Chapter Twelve
The Unavoidable Immanuel Kant
I have been recommending (especially to those who see the point of changing the world by reinterpreting it) choosing to talk about rules; especially constitutive rules; and most especially those rules that principally constitute the relationship of people to things, property law, and those rules that principally constitute the relationship of people to people, contract law. (Here I take “”law” to include the morality and common sense in which law is embedded.) This is a realist recommendation insofar as it claims that rules are key causal powers moving human conduct and culture, and (what amounts to the same thing) moving history. Social scientists should talk about rules (or, in the light of legitimate reservations about the use of that term in certain contexts and for certain purposes, about norms, relationships, habitus, customs, institutions, conventions, or something else that does what rules do) for the same reason that chemists talk about molecules. Molecules exist. Rules exist. Talk about them is talk about reality because it reflects the way things are.
The chemist’s choice to talk about molecules, the biologist’s choice to talk about evolution, and the social scientist’s choice to talk about constitutive rules are Heideggerian choices in the sense that they let being appear. (Heidegger 1926 p. ) They do not erect a scientific method, or an epistemology, or a criterion for deciding whether statements are meaningful, which stands as a gatekeeper admitting some discursive practices into science while shutting others out, and thus by implication deciding what exists. They are Derridean choices because they are not totalizing. (Derrida ) They do not claim that one should talk in only one way, nor (drawing from Foucault the point that what one says and what one sees are two sides of the same coin) that one should see only one dynamic at work in nature or in culture. Recommending talking of rules is not the crest of a slippery slope that falls inevitably downward into insisting that nobody ever talk of anything else.
To illustrate further the merits of talking about constitutive rules, and doing so from a critical realist and Deweyan pragmatic perspective, I will comment on the following excerpt from Thomas P.M. Barnett’s book The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century, in which the author endorses the American invasion of Iraq:
“Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and –most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.” (Barnett 2004 )
I want to use this passage as an example of a general idea employed both in everyday speech and in sophisticated social science: the idea that one can draw conclusions about cause and effect by observing which phenomena occur together. In this case, Barnett observes that globalization thick with network connectivity occurs together with stable governments and rising standards of living. The similarity between this simple logic and the elaborate logic of statistical regression analysis commonly used in academic research is perhaps clear enough. They share the premise John Stuart Mill in his Logic called concomitant variation, that is to say the premise that phenomena are causally linked if they vary together. Causality is deduced as a conclusion from the premises that the presence of one occurs with the presence of the other, the absence of one occurs with the absence of the other, and the degree to which one occurs matches the degree to which the other occurs. They share this premise in practice even though cautious statisticians separate statistical significance in general and regression analysis in particular from causality, demurring that when a certain percentage of the variance of a dependent variable –say some measure of rising standards of living—is said to be “explained by” an independent variable—say some measure of globalization—the “explanation” is merely a number resulting from certain calculations. Cautious statisticians say it should be interpreted carefully, taken for whatever it may be worth in the context of other relevant considerations.
The affinity of the passage just quoted from Barnett in 2004 with Lionel Robbins’ utopian vision nearly seventy years earlier is perhaps clear enough also. The invasion of Iraq is justified because its aim is to reduce the size of the Non-Integrating Gap, to bring another area of the world into globalization thick with network connectivity, which virtually amounts to what Robbins recommended in 1936: enlarging the territory administered to protect the security of investments, to enforce contracts, and to facilitate the free flow of capital and labor across borders (See Dillon 1998). Barnett, like Robbins, thinks he knows that some parts of the world work while others do not, and also why some parts of the world work while others do not. The working parts Barnett calls the Functioning Core. He consequently thinks he knows the truth of the counterfactual proposition that if the other parts of the world, the parts he calls the Non-Integrating Gap, were brought into the correctly administered area, they too would work. On the basis of what he took to be scientific knowledge, Robbins justified the British Empire for his present (1936) and advocated for the future a global organization whose task would be to impose free trade on every nation. On similar grounds, Barnett endorses the Iraq war.
In sum, Barnett echoes a theme from chapter ten: The empirical evidence justifies the actions of those who are working to put into practice the ideals and principles of a liberal utopia.
Let us now change lenses. Let us take off the Humean/Millian empiricist lenses of Robbins and Barnett. Let us focus our eyes through the lenses of the version of critical realism I am recommending.
My invitation to the reader to change lenses is implicitly a request to the reader to resist any inclination to cite counterexamples to show that the generalizations of Robbins and Barnett are false. Please refrain, for example, from citing ethnographies from the ghettos of America, and from quoting passages from The Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu et al on life in contemporary France. In general, please resist painting a bleak picture of life in the areas Barnett calls the Functioning Core to refute the claim that globalization produces rising standards of living. It could be done. (It has been done e.g. in Patomaki forthcoming) But it would not be a change of lenses. It would be normal science, even though it would cite different evidence to draw different conclusions. It is necessary to resist –or at least temporarily to suspend—one’s inclinations to look at different facts in order to accept an invitation to see facts differently.
If one dons lenses ground by deciding to talk in the less Humean and more realist idiom of basic cultural structures, the emphasis will be less on concomitant variation and more on the causal powers of rules. (See Patomaki ) (Nonetheless, constructing falsifiable hypotheses and testing them by experiment and observation will still have roles to play.) As Robbins sees the need to cope with scarcity as inherent in general features of the human condition, the realist, while not disagreeing with Robbins on this point, will see causal powers inherent in the general observation that of all the species inhabiting the planet earth, homo sapiens sapiens is the only one who is a juridical subject capable of owning property and capable of participating as a party to sales and other contracts. Dogs are not juridical subjects. A human person can own a dog, but a dog cannot own a person. Trees own no property, not even the soil between their roots. Fish make no sales, incur no debts, and never sue other fish for breach of contract. Homo sapiens sapiens was not a juridical subject either during most of the time that has elapsed since the hypothetical first homo sapiens sapiens crossed the imaginary line separating her from non-human primates. Even during the short span of geologic time during which juridical subjects have existed, most of that time most humans have not been among them. In archaic Rome, as discussed three chapters ago, only the paterfamilias was a juridical subject. Most times most places most people have been slaves or serfs, unemancipated women, or else members of one or another dependent category for which today’s western languages have no precise names, such as the categories of quasi-slaves and quasi-serfs discussed by M.I. Finley in The Ancient Economy. (Finley )
The facts will be seen differently when they are viewed through lenses that see today’s world as governed by quite peculiar institutions. Capitalism will be seen, as Marx saw it, as both the best and the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. But I am proposing a coupure epistemologique not quite the same as Marx’s; and not quite the same as one that would take patriarchy as the key, or a key, to understanding oppression in general. It is one that sees the human body (especially but not only the brain, the mouth, and the ears) as a social body, as the body of an animal whose ecological niche is culture, as the body of an animal that achieved a competitive advantage over other mammals thousands of years ago because it could organize group hunts with the aid of language (Tanner ), as the body of an animal that organized social cooperation not by instinct, as do ants and bees, but by custom and by ceremony (Durkheim ). In dialogue with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, I recommend seeing the human body as intrinsically relational, as site and source of social structure. On a good day one could call the related body (the family, the tribe, the community) the site and source of function and of beauty born in custom and in ceremony. (Yeats ) On a bad day one could say that, “… we all have a fascism in our heads, or, more profoundly, that we all have a power in our bodies.” (Foucault 1976B p. 36). Revising Max Weber slightly, while not disagreeing with him, I see modernity not as the eclipse of custom (Brauche, Wertrationalitat)) but (following Karl Polanyi) as the disembedding and the exponential runaway growth of certain customs, namely of the customs that form the constitutive rules constituting sales. From such disembedding there follow strategic thinking, the sequence of actions that make up capital accumulation, instrumental rationality, and so on…all of which are customs too. In Wittgenstein’s terminology they are language-games too.
Through such lenses, the facts Barnett summarizes in his concept of Non-Integrating Gap appear differently. Regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and the regions where there are chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists, are not the regions that have not yet been integrated into the Functioning Core. As Paulo Freire emphasizes, it is in an important sense an error to speak of “marginal people” because it is an entirely central feature of the existing dominant system that it produces populations mistakenly described as “marginal” to it. (Freire ) The phenomena observed in the Gap regions are consequences produced by the same quite peculiar institutions, the same norms organizing sales, the same causal powers, which produce the Functioning Core. One mother earth hosts a talking species that has organized itself according to one dominant paradigm; or, in other words, according to one pervasive and ubiquitous language game, the buying and selling game, which has become disembedded from social relations generally, and has become their context more than they are its context. (Baumann, Polanyi, Dumont) The object of social science has become one modern world-system. (Wallerstein )
If we look at society through lenses that focus on the property and contract rules derived from Roman Law forming a private law substrate underlying the public laws of the modern world-system, then we will not be surprised to find, first, that many people own no property, and, second, that many people do not succeed in selling enough goods or services with enough regularity to have any considerable income. The law of property comes from the dominus of the paterfamilias. It means power. It means control. It means exclusion. It is compatible with a Jeffersonian ideal in which everybody owns property, but it is not surprising that often, most often, some do and some do not. Those who do not have no place to stand, no place to sleep, no place to be, unless they can raise enough money to pay rent, which brings into play the second non-surprising fact. It might be the case (Jean-Baptiste Say and John Stuart Mill thought it was always the case) that everybody could always sell something, if only their labor power. But the weight of history and the cogent critique of Say’s Law by John Maynard Keynes support the latter’s opinion that full employment is only a special case, unusual and when it happens temporary. Full employment at wages high enough to provide a decent living is an even more special case, even more unusual, and when it happens even more temporary. From a legal point of view, Keynes’ critique of Say’s Law (a critique he called a “general theory” because full employment is a special case, as in physics Newton’s laws are a special case of the laws of Einstein’s general theory) is a truism. It is obvious. There is a contract of sale only if there is a meeting of the minds of two parties, a buyer and a seller. That there would always be an employer for every job-seeker is a logical possibility, but there is no reason to expect that it will usually happen.
In general, the basic rules constituting markets do not provide for the inclusion of the excluded. By “the excluded” I mean here those who lack something to sell that buyers want. (Others are socially excluded for other reasons, but although that is often Foucault’s topic, and although it is an important topic, it is not my topic right now.) To be sure, in addition to their merits as ways of bringing efficiency and freedom together, markets also have merits as institutions that promote inclusion. For example, members of a minority ethnic community may not to be allowed to marry into the dominant group, or to participate in politics, or to be in the army, or in the dominant church, but they may nonetheless be allowed to engage in trade. In such a case, the market includes people other institutions exclude. For another example, the inclusion of women in areas of social life formerly out of bounds for them may be facilitated by their entry into the labor market and through it into employment outside the home.
Nevertheless, the social objective of including the excluded is in general an objective that markets left to themselves do not achieve. The standard consequence of following the rules of trade is the exchange of goods of equivalent value. Competition makes supply and demand intersect at a price where the value of what the seller delivers is equal to the value of what the buyer pays. Therefore, the person who enters the market with a pittance leaves the market with a pittance. Those who own nothing –or nothing anybody else wants to buy—cannot enter the market at all. Markets do not function to improve the social or economic status of those who have little or nothing to offer for sale.
How do I know these things are true? By deducing them from the constitutive rules. They are, indeed, not always true, but only true to the extent that people act as markets presume and prescribe. I would claim that Max Weber’s ideal types and Karl Marx’s account of capital accumulation are for the most part also true because and to the extent that what rules presume and prescribe is practiced.
If these considerations are valid, then the claims of the liberal utopians are false insofar as they claim to know that mass prosperity bringing in the excluded is produced by free markets. The counterfactual claim that if things were different from the way they are in the respect that the independent variable identified by concomitant variation as the cause (free markets) were changed in a direction expected to drag the dependent variable (prosperity) with it (according to a function plotted by mapping the past concomitant variation of the two) is made implausible by knowledge of the causal powers that produce the phenomena in question. This is not to say that all liberal utopian claims are false. Their claims are not false insofar as they follow Adam Smith in holding that the division of labor produces the multiplication of wealth, a principle that on a global scale is called comparative advantage. (For further discussion of the verities and deceptions inherent in “comparative advantage” see Richards 2000) Nor are their claims false insofar as they follow Ludwig von Mises in holding that round about production requiring large capital investments over long periods of time is in the end much more productive than handicrafts. (I should, however, mention the view that Smithian and vonMisian factors have historically been overshadowed as causes of prosperity by science and its technological applications, and that the achievements attributed to such factors are mainly due to their alliances with science; and it is further sometimes held that science could be put to work most effectively to meet human needs through institutions much different from those the liberal utopians envisage.) However, granted that utopian liberals have indeed identified plausible causal mechanisms that make their claims both not entirely dependent on concomitant variation and not entirely false, they are nonetheless mistaken insofar as they think they have general grounds for believing that a Robbinsian world order would be a world of universally shared prosperity.
Whatever the historical causes of increased productivity (which is what the Smithian principle and the vonMisian principle just cited tend to explain) may be, they do not explain including the bulk of the population in its benefits. Adam Smith claimed that even the poorest Scot of his times had been made better off than even the richest savage by increased productivity and production, but whatever the merits of his claim, and whatever the merits of more recent claims that rising tides raise all ships, they do not explain the American way of life as it developed after World War II or European social democracy or other similar phenomena. What is surprising from a rules-realist point of view, and what calls for explanation, is not poverty but rather the mass prosperity that came to pass in the United States and North-West Europe after World War II, and which has come to pass to a certain extent in other areas also, most notably recently in India and China.
From a realist point of view a considerable part of the explanation of the participation of the masses in the prosperity made possible by science, by the division of labor, and by capital intensive technologies, is to be found in social movements and doctrines that have modified the basic rules of the market. The massification of prosperity is explained less by free market orthodoxy than by deviations from it. That the basic legal rules of property and contract have had to be modified to achieve mass prosperity is dramatically illustrated by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States first rejecting and then accepting the social democratic measures taken in the United States in response to the great depression of the 1930s in such cases as West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (accepting the modification of contract law through minimum wage legislation) and (accepting the modification of property law by extending the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission), and others. (cite ) Marx explained the relatively high wages in the United States in the early nineteenth century by a different sort of modification of the norms governing poverty: the existence of western frontier regions, where even workers brought to America as indentured servants could flee and squat, legally or illegally, thus reducing the supply of workers electing to stay on the East Coast and work for wages. Generalizing his Swedish experience, Gunnar Myrdal observed that wherever the masses have political power, they find it to their interest to modify the basic rules of contract law. Collective bargaining modifies the lopsided confrontation in the market place between the giant corporation and the lone worker. Consumer protection laws modify caveat emptor (“Let the buyer beware.”) In general, new public laws modify the comparatively old rules of private law. Another realist, Aristotle, observed that the more egalitarian rules of justice in Athens, compared to other Greek cities, derived from the political power of the masses there, which in turn derived from Athens’ military dependence on its navy. The navy depended on having many men to row its boats. Cities that depended on cavalry depended on a wealthy minority rich enough to own horses, and in those cities the rules of justice were less egalitarian. (Aristotle ) An Aristotelian interpretation can be given to the laws committing governments to take measures to maintain full employment that were approved by the parliaments of all western industrial nations after World War II. Full employment laws had to be passed to keep promises that had been made to the working classes during the war, promises which had to be made to win the war. (Or, in Germany’s case, to attempt to win it.)
Such considerations fade out of focus if instead of seeing history in terms of political struggles over what the rules will be, one sees it as a source of datasets to be analyzed to measure the impacts of independent variables on dependent variables. A constitutive rules approach will see that poverty, defined as lack of wealth and income, can only end when the formerly poor no longer exist because everyone has wealth and income. The rules constituting the phenomenon, the ones that establish what counts as the phenomenon (the nominal level of measurement, the level that determines what –quality—as a necessary prerequisite to determining how much—quantity) establish also the criteria that define when the phenomenon will be over. They also name dynamic forces that produce the phenomenon: in this case the causal powers of the laws that exclude certain persons from wealth and from income. The latter approach (the one that sees history as datasets to be analyzed in terms of independent and dependent variables) will not see what Aristotle saw, or what Marx or Foucault saw, the action in history of conflicts about rules, but will instead tend to fall into what can be called the independent variable/dependent variable fallacy (abbreviated as IVDVF or IVDV fallacy). Let me try to explain what the IVDVF is. It is not equivalent to (and therefore it is not saved from being a fallacy by being a corrollary of) valid triangulation. For example, it would be a valid triangulation of Aristotle to try to find out which Greek city states relied on navies and which on cavalries and whether there was more social equality in the former than in the latter. (For more on “triangulation” see Richards 1985)
The IVDVF builds on David Hume’s and John Stuart Mill’s logic of concomitant variation mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. It specifies that one variable is independent and another dependent. Let us call the independent variable A and the dependent variable B. Research sometimes succeeds in showing that there is a functional relationship implicit in the data such that if you know A you can calculate B to some extent within some identifiable margin of error. The IVDVF then takes another step. It indulges in policy advice of the form: Increase A to get more B. Or, alternatively, decrease A to get less B. For example: Show me where there is more globalization (A), and I will show you where there are rising levels of prosperity (B). Therefore, globalize more to get more prosperity.
The IVDV fallacy suggests a research program different from the rules analysis above. Above it was immediately obvious that once one decides to define poverty in terms of wealth and income, then in order to end poverty those who used to be poor must attain wealth and income. It follows that although some may emerge from poverty by participating in markets, markets will not, cannot, take everybody out of poverty. Markets are places where persons make sales. Sales are contracts. A contract is a meeting of the minds. It is voluntary. Everybody getting out of poverty by selling their wares, by finding buyers willing and able to pay for them, is for practical purposes impossible. It could only happen if for every seller there were a buyer, not just somebody who wanted to buy what the seller had to sell, but who had money to buy it with, and who knew about the seller. History does not record that such a series of coincidences has ever happened, and if it did happen it would surely be (as Keynes said of full employment) an unusual and temporary phenomenon, like the brief passage near the earth of a comet that visits our corner of the universe once every thousand years. But IVDVF suggests another approach, one that would begin a study of poverty by measuring how much of it there is, one that would map where it is and what the characteristics of the people who suffer from it are, one that would measure a number of other variables, such as race, educational level, gender, type of education, savings, investment, percentage of national budget spent on primary school education, delinquency, father-absent households, teen pregnancies, religion or its absence, number of siblings, personality traits, …. Statistics would then suggest a number of variables for the role of A, where some measure of poverty is taken as B. The fallacy consists, first, of then recommending increases of A, in Barnett’s case globalization, in order to get less poverty. (Or sometimes more A to get less B, or less A to get more B, depending on which way the variation goes) And then, second, going on to suppose (speciously following the logic of mutiple regression analysis) that taking action (sometimes called “treatment” or “intervention”) on a series of independent variables, each of which is shown by research to be one of the multiple causes of poverty, would eventually eliminate poverty completely.
I figured out that the liberal utopia of worldwide free markets could not possibly eliminate poverty completely by thinking about rules. I could not have figured it out using an IVDV approach to calculate which independent variables explain how much of it, graphing its ups and down over time, and comparing them to the ups and downs of operationally defined indices of variables suspected of being its causes. Note, however, that on a rules approach it follows, given that the rules governing the global economy are what they are, that economic activity will be stimulated by providing incentives for investors. High profit margins will tend to be associated with high economic growth. This tendency will (and does) show up in statistics. Given that the rules are as they are, it will be empirically observed that those places where the prospects for capital accumulation are relatively good are also places that are relatively prosperous. The same facts, when read through the lenses of the liberal utopian, will confirm a liberal utopian worldview, and when read through realist lenses will confirm a realist worldview.
In recommending choosing to talk about rules, especially constitutive rules, and especially those that govern the relationships of juridical subjects to things and to each other; I take it to be a merit of my recommendation that such an approach simultaneously: (1) reveals realities that the IVDVF systematically conceals, and (2) helps one to understand the statistical regularities and tendencies that are observed. That choosing to talk about rules helps to explain and to understand reality, bolsters the case for also recommending that those who want to change reality conceive of social change as rule change. (Richards and Swanger 2008)
Another merit of talking about the global economy’s constitutive rules is that it helps to bring into focus its fragility. It is a house built on sand. Its dominant institution is the market. Markets are places where persons make sales. Sales are contracts. Contracts are agreements. They are voluntary and in principle unpredictable. The value of everything and anything is what it will sell for, but what it will sell for is not anything that exists in the present, but a prediction about what may exist in the future. What it will sell for tomorrow can be estimated but it cannot be known. The judgments of employers concerning whether there will be enough sales in the future to make it a wise investment to hire employees today is a present fact, since it is about their present judgments, but it is an unstable fact, since it depends on what Keynes called “confidence,” a feeling about the future. (Keynes 1936, p. ) Sales indeed usually lag, leaving a portion of the world’s population outside the flow of exchanges of goods and services. At any moment for any reason or for no reason confidence may collapse, plumetting middle classes who thought they had achieved economic security into the chronic insecurity that is the normal lot of the lower classes, as has happened recently in Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, and Argentina.
If one assumes that the characteristic institutions of modernity have a certain quasi-homeostatic tendency to defend themselves and to remain in being, and (pace the Foucault of the mid 1970s) that they have a certain functional tendency to nurture human populations and to provide for their needs; and if one accepts the foregoing analysis of their fragility, then one would expect that the system (le pouvoir Foucault would say) would incessantly compensate for its fragility in repeated attempts to stabilize itself. It would compensate for the instability inherent in its constitutive rules by doing something –something or other—to keep the processes of life (what Marx called the metabolism of society) going, so that everybody’s basic needs could somehow be more or less met.
Regarding the world through a prism that keeps these considerations in focus, one might see a great deal of what happens in the world as Stabilizing Compensation. (I capitalize S and C to call attention to the idea.) Militarism, popular culture oriented toward buying, incurring debt public and private (what Harvey calls displacement in time (Harvey 1987)), colonization, decolonization followed by economic penetration, Keynesian pump-priming policies, enterprise zones, the promotion of suburbs and the automobile culture, and much more are all seen in a new light when one sees the world through lenses that focus on the need of an inherently unstable system to find Stabilizing Compensations. Many of the phenomena Foucault studies as normalization produced by disciplinary power, phenomena where people are enclosed in controlled spaces and subjected to surveillance in jails, mental hospitals, factories, barracks, and schools, can also be studied as Stabilizing Compensations. A set of rules that chronically excludes large numbers of people from commerce, because commerce depends on sales and there are never enough buyers; and therefore creates large populations of people who are not integrated into society, who tend to be dangerous, requires Stabilizing Compensations. To keep the system going something must be done not only with those whose labor power the market buys, the ones in the factories and other places of work; but also with those whose labor power the market does not buy, who tend to be kept in jails, mental hospitals, barracks, and schools. It is consonant with this view (as mentioned in a previous chapter) that in the big early roundup of surplus population studied by Foucault, the great confinement of the 17th century, diverse people –the impoverished, the heretical, the ill, the destitute aged, the drunken, the loony, the weird, the aggressive—were all rounded up, locked up, and in principle cared for for their own and society’s good. What they had in common was that society did not know what else to do with them.
Similar considerations lead to regarding as fundamental for understanding the global economy what Ellen Meiksins Wood and others call “systemic imperatives.” The idea of Stabilizing Compensations already introduces the idea of systemic imperative in the sense that the basic cultural structure, the system, makes Stabilizing Compensations obligatory. There is no rational or ethical process of social choice that produces a decision to resort to Stabilizing Compensations. It is not a matter of choice. There must be confidence; there must be a feeling that future sales justify present outlays; and it is consequently imperative that measures be taken to inspire confidence. Among other imperatives is the imperative to do something with the dangerous classes just discussed. Ellen Meiksins Wood discusses among others the imperative to cut costs (and therefore under normal circumstances to keep wages down) to remain competitive. However, seeing the principal trends in the global economy as impelled by systemic imperatives does not imply, as some critics have worried, that human agency is in principle denied. It simply implies that human agency should be employed to modify the constitutive rules that imply the imperatives. It simply means interpreting “emancipation” as empowerment, as strengthening the capacity to make social choices, as weakening the grip of systemic imperatives, as liberating humanity from having to do willy nilly what the presently dominant cultural structures impose on it. Unless humanity can thus free itself from imperatives imposed by markets, and turn markets into its servants instead of its masters, it seems unlikely that homo sapiens sapiens will survive many centuries more, because many of the things the systemic imperatives impose tend to destroy the biosphere, the habitat of the species, and therefore the species itself. (see Dryzek, Bookchin, and Milani)
If one regards, as I am recommending that one regard, the enhancement of the capacity of humanity to solve its principal problems as a process of transformation of norms, then one will have a number of questions to raise about what Foucault has written regarding the relationship between rules and power, the relationship between legal power and disciplinary power, and Kant’s concept of rules.
Foucault was driven by the requirements of his project to avoid rule-talk, to criticize rule-talk, and to seek alternatives to rule-talk. By 1976 he had come to define his project as the struggle of genealogies against the enemy. (Foucault 1976A pp. 25-26) The enemy was totalizing theories, specifically Marxism and psychoanalysis, most especially Marxism; and more broadly any historiography which, like Marxism, reads history’s great causes in economic language. Although Foucault lectured on liberal utopian thinking in his course at the Collėge de France in 1978-9, he apparently did not anticipate that after his death in 1984 it would would assume the dimensions of another totalizing theory, different from the enemies of 1976 but equally closed, and leading in the late 20th and earlty 21st century to, among other things, “the increasing unilateralism of the US, justified in terms of universal validity of neoliberal ideals” (Patomaki forthcoming p. 135) Nonethelesss, although he apparently did not anticipate the course history took after his death, many of his arguments against universalizing pseudo-science are available to those who today advocate cultural diversity, alternative economics, and local development.
The enemy of 1976 was similar to the economic history Foucault had set out to evade at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969; and indeed he continued to criticize economic historians for thinking in terms of structures instead of thinking in terms of events. (Foucault 1975, p. 467) Everything happens as if in 1976 Foucault had recognized that economic history was largely a history of markets, and that markets are places where people buy and sell governed by the norms of commercial law. Hence economic history was necessarily legal history. Market-talk led inevitably to rule-talk. Evading one required evading the other.
Foucault asks, “What means are available to us today if we seek to conduct a noneconomic analysis of power? Very few, I believe.” (Foucault 1976A, p. 28) Notice that Foucault does not conclude after an impartial inquiry that power is neither economic nor juridical. He frankly asks how to achieve the objective of talking in a noneconomic way about power and consequently in a nonjuridical way as well. Two pages later he summarizes his answer to his own question: “Thus we have two schemes for the analysis of power. The contract-oppression schema, which is the juridical one and the domination-repression or war-repression schema for which the pertinent opposition is not between the legitimate and the illegitimate, as in the first schema, but between struggle and submission.” He chooses the second schema. (Foucault 1976A p. 30) He identifies the first schema, the juridical one, with traditions deriving from late Roman imperial law that regard all law as an expression of the will of the sovereign; while simultaneously he makes a methodological choice to ground his studies of power in the micro relations of everyday life (which he sees as governed by what he sometimes calls capillary power); and thusly, by deftly kicking power downstairs (to the capillary level) and rules upstairs (to the level of the king, or modern king-surrogate), he makes his case for the superiority of a power-talk over rules-talk also a case for the superiority of the grassroots-oriented specific local intellectual over the systems-oriented general global intellectual. Consistently, in praising Deleuze and Guattari he praises them for not thinking in terms of totalities and in the same breath with writing an introduction to the non-fascist life conceived as a life where one both resists power and does not seek to exercise power over others (Foucault 1977 ).
Several years earlier, in his famous essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault had written: “Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” (Foucault 1971 p. 151) These words must be read as throwing down the gauntlet both to historians and social scientists who see social change as institution-building, and to those who see the world-system as driven by economics. Foucault’s project in the mid-1970s calls for convincing his readers that his version of power-talk can enable him to make sense of history while refraining from looking at it through the lenses offered by his chosen enemies. In his lectures at the Collėge de France for 1975-1976 he tries to show historically, drawing his material mainly from England and France, that war has been the origin and source of law. Thus he attempts to carry out a project requiring him to show that neither the rules governing institutions in general, nor, in particular, the market forces generated by the constitutive rules of capitalism, are laws of motion making history what it is.
Somewhat paradoxically, during the same year when his lectures were attempting to demonstrate that politics is the continuation of war by other means, Foucault echoed (perhaps ironically) some lyrical themes of his Heideggerian youth in an introduction to a book of photographs of contemporary political leaders. (Foucault 1976C) Their faces succeed the busts of kings; they are the images of sovereignty as were yesteryear the royal images stamped on coins, voici l’homme qui vous gouverne; they exude ceremony, magic, and a secular variant of divine power. It is not clear to me whether Foucault believed that the contemporary political leaders’ manufactured charm was (1) smoke and mirrors with no causal efficacy, or (2) a secondary form of power, as for Descartes color was a secondary quality, whose causal efficacy depended on the powers that manufactured it, or (3) causally efficacious in its own right, or (4) none of the above. I believe option (3) is the true one. In talking about rules above I did not use the term “culture,” but I had in mind the broader idea of cultural structures;wherein ceremony, imagery, music, magic, and, speaking generally, religion or its mythic substitutes, are integral parts of the functioning of the same human cultures that when looked at on their more sober, less playful, less mysterious side, are constituted by norms or rules.
Partly because I attribute causal powers to the charm of politicians (see Toynbee) and to other cultural resources that Foucault himself masterfully portrays, I find myself in agreement with Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1987), Charles Taylor (Taylor 1986), and other commentators who do not find Foucault’s enlargement of power-talk convincing. I take it to be a merit of talking about constitutive rules that it helps to explain precisely why it is not convincing. (While also believing that other linguistic options, e.g. Toynbee’s talk of charm (Toynbee ) have the same merit.) One way it does this is by attributing causal powers to rules. Patomaki makes a similar but broader point in regarding prevailing narratives as causal complexes. (Patomaki forthcoming) For example, Foucault argues at length that in Renaissance and early modern Europe certain accounts of the history of jurisprudence became military assets. (e.g. Foucault 1976D) He shows that in the wars and warlike struggles between the nobilities and the kings, the nobles found support in old Germanic laws which made the king merely a primus inter pares who ruled within the boundaries imposed by ancient customs. The kings found support in Roman doctrines of absolute sovereignty. Histories purporting to tell who conquered whom when justified legal claims. For example a history making France an historical product of the conquest of the Gauls by the Germanic Franks justified calling Germanic law (and therefore limited royal power) the true law of France. It made a king asserting absolute sovereignty into a usurper. Conversely, neo-Roman narratives defining France as the successor of the Roman province of Gaul could be used to make nobles contesting absolute sovereignty into usurpers. Foucault’s evidence regarding the roles played in wars by historical claims (which he presents as part of his case for his broader view that power needs to produce truth) tends to justify his choice to speak of politics as a continuation of war by other means in one respect. It shows that the same aims, e.g. extending or restricting royal power, can be pursued by different means, by military force or by political means such as writing persuasive historical narratives, or by their combination. But it does not support what sometimes appears to be Foucault’s case in another respect. It does not show that politics can be reduced to war, as if politics and war were indistinguisable, or as if politics were nothing but war. It does not justify expanding power-talk at the expense of rules-talk. If military force allied with narratives about rules is stronger because of that alliance, it is precisely because the rules narrative contributes strength to the alliance. It is because, for example, armies self-defined as fighting usurpers are able to recruit more fighters with better morale. It is because rules have causal powers and because prevailing narratives are causal complexes. “People can find it more important to do the right thing, as designated by these existentially constitutive stories and myths, than to avoid the risk of death.” (Patomaki forthcoming, p. 86)
In his 1975-76 lectures Foucault tried to show that historical accounts of the origin of rights in conquests were more plausible than juridical accounts of the origins of rights in contracts, such as those found in the natural law and social contract theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. However, his efforts were often devoted not so much to thus enlarging the sphere of power-talk at the expense of rules-talk, as to swallowing up rules-talk altogether in power-talk. Rules-talk becomes a kind of power-talk. The sphere of rules-talk separate from power-talk shrinks to zero because rules-talk, and indeed all talk, becomes power-talk. He says, for example, “Le discours est une série d’élements qui opèrent a l’intérieur du mécanisme général du pouvoir. En conséquence, il faut considèrer le discours comme une série d’événements, comme des événements politiques, à travers lesquels du pouvoir est véhiculé et orienté. (Foucault 1975 p. 465) (Speech is a series of elements that operate inside the general mechanism of power. Consequently, it is necessary to think of speech as a series of events, as political events, through which power is moved and oriented.) Foucault proposes not to ask what signifying structures mean, but rather to do genealogies of relations of force, of strategies, of tactics. His great model is not language and signs but war and battle. History is not “linguistic” but “bellicose.” (belliqueuse, warlike.) (Watanabe and Foucault 1978, p. 573) It seems to me that if such a view is taken literally one could not say, as I said in Chapter Seven, that Salvador Allende faced a choice between talking in terms of Chilean constitutional law or talking in terms of political and social power. He could only talk in terms of power because everybody always does. “Power” in the Foucault of the mid 1970s strikes me as like “Being” in Heidegger (Heidegger 1926 p. ) or “God” in the Old Testament (Exodus ) in the respect that it cannot be named because it is what is presupposed by every name. Foucault claims to study in detail exactly how power works. “My research is about the techniques of power, about the technology of power.” (Foucault 1978A p. 532) He often begs the question what it is about a particular phenomenon that justifies calling it an instance of power at work, rather than as an instance of something else at work. Because of what can be regarded as his universalizing of power-talk to make it into a single totalizing meta-narrative Foucault, Thomas McCarthy has written that Foucault sometimes makes a conceptual night in which all cows are black. (McCarthy 1994 p. 254) McCarthy no doubt had in mind occasions when Foucault says power is ¨relations¨as he did in a 1981 interview. (Foucault 1981 p. 750). While in 1976 power was ¨relations of force¨ in 1981 the ¨force¨is dropped and power is just ¨relations.¨ It is any way people interact with each other (agir les uns sur les autres) (Id. p. 751). The Weberian social science categories of custom, authority, force, violence, legitimacy, and domination are lumped together. ( Fraser 1989, p. 32) Distinctions are effaced. (Foucault 1984B pp. 719-20)\ (However, in his Tanner Lectures at Stanford in October of 1979 Foucault did make Weberian distinctions. See also Foucault 1978B)
For the sake of keeping some distinctions, while effacing others, I omitted “power” from my list of acceptable “rule” surrogates given at the beginning of this chapter. My relationship to the word “rule” is one of love but not one of marriage. I sympathize with the reasons some people have for declining to describe human behavior in terms of rules, while for other reasons I continue to do what they decline to do. The substance of what I have to say could be said, if one preferred to do so, in terms of norms, relationships, habitus, institutions, customs, conventions, or something else that does what rules do. I myself often use one or more of these, effacing, among others, distinctions between norms and rules. But “power” was not on my rule-surrogate list.
My reason for excluding “power” is that I find it to be an inappropriate tool for doing much of the work that “rule” does. It does not call attention to the self-guiding and social features of human behavior. It effaces these two important features that distinguish human behavior from the mechanical behavior of, to use Spinoza’s example, a falling stone. Regarding the self-guiding feature, it effaces what H.L.A. Hart and Jürgen Habermas call the internal aspect of rules, which appears, for example, when an accountant looks up generally accepted accounting principles to decide how to enter a credit or a debit. In Rom Harré’s terms, humans are self-monitoring, as are also to some extent some other animals. In Heidegger’s terms, dasein is self-interpreting; it is always a question for itself. Regarding the social features of human behavior, and without wanting to subtract anything from what Max Weber (Weber ), Pierre Bourdieu ( ), Anthony Giddens ( ), and many others have had to say about the appropriate vocabularies for talking about them, I would mention, as just one example of work that “rule” does that “power” cannot conveniently be used for, H.L.A. Hart’s point that rule violation licenses criticism. That is why Garfinkeling works. (Garfinkel ) One can begin to study a group’s norms by violating what one hypothesizes might be one, and then observing how members of the group react.
“Power” is too closely associated with mechanical causality to be a suitable tool for talking about rule-following that is self-monitored and social. However, Nietzsche and Foucault sometimes use the word “power” to describe a third sort of thing, which is not obviously either rule-following or machine-like. Violence. Warfare. Physical subjugation and domination of some people by others.
I want to insist on rule-following-talk as distinct from power-talk partly because I want to insist that rule-following is characteristic of that animal whose ecological niche is culture, while subjugation by violence and the imposition of rules by force, although common, is neither what is most characteristic of our species, nor what on pragmatic grounds we should emphasize. A theoretical choice to emphasize it runs the practical risk of encouraging negative self-fulfilling prophecies. Violence and warfare should be regarded as inhuman treatments of human beings. They have, unfortunately, often been standard male treatments of women and children, as well as of other males, but there is no good reason to identify the characteristically human with the physically powerful grown male, or with what has happened most often in history. Simone Weil has shown the similarities between mechanical causality and war in her study The Iliad or the Poem of Force. She shows war and violence as about mechanical causality even though they are not obviously about mechanical causality; they are about treating humans in their physical dimensions as forces more or less capable of inflicting physical damage on others. ( Weil ) War and violence treat the human being as if she or he were not human.
Foucault at one point in his career argues that violence plays a larger role in history than his chosen enemies think. He also sees the same conventional mostly peaceful ordinary daily behavior that everyone else sees, but proposes (acting as what John L. Austin would call a linguistic legislator (Austin )) to revise the ordinary language used to talk about it in ways that see it as manifesting capillary power. Insofar as his case is an empirical one, it is sometimes at odds with the weight of the evidence. For example, when in a passage quoted above he writes, ““Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination,” (Foucault 1971 p. 151 , he describes as not happening what psychological research finds does happen. Children do progress from unilateral respect to mutual respect. They normally give up fighting and accept conventional morality. Jürgen Habermas makes a case that the findings of research in developmental moral psychology are reflected in a parallel evolution of society over the course of history. (Habermas 1976) Insofar as he is doing redescriptions of the same facts everyone else sees, it is pertinent to ask what the practical consequences of the redescriptions will be. For example, social psychologists influenced by Foucault have analyzed the breast feeding of newborns in terms of a power struggle between baby and mother over feeding time and feeding position. ( ) Perhaps something is gained for science by reading the facts in that way, but perhaps something more valuable would be gained by following another linguistic legislator, Plato, who suggested treating all children as if they had golden souls. (Plato ) If neither the power struggle myth nor the golden soul myth is imposed on speakers by the scientific ideal of honest reporting of the facts, then speakers might well choose on pragmatic grounds to prefer the latter to the former. It would be a metaphysical choice. (Richards 1995, Letter 11)
Sometimes Foucault takes yet a third tack regarding power and rules. He says that power used to be about rules (a juridical model), but that it has changed and is now increasingly about norms (disciplinary techniques), asserting that rules and norms are quite different things. (For example in his lectures at the University of Bahia, Foucault 1976 pp. 162-201). (The first two tacks were: (1) saying that rules do not explain history but fighting does, for example in the Collège de France lectures for 1975-76; and (2) making power ubiquitous and all-pervasive so that rules are one form of power among others, for example in Surveiller et Punir.) The third tack appears to surrender using a Nietzschean turn to escape from what Dreyfus and Rabinow call the illusion of autonomous discourse, since power becomes whatever people at some given time and place take it to be, rather than the Schopenhauerian/Nietzschean will-to-power matrix in which all cultures live and move and have their being. (Indeed the late Foucault once wrote a summary of his entire life’s project for a dictionary of philosophers fitting all his work into a framework of archaeological research determining the historical a prioris of possible experiences, quite as if he had never seen the illusion of autonomous discourse as a problem and had never taken a Nietzschean turn to solve it. (Foucault 1984A pp. 631-36)) I do not want to go into detail concerning the plausibility of Foucault’s various views of power, but only to cite their variety as further evidence that Foucault was motivated to avoid rules-talk. If he ran into difficulties avoiding it one way, then he avoided it another way.
I believe that my reservations about power-talk are similar to the reasons Foucault himself had for talking toward the end of his life less of power and war, and more of care of the self and governability; partly because the same reservations that occur to me occurred to other people and were brought to Foucault’s attention. Foucault came to complain, for example, about people who treated ideological struggle as a form of warfare. They should instead do research side by side (les uns a coté des autres), viewing areas of disagreement more in terms of mistakes or in terms of lack of communication than in terms of struggle. (Foucault 1980, p. 95) However, even when at the end of his life he was doing little power-talk, he was careful to specify that what he was doing was not rules-talk, for example in Le Souci de Soi.
Immanuel Kant did talk about rules, and he rescued moral rules from mechanical causality in a way different from the ways I have been suggesting. Instead of finding ethics in the empirically given facts of life, à la John Dewey and à la Jean Piaget, he invented (or was one of the inventors of) the entity Michel Foucault calls humanity, l’homme, the transcendental/empirical double, an entity whose rational and ethical essence was guaranteed by universal and eternal concepts. As Foucault summarizes Kant, Kant made l’homme a universal subject, constituting himself in each of his actions according to universal rules. (Foucault 1983 p. 631) In the nick of time. When God and King were felled by the French Revolution, l’homme, although recently invented, was waiting in the wings ready to supply moral rules to a western world bereft of its principles of authority. Treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only, became a command that has inspired and guided from the time Kant first penned it until now. Hopefully it will inspire and guide the future as well.
How do I know this Kantian command is one that should be obeyed? Perhaps better: How do I know it is advisable to say this? What reasons do I have for believing it is true, or advisable to say, that humans should always be treated as ends, and never as means only, i.e. treated as having a dignity (Würde) beyond price, i.e. treated with respect (Achtung)?
My reasons are not identical with Kant’s. Kant saw his task as justifying philosophically what ordinary people already believe. (Kant ). (I see the conventional norms and attitudes of any given time and place as imperfect and needing improvement. ( I disagree on this point not only with Kant but also with John Rawls’ method of reflective equlibrium; with the similar methods of Robert Nozick; and with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and others who tend to advocate refraining from criticizing whatever anybody else may believe or feel.)) (Rawls , Nozick, , Deleuze and Guattari) Kant asserted that the only thing good without qualification was a good will. (Kant ) (I assert that there are other good things besides good wills, and I strongly emphasize things that are not good without qualification but nevertheless good.) For Kant it was a problem how to conceive a good will because it was a problem how to conceive any will at all, given that everything in nature is governed by laws like Newton’s laws, including the inclinations (Neigungen) that naturally move human action. (I am not worried about whether free will could possibly exist in a world governed by mechanical laws; as a Wittgensteinian I am satisfied to say that “will” is a word that has roles in language-games people play; as an Aristotelian realist I am satisfied to say that a person’s will determines the choice of an action when the causal powers determining the action are within the person; as a lawyer I am satisfied to interpret the joint wills of the parties to a contract in the manners provided by the statutes and case law precedents that provide guidance for deciding doubtful cases.) Kant finds that although everything in nature acts according to laws, humanity has a remarkable capacity to act from the conception of law. This capacity defines “will” and thus the possibility of morals. Remarkably, it also defines “person” A person is a rational will. The person should be regarded as an exception to the mechanical laws of nature because our intuitively given concept of moral law requires free rational wll while science cannot prove either its possibility or its impossiblity. (Kant ) ( I agree with Kant that humans can act from the conception of law, adding that they can also act in other potentially good ways, including imitating role models, following rules compassionately, habitually, acting under the inspiration of a spirit within, and others.) For Kant, humanity has the aforesaid remarkable capacity because humans are rational beings, rational essences, vernunftige Wesen. When Kant refers to humanity (Menschheit) he refers to persons who are rational essences. (Kant ) (This is why in 1966 Foucault dismisses with a philosophical laugh Kant’s homme as a being whose supposed essence includes a universal and eternal concept of reason, a being who inspires bogus Achtung as a successor not only of God but also of royal sovereignty identified with universal legal reason.) (Foucault 1966 p. ) Kant’s logical apparatus for justifying what he takes to be ordinary morality leads to identifying it with the commands the free rational subject gives itself. His ethics is an ethics of autonomy. It is an ethics of self-government, in which each human being, as a rational essence, is simultaneously free and morally responsible. It is an ethics that synthesises the juridical subject of Roman Law, the extended paterfamilias who can own property and make contracts, with the mechanistic worldview of Sir Isaac Newton. In this respect it is typical of the Enlightenment, similar to Voltaire and to Hume, and indeed to Spinoza and Leibniz, differing from their ethics in being more logically elegant and in the subsequent course of history more influential. It is an ethic that requires treating every other human being as an end and never as means only, because every other human being in principle is also (and in practice also ought to be) free and morally responsible. (I arrive at the same conclusion, while giving it a broader and more pragmatic interpretation, for broader and more pragmatic reasons partly given in parentheses in this paragraph and partly given below and elsewhere.) (Richards 1995)
In this chapter I have been contrasting two ways of thinking (i.e. ways of talking and seeing); criticizing one, a certain alloy of neoliberalism, militarism, and Humean/Millian empirical social science; while advocating another, one sympathetic to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory that regards basic cultural structures as causes at work in history. Any misleading impression I may have given that there were only two ways to think, and not an indefinitely large number, was, I trust, dispelled, when I introduced a third, that of Foucault in the mid and late 1970’s. The dialogue with Foucault had to be resumed because he seemed to challenge my claim that cultural structures are causally efficacious by reducing history to fighting. Then I introduced a fourth way of thinking, Kant’s. The early modern philosophers, among whom Kant has proved over time to be the most influential, gave modernity a secular coherence, ending theology’s monopoly of public discourse, by synthesizing science and law. (Rorty, Freudenthal, Richards 1995) Kant in particular invented a worldview in which the cosmos could be understood as Sir Isaac Newton understood it, while, simultaneously, the planet earth could be understood as inhabited by juridical subjects. I proposed to shield useful phrases from Kant’s ethics from the scorn of the Foucault of 1966 by giving them a broad and pragmatic interpretation.
One might ask the question why a social democrat would want to rescue Kant, when his edifying proposal to treat humanity always as an end and never as means only is regarded by him as only one formulation of that same categorical imperative which, otherwise formulated, commands absolute respect for property rights and contract rights. Kant made the civil code eternal; the realm of ends (i.e. of morals, which for Kant has two parts: ethics and moralische Rechtlehre, moral jurisprudence) is to be conceived by analogy to the realm of nature. He repeated the basic axioms of Roman Law as stated by Ulpian and later restated by Justinian (honeste vive, nemenem laede, suum cuique tribue), adding the later formulation pacta sunt servanda, and made them into universal and eternal principles guaranteed by pure reason (Kant 1797, especially page 344). The realm of nature never changes. As Newton’s laws forever govern the sky above, Roman Law forever governs the earth below. The first, not the second, part of the metaphysics of ethics (Sittenlehre, is the metaphysics of law (Rechtslehre) (Kant 1797); and for Kant the content of law is a replay of the European Roman Law tradition: a framework of private law (Privatrecht) including the law of property (Sachenrecht) and the law of persons (personlichen Recht) that forms the background presupposed by public law (öffentliche Recht)(See the table at Id. p. 314). Kant confirms the basic cultural structures that made occidental “absolute” monarchs different from oriental despots, because the former ruled as legal monarchs whose very right to rule presupposed that they would defend and not violate private law. In confirming tradition (as some of the social contract theorists also confirmed tradition with the somewhat different logical gambit of saying there were already rights in a state of nature before people agreed to form societies, and that as part of their agreement they kept certain of those pre-existing rights) he gave Roman Law metaphysical status. It became in principle eternal and universal. The moral law within is a categorical imperative that makes it a strict duty to others never to incur a debt without intending to pay it; the starry sky above shows the pattern of nature’s eternal clockwork.
My answer to the question begins by postulating that the transformation of the basic structures of the modern world begins with culture as it is, not with culture as we might wish it were. Pace Foucault’s view that a candid diagnosis of contemporary culture confirms Nietzsche’s account of the death of God necessarily followed by the death of man, I find that a candid diagnosis of contemporary culture shows that its magic words echo Kant: human dignity, respect for persons, human rights. I myself, having been fairly recently socialized into the contemporary world, when I read the words, “treat humanity whether in your own person or in that of others always as an end and never as a means only,” immediately feel a little thump of my heart that says, “Yes! That’s right! That is what I believe!” (Richards 1995, Letter Ten) While I do not believe cultures are self-justifying, I do believe improvement starts where they are. Würde and Achtung, Menschenrecht, are our growth points to nurture; our foundations to build on.
Kantian themes make possible a dialogue with the liberal utopians. Kant’s themes are our lingua franca. They are the center, and the question is Yeats’ question, “Will the center hold?” There is a concept of peace in the world today that is tolerated by le pouvoir because it is equated with security, where security means protecting business both against small scale thieves and against political radicals regarded as large scale thieves. The tolerated concept of peace is a Kantian concept, because Kant’s categorical imperative commands absolute respect for property rights. But although it is an officially tolerated concept of peace, it is not a possible concept of peace, because unmodified markets and property rights cannot achieve social integration. By the same token, it is not a Kantian concept of peace, because human dignity requires the inclusion of the excluded. Thus it is both Kantian and not Kantian. Kantian themes provide the lingua franca making dialogue possible, and the process of sorting out the contradictions that emerge in dialogue builds the conceptual bridges that need to be crossed to get from where we are to where we need to be, from peace as security to peace as community.
Against Kant, it can be said that he froze thought and institutions in time. One pure reason. One unidirectional time. One three-dimensional space. One Newtonian physics. One Roman Law. In his favor, it can be said that he regarded none of these as things in themselves, and all of them as conditions of the possibility of experience imposed by mind. He paved the way for others to replace “mind” with “culture” and for Hegel, for Marx, for Nietzsche, for Einstein, for Foucault, for Thomas Kuhn, for Fernand Braudel, and in general for all the many people who have charted how time, space, physics, and law have in fact changed over time. Kant advocated unending criticism of established ideas and daring to think for oneself. He saw them as necessary conditions of human maturity, of humans coming into their own and being themselves. (Kant ) It was this aspect of Kant that Foucault identified his own career with in one of his last writings composed shortly before his death. (Foucault )
There is a vast academic literature on Kant and politics, which stems from Kant’s own confused and contradictory attempts to escape from his premises. If a civil constitution is possible, if eventually peace is possible, it is because the moral law somehow causes human behavior. It must move people to respect in practice the rights of others. But ethics cannot possibly have any causal efficacy for Kant, because all the causal efficacy is in the Neigungen; it is in the Newtonian sorts of mechanical laws that govern everything. At one point Kant suggests that hope for a future efficacy of republican principles is to be found in the general enthusiasm with which European public opinion greeted the French Revolution. (Kant ) At another point he suggests that the ever-increasing horrors of war will lead humanity to see the need to conduct itself according to the principles of moral law, thus creating the necessary emotional motivation to act from purely rational principles. (Kant ) His legacy is necessarily uncertain, because his transcendental rational essence of humanity was by definition outside the phenomenal world governed by the category of cause and effect; and yet he wanted it to cause desirable effects. Commentators have debated at length whether Kant was a republican liberal, the intellectual grandfather of collective security and the United Nations, and of today’s theories of democratic peace ( ); or whether he was a pessimist, who held that human selfishness and violence were incorrigible ( ); or whether he was neither of these but something else ( ). These debates about Kant blend into the larger questions of political philosophy and international relations theory, especially the question whether peace is possible, given that human nature is what it is. I hope to have added to these extensive debates two distinctive ideas: (1) It is a mistake to treat causality in a Newtonian fashion in the first place, because rules and human agency have causal powers. (Patomaki 2004, Patomaki forthcoming); (2) The prospects for peace at all levels do not depend on whether human nature has enough potential for good to make a liberal utopia practical, but rather on whether market economies can become social democracies.
Although a great deal might be said, and has been said, concerning the various ways in which Foucault does and does not follow Kant, there are certain crucial ways in which he does not follow him, and I am claiming that in some of them it is prudent to defend Kant against Foucault, or at least against what appear to be the consequence and the intention of Foucault’s anti-humanism. I am regarding as naïve those who read Foucault as having no political interest in discrediting kantian ideals, but only an academic interest in determining the historical conditions of the possibility of their emergence, but I have no desire to quarrel with those whom I regard as naïve, nor with those who regard me as naïve. What I have in mind can be clarified by quoting a telegraphic synthesis of Foucault’s main ideas provided by Colin Gordon. (Gordon 1985, p. 239) For Foucault, Gordon writes, “…two complementary shifts of philosophical perspective are necessary: firstly, the discarding of that ethical polarisation of the subject-object relationship which privileges subjectivity as the form of moral autonomy, in favour of a conception of domination as able to take the form of a subjectivization as well as of an objectivation; and, secondly, the rejection of the assumption that domination falsifies the essence of human subjectivity, and the assertion that power regularly promotes and utilises a “true” knowledge of subjects and indeed in a certain manner constitutes the very field of that truth. The whole of Foucault’s work from Madness and Civilization to The Will to Know can be read as an exposition of these two theses; ….” (Ibid.)
Let me repeat briefly the positions Gordon finds that Foucault discards and rejects: “…subjectivity as the form of moral autonomy, …” and “…the assumption that domination falsifies the essence of human subjectivity,….” These positions are, I find, at the heart of today’s moral common sense; they represent and imply the upside of liberalism: freedom, dignity, rights. Their most typical (although not only) philosophical defense is found in Kant’s philosophy; they are expressed, for example, in his claim that autonomy is the principle of all true ethics. In finding it prudent to include a defense of them in a program of realistic ethical reconstruction aiming to surpass them, I am finding it prudent to defend (while modifying and improving) the modern liberal democratic state. These kantian positions are central to the moralische Rechtslehre that the western and westernized portions of humanity (and all of humanity regarded as participants in the global economy) now have to work with.
References
Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century. New York: Dunlap, 2004.
Michael Dillon, “Criminalising Social and Political Violence Internationally,’ Millenium, volume 27, number 3 (1998). Pp. 543-69.
Emile Durkheim, Les Formes Elementaries
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Donald Bouchard (ed) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. (1971)
Michel Foucault, “Lecture One: 7 January 1976,” (1976A) (from 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France, published in Paris by Seuil in 1997 under the title Il Faut Defendre la Societé) Translated and included in Michael Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Page numbers are to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Lecture Two: 14 January 1976,” (1976B) (from 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France, published in Paris by Seuil in 1997 under the title Il Faut Defendre la Societé) Translated and included in Michael Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Page numbers are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, Lecture of 25 February 1976. (1976D) (from 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France, in Il Faut Defendre la Societé. Paris: Seuil, 1997.
Michel Foucault, “Les Têtes de la Politique,”in Wiaz, En Attendant le Grand Soir. Paris: Denoël, 1976. (1976C) pp. 7-12. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III, pages 9-13.
Michel Foucault, “Dialogue sur le Pouvoir,” (Foucault 1975) interview in May 1975 with students at Pomona College, first published in 1978, translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III, pages 464-477.
Michel Foucault, “La Societé Discliplinaire en Crise,” Asahi Jaanaru 12 May 1978, (1978A) translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III.
Michel Foucault, “Précisions sur le Pouvoir: Réponses à Certaines Critiques.” Interview with P. Pasquino February 1978. (1978B) translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III.
Michel Foucault, Interview with D. Trombadori at the end of 1978, published in Italian in 1980, translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 41-95. Foucault also lectured on governability at the Collège de France.
Michel Foucault, “Á Propos de la Généalogie de l’Ethique,” an interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow at Berkeley in April of 1983, first published in English, and then later revised by Foucault. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 609-631.
Michel Foucault, “Foucault,” an article written about himself in 1980 under a pseudonym, for D. Huisman (ed.) Dictionnaire des Philosophes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. (1984A) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 631-636.
Michel Foucault, “L´Intellectuel et les Pourvoirs,” an interview for Le Revue Nouvelle on May 14, 1981, but not published until its edition of October 1984 pp. 338-343. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 747-762. (1981)
Michel Foucault, “L’Ethique du Souci de Soi Comme Pratique de la Liberté,” an interview published in Concordia, Revista Internacional de Filosofía for July-December 1984. pp. 99-106. (1984B) Translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 708-729.
Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Colin Gordon, “Afterword,” to Michel Foucault, Power\Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1991. (first German edition 1976)
Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten. (Werkausgabe Band VIII) Frankfort: Suhrkamp, 1982. (1797) Articulating a defense of modern institutions through a marriage of Newtonian physics and Roman Law is implicit in all of Kant´s works and indeed in early modern philosophy generally. In this work it becomes explicit.
Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” in Michael Kelly (ed) Critique and Power. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. pp. 243-282.
Heikki Patomaki, The Political Economy of Global Security. London: Routledge, forthcoming.
Howard Richards, The Evaluation of Cultural Action. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Howard Richards, Understanding the Global Economy. Delhi: Maadhyam Books, 2000.
Nancy Tanner, On Becoming Human
Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in David Hoy (ed.) Foucault: a Critical Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. pp. 69-102.
Moriaki Watanabe and Michel Foucault, ”La Scène de la Philosophie,” interview of Foucault by Watanabe, April 22, 1978 published in Japanese in Sekai for July 1978 pp. 312-332. Translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III. Pages are cited to the latter.
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