I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom -- "Why the worst get on top." Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek's argument struck me immediately as watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary?
Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a collective. Harold Rosenberg coined a fine phrase for such collectives: "the herd of independent minds." Whether we call it capitalism or free enterprise, the individualist's Utopia meets Hayek's definition of collectivism: "The 'social goal,' or 'common purpose,' for which society is to be organized is usually vaguely described as the 'common good,' the 'general welfare,' or the 'general interest.'"
We can be less vague in describing the social goal of a capitalist society: the accumulation of capital. Does that goal not seem collectivist enough? O.K., then let's be more vague and call it economic growth. That way, the people on top can claim to be pursuing the general welfare by promoting the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is collectivist.
Why does organizing society for a common social goal favour the worst? In the first place, because success is not guaranteed. When a democratic leaders run into obstacles in achieving the plan, they face a choice of giving up or of assuming extraordinary powers. When a dictator faces that choice, the choice is between "disregard of ordinary morals or failure." That is why, "the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism." Sound familiar?
How do these unscrupulous and uninhibited people manage to rise to the top? Hayek gave three reasons why a "numerous and strong group with fairly homogenous views," large enough to impose its views on society, "is not likely to be formed from the best but rather by the worst elements of any society":
"the lowest common denominator [of moral and intellectual standards] unites the largest number of people."
"those whose whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused... will swell the ranks..."
"it is easier for people to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy or envy of those better off [or of those worse off!] -- than on any positive task."
Sound familiar?
What brings me to Hayek is Immanuel Kant, "the most evil man in mankind's history." Hayek's epistemology was neo-Kantian. One might think that the extreme contradiction between Ayn Rand and Fred Hayek, the two libertarian icons, would lead to some kind of open rupture. But no. Even evangelical anti-abortionists have no problem embracing sound bites from the pro-abortion, atheist Rand when it helps them attack the critical race theory enemy. They just let icons be icons.
Do you think First Liberty Institute would mind that their anti-Kant rant echoes a 1960 Ayn Rand lecture titled "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World?" I asked them. I'll let you know if they reply. Here's the view of a religious group from the other side of the spectrum:
There's always the danger that watching all the Ayn Rand interviews and reading the lectures and newsletter articles from the 1960s will turn me into an objectivist. But not really. I am amused and mildly charmed by her chutzpah but I cannot be seduced by her borscht-circuit philosophy. Rand inverted Leninism to construct a myth where everyman is free to be Lenin, independent of the Party or the State (but not of the cult and its omniscient creator, Ayn Rand).
In practice, the objectivist is no different from what Rosenberg called "the heroes of Marxist science." One can paraphrase Rosenberg's description, simply substituting the word "Objectivist" for "Communist": "The Objectivist belongs to an elite of the knowing. Thus he is an intellectual. But since all truth has been automatically bestowed upon him by his adherence to Objectivism, he is an intellectual who need not think."
The backstory on Ayn Rand is that she got the meat of her "philosophy" from New York Herald Tribune columnist, Isabel Paterson, whom she met in 1940 during the Wendell Willkie campaign. Rand was enthralled by Paterson's erudition. For the next eight years, I.M.P., as she signed her columns, became her mentor. Rand was not well read; Paterson was a bookworm. Rand sat at Pat's feet and imbibed the individualist creed.
Paterson was a remarkable woman. She set a flight altitude world record for women less than a decade after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. With two years of formal schooling, she became a nationally-syndicated reviewer of books. She wrote several novels and a philosophical/political/economic manifesto on individualism. With a few elaborations and vulgarizations, Paterson's manifesto, The God of the Machine, was canonized as Rand's philosophy.
In November 1943, Rand wrote a four-page letter to Paterson's publisher, G.P. Putnam, urging publicity for the book on the grounds that it was, "a document that could literally save the world--if enough people knew of it and read it."
"The God of the Machine," Rand wrote, "is the greatest book written in the last three hundred years. It is the first complete statement of the philosophy of individualism as a political and economic system. It is the basic document of capitalism." This was high praise indeed, considering Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, had been published earlier that year.
Kidding aside, was the book really that great? Would it do for capitalism, "what the Bible did for Christianity—and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism"? Admittedly, Paterson was a forceful, compelling writer with an impressive breadth of knowledge. Less impressive is the shallowness of her comprehension of the argument of her main ideological adversary, Karl Marx.
Paterson's argument against Marx was mostly ad hominem: "Marx was a fool with a large vocabulary of long words." "A parasitical pedant, shiftless and dishonest." He had "an unacknowledged need to adopt the non-sensical 'dialectic' of Hegel." "Marx's theory of class war is utter nonsense by its own definition..." Again, "Marx was a fool..." He had a "superficial mind..."
Beyond the onslaught of disdain are only repeated claims about Marx's theory being deterministic and mechanistic:
...the most grinding despotism ever known resulted at once from the "experiment" of Marxist communism, which could posit nothing but a mechanistic process for its validation.
...they assume that a productive society, which depends primarily on exact communication, can be organized after they have destroyed that means. In this they revert below savagery, and even below the animal level. They have got down to the premise of mere mechanism. Cogs in a machine need no language.
What was Paterson's rational and individualistic alternative to this deterministic, mechanistic dishonest foolish sub-human non-sense? Society is a machine!
No, seriously. Society is literally a machine:
Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit. An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens.
In spite of Paterson's insistence that her metaphor is not a figure of speech, it is the central metaphor of her book, as indicated by the book's title. Any discrepancy in the "hook-up" between the political system and the production process can result in "short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion." The examples Paterson gives of such mismatched hook-ups are between European society and the industrial revolution and Native Americans and the introduction of firearms to their hunting economy.
In her weekly column, "Turns With a Bookworm" of July 16, 1939, Paterson laid out the premise of her future book in the form of a report on a conversation with the Irish poet and literary critic, Mary Colum, which concluded with Colum asking Paterson, "Well, why don't you write that?"
And so she did. Remarkably, Paterson's grasp of Marx in the resulting book didn't exceed the reach of an off-hand comment made by Colum one summer evening in 1939.
Somehow the suggestion Paterson once had a job proofreading Capital -- "Good grief, didn't we have to proofread Capital once; and a dreary job it was" -- sounds far fetched, or at least apocryphal. Charles Kerr published a revised edition of volume 1 in 1905, volume 2 in 1907 and volume 3 in 1909. Paterson left home for Calgary in her teens and held various jobs for several years. From 1905 to 1910, starting when she was 19, Paterson was employed by a Calgary, Alberta law firm.
About half-way through "The dynamic economy of the future," the final chapter of her book, Paterson calls attention to "[t]he one problem which may be said to have arisen from the dynamic economy": the labor problem -- "when industry slows down, the workingmen are most visibly affected."
Paterson offered a partial solution:
There is absolutely no solution for this except individual land ownership by the great majority, and the use of real money. It is not necessary that everyone should own a farm; but enough people must own their homes and have a reserve for "hard times."
In two sentences, "the great majority" dwindles down to a vague "enough people." Paterson doesn't elaborate on how this condition of home ownship and a financial reserve is to be met. Presumably, it can only be achieved by hard work and thrift. Since those "most visibly affected" are most also likely to not have such a reserve, it is hard to see in what way this is meant as a "solution" to the labor problem any more than "stop eating avocado toast" is a solution to the high price of housing.
"It is not necessary that everyone should own a farm..." is a remarkably insensitive statement to make in the aftermath of the great depression when farmers were on the front lines of dispossession. In the wake of the World War I wartime boom, small farms limped through the 1920s faced with low prices, over-supplied markets and rising debt. When "hard times" suddenly went viral after the stock market crash of 1929, many farmers had no reserve because they had already suffered through a decade of "hard times."
Admittedly, Marx didn't offer a practical solution for the labor problem, either. What he did, though, is present an analysis of how the accumulation of capital necessarily generates hard times both through cyclical depressions and chronic unemployment.
Although Paterson had a great deal to say about how stupid and dishonest Marx was, she didn't offer a single sentence about why he was wrong about, for example, "the disposable industrial reserve army of the unemployed" or "the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline." She did, however, offer this chestnut: "The collectivist, with the theory of "technological unemployment," assumes a fixed number of jobs, another arbitrary quantity." The lump of labor fallacy!
Backing up to her previous paragraph, this is how Paterson presented the alleged fallacy:
Anyhow, the collectivists were forced to admit that production had refuted Malthus, increasing prodigiously, year by year. Then they had to say that the trouble was "overproduction"; the workingman would work himself out of a job pretty soon! This theory has evoked the phrase "technological unemployment," which is said to be caused by mechanical improvements in the means of production. That is, if a machine is invented by which one man can do the work previously done by ten men, it must put nine men permanently out of employment. It sounds plausible, but is it true?
Not only is it not true, it is not Marx's argument, which presumably is what is meant by "the collectivists' theory." Marx's argument is that capital must constantly employ more labor power because labor power is what produces surplus labor. If capital gets rid of nine workers in one factory, it has to hire ten or eleven somewhere else in the economy to up the accumulation process.
Marx's theory has nothing to do with a "fixed amount of work." It has to do with disequilibria between supply and demand for commodities -- including labor power -- that is not adjusted automatically by investment, interest rates or some market deity's "invisible hand." Far from assuming a fixed amount of work, Marx argues that the accumulation of capital requires a perpetual increase in the amount of labor employed alongside an increase in unemployment.
Maybe Marx was wrong. If so, a hoary straw man argument demonstrates no such thing. How hoary? The bogus fallacy claim was 163 years old in 1943.
It seems possible to me that Isabel Paterson was working out some complex personal issues when she wrote The God of the Machine. According to her biographer, Stephen Cox, she hated her father, whom she saw as a ne'er-do-well and loved her mother who seemed able to get things done even when there was little to work with. She had a poor opinion of many men she knew, who she viewed as weak and feckless.
She was able to "make it" in a patriarchal society pretty much on her own terms. Or perhaps not.
On a visit to Manitoulin Island in Ontario, where she was born, she mentioned that she had "ten thousand cousins" there that she didn't want to have anything to do with. Ten thousand is an obvious exaggeration. Manitoulin Island has seven Indian Reserves. Paterson was born in the township of Tehkummah about 10 kilometers from what is now called the Unceded Territory of the Wiikwemkoong.
When Paterson was a year old, her family's house burned down and her family moved to Michigan, then to Utah, and finally to Alberta, next door to Blackfoot territory. Indigenous characters feature peripherally in several of her novels and are central to her mismatched "hook-up" theory of political organization and production. I didn't know any of the foregoing when I first saw her photograph and wondered if she was part Indigenous. From the 1920s to the 1940s, assimilationist themes were rife among (acknowledged) Native American authors. What better way to assimilate that to simply become that to which one is assimilating?
McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy : being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica : together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M'Vickar. New-York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.
Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture. Addressed to the working people in that manufacture, and to the poor in general. Manchester. 1780. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.
Wennerlind, Carl. "Credit-Money as the Philosopher's Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England." History of Political Economy, Volume 35, Annual Supplement, 2003, pp. 234-261.
Dorning Rasbotham's pamphlet evoked the image of alchemical transmutation. That was the inspiration for the working title for this serial posting, The Moral Philosophers' Stone. That notion of alchemy has led me to two additional sources ; a footnote by the American editor of M'Culloch's Outlines of Political Economy, John M'Vickar and the article by Wennerlind. M'Vickar's footnote shares Rasbotham's unrestrained enthusiasm for commerce but makes explicit the allusion to alchemy:
Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as "the lump of labor." To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th century political economist of the proposition that "...there is a certain quantity of work to be done; and this quantity, generally speaking, does not admit of being much extended, merely on the temptation of labour being offered at a cheaper rate..."
The author was the Scottish church leader, Thomas Chalmers, whose neglected 1808 treatise on "the Extent and Stability of Natural Resources" has been described by A. M. C. Waterman as a "missing link" between T. R. Malthus and David Ricardo. Chalmers's later article appeared in the May 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review, the flagship journal of Whig political economy.
Alas, my Eureka moment was destined to be short-lived, however, because one week later, while searching the Goldsmiths'-Kress archives for a quote from James Phillips Kay's The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, I discovered an even more venerable specimen in a pamphlet signed "A Friend of the Poor" but attributed to a gentleman with the picturesque handle of Dorning Rasbotham, Esq. The 1780 pamphlet, "Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture," was written in response to disturbances occasioned by the introduction of Richard Arkwright's spinning jenny. The following passage contains the tell-tale phrase, "a certain quantity of labour to be performed" and pronounces the alleged principle false:
There is, say they, a certain quantity of labour to be performed. This used to be performed by hands, without machines, or with very little help from them. But if now machines perform a larger share than before, suppose one fourth part, so many hands as are necessary to work that fourth part, will be thrown out of work, or suffer in their wages. The principle itself is false. There is not a precise limited quantity of labour, beyond which there is no demand. Trade is not hemmed in by great walls, beyond which it cannot go. By bringing our goods cheaper and better to market, we open new markets, we get new customers, we encrease the quantity of labour necessary to supply these, and thus we are encouraged to push on, in hope of still new advantages. A cheap market will always be full of customers.
Now, "a certain quantity of work to be done" was part of the the dictionary definition of the verb, to task, that is, to assign a person to perform a certain amount (and kind) of work within a particular time and place. It is useful to keep this definition in mind because the difference between Rasbotham's "certain quantity of labour" and Chalmers's "certain quantity of work" commences in a not-so-subtle shift from an indefinite abstract possibility to a finite empirical fact. But the latter fact is not some crude, static "assumption" -- it is a theoretically-refined empirical prediction, which takes into account both the abstract indefiniteness and the practical constraints upon realizing that theoretical potential.
In terms of both chronology and demonstrated familiarity with the "founding fathers" of classical political economy, Chalmers must be presumed to have an edge over Rasbotham. This is not to say that he is necessarily right, only that it would be presumptuous to dismiss his claim peremptorily -- to "view [it] with contempt," as Paul Krugman put it.
In modern terms, the second part of Chambers's sentence -- "...this quantity, generally speaking, does not admit of being much extended, merely on the temptation of labour being offered at a cheaper rate..." -- expresses the concept of the price elasticity of demand. In fact, Chambers uses the term, "elasticity," to describe the phenomenon. By contrast, Rasbotham's pamphlet deals optimistically in stark dichotomies of good versus bad effects, with the preponderance of expected benefits rendering "some little difficulty, in particular cases... a sacrifice we ought to make chearfully for the common good."
In an 1827 essay on the progress and prospects of the British cotton industry, John Ramsay M'Culloch judged Rasbotham's opinion as having been proven sound by the results, employment rising from less than 30,000 in 1767 to nearly a million fifty years later, concluding "There is, in fact, no idea so groundless and absurd, as that which supposes that an increased facility of production can under any circumstances be injurious to the labourers" [emphasis added]. Not under any circumstances?
It is always annoying to have to admit one has been wrong. But I was among those who a year ago or so was going along with those who argued inflation was transitory and the rate would probably come down later in the year. The annoying Larry Summers, along with the somewhat less annoying Olivier Blanchard, prominently argued the contrary, hauling out old-fashioned conventional macroeconomic arguments why this might be the case, replete with implicit Phillips Curves and the like. A major focus was the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan (ARP) fiscal stimulus and its large budget deficits aimed to help pull the US economy further out of the pandemic recession, but hopefully without stimulating inflation. As it turns out, the critics were right, and while the economy has grown vigorously, inflation has not only not gone down, but it has accelerated.
Obviously part of this is due to things that neither Summers nor Blanchard could foresee, two more rounds of pandemic (with arguably a third now coming on), with these aggravating the supply chain problems that played a prime role in the initial rise of inflation, and which those of predicting a decline in inflation saw as easing. And then we got Putin's invasion of Ukraine that has seriously aggravated supply side problems further in both energy and food as well as some other resource inputs such as nickel. The new round of Omicron B.2 also is hitting China, with lockdowns shutting ports and further keeping supply problems going. Supply side problems on the inflation front look likely to persist certainly through the rest of this year, even if longer range forecasts in markets still see the rate returning to the old target 2 percent range some years in the future.
Needless to say, these supply chain and side problems affect global inflation, not just that in the US. Can we distinguish the effect of more recent fiscal stimulus in the US on its inflation that Summers and Blanchard highlighted with its impact on demand on top of these global supply problems? One indicator may be a comparison with the euro area. It has experienced most of these supply problems similarly to the US. It is also the case that both engaged in large fiscal stimulus in 2020 during the initial onslaught of the pandemic when the global economy eventually plunged through the floor. But the euro area held back on this extra fiscal stimulus last year while the US roared ahead.
The crude numbers in comparison tell a Phillips Curve story. On the one hand indeed inflation in the US is now about 2% higher than in the eurozone; 7.9% compared to 5.9%. But the unemployment rate in the US is much lower: 3.8% compared to 6.8%. The difference in growth rates has not been all that sharp, although indeed the US has been faster over the past year: 5.6% to 4.6%. As for fiscal budget balances, the US is in a much more substantial budget deficit situation with it at -7.4% of GDP compared to -4.1% in the eurozone.
Of course, the ARP has nearly run its course, although in Harrisonburg where I live the city is just now debating what to do with the extra $24 million it received as part of the ARP package. The money may have been allocated, but it has not yet been spent. In any case, the new budget just proposed by Biden looks to cut the budget deficit roughly in half, although I expect that Congress will not have it do so by quite that much, especially as it will probably not go along with some of the tax increases proposed in the budget. But if indeed the budget deficit were to be cut in half, that would put the US budget balance in line approximately with what one sees currently in the eurozone.
I close by noting that in recent years the US had one extra round of fiscal stimulus that was almost certainly not needed and did not have an equivalent in the eurozone, even if it did not set off an inflation increase at the time. This was Trump's tax cut for the well off that happened early in his administration, unaccompanied by any spending cut, and that happened at a time when the US economy was nearing a full employment level. Biden's new budget proposal only partially attempts to undo that unnecessary and unuseful tax cut, but does not do so full, and very likely even the slight moves to do so proposed in the budget will not make it through the Congress.
In previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that "critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant."
In the latter post, I stuck to source that Guelzo cited in his published writings. There is much speculation that Guelzo's Kant to critical race theory pipeline owes its inspiration to Ayn Rand's attacks on Kant and I would like to present evidence that supports that thesis here.
Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, aka Alice O'Connor, aka Ayn Rand once called Immanuel Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." The claim appeared in a "brief summary" in the September 1971 issue of The Objectivist. In the first half of the summary, Rand congratulated herself for the foresight of her articles in previous issues of The Objectivist. The second half was a prelude to an excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's chosen successor as cult leader. "Suppose you met a twisted, tormented young man," her introduction began. It continued:
...and, trying to understand his behavior, discovered that he was brought up by a man-hating monster who worked systematically to paralyze his mind, destroy his self-confidence, obliterate his capacity for enjoyment and undercut his every attempt to escape. You would realize that nothing could be done with or for that young man and nothing could be expected of him until he was removed from the monster's influence.
Western civilization is in that young man's position. The monster is Immanuel Kant.
Rand then goes on to rationalize her repeated characterization of Kant as "the chief destroyer of the modern world." In a brief digression, Rand demurs that "It is useless to be against anything, unless one knows what one is for." What exactly was Rand for? She paraphrases one of her characters from Atlas Shrugged, "I've chosen a special mission of my own. I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. ...until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in. (What man?) Immanuel Kant." She concludes her introduction to Peikoff's essay with her own call to eradicate "cancel" every last drop of Kantian "intellectual poison" from American culture:
You may also find it hard to believe that anyone could advocate the things Kant is advocating. If you doubt it. I suggest that you look up the references given and read the original works. Do not seek to escape the subject by thinking: "Oh, Kant didn't mean it!" He did.
Dr. Peikoff's essay will help you to understand more fully why I say that no matter how diluted or disguised, one drop of this kind of intellectual poison is too much for a culture to absorb with impunity — that the latest depredations of some Washington ward-heelers are nothing compared to a destroyer of this kind — that Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history.
Rand had indeed written previously on what an evil influence Kant was. In a series of articles in her Objectivist Newsletter from 1965, Rand condemned the University of California Berkeley student movement and the "Kantian" curriculum that they were, according to her, the product of. In one of her articles, Rand indicted pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and existentialism as the bastard children of Kant, along with student activism. Because it is such a tour de force of motivated invective, I am presenting a long excerpt from the essay with just a bit of digression cut from the middle.
Mario Savio, Son of Immanuel Kant
If a dramatist had the power to convert philosophical ideas into real, flesh-and-blood people, and attempted to create the walking embodiments of modern philosophy—the result would be the Berkeley rebels.
These “activists” are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: “Brothers, you asked for it!”
Mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as: “Reason is impotent to know things as they are—reality is unknowable—certainty is impossible—knowledge is mere probability— truth is that which works—mind is a superstition—logic is a social convention—ethics is a matter of subjective commitment to an arbitrary postulate.” And the consequent mutations are those contorted young creatures who scream, in chronic terror, that they know nothing and want to rule everything.
If that dramatist were writing a movie, he could justifiably entitle it “Mario Savio, Son of Immanuel Kant.”
With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical “mainstream” that seeps into every classroom, subject, and brain in today’s universities, is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it farther and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster-lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system—by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true—in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man’s existence.
It has been said that Kant’s dichotomy led to two lines of Kantian philosophers, both accepting his basic premises, but choosing opposite sides: those who chose reason, abandoning reality—and those who chose reality, abandoning reason. The first delivered the world to the second.
The collector of the Kantian rationalizers’ efforts—the receiver of the bankrupt shambles of sophistry, casuistry, sterility, and abysmal triviality to which they had reduced philosophy—was Existentialism.
Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: “Since this is reason, to hell with it!”
Perhaps alongside Rand's sweeping condemnation of the mid-1960s university curriculum, Guelzo's more focused attack on critical theory and critical race theory may seem mild. Salami tactics. When they came for the critical theorists, I was silent...
Oh... and just one more thing. "Professor Allen Guelzo of Princeton" is not a Princeton professor. He was a professor at Gettysburg College. At Princeton, he is a "senior research scholar" in the James Madison Program, which is a right-wing beachhead installed in Princeton's Department of Politics in 2000 with a half million dollar grant from the Olin Foundation. What does a "senior research scholar" do? I suspect it has something to do with giving commentary on Fox News that can be propagated in Washington Post columns as right-wing talking points that get incorporated into Congressional testimony.
Jane Mayers profiled "How Right-Wing Billionaires Infiltrated Higher Education" in a 2016 Chronicle of Higher Education article adapted from her book, Dark Money. In the video below, Jane Mayer talks about the Koch brothers "political assembly line" starting at around 21:15 to 22:57.
The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and "every dictatorship in between":
But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that's really because critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away. It instead justified ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations -- things like race, nationality, class -- and they gave us Karl Marx and Jim Crow and every dictatorship in between, that's especially true about race.
As far as I can tell, Guelzo has not published anything on that specific theme. There is the Fox News interview from May of last year, an interview on the American Enterprise Institute podcast, "What the Hell is Going On?" with Marc Thiessen and Danielle Pletka in June, and Thiessen's column in the Washington Post from November. On March 24, Keisha Russell plagiarized Thiessen's column in her testimony on behalf of the First Liberty Institute at the Senate confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson.
At universities, plagiarism is defined as intellectual dishonesty. There are other forms of intellectual dishonesty, such as fabricating or adulterating data from experiments or fabricating sources or attributing to authorities things they never said. After that, there is an enormous gray area of just plain sloppy scholarship that nevertheless gets vindicated by being published or delivered in a lecture or interview.
Although he is a university professor who has published several books, Guelzo's claims about Kant and critical race theory are not scholarship. They were not explicitly represented as scholarship. There is, however, an insinuation of scholarship that flows from their packaging. The commentator is presented as a scholar and is backed by a wall of books. His thoughts are presented in mellifluous, modulated tones, as if he is giving a lecture. He talks about a philosopher from the eighteenth century that only an academic would talk about.
But one must ask, is a Civil War historian necessarily any more of an authority on Kant and critical race theory than a Green Bay Packers quarterback is on vaccination? Because Guelzo has not published his idea that critical race theory is a "subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s," it would be prudent to examine his published work to see if there are any clues. There are clues but they are not entirely consistent.
In Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (2009), Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004). and Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Guelzo mentions Kant as a forerunner of romanticism, which Guelzo evaluates negatively but also associates with such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Evangelical Christianity, Abolitionists, Southern secessionists and so on.
Guelzo's scorn for romanticism is linked to his admiration for what he describes as Lincoln's "politics of prudence," which he identifies as an Enlightenment principle that guided the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In a YouTube interview from February 2021, Guelzo attributed romanticism to Edmund Burke and cited pro-slavery Senator, cabinet secretary and Vice President John Calhoun as a follower of Burke.
[Royce] ...did not want Absolute pragmatism to lapse into the usual caricature of idealism, which made ideas into nothing more than objects of idle contemplation; ideas always contain, at their core, an intention to act. And he separated his notion of the Absolute from Scottish realism, Romantic mysticism, and even some aspects of Kant.
Perhaps Guelzo's ambivalence toward Kant in that article reflects the fact his antagonism in the earlier books was second-hand. One of Guelzo's sources is Isaiah Berlin. In Berlin's lectures on romanticism from 1952 and 1965, he cited Kant as the reluctant "father "of romanticism and excoriated romantics as "enemies of human liberty" ultimately linking romanticism to Marxism and fascism.
Guelzo appears to have taken Berlin's word for it. Other commentators have not been so indulgent of Berlin's ideas about romanticism. Curiously enough, Berlin concluded his 1965 lectures, published as The Roots of Romanticism, with an encomium to the "unintended" effects of romanticism that undermines everything that he had previously said about the supposed evils of romanticism:
The result of romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life; some degree of increased rational self-understanding. This was very far from the intentions of the romantics. But at the same time — and to this extent the romantic doctrine is true — they are the persons who most strongly emphasised the unpredictability of all human activities. They were hoist with their own petard. Aiming at one thing, they produced, fortunately for us all, almost the exact opposite.
This concluding paragraph is a remarkable document. Somehow, we are told, romanticism had all sorts of unintended bad effects that reveal some deep, underlying anti-Reason, anti-Enlightenment, anti-freedom essence that the "result of romanticism" ironically confounded. The argument is so inconsistent that to even try to summarize it falls into incoherence: we have the "enemies of freedom" to thank for all those things that are essential to freedom. I suppose that is why Berlin called them enemies of freedom? Of course by the same logic, romanticism was an unintended effect of the Enlightenment, which was an unintended effect of the Protestant Reformation, ad infinitum. By those lights, it's enemies of freedom all the way down.
The contradictory conclusion to Berlin's 1965 lectures was no anomaly. Berlin was a virtuoso of the ironic non-sequitur. Listening to his lectures gives the sense of a comedy routine. Isaiah Berlin was an entertainer; the exaggeratedly ironic formulations were part of his shtick. His lecture on Kant is a case in point:
Kant hated romanticism. He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwärmerei, any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion. Nevertheless, he is justly regarded as one of the fathers of romanticism — in which there is a certain irony. ...
Kant was an admirer of the sciences. He had a precise and extremely lucid mind: he wrote obscurely but seldom imprecisely. He was a distinguished scientist himself (he was a cosmologist); he believed in scientific principles perhaps more deeply than in any others; he regarded it as his life's task to explain the foundations of scientific logic and scientific method. He disliked everything that was rhapsodical or confused in any respect. He liked logic and he liked rigour. ... But if he is in any respect the father of romanticism, it is not as a critic of the sciences, nor of course as a scientist himself, but specifically in his moral philosophy.
Kant was virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedom.
So, let's be clear: Kant, the father of romanticism hated romanticism. He loved reason, which romanticism hated. He was intoxicated by the idea of human freedom and that spawned romanticism, the enemy of freedom. Isn't that brilliant? Who else could pack so many blatantly contradictory claims into two paragraphs and make it all sound oh so terribly clever?
Evidently, Professor Guelzo was not nimble-minded enough to realize that Isaiah Berlin was having us on. Maybe Berlin believed what he was saying at the moment. Maybe he didn't. But there is certainly nothing rationalistic and enlightening about Berlin's erudite stream of exaggeration, confusion, contradiction, wit, and irony. I'm not the first to call it a muddle.
In his introduction to Berlin's Political ideas in the romantic age, Joshua Cherniss discretely noted the author's inconsistencies:
...nor does Berlin ever exactly repeat himself, even when he is ostensibly recapitulating discussions that have appeared elsewhere, which means that one needs to read all his discussions of a topic to be sure that one has squeezed out every drop of what he (not always consistently) has to say about it.
With regard to who was the "father of romanticism," what Berlin had to say "contained multitudes," to borrow Walt Whitman's euphemism for self-contradiction. In his 1965 lectures, Berlin said Kant was "justly regarded as one of the fathers of romanticism." Seven years later, it was "Kant's unfaithful disciple Fichte" who was "the true father of romanticism." Berlin repeated the attribution to Fichte of fatherhood in 1975 and 1983.
Meanwhile, Berlin appears at times to present himself as somewhat of a disciple of Kant. The original dictation of "Two Concepts of Liberty" concludes with the following affirmation of Kant:
The need to calculate and weigh and compromise, and adjust and test and experiment, and make mistakes and never reach certain answers or guarantees for rational action, must irritate those who seek for clear and final solutions, and yearn for unity and symmetry, and all-embracing answers. Nevertheless it seems to me the inescapable task of those who, with Kant, believe that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."
The liberty that they seek to realise, and the world as they conceive it, seems to me, in comparison with that of the absolutists, more rational, more humane and more nearly realisable, because they alone are compatible with what most human beings have found the facts to be.
Kant's phrase about crooked timber was Berlin's favorite and it became the title for a collection of his essays published in 1990. He used the phrase in two of his essays in that volume, "The Pursuit of the Ideal" and "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West." In the former essay, Berlin stated:
No more rigorous moralist than Immanuel Kant has ever lived, but even he said, in a moment of illumination, 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity. We can only do what we can: but that we must do, against difficulties.
The final irony of Guelzo's objection to Kant, critical theory and critical race theory is that it is utterly, profoundly unreasonable. Even in his scholarly work, Guelzo makes the inexcusable first-year undergraduate error of assuming (because it is convenient to his hypothesis) that a brief passage from a 1952 lecture by a famous philosopher is the last word -- or even Berlin's last word -- on the relationship between Kant, the Enlightenment, romanticism, and irrationalism.
In his subsequent political pronouncements, Guelzo compounds his display of incomprehension with leaps of illogic such as "[t]he problem was that critical theory got away." Critical theory "got away"? Was this like a bank robbery with a "get-away" car waiting outside? Was critical theory some wild beast that escaped from the zoo?
"There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason," Guelzo explained Kant's thinking, "and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory." There is an example of word play by someone who knows nothing of the substance or context of the words he is playing with. Whatever its merits or faults, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason did not contain the seed that, according to one account by Berlin, spawned romanticism. That honour went to his moral philosophy.
As for the "hence" that generated "critical theory" from "a theory being critical of reason," they do both contain the words "critical" and "theory." So what? As I have discussed here, Thorstein Veblen pioneered the use of the word "obsolescence" in sociology and economics. In 1928, J. George Frederick coined the term "progressive obsolescence" to refer to a strategy of accelerating the turn-over of consumer goods. Is progressive obsolescence, then, a "subset" of Veblen's critique of conspicuous consumption? If so, that would have to be demonstrated and not deduced from the use of the same words.
In his role as Heritage Foundation "Visiting Scholar," Guelzo doesn't have to demonstrate anything. He doesn't need to show you any stinking badges. All he needs to do is go on Fox News or an American Enterprise Institute podcast and make assertions that can then be repeated ad nauseum by conservative columnists and commentators until they blend seamlessly into the propaganda wallpaper that the right-wing audience can assimilate as expert-verified reality.
Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. -- Voltaire
Keisha Russell is a propagandist for the "First Liberty Institute" who they grace with the title of "counsel." It looks from her resume that the counsel she provides consists of appearing on right-wing cable news and doing speaking engagements. Her bio at First Liberty doesn't mention any litigation experience and emphasizes her "commentary."
Today Russell appeared before the Senate confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson and read a script that included a section copied almost verbatim from a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen. Thiessen is a "conservative" columnist with the Washington Post, which is to say he is a megaphone for whatever the current right-wing talking points happen to be. On November 11, 2021, Thiessen's column was on "The Danger of Critical Race Theory" and featured talking points based on an interview with "one of our nation’s preeminent historians, Princeton University professor Allen C. Guelzo," Here is Thiessen's paraphrase of Guelzo's argument:
Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.
But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations — things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism, which taught that all human relationships are relationships of power between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that Whites are the oppressors.
Leave aside for the moment that: a. Guelzo's theory is batshit and b. Thiessen's summary of it makes it look even worse than it actually is. Here is part of Ms. Russell's Senate testimony:
What is Critical Race Theory?
Critical race theory (CRT) is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Critical theory rejected the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded.1 Critical theory teaches that all human relationships are relationships of power between the oppressors and the oppressed.2 The oppressor/oppressed lens of critical theory helped establish totalitarian ideologies such as Marxism and Nazism. In Marxism, the rich elite are the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jewish people were the oppressors. Today, in America, critical race theory teaches that whites are the oppressors.3
CRT’s key assertion is that racism is not the result of individual, conscious prejudices, actions, or thoughts, but rather that racism is a systemic and structural force.4 CRT teaches that racism is embedded in America’s legal system, institutions, and capitalist economy, and it demands “whiteness” as the societal norm.5
CRT demands a radical reordering of society and restructuring of the systems that perpetuate racial inequality.6
Note footnotes, "1-6." This is the prelude for the plagiarist's predictable defense, "but I cited my sources!" Nope. Citing your sources in a footnote -- which at any rate will not be visible to the hearing audience -- does not make it o.k. to copy and paste verbatim the words of someone else. Let's go through Russell's first paragraph on CRT again with the words copied verbatim (from Thiessen) highlighted.
Critical race theory (CRT) is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Critical theory rejected the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Critical theory teaches that all human relationships are relationships of power between the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressor/oppressed lens of critical theory helped establish totalitarian ideologies such as Marxism and Nazism.In Marxism, the rich elite are the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jewish people were the oppressors. Today, in America, critical race theory teaches that whites are the oppressors.
In my experience, that much evidence of plagiarism is sufficient to indicate that the paper in question is likely to have several more severe instances of plagiarism. I've gone through student papers with a fine tooth comb and almost inevitably one zinger is followed by many others.
Why does this even matter? In academia, it is known as "intellectual dishonesty." It is a kind of fraud, somebody attempting to take credit for work they didn't do, for expertise they don't have, and for arguments and analysis that in all likelihood they do not understand. Keisha Russell probably knows next to nothing about Immanuel Kant besides the second-hand drivel she has copied from Marc Thiessen. For that matter, Thiessen probably knows little about Kant but at least he attributed the argument to Guelzo. I personally haven't read much Kant beyond the first few pages of a few of his books, but I do know critical theory well enough to recognize that "preeminent historian" Guelzo doesn't know what he is talking about.
As Max Horkheimer pointed out in his 1941 essay, "The End of Reason," skepticism about reason has also been fundamental to reason. Kant was following the tradition. He gives examples going back to the Socratics, Descartes, Locke, and David Hume.
As the epigram of this post suggests, that arch Enlightenment figure, Voltaire, didn't hold Christianity in high esteem. Neither did he have much regard for the common people -- the rabble -- "We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants,—this is up to apostles," he wrote to D'Alembert in September of 1768. Is it Professor Guelzo's contention that it was the original intent of the framers of the constitution to honor those "principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason"?
An unfortunate reason the current war in Ukraine might go on longer than it should (with the should here being that it should never have happened in the first place, and the sooner it stops the better, with the onus here clearly on V.V. Putin to stop it as he started it without any justification), is that wartime leaders get a puff in their popularity at least for awhile and are let off the hook on domestic problems. From the outside it may look that V.V. Putin is indeed in trouble with much of the world denouncing his Ukraine invasion and imposing economic sanctions on Russia. But with his total control of the media, reports have his poll results up some, despite various prominent figures expressing opposition, with the economic adviser Anatoly Chubais the latest to resign and reportedly depart Russia. Children all over Russia are making Z formations in their schools, and Putin is able to purge enemies and impose an even longer jail sentence on his most threatening political rival, Navalny.
It must be noted that something similar, arguably even more dramatic, has happened with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He is now being hailed as a new "Winston Churchill," and is compared favorably with virtually all western leaders who are apparently shamed by the comparison. Now I shall grant that there is much more to admire with him than there is with Putin, with his willingness to remain in Kyiv from the beginning of the invasion at the time when many were predicting a rapid conquest of the city by the invading forces and reports that Putin was actively seeking not only to depose him but to kill him showing real personal bravery. So his reputation is not all that undeserved. But it must be noted that shortly before the invasion started his positive poll rating was an abysmal 21%. He had come into office promising various reforms and changes, but his government had gotten bogged down in many ways. His poll results are much higher now. I do think he wants peace, but it is also the case that he may not be all that keen on going back to what he was. After all, Winston Churchill was defeated in the election of 1945.
I reread the first 50-pages of One-Dimensional Man and the 9-page introduction with Rosenberg's critique of Mills, Packard, Riesman, Spectorsky and Whyte in mind. That is a fair sample given that Marcuse repeats his basic thesis ad nauseum in various "negative" formulations.
Rosenberg's essay almost qualifies as a critique of Marcuse's book even though it wasn't to be published for another five years. The essay was also published as "America's Post-Radical Critics," a less inscrutable title than "The Orgamerican Phantasy."
The two qualifications I would offer to my claim is that Rosenberg never mentioned the underlying Veblenism of his targets and merely alluded to Weber by way of referring to Whyte's nostalgia for the "Protestant Ethic Person." The gap left by absence of a critique of Veblen by Rosenberg can be filled in by Adorno's essay, "Veblen's Attack on Culture."
Below I have summarized Rosenberg's essay with excerpts that, with one exception, seem to me as pertinent to One-Dimensional Man as they are to the books Rosenberg was criticizing. The one exception is that Marcuse frequently registered nostalgia for the "old class struggle" and "the ideological Passion Plays of Marxian condemnation and conflict."
It goes without saying that the Other-Directed Man, the Exurbanite, the Organization Man, [the One-Dimensional Man!] is a type... The type or character is deficient in individuality by definition.
...
All our authors are at one in conceiving the flattening of personality in America as a universal effect of our interrelated economic and social practices.
What the Orgman-critics expose is not a flaw in society but the injurious realities of its normal everyday life. ... The emergence of the Orgman is conceived in terms far more deterministic than those of the "historical materialists."
...
Before the Orgman can feel put upon, it is only fair that he consider the advantages gained. "It is not," explains Whyte, "the evils of the organization that puzzle him, but its very beneficence."
...
The drama of history has been replaced by a pantomime in which, freed of individual or mass conflicts, bewildered, adjusted beings respond as in a narcosis to mysterious signs, whispers, hints, and shocks, which each receives on his Riesman "radar mechanism."
...
Extremist but neither radical nor conservative, the Organization criticism is inspired not by a passion for social correction but by nostalgia. A sigh over the lost person mars the phantasy of American unanimity which has supplanted the ideological Passion Plays of Marxian condemnation and conflict.
...
Loosed from action, for which it can see no aim, the post-radical criticism often exaggerates its complaints, producing a worse impression of conditions than is warranted by the facts, at the same time that it seeks remedies in the wrong direction.
...
But there is more to the conception of the Orgman than regret for an older social type. As the representative of the new post-war employed intelligentsia, the post-radical critic suffers also a nostalgia for himself as an independent individual. For his former abstract sympathy with a nominal working class, the intellectual of this decade has substituted an examination in the mirror of his own social double as insider of the Organization and the Community. It is what he sees there that has caused him to project a morbid image of society compared with which the old "class struggle" America seems not only naif but as relatively healthy as a war with rifles and cannons.
For in regard to the misery of alienation who is a greater victim of what Whyte calls the split "between the individual as he is and the role he is called upon to play" than the member of the intellectual caste newly enlisted en masse in carrying out society’s functions? As writer, artist, social scientist, he is one with his talents and his education for creative work; in playing his part in the service of the organization he must eliminate any thought of functioning for himself.
...
The intellectual employee also accepts a more total identification with his role than other workers, in that the editorial director, the designer, the copy writer, etc., sells himself more completely in terms of both psychic energy expended and in number of hours worked. With him the division between work and leisure, discipline and freedom, has truly been erased. If the free artist or the founder of a great enterprise builds his life exclusively out of the substance of his work, today’s intellectual unbuilds his life in order to live his job.
Besides being the prime victim and exemplar of self-loss in contemporary society, the “organized” professional cannot escape a conviction of guilt for his part in depriving others of their individuality. He has consented to use his capacities as a tool and to approve in practice the proposition recorded by Whyte that "all the great ideas have already been discovered."
In 1959, Harold Rosenberg wrote the essay "The Orgamerican Phantasy," published in The Tradition of the New. Rosenberg's essay criticized the "post-radical" self-absorption of several of the same authors -- William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard -- that Herbert Marcuse would subsequently praise in the Introduction to One-Dimensional Man for the "vital importance" of their work. In Vance Packard and American Social Criticism, Daniel Horowitz discussed Rosenberg's attack on Packard. Curiously, though, I can find no discussion that connects Rosenberg's criticism of Packard et al. to Marcuse's admitted admiration of and reliance on their work.
Tellingly, all of the authors discussed by Rosenberg in his essay cited Thorstein Veblen. In addition to the three also cited by Marcuse, Rosenberg also discussed David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and Auguste C. Spectorsky's The Exurbanites. Rosenberg, however, didn't mention the common Veblenian legacy.
The stock of Thomas Robert Malthus rises and falls with the real price of food. He was not the inventor of his theory of population, a point that Karl Marx threw at him among other criticisms, with such people as James Anderson and Benjamin Franklin preceding him with pretty much the entiretly of his theory. But his timing was much better, publishing the flawed first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, a year coming at the end of a decade of rising food prices coinciding with the chaos of the French Revolution, which Malthus also opposed. The main flaw in his essay was his argument that food production grows linearly while population grows exponentially. The theory of exponential growth applies to the populations from which food comes as much as it does to human populations, but those populations find their growth limited by the fixity of land, which leads to the relevance of the law of diminishing returns, a point made by Ricardo and which Malthus picked up on by the third edition of his book, switching to it then to justify his theory of human populations tending to press upon the means of subsistence. Ricardo relied on Malthus's theory to underpin his depressing Iron Law of Wages.
Neo-Malthusianism expanded to include concern over natural resources beyond just food to such items as oil and energy more broadly as well as industrial metals. Thus the neo-Malthusian Limits to Growth, initially published in 1972 had a heyday of popularity in 1974 when not only was world population growth approaching its all time maximum rate but the world experienced simultaneous energy and food price shocks. The former was driven by the tripling of the price of oil following the Yom Kippur War in late 1973 and the Saudi oil export embargo on the US that happened then but that held even after the embargo was lifted as a broader production cut by OPEC was put in place. The latter followed poor harvests in 1972 and 1973 accompanied by large-scale purchases of corn in particular by the USSR to maintain meat production, which led to a tripling of the price of corn (maize) with other major grain crops also sharply rising in price. The upshot was sharply rising prices of both gasoline and food in the year 1974, the year that the stagflation of the 1970s took fully hold. Oil prices soared again at the end of the 1970s with the fall of the Shah of Iran, but then grain and thus food prices did not do so. But 1974 was a year of neo-Malthusian frenzy as both of these soared.
In the aftermath of having fallen very low during the pandemic, oil and grain prices had been rising since April 2020 and had accelerated with the more general outbreak of rising inflation since the beginning of 2021. But now the outbreak of war in Ukraine has led to a much sharper surge of oil and wheat prices as oil and wheat exports from Russia have been widely embargoed (although not totally), with it the world's leading exporter of wheat and the second leading exporter of oil, and with wheat exports from Ukraine, the fifth largest source of it on world markets, due to disruption from the Russian invasion. Oil prices have quintupled since their April 2020 low and wheat prices have more than tripled, with both of them surging by something like 50% in the month since Russia invaded Ukraine. This is the first time since 1974 we have seen such a convergence of sharply rising oil and grain prices, although corn prices have not been up quite as sharply. Only the slowdown of world population growth has kept us so far from having an outburst of neo-Malthusianist sentiment, and indeed to the extent that pressure to enact policies to combat global warming are partly driven by neo-Malthusian attitudes, the sharp increase in gasoline prices has brought at least in the US a reaction against such policies at least with respect to oil, as politicians on both sides of the fence call for at least temporarily suspending gasoline taxes in order to combat inflation. Heck, elections are at stake.
"Rhetoric" in quotes because it may not be just that. I have not been posting much, partly because had a wedding for daughter, Sasha, last weekend, but also because I am seriously demoralized by the current situation, and every time I think I have something intelligent to say about the economics of it, that seems to keep changing, although I shall soon.
Anyway, I have to get off my chest what I have heard from my wife, Marina, coming out of Russian language sources, not reported in English language media. This is from an hour and a half presentation by a man named Padkin (don't know first name and googling does not bring him up, maybe spelling off) who apparently heads something in Moscow called the Foundation for Conceptual Technology, which also does not come up on a google. Anyway, this guy was calling for the use of Russian tactical nuclear weapons against NATO members, more specifically against Ankara, Turkey where drones are being produced that the Ukrainians have been successfully using against the Russian military, and also against two air bases in Poland that have been used to ship arms to the Ukrainians. About the only good thing that can be said about his broadcast is that he said warnings should be sent first so that civilians can be removed.
I do not know how this is gong to end, but that high level Russians are talking like this in public is very bad news. I note that it was a Russian TV anchor back in 2014 who was the first person in a major nuclear power since 1962 to talk about using nuclear weapons openly and seriously after the essentially wimply economic sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed Crimea. That guy talked about how dare the US do such a thing when Russia could "incinerate New York City."
Georg Simmel called it "a faint sense of tension and vague longing" connected with the modern preponderance of means over ends. What Simmel calls estrangement
[We] feel as if the whole meaning of our existence were so remote that we are unable to locate it and are constantly in danger of moving away from rather than closer to it. Furthermore, it is as if the meaning of life clearly confronted us, as if we would be able to grasp it were it not for the fact that we lack some modest amount of courage, strength and inner security.
I would add that this perceived remoteness of spirituality and contemplation is compounded by ambivalence toward the material wonders that the preponderance of means delivers. Here I am -- blithely typing into my computer to instantly send my thoughts out to potentially who knows how many readers, yet:
People's ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation.
This, at best, "faint sense of tension and vague longing," or, at worst, "deep feeling that something is wrong," is what underlies the otherwise inexplicable appeal of demagogues and scapegoating cults, which promise the "courage, strength and inner security" that people feel they lack. The magical thing about cults is that their failure to resolve the tension and longing merely heightens the loyalty of recruits. The more they fail, the stronger is their grip.
At the turn of the twentieth century, both Simmel and Thorstein Veblen were, I believe, seeking to address that "faint sense of tension and vague longing" -- the infamous fin de siècle spirit of "ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and 'a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence'." (wikipedia) Both offered compelling analyses. It seems that Veblen's critique became the 'common sense' of American social criticism and as such was eventually assimilated into what I would characterize as a mainstream current of resigned radicalism -- the sense that things are not quite right but that there is no realistic chance of fundamental change.
Veblen's social criticism may be summed up as asserting that social progress is perpetually impeded by archaic -- 'obsolescent' -- habits of mind, such that we are always trying to address today's problems with yesterday's institutions. "...this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time":
Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these institutions is the development of society. The institutions are, in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular relations and particular functions of the individual and of the community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type of character.
The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men’s habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past. The institutions — that is to say the habits of thought — under the guidance of which men live are in this way received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past. Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established [emphasis added]. When a step in the development has been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the institutions of today — the present accepted scheme of life — do not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men’s present habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down, these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes, or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not be a question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is a process of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a process of individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.
For Simmel, it is not the 'obsolescence' of these institutions and habits of minds that is at the root of the problem. Rather it is the sheer proliferation of "objective" facts that overwhelm the individual's capability of assimilating them:
If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say — subject to many individual exceptions — that the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined. … The fact that machinery has become so much more sophisticated than the worker is part of this same process. How many workers are there today, even within large-scale industry, who are able to understand the machine with which they work, that is the mental effort invested in it? ... In the purely intellectual sphere, even the best informed and most thoughtful persons work with a growing number of ideas, concepts and statements, the exact meaning and content of which they are not fully aware. The tremendous expansion of objective, available material of knowledge allows or even enforces the use of expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers without the condensed content of thought actually enclosed within them being unfolded for the individual user. Just as our everyday life is surrounded more and more by objects of which we cannot conceive how much intellectual effort is expended in their production, so our mental and social communication is filled with symbolic terms, in which a comprehensive intellectuality is accumulated, but of which the individual mind need make only minimal use. … Every day and from all sides, the wealth of objective culture increases, but the individual mind can enrich the forms and contents of its own development only by distancing itself still further from that culture and developing its own at a much slower pace.
How can we explain this phenomenon? If all the culture of things is, as we saw, nothing but a culture of people, so that we develop ourselves only by developing things, then what does that development, elaboration and intellectualization of objects mean, which seems to evolve out of these objects' own powers and norms without correspondingly developing the individual mind? This implies an accentuation of the enigmatic relationship which prevails between the social life and its products on the one hand and the fragmentary life-contents of individuals on the other. The labour of countless generations is embedded in language and custom, political constitutions and religious doctrines, literature and technology as objectified spirit from which everyone can take as much of it as they wish to or are able to, but no single individual is able to exhaust it all. Between the amount of this treasure and what is taken from it, there exists the most diverse and fortuitous relationships. The insignificance or irrationality of the individual's share leaves the substance and dignity of mankind's ownership unaffected, just as any physical entity is independent of its being individually perceived. Just as the content and significance of a book remains indifferent to a large or small, understanding or unresponsive, group of readers, so any cultural product confronts its cultural audience, ready to be absorbed by anyone but in fact taken up only sporadically. This concentrated mental labour of a cultural community is related to the degree to which it comes alive in individuals just as the abundance of possibilities is related to the limitations of reality.
If only these two contemporaries could have been brought together in an exchange of views! I have long admired Veblen's thought and his influence on subsequent writers, including Kenneth Burke, Stephen Leacock, and Arthur Dahlberg. But re-evaluating it in the light of "planned obsolescence" and "progressive obsolescence" I can now see its potential for misappropriation. We "can never catch up with the progressively changing situation" — therefore we must race ever faster on the treadmill of technological progress!
William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings wrote several underconsumptionist texts in the 1920s that Steven Kates has argued were a formative — but unacknowledged — influence on Keynes's General Theory. For our purposes, though, what is of interest is their comments on Veblen in two of their early books, Money (1924) and Profits (1925). In the former book, Foster and Catchings took issue with Veblen's objection to the "conspicuous waste" of non-productive consumers:
But, however objectionable it may be to have any members of society appropriate for their personal use far more than they contribute to society, we cannot for that reason hold them directly responsible" for fluctuations in the world's work. Their "joy-riding” cannot budge business as long as the amount they spend in consumption bears a constant relation to the other factors that determine the annual production-consumption equation.
In Profits, Foster and Catchings chided Veblen and others for hypocritically assuming that other people's consumption is waste but their own is sensible:
No one who cries out against wasteful and harmful products proposes to have his own freedom of choice restrained. He assumes that in an ideal economic order, where nobody wasted the labors of men in the pursuit of profit, he would still be able to buy about all that he now enjoys; for, naturally, his own expenditures seem to him sensible. He does not expect to give up his favorite cigar or cheese, or anything else except, perhaps, certain newspapers or vaudeville shows that are beginning to bore him. It is always some other man's way of spending money that he wishes to curtail for the common good. So when Thorstein Veblen lashes, with all the thongs of his far-flung vocabulary, the conspicuous waste of the leisure class, and when Hartley Withers condemns it for 'consuming things that it does not really want,' we should bear in mind, however tempted we may be to join in the flaying, that every consumer is the sole judge of what he really wants.
There are only a couple of steps from every consumer being the sole judge of what he wants to the economic imperative of advertising and fashion compelling people to want things they otherwise don't want. The first step is from Foster and Catchings to Paul Mazur's American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences (1928). Catchings was a senior partner at Goldman Sachs; Mazur was a senior partner at Lehman Brothers. The two men "played equally important roles in directing investment bankers toward the consumer industry." ("Brokers and the New Corporate Industrial Order" -- William Leach). They worked together promoting mergers in the merchandise sector. Mazur didn't cite Foster and Catchings in his book and he didn't mention Veblen.
Obsolescence, however, appears 43 times in Mazur's book. Veblen used the term in 1897 and used it pointedly in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term began to appear relatively frequently with reference to depreciation of capital goods around 1903-1904. Before then it usually referred to medical, biological, or linguistic matters. Obsolete was used by several economists, including Veblen, in the 1890s with reference to machinery. I could find no reference prior to the twentieth century of obsolescent or obsolete consumer goods.
Mazur's friend in the advertising industry, J. George Frederick, undoubtedly got his inspiration from Mazur's book for his article, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption." American Prosperity was published in January 1928. Frederick's article was published the following September. Frederick didn't mention Mazur. He did, however, take a dig at Foster and Catchings:
Messrs. Foster and Catchings have been talking and writing theoretically about this question for four or five years and getting much attention. They say "get more money into the consumer's hands with which to buy," which is most admirable doctrine, but their only concrete recipe for doing this little piece of bootstrap-lifting is for the Government to employ men on Federal building projects. I think that it is self-evident that this is a mere minor stop-gap.
Having now obtained Frederick's "Progressive Obsolescence" article, I'm confident he wrote the progressive obsolescence chapter of his wife's book and likely added the ironic praise of "Veblen's excellent phrase."
Herbert Marcuse's 1941 essay "Some social implications of Modern Technology" was published in the same issue of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, as Theodor Adorno's "Veblen’s Attack on Culture: Remarks Occasioned by the Theory of the Leisure Class." Marcuse's references to Veblen there were mainly to the "Instinct of Workmanship" essay and to observations by Veblen about technology that were similar to Marx's views on the relationship between workers and machinery. Adorno was more perceptive in criticizing Veblen's one-sided debunking of culture as being "not completely out of harmony" with the "disarming" reception he received. Presumably, though, Veblen — and even Adorno — would have been horrified by facility with which Foster and Catchings repelled lashes from "the thongs of his far-flung vocabulary," Mazur perverted his "striking terminology," and the Fredericks mocked his "excellent phrase," conspicuous consumption.
Simmel's analysis didn't lend itself so readily to snappy sloganeering and perhaps that spared it from assimilation and vulgarization. I recently read a 54-page essay that mostly focuses on a 24-page section of Simmel's The Philosophy of Money. My advice would be to read the section on culture in Simmel's chapter on the "Style of Life" twice -- or maybe three times. This is not meant as a slight on the 54-page essay. Simmel's writing is so rich and deep that one can read it over and over profitably.
Simmel didn't offer a solution to the problems of modernity that he describes. To be fair, Veblen didn't offer a solution either, at least not in The Theory of the Leisure Class (later on he hallucinated about 'the engineers' as agents of social change). Simmel's refusal of a solution was consistent with his critique of the preponderance of means over ends. Solutions to problems, after all, are means, not ends. The end is not resignation but wisdom.
In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, "Obsolescence of Socialism," Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had "repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"
As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on the labor time and the quantity of labor expended in the productive process than on the power of the instruments set in motion during the labor time. These instruments, and their growing effectiveness are in no proportion to the actual labor time which the production requires; their effectiveness rather depends on the attained level of science and technical progress. Human labor then is no longer enclosed in the process of production — man rather relates himself to the process of production merely as supervisor and regulator. He stands outside this process instead of being its principal agent. In this transformation, the basis of production and wealth is no longer the actual (physical) labor performed by man himself, nor his labor time, but his own creative power, that is, his knowledge and mastery of nature through his social existence in one word, the development of the social (all-round) individual. The theft of another man's labor time, on which the social wealth still rests today, then becomes a miserable basis compared with the new basis which large-scale industry itself has created. As soon as human labor, in its physical form, has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labor time will cease, and must of necessity cease, to be the measure of wealth, and exchange value must of necessity cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass of the population has then ceased to be the condition for the development of social wealth, and the leisure of the few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the intellectual faculties of man. The (capitalist) mode of production, which rests on exchange value, thus collapses...
Marcuse's quotation corresponds to the passage beginning on page 704 of the Penguin edition and continuing though most of page 705, with some elisions. "Man becomes free from the necessities of spending himself in material production," Marcuse exclaimed following the quotation, "Free to control, even to 'play' with it according to his own human faculties. Not a word about class struggle! Not a word about impoverishment!"
Not a word about class struggle or impoverishment in the passage quoted by Marcuse because those questions were dealt with elsewhere in the manuscript. "It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer," Marx wrote on page 604, "that he is a pauper: virtual pauper." And, Marx continued:
According to his economic conditions he is merely a living labour capacity, hence equipped with the necessaries of life. Necessity on all sides, without the objectivities necessary to realize himself as labour capacity. If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour; not produce his necessaries. Then he cannot obtain them through exchange; rather, if he does obtain them, it is only because alms are thrown to him from revenue. He can live as a worker only in so far as he exchanges his labour capacity for that part of capital which forms the labour fund. This exchange is tied to conditions which are accidental for him, and indifferent to his organic presence. He is thus a virtual pauper. Since it is further the condition of production based on capital that he produces ever more surplus labour, it follows that ever more necessary labour is set free. Thus the chances of his pauperism increase. To the development of surplus labour corresponds that of the surplus population. In different modes of social production there are different laws of the increase of population and of overpopulation ; the latter identical with pauperism. These different laws can simply be reduced to the different modes of relating to the conditions of production, or, in respect to the living individual, the conditions of his reproduction as a member of society, since he labours and appropriates only in society. The dissolution of these relations in regard to the single individual, or to part of the population, places them outside the reproductive conditions of this specific basis, and hence posits them as overpopulation, and not only lacking in means but incapable of appropriating the necessaries through labour, hence as paupers. Only in the mode of production based on capital does pauperism appear as the result of labour itself, of the development of the productive force of labour.
"Not a [single] word about class struggle! Not a [single] word about impoverishment!" No, not one word -- three hundred and twenty words about class and pauperization with another six pages on the same topics to follow.
The passage Marcuse quoted is from a part of the Grundrisse that has come to be known as the "fragment on machines." It is my argument that the so-called fragment is intimately related to two other fragments that occur earlier in the edited manuscript as it has been published. The connections between the three fragments are both lexical and logical, and the analysis in the first two informs the interpretation of terminology used in the third. Marcuse was right that the passage he quoted contained a "most amazing insight." It just wasn't the one he thought it was.
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