Author: kurto

12. Scruton, Short History of Modern Philosophy (19 May 2024)

by kurto

Explicates European philosophy from Descartes to Wittgenstein: modern pursuits commenced with the identification of the subject, were borne along by detachment of the object, and concluded when the subject became knowable in light of the object. As in phenomenology, the author treats the big questions as regarding certainty and doubt.

To be part of the history of philosophy, an idea must have been significant in the train of philosophic thought, whereas history of ideas is concerned only with an idea’s influence on human affairs, for what distinguishes philosophic thought is its primary concern with possibility, necessity, and truth (validity), not actuality.

Dispute over universals was an important distinction between empiricism and rationalism, the measurable / demonstrable versus the deductible. This in turn pointed up the importance of language. Abstraction, the concern of practical methodology prior to modernity, turned on either Platonic objects or intellectual criticism of methodology.

Bacon rejected Aristotelian deduction in favor of induction, and postulated universal laws based on observed instances, marrying empirical and rational. This ended scholasticism and paved the way for Descartes. (The ontological argument that God is proven because no greater entity can be held from Aristotle through St Anselm though the medieval schoolmen naturally favored Platonic ideas versus skepticism.) The Frenchman held human knowledge is a tree, the trunk being physics and the roots metaphysics. Philosophy ought to commence with a method of doubt in order to arrive at undoubted propositions. These must be at least as much real in cause as effect (cosmology versus ontology). This radical break with scholasticism renewed both rationalism and empiricism. Not the Renaissance but the birth of modern philosophy in the early 17th century is the origin of the modern West. Science and philosophy went hand in hand. Descartes sought for fundamental laws so general as to explain all, yet a prior (i.e., not demonstrable by experiment), deductively departing from metaphysics.

Spinoza: the more active a man in respect of behavior, the more his consciousness understands cause. The more man grasps the cause of causes, the more free he is. Leibniz’s rationalism turns on the principle of contradiction (that which opposes false is true) and the principle of sufficient reason (for every truth there is a threshold of evidence that’s enough). Rationalism assumes man possesses ideas which outstrip experience (e.g., God, cause, self). The existence of innate ideas is not necessary for language, as Locke showed: possession of a concept does not equal the power to acquire it. Locke (tabula rasa) and Leibniz (monads) were arguing over the possibility of a priori ideas. Shaftesbury thought love of beauty is animated by perception of happiness, which is much the same as the tendency to admire virtue (in others). Bishop Joseph Butler asserted, borrowing from Cicero, the distinction between power and authority: conscience is a steady force that is both maker of law (common to men) and provider of notice to obedience. There is no such thing as a love of injustice or oppression. Hume’s naturalism (i.e., close connection with human nature) led to preferring custom over reason whenever choice is not obvious. Skepticism is more empirical use of reason than deductive, reason being the subordinate of passions; if reason were superordinate, we would be driven to radical skepticism whenever reason had no competence. Thus reason should cede to custom, the exemplar of human nature. The Philosophes were rooted in Cartesian skepticism, born of metaphysics, but added nothing to philosophy: theirs was more polemics, to ridicule rather than generate new understandings.

Kant asserted the legitimacy of rational deduction (including its limits). Skepticism doesn’t hold because deduction allows for understanding the object, and the principles of science allow for a priori knowledge. Science is a posteriori, based in experience, but rests on axioms and principles which cannot be demonstrated, what he called synthetic a priori or necessary truth. Neither empiricism nor rationalism provides a coherent theory of knowledge, which is achieved through the synthesis of concept and experience, and which synthesis can never be observed as a process but must be presupposed as a result. ‘Transcendental’ means to overcome through rationalization what argument must presuppose. Experience conforms to ‘categories’ of understanding which are a priori (e.g., table < artifact < object < substance). Kant like Descartes begins from self-consciousness but rejects the priority of the first person (subjectivity), which precludes empiricist epistemology. Metaphysics is superior to epistemology, because the former enables the senses to deliver. The tendency of reason to outstrip intelligibility is the dialectic of reason, a concept which influenced Hegel. Kant revived the ancient distinction between theoretical and practical reason, setting the stage for German idealism. Theoretical (pure) reason guides belief, practical reason guides action. The former aims at truth, the latter at rightness. The former can lead to understanding or standing on reason; however practical reason, being a judgment of imperatives (i.e., objective conditions), does not automatically generate morality. This points to the categorical imperative, the universal, unconditional treatment of humans as ends in themselves. The idea conclusively undermines Hume’s skepticism, since reason is no longer inert, subject to desire: the moral law is not only universal but necessary, for there’s no way of practical thinking can ignore these features. This is a priori – but Kant left open a gap in metaphysics and ethics by omitting proof of objective necessity – practical reason cannot demonstrate how things are (e.g., that God exists or the soul is immortal) but only how things ought to be. No moral law is intelligible without freedom; to act in concert with the law out of coercion does not prove the law, but the actor must choose to comply from the premise of reason, conscious of his autonomy. No one has argued more for the objectivity of morality, but Kant’s aesthetics, which form a picture of relation of the mind to experience, accommodates subjectivity. Morality cannot be observed by experience but must be treated as so because of the ‘pressure of reason’. Fichte thought understanding knowledge is a free, self-producing object which knows itself by determining itself, realizing freedom in an objective world. This view of venturing outward, alienating the self (that is, thesis-antithesis), to emerge with synthetic self-consciousness and understanding of order, runs through Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and others. Hegel sought to replace Aristotelian logic by starting not from the structure of argument but the nature of being: logic is not preserving truth (formality) but telling what truth is (substance). (Modern logic advanced so as to set both aside, by adopting conditionality.) While Kant saw the dialectic as propensity to fall into contradictions, for Hegel it was the likelihood of surmounting them. Concepts are true or false. The historical process is dialectic, but is logic a science of relations among ideas, or an intellectual operation whose relations are to be discovered? (The character of any ontological proof is demonstrated in procession from concept to reality.) Hegel’s genius for abstraction inevitably leads away from subject of thought to thought itself, resulting in metaphysical blurring of the distinction between thought and reality – the principal characteristic of idealism. Hegel tries to show knowledge of the self as the subject presupposes not only knowledge of objects but also knowledge of the public (social) world which possesses moral order and civic trust - that is, the basis of the categorical imperative. This re-abolishes Kant’s separation of practical and theoretical wisdom, since the subject is not constrained to acknowledge the other (the object). The real subject, as in the phenomenological view, is Geist not the solipsistic self. Hegel’s metaphysics is largely independent of epistemology, avoiding Descartes’ first person. The dialectic of reason works through ontology: nothing exists which is not pure being, derived from rational synthesis of concept. The ‘cunning of reason’ is the world discovering that the seemingly contingent is in fact necessary – the real is rational, the rational real. Consequences in history, politics, art criticism and so on have been disastrous. Hegel was truly a philosopher of modernity, though like Bertrand Russell, who saw only exterior of thought, missed the import of the profound spiritual crisis which he sought to describe, the crisis of a society newly understanding God was its own creation. Schopenhauer: one’s self-awareness consists of knowing one’s own will, but only as a phenomenon, that is, in a given space and time. Though disappointed w Hegel’s popularity, he made Kant’s system more understandable: it jibed with Romanticism and Christian Germany, and prefigured Wagner and Nietzsche, who chose will over resignation, thereby foreclosing romanticism in Germany philosophy. Kierkegaard criticized Hegel for transferring religious faith from Christian god to philosophy of history. This was a necessary outcome but false because logic, the science of inference, cannot provide its own premises and also the Hegelian universal subject is in fact the absence of subject. Kierkegaard moved back toward the Cartesian subject. Nietzsche, despite a very different style, was highly Aristotelian, seeing good in ordering passions the right way, into self-mastery; these were not located in religion. Trying to forestall nihilism, not to promote it, his radical critique of identifying the ‘will to believe’ in orthodoxy has been beloved of the West’s leftist critics. Hobbes’ assertion that man’s obligations to political society stem from himself is the most important idea promoted by the philosophes. Rousseau’s general will comes about from men coming into civil society: it is not the will of all, though notoriously it can force men to be free. One of Hegel’s most important innovations in political thought is the state as an entity (as compared with civil society). He denied the social contract: individual autonomy can only be defined in reference to society. His civic obligations stem from piety to the polis, and the individual finds freedom in self-discovery commencing with the family (itself another innovation – recognizing a private institution as a political but also not contractual). Marx thought the nature of man isn’t fixed but laws are intended, like property, to be permanent, thus discouraging fluidity (toward the ends of equality) in social relations and ensuring the subject’s alienation from the self. This is laid out in German Ideology, which seeks to undermine the moral and political order of capitalism. Alienation (false consciousness) is necessary to correct errors of perception in the social world. Ultimately the nature of man, the movement (philosophy) of history, and the conception of economic value are each attempts to define what determines man’s consciousness. They are all material (substantive) and social, and all ‘labor’ in that this is the heart of a political philosophy which sees the common man as supporting the superstructure of society (i.e., the labor theory of value). Burke’s roots were in the moral psychology of the 18th century. The Utilitarians were fundamentally concerned with the nature of political freedom, but the concept of the rational agent, present from Plato to Kant, disappears in the ‘greatest good for greatest number’ formulation. Mill demonstrated the difference between logic and science in distinguishing between deduction and induction. His individual is anarchic, subject to impulse, and lacking the north star of freedom, as Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pointed out. The practical response is embodied in the British idealism of FH Bradley, who saw the individual inherently operating in a social milieu. Since Kant assigned metaphysics to synthetic a priori, giving math as the preeminent exemplar, Frege’s demonstration that math is analytic opened the way for the modern rejection of metaphysical argument. Frege, who had overturned Aristotelian, syllogistic logic, showed math is not concerned with the properties of objects but the second-order properties of properties of objects, vindicating the Kantian assertion that existence is not an Aristotelian predicate. Statements of identity are not statements which predicate the property of an object. Venus is the morning star can be reversed, but Socrates is wise cannot, so the distinction between subject and predicate is the ability to assign properties to the object (otherwise everything is an arbitrary determination). Frege’s views allow for extension (i.e., truth value) and intention (truth conditions) in sentences. Extensions are detachable, and so independent existence is possible for objects. Phenomenology, credited mainly to Husserl, is the necessary preliminary to science of the mind – psychology – since it locates prior to description, classification, or explanation in the individual’s mental acts. It is the access to meaning created by these acts, the world becoming present to individual consciousness. Phenomenology is the understanding of essences, therefore an a priori science. Hermeneutics searches for reasons not causes, understanding texts as expression of the creator’s rational activity (i.e., understandings of the author’s intentions better than he does). The classifications aren’t scientific, are not disprovable, and so an axiomatic authority. Husserl’s work revived efforts to distinguish between human real (of meaning) from the natural realm (science); his Lebenswelt showed science had invaded where its power is groundless, but nonetheless results in a moral vacuum, for Lebenswelt collapses when not sustained by reflection on human matters. Of the existentialists, Heidegger was most concerned to counter the role of science, addressing time in the Kantian notion of the form of an inner sense. Satre would later pick up the thread, both he and Heidegger following Hegel in complicated means of distinguishing things from persons. Heidegger addressed the modern problem of self-knowledge via ontology, based on self-consciousness. After him, philosophy’s detour from logic, metaphysics, and epistemology allowed it to (again) stray into the psychology: moral exhibitionism is logical end of existentialism. Satre, following suit, proposed existence precedes essence: there is no human nature, since there’s no God to have conceived nature; essences vanish with the human mind that created them. Descartes cogito is transformed by Husserl’s phenomenology: all consciousness is intentional, the subject-object relation arises in ways that defy common-sense description. Sartre introduced nothingness as an entity, making logical mistakes and consequently forcing him to strain language. Like Socrates, his discussion (e.g., of Pierre not being in a café) introduces aporia. He leads to the inability to distinguish objects from subjects, an anguished path to ethical subjectivism. Any attempt to establish a system of values represents an attempt to transfer individual freedom to the objective world, which is to cede freedom for nothing, since there is no valid order. Sartre seeks to preserve Kant’s ethic of moral autonomy while divesting it o commitment to a moral law: he cannot transcend the impasse of paradox and dialectics. Wittgenstein, who concluded Heidegger evidenced a ‘bewitchment of intelligence’ in his use of (convoluted) language, was the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He saw truth as extension that is vital to logic and analysis. Logic must be transparent, while analysis (analytical philosophy) assumes the surface form of language to contain hidden logical structures. His philosophy ended the tradition of inquiry premised on the subject which started with Descartes, refuting the possibility of pure phenomenology, since nothing can be learned from the study of the first person alone (Cartesian examination). The first person distinction between being and seeming collapses, nothing can be certain, only a common public language determining first-person ‘knowledge’: I know things because others agree the premise. The condition of self-knowledge is a knowledge of others; the third person takes priority. The first person certainty of Descartes (rationalism) and Hume (empiricism) had been displaced, and with it modern epistemology and metaphysics. The ambitions of Kant and Hegel to remove the self from the core of knowledge have been achieved. What is the relation between logic and dialectics (science of deduction)? NB: Bertrand Russell thought the worse one’s logic, the more interested the consequences.

15. Devine, Scotland (21 July 2024)

by kurto

1707’s Act of Union catalyzed Scotland’s transformation from one of Europe’s poorest, most backward regions to the workshop of the world, before the postwar decline of the heavy industry undermined paternalism and consequently British sentiment. Allowing the Presbyterian church (the kirk) to continue its predominant role, in contradistinction to threat of economic sanctions and alien status in England, cleared the path for Highlander Jacobitism to be absorbed into national mythology, as the elite of American and French revolutionary wars. Post-union Scotland, a center of the Enlightenment and gateway for the world’s newly integrated primary producers to Europe, never extended into consumer products – indeed, shipping supplanted textiles: the Clyde’s deterioration could not be ameliorated. Labour lost out to resurgent nationalism, and Thatcher’s policies catalyzed abandonment (which incongruously implies England broke the statist compact).

Poor harvests over 1695-99 had induced as much as 15 percent of the population to leave for Ulster or North America, as well as producing unrest which threatened the Glorious Revolution, the island’s regimes no longer unified by monarchy. Accommodating the kirk vitally eliminated religion as a source of resistance, leaving only personal loyalty to Jacobitism – never a solid basis in a country characterized by clans. Notwithstanding uprisings in 1725 and 1746, most residents would have had more to do with the Presbyterian church than London’s House of Parliament, so education and poor relief in Presbyterian hands, as well as continuity of law, enshrined a high degree of autonomy and continuity. For the aristocratic class, there was further the prospect of free trade with the colonies as well as exemption from debt. Landowners (mainly in the Lowlands) were coming to see their holdings as assets for revenue and wealth, rather than sources of military power and authority. Union-era Calvinism was stern but stimulated interest into morality, philosophy, and science. The end of 17th century had been misleading.

Rural social structure circa 1760 was more like Europe than commercializing England. From then, however, socioeconomic change proceeded faster than the continent: by 1850, one-third lived in towns greater than 5,000, the migrants including Ulstermen, though only 5 percent of Glaswegians were Highlander. Newcomers were lured by textiles (i.e., mechanized spinning) of cotton, linen, and woold. Living standards rose over 1780-1800, but thereafter stagnated. In two generations, Gaeldom went from tribal to market-oriented society. Single-tenant farming increased, meaning shared holdings declined, as produce was more for sale at market than community sustenance. Cottars had long since declined in England, the structure of landowner, less-farmer, and landless laborers effectively in place by 1700, driven by the gentry. By 1800, rising Scottish grain yields catalyzed Scotland’s transition, bringing in year-round demand for labor and aristocratic landowners using the right to eject lessees at end of term, the rise of sheep farms also promoting displacement. However, rural landowners were forced to offer high wages to compete with urban opportunities. Highland elites, often educated in southern schools and by travel, were absorbing extra-Gael culture before Culloden. The effects of Smith and the Enlightenment were to undermine the currency of the ‘social economy’, in which wages were to be sufficient to the cost of living. Measures to pacify Scotland (e.g., military roads, confiscation of lands) played their role were complemented by changing views of indigenous lifestyles.

Indebted Highlander landowners were then replaced by well-to-do gentry. By the 1840s Scotland’s per capita income passed Ireland. Scotland’s central advantage in early 19th century was engineering on the Clyde, especially in steam engines, allied to railroad integration of Ayr, Lanarkshire, and West Lothian counties. Highland labor seasonally migrated to the south, which helped (along with subsidized emigration) to check crop failures late in the decade. Presbyterian leader Thomas Chalmers was arguably the most influential Scotsman of the century, but the church broke in 1843, ending its hold on civic matters (but also prompting internal evangelization and charity). Literacy neared 90 percent even before compulsory education and local boards arrived in 1871 (which innovation was easily adopted, there being no class connotations as with English public schools). Liberalism reigned: Conservatives won but 7 seats over 1832-68. Nationalism was subsumed though culture persisted. The fetish of Highlandism was promoted by Romanticism, taking in identity without threatening the state. Home Rule, which split liberalism, the party being too far to the left for landed interests, threatening to commercial interests, and disquieting for Ulster migrants in the west. The Crofters war of 1880 (rent strikes, ‘raiding’ aka squatting) was notable less for agrarian violence than its purchase among urban southerners as well as similarities with Ireland. Following Gladstone’s Irish Land Act of 1881, Scotland too prohibited eviction at the end of rental tenure (blocking clearance), established boards for setting rents and payment for rental improvements, and otherwise set up the state as the primary force in the Highlands and the islands. (Public policy in the west Highlands and west Ireland were often similar.) In 1897 ‘congested districts’ boards came in to promote improved agricultural practices, financing of infrastructure, land redistribution, education, and assistance for fishing and weaving. The trend culminated in 1919’s Land Settlement Act (eminent domain for returned WWI soldiers, funds to convert squatters to landowners). Such measures were effective for the symptoms but not depopulation in the face of declining fishing and stock prices.

By 1901 2 of 4.5 million lived in towns, where lifestyles were segregating into bourgeois vs working class. Council boards were tasked with fitness and welfare following revelations of poor health of Boer War soldiers. Nascent Labour was reformist not revolutionary, prior to the Red Clyde’s World War I emergence. Lloyd George’s Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 (and follow-on acts for ‘slum clearance’, etc.) shaped Scotland’s 20th-century cities: the free market was replaced by subsidized building and activist council management, which bodies received £9 per capita per annum for maintenance. Reformed universities started down the path to Hegelian curricula, social exclusion (e.g., sons of pastors), and Oxford-trained administrators. In the rural Lowlands, 1/5 of all lands to changed hands, aristocratic landowners too selling to tenants (though Scotland in the 1970s was still highly concentrated, 1/3 of holdings being greater than 20,000 acres, land taxation having declined since 1945). Lowlands laborers often ‘flitted’ around the region, encouraged by one-year employment contracts which came with (spartan) housing for the married; in the interwar era, men commonly went out Friday nights so women could share a hot bath. Voting rights for women were seen to favor out-of-power Conservatives (!).

The Beveridge report raised postwar social expectations. The Marshall Plan and Labour’s policy of export promotion sustained Glasgow: 15 percent of the world’s tonnage was made on the Clyde over 1948-51. WWII’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, a former Red Clyde man, was charged to head off wartime unrest and became the century’s best Scottish leader. The Scottish TUC dropped Home Rule during the 1950s. Decolonization never really made an impression on Scotland inasmuch as decoupling had already taken place with devolution to the dominions. The Scottish National Party won its first seat in 1967 in Glasgow. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act triggered growing unrest. The first Home Rule vote in 1979 narrowly missed: though only 1/3 had voted, the populace was divided. Thatcher paradoxically increased working-class dependency on the state while alienating popular sentiment: she is midwife to 1997’s successful referendum, which granted authority over all but foreign and (macro) economic policy, social security, and television broadcasting.

Later chapters read less like history than sociology. Devine never offers a solution to the question of Scottish selfishness, why the country which benefit so greatly from English ascendancy should have so readily abandoned its neighbor. Perfidious Albion indeed.

21. Sinclair, History of New Zealand (4 Nov 2024)

by kurto

The main themes of 19th- and 20th-century history are the themes of encouraging an egalitarian society dependent on foreign trade (and primary products at that) and reconciliation among Maori and pakeha.

As much as three-fourths of NZ’s flora is unique, so long had the islands been separated. The first Europeans were traders and settlers from Australia, exporting timber from Kororakea (Bay of Islands). The Colonial Office did not wish to assume responsibility for governance; the Maori were to treated fairly – contra contemporary theories of imperialism.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield led those who saw NZ as a proto ‘dominion’, that is a tabula rasa colony, later joined by South Island pastoralists; Gordon Coates personified the philanthropic / missionary types, intending to help Maori cultural progress. Politics was pluralist, the government mainly confronting lawlessness and semi-open settler-Maori warfare. Wakefield’s New Zealand company didn’t force the Colonial Office’s hand but to the contrary, established beachheads knowing of London’s intent. The first governor-general was instructed to moderate Australian settlers and protect Maori largely by guaranteeing land rights: all European title was to come via crown grants, since the crown assigned itself a monopoly on buying from Maori. This view that the land belonged to the locals was different from commerce with the American Indian, Australian aborigine, or South African bantu, the author notes. The Maori tribes began a loose amalgamation.

1840’s Treaty of Waitangi sought to codify bicultural relations. Thereafter governor George Grey established order among competing interests, shaping the balance of the 19th century. The constitution of 1852 was highly democratic; lands were purchased for settlers; and Maori subdued along the road from Auckland to Hamilton and in the Waitara. Thus the country’s socioeconomic character was formed in its infancy: paternalist government, concern for Maori, and focus on primary production. Of the six provinces given in the constitution, five were NZC (Wakefieldian) settlements; most settlers were from London or the Home counties not Australia, though the 1861 gold rush in Otago brought in 65,000, mostly Aussie. (In the 1960s, it was still possible to hear the Kiwi accent in Essex.) Most were working class concerned to surmount poverty or some social predicament. A New Zealand-born mentality was already forming, the North Island characterized race relations and commerce with the UK, the south, more exclusively pakeha, concerned with sheep grazing as well as outgrowths of the gold rush. There was predictable struggle between the central government (as a proxy for the poorer provinces) and the well-to-do (South) provinces. Wellington was made capital in 1865, after it seemed Maori warfare had peaked.

The decisive moment had been the fall of ‘King country’ strongholds in 1863. Though Maori tribes controlled large sections of the North Island all the way to Napier, they never opted for a broad guerrilla was but only tradition defensive fortification (pa), and of course weaponry was no match; however, the British regulars thought the Maori their toughest colonial foe. After the final battle in Orakau, just south of Hamilton, some 3 million acres was confiscated in Waikato, the East coast, and Taranaki – prime lands rather than punitive confiscation – unfairly and the worst example of colonial mismanagement, the author suggests. But if the conflict was actually a civil war (as now characterized), then would not the losing side expect to suffer losses? Among the Maori, the Hau Hau religion sprang up.

In the 1870s-80s, Julius Vogel promoted growth via borrowing from London investors. The population doubled, railways and telegraphs were built, and pakeha landownership quadrupled. Government spending per capita was 13 times the rate of Canada, surpassing Victoria and New South Wales on a gross basis. In something like the American election of 1828, the Liberals came to power in 1890, marking the decline of southern pastoralists, the colonial gentry. The party taxed land rents, and toyed with the idea of owning all the land. Dick Seddon ruled over 1893 to 1906, which era brought in the women’s vote, mandatory arbitration for labor unions, and easy loans to buy land amid continuing dispute over freehold versus leasehold. The radicality of 1890 settled into paternalism. Labor came to be dissatisfied with arbitration, and the country grew weary of Seddon’s rule, leading conservatives to establish the Reform Party while the leftists became Labour (the ‘Red Feds’). As in Britain, the centrists eventually died off.

At the turn of the century, NZ decided not to join federal Australia as being too far awas and for lack of a common sensibility, though the Kiwis sought to retain an option to later join. Reform came to power in 1912, simultaneous with the political ascendancy of Northern small farming and diary interests (the ‘cow cockies’). As in Australia, Gallipoli and World War I marked the turning point of British colonists into Pacific islanders. Postwar soldiers were encouraged to buy farms: veterans and speculators roamed the countryside, resulting in nearly half the land changing hands. The three-party balance was unstable, Reform first among relative equals. Exports led by meat, wool, butter, and cheese (which in 1980 still comprised 50 percent of trade) were the highest per capita in the world. Foreign debt grew: in 1933, nearly 40 percent of government expenditure was on interest. New Zealanders understood themselves to have a high standard of living.

In the downturn, labor radicalism was easier to effect than in the US or Australia – which is seen as influencing Labour’s 1935 electoral win. The left wished to ‘insulate’ the country from the world economy, questionable for a trading nation. World War II again propelled centralization. By 1949 social services reached one-third of spending, up from 20 percent in 1928, growth mainly coming from eliminating means testing of family benefits, which increasing the welfare roster to 230,000 from 45,000. Government policies sought for equality of outcomes.

The postwar economic grew apace with the west; communist-inspired labor strife dominated the cities; the countryside and South Island remains pastoral and agricultural. The government sought to implement autarchic industrial growth in steel and liquid natural gas, with limited success. In the late 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands emigrated: the population actually fell in 1978. From 1984, the country like Australia veered from excessive statism, Rogernomics lowered income rates and introduced a value-added tax.

Though the government took radical steps in the slumps of 1891-98 and 1936-38 and otherwise centralized, the people are temperamentally conservative. Wealth carries no prerogative of leadership, and politics mostly centers on economic development to pay for education, health, and pensions, such beneficence stemming from missionary humanitarianism as well as 19th-century utilitarianism. Sinclair writes redistribution is the more possible because of the country’s small size. The matters of biracial society are important but subsumed under equality of outcomes, achieved through government mandate.

New Zealand belongs to a ‘pacific triangle’ formed by Auckland, Sydney, and San Francisco: Kiwis are not a ‘better British’ but a bicultural, Pacific Ocean people – albeit more British than the Aussies (against whom they define themselves) or Americans (never quite forgotten as colonial brethren). Questions of identify are more pronounced in the South Island, the northerners having the stronger Maori influence and balance of population.

22. Laidlaw, Somebody Stole My Game (5 Nov 2024)

by kurto

A jeremiad lamenting professionalism’s impacts on rugby circa 1995-2010, focusing on New Zealand’s game but also emphasizing on tensions borne of globalization (i.e., homogenization) and commercial management. Oscar Wilde’s mot that America went from barbarism to decadence with no intervening period of civilization is well cited. Professionalism polarizes public opinion because of its inherent conflict with amateur competition: the more top-end success, the greater the contrast. The observation might well extend to administrators. Universities brought the game to the English-speaking colonies, so their diminished role is emblematic of homogenized full-timers and likely to result in the game’s declining appeal to middle classes.

Laidlaw struggles, however, in identifying the one thing needful of reform, sometimes pointing to the European club-driven escalation of player salaries, which distances the game from amateurism (p. 27), and other times the judicial system, which indicates rugby’s doubts of its ability to govern itself (p. 44). In the end, revenue has become overly dependent on TV and other commercial interests, administrators have forgotten their loyalties to amateurs and the fan base, and the sport’s credibility tarnished by unrealistic aspirations.

Eventually the work resolves into short essays on such questions as the decrease of schoolboy playing numbers, whether arts deserve the same subsidization as sport, the role of 7s, why union hasn’t reconciled with league, and so on. The author is sometimes astute, as in foreseeing Ireland’s advance, and sometimes naïve, such as the impact of IRB ‘investment’, centralized planning sitting uneasily alongside distrust of professionalism.

Pro players should work in the off-season as development officers – but what rugby is on? This clever suggestion might easily resolve itself as officers in foreign countries. His understanding of America is shallow, such as in the assertion the pro game has hurt amateur basketball, baseball, or football.

20. Baker and Glassner, Man Who Ran Washington (13 October 2024)

by kurto

The career of Jim Baker, a corporate lawyer from an upper-crust Houston family, epitomizes a bygone era of Washington DC dealmaking, crowned by his successful tenure as Secretary of State during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Baker, who chafed at his campaign director and chief of staff roles, premised authority on power not wisdom as well as skill in sidestepping responsibility, with legal know-how acting as guarantor. The approach falters when the fundamental questions stretch the paradigm, in Baker’s case, the Baby Boom-era welfare state politics and Cold War arms control. Despite the authors’ frequent contention that dealmaking is out of fashion, Baker’s successor is Obama, the president himself the knife fighter.

A product of Princeton-as-finishing school, he turned to politics not because of his first wife’s death but from weariness with corporate law. His second marriage made for tempestuous family life. Still, over the 10 years from age 48 to 58 he soared from an outsider to Secretary of Treasury and then State, Nixon’s resignation having opened the way. Baker’s modus vivendi was to leak but not lie to the media; to keep a file of unethical requests; as negotiator, to allow the opposite side to show concerns had been expressed, without conceding the substance of his position. He used ‘double option’ positions to take credit or disavow the outcome. No permanent enemies, but equally no clear mechanism for driving consensus; there are compromises with Democrats but fewer examples of conciliating Republicans. Quayle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are exemplars of conservatism. Buckley is said to be an eminence grise.

Baker preserved Social Security, and is credited with Canadian free trade by Mulroney. He was the first American leader to accept Chinese tyranny as concomitant with economic growth, and responsible for Willie Horton campaigning. His great rival was Henry Kissinger, the strategist being a very different prototype to the dealmaker. Nixon thought him prone to illustory international consensus. Thatcher thought his decision making average, e.g., allowing Germany to come together without any concern for proto-European Union (given Merkel, was she wrong?). He ended his days trading on influence, rallying to put the second Bush in the presidency.

Where is the line between duplicity and personal honor? He didn’t waste time on guilt over Machiavellian moves, according to his wife. The authors recur to the theme of Baker being out for himself, e.g., as Reagan’s chief, versus Bush’s consigliere; Nancy Reagan is said to have been pleased, Barbara Bush unhappy.

Well sourced, though from a historiographic perspective, the authors tend to describe characters as they would be remembered, rather than contemporaneously viewed (e.g., Oregon senator Bob Packwood). Reagan ‘stoked division’ by campaigning on welfare queens, apartheid was failing in 1992, left-liberal homogeneity pervades.

19. Kenyon, History Men (5 October 2024)

by kurto

Surveys the development of English historiography to the 1980s, focusing on the distinction between literary (i.e., politically minded, aristocratic, and/or ‘amateur’) and professional (postwar, specialized university) work. New social history, inspired by Namierite prosopography, sociology, and so on is prematurely seen to have failed: Kenyon didn’t account for ideology. As the Marxists and the Annalistes never much figured in the literary specialists’ treatment of the ancient constitution or the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, so their long march through the schools was not yet evident.

Raleigh was the first to discern political uses of antiquarian writing. Whiggish history commenced with Hume, whom Macaulay sought to eclipse. The contemporaneous opposition was not Voltaire’s philosophical reflections of universal relevance, but Ranke’s emphasis on re-creation of events and ideas. William Stubbs initiated premodern academic study at Oxford over 1866-84, unusually for his time working back into the medieval era to discern the origins of the modern British nation. English professionals (i.e., Oxbridge) trailed Paris, Göttingen, and Vienna. Early 20th-century practitioners were infatuated with scientific history, lacked degrees to rival the continental schools, and were already becoming overspecialized even as new institutions such as Manchester sprung up. Albert Pollard of University College Lond was the era’s driving force.

Trevelyan was perhaps the last of the aristocratic literary men. Elton, co-star with Namier of the postwar era, was England’s most Germanic practitioners; curiously both were immigrants. The former opposed conceptual history; history is the only truly empirical discipline, in which the author starts not with a thesis or paradigm to test but criticizes evidence, asks questions, examines authoritative claims – especially when the subject moves from narrow intellectual concerns (sexuality) to political matters that concern all. Plumb contended the point of undergraduate history is to prepare for public service and statesmanship, to embrace ideas and policies, the better see through forthcoming events. The quality of an age is not the work of the common man, though they must labor namelessly to support it.

16. Lüthy, From Calvin to Rousseau (28 July 2024)

by kurto

Sketches the 17th- and 18th-century Geneva’s contribution to Western political economy, commencing with Calvinist government and concluding with subjection to French Louisianan oligarchy and Rousseau’s utopianism.

To Weber as to Marx, the Reformation was the first bourgeois revolution, foreshadowing capitalism. Lüthy dismisses Weber’s thesis of Calvinist Protestantism promoting capitalism, showing predestination is not pivotal to Calvin and simplistic definitions obscure more than they clarify: it’s survives only because succeeding scholars couldn’t agree definitions either. The Reformation was evidently a milestone in the progression from the medieval to the modern world, and Calvinist views indeed underpinned northwestern Europe; but this was just one of many conditions, also to include money (specie) from the new world, emigration (especially Huguenot) within Europe prompted by the Counterreformation, the rise of banking, and the maturation of medieval republican city-states. Is it not also evident that the Counterreformation stifled what would have happened in Catholic countries, especially as Spain and Italy were the more advanced economies?

Calvinism was important for manifesting reformist Christianity most clearly independent of politics and statecraft. The connection to economics is less fear of predestinarian uncertainty and more release of fears of other men, of social stricture. The Reformation destroyed social hierarchy more than it shaped individual values. Calvin broke the hold of usury by common sense: wealthy lenders have richer men as clients, demonstrating the borrower is not always and evidently prey. The rule of equity (i.e., the golden rule) guides proper lending, Calvin observed in overturning Aristotelian view that money (interest) does not engender money. Protestant lenders were no different from Catholics for example in maritime credit, bills of currency exchange. Ironically classical Greece alone among the ancients employed a productive credit system, to support the agricultural regions near the poleis.

Neither the French monarchy nor the country’s national church fits comfortably into the common dynastic vs national schema. France’s centralizing tendencies were most evident in the Academy Francaise (i.e., control of language), which produced clarity over fuller participation in the Enlightenment. Louis XV’s reign completed his predecessor’s making aristocratic and heritable bourgeois office completely dependent on the throne. The constitution of society was economic and social, not only political – a regime in the full sense of the word. The French economy amounted to starveling producers and consumers exempt from tax; there were regional exceptions in Brittany, Normandy, and Languedoc that proved the rule. Quesnay’s primary concern was distribution of ‘net product’ of agriculture (i.e., primary produce) among the royalist entourage: Louis XV’s era was an age of unbounded, reckless enthusiasm not the edge of the abyss. The rise of the Atlantic trade from 1760 undermined the specifics of physiocratic economics, and Quesnay lacked the tooling of the modern discipline, but he was not wrong in his assessment of the country’s dynamics. By contrast, Turgot changed men’s minds in their understanding of the state’s role in the economy.

Rousseau sought to understand the act by which a people is a people, but compromised by proposing the tyrannical general will. Having posited society corrupts natural man, he could not allow for civic order which protects individual rights. In fairness, he saw the Greek city-state as a model; his eloquence raised its applicability to large, modern nations – and led directly to 20th-century tyrannies. In his own time, Genevan democrats (‘populists’) brought the general will to Louis XV’s France, foreshadowing Mirabeau and Robespierre.

In France, finance was the preserve of Catholic royalist administrators, banking was open to all, that is to Protestants. The former traded with Spain, the latter with faster-growing England. Absolute monarchy and public credit were discovered by Necker to be incompatible, and in the late 18th century the latter won. The Protestants retained the anti-dogmatic attitudes of 17th-century emigres to Geneva, mixed with the Enlightenment’s freethinking, critical reasoning, and sovereignty of conscience. But in the storm of the Revolution, the Catholic Church proved a shelter against the radicals, whereas the Protestant churches lacked institutional bulwark: liberalism was first to succumb.

NB: the example of Genevan oligarchies sacrificing Calvinist self-governance to Catholic Paris is relevant to 21st-century USARFU (p. 260)

10. Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (15 April 2024)

by kurto

Essays spanning literary criticism and political thought, insistently making the point that only recovering the origins of one’s ideas, so as to see the real arguments before they calcified, makes one a thoughtful analyst. Some of the things we hold true are so, some are not.

Modern science seeks to explain man by what is not man, not by the soul. It broke with the classics, Swift first noted in Gulliver’s Travels, when it could no longer reason but only slavishly follow process: humanity was sidelined for Cartesian rationalism. But a man is most what he is by result of what he does, by the character of his activity. Schiller thought modernity was characterized by abstract science and also unrefined passions, whereas a good man and conscientious citizen seeks for harmony. But the ‘accidents of life’ force men into customs which cause them to forget the whole. Harmony is not daily but transcendent.

Since Rousseau, overcoming society’s bourgeois has been seen as very nearly the whole problem of realizing true democracy and simultaneously achieving genuine ‘personality’. Rousseau studied the passions to balance them, not to govern them. Yet he sought to reproduce Platonic egalitarianism based on morality, not post-Machiavellian self-interest. He introduced sublimation of the will as a source of higher expression (e.g., the arts); Nietzsche coined the erm; Freud popularized it. In Emile, lessons are separated into layers where philosophy seeks for the whole. Only in the end, in winning Sophia, does the protagonist distinguish between inclination and will; morality is the struggle between these since nature is primary and authority comes from within. Thus balanced can man be free and moral.

The bourgeois as Rousseau popularized them stand between the naturally good and the moral public. Rousseau follows Montesquieu in seeing virtue as a passion (as against the ancients), in believing passion the real power of the soul, in seeing only passion as able to control passion. But Enlightenment sought to connect selfish passions to the rational, dependable civic ones, while Rousseau defended morality versus reason and denied the otherwise desired transition. Consequently while the ancients saw the freedom of the small community as the means to virtue, he made freedom the end. Willing the general will was a new kind of inclination: obedience is freedom! Rousseau looked to aristocratic Sparta and Geneva as models.

To summarize

    Natural Right and History

(pp. 241-242): Strauss thought Nietzsche wrong to assert rationalism was a line of inquiry unbroken from the ancients to contemporary science. The succession of philosophical developments obscures the core questions and their alternatives. To reject historicism is to seek to understand people as they themselves did, not to assert one can know more than the principals themselves.

On Aron: the Cold War was the political issue of the 20th century. The greatest sign of liberal decay was the savaging of the university by people who called themselves liberals. The tyrannies see bourgeois society as the enemy; communism says reason can’t be free, and must be replaced by theory; fascism wants to be replace reason with passion. Both undercut rationalism.

Kojeve saw Hegel as primarily concerned with self-knowledge, the ability for the philosopher to explain his doings. Hegel fulfilled the Platonic-Aristotelian goal of absolute wisdom – without such possibility, all knowledge, science, and philosophy itself is impossible. Thus the end of history, for only at the end can all be known. But if we lack final wisdom, then the matter is to understand alternatives.

Modern state-of-nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) agreed with Plato and Aristotle that nature is the permanent standard, but disagreed on what is natural. John Rawls is an updated utilitarian. Simplifying Hobbes and Locke, uninfluenced by Rousseau or Kant, focused on the satisfaction of desire but not morality let alone virtue, he thought pursuing contradictory social ends presented no problems, but evidenced freedom. Thus he was to intuit equality, dispensing with the question of whether equality is just.

Socrates saw the contest between philosophy and poetry stemming from religion, and more specifically the latter’s connection to fanaticism – a connection present in all artistic ‘cultures’. Culture implies opposition to commercial society (i.e., pursuits based on reason). It stems from the Platonic cave. During the Enlightenment art and religion became subservient to more amorphous culture. Bloom holds up Goethe as able to see the real problem of coming to terms with what is, not first reforming the world to one’s vision.

The

    Republic

attempts to find a regime in which philosophers are not ruled by hypocrites. Paraphrasing Aristotle, we begin with the things which are first to us, in order to reach what is first to nature. Aristotle saw the essence of happiness as virtue; life, liberty, and property are merely conditions favored by the moderns. In politics, teachings (i.e., consensus) reflect what is more powerful in the regime and in turn magnify the regime’s most dangerous tendencies. Yet there’s no reason to compromise public views which are conducive to the general good to accommodate the freedom of fanatical minorities.

The sociology of knowledge is a premise which accepts that which is to be investigated as established, that which is to be proven (by exegesis) as a given. A corollary: in what appears similar, we should look for distinctions.

Most university scientists are sub-theoretical technicians, and most research for commercial purposes. Only the money stops conflict from being apparent. More broadly, the modern university’s divided pursuits is the decisive intellectual phenomenon of the late 20th century (and counting?). The left sees the university as the means to addressing contemporary politics (or even forcing the issue). To assert students have the right to judge their teachers is to convert the school to a marketplace.

17. Klein and Pinos, ed., Burke (30 July 2024)

by kurto

A compilation of passages focused on the French Revolution, statesmanship, and neo-political thought. Burke estimated contemporary Britain (circa 1795) had 400,000 informed citizens, from among a population of 10 million, of whom 80,000 favored the French Revolution. The editors contend radical is natural to man, to be countered by training and education. Burke’s writings tend to confirm O’Brien’s view that he most of all opposed tyranny, that he changed his stance but never his ground. Of note:

• Revolution is the last thought (‘resource’) of the thoughtful
• Prejudice (learned inclination) is trusted and ready in an emergency
• England would never ‘call in an enemy to the substance of any systems to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its constitution’ (p. 45)
• The press naturally become demagogues against wealth and merit
• ‘Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of members but not for their punishment’ (p. 61)
• Plans benefit from observations of those whose understand is inferior, as a sanity check (p. 75)
• Revolutionary persecution unifies the opposite evils of intolerance and indifference – against all conscience. Moral sentiments, connected with ‘early prejudice’, cannot live long under nihilist regimes
• The foundation of government is not in theoretical rights of man (‘a confusion of judicial with civil principles’) but in convenience and nature – that is, either universal or local modification
• Men often mistakenly feel courage produces danger, rather than the obvious opposite
• When reason of state prohibits disclosure, silence is manly
• The possession of power discloses the true character of a man

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb 2021)

by kurto

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb)
Shunning understandings of Burke as the father of conservatism or primarily an exponent of natural law, O’Brien contends the guiding theme of the Anglo-Irishman’s political career is opposing tyranny and the abuse of power:

American colonies, Ireland, France, and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it
– WB Yeats, the Sevens Sages

He agrees Burke changed his stance but not his ground: ‘One should distinguish between inconstancy and variation under circumstance. Liberty must work in conjunction with order’, Burke says in a detailed statement of political views (p. 441). Whenever there is an ‘obvious’ silence it’s traceable to his Irish liabilities; identification with Catholics emerges only very late, in the published letter to Hercules Langrishe.

Whiggish views of the late Georgian era remain prevalent, even if the methodology is suspect. Burke’s role in British and international politics was more significant than usually held, notably his analysis of George III’s court being more accurate than Namierites allow. Indeed, he ‘founded’ the Whig school of history with Thoughts on Present Discontents; O’Brien’s view is consistent with Mansfield’s finding that Burke established political parties. Namier saw Burke as the lead representative of the Whig tradition, which is better represented by Macaulay, Morley, and Trevelyan. Morley thought no one surpassed Burke in bringing philosophy to bear on statesmanship, ironic given his reputation for hysteria, and Namier’s mistake is believing the historian who sees the most recent / the latest has the best perspective: this may be so but does not entail authority to refute contemporary statements and records. To find Burke guilty of authoritarianism, as does Namier, one must ignore everything he ever said.

O’Brien treats Burke thematically, rather than chronologically.

    Ireland

: Grattan represented the Protestant Ascendancy, Burke surreptitiously the underground Catholic gentry, displaying lifelong interest in its culture. ‘Will no one stop this madman Grattan?’ (p. 243) – Burke was alarmed by independence for the Ascendancy, the Volunteers seeming to Catholics to represent mob violence. His father’s conversion was a wound that never healed; to his mother he owed a debt of honor that was never expatiated. He accepted Rome as a legitimate Christian institution, and closely identified with Trinity College Dublin. The Ascendancy correctly perceived Burke as a threat but couldn’t produce a smoking gun to alienate British Whigs. He shaped the Catholic Relief Bill of 1778, though did not advocate it; he lost Bristol because of evident sympathies which characterized every other important field of pursuit.

    America

: conciliation meant extending liberty throughout the empire. Once the fighting broke out, he fully sided with the colonists. As with the other three themes, the enemy is abuse of power. He likely drove the Rockingham administration’s repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke was concerned with American affairs by 1767, contra Namier, but the fragile alliance between Rockingham and Grenville (whom Burke disliked) effectively silenced him; when Grenville died in 1770, Burke (the driving force behind repeal of the Stamp Act) was no longer hostage to its author. Subsequently Fox was won over to the Rockinghams by Burke, who was prepared to follow him in the Commons. His major pronouncements on the Colonies comprise speeches on the Declaratory Act (1766), American taxation (1774), Conciliation with America (1775), and the address to the sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Those who were most anti-Catholic in Ireland and America were also most opposed to George III’s America policy, paradoxically for Burke. Further, Irish Volunteers were pro-American but anti-French, a problem once France swung behind the colonists. Burke spoke to English Whig towns, but not to the Ascendancy since he was a closet Jacobite. The Irish ferment around free trade in 1779 demonstrated the gulf between Grattan, unconcerned with Catholics, and Burke. Between Saratoga and Yorktown, Westminster’s struggles were essentially George III versus Burke, via the struggle for economic reform and the push for a second Rockingham ministry. In the course of negotiating the possibility of a North-Rockingham coalition, George III saw Burke a real advantage, ergo Burke didn’t need to prove his bona fides; from 1782 (Yorktown), George moves toward the character of a Whiggish constitutional monarch (contra Roberts).

    India

: In 1773 Burke turned down an opportunity to lead an inquiry into general amnesty for the East India Company – to whitewash, which would have produced personal benefits. However, he soon after gave a speech seeming to absolve Hastings and others in furtherance of the Rockingham line. He could not yet set the party’s tone. His real interests emerge in 1781, his fury demonstrating the injury of prior restraint. O’Brien allows for some defense of Hastings’ administration, while concluding Burke’s opposition to be principled. In supporting Fox’s India bill, Burke reveals his mind: ‘obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory’; ‘It is by bribing, not so often being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind’ (p. 348). George III ultimately saw the validity of Burke’s view; Pitt trapped the Foxite Whigs of public identification w opposition to East India, Burke didn’t care. Cornwallis, succeeding Hastings, concluded the project Burke commenced in 1781.

    France

: Price’s Revolutionary Society, established to celebrate 1688, emphasized the anti-Catholic aspects of the Revolution. Price was further an acolyte of Lord Shelburne, whom Burke thought had fomented the Gordon riots. Fox precipitated and insisted on the Whigs’ public split over France; Burke was trying not to run too far ahead of Portland and Fitzwilliam. When Pitt coopted the latter, Burke became superfluous. Burke understood fear of Jacobinism spreading to Ireland was paradoxically helpful to Catholic emancipation. Pitt calculated he would continue to support the government despite Fitzwilliams’ recall from Dublin, to have no choice but to support continued repression.
The French Revolution and Russian Revolution preceded Hitler in recasting society on the basis of theory. The exact nature of ideas is unimportant – the possibility of the mob seizing power is the essence; victims of the Terror were victims of rationalism. In an appendix of correspondence with the author, Irving Berlin is wrong to suggest Burke attacked the Enlightenment, or was reactionary (in Crooked Timber). Opposing the French Revolution as utopiam is far from reactionary, which Berlin concedes in correspondence. Nor was Burke a theoretical advocate of aristocracy, but more a defending of actually existing society.

NB: ‘Too much immersion in one’s profession, not enough in learning, relegates concentration to forms of business – not substance – because forms deal with ordinary matters’.
‘I cannot go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be’. (p. 321
‘Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else’. (p. 387)
‘To innovate is not to reform’ (p.537)