![8 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe
Europe, was founded under the direction of MPS member Hardy
Bouillon, criticizing EU policy. In the late 1990s, German neoliberals
like Detmar Doering and Roland Vaubel were among the few to openly
theorize and demand a right of secession in the EU with emphasis on
the salutary nature of fragmentation and competition. Symptomatically,
Doering wrote a column in 1999 attempting to rehabilitate the category
of social Darwinism.17
Although the EU is described regularly as a neoliberal federation,
there are clear forerunners to Brexit in neoliberal networks. One sees
this in the European Conservatives and Reformers Group (ECR) and
the affiliated Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformers, both
established in 2009 and led by British Conservatives. The Prague decla-
ration of the ECR, prepared by Tories and the Liberal Institute led by
MPS member and former Czech president Václav Klaus, emphasized
economic not political freedom as the foundation of individual freedom
and national prosperity.18
At the MPS meeting in South Korea in 2017,
Klaus voiced typical xenophobic “populist” themes, saying that “mass
migration into Europe . . . threatens to destroy European society and to
create a new Europe which would be very different from the past as well
as from MPS way of thinking [sic].”19
Referring to far-right parties in
France, Austria, Germany, and Italy, he said: “The people are starting to
open their eyes, to look around, to speak out, to express their dissatisfac-
tion with the brave new world without freedom and democracy, with
the world heralding relativism, with the suppression of old values, tradi-
tions, customs and habits, with the world of new aristocracies.”20
Already
in 2014 at an MPS meeting in Hong Kong, Klaus had made it clear that
“to protect liberty . . . we need to rehabilitate the sovereign nation-
state . . . We need responsible citizens anchored in domestic realities,
not cosmopolitan, selfish individuals ‘floating’ at the surface and search-
ing for short-term pleasures and advantages—without roots and
Dieter Plehwe, “Neoliberals against Europe,” in William Callison and Zachary Manfredi,
eds. Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Ruptures (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2019).
17 Detmar Doering, “‘Sozialdarwinismus’ Die unterschwellige Perfidie eines
Schlagwortes,” Eigentümlich Frei 2, no. 6 (1999).
18 The declaration is available at http://ecrgroup.eu/about-us/our-history.
19 Václav Klaus, “Mont Pèlerin Society Speech in Korea” (2017), 12, available at
montpelerin.org.
20 Ibid., 16.
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![22 Martin Beddeleem
into view. Through recent decades, neoliberals have demonstrated an
uncanny ability to forsake obsolete theories and models in order to
produce seemingly fresh answers to the repeated crises they have
encountered. Although the original agenda of neoliberalism has been
revised many times over, its programmatic ambition and scientific reach
have steadily increased. Commonly overlooked, this scientific dyna-
mism, sponsored by private foundations, relayed by think tanks, and
embedded within the “marketplace of ideas,” remains at the very heart
of the neoliberal project today.
Since its inception, the problem space shared by neoliberals has been
spread out on a modernist canvas, one which contrasted sharply with
conservatives, reactionaries and old-fashioned liberals. During the inter-
war period, self-proclaimed neoliberals dismantled and recoded the
unpopular laissez-faire liberalism with epistemological ideas adapted
from the “new scientific spirit” of the early twentieth century.3
Breaking
with naturalism and empiricism, they espoused a research program
inspiredbymathematicalandphysicalconventionalism,onethatbalanced
a skeptical epistemology with a commitment to scientific progress and
objectivity. To this end, methodological rules were pivotal to the recon-
struction of a genuine science of liberalism which had fallen into disrepute.
This agenda aimed at regaining the political ground lost to ‘collectivism’ in
the twentieth century by tackling two sets of problems left aside by ‘classi-
cal’ liberals: the positive role of the state and the social question.
While laying this epistemological groundwork, neoliberals battled
competing claims about the nature of science, its history, and its posi-
tion in society by actively reshaping ideas about academic freedom, the
discovery of knowledge, and their relationship with political institutions
and social reform. Faced with the scientific and rationalist optimism of
the unity of science movement as well as much of Marxism, early neolib-
erals demarcated and defended a liberal science against progressive
scientists who promoted science as the midwife of social change.
Crucially, they developed a new theory of knowledge-in-society which
fused together philosophy of science and political economy into a single
set of hypotheses. In these debates, concerns about the role of science in
society linked up with the most pressing political question of the day:
the rise of fascism and totalitarianism.
3 See Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984
[1934]).
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![24 Martin Beddeleem
Neoliberalism owes its scientific imagination to the strong contingent
of philosophers of science who participated in its elaboration. Michael
Polanyi, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises,
and F. A. Hayek, among others, were all refugees and exiles from Austria
and Hungary who were immersed in the scientific world and volatile
political situation of the interwar period. They unanimously perceived
the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a disaster,4
respon-
sible for the rise of an antagonistic politics pitting nationalism and
conservatism against the growing communist movement. At that time,
Vienna underwent one of the most radical municipal experiments of the
twentieth century with the large-scale social policies promoted by the
Austrian Socialist Party. In 1919, the philosopher and socialist educator
Otto Neurath, president of the Central Planning Office in the short-
lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, advocated a centrally planned economy
in which money would be abolished and exchange would be made in
kind. Before the war, Neurath had been a participant in the seminar led
by Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, along with Joseph
Schumpeter, Otto Bauer, Emil Lederer, and Ludwig von Mises, who
remembered him, in his words, for the “nonsense” he presented with
“fanatical fervor.”5
The refutation of Neurath’s scheme published in 1920 by Mises trig-
gered the Planwirtschaft (planned economy) debate in Vienna, wherein
Mises argued that economic calculation was naive and unmanageable
without the indispensable role of prices as signals of the relative value
of factors of production. Against Neurath’s desire to institute a scien-
tific management of the economy, Mises claimed that the complexity
of the economic system made its apprehension in one mind or place so
difficult as to be near impossible. The debate received considerable
attention, in part because physics and economics had displaced theol-
ogy as the main subjects for intellectual debate in Vienna. Within both
disciplines, the Austrian scientific “culture of uncertainty” was unique
in Europe: their embrace of probabilistic theory “was tied to a
4 Popper writes in his autobiography that “the breakdown of the Austrian Empire
and the aftermath of the First World War, the famine, the hunger riots in Vienna, and
the runaway inflation [. . .] destroyed the world in which I had grown up.” Karl Popper,
Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), 31.
5 See Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to F. A. Hayek, Socialism and War (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5.
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![28 Martin Beddeleem
community of views with the Verein Ernst Mach in Vienna and
Reichenbach’s Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin led him
to join both groups, and to attempt to create, without success, a similar
society in France: la Société Henri Poincaré. Despite his close acquaint-
ance with Neurath, with whom he organized in 1935 the First
International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in Paris, Rougier’s
philosophy and politics were closer to the “right wing” of the Vienna
Circle (Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, Felix Kaufmann) than to
the left one.15
Rougier and his Viennese colleagues hoped to demarcate a sphere of
knowledge sheltered from the metaphysics inherent to any language,
and by extension, to any political ideologies. For Hayek, Rougier, and
Popper, the application of the methods of empirical science to social
phenomena raised methodological dilemmas, which were superim-
posed onto diverging political orientations. While sharing the same
imperative as their Viennese counterparts of demarcating a decontested
language of science, neoliberal philosophers of science became skeptical
of the powers of scientific method to directly shape social reform.
Instead, they aspired to emulate the creative rupture they applauded in
the philosophy of physics and mathematics to the doctrine of liberal-
ism.16
During the interwar period, rival epistemological doctrines came
to be deeply interwoven with the political visions they promised to
vindicate. Most of the methodological and epistemological disagree-
ments which came to light in 1920s Vienna would resurface as the
economic crisis of the 1930s called past orthodoxies in economics and
the social sciences into question.
Clarity and Opacity in the Liberal Order
The idea of a planned economy as the answer to the ‘chaos of laissez-faire’
circulated as early as 1929 on the fringes of all British political parties,
while the Soviet Union implemented its first Five Year Plan in 1928.
of that instrument.” Louis Rougier, “Une philosophie nouvelle: l’empirisme logique, à
propos d’un Congrès récent,” La Revue de Paris 43, no. 1 (1936): 194.
15 Mathieu Marion, “Une philosophie politique pour l’empirisme logique?”
Philosophia Scientiae CS 7 (2007): 209–10.
16 Another crucial publication illustrating this evolution is Jacques Rueff, From the
Physical to the Social Sciences (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1929 [1922]).
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![30 Martin Beddeleem
F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi in England, and Walter Lippmann in
the United States, independently reached the same conclusion: the feasi-
bility of economic planning was not solely a technical problem, but
called for a much larger understanding of the epistemological founda-
tions of liberalism and its relationship with the market economy.
Arriving in England in 1931, Hayek did not simply apply his exper-
tise on the German-language calculation debate of the 1920s to the
English situation. Rather, his own thinking was transformed by the
planning mania of the 1930s. As he emphasized in his inaugural lecture
at the LSE, the way forward for liberals was to learn from the failures of
free market rhetoric in order to initiate a long-term process of ideologi-
cal change. He worried that the masses were deluded by the promise of
reason and science to direct social reform. While the scientific econo-
mist cautioned against government interference, the layman demanded
immediate change in society. The lack of legitimacy of a market econ-
omy lay precisely with the hidden nature of the economic problem—the
invisibility of Adam Smith’s hand.21
This was the spirit in which Hayek published his contribution to the
socialist calculation debate in 1935. He was confident that a technical
demonstration of the economic impossibility of socialism was all that
was needed to undermine its political appeal, the same way that Mises’s
critique had discredited the Austrian socialist plan for a centrally
planned economy. His goal was to bring socialism out of the ethical and
political realm to wage a scientific battle against it: to subject its ideology
and plans of social organization to a scientific examination of their
proposed means.22
Hayek’s strategy was two-pronged. On the one hand,
the signaling function of prices was reliable for economic decisions and
Positive Program for Laissez-faire: “in earlier periods, [our economic organization] could
be expected to become increasingly strong if only protected from undue political
interference. Now, however, it has reached a condition where it can be saved only
through adoption of the wisest measures by the state.” Henry Simons, A Positive Program
for Laissez-faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy, Public Policy Pamphlet
no. 15 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 2.
21 Hayek wrote in 1935 that “the fact that in the present order of things such
economic problems are not solved by the conscious decision of anybody has the effect
that most people are not conscious of their existence.” Hayek, Socialism and War, 56.
22 Hayek states in his refutation that “on the validity of the ultimate ends science
has nothing to say. They may be accepted or rejected, but they cannot be proved or
disproved. All that we can rationally argue about is whether and to what extent given
measures will lead to the desired results.” Ibid., 62.
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![32 Martin Beddeleem
in the Soviet Union through public emotion and propaganda could be
accomplished in liberal societies through reason and public education.
Commending Polanyi as an “exceptionally gifted observer,” Walter
Lippmann reflected on the same theme in the opening chapters of his book
The Good Society, published in 1937. The complexity of social life appeared
to him as an invisible canvas into which our daily interactions were woven.
The opacity of the individual psyche veiled a wealth of knowledge which the
market artfully and efficiently coordinated. Complete planning, by bringing
all the economic processes to the fore, failed to acknowledge the cognitive
economy brought forth spontaneously by the division of labor. Once the
intrinsic limitations of thought were established, conscious control over
social orders became a delusion. “No human mind has ever understood the
whole scheme of society,” wrote Lippmann, “at best a mind can understand
its own version of this scheme, something much thinner, which bears to
reality some such relations as a silhouette to a man.”25
The opacity of society
to our efforts of scientific probing had become so overwhelming that no
science of society could form the basis of its conscious control.26
Consequently, the legitimacy of the market economy relied on entrenching
these invisible processes within public opinion.
Taken together, these arguments against the possibility of planning
revolved around the elaboration of two key ideas. First, social knowledge
is irremediably divided and dispersed. Second, it is a resource that remains
largely implicit and tacit. In his seminal article on “Economics and
Knowledge” from 1937, Hayek argued that the assumption of perfect
knowledge in economic science was eliding the most important question
that the social sciences had to address: “how knowledge is acquired and
communicated.”27
Epistemic limitations deriving from the division of
25 Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publisher,
2005 [1937]), 31.
26 Lippmann’s criticism of a socialist economy, however, did not originate with the
preparation of The Good Society. Already in 1933, he was familiar with the socialist
calculation debate and pointed at the same epistemological argument which Hayek and
Polanyi had exposed. Quoting the American Austrian economist Benjamin Anderson,
Lippmann stated clearly in his column “Today and Tomorrow” from February 27, 1934
that the state was in no position to intervene in a detailed manner in the economy
because “to regulate the business of a country as a whole and to guide and control
production there is required a central brain of such vast power that no human being can
be expected to supply it.” Cf. Craufurd D. Goodwin, Walter Lippmann: Public Economist
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 149.
27 F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948), 46.
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![34 Martin Beddeleem
The Mantle of Science
Beyond economics, the 1930s also proved to be a pivotal decade in the
discipline of the history of science, a period “when radical historicist
messages from Central Europe and the new Soviet Union combined
with local antiquarian cultures into historiographical and institutional
changes.”31
The movement for the planning of science gained promi-
nence in the United Kingdom after a Russian delegation led by Nikolai
Bukharin stunned the Second International Congress for the History of
Science held in London in 1931.32
The audience, largely scientists and
amateurs, had been unprepared to hear the discourse of dialectical
materialism applied to the history of science. What sounded like a
Martian language to some was a revelation to others. Relating scientific
discovery to historical processes, Soviet scientists openly challenged the
dominant internalist accounts of progress and discovery in science.
These birth pangs of the externalist account of the history of science
activated an intense scrutiny over the possibility and desirability of
planning in science. Many left-leaning scientists and intellectuals visited
the Soviet Union in the early 1930s looking for an alternate model for
the organization of science and railed against the “frustration of science”
felt in Europe because of its lack of coordination and planning.
This conference, remarked Edward Shils, “led an important bloc of
British scientists to support the Marxist theses that all scientific work,
however abstruse, is a witting or unwitting response to the practical
problems confronting the society or the ruling classes of the society in
which the scientists live.”33
Pure research meant nothing on its own, but
constituted a preparatory step to applied science and, ultimately, social
change. At the same time, many natural scientists themselves supported
a wider application of science to social problems, promoting its rational-
ity and tangibility over the dead-end of partisan shibboleths. The fact
that economic planning had been infused with scientific credibility
31 Anna-K. Mayer, “Setting up a Discipline, II: British History of Science and ‘the
End of Ideology,’ 1931–1948,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35, no. 1
(2004): 43.
32 The papers given by the Russian delegation were published together a couple of
days after the end of the Congress and were widely disseminated. See N. I. Bukharin, ed.,
Science at the Cross-Roads (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971 [1931]).
33 Edward Shils, “A Critique of Planning: The Society for Freedom in Science,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 3, no. 3 (1947): 80.
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![36 Martin Beddeleem
and organization. They are set to show that the scientific community,
far from embodying an archetypal communist society, represented,
on the contrary, the incarnation of a liberal order guided by the
scientific method.
As the 1930s progressed, it became increasingly obvious that scien-
tific research in totalitarian countries was impaired to a large extent. The
academic purge in Nazi Germany and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union
had laid bare the gradual submission of science to ideological purposes.
This spectacle, Rougier admitted, had proven to him through “the
absurd, the necessity and the soundness of liberalism.” He portrayed the
mystique soviétique as a new form of “state religion,” “whose particular-
ity is to present itself as . . . the highest synthesis of the totality of scien-
tific knowledge.”38
Rougier’s portrait of the state of the Soviet Union was
one of complete failure in all domains, as whole areas of scientific
research, notably genetics, had been deemed incompatible with ortho-
dox Marxist-Leninism. The gradual alignment of Russian scientific
research with the Soviet ideology equally disturbed Polanyi, who set
chemistry aside and endeavored to write about the nature of science
specifically in reaction to the Vavilov-Lysenko controversy. He
condemned the corruption of Russian science, where the authority of
science had been replaced “by that of the State,” and advocated the self-
government of science to restore the “independence of scientific
opinion.”39
Polanyi argued that both science and truth were lost when-
ever political liberty fell, as independent thought was subjugated to
temporal powers. Therefore, there existed “a common fate between
independent science and political liberty.”40
A free society cultivated
science as the boundless quest for new truths whose ultimate uncer-
tainty lay at the core of the liberal values of tolerance and freedom of
conscience: science under political direction was thus bound to become
an instrument of propaganda.
Both Hayek and Polanyi were looking for ways to defeat the “scient-
ism” and “scientific socialism” which they felt dominated the media and
the public intelligentsia, thanks to the well-disposed editorship of Nature
38 Louis Rougier, “La mystique soviétique. Une scolastique nouvelle: le marxisme-
léninisme,” La Revue de Paris 41, no. 2 (April 1934): 622.
39 Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998 [1951]),
81, 78.
40 Michael Polanyi, “Congrès du Palais de la Découverte,” Nature 140 (October
1937): 710.
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- 8. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism Edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd iii 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd iii 10/03/2020 13:59:53 10/03/2020 13:59:53
- 9. The publication of this book was funded by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Leibniz Association. This work is an open access publication. The book and the single chapters are made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 URN:ISBN:978-1-78873-253-6 First published by Verso 2020 Collection © Verso and the editors 2020 Contributions © The contributors 2020 Some rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-253-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-254-3 (UK EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-255-0 (US EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Plehwe, Dieter, editor. | Slobodian, Quinn, 1978- editor. | Mirowski, Philip, 1951- editor. Title: Nine lives of neoliberalism / edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski. Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017198| ISBN 9781788732536 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788732550 (US ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Neoliberalism. | Liberalism. Classification: LCC JC574 .N57 2020 | DDC 320.51/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017198 Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd iv 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd iv 10/03/2020 13:59:53 10/03/2020 13:59:53
- 10. Contents List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe 1 Part One neoliberal science beyond market fundamentalism 19 Recoding Liberalism: Philosophy and Sociology of Science against Planning Martin Beddeleem 21 On Skinning a Cat: George Stigler on the Marketplace of Ideas Edward Nik-Khah 46 The Law of the Sea of Ignorance: F. A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, and other Neoliberals Confront the Intellectual Property Problem Quinn Slobodian 70 Part Two neoliberal subjectivity beyond homo economicus 93 Neoliberalism’s Family Values: Welfare, Human Capital, and Kinship Melinda Cooper 95 Schumpeter Revival? How Neoliberals Revised the Image of the Entrepreneur Dieter Plehwe 120 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd v 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd v 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 11. Human Behavior as a Limit to and a Means of State Intervention: Günter Schmölders and Behavioral Economics Rüdiger Graf 143 Part Three neoliberal internationalism beyond the washington consensus 167 Embedded Early Neoliberalism: Transnational Origins of the Agenda of Liberalism Reconsidered Hagen Schulz-Forberg 169 What Comes After Bretton Woods? Neoliberals Debate and Fight for a Future Monetary Order Matthias Schmelzer 197 The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize Philip Mirowski 219 Part Four neoliberal influence beyond reagan, thatcher, and pinochet 255 How the Neoliberal Think Tank Went Global: The Atlas Network, 1981 to the Present Marie Laure Djelic and Reza Mousavi 257 Think Tank Networks of German Neoliberalism: Power Structures in Economics and Economic Policies in Postwar Germany Stephan Pühringer 283 About the Contributors 309 Bibliography 311 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd vi 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd vi 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 12. List of Figures and Tables List of Figures Figure 5.1. Many Hounds Soon Catch the Hare 132 Figure 8.1. The Impossible Trilemma and the Three Monetary Systems 203 Figure 9.1. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize Medal 228 Figure 9.2. Francis Amasa Walker Medal 250 Figure 10.1. Number of Think Tanks Added to/Dropped from the Atlas Network 260 Figure 10.2. Global Reach of the Atlas Network in 2015 261 Figure 10.3. North America (reaching a net of 69 in 1995 and 170 in 2015) 262 Figure 10.4. Latin America (reaching a total of 25 in 1995 and 73 in 2015) 263 Figure 10.5. Asia and Pacific (reaching a net of 5 in 1995 and 55 in 2015) 264 Figure 10.6. Europe (reaching a net of 21 in 1995 and 130 in 2015) 265 Figure 10.7. Africa and Middle East (reaching a net of 2 in 1995 and 31 in the second period) 266 Figure 11.1. Walter Eucken as Academic Teacher 292 Figure 11.2. Continuity of German Neoliberal Networks after World War II 294 Figure 11.3. The Academic Roots of the Proponents of the Monetarist Turn in Germany 296 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd vii 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd vii 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 13. Figure 11.4. Economists in German Neoliberal Networks During the Monetarist Turn in Germany 297 Figure 11.5. Kronberger Kreis as the Central Node in German Neoliberal Networks of Economists 302 Figure 11.6. Economists with a High Media Coefficient in Think Tank Networks 303 Figure 11.7. Economists with a High Economic Policy Advice Coefficient in Think Tank Networks 304 Figure 11.8. Influential German Economists in Think Tank Networks 305 List of Tables Table 9.1. Neoliberal Winners of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics 241 Table 9.2. Walker Medal Awards 251 Table 10.1. Atlas International Workshops, 1981–1995 267 Table 10.2. Atlas Grants in Recent Years 273 Table 10.3. Fisher Memorial Award Competition, 1990–1995 277 Table 10.4. ALA Training and Graduates 280 Table 11.1. Performative Footprint of Members of the Kronberger Kreis (Percentages Shown) 301 Table 11.2. Classification Scheme for the Operationalization of Political Coefficients of the PFP 307 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd viii 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd viii 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 14. Acknowledgments In March 2016, a group of thirty scholars from around the world convened at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center to discuss “more roads” to and from Mont Pèlerin. All the chapters in this volume were presented and discussed at the conference and benefited from seventy- two hours of intense debate. The four organizers of the conference (Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, and Quinn Slobodian) and the authors of the present volume are indebted to the other participants: Ola Innset, Jacob Jensen, Niklas Olsen, Tiago Mata, Elisabeth Winter, Fabio Masini, Andrea Franc, Merijn Oudenampsen, Bram Mellink, Karin Fischer, Lars Mjoset, Tamotsu Nishizawa, Isabella Weber, Aditya Balasubramanian, Joshua Rahtz, Holger Straßheim, and Vineet Thakur. The conference was generously funded by Schulz- Forberg’s Velux “Good Society” Project at Aarhus University and the WZB Research Unit on Inequality and Social Policy, which was headed by Felix Elwert at the time. Our thanks are due to the WZB team of Stefanie Roth, Marion Obermaier, and Moritz Neujeffski. The conference was the third international conference on the topic of neoliberalism focusing on organized neoliberal networks. The previous conference at NYU led to the publication of The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, which has sparked an ongoing international debate and a wide range of research on the intel- lectual and social history of neoliberalism. The 2016 meeting was actu- ally a return to the origins of the research project as the first conference took place in Berlin in 2002. It led to Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen, and Gisela Neunhöffer. Ironically, much like the present volume, the book’s intro- duction attacked the notion of the impending demise of neoliberalism. We hope the next effort to deal with global neoliberalism, and much of 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd ix 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd ix 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 15. x Acknowledgments the work of the other conference participants, will not require similar introduction. We thank Sebastian Budgen and Cian McCourt at Verso for shepherding the current volume to completion. We are grateful for the spirit and support of many friends and colleagues who are living together with us in these neoliberal times, and dedicate this book to all those who struggle with and against neoliberal- ism. They understand that there are alternatives, and that they will certainly not be a result of purely academic declarations. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd x 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd x 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 16. Introduction Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe Neoliberalism is dead again. After the election of Donald J. Trump, politi- cal economist Mark Blyth declared the “era of neoliberalism is over,” intel- lectual historian Samuel Moyn tweeted neoliberalism “RIP,” and Cornel West wrote that “the neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang.”1 Such pronouncements recur with regularity. A quarter- century ago, a Latin American politician deemed neoliberalism “dead” after the election of another US president—Bill Clinton. Obituaries resur- faced as critiques of the Washington Consensus in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, returned on the crest of the Latin American pink tide (Evo Morales declared “neoliberalism is dead” in 2003), and peaked in the wake of the near-collapse of the global financial system in 2008. One year after Trump’s election, with a tax plan benefiting corpora- tions and the country’s wealthiest citizens as his only major legislative achievement, the obituarists for neoliberalism had fallen silent too. The real-estate magnate’s cabinet has pursued policies openly geared to the richest members of society and done little beyond making token gestures to reverse the flight of industrial jobs from the United States. The prom- ised infrastructure plans that had some dreaming of a second New Deal vanished without ceremony. The standard response to what Colin Crouch called the “strange non-death of neoliberalism” has been a turn to the metaphor of the 1 Cornel West. “Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here.” The Guardian (17 Nov 2016). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 1 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 1 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 17. 2 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe zombie.2 Yet invoking the occult in the interest of reasoned analysis strikes us as self-defeating. Jamie Peck has suggested that neoliberalism lost “another of its nine lives” after the global financial crisis in 2008.3 We adopt his metaphor in seeing neoliberalism as less like a zombie and more like a cat. Though cats are granted nine lives, this is not meant literally. There is no sorcery in their survival, simply a preternatural abil- ity. As a body of thought and set of practices, neoliberalism too has proven agile and acrobatic, prone to escaping alive from even the most treacherous predicaments. As Peck writes, it has shown a consistent feline capacity to “fail-and-flail-forward.”4 There are two ways of making sense of neoliberalism’s longevity. One is to point to the durability of the blocs of capital and their allies in government. The other points to the expansion and adaptation of neoliberal worldviews encroaching upon the competing ideologies of conservatism and social democratic liberalism. This book has no quar- rel with the former explanations, including those of neo-Gramscian International Political Economy, and finds them essential for making sense of the present.5 To draw attention to the intellectual history of neoliberalism as in the second model is not to insist dogmatically on the primacy of ideas. It would be ironic, as some have noted, if leftist critics became fixated on the realm of ideas while the right adopted materialist explanations of the present. At the same time, proposals for social changes, whether large or small, do not emerge in a vacuum, which requires attention to the universe of ideologies and to the process of preference formation. If neoliberalism’s demise has been foretold prematurely yet again, then we still need more and better analyses of its mechanics, its morphol- ogy, and the stations of its metamorphosis. Eighty years after the term 2 Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 3 Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 277. He uses the metaphor elsewhere, including in the title of a foreword seen by this volume’s editors only after its completion. We credit him with the evocative metaphor. Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule after the Great Recession,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 265; Jamie Peck, “Foreword: The Nine Lives of Neoliberalism,” in Urban Political Geographies: A Global Perspective, ed. Ugo Rossi and Alberto Vanolo (London: Sage, 2012). 4 Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, 277. 5 See, e.g., Stephen Gill and A. Claire Cutler, eds, New Constitutionalism and World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 2 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 2 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 18. Introduction 3 was coined, forty years after the Volcker shock and the victories of Thatcher and Reagan, people still do not agree on whether neoliberal- ism exists. Many continue to find it useful to avoid the term—preferring “advanced liberalism,” distinguishing between “financialization” and neoliberalism, or insisting on neoliberalization as a verb rather than a noun.6 The authors in this book find it perfectly acceptable to use a word with a contested definition. Rather than jettisoning the term altogether, they seek to add precision to its use, examine its conceptual background, clarify important building blocks, and observe its evolution as a result of the interplay of intellectual debate, changing circumstances, and, not least, social struggles. The alternative narrative according to which neoliberalism is not a suitable analytical category because it changes or because it has multi- ple and sometimes contradictory meanings amounts to self-defeating denialism, expressing a desire for a neat and simple singular ideology with an ahistorical essence to replace the messy world of competing worldviews. Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism have experienced kaleidoscopic refraction, splintering, and recombination over the decades. We see no reason why neoliberalism would not exhibit the same diversity. Indeed, we can prove that it has. If the loose use of terms was the grounds for expungement, then “socialism,” “capital- ism,” “conservatism,” and plain “liberalism” would have long been purged. Avoiding the term does little to address the ideology it was coined to describe. In 2009, two editors of this volume helped launch a wide-ranging conversation about neoliberalism as an intellectual movement around the Mont Pèlerin Society, or what they dubbed with Bernhard Walpen the “neoliberal thought collective,” with the publication of The Road from Mont Pèlerin.7 In defense of its central contention that neoliberal- ism could be studied as an intellectual network and not simply an agent- less spirit of capitalism, the contributions to that book focused on the 6 See,e.g. Nikolas Rose, “Still ‘Like Birds onthe Wire’? FreedomafterNeoliberalism,” Economy and Society, published online November 10, 2017; Aeron Davis and Catherine Walsh, “Distinguishing Financialization from Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, nos. 5–6 (2017); Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, “An Introduction to Neoliberalism,” in The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2. 7 Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 3 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 3 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 19. 4 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe confluence of national traditions of neoliberal economic thought in the postwar moment as well as the debates on a few key issues like competi- tion, trade unions, and development economics. The book helped accel- erate a shift in the scholarship on neoliberalism. Critical studies of neoliberalism had begun in the 1990s with the basic contention that the ideology meant the rollback of the state and the return of laissez-faire: a market fundamentalism, which purportedly dictated the liberation of markets and the transformation of every member of the world’s popula- tion into homo economicus. The scholarship evolved in the early 2000s to clarify that neoliberalism in both theory and practice actually meant a “strong state and free market” with a “roll-out” (Peck) of a new form of state to match its rollback.8 New work clarified the importance of the knowledge problem for neoliberals and outlined their project of building a counter-public to the social democratic consensus after 1945. Insights from this literature surfaced during the Eurozone crisis with repeated arguments that the European Union seemed to realize F. A. Hayek’s visions for federation from decades earlier. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble cited Hayek’s warnings against “the pretense of knowledge” as he clung to the precepts of austerian orthodoxy, and Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated a term coined by neoliberal Wilhelm Röpke a half-century earlier when she spoke of the need for a “market-conforming democracy.” Op-ed columns, social media feeds and academic journals were suddenly alive with pronouncements of the “return of ordoliberalism.”9 Despite—or because of—this flourishing of scholarship, the literature on neoliberalism is now at a critical juncture. Weary of the range and variety of analyses, some observers on the left propose that there is “no such thing” as neoliberalism and that “the left should abandon the concept.”10 Curiously, this is happening parallel to a moment when the IMFitselfdarestospeakthenameofneoliberalism,11 andwhenmembers 8 Werner Bonefeld, The Strong State and the Free Economy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Jamie Peck, “Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 3 (2001): 447. 9 Werner Bonefeld, The Strong State and the Free Economy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Jamie Peck, “Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 3 (2001): 447. 10 Bill Dunn, “Against Neoliberalism as a Concept,” Capital & Class 41, no. 3 (2017); Rajesh Venugopal, “Neoliberalism as Concept,” Economy and Society 44, no. 2 (2015). 11 Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development (June 2016). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 4 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 4 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 20. Introduction 5 of the market-right, including the venerable UK think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, have, in their own words, “come out as neoliberals.”12 This volume contends that more is to be learned by continuing the inquiry into neoliberalism than declaring it dead, defunct, or a diversion. It follows a number of exceptional publications on this topic.13 At the same time, it builds on this literature in ways that strike us as crucial for the development of the field. The first is its focus on institutional embed- dedness. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism places ideas in context and follows them in action. Sites of analysis include the League of Nations’ intellec- tual wing, the Bellagio Group of academics and central bankers, and the California tax and welfare reform movement. Against charges that criti- cal scholars cast neoliberalism as a monolith, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism also emphasizes the diversity and heterogeneity of the neoliberal thought style. Attention is drawn to the deep influence of the philosophy of science on early neoliberalism, the contested nature of behavioral economics in neoliberalism, the divergent stances on the idea of intel- lectual property rights, and the bitter conflicts within the Mont Pélerin Society (MPS) over what might underpin a global monetary order. Through a serious engagement with the histories of actually existing neoliberals, their ideas, discussions, battles, projects, and legacies, we can learn about the ways in which neoliberals themselves thought of the polit- ical and economic spheres as not being separate. Many critics of neoliber- alism fail to acknowledge that neoliberals themselves moved beyond clas- sical liberalism and economic naturalism. Since most critics continue to not take neoliberals seriously, they are content to equate neoliberal calls for a “free market” to neoliberalism regardless of the clear profession of all neoliberals that there is no such thing as a free market. The announce- ment of “the death of homo economicus” is deployed as a supposedly radical provocation despite the fact that Hayek described “economic man” as a skeleton in the closet of economics eight decades ago.14 Against the 12 Sam Bowman, “Coming out as Neoliberals,” Adam Smith Institute Blog (October 11, 2016). 13 For a state of the field, see the two impressive new handbooks: Springer, Birch, and MacLeavy, eds, The Handbook of Neoliberalism; Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings, and David Primrose, eds, The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism (Los Angeles: Sage, 2018). 14 F. A. Hayek, “Economics and Knowledge (1937),” in Individualism and Economic Order, ed. F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 46. See Peter Fleming, The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation (London: Pluto Press, 2017). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 5 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 5 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 21. 6 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe reality of nearly half a century of modifications in neoliberal doctrine, political economists continue to (re)discover the origins of neoliberalism in the US Democratic Party of the 1980s and reduce it to the idea of a “single blueprint” for deregulation and privatization.15 By definition, theories that postulate free or pure markets per se are not neoliberal, and it is easy for neoliberals to point to the need for the right set of institutions, politics, and nowadays even behavior to allow markets to operate relatively freely, and, more importantly, to set market forces free. The charge of “one size fits all” fails in the face of the documentable shifts in neoliberal approaches to policy problems. Our case studies show that neoliberalism is less a policy orthodoxy than a consistent approach to policy problems. To adapt the famous legal maxim of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, neoliberals hold that the market lives by prerequisites it cannot guarantee itself. Rather than operate with a belief in the “magic” of a putatively “natural” market, neoliberals are avowed interventionists of their own kind, rethinking policies according to context and showing both a capacity for improvisation and an attitude of flexible response. If the end goal remains constant—safeguarding what neoliberals call a competitive order and exposing humanity ever more to the compulsions of adjustment according to the price mechanism—the means of arriving at this goal shift with time and place. Only by understanding this flexibil- ity do the nine lives of neoliberalism become explainable. The contributions in this book introduce readers to lesser-known but still influential neoliberal thinkers. These include former MPS president Herbert Giersch, described as “Germany’s Milton Friedman”; Fritz Machlup, coiner of the term “the knowledge economy”; the generations of German ordoliberals taught by Walter Eucken; and another former MPS president, George Stigler, who often exists in the shadow of Friedman and Hayek in histories of the Chicago School. The contributions also show how much more attention to the broader philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of neoliberal ideol- ogy and political theory is required in order to account for its influ- ence across disciplines and professions; for the creative and innovative 15 Dani Rodrik, “Rescuing Economics from Neoliberalism,” Boston Review (6 Nov 2017). On the history of supranational visions of order see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2018).QuinnSlobodian,“PerfectCapitalism,ImperfectHumans:Race,Migration, and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism,” Contemporary European History 28(2): 143–55. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 6 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 6 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 22. Introduction 7 development of new approaches to and theoretical understandings of economic and social theory, and the subtleties of neoliberal reasoning; for the institutional positions and embeddedness—both domestic and international—of key neoliberal intellectuals and events; and, last but not least, for the neoliberal capacities and infrastructures that influ- ence science and society, through networks of intellectuals and think tanks, donors, and supporters. Lifeboat Neoliberalism This book’s method can help explain some of the apparent contradic- tions of the present. Many observers felt that neoliberalism lost its latest life with the victory of Brexit and Trump in 2016. Political diagnoses have pitched an ascendant populism against a degenerate neoliberalism reaping the effects of the inequality and democratic disempowerment it had sown. Yet a closer look at the standard-bearers of the right throws this dichotomy into question. We find that many neoliberals are more than willing to find a middle ground between their own principles and those of an exclusionary culturalist, and even racist, right. To offer a few examples: Antonio Martino, MPS member since 1976 and president from 1988–1990, was a founding member of Forza Italia in 1994 and a minister of foreign affairs and minister of defense in two of Silvio Berlusconi’s governments. A member of the core negotiators in coalition talks for the Austrian Freedom Party (whose slogans included “Vienna must not become Istanbul”) in late 2017 was president of the Friedrich Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm. The leadership of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for whom opposi- tion to migration from majority Muslim countries is central, includes multiple members of the Friedrich Hayek Society, some of whom have been active in Euro-critical parties since the early 1990s. Among the AfD’s founders are Joachim Starbatty, who filed a constitutional complaint against Germany joining the Euro in 1997 and helped found an anti-European party with New Right politician Manfred Brunner in 1994.16 As early as 1993, a Brussels think tank, Centre for the New 16 For this history see Dieter Plehwe, “‘Alternative für Deutschland,’ Alternativen für Europa?” in Europäische Identität in der Krise? Europäische Identitätsforschung und Rechtspopulismusforschung im Dialog, ed. Gudrun Hentges, Kristina Nottbohm, and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017), 249–69; Quinn Slobodian and 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 7 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 7 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 23. 8 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe Europe, was founded under the direction of MPS member Hardy Bouillon, criticizing EU policy. In the late 1990s, German neoliberals like Detmar Doering and Roland Vaubel were among the few to openly theorize and demand a right of secession in the EU with emphasis on the salutary nature of fragmentation and competition. Symptomatically, Doering wrote a column in 1999 attempting to rehabilitate the category of social Darwinism.17 Although the EU is described regularly as a neoliberal federation, there are clear forerunners to Brexit in neoliberal networks. One sees this in the European Conservatives and Reformers Group (ECR) and the affiliated Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformers, both established in 2009 and led by British Conservatives. The Prague decla- ration of the ECR, prepared by Tories and the Liberal Institute led by MPS member and former Czech president Václav Klaus, emphasized economic not political freedom as the foundation of individual freedom and national prosperity.18 At the MPS meeting in South Korea in 2017, Klaus voiced typical xenophobic “populist” themes, saying that “mass migration into Europe . . . threatens to destroy European society and to create a new Europe which would be very different from the past as well as from MPS way of thinking [sic].”19 Referring to far-right parties in France, Austria, Germany, and Italy, he said: “The people are starting to open their eyes, to look around, to speak out, to express their dissatisfac- tion with the brave new world without freedom and democracy, with the world heralding relativism, with the suppression of old values, tradi- tions, customs and habits, with the world of new aristocracies.”20 Already in 2014 at an MPS meeting in Hong Kong, Klaus had made it clear that “to protect liberty . . . we need to rehabilitate the sovereign nation- state . . . We need responsible citizens anchored in domestic realities, not cosmopolitan, selfish individuals ‘floating’ at the surface and search- ing for short-term pleasures and advantages—without roots and Dieter Plehwe, “Neoliberals against Europe,” in William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, eds. Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Ruptures (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 17 Detmar Doering, “‘Sozialdarwinismus’ Die unterschwellige Perfidie eines Schlagwortes,” Eigentümlich Frei 2, no. 6 (1999). 18 The declaration is available at http://ecrgroup.eu/about-us/our-history. 19 Václav Klaus, “Mont Pèlerin Society Speech in Korea” (2017), 12, available at montpelerin.org. 20 Ibid., 16. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 8 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 8 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 24. Introduction 9 responsibility.”21 Along with parties organized in the AECR, the far- right parties invoked by Klaus share the rejection of an ever-closer European Union and insist on a Europe of nations. Yet even as they reject free migration, they retain the other three freedoms of European integration: those of goods, services, and capital. The new variety of conservative-neoliberal perspectives combines uninhibited economic liberalism with limited mobility of people and a new attention to the sociological—and sociobiological—necessity of cultural homogeneity as a basis for order. To understand the current convergence of far-right and neoliberal thought, it is helpful to return to the philosopher and ecologist Garrett Hardin’s essay on “lifeboat ethics” from 1974, subtitled “the argument against helping the poor.”22 Hardin is best known for his idea of the “tragedy of the commons” from 1968.23 While some take this to be a call for regulatory intervention, Hardin clarified his own understanding in collaboration with the self-professed free market environmentalist and MPS member John Baden. To be used according to economic princi- ples, nature had to be commodified, declared the founder of so-called New Resource Economics. The solution to problems of scarcity was neither free access nor regulation but management according to prop- erty rights and price signals.24 Hardin proposed his system of “lifeboat ethics” in response to contemporary concerns over ecology, overpopulation and migration, including The Limits to Growth report published by the Club of Rome in 1972. He opposed the spaceship earth metaphor—introduced by Adlai Stevenson and developed by Barbara Ward—for implying central lead- ership in the form of a captain that did not exist. Against the idea of global planning, he posed nation-states trapped in a realist game of global anarchy with relations between states depending on relative strength. Given the limited resources of the lifeboat nation, stranded 21 Václav Klaus, “Careless Opening up of Countries (without Keeping the Anchor of the Nation-State) Leads Either to Anarchy or to Global Governance: Lessons of the European Experience,” Speech at the Mont Pèlerin Society General Meeting, Hong Kong (July 23, 2014), 16, available at montpelerin.org. 22 Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Argument Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today 8 (1974): 38–43. 23 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, New Series 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–8. 24 Garrett Hardin and John Baden, eds, Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 9 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 9 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 25. 10 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe swimmers (read: migrants) could not be taken aboard without endan- gering the lives of others through overtaxing limited resources. Prefiguring the later anti-immigration slogan “the boat is full,” Hardin’s ethics posited the inhumanity of wealthier, more economically efficient nations as a utilitarian necessity. In his final book, Hayek referred to Hardin in a section titled “the calcu- lus of costs is a calculus of lives.” Expanding on his ideas of cultural evolu- tionary progress measured in the quality and quantity of lives, Hayek suggested that humans could be ranked by utility: “The good hunter or defender of the community, the fertile mother and perhaps even the wise old man may be more important than most babies and most of the aged.” “The requirement of preserving the maximum number of lives,” he wrote, “is not that all individual lives be regarded as equally important.”25 The far-right strain of neoliberalism deploys a similarly dispassionate calculus of human lives. The national community is not privileged for its transcendent value (in the Herderian sense of the Volk) but because of the utility of cultural homogeneity for stability and the accumulated cognitive capital of the population in industrialized nations. Combining critiques of foreigners and the welfare state with calls for closed borders and private property rights has become standard fare for right-wing neoliberals in the new millennium. A case in point is Erich Weede, sociology professor, MPS member since 1992, and leader of the right wing of the German Hayek Society. In an article from 2016, Weede, who has argued for the genetic basis of differential “human capital” endowments and has correlated economic growth to IQ, called for the closing and fortification of borders to prevent the influx of refugees. Using an intergenerational zero-sum logic, he wrote that “one must not forget that governments are always dispensing other people’s money—or in the case of higher and rising state debts, even the money of underage and yet unborn tax payers. Those who give governments the free- dom to do good for foreigners must by necessity take freedom and property away from citizens.”26 Lifeboat neoliberalism sees empathy as feckless state spending, and openness to foreigners as a downgrading of human capital. 25 F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 132. 26 Erich Weede, “Vertragen die alternden europäischen Sozialstaaten die Massenzu- wanderung, die wir haben?” Orientierungen zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik no. 143 (June 2016): 64. On the intellectual history see Quinn Slobodian, “Anti-68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right,” Cultural Politics 15 no. 3 (2019): 372–86. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 10 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 10 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 26. Introduction 11 Rather than posing a globalist neoliberalism against a neo- nationalist and social conservative populism, we must remain mindful of the elasticity of neoliberal norms and principles. Principles of competition, private property, and consumer sovereignty can be tied to human rights, multicultural tolerance, and recognition of minori- ties as well as exclusionary bonds based in culture and race. Neither left nor right had much affinity to neoliberal-style individualism historically. But the advance of neoliberal worldviews expanded certain ideas at the expense of competing notions of individualism and solidarity. Social democracy has become less concerned with redistribution under the impact of advancing neoliberal understand- ings of social life, while conservatism has become less concerned with tradition under the impact of advancing neoliberal understandings of competitiveness. The way in which neoliberal core ideas have made inroads and been absorbed by competing worldviews is among the most important reasons for the longevity of neoliberalism in spite of the perceptions of its eternal crisis. The task at hand is twofold: observe the historical development and expansion of neoliberal ideas, or the morphology of neoliberal world- views in their own right, while also tracking the linkages of elements of those worldviews to competing ideologies, or the mixed morphologies of both conservative-neoliberal and progressive-neoliberal perspec- tives. Both more progressive and conservative fusions with neoliberal- ism result in patterns of exclusive solidarity: progressive neoliberals preach recognition but not redistribution, and conservative neoliberals abandon the humanitarian face of social order. Once belief and trust in mutual and comprehensive solidarity is lost, communities of competi- tion constitute themselves against one another: core workforce against peripheral workers, rich communities against poor, and so on. The current fusion of neoliberalism and right-wing populism is a consequence of the unleashed notion of the competition state, the competition region, and the competitive units of and within the enter- prise. The social reproduction of the moral underpinnings of neoliberal order—communitarian notions of self-help and caring, social responsi- bility for those in close proximity—can be regarded as compensation for social redistribution and welfare, but it may not develop fast enough or at the same speed as the centrifugal notions of selfishness and competi- tiveness. Only time will tell when neoliberalism will use up its next—or even final—life. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 11 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 11 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 27. 12 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe Chapter Outline The chapters of this book introduce domains of neoliberal theory unfa- miliar to many and offer revisionist perspectives on supposedly well- worn truths about what neoliberalism is. The book begins with the question of knowledge itself. The limitation of human cognition is a leit- motif in neoliberal theory. The origin of the axiom that the mass of tacit human knowledge coordinated without direction by market actors trumps any attempt at centralized knowledge production, most often associated with Hayek, is rooted in debates in the philosophy of science dating before 1945. Martin Beddeleem’s chapter explains the innovative character and the strength of neoliberal epistemology vis-à-vis tradi- tional liberal epistemologies of empiricism and naturalism (based on a priori assumptions) on the one hand, and universal positivist episte- mologies prevalent in both socialist and conservative Vienna Circles on the other. Faced with the scientific and rationalist optimism of the unity of science movement as well as much of Marxism, a cohort of early neoliberal philosophers of science, including Michael Polanyi, Hayek, Karl Popper, and Louis Rougier, developed a new epistemology of criti- cal conventionalism. Separating the spheres of lawful exact knowledge from social spheres in which precise knowledge was impossible due to the dispersed, tacit, and opaque character of the subject, neoliberals intervened in the fields of both epistemology and public policy. Arguing for the unavoidability of human ignorance became an important precon- dition for granting the market (and, by extension, its most powerful actors) superior powers of cognition and coordination. Abstract debates happened in concrete places. We still know remark- ably little about how neoliberals reacted to changes in their own primary places of employment—universities—and what influence, if any, they had on higher education. Understanding this history is pressing in light of present-day concerns about “the neoliberal university” and the shift from permanent faculty to adjunct labor, the restructuring of funding in pursuit of patents and other marketable research outcomes, the perva- sive discourses of impact, customer (student) experience, and realign- ment to forms of training rewarded by high post-graduate salaries. In his chapter, Edward Nik-Khah follows one such storyline through Chicago economist George Stigler. Beginning as an advocate of trustees as guardians of academic freedom against the student-as-customer, Stigler shifted after the campus unrest of the late 1960s towards a distrust 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 12 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 12 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 28. Introduction 13 of trustees themselves. He ended by advocating that research be hived off from instruction. Instead, privately funded institutes should produce knowledge directly respondent to the demands of the broader marketplace. Neoliberalism’s nine lives can only be understood as a chain of such transformations over time. In 1937, Lionel Robbins wrote that “true liberals should want more property all round, not less.”27 Mises compli- mented him on the line in a letter, saying he would use the sentence as a motto for the new edition of his book.28 While such a statement may seem like a truism, paying attention to the transformations of neoliberal theory teaches one to be suspicious of eternal principles. Quinn Slobodian’s chapter shows that the dictum of “more property” was far from the stance on patents and copyright taken by many neoliberals who felt that weaker rather than stronger property rights in ideas would produce better outcomes. While arguments from Chicago School think- ers like Stigler himself were central to the emerging intellectual property regime of the 1980s and beyond, Austrian and libertarian neoliberals continue to be forceful and sometimes radical critics of existing IP rights. Understanding neoliberalism requires first disaggregating the competing claims of different neoliberal factions and then asking which ideas are translated into policy and why. One might also assume that the sphere of personal sexual freedom would be honored as sacrosanct by neoliberals on the principle of live- and-let-live as long as lifestyle choices could be commodified and marketed. In fact, as Melinda Cooper shows, neoliberal thinkers promoted various forms of intervention into the private sphere of kinship and marriage on the principle of offloading (and financializ- ing) state responsibilities for welfare onto the family unit. Actual exist- ing neoliberalism in the US since the Reagan era has required the parallel discourse of social conservatism. Far from simply dissolving society down to atomistic consumer-entrepreneurs, family ties and family values were necessary to substitute for the shredded social safety net. The reduction of neoliberal theory to market fundamentalism is one of the most misleading tendencies in comprehending it as a body of 27 Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London: Macmillan and Co., 1937), 265. 28 Mises to Robbins, May 8, 1937. LSE Archive, Robbins Papers, Box 128. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 13 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 13 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 29. 14 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe thought. In fact, the neoliberal project from the 1930s onward was about charting a route between laissez-faire and planning, between universal scientific optimism and anti-scientific nihilism, and between a belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism and a belief in its natural stability. Dieter Plehwe traces the engagement of neoliberals with one of the most notorious prophets of capitalism’s decline, Joseph A. Schumpeter. Plehwe shows how neoliberals revived and revised Schumpeter’s under- standing of the entrepreneur. Israel Kirzner, Herbert Giersch, and others grafted Schumpeter onto the theories of Ludwig von Mises, universal- izing the concept of the entrepreneur and extending it from a discrete sociological group to each and every human. Entrepreneurship in the new sense of entrepreneurial management of the self and others was not the only field defining the current Zeitgeist where neoliberals left their mark. The recent boom in behavioral economics, marked by the Nobel Memorial Prize for Richard Thaler in 2017, is often described as a refutation of the supposedly one- dimensional models of human behavior native to neoliberal thought. Yet this dichotomy relies on a false contrast and glosses over the many links between the two fields. Rüdiger Graf concentrates on the over- looked case of Günther Schmölders. As a member of the Nazi party and SSfrom1933onward,andMPSpresidentfrom1968to1970,Schmölders was the proponent of an idiosyncratic strain of behavioral economics in Germany. Graf shows the multiple political uses to which behavioral economic approaches can be put—to both limit state power and extend it into new domains. If neoliberal theory shares some moments of origin with behavio- ral economics, it does so with the field of international relations as well. Hagen Schulz-Forberg sheds new light on the early discussion of the interrelation of national and international order by looking at the role of neoliberals in networks linked to the League of Nations, including the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, organized under the aegis of the League’s International Intellectual Committees. Many of those involved in international networks in the wake of World War I and the Great Depresssion no longer believed that capitalism was a self-stabilizing system. The alleged correlation of trade and peace required rules and supranational institutions. The intellectual discus- sions of the 1920s and 1930s helped pave the way for the Mont Pèlerin Society effort, but also for the discipline of international relations after 1945. The guiding principle for both was not democracy as a 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 14 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 14 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 30. Introduction 15 principle in itself, but the stability of the free market order at the national and international levels. One of the central debates that carried over from the League of Nations to the postwar period was about money and the global monetary order. Was it possible to return to a gold standard or was fiat money under systems of fixed or flexible exchange rates unavoidable? In the early twenty-first century, neoliberalism would seem to mean, if anything, the approval of the “casino capitalism” of deregulated financial markets, spec- ulative capital flows, and floating currency exchange rates. Yet, Matthias Schmelzer shows that, while the core faith in the right of capital to move across borders was shared by all neoliberals, the debate over monetary order split the Mont Pèlerin Society into warring factions in the 1950s and 1960s as the older gold bugs faced off against the younger advocates of floating, including Milton Friedman. Far from being a merely technical discussion relevant only to experts and bankers, the choice about fixed or floating exchange rates had huge consequences for both democratic governance and the volatility of the global capitalist system. Even as it is denigrated as the “dismal science,” economics reigns supreme in the public mind as the social science with the most influ- ence on policy. One of the signs of the authority of the discipline is the awarding of a Nobel Prize in Economics—an honor shared by no other social science. In his chapter on the “Ersatz Nobel Prize,” Philip Mirowski emphasizes the relevance of cultural institutions for the rise and staying power of neoliberalism by recounting the genesis of the “Memorial Prize in Honor of Alfred Nobel” a half-century after the other prizes. He recounts a powerful confluence of contingency and purposeful strategy in the creation of the prize by a group of officials and economists of the Swedish Riksbank united in opposition to the Swedish welfare state in the 1960s. Mirowski details the Swedish push for modern American neoclassical economics and the right wing of neoliberal economics through the strategic selection of committee members and candidates. The eight “Nobels” enjoyed by organized neoliberals in the Mont Pèlerin Society, and the considerably larger number of prizes for work in the realm of neoliberal economics, testify to the way in which the institution has served to validate one perspec- tive of many in the discipline of economics. However significant within the field of economics, the role of the Riksbank Nobel pales in comparison to the importance of think tanks as platforms and megaphones for neoliberal ideas. While the role of think 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 15 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 15 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 31. 16 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe tanks has been observed by journalists and scholars since the 1980s, empirical studies of their organization and activity remain surprisingly rare. An important case in point is the Atlas Economic Foundation (later Atlas Network), started in the early 1980s by Antony Fisher, the founder of the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs. Marie-Laure Djelic and Reza Mousavi trace the development of the Atlas Network under the long-term leadership of the Argentine economist Alejandro Chafuen, from a modest network of fifteen think tanks in nine countries in the mid-1980s to a partnership of 457 in ninety-six countries. Beyond strongholds in North America and Europe (both West and East), the network is strong in Latin America and has reached significant member- ship in the Asia-Pacific Region and even Africa. In only a few decades, Atlas moved from the equivalent of small trade or handcraft to mass production, creating replicable templates for the production and diffu- sion of neoliberal ideas. Stephan Pühringer also follows ideas in action, using empirical meth- ods to evaluate the influence of neoliberalism on policy in Germany—a connection more often asserted than proven. Pühringer tracks the insti- tutional affiliation and public impact of 800 German economists from 1945 to 1995. Comparing neoliberal to Keynesian economists, he finds an extremely uneven power structure in the discipline of economics in favor of the former. Taken as a whole, this book seeks to move the study of neoliberalism beyond what has become a set of clichés that inhibit rather than advance understanding of the larger phenomenon. The chapters demonstrate varieties of neoliberal epistemology beyond market worship, and proposals for policy beyond a bullet-point list of edicts. They outline a vision of subjectivity beyond the atomized utility-maximizing individ- ual, and of organization beyond the shock doctrine. Grasping neoliber- alism in its complexity will help its opponents better identify their antagonist, and its advocates contend both with the departures from classical liberalism and with the absence of a unified theory. Recent splits within the neoliberal universe like the founding of the Property and Freedom Society by racialist right-wing libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe, or the failure of cosmopolitan neoliberals to purge the social conservative right-wing neoliberals from Germany’s Hayek Society, should not be read prematurely as signs of disintegration. There has, however, certainly been a stronger dose of serious conflict in the neolib- eral camp, and we can expect more of it in the face of serious challenges 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 16 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 16 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 32. Introduction 17 to the competitive order in issues like climate change, growing inequal- ity, and mass human mobility. The founding neoliberal group’s emphasis on the inviolability of the human and the epistemological baseline of human ignorance presents increasing difficulties for those who focus mainly if not exclusively on the maintenance of property rights, freedom of contract, and the praise- worthiness of endless competition. There are areas where neoliberalism appears to fail to reproduce the conditions on which its existence is based. Will the challenge of climate change and the depletion of natural resources lead to a modification of neoliberal thinking, or will the oscil- lating appeals to human ignorance and the superior wisdom of the market march capitalist civilization to its final extinction? Nine lives may be long but, at least theoretically, they are finite. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 17 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 17 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 33. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 18 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 18 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 34. PART ONE NEOLIBERAL SCIENCE BEYOND MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 19 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 19 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 35. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 20 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 20 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 36. 1 Recoding Liberalism: Philosophy and Sociology of Science against Planning Martin Beddeleem Our often unconscious views on the theory of knowledge and its central problems (“What can we know?,” “How certain is our knowledge?”) are decisive for our attitude towards ourselves and towards politics. Karl Popper In the wake of the global financial crisis, the resilience of contemporary neoliberalism confounded its detractors who expected its “zombie economics” and obsolete policy models to give way to new horizons of expectations. Usually, these predictions focused either on a superficial reading of the defeat of neoliberalism-qua-austerity or insisted that its systemic flaws had ruined any remnant of its legitimacy.1 More skepti- cal authors remarked that, far from suffering from a sudden collapse, neoliberalism has never been more palpable than in times of crisis, when it reinvents itself by metabolizing the criticisms leveled at it or by entrenching its dominance over the policy debate.2 To be sure, neoliberalism owes its ideological fluidity and staying power to a hegemonic position among economic elites. Yet this puzzling continuity only becomes clearer once its epistemological fabric comes 1 Cf. Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress,2013);GérardDuménilandDominiqueLévy,TheCrisisofNeoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 21 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 21 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 37. 22 Martin Beddeleem into view. Through recent decades, neoliberals have demonstrated an uncanny ability to forsake obsolete theories and models in order to produce seemingly fresh answers to the repeated crises they have encountered. Although the original agenda of neoliberalism has been revised many times over, its programmatic ambition and scientific reach have steadily increased. Commonly overlooked, this scientific dyna- mism, sponsored by private foundations, relayed by think tanks, and embedded within the “marketplace of ideas,” remains at the very heart of the neoliberal project today. Since its inception, the problem space shared by neoliberals has been spread out on a modernist canvas, one which contrasted sharply with conservatives, reactionaries and old-fashioned liberals. During the inter- war period, self-proclaimed neoliberals dismantled and recoded the unpopular laissez-faire liberalism with epistemological ideas adapted from the “new scientific spirit” of the early twentieth century.3 Breaking with naturalism and empiricism, they espoused a research program inspiredbymathematicalandphysicalconventionalism,onethatbalanced a skeptical epistemology with a commitment to scientific progress and objectivity. To this end, methodological rules were pivotal to the recon- struction of a genuine science of liberalism which had fallen into disrepute. This agenda aimed at regaining the political ground lost to ‘collectivism’ in the twentieth century by tackling two sets of problems left aside by ‘classi- cal’ liberals: the positive role of the state and the social question. While laying this epistemological groundwork, neoliberals battled competing claims about the nature of science, its history, and its posi- tion in society by actively reshaping ideas about academic freedom, the discovery of knowledge, and their relationship with political institutions and social reform. Faced with the scientific and rationalist optimism of the unity of science movement as well as much of Marxism, early neolib- erals demarcated and defended a liberal science against progressive scientists who promoted science as the midwife of social change. Crucially, they developed a new theory of knowledge-in-society which fused together philosophy of science and political economy into a single set of hypotheses. In these debates, concerns about the role of science in society linked up with the most pressing political question of the day: the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. 3 See Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [1934]). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 22 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 22 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 38. Recoding Liberalism 23 Neoliberalism was thus born out of a collision between the contro- versial importation of the methods and authority of the experimen- tal sciences into politics on the one hand, and the acknowledgement of the social and political conditions for the discovery and justifica- tion of knowledge on the other. It made the pursuit of knowledge and truth a political question, and gave the question of social order an epistemological answer: what we can do depends ultimately on what we can know. Nevertheless, this proclivity for epistemological investigations did not imply a unity of views among neoliberals, nor that their conclusions were devoid of political motivations. Moreover, in their contention to reclaiming the mantle of science, neoliberals shared many premises with progressive scientists regarding the posi- tion and “function” of science in society. This apparent paradox explains both the fluidity of neoliberal thinking and the inspiration it has drawn from its detractors at a sociological and organizational level, two dimensions still relevant today in accounting for the stead- iness of neoliberalism and its success in cannibalizing competing ideas. The first part of this chapter situates the scientific controversies in which neoliberal philosophers of science developed their intuitions. The second part revisits the socialist calculation debate as the cradle of their epistemological arguments for the superiority of the market. The third part deals with their common fight against the planning of science and the reciprocal relation they established between liberal institutions and the conduct of science. Vienna The early twentieth-century breakthroughs in relativity theory, quan- tum mechanics, and non-Euclidean geometry had in common an encounter with phenomena from premises which were counter- intuitive to a natural or rational picture of the world. Unshackling foun- dational axioms from fitting any “realist,” “naturalist” or “a priori” presuppositions unleashed extraordinary debates and ingenuity in the advancement of these disciplines. While scientists retreated from their pretension to describe the “real” world, their quest for new theories and assumptions, which combined methodological inventiveness and instrumental needs, became boundless. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 23 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 23 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 39. 24 Martin Beddeleem Neoliberalism owes its scientific imagination to the strong contingent of philosophers of science who participated in its elaboration. Michael Polanyi, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek, among others, were all refugees and exiles from Austria and Hungary who were immersed in the scientific world and volatile political situation of the interwar period. They unanimously perceived the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a disaster,4 respon- sible for the rise of an antagonistic politics pitting nationalism and conservatism against the growing communist movement. At that time, Vienna underwent one of the most radical municipal experiments of the twentieth century with the large-scale social policies promoted by the Austrian Socialist Party. In 1919, the philosopher and socialist educator Otto Neurath, president of the Central Planning Office in the short- lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, advocated a centrally planned economy in which money would be abolished and exchange would be made in kind. Before the war, Neurath had been a participant in the seminar led by Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, along with Joseph Schumpeter, Otto Bauer, Emil Lederer, and Ludwig von Mises, who remembered him, in his words, for the “nonsense” he presented with “fanatical fervor.”5 The refutation of Neurath’s scheme published in 1920 by Mises trig- gered the Planwirtschaft (planned economy) debate in Vienna, wherein Mises argued that economic calculation was naive and unmanageable without the indispensable role of prices as signals of the relative value of factors of production. Against Neurath’s desire to institute a scien- tific management of the economy, Mises claimed that the complexity of the economic system made its apprehension in one mind or place so difficult as to be near impossible. The debate received considerable attention, in part because physics and economics had displaced theol- ogy as the main subjects for intellectual debate in Vienna. Within both disciplines, the Austrian scientific “culture of uncertainty” was unique in Europe: their embrace of probabilistic theory “was tied to a 4 Popper writes in his autobiography that “the breakdown of the Austrian Empire and the aftermath of the First World War, the famine, the hunger riots in Vienna, and the runaway inflation [. . .] destroyed the world in which I had grown up.” Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 31. 5 See Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to F. A. Hayek, Socialism and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 24 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 24 10/03/2020 13:59:54 10/03/2020 13:59:54
- 40. Recoding Liberalism 25 characteristically liberal and anticlerical rejection of absolute claims,”6 and “philosophers who challenged certitude often led efforts for social reform and popular scientific education.”7 As a matter of fact, Austrian Marxism itself was unique in drawing heavily on the ideas of Ernst Mach as it blended socialist economics with a positivist philosophy of science in the hope of attaining a truly scientific socialism. A rare fluidity existed, then, between the new discoveries of the physical sciences, their impact upon philosophical debates, and their transla- tion into economic theories or social reforms. Though Mises never held a formal appointment at the University of Vienna, his Privatseminar became the meeting place for a new genera- tion of liberal economists—first among them Hayek—wherein the discussions ranged from sociology and psychology to logic and episte- mology, with a strong interest in the “methodological and philosophical foundations of economics.”8 Participants were kept abreast of the latest philosophical developments through the participation of Felix Kaufmann, who was a member of the Vienna Circle formed in 1924 by philosopher Moritz Schlick. In its manifesto of 1929, the Vienna Circle had expressed confidently that a scientific approach to social problems based on empiricism and logic ought to shape economic and social life in accordance with rational principles. In addition to Neurath, many of its important members like Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Philip Frank had socialist convictions and conceived the philosophical work of the Circle as intimately connected with the rationalization of politics and progressive social change. In its early days, the logical positivist movement had a distinctly political flavor. Their unified and scientific world conception provided the philosophical and methodological basis for the integration of everyday life with politics and science, aiming at a comprehensive reform of society along egalitarian lines. 6 Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism and Private Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13. 7 Malachi H. Hacohen, “Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle, and Red Vienna,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 4 (1998): 718. 8 F. A. Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27. Hayek was also a founder of the “Geist circle” which comprised Herbert Fürth, Friedrich Engel-Janosi, Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann, and Karl Menger. Alfred Schutz elaborated his Phenomenology of the Social World (1932) indiscussionwithAustriansocialtheory,ashesoughttoreconcileHusserlianphilosophy with the subjectivist standpoint of the Austrians. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 25 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 25 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 41. 26 Martin Beddeleem The positivist philosophy of science of the Vienna Circle became conflated, in the minds of their opponents, with socialist politics and economics. Neurath’s radical politics repelled someone like Hayek, who credited the former’s “extreme” and “naive” views on economics with his conversion from positivism.9 In 1935, Karl Popper published in German The Logic of Scientific Discovery, his epistemological critique of the posi- tivist premises of the Vienna Circle. Neurath and Carnap were singled out for their defense of physicalism: the view that scientific theories are little more than a formal system of signs with their corresponding rules for application—a “practical analog” to social reality. Against their “logi- cal empiricism,” Popper proposed that theory and experience constantly modify each other through criticism to such an extent that “the empiri- cal basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it.” Instead he famously proclaimed that science did not “rest upon solid bedrock” since “the bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp.”10 The falsification device favored by Popper to test the validity of theories did not convince the rest of the Vienna Circle, and Neurath remained adamant that Popper’s view of science as a permanent revolution neither reflected scientific practice nor served it well. Paradoxically, Neurath and Popper were much closer to each other than to some other Circle members. Both embraced a revised conventionalism, combining anti-absolutism and non-foundationalism, which discarded the view that scientific knowledge “corresponded” to reality. More impor- tantly, Popper renounced any psychological foundation for knowledge, something which later became important for Hayek’s own rupture with Mises’s a priori praxeology of human action. In the cases of both Hayek and Popper, the distance they took from their initial intellectual environ- ments entailed an epistemological argument that science could not rely on either deductive apodictic structures nor empirically derived protocols to guarantee its validity. Instead, they reckoned that truth corresponded to theresultofanintersubjectiveprocess—thereby“socializingepistemology.”11 The heuristics of this process depended on three interrelated provisions: the methodology employed for discovery and justification, the design of its 9 Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 157. 10 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002), 93–4. 11 Jeremy Shearmur, “Epistemology Socialized?” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 42, no. 3 (1985): 272–82; Ian C. Jarvie, The Republic of Science: The Emergence of Popper’s Social View of Science 1935–1945 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 26 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 26 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 42. Recoding Liberalism 27 institutions, and the values shared by the participants. In the end, the epis- temological conditions of truth and of social order ultimately shared the same foundations: that of conventional rules which could be revised and improved according to an established method. The existence of the Vienna Circle had been equally crucial for its only Frenchmemberandothermajorphilosopherofsciencewithinearlyneolib- eralism: Louis Rougier. Although one of its most unsung representatives, Rougier charted the clearest path among early neoliberals for an epistemo- logical critique of rival political ideologies (on Rougier see Schulz-Forberg’s chapter in this volume). His portrayal of socialism as a scientific fallacy originated in his early epistemological works in which he rejected the valid- ity of all opodictic truths. Following Henri Poincaré, Rougier proposed that a scientific proposition, instead of being either a rational truth a priori, or an empirical truth a posteriori, could be a “hypothesis” or an “optional conven- tion” picked for reasons of practical or theoretical convenience and tacitly accepted as such by the scientific community.12 Poincaré’s geometrical conventionalism, once extended to all disciplines, pointed to a “third way” which preserved the possibility of scientific objectivity while acknowledg- ing the artificiality of reasoning and truth. Rougier’s real foe, however, was not so much rationalism as a philo- sophical system than as a political doctrine. He contended that the spirit and ideas of the French Revolution, originating in classical rationalism, had ended up “par une sorte de logique immanente” in egalitarian social- ism.13 For Rougier, political principles merely represented useful conventions suggested by experience. Any philosophical attempt to naturalize or rationalize these axioms must employ a metaphysical discourse that is ultimately unsubstantiated. To some extent, Rougier followed the same epistemological path as Hayek and Popper. Inspired by conventionalism, his criticism of a priori truths convinced him that the determinants of knowledge rested with the scientists themselves and the discrete but rigorous methodological rules they adopted.14 Rougier’s 12 Louis Rougier, Les Paralogismes du rationalisme. Essai sur la théorie de la connaissance (Paris: Alcan, 1920), 439. Rougier’s doctoral dissertation dealt with Poincaré’s geometrical conventionalism. It was published as La philosophie géométrique de Henri Poincaré (Paris: Alcan, 1920). 13 Rougier, Paralogismes, 30. 14 “Contemplating its evolution,” writes Rougier, “the analysis of science now requires that we introduce historical, psychological and sociological considerations. Human science can only be interpreted, in the last instance, with the men who make it, just as the measurements of an instrument can only be interpreted through the theory 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 27 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 27 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 43. 28 Martin Beddeleem community of views with the Verein Ernst Mach in Vienna and Reichenbach’s Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin led him to join both groups, and to attempt to create, without success, a similar society in France: la Société Henri Poincaré. Despite his close acquaint- ance with Neurath, with whom he organized in 1935 the First International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in Paris, Rougier’s philosophy and politics were closer to the “right wing” of the Vienna Circle (Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, Felix Kaufmann) than to the left one.15 Rougier and his Viennese colleagues hoped to demarcate a sphere of knowledge sheltered from the metaphysics inherent to any language, and by extension, to any political ideologies. For Hayek, Rougier, and Popper, the application of the methods of empirical science to social phenomena raised methodological dilemmas, which were superim- posed onto diverging political orientations. While sharing the same imperative as their Viennese counterparts of demarcating a decontested language of science, neoliberal philosophers of science became skeptical of the powers of scientific method to directly shape social reform. Instead, they aspired to emulate the creative rupture they applauded in the philosophy of physics and mathematics to the doctrine of liberal- ism.16 During the interwar period, rival epistemological doctrines came to be deeply interwoven with the political visions they promised to vindicate. Most of the methodological and epistemological disagree- ments which came to light in 1920s Vienna would resurface as the economic crisis of the 1930s called past orthodoxies in economics and the social sciences into question. Clarity and Opacity in the Liberal Order The idea of a planned economy as the answer to the ‘chaos of laissez-faire’ circulated as early as 1929 on the fringes of all British political parties, while the Soviet Union implemented its first Five Year Plan in 1928. of that instrument.” Louis Rougier, “Une philosophie nouvelle: l’empirisme logique, à propos d’un Congrès récent,” La Revue de Paris 43, no. 1 (1936): 194. 15 Mathieu Marion, “Une philosophie politique pour l’empirisme logique?” Philosophia Scientiae CS 7 (2007): 209–10. 16 Another crucial publication illustrating this evolution is Jacques Rueff, From the Physical to the Social Sciences (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1929 [1922]). 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 28 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 28 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 44. Recoding Liberalism 29 “Planning is forced upon us,” wrote one of its most vocal promoters in 1933, “not for idealistic reasons, but because the old mechanism which served us when markets were expanding naturally and spontaneously is no longer adequate when the tendency is in the opposite direction . . . The economic system is out of gear,” concluded Harold Macmillan, echoing the Zeitgeist of post-1929 England.17 Such was the pervasiveness of plan- ning that it became defined as the “middle opinion” of the 1930s, paving the way for the post-World War II consensus on the British welfare state.18 Its popularity owed to the apparent scientificity of its mechanism as well as to the promise of an engineered economy where control and reason would be restored at the hands of the state. The success of the experimen- tal methods in the natural sciences provided a vivid case in point for reformers eager to rein in the growing complexity of the world economy, whereas the discipline of economics was seen to have failed to provide a coherent picture of the crisis or suitable remedies to cure it. Founded in 1931, the British think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP) aspired to design a theory of “capitalist planning” where legislative delegation, expertise oversight, and the cult of the scientific method would make economic policy a mere matter of arbitration between public and private interests. Resolutely pro-business, their proposal was also fiercely anti-free-market, testifying to how unpopular laissez-faire had become with large sections of the business world itself. Not unlike the rhetoric of the New Deal, “rational capitalism,” “orderly economy,” and “scientific planning” were all terms used in contraposi- tion to the “evils of competition” or the “chaos of overproduction.”19 With the exception of Mises, few free market economists on either side of the Atlantic denied that better state controls were needed to rein in the economic crisis.20 Confronted with the popularity of state controls, 17 Harold Macmillan, Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Policy (London: Macmillan, 1933), 18, 23. 18 Arthur Marwick, “Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political ‘Agreement’,” The English Historical Review 79, no. 311 (1964): 285–98. 19 If a wide spectrum of politicians agreed on planning however, no one could reach an understanding as to what it meant and covered: it ranged “from capitalist- sponsored efforts to ‘rationalize’ industries to market socialism to Soviet-style Gosplanning, with Keynes-inspired fiscal ‘planning’ often thrown in for good measure.” Ben Jackson, “At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–1947,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (2010): 139–40. 20 “There is now an imperative need for a sound, positive program of economic legislation,” announced Chicago economist Henry Simons in the opening pages of his 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 29 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 29 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 45. 30 Martin Beddeleem F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi in England, and Walter Lippmann in the United States, independently reached the same conclusion: the feasi- bility of economic planning was not solely a technical problem, but called for a much larger understanding of the epistemological founda- tions of liberalism and its relationship with the market economy. Arriving in England in 1931, Hayek did not simply apply his exper- tise on the German-language calculation debate of the 1920s to the English situation. Rather, his own thinking was transformed by the planning mania of the 1930s. As he emphasized in his inaugural lecture at the LSE, the way forward for liberals was to learn from the failures of free market rhetoric in order to initiate a long-term process of ideologi- cal change. He worried that the masses were deluded by the promise of reason and science to direct social reform. While the scientific econo- mist cautioned against government interference, the layman demanded immediate change in society. The lack of legitimacy of a market econ- omy lay precisely with the hidden nature of the economic problem—the invisibility of Adam Smith’s hand.21 This was the spirit in which Hayek published his contribution to the socialist calculation debate in 1935. He was confident that a technical demonstration of the economic impossibility of socialism was all that was needed to undermine its political appeal, the same way that Mises’s critique had discredited the Austrian socialist plan for a centrally planned economy. His goal was to bring socialism out of the ethical and political realm to wage a scientific battle against it: to subject its ideology and plans of social organization to a scientific examination of their proposed means.22 Hayek’s strategy was two-pronged. On the one hand, the signaling function of prices was reliable for economic decisions and Positive Program for Laissez-faire: “in earlier periods, [our economic organization] could be expected to become increasingly strong if only protected from undue political interference. Now, however, it has reached a condition where it can be saved only through adoption of the wisest measures by the state.” Henry Simons, A Positive Program for Laissez-faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy, Public Policy Pamphlet no. 15 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 2. 21 Hayek wrote in 1935 that “the fact that in the present order of things such economic problems are not solved by the conscious decision of anybody has the effect that most people are not conscious of their existence.” Hayek, Socialism and War, 56. 22 Hayek states in his refutation that “on the validity of the ultimate ends science has nothing to say. They may be accepted or rejected, but they cannot be proved or disproved. All that we can rationally argue about is whether and to what extent given measures will lead to the desired results.” Ibid., 62. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 30 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 30 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 46. Recoding Liberalism 31 forecasts insofar as markets were competitive. Information, as relayed by prices, was not only carried but generated through the market—a crucial insight. On the other hand, this limited the kind of problems that economic science could solve. Widely shared among neoliberals, Hayek’s critique pivoted around one single axis: the (seemingly infinite) cogni- tive function of markets worked hand in hand with the epistemic limita- tions of other disciplines and institutions aiming to correct its workings. Knowledge remained irrevocably local, dispersed, and impossible to centralize; the marketplace produced a continuous stream of new data within the confines of a radical skepticism towards intervention. Like Hayek, Michael Polanyi perceived the obscure workings of economics as demanding both explanation and passivity. After his multiple trips to the Soviet Union as a chemist, he published a detailed study of Soviet statistics demonstrating the failure of the Communist Party to reach the objectives set by their plan. Despite its abysmal record, the genuine support of the population puzzled Polanyi, who spotted in the Soviet propaganda’s displays of “public emotion” a “vivid form of social consciousness” which provided clear purpose and direction to the citizens. At the core of the desire for social revolution in Western socie- ties, he concluded, brewed a frustration with the opacity of the market system, a lack of a refined grasp of its concealed mechanisms.23 Taking it upon himself to correct the situation, Polanyi produced an educational motion picture expounding the workings of a market econ- omy which aimed at embedding in the public spirit an expert under- standing of the economic mechanism.24 Inspired by Keynes’s General Theory, the film centered around the representation of the money belt, streaming from industries, to shops, to consumers, with a central bank regulating the flow of spending and saving. Praising the film’s semiotic properties, which allowed an invisible complex structure to be seen and thus understood, Polanyi was optimistic about its educational impact on the lay masses, hoping it would turn them away from central planning and restore their confidence in a market economy. A society so trans- formed by this effort to publicize the coordinating virtues of markets would fulfil the “promise of liberalism”: the social integration achieved 23 Michael Polanyi, U.S.S.R. Economics: Fundamental Data, System and Spirit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1936). 24 The final version titled “Unemployment and Money” (1940) is available at the following address: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTMdHC_OU2w. Trivial nowadays, the use of film for economic education was entirely novel at the time. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 31 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 31 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 47. 32 Martin Beddeleem in the Soviet Union through public emotion and propaganda could be accomplished in liberal societies through reason and public education. Commending Polanyi as an “exceptionally gifted observer,” Walter Lippmann reflected on the same theme in the opening chapters of his book The Good Society, published in 1937. The complexity of social life appeared to him as an invisible canvas into which our daily interactions were woven. The opacity of the individual psyche veiled a wealth of knowledge which the market artfully and efficiently coordinated. Complete planning, by bringing all the economic processes to the fore, failed to acknowledge the cognitive economy brought forth spontaneously by the division of labor. Once the intrinsic limitations of thought were established, conscious control over social orders became a delusion. “No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of society,” wrote Lippmann, “at best a mind can understand its own version of this scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relations as a silhouette to a man.”25 The opacity of society to our efforts of scientific probing had become so overwhelming that no science of society could form the basis of its conscious control.26 Consequently, the legitimacy of the market economy relied on entrenching these invisible processes within public opinion. Taken together, these arguments against the possibility of planning revolved around the elaboration of two key ideas. First, social knowledge is irremediably divided and dispersed. Second, it is a resource that remains largely implicit and tacit. In his seminal article on “Economics and Knowledge” from 1937, Hayek argued that the assumption of perfect knowledge in economic science was eliding the most important question that the social sciences had to address: “how knowledge is acquired and communicated.”27 Epistemic limitations deriving from the division of 25 Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publisher, 2005 [1937]), 31. 26 Lippmann’s criticism of a socialist economy, however, did not originate with the preparation of The Good Society. Already in 1933, he was familiar with the socialist calculation debate and pointed at the same epistemological argument which Hayek and Polanyi had exposed. Quoting the American Austrian economist Benjamin Anderson, Lippmann stated clearly in his column “Today and Tomorrow” from February 27, 1934 that the state was in no position to intervene in a detailed manner in the economy because “to regulate the business of a country as a whole and to guide and control production there is required a central brain of such vast power that no human being can be expected to supply it.” Cf. Craufurd D. Goodwin, Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 149. 27 F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 46. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 32 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 32 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 48. Recoding Liberalism 33 knowledge had both scientific and political consequences for just how much one (e.g. the state; the planning board; the welfare economist) was capable of knowing and thus of predicting adequately. Neoliberals shared the same critique of planning based on the impossibility of centralizing information efficiently, and the necessity of letting horizontal adjustments substitute for vertical decisions. But there existed an additional epistemo- logical limit to planning. It was not only that social knowledge could not be centralized in one place, but also that it remained largely implicit, that is, tacitly embedded in traditions and customs. In order to articulate a model for a liberal society, neoliberals agreed, one hadtostartfromthecomplexityofexistingorderswherein“wemakeconstant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowl- edge which individually we do not possess.”28 The superiority of competitive marketsdidnotlieonlywiththeputativelyeffortlesscoordinationofthevari- ous individual plans, but stemmed from their capacity to draw out, compute, and value the tacit knowledge carried by the participants. As a result, the neoliberal argument about the superiority of a market economy was predicated upon an epistemology which distinguished between spheres of lawful exact knowledge, and spheres where precise knowledge was impossible because it remained dispersed, tacit, and opaque. This assumption accounted for much of the anti-positivist and anti-reductionist position shared by neoliberals, as well as their insist- ence upon the observation of actions rather than the sociological scan- ning of intentions.29 First rolled out in the analysis of the economic order, these epistemological ground rules were later extended by anal- ogy to all “spontaneously arising orders”: common law, language, aesthetics, traditions, etc.30 By the end of the 1930s, the socialist calcula- tion debate had been reframed in terms of the defence of liberalism against totalitarianism, giving political leverage to epistemological argu- ments which had been originally devised to discredit the idea of economic planning. Far from evident at the outset, this recoding has become a hallmark of neoliberal thinking. 28 Ibid., 88. 29 In his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Michel Foucault clearly identified this core element in the neoliberal theory but attributed it mainly to the social theory of Gary Becker. The postulate of a sociologicalanti-reductionismwithinneoliberalismwasinstrumentalfromthebeginning. 30 Michael Polanyi, “The Growth of Thought in Society,” Economica 8 (1941): 432. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 33 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 33 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 49. 34 Martin Beddeleem The Mantle of Science Beyond economics, the 1930s also proved to be a pivotal decade in the discipline of the history of science, a period “when radical historicist messages from Central Europe and the new Soviet Union combined with local antiquarian cultures into historiographical and institutional changes.”31 The movement for the planning of science gained promi- nence in the United Kingdom after a Russian delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin stunned the Second International Congress for the History of Science held in London in 1931.32 The audience, largely scientists and amateurs, had been unprepared to hear the discourse of dialectical materialism applied to the history of science. What sounded like a Martian language to some was a revelation to others. Relating scientific discovery to historical processes, Soviet scientists openly challenged the dominant internalist accounts of progress and discovery in science. These birth pangs of the externalist account of the history of science activated an intense scrutiny over the possibility and desirability of planning in science. Many left-leaning scientists and intellectuals visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s looking for an alternate model for the organization of science and railed against the “frustration of science” felt in Europe because of its lack of coordination and planning. This conference, remarked Edward Shils, “led an important bloc of British scientists to support the Marxist theses that all scientific work, however abstruse, is a witting or unwitting response to the practical problems confronting the society or the ruling classes of the society in which the scientists live.”33 Pure research meant nothing on its own, but constituted a preparatory step to applied science and, ultimately, social change. At the same time, many natural scientists themselves supported a wider application of science to social problems, promoting its rational- ity and tangibility over the dead-end of partisan shibboleths. The fact that economic planning had been infused with scientific credibility 31 Anna-K. Mayer, “Setting up a Discipline, II: British History of Science and ‘the End of Ideology,’ 1931–1948,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35, no. 1 (2004): 43. 32 The papers given by the Russian delegation were published together a couple of days after the end of the Congress and were widely disseminated. See N. I. Bukharin, ed., Science at the Cross-Roads (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971 [1931]). 33 Edward Shils, “A Critique of Planning: The Society for Freedom in Science,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 3, no. 3 (1947): 80. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 34 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 34 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 50. Recoding Liberalism 35 granted a good measure of legitimacy to sympathetic scientists. They were to be the “men of science” or “experts” in charge of rationalising the economy and the administration. In his 1933 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the President of the Royal Society Frederick G. Hopkins applauded the use of science to solve social problems, adding that “the trained scientific mind must play its part” in the current debates on planning.34 Under the leadership of J. D. Bernal, P. M. S. Blackett, Joseph Needham, and Lancelot Hogben, the “social relations of science move- ment” put forward a fuller integration of society, industry, and science, in which the latter, rationally planned and emancipated from capitalism, would fulfil its natural object of serving human welfare. They adopted the conclusion of Soviet scientists that “only in a socialist society will science genuinely belong to all mankind.”35 Capitalism, they thought, had led to a scientific regression, introducing competition between researchers “when what is really needed is more science applied to the convenience of living instead of to profit-making.”36 Bernal, their most vocal spokesperson, denounced liberalism as the method of chaos, “spontaneously grown,” hindering the use of knowledge in society because innovation was corrupted by private profiteering. On the contrary, communism as a political system bore the closest resemblance to the collaborative method used by researchers.37 The challenge of “Bernalism,” and its continuous influence during World War II, vastly influenced the orientation of neoliberalism. Epistemological battles around the scientific method reverberated as a political and ideological argument over the best form of govern- ment. The formative political activities of neoliberals during the 1930s were chiefly set against natural scientists promoting socialism and planning as the logical extrapolation of a scientific worldview 34 Frederick G. Hopkins, “Some Chemical Aspects of Life,” Nature 132, no. 3332 (1933): 394. 35 Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’,” in Science at the Cross-Roads, ed. Bukharin, 212. 36 See Daniel A. Hall, ed., The Frustration of Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), 60. 37 “The task which the scientists have undertaken,” Bernal concluded in his Social Function of Science, “the understanding and control of nature and of man himself, is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society . . . in its endeavour, science is communism.” J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939), 415. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 35 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 35 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 51. 36 Martin Beddeleem and organization. They are set to show that the scientific community, far from embodying an archetypal communist society, represented, on the contrary, the incarnation of a liberal order guided by the scientific method. As the 1930s progressed, it became increasingly obvious that scien- tific research in totalitarian countries was impaired to a large extent. The academic purge in Nazi Germany and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union had laid bare the gradual submission of science to ideological purposes. This spectacle, Rougier admitted, had proven to him through “the absurd, the necessity and the soundness of liberalism.” He portrayed the mystique soviétique as a new form of “state religion,” “whose particular- ity is to present itself as . . . the highest synthesis of the totality of scien- tific knowledge.”38 Rougier’s portrait of the state of the Soviet Union was one of complete failure in all domains, as whole areas of scientific research, notably genetics, had been deemed incompatible with ortho- dox Marxist-Leninism. The gradual alignment of Russian scientific research with the Soviet ideology equally disturbed Polanyi, who set chemistry aside and endeavored to write about the nature of science specifically in reaction to the Vavilov-Lysenko controversy. He condemned the corruption of Russian science, where the authority of science had been replaced “by that of the State,” and advocated the self- government of science to restore the “independence of scientific opinion.”39 Polanyi argued that both science and truth were lost when- ever political liberty fell, as independent thought was subjugated to temporal powers. Therefore, there existed “a common fate between independent science and political liberty.”40 A free society cultivated science as the boundless quest for new truths whose ultimate uncer- tainty lay at the core of the liberal values of tolerance and freedom of conscience: science under political direction was thus bound to become an instrument of propaganda. Both Hayek and Polanyi were looking for ways to defeat the “scient- ism” and “scientific socialism” which they felt dominated the media and the public intelligentsia, thanks to the well-disposed editorship of Nature 38 Louis Rougier, “La mystique soviétique. Une scolastique nouvelle: le marxisme- léninisme,” La Revue de Paris 41, no. 2 (April 1934): 622. 39 Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998 [1951]), 81, 78. 40 Michael Polanyi, “Congrès du Palais de la Découverte,” Nature 140 (October 1937): 710. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 36 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 36 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 52. Recoding Liberalism 37 and the BBC. Returning to England after the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris in 1938, Hayek committed himself to his Abuse and Decline of Reason project in which a series of historical case studies and problems of methodology would lead to “the fundamental scientific principles of economic policy and ultimately to the consequences of socialism.”41 In parallel, his position as editor of Economica afforded him an outlet both to present his own views and to publish major papers by Polanyi (1941), Schutz (1943), and Popper (1943–44) which comple- mented his arguments. In the midst of the project, Hayek wrote to Polanyi that he attached “very great importance to these pseudo- scientific arguments on social organization being effectively met and I am getting more and more alarmed by the effects of the propaganda” of the left-wing scientists which “discredit the reputation of science by such escapades.”42 The movement for economic planning supported by socialist scientists and engineers, Hayek wrote in Nature, had now so “succeeded in capturing public opinion that what little opposition there is comes almost solely from a small group of economists.”43 In due course, his Abuse of Reason project laid the groundwork for The Road to Serfdom and prolonged the previous developments of his methodologi- cal views. But to a large extent, it amounted to a wartime effort against the left scientists in England who occupied vital positions within the wartime government, continued to influence the general public, and met regularly to discuss their views in the Tots & Quots discussion group. In the meantime, Polanyi’s own refutation of planning evolved from a defence of pure science towards an epistemological defence of liberal- ism based on the position of thought in society. The struggle for pure science had been a small but revelatory part of a much larger civiliza- tional struggle. “The attack on science,” he proclaimed, “is a secondary battlefield in a war against all human ideals, and the attack on the free- dom of science is only an incident in the totalitarian assault on all free- dom in society.”44 In 1941, Polanyi founded the Society for Freedom in 41 F. A. Hayek, Letter to Machlup, dated August 27, 1939. Cf. F. A. Hayek, Studies in the Abuse and Decline of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1. 42 F. A. Hayek, Letter to Michael Polanyi, dated July 1, 1941, Polanyi Papers, Box 4, Folder 7. 43 F. A. Hayek, “Planning, Science, and Freedom” (1941), in Hayek, Socialism and War, 213. 44 Polanyi, “The Growth of Thought,” 454. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 37 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 37 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 53. 38 Martin Beddeleem Science (SFS) with Oxford zoologist J. R. Baker. Like his rivals from the left, he dismissed the neutralist position as naive in the face of the “abso- lute state,” citing the detachment of the scientist as a main cause for concern. The SFS circulated a four-page letter among scientists in May 1941 which pressed for the “defence of scientific freedom” not to be put to rest once peacetime came. Explicitly conceived as an organization to match the influence of the ‘social relations of science movement’, the SFS insisted that adhering to a liberal view of science was not to retreat into the high spheres of knowledge, but to serve society to the scientist’s best abilities. As long as it remained free from state interference, science stood as the perfect example of liberalism in action, demonstrating how individual liberty may be seamlessly reconciled with authority, tradi- tion, and social control. Despite their irreconcilable political differences, Polanyi and Bernal envisaged in remarkably similar ways the operation of social norms within the scientific community and the paucity of a history of science told as the progressive evolution of intangible ideas. Each argued in their own way “for a social turn in studying the history and philosophy of science.”45 As a result, the project of recoding liberalism incorpo- rated the growing externalist account of science that sought to reground its history within the social and economic determinants of scientific research and knowledge. Neoliberal philosophers of science largely agreed with the necessity of conceptualizing knowledge and science within their institutional conditions and not as a disembodied process, yet proposed an alternative model for the workings of science which drewitsinspirationfromeconomicliberalism:theRepublicofScience.46 In this model, the metaphor of the market played out as the epistemo- logical engine of a largely dispersed and tacit knowledge between indi- viduals, be they scientists, producers, lawyers, or road-users. The rule of law, market regulations, and scientific conventions were conceived as so many analogical methods of social coordination to achieve a liberal social order, as they ensured a variety of ends with minimum direct control. Peculiar to neoliberalism therefore is the strong epistemologi- cal bent of its social theory, one where freedom is recoded as 45 Mary-Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and his Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 184. 46 Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory,” Minerva 1 (1962): 54–74. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 38 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 38 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
- 54. Recoding Liberalism 39 instrumental to the activity of separate independent orders working according to analogous principles. Building a Neoliberal Research Program During the Second World War, the polemical use of the term “scient- ism” by Hayek complemented Popper’s refutation of “historicist” doctrines, Polanyi’s defense of pure science, Lippmann’s call for the restoration of a “liberal science,” and Rougier’s dichotomy of doctrine and mystique. Each demonstrated that liberal principles were concomi- tant with the proper view of science while a purely instrumental concep- tion served the goals of collectivist ideologies. Arguments once used against Viennese philosophers were recycled in a context in which prep- aration and planning for war had given pride of place to applied scien- tists and engineers. From varying angles, they all accused the applica- tion of the aims and methods of the natural sciences to power social change of usurping the mantle of science out of sheer intellectual error. The opacity of the “sense-data” in the social sciences made its methods and orientation different than those of the natural sciences, because it could only observe man’s actions—and their undesigned results—with- out accessing the inner realm of consciousness. Opinions, they believed, constituted the genuine “facts” of the social sciences.47 On the one hand, neoliberals argued, any theory of historical devel- opment wrongfully applied lawful assumptions to the contingency of history, thereby confusing prophecy and prediction,48 and mistaking explanation by general principles with the knowledge of deliberate direction. On the other hand, engineers and planners suffered from a “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science” which they used for the purpose of “social midwifery.”49 By denying the fundamen- tal uncertainty in social processes, and the logical impossibility of controlling social wholes, Polanyi contended that their mentality veered towards “utopian engineering,” and was the inspiration for “grandiose planning.”50 The application of statistics and mathematics to social 47 Hayek, Studies, 86ff. 48 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002), 110ff. 49 Hayek, Studies, 80; Popper, Poverty, 52. 50 Michael Polanyi, The Contempt of Freedom: The Russian Experiment and After (London: Watts & Co., 1940), 28. 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 39 9781788732536 Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (469j) - 7th pass.indd 39 10/03/2020 13:59:55 10/03/2020 13:59:55
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- 56. very few in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more nourishment to the thoughts. They might be judiciously introduced, with a small number more, into a sound method of education, one that should make wisdom, rather than mere knowledge, its object, and might become a text-book of examination in our schools.”38 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. The Advancement of Learning was published in 1605. It has usually been considered that the whole of Bacon’s philosophy is contained in this work, excepting, however, the second book of the Novum Organum. Of the Advancement of Learning he made a Latin translation, under the title of De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, which, however, contains about one third of new matter and some slight interpolations; a few omissions have been remarked in it. The Advancement of Learning is, as it were, to use his own language, “a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover with a note and description of those facts which seem to me not constantly occupate or not well converted by the labor of man. In which, if I have in any point receded from that which is commonly received, it hath been with a purpose of proceeding in melius and not in aliud, a mind of amendment and proficience, and not of change and difference. For I could not be true and constant to the argument I handle, if I were not willing to go beyond others, but yet not more willing than to have others go beyond me.” The Advancement of Learning is divided into two parts; the former of which is intended to remove prejudices against the search after truth, by pointing out the causes which obstruct it; in the second, learning is divided into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the faculties of the mind from which they emanate—memory, imagination, and reason. Our author states the deficiencies he observes in each.
- 57. All the peculiar qualities of his style are fully developed in this noble monument of genius, one of the finest in English, or perhaps any other language; it is full of deep thought, keen observation, rich imagery, Attic wit, and apt illustration. Dugald Stewart and Hallam have both expressed their just admiration of the short paragraph on poesy; but, with all due deference, we must consider that the beautiful passage on the dignity and excellency of knowledge is surpassed by none. Can aught excel the noble comparison of the ship? The reader shall judge for himself. “If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?” DE SAPIENTIA VETERUM. The Wisdom of the Ancients, or rather, De sapientia veterum (for it was written in Latin), is a short treatise on the mythology of the ancients, by which Bacon endeavors to discover and to show the physical, moral, and political meanings it concealed. If the reader is not convinced that the ancients understood by these fables all that Bacon discovers in them, he must at least admit the probability of it, and be impressed with the penetration of the author and the variety and depth of his knowledge. INSTAURATIO MAGNA. The Instauratio Magna was published in 1620, while Bacon was still chancellor. In his dedication of it to James the First, in 1620, in which he says he has been engaged in it nearly thirty years, he pathetically remarks: “The reason why I have published it now, specially being imperfect, is, to speak plainly, because I number my days, and
- 58. would have it saved.” His country and the world participate in the opinion of the philosopher, and would have deemed its loss one of the greatest to mankind. Such was the care with which it was composed, that Bacon transcribed it twelve times with his own hand. It is divided into six parts. The first entitled Partitiones Scientiarum, or the divisions of knowledge possessed by mankind, in which the author has noted the deficiencies and imperfections of each. This he had already accomplished by his Advancement of Learning. Part 2 is the Novum Organum Scientiarum, or new method of studying the sciences, a name probably suggested by Aristotle’s Organon (treatises on Logic). He intended it to be “the science of a better and more perfect use of reason in the investigation of things and of the true end of understanding.” This has been generally denominated the inductive method, i. e. the experimental method, from the principle of induction, or bringing together facts and drawing from them general principles or truths, by which the author proposes the advancement of all kinds of knowledge. In this consists preëminently the philosophy of Bacon. Not reasoning upon conjecture on the laws and properties of nature, but, as Bacon quaintly terms it, “asking questions of nature,” that is, making experiments, laboriously collecting facts first, and, after a sufficient number has been brought together, then forming systems or theories founded on them. But this work is rather the summary of a more extensive one he designed, the aphorisms of it being rather, according to Hallam, “the heads or theses of chapters.” But some of these principles are of paramount importance. An instance may be afforded of this, extracted from the “Interpretation of Nature, and Man’s dominion over it.” It is the very first sentence in the Novum Organum. “Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, can only understand and act in proportion as he observes and contemplates the order of nature;
- 59. more, he can neither know nor do.” This, as has justly been observed, is undoubtedly the foundation of all our real knowledge. The Novum Organum is so important, that we deem it desirable to present some more detailed accounts of it. The body of the work is divided into two parts; the former of which is intended to serve as an introduction to the other, a preparation of the mind for receiving the doctrine. Bacon begins by endeavoring to remove the prejudices and to obtain fair attention to his doctrine. He compares philosophy to “a vast pyramid, which ought to have the history of nature for its basis;” he likens those who strive to erect by the force of abstract speculation to the giants of old, who, according to the poets, endeavored to throw Mount Ossa upon Pelion, and Olympus upon Ossa. The method of “anticipating nature,” he denounces “as rash, hasty, and unphilosophical;” whereas, “interpretations of nature, or real truths arrived at by deduction, cannot so suddenly arrest the mind; and when the conclusion actually arrives, it may so oppose prejudice, and appear so paradoxical as to be in danger of not being received, notwithstanding the evidence that supports it, like mysteries of faith.” Bacon first attacks the “Idols of the Mind,” i. e. the great sources of prejudice, then the different false philosophical theories; he afterwards proceeds to show what are the characteristics of false systems, the causes of error in philosophy, and lastly the grounds of hope regarding the advancement of science. He now aspires, to use his own language, “only to sow the seeds of pure truth for posterity, and not to be wanting in his assistance to the first beginning of great undertakings.” “Let the human race,” says he further, “regain their dominion over nature, which belongs to them by the bounty of their Maker, and right reason and sound religion will direct the use.”
- 60. The second part of the Novum Organum may be divided into three sections. The first is on the discovery of forms, i. e. causes in nature. The second section is composed of tables illustrative of the inductive method, and the third and last is styled the doctrine of instances, i. e. facts regarding the discovery of causes. Part the third of the Instauratio Magna was to be a Natural History, as he termed it, or rather a history of natural substances, in which the art of man had been employed, which would have been a history of universal nature. Part 4, to be called Scala intellectus, or Intellectual Ladder, was intended to be, to use his own words, “types and models which place before our eyes the entire process of the mind in the discovery of truth, selecting various and remarkable instances.” He had designed in the fifth part to give specimens of the new philosophy; a few fragments only of this have been published. It was to be “the fragment of interest till the principal could be raised.” The sixth and last part was “to display a perfect system of philosophy deduced and confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry according to the method he had laid down and invented.” “To perfect this last part,” says Bacon, “is above our powers and beyond our hopes.” Let us return, however, for a moment to the commencement, to remark that he concludes the introduction by an eloquent prayer that his exertions may be rendered effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness. But he feels his own inability, for “his days are numbered,” to conduct mankind to the hoped for goal. It was given to him to point out the road to the promised land; but, like Moses, after having descried it from afar, it was denied him to enter the land to which he had led the way. LIFE OF HENRY VII.
- 61. The Life of Henry VII., published in 1622, is, in the opinion of Hallam, “the first instance in our language of the application of philosophy to reasoning on public events in the manner of the ancients and the Italians. Praise upon Henry is too largely bestowed; but it was in the nature of Bacon to admire too much a crafty and selfish policy; and he thought also, no doubt, that so near an ancestor of his own sovereign should not be treated with severe impartiality.”39 LETTERS. His Letters published in his works are numerous; they are written in a stiff, ungraceful, formal style; but still, they frequently bear the impress of the writer’s greatness and genius. Fragments of them have been frequently quoted in the course of this notice; they have, perhaps, best served to exhibit more fully the man in all the relations of his public and private life. MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. Amongst his miscellaneous papers there was found after his death a remarkable prayer, which Addison deemed sufficiently beautiful to be published in the Tatler40 for Christmas, 1710. We extract a passage or two, that may serve to illustrate Bacon’s position or his character. “I have, though in a despised weed, procured the good of all men. If any have been my enemies, I thought not of them, neither hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness.” “Just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea? Earth, heaven, and all these are nothing to thy mercies.” Addison observes of this prayer, that for elevation of thought and greatness of expression, “it seems—rather the devotion of an angel than a man.”
- 62. In taking leave of the life and the works of the greatest of philosophers, and alas! the least of men, we have endeavored to present a succinct but faithful narrative—“his glory not extenuated wherein he was worthy, nor his offences enforced, for which he suffered” merited obloquy with his own contemporaries and all posterity. Our endeavor has been
- 63. Verba animi proferre et vitam impendere vero. But his failings, great as they were, are forgotten through his transcendent merit; his faults injured but few, and in his own time alone; his genius has benefited all mankind. The new direction he gave to philosophy was the indirect cause of all the modern conquests of science over matter, or, as it were, over nature. What it has already accomplished, and may yet effect for the whole human race, is incalculable. Macaulay, the historian of England, has been likewise the eloquent narrator of the progress, that owes its origin to the genius of Francis Bacon. “Ask a follower of Bacon,” says Macaulay, “what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready: ‘It hath lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscle; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land on cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which sail against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first-fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.’”41
- 64. ESSAYS. I.—OF TRUTH. What is truth? said jesting Pilate;42 and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting freewill in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth: nor again, that, when it is found, it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later schools43 of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers,44 in great severity, called poesy “vinum dæmonum,”45 because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we
- 65. spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men’s depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense;46 the last was the light of reason;47 and his sabbath work, ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit. First, he breathed light upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then he breathed light into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet48 that beautified the sect,49 that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: “It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth” (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), “and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below;”50 so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth. To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business; it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of man’s nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious; and therefore Montaigne51 saith prettily, when he inquired the reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge: saith he, “If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much as to say that he is
- 66. brave towards God and a coward towards men. For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man;” surely, the wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men: it being foretold, that, when “Christ cometh,” he shall not “find faith upon the earth.”52 II.—OF DEATH.53 Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes mixture of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in some of the friars’ books of mortification, that a man should think with himself, what the pain is, if he have but his finger’s end pressed or tortured; and thereby imagine what the pains of death are, when the whole body is corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with less pain than the torture of a limb, for the most vital parts are not the quickest of sense. And by him that spake only as a philosopher and natural man, it was well said, “Pompa mortis magis terret, quam mors ipsa.”54 Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks55 and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the emperor had slain himself, pity (which is the tenderest of affections) provoked many to die out of mere compassion to their
- 67. sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers.56 Nay, Seneca57 adds niceness and satiety: “Cogita quamdiu eadem feceris; mori velle, non tantum fortis, aut miser, sed etiam fastidiosus potest.”58 A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over. It is no less worthy to observe, how little alteration in good spirits the approaches of death make: for they appear to be the same men till the last instant. Augustus Cæsar died in a compliment: “Livia, conjugii nostri memor, vive et vale.”59 Tiberius in dissimulation, as Tacitus saith of him, “Jam Tiberium vires et corpus, non dissimulatio, deserebant:”60 Vespasian in a jest, sitting upon the stool,61 “Ut puto Deus fio;”62 Galba with a sentence, “Feri, si ex re sit populi Romani,”63 holding forth his neck; Septimus Severus in dispatch, “Adeste, si quid mihi restat agendum,”64 and the like. Certainly, the Stoics65 bestowed too much cost upon death, and by their great preparations made it appear more fearful. Better, saith he, “qui finem vitæ extremum inter munera ponit naturæ.”66 It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolors of death; but, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is “Nunc dimittis,”67 when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy: “Extinctus amabitur idem.”68 III.—OF UNITY IN RELIGION. Religion being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels and divisions about religion were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen
- 68. consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets. But the true God hath this attribute, that he is a jealous God; and therefore his worship and religion will endure no mixture nor partner. We shall therefore speak a few words concerning the unity of the church; what are the fruits thereof; what the bounds; and what the means. The fruits of unity (next unto the well-pleasing of God, which is all in all), are two; the one towards those that are without the church, the other towards those that are within. For the former, it is certain that heresies and schisms are, of all others, the greatest scandals, yea, more than corruption of manners; for as in the natural body a wound or solution of continuity is worse than a corrupt humor, so in the spiritual; so that nothing doth so much keep men out of the church, and drive men out of the church, as breach of unity; and therefore, whensoever it cometh to that pass that one saith, “Ecce in Deserto,”69 another saith, “Ecce in penetralibus;”70 that is, when some men seek Christ in the conventicles of heretics, and others in an outward face of a church, that voice had need continually to sound in men’s ears, “nolite exire,” “go not out.” The doctor of the Gentiles (the propriety of whose vocation drew him to have a special care of those without) saith: “If a heathen71 come in, and hear you speak with several tongues, will he not say that you are mad?” and, certainly, it is little better: when atheists and profane persons do hear of so many discordant and contrary opinions in religion, it doth avert them from the church, and maketh them “to sit down in the chair of the scorners.”72 It is but a light thing to be vouched in so serious a matter, but yet it expresseth well the deformity. There is a master of scoffing, that, in his catalogue of books of a feigned library, sets down this title of a book, “The Morris-Dance73 of Heretics;” for, indeed, every sect of them hath a diverse posture, or cringe, by themselves, which cannot but move derision in worldlings and depraved politicians, who are apt to contemn holy things.
- 69. As for the fruit towards those that are within, it is peace, which containeth infinite blessings; it establisheth faith; it kindleth charity; the outward peace of the church distilleth into peace of conscience, and it turneth the labors of writing and reading of controversies into treatises of mortification and devotion. Concerning the bounds of unity, the true placing of them importeth exceedingly. There appear to be two extremes; for to certain zealots all speech of pacification is odious. “Is it peace, Jehu?”—“What hast thou to do with peace? turn thee behind me.”74 Peace is not the matter, but following, and party. Contrariwise, certain Laodiceans75 and lukewarm persons think they may accommodate points of religion by middle ways, and taking part of both, and witty reconcilements, as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man. Both these extremes are to be avoided; which will be done if the league of Christians, penned by our Saviour himself, were in the two cross clauses thereof soundly and plainly expounded: “He that is not with us is against us;”76 and again, “He that is not against us, is with us;” that is, if the points fundamental, and of substance in religion, were truly discerned and distinguished from points not merely of faith, but of opinion, order, or good intention. This is a thing may seem to many a matter trivial, and done already; but if it were done less partially, it would be embraced more generally. Of this I may give only this advice, according to my small model. Men ought to take heed of rending God’s church by two kinds of controversies; the one is, when the matter of the point controverted is too small and light, not worth the heat and strife about it, kindled only by contradiction; for, as it is noted by one of the fathers, “Christ’s coat indeed had no seam, but the church’s vesture was of divers colors;” whereupon he saith, “In veste varietas sit, scissura non sit,”77 they be two things, unity and uniformity; the other is, when the matter of the point controverted is great, but it is driven to an over-great subtilty and obscurity, so that it becometh a thing rather ingenious than substantial. A man that is of judgment and
- 70. understanding shall sometimes hear ignorant men differ, and know well within himself, that those which so differ mean one thing, and yet they themselves would never agree; and if it come so to pass in that distance of judgment, which is between man and man, shall we not think that God above, that knows the heart, doth not discern that frail men, in some of their contradictions, intend the same thing, and accepteth of both? The nature of such controversies is excellently expressed by St. Paul, in the warning and precept that he giveth concerning the same: “Devita profanas vocum novitates, et oppositiones falsi nominis scientiæ.”78 Men create oppositions which are not, and put them into new terms, so fixed as, whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning. There be also two false peaces, or unities; the one, when the peace is grounded but upon an implicit ignorance; for all colors will agree in the dark; the other, when it is pieced up upon a direct admission of contraries in fundamental points; for truth and falsehood, in such things, are like the iron and clay in the toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s image;79 they may cleave, but they will not incorporate. Concerning the means of procuring unity, men must beware that, in the procuring or muniting of religious unity, they do not dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human society. There be two swords amongst Christians, the spiritual and temporal, and both have their due office and place in the maintenance of religion; but we may not take up the third sword, which is Mahomet’s sword,80 or like unto it; that is, to propagate religion by wars, or, by sanguinary persecutions, to force consciences; except it be in cases of overt scandal, blasphemy, or intermixture of practice against the state; much less to nourish seditions, to authorize conspiracies and rebellions, to put the sword into the people’s hands, and the like, tending to the subversion of all government, which is the ordinance of God; for this is but to dash the first table against the second, and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men.
- 71. Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed;— “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”81 What would he have said, if he had known of the massacre in France,82 or the powder treason of England?83 He would have been seven times more epicure and atheist than he was; for as the temporal sword is to be drawn with great circumspection in cases of religion, so it is a thing monstrous to put it into the hands of the common people; let that be left unto the Anabaptists, and other furies. It was great blasphemy when the devil said, “I will ascend and be like the Highest;”84 but it is greater blasphemy to personate God, and bring him in saying, “I will descend, and be like the prince of darkness;” and what is it better, to make the cause of religion to descend to the cruel and execrable actions of murdering princes, butchery of people, and subversion of states and governments? Surely, this is to bring down the Holy Ghost, instead of the likeness of a dove, in the shape of a vulture or raven; and to set out of the bark of a Christian church a flag of a bark of pirates and assassins; therefore, it is most necessary that the church by doctrine and decree, princes by their sword, and all learnings, both Christian and moral, as by their Mercury rod,85 do damn and send to hell forever those facts and opinions tending to the support of the same, as hath been already in good part done. Surely, in counsels concerning religion, that counsel of the apostle would be prefixed: “Ira hominis non implet justitiam Dei;”86 and it was a notable observation of a wise father, and no less ingenuously confessed, that those which held and persuaded pressure of consciences, were commonly interested therein themselves for their own ends. IV.—OF REVENGE.
- 72. Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out; for as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law, but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy, but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon; and Solomon, I am sure, saith, “It is the glory of a man to pass by an offence.” That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labor in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like; therefore, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill- nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other. The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy; but then, let a man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish, else a man’s enemy is still beforehand, and it is two for one. Some, when they take revenge, are desirous the party should know whence it cometh. This is the more generous; for the delight seemeth to be not so much in doing the hurt as in making the party repent; but base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark. Cosmus, Duke of Florence,87 had a desperate saying against perfidious or neglecting friends, as if those wrongs were unpardonable. “You shall read,” saith he, “that we are commanded to forgive our enemies; but you never read that we are commanded to forgive our friends.” But yet the spirit of Job was in a better tune: “Shall we,” saith he, “take good at God’s hands, and not be content to take evil also?”88 and so of friends in a proportion. This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well. Public revenges89 are for the most part fortunate; as that for the death of Cæsar;90 for the death of Pertinax; for the death of Henry the Third of France;91 and many more. But in private revenges it is not so; nay, rather,
- 73. vindictive persons live the life of witches, who, as they are mischievous, so end they unfortunate. V.—OF ADVERSITY. It was a high speech of Seneca (after the manner of the Stoics), that “the good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.” (“Bona rerum secundarum optabilia, adversarum mirabilia.”)92 Certainly, if miracles be the command over nature, they appear most in adversity. It is yet a higher speech of his than the other (much too high for a heathen), “It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man, and the security of a God.” (“Vere magnum habere fragilitatem hominis securitatem Dei.”)93 This would have done better in poesy, where transcendencies are more allowed, and the poets, indeed, have been busy with it; for it is, in effect, the thing which is figured in that strange fiction of the ancient poets,94 which seemeth not to be without mystery; nay, and to have some approach to the state of a Christian, “that Hercules, when he went to unbind Prometheus (by whom human nature is represented), sailed the length of the great ocean in an earthen pot or pitcher,” lively describing Christian resolution, that saileth in the frail bark of the flesh through the waves of the world. But to speak in a mean, the virtue of prosperity is temperance, the virtue of adversity is fortitude, which in morals is the more heroical virtue. Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God’s favor. Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David’s harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs95 as carols; and the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without
- 74. comforts and hopes. We see, in needleworks and embroideries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground: judge, therefore, of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure of the eye. Certainly, virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.96 VI.—OF SIMULATION AND DISSIMULATION. Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy, or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth, and to do it; therefore it is the weaker sort of politicians that are the great dissemblers. Tacitus saith, “Livia sorted well with the arts of her husband, and dissimulation of her son;97 attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius:” and again, when Mucianus encourageth Vespasian to take arms against Vitellius, he saith, “We rise not against the piercing judgment of Augustus, nor the extreme caution or closeness of Tiberius.”98 These properties of arts or policy, and dissimulation or closeness, are indeed habits and faculties several, and to be distinguished; for if a man have that penetration of judgment as he can discern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be showed at half-lights, and to whom and when (which indeed are arts of state, and arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them), to him a habit of dissimulation is a hinderance and a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally to be close, and a dissembler; for where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, there it is good to take the safest and wariest way in general, like the going softly by one that cannot well see. Certainly, the ablest
- 75. men that ever were, have had all an openness and frankness of dealing, and a name of certainty and veracity: but then they were like horses well managed, for they could tell passing well when to stop or turn; and at such times, when they thought the case indeed required dissimulation, if then they used it, it came to pass that the former opinion spread abroad, of their good faith and clearness of dealing, made them almost invisible. There be three degrees of this hiding and veiling of a man’s self: the first, closeness, reservation, and secrecy; when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is: the second, dissimulation in the negative; when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is: and the third, simulation in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not. For the first of these, secrecy, it is indeed the virtue of a confessor; and assuredly the secret man heareth many confessions; for who will open himself to a blab or a babbler? But if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery, as the more close air sucketh in the more open; and, as in confession, the revealing is not for worldly use, but for the ease of a man’s heart, so secret men come to the knowledge of many things in that kind; while men rather discharge their minds than impart their minds. In few words, mysteries are due to secrecy. Besides (to say truth), nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body; and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions, if they be not altogether open. As for talkers and futile persons, they are commonly vain and credulous withal; for he that talketh what he knoweth, will also talk what he knoweth not; therefore set it down, that a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral: and in this part it is good that a man’s face give his tongue leave to speak; for the discovery of a man’s self by the tracts99 of his countenance, is a great weakness and betraying, by how much it is many times more marked and believed than a man’s words. For the second, which is dissimulation, it followeth many times upon secrecy by a necessity; so that he that will be secret must be a
- 76. dissembler in some degree; for men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage between both, and to be secret, without swaying the balance on either side. They will so beset a man with questions, and draw him on, and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence, he must show an inclination one way; or if he do not, they will gather as much by his silence as by his speech. As for equivocations, or oraculous speeches, they cannot hold out long: so that no man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation, which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy. But for the third degree, which is simulation and false profession, that I hold more culpable, and less politic, except it be in great and rare matters; and, therefore, a general custom of simulation (which is this last degree) is a vice rising either of a natural falseness, or fearfulness, or of a mind that hath some main faults; which because a man must needs disguise, it maketh him practise simulation in other things, lest his hand should be out of use. The advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three: first, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise; for, where a man’s intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them: the second is, to reserve to a man’s self a fair retreat; for if a man engage himself by a manifest declaration, he must go through or take a fall: the third is, the better to discover the mind of another; for to him that opens himself men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will (fair) let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought; and therefore it is a good shrewd proverb of the Spaniard, “Tell a lie, and find a troth;”100 as if there were no way of discovery but by simulation. There be also three disadvantages to set it even; the first, that simulation and dissimulation commonly carry with them a show of fearfulness, which, in any business, doth spoil the feathers of round flying up to the mark; the second, that it puzzleth and perplexeth the conceits of many, that, perhaps, would otherwise coöperate with him, and makes a man walk almost alone to his own ends: the third, and greatest, is, that it depriveth a man of one of the most principal
- 77. instruments for action, which is trust and belief. The best composition and temperature is, to have openness in fame and opinion, secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign if there be no remedy. VII.—OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN. The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears; they cannot utter the one, nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death. The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men: and surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds where those of their bodies have failed; so the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity. They that are the first raisers of their houses are most indulgent towards their children, beholding them as the continuance, not only of their kind, but of their work; and so both children and creatures. The difference in affection of parents towards their several children is many times unequal, and sometimes unworthy, especially in the mother; as Solomon saith, “A wise son rejoiceth the father, but an ungracious son shames the mother.”101 A man shall see, where there is a house full of children, one or two of the eldest respected, and the youngest made wantons;102 but in the midst some that are, as it were, forgotten, who many times, nevertheless, prove the best. The illiberality of parents, in allowance towards their children, is a harmful error, makes them base, acquaints them with shifts, makes them sort with mean company, and makes them surfeit more when they come to plenty; and, therefore, the proof103 is best when men
- 78. keep their authority towards their children, but not their purse. Men have a foolish manner (both parents, and schoolmasters, and servants), in creating and breeding an emulation between brothers during childhood, which many times sorteth104 to discord when they are men, and disturbeth families.105 The Italians make little difference between children and nephews, or near kinsfolk; but so they be of the lump, they care not, though they pass not through their own body; and, to say truth, in nature it is much a like matter; insomuch that we see a nephew sometimes resembleth an uncle or a kinsman more than his own parent, as the blood happens. Let parents choose betimes the vocations and courses they mean their children should take, for then they are most flexible; and let them not too much apply themselves to the disposition of their children, as thinking they will take best to that which they have most mind to. It is true, that if the affection or aptness of the children be extraordinary, then it is good not to cross it; but generally the precept is good, “Optimum elige, suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo.”106—Younger brothers are commonly fortunate, but seldom or never where the elder are disinherited. VIII.—OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE. He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public. Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times, unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges. Some there are who, though they lead a single life, yet their thoughts do end with themselves, and account future times impertinences; nay, there are some other that
- 79. account wife and children but as bills of charges; nay more, there are some foolish, rich, covetous men, that take a pride in having no children, because they may be thought so much the richer; for, perhaps they have heard some talk, “Such an one is a great rich man,” and another except to it, “Yea, but he hath a great charge of children;” as if it were an abatement to his riches. But the most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self- pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects, for they are light to run away, and almost all fugitives are of that condition. A single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.107 It is indifferent for judges and magistrates; for if they be facile and corrupt, you shall have a servant five times worse than a wife. For soldiers, I find the generals commonly, in their hortatives, put men in mind of their wives and children; and I think the despising of marriage amongst the Turks maketh the vulgar soldier more base. Certainly, wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men, though they be many times more charitable, because their means are less exhaust, yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hard-hearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their tenderness is not so oft called upon. Grave natures, led by custom, and therefore constant, are commonly loving husbands, as was said of Ulysses, “Vetulam suam praetulit immortalitati.”108 Chaste women are often proud and froward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity. It is one of the best bonds, both of chastity and obedience, in the wife, if she think her husband wise, which she will never do if she find him jealous. Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses, so as a man may have a quarrel109 to marry when he will; but yet he was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry, “A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.”110 It is often seen that bad husbands have very good wives; whether it be that it raiseth the
- 80. price of their husbands’ kindness when it comes, or that the wives take a pride in their patience; but this never fails, if the bad husbands were of their own choosing, against their friends’ consent, for then they will be sure to make good their own folly. IX.—OF ENVY. There be none of the affections which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch, but love and envy. They both have vehement wishes; they frame themselves readily into imaginations and suggestions, and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of the objects which are the points that conduce to fascination, if any such thing there be. We see, likewise, the Scripture calleth envy an evil eye;111 and the astrologers call the evil influences of the stars evil aspects; so that still there seemeth to be acknowledged, in the act of envy, an ejaculation, or irradiation of the eye; nay, some have been so curious as to note that the times, when the stroke or percussion of an envious eye doth most hurt, are, when the party envied is beheld in glory or triumph, for that sets an edge upon envy; and besides, at such times, the spirits of the person envied do come forth most into the outward parts, and so meet the blow. But, leaving these curiosities (though not unworthy to be thought on in fit place), we will handle what persons are apt to envy others; what persons are most subject to be envied themselves; and what is the difference between public and private envy. A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others; for men’s minds will either feed upon their own good, or upon others’ evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope to attain to another’s virtue, will seek to come at even hand112 by depressing another’s fortune.
- 81. A man that is busy and inquisitive, is commonly envious; for to know much of other men’s matters cannot be, because all that ado may concern his own estate; therefore, it must needs be that he taketh a kind of play-pleasure in looking upon the fortunes of others; neither can he that mindeth but his own business find much matter for envy; for envy is a gadding passion, and walketh the streets, and doth not keep home: “Non est curiosus, quin idem sit malevolus.”113 Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they rise, for the distance is altered; and it is like a deceit of the eye, that when others come on they think themselves go back. Deformed persons and eunuchs, and old men and bastards, are envious; for he that cannot possibly mend his own case, will do what he can to impair another’s; except these defects light upon a very brave and heroical nature, which thinketh to make his natural wants part of his honor; in that it should be said, “That a eunuch, or a lame man, did such great matters,” affecting the honor of a miracle; as it was in Narses114 the eunuch, and Agesilaus and Tamerlane,115 that were lame men. The same is the case of men that rise after calamities and misfortunes; for they are as men fallen out with the times, and think other men’s harms a redemption of their own sufferings. They that desire to excel in too many matters, out of levity and vainglory, are ever envious, for they cannot want work; it being impossible but many, in some one of those things, should surpass them; which was the character of Adrian the emperor, that mortally envied poets and painters, and artificers in works, wherein he had a vein to excel.116 Lastly, near kinsfolk and fellows in office, and those that have been bred together, are more apt to envy their equals when they are raised; for it doth upbraid unto them their own fortunes, and pointeth at them, and cometh oftener into their remembrance, and incurreth likewise more into the note117 of others; and envy ever
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