Coercion in Brandom – framing the problem

Ok. In the last post I articulated a problem space that I fear is going to be dominating my thoughts in the near to medium term: how to introduce coercion into the Brandomian metatheoretical apparatus.  That post therefore also inaugurated a new strand on the blog, which I’m going to characterise as “flailing around wildly, thinking out loud, trying to figure out how to get a handle on this issue.”  In this post I want to back up and frame this line of thought very slightly more carefully.

Recall that a few posts ago I said that the space I’d gotten to in my thinking about Brandom opened up three distinct lines of thought – three ways in which I wanted to modify the Brandomian apparatus.  The first was that I wanted to take the Brandomian apparatus in a more pluralist direction.  I think it’s basically very clear how to pursue this line of thought – and I’ve already gone some meaningful way towards doing so, on the blog.  The tweaks that need to be made to the Brandomian apparatus in this respect are quite minor, and moreover there is a vast amount of published philosophical (and political, etc.) literature on normative and political pluralism.  I need to do a lot of reading, but I don’t think there are any ~fundamental~ conceptual problems here.

The second was that I wanted to take the Brandomian apparatus in a more psychoanalytic or moral psychological direction.  Here I think things are a bit muddier: the literature in this space is, in my view, a lot less developed than the literature on normative and political pluralism.  Moreover, a lot of psychoanalytic literature is kind of bizarre, and itself requires very heavy modification before it can be (responsibly) adapted.  Nevertheless, I think it’s broadly clear how to begin to go about pursuing this line of thought.

The third issue was coercion.  This is what I want to focus on in this series of posts.  I think this topic is both the most central to the political-economic research programme that I’m trying to pursue here on the blog, and the hardest for me to get handle on.  I’m not of course saying that there isn’t relevant literature here – almost certainly there is.  But it’s not immediately clear to me what that literature is.  There is, I realise, a substantial philosophical literature on coercion – and I probably need to start reading in that space.  But it’s not clear to me that most of that literature is even addressing the problem space that I want to address.  That problem space is something like the following: how is coercion implicated in the production of our norms?

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One of my reference points in thinking about this kind of thing is the work of Charles W. Mills.  I’ve written on the blog before about both ‘The Racial Contract’ and Mills’ defence of liberalism.  Here I want, I guess, to think in the space of his distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory.  I’m not sure what I’m saying exactly maps onto that distinction, but for the moment I don’t care – as I say, the goal of these posts is to flail around to try to get a handle on things; efforts at precision can come much later (if at all).

Think, then, about what one might call the traditional order of explanation of the relationship between freedom and coercion articulated in social contract theory (this applies to both left (e.g. Rawls) and right (e.g. Buchanan) variants of social contractarianism).  In that traditional order of explanation, we begin with individual social agents acting freely.  For whatever reason (some kind of cooperative self-interest) those agents engage in a process of negotiation out of which emerges an agreement to cooperatively act in concert in the production of political institutions – paradigmatically (though not necessarily) the state.  Those political institutions can then wield coercive power.  But, the idea is, because the subjects of that coercive power have freely chosen to institute the coercive institutions, those institutions enjoy some (relatively high) degree of legitimacy, even when they are acting coercively.  There are a lot of large question marks hanging over this entire argumentative approach, in my view, but that’s not the point here – I just want to characterise the tradition.

(NB: I think it’s worth distinguishing this kind of social contractarian argument from Rousseau’s argument about the emergence of a general will, which is in my view a basically non-liberal argument (because basically anti-individualist).  In other words, I’m suggesting that even though Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’ is one of the paradigmatic social-contractarian texts, the core collectivist argument Rousseau makes in that text actually isn’t a social contractarian argument in the sense in which I’m using that term.  Maybe the usage I’m adopting here is silly, or at least eccentric, but again, the goal here is flailing not precision.)

Now, Mills’ core argument (or one of them – I’ll maybe do a survey post at some point that tries to summarise the different dimensions of Mills’ overall project?) is that the freely chosen social contract by means of which political actors choose to subordinate themselves to the power of a coercive authority is also a contract between social actors choosing to dominate groups excluded from the recognition of rights under that contract.  Drawing on (and co-authoring with!) Carole Pateman, as well as other feminist theorists, Mills argues that the contract that allows the freely choosing subject to be subjected to political authority is also a contract by means of which the subject enters into a cooperative venture of domination of those who are not understood by the contracting parties to even enjoy the enlightened freedom to engage in contracts.  Thus the classical social contract theorists simply excluded subordinated populations from the realm of political recognition – notably women and people of colour – as part of a project of planetary conquest and domination that was notably ‘illiberal’, if one understands liberalism in anything like (by our lights) genuine universalist terms.

I think this is an extremely clearly correct and essential argument that has to be incorporated into the ‘ground floor’ of our thinking about contractarianism.  But it’s not quite the argument about coercion or domination that I want to think about in this post.

The argument I want to think about is, rather, the role of coercion in the constitution of the contracting social agents in the first place.  In other words, I want to think about the way in which the free agents of liberal social contract theory (and – eventually – liberal political economy) are themselves ‘made’ by power relations.

Now, at one level this point is already baked into the social contractarian tradition, in the form of the Hobbesian argument about the pre-contractarian state of nature, in which humanity’s life is (famously) nasty, brutish, and short.  The context here is (again famously) a period of disastrous civil war, in which the use of violence in society was extremely widespread.  The Hobbesian argument, obviously, is something like the following: yes, despotism may be bad, but the alternative is even worse.  In choosing the Hobbesian contract, then, an argument could be made that the social agents in question aren’t really exactly choosing freely.  On the contrary, they are making their decision to endorse despotism under threat of death.  In other, less life-threatening circumstances, maybe they would choose a different form of government – a less despotic one.  One of the approaches taken by some subsequent social contract theory, then, is to imagine the contractarian decision being made under more benign circumstances.  In the Rawlsian case, these circumstances are, of course, purely hypothetical – a veil of ignorance descends, under which one not only does not experience coercion, but does not even experience a full self-identity, in the sense of specific social location or ascriptive attributes of self.

Ok.  Now, if you’re a pragmatist (like me), then one of your core theoretical commitments is the idea that there actually isn’t a self without social location.  The self is socially constituted.  One of the things this means is that if you are imagining a context-free self, making decisions abstracted from social location, then you are simply disavowing the role that social location plays in constituting that self.  Now, I don’t think that accepting this argument is necessarily the death knell for Rawlsian social contractarian theorising – I think there are various ways you could credibly try to square that circle.  One could, for example, argue that, yes, the ‘free floating’ self behind the veil of ignorance has been socially constituted, but it has been ~appropriately~ socially constituted – the availability of this style of reasoning is one of the virtues of the way in which our societies are currently constructed, and we should embrace not reject it, albeit grounded in a more fully pragmatist and historicising metatheory.  But that’s not the project I want to pursue in this series of posts.

Rather, I want to think about the way in which the entire social context – including force, including coercion – is constitutive of the self that engages in free decision-making.  Brandom’s metatheory, as I’ve argued before, essentially rules out this line of thought on methodological grounds early in ‘Making It Explicit’, when he is clear that the kinds of sanctions he is interested in are ~normative~ sanctions – that the theory is going to ground the institution of normativity in a set of social practices that centrally include normative sanctions, and that his theory does not require, and will not be discussing, other forms of sanctioning – such as “beating people with sticks”.  What I want to do in this series of posts is try to think about how to bring back in “beating people with sticks”.

Work to do

As I said in my last post, the main thing I want to do at the moment, intellectually speaking, is read.  There is ~so much~ to read – I don’t think I’ve been a complete laggard in my reading, and yet there is still a completely overwhelming amount to read.

Mostly to try to keep my psychological moorings, though, I want to put up yet another of my posts in which I try to sketch the general contours of my project.  That project is – as I keep repeating to myself – fundamentally a project in ~political economy~.  It may look like I don’t spend any time at all on political economy, but that’s (I tell myself) because I want and need to get my ‘foundations’ solid before I get into the real stuff.  But let me review.

How are we to think about the microfoundations of political economy?  One popular way to think about this question is to take the transaction as the basic unit of analysis.  Here the tacit (or overt!) model is of free, equal individuals engaging in an exchange for mutual advantage.  Out of this basic micro-level model we can then build an entire political-economic apparatus, in which the aggregate interaction of all those countless transactions results in macro-level phenomena that can be analysed from a much more ‘global’ perspective.  This is, I think, broadly, the Marshallian and then neoclassical project.

But do transactions take place in a vacuum?  Clearly they do not.  On the contrary, transactions take place within an institutional framework, which makes those transactions possible.  How, then, are we to understand this institutional framework?

Here I think there are two core answers in the institutional economics literature.  First, we can derive institutions from transactions, by seeing institutions as functionally serving the economic ‘base’ of transactions.  This is, to a reasonable first approximation, what transaction cost economics (i.e. Williamson and company) does.  In this respect, transaction cost economics is extremely close to the kind of functionalist account of the production of an institutional superstructure from an economic base advocated by one strand of orthodox Marxism – best represented, at least in the analytic literature, by G.A. Cohen.  I think this approach has all the flaws that are traditionally levelled at functionalist frameworks that lack an adequate account of the mechanisms that ‘select’ or produce the functional behaviour in question, so this is very much not my favoured approach.

The other approach is to focus on ‘the rules of the game’.  Here we stipulate that institutions are rules, that changing the rules changes the institution, and so on.  And then this approach raises an obvious additional question: where do the rules come from?

The elaborate Brandomian apparatus that I’ve been working through on the blog this last decade plus, I claim, can provide a developed metatheoretical framework for answering this question.  Brandom is all about the analysis of the institution of rules.  Moreover, Brandom’s account of the institution of rules is itself ‘microfounded’.  One of the problems with ‘rules of the game’ institutional economics is that its account of the institution of rules can itself be sort of hand-wavy – but not so with Brandom.

So my claim is: we start with the metatheoretical microfoundations of a Brandomian neopragmatism.  Those microfoundations can then give us an account of how social actors institute rules in practice.  Those rules can then be used to explain the institutional framework within which transactions take place.  And from this we can then reconstruct basically the entirety of modern economics, on (ultimately) neopragmatist Brandomian foundations.

But there’s a problem.  Or really, there are two problems – one of which the Brandomian apparatus can solve, and one of which it (in my view) cannot – at least not yet, that I see.

In a Real Academic Paper that I’m currently working on, and that will hopefully see the light of day one of these decades, I argue that the most developed rules-of-the-game metatheoretical apparatus within institutional economics (Elinor Ostrom’s) has two core shortcomings.  First: it is unable to adequately deal with dissensus.  Second: it is unable to adequately deal with coercion.  (I will make this argument properly, with i’s dotted and t’s crossed, if the paper ever gets published – this post is just a very very high-level summary.)

I think that the nudges I’ve made to the Brandomian apparatus on this blog over the last little while go quite some way towards tackling the dissensus issue.  It’s true, of course, that Brandom’s Hegel appears to aspire to some kind of totalising recognitive unity, but (I’ve argued) we can just ditch that commitment and entitle ourselves to a ‘microfounded’ account of a complexly normatively pluralist civil society, which exhibits a high degree of dissensus and yet is capable of instituting ‘rules of the game’.

But what about coercion?  What about “beating people with sticks”?  Here, I claim, Brandom’s apparatus falls short.  If we didn’t care about building coercion into the ground floor of our theoretical apparatus, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But if we are to have a ~critical~ political economy – a political economy that is engaged in (in Charles W. Mills’ vocabulary) non-ideal rather than ideal theory – we need (I claim) to bake coercion into our account of rule-formation.  It’s this absence in the Brandomian metatheoretical apparatus that’s preventing me from hitting ‘go’ and moving down the levels of abstraction to apply the Brandomian metatheoretical apparatus to the theoretical problems of actual political economy.

So this is, I think, the big missing component of the philosophical or metatheoretical side of the project I’m pursuing here.  How can we think about coercion within a broadly Brandomian neopragmatist framework?  If I could answer that question to my satisfaction I’d be a lot further along with this project than I feel I am, right now.