Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes:

Works from Harvard in political theory have a special sociological interest because they come from a center of power and indicate the probable rationale for where the elite are next taking the government. The last 50 years have been dominated by Rawlsian redistributionism. Danielle Allen’s new book proposes a radicalization, correcting the flaws of Rawls. But it retains the basic animus of Rawlsianism, which is that justice is fundamentally about equality. The book is deeply indebted to the Harvard milieu and to a large group of interlocutors…

The focus of much of this work has been on diversity, meaning racial difference should be taken into account in normative democratic theorizing under the slogan “difference without domination” — the title of her co-edited collection with Rohini Somanathan. “Domination” is a term taken from a non-Harvard source, Phillip Pettit, who made the interesting move to replace the liberal notion of freedom as “non-interference” by the state (i.e., “negative freedom”) with the idea of non-domination. The point of the replacement was to relativize the goal of limiting power to the common knowledge of the people in the society in question about what was and was not legitimate interference in people’s lives. This meant that state intervention had no absolute limits. Some forms of power which rested on absolute rights of a negative kind, for example, socially disapproved cruelties, could be legitimately limited by the state. But, it also opened the door to “positive” interventions for the good of the recipient, however unwelcome…

…the majority may want coercive acts by the state that the minority regards as unjust and oppressive. And the minority may be oppressed by what is allowed, either by the state or by negative liberties. As Lawrence Bobo puts it, “modern racial inequality relies upon the market and informal racial bias to recreate, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.” Hence, the phrase “Laissez Faire Racism.” These are hierarchies of domination, which unjustly restrict opportunity, power, and influence. Rawlsian notions of justice, which preserve negative freedoms and prioritize redistribution with a market economy, do not touch, and indeed can exacerbate racial injustice, and assume homogeneity. Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, oriented to achieving a transformative consensus, fail to respect differences that should be preserved. Justice requires something else…

Democracy requires loss: people can vote, but they must “sacrifice” to the majority, which frequently(?) disempowers them. As a result, “democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”9 This turns to the emotional matters. To make these sacrifices acceptable, they should be honored as such, and grievances should be open to redress. And this can happen only if there is a basis in “friendship,” in which we are not strangers but are vulnerable to one another.

“Difference” is a challenge to this: it estranges and allows us to evade the mutual vulnerability necessary for friendship and trust. We need, she concludes, new habits for dealing with one another in spite of difference. Friendship answers this need: “friendship’s basic habits for establishing equality of material benefit, recognition, and agency do the same work as justice….the core practices that are necessary for a relationship to count as friendship are practices to equalize benefits and burdens and power sharing.” There is a further complication, addressed in Allen and Light’s volume: immigration. Can these arguments apply to immigration? To the digital sphere?

So who rules in this new order? On the one hand, she claims to support egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and self-transformative political liberty. On the other, she concedes that participation will not appeal to everyone. Similarly, the activity of political friendship and the making of bridging ties between quasi-representative group members with parallel figures from other groups, which is at the core of her model, will be for the very few. One gets the uncomfortable sense that she is describing a form of rule in which justice-enlightened multi-tasking people with good connections across groups, like herself, use state power to “steer,” one of her favorite terms, the rest of us.”

Philosopher Stephen Turner writes on Facebook: “So now there is a threat of using AI to escalate the plagiarism wars and out the offenders. It is an interesting dynamic. But I suspect it will be blunted by confusion over the definitions, which has already happened. There is an interesting dynamic that already shows up in the [Claudine] Gay case — the powerful can steal from the less powerful, but if the less powerful were to steal from the powerful, it would be apparent. So the incentive to steal goes mostly in one direction. On the other hand, nobody reads this stuff anyway, so until AI catches people they are safe from detection.”

Jan. 10, 2024, Professor Turner writes: “So I did a mildly critical review of Danielle Allen for Society. Next thing I know she is a top candidate for the Presidency of Harvard. Anyone else need a favor?”

Stephen Turner writes a chapter called “Carl Friedrich and the Cancellation of Pareto” in the 2023 book, Vilfredo Pareto’s Contributions to Modern Social Theory: A Centennial Appraisal:

* What makes Friedrich of special interest is not only the texts but also the role he and his thought played in forming the self-conception of Harvard faculty and leadership as it emerged during the late Roosevelt administration and World War II as the academic arm of the federal government, where it played the role of an elite and as the academic wing of the national elite. Friedrich was a member, by any standard, of the elite, both German and American. Moreover, he was a major participant in the successful political Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grab for World Power) of Harvard during the period from the mid-1930s, when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary by inviting scholars from all over the world, to the 1960s, when the Kennedy Presidency was dominated by the “thought brigade” (Stuart 1963), overwhelmingly from Harvard. His comments on elites were therefore descriptions and implicit justifications of his own status-or denials of it. This lends his texts and thoughts a special historical interest, notably in relation to Pareto’s own account of elites, and points to reasons to be cautious in interpreting them.

The temporal background of the rise of this new elite is important. Bronislaw Malinowski confided in an unpublished text written shortly after the First World War that “the basic principle of democracy as we find it now is wrong [ and] hence real advance lies in government by detached experts” (quoted in Coleman 2021, p. 99). This was a common perception at the time, promoted in the American public sphere by Walter Lippman. It came to be combined, in the 1930s, with the enthusiasm from intellectuals for the expansion of state power and liberation from a strict interpretation of the constitution under Roosevelt, his “brains trust,” and the expansion of federal regulatory agencies with expert leaders. These were developments the Harvard community generally applauded, and in some key cases, such as the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, participated in. But they often did so by treating these developments not as anti-democratic but as the fulfillment of genuine democracy. Friedrich’s writings of the period and indeed throughout his career reflected this climate of opinion, as well as his active membership in this group.

Nor was Friedrich’s role merely intellectual. Not only was Friedrich a prominent figure in the movement to involve the US in the European war, which characterized itself as defending democracy, he played a prominent role in Harvard’s participation in the war effort, especially in the training of officers for the expected occupation, along with Talcott Parsons who used this role as a way of expanding his own power…

“Hitler’s rule was legal, but it was not legitimate; it had a basis in law, but not in right and justice.”

* Pareto was an elitist and therefore anti-democratic, whereas Friedrich defended democratic institutions; Friedrich embraced Kantianism and genuine authority, whereas Pareto ridiculed doctrines, especially Kantianism and Natural Law, that embraced the idea of genuine authority rooted in reason; Friedrich had a rich and humane Kantian view of reason, which included values, whereas Pareto had an odd and narrow view of logical action and scientific method that excluded the rationality of values and exposed their emotional basis and was therefore a form of irrationalism. Friedrich was open and honest, as shown by his various public confessions, while Pareto was disingenuous, elusive, and cynical, as shown by the contradictory and opaque character of his political statements; Friedrich embraced the idea of representation, whereas Pareto dismissed it as “poppycock”; Pareto believed in the inevitability of the rule of the few based on his account of history, whereas Friedrich affirmed the possibility of a future politics of a different more egalitarian kind; Pareto regarded the law as an instrument in the hands of the powerful, whereas Friedrich granted it an intrinsic purposiveness and rationality apart from the aims of its creators; Friedrich believed in universality, emancipation, and the power of reason to bring them about, whereas Pareto celebrated the dark, irrational, and particularistic side of humanity; for Pareto, bureaucracy was a stage of elite decadence, whereas for Friedrich, bureaucracy represented reason itself. The summary is this: Pareto was a Machiavellian who saw ancient and modem regimes as all governed by the rule of the few and their underlying power motivations and regarded this not only as unavoidable but good; Friedrich celebrated the modem state and the superior rationality of its bureaucratic and representative institutions governed by the rule of law and looked forward to more political equality.

* when one encounters an ideology, look for the underlying sentiments and at the group which shares them.

* Pareto is closer to Freud or Jung: he categorizes a long list of residues, or sentiments, drawn from the historical and anthropological literature with an eye toward finding the common features among superficially different ones, with the aim of identifying and grouping them into a systematic classification scheme. He treated the ideologies that derived from these sentiments as more variable responses to transient situations and treated political structures as even more variable results of sentiments and ideologies. This conflicted with the holistic, relativistic view of culture that became fashionable in the interwar period: for Pareto, residues were fundamental and persisted, ideologies and explicit cultural beliefs-that is to say “reasons” other than those of science-were transient and derivative.

* “through the dexterous use of such ambiguous terms as ‘functional’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’, ‘progressive’, [Carl Friedrich] invests the American ideal of democracy, equality and freedom, with a content which reduces the role of the common man to his status in medieval times.”

* Kantian reason was prone to slipping into overt authoritarianism in the name of reason.

* These governing classes tended to be overthrown; in time, they came to be populated by people he likened to foxes, people who mastered the art of getting their way without force. They lacked, however, the talent and capacity to defend themselves or their rule with force. The people who overthrew and replaced them had those talents. He likened them to lions. History was a graveyard of elites. Through the process of succession, one elite replaced another.1 An elite could prolong its rule by co optation, bringing forceful types into the ruling class. But there was a tendency for this not to happen and for the lions to replace the old governing class. Both were examples of “circulation.” The governing classes did indeed have special talents and capacities. But the capacities of foxes were different from those of lions (Pareto [1935] 1963, vol. IV, §2178, pp. 1515-1516). The theory implied that the governing class would become corrupt and be replaced if they were not open to outside talent of a different kind, which would have to, by definition, come from outside the governing class. Normally, the governing class became closed, fox-like, and vulnerable to challenge from below.

* Lincoln was an outsider to the foxes who dominated late antebellum American politics and had failed to solve the slavery question. He came with a following that transformed the federal system after his death-a transformation carried out not by the foxes but by the pride of lions who had risen to prominence through their military service in the Civil War and the radical Republicans, who took over and expanded the Federal government-only to be themselves followed by foxes.

* A sovereign or parliament “occupies the stage. But behind the scenes there are always people who play a very important role in actual government.”

* Bureaucrats operated in this way. They were the ones who carried out the law by taking “measures,” a concept Friedrich emphasized, in contrast to legislation, as the place where governance happens. They did so with discretionary power, which he also emphasized, but always with a sense of the limits imposed by the potential reactions of others. The picture we get is this: politicians propose, bureaucrats dispose, and in the way they want, unless they provoke a reaction…

Rony Guldmann wrote in his work-in-progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

Fascism is defined, not by rabid nationalism as such, but by a set of emotional or instinctual impulses that fuel an uncompromising quest for community, the “urge to ‘get beyond’ politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth.”21 Fascism calls upon man “to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image.”22 To this end, it sanctions an all-powerful state led by “an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”

Was Carl Friedrich pushing a kind of liberal fascism? Does not liberalism want to get beyond politics by rendering neutral as much of the political as possible (initially that meant neutralizing the ability of religion to set men at each other’s throats, and then liberal neutralization came for the politics of race, sex, immigration and other hot button issues), and hence under the rule of experts rather than voters? Does not liberalism believe in the authority of experts? Does not liberalism reject “the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like”? Liberalism does not abide the “uncompromising quest for community” because that tramples on human rights. It does not worship the aesthetics of youth. Different types of liberalism react differently to the idea of “an all-powerful state led by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”