Distributive Justice and Adam Smith (Istanbul Talk) IV (final)

A model for understanding Smith might be provided by Foucault’s discussion of ‘art of government’ and governmentality in the 18^th century, not because Foucault was a a great Smith scholar, or that he was correct in every respect in his understanding of 18^th century thought, but because his schema is so good at illustrating the general contours of thought. Foucault thinks of a model of ‘nature’ related to an emphasis on government becoming effective through learning to restrain itself. That self-limitation allows the natural growth of commerce and the emergence of natural man.

The 18^th century understanding of the ‘savage’ promotes a natural man who can be the individual of political economy and of contractual relations (as in the political contract which Smith did not advocate, and the importance of voluntary contracts between free individuals, which Smith does advocate). There is an idea of ‘natural liberty’ in Smith which is what allows commercial society, and the benefits that commercial society brings to all classes free of too much design and political schemes.

The influence on Smith of the model of ‘nature’ can also be seen in his tendency to see agriculture as more natural and therefore more important to wealth than manufacture, and to understand financial and banking sectors as less important than either, even if necessary. Similar evaluations can be found in his attitude to countryside and city, particularly the capital city of a monarchy where luxury is concentrated. Smith does have a critical attitude to the maldistribution of economic goods through politically centred concentrations of wealth, but it is the weakening of such impositions on the natural development of trade which is important to Smith, not schemes of redistribution.

There is a theory (largely implicit) of distributive justice in Smith but not a justification of redistribution, and it is important to maintain that distinction. There is a Smithian desire to remove distortions of ‘natural’ distributive justice, with the welfare of the poor in mind and conditioned by disdain for the luxuries of the rich, but no desire to re-arrange property and income distribution through state power, and in general no desire for measures which limit the ‘natural’ growth of wealth except at margins which will not have a major impeding effect, as in the proposal for free education for the poorest or direct taxes on the luxury goods of the rich. Other interpretations of Smith tend to make false equivalences between concern for the welfare of the poor, or criticism of measures which harm the poor, and enthusiasm for state re-arrangement of the distribution of income and wealth.

 

Distributive Justice and Adam Smith (Istanbul Talk) III

In Smith distributive justice has a rather accidental aspect then, as we can see it emerging when other considerations are taken into account rather than having  structure of arguments of its own. This could be taken as simply the consequence of Smith not writing a book on justice, or the principles of politics. However, we do have his Lectures on Jurisprudence for the law and theory of justice, The Theory of Moral Sentiments for his moral principles, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations for his political economy, and much associated thought about the state, taxes, poverty, public works, luxury and so on. There is a theory of distributive justice which can be constructed from these texts, and others, but that is not to say a theory of redistributive justice.

One of the problems with Smith commentary is that admirable scholars and political theory thinkers, like Rasmussen and Fleischacker, who are disposed favourably to a theory of redistributive justice see it in those elements of Smith which express a wish for distributive justice. There is distributive justice in Smith in the sense that he favours the distribution that emerges from freedom in economic activities, and in the state measures he favours to benefit the poor rather than the rich. However, that is not the same as the kind of belief in a predetermined pattern of distribution of justice which Rawlsians, or egalitarian liberal favour, at the extreme a completely flat distribution as argued for by G.A. Cohen and which is in the basic assumptions of Habermas‘ thought on norms, ethics, and discourse.

It is important to note in this context that there are people who favour a flat income distribution who do not favour a state designed plan of redistribution. That includes individualist anarchists like Roderick Long and Gary Chartier, who believe that markets and property exist best through voluntary protection and law enforcement agencies, as without the power of a central state which monopolises violence, there is no strong force favouring large scale concentrations of property. In that case the state acts that favour financial services and large companies cannot exist and such economic entities would not exist. Without such large entities there can only be a diverse and broadly equal range of small companies and the self-employed. That kind of analysis draws on Smith and David Hume, referring to the way that government bonds ground a financial market by transferring money to bondholders from the tax payers in general, the monopolies granted to companies, the layer of senior state bureaucrats who have an impact on general income distribution  and naturally favour the existence of a private bourgeoise, interact with and find ways of getting family members into it. Smith does  not favour the anarchist solution, but the existence of that option in the terms I have just described, clarifies something about Smith’s attitude to distributive justice. That it is possible to favour increasing economic benefits for the poor and to attach more importance to that than increasing economic benefits for the rich, without favouring state imposed schemes of redistributive justice, but favouring that distributive pattern that emerges from state enforcement of the rules of a market economy. There is some modest state action to promote public goods and relieve the conditions of the poorest, but beyond that Smith is arguing for withdrawal of the state, not expansion of the state.

Admirable though the work of Rasmussen and Fleischacker on Smith is, they are too inclined to see an underlying drive towards redistribution though they acknowledge that there is no explicit argument along those lines. One compensating argument is that  no one else was arguing for redistribution at that time, or previously, so Smith could not make that argument. Though it is true that recent ideas of comprehensive redistribution through the tax and benefits system, maybe combined with strong trade unions and collective bargaining legislation, lack precedents from before the emergence of the modern welfare state in the 1870s, there are some precedents. Plato and Aristotle favoured some restraint on accumulation of  wealth, and Rousseau evidently preferred a flat income distribution, though not regarding it as plausible in a large modern commercial society.

Various ancient, medieval and early modern states have had a confiscatory attitude towards large accumulations of private wealth, particularly where it threatens political power, and bought consent from the lower classes on the model of the ‘bread and circuses‘ provided for the poor of Rome during the Empire. Smith himself notes the way that land was transferred to army veterans through colonies in conquered territories.  Thomas More’s Utopia provided a Renaissance example of a literary thought experiment about an egalitarian communist society. Radical Protestant movements of the Reformation, such as the Anabaptists at Münster provided examples of egalitarian communism. None of this seems to have been attractive to Smith. It could be argued that he would have been attracted to a Thomas Paine type program of taxation, but despite living into the time of Paine’s notorious (to mainstream British opinion) major writings there is no evidence that Smith was impressed.

Distributive Justice and Adam Smith (Istanbul Talk) II

There is a welfare, or ethical, aspect to Smith’s political economy, which includes a bias towards the interests of the poor, and against wealth that arises from the less productive parts of the economy. However, these aspects of his thought do not lead him to state designed schemes for distributive justice. Rather he demands an end to those state activities which harm the poor, and the most productive parts of the economy. The assumption is that state action is to very limited, and beyond education, which Smith still  believes should be largely private, he does not suggest expanded state activity on behalf of the poor, as distinct from the re-ordering of taxes and the regulation of the economy which itself tends towards deregulation. Herzog refers to negative externalities and asymmetries of power in the economy which are not addressed by Smith and which might have led him to expand the field of state action if he had lived long enough to see those issues become of more concern in political life and in political thought.

Answers to this kind of question are necessarily speculative, but we can get some idea by looking at where Smith can be located in relation to other thinkers of his time. Wilhelm von Humbolt who was writing a bit later in The Limits of State Action puts forward an eloquent case for minarchism, minimal state liberalism, which he refers to as proper polity or a state based on negative welfare. This includes a rejection of the kind of modest proposals Smith has for state activity with regard to public goods and the condition of the poor. There is not precise equivalent for Humboldt on the side of a very active state. Rousseau had a strong belief in the justice of income and wealth equality, but he thought it was only relevant circumstances where not much state action would be necessary to maintain that situation. There is some attention at some points to measures the state might take to restrain inequality, as in the proposed constitution for Corsica, though the concern is just as much with the moral corruption of leaving a locality and immediate community. The major arguments for an active and expanding state of Smith’s time come from the actions and brief texts of political actors, most famously the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and from a conservative position of maintaining an existing aristocratic-monarchical state.

The difficulty in comparing Smith with current thinkers is that ‘progressive’ thinkers of the 18^th century favoured limited government, and now support expansive government. Those elements of 18^th century thought which anticipate statist-active government progressive positions now are only accepted by Smith in their most moderate form and more than balanced by state limiting proposals. This suggests a libertarian-egalitarian liberal cross over, but more leaning to the libertarian side. The likelihood therefore is that Smith would have favoured very limited moderate steps on the issues raised by Herzog, and would have wished to cut back on big schemes to restructure the distributive effects of the market.

Smith’s view of distributive justice early on in Lectures on Jurisprudence, where he invokes Aristotle and Grotius to discuss the distinction between commutative justice and distributive justice. Commutative justice refers to what cannot be taken from us or attacked, because it rightly belongs to us, or is part of us. It is a very strong form of justice relative to distributive justice. Commutative justice is enforced through the state legal system, distributive justice is a matter or morally preferably outcomes in which we prefer to see wealth going to those in need rather than those who already have many luxuries. Smith never directly says that all distributive  justice should become a voluntary matter never enforced by the state, though that might seem to follow. He also refers, as we have seen, to the relation between politics and issues of ideals of distribution, the inevitability of the ways that the state tries to maintain itself though distributive strategies. Smith may think that distributive justice is in a middle position between the institutions of criminal justice which enforce commutative justice (strictly speaking) and the purely individual voluntary nature of charitable giving. Distributive justice is something pursued by the state for the sake of social peace, and the maintaining of itself, as a precondition for social existence, but not a matter of absolute justice.

Distributive Justice and Adam Smith (Istanbul Talk) I

Based on a presentation for a panel I convened on Adam Smith at the conference Pluralism and Conflict: Distributive Justice Beyond Rawls and Conflict, Fatih University, Istanbul, 6-8th June 2013.

There are two aspects to distributive justice in Smith, referring more to the underlying themes of his work rather than his explicit claims. One aspect is the manner in which states maintain themselves by bringing advantages to enough people for it not to encounter too much resistance to enjoy and orderly existence. The second aspect is more morally guided with regard to protecting the poorest from complete destitution and preserving the sense that justice is being applied to all. The first aspect might not seem like justice at all, because it is what people in power do in order to keep their status, and associated economic goods, rather than what anyone does for the sake of justice itself.

Smith himself was not, however, an advocate of a form of moral theory detached from other interests. Theory of Moral Sentiments gives psychological and social bases for moral rules and judgements, and though Smith strongly resisted the idea of an egotistical reduction of ethics, the criterion of satisfying the invisible spectator does not establish a sharp distinction between self-regarding acts and altruistic acts. Ethics on  a collective level grows and and improves over time. The idea of social and political justice emerging from state craft is in this case not a big jump from Smith’s explicit thoughts about justice. The second aspect flows from Smith‘s explicit thoughts about ethics and justice, though it does not give us a fully explicit theory.

 

The second aspect is developed in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, mostly with regard to distributive injustice. This itself has two aspects: injustice towards the poor and injustice between sectors of society. The first brings us closer to the more pure form of distributive justice questions, and the second closer to the state craft issues. In these threads in Wealth of Nations, the cause is largely the activity of the state rather than the results of markets being left free of state legislation and government schemes. Smith sees injustice as resulting from collaboration between merchants in the same sector, but sees this as more the consequence of state intervention than of free commerce. The state enabling, encouraging and even requiring enterprises to form corporate bodies (such as local chambers of commerce in Britain) in the same sector is the biggest reason for merchants conspiring against the public. That is the source of the famous quotation about merchants conspiring against the public, though that quotation is often used to support demands for increased state regulation. The great injustices that Smith mentions to the poor come in part from the way the Poor Law tends to tie the poor to their locality of birth, under suspicion that they might apply for public funds in a parish (minimal unit of local government in Britain) where they lack previous connections. There is a concern here with the suffering of the poor, but also with the negative consequences for the economy of restricting labour mobility (concern which can and should be applied now to migration between countries).

A related concern is that lingering requirements from the Middle Ages for seven years of apprenticeship, before practising a craft, limits the chances to the poor to improve their economic situation. The poor are less able to offer skills to make a good living if faced with an artificial seven year delay before putting their skills out on the market.  Again there is an interlacing of concern for the condition and rights of the poor, with the negative consequence for consumers in general and what we might now call the public good.

Another source of injustice to the poor is the application of taxes on the necessities of life, in which case the concern is more purely one for the condition of the poor. Smith’s favours taxing luxuries rather than necessities, but he nowhere calls for graduated (progressive) taxes, and only a tortuous interpretation of his work can support such an idea. Public debt results in a distributive injustice for Smith, the understanding of which includes the assumption that ‘natural liberty’ is a better basis for political economy than state interventions. Public debt leads to a forced transfer of income from the productive sectors of the economy to creditors, that is the financial sector of the economy. That includes a transfer (also noted by Hume) from tax payers of low income to rich holders of government bonds (a very relevant issue at present, though it tends to be egalitarians now who are less concerned with debt than conservatives and libertarians).The solution that Smith advocates is reducing debt, which includes reducing public expenditure, particularly on war, so again an approach different from most egalitarians at present, though on the specific issue of military spending there could be some agreement.

Political Judgement, Justice and Republicanism IV (Istanbul Talk on Hannah Arendt)

The political realm in antiquity was the realm of a kind of freedom which could not belong to everyone, as some have to labour, including the labour done by slaves. The political sphere was one of equality, but qualified by aristocratic suspicion of free labourers, an equality of liberty from coercion by a tyrant in every case, but ambiguous about how far those free relations could extend amongst the population. The sphere of the home was a place of non-freedom. Men ruled the home and themselves only became part of something where there was freedom on leaving the home to participate in public affairs. The suggestion is that even the male patriarchal ruler of the home was preoccupied there with business which had nothing to with freedom, managing the family, slaves and the wealth/property of the family.

In her understanding of antiquity, Arendt sees wealth as something separate from property. Property was not separable from the family and was essential to political elite status. Wealth refers to all the things owned by the family, and its income which be lost. That idea of the permanence of property was essential to how the ancients thought of what was proper to a governing class, and that assumption lingered into the 19th century, when capitalism undermined the idea that any kind of property could be separated from the world of exchange where it acquired a contingent status in relation to the owning family. The non-political sphere of household family affairs became the basis of polities, which moved away form discussion of matters of purely public interest to maximisation of everyone’s wealth. Equality and justice moved from being questions largely for the elite class in its awareness of itself, to the main concerns of politics in promoting the welfare of all.

This is part of Arendt’s picture of the emergence of economic and social goods for all as the centre of modern politics, a process she does not reject, but which inspires reservations about the loss of political questions within the political world. Again her supposed nostalgia for Athenian republicanism must be heavily qualified by her capacity for sketching out economic, social and political shifts since then. There is a desire for moments of political participation but this does not so much involve Athenian nostalgia as idealisation of the early stages of the American, French and Russian revolutions.The interest in both the virtues of participation and of aristocratic excellence draw on Tocqueville, whose work is part of the 18^th and 19^th century attempts to reconcile antique republican political liberty with modern individualistic commercial liberty. One of the sources for Tocqueville here is Benjamin Constant’s essay on the difference between the liberty of the ancients and the moderns, which draws on Athens as the most ‘modern‘ of ancient republics. The Pettit style of distinction between neo-Roman liberty and civic humanism, Athenian and Roman republicanism does not really account for this.

There is a drive in Arendt towards separating politics from the kind of welfare concerns that have absorbed politics since the 18^th century, though this just as much as about hanging onto non-Kantian and non-Utilitarian notions of the good, so what hanging to what is normally called virtue theory, though she does not use that phrase. In other words, she defends a version of eudaemonism which is not just about immediate pleasure, but about excellence, distinction and becoming worthy of history. The being worthy of history establishes a political goal, the birth of political institutions and laws that will be remembered and last.  Arendt has a disruptive perspective here, since the agonistic element of her view of republicanism, the aristocratic struggle for excellence spread widely in the population, also undermines the Roman and Spartan, what Nietzsche called the Doric state, image of marmoreal permanence. The ancient aristocratic writers preferred the permanence and solidity of Rome and Sparta, that is the meaning of the rejection of Athens then and more recently, as in the criticisms of democracy by the Founders of the American republic, who in large degree tried to established an unchanging Lycurgian constitution, run by an oligarchy protected from the passions of the public. Though Pettit and Skinner would not define themselves in that way, they are positioning themselves in the same territory. Pettit’s work on Hobbes in which he implicitly finds the Hobbesian sovereign to be the centre of Rawls and Habermas style rational discourse goes even further in the direction of power for those who head the institution and make the laws which claim to be guided by reason, and what the people would want if they thought about it long enough under ideal conditions. That includes schemes of redistribution, of state enforced patterns of income and wealth which are in tension with the unplanned nature of the most productive economic activity. There is no such constraint on Arendtian political judgement, which makes judgement a matter of conceiving common goods and gaols without an inherent bias towards state power over the economy, in norms that demand government designed economic patterns.

 

 

Political Judgement, Justice and Republicanism III (Istanbul Talk on Hannah Arendt)

Hannah Arendt’s political theory, and broader account of the human world, amongst other things, shows a way that we can understand the movement from antique philosophical contempt for the slave, and the labourer, to political philosophies of human equality.   The broad point is that the kind of equality Marx sought for all who work is a product of capitalism itself. [Capitalism makes clear a distinction present, but only a very submerged way, in antique concepts between the labour of the whole body and the work of the hands. It is labour which is one of the things that distinguishes us from animals according to Arendt. Her capacity to assume an absolute opposition between the merely animal and the human, is not so widely shared now, but we can hold on to it as a form of ranking which is not reliant on absolute distinctions, including any absolute distinction between the animal and the human.] The modern commercial, or capitalist world, of production driven by trade across large areas unified as markets, is contrasted with production  by the household, for the household, at the centre of antique understanding. An understanding in which any kind of labour degrades, a labourer is a slave or only just above servitude in status, and can be tortured in judicial proceedings since that disgrace enacted on the body is just an extension of the disgrace of labour. Again these are no absolutes. We would have a very poor understanding of the antique world, and even of pre-historic human communities, if we do not appreciate that there was trade across large areas. The point is that the weight of trade across large areas compared with more self-contained forms of production and consumption increases, creating a sense of nationhood and of  humanity as unified by trade and by participation in production. That production for trade is what pushes in the direction of egalitarianism in ethics and politics, and then egalitarian ideas of income and wealth distribution

Arendt’s alleged nostalgia for ancient Athens provides a useful way of thinking about why income and wealth egalitarianism are not necessary outcomes of moral equality, other than reasons of economic efficiency. Arendt emphasise the antique Greek aristocratic pursuit of excellence, but not simply by going back to antiquity. It is something emphasised in the late 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt, the historian and cultural historian, so we might see an implicit attempt there to find something equivalent to economic competition in antique aristocratic competition. Burckhardt was a friend of Nietzsche, there is some common purpose and some benefit in framing Nietzsche’s political thought in relation to Burckhardt, but we cannot go into that right now.  Arendt does not suggest that aristocratic competition finds a direct equivalent in market competition, emphasising political competition. There as a distinct 19th century bourgeois tendency towards seeking dignity in antique and medieval heroic references, and this is open to charges of anachronism, if not outright absurdity. The point is that the political realm of competition provides the nearest equivalent to ancient aristocratic competition, which included the idea of political honour. We could take the economic  realm as something completely different, as if politics was heaven in relation to economic materialism. That is Marx’s critique of Hegel, and he was right in analysis if not so right in his offered solutions. There must be some spill over between economic efforts, which are efforts to find social status, ‘honour, as much as anything, and the search for political office, though hopefully with the  minimum of confusion between the political search to provide public goods, and the sectional work of economic self-interest. Back in antiquity, Pericles himself suggested in his famous funeral oration that poverty is not disgraceful, but a failure to struggle against it is.

Amongst other things, Arendt shows the broad history and conceptual transformation which led from an Ancient Greek understanding of equality, and inequality, in justice to modern assumptions regarding those issues. Arendt does refer to Ancient Rome as the most political of communities.  We can see that Arendt did not make an opposition between Athens and Rome in the way that Pettit does, though she certainly does note some differences. Arendt contributes to an already well established interest in law as fundamental to the difference between Athens and Rome. We can see such a suggestion in the philosophical idealist history of Hegel. The way Arendt understands the difference is that Greek law is a form of divine authority over humans, while Roman law is about contractual relations between individuals and at the basis of political institutions. That is a distinction that suits the idea that Rome was the most political of communities, since it is the possibility of freely held relationships, which is the meaning of politics in the ancient world. That is Arendt refers to politics as the realm of freedom, as distinct from necessity. The work at issue, is most obviously slave labour. Arendt notes ancient distinctions between slaves (presumably by birth) and conquered peoples who become slaves. That separation of freedom from work includes the work of free labourers, on the whole. Ancient democracies, including Rome though that democracy was rather rigged to the benefit of the aristocracy, gave political rights to free labourers but never lost the disdain for labourers. Both Plato and Aristotle assume that political leadership should be in the hands of an elite not concerned with work or money making, and even regard politics itself as non-serious and secondary compared with philosophy, an inevitably elite pursuit. Arendt does allow for the political vision of human life in Plato and Aristotle, but also makes us pay attention to the opposite drive in their thought, the thought that the polity is something for the philosopher to ignore as far as possible.

 

Political Judgement, Justice and Republicanism II (Istanbul Talk on Hannah Arendt)

There is distinct interest in aristocracy and competitive excellence in Arendt, which do not obviously lend themselves to egalitarian redistributionist projects, she is more Tocqueville and Burckhardt than Marx or even Thomas Paine. Arendt’s thought defends the existence and irreducibility of political community as part of any human community. There is no possible depoliticised utopia of rational (utlra-Rawlsianism) designers or (ultra-Hayekianism) of spontaneous orders, which evades the need for a political sphere. That is a sphere that mixes competition for power and the pursuit of political values, and that is an inevitable part of any human community. The political sphere is one of selection with regard to membership of political elites in different political currents, and in the overarching political elite of state institutions.

Arendt provides a framework for social justice which is much more engaged with the nature of politics as contestatory and as oriented towards the conquest of power, than the Rawls approach of public reason, or other approaches to political foundations such as discursive rationality in Habermas. The advantage of Arendt’s approach is that is does not need to presume a perfectly rational basis for distributing economic goods or a perfectly rational basis for political judgement. Even if we just take those rationalistic approaches as guiding ideals, they lead to theory unable to deal with the spontaneity necessary to a dynamic economic order, or the agonism necessary to pluralist political life.  It is not possible to make a strong enough distinction between questions of political citizenship and questions of distribution of economic goods on the basis of Aristotle’s approach, which leads him to limit economic inequality between citizens to a ratio of five to one. No one has created a society with flourishing political freedoms, strong individual rights, and a dynamic economy, on the basis of such restrictions, even if we allow for the limited number that Aristotle thinks of as citizens.  The Athens that Aristotle knew showed the ways that prosperity, democracy, and individual rights go together and grow, in an economy which is not constrained in the ways that Aristotle would like economic exchange and inequality to be constrained.  Arendt shows how there can be participatory and contestatory democracy, with elites approximately equivalent to Aristotle’s aristocracy, but based on choice and competition. The reaction to the intrusive economic sphere, and various dissatisfaction with distribution in modernity are the basis of the modern political sphere.  The dissatisfaction with distribution does not just take the form or resistance to inequality, but also of sectional demands for more economic goods, and complaints about misdirection of economic goods to others, along with attempts to define genuine public goods and forms of government action which do not create sectional economic advantages or undermine economic incentives. That is the James Buchanan public choice style of analysis of how political bargaining can undermine the provision of public goods is a better fit with the Arendtian themes of political judgement and struggle than redistributivist models. The public choice model does not exclude some redistribution where there satisfies some widely accepted public good, or moral impulse, to keep citizens out of poverty, but it tends to provide reasons for regarding attempts to define an acceptable income and wealth spread, and who gets economic rewards, as pretexts for capture of the polity by coalitions of sectional interest.

Arendt provides a framework in which politics is not depoliticised as in Rawls, something taken further by many libertarian thinkers, economics is not subordinated to political rationalism as in Rawls, and there is a stronger distinction between the economic and political spheres than in Aristotle. Political justice is partly established through the competitive means of selecting a genuine political élite, and detached from possession of economic goods. There cannot be a complete separation between political elites and economic elites. Members of the political elite are likely to be economically privileged as political actors, and have have advantages in becoming economic actors.  However, the relationship is much looser than Aristotle could envisage, as the modern economic sphere generates a level of economic goods for the most successful in the economic sphere beyond the goods of the political elite.  The complexity of modern society, the more varied nature of the economic world, the changes in the private-public distinction examined by Arendt, enable more distinction between distribution of political and economic goods.  She also understands that the complexity, the individualism, and the changeableness of modern societies, creates a need for an effective political elite able to shape the rules of the economic sphere to the public welfare, without eroding the autonomy, emergent complexity, and spontaneity of the economic sphere.

We should not seek a rationalistic determination of economic distribution or of the arguments of politics.  We should seek a framework that is both sustainable and adaptive, an evolutionary framework, where rules are clear and known but can be debated and changed. The political elite has been tested in the competitive nature of elections, and is not able to direct all economic goods towards itself.  Arendt shows how there can be a framework, rules, institutions and elite formation which are open to spontaneity and conflict, and thereby draw on the greatest Aristotelian insights into justice, politics, and judgement .

 

Political Judgement, Justice and Republicanism I (Istanbul Talk on Hannah Arendt)

There has not bee much blogging for a while as my attention has been taken by the political drama here in Turkey. I will post about that, but when I am ready to say something considered and reflective. I prefer to avoid instant reactions here or imitating the kind of media intellectual always ready with a reaction dressed  up in superficially theoretical, historical or philosophical terms. I am posting, in parts, the talk (original title: ‘Political Judgement and Economic Justice in Arendt: Renewing Athenian Republicanism). I recently gave in Istanbul on Hannah Arendt at the conference Pluralism and  Conflict: Distributive Justice Beyond Rawls and Consensus  (6th to 8th June). My thoughts about Arendt do have some relation to my thinking about the protest movement in Turkey, but I want to avoid an instant pseduo-Arendtian analysis, so have nothing to say about current politics in the paper. The text is very much a text for oral presentation rather than a finished piece of work, so is I think suitable reading for a blog. I also gave a talk on Adam Smith, which I will post here, possibly after commenting on politics in Turkey.

The suggestion that we take Arendt in terms of Athenian republicanism should not be taken too literally. There is a polemical context here which is to contest the kind of republicanism presented by Philip Pettit, and which draws on Quentin Skinner in its reference to Neo-Roman liberty. Pettit briefly suggests that Arendt is a nostalgic for Athens. That is part of Pettit’s own general distinction, used by others, between the proper kind of republicanism base on liberty as non-domination, and civic humanism which apparently enforces some kind of conformity to a completely political and communal life. The distinctions Pettit makes are peculiar. Why should we regard the Rome described by Polybius as more open to privacy and individualism than Athens as defined by Pericles, who explicitly defends the Athenian model with regard to what Pettit says it does not contain, that is respect for difference and individuality. The really distinctive thing about Pettit’s republicanism is that republicanism is distinguished from civic humanism, or Athenian republicanism by its emphasis on institutions and procedures. If we think of those characteristics as requiring laws, that is laws understood as civic rules distinct from divine order and archaic custom, then Rome does provide a better model. Arendt herself emphasises the idea that Roman law establishes a break with the Greek vision of law as divine authority. The republican impulse is one that Arendt traces back to ancient Greece in a rather idealised way, in terms of sticking to a tradition of great moments in European freedom and thought, but in a way which is very revealing. It is a way of thinking about republicanism in which there is renewal of the tradition interacting with the ways that republicanism itself refers to the hope of a new order, a new birth of freedom. Roman law is one part of that renewal. Arendt does look at Roman republicanism critically with regard to a loss of the autonomy of politics, which becomes identified with community in her view, though that is a process she sees as completed in the Latin Middle Ages. The drive in that non-political direction, which is the direction of freedom, freedom from the kind of necessity found in labour and economy as well as from a tyrant or oligarchy, is mitigated at least in the republic by the development of law in Rome as something other than the divine authority.

Pettit’s republicanism in its adherence to institutions and procedures is following on from Rawls and Habermas, where ideas of correct institutional arrangement and procedures are very entangled with a definition of justice as economic equality. The default   is that income and wealth should have a completely flat distribution, but that inequalities may be allowed as far as they benefit the poorest (through greater economic growth) or promote the viability of civil society (which I think is a background constraint for Habermas, poking up through his texts in indirect ways). These economic egalitarian principles are largely advocated as normative arguments rather than directions for government policy, but they are designed as constraints on government actions and so at some point come into contact with policy, and as such steer policy towards redistribution of the wealth and income distribution that emerges from the market.

There are no such redistributive schemes in Arendt, though her thought does not completely exclude that possibility. On the whole,  she thinks of politics as being about something separate from economy and society, though she gives a very compelling argument for how the modern political concern with economic welfare is a product of the way that early modern capitalism creates a public sphere entangled with markets, which take economics out of the household into national and international systems of trade and exchange. Arendt refers to the changing nature of the relation between public and private in the emergence of capitalism, with an analysis of how that process erodes older versions of the public-private distinction that rely on the idea of a self-contained family economy. Capitalism breaks up that self-containment as individuals become actors in integrated economies at national and transnational levels. That  expanding and invasive economic sphere is the source of a public sphere with the same qualities, a parallel that arises because the economic sphere depends on laws, and on the state that enforces those laws. Politics in the world of modern political economy is conditioned by the reality of that invasive public sphere, the benefits it brings and resistance to its more coercive aspects.

Arendt, Ancient Republicanism and Modern Equality

Hannah Arendt’s political theory, and broader account of the human world, amongst other things, shows a way that we can understand the movement from antique philosophical contempt for the slave, and the labourer, to political philosophies of human equality. Though she was no Marxist, her account includes an admirable way of thinking about Marx and Marxist theory as a deeply necessary form of analysis that captures some realities better than previous analyses. Marx’s way of thinking is part of the theoretical capture of a social world based on trade, production for trade, and the value of the efforts that go into production. She resists the temptation of some non-Marxist thinkers to snipe at those aspects of Marx’s economic analysis lacking much plausibility, even amongst Marxists after Marx’s own life time. The most obvious example of that is Marx’s labour theory of value, and related claims about the declining rate of profit and immiseration of the proletariat (sometime expressed as relative rather than absolute, which is the more plausible version). Sniping at Marx on these points should also be directed at his sources, including Ricardo, Malthus and Smith, who contain precedents for these claims. Arendt is inclined to take early political economy up to Marx as single school, and there is some justification for this. Her analysis is based on illumination of common points, continuities and the broad transformations of concepts and of social realities, rather than detailed appreciation of sources, and that is itself a necessary moment of analysis.

The broad point is that the kind of equality Marx sought for all who work is a product of capitalism itself. Capitalism makes clear a distinction present, but only a very submerged way, in antique concepts between the labour of the whole body and the work of the hands. It is labour which is one of the things distinguishes us from animals according to Arendt. Her capacity to assume an absolute opposition between the merely animal and the human, is not so widely shared now, but we hold on to it as a form of ranking which is not reliant on absolute distinctions, including any absolute distinction between the animal and the human. The modern commercial, or capitalist world, of production driven by trade across large areas unified as markets, is contrasted with production  by the household, for the household, at the centre of antique understanding. An understanding in which any kind of labour degrades, a labourer is a slave or only just above servitude in status, and can be tortured in judicial proceedings since that disgrace enacted on the body is just an extension of the disgrace of labour. Again these are no absolutes. We would have a very poor understanding of the antique world, and even of pre-historic human communities, if we do not appreciate that there was trade across large areas. The point is that the weight of trade across large areas compared with more self-contained forms of production and consumption increases, creating a sense of humanity as unified by trade and by participation in production. That production for trade is what pushes in the direction of egalitarianism in ethics and politics, and then egalitarian ideas of income and wealth distribution The distinction between dignified labour and mere work becomes more clear, though it had already been present in antique distinction between a craft using knowledge, sometimes providing a model for knowledge, and more disgraceful forms of money making.

Arendt’s alleged nostalgia for ancient Athens provides a useful way of thinking about why income and wealth egalitarianism are not necessary outcomes of moral equality, other than reasons of economic efficiency. Arendt emphasise the antique Greek aristocratic pursuit of excellence, but not simply by going back to antiquity. It is something emphasised in the late 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt, the historian and cultural historian, so we might see an implicit attempt there to find something equivalent to economic competition in antique aristocratic competition. Burckhardt was a friend of Nietzsche, there is some common purpose and some benefit in framing Nietzsche’s political thought in relation to Burckhardt, but we cannot go into that right now.  Arendt does not suggest that aristocratic competition finds a direct equivalent in market competition, emphasising political competition, so I am extending her analysis a bit. There as a distinct 19th century bourgeois tendency towards seeking dignity in antique and medieval heroic references, and is open to charges of anachronism. The point is that the political realm of competition provides the nearest equivalent to ancient aristocratic competition which included the idea of political honour. We could taken the economic  realm as something completely different, as if politics was heaven in relation to economic materialism. That is Marx’s critique of Hegel, and he was right in analysis if not so right in his offered solutions. There must be some spill over between economic efforts, which are efforts to find social status, ‘honour, as much as anything, and the search for political office, though hopefully with the  minimum of confusion between the political search to provide public goods, and the sectional work of economic self-interest. Back in antiquity, Pericles himself suggested in his famous funeral oration that poverty is not disgraceful, but a failure to struggle against it is.

Adam Smith and Historical Pessimism

The second of two posts of  thoughts about Adam Smith’s lectures, as I work on two conference papers on the man from Kirkcaldy.

There is an element of pessimism in Adam Smith, despite the general expectation that Enlightenment thinkers are humanist optimists. While arguing against slavery, Smith suggests that it might never be eliminated from the world. It still has not been absolutely eliminated from the world, not that there is anywhere it is still legal, but a mixture of abuse of power by traditional elites in more isolated parts of the world, and the vulnerability of migrants in a world of immigration controls means there are certainly persistent pockets of effective slavery. Smith’s reasons for such pessimism seem to include an element of geographical determinism. I have come across no discussion of the element of geographical determinism in Smith, which he shares with Montesquieu and Rousseau. It is not something that he has a lot to say about, and of course though I have read quite a lot of Smith scholarship, on and off in recent years, and intensively in the last couple of years, my knowledge is not exhaustive. It may have become subsumed under discussion of the element of the primacy of agriculture within Smith. There is a tendency to think of wealth as coming from the land because that use of the land is the first form of economic activity, and that it must always have primacy within any national economy. That is maybe more of a tendency, than an explicit theory, but it has been quite widely noticed with regard to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Getting back to slavery, the element of reduction of wealth to agriculture fits with a view of the determination of societies, and their possible development, by physical geographical conditions.

The tone of pessimism comes partly from a way of looking at the past, shared with two other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, David Hume and Adam Ferguson, and with many precedents, in which commerce and culture accompanies declining military capacities, leading to the conquest of cultured commercial peoples by savage peoples. Tough that is compensated in the world Smith knows with the hope that commerce and culture is generally winning, he does have a pessimism still poking through. Towards the end of the  Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith reverts to a version of the savages defeating commercial cultured peoples when he refers to French invasion of the Netherlands in the early 18th century. This presumably refers to an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands (roughly what is now Belgium) in 1701, in which France undermined conditions the Dutch had imposed on trade by the Spanish Netherlands and removed Dutch fortresses within the Spanish Netherlands near the French border. Smith refers to a plan to evacuate the Netherlands and move the population to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This is all rather bizarre and I can only think that Smith is confusing the 1701 events with the 1672 invasion of the Netherlands (as in the independent Dutch state) by France, as part of a four party coalition which also included Britain, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (in practice the lands controlled by the Austrian Habsburgs). This event was a terrible threat to the Netherlands, which lead to the murder of the Grand Pensionary of Holland (roughly speaking the de facto prime minister of the Netherland, based on control of the largest province) Jan de Witt, an event witnessed with great horror by the philosopher Spinoza. The Dutch did not attempt to move to colonies of the East Indies. The newly empowered Stadtholder (military chief of Holland and other provinces, a position always held by the Princes of Orange) organised the breach of dams flooding large parts of the country. So far from the cultured commercial Dutch giving in softly to an invasion by French brutes, desperate measures were undertaken to maintain independent national life, following brutal measures so that those who thought they could organise such resistance could assume complete power. In addition, as Smith often mentioned, France was a cultured, wealthy and complex nation at that time, if less free of onerous government than Britain.

So, at least some of the time, Smith was more melancholic in his view of history, and associated view of the possible futures of humanity, than some might assumes. I’m inclined to associate this with his view of antiquity and of the history of republics. While discussing the undoubted horror of antique slavery, he seems at times to overstate things  bit. Though he mentions an anecdote about the horror of the Emperor Augustus at the cruelty of one of the nobility with regard to his slaves, and a subsequent decision to emancipate them, Smith has nothing to say about the general improvement in the condition of slaves during the Empire, compared with the Republic. Smith does mention the miserable condition of slaves under the republic, but more to suggest that  a republic of free people may be less willing to emancipate slaves than an absolute monarch, than to create an optimistic narrative about the history of slavery. Smith is  very conscious of how republics may fail to give rights to slaves, or to free poor citizens, or the lower orders in general, though not so much it seems to me to advocate monarchy, which he does not, but to suggest that even the antique, medieval and early modern republics were limited and even counter productive in pursuit of liberty, while monarchy inclines to distortions of the nation economy through luxury, palaces, and an over burdensome state.