Recognitive and property rights

Ok – in this post I want to bring together four passages or ideas from four different social theorists – covering a lot of ground that I’ve already been over on the blog (for example, here), but maybe inching forward slightly too.

First up – Coase in ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, where he argues, towards the end of the article, that a factor of production should be understood as “a right to perform certain (physical) actions”.  This move shifts the focus of economic theory into the space of rights, entitlements, etc.  From this perspective, when one is studying transactions, one is really studying the shift in the broadly recognised entitlements or rights associated with each of the parties to the transactions.  In Brandomian terms, an exchange of property is really a shift in the broad normative attitudes associated with the recognitive community in which the property-holders are embedded.

Second – Buchanan in ‘The Limits of Liberty’, who argues that “[t]he delineation of property rights is, in effect, the instrument or means through which a ‘person’ is initially defined.”  Buchanan is here working within a right-liberal Lockean framework which tethers personhood extremely closely to ownership or property-rights.  This liberal tradition effectively ‘metaphysicalises’ private property relations by understanding private property as the paradigm of rights in general – the ur-right in terms of which all other rights can be analysed.  I think we should reject this private-property-centred framework.  But we should reject it by seeing that there are many forms of rights, entitlements, obligations, etc. that are not tethered to property.  (See, for example, Elinor Ostrom’s work on the rules – including rights – associated with community governance of common pool resources.)  Instead, I recommend (as usual) shifting to a more Brandomian framework, in which normative attitudes attribute rights and responsibilities, of which property rights are a special case.  But within this framework, we can see normative attitudes as defining personhood, because on the Brandomian-Hegelian account personhood is constituted by participation in an appropriately structured recognitive community (where recognitive relations are of course themselves normative attitudes).  Appropriately generalised, then, a version of Buchanan’s insight still holds.

Third – Charles W. Mills’ analysis of ‘subpersons’ as core to the white supremacist racial contract.  Here – for example, in his article ‘Non-Cartesian sums’, but also throughout much of his career – Mills is interested in analysing the way in which European political theory is constituted by the category of ‘subpersons’ – racial others who lack full personhood, and who therefore are not admitted to the schedule of liberal rights and entitlements associated with modernity.  This is a fundamentally recognitive argument. Therefore, although Mills is too ‘analytic’ to make heavy use of Hegel (who is of course one of many exemplars of the white supremacist discourse Mills is critiquing), I think this argument can nevertheless easily be made within a broadly Hegelian (and, therefore, Brandomian-Hegelian) framework.  In his later work, Mills is primarily interested in ‘recuperating’ liberal social contract theory for an emancipatory anti-racist politics, by reworking Rawls and Kant in a more liberatory direction.  But I think a similar argument can be made for (an analytic) Hegel – using the Hegelian-Brandomian recognitive apparatus to understand the white supremacist distinction between full persons and subpersons in terms of recognitive communities – i.e. normative attitudes.

Fourth and finally – Brandom himself.  As is clear, I think that all three of the arguments or positions I’ve cited so far can be re-articulated within a broadly Brandomian idiom.  So at one level I’m simply recommending shifting all these arguments into this register.  (Or at least, that’s what I’m doing myself, whether or not other people find it useful…)  But here, again, the caveat is that Brandom’s apparatus – though incredibly strong on the way in which normative statuses are constituted by normative attitudes – is one-sided in its focus on a) linguistic, and b) ‘wholly’ normative attitudes.  So if we’re going to shift these political-economic and political claims into the register of a Brandomian analytic framework, we need to also extend the framework, so that, at a minimum, it can accommodate relationships of domination – normative attitudes that are straightforwardly repressive.  If we can’t extend Brandom’s apparatus in this way, then it’s not going to be able to articulate core insights within the political and political-economic discourses I’m citing.

Ok.  As I say, I’m circling round the same space again and again in these recent posts, for which I apologise.  But I guess that’s what the blog is – ringing slight changes on the same basic content, in the hope that slowly, over time, progress can be made.  I feel like some degree of greater clarity is slowly being accomplished, maybe.