Virtue and economy : essays on morality and markets 9781472412560, 1472412567, 9781472412577, 1472412575, 9781472412584, 1472412583

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Virtue and economy

Rethinking Political and International Theory Series editors: Keith Breen, dan Bulley and Susan mcmanus, all at Queens university Belfast, uK committed to show you in what ways traditional approaches in political and international theory may be applied to twenty-irst century politics, this series will present inventive and pioneering theoretical work designed to build a common framework for the latest scholarly research on political theory and international relations. intended to be international and interdisciplinary in scope, the series will contain works which advance our understanding of the relevance of seminal thinkers to our current socio-political context(s) as well as problematise and offer new insights into key political concepts and phenomena within the arena of politics and international relations. Also in the series revolutionary Subjectivity in Post-marxist thought Laclau, negri, Badiou Oliver Harrison ISBN 978 1 4724 2133 3 Human rights, Human dignity, and cosmopolitan ideals essays on critical theory and Human rights Edited by Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Amos Nascimento iSBn 978 1 4094 4295 0 Knowing al-Qaeda the epistemology of terrorism Edited by Christina Hellmich and Andreas Behnke iSBn 978 1 4094 2366 9 real Green Sustainability after the end of nature Manuel Arias-Maldonado iSBn 978 1 4094 2409 3 the Politics of misrecognition Edited by Simon Thompson and Majid Yar iSBn 978 1 4094 0169 8

Virtue and Economy Essays on Morality and Markets

edited by andriuS BieLSKiS Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania KeLVin KniGHt London Metropolitan University, UK

First published 2015 by ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by routledge 2 Park Square, milton Park, abingdon, oxon oX14 4rn 711 third avenue, new york, ny 10017, uSa Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business copyright © andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight 2015 andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight have asserted their right under the copyright, designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiied as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiication and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Bielskis, andrius, 1973– Virtue and economy : essays on morality and markets / by Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight. pages cm. – (Rethinking political and international theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1256-0 (hardback) 1. Economics–Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Economics–Philosophy. I. Knight, Kelvin. II. Title. HB72.B53 2015 174’.4–dc23 ISBN: 9781472412560 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315548067 (ebk)

2014041309

In memory of truly virtuous men: Antanas Andrius Bielskis, an excellent scientist and opera singer, and Vincent Stanley Nickels Knight, an excellent electronic engineer and beekeeper.

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Contents

List of Contributors

ix

introduction Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight

1

PART I

The VIRTue CRITIque of CAPITALIsT eConomy

1

the irrelevance of ethics Alasdair MacIntyre

2

neoliberalism and its threat to moral agency Bob Brecher

23

3

economics as ethical Pre-condition of the credit crunch William Dixon and David Wilson

33

4

is aristotelian capitalism Possible? Rajeev Sehgal

55

PART II

PoLemICIsIng The CRITIque

5

equality, Vulnerability and independence John O’Neill

6

no Place to Hide for the moral Self: Bureaucratic individualism and the Fate of ethics in modernity Peter McMylor

7

8

7

reappraising neoliberalism: Homo Economicus, Practitioners and Practices Mustafa Ongun the Great Perverting transformation Niko Noponen

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95

109

135

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PART III

ALTeRnATIVes To CAPITALIsT eConomy

9

Goods, interests and the Language of morals Piotr Machura

10

Formalising Functions: the History of a Passing challenge to capitalist economy Kelvin Knight

155

171

11

towards a critical ethical economy Russell Keat

191

12

How is ethical revolution Possible? Buket Korkut Raptis

213

13

Anti-Capitalist Politics and Labour for the Twenty-irst century: History and Future challenges Andrius Bielskis

Index

229

249

viii

List of Contributors

Andrius Bielskis is Professor of Political theory at mykolas romeris university and one of the leading public intellectuals in Lithuania. Previously, he was Professor at iSm university of management and economics. Professor Bielskis is also the director of demoS institute of critical thought. He is the author of many scholarly articles, of the books The Unholy Sacrament. Ideology, Faith, and the Politics of Emancipation (demos, 2014), Towards a Post-Modern Understanding of the Political (Palgrave, 2005), and is the editor of Democracy Without Labour Movement? (Kitos knygos, 2009). His research focuses on the utilisation of virtue ethics in constructing an alternative political, economic and institutional order in the post-modern world. currently, he is also an adviser to the Prime Minister of Lithuania, Algirdas Butkevičius. Bob Brecher is Professor of moral Philosophy at the university of Brighton, director of its centre for applied Philosophy, Politics & ethics and co-director of the Understanding Violent Conlict Research Cluster. He has published over sixty articles in moral theory, applied ethics and politics, healthcare and medical ethics, sexual politics, terrorism and the politics of higher education. His latest book, Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) is the irst book-length rebuttal of calls to legalise interrogational torture. currently he is working on a theory of morality as practical reason, building on his earlier Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality (routledge, 1997). a past president of the association for Legal and Social Philosophy, he is also on the Board of a number of academic journals and co-editor of rowman and Littleield International’s Off The Fence series. William Dixon is currently a lecturer in the Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law, London metropolitan university. He researches economic theory especially as its assumptions and methods relate to political, social, ethical and business issues. He is currently researching with david Wilson the importance of moral competence in relation to the emergence of money, economics, the corporation and the conduct of banking, especially relating to the banking crisis. the core ideas of this work have appeared in A History of Homo Economicus; the Nature of the Moral in Economic theory (routledge, 2012).

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Russell Keat is emeritus Professor of Political theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the university of edinburgh. current research interests are in political theory and market economies, including issues about the boundaries between market and non-market spheres, consumer sovereignty and cultural goods, and the ethical implications of market institutions and varieties of capitalism. Publications in this area include Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (Palgrave, 2000) and two collections co-edited with n. abercrombie and n. Whiteley, Enterprise Culture (routledge, 1991) and The Authority of the Consumer (routledge, 1994). earlier research included work on the philosophy of the social sciences (Social Theory as Science, with J. urry, routledge, 1975/82), Habermas’s critical theory (The Politics of Social Theory, university of chicago Press, 1981) and phenomenology (Understanding Phenomenology, with m. Hammond and J. Howarth, Blackwell, 1991). Kelvin Knight is reader in ethics and Politics at London metropolitan university and director of caSeP, the centre for contemporary aristotelian Studies in ethics and Politics. He is author of Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre (Polity Press, 2007) and of many essays, a founding editor of Nations and Nationalism, editor of The MacIntyre Reader (Polity Press/university of notre dame Press, 1998), and co-editor of Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Lucius & Lucius, 2008) and Virtue and Politics (university of notre dame Press, 2011). He is presently writing a monograph on philosophy and politics in the history of human rights. Buket Korkut Raptis holds a Phd in philosophy from the university of notre dame, uSa. She worked as a postdoctoral scholar at notre dame and is now Assistant Professor at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Turkey. She is an author of several scholarly articles on nietzsche, aristotle and macintyre. Piotr machura is assistant Professor of ethics at the university of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. in his work he combines aristotelian political and ethical ideas with those of continental hermeneutics. He deals with the concept of moral ideals as well as with the problems of individual and social identity, moral education and practical conduct. Alasdair macIntyre has written widely in philosophy since his irst book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953). He has taught at oxford university, Princeton university, Brandeis university, Boston university, Wellesley college, Vanderbilt university, duke university and the university of notre dame, where he was research fellow in the center for ethics and culture before moving to caSeP at London metropolitan university as Senior research Fellow. His After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (duckworth and university of notre dame Press, x

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2007, 3rd edn.) remains the most important text in the reestablishment of virtue ethics. He has made great contributions to the history of philosophy, to moral philosophy, to the philosophy of politics and of the social sciences, and, especially, to the renewal of aristotelianism and to its challenge to rival traditions. His recent books include an examination of the philosophical work of edith Stein set against the background of twentieth century phenomenology entitled Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue (Rowman & Littleield, 2005; Continuum, 2006), God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Rowman & Littleield, 2009), and two volumes of his selected essays, The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and Politics (both cambridge uP, 2006). Peter mcmylor is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the university of manchester. He is the author of Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (routledge, 1994) and continues to work on the relationship between morality, ethics and religion to social and political theory, and on intellectuals as bearers of ethical resources and identities. niko noponen has worked as a high school teacher since teaching philosophy until 2003 at the university of Helsinki, from where he holds a PhD. He has translated Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue into Finnish (Hyveiden jäljillä, Gaudeamus, 2004), co-edited Kiista yhteismaista (niin & näin, 2011) on environmental and political philosophy, and published many papers on aristotelianism and ethics. He now writes on the leftist and local implications of our republican inheritance. John o’neill is Professor in Political economy at the university of manchester. Previously, he was Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster university. He has also held posts at the university of Sussex and the university of Wales. He is currently co-director of the Political Economy Institute and is director of the ma in Political Economy. Professor O’Neill is also a member of the Society and Environment research Group and the centre for democracy and elections. He is on the editorial boards of a number of journals including New Political Economy, The Journal of Applied Philosophy, Environmental Values and Historical Materialism. He has been involved in a number of european projects on environmental policy. He also is an author of over 80 scholarly articles and ive books (including Markets, Deliberation and Environment, routledge, 2007). mustafa ongun has studied Philosophy at the middle east technical university and Political theory at London metropolitan university. He is currently working on his Phd at the contemporary aristotelian Studies in ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University, in which he brings Alasdair MacIntyre’s social xi

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and political philosophy into engagement with that of michel Foucault with particular attention to the modern forms of economic rationality. Rajeev sehgal is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the university of roehampton. His research interests are in contemporary theories of social justice; the history, nature and future of capitalism; the social science and philosophy of Karl Marx; the ethics of Aristotle; and the Neo-Aristotelian moral and political philosophy of alasdair macintyre. He is currently working on two book projects on Karl Marx’s Aristotelian Communism and Class, Power and Morality. David Wilson has been a lecturer in previous versions of economics departments at London metropolitan university and London Guildhall university. He is currently engaged in research with William dixon on the importance of moral competence in relation to the emergence of money, economics, the corporation and the conduct of banking, especially relating to the banking crisis. the key theory for this work appears in A History of Homo Economicus; the Nature of the Moral in Economic Theory (routledge, 2012).

xii

Introduction andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight

this collection of chapters is designed to explore the relationship between ethics and political economy in the light of the recent economic crisis. Some of these chapters were originally presented at the international Society for macintyrean enquiry conference ‘Virtue and economic crises’, which took place at mykolas romeris university in Vilnius in 2010. the underlying presupposition of the book is that orthodox neoclassical political economy ought to be challenged, theoretically and practically. one way of doing so is through an appropriation of aristotelian virtue ethics. there has been a growing interest in aristotelian philosophy over the past 20 years. A number of important books have been published especially in the ield of aristotelian practical philosophy. Some of the most notable examples of the work done in this area are by theorists such as alasdair macintyre, martha nussbaum, Philippa Foot, nancy Sherman, to name but a few. However, so far aristotelian practical philosophy has been strong on ethics and politics, but it has been much weaker on economics. This volume seeks to ill the lacuna. despite a continuous critique of neoliberal economic policy from a variety of theoretical points of view, the dominant economic reasoning still takes instrumental rationality and individual preference maximisation as the philosophically unquestioned premise of rationality. this commonplace assumption is the long-standing consequence of the tradition of the Humean divide between fact and value and its methodological rejection of any ethical considerations from economic reasoning. one of the underlying themes of this book is the opposite. We argue that ethical reasoning about human ends is essential to any economy and that economic theorising should necessarily start from the notion of ethically justiiable human needs and desires. Therein lies the importance of aristotelian teleology and virtue ethics. the concepts of zoon politikon, of human cooperation, and of human practices aiming at their internal goods are essential for any theoretical attempt to envisage economy beyond the dictums of proit and of preference maximisation. Thus a serious attempt to engage in rethinking economy in this way should aim to answer the questions of what it is to live and engage in ethical consumption and ethical production today. can an aristotelian understanding of the good life and aristotle’s teleological conception of ethics be practiced within the institutional framework of capitalist

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economy and if it cannot (as alasdair macintyre and rajeev Sehgal argue in their chapters) how can we reform and create new socioeconomic institutions which would allow individuals to do so? these presuppose both theoretical and normative relections on the possible past and future alternatives to the dominant capitalist economic order (russell Keat, Buket Korkut-raptis and Piotr machura present possible alternatives to contemporary neoliberal economic reasoning, whilst Kelvin Knight relects on past alternatives). It also requires posing the question of power and political subjectivity in order to advance some of these badly needed theoretical alternatives (andrius Bielskis’s, among other things, discusses the strength and weaknesses of anti-capitalist politics). of course, it would be wrong to pretend that this volume provides answers to these dificult questions. The irst part of the volume, ‘The Virtue Critique of capitalist economy’, criticises neoliberal capitalism. alasdair macintyre argues that the academic discipline of business ethics is irrelevant to the conduct of business and distracts from enquiry into what is morally wrong in such activity. Similarly, Bob Brecher argues that neo-liberalism transforms people into egoists, that the logic of capitalist markets renders morality merely ‘personal’, and, consequently, that neo-liberalism is inimical to morality as such. William dixon and david Wilson extend this line of reasoning in arguing that a further consequence is our recent recession, which was caused by bankers’ entirely amoral approach to risk. Whatever its occasional merits in terms of eficiency and utility, neo-liberalism’s separation of economics from politics excludes from economic reasoning any broader wisdom about practice. not only does the neoliberal conception of rationality of preference maximisation presuppose an atomistic notion of human agency; it has institutionalised and indeed produced social atomism and alienation. to paraphrase Karl Polanyi’s thesis (discussed by niko noponen), although the mills of the great transformation have been spinning for at least two centuries, they reached a new phase by the end of the twentieth century when the remains of post-war compromise politics and the institutions of embedded social economy were destroyed by neoliberal theory and practice. the two greatest theorists of neoliberalism were Friedrich von Hayek and milton Friedman, whose ideas informed radical policies of marketisation. the economists of the chicago school incorporated Keynesianism in order to reject it. They argued that too great a supply of money will produce inlation detrimental to the whole economy. this lesson was soon learned by the key policy makers and so market deregulation, privatisation, attacks on organised labour movement followed. the economic institutions of neoliberal capitalism brought about a huge reduction of the public sector and of capital controls, whilst ixed currency rates were abandoned and the sole principles of economic eficiency became competitiveness and higher proits. Even the public sector and public management had to be reorganised in terms of greater eficiency, 2

InTRoduCTIon

understood as customers’ preference maximisation through the implementation of so-called new public management. the pitfalls of the latter in the case of the BBc are discussed by mustafa ongun within the broad theoretical frameworks of michel Foucault and, better, of alasdair macintyre. it is in this context that the relevance of aristotle’s critique of limitless money-making – chrematistike – for our attempt to understand capitalist economy becomes important. aristotle’s critique of money-making (moneycommodity-money, to put it in marxist terms) is ethical in as much as it is informed by his virtue ethics, developed in his Nicomachean Ethics. thus, as many neo-aristotelians have argued, Politics should be read together with Nicomachean Ethics: production and consumption within household management (oikonomia) and money-making for the sake of more wealth (chrematistike) are ethically mediated activities, the practical implications of which become evident only within a broader institutional context of the political community or polis. From aristotle’s point of view there is something ethically irrational in the process of capital accumulation, not only because there is no limit to it but also because it is prone to the vice of acquisitiveness. the authors of this volume argue that a well-functioning political community should control the creation of wealth and its equitable distribution. thus what we further need to ask is: what is the role of the state in tempering markets to ensure that they serve the ethical needs of communities? this is one of the key questions addressed by russell Keat, amongst others. this question needs further research and philosophical relection. the book’s second part builds on alasdair macintyre’s work. ‘Polemicising the critique’ utilises macintyre’s philosophically rich theoretical apparatus to relect on and to critique dominant economic institutions and neoliberal economic policy. this part brings the virtue critique into testing engagement with rival traditions and arguments. So John o’neill, for example, engages with macintyre’s aristotelian conception of human dependence, as well as with adam Smith, Jean-Jacques rousseau, and richard titmuss, while Peter mcmylor compares alasdair macintyre’s critique of bureaucratic rationality in ‘advanced’ capitalist societies with that of Zygmunt Bauman. as such, this part presents macintyre’s neo-aristotelian critique of capitalist modernity within a context of social scientiic theory. the third part of the book, ‘alternatives to capitalist economy’, attempts to think through some badly needed alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Starting with a distinction between two kinds of institution – institutions of ownership of the means of production, and markets as institutions of resource allocation – it argues for a market socialism, broadly understood. this alternative need not be perceived in utopian terms, although the book’s concluding chapter suggests that it should be. Practice-based cooperative production seems far more compatible with German and Scandinavian coordinated market economies 3

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than with the neoliberal institutions of the uK and uS. yet questions about true alternatives remain. one of history’s lessons for the labour movement is that the social progress achieved by the left after the Second World War was made possible by the approximation of labour’s political inluence to that of capital. Labour then had bigger dreams than today, and the welfare state followed as a compromise between capital’s limitless extraction of surplus value and the democratic socialism aimed at by labour. To think through and relect on some of these alternatives is, no doubt, yet to be done.

4

PaRT I The Virtue Critique of Capitalist Economy

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Chapter 1

The Irrelevance of Ethics alasdair macintyre

at the end of Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates addresses a prayer to Pan and other local gods, a prayer that concludes: ‘may i think him rich who is wise; and of gold may i have only as much of it as a temperate man might bear and carry with him’. Plato’s thought is this: that we may measure ourselves and our activities either by the standards of wisdom and temperateness, the standards of the virtues, or by the standards of money, but that we cannot do both. We have to choose between them. yet we here now inhabit a culture in which on the one hand the truth of Plato’s thought is recurrently conirmed, while on the other our dominant economic institutions and our business schools continue to present themselves rhetorically as fostering and often attaining excellence by both standards. From time to time however it becomes impossible to avoid acknowledging that there is a problem. So it has been strikingly in the period following the largescale economic disasters that the capitalism of advanced modernity recently brought on itself and on the peoples of the world. it matters a good deal how we formulate those questions, since, if they are badly posed, we will misdirect our enquiries. and misdirected enquiries will lead to conclusions that are not just false, but that may conirm us in some of the modes of thought and action that generated the disasters. So it has been, i shall suggest, with much recent discussion of ethics and business activity, especially discussion of the place of ethics in business education. the presupposition of such discussion has been that individuals who went astray in their judgements and actions often did so only because they had failed to pay suficient heed to what the standards of the virtues enjoin and so had been morally misguided as to what standards should have guided them in their money-making activities. on this view it is not that there is anything about the activity of money-making as such that it is dificult to reconcile with the injunctions of the virtues. it is just that too often morally inadequate or misguided individuals have not understood what was required of them, if they were both to make money successfully and to conform to what the virtues require. What is missing in such individuals, so it is claimed, is an ethical dimension. and, if we are to have fewer such individuals in future, we must, it is

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concluded, provide for more strenuous teaching of ethics as part of a business education, perhaps indeed of education in general. ethics has of course been in vogue for quite some time: medical ethics, legal ethics, journalistic ethics, the ethics of this and of that. Whenever there is serious malpractice, the cry goes up: Bring on the teachers of ethics! So courses, programmes, academic appointments, centres, have multiplied. there is now money to be made in ethics, even if not all that much. Here i shall speak only of the teaching of ethics designed to be relevant to business, arguing irst that such teaching, like the academic teaching of ethics in general, has little or nothing to do with the formation of moral character and is ineffective as an instrument of moral transformation, and secondly that, in the case of business ethics, its teaching is a dangerous distraction from enquiry into the nature and causes of what is morally lawed in our economic institutions and activities. Begin from some facts about the teaching of ethics. First, there is no hard evidence of any kind that the teaching of ethics in academic courses has any effect whatsoever on the subsequent conduct of students in such courses. of course absence of evidence leaves open the possibility that such teaching is morally effective, although we do need to note that, even if it were the case that students who attended business schools in which the teaching of ethics was given special attention were found to behave better subsequently than the graduates of other business schools, this might be only because students of better moral character choose to attend business schools which attend to the teaching of ethics. We should however note that we do possess one piece of indirect evidence about the effects of the academic teaching of ethics, albeit evidence about its teachers, not its students. eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua rust have recently canvassed and reported on the moral evaluations of teachers of ethics by their colleagues in university and college philosophy departments. Their inding is that those colleagues ‘do not tend to see ethicists, in general, as particularly wellbehaved. indeed a substantial minority of non-ethicists asserted that ethicists on average behave morally worse than non-ethicists’ (Schwitzgebel and rust 2008: 1053). Given this, we should not be too surprised if the teaching of ethics turns out to fail as a remedy for bad behaviour. But we have a much better reason for not being surprised at this. everything that we already know of moral character should have suggested that attendance at courses on ethics, no matter how good the teacher, is bound to be ineffective. Why? Begin with the record of those notable, although not too numerous institutions that have had signiicant success in taking young people who have gone badly wrong and redirecting them into participation in constructive activities and worthwhile ways of life, some of them prisons for juvenile offenders or reform schools, some of them tough boarding schools, some of them providing the kind of basic training that the united States marine corps affords its recruits. 8

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uniformly such institutions succeed by subjecting the young to rigorous discipline, introducing them to testing activities in which they have to depend on others and become such that others can depend on them, learning a mode of common life, learning some trade, and always incurring penalties, if they fail to learn, until they have learned at last that failing to learn is itself the worst penalty. What such imposed discipline achieves, if successful, is a radical transformation of attitudes and habits, a transformation without which those who need it would be unable to hear, let alone to be persuaded by, arguments about how it is best for them to live. and we have only to say this to be reminded that it has already been said by aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. In order to attend to and learn from arguments, we must irst have certain predispositions of character, formed by right training and habituation (1179b2–31).this is why in the modern world of business ethics, although it is just those who lack the relevant character formation who most need a moral education, it is they who will be least able to beneit from academic courses in ethics. What then are the habits that we need to acquire, if we are to act as morally responsible agents? Let me select just four. i begin not from aristotle, but from d.W. Winnicott, whose psychoanalytic understanding of the inluence of mothers on very young children has still not been surpassed (Winnicot 1964 and 1971). What Winnicott taught us is that mothers of such children have to ind a mean between a too strict and a too indulgent regime. the outcome of an over strict regime is apt to be a child who is too compliant, too deferential to authorities and too yielding to circumstance, while the outcome of a too indulgent regime is apt to be a child insuficiently able to distinguish realities from the projections of her or his fantasies. and in our subsequent lives we need to strengthen those character traits that enable us to chart a way between, on the one hand, unrealistic conidence in ourselves and in our powers and, on the other, an overestimation of obstacles and dificulties. So a irst mark of moral character is a tempered realism about oneself, one’s powers, one’s self-knowledge. Those traits are closely related to dispositions that Aristotle identiied in his discussion of the virtue of courage, dispositions that are a second mark of the morally responsible agent. the courageous human being, on aristotle’s account, strikes a mean between rashness and cowardice. She or he is able to assess impending dangers accurately, to identify the resources available to confront those dangers, and to judge which risks it is reasonable to take and which are foolhardy, whether those risks are to her or himself or to others. But in any case the courageous agent puts her or himself on the line. if things go wrong, she or he will be among those who lose out. and this trait is in turn related to a third mark of morally responsible agents. their care for and commitment to particular others is not at the expense of their care for and commitment to themselves. and their care for and commitment to themselves is not at the 9

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expense of their care for and commitment to particular others. they are neither self-sacriicing altruists nor self-indulging egoists. What they have understood is that the achievement of their own good is inseparable from their achievement of some set of common goods, common goods shared with those others whom they encounter or on whom their lives impact in their various activities. a fourth characteristic of those with developed moral character is neither to focus on the present at the expense of the future nor on the future at the expense of the present. this involves understanding oneself as responsible not just for this or that set of actions, but for living out and for having lived out one’s life well or badly. it is to know which projects are to be persisted in, even when they are going badly, and which are to be set aside. it is to prefer honourable failure to dishonest success and to know what to do next when one fails. it is to understand the importance of contributing to projects that began before one was born and that will lourish long after one’s death. It is to know to what history one belongs. There are of course other signiicant marks of moral character, but attention to these four is instructive when we consider what is demanded of those at work in the inancial sector who trade in securities and currency, either on behalf of their irm’s clients or for their irm itself, that is, what personality traits seem indispensable for success as a trader. Begin with self-conidence. Adam Smith remarked that ‘the chance of gain is by every man more or less overvalued and the chance of loss by most men undervalued’ (Smith 2007: X, 70). traders, in order to be successful, need to communicate to their clients, to their employers, and most of all to themselves that their abilities and resourcefulness are such that gain can be conidently expected from their activities. And reports of how traders behave both when engaged hour after hour in complex and testing transactions and afterwards when celebrating success suggest that selfquestioning and self-doubt are states of mind that traders cannot afford to entertain. Studies by social psychologists provide persuasive evidence that it is those of us who have mildly depressive personalities who are most likely to see things as they are. It is dificult not to conclude that by contrast an ability to see things – including oneself – as more promising than they are is an essential ingredient in trading success. And here then is a irst respect in which the possession of a trait that is the mark of an agent with well developed moral character is generally incompatible with success as a trader. traders have to be too self-conident and therefore lacking in self-knowledge. turn now to risk-taking. traders want to be able to calculate risk accurately and they want to distribute risk, so that as much of it as possible is borne by other people. their wish to calculate risk accurately is in itself admirable. But it has very often misled overconident traders into believing that they could get from a formula what can only be supplied by good judgement. and this belief has been powerful enough to allow them to rely on formulas provided 10

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by others, formulas too often understood only imperfectly. in such cases bad judgement or at least an incapacity for good judgement has worn the mask of mathematical sophistication. one result of this has been that a wish to transfer as much risk as possible to others has been accompanied by either an inability or an unwillingness to explain either to those others or to oneself the nature and extent of the risk that is being taken on. So traders are apt to fail as risk-takers, unable to distinguish adequately between rashness, cowardice and courage, and they fail not because they fall short of their own professional standards, but just because and insofar as they conform to those standards. a third salient characteristic of traders is the line that they draw between those others whom they take into account when making professional decisions and those others whose fate they believe that they can safely ignore. on one side of that line are the traders themselves, the irm that employs them, most of their irm’s clients, and those on whose goodwill they may have to rely in future. on the other side lies everyone else, including those who are the victims of collateral damage resulting from transactions in the inancial markets. Speaking of the effects of the market crises of the 1990s on those who were both socially and geographically remote from those markets, the Governor of the Bank of england, mervyn King, noted that ‘in Korea unemployment tripled. in indonesia several years of economic growth were wiped out leading to political instability and similar results have been visible in other parts of asia as well as Latin america’ (speech at the Federal reserve Bank, September 9, 1999).yet, if such effects were remembered at all by analysts or traders during the next decade, it was only as contributions to the data that enabled them to assign probabilities to the various possible outcomes on which they were placing wagers. and it is clear that only by putting the larger human costs of transactions in the inancial markets out of mind that traders are able to function as they do, with their own severely limited versions of cost-beneit analysis. So their understanding of the relationship of their professional actions to the common goods that they share with others is inevitably and radically defective. Fourthly, the focus of traders has to be almost exclusively on the present and the near future. they are held strictly to account for short term successes and failures under conditions of extreme competitiveness in which immediate responsiveness to changing prices is required of them. their effectiveness is always under scrutiny and their annual self-reviews and reviews by their managers, reviews that determine the size of their income, deine their professional time horizons. thought of and for the longer term is professionally precluded. compare then point by point what on the one hand is required for the formation of moral character in respect of self-conidence and self-knowledge, in respect of risk-taking, in respect of regard for the relationships of the self to multifarious others, and in respect of time horizons, and on the other how traders are shaped by their professional norms. it is at once obvious that the 11

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differences are such that, were we successfully to impose on someone the kind of discipline that issues in the formation of genuine moral character, we would have disqualiied that someone from success as a trader and, most probably from employment as a trader. We have thus arrived at a second conclusion much stronger than our irst. Our irst conclusion was that we have no reason to believe that the teaching of courses in ethics effects any signiicant moral transformation in those subjected to them. our second conclusion is that, just as the successful training of a boxer will destroy his prospects as a violinist, so the inculcation of qualities of moral character is no way to prepare someone for a rewarding career in the inancial sector. Ethics is not just irrelevant. It is a probably insuperable disadvantage. to understand this conclusion it is important to note what i am not saying. i am not saying that traders are or are apt to be ‘bad’ people by any conventional standards. my conclusion holds of traders who are meticulous in their performance of their duties to their clients and their irms, who abstain scrupulously from bad professional behaviour. it is indeed because of and not in spite of their being good in this way that they fail by the standards that i have identiied as the standards of moral character. So it is easy to imagine as a vigorous rejoinder a complaint that i have simply not understood what ethics is or should be. and it would turn out if the quarrel resulting from this complaint were pursued that what divides me – and more importantly aristotle and aquinas – from the complainants is the view that each of us takes of human lourishing. note too that my thesis is not only about traders. it is true that trading is only one among several types of activity in the inancial sector. Investors, analysts, quants, managers of different kinds, all are unlike traders in various ways. But all of them are able to function as they do only because and insofar as traders function as they do. So that it is the inancial sector as a whole that is from the thomistic aristotelian point of view a school of bad character, while from the point of view of those at work in it, it is, if rightly conducted, a benevolent engine of growth, productive of goods conferred on very many people by a globalised and globalizing economy. How then did this conlict in points of view occur? the answer that i propose provides a third reason for regarding the standard teaching of ethics as irrelevant to the problems presented by the inancial sector. it is that those concerned with ethics in the last two hundred years, from whatever standpoint, became insuficiently concerned with money and those engaging with money became insuficiently concerned with ethics. What ethics became as a result and what the management of money became as a result are such that we no longer know how to connect them. The most that we can hope to do is irst, to understand the limitations of our present moral and intellectual condition, and then to ask how we can best live and act in that condition. 12

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in the thinking of the enlightenment it took a long time for the divorce between ethics and concerns with money to become as complete as it is today. Political economy was the offspring of moral philosophy and adam Smith after all wrote both The Theory of the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. But the former is now read in one set of courses by one set of students, while the latter is generally read only selectively – how seldom do we hear Smith (2007: X, 84) quoted as saying that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public … ’ – and, when it is read, it is by a very different set of students in other courses. John Stuart mill wrote both Utilitarianism and the Principles of Political Economy, but, while many students still read the former, very, very few now read the latter. my point is not just that postenlightenment academic ethics has gone one way and academic economics another, but that this divide is one symptom of a condition such that no one knows how to educate our culture into thinking coherently about money. So what is the problem set by the way we think about money? How do we think about money? In at least four ways. The irst provides a simple-minded starting-point, although it is of course the starting-point of aristotle and aquinas. the value of money is by them and by many of us much of the time taken to be no more and no less than the value of the goods which can be exchanged for it, so that we have no good reason to want money except insofar as we want particular goods. a second way of thinking about money moves us one small step further. Given that i have money, i can exchange it for a number of different kinds of goods. Money affords me indeinitely more choices and choice is itself a good. So i seem to have after all some reason to want money independently of my wanting this or that particular set of goods. But what kind of a good then is choice? It is certainly not an unqualiied good. When individuals as rational agents have a tolerably clear grasp of what individual and common goods they and others need to pursue, if they are to lourish as human beings, then the choices between alternative possibilities that they make will be for the most part choices of genuine goods and money will be important, although only as opening up possibilities for achieving such goods. Goods will still be the measure of money. But, when individuals lack such a grasp, they may ind their choices framed for them and imposed on them by others and by others whose interest is primarily in getting them to spend money, so that what are presented in the market as goods are designed to elicit predictable consumer responses. and for those who make those seductive presentations money has now become the measure of goods. Goods are to be made and supplied, just insofar as they can be turned into money. and this is only the beginning of an inversion of the relationship between money and goods. We have then moved from a irst stage in which money is valued only because and insofar as it is translatable into goods to a second in which it is also 13

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valued because it extends the range of possibilities in the choice of goods, and from this to the beginning of a third stage in which the relationships of goods to money become more complex and various. What lies beyond this is not only increasing complexity and variety, but a movement towards money becoming the measure of all things, including itself. It is crucial to this inal stage that money is made not just from the exchange of goods for money, but also from the exchange of money for money, as, for example, in currency transactions. and in due time trading in derivatives and in derivatives of derivatives will distance those at work in the inancial sector more and more from the uses of money in everyday life. the outcome is that how individuals fare in the world increasingly depends upon a complex and often badly understood set of relationships to money, to the money that they have, that they owe, that they save or fail to save, that they are owed. to do well in this monetary world requires just that kind of self-conidence in the getting and the spending of money which we noted earlier as informing the activities of traders, a self-conidence that characteristically disguises from those who have it the fragility and vulnerability of the economic and monetary relationships that constitute their world. consider just one example of the irrationality of that world. one thing that money procures is deference and deference is procured not by spending money, but simply by having it. With deference of this kind money has become the measure of a human being. What this relects are the gross inequalities that have emerged, so that even the rich have become dwarfed into ordinariness by the superrich. Peter drucker, the best apologist that the capitalist corporation has ever had, argued 30 years ago that the most highly paid executives of such corporations could reasonably be paid 20 times the average wage of their workers. in the year 2000 in the united Kingdom such executives received 47 times the average wage, while by 2009 the multiple was 81, while in the united States in 2008 the multiple was 319. So money generated a new kind of hierarchy, a hierarchy of patent absurdities – for you have to be a fool to believe that you should be paid that amount of money – yet absurdities that are treated with great solemnity. We are not supposed to laugh at the foolishness of the rich. note that in describing these developments i have been talking for the most part not about money itself, let alone about the network of economic relationships in which money plays its part, but only about how we think about money. note too that in identifying these various stages in the development of how we think about money i have not suggested that at later stages we leave behind the earlier stages. my thesis has been that in thinking about money, that in trying to understand the place of money in our lives, our thought has become not only increasingly complex, but also increasingly incoherent, so that at one end of a spectrum experts move comfortably without thinking 14

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about it from one stance to another, while at the other end of that spectrum many plain people caught up in the nexus of wages, prices, taxes, pension funds, mortgages and investments are rightly uneasy about money and view it as one more great incomprehensible. remember how i began from Plato’s thought that we can measure ourselves by the standard of the virtues or by the standard of money, but that allegiance to the irst set of standards precludes allegiance to the second. yet we now inhabit a society in which, whether we like it or not, we ind ourselves on a great many occasions measured by the standards of money and in consequence aflicted by either the incoherence or the incomprehensibility of our thought about money. What then can be said to those of us in this condition from the standpoint of a thomistic aristotelian understanding of the virtues? Part of the problem is that, in the period in which a thomistic concern with the virtues still did extend to the economic realm its focus was principally on questions concerning the legitimacy or otherwise of usury and that from the sixteenth century onwards those who attempted to follow aquinas in defending the prohibition of usury underwent defeat after defeat, both in intellectual debate and in the economic practices of the age. in Benjamin nelson’s narrative of these defeats the last unhappy and defeated defender of that prohibition in the 1820s was William cobbett’s wild and engaging friend, Father Jeremiah O’Callaghan, against whom an oficial of the Irish diocese of Cloyne and ross argued and rightly that, were the catholic clergy in general to adopt o’callaghan’s view, they ‘would, by now opposing a deep rooted and general custom, fall into contempt and be despised upon all questions’ (nelson 1969: 128). With that apparently inal defeat it became dificult to spell out what, in its thomistic or any other version, the tradition of the virtues requires of us, when we are engaged in economic transactions. it is not that a need to understand those requirements did not continue to be felt. the concept of a just wage and of what justice requires in the way of relationships between employers and workers remained central to catholic and especially thomistic social teaching. But if we remember that, when Leo Xiii published Rerum Novarum in 1891, it was two years after Georg Simmel had published the irst of his essays on money and only nine years before his deinitive Philosphie des Geldes appeared, we at once become aware of the lack of communication between those for whom aristotelian and thomistic thought about the virtues is central and those, like Simmel, who had recognised what money had become and of the need to think about it in quite new ways. they inhabited and still often inhabit quite different moral cultures. That this is so received striking conirmation 30 or 40 years later in the sad history of the distributivist movement in england. Both Belloc and chesterton were deeply engaged with the politics of their time, but had become disillusioned with the politics and economics of all the British political parties. each rejected 15

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both capitalism and socialism. each had searching questions about the place of money in our lives. But neither Belloc nor chesterton understood quite how much was presupposed by their distributivist stance. that radical understanding was supplied by the dominican Father Vincent mcnabb, someone whose thinking was deeply thomistic. What mcnabb recognised was that the concepts of just wages and just exchanges, of the proper relationships of workers to their work and to the products of their work, of the proper relationship of the household to the work place and of both to the arenas of politics, as understood by the distributivists, were so much at odds with the norms governing the British political, economic and monetary system of the 1930s that what was implied by distributivist doctrine was a total withdrawal from that system. mcnabb’s conception of that withdrawal entailed that each household should become as far as possible self-suficient, responsible for producing its own food. In so concluding he not only conirms my thesis about the distance between these two worlds, the world of the theory and practice of the virtues, as aquinas understood them, and the world in which money exercises its magical power and inluence, but provides a reductio ad absurdum of the view that we can simply withdraw from or reject that latter world. it is, like it or not, the world in which we now have to live. it may perhaps seem that the third of my conclusions warrants a pessimism even more radical than its irst formulation suggested. My irst conclusion, I should remind you, was that we have no good reason to believe that the teaching of ethics through academic courses can be effective in bringing about moral transformations. my second conclusion was that an effective education into the virtues would in fact disqualify one for a successful career in the inancial sector. and my third conclusion has been that the present content of even an ethics of the virtues is such and the ways in which we think about money are such that we are generally at a loss when we try to connect them. What i have also shown, i believe, is that this has been at times markedly true of the thomistic aristotelian conception of the virtues, as understood by some of its best exponents. So what are we, especially those of us who are committed to that tradition, now to do? How are we to make ethics relevant? We have to begin all over again. What we need to do irst is to redescribe the nexus of economic and inancial relationships in the vocabulary of the virtues, drawing upon the resources provided both by economists and by Simmel on the one hand and by the thinkers of the thomistic aristotelian tradition on the other. and part of what our description has to capture is the double aspect of the globalising economy and its inancial sector, so that we understand it both as an engine of growth and as such a source of beneits, but equally as a perpetrator of great harms and continuing injustices. the apologists for globalisation too often 16

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treat it as by its essential nature only a source of beneits, only accidentally and incidentally a source of harms, harms that could be prevented by vigilant regulatory agencies. the critics of globalisation sometimes talk as though there is somewhere offstage some alternative to the globalisating economy that we now have, a set of possible economic structures that would be free from the evils of globalisation. the truth is that we have no alternative to the globalising economy as it now is and that its propensities for good and for harm cannot be split apart. to be for or against globalisation is in some ways like being for or against the weather. yet, unlike the weather, it is a human work, although one which it is all too easy to treat as a set of impersonal forces representable by the equations of the economists’ blackboards. Even Karl Marx (1990: 92) in his preface to the irst volume of Capital could write that: here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personiication of economic categories … my standpoint … can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.

marx thus, like so many others, supposed that, if individuals in their social and economic roles act out their parts with systematic regularity, they cannot be called to account as responsible moral agents for what they do. But this is a mistake. For at key points the system can be successfully resisted and even changed. And a irst condition of its being so resisted, of knowing when and how to resist it, is that its workings are understood in moral terms. So to understand it, we have to describe those workings in terms of such vices as those of injustice, intemperateness and imprudence. What is it to be an unjust agent? it is not simply to violate the canons of a just distribution of goods. it is to do so because one is a certain kind of person with a misconception of one’s good and wrongly directed desires. aristotle takes the vice that is the counterpart of the virtue of justice to be pleonexia, an expression that nietzsche translated as Mehrundmehrwollhaben. (the only better translation, as i have suggested elsewhere, would perhaps have been ‘Mehrundmehrundmehrundmehr … wollhaben’.) This is indeed the vice that informs the inancial sector of the globalising economy: growth both for the sake of growth and at the service of and as an expression of acquisitiveness. To be economically and inancially unjust, intemperate and imprudent is to deny others their due in the interests of increasing one’s own gains. the principal expression of such vices in the economic life of the past 30 years has been the unjust inliction of debt. And this has not been an accidental or incidental aspect of the system. to understand why begin where Karl marx began, with the appropriation of surplus value. Surplus value is the difference 17

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between what the labour of productive workers earns in wages and what capitalists receive for the products of that labour. it is only because capitalists are able to appropriate that difference – their proits – and to invest it in their businesses that capitalism is a growth economy. Successful capitalists maximise their proit-taking and to do so they must keep their costs as low as possible. the owners of capital and those who manage their enterprises always therefore have a compelling reason to keep wages low. But, insofar as they succeed, they create a recurrent problem for themselves. For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy the products that are brought to market. So there is a tension between a need to keep wages low and a need to keep consumption high. in the course of its history capitalism has solved the problems generated by this tension in various ways. But in the last 20 years its most important solution has been the extension of credit and the inliction of debt. Capitalism legitimates itself to those who are not large owners of capital by portraying itself as the instrument of both past and future growth, by its seductive promises as well as by its often spectacular achievements. and when, as in the united States in the last 20 years the achievement of growth has been remarkable, but the wages of very many have remained stagnant or even fallen, then the legitimation of capitalism to those who have not shared in the beneits of growth has become more and more a matter of promises not yet kept. But promises of future reward are insubstantial things. So the strategy has been to bring future consumption, future prosperity into the present by dramatic extensions of credit, including credit to those hitherto judged not creditworthy. and by this there was achieved for a time an equally dramatic increase in purchasing power, so for a moment the problems arising from the appropriation of surplus value were resolved. the extension of credit took a number of forms and each of them inluenced consumers in how they think about money and in how they think about themselves. the different forms wear different faces: credit cards, gold, platinum, and platinum plus cards, cards that earn airline points, free nights in hotels; mortgages that promised to transform improvident renters into prudent homebuyers, building equity in their homes over 10, 20, 30 years; student loans either from banks or government, not repayable until you graduate; multifarious services provided by governments that borrow money in order to provide them and to win elections because they provide them. So the message is: you may not as yet have enough money to make yourselves and others happy, by getting an education, by providing your family with a home, by taking a vacation from your treadmill of a job, but you do and will have enough money for us to make you a loan and for you somehow or other to repay it. one of the crafts highly valued by all these lending agencies is a form of writing for nonreaders, the writing of legalese in small print that is not meant to be read or, if read, understood. and this bizarre use of the written word 18

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is accompanied by the blandishments of the spoken word and the visual presentations of the advertiser, designed to assure as many of us as possible that we are unproblematically creditworthy. this vast expansion of credit was accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to the possibility of ruin millions of people quite unaware that they had been thus exposed. and so, when capitalism once again fatally overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt, into loss of jobs and loss of wages, into bankruptcies of irms and foreclosures of homes, into one sort of ruin for ireland, another for iceland, and a third for california and illinois, into savage cuts in welfare, laid off teachers, children, already educationally deprived, deprived still further. it is not just that capitalism, as always, imposes the costs of growth and of lack of growth on those least able to bear them. it is that much of this debt is unjust and unjust in at least three ways. First there are those – especially, but not only children – who are paying the costs of money having been borrowed which they never borrowed. Secondly, a large number of those who did borrow were either misinformed or miseducated about the nature and extent of the risk to which they were being exposed. and thirdly those who were the engineers of this debt and who had already beneited quite disproportionately from the extension of credit have been to an extraordinary degree allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions. and these injustices are not accidental or peripheral phenomena. the imposition of unjust debt is a symptom of the moral condition of the economic system of advanced modernity and is in its most basic forms an expression of the vices of intemperateness, injustice and imprudence. until it is described in these terms it has been underdescribed and misdescribed. It is not that there is an economic system whose relationships can irst be described and elucidated in purely economic terms and then evaluated by moralists from some external standpoint. it is that the relationships that are constitutive of the economic system are from the outset norm-governed moral relationships, relationships of trust or lack of trust, of prudence or imprudence, of appropriate or inappropriate risk-taking, of candour or deception, relationships in which individual and common goods are at stake, and we have not grasped those relationships adequately, if we have understood them in nonmoral terms, as most economists continue to understand them. We need instead to interpret them as marx, that almost, but not quite moralist, interpreted them and as aristotle and aquinas would have interpreted them. remember that i began this simple-minded moral account of the economy – and in these matters it is important to remain simple-minded – with marx’s identiication of surplus value. From this starting-point what we need to do is bring aquinas and marx together, both in characterising the relationship between the appropriation of surplus value and the inliction of unjust debt and in formulating the principles that should inform our attitude to such debt. 19

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Begin with the latter. We need at least three kinds of principle, one set concerned with issues of desert, one with responsible risk-taking, and one to do with setting limits to the burdens of debt. Let me sketch examples of each. Desert is an issue when the consequences of debt are inlicted on those who played no part in incurring that debt. among those who undeservedly suffer from those consequences are, as i have already noticed, large numbers of children. And our irst political and economic responsibility in every situation is to the children of our society. So child care, child nutrition, child health, education: these must be insulated, as far as possible, from the effects of public and private debt. and, that is to say, family life must be protected. a second set of principles enjoin that those who expose others to risk in the inancial markets must spell out in public in advance the risks that they are distributing, in terms that are intelligible to those whom they are putting at risk. And when there are bad consequences of risk-taking in the inancial markets, the consequences for those who made the relevant decisions must be made as bad as they are for the worst off amongst their victims. thirdly, limits must be set to the burdens imposed by debt on individual and family lives, so that those burdens are not disproportionate. and this will involve in many situations a required forgiveness of debt, amnesty, years of jubilee. those principles have of course implications for the kinds of regulation that should be imposed on inancial markets. But debates over regulation commonly have as their aim the prevention of further large-scale crises. By contrast the kind of principle that i have sketched is intended primarily to identify and to respond to the moral dimensions of the normal workings of our economic and inancial arrangements. To which it will be retorted that these principles, as i have sketched them, are much too abstract and general for this purpose. that is, of course, true. and therefore the next urgent task is to spell them out in adequate and concrete detail, noting that to do so will be impossible without major incursions into economic theory, since the social structures of an economy informed by such principles would be very different from those of either a wholly free market economy or of the state-and-market economies of present day europe. it would be a type of economy in which, among other things, deference to wealth would be recognised as a vice. yet spelling out such principles in appropriate detail would still be of little moment, unless and until they were acted upon in resistance to the continuing imposition of unjust debt. it would only be with such action that our thinking about the virtues and out thinking about money would inally have been reconnected. and it is only with such a reconnection that ethics will once again become relevant.

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References

marx, K. 1990. Capital. Volume I. London: Penguin Books. nelson, B. 1969 (2nd ed.). The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. chicago: university of chicago Press. Schwitzgebel, e. and rust, J. 2008. the moral Behaviour of ethicists: Peer opinion. Mind. 118 (422), 1053. Smith, a. 2007. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Petersield: Harriman House. Winnicott, d.W. 1964. The Child, the Family and the Outside World. London: Pelican Books. Winnicott, d.W. 1971. Play and Reality. London: tavistock.

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Chapter 2

neoliberalism and its Threat to Moral agency Bob Brecher

What i intend to say in this piece is really no more than a statement of the obvious. But i think such statements sometimes need making, as it is one thing for something to be obvious, another for it to be recognised and accepted as such. Furthermore, statements of the obvious can have practical consequences: i am thinking here of the story of the emperor’s new clothes. responding to a change in legislation which will require lap-dancing clubs to apply for a ‘sexual entertainment licence’, Peter Stringfellow – owner of a chain of such clubs – has argued that this change breaches his human rights, on the grounds that it ‘deprives him of his possessions’ (Banyard 2010). it is not his logic that immediately concerns me here, but rather the nature of the basis of that logic. For his objection in fact illustrates how the tenets of a free market in the economic sphere are at odds with one of the conditions for its lourishing, namely that people do not too easily or too openly act in the so-called private realm of morality as they are enjoined to in the public, economic, sphere. Hence, for example, the fuss over British members of Parliament milking the rest of us in pursuit of ‘expenses’ and the genuine puzzlement of some of the stupider among them that its being permitted by the rules should turn out not to be a valid excuse. The point is that the logic of the ine upstanding freemarketeer mr Stringfellow is right: the women who perform in his clubs are indeed his possessions. that is exactly the logic of the free market: all relations are between owner and owned; and value is determined concomitantly. naomi Klein has charted something of the political impact, methods and implications of the logic of actually existing neo-liberalism in her book on the rise of ‘disaster capitalism’, The Shock Doctrine (2007). Fundamental to the ideology she documents is this statement that she reports from milton Friedman: most new orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. the children are now scattered all over the country. this is a tragedy. it is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system. (Friedman 2005: 2)

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For Friedman, the state’s sole legitimate functions are ‘to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: [and] to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets’ (Friedman 1982: 2); and state education is an impediment to the realisation of a state with just these and no other functions. my theme here parallels Klein’s political analysis: for convincing though i think it is, it would be a mistake to treat neo-liberalism as a political phenomenon only. it would be a mistake for two reasons. First, it would be to miss its genuinely perceived normative thrust, anti-moral though it in fact is. Second, it would be to overlook the tension at the heart of neo-liberalism, a tension which we may hope might yet prove its nemesis. that tension is the one i alluded to at the outset, between the thrusting, self-interested free-marketeer who acts in the economic sphere; and that same person in the ‘private’, moral sphere: for the homo economicus of neo-liberalism’s public world is none other than thrasymachus. and – what the neo-liberals are of course unwilling to acknowledge – a society whose members were consistently guided solely by self-interest would soon take the form so aptly described by Hobbes as one in which life was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1968: 186). in such a society, Friedman’s free market, unprotected by the state, would soon descend into mayhem if it did not create its own substitute for the state’s police and army. in fact, of course, we are already on that road. in short, neo-liberalism’s conceit is that the free market relies on the majority not acting in their day-to-day lives in the way it insists human nature dictates; that is for those in power alone. it is also why capitalism’s need to expand presents neo-liberals with the dilemma of the need for increasingly authoritarian social control. it is one thing for Halliburton’s shareholders – and owners – to welcome the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of iraqis on the grounds that, by october 2006 alone, the slaughter had generated some $20 billion (Klein 2007: 14); it is another thing for those shareholders -- especially those small-scale shareholders so beloved of the neo-liberals in their effort to create people in its own image -- to take a short cut and engage in slaughter on the home front in the pursuit of proit. it is the case, of course, that in deliberately and explicitly creating an increasingly unequal society – unequal economically, socially and in terms of power – neo-liberalism creates an oppressive society, and with that an increasing need to suppress the ‘have-nots’. as Simone de Beauvoir insists, ‘all oppressive regimes become stronger through the degradation of the oppressed’ (de Beauvoir 1962: 101). it is a commonplace that such a society, the sort of society in which more and more human beings around the world are being forced to live, dehumanises us. So when, for example, we walk past the beggar on the street, or read about the continuing atrocity of america’s secret torture 24

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‘facilities’ set up to further our efforts to remake iraq and afghanistan in our own image, we lose a little of the humanity we (still) have: Bystanders and witnesses to atrocities are dehumanized to the extent that their moral agency is affected, since societal pressure is against acting ethically towards the enemy. … Witnessing and not living up to the higher standard of what is required for moral action in these circumstances means that moral agency, and therefore the individual’s humanity, is affected. (oelofsen 2009: 178)

it remains important to insist on that observation about how dehumanisation works and what its purpose all too often is. But my point here is not to remind us of the Holocaust, the British in malaysia and Kenya 50 years ago, of Vietnam, cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, chechnya, rwanda, Sierra Leone, iraq, Guantanamo Bay, the democratic republic of congo, Gaza or uzbekistan. there is a place for such reminders, and they need to be issued and insisted upon. my concern here, however, is not the dehumanisation that permits people to do as they are told and at the same time is one of the effects of what they do. For in these cases, we begin with moral agents. We are concerned with the way and the extent to which they lose their capacity to exercise their moral agency. that is what ‘dehumanisation’ is all about: the loss of something once extant. and so it is that in all sorts of circumstances moral heroism comes to be required of people: the rescuers; the women of Greenham common; the people – self-styled ‘decommissioners’ – who smashed up a irm called EDO and justiied their action as the prevention of war crimes; and the judge and jury who agreed with them (anon 2010; Azvsas 2010; SmashEdo 2010). i want, however, to take a step back from dehumanisation, from the loss of something we hopefully have; from the need for moral heroism in circumstances of dehumanisation; from morality as being a matter of individual determination – of conscience if you want to put it that way. rather i want to focus on what the ‘new person’ is that the neo-liberal revolutionaries are creating, and in particular to focus on why such an agent cannot be a moral agent at all: not because they lose something – the capacity for moral action – that they once had, but rather because they have nothing to lose in the irst place. Neo-liberalism, I contend, is in the business of creating non-people; non-people, because a human being who is incapable of exercising moral agency is just a human being, a member of the species homo sapiens, and not a person at all – not, that is to say, a moral agent. my starting-point is alasdair macintyre’s seminal article, ‘Social structures and their threat to moral agency’ (1999). But i think we need to go beyond what macintyre argued there, right though he largely was. He takes us through the case of J, a railway manager as one might put it; a manager who, having been ‘instructed irmly by his superiors to take no interest’ in ‘what “his” trains carried’ 25

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(macintyre 1999: 312), remained within the parameters of his role as a railway manager. His failure, macintyre argues, to ‘have been aware’ of what he should have been aware of is rooted in his inability to put ‘established standards in question, whatever verdict about them one may arrive at in the end’ (1999: 313). But, MacIntyre insists, ‘it can be justiiably asserted of J that as a normal human being he must have had the powers of moral agency and therefore had the responsibility for doing what he failed to do’ (1999: 314) (by ‘normal’ he means not cognitively impaired, not a child, etc.). Why? Because ‘i have to understand myself as someone who brings with her or himself to each role [such as that of railway manager] qualities of mind and character that belong to her or him qua individual and not qua role-player’. the central point is that it is of the nature of being a person, of being a moral agent, that ‘my awareness of and understanding of myself as an individual is exhibited in and partly constituted by the various acknowledgements of that individuality by others and my ability to respond to those others as individuals and not just as role-players’ (1999: 315). i have no quarrel with any of that. nor do i disagree that an understanding and an acknowledgement that this is the case ‘does seem to require a particular kind of social setting’ (1999: 317). nor that the kind of social setting with which we have become increasingly familiar over the last 35 years (and on macintyre’s view since the Enlightenment) is one that is antithetical to the exercise of moral agency, just because it tends to encourage people to recognise themselves merely as the inhabitants of particular social roles rather than as the moral agents that we in fact are. MacIntyre is absolutely right that ‘“Always ask about your own social and cultural order what it needs you and others not to know” has become an indispensable moral maxim’ (1999: 319). certainly our social and cultural order seeks to prevent us from acting on the knowledge that we are moral agents and not mere role-players. to put it in macintyre’s terms, it seeks to prevent our properly understanding that we are moral individuals as well as social actors. in this, he and others are right to criticise ‘instrumental rationality’ and a social and political structure that at once instantiates and encourages the instrumental rationality. in like fashion, while Gerry Cohen’s observations that ‘Both selish and generous propensities reside, after all, in (almost?) everyone’ (cohen 2009: 58) and that carers’ (unlike, say, hedge fund managers’) ‘conception of what is to be produced is guided by a conception of human need’ (cohen 2009: 59) may be accurate, it will not do to point to people undertaking such uncommodiied activities as a basis for hope. of course ‘any attempt to realize the socialist ideal runs up against entrenched capitalist power and individual human selishness’ (Cohen 2009: 80). But the speciic form that that power takes, and the impetus it gives to such pre-existing ‘human selishness’ as there may be, needs to be identiied; and once identiied, directly countered. 26

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the neo-liberal order does not so much attempt to make us forget what we already know, and/or to harness such individual traits as there are, as to make us into beings who do not know – above all, people who do not know morality. it is not that we are being encouraged to forget, or to overlook, what macintyre describes as the tensions between ‘the requirements of the established social and moral order and the attitudes of those educated in those social settings that make the exercise of the powers of moral agency possible’ (macintyre 1999: 318), but that we are being manipulated into a state of ignorance in which we do not even know of the existence of such tensions. neo-liberalism does not try just to persuade us to ignore what we as rational, and thus moral, agents know; rather it tries to create or re-create us in its own image of agency as the instantiation of self-interest. to put it in Kantian terms: it is not just that it is dificult for people living under the market’s alleged freedoms to obey Kant’s injunction so to act ‘that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (Kant 1997: 38; 4: 429). Rather it is becoming dificult for people actually to understand what Kant is enjoining us to do. For the logic – and the reality – of the market tell us that the very notion of humanity as an end in itself is incomprehensible. the only end in itself that the free market recognises is whatever our own self-interest demands. in short, moral action itself, so neo-liberalism tells us, is a chimera, the selfinterested pursuit of our own ends whatever they happen to be masquerading as something it is not. Hobbes and mill at least thought that morality was socially necessary, even if only on the basis of its serving our self-interests, wants or desires. as mill has it (1962: 288), ‘the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it’. For non-cognitivists, this is a statement of the obvious; for cognitivists, it shows precisely how non-cognitivism fails to grasp morality at all. mill’s dictum then becomes a crude refusal to understand that ‘desirable’ is ambivalent as between description and evaluation. But at least it was not mill’s intention to eliminate morality: on the contrary, he thought utilitarianism was a genuinely moral position. thrasymachus is obviously more ‘realistic’, arguing that there is no good reason not to do whatever is in your own interests so long as you can get away with it. and as we are about to see, the neo-liberals too don’t even try to ‘redeine’ morality; they simply eliminate it. But irst, let us return to MacIntyre’s railway manager, J. Mill’s ambivalence between ‘desirable’ as description and evaluation parallels J’s insistence ‘that he had discharged all his responsibilities’ (macintyre 1999: 314): and the question is, does he mean the responsibilities he incurs qua railway manager or those he incurs just in virtue of being a person? i want to suggest that he is neither philosophically ignorant nor stupid. J has not forgotten that he is a person as well as being a railway manager. rather the reality he inhabits makes him 27

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into a being incapable of distinguishing between something’s being desirable inasmuch as people desire it and its being desirable on account of what it is. and such a being cannot be a person, where by ‘person’ is understood something normative as well as something empirical; and so he cannot be a moral agent. macintyre is right that J needs to ask not only ‘How is it best for me to play this role?’, but also ‘“By what standards am I to judge what is best?” and “Should I continue to play this role in this way?”’ (1999: 326). But the social structures of neo-liberalism do not just militate against a J’s seeing that the last two questions need to be asked; they actively help prevent their being even recognised as the sort of questions that are relevant. the sustained attack on the welfare state is not only symptomatic of the neoliberal aversion to the state and its insistence that individuals (and their families) are all there is. it is also, and more radically, an attempt to make people anew. Here is the mont Pelerin Society’s 1947 founding ‘mission statement’: The central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. in others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. the position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own. (…) the group holds that these developments have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and by the growth of theories which question the desirability of the rule of law. it holds further that they have been fostered by a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market; for without the diffused power and initiative associated with these institutions it is dificult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preserved. (mont Pelerin Society)

We should not misunderstand this as the day-to-day rhetoric typical of political groupuscules (as the mont Pelerin Society initially was). it is a revolutionary manifesto for a new society; and thus for the creation of new people. in case this be thought an exaggeration, consider the following two remarks by the movement’s founding father, von Hayek. First we have this gem: [the] impersonal process of the market … can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen. (Liberty-tree)

and then another: 28

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the ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the ‘wrong’ beliefs. (Enotes)

now of course what von Hayek claims in the second quotation – worthy no less of Goebbels than of thrasymachus – seems hard to square with the view expressed in the irst. But that dificulty is only apparent. He is claiming that it simply is the case that the market – not being an individual person – cannot operate either justly or unjustly, since justice has no application other than to individual persons. morality, such as it is – the judgements about an individual’s action or character alone – is a phenomenon exhaustively to be understood in Social darwinist terms. (there is a long historical and conceptual story to be told here about liberalism’s colonisation of darwin and about today’s unholy alliance between neo-liberalism and evolutionary psychology.) certainly there can be no question of any absolute judgements of individuals. the pursuit of moral goals, therefore – such as a neo-liberal, free-market society – is (a) right or wrong only inasmuch as they are the personal preference of its proponents or opponents and (b) a goal that, among other things, demands the ‘recognition’ that the free market itself is not subject to moral judgement. So let us go back to Friedman and see how this works out in his thought. in his 1991 Smith centre lecture, he tells us that a free private market is a mechanism for enabling a complex structure of cooperation to arise as an unintended consequence of adam Smith’s invisible hand, without any deliberate design. a free private market involves the absence of coercion. People deal with one another voluntarily, not because somebody tells them to or forces them to. it does not follow that the people who engage in these deals like one another, or know one another, or have any interest in one another. They may hate one another. Everyone of us, everyday without recognizing it, engages in deals with people all over the world whom we do not know and who do not know us. no super planning agency is telling them to produce something for us. they may be of a different religion, a different color, a different race. the farmer who grows wheat is not interested in whether it is going to be bought by somebody who is black or white, somebody who is catholic or Protestant; and the person who buys the wheat is not concerned about whether the person who grew it was white or black, catholic or Protestant. So the essence of a free private market is that it is a situation in which everybody deals with one another because he or she believes he or she will be better off. (Friedman 1991)

notice how beguiling this can be: apartheid was, after all, brought down by capitalism; and the global market is indeed one where skin colour and religion are quite irrelevant. So far, perhaps so good. So let us focus on some of the 29

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things Friedman goes on to tell us in his lecture, things worth repeating: ‘it does not follow that the people who engage in these deals like one another, or know one another, or have any interest in one another.’ is not morality – any morality recognised as such, whether by macintyre or Kant – something that in fact requires us to have an interest in each other? and is not believing that one will be better off doing a deal than not doing it in fact inimical to moral judgement? the fact that ‘a staggering 63 per cent of girls would rather be glamour models than nurses, doctors or teachers’ (Manchester Evening News 2005) is the problem, not its moral solution: it is not the case, as mill thought, that ‘the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it’ (1962: 288). a lapdancer may well believe that she will be better off lapdancing than sitting at a supermarket checkout; but again, even if her belief is both economic and justiied, that does not make lapdancing morally justiiable. That she wants the job is the problem, not the moral justiication of her taking it (Brecher 1997). and so with ‘the nearly 1,000 girls surveyed, [of whom] 63 per cent found being a glamour model most appealing. a quarter thought being a lap dancer would be a good profession but just 3 per cent picked the teaching profession … . ‘[I]t may well be the case that “[T]aking your clothes off is now more lucrative than ever and teenagers see it as a great way of making money and becoming famous”’ (Manchester Evening News 2005). certainly many female university students in the uK seem to think so: one in three female university students would work in a gentleman’s club to fund their degree and lifestyle, new research has revealed. results show that 72% of female students would model in their underwear if they needed extra money. 61% said they have felt ‘desperate’ for money whilst studying. despite the 34% of female students who said they would work in a gentleman’s club to pay for their studies, just 3% said they would make a living out of the career once they graduated. When asked ‘Why did you choose to work in a gentlemen’s club?’ 48% said it was ‘easy money’ and 19% said it offered a ‘quick solution to inancial problems’. These statistics were revealed in a survey of 1,022 female university students. the survey was carried out by www.studentgems.com, a company that helps businesses and individuals recruit students for part-time employment during their degree. (turner 2010)

But the logic of the free market requires that the opposite be the case: that moral judgement apply solely to people’s ‘personal’ lives; that the ‘free market’ cannot be subjected to moral judgement; and, unsurprisingly of course, that moral judgment itself is nothing more than the expression of taste or preference, that right and wrong is a matter of what those making such a judgement take it to be. and so it is on two grounds necessarily inimical to morality. First, it restricts morality’s scope to ‘the private’. Second, it insists that morality is anyway merely the expression of taste or of preference. consider just one more quotation from Friedman: 30

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armen alchian once made a very important comment. He said, ‘you know, there is one thing you can trust everybody to do. you can trust everybody to put his interest above yours’. that goes for those of us in the private sector; that goes for people in the government sector. the difference between the two is not in the people; it is not in the incentives. it is in what it is in the self interest for different people to do. … in the private economy, so long as we keep a free private market, one party to a deal can only beneit if the other party also beneits. There is no way in which you can satisfy your needs at the expense of somebody else. (Friedman 1991)

Friedman’s conclusion of course follows – provided only that one interpret ‘expense’ in terms of purely economic advantage. and on his view no other interpretation is possible: the poor can always be bribed. So much for the categorical imperative. neo-liberalism actually demands that we treat others merely as a means to an end. that is exactly what the ‘free market’ is all about, treating people merely as a means to economic ends. it rules morality out altogether. Let me conclude by summing up. First, neo-liberalism requires a noncognitivist view of morality, and all such views in effect (if not by intention) deny morality (as i have argued elsewhere). Second, it insists that the simulacrum of morality that remains pertains only to individuals’ individual lives – that’s to say, our ‘private’ lives, where of course non-cognitivist views of morality might have such plausibility as they do. So neo-liberalism is necessarily anti-moral. that is the ‘neo’ in ‘neo-liberalism’; and it is only the merest coincidence that what is fundamental to it is no less fundamental for both the roman catholic church (macintyre notwithstanding) and for ‘comrade’ Stalin: ‘t[h]e production of souls is more important than the production of tanks … and therefore i raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul’ (Stalin 1932). But is not all this just the speculation of a disillusioned and disgruntled old leftie? i wish it were. unhappily, it is no use to refuse to recognise the neo-liberal project as truly revolutionary. its social structures, no less than its ‘thought’, require people not to act as moral agents. at the concrete level of everyday life, neo-liberalism requires us to treat each other merely as means to economic ends.

References

azvsas 2010 [online, July 2010]. available at azvsas.blogspot.com/2010/07/ magniicent-victory-for-decommissioners.html [accessed: 8 July 2010]. Banyard, K. 2010. a Small Blow to the Sex industry. Prospect [online, 1 april]. available at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/04/blow-for-sex-industry/ [accessed: 9 July 2010]. Brecher, r. 1997. Getting What You Want? London: routledge. Brighton and Hove Leader 2010. anti-War activists cleared by jury. 8 July: 1–3. 31

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cohen, G.a. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton: Princeton university Press. de Beauvoir, S. 1962 [1948]. The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman. new york: citadel Press. Enotes. No date. Available at http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/ von-hayek-friedrich-august [accessed: 6 January 2013]. Friedman, m. 1982 [1962]. Capitalism and Freedom. chicago: chicago university Press. Friedman, M. 1991. Economic freedom, human freedom, political freedom: lecture delivered at the Smith centre [online, 1 november]. available at http://www.cbe.csueastbay.edu/~sbesc/frlect.html [accessed: 1 July 2010]. Friedman, m. 2005. the promise of vouchers. Wall Street Journal [online, 5 december]. available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113374845791113764. html [accessed: 6 January 2013]. Hobbes, t. 1968 [1651]. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kant, i. 1997 [1785]. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. m. Gregor. cambridge: cambridge university Press. Klein, n. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: allen Lane. Liberty-tree [online]. available at http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/fredrich_ august_von_hayek_quote_b6ea [accessed: 6 January 2013]. macintyre, a. 1999. Social Structures and their threat to moral agency. Philosophy 74: 311–29. Manchester Evening News. 2005. naked ambition rubs off on teen girls – GLam: the new role models [online, 6 June]. available at http://06/060/2005menmedia. co.uk /news/s/161/161338_naked_ambition_rubs_off_on_teen_girls.html [accessed: 1 June 2010]. mill, J.S. 1962 [1859]. Utilitarianism. London: Fontana. mont Pelerin Society [online]. available at www.montpelerin.org [accessed: 10 July 2010]. oelofsen, r. 2009. de- and rehumanization in the Wake of atrocities. South African Journal of Philosophy 28: 178–88. SmashEdo 2010 [Online]. Available at smashedo.safp.info/mailings/?p=prefer ences &uid=8f1a86826f778f539887b8b07b8259a5 [accessed: 9 July 2010]. Stalin, J. 1932. Speech at home of maxim Gorky [online, 26 october]. available at http://www.dailypaul.com/comment/2816897 [accessed: 6 January 2013]. turner, c. 2010. third of female students would strip off to fund degree. Cherwell 30 march. accessible at http://www.cherwell.org/content/10139: [accessed: 2 June 2010].

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Chapter 3

Economics as Ethical Pre-condition of the Credit Crunch William dixon and david Wilson1

Introduction

economics presents itself as a neutral discipline, bestowing techniques for the study of the allocation of scarce resources. it thereby claims neutrality to ends and so denies any role in the forming of human conduct. the focus on a general economic problem allows a claim to universal applicability across all social forms and times. this may also be seen as a claim that beneath all social forms lies a story of self-interest enabled by rationality, so that beneath any moral stance lies a natural reversion to selfinterest. This is a speciic ethical structure that arises from the position of rationality as the basic competence of the agent and its accompanying default deinition, even when not explicit, of the human as morally incompetent. We are presented with a self outside social context or concrete practice. in this light, social forms, whether observed moral conduct, organisations, speciic practices, situations of trust now appear not just as fragile but as inauthentic. it appears that there is no alternative but to it conduct to this ethical structure. Not only are we led to understand ourselves in this way but also others. this shapes conduct both in presenting a realistic, if not a preferred, vision as well as in understanding the nature of supervision and regulation of others. What may seem like speciic activities with their own disciplines and internal interests, or concerns, now appear as manifestations of a reality of selfinterest. organisational function, individual purpose and activity-interest are revealed to be nothing more than veneers for a reality of rational self-interest. this poses particular problems of control and incentive. it is not just that the use value side of the commodity has lost effective recognition but also, with that, speciic excellence and intrinsic motivation are also dissolved, through understanding, into the homogenised conduct of an exchange based self-interest. the scene is set for the reshaping of the inancial and regulatory worlds as conduct conforms to the ruling ethical structure. No bust can occur without a preceding boom in which we are sold a covering story, a story that enables the homogenised behaviour that every boom needs. one part of that story was a common belief in the triumph of markets after the 1 the authors wish to thank the following for helpful suggestions and discussions on the ideas in here, claudia Jefferies, christine diedrich and Kaveh Pourvand.

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fall both of Keynesianism and of the iron curtain. economics came to represent this triumph and was at the heart of the macro level management of the economy. it appeared the economy had entered a new phase, the ‘Great moderation’. Signiicant macro risks seemed a thing of the past. Our focus here though is on how economic thinking shaped organisational behaviour and the micro level management of risk. our particular focus is on the conduct of banking. To forward our argument we take the following steps. We irst identify the nature of the problem to be addressed by examining classical Greek thought. We argue for philosophical thinking as being grounded on the dual nature of the commodity. that dual nature opens a space for interpretation that philosophy sets out to resolve. We then show political economy as occupying that space in making an argument for wealth as consisting of use values so also for the neutrality of money. that allowed an argument for accumulation that was formative in shifting policy and legislation towards conditions that would allow a growing production of use values. this was an argument for the appropriate disposition of the market that required, for Smith, not just suficient competition but also a moral competence, founded on sympathy. in ricardo that disposition required a properly constituted universal franchise. that understanding of disposition eroded once economics settled on its task as the study of allocation. For the latter all that was required was rational maximising. combined with the separation of ownership and control, that vision of maximising would undermine the containment of money proposed in political economy. as the purpose of the corporation was reduced in economic thinking to the disgorging of residual claims so the means of challenging the conduct of banking was eroded. We consider examples that illustrate the loss of attention to the public function of banks in favour of business objectives. risk management, so responsibility, was subject to marketisation endorsed by economics. this ensured the homogenisation required for a bubble and crash to occur. We start by examining how the problems we draw attention to here were irst confronted in Classical Greek philosophy. The signiicance of this starting point is that it coincides with the irst signiicant usage, in Ancient Greece, of marked precious metal as coin money.

Aristotle and Modern Economy

it is not just lapse of time that would make aristotle seem an unpromising source for a grasp on modern economy. His strictures on money, in particular lending for money, would also appear to rule out an analysis adequate for modern economy. as Scott meikle points out aristotle’s views have become associated with a ‘snobbish political prejudice against trades and money-makers’ and this view is identiied as little more than ‘an expression of aristocratic 34

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anti-business attitudes’ (meikle 1995: 1). a reading of alasdair macintyre could reinforce such doubts since his chief point is that aristotle’s virtues relate to a social context that Aristotle could take for granted but that has gone. Nor, minus such context, can we pick up ready-virtues as if simply convenient to go. rather, once such virtues have become matters of individual choice, a matter of pick-and-mix, there is no basis for virtue at all. We inhabit that world of sovereign individualism called by macintyre ‘emotivism’ where, indeed, you and i may pick up virtues, but, without means of coming by any common set, we are instead after virtue. it is this world, for macintyre, that gives us the debate between individualism and collectivism, so the characteristic ‘bifurcation’ that has a common agreement, there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so it may limit the free and arbitrary choice of individuals. (macintyre 1985: 35)

in this version social context does not engender common virtues, we have instead ‘the politics of modern societies [that] oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but lack of regulation of individual behaviour and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest’ (ibid.) this is a world of choice that applies as much to religion as to chocolate, that inds expression in, and is reinforced, by modern economic thought. the rational maximising agent of economics establishes the intellectual ground for the necessary sovereignty of what durkheim called ‘social facts’ and from there we soon ind an interminable methodological investigation between individualism and collectivism. that extreme of individual and social might remind us of the arguments of the sophists and we may indeed relect that such arguments could only suppose, though we might struggle for a different case, that some perception of a recognisable distinction between individual and social had come into being. thrasymachus, in the Republic, argued the view that justice is the interest of the stronger party, suggesting already some uneasy sense of individual and social. the point is brought home by Glaucon, again in the Republic, when he says that we act justly, in the sight of witnesses, when we act in accordance with convention, so according to the expectations of those witnesses. outside that gaze, justice goes with natural law, according to our instincts. We can suppose then that individual capable of acting, in some fashion, apart from the expectations of others, riding their own high bike. We have the idea of an autonomous individual. this is an interesting moment for we must somehow come to a view of how this autonomy may relate to the social. antiphon helps us here, again from the classical period, for we see that this autonomy also 35

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implies equality since, necessarily, we escape the mark by which, in antiphon’s view, we could be artiicially distinguished, We can consider those natural qualities which are essential to all human beings and with which we are all equally endowed, and we ind that in the case of all these qualities there is nothing to tell any of us apart as foreigner or Greek. (Waterield 2000: 264)

Such is one implication of individuation that a natural truth lies below the social marks. conduct then should be considered in the same light, the way to/gain maximum advantage for yourself from justice, then, is to treat the laws as important when other people are present, but when there is nobody else with you to value the demands of nature. (ibid.: 264–5)

in supposing this straddling between the social and instinct we have an uncomfortable stretch but, even if managed, what anyway does that space, if nobody is with you, amount to? the alternatives leave us unsure how we come together, whether we live by imposed social fact or free by natural instinct. For the development of philosophy it was necessary to attempt a proper resolution. the nature of the problem is this. Free activity supposes different determinations. this, put simply, gives us the two party problem, as to how two individuals would come by common ends. in terms of what third party or perspective might this be done and, also, by imposition or some kind of free for all? Later this problem would be known, when durkheim presented it, as the Hobbes Problem. Plato, as always, anticipated such issues in his search for an adequate principle by which our conduct may come together. ultimately what we all want is the good, it is this that stands apart, this that provides the third party perspective in terms of which the two parties have commonality. Now, of course the problem in Plato, as subsequent development attests to, is that this third party perspective is indeed apart, its objectivity takes the form of what we now call idealism. Not only is the good itself an imperishable form but also rule in its name must be through separate guardians. aristotle must deal with how Plato deals with this issue and we move in some way between idealism and materialism, but should not lose sight that it is in setting out the third party perspective that the key issue is confronted. addressed by Plato, the question is what is justice? Plato’s answer proceeds by examining what it is that we do and why. the sophists’ edge comes from the law of instincts, so at least a self that is up to something, except that their evasion of the social in the natural is also escape from practical and concrete conduct. Here they can be tied in knots. after all, whatever thrasymachus might say on the stronger party, the ruler must still rule and ruling has some 36

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speciicity. It might be done well or ill in terms of the activity itself. What then do we do if the ruler is mistaken in his rule, so in the speciicities of his task? do we obey? But if we do then we act against the ruler. it is not enough to have a stronger party resolve the relation. that was just small talk. this is what Plato is getting at when he asks whether the doctor may be doing something when he acts without money. Perhaps the sophist, ready to hawk a view, according to aristotle, would answer, ‘nothing’. alternatively, there is something in the deining of doctor that cannot be captured simply in the fact of payment. there is something that cannot be captured in self-interest or greed. What is this activity, what is its end? there is something internal to doctoring that persists outside the gaze, or judgement, of payment, something by which doctoring is deined as doctoring. Or, as we might anticipate the issue, there is a thisness to this this. Plato asks whether the doctor is a ‘healer of the sick or maker of money’ (Buchanan 1976: 302). Now, we see the problem. While we deal with speciicity in doctoring, it is not particularity; it is not this particular effort here, or there, as the case might be. that does not withstand money, particularity is just what can be bought. We address a speciicity to doctoring in general by which we know it as such. if we are caught in mere particularity then any old thing, if the money is right, could be doctoring. Simply winning an argument will not meet the case. individuation must suppose another’s view so poses a two party problem so poses that condition in which the sophist view can persist. it may indeed seem that some particular argument wins and that’s that. This is not however suficient as the case of the doctor illustrates. There must be something speciic going on, even in the case of the ruler. there is an end that allows us to identify the good doctor. Socrates confronts thrasymachus asking whether ‘a band of robbers and thieves, or any other gang of evil doers could act at all if they injured one another’ and answers the query that they could not since ‘injustice creates divisions and hatreds and ighting’ (ibid.: 318). It cannot then, he deals with Thrasymachus, be the stronger interest that prevails. indeed this problem of interest, this problem of the individual, is at the heart of the problem of ruling for it offers, as Socrates suggests, no resolution and indeed offers worse. Money may provide a reason for rule but it is not suitable since the speciicity of ruling is not recognised. indeed, put another way, ‘good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues get the name of thieves’ (Buchanan 1976: 310–11). Even if rulers may be those who must do so in order that evil men do not, they must still do so in terms of some speciic conception of ruling, something over and above the different parties. We might call this objectivity. certainly, it takes us, if we join Plato, to the absolute, the good, Plato’s forms. in what sense can contending interests recognise the good? each for Plato is part of a division of labour and each is 37

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thereby limited in getting the overall picture. From the cave they mistake the shadows thrown by the ire as real. Plato’s solution puts the good in the hands of guardians. of course their love of knowledge, of course knowledge of the good, sets them apart and so qualiies them for their special role. Even so, that is not enough, they must indeed live separately and crucially must not touch gold, so must not be brought back. While they cannot either be entirely separate from the cave they must not succumb. then they can oversee those dwellers in the cave. that separation of forms in accord to which we can act in common is also, in conceiving the republic, a separation in fact as the guardians. this apprehension of forms was one aristotle had to confront. even so, aristotle shared Plato’s motivating concerns. in each activity there consists a good speciic to it, deining it. There is some essence in which the virtue of the action can be looked for. that sophist provocation necessarily posed the issue of what an activity is and so that other question as to what it is to do something well. or, indeed, what is excellence in practice? the issue is necessarily framed by the market for without it the question need not be asked in the irst place. It is the market, more particularly money, that frames Aristotle’s work for, speciically, it is the problems posed by the emergence of coinage that he must confront. money does not simply arise to solve some technical issue of barter. it poses problems we see represented, in their way, by the sophists then addressed critically by Plato. in the sophists we have those who will speak on matters such as justice where the price is right. and their views on justice correspond. in Plato there must be something to justice, some speciicity that escapes, is not in itself corruptible, even if the particular person may fall by the act of payment. the sophist arguments are not in themselves the issue rather that such arguments became possible is signiicant. This suggests a deeper problem, perhaps intractable, than would be captured simply by looking at the quality of sophist arguments. money is key. Just as it holds a certain kind of wealth so, also, it holds a certain kind of community. it holds both in that way that marx described when he said that we hold money as wealth but it is not, ‘if i want to cling to it, it evaporates in my hand to become a mere phantom of real wealth’ (marx c.f. Seaford 2004: 95). As with holding wealth, so also in money we must have some kind of community for without some recognition of its meaning, without acceptance of its place between us it could not operate. it is not command, even if it can enable command. money in the act of exchange supposes the formal equality of those who exchange (see Nicomachean Ethics 1133a17). yet something else is there for, with money, i can step outside convention. i can for example act for the purpose of money or get you to act for that purpose. i can also move in wider social areas than given by kinship or village. once i can exchange through money am i, apart from that alone, beholden to you? With money we 38

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have agreement but it appears, eficiently, as price. Money both poses and yet seems to dissolve community. richard Seaford puts the matter in this way: the universe is no longer imagined as controlled by a monarch but by what may seem to be an all-powerful, all-pervasive impersonal substance, and the irst and only such substance in history is money. (Seaford 2012: 79)

it is not just monarchy that bears the brunt. Seaford’s analysis of the distinctive understanding of reincarnation in areas that irst developed coinage, Greece and North India, shows also the dissolution of customary kinship relations. reincarnation in these areas loses its usual path within lineages, the death of an elder seen in the new birth, to become ‘ethicised’ and lying outside not just lineage but also even species. the individual is conceived as having some being outside the lineage, kinship, and so as subject to some fate that may depend on his own conduct, hence is ethicised. The signiicant element in Seaford’s account is the introduction of coinage. at this point all goods are brought together in relation to coin, the gold or silver with common mark, in a way that they are not in relation to gold or silver as such. a general exchange is posited in coin. each commodity then carries this aspect of exchange and this has an apparently simple implication that the commodity to be exchanged must be ‘separated from (abstracted) from use’ (ibid.). yet much else follows. this separation is also from activity and so necessarily from types of relationships. the sophists carry through the arguments even if they may not grasp the ground they stand on. the mark allows a full play and recognition of money, so then, ‘Purchase seems governed by objective necessity, impersonal equivalence of value, with the result that the separation of the transactors from commodities and money –and therefore from each other – is absolute’ (ibid.: 85). once it is coin that has the mark, there is also the possibility of the autonomous, that is to say the unmarked, individual. Now we can see something of the sophist arguments posed in terms of money, ‘there is polarisation: to the absolute (isolated) objectivity of commodities and money corresponds the absolute (isolated) subjectivity of the transactors’ (ibid.: 85). So we have that autonomous individual ‘detached by monetisation from (in principle) all goods and persons {who} becomes constituted instead by the invisible (abstract) uniication of diversity that permits her practical autonomy’ (ibid.: 89.). if we revisit Glaucon’s argument about the witness we see now that it is not so much Gyges’ ring that gives us invisibility but rather money. Now, indeed, the shepherd sleeps with the queen and, perhaps, both may be the better for it. the matter of philosophy is on hand. money structures thinking. richard Seaford stresses that aspect of Greek philosophy that seeks explanation in terms of a single substance. Whether water, air, ire or water, all share this 39

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characteristic with money that things are equated in terms of some common factor. the key element that richard Seaford stresses is that this early period looked to an ‘intelligible order subject to the uniformity of impersonal power’ (ibid.: 175). certainly some connection should be made between the emergence of a general exchange with money and this idea of a single substance proving underlying explanation. our stress here though is on how the emergence of money allowed the sophist view that in turn had to be answered. We now need to know what our activity is. the sophist self presents those puzzles of justice that lead ultimately to an understanding of engagement in speciic activity and ends. We both want to, and must, be mindful of what we do. it is money that sets up that development of thought, not just because of the reputation of the sophists, so entangled with money as it is, but because their arguments are made possible by the individuation that arises with money and takes us via Plato’s form to aristotle’s essence. We see a continuing development on from the single substance of earlier Greek thought. We can only skirt these issues here. We deal with the dual nature of the commodity. the commodity is not in some chance relation to exchange but is represented by coin at all times. aristotle recognises this of the commodity that it partakes of both use and exchange value. We see now the signiicance of him doing so. The market frames aristotle’s work. money poses problems that aristotle must address, problems brought out, in however contrary a manner, by the sophists. in identifying the two-sided nature of the commodity, aristotle provides a basis for grasping the problems to be addressed. aristotle could appear to be the culmination of a process ending in resolution. this though is a trick of thought. rather, we have a structure of thought. money still pitches its own brute philosophy. resolve what we want, even to our own satisfaction, and after that, still, money holds community in a manner that allows individuation and so poses freedom from community and from speciic activity. In that sense sophism cannot simply be wrong and pass away. it must be always with us in the nature of money. it must also be contested, that too is part of the structure of thought. the structure can be elaborated but it cannot be dissolved anymore than the dual nature of the commodity can be when there is money. the individuation allowed by money poses something outside community that appears as if it were a moral freedom of practice. this appearance is part of its emergence out of community. this necessarily poses though, as we have said, the question of the speciicity of practice. Speciicity supposes that we can do well and so we have in mind some idea of excellence in practice. aristotle has helped us grasp this structure but he has not overcome it. this structure has two sides that can be variously understood whether, for example, as individual and social or self-interest and practice and so on. there is a real scope for interpretation that might favour one side or the other or some combination 40

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thereof. that real scope has its basis in the rattle room for understanding that comes from money. ideas matter. opposing views may co-exist that in effect are part of each other. this allows, as well, an autonomy of philosophy as a journey through loss. We return then to macintyre’s earlier point about the bifurcation in our thought but now we can place it with the emergence of marked silver and gold as coin. We turn next to the emergence of political economy as a signiicant development in consideration of money and use.

From Adam Smith Onwards

the dual nature of the commodity was at the birth of political economy. The distinction between use and exchange deined Smith’s opposition to a mercantilist system in which money revenues being favoured so also were particular interests favoured. rather, for Smith, wealth lay in use values and so, for their production, a ‘system of liberty’, one speciically free from the extractive hand of aristocracy, had to be allowed. that distinction between for money and for use deined the opposition of political economy to old corruption. David Ricardo’s work clariied this distinction further in his explanation of the different money revenues. in analysing distribution he examined claims on wealth, established in money, and how they might impact the production of wealth made up of use values. We have claims on wealth and wealth itself, sharing an underlying structure that was also central to Plato and subsequently to aristotle. evidently, of course Smith’s journey from there to the support for generalised markets was not one that Plato or aristotle were prepared to make. it is though too easy to pose aristotle versus Smith and ricardo. all shared an apprehension of the corroding inluence of money but for Smith and ricardo the competitive market itself could curb those money claims. in doing so both emphasised accumulation and this potential exterior good, implying an essentially fruitless chase, was exactly what aristotle objected to. it was not the case however that what Smith and ricardo had in mind was the free market vision we might be presented with today and nor was accumulation an end in itself. For both Smith and ricardo the market was central to an alternative order but was not the vision itself. Smith wanted to know how such an order might come into being, how it might be sustained, and for that his question of how we judge and indeed come by moral conduct was central. For ricardo, who took much of what Smith said as given, including the moral pre-conditions, the issue was the institutional arrangements by which the inluence of money claims could be channelled. So, for Smith sympathy was crucial while for ricardo a full extension of the franchise with secret ballots was crucial, and at the heart of that was the improvement of the wage (Dixon 2008). For both, then, it was the 41

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reproduction of a proper order that was central. the issue was not markets but how they were disposed. adam Smith highlighted sympathy as the competence required for coming by moral conduct. it was the natural condition that made self-regulation possible. indeed, ricardo in the course of his arguments for democracy, having to address the panic of such as Hutches trower, countered by arguing that the people are ‘improved in morals and knowledge’. Smith and ricardo went further than Plato and Aristotle in their conidence in the quality of people. While neither Smith nor ricardo made much of excellence in practice, both did consider that, in a properly disposed market, money claims on wealth were disciplined to prevent the degradation of use values. With other providers my objection to your shoddy standards leaves me with no more than the trouble of inding someone who can deliver. However, simply positing some free market was insuficient for Adam Smith. He presented the sympathetic creature who naturally comes by moral judgement, including then of her own behaviour. through feeling we are already related to the expectations of others since it is our fellow of their feeling that enables us to understand what it is we do. Smith sees this process as producing ‘the man within the breast’. Here the third party perspective is internal yet is also from outside since my feeling is a fellow of yours and when surprised i must update how i previously felt things to be. the basis is a natural competence. We do not curtail our actions from some natural self to some witnessed self. it is natural that we act through the witness for without that no action, except haphazard, would anyway be possible. So we are home and dry. No. We have said that money has its own brute philosophy. We are in search of right conduct. We do not know right conduct but we do learn it. We might end up anywhere within the structure given by the dual nature of the commodity. indeed, Smith himself would come to a somewhat pessimistic view of the inluence of the market on the citizen. our ability to learn right conduct could take us to the sophist side. We shall develop this later. Now though we can bring back Aristotle. Experience in the market may undermine the good citizen while the production of use values may bring us to excellence. the modern language of self-interest has a limited scope for it ultimately focuses on the exchange side. Self-interest does not refer to a particular thing being made but rather poses some conduct apart from our doing. With moral incompetence comes a more general incompetence relating to the actual task. the moral incompetent is motivated by self-interest without relation to the task in question nor then to its speciicity. This comes together in the description of the self, in the chicago school of economics, as an ‘opportunistic agent’. this is what we refer to as the stranded or default self that pervades our culture (Dixon and Wilson 2014). Yet we may be involved in practice that can be done well, according to the internal disciplines of that speciic production. How we understand this is of some importance. The 42

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structure given by money, the structure of the commodity itself, objectively allows room for interpretation. the argument develops within that space. economic theory does not shape conduct in a vacuum but rather within a structure given by the commodity. in the commodity’s dual nature we observe use value and exchange value as underlying a series of contrasts that, in their different ways, structure our culture. there is that distinction between wealth and claims on wealth, also community and individual, quality and quantity, limited and unlimited, heterogeneity and homogeneity, speciic and universal. these contrasts, all mapable onto the commodity, mark out a space within which a number of potentials arise. they are not simple, so, for example, community and individual could be control and freedom or imposition and moral. the latter under the impulse of a modern understanding could itself be seen as social and ego. What we do want to draw attention to is that on the exchange side there is some kind of escape that we might view, depending on the situation, as good or bad. We should look at the situation. We are speciically concerned with two interrelated elements. The irst we want to look at is the separation of ownership and control the second is the depletion in understanding of the agent. the separation of ownership and control was brought about by the formation of joint stock companies and the introduction of limited liability. this allowed a signiicant change in the relation of use and exchange. In the General Theory Keynes (1936) argued that, in former times, when enterprises were mainly owned by those who undertook them or by their friends and associates, investment depended on a suficient supply of individuals of sanguine temperament and constructive impulses who embarked on business as a way of life, not really relying on a precise calculation of prospective proit. (150)

or again: If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (proit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation. (ibid.) decisions to invest in private business of the old fashioned type were, however, largely irrevocable, not only for the community as a whole, but also for the individual. With the separation between ownership and management which prevails today and with the development of organised capital markets, a new factor of great importance has entered in, which sometimes facilitates investment but sometimes adds greatly to the instability of the system. (ibid.: 150–51)

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What Keynes is arguing is that investments which are ‘ixed’ for the community are thus made ‘liquid’ for the individual. in that relation between ixed and liquid we see also another layer of contrast over use and exchange and another layer in which the element of escape is at the core. this escape encouraged investment by providing an exit option but in so doing brought forward that process by which marketisation could crowd out elements arising from a relation to use. the sole owner had to know the business or get out, the modern investor is not committed to any particular investment but is free to construct a portfolio. one set of risks can be played against another. the portfolio can change according to the latest news so also the valuation of the underlying investments. Keynes makes the point that without a security market there would be no purpose in revaluing investment: ‘But the Stock exchange revalues many investments every day and the revaluations give a frequent opportunity to the individual (though not to the community as a whole) to revise his commitments’ (ibid.: 151). these individuals though are a different breed from the former sole owner, holding different shares across industries, their knowledge is also inevitably different but also since they all act on the share price it adds a different layer of knowledge. the result is that, ‘certain classes of investment are governed by the average expectation of those who deal on the Stock exchange as revealed in the price of shares, rather than by the genuine expectations of the professional entrepreneur’ (ibid.). So, as a result of the gradual increase in the proportion of equity in the community’s aggregate capital investment which is owned by persons who do not manage and have no special knowledge of the circumstances, either actual or prospective, of the business in question, the element of real knowledge in the valuation of investments by those who own them or contemplate purchasing them has seriously declined. (ibid.: 153, our emphasis added)

This was part of a general shift in understanding that would be relected in economic thought. in the classical school the focus was on production for use and accumulation that in Smith and ricardo included a focus on moral competence and the institutional basis. reproduction of the whole system was at the heart of classical political economy. We ind such concern surviving in alfred marshall and then John maynard Keynes but they now stand in contrast to another development that of a ‘scientiic’ economics. The deining shift in modern economics was from a focus on reproduction to that of allocation, a shift captured in Lionel robbins’s Nature and Signiicance of Economic Science. the proper economic inquiry was to be of the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends, between which the inquiry is neutral. reproduction of the system was deined out of the study. This was part of a process also in the deining of the modern self. Smith’s question about moral conduct had been about how a system of free conduct could reproduce itself. Sympathy was 44

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central to this vision but was squeezed out in subsequent economic thought so generating what would be called Das Adam Smith Problem. once economics was deined in terms of allocation, the rational maximiser was conirmed as adequate to understanding the self. the neutral inquiry set in place an understanding of self. With the separation of ownership and control and this allocative self we have in place the conditions for the modern understanding of the corporation in terms of the principal-agent problem.

The Death of the Corporation

the manager is involved or rather once was, in a process in which they had a developed speciic knowledge, one enabling them to judge the suitability of decisions. Judgement was to the fore founded on the speciic knowledge whether of railway or, as we shall argue here, banking. We do not argue that this judgement entirely disappears for it is in the nature of the commodity that there are two sides but we do say that that it is pushed away as one side of the commodity comes to dominate. the organisation of economic institutions has changed quite radically in recent years, and inancial institutions are no exception. We would argue that a central element has been the decline of speciic knowledge in favour of business knowledge. This has been identiied by Hopper and Hopper as a decline of domain knowledge (Hopper and Hopper 2009, henceforth HH). they point to a decline from the management of companies by people with intimate knowledge of them (i.e. rising through the ranks) to the management of companies by a certain kind of ‘expert’: the accountant, lawyer, the professional manager and the like. the change is from a company under the stewardship of someone or some group that has an understanding of the purpose of a company, i.e. the (use-)value-speciic task of a company, to someone who instead understands the company in terms of some metric or other, such as ‘the bottom line’, ‘shareholder value’, etc. in HH this change marks the end of a golden age that had its roots in the puritan period of england and the transportation of these ideas to early america. this was the ‘puritan gift’ to the uSa that produced a particular kind of management style crucial to the success of american business. management was certainly hierarchical but not in some crass way. crucially the good manager – and engineers for HH typify this style – recognise that staff, involved in speciic production, know more than the manager. Rather than imposing on staff, showing who is boss, so to speak, the good manager would talk to them, to ind out exactly what they do know. Of course, at some stage a decision has to be taken, and it is the manager who takes it. But, given the way that the decision is arrived at, individual staff members can see themselves and their 45

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(real) expertise embodied in it. HH see this model as being responsible for American commercial success up to the 1970s. the alternative to this corporate world came from the emergence of shareholder value. the separation of ownership and control along with the allocative self-maximiser came together in the proposition that shareholders were confronted by managers who were opportunistic agents. this was key to chicago school economics. the aim was to protect the ‘residual claims’ of the shareholders from the insider knowledge of the managers. the organisation was conceived as a nexus of contracts in keeping with the self-interest vision of the self. this implied there was no intrinsic basis to the organisation. it was the logical consequence of the understanding of the agent, within the allocative frame, as engaged merely in the pursuit of self-interest. understanding had shifted deinitely towards the exchange side of the commodity. This self was posed, in pre-Smithian Hobbesian fashion, as a matter of reward and punishment. the apparent need for a market in corporate control was logically preceded by the vision of the self as a nexus of contracts. that vision would be realised once the shaping of organisational form came to shape real conduct. the individual informed of their status as simply a nexus of contracts has been informed then of what in those conditions is right conduct. any other story has been crowded out. We have the ground then for a corporate culture in which only a mug would consider anything but self-interest. the latter is outside of practical activity except in as much as it is advantageous, so has ‘interests’ deined apart from the speciic nature of practice. In being so deined, interest has a necessarily questionable relation to that activity that must be brought in line by contract. or, we might put it another way, it is the market, including appropriate contracts, that determines outcomes while we all go out for ourselves. this is the basis of the (mis)reading of Smith’s statement about the invisible hand that it is not from benevolence that we expect our dinner. this market culture is key to the development of the credit crunch. the form the crunch took was the outcome of an understanding of markets that had broken away from classical concerns with reproduction and so also from issues of moral conduct and the speciicity of tasks. For banking then, to make our argument, we must identify that speciic nature.

Modern Banking

the simple case is that i deposit money in a bank but the bank then lends it out to someone else. Broadly we might say that in doing this the bank provides liquidity but this does not adequately capture the task at hand. Not only have I lent money but i expect it back whenever i ask. even as i deposit that money 46

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it is still, for me, one day money. if on the other hand i have borrowed i am expecting to hold that loan for a longer time period. a bank changes one day money into one year money. So the money i wasn’t using is used by someone else to purchase some capital good (or housing) that requires longer term debt for a reasonably liquid market and in which the cost of borrowing is favourable to that longer view. yet i can still draw on that money when i want. the matter is neatly summarised in the turner review, ‘one of the key functions of the banking system is maturity transformation, holding longer term assets than liabilities and thus enabling the non-bank sector to hold shorter term assets than liabilities’ (Turner Review: 23) In the context of a market economy driven by capital accumulation this is a central function and one indeed that turner describes as ‘crucial’ and ‘delivering major social and economic value’. We may wish to object to banking but then to be consistent we should be objecting to the whole system in which this social function becomes relevant. once we identify the function of banking we see it necessarily involves issues of trust and judgement, based on proper knowledge. We need a safe level of deposits and sound knowledge of those to whom money is lent and of the project they wish to be involved in. in addition a key function of any bank would be to have some oversight of the risk position of the bank that comes with maturity transformation. the social function of maturity transformation implies that sound judgement, reputation and so ethical culture are central to what a bank does. yet it was exactly reputation that had been knocked by the credit crunch and then an extended run of scandals in relation to mis-selling or the setting of the LiBor rate or exchange rate. the Salz Review recognised that the ethical position was the start of any inquiry in to the conduct of banks ‘a bank’s licence to operate is built on the trust of customers and of other stakeholders, such as its staff, regulators and the public as a whole’ (Salz Review: 4.). Such a message would jar with a pre-crunch city culture that had drunk to the full the ethical structure given by economics. What was required was rational maximising. this answered to the unacknowledged but still practical ethical structure of economics that posed a relation of maximising to ends in which convention, trust, the social, etc. were presented as, or rather hollowed out as, matters of choice, as possible content of a utility function. in that structure the ethical does not enable action it provides possible motivation for action. this is a structure we have already in the work of the sophists and we saw that its substantive base lay in the dual nature of the commodity. economics has enabled a conception of agency distinct from interaction and from the job in hand. agency is considered apart from practicalities in terms of skills and internal knowledge but also from the ethical element related to the doing of such a job well. the latter, however, is not a matter of choice but comes with the internal practice of the job. yet in the modern market ethos such internal practice was vulnerable to the 47

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shifting understanding possible within the scope of the commodity. Here was a necessary condition for the undermining of social function but it does not yet capture the actual process by which social function became undermined. We speak of social function yet speak of private organisations. For the chicago school this would be confused thinking. the purpose of that organisation was to ensure the disgorging of residual revenue streams. it was meaningless to speak of a corporation having social function, let alone social responsibility. the organisation was a nexus of contracts from which any kind of internal function, even private, was already crowded out. there was no this to the corporation. Without that there was nothing for any claim of social function to cling to. it had already been hollowed out. in the Salz Review the matter is obscured by invoking the semi-public status of banks, the implicit and explicit government support of banks and the systemic risks they pose to inancial stability make them semi-public institutions. As a result, politicians and the public believe they have the right to insist on changes. Banks need to set the highest standards to meet expectations. (ibid.: 5)

this suggests some departure from a norm because of special circumstances including intervention. yet a further point made in the Salz Review suggests a more radical problem when it summarises a position we are familiar with, the public has been understandably shocked by some of the revelations. it takes them as conirming the view that some banks and bankers have lost any sense of social responsibility and are only out for themselves.2 (Salz review: 5)

the shock arises from the loss of ‘social responsibility’ in favour of ‘themselves’. Social responsibility makes sense only in terms of the existing (apparently private) function of the bank. it did not refer to whether banks were providing charitable support for this good cause or another but rather that they could not fulil properly the basic functions expected of them. They hadn’t even passed this irst post in moral conduct. Orthodox economic thinking has a language of morality that leads us to talk of choices regarding philanthropy or altruism, but the root of this takes for granted a separation of self-interest and practice. the morally depleted self was a general condition for a culture that enabled a number of inancial scandals, of mis-selling, market manipulation, as well as, 2 See also the problem stated by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, ‘the uK banking sector’s ability both to perform its crucial role in support of the real economy and to maintain international pre-eminence has been eroded by a profound loss of trust born of profound lapses in banking standards’, p.8. 48

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we argue, the global inancial crisis. This culture was given its ethical structure by economics and this structure was the basis for a process that undermined the proper functions of banks. a vision of moral depletion was at the core of mispractice. the use value side of banking, maturity transformation, was overridden by the exchange value side, that is to say success in the market. moral depletion was not then simply an absence of morality but rather itself was part of an ethos that could be learnt and that had the comfort of being founded, even if partially, on the nature of the commodity. the curious case of a moral culture of moral depletion is captured in the words of the Goldman Sachs employee, Fabrice tourre, ‘i’ve managed to sell a few abacus bonds to widows and orphans that i ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic ABS CDO2’ (Goldman Sachs 2010: 23). The derivative product abacus had been knowingly designed with the help of John Paulson to be entirely sub-prime so that Paulson could himself bet against it by selling it short. the easiest explanation here is to look to individual explanation, so rogue characters. this supposes a culture from which individuals diverged. this is not at all the case we want to make. in speaking of a culture of moral depletion we refer to a culture to which these individuals conformed, a culture with a norm rooted on one side of the commodity. We can indeed, for example, point to Fred Goodwin and his deal-making that eventually, without due care, got rBS exposed to sub-prime exposure when it bought ABN-Ambro. We can look to bad management in such a deal but, in acting as he did, Fred Goodwin acted according to the morality of the day. the rapid expansion of rBS through acquisition was also, unsurprisingly accompanied by a transformation from funding by deposits to an increased use of wholesale funding. As beits this culture he was not even a banker when irst appointed so, relieved of that potential restraint, he could aggressively grow the bank. His incompetence was essential to his practice. He would not have been hired otherwise. the relation of wholesale funding to the loss of banking practice was also relevant in the case of HBoS. Here we have the advantage of a whistleblower from HBoS, Paul moore, former Group risk regulator of HBoS, before being ired for warning about group risk, i.e., doing what other people would call his job. He subsequently offered evidence to the treasury Select committee, on the grounds that it was in the public interest. What is clear from his evidence is that HBOS were not fulilling banking practice. Rather in pursuit of an aggressive retail and marketing strategy they were selling ever more product. Paul moore’s evidence is clear enough: the wholesale funding requirement had grown so rapidly not only because corporate were selling risky loans to people, but because retail was. in fact, i understand that the total loan book of corporate, at the end of the day, was £116 billion, but the total loan book in the retail division was much larger 49

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than that. the point about the sales culture is that it applied across all types of products. By the way, mis-selling does not apply only to insurance products, funds or corporate bond funds; you can mis-sell loans just as easily as you can mis-sell an insurance product. i do not distinguish between loans and corporate bonds for mis-selling purposes. mis-selling got done because we oversold and mis-sold credit to people, as well as other products. (Parliamentary commission 2013 Vol. VII, B ev 6 / Vol. VII B ev 7)

His evidence highlights the direct link between mis-selling and maturity transformation. this is not the usual understanding. What we hear of, for example, is PPi, i.e. the insurance he refers to, or the selling of interest swaps to small irms that don’t fully understand. Bad enough but the core mis-selling concerned the corruption of maturity transformation, the mis-selling of credit. the culture led by Sir James crosby was focussed on sales targets and as a result Moore came into conlict with the corporate bond section of the retail division. In the subsequent conlict its head, Jo Dawson, was described by moore as leaning over the table to threaten him: ‘i’m warning you. don’t you make an efin’ enemy out of me’. Jo Dawson would then be the next head of Group regulatory risk. Her experience was not preparation for overseeing risk but then that was hardly the point. What might ordinarily disqualify her now qualiied her. Of course she reported to the chairman of the risk committee of the retail bank. this is what Paul moore says about that committee and its chair, charles dunstone is a very good man and i am not making any personal comment about Charles Dunstone, but he had no technical expertise in banking; he had no technical expertise in risk management; he had no technical expertise in what you might call audit and assurance and oversight work; yet he was the chairman of the risk committee for the retail bank, which was the largest part of the bank. We obviously now know – subsequently – that in relation to corporate, there was inadequate oversight. that is quite clear. (Parliamentary commission 2013 Vol. VII, B ev 3)

Behind a story about private enterprise lies the hidden ongoing destruction of public good. the function of the bank was crowded out by business objectives. Shareholders not only did not have suficient knowledge they were beneitting from the short term gains. the culture that enabled this went back to the 80s and before with the triumph of a form of economics in which issues of reproduction, issues of responsibility, issues of moral conduct were shaped by a depleted vision of economics. it pushed a conception of self-interest that could not relate to the underlying purpose and its internal disciplines. it was a process taking place across the industry and indeed if it wasn’t there could not have been adequate conditions for the global inancial crisis. The ethical departure 50

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we have stressed is the departure from practice and hence from any hope of excellence. this departure was enabled by a culture that had reduced the self to rational maximiser and economics to allocation. The particularities of the Northern Rock case illustrate how ethos produced the process of homogenisation that was a necessary precondition of the credit crunch. We might refer here to the libertarian market philosophy of its chairman, matt ridley, or we might refer to its demutualisation from building society to bank, or refer to its reliance on the wholesale money markets for funds or its selling on of mortgages in securitised assets. in each of these the common feature is the marketisation enabled by the ethical structure of economics. the mortgage market is interesting because it involves a particular form of maturity transformation that had been carried in building societies. the latter did not take normal sight deposits but rather had savings accounts and these were held by members not customers. this would then entitle those members at some point to get a mortgage. the two ends of maturity transformation were managed differently than they would have been in a straight commercial institution. indeed, banks were not allowed to enter the mortgage market. differing maturity transformation was associated with a necessary heterogeneity in inancial institutions. There was heterogeneity in ownership structure, legislative framework as well geographic; all these aspects relate to management of maturity transformation. these aspects of heterogeneity were gradually chipped away to be inally undermined by the process of demutualisation as the market ethos prevailed. Northern Rock, echoing its past, concentrated on the mortgage market but already this was a changed practice after demutualisation. the aim, as with HBoS, was aggressively to take market share and expand business. the management of maturity transformation was given up to the market at both ends with the marketisation of funding and then marketisation of mortgages. expansion was enabled by wholesale funds. then securitisation could remove the long term assets from their books, lessening capital adequacy requirements and also releasing yet more funds for mortgages. In the irst half of 2007 their mortgage business was up 47 per cent on the equivalent period of the year before (Chick: 2008). This expansion necessarily had to go into sub-prime but this was not in itself the issue. rather, this process of ‘originate and distribute’ generated a line of irresponsibility. those selling mortgages were not going to be saddled with long term commitment while those who inally held the mortgages did so as part of packaged instruments constructed deliberately to circumvent the need for judgement, ensuring a ready market. it was this mixture of marketisation to sub-prime that was so deadly. Judgement, necessary at the long end of maturity transformation, had become marketised. in that moment a part of the moral function of the bank, its practice, was dissolved. this culture of moral depletion had no need for rogues. 51

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Financial institutions, especially in the uK and uSa were homogenised through marketisation. New era stories referred to the triumph of orthodox economics from which new market instruments had been constructed that enabled the management of risk to become a market function. regulators, educated no differently from regulated, also converged accepting that regulation had become increasingly inappropriate when the management of risk had become simply a matter of market allocation. different organisations began to act in similar ways and in the same markets. Banking became a profession in which knowledge of, or expertise, in banking became increasingly irrelevant.

Conclusion

We may question whether there could be virtue in banking. We can though identify a practice, speciic certainly to a money economy, in which judgement has a role and in which there is a public interest that this function be properly managed. in departures from this function banking ceased to be banking. expertise in this function was replaced by those with grander more exciting ambitions. the commodity structured the space in which this new exciting conduct had some hold. it did indeed seem like the right thing to do at the time. We see now though from the resulting global inancial crisis that the consequences were not so happy. at heart then this was a crisis of ethos and reproduction, but neither of these was properly recognised so that practice and organisation, informed by modern economics had come to be understood as self-interest and allocation.

References

aristotle 1985. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. t. irwin. indianapolis: Hackett. Buchanan, S. 1976. The Portable Plato. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chick, V. 2008. Could the Crisis at Northern Rock have been Predicted? An evolutionary approach. Contributions to Political Economy, 27, 115–24. Dixon, W. 2008. Ricardo: Economic Thought and Social Order. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 30, 235–53. Dixon, W. and Wilson, D. 2014. Political Economy and the Social Disciplines: the modern Life of Das Adam Smith Problem. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38(3), 623–41. Hopper, K. and Hopper, W. 2009. The Puritan Gift. London: i.B. tauris. Keynes, J.M. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest London: macmillan. meikle, S. 1995. Aristotle’s Economic Thought. oxford: clarendon Press. 52

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macintyre, a. 1985. After Virtue. London: duckworth. Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, 2013, Changing Banking for Good vol. I–IX, The Stationery Ofice. Robbins, L. 1945. An Essay on the Nature and Signiicance of Economic Science. London: macmillan. Sachs, G. 2010. Risk Management and the Residential Mortgage Market [Online]. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/30474285/GoldmanSachs-Response-to-Senate-Document-Release [accessed: 2 April 2015]. Seaford, R. 2012. Monetisation and the Genesis of the Western Subject. Historical Materialism, 20(1), 78–102. Seaford, R. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind. cambridge: cambridge university Press. Smith, A. (1976) [1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (ed. by d.d. raphael and A.L. Macie). Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays Business Practices 2013. The Turner Review: a regulatory response to the global banking crisis 2009 Financial Services authority. Waterield, R. 2000. The First Philosophers. oxford: oxford university Press. Wilson, D. and Dixon, W. 2004. The Irreducibly Social Self in Classical economy: adam Smith and thomas chalmers meet G.H. mead. History of Economics Review, 40 (summer), 121–36. Wilson, D. and Dixon, W. 2006. Das Adam Smith Problem: A Critical Realist Perspective. Journal of Critical Realism, 5(2), 251–72. Wilson, D. and Dixon, W. 2008. Homo Economicus meets G.H. mead: a contribution to the critique of economic theory. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 67(2), 241–63. Wilson, D. and Dixon, W. 2012. A History of Homo Economicus: The Nature of the Moral in Economic Theory. London: routledge.

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Chapter 4

Is aristotelian Capitalism Possible?1 rajeev Sehgal

according to alasdair macintyre aristotelian capitalism is not possible. macintyre’s neo-aristotelian philosophy is considered by him and others to provide the basis for a radical critique of capitalism. critics of macintyre and certain defenders of the capitalist economy think that this is mistaken and that aristotelian capitalism is possible. robert Solomon (1992) and John Kay (2003) provide attempts to defend the case for aristotelian capitalism. Kay explicitly attempts to use macintyre’s ideas in his defence of the possibility of aristotelian capitalism. He is therefore the main focus of my defence of macintyre against his aristotelian capitalist critics. others who defend the possibility of aristotelian capitalism are Paul and miller (1990). i do not to aim to defend macintyre’s neo-aristotelianism in this chapter. this is because a virtue-based account of the good is accepted by both aristotelian defenders and critics of capitalism. rather my concern here is with the correct application of macintyre’s neo-aristotelian philosophy and whether it should be considered as providing a critique or defence of capitalism. aristotelian defenders of capitalism claim that macintyre misapplies his own aristotelian insights into the good life and society to capitalism and the pursuit of proit. They argue that Aristotelian virtue theory in general, and MacIntyre’s Neo-Aristotelianism in particular, can help explain the persistence and relative success of capitalism as an economic system. they further claim that Aristotelian virtue theory has played, and can play, a role in shaping and directing the conduct of proit-seeking capitalist corporations for good in the modern economy. Against MacIntyre, it is argued that there is no necessary contradiction between the corporate pursuit of capitalist proit and the realisation of aristotelian virtues. the aim of this chapter is to defend macintyre against such criticisms. i start by setting out the fundamentals of a contemporary aristotelian political economy based on macintyre’s philosophy. i then go on to consider an argument which has been used by ‘aristotelian’ critics of macintyre and defenders of capitalism, namely, the ‘paradox of proit’ argument. I argue that, if applied 1 i thank the following people for very useful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper: ron Beadle, Andrius Bielskis, Víctor Durà-Vilà, Russell Keat, John O’Neill and James Wilson.

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to contemporary conditions of capitalism, this argument is false. It is wrong to use MacIntyre in particular, and Aristotle in general, in such a defence of capitalism. Aristotelian capitalism is, for the most part, not possible. I conclude the chapter with some thoughts about ways in which we can make the economy more aristotelian.

The Fundamentals of an Aristotelian Political Economy

macintyre considers himself to be a critic of capitalism because of his neoaristotelian account about the good life and community. macintyre’s account centres on his idea about social practices. the good life involves participation in social practices and especially in one’s working life. the good political community has at its heart a shared conception of the good which contains agreement on valued social practices. In general, a social practice is valuable for what it yields to both producers and consumers of the practice. For producers a practice requires that they develop, exercise and express a set of creative capacities, excellences or virtues. this can provide producers with a measure of self-identity and self-realisation. As for consumers, the skilful virtue-realising activities of producers within a practice results in an aspect of individual need and/or want being addressed. at the heart of macintyre’s account of a social practice is the idea of ‘internal goods’. Internal goods deine the point of a social practice. The developed capacities of producers are set to aim at the realisation of goods internal to practice. For example, medicine is a social practice. Its internal goods include the alleviation of pain, the prevention of premature death and the promotion of good health. medical professionals are expected to develop knowledge of the causes of true body dis-function and treatment, and honestly deploy an ability to diagnose ailments and prescribe cures, for the sake of such internal goods. macintyre contrasts the idea of goods internal to social practices with the idea of ‘external goods’. money is an example of an external good. macintyre claims that the pursuit of money can be solvent of goods internal to practice and thus detrimental to the interests of a practice-based community and social needs. From an Aristotelian point of view, producers should not be encouraged or forced to sacriice goods internal to practices for external goods. For MacIntyre, capitalism is the pursuit of money and proit par excellence. macintyre’s critique of capitalism is based on the concern that there is an institutional and individual drive towards proit which entails sacriice of practices and the associated internal goods. Capitalists treat resources, workers and consumers largely as a means to money and frustrate our ability to realise the aristotelian good in our own lives and as a practice-centred virtue-realising political community. 56

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The Fundamentals of Capitalism and the Paradox of Proit Argument

There are three key features of a capitalist economy. First, the freedom to hold and use private property in the means of production. Second, free market exchange and distribution of goods. Third, freedom to produce and distribute goods and services for proit. All three features have to obtain in order for an economy as a whole, or a particular area within a mixed economy, to be classed as capitalist. there are no truly capitalist economies. even in the most laissez-faire capitalist economies there are some restrictions and regulations on the right and use of property in production; the freedom to conduct market exchange and the ability to proit from the production and sale of goods. I will return to the issue of capitalist regulation later. For now the key question is: are the fundamentals of a neo-aristotelian political economy safe in capitalist hands? aristotelian capitalist critics of macintyre claim yes. they do so because of their belief in the so-called ‘paradox of proit’ argument. It is not obvious what proit actually represents and why it is necessarily a good thing for economic life. Friedrich von Hayek claims that ‘in the evolution of the structure of human activities, proitability works as a signal that guides selection towards what makes man fruitful; only what is more proitable will, as a rule, nourish more people, for it sacriices less than it adds’ (Hayek 1988: 46). The former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, suggests that ‘moral values’ are the ‘motive power’ of capitalism and that ‘virtue not vice’ is rewarded by proit in the capitalist market place.2 the political economist John Kay claims that the achievement of capitalist proit actually requires respect for Aristotelian practices and realisation of virtues in our economic life. rather than destroying practices and the virtues, as MacIntyre argues, Kay claims that good proitable capitalist corporations have respected, and do respect, practices and the virtues as a means to proit. They do so because they appreciate the truth of the paradox of proit argument. this argument has a similar structure to mill’s paradox of hedonism argument. mill argues that we don’t actually succeed in maximising pleasure if we pursue it directly. the direct pursuit of pleasure is self-defeating. instead we should direct our efforts to meaningful activities such as friendships and poetry. Pleasure will arise as an indirect result of striving for and achieving good friendships or becoming accomplished at the art of reading and writing poetry (Mill 1981: 144). Kay argues that the same is true about capitalist proit. The direct pursuit of proit is not necessarily the proit-maximising strategy; the single and narrow2 Greenspan chides critics of capitalism for their “inability to grasp the crucial importance of the moral values which are the motive power of capitalism.” He continues: “Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal values and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.” (Rand 1962: 128) 57

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minded pursuit of money can be self-defeating. Firms maximise proit by being good irst and in the business of proit second. Proit comes as a consequence of being good. Kay claims that macintyre’s neo-aristotelian theory of social practices actually helps us understand what it is for a irm to be good. MacIntyre’s theory explains how and why proitable capitalist irms have thrived up to now, and how capitalist irms in the present and future should think about what they can and should do in order to be proitable.3 MacIntyre’s Fishing Example

Kay attempts to support the paradox of proit argument by the use of MacIntyre’s ‘ishing crew’ example (MacIntyre 1994: 284). Kay thinks that MacIntyre’s ishing crews example actually proves the opposite of what macintyre thinks it shows. in the example macintyre asks us to imagine two crews. crew a is organised on cliché-capitalist lines. crew B is aristotelian. The boat and equipment that Crew A use is owned by ish wholesalers. Their headquarters are in the city close to the urban restaurant and supermarket trade. At the coast the company employs ‘hire-and-ire’ wage-labour crew drawn from anywhere and everywhere to catch ish at sea. The crew might be expected to work a minimum amount of shifts and catch a minimum number of crates. Perhaps there are extra-incentives in place for those that do more shifts and prepare extra crates of ish for market. Maybe there are inancial penalties for those who don’t achieve their basic quota. The ishing wholesaler calculates worker expectations, penalties and rewards in accordance with Taylor-Fordist time-and-motion studies. The more ish the crew get then the more restaurant, ishmonger and frozen food deals the wholesaler can make. In contrast, the members of Crew B emerge from an established ishing community. Their forefathers ished and they have entered and become part of a ishing tradition. They have inherited their equipment and knowledge about ishing techniques. 3 A version of the paradox of profit argument can be found in Norman Bowie (1998). there is a weaker version of Kay’s paradox of profit argument. instead of thinking that profit requires or entails goodness, some claim that, although there is a tension between profit-making and the good, these two goals can sit in some sort of harmony. For this view, see Paul and Miller (1990). They write: ‘It is true that one can become so fixated on acquisitive, goal-directed activities such as earning money or accumulating goods that one loses sight of the virtues, which are for macintyre excellences concerned with intrinsically valuable activities. But it is possible for individuals in a liberal, capitalist society to maintain a proper balance in their lives between goaldirected and intrinsically valuable activities. Furthermore, the same activity can be intrinsically valuable as well as productive; thus in a free society a philosopher or artist can simultaneously lead the good life and make a living’ (ibid.: 814). My view is that the presence of corporate capitalist profit-making is hostile to the Aristotelian good. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for the pursuit of profit and the realisation of goods internal to practice in conditions of late capitalism to peacefully co-exist with one another. 58

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They appreciate goods internal to the practice of the craft of ishing and how these goods relate to the self-identity and self-realisation they get from their work and the interests that chefs and consumers have for their catch. Kay thinks that the distinction that macintyre draws between capitalist crew a and aristotelian crew B is instructive. they do represent two distinct approaches to production. everyone involved in crew a is assumed to have an instrumental approach to the ishing enterprise. The irm’s ‘human resource’ strategy is based upon the assumption that workers are mostly motivated by money and that therefore a system of inancial incentives and penalties – the motives of greed and fear – will get the best out of them. In the case of Aristotelian Group B, ishing is part of who they are. They produce because there is a basic care for how they produce, who they are and how their efforts serve the ish-consuming community. However, Kay criticises MacIntyre for not asking the further question: which crew is more proitable? Kay thinks that MacIntyre assumes that Crew A will be more proitable and that the main point of the example for MacIntyre is that proit isn’t everything. There are values which inhere in production, and are present in the work of Crew B, which are lost by shaping our systems of production along the capitalist lines of crew a. Kay claims that macintyre is mistaken in his assumption about which of these kinds of crew are more proitable. He cites the Harvard business case study of the Prelude Fishing corporation. the President of Prelude aimed for his company to become the ‘General Motors’ of the ishing business by using type-a crew techniques production. Prelude eventually went bust. the lesson that Kay draws from his relection on MacIntyre’s examples and his reference to the Prelude case study is that capitalists must be aristotelian if they aim to be proitable. Capitalist don’t have to choose between being good and being proitable. Proit requires goodness of the kind exempliied in MacIntyre’s Aristotelian Crew B (Kay 2003: 349). Kay draws a strong conclusion about capitalist proit in general from his Harvard case-study research into the North American ishing business. It might very well be the case that type-A ishing crews can’t compete with type-B ishing crews but this seems unique to this sector of the capitalist economy. Generations of capitalists in other sectors of the economy have proited from the extinguishing of social practices from the realm of production. As MacIntyre points out, we now have a late capitalist condition in which the social practices in work are marginalised (MacIntyre 1985: 227). the vast majority of workers are now not able to produce in accordance with a social practice. Workers are not able to develop, exercise and express creative capacities, excellences and virtues in their work. For masses of workers, production is repetitive and dull. Work is enjoined simply or largely for the sake of a wage. capitalists have stripped out craft and skills from the production 59

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process and in its place have installed taylor-Ford-inspired systems of routine ield, factory, ofice and retail line-work. Such capitalist line-work has evolved because of eficiency gains, cost reduction and, ultimately, proit. The Prelude corporation were simply trying out type-a methods which have proved to be proitable in other parts of the capitalist economy. Prelude’s failure simply shows the limits of taking type-a crew thinking to relatively small parts of the economy. In general and for the most part there is no deep conlict between type-A crew working and proit. Kay’s relection on MacIntyre’s ishing crew example does not show that there is a necessary link between type-B working and proit. Kay claims that MacIntyre’s ishing crew example reveals a ‘deep truth’ about the goodness required for proit at the heart of the market capitalist economy. It doesn’t. The example highlights exactly what it intended, which is what we lose in terms of intrinsic producer values because of the capitalist drive to proit. apologists for laissez-faire capitalism, and those who see consumption as the be all and end all of the economy, don’t see trends towards type-A working in negative terms. They see the de-skilling of production, and the proliferation of capitalist line-work, as a justiiable price to pay for what we get back from the mass production and consumption of goods. In contrast, macintyre’s ideal economy aims at a balance between values for producers and consumers. For macintyre what we have lost in terms of the capacities and virtues that producers used to be able to express in their work for the sake of indulging ourselves in a capitalist consumer culture is not worth it (MacIntyre 1995: xii). According to MacIntyre there should have been more ‘moral resistance’ based on an aristotelian philosophy of social practices to the process of capitalist industrialisation and proletarianisation of work that has taken place (MacIntyre 1998: 232). What we have lost are forms of economic life ‘in which social relationships [were] informed by a shared allegiance to the goods internal to communal practices’ and in which ‘the uses of power and wealth [were] subordinated to the achievement of those goods’ and where each pursued ‘their own goods rationally and critically, rather than [as under capitalism] having continually to struggle … against being reduced to the status of instruments of this or that type of capital formation’ (macintyre 1995: xxvii). a central way in which capitalism frustrates aristotelian economic ideals is the way in which it condemns a mass and majority of workers to type-a work. However this still leaves a minority of professionals who are supposedly engaged in practice-based virtue realising work in a capitalist economy. Perhaps this class of professional workers have to be like ishing Crew-B and understand that what they do is embedded in a set of practices and values. Doesn’t the strategic and technical work of such professionals within capitalist organisations have to conform to the demands of relevant social practices for a corporation 60

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to be proitable? Could the paradox of proit argument apply to the class of professional workers producing within the capitalist economy? i consider these questions in the following section.

Capitalism and Professional Producers

Kay and other aristotelian capitalists are impressed when capitalist corporations profess their commitment to ‘ethics’. thus Kay approvingly cites an explicit paradox-of-proit-inspired statement in the founding prospectus of the american pharmaceutical company merck. they claim that we ‘never try to forget that medicine is for people. It is not for proits. The proits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear’. And yet in 2000 Merck were investigated by the US Justice Department under the False Claims Act. The Justice Department charged Merck with fraudulently overcharging for their drugs to medicaid and for paying illegal kickbacks to drugs-purchasers in other healthcare schemes. the kickbacks included giving hospitals a discount of 92 per cent on the arthritis drug Vioxx which was eventually withdrawn from the market in light of safety concerns. the drug was found to double the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In 2008 Merck agreed to pay $650 million to settle the Medicaid fraud case. As regards Vioxx, Merck agreed to pay a $68 million in a multistate law suit. the law suit alleged that the company deceptively played down the health risks of the drug in its advertising and marketing (new york Times, 2008). Indeed Merck drew up a ‘hit-list’ of doctors that disputed the claims of the drug and sought to discredit their reputations. the activities of Merck were brought to light by a company whistle-blower. When he tried to raise concerns the company’s products and selling practices with his supervisor, he was told: ‘I don’t care how you do it … get the damn business’ (Johnson 2008). other pharmaceutical companies aren’t as self-conscious about being ‘ethical’ as merck and they are just as bad if not worse than merck. to take another example: GlaxoSmithKline is one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world. And yet, in 2004 it had to pay $2.5 million in settlement of a consumer fraud charge. they deceptively concealed evidence which showed that their anti-depressant drug Paxil was ‘ineffective and possibly harmful to children and adolescents’. In 1994, GlaxoSmithKline hoped to boost sales for Paxil by marketing it as a cure for the ‘illness’ of ‘shyness’. they relabelled shyness and gave it the more medical-sounding phrase ‘social anxiety disorder’. on their billboard posters they displayed an image of a forlorn individual looking isolated in a social setting. alongside the image they inserted the phrase: ‘Imagine being allergic to people’. Under this they wrote: ‘Paxil, a new hope for people with social anxiety disorder’. the medical and marketing might of GlaxoSmithKline preyed on ordinary human anxieties about relationships. 61

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Sales and proits of Paxil soared after the launch of their advertising campaign (marcia angell 2009). Merck is cited by Kay as an example of a ‘good’ proit-making company which explicitly claim that they are not primarily in business for the money. this company is supposedly self-conscious about not being primarily driven by proit but when push comes to shove the ‘professionals’ who drive the organisation are actually more interested in the interests of their shareholders and proit (Lexchin 2006). Merck’s sharp practices aren’t unique. Such behaviour is endemic in the private proit-maximising healthcare sector (Petersen 2009). These indings about capitalism and healthcare are especially troubling for the Aristotelian Capitalist belief in the paradox of proit argument. Healthcare professionals are supposed to be driven by a fundamental care-instinct for their dependent and vulnerable patients. the spirit of the Hippocratic oath is meant to inspire and govern them in their basic and tough professional judgements. Healthcare is supposedly the ultimate vocational form of work. If professional ethics was going to be held up and not sacriiced in any part of the capitalist economy then one would expect it to be sustained in the private healthcare sector. it is not just in private healthcare that professional ethics comes to be sacriiced for proit. One might similarly expect professional producers within the education sector to produce from high-ethos and vocational motivations, and to be led in their professional judgements by a fundamental care for their dependent client-interests. And yet, in the US, the Government Accountability Ofice (GAO) produced a damning report on the conduct of For-Proit colleges. they were found to be engaged in ‘deceptive and questionable marketing practices’ which lied about or exaggerated the beneits of their qualiications to potential students. Once students were in the college they were subject to half the teacher contact time and half the curriculum of regular not-for-proit colleges. Hardly any of the teaching staff were tenured. Almost type-a temporary contract teaching staff were hired to supply the half-baked classes and courses for students. Students typically ran up around $70000 of personal debt to pay for their ‘education’. other students were encouraged by the colleges to fraudulently apply for Federal and State grants in order to cover the cost of college fees (US Government Accountability Report 2010). How can aristotelian capitalists respond to these healthcare and education counterexamples to the paradox of proit argument? They could possibly respond by saying: ‘Of course people can and have proited from fraudulent, deceptive and illegal activities. However, there are laws against fraud in the content, quality and claimed beneits of tradable goods in a capitalist economy. The paradox of proit argument applies to capitalist economic activity that occurs within the bounds of law and regulations. it is the realisation of legal proit that promotes the good in MacIntyrean social practices. It is proit 62

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making within the bounds of law which the paradox of proit argument applies to. Aristotelian social practices and virtues are respected by reputable proitmaking companies within the law’. This point about legal proit does not help Aristotelian Capitalists. There are two issues which this question raises about the relationship between the State, law and corporate capitalist producers which speak against the paradox of proit argument. First, it is not necessarily true that major ‘reputable’ capitalist corporations stay within the law in their quest for proit. Second, capitalist corporations try to inluence the political process and the system of law so that the State regulation of their economic activity can be reduced. To take this last point irst, corporate capitalist producers are not passive law-taking and regulation-accepting agents. We know from our experience of capitalism that capitalist corporations devote vast sums to lobbying the political classes (Kaiser 2010). they want the law and State regulations off their proit-seeking backs. They want maximum freedom to proit and that means sponsoring those parties and politicians who will deliver policies of deregulation and tendency towards a minimal state laissez-faire capitalism to them. in theory we could completely de-regulate capitalist market exchange and just have a rule of the principle ‘caveat emptor’ in our economic life. in such a deregulated laissez-faire world Merck and GlaxoSmithKline would be free to sell Vioxx and Paxil. Producers in general would be free to make false and overblown claims for their products. capitalist corporations do lobby the political classes for a legal and regulatory system which tends towards the caveat emptor world and minimises the amount of monitoring, accountability and come back on their proit-maximising activity by the State (Bakan 2004: chapter 4). Second, major ‘reputable’ corporate capitalist organisations often stray into deceptive, fraudulent and illegal economic activity for the sake of proit. aristotelian capitalists set much store by the concept of corporate branding and the theoretical incentive that maintaining a brand-image gives to corporations to be ethical. in reality this is not much of an incentive. the illegal activity of major household-known capitalist corporations is wide-spread and well documented (Boyle and Simms 2011). indeed capitalist corporations make rational calculations about whether it is in their inancial interest to break particular laws and bear the risk and penalty for getting caught (Bakan 2004: chapter 3). From a neo-aristotelian perspective there are even problems with the commercial conduct of capitalist corporations that do seem to operate within the law. Thus, there are corporations which proit and seem to provide genuine beneits for their consumers. Sony is cited by Kay as a good proitable capitalist corporation. in its founding prospectus Sony declare: ‘we shall eliminate untoward proit-seeking’ (Kay 1998). I’m using a Sony laptop to write this chapter. in the past i have used a Sony mobile phone and one of their mp3 players. these are useful products which have generally performed as expected. 63

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Sony engineers are channelling high feats of practice-based production in a socially useful way. to this extent these producers are conducting themselves in an Aristotelian way. However, whilst the professionalism and utility of such goods is dificult to deny, there are two related problems which seem to come with the proit-driven consumer culture in which the corporate capitalist trade of such ‘honest’ goods is embedded. First, there is a narrowing of human aspiration towards fulilment in consumption which corporations like Sony encourage. Second, there is the problem of ‘overproduction’. First, MacIntyre would challenge what commonly passes for much ‘honest’ capitalist trade. macintyre would argue that although there isn’t overt deception involved in much of proitable capitalist market trade a certain kind of ‘miseducation’ is perpetuated in the kinds of advertising and promotion of consumer goods conducted by corporate capitalist companies. macintyre claims that people are educated or rather miseducated to believe that what they should aim at and hope for is … whatever they may happen to want. they are in the vast majority of cases to regard themselves as primarily consumers whose practical and productive activities are no more than a means to consumption. What constitutes success in life becomes a matter of the successful acquisition of consumer goods … . (MacIntyre 1995: xiii)

this leads to the second problem of overproduction and overconsumption. What comes with such products is built-in obsolescence and ever faster cycles of generation and decline. I purchased my laptop 18 months ago. Given the pace of product development, it already seems like an antique. Tremendous corporate marketing resources and effort is devoted to persuading us to junk the old for the novelty of the new. Sony wouldn’t count this behaviour as resulting in ‘untoward proit’. MacIntyre would. Especially if it is boredom in our type-A capitalist work or proit-driven compromises in our type-B work which lead us to seek solace and meaning in the kind of highly-disposable conspicuous consumption that corporations like Sony encourage. Proit-making capitalists like Sony can direct high feats of practice-based engineering production toward market wants without customer complaints. However, a problem is what comes with the modest Aristotelian good that they deliver. the capitalist consumer society condition in which we have come to focus so much of our aspirations in consumption falls far short of macintyre’s ideal of an aristotelian political economy and the hope for a balance between values which inhere in the activity of production and values we invest in the activity of consumption. an economy should be able to supply useful goods for human life but, from an Aristotelian point of view, we don’t want the sheer amount of them that are generated in a proit-maximising capitalist economic 64

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system. It is proit-maximisation which drives a concept of the good centred on commodity consumption, the phenomenon over overproduction and the dependence of the economy on the mass employment of type-a workers for the production, distribution and retail of such overproduced goods. To sum up: the paradox of proit argument fails and Aristotelian Capitalism is for the most part not possible for three main reasons. First, because of the way in which capitalism marginalises the social practices and develops type-a line-work for the mass of workers. Second, because of the way in which the capitalist push for proit corrupts the notionally social practice based work of professional producers. Third, Aristotelian Capitalism is not possible because of the ways in which proit seeking capitalist producers cheat consumers and narrow human life and aspiration towards consumption.

Capitalism in Practice and Theory

aristotelian capitalists do acknowledge that in recent times there have been spectacular proit-driven capitalist outrages. They suggest that the proit/frauddriven collapses of great corporations such as WorldCom and Enron at the turn of the century do seem to count against their view. to this they would have to recognise that the 2008 global inancial scandals, which took the capitalist economic system as a whole to crisis and which were driven by the illicit proitmaximising activities of a large number of supposedly reputable inance irms, including giant investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, also counts against their belief in Aristotelian Capitalism.4 However, Aristotelian Capitalists don’t believe that the corporate outrages which we have witnessed in recent times are the fault of capitalist economic practice as such. instead they claim that the blame lies with a particular kind of pernicious thinking and theory about capitalism which has recently come to contaminate capitalist economic practice. They advance, what I call, a ‘theoryinfecting-practice’ hypothesis about the cause of our current proit-driven problems with capitalism. aristotelian capitalists suggest that capitalism has only recently come to be infected by ‘greed is good’ thinking as exempliied in the 1980’s Oliver Stone ilm Wall Street (Solomon 1992: 16). Kay makes this claim more formal by describing the problematic infecting theory as ‘the American Business Model’ (Kay 2003, chapter 26). American Business Model (ABM) is neo-liberal economic theory with added assumptions about human nature. thus neo-liberals believe in minimal state, low taxation and little regulation of capitalist economic activity 4 For an excellent account of the central role that the illicit activities of these companies played in the 2008 financial crisis, see Gillian Tett (2010). 65

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is essential for a just and eficient economic order. ABM adds to this, irst, the empirical claim that self-regarding materialism governs capitalist economic agency and, second, the normative judgement that allowing individuals to pursue their material self-interest through legal capitalist market exchange best promotes the economic good. aristotelian capitalists claim that such greed is good thinking and theory has come to be self-fulilling. Capitalist agents have now come to act in ways described and predicted by aBm theory. capitalist agents have taken these beliefs in materialism and greed to heart and have pushed their narrow self-interest to the maximum. it is aBm theory infecting capitalist practice which has led us to recent economic disasters (Kay 2003: 346). Kay claims that in pre-aBm-infection days capitalists were restrained by macintyre-type aristotelian considerations about being embedded in a practice and realised that the best way to make proit is to be true to the virtues of relevant social practices. Solomon suggests that in pre-Wall Street days ‘capitalism … succeeded not with brute strength and not just because it has made many people rich but because it has produced responsible citizens’. He adds: capitalism ‘cannot long tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity and ignores the traditional virtues of responsibility, community and integrity’ (Solomon 1992: 17). For both of these Aristotelian Capitalists, given that the problem is ABMtheory-infecting-practice, the antidote is to verse capitalist agents in Aristotelian theory for corporate capitalist business. thus Soloman takes it as his aim ‘to reemphasize some very old [Aristotelian] ways of thinking that have gotten all but lost in the contemporary corporate world and provide a conceptual antidote to the self-destructive thinking and behaviour of our best corporations’. Similarly Kay suggests that what we need to do is instil a different kind of capitalist selfunderstanding, what he calls the ‘political economy of the embedded market’. this theory is substantially informed by what macintyre has to say about social practices and the virtues. it is an understanding and appreciation of this theory which, Kay suggests, will take us back to a benign capitalism. Kay mocks a banner which appeared at an anti-capitalist demonstration which read: capitalism should be replaced with something nicer (Kay 2003: 323). in response Kay writes: ‘Capitalism does indeed need to be replaced by something nicer, but perhaps that something nicer is capitalism itself ’ (Kay 2003: 336). By this he means we need to get back to the pre-aBm golden age of aristotelian capitalism. the theory-infecting-practice hypothesis is not plausible. aBm theory did not develop ex nihilo. It is an ideological relex of actual capitalist economic practice. Destructive self-seeking narrow materialist capitalist behaviour is not a recently developed feature of capitalism. As MacIntyre suggests, theories which come to dominate intellectual life presuppose a particular sociology of actual behaviour (MacIntyre 1985: chapter 3). Indeed ABM-type behaviour was singled out in 1776 by the irst theorist of capitalism – Adam Smith. In his 66

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Wealth of Nations he warns us against conspiratorial behaviour of proit-seeking capitalists against the public interest (Smith 1997: 232). There was not a pre-ABM-Wall-Street golden age of Aristotelian Capitalism. Since Smith’s time there has been a history of State regulation of capitalism in order to protect the public interest against capitalist tendencies towards exploitative, pernicious and destructive behaviour. What has taken place since the 1980’s is the State rolling-back of such regulation and privatisation of the commanding heights of the economy. Since the 1980’s the political class in western capitalist economies have given capitalist agents a much freer hand to pursue and realise proit. What has made matters much worse since Smith’s day is the nature of the capitalist agent which now seeks proit from the economy. Smith was theorising in a time of largely perfect competition. We live in a time in which oligopoly corporate capital dominates in the economy. under oligopoly capitalism there is a radical separation between investment in capital and the day-to-day deployment of private capital for proit. On the one hand, we have pension funds and other inancial institutions that own share capital in oligopolistic business and expect money-returns for their investment. On the other hand, within oligopolistic business, we have type-A line-workers and notionally type-B professional workers who are driven to deliver quarterly money-results to their distant shareholders. Apart from the minority of ethical pension funds and banks, investors in oligopoly share capital don’t much care about how their returns are realised. and they can switch their investment from one corporation to the next in an instant. Given this economic reality there is unrelenting pressure on type-A and notionally type-B professional workers within oligopolistic corporations to do whatever it takes within the law (and outside of law) to deliver proits.

Conclusion

if any aristotelian social practices exist and any virtues are realised under conditions of contemporary oligopolistic capitalism then they obtain in spite of capitalist proit and not, as Aristotelian Capitalists maintain, because of the pursuit of proit. If we are to have a truly Aristotelian political economy then this should involve the marginalisation and, perhaps, the extinction of proit as the main objective of production. this seems required not simply to prevent the kind of recent catastrophic outrages that capitalism has presented to human society but also tackle the three reasons, which I argued for earlier, about why aristotelian capitalism is not for the most part possible. A truly Aristotelian political economy requires social practices, and especially goods internal to practices to be centre stage in each of our individual productive lives and in the productive community as a whole. as regards the 67

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problem of type-a production we should aim for an economy beyond wagelabour.5 As regards type-B production the pressure to deliver capitalist proit on such producers should be reined in. i am not claiming that in a situation where goods internal to practice become central that no one will be moved to act in accordance with instrumental concerns such as the desire for money, and that no one will view a practice simply as a means to realising such an external good. However, according to Aristotle, nature neither prejudices nor promotes an individual’s capacity to act in accordance with virtue. What is crucial is the social environment in which such potential either lourishes or is frustrated, and by which we become disposed (are habituated) to act in one way rather than another (Aristotle 1976: 91). Following Aristotle and MacIntyre we should aim to construct and sustain forms of productive association which makes the realisation of virtue more rather than less likely. In the healthcare examples, the internal goods of medical practice within these organisations did not survive the strain of the capitalist push for proit. However, an understanding of the central virtues and duties of medical practice did drive the courageous efforts of the whistle-blower that brought the proitseeking conduct of merck into public and political view. in a properly aristotelian political economy the virtues of such whistle-blowers would govern the dayto-day operation of these organisations and not the money-minded managers which professionals have come to cower before in capitalist organisations. of course there must be an accounting basis of production and a way to represent and re-invest surplus within the economy; however, the practices have their best chance of being in good order and of promoting the maximum human good when producers don’t pursue proit at any cost. To put it briely, our options seem to be the following: 1. Go back to the kind of ‘localism’ in economic life which some neo-Aristotelians, such as MacIntyre, favour. 2. Seek more regulation of current oligopolistic proit-seeking capitalist business. 3. try to ‘crowd-in’ virtue in current oligopolistic capitalist businesses through a culture of whistle-blowing. 4. In a Maoist way re-educate capitalist agents within current oligopolistic corporation in Kay’s macintyre-inspired ‘political economy of the embedded market’.6 5 Elsewhere (Sehgal 2010) I argue that type-A work should mostly cease to be performed by humans and, as much as possible, be consigned to technology. 6 This Aristotelian Capitalist position has been endorsed by a pro-capitalist right wing commentator as a response to the 2008 capitalist financial crisis. Thus Niall Ferguson writes: ‘In my view, business education urgently needs to be reformed so that bankers learn to strive for more than just the “maximisation of shareholder value” (code for driving up the share price by fair means or foul). The next generation of financiers needs something like a Hippocratic Oath, along the lines recently proposed by students at Harvard Business School … the world needs 68

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5. Give oligopolistic corporations more space to make a proit without compromise to virtue by radically altering ownership and control rights in their inancial and physical capital so that the stock market pressure for quarterly statements and annual returns to investors is lifted. this may involve dissolving the stock market and ending all forms of economic speculation on company shares. 6. Aim for an economy beyond production for proit as a goal for productive enterprises.

I am sceptical about options (1)–(4) and think that something like (6) has to occur for a truly aristotelian political economy via a transitional phase in which (5) operates. As regards (1), there are too many beneits to large-scale production for us to undo history and aim for a pre-industrial idyll. As regards (2), attempts to regulate generally occur after a capitalist outrage and in the heat of the political moment. Capitalists can run rings around prevailing regulations. Also, after the outrage subsides, capitalist corporations will lobby the political class to remove regulations and tend the economy towards a caveat emptor state. Lastly, regulation is inevitably one step or several steps behind what proit-seeking capitalists are up to.7 In the meantime, as we have seen with the 2008 inancial crisis, their proit-seeking activity can take the whole economic system to disaster. As money doctors, not investment bankers focused myopically on “the numbers’” (Ferguson 2010). as we have seen above the Hippocratic oath has limited effect on ‘professionals’ in the capitalist healthcare sector, why should it be considered a fix for the capitalist financial sector? 7 In 2010 Goldman Sachs was fined $550,000 by the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) for their part in the Abacus CDO (Collateralised Debt Obligation) scandal. Between July 2004 and April 2007 Goldman sold Abacus CDO products which contained ‘assets’ of subprime mortgages to their investor-clients. $7.8 billion worth of Abacus CDO stock was sold in this period. Goldman didn’t tell their clients that the Abacus CDO asset packages were put together by the hedge fund firm Paulson & Co. They also failed to mention that Paulson took out bets that the CDO packages would default and end up being worthless. The Paulson bets worked out and they turned a $1 billion profit from their payout. The clients of Goldman who invested in the Abacus packages lost out by $1 billion. Goldman profited from all sides of the transaction. See report in The Guardian for details of the fine imposed on Goldman Sachs (Treanor 2010). See report in Blomberg for the unknowing risks that clients of Goldman Sachs took with their money (ivry and Jody Shenn 2010). Goldman was fined a paltry 1.7 per cent of their estimated profits for this year. Their stock market price leapt by $6.16 after the announcement of the SEC fine. The SEC didn’t pursue Goldman Sachs in the courts. The fine was an out-of-court settlement in which Goldman did not admit or deny allegations of deception and fraud. It puzzled me why Goldman Sachs got off so lightly. i suspect that their lobby relationships with the political class in capitol Hill have something to do with it. From a discussion that I had with Hedge Fund managers recently, it was suggested to me that the Sec didn’t pursue the matter in the courts because they might not have got anywhere with it. Why? Because there is no written law or regulation which explicitly forbids what Goldman did for the sake of profit. Law-makers and regulators had not anticipated such behaviour from ‘respectable’ financial institutions. 69

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regards (3) there seem to be very high personal stakes involved in a professional turning upon colleagues that they have perhaps known for years and accusing them of being liars and cheats. As regards (4), the proit-making ‘greed is good’ genie is too far out of the bottle under current capitalist conditions. therefore it is unlikely that any amount of aristotelian reconditioning or indoctrination of the present corporate capitalist executive class will work. earlier i said that there are three fundamentals to the capitalist economy: private property in the means of production, markets and production for proit. if i am right in my argument against the possibility of aristotelian capitalism then we should seek reform in the irst and third of these fundamentals. What is required is an end to, or radical reform of, private oligopolistic ownership of capital and the marginalisation, or end of, production for proit as the main goal of production. All of these options require further investigation. For now, we should not take it from Aristotelian Capitalists that social practices and the virtues are, or can be, safe in proit-seeking corporate capitalist hands. Aristotelian Capitalism is for the most part not possible.

References

Angell, M. 2009. Drugs Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. New York Review of Books [Online, 15 January]. Available at http://www.nybooks. com [accessed: 30 April, 2013]. Aristotle 1976. Nicomachean Ethics. trans. by Hugh tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bakan, J. 2004. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Proit and Power. new york: Free Press. Bowie, N. 1998. The Proit Seeking Paradox. Ethics of Administration, edited by N. Dale Wright. Utah: Brigham University Press.

It would take a remarkable, perhaps impossible, degree of foresight for regulators to anticipate all of the potentially hazardous things that profit-seeking firms can and will get up to in the financial services. That is, if there is a lobby-free political will to do something about reckless profiteering. Even if there is such a political will, we can write the rule now but then, as long as there is profit to be had, then money-seeking companies will come up with new ways to lie, cheat and exploit their way to profit. The profit-seeking behaviour of firms such as Goldman Sachs took the capitalist economic system to disaster. capitalism was only saved through concerted socialist intervention in the financial markets and in the economy more generally. the deep problem we are facing as a result of the 2008 financial crisis is not lack of appropriate regulation (which might be impossible to come up with) but the catastrophic effects of the capitalist profitmotive itself. 70

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Boyle, D. and Simms, A. 2011. Eminent Corporations: The Rise and Fall of the Great British Corporation. London: constable. Ferguson, N. 2010. To do God’s work, bankers need morals. The Telegraph [Online]. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/inance/newsbysector/ banksandinance/7871781/To-do-Gods-work-bankers-need-morals.html [accessed: 30 April, 2013]. Hayek, F. 1988. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. chicago: university of chicago. Ivry, B. and Shenn, J. 2010. Abacus Let Goldman Shufle Mortgage Risk Like Beads. Blomberg [Online, 16 April]. Available at: http://www.bloomberg. com/news/2010–04–16/goldman-used-abacus-to-shuffle-debt-risk-likebeads.html [accessed: 30 april 2013]. Johnson, C. 2008. Merck to Pay $650 million in Medicaid Settlement. The Washington Post [Online, 8 February]. Available at http://articles. washingtonpost.com/2008–02–08/business/36878408_1_vioxx-merckcholesterol-drug [accessed: 30 april 2013]. Kaiser, R. 2010. So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government. New York: Vintage Books. Kay, J. 2003. The Truth About Markets: Their Genius, Their Limits, Their Follies. London: Penguin. Kay, J. 1998. The Role of Business in Society [Online, 3 February]. Available at http://www.johnkay.com/1998/02/03/the-role-of-business-in-society [accessed: 4 February 2014]. Lexchin, J. 2006. The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Pursuit of Proit. The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development, Marketing and Pricing, edited by J.C. Cohen, P. Illingworth and U. Schüklenk. London: Pluto Press. MacIntyre, A. 1985. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 1994. A Partial Response to My Critics. After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by John Horton and Susan mendus. oxford: Polity Press. MacIntyre, A. 1995. Marxism and Christianity. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 1998. Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken. The MacIntyre Reader, edited by K. Knight. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mill, J.S. 1981. Autobiography. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill Volume 1, edited by J.m. robson. London: routledge. New York Times. 2008. Merck Agrees to Settlement over Vioxx Ads. [Online 21 May]. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/21vioxx. html?_r=0 [accessed: 30 April 2013]. Paul, J. and Miller, F. 1990. Communitarian and Liberal Theories of the Good. Review of Metaphysics, 43(4), 803–30. 71

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Petersen, M. 2009. Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs. London: Picador. Rand, A. 1962. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. new york: Signet. Sehgal, R. 2010. The Marxian Technological-Fix. Interpretations of Marxism: Eastern and Western, edited by Q. Tan. Beijing: Publishing House of Social Sciences Documentation. Smith, A. 1997. The Wealth of Nations. London: Penguin. Solomon, R. 1992. Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business. oxford: oxford university Press. Tett, G. 2010. Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. London: abacus Books. Treanor, J. 2010. Goldman Sachs handed record $550m ine over Abacus transaction. The Guardian [Online, 16 July]. Available at http://www.guardian. co.uk/business/2010/jul/ 16/goldman-sachs-record-abacus-ine [accessed: 30 april 2013]. US Government Accountability Ofice Report. 2010. For-Proit Colleges: undercover testing Finds colleges encouraged Fraud and engaged. Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices GAO-10–948T [Online, 4 August]. Available at http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10–948T [accessed: 30 april 2013].

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Chapter 5

Equality, Vulnerability and Independence John o’neill

in the opening chapter to Dependent Rational Animals alasdair macintyre takes adam Smith to exemplify a particular attitude of philosophers to the facts of human vulnerability, afliction and dependence. While Smith recognises the ‘perspectives of ill health and old age’ in which such facts are evident, he ‘inds reason at once to put them aside’ (MacIntyre 1999: 2). Thus on the one side, Smith recognises the existence of vulnerability and dependence: While discussing what it is that makes the ‘pleasures of wealth and greatness … strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful’ he remarks that ‘in the languor of disease and the weariness of old age’ we ceased to be so impressed, for we then take note of the fact that the acquisition of wealth and greatness leaves the possessors ‘always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death’ (Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV, chapter 1). (MacIntyre 1999: 2)

However, having acknowledged these facts of human dependence and vulnerability, Smith claims in better health we put such ‘splenetic philosophy’ aside and that it is good that we do so. The imagination of those ‘in better health or in better humor’ fosters what may, Smith concedes, be no more that seductive illusions about the pleasures of wealth and greatness, but they are economically beneicial illusions. ‘It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind’. (ibid.)

In thus putting the facts of vulnerability and dependence aside Smith typiies the stance of philosophy: ‘Smith speaks for moral philosophy in general’ (ibid.). He is not the irst to so speak. MacIntyre takes Aristotle to have anticipated him. However the two thinkers share the standpoint of the ‘self-suficiently superior’ who are ‘unable to give due recognition to afliction and to dependence’ (ibid.: 7). in this chapter i will consider these criticisms of Smith in detail with the aim of linking them with a wider tradition of egalitarian argument. I will do so by putting Smith’s own work into dialogue with claims of contemporary authors

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which were more sensitive to the facts of human vulnerability and dependence, in particular those of rousseau, and examining different lines of argument that emerge from these discussions. In section one I outline the central role of the value of independence plays in Smith’s defence of commercial society. In section two i consider Smith’s arguments in contrast to those of rousseau to whom he was, among others, responding. In doing so I distinguish two different forms of criticism that might be made of Smith’s arguments which have remained important to discussions of market economies. The irst is that the independence in commercial society is partial and illusory. While commercial society is marked by new forms of personal independence, it also brings with it new forms of dependence. Versions of this claim are to be found in Marx in particular. The second is that which MacIntyre develops – that failure to acknowledge background states of dependency which are a condition of the virtues of independence leads to a mischaracterisation of those virtues. In developing that theme I want to relate it to a theme implicit in Rousseau – that mutual assistance which takes place under conditions of equality in which there exists mutual recognition of a symmetry in vulnerability allows the compatibility of dependence and self-respect which is absent where that symmetry and its recognition are absent. Equality is a condition for dependency to lose its potentially humiliating character. In the inal section I outline the continuing legacy of that thread of egalitarian thought in particular in the work of Titmuss.

Smith’s Defence of Commercial Society

adam Smith’s defence of commercial society turns on the claim that commercial society fosters the virtues of independence: nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independency. Commerce is one great preventative of this custom. (Smith 1982c: vi.6)

Smith’s defence of commercial society in these terms appeals to Stoic virtues: ‘Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is irst and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, itter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person’ (Smith 1982b: VI.ii.1.1). Commercial society fosters the virtues of independence. These claims remain at the core of Smith’s arguments for commercial society in The Wealth of Nations:

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[C]ommerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. (Smith 1981: III.IV.4)

Whereas in pre-commercial society the power of patronage and gift renders the poor dependent on the wealthy1, in commercial society ties of personal dependence are broken. Through the division of labour and relationships of exchange the economic interdependence of individuals is disassociated from personal dependence. The income of each worker is not tied to that of any particular individual. Hence, the powers that the rich previously exercised over their workers are broken. ‘Though [the wealthy person] contributes, therefore, to the maintenance of them all, they are all more or less independent of him, because generally they can all be maintained without him’ (Smith 1981: III. IV.11). This independence is not complete. Smith acknowledges a distinction between the fully independent artisan and the dependent servant and wageworker (ibid.: I.viii.48). In entering the wage contract the worker lays down a portion, ‘his liberty’ in addition to his ease and happiness (ibid.: I.v.7). However, the wage worker is free of ties of personal dependence that marked the worker of pre-commercial society. While not absolutely independent, the wage worker is relatively independent. These virtues of independence are also evident in the other often quoted sentence from The Wealth of Nations that macintyre cites in Dependent Rational Animals: ‘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’ (ibid.: I.II). There are two distinct points that Smith is making in the passage in which this sentence occurs which are evident in the two sentences that follow: ‘We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiely upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens’. The irst of the sentences is about the possibility of a social order founded on selflove and limited benevolence. The second is about the possibility of a social order in which individuals relate to each other as independent agents. 1 ‘[The great proprietor] is at all times … surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who, having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him … Before the extension of commerce and manufacture in Europe, the hospitality of the rich, and the great, from the sovereign down to the smallest baron, exceeded everything which in the present times we can easily form a notion of ’ (Smith 1981: III. IV.5–6). 77

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The irst claim is one that Smith defends in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and is standard in the commentaries on the passage in The Wealth of Nations: commercial society makes possible an order in which the strong bonds of benevolence are absent. Such bonds cannot be expected to extend beyond local communities of kin and friendship to the wider ‘assembly of strangers’ with whom individuals relate in commercial society (Smith 1982b: I.i.4.9). However, through market exchange, individuals can cooperate in the absence of such bonds: Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good ofices according to an agreed valuation. (ibid.: II.ii 3.2)

While no society can exist in the absence of the rules and sentiments of justice governing negative responsibilities to avoid harm, the positive sentiments of beneicence are not required in a commercial social order. It is this claim that macintyre implicitly criticises in his discussion of the passage: ‘market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of nonmarket relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving’ (MacIntyre 1999: 117). However, Smith’s arguments in the passages from The Wealth of Nations do not just turn on a negative claim about the limits of benevolence, but a positive claim about the virtues of those limits. In addressing others’ self-love and not their benevolence, individuals realise the virtues of independence. A person obtains what he needs not though ‘servile and fawning attention to obtain their good will’ (Smith 1981: I.II.2), but rather though exchange between independent property holders. In contrast in pre-commercial societies governed by gift and patronage, the dependent do have to call upon the benevolence of the wealthy. It is in virtue of doing so that one is rendered dependent. Commercial society realises an order in which independent agents relate to others as independent agents. Individuals stand to each other neither as benefactor nor as dependent. The ethical appeal Smith is making here is to the Stoic virtues where persons are recommended to their own care and have standing as such, as a persons who are able to care for themselves. This Stoic conception of independence to which Smith appeals elsewhere takes a still stronger form. Smith also denies the traditional doctrine defended by aquinas and still evident in the work of Locke, that claims of necessity give an individual rights in the property of another (Aquinas: II.II 66.7; Locke 1988: I.42). Smith in contrast follows the Stoic doctrine found in Cicero, that for the virtuous agent poverty and even death are to be preferred to the injustice 78

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involved in taking what is the property of another: ‘for one man to take from another and to increase his own advantage at the cost of another’s disadvantage is more contrary to nature than death, than poverty, than pain and than anything else that may happen to his body or external circumstances’ (Cicero 1991: III.21). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith directly echoes this passage from Cicero in denying the poor rights in the wealth of the rich: The poor man must neither defraud nor steal from the rich, though the acquisition might be much more beneicial to the one than the loss could be hurtful to the other … There is no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace of such an action, the indelible stain which it would forever stamp upon his own mind, than the greatest external calamity which, without any fault of his own, could possibly befal him; and who does not inwardly feel the truth of that great stoical maxim, that for one man to deprive another unjustly of any thing, or unjustly to promote his own advantage by the loss or disadvantage of another, is more contrary to nature, than death, than poverty, than pain, than all the misfortunes which can affect him, either in his body, or in his external circumstances. (Smith 1982a: III.3)2

The virtuous agent is an independent agent for whom even poverty and death is better than transgressing the rules of property on which ‘depend the whole security and peace of human society’ (ibid.).

Smith, Rousseau and the Virtues of Independency

Smith, in claiming that commercial society realises the virtues of independence is responding to contemporary arguments that claimed to the contrary that it leads to dependence. A particular opponent is Rousseau who in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality contrasts the ‘free, healthful, humane and happy’ lives of those in ‘savage’ society who ‘continued to enjoy amongst themselves the sweets of an independent society’ with the dependency of those in commercial society. The fall from original independence and freedom occurs when the individuals begin to see themselves through the eyes of others and where appearance gained through material possession is consequently divorced from character: To be and to appear to be, became two things entirely different; and from this distinction arose imposing ostentation, deceitful guile, and all the vices 2 For a discussion see Salter 1999. On the status of claims of necessity in The Wealth of Nations see Hont and Ignatieff 1983. For a contrasting view to the one presented here see Fleischacker 2004, chapter 10. 79

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which attend them. Thus man, from being free and independent, became by a multitude of new necessities subjected in a manner, to all nature, and above all to his fellow creatures, whose slave he is in one sense even while he becomes their master; rich, he has occasion for their services; poor, he stands in need of their assistance; and even mediocrity does not enable him to live without them. (Rousseau 1984, Smith translation, Smith 1982a: 119)

The translations from Rousseau here are those of Smith who picks out these passages as crucial to Rousseau’s argument. Smith’s defence of commercial society as a sphere in which independence is realised is aimed in part against Rousseau’s rejection of commercial society. Smith accepts that accumulation of wealth in commercial society is driven vanity, for a desire for appearance: For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth and power, and preeminence? is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them … From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they draw upon him the attention of the world … (Smith 1982b: 50)

However, while this vanity is allowed to be ‘the great and most universal cause of corruption of our moral sentiments’ (ibid.: I.iii.3.1), Smith inverts Rousseau’s view of its consequences. Consider another passage Smith translates from the Discourses on Inequality: But from the instant in which one man had occasion for the assistance of another, from the moment that he perceived that it could be advantageous to a single person to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forrests of nature were changed into agreeable plains, which must be watered with the sweat of mankind, and in which the world beheld slavery and wretchedness begin to grow up and blosom with the harvest. (Rousseau 1984, translated by Smith 1982a: 252)

as the editors of the Glasgow edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments note, the inal sentences of this passage reappear in a very different context in that book: 80

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The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it … it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which irst prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. (Smith 1982b: IV.1.9–10)

Smith’s account inverts the critical force of rousseau’s arguments about commercial society and dependence. It appears as part of a defence of commercial society. The paragraph in which this passage appears ends in the invisible hand metaphor, here in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a link between the ‘natural selishness and rapacity’ of the rich and a ‘distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants’ (ibid.: IV.1.10). However, it is not merely the distribution of necessities that matters here, but the conditions for independence. As we have seen for Smith, in commercial society, through the division of labour and exchange, each person is freed from personal dependence and realises the Stoic virtues of independence. Rousseau’s position is inverted. This argument about the relation of commercial society and independence is the start of a history of a debate about the relation of commercial society and independence. There are two distinct varieties of criticism both of which are variations on themes that can be found in Rousseau. The irst is that the apparent independence fostered by commercial society disguises new forms of dependence. a version of the claim appears in the work of Kant: [M]oney makes one independent, one gains respect by the possession of it; one has worth, needs no one and depends on no one. But in making us independent of others, money in the long run makes us dependent on itself; it frees us from others in order to enslave us. (Kant 1979: 177)

More signiicantly the claim that the independence realised in commercial society is partial and illusory is a central theme in Marx. In the early writing the divorce of real character and appearance and the forms of dependency it is taken to produce are to be found in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

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under private property … every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacriice, to place him in a new dependence … Each tries to establish over the other an alien power … (Marx 1974: 358)

in the later works the theme remains although with a stronger emphasis on the achievements of commercial society in realising personal independence. marx accepts that a virtue of a commercial society based on exchanges relations is that it destroys the forms of personal dependence that existed in pre-commercial society: ‘in the money relation, in the developed system of exchange … the ties of personal dependence … are in fact exploded, ripped up … ; and individuals seem independent … ’ (Marx 1973: 163). However, the independence is only apparent not real. It is ‘an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion’ (ibid.). The independence is taken to be illusory for two reasons. The irst concerns the form that the independence takes. While personal dependence may be absent, it is not replaced by independence as a social virtue. Independence realised through the monetary exchange is ‘more properly called indifference’ (ibid.). Second, while personal dependence might be an achievement of commercial society, it is replaced by what marx calls ‘objective dependency’. The objective dependence takes at least two forms. First, there is the speciic form it takes for the worker. While the worker in owning his own labour power is not personally dependent on any particular owner of capital, he must sell his labour power to some capitalist. Second, there is the general form in which it affects all members of modern commercial societies. all are the ‘plaything of alien powers’, dependent on the impersonal workings of market society. Full independence requires that objective dependence of this form is overcome through social relations being brought under the ‘communal control’ of individuals (ibid.: 162). The argument about the degree to which commercial society does actually realise independence forms then one major theme in the discussion commercial society. However, it needs to be kept distinct from a second line of criticism that MacIntyre invokes. This line of argument plays not on the illusory nature of independence in commercial society, but the particular characterisation of the virtues independence offered by Smith and, in particular, its failure to properly recognise and acknowledge the background states of dependency which are a condition of the virtues of independence. Smith represents the standpoint of ‘self-suficiently superior’ who is ‘unable to give due recognition to afliction and to dependence’ (MacIntyre 1999: 7). The virtues of independence are mischaracterised by Smith in virtue of this failure. one way of reformulating this point is in terms of an aristotelian characterisation of the virtues of independence. John Benson has noted that the virtues of autonomous or independent character are typically characterised only in terms of contrast with the vices of deiciency. Autonomy is contrasted 82

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with heteronomy. Independence is contrasted with dependence. While these vices are undoubtedly vices, this characterisation is partial since it fails to recognise the vices of excess. The virtues of the autonomous or independent character need to be contrasted not only with vices of deiciency, but also those of excess: The virtue of autonomy is a mean state of character with regard to reliance on one’s own powers in acting, choosing and forming opinions. The deiciency is termed heteronomy, and there are many terms which may be used to describe the heteronomous person, some of which suggest speciic forms of the vice: credulous, gullible, compliant, passive, submissive, overdependent, servile. For the vice of excess there is no name in common use, but solipsism might do, or arrogant self-suficiency. (Benson 1983: 5)

Benson’s claim that no term exists for the vices of excess is a telling one. not only is the existence of these vices often unrecognised, as i have argued elsewhere, they are often celebrated as virtues (O’Neill 1998: chs. 5–7). Forms of human dependence and the limits of self-suficiency go unacknowledged. While these points are well-made, there is a question as to how far they give a fair characterisation of Adam Smith. As MacIntyre notes, Smith does recognise the fact of human dependence (MacIntyre 1999: 2). Smith is sensitive to the limits of human self-suficiency and the inescapable fact of human dependence: ‘all the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries’ (Smith 1982b: 85). This mutual dependence is grounded in our biological frailties that wealth and social power cannot in the end overcome. Human beings begin their existence in complete dependence on others: ‘in the natural state of things … the existence of the child, for some time after it comes into the world, depends altogether upon the care of the parent’ (ibid.: VI.ii.1.3). Furthermore in passages that MacIntyre cites, Smith recognises that in illness and old age these facts of human dependence force themselves on us. in the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear … Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few triling conveniences to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention … . They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death. (ibid.: IV.1.8)

it would be false then to say that Smith does not recognise the inescapable facts of human dependence. Smith’s point is rather that these facts are rarely 83

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recognised and it is good that this is the case. Economic life thrives when we forget these facts and power and riches appear as objects of desire. But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire, when in better health and better humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect. (ibid.: IV.1.9).

The lourishing of commercial society depends upon on the self-deception of those involved about these biological limits of self-suficiency, in which the truths of ‘splenetic philosophy’ go unrecognised. it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. (ibid.: IV.1.10)

These passages on unacknowledged dependence are followed by the appearance of the invisible hand in The Theory of Moral Sentiments quoted above. The self-deception has beneicial outcomes – the improvement of the condition of the poor. Smith’s arguments again contrast with those of rousseau whose version of egalitarianism moved in the opposite direction of a fully splenetic philosophy. The truths of splenetic philosophy – the acknowledgement of mutual vulnerability and dependence – form the basis of a social order in which mutual assistance is premised on the fact that ‘tomorrow, any one may himself be in the same position as the one he assists is in today’ (Rousseau 1911: Book IV, 185). This roughly egalitarian order contrasts with the one-sided relations in which one party takes itself to lack those vulnerabilities. Why have kings no pity on their people? Because they never expect to be ordinary men. Why are the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be a commoner … So do not train your pupil to look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate, the labours of the wretched, and do not hope to teach him to pity them as long as he considers them as far removed from himself. Make him clearly thoroughly aware of the fact that the fate of these unhappy persons may one day be his own, that his feet are standing on the edge of an abyss, into which he may be plunged at any moment by a thousand unexpected irresistible misfortunes … (ibid.)

Rousseau’s defence of the claim – the consciousness of vulnerability is a condition for the exercise of pity – appeals to a particular account of the emotion of pity. Those who take themselves to be invulnerable are unable to feel pity since the belief that a like misfortune could befall oneself is constitutive of 84

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the emotion of pity: ‘we never pity another’s woes unless we may suffer in like manner ourselves’ (ibid.). In claiming that pity is constituted by the possibility that like misfortune could befall one, rousseau is following a line of argument found in Aristotle and Hobbes.3 Thus Aristotle characterises pity thus: Pity may be deined as a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon. (Aristotle 1946: 85b12ff)

Hobbes offers a characterisation couched in similar terms: Griefe, for the Calamity of another, is pitty; and ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe; and therefore is called also COMPASSION, and in the phrase of this present time a fellow-feeling … . (Hobbes 1968: 126)

Smith in Book Vii of The Theory of Moral Sentiments explicitly rejects this Hobbesian account of the pity or compassion. In distancing his own account from the Hobbesian view that appears to ground the feelings of pity and compassion in self-love or ‘selish principles’ he suggests that we can feel pity or compassion for persons whose situation is such that we know we could not suffer. The possibility of compassion is founded not simply on imagining ourselves to have fallen into the situation of another, but imagining them in their own person: ‘i consider what i should suffer if i was really you, and i not only change circumstances with you, but i change persons and character’ (Smith 1982b: VII.iii.I.4). A man can feel sympathy with another for the loss of his son or for a woman in childbirth while knowing that these are situations he cannot face: ‘A man may sympathize with a woman in child-bed; though it is impossible that he should conceive of himself as suffering her pains in his own proper person and character’ (ibid.).4 There are large questions to be raised as to whether this account of sympathy in the later Book Vii is consistent with the account that Smith introduces earlier in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which sympathy, and more speciically compassion, is understood in terms of our imagining ourselves in our own person being in the same situation as the other: ‘The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration 3 See also the discussion in Nussbaum 2001: 315ff. 4 Smith as is often observed uses the term ‘sympathy’ in a much more general sense than with reference to pity or compassion: ‘Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow felling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’ (Smith 1982b: I.i.I.5). However, in this context Smith’s examples are specifically with compassion and pity as forms of sympathy. 85

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of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same to time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment’ (ibid.: I.i.1.11). It is this account of placing oneself in the situation of the other which informs his account of moral judgement in terms of the correspondence or non-correspondence of sympathetic emotions of the spectator and the agent in a particular situation (ibid. I.i.3.1). However, whatever story can be told about the internal consistency of Smith’s position, there is something right about the claim that we can feel compassion for those in a situation we know that will not and cannot befall us. While there may be epistemic limits on fellow-feeling – imagination is not a substitute for the direct experience of a particular condition – the possibility of pity as such is not ruled out. To the extent to which Rousseau’s argument depends on claims about the impossibility of pity in the absence of the possibility of a situation befalling us, the arguments fail. There is, however, another aspect of Rousseau’s argument in Emile that is more telling. Rousseau draws a distinction between conditions in which mutual assistance takes place under mutual recognition of a symmetry in vulnerability – in which ‘tomorrow, any one may himself be in the same position as the one he assists is in today’ (Rousseau 1911: 185) – and conditions where there is an asymmetry of vulnerabilities – in which ‘look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate’ (ibid.). A point that is implicit in that contrast is the very different social meanings that attached to acts of beneicence in those different contexts. In conditions of where vulnerabilities are symmetrical expressions of pity can be understood as expressions of solidarity or fellow feeling. In conditions of inequality they cannot be thus understood. They rather can take on properties of condescension and charity. Where the benefactor appears to ‘look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate’, the beneiciary is transformed into an object of dependency.5 Smith’s own observations about the view of poverty from those with wealth in places sound harsh. He claims, addressing clearly a particular readership, that while we may feel for sympathy for a person who falls from wealth into poverty, those who are simply in poverty are objects of contempt: ‘The mere want of fortune, mere poverty, excites little compassion. Its complaints are too apt to be the objects rather of contempt than fellow feeling’ (Smith 1982b: III.3.18). However, it is clear elsewhere that this contempt is not an attitude that Smith is necessarily endorsing. It is a source of the corruption of the moral sentiments: 5 The distinction is now commonly marked between compassion and pity, where pity is taken to involve condescension that need not be involved in the attitude of compassion. This distinction is a relatively recent one that is absent in the use of the terms pity and compassion by Hobbes, Rousseau and Smith. For discussions see Blum 1994: 177–8, Nussbaum 2001: 301–2, Crisp 2008: 233. 86

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The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness … (ibid.: I.iii.3.1)

However, while the conlict between the corruption of the sentiments on the one hand and the maintenance of ranks and order on the other runs through The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in the end in the work of Smith it is decided in favour of the latter. Nature has wisely judged that the distinction of ranks, the peace and order of society, would rest more securely upon the plain and palpable difference of birth and fortune, than upon the invisible and often uncertain difference of wisdom and virtue. The undistinguishing eyes of the great mob of mankind can well enough perceive the former: it is with dificulty that the nice discernment of the wise and the virtuous can sometimes distinguish the latter. (Smith 1982b: VI.ii.1.21)

The attitudes to wealth and poverty are treated naturalistically as the necessary consequences of human psychology.6 The attitudes are ultimately defended by Smith as a condition for social order: ‘The peace and order of society, is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable’ (ibid.). Smith’s discussion of virtues of independence takes place against the background of an assumed inequality of ranks. What is absent from Smith’s discussion is an account of networks of assistance that might take place in modern conditions in the absence of the distinction of ranks. To make this point is not to make some ahistorical judgement on Smith from a later egalitarian perspective. The assumption that a rough equality in vulnerabilities creates condition of mutual assistance without dependence found practical expression in the institutions of mutual aid that developed in eighteenth century working class communities. Consider for example the Rules 6 These attitudes for Smith have their origin in human cognitive limits to properly discern virtue on the one hand and in our psychological dispositions with respect to joy and sorrow on the other. It is in virtue of ‘our propensity to sympathize with joy is much stronger than our propensity to sympathize with sorrow’ (Smith 1982b: I.iii.1.5) that our admiration for wealth ultimately arises: ‘It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty’ (1982b: I.iii.2.1). 87

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and Orders of the Honourable Society of Workington written in February 2nd, 1792 just two years after the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments: When we look upon mankind as being subject to an innumerable train of evils and calamities, resulting either from pain or sickness, or the inirmities of old age, which render them unable to procure even a scanty subsistence, when at the same time they are made capable of the noblest friendship, common prudence induces us so to form ourselves into society, that the insupportable condition of the individual may, by the mutual assistance and support of the whole, become tolerable … (c.f. Gray 2001)

in conditions where vulnerabilities are roughly equal, acknowledged dependence on others and the receipt of assistance are not associated with the asymmetries of power or the loss of standing as an independent agent which Smith properly criticises as features of patronage in pre-commercial society. In conditions of equality, the existence and recognition of common vulnerability to evil and calamity robs the fact of dependency of any potentially humiliating condition.

Dependency and Equality

The thought that equality is a condition for dependency to lose its potentially humiliating character is one that has marked an important strand of egalitarian thought that appeals back to these traditions of experience of mutual aid in conditions of common vulnerabilities that marked the early history of working class movements (Tawney 1964: 40ff; Titmuss 1987: 122; Mauss 2002: 89). One expression of this egalitarian strand that deserves to be more widely discussed is to be found in the work of Richard Titmuss. Modern forms of dependency and the problems they create lie at the heart of Titmuss’s account of social welfare: [S]tates of dependency’ arise for the vast majority of the population whenever they are not in a position to ‘earn life’ for themselves and their families; they are dependent people. In industrial societies there are many causes of dependency; they may be ‘natural dependencies’ as in childhood, extreme old age, and child-bearing. They maybe causes by physical and psychological ill-health and incapacity, in part these are culturally determined. Or they may be wholly or predominantly determined by social and cultural factors. These may be said to be the ‘man-made’ dependencies. (Titmuss 1987: 46)

The central question becomes how one can render compatible the reality of these forms of natural and ‘man-made’ dependence with social independence. Titmuss rejects market solutions to the problem of dependence for at least two 88

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reasons. First, market relations do not require care for others, including strangers: ‘one of the functions of atomistic private market systems is to free men from any sense of obligation to or for other men’ (Titmuss 1970: 239). Second, markets are not an appropriate response to many natural and cultural dependencies. dependencies that result from age, ill-health and natural incapacities render individuals unable to act as independent agents in markets and hence leave them unprotected by market mechanisms. Failures of the market itself are the source of many of the modern ‘man-made’ dependencies such as unemployment and underemployment. Titmuss’s well known work on the gift relationship is invoked in response to the market model of interdependence. The appeal is to a very particular gift relationship which is marked by a rough equality between participants in their capacities and vulnerabilities. The gift relationship as such need involve no egalitarian relationships. There is nothing essentially egalitarian about gift relationships. When one turns to the anthropological literature to which Titmuss himself appeals, it is clear that the opposite can be true. Gift and counter-gift in many traditional gift economies is part of a display of power and status. A gift places the receiver within a relationship of dependency and debt, a countergift restores equality. As such gift-giving and receiving can take competitive forms of assertion and counter-assertion of power and status, most famously in forms of potlatch. Thus as Mauss puts it: Between chiefs and vassals, between vassals and their tenants, through such gifts a hierarchy is established. To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister). (Mauss 1990: 74)

a similar point is, as we noted earlier, central to Smith’s defence of commercial society. Conspicuous gift giving is part of the ties of dependence that commercial relations undermine. The gift serves as a means by which the wealthy exercise power and the poor are rendered dependent. The virtue of commerce on this account is that through exchange and the division of labour the relations of the worker to the wealthy no longer exhibit ties of personal dependence. The concept of a gift relationship cannot then be invoked in any simple sense to exhibit institutional relations of the kind found in an egalitarian community. Nor does Titmuss claim it does. Titmuss recognises there are particular features of the gift relationship involved in blood donation which mark it off from other gift relations. It is impersonal; it takes place in the context of a rough equality of vulnerabilities and capacities; the exercise of the capacity of the gift is socially unmarked (Titmuss 1970: 74). Consider irst the impersonality of the 89

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gift. While the gift takes place in a context of natural dependence of a strong kind – there is a strong asymmetry of needs in the context – it takes place in a context of social independence. It is normally a relation between strangers who are unknown to each other. It is in that sense an impersonal relationship, with no ongoing ties between the agents. Second, the donation also takes place in the context of a rough equality of vulnerabilities. While there may be particular groups like haemophiliacs who are in particular need of the gift and not able to reciprocate, blood is something that anyone could at some stage in their lives require. Anyone could become a recipient for all that they hope that will not need to be. Third, the capacity to give is likewise socially unmarked – it is a capacity possessed by any healthy adult irrespective of wealth or status. It is an anonymous gift that bestows no special status on the donor, a point that is explored beautifully in Galton and Simpson’s The Blood Donor which exploits the inappropriateness of Tony Hancock’s snobbery. Tony Well – it’s a grand job we’re all doing. (Pause) yes, i think we can all be very proud of ourselves. (Pause) Some people, all they do is take, take, take out of life, and never put anything back. Well that’s not my way of living, and never has been. Never has been. You’re only entitled to take out of life what you are prepared to put into it. (To man) do we get a badge for doing this? man No, I don’t think so. Tony Pity. We should have something people to pick us out by. man not really important, is it? as long as we give the blood and help someone, that’s the main thing. Tony Oh well, quite, quite, I mean as long as they get their corpuscles, quite, quite. That’s reward in itself, I agree, no names, no pack drill, quite, quite. I just think we ought to get a badge as well. I mean nothing grand, a little enamelled thing, a little motto that’s all, nothing pretentious, something like ‘He gaveth for others so that others may live. (Galton and Simpson 1974: 104–5)

it is in part because of these features of blood donation that this gift relationship has its power against a contractual model of human relations which we have seen is often invoked in contrast to the social dependence of premodern societies, including those dependencies that themselves are based on gift. Like the contract it is an impersonal relation between equals. Unlike the contract blood donation expresses not an instrumental relationship between self-subsistent agents but an expression of care which recognises mutual natural dependencies to which we are all vulnerable. It is as such that it expresses the kinds of social relations between equals that are central to the case for a communitarian egalitarianism. Hence the central contrast in The Gift Relationship between market and non-market spheres of interdependence. 90

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In not asking for or expecting any payment of money these donors signiied their belief in the willingness of other men to act altruistically in the future, and to combine together to make a gift freely available should they have a need for it … as individuals they were, it may be said, taking part in the creation of a greater good transcending the good of self-love. To ‘love’ themselves they recognised the need to ‘love’ strangers. By contrast, one of the functions of atomistic private market systems is to free men from any sense of obligation to or for other men. (Titmuss 1970: 239)

For this reason, the introduction of a market system in blood undermines a social sphere of mutual care between equals. While Titmuss is best known for his work on the gift relationship the general theme in his thought about the need to respond to dependence without humiliating the recipients is also to be found elsewhere in his work. For example it informs his discussion of means-tested beneits. One argument for the policy of means-testing beneits is that it offers a more just distribution of goods by targeting those in most need. The thought runs something as follows: ‘“let us concentrate help on those whose needs are greatest”; “why provide beneits for those who do not really need them”’ (Titmuss 1987: 130). Titmuss’s objection to this approach focuses on the loss of dignity and self-respect associated with the means test. Selective means tested services fail ‘to understand the indignities of expecting the poor to identify themselves as poor people and to declare, in effect, “I am an unequal person”’ (Titmuss 1987: 203). Hence the problem that Titmuss outlines for providers of social services: ‘How to include poor people … and at the same time channel proportionately more resources in their favour without inducing shame and stigma’ (Titmuss 1987: 129).7 Titmuss’s egalitarianism is one that starts from the facts of vulnerability and dependence. It also belongs to that thread of egalitarianism according to which equality matters in virtue of the social relationships of which it is constitutive. It is not possible to sustain ‘true community where great disparities of income and wealth preside’ (Titmuss 1987: 121). This egalitarianism informs what Titmuss characterises as his ‘institutional-redistributive model of social welfare’:

7 ‘The real challenge resides in the question: what particular infrastructure of universal services is needed in order to provide a framework of values and opportunity bases with and around which can be developed acceptable selective services provided, as social rights, on criterion on needs of specific categories, groups and territorial areas and not dependent on individual tests of means? it is in such practical ways which do not involve an assault on human dignity, which are not socially decisive and which do not lead to the development of two standards of services for two nations that more redistribution can be affected through the social services in favour of those whose needs are greatest’. (Titmuss 1987: 139) For a related discussion see Wolff, 1998. 91

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it sees social welfare as a basic integrated institution in society providing both universal and selective services outside the market on the principle of need. universal services, available without distinction of class, colour, sex or religion, can perform functions which foster and promote attitudes and behaviour directed towards the values of social solidarity, altruism, toleration and accountability. (Titmuss 1970: 263)

Whether the particular forms of social welfare he outlines are adequate to sustain the forms of egalitarian social relations he aims to defend remains an open empirical question. I still hold the view that a more radical undoing of background inequalities in power and property is required. However, Titmuss brings a proper focus on the question as to what forms of social order are compatible with both the recognition of human vulnerability and sensitivity to the potential humiliations that particular forms of social dependence can bring. a virtue of macintyre’s work on dependence is the way it brings this question properly back to centre of social and political thought. My aim in this chapter has been to link this work, and speciically the criticisms of Smith, to wider arguments for equality that are evident in a particular tradition of egalitarian thought.8

References

Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologica [Online]. Available at: http://www. ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.html [accessed: 8 September 2014]. Aristotle 1946. Rhetoric, trans. W. Roberts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benson, J. 1983. Who is the Autonomous Man? Philosophy, 58, 5–17. Blum, L., 1994. Moral Perception and Particularity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cicero 1991. On Duties, edited by M.T. Grifin and E.M. Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crisp, R. 2008. Compassion and Beyond. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 11, 233–46. Fleischacker, S. 2004. On Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Galton, R. and Simpson, A. 1974. Hancock’s Half Hour. London: Woburn Press.

8 an earlier version of the paper was given at the conference Virtue and Economic Crises ISME Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania July 29–August 1, 2010. Thanks are owed for the many helpful comments made on this occasion. The paper draws on and develops earlier arguments developed in O’Neill 2011. 92

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Gray, P. 2001. A Brief History of Friendly Societies [Online]. Available at http:// web.archive.org/web/20011225144332/http://www.afs.org.uk/research/ researchpgrayhistorypage.htm [accessed: 8 September 2014]. Hobbes, T. 1968. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hont, I. and Ignatieff, M. 1983. Needs and Justice in The Wealth of Nations, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by I. Hont and M. Ignatieff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1979. Lectures on Ethics. London: Methuen. Locke, J. 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. 1999. Rational Dependent Animals. London: Duckworth. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. 1974. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mauss, M. 2002. The Gift. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, J. 1998. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge. O’Neill, J. 2011. The Political Economy of Recognition. The Adam Smith Review, 6, 129–51. Rousseau, J.J. 1911. Emile, trans. B. Foxley. London: Dent. Rousseau, J.J. 1984. A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. London: Penguin Books. Smith, A. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Smith, A. 1982a. Letter to the Edinburgh Review. Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Smith, A. 1982b. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Smith, A. 1982c. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Tawney, R. 1964. Equality. London: Unwin. Titmuss, R. 1987. The Philosophy of Welfare: Selected Writings of Richard M. Titmuss, edited by B. Abel-Smith and K. Titmuss. London: Allen and Unwin. Titmuss, R. 1970. The Gift Relationship. London: Allen and Unwin. Wolff, J. 1998. Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27, 97–122.

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Chapter 6

no Place to hide for the Moral self: bureaucratic Individualism and the fate of Ethics in Modernity Peter mcmylor

Modernity did not make people more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people. (Bauman 1995: 198) On many occasions moral behaviour means taking a stance dubbed and decreed anti-social or subversive by the power that be and by public opinion … Promotion of moral behaviour in such cases means resistance to societal authority and action aimed at the weakening of its grip. Moral duty has to count on its pristine source: the essential human responsibility for the Other. (Bauman 1989: 199)

I

the fate of morality within the cultural and institutional structures of modernity has long been seen as a pressing problem. the dream of an entirely rational and transparent social order in which moral decisions would be absorbed into technical and scientiic procedures has been a feature of modernist utopias that could not survive the horrors of the twentieth century. it is hardly surprising that in attempting to gain an understanding of the pathologies of modernity ethics and morality would have to be given careful consideration by social scientists. in what follows i want to compare and contrast the understandings of two of the central igures writing on the contemporary nature of morality in modern societies: alasdair macintyre and Zygmunt Bauman. How are we to compare two such signiicant and productive thinkers as alasdair macintyre and Zygmunt Bauman with extraordinarily extended intellectual careers that continue to lourish to this day? They are, of course, of similar age: Bauman was born in 1925 and macintyre in 1929. despite Bauman and MacIntyre being born either side of the East/West divide, Bauman Poland and MacIntyre in Britain their lives have also been marked by the history of

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the great ideological conlicts of the twentieth century with Marxism being an important inluence on both. Indeed it would be impossible to fully understand the signiicance of the work of either theorist without noting that it is the strengths, as well as the fundamental weaknesses, of Marxism that are central to their thought and explain their concern both with the signiicance of ethics and the nature of modern managed capitalism and the responsibility of groups of intellectuals for the legitimation and self-interpretation of modern society. However for my purposes what is most signiicant is their focus, in their different and, often, highly original ways for the nature and importance of ethical/moral conduct, when viewed in suficiently broad perspectives that would include economic and social organisation. Any comparison between these two igures within the conines of a single chapter is a rather daunting prospect because of the sheer range of work that these two thinkers have produced. Bauman has, for example, written some 57 books and numerous articles. Whilst MacIntyre has not written so many books as Bauman but, nonetheless, his output – especially in the light of its analytic rigour – is very considerable: with some 20 books to his name and again numerous articles. Bauman is a igure who was once widely associated, until his strenuous efforts to disassociate himself, with the term postmodernity or the postmodern (see especially his comments in Bauman and Tester 2001: 96–8). It has now become clear that Bauman should not be seen as a an advocate of the postmodern culture but rather as a sociologist who sought to understand what types of social change were encouraging this type of cultural self-interpretation. it is these newer features of modernity which he now attempts to capture with the term ‘liquid modernity’. at the heart of this analysis is the nature of the changing role of two widespread social processes: consumption/consumerism and globalisation. The technologically conditioned, but politically and socially organised shifts in the pattern of time and space in human society has changed the nature of the geographical dimensions of human society. this has signiicantly increased the mobility of capital and of social elites and has had a dramatically polarising impact on the economic and social life of the contemporary world. Bauman puts it thus The mobility acquired by ‘people who invest’ – those with capital with money which the investment requires – means the new, indeed unprecedented in its radical unconditionality, disconnection of power from obligations: duties towards employees, but also towards the younger and weaker, towards yet unborn generations and towards the self-reproduction of the living conditions of all; in short, freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community. (Bauman 1998: 9) 96

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One of the striking things about this quotation is the way in which the author, writing as a social scientist, speaks, in effect, of the moral duties and responsibilities of footloose capitalists in ways that are remarkably similar to those of macintyre1. the reasons for this adoption of a moral critique by a sociologist are important and partly related to the other aspect of ‘liquid modernity’ mentioned above, the salience of consumption within advanced capitalist societies and the unacknowledged trail of victims that it leaves in its wake. This issue is partly related to globalisation as the move of production away from the advanced capitalist societies of the West towards asia that led to de-industrialisation in these countries and the decline of routine or unskilled manual labour which coincided with the rise of an aggressive neo-liberal political and economic strategy in the West which further weakened organised labour. increasingly Bauman suggests social integration is achieved via forms of normatively deined levels of consumption which are used to mark aspects of identity that had once been achieved via forms of work based symbolic solidarities. It is not of course that work has disappeared – although it has for some – but rather that work based collectivities no longer seem to have the leverage to shape politically or culturally the broader social order (Bauman 1982). consumerism seems then to occupy more and more of the social space of advanced societies and this is not simply because mass production is going on elsewhere rather than in the West, but also that the promotion and expansion of consumption, including largely non-material goods like entertainment, are structurally more and more important to the functioning of a Western economy. MacIntyre had long ago noted, in a manner perhaps more radical than Bauman’s, an understanding that by the mid twentieth century advanced capitalism had succeeded in achieving for many a conceptualisation of work as primarily a means to achieve as much capacity for consumption as possible; indeed as he puts it, humans are viewed ‘primarily as consumers and they work in order to be able to consume’ (macintyre 1998: 55). this was in contrast to the view, still held by particularly craft workers of all kinds, and in thinkers inluenced by the Aristotelian tradition, that essential for humans ‘is rational activity and consumption exists to serve activity and not to be served by it’ (ibid.). if the former view prevails then owners and management ind it easier to manage and limit aspiration for ordinary people to control their creative work activities and focus their vision of a better life only in the sphere of consumption. in such a context, MacIntyre notes, what is lacking is ‘any conception of political life as being the pursuit of a common good which transcends all partial interests and which can be realised by the individual only through his or her participation in political life’ (ibid.: 56).

1 See macintyre’s essay ‘the irrelevance of ethics’ in this volume. 97

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Bauman’s view is clearly similar. He notes the damaging effects of the normative force of consumption as a deinition of the good life, in particular, in his justly famous book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998). Here Bauman noted that with the jobless growth of the 1990s the poverty that emerged was that of a poor viewed as, yes workless, but ultimately and symbolically as ‘lawed consumers’. As he put it in a commentary on the UK riots of the summer of 2011: For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity, of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for selfrespect and respect of the others around. (Bauman 2012: 34)

By highlighting the optic of morality within his critical account of modernity Bauman indicates a sociology that must share some ground with moral philosophy (Bauman 1991, 1993, 1997). However, we can note already that MacIntyre by stressing the Aristotelian conception, cited above, of the human need for rational purposive activity served by, rather than, serving consumption, possesses a powerful horizon of criticism outside of the dominant assumption that modern capitalism presupposes. As we will note later, Bauman also asks to reject the limited calculative means-ends schema of modernity. But on what basis can he make his claim for this rejection? However before exploring the detail of this issue I want to look at some broader conceptual similarities between these thinkers understanding of aspects of the theoretical underpinnings of modernity. there is no doubt that there are parallels to be found in Bauman’s critical understanding of the moral self-interpretation of modernity and macintyre’s critique of and rejection of the enlightenment’s moral philosophical project that he sets our so clearly in his key work After Virtue (1981).2 macintyre’s understanding of the limitations of the enlightenment’s attempt to reconstruct moral thought and, following from this, the lawed attempts to construct a positivistic and predictive social science, do have clear parallels with the critical account of these process to be found in some of the work of Bauman, especially his books Legislators and Interpreters (1987) and his Postmodern Ethics (1995). Both thinkers see the rise of the conventional social sciences as part of a modernist project which has, at best, had ambivalent results and, at worst, led to forms of bureaucratic domination that effaced and marginalised ethical understandings. 2 it should be noted that this rejection of the enlightenment’s attempt to reground morality has allowed some postmdernists to deploy MacIntyre’s work for their own purposes (e.g. Grey 1995). 98

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these processes assisted in creating the space for the organisational and social moral indifference that allowed the Gulags and the Holocaust to happen in the twentieth century. one very clear methodological point that is deeply shared by MacIntyre and Bauman is that the dominant modes of philosophy and, perhaps, especially the dominant modes of ethical reasoning, are connected to, represent and indeed give potentially relective self-awareness to the dominant modes of life of their society. For both of them the dominant modes of modernist moral thought are not only deeply problematic but also reveal much about a particular form of contemporary social organisation. Bauman puts it quite baldly when he states that Ethical philosophy of the modern era could not but relect the legislative and order-building ambition of, the deining trait of modernity. It also had to be animated by the foremost characteristics of modern spirit – the unshakable trust in the ultimate and irrevocable triumph of reason over other faculties … Like the statesmen and social reformers bent on legislating harmony, peace and conlict free order into social reality with the help of a legal code meticulously cleansed of blank spots and all traces of ambiguity, the philosophers vested their hopes in a code of ethical rules puriied of all ambivalence and contradiction … (Bauman 2007: 114)

Both macintyre and Bauman have sought alternative moral understandings to escape from the limitations of this dominant form of moral thought. MacIntyre, of course, in Aristotelian virtue ethics and Bauman in the moral thought of emmanuel Levinas and also in that of the danish philosopher and theologian Knud Logstrup, a igure who signiicantly MacIntyre also has an interest in.3 However before turning to these alternative sources of thought I want to look at the description and analysis of modernity that these thinkers produce to establish the claim that a neo-aristotelian inspired analysis has something signiicant to learn from Bauman’s account of the moral dangers of modernity.

II

For both Bauman and macintyre the nature and form of bureaucratic organisation has fateful consequences. For both of them the nature of modern social organisation can facilitate the foulest of crimes. Bauman most famous and probably his most important contribution to the social sciences is his work 3 MacIntyre was joint author (with Hans Fink) of the very laudatory introduction to the 1997 edition of the english language translation Logstrup key text, The Ethical Demand (Logstrup 1997). 99

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Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and one of MacIntyre (2006) most signiicant papers also relates to this, ‘Social Structures and their threats to Moral Agency’. now if the claims of early modern legislative power were in part underwritten by the rule based conception of reason in early modern moral philosophy, when we come to the twentieth century, at the centre of MacIntyre’s and Bauman’s shared focus is the speciic nature of managerial power and its claims to authority. this is an authority often underwritten by some of the claims of the social sciences and challenging it is a central aspect of the argument of After Virtue (1981), in which the presence of what much conventional twentieth century social science took to be Weberian sociology is noted as assisting the creation of forms of organisation that facilitate a social domain hospitable to emotivist ethics and managerial authority. as macintyre famously puts it Weber’s thought embodies just those dichotomies which emotivism embodies and obliterates just those distinctions to which emotivism has been blind. Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent, conlict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. instead one must simply choose between parties, classes, nations, causes and ideals. (ibid.: 33)

The manager treats ends as given and is concerned principally with technique, how to transform the resources at his/her disposal into a inal product, e.g. investment into proits. However the afinities of bureaucratic/managerial power and social scientiic thought are explored in detail in MacIntyre’s paper that we cited earlier, ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ (1979), where he elaborates his argument concerning the legitimising role of the social sciences for the bureaucratic manager. He argues that conventional social science methodology incorporates a very particular and limited view of the social world in its methodology, which in turn dovetails with the concepts and needs of managers and bureaucrats. He denotes ive corresponding elements between social scientists and bureaucrats. Firstly, he claims the world is seen as composed of discrete and identiiable variables. Secondly, that the researcher can label these in a neutral and noncontestable way. Thirdly, that the process of conceptualisation about the subject matter is a matter of his scientiic convenience rather than culturally determined by social factors outside the discipline, e.g. ‘operational deinitions’. Fourthly, the researcher constructs law-like or probabilistic generalisations from the data. And inally, ifthly, the kind of generalisation sought, provide some lever for producing reasonably predictable events in society, in other words, it provides those with access to this knowledge and resources, with certain types of manipulative ability. the response of many social scientists will be that this ideal type is really a straw man. Donald Levine, for example, protests that few sociologists now 100

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want to produce universal, law-like generalisations but now rather concentrate on probabilistic ones (1983: 702). In fact MacIntyre is well aware of this, but argues that restriction to probabilistic conclusions would not alter the nature of the methodological enterprise (1973: 332–7). The key question is: why do private and public bodies commission research? certainly not principally out of intellectual interest. is it really possible for social scientists to honestly admit even today in a rather different late modern environment that few of their numbers have aspirations summarisable in MacIntyre’s ive points. What of those in organisational theory, or Business Studies, who, like Herbert Simon, the author of a classic text of that genre, Administrative Behaviour, who could write in the 1966 edition: ‘We can predict that in the world of 1985 we shall have psychological theories that are as successful as the theories we have in chemistry and biology’ (c.f. Sennett 1993). Success of course here means not just intellectual success for we have no reason to doubt that in 1966 there were rational and persuasive psychological theories, however, what was being sought here were ones that could provide a social technology spin-off, the equivalent to that of chemical and biological science. in this context it meant power and predictive control over human persons. But the afinity of this conception of social science with bureaucracy only becomes fully apparent when we see macintyre’s description of the bureaucrat: First the bureaucrat has to deal in discrete items which can be given an established and unique classiication … secondly the classiicatory scheme which it gives rise to, which in an important sense creates those (discrete) variables, must itself be treated as non-contestable. the scheme has to be accepted independently of the evaluative viewpoint of particular individuals or social groups. thirdly it is the bureaucrat who is free to create the classiicatory scheme; it is he, who, so to speak, operationalizes his concepts so that items will be handled by him in his way. (1979: 55)

Obviously these correspond precisely to the form of the ideal typical, methodological scheme MacIntyre set out. In themselves, they embody the idealised self-picture of bureaucratic practice. The same is true for the inal two elements, because the bureaucrat must operate upon the classiied materials, to produce desired consequences, so he or she must be equipped with sets of rules that correspond to causal generalisation. the operation of these rules then has deinite effects, i.e. social manipulation. It is crucial to understand that MacIntyre’s argument is, in important ways, a culturalist one. He is not claiming that bureaucracy or social science directly correspond to these forms, but that it is signiicantly important that they both exist together, in our culture, as modes of legitimation. The claim is that when authority is challenged, or answers are demanded for a problem, it is to 101

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these cultural forms that appeal is made. In this process conlict is made both marginal and manageable, technique and modes of manipulation triumph over the claims of substantive value. It seems, then, we may well be in the presence of ideology, dependent, like all ideology is, on partial truths. There are built in features of uncertainty in human action, but can probabilistic approaches ill the expert gap? MacIntyre argues not, because statistical correlations cannot alone provide a deinite causal link between factors and that the social sciences have inherent problems of repeatability of sets of events, not present in the natural sciences and this is to leave aside the inherent relexive potentiality of human practice (1973: 335). It would seem that the law-like generalisations, the expert bureaucrat or manager requires, are not available. But what of the other prior condition, that is, that there exists a domain of morally neutral facts, about which he or she (expert or bureaucrat) discovers out there, and then confront us with. For even if law-like generalisations are not possible, cannot, at least, a manager or bureaucrat claim to be in command of the ‘facts’, and hence, the unavoidable nature of reality with which we must live. this is a peculiarly important claim within our culture, which takes us to the very heart of the claims made for the liberal state, and those of citizenship, and sovereign subjectivity. For a crucial dimension of modern liberalism has been the gradual withdrawal of the state from judgement about values and beliefs. This was partly the product of, and partly reinforced by intellectual tendencies, which moved in the direction of the separation of ‘is’ from ‘ought’, ‘facts’ from ‘values’ or formal from substantive rationality. Crucially for MacIntyre, in the philosophical and scientiic rejection of aristotle and the consequent giving up of any notion of ‘man-as-he-could-beif-he-realised-his-telos’ in favour of something like ‘untutored-human-natureas-it-is’ (MacIntyre 1981: 50). In the irst context ethics allows a human being to pass from where they are, to where it is in their nature to go. In the second, one is left with basic human nature on one hand, and a system of ethics on the other, which seem radically incompatible with one another, with no linking concept of necessarily guided development to an end or good. With the consequence that within modernity moral conservatives like Kant have advocated duty in ethics, whilst radicals have tended to emphasise release from constraint. Now if managerialism successfully marginalises conlict over ends, then part of the way it achieves this is via the deepening of the division of labour and the fragmentation and compartmentaliszation associated with modern life into a series of particular roles (see McMylor 2011 for a more detailed account) which discourages the moral subject from asking questions about ends or about the good of a whole community. This picture of fragmentation and moral danger is fully shared by Bauman, indeed it lies at the centre of his sociological account of the contemporary nature and signiicance of the Holocaust. For Bauman, one absolutely central 102

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lesson of the Holocaust is that it makes, ‘untenable … the concept of modern society as an unambiguously moralizing force, of its institutions as civilizing powers, of its coercive controls as a dam defending brittle humanity against the torrents of animal passion’ (Bauman 1991: 212–13). Bauman indeed argues that a central feature of all modern organisations is that they are, at least in part, engaged in the process of stiling or limiting the moral capacities of their employees and operatives. this is principally done by what Bauman terms the rendering of social action, adiaphoric – adapted originally from the medieval Latin term adiaphoron meaning a thing that declared to be indifferent by the Church i.e. not within its moral purview – in other words something that is not considered to be either good or bad. He argues that this is done by a number of strategies: (1) stretching the distance between action and its consequences beyond the reach of moral impulse; (2) exempting some ‘others’ from the class of potential objects of moral conduct, of potential ‘faces’; (3) disassembling other human objects of action into aggregates of functionally speciic traits, held separate so that the occasion for re-assembling the face does not arise, and the task set for each action can be free from moral evaluation. (Bauman 1991: 215)

What this exercise in social technology achieves in the irst instance is frequently the temporal and spatial separation of action from consequences, and frequently, introduces a chain of mediators so actors are rarely faced by the consequences of their actions. each contributor’s actions are so small as to appear inconsequential and bad effects can be conceptualised as the failure of the system, the unintended consequence of blameless action – a failure of reason rather than of morality. the second point evicts the object of action from the ranks of those who can be recognised as a moral actor, or in a Levinasian sense, a ‘face’ that can appeal to or challenge the action, at its most extreme it means evicting certain subjects from the ranks of humanity altogether. The inal elements relects the penetration of the concept of the division of labour into the administration of aspects of the social order, and destroys the object of action as a self, and sees only the trait to be controlled, regulated or destroyed. These elements – which are of course more fully explored by Bauman, especially in relation to his study of the Holocaust – it seems to me complement and deepen MacIntyre’s conceptions and concerns, especially in respect of social compartmentalisation and the social structural threats to moral action, by providing some absolutely compelling empirical detail whilst providing analytic distinctions that take further the conceptual implications of the deepening of the social division of labour and role differentiation, already implicit, in MacIntyre (McMylor 2011). However this account also points to some signiicant differences in respect of some key claims underpinning 103

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Bauman’s Holocaust study and his later work on ethics. Principal amongst these differences is the view of Bauman’s that morality has ‘pre-social sources’ and indeed, perhaps also, pre-rational sources.

III

At irst sight there is something rather astonishing in this claim about the presocial sources of morality, coming, as it does, from a lifelong and, in many respect, quite passionate sociologist. Indeed it is fair to say that Bauman’s account of ethics, although widely recognised and acknowledged, is, compared to other area of his work, the least inluential aspect of his thought amongst sociologists. This is because, for Bauman, following Levinas and Logstrup, the ethical is formed against the rule based logic of modern social organisation, so that it is, at least in part, a reaction against the dulling power and baleful consequences of modern rule based morality; a rule based world that sociology is at home in and, in some respects, played a key part in creating. However, despite being a sociologist, Bauman is committed to Levinas and Logstrup for what can only be philosophical and moral reasons, in that in key respects the foundations of these moral positions mean an engagement with particular versions of phenomenological analysis, an analysis which has the virtue for Bauman, when it is developed by Levinas and Logstrup, in being already ethical in its foundation. this position is frequently misunderstood by sociologists as a claim that ethics is somehow pre-rational and supposedly rooted in our emotions (see crone 2008) but in so far as I understand a dense argument, Levinas, whilst inluenced by Husserl’s phenomenology that seeks to strip away accumulated layers of conceptualisation in order to reveal experience in itself, goes on to adapt this work to look at intersubjective experience, as it emerges in phenomenological relection, and views it as having an irreducible ‘ethical’ element in the direct sense that an ‘i’ discovers its own reality when it is singled out by the gaze of the other. as Bergo puts it: This gaze is interrogative and imperative. It says ‘do not kill me’. It also implores the ‘I’, who eludes it only with dificulty, although this request may have actually no discursive content. this command and supplication occurs because human faces impact us as affective moments or, what Levinas calls ‘interruptions’. The face of the other is irstly expressiveness. It could be compared to a force. (Bergo 2011: 1.1)

it is this ‘ethics before being’ that provide the metaphysical ground for Bauman’s appeal to an ethical stance that is primordial, and always remains a possible 104

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human choice, no matter how bad the fragmenting social reality of the modern, and the liquid modern, social order can become. How then does a MacIntyrean analysis respond to Bauman work? In the irst instance it would welcome a powerful critique of modern organisational forms and their threats to moral agency. it is clear that macintyre himself is appreciative of Levinas and Logstrup as attempting to get us to understand aspects of our moral experience that both modern social organisation and some forms of moral philosophy may make us blind to, namely, our direct responsibility to other human beings as just that, human beings, rather than speciic persons as bearers of status, or a kinship relations to us. However, macintyre’s response to these ethical views would also want to give due weight to the fact that this position constitutes a very particular, although important, response to the inadequacy of the forms of modernist moral thought. that is, as MacIntyre has already began to argue in recent papers on Logstrup, and we can extend to Bauman, that this response to modernity is understandable and, in some respects, eminently justiied, but, it does not exhaust the possible options available to us. We are not faced with just, either a ruled based morality or a self-aware pre-social ethics of, and for, the Other. We are not faced just, in Logstrup’s terms, with moral spontaneity or rules, but have the possibility of responding to the needs of others in a quite immediate way because we have acquired reason based virtues. As MacIntyre puts it: ‘our goods are the speciic goods of rational animals, and right action is action that not only accords with reason but issues from deliberative reasoning’ (MacIntyre 2007: 159) and that ‘the spontaneity that issues in right action has to be learned. to say this is not to deny that such spontaneity is natural. For it is our nature to learn, and part of what we have to learn is when and where to be spontaneous’ (ibid.: 160). However, Bauman (as, also in their different ways, would Levinas and Logstup) would point to the radical inadequacy of our moral responses in the face of the profound needs of the other. Bauman puts it thus ‘one recognizes morality by its gnawing sense of unfulilledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with itself. the moral self is always haunted by the sense that it is not moral enough (Bauman 1993, 80) and goes on to say, Saints are saints because they do not hide behind the Law’s broad shoulders. They know, or they feel, or they act as if they felt, that no law, however generous and humane, may exhaust the moral duty, trace the consequences of ‘being for’ to their radical end, to the ultimate choice of life or death. (ibid.: 81)4

4 MacIntyre was joint author (with Hans Fink) of the very laudatory introduction to the 1997 edition of the English language translation Logstrup key text, The Ethical Demand (Logstrup 1997). 105

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clearly macintyre may well agree with this contrast between the law and ethics, and can also agree that many, or most, cannot fulill that which the situation demands, however, this, he would suggest, is best understood as falling short on the road to developing virtues, as he puts it when the demand is less than completely fulillable for them, because of that factor in their insuficiently reordered desires that still holds them back. Yet there are also lives that have progressed beyond that stage, the lives of those in whom openness to the grace of charity has allowed them to become spontaneously responsive to whatever is demanded of them … .they are the lives of the Saints. (MacIntyre Op. Cit., 165)

We seem to end for both theorist at a similar place in respect of the power of and the dificulty of the demands on goodness in respect of others in need, but the aristotelian macintyre can at least offer an account that remains connected to the everyday patterns of human socialisation, via his stress on the learning of virtue via deliberative reason, and so provides a potentially socially grounded account of the ethical, in contrast to the ‘pre-social’ account of, the sociologist, Bauman. However MacIntyre may offer something else to the social scientist who is still, perhaps, puzzled by Bauman’s account and that is at least the beginnings of an explanation of why such an account as Levinas’s and Bauman’s might arise. To understand what this account might be we must remember, as we noted above, that MacIntyre follows Bauman in viewing the ethical demand theory of Logstrup as being very similar in content to Levinas’s ethics of the face of the Other. What MacIntyre suggests (MacIntyre 2010) is that the conceptions of ethics to be found in the work of Logstrup and Levinas emerge in the context of the social differentiation, bureaucratisation and secularisation that have taken place in European societies in the second half of the twentieth century and, in comparing, as he does Denmark and France, it makes little difference to the outcome if the religious background of the society is Protestant or catholic. For he notes that when persons in such societies come upon a person in acute need, ‘their disposition to view, to judge, to feel, and to act remain what they had been’ (ibid.: 12) in the past. However, if they were asked to give an account, or a description, of what they were doing, they are unlikely to have access to, or ind personally persuasive, the discourse in which the virtues and the conception of the common good would be readily available to them. Instead MacIntyre suggests what they, in all likelihood, would give – if they are suficiently articulate – is a phenomenological description of ‘how certain types of situation present themselves to consciousness and elicit or fail to elicit appropriate responses’ (ibid.). Importantly, MacIntyre suggests, that, in deep afinity with Bauman’s sociological sense of present day culture, these social 106

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actors would be unlikely to understand their actions as the following of a rule, but instead, what they have done, ‘will be experienced as the response to the singularity of this particular individual or group of individuals in this particular plight with these particular needs’ (ibid.). Sensitive phenomenological describers like Levinas and Logstrup articulate this sensibility and provide what appear to be powerfully persuasive accounts of moral experience of what diane Perpich has aptly called ‘normativity without norms’ (c.f. op. cit.: 14). However, for MacIntyre these accounts, powerful and real as they are, can only be fully understood as ‘reports of historical residues’ (ibid.) of that which remains from the diluted legacy of a more comprehensive moral framework in which the common good and the virtues were at home and in which reasoning about practical goods, was not separated out from feelings and judgments elicited by those in urgent need. macintyre recognises that all he has done in respect of the phenomenological account of ethics is gesture towards a historical and sociological speciication of the tradition but, in so doing, he has invited social scientists to place changing ethical understandings at the centre of their accounts of social transformation and in doing this, he can only be honouring the commitment to this very task by Bauman himself. However we, and quite possibly Bauman, also, will have good reason to be disturbed by MacIntyre’s sociological account of the moral philosophy that Bauman seeks to rely upon. For if what appears to be a phenomenological account of human responses to the needs of others, turns out to be, not a permanent feature of human beings, but an historically inherited and sociologically conditioned pattern of behaviour, then the long term viability of this account of our moral experience may be fragile and put at risk by the new social forms of consumer capitalism that Bauman, as a sociologist, so acutely describes.

References

Bauman, Z. 1982. Memories of Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bauman, Z. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters. cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. 1991. Modernity and the Holocaust. cambridge: Polity Press Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. 1997. Postmodernity and its Discontents. cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. 1998. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. maidenhead: open University Press. Bauman, Z. 2007. The Liquid Modern Adventure of the ‘Sovereign Expression of Life’. Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K.E. Logstrup, edited by S. Andersen and K.K. Niekerk. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre dame Press. 107

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Bauman, Z. 2012. London Riots – Consumerism Coming Home to Roost, Social Europe Journal, 6(2). Bauman, Z. and Tester, K. 2001. Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. cambridge: Polity Press. Bergo, B. 2011. Emmanuel Levinas. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Online]. Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ levinas/ [accessed: 8 September 2014]. Croan, M. 2008. Bauman on Ethics: Intimate Ethics for a Global World, in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critique, edited by M.H. Jacobsen and P. Poder. London: ashgate. Derrida, J. 2002. Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’, in Jacques Derrida Acts of Religion, edited G. Anidjar. London: Routledge. Grey, J. 1995. In Enlightenment’s Wake. London: routledge. Levine, D. 1983. Sociology After MacIntyre. American Journal of Sociology, 89(3), 700–707. Logstrup, K.E. 1997. The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of notre dame Press. MacIntyre, A. 1973. Ideology, Social Science and Revolution. Comparative Politics, 5(3), 321–42. MacIntyre, A. 1998. Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority, in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by K. Knight. Cambridge: Polity Press. MacIntyre, A. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 2006. Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral Agency. Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. 2007. Human Nature and Human Dependence: What Might a Thomist Learn from Reading Logstrup, in Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K.E. Logstrup, edited by S. Andersen and K.K. Niekerk. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. MacIntyre, A. 2010. Danish Ethical Demands and French Common Goods: two moral Philosophies. European Journal of Philosophy, 18(1), 1–16. MacIntyre, A. and Fink, H. 1997. Introduction to K.E. Logstrup, in The Ethical Demand, K.E. Logstrup. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. McMylor, P. 2011. Compartmentalization and Social Roles: macintyre’s critical Theory of Modernity, in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, edited by K. Knight and P. Blackledge. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Sennett, R. 1993. Authority. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Chapter 7

Reappraising neoliberalism: Homo Economicus, Practitioners and Practices mustafa ongun

At the core of neoliberal theory, we often ind a normative account of the relationship between state (or politics) and economy. In its essence, neoliberalism suggests free market principles and rationality as a cure to the alleged ineficiencies and ineffectiveness of the ways in which we manage our institutions. It is from this background that neoliberalism also argues in favour of markets being free from intervention. Hence, one inds neoliberals arguing for privatisation, free trade, tax reduction, elimination of price controls, competition in all sectors and many other similar macro-economic and political changes. Although neoliberalism has been criticised for a long time, after the crisis of 2008, such criticisms have become more intense and widespread. Once a marginalised attempt is now becoming common. However, despite this popularity, criticisms appear to be one dimensional and for this reason insuficient. Main criticisms (e.g. Gamble 2001; Harvey 2005; Albo et al 2010; Piketty 2013), that is to say, often focus on the ways in which neoliberalism perceives the relationship between politics and economics and how such relationship creates economic and social inequalities. In this chapter, I argue – by using Foucault’s notion of homo economicus and MacIntyre’s concepts of goods, practices and institutions – that neoliberalism is more than a set of normative suggestions about how politics and economics should relate. Furthermore, application of neoliberal theory to the management of social organisations has further consequences beyond economic and social inequalities. Let me state from the outset that my intention here is not to refute the existing criticisms of neoliberalism some of which already accepts that neoliberalism extends further than their own accounts of it (Harvey 2005). Rather I intend to extend these criticisms by providing an analysis of a certain dimension of neoliberalism that lies behind its allegedly perceived relationship between politics and economics. Unlike the mainstream criticisms of neoliberalism, I argue that neoliberalism is, irst of all, a particular mode of understanding of practitioners, practices and their relationship with institutions.

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So, my argument is that before neoliberalism becomes a set of macro-economic policies, it is a particular mode of understanding of particular aspects of our social life. Practitioners of various practices as important as medicine, art and sciences are regarded by neoliberals as acting and thinking as market actors. Practitioners are considered as buyers and sellers who act and think on the basis of cost-beneit analysis no matter the conditions. This kind of an understanding, I argue, is very limited and problematic and has not yet been fully recognised by the existing critical appraisals. In particular, the argument is that neoliberalism is limited because practitioners act and think beyond that of cost-beneit analysis. And it is problematic because practices do not always function according to the logic of markets. Indeed, they often resemble schools rather than markets. As a result of this problematic understanding, I argue, practices such as medicine, arts, sciences and even TV and radio programme-making tend to become instruments of economic effectiveness and eficiency. This, in turn, allows no room for relecting on questions such as what aims are possible other than economic eficiency and institutional effectiveness and how practices and practitioners can lourish. So, despite the inequalities created through the aforementioned macro-policies of neoliberalism, neoliberalism also inhibits practices such as arts, sciences and medicine from lourishing. This is the main limit of neoliberalism which has not yet been fully recognised by the existing critical accounts and I, in this chapter, will try to explore this limit of neoliberalism. I develop these arguments largely through Alasdair MacIntyre’s concepts of goods, practices and institutions. These concepts help us understand what kind of a sociology neoliberalism implies and what kind of sociological effects it can have on social practices like media. I demonstrate this with reference to an empirical case. The main ethnographic studies of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) show that the BBC began to adopt neoliberal views of programme-making practices and practitioners between the early 1990s and early 2000s. Although this adoption does not indicate that the organisation surrendered to neoliberalism, it did result in tension between practitioners and managers, which prevented programme-making practices from lourishing. Therefore, the BBC can be an illustrative case of how neoliberalism exceeds macro politics-economy relations and presents practices as if they are market commodities and practitioners as utility-maximisers and how this affects the very practice of the people who are engaged with practices. It also needs to be noted that I am not the irst to attempt to analyse neoliberal theory beyond political-economic relations. Others have tried to do so, the most prominent being the ones inluenced by Foucault. These accounts are worth considering in serious depth by anyone trying to develop a critical account of

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neoliberalism. I will, therefore, begin with these Foucauldian1 accounts and in part use them to develop the main argument of this chapter. Especially, Foucault’s notion of homo-economicus and how it has been used by others will be of particular importance. However, since Foucauldian accounts have some important drawbacks, I will go beyond them and propose Aristotelianism, as revised through MacIntyre’s notions of goods, practices and institutions, as an alternative framework in which we can develop our critical understanding of neoliberalism beyond that of political-economic relations. This brings another intention of the chapter to light. That is, to argue that the use of MacIntyre goes beyond the use of Foucault in trying to understand the ways in which neoliberalism affects our social practices. Some drawbacks of Foucauldian analysis can be overcome by a MacIntyrean framework of goods, practices, and institutions so that not only the homo-economicus can be recognised but also criticised from a normative point of view.

The Foucauldian Understanding of Neoliberalism: Expansion of Homo Economicus

Neoliberalism often denotes a theory which refers to macro-political and economic changes such as the privatisation of public organisations, decline in welfare-state provisions, less governmental regulation on economic activity, dissolution of the power of trade unions, introduction of market principles such as competition to the non-proit sector and increase in completion-led, contract-based labour (Gamble 2001, Harvey 2005: 2–3, Albo et al 2010: 16– 18). Despite the increasing number of criticism of neoliberalism, there have been very limited theoretical accounts of what neoliberalism means in terms of practices other than these macroeconomic claims and changes. Within this limited literature, Foucault’s notion of homo economicus is often cited as a useful concept to understand the kind of subjectivity neoliberalism assigns to individual practitioners (Brown 2003 and 2007, Lemke 2001, Miller and Rose 2008). This attempt can be considered to go beyond that of political-economic relations. For this reason it is helpful to begin this chapter with Foucault. Foucault deals with neoliberalism in his 1978–79 lectures at the Collège de France. There, neoliberalism is considered as a theory in which human subjectivity is understood in a speciic way. According to Foucault, neoliberalism understands subjects as homo economicus, the origins of which can be found in classical liberalism (Foucault 2008: 139). That is, human beings, in neoliberal 1 Here I will use the term Foucauldian in a very loose sense. It basically means those who often refer to Foucault’s notion of homo-economicus in their work and suggest that neoliberalism goes beyond that of a particular set of macro political-economic changes. 111

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theory, are understood as essentially economic beings. Basically, human action, thoughts and judgements are understood in terms of the activities of buying and selling. The essential feature of neoliberal homo economicus is trade and a speciic type of cost-beneit analysis. That is, human beings always seek their own self-interest and they use their practical rationality to calculate the costs and beneits of a decision or action. This assumption is central to mainstream economic analysis, and there is no need to establish this claim. Such an assumption persists in the classical economic theories of capitalism like that of Adam Smith. However, neoliberalism does not only consist of this assumption. Referring to Hayek and Becker as thoroughgoing neoliberals, Foucault suggests that a neoliberal understanding of human beings as homo economicus, unlike the classical one, expands into wider spheres of social life. In neoliberal theory, marriage, crime, immigration, education and many other aspects of social life are considered as areas in which homo economicus can and should lourish (Foucault 2008: 270–71). One gets married, educated, and even commits crime on the same cost-beneit analysis as is encountered in the free market. It is this aspect of Foucault’s analysis that has inluenced such commentators on neoliberalism as Wendy Brown and Thomas Lemke. Brown, proceeding from this interpretation of Foucault, argues that neoliberalism understands and promotes homo economicus as an ideal type of subjectivity in all aspects of social life (Brown 2003: 11). According to Brown and Lemke, neoliberalism requires all forms of social existence to be submitted to an economic rationality (Brown 2003: 4–5, Lemke 2001). This means that the social existence of human beings is reconstructed in terms of markets in neoliberal sociology. That is, human action, judgement and thinking take a speciic form of cost-beneit analysis. Even education and marriage are considered as investments. One gets an education, inds a job, gets married, raises children and so on in order to extend his or her ‘human capital’ (Foucault 2008: 252–3). Neoliberal theory, on Foucault’s account, considers all human beings as owners of capital. Human individuals are no longer categorised as ‘workers’, ‘managers’, ‘fathers’, ‘mothers’, etc. They are all considered as owners of capital with an ability to make investments. On a neoliberal account, human action and decision take place in the form of a cost-beneit analysis. This is why Foucault says that in neoliberalism, ‘homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself ’ (Foucault 2008: 226). Individuals’ actions, judgements and thinking need to resemble a successful entrepreneur even if he is not doing trade, business and accounting. Indeed, the ways in which individuals are engaged with other individuals is envisaged as a relationship between businesses and consumers. From a Foucauldian perspective, this is the norm neoliberalism assigns to practices of social life (Brown 2003: 10). In neoliberal theory, practices are market places, practitioners are market beings, and the ways in 112

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which practitioners are related to each other resemble the relationship between businesses and consumers. As it is clear, a Foucauldian assessment of neoliberalism goes beyond that of political-economic relations. That is, moving from Foucault, one can conclude that neoliberalism, despite being largely a normative theory about the relationship between politics and economics, is also a theory about how to understand and manage human practices. However, although this might be a good starting point, concerning the purposes of this essay, it is not suficient. This is because of at least two important problems I ind with this approach. The irst problem is that this analysis of neoliberal theory is not feasible for empirical assessment. Although the notion of homo economicus and its relation to neoliberal theory is convincing, one can hardly go beyond it to discover what it entails with respect to actual practices, since there is no clear idea of what practices are. Neither Foucault nor his commentators specify what they mean by a ‘practice’. Does it mean any kind of activity? Does it mean a certain type of relationship? How are practices related to institutions? Or are they at all different from institutions? These questions remain to be answered by the Foucauldian approaches. However, unless these questions are answered, it is not clear how to proceed empirically and search for the ways in which understanding practices as market and practitioners as homo economicus would emerge within a particular institution. For instance, the question of what would understanding medical doctors in terms of homo-economicus and the practice of medicine as a market within a particular hospital entail? What would it mean if a media institution adopts this view of practitioners and practices? For instance, as is often done, one can search the ways in which neoliberalism affects patients with regard to equality in an empirical way (De Vogli 2011; Navarro 2009) or one can investigate education with the same regard. However, despite the value of this type of research, there is a shortage of studies addressing the issue of what it means for those who are involved in the day to day practices of various organisations. Neither the mainstream criticisms of neoliberalism nor the Foucauldian critiques seem to be interested in this aspect of neoliberalism, but neoliberalism in fact affects this aspect of our social life as well. It is, of course, true that there are ine Foucauldian criticisms regarding the affect of neoliberalism on the institution of liberal democracy (e.g. Brown 2003; Lazzarato 2009). However, these criticisms also fail to go beyond that of political-economic relations. In essence, these criticisms do not require the use of the notion of homo economicus in any particular way. That is, they are not investigating the particular implications of understanding practices as markets and practitioners as homo-economicus. Rather, they seek only to articulate the ways in which neoliberalism alters the institution of liberal democracy. David Harvey (2005) and Tony Judt (2010), for instance, provide very similar criticisms of neoliberalism without referring to the notion of homo-economicus. 113

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So, such Foucauldian criticisms fall into a one dimensional category, which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. As stated earlier, a more substantive criticism requires us to ask why understanding human practices in terms of homo economicus is problematic and this is a question Foucauldian approaches fail to answer. This, I argue, is no surprise given that Foucault’s philosophy is often criticised for failing to tell us why we should resist power or aim to change it (see Fraser 1994; Habermas 1985: 274–7). That is to say, within Foucault’s philosophy, there is no moral basis on which one can propose changes or resistance to neoliberal understandings of human beings in terms of homo economicus and of human practices in terms of markets. I argue that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian sociology, as explained below, can be considered as a theoretical framework in which the notion of homo economicus can be analysed empirically and criticised normatively in a much more feasible way than the Foucauldian accounts would do. And this would yield to a critical relection on neoliberalism beyond that of the political-economic relation. Below I will provide an exposition of MacIntyre’s notions of goods, practices, and institutions and show how it helps us to seek the concept of homo economicus empirically and normatively criticise it. MacIntyre’s notions of goods, practices, and institutions also help us to develop a clear deinition of what a practice is and how it is distinguished from an institution. This clariication, I argue, leads us to possible empirical and critical appraisals of the neoliberal notion of homo economicus and its application to a speciic case. I will, then, take BBC TV and radio programme-making as an illustrative case to indicate how future empirical work on the ways in which different understandings of practices and practitioners can be conducted regarding various organisations.

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian Sociology as an Alternative Method

MacIntyre himself does not provide us with an account of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, as I will show below, his Aristotelianism can be used to analyse neoliberalism and such analysis will go beyond that of political-economic relations in a way that Foucauldian analysis cannot. This will help us comprehend another dimension of neoliberalism that goes beyond that of political-economic relations and its macro affects on socio-economic inequalities. Let me begin with Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics begins with a general assumption about human action: all human activities, sciences, arts, inquiries and choices aim at some good (NE: 1094a). MacIntyre’s philosophy follows this general assumption (MacIntyre 2007: 148; MacIntyre 2006a, 1988: 103–24) and this has various sociological implications. One implication is that practices, in so far as they consist of human activities, need to be understood in relationship to goods. As this chapter aims to show below, it is mainly this 114

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aspect of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism that provides us with a framework in which a better critical evaluation of the neoliberal notion of homo economicus can be developed. Aristotle suggests that goods can be classiied into two main categories: goods that are instrumental to the achievement of other goods, and goods that are pursued for their own sake (NE: 1096b3; MacIntyre 1999a: 66). Although MacIntyre’s sociology follows this classiication of goods, unlike Aristotle’s, his sociology relies on the notion of a social practice he develops in After Virtue. By a social practice MacIntyre means any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially deinitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the goods and ends involved are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 2007: 187)

Examples of social practices understood in this way vary from farming, architecture, scientiic inquiry, games, and arts to medicine. As it is clear this notion of a practice is much more speciic and clear than what Foucault and his commentators mean by a practice. This speciicity provides us with a better framework for empirical evaluation of neoliberal understanding of homo economicus. Broadly, on MacIntyre’s account, there are two classes of goods that are deined in relation to a social practice. He names one class of goods as goods internal to a practice. Such goods are ends achieved (or not) in the pursuit of the standards of excellence inherent in the relevant practice. Another class of goods are deined as goods external to a practice, and these goods are instrumental to the achievement of internal goods. So, external goods are pursued for the sake of other goods, they are not goods in themselves. Medicine, for instance, is a social practice, which has goods internal and external to it. In the pursuit of excellent diagnoses and cures, doctors can (or cannot) achieve goods internal to the practice of medicine. These kinds of goods are named as ‘internal’ because they are goods achievable only through participating in medicine and through aiming to achieve the standards of excellence peculiar to that form of practice. In contrast, goods external to a practice are goods such as money, status, power and prestige (ibid.: 188). External goods are not speciic to a practice in the way that internal goods are. Making the land fruitful, in a sustainable way, is an internal good of farming, and it can only be achieved through the practice of farming, whereas, money and status can be achieved in variety of ways. As MacIntyre puts it, ‘there are always alternative ways of achieving such [external] goods, and their achievement is never to be had only by engaging in some particular kind of practice’ (ibid.: 188). External goods are always some 115

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individual’s property and possession, and for this reason they are objects of competition (ibid.: 190). Since external goods are always possessions of some individual, the more external goods an individual achieves the less there are left for other individuals. Internal goods, on the other hand, are quite different. Their achievement renders the possibility of others achieving them too.

Practices, Institutions, and Flourishing

MacIntyre makes it clear that his understanding of goods does not entail that goods external to a practice are irrelevant or unimportant. External goods are essential for practices because without external goods practices cannot survive (ibid.: 194). Institutional settings of social practices become important in the light of this understanding of external goods, because it is institutions, which are necessarily concerned with external goods, not the practices. [Institutions] are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are constructed in terms of power and status as rewards. Nor could they do otherwise if they are to sustain not only themselves but also practices of which they are the bearers. For no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions. Indeed so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions … that institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order in which ideals and the creativity of the practices are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institutions, in which the cooperative care for the common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. (ibid.: 194)

As institutions are concerned with goods external to practices, and as such goods are necessary for the survival of practices, MacIntyre’s contention is that without institutional governance practices can hardly survive (Coe and Beadle 2008). Such contention has implication with respect to effectiveness and eficiency of an institution. On MacIntyre’s account, effectiveness and eficiency are institutional attributes. This is because effectiveness consists of qualities, which would enable the acquisition and distribution of external goods in an effective and eficient way (MacIntyre 1988: 32; see also Knight and Beadle 2013, Knight 2008a: 115, Knight 2008b). Effectiveness and eficiency of institutions are, therefore, important for the survival of social practices. Practices, however, do not only survive, but also lourish or fail to do so. There is an important difference between survival and lourishing of practices. Failure with respect to lourishing does not imply that the practice cannot survive. Practices such as architecture, medicine, games, and many others can be found within the history of almost every civilization. However, their mere 116

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existence does not mean that they are lourishing. Flourishing of practices requires more than effectiveness and eficiency of institutions. Flourishing of any social practice depends upon the realisation of goods internal to practices and the motivation of practitioners towards the standards of excellences. Furthermore, the possession and exercise of virtue is central to the realisation of internal goods. Practitioners, MacIntyre argues, cannot realise internal goods without such virtues as justice, courage and honesty (MacIntyre 1998a: 226). So, apart from pursuing standards of excellence, practitioners also need to learn to become virtuous. As MacIntyre puts it, ‘a virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices’ (MacIntyre 2007: 191). The exercise of virtue, on the other hand, requires practitioners to transform their desires and preferences they had when they irst became a practitioner (MacIntyre 1998b: 121–2, MacIntyre 1999: 66–7, MacIntyre 2011: 12; Knight and Beadle 2012). As Knight puts it, ‘practices are the shared activities within which individuals may ind goods apart from and greater than those valued by their untutored desires and passions’ (Knight 2007: 152). This does not entail, however, that the exercise of the virtues are contrary to subjective desires and wants. Practitioners may well desire and want to act virtuously and thus, to achieve internal goods of practices, but it is often the case that such desires are formed within practices, where practitioners transform their ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ rather than simply satisfying them. Being constituted by internal goods and standards of excellence, practices function as a transforming sphere. This is striving to achieve standards of excellence provides practitioners with grounds relying on which they transform their wants and desires. Flourishing social practices, therefore, are not social spheres where individuals simply satisfy their wants and desires, but they are spheres where practitioners transform their wants and desires. This account of practices irstly makes a clear and useful distinction between that of practices and institutions with reference to goods. As shown, practices and practitioners deal with goods internal to the relevant practice whereas institutions deal with goods external to a practice. Such a distinction cannot be found within Foucauldian accounts of homo economicus. This prevents them from illustrating the cases where practitioners and practices are understood as homo-economicus and markets. A MacIntyrean account of institutions also brings a normative aspect into our understanding of practices, unlike the Foucauldian accounts. That is, from a MacIntyrean perspective, one can make claims on practices with reference to whether a practice lourishes or fails to do so. Practices, that are organised and practiced with regard to virtues such as justice, generosity and honesty, goods internal to practices and standards of excellences, transform the desires and wants of individuals in such a way that renders practices as lourishing. 117

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Two Fishing Crews, Practices, and Neoliberalism

MacIntyre’s (1994; see also MacIntyre, 1999b) two contrasting ishing crew cases illustrate the aforementioned normative aspect of his account in further detail. MacIntyre invites us to imagine two ishing crews one of which can be considered to have an ideal form where the other to have a defective one. In the ideal crew, goods internal to ishing such as ishing in a sustainable and excellent way and performing one’s role within the crew in an excellent and virtuous way are shared ends of the members of the crew. In such a ishing crew external goods are always secondary to the standards of excellence in catching ish and the commitment to the common good of the crew. In this kind of a context, reasoning and decisions are often justiied and motivated in relation to the internal goods of the practice of ishing. Likewise, in such a ishing crew, effectiveness and eficiency of the institutional settings of ishing are justiied and pursued for the sake of internal goods of the crew. This is to say that the effectiveness and eficiency of the institutional settings stands in an instrumental relationship to the lourishing of the practice. If the practice of ishing is to lourish, then the effectiveness and eficiency of the institution needs to serve the practitioners attempt to realise goods internal to ishing and the achievement of the standards of excellence in ishing. There can be, however, another type of ishing crew organized and understood as a purely technical and economic means to a productive end, whose aim is only or over-ridingly to satisfy as proitably as possible some market’s demand for ish. Just as those managing its organization aim at a high level of proits, so also the individual crew members aim at a high level of reward. Not only the skills, but also the qualities of character valued by those who manage the organization, will be those well designed to achieve a high level of proitability. (MacIntyre 1994: 284–5)

In this ishing crew practical reasoning often takes the form of ‘individual reasoning qua individual’. That is, practical reasoning of the practitioners takes the following structure: ‘I want such and such; doing so and so will enable me to achieve such and such; and doing so and so will not frustrate any equal or stronger preference’ (MacIntyre, 1998a:130). Practical reasoning here occurs as a result of individual wants, and it functions in a form of calculation about how to attain those wants. In such an organisation, goods internal to ishing and the standards of excellence are valued in so far as they satisfy individual wants. Internal goods and standards of excellence are not the means to transform the desıres and preferences of the practitioner. In other words, the main motivation for engaging in the practice of ishing and developing institutional settings of 118

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the practice turns out to be the satisfaction of subjective wants, interests and desires of either individual members of the crew or of certain interest groups. Furthermore, in a second crew, it is highly likely that the pursuit of goods internal to the practice will be undermined by a focus on external goods. This is mainly because the practice in the latter ishing crew is not a transforming sphere. As noted above, a lourishing practice needs to become transforming of for the practitioners, and for a practice to become transforming, practitioners need to focus largely on goods internal to practices rather than the external ones (MacIntyre 1998b: 225–6). As argued by others as well, this has an important implication for institutional decision making: in reasoning about particular institutional decisions and actions goods internal to the practices should become a predicate of reasoning, if practices are to lourish (Moore and Beadle 2006). In other words, decisions about goods external to practices, needs always to be made in the light of goods internal to practices and the ways in which practitioners aim at achieving those goods. Now, an Aristotelian evaluation of neoliberalism should depart from the above notions of goods, practices, and institutions. As noted earlier medicine, farming, research, arts and so on can all be considered as practices, but simply reading, speaking, walking, thinking or driving cannot. In Foucauldian accounts of neoliberalism, there is no such distinction. It is not at all clear whether any kind of activity has the status of being a practice or not. Foucault and his commentators, of course were not particularly concerned with the issue of whether any activity or particular types of activities should be concerned as a practice. However, especially with regard to providing an account of neoliberalism beyond that of macro structural changes, I argue that it is important to be concerned about this issue. This is because to illustrate this dimension of neoliberalism through empirical cases requires us to have a speciic meaning of a practice. Otherwise, anything would count as a practice and one would have to look into everything in order to provide with an empirical case. This would, however, be an extremely dificult task, if not impossible. Furthermore, rather than having a blurred relationship with institutions, as in Foucauldian accounts, practices, on a MacIntyrean account, have a clear relationship with institutions, which are concerned with external goods. Such an account of the relationship between institutions and practices, on the other hand, allows one to develop a normative critique of this dimension of neoliberalism too. What follows from this is the claim that neoliberalism understands practices as markets and human action and judgement in terms of homo economicus needs to be assessed with reference to certain types of goods, practices, and institutions. So, the questions one needs to ask in order to develop an account of neoliberalism other than the political-economic relation are the following:

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1. What would assigning the role of homo economicus to the practitioners and considering practices as markets mean with respect to speciic practices and institutions, and 2. What would a neoliberal understanding of say a doctor as homo economicus mean or medicine as a market entail? 3. What kind of fair normative criticism can be developed towards such an understanding of practices and practitioners? These questions cannot even be asked within a Foucauldian framework, which lacks any clear deinition of practices and institutions. What, then, would understanding practitioners as homo economicus and practices in terms of markets entail from a MacIntyrean perspective? First of all, it involves the error of subsuming practices under institutions so that practitioners function only to serve institutions. That is, conceiving practitioners in terms of homo economicus orders practical rationality only to the effectiveness and eficiency of the institution, not the virtues and internal goods of the practices. This is because what has been referred to as homo economicus, and the rationality peculiar to it, is very different from that of a cultivated practical rationality of a practitioner. The reasoning of homo economicus is reasoning about external goods. This would entail that practices within neoliberal theory are considered as markets. Markets, on the other hand, require cost-beneit analysis, which is a mode of reasoning peculiar to external goods of practices. As a practitioner, if one is to achieve the internal goods of the practice, then he/she has to reason on the bases of the standards of excellence and not on the bases of cost-beneit analysis. From this point of view, it is possible to argue that under neoliberalism, institutions are understood in such a way that the pursuit of external goods and effectiveness of institutions are favoured over the realisation of internal goods and standards of excellence. Neoliberalism, that is to say, conceives internal goods and standards of excellence as secondary to the external goods of practices and effectiveness of institutions. This, in turn, prevents one from asking questions and implementing policies that would prioritise the lourishing of practices. As again stated above, the lourishing of practices requires prioritising internal goods over the external ones. However, neoliberalism, in considering practitioners as market beings, cannot ask questions about lourishing. This is why neoliberal theory needs to be either rejected or radically revised. But what would this mean with respect to a speciic case? What does neoliberalism mean in relationship to a speciic institution and its relevant practices? In this last section, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is going to be considered as an illustrative case in order to provide further support for what has been argued above. Before I demonstrate the case of the BBC, I should also note that there will be an implicit argument to this demonstration. 120

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That is, the account I will provide below cannot be given by a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism. As argued above, although Foucauldian account does go beyond political-economic relations, it cannot critically evaluate the application of neoliberalism to a particular organisation, like the BBC, because of its failure to deine and distinguish practices from institutions. It is the main argument of this next section that from the early 1990s to early 2000s TV and radio programme-making within the BBC has tended to be understood and managed from a neoliberal perspective. I use the word ‘tended’ here intentionally as there were some serious resistance to such perspective from those who we will name as practitioners. This is why I also argue in this section that the BBC and the practices embodied within this institution have been caught in between the irst and the second ishing crews exempliied above. This is to suggest that, on the one hand, there has been an institutional tendency to view programme-makers as homo economicus and programme-making as a market. On the other, as I will demonstrate below, practitioners tend to think and act on different bases than such economic rationality. They often act and think through goods internal to their practices and practices, at least for the actual practitioners, do not seem to resemble markets like they do for neoliberals. Neoliberals’ perspective, on the other hand, confuses practices with institutions and this, applied as policy, creates tension between programmemakers and managers. A neoliberal understanding and management of social practices leads to tension between institutions and practices. We can name this tension as a state of being caught between the two ishing crews. That is, the BBC in the course of its recent history neither become the irst crew where external goods become secondary to the internal ones, nor did it become the second crew where external goods are always prioritised over the internal ones. However, this tension cannot be apprehended and critically evaluated from a Foucauldian perspective because it lacks a deinition of a practice and how it differs from institution. Nor can it be understood by the mainstream critical accounts of neoliberalism because of their overemphasis on the macro economic and political structures surrounding the organisation. It is the MacIntyrean framework that apprehends this tension with reference to a speciic empirical case due to its notions of a practice, institutions and goods.

The BBC and Programme-Making: In Between Two Fishing Crews2

To begin, the BBC is a non-proit public corporation. Since its foundation under John Reith in 1922, its oficial ethos has been to inform, educate, and 2 For more detailed account of empirical studies from MacIntyrean point of view – with a slightly different intension then this essay’s – see Beadle and Könyöt (2006). 121

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entertain the public through TV and radio programmes (Seaton 1997: 302–15). To achieve this ethos Reith thought that TV and radio programme production should be free from political and commercial pressures. That is, he thought that the BBC should not earn money from advertising and should be freed from political pressures. Since then the BBC does not earn money from advertising and it has separate executive powers from the government. The organisation is largely funded by TV license fee paid by the public. How, then, might neoliberalism be related to the BBC from a MacIntyrean perspective? First of all, let me remind the reader once again that neoliberalism understood here has a tendency to understand practices as markets and practitioners as homo economicus. So, from such a perspective, the initial question that needs to be asked regarding the BBC is when this tendency became apparent within the institution. An important study by Tom Burns (1977) suggests that such a tendency started in the 1970s. However, as I show below, it took about 20 years for this tendency to become more intense and apparent. Burns conducted two extensive ethnographic studies of the BBC; one in the 1963 and another one in 1973. Rather than going into the details of these studies separately, the differences Burns underscores between the two studies are quite illustrative of the beginning of the neoliberal tendencies within the BBC. It is, of course, quite natural for an organisation (indeed for any organisation) to change over time. And the BBC is no exception. Between 1963 and 1973, the organisation has been subjected to certain forms of reorganisation. However, Burns (1977: 211) notes something special about the reorganisation that took place in those ten years: ‘What was novel about [the change] was that the idea of reconstruction had been promoted largely by the need for a corporate strategy directed towards improving and maintaining cost-effectiveness’. The main intention of the change, that is to say, had to do with the management of expenditures and costs. Burns argued that this type of a change was quite new for the organisation, despite the constant changes that took place since the establishment of the organisation. According to Burns (1977; also conirmed by Wegg-Prosser, 2001; Born; 2004; Carter and McKinlay, 2013), this reorganisation had a fundamental effect on the ways in which the BBC and the TV and radio programme-making was related. And it is this change that is of special interest concerning the purpose of this essay, as here lays the beginning of neoliberalism within the BBC. Burns also noted that by 1963 the BBC was divided into two parts: Creative and administrative. The difference Burns unveils between these two parts resembles MacIntyre’s distinction between practices and institutions. The administrative part, in line with MacIntyre’s deinition of institutions, deals mostly with goods external to various practices housed by the BBC such as inancial control, payments, distribution of power, and status. Burns notes that within the creative part of the organisation, the concern was rather with 122

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professional standards that are deined and developed by the practitioners themselves through the history of broadcasting (1977: 124–5, 133; see also Born, 2004: 69–73)3. One can observe this through an old tradition the main concern of which is with the quality of TV and radio programmes. In 2008, for instance, a poll conducted among 4,000 past BBC employees pointed out that the BBC’s TV and radio programmes were being ‘dumbed down’ and audience ratings were becoming more important than the quality of programme-making (Bingham 2008; see also Collins 2012)4. I will call this the ‘dumbing down’ debate. The debate shows how practitioners (that is employees who are directly involved in programme-making) are worried about the degrading of the standards of excellence. Dumbing down, in other words, reveals that practitioners are concerned with the quality of programmes. They are concerned that standards of excellence, which have been traditionally and largely deined by practitioners, are beginning to be deined not by aspects appropriate to and deinitive of the form of activities peculiar to programme-making, but rather by institutional concerns such as cost-effectiveness and ratings. Not only does the dumbing down debate demonstrate this, but various important ethnographies of the BBC also indicate similar indings. As shown by Burns (1977), Ursell (2003), and Born (2004:81), practitioners ind it important to have power over the ways in which the standards of excellence are formed within the programme-making practices such as journalism, research, acting, video editing, and so on. As I will demonstrate below, it is this particular concern as opposed to the concerns about cost-effectiveness and ratings of the programmes that shows how neoliberalism renders the BBC as being caught between the two ishing crews. But, to do this, we need to explore other indicators for understanding the BBC and its programme-making through MacIntyrean lenses. From a MacIntyrean perspective, one can argue that TV and radio programme-making are projects, in which various standards of excellences and internal goods of various social practices can be realised. Journalism, research, engineering, graphic design, acting, custom design are all essential practices for 3 Although various other studies use words like ‘professionals’, ‘programme-makers’ or ‘staff ’, it would be fair to use the concept ‘practitioners’ in the way that MacIntyre does to refer to a particular type of employee within the BBC. We can call these type of employees ‘practitioners’ because people involved in programme-making practices can be considered to strive for ‘standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity’ (MacIntyre 2007: 187). 4 The issue of programme quality or standards of excellence and in particular ‘dumbing down’ debate is also discussed around concepts such as elitism versus populism, which is itself an important debate, but we will not deal with this issue here. For an account of this from a MacIntyrean perspective see Keat 2000. 123

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programme-making. A journalist, for instance, can strive towards the standards of excellence peculiar to journalism, and in so doing, achieve the goods internal to journalism (see also, Lee 2008). Such kinds of achievement helps various TV and radio programmes to lourish within the BBC. Journalism not only lourishes under these conditions but also, programmes like Panorama (one of the oldest and best BBC investigative journalism programme) to include the research, editing, visual and sound engineering practices as their standards of excellence are also essential for practitioners. Nevertheless, programme-making as projects with various social practices require institutional arrangements in order to survive and that is (or should be) the role of the BBC. Although, the BBC does not earn a proit, as noted above, it has to deal with money, power, and status as an institution. Otherwise programme-making cannot survive. The BBC that is to say, needs to be effective and eficient in its use of money, power, and status. However, from a MacIntyrean perspective, such effectiveness and eficiency cannot be the only purpose of the institution. The ultimate aim needs to be the lourishing of practices and thus the TV and radio programmes. From this point of view, genuine effectiveness and eficiency of the BBC depends upon the lourishing of TV and radio programme production projects. That is, the BBC not only needs to be effective and eficient, but also needs to set effectiveness and eficiency in the service of standards of excellence and goods internal to practices. Without such relations between the BBC and practices relevant to programme-making, the BBC cannot be considered a good institution. When we look into two seminal ethnographic studies of the BBC (Burns 1977 and Born 2004), it seems clear that the relationship between the practices and the institution had been conducive to the lourishing of practices until the 1990s. In other words, the BBC was a good institution, from a MacIntyrean perspective, until the late 1980s as it resembled the irst ishing crew until the 1990s. It was between the early 1990s and early 2000s, when neoliberal management began to be more dominant, changing the relationship between the institution and its practices. Although the seeds of change were planted in the 1970s, as underscored by Burns (1977), it only became apparent in the 1990s (Cottle and Ashton 1999; Carter and McKinlay 2013). This is to say, in 1963, management of BBC TV and radio programmes were more concerned with standards of excellence as deined and developed by the practitioners themselves than it was in 1973. Burns argues that, in the 1960s, the administrative part of the BBC was subordinated to the creative (programme-making) side of the organisation (Burns 1977: 217). One administrator, in one of the 1963 interviews, points this out in saying that ‘one is always frightened, in administration, of stopping something. You know, preach the gospel, that we’re only here to help’ (ibid.: 252). Another senior administrator of the BBC (in 1963) says that ‘my job is 124

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to encourage attitudes which will pull out of the staff more than you could justify getting out of them by any usual criteria which exist in say the business world’ (ibid.: 260, my emphasis). This and many other interviews quoted in Burns’ study show that the institution had traditionally been sensitive towards internal practices and standards of excellence. That is, there had been a clear perception by the administrators, until the 1960s, that the institutional priorities such as cost-effectiveness, power, and status need to serve the practices rather than the other way around. A former BBC producer, for instance, says that in the 1960s the people who were scheduling the programmes, running channels and controlling inances and resources were all people who’d make programmes. By deinition and by instinct they knew the problems involved; so there was a culture of integration. (Born 2004: 212)

On Burns’ account, however, this culture of integration gave way to a tension between programme-makers and managers in the 1970s: a tension which was initiated by lack of trust between superiors and subordinates, an excessive and unwelcome monitoring of subordinates by the managers (Burns 1977: 254–5). Indeed, some interviews led Burns to claim that the conlict between management and the practitioners involved in programme-making, yields to ‘a situation in which intelligent, sensitive, and hard-working people … can speak of feeling slightly paranoid about the BBC management’ (Burns 1977: 256). Reading this tension through MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism entails that the tension is best evaluated in terms of tension between practices and the institution. That is, a tension between practitioners aiming at the standards of excellence, and thus trying to achieve goods internal to practices, and the institutional settings aiming at eficiency, effectiveness and external goods. More to the point, from the 1970s onwards, the priority given to effectiveness led to a different understanding of excellence between the managers and practitioners. As the latter relected on the ‘dumbing down debate’. On the one hand, there appeared to be practitioners willing to deine excellence in a way that was relevant to the tradition of their practices; and, on the other, there were managers who were equating excellence with that of cost-effectiveness and ratings. This difference is one the main underlying factors of the tension between the institution and practitioners that neoliberal theory nurtured as it was applied to a speciic institution, namely the BBC. However, during the 1970s this difference had not yet reached its climax.

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The Tension becomes More Intense: The 1990s

As Born (2004) shows, in the 1990s, BBC management reorganised the institution towards a market-based model. ‘Producer Choice’ was the oficial policy of this transition. Let me note irst that, in many respects, the Producer Choice and its required reorganisation of the BBC resembled the reorganisation of the 1970s (Wegg-Prosser 2001). But this time pressure from the government was more intense than it was in the 1970s. In large part, Producer Choice was introduced by Bird (director general by then) in response to criticisms from the Thatcher government that the BBC, like some other public institutions, was ineffectively managed. In fact, the criticism was not only directed towards ineffectiveness but also toward the accountability of the organisation. Public money, Thatcherians believed, was wasted within the bureaucracy of the BBC (Seaton 1997). As a result of such criticisms cost-effectiveness, accountability, inancial regulation and monitoring the activity of programme-makers once more became a hot issue. The solution to these alleged problems of ineffectiveness and ineficiency were the restructuring of institutional settings of programme-making on the bases of successful business management models (Carter and McKinlay 2013). As it was in the 1970s, a disciplinary regime was introduced through Producer Choice in order to overcome the alleged problems of accountability, effectiveness and eficiency. Like the 1970s’ reorganisation, the new institutional setting, during the 1990s, also required management consultancy. This time, John Birt, drew on the assistance of ive management consultancies – Deloitte, Coopers & Lybrand, PriceWaterhouse, Ernst & Young, and Kinsley Lord (Born, 2004: 100). What was peculiar to the 1990s reorganisation was that the Producer Choice integrated a system in which BBC producers began to buy services from in-house departments or outside suppliers. That is, for the irst time, Producer Choice introduced an internal market to the BBC in order to bring about inancial discipline and accountability. Furthermore, and more importantly, as Born (2004: 60) shows, with the introduction of Producer Choice, management of the BBC embraced the monopoly of neoliberal economic themes such as competition, consumer sovereignty, and entrepreneurialism. In particular, during the 1990s, the discourse of ‘consumer sovereignty’ became dominant in the governance activities of the organisation (Born 2003: 66). That is, the management of TV and radio programme-making began to be primarily concerned with audience preferences and their satisfaction. In other words, practitioners are expected to form their practices in a way that their actions and decisions can be considered as activities of buying and selling. Thus, on the one hand, TV and radio programme-making practices were viewed as markets by the management of the organisation while practitioners were considered as homo economicus. 126

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This was relected in the 1986 Peacock Report concerning the inancing of the BBC, which was initiated by the conservative government and had important affects on the management of the TV and radio programme-making practices within the BBC (Ursell 2003: 35). Consumer sovereignty was central to this inluential report. The report suggested that ‘British broadcasting should move towards a sophisticated system based on consumer sovereignty. That is a system which recognises that viewers and listeners are the best ultimate judges of their own interests’ (1986: para 592, my emphasis). The Peacock Report rejected any superior judgement on the quality of programmes apart from the individual viewers and audiences themselves. Hence, the standards of excellence were judged by the viewers and listeners rather than the practitioners themselves. One can of course discuss whether such views are the correct views of excellence or not. But regardless of this discussion, it is apparent that such views of excellence initiated the contention that high ratings are one the major preconditions of programme-making and this kind of an evaluation of programmes was new when compared to the traditional understanding of good programme-making within institutional settings. Therefore, a new understanding of excellence emerged. This new understanding, I argue, shows how practitioners tend to be understood as homo economicus and how such an understanding created tension between practitioners and managers of the organisation. Reith (the irst director general of the BBC), for instance, thought that ‘he who prides himself on giving what the public wants is often creating a ictitious demand for lower standards which himself will then satisfy’ (c.f. Scanell 1990:13). Traditionally programme-makers and the administration thought that giving the public what they simply wanted meant devaluing the public itself. The Pilkington Report produced in the 1960s, another government initiated report on the BBC, vindicated this consideration: The subject matter of television is to be found in the whole scope and variety of human awareness and experience. If viewers are thought of as ‘the mass audience’ they will be offered only the average of common experience and awareness; the ‘ordinary’; the commonplace. They will be kept unaware of what lies beyond the average of experience. In time they may come to like only what they know. But it will always be true that, had they been offered a wider range from which to choose, they might have chosen otherwise, and with greater enjoyment. (Coase 1966: 442)

The neoliberal understanding of practitioners changed this consideration through the Peacock Report and Producer Choice. According to Born, although the discourse of consumer sovereignty appeared to serve democratic values, in reality it was used to justify the excessive auditing policies of the new (1990s) management of programme-making, which in turn had devastating effects on 127

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the creative parts of the organisation (Born 2004: 495). As Seaton conirms, ‘what had been a producers’ programme-led hierarchy became a managementled power structure [in the 1990s]’ (Seaton 1997: 223). This demonstrates how in the 1990s programme-making activities were thought of and managed in terms of markets where consumer satisfaction is the inal end of the activity. What these changes also illustrate is that the practitioners are understood, from the point of the institution, in terms of homo economicus. That is, they are thought of as actors who should prioritise the mere satisfaction of the preferences of their consumers and cost effectiveness of their activity over any other concern. Furthermore, with the Producer Choice and Peacock Report, standards of excellence are also expected to be deined largely by the consumers rather than the practitioners themselves. More to the point, organisational changes, led by the Producer Choice, strengthened the tension between programme-makers, concerned with standards of excellence as understood by practitioners, and management of the organisation, concerned with cost-effectiveness and consumer satisfaction. To give some empirical examples, one producer from BBC drama thinks that the new management of the BBC generated a kind of programming making culture in which the more you make stupid products, the more you create audiences. The more you pander to unsophisticated taste, the more that taste becomes unsophisticated … I believe in the craft and I respect the popular audience, and the problem is that so many people who work here in TV don’t respect the audiences. What they care about is numbers. (c.f. Born 2004: 85)

This quote represents the aforementioned tradition of practitioners who operate within programme projects and who are highly concerned about the quality of programmes and the possibility of programmes being dumbed down. The producer, quoted above, thinks that respecting the audiences is not simply making them watch whatever happens to be on TV. The producer, along with a tradition of practitioners believes that it is important to transform the audiences through TV and radio programmes. In MacIntyrean terms, such transformation requires programme-makers to excel in their practice and achieve goods internal to practices involved in programme-making. Such achievement also involves the risk of having less audiences than one would have through making low quality programmes. However, in the view of practitioners, taking such risks is no longer allowed by the management structures of the BBC because of their excessive concern with effectiveness, eficiency, and consumer satisfaction. As another former BBC drama producer notes ‘[In 1970s] the BBC could afford to allow you to 128

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experiment, to fail. It doesn’t seem able to do that now; the amount of drama is much less, and drama is used pretty much to the ratings’ (c.f. Born 2004: 305). As it is clear from the above examples, in the 1990s, practitioners aiming at excellence and goods internal to practices ind themselves in tension with the institutional settings of their activity. A inance executive’s statement, in 1996, also indicates this tension: what was supposed to be a creative process [within the BBC] was incredibly ineficient … the BBC was a production-led, bofin-led organization; now it’s marketing-led. It’s like a lot of British industries: they used to make toys without thinking what kids like to play with! (c.f. Born 2004: 306)

An interesting remark (in 2001) by a senior BBC strategist also highlights this tension: In any ordinary business you’ve got a inancial year-end where you weigh things up. Performance review was an attempt to do that, but if foundered partly because of … dificulty deining objectives and measuring performance because of the BBC’s nature as a PSB [public service broadcasting] rather than a proitmaximising entity. That‘s a problem that continues to exist for the BBC. (c.f. Born, 2004: 226)

It can be argued that this tension is a result of a neoliberal understanding stemming from the management of the organisation at least from the 1990s to the 2000s. Once viewed from a MacIntyrean perspective, the tension entails that practices are understood as markets and practitioners (programme-makers) as homo economicus by the new management. Whereas traditionally programmemaking within the BBC considered as a profession very different from the market and an institution (Burns 1977: 126), after the 1990s, the difference is blurred by management’s wide implementation of neoliberal ideals throughout the organisation. ‘Producer Choice’ was the oficial policy of this transition. In many respects, ‘Producer Choice’ can be understood as a neoliberal agenda, which went beyond that of the political-economic relations. However, it is important to note that some adopted while others resisted these neoliberal reforms. As shown above, most managers adopted the view and practitioners rejected or resisted it. This entails that within the BBC there are still practices with standards of excellence and goods internal to practices that can lead to production of excellent TV and radio programmes. Standards of excellence, on this account, develop within the practices and by and through the practitioners. Experienced and virtuous practitioners are the best judges of a good programme not necessarily the mass audiences and the managers. So, practitioners, while making a programme, do not – and should not – act and 129

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think as homo economicus trying to sell something to consumers. They need to act and think on the bases of standards of excellence and internal goods, which does not necessarily exclude the viewers. In other words, practitioners do not (and should not) act and think like homo economicus. It is the management of the organisation that tend to think practitioners should act in this way. It is the neoliberal misunderstanding of the practices and practitioners that leads to the aforementioned tension between practitioners and managers. It is also important to note that what has been suggested above does not entail that cost effectiveness and ratings are not at all important. If a programme becomes popular and cost effective and at the same time it enables the practitioners to excel in their practice, then ratings and effectiveness becomes something good. However, if effectiveness and ratings become ends in themselves, they begin to create tension as it did in the case of the BBC, between practices and institutions. In other words, adoption and application of neoliberalism, within a speciic institution, yields to a state in which the institution is caught between the two ishing crews. This is illustrated by the institutional settings of the BBC evidenced between the 1990s and 2000s where management discourses and activities regarded consumer satisfaction and high ratings as ends in themselves. So, rather than considering effectiveness and eficiency as instrumental to the realisation of the standards of excellences and internal goods of the programme-production practices established by practitioners, neoliberal ideals instituted effectiveness, eficiency, consumer satisfaction, and high ratings as ends in themselves, producing tension between the practitioners and management of the BBC.5

Conclusion

Critical accounts of neoliberalism are becoming popular in the wake of the inancial crisis. However, these criticisms are mostly one dimensional. They consider neoliberalism only with relation to macro political and economic changes and the ways in which such changes are relected with regards to socioeconomic inequalities. As a matter of fact, though, neoliberal political economy 5 As Keat (2000: 31) claims using MacIntyre’s notions of goods, practices, and institutions, consumer satisfaction provides no objective standard that practitioners can strive to meet. Consumer satisfaction depends upon subjective preferences of the audiences and there are no standards above such subjectivity to constitute the ground on which virtue and practical reasoning of practitioners can be exercised. It could be argued, from a MacIntyrean view, that the neoliberal understanding of practices and practitioners in terms of markets and homo economicus, and their actual implementations are the main resource of the on-going tensions between programmemakers committed to creative, excellent, educative and informing programme production, and the managers aiming at effectiveness and efficiency with a view to consumer satisfaction. 130

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is also a particular form of understanding of our practices in market terms and construes the human persons as essentially economic beings. Foucauldian analysis captures this aspect of neoliberalism but fails to go beyond it and explore neoliberalism’s implications for productive practices and practitioners, which can be accomplished by MacIntyre’s schema of goods, practices, and institutions. Practitioners, in lourishing practices, recognise standards of excellence in pursuit of internal goods in a way that involves a very different kind of reasoning than that of cost-beneit calculation in meeting consumer demand. Applied to the BBC, neoliberalism led to confusion and conlict between practices and institutions. Despite the potential for practices to lourish within the BBC, this tension and conlict, which results from neoliberalism, is an obstacle for the lourishing of TV and radio programmes within the BBC.

References

Albo, G., Gindin, S. and Panitch, L. 2010. In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Aristotle 1925. The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beadle, R. and Knight, K. 2012. Virtue and Meaningful Work. Business Ethics Quarterly, 22(2), 433–50. Beadle, R. and Könyöt, D. 2006. The Man in the Red Coat – Management in the Circus. Culture and Organization, 12(2), 127–37. Bingham, J. 2008. Dumbed Down: BBC No Longer Knows What it is For, Say Former Staff. Daily Telegraph, 12 November, 8–9. Born, G. 2003. From Reithian Ethics to Managerial Discourse: Accountability and Audit at the BBC. The Public, 10(2), 63–80. Born, G. 2004. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Secker & Warburg. Brown, W. 2003. Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory and Practice, 7(2), 1–25. Burns, T. 1977. The BBC: Public Institutions and Private World. London: Macmillan. Carter, C. and McKinlay, A. 2013. Cultures of Strategy: Remaking the BBC, 1968–2003, Business History, 55(7), 1228–46. Coase, R.H. 1966. The Economics of Broadcasting and Government Policy. American Economic Review, 56, 440–47. Coe, S. and Beadle, R. 2008. Could We Know a Practice-Embodying Institution if We Saw One? Philosophy of Management, 7(1), 9–20. Collins, N. 2012. Robert Winston: BBC is Dumbing Down Science. Daily Telegraph, 30 October. 131

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Cottle, S. and Ashton, M. 1999. From BBC Newsroom to BBC Newscentre: On Changing Technology and Journalist Practices. Convergence, 5(3), 22–43. Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 1979, edited by A.I. Davidson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gamble, A. 2001. Neo-Liberalism, Capital & Class, 75, 127–34. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Judt, Tony 2010. Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin. Keat, R. 2000. Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market. London: Sage. Knight, K. 2007. Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre. Cambridge: Polity Press. Knight, K. 2008a. Practices: The Aristotelian Concept. Analyse & Kritik, 30(2), 229–41. Knight, Kelvin 2008b. Goods. Philosophy of Management, 7(1), 107–22. Lazzarato, M. 2009. Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social. Theory, Culture and Society, 26(6), 109–33. Lemke, T. 2001. The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality. Economy and Society, 30(2), 190–207. MacIntyre, A. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 1998a. The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken, in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by Kelvin Knight. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. MacIntyre, A. 1998b. Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure, in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by Kelvin Knight. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. MacIntyre, A. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 2006a. Rival Aristotles: Aristotle Against Some Modern aristotelians, in Alasdair MacIntyre, Selected Essays, vol. 2: Ethics and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. 2006b. Colors, Cultures and Practices, in Alasdair MacIntyre, Selected Essays, vol 1: The Task of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. 2007 (3rd ed.). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 2011. How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, in Virtue and Politics, edited by P. Blackledge and K. Knight. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Miller, P. and Rose, N. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Chapter 8

The great Perverting Transformation1 niko noponen

‘[r]eligion … has become so much a leisure-time activity, which has little or no relationship to work or to the conditions under which men work’ wrote alasdair macintyre in his 1967 essay Secularization and Moral Change (1967: 63). the central claim of this preliminary work to After Virtue (2007 [1981]) was that modern secularisation did not change morality but the other way round: a change in the social and moral ways of living and thinking undermined the basis of the common shared ritual practice and trivialised the related theistic conceptions. this social and moral change macintyre believed already at that time, i assume, to be a part of that what Karl Polanyi had named ‘the great transformation’, even if he did not at that time refer explicitly to Polanyi (cf. macintyre 1967: 12–13, 42–4). the process of the great transformation had started in the late middle ages, gathered force during the industrial era, and is thus far the greatest change of the ways of life in human history. The irst great analyst of this process was Karl marx who in 1848 characterised some features of it, not altogether without ambivalent irony, as follows: the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. (…) the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. (…) the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. it has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. (marx and engels 1973: 71)

a century later the political, economic and social background as well as some important implications and consequences of the process were studied carefully by Polanyi in his 1944 major work The Great Transformation: The Political and 1 thanks to maija aalto-Heinilä and mike Butler for improving the chapter.

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Economic Origins of Our Time (2001). one aim of his was to explain how and why the political self-defensive actions of states and international agreements had begun to try to prevent the ruthless market mills from crushing societies, communities and individual human beings. The current inancial crisis that began in 2007 is only a further stage of this process, and the consequent ongoing national and international policies have followed in many ways similar patterns than the policies from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century of the Western states described by Polanyi in 1944. in After Virtue, as well as in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), macintyre refers to Polanyi’s book but he does not explicate the connections. my main aim in this chapter is to explain how macintyre’s diagnosis of the moral culture of modernity and the historical narrative of the origins of it resonate with Polanyi’s sociological and historical analysis. to put it shortly, macintyre sees modern moral language and behaviour in the same way as Polanyi saw modern economy; as very peculiar type of phenomena that differ greatly from their counterparts in traditional societies. i have argued elsewhere that the young marx’s view of alienation can be interpreted as alienation from practices understood in macintyre’s sense of the concept (noponen 2011). in modern capitalist market societies human beings tend to be alienated from common practices and the goods internal to them, and thus from virtues as well as from meaningful human relationships. modern economic institutions and activities tend to marginalise traditional productive practices, the kinds of practices that can be associated for instance with oikos or artisan guilds. at the same time the modern economic institutions tend to separate areas related to crafts or skills and virtues from the productive and economic areas of social life. overemphasising of external goods threatens the sustenance of both crafts and virtues. this applies particularly under institutionally established market conditions. Here my aim is to show how macintyre’s concept of practices and the related distinction between internal goods and external goods envisaged in After Virtue chime with Polanyi’s sociological study and how their ideas echo and support each other. it can be said that in traditional economies productive activities aim both at external goods and internal goods, even if this kind of distinction was rarely explicitly made, whereas the typically modern economies concentrate purely on the production and commerce of external goods. in the last part of the chapter i will return to the question of the relationship between religious, moral and economic issues, and tentatively indicate how productive activities – namely, the communal work undertaken by peasant villages, guild member artisan groups, monasteries or ishing parties – are often integrated into the religious life of these communities. What i am going to say about this issue is something i believe macintyre means to be taken into account 136

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when writing ‘the history on modern secularisation … from the standpoint of christian theism, rather than vice versa’ (macintyre 1998: 268). to conclude this introduction i combine macintyre’s general reminder that ‘[a]n aristotelian critique of contemporary society has to recognise that the costs of economic development are generally paid by those least able to afford them’ (macintyre 1998: 265) with the notion that the great transformation described by Polanyi is not only Western history and far from being only history. the great transformation is very much still an on-going process; violently so in the socalled developing countries. to mention just a few examples, in mexico millions of people have been forced out of farming since the north american Free trade agreement in 1994; the state of china and chinese enterprises among others are buying huge areas of arable land for industrial agricultural production in many parts of africa and the near east; the growth of pirate entrepreneurship off the coast of Somalia is mainly explained by the self-defensive measures and novel business ideas of local ishing communities in the face of a largely EU-based industrial ishing armada (see e.g. Vigna 2008, Baxter 2010, and Lehr 2008). these developments resemble in many ways the late medieval and early modern enclosures and coniscations of the commons. According to Polanyi the enclosures essentially paved the way for modern european capitalism and market economy (Polanyi 2001: 36–44, 79–80, 187–92).

The Peculiarly Untypical Nature of Modern Societies – the Basic Agreement Between Polanyi and MacIntyre

already in his 1966 A Short History of Ethics macintyre argued that moral vocabulary and theories have to be understood in their historical contexts. He has since kept on reminding us that when societies or cultures change, some of their moral vocabulary can survive as contextless fragments, incapable of helping people understand their actions, communal living and social relations. When a human culture evolves, linguistic and conceptual change does not necessarily occur simultaneously with the corresponding development of techniques, habits and institutions. in After Virtue macintyre applies this general view to our own modern culture in order to show how the current condition of moral affairs and language is a result of a speciic historical process. He also studies widely the ethical and political debates of Athens of the ifth and fourth centuries in the light of the preceding Homeric culture, as well as later developments. our modern culture is not unique in inheriting vocabulary and conceptual battles from earlier ones. Human cultures quite generally contain behavioural, linguistic and conceptual fragments from earlier times. Why does macintyre think that our age is in this respect somehow special? The answer is tied to his defence of a modiied 137

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aristotelian view of communal action and life. Here a similarity between macintyre and Polanyi can also be seen. macintyre’s argument for the aristotelian way of doing ethics, or political science if you want to, includes the claim of its comparative universality. an aristotelian ethics offers an applicable conceptual framework for people in very different times and very different cultural settings. this means that even if cultures commonly evolve, there is something in human communal living, modes of action and social relations that usually remains relatively unchanging, and this can be adequately conceptualised by some modiied version of a basically aristotelian theory (cf. macintyre 2007: 52–3, 146–7, 180). according to macintyre our modern culture is very different from many or even most other human cultures, so different that no aristotelian theory can describe and conceptualise the dominant ways of living in, or the typical social relations of our societies. Peter McMylor was the irst to study more closely how ’macintyre’s philosophical and sociological theory presupposes a particular history’ (mcmylor 1994: 78). He connected macintyre’s theory to Polanyi’s study of the great transformation and defended Polanyi against some critics who claimed that no great transformation ever happened. even if mcmylor broadened the analysis of macintyre’s works to include not only Polanyi but also marxist scholarly tradition and sociology in a pioneering way, he did not explicate enough the conceptual similarities and convergences between Polanyi’s and macintyre’s views (mcmylor 1994: 77–86, 97–108; cf. Knight 1998: 294, 2007: 132). macintyre’s narrative in After Virtue deals with one aspect of the historical process that determines our current culture and its distinctively unaristotelian modes of living. He is concerned mainly with changes in moral discourse and philosophy but as he states: there ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only actions, the other only by theories. (…) thus the transition into modernity was a transition both in theory and in practice and a single transition at that. (macintyre 2007: 61)

in After Virtue macintyre of course focuses only on some aspects on this transition, but he refers once to ‘that great division in human history … the past before individualism and the power of markets … what Karl Polanyi called “the great transformation’’’ (ibid.: 239). Later on the same page he mentions that ‘in the eighteenth century … production has moved outside the household’ (cf. macintyre 1988: 211, 311 and 118). a central part of Polanyi’s argument in The Great Transformation is based on comparative anthropological and social historical studies concerning pre138

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modern and non-Western societies. Polanyi states that the modern market economy is something very special in human history and culture, ‘[t]hough the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone age’ (Polanyi 2001: 45). ‘according to the historians, the forms of industrial life in agricultural europe were, until recently, not much different from what they had been several thousand years earlier’ (ibid.: 47). the pre-modern ways of understanding economic activities and attitudes towards them differ greatly from a modern understanding. the outstanding discovery of the recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. (…) For it is on this one negative point the modern ethnographers agree: the absence of the motive of gain; the absence of the principle of laboring for remuneration; the absence of the principle of least effort; and, especially, the absence of any separate and distinct institution based on economic motives. (ibid.: 48, 49)

if the role of the market institution has been marginal in human societies until the last few hundred years, what are traditional economies then all about? according to Polanyi the three main principles of traditional economies in their various speciic forms are reciprocity, redistribution, and most importantly, householding (ibid.: 49–58). as Polanyi notes before moving on to his short but important discussion of aristotle, ironically our word ‘economy’ derives from the ancient Greek oikonomia, and thus from oikos, meaning household that produces primarily for its own use. Looking back from the rapidly declining heights of a worldwide market economy, we must concede that [aristotle’s] famous distinction of householding proper and money-making, in the introductory chapter of his Politics, was probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences; it is certainly still the best analysis of the subject we possess. aristotle insists on production for use as against production for gain as essence of householding proper; yet accessory production for the market need not, he argues, destroy the self-suficiency of the household as long as the cash crop would also otherwise be raised on the farm sustenance, as cattle or grain; the sale of the surpluses need not destroy the basis of householding. (ibid.: 57)

Here is the essential similarity between macintyre’s diagnosis of modernity (and its moral thinking) and Polanyi’s historical and sociological diagnosis of modern economic development. Both Polanyi and macintyre think that modern market 139

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societies, with their peculiar features of mutual relations between individuals, are aberrations among human societies. they both think that aristotle’s view of what is typical and natural for human beings and their societies is correct. Polanyi writes: in denouncing the principle of production for gain as boundless and limitless, ‘as not natural to man’, aristotle was, in effect, aiming at the crucial point, namely the divorce of the economic motive from all concrete social relationships which would by their very nature set a limit to that motive. (ibid.: 57)

The Great Transformation Towards the Societies After Virtue

Polanyi’s historical narrative about the great transformation does not identify any one particular cause (cf. ibid.: 29–32, 42–4). For this macintyre congratulates Polanyi’s achievement: ‘it avoids the methodological mistakes which all three make (marxist, neo marxist, Weberian), most notably the error of supposing that we can identify economic or social factors independently from ideological or theoretical factors in such a way as to produce causal explanations of a cogent kind’ (macintyre 1984: 253; cf. 1976). the central thesis of Polanyi’s narrative is ‘that the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system’ (Polanyi 2001: 31). His narrative explanation ties together psychological, political, economic and cultural aspects: all types of societies are limited by economic factors. nineteenth-century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself on a motive only rarely acknowledged as valid in the history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of a justiication of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain. the self-regulating market system was uniquely derived from this principle. (ibid.: 31)

Polanyi’s account also clearly includes a moral critique against the policies behind the transformation. Since many people did not adjust well to the great transformation, the nature of the economic progress towards market society in england from the eighteenth century onwards was, according to Polanyi, degenerative: the usual ‘long-run’ considerations of economic theory are inadmissible; they would prejudge the issue by assuming that the event took place under a market system. However natural it may appear to us to make that assumption, it is 140

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unjustiied: such a system is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only partially present. yet apart from this assumption ‘long-run’ considerations are meaningless. if the immediate effect of change is deleterious, then, until proof to the contrary, the inal effect is deleterious. If conversion of arable land to pasture involves the destruction of a deinite number of houses, the scrapping of a deinite amount of employment, and the diminution of the locally available food provisions, then these effects must be regarded as inal, until evidence to the contrary is produced. (Polanyi 2001: 40)

Polanyi claims that the modern economists ‘have strayed from the facts when their strictures’ ‘implied the prior existence of a market system’. For ‘[o]nly in the institutional setting of market economy are market laws relevant’ (ibid.: 40). He considers this great transformation to be so degenerative that its machineaided institutions in the evolving industrial phase justify the term ‘the satanic mills’. during the nineteenth century ’[w]riters of all views and parties, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and socialists, invariably referred to social conditions under the industrial revolution as a veritable abyss of human degradation’ (ibid.: 41). it should be noted that Polanyi’s critique is focused not only on the effects of the process but also, and more importantly for my purposes, on the rationale behind the markets’ policies. as he points out, any grounds for the policies concerning the effects of market systems could not have been known before the market systems were established. Furthermore the immediate consequences of the markets establishing actions were known to be malign. this critique rests on an aristotelian way of conceptualisation actions, namely on the distinction (tentatively made in Nicomachean Ethics iii, 1) between the intended effect of an action and the foreseen side-effects of that action.2 the role of the markets has typically been limited in human societies, and, according to Polanyi, the modern markets of labour, land and money are highly untypical, even unnatural. markets in general, not only those of these ‘artiicial commodities’, are always institutionally based. With them modes of human interaction are planned and regulated, despite the fact that the nature of human interaction resists planning and regulations and produce unintentional and unpredictable consequences. Polanyi calls the nineteenth-century Western market institution a ‘highly artiicial economic organization’ (Polanyi 2001: 20). 2 this distinction is used by St thomas aquinas in Summa Theologiae (iiaiiae, 64, 7) in a discussion about the justification of self-defense. in the twentieth century its importance was emphasised by elizabeth anscombe (1958), and it was then applied in an influential way by Philippa Foot (1978 [1967]) (both well-known neoaristotelian philosophers). the distinction is nowadays often referred to, quite unfortunately, as the doctrine (or principle) of ‘double effect’. 141

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‘regulation and markets … grew up together’ (ibid.: 71). markets were developed under ‘the control of centralized administration’. this happened irst during the emergence of precapitalist European kingdoms of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, continued during their full mercantile phase, and then from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards developed towards nation states with the new invention of ‘self-regulating market’.3 the distinction between economics and politics, between free activity at markets and in a civil society, and state policies and interventions, are thus highly ideological in the Hegelian and marxist sense of the term (ibid.: ch. X).4 thus, the current economic crisis that has demanded huge state interventions to level luctuations and to prevent breakdown did not begun in 2007 but two hundred or more years ago. Such creations as derivatives and futures and the related hedge funds were just one more fantastical, artiicial mode of money postulated as commodities for buying and selling.5 Polanyi ‘clariies the interplay between ideologies and particular interests: how free market ideology was the handmaiden for new industrial interests, and how those interests used the ideology selectively, calling upon government intervention when needed to pursue their own interest’ (Stiglitz 2001: viii). the events since the autumn of 2007 indicates the relevance of Polanyi’s analysis of the interplay between the private gain driven market economy and public interventions to protect societies. and once again these kinds of desperate interventions reinforce institutionally the markets of the artiicial commodity of money.6 it would also be interesting to see how the developments described by Polanyi relate for 3 one central aspect of the current markets is actually to a much larger extent institutionally conditioned than the expanding markets of the nineteenth century. the long nineteenth century ended when the monetary gold standard ended in the early 1930s after the first great depression. When the national central banks had tied the values of their currencies to gold, the value of money was much more dependent on the market mechanism of demand and supply. Since the thus far final end of the gold standard of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, monetary markets have been driven by the national, federal or european union politics. the most important means for political intervention has been the interest instrument of central banks. 4 even if Polanyi’s study is historical, it seems to draw heavily from modern political theory, especially from Hegel and marx (whose distinction between state and civil society plays a central role in the view of markets as institutionally established). But Polanyi balances between Hegelian and marxist approaches by not giving theoretical or explanative domination to either side, market economy or state politics, ‘material base’ or ‘ideological superstructure’ (cf. e.g. colletti 1975: ch. 3), and thus succeeds, according to macintyre, in ‘avoiding methodological mistakes’. 5 For a pre-depression view of them see Kolko 2006. 6 the ultimate cause of the current and deepening depression is, however, the peak reached in the production of oil and the approaching or already reached peak in the production of other fossil fuels. As Tere Vadén (2010) writes: ‘Virtually free … energy spurting out from the ground: herein lies the material and mystical foundation of growth-oriented capitalism’. the role of very rewarding energy return on energy invested (eroei) ratio of fossil fuels for the development of modern industrial capitalism, and subsequent exponentially growing total amount of 142

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example to the effects of european monetary union on the labour markets (especially in such satellite member states as Greece, Portugal and ireland). it seems that the workings of the ‘satanic’ market mills, established and aided by national and international institutional policies, still have very similar local economic, social and political consequences than a century or two ago. in the modern society of market economy life is very different than in traditional societies. What then has been greatly transformed? Polanyi contrasts the newly evolved industrial and irst and foremost commercial mode of productive activity with the traditional ones as follows: the creation of goods involved neither the reciprocation attitudes of mutual aid; nor the concern of the householder for those whose needs are left to his care; nor the craftsman’s pride in the exercise of his trade; nor the satisfaction of the public praise – nothing but the plain motive of gain so familiar to the man whose profession is buying and selling. (Polanyi 2001: 77)

This indicates why the idea of labour as saleable commodity is so artiicial and unnatural, for ‘[l]abor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored and mobilized’. Polanyi makes clear that ‘labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them’ (ibid.: 75). according to him, in regard to labor, land, and money such a postulate cannot be upheld. to allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. in disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. robbed of the protective covering cultural institutions, would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. (…) [n]o society could stand the effects of such a system of crude ictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill. (…) the consumption, has not been understood either by marx, Polanyi, or any other later significant economist or historian (cf. roberts 2004 and Partanen et al. 2015). 143

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extreme artiiciality of market economy is rooted in the fact that the process of production itself is here organized in the form of buying and selling. (ibid.: 76–7)

Here macintyre’s distinction between external and internal goods can be applied to explicate both types of loss that Polanyi mentions. as indicated in the passage quoted earlier, according to Polanyi, the ‘economic development’ of the great transformation did not originally bring any great amount of external goods for all parts of the societies but instead took away irst the main factor of production, arable land, and thus the main traditional modes of production and relative economic self-suficiency. But he also refers to the great corresponding cultural and moral loss (ibid.: 39–40, 164–70, 300–303), the loss of possibilities to participate in traditional productive practices which produce both the needed external goods, and also the goods internal to these practices. the effect of the great transformation was that it became increasingly dificult for members of modernising societies to sustain communities of living practices where one can also cultivate and learn virtues. in modern market societies human beings tend to alienate themselves from meaningful work, that is, from common practices with the goods internal to them. macintyre explains the nature of practices by distinguishing them from institutions. institutions are characteristically and necessarily concerned with what i have called external goods. they are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards. (macintyre 2007: 194)

according to macintyre external goods are genuine goods but they are ‘characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners’. Since institutions are centred around external goods and manage them, institutions have corrupting power (ibid.: 190–96). macintyre claims that according to the present dominant view of the nature of industrial work and its reward, men are under capitalism ‘primarily consumers and they work in order to be able to consume’. But he also stresses that from another perspective it is precisely unnatural. (…) on this rival view, what is essentially human is rational activity, and consumption exists to serve activity and not to be served by it. We ought to eat in order to work, not vice versa. the classical expression of this thought is aristotle’s, but all artists, most professors and some socialists believe it too. (macintyre 1998 [1979]: 55)

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Productive Crafts as Practices

artisan communities have long had their own conventions of training new members as apprentices under the supervision of master craftsmen. in medieval europe this convention was institutionalised by artisan guilds. i take a community of artisans or craftsmen to be a kind of paradigm of what macintyre means by a community of human beings participating in a speciic practice. Farming and ishing are other traditional productive practices mentioned by him. Training for the skills needed in farming, ishing or any other productive house holding practice follows basically the same patterns as the training for artisan skills. But training to work in a family farm or in a village ishing party has not usually been institutionalised in the same way as training in artisan guilds. using artisan guilds as a paradigm case also its my current purposes well, irstly because the training of ine artists and musicians as well as university education share to a great extent the patterns of traditional artisan guilds,7 and thus are in practice familiar to my audience; and secondly because european medieval city culture with its artisan guilds is one central base from which modern industrial and commercial societies sprang. But how can an artisan community which specialises in working with hands be a paradigm of a practice understood in an aristotelian way? did not aristotle himself think that manual labourers or craftsmen are incapable of virtuous and rational living and thus of political participation? macintyre holds that aristotle was here inconsistent and misguided by the cultural prejudices of his own culture. Following this cary nederman (2008) has argued convincingly that those late medieval aristotelians who thought that ‘mechanics’ or artisans, craftsmen and other manual workers are able to attain virtues and thus capable of citizenship were actually more consistent and faithful to aristotle’s wider theory (including his classiication of knowledge) than Aristotle himself.8 macintyre has often been seen to be politically conservative because of his aristotelianism. But there is no trace of traditional conservative elitism and exclusiveness in macintyre, and along with nederman, Kelvin Knight (2007: 16–25, 51–8, ch. 4) has produced convincing arguments, based primarily on aristotle’s own theorising, for the inclusion of ‘mechanics’ and other artisans to virtuous living and political participation. 7 Here macintyre’s conceptions of practices should be compared to the later works of Wittgenstein, as well as to Gilbert ryle’s idea of ‘knowing how’, to michael Polanyi’s idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, and to thomas Kuhn’s idea of guiding students to the paradigmatic theories and research methods of any particular field of science (see Kuhn 1970). 8 macintyre (2008: 275) himself comments: ‘to nederman’s excellent account i have only one thing to add: the medieval thinkers whom he cites were indebted to St Benedict as well as to aristotle and it is in part Benedict’s understanding of work that has found a place within their aristotelian framework’. 145

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macintyre presents his concept of practices and the related conceptions concerning internal goods or goods of excellence in a discussion model of traditional crafts including apprentice-master relationship (macintyre 2007: 187–95; cf. also macintyre 1967: 53; 1988: 105, 110, 140–41; 1999: 85–9). in this relationship, the authority of the master is based primarily on his skills, but also on his good character traits – these were at least tacitly assumed to be indispensable to master the craft. to learn what a master can do with his hands, tools, words and so on, an apprentice has to imitate the master’s example, do the tasks and the exercises given to him, and follow the orders and the instructions even if he does not yet understand the rationale behind them. the authority is based on trust in skilful expertise but also on virtues. the master-apprentice relationships were typical to many crafts and were often institutionalised by guilds in european medieval city culture, but probably also in the mediterranean and other ancient or even archaic city cultures (cf. e.g. applebaum 1992: 69, 116–22, 141–6, 267–88). in traditional societies the different skills needed for sustaining household or village life were taught in the same manner. the master-apprentice relationship aims at teaching technical skills. But it can be understood as an implicit way to carry on any communal activity of practices. according to Knight (2007: 153) ‘macintyre proposes that within practices the learning of skills proceeds hand in hand with the learning of virtues, not least because an education in self-disciplined practical judgement is likely to supervene upon an education in skill’. the practices are schools of excellence, not only of skills but also of the virtues. as Polanyi states ‘[u]nder the guild system, as under every other economic system in previous history, the motives and circumstances of productive activities were embedded in the general organization of society’ (Polanyi 2001: 73).9 For an artisan, skilful work is a question of honour and primarily a reward in itself (cf. also applebaum 1992: 71, 188–90, 200–202). this is, of course, partly an idealisation, but only partly. the industrialisation and commercialisation of human activity as a commodity had enormous and multifarious effects. the main mode of work came to be wage labour and traditional conceptions of, and attitudes towards work became more and more unsuited to the dominant ways of behaviour. in market societies work became instrumental and traditional productive practices were marginalised (macintyre 1967: 27). the role and rationale of morality became also to be understood irst in an instrumental manner (1967: 24–5) and then in a subjective, emotivist manner (macintyre 2007: ch. 2, 3, 9). 9 the concept of embeddedness that macintyre utilises in After Virtue may also indicate his conceptual and terminological debt to Polanyi who uses the term ‘embedded’ in an important sociological manner in The Great Transformation (Polanyi 2001: 60, 64, 73, 135, 279). macintyre used the term ‘embed’ in a sociological manner already in his secularisation studies (1969: 45). 146

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What did the great transformation change, or to be more accurate, pervert in early modern and modern economically developing societies? macintyre’s answer is: as, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work. the means-end relationships embodied for the most part in such work – on a production line, for example – are necessarily external to the goods which those who work seek; such work too has consequently been expelled from the realm of practices with goods internal to themselves. and correspondingly practices have in turn been removed to the margins of social and cultural life. (ibid.: 227)

Polanyi’s narrative and diagnosis appears to me to be plausible, supported as it is by careful documentation and detail about political acts, historical events, and with a full discussion of comments and theories by contemporaries. But an actual assessment of the accuracy of Polanyi’s arguments and theses falls beyond my competence. instead, i’ve focused on some theoretical or conceptual similarities between Polanyi’s and macintyre’s studies that concern their conceptions of institutions, instrumental activity and ideological justiications. Polanyi argues that irst of all, modern economic activity is untypical or even unnatural to human societies, and secondly that the developments that have created the evergrowing volume, proportion and role of that kind of activity irst in Western and then in other societies have been institutionally steered and managed and ideologically motivated. i assume that these and related views and arguments by Polanyi have in their part helped macintyre to develop his views or at least offered support for them. and conversely, macintyre’s distinctions between practices and institutions and between internal goods (or goods of excellence) and external goods (or goods of effectiveness) can help to clarify Polanyi’s aspirations.

Why is work worthy of a feast?

the sacred element in work has been given many kinds of symbolic and ritual expressions. in the Hebrew scriptures God is often pictured as a craftsman or master builder. Similarly, the teachings of St Paul and St augustine require us to see work in a very different light from what was typical in ancient philosophy; and the Benedictine motto for monks and nuns even became to be ‘to labour 147

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is to pray’. in theistic thought working human beings have been seen as coworkers of God.10 through skilful work human beings may really be said to be reaching towards and maybe even achieving something that is good in itself. in an aristotelian praxis the reason and the purpose of action is the excellent performance of that action itself. the beauty of a skilful performance or product lies in its functional goodness and its seeking to be the best of its kind (cf. macintyre 1990). according to macintyre ‘theism itself requires and presupposes both a moral vocabulary which can be understood independently of theistic beliefs and moral practices which can be justiied independently of theistic beliefs’ (1969: 32, cf. 35–6). urban high medieval feasts were largely arranged by craft guild members and one function of the dramatic features, plays, masses and processions was to present excellent products and skilful performances of artisans and other experts. the pagan roots of the guild feast tradition are clear, but, as with many other pagan rituals and celebrations, they were eventually christianised. For example the urban may day and passage rituals of the spring time were originally fertility celebrations where the old and the new, like the summer and the winter in the carnival feasts, struggled.11 this can partly be seen as symbolically expressing the competition in excellence between the established members of guilds and their challengers, journeymen. But these symbolic battles and passage rituals not only expressed competition in excellence (in the sense of goodness in a practice); journeymen and masters were also mutually dependent on aspects of external goods or goods of effectiveness. religious modes of thought and behaviour not only idealise certain aspects of social life and work but also express truly oppressive and conlictual elements of them; some aspects of the human sinfulness. ‘to the natural morality of men theism adds rules concerned with man’s supernatural end, and a set of beliefs and practices concerning guilt, repentance, and forgiveness to provide for moral, as well as religious, failure’ (macintyre 1969: 38).12 the struggle between those who sold their work and those who gained by the added value of the work actually started partly inside the craft guilds. ‘[a]s time went on, it became more and more dificult for journeymen to become masters, and a permanent class of journeymen came into being whose interests clashed with those of the masters’ explains Herbert applebaum (1992: 273; cf. moore 1978: 129–33). as macintyre (1967: 12) noted in his secularisation study: ‘What the 10 on these and other religious issues related to work see applebaum 1992: 10–11, 14, 17, 41–3, 70, 117–22, 147, 167, 186, 195–202, 310–11, 316, 321–5; and Knight 2007: 42–50. 11 on late medieval and early modern guild traditions see Burke 1978: 36–42, 102–4, 174–7, 191–4, ch. 7. 12 it should be noted that like the christian mass and easter celebrations, for example the Jewish yom Kippur and the islamic eid ul-Fidr also handle just these issues. 148

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urbanization of the industrial revolution meant was the destruction of the older forms of community, in many cases rapidly, and in particular the destruction of those features of them to which religion had given symbolic expression’. When the common framework of practices diminished in the course of the great transformation, realist and cognitivist conceptions concerning the judging of actions and achievements diminished too, and when virtues could not anymore prevail in practice, religious ways of thinking and acting also began to fade (macintyre 1967: 30, 63–4, 66; cf. also 1969: 18–19, 26, 32–9, 42–3, and 2007: Ch. XVI, and mcmylor 2011: 235). among the religious aspects of communal life that the secularising transformation diminished can be included festivities related to the good as something common and shared and to eschatological perfection; and, rituals dealing with human imperfection or failure in virtues. Both of these aspects are tied to seeing the good as telos and as something transcendental, and to seeing the achievement of good as consummation or perfection.

References

anscombe, G.e.m. 1958. modern moral Philosophy. Philosophy 33(124), 1–19. applebaum, H.a. 1992. The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. albany: State university of new york Press. Baxter, J. 2010. Great african land grab. Le Monde diplomatique [online, april]. available at http://mondediplo.com/2010/04/10africaland [accessed: 10 February 2015]. Burke, P. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Temple Smith. Colletti, L. 1975. Introduction (translated by T. Nairn), in Karl Marx Early Writings, edited by Q. Hoare. London: Penguin, 7–56. Foot, P. 1978. the Problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect, in Virtues and Vices. oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19–33. Knight, K. 1998. Guide for Further reading, in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by K. Knight, notre dame: university of notre dame Press, 276–94. Knight, K. 2007. Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre. cambridge: Polity Press. Kolko, G. 2006. Weapons of mass inancial destruction. Le Monde diplomatique [Online, October]. Available at: http://mondediplo.com/2006/10/02inance [accessed: 10 February 2015]. Kuhn, t.S. 1970. Postscript, in The Structure of Scientiic Revolutions. 2nd edition. chicago: university of chicago Press, 174–210. Lehr, P. 2008. A western armada is not the way to sink Somalia’s pirates. The Guardian [online, 19 november]. available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/ nov/19/piracy-somalia [accessed: 10 February 2015]. 149

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macintyre, a. 1998. A Short History of Ethics. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. macintyre, a. 1967. Secularization and Moral Change. London: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. 1969. The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and contemporary irrelevance, in a. macintyre and P. ricoeur, The Religious Signiicance of Atheism. new york: columbia university Press, 1–55. macintyre, a. 1976. causality and History, in Essays on Explanation and Understanding, edited by J. manninen and r. tuomela. dordrecht: d. reidel, 137–58. macintyre, a. 1998. Social Science methodology as the ideology of Bureaucratic authority, in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by K. Knight. notre dame: university of notre dame Press, 56–68. macintyre, a. 2007. After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory. 3rd Edition. London: duckworth. macintyre, a. 1984. After Virtue and Marxism: A Response to Wartofsky. Inquiry 27 (2–3), 251–4. macintyre, a. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. macintyre, a. 1990. the Form of the Good, tradition and enquiry, in Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, edited by R. Gaita. London: Routledge, 242–62. macintyre, a. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth. macintyre, a. 2008. What more needs to be Said? a Beginning, although only a Beginning, at Saying it, in Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, edited by K. Knight and P. Blackledge, Analyse & Kritik 30(1), 261–81. mcmylor, P. 1994. Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity. London – New York: routledge. mcmylor, P. 2011. compartmentalisation and Social roles: macintyre’s critical theory of modernity, in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, edited by P. Blackledge and K. Knight. notre dame: university of notre dame Press, 228–40. marx, K. and F. engels. 1973. Manifesto of the Communist Party (translated by S. moore, 1888), in K. marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, Vol. 1, edited by D. Fernbach. London: Penguin, 67–98. moore, B. 1978. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. Basingstoke: macmillan. Nederman, C.J. 2008. Men at Work: Politics and Labour in Aristotle and some aristotelians, in Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, edited by K. Knight and P. Blackledge, Analyse & Kritik 30(1), 17–31.

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noponen, n. 2011. alienation, Practices, and Human nature: marxist critique in macintyre’s aristotelian ethics, in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, edited by P. Blackledge and K. Knight. notre dame: university of notre dame Press, 97–111. Partanen, r., H. Paloheimo and H. Waris 2015. The World After Cheap Oil. London – New York: Routledge. Polanyi, K. 2001. The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. roberts, P. 2004. The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Boston: Houghton Miflin. Stiglitz, J.e. 2001. Foreword, in K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, vii–xvii. Vadén, T. 2010. Oil and the regime of capitalism: questions to philosophers of the future (translated by K. Kölhi and G. Grifiths), in CTHEORY [online, 23 June]. available at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=658 [accessed: 10 February 2015]. Vigna, A. 2008. Mexico: the high price of cheap corn. Le Monde diplomatique [online march]. available at: http://mondediplo.com/2008/04/07mexico [accessed: 10 February 2015].

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Chapter 9

goods, Interests and the Language of Morals Piotr machura

in his famous and powerful critique of contemporary morals, alasdair macintyre pointed out that the contemporary moral situation should be seen as the outcome of the melting of languages of different origins and backgrounds (macintyre 1984/1981). as he understands languages as forms of tradition-carriers, they should be used with a clear recognition of the intellectual frameworks of which they are part. as the concept of tradition was widely rejected by both intellectual and cultural authorities as well as western societies of early modernity, the language of morals has started to be used instead as an alternative way of describing and solving moral issues. Hence, part of macintyre’s philosophical project was to make clear distinctions between different and competing traditions, which are embodied in particular moral languages, in order to explain their internal history and their place within the picture of intellectual modernity. my intention here is to follow this path. the aim of this chapter is to examine tentatively the difference between two kinds of moral frameworks based on the concepts of the good and that of interest. i shall start with some introductory remarks on language taken as an explanatory framework rooted in Gadamer and a hermeneutical reading of macintyre. in parts two and three, i use this hermeneutical background to analyse the difference between the concept of the good as seen within the classical tradition and that of interest as it came up with the turn of modernity. i also deal with some consequences of this distinction for ethics. Finally, in part four, i discuss the possibilities of using the aristotelian idea of the ethical in a contemporary social and philosophical context. i argue for the necessity of including some references to developed economics by pointing out those aspects of martha nussbaum’s and amartya Sen’s projects, which promote a conception of the good within liberal economics.

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Language and Explanation

macintyre stresses that we should not only see language as rooted in the culture of a certain community, but also as a way in which worldviews are organised (macintyre 1988: 372–3). the basic terms and expressions typical of a particular language are not only ixed modes of using the medium of language, but they also provide language with certain views, a network of senses. Hence, when learning a foreign language one not only needs to recognise the rules of grammar and word-formation, but also those expressions that are derived from the culture of this particular language community (macintyre 1988: 382–3). He takes those expressions as ixed modes of understanding the world, ways in which people not only recognise objects but also make sense of them and incorporating them into the network of values they share. this view can be reinforced by Gadamerian hermeneutics. Gadamer follows aristotle’s concept of language as based in the recognition of shared worldviews. He argues that languages should be recognised as forms of Weltschauungen or worldviews, and as such they cannot be taken as transparent, free form values and opinions (Gadamer 1989). Languages should thus be seen not only as modes of communication, but primarily as ways of understanding the world, and as such the crucial terms used by language-users are of signiicant importance for their ability to build any picture of the world. Gadamer points out the ‘intimate unity of language and thought’ (ibid.: 403). For any thinking (understanding) is possible due to, and limited by, the possibilities offered by a certain language and the intellectual resources provided by it (ibid.: 426–35). this makes Gadamer claim that what we can recognise is language and not the world in itself. yet, it might be added, if language is the realm of understanding, it also provides agents with the idea of possible deeds, the sense of meaningful and meaningless acting and with the range of intelligible behaviour. That is to say, when one faces some problem, they must be able irst to name it, but by doing so he or she incorporates the problem into the realm of practical thinking, connects it with other problems of that kind and situates it in the network of senses. Hence, naming should be treated as equivalent to conceiving. to give something a proper name is to make sense of the issue. in this respect making sense here means: making something intelligible for oneself by situating the issue within the boundaries of the socially shared framework of language, which should be taken as a form of ‘social imaginary’ (taylor 2004). any kind of practical reasoning, as well as the very sense of the intelligibility of acting, is rooted in the conceptual resources of a certain language. thus, the most fundamental aim of hermeneutical analysis in not only a purely theoretical, speculative explanation of the language itself, but also a practical clariication of the way in which our sense of the right and good, meaningful and meaningless 156

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appears. this kind of analysis is obviously morally and politically engaged, as it might result in putting into question the dominant forms of rationality. the above explains the importance of the Gadamerian analysis of ‘taste’ from early passages of Truth and Method not only for his hermeneutical project, but also for any social and moral analysis following those lines. For, as Gadamer states: the unity of an ideal of taste that distinguishes a society and bonds its members together differs from that which constitutes the igure of aesthetic culture. Taste still obeys a criterion of content. What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stamp from the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses and knows what belongs to it and what does not. (Gadamer 1989: 73)

taste seen along such lines is ‘something like a sense’ (ibid.: 32), that is, it allows rational judgements to be supplemented with a clear recognition of what is the proper form of an artistic piece but also of a proper action. education in good taste is thus an education in what is conceived as naturally right this kind of sense is obviously needed wherever a whole is intended but not given as a whole – that is, conceived in purposive concepts. thus, taste is in no way limited to what is beautiful in nature and art, judging it in respect to its decorative quality, but embraces the whole realm of morality and manners. even moral concepts are never given as a whole or determined in a normatively univocal way. rather, the ordering of life by the rules of law and morality is incomplete and needs productive supplementation. Judgment is necessary in order to make a correct evaluation of the concrete instance. (ibid.: 34)

therefore any morality, following Gadamer, needs taste as a crucial factor of hexis, moral conduct, that makes one able to be a moral agent, independent practical reasoned to use macintyre’s term. taste seems to play a double role here. On the one hand, it is the inal product of a moral (and aesthetic) education that goes beyond the bound of norm and rules. on the other hand, it is part of the forestructure of any validation, for it is taken as what bonds members of a certain community together; it appears to be part of the intellectual and moral prejudice shared (presupposed) by them. this makes the relationship between Gadamerian hermeneutics and taylor’s concept of the ‘social imaginary’ clear: what we face here is, in fact, a kind of social aesthetic in the source sense of the term, that is, the way of seeing the world around. What we take as natural and right, intelligible and obvious is based on how we imagine the world to work. We take the kind of concepts we accept as the basis of our intellectual frameworks. Hence, part of the task of moral and political hermeneutics is to pay close attention to the transformations taking place within the moral and political 157

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language that people use to describe their world (Lebenswelt). one of the possible mistakes here is to focus on the transformations taking place within moral and political philosophy without the recognition of how the acceptance of an intellectual transformation has inluenced the shared imaginary, and why the transformation was accepted.

Sources of Modernity and Change of Imagination

as macintyre states, what we should be especially aware of in contemporary morals are the manipulative social relationships that gradually become the norm for all kinds of relationships. this, however, is to be understood as the outcome of the progressive economisation of all spheres of human life. it is not only that commercial institutions are dislodging other institutions from their traditional positions but also that people seem to accept interest-based market relationships as an adequate depiction of any interpersonal relationship. Hence, the most important query that should be raised by partisans of classical tradition concerns the nature of the turn of early modernity – the transition from the ancient and christian ideas of ethics and politics based on the concept of the good to the modern idea of man as a free individual participating in market exchange. the analysis of the nature of this transition, even if preliminary and supericial, should lead, according to the hermeneutic method, to the revealing of the source difference between these two concepts taken as the basis of the economics and morality. We should start with placing the idea of the good within the frameworks of both ancient and christian thought. obviously, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss this issue at length. it is crucial, however, to recall those aspects of the idea that were questioned (explicitly or implicitly) in early modernity. the most important thing here is that in both cases the good is understood to be part of a broader perspective on human nature. For when aristotle says, in a famous passage from his Nicomachean Ethics, that ‘every action and pursuit [ … ] is thought to aim at some good’ (i, 1, 1094a 1–2), it should be read in connection with the analysis of happiness (eudaimonia) as the essence of the highest good that follows. yet, happiness understood along such lines is not only a fortuitous outcome of the actions of an individual, but also a fulilment of his or her nature as a human being. Hence, to call something the good is to refer to its beneicial inluence on one’s lourishing as a certain kind of being, as a part of the whole being. the idea of the good as seen from within the aristotelian framework is a general perspective on the development of being. For ethics, this is of signiicant importance. Seen along such lines, a human being is incomplete and acts towards the fulilment of his or her nature (entelecheia). a human being is a special kind of animal, who may – thanks to its intellectual and 158

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language capacities – participate in this development as an agent. as a rational animal a human being is only partially determined in his or her lourishing, with a broad sphere of freedom enabling him or her to deine the good in their lives. What is good then is to be seen on two levels: it is what supports this particular person in living a proliic life and what supports their achievement of distinctively human goals. A person’s true lourishing would be impossible without their acquiring at least some kind of material self-dependency (with familial ties being of central importance) and a certain development of one’s intellectual skills (if possible within the framework provided by the intellectual tradition of the community one inhabits). Hence, the human good is rooted in the recognition of the nature of being at the level of metaphysics. Similarly, the christian doctrine of human good must start with the idea of the world as God’s creation. as augustine highlights, the good should be seen with reference to God as the highest good and the highest form of being. the starting point of any christian analysis is a metaphysical one. that is what causes augustine to point out measure, form and order, which are the excellences of being, as characteristics of the good as well (On the Nature of Good, chapter 3). according to augustine, every being was designed to take a certain position within creation, and it is only with respect to the whole of creation that the good can be pronounced. augustine’s three aspects of the good are obviously derived from the Platonic vision of the universe and are markers of a universal hierarchy. in fact, the christian universe is depicted as a pyramid with the creator at the top and ordered ranks of beings below, each following in the order set by their participation in the excellence of being. to name something good is to point to its place in the overall hierarchy of beings and its role in bringing human beings to God. there is one more aspect that should be stressed here. For aristotelianism (both in its ancient and medieval form) as well as for christianity, economic activity is not a central issue. aristotle pays attention to this sphere only as one of the aspects of human agency in search of the good life, and as his Economics has been rejected as one of his works and is now considered to be apocryphal, he does not give us any developed theory in this respect. For medieval christianity, organised economic activity that was not rooted in obedience to moral teaching, was to a certain degree suspect, even sinful (just to mention the prohibition of usury) as, supposedly, grounded in the human propensity for greed. the only kind of economy that was acceptable within the classical framework was an embedded economy informed by the rules and ends of practical philosophy (in the sense of aristotle). However, the turn of modernity brought important changes in both the social imagination and intellectual life. Firstly, the authority of the church decreased and the number of alternative interpretations of the divine order 159

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increased with the reformation. this led to the appearance of a new value – toleration – which importantly limited the possibilities of appealing to the ‘truth’ in philosophical (mainly – moral and political) reasoning (Hazard 1953). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the aristotelianism of the late middle Ages failed to a signiicant degree in confronting the achievements of modern science. Parallel to the search for a new scientiic method was also the search for a new mode of the depiction of the society and human activity. this new model was found in economics. it must be stressed that modern economics is very different from its ancient and medieval ancestors. the difference lies in the reasons for actions. Within the classical traditions of thought, as was pointed out above, economics was a part of human activity aimed at the good life. What was crucial in that view was the central position of a housekeeping agent working in cooperation with other household agents for the common good of each (free) member. the emphasis placed on the heads of household made them crucial igures in sustaining a well-rounded community. Hence, it was ethics that was the basic science on which economics and politics were built. With the philosophical projects of Hobbes and machiavelli, however, the situation changed signiicantly. For, as Mark Perlman points out, governmental rule started to be treated ‘not as an ethical but as economic eficiency problem’ with their works (Perlman 2003: 644; also Hirschman 1977: 12). the change came with the rejection of the aristotelian holistic framework on the one hand and the growing complexity of social relationships on the other. as Louis dumont indicates, traditional morality seen from the perspective of the turn of modernity depicts ‘the small and stagnant society (of yesterday), rather than the large and powerful society (economy) of today’ (dumont 1977: 76–7). For just as classical practical philosophy was rooted in the righteous character of the agent, which was in fact the result of the development of human capabilities, from the modern perspective it was participation in the prosperity of the entire society that would count as the just course of action. the change introduced by Hobbes’ and machiavelli’s political projects as well as the inluence of emerging empiricism in the theory of knowledge led to the emergence of the vision of man and society based, irst of all, on a certain vision of the state foregrounding the role of the government and, secondly, in a reductionist anthropological theory. the need to confront the increasing complexity of social relationships led to the formulation of a political economy, which was at irst seen as part of the theory of government. It was William Petty, one of the irst theorists concerned with the problems of an effective economic policy, who proposed, based on Bacon’s theory of knowledge, a kind of policy that aimed at strengthening the state and its effectiveness, with little space left for individual goods and interests (Brewer 2003: 83–4). this kind of policy had little in common with the classical concept of politics as the 160

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realm of the common good. What was at stake here was how the government could make the state more secure and wealthy. the state was understood as a set of individuals acting according to certain regularities, which explained why the actual object of policy was to deal with those regularities and not with the nature of human beings. the changes that started in political philosophy was broadened to form a universal perspective. It was Francois Quesnay who irst argued for considering the economy as ‘consistent whole’, ‘a system of logical interrelations extending to the whole domain [of economic life]’ (dumont 1977: 41). as dumont asserts, with Quesnay economics becomes, in fact, a new model of society (ibid.: 42). this model was strictly connected with the politics of the state and his Tableau was devoted to the illustration of the mechanism that governs the actual life of citizens. Furthermore, the picture was created on the sound ground of empiricism (Steiner 2003: 67). as Quesnay puts it: We understand here by physical law the regular course [cours réglé] of any physical event of the natural order obviously the most advantageous to the human genus. We understand here by moral law the rule [la régle] of any human action of the moral order in conformity with [conforme à] the physical order obviously the most advantageous to the human genus. (c.f. dumont 1977: 43)

thus, the laws of nature and moral laws are parallel, that is, obedience to the natural law is necessary for the fulilment of the moral law. This is also valid for the relationship between politics and the economy. as dumont notices, ‘the right policy on the part of the State is a necessary condition of economic order’ (ibid.: 44) even if Quesnay sees the duties of the government as signiicantly limited. nevertheless, he points out that economic reasoning should be based on facts and the language most useful here is that of mathematics (Steiner 2003: 67). the philosopher who separated morals from economics was Bernard mandeville. His controversial The Fable of the Bees (1714) brought an important insight into the changing context of moral judgement. as he found no ground for the strong concept of human nature and considered humans as members of a society understood as an economic system, private morality (i.e., individual traits of character) did not in fact bring any important beneits to the system. Quite the opposite, as the core of the social life is thought to be based in the market exchange, the exchange and mobility of capital and commodities that contribute to economic development start to be valued for themselves. thus, whatever increases the eficiency of the system should be conceived of as a good. Whether it is a vice or a virtue does not pose any serious problem for mandeville. as dumont notes in the case of mandeville:

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to speak simply of an emancipation from morality would be at once excessive and insuficient: in this case the relation is more subtle. There is actually an emancipation from the general or common run of morality, but it is accompanied by the recognition that economic action is by itself oriented to the good, that is has a special moral character of its own. it is by virtue of this special characteristic that it is allowed to escape the general form of moral judgement. (dumont 1977: 61)

on the ground of a reductionist anthropological vision, which presents the human being as a selish creature, Mandeville presupposes the primal character of the relationship between humans and things, due to which humans fulil their primarily material needs. People seen along such lines join their forces only insofar as their personal interest is to be realised. Hence, with mandeville, ethics gets a new perspective that is informed on the one hand, by a narrow conception of self-love as the basic motivation for human action, and on the other by an expanded perspective on the large-scale society. this ‘economy of morality’ forms a new language of morals that will be employed by utilitarians, especially by Bentham in his ‘feliciic calculus’.

Goods or Interests: Two Models of Moral Rationality

this brief discussion of the changing historical perspective on morality offers a glimpse into the nature of the distinction between the concepts of goods and interests as sources of certain kinds of moral languages. Hence, on the ground of the above, it is now possible to outline at least a few basic traits of each of those concepts that determine the kinds reasoning typical for them. in what follows, i would like to concentrate on two main problems: the concept of man and the form of the depiction of the form of human life. as i pointed out above, the concept of the good originates within the holistic framework of classical philosophy. From this point of view, morality should be seen in connection with a certain recognition of the nature of human beings and their place within the overall schema of the world. this perspective leads to the recognition of a particular individual as one among many possibilities of what a human being may be. that is to say, the concept of the nature of any kind of being seen along such lines consists of two of its aspects: the form of the particular being as it is now and the ideal form of the being as it would be if it realised its essence (macintyre 1984/1981: 52–3). this makes classical ethics (both ancient and christian) perfectionist in most cases and is supported by a strong commitment to the recognition of an objective truth about the world. With reference to humans, this brings the picture of a human being as, irst of all, (potentially) a rational animal, whose distinctively human capabilities may be developed due to his or her participation in the 162

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culture of a certain community and for whom the ties of community are natural relationships informing his or her relationships with others. Because the world is seen as interconnected, friendship (and in christian ethics – love) is thought to be the most basic link between people. With the turn of modernity and the rejection of christian aristotelianism as the dominant theory of knowledge and being, human beings began to be perceived as determined by their social relationships. yet, as indicated above, the picture of society has been undergoing deep changes. the origin of individualism and the rejection of metaphysics have led to a serious limitation on the possibility of placing the concept of man into a wider context. Psychological hedonism has become an alternative paradigm since at least mandeville. it was so deeply internalised that Jeremy Bentham found it unnecessary to explain the term ‘interest’ claiming that its meaning is simply obvious (Bentham 1823: 4; for a history of the introduction of the term ‘interest’ see Hirschman 1977: 32–42). With the rejection of metaphysics and aristotelian ethics and the growth of social complexity, the classical concept of morals appeared to be insuficient for the description of a society. the recognition of the economic backbone of the good of society, and the limits of the resources needed, raised the important issue of how well-being should be judged and measured. in consequence, the problem of a depiction of the moral situation of an agent arises. Because classical ethics is concentrated on the problem of the good character of an individual, the form in which people try to conceive themselves is a narrative1. What is crucial in the concept of the narrative, taken as an essential aspect of morality, is that it is focused on a particular agent as the main character of the plot, and it looks at the agent ‘from inside’ from the perspective of the agent themselves. the agent is only a co-author of the story, as he or she becomes an agent through the process of education and incorporation into the framework of culture that is in place prior to his or her agency. Hence, the modes of expression, as well as the basic network of signiicant others involved in one’s narrative, are predeined by the community and its culture. it is through the form of a narrative that one’s identity may be expressed and become intelligible for oneself as well as for others in the context posed by different kinds of goods and relationships. due to the quest for the good, and more precisely for the good life, one may ind an existential ground for moral decision-making, and consequently for making one’s entire life intelligible. For, as macintyre claims: ‘a quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge’ (macintyre 1984/1981: 219). 1 For a discussion on the relationship between ancient ethics and the narrative, see e.g. nussbaum 2001. on the meaning of the narrative order for ethics in general, see macintyre 1984/1981. 163

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the language most suitable here is that of virtues. For the central issue of ethics seen along such lines is how is it possible to build a proper character, that is, a conduct that enables one not only to succeed in everyday life but also to overcome the gap between one’s current and possible state. Hence, what one needs are consistent personality traits, modes of behaviour and reason, which will enable him or her to deal with practical problems on the one hand, and to reason out and aim at least a generally set goal. Building character is accompanied by acquiring self-knowledge, due to which one is able to act as the main character of the developing narrative. it is crucial to note that the structure of a narrative is dynamic, developing in terms of both plot and an acknowledgement of the end of the story. Hence, the answer to the question on rightful acting comes from inside, that is from one’s own recognition of what is important for him or her, what are the conditions for action and which goods/aims have priority. this allows one to live his or her own life. on the other hand, the narrative order may help to evaluate progress in obtaining the good. As the set of narratives available to the agent is deined by the culture of the community he or she inhabits, the general views and ideals in which the narratives are rooted are also common (e.g. machura 2008). this directs all the agents in the same general direction and makes them evaluate both their own and other’s progress with respect to similar standards of excellence. that is what makes justice one of central virtues since it enables one to make correct judgements concerning his or her relationships to others. thus social (political) and economic rules are derivatives of virtues rooted in a narrative (moral) form of the depiction of human life. By contrast, from the standpoint of economics, the idea of the narrative was useless as it was deemed to be incompatible with the necessity of giving a clear picture of the complex situation of multitudinous interdependence. What economists needed was a tool to estimate not only interpersonal relationships, but also the relationships of people to material things. Hence, since the time of Quesnay, economics has gradually been involving mathematical modelling as its most convenient instrument. this has at least two consequences for moral philosophy. Firstly, some theorists, for example Bentham, found it useful to try to incorporate mathematics into ethics. as ethics became focused on norms and rules, their productivity could be checked simply by making an appropriate mathematical model in order to explain the consequences of their implementation. Secondly, the reductionist anthropological theory (focused on ‘a man as he truly is’ based on the concept of interest, personal preference as basic form of motivation of ‘punctual self ’, see taylor 1989: 49–50), accompanied by the economic perspective that sees society as a system, has led to an understanding of a society as a game and of its members as players. the game is deined within the limits of the boundary conditions of economically reasonable actions and ruled by set of abstract rules. 164

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Gadamer points out that the game (play)2 is a peculiar activity, for, as he claims, part of every game is that it has its own essence ‘independent of the consciousness of those who play’ (Gadamer 1989, 103). the game should thus be seen as a universal mechanism, independent of the will of the players (which corresponds with Quesnay’s notion of an economic mechanism). that is to say, the only thing players can do is to igure out the rules of the game, which have not been created by them. in this respect, the game is endless and it takes precedence over the individuals. as Gadamer states: ‘the players are not the subjects of the play; instead play merely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players’ (ibid.). What is thus being presented in a market game? a liberal would claim that it is the equality of possibilities rooted in the freedom of the bargaining process. yet, it might be argued, that the most important aspect of the game (at least from the moral point of view) is that it is based on the idea of competition. the effectiveness of a market economy is rooted in the belief that people will do their best to get what they want when access to goods is limited. Hence, as Gadamer points out, the movement of the game implicitly aims at determining the winner and through this to spread the logic of the game as a universal model of reality (ibid.: 105). Gadamer continues: ‘the being of all play is always self-realization, sheer fulilment, energeia that has its telos within itself ’ (ibid.: 112). thus, not only should the economy be taken as aimless system, but also the criteria of rationality and worth are given ‘from the outside’, that is, an individual needs to adjust his or her character and goals to the possibilities offered within the boundary conditions of economic rationality, that is, of endless competition and cost-eficiency. Thus, it is more apt to introduce manipulative social relationships as it directs people towards the goals of selfinterest and possession rather than a ‘kingdom of ends’. yet, focused on interest, that is – the preference of a narrowly seen agent, economics seems to oversee not only the way in which human beings become practically rational, but also, and more fundamentally, the central character of non-economic activities to human well-being. this marks the gap between the forms of understanding provided by a goodoriented ethics and an interest-oriented economy. For just as the narrative, itself useful for establishing and sustaining personal identity and moral responsibility, is to a signiicant degree useless as a tool for the analysis of large-scale societies and their ethos, the language of the market game provides an agent with the tools for estimating one’s position within the society. Yet, to a signiicant 2 there is ambiguity in translation of German Spiel as either play or game. as Gadamer himself uses it to describe the issues of aesthetics, ‘play’ seems to be more natural. yet, Gadamer’s own examples such as ball games (Gadamer 1989: 106) make the ambiguity even stronger. thus for my own purpose i use ‘game’ as equivalent of Spiel retaining ‘play’ in quotations. 165

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degree it covers the actual limits posed on individual agency and makes the recognition of certain important aspects of human life impossible. For where the estimation of market trends gives a good picture of e.g. current social and economic situation, it is limited in possibilities of the acknowledgement of the worth of the market itself and the individual qua human being independently of their market position.

Good and Economics

it is a common practice of authors working in moral philosophy to avoid the problems of economy. However, what can be learned from marx is that the possibilities of an individual lourishing are always dependent on the form of the social and economic order. therefore, if contemporary aristotelianism is to be a real alternative to liberalism, it must not only confront the problems of economic practice but primarily the economic form of the depiction of human life and economy-inluenced action theory. It is not enough just to criticise liberalism for destroying natural ties and communities (Walzer 1990, macintyre 2006), what is needed is a kind of aristotelian perspective on contemporary, highly developed economy and society. For if we acknowledge the relationship between the social and intellectual, the philosophical changes that were introduced in the last 400 years, a call to the mere return to aristotelian concepts must be seen as philosophically and practically insuficient. One of the tasks for contemporary aristotelians is to work out some kind of aristotelian economics. two issues seem to be crucial here. Firstly, it must follow the general scheme of aristotelian practical philosophy with the central position of morals and economics seen as based on the moral architecture of human agency. Secondly, this perspective needs to be good-oriented; that is, it needs to be rooted in the broader concept of human nature and practice. that is, it should relect human development and aim-orientation ‘from inside’ so that the needs of human being and their way of functionings are the starting points of any institutional order. Both of these mean a turn, or in fact a return, to the idea of an ‘embedded economy’ as contrasted with modern ‘disembedded economy’. the former, which was typical for pre-modern, non-market societies, offers normative practical models of decision-making in which a broader set of goals is taken into account (see e.g. meikle 1995: 171–2). Hence, there is not only a need to incorporate some moral correction into the rules of today’s capitalism, but the general perspective on human agency and economic development needs to be revised. one solution has been proposed by amartya Sen who has developed an economics of ‘a particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a person’s ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of 166

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being’ (Sen 1997/1993: 30). His project is devoted to a search for the kind of economic order that would enable people to live meaningful and prosperous lives. Hence, he proposes changes to the free-market economic system and in theoretical economics that would promote this approach. namely, he highlights the necessity of replacing the Gross national Product as the main indicator of development by the Human development index, which shows the standards of living available to the majority of people and not the low of capital. His deinition of the standard of life in terms of distinctively human functioning is nothing but the good in terms of classical philosophy (see also nussbaum 2011). For just as economic thought inds it useful to depict the realm of human practice in terms of the rules governing the acting of punctual selves, it might be argued that any kind of ‘embedded economy’ is rooted in a recognition of the multifaceted character of human life and its dynamic character. it seems that two general strategies may be used here. Firstly, we may look into contemporary anthropology and evolutionary sciences for an explanation of how human beings act as social and intelligent mammals and taking this as basis, we may aim at building an ethical and political program that would include this as the source of an account of human needs and functioning (as an example see macintyre 1999). Secondly, without an attempt to bring the metaphysical perspective into practical debates, it might be fruitful to examine the ways in which people act and point out those areas of human activity that require special attention. the latter is what nussbaum and Sen have developed as the ‘capability approach’. in her Creating Capabilities (2011) Nussbaum deines deines capabilities as ‘substantial freedoms’ that mark a person’s possibilities of acting and selfdevelopment, ‘the freedoms or opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social and economic environment’ (ibid.: 20). nussbaum distinguishes two kinds of capabilities: combined and internal, and gives the latter priority over the former. that is, the possibilities of further development that one gets during prenatal life as well as personal characteristics are key prerequisites of the moral and political aristotelianism she develops. thus, what she is focused on are the possibilities of the development of a human being as a whole and the realisation of its essence. this ‘aristotelian essentialism’ consists in paying attention to what she calls the ‘thick vague theory of the good’ (nussbaum 1992: 214). this concept of the good is ‘thick and vague’ because she rejects sound metaphysical commitments in favour of a ‘multiple speciication’ of the good that is realised by people of different origins and capacities (ibid.: 215). She claims that it is possible to name ten fundamental human capabilities that correspond to the ten most important aspects of human life that determine possibilities of human lourishing. Hence, she argues, it is our political and moral duty to provide every human being with such material, 167

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institutional and educational support that it will be possible for this person to live a good human life. However, mere inancial or institutional support, although necessary, is insuficient as it does not strengthen one’s own agency and their sense of aim at their good. Hence, according to the general aristotelian framework, this is an agent-oriented view in which people’s needs and freedoms are more important than the cost-eficiency of the overall economic system. nussbaum sees bringing as great a number of people as possible above a certain threshold of living conditions that should give them the ability to live a life that is not only ‘worth living’ in terms of basic human dignity, but that also enables them to act as agents as a key political and social duty. For this reason nussbaum proposes a number of institutional changes in both the educational system and international politics. She calls for defending the liberal form (in the sense of artes liberales) of higher education from specialisation forced by the market, advocates the promotion of education for women, speciically in the third world (which is in fact a form of emancipation of the largest group of the excluded), and calls for the support of developing communities, primarily by promoting education. education is a key element as it would help people to become self-conscious agents or, to put it in macintyrean terms, independent practical reasoners.

Conclusion

it is crucial to remember, when discussing the possibilities of building an aristotelian alternative to both political and economic liberalism, that the aristotelian perspective is primarily a moral one. that is, it is concerned with human good (well-being, happiness) and functioning and only secondarily with the cost-eficiency of a social system and the state. Yet, by saying this, I do not imply that it should not challenge ‘late capitalism’ in this area. Just the opposite, one of the most necessary tasks partisans of contemporary aristotelianism face is to justify the priority of a moral standpoint over an economic one. on the other hand, what is most important here is that the key condition for the success of neo-aristotelianism is its ability to justify a sound concept of good as the source notion of human self-understanding and their development in the context of, irstly, the great diversity in the ways of life and social connections of humans and, secondarily, within contemporary philosophical language and, simultaneously, the dominant social (and moral) imaginary.

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References

aristotle 2001. Nicomachean Ethics, transl. W.d. ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by r. mcKeon. new york: the modern Library. Bentham, J. 1907. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. oxford: clarendon Press. Brewer, a. 2003. Pre-classical economists in Britain, in A Companion to the History of Economic Thought, edited by W. J. Samuels et al. oxford: Blackwell. dumont, L. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx. The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. chicago: chicago university Press. Gadamer, H.-G. 1989. Truth and Method. London and new york: continuum. Hazard, P. 1953. The European Mind: Critical Years 1680 – 1715. new Haven, ct: yale university Press. Hirschman, a. 1977. The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton university Press. machura, P. 2008. MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: Philosopher as a Moral Ideal, in: Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, edited by K. Knight, P. Blackledge. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. macintyre, a. 1984/1981. After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory. notre dame: university of notre dame Press. macintyre, a. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? notre dame: notre dame university Press. macintyre, a. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: duckworth. macintyre, a. 2006. Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995, in a. macintyre, Ethics and Politics. Selected Essays, Volume 2. cambridge: cambridge university Press. meikle, S. 1995. Aristotle’s Economic Thought. oxford: clarendon Press. nussbaum, m.c. 1992. Human Functioning and Social Justice. in defence of aristotelian essentialism. Political Theory, 20(2), 202–46. nussbaum, m.c. 2001. The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. cambridge: cambridge university Press. nussbaum, m.c. 2011. Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. cambridge, ma: Harvard university Press Perlman, m. 2003. the History of ideas and economics, in: A Companion to the History of Economic Thought, eds. W.J. Samuels, J.e. Biddle, J.B. davis. oxford: Blackwell. Sen, a. 1997/1993. capability and Well-Being, in: The Quality of Life, edited. m. nussbaum, a. Sen. oxford: clarendon Press. Steiner, P. 2003. Physiocracy and French Pre-classical Political economy, in A Companion to the History of Economic Thought, edited by W.J. Samuels, J.e. Biddle, J.B. davis. oxford: Blackwell. 169

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taylor, ch. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. cambridge: cambridge university Press. taylor, ch. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. durham, nc: duke university Press. Walzer, m. 1990. communitarian critique of Liberalism. Political Theory, 19(1), 6–23.

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Chapter 10

formalising functions: The history of a Passing Challenge to Capitalist Economy Kelvin Knight

our idea of the economy is modern. in most premodern societies the principal unit of production and distribution was the household, and our word and concept of economy can be traced back to the Greek oikos or household. Paradigmatically, the oikos was purposefully directed and ruled by the visible hand of its patriarchal oikonomos, who delegated to his wife management of their children and slaves. in much of mediaeval europe peasant households were encompassed within the larger economy of the manorial or castlery household, whilst the royal household increasingly domesticated agrarian aristocrats into urban courtiers. What was thereby eroded may be understood as a feudal system in which a hierarchy of lords and vassals had unequal and different, but nonetheless reciprocal, rights and duties. early modern ‘political oeconomy’ saw royal chancellors tax and ‘police’ productive activity in ways claimed to be for the public good, and which, alongside public debt, inanced an increasing concentration of coercive power and of legal and administrative authority in the hands of the sovereign. Limits to this coercive order were identiied by Adam Smith’s theoretical abstraction of a speciically commercial order, which operated and expanded as if providentially directed by an ‘invisible hand’ through the division of productive labour (Smith 1976: 456). This order has become an object of enquiry, explained in terms of speciically economic laws that seemed to have the causal force of Newtonian nature. The nomoi that order the economy were held to be entirely impersonal, operating independently of human purposes. The economic order that arose as if by nature out of the free transactions of self-interested individuals was perceived to serve the public interest, by eficiently maximising wealth and meeting needs. As Bernard Mandeville had provocatively put it, ‘private vices’ generate ‘public beneits’. Whereas philosophers and theologians had traditionally taught that personal virtue is the means to the common good, economists increasingly explained how beneicial consequences are caused by actions lacking any moral motivation. Therefore,

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they argued, the state’s task is simply to enforce a law that protects individuals’ natural right to liberty, to property, and to contract with one another. Such a free market, they explained, would affect public utility or welfare; utility is a function of commerce. The theoretical and ethical claims of English utilitarianism were resisted by Kant, Hegel and Marx. For Kant, even if experience grants that selishness is natural, and even if commerce promotes ‘perpetual peace’, our enlightened freedom of pure practical rationality tells us that we ought not to treat one another only as means to our own ends. Hegel subsumed the cunning of the utilitarian reason of the market, as a system for satisfying material needs, within the ethical reasoning of its purposive policing by the state, and to the greater cunning of a rationality actualised in history. This impersonal logic of society and its history he described as ‘objective mind’. in accepting the economy’s separation from household and family, but refusing its entire separation from politics, he proposed the representation of people in legislatures not as abstract individuals but as particular kinds of economic actor, through ‘estates’ or ‘corporations’, in order to educate individuals into their role and function within society as an ethical whole. Marx radicalised this heuristic prioritisation of social form to human consciousness in describing ethics as ideology and by subordinating politics to economic necessity and laws. His hope for a scientiic socialism was that the laws of an increasingly apolitical economy are speciic to the capitalist mode of production, so that the systemic use of labour as a means to capital accumulation will cease once historical progress permits capital’s socialisation by the state. The period of political economy ended with the replacement of personal and political purposiveness by causal, ‘scientiic’ explanation in terms of the unintended consequences of individuals’ actions and interactions. The political lesson was that the state should leave the economy alone, to ind its own direction. The theoretical lesson was that the concept of civil society should be entirely detached from that of political community. one result (accelerated once a wholly apolitical microeconomics focussed upon merely ‘marginal’ utility) was the emergence of sociology as a distinct discipline. The loss of social relations from ethics and politics was meanwhile condemned by socialists, who wished to submit the new power of capital to political direction. British social and socialist theory was inluenced directly by Marx and indirectly by Kant and Hegel, especially through the work of T.H. Green and his followers at Balliol College, Oxford. There, when political philosophy was still taught in conjunction with classics, and economics had not yet been established as a distinct discipline, the idea was sustained that politics and ethics should be understood in terms of a teleological purposiveness. Classical politics was idealised as the participation of citizens in rationally determining and actualising their common good, with the implication that contemporary politics 172

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ought, somehow, to become the participative and intentionally functional pursuit of their common good by all members of society. British idealists could then happily call themselves both ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’. Philosophical idealism inspired a ‘new liberalism’, which adapted and elaborated Kant’s distinction of ‘positive’ from ‘negative’ or ‘external’ freedom. on their account, freedom was a historical, social and political achievement in which individuals could participate with the state’s help. British socialism also had other, indigenous sources. One of these was utilitarianism. in retheorising welfare apart from traditional ideas of goodness and virtue, and apart from idealist accounts of positive freedom, welfare became an end to be rationalistically effected through bureaucratic means. This became the special project of the Fabian Society, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, trade unions decided that they should form and inance their own Labour Party in opposition to the Liberal Party, Fabians, as well as some idealist new liberals, also switched their allegiance. unlike continental social democratic parties, the Labour Party was founded by trade unions that themselves predated the new socialist theories and that had formed their guiding ideas in an era when industry’s interest was deined by liberalism and free trade. Accordingly, the new party’s purpose was deined as the protection of unions’ unincorporated legal status, of their classically liberal negative freedom from legislative and judicial interference, and of their rights to strike and to represent their members in ‘free collective bargaining’. From the perspective of middle-class utilitarian and idealist theorists, labour was only one part of society which had to be incorporated into the social whole. in contrast, another indigenous source of socialist theory took the activity of material production as its starting point. This was the theory of guild socialism.

Guilds, and Socialism

Guilds were presented as an alternative to the division of labour from capital, and as an alternative to the economy or civil society as what rightly lies above the household and beneath the state. instead, guilds of producers were presented as the occupants of that intermediate position. in Germany, this presentation was historical and sociological, by Otto von Gierke and Ferdinand Tönnies (echoed in France by Georges Renard and Émile Durkheim). In Britain, historical and sociological theory came to inform what aspired to be a socialist politics. Guilds predate socialism, being those combinations of self-employed craftsmen and tradesmen that were condemned as conspiracies against the public interest by early champions of market competition. They had a role in maintaining mediaeval urban order, apart from rural manorialism. Gradually, in Britain (as in most of Germany; their disappearance in revolutionary France 173

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was more abrupt), they were marginalised by the growth of national markets and abolished with the institutionalisation of parliamentary sovereignty and individual representation. instead, there emerged a sharper social division between capital-owning employers and their employees. increasingly, those employees combined together by craft and fought collectively for their rights and interests within the existing division of labour. The idea that workers could own their own tools, manage their own labour and sell their own products was never entirely forgotten. it was practiced by those who might otherwise be called the petite bourgeoisie. nor was the idea forgotten that skilled production required training under the direction of workers who had already completed such apprenticeship, or that such workers might associate with one another to share their expertise and order their common industry. These principles were followed by those who organised themselves into what were increasingly recognised as ‘the professions’. Professionals understood themselves to have a particular vocation and purpose, in contrast to the idea of labour as a physical means to any end. The idea that something like professional self-management could be practiced throughout society had already been expressed in terms both of socialism and of guilds, in the nineteenth century. In Britain, such expressions included the Owenite Grand National Guild of Builders, from 1833 to 1834, the Anglican Guild of St Matthew, founded in 1877, John Ruskin’s formation of the (still existing) Guild of St George in the 1870s, and the work of William Morris, which may be perceived also as the culmination of an anti-capitalist tradition of romantic and mediaevalist Victorian dissent that began with Thomas Carlyle and was aestheticised by Ruskin. Ruskin and Morris helped inspire an ‘arts and crafts movement’, in which self-employed artisans once again formed associations resisting industrial mechanisation and its division of labour. The movement’s core critique was that capitalism prevented the cultivation of aesthetic, moral and personal excellence by reducing workers’ activity to repetitive physical tasks, commanded by others. in contrast, craft production engaged the worker, physically and intellectually, in the creation of an entire product. A craftsman, unlike a proletarian, was a worker with full responsibility for his own productive activity. Guilds were to engage such workers in the cooperative government of their entire craft and industry, for which they were to share responsibility toward society as a whole. Arthur J. Penty – an architect, like his ex-builder father – was the irst to argue that guilds should be basic to social reform. Still then a member of the reformist Fabian Society, he opposed ‘the restoration of the gild system’ to the ‘socialist’ or ‘collectivist formula’ proposed by Sydney Webb and others through Fabian publications. He granted that collectivism aimed to correct the capitalist ‘evils which Liberalism brought with it’ by ‘re-awaken[ing] the moral sense of society, and … restor[ing] to it the lost ideal of a corporate life’ 174

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(Penty 1906: 41), arguing that this aim would be more surely achieved through workers’ active participation in guild organisation than through the replacement of capitalist by bureaucratic management. Eventually published in 1906, The Restoration of the Gild System inspired the formation in the same year of both a Fabian Arts Group and a still more short-lived Guild Restoration League, in which Penty’s collaborators included A.R. Orage, editor of The New Age, and the more expressly socialist S.G. Hobson. Penty and Hobson were to remain amongst the most proliic proponents of guilds. They agreed that the way to achieve a comprehensive guild system was through the conversion of existing trade unions into organisations willing and able to take over industrial management. They disagreed about the nature and scale of the production that was to be managed. Penty was in the tradition of Ruskin and Morris, who opposed mechanised mass production in the cause of artisanship. Hobson’s overriding opposition was to ‘wagery’ or wage-slavery, the system by which capital systematically dominated labour and which would be continued even if capital were expropriated by a statist socialism. in a formulation that was to be repeated by other guild socialists, Hobson asserted that ‘economic power must precede political power’ (Orage 1914: 16; when reissued in 1919, Hobson was belatedly acknowledged as the author). All of this was set out by Hobson in a series of articles published from 1912 on in The New Age, and then collected together in 1914 as National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out. Between the publication of Penty’s and of Hobson’s irst books, the case for a non-statist guild socialism gained force from the rise and fall of British syndicalism. Syndicalists identiied production as the point at which class conlict was to be decided, in militant deiance of the Labour Party’s parliamentary representation of trade unionists’ interests. Like syndicalists and ‘industrial unionists’, guild socialists criticised the oficial labour movement for its compromises with capitalism. The breaking of the syndicalist wave therefore left guild socialist intellectuals with signiicant proletarian support in such places as the shipyards of the Clyde, as well as with considerable attention in such Fabian clubs as that at Oxford. The most notable of the Oxbridge Fabians drawn to guild socialism was G.D.H. Cole, who soon led the takeover of the central Society’s Research Department and was to prove more proliic than any of the movement’s founders.1 He had already felt the inluence of Morris and, as a student at Balliol, also felt that of the late T.H. Green and of some of Green’s idealist followers. Cole called Green a ‘mid-Victorian Rousseau’ (Cole 1915: 148), and Green indeed took his idealism from Rousseau as well as from Kant and Hegel. 1 On Cole, see Wright 1979. For an incisive defence of Cole against the Webbs, see Tomlinson 1982: 47–62. For an attempt to update Cole’s arguments, see Hirst 1994. 175

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The earliest philosophical source of Cole’s concept of function will have been Greenian idealism. According to that, a social function is the proper activity of some particular in relation to the universal of society, the unity of which is represented by the state. Having been led to Rousseau, Cole took directly from him an unEnglish conception of politics as based not in coercion or rules but in will. Cole’s difference from Rousseau, as from the idealists, was in his refusal to limit the general will to the state. He denied their assimilation of society to the state and of individuals to its citizenship. Rather, different kinds of association express different kinds of general will, none of which can encompass the entirety of the will of an individual. Cole nonetheless shared the preoccupation of Balliol idealism with ‘the social question’ of how to educate and assimilate the working class into citizenship. Idealist inluence is evident, for example, when he says that ‘it is the function of the State’ to educate workers ‘to desire more. The State exists not merely to supply, but to stimulate the demand for, the “good life”’ (Cole 1913: 381–2). He was constantly troubled by the idea of the state. What he attempted, in varying ways, was to deine it by reference to one or more particular functions, so that it could be understood as one more part of society. When syndicalism was a force, he criticised its refusal ‘to recognise the function of the great league of consumers we call the State’, proposing that some such organisational representation of consumers is necessary to complement the function of guilds in organising and representing producers. Consumer representation may not be the purpose of ‘the bourgeois State of the present’ (Cole 1913: 124) but it should determine the state’s future form, since ‘structure is determined by function’ (Cole 1913: 259). Functions and Fascism

Cole’s version of guild socialism has long been regarded as one of the main instances of a broader ‘english political pluralism’, which aims at a ‘pluralist state’ that extends beyond recognition of the ‘legal personality’ of various associations (e.g. Ellis 1923, Hsiao 1927, Elliott 1928, Magid 1941, Hirst 1989, Nicholls 1994, Runciman 1997, Laborde 2000, Stears 2006). Even after the Great War and Bolshevik revolution, he dismissed the need for any coercive sovereign. His most sustained and considered attempt to elaborate premisses for a political pluralism is made in Social Theory. Following the opening observation that ‘men do not make communities – they are born and bred into them’ (Cole 1920a: 1), he spends a couple of chapters theorising ‘community’ and ‘society’ as irreducible to any political or other kind of association. ‘in order to be a community, a group must exist for the good life and not merely for the furtherance of some speciic and partial purpose’ (Cole 1920a: 26). He then 176

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explores ‘the principle of Function’, which ‘is the underlying principle of social organisation’ (Cole 1920a: 48; Cole’s emphases). Cole’s idea of social organisation and social function is political, not sociological. As for Rousseau, so for Cole, human association expresses a shared will. Cole’s claim against Rousseau is that there is, rightly, an irreducible plurality of associative wills, purposively aiming at an irreducible plurality of different objects. An association’s function is to pursue that shared and fully intentional object. Whereas sociological or anthropological functionalists attempted to emulate economists’ explanation of order as the unintended consequence of actions, and although philosophers sympathetic to that project might object to Cole that there is ‘a polarity between purpose and function’ (Emmet 1958: 92), he identiies ‘social functions’ as humans’ associative purposes once intentionally ‘selected and placed in coherent relationship’ (Cole 1920a: 54; emphasis added). The political problem with which he grappled inconclusively in numerous works was that of how the plurality should be made to cohere. Whilst functions are always ‘speciic’, individuals are ‘universal’ (Cole 1920a: 49). Even when he can be caught admitting that it is the function of the state to stimulate and supply the good life, Cole holds that what constitutes that life is determined and willed by individuals. expressly both socialist and pluralist, Cole was also always an individualist. His social theory was implicitly idealist, and his concern with class was ethical. His concern with class conlict was that it should be replaced by the mutual recognition of a plurality of functions. ‘In short, function is the key not only to “social”, but also to communal and personal well-being’ (Cole 1920a: 62). What has attracted most attention from political theorists in Cole’s guild socialism after the movement’s demise is his denial that an individual as such can be represented, and his assertion that an individual can only be represented severally, in each of her different functions; that real political representation must be of those shared interests deriving from people’s social functions. Just as some particular purpose and interest may be shared in a functional association, so one’s share in such a particular interest – say, as producer or as consumer – can be represented by another. ‘All true and democratic representation is therefore functional representation’ (Cole 1920b: 33; Cole’s emphasis). Whilst the argument has been criticised (Stocks 1932, Hirst 1979: 31–3), the term (as we will see in discussing liberal corporatism) has stuck. We may add that Hobson later advanced a socialist version of the argument for reform of the House of Lords made by Winston Churchill and others. Aristocratic lords had once merited special representation because of their economic function. now that economic function is performed by industrial workers, which warrants their functional representation in a House of Industry (Hobson 1931). Cole’s prominence in the guild socialist movement was not only due to his writings. it was also due to his leadership in the wartime foundation of the 177

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National Guilds League. After the war, Hobson played a similarly practical role in helping (like Owen, earlier) to establish building guilds that thrived briely when inance was available to build ‘homes it for heroes’. That the movement nonetheless disappeared within a couple years of the war’s end was largely due to the increasing success of the Labour Party and the foundation of the British Communist Party, to which many guild socialists switched. If the purpose was socialism, MacDonald and Lenin seemed to demonstrate better than Cole and Hobson how it might be actualised. Class won out over craft. it was during the war, and in relation to it, that the most determined case was made for what, by the war’s end, was recognised to be guild socialism’s ‘irst principle’: ‘function’ (Stirling Taylor 1919: ch. 2; on Taylor’s account, its secondary principles are ‘self-management’ and ‘decentralization’). As Hobson was to later observe, there should ‘have been no “Guild Socialism”. It [sh]ould have been “Functional Socialism”’. That function – i.e. ‘the actual work done by men and women when applied to the common weal’ – was ‘the fundamental principle’ (Hobson 1936: 15–16) he came to appreciate from Ramiro de Maeztu’s Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War. Maeztu, a Spanish journalist based in London since 1905, had no time for the idealism of either Oxford or Germany. His irst target was ‘authority’ and ‘the doctrine of power’. These he identiied with ‘the German heresy’ of Hegel, Marx, Kant and the Kaiser, all of whom, on his account, were logically committed to the principle that ‘might is right’ (Maeztu 1916: 11–103). He then turned on ‘liberty’, ‘the ideal of happiness’ and, amongst others, John Stuart Mill (Maeztu 1916: 107–92). Authority and liberty were, he proposed, the rival principles informing the states then entrenched against one another on the Western Front. With their descent into war each principle, he concluded, had already failed. Finally, he elaborated his rival principle of function, and his account of ‘the primacy of things’ in pursuit of which individuals are functional (Maeztu 1916: 107–282). For his philosophical premisses, he owed ‘to M. Léon Duguit that of objective rights; to Mr G.E. Moore that of objective good; to Herr Edmond Husserl that of objective logic’ (Maeztu 1916: 5). Moore he mobilised against ‘the subjective morality from which both the authoritarian and the Liberal principles are derived’ (Maeztu 1916: 136), and for the objectivity of those goods in pursuit of which people associate and in relation to which they regard one another as functional means. ‘My morality is Moore’s’, he declared in The New Age (Maeztu 1917: 367). Also invoked was Bertrand Russell, Moore’s colleague at Cambridge where philosophy had long been close to economics and where the dominant ethics was utilitarian. Russell’s ‘logical doctrine of external relations’ Maeztu deployed against both its author’s wartime paciism and the ‘idealistic mysticism’ in opposition to which it had been designed (Maeztu 1916: 66, 70). In turn, Russell believed guild socialism to be ‘capable, not only of putting an end to poverty and economic injustice, but of securing the greatest 178

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sum of liberty and initiative that is possible to human nature at its present stage of development’ (Russell 1919a: 3). Following his wartime commendation of syndicalism (Russell 1916), Russell commended guild socialism as ‘the best practicable’ road to freedom’ (Russell 1919b: xi), not function. Function was proposed by Maeztu as a third way between the individualism to which he had been attracted before he left Spain and the statism that he might, nonetheless, be thought to have increasingly embraced upon his return in 1919, when he translated his critique of moral subjectivism into a historical critique of humanism. In the 1920s he became one of the principal intellectual props of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, and in the 1930s his Acción Española imitated the integral nationalism and monarchism of Action Française. He certainly also went well beyond any morality of Moore in specifying political goods, in relation to the objectivity and primacy of which individuals should be regarded only as secondary means. These were the goods of Spanish civilization and transatlantic Hispanic tradition (Maeztu 1934), and of a national syndicalism and authoritarian corporatism. Maeztu’s move to fascism was anticipated by the only other signiicant southern european advocate of guild socialism, the Hungarian-born and italian-naturalised odon Por. Having been involved with guild socialism for over a decade, Por published two books in 1923 in which he praised d’Annunzio’s constitution for Fiume as that of a guild state. The earlier of the two books analysed Italian economy in terms of British guild socialism, and especially of Penty. no pluralist, he proposed that, left to themselves, guilds and cooperatives, would ‘become a State within the State, and consequently a disintegrating factor; embodied into the social structure [they] would be a source of strength’ (Por 1923a: 114–15). In the preface, Por welcomed Mussolini’s recent declaration that he would use government to create a corporate state (Por 1923a: xiii–xviii). The second book elaborated on that policy, proposing that fascism ‘has hit, almost by chance, on th[e] principle of function’ and was already ‘constructing a functional democracy’ (Por 1923b: 14, 169). Even Cole, years later, acknowledged that Mussolini, who ‘graduated in the school of Socialism’, intended that property ‘rights depend … on functions, and are conditional on the performance of function’ (Cole 1937: 98). In Britain, Penty himself became attracted to fascism. Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, had been attracted to guild socialism (Jackson 2012: 61). For those repulsed by both communist class warfare and individualist liberalism, the idea of function pointed to a third way. on its own (or even in combination with the idea of ‘social credit’), however, it could never be enough. even if one were to agree that rights might derive from functions, it was necessary to say what it is from which functions derive. As Maeztu appreciated, one can only be functional in relation to something. What Mussolini acknowledged, in graduating from socialism to fascism during the 179

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Great War, was that nationalism and war provide the readiest causes of mass enthusiasm and mobilisation. one can easily be functional when there is a war to be won, but fascism’s death by the sword demonstrates how imprudent it is to make the nation an end in itself. Guild socialists were amongst those intent on inding some moral equivalent and political alternative to war. What guild socialism demonstrated is that it is not easily found. The Functional Society

The theme of function was taken up most famously by R.H. Tawney. Praised as ‘the irst prophet of professional society’ and as the provider ‘of a philosophy for British Socialism’ whose ‘importance in the realm of political thought … cannot be overestimated’ (Perkin 1996: 71, Foote 1997: 72, 80; Foote’s emphasis), he elaborated a moral alternative to Webbian utilitarianism for the Labour Party.2 ultimately, his efforts were hardly more successful than those of guild socialists outside the party. Himself a member of the national Guilds League after the First World War (in which he participated patriotically), he took a clearer line than Sidney Webb when, as members of the Royal Commission on the Coal Mines, they persuaded their colleagues of the need for a ‘nationalization’ that was to inally occur only after the Second. Before Cole, Tawney had been a graduate of Balliol and inluenced by Greenian idealism. Unlike Cole, he was no pluralist. Society, for Tawney, as for Green, is a moral whole, the unity of which is represented by the state. Since he joined the Christian Social Union’s Oxford University branch, which was concerned with elaborating an ethical economics and publishing The Economic Review, it is unsurprising that he went on to make his profession economic history. He was the most prominent of many who tried, abortively, to resist the conceptual detachment of function from purpose and of social science from ethics. in The Acquisitive Society, Tawney elaborates an account both of how society is and of how it ought to be. ‘The acquisitive society’ is his moralistic name for capitalism. on his account, the problem with the economy is less that it is dominated by impersonal capital than that it is dominated by ideas supporting a selishly acquisitive individualism; speciically, an idea of private property rights onto which has been grafted a utilitarian economics identifying the economic good as the outcome of competition between self-interested individuals. Against this acquisitive society and its legitimatory ideas, he poses his ideal of 2 An Anglican (like several leading guild socialists, gathered within the Church Socialist League), Tawney was also influential, as an author of reports and long-time friend of Archbishop William Temple, in politicising the Church of England toward the left. On this and on Tawney’s life and ideas more generally, see Goldman 2013. 180

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‘the functional society’ in which ‘rights’ – meaning, primarily, property rights – would derive from social functions, because one has a right to what is necessary to perform one’s function, and one’s possession and exercise of rights would be conditional on such performance. This argument seems a radicalisation of one made earlier by Oxford’s second most famous idealist, F.H Bradley, in his essay ‘My Station and Its Duties’ (Bradley 1927). Tawney’s own thoroughly moral critique of capitalism is that it dissociates rights, wealth and power from function. Share-holders and usurious bankers are foremost amongst those who have rights without duties, and he opposed all such free-riding upon those who work for the common good. Function or service is a moral virtue; acquisitiveness is a vice. One problem with which Tawney’s would now be confronted is the clear opposition in contemporary moral theory of utility to rights, which he combines into a single legitimation of acquisitiveness. Presumably, he could have happily cited their combination by John Stuart Mill, ‘the last and greatest of liberal thinkers’ (Tawney 1921: 102; he fails to acknowledge Green or ‘New Liberalism’), as a warrant for its elision. Instead he goes directly to Bentham, proposing that in arguing ‘that rights were derived from utility’, whilst failing to ‘push his analysis so far as to argue that any particular right was relative to any particular function’, Bentham had enabled ‘the English Utilitarians [to retain] something not unlike the substance of ’ ‘natural rights’, and enabled ‘absolute rights to property’ to persist in practice ‘as the unquestioned center of social organization’ long after they had been ‘discredited’ in theory (Tawney 1921: 18–19).3 For utilitarians, rights are justiiable by reference to their economic expediency and supposedly beneicial consequences. For Tawney, Smithian arguments for free market competition were as obsolete in the new era of corporate power (Clift and Tomlinson 2002: 324–5) as were Lockean arguments for individual rights. What Tawney objected to in utilitarianism was not its consequentialism but its detachment of social consequences from individual intentionality. He identiied morality with one’s practical concern for others. Like Penty, and like their distributivist contemporaries, he looked back to mediaeval Christendom as a time when economic activity was inseparable from ethics, and when society was intentionally organised in terms of function. Then, there had been no absolute right to property and all had their particular rights and duties within an ordered hierarchy. The task of socialism was now to do what the Church had done then, by educating people to think of their social responsibilities and obligations. What Tawney considered ‘essential … is that men should ix their 3 In this first British edition there follows an endorsement of ‘enlightenment’ absent from the earlier (Harcourt, Brace and Howe 1920) American edition. The British edition is similarly expanded in other cited passages. 181

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minds upon the idea of purpose, and give that idea pre-eminence’ (Tawney 1921: 96). Tawney’s opposition of function to acquisitiveness sets function on a very different path than from that taken in Maeztu’s opposition of it to liberty. Even if we may suppose that Tawney’s attention, like that of Hobson, was drawn by Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War to the possibility of making function the highest ethical principle, Tawney ends the introduction to his own book with an implicit critique of Maeztu. First, he repeats an account of productive work from an essay that looked forward to labour relations after the war: An industry … [is] a body of men associated … to win their living by providing the community with some service which it requires. organise it as you will … its function is service, its method is association. Because service is its function, an industry as a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation of which involves privilege. Because its method is association, the different parties within it have rights and duties towards each other, and their neglect or perversion involves oppression. (Tawney 1921: 6; Tawney 1918: 97–8)

In the earlier essay, Tawney made little further reference to function as a distinct ethical principle. Rather, the principle espoused was that of workers’ ‘economic liberty’ through collective self-management. in concluding The Acquisitive Society’s introduction, he goes on to combine the two principles in such a way as sublate Maeztu’s opposition of function, freedom and authority, with the qualiication only that economic authority should, like political authority, be democratic. This he does so in specifying the two ‘conditions of a right organization of industry are’ (Tawney 1921: 6): The irst principle is that industry should be subordinated to the community in such a way as to render the best service technically possible … and that those who render no service should not be paid at all, because it is of the essence of a function that it should ind its meaning in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end which it serves. The second is that its direction and government should be in the hands of persons who are responsible to those who are directed and governed, because it is the condition of economic freedom that men should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot control. The industrial problem … is a problem of right … and … is most acute among those sections of the working classes whose material misery is least. It is a question irst of Function, and secondly of Freedom. (Tawney 1921: 7–8)

Soon after the book’s publication, Tawney gave the series of lectures which became Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Like many others at the time, 182

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he was exercised by the question of why and how mediaeval Christendom had given rise to modern capitalism. Rather like Max Weber, he identiied Calvinism’s individualistic reformation of faith as capitalism’s unintentional cause. His own version of this historical paradox was that the Puritan principle ‘had been discipline; its practical result was liberty’ (Tawney 1938: 233). This Puritan principle was the ‘counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by … economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose’ (Tawney 1938: 194). The latter ‘doctrine was at once repressive and protective’ (Tawney 1938: 36), so that in combining function with liberty Tawney was refusing a return to that past. Individualism had irst been ‘denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justiied in the name of economic liberty’ (Tawney 1938: 27). This was a name that Tawney attempted to adopt and adapt, declaring ‘individual liberty’ to be ‘a question-begging phrase’ (Tawney 1938: 178). Already in his wartime essay, Tawney had juxtaposed a ‘negative conception of liberty’ as ‘absence of interference’ to ‘a more positive’ conception of liberty’s completion with ‘the opportunity of self-organisation’. This positive conception pointed to a resolution of the ‘inevitable contradiction’ he identiied between workers’ collective economic liberty and their functional accountability ‘to the larger sovereignty of the community’ and state (Tawney 1918: 101–2). in The Acquisitive Society, this theoretical resolution was achieved by workers’ common subordination to authority. Within an industry, authority, like rights, would correspond to function. A higher authority derives ‘from the necessity of combining different duties to attain a common end’ (Tawney 1921: 206), purposively pursued by the state apart from market mechanisms. ultimately, what was legitimate in freedom and property was, for him, as for German and British idealists, properly subsumed under the authority of the modern state, which had assumed the institutional role of ‘the temporal expression of spiritual obligations’ (Tawney 1938: 174). Therefore, for him, even if less so than for the Fabians, economic and social democratisation could take the form of the municipalised or nationalised ‘public corporation’, preserving, under state ownership, the functional division of management from workers.

Capitalist Corporatism

The immediate legacy of the Second World War, in Britain as much as anywhere, was a sense of shared national purposiveness and a desire for national reconstruction. in the general election held between the defeat of Germany and that of Japan, the Labour Party was, for the irst time, elected to government 183

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with a massive majority. At last, it could implement its welfare state, the National Health Service, and a policy of full employment. What followed was two or three decades of consensus politics, in which industries were nationalised and trade union leaders participated in making economic policy. A peculiar problem facing the enactment of a functional society in Britain was the resistance of the trade unions, which remained the ‘industrial wing’ of the British ‘labour movement’ and the inancier of its political wing. Their ‘voluntarist’ conception of their own traditional function remained that of free collective bargaining within the capitalist division of labour, which remained even under nationalisation. This traditional function was not at all that which the likes of Cole and Tawney imputed to unions and their members, of responsibly discharging an obligation to society and the common good. Rather, theirs was a responsibility to deine and ight for their members’ particular interest, through negotiation and strike. Unlike most of their continental counterparts, British trade unions therefore resisted political incorporation. The old idealist and Tawneyesque principle of function is the hidden motivation within T.H. Marshall’s still-famous 1949 lecture, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’. In it, Marshall celebrates centuries of native progress, in which class had been gradually displaced by national, political citizenship. Before the process began, ‘social rights’ derived from ‘local communities and functional associations’. These were replaced by contractual, ‘civil rights in the economic sphere’ (Marshall 1992: 14), in a process that had been famously described as that ‘from Status to Contract’ (Maine 1906: 174; emphasis omitted). In effect, Marshall recounted how that process had been replaced by one from the civil rights and duties of contract to the equal status of citizenship. Throughout, this process was one of increasing ‘social’ rights and duties. What was legally and socially ‘anomalous’ was workers’ exercise of ‘civil rights collectively’, through free collective bargaining, which ‘created a secondary system of industrial citizenship’ (Marshall 1992: 26; emphases added). Now, ‘government can no longer stand aloof from industrial disputes’, and its intervention ‘has been met … by trade union intervention in the work of government’ in ‘something like a joint discussion of policy’. Marshall’s moral point was that ‘the corresponding duties of citizenship cannot be ignored’, and that worker’s ‘acts should be inspired by a lively sense of responsibility towards the welfare of the community’ (Marshall 1992: 41). A welfare state requires the performance of industrial duties if it is to afford industrial and social rights. ‘When social relations were dominated by contract, the duty to work was not recognised’; now, that duty is ‘to put one’s heart into one’s job and work hard’ (Marshall 1992: 46). over the next quarter of a century the integration of trade unions into policy and politics grew. So too did the formal integration of the management of industrial capital. A Conservative government established the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) in 1962, and three years later, under 184

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a Labour government, the Confederation of British Industry was formed to represent capital in the Council, alongside government ministers and members of the Trade Union Congress, in discussion of policy on investment, wages, and even prices. The economy had been politicised, as was now the norm throughout europe. An American political scientist, Samuel Beer, was one of the irst to recognise the political signiicance of what was occurring, in a book irst published in 1965. When governments are committed to economic management, a group organised ‘on a productive function’ has ‘political power’ not simply because it can ‘refuse to perform its function in the economy’ but also because it can withhold ‘instrumentalities’ necessary for governmental effectiveness. Government will need the group to give it ‘advice’, so that it knows what is happening, ‘acquiescence’, since it will require the group to implement policy, and ‘approval’, so that policy will be seen to be legitimated by those who perform ‘the productive function’. Government itself will have ‘taken over functions once performed by … market mechanisms’ (Beer 1982: 320–31). The owl of Minerva really took light in the 1970s, after Phillipe Schmitter famously declared that, even after the defeat of fascism, it remained ‘the century of corporatism’ (Schmitter 1974). What was often called neo-corporatism was explained as a functionally necessary ‘organized capitalism’ by sociologists, a couple of whom went so far later that year as to predict the demise of capitalism and that ‘a new form of political-economic organisation’, corporatism, ‘will be introduced in Britain by 1980’, irrespective of which party governs (Pahl and Winkler 1974: 72). An ideal-type of corporatism was elaborated by Alan Cawson, in which it formed half of a ‘dual economy’ and of a ‘dual polity’ based on ‘functional representation’ (Cawson 1982, Cawson 1986). In the ‘liberal-democratic’ half of that polity ‘the means of representation … are formally separated from’ the executive, whereas ‘in corporatism those bodies which represent their members’ interests according to their function within the division of labour are also the instruments of policy implementation’ (Cawson 1983: 179–80). Corporatism was presented as a political and economic fact. The problem he acknowledged was that it lacked any ‘justiicatory theory’ (Cawson 1983: 182). Most theorists of neo-corporatism were indeed as distant from an express ethics as ever was any laissez-faire member of the Anti-Corn Law League. Neocorporatism was understood as a politics of class interest, premissed upon the division of labour from capital. The price of labour was being explicitly politicised but not moralised, whilst both left-wing (e.g. Arthur Scargill) and right-wing (e.g. Frank Chapple) trade union leaders justiied resistance to any extension of ‘industrial democracy’ down to the workplace or ‘the point of production’, whether in public or private corporations. Having no justiication beyond that of partisan power, corporatist political economy withered away 185

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with the Thatcherite ‘freeing’ of the labour market throughout the 1980s. The NEDC was inally abolished in 1992, 30 years after its creation. Its functionalist ‘tripartism’ of government, labour and capital disappeared to allow the resumption of liberal democratic party politics, as inance along with labour was freed from the state, parliament was freed from rubber-stamping economic policies bargained elsewhere, and industries were left free to collapse. Possibilities closed for criticism from the left by the likes of the institute for Workers’ Control, which claimed a lineage from guild socialism (Coates and Topham 1968). Labour was defeated and rendered ‘lexible’, the professions were picked off one by one, and ‘a manager’s right to manage’ was asserted, irrespective of function. Labour’s party was deserted by an expressly social democratic one, its ex-Fabians founding a ‘Tawney Society’ before attempting to rewind twentieth-century party politics by joining the Liberal Party. The party they left then imitated both them and new Liberalism by distancing itself from the unions, disowning corporatism, and declaring itself ‘new Labour’. When unregulated and functionless inance inally crashed, social democracy itself lacked any justiicatory theory. Now, ‘socialism’ once again denotes little or nothing apart from liberalism.

Toward an Ethical Conclusion

The original justiication for socialism was sociological. Whereas patriarchal farmers in America could perhaps pretend that the land they fenced off had been terra nullius, that the fruits of what they planted were solely theirs, and that they had contracted with one another to form their society and republic, people back in europe thought they knew differently. Production was a social activity. ‘economy’ might name an individual virtue but the economy extended beyond any patriarchal household, to name a universal that the state tried and failed to control. The autonomous individual was, at most, an ideal. The autarchic individual was an impossibility. The new discipline of sociology followed that of economics in pretending to the status of science. if this did not necessarily imply the separation of facts from non-market values, it nonetheless implied that values should be understood as social facts. Individualism was widely judged to be a factual and moral iction. Socialism described both a fact and a value. If production, distribution and exchange were social activities, then it seemed to follow that they were rightly subjected to social control. One did not have to be a Marxist to see the logic of understanding capitalism as a mode of social production, or to infer from that understanding an ethic that each member of society should receive the fruits of that production in accordance with their functional contribution or, even, 186

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according to their need. A scientiic understanding of society was widely seen to justify its reform. Distributive justice was only one of socialism’s ethical aims. Reform of society was to be undertaken in the cause of improving both the conditions and the character of its inhabitants. The ‘social question’ of a century and more ago was that of how to improve the conditions and character of the working class. The industrial proletarian was widely perceived to be exploited, alienated, and demoralised. one contrast was with the functionless and idle rich, corrupted by luxury and acquisitiveness. Another was with the industrious professional, and socialists’ aim was to reform workers’ conditions in order to reform workers’ character in accordance with modern, middle class norms. For Marx, following Hegel, modernity has socialised the self in a way unprecedented in earlier social formations. Where Hegel saw the modern individual as able to reach a universal consciousness through relection upon one’s particular role within the whole and in relation to the state, Marx thought proletarians’ relection on their role would prove revolutionary and that truly universal conditions and consciousness will be possible only in a post-revolutionary future. Morality must wait. Guild socialists took a different view. Like Hegel and his British idealist followers, and far more than neo-corporatists, they saw ethical value in particular activities that could be understood as contributing to a common, universal good. Ethics perceived the universal in the particular. Socialism, as a political project, concerned the ordering of particulars to that common good. ethical socialism was concerned with raising people’s consciousness of the common good, and with reforming society as both a means to and a consequence of such understanding. The idea of useful work was opposed both to useless toil and the idle rich. it could not simply be assumed that capitalism was a functionally integrated society. Rather, every industry should be purposefully ordered by its participants to perform its function within the economy as a whole, and therefore industries should be purposefully coordinated to the common good by their representatives. economy should be subordinated to a newly social democracy and industrial polity, in which form would follow function. For Tawney, ‘the course of wisdom in the affairs of industry is … to consider the end for which economic activity is carried on and then to adapt economic organization to it’ (Tawney 1921: 98). After the failures of twentieth-century socialism, the loudest echo of Tawney’s ethical appeal lies in the moral and political sociology of Alasdair MacIntyre. In the terms of his After Virtue, socially beneicial activities are ‘practices’ whereas organisations are ‘institutions’ that should be adapted to pursuit of goods internal to those practices (MacIntyre 2007: 194). This better expresses the original inspiration for guild socialism than even that principle of function elaborated in The Acquisitive Society. Ultimately, Tawney accepted the post-1945 conversion of industry ‘into a responsible public or semi-public function in the traditional 187

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english manner, by its submission to public control, whether in the form of regulation or of ownership’ (Tawney 1964: 230). Such a compromise could not be accommodated within MacIntyre’s conceptual scheme. Whereas Tawney recounted a history in which Smith’s conception of economic order is part of the progress toward a functional society, MacIntyre opposes Smith’s intellectual tradition with one originating from Aristotle (MacIntyre 1988). Crucial to this Aristotelian tradition is the idea that one should learn from others how to become an independent practical reasoner (MacIntyre 1999), responsible for one’s judgements and in control of one’s actions, especially when acting for the sake of common or political goods. On this Aristotelian account, the economy should never be conceived as an object of enquiry apart from the ethical ends of its practitioners.

References

Beer, S.H. 1982 (3rd ed.). Modern British Politics: Parties and Pressure Groups in the Collectivist Age. London: Faber and Faber. Cawson, A. 1982. Corporatism and Welfare: State Policy and State Intervention in Britain. London: Heinemann. Cawson, A. 1983. Functional Representation and Democratic Politics: Towards a Corporatist Democracy?, in Democratic Theory and Practice, edited by G. Duncan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cawson, A. 1986. Corporatism and Political Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Clift, B. and Tomlinson, J. 2002. Tawney and the Third Way. Journal of Political Ideologies, 7(3), 315–31. Coates, K. and Topham, T. (eds) 1968. Industrial Democracy in Great Britain: A Book of Readings and Witnesses for Workers’ Control. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Cole, G.D.H. 1913. The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade Unionism. London: G. Bell and Sons. Cole, G.D.H. 1915. Conlicting Social Obligations. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 15, 140–59. Cole, G.D.H. 1920a. Social Theory. London: Methuen. Cole, G.D.H. 1920b. Guild Socialism Re-stated. London: Leonard Parsons. Cole, G.D.H. 1937. Practical Economics: Or Studies in Economic Planning, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Elliott, W.Y. 1928. The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional State. New York: Macmillan. Ellis, E.D. 1923. Guild Socialism and Politics. American Political Science Review, 17(4), 584–96. 188

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Emmet, D. 1958. Function, Purpose and Powers: Some Concepts in the Study of Individuals and Societies. London: Macmillan. Foote, G. (3rd ed.) 1997. The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Goldman, L. 2013. The Life of R.H. Tawney: Socialism and History. London: Bloomsbury. Hirst, P.Q. (ed.) 1989. The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis, and H.J. Laski. London: Routledge. Hirst, P.Q. 1994. Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hobson, S.G. 1931. The House of Industry: A New Estate of the Realm. London: P.S. King and Son. Hobson, S.G. 1936. Functional Socialism. London: Stanley Nott. Hsiao, K.Ch. 1927. Political Pluralism: A Study in Contemporary Theory. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Jackson, P. 2012. Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine. London: Bloomsbury. Knight, K. 2007. Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre. Cambridge: Polity Press. Laborde, C. 2000. Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–25. Basingstoke: Macmillan. MacIntyre, A. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. 2007 (3rd ed.). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Maeztu, R. 1916. Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War: A Critique of Authority and Liberty as the Foundations of the Modern State and an Attempt to Base Societies on the Principle of Function. London: George Allen and Unwin. Maeztu, R. 1917. The Principle of Nationality. The New Age, 15 February, 366–7. Maeztu, R. 1934. Defensa de la Hispanidad. Madrid: Ediciones Fax. Magid, H.M. 1941. English Political Pluralism: The Problem of Freedom and Organization. New York: Columbia University Press. Maine, H.S. 1906 (1st ed. with Frederick Pollock’s notes). Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray. Marshall, T.H. 1992. Citizenship and Social Class, in Citizenship and Social Class, edited by T.H. Marshall and T. Bottomore. London: Pluto Press. Nicholls, D. 1994 (2nd ed.). The Pluralist State: The Political Ideas of J.N. Figgis and his Contemporaries. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Orage, A.R. (ed.) 1914. National Guilds: An Inquiry in to the Wage System and the Way Out. London: G. Bell and Sons. Pahl, R.E. and Winkler, J.T. 1974. The Coming Corporatism. New Society, 10 October, 72–6. 189

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Penty, A.J. 1906. The Restoration of the Gild System. Bloomsbury: Swan Sonnenschein. Perkin, H. 1996. The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World. London: Routledge. Por, O. 1923a. Guilds and Co-operatives in Italy, trans. E. Townshend. London: Labour Publishing Company. Por, O. 1923b, Fascism, trans. E. Townshend. London: Labour Publishing Company. Runciman, D. 1997. Pluralism and the Personality of the State, Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. Russell, B. 1916. Principles of Social Reconstruction. London: George Allen and unwin. Russell, B. 1919a. Why I am a Guildsman. The Guildsman, September, 3. Russell, B.1919b. Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schmitter, Ph. C. 1974. Still the Century of Corporatism? Review of Politics, 36(1), 85–131. Smith, A. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner and W.B. Todd. Oxford: Oxford university Press. Stears, M. 2006 (2nd ed.). Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926. Oxford: Oxford university Press. Stirling Taylor, G.R. 1919. The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities. London: George Allen and Unwin. Stocks, J.L. 1932. Representation, in J.L. Stocks, The Limits of Purpose and Other Essays. London: Ernest Benn. Tawney, R.H. 1918. No title, in Labour and Capital After the War, edited by S.J. Chapman. London: John Murray, 93–128. Tawney, R.H. 1921. The Acquisitive Society. London: G. Bell and Sons. Tawney, R.H. 1938. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Tawney, R.H. 1964 (4th ed.). Equality. London: George Allen and Unwin. Tomlinson, J. 1982. The Unequal Struggle? British Socialism and the Capitalist Enterprise. London: Methuen. Wright, A.W. 1979. G.D.H. Cole and Socialist Democracy. Oxford: Oxford university Press.

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Chapter 11

Towards a Critical Ethical Economy1 russell Keat

about 50 years ago, several previously unavailable or unnoticed texts written by marx in the early 1840s began to attract the attention of numerous scholars and commentators. the ensuing stream of publications brought to light a distinctively ethical Marx, a very different theoretical igure from the previously familiar one.2 couched in a philosophical language of alienation, these early writings condemned capitalism for its destructive impact on the development and exercise of human powers and capacities, undermining the possibility of genuinely social relationships and of meaningful work. the humanistic marxism that emerged from these texts and commentaries was deeply attractive to many (though by no means all) of their readers; marx’s thought could now be seen as contributing to the broader tradition of ethical socialism, previously a frequent target of marxist criticism. of course, it was argued by some that marx himself soon abandoned this early ethical critique, and that we should follow him in adopting instead the strictly scientiic approach of his later work. in interpretive terms, this periodisation of marx’s work was itself soon to be undermined by another ‘previously unavailable’ text, the 1857 Grundrisse (the irst major English translation of which was published in 1972). more importantly, i shall argue, this response depended on a misconception of ethics and science as mutually exclusive, rather than as distinct but complementary elements of critique. However, it is not these internal debates within the marxist tradition that mainly concern me here. rather it is the remarkable (and in my view, regrettable) lack of impact that this ethical critique of capitalism has had on the various non1 this is a revised version of a paper published in German translation as ‘die ethische Kritik ökonomischer institutionen’, trans. catherine davies, in rahel Jaeggi and daniel Loick (eds) Marx’ Kritik der Gesellschaft. Texte zu Philosophie, Ökonomie und Politik, Berlin: akademie, 2013. i am especially grateful to Lynn dobson and other members of the political theory research group in Edinburgh for their comments on an earlier version of the paper. 2 these are too numerous to list here. my personal favourites include Kamenka 1962/72 and Petrovic 1967, the latter of particular interest in relation to the ‘Praxis’ group in (the former) yugoslavia.

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marxist schools of social criticism that have dominated the intellectual scene since the 1970s. This was not, I suggest, because of its perceived deiciencies in substantive terms, but because it represented a kind of critique that was deemed illegitimate from various philosophical or meta-theoretical standpoints. Sometimes this was because any form of normative critique was rejected as illegitimate. in some cases this was based simply on scepticism about the cognitive credentials of all kinds of ‘value-judgement’. In others, including various forms of post-modernism, such judgements were themselves treated with particular suspicion, and ‘criticised’ through their links to supposedly spurious modes of cultural authority or unrecognised forms of power. But of greater interest, for my purposes here, have been those schools of social criticism that, although fully committed to some form of normative criticism (and hence often hostile to post-modernism), have nonetheless excluded normative criticism of a speciically ethical kind. most notably, this has been true both of the neutralist liberalism that has been such a major force in Anglo-American political philosophy since the 1970s, and of the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas.3 in both cases, a distinction is drawn between ethics and morality, the ‘good’ and the ‘right’.4 in ethics, we are dealing with (normative) questions about the nature and sources of human lourishing, of ‘the good life for humans’; in morality, by contrast, with (normative) issues of justice, including the equitable distribution of resources and other matters of right or rights. In both of these inluential schools of social criticism, ethical judgements are rejected as a proper basis for social criticism (and/or for state action), and the critical evaluation of economic institutions is restricted to issues of justice or right.5 in this respect they depart radically (and often explicitly) from the theoretical and political tradition of socialism, which has typically couched its critique of capitalism (and its depiction of a socialist future) in both moral and ethical terms: in terms, for example, of both exploitation and alienation.6 and to these may be added a third dimension of socialism’s normative repertoire: a concern 3 See Keat 2008a for an extended discussion of the exclusion of ethics in these two schools of thought; Honneth 1996 explores the different conceptions of social philosophy associated with them. 4 although Habermas has for a long time employed this distinction, conceptually, it is only more recently that he has named it in this way: see the Preface to Habermas 1993. in this more recent work (especially Habermas 1996) he accepts the role of ethics in political debate, but not in critical social theory. For criticism of his conception of ethics, see Keat 2009b and 2009c. 5 This restriction of social criticism to issues of justice is criticised by Honneth 2005, although his conception of ethics in terms of ‘social pathologies’ differs from the broadly aristotelian one i shall employ here. 6 It should be noted that Marx, in his early writings, rejected ‘the standpoint of right/ morality’, subjecting this to an ethical critique (see Lukes 1985). I believe he was wrong to do so, and that this damaged the ‘humanistic credentials’ of his early (and indeed later) work. 192

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with issues of domination and freedom, and hence with principles for the proper exercise of power. in my view, this broader socialist tradition is correct in its inclusion of ethics as a legitimate and signiicant element in the normative critique of economic institutions. in particular, i believe it can be shown that state action aimed at ethically speciied goals does not necessarily threaten important liberal principles: state neutrality – the exclusion of ethical considerations as a basis for state action – is not required by liberalism.7 in more positive terms, i want to support the philosophical legitimacy and political value of what might be seen as the ethical analogue of critical political economy: a critical ethical economy, concerned with the critical evaluation of economic institutions in ethical terms, in terms, that is, of the kinds of life they make it possible (or impossible) for people to live, of the kinds of goods and ills they make (or fail to make) available. the ethical critique of capitalism in marx’s early writings should be regarded as a contribution to this more broadly deined critical enterprise. The best way of showing our respect for these texts is to defend and develop this intellectual project, even if this leads us to revise or abandon many of their speciic claims. We should neither reject Marx’s ethical critique of capitalism as a matter of philosophical principle, nor slavishly reproduce its speciic content. Instead we should assess its merits and defects in substantive terms. in later sections of this chapter I shall argue there are signiicant problems in this critique, which make it less than fully persuasive. But irst I want to suggest certain requirements that need to be met by any normative critique of capitalism, whether or not this is a speciically ethical critique.

Normative critique and institutional alternatives

the most important of these requirements is that any such critique must show not only (i) that the economic institutions of capitalism display certain features that are normatively objectionable, but also (ii) that there is some possible alternative set of economic institutions that would be normatively preferable (Keat and o’neill 2011). if we can establish only (i), but not (ii) – a preferable alternative – we have grounds only for criticising capitalism, but not for rejecting it (either in theory or in practice). if we cannot specify some institutional alternative to capitalism that would remove its normative defects, and do so without generating additional ones of its own, then capitalism might still be better than any alternative system, despite these defects.

7 See Keat 2009b and 2012, where i argue for a position termed ‘liberal perfectionism’, or perfectionism subject to liberal constraints. 193

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Establishing both (i) and (ii) is thus crucial to the case for socialism, both intellectually and politically. We need to know if what would be normatively preferable is institutionally possible, and hence – at least in broad terms – what those institutions would be like, and why they might reasonably be expected to be better. unfortunately, marx himself often seemed not to accept this: for example, in ridiculing the ‘utopian socialists’ for their ‘blueprints’, and in largely conining his own depiction of a future communist society to its normative rather than its institutional character. But we should not follow him in this.8 the failure to establish plausible models of normatively preferable economic institutions has seriously damaged the case for socialism in the past, and rectifying this failure remains its central challenge. an important feature of normative critique, understood in the way i have presented it, is that it requires a combination of both normative and empirical judgements, each kind of judgement having its own criteria of validity or mode of justiication. So, for example (with respect to (i)), to object to capitalism on the grounds of its injustice requires both that a speciic principle of justice be deined and justiied, and that capitalism be shown in fact to be unjust when judged according to this criterion. Correspondingly, this criticism may be rejected either by rejecting the principle of justice invoked by the socialist critic, on normative or philosophical grounds, or by arguing that capitalist societies are not in fact unjust, when judged in these terms. This latter disagreement is essentially empirical or scientiic, and can be settled independently of the former.9 (The same points of principle would apply to a speciically ethical objection: for example, to the alienated character of work in capitalism). Likewise (with respect to (ii)), any justiication of alternative economic institutions must not only show that they can avoid the undesirable features of capitalism that have been speciied, but also that these alternative institutions will not generate defects of their own that are more signiicant, in normative terms, than those they avoid. So in addition to the empirical claims involved here, distinctively normative judgements must be made about which of these kinds of defects are more important. (the more general point raised by this is that not everything we have good reason to value may be institutionally corealisable, so that normative priority judgements may often need to be made). Further, what I have called ‘empirical’ or ‘scientiic’ issues go a good deal deeper, in theoretical terms, than i have so far indicated. one needs to know not only whether actual capitalist societies display certain normative defects, but also whether this is because of features inherent to capitalism, or for other 8 there might be a rationale for marx’s view if one adopts a conception of historical change in which there is no place for appeals to political action based on normative considerations, but this is a different matter. 9 For a fuller account and defence of this view see Keat 1981, chapter 2. 194

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reasons. and then, in the former, case, one needs to understand what it is about capitalism that is responsible for these defects. this is especially important in attempting to specify what might be normatively superior institutional alternatives. Of particular signiicance here is that what has so far been referred to simply as ‘capitalism’ is better understood as consisting in at least two, largely distinct sets of institutions: those concerning the form of property ownership applying to the means of production, namely, private ownership (and hence class-divisions, wagelabour and so on); and those concerning the mode of economic coordination and resource allocation, namely market institutions (and hence production for exchange, competition between irms, and so on). That is: capitalist economies (of the kind that marx was concerned with) are more perspicuously described as capitalist market economies. So one needs to know whether their normative defects are due to their capitalist or to their market elements. this distinction between the capitalist and market elements of capitalism has been crucial for the advocates of market socialism, i.e. of a socialist market economy as a preferable alternative to capitalism.10 By a ‘socialist market economy’ I mean one in which capitalist irms are replaced by cooperatives or self-managed enterprises that either own their own capital or lease it from an outside investment agency, but which nonetheless compete with one another in the pursuit of ‘proitable’ sales in a framework of market institutions. 11 What market socialists have argued is that in a system of this kind one can eliminate what is objectionable about capitalism without losing what is valuable about markets. What is valuable about markets, they argue, has been amply demonstrated by the failings of state socialism, the combination of state ownership and central planning that has been, at least in practice, the main ‘socialist’ alternative to capitalism. State socialism failed, they claim, in both economic and political terms: it lacked economic eficiency and dynamism, and it failed to protect certain basic individual rights, including the political freedoms essential to democracy. in both cases, they argue, this was due to the absence of market institutions, which are necessary (though not suficient) conditions for economic eficiency and political liberty. But is it true, as market socialists claim, that what is primarily objectionable about capitalist market economies is due to their capitalist, and not to their market, character? Here, i suggest, the distinction between ethical and nonethical grounds for normative judgements is especially signiicant. If we put aside 10 advocates of market socialism include Selucky 1979, nove 1983, and miller 1990; for critical discussions, see Pierson 1995 and ollman 1998. 11 there are important debates about appropriate forms of ownership for market socialism, many of which are discussed, for example, in Estrin 1989, but these are not directly relevant to the arguments that follow. 195

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speciically ethical considerations, and limit our normative evaluation to issues of justice and the proper exercise of power, it is the capitalist rather than the market character of capitalist market economies that is normatively problematic.12 Capitalism, it might be argued, stands condemned for the injustice of its relations of production, the absence of genuine freedom and equality in the contractual exchanges between workers and owners, the hierarchical organisation of capitalist enterprises, the inequalities of wealth and political power stemming from its class-divisions, and so on. these normative defects of capitalist market economies are eliminated in socialist market economies, through the abolition of wage-labour and the democratisation of decision-making within cooperative enterprises. thus the possibility of market socialism enables a normative critique of capitalism in non-ethical terms to meet the requirement of there being a preferable institutional alternative. However, the same cannot straightforwardly be said if the evaluation of capitalism is extended to include speciically ethical considerations. In particular, it seems reasonably clear that marx’s ethical critique of capitalism in his early writings – including On the Jewish Question (1843), the Excerpt-Notes (1844), and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) – is directed primarily at its market character, and hence at any kind of market economy, whether capitalist or socialist. So if Marx’s ethical objections to the market are correct, a socialist market economy can at best be only a partial realisation of socialist aspirations, the full realisation of which requires some alternative to market institutions. However, those ethical objections, even if justiied, can only provide adequate grounds for rejecting the market if some plausible account of ethically preferable institutions can be provided. and if the economic institutions of state socialism are rejected, for the kinds of reasons indicated earlier, what would be needed is an institutional alternative that is ‘neither state nor market’. Further, such an alternative must be able to ‘retain’ whatever is properly regarded as normatively desirable about these rejected economic arrangements, such as the compatibility of the market with various individual rights and its economic dynamism.13 However, the need to engage in this complex project of institutional design and normative evaluation arises only if an ethical critique of the market of the kind provided by Marx is justiied. Without trying to provide a systematic assessment, I shall now suggest that there are suficient reasons for doubting the strength of his arguments to keep open the possibility that market institutions 12 Here I ignore some difficult problems about justice in the distribution of income under market socialism, though i do not think these are insurmountable. 13 thus ‘associational socialists’, such as o’neill (1998), argue for economic institutions that preserve the individual rights historically achieved by the market. this would require them to reject the claim made by Selucky (1979, ch. 5) and others that markets are a necessary condition for such rights, and to argue instead ‘only’ that state socialism is a sufficient condition for their absence. 196

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have a proper place in a socialist economy. Whether or not this ethical defence of market socialism succeeds, it should at least serve to illustrate the kinds of issues involved in an ethical critique of market institutions.

Marx’s Ethical Critique of the Market

At least three speciic targets may be identiied in Marx’s ethical critique of the market: the amoral character of the social relations implied by production for exchange; the subordination of political community to the atomism of civil society; and the absence of opportunities for meaningful work. the development and exercise of valuable and distinctively human capacities for mutual concern, collective autonomy and individual self-realisation are thereby undermined. I shall consider the irst two of these criticisms now, reserving the third for more extensive discussion in later sections of the chapter. in the Excerpt-Notes, marx presents a scathing picture of the moral character of the relationships between producers and consumers implied by production for exchange. drawing on extensive passages from James mill’s Political Economy, he argues that each party to such exchanges is concerned exclusively with their own interests, regarding the needs and desires of the other only as a means of satisfying their own, and prevented only by the fear of sanctions from gaining possession of the other’s product or money by theft or plunder. in these and other respects, he argues, market exchange is in stark contrast to the mutual concern and unconditional responsiveness to needs displayed by truly human or social relationships. However, it might be objected that this ethical critique of exchange both misrepresents its character and judges it by inappropriate standards. I shall consider each of these points in turn. in the Excerpt-Notes, it might be argued, marx relies uncritically on the depiction of market exchange presented by James mill (and by many other economists, both at that time and since). But the adequacy of this picture of normatively unconstrained self-interest is open to question. durkheim, for example, famously argued that contractual exchange is a normatively constituted relationship, the participants in which ind themselves bound by obligations that express particular social norms of justice (Durkheim 1893/1984).14 and classical liberals have typically emphasised the freedom and equality of the parties to market exchange, favourably contrasting its moral character to that of feudal relations. indeed, adam Smith maintained that one of the chief 14 alternatively, it might be argued that marx’s account applies more to the ‘classical’ form of contract typical of anglo-american capitalism than to the ‘relational’ form to be found in Japan: see dore 1983. 197

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beneits of commercial society was the replacement of hierarchy and deference by relations of social equality between independent individuals.15 Further, when marx himself returned to a discussion of exchange, in the 1857 Grundrisse, the picture he presented was much closer to Smith’s than to mill’s, and his attitude towards it correspondingly less hostile (and more nuanced) than before. Praising the ‘personal independence’ achieved historically through market exchange, by contrast with the ‘personal dependence’ of feudal relations, he nonetheless drew attention to the ways in which the formal freedom and equality of exchange relations are undermined by the realities of the labour contract, and to the hierarchical nature of relationships within the capitalist enterprise. But as radoslav Selucky (1979) has noted, in his defence of market socialism against marx’s critique of the market, these criticisms are applicable only to capitalist, and not to socialist, market economies.16 Selucky goes on to criticise marx’s further claim, in the Grundrisse, that the personal independence achieved through the market can and should be retained in the non-market economy that is necessary, in marx’s view, if the failure of markets to enable ‘directly social’ production (and to free people from ‘objective dependence’) is to be rectiied. Selucky argues that personal independence requires market institutions, and is inevitably undermined by the kind of societal-level ‘organisation of labour’ with which marx wished to replace them (Selucky 1979: 9–56). the issues raised by this are too complex to consider here, so i shall turn instead to the second problem noted earlier about marx’s Excerpt-Notes, that of the ethical ideal invoked in criticising exchange. By judging exchange relations against an ideal of mutual benevolence and unconditional responsiveness to others’ needs, it could be argued that marx is applying a normatively inappropriate standard, one that is appropriate only for certain kinds of personal (and particularistic) relationships. More speciically, according to this view, we should accept the need for, and the value of, a variety of different kinds of social activities and relationships, each with their respective moral norms and institutional forms, of which market exchange is one, and friendship, kinship, citizenship, and so on, are others. We should therefore resist the idea that there is some single model of ‘true sociality’ to which all kinds of social relations should conform (a view which marx arguably retained in the Grundrisse, despite other departures from his earlier position). to defend the ethical acceptability of exchange is not, therefore, to endorse it as the model for

15 this aspect of Smith’s position has recently been emphasised in Satz 2010. on the classical liberal view of exchange, see Booth 1994; for discussion, see Keat 2013. 16 Selucky, a czech economist and philosopher, was an important political and theoretical figure in the 1968 Prague Spring, and his later book presents an exceptionally illuminating critique of marx from a market socialist standpoint. For an analysis of the role of intellectuals (including Selucky) in the Prague Spring, see Karabel 1990. 198

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all social relationships; nor, correspondingly, should it be criticised because it is not like the relations between friends, family members, or citizens.17 now marx (or his defenders) might respond by saying that this picture of ethical and institutional differentiation, with the market as merely one institutional domain amongst several, is empirically naïve, since it ignores the ways in which the market, due to its inherently expansive nature, tends constantly to invade or ‘colonise’ non-market spheres, turning every relationship into one of exchange, reducing every form of value to that of price, transforming everything into a purchasable commodity, and reducing all qualitatively distinct and incommensurable values to a single measure. However, without denying the colonising tendencies of the market, it is also important to recognise that the very possibility of what we now conceive as colonisation depends upon the kind of institutional differentiation that emerged historically ‘hand-in-hand’ with the emergence of market economies; it is this that distinguishes them from their pre-market predecessors in which, one might argue, the actual and potential scope of money was in many respects less limited or restricted than in market societies.18 the proper response, then, to the colonising tendencies of the market may be not to replace it by something else, but to establish effective boundaries around it, using the powers of the state to prohibit the sale and purchase of various goods, to support the non-market provision of others, and so on (anderson 1990; Keat 1993, 2000; Satz 2010). Establishing and maintaining such boundaries, as both Walzer (1983) and Habermas (1987, 1996) have argued, is a key responsibility of citizens in a democratic polity. Furthermore, i would argue, this can best be seen as one element in a much wider set of political responsibilities, that crucially include what might be called the ‘instituting’ of markets themselves: the use of state powers to deine and enforce the various rights and obligations that serve to constitute market economies as such, including the nature and scope of property rights and of contractual exchange (and hence of rules about who is permitted to buy or sell what kinds of goods, under what conditions, and so on). that this is a possible way of conceiving (and enacting) the relationship between politics and markets provides a possible response to marx’s depiction of this relationship in his critique of ‘political alienation’ in On The Jewish Question. there he criticises what he calls the ‘contradiction’ or ‘opposition’ between civil society and the state, between the egoism of market actors and the communality of citizens. But what exactly is objectionable about this ‘contradiction’? I have 17 indeed, there is a strong case against economic transactions being modelled on those of friendship, for example, and hence in favour of their highly impersonal nature, as Selucky argues (1979: 170–73). 18 cf. marx’s comments on the differentiation of politics and economics in capitalist, as distinct from feudal, societies, in the Grundrisse. 199

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already suggested there is no good reason to regard the differences between these modes of social activity as essentially problematic, as marx apparently does. nor should we regard it as motivationally impossible for people to act on the basis of different norms in different institutional locations: there is no contradiction, in the sense of psychological impossibility, between thinking in terms of the common good, as a citizen, and in terms of one’s own interests as an economic agent. marx also argues in On The Jewish Question that in market societies the political sphere has an essentially subordinate role in relation to the economic sphere: that the ‘rights of citizens’ are exercised only or primarily to support ‘the rights of man’, the rights (to property and security etc.) of market actors. the ideal is thus subordinated to the non-ideal, with politics condemned to serving the latter’s purposes rather than its own. But what i have said above implies the possibility of a different understanding (and practice) of this relationship: a recognition that ‘the rights of man’, or at least the rights essential to market institutions, are the creation of a political community, using the state’s powers to establish and maintain economic institutions it regards as beneicial to its members’ needs and interests, who thus share collective responsibility for, and control over, the market domain. But this control does not involve a ‘direct politicisation’ of the economy; nor does it involve ‘overcoming the separation of the political and economic spheres’ by re-shaping the latter on the model provided by the former. But why should any political community regard market institutions as serving the needs and interests of its members? Whatever the merits of markets in terms of economic eficiency, wealth-creating dynamism and individual liberties, no defence of them can avoid addressing what is, for marx, arguably their central ethical defect, the generation of work that is so devoid of any opportunity to develop and distinctively human capacities that it can be performed only for instrumental reasons: to acquire the necessities of life rather than to express one’s creative and productive powers. However, despite the richness and suggestiveness of marx’s ethical critique of alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, i shall not comment directly on it here. instead, i shall consider the implications of market institutions for the nature and value of human work from the theoretical perspective provided by the ethical ideal of social practices, as deined and developed by alasdair macintyre. i shall suggest that macintyre’s conception of work conducted as a practice, whilst belonging to broadly the same ethical tradition as marx’s conception of non-alienated labour, is in certain respects superior to it. 19 But i shall also argue that macintyre shares with marx an unduly negative view of the implications of market institutions for work of this kind. 19 Kamenka (1962/1972) provides a re-interpretation of marx’s ethics of production through the work of the Scottish-australian philosopher John anderson, which brings it quite 200

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MacIntyre’s Conception of Practices20

in After Virtue, macintyre argues that the institutional character of modern market economies is inherently antithetical to the conduct of economic production as a practice. a practice, he says, is any ‘complex form of socially established cooperative activity’ in which goods that are internal to the activity are realised ‘in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence that are appropriate to’, and partly deine the nature of, that activity (MacIntyre 1981: 175). a wide range of social activities can potentially be practices, including the various arts and sciences, the conduct of politics and households, sports and games, and ‘productive’ activities such as ishing and farming, and the making of objects that satisfy human needs. Two elements in MacIntyre’s deinition of practices require some elaboration. First, standards of excellence. Every practice involves a set of standards that serve to identify what counts as a good or bad (genuine or spurious, exemplary or worthless) instance of the activity concerned. it is by reference to these standards that the success of people’s performance of the activity, and the value of their respective contributions to the practice, are judged. When individuals engage in a practice, they must be willing, at least initially, to subject their own choices and tastes to the authority of its standards. Second, internal goods, and the contrast with what he terms ‘external’ ones, namely money, power, and prestige or status. the internal goods of a practice can be identiied only by reference to the speciic nature of the practice concerned, and its particular standards: for example (mine, not macintyre’s), the elegance or explanatory power of a scientiic theory; the truthfulness or affective power of a theatrical performance. The ability to appreciate and enjoy such goods is hence dependent on engagement in, or familiarity with, the relevant practice. By contrast, the nature of external goods does not depend on that of the activities through which they are acquired. When people engage in such activities in the pursuit of external goods, what would count as success in terms of a practice’s own standards is valued only instrumentally, as a means to achieving goods that could be acquired by other means, and not intrinsically, as is the case with internal goods, which are achieved through success in the participant’s primary aims of performing the relevant activity well and contributing to the practice itself. Internal and external goods differ also in the ‘exclusivity’ of the beneits they produce. those who possess external goods do so to the exclusion of others who do not, and in the competition for external goods, there are necessarily both winners and losers. By contrast, although competition may also close to the conception of practices developed by macintyre. 20 this section draws on ‘consumer sovereignty and the integrity of practices’, and ‘markets, firms and practices’, in Keat 2000: 19–32 and 111–32. 201

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be involved in achieving internal goods, such competition is itself conducted by reference to the shared standards and purposes of the practice concerned, and what emerges from it ‘ … is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice’. (macintyre 1981: 178). macintyre insists, however, that external goods are necessary for practices, since practices cannot survive or lourish for any signiicant length of time without the support of institutions, and institutions essentially involve the use of external goods. thus: Practices must not be confused with institutions. chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions. institutions are characteristically and necessarily concerned with what i have called external goods. they are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards. (macintyre 1981: 181)

ideally, the institutional use of external goods should enhance the practice’s ability to pursue and develop its particular goals, to operate in accordance with its standards, and to generate for its participants the shared appreciation and enjoyment of its internal goods. But in MacIntyre’s view this positive role for institutions is dificult to ensure, since external goods always have the potential, and perhaps an inherent tendency, to undermine the integrity of practices: ‘ … the ideals and creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution … ’, and ‘ … the cooperative care for the common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution’. (macintyre 1981: 181). it is partly for this reason that he emphasises the role of the moral virtues, especially those of courage, honesty and justice, in enabling practitioners to resist the dangers presented by external goods. macintyre’s conception of practices provides us, i would argue, with an ethically attractive and philosophically illuminating picture of what human production could be like ‘at its best’. Like marx’s conception of non-alienated labour, it displays its aristotelian heritage in its focus on the value of human self-activity directed towards intrinsically valuable goals, while (rightly) rejecting aristotle’s view that human work cannot be a genuine form of praxis. 21 But it is also, i suggest, superior to marx’s position in several important respects. First, by emphasising the role of intersubjective standards in the conduct of practices, and the ways in which their internal goods depend on the moral character of their participants’ relationships with one another, it avoids what is arguably a tendency in marx towards an unduly individualistic and ‘expressivist’ 21 For sympathetic appraisals of macintyre’s conception of practices in relation to work, see Breen 2007 and Knight 2007: 144–67. 202

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ideal of human creativity. Second, by insisting that work is only one amongst many kinds of social activity that can in principle be practices, it avoids marx’s apparent privileging of economic production over other social domains as the primary ‘location’ for human lourishing, for the realisation of what is distinctively human. in this respect (though perhaps not in others), the concept of practices may avoid important feminist objections to Marx’s privileging of production over reproduction. third, by insisting on the need for institutions, and hence on the role of money, power and status, it steers us away from regarding these external goods as inherently antithetical to the possibilities for human lourishing provided by practices, including those of production, and instead directs our attention to issues of institutional design, including the design of institutions that are favourable to the conduct of economic production as a practice, and which can thus be presented as a viable alternative to those that are criticised for being unfavourable to this. it may be helpful, here, to distinguish between various levels at which these issues of institutional design need to be addressed. When macintyre talks about institutions, he seems mainly to have in mind what might be called ‘individual organisations’: his examples are hospitals, universities, laboratories and the like. in the case of productive practices, the relevant ‘institutions’ would presumably thus be individual irms or business enterprises. One of the central design issues, i suggest, would then be how to construct their internal reward-systems in such a way that behaviour at odds with the purposes of the relevant practice is discouraged, and virtuous behaviour is not made too costly to sustain.22 However, the prospects for practice-favourable institutions at this level of analysis are signiicantly affected by the broader institutional environment within which these individual organisations operate: both directly, through forms of regulation, statutory requirements for internal governance and so on, and indirectly through the kinds of pressures imposed, and opportunities presented, by the overall framework of institutions in which their activities take place. Here the central question is what form of institutional organisation, at this macrolevel, is conducive to, or at least compatible with, the conduct of production as a practice at the micro-level of individual irms or business organisations. as noted earlier, macintyre’s view (like marx’s, with respect to nonalienated labour) is that modern capitalist economies are inherently antithetical to economic production as a practice. the same is true, he believes, of state socialism. if productive activities are to be conducted as practices, their primary institutional framework must be provided by relatively small-scale local 22 in thinking about institutional design at this level one might usefully draw, for example, on recent analyses of the ‘crowding-out’ of intrinsic motivations by extrinsic rewards (Frey 1997), and of the use of ‘esteem’ in the design of reward-systems (Brennan and Pettit 2004). For an application of these kinds of analysis within a macintyrean framework, see moore 2012. 203

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communities, in which economic activity forms an integral part of the shared life of the community’s members, including their political life which, unlike the politics of the modern state, is also conducted as a practice.23 Just what the institutional character of this ‘local community’ solution consists in, and whether it can be shown to be favourable to production as a practice, i shall not discuss here. instead i want to suggest that macintyre’s view of capitalism as inherently antithetical to productive practices may be mistaken. I shall do so by briely considering some of the extensive literature in comparative political economy on the nature and implications of different kinds of capitalist market economy. i will argue that these ‘varieties of capitalism’ can be expected to differ signiicantly in how favourable they are to the conduct of production as a practice, and that there is one such variety that may well be quite conducive to this. Further, although this literature is about capitalist market economies, i shall also argue that it has positive implications for the ethical potential of a socialist market economy, since some of the institutional features of the practicefavourable form of capitalism may be carried over, and indeed enhanced, in market socialism. But this practice-conducive potential can only be realised if socialist market economies themselves take a speciic institutional form.

Markets, Firms and Associations

In their inluential volume entitled Varieties of Capitalism, Peter Hall and david Soskice set out to identify the institutional differences between what they call ‘Liberal’ and ‘Coordinated’ Market Economies (LMEs and CMEs).24 taking the uK and uSa as exemplifying the former, and Germany as the paradigmatic case of the latter, they argue that the different institutional arrangements of LMEs and CMEs impact signiicantly on the organisation and behaviour of irms.25 these institutional differences include, centrally, those concerned with forms of ownership and the provision of inance; with the internal governance of 23 See macintyre 1999; for discussion, see Knight 2007: 167–89. the influence of Karl Polanyi’s (1944/1957) analysis of the historical development of the market as a ‘disembedding’ of economic activity from social and political institutions and relationships is significant here, as elsewhere in macintyre’s work. For criticism of Polanyi on this issue, see Keat 2013. 24 Hall and Soskice 2001. Similar contrasts (but with different terminology) are drawn in crouch and Streeck 1997 and Whiteley 1999. See Keat 2008b for a detailed presentation of the argument that follows which, it should be emphasised, makes a very different use of Hall and Soskice’s analysis than their own, reflecting quite different theoretical interests. 25 Strictly speaking, Germany exemplifies only one of several different kinds of CMEs; another is exemplified by Japan. See Keat 2008b on the differences between Germany and Japan with respect to production as a practice. 204

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irms; and with the nature of inter-irm relationships. The irst of these make irms in CMEs less vulnerable than those in LMEs to the pressures of shortterm proitability – enjoying the beneits of so-called ‘patient’ as distinct from ‘impatient’ capital – and less susceptible to the subordination of production decisions to inancial imperatives. The second reduces considerably the extent of intra-irm hierarchy and the exercise of ‘managerial prerogative’ in CMEs, by comparison with LMEs. The third enables various forms of cooperation between irms in CMEs, by contrast with the purely competitive relations in LMEs. This is due to the presence of industry-wide associations, to which all irms in a given industry belong, and which play a major role in research and development, in technology transfer, and in systems of education and training. Hall and Soskice argue that, because of these institutional differences, irms in CMEs are more likely than their LME counterparts to compete in terms of quality rather than price, and to make more extensive use of workers who are equipped with high levels of technical skill, are subject to less intrusive monitoring, and have more opportunities for taking initiatives. Such differences would clearly be important for any ethical evaluation of the kinds of work provided by the two varieties of capitalism, since they can be expected to affect signiicantly the opportunities for intrinsic satisfaction. However, MacIntyrean practices are not just a matter of the development and exercise of complex skills and judgement, and the intrinsic satisfactions generated by these, but also of engagement in a shared activity with its own standards of excellence and the possible enjoyment of internal goods dependent on these. It is here, I suggest, that the industry-wide associations of CMEs, and their role inter alia in education and training, are especially relevant. as Hall and Soskice emphasise, the skills acquired through such training are industry-speciic, in the sense of being applicable across all irms in a particular industry.26 combined with the emphasis on apprenticeship, and other features of a craft-oriented conception of training, this could be regarded, i suggest, as providing an appropriate form of induction into a shared activity that goes beyond the boundaries of individual irms, and at least potentially enables workers to participate in, contribute to, and experience the beneits of, something quite close to the nature of a MacIntyrean practice. In LMEs, by contrast, such possibilities could be expected to be relatively slight, given the absence of industry-wide associations with comparable powers and functions. I do not wish to claim that CMEs are entirely conducive to the conduct of production as a practice. nonetheless, if the argument i have presented has some reasonable degree of plausibility, there are signiicant implications for the design of economic institutions that might realise this ethical ideal, including the 26 on the distinctions between industry-specific, firm-specific and generic skills, see Estevezabé et al 2001. 205

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prospects of achieving this in a socialist market economy. two such implications will be noted here. First, if it is true that the ‘patient capital’ and ‘reduced hierarchies’ of CMEs contribute positively to their practice-compatibility, then we could expect this to be all the more so in a market socialist economy, given the lack of dependency on capitalist inancial institutions and the democratic character of co-operative enterprises.27 Further, although the requirement of proitability – which has a crucial function in any market system – remains, the external environment and internal governance of co-operatives may provide their members with suficient institutional space (if they wish to use it in this way) to devise and operate practice-compatible reward-systems. However – and this is the second implication – if it is true that industry-wide associations are crucial to the practice-conducive nature of CMEs, there is no reason to expect a socialist market economy to be similarly practice-conducive if it lacks these, or some equivalent to them.28 the cooperative relationships between members of an individual irm does nothing, by itself, to support or promote any sense of engaging in an activity they share with others outside their own enterprise. they may develop a strong sense of identity with, and loyalty to, other members of the co-operative, but this is quite distinct from, and compatible with the absence of, any such identity with and loyalty towards others engaged in ‘the same’ activity, or perhaps more fundamentally, towards the activity or practice itself – to its basic purposes, standards of excellence and internal goods. it is only, i suggest, if there are additional practice-based institutions, such as the industry-wide associations of CMEs, that these crucial requirements for practices can be met. 29 thus institutions of this kind – neither those of the market, nor those of the irm – would also need to be included in the design of socialist market economies, if the possibilities for production as a practice are to be more fully realised.30 Production as a practice cannot be achieved simply by replacing capitalist irms by self-managed ones (or capitalist relations of production 27 mason (1997) has argued that the prospects for production as a practice are enhanced by the co-operative nature of firms under market socialism. 28 Likewise, returning to the earlier discussion of macintyre, the relevant ‘institutions’ for practices include not just hospitals and chess-clubs but their respective associations, federations and so on. 29 See Keat 2008b, where it is argued that Japan differs crucially from Germany in its lack of such associations, despite high levels of intra-firm loyalty. there is also an important issue about whether the most suitable associations are based on industries or on occupations. denmark provides an interesting example of the latter, by contrast with the former in Germany: see Whitely 1999. 30 But these associational institutions do not replace markets as the primary means of economic coordination and resource allocation, by contrast with ‘associational socialism’, in which associations the proposed alternative to both market and state for these purposes: see note 12 above. 206

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by socialist ones). Just as there are ‘varieties of capitalism’ there can also be ‘varieties of market socialism’, and one can learn a good deal about which of the latter is ethically preferable by examining the former.31 indeed, even if any form of market socialism is normatively preferable to all forms of capitalism when judged exclusively in non-ethical terms, it is quite conceivable that one form of capitalism – Hall and Soskice’s CME – is preferable in ethical terms to forms of market socialism which lack the necessary practice-supportive institutions.

Critical Ethical Economy

Whether or not my claims about practices and markets in the preceding section are correct, they may at least serve to illustrate the more general theoretical enterprise that i wish to support: a critical ethical economy, concerned with the critical evaluation of economic institutions in terms of the kinds of life they make it possible (or impossible) for people to live, and more speciically of the kinds of goods and ills they make (or fail to make) available. a similar point applies to my defence of market socialism: although i do, in fact, believe this is the most plausible and attractive socialist alternative to capitalism, my primary purpose here has been to illustrate the kinds of issues and arguments that a critical ethical economy should address. The speciic issues considered above have been concerned with the ethical nature of exchange, the possibilities for work as a practice, and the relationship between market and non-market goods and institutions. to these should be added, amongst several others, the ethical value (or disvalue) of consumption, and of what this enables people to do or be. But despite the wide scope of critical ethical economy, it does not exhaust the range of considerations that belong more generally to the normative evaluation of economic institutions, which includes also questions of right or justice, and questions of power and authority. The speciically ethical dimension of normative critique should not be privileged over these.32 Further, there is something that they (should) all share: the distinction between normative and scientiic claims, and their respective modes of justiication, and the need to bring together these (epistemologically distinct) kinds of judgement in the critical evaluation of economic institutions. Thus, returning to the debates noted in the opening section of the chapter, we do not have to choose between ‘an early, ethical Marx’ and a ‘later, scientiic one’, or 31 another area in which such lessons can be learned concerns the relationships between different kinds of production and welfare-systems: see Estevez-Abé et al 2001. 32 the following three paragraphs draw on the argument in the concluding section of Keat 2008a. 207

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between ethical critique and scientiic critique, since both ‘ethics’ and ‘science’ are required for a critical ethical economy. nor do we need – as many proponents of ‘critique’ maintain we do – to challenge the distinction between normative and scientiic judgements, or to attempt to ‘transcend’ this ‘opposition’. in particular, we do not need to develop some special kind of social science that is itself ‘essentially critical’: an epistemologically distinctive form of social enquiry with its own criteria of validity, such that the truth or falsity of its descriptive and explanatory claims is logically dependent on that of the ethical values endorsed by the social critic. What is required by social criticism of an ethical kind is not critical social science (in this speciic sense), but on the one hand, rigorously theorised and empirically grounded social enquiry that is guided in the questions it addresses, and in the concepts it employs, by speciic ethical concerns, and on the other hand, philosophical relection on the nature (and variety) of human goods and lourishing, informed by rich descriptions of people’s actual and imagined lives. distinguishing between social science and ethics does not prevent them being brought into a constructive relationship with one another: here as elsewhere, separate identities contribute to, rather than detract from, constructive relationships. What makes a constructive, complementary relationship of this kind possible, in the speciic conception of critical ethical economy I have outlined here, is the concept (and reality) of institutions. any adequate ethical theory should recognise the institutional dependence of (at least many) human goods, including the dependence upon institutions of the complex social relationships and activities that are themselves constitutive of many such goods. Likewise, any adequate economic theory must be ‘institutional’, rejecting the methodological individualism of neo-classical economics and its speciic model of individual agency.33 When ethics and economics are brought together in this way, institutional comparison will be central: comparisons between actual kinds of economic institutions, and between these and theoretically possible ones. in both cases, the focus is on their ethical implications, on the kinds of goods and ills they make possible. It is only through such comparisons that political judgements and decisions about economic systems can be made. in making these, we must both distinguish between, and give equal attention to, what is ethically desirable and what is institutionally possible. the avoidance of wishful thinking is essential if we are to create (both practically and theoretically) new institutions that can realise collectively determined ethical goals.

33 the appropriate form of institutionalism is what Hodgson (2000) has called ‘old’, rather than ‘new’. See Keat 2012 and 2013 on the relations between ethics and institutional economics. 208

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References

Anderson, E. 1990. The Ethical Limitations of the Market. Economics and Philosophy, 6, 179–205. arneson, r. 1987. meaningful Work and market Socialism. Ethics, 97, 517–45. Booth, W.J. 1994. On the Idea of the Moral Economy. American Political Science Review, 88, 653–67. Breen, K. 2007. Work and Emancipatory Practice: Towards a Recovery of Human Beings’ Productive capacities. Res Publica, 13, 381–414. Brennan, G. and Pettit, P. 2004. The Economy of Esteem. oxford: oxford university Press. Bruni, L. and Sugden, r. 2008. Fraternity: Why the market need not be a morally Free Zone. Economics and Philosophy, 24, 35–64. crouch, c. and Streeck, W. 1993. Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity. London: Sage. dore, r. 1983. Goodwill and the Spirit of market capitalism. British Journal of Sociology, 34(4), 459–82. Durkheim, E. 1893/1984. The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W.d. Halls. Basingstoke: macmillan. Estevez-Abé, M., Iversen, T. and Soskice, D. 2001. Social Protection and the Formation of Skills: a reinterpretation of the Welfare State, in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, edited by P. Hall and F. Soskice. oxford: oxford university Press, 145–83. Estrin, S. 1989. Workers’ Cooperatives: Their Merits and Their Limitations, in Market Socialism, edited by J. Le Grand and S. Estrin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 165–92. Frey, B. 1997. Not Just for the Money. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Habermas, J. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, translated by t. mccarthy. cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. 1990. What does Socialism mean today? New Left Review, 183, 3–21. Habermas, J. 1993. On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical reason, in Justiication and Application, translated by c. cronin. cambridge: Polity, 1–18. Habermas, J. 1996, Between Facts and Norms, translated by W. rehg. cambridge: Polity. Hall, P. and Soskice, F. 2001. an introduction to Varieties of capitalism, in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, edited by P. Hall and F. Soskice. oxford: oxford university Press, 1–68. Hodgson, G.M. 2000. What Is the Essence of Institutional Economics? Journal of Economic Issues, 34(2), 317–29. 209

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Honneth, a. 1996. Pathologies of the Social: the Past and Present of Social Philosophy, in Handbook of Critical Theory, edited by d. rasmussen. oxford: Blackwell, 369–96. Honneth, A. 2005. Reiication: A Recognition-Theoretical View, Tanner Lectures on Human Values. uc Berkeley. Kamenka, E. 1962/1972. The Ethical Foundations of Marxism. London: routledge and Kegan Paul. Karabel, J. 1990. the revolt of the intellectuals: the origins of the Prague Spring and the Politics of reform communism. uc Berkeley: institute for Research on Labor and Employment. [Online] Available at: http:// escholarship.org/uc/item/4jh7385x [accessed: 8 September 2014]. Keat, r. 1981. The Politics of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud and the Critique of Positivism. oxford: Basil Blackwell. Keat, r. 1993. the moral Boundaries of the market, in Ethics and Markets, edited by c. crouch and d. marquand. oxford: Blackwell, 6–20. Keat, r. 2000. Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market. London: Palgrave. Keat, R. 2008a. Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics. Analyse und Kritik, 30(2), 291–316. Keat, r. 2008b. Practices, Firms and Varieties of capitalism. Philosophy of Management, 7(1), 74–91. Keat, R. 2009a. Anti-Perfectionism, Market Economies and the Right to meaningful Work. Analyse und Kritik, 31(1), 121–38. Keat, R. 2009b. Habermas on Ethics, Morality and European Identity. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 12(4), 535–57. Keat, R. 2009c. Choosing between Capitalisms: Habermas, Ethics and Politics. Res Publica, 15, 355–76. Keat, r. 2012. Liberalism, neutrality and Varieties of capitalism, in New Philosophies of Labour: Work and the Social Bond, edited by n. Smith and J-P deranty. Leiden: Brill, 347–70. Keat, r. 2013. The Ethical Character of Market Institutions in The Anxiety of the Jurist: Legality, Exchange and Judgement, edited by m.d. mar and c. michelon, London: ashgate, 173–94. Keat, r and o’neill, J. 2011. Socialism, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. Craig. London: Routledge. Knight, K. 2007. Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre. cambridge: Polity. Lukes, S. 1985. Marxism and Morality. oxford: oxford university Press. macintyre, a. 1981. After Virtue. notre dame, in: university of notre dame Press. macintyre, a. 1994. a Partial response to my critics, in After MacIntyre, edited by J. Horton and S. mendus. notre dame, in: university of notre dame Press, 283–304. 210

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macintyre, a. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals. London: duckworth. mason, a. 1996. macintyre on modernity and How it has marginalised the Virtues, in How Should One Live?, edited by r. crisp. oxford: oxford university Press, 191–209. miller, d. 1990. Market, State and Community. oxford: oxford university Press. moore, G. 2012. Virtue of Governance: Governance of Virtue. Business Ethics Quarterly, 22, 293–318. nove, a. 1983. The Economics of Feasible Socialism. London: allen and unwin. o’neill, J. 1998. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London: routledge. ollman, B. (ed.). 1998. Market Socialism: The Debate Amongst Socialists. London: routledge. Petrovic, G. 1967. Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century. new york: doubleday anchor. Pierson, c. 1995. Socialism After Communism: The New Market Socialism. cambridge: Polity Press. Polanyi, K. 1944/1957. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Satz, d. 2010. Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. oxford: oxford university Press. Selucky, r. 1979. Marxism, Socialism, Freedom. London: macmillan. Walzer, m. 1983. Spheres of Justice. oxford: martin roberston. Whitely, r. 1999. Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems. oxford: oxford university Press.

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Chapter 12

how Is Ethical Revolution Possible? Buket Korkut raptis

this time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. and it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict. alasdair macintyre, After Virtue and some people arrived from the borders, and said that there are no longer any barbarians. and now what shall become of us without any barbarians? those people were some kind of solution. Konstantinos Kavais, Waiting for the Barbarians

ethical discourse is what we do when we try to make sense of our life for the purpose of enhancing it. Life for a human consists of one’s activities in relation to oneself, others, and the environment. ethical discourse is then the special activity of human beings concerned with the achievement of a fulilling life, at the centre of which is the regulative question with two dimensions: How are we supposed to live together and what am i supposed to accomplish? In this chapter, I will only focus on the irst dimension of ethical discourse (that addresses how we are supposed to live together) and try to explain the conditions necessary for the possibility of a revolutionary ethical discourse, i.e., the kind of discourse that leads to a revolutionary change for a better social world. the urgency of addressing this question resides in our contemporary situation and has become apparent with the recent economic crisis that had a global effect on different social worlds. our current condition, then, seems to call for a revolutionary ethical discourse that addresses how we might transform our situation so as to achieve a better social life. therefore, a theoretical understanding of the necessary conditions for the possibility of a revolutionary ethical discourse is much needed for pursuing such a discourse in practice within a particular social world, or in the worst case, for understanding why such a discourse cannot be initiated in that particular social world.

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this question obliges me to give a provisionary model of the human social world; for it is only in view of such a model can we explain the necessary conditions for ethical revolution. in developing such a model, i will borrow some concepts from alasdair macintyre, Pierre Bourdieu, and alain Badiou, who have given different but complementary models of the human social world. Since we need to think about a model that is rich enough for explaining the possibility of social change, one of the main dificulties in developing this model is precisely this: An adequate model of the human social world should explain not only the characteristics that enable a social world to endure, but also the resources that enable a social world to go through transitions which might be radical at times. macintyre, Bourdieu, and Badiou are aware of this challenge more so than other contemporary philosophers and sociologists. nonetheless, their particular accounts of the human social world do not yet enable us to give a satisfactory answer. While Bourdieu’s account of habitus provides us with an understanding of social worlds as to how they are preserved and re-generated, Badiou’s discussion of event pinpoints the resources of radical social change. it is, however, macintyre’s account of tradition that addresses our challenge most explicitly, for his account pays particular attention to the dialectics between endurance and revolutionary change. But it falls short of explaining the social conditions. Hence, I shall irst discuss the bottle neck in MacIntyre’s account, and then suggest a revised model of the human social world by enriching and changing the role of his other concepts, such as practice, institution and narrative, in view of Bourdieu’s account of habitus and Badiou’s notion of event. Since our proposed model revises the way in which these concepts are related, it would not be proper to claim that the concepts themselves remain the same as how these thinkers interpreted them. indeed, i do not attempt to rephrase their accounts within a uniied model. Rather, I aim to propose an alternative model in comparison to their models so as to achieve a better understanding of the human social world. as i develop this alternative model, i will also depict, step by step, the conditions necessary for the possibility of a revolutionary ethical discourse.

Tradition: Shared Argument or Common Practical Life

There are three signiicant concepts that play a role in MacIntyre’s account of the social world, namely, practice, institution and tradition. i will begin with his conception of tradition, for it occupies the central place in macintyre’s overall approach. early on, in After Virtue (1984), macintyre introduces the notion of tradition in order to highlight the social and historical setting of practices and the goods relevant to those practices. initially, then, ‘tradition’, for macintyre, preserves its familiar meaning, that is, the body of practices and customs handed down from generation to generation. in his philosophical 214

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works later than After Virtue, however, macintyre changes the meaning and the role of tradition. in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) ‘tradition’ accounts for rationality, and in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), it stands for a version of moral enquiry. in this later stage, macintyre’s (1988, 1990) ‘tradition’ refers to an argument with a distinctive historical development of rational enquiry, as macintyre deines: ‘A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are deined and redeined’ (MacIntyre 1988: 12). Not surprisingly, the ‘traditions’ macintyre discusses here are exclusively theoretical or philosophical traditions (e.g., philosophies of aristotle, augustine, aquinas, and Scottish enlightenment). there is surely an interaction between philosophy and life. nonetheless, it would be quite erroneous to imagine one-to-one correspondence. For instance, when we talk about aristotelian tradition in philosophy, it would be wrong to think that aristotelians also share the same social-practical tradition. in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? macintyre takes traditions to be essentially theoretical (or philosophical) systems that might encounter epistemological crises, and gives a dialectical account of progress in these systems. But he does not suficiently and explicitly articulate how he understands the relation between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. traditions, understood in our familiar terms, however, represent different ways of living together (which constitute practical knowledge). From this perspective, the kind of crisis a tradition might face is originally a crisis of the social world. it is precisely this kind of practical crisis that we need to discuss in our explanation of the possibility of ethical discourse that can result in revolutionary social change towards a better way of life.1 traditions are where we all start our lives. nonetheless, traditions are not immune from change. as aristotle rightly says, ‘Generally speaking, everyone seeks not what is traditional but what is good’ (Aristotle 1998: 1269a3–4). How is this possible? How do humans seek not merely what is traditional, not merely the way of their ancestors, but the good? i have proposed that ethical discourse is what humans do when they search for a good life that might even lead to revolutionary transformations. But what kind of quest is this ethical discourse? We shall agree with macintyre of After Virtue that the task of ethical discourse is, irst and foremost, to understand ‘what more and what else the good life for man is’ (MacIntyre 2003a: 219). This, however, means that there needs to be a 1 in this sense, the enlightenment period of the Western civilization needs to be understood primarily as an attempt to address the social crisis that began after encountering the theoretical and practical achievements of the ancient Greek and the middle eastern civilizations. that is why it resulted in revolutionary changes not only in science but also in social practices and institutions. Hence, it would be a mistake to reduce it to a mere epistemological crisis, which was surely part of the story. 215

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style of articulating and evaluating life, which is singular in its application (in terms of location and occasion), but universal in its use. i suggest that the universal style of ethical discourse is narrative; for ethical discourse is concerned with the articulation and evaluation of life, and narrative is the way in which we give an account of our actions, social practices, and events, which constitute our life.2 the trans-historical and trans-cultural nature and function of narrative also conirm that the universal style of ethical discourse is narrative. accordingly, ethical discourse, when it is past-directed, is a retrospective narrative account of a certain way of life for the purposes of evaluating it, and when it is future-directed, ethical discourse is a prospective narrative account of a better way of life. We need to pursue ethical discourse in both directions when we have to deliberate about how to enhance our life due to a practical crisis we encounter in our particular social world.

On the Relation between Practices and Institutions

in view of this, we now need to think about an alternative model of the human social world that will enable us to situate when and how a revolutionary ethical discourse becomes possible within a social world. early on, i indicated that there are two other signiicant concepts embodied in Macintyre’s account, namely, practice and institution. i also consider these concepts to be crucial for substantiating a model of the human social world that is also capable of explaining the conditions of social change. i shall begin with macintyre’s deinitions and his interpretation of the way in which these two concepts are related, and then, suggest some revisions. according to macintyre (1984), a practice is a coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially deinitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 2003a: 187)

MacIntyre (1984) deines what he means by an institution in comparison to his notion of practice. crucial to this comparison is macintyre’s distinction between 2 This simply means that I agree with MacIntyre’s (1984) earlier remarks on the role of narrative in our quest for possible human goods as opposed to macintyre’s (1988) subsequent proposal of traditions as conceptual schemas with distinctive moral enquiries and rationalities. Hence, the conception of ethical discourse as narrative quest supports and aims to extend macintyre’s initial approach. 216

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internal and externals goods. an internal good is available through participating in a practice; in a sense, it is constitutive of the activity itself. an external good is rather an object of competition such as ‘power’ and ‘status’. While practices embody internal goods, institutions are rather concerned with external goods; as macintyre explains, institutions ‘are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power, and status as rewards’ (MacIntyre 2003a: 194). institutions, for macintyre, are necessarily concerned with external goods, because this is the way in which they can ‘sustain not only themselves but also the practices of which they are the bearers’ (MacIntyre 2003a: 194). Here, the relationship between institutions and practices is also clear: according to macintyre, institutions are the bearers of practices; furthermore, no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions. indeed so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions – and consequently of the goods external to the goods internal to the practices in question – that institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order. (MacIntyre 2003a: 194)

macintyre’s portrayal of the relationship between practices and institutions raises some questions. is this relationship indeed a necessary connection, and, in a sense, a symbiotic one? can none of the practices survive any length of time unsustained by institutions? do all kinds of practices require distribution of external goods? in human history and in all possible social worlds did/do all kinds of practices necessarily require institutions? i have some doubts about this. macintyre’s description is surely correct for the kind of practices available to us in most of the modern societies. my concern is rather whether or not this is true for the human social world as such. it seems to me that from the situation of the modern social worlds, macintyre makes a tenuous generalisation about the human social world as such. evidently there cannot be a social world without practices. But can there not be sustainable practices without institutionalisation? even macintyre’s own examples seem to falsify the necessity he attributes to the relation between practices and institutions. For macintyre says that ‘chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions’ (MacIntyre 2003a: 194). And when did humans begin to have chess clubs, laboratories, universities, and hospitals? they did not have some of these institutions up until modernity. But humans did have the associated practices long before they had these institutions, and hence, it is not clear whether all of these practices had to be associated with the distribution of external goods. it seems that the relationship between practices and institutions might be necessary but only contingently (for a particular social world under certain 217

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socio-historical conditions). the conception of a symbiotic relationship between practices and institutions and taking this to be necessarily so by the nature of this relation does not merely contradict with the reality of some social worlds (that there are/were practices unsustained by institutions in some social worlds), but also results in a dilemma that does not allow us to explain the possibility of ethical revolution. the dilemma here emerges for the following reasons. as macintyre (1984) indicates, ‘the cooperative care for the common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution’ (2003a: 194). MacIntyre (1984) also points out that without virtues ‘practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions’ (2003a: 194). The question here is this: If there is a necessary symbiotic relation between practices and institutions, then, how can practices sustain virtues while they are themselves sustained by institutions, which, as macintyre depicts, are the sources of corruption? How can the institutionalised practices, which are supposed to sustain virtues through cooperative activity, but actually become the source corruption due to competition, preserve the kind of virtues required for resisting corruption? Since there is a natural conlict between cooperation and competition, cooperation cannot be preserved for any length of time within an organisation that enforces competition. Since institutions enforce competition and ‘no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions’, the practices that survive in the long run will necessarily be the ones that are corrupted (i.e., the ones that ‘excel’ in competition over cooperation). turning to the question of ethical revolution, if we claim that all kinds of practices necessarily require the support of institutions, then, we cannot explain the sources of the virtues necessary for the possibility of seeking a better life through ethical discourse that might result in radical social changes. Hence, we arrive at the pessimistic conclusion that revolutionary ethical discourse is essentially impossible. From this, it follows that all of the historical revolutions must have resulted in social changes mostly for the worse, and the ones with better results must have been achieved at random without human deliberation and effort. But this is implausible. therefore, if we want to allow for the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse, we need to imagine a different form of relationship between practices and institutions.

A General Model of the Human Social World

What we primarily need is a more general model of the human social world. according to this general model, the kind of social world, in which practices and institutions are necessarily related, must be one alternative among others. 218

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to begin with, how shall we understand the human social world? What does it consist of ? does it consist of social structures as it is usually supposed in sociological studies? the conception of the social world in terms of structures, however, gives the misleading impression that a social world is an immutable and independent entity above human beings. if social structures are taken to be independent of human beings and rather supposed to determine what human beings can possibly be, then it becomes hard to give a reasonable account of the origin of social structures on the one hand, and on the other, to understand how the historical evolution of a social world is possible, without being random. the notion of the social presupposes a certain sense of relation. one sense of relation seems to be immune from time, for instance, geometrical relations. the notion of structure implies this kind of relation. at least conceptually, structural relations are immune from time; more precisely, the dimension of time is not internal to the deinition of a structure. That is why the notion of social structure implies a certain sense of immutability. Social relations, however, are subject to time because they involve human inter-activities and the dimension of time is internal to the deinition of an activity. Accordingly our provisional deinition of the human social world must be this: a social world is a spatio-temporal sphere of inter-relational human activities. to understand the resources of change in social worlds (which is our primary concern for explaining the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse), we need to elaborate our preliminary view of the social world by introducing a distinction between habitus and eventfulness. Habitus consists of regular and repeatable but improvisational inter-activities of a social world which enable people to gain and sustain certain dispositions.3 the habitus of a social world then involves practices and we should consider practices to be regular and repeatable human inter-activities (i.e., pragmatic e.g., farming; recreational, e.g. folk dances; ritual, e.g. celebrations; and epistemic, e.g. scientiic discourse production). Although these practices seem to be more or less common to all social worlds, as if they actually constitute the possibility of a social world, the characteristics of them change from one social world to the other and indeed mark the distinction of a social world from others. as i have indicated before, it would be a mistake to think that social worlds are immutable ixed structures. Nonetheless, due to the slowness of the evolution of social worlds, it is still possible to identify relatively durable and regular practices of a social world, which are, nonetheless, in the long run, not immune from change. 3 Here I use the notion of habitus more or less in the same sense as it is used in sociological studies, first introduced by marcell mauss in order to signify the aspects of culture that are anchored in the daily practices of human beings, and later on substantially developed and systematically used by Pierre Bourdieu (1998), according to whom habitus constitutes a system of durable dispositions, i.e., acquirable ways of perception, thought and action. 219

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the second dimension of the social world, namely, eventfulness, signiies a rupture from the habitus in the sense that there is an event involved. an event is not a well-established inter-activity, but a unique and an irregular one from the perspective of the habitus, and hence, the possibilities of how it might unfold are not fully predictable. We shall, nonetheless, consider eventfulness as part of the human social world, because social worlds are always pregnant to the possibility of an event; for they cannot be determined once and for all by the habitus alone due to the nature of human potentiality for change. interestingly then, even if the characteristics of a social world at a certain time, namely, its apparent identity, is primarily determined by its habitus, the trajectory of its historical evolution is based on its eventfulness. Properly speaking, the real identity of a social world is shaped by the interplay between its habitus and its eventfulness. 4

The Dialectics of Habitus and Eventfulness: Morality vs. Ethical Discourse

in view of this outline about the nature of social worlds, how can we now explain where and when revolutionary ethical discourse is possible? it is usually thought that ethical discourse is, and ought to be, based on a theoretical knowledge of moral principles, namely, a normative theory of morality. according to our model, however, what underlies morality is not a normative theory or a set of prescriptive principles but a habitus. What enables people to act according to moral codes is not their theoretical knowledge of the objective moral laws, but their dispositions generated by being situated in a habitus. the realm of morality, properly understood, is the realm of habitus and it consists of the acquisition and exercise of certain dispositions through regular and repeatable practices rather than memorising and obeying prescriptive rules. revolutionary ethical discourse, however, does not take place in the habitus. it emerges within the eventfulness of a social world, at those rare moments of rupture from the habitus; for it aims at a change in the habitus, i.e., an accomplishment in the direction of a better life that is not available within 4 the parallelism between our conception of event and Badiou’s understanding of it is evident, but this needs to be taken with some caution. Badiou’s notion of event is a technical concept that comes with other connotations which i do not want to endorse. i primarily disagree with the following. First, Badiou (2002) considers an event to be a process of truth and contrasts it with the ‘constituted knowledge’ of opinions which he takes to be ‘representations without truth’. Second, for Badiou (op. cit.), the sole purpose of opinions is communication and what arises from a truth-process is not communicable. third, Badiou claims that ‘opinions are the cements of sociality’ and the ethic of truths is ‘literally asocial’ (Badiou, op. cit.: 40–57). In the following sections, i rather claim that practices with their constituted knowledge can also involve truths, and events can be communicated by means of narratives. the striking aspect of Badiou’s ethic of truths is its asociality, which i disagree with most. in my view, the realm of morality and the realm of ethical discourse, namely, habitus and eventfulness, are both essentially social. 220

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boundaries of the established moral codes of the habitus. there is then a distinction between ‘morality’ as practical dispositioning that takes place in the habitus and ‘ethical discourse’ as evaluative deliberation that emerges in the realm of eventfulness. We are introduced into the morality of a habitus through participation in the practices of that habitus, and we acquire certain dispositions through participation in these practices. ethical discourse is evaluative deliberation and this evaluation requires imagination of alternative ways of life. the style of ethical discourse is narrative; for it is only through retrospective and prospective narratives we can evaluate the nature and the outcomes of our practices, and imagine better inter-activities as alternatives.5 We primarily dwell in the habitus of a social world. it would be a mistake to think that habitus is necessarily against the possibility of a good life. there might be social worlds whose habitus consists of practices that sustain a good social life. the point is that in these well-functioning social worlds ethical discourse would not be a requirement for achieving a good life; in a well-functioning social world, a way of good life would already be available in the habitus and all one would need to do is to engage in the regular practices of the habitus, in a word, to continue to play the game. The signiicance of ethical discourse, more precisely, its urgency emerges when a gap occurs between the life of a habitus and a good social life. in such a situation, the minimal requirement for the possibility of ethical revolution (for a better habitus), is the emergence of an event. But such an event cannot be initiated by the moral codes that regulate the practices of the habitus. it is the revolutionary ethical discourse that can bring about an event that can lead to a change in the habitus. Such an evaluative discourse is fuelled by human imagination and consists of an evaluation of narrative accounts of alternative inter-activities, and a prospective narrative of an event required for a transition towards a better habitus. the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse then, emerges when the life available in a habitus cannot accomplish its task anymore, that is to say, it cannot fulil people’s wish to feel and be at home. the gap between the life of a habitus and a good life reveals itself to the individual as a gap between his being at home and his feeling at home; more precisely, such a person will be at home, but not feel at home, and this is precisely what alienation or estrangement means. and when there is such a gap, what enables one to leave the comfort of one’s habitus and enter the site of the eventfulness is the wish to face the un/over/ under-determined, the determination of which would bring about the possibility 5 For instance, marriage is a ceremony of the habitus while love is an event about which the habitus is silent; voting in a democratic election is a practice in the habitus while revolution is an event. an event, then, is possible both for a person in particular and for the social world in general. Hence, revolutionary ethical discourse is also possible in both of these levels. in this chapter, however, we are focusing on the social level. 221

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of a better life. the call for an ethical discourse then emerges only in a distorted habitus which deviates from the way of a good life and facing this challenge means giving truthful narratives retrospectively and prospectively. our initial question, ‘How is revolutionary ethical discourse possible?’ now presents itself as a question of puzzlement. If the signiicance and urgency of revolutionary ethical discourse emerge when there occurs a gap between the life of a habitus and a good life, how can a narrative (of what is wrong with the habitus and what needs to be done in the direction of a good life) be given at all within this habitus which deviates from the way of a good life; in a distorted habitus, for whom and under what conditions is a good life still a possibility achievable through revolutionary ethical discourse as narrative quest? to answer this question, we shall make a distinction between a distorted habitus and a malfunctioning habitus. a habitus is distorted when there occurs a gap between the life of that habitus and a good life, but it is not yet a malfunctioning habitus. For the most part the social world with a merely distorted habitus is not productive of a good life, at least not anymore; nonetheless, it is still possible to regain a good life in this social world through an ethical revolution. and a revolutionary ethical discourse is possible in a social world if and only if the social world sustains trust and also includes honest people. in other words, unless the social world is based on fear rather than trust and lacks honest people, its habitus is not yet a malfunctioning one, even of it is distorted. there is then this interplay between habitus and eventfulness. the wish to be and feel at home is what keeps us in the habitus. and in a well-functioning habitus we shall be at ease. But social worlds are susceptible to time. What was once a well-functioning habitus may cease to be so and there may appear a gap between the life of a habitus and a good life. in such a situation, only trust among honest people can enable them to initiate a revolutionary event. this is then our preliminary answer to the question of puzzlement; for the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse (i) the habitus of a social world needs to be distorted and (ii) people that share this distorted habitus (for the most part) must be honest and trust each other. Notice that honesty and trust alone are not yet suficient for the possibility of a good life. they are necessary conditions for the possibility of giving a truthful narrative about the distortion in the habitus and what needs to happen for a recovery, but not yet suficient for the possibility of an event as remedy; because an event is not fully in our control. We may initiate, engage in, contribute to an event, but there is always an element of historical chance involved in its emergence and success. nonetheless, a revolutionary ethical discourse (i.e. a truthful narrative account of the distortion in a habitus together with a prospective narrative of what would be better) is indispensible for an event to take place.

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Social Conditions for Honesty and Trust

now we need to think about the social conditions necessary for the possibility of preserving honesty and trust among the people of a social world. macintyre (1984) is right when he says that practices constitute the arena in which we gain certain virtues, but this is so when practices continue to be cooperative human activities, and originally, practices are supposed to be cooperative but might cease to be so. in agreement with Bourdieu (1998), then, we should rather make a more general claim that practices provide us with certain dispositions. i also noted that macintyre’s distinction between practices and institutions is closely related to his further distinction between internal goods and external goods; while practices provide internal goods, institutions are concerned with external goods. an elaboration of this relation further, i believe, will prove to be fruitful. i want to suggest that we understand the internal goods as the natural ends of practices and external goods as the accidental ends that can be taken contingently as goals. MacIntyre (1984) claims that ‘practices never have a goal or goals ixed for all time – painting has no such goal nor has physics’ (2003a: 193). It is not clear here whether macintyre also rejects that practices have natural ends. i doubt this. at any rate, he is right that goals (understood as accidental ends) change through time. nonetheless, there is at least a natural end (or an internal good) that is fundamental to each kind of practice. For instance, the primary natural end of physics is gaining knowledge about the physical world; and this end is natural because it is indispensible from the practice itself, in other words, it is an internal good embodied in this scientiic discourse. And in a well-functioning social world scientists would take this internal good as their goal, and hence they would wish to gain knowledge. it is still possible that at a certain historical period in a particular society, people might rather take an external good as their goal, for instance, they might wish to gain prestige through their participation in a scientiic discourse. In a word, the goals attributed to a certain kind of practice might change through time, but there are, nonetheless, some ends that are natural to the kind of practice itself. in this sense, what macintyre (1984) calls internal goods can be taken as the natural (constitutive) ends of practices. Some practices might also have ‘earning livelihood’ as their natural end. earning our life is the basic internal good without which we cannot achieve further internal goods. therefore, the distinction between internal and external goods should not be understood as a distinction between abstract/spiritual goods and concrete/material goods. this is clearly not the case, because, in agreement with macintyre (1984), we should count ‘power’ and ‘prestige’ among the external goods, which do not, surely, correspond to ‘concrete/material goods’. the material goods that are necessary for nourishing and protecting our bodies are also internal goods. Furthermore, we need to cooperate with other human beings so as to earn these necessary material goods. Since cooperation is 223

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indispensible for the practices with internal goods, the material goods necessary for nourishment (which are earned through cooperation) also count as internal goods. earning our livelihood is an internal good for it is necessary not only for our physical well-being but also for our psychological well-being, namely, for feeling self-suficient and also valuable for society. But, when one earns more than what one needs for sustaining one’s life, the excess transforms itself into ‘capital’ which becomes a source of power, that is, an external good; for it is external to nourishing and protecting one’s self. Since this excess as capital cannot be available to all (because it is parasitic upon the exploitation of the labour of others), it becomes an object of competition. therefore, money is neither an internal good nor an external good. the money that corresponds to one’s livelihood is an internal good, while the money that corresponds to capital is an external one.6 at this point, we need to distinguish between the three kinds of practices with respect to the differences in their primary natural ends: (a) Pragmatic practices that involve occupational endeavours with the primary natural end of providing livelihood (e.g. farming); (b) Poetical practices that involve recreational and ritual activities with the primary natural end of providing poetical experience of solidarity (e.g., folk dancing and ceremonies); (c) Epistemic practices that involve studying and learning with the primary natural end of achieving a theoretical understanding of the world (e.g., various scientiic discourses).7 Some practices might of course involve multiple natural ends, that is, they might have secondary natural ends. For instance, a scientist might pursue an epistemic practice with the primary natural end of studying nature and also with the secondary natural end of earning his livelihood. if in a particular social world, pragmatic and epistemic practices are also poetical by nature, so much the better. in other words, if all the practices of a social world have a natural end of enhancing solidarity (together with their other primary natural ends), such a social world would be what the ancients and the mediaevals called a perfect or a divine social world. institutionalising a practice means assigning an external good as an end of that practice. an external good assigned as an end is accidental to the practice and an object of competition. that is why an institutionalised practice always 6 I do not mean to claim that this is how MacIntyre himself understands the distinction between internal and external goods. on the contrary, a careful reading of his text suggests that macintyre uses ‘external goods’ interchangeable with ‘material goods’. But this does not yet mean that by ‘material’ he means ‘tengible/concrete’ for he counts ‘status’ or ‘power’ as a material good. 7 There might be better and more elaborate classifications of the kinds of practices common to different social worlds. this basic three-part distinction, however, is necessary for allowing us to distinguish the kind of practices required for sustaining the virtue of honesty and trust, and hence, for understanding the social conditions necessary for the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse towards a better life. 224

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displays a struggle between cooperation and competition. on the one hand, the natural end of such a practice, namely, an internal good, is not available without cooperation, on the other hand, due to institutionalisation, there is an enforced competition for the external goods attached to this practice. the competition is enforced because engagement in this practice (i.e. the possibility of achieving the internal goods) is limited to those who can succeed in securing a portion from the associated external goods. Since the dispositions required for gaining external goods through competition is not merely different, but actually in conlict with the virtues that can be achieved through cooperative practice of acquiring internal goods, persons who ‘succeed’ in this competition extremely well are usually the ones who develop those dispositions in conlict with the virtues of the practice. and this is the source of corruption, for institutions promote rivalry of all against all. But why do/did human beings need institutions? What kind of practices did they institutionalise irst? Institutionalisation of practices seems to begin with pragmatic practices for the purposes of maintaining a hierarchical division of labour. it is true that competition provides a certain sense of motive for excelling. in order to promote motivation through competition, however, institutions distribute external goods, and hence, this enforced motive is not for excelling in the practice, but for excelling in gaining an external good. the real problem, however, emerges when epistemic and poetical practices are also institutionalised.8 in a well-functioning social world, internal goods of epistemic and poetical practices would be available without the requirement of gaining associated external goods, in other words, these practices would be sustainable without institutions. The irst stage of distortion then emerges with the institutionalisation of epistemic practices, and as a result, the possibility of achieving knowledge necessarily requires the acquisition of external goods through gaining a powerstatus in an associated institution. the subsequent stage of distortion begins with the institutionalisation of poetical practices. At the inal stage (i.e., when all kinds of practices are regulated by well-established institutions), inevitably external goods are taken to be the goals of practices at the expense of internal 8 an epistemic practice with the natural end of learning can become a practical practice with the natural end of earning a livelihood. this is not the problem. as we said, livelihood is also an internal good. the problem is that introducing external goods so as to motivate excelling in an epistemic practice ruins the natural end of epistemic practice itself. if knowledge is pursued by those who actually seek external goods, then at some point the distinction between dogma (or opinion) and knowledge will begin to blur. Furthermore, when knowledge has been transformed into an object of power, those who seek external goods will not freely share their knowledge with others. the natural end of epistemic activities can be preserved by cooperation of those who aspire for the internal good definitive of that activity. this is more so with poetical practices, for their natural end is solidarity which cannot at all be gained through competition. 225

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goods, which results in total corruption. We can, hence, rephrase the distinction between a distorted and a malfunctioning social world in reference to the distinction between internal and external goods. in a distorted society, some internal goods will not be available without the support of external goods. in a malfunctioning society, however, external goods will take the priority all over at the expense of internal goods. now, it is the natural end of a practice that enables us to gain certain virtues; for we strive to achieve the internal good that is deinitive of a practice as its natural end, and as we learn how to achieve this internal good, we at the same time acquire the relevant virtues. From this observation, it follows that our engagement in poetical practices, due to their primary natural end of solidarity, provides us with the virtues of trust and honesty. evidently, if a social world with a distorted habitus has at least some poetical practices that preserve their natural end of enhancing solidarity, then people who engage in these practices will be able to gain the associated virtues of honesty and trust. this merely distorted social world is then capable of revolutionary ethical discourse so as to transform itself into a well-functioning one. the revolution (that is required for achieving a well-functioning habitus) at the very minimum consists of either the de-institutionalision of the available epistemic and poetical practices or the initiation of some new epistemic and poetical practices that can resist institutionalisation. the solidarity provided by poetical practices and the knowledge provided by epistemic practices are indispensible for human beings to feel at home, and hence, these internal goods should not be limited to those who can secure some external goods within the hierarchy of an associated institution. in a malfunctioning society, in which even the poetical practices are fully institutionalised and limited to those few who pursue them primarily for an external good (such as ‘fame’), then these institutionalised poetical practices would actually lose their natural poetical end of solidarity. that is why revolutionary ethical discourse will be possible for the social worlds with a distorted habitus, but not for the ones with a malfunctioning habitus. the reason is straightforward. in a malfunctioning habitus, in which external goods take over at the expense of internal goods, competition will be the established form of socialisation. in such a world, the cultivation of the virtues such as honesty and trust will not be possible anymore, because there is no arena left for acquiring internal goods through cooperation and sustaining solidarity through poetical practices, which are necessary for developing the virtues of honesty and trust. and without these virtues we cannot expect to initiate a revolutionary ethical discourse that would result in a truthful narrative about what is problematic and what needs to be done. in a malfunctioning social world, then, only a natural, or a cultural, or an economical disaster can lead to a revolutionary change, which might not actually result in a better world. 226

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therefore, in order to assess the possibility of revolutionary ethical discourse in a particular social world with a distorted habitus, the question that needs to be answered irst is whether the distorted habitus of that social world has transformed itself into a malfunctioning one. if it has already done so, then even the arrival of some ‘barbarians’ from the borders would not be suficient for the emergence of a revolutionary ethical discourse in that social world. For what essentially allows Subcomandante marcos to become ‘another – doubtless very different – St Benedict’ is not his degree in philosophy, but the community of Zapatistas with their ‘barbarian’ practices that are still poetical in nature. the success of any revolutionary ethical movement, however, depends on the degree in which it can sustain its ethical claim. that, at the very least, requires being faithful to the claim of justice without being unjust.9

References

aristotle 1998. Politics, trans. c.d.c. reeve. indianapolis: Hackett Publishing company. Badiou, A. 2002. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. by Peter Hallward. new york: Verso. Bourdieu, P. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. randall Johnson. Stanford: Stanford university Press. MacIntyre, A. 1984/2003a. After Virtue. notre dame, indiana: university of notre dame Press. MacIntyre, A. 1988/2003b. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? notre dame, indiana: university of notre dame Press. macintyre, a. 1990. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. notre dame, indiana: university of notre dame Press.

9 Here, i use the term ‘barbarian’ to specify the practices of a less civilized group of people who have not yet lost their community spirit. evidently ‘barbarian’ is a controversial term, for it has multiple connotations such as foreigner, primitive (or less civilized), and brutal. these connotations are usually considered to go together. this, i believe to be a mistake. not all the foreigners are primitive and not all the primitive people are brutal. in the quotation at the beginning of this article, i think, macintyre uses the term only in the negative sense of ‘brutal’ when he says ‘barbarians are among us’. i agree with his judgement. instead of accusing foreigners (or others) we should rather try to understand the internal source of our problems, which requires an honest retrospective critique of ourselves. this is also in agreement with the idea conveyed in Kavafis’s poem. 227

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Chapter 13

anti-Capitalist Politics and Labour for the Twenty-irst Century: history and future Challenges1 andrius Bielskis

the weakness of the anti-capitalist politics and the Left ever since the collapse of the Soviet union has been lamented by many people far too often. this banality, however, does not change the substance of the matter. Given the massive shift in the global balance of power, enormous economic disparities, and the other changes that most advanced postmodern Western societies have undergone over the past 40 years, the conditions and main challenges for the Left require renewed analysis. in this chapter, the weaknesses of the anticapitalist Left will be considered against the background of two related factors – the neoliberal sociopolitical reality and the ideological crisis of the Left ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. reference to ideological crisis is important not merely because the collapse of Soviet pseudo-marxism played an important role in the gradual process of weakening the identity of the Left. the mere proximity of the Soviet union and its east european satellites, for better or worse, strengthened the political Left in Western europe. this took place both as a source of ideological inspiration and as an external national threat to capital owners. on the other hand, because of the historical experience of the brutalities and crudities of Soviet pseudo-marxism, the region of central and eastern europe is so important in interpreting anticapitalist thought, including alternative political economy, today. the methodological approach in this chapter is based on what may be called a mild version of conlict-driven class struggle. The most prominent contemporary marxists such as david Harvey and daniel Bensaïd have argued that neoliberalism is the political project of top economic elites who via lobbyists and key politicians advanced deregulation and other national policies in order to increase the share of their wealth (Bensaïd 2002, Harvey 2005). according to this 1 a version of this paper was first published as ‘the challenges for the Left in the 21st century’ in Next Left: For a New Social Deal, edited by e. Stetter, K. duffek, a. Skrzypek. Foundation for european Progressive Studies, 134–59.

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approach the weaknesses of the Left are due to the onslaught of neoliberal promarket reforms by business elites. on the other hand, thinkers such as anthony Giddens (1997) have argued that it is the cultural changes of modern societies, on the one hand, and globalisation together with the societal emphasis on individual self-expression on the other hand, which gave rise to identity politics that gradually distanced the Left from the (neo)marxian politics of emancipation broadly understood. thus, in postmodern societies people chose the idea of a consumer life in a free-market economy for its general appeal. in short, the difference between two major theoretical approaches is Karl marx’s historical materialism in contrast with post-marxist sociology of democratic societies. my own position in this chapter is somewhere between these two approaches. one of the tasks of this chapter is to clarify an intermediary position and to elaborate on its importance in our debate on the future of the political Left. the chapter will thus engage with two related issues: it will give a brief historical outline of the Left prior to the project of neoliberalism and confront the shift in the post-cold War power balance during the dominance of neoliberalism. The second part will be theoretical and normative, briely looking at marx’s conceptions of alienation and exploitation. it will argue that despite the essential signiicance of Marx for the Left today we need to ind new theoretical resources for the renewal of neo-Marxist thought. The teleological notion of ‘practice’ in alasdair macintyre’s work (1985) and the idea of ‘immaterial labour’ developed by michael Hardt and antonio negri (2005) are, among other things, also employed to serve us in the important task of providing new fuel for the anti-capitalist politics.

The Politics of Social Pact and the Role of the Left in Post-War Europe: A Brief Outline

our core theoretical approach, as mentioned above, lies in the methodological presupposition that social conlict is at the heart of industrial society. Karl Marx’s notion of class conlict was signiicantly modiied in the work of Ralf dahrendrof (1959). the central thesis of the class tension in post-World War ii europe was acutely formulated, among many others, by theodor Geiger: the tension between capital and labor is recognized as a principle of the structure of the labor market and has become a legal institution of society … the methods, weapons, and techniques of the class struggle are recognized – and are thereby brought under control. the struggle evolves according to certain rules of the game. thereby the class struggle has lost its worst sting, it is converted into a legitimate tension between power factors which balance each other. capital and labor struggle with each other, conclude compromises, 230

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negotiate solutions, and thereby determine wage levels, hours of work, and other conditions of work. (Geiger 1949, c.f. dahrendrof 1959: 65)

While Karl marx argued that class struggle between labour and capital was ierce and uncompromising (and of course he was right as far as the nineteenth century was concerned), the postwar social theorists in the 1950s argued, also rightly, that class conlict gradually became institutionalised within the institutional setting of european industrial societies.2 What was fundamental for marx and his critics of the mid twentieth century then was the idea that at the very heart of industrial capitalism was fundamental conlict between the two social groups that represented opposing economic-productive realities; capital, as the institutionalised private property used to produce commodities and labour, as the physical or intellectual human power needed for production. marx’s genius subsisted in, among other things, the accuracy of his insight that despite numerous social groups (landowners, peasants, petty bourgeois, state bureaucrats, etc.) the structural core of industrial capitalist society in the nineteenth century was the Hegelian master-slave interdependence between capital owners and workers forced to sell their labour power for a miserable wage. The key to this insight was that the conlict between labour and capital was the political conlict within capitalist societies. Where marx was wrong, however, was in his prediction that the development of capitalism would lead to the pauperisation of the vast majority of workers who would become a relatively homogeneous and self-conscious class ready to overthrow the capitalist mode of production. this, as we know, did not happen. What happened instead, for a number of important reasons, was the aforementioned postwar institutionalisation of class struggle in the form of tripartite councils that negotiated the humane conditions of work and pay on the highest political level. this became a secondary system of industrial citizenship, as t.H. marshall (1950) called it, citizenship of the social and economic rights of ordinary working men and women. the institution of postwar european welfare states, especially as they became embodied in the northern model of the welfare state, was therefore the result of a bargaining process between trade unions, employers and representatives of the state. of course, there were other important factors in establishing the institutions of the welfare state among which two of them deserve our attention: the rise of Keynesian political economy and the proximity of the Soviet union to Western Europe. The irst was important since it served policy makers with economic theory that justiied macroeconomic planning and regulation as well as argued 2 one of the most notable theorists of the institutionalisation of class struggle thesis, besides dahrendorf and Geiger, was t.H. marshall (1950), a so called ‘new liberal’ influenced by t.H. Green and L.t. Hobhouse. 231

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for the active role of the state in domestic national economies (that is, mainly through state ownership of key industries). Keynesian economic policies resulted in mixed economies when, for example, in Scandinavian countries the market was removed from approximately half of the economy and controlled through political means (Wahl 2012: 39). thus, no matter how one interprets the role of Keynesian policies – either as ideological superstructure of the postwar class compromise or as an economic theory which was able to provide a better and more convincing explanation of economic processes – its key role in shaping the political and economic institutions of post-war europe cannot be denied. on the other hand, the proximity of the uSSr was also an important factor, because, as many theorists have argued (e.g. Wahl 2012 and Berman 2006), it gave yet another external reason for capital owners to make concessions to trade unions in order to prevent ‘the terrible’ fate of soviet communism. yet there was a more important inluence: the free movement of capital was pretty much limited within the ‘West’ (or within oecd countries) during the cold War, which played a key role in restricting the further advancement of economic globalisation. thus, to outsource cheap labour to the rest of the world was far more dificult in the Cold War than it is now. However, where the theorists of the institutionalisation of class compromise such as ralf dahrendorf were wrong was in their mistaken belief that the politics of a successful social pact was established for good. Furthermore, dahrendorf erred in thinking that the politics of class compromise, the decomposition of capital and labour, and the stabilisation of institutional structures of the social pact brought about post-capitalist industrial societies.3 By stressing the 3 dahrendorf (1959) argues that the changes of postwar industrial societies brought about the decomposition of capital in the form of functional separation between ownership and management (i.e. in joint-stock companies), on the one hand, and fragmentation and specialisation of the working class, on the other. Following Joseph Schumpeter and marx, dahrendorf defines capitalism as 1) the private ownership of means of production, 2) the regulation of production process through private contracts, 3) creation of a private credit system, and 4) the union between ‘private ownership and factual control of the instruments of production’ (ibid.: 42). it is the fourth that is most essential to dahrendorf. He uncritically accepts the misinterpreted (and potentially wrong) view of marx, where marx in the third volume of Capital argues that the formation of joint-stock companies, when capital is utterly divorced from production, means ‘the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself ’ (marx 1999: 304). accepting a ‘radical’ reading of this passage, dahrendorf argues that this is one of the reasons why we can talk about post-capitalist industrial societies: managers, as ‘functionaries without capital’, have different functional interests to those of capital owners, the legitimacy of their authority lies in the need to find a consensus between owners and workers, therefore both classes – capitalists and workers – cease to be homogeneous and therefore become less antagonistic. it is therefore feasible to claim that dahrendorf ’s conception of capitalism is far more informed by so-called vulgar marxism than some of his marxist opponents. Given that capitalist societies are necessarily societies of two antagonistic classes, postwar industrial societies are no longer capitalist (that is, they are post-capitalist) since both classes have become 232

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institutionalised aspect of class conlicts, their own methodological emphasis on social conlict gradually faded away. Furthermore, the argument that policies institutionalising class compromise resulted in the transformation from class conlict-driven capitalism of the nineteenth century to post-capitalism of the postwar era is also deeply lawed. Even in the heyday of Keynesian mixed economies, european industrial societies were capitalist societies.4 yet the theory of class compromise was so pervasive that it gradually became a widespread ideology. it is this ideological obfuscation, advanced in its new guise by Seymour m. Lipset, daniel Bell and many others as the ‘end of ideology’ thesis5, that played an important role in luring the Left to accept class compromise as given. asbjørn Wahl (2012) convincingly argues that the politics of a social pact was indeed a compromise between two opposing interests and that the welfare state was its speciic historical outcome. According to him, the political Left – a well-organised trade union movement together with socialist or social democratic parties6 – aimed for more than the creation of the institutional setting to restrict market forces. a great number of trade unions and socialist parties, whose leaders and members were more or less informed by marxism, aimed to establish democratic socialism and ‘the socialization of the means of production’, and the welfare state was thus never an explicit goal of the labour movement (ibid.: 215, 32). on the other hand, the owners of capital accepted some of the key demands of the labour movement because of its political strength and trade decomposed and fragmented. this argument is utterly unconvincing and must be rejected as ideological obfuscation. marx’s insight about joint-stock corporations and the financialisation of production – ‘it reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. it is private production without the control of private property’ (ibid.) – despite questionable emphasis and misleading wording (‘abolition of capitalist mode of production’) is especially relevant today. a growing alienation of capital in the form of speculative financial capital, its alienation from production (financial capital stopped financing production long ago, nowadays it finances itself) does not change the existing power relations. if anything, financial capital has gained ‘absolute control (…) over the capital and property of others’ (ibid.). in short, capitalism, despite its contradictions and periodical crises, is here with us, it has penetrated even the most intimate spheres of human life. therefore its grip on human lives is stronger than ever before. it is therefore essential for the political Left not to lose sight of the prevalence of capitalism. Key to the renewed definition of capitalism should be the following aspects: 1) institutionalisation of the principle of profit maximisation, 2) subordination and control of labour to/by capital, 3) control of the privately owned means of production through capital over the entire process of production, and 4) commodification of human life in the multiplicity of its forms and spheres. 4 they were so because labour, despite the strength and militancy of labour movement, was nevertheless functionally subordinated to capital. economic democracy was never achieved by the labour movement. 5 For an insightful critique of this thesis see alasdair macintyre (1971: 3–12). 6 Socialism and social democracy here will be used as synonyms, i.e. as ‘democratic socialism’. 233

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union militancy of strikes, of protests, of ideological and propaganda work via the labour movement’s public press. in this way the social pact was a compromise between two competing interests and worldviews – socialism broadly understood and the unlimited appropriation of surplus value and capital accumulation by owners of production within free-market capitalism. this compromise was possible only because of the more or less equal balance of power in West european societies. these competing interests, once again, were and still are linked to two ethically incompatible worldviews: on the one hand, there is an attempt to create community life and public institutions on the basis of a common good and, on the other hand, there is an attempt to extend and defend private interests at the expense of the public interest and of the commons.

Neoliberalism and the Shift in the Balance of Power

To my knowledge, David Harvey has provided one of the best deinitions and conceptualisations of neoliberalism so far. He argues that neoliberalism, holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. this requires technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyse, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace. Hence neoliberalism’s intense interest in and pursuit of information technologies (leading some to proclaim the emergence of a new kind of ‘information society’). these technologies have compressed the rising density of market transactions in both space and time. they have produced a particularly intensive burst of (…) ‘time-space compression’. the greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on ‘globalization’) and the shorter the term of market contracts the better. this latter preference parallels [J.-F.] Lyotard’s famous description of the postmodern condition as one where ‘the temporary contract’ supplants ‘permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political affairs’. (Harvey 2005: 3)

The usefulness of this deinition lies in the fact that it touches on two crucial and mutually supportive aspects of neoliberal ideology and reality: the extension of markets both globally and to new spheres of social life, on the one hand, and the advent of the so-called postmodern condition, on the other. Since both of them are important vis-à-vis our discussion on the challenges for the political Left, it is imperative to address them briely. The ierce theoretical and ideological battles waged against Keynesian economics and socialism by the likes of Friedrich von Hayek gradually started 234

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to give fruit by the mid-1970s. the version of neoclassical economics advanced by the economists of the Chicago school (irst of all Milton Friedman) incorporated Keynesianism only to reject it. monetarism, backed by the austrian zeal for laissez-faire policies as the foundation of human freedom, rejected the then-orthodox Keynesian idea that the key objective of economic policy was to tackle unemployment. monetarism instead argued that too great a supply of money would necessarily produce a counter-productive result of increased inlation. Thus, the challenge to the dominance of Keynesian views came irst of all from Friedman’s economic theory honoured by a Nobel Prize in 1976. By the late 1970s monetarist supply-side policies were already learned and later implemented by margaret thatcher who advanced radical reforms of postwar institutions involving class compromise. Part of the strategy was attacks on trade unions that were advanced and gradually won by conservative governments in the uK and uSa. alongside of the post-Keynesian paradigm shift in economic theory, promarket reforms followed, including systemic deregulation of the markets, abandonment of ixed currency rates, attacks on labour laws, privatisation of key industries that were traditionally controlled through direct political process, reduction of the public sector, and discarding capital controls, something which was part of the Bretton Woods system until its collapse in 1971. With these changes also followed the advent of speculative inancial capitalism (Wahl 2012: 45–7). The consequences of these changes are well known: speculative inancial capital, which creates very little added value, has grown exponentially, labour productivity has grown 600 per cent (over the past 50 years) while wages have dropped by more than 1 dollar (taking inlation into account, in 1973 wages were 15.72 uSd per hour, while in 2000 they were 14.15 uSd), and corporate taxes have been reduced, while the rate of proits from direct investments abroad in the uSa grew from approximately 10 per cent in the 1950s to approximately 45 per cent in 2000 (ibid.: 49 and Harvey 2005: 9–19). in short, the neoliberal project advanced by capitalist forces aimed to break the postwar class compromise. as Wahl argues, capital owners withdrew from the postwar social pact and as a result class compromise was broken. What was the reaction of the labour movement and the political Left in general? although there were numerous attempts to defend labour interests through a wave of strikes and protests in 1980s, generally there were fewer strikes from the late 1970s onwards than there were in the postwar era and they were less successful (Kohl 2008, Knox 2004). Some of the key industrial battles were lost. the uK miners’ strike, led by the national union of mineworkers, the stronghold of the labour movement in Britain, was defeated by thatcher’s administration in 1985 and the air trafic controllers strike in the USA was ruthlessly broken by the reagan administration in 1981. Generally, the statistics 235

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on strikes, for example in the uK, demonstrate that the labour movement was not prepared adequately to respond to the neoliberal offensive: there were 2397 strikes in the period from 1965 to 1969, and only 274 strikes from 1990 to 1999, which means only 2 per cent of the total strikes and lockouts in 1998 compared with 1970 (Eironline 1999). the same general pattern is seen in other European countries where membership in trade unions has signiicantly decreased (Bielskis and Paleckis 2009). meanwhile, the trade union movement in europe, especially within the european community, was calling for more of the same – more social dialogue. this is especially the case with institutions such as the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), whose oficial ideological stance has always been to promote social dialogue. it is clear at this stage of the argument why social dialogue alone is inadequate today. If we accept the theoretical approach of moderate social conlict, as I suggest we should, then it becomes clear that dialogue is a remnant of the postwar class compromise that is now past its time. the class compromise and the social pact as a consequence were possible only because the labour movement managed to become a signiicant power that was able to threaten and to cause real harm to capital owners. it was possible because of the real power that the labour movement had acquired through its ability to win dificult battles, through its self-organisation potential and the strength of its ideological identity in the prewar era. Social dialogue is possible only between equals. When the power of the labour movement was diminished, partly due to its gradual domestication by ‘humane’ postwar capitalism, it became a simulacrum for truthful dialogue. the second cultural aspect of the current dominance of neoliberalism has to do with the advent of postmodernism. Both the term and the socio-cultural phenomenon it signiies are rather vague. However, for the sake of clarity, let us deine it, following J.-F. Lyotard, as the loss of belief in the credibility of a coherent worldview vis-à-vis growing social and cultural fragmentation (Lyotard 1984, Harvey 1990, Bielskis 2005). if the theories, grand-theories or grandnarratives of the past were able to mobilise and convince people to follow them and ight against the theories and grand-narratives of their rivals, today grandtheories have instead simply become marked by incredulity.7 thus, postmodernity has also been described as post-metaphysical, as weak thought; thought which doubts its own seriousness and claims to truth (Vattimo 1997 and 2002). the key symbolic political event that marks the advent of postmodernity is, of course, the students’ revolution, may 1968 in Paris. these events played a key role in waking up an alternative theoretical imagination that saw the 7 the distinction between ‘post-modernity’ and ‘modernity’, in as much as they require definitions, are first of all conceptual rather than temporal phenomena. thus the chronological element is secondary to these definitions (Bielskis 2007). 236

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necessity to break with old ways of thinking and imagining one’s place in the social world (Best and Keller 1991: 17). Friedrich nietzsche was one of the most important theoretical inspirations in the attempt to reinvigorate an alternative political imagination (Bielskis 2005). the so-called poststructuralist theorists such as michel Foucault, Gilles deleuze and Felix Guattari, roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and J.-F. Lyotard, in one way or another, were all inluenced by nietzsche and his radical critique of the Western philosophical tradition. the new developments in philosophy were important because they were linked to the political environment of the late 1960s. the 1968 students’ unrest was, among other things, a revolt against discrimination, against old-fashioned Marxism, its lirtation with Stalinism, against the bureaucratisation of trade union power. it was the students’ revolution backed by the wildcat strikes of workers who (also) revolted against the leadership of communist parties and trade union bosses. it was the revolution of the id, of bodies without organs, a revolt of the real against the Symbolic, a revolt against authoritarian fathers who created postwar fragile institutions of a welfare system within capitalism, a system which was generous to ‘our kids’ but was stingy and discriminating towards others – blacks, homosexuals, women and immigrants. the students’ revolution symbolised the libidinal revolution whose only weapons were poetry and liberated sexual desire; a militant anger without the necessary discipline of traditional anti-capitalist politics. Post-modernism represented a cultural change which came from below. yet the students’ revolution failed to change capitalist institutions while at the same time producing a new kind of society, a society where collective emancipatory efforts to get rid of oppressive political and economic structures became internalised and the key political battle now became one of the human mind and discourse. it was then that the political Left advanced theories of identity politics, including theories of multiculturalism. thus, the theoretical discourse of the Left gradually shifted away from universal political emancipation of the working-class based on collective solidarity to the discourse of left-liberal fragmented theories of identity formation. Here some preliminary conclusive remarks can be drawn. there are several reasons why democratic socialism started to experience major dificulties since the 1980s. as social democratic parties became governing parties across Western europe they lost their social base by becoming the political power of ‘the majority class’. Furthermore, the gradual bureaucratisation of these parties, an inevitable consequence of being in power, was also a factor contributing to the loss of their social base (dahrendorf 1990). additionally, although the decomposition and fragmentation of the politics of labour was an objective social process, it was closely linked to a gradual increase in general living standards. of course, the growth in living standards was partly due to the strength of labour movement and the more or less universal welfare system built by social 237

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democratic parties. it was also due to the comprehensive education system, a system which for the irst time in European history provided free access not only to primary and secondary education, but also to university education. What was less positive was the ideological disorientation of the Left and the inability to respond to changes that happened during and after the 1970s, an inability that was partly caused by the inadequacies of marxist theory itself. that is, either marxism became detached from effective political praxis and thus turned into a merely academic ivory-tower discipline, or it informed and fostered small sectarian revolutionary groups which lost wider support among ordinary working class people. it is not surprising that marx’s ideas were increasingly considered to be outdated and so were gradually replaced by (nietzschean) post-structuralism as the theoretical modus vivendi of those who considered themselves to be ‘progressive’. therefore, at the end of the postwar compromise, the labour movement was considerably weakened and ceased to be informed by marxism. on the other hand, the forces of capital, co-opted radical poststructuralist theoretical imagination, adapted to the changing cultural environment, and prepared for a new offensive – both directly and through inclusion of the former revolutionary youth counter-culture who now became ‘perfect’ consumers.

Karl Marx on Alienation and Exploitation

my thesis therefore is that the political Left needs to get back to the original ideological division between labour and capital in order to become the political power of the labour movement again. the great challenge, of course, is how we should conceptualise labour in the twenty-irst century. In the rest of this chapter i will be preoccupied with this issue. to conceptualise labour in a relevant way once again we have to turn to marx. to put it in Jacques Lacan’s terms, marx is the Master Signiier of the Left, a father igure who can and should be repressed in order to be resuscitated and reinterpreted in a way that is appropriate for twentyirst century social reality. Reading Marx critically will help us to understand what role the concepts of alienation and exploitation should play in our attempt to understand what social justice is and should be about. in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, marx argues that wages are determined through ‘antagonistic struggle’ where victory ‘goes necessarily to the capitalist’ and that workers’ wages luctuate depending on the supply and demand of labour (marx 1988, 19). refusing to accept the alienation of productive labour, marx engages in a critique of adam Smith’s political economy and its prioritisation of private property over human labour. For Marx, Smith’s conceptualisation of a ‘free’ market reinforces and justiies the alienation of human labour. classical political economy thus accepts and never 238

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questions the fact that initial accumulation of capital always takes the form of appropriating either land or surplus value.8 marx instead argues that capital is nothing else than stored-up labour which, at the same time, attributes to the owners of capital a governing power over labour. Furthermore, he contends that the source of all wealth is labour. man is essentially homo laborans and so all wealth, at least as far as capitalism is concerned, is mediated through human labour. and yet the artifact – the commodity or result of labour – does not belong to the man or woman who produced it. in return for his/her labour the worker receives a wage or salary. the owner of capital buys human labour as a commodity in order to produce other commodities (or services). the labour market thus functions as any other market where the prices of labour luctuate depending on their supply and demand. When demand for labour is growing, the costs of labour increase, but so does working time, since workers want to earn more at the expense of their leisure time, whereas when the demand for labour decreases, workers lose their jobs (ibid.: 20). there are therefore several aspects to marx’s notion of alienation. Firstly, through the commodiication of labour, human beings become commodiied as well. Selling oneself and knowing how to do it is part of everyday life. Secondly, commodities are alien to their producers. this is due to the fragmentation and division of the production process and to the fact that the means of production are controlled by capital owners. its consequence is not merely the fact that workers are estranged from the end product. Labour’s objectiication as a inished commodity means a loss of meaningful reality for the worker; it means an impoverishment of the worker’s life-world (ibid.: 72). Workers in this way become estranged both from nature and from the product they created through their labour. Furthermore, they can no longer rely on access to the natural world for subsistence and are deprived from the wholeness of productive process. alienation also means that labour under capitalism is forced labour in as much as workers can do nothing but sell their labour to the owners of capital. through all of this the worker ‘does not afirm but denies himself ’, does not develop ‘freely his physical and mental energy but mortiies his body and ruins his mind’ (ibid.: 74). as a result, labour (of a certain type) under capitalism lacks creative spontaneity and so degrades the humanity of the worker to mere animal functioning, to earning one’s living in order barely to sustain one’s physical existence. therein lays the third and most metaphysical aspect of alienation: since labour is the most essential human activity, alienated labour means that human life turns against itself, against a universal feature of our species-being or, in neo-aristotelian rather than neo-Hegelian terms, it goes against our essential human nature. 8 Similarly, macintyre (1995: ix–x), for example, also argues that initial capital accumulation is fundamentally unjust. 239

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this is, no doubt, far too familiar and not everything is relevant today. yet the main conceptual point of marx’s alienation argument, even if we accept the fact that nowadays workers do not often fall ‘into the ranks of beggary or starvation’, is still broadly correct. it is a characteristic of capitalism that humans are treated as commodities, as tools which can be and in fact are dispensed of whenever proitability rates drop. Each economic crisis is accompanied by massive layoffs by companies whose proitability rates drop even by a relatively small margin which does not necessarily threaten their corporate existence. neoliberal economic theory advanced by the likes of milton Friedman treats any protective measures by trade unions as monopolised cartel agreements (Friedman 1982: 123–5). the claim is that by negotiating higher salaries trade unions restrict other workers’ entry to a given profession, raise wages at the expense of other workers and thus contribute to higher unemployment. the argument, of course, is a ine piece of ideology; it is also wrong since there is no reliable evidence to suggest that highly unionised countries (irst of all Scandinavian countries) have higher unemployment (eurostat). the point, however, is not to show its laws, but to highlight the necessity of alienation at its core. the key assumption of this argument, which has increasingly become our reality ever since the advancement of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s, rests on the idea that the collective bargaining of trade unions distorts the equilibrium of the labour market. this means that workers, according to neoliberal economic theory, should be understood and treated as atomised commodities. the only economically rational behaviour is competition and never cooperation among workers since any cooperation between them contradicts the very idea of a free market. thus, human beings live in the alienated and atomised state of a compartmentalised social environment, in as much as neoliberal dogma has been embodied in the practices of our daily lives. the fact that some workers earn relatively good wages does not change the forced alienation under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. marx’s concept of alienation is later transformed into the theory of exploitation fully developed in Capital. although it is directly linked to and derives from the labour theory of value which marx shared with adam Smith and other classical political economists, it is feasible to argue that marx’s labour theory of value is presupposed by an implicit conception of social justice. at its core is marx’s notion of equivalence and equity. this indicates a natural predisposition of human reason to assume that things can be exchanged if they are equivalent, that is, if they have equal value. He starts his enquiry by arguing that wealth in capitalism is created through the form of commodity production and that it is human labour that determines the value of a commodity. the value of a commodity, however, has at least two aspects. any commodity has both use-value and exchange-value and there are two kinds of labour that produce it. the usefulness of a commodity is based on its use-value produced 240

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by labour whereas exchange-value is apparent only when one use-value, e.g. Bible, is somehow made equivalent to another use-value, e.g. a bottle of vodka, to use marx’s own example, in order to exchange them. contrary to neoclassical economic theory, which rejected marx’s labour theory of value and thus equated value with price luctuating according to the whims of supply and demand, marx argues that what enables us to equate two qualitatively different commodities as use-values is the fact that both of them have certain quantiiable values created by and expressed in terms of abstract labour. Both of these two aspects of human labour – useful and abstract – are present in the production of any commodity. useful labour is ‘determined by its aim, mode of operation, object, means and result’ (marx 1990: 132). abstract labour or simple average labour, as marx calls it, is time spent using one’s physical and mental energy – labour power – in order to produce a given commodity. So the value of a commodity is equivalent to the duration of time needed to produce it. if, for example, one hour is needed to make a pot while it takes half an hour to carve a wooden spoon, the value of the pot is equivalent to two wooden spoons. Since not every useful thing is a commodity, value for marx is the essential aspect of any commodity as something which by its nature is exchangeable. Since the measure of value in a capitalist economy is abstract labour, marx writes about labour almost exclusively in terms of abstract labour and rarely in terms of useful labour. this is partly due to the fact that abstract labour – labour power which transcends particularities of different kinds of useful labour – allows marx to link his theory of value with the politics of emancipation. it is only on the basis of abstract labour that the ‘class’ identity of workers becomes possible and thus ‘labour’, as it has been discussed above, transforms into political concept. Once these key premises are established in the irst chapters of Capital, marx proceeds to conceptualise the origin of surplus value. the appropriation of surplus value is the source of exploitation; it is also the source of capital. in appropriating surplus value capitalists break the principle of equivalence in the exchange and circulation of commodities9. In chapter ive Marx argues that the general formula of capital – m-c-m – is contradictory if it takes at face value the claim that selling a commodity at a cost higher than its original value produces surplus value. For marx circulation does not and cannot on its own create surplus value: if economic activity consisted only of buying and selling or reselling commodities, where would the value come from? therefore, marx’s conclusion is that surplus value is and can be created only when labour, which is most often advanced by the worker prior to the payment he/she receives (hence, labour ‘is the most wretched commodity’), is bought to produce 9 ‘in its pure form, the exchange of commodities is an exchange of equivalents, and thus it is not the method of increasing value’ (marx 1990: 261). 241

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commodities. thus the original source of surplus value is industrial capital, not the speculative capital of merchants. Surplus value then is the appropriation of labour time without equivalent pay. it is an arbitrary appropriation in a similar way that land was appropriated during the process of enclosures in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries in england or during the era of illegal privatisation of state-owned assets by the ex-communist nomenclature in post-Soviet Lithuania. marx explains the mechanism of generating surplus in the following way: the value of a day’s labour-power amounts to 3 shillings (…), because the means of subsistence required every day for the production of labour-power costs half a day’s labour. But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. (…) the fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him [sic] from working the whole day. therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes (…) in the labour process, are entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power. (ibid.: 300)

the difference therefore is between the exchange-value of labour – the wage which is needed for a worker to survive 24 hours – and the use-value of labour, which belongs to the owner of capital and creates more value than was spent in buying the labour itself. the latter is much greater than the former and the total value created by the use-value of labour (or the labour power during the whole working day) is much higher than the exchange-value of labour. Hence in marx’s own hypothetical examples half of the labourer’s day is simply appropriated by the owner of capital. to conceptualise the appropriation of labour time further marx introduces the distinction between necessary labour time (or necessary labour) and surplus labour time (surplus labour). to simplify it, necessary labour is time needed to create enough value to cover the costs of labour or, in other words, to earn one’s wage. Surplus labour is the remaining time spent labouring which creates surplus value for the capitalist owner. In the examples we ind in Capital, marx assumes that surplus labour is half of the working day, while another half of the day, another 6 hours, is surplus labour. Surplus labour therefore is the source of exploitation. However, marx neither came up with a detailed account how to measure the level of exploitation in a given capitalist company, nor did he discuss whether at least some surplus value, given the risk capital owners take in investing and producing innovation and technological advancement, is justiiable. It is therefore important to discuss these issues briely. a general formula of exploitation has been conceptualised in terms of a so-called exploitation calculus (Bielskis 2012). its key assumptions are the 242

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aforementioned distinction between necessary labour and surplus labour, on the one hand, and a revised version of marx’s labour theory of value, on the other hand. Labour is the source of value in as much as it is only labour (as human creative activity) that can create value. yet the expression of a commodity’s value is its price. So the attempt to measure exploitation in a capitalist corporation is possible only if the value of a commodity is equated with its price simply because there is no other way to measure the created aggregate value of a company except by calculating its revenues received through commodity sales. this also presupposes the necessity of an institution of free exchange which should be distinguished from market capitalism.10 Given these assumptions, the level of exploitation is expressed in the ratio between surplus labour (SL) and necessary labour (nL), i.e. SL/nL, where SL is surplus value (SV, that is, revenue minus the costs of constant capital), say, per week expressed in any currency divided by labour’s productivity per hour (or income generated by average labour per hour (ipH)) while nL is the sum of real wages per week divided by ipH. thus given four known variables – the total number of employees, the annual income of a company, the costs of constant capital, and the average wage of employees – it is possible to provide a more or less accurate measurement of exploitation in the form of the average ratio between surplus labour time and necessary labour time a worker spends during an eight hours working day (that is, ec equals SL/nL) (ibid.). it has been estimated, for example, that the level of exploitation of a beer brewer based in Lithuania is approximately 9, that is to say, on average a worker works 9 times longer generating surplus value for the capitalist owner compared to the time spent earning his/her own wage (or, in other words, 7 hours 12 minutes he/she works to generate surplus value while 48 minutes during the 8 hour working day works to earn his/her wage). thus it is beyond any doubt that given the fact mentioned above – labour productivity has grown six times while wages have marginally decreased over the past 50 years – the general level of exploitation has also grown signiicantly. Therefore we should conclude that the lessons of marx – especially his discussion on alienation and exploitation – are not only relevant but essential for any alternative and ethically informed considerations of political economy.

10 the argument that markets should be distinguished from market capitalism is made on the basis that market and capital ownership perform different functions that are not complementary, see chapter 11 by russell Keat. 243

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Concluding Remarks: On Labour in the Twenty-irst Century

How then should we conceptualise labour today and what its alternative political goals should be about? Leaving aside marx’s elusive and utopian remarks about communism when value form and commodity fetishism are abolished, let us settle for a more modest utopia – economic democracy. By economic democracy i mean 1) democratically controlled means of production in the form of worker’s cooperatives including democratic control of surplus value, 2) subordination of capital to labour as the creative activity of production, and 3) abolition of the principle or, at least, legal regulation of proit maximisation through the institutionalisation of practice-based activities aimed at internal standards of excellence. these preliminary principles of economic democracy have yet to be spelled out in detail (this, however, cannot be our task here). It will sufice to note that economic democracy properly understood will have nothing to do with either so-called Soviet-style state ‘socialism’ or the conlated social democratic ideal of welfare states under market capitalism. Furthermore these principles rely on a certain conception of labour that needs to be briely spelled out. the concept of labour or ‘working class’ has always been political and was never meant to be only an empirical or descriptive concept. the fact that working classes are fragmented and not homogeneous enough does not change marx’s original insight that there are only two signiicant classes in capitalism – those who live off their labour and those who generate surplus value by buying labour and by using their wealth to accumulate more capital. it has been convincingly argued that the self-organisation of the working class was a historical and open ended process of consciousness building which united a great number of different social groups without however discarding its huge diversity and complexity (thompson 1963/2002). thus being in a class confers a role: the role of capitalists ‘is to use money to command the labour or the assets of others and to use that command to make a proit’, while a working class is all those who are wage earners and live off their labour (Harvey 2010, 232). daniel Bensaïd (2002) argues that at least two thirds of population in advanced capitalist societies consists of wage/salary earners and thus at least formally constitutes working class. Such a deinition of working class is only partial, yet it is nonetheless important because it gives a common identity, even if only formally, to large social groups in contemporary society. This deinition allows us to argue against certain sociological conceptualisations of social classes which, in one way or another, depart from the marxist approach and argue for the distinctiveness of the middle class. Probably the most famous of them are the works by c. Wright mills (1959) and Daniel Bell (1973). Val Burris rightly argues that for Marx classes are ‘deined from the standpoint of their position within the social relations of production of a given mode of production’ and thus middle class does not constitute an 244

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independent class (Burris 1995: 21). of course, it does not mean that the vast social differences that exist within the working class thus understood are not important, but their importance is that of political tactics and strategy (that is, how to cut across these difference and build a common political identity) rather than conceptual. the conceptual difference has both economic and ethical aspects and is between two opposing orientations – the limitless and therefore irrational accumulation of capital for its own sake (the logic of proit maximisation and those who serve it) and the anti-capitalist orientation of all those who reject the principle of capital accumulation as the governing economic and social principle of human life and live off their practice-based activities and creative labour. micheal Hardt and atonio negri (2005) have recently argued that the dominant form of production in industrial societies has gradually changed from material to immaterial in post-industrial societies. although the conceptualisation of contemporary society as knowledge-based or as post-industrial society is not without its problems, the signiicance of this social-economic transformation cannot be denied. thus even if most of Hardt’s and negri’s arguments are dubious, i take their claim that the character of production in postmodern societies is signiicantly different from production in traditional industrial settings (that is, from Fordism to post-Fordism) to be broadly correct. according to this view, material labour produces tangible commodities, the means of life, whereas ‘[i]mmaterial production, including the production of ideas, images, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life, but social life itself. (…). the production of capital is, ever more clearly and directly today, the production of social life’ (ibid.: 146). Indeed, human labour has undergone signiicant transformation whereby more people engaged in production are engaged in creative labour. this claim should be read in historical materialist terms broadly understood. that is, whether labour is material or immaterial, manual or intellectual in the process of human development, it has increased its innovative and creative character, and, given the growing technological and societal advancement, it will hopefully increase in the future. thus, labour needs to be conceptualised as a productive activity which has its own internal standards of excellence. it is here that i want to suggest alasdair macintyre’s work becomes very useful. alasdair macintyre in his seminal book After Virtue attempted to conceptualise human productive activity in both moral and philosophical terms. in doing so he introduces the concept of practice: By a ‘practice’ i am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially deinitive of, that form of 245

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activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (macintyre 1985: 187)

There is no need to comment on this well-known and often quoted deinition of practice. Although MacIntyre himself does not deine practice in terms of labour, several theorists have argued that practice in macintyre’s work has a close resemblance to what marx meant by non-alienated labour (e.g. Breen 2007 and Keat 2008). not all productive labour can be seen in terms of practices thus conceptualised. nevertheless, i want to suggest that understanding human labour in terms of different practices could be interpreted as a missing normative element in the marxist conception of labour. it is to view labour as a productive activity which requires creative self-transformation and which contributes to the good of the whole society. thus labour should not be seen only as abstract labour but as a teleological activity pursuing genuine human goods. this extended notion of creative labour has, of course, a utopian element to it as well – the great many productive activities of an emancipated society would be structured in terms of practices. engaging in labour then would provide our lives with meaning and would therefore give labour its prestige and high moral ground. it would also give a renewed identity to inclusive working classes of the twenty-irst century; to those who, in the present conditions of capitalism, are reduced to being the instruments of capital. Of course, this refers irst of all to manual and nonmanual alienated wage-labourers who collectively ight their exploitation and alienation, but also to those members of our societies who have been lucky enough to pursue their careers of genuine practices – of being professional philosophers, chemists, musicians, journalists, surgeons, artists, etc. most of the latter practitioners are salaried employees who depend on institutions and who have to be wise and courageous enough to ight collectively the corrupting power of their institutions and the neoliberal ideology of institutional ‘effectiveness’ and ‘modernisation’. these diverse social groups should learn to see the vices of capitalism and of institutions bent by acquisitiveness and the subordination of human activities and practices towards the banality of external goods of money, status and power.11 it is these vices of irrational capital accumulation that cannot be reconciled with a genuinely free and just society towards human solidarity and social justice, society whose individuals engage in meaningful activities for their own sake rather than for sake of more proit and more power at the expense of others.

11 to say that power, money and status are banal is not to say that they are not important. as macintyre puts it, ‘no one can despise them altogether without a certain hypocrisy’ (1985: 196). 246

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References

Bakan, J. 2004. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Proit and Power. new york: Free Press. Bell, d. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. new york: Basic Books. Bensaïd, d. 2002. Marx for Our Time. London: Verso. Berman, S. 2006. The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe‘s Twentieth Century. cambridge: cambridge university Press. Best, S. and Keller, d. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Basingstoke: macmillan. Bielskis, a. 2012. the Political implication of alasdair macintyre’s claims of Dependent Rational Animals. Problemos, 82, 85–98. Bielskis, A. and Paleckis, J. 2009. Lietuvos profesinės sąjungos tarptautinio darbo judėjimo kontekste. Demokratija be darbo judėjimo?, edited by a. Bielskis. Kaunas: Kitos knygos. Bielskis, a. 2007. towards an alternative Postmodernity: the Local versus the Barbarianism of market capitalism. Athena, 3, 52–67. Bielskis, andrius 2005. Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political. Basingstoke: Palgrave macmillan. Breen, K. 2007. Work and emancipatory Practice: towards a recovery of Human Beings’ Productive capacities. Res Publica, 14(1) 381–414. Burris, V. 1995. the discovery of the new middle classes, in The New Middle Classes, edited by a.J. Vidich. London: macmillan Press. dahrendorf, r. 1959. Class and Class Conlict in Industrial Society. London: routledge and Kegan Paul. dahrendorf, r. 1990. Relections on the Revolution in Europe. new york: random House. eagleton, t. 2011. Why Marx Was Right. new Haven: yale university Press. eironline 1999. Strikes in the uK: withering away? european industrial relations observatory online. available at http://www.eurofound.europa. eu/eiro/1999/07/ feature/ uk9907215f.htm [accessed: 18 august 2013]. eurostat. table of unimplemented rates: eu-27, croatia, turkey, uSa, norway, Japan 2000–2010 [online]. available at epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu [accessed 27 august 2012]. Friedman, m. 1982. Capitalism and Freedom. chicago: the university of chicago Press. Giddens, a. 1997. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. cambridge: cambridge university Press. Geiger, t. 1949. Die Klassengesellschaft im Schmelztiegel. Köln: Gustav Kiepenheuer. Harvey, d. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. cambridge, ma and oxford, uK: Blackwell. 247

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Harvey, d. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. oxford: oxford university Press. Harvey, d. 2010. The Enigma of Capital. oxford: oxford university Press. Hardt, m. and negri, a. 2005. Multitude. London: Penguin. Keat, r. 2008. ethics, markets and macintyre. Analyse & Kritik, 1, 243–57. Knox, noelle 2004. unions begin to struggle in europe. USA Today, 11 november. Kohl, H. 2008. Where east european trade unions Stands in eastern europe today. Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft. Berlin: Friedrich ebert Stiftung, 3. Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. minneapolis: university of minnesota Press. macintyre, a. 1971. Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy. London: duckworth. macintyre, a. 1985. After Virtue. London: duckworth. marshall, t.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. cambridge: cambridge university Press. marx, K. 1988. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. new york: Prometheus books. marx, K. 1990. Capital. Volume I. London: Penguin classics. marx, K. 1999. Capital. Volume III [online]. available at http://www.marxists. org/ archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ [accessed: 8 September 2014]. mills, c.W. 1959. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. oxford: oxford university Press. thompson, e.P. 2002. The Making of the Working Class. London: Penguin. Vattimo, G. 1997. Beyond Interpretation: the Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. cambridge: Polity Press. Vattimo, G. 2002. After Christianity. new york: columbia university Press. Wahl, a. 2012. The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State. London: Pluto Press.

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Index

anderson, John 200–201 anscombe, elizabeth 141 applebaum, Herbert 148 aquinas, St thomas 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 78, 141, 215 aristotle 1, 3, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 34–8, 40–42, 56, 68, 75, 85, 102, 114–15, 139–40, 141, 144–5, 156, 158, 159, 188, 202, 215 aristotelianism 1, 3, 12, 15–16, 55–70, 82, 97–9, 111, 114–15, 137–8, 141, 145, 158–60, 163, 166–8, 188, 192, 202, 215, 239 augustine of Hippo, St 147, 159, 215 Bacon, Francis 160 Badiou, alain 214, 220 Barthes, roland 237 Bauman, Zygmunt 3, 95–100, 102–7 Belloc, Hilaire 15–16 Bensaïd, danie 229, 244 Benson, John 82 Bentham, Jeremy 162–4, 181 Beauvoir, Simone de 24 Beer, Samuel 185 Bell, daniel 233, 244 Bensaïd, daniel 229, 244 Benson, John 82–3 Bielskis, andrius ix, 1–4, 229–48 Birt, John 126 Born, Georgina 126–8 Bourdieu, Pierre 214, 219, 223 Bradley, F.H. 181 Brecher, Bob ix, 2, 23–32 Brown, Wendy 112 Burns, tom 122–5

Burris, Val 244–5 carlyle, thomas 174 cawson, alan 185 chesterton, G.K 15–16 chapple, Frank 185 chicago School 2, 42, 46, 48, 235 christianity 15, 148, 158–9, 162–3, 181, 183 chuchill, Winston 177 cicero, marcus tullius 78–9 cobbett, William 15 cohen, G.a. 26 cole, G.d.H. 175–80, 184 crosby, Sir James 50 dahrendorf, ralf 230–32 dawson, Jo 50 deleuze, Gilles 237 derrida, Jacques 144, 193, 237 distributivism 15–16, 181 dixon, William ix, 2, 33–53 drucker, Peter 14 dumont, Louis 160–62 durkheim, Émile 35–6, 173, 197 Fabian Society 173, 174–5, 183, 186 Ferguson, niall 68–9 Foot, Philippa 1, 141 Foucault, michel 3, 109–15, 119, 237 Friedman, milton 23–4, 29–31, 235, 240 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 155–7, 165 Geiger, theodor 230–31 Giddens, anthony 230

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Gierke, otto von 173 Glaucon 35, 39 Goodwin, Fred 49 Green, t.H. 172, 175–6, 180–81, 231 Greenspan, alan 57 Guild socialism 173–87 Guilds, mediaeval 136, 145, 148, 173 Guattari, Felix 237

Lenin, V.i. 178 Levinas, emmanuel 99, 103–7 Løgstrup, Knud ejler 99, 104–7 Levine, donald 100–101 Leo Xiii 15 Lipset, Seymour m. 233 Locke, John 78, 181 Lyotard, Jean-François 234, 236–7

Habermas, Jürgen 192, 199 Hall, Peter 204–5 Hancock, tony 90 Hardt, michael 230, 245 Harvey, david 113, 229, 234 Hayek, F.a. 2, 28–9, 57, 112, 234–5 Hegel, G.W.F. 142, 172, 175, 178, 187 Hegelianism 142, 231, 239 Hirschman, albert 163 Hobbes, thomas 24, 27, 46, 85–6, 160 Hobhouse, L.t. 231 Hobson, S.G. 175, 177–8, 182 Honneth, axel 192 Hopper, Kenneth 45–6 Hopper, William 45–6 Husserl, edmund 178, 104

macdonald, ramsey 178 machiavelli, niccolò 160 machura, Piotr x, 2, 155–70 macintyre, alasdair x–xi, 1–3, 7–21, 25–8, 30, 31, 35, 41, 55–60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 75–8, 82–3, 92, 95–103, 105–7, 109–11, 114–25, 128–31, 135–40, 142, 144–9, 155–8, 163, 168, 187–8, 200–206, 214–18, 223–4, 227, 230, 239, 245–6 maeztu, ramiro de 178–9, 182 mandeville, Bernard 161–3, 171 marshall, alfred 44 marshall, t.H. 184, 231 marx, Karl 17, 19, 38, 76, 81–2, 135–6, 142–3, 166, 172, 178, 187, 191–200, 202–3, 207, 230–33, 238–44, 246 marxism 3, 96, 138, 140, 142, 186, 191–2, 229–33, 237–8 mcmylor, Peter xi, 3, 95–108, 138 mcnabb, Vincent 16 meikle, Scott 34–5 mill, James 197–8 mill, John Stuart 13, 27, 30, 57, 178, 181 miller Jr, Fred d. 55, 58 mills, c. Wright 244 mont Pelerin Society 28 moore, G.e. 178–9 moore, Paul 49–50 morris, William 174–5 mussolini, Benito 179

Kamenka, eugene 200–201 Kant, immanuel 27, 30, 81, 102, 172–3, 175, 178 Kavais, Konstantinos 213, 227 Kay, John 55, 57–63, 65–6, 68 Keat , russell ix–x, 2, 3, 130, 191–211, 243 Keynes, John maynard 43–4 Keynesianism 2, 34, 231–5 King, mervyn 11 Klein, naomi 23–4 Knight, Kelvin x, 1–4, 117, 145–6, 171–90 Korkut raptis, Buket x, 2, 213–27 Kuhn, thomas 145 Lacan, Jacques 238 Lemke., thomas 112

nederman, cary 145 250

IndEX

negri, antonio 230, 245 nelson, Benjamin 15 nietzsche, Friedrich 17 noponen, niko xi, 135–51 nussbaum, martha 1, 156, 167–8

Schmitter, Phillipe 185 Schumpeter, Joseph 232 Schwitzgebel, eric 8 Seaford, richard 39–40 Sehgal, rajeev xi, 2, 55–72 Selucky, radoslav 196, 198, 199 Sen, amrtya 166–7 Sherman, nancy 1 Simmel, George 15–16 Simon, Herbert 101 Smith, adam 3, 10, 13, 29, 34, 41–2, 44–6, 66–7, 75–89, 92, 112, 171, 181, 188, 197–8, 238, 240 Socrates 7, 37 Solomon, robert 55, 66 Soskice, david 204–5 Stalin, J.V. 31 Stirling taylor, G.r. 178 Strauss, Leo 139, 276 surplus value 4, 17–19, 234, 239, 241–4

ongun, mustafa xi, 3, 109–33 o’neill, John xi, 3, 75–93, 196 o’callaghan, Jeremiah 15 orage, a.r. 175 owen, robert 174, 178 Paul, Jeffrey 55, 58 Paul of tarsus, St 147 Paulson, John 49, 69 Penty, arthur J. 174–5, 179, 181 Perlman, mark 160 Perpich, diane 107 Petty, William 160 Polanyi, Karl 2, 135–47, 204 Polanyi, michael 145 Plato 7, 15, 36–8 Por, odon 179 practices 1, 3, 56–68, 70, 109–31, 136, 144–9, 187, 200–207, 214–21, 223–7, 230, 244–6

tawney, r.H. 180–84, 187–8 taylor, charles 157, 164 temple, William 180 thatcher, margaret 126, 186, 235 thrasymachus 24, 27, 29, 35, 36–7 titmuss, richard 3, 76, 88–9, 91–2 tönnies, Ferdinand 173 tourre, Fabrice 49

Quesnay, Francois 161, 164–5 reagan, ronald 235 reith, John 121–2 renard, Georges 173 ricardo, david 34, 41–2, 44 ridley, matt 51 rivera, Primo de 179 robbins Lionel 44 rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 76, 79–81, 84–6, 175–7 ruskin, John 174–5 russell, Bertrand 178–9 rust, Joshua 8 ryle, Gilbert 145

utilitarianism 27, 162, 172–3, 178, 180–81 Wahl, asbjørn 233, 235 Walzer, michael 199 Webb, Beatrice 173, 175 Webb, Sidney 173, 174, 175, 180 Weber, max 100, 183 Wilson, david ix, 2, 33–53 Winnicott, d.W. 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 145

Scargill, arthur 185

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