or corporate CEO) involved: one must not assume, as did subsequent constructivist writers, that if one does not promote his or her own individual ends one must therefore promote those of another agent or planner instead. One must not interpret the social rules of conduct that result from our actions but not our designs either anthropomorphically or animistically. There is no agency in the social whole. Agency is, by definition and in fact, an individual attribute. Thus to the extent that our ambiguous and unforeseen world is not completely known to us (and therefore is not predictable), the culturally transmitted prohibitions to action have tremendous survival value both for the individual and the society. They teach us not to repeat specific errors but do not force us to limit our behavior to the performance of any definite or positive particular course of action. We should attempt to increase our tolerance for ambiguity of outcome in these general rules rather than attempt replacement of prohibitions merely because we do not understand how they arose or what function they serve. Like the British during the era of liberalism, we should be more willing to “make do” with what we have available. The “make do” attitude that their tradition represents is not a return to concern with only the specifics of a given case, but rather a firm grasp of the indispensability of general principles, so that the British (having a context of constraint firmly in mind) were aware of what can and can’t be done in particular cases without the necessity of discussion of abstract ideas. It is not because they were indifferent to abstract principles that the British could “muddle through,” but because they had them so firmly in mind. Freedom in such a society is a matter of everyone being bound equally by the abstract rule of law, and a refusal to legislate specifics or decide a case “solely on its individual merits.” Such a position enables a society to cope with novel occurrences,

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

257

to venture into the unknown and unexplored, because the reliance upon abstract principles encompasses the possible as well as the particular, and is not limited to that which has already been experienced. The problem of productivity or creativity in conduct, the ability to make infinite use of finite means—which is above all the possibility of new development and learning for the future—requires the primacy of the abstract over the particular.

The Fundamental Problem of the Social and Biological Sciences: The Economy of Knowledge The spontaneous order of society is far beyond either the control or the comprehension of any individual. The primacy of the abstract in such orders forces individuals to utilize momentary knowledge of particulars to be able to take advantage of the distributed resources of the spontaneous order. The other side of the coin of the primacy of abstract constraints in such situations is the remarkable extent to which the order conveys sufficient information for each individual to act upon. The order is a knowledge transmission and dispersion system. How do spontaneous orders of indefinitely extended complexity manage to economize information and to distribute it at the same time? How can finite individuals function in such an order without being overwhelmed by a chaotic welter of potential information? The answer first became clear in the economic order, when it was realized that prices are knowledge (or information) that is distributed throughout the decentralized order of the market. The division of labor that brings about spontaneous market orders also simultaneously provides a distribution of knowledge that automatically takes account of momentary changes throughout the system. The remarkable economy of knowledge in the market’s division of labor and knowledge is perhaps the most important lesson from economics for the other social domains. The marketplace acts by decentralizing control along with that decentralized knowledge: it automatically divides (distributes) the knowledge

258

W. B. Weimer

necessary for its functioning among its many participants. This division of knowledge, which is characteristic of all complex systems, is the central problem of economic analysis: as Hayek (1948) put it, “The problem which we pretend to solve is how the spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs, etc., and which could be brought about by deliberate direction only by somebody who possessed the combined knowledge of all those individuals” (pp. 50– 51). The central problem of economics is thus one of the knowledge and its distribution, in a wide sense of “knowledge” that includes not only current prices but also broader information (local and individual knowledge) such as how different commodities may be obtained and then used by an individual at their location and time, and various possibilities for an individual’s future actions. From this we can generalize to all the “social” sciences: the problem is “How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess” (ibid., p. 54)?

Science and Knowledge The central problems must be faced quite differently, from the standpoint of scientific analysis, in the social realm than in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences the basic phenomena with which we deal are always inferences far from our experience, that is, theoretical constructions in what Russell (1948) called knowledge by description. When we do “physical” science research it is of necessity from the outside, and we gain knowledge by experimentation, which is essentially the carefully controlled repetition of conditions in order to detect regularities in the phenomena of interest. In short, we impose controls on things and do experiments upon selected entities to tease out their behavior. In the physical sciences, all that experience shows us is the result of “processes which we cannot directly observe and which it is our task to reconstruct. All our conclusions concerning the nature of these

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

259

processes are of necessity hypothetical, and the only test of the validity of these hypotheses is that they prove equally applicable to the explanation of other phenomena” (Hayek, 1948, pp. 125–126). When we turn to the social sciences, in contrast, it is the “facts” that constitute our awareness or experience (what Russell called acquaintance, or that which we undergo), and if we know anything without experiment, or relatively directly, it is the psychological and social “facts.” The empirical element in the social sciences is thus nonphysical , comprising the functionally (never physically) specified ingredients of our acquaintance as social beings. Thus what constitutes understanding is quite different in the social domains from what we have been used to in physical science: Experiment is impossible, and we have therefore no knowledge of definite regularities in the complex phenomena in the same sense as we have in the natural sciences. But, on the other hand, the position of man, midway between the natural and social phenomena—of the one of which he is an effect and of the other a cause—brings it about that the essential basic facts which we need for the explanation of social phenomena are part of common experience, part of the stuff of our thinking. (ibid., p. 126)

The “stuff of our thinking,” which is to say our knowledge, is thus a key: the remarkable economy of knowledge that results from the division of knowledge in complex phenomena is central to understanding all complex social domains.

Benefits and Drawbacks of the Game of Catallaxy The spontaneous order of society arose, quite literally by happenstance, when humanity stumbled upon the situation that individuals can benefit to different degrees from the same goods. When it happened—or was recognized—(and that recognition need not have been conscious at all) that different individuals have different uses for the same goods, barter arose as a means by which two individuals could both benefit in return

260

W. B. Weimer

for each providing the other with what they desired. When this face-toface procedure of exchange is extended to unknown individuals united only by rules that prescribe property ownership and transfer by consent, the impersonal market order comes into existence. With the decentralized information processing capacity of the spontaneous market order humanity created all the benefits as well as all the drawbacks of the abstract society in which we are now found. This order unleashes the most powerful force in this region of the galaxy, and it has brought us all our wealth and material goods, all the knowledge of science and power of technology, as well as all the culture that we possess. Attaining a correct understanding of the infinite capacity of this order is of more potential benefit to humanity than any positive prescription for action ever proposed by any human being. That may seem to be a dramatic overstatement, but it is not a distortion at all. This mechanism allows us to reap the benefits of all the knowledge possessed by others and is thus the means by which our capabilities for knowing and acting are extended beyond the narrow limits of an individual’s personal experience and action. The key to this tremendous power is the market or catallactic order. This order is both the mechanism of creativity or productivity in the social cosmos and also the mechanism of knowledge transmission throughout society. The key to the market is that it allows unknown and divergent (indeed, often quite conflicting) ends to be achieved by a simple and common means. It is a great advantage and the source of the market’s power that it is “merely” means connected, and thus requires no agreement whatsoever on ends in order for individuals to cooperate. Because the market is just a means and has no ends (and is not an end in itself ) it allows anyone, no matter what their particular individual purposes, to participate. It is this tremendous advantage of the market order that has allowed the growth of society and the acquisition of our knowledge. This is the benefit, and also the drawback, of such an order. It will reconcile claims from different noneconomic ends by the only known process that benefits everyone. But it does this without assuring that the more important comes before the less important, “for the simple reason that there can exist in such a system no single ordering of needs” (Hayek, 1976, p. 113).

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

261

Participating in the market order is playing a game—the game of catallaxy—that is played according to rules, and any given game is decided by the participants’ combination of knowledge, skills, and sheer luck.1 The market brings about the situation in which satisfaction of any given end requires the least expenditure necessary to satisfy that end, and thus leaves intact (or allows to remain at work within the order) the maximum means for the use of other ends. The price mechanism is the signal or information that gives the market its superior cost-efficiency for any given end. The current price of goods is always a signal that indicates what should be procured to realize a given end at the current time. Thus a gain to one’s self, purchasing at the lowest available price whichever goods one needs, also serves the needs of unknown others: “Each is made by the visible gain to himself to serve needs which to him are invisible, and in order to do so to avail himself of to him unknown particular circumstances which put him in the position to satisfy these needs at as small a cost as possible in terms of other things which it is possible to produce instead” (ibid., p. 116). This is what brings about Adam Smith’s invisible hand—the impersonal market mechanism. And the “hand” is not that of an agent—it is instead an impersonal “push” from the forces which constitute the market itself—from a context of constraints that are the result of human action but not design. Competition for resources in the game produces the information represented by the current price. Competition is simultaneously a discovery procedure that tells different individuals what the most economical course of action is to produce a given end. By attempting to procure and/or produce one’s own goods as cheaply as possible one maximizes the total output of the entire market order. This has the consequence that overpaying in a free market benefits absolutely no one—it merely lowers the overall product (and the efficiency) of the entire order. And this is why charity—the decision to deliberately “overpay” in order to benefit a particular individual or group—is inherently outside the market order.

262

W. B. Weimer

The Rules of the Market The catallactic order has no common ends. Market regulation depends not on the imposition of common ends, but rather upon the creation of a context of constraint that produces an abstract order that will secure for any individual in the order the best chance of achieving his or her particular aims and ends. This is its tremendous superiority over an order directed to achieve particular ends. The common “good” of a spontaneous order is not any particular state that can be positively specified, but merely an abstract ordering allowing the maximal freedom for individuals to pursue their different unknown ends. Thus one’s current place in the order is always independent of past success and is not in any manner a guarantee for the future. The market is totally lacking in memory, in foresight, and in goals. It has no teleological purpose or end. Justice in the spontaneous order of society is blind to the particular circumstances, and the outcome of any particular market transaction is neither just nor injust. The abstract rules of just conduct can never determine particular results (specify where one should be in the order), but only guarantee equal chances or opportunities to utilize individual knowledge, skill, and available resources. Justice requires that each participant must have an equal opportunity to play the game, but it can never require a particular outcome, for the game in general or for any given individual. It cannot guarantee that one either improve, maintain, or lose one’s present position in the future. The possibility of greatly rewarding some individuals carries with it the inevitable disappointment of at least some others. And we can never satisfy expectations in advance in an order that has no common ends. We can only aim at providing the best basis for eliminating unnecessary uncertainty, and thus to secure continual adaptation to what could not have been known before. Uncertainty and ignorance are indispensable in the game of catallaxy—their elimination would destroy the cosmos by turning it into a taxis. Thus adaptation in a cosmos is a matter of continual trial and error, a phenomenon of evolution, and it must involve constant disappointment of at least some expectations of all, including those who achieve their ends. No one can correctly anticipate the particulars of the market order—not even those whom the market rewards.

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

263

The aim of the law for the rules of catallaxy should be to improve the chances of all players equally. Playing the game requires that the playing field be level or equal for all participants. We can never aim to discriminate in favor of some against others without interfering and harming the ongoing order.2 It can never be the known who benefits from the rules, but instead all participants must have an equal opportunity, which means that the outcomes must remain unknown in advance. As Hayek put it, such universal rules are intended to apply for an indefinite period, and thus aim solely at increasing the chances of unknown persons (see ibid., p. 130). Every active interference to bring about a particular distribution creates a privilege for some at the expense of others, and thus disturbs the market order in ways that can never be foreseen in detail. By preventing those against whom the interference is directed from adapting as best as possible to changing circumstances, intervention in the market destroys the system of mutual adaptations of individuals, falsifies the price mechanism, and destroys the efficiency that makes the market so powerful and effective. Understanding that consequence explains why no form of socialism, with its attempt to control the market order for particular purposes, can ever succeed. One must not presume that liberalism can specify a “bill of particulars” as to what constitutes a level playing field and an equal opportunity. A just or fair game is one in which all participants play by the same rules and have no advantage conferred upon them in doing so. But the starting point for all cannot be made identical. Thus one cannot play a game of Monopoly and claim that it was “fair” because the participants all started from “go,” if one of them was given more money to begin with than the other players. There is no equality of opportunity there. The constraints that are required to keep the peace of the order, for equality of opportunity under the rule of general or impersonal law, must not favor any single individual (or group thereof ) over the others. All that can be done is to enforce nomos, the general or abstract rule of law as a framework rather than attempt to enshrine particular constraints. General rules are constraints which apply equally and in that sense impersonally or indiscriminately to all. Particular prescriptions cannot be the province of government (whether representative and democratic or dictatorial) for the rule of law to provide. Allowable particulars are

264

W. B. Weimer

simply “the luck of the draw.” Starting with more money in monopoly is not fair because it violates the rules according to which the game is stated to be played. Someone either cheated or had an unfair advantage given to them before playing. But if one were to want to go to college, and happened to have inherited some money (and thus would not necessarily be as constrained in terms of requiring scholarships, etc.), that does not violate the rules of going to college, which are simply that one apply and be accepted as possessing the right qualifications for that college. Similarly, if one were to be extremely intelligent and possess the ability to do well on academic tests and other criteria of admittance, that alone would not constitute an unfair advantage (it was not “given” to you to deliberately confer a headstart). On the other hand, legislation enshrining one or another form of “affirmative” action, for instance, based upon arbitrary criteria such as skin color, surname, or height or weight, etc., does in fact break the rules of fair play for going to college. It does so because it legislates a type of discrimination against certain players and in favor of others (exactly as starting with more Monopoly money than others had at the start of that game). Affirmative action programs are simply legally sanctified forms of discrimination, since they do not apply equally to all participants. Such players do not all start equally at “go,” any more than the player who has extra money before starting does. Life is not a Monopoly game in which everyone starts out with “the same” resources. In life what is fair is being able to utilize whatever you have, regardless of what someone else has. This is the only way possible, since no two individuals are actually “alike” on almost any initial measure for any situation.

Drawbacks of the Game of Catallaxy Since the market order is impersonal, the means to diverse ends, it can never be used to bring about particular ends without destroying its efficiency and modifying the resultant order in unforeseen ways. Thus the taxis engineer’s dream of somehow utilizing the market order as a basis for creating a particular state of affairs must always be a nightmare if it is put into practice. The attempt to impose a particular taxis structure, such

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

265

a Skinner’s hallucination in Walden Two, upon the spontaneous cosmos must result in the destruction of the order and thus the creativity or productivity that can only flourish in the context of constraint provided by impersonal abstract rules. This aspect, its productivity or creativity, of the spontaneous cosmos simultaneously creates the conditions necessary to bring about Smith’s and Hayek’s Great Society—the abstract and impersonal order that has provided our present knowledge and culture—but also introduces in its operation the increasing alienation and depersonalization of humanity. The values that prevailed throughout the vast majority of humankind’s tenure on this planet are enshrined in our emotions and personal desires, in our internal mileau. This is even though they were developed in the face-to-face or tribal society that we have (at this point, forever) turned away from. The impersonal order is not only abstract but also frightening, ambiguous, anonymous, and totally lacking in the sense of self-worth and our sense of place within the personal contact of the tribal order. The security of the organizational arrangement of the tribe has been shattered forever. The mechanism on which modern society rests, the division of knowledge and its resultant division of labor, have given rise to personal alienation, dissociation, and malaise, on one hand, and to the possibility of war and destruction of a sort unparalleled in history, indeed unanticipated by the wildest imaginations of even a few generations ago. Adam Ferguson (1767) knew this well, and numerous gloomy passages in his History shocked even the great skeptic, his friend Hume. This passage presaged Popper’s The Open Society and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom by nearly 180 years: The boasted refinements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of danger. They open a door, perhaps, to disaster, as wide and accessible as any of those they have shut. If they build walls and ramparts, they enervate the minds of those who are placed to defend them; if they form disciplined armies, they reduce the military spirit of entire nations; and by placing the sword where they have given a distaste to civil establishments, they prepare for mankind the government of force. (p. 355)

266

W. B. Weimer

The increased specialization of occupation and the fragmentation of knowledge and contact with the personal aspects of the wider world (even within one’s circle of friendship and knowledge) that this increase entails are depersonalizing and alienating all “advanced” societies at an ever-increasing rate. The cost, in personal terms, of the progress of the abstract society is constantly increasing. Our lives are being deprived of more and more human meaning; personal involvement; tribal ethical and spiritual value; and sense of well-being at the same time that our wealth and knowledge are reaching new heights. We have more and more material goods and new toys while our sense of humanity and our individual worth and purpose become less and less. And since we have always been led, in the dim past, by a powerful tribal leader, it is not surprising that we now long for one or another benevolent dictator to take charge of the frightened flock and lead us all back to the safety of the tribe. This is the inevitable tension between tradition and innovation (studied by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), and the reason why every period of intellectual or social change produces an uncritical backlash of fundamentalism and unease. With the increasing realization that standards and values are either no longer applicable or were never attainable to begin with, we become not only more anxious but more willing to grasp at any straw in the wind that promises stability and security. This is why the doctrine of socialism, which as Thomas Sowell has repeatedly noted, merely substitutes that which sounds good for what works pretty well, has become increasingly popular since the industrial revolution. Socialism and collectivism promise to bring us back to “the good old days” and alleviate that depersonalization and alienation. Unfortunately, if such policies are pursued they will destroy the market order and science3 in the process. You cannot make things better by killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The Breakdown of Traditional Standards and Rationality The breakdown of traditional intellectual rationality from Hume’s time to the present is a graphic example of the malaise of modern society. The

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

267

various schools and “isms” that have characterized traditional philosophy are all responses to the perceived breakdown of justificationist rationality, just as the various proposals for utopian social reconstruction are manifestations of the appeal of rationalist constructivist primitivism, as “the” solution to reclaiming the promised land. The pessimism of existentialism, the extremes of Romanticism, even pragmatism and Dewey’s instrumentalism, tend to dovetail with and reinforce the libertarian anarchist side of constructivism. This leads to the seeming paradox of a writer such as Chomsky, the tough-minded mathematical logician and syntactician, espousing a romantic flower child’s social philosophy. On the other side are the brash reaffirmations of Reason and Science as the new substitute for religion, endorsed with a fideism that recalls the original meaning of an “enthusiast.” In this sense, positivism, behaviorism, logical positivism and empiricism, Russell’s atomism, and dozens of similar brash movements abandon the “proving” power of reason for simple enthusiasm for reason as the form of transcendent Cartesian intellect that can be the new tribal leader—The Organization Man (Whyte, 1956). Their substitution of scientism for understanding has created the engineering mentality of the taxis organizer, and the result is the same in all fields— Watson and Skinner’s behaviorism is equally the progressivism in the U.S. of Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, Obama, Sanders, Keynes’ economic interventionism, Russell’s socialism, as well as Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascism. About all that varies in these positions is who should play God, and what program He or She should impose upon us. We are being urged to go back to the idea of Hobbes—to have only one free choice—of which dictator we want to enslave us—after which we are no longer subjects but merely objects on the chessboard of tyranny. We are faced, in other words, with increasing realization of the bankruptcy of justificationist and traditional standards of rationality in society and science just when the abstract society is bringing about unprecedented wealth, creativity, technical ability, and also unprecedented alienation and ambiguity. If we are not to be submerged by one or another rationalist constructivist proposal for the well-intended destruction of the market order by some new, seemingly scientific tribalism, we must begin to understand the forces that have shaped us to be what we

268

W. B. Weimer

are. Neither gloom and doom nor some variety of utopia will automatically occur: we are not faced with some exhaustive forced choice like the little old lady presumed when she chose force over violence as the answer to an immigration form question. But we definitely can, through error and intervention, destroy the spontaneous order that has led to both our progress and our problems. To that prospect there really is only one alternative—we must proceed very slowly, developing a rational theory of tradition adequate to the spontaneous orders of humanity in impersonal society, and slowly and painfully educate ourselves to the fact that many of our cherished ideals and dreams cannot be realized, and that their pursuit has the unintended consequence of leading to the destruction of our civilization by destroying the abstract society and hence liberty, freedom, and knowledge. We must learn to live with ambiguity and the unknown and realize that adaptation to life in society is a never-ending task regulated by abstract rules that cannot specify particular courses of action. If we fail to make this adjustment then we may revert to the most primitive forms of tribalism, assuming we do not destroy ourselves in the process. The drawbacks of the game of catallaxy are very real. The question is whether or not the social studies and education can be cured of justificationism, constructivism, and scientism to a great enough extent that they will benefit humanity in the attempt to adapt to the abstract society, or whether they will merely continue to represent and exacerbate the problems which that attempt poses. The chapter that follows, and Volume 2, attempt to flesh out and expand these points, almost all of which are either explicitly or implicitly available in the theory of social evolution proposed by the Scottish moralists. We need to see that the intervening centuries have provided detailed elaboration and emendation of the essentials the classic liberals have provided for us. Despite the emotional appeal of the current versions of positions advocating the return to face-to-face benevolence and centralized control of our lives and our economy, there is no actual evidence that those positions are attainable, and much theory and available evidence that they would quickly lead to disasters such as the return to primitive existence and the inability to sustain the advantages of our present civilization. We begin this task by looking at some of the differences between the “hard” and “social” domains to see that what

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

269

we can expect to learn in the social and psychological domains is very different from the positivistic approaches stemming from Comte and his successors.

Notes 1. The term catallaxy stems from catallactics or the science of exchanges in Richard Whately’s book, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, published in 1831. Catallaxy is to be contrasted to economy in its traditional meaning—referring to organizing the affairs of a household (as Aristotle had used the term). An economy in that traditional sense is a taxis phenomenon, concerned to fulfill particular ends specified in advance by “rational” planning and allocation of resources by a group which has common goals. A catallaxy is a cosmic phenomenon, a market order of means but not ends in a form of connected exchange that unites unknown individuals acting for equally unknown purposes (that may indeed be in conflict). Playing the game of the market holds the promise of great benefit for any individual who plays, but it does not guarantee any results. It is because some can be rewarded that others will not have their expectations fulfilled. There is a genuine amount of luck, or better happenstance, in the sense of factors beyond the knowledge or control of any individual, involved in playing the game. But the catallactic order is infinitely more powerful than any order constructed to fulfill particular purposes. And it is the mechanism upon which all of modern society, technology, and science are based. Consider why this is so. The superior power of the catallactic order is a consequence of the division of labor. It is this power that has given rise to civilization as we know it today and will continue to raise it tomorrow unless we are foolish enough to kill the goose laying the golden eggs. We can exhibit this creative capacity by showing how the division of labor arises, and how it can be extended in what is known as Ricardo’s law of comparative cost or the law of association. Three empirical factors have led mankind to abandon solitude in favor of social cooperation to achieve their diverse ends. First,

270

W. B. Weimer

against the equalitarian sentimentalism so prevalent today, is the innate inequality of individuals in their ability to perform various kinds of action and labor. No two living creatures, let alone humans, are ever equal in any sense that can be physically or functionally specified. Second, there is the simple fact of the unequal distribution of resources, or factors for use or production, in our econiche, on the surface of our planet. Third, it is a fact that there are undertakings that are beyond the capacity of any single individual. As Ludwig von Mises (in 1949) put it, The increase in productivity brought about by the division of labor is obvious whenever the inequality of the participants is such that every individual or every piece of land is superior at least in one regard to the other individuals or pieces of land concerned. If A is fit to produce in one unit of time 6p or 4q and B only 2p, but 8q, they both, when working in isolation, will produce together 4p + 6q; when working under the division of labor, each of them producing only that commodity in whose production he is more efficient than his partner, they will produce 6p + 8q. (Mises, 1966, p. 158)

Thus, over a period of time, in trial and error fashion, the division of labor will displace isolated labor when the two compete. Note that this will not be a conscious result: it will happen simply because the increased productivity of groups who utilize it will displace isolated labor when they compete. But what could be the advantage of cooperation, in the division of labor, when one individual is superior to another in every regard of output? Ricardo’s law of association extends the superiority of the division of labor to this case, and in so doing indicates that it is advantageous to all concerned in any instance: Association, and with it division of labor, is always superior to isolation. To see this, suppose that A is more efficient than B in that A can produce one unit of p in three hours to B’s five hours, and A can produce one unit of q in two hours to B’s four hours. In this case both gain if A produces q while B produces p. To continue Mises’ presentation:

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

271

If each of them gives 60 hours to producing p and 60 hours to producing q, the result of A’s labor is 20 p +30 q; of B’s, 12 p +15 q; and for both together, 32p +45q. If, however, A confines himself to producing q alone, he produces 60 q in 120 hours, while B, if he confines himself to producing p, produces in the same time 24p. The result of their activities is then 24p +60 q, which, as p has for A a substitution ratio of (3 over 2) q and for B one of (5 over 4) q, signifies a larger output than 32p +45q. Therefore it is manifest that the division of labor brings advantages to all who take part in it. Collaboration of the more talented, more able, and less industrious results in benefits for both. (ibid., p. 159)

It is the superiority of association that has led in the last 12,000 years to the level of social order that we have achieved. With the division of labor we also achieve the division of knowledge that has produced technology, science, and the arts and humanities, and thus our enormous intellectual tradition that is vastly beyond the capacity of any single individual. The game of catallaxy is the modus operandi of all cultural evolution, and in so far as the Ricardian law of association holds it is a failsafe mechanism for our continued evolution. If we intervene in the market order to try to achieve particular ends or distributions of goods we can destroy or greatly curtail that evolutionary mechanism and thus our progress. 2. We have, through well-meaning ignorance, managed to obstruct the catallactic order of society by many programs designed to achieve particular goals. We have imposed forms of obvious discrimination in order to bring about “social justice,” and because we have given these forms of discrimination pleasant sounding names their effects are all the more heinous. Perhaps the most obvious case is the doctrine of affirmative action in educational policy, which discriminates against the so-called advantaged or privileged (defined almost entirely in terms of the skin color of certain individuals) in favor of so-called disadvantaged minorities (again, where disadvantage is defined almost entirely in terms of the skin color of certain individuals) in order to bring about “equality” in some unspecified sense. While perhaps meant to achieve the totally laudable goal of “equality of opportunity,” the means chosen has been to discriminate in favor of “equality

272

W. B. Weimer

of outcome.” Such an end, it must be noted, is not something that can ever be provided by the catallactic order. The game of catallaxy under the rule of law can indeed provide equality of opportunity, in the sense that all individuals face no or equal barriers into entry to the game, but it can never provide equality of result or outcome. Equal outcomes can be provided only by a taxis structure controlled by an all-powerful centralized leadership which utilizes that power to guarantee specific outcomes. According to the legislation underlying affirmative action programs in the United States, power has been delegated to the Department of Education and funding agencies responsible for educational programs. Thus the almighty power of the purse is what actually requires and directs no longer independent educational institutions to achieve particular goals with respect to particular individuals. What it has insured is that selected “minorities” cannot be discriminated against, which is to say must be taken into the educational programs of those no longer independent educational institutions and must be treated more leniently than other students. Thus we have achieved quotas for admission and for success (in terms of graduation requirements) for minorities without any independent means of assessing whether or not the “graduates” have the same skills and competences that the free market order would produce if admission were a matter of the standard specification of skill (satisfactory grades and selection determined by competition among would-be entrants for limited positions). Is it any wonder that there are now lawsuits initiated by the so-called “nonminority groups” who are now in fact being discriminated against because they are rejected for positions in educational programs that they should have been, according to their educational qualifications and competences, accepted into? How long is it going to be until our “well-intended” citizens and legislatures come to realize that the only way to end discrimination is to in fact end all forms of legislated discrimination, and in their place create situations that lead to equality of opportunity instead of attempting to dictate equality of outcome? How long will it be before we realize that we can only control outcome “equality” by reducing

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

273

the output ability of the best and brightest to the level of the lowest? Equality of outcome means accepting only the worst. 3. Many authors have noted that science exemplifies many principles of organization found in “free” markets. Perhaps most famous was Michael Polanyi, who advanced the thesis that scientific research is a matter of the spontaneous coordination of independent research initiatives—in essays such as “The Growth of Thought in Society” (published in 1941) and “the Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” (published in 1962), reprinted in Knowing and Being (1969). Polanyi explicitly related science to Adam Smith’s invisible hand conception of spontaneous organization, and his writings are excellent refutations of the social welfare and egalitarianism themes that government should direct research to ends that it designates as most “relevant” rather than allowing it to continue in “haphazard” or “undirected” fashion. He brought out very clearly that any attempt at guiding scientific research toward a purpose other than its own is an attempt to deflect it from the advancement of science. “You can kill or mutilate the advance of science, you cannot shape it. For it can advance only by essentially unpredictable steps, pursuing problems of its own, and the practical benefits of these advances will be incidental and hence doubly unpredictable” (1969, p. 59). The particulars of science are exactly like the particulars of the market order: unpredictable in principle. Any attempt to specify what particulars must be achieved kills the cosmos of science by turning it into a directed taxis. No matter how laudable the goals may seem their actual function is simply to destroy science as a source of knowledge by turning it into an ex post facto rationalization of goals and programs chosen for nothing more than their momentary political correctness. While normal science research traditions operate by following a type of taxis organization, it eventually leads to unintended and unpredictable results. One cannot turn political correctness directives into normal science research. One would have thought that this obvious lesson had been learned by studying “science” in the Soviet regime in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, but political correctness, like the communists, denies history rather than

274

W. B. Weimer

learning from it. That is why we are now faced with the rewritten “history” of critical race Marxism. Another way of making this point is to note that, exactly like the market order, one must never confuse science, which is nothing but a means to the end of knowledge, with an end in itself. Bronowski (1978) was quite explicit about this: I am not allowed to say “I think the theory of relativity is true, I think it would be a splendid thing for everybody to believe it, why do I not cook the evidence just a little so that it will appear to be true? Why do I not select the facts in favor of it and suppress the facts against it?” Now this is absolutely crucial: scientists never discuss ends, they only discuss means, the steps by which you get from today’s knowledge to tomorrow’s knowledge. (pp. 125–126)

And yet this is exactly what we are allowing to happen when science is “directed” by governments and career bureaucrats to produce research that fits with politically acceptable goals. Unfortunately, no matter how momentarily desirable it may appear, a crime against knowledge is likewise a crime against humanity.

References Bronowski, J. (1978). The origins of knowledge and imagination. Yale University Press. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An essay on the history of civil society. Cambridge University Press. Hayek, F. A. (1948/1996). Individualism and economic order. University of Chicago Press; Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1967). Studies in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press; Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 2: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press.

12 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

275

Hayek, F. A. (1979). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 3: The political order of a free people. University of Chicago Press; Informa, Ltd. (Taylor and Francis). Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Maturana, H. (1980). Reproduction, heredity and evolution. In M. Zeleny (Ed.), Autopoiesis, dissipative structures, and spontaneous social orders (pp. 45– 79). Westview Press. Mises, L. (1949/1966). Human action (3rd ed.). Now Foundation for Economic Freedom. Contemporary Books. Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and being. University of Chicago Press. Russell, B. (1948/2009). Human knowledge its scope and limits. Routledge Classics (2009). Simon and Schuster. Whately, R. (1831). Introductory lectures on political economy. B. Fellowes. Whyte, W. H. (1956). The organization man. Simon and Schuster.

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition: Methodological and Conceptual Issues

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. Pericles, funeral oration In my course I have known and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. Edmund Burke

One must be clear what constitutes appropriate methods of study for the social and psychological domains, how the various fields are related, and what the similarities and differences are in comparison with the natural sciences. This chapter overviews some of these issues to provide background information. In each case we need to remove rationalist constructivist and justificationist biases that would prevent adequate understanding of the complex spontaneous orders of the psychological and sociological realms. More issues are discussed in Volume 2, Chapter 1. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0_13

277

278

W. B. Weimer

Methodological Individualism Is society composed primarily of individuals or of institutions? Several issues are confused in questions of this form, and it is crucial to see in what respects either individuals or social “wholes” or collectives could be the primary entities for study. Individualism is the doctrine that what exists in society are individuals and their interactions, while collectivism asserts that wholes have an independent and causal existence that cannot be reduced to the behavior of individuals. There is a way to defend both poles of this distinction (albeit without the attribution of causality to collectives) in methodological individualism. Methodological individualism asserts that the independent power (or real existence) of every institution is found in the capacity of the individuals involved to act with unforeseen consequences. Thus there is no collective whole, such as a group mind or a social class, responsible for group behavior: rather, each individual acts according to his or her intentions and perceptions of the others, and the actions those intentions bring about have unintended consequences. Thus, from Ferguson, the social realm is most often constituted by human action but not design. In contrast, the psychological realm is constituted by human design (except for the tacit aspects of cognition). Social “wholes” are not conscious and do not act according to design or intention. Social aggregates have no independent status as an agency—society is not an organism. And equally important, the output of social wholes cannot be anticipated, because of the inevitable creativity or productivity of the behavior of the individuals involved. Group or institutional properties are in this restricted sense at least potentially emergent from the actions of individuals. What methodological individualism must deny is that collectives are agents or “causes” that “determine” social developments independently of being unanticipated consequences of individual actions. They are not independent causal entities because they are not “given” independently of our observations but rather are created by our minds to render our experience intelligible. They are abstract entities whose existence is only in terms of their function in human understanding. As Hayek (1948) noted, we never observe “states” or “governments,” any more than battles or commercial activities. When we use any such terms,

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

279

we always refer to a conceptual scheme that connects individual human activities by intelligible relations. Our concepts are those relations. In contrast, collectivism asserts that social wholes causally influence both the growth of society and behavior of individuals (rather than simply being comprised of individuals). Collectivism has been familiar from the writings of Hegel and Marx, and the Marxist idea that “class” interests exist independently of individuals and determine their behavior (allegedly according to “inexorable” historical laws). Collectivist thinking results from the rationalist constructivist desire to find conscious motives or intentions (agency) as the causes of all behavior.1 Rather than countenance unintended orders of action, thinkers imbued with this approach simply assume that the cosmos is a taxis and postulate constructivist causes behind the scenes to account for grown or spontaneous orders. As a result the organismic model of society, which proposes that the social whole is a single entity that “has” the necessary intentions and desires, is a prominent theme in constructivist thought. Closely related is the constructivist conspiracy theory of history, which asserts that behind the scenes power groups (agents) are the true motive forces of historical development. This sort of anthropomorphism loses plausibility when an alternative account explains how the appearance of collectivist desires and superindividual causation can result from the unintended consequences of actions of individuals. This latter approach is the evolutionary model of society. Because of its pervasive presence let us first examine the conspiracy theory in more detail.

Constructivism and the Conspiracy Theory Prior to discussion of Darwinian views in the nineteenth century, the most powerful argument theologians could muster for the belief in God (and creation) was the argument from design. This argument took as evidence the apparent “perfect” fit or adaptation between organisms and their environments to be evidence for a creator who had brought this about as part of a plan. It was asserted that the eye was so marvelously made for the purpose of seeing it must have been made specifically to do

280

W. B. Weimer

so solely by divine will. Indeed it appears (and very genuinely so) that everything in our world is made just so we can manage it, and if it were even slightly different we could not manage to live in it. The speciousness of the argument is obvious from the evolutionary perspective that recognizes spontaneous orders and the emergence of novel behavior and speciation. Thus Russell ridiculed the argument by design by pointing out that the sort of God that could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or fascists, even after thousands or millions of years, was hardly what one would call divine or even godlike. Similarly, Voltaire earlier remarked that “obviously” the nose had been designed to hold up spectacles. When the biological and evolutionary perspective arose it became clear that the “evidence” for design was instead evidence of adaptation, and adaptation as a phenomenon does not entail teleological explanation, even though the phenomena are legitimately described teleonomically in purposive terms. But while the argument from design was laughed out of court in the biological context it still exerts fascination and influence when the allegedly “scientific” rationalist constructivist looks at society. We are often presented with the social version of the argument from design, the conspiracy theory, as an account of behind the scenes power struggles that cause history to be one way and not another. The assertion is that events that have no obvious central direction and planning must have secret planners hidden behind the appearances, which are regarded as contrived by those planners to cover their nefarious purposes. Thus constructivists assume that all societies are in fact successfully centrally planned, and that the power groups involved are not only capable of clandestinely realizing their goals, but also, when desired, of covering up their involvement. Conspiracy theorists are incapable of fathoming the “unintended consequences” of our action, and in consequence phenomena that result from our actions but not our designs. More importantly, they presume a nearly godlike power on the part of successful conspirators, who not only are successful in achieving their intended goals but also in concealing their causal role. As Popper (1962, Vol. II) put it “The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups—sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

281

from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists” (p. 95; 2013, p. 306). To the organization mentality, all the evil and injustice in human interaction must be the result of the new “first cause” or designer in modern society—the clandestine organization. In this framework, Popper noted that governments are conceived to be monopolistic capitalists at the level of the state instead of industry. Chomsky’s political views make unquestioning reliance on the conspiracy theory as an explanation for war, social injustice, and other ills that thwart the libertarian anarchist utopia. His pessimism about the future success of libertarian anarchism is never directed to problems that could arise if anarchism were to be adopted, but consists in doubting whether Cartesian common sense is capable of withstanding the onslaught of the horrible authoritarian capitalists. Thus there is a tension that leads to despair in much of his political work: Chomsky has been opposed to authoritarian socialism (and capitalism), but he has seen no way to overthrow authoritarianism unless its opponents organize. His views would take a conspiracy to overthrow conspiracy, or an organization to overthrow organizations. Small wonder that advocates of socialist libertarian views state that they are only an ideal rather than a practical political alternative. Chomsky’s ideal has been the square circle of disorganized organization, and it should not be surprising that his outlook has been pessimistic. Another use of the conspiracy theory is found in the popularization of science and the social impact of technology. Many popularizers, especially when constrained to deliver an Important Message between the covers of a slim paperback or at the close of a visually spectacular television or video presentation, have portrayed their intended audience as unwitting conspirators. The popularizing sage’s message is that we, as an organismic collective humanity straight out of Hobbes’s Leviathan, must now consciously choose whether we will follow the path leading to, e.g., nuclear folly and pollution, or “the” other path that leads to ecological harmony and never-ending peace. Carl Sagan’s (1980) enormously popular Cosmos (both book and television series) presented such a message forcefully. Numerous similar presentations about global warming or saving the animals can be found on the Internet today.

282

W. B. Weimer

Earlier, and equally reliant on the conspiracy theory, was Russell’s presentation of conscious forced choices on nuclear disarmament, as well as Chomsky’s antiwar and disarmament speeches and writings. What such presentations totally ignore is the existence of the tacit dimension of society and individual creativity. No one consciously works to create disaster and gloom. Instead, such things arise from the conflicting actions of individuals all of whom have their self-interest (and self-preservation) firmly in mind at the “conscious” level. But since the social cosmos is not a taxis, the unintended consequences of our action are often as unpleasant as they are unforeseen, and if allowed to continue unchecked could be disastrous in countless ways. The game of catallaxy certainly has drawbacks as well as advantages. Similarly, a well-intentioned attempt to correct disaster can bring about even greater disaster if the theory of organization upon which it is based is fallacious—witness the disastrous effects of Keynesian economic policy, and our present affirmative action programs. It is not the case that spontaneous orders, such as free-market enterprise behaviors, are “willfully” ignoring long-term deleterious effects in order to secure short-term benefits. The market order cannot will nor can it “seek” either benefits or disasters. Only individuals have goals, wills, incentives, desires, etc. Neither society nor the market is an organism— it is not a giant individual (or family of Olympian demigods) who can have goals or make conscious choices. As a result it cannot ever “change its collective mind” and do something else. The solemn pronouncements of a Sagan, Chomsky, Russell, or Thunberg may be touching, but they are only as relevant to the existential predicament of humanity as the argument from design—which is to say, not relevant at all. Conspiracy theories are not a substitute for scientific inquiry into piecemeal changes that might in fact help alleviate the problem that the television or popular press personality has deemed to be the cause of our eminent extinction. Conspiracy theories are omnipresent in twenty-first-century political thought. One need only look at the idea of a “deep state” conspiracy alleged to exist in U.S. “entrenched” political bureaucracy which is said to be dedicated to keeping out “conservative” views and policies, and favoring leftist or socialist views, especially with regard to hot button issues such as health care for the welfare state and free

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

283

abortion on demand. That idea is taken as seriously by “right-wing” conservatives as the counterpart idea, that there is a vast “corporate” or “big business” conspiracy to prevent the “green revolution” in order to continue pollution and profiteering (usually equated with each other), which is held with equal fervor by the young socialists and collectivists of the left. Neither side seems to understand the logistics and planning that would be involved in any real conspiracy that had such far-reaching effects. Willfully propounding absurd conspiracy theories is not restricted to politicians—it is equally found in the works of alleged economists. A recent example is provided by Scott Galloway (2020) in Post-Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. In an interview with Adam Shapiro for Anchor entitled “Capitalism ‘will collapse on itself ’ without more empathy and love,” he admitted that he felt as if the covid pandemic had largely been “invented” as a ploy for taking the top 10% (of wealth holders) into the top 1%, while taking the rest of the 90% downward in comparison. If we (anyone) could successfully coordinate human behavior to that degree it would take something as omniscient and omnipotent as was dreamed of by G. B. Shaw writing of “Man and Superman.” But the Bloomsbury group did indeed regard themselves as Supermen and Superwomen.2 Apparently Galloway felt that there really are such Shavian all-powerful conspirators who, first, successfully created the coronavirus pandemic, and second, managed to have it benefit the rich in order to make them superrich. If something as absurd as this had been proposed by a politician the media would have descended upon him or her with an ambulance and a straitjacket. In contrast, they take the proposal from an “economist” seriously. Instead of taking such “determinism” seriously we must learn to make changes slowly, and then study the unintended consequences that result from our changes. If the consequences are not beneficial we need to change something to avoid them. Rather than a simplistic overall plan that states positive prescriptions to be achieved we must learn to set up situations in which progress can occur, even though we cannot foresee exactly what will result. Life cannot be controlled in the manner the constructivists and conspiracy theorists desire. There is no giant Walden Two Skinner box to do so. But if we abandon unrealistic positive specifications we can still work to improve our situation, by strictly adhering

284

W. B. Weimer

to a program of general rules of conduct that tells us what mistakes to avoid rather than what actions must be achieved. Long ago Vico told us “homo non intellegendo fit omnia”—man has become all that he is without understanding what happened—(see his New Science of 1725). In all such cases, our task is a Sisyphean one in that our responsibility to correct mistakes is never-ending. But to acknowledge that the task is never-ending is not to say that the situation is hopeless, for it certainly is not—if we can learn to live with our various abstract orders, and take advantage of their capabilities, rather than attempt to deny them, or try to turn them into taxes to achieve particulars specified in advance. If we try instead to step outside the spontaneous order of human interaction to control its progress, the unintended consequence will most likely be the destruction of ourselves and our planet that the popularizers are trying to prevent.

The Social Order can Never be Reduced to the Psychological The social domain is comprised of “nothing but” the actions of individuals. There is no such thing as a social entity that exists independently of the behavior of individuals. Social collectives are abstract entities that exist only in the interaction of individuals with others in the conduct of their affairs. That is the “negative” message of methodological individualism. But it should not be inferred that because all we observe is the (inter-) actions of individuals that the social domain can be reduced to the individual psychological domain. Having argued against collectivism we must now state the case against such a reductive psychologism. Methodological psychologism claims that since all social phenomena reduce, in the last analysis, to the behavior of individuals, a further reduction to the psychology of the individual is in order. The assumption is that the origin and development of all traditions must be explainable in psychological terms, since group behavior is “nothing but” behavior of individuals in groups. The failure of psychologism is comparable to the failure of rationalist constructivism. It cannot acknowledge that the social or institutional domain is the result of human action but not design.

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

285

If all institutions were the product of explicit decisions to bring about particular results (and only those results were achieved), i.e., if the social cosmos were nothing but a taxis, then psychologism would be tenable. But since the social is an unintended and therefore not conscious domain there is no possibility of understanding it by reducing it to the behavior of individuals. The unintended creates a dimension of which the individual is always ignorant. Even those institutions that arose as a result of deliberate design have unintended (and often unwanted) consequences that are not part of any individual account. Indeed if there is legitimate explanatory (rather than reductive) primacy, it favors the social over the individual when rules of conduct are involved. To quote Karl Marx (1859) on this point, it is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence—rather “it is his social existence that determines his consciousness” (p. 233).3 Where Marx went wrong (as, for instance, Popper pointed out in The Open Society, Chapter 12) was in marrying this insight about the priority of the social, which he learned from the Scottish moralists, to collectivism. In order to understand the behavior of individuals when they follow rules of conduct we must always know more than individual factors. To explain why brothers do not marry their sisters, we need to know the customs of a social group but not the individual psychological makeup of those involved. In so far as the social domain consists of the unintended consequences of action it is autonomous, and not dependent upon any sort of individual psychological theory. In comparison, the task of individual psychology is to explain how individual intentions are realized (or unrealized) in behavior.

The Tacit Dimension in Society, Science, and the Individual The social order that results from the unintended consequences of action is not conscious. Since psychology habitually makes use of some sort of conscious–unconscious distinction to account for an individual’s behavior there is a temptation to refer to the social as unconscious. This is misleading in several respects. First, it implies that the social could,

286

W. B. Weimer

if properly manipulated, become conscious (Freud pioneered techniques for making some contents available, but he did not say that all could be made conscious)—in a manner analogous to that in which depth psychologists attempt to bring to consciousness material that has been repressed. But try as one may, the social can never become conscious, because there is no group mind in which it could “rise” to consciousness. A given individual can be made aware of social phenomena, but that is a case in which the individual becomes conscious of the social. Since the social realm is not the sort of thing that could be conscious, it does not automatically follow that it is therefore unconscious. It never could be. Second, the analogy is misleading in that preconscious or unconscious processes are often considered to motivate our behavior. In contrast, social institutions and collectives are the products of individual behavior motivated by many diverse causes, the results of behavior instead of its particular causes or motivations. The social realm is not a motivational source of our behavior, but rather a product of it. Third, this is a misleading analogy stemming from the common assumption that unconscious processes in the individual are somehow on a lower or less important level than the conscious level. Because we identify consciousness with the highest achievements of humanity there is a tendency to denigrate everything that does not make its way “up” into consciousness. To identify the social dimension with the unanticipated consequences of action must not be taken as an assignment of second-class citizenship, in the manner in which theoretical entities were derivative or second-class citizens in comparison to facts for the logical positivist philosophers. A different level than conscious experience, no doubt—but not a less fundamental one in human affairs. For such reasons the social realm is a tacit dimension, as Michael Polanyi (1958, 1966) used the term, in contrast to the explicit dimension of conscious and explicit or rational awareness. The consciousness– unconsciousness distinction should be restricted to the individual, where it retains determinate and useful meaning. It is the illegitimate overextension of this distinction applicable only to individuals that leads to wholism and collectivism, and blunders such as a conscious “group mind” that aims to bring about its intentions.

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

287

The tacit dimension of the human mind is likewise less likely to be confused with a level of functioning than is the notion of the unconscious. If we reflect on the surface-deep and particular-abstract structure distinctions it becomes clear that the processing that eventuates into consciousness at the level of surface structure particulars of language is more correctly called “higher” rather than lower. The principles of determination that are the human mind control conscious experience but nowhere appear within it. The contents of consciousness dance like a puppet, but the strings of the puppet are manipulated in the abstract tacit dimension that is logically and causally antecedent to the particulars of experience. The tacit power of the mind, its ability to create meaning and experience and action, never “stoops so low” as to show itself in conscious processes. Our creative and productive capacity, alleged to be the glory of our explicit rationality, is always the product of abstract processes that occur within the tacit dimension before it occurs. Reason, as Hume and the moralists knew so well, is a slave of the passions, the psychology and emotionality of the gut, and a mere handmaiden attending the tacit dimension, the product of our evolution and not its cause or master. We need to realize that our reason cannot effect a wholesale replacement of the rest of our psychology and social environment. The constructivist approach literally can never be realized—it reverses the causal arrow between the social domain and our explicit reason. Nowhere is the tacit dimension of reason and rationality more obvious (and painfully so to the rationalist constructivist) than in the conduct of science. The social or tacit dimension of science is clear in its community structure, language of fact and theory, conventions as to the method of assessment, tuition, and dissemination of results. The explicit afterthe-fact “rational reconstruction” typically espoused by the justificationist and rationalist constructivist conveys virtually nothing of science as a spontaneously arisen social process—instead, it tries to eliminate it. Instead of trying to eliminate or reduce this by “rational” reconstruction, we must come to appreciate the tremendous power of the tacit dimension within science, and learn how to cultivate it: to create the conditions in which scientific progress can occur, instead of trying vainly to plan that progress (in advance) by creating its particulars.

288

W. B. Weimer

Evolutionary Epistemology was an Outgrowth of Liberalism The continuity of cognition between animals and humans and the realization that all higher cognitive apparatus has evolved hand-in-hand with culture has a close affinity to the development of liberalism. Had it not been for the development of law, economics, and sociological history to the point that the Scottish moralists developed the theory of cultural evolution (as a conception of self-regulating systems that grow through feedback and feedforward control), it is unlikely that the biological conception of evolution would have arisen in the nineteenth century. Darwin’s (and his near competitors such as Wallace) work on “the species problem” led to the application of cultural evolutionary ideas to living species (from the idea that the individual is a product of the evolved social–cultural cosmos to the idea that the present form of the species— all of its individuals—is the result of survival of the fittest through sexual selection). The moralists, the Darwinians before Darwin, were concerned with the growth of institutions that were the result of human action but not design (such as money, the market exchange, moral rules and law, language, and government). Liberalism led to an evolutionary theory of complexly organized spontaneously developed orders of human action, and the emphasis upon gradual evolution for society provided the biological theorists with a fleshed-out framework, which they could apply to their problem of finding a mechanism for evolution in living species rather than creating such a framework de novo (see Note 3). In both culture and biology the problem is to account for the role of ignorance. Just as we are totally ignorant of what the state of our knowledge or culture will be in the future, the parents of offspring are totally ignorant of the ways in which those offspring will differ from themselves. Neither form of “growth” or evolution is predictable or “rational”— we cannot rationally plan the future according to algorithmic formulae because of the emergence of novelty and uncertainty in them both. What alternatives are available to explain this? Postulation of one or another “Deus ex” form could account for the fixity or degeneration of species, and the fixity or degeneration of knowledge (degeneration could occur from fallible rather than perfect materials, or psychological performance

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

289

factors such as lack of attention or poor memory, etc.). Postulation of a less than omniscient primordial lawgiver, such as Lycurgus, would likewise rule out productive change because all conduct would be limited to forms which the lawgiver had thought out and permitted. The problem is indeed insoluble when approached from the perspective of trying to put enough knowledge into the past to account for progress in the future. What is needed is a system that operates upon ignorance, and that trades the possibility for definite prediction of limited variation of particulars for the possibility of prediction of only patterns and therefore unlimited variation. The notion of natural selection sampling from the gene pool that also allows the possibility of mutation provides such an a priori “ignorant,” or as Campbell (1974a, 1974b) and Popper would emphasize, “blind” (but far from “random”) mechanism of variation. The claim that our reason evolved with our culture rather than preceding it likewise emphasizes the necessary presence of our ignorance—we have no idea what the continued functioning (and existence) of reason depends upon. Cartesian rationalism, picturing the mind as outside the evolving natural order because it produces capital R reason independent of experience, is simply fundamentally irreconcilable with any evolutionary perspective. As Hayek put it decades ago: The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created in his mind. His mind is in itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. (1960, p. 23)

The fundamental insight of the Scottish moralists from Mandeville through Ferguson and Smith was that of the inevitability of our ignorance of the particulars of any evolving spontaneous order. From this follows at once the primacy of the abstract or general rules of determination in such systems, and the possibility of emergence, or genuine novelty, as a result of rule-governed productivity. This is the framework

290

W. B. Weimer

in which David Hume turned the claims of the Enlightenment against itself, by whittling down the claims of false reason by means of rational analysis. To the rationalist constructivist this has been an enormously bitter pill to swallow, and there is nothing to do but for them to label Hume, the critical rationalist who devastated comprehensive rationalism, as an irrationalist, which he must be from their false conception of rationality. Likewise the justificationist philosopher, who cannot live with uncertainty and unpredictability (requiring instead some firm foundation for knowledge and a definite method for its acquisition by science) must label Hume a skeptic who denies genuine knowledge. From the hostility of rationalist constructivism to evolution one can understand why “Cartesian linguistics” in Chomsky’s sense was simultaneously full of nativism but also violently opposed to actual evolutionary accounts of language (e.g., see his critique of Popper as an evolutionary theorist in Chapter 3 of Language and Mind ). Since this approach must build everything into the speaker-hearer in advance, rather than allow for evolutionary development, Chomsky had to declare humans totally unique in possessing, from whatever period in evolution man evolved any linguistic capacity, all present ones. Whenever we gain any language we must have gained the capacity for all language. Thus one meaning of competence as structural capacity, and the constant theme that we have yet to formulate a nativistic hypothesis about the speaker-hearer’s competence that is strong enough to be taken seriously. What of this all or nothing argument? Consider a similar claim with regard to vision: the capacity for seeing arose all or none with the development of eyes and relevant cortical structures. No one would claim that visual capacity or competence has not increased with evolutionary changes in the structure of the eye and brain—without eyes there is no vision and with better ones there is better vision. With the addition of more connections in the brain there is not only sensation but perception and conception. But what is the range of visual competence for a given physiological system? Is it fixed and invariant in advance, with the first individual to possess it, or does it evolve? If competence means possessing a certain physiological structuring of functional anatomical units then it is set in advance and all evolution is emergent. If competence refers to the possibilities for experience, the “knowledge” gathering capacity of

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

291

visual processing, it is growing all the time in new species. The functional development of competence in the organism’s ongoing adaptation to its econiche occurs all the time—and this occurs in language as well. The ambiguity of “competence” prevents a telling opposition to the strong nativist claim, but Chomsky apparently did not notice the functional character of Popper’s argument, and opposed its evolutionary character on (clear Cartesian) principle, arguing (again ambiguously) that human language is emergently unique. Language competency evolved with our social organization, just as our reason has evolved. The historical dimension of competence may be difficult to detect, but only for the same reasons that all social evolution is difficult to see in the present. We have at present nothing that faintly resembles an adequate evolutionary neurophysiological account of the development of CNS complexity. The best we have from comparative study is the rule of thumb that every quantitative overlay in CNS organization brings about a qualitatively different level of behavioral competence. One can admit that the neurophysiological capacity underlying linguistic competence does not differentiate between existing languages (as one cannot see without an eye), but it does not follow that functional explanations of the origin of language and its acquisition are either illegitimate or uninformative. The best account we presently have is functional due to our prolonged neoteny which in turn is due to the impossibility of having larger head size at birth due to the limits of female pelvic structure. That, rather than any genetic “foundation,” seems to be the reason that only humans have developed spoken languages (as Chapter 8 in Volume 2 develops in more detail).

Notes 1. Psychologists are familiar with the constructivist interpretation of history from the voluminous writings of E. G. Boring, whose A History of Experimental Psychology (originally published in 1929) has been a bestseller through many editions. Boring proffered the concept

292

W. B. Weimer

of the Zeitgeist, defined as the intellectual and social climate of opinion prevalent at a time, as a causal factor in history. Boring’s reliance on this explanatorily vacuous notion (the Zeitgeist is a datum to be explained, not in itself an explanatory concept) was due to his desire to present a positivistically “objective” and “scientific” account of history. Imbued with the positivism of the era he chose the Zeitgeist as a “naturalistic” approach that was objective and causal, over the alternative of a “personalistic” and therefore unscientific account emphasizing individual “great men” as agents of historical change. Boring saw only two possibilities for agency: the Zeitgeist as a “scientific” account, and the great man as an unscientific one. Boring’s reason for the endorsement of collectivism is clear in this passage (1950): “To think of the man whose brilliant novel thought heads an important development as the originator is to abandon scientific psychology and suppose that among all orderly lawful mental phenomena the insights of genius constitute an exception in that they occur without causes. This view of nature makes the great man, if not a deus at least an homunculus ex machina” (p. 745). Boring felt that the only “scientific” explanation of historical unfolding was one that is uncreative (creativity asserts precisely the thesis that individuals are the originators, but not with the ridiculous thesis that creativity is somehow “uncaused” and outside the natural order) and transpersonal. A collective conscious agency was deemed acceptable and scientific, but not an individual one. The Zeitgeist notion is still rampant, especially in the rewritten versions of Boring’s texts and copycat texts such as Schulz (1981). 2. It is easy to understand why the very successful entrepreneurs of society, the “movers and shakers” who have made, invariably at a young age, immense fortunes, are always rationalist constructivists and advocates of immediate change in order to save society from what they perceive as imminent doom. Having been immensely successful with absolutely no understanding of how that happened, they are now looked upon as gods (and in the entertainment industry, as rock gods) with the media present with cell phone cameras to record their every burp and giggle. Being used to making pronouncements that elicit immediate affirmation from their equally unknowing but fawning

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

293

cohorts, they continue to say what is obvious to their “enlightened Cartesian common sense.” Thus the youth of the 1960s, along with the media, built the myth of the golden age of Camelot for Kennedy’s presidency, despite the fact that older historians (as well as contemporary ones born after Camelot) have judged it to have been only marginally adequate. Slightly later an excellent rock group, the Beatles, switched from being competent musicians to drug-addled would-be gurus to the masses with well-publicized trips to India (and their accompanying Nehru jackets and various robes), not because they were of superior intelligence but only because the press and their fans hung appreciatively on their every word. Nothing seems to change this pattern: someone becomes famous for an ability in one particular area (such as starting a business that took off and made a fortune or singing songs that make similar fortunes or being an idolized athlete), and as a result of the publicity and adulation they begin to think that it is appropriate for them to pontificate upon subjects about which they know either next to nothing or absolutely nothing. And because of their fame they have an enormous influence on their cohort groups. Almost invariably their “message” is the endorsement of tribal primitivism (with the implicit understanding that they will be a chieftain and continue to tell others what to do) against the abstract and impersonal society. There are no rock stars endorsing the efficiency of implicit cooperation in the abstract market order (perhaps Neil Peart of Rush came closest). They do not even begin to understand that that order produced their success, nor would they be happy to have it pointed out to them. After all, they have constantly been told that they are Supermen and Superwomen, and it would not be suitable for such superior beings to be the result of mere luck and timing in an impersonal market order. An international sport star such as Diego Maradona (1960–2020) can tell half the world of the superiority of socialism and the evil of capitalism (and the United States) and never comprehend to his dying day that he was the product of an abstract “capital” market order and that his success in it refuted what he professed to the masses.

294

W. B. Weimer

3. In this Marx was only echoing the moralists. Marx mistakenly believed Ferguson to be the master, and Adam Smith his pupil, and credited Ferguson with being the first to develop the division of labor (see The Poverty of Philosophy and Das Capital , as cited in Lehmann, 1960, p. 158). But it is most clearly from Ferguson (in 1767) that we have learned: “Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted. The history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species: and every experiment relative to this subject should be made with entire societies, not with single men” (p. 6).

References Boring, E. G. (1950/1970). A history of experimental psychology. AppletonCentury-Crofts. Campbell, D. T. (1974a). “Downward Causation” in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. Macmillan. Campbell, D. T. (1974b). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 413–463). Open Court. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An essay on the history of civil society. Cambridge University Press. Galloway, S. (2020). Post corona: From crisis to opportunity. Portfolio/Penguin Random House. Hayek, F. A. (1948/1996). Individualism and economic order. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1960/2007). The constitution of liberty. University of Chicago Press. Now Routledge Classics. Lehmann, W. C. (1960). John Millar of Glascow. Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1859/1993). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Marx.org. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. Harper and Row. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday.

13 Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition …

295

Popper, K. R. (1950/1962/2020). The open society and its enemies (2 vols.). (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row. Now Princeton University Press, one volume format from 2013. Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos. Random House. Schultz, D. (1981). A history of modern psychology (3rd ed.). Academic Press.

References

No Editor. (1982). Absolute values and the creation of the new world order. The International Cultural Foundation Press. Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2012). Why nations fail: The origin of power, prosperity and poverty. Crown. Acton, L. (1907/1967). The history of freedom and other essays. Macmillan. Now in the public domain. Acton, H. B. (1971/1993). The morals of markets and related issues. Liberty Fund. Agassi, J. (1963). Towards a historiography of science. In History and theory (Beiheft 2). Wesleyan University Press. Alchian, A. (1965). Some economics of property rights. Il Politico, 30, 816– 829. Alchian, A., & Demsetz, H. (1973). The property right paradigm. The Journal of Economic History, 33(1), 16–27. Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of behavior modification. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0

297

298

References

Barnett, B. A. (2016). Rush’s lyrical rhetoric of oppression and liberation: Extending “Freedom Songs” into the progressive rock genre. Relevant Rhetoric, 7 , 1–17. Bartley, W. W. III. (1974). Theory of language and philosophy of science as instruments of educational reform: Wittgenstein and Popper as Austrian school teachers. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Method and metaphysics: Methodological and historical essays in the natural and social sciences. D. Reidel. Bartley, W. W. III. (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court. Now Cricket Media. Bell, D. A., Jr. (1973). Race, racism and American law. Little, Brown and Company. Bentham, J. (1931). Theory of legislation 111–13 (C. K. Ogden, Eds., R. Hildreth, Trans.). Harcourt, Brace & Co. Bindas, K. J., & Houston, C. (1989). “Takin’ Care of Business”: Rock music, Vietnam and the protest myth. The Historian, 52(1), 1–23. Blumenthal, A. (1970). Language and psychology: Historical aspects of psycholinguistics. Wiley. Blumenthal, A. (1977). Wilhelm Wundt and early American psychology: A clash of two cultures. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 291(1), 13–20. Bohm, D. (1965). The special theory of relativity. W. A. Benjamin Inc. Boring, E. G. (1950/1970). A history of experimental psychology. AppletonCentury-Crofts. Bronowski, J. (1978). The origins of knowledge and imagination. Yale University Press. Burke, E. (1790/2009). Reflections on the revolution in France. Oxford University Press. Butos, W. (1994). The Hayek-Keynes macro debate. In P. J. Boettke (Ed.), Elgar companion to Austrian economics (pp. 471–477). Edward Elgar. Butos, W. (2020). The Keynes perplex. The Independent Review, 24 (4), 1–13. Campbell, D. T. (1974a). “Downward Causation” in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. Macmillan. Campbell, D. T. (1974b). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 413–463). Open Court. Now Cricket Media. Cassirer, E. (1945/1963). Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two essays. Harper & Row, Princeton University Press.

References

299

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton & Company. Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F Skinner’s verbal behavior. Language, 35, 26–58. Chomsky, N. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory. Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1966/2009). Cartesian linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (1967). The formal nature of language. In E. H. Lenneberg (Ed.), Biological foundations of language. Wiley. Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. Chomsky, N. (1971). Problems of knowledge and freedom. Pantheon. Chomsky, N. (1972). Anarchism. In K. Coates (Ed.), Essays in socialist humanism (pp. 31–44). Spokesman Press. Chomsky, N. (1977). Essays on form and interpretation. North-Holland. Chomsky, N. (1979). Language and responsibility. Pantheon. Comte, A. (1893). The positive philosophy of August Comte. Trubner. Originally Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1800. Internet Archive, Open Library. de Ruggiero, G. (1927). The history of European liberalism (R. G. Collingwood, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Descartes, R. (1960). A discourse on method . Library of Liberal Arts. de Tocqueville, A. (1845/2002). Democracy in America (H. C. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Dewey, J. (1935). Liberty and social control. Social Frontier, II (2), now Teachers College Record, 1(1), 41–42. Dewey, J. (1935/2000). Liberalism and social action. Capricorn Books, Rowman and Littlefield (Prometheus). Dunaway, D. K. (1992). Review: Folk protest and political music in the United States. The Journal of American Folklore, 105 (417), 374–379. Everett, C. W. (1931/2009). The education of Jeremy Bentham. Columbia University Press. Online by Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An essay on the history of civil society. Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, A. (1785/2010). Institutes of moral philosophy. Gale ECCO, Print Editions. Ferguson, A. (1792/1978). Principles of moral and political science (2 vols.). Garland Publishing.

300

References

Feyerabend, P. K. (1962). Explanation, reduction, and empiricism. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Scientific explanation, space, and time (pp. 22– 97). University of Minnesota Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965a). Problems of empiricism. In R. G. Colodny (Ed.), Beyond the edge of certainty (pp. 145–260). Prentice-Hall. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965b) Reply to criticism. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Boston studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 3) (pp. 223– 261). Humanities Press. Fitch, W. T. II (2010). The evolution of language. Cambridge University Press. Galloway, S. (2020). Post corona: From crisis to opportunity. Portfolio/Penguin Random House. Gay, P. (1973). The enlightenment. Simon & Schuster. Golub, R., & Townsend, J. (1977). Malthus, multinationals, and the club of Rome. Social Studies of Science, 7 (2), 201–222. Hamowy, R. (1987). The Scottish enlightenment and the theory of spontaneous order. Forward by Ian Ross. Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series (R. H. Popkin & R. A. Watson, Eds.). Southern Illinois University Press. Havelock, E. (1964). The liberal temper in Greek politics. Yale University Press. Hayek, F. A. (1948/1996). Individualism and economic order. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1944/2007). The road to serfdom (B. Caldwell, Ed.). University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1952a). The counter-revolution of science: Studies on the abuse of reason. The Free Press. Hayek, F. A. (1952b). The sensory order. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1960/2007). The constitution of liberty. University of Chicago Press. Now Routledge Classics. Hayek, F. A. (1967). Studies in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis). Hayek, F. A. (1973/2012). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 1: Rules and order. University of Chicago Press. Now Routledge Classics. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 2: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1978). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor & Francis Group). Hayek, F. A. (1979). Law, legislation and liberty Vol. 3: The political order of a free people. University of Chicago Press, Informa, Ltd. (Taylor and Francis).

References

301

Hawes, R. P. (1923). The logic of contemporary English realism. Longmans, Green. Hempel, C. G., & Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the logic of explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15, 135–175. Hill, J. D. (2009). Beyond blood identities: Post-humanity in the twenty-first century. Lexington Books. Hill, J. D. (2013). Civil disobedience and the politics of identity: When we should not get along. Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, J. D. (2021). What do White Americans owe Black people: Racial justice in the age of post-oppression. Emancipation Books. Himmelfarb, G. (1952/2015). Lord Acton: A study in conscience and politics. University of Chicago Press, Acton Institute. Hobart, R. E. (Pen name of D. S. Miller) (1934). Free will as involving determination and inconceivable without it. Mind N. S. 43(1690), 1–27. Holdsworth, W. S. (1924). A history of English law (7 vols.). Little, Brown and Company. Hume, D. (1739/1888/1978). Hume’s treatise of human nature (L. A. SelbyBigge, Ed., P. H. Niddich, Revised). Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1748/1955/1999). An enquiry concerning human understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Also 1955, Edited by C. W. Hendel. Hume, D. (1751/1998). An enquiry concerning the principles of morals (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1752/2018). Political discourses. Creative Resources/Gale Research, Inc. Hume, D. (1875). Essays moral, political and literary (T. H. Green & T. H. Grose, Eds.). Longmans, Green, and Company. Jefferson Monticello, IV (2000). Jefferson and Hemings. Research findings and implications. Johnson, H. M. (1936). Pesudo-mathematics in the mental and social sciences. American Journal of Psychology, 48, 342–351. Jones, H. M. (1954). Republican humanism. Social Research, 21, 159–178. Jones, W. (1807). The works of Sir William Jones Vol III (Lord Teignmouth, Ed.). John Stockdale. Kant, I. (1788/1996). Critique of practical reason (M. J. Gregor, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1790). The critique of judgment (J. H. Bernard, Trans.). Online Library of Liberty. Kelsen, H. (1945). General theory of law and the state. Harvard University Press.

302

References

Kelsen, H. (1957). What is justice? University of California Press. Kern, F. (1939). Kingship and law in the Middle Ages (S. B. Chrimes, Trans.). Basil Blackwell. Keynes, J. M. (1936/2007). The general theory of employment, interest, and money. Palgrave Macmillan. Korner, S. (1966). Experience and theory. Humanities Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. University of Chicago Press. Lachmann, L. (1971). Ludwig von Mises and the market process. In F. A. Hayek (Ed.), Toward liberty: Essays in honour of Ludwig von Mises. Institute for Humane Studies. Lashley, K. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior (pp. 112–135). Wiley. Lee, S. E. (2013). Reconsidering the Jefferson-Hemings relationship: Nationalist historiography without nationalist heroes, racial sexuality without racial significance. Political Research Quarterly, 66 (3), 500–515. Lehmann, W. C. (1960). John Millar of Glasgow. Cambridge University Press. Lele, J. K., & Singh, R. (1991). And never the Twain shall meet or language and politics Chez Chomsky: A review of Noam Chomsky’s Problems of Knowledge and Power and On Power and Ideology. Journal of Pragmatics, 15 (2), 175–194. Levendis, J., Eckhardt, R. B., & Block, W. (2020). Evolutionary psychology, economic freedom, trade and benevolence. Review of Economic Perspectives/Narodohospodarsky, 19 (2), 73–94. Locke, J. (1689/1975). Two treatises of government. Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1689/1998). An essay concerning human understanding. Penguin Classics. MacCallum, S. H. (1970). The art of community. Institute for Humane Studies. MacCorquodale, K., & Meehl, P. E. (1948). On a distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables. Psychological Review, 55 (2), 95–107. Mach, E. (1902/2012). The analysis of sensations, and the relation of the physical to the psychical . Forgotten Books Reprint Series. MacNeill, D. (1970). The acquisition of language: The study of developmental psycholinguistics. Harper and Row. Malthus, T. R. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. J. Johnson (Originally published anonymously).

References

303

Mandeville, B. (1705/1723). The fable of the bees: Or, private vices, public benefits. Anonymously published in London. Mandeville, B. (1732). An inquiry into the origin of honour, and The usefulness of Christianity in war. By the author of The fable of the bees. Printed for J. Brotherton. Marcuse, H. (1964/2006). One-dimensional man. Beacon Press. Now Routledge Classics. Marcuse, H. (1969). Repressive tolerance. In R. W. Wolff, B. Moore, & H. Marcuse (Eds.), A critique of pure tolerance (pp. 81–123). Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1859/1993). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Marx.org. Maturana, H. (1980). Reproduction, heredity and evolution. In M. Zeleny (Ed.), Autopoiesis, dissipative structures, and spontaneous social orders (pp. 45– 79). Westview Press. Maxwell, G. (1975). Induction and empiricism: A Bayesian-frequentist alternative. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 106–165). University of Minnesota Press. McCormick, J. (1992). British politics and the environment. Earthscan. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth: A report of the club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind . Universe Books. Meehl, P. E. (1967). Theory testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox. Philosophy of Science, 34 (2), 103–115. Mill, J. S. (1859/2001). On liberty. Batoche Books Reprint. Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior. Henry Holt and Company. Miller, H. K. (1997). “The Times They Were a-changing”: A study of popular protest songs, 1963–1970. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/stu dentwork/2839 Mises, L. (1949/1966). Human action (3rd ed.). Contemporary Books. Now Foundation for Economic Freedom. Mitchell, J. (1997). Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 88, 355–383. Montegue, F. C. (1885). The limits of individual liberty. Rivington. Montequieu, (1748/1777). The spirit of the laws (Vol. 1). English translation 1777. Online Library of Liberty. Ott, J. (2020). The pretense of knowledge: On the insidious presumptions of artificial intelligence. Cosmos + Taxis, 8(10+11), 60–65. Pattee, H. H. (2012). Laws, language and life. Springer.

304

References

Peirce, C. S. (1992). Reasoning and the logic of things: The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898 (K. I. Kettner, Ed.). Harvard University Press. Polanyi, M. (1951). The logic of liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted by Liberty Fund. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. Harper and Row. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday. Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and being. University of Chicago Press. Popper, K. R. (1934/1959/1992). The logic of scientific discovery. Harper & Row. Now Routledge Classics. Popper, K. R. (1950/1962/2020). The open society and its enemies (2 vols.). (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row. Now Princeton University Press, one volume format from 2013. Popper, K. R. (1963/2014). Conjectures and refutations. Harper & Row. Now Routledge Classics. Popper, K. R. (1974). Intellectual autobiography and replies to my critics. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper. Open Court, 3–181; 961–1297. Crickett Media. Popper, K. R., & Eccles, J. C. (1977). The self and its brain: An argument for interactionism. Springer International. Post, E. (1943). Formal reductions of the general combinatorial decision problem. American Journal of Mathematics, 65, 197–215. Post, E. (1965). Absolutely unsolvable problems and relatively undecidable propositions-account of an anticipation. In M. Davis (Ed.), The undecidable: Basic papers on undecidable propositions, unsolvable problems and computable functions (pp. 340–433). Raven Press. Postal, P. (1963). Limitations of phrase structure grammars. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall. Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. M.I.T. Press. Quirk Cort, M. E. (2013). The power of lyrical protest: Examining the rhetorical function of protest songs in the 2000s. Rochester Institute of Technology. http://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses Robinson, D. N. (1981). An intellectual history of psychology. Macmillan. Rosenblueth, A., & Weiner, N. (1945). The role of models in science. Philosophy of Science, 12(4), 316–321. Rousseau, H. (1968). The social contract. Penguin Classics. Text in the Public Domain. Russell, B. (1903/2009). The principles of mathematics. Cambridge University Press. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd, and Taylor & Francis.

References

305

Russell, B. (1918/2004). Proposed roads to freedom: Socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism. George Allen & Unwin. Cosimo Classics. Russell, B. (1926). Freedom in society. Harpers Magazine. Russell, B. (1927/1960). Philosophy. W.W. Norton Russell, B. (1927/1972). Selected papers of Bertrand Russell. Modern Library. Russell, B. (1927/2009). An outline of philosophy. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1931/2009). The scientific outlook. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1934/2009). Freedom and organization, 1814–1914. George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1935/1997). Religion and science. Thornton Butterworth. Now Oxford University Press. Russell, B. (1944/2004). Reply to criticisms. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Bertrand Russell (pp. 681–741). Northwestern University Press, Cricket Media. Russell, B. (1945/2004). A history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster. Now Routledge Classics. Copyright by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Taylor & Francis. Russell, B. (1948/2009). Human knowledge its scope and limits. Simon and Schuster. Routledge Classics. Russell, B. (1950/1969). What desires are politically important? In H. Frenz (Ed.), Nobel lectures: Literature 1901–1967 . Elsevier. Russell, B. (1956/2021). Portraits from memory. Simon & Schuster, Routledge. Russell, B. (1969/2010). The autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Vol. 3). George Allen & Unwin. Now Routledge Classics. Russell, B., & Whitehead, A. N. (1913). Principia mathematica (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind . University of Chicago Press. Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos. Random House. Saint-Simon, H. (1953). Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) selected writings (F. M. H. Markham, Ed., and Trans.). Macmillan. Sampson, G. (1979). Liberty and language. Oxford University Press. Sandbach, F. (1978). The rise and fall of the Limits of Growth debate. Social Studies of Science, 8, 495–520. Schabas, M., & Wennerlind, C. (2020). A philosopher’s economist: Hume and the rise of capitalism. The University of Chicago Press. Schultz, D. (1981). A history of modern psychology (3rd ed.). Academic Press.

306

References

Schumpeter, J. (1954). History of economic analysis (E. B. Schumpeter, Ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Skinner, B. F. (1938/1976). The behavior of organisms. Appleton-CenturyCrofts. Skinner, B. F. (1948/1976/2005). Walden two (Rev. ed.). Macmillan, Hackett Publishing Company. Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 57 , 193–216. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. Meredith. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. A. A. Knopf. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Random House. Skinner, B. F. (1979/1985). The shaping of a behaviorist. A. A. Knopf, New York University Press. Smith, A. (1759/1976/2006). The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford University Press; Dover Reprints. Smith, A. (1776/1948/1977). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nation (E. Cannan, Ed.). University of Chicago Press. Sowell, T. (1995). The vision of the annointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy. Basic Books. Sowell, T. (2009). Intellectuals and society. Basic Books. Sowell, T. (2013). Intellectuals and race. Basic Books. Spencer, N. (1973). Differences between linguists and nonlinguists in intuitions of grammaticality-acceptability. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 83–98. Stevens, S. S. (1951). Mathematics, measurement, and psychophysics. In S. S. Stevens (Ed.), Handbook of experimental psychology (pp. 1–49). Wiley. Stillinger, J. (Ed.). (1961). The early draft of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography. University of Illinois Press. Talmon, J. L. (1952). The rise of totalitarian democracy. Beacon Press. Theraulez, G., & Bonabeau, E. (1999). A brief history of stigmergy. Artificial Life, 5, 97–116. Thucydides. (1972). Pericles’ funeral oration from the Peloponnesian War (Book 2.34–46). Printed in full in Fordham University Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, also Penguin Random House. Thyer, B. A. (2007). On the possible influence of Bertrand Russell on B. F. Skinner’s approach to education. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40 (3), 587.

References

307

Trendler, G. (2009). Measurement theory, psychology and the revolution that cannot happen. Theory & Psychology, 19 (5), 579–599. Vico, G. (1725/2002). Scienza Nuova. The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744 Edition) (L. Pompa, Ed., and Trans). Cambridge University Press. Viner, J. (1966). Adam Smith and Laissez Faire. In J. M. Clark, P. H. Douglas, J. H. Hollander, G. R. Morrow, M. Palyi, & J. Viner. Adam Smith, 1777– 1926. A. M. Kelley (originally 1928). von Humboldt, W. (1854). The sphere and duties of government. Online Library of Liberty. von Leyden, W. (Ed.). (1954/2002). John Locke: Essays on the law of nature. Oxford University Press. von Neumann, J. (1966). Theory of self-reproducing automata (A. Burks, Ed.). University of Illinois Press. Weimer, W. B. (1973). Psycholinguistics and Plato’s paradoxes of the Meno. American Psychologist, 28, 15–33. Weimer, W. B. (1974). The history of psychology and its retrieval from historiography: Part 1. Science Studies, 4, 235–258. Weimer, W. B. (1975). The psychology of inference and expectation: Some preliminary remarks. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 430–486). University of Minnesota Press. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weimer, W. B. (1987). Spontaneously ordered complex phenomena and the unity of the sciences. In G. Radnitzky (Ed.), Centripedal forces in the sciences (Vol. 1, pp. 257–296). Paragon House. Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59. Whately, R. (1831). Introductory lectures on political economy. B. Fellowes. Wheeler, H. (1966). Harvey Wheeler on the rise and fall of liberal democracy. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Whitehead, A. N. (1933/1967). Adventures of ideas. The Free Press. Whyte, W. H. (1956). The organization man. Simon and Schuster. Wilkowski, C. (2015). Use of rhetoric in 1960s protest music: A case study of Bob Dylan’s music (Rollins College Honors Program Thesis). http://scholarshipr ollins.edu/honors Wundt, W. (1902). Ethics: the facts of the moral life (E. B. Titchener, J. H. Gulliver, & M. F. Washburn, Eds.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Xenophon. (1918). Helenica, I, vii, 12–16 (C. L. Brownson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Index

A

abandonment of liberalism for social equality (J. S. Mill) 161 abduction, as method (Peirce) 104 abduction (Peirce) 4 abstract society, as law by Nomos 202 Academic scribbler, Keynes vii academic scribbler, Keynes 170 accidents and prediction, H. B. Acton on 53 acquaintance, role in structural realism 128 adaptation 280 affirmative action, as legally sanctioned discrimination 264 affirmative action, in education 271 affirmative action programs 282 affirming the consequent fallacy 246 agency 256

alienation and depersonalization, in modern society 265 ambiguity, tolerance for 256 anarchism as an ideal, Chomsky 105 anarchist libertarianism 172 ant and the grasshopper, fable of 186 argument from design 279 Aristotle, as father of distributive justice 33 arrest all change, Plato doctrine 150 associationism 237 autonomic nervous system 241 the “autonomous” man within 124

B

baby boomers 171 big is bad, small is beautiful 122 Bloomsbury Group 84 British associationism 235

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume I, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94858-0

309

310

Index

British empiricism 235

C

Camelot (Kennedy era), as myth of the Golden age 293 capitalists, chasing after money 185 Cartesian concept of culture, as accumulated error 38 Cartesian philosophy, as justificationist 39 Cartesian rationalism, as not reconcilable with evolution 289 Cartesian reason, as explicit and sovereignty 38 catallactic order 138 catallactic order, has no common ends 262 catallactics, definition 269 catallaxy 282 catallaxy versus taxis organization 131 categorical imperative, Russell on 65 category mistake (Ryle) 228 causal arrow, between social order and reason 287 Chomsky, as rationalist 74 Chomsky linguistics, opposed to evolutionary explanations 290 “clear case” concept 93 clear cases, as data for linguistics 100, 101 Club of Rome 154 cognitive psychology 89 competence, ambiguity of conception (Chomsky) 291 competence and performance 90

competition, as a discovery procedure 261 competition as evil, Russell 78 competition, as method of growth and progress 219 conceptual nature of facts (factual relativity) 237 confirmation theory 101 conscious-unconscious distinction 285 conservatism, defined as opposed to any change 140 Conspiracy theories 282 control, by contingencies of reinforcement 114 control, to reduce a cosmos to a taxis 121 conventional (nomo) 21 convention, as artifactual, distinguished from natural and deliberate (Ferguson) 212 convention as social, tacit and advantageous (Hume) 213 convention, defined 214 cosmos 34 Covid 19 183 Covid 19 pandemic, as conspiracy 283 cradle-to-grave socialism 188 creativity and competence 211 creativity, as “anything goes” in society, versus rule governed in language 107 creativity, as external control 118 creativity, as the central problem of language 95 creativity or productivity 257 critical race theory 157 critical race theory, origin of 165

Index

criticism as the attempt to prove (justificationism) 243 Cultural Marxism 136 culture (Leviathan), as ultimate social controller 125

D

Darwinians before Darwin 288 deduction, definition 229 deep structure ambiguity 92 deliberate (thesei) 21 descriptivism, as essence of science 130 determinism, falsified by modern physics 248 disaffected youth 170 disco era 186 discrimination, ending 272 distributive justice, as atavism to tribalism 208 distributive justice, in Nicomachean ethics 69 division of knowledge 10, 258 division of labor 219 dogmatic slumbers, Kant 229

E

economics, central problem of 258 economy of knowledge 257 education and discipline, Russell on 106 egalitarianism and nativism, Chomsky on 108 emergent properties, resulting from individual actions 278 emotionality, central in youth disaffection 187

311

empirical element, in social science 259 English common law, as private law 29, 201 equality of outcome 272 evolution and individualism, Humboldt 231 evolutionary epistemology 12 evolutionary selection, as competition 132 evolution, as invisible in the present 254

F

Fabian socialists 192 face-to-face cooperation, benevolent 177 factual relativity 13 faculty of language 111 falsificationist methodology, Chomsky 101 fear of private property, Russell on 68 fixed pie competition 133 forced to accept freedom, Rousseau 43 Frankfurt School 157 freed intelligence (Dewey) 160 freedom 20 freedom and dignity, as “outmoded” concepts 123 freedom and “don’t do’s” 182 freedom, as a standing obligation 70 freedom as organization, Comte 49 freedom as power (Bacon) 6 freedom, defined as freedom from want 151 free lunch, no such thing 183

312

Index

G

I

general rules, as equal constraints on all 263 general will, Rousseau 43 generation gap, in parent-teenager tension 188 the “given” cannot be taken (as not theoretical) 104 given in experience cannot be taken as such 129 guild socialism, Russell 105

ignorance and uncertainty in catallaxy, indispensability of 262 impotence of statistics in explanation of language 101 inductive logic 101 inductivism 4, 237 inductivism-deductivism 93 Industrial Revolution 76 inequality, of all individuals (subjects) 270 instant rational assessment 241 inversion of meaning of natural law, as leading to legal positivism 31 invisible hand 261 invisible hand passage, Adam Smith 221

H

happiness, as a goal, cannot be reached 86 happiness as goal of life and ethics, Russell on 66 hierarchy of sciences, Comte 46 historical relativism 142 historicism 51 historiography 14 history, as rational reconstruction 18 Hobbes’ Leviathan: society as an organism 39 Hobbes, as empiricist 74 Hobbes, on one free choice 40 humanitarian, Russell’s definition 64 Hume, as evolutionary epistemologist 236 Hume, constant conjunction 224 Hume, David intellectual legacy 252 Hume, on cause and effect 223

J

justice as blind to the particular, from the stoics 148 justificationism, as incompatible with evolution 244 justificationism, as knowledge is justified true belief 2 justificationist rationality, breakdown in 267 Justinian, as law codifier 28 just or fair game, definition 263

K

Kant, and positive morals 228 Keynesian economic interventionism 80

Index

knowledge, as justified true belief (justificationism) 243 knowledge, cannot be just capacity to predict 248

L

laissez faire, Russell versus Viner on 60 language acquisition, as innate 99 language acquisition, as unfolding of capacity (Ferguson) 211 Law as “disrespected” 179 law as impersonal, Roman Stoics 26 laws of associationism 235 legal positivism 27, 28 Liberal, brief definition xi liberalism, and the status quo 138 liberalism, as both political theory and the organization of society 242 liberalism, as repudiating democracy that is sovereign 222 liberalism as vague, Russell 74 liberalism, not a political theory 14 liberating tolerance (Marcuse) 159 libertarianis, as French traditional 42 liberty, providing room for the unexpected 209 living with ambiguity, as never-ending adaptation 268 Locke, as father of constitutionalism 57

M

the man of system 127 Adam Smith on 127 “the man within” Skinner 115, 129

313

market cooperation, impersonal 177 market order, as knowledge transmission system 257 market order, cannot will results 282 mentalism 90 mention versus use in Chomsky 110 mercantile man 143 mercantilism 84 “merely legal liberty” Dewey 142 methodological collectivism, definition 278 methodological individualism 4 definition 278 methodological positivism and phenomenalism, Comte 47 military-industrial complex 157 mind and culture, as concurrent developments 255 mind-body problem 109, 110 modus ponens and modus tollens, logical asymmetry between 246 money, as evil 183 myth of the Golden Age 181

N

nationalism 79 nativism, in language learning 97 natural laws, natural rights 216 natural (physei) 21 natural versus conventional 18 negative rules 172 negative rules, indispensability 181 neojustificationism and probability, instead of provability 103 neoteny, prolonged in humans 291 New Deal (Roosevelt) 141 Nomos and thesis 225

314

Index

Nomos, as essential negative 207 Nomos, as keeping the peace of the order 204 Nomos, as law that sets boundaries of personal domains 203 non-justificational philosophy 95, 96 normal science (Kuhn) 126 normal science, turns the cosmos into a taxis 246

O

operationalist’s fallacy, Feigl 129 opinion, does not prescribe particular goals 222 order, as both mechanism of creativity and mechanism of knowledge transmission 260 organismic model, of society 279 organization and equality 79 organization and equality, as “logical successor” to liberty, Russell 77 organization of society, Saint-Simon 45 organization, result of prescriptions 24

P

“paradox of positivism” Comte 48 particular-abstract 287 pattern prediction, versus prediction of particulars 289 philosophical solipsism 224 physical nature as “determined by schedules of reinforcement” 117 physiological a priorism 240 piecemeal engineering 139

Plato, thesis of arrest all change 23 Popper, Karl on associationism 244 positive reinforcement, as working in a taxis 127 “positive rights” in progressivism 151 primacy of the abstract 10, 215 primary narcissism, in youth 184 the “primitive” studied by the anthropologist 254 private property, as control by choice 85 private property, as determined by public appraisals 82 private property, hatred of 182 productivity and creativity 91 progressive education 174 progressivism defined xii, 8 property 58, 59, 172, 192 defined 205 property, as basis of the law of liberty 205 property owner, rights 182 property rights, as human rights 81 property rights, definition 81 proprietary community 151 psycholinguistics 89 pure theory of law and legal positivism 51 Pyrronian skepticism 224

Q

quest for certainty, as a religion, Russell on 67

Index

315

R

S

racial discrimination 171 radical behaviorism 113 rainbow fish, theory of equality 194 Rationalist constructivism defined ix rationalist constructivism 3 defined 5 reason and natural law, as Roman positivus 30 reason, as modeling 255 reason, as slave of passions 238 reductio ad absurdum 240 renascent liberalism as freedom from want (Dewey) 161 renascent liberalism, Dewey 141 “res cogitans” 52 results of human action but not design 11 Ricardo’s law of association 271 Ricardo theory of rent 77 rights as not claims against society 153 rights, as unalienable 216 rights versus entitlements 193 rock and roll, as teenage rebellion 191 rock and roll, becoming self conscious 190 Rousseau, as libertarian 74 rule by majority opinion versus majority will 222 rules, as having functions but not purposes 149 rules, as necessary for adaptation due to ignorance of particulars 149

science, as advancing by refutations 238 science, as nothing but contingencies of reinforcement 116 science as purely descriptive, Skinner 119 science, government directs and of research and interference 273 science, hypothetico-deductive approach to 228 scientism 146, 147 defined 6 Scientism, brief definition ix the self, as a bundle of sensations (Hume) 234 the Skinner box 120 social, cannot be reduced to the psychological 284 social collectives, as interactions of individuals 284 social contract 24 social equality, substituted for liberty 141 socialism, and the distribution problem 15 socialism, as based upon collectivist control 15 socialism, as response to capitalism 76 socialism, response to machine production 75 social justice 181 social wholes, as causal 279 society as deterministic, Hobbes 52 society, as having no purposes 152 society, has spontaneous social order 216 Socratic Maiutic 99

316

Index

song licensing, as guild socialism 193–194 sovereignty 20 spontaneous market order, origin 260 spontaneous order, as tending toward dynamic equilibrium 207 spontaneous order of the market, function of 144 spontaneous orders, and emergence 280 stigmergy, Grassé 230 Stoics, as “paradoxers” 21 structural realism 4 supply and demand, Skinner on 131 surface-deep structure 132 surface-deep structure distinction 90 surface structure ambiguity 92 surfing-deep distinction 287 survival of the fittest, for human conventions 242 syntax versus semantics 92 T

tacit dimension 10, 11, 225 take over of scientific research, by progressivism 156 taxis 34 taxis law, as legislation by thesis 202

thinking, as a form of discrimination 155 traditional education, failure of 175 tradition and innovation, tension between 266 tradition, as rules of conduct independent of the individuals 255 transformational rules 92 tribal organization versus spontaneous ordering 202

U

utilitarianism 146 utilitarianism, Benthamite 58, 222 utility as a means to an end (Hume) 163 utility as the end (Bentham) 163

V

verifiability theory of cognitive significance (logical positivism) 238 votes for oysters, Russell on 62

Z

zeitgeist 57 definition 292