Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

WTO Director Recommends Marx to Understand Contemporary Capitalism

Curious story here.  It seems to me a more robust defense of Marx could, in fact, be given on this score.

Geuss's Skepticism about Rawls

I have been reading around in Raymond Geuss's quite interesting and iconoclastic set of papers, Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005), and found the essay on Rawls, "Neither History nor Praxis" especially striking.  Responding to Rawls's autobiographic statement that his service in World War II stimulated his interested in the theory of justice, Geuss comments (p. 31):

One can easily imagine a person confronted with the events of the Second World War being motivated to ask various questions, for instance about European history, about the dynamics of political systems under stress, about the economics of competitive international markets, about human social psychology and the structure of collective action.  What, however, would one have to believe about the world to think that "What is the correct conception of justice?" is the appropriate question to ask in the face of concentration camps, secret police, and the firebombing of cities?  Are reflections about the correct distirbution of goods and services in a "well-ordered society" the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture, and mass murder?  Was the problem in the Third Reich that people in extermination camps didn't get the slice of the economic pie that they ought to have had, if everyone had discussed the matter freely and under the right conditions?  Should political philosophy really be essentially about questions of fairness of distribution of resources?  Aren't security and the control of violence far more important?  How about the coordination of action, the sharing of information, the cultivation of trust, the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities, the management of relations of power and authority, the balancing of the demands of stability and reform, the provision for a viable social future?

Geuss, to be sure, has specific, substantive doubts about the resulting Theory of Justice.  Why, he asks, think that there would be any agreement in an "original position":  "No matter how long they discussed matters, there might remain at the end different groups with different views" (p. 32).  And even if there were an agreement, why should it "have any relevance whatever to us, who do have concrete 'identities,' parts of which sometimes can be of importance to us, and who live in a concrete situation in a complex real world" (p. 32)?  The "difference principle," Geuss suggests, both (1) helps explain why the theory's "political effects..has been close to zero" (p. 33), since it "turns out to be extremely difficult to assess in practice whether or not a certain existing inequality is or is not allowed by the difference principle" (p. 33), and (2) is itself "morally very repellent" since "increases in the absolute standard of living of the poor can, in principle, justify very great inequalities" (p. 33).

Geuss is no fonder of the argument of the later Law of Peoples, noting that Rawls believes that,

Outlaw states may not be exterminated ad libitum, but "liberal" states have a right to keep and deploy nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes, and may attack outlaw states with military force under certain circumstances if that is necessary to prevent violation of human rights.  This does not even purport to be a view from an anonymous universal "original position," but is, even on the most superficial inspection, a specifically American political position--more enlightened, perhaps, than that of George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice, but generically the same kind of thing.  Of course, no one can object in principle to citizens helping to elaborate the national ideology (provided it is not actively vicious), but philosophy has in the past often aspired to something more than this.  (p. 34)

Noting that the huge growth of the academic industry surrounding Rawls's A Theory of Justice coincided with increasing inequality and a rightward turn of the Western industrial democracies, Geuss asks (p. 38):

Is it,...or should it be, of any significance that the "normative" moral and political theory of the Rawlsian type has nothing, literally nothing, to say about the real increase in inequality, except perhaps "so much the worse for the facts"?  This is not a criticism to the effect that theoreticians should act rather than merely thinking, but a criticism to the effect that they are not thinking about relevant issues in a serious way.

Geuss favors an approach to political philosophy in which one studies,

history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics in a reflective way.  This is not incompatible with "doing philosophy"; rather, in this area, it is the only sensible way to proceed.  After all, a major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason.  The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias....

One of the great uses of history is to show us what, because it has in the past been real, is a fortiori possible.  This can give rise to various illusions.  Something can be thought to be politically possible now because it actually existed in the past, but it may have been possible in the past because of circumstances that have meanwhile changed.  This is a case in which further development of the very historical consciousness that gave rise to the problem will contribute to clearing it away.  (pp. 38-39)

From the preceding reflections about how to approach political philosophy, Geuss concludes:

For those of us with views like these, Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist, whose work self-evidently deserves and repays the most careful scrutiny.  Rather, he was a parochial figure who not only failed to advance the subject but also pointed political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction.  (p. 39)

I'm curious what philosophers think.  I have given, of course, only excerpts from the Geuss essay, and it is obvious enough how Rawlsians might respond to some of the particulars of Geuss's doubts about the theory of justice.  But what about the more general criticisms of this approach to political philosophy and its relevance and value?  Post only once; posts may take awhile to appear.  Non-anonymous postings preferred, though, anonymous or otherwise, only substantive contributions will be approved.

Draft paper on Continental "Morality Critics": Comments Welcome! (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM DECEMBER 20:  There is a slightly revised version on-line now (changes primarily in the Marx and Foucault sections).  I'd still gratefully receive comments, since I can still make changes at the copy-editing stage.

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You can download the working draft here.  Comments in the next week would be especially welcome, though I will be able to make more minor edits thereafter.  Here is the abstract:

What could be wrong with morality?  Popular, including religious, thinking has long proceeded on the assumption that “morality” as a system of norms deserves our allegiance and that “moral conduct” should earn our praise and admiration.  Modern philosophy has, on this (as other matters) not been far away from the popular consensus.   Hume “discovered,” happily, that “by nature” human beings were disposed to have the sentiments and dispositions constitutive of sound morality; Kant sought to vindicate the deontological moral intuitions of the ordinary German peasant; while Sidgwick found that the “unconscious” morality of the English “peasants” was utilitarian, not deontological (and locked in hopeless conflict, alas, with egoistic considerations).  Most of moral philosophy of the past one hundred years—from Habermas and the adherents of “discourse ethics” (descendants of the Kantian project), to the proliferating Anglophone Kantians, to the earnest utilitarianisms of J.J.C. Smart, R.B. Brandt, Peter Singer, and others--has proceeded on the assumption that morality and a moral life are worth understanding because they are worth having and leading.

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One striking feature of post-Kantian philosophy in Europe has been the emergence of morality critics, philosophers who, contra the popular consensus, dispute the value of morality and the moral life.  Their views find a faint echo in the work of some Anglophone moral philosophers (Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams are the main exemplars), but, as we will see, the “Continental” criticisms of morality generally cut far deeper and more radically.  Whereas the Anglophone skeptics take issue with, for example, the “demandingness” of utilitarian moral theory, or the purported “overridingness” of moral obligations as Kantians understand them, the Continental critics pitch their concerns less at the level of academic theory than at the level of social, political, and cultural life.  These Continental morality critics object that morality in practice is an obstacle to human flourishing itself.

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So understood, this attack on morality raises two immediate questions.  First, the Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.”  Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques.  We will refer to this as the “Scope Problem” about morality criticism.  Second, we can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps:  those who see morality as a direct threat to human flourishing; and those who see morality as an indirect threat.  In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics.  In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing.  On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School—it is not allegiance to morality per se that thwarts individual flourishing, but rather the role such allegiance plays in sustaining certain socio-economic relations, the latter of which constitute the immediate obstacle to flourishing.  We will call the former “Direct Morality Critics” and the latter “Indirect Morality Critics.”  (Foucault straddles both approaches, and so we will discuss him in a transitional section.) 

Reaction Formation Watch (Leiter)

Story here:

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page....

Campaign aides had previously acknowledged that the Republican congressman e-mailed the former Capitol page five times, but had said there was nothing inappropriate about the exchange. The page was 16 at the time of the e-mail correspondence.

The page worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who said Friday that when he learned of the e-mail exchanges 10 to 11 months ago, he called the teen's parents. Alexander told the Ruston Daily Leader, ''We also notified the House leadership that there might be a potential problem....''

ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: ''Do I make you a little horny?''

In another message, Foley wrote, ''You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get naked.''

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.

''We track library books better than we do sexual predators,'' Foley has said....

"The People Are Unfit to Rule"

This is a sharp cultural analysis of some trends in daytime T.V. broadcasting:

[On the Maury Povich Show] [a] married couple was waiting for Povich’s paternity testers to come in with the verdict on whether or not the husband was the father of his pregnant wife's baby.

The judgment came in a sealed envelope. Povich held the results in the air and proclaimed that the husband “had nothing to worry about. It's your child, Stewart!.”

“Stewart” issued a victorious war whoop and punched the air with his fist. He gave Maury a big hug.

Stewart's wife rolled her eyes. “I told you you were the daddy,” she said with a distinctly southern accent, “you big [bleep].”

The audience roared. 

Maury likes to build his shows around paternity tests. 

The last time I saw him do one of these, things turned out differently. A cuckolded husband collapsed in tears. As he lay sobbing on a couch, a winking Maury pretended to console him. His wife wept as the crowd howled. 

This kind of atrocity has been commonplace on American daytime corporate television for some time.

Povich is neither the first nor the last daytime television host to construct a broadcast around the employment of marginal and poor people as tragic sociological circus freaks. This was how “Jenny Jones” and Sally Jesse Raphael made their talk-who names and how Montel Williams got his start.

The worst is probably Jerry Springer, who loves to pit cheating lower-class couples and their lovers against one another....

Then there’s the real-life judicial shows, wherein small-claims and divorce justices likes “Judge Judy” and “Judge Joe Brown” preside over dysfunctional poor people who can’t stop bitterly arguing with each other. These television judges lace their proceedings and judgments with lectures on proper behavior and values, accompanying their legal verdicts with cutting comments about the rabble’s insufficiently middle-class comportment and conduct and instructing them in the virtues of work, fidelity, family responsibility, and the respect for authority....

Beyond their profitable (for broadcasters) appeal to the public’s most base and voyeuristic instincts, these and other “real—life” television shows...are part of an elitist thought control project: the cultural engineering and enforcement of mass consent to social hierarchy.

Along with numerous other corporate television productions they propagate at least two central authoritarian ideas. The first such idea maintains that poor people –--- it is practically always working- and lower-class people who get held up for ridicule in the human cockfights staged by Maury, Jerry, and the rest –--- deserve their own poverty and related isolation and criminalization in America. A college student who has been mass culturally weaned on Jerry (Springer), Jenny (Jones), Sally (Jesse-Raphael), Judy (the judge), and Maury et al. is not a good candidate to follow his left-liberal sociology, history, or English professor’s discourse on the role that structural forces and elite agents of class, race, and/or gender oppression play in creating mass inequality and misery in the United States. The endless army of stupid, hateful, alienated, and hopeless poor people paraded across her television screen by Maury and his friends strike the student as being oppressed by nobody or nothing so much as themselves.

Of course, Maury and Jerry don’t do shows about the rampant social injustice that produces the people who show up on their stages. Judges Judy and Joe Brown and the authorities on Divorce Court don’t adjudicate on the political-economic abandonment of the inner city or the corporate globalization that destroys jobs, families, and communities....
 
The second richly authoritarian idea “taught” by Maury and Jerry et al. holds that the ordinary populace is too stupid, vile, savage, selfish, atavistic, and ignorant to be trusted with the possession of any particular power in “democratic” America....

Maury, Jerry, and the rest are excellent disseminators of a notion that Chomsky rightly places at the heart of the venerable thought-control project of the corporate master class: “the people who are supposed to run the show” (the society’s power elite) must “do so without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the public arena” (Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World [New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2005], p. 21).

“No business in the public arena”…except as angry and tragic circus-freaks who deserve their position at the bottom of America’s steep socioeconomic pyramids.

Feeling Uncertain About Your Masculinity? Support the Iraq War, Buy an SUV, and Hate Gays

Ruchira Paul has the details on this recent study out of Cornell University.

On Gay Marriage

ORIGINALLY POSTED March 27, 2004; recent events in Texas, sadly, make it relevant again.

==========================

This is not bad from Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

In the [1967] Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent.

This does get to the heart of the matter. There is no doubt that the idea of two men or two women being married seems strange and unfamiliar (well, it is unfamiliar, after all), that it is upsetting to many, that it provokes hard-to-articulate feelings of unease and, in some, revulsion. It is, in that regard, no different than the feelings very common fifty years ago, and still sometimes found today, regarding interracial marriage. In both cases, it is impossible for anyone to give a rational explanation for their opposition. (A good illustration are the postings at this conservative site.)

It seems to me there have been three general kinds of attempts to offer a rational basis for opposition to gay marriage: appeals to religion, tradition, and the "essential" nature of marriage. Assuming that religious faith can be rationally defended--I will assume, arguendo, that it can be--it's not at all clear that those defenses suffice to underwrite the rationality of claims about God's intentions on matters like gay marriage. Belief in God is one thing; claims to authoritative epistemic access to God's intentions is another. The rationality of claims of the latter sort has never been adequately defended.

Reliance on "tradition" is not rational in the absence of (a) a defense of the rationality of the tradition, or (b) a defense of the rationality of deference to tradition. Obviously if the rationality of the tradition could be defended there would be no need to appeal to the tradition in the first place. And the only defenses of the rationality of deference to tradition--assuming they're successful--establish, at best, that tradition is a defeasible guide to what we should do today, and thus can not themselves fully dodge the question of why tradition should not be defeated in this instance. (Again, I'm assuming, arguendo, that the "tradition" supports the claims of the opponents of gay marriage: for some pertinent doubts, see the interview with Sanford Levinson linked at the end of this posting.)

Finally, arguments based on claims about the essential nature of marriage--like those by John Finnis and Robert George--are, it is fair to say, generally recognized as reductios: the arguments are so tortured and so wrought with bizarre premises as to lead one agnostic on the subject to be highly suspicious. (A thinner version of these arguments from Doug Kmiec is here. Larry Solum [San Diego Law] comments on some of the peculiarities of the Kmiec argument here.)

Thus Spoke Heinrich Heine

As memorably quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged.

Reaction Formation Watch

Details here; an excerpt:

Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school....

With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you some information about how...God has called me to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country."

For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality....

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you...."

[O]ut in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--...his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.

According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible...."

She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit....

As laid out in his writings, Hager's worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books, he refers to a man who raped his wife as "selfish" and "sinful.") But to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their lives don't meet the high standard set by God Himself--trapped in a permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well....

Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, [ex-wife Linda] could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be asleep," she recalls, "and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it....'"

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years....

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

UPDATE:  Originally posted March 23, 2005.

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This essay, my contribution to The Future for Philosophy (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2004), is now available for free download here.  This is from the introduction to the essay:

Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth--and early twentieth-century thought--Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--“the school of suspicion,”[i] by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience,[ii] whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one’s desires (“I really want to be rich!”), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit (“an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!”).  “Beneath” or “behind” the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena:  I don’t really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on.

            Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud.  For understandable, if philosophically frivolous, reasons the collapse of the Soviet Union has been taken—especially in the media—as signalling the defeat of Marxism qua philosophy.[iii]  Meanwhile, Freud’s theory of the mind fell prey to the combined forces of the philosophical critique launched by Adolf Grünbaum[iv] (especially as popularized by polemicists like Frederick Crews[v]) and market-driven models of medical care (especially in the United States), which disfavored the lengthy investment required by Freudian psychoanalysis.  Only Nietzsche has remained apparently unscathed, his academic reputation and influence at perhaps its highest point ever.[vi]

            Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought.  The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy.  Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality’s authority. 

So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades,[vii] has declared that “Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact”[viii] and that, as a result, “Marxists...are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy.”[ix]  (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.[x])   Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, “Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers”[xi] and goes on to claim that “Freud’s theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of [Kant’s] Categorical Imperative.”[xii]  On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality.[xiii]

            Yet even Nietzsche has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way.  The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality--a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago[xiv]-- in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge:  the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a “revaluation of values.”  Thus, on the European Continent, Heidegger tells us that Nietzsche is the last great metaphysician, advancing claims, like Plato, about the essence of Being,[xv] while in the hands of Foucault and Derrida, Nietzsche becomes the precursor of post-modern skepticism about knowledge and determinate meaning.   

            In Anglophone philosophy, the development has followed a somewhat different trajectory, but arrived, nonetheless, at the same resting point.  The late Walter Kaufmann, a gifted translator but unreliable scholar, saved Nietzsche from the misrepresentations of the Nazis, but added his own by introducing a more straightforwardly moralistic interpretation:  Kaufmann’s Nietzsche turns out to be a congenial secular liberal, committed to self-realization.[xvi]  Since Kaufmann, however, the primary tendency among English-speaking interpreters has been, as on the Continent, to locate Nietzsche’s central philosophical concerns outside of the theory of value:  for example, as a certain sort of philosophical skeptic about truth, knowledge, and meaning.  This approach, which dominated Nietzsche studies beginning with Arthur Danto’s 1965 book Nietzsche as Philosopher,[xvii] received its most sophisticated articulation in Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 study, Nietzsche:  Life as Literature,[xviii] a book which presents a “Nietzsche” that, one suspects, Georg Brandes would not have recognized.

            I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice.  The resistance, it is important to note at the beginning, has taken different forms.  On Cohen’s reading of Marx, for example, Marx is, indeed, a kind of naturalist, but a failed one:  Marxists are better-served by turning to moral theory, according to Cohen, given the failure of the naturalistic project. On Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche, by contrast, the naturalism is simply ignored, in favor of a reading that makes Nietzsche morally palatable by reading him as claiming only that the best kind of life is one that displays the coherence of the ideal literary character.  In the case of Freud, finally, recent interpretations have been straightforwardly moralistic:  Freud is, indeed, a naturalist, on these accounts, but one whose central claims either lend support to or require supplementation by claims from—of all sources!—Kantian moral theory.

This paper argues against all three forms of moralizing readings, and in support of the claim that, as a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it.  When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

            Now admittedly, such a rendering of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” would have seemed strange to Ricoeur, who was in the grips of a fairly crude philosophy of science.  He thought the hermeneutics of suspicion stood in opposition to a “scientific” understanding of phenomena.  “The statements of psychoanalysis are [not] located...within the causal discourse of the natural sciences,” Ricoeur says, then adding that since psychoanalysis is concerned with “motives”--though not motives that “coincide with any conscious process of awareness”-- “its explanations resemble causal explanations, without, however, being identically the same, for then psychoanalysis would reify all its notions and mystify interpretation itself.”[xix]  The talk of “reification” is, shall we say, obscure. Psychoanalysis, as Freud himself understood it, offers causal explanations that appeal to unconscious motives, and while these causes are laden with meaning, they are causes nonetheless.[xx]  To be sure, when philosophers of science thought that all causal explanations had to conform to one model--usually drawn from some idealized version of physics--it seemed that a hermeneutic explanation, one that took seriously the meaningfulness of certain mental states qua causes, was necessarily not part of the causal discourse of science.  But that understanding of causal explanation is now, happily, defunct,[xxi] replaced with a new pluralism that recognizes, as one philosopher of science puts it, that “explanatory adequacy is essentially pragmatic and field-specific”[xxii]  Sciences may all offer consilient explanations of diverse phenomena, and generate true predictions, but beyond that, there is room for a plurality of logical forms and degrees of quantitative precision.

            This last point bears emphasizing:  naturalism in philosophy--certainly as it is relevant to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--is fundamentally a methodological view, which holds that philosophical inquiry should be both modelled on the methods of the successful sciences, and, at a minimum, consistent with the results of those sciences.[xxiii]  The supernatural finds no place in our best ontology, on this view, simply because the methods of the sciences don’t require positing its existence.  Because naturalism, so understood, gives priority to actual scientific practices, it repudiates the characteristic doctrines of mid-20th-century scientistic philosophy, such as the idea that all genuine sciences must ultimately be reducible to physics, or the claim that all genuine explanations must have a certain logical form or at least the form of the explanations we find in physics.  Physics is a successful science, but so too are evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and geology, despite the fact that they aren’t reducible to physics, and despite the fact that they explain phenomena in ways that look unfamiliar from the austere ontological and methodological repertoire of physics. 

            Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are more important, to be sure, for their methodological naturalism, brought as it is to bear on questions of great moment, than for all the details of their empirical theories.  We must allow that on many particulars, these three great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion are not satisfactory--indeed, can not be uniformly satisfactory since they sometimes contradict each other! Of course, empirical progress is the norm in all forms of inquiry that aim for a naturalistic understanding of the world.  And just as evolutionary biologists find it necessary to modify parts of the explanatory framework bequeathed them by Darwin--even as they preserve the main elements of his outlook--so, too, should practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion expect to dispense with many of the particular theses associated with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, even as they retain the general explanatory framework that informs their hermeneutics of suspicion.[xxiv]  As one recent researcher, reviewing experimental evidence supporting Freud, wrote:  “To reject psychodynamic thinking because Freud’s instinct theory is his view of women is dated is like rejecting modern physics because Newton did not understand relativity.”[xxv]  To take Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud seriously as philosophical naturalists demands nothing less.

            If we can recover the naturalistic ambitions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we will also accomplish two important meta-philosophical goals:   first, it helps make philosophy “relevant”--as the critics of philosophy so often demand--and, second, it bridges the so-called analytic/Continental divide in philosophy.  Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it.  And by taking these three seminal figures of the Continental traditions as philosophical naturalists we show their work to be continuous with the naturalistic turn that has swept Anglophone philosophy over the past several decades.  Such a reconciliation of Continental and Anglophone philosophy may seem to some the wrong one, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to defend the importance of the naturalistic turn.[xxvi]  All I hope to establish here is that the antipathy to naturalism often thought to be constitutive of “the Continental tradition” is simply an artifact of cutting the joints of that tradition in certain places.[xxvii]  Much of that Continental tradition has earned the--sometimes justified--antipathy of Anglophone philosophers, but there is reason to hope that just as German intellectuals of the 1840s and 50s, in the grips of the first great naturalistic turn in philosophy, gave up on Hegel as an obscurantist metaphysician,[xxviii] that we, too, may leave behind Hegel and his progeny.

---

      [i] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.

      [ii] “If we go back to the intention they had in common, we find in it the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”  Id. at 33. 

      [iii] Marxism had been so long associated with the Soviet Union, that that system’s collapse was taken to coincide with the collapse of its putative intellectual foundations.  Of course, this association is, from a philosophical point of view, a non-sequitur.  Indeed, the Soviet Union arguably collapsed for Marxian reasons:  bureaucratic central planning clearly fettered the development of the forces of production, and thus was eventually supplanted by nascent market forms of production and distribution.

      [iv] Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis:  A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984).

      [v] See infra n. 85.

      [vi] Even analytic philosophers like Christine Korsgaard and Thomas Nagel--ones with Kantian sympathies no less!--now refer respectfully to his ideas.

      [vii] See G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History:  A Defense (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978).

      [viii] G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 103.

      [ix] Id. at 109.

[x] See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1981), translated as The Theory of Communicative Action by Thomas McCarthy in two volumes (1984, 1987) published by Beacon Press (Boston).

      [xi] J. David Velleman, “A Rational Superego,” Philosophical Review 108 (1999), p. 529.

      [xii] Id.

      [xiii] One hopeful sign that the tide may be turning with respect to Marx is Jonathan Wolff’s splendid book, Why Read Marx Today? (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002).  At times, to be sure, Wolff expresses a certain uneasiness about the epistemic status of Marx’s claims..  “My point,” he says, “is that we value the work of the greatest philosophers for their power, rigour, depth, inventiveness, insight, originality, systematic vision, and, no doubt, other virtues too.  Truth, or at least the whole truth and nothing but the truth, seems way down the list....There are things much more interesting than truth.  Understood this way, Marx’s works are as alive as anyone’s.”   Id. at 101.  Yet elsewhere--and Wolff makes the case powerfully--he notes that Marx “does say may true and inspiring things.  His work is full of insight and illumination.”  Id. at 125.

      [xiv] Based on lectures first given in the late 1880s, they subsequently appeared in English as Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. Chater (London:  Heinemann, 1915).

      [xv] A more compelling reading of Nietzsche along these lines than Heidegger’s is presented in John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996).  For my own doubts about this interpretation, see my review in Mind 107 (1998):  683-690.

      [xvi] Although long discredited, this reading continues to resurface.  For a recent example, see James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism:  A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001).  For discussion of the sloppy scholarship here, see my review in Mind 112 (2003):  175-178.   As Thomas Hurka points out, Conant even quotes selectively from “Schopenhauer as Educator,” and mistranslates a central term in order to support his (mis)reading.  See Thomas Hurka, “Nietzsche:  Perfectionist,” in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

      [xvii] (New York:  MacMillan, 1965).

      [xviii] (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 1985).  Nehamas does repudiate, correctly, Danto’s attribution of a pragmatic theory of truth to Nietzsche.  But in its overall interpretive orientation, it follows in Danto’s footsteps.

      [xix] Freud and Philosophy, p. 360.

[xx] As Peter Railton eloquently puts the same general point in his contribution to this volume:  “How could any explanation of a human phenomenon be causally adequate if it failed to give us an account that accurately rendered the lived experience or subjectivity of those immersed in a practice?—such experience is surely the primary data to be accounted for.  And how could an understanding of human action be meaning adequate if it failed to locate those ideas, images, or motives that actually played a role in bringing about the behavior and its effects?”

      [xxi] See Nancy Cartwright’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays in this volume.

      [xxii] Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method:  Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 95.

      [xxiii] I have defended this view of naturalism in various places:  see, e.g., my Nietzsche on Morality (London:  Routledge, 2002), pp. 3-6, and my “Naturalism and Naturalized Jurisprudence,” in Analyzing Law:  New Essays in Legal Theory, ed. B. Bix (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 81-84.  Michael Rea, in one of the most careful and systematic (albeit highly critical) considerations of philosophical naturalism, reaches a similar conclusion:  see Michael C. Rea, World Without Design:  The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2002), esp. chapters 2 and 3. 

[xxiv] Obviously, they shouldn’t retain the framework if it proves empirically unsustainable.  And equally obviously, this way of approaching the hermeneutics of suspicion makes it hostage to empirical fortune:  but as far as I can see, that is what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud intended, and that is what makes them genuinely interesting and significant.  On recent empirical support for Nietzsche, see my essay on Nietzsche’s theory of the will in The Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (Oxford:  Blackwell, forthcoming) and the essay by Joshua Knobe and myself on the empirical foundations of Nietzsche’s moral psychology in Nietzsche and Morality, op cit.; on Freud, see infra n. 89; on Marx, see infra nn. 41-46.

[xxv] Drew Westen, “The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud:  Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science,” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998), p. 334.

      [xxvi] But see the introduction to this volume, and, especially, the contributions by Alvin Goldman and Peter Railton.

      [xxvii] This is not to deny that anti-naturalism is an important theme in post-Kantian philosophy on the European Continent in the 19th- and 20th- centuries; it is to deny that such a theme constitutes an ineliminable element of Continental philosophy.

[xxviii] No one put it better than Schopenhauer, who remarked that the emblem of a university committed to Hegel’s philosophy would be “a cuttle-fish creating a cloud of obscurity around itself so that no one sees what it is, with the legend, mea caligine tutus [fortified by my own obscurity].”  On the Will in Nature, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 24.

Reaction Formation Watch

Story here; an excerpt:

Mayor James E. West of Spokane, a Republican opponent of gay rights, was accused in a newspaper on Thursday of molesting two boys decades ago and the paper also says it caught him using the trappings of his office to try to court a young man online.

Mr. West denied the accusations, but acknowledged he "had relations with adult men."

He admitted offering autographed sports memorabilia and a possible City Hall internship to what he thought was an 18-year-old man on the Web site Gay.com. The man was actually a computer expert hired by the newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, as part of a sting operation.

Mr. West, 54, a former Boy Scout leader and Army paratrooper who was married for five years in the 1990's, denied that the online offers constituted abuse of his office, and he said he would serve out the more than three years remaining in his term....

Mr. West, a conservative, rose to become majority leader of the State Senate during a two-decade legislative career. He consistently opposed efforts to expand civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on same-sex marriage, in 1998.

The newspaper had hired a computer expert to create a fictitious identity as an 18-year-old boy to chat with Mr. West, whose online aliases included "RightBi-Guy."

UPDATE:  More commentary and information here:

The West scandal fits a pattern.

As PBS' "Frontline" recently had courage to report, closeted homosexuals help design conservatives' media and political campaigns against such causes as same-sex marriage.

It has been a quarter-century since Washington, D.C., police charged Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman with propositioning a 17-year-old male. Bauman was an original sponsor of an anti-gay bill called the Family Protection Act.

As Karen Dorn Steele reported yesterday in The Spokesman-Review, West championed criminal background checks for jobs involving children, warning that abusers "often try to gain a position of trust and authority."

West proposed making it a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger to have sexual contact.

He co-sponsored a bill to bar gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day care centers and some agencies: It provided for screening prospective employees on their sexual orientation.

Reaction Formations, a Continuing Saga

Details here (from a conservative Christian magazine); an excerpt: 

For 20 years, churchgoers first in Birmingham, Ala., and then Cincinnati, Ohio, trusted, revered, and believed the impeccable reputation Mr. Burgin built from his pulpit. But beneath the thick varnish of smooth oration and doctrinally sound sermons, this conservative pastor secretly harbored a monster....Mr. Burgin was addicted to internet pornography. For the entirety of his ministry and even before, Mr. Burgin tumbled silently through a cycle of shame, repentance, and broken vows....

Despite [Ed.-or rather, "because of"] a guilt-ridden conscience, Mr. Burgin often preached on sexual purity, slogging through such sermons undetected. "I compartmentalized it in my mind," he said. "I rationalized. I minimized. I would stop while preaching and teaching on it...."

A Barna Research Group study released in November 2003 found four out of five born-again Christians believe pornography to be morally unacceptable. The Bible likens lust to adultery and fornication, both expressly forbidden. Nevertheless, Mr. Burgin's disaster is far from unique:

• A 2003 survey from Internet Filter Review reported that 47 percent of Christians admit pornography is a major problem in their homes.

• An internet survey conducted by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in 2002 found 30 percent of 6,000 pastors had viewed internet porn in the last 30 days.

• A Christianity Today Leadership Survey in 2001 reported 37 percent of pastors have viewed internet porn.

• Family Safe Media reports 53 percent of men belonging to the Christian organization Promise Keepers visit porn sites every week.

• One in seven calls to Focus on the Family's Pastoral Care Hotline is related to internet pornography.

• Today's Christian Woman in 2003 found that one in six women, including Christians, struggles with pornography addiction.

(For those new to Freud, see here on "reaction formations.")

Center for Naturalism

I've just accepted an invitation to join the Advisory Board of the Center for Naturalism, along with Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, and some other philosophers and scientists.  Do check them out:  lots of good links and information.

"The Black Book of Communism"

ORIGINALLY POSTED July 20, 2004.

=====================================

This book, published by French scholars in 1997, documents the death tolls attributable to communist regimes in different countries. The book is obviously premised on the thought that the fact that these were communist regimes is explanatory: clearly, one could produce similar books like "The Black Book of White Men" or or "The Black Book of Short Dictators" or "The Black Book of Blondes," listing the atrocities committed by regimes with the designated characteristics. But the undertaking would seem peculiar, since there is no reason to think that the highlighted attributes are explanatory.

The Black Book of Communism doesn't actually argue that allegiance to communism is explanatory; it takes it for granted. Someone writing The Black Book of Capitalism, in turn, might start counting corpses attributable to 19th-century European imperialism, Pinochet, Suhatro, Marcos, Somoza, etc. (Should we add Hitler, who on some accounts owes much to the support of the capitalist class, and whose rise to power was, uncontroversially, facilitated by the worldwide capitalist crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s?)

Would such an exercise illuminate anything about capitalism? It is an interesting question, and I do not know the answer. Still, in viewing the Black Book of Communism it is not unreasonable to raise the kinds of questions put--with characteristic Maoist hyperbole and apologetics--by this Maoist organization::

[I]t is an 856 page book and there are no statistical comparisons of premature deaths between capitalist and socialist countries anywhere in the book, just as MIM [Maoist International Movement] charged all along. The reason is simple: the Communists doubled the life expectancies of the people of the Soviet Union and China. That is the overall picture. It does not mean there were not civil wars or executions, including some unjust ones, but overall, the violence of communism is less than that of capitalism, by far.

The simple scientific link missing in the minds of our critics is the link between poverty under a system of private property and death. Poverty under capitalism causes death from lack of food, a decent environment and adequate health care.

Assuming one is a utilitarian about these matters--as the economists usually profess to be (though theirs is typically a sophomoric utilitarianism which equates well-being with preference-satisfaction)--then the only relevant question really is the causal nexus between different forms of socio-economic ordering and human well-being. And thus the Maoists are plainly correct to raise the question: how many lives were cut short by the catastrophe of the Great Depression? how many lives were lost to capitalist exploitation and terror in third world counctries? and so on.

It will not do, to refute the Maoists, to follow the lead of the silly Arnold Kling, and compare per capita life spans today to 100 or 200 years ago. No one was a more vigorous cheerleader for the productive power of capitalism, of course, than Karl Marx. The relevant question is whether that productive power might have been harnessed in ways that would have resulted in greater maximization of human well-being than actually resulted under existing socio-economic arrangements? And then, if we were to be serious about the question, we would have to line up the corpses and human misery (causally) attributable to the imperfections of capitalist forms of socio-economic organization next to those (causally) attributable to the communist societies, to see whose "Black Book" should be the fattest.

Now doctrinaire Marxists will presumably conclude, before the exercise even begins, that of course the ledger sheet of human misery will be longer on the side of the Chinese and the Soviets, since those nations were prematurely communist, and so deprived themselves of decades (or centuries) of development of their productive power which capitalism would have made possible. Such productive power, in turn, would have made possible, even within the pathologies of a capitalist system, improvements in human well-being, as those such as Dr. Kling like to point out.

Fortunately, doctrinaire Marxists are now in short supply! (Too bad the same is not true of doctrinaire libertarians, whose reasoning is not so different.) And so there is a genuine empirical issue here, for which The Black Book of Communism is only a partial contribution. (It focuses disproportionately on intentional killings, though it factors in some non-intentional ones as well, such as the Chinese famine. But it ignores precisely the critique of the Soviets and the Chinese that would be raised by the doctrinaire Marxist, noted above.) I will not be betting, to be sure, on Harvard University Press publishing installments looking at the other side of the ledger sheets, but perhaps other scholars will find other fora in which to address the issues.

At the same time, what is needed is not simply correlations, but some account of causal mechanisms, so that we understand the precise sense in which, e.g., "capitalism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Suhatro, or "communism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Stalin.

These are fascinating issues, of enormous human importance. Is there a pertinent scholarly (as distinct from a popular [e.g., the silly Arnold Kling] or polemical [e.g., the MIM, above]) literature?

UPDATE: My colleague Frank Cross calls my attention to an interesting, small-scale study of the effect of privatization of water rights on child mortality in Argentina.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  A different perspective on water privatization here.  AND ANOTHER:  Reader Tom Barker alerts me to the fact that there is, in French, a Black Book of Capitalism, though it may already be out of print.

The Democracy that wasn't: Chomsky on the U.S. elections

Full text here; an excerpt:

[T]he parties try to exclude the population from participation. So they don't present issues, policies, agendas, and so on. They project imagery, and people either don't bother or they vote for the image. The Gallup Poll regularly asks, "Why are you voting?" One of the choices is, "I'm voting for the candidate's stand on issues." That was 6% for Bush, and 13% for Kerry ­and most of those voters were deluded about the positions of the candidates. So what you have is essentially flipping a coin. Each candidate got approximately 30% of the electorate. Bush got 31%, Kerry got 29%.

The party managers know where the public stands on a whole list of issues. Their funders just don't support them; the interests they represent don't support them. So they project a different kind of image.

If you listen to the presidential debates, you can't figure out what they're saying, and that's on purpose. The last debate was supposed to be about domestic issues. The New York Times commented that Kerry didn't make any hint about possible government involvement in health care programs because that position has, in their words, "no political support." Well, according to the most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the government ought to guarantee health care for everyone, and furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you something about people's values. But there's "no political support."

Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there's "no political support." It doesn't matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn't count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You're supposed to vote for the image they're projecting. That's not surprising really. Just ask yourself, "Who runs the elections?"

The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it's intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one. Same when they run elections...Quite naturally, the [advertising] industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information­and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.

No credit card company left behind

A well-known German philosopher once observed that, "The modern state is merely the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."  Today's management excercise is well-described here:

The bankruptcy bill [the Senate will soon approve] was written by and for credit card companies, and the industry's political muscle is the reason it seems unstoppable....

The bill would make it much harder for families in distress to write off their debts and make a fresh start. Instead, many debtors would find themselves on an endless treadmill of payments.

The credit card companies say this is needed because people have been abusing the bankruptcy law, borrowing irresponsibly and walking away from debts. The facts say otherwise.

A vast majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of severe misfortune. One recent study found that more than half of bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies. The rest are overwhelmingly the result either of job loss or of divorce.

To the extent that there is significant abuse of the system, it's concentrated among the wealthy - including corporate executives found guilty of misleading investors - who can exploit loopholes in the law to protect their wealth, no matter how ill-gotten.

One increasingly popular loophole is the creation of an "asset protection trust," which is worth doing only for the wealthy. Senator Charles Schumer introduced an amendment that would have limited the exemption on such trusts, but apparently it's O.K. to game the system if you're rich: 54 Republicans and 2 Democrats voted against the Schumer amendment.

Other amendments were aimed at protecting families and individuals who have clearly been forced into bankruptcy by events, or who would face extreme hardship in repaying debts. Ted Kennedy introduced an exemption for cases of medical bankruptcy. Russ Feingold introduced an amendment protecting the homes of the elderly. Dick Durbin asked for protection for armed services members and veterans. All were rejected....

As Mr. Hacker and others have documented, over the past three decades the lives of ordinary Americans have become steadily less secure, and their chances of plunging from the middle class into acute poverty ever larger. Job stability has declined; spells of unemployment, when they happen, last longer; fewer workers receive health insurance from their employers; fewer workers have guaranteed pensions....

The bankruptcy bill fits right into this picture. When everything else goes wrong, Americans can still get a measure of relief by filing for bankruptcy - and rising insecurity means that they are forced to do this more often than in the past. But Congress is now poised to make bankruptcy law harsher, too.

Warren Buffett recently made headlines by saying America is more likely to turn into a "sharecroppers' society" than an "ownership society." But I think the right term is a "debt peonage" society - after the system, prevalent in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for their creditors. The bankruptcy bill won't get us back to those bad old days all by itself, but it's a significant step in that direction.

There is more on the bankruptcy con here.

Canada at risk of becoming a plutocracy?

So says Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks:

The C. D. Howe Institute recently set up a "Tax Competitiveness Centre" to recommend far-reaching tax reforms. That spells trouble for most Canadians.

Unless you're a rich investor, hold onto your wallet. Whenever the business-funded institute starts poking around in the tax system, it finds lots of things to change - mostly for the benefit of the rich.

That means the rest of us end up paying more taxes, or face cuts to social programs or benefits.

With the federal government trying to decide what to do with a surplus of $9 billion, the institute has been full of ideas.

Its latest - advocated by Jack Mintz, head of its new Tax Competitiveness Centre - is strikingly similar to one favoured by the Bush administration

Lift the tax burden entirely off income from investments and place the full tax burden on income from labour.

Not surprisingly, this idea is wildly popular among investors, who make up the bulk of C.D. Howe members.

Of course, these investors represent only a tiny proportion of Canada's taxpayers. But they tend to be highly effective at getting their way.

They've been particularly effective in the last few decades, as the power of labour has declined and the power of corporations and investors has risen sharply.

Rich Canadians have benefited enormously.

According to calculations by McMaster University economist Michael Veall, the top-earning 1 per cent of Canadians have almost doubled their share of the national income - from 7.6 per cent in 1980 to 13.6 per cent in 2000.

Osgoode Hall law professor Neil Brooks says the top-earning Canadians haven't enjoyed such a large share of Canada's national income since the 1920s and 1930s, a time when Canada was often regarded as a plutocracy (that is, a society ruled by the wealthy).

"Canada is once again at risk of becoming a plutocracy," says Brooks.

(By the way, when was the last time a major American newspaper described various right-wing think tanks, correctly, as shills for the rich and corporate interests?)

But let's look on the bright side:  if Canada becomes more plutocratic, then Canadians and Americans will have even more in common!