PROCESS and PREDICAMENT in POLITICAL ECONOMY By
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THE DOUBLE FOCUS: PROCESS AND PREDICAMENT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY by Christopher England A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October, 2016 Abstract This dissertation is about the conceptual problems and existential tensions that animate theories of political economy. I argue that most theories of political economy adopt an ontological stance that Charles Taylor calls the “double focus,” that is, a view of society that attempts to unite ideas about impersonal social processes with an understanding of the context and powers of human agency. Thus political economists have often seen the economy as both an objective historical force and as a potential site of human freedom and creativity. I claim that this stance is inherently unstable, that it tends to vacillate between a sense of historical fatalism, an anxious longing for freedom and mastery, and a utopian affirmation of impersonal orders. Major theories of political economy have been motivated, in part, by an urge to reconcile these competing existential demands. The first three chapters analyze unsatisfactory attempts to reconcile the competing imperatives of the double focus. Chapter 1 examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. I argue that Rousseau’s sense of economic history as a tale of arbitrary injustice and inequality pushes him towards a dangerous version of philosophical nihilism. Chapter 2 looks at Adam Smith and explores his attempt to redeem commercial society by showing that impersonal orders of exchange can help foster individual virtue. I argue that Smith’s optimistic account cannot be sustained, largely because it depends on a flawed conception of subjectivity, but also because the institutional structure of market economies has mutated in ways that make Smith’s vision less tenable. In Chapter 3, I explore the work of F.A. Hayek and show that it represents a utopian radicalization of liberal thought. I claim that Hayek’s turn to evolutionary theory eviscerates much that was valuable in the ethical standpoint of the older liberalism. Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine the work of Karl ii Polanyi. I argue that Polanyi’s work offers a promising alternative because he explicates a tragic vision of the human predicament, crafting a sensibility that avoids dangerous utopian aspirations and instead embraces an uncertain freedom in an imperfect world. Polanyi’s tragic ethos attempts to avoid the most destructive consequences of the double focus: the vacillation between a false utopianism and a misguided fatalism that has plagued the history of political economy. iii Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks to Johns Hopkins University, which has provided a wonderful environment for thinking and learning over the past several years, and to my primary readers, William E. Connolly and Samuel Chambers, who have assisted this project with much gracious advice and more than a little patience. I would also like to thank my wife, Kajsa, whose support made it possible to complete the dissertation. Above all, however, I want to thank my father, Michael England, whose conversation, friendship, and guidance have been too important to define. iv The Double Focus: Process and Predicament in Political Economy Table of Contents Page # Introduction 1 1. The Double Focus 1 2. The Problem with Capitalism 6 3. Process and Predicament 10 4. Looking Ahead 15 Chapter 1 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau: History, Nature, and the Soul 19 1. Why Rousseau? 19 2. Three Problems with Current Readings of Rousseau 21 3. States of Nature: The Original Human Predicament 25 4. Out of Nature: The Origins of Inequality 34 5. Between Nature and History: Rousseau’s Anxiety 48 6. Philosophical Radicalism and Nihilism 58 7. Political Economy After Rousseau 64 Chapter 2 – Adam Smith and the Dream of Commercial Humanism 65 1. In the Wake of Rousseau 66 2. The Legacy of Hobbes; or What is at Stake in the Smith-Rousseau Debate 71 3. The Smithian Synthesis: Order as Intersubjectivity 78 4. Commercial Humanism and Its Limits 88 Chapter 3 – Skepticism and Utopia: The Liberalism of F.A. Hayek 105 1. Minimalist Liberalism 107 2. Liberalism’s Utopian Turn 112 3. The Case of F.A. Hayek: A Skeptical Utopian? 117 v 4. Problems of Spontaneous Evolution: The Plastic and the Brittle 124 5. Modern Utopias: Hayek on the Revolt of the Intellectuals 128 6. Individualism: True and False 132 7. Why Liberalism? The Problem of Justification 141 8. From the Authentic Self, to Spontaneous Evolution, and Back 155 Chapter 4 – Transformation, Theodicy, Tragedy: Karl Polanyi and the Experience of Economics 168 1. Economics as Ethics 168 2. Market Utopianism and Polanyi’s Critique of Formalism 172 3. The Great Transformation: The Need for a Tragic Interpretation 179 4. Precursors: Nietzsche, Weber, and the Theology of Economic Life 184 5. “Where do the Poor Come from?” Polanyi’s Genealogy of Economics Pt. I 192 6. Speenhamland Polanyi’s Genealogy of Economics Pt. II 206 7. Hamlet as a Guide to the Critique of Political Economy 216 8. Between Autonomy and Heteronomy: Polanyi’s Tragic Ethics 222 9. Afterthoughts, Affirmations, and Reservations 229 Bibliography 240 vi Introduction: The Double Focus of Political Economy "Science, separated from philosophy, is the opiate of the suburbs."1 - Yeats 1. The Double Focus This dissertation argues that theorists of political economy face a common dilemma, namely, the need to reconcile an understanding of the human predicament with a notion of impersonal processes. How can one give an account of the world that simultaneously describes the economic patterns that we observe over the longue durée but also takes account of human agency and the problems that surround it, including the longing for freedom and the avoidance of suffering? There seems to be a fundamental disjuncture between the broad movement of social change and the choices, ethical and otherwise, individuals must make at any given moment. Keynes gestured towards this problem when he quipped, "In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is past, the ocean is flat again."2 But, as Keynes knew, whether the seas look rough or smooth depends on the vessel in which one is traveling, just as our understanding of economic processes is inseparable from some conception of the limits and exigencies of the human predicament. That is my claim, at least. I take my cue, in part, from the work of Charles Taylor. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor observes that a split between the perspective of the agent and theories of impersonal order constitutes the "double focus of modern consciousness of society," a sort of horizon that modern thought continually retraces.3 He points out that the new modes of political thought 1 Yeats, W. B., Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, Norton, 2000, 257. 2 Keynes, John Maynard, A Tract on Monetary Reform, Macmillan, 1971, 65. 3 Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke, 2004. 1 that emerge in early European modernity — ideas about the economy, the public sphere, the nation, and democracy — each attempt to unite some understanding of agency or freedom with a notion of an ordered process.4 This split perspective is part of the background context that makes complex society intelligible and therefore livable.5 It also helps us to make sense of ourselves as agents who, to some uncertain degree, shape and are shaped by a series of ongoing processes, ranging from politics to economics to ecology. As a way of understanding the human predicament, the double focus is part of the "tone" or feel of our lived experience, since much of the urgency of contemporary life stems from just this consciousness of being an agent entangled in a variety of impersonal processes. However, there is a kind of dissatisfaction or anxiety latent within the split perspective. Taylor suggests that, because ideas of agency and impersonal order seldom co-exist without tension, attempted resolutions and reconfigurations of the double focus are typical of the human sciences that take shape after the 16th century.6 There is a continual urge to render these two polarities compatible, to grasp the whole, to see harmony in a world that seems fractured by the split perspective. From this angle, political economy can be seen as one species of a broader genus of modern social thought, one mode of a loose set of theories and intuitions that continually brushes up against a similar set of problems. One such problem, to which Taylor alludes with his concept of a double focus, is the apparent incompatibility between ideal pairings that have been variously labeled agency and structure, freedom and order, autonomy 4 Ibid., 69. 5 "By ‘context of understanding’ here, I mean both matters that will probably have been explicitly formulated by almost everyone...and some which form the implicit, largely unfocused background of this experience…its 'pre- ontology,' to use a Heideggerian term." Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007, 3. 6 I take this to be one thread that unites his diffuse speculations in Modern Social Imaginaries. 2 and heteronomy, familiar oppositions that might be characterized in more general terms as the tension between impersonal process and human predicament. In what follows, I build on the insights of Taylor and others by reading four major theorists of political economy (Rousseau, Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and Karl Polanyi) with an eye towards the way that each writer approaches the double focus of modern social thought.7 I argue that each theorist has a unique conception of the human predicament and its involvement in complex economic, historical, and ecological processes.