Monthly Archives: January 2004

Jon Elster

When Marx went into his inner exile in the British Museum, he followed the strategy “One step backward, two steps forward,” taking time off from politics to fashion a tool that could then be of use in politics. The theory he developed has done service for a century but it becoming increasingly irrelevant for most of our urgent problems. “Back to the British Museum!” is hardly a slogan with mass political appeal, but it is one that Marxists would do well to ponder.

Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1986, p. 17

Alan Carter

Marxists, by considering the use of state power or in advocating a revolutionary vanguard (which would eventually form a new state power) as acceptable means toward equality and freedom, advocate courses of action that, as the State-Primacy Theory reveals, would perpetuate the extensive inequalities Marxists ostensibly oppose. And they are uncritical of such courses of action because their theory overlooks the fundamental importance of the state and, especially, state power. The result of this is the promotion of a strategy that inadvertently perpetuates unfreedom and inequality. Consequently, the State-Primacy Theory indicates that anarchists are indeed correct to oppose all statist and vanguardist approaches to revolutionary change. In this respect, the State-Primacy Theory provides anarchism with the theory of historical transition it requires.

So, an anarchist theory of history can be developed that offers the promise of being at least as effective as Marxist theory in explaining technological, economic, and political developments but that has the added advantage, by drawing attention to the tremendous power that the state can exert, of predicting accurately the outcome of statist and vanguardist revolutions. This is in stark contrast with Marxist theory, which, through underemphasizing the power of the state because of an unbalanced stress on the economic, has created such a dangerous pitfall for the Left. By stressing the technological and the economic, Marxists have distracted attention from the state. This proved disastrous in the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and numerous revolutions in the Third World and will do so time and time again until Marx’s theory of history is eventually abandoned by the Left.

Alan Carter, ‘Analytical Anarchism: Some Conceptual Foundations’, Political Theory, vol. 28, no. 2. (April, 2000)

Roberto Gargarella & Félix Ovejero

[A]l socialista le preocupa restablecer la defensa de igualdad que el liberal parece abandonar con la proclamación de principios políticos (fundamentales), tales como el de “un hombre, un voto”. El socialista se toma en serio la igual capacidad de influencia. Por contra, el liberal se despreocupa del hecho de que en la esfera económica esa iguale pueda resultar desvirtuada. En el mercado, no se olvide, sólo se reconocen las necesidades de quienes tienen recursos para “expresar” sus demandas. Todos pueden desear una educación excelente o una protección jurídica fiable, pero sólo los que tienen recursos pueden “expresar” esos deseos. Desde otra perspectiva, eso es lo mismo que reconocer que unos (que siempre son pocos) tienen mucha más capacidad de decisión que otros acerca qué es lo que se demanda. Si hay unos cuantos que están en condiciones de comprar coches de lujo o de pagar por una medicina cara (sofisticada tecnología para enfermedades propias de edades avanzadas, cirugía plástica), serán esos “bienes” los que se alentarán, aun si con los mismos recursos cabría mejorar la esperanza de vida de muchos otros que, por supuesto, tienen demandas pero no el idioma (dinero) con el que expresarlas. […] Una defensa consistente de la igualdad, podríamos añadir, requiere que no se abandone dicho ideal a mitad de camino: requiere extender el principio que hay detrás de la fórmula “un hombre, un voto” desde el campo político al económico, tanto como requiere resistir las acciones que puedan minar tal principio (desde restricciones a la participación política de algún sector de la población hasta medidas que, más directa o indirectamente, favorezcan la concentración del poder económico en pocas manos).

Roberto Gargarella & Félix Ovejero, ‘Introducción: el socialismo, todavía’, in Razones para el socialismo, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 53-54

Brian Barry

Saying that something involves excessive sacrifice implies that you already know what the right answer is: it makes sense to speak of giving something up only against the background of some standard. But if you already have the standard (for example, that each person has a “natural right” to whatever he can make in the market) then the criticism to be made of other criteria should be that they happen to be incompatible with it. Nothing is added to this by talking about the “sacrifice” called for by utilitarian or other criteria.

Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, Berkeley, 1989, pp. 82-83

Stanisław Lem

ALTRUIZINE. A metapsychotropic transmitting agent effective for all sentient homoproteinates. The drug duplicates into others, within a radius of fifty yards, whatever sensations, emotions, and mental states one may experience… According to its discoverer, ALTRUIZINE will ensure the untrammeled reign of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Compassion in any society, since the neighbors of a happy man must share his happiness, and the happier he, the happier perforce they, so it is entirely in their own interest that they wish him nothing but the best. Should he suffer any hurt, they will rush so help at once, so as to spare themselves the pain induced by his. Neither walls, fences, hedges, nor any other obstacle will weaken the altruizing influence… We assume no responsibility for results at variance with the discoverer’s claims.

Stanisław Lem, ‘Altruizine; or, a True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermitic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness and What Came of It’, in The Cyberiad, New York, 1976, p. 218

John Broome

The Pareto principle is, I think, untrue. It is an ill-begotten hybrid. It tries to link individual preferences with general good. But one should either link individual preferences with what should come about, as the democratic principle does, or individual good with general good, as the principle of general good does. The hybrid is no viable.

John Broome, Weighing Goods, Oxford, 1991, p. 159

Hannah Arendt

Furthermore, all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid “language rules,” and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing” occur. The prescribed code names for killing were “final solution,” “evacuation” (Aussiedlung), and “special treatment” (Sonder-behandlung); deportation—unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the “old people’s ghetto” for privileged Jews, in which case it was called “change of residence”—received the names of “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) and “labor in the East” (Arbeitseinsatz im Osteri), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily resettled in ghettos and that a certain percentage of them were temporarily used for labor. Under special circumstances, slight changes in the language rules became necessary. Thus, for instance, a high official in the Foreign Office once proposed that in all correspondence with the Vatican the killing of Jews be called the “radical solution”; this was ingenious, because the Catholic puppet government of Slovakia, with which the Vatican had intervened, had not been, in the view of the Nazis, “radical enough” in its anti-Jewish legislation, having committed the “basic error” of excluding baptized Jews. Only among themselves could the “bearers of secrets” talk in uncoded language, and it is very unlikely that they did so in the ordinary pursuit of their murderous duties—certainly not in the presence of their stenographers and other office personnel. For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. Moreover, the very term “language rule” (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie. For when a “bearer of secrets” was sent to meet someone from the outside world—as when Eichmann was sent to show the Theresienstadt ghetto to International Red Cross representatives from Switzerland—he received, together with his orders, his “language rule,” which in this instance consisted of a lie about a nonexistent typhus epidemic in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which the gentlemen also wished to visit. The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for “language rules.”

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York, 1964, pp. 85-86

Getchen Vogel

With so many cooperative tendencies built into human brains, whether by genes or culture or both, why isn’t there more harmony in the world? Unfortunately, notes Boyd, one of humans’ most successful cooperative endeavors is making war. “All that increased cooperation has done is change the scale on which conflict takes place,” he says. “I would like to think there’s a happy story of peace and understanding. But you can’t be a 21st century human and not see that the trend is in the other direction.”

Getchen Vogel, ‘The Evolution of the Golden Rule’, Science, vol. 303, no. 5561 (February 20, 2004), p. 1131

R. M. Hare

[T]here have been several important books about [distributive justice], notably Rawls’s book, and also that of Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He works at Harvard too, and it is curious that two people with such a similar background should produce books which politically are poles apart. It shows that we can’t depend on people’s intuitions agreeing.

R. M. Hare, ‘Dialogue with R. M. Hare’, in Brian Magee, Men of Ideas, London, 1978, p. 160

Edward O. Wilson

John Rawls opens his influential A Theory of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” Robert Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm proposition: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights they rise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.” These two premises are somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different prescriptions. Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society’s rewards. Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud, and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible. Rawls rejects the meritocracy; Nozick accepts it as desirable except in those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment with egalitarianism. Like everyone else, philosophers measure their personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though consulting a hidden oracle.

Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978, pp. 5-6

Colin McGinn

[M]orality is founded in a sense of the contingency of the world, and it is powered by the ability to envisage alternatives. Imagination is central to its operations. The morally complacent person is the person who cannot conceive how things could have been different; he or she fails to appreciate the role of luck—itself a concept that relies on imagining alternatives. There is no point in seeking change if this is the way things have to be. Morality is thus based on modality: that is, on a mastery of the concepts of necessity and possibility. To be able to think morally is to be able to think modally. Specifically, it depends upon seeing other possibilities—not taking the actual as the necessary.

Colin McGinn, ‘Apes, Humans, Aliens, Vampires and Robots’, in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (eds.), The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, New York, 1993, p. 147

Jorge Luis Borges

Al otro, a Borges, es a quien le ocurren las cosas. Yo camino por Buenos Aires y me demoro, acaso ya mecánicamente, para mirar el arco de un zaguán y la puerta cancel; de Borges tengo noticias por el correo y veo su nombre en una terna de profesores o en un diccionario biográfico. Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografía del siglo XVIII, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson; el otro comparte esas preferencias, pero de un modo vanidoso que las convierte en atributos de un actor. Seria exagerado afirmar que nuestra relación es hostil; yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir, para que Borges pueda tramar su literatura y esa literatura me justifica. Nada me cuesta confesar que ha logrado ciertas páginas válidas, pero esas páginas no me pueden salvar, quizá porque lo bueno ya no es de nadie, ni siquiera del otro, sino del lenguaje o la tradición. Por lo demás, yo estoy destinado a perderme, definitivamente, y sólo algún instante de mí podrá sobrevivir en el otro. Poco a poco voy cediéndole todo, aunque me consta su perversa costumbre de falsear y magnificar. Spinoza entendió que todas las cosas quieren perseverar en su ser; la piedra eternamente quiere ser piedra y el tigre un tigre. Yo he de quedar en Borges, no en mí (si es que alguien soy), pero me reconozco menos en sus libros que en muchos otros o que en el laborioso rasgueo de una guitarra. Hace años yo traté de librarme de él y pasé de las mitologías del arrabal a los juegos con el tiempo y con lo infinito, pero esos juegos son de Borges ahora y tendré que idear otras cosas. Así mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro.

No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta página.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Borges y yo’, in El hacedor, Buenos Aires, 1960

Paul Krugman

If you follow trends in psychology, you know that Freud is out and Darwin is in. The basic idea of “evolutionary psych” is that our brains are exquisitely designed to help us cope with our environment—but unfortunately, the environment they are designed for is the one we evolved and lived in for the past two million years, no the alleged civilization we created just a couple of centuries ago. We are, all of us, hunter-gatherers lost in the big city. And therein, say the theorists, lie the roots of many of our bad habits. Our craving for sweets evolved in a world without ice cream; our interest in gossip evolved in a world without tabloids; our emotional response to music evolved in a world without Celine Dion. And we have investment instincts designed for hunting mammoths, not capital gains.

Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling, New York, 2003, p. 31

Robin Hahnel

At their present pace they may undo, in only a couple of years, all progress toward reclaiming their economies made by anti-imperialist third world movements and governments over the past 50 years. They may do it without the cost of occupying armies. They may do it without firing a shot. Just as the painfully slow reduction of inequality and wealth within the advanced economies won by tremendous organizing efforts and personal sacrifices of millions of progressive activists during the first three quarters of the 20th century was literally wiped out in the past 20 years, all the gains of the great anti-imperialist movements of the 20th century may soon be wiped out by the policies of neoliberalism and its ensuing global crisis. This should be our greatest fear, and this must be what we most resolutely condemn and do everything in our power to stop.

Robin Hahnel, Panic Rules!, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 72-73

Peter Singer

The clearest sign of a Christian, and more specifically evangelical, influence on Bush’s ethics is his repeated invocation of a conflict between good and evil. We have seen that Bush often talks of “the evil ones” and even occasionally of those who are “servants of evil.” He urges us to “call evil by its name,” to “fight evil” and tells us that out of evil will come good. This language comes straight out of apocalyptic Christianity. To understand the context in which Bush uses this language, we need to remember that tens of millions of Americans hold an apocalyptic view of the world. According to a poll taken by Time, 53 percent of adult Americans “expect the imminent return of Jesus Christ, accompanied by the fulfillment of biblical prophecies concerning the cataclysmic destruction of all that is wicked.” One of the signs of the apocalypse that will precede the Second Coming of Christ is the rise of the Antichrist, the ultimate enemy of Christ, who heads Satan’s forces in the battle that will culminate in the triumph of the forces of God, and the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth. Projecting this prophecy onto the world in which they live, many American Christians see their own nation as carrying out a divine mission. The nation’s enemies therefore are demonized. That is exactly what Bush does. When, during a discussion about the looming war with Iraq with Australian Prime Minister John Howard in February 2003, Bush said that liberty for the people of Iraq would not be a gift that the United States could provide, but rather, “God’s gift to every human being in the world,” he seemed to be suggesting that there was divine endorsement for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. David Frum, Bush’s speechwriter at the time of his “axis of evil” speech, says of Bush’s use of the term “evil ones” for the people behind 9/11: “In a country where almost two-thirds of the population believes in the devil, Bush was identifying Osama bin Laden and his gang as literally satanic.”

Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil, New York, 2004, pp. 202-203

Gore Vidal

It is ironic—to use the limpest adjective—that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come to care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take “hard” drugs on the parental ground that they are bad for the user’s health. One is touched by their concern—touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in an year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service.

Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, New York, 2002, p. 58

Jeremy Bentham

Liberty therefore not being more fit than other words in some of the instances in which it has been used, and not so fit in others, the less the use that is made of it the better. I would no more use the word liberty in my conversation when I could get another that would answer the purpose, than I would brandy in my diet, if my physician did not order me: both cloud the understanding and inflame the passions.

Jeremy Bentham, quoted in P. J. Kelly, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Oxford, 1990, p. 96

Jorge Luis Borges

[Y]o tengo la impresión de que casi todo el mundo ahora vive, bueno, como si no vieran; que hay como una… no sé, se han abotagado los sentidos, ¿no? Tengo esa impresión, ¿eh? […] [de que] no sienten las cosas; la gente vive de oídas, sobre todo, repiten fórmulas pero no tratan de imaginarlas; tampoco sacan conclusiones de ellas. Parece que se viviera así, recibiendo, pero recibiendo de un modo superficial; es como si casi nadie pensara, como si el razonamiento fuera un hábito que los hombres están perdiendo.

Jorge Luis Borges, in Osvaldo Ferrari, Reencuentro: Diálogos inéditos, Buenos Aires, 1999, pp. 104-105