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Detail from the cover art of issue no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper.
There’s a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen movies—Dirty Dancing, Say Anything, One Crazy Summer—you never know when you’ll see some skin. And so it goes in our new Summer issue. In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “Kings,” the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations:
… You never knew
whether it would be strip or not, so you always
considered wearing layers. It was summer.
Sometimes you’d get pretty naked
but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off
one sock at a time.
Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer fling? Maybe that’s just how objects appear in the rearview mirror; even the most operatic affairs can seem a little comical in retrospect. In his poem “Armed Cavalier,” Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse kind of summer romance, when two lovers lock themselves away “for a whole weekend / and not eat or drink.” I love the wry look he casts over his shoulder at the end of these lines:
Stars, slow traffic,
the summer I wished you loved me
enough to kill me,
but not really.
If you’re curious to learn more about the story behind “Armed Cavalier,” check out our online Making of a Poem series feature on his poem this month. Leopoldine Core, whose poem “Ex-Stewardess” appears in this issue, recently contributed to the series, too—and to my summer playlist. “I was listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Dance II’ by Discovery Zone, and this mournful song ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,’ performed by Mia Farrow in The Muppets Valentine Show in 1974,” Core recalls. I’m listening to Farrow’s Muppets Show rendition as I write this, and Core’s right, she does sound “a little like Nico.”
They say that on hot summer days in the nation’s capital, Richard Nixon would light a roaring blaze in the fireplace of his White House study, crank the air conditioning up to full blast, put on a little Mantovani, and gaze out the window at the Washington Monument. This might be one of the few things Nixon and I have in common; while my fellow Americans are out in droves worshipping the sun, I like nothing more than to retreat to my home office and, thermostat set to eco mode, leaf through poems about summer. In this issue’s pages, fellow seasonal voyeurs will find that Lewis Meyers’s “Summer Letters” delivers “the black raspberry’s passion for a drop of sunlight” without any need for sunscreen. “Summer Letters” marks the late Meyers’s return to our pages after more than a half century; his last poem in the magazine, “Going to Chicago,” was published in a 1965 issue, under the Johnson administration. We’re grateful to Meyers’s widow, Diana, and to the poet Ellen Doré Watson, for sharing the poem with us.
Elsewhere, Sharon Olds muses on her quest to find a better language for sex in her Art of Poetry interview, and John Keene, in his Art of Fiction interview, observes that Portuguese is better suited to that task than English. It should also be said that, although we tried our best, not every poem in this issue is about summer, sex, or summer sex. You’ll also find a philosophical poem about cats by the great Argentinian writer Mirta Rosenberg, translated from the Spanish by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman; an excerpt from Imani Elizabeth Jackson’s expansive minimalist sequence “Flag”; and a poetic noir set in the Antwerp of Jonathan Thirkield’s singular imagination. Bon voyage, and happy reading.
Srikanth Reddy is the Review‘s poetry editor.
Can art make us better people? Musician Markus Reuter joins Mark, Wes, and Seth to discussion the first half of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).
Given the failure of the French Revolution, this famous German poet wondered what could make the masses capable of governing themselves? His answer: Beauty! Aesthetic appreciation puts us at a distance from our savage desires, enables the abstract thought necessary for Kantian rationalist morality, and yet keeps us in touch with our feelings so that we don't just become cogs in the industrial machine.
Sponsors: Secure your Internet and get three extra months free at ExpressVPN.com/PEL. Try The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman.
The post Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.
And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was
lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133
In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.
To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139). My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).
My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!)
So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures).
In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:
The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130
For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis').
I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori.
Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche.
So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy.
In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories.
The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.
The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances."
Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds. Okay, so much for set up.
The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.
Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):
Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy.
Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.
Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).
Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature.
What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.
Yet agreement between Hayek and the dominant strand of liberal theory may not be quite so easily secured. For a great deal turns on what is understood by a modus vivendi, and thought necessary to secure it. For Gutmann and Larmore, a liberal modus vivendi may well involve the growth of the mechanisms of participatory democracy, and need not compromise egalitarian ideals. A Hayekian conception of the liberal order as a modus vivendi, however, would not be of this nature. The conclusion he draws from his social theory is that a liberal order must be ruled by a limited government whose primary task is to maintain the framework within which individuals and groups may pursue their respective aims, regardless of the shape the resulting society assumes.
Rawls, however...explicitly rejects the idea of a modus vivendi. For him, what is needed is a political conception of justice which will command the allegiance of a diversity of moral viewpoints in a pluralist society. Only such a public philosophy which was able to sustain an 'overlapping consensus' of views would ensure social unity in 'long run equilibrium'. A modus vivendi would amount to little more than a temporary truce, in which time the more powerful interests would be able to marshall their forces, later to impose their own attitudes upon all. This contrasts with Hayek who sees social stability as possible only under political institutions which removed social justice from the agenda of politics.
This lack of agreement does not, however, reduce the interest of Hayek's contribution to liberal theory. Indeed, it suggests one way liberals may approach the problem of dealing with differences that divide them: by returning to issues in social theory. His work deserves examination because he draws attention to the need to consider the nature of society and the way in which this constrains our choice of political principles. For, if Hayek is right, many kinds of principles may be ruled out as unworkable. In other words, the circumstances of justice need much more careful investigation than they have been given.
Hayek's endeavours, while they have not succeeded in establishing a coherent liberal philosophy, do push contemporary liberal theory in a promising direction. For they show, first, that the defence of the liberal order need not assume that man is an isolated, asocial, utility maximizer: the defence of liberalism can, and should, be grounded in a more plausible account of man and society. And they suggest, secondly, that, while it will prove difficult to establish philosophical foundations for liberal rights, or a liberal theory of liberty, an understanding of the nature of social processes may offer a surer guide by telling us what kinds of rights and liberties cannot be adopted if the liberal ideal is to survive.-- Chandran Kukathas (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, pp. 227-228. [Emphasis in original]
[If you are impatient you can skip the first four autobiographical paragraphs of today's digression.] Because I never went through a libertarian phase (and where I grew up these barely existed then), I am not quite sure when I first encountered Hayek's name and when I first read him. I do know that when I entered graduate school at age 24, I was aware of some of the features of Hayek's 'knowledge problem' because I briefly tried -- without success -- to get others in my graduate cohort interested in Hayek as an epistemologist in light of Hayek 1945. But I am really unsure how I picked this up. Between college and graduate school I read anything that happened to come my way or encountered in bookstores so I'll leave it to chance.
Because I ended up writing a PhD on Hume and Smith's philosophy of science, I did end up reading some of Hayek's writings on the Scottish Enlightenment. During my PhD, I also read the Road to Serfdom (which left me unmoved) and The Sensory Order (which was astonishing, and I was shocked nobody else I knew had read). But because I was not especially interested in spontaneous order or a deep dive into libertarianism (beyond Nozick) my knowledge of Hayek was superficial.
This started to change near the end of my PhD, around 2001, when the historians of economics, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, started to invite me to their annual workshop on the preservation of the history of economics. Peart was working on her excellent edition of Hayek on Mill. David knew his Hayek and could easily make him philosophically interesting to me. (Recently David has been sharing his excitement about the development of modal logics by nineteenth century economists who moonlight as logicians!) Through them I met Erik Angner who was very interested in Hayek's theory of cultural evolution (a topic I was then very interested in), and I eventually read his wonderful monograph on Hayek and natural law.
I mention all of this because after I did start reading Hayek, I actually thought of Hayek as a weird Kantian or neo-Kantian. When I first mentioned this to people with a philosophical interest in Hayek this was often dismissed (such people treated him as more as a follower of Hume). So, I was quite pleased back when I read Kukathas' book the first time (about two decades ago) that Kukathas argues for Hayek's Kantianism in great detail (alongside Hayek's debts to Hume). And not surprised when decades later I read Foucault (who historically precedes Kukathas by a decade) on the significance of Kant/Kantianism to Hayek and other neoliberals in his biopolitics lectures.
Anyway, above I quote the final paragraphs of Kukathas' wonderful book, which manages to juggle quite a few balls apparently effortless at once: it is a careful study of Hayek as a systematic thinker; it locates Hayek in debates within liberalism (not the least through a detailed comparison with Rawls) and between liberalism(s) and its/their critics. Along the way, readers also get a judicious account of why it is misleading to treat Hayek as an (indirect) utilitarian. And while Kukathas is respectful of Hayek, as the quoted paragraph suggests, he argues at length that Hayek is incapable of reconciling the Kantian and Humean strands of his own theory.* Okay, so much for set up.
One important contribution of Kukathas' book is to illustrate the value of social theory to political philosophy even among those who think of political philosophy as an 'ethics first' or 'justice first' enterprise. Part of that use is hinted at in the closing paragraphs quoted at the top of this post: first, a social theory provides us with the content in a feasibility or aptness constraint. Let's call this a 'negative use of social theory' in which social theory is used (with a nod to 'ought implies can' perhaps) to rule out or block certain normative theories (or the principles on which they rely) because they are literally impossible for beings like us, once we're more informed about who we are (by social theory). Of course, unrealistic or unfeasible models or theories may still be useful in some way or another -- not the least as paradigms that discipline a field --, so one should not expect to use social theory (which often blends normative and empirical features in complex ways) as a hammer to destroy viewpoints one wishes to reject.
Second, and this is a positive feature, social theory can provide one with a philosophical anthropology that allows one to recast one's political vision and/or normative theories. In Hayek's case this also (third) means that many typical criticisms of liberalism (familiar, say, from Karl Polanyi (who goes unmentioned), Alisdair MacIntyre, various communitarians and Marxists (etc.) are disarmed in advance because the anthropology supplied by Hayek's social theory actually is not the Robinson Crusoe one -- "isolated, asocial, utility maximizing" -- usually criticized by critics of liberalism; if anything Kukathas' Hayek (and I agree) is not very far from Hegel, although as Kukathas notes with some key differences.
But, unless I missed it, Kukathas does not define what he or Hayek means by 'social theory' (something on my mind due to failed efforts to do so while teaching undergrads). Hayek does give us some material to work on this. For example, in (1967) in "Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct: The Interplay between Rules of Individual Conduct and the Social Order of Actions," Hayek writes the following:
The whole task of social theory consists in little else but an effort to reconstruct the overall orders which are thus formed, and the reason why that special apparatus of conceptual construction is needed which social theory represents is the complexity of this task. It will also be clear that such a distinct theory of social structures can provide only an explanation of certain general and highly abstract features of the different types of structures (or only of the ‘qualitative aspects’), because these abstract features will be all that all the structures of a certain type will have in common, and therefore all that will be predictable or provide useful guidance for action.--p. 283 in The Market and Other Orders, edited by Bruce Caldwell.
On Hayek's view social theory is, thus, engaged in conceptual construction. And it aims to construct what he calls an 'overall order.' (There are distinct resonances here with the morphological project of the ordoliberal, Eucken.) These overall orders are "systems of rules of conduct" which "will develop as wholes" and on which a certain kind of "selection process...will operate on the order as a whole." Now, clearly this conception of social theory is, while capable of objectivity, itself partial to Hayekian projects (he goes on to claim that "of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order
of free human societies, is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period"), so I don't mean to suggest Hayek's idea of 'social theory' ought to generalize to all social theory.
Now, crucially, Hayekian social theory provides one with functional explanations of social order(s). Hayek is very explicit about this on the following page (p. 284). It may require auxiliary sciences to do so (Hayek is discussing the rule of evolutionary social psychology in context). And one way it offers such a functional explanation is to make clear the "interaction between the regularity of the conduct of the elements [or individuals] and the regularity of the resulting structure." (289)
I call it 'Hayekian' social theory because one of the other "tasks" he ascribes to it is to explain the "unintended patterns and regularities which we find to exist in human society." (from Hayek (1967) "The results of human action but not of human design." p. 294 in The Market and Other Orders.) Obviously, that may be incompatible with a social theory that has a different focus, although Marx is clearly interested in features of such a social theory.
So, why do I mention this? Before I answer that let's stipulate that Hayek's social theory is coherent. I have two reasons. First, even coherent, it is not entirely obvious what the status of the fruits of Hayekian social theory are. What kind of impossibility is proven by social theory if it has a Hayekian cast? This is not obvious. (In part this is not obvious because the empirical basis of social theory is not easily disentangled from its normative commitments.) I don't see how Hayekian social theory can rule out orders constructed on principles very different than Hayekian social theory, even if one can suspect that these will not be functional in the way that (say) spontaneous orders will be. This depends on plasticity of humans but also on the possibility of social structures with different kinds of social rules. I don't think this paragraph undermines Kukathas' particular argument because he shows how much Rawls and Hayek agree in their commitments.
Second, Hayekian social theory inherits from 19th century historicism (and some aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment) the idea of social wholes (that are constituted by their system of rules). Now, Hayek acknowledges that (say) a historian or social scientist may well do his or her job without embracing social wholes. His is not an organicist theory, and since social pluralism is -- as Kukathas reveals -- kind of bedrock in his theory it would be odd to attribute organicism to Hayek. However, it is not obvious why in a world constituted by social pluralism of different sorts -- and with non-trivial barriers that would facilitate differential and distinct selection -- we would find such social wholes even in (say) places that share non-trivial social commonalities. If human law or force is part of the selection process we should in fact expect greater diversity. In fact, I am echoing here Hayek's friend, Eucken, who clearly thought that Hayek's expectation of such social wholes was only so in theory, but that in practice one could find a rich diversity of social orders (based on a limited number of morphological elements).
Let me stop there. I don't mean to suggest these are fatal objections to Hayek's theory. But if we look forward to Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago it helps explain Kukathas' non-trivial distance from using Hayekian social theory despite Kukathas and Hayek sharing a deep debts to Hume.
*I should say while I agree with Kukathas' analysis of Hayek, there is wiggle room for a Hayekian. Kukathas acknowledges that Hayek is not especially interested in 'moral justification.' (p.3) But on my reading of Kukathas' argument the Kantian parts that cause trouble for the coherence of Hayek's system (those in his account of the rule of law that enter into his normative claims (p. 19)) all involve such justification.
It was toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1784. A Berlin journal asked a few worthy thinkers the question, "What is enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant answered, after Moses Mendelssohn.
I find the question more noteworthy than the answers. Because enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, was not news, was not an invention, a revolution, or a party. It was something familiar and diffuse, something that was going on-and fading out. The Prussian newspaper was basically asking: "What is it that has happened to us? What is this event that is nothing else but what we have just said, thought, and done-nothing else but ourselves, nothing but that something which we have been and still are?"
Should this singular inquiry be placed in the history of joumalism or of philosophy? I only know that, since that time, there have not been many philosophies that don't revolve around the question: "What are we now? What is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry that identity away with it?" But I believe this question is also the basis of the journalist's occupation.--Michel Foucault (1979) "For an Ethic of Discomfort," [reviewing Jean Daniel], in Power: Essential Works of Foiucault 1954-84: Volume Three, translated by Robert Hurley, p. 443
lt is probably well known that near the end of his life, Foucault got very interested in Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault engaged with it directly and circled around it on a number of occasions. A subset of these has, in fact, been collected in a volume edited by Sylvère Lotringer (who I long thought an invention of Chris Kraus) What is Truth? It contains a version of the same book review that I quoted above, but there it is translated beautifully by Lysa Hochroth.
My interest here is not to litigate to what degree Foucault's reading or appropriation of Kant does justice to the source material, or even is worth emulating. But I digress on some of Foucault's moves.
First, Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, 'what are we now?' To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not about reporting the news anymore, but we might say that what is thought or taken to be worthy to be reported must pertain to this kind of salience. What's interesting about this claim is that it prefigures, but also reminds us of what we already know, that 'All the News That's Fit to Print' reflects the question of (our potentially fleeting) identity. The expanding lifestyle pages, perhaps, suggest that the oblique mirror that contemporary journalism provides us with to answer this question is more suggestive of our desires and fantasies than anything else.
What journalism is perhaps not, however, is the initial record for law and (historical and social) science that can enter into any truth. It's orthogonal to establishing a public record that enters as facts into, say, a deliberative practice. It is, of course, so conceived not wholly irrelevant to public deliberation because in a non-trivial sense it defines and helps constitute the unity -- the we -- that deliberates and does so in virtue of some non-trivial identity. And while in the previous paragraph I satirized the pretentions of journalism so conceived, in this paragraph I point to the constitutive role of journalism to social life.
Evidently, this constitutive role to social life is also a task for the philosopher. In fact, Foucault tells us explicitly that nearly all philosophies he is aware of -- and while he has limitations, Foucault is nothing but well-read and he stakes a knowledge claim on it "I only know that"-- try to play this role, at least since Kant tried to answer the question. It's a bit of a shame that he doesn't hint at the exceptions, but Foucault's claim here is a nice way of capturing one way in which analytic philosophy, while conditioned by the ages in which it is produced, does not -- despite our advances in quantified modal logic -- generally (there are exceptions) answer the question, what are we now.
There is, of course, for all the play (Foucault clearly admires w the author of the book he is reviewing) a dethroning involved here. To speak crassly, philosophy is not in the business of truth as the law and science are, but it is much closer to the world of opinion (that is journalism) and this is a world of near-Hericlitan flux--the oft imperceptible instability of identity, when its self-evidentness cannot be taken for granted anymore, is the great theme of the review. *
As I have noted before, there is for all his nominalism and disciplined skepticism a historicism lurking in Foucault. Each fleeting now has its singular identity, and it takes occupations devoted to singular inquiry -- journalism, philosophy, and, of course, the arts -- to try to sketch a kind of repetition of that once diffuse identity; for after completion of the task, it turns out already to be "familiar" even if we see it afresh.
*And in invites us to rediscover in the title of the essay, Merleu-Ponty's philosophical task, 'never to consent to being completely comfortable with one's presuppositions.' (p. 448)
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