Monthly Archives: July 2010

the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger

We are deep into our annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies, with as much as six-and-a-half-hours of class and many hundreds of pages of reading each day. The most blogging I can manage will be less-than-daily notes about the texts we discuss. Today, one important text is Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy. (Unger is a Harvard Law Professor and cabinet member in his home country of Brazil.)

Unger takes “to its ultimate conclusion” the thesis “that society is an artifact” (p. 2). All our institutions, mores, habits, and incentives are things that we imagine and make. We can change each of these things, “if not all at once, then piece by piece” (p. 4). When we observe that people are poisoning their environment or slaughtering each other–or are suffering from a loss of community and freedom–we should view the situation as our work and strive to change it. He “carries to extremes the idea that everything in society is politics, mere politics”–in the sense of collective action and creation (p. 1)

Unger is a radical leftist but a strong critic of Marxism. He views Marxism as one example of “deep-structure” theory. Any deep-structure theory identifies some “basic framework, structure, or context” beneath all our routine debates and conflicts. It treats each framework as “an indivisible and repeatable type of social organization.” And then it explains changes from one framework to another in terms of “lawlike tendencies or deep-seated economic, organizational, and psychological constraints” (p. 14-5). So–according to Marxists–all the politics that we observe today is a function of “capitalism”; capitalism is a unitary thing that can repeat or end; and the only way forward is from capitalism to a different deep structure, namely socialism.

Unger argues that this theory fails to acknowledge the virtually infinite forms of social organization that we can make (including, for instance, many definitions of private property and many combinations of property with other laws and institutions). It suggest that perhaps nothing can be done to alter the arc of history. The only possible strategy is to start a revolution to change the unitary underlying structure of the present society. But that solution is generally (perhaps always) impractical, so the leftist thinker or leader is reduced to denouncing capitalist inequality. “Preoccupied with the hierarchy-producing effects of inherited institutional arrangements, the leftist reaches for distant and vague solutions that cannot withstand the urgent pressures of statecraft and quickly give way to approaches betraying its initial aims” (p. 20).

Instead, writes Unger, the leftist should be constantly “inventing ever more ingenious institutional instruments.” The clearest failure of actual Marxism was its refusal to experiment, which was legitimized by its deep-structure theory. (Once capitalism was banished, everything was supposed to be fixed). “The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With a few exceptions … it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of a soviet or conciliar type of organization” (p. 24). In theory, a “soviet” was a system of direct democracy in each workplace or small geographical location. But, Unger writes, that was an unworkable and generally poor idea.

In contrast, Unger is a veritable volcano of innovative institutional conceptions. He wants a new branch of government devoted to constant reform that is empowered to seize other institutions but only for a short time; mandatory voting; automatic unionization combined with complete independence of unions from the state; neighborhood associations independent from local governments; a right to exit from public law completely and instead form private associations with rules that protect rights; a wealth tax; competitive social funds that allocate endowments originally funded by the state; and new baskets of property rights.

None of these proposals is presented as a solution. Together they are ways of creating “a framework that is permanently more hospitable to the reconstructive freedom of the people who work within its limits” (p. 34). The task is to “combine realism, practicality, and detail with visionary fire” (p. 14)

On deck: Madison, Hayek, and Burke–all defenders of tradition and enemies of the Ungerian project.

Bent Flyvbjerg’s radical alternative to applied social science

Bent Flyvbjerg is one of the authors we teach in our Summer Institute of Civic Studies. He is a Danish social scientist who has developed a radical ideal of social research that he calls “phronesis” (Greek for “prudence” or “practical wisdom”). I would introduce it as follows:

A very common method is to identify some feature of practice or policy that can be described generically. It may be an “approach,” a “strategy,” or an “intervention.” The goal is to show that this thing works in general, all else being equal. The ideal method is a randomized field experiment (individuals are randomly assigned to receive or not to receive the intervention, and we measure the differences in results). Alternatives to experiments are acceptable, but overall, social programs are treated like drugs. If something is effective, it should work reliably in whole categories of contexts. So any positive finding should be replicable.

In reality, we find many programs that work in their original contexts for the people who enroll, but very few that prove replicable when tested in randomized studies. One conclusion might be that government and nonprofit agencies just can’t do any good; they aren’t up to it. But that seems very odd because no one wants to (say) disband all the schools in a suburban, middle-class town on the theory that interventions never work.

An alternative conclusion is that there is something wrong with the method. Social interventions don’t work like drugs because the behavior of groups of human beings is not law-like. People know what is going on and influence any treatment, as well as being affected by it. They have a variety of interests and motives that do not all align neatly with the experimenter, and they adjust as they are being experimented on. People act differently if they feel that a social process is theirs instead of someone else’s experiment. Context is highly variable and very important. That includes the “macro” context of major events in the world, which constantly change people’s values and beliefs. There are complex interactions between subjects, researchers, and contexts.

Flyvbjerg goes so far as to say: “The natural science approach simply does not work in the social sciences. No predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying. This approach is a wasteful dead-end.”

On one hand, I want to say that Flyvbjerg is wrong. In our Institute, we read work by scholars like Elinor Ostrom and Archon Fung who identify methods and approaches that seem to work fairly regularly in various contexts. Ostrom has identified design principles to use if you want to manage a public resource voluntarily. Fung shows that certain formats and strategies for public meetings work better than others for various purposes, under various circumstances. Such research seems very important for reform efforts.

On the other hand, these are not literally “predictive” theories. They do not deny people’s freedom to change outcomes. There is nothing inevitable about the recipes that Ostrom and Fung identify. Further, the search for powerful explanations, regularities, and generic solutions in social science does seem disappointing overall. As the volume of data rises, analytical tools improve, publications proliferate, and more and more people work at understanding social issues, faith in actual solutions only seems to recede.

Flyvbjerg has a constructive alternative, based on his own intervention as a researcher in the city politics of Aalborg, Denmark. In his model, “social scientists and social science professionals [are] analysts who provide food for thought for the ongoing process of public deliberation, participation, and decision-making.” They do so by immersing themselves in a concrete situation and asking (with all due methodological rigor) the following four questions:

    (1) Where are we going?

    (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?

    (3) Is this development desirable?

    (4) What, if anything, should we do about it?

Note the following features that are absent in purely positivist social science (although they are practiced by many fine scholars): a combination of values, facts, and strategies; a forward-looking orientation; a sensitivity to power that does not preclude hope that something good can be achieved; and a presumption that the researcher is part of the community that must act (“what should we do?”).

how a community can own a resource

Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the most frequently cited articles of the 20th century. Hardin argued that a valuable resource must be owned. If it is left unowned, it will be consumed and not replenished. There appeared to be two kinds of owners: (1) private individuals or corporations, and (2) governments. There was heated debate about the relative advantages and dangers of each, but the consensus held that one or the other type of owner ought to own everything that matters.

As a result, reformers (governments, international lenders, and experts) turned forests, grazing lands, fisheries, and other resources all over the world into property: either privatizing and marketizing these assets, or else nationalizing them. In many cases, the results were devastating. As Elinor Ostrom (2000) writes, “In many settings where individuals have managed small- to medium-sized resources for centuries, drawing on local knowledge and locally crafted institutions, their disempowerment led to a worsening of environmental problems rather than their betterment.” This was no small matter: human famine and the extinction of natural species were sometimes the price.

Part of the problem was conceptual, an assumption that if something is property, it must be state or private property. As Ostrom and colleagues have shown, a community can own an asset. That does not mean that a government that represents the community owns it, as my town of Belmont, MA (an incorporated municipality) owns Clay Pit Pond. Nor does it mean that a nonprofit corporation manages the asset as the community’s trustee. The community can actually own the resource. It needs rules, norms, traditions, or processes that limit the asset’s use and/or cause people to replenish it.

Those rules may include large doses of individual property rights. For instance, you may own your fishing boat and nets and any fish that you catch. But the community owns the fishery if only approved people can fish there and if each can only take a certain number of fish. If those rules are local government ordinances, we may say that the community owns the fishery and uses the government as one of its instruments of control. (It will almost certainly use other tools as well, including private vigilance.) In many cases, the rules are effectively enforced without official government endorsement. Violence and threats of violence may never be necessary, either, if local ties are strong and outsiders are rare.

An asset can belong to a community in a meaningful sense if it is true collective property, or if it is divided among private owners who collectively regulate its use, or if it belongs to just a few official owners who depend upon and are accountable to the whole community. For instance, many houses of worship all over the world belong to the state or a private party who holds title to the land and the building. Yet those religious institutions are genuinely owned by the community in the sense that they could never move or survive without the community’s support.

Opening one’s eyes to the possibility of community ownership that is not state or private ownership provides new options for managing resources, allows us to evaluate and appreciate traditional arrangements, and calls attention to the impressive skills and values that people employ all over the world to manage common assets.

See …

Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolsak, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern (2002) “The Drama of the Commons,” in Elinor Ostrom, ed., Drama of the Commons, pp. 3-26.

Ostrom, Elinor (2000), “Crowding Out Citizenship,” Scandinavian Political Studies (23)1

Ostrom, Elinor (2004) “Covenants, Collective Action and Common Pool Resources” in Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen Elkin, eds., The Constitution of Good Societies.

on hope as an intellectual virtue

My favorite empirical research programs try to help something good work in the world. For instance, scholars who study Positive Youth Development assess initiatives that give young people opportunities to contribute to their communities. Scholars of Common Pool Resources study how communities manage common property, such as fisheries and forests. Scholars of Deliberative Democracy investigate the impacts on citizens, communities, and policies when people talk in structured settings.

These are empirical research programs, committed to facts and truth. They do not seek to celebrate, but to critically evaluate, their research subjects. However, an obvious goal is to make the practical work succeed by identifying and demonstrating positive impacts and by helping to sort out the effective strategies from the ineffective ones. Underlying these intellectual efforts is some kind of hope that the practical programs, when done well, succeed.

As a philosopher, I am especially interested in that hope and why scholars have it. I like to ask what motivates these research projects. The motives are largely hidden, because positivist social science cannot handle value-commitments on the part of researchers; it treats them as biases to be minimized and disclosed only if they prove impossible to eliminate. Often the search for motives is critical and suspicious: one tries to show that a given research project is biased by some value-judgment, cultural assumption, or self-interest on the scholars’ part. But I look for motives in an appreciative spirit, believing that an empirical research program in the social sciences can only be as good as its core values.

Note that it is not at all obvious why we should hope that Positive Youth Development, Common Property Resource Management, and Deliberative Democracy work. These are expensive and tricky strategies. For instance, the core empirical hypothesis of Positive Youth Development is that you will get better outcomes for youth if you help them contribute than if you use surveillance and remediation. But it would be cheaper and more reliable if we could cut crime with metal detectors in every school instead of elaborate service-learning programs. So why should we hope that Positive Youth Development is right?

Likewise, it would be easier to turn all resources into private or state property than to encourage communities to manage resources as common property. And it would be easier for professionals to make city plans and budgets than to turn those decisions over to citizens. So why do scholars evidently hope that good common property regimes produce more sustainable and efficient economic outcomes than expert management, and that deliberations generate more legitimate and fair policies than governments do?

I think part of the reason is simply that things are not going very well in the world, and scholars seek alternatives that may be uncontroversially better: more efficient or sustainable, less corrupt and wasteful. That’s part of the reason, but it doesn’t fully explain the focus of these research projects. If you’re worried about violence in American high schools, you should look for something new that works. But why should that new approach include service and leadership programs, instead of better metal detectors and video cameras?

Ultimately, all three of my examples are anchored in commitments that I would describe as “Kantian.” The individual is a sovereign moral agent and our responsibility to others is always to help develop their capacities for autonomy and voluntary cooperation. Real Kantianism is dismissive of utilitarian outcomes (such as efficient public services) and is willing to defend autonomy even if the consequences for health and welfare turn out to be bad. But real Kantianism just doesn’t fly. It doesn’t influence power and it doesn’t satisfy most people’s intuitions. So I think the research projects I have mentioned here are motivated by a kind of soft or strategic Kantianism. The best initiatives, on this view, are the ones that achieve efficient and reliable improvements in tangible human welfare by enhancing people’s autonomy. Strategies like Positive Youth Development and common property regimes stand out as worthy of study because of their Kantian values. But they deserve critical scrutiny on utilitarian grounds. If they fail to deliver the promised practical outcomes, they should be improved before they are abandoned. The same attention should not be given to surveillance systems or top-down managerial structures. In theory, those solutions might work just as well, but helping them to succeed would not enhance autonomy.

I realize that it is a risky strategy in our culture for scholars to admit their core moral commitments. The smartest move is to pretend that a research program is simply scientific and all the outcomes of interest are utilitarian. But those assumptions have the disadvantage of being wrong. They distort research in various subtle but damaging ways. Even though it is idealistic, I think we should take on positivism directly and not accept the presumption that values are simply biases.