A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the pervasive and unavoidable inconsistency of the relationship between principle and practice in contemporary politics. We have so-called "free speech warriors" who are very worried about the "chilling effects" on free speech by students who protest speakers, but have nothing at all to say about state governments banning the teaching of Plato, and a federal government that makes education funding contingent on universities promoting their agenda, and, more recently, we have defenders of the right to bear arms arguing that just carrying a gun is enough to justify a summary execution. All of this goes beyond hypocrisy. Since I could not get it to work in a few characters, I thought that I would reflect on it more here.
I would like to ask a bigger, and more abstract question, what does it mean to apply a principle, to hold oneself to a principle? In answering this I am going to start in a fairly unlikely place, at least for me, and that is with John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty John Stuart Mill offers the following reflection on principles and the lack thereof:
"There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that in consequence of this absence of rule or principle, one side is at present as of wrong as the other; the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned."
When I teach Mill, and I should say that is my primary relationship to Mill, as someone who occasionally teaches On Liberty in a political theory class, I do not claim to be a Mill scholar, one of the things I try to stress is that Mill's description can be used to make sense of a lot of political debates, debates where, as is often the case, to cite Mill again, people are governed by taste and opinion. This is what gets the world we live in where the same people will have no problem with a government that dictates how people should conduct themselves sexually so long as it allows them to own semi-automatic weapons, while other people have no problem with a government that supports religion so long as it is their religion. This is because, as Mill argues, they do not frame these questions of government power in terms of an abstract principle, one of the limits of authority, but according to their own opinions and tastes. As Mill also writes,
"Men’s opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable or blamable, are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which are as numerous as those which determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their reason—at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly their desires or fears for themselves--their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest."
(I should mention parenthetically, the Mill has some interesting things to say on this point about custom and second nature--which is a topic I find interesting).
Of course anyone who is familiar with even the cliff notes version of Mill knows how he solves this, with his famous "harm principle" (although he does not call it that), which puts the limits of liberty at the exact point where one's actions can harm others. I say exact point, because, to use one more example, harm is a tricky concept, leading to all kinds of slippery slopes, so one could read Mill as the original libertarian, in which drugs, gambling, etc., or all legal, or its opposite, in which second hand smoke, PFAs, and all other unintended effects of actions, even hate speech, have to be regulated because of their harms. Everything depends on harm is defined, on how one understands causality and effects (and what one understands about chemical compounds and the effects of trauma). What might have seemed libertarian in the nineteenth century becomes more dystopian in the twenty-first as we understand more and more about how all sorts of actions have effects and harms. Mill's principle is lost in the changing definitions of harm.
Despite these limitations, one can see the appeal of Mill's argument, which is in some sense the appeal of liberalism. Things would be better if we framed so many of these debates in terms of principles rather than specific anecdotes with their own specific vibes. If we asked the question should the president, any president, get to dictate what is taught in schools, or who is on late night television, or the question, should a group of armed masked individuals be able to stop and harass anyone on the streets, we would probably get different answers than those animating contemporary politics.
It is on this point that I lose interest with Mill. I have recently been rereading Katja Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy (that is the kind of reference that one would expect). One of the things that comes up in her reading of the various Marxist readings of Spinoza, and I will say more about this book later, is that for Spinoza the problem of knowledge and the problem of politics are thoroughly intertwined. This is an argument one can find in the other big book on Spinoza that came out recently, Kletenik's Sovereignty Disrupted, which traces it back to his Jewish and Islamic sources, but she gets it from Balibar (who plays a central role in her book). As Diefenbach writes,
"The fundamental problem of politics 'is to know how reason and imagination interact' and how, out of these interactions, they constitute the sociality of humans. It does not follow that the 'unity' of this process turns the passions into mere means of the realization of reason, as in Hegel, another great theorist of anthropological for whom reason actualizes itself in the necessary detour through the most varied empirical phenomena, passions and particular interests in order to find its objective revelation in the state."
I know that the Hegel reference seems like a bit of an aside, and it is, but I will add to it--going more and more off topic--(something that happens in my classes as well) to say that in The Politics of Transindividuality I made the argument that one of the things that connects Marx and Spinoza is their rejection of an teleology that would resolve the imagination into reason. As I wrote in that book,
"The question of appearance returns, only now it is not just a matter of the ambiguous appearance of individuality, but of the appearance of social relations, social relations that appear primarily as the quality of objects, as in commodity fetishism, or as the effect of capital itself. Between the sphere of circulation, which is made up of isolated individuals, and the sphere of production, which represents their cooperative relations as the relations of capital, transindividuality, everything that exceeds the individual, cannot appear. Isolated individuals appear, the power capital itself appears, but social relations, the way individuals shape and are shaped by their relations, producing themselves and their social conditions, does not appear. The fetishism, of commodities and of capital itself, is Marx’s explanation as to why the Hegelian passage from the particular to the universal is interrupted. One could argue, following the reading of The Philosophy of Right that we have developed here, that this interruption is developed on Hegelian grounds. The fetishism of commodities might be another way of framing the split between work and consumption as transindividual individuations. The only difference is that the individuation through consumption, through what Hegel called the sphere of need, does not lead to recognition of its universal dimension, its connection with and dependence on others, but to fetishization, a naturalization of the capitalist economy. There is no education of the particular, its eventual recognition of its connection with others in the state, instead there is a bifurcation of transindividual individuation. On the one side there is the isolated and competitive individual of the sphere of production, while on the other there is the cooperative social individual of the hidden abode of production. However, this second individual does not appear, does not see itself in institutions and structures, instead what is immediately visible is the fetishism of commodities, money, and the power of capital itself."
In other words, both Marx and Spinoza argue, in different ways, and on different grounds, that the passage from particularity to universality is fundamentally interrupted.
To close this parenthesis, and leaving Hegel out of it, we can frame three different ways of understanding the relation between imagination and reason, between what is shaped by custom and taste, and what is framed by thinking. The first, Mill, is predicated on the idea that if we had a principle, some abstract rule, we could better understand the limits and scope of government power because we would ask the question abstractly. The abstract principle is the antidote to particularity. The second position, that of Spinoza, the realist one, suggest that such a passage is not possible, not just for some, the vulgus, but for all of us. Sometimes we are reasonable, governed by rational ideas, and other times we are governed by our passions. The reference to Marx then maps out a third position one that is less anthropological and more historical. How we think, how much we are capable of framing things in terms of abstract concepts or particular images, affects, or vibes, is not a static given, but is itself a product of social relations.
This connects to something I have posted before, and will say again, we have to understand what we are living through as not just a change of a political order, but an epistemic one. It is a regime in which the things that we think of as hypocrisy, or the violation of principles, do not register because they are never framed in that way. They are framed in terms of vibes or moods, and as such the shift and change with the time and the moment. That is how we get people who can champion people brandishing guns at a protest one year and arguing that just having a gun is grounds for execution years later. These are not principles or arguments, but affects, fear, and imagination. Thus, in moving away from Mill I have brought us back to him, to the importance of education, to the idea that we need to at least try to be more reasonable if we are going to be free (which is of course also back to Spinoza).
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