What Did Theories of Thinkers Do with the Contemporaries' Minds - Essay Example

Social Contract Economics Enlightenment/Progress The emergence of democratic thought in response to the Reformation in Europe was informed by theological and teleological dialectics in 17th century philosophy. At the dawn of the Modern era, 18th century advocates of a coherent formulation for social and economic progress was erected. The ‘Enlightenment’ period marks the transition from state-building interests promulgated by mere manifest destiny, toward a new world of production in all aspects of life; and especially the market production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs according to individual and social norms. Morality, then, became a practical matter bound up in the efficacy of policy instruments, and administration of a ‘public good’ that in turn informed an iterative framework of ‘scientific economic theory.’ From the metaphysics of ‘public good’ discourses from the Enlightenment forward, we see the shift from ‘what constitutes political legitimacy in society’ to furtherance of those concepts within a praxis of material distribution and its oversight. Although Enlightenment philosophers stood at the crossroads between the exclusive realm of thought production as ideologues, application of their theories, and particularly where the economic or legal ideas pertaining to ‘right’ are concerned envigorated a dialectic between ideas and material history; thus enabling the expansion of ‘governance’ by way of a laissez-faire capitalist market trade and beyond the limited territorial vestiture of real property. The primary vehicle for administration of the public good, scientific economy and its attendant resource in evidentiary facts, finds its systemization as an instrument of dissemination for social policies during the Enlightenment. For example, Samuels et al. (2003) points to the ‘laissez faire, laissez passer’ (leave the market alone) physiocratic economic model within the rubric of economists in early modern France, that included a system or Tableau économique that advanced study of ‘economic surplus (produit net) from agriculture, the accumulation of capital (avances), economies of scale (grand culture), taxes that would not interfere with production (impôt unique) and suitable market prices (bon prix).’ An early manifesto for the transformative progress of market and state, the physiocrats denounced feudal and mercantilist restrictions, and instigated public discourse over the retraction of a universal tax in the belief that it distorted surplus cash flows. The physiocrats agitated for policies that promoted the potential for justice within natural law. Inequalities inherent within the social contract (i.e. children, women, slaves etc.) were observed within those policy recommendations, and underscored the physiocrat’s push for discretionary taxation of landowners, due to surplus access as a universal strategy for democratic state administration. Scottish inspiration for the Enlightenment project and a distinct vision of an economic system and its social mores was first published in David Hume’s essays and Adam Smith’s (1776) treatises, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Impetus for the Scottish response to capitalism focused on how individual actors participated through competition in the marketplace. The Scottish doctrines continued to serve as the basis for political economist praxis, and institutional regulation of the market, challenging historically precedent practices that, from a purely economic standpoint, had hindered the unencumbered expansion of capital (i.e. monopolies, colonies, protective tariffs and subsidies). Stages of History/Social Conflict Property is at the core of social contract philosopher, John Locke’s (1690) Second Treatise on Government. The enlightenment account offers a systematic rendering of the mechanistic economic and politico-legal relationship between labour and property. According to Locke, and all social contract thought to follow, ‘the commons’ or the shared real property of territorial ‘right’ prepares the terrain for social contract responsibilities accorded under sovereign jurisdiction. Rights and responsibilities are then, the result of free ‘men’ whom toil land. Justification of claim to property is evidentiary all other economic and politico-legal claims related to overt consent by reasoned men. Property also provides the basis for calculation from this period forward for state jurisdiction over other aspects of personal property and fiduciary relationship by way of public policies dedicated to everything from enumeration in public census to land and usury tax. The mere presence of such public service activities during this period is evidence that philosophers had much to think about in regard to what those new instruments of enumeration were “doing” and in regard to the monarchy and the nation in its colonial efforts. In England, the existence of measured means of governance, and especially as it pertained to land seems to have skewed philosophical intolerance regarding colonial subjugation toward a rationale of tacit consent. If one was available to be counted as a reasonable man, one then, acknowledges the legitimacy and of the official record. For women, the relationship between the propertied interests of men, and their conjugal subjugation as part of that calculation was a point of negotiation. This is particularly the case in those post Reformation discussions whereby children are considered to be under the dominion of both parents as minors, but with acknowledgment that women, their mothers, are also of a distinct class accorded to a hierarchy difference where women, children and slaves are positioned as unequal in relation to husband, father and master. In all cases, propertied classes of men prefaced the commonsense backdrop for 17th and 18th century philosophers; a homage to the Mosaic tradition, where domestic arrangements reinforce male authority as a virtual law of commandments. In 1651, John Hobbes Leviathan proposed a pessimistic vision of the state of nature; where human beings are in perpetual struggle against each other. Voluntarily exiled to Holland during the years of Parliamentary Rule himself, Hobbes proffered insight into the foundational basis that would come to circumscribe all later discussions on human volition, and the mechanistic operations of nature (i.e. the State). A royalist, Hobbes envisioned the formation of the commonwealth as a public good, where individual powers are consensually and necessarily offered to the authority of an absolute sovereign. A State of War, then, merely justified monarchal dominion, and later statist wars elsewhere. It is here that we can glimpse the Hobbes in mainstream, individual obedience to even arbitrary government, in excuse that it is somehow ‘essential’ as a means of hedging against disorderly evil. However, we can also observe the distinctions between Hobbes lack of diligence that Locke perceives to be the rationale for enslavement. If a state of war is to be avoided, near tyranny and certainly the loss of freedom of those whom “threaten” the rational order of things are to be subjugated. Territory and its charismatic reckoning with the state of nature once operated upon by rational men was the most significant aspect of this interpretation, with the future of the sovereign dependent upon expansion of property as right. The efficacy of violence within History’s becoming, and its root the social contract is revealed in the last instance: how is one to know one is free to own, if there is no option to not be free? Are women, children and slaves really the manifestation of the “rights of man” or are they merely representations that justify dominion in response to the threat of war? The significance of this statement circles back to English Empiricism, and the new found capacity of governments to measure rather than merely allocate according to a divine plan. What of imperishable exchange value? Is every country America as Locke argues? Ultimately, the subjugated still provide us with the best leverage from which to counter utopian satisfaction of a democratic job complete. For philosophers whom followed the trajectories set forth by Hobbes and Locke, such as John Stewart Mills and Mary Wollstonecroft, the gendered aspect of the social contract became a point of contest, and influenced early feminist thought. Subjugation of women appears as a fact, a taken for granted assumption in a world of reasoned men with propertied rights. Since the 1980s academic concerns focused on what is seen as an urgent need to articulate new epistemologies in the face of the increasingly ‘global-lizing’ and ‘femin-izing’ forces of fin-de-síecle capitalist forms of flexible accumulation have emerged in direct confrontation with the social contract. Technology is but one example, where methodological constraints in law’s rights and protections that were once taken-for-granted instruments of consensus building and tacit consent, have left the modern era chasing after potentialities for violence and its oscillations within a future history for the future yet known. Legal Rationality/Bureaucracy In E.L. Jones’ (1981), The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, he examines the emergence of the European nation-state from pre-history to the present, and looks at environmental and technological changes contributory to the formation of the market. Those processes, as he puts it, are comprise the origin and resultant practices of the European states and states-system; and its cumulative capacity toward the generation of capital from extracted resources, and toward extra-territorial market expansion. Manifest destiny is at the core of early modern Europe’s knowledge of its own settlement in history. Inferred within his discussion is the long-term impact that Europe has had on the instruments of cultural and market transmission, as well as attendant rules of international law. For instance, Maritime Law and its rules on trade, quite explicitly if not expressly, opened the door for European interpretations of the globe as a resource that could be ‘discovered’ or as Jones argues, resource usurpation for market purposes; the primary basis for colonialism through Lex Mercatoria and Jus Mercatorum – regulatory rules for trade by sea. The retention of writings within legal statute is illuminated through this history of maritime law, as the sustainability of Law’s project is first and foremost sourced in classical codes, dating back to the law of Rhodes in the first century B.C. How the ‘rights’ of Europeans and protections within European economies of trade law emerged reveals much about ‘entitlement’ in general, and through the preeminence of contract law in the Statute of Frauds and UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) the circumstantial is turned into certainty ‘as its written.’ Statutory references in Bruno Leoni’s (1961) twentieth century perspective provide insight into the political economy of law, and the use of existing laws to inform the legislative process. Of particular interest is his understanding of legal certainty as it pertains to economics. Citing the Roman Emperor, Justinian’s Corpus Juris, Leoni notes that while “written law is itself not always necessarily legislation” the body of ‘existing’ law is an object that carries value much like inconvertible legal tender currency. European civil law is constituted of a dearth of written rules which, for Europeans, stands as an icon of freedom. The exception to this rule is, of course, seen within the process of British constitutional law which is unwritten, and reliant upon the parliament of the day. The translation of something like early maritime law into colonial administration is quite apparent, through analysis of the extra-territorial constitutional efforts of European governments claiming statehood in locations in the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia. The legacy of those sovereign compacts, albeit somewhat strictly adhered to through a matrix of dominance and tacit consent, crafted charters for new citizens outside the client state. The practice of extensive appropriation of lands elsewhere had precedent history in Europe, where disjunctured territories comprising an economy of scale, were subject to allegiance of a centralized ruler at quite some distance. The Roman Empire clearly provided both the institutional and market framework much prior to the colonial outposts between the 17th and 20th century. The ecclesiastical courts of the Vatican contributed to this tradition, with Canon Law instigating a foundation for European law written in Latin, and translated into Italian and French according to dominion. Hence, extrapolation of bureaucratic rules was ready-made vis-à-vis legal writings, and the certainty of their enforcement. Since Leoni’s 20th century writings, the production of law and relationship to the economy has changed significantly. How legislation impacts market interests and individual choice provides the main thrust to Leoni’s argument. As the market expands, argues Leoni, determination of freedom and constraint ‘pivot[s] more and more on legislation.’ From a public choice perspective, the social contract has become one of legislative, and most specifically, regulatory interests that foster a futures market based on ideals such as the modification of regulatory standards within trade relationships through market incentives. Engagement between legislative laws and civil law has increased as the number of regulatory statutes increases based on policy demands by a public that has rapidly changing ideas about technology and its uses, are also incorporated into the rules of contract law, and the parameters of tortfeasor litigation. So too, inroads made with international law comprised of conventions, are ratified completely or partially into national legislation as signatory agreements, and amendments proceed forward on the numerous agendas providing governance to global civil society. Social Solidarity/Labour In Murray Rothbard’s (1926) For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, it is not disappearance of capitalism, but discontinuation of an aggressive state. Writing about the transformation of the nation-state from the ancient regime to the market driven interests of modern governance in the United States, Rothbard argues for a retraction of all statist tendencies toward a position of individual proprietary measures. Fundamentally interested in the propensity of the State to become a “corporate state” Rothbard’s thought is impacted by general theories of corporatist logic whereby syndicalism stamps out true laissez faire market advantages for individuals in the face of Big Business becoming a ‘neomercantilist corporate state.’ In sum, for Rothbard and his Libertarian Party, colonialism was not something that ended with the plantation system, but was expanded to a new regime of dominance where Statism over public consent insures the engineering of the minds of its sovereigns. Contrary to Schumpeter’s vision of public leadership necessarily practicing propaganda as a natural form of politics, Rothbard’s model of political dissent proposes devaluation of such practices. In the 1970s, amidst Neo-Marxist trajectories responsive to the social movement ideologies and legal challenges of the civil rights movement, and following anti-war movement, women’s movement, and gay and lesbian movement(s), a Western philosophers and social theorist were challenged to reconfigure Modernist assumptions about the meaning of “Right;” and the legitimacy of law as an juridical principle within the constitutional governance of democratic nations. It is in the Cold War context that the materialist logics of Marxist praxis, popularly perceived as foundation to Communist state formation in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and elsewhere by readers in the West, was re-visited as a site of intellectual contest and renegotiation. At the nexus between anarchy and the state, denunciations against coercion set the tone for alternative responses by social theorists, such as “New Contractarians” James Buchanan (1975) and Robert Nozick (1974). In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Novick calls for a “minimal state” arguing that a more extensive state will lead to similar violations of citizens posited in Rothbard’s rendition of statist instigated retraction of liberties. Arguing that a more extensive state is unjustifiable, even on the grounds of distributive justice, he develops a theory of “entitlement” that on the one hand looks to elements within voluntary relations, and on the other, is unaccountable to notions of “citizen aid” or prohibition of activities for citizens “own good.” An actual result of this perspective can be seen in the vision of social contract within contemporary civil law in the United States, whereby there is no equivalent adherence to a “law of rescue” as codified within EU law, so that under constitutional right as expressed in U.S. Federal Tort Law, parties are not subject to obligation to attempt to rescue other persons witnessed to be potential imminent danger. The question of viability in social solidarity, then, varies from region to region. Public policy and tacit consent toward those rules is largely dependent upon degrees that social norms are influenced by transgressions in labour politics and access to market and public goods. In Irina Michalowitz’ (2005) Assessing Conditions for Influence of Interest Groups in the EU, she looks at the sectorial changes taking place in Ireland and Italy through participatory union groups in conflation with government and public institutions and structural conditions. The effectiveness of public-private strategic interaction, notes Michalowitz, is in direct correlation with structural accountability of those institutions and their capacity to work with participatory dynamics of labour or otherwise. Diffusion of decision making through activist networks engaged with state-interest groups has recently prompted a discussion about the limits of pluralism and what she calls ‘(neo) corporatism’ in response to almost syndicated labour in nations like Italy. In reflection of Italy’s history as a corporatist state under Mussolini, and bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in the latter half of the twentieth century, the final response in Michalowitz’ essay is clear: ‘the weakness of democratic cultures needs to be pointed out, and it should be considered as a possibly unsolvable problem in the freedom of speech, association and governance’ (p. 24). Works Cited Ahnert, T.J., 2005. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 2003 [Review]. Annals of Science 62,pp. 273 -275. Berman, E.P., 2008. Creating the Market University: Science, the State, and the Economy, 1965-1985. Dissertation Abstracts International, A 68/08. Bertucci, P., 2007. Sparks in the Dark: The Attraction of Electricity in the Eighteenth Century. Endeavour 31, pp. 88 -93. Buchanan, J. (1975). The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and the Leviathan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hobbes, T. (1668). Leviathan. Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1994. Jones, E.L. (1981). The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacki, J., 2007. The Physical Tourist. Geneva: From the Science of the Enlightenment to CERN. Physics in Perspective 9, pp.231-252. Leoni, Bruno, 1961. Freedom and the Law. Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund. Locke, John, 1689. The Two Treatises of Civil Government. Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund. 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Michalowitz, Irina, 2004. Assessing Conditions for Influence of Interest Groups in the EU. Reihe Politikwissenschaft: Political Science Series. Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies, November, 2005. Nozick, Robert, 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Persson, M., 2000. Upplysningen och historismen: Utsikt över ett forskningsläge. Lychnos, , pp. 59-105. Petiti, Jean, P., 2008. Introduction: Science, Politics, Philosophy and History. Minerva 46, pp. 175-180. Rothbard, Murray, 1926. For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. New York: Collin Books MacMillan Publishing, 2002. Samuels, Warren J., et al. (2003). A Companion to the History of Economic Thought: Blackwell Companions to Contemporary Economics. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Werskey, G., 2007. The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements? Science as Culture 16, pp. 397-461. Withers, C.W.J., 2002. The Social Nature of Map Making in the Scottish Enlightenment, c.1682--c.1832. Imago Mundi 54, pp. 46-66. Read More