The economist and the preacher

There exists in every human breast an inevitable state of tension between the aggressive and acquisitive instincts and the instincts of benevolence and self-sacrifice. It is for the preacher, lay or clerical, to inculcate the duty of subordinating the former to the latter. It is the humbler, and often invidious, role of the economist to help, so far as he can, in reducing the preacher’s task to manageable dimensions. It is his function to emit a warning bark if he sees courses of action being advocated or pursued which will increase unnecessarily the inevitable tension between self-interest and public duty; and to wag his tail in approval of courses of action which will tend to keep the tension low and tolerable.

That’s Dennis Robertson, in a much-cited passage that I (like I assume many people) first read in ‘The Calculus of Consent’.  I think this is a fantastic passage, which really sums up a lot of what’s good and important about economics as a social science.  ‘Homo economicus’ – that rationally self-interested meagre shadow of a vision of the human animal – provides a salutary check against institutional structures that rely too heavily on non-self-interested behaviour from their inhabitants.

But what about the “preacher” side of this quote?  Do we have nothing to say about the behaviours of the human animal that break with ‘homo economicus’?  Isn’t there a danger that, in neglecting other elements of human behaviour, economists’ proposals and analyses will miss essential components of even those “incentive-compatible” institutions which rely for their primary motive force on rational self-interest?

I think the three-tiered analysis of the motive structures of human behaviour that I’ve recently been outlining goes some way towards addressing this category of worry.  On that approach, the ‘homo economicus’ framework resides on the ‘middle’ of the three analytic tiers: straightforward individual-level preference functions.  But ‘above’ and ‘below’ this level of analysis are two additional analytic tiers, which can greatly complicate our understanding of the motive structure of the human animal.  At the ‘social’ level, there is the desire to enjoy the approbation and escape the disapprobation of one’s peers.  And at the ‘sub-individual’ level there are the potentially conflictual subcomponents of the psyche, as (for example) analysed by Freud.

Because this three-tiered analysis can, if we wish, be articulated in rational choice terms, this approach does not necessarily take us outside the space of the economist’s analytic toolkit.  Specifically, it keeps us within the domain of one of the discipline’s central analytic principles: people respond to incentives.  When we move between analytic tiers, we are shifting our focus from one category of incentive to another – but we are still working within a framework that can be understood in incentive-compatibility terms.

This in turn allows us to think about what “the task of the preacher” amounts to, at least from this perspective.  In terms of the social level of analysis, the task of the ‘preacher’ is to institute a culture of moral approbation and disapprobation that itself incentives the “right” behaviour.  And I think this is a pretty useful (albeit, yes, perhaps slightly crass or reductionist) way to think about ethical communities.  It’s not the case (contra some cynics) that people only behave well because they fear the negative judgements of their peers, but the negative (and positive) judgements of peers clearly do function as a substantial set of incentives in shaping behaviour – a community that rewards good behaviour with approbation and bad behaviour with disapprobation will tend to encourage more good and less bad behaviour than a community of which the reverse is true.  (Of course, what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour is a vastly contentious matter, but that’s not the point here.)

What about the ‘sub-individual’ level – the level of the internal subcomponents and dynamics of the individual psyche?  Here, too, we can think in terms of incentives: the interaction of the different subcomponents of the psyche involves internal praise and blame, internal gratifications and distress.  Here, too, then, we can think (perhaps with a little straining of terminology) in terms of the construction of an ‘incentive structure’ – the internal incentive structure of the psyche’s gratifications.  And the formation of this internal ‘incentive structure’ is another way of thinking about the formation of character.  (More on this, hopefully, soon.)

So if we want to we can extend the concept of ‘incentive compatibility’ to character-formation and the ethical dynamics of a community.  Of course, we need to keep straight which sense of ‘incentive compatibility’ we’re talking about – and we need to remember that this is just one way of thinking about these phenomena, and not invariably the most productive one.  Still, I find it helpful.  Thinking about things in this way also allows us to retain (what I regard as) the core insight of the Robertson quote, without committing ourselves to all the baggage that comes with a generative distinction between aggressive/acquisitive versus benevolent/self-sacrificing instincts within the human psyche.  Rather, that distinction can be folded into and generated out of a larger story about the moral economy of our motives and behaviour.

In this next post in this series, I want to return to the issue of character-formation, and talk a little about the distinction between habits and decisions.

Levels of analysis of individual action

I’ve uploaded another short document to my ‘draftwork’ page – The Social Construction of Non-Transitive Preferences [PDF].  The goal of this post is to gloss and associate around that document in a more informal way (not that the document itself is a paragon of rigour).

I’ll start by flagging that, in the train of thought to which this post contributes, I’m going to be moving unceremoniously between analysis couched in terms of motives and analysis couched in terms of commitments (or at least, claims that I’ve reached via analysis couched in terms of commitments).  This is (understandably) a mortal sin from at least some theoretical perspectives.  As I’ve said before, my overarching claim in this space is that the paired terms in the oppositions “motives / commitments” and “desire / duty” can be rendered strongly compatible (albeit certainly not synonymous!) with the right philosophical heavy lifting, and that the concluding sections of the Spirit section of Hegel’s Phenomenology are my reference point for how that argument ought to go.  (My claim, further, is that Brandom refuses to follow Hegel down this element of the Phenomenology’s argument, for again understandable but in my view ultimately misguided anti-subjectivist methodological reasons.)  In any case, I intend to come back to all this, life permitting, but for now I’m giving myself permission to move freely and carelessly between non-equivalent vocabularies that fall on different sides of these oppositions, on the heroic but relatively strongly-held assumption that this can all be made to work out in the wash.

Ok.  So the document is working in a rational choice paradigm, and sort of using that paradigm to produce a model of the individual that is completely intractable within that paradigm, thereby losing most of the paradigm’s modelling virtues.  Still – what I want to talk about in terms of the document I’ve uploaded, is the three levels of analysis of individual action it’s working with.  [Some might say “Are you really going to start posting commentary on your own writing here now??  This seems like new levels of self-absorption for the blog” And to those people I say: “Look, ….”]

On the one hand, we have analysis of the individual in traditional rational choice terms – the individual has a well-behaved preference function which exhibits the attributes of completeness and transitivity.  But then, still staying within the rational choice framework, we can treat the individual as an ‘aggregation’ of other preference functions, at which point we can wave goodbye to transitivity (because Arrow).  There are two (potentially overlapping or intersecting) ways in which we can treat the individual as an aggregation of preference functions.

1. We can treat the individual as composed of multiple subcomponents, each of which can itself be analysed in intentional terms.  This is, basically, the Freudian strategy.  So, for example, the ‘id’ is a unit within the individual psyche with its own intentional structure, while the ‘superego’ is another unit within the individual psyche with its own, different intentional structure.  One of the tasks of the ‘ego’ is to reconcile incompatible desires associated with conflictual subcomponents of the psyche.  I’m suggesting this can in principle be understood as a preference aggregation mechanism.
2. We can treat the individual as channelling the preferences of others in their social environment.  So, for example (and very simply), I might tend to adopt the opinion of the majority of people in my social milieu on any given topic.  (There’s a whole ton of opinion dynamics modelling in this broad space.)  Obviously this is not how we adopt all our opinions – but I think it would be a naive model of the human animal that doesn’t treat this dynamic as playing a major role in opinion- (and therefore preference-) formation.

Then of course given these two approaches, we have:

3. A combination of the two.  For example: the subcomponent of the self that is the superego is formed by the ‘introjection’ of the preferences of others in one’s social milieu.

That’s basically what the linked document says, in the idiom of rational choice theory.  In this post I want to shift partly out of that idiom, and go a little further with this line of thought.

Start by shifting from the language of preferences to that of commitments, and then re-introduce the Brandomian de dicto / de re distinction.  So, staying with the example of the superego, we might say that rather than introjecting another’s preference function, the superego introjects a set of normative commitments.  But then we could in principle distinguish between (what we take to be) the de dicto and de re commitments of the individual(s) whose commitments are introjected.  I could even in principle attribute a different assessment of the de re content of the introjected commitments to different subcomponents of the psyche.  So, for example, I (as my ego) might attribute to my superego commitments that I don’t believe correctly track the commitments it has introjected.

One of the consequences of this “double bookkeeping” dimension of commitment tracking is that one can end up with selves that are really very complexly divergent from their social milieux, even if all of the selves’ commitments are derived from or constituted by those social milieux.  This is important to me, metatheoretically speaking, as a (somewhat, loosely) “cashed out” explanation of how the individual self can diverge from its social milieu even on a quite strongly social constructivist account of the self.

If one wanted to make this point in a more ‘rational choice’ idiom, I suppose one could argue that because we can never fully know another’s preference function (but only its expression in a finite number of decisions) one can easily “introject” a reconstructed preference function that is in fact significantly divergent from the “real” preference function that “really” underlies those decisions.  I prefer the Brandomian way of doing things, but this rational choice version will carry much of the same argumentative weight, in terms of the divergence of self from milieu.

What does this apparatus give us?  Well, it gives us three different lenses on analysing the actions of the individual.

First lens: standard rational choice theory.  Here we have an individual with a specifiable preference function behaving in accordance with that function.  Obviously the most prominent version of this approach is ‘homo economicus’ – the idea that we have a rationally self-interested individual maximising their utility construed in fairly ‘crass’ material terms.

As I’ve said before, I have a lot of time for this ‘homo economicus’ approach, which I think captures a lot of human behaviour.  However – there is clearly also a lot of human behaviour that this approach does not capture.  Some of that non-homo-economicus behaviour can be modelled by simply changing the content of the individual’s preference function (for example: making it, at least in part, other-oriented).  But the apparatus I’m discussing here gives us two additional ways to modify ‘homo economicus’.

Second lens: the socially-constituted individual.  Here the idea is that individuals’ preferences are radically shaped by the preferences of those around them.  If I have a meta-preference for my preferences to align with the preferences of those around me, and if those around me have the same meta-preference, then this provides another mechanism via which all our preferences can diverge quite radically from those of ‘homo economicus’, as we mutually reinforce each others’ preferences (and beliefs, and behaviours).  I think there’s a useful, albeit very loose, analogy here with sexual selection in biology.  The functionalist dimension of the Darwinist explanatory framework suggests that animals should be ‘adapted’ to their environment.  But since that environment includes other animals of the same species, sexual selection preferences can produce really weird evolutionary features that don’t have any obvious ‘environmental’ function beyond matching the sexual preferences of other animals, where those preferences have themselves evolved as part of the same dynamic.  Similarly in social life, preferences can diverge from those that might appear ‘rationally self-interested’ very dramatically, even on a rational choice model, because ‘self-interest’ includes an interest in the preferences and opinions of others.  Once this ‘specular’ dimension of self-formation is permitted to enter the picture, it is in principle possible for almost any behaviour to be socially instituted by a mutually-reinforcing community of practice.

Third lens: Instead of looking at individual behaviour via this kind of group dynamics, we can also see the individual as formed out of the internal dynamics of the subcomponents of the psyche.  As I said above, this approach is strongly compatible with the ‘social milieu’ approach – but it also allows us to explain high levels of ‘disconnect’ between individual and social environment.

Now – one of the problems with ‘homo economicus’ approaches is that they often seem to have a debased and narrow understanding of the motives that inform individual action.  People can behave in highly non-’rational’ ways, at least as ‘homo economicus’ construes reason.  But I think a lot of those behaviours can be thought about using the apparatus sketched above.  Critics of homo economicus often complain that the framework doesn’t accommodate major forms of collective action or social solidarity – I think the ‘specular’ dimension of the framework sketched above can easily do this.  It’s important to recognise, however, that ‘collective action’ and ‘social solidarity’ are morally neutral terms.  Pogroms and lynch mobs are also examples of collective action and (in-group) social solidarity.  In fact, one of the biggest problems with the ‘homo economicus’ framework, from my perspective, is that it doesn’t easily or intuitively accommodate these major negative features of actually-existing social reality: the vigilante mob; the murderous fury of the community directed against its demonised others.

At this same time, the ‘internal dynamics of the psyche’ dimension of this approach can also accommodate behaviours that radically depart both from narrowly-understood individual self-interest and from group dynamics.  The self, once forged, can have its own internal ‘specular’ dynamics which reinforce preferences, commitments, and behaviours which dramatically diverge from those of the individual’s social environment.  Again, this is in itself morally neutral – moral superheroes and sociopaths can both possess these qualities.

In any case, this three-tiered approach to thinking about individual motives and intentionality is what I want to be working with, at least for now.  There’s much more to say about all of this, but I think that’s enough for this post.

Homo psychoanalyticus

My ‘taking stock’ post of January 6th laid out what I think is basically my current philosophical or metatheoretical research programme.  I don’t want to recapitulate that post here, but the basic idea is that I want to bolt a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘Humean’ account of the motivational structure of action onto the Brandomian-Hegelian metatheoretical apparatus that I otherwise largely endorse (albeit with important caveats that I’ve outlined elsewhere on the blog).

The basic idea of that ‘subjectivist’ or ‘Humean’ framework is that people are essentially motivated by gratification and/or desire.  (This claim needs to be caveated immediately, because as pragmatists we of course know that habit is central to human behaviour also – but that side of things can wait for another time.)  I am interested in two big divergent theoretical streams that come out of that basic philosophical move.  On the one hand, you have psychoanalytic approaches; on the other hand, you have rational choice theory.  There are (obviously) major points of difference between those two traditions.  Nevertheless, they share a basic assumption that “the pleasure principle” is a fundamental explanatory category.  Psychoanalysis understands the “pleasure principle” in terms of libidinal drives and their vicissitudes; rational choice theory understands the “pleasure principle” in terms of instrumentally rational utility maximisation.  But there is a fundamental commonality here which I am interested in – and which I endorse.

In working through Brandom’s interpretation of the conclusion of the Spirit section of the Phenomenology I have argued that Brandom misinterprets Hegel’s interest in this thematic.  Hegel, I am claiming, is attempting to integrate a “pleasure principle” motivational structure with a “duty-oriented” moral philosophy – integrating these key elements of Hume and Kant’s moral philosophies, if you like.  I claim that this project closely parallels Brandom’s integration of a “normative attitudes” explanatory framework with a “normative statuses” account of semantic content.  Brandom, however, conflates these two projects (the project focused on the relation between duty and desire, and the project focused on the relation between norms and practices), in a way that does not do justice to the subtlety and force of Hegel’s argument in ‘Spirit’.  This in turn can be explained by Brandom’s resolute refusal to make use of fundamentally subjectivist categories (experience; belief; desire) as core explanatory planks of his system.  I want to break with Brandom on this issue.

I’ve said that rational choice theory and psychoanalysis share a basic philosophical approach.  But I want to make a stronger claim than that – I want to argue that there is considerably more potential overlap between these two frameworks than is typically recognised.  What I want to start thinking about on the blog in more detail, then, is how (or to what extent) this latter claim can be cashed out.  How far is it possible to integrate these apparently very different approaches?  I don’t think they’re going to be fully synthesisable – even I wouldn’t go that far.  But I want to push this line of thought and see where I can get to with it.  This is also a way of trying to talk myself into finally doing the work on getting to grips with rational choice theory in economics – or at least give myself some way of thinking about what is and isn’t implied by these elements of the standard formal econ toolkit.

What are some objections to this project?  Non-exhaustively, the following immediately spring to mind:

• Objections from simple “that alternative framework is obviously malign in some under-elaborated way.”  Lots of people in a critical theory or qualitative social-scientific space just object to formal approaches on sight, and vice versa.  Most of the time I think this is just a ‘two cultures’ in-group out-group dynamic, and I don’t intend to pay it much heed.
• Objections from “what becomes of normativity on this account?”  I want to subdivide this objection into two subcategories.  First there are objections to pragmatist approaches in general – I take it Brandom has addressed these, and I have covered this terrain extensively in my posts about Brandom on the blog.  Second, there are objections from within a broadly Brandomian framework, which reject the move to “pleasure principle” or to instrumental rationality accounts of motivation or behaviour as undermining key dimensions of the Brandomian project – I’ll want to speak more to this kind of objection as I go.
• The apparent incompatibility of an approach that presupposes rationality (rational choice theory), and an approach that studies irrationality (psychoanalysis).  No doubt there’s something in this objection, but I think people sometimes forget the extent to which Freud’s project is a sense-making one.  Semantically, Freud’s goal is to uncover the meaningful content in apparently meaningless cognitive content (parapraxis; dreams); in the theory of action, Freud’s goal is to expose the intentional structures behind apparently irrational, unintended action.  The psychoanalytic project is to explain irrational behaviour in terms of action that is, at some level, rational.  I think it’s worth pressing on this side of things.
• The incompatibility of the two frameworks’ conceptions of the subject.  Rational choice theory typically assumes a unitary subject, while psychoanalysis typically assumes a divided subject.  I think this is very true, and in fact this is going to be my main initial strategy for synthesising these approaches – arguing that rational action at the sub-individual level can result in irrational action at the individual level, just as rational action at the individual level can result in irrational action at the collective level (Arrow’s impossibility theorem, etc.).  So I’m going to embrace this difference rather than aim to minimise it.
• Deep philosophical problems with the conceptions of intentionality involved in either or both frameworks’ understanding of the relation between desire and gratification.  I can already see some murky philosophical depths here that presumably at some point I’ll have to dip my toes into – for now, though, this side of things is going onto the back burner until such time as I’ve worked through some of the other objections in this list a little more thoroughly.
• Objections of pseudo-science.  Both psychoanalysis and rational choice theory have frequently been characterised as pseudo-scientific, on the grounds that both approaches posit unobservable explanatory factors that can always be ‘preserved’ by explanatory epicycles which render the basic framework compatible with any empirical observations whatsoever.  I think this objection has some force, and should be taken seriously, but I ultimately don’t accept it as a basis for rejecting either framework (or, obviously, their synthesis).  I probably need to do more work in the philosophy of science to elaborate or justify this opinion of mine, though, as I go.

Anyway, those are some objections to the project I’m pursuing here, most of which I want to at least keep at the back of my mind as I pursue it.  For now, though, I want to trudge on.  To repeat, the project – or subproject – is to see to what extent the psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of behaviour can be integrated with the rational utility-maximising framework of ‘homo economicus’, producing something like ‘homo psychoanalyticus’.  I feel like Jon Elster is a theorist who has explored quite a bit of this kind of terrain already (though not always with positive conclusions for any of these traditions), and I haven’t read nearly enough Elster, so I think he’s an obvious starting point in trying to work through this kind of space.  Onward.

Acemoğlu and Robinson

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Acemoğlu and Robinson recently: their three books – The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2005); Why Nations Fail (2012); The Narrow Corridor (2019) – as well as various articles.  There are many more articles I could and should read, but I feel I’ve read enough to give a high-level summary and assessment of their project.

Broadly speaking, I think you can say that Acemoğlu and Robinson have three ‘big ideas’.

1. Political-economic institutions are the major determinant of economic growth.
2. Political-economic institutions are themselves largely a function of the balance of class power within a society.
3. The single largest determinant of the global distribution of wealth is the legacy of European colonialism.

I think all of these three ideas have a great deal to recommend them, and so at this level of abstraction I am strongly on board with Acemoğlu and Robinson’s project.  Getting into slightly more detail, though, I do have some points of difference or criticisms.  In the rest of this post I want to discuss a few specific dimensions of Acemoğlu and Robinson’s work.

First up: Acemoğlu and Robinson’s (hereafter A&R’s) relation to the existing literature.  One of the oddities of A&R’s approach is how thoroughly it takes on board a set of moves that are historically associated with broadly Marxist approaches to political economy, and yet how little A&R reference that tradition in their discussions of prior scholarship.  I don’t entirely know what to make of this.  Are A&R quasi-concealing the Marxist influences on their work for respectability reasons?  Are they unaware of those influences?  A&R are not politically Marxists – they are, as far as I can tell, basically left-neoliberal social democrats, in favour of a moderately redistributive dynamic market economy.  But their framework imports huge amounts from relatively orthodox historical materialism.  Douglass North describes himself somewhere as a right-wing Marxist, which I think is accurate – and would be an accurate description of A&R as well.  A&R take it that the appropriate goal of mass revolutionary politics is democratic political institutions plus broadly distributed and stable private property rights.  Obviously this is a major difference from orthodox Marxism.  But if you make that substitution, A&R’s account of class struggle as the route to achieving this outcome is quite ‘orthodox’ – essentially they just substitute “more redistributive and democratic capitalism” for “communism” as the historic goal of mass politics.  In this respect, I think A&R can plausibly be seen as the ‘inheritors’ of the more econ-aligned wing of the short-lived [though maybe undergoing a mini-revival?] analytical Marxist tradition (and indeed they cite Roemer, Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein at various moments).  This isn’t how they present themselves, though, nor does it seem very central to their reception.  I guess people care more about whether someone’s politics is Marxist than whether their analytic framework is.

Anyway, that’s one oddity of A&R’s relation to the existing literature.  Another is that they are not reliable summarisers of that literature.  One example: they differentiate their position from that of Eric Williams, whom they seem to understand as emphasising “the plunder of the colonies by the Europeans” as the major driver of differential core/periphery development.  A&R, by supposed contrast, argue that the most important difference between “a society like the Caribbean colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries” and the post-industrial-revolution European core was different categories of capitalist institution: extractivist and monopolistic versus industrial and dynamic.  But this claim is central to Williams’ argument in ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ – the second half of that book is about the eclipse of the mercantilist-slaver model of capitalism by the free-trade-industrialist model, the slave colonies ‘left behind’ by the new, dynamic form of capitalism rising to power in the core.  A&R seem to be overstating the novelty of their argument by contrasting it with a position that seems to me more like a precursor.

Another, stranger, example of this phenomenon is their treatment of W. Arthur Lewis.  In their most-cited paper, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’ (2001), A&R cite Lewis as someone who has lucidly articulated their most central claim about the damaging effects of the persistence of extractivist colonial institutions into post-colonial independent states:

Arthur Lewis gives a succinct statement of the issues (1965, pp. 32-33):

“… for most of [the governments of newly-independent African states] independence means merely that they have succeeded to the autocracy vacated by British and French civil servants.  They model themselves on the arrogant and arbitrary pattern set by Governors and district commissioners.”

Here Lewis is cited as an influence on – or at least precursor to – A&R’s argument, and A&R’s original contribution is providing econometric support for a position already articulated, at least in broad brush strokes, by Lewis.  By the time we get to ‘Why Nations Fail’, though, A&R seem to have forgotten this dimension of Lewis’s work.  In chapter nine of ‘Why Nations Fail’ they contrast their institutional approach to Lewis’s ‘dual economy’ theory of development.  They summarise Lewis’s dual sector model and argue that development theorists, building on Lewis, have failed to understand the political origins of the dual economy in many underdeveloped countries:

This perspective has much truth to it but misses the entire logic of how the dual economy came into existence and its relation to the modern economy.

Later:

The dual economy of South Africa did come to an end in 1994.  But not because of the reasons that Sir Arthur Lewis theorized about.  It was not the natural course of economic development that ended the color bar and the Homelands.  Black South Africans protested and rose up against the regime that did not recognize their basic rights and did not share the gains of economic growth with them.

The strong, and strange, implication here is that Lewis is somehow unaware of or inattentive to the political-economic institutional features – including apartheid! – that constrained South African economic development, or the role of political contestation in transforming such institutions.  A&R do not cite Lewis’s 1985 book ‘Racial conflict and economic development’, where he writes that “after testing the water in Kenya” Britain learned:

that even small guerrilla groups could reduce government almost to a standstill.  France took longer to learn, and bloodied herself in Algeria and Indochina; but she learned. … The Union of South Africa will be the last to learn, but its time has not yet come.

I think it’s clear that Lewis cannot legitimately be used as a foil for A&R here, as an example of a theorist unaware of conflictual or structural elements of inherited colonial institutions.  But this is how A&R use him in ‘Why Nations Fail’, even though they quote him appropriately elsewhere.  I don’t really know what’s gone wrong here, but I don’t think one can rely on A&R to accurately summarise the literature they are engaging with.

Ok.  This is all pretty much in the domain of ‘scholarly quibbles’.  Moving more onto the substance.

I’ve said that one (big!) difference between A&R’s apparatus and that of classical Marxism is their actual politics.  Another difference is methodological.  A&R are frequently translating into the language of mainstream economics positions that have been widely held for a long time in other subfields.  (There’s nothing wrong with this at all, in my view.)  They have two toolkits for doing this: game theory, and econometrics.

On the game theory side of things, A&R’s first book – ‘The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy’ – is essentially presenting a traditional class conflict model of the economic determination of political institutions in game-theoretic terms.  This is extremely good, in my opinion.  Moreover the game-theoretic packaging (plus, no doubt, the authors’ political vibes) seems to make the framework entirely palatable within mainstream economics.  Anyone who wants to make a class-conflict base-superstructure-type argument within mainstream economics can just pick up this framework and run with it.  The framework can easily be integrated with other elements of mainstream economics, which is also good.  At least, it’s good for those of us who dislike the siloing of critical political economy and mainstream economics, and think that each has much to learn from the other.

On the econometric side of things, several of A&R’s papers are doing quite laborious econometric analysis to make the case that different kinds of colonial institutions have differential ongoing effects on nations’ economic development.  I’m no econometrician, so I’m not really in a position to evaluate this side of things.  I do have some tentative methodological worries about this approach – but I will aim to circle back to those later in this post.

Ok.  But what about the actual claims A&R are making?  Here I think it’s useful to distinguish three different elements of their argument.

1. Their emphasis on conflict theory.
2. Their distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions.
3. Their argument about the legacy of colonial institutions.

I am on board with (1) – the emphasis on conflict theory.  I can imagine two broad objections to this approach.  The first objection is the traditional objection to class conflict accounts of history – that it’s too crude and simplistic, missing out the countless factors that cannot be explained in terms of class interest.  My attitude to this critique is sort of doubled.  On the one hand, this critique is clearly correct – this kind of analytic approach is very simplistic.  I think it’s entirely fair to object that much of the substance of history and of social life goes missing in this kind of account.  On the other hand, however, I feel like a lot of supposedly more nuanced and sophisticated frameworks in fact do worse than vulgar class conflict analysis when it comes to explaining lots of important political-economic dynamics.  I regard ‘vulgar class conflict’ analysis as a sort of baseline that it is surprisingly easy to fall below.  So I regard this kind of approach as providing a valuable starting point to work from, rather than as something to be dismissed.

The second common objection to the kind of approach that A&R pursue is an objection to its formalism: isn’t game theory itself simply too crude a tool to provide any really useful analytic purchase on complex social reality?  Here, again, my attitude is sort of doubled: yes, in principle that’s a perfectly valid objection.  In practice, however, I find that many people who object to the crudity of formal approaches themselves have frameworks that are, if anything, even cruder – while also lacking the virtues of clarity and transparency that come from spelling out one’s commitments in simple formal terms.  So, again, I think we should be extremely open to legitimately more sophisticated approaches, but I also think there’s much to be said for the formalisms.  There are categories of handwaving and bluster that are basically incompatible with developing a simple toy model to illustrate one’s claims – and that in itself is a strong virtue of toy models.

Anyway, as I say, I like the conflict theory dimension of A&R’s approach, and I like that they integrate their conflict theory with mainstream economics via the use of game theory, albeit with appropriate caveats and cautions.

Point (2) – the distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions – is more complex.  I think it’s clear that A&R are onto something with this distinction: it’s obvious that many historical colonial institutions were oriented toward the extraction of a region’s wealth for the benefit of overseas interests, whereas many core economies are much more “inclusive” both politically and economically.  Similarly, it’s clear that lots of political-economic institutions are set up for the benefit of a ruling elite rather than for the benefit of society as a whole.  So this distinction definitely captures something.  But I also think this distinction is clearly much too crude to do much explanatory heavy lifting.  To be sure, A&R distinguish between political versus economic extractive and inclusive institutions.  Similarly, they are clear that there is a spectrum of inclusivity and extractivism.  For example, on their (broadly Whiggish) account, post-Glorious Revolution British state institutions were much more inclusive than those that preceded the civil war.  But those institutions were still non-inclusive in all kinds of ways.  The degree of inclusivity they exhibited, however, (on A&R’s account) facilitated a “virtuous circle” whereby the inclusivity of British institutions increased overtime, largely via the expansion of the franchise.  For A&R, in other words, political and economic inclusivity and extractivism aren’t a simple on-off switch – their account is more nuanced than that.  Likewise, in academic papers they aim to distinguish between different categories of institution – for example, distinguishing “property rights institutions” and “contracting institutions” as different elements of economic inclusivity.

Nevertheless, these categories still seem very crude to me.  Unlike the crudity of the basic conflict theory apparatus, I don’t (perhaps inconsistently or incoherently) find this crudity to be very productive.  Rather, I feel like a great deal more “unbundling” is needed to clarify what we’re actually talking about when we talk about ‘extractive’ or ‘inclusive’ institutions.  In particular, it seems to me that there are many different dimensions of political-economic institutions, and it’s not at all obvious that moving in an “inclusive” direction in one respect cannot also be moving in an “extractivist” dimension in another.  To take an example that A&R discuss: the enclosure of the English commons (that Marx also thematises in ‘Capital’) is clearly part of the shift towards a capitalist property-rights-based economy.  And yet it involved the expropriation of de facto property and the concentration of property rights in the hands of a smaller number of economic actors.  Was this move “inclusive” or “extractive”?  Different moments in A&R’s texts seem to imply different answers to this question.  In discussing expropriation of the commons in some developing contexts they seem to label this move as part of an extractivist shift; but their account of early modern Britain is an account of increasing inclusivity of economic institutions, with the move away from feudal towards capitalist structures.  Because the distinction between ‘inclusive’ and ‘extractive’ institutions is so crude, and so vague, it’s not clear that A&R have the theoretical resources to analyse institutional shifts that are inclusive in one sense or from one perspective, and extractive in another.

Similarly, the category of ‘extractive’ institutions has to cover vast historical ground, on A&R’s account.  The Mayan civilisation falls under this category; so do capitalist slave economies; so does the USSR and Mao’s China.  These are three very different political-economic institutional set-ups.  It’s not that it’s wrong to call them all extractive – it’s just not clear to me that ‘extractive’ is doing much explanatory work here.  At a minimum, I think we need to be able to break down these ‘inclusive’/’extractive’ categories in a much more fine-grained way.  As stands, it’s hard not to feel that the vagueness of the categories gives A&R a lot of wiggle-room to classify ambiguous political-economic institutions as extractive or inclusive depending on what best serves their argument at any given moment.

So this is one of my big issues with A&R’s apparatus – the lack of clarity around their core distinction between ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions.

My final criticism or worry concerns A&R’s treatment of the dynamics of the international system.  European colonialism is central to A&R’s argument.  Their account of differential global development is essentially as follows.  Where Europeans set up European-style institutions in colonised countries (basically, settler colonies) those colonies have gone on to prosper even after independence, by virtue of their growth-oriented institutions.  By contrast, where Europeans set up extractivist institutions – slave societies, or structures oriented to the extraction of raw materials or the exploitation of local labour entirely for the benefit of the European core – those extractivist institutions have also often persisted in some way post-independence.  Those extractivist institutions have tended to make post-independence societies also extractivist, now largely for the benefit of a local elite, to the detriment of both economic growth and broad public welfare.

I think this argument is correct as far as it goes (albeit obviously requiring very many caveats).  One worry, though, is that A&R underrate the role of ongoing power relations in the international system for differential development.  A&R’s approach is to treat European colonialism as an exogenous intervention in local governance institutions, which beyond a certain point no longer exists.  In A&R’s model, post-independence nations’ differential economic performance can then mostly be explained by their (now local) institutions.  This account does not really leave room for ongoing power dynamics within the international system.  A&R’s framework is all about power dynamics within nation states, but it does not meaningfully discuss power dynamics between nation states.

This problem has consequences for both sides of A&R’s methodological approach.  On the game-theoretic side, I think A&R’s framework needs to be supplemented by much more analysis of international conflictual dynamics.  This is not entirely absent from their framework – for example, they discuss capital flight, and they discuss the role that powerful states may play in encouraging democratic movements.  But, to take the most straightforward example, they do not discuss coercive interstate actions – either military invasion and regime change, or the orchestrating of coups by powerful states to topple the governments of weaker ones.  Nor do they discuss the support of some group or groups within an internal conflict by another power.  Nor do they discuss simple economic power or leverage that some political-economic actors have over others within the international system.  All of this would be analysable game-theoretically, just as A&R analyse conflict within a state between a ruling elite and the rest of the populace.  But A&R largely haven’t turned to this side of things.  This seems like a useful way to extend their framework.  (Of course, it’s likely that lots of people have already done this, and I simply haven’t read them.)

This problem is arguably even more consequential for the econometric side of A&R’s methodology.  It’s central to A&R’s approach that states can, beyond a certain historical point, be treated as independent entities for statistical comparative purposes.  Comparative institutional analysis operates by looking at the differential impact of different institutions on different political-economic entities.  But what if the appropriate unit of analysis – at least for some purposes – is not the state, but is rather the world-system?  What if these are not independent entities at all, but are complexly interwoven within a system that has its own dynamics, including dynamics that impose different functions on different subcomponents of the system?  In this scenario, the degree of independence of cases that is assumed by standard statistical techniques just wouldn’t hold.  At a minimum, one would need to be more cautious than A&R in applying these kinds of comparative analytic techniques.

It seems to me, then, that A&R’s approach should take world-systems analysis much more seriously than it seems to.  I don’t know what that would look like yet, but it feels like a fruitful potential line of inquiry.  (Again, it seems likely that people have already done this, and I just need to find them and read them.)

To sum up.  A&R’s work has several through lines: the importance of institutions, specifically the distinction between ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions; the importance of class conflict in forming those institutions; the role of colonial-era institutions in explaining differential economic development internationally.  For me, A&R’s most significant contribution is probably the way in which they ‘operationalise’ conflict theory accounts of institution formation with a set of developed game-theoretic models.  This is valuable in itself, but it is also valuable because it makes it easier to integrate important elements of critical political economy with mainstream economics.

I do have some criticisms of A&R, however.  I think they make it harder than it ought to be to draw connections between their work and the work of scholars in critical political economy, because their discussions of other scholars’ work isn’t always reliable.  More substantively, I think there are two big areas where A&R’s framework needs extension or modification.  First, A&R’s distinction between ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions needs much more fine-grained unpacking.  Second, A&R are insufficiently attentive to the interstate dynamics of the world-system as a whole.  Hopefully, as I keep reading in political economy, I’ll find people who have done some of this work.

Regularism and game theory

In this post I want to contrast Brandom’s apparatus in (especially) ‘Making It Explicit’ with Lewis’s game-theoretic approach to convention (in ‘Convention’).  It’s now quite some time since I read MIE, and I’ll revisit it in detail at some point.  But for now I want to discuss some connections between these two works, as part of my general effort to veer the Brandomian orientation of this blog around towards more political-economic themes.  (Lewis is, of course, a philosopher, not a political economist – but ‘Convention’ is a foundational work in the canon of formal economics.)

Regularism, recall, is the idea that norms can ultimately be identified with regularities of social behaviour.  The regularist move is: norms are socially instituted; we defer to our social milieu for judgements about correct and incorrect practice; how are we to understand the judgement of ‘the social’ to which we are thereby deferring?; maybe we can simply understand it as a regularity of practice.  If everyone in a milieu does such-and-such, they have instituted the norm that such-and-such.

I take it that Lewis’s game-theoretic account of the emergence of conventions as regularities of strategic behaviour, in ‘Convention’, is a paradigmatic example of such an account.  Lewis is interested in ‘coordination games’, in which (I’m being a bit loose here, but this is the general idea) every player benefits if they coordinate their actions successfully with the other players, but coordination is non-trivial: there are multiple available coordination equilibria.  A classic example is the practice of driving on the right (or left) side of the road.  It doesn’t matter which side of the road car users drive on, so long as everyone drives on the same side of the road, but disaster ensues if coordination is not achieved.  

Lewis analyses conventions in these terms.  His ultimate target is linguistic convention, and he’s preoccupied with linguistic convention because of the debates arising out of Quine’s sceptical critique of Carnap’s mobilisation of the concept of analyticity.  This is another example, for what it’s worth, of the way in which Carnap’s project’s influence looms over this entire intellectual tradition in a way that I hadn’t appreciated until recently.  But the point is that Lewis is interested in analysing a particular category of norm – conventions – in terms of strategic regularities within a game-theoretic model.

Now, I want to discuss two Brandomian critiques of this regularist project.

The first is the critique from ‘gerrymandering’.  This critique is basically: what counts as a regularity?  ‘Gerrymandering’ can take place at the level of the actions that ‘count’ towards the regularity: which actions are included in the set of actions analysed will influence one’s understanding of the regularity in question.  But ‘gerrymandering’ can also take place at the level of any given set of actions: because any action can be described under multiple perspectives, it is always possible to construe any given set of actions as compatible with multiple regularities.

Lewis discusses this latter issue in ‘Convention’ – and basically concludes his discussion by saying “yes, this is all true, but let’s not be silly here”.  I think this is a legitimate approach to the problem of gerrymandering for most practical purposes, but it’s not clearly a legitimate approach if the point at issue is sceptical critiques of the very idea of convention.  Brandom, in his discussion of regularism, pushes on this sceptical point about gerrymandering.  Brandom draws (I think correctly) the following conclusion: gerrymandering means that there is always a normatively interpretive element to the specification of any regularity; therefore normativity cannot be reduced to regularities of practice.  You can’t simply explain norms in terms of regularities of practice, because specifying the relevant regularity of practice is already an interpretive (therefore normative) task.

I think this is all correct as far as it goes.  In terms of the ‘two cultures of the social sciences’ distinction, that I discussed a few posts ago, I think this argument shows that you cannot entirely eliminate the ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘interpretive’ approach to social science from the ‘reductionist’ or ‘objectivist’ approach.  Even formal game-theoretic models of the kind Lewis lays out are still ‘interpretive’ and ‘internalist’ in some sense.  In terms of the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy of science, even our apparently ‘reductionist’ theoretical toolkits are always ‘value-laden’.  This blog endorses the broad philosophy of science approach articulated by Helen Longino, and this result seems compatible with that approach, to me.

Ok.  But we should also, in my view, take care not to draw overly strong conclusions from this argument.  The facts that theory is value-laden and that game-theoretic models are interpretive is only a problem with Lewis’s analytic toolkit if we are trying to use that toolkit to bolster a very strong reductionism.  These aren’t objections to the tools; they are only objections to the attempt to use these tools to fully reduce norms to regularities of practice, with no explanatory remainder.

In fact, Brandom’s whole project is about the interpretive act of ‘explicitating’ the norms implicit in practice, and thereby specifying the practice itself under one particular description.  And this project is also grounded in Brandom’s critique of ‘regulism’, or Brandom’s broader pragmatism.  Brandom is clear that we do rely on grounding our norms in regularities of practice, as long as all parties agree in practice on the tacit implications of those practices.  The practical problem of ‘gerrymandering’ appears when there is a disagreement over the normative content of those practices, and therefore different interpretive perspectives on the ‘same’ set of practices.  But such disagreements (while they undermine the strong reductionist project of wholly explaining norms in terms of regularities) are themselves reliant on background uncontested norms implicit in currently unproblematic (that is, unchallenged) regularities of practice.  Brandom’s approach is therefore pointing in two directions simultaneously – rejecting strongly reductionist regularism, while still grounding the interpretive disagreements that prompt the gerrymandering problem within a larger context of background regularities of practice.

So Brandom’s larger problem, as I see it, is how to explain these disagreements – the interpretive disagreements that allow the gerrymandering problem to become live even to participants in Lewisian coordination communities – in terms of the social practices that are also generating the regularities in question.  And this problem is what Brandom’s complex scorekeeping apparatus addresses.  Brandom’s core account, as I see it, says: yes, norms are generated by regularities of practice, but the regularities of practice have to themselves include practices capable of both generating and resolving the gerrymandering problem for participants in those practices.

Now, as I see it the distinction between de dicto and de re tracking of entitlements and commitments gives Brandom the resources to explain how social actors within a scorekeeping game can themselves perceive the gerrymandering problem.  The game of asking for and giving reasons then gives those social actors the resources to resolve the gerrymandering problem – to reach an explicit discursive consensus rather than implicit practical consensus around the relevant norm-forming regularities, once any given gerrymandering problem has been rendered problematic by a ‘challenge’ to the ‘default’ background consensus of practical coordination. (Of course, the game of asking for and giving reasons and the practices of scorekeeping are themselves mutually implicated or constitutive, on Brandom’s account, but even so.)

To sum up the post so far, then.  My first point is that Brandom’s critique of regularism shouldn’t be seen as a global challenge to Lewis’s account of convention, which is useful in all kinds of ways.  Rather, it should be seen as a challenge to the attempt to derive a reductionist account of normativity from Lewis’s account.  My second point is that if we want a model of social practice that can deal with the gerrymandering problem, the social practices in question need to incorporate Brandomian scorekeeping.

What does this mean for the relation between Brandom and game theory?  Well, I’m focusing in this post on only one dimension of that relation – the problem of regularism (ignoring, notably, issues around instrumental reason).  But in terms of the problem of regularism, I think it means two things.

First: we need to remember that game-theoretic models of the kind Lewis is articulating are greatly simplified, and can’t themselves fully ground our account of normativity.  I think this is a relatively uncontroversial point – that our models are greatly simplified and do not provide a comprehensive or foundational social ontology is sort of a methodological banality in the modelling literature.  Second, though: Brandom’s own fuller account does provide resources that could themselves potentially be interestingly incorporated into game-theoretic approaches.  What would Lewis’s models of convention look like if they were extended to incorporate scorekeeping? I don’t know. Nor do I know whether such an extension would be useful: another rightly emphasised methodological point in the modelling literature is that greater modelling complexity is not necessarily desirable.  But still, I’d like to explore this possibility, if I can, eventually.

Instituting Norms

Ok – yet another ‘orienting myself to the conceptual terrain’ post.  I take it that in my last post I outlined a broad map of what I’m trying to do here.  Trying to distil that down still further, I think it’s fair to say that the (very broad) problem I’m trying to navigate here is: How are norms instituted by social practice?

This problem has two poles.  At the philosophical pole, there is the problem of how to reconcile the genuine bindingness of norms with the reductionist project of explaining norms as instituted by social practice.  How is it that the claim that norms are instituted by social practice doesn’t evacuate the normativity of norms?

At the social-scientific pole, there is the question: how should we best analyse the institution of norms by a community, whether or not we endorse those norms ourselves?  This is the problem space that (for example) institutional economics is wrestling with, when it tries to apply its social-scientific toolkit to the analysis of the creation of the ‘rules of the game’ that structure economic life.

These two poles don’t exactly exhaust our perspectives on this problem, though – because within the social-scientific tradition there are very different ways of going about analysing the institution of norms.  Roughly speaking (and hopefully I’ll get more precise and informed on this as I move forward) there are ‘reductionist’/’behaviourist’ and ‘internalist’ accounts of normativity.  A reductionist or behaviourist approach (a common usage here is ‘positivist’, but I think that usage is so unfair to actually-existing historical positivism that I don’t want to deploy it) just looks at the social practices in question.  An ‘internalist’ approach tries to sympathetically ‘inhabit’ the normative space instituted by those practices.  This typology on my part is very crude – but I think there’s a legitimate “two cultures” divide within the social sciences, concerning which of these two approaches is privileged.  (This ‘two cultures’ divide is often taken to line up with quantitative versus qualitative research methods, but I feel like ‘reductionist’ versus ‘internalist’ approaches to the analysis of social meaning gets at the affective ‘heart’ of that divide better.)

Anyway, this three-way typology maps onto three different ‘stances’ within the Brandomian apparatus.  One stance is our own attitude to our own normative commitments – what we take to be normatively correct [stance one].  Another stance is our sympathetic ‘tracking’ of other people’s normative commitments – we do not endorse those commitments, but we keep track of what other people take themselves to be committed to [stance two].  A third stance is a simple description of the normative practices that institute the commitments themselves – this is, as it were, the ‘objective scientific’ attitude that just picks out the relevant furniture of the world [stance three].

On Brandom’s account (which I endorse) these three stances are complexly interdependent.  Because norms are instituted by practices, we cannot explain the origin of our norms without just analytically describing the practices in question [stance three].  But we cannot describe anything (cannot make a declarative statement) without having normative commitments of our own [stance one].  We cannot have normative commitments of our own, however, without being able to move between different social perspectives on those commitments – social-perspectival scorekeeping [stance two] is a precondition of first-order normative commitments (which are in turn a precondition of declarative sentences, and therefore of the ‘reductionist’ scientific stance).

All three of these stances, therefore, for Brandom, necessarily come as a package.  I endorse all of this.  For myself, though, I now want to move further and further into the space of stance three – the ‘reductionist’ social-scientific account of how, exactly, social practices operate to institute our norms.  I want to do this, however, with several shifts of emphasis that I’ve talked about for a long time, on the blog.  I want to move away from Brandom’s focus on specifically linguistic practice.  I want to bring in ‘desire’, ‘utility’ etc. – the subjective motivational side of the ‘Humean’ and post-Humean approach to human nature.  And I think I want to reject the ‘Kant-Rousseau’ claim that we can only be bound by norms that we have committed ourselves to – I may try to blog about this point again soon.

Taking stock – Hume, Brandom, Hegel, game theory

Ok – I realise I write up “taking stock” type posts on here constantly, but a lot of what the blog is for is to organise my thoughts, so I’m afraid I’m going to do it again.

The last post feels, to me, like a significant advance in what I’m trying to think through here.  I feel like I’ve now clarified the main theoretical area in which I’m trying to modify Brandom’s apparatus, and this also finally clarifies how the two parts of my project – Brandomian philosophical pragmatism and institutional political economy – join up.  So, let me give a very high-level overview.

I’ve argued that we can distinguish three major challenges of post-Enlightenment ‘critical theory’ (in a very expansive sense) to the idea of norms or values.  The first is scientific naturalism: if science gives us a full accounting of the furniture of the world, and if norms are not part of that accounting, what becomes of norms in general?  The second is social perspectivalism: if there are many available social perspectives, each with different values, and if there is no clear perspective-transcendent principle for selecting between those perspectives, then what becomes of objective norms?  The third is an account of human motivation in terms of sentiment, utility, and pleasure: if ‘high’ values (the Good) can be explained as psychologically derivative of ‘low’ values (gratification), then what becomes of the (let’s say, for current want of a better word) nobility of norms?

I’ve also argued that Brandom’s apparatus gives us adequate responses to the first two of these challenges.  To a reasonable first approximation Brandom explains the institution of genuine normativity by ‘normative attitudes’ in the sense of discursive practices; these normative attitudes can be analysed as natural features of human behaviour; therefore Brandom’s apparatus reconciles normativity and philosophical naturalism.  (Brandom’s full account, as I’ve discussed at some length before, is of course vastly more complex than this, but I think this is an acceptable summary of the basic approach.)  Moreover, Brandom has a ‘formal’ account of objectivity as a concept that emerges out of an appropriately internally articulated social perspectivalism – this is the masterstroke of Brandom’s ‘double bookkeeping’ scorekeeping account.  So I take it that Brandom has also reconciled objectivity and perspectivalism.  In these two areas, I am relatively straightforwardly and unproblematically a Brandomian.

Along the third dimension of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment challenge to normativity, however, Brandom has almost nothing to say.  Brandom is aggressively (and deliberately or strategically) uninterested in desire, sentiment, utility, and so on and so forth.  This lack of interest is not an oversight – I think it is part of Brandom’s general philosophical approach.  In the domain of epistemology, and building on Sellars’ critique of the ‘myth of the given’, Brandom extricates himself in one leap from the quagmire of traditional empiricist theorisation of the nature of experience, by simply substituting the concept of “reliable differential responsive dispositions” for the concept of “experience”.  In this respect, Brandom is a behaviourist – he simply isn’t interested in theorising the subjectivity of experience, when an account of stimulus-response dispositions will do the same philosophical work for his account of normativity and semantics.  In this respect, Brandom’s apparatus occupies the apparently paradoxical philosophical niche of being a non-subjectivist perspectivalism.

If one thinks of this move in terms of the challenge of the Humean philosophical apparatus [these remarks subject to the same caveats as before about how long it is since I’ve read Hume], Brandom is rejecting in one fell swoop the psychologist understanding of experience that grounds Hume’s empiricism.  This can be seen, indeed, as part of a general move away from psychologist explanations that begins (in the analytic tradition) with Frege’s critique of psychologist understandings of logic, and continues with Sellars’ and Wittgenstein’s critiques of psychologist understandings of apparently mental categories like experience or pain.

But Hume’s psychologising philosophy has two parts: a radical empiricism in epistemology, and an analogous psychologisation of moral philosophy – analysing values in terms of sentiment, utility, etc.  In this respect Hume is a representative of one major trend in the Enlightenment, which also finds expression in (I gather) Helvétius, Bentham, and who knows who else (I am, as always, under-read).  Just as Kantian epistemology is reacting against psychologising theories of knowledge, so Kant’s moral philosophy is reacting against these psychologising theories of moral sentiment.  One way to understand Hegel, I think, is as an effort to synthesise the Kantian transcendental critical response to these psychologising philosophies, with the more ‘down to earth’ insights of those philosophies.  For all the (by my lights) bizarre speculative excesses of the Hegelian project, Hegel is at base a more ‘earthy’ figure than Kant: he is critical of the effort to abstract knowledge away from day-to-day concerns.  He wants to abolish the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal that grounds Kant’s epistemology, and he also wants to abolish (or at least muddy) the distinction between formal, universal duty and base, sentimental satisfaction that grounds Kant’s moral philosophy.  Hegel is ‘bringing desire back in’ to the Kantian understanding of morality.

Brandom is different.  Just as Brandom cuts the Gordian knot of post-Humean empiricism by simply substituting responsive dispositions for experience, so (I want to claim) he likewise cuts the Gordian knot of post-Humean sentiment-based moral philosophy by substituting dispositions to act for (subjective) desire, sentiment, and utility.  However, I think that Brandom’s move in this domain is less carefully thought-through than his Sellarsian rejection of post-Humean empiricism.  (At base, moral philosophy is not very close to the centre of Brandom’s concerns.)  For this reason, I think, he misreads (or at least mis-summarises) Hegel’s wrestling with this problem in terms of a different kind of problem with Enlightenment naturalism.  Hegel is trying to bring ‘subjective’ Humean desire and sentiment back into moral philosophy, after Kant’s attempt to draw an (untenably) hard line between desire and duty.  Brandom, however, reads these passages as wrestling with reductive ‘objective’ scientific naturalism – Brandom is concerned with attitudes in the sense of practices and dispositions, not with attitudes in the sense of desires and sentiments.  By collapsing the latter problematic into the former, I think Brandom misses an important element of the Hegelian project.

Moreover, as I said in the last post, this is the element of the Hegelian project that interests me most.  I am interested in this ‘Humean’ problem space for a range of reasons – but one of them is that this development of a psychologising and ‘deflationary’ theory of moral sentiments is also part and parcel of the development (in the English-language tradition) of political economy.  Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ and Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ are part of the same philosophical tendency and moment, and this is all part of the same shift that inaugurates political economy as its own field of study.  The ‘Humean’ understanding of human behaviour or human nature is also political economy’s understanding of human behaviour or human nature.  The entire political-economic tradition that sees humans as driven by incentives, which can be analysed in terms of gratifications or satisfactions, can plausibly be located within this intellectual current.  Utilitarianism, mathematised welfare-maximising decision theory, the marginal revolution – all of this is plausibly downstream of the basic ‘reductionist’ account of human motives and action that sees things like fundamental duties or intrinsic orientation to The Good as less explanatorily important than psychological analysis of gratifications, satisfactions, pleasures, etc.

As I’ve said many times, this is also the tradition I want to locate myself in.  Both mathematised economics and psychoanalysis are (in very different ways) downstream of this basic (‘Humean’) philosophical move.  But (I’m saying) Brandom isn’t much help in navigating this tradition.  Indeed, Brandom basically rules this entire psychologising motivational space out of bounds by his (pragmatist) emphasis on dispositions rather than (on the side of knowledge) experience or (on the side of action) desire and gratification.

In previous posts I’ve articulated some specific ways in which I disagree with Brandom: I reject the conceptual realist metaphysics of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ in favour of a still more thoroughgoing fallibilism; I worry that Brandom’s Hegelian Whiggism leaves insufficient space for normative pluralism; I am inclined to reject the ‘Rousseauian-Kantian’ idea that we can only have obligations that we acknowledge as such – at the very least, I think the arguments for this claim need to be located at the “messy retail business” level of ethical debate rather than at the metatheoretical level; I would prefer greater emphasis on non-linguistic practice than Brandom’s apparatus provides; I am doubtful that Brandom’s hard line between the sapient and the sentient can be drawn in the way he draws it.  These are all ways in which I differ from Brandom, and I expect to keep exploring at least some of these points in future posts on the blog.

However, I think with this ‘Humean’ point I have finally pinned down the most central way in which I want to modify the Brandomian framework.  I want to combine Brandom’s pragmatism with a ‘psychologising’ account of the motives associated with and driving the practices in question.  Qualitatively, I see that account in broadly psychoanalytic terms.  Formally, I think a ‘utility-maximising’ ‘instrumental reason’ framework can be grafted on to Brandom’s pragmatist apparatus, to explain (or at least model) the ways in which Brandomian agents behave in practice.

So this is the project I take myself to be engaged in.  Moreover, modifying or extending the Brandomian apparatus in this way also finally ties this Brandomian line of thought more concretely into the institutional political economy that I am also interested in.

~~

This point (about institutional political economy) can, I think, be summarised more quickly – if only because political economy has now been on the back burner for me for so long that I don’t feel nearly as fluent in writing about it as I am in writing about Brandom.  Here’s the basic point though: economics tends to work with utility-maximising economic agents.  Those agents, however, operate within an institutional framework.  One of the questions that has increasingly preoccupied economic theorists is therefore: how are we to understand that institutional framework?

One obvious way to answer this question (since the twentieth-century explosion in game-theoretic tools) is: in terms of game theory.  Broadly speaking, the “rules of the game” are the institutional environment within which economic agents act.  But then the question becomes: how do those rules of the game get established?

Here, very crudely, there are two ideal-typical paradigms.  One is “coercion” and the other is “cooperation”.  The paradigmatic coercive understanding of the institution of rules is an authoritarian leader or ruling elite imposing rules on society as a whole.  The paradigmatic cooperative understanding of the institution of rules is social contract theory, in which consensus or near-consensus among members of a society establishes the ‘ground level’ rules within which other rules are determined.

The problem, obviously, is that both of these two ideal types are much too simplistic.  In real life, rules emerge from complex processes that have both cooperative and coercive dimensions.  Moreover, full consensus is never achieved – even quite small-scale communities are internally heterogeneous.  What we need to understand is how the “rules of the game” that do structure a social space can emerge as structuring that social space even despite and through that heterogeneity.

Now, there are lots of political-economic theorists wrestling with this problem space – and although I’ve read a fair bit of political economy, there’s a lot more I need to read, so I’m not making any serious claims about the shortcomings of the tradition as a whole.  Still, I think Brandom’s account of the emergence of norms via complex scorekeeping practices meets all the criteria of adequacy with respect to the simultaneous modelling of shared norms and internal social heterogeneity.  Brandom does not have a reified concept of the social – his understanding of sociality is very internally heterogeneous, because it is so complexly social-perspectival.  It is both “social constructivist” and “microfounded”.  I think that Brandom’s scorekeeping account of rule-formation is the best account of the institution of individual-transcendent social structures that I know.

So what I want to do is pick up this Brandomian apparatus for the analysis of rule-formation, and apply it to the problem space of institutional political economy.  However, up until this point I’ve found it hard to navigate significant obstacles to this application.  One obstacle is Brandom’s focus on linguistic practice rather than the kinds of social practice more central to political economy.  More on that eventually.  The other, as I’ve said a number of times, is that Brandom’s apparatus simply doesn’t tackle the issue of coercion – which has to be central to any credible, or at least critical, political economy.

I now think that this difficulty of treating coercion within a Brandomian framework can usefully be seen as downstream of Brandom’s rejection of Humean moral sentiments theory.  I recognise that this needn’t necessarily be so, and I’m taking some very significant shortcuts here – hopefully I’ll return to all this in more detail somewhere down the road.  But very schematically, I now want to make the following series of moves.

• First, embed Brandom’s practice theory within a ‘Humean’ account of psychological motives.

[NB: I keep saying ‘Humean’ here – that’s because I’ve found, from my cursory recent reading in the philosophy of action, that philosophers tend to identify the broad category of theoretical approach I’m advocating here as ‘Humean’.  Terminology doesn’t really matter to me – I guess in my head this approach is ‘Smithian’ if it’s anything.  The point I’m trying to make is just: an approach in which gratification, the pleasure principle, utility, etc. is fundamental to the explanation of human action.]

• Specifically, see agents as broadly “expected-utility-maximising” in a manner compatible with mainstream mathematised economic approaches.
• Identify “the peculiar force of the better reason” with a specific category of gratification.  Elinor Ostrom writes about the “warm glow” that comes with the experience of moral approbation from peers – I want to think about moral motivation in this kind of ‘deflationary’ or ‘subjectively reductionist’ way.
• This allows the Brandomian apparatus to be folded into a broader political-economic analytic space.  Specifically, it allows a Brandomian account of the institution of norms to be modelled in terms of behaviour associated with ‘instrumental reason’.
• And we already know how to model coercive relations using those (game-theoretic) resources.

This set of moves would then in turn have two sets of benefits:

• Philosophically speaking, it would allow an account of how “non-instrumental behaviour” can be explained in terms of “instrumental behaviour” in a way that I believe would be formally parallel to Brandom’s account of normative statuses in terms of normative attitudes, and of objectivity in terms of social-perspectival mobility.  This, among other things, it seems to me, would at least resonate with what Hegel is trying to do with his effort to synthesise Kantian and (broadly) Humean moral philosophies.
• Social-scientifically speaking, it would potentially give us quite sophisticated resources for modelling the emergence of “the rules of the game” from the utility-maximising behaviour of economic agents.  Obviously I’m a long way from even beginning to cash that claim out, but this is a space I want to explore.

~~

Before I end this post, I want to make one more set of remarks, which are less high-level summary and more trying to continue to inch forward analytically.

Let’s say we adopt this approach I’m proposing.  Let’s say we introduce this “pleasure principle” approach to the Brandomian apparatus.  How do we do so, in very general terms?  And what does this approach do to the Brandomian understanding of normativity?

It seems to me that there are a range of different ways to think about this.

The narrowest way to think about this problem space would be something like the following.  Ok – we’re going to treat “the force of the better reason” as a kind of incentive that can be understood in the same way as other incentives (as gratification associated with the warm glow of a particular category of peer approval, for example).  Then we could, in principle, classify actions into those that are guided by “the force of the better reason” and those that are not, and evaluate actions in those terms.

Taking a slightly more ‘critical’ approach, we could then note that epistemic delegation is a necessary feature of cognition, and that even if an individual is guided by “the force of the better reason” in any given case, the broader social judgements to which they necessarily delegate will, presumably, be influenced by a range of incentives, not just “the force of the better reason”.  In this scenario, the individual-level “force of the better reason” is, so to speak, ‘contaminated’ by a range of other factors, due to the social nature of cognition and the many forces shaping the broader social determination of the relevant conceptual content.  (“The blemish of determinateness”, in Hegel’s great phrase.)  This would be a step towards a more ‘genealogical’ orientation.

But then, given that forces beyond the narrowly-understood “force of the better reason” are ‘always already’ at play in the determination of conceptual content, a question arises about whether it is always reasonable to draw a sharp line between the (narrowly understood) “force of the better reason” and other kinds of motives.  Here the more thoroughgoingly ‘genealogical’ perspective would say: the line we draw between reasonable reasons and unreasonable motives is itself a pragmatic one; motives are granted the status of reasons by our treating them as such within our normative practices; there is no line ‘in nature’ that allows us to pick out one category of motive as intrinsically missing the socially-granted light of reason.  Indeed, one of the goals of Hegel’s theodicy is to ultimately bathe all of irrational nature in this divine light.  The genealogical perspective emerges when we take this Hegelian refusal to draw a sharp line between reason and motive, reason and cause, reason and practice, reason and desire… and yet reject the Hegelian theodicy that makes reality as a whole rational.

Here we are thrown back to the opening of ‘Making It Explicit’, where Brandom draws a distinction between discursive practice driven by “the force of the better reason” and the coercive practices of material sanction – beating people with sticks.  One of the features of Hegel’s alarmingly retributive theory of justice is that reason manifests through coercion too.  I take Brandom not to endorse this Hegelian claim – but the cost of Brandom’s refusal to tackle this dimension of Hegel’s project is a failure to integrate non-discursive practice into his account.  I don’t myself want to end up in the same political place as Hegel – but I think we can do better than ‘A Spirit of Trust’ does in reckoning with this dimension of the Phenomenology.

In any case, clearly I have a lot of work to do in this space.  But I think here, in very broad brush strokes, I’ve outlined the conceptual map that plausibly connects Brandomian normative pragmatics to game-theoretic modelling of political-economic institutions.  This map covers the terrain I want to continue to explore.  There is a huge amount of ‘colouring in’ required to get any of this even faintly ‘operational’.  But this is the space I want to be thinking in.  We’ll see whether I can work any of this up into anything approaching respectability.

Toward a Rational Choice Marxist Hegelianism

[NB: This post is trying something slightly different on the blog – it’s a lot closer to an academic paper draft than to a regular blog post. Of course, it lacks the apparatus of an academic paper, and almost certainly moves too quickly, with much too much handwaving, to be anywhere close to professional publication standards. But I want to try to start articulating things here in a way that is slightly less informal, so this is a start.]

1. Analytical Marxism and analytic Hegelianism

In the late 1970s and 1980s a tendency emerged within European and US academic Marxism which came to call itself ‘analytical Marxism’.  This movement was focused on a group of scholars who participated in an annual workshop that called itself the ‘September Group’ – notable members included Jerry Cohen, John Roemer, Jon Elster, Erik Olin Wright, and Adam Przeworski.  There was no very clear unified set of doctrines – either substantive or methodological – held by all members.  However, they were loosely united in what they opposed: forms of academic Marxism which, as they saw it, indulged in an obscurantism that mystified the real content and claims of Marxist analysis.  Two frequent targets of criticism, in this regard, were Althusserian Marxism and Hegelian Marxism, both of which used ‘continental’ philosophy or theory in ways that the September Group saw as muddy, confused, or sophistical.  It was in opposition to these theoretical tendencies that the September Group also sometimes branded its own project ‘No Bullshit Marxism’.

This rejection of the apparently obscurantist tendencies of continental theory, in favour of a non-nonsense logical and empiricist analytic approach, repeated in miniature the founding myth of the so-called ‘analytic’ philosophical tradition, in which Russell (in the UK) and Frege, Carnap and the Vienna Circle (in continental Europe) rejected the mystifying categories and methods of Hegelian – or, more broadly, post-Kantian – philosophy, in favour of a new form of no-nonsense empiricism bolstered by the newly developed tools of formal, mathematical logic. 

Like ‘analytic philosophy’ more broadly, there was no unified set of commitments associated with ‘analytical Marxism’: Cohen sought to unpack Marx’s theory of history in more precise and deflationary philosophical idiom; Wright sought to elaborate Marx’s class analysis using the tools of empirical sociology; Roemer and Przeworski both sought to use the toolkit of mathematised economics and political science to construct formal models that captured key Marxian concepts.  This latter, mathematised, tendency within analytical Marxism was often captured under the heading ‘Rational Choice Marxism’ – a concept that struck, and still strikes, many of its critics as a manifest and risible contradiction in terms.  Thus, for example, Ellen Meiksins Wood criticised the very idea of using game-theoretic tools to formalise Marxist concepts, an argument that has subsequently been repeated and refined by other critics. 

Even when its own methodological premises are granted, however, one of the challenges this tradition faced was wrestling with the dimensions of Marx’s texts that seemed least amenable to unpacking in ‘analytic’ terms.  In particular, it is a matter of broad consensus that Marx’s work is deeply influenced by Hegel – and it has been clear for decades, now, that this influence persists even through the late, mature work.  What to make of Marx’s use of Hegel, from an interpretive perspective that favours ‘analytic’ methods and tools?  Elster, in his impressively systematic ‘Making Sense of Marx’, aims to sift through the Hegelian elements of Marx’s work, making lucid analytic sense of what he can, and discarding the rest – a process of finding the “rational kernel in the mystical shell” of Hegelian doctrine more comprehensive and unforgiving than Marx himself achieved.  Other scholars working in the analytical Marxist tradition have often chosen to ignore the Hegelian dimensions of Marx’s work entirely.

Even as this tradition was seeking to extract an ‘analytic’ Marx from the murk of Hegelian categories, however, another tradition was seeking to construct or reveal an ‘analytic’ Hegel.  A collection of scholars have sought to elaborate a non-metaphysical, non-theological, non-mystifying (no bullshit?) Hegel, which stands in contrast with the Hegelian traditions rejected by early analytic philosophers.  This more pragmatist and social-theoretic approach to the interpretation of Hegel has now been elaborated across a range of works.  One of the most notable recent contributions to this interpretive tradition is Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust, a detailed re-interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in terms of Brandom’s own practice-theoretic inferentialist semantics.  The Hegel that emerges from this interpretive project is strikingly different from the Hegel rejected by both the early analytic philosophers and the analytical Marxists.  Moreover, the ability to extract this kind of deflationary, social- and practice-theoretic Hegel from even the most apparently abstruse Hegelian texts may help us to understand what Marx’s own project of turning Hegel “right side up” amounted to.  It may be that – even from an ‘analytical’ perspective – less Hegel needs to be rejected, and more Hegel needs to be analytically reinterpreted, in order to make sense of what value Marx is finding in Hegel’s text.

Such, at any rate, is the strategy I am pursuing in the project to which this paper aims to contribute.  I suggest that the ongoing elaboration of a credible ‘analytic Hegel’ should have implications for the (now substantially moribund) project of an analytical Marxism.  More than that – in this paper I want to make the case for our ability to interpret Hegel using the apparently least promising tools of the broad analytic tradition: the tools of rational choice theory.

2. Is a rational choice Hegelianism possible?

On its face, the obstacles to the very idea of a rational choice Hegelianism would seem to be overwhelming.  In this paper, I will discuss (briefly) just three of those obstacles – three of the most obvious objections to the project I am programmatically outlining here.  First, there is the objection from holism: isn’t Hegel a holist philosopher, in some sense, and isn’t rational choice theory intrinsically atomistic or individualistic? Second, there is the objection from anti-instrumentalism: isn’t Hegel elaborating a sophisticated non- (indeed, anti-) instrumentalist concept of reason, and isn’t the concept of reason operative in rational choice theory intrinsically instrumental?  Third and finally, there is the objection from the social construction and internal division of the self.  Hegel understands the self as formed in its relations to others, and as internally divided in part by those relations.  Isn’t this understanding of the self manifestly incompatible with the isolated, unitary, internally consistent decision-theoretic self posited by rational choice theory?  In the rest of this section I will aim to gesture, very briefly, at three possible responses to each of these objections. 

a) Holism and atomism

It is unambiguous that rational choice theory represents a form of methodological individualism, and relatively unambiguous that Hegel’s philosophy proposes some form of holism.  In Brandom’s reinterpretation of the Phenomenology, the holism that Hegel proposes is primarily a semantic holism.  Several claims are packed into this idea.  First, the idea that the content of any given semantic unit can only be understood by virtue of the broad network of implications and incompatibilities instituted across an entire discursive field.  Second, the claim that this discursive field can itself only be understood as a complex, emergent social phenomenon, produced by many social actors working together.  For these reasons, the idea that any semantic unit can be “understood” independent of the very broad social-linguistic dynamics of which it is a part has no place in Brandom’s Hegel.  Moreover, this category of philosophical move can be made more broadly.  For Brandom’s Hegel, ‘independence’ – the idea that any moment of the complex system that the Phenomenology charts can be understood in isolation from its place within that system – is a basic philosophical failure to understand the nature of the phenomenon under examination.

In these senses, Brandom’s Hegel is a holist.  In the famous analogy with which Russell articulated his break with British Hegelians, such holism appears to understand reality as “a bowl of jelly” rather than “a bucket of shot”.  And yet, Brandom is also keen to emphasise that there is nothing mystical or mystified about this holism.  Brandom’s Hegelian apparatus has – in the language of mathematised modern economics – ‘microfoundations’.  Key to Brandom’s approach is the argument that phenomena that can only be analysed as a whole, are nevertheless a complex system the subcomponents of which can be analysed in turn.  We cannot understand the semantic or normative or philosophical weight those subcomponents bear without understanding the complex system of which they are a part.  Yet, at the same time, we do not properly understand that complex system unless we understand the way in which its analysis can be ‘microfounded’. 

My claim, then, is that the opposition between atomism or individualism and holism, which has structured so many of the debates around Hegelian theory, is at base a false opposition – and that Brandom’s ‘microfounded’ Hegel can help to show us why.

b) Instrumentalism and values

A similar, slightly more complex, argument can be made about the relationship between instrumental reason and values.  Here the position we aim ultimately to reject has been very lucidly articulated by Amartya Sen in his critique of rational choice theory, ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory’.  In that paper, Sen argues that rational choice theory can accommodate both self-interested action (as in the classic ‘homo economicus’) and other-oriented action (in a scenario in which the agent’s personal ‘utility function’ is sympathetically bound up with the welfare of another).  Sen argues that such sympathy can be accommodated by the utility-maximising instrumental reason of rational choice modelling, but that conformity of action to values cannot be.

My claim is that sympathetic inhabiting of another’s judgements is, to a useful first approximation, all that is required to get genuine normativity – values themselves – off the ground.  Moreover, Brandom’s analytic Hegelian apparatus again shows us how.  For Brandom, normative statuses, like commitments and entitlements, are instituted by normative attitudes, like attributing and acknowledging commitments.  In this respect, Brandom aspires to explain norms in terms of social practices.  Brandom’s text devotes less attention to the motive structures associated with such practices – and yet, I claim, the opposition between instrumental reason and norm-bound reason maps quite closely onto the opposition between normative attitudes and normative statuses.  In other words, it is a category error to think of normative reason as qualitatively different in kind from instrumental reason; rather, normative reason is what instrumental reason becomes when it is caught up in the appropriate network of norm-instituting practices.

The key moment in Brandom’s text in this regard is his discussion of the conclusion of the ‘Spirit’ section of the Phenomenology – the confrontation between the penitent sinner and the hard-hearted judge.  To simplify greatly, in this parable the sinner confesses that they have failed to follow norms – they have been guided rather by the ‘particularity’ of their own, personal interests and desires.  That is to say, in our vocabulary: they have been guided by instrumental rather than normative reason.  The judge then has a choice to make.  The judge can take a ‘small-souled’ attitude towards the sinner, and condemn them for following only particular, instrumental motives, rather than normative, universal ones.  Alternatively, the judge can take a ‘great-souled’ attitude and see the particularity of the sinner’s actions as operating in accordance with norms, even if imperfectly.  To take the former attitude, Brandom-Hegel argues, is to take the debunking perspective of the ‘moral valet’ – always seeing every action only under the dimension of particularity.  The alternative attitude – the attitude of forgiveness – is to see such particularity as infused with or participating in a larger universality.  The characteristic Hegelian move, here, is to see particularity and universality not as opposing categories of phenomena, but as the same phenomenon seen under different perspectives: universality only has any reality because it is instituted by particularity; particularity, understood properly, is always part of a larger universality.  We do not need to accept the theological dimensions of Hegel’s arguments in this space to understand the general category of move: it is again an argument about the emergence of norms from the ‘particularity’ of practices even when those practices can also be analysed in thoroughly non-normative terms.

In relation to Sen’s argument, I want to argue, individual social actors valuing the esteem in which they are held by other social actors is, to a reasonable first approximation, all that is required for ‘emergent’ values to be instituted by the particularity of instrumental reason.  (I say “to a reasonable first approximation” because Brandom-Hegel’s full apparatus of course requires more than this – social practices of asking for and giving reasons; complex systems of social scorekeeping; the institution of recognitive social networks.  Nevertheless, the basic reputational economy of valuing others’ good opinion of our actions is the most load-bearing element of this apparatus, I suggest.)  It is entirely permissible, I claim, to analyse such motives in ‘instrumental’ terms – provided that we do not imagine that analysing motives in such terms evacuates the normative dimension of the actions in question.

In other words, the modelling of rational actors’ instrumental actions to maximise individual payoffs within an intersubjective reputational economy is in principle entirely compatible with the simultaneous endorsement of a non-instrumental concept of normativity and reason as instituted by that same reputational economy.  In this respect, the Hegelian account of non-instrumental reason is not only compatible with, but could in principle be modelled using the resources of, contemporary multi-player iterated game theory.

c) The socially constructed, internally divided self

The final element of Hegel’s position that seems manifestly incompatible with a rational choice approach, is Hegel’s account of the self as both socially constituted and internally divided.  The self of rational choice theory is (again) atomistic, and moreover possesses by methodological fiat an entirely self-consistent set of preferences.  It does not seem that there is any obvious way to render this compatible with the Hegelian framework.

I confess, this is the area in which I regard the project of forging a ‘rational choice Hegelianism’ as most likely to run aground.  In his very incisive critique of the ‘rational choice Marxism’ programme, Mark E. Warren argues that Elster and others in the tradition correctly see Marx as aiming to ground his political economy in a set of ‘microfoundations’ – but they err in their account of the microfoundations in question.  Marx’s political economy, Warren argues, is grounded not in individuals but in practices.  I think Warren is correct in this – and it is also true of Brandom’s reconstructed Hegel.

Nevertheless, I think that even here the incompatibility between the analytic Hegelian and the rational choice approaches is not as clear-cut as it might appear.  Again, the key lies in the distinction between different perspectives on the same phenomenon – the perspective of the ‘moral valet’, which interprets behaviour in the instrumental terms of (I am tendentiously suggesting) rational choice theory, and the perspective of the ‘great souled’ judge, who interprets the same behaviour, motivated by the same particular incentives, as norm-governed.  From an ‘instrumental reason’ perspective, I am suggesting, the behaviour of the individual actor can be interpreted in unitary self-consistent utility-maximising rational choice terms.  But from the normative perspective made available by the social practices produced by those instrumentally-motivated actions, the very same normative self is internally divided and, moreover, socially distributed.  The normative self is produced by the instrumental self’s investment in the judgements of others.  Those socially-distributed judgements are in turn contradictory (because held by different people with different views), and navigating the contradictory normative commitments produced by the multiple social perspectives via which the individual constitutes itself produces an ‘internally’ contradictory individual.  The same individual, then, I am claiming, can be analysed as instrumental, rational, and driven by maximising utility according to a well-ordered preference function, when seen from one perspective, but as normatively motivated, internally conflicted, and socially constituted, when seen from another.

Now, of course none of this means that rational choice theory is the correct analytic framework with which to ‘microfound’ this form of analytic Hegelianism.  But I am claiming that this project is not clearly doomed out of the gates, in the way that one might imagine.  Arguably, in fact, seeing this project as doomed out of the gates may represent a failure to take seriously the core Hegelian argument about the nature of the relation between ‘particularity’ and ‘universality’.

3. A rational choice Hegelian Marxism?

I have very briefly outlined some arguments as to why the project of a ‘rational choice Hegelianism’ might be viable.  And this in turn opens the possibility of a different strategy towards the project of ‘rational choice Marxism’.  Rather than rejecting Hegelianism entirely, or extracting some meagre rational core, the project I am proposing reconstructs Hegel in terms that are compatible with the rational choice methodological toolkit.  Doing this then changes the sense in which we understand the break between a Hegelian and Marxist analytic framework.

Whatever else interpreters disagree on, almost everyone can agree that Marx’s break with or critique of Hegel involves a shift from an idealist to a materialist framework.  If we understand Hegel in metaphysical terms, in which a quasi-divine spiritual substance is the true reality of both ourselves and the natural world, then this break is an ‘ontological’ one – rejecting conceptual or spiritual substance as the bedrock of reality, and treating the material world as producing consciousness, rather than the other way around.

If, however, we interpret Hegel in a pragmatist or practice-theoretic vein, then there is nothing necessarily ‘metaphysical’ or ‘spiritual’ about this deflationary Hegel’s understanding of the world.  A practice-theoretic Hegel doesn’t need to be made ‘materialist’ because this Hegel is already compatible with a materialist theoretical framework.

What, then, does the philosophical break with Hegel consist in?  Here I think Charles W. Mills’ distinction between two senses of ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ is illuminating.  For Mills, there is the metaphysical sense of idealism versus materialism, but there is also the practice-theoretic sense of idealism versus materialism.  The former asks a philosophical, ontological question: is spirit or matter the basic substance of our world?  The latter asks a social-scientific, explanatory question: what category of social practices are most influential in shaping our social world?  This latter, practice-theoretic debate is primarily about the question: are ideas or political-economic forces more influential in shaping society?  And this social-scientific debate is almost entirely orthogonal to the ontological debate which is carried out under the same heading.

The focus of A Spirit of Trust is overwhelmingly on linguistic practices.  An analytical Marxist appropriation of this analytic Hegel would involve a transformation of the focus of the apparatus, from linguistic to non-linguistic (political and economic) practices.  I suggest that this project is well worth attempting.

The claim of this paper, then, is that both the analytical Marxist and the analytic Hegelian projects would benefit from a degree of synthesis.  Analytical Marxism would benefit from an elaborated, analytic understanding of Hegel as a practice theorist, which makes more sense of Marx’s extensive use of Hegel, and requires less stringent disavowal of the Hegelian dimensions of Marx’s work.  At the same time, analytic Hegelianism would benefit from the Marxist emphasis on non-linguistic practice – material practice in the sense of day-to-day economic and social practices.  And, I claim, all of this can in principle be accomplished – or at least explored – within a rational choice framework that is broadly deprecated within both Marxist and Hegelian traditions, but which has very extensive resources available for the analysis of political-economic behaviour.

The utilitarian behavioural spectrum

This post is largely recapitulating territory I’ve already covered, but will maybe inch into new content towards the end.  The topic is utilitarianism.  (About which I have still read shockingly little – but that’s the blog for you…)

As I believe I’ve already said, you can differentiate three broad elements of the utilitarian philosophical project.

First, there is an ethical doctrine: the claim that the ethical principle that should guide our practice is to act in such a way as to achieve the greatest utility for the greatest number of people.  I’m just not looking at this side of things at the moment – for now I’m interested in metaethical and methodological issues, rather than first-order ethical principles.

Second, there is a semantic doctrine: the claim that ethical propositions can be ‘translated’ into propositions about pain and pleasure.  I take it that we’ve established (and here as ever I’m just relying on Brandom) that this is incorrect.  I therefore won’t say anything more about this in this post.

Third, there is a behavioural doctrine: that individual human agents act in such a way as to maximise their own pleasure.  This is the doctrine that I’m primarily interested in, because this doctrine is a major source of two great traditions that lead away from it: on the one hand, the formal apparatus of rational choice theory, which informs so much of economics; on the other hand, the apparatus of psychoanalysis, which understands “the pleasure principle” as driving so much of our psychological lives and actions – even those that appear to be non-self-interested.

So far so good.  I want to remain within the terrain of this third doctrine for everything I say here.  But, as I’ve already said, this broad doctrine can be interpreted or developed in a range of different ways.  I’ve already mentioned the difference between mathematicised rational choice theory and psychoanalysis.  I now want to talk about narrow and broader ways we can interpret “self-interest” or “pleasure-seeking”.

One way to interpret these categories is through the lens of ‘homo economicus’.  Here we understand self-interested action in a narrow way.  That is to say, we see people as primarily motivated by narrowly-understood material self-interest – things like wealth, for example.  This approach – ‘homo economicus’ – is often associated with a debunking orientation towards ‘the higher things in life’ – towards cultural or ethical or communal dimensions of human existence.  This is one of the bases for critique of homo economicus – for example in Amartya Sen’s classic paper on ‘rational fools’.  In that paper, Sen argues that the homo economicus approach – modelling economic agents as rational self-interested actors – is incompatible with the idea that agents can be motivated by commitment.  Sen acknowledges that agents may be other-oriented within a homo economicus approach – sympathy may influence actions – but, for Sen, commitment – characteristically moral reasons for action – is another matter.

I think that this is wrong – and I think that Brandom gives us the resources to see why.  For Brandom, of course, we are motivated, in part, by “the force of the better reason” – this is (to oversimplify) what makes us characteristically sapient creatures.  Brandom (again to oversimplify) sees us as participants in a social recognitive game whereby we grant others the right to judge us.  This is a sanctions-based ‘scorekeeping’ (or reputational) game, wherein our vulnerability to the judgement of those we judge as having the right to judge us can react back on our own actions.

I see no reason why the behaviours Brandom describes in this model cannot be seen as driven by the “pleasure principle” in an expanded sense – a sense closely related to some of the more social-theoretic dimensions of psychoanalytic theory.  We value others valuing us – we want to be judged well by those we choose to recognise as having the right to judge us.  In seeking this category of recognitive relation out, we both constitute and reconstitute recognitive communities, and modify our own behaviour in the light of the judgements of the relevant community.  Understanding our social selves on this model, the “pleasure principle” is not only compatible with commitments, it drives the social actions that institute commitments.

So I think the utilitarian behavioural model is compatible with a Brandomian (/Hegelian) model of sociality.  But this understanding of “the pleasure principle” is clearly a long way from homo economicus.  This broad model can constitute (I claim) a commitment-driven ethical rationalism (of the kind that both Sen and Brandom want to endorse).  But it can also constitute all kinds of other behaviours – the kinds of socially-driven irrationalisms that are a feature of so much of human history.  We are normative creatures, we are creatures of community, and community norms can take all kinds of bizarre forms, up to and including mandating behaviours that are radically incompatible with self-interest in any narrow sense.  Here we are more in a sociological world of in-groups and out-groups, inclusions and exclusions, moral panics and moral suasion, ideology, social psychology, and so on and so forth.

The point I’m trying to make, then, is that if we expand the category of ‘self-interest’ to include the gratifications associated with others thinking well of us, then this immediately opens our model up to more or less any bizarre human behaviour one might care to imagine.  Actions that are massively non-self-interested on any kind of ‘narrow’ understanding of self-interest can still be driven by the ‘pleasure principle’ in this expanded sense.  I value the good opinion of my chosen recognitive community in a way that leads me to martyrdom.  Or I value the good opinion of my chosen recognitive community in a way that leads me to a life of incredible hardship and self-abnegation.  Here in psychoanalytic terms one can simply say that the gratifications associated with this recognitive relation (my cathection of the community in question, and its judgements) are stronger than the pleasures associated with my (narrowly conceived) self-interest – that my socialisation has constituted my internal psychic economy in such a way to produce apparently non-pleasure-seeking behaviours (which in fact carry their own deep gratifications).

In his rational fools article Sen is very dismissive of this type of argument – I believe he thinks that it leaves the realm of legitimate social science into the space of quasi-metaphysical irrefutability.  But I don’t share Sen’s impatience – I think there is a psychological truth or insight in expanding the category of ‘self-interest’ or the ‘pleasure principle’ to encompass the psychic economy as a whole.

Nevertheless, doing this gives us radically divergent ways of interpreting the same basic behavioural utilitarian model (‘self-interested’ pleasure-maximising social actors).  On the one hand – interpreting self-interest narrowly – we have homo economicus.  I think there is much to recommend homo economicus as an analytic heuristic, because I think a large proportion of social actions reliably will be narrowly self-interested in something like this sense.  On the other hand, though, as soon as we open up our understanding of ‘self-interest’ to ‘reputational’ gratifications, then basically anything can happen: human communities are in principle capable of reputationally incentivising basically any behaviour at all.  (And one can see this, of course in real life, with unbelievably strange behaviour associated with communities that have successfully instituted strong recognitive community incentives around their practices.)

All this has a formal analogue in mainstream game theory.  On the one hand, in one-shot games, agents typically or canonically behave in narrowly self-interested ways.  On the other hand, as soon as we move into the space of iterated games, the ‘folk theorem’ tells us that agents’ abilities to institute incentives for each other via their own strategic behaviours can generate more or less any equilibrium at all.  Suddenly game theory becomes radically uninformative, because the sanctions-based ‘recognitive community’ of the players of the iterated game can institute its own incentive structures, almost irrespective of the baseline incentive structures of the core game.

I think there are strong parallels here, but I don’t want to overstate them – for now I just want to raise these issues.  My general point, for now, is simply that the utilitarian behavioural model of ‘pleasure principle’-driven agents is compatible with the entire range of human behaviour, from ‘narrowly economistic’ self-interest, to the wildest and unlikeliest forms of sociological non-self-interested dynamics.  And this includes (in my view) a broadly Brandomian account of commitments – contra Sen’s claim that commitments are in some deep sense incompatible with a behavioural utilitarian framework.

Ellen Meiksins Wood on Rational Choice Marxism

So I believe I want to begin to pivot, in my thinking (which probably also means in my writing on the blog), to the space of rational choice theory.  I don’t think I’m completely unaware of various widely-noted problems with rational choice theory – and I will probably worry away at some of those problems, in posts on the blog; I don’t want my thinking here to be entirely or uncritically swallowed by the rational choice paradigm.  But I also think that: 1) like it or not, rational choice theory simply is central to a lot of formal economics, and I need to get to grips with it properly, not superficially; moreover, 2) I think rational choice theory has a lot more to recommend it than many of its critics’ criticisms imply.

With that second point in mind, I want to put up some quick thoughts on Ellen Meiksins Wood’s 1989 critique of ‘rational choice Marxism’ (Wood is specifically criticising Roemer, Elster, Przeworski, and Carling).  Wood makes a lot of different moves in this essay, some of which I agree with.  Things I agree with include: she is critical of teleological theories of history; she rightly argues that many theories that transhistoricise contingently-produced contemporary categories are tacitly teleological; she rightly (by my lights), and contra Elster, argues that Marx’s remark that “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” is an anti-teleological, rather than a teleological, remark; she is critical of the tendency, within a lot of ‘analytical’ (and, I would add, not just analytical) Marxism, to ‘idealise’ capitalism on the grounds that Marx’s critique can then be shown to apply even to the best-case scenario for capitalism.  I agree with all of this.

But there’s also quite a lot I disagree with in the essay. My disagreements include the following:

As is generally the case for ‘political Marxism’ (i.e. basically Wood and Brenner), I think Wood has an understanding of capitalism that is too centrally focused on the specific form of domination associated with the ‘site of production’.  Wood and Brenner tend to distinguish their position from a ‘neo-Smithian Marxism’ that (as they see it) over-emphasises the market as the key institution within capitalism.  I think this framing is often unfair to theorists working within non-’political Marxist’ traditions.  I think that’s the case both because those other Marxist theorists are often more sophisticated in their understanding of capitalism than the ‘political Marxists’ allow (for example, Brenner’s critique of Immanuel Wallerstein in my view actively misrepresents Wallerstein’s position), but also, separately, because I think Adam Smith is a great social theorist and political economist, and being a neo-Smithian is fine.  I’ll come back to this point eventually.

Wood sees Roemer’s economics as centrally motivated by the attempt to develop an alternative ethical critique of capitalism.  Maybe this is the central motive for Roemer’s work – but Roemer’s major contribution, as I see it, lies in his effort to wrestle Marxist political-economic categories into an analytic framework that isn’t completely embarrassing as economics.  Roemer’s critique of (or, perhaps better, radical circumscription of the claims made by) the labour theory of value is mainly driven by the fact that (as I’ve blogged about before) the ‘classical’ labour theory of value simply makes no sense as economics.  Now, if you’re a historian this probably isn’t as big a problem as it is if you’re an economist, and Marx’s major contributions can be seen as lying elsewhere – but for those of us who are interested in doing good economics, Roemer’s project makes a lot of sense; Wood’s argument that there’s no ‘there’ there seems very misguided to me.

But the main thing I wanted to talk about in this post is one of Wood’s more general critiques of rational choice theory (here writing about Przeworski, but the point is broader). As Wood puts it:

Since for the purposes of the rational choice model capitalism exists only as a ‘game’ between consenting adults, a game in which the stakes are no more compelling than a desire for ‘optimization’, there is no ‘logical place’ in his argument for capitalism as a compulsive and coercive system, a ruthless logic of process.

I think there are two defensible claims that can be made in this space.  First, as I said above, the tradition of Marxist economics of which Roemer is one representative has a tendency to construct ‘ideal’ models of capitalism, which aspire to show that, even in a capitalist system that is minimally coercive, exploitation still takes place.  This ‘ideal capitalism’ approach is certainly defensible, but it naturally has a tendency to sideline the analysis of coercive dynamics.  Second, there is a much broader tradition within mainstream economics that takes free and equal, mutually beneficial exchange as its paradigmatic economic interaction.  (This is the approach mocked by Marx as inhabiting a world ruled by “Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham”.)  In this tradition there is a very widespread tendency to move from the formal representation of economic interactions in terms of individual optimisation, to the Panglossian claim that in an economy composed of such interactions, every interaction must be mutually beneficial for every party.  This move, similarly, has a tendency to elide coercion, and arguably with less theoretical warrant than Roemer-style idealisation.

So to the extent that Wood is criticising these phenomena, I think her critique has some force.  But Wood makes much broader claims than can be justified by these points.  In the passage I quoted, Wood seems to be arguing that rational choice theory is incapable of capturing coercion or compulsion at all – and this is flatly wrong.

There are, I think, implicitly two separate arguments in this space, in the passage I quoted.  One is basically just a play on words: because game theory represents economic life as a “game”, Wood seems to be suggesting, it is treating economic interactions as trivial and low-stakes.  One can, along these lines, regret the fact that game theory is called ‘game theory’, but I think it’s extremely clear that as a substantive critique of the analytic framework, this is nonsense.  We’re just talking about a theoretical toolkit here – the toolkit can be used to analyse matters of life and death, and is used in that way all the time.

The second implicit argument, I think, is really a cluster of points: that rational choice theory is about choice, and therefore cannot capture coercion; and that because agents are engaged in ‘optimisation’, they are understood as necessarily coming out of interactions ‘ahead’ in some sense.  As I said above, I do think a lot of ‘mainstream’ political economy makes the move that Wood is here tacitly highlighting – but I also think it’s clear that this move is not ‘baked in’ to the rational choice analytic framework at all.

Let me take this point in two stages.  First, the issue of choice.  Of course it’s true that ‘choice’ contrasts with ‘coercion’, and therefore to some extent these are opposed concepts.  But I think it’s a big mistake to therefore conclude that frameworks which emphasise choice have difficulty tackling coercion.  The reason is the following: there is no human scenario in which agents completely lack choice.  Even if I am being ordered to act in some way with a gun to my head, I have the choice to refuse to act in that way – and to be shot.  Even if I am imprisoned, I have some choice about what actions to take in my confinement.  Of course, these are scenarios of sharply limited choice – they are scenarios of coercion.  But the coercive dimension of these scenarios is captured by the range of choices available to me – the way in which other social actors’ actions influence my choice set.  The choice is still present.

This point applies to rational choice theory also.  The scenario of violent coercion can perfectly well be modelled within a rational choice framework – one social actor’s threat of violence transforms the set of options between which another social actor must choose.  The second social actor then optimises within the new choice options.  Nothing about this is contrary to the rational choice framework – the issue of whether a choice is coerced or not is simply orthogonal to the use of the analytic toolkit.

A similar point applies to the question of ‘optimisation’.  The fact that a social actor chooses what they take to be the most welfare-enhancing (or whatever) action among the available options, thereby optimising their expected utility (or whatever), really doesn’t speak at all, in the abstract, to whether they are better off or worse off, out the other side of this interaction.  They are better off relative to the other available options, as they see it.  But again, they may be worse off relative to the prior state – it all depends on the scenario in question.

These are basic points, but I think it’s clear from various remarks Wood makes across her piece that Wood does not accept them.  Of course, these aren’t Wood’s only critiques of rational choice theory – she makes many other points in the essay, some of which I’ve mentioned briefly above, some of which I haven’t touched on at all.  But I think it’s important to be clear that this specific argument – the idea that a rational choice approach to political economy has no place “for capitalism as a compulsive and coercive system” – is straightforwardly false.

I had thought about writing more on Wood’s essay, and issues arising from it, but I think this is a good stopping point for now.