Just War Theory and Other Philosophical Responses to Warfare (A Footnote on Aquinas, Erasmus, and Machiavelli)

(Warning: a rambling disquisition about the point of just war theory in history. Tries to articulate some thoughts I've been nursing for the last couple of months, and some things I've tried to say in my class on political philosophy and international relations). 

How should one respond to the fact of war? I do not mean how we ought to respond to this or that war, but about the enduring fact that human beings engage in warfare: what should we do about this fact, at the most general level, if anything? And in particular, what constitutes a proper philosophical response to the fact of war?

One common response to the fact of warfare is articulated by the theory of just war. Just war theory presupposes that war is an unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable aspect of the human condition: given some general facts about human psychology (for example, the fact that at least some people lust for power or strongly believe that particular ideologies must be imposed on others), we must expect war to flare up from time to time, though its frequency may wax and wane for a variety of reasons (demographic, technological, cultural, etc.). Yet some of these wars will be justifiable: there will be good reason for (some people) to fight them in order to protect important values. The proper response to the fact of warfare thus involves articulating the principles and rules that distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable wars (and between justifiable and unjustifiable conduct in war), and appealing to or forcing those who engage in that practice to regulate their conduct according to these principles and rules; and at least the first task necessarily involves philosophical reflection.

The ideal here is not the elimination of war, but the reduction of unjustifiable war through the moral (and sometimes legal) regulation of the practice. And though this regulation may take institutional form (as it does, imperfectly, nowadays), it need not: all the just war theorist presumes is that most people are relatively receptive to moral argument, at least when such moral argument appeals to relatively noncontroversial principles and is presented in a clear way. And even if such appeals sometimes fall on deaf ears, the just war theorist assumes that they are not entirely ineffectual. One can appeal to the conscience of those in power, even if sometimes they have trouble hearing its voice, or at least force them to pay a decent respect to the opinions of others, and one can train those who actually fight to be responsive to moral precepts that constrain what they can do in the heat of battle.

The basic principles of just war theory seem to have a certain universal appeal, given that they have changed little since Aquinas articulated them in the 13^th century. (And he was merely systematizing ideas that were even older, going back to Cicero and the Stoics in the late Roman Republic). We still discuss ius ad bellum in terms of the basic triad of proper authority (who can authorize a war?), just cause (is there a good reason to fight, and in particular a reason that can justify the collective use of armed force?), and right intention (is the just cause merely a pretext for more nefarious purposes, or do the people waging war genuinely intend to protect some important values by going to war?). Other principles – like “reasonable chance of success” – sometimes enter the discussion, but the basic framework remains ancient. Witness the debate about the recent intervention in Libya, for example. Disagreement about the morality of the intervention revolved around the questions of who had the authority, if anyone, to permit the use of armed force against Gaddafi’s government, whether Gaddafi’s actions to put down a rebellion against his government gave other countries a good reason for engaging in war against him, and whether NATO members genuinely intended to protect Libyan civilians and/or help the Libyan rebels overthrow an oppressive regime (or were, on the contrary, acting to secure control over Libya’s oil or Western influence in the Middle East). Similarly, debates about the morality of particular tactics in bello (e.g., the use of precision munitions to attack particular people in urban areas) all revolve around the basic triad of principles of innocent immunity (is the target a civilian or a combatant?), proportionality (are the means proportionate to the end, or are they “overkill”?), and double effect (are the deaths of civilians a genuinely unavoidable result of the use of proportionate means?). Though the full articulation of the principles of ius in bello is of somewhat more recent vintage (they are more sketchily described in Aquinas than the principles of ius ad bellum, for example), they are still quite old and broadly accepted.

But though the basic principles of just war theory are widely accepted, the fact of disagreement obviously indicates that their application is much more controversial. The more one moves from broad principles to specific rules and even more to particular judgments the less arguments about the justice of particular wars or tactics will be convincing. Arguments come to depend on distinctions that are far less obvious and much more contestable. For example, the US Air Force consistently argues (and I’m sure mostly in good faith; as far as I know, American soldiers do receive explicit training on the principles of just conduct in war) that its use of precision munitions respects all the basic principles of ius in bello: such munitions are used only against people which intelligence indicates are “combatants” and responsible people attempt to minimize “collateral damage” (i.e., apply the proportionality and double effect principles). Yet many people vocally disagree with them about all aspects of this argument, including the weight that should be given to the evidence of combatant status (what is the acceptable false positive rate for a target?) and whether the use of 500 pound weapons in urban areas represents due care for the lives of non-combatants (what is the acceptable rate of civilian death from attacks on genuine military targets?).

The problem is not that there is no right answer to these questions, but that no particular answer can depend on premises that are all widely acceptable. Many if not most positions can muster plausible arguments (I get a glimpse of this every year when I ask my students to write essays applying the principles of just war to various recent military conflicts). Even sincere attempts by serious and well-trained thinkers to apply these principles to particular conflicts lead to ambiguous results. When one reads Vitoria’s exhaustive examination (in the 16^th century) of what would count as a just cause of war against the natives of the Americas (and hence would justify conquering them and taking their land), it is hard to say for sure whether he supported or opposed the conquest; though in private made it clear that he was appalled, he thought that there could be (and perhaps were?) circumstances in which the conquest would have been justified.

The pervasiveness of disagreement, and the fact that such disagreement is necessarily entwined with important (even existential) interests tends to make moral argument about just war appear as a form of rationalization, and worse, as legitimating the designs of the powerful. The suspicion arises that in trying to distinguish between justified and unjustified forms of war we merely enable more warfare; and that we would all be better off if the considerable intellectual energy spent on making these distinctions were instead spent on delegitimizing warfare as such. Already in the 16^th century, when the School of Salamanca was at the height of its influence (the Valladolid debates on the justice of the Spanish conquest of the Americas were not just for show!) and just war theory had evolved into a highly sophisticated discourse, there were people who thought precisely that. In his Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, Erasmus railed against what he saw as the enabling role of theologians in justifying too many wars. For him, just war reasoning was corrupting: it turned theologians and philosophers into advocates of their patrons’ predatory projects. The correct philosophical response to the fact of warfare, in Erasmus’ view, was not to help regulate it by articulating the principles and rules that can justify particular wars or practices within wars, but to deploy the full power of rhetoric to depict the horror of warfare and to delegitimize it as much as possible. (It is worth noting that the Dulce Bellum Inexpertis was a sort of 16^th century best seller. The printing press was still relatively new in Europe, and Erasmus was very good at making use of it to publicize his views).

The point is not that Erasmus thought that no war could ever be just (he does suggest here and there that some wars could be justified), but that asking which wars are just is (most of the time) the wrong question, since most wars will not be just. Intellectual energy is better spent delegitimizing warfare as much as possible by depicting its material and moral costs as vividly as possible, denouncing its general injustice, and indicating potential alternatives. (This is implicitly an argument about the “responsibility of intellectuals,” though of course the point is never put that way by Erasmus). In this way, if wars must be fought, they will tend to be fought less often, and with more restraint; the use of rhetoric to delegitimize warfare as such will if nothing else tend to “ratchet” up the restrictive force of just war principles, increasing the rhetorical cost that must be paid to start or wage a war. Whether this is in fact the case is difficult to tell; there does seem to have been a gradual, if haphazard, “tightening” of the restrictive force of just war principles over time, though whether this “tightening” is at least partly due to the efforts of people like Erasmus is anybody’s guess. For example, whereas Aquinas in the 13^th century thought that almost any “wrongdoing” that could not be redressed by the political authorities of a single political community could constitute a just cause of war, we now treat suspiciously any form of warfare that is not obviously defensive. And this “tightening” of the principles of just war has been correlated (I’m not claiming causality, however) with apparently large declines in the overall frequency and murderousness of war. (Yes, there are exceptions, and very long-term trends obscure significant variation over shorter periods of time. But the overall trends are striking, despite the greater destructiveness of modern technologies of warfare. At any rate, one only has to read Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War to understand that the modern era is not particularly inhumane in its way of waging war).

The 16^th century also gave rise to a very different response to the fact of warfare. Here the exemplary figure is Machiavelli, and the problem is not what to do to reduce warfare (should one help regulate it, or delegitimize it?), but how to use warfare to accomplish important goals. Warfare is not seen as a uniquely awful experience, but as a tool of politics; and one must study “The Art of War,” not because one ought to avoid war, but because one must learn to use it efficiently. Machiavelli (among others, though he most of all) wants to study the “economy of violence,” in Sheldon Wolin’s useful phrase, to put war to use, and in particular to put it to use for purposes that are internal to political life (the achievement of power, the foundation and preservation of political communities, etc.). Machiavelli’s thought is especially original not so much because he wants to study the economy of violence, however (there are many precedents, and Machiavelli’s advice in this respect, though generally acute, is not always great), but because he thinks that the standards by which we must judge the use of violence are themselves internal to the practice of politics: greatness rather than goodness. The point is to learn to do memorable and admirable deeds, and the most admirable deeds are those which produce lasting authority structures (founding religions and political communities, for example), not those that are most in keeping with conventional moral rules (or are accomplished with the least amount of violence). (I might write more on this point. It’s something I’ve been thinking about).  But even if one disagrees with Machiavelli that these are legitimate goals, and that reducing warfare is much more important, one might still think that doing so requires understanding the economy of violence and using it judiciously: that seems to me to be the genuine moral core of “realism” as a kind of consequentialist theory. 

Though the Machiavellian response is not a direct reaction to the development of just war theory, it is nevertheless a logical response to the same concerns that led Erasmus to move away from just war reasoning. It’s interesting to me that the European experience of the 16^th century produced these entirely divergent responses to war, despite the fact that all of the writers who were operating in these traditions had similar understandings of what war entailed (war was after all a very common experience in their world). None of them were especially naive about human beings and their limitations, and many had real influence with those in power. Yet these three responses seem to be fundamentally different, and the difference is not always rooted in radically different understandings of human nature (though they do differ on this point, especially Erasmus). In my class, I sometimes put the point in slogan form: just war theory says (about war) “regulate it,” Erasmian pacifism says “delegitimize it,” and Machiavellian political science says “study and use it.” 

Yet which of these responses is the best one? And how are they related to one another? Are they complementary responses, such that a division of intellectual labor between their proponents is possible, and capable of promoting important values over time? (Just war theory and Erasmian-style pacifism do seem to me to be related in something like this way, but to be in tension with Machiavellian political science). Or are they ultimately incompatible, so that we must choose among them? And does the development of just war theory typically necessarily generate, in a “dialectical” fashion, these alternative responses to war? I suspect that it does: as just war theory becomes more complex, it comes to seem more futile, giving rise both to Erasmian-style “delegitimize it” responses Machiavellian-style “study and use it” responses, and yet it never fully disappears; and perhaps just war theory itself becomes more relevant after periods where both Erasmian and Machiavellian responses seem to fail (perhaps the period after WWII).

[Update 9/22: fixed some typos and made some minor wording changes]

Endnotes

Haven't done one of these posts for over a month now, and the links accumulate. In no particular order for your Sunday reading pleasure:

• Gabriel Rossman on explaining the superstar effect in cultural markets. I loved the distinction between "watercooler" and "addiction" goods. 
• Alexis Madrigal on the "real names" policy on Facebook. It has the striking observation that, in real life, most of the statements we make are not as tightly tied to our identity as they are on Facebook.
• This is from a few months ago, but I also found Zeynep Tufekci's reflections on whether "real names" are useful or necessary to political mobilization in repressive contexts quite thought-provoking. 
• More on how the architecture of naming affects our social and political lives: Savage Minds on "seeing like a social network." 
• I rather enjoyed this, on art and quantification. 
• Jay Ulfelder's blog is great for people interested on questions of democratization. I especially liked his "democratization is not like growing up" post.
• A longuish meditation on Hans Blumenberg, who I once tried and failed to read. Made me want to try again. 
• N+1 on singing to whales. They also have a great deal of other excellent writing. 
• And your Sunday extremophile: Haliocephalobus Mephisto. Lives miles underground, where it remains in communication with the Ancient and Unnamable ones. 
• [Update 8/7/2011] pictures of the gates of hell.

More links accumulate here. HT: Zunguzungu, Cosma Shalizi, Henry Farrell, and probably others too.

Exit, Voice, and Legitimacy: Responses to Domination in Political Thought

Albert O. Hirschmann’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States is a “generative” book: the ideas it contains are deceptively simple but enormously fruitful. The book starts from the premise that individuals faced with a “decline” in service or performance from an organization (including a state) can either “exit” (switch to a different product, move to a different jurisdiction, etc.) or exercise their “voice” (complain, vote, protest, etc.), and that the degree to which they will opt for exit over voice depends in part on their “loyalty” to the organization. What makes the book interesting is Hirschmann’s detailed exploration of the complex and sometimes counterintuitive interactions between exit, voice, and loyalty: e.g., how the threat of exit can make voice more effective, and yet actual exit often undermines its effectiveness, or how exit can serve as a signal to activate certain forms of voice (as in Hirschmann’s analysis of the fall of the GDR, extended and refined in Steven Pfaff’s excellent Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of the GDR).

Anyway, this is probably utterly obvious, but it occurs to me that Hirschmann’s conceptual framework can be used to make sense of some important features of contemporary political thought. In particular, to the extent that contemporary political thought conceptualizes the key political problem not as a problem of performance (pace Hirschmann) but as a problem of domination (how should we think and what should we do about the fact that some people appear to dominate others?), specific positions will tend to emphasize one or another of the three Hirschmannian “mechanisms” for dealing with it. Thus, “right-liberals” (libertarians, but also others) tend to focus on exit as the most important component of a solution to this problem, “left-liberals” (and many other leftists who would abhor the label “liberal,” but I want to leave these aside) tend to focus on voice, and “conservatives” tend to focus on legitimacy.[1]

To me, this framework makes sense of many features of contemporary theoretical (and not-so-theoretical) debates, at least those I more or less follow. For example, right-liberals (from Nozick and Friedman to so many others) are especially attracted to markets as solutions to political problems in great part because they think that whenever such markets work well, they enable some people to escape from particular relations of potential domination: to leave jobs, or to switch products, or to escape oppressive social conditions, etc. The competitive market functions here as an ideal of exit, even if actually existing markets do not always work as advertised. Similarly, where left-liberals typically prefer to tackle domination within markets by encouraging unionization and other forms of organized voice, like worker-controlled enterprises (see, e.g., Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice), right-liberals might prefer to make the costs of exiting relations of domination smaller by lowering barriers to employment (so that people who quit have other options). Thus, at the extreme, many right-liberals are fairly comfortable with “private” governments not because they are secret authoritarians, as some people on the left might argue, but because private governments are typically predicated on easy exit: if you don’t like it, you can leave. (Many right-liberals tend to tie “legitimacy” to the possibility of exit: a relationship is legitimate when it does not unduly close off the possibility of exit). Domination, from this point of view, is captivity, and freedom is primarily understood as the ability to exit a relationship.

By the same token, left-liberals (and other people on the left, though not all) are often far more enamoured of democracy than the dinghy realities of actually-existing democracies would seem to warrant, with their refractory electorates, poor quality deliberations, capture by organized minorities, etc. This is not necessarily because they are blind to their failings, but because their default solution to the problem of domination is to increase voice – more consultation, more deliberation, more organized representation, and the like. They find voice itself desirable, and understand freedom partly in such terms: to be dominated is to have no means of affecting the direction of a relationship, to be voiceless, and to be free is to have input into the relationship, to have a say, which in turn legitimates a relationship. (If you don't like it, you can complain, or vote, or otherwise "make your voice heard"). And so left-liberals tend to look on exit-based solutions suspiciously, rightly understanding (as Hirschmann noted) that unrestricted exit typically undermines voice, and prefer to strengthen institutions of voice, even if these do not always work so well. Democracy is the normative ideal of voice, just as competitive markets are the normative ideal of exit.

The conservative response to domination is best seen as an attribute of other responses. Whether a person favours exit or voice in general as a response to domination, a more conservative position will typically understand existing relations of domination to be more legitimate than a less conservative position. But to the extent that there is a distinctively conservative response to illegitimate domination, it tends to stress the need to legitimate the relationship in question. This may involve increasing voice or enabling exit, but it may also involve changing other aspects of a relationship: domination can be legitimate, for the true conservative, even when there is otherwise no possibility of exit or voice, so long as the right people are in charge, or the right rules are applied, or the right procedures have been followed, etc. (Some of the “natural law theorists” around Robert George might fit this sort of characterization; but generally speaking true “conservatism” in this sense is harder to find today than one might think). Of course, the conservative response in this sense may be at odds with the conservatism of one’s position: it is, after all, possible to think that existing relations of domination are almost wholly illegitimate (and so ought to be changed), but for reasons having little to do with the possibility of exit or voice within the relationship (e.g., one may think that the wrong people are in charge; this is the Platonic position).

I do not want to make too much of this scheme. Whether one thinks that exit or voice (or legitimacy) is the right response to domination in a given situation may depend on any number of factors, such as one’s estimates of the costs of exit, the value of the community affected, the different organizational requirements of enabling exit rather than voice, and so on. (Consider: it is generally agreed today that people in abusive relationships should be given the option of exit rather than voice, since it is generally thought that voice is pointless in these circumstances). But I think that “left” and “right” strands of (broadly liberal) thought often differ in the extent to which they tend to value exit over voice or vice-versa as responses to domination: there is a style of reasoning and a constellation of theoretical commitments that favour one response over another. Left-liberals typically see high costs of exit and value group solidarity in ways that they would prefer not to undermine by promoting exit. Right-liberals, by contrast, typically see many pathologies in arrangements of collective voice and tend to more heavily discount the value of existing group solidarity. I suspect this is partly a matter of temperament and circumstance: some people seem to be “exit” people, some “voice” people (e.g., some of my relatives, when they receive bad service in a restaurant, will complain and demand their money back; I will just stop patronizing the place), just as some people seem more “conservative” than others, for whatever reasons, and these propensities may lead them to sort themselves into patterns of political thought. It may also have something to do with one’s particular circumstances; if one cannot imagine leaving a place and starting out elsewhere, or if one’s “exit” options are extremely costly, one may come to think that voice is generally the right response to domination, whereas highly mobile people with many “exit” options may come to think that exit is usually the right sort of response to domination. (And political debates may shift to left or right over time depending on whether people see themselves as fitting into one or the other category).

But this is all extremely speculative. The point of looking at domination through this sort of framework, in the end, is less to sort people into categories than to consider the interesting interactions between exit and voice, since it is clear that most of us do not see domination exclusively through either lens. Domination is both captivity and voicelessness, and freedom is both the ability to leave and the ability to talk, though we disagree about the balance between these two aspects in given situations, as well as about the legitimacy of existing relationships of domination.  But, if we look at the interaction of exit and voice, we might sometimes come to surprising conclusions, just as Hirschmann did in his book. For example, we may come to see how exit and voice can be mutually reinforcing in the struggle against some forms of domination, but mutually undermining in other cases. Any thoughts?

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[1] I use these names to indicate primarily theoretical commitments, not practical ones; in practice, who counts as “liberal” or as “conservative” in existing political debates is hardly as clear, and sometimes may be entirely dependent on temporary alliances and “tribal” affiliations. I am also talking only about the face value of these theoretical commitments; obviously any position claiming to talk about the problem of domination can be appropriated for less than noble ends by clever enough political entrepreneurs, though not always without costs.

Does the History of Political Thought Matter?

(Most of this was written months ago, then allowed to gather electronic dust. But the occasion is right to post it, since today is the first lecture of my yearly "Political Philosophy and International Relations" course). 

It’s that time of the year again: time to teach my course on the history of political thought. My approach is fairly traditional; in my classes we tend to read old books by “canonical” thinkers – Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and so on. Though I flatter myself that I present their arguments as sympathetically as possible, attempting to extract what is interesting and intellectually fruitful in their works (but really, you should ask my students if you want an unbiased opinion), I do not claim to go much beyond a standard canon of basically male, basically “Western” (whatever this means – more on this later), thinkers. I also teach a course in contemporary political thought, where we read similarly canonical thinkers, if of more recent vintage: Foucault, Habermas, Arendt, Rawls, Nozick, and so on, most of them people who thought that the history of political thought matters considerably. I spent way too many years working on a dissertation on a single dialogue of Plato which I consider to be a great neglected masterpiece  (the Statesman, mentioned many times in this here blog; this is the basis of my first book, which will be published soon enough), and have published work on ancient political thought (Plato and Cicero, mostly). Much of my research has been, loosely speaking, commentary: attempts to explicate other people’s arguments and put them in context. That is the way I was trained, and it is what I know how to do best. So you would expect to hear that I think we can learn something from old books; otherwise, why spend so much time reading them?

But I am not a historian; indeed, I would probably make a lousy historian. I have little tolerance for real archival research, and less of the historian’s sense for organizing masses of sometimes intrinsically boring material into compelling stories. I also find playing around with abstract ideas much more intellectually rewarding than the historian’s attention to particularity, and often feel more intellectual kinship with defiantly ahistorical rational choice modelers than with the sort of people who produce the deeply contextualized, “thick” scholarship common in my field. (If that makes me a bad person, so be it. It’s a matter of temperament, not necessarily intellectual conviction. Accidents of history turned me into a sort of historical scholar rather than a mathematician). Ultimately, I am more interested in thinking with Hobbes or Plato than in thinking about them; I get easily bored with genealogies and intellectual lineages, and I dislike the faint odor of antiquarianism clinging to attempts to overly contextualize the works I am interested in (why care about something that is entirely past?).

Moreover, the objections to the sort of activity I engage in on a regular basis are pretty obvious: sure, Plato and Hobbes and Hume had many bright ideas, but to the extent that their ideas were good, wouldn’t they have been incorporated into our common knowledge already? Physicists don’t need to read Newton, after all, and they certainly do not learn much from Aristotle’s physics (save for a catalog of errors). So why read books that, even if they contain some good ideas, also contain rather large amounts of questionable nonsense? Can’t we say that we have learned something over the last two thousand years? So does the history of political thought matter?

I suppose the question is not, in general, very interesting. The history of political thought certainly matters to some people in some circumstances and for some purposes. Some people just enjoy reading old texts and find value in them, just like some people enjoy studying giant crabs or butterflies, and in the grand scheme of things both activities have a civilizational value apart from the rewards they bring to their practitioners (though there is, of course, always a political and economic question as to how many resources societies should dedicate to the study of crabs or ancient texts, a question I will ignore right now). The more interesting question, from my point of view, is: if the history of political thought matters to you, why does it matter? What is it that you think you can accomplish by reading old books? What do you learn through studying the history of political thought that you cannot learn better by doing something else? Here a “map” of the various positions and their quarrels is perhaps more useful than a general argument for one or another position. So, (with apologies to XKCD), here it one attempt (click for larger image):

A bit of commentary. In the far North, one finds the Talmudists of the Highlands of Strauss. Some of my teachers came from here, and I know some of the customs of the land (though I don't live there anymore). These people think that there are some political problems that are enduring and perhaps inherent in the human condition; that these problems are supremely important; and that some of the old books of political thought have solved them, or at least have raised the truly important questions, or perhaps developed the right sorts of methods for addressing the important questions, even if they sometimes disagree about which of the books are true, and which questions are important. Moreover, they think that one can only learn to appreciate these “special” questions and answers by deeply immersing oneself in specific books; the pedagogical experience of learning through the book (and not merely being told a summary of the conclusions) is essential to achieving understanding. You have to work through the subtleties of Plato’s Republic to really understand these truths; one cannot truly understand them by reading the cliff notes version of the Republic. From this point of view, the context of these books is, though helpful in order to understand the structure of particular arguments, or the nuances and allusions that are so evident in these texts, ultimately unimportant: the texts speak to us across the ages, and do not remain rooted in their contexts. Since the problems with which these texts deal are enduring, there is no reason to think that there is something anachronistic in treating them as contemporaries.

Now, this is actually a very old view of why certain old books are important, perhaps the oldest of all. It is ultimately a sort of religious view, in which wisdom is to be found in books (perhaps including the book of nature). If we can only identify the right books, and read them properly, we shall achieve genuine understanding; and the task of the contemporary political thinker is at best a sort of “Talmudic” commentary, elaborating and applying the true principles found in ancient texts to the different circumstances of human life today, and at worst a sort of recovery operation whenever important principles and insights have been covered up by the errors of later generations. So long as we believe that human nature (however defined) remains (relatively) constant, and that the constraints that such nature puts on our “political” life are in fact important, it makes sense to believe that earlier thinkers have in fact discovered the important solution to these problems. And we might come to think that since some books are old and have been considered by many people to be rich sources of wisdom, that it is precisely these books that are likely to contain the true insights – the “classics” in the canon. This view, in other words, is especially concerned with the possibility of a canon.  

I know that this sort of view might strike many people as silly when stated in this way. But there is something to be said for it: it has the merit of treating ancient texts not as the benighted products of stupid people, but as potential sources of valuable knowledge, and really, to some extent the proof is in the pudding. (If you have, like I have, spent enough time with a “classic” text, you may eventually find that there is wisdom in it). Yet it still remains implausible. For one thing, awareness of the sheer contingency of the preservation of ancient and not so ancient texts should shake any notion that the classic texts are precisely those that contain important questions and true insight. It is only sheer accident that we have any of Plato or Aristotle’s texts (most of them in fact vanished for long centuries at a time in the West), and there are vast libraries of ancient texts that have quite simply vanished; we barely know the names of the books they contained. For another, it is not clear why the canon should contain “Western” books and not, say, Chinese books. After all, if the fundamental problems of human life are such that they are likely to have been solved already, they could have been solved elsewhere, unless there is perhaps something about the specific circumstances of say, fourth century Greece that made people at the time especially likely to solve such problems. (After all, fourth century Greece is just as different from modern society as fourth century China; and our knowledge of ancient Greek is about as good as our knowledge of ancient Chinese, i.e., worse than you think; ancient languages, despite the superficial familiarity that translations give us, still remain on occasion stubbornly difficult to parse, as should be evident to anyone who has tried to read Thucydides in the original Greek). But most importantly of all, the classic texts contradict each other; if the Greeks are right then Locke and Hobbes are wrong. So at best all that one could say is that the work of the scholar is a fight against the forces of forgetfulness or perversion that threaten the hard-won wisdom of the ancients, or perhaps the reverse, a rearguard action against the always possible return of the repressed falsehoods of the ancients. On this view, the scholar should be the champion of the truth; and the truth is threatened by forgetfulness of the right books.

Across some high mountains to the south we find people whose view of the old books is in many ways diametrically opposed to the Talmudists of the Highlands. These are the peoples who inhabit the Skinnerian plains of Contextualism. Such people also share a passion for understanding the texts of the past; but their appetite is more indiscriminate, and they disclaim the relevance of such texts for making much sense of our current conditions. The inhabitants of the Skinnerian plain believe that the great texts emerged from very particular historical contexts, and mostly speak to that historical context; their mission is to show how what they thought emerged from very specific, and very different, historical contexts, and is hence of little use or value for understanding the present situation. The inhabitants of the Skinnerian plain delight in claiming that the “abstract” arguments of people like, say, Hobbes, are really very particular interventions in very particular debates about the civil war, and were not really “intended” to speak to us across the centuries. They not only believe that the context matters for understanding a thinker, but that it is practically all that matters.

Yet this view has an odd consequence: only a misappropriation or misunderstanding of the past can make the past truly relevant to us; when we debate about this or that earlier thinker, we are only debating with ourselves. Truly understanding the past renders the past sterile for current debates; to render it relevant is, in a sense, to overlook so many important differences in context that we simply misunderstand these people. At best, the texts of ancient thinkers are data for large-scale narratives of historical change.

One should acknowledge that the contextualists are in fact right that particular thinkers emerge out of specific historical contexts and that important aspects of their arguments can only be fully understood by placing them in context. But in their enthusiasm, sometimes they contextualize too much. They leave these thinkers stranded in the past, and give us little reason to care about them; the more we care about context, the less we care about substance. We thus lose the trace of the absent interlocutor.

Some people thus migrate from the lands of the contextualists to the rugged hills where the Indifferent Tribes inhabit. Having been convinced that the past is past, and the thinkers of the past are wholly bound to their contexts, they figure there is nothing to be gained from studying them. If the arguments and discussions of the past, despite their superficial resemblance to modern arguments, are truly different from ours, then what is the point of trying to extract useful lessons from them? The contextualists rebuke them: how can you understand current debates without understanding their history? But the Indifferent Tribes have a good reply: it is important to understand the history of a conversation, if the interlocutors remain constant. But the contextualists have shown that the thinkers of the past are not in any important sense our interlocutors; to ignore them is as necessary and useful as ignoring the conversations that took place in this auditorium for a very different conference.

Appeals to the past, they continue, are at best appeals to authority and statements of affiliation, but not really useful in thinking about current problems. It may be true that we need to know some history for understanding our current problems; but this history will often not go back to the Greeks and the Romans. (Do we need to know the entire biography of a person to engage with them meaningfully, or their entire genealogy? Not really.) And at any rate it is unclear what kind of history is needed for understanding our current political predicaments; unless we have strong reason to suspect that certain political thinkers have been highly influential, we might think that the influence of dense treatises is slight and unimportant; and the history we might be interested in, even if some thinkers have been influential, might well be the history of misinterpretations and misappropriations, not the true meaning of some particular author. So the Indifferent Tribes profess indifference to past texts; while these texts might be neat, the history of political thought is not, ultimately, extremely important for current debates.

Their neighbours to the east are perhaps more tolerant. Though indifferent to context and “true” meaning, the Tomb Raiders of Analytia regard the past as a vast ruined storehouse of argument, many of which would not easily occur to us precisely because our context is so different. So there is something to be said for engaging with the past, though for such tomb raiders it is ok to proceed in blithe disregard of context, just picking and choosing what arguments are interesting, and which ones seem true. Scholarship in this vein (like that of Gregory Vlastos or Terry Penner in the case of Plato) tends to be highly sophisticated about the interpretation of specific texts, but little interested in the overall debates in which these classical arguments were set. They think of these arguments like they think of any other argument – things to consider in their own right, with little regard to whether they come “from oak or rock,” as Socrates says in the Phaedrus. (Socrates was the first tomb raider, they might claim, if they were moved much to appeal to authority). So they take seriously the thinkers of the past, but they do not experience them as participants in a highly structured conversation about problems that have evolved historically. They claim that engagement with past thinkers strengthens and challenges their own views, but only insofar as these past arguments can be cast in the most sophisticated modern languages, including sometimes the language of formal logic. But this challenge and refinement occurs at the expense of a (sometimes) highly impoverished understanding of the many artistic dimensions of these old books and their pedagogy.

Two other peoples exhibit similar understandings of how one should relate to these old books, though they are more mindful of contexts, if for different reasons. Up on the Northeast corner we find the Orchard of Ancient bookfruit. These are people (I count myself a resident on most days) who think that the value of the ancient books lies not in the fact that they are true but that their views are intellectually fruitful: we read them because we can endlessly appropriate and adapt their ideas in various ways. For such people, it matters little whether the specific views of Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature are true, for example, but the fact that they provide us with powerful conceptual vocabularies capable of structuring modern debates in anthropology and political theory to this day. Reading Hobbes and Rousseau, on this view, is important because they provide the best introduction to these vocabularies – to ways of framing and thinking about a particular problem. The very richness of the books in which these views first emerged makes them ideal instruments both for teaching and for further reflection. But in order to learn this vocabulary properly, we have to understand the contexts in which it was forged, and the whole range of problems to which it was applied; hence the history of political thought matters.

I suspect there is something mildly implausible about this view; we do not become more competent speakers of English because we know ancient Anglo-Saxon. But even if the idea that we need to study the generative books in order to study the derivative books (and this is clearly not the case in Physics, or Biology, or Psychology, or in many other disciplines), not every book matters equally. Generative books are necessarily few and far between; most books are derivative rather than generative and thus are of only “historical” interest. The historian may trot out in response the old commonplace about how those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it; but though this is occasionally true, it is also irrelevant. Unless there is some reason to think that in the absence of these books, we would have a tendency to regress or that reflection on political thought is progressive, it would matter very little whether or not particular views and arguments are randomly forgotten. And on this view, at least, the task of the scholar is reasonably well defined: it is to bring out constantly the generative richness of these old texts, and prevent their ossification as sources of thought (their fossilization into mere “classics,” mentioned but not read, or read but not engaged with, turned into a storehouse of platitudes).

Down by the Southwest corner, by contrast, we find the pearl divers of Arendtia. These divers think, like the Tomb Raiders, that the great tradition of political and philosophical thought is a great ruin. The key aspects of that tradition are no longer plausible and convincing – its structure has collapsed. But within this ruin, there are great thoughts – not just argument – and great insights that are more or less applicable in our current condition; pearls among the ruins. (The metaphor of pearl-diving is Arendt’s own, though I don’t remember exactly where she says it). These are thoughts and insights that our current condition threatens to hide – we tend to forget them, or we misunderstand them for reasons that lie in our current historical situation, and indeed in our current neglect of certain old concepts. This idea is clearly indebted to the Heideggerian concern with the forgetfulness of being, and it is shared in some way with the Talmudic Highlanders. The pearl-divers are thus also concerned with explanations of how the tradition of political thought has sometimes hidden fundamental insights about the nature of politics; not every insight is to be found in the classical texts; sometimes the deeds of actors need to be studied as well. So not every thinker contains hidden pearls. Some are simply rotten oysters.

Slightly north of them, we find the inhabitants of Macintyria. These people believe that there have been many traditions of political and ethical thought, but some of them are still live traditions. These are incommensurable, and we are interested in them because we cannot but belong to some tradition; we learn to think ethically and politically by learning a specific vocabulary and a way of thinking. We learn from the foundational texts, but not only from them; a tradition of ethical and political thought is a live project, developed by a number of people over much time. We can still be Aristotelians (and some people proudly think of themselves in this way, just as others call themselves Marxists).

In the great harbour south of the Talmudic Highlanders we find the Genealogical Pirates and the inhabitants of Berlinia. Though their temperament is extremely different, both are concerned with the tracing of lineages. The genealogical pirates believe that by unmasking the bastard origins of influential ideas they thereby open a space for truth or freedom. Their chief delight is to show how ideas that may appear natural and noble were at one point neither obvious nor noble; their concern is not that ancient texts might have had wisdom, but that they spread falsehood and mystification, or support unacknowledged forms of domination. Genealogy thus typically looks at neglected texts by minor authors (e.g., the Foucault of Discipline and Punish). But genealogical argument is necessarily limited. The contingent origins of particular ideas, while able to shake any certainties about divine revelation, cannot say that these ideas are not true or insightful; at best, genealogical argument can displace certain questions (though not always very permanently or very effectively) in favour of other (presumably more important) questions (e.g., we cease to ask about the legitimacy of power and inquire about the mechanisms of power).

Some of the genealogists settled in Foucauldia, where they grew old and developed a more mellow outlook on the past. Here they found that the history of political thought, though it did not disclose views that would be of universal import (for the genealogists, like the contextualists, think context is everything, or at least a lot) are nevertheless exemplars; they are worth admiring, even if they cannot be replicated (consider, for example, Foucault’s treatment of the Greeks in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality). It is also worth contrasting the genealogical pirates with the Unmaskers of Marxia; the Unmaskers are also interested in showing that certain ideas are neither natural nor noble, but behind them they always find the same thing: the history of class struggle. The history of political thought merely confirms, for them, the fundamental pattern of history; it illustrates, but does not, ultimately, enlighten. It can at best serve to predict the future.

The Berlinians, by contrast, delight more in noble lineages. But they are also concerned with showing how particular ideas get transformed in harmful ways; the blood goes bad. Here we may take Isaiah Berlin’s discussion of positive liberty as an example: Berlin thinks that the idea of positive liberty was not, in itself, very different from the idea of negative liberty. But its development tended to proceed along undesirable dimensions; and the practical consequences of ideals of liberty were ultimately undesirable. Yet it is always hard to know whether ideas truly are responsible for bad consequences, or merely cover them up.

Finally, a few words on the peoples of the anthropological islands (which I also like to visit on occasion). For the peoples of these islands, the history of political thought does not reveal a single important value, or a single important idea that contains “the truth.” On the contrary, it reveals that a plurality of ideas – in fact, a great number of ideas, some silly, some wise – have been entertained by political thinkers. (I think that people like Justin E. H. Smith would come from here, if they were concerned with the history of political thought specifically rather than with the history of philosophy more generally, but these anthropologists tend to be rather self-effacing and not prone to methodenstreiten). The mission of the anthropologists is to catalog this diversity, like real anthropologists, whose purpose is to classify and understand the myriad possibilities of human organization and culture. Understanding this diversity fully may give us a better picture of the possibilities and errors open to human thought, but it certainly does not directly affect anything we may think about current debates. 

Where are you located? What other possibilities are there?

The Irrelevance of Legitimacy

(As I intimated a while ago, I’ve grown weary of the concept of legitimacy. This is an experiment in thinking about how one might understand political life without recourse to this idea, or with a very different version of it).

Both everyday and academic explanations of uprisings and revolutions tend to make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. For example, a common argument suggests that some of the regimes of the Middle East (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya) collapsed in part because they had long forfeited their legitimacy due to the abusive ways in which they treated their own people, whereas others (Morocco, the absolute monarchies of the gulf) are likely to weather the current crisis because their governments are still considered legitimate by the majority of their populations. (A very sophisticated version of this argument can be found in this piece by Jack Goldstone). More generally, I often come across arguments for the view that some action or discourse “legitimates” certain forms of power and thus helps sustain it, or conversely that the breakdown of particular power relations can be explained (at least in part) by pointing to the fact that people have ceased to consider them “legitimate.” Yet I find most of these explanations for the maintenance or breakdown of regimes unsatisfactory. They seem to amount to little more than saying that regimes (or, more generally, relations of domination) endure so long as they are accepted by the ruled, and when they are not, they don’t. But this is not obviously true.

For one thing, it is not empirically clear that “acceptance” needs to be very deep to sustain many forms of domination and oppression. Consider the variety of ways in which we might say that someone accepts their domination. For example, a person might sullenly submit to some oppressive institutional order because of his or her inability to imagine a different one; or (more commonly) because of his or her inability to mobilize collective action in favor of some alternative order (they face a coordination problem); or because despite the fact that a different institutional order would be better for a large group, it is individually “rational” for individuals to defect from collective efforts to change the current institutional order (they face a standard “prisoner’s dilemma”); or because the institutional order so shapes his or her interests and identity that they find challenges to the order against their “long-run” interests (their interests and those of the order are ultimately aligned, though they still think of themselves as oppressed); or (very rarely) because they think that the institutional order that dominates them is right and just. Many obviously oppressive social orders are not believed to be right and just by majorities of the dominated and yet they endure for a very long time, at least if we believe studies like James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance or Weapons of the Weak, which thoroughly document the fact that peasants in many agrarian societies do not come to accept their domination as rightful and just in any sense. The same is true of most authoritarian regimes, where preference falsification is often rampant, as I indicated in passing in my cults of personality post. Yet it is also clear that many people in such orders also accept their domination in a loose sense of the term: they conform publicly, they vote, they don’t rebel, they even contribute to the maintenance of the oppression by denouncing others or taking advantage of opportunities to climb the social ladder at the expense of others, and so on. Should we say that these social orders are considered “legitimate”? I say no: they should not be considered legitimate in any empirically relevant sense (let alone in any normatively relevant sense, but that’s another story).

The basic (and probably correct) intuition behind the use of the concept of legitimacy to explain the endurance of oppressive regimes or social relations is the idea that power – and more specifically, relationships of domination - cannot normally be sustained by private incentives (payments and threats) alone; “something more” is necessary if domination is to endure for any length of time. Domination is involved in relationships that are typically contrary to the interest of at least one of the parties, and hence it is likely to be resisted whenever the opportunity presents itself. Domination thus often requires repression to sustain the relationship, but repression is costly and often ineffective over the long run if the relationship is supposed to induce the cooperation of the dominated in some productive endeavour; hence domination needs to be “legitimated,” i.e., needs to be based on a set of shared and relatively stable beliefs that enable those who benefit from relationships of domination to direct the actions of those who are in subordinate positions with a minimum of repression even when such direction is against the interests of the latter. When domination is actually sustained in the long run, the argument goes, it must be because those who are dominated somehow accept their domination, however grudgingly, and in particular because they believe certain things about the people or institutions that dominate them (e.g., that the powerful have a “right” to command, or that they have a special sort of charisma, or that certain institutions represent the natural order of things). Conversely, if domination breaks down, then it must be because the dominated have stopped believing these things. (Note that I am talking here about “empirical” legitimacy, not “normative” legitimacy: I am interested in the role the concept of legitimacy plays in explaining domination, not in whether particular relationships of domination are legitimate in some interesting normative sense. Empirical legitimacy claims to be about the beliefs that people actually do have, not about the beliefs that they ought to have).

But this general understanding of how domination requires legitimacy is, I suspect, incorrect or at least fundamentally confused. Though belief may on occasion help sustain domination, the idea that domination is always sustained by (shared) belief is not true. At the very least, the majority of the mechanisms that sustain relationships of domination over the long run are not reducible to beliefs in the rightness or charisma or naturalness of certain people or institutions. For example, we ought to distinguish between a belief in a lack of alternatives (which may make people sullenly conform to a social order they deem oppressive), and a belief in the rightness of a social order, or between the idea that some of the mechanisms through which people are dominated are “hidden” and the idea that these power relationships are considered to be legitimate.

In order to make some progress on thinking about this problem, it may be useful to take a somewhat lengthy detour into Max Weber’s Economy and Society, where Weber rigorously tries to define the idea of empirical legitimacy in order to explain what constitutes a “social order” or a regularity of social action (feel free to skip the next 3-4 paragraphs if this is not your cup of tea). This is still the standard understanding of legitimacy in the social sciences (though it is not the only possible one, other conceptualizations of legitimacy typically draw on it), so it is worth examining in some detail (and improving on it, if possible). At the very beginning of the work, Weber analyzes how different sorts of reasons for action (“micromotives,” to use Schelling’s term) give rise to and disrupt different kinds of social order (“macrobehaviors” or patterns of social action). According to him, there are only three kinds of social order (I draw here on Habermas’ interpretation of Weber’s thought in his Theory of Communicative Action, especially I.ii.1, pp.157-185 and I.ii.4, pp. 254-271; the relevant passages of Weber are mostly in Economy and Society I.i, especially sections 4-6):

1. In habitual orders, social regularities emerge and are kept in existence through the unthinking inertia of everyday activity (“habitual action”); reasons do not play a motivating role in their creation. Such orders are not stable, however, to the introduction of reflection; when people think about what they are doing, they may sometimes act differently, transforming their social order into an interest-based or a legitimate order.
2. In interest-based orders (such as markets, though Weber does not think that markets are sustained purely by interest), social regularities emerge from the mutual adjustment of the activities of more or less instrumentally rational actors engaging in tactical and strategic activity in pursuit of their various interests. Reasons here play a motivating role in the emergence of social regularities, but only privately: each actor has his or her own (different) reasons for acting as he or she does in pursuit of his or her interests, yet social regularities still emerge from the private adjustments each actor makes to his or her behavior in light of the actions of others. In modern game-theoretic terms, the social order is an equilibrium of some game, given people’s (potentially heterogeneous) private incentives for action. Weber thinks, however, that pure interest-based orders are generally unstable, and are thus often stabilized by what we might call “shared” or “public” reasons, which transform interest-based orders into “legitimate” orders properly speaking.
3. In legitimate orders social regularities emerge from the shared acceptance by agents of certain reasons for action or inaction. These reasons are usually understood as normative constraints on the kinds of courses of action that agents might privately consider, such as for example beliefs about the validity, justice, fairness, or virtue of particular actions or norms. Here reasons produce social regularities not through their being held privately (as in interest-based orders) but through their being shared or “public” reasons that can rule out of bounds or override, so to speak, certain kinds of private reasons for action (e.g., reasons to revolt). Weber goes further and identifies three basic ideal kinds of legitimate order: the traditional order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the supposed naturalness of an institution (people fail to imagine alternatives; this is the legitimate equivalent of a habitual order); the charismatic order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the special qualities of a person or persons from whom rules issue; and the legal-rational order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the special qualities of a set of rules (which can themselves be used to generate further rules). These ideas are rather abstract, but the basic point is, I think, generally comprehensible. In a traditional order, when one asks the question “why do you obey/submit/follow somebody’s commands?” the expected answer is “because that is the way we do things here” (not “because otherwise I will be beaten over the head with that stick”). Similarly, in a charismatic order, the expected answer is “because my leader or messiah told me,” and in a legal-rational order the expected answer is “because (other) rules authorize it” or “because the rules are just (i.e., in accordance with the rules or principles of justice).”

But what does it mean for reasons for action to be shared or public? The obvious interpretation (and the one that Weber seems to prefer) is that reasons are shared and public to the extent that many agents believe the same thing about why they or their rulers should or should not act in particular ways. In game-theoretic terms, we might say that in legitimate orders social order emerges not from the private adjustment of behavior by participants in a game according to their private reasons for action (the expected "utility" they might derive from acting in one way rather than another), but from the shared beliefs of participants about the rules of the game, which limit the strategies available to them: a legitimate order is simply one in which enough participants accept the rules of the game as rules (and not merely as constraints imposed on them by the action of others in equilibrium). Empirical legitimacy enables a social order to economize on coercion both by consistently narrowing the range of the possible strategies open to actors and by clearly signaling any violations of the  rules (and hence enabling violators to be more easily punished). This sort of legitimacy is also conceptually related to trust: a government that is illegitimate is one that violates the (shared) rules consistently enough to lose the trust of the population.

One might want to say that to the extent that some people believe in the legitimacy of a social order (that is, believe that the rules structuring the social order, or the persons who have authority to produce such rules, are somehow the right rules, or the right persons), that social order will be made more “resilient” to changes in the habits or private reasons people may or may not have for conforming to the demands of the social order in question (e.g., rewards/penalties and the probability of physical punishment for nonconformity). How else should we explain the enormous investment that dominant groups make in the deployment of what we might call (I’m trying to use this term neutrally) “ideological” resources (persuasive arguments, sophistic arguments, propaganda, cults of personality, the mobilization of scientific or other authoritative discourses to “naturalize” certain institutions or practices, etc.)? How else should we think of these efforts to “legitimate” particular social orders, if not by seeing them as efforts to change people’s beliefs (by means fair or foul, good-faith persuasion or underhanded manipulation) so that they conform better to a particular social order? But then: should we really say that when Robert Mugabe holds a rigged election in Zimbabwe, for example, he is attempting to legitimate his rule?

The key to a different understanding of this problem lies in taking seriously the idea that supposedly “legitimating” beliefs are shared. What matters for (what we normally call) charismatic legitimacy, for example, is less the belief that some particular person is a demigod but that this particular answer to the question “why do you submit/obey/do X/etc.?” becomes expected in some group, and that not giving the expected answer singles one out for sanctions, exclusion, and other bad things. And just as we can have the spectacle of charismatic legitimacy without charisma, we should be able to see legal-rational “legitimacy” in the midst of corruption, or (I suspect) traditional “legitimacy” even when there is widespread awareness of the newness of tradition. Legitimacy is thus underpinned primarily by signals, not beliefs: those who do not provide the appropriate answer in the right circumstances (or rather, those who do not provide a credible answer) identify themselves as violators. Even the corrupt bureaucrat gives lip service to the law, whatever he or she may believe privately, and the irreligious king still takes seriously the traditional liturgical forms.

“Legitimate” social orders thus function like a signaling system in which rulers and ruled, dominator and dominated, both provide (credible) signals of their commitment to particular rules or persons or existing practices; and insofar as the system “works” it produces authority, i.e., it identifies certain people or rules or forms of speech as precisely those people or rules or forms of speech that one is expected (by other people subject to the social order) to follow or use in particular circumstances. But “credible” signals are not always “true” signals; that a signal – a particular answer to the question, “why do you submit/obey/ do X?” – is taken as credible by a relevant receiver does not mean it actually reflects some deep belief about the rightness or justice of the system (though it of course may). Credibility in a signaling system may be achieved in many ways, only some of which involve any sort of belief in the content of the signals.

What matters [for explanations of social change] are the conditions under which alternative legitimacy claims can emerge as focal points for new signaling systems, or under which the signaling equilibrium is disrupted. Here traditional explanations based on legitimacy have somewhat more to say: there are many common conditions under which, for example, the failure of authorities to demonstrate a credible commitment to norms of justice to which a population is committed produces anger and in turn triggers activities that reduce the costs of coordinating signals of commitment to a different social order (a different set of rules or persons). And from this point of view, “ideological” investments (or such practices as blatantly rigged or fraudulent elections, or unbelievable cults of personality) are thus useful not so much because they make people believe in the rightness or special qualities of particular people or institutions, but because they prevent the emergence of alternative focal points for legitimacy claims - e.g., because they destroy the common knowledge necessary for collective action, or because they are too salient for other foci of collective justification to easily emerge (they colonize public space).

But if this analysis is even partially correct, then it seems to me that legitimacy in the traditional sense (as beliefs in the rightness of people or institutions) is irrelevant to the explanation of political phenomena such as revolutions. Legitimacy still matters normatively – we want to live under social orders that are just or fair – but not so much for explaining social change. 

1989 and the Arab Revolutions of 2011 redux: A plea for theory-driven comparisons

Marc Morjé Howard has a guest post up at The Monkey Cage summarizing some of the similarities and differences between the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the current revolts in the Middle East. (I don’t like the term “Arab Spring,” since spring is not a season in Arabia, as somebody reminded me recently, and anyway the implicit comparison with the Prague Spring of 1968 or even the “Springtime of Nations” of 1848 is needlessly discouraging). I hesitate to disagree with Prof. Howard, since he is a real expert on Eastern European politics who has published widely on the events of 1989 and their aftermath, whereas whatever knowledge I have acquired about the fall of communism comes from teaching the events of 1989 at the undergraduate level over the last four years and basically learning on the go. And I am mostly in agreement with what he says about the similarities between 1989 and 2011 (though I might demur on the point about the importance of prediction, but we’ll leave that for another day).

Yet I think the basic idea of the post, in which Howard notes various similarities and differences between the regimes and argues that the differences outweigh the similarities, making him pessimistic about the ultimate democratization of the region, leads to misleading conclusions. In order to know whether the similarities between the cases outweigh the differences, and more importantly whether the differences mean that we should expect much less democratic change in the Arab world than in Eastern Europe in 1989, we need to have a theory or a set of theories that tell us how to weigh them; and it is not clear that Howard provides such a theory, or that the theories that he does discuss support the more pessimistic conclusions about democratic change he draws. Consider the differences between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East now that Howard describes:

1)      The larger geo-strategic environment is very different today.  The movements of 1989 took place within the context of the Cold War, with two main super-powers and their mutually assured destruction.  Today there are numerous complicating factors—some of which existed previously, but now have their own post-Cold War dynamic—including oil, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of China, and many others.

This is true, but these changes in the geo-strategic environment may push in both directions: some of them might favour democratization, some might favour authoritarianism, some might favour regime collapse followed by a different authoritarian regime, and some might be a wash. For example, the global “norm” of democracy has been arguably strengthened since 1989 (and perhaps because of the events of 1989), a change that would make the revolts in the Arab world more likely to lead to liberalized electoral regimes than the revolts of 1989. Theory does suggest that oil gives incentives to elites in authoritarian regimes to hang on to power at great cost (as appears to be happening in Libya, though for many different reasons), and it might give the USA incentives to be protective of their big oil clients (like Saudi Arabia), but some of the best empirical work on the question (by Haber and Menaldo) suggests that oil does not necessarily lead to authoritarianism, at least not in any simple way, and at any rate not every Middle Eastern country is oil-rich (Egypt and Syria, for example, are not, and Tunisia produces only trivial amounts of oil). My point is not that there have been no geo-strategic changes of any significance between 1989 and today, but that in order to say that the differences matter we need a more explicit theory, or at least a more explicit causal story, connecting these differences to likely outcomes (whether democratization or authoritarian survival).

2)      It is important to remember that the East European states were not autonomous.  Indeed, the Soviet Union was the guarantor of stability and continuity in the region.  When Gorbachev made it clear that the Soviet Union would not intervene in Eastern Europe, the gates opened (quite literally in Hungary).  Today’s Middle East contains a mix of small and large states with different levels of autonomy, but there is no equivalent to the Soviet Union lurking in the shadows.

I’m not sure I see that much difference between the Middle East today and Eastern Europe in 1989 in this respect; it all depends on how we define the extent of the regions. As Howard concedes, autonomy is a relative term, and Eastern Europe in 1989 contained a mixture of more and less autonomous regimes. At one end of the spectrum were the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, which were clearly not autonomous from the Soviet Union: they hosted large numbers of Soviet troops and had only managed to remain in power with direct Soviet support in the past. At the other end were Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania, which had been able to retain power without significant Soviet support (and sometimes in opposition to Soviet policy). But even a regime like the one in Poland – which was clearly less “autonomous” than, say, Albania or Yugoslavia – did not necessarily depend on the Soviet Union to survive. Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law in 1981 was not forced on him by the Soviets (though I don’t remember whether he was worried about Soviet intervention if he did not act), and he managed to arrest most of Solidarity’s leadership all by himself. Similarly, the regimes of the Middle East display varying degrees of autonomy from the USA, from states like Bahrain (where the American fifth fleet is stationed) to states like Libya. To be sure, one might argue that the kind of support that the Soviet Union provided at least some of the regimes in the region was qualitatively different from the kind of support the USA provides to its client states in the region, so that when the Soviets withdrew that support, the Eastern European regimes had to fall; but this argument certainly would not apply to Romania, and I think it’s quite dubious for Poland. (And the Albanian regime survived until 1991). Without a fuller causal story about the mechanisms connecting superpower support (or not) to regime preservation, we cannot draw any significant conclusions about the effects of any differences between Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Middle East today for the outcomes of the Arab revolts.

3)      The 1989 movements were not the first democratic protests in the region.  Earlier movements had taken place in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980-81), but these were all crushed.  Nonetheless, they still stood as important precedents, to both the regime and the citizenry, which became useful later.  Although dissent has been brewing in the Middle East for the past decade, there are no comparable precedents to these earlier East European movements.

I think this is incorrect. There may be no precedents that are well known in the West, but there have been antiregime protests in Libya, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries before the last decade (all of them crushed). The levelling of Hama by Hafez al-Assad in response to antiregime protests there occurred in 1982, and (I think, though I can’t find my source) there have been occasional riots in Benghazi against the Gaddhafi regime since 1969. Whether one should refer to these protests as “democratic” protests is a different matter, but it is worth noting that among the precedents Howard cites the 1956 revolution in Hungary was not necessarily a “democratic” revolution (at least initially, its main leadership did not want to get rid of the communist party’s monopoly on power, though that changed once tanks rolled in), and that after 1953 there were no democratic protests of any significance in East Germany (and for that matter, there were few protests of any significance in Romania). At any rate, it is unclear what the fact that there were protests in some Eastern European countries is supposed to show; as a recent working paper by Krichner, Livne, and Magaloni notes, though more repressive regimes experience fewer mass protests, they tend to fall at higher rates when they do experience such protests. (The intuition is simple: repressive regimes make it very costly to protest. So mass protest in such circumstances signals quite extensive dissatisfaction). One could perhaps tell a story about the building up of democratic movements through protests, but though this story makes sense for Poland, it makes no sense for the GDR and Romania, where the opposition was small and thoroughly infiltrated by the security services.

4)      The East European movements generally fit the classic (from O’Donnell and Schmitter’s Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, published in 1986) model of elite agency, whereby divisions between hard-liners and soft-liners in the regime led to pacts with the opposition, resulting in compromises on both sides.  In this model, the “resurrection” of civil society only came later.  In the Middle East, in contrast, the “popular upsurge” came first, before the elite divisions became apparent.

I don’t think this is right. The only two countries that fit the standard O’Donnell and Schmitter pattern in Eastern Europe were Hungary and Poland. Certainly these were important countries, and it is true that they were also the countries where transitions to democracy were most successful initially (except for the GDR, which is sui generis). But regime change happened in the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia despite the fact that these regimes were dominated by hardliners who were unwilling to make compromises until protests had forced them to, and democracy emerged quickly in Czechoslovakia (less quickly and less perfectly in Romania and Bulgaria). The “popular upsurge” came first in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and reformers within the Bulgarian communist party emerged more as a result of a fuite en avant by nomenklatura members who got rid of Zhivkov when they saw the writing on the wall than as a result of a struggle between hardliners and softliners in O’Donnell and Schmitter’s sense (though my old teacher Venelin Ganev should be able to correct me here if this is wrong, since he wrote the book on Bulgaria after 1989).  It seems to me that a better model for what happened in Eastern Europe is the “elite defection” model Mark Beissinger describes in his piece on modular revolution: divisions within the elite played a big role in the first two cases, but then the other regimes fell as elites failed to find the right combinations of repression and concessions to stop popular mobilization. This may not be the right model for the middle East right now (“elite learning” seems more appropriate, where later leaders learn what combinations of repression and concessions will stop popular mobilization), but it is not clear that there is that much of a difference between Eastern Europe in 1989 and  the Middle East today in this respect. And to the extent that there is a difference, it is not clear to me that O’Donnell and Schmitter’s model of “pacted” transitions is the best lens for analyzing these differences.

5)      Unlike today in the Middle East, when the “opposition” is largely faceless, in Eastern Europe there were well-recognized dissidents who had much popular legitimacy.  Although they may have been small in number, these writers, pastors, and environmental leaders were quite influential.  In contrast, many of the long-standing opposition leaders in the countries of the Middle East are ineffective, coopted, or disconnected from contentious politics, thus contributing to the large gap between elite opposition politics and popular demands for democratic change.

Again, I think there is less here than meets the eye. The opposition was entirely faceless (not to mention disorganized and infiltrated) in the GDR, where the Stasi estimated that there were only 60 “core” dissidents in the entire country (see Stephen Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society,” p. 10). There were simply no well-recognized East German or Romanian dissidents, they were all caught by surprise by the revolutions, and they had little role to play in shaping the aftermath (Barbel Bohley? Mircea Dinescu?). Even in Czechoslovakia, Havel was simply not a well-recognized opposition leader under very late, and his influence really came with the revolution. Only in Poland do we meet with real opposition leaders with genuine popular legitimacy, like Walesa. But this point is moot, for revolutions make leaders, not the other way around; and at least Egyptians and Tunisians do seem to have leaders with some legitimacy and name recognition, even if not necessarily wide popularity yet. (What are Amr Moussa and Mohammed El-Baradei, chopped liver? Or Wael Ghonim and some of the other youth leaders of the April 6^th movement?). These are not perfect leaders, but neither was Walesa (or many of the leaders in the rest of Eastern Europe), and revolution and democratization do not depend on having popular and legitimate leaders before a transition.

6)      Except for the Catholic Church in Poland, religion was almost entirely absent in the East European movements.  Although churches were sometimes a “safe zone” in communist countries, the movements themselves were not religious, and the societies are the least religious in the world.  In contrast, in the Middle East, although the movements have not been particularly religious, the societies certainly are, and the role of religion in political life remains a big, open, unanswered question.

The Polish exception is big enough to drive a truck through (since Poland was the birthplace of the 1989 revolutions); the religious component of the Polish revolution was huge, and the society was very religious. (I also think that Romanian society was also more religious than is perhaps generally recognized). But anyway, it is unclear what the religiosity of Middle Eastern societies (which varies widely, by the way, and is organized in many different ways) is supposed to imply, given that, as Howard notes, the movements leading the revolts there have not been particularly religious. Without a good theory, we cannot say much about its effect on regime collapse or democratization – it could be positive, negative, or a wash. What little we do know suggests that the background religiosity of a society (as opposed to the religiosity of particular movements) does not appear to have much effect on political regime (see, for example, Przeworski’s “Culture and Democracy,” unfortunately not online, or Ronald Inglehart’s work). So, granted that there are differences between the religiosity of Middle Eastern and East European societies, we simply cannot tell whether this is a positive fact for revolution and democratization (maybe more religious societies sustain the solidarity necessary for protest better? Or have more ways of organising resistance, as with Friday prayers?) or not; one must remember that Iran was also a relatively religious society that had a world-historical revolution in 1979 (even if the resulting regime was later pushed into a less democratic direction for a variety of reasons).

7)      All movements depend on communication—this has not changed—but the speed of the new media has obviously changed tremendously.  Much of the information in the East European movements spread via samizdat (precious photocopies of texts and information from the outside that were smuggled around secretly).  Today the spread of information is almost instantaneous via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

But this particular fact (if it is a fact: remember the feedback loops with TV in the East German revolution) would support the view that the revolutions in the Arab world are more likely to result in democratic change. Of course, if Evgeny Morozov is right, then the effect of this might go in the other direction: Facebook, Twitter, and the like will just make it easier for authoritarian regimes to suppress revolts. But we need a more explicit theory to evaluate the significance of this difference between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East today, and what theory we do have does not indicate that this is particularly likely to retard democratization or even simple regime change in the region; on the contrary.

8)      After the movements of 1989 ran their course, the communist regimes actually fell (even if they reorganized and competed electorally in some cases).  In the Middle East, this has not happened (yet?).  The outcomes of the ongoing transitions in Egypt and Tunisia are unclear, and it remains to be seen whether they will yield a clean break from authoritarian politics.  In the other countries, autocrats still remain in charge, even if they have been shaken by the protests.

Here I think the significance of this point depends on what you mean by “the regimes fell.” Did the regime really fall in Bulgaria? Or for that matter in Romania, where Ion Illiescu and the National Salvation Front (basically repainted communists) took power after Ceausescu fell? The regime fell much more thoroughly in Tunisia than it ever did in Bulgaria, it seems to me (the former ruling party has been suspended, people from the regime elite have been put on trial, etc.). And protests are still ongoing. Revolutions don’t always happen in a day; it took 10 years in Poland.

9)      Extending from point 5, when the communist regimes fell, known opposition leaders were ready to assume office.  Poland’s Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel were the most prominent, but most East European countries had new leaders ready to fill the gap.  This remains an open question in the Middle East.

See my response to point 5). I think “most East European countries had new leaders ready to fill the gap” is a vast exaggeration; it is only in retrospect that this seems to be the case.

10)   In terms of the eventual consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe, NATO and the European Union have played crucial roles by encouraging democratic reforms and making them conditions of membership.  There are no equivalent regional organizations in the Middle East that could help to push these regimes to further democratize, and they are certainly not going to be invited to join NATO or the EU.

This is true, but what is the marginal effect of this causal mechanism on democracy? If these organizations had not existed, do we think that Poland and Hungary would not have become democratic? Other forces push countries towards more democratic forms of government, and while I do not want to discount the positive influence of the incentive to join the EU and NATO, I am just not sure that we know this was a very big cause of democratization (as opposed to, for example, the availability of the democratic model and its relative success in Western Europe).

I am not arguing here that there are no differences between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East in 2010. Of course there are. But in order to evaluate the significance of these differences for both regime change and democratization, it seems to me better to engage in theory-driven comparisons, where, to use Przeworski and Teune’s phrase, we substitute variables for country names. For example, we might say “countries with a history of democratic protest are more likely to democratize than countries without”; or “countries with a higher GDP per capita are more likely to sustain democracy than poorer countries, though they are no more likely to democratize;” and so on. And then we try to tally the weight of each of these effects, and consider whether (and how) the theory applied both in 1989 and today. For what is worth (and I’m no Middle East specialist), this sort of exercise suggests that Tunisia and Egypt are in relatively good shape to become more democratic (and perhaps Syria, if the regime collapses there, and Jordan and Morocco, if the monarchs there act reasonably), though obviously nothing is guaranteed; other middle Eastern countries less so.