Freedom and coercion in formal political economy

Some very preliminary, scattered, and basic notes.

One of the dichotomies that structures a lot of work in economics is that between coercion and freely made decisions. There’s a lot to unpack here and the following is very crude, but ‘ideal typically’, a lot of economic theory draws a distinction between state action – which can be coercive, due to the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the state’s geographical boundaries – and freely made decisions, such as contract formation, market exchange, or collective action within civil society. Obviously the market, or contracts, are structured by ‘rules of the game’ that are themselves coercively enforced by the state – so the market and the contract are not untarnished, as it were, by coercive force. Moreover, economists are obviously aware that the state is not always and everywhere coercive. Nevertheless, this dichotomy does, in my view, inform a lot of economic analysis, in some sense.

There are at least two things to unpack from this picture. First, the dichotomy between coercive and free economic relationships; and second the way this dichotomy maps onto the distinction between the state, on the one hand, and the market and civil society, on the other. Both of these ideas are, of course, flawed. W/r/t the latter: obviously coercion can operate in market and civil society contexts, and not merely via the actions of the state and its representatives. Moreover, coercion need not be violent: for example, those likely to starve if they lose their jobs are extremely vulnerable to employer demands – these employers wield a high level of power over these employees, regardless of the formal free contracting of the employment relation. These kinds of unfreedom within market and civil society relationships also indicate the flaw in the first dichotomy discussed above: that coercion versus freedom is not, in fact, a dichotomy. On the contrary, the boundary between free interactions and coercive ones is, potentially, fuzzy. Economists are happy, in many contexts, to talk about ‘bargaining power’. It is, however, innate in the concept of bargaining power, that bargaining power is power. If one participant in an interaction has enough power relative to the other, we may reasonably start to doubt the extent to which the interaction’s outcome is a freely agreed bargain, and wonder whether language associated with coercive relationships may begin to become more appropriate.

Perhaps, then, it makes sense to think of freedom not as an on-off switch, but as a spectrum: we can all be more or less free, in different dimensions of our lives, or in different social and economic interactions. This framing avoids, of course, complexities around varied senses of freedom (some of which I’ve discussed in earlier posts on this blog), and questions over the extent to which freedom can usefully be quantified, or at least represented ordinally, on any kind of spectrum. Even this crude ‘linear spectrum’ model of freedom would seem, however, to be an advance on the binary model of freedom and coercion that seems tacit in a lot of economic theory.

In my view economics as a discipline needs to better get to grips with this. Economics is not unused to making normative judgements – around welfare or utility outcomes, etc. But these evaluations often seem naive (or, from a more cynical perspective, apologistic) around questions of freedom and coercion. Bringing such problems into the apparatus of formal economics of course threatens to take economics into a terrain that is traditionally reserved for moral philosophy. I think a good case could be made, however, that a lot of economics is already in fact occupying this terrain – it is simply (too often) doing so naively and unknowingly.

Notes on Ideology Critique

Some work-in-progress notes on what I see as best practice in ideology critique, with references to some relevant figures.

1) Symmetry.

The joke about ideology is that it’s an irregular verb: they have ideology, you have beliefs, I have clear knowledge. But as I see it ideology critique ought to be ‘symmetrical’ and ‘reflexive’ in the sense in which those terms are used by David Bloor, in his ‘Knowledge and Social Imagery’. It’s fine to prefer one’s own ideology, but one ought to be able to adopt a perspective that sees one’s own ideological commitments as ideological commitments like any others. Apart from anything else, one will not be able to fully understand another ideology, if one cannot see one’s own ideological perspective through another’s eyes. [This doesn’t, as I’ve argued elsewhere at some length, commit one to a relativisation of perspectives – but it does mean that one should be able to shift perspectives, even if one retains rational warrant for adopting one’s own.]

2) Ideologies involve ‘social ontologies’, not just value-claims.

Although one can in principle distinguish between factual matters and ideological commitments, in practice ideological commitments typically involve lots of contested claims about factual matters. Adherents of different ideologies take themselves to be inhabiting different worlds, and these debates over matters of fact are major sites of ideological contestation.

3) ‘Irrational’ commitments are often rational.

A great deal of what is typically attributed to ideological bias, motivated reasoning, delusion, etc., is better understood as rational commitments given different priors – understand the priors and you understand the commitments. It’s a good rule of thumb to assume, as a first pass, that someone’s ideological commitments make sense, and that if they seem not to make sense, it’s because you don’t understand the relevant background commitments. An ‘inferentialist’ approach to ideology critique is useful here – mapping an ideology by understanding the inferential connections that bind and form the beliefs that, in their interconnection, constitute an ideological system. [I’ve spelled out my understanding of inferentialism in a longer series of posts on Robert Brandom, previously on this blog.] At the same time:

4) Some ‘irrational’ commitments really are ‘irrational’.

Some ideological commitments are better understood using psychoanalytic resources – broadly understood – than using the resources traditionally associated with rational belief network mapping. Ideologies can be driven by desire, and the expression of desire – including its symptomatic expression. Although there are lots of problems with the Freudian apparatus, many of its core concepts – repression, sublimation, cathection, etc. – are useful for understanding why people act and think in the ways they do.

5) De dicto versus de re ideology analysis.

The ‘rational’ inferentialist and ‘irrational’ Freudian dimensions of ideology analysis and critique are not as conflictual as they appear, however – a good deal of the apparent tension between them can be resolved by adopting the Brandomian distinction between de dicto and de re commitment tracking. The commitments that ideology-holders take to be their own may not be the commitments that we attribute to them. That disjunction may exist, of course, because we are wrong about someone’s commitments – but it may also exist because an ideology does not adequately know itself. Tracking the *actual* commitments that inform and shape an ideology, beyond the nominal commitments that form an ideology’s own self-understanding, is one of the ways in which ideology critique functions as *critique*.

6) Ideologies often have more than one set of apparently conflictual commitments.

However, we also should be cautious about ‘seeing through’ ‘nominal’ ideological commitments to supposedly ‘underlying’ real ones. Many ideologies have different, apparently conflictual, sets of commitments operating simultaneously, and understanding the ideology requires understanding the contexts in which one set of commitments is operative, rather than another. One simple, important example of this is the ideological logic of liberalism described by Charles Mills in ‘The Racial Contract’. For Mills, the social contract of traditional, ‘mainstream’ liberalism operates within a specific, privileged social sphere. Outside that sphere, another – violent and coercive – set of ideological commitments is operative. The boundary between these spheres is determined by a ‘racial contract’ – a racial hierarchisation in which political and ethical principles are differentially applied. This is one example of a common ‘layering’ of ideologies, in which an ideology can best be understood as composed of multiple different ideologies, together with a set of principles for moving between them.

These are some first pass articulations of elements of ideology critique. More as and when.