H Arendt and Human Nature

To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the | same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature (pp. 9-10).

No, H Arendt is not speaking out of both sides of her mouth. Instead she is disclosing her Kantian moorings. Lodged firmly in Kantian soil, Arendt is perfectly comfortable writing, as she does, both of the conditions that impose and press upon human beings (and therein constitute their state of being conditioned; hence, the Human Condition); but also the fact that what is human about human being cannot itself be conditioned without ceasing to be human.

H Arendt, Action and Natality

I invite PE 160 students to reflect on possible relationships between action, natality, and the transcendental subject. Is it coincidental that for Arendt action is that element of human being that highlights not the ways that they are shaped by and embedded in the world, but, to the contrary, the ways that they shape and hold mastery over that world, politically. Although clearly her training differed significantly from the training of Milton Friedman or Leo Strauss, it must have seemed spectacular to observe the three interact in the Committee on Social Thought. How might their perspectives have clashed? How might they each have supplemented and reinforced the others?

M Friedman on the Game of Democracy

Reading M Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, one might easily get the impression that Mr. Friedman is not a particularly big fan of government. Which is why I was pleased to find the following reassurance roughly half way into Chapter One:

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential . . . (p. 15).

But, earlier promises in the book notwithstanding, don’t expect to find anything here about republican values, democracy, or popular self-governance. That for which the “government is essential” is to serve “both as a forum for determining the ‘rules of the game’ and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on” (p. 15). “Rules of the game”? “Umpire”?

Let us suppose for a moment, just for the sake of argument, that, in the instance of a republic, the government is exactly not the forum that determines the rules of the game; that the rules are decided in convention and then laid out in a Constitution (see “M Friedman, “Introduction”). Let us further suppose that these rules are felt by the conventioneers to be bound to republican values and theory. What rules are they then that this forum will determine? Perhaps they will determine a rule that subjects public things (res publicum) to private interests?

But, anyone who has read the Federalist Papers or James Madison’s notes on the Convention knows that the conventioneers feared no tyrant more than the tyranny imposed by private self-interest and party spirit, and that they were covetous of no spirit more than they were the spirit of concord and harmony; which, again, makes me wonder whether, perhaps, Mr. Friedman was confusing the U.S. Constitution with the Anti-Federalist Papers or perhaps F v Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

But, even assuming that Mr. Friedman was not so confused, it strains credulity to believe, as Mr. Friedman appears to believe, that the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments can be understood as a game designed solely to ensure the freedom of the market place.

Indeed, if this is what Mr. Friedman and his followers believe, then among the many lessons we can take home from this belief is that our public institutions—particularly our schools—have done a wretched job teaching US History to our students, not least of all to Mr. Friedman himself, who appears to have been asleep during those lessons.

M Friedman, “Introduction”

In the Introduction to his Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman writes that

Two broad principles embodied in our Constitution give an answer that has preserved our freedom so far, though they have been violated repeatedly in practice while proclaimed as precept. First, the scope of government must be limited. . . . The second broad principle is that government power must be dispersed.

While we might agree with Mr. Friedman that some British constitutional theorists and legal scholars favored this anti-Federalist view and even that some at the Constitutional Convention favored this view, it would be extremely difficult to find these two principles stated outright in the Constitution itself. (Indeed, I challenge students to find them stated there in this way.)

However, aside from the fact that these principles are not expressed in the Constitution, there are two additional complications. Upon reading the serialized version of the so-called “Federalist Papers,” which conveyed the sense of the conventioneers and their document to the public before its official publication, the anti-Federalists were so incensed by the document that they composed their own broadsides, excoriating the very document that Mr. Friedman her claims to defend. They excoriated it precisely because they found that it provided far to much scope to the Federal government and that it failed to sufficiently disperse governmental power.

But that is not all. Not a century after this Federalist Constitution was ratified, anti-Federalist sentiment in the southern United States ran so hot—particularly, but not exclusively, over the issue of whether the Federal government could pass laws depriving individuals of their private property (in this case, slaves and arms)—that, rather than submit to Federal tyranny, they opted for separation and civil war.

This does not make Mr. Friedman’s defense of capitalism untenable, only that part of his defense for which he seeks Constitutional succor.

However, it does call attention to some very curious features within Mr. Friedman’s argument. Did the framers of the Constitution really understand the “separation of powers” as a separation of the political from the economic? I had always supposed that they meant the separation of the judiciary, the legislative, and the executive branches of government. And, even admitting that it was this group (and not their irate detractors outside Constitution Hall) that feared the concentration of power, did they really conceptualize this fear in terms of Federal government as a whole rather than the concentration of this power in a single sovereign?

Interestingly enough, it is Mr. Friedman himself who seems unable to think about the dispersal of political power, asking:

But can there be more than one really outstanding leader, one person on whom the energies and enthusiasms of his countrymen are centered (p. 16)?

Well, yes, there can be. And we hope there is. But, Mr. Friedman’s point is that we would rather have power dispersed over as many individuals as possible. And that can only happen through the market.

And, so, in the end, by attempting to politically rather than economically “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” Mr. Friedman apparently feels that the framers of the Constitution were pursuing the wrong course. More on that, though, in the next installment.

Aristotle in Hyde Park; FH Knight’s Guardians

The direct effects of " preaching" about economic relations and obligations are in general bad; and the kind of legislation which results from the clamour of idealistic preachers-and from the public attitude which such preaching at once expresses and tends to generate or aggravate-is especially bad. All this is the natural consequence of exhortation without knowledge and understanding-of well-meaning people attempting to meddle with the workings of extremely complicated and sensitive machinery which. they do not. understand (418).

The problem to which Professor Knight calls our attention here is not unlike the problem we identified earlier and to which we will return repeatedly throughout the course. When Pericles broadens the franchise to include most Athenians, he does so not in order to empower them, but to empower himself through their ignorance. He is a demagogue. Aristotle’s solution to this problem is to isolate the political elite from the realm of necessity—an ideal, incidentally, that the framers of the US Constitution took quite seriously (Elliot’s Debates, 1787-1789).

Theorists and policy makers who embrace Aristotle’s solution have, however, been of two minds; call them minimalists and maximalists. The minimalists (such as Knight) argue that not all can be experts and therefore that policy-making should be reserved to a small elite. Maximalists argue that, while not all should be empowered with decision-making, economic and educational policy should endeavor to make all who are citizens competent and able to intelligently debate over policy decisions.

The danger that Knight sees in “preaching” is that it appeals to individuals who, while deeply affected by economic policy and economic forces, have neither the competence to understand what is happening to them nor the expertise to appreciate what can and cannot be done. But the “solution” is not to work towards extending this competence or expertise to them. The solution is for preachers to cease and desist their rabble-rousing.

FH Knight and the “Economic Interpretation”

It is at least closely related to the doctrine of the " economic interpretation ", the falsity of which has received brief consideration previously.

The “economic interpretation” here is short-hand not only for Marxist, but for materialist interpretations more generally, which, according to FH Knight, hold not only that all social, cultural, and political relations should be interpreted through the lens of economics, but that they also have an economic solution. What interests us in Mr. Knight’s foregrounding of the “economic interpretation” is the specific weight he places on it. Human societies inevitably and invariably are accompanied by sometimes violent conflict. Removing economic occasions for conflict, according to Knight, does not remove conflict. It follows that eo ipso economic reform will not lead to an end of conflict. Conflict comes to an end, rather, by the imposition of law (see FH Knight, “Ethics and Economic Reform. I. The Ethics of Liberalism,” Economica, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 21 (Feb., 1939), pp. 1-29).

T Veblen’s Rights of Man

The vulgar element, held cheap, kept under, but massive, in the medieval
order of society, comes gradually into the foreground
and into the controlling position in economic life;
so that the aristocratic or chivalric standards and ideals
are gradually supplanted or displaced by the vulgar apprehension
of what is right and best in the conduct of life.

You got to love Veblen. He tells it like it is. The origins of the modern—he is writing in 1910, a mere 135 years after the American Revolution—sense of liberte, egalite, fraternite are actually, says Veblen, to be sought in the displacement of aristocratic and chivalric standards by the vulgar standards entertained by the rest of us . . . or not.

T Veblen’s Islam

There is, in point of practical morality, not much to
choose, e. g., between the upper-class medieval Christianity
and the contemporary Mohammedan morality.

Although it might be difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend, in 1910, when T Veblen composed this article, “Christian Morality and the Competitive System,” Islam lay fairly soundly defeated as a comprehensive political-social-cultural form. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Veblen recognized a kinship between attitudes entertained by upper-class medieval Christians and early twentieth century Muslims with regard to the principle of non-resistance. It was, or so Veblen theorized, the subjected classes that embraced the Christian principle of non-resistance. In a kind of back-handed way, therefore, Veblen is crediting early twentieth century Muslims with the forward-looking, advanced, perspective of the master, who refuses to be mastered and refuses to embrace non-resistance.

T Veblen’s Anthropology

Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori
et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living (VIII, 83).

Although it is not entirely impossible that Veblen, like Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis), here intends to satirize those who sacrifice their lives for honor, I find it doubtful since the sentiment is so pervasive among those who fall (or will fall) within Veblen’s orbit.

Later this semester Alexander Kojeve and then Francis Fukuyama will take this preference for death and honor over life and dishonor as a leading quality of the master race (an interpretation that Fukuyama ascribes, not unjustly, to GFW Hegel’s master class). And Hannah Arendt, another Chicago luminary, will come to fault the working class for failing, when granted leisure time, to know quite what to do with it, since they had long ago sacrificed their human dignity in the pursuit of industry.

PE 160 will take up this topic more fully on Monday.