The Fundamental Unsolved Problem in Political Philosophy

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Steven Yates

Political philosophy I define as the philosophical study of social governance. Note, I did not say government, as there are political philosophies (anarchism is the obvious example) which urge us to do away with specific institutions devoted exclusively to governance (the state). Many philosophers have seen the chief goal of political philosophy as developing a theory of the ideal society, with or without a state. Plato was the first example. There were many others. Plato’s was a proposal that came down to “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” Read his Republic. To make a long story short: the “philosopher-king” ruled. Only when kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings will we have the ideal society, wisely ruled over. How could such a state of affairs be arranged? Plato’s Socrates expends great energy trying to lay out how the “philosopher-king” is to be educated for his station in life, and also how his “Guardians” are to perform their roles as a kind of police force that would never grow abusive. Unfortunately, I know of no kings who became philosophers, although a few philosophers would have become kings given the chance. Their rule would have been anything but wise!

I would like to propose a different goal for political philosophy. It is based on something we can observe from history that appears to be true for all large societies: they are afflicted by a minority (probably no more than 4%) who are fascinated with power, and drawn to institutions that wield power. This goal for political philosophy would be to solve its unsolved problem. As a first approximation: how does society contain or constrain power?

This is too simple, of course. Contain and constrain are power words, after all. And who is society? Taking these in reverse order, let’s consider: society is made up of different layers of its citizenry. There is the minority fascinated with power. There is, I submit, another minority that is equally fascinated with liberty and its possibilities. The sort of philosophyt appropriate for them merits close study. Then there is the majority that doesn’t much care, so long as their lives are immersed in familiarity and most of their expectations are met. The masses, this majority is generally called. The word doesn’t have to be derogatory. It just means, the common people as opposed to that small fraction who lead, whether for better or for worse.

The fundamental unsolved problem of political philosophy therefore devolves to: how does the minority that wants to be free (is fascinated with liberty and its possibilities) place checks on those who are drawn to power (don’t want people to be free—freedom, after all, is too chaotic and unpredictable)? Put this way, the problem is a good bit more formidable than How to build the Ideal State, is it not? It may even suggest that there neither is nor can be an “ideal state,” since the deep motivations of one group (those who want liberty) are invariably at odds with, and are bound to come into conflict with, another (those driven to assume power and command).

There seem to be a couple of employable strategies for containing power. One way to contain power would be with a greater power. But this isn’t a strategy at all. It just pushes the problem back a step. For then the question is, How is that greater power to be constrained once it gets out of hand, as it inevitably will?

The other strategy is to obligate power to control itself, through the appeal to a higher set of principles. This was the strategy employed in the English-speaking world. The very existence of the Magna Carta implied that the King, despite his position, couldn’t rightly do as he pleased (and there was much that King John was doing that displeased his noble countrymen). Unfortunately, efforts to check the King’s power didn’t take right away, and it took several more movements, with names like the Diggers and the Levellers (who lived around the time of the English Civil War), to bring the throne to heel. Arguably, England’s Constitutional Monarchy did not succeed at this until well after the American War for Independence (or Revolutionary War, if you prefer) against King George III.

The Declaration of Independence articulated the crimes of the British Monarchy as justifying severing ties with George; within a year, the fledgling U.S. was at war with Great Britain, under the Articles of Confederation which created a weak central government that could not lay taxes or raise its own army. The new leadership class of Americans, those who had led the struggle against the British and formed a new government, saw that government as too weak. They set about to create a stronger one. They feared that under the Articles, the U.S. would slowly pull itself apart. So in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they closed the doors, set aside their official mandate (to revise the Articles of Confederation), and over the next four months, penned a new document, the Constitution of the United States of America, which they then presented to the 13 States for ratification. Its own rules stated that nine states had to ratify it.

The first major conversation over the nature of power proceeded apace. Those history calls the Antifederalists argued against ratification. The new Constitution, they argued, was full of loopholes through which those who wanted power would eventually climb. The authors of The Federalist Papers defended ratification on the grounds that although any document penned by human hands would be imperfect, the Constitution was likely the best we would be able to do. James Madison presented the challenge in Federalist 52:

“But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the greatest difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Madison understood the problem of power.

But as subsequent years showed, this wasn’t enough. The Constitution, as we all know, was ratified in 1791, and the first president under the new regime, George Washington, crushed the Whiskey Rebels (who were protesting an excise tax) and allowed Alexander Hamilton to create the First Bank of the United States over the express objections of Thomas Jefferson (and possibly in violation of Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution which mandates to Congress responsibility for coining money and regulating its value, without a clause allowing for delegation).

Subsequent decades, one by one, indicated that the Antifederalist view was probably the correct one. Government has grown progressively larger, and has grown vulnerable to control by those holding the purse strings (often corporations). What conclusions can we draw from this now? That the problem of how to contain power is still the major unsolved practical problem in political philosophy, however we cash it out or rationalize it. Contending that we might solve the problem by embracing one ideology or another, perhaps of the “right” or of the “left,” is clearly a dead end, if only because both of these have produced cruel, totalitarian regimes. Ours has arguably slouched towards plutocratic oligarchy, which may turn out to be the most stable form of political economy for a civilization at our present stage of development in the West. Sadly, efforts to “restore the Constitution” led, e.g., by former Texas Senator Ron Paul, haven’t succeeded despite having generated a large following.

Plutocratic oligarchy has many features that bespeak of lack of accountability, irresponsibility, and a failure to attend to long-term planning (where long term here means further than the next annual report or election). Thus how and whether civilization will move forward is equally a problem. In future posts, we will consider the various issues raised here and explore more specifics, as well as a few proposed solutions.

One of the solutions I take the most seriously was originally developed by renegade economist and political philosopher Leopold Kohr (1909 – 1994), author of an important work entitled The Breakdown of Nations (1957). Kohr’s thesis, which I have discussed at length in a separate essay (link to be supplied next week), is that the best way of containing those who want power is to shrink our governments and corporations in size, shrinking their reach and capacity to do harm.

The second best solution, as Kohr would have it, is for smaller and largely self-contained groups to separate themselves from larger and out-of-control ones: secede, in other word. Separations have occurred, and proven successful, in numerous places (e.g., Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, or Slovenia and others from the former Yugoslavia). Whether we will see a period of globalization-in-reverse, one might call it, as a solution to the increasing dominance of the globe by a global one percent, remains to be seen, but the prospects for and dynamics of such a process merit being thought about carefully.

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Scholarship “In the Doldrums” as Elderly Generation Dies Out and Is Not Replaced

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Steven Yates

Our point of departure for this week’s article will be a remark by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, best known as having authored the colorful little tract On Bullshit (2005) which, significantly, may be the only work by a professional philosopher to stand out during that entire decade. Certainly it sold the best, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? Frankfurt recently commented on the current state of the art regarding scholarship in academic philosophy:

I believe that there is, at least in this country, a more or less general agreement among philosophers and other scholars that our  subject is currently in the doldrums.  Until not very long ago, there were powerful creative impulses moving energetically through the field.  There was the work in England of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and of Gilbert Ryle, Paul Grice, and Herbert Hart, as well as the work of various logicial positivsts.  In the United States, even after interest in William James and John Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald Davidson, John Rawls and Saul Kripke.  In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead.  Heidegger was having a massive impact on European philosophy, as well as on other disciplines–and not only in Europe, but here as well.  And, of course, there was everywhere a vigorously appreciative and productive response to the work of Wittgenstein.

The lively impact of these impressive figures has faded.  We are no longer busily preoccupied with responding to them.  Except for a few contributors of somewhat less general scope, such as Habermas, no one has replaced the imposingly great figures of the recent past in providing  us with contagiously inspiring direction.  Nowadays, there are really no conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations.  For the most part, the field is quiet.  We seem, more or less, to be marking time.  (Steven Cahn, ed., Portraits of American Philosophy [2013], pp. 125-126; quoted on Brian Leiter’s blog)

A number of major figures made philosophy worth studying during the twentieth century. We can find first rate intellects in both of the major traditions, that of the analytic tradition that dominated the English-speaking world and that of the existential-phenomenological tradition that dominated on Continental Europe. The names of the first generation are well known: G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein (both “Wittgensteins”), A.J.  Ayer, Karl Popper, others; later, we saw Nelson Goodman, Wilfred Sellars, W.V. Quine, John Rawls; a bit later, John Searle and obviously Saul Kripke. On the Continent were imposing figures beginning with Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre obviously; later, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, and more.

Meanwhile, “historicist” philosophy of science, born of the idea of paying more attention to actual science as opposed to logical reconstructions in the wake of the breakdown of logical empiricism, gave us Stephen Toulmin, Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and more. As the discipline moved into the final quarter of the twentieth century we saw major writings by additional giants such as Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. These are just the names I can think of off the top of my head. This list is not exhaustive; nor is it intended to be. Rorty might be seen as possibly the last truly imposing figure in twentieth century philosophy, whose work ironically left us with the sense that the primary work of the analytic tradition was over; with such discoveries as the lack of a need for a “theory” about truth once we’ve rejected Platonism, there is actually little left for such a tradition to do that is interesting or novel.

This was all after the job market in philosophy collapsed, of course. All of a sudden, younger philosophers were too busy trying to survive in the field to rise in stature.

Today, of course, with the exception of Searle and a handful of others, these figures have passed to their eternal reward whatever it may be. The youngest philosophers of stature in academic philosophy today are in their 70s (Searle is in his 80s); a handful are in their 60s. There are almost no younger voices, especially in the U.S. One thinks of Timothy Williamson who is British and David John Chalmers who is Australian. The former is in his late 50s; the latter, in his late 40s.

Among 30-somethings and younger: no one. Ayer wrote Language, Truth & Logic when he was in his 20s. Can anyone imagine a feat like that today?

As a direct consequence of the long-term collapse which began in the 1970s, the field really is “in the doldrums” and “marking time.” One can ask of U.S. philosophy today, Where are its Russells, Quines, Rawlses, or Kripkes? One can only guess, but many are probably writing computer software or designing apps for hand-held gadgets. After all, most of the skills that make a person a good analytic philosopher are transferable to other fields and occupations, computer science and cognate technologies being the obvious example. Whatever philosophical talents such individuals might have developed and brought to the field have been lost. Assuming they were interested in philosophy at one time, they may have kept the subject as a hobby. Hobbyists don’t tend to become the next generation’s movers and shakers in an academic discipline, however. Assuming they have the time make any contributions at all, with no academic affiliation they are simply ignored.

Academia is not a meritocracy. This is a primary fact of its political economy: that it has its one-percenters just as the larger economy has its one-percenters. Does anyone really believe admission to this club is solely a matter of accomplishment? There are, in fact, good philosophers out there in the tenured class not on my list because they did not graduate from a “ranked” Ph.D. program, and thus despite sometimes long lists of publications, the best they could hope for was a job at Podunksville State Community College instead of Harvard or Penn State or Princeton. Since no one reads the work of philosophers from Podunksville State Community College, their work may impress their wives but otherwise sits on library shelves unread.

What some have begun to call the neoliberal attack on higher education bears a large part of the responsibility for this situation. This attack has its roots in the 1970s response to the campus disruptions of the previous decade, and involves increasing corporate influence on universities and an increasingly corporate mindset within them. The university president becomes a glorified fundraiser; layers of administration expand; faculty are paid progressively less as they suffer “adjunctification” in the name of “cost cutting” (this while plush new buildings go up and expensive campus beautification projects are undertaken). Students, of course, are treated as consumers in this model, even as they go massively into debt: perfect preparation for a precarious life in the mass consumption culture of the near future, which everything will be commodified and leveraged to the hilt.

Where will this end? We get a suggestion from the final paragraph of this recent article on the demise of the legal profession. While society may well have too many lawyers, the author’s final paragraph is telling.

At this point, it is probably no more risky to pursue even a Ph.D in political philosophy or “regular philosophy” or history or whatever. Typically talented and accomplished students have to borrow little to nothing–at least if they don’t have a family and are very frugal–to flourish in said programs. The career prospects in a world where liberal education is disappearing, tenure has no future,  political correctness and techno-vocationalism are crowding out everything else, might not be all that much worse than that for most law students today.  That is, pretty bleepin’ bad.

Yes, a few intelligent and determined folks can pursue such programs without borrowing money if they live frugally. But then what? At present, they can look forward to “careers” working for starvation wages under the thumbs of ridiculously overpaid administrations. Their students will suffer from the relative unavailability of their professors as the latter commute to other jobs on other campuses. From lack of time, they will do no scholarly research. Whatever research skills they had developed enabling them to write theses and dissertations will wither from nonuse; eventually their interest in their subject will wear down as their patience with their work conditions wears thin. Some will eventually quit and learn to write software.

We should see here, in a nutshell, why there are no more Russells or Quines or Kripkes … why scholarship is dying in the U.S.

It is, of course, worth asking what subjects like philosophy contribute, whether to the economy or the culture. When taught properly, what they contribute to the lives of their students is an ability, on the part of the people, to think. To examine, to evaluate, to assess, as individuals instead of mindless followers. There are, among the one-percenters (and those above them), some who manifestly do not want a population with a troublesome critical mass of independent-minded thinkers. Such people are problems for authority.

That, obviously, is a much longer story.

Whatever else we can say at the moment, at present this is not likely to end well!

Posted in Where Is Philosophy Going? | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Welcome to this Blog

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Steven Yates

Hello. I’ve had this WordPress title for quite a while, but have only recently decided to use it. To those who have found their way here: welcome.

What’s this all about? I am a Lost Generation Philosopher. What’s a Lost Generation Philosopher? A member of the generation, a few of them full-time academics, many of them part-time academics, some of them would-have-been academics, who were granted their doctorates after the collapse of the academic job market in the 1970s. Mine was granted in 1987; I bounced from school to school to school despite publishing regularly, then took a lengthy break from teaching from 1995 until 2005 (not counting a tiny handful of courses, a couple in 1997, one in 1999, and one in 2004, at glorified business schools). I returned to “regular” teaching in 2005, but it was part-time adjunct teaching. Soon I had a second adjunct teaching job that went to two different campuses (that’s three campuses in all), and was commuting perhaps 150 miles per week. I stopped the second job after my elderly parents’ health went into terminal decline. With just one very small raise at the school I’d been at since 2005 and an inheritance, I walked away in May, 2012, and moved to Santiago, Chile, where I have been ever since … getting married to a chilena, establishing a new career, living a new life … but without real closure on the old one.

Hence some of this material. I am no longer an academic philosopher in any ordinary sense, but I am still a Lost Generation Philosopher who got caught up in the adjunct mess before it began to get publicity, which began in 2013 with the sad death of Margaret Mary Vojtko from a stress-induced heart attack on her front lawn that August. She had taught French at Duquesne University for over a quarter century, been kicked to the curb when health issues made it difficult for her to continue meeting with classes, given no severance pay, and forced to spend nights in a coffee shop because the electricity had been turned off in her increasingly unlivable house (in need of repairs she couldn’t afford). She died broke, literally. Her death shamed Duquesne University, a private Catholic institution.

The raising of consciousness about the plight of adjuncts back in the U.S. on National Adjunct Walkout Day last Wednesday brought all this back; hence one of the reasons (not the only reason) for blogging here. It explains my belaboring the issue in my first post. Adjuncts are teaching for poverty wages (averaging around $2,700 per course), often needing multiple jobs to survive, often on semester contracts without job security, without benefits, without office space to meet with students, and sometimes without decent places to sleep at night. Yes, there are cases of adjuncts living in their automobiles, while they collect food stamps. This harms students who are often unable to locate an instructor who is probably on one of his or her other campuses. Adjuncts often do not find out if they are going to have any work until a few days before the semester is to start, making it difficult for them to prepare a course properly. Naturally, they are expected to be stars in the classroom! Otherwise they don’t have a job the following semester!

Some see this as “the market at work.” Supply and demand, after all. An oversupply of Ph.D.s … or an undersupply of jobs, in an environment others of us see as an abomination, at institutions which pay their top administrators six figures (sometimes even more), pay the head football coach still more, can hire layers upon layers of administrators who are paid very well, and can spend millions on new buildings and campus beautification projects. I have argued at length on my Facebook page that the problem is not lack of money, it is lack of any sense of priority in allocating it, especially to those doing the real work of a college or university, which is educating the students who apply, are accepted, and nowadays pay tuition rates that have also gone beyond absurd! The majority of students can no longer afford college without going massively into debt. That’s a different but related crisis … and yes, it is a crisis when outstanding student loan debt has reached $1.3 trillion! With the relative lack of good paying jobs in the U.S. outside a few very narrow occupations, much of this debt will turn out to be unpayable.

I am one of the people who got fed up with this system and left. But: (1) philosophical problems continue to interest me a great deal on their own terms, along with their application to the problems of living; (2) I cannot forget where I came from, or that others were not as fortunate as I was in being handed an escape route; and (3) I am still on track in one respect, working on a long term project about which I will write here in due course: an intended legacy. Being an outsider, I don’t know if anyone will read it even assuming it gets finished and published, but if I can get the word out at all, I will go to my grave with a sense that my books are at least partially balanced.

I’ll say a little about my interests, and what will give this blog whatever semblance of focus it has, and then sign off. I grew interested in the history and philosophy of science when I was an undergraduate. The trigger for this interest probably reveals a contrarian streak in my personality and outlook I carried around with me even then: anomalies, with respect to scientific theories, what they implied about the relations between theory, observation, and reality, and what to do with them (if anything). Anomalies are reasonably well verified facts that do not fit into, or are not predicted by, a dominant or prevailing theory. In a future post, we’ll consider some examples. I pursued history and philosophy of science at length by studying at length works like Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed. (1970) and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975), leaders of the historicist movement. Eventually, ideas developed by these authors went into both my M.A. thesis (1983) and my doctoral dissertation (1987). Then I hit the hostile job market, lost my focus as the above-described bouncing around took place, and never finished that book on Feyerabend’s philosophy I’d left graduate school intending to write. (No, you cannot sustain a quality academic research program while spending 30-40 hours a week looking for your next teaching job. I was not helped by having graduated from a department which did next to nothing to sell its graduates on the job market.)

As time passed I developed interests in political philosophy and political economy, both to teach about the former, and to understand my own plight and the plight of my generation. I did write a book, but I’ll write about that in another post. I also encountered systems theory, The Matrix, and cultural studies, and more scales fell from my eyes. A longstanding interest in Brian Eno’s music and ideas about culture had opened my mind to a number of vistas that probably would not have appeared interesting otherwise.

In any event, I am now doubtless too much of a generalist for today’s philosophy job market, which although I keep an eye on it, I am no longer using to seek employment. So what am I doing to survive now? I have an investment (money that originated with my inheritance) and teach a couple of classes in Critical Thinking at a local university, Universidad Nacionale Andrés Bello in English. I may have another inheritance coming. There is interest there in broadening the number of General Education courses taught in English, and I happened to be available to step in.

So welcome to this blog. Will not be posting again for a few days, as a death in my extended family is taking me back to the U.S. for the remainder of this week and the start of next week. But never worry; we’ll talk more. If you’ve found your way in here, I hope you found this of some interest, or at least a source of mild curiosity about what will come next. I have more going on than what I listed above. There are some surprises ahead. You can trust me. I am not a politician, and I am not going to try to sell you anything. That’s a promise.

Posted in Philosophy, Political Economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments