Category Archives: philosophy

summative questions after a semester of 20th century political philosophy

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I’ve been discussing these texts all semester with a very intense and dedicated group of students. In our final discussions, we are considering the following questions (or as many as we have time for):

  1. What are the roles of reasoning and/or deliberation (Mill, Dewey, Arendt, Habermas), as opposed to unconscious emotions and/or interests (Freud, Adorno) in modern politics?
  2. How do complex mass societies manage information, and how should they? Options include bureaucracies (Weber), free speech (Mill), price signals (Hayek), organic intellectuals (Gramsci), corporate propaganda (Horkheimer & Adorno), small-scale politics (Arendt), surveillance (Foucault), or institutions of civil society (Dewey, Habermas).
  3. What causal factors are important in history? E.g., class struggle (Marx, Gramsci), Darwinian selection among ideas and institutions (Hayek, Weber, Foucault), intentional deliberation and learning (Mill, Dewey), great men (Mussolini), or conflicts among enemies (Schmitt, Mussolini, perhaps Fanon).
  4. What is the potential of direct democratic self-rule as understood by Marx (in “The Civil War in France”), Luxemburg, duBois, Dewey, Arendt, or Fanon? What are its likely limitations, according to Schmitt, or Weber, or Habermas? How does decentralized democracy compare to market decentralization (Hayek)?
  5. How should we think about positive and negative liberty (Berlin) in the light of other accounts of freedom by, e.g., DuBois, Foucault, or de Beauvoir?
  6. What defines “liberalism” and how does it look from the perspective of a class revolutionary (Gramsci), a Black American thinker (DuBois), a revolutionary colonial subject (Fanon), or a woman (de Beauvoir)?
  7. In 1945, Arendt wrote, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” What, if anything, does evil mean in the context of earthly politics? Should we talk about evil?
  8. What can political thinkers contribute? E.g., a prophetic voice (Marx, Benjamin, possibly Dewey, possibly de Beauvoir), detached analysis (Weber, early Foucault, perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno), or concrete involvements in public life (Dewey, Gramsci, DuBois, Fanon, late Foucault).
  9. Are the questions of the 21st century different from those of the 20th?

Reading Arendt in Palo Alto

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During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what I describe and are working on solutions.

I can imagine telling Arendt that Silicon Valley has become the capital of a certain kind of power, explaining how it reaches through Elon Musk to control the US government and the US military and through Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to dominate the global public sphere. I imagine showing her Sand Hill Road, the completely prosaic—although nicely landscaped—suburban highway where venture capitalists meet in undistinguished office parks to decide the flow of billions. This is Arendt’s nightmare.

For her, there should be a public domain in which diverse people convene for the “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that constitutes politics (OR 24).

Politics enables a particular kind of equality: the equal standing to debate and influence collective decisions. Politics also enables a specific kind of freedom, because a person who decides with others what to do together is neither a boss nor a subordinate but a free actor.

Politics allows us to be–and to be recognized–as genuine individuals, having our own perspectives on topics that also matter to others (HC 41). And politics defeats death because it is where we concern ourselves with making a common world that can outlast us. “It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (HC 55).

Politics excludes force against fellow citizens. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (HC 26). Speech is not persuasive unless the recipient is free to accept or reject it, and force destroys that freedom. By the same token, force prevents the one who uses it from being genuinely persuasive, which is a sign of rationality.

Musk’s DOGE efforts are clear examples of force. But I also think about when Zuckerberg decided to try to improve the schools of Newark, NJ. He had derived his vast wealth from developing a platform on which people live their private lives in the view of algorithms that nudge them to buy goods. He allocated some of this wealth to a reform project in Newark, discovered that people were ungrateful and that his plan didn’t work, and retreated in a huff because he didn’t receive the praise or impact that he expected to buy.

From Arendt’s perspective, each teenager in Newark was exactly Zuckerberg’s equal, worthy to look him in the eye and say what they they should do together. This would constitute what she calls “action.” However, Zuckerberg showed himself incapable of such equality and therefore devoid of genuine freedom.

Musk, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires understand themselves as deservedly powerful and receive adulation from millions. But, says Arendt, “The popular belief in ‘strong men’ … is either sheer superstition … or is a conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material'” (HC 188).

There is no public space on Sand Hill Road. Palo Alto has a city hall, but it is not where Silicon Valley is governed. And the laborers “who with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life” (Aristotle) are carefully hidden away (HC 72).

Arendt describes how economic activity has eclipsed politics in modern times. Descriptions of private life in the form of lyric poetry and novels have flourished–today, thousands of fine novels are available on the Kindle store–a development “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (HC 39). In her day, corporations still built quite impressive urban headquarters, like Rockefeller Center, which continued the tradition of the Medici Palace or a Rothschild estate. But Sand Hill Road is a perfect example of wealth refusing to create anything of public value. Unless you are invited to a meeting there, you just drive by.

Arendt acknowledges that people need private property to afford political participation and to develop individual perspectives. We each need a dwelling and objects (such as, perhaps, books or mementos) that are protected from outsiders: “a tangible. worldly place of one’s own” (HC 70). But we do not need wealth. Arendt decries the “present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole” (HC 61). For example, to own a great deal of stock is not to have property (the basis of individuality) but to be part of a mass society that renders your behavior statistically predictable, like a natural phenomenon (HC43). All those Teslas that cruise silently around Palo Alto are metaphors for wealth that is not truly private property.

Much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from digital media through which we live our private lives in the view of algorithms that assess us statistically and influence our behavior. For Arendt, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (HC 71). She is against socialist and communist efforts to expropriate property, but she also believes that privacy can be invaded by society in other ways (HC72). She expresses this concern vaguely, but nothing epitomizes it better than a corporate social media platform that becomes the space for ostensibly private life.

Artificial Intelligence represents the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley, producing software that appears to speak in the first-person singular but actually aggregates billions of people’s previous thought. Arendt’s words are eerie: “Without the accompaniment of speech .., action would not only lose its revelatory power, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would be incomprehensible” (HC 178).

The result is a kind of death: “A life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (HC 176).

See also: Arendt, freedom, Trump (2017); the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human; Victorians warn us about AI; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt etc.

important findings about the persuasive power of facts

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There is a huge body of research that suggests that people are not very susceptible to good arguments. Apparently, we believe things for unexamined reasons, cherry-pick evidence to support our intuitive beliefs, and minimize the significance of inconvenient evidence.

These findings contribute to a general skepticism about people’s capacity for democracy, and I fear that this skepticism is self-reinforcing. If we presume that humans cannot reason well, why would we try to build institutions that promote reasoning? Only half jokingly, I sometimes say that the theme of current social science is: people are stupid and they hate each other.

But I also argue that at least some of this research employs methods that are biased against discovering rational thought. In particular, if you ask random samples of people disconnected survey questions that interest you (not them) and then use techniques such as factor analysis to find latent patterns, you will, indeed, often discover that people are stupid and hate each other. More prosaically, you will develop scales for latent variables like knowledge or tolerance that yield poor scores. But such methods may overlook the idiosyncratic ways that reasons influence individuals on the topics that matter to them.

Of all people, those who believe in false conspiracy theories are generally seen as the least susceptible to good reasons; and previous efforts to convince them have often failed. However, in a 2024 Science article, Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand report results of an intervention that substantially reduced people’s commitment to conspiracy theories, not only in the short term, but also two months later.

In this study, holders of conspiracy theories wrote about why they held their beliefs, and then an AI bot held a conversation with them in which it supplied reliable information directly relevant to the specific factual premises of each respondent. For instance, if a person believed that 9/11 was an “inside job” because Building 7 collapsed even though no plane hit it (see Wood and Douglas 2013), the AI might provide engineering information about Building 7. Many people were persuaded.

These results are consistent with a study of conversations with canvassers who succeeded in persuading many voters “by listening for individual voters’ … moral values and then tailoring their appeals to those moral values” (Kalla, Levine, A. S., & Broockman 2022). The two studies differ in that one used people and the other, an AI bot; and one emphasized facts while the other focused on values. But both results point to a model in which each person holds various beliefs that are more-or-less connected to other beliefs as reasons, forming a network. Beliefs may be normative or empirical–they function very similarly. Discourse involves stating one’s beliefs and their connections to other beliefs that serve as premises or implications.

People actually do a lot of this and are relatively good at assessing the rigor of such conversations when they observe them (Mercier and Sperber 2017). However, many of our methods are biased against discovering such reasoning (Levine 2024a and Levine 2024b), leaving us with the mistaken impression that we are a bunch of idiots incapable of self-governance.

Sources: Costello, T. H., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2024). Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science, 385(6714); Wood MJ, Douglas KM. “What about building 7?” A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Front Psychol. 2013 Jul 8;4:409; Kalla, J. L., Levine, A. S., & Broockman, D. E. (2022). Personalizing moral reframing in interpersonal conversation: A field experiment. The Journal of Politics, 84(2), 1239-1243; Mercier, H. & Sperber D, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard University Press 2017; Levine, P. (2024a). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024a), and Levine, P. (2024v). Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas. Journal of Political Ideologies, 29(3), 464-491.

the ham actor and the psychopath: Adorno on Trump and Musk

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It is not my style to apply psychoanalytic categories to political phenomena. I generally want to take explicit political claims at face value, whether I find them appealing or awful. I see this as a way of treating other people as fellow citizens. Besides, I have little background in psychoanalysis and sometimes doubt whether it can make falsifiable claims about politics.

However, if you want a critical Freudian interpretation of people like Trump and Musk (or Putin, or Modi) and their supporters, I can recommend a classic text: Theodor Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).

Adorno claims that many people in capitalist societies have “a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency.” I think this means that people have been taught to form personal desires and to strive to get what they want. But they also experience “the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.” In short, they are not as successful as they expect to be. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object” (p. 126).

This object is a leader. “Only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father. This is the ultimate root of the otherwise enigmatic personalization of fascist propaganda, its incessant plugging of names and supposedly great men, instead of discussing objective causes” (124).

Three features enable a leader to draw support:

First, the leader presents himself as similar to his followers. “While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person” (127). He even demonstrates “startling symptoms of inferiority,” such as a “resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths.” (I thought about Trump and Musk, respectively, when I read that sentence.)

Adorno explains why people tolerate–or even prefer–their leader to have such flaws: it makes it easier to identify with him. “He resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority” (132). “The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” In short, the leader aims to be a “great little man” (127).

Second, people gain pleasure from loving a leader who demonstrates little or no love. “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches, namely the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give,’ as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial, is thus being accounted for: the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love.” This combination is compelling because the followers identify with the leader and thereby feel liberated from having to give or care.

Or perhaps the leader vaguely expresses love for his followers (without being accountable to them), while denouncing more general love. Adorno quotes Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922): “Even today, the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent” (127)

Third, the leader enables the followers to identify with each other by expressing hatred for weak outsiders. The followers do not deeply believe the premises of the hatred but gain pleasure from participating together in ritualistic expressions of it. “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance” (136-7).

There is more to Adorno’s account. For example, the mass’s desire is libidinal and erotic, but this truth must be concealed because it would be embarrassing. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends” (123).

Also, the decline of serious religious belief helps fascist leaders, because actual religions teach demanding ideas, including self-sacrificial love. But once religion becomes an identity label, religious ideas no longer stand in the way of politics.

the division between the believers and nonbelievers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the “sheep and goat” device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages (129).

Finally, Adorno denies that fascism has caused these outcomes or that a fascist leader is ultimately responsible for them. “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue” (135). Rather, for Adorno, a fascist demagogue is a tool by which capitalist interests control the masses.

(I am not committed to either the Freudianism or the Marxism of Adorno’s account, but it rings lots of bells today.)

Source: Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’”[1951] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982). See also: the troubling implications of factor analysis for democracy (with notes on Adorno); philosophy of boredom; what if the people don’t want to rule?;

how markets “think” about politics

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As I write, US stocks are plunging. I have no idea what will be happening by the time you read this post. However, stepping back from the moment, what does it mean that Wall Street indexes rose after Trump won the 2024 election but fell last week? Or that Ukrainian government bond prices rose from October 2024 until last week and then fell rapidly?

One view is that markets have wisdom–or at least predictive value–because they aggregate information from many people. Investors think critically and rigorously because their money is on the line. The recent trends make sense on their face and confirm that markets are rational.

A different view is that capitalism involves a class struggle, and capital markets rise when the upper classes expect their interests to prevail. This model has no trouble explaining why business leaders, including registered Democrats, would tell Steven Rattner that they like Trump. They were not predicting prosperity for all but expecting to profit for themselves.

I would endorse a third model. Friedrich Hayek had a genuine insight: individuals have limited cognitive capacity and diverse motives. Therefore, individuals cannot reliably assess whole societies, let alone predict the future of anything large-scale. However, says Hayek, within our own domains of experience and expertise, we can reasonably predict specific prices. After a tough spring, farmers will expect the price of wheat to rise.

Prices allow us to plan efficiently. Many people do not seek to maximize wealth but to accomplish something else, such as holding onto a valued job or retiring soon. Nevertheless, the result of all their private planning is a market that is–in certain respects–efficient.

However, markets also create opportunities to profit by correctly predicting the large-scale situation. In turn, such predictions require assessing the present. For example, to guess how the US economy will fare over the next four years, it’s necessary to evaluate Donald Trump as a leader. One can buy bonds and other securities partly on the basis of such predictions. In this way, an accurate evaluation of Trump could pay off financially.

But Hayek’s defense of markets would not encourage us to trust the aggregate results of such thinking. Just because many people trade securities, it does not follow that their overall understanding of the present or their predictions for the society as a whole are reliable.

On the contrary, each participant in a market who tries to predict how a whole economy or country will perform is subject to the same cognitive limitations that–according to Hayek–beset us as voters and policymakers.

Markets do respond intelligibly to news. Wall Street indices fall every time Trump announces tariffs and rise whenever he seems to back off. But these changes are not predictive. In fact, we can easily predict market shifts as soon as we know what Trump says. The market adds little new information.

It’s true that putting money on the line gives an individual a motivation to think rigorously and critically. But motivations do not solve cognitive limitations. The businessmen who confided in Rattner said that they didn’t like “woke stuff” under Biden. Such feelings should not directly influence their market behavior under Trump. Nevertheless, their hostility to “woke stuff” could affect their stock trades by influencing their moods or by leading them to consume news and information that is tilted in favor of Trump. As cognitively limited creatures, we must rely on limited sources and a priori models–also known as ideologies.

In recent months, CEOs reported rising confidence in the economy, while consumers’ confidence slipped. A closer look at consumer confidence reveals that it fell by 28 points among Democrats but rose by 32.8 points among Republicans between January and February. So we can compare three changing predictions: those of corporate bosses, Democrats as consumers, and Republicans as consumers. Why do the Democrats diverge from the CEOs and the average Republicans?

  • The CEOs tend to have different values from the Democratic consumers. If everyone agreed that Trump’s tax policies will boost corporate profits but hurt the environment, CEOs would be more positive than representative Democrats.
  • The CEOs have different information from Democratic consumers. They are awash in data about their own balance sheets, plus business-oriented news. Democratic consumers are seeing negative assessments of Trump.
  • The CEO’s and the Democrats probably hold different mental models of such fundamental issues as the role of government and businesses in our society. Everyone holds such models, without which we cannot absorb new information.
  • Partisan identity is working as a powerful heuristic. Americans are using the party of the incumbent president to predict the economy. This may be unwise, but human beings must use heuristics, and a party label does convey relevant information if you combine it with a model of the society.
  • Some people act performatively. I would probably answer almost any survey question about Trump in a way that made him look bad, even if I didn’t completely believe the literal truth of my response. Some may even buy financial instruments to make a point–witness the popularity of Trump’s cryptocurrency.
  • Finally, the information that people absorb may reflect political agendas. Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, and other media barons want to affect public opinion, although their impact is uneven because news consumers are sorted ideologically.

This is not a simple model, but it does have a simple core. It is methodologically individualist, presuming that the decision-makers are human beings rather than classes or other abstractions. Regardless of their interests and social positions, these individuals are cognitively constrained and not primarily concerned with assessing the whole society. When they do make general assessments and predictions, these decisions reflect their mental models (which, in turn, often reflect their social positions), limited information, and concrete issues that are salient for them at the time. As a result, markets respond intelligibly to widely reported breaking news but have little predictive value.

See also: The truth in Hayek; making our models explicit; social education as learning to improve models; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach; etc.