|
政治學 – 開欄文
|
瀏覽7,849 ｜回應39｜推薦2 |
|
|
|
相對於社會學和心理學，我對政治學的興趣開始得比較晚。一方面從14、15歲開始，我主要想了解的問題在倫理學；另一方面，我和大多數人一樣，性向上急功近利；對政治學的興趣始於軍事學。
大學一年級前後我讀了徐訏先生的《回到個人主義與自由主義》，印象深刻。35歲以前，我在聖荷西大學附近舊書攤上，買了常常被其他學者介紹和引用的《君王論》和《政府論》，但大概都只讀了1/4或1/3。不過，馬克思的《政治經濟學批判》我倒是讀得非常仔細，此書也構成我對政治的基本理解。當然，之後偶而也會涉獵一些政治學方面的書籍，但為數不多。
在2002年以前，除了以上四本經典名著之外，我對政治/政治學的了解，大部分來自新聞報導和報紙/期刊上的政治評論。2001年我退休以後開使在網上漫遊；由於在不同論壇上經常和其他網友就政治理論與實際議題進行討論，我不時有「書到用時方恨少」的感慨。於是我開始花較多時間閱讀「政治學」領域的書籍。
我對「政治」的「定義」以及對「民主政治」的詮釋，都是根據以往30多年對政治實務的觀察，以及這段時間對政治理論的領悟，綜合兩者而形成。
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
當共產主義成為唯一的選項 -- Slavoj Žižek
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
請參考：
* 伊朗的水荒危機 -- Adi Wolfson(該欄2025/12/15)
* Iran’s Water Crisis Is a Warning to Other Countries
並請參見齊澤克教授在此文所表達的觀點(該欄12/10/25貼文)。齊澤克教授倒是相當的「一以貫之」：這兩篇文章表現了他同樣的兩個思考盲點。我會在《《齊澤克對談：「一切量子說」》評論》一文中一併討論它們(尚未完成)。
When Communism Is the Only Option
Slavoj Žižek, 12/10/25
Iran's flailing response to a nationally destabilizing water crisis should be a warning to everyone. As more societies push up against planetary boundaries, they will confront threats to their very survival, and responses that once seemed drastic or utopian will begin to look like common sense.
LJUBLJANA – Where, in today’s world, do all our antagonisms and struggles for survival converge? Is there a singular point that embodies our universal predicament? It is not Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, or the scam centers in the north of Myanmar. It is Tehran.
The Iranian capital is counting down to a “day zero” when it will simply run out of water. Nor is it alone. Most of Iran is hurtling toward “water bankruptcy,” when demand will permanently exceed the natural supply. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is now talking about moving the capital and mandating the evacuation of the population (nearly ten million).
The crisis reflects several factors. The immediate cause is a severe six-year drought. Even in the rainy season, Iran has received almost no rain. Moreover, water-intensive agriculture and subsidization of water and energy have overdrawn the country’s aquifers and depleted its groundwater supplies.
Then, there is the concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, which has further strained water resources. The loss of groundwater has been so severe that parts of the Tehran plateau are sinking. Even if the rains do return, less will be stored as groundwater than in the past, because the physical space for it has contracted.
Since the sinking now underway is not uniformly distributed, the entire water and sewage system of Tehran is falling apart. Gas is leaking into the open air from broken underground channels.
Iran’s leaders have known about this problem for decades but always postponed any serious attempt to deal with it. Instead, the regime allocated resources to its nuclear program, foreign proxies like Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, and military production, keeping the armed forces well-equipped and building the drones that Russia has been using to bomb Ukrainian cities.
Worse, now that the crisis has come to a head, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has created a “water mafia.” Lakes and rivers that have survived for thousands of years are being drained to supply water to whoever can afford it. The average household in Tehran is spending 10% of its income on water, and many people are going without baths and other basic hygiene while the regime directly profits from the crisis.
But why has this old and ongoing problem suddenly become a global news story? Is it because the West wants to set the stage for another Israeli/American attack (this time under the guise of yet another humanitarian intervention)? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already cynically exploited the situation, telling Iranians that if they rise up against the regime, Israel will send specialists to address the water shortages.
Aside from organizing mass prayers for rain, the regime has adopted the dubious strategy of spraying large amounts of chemical salts into the atmosphere. But rather than reliably inducing rain, such “cloud seeding” threatens to kill off vegetation and make breathing more difficult. People are increasingly staying home, and Iranian society is beginning to unravel.
As for the plan to move the capital, Pezeshkian’s statements have been rather ambiguous. Is he talking about the bulk of the population, or just the government administration? If it is the second option, what will happen to the millions of people left behind? If it is the first, the effort would take years and impose an unsustainable financial burden on the state – all without solving the fundamental problem.
Not surprisingly, tens of thousands of people in Tehran have begun to panic. Highways north of the city are jammed with cars trying to make their way to the Caspian Sea region, where there may still be enough water. But what would happen if these thousands of evacuees became millions? Turkey is the obvious first destination, followed by Europe. But what about the wealthy Arab states in the Gulf region? Why aren’t Iran’s immediate neighbors expected to provide more help?
Although the water crisis follows from a specific mix of natural causes and policy errors, Iran is not alone. Neighboring Afghanistan, for example, is pursuing large-scale irrigation projects to route water toward Kabul, which is also heading for water bankruptcy. Such projects are not without controversy, because they can have implications for water supplies elsewhere, including across borders. That is why Egypt, whose survival depends on the Nile River, objects so strenuously to Ethiopian dam projects.
What is to be done? While I don’t have any concrete proposals, the general solution seems clear: the world is going to need some form of communism. I don’t mean anything like 20th-century “actually existing socialism,” but rather something more obvious and elementary.
Neither authoritarian states nor multiparty democracies nor grassroots self-organization can address problems like those confronting Iran. When we are facing threats to our very survival as a civilized community, the only choice is to proclaim a large-scale emergency, which implies a de facto state of war – not against another state, but against those in one’s own country who are responsible for the crisis.
A state of emergency should not abolish markets and nationalize everything; but it should assert public control and regulate those areas of social life that have a direct bearing on the cause of the emergency. In this case, that means controlling the distribution of water. In Iran, the “water mafia” should have been crushed immediately.
The state power (which can move the fastest) must then be complemented by locally organized acts of solidarity, together with much stronger forms of international cooperation. Utopian? Not at all. The real utopia is believing that we can survive without such measures.
Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is the author, most recently, of Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
Joseph E. Stiglitz & Andrew Kosenko explain why it is in Europe's interest to mobilize frozen Russian assets to ensure Ukraine's survival.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, PS Politics (請至原網頁登錄)
Go beyond the headlines to understand the issues, forces, and trends shaping the US presidential election – and the likely implications of its outcome.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.
PS Quarterly: The Year Ahead 2026 is almost here.
To read the magazine as soon as it is available, subscribe to Digital Plus or Premium today. As a subscriber, you would enjoy digital access to all the new magazine’s content and receive a print copy, delivered to your door in the coming weeks.
SUBSCRIBE NOW (請至原網頁訂閱)
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
「萬能政府」概念是個神話 -- Andreas Wesemann
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
衛撒門先生這篇大作長達3,000多字；但他沒有分節，讀起來有些費勁。我讀過之後，由於此文能夠做為我多年來想法的「反面教材」，我打算寫篇評論。於是做了分節、加上子標題、和標示段落序號這些動作；以便於指涉。如有誤解或誤導之處，還請指正。
索引：
Gray,John：格瑞教授
Hobbes, Thomas：霍布士；衛撒門先生大作標題有他《政府論》原名中的「海怪」一詞；這是象徵性的修辭用法。
Schmitt, Carl：席彌特博士(1888 – 1985)
It's time to dismantle the Leviathan
Technocratic, bureaucratic politics have failed
Andreas Wesemann, 11/19/25
Editor’s Notess：For more than half a century, Western democracies trusted in a rules-based, technocratic machine to deliver stability and fairness. But the Great Financial Crisis revealed the limits of government by algorithm and exposed a deeper crisis of legitimacy at the heart of the liberal state. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s unsettling account of sovereignty, author of After the Leviathan, Andreas Wesemann argues that Britain’s malaise lies not in weak leaders but in an over-centralized State-as-Computer, and that its renewal requires a radical redistribution of power rather than the search for a new strongman.
0. 前言：電腦模式的政府
1
After the Second World War, the European members of the Allied coalition embarked on a project of cooperation and integration to ensure that no single nation could again dominate the continent. This would yield economic benefits, but it also required a far greater codification of the “rules of the game” -- a dense web of laws, regulations, and guidelines designed to insulate states and their citizens from the whims of political personalities. The unconstrained powers of the European dictators were never to be possible again; they would be replaced by the quasi-automatons of the legislative and administrative state. In parallel, governments expanded their control over economic life. The logic was simple: if centralized coordination had worked in war, why not in peace? Britain joined this wider project of codification and control, though with characteristic ambivalence when it came to European integration. Out of this architecture of rules and institutions emerged what might be called the State-as-Computer: a machine designed to replace human judgment with coded procedures.
2
Meanwhile, the United States followed a similar path, even though it emerged from the Second World War as the largest, richest, and most powerful nation on earth. Its pre-eminence made it indispensable to the network of international agreements and institutions born of this new cooperative spirit. While that allowed America to leave a deep imprint on how the rules were written and enforced, it nevertheless subscribed to the same rules-based order embraced by Europe and the United Kingdom. After all, the United States shared the same conviction: cooperation requires rules. Laws and institutions were to replace individuals as the leading protagonists on both the national and international stage. After the slaughter of millions at the hands of a few deranged but effective dictators, the semi-automatic, if somewhat legalistic, computer of governance may well have seemed a welcome substitute for the uncontrollable explosions of emotional strongmen. That these law- and rule-making institutions often operated out of sight was, perhaps, part of their virtue.
1. 回顧政治演變
3
In the first decades after 1945, with the memory of carnage still fresh, the new order performed admirably. Economic growth was strong, internal peace held, and international cooperation flourished. Gradually, however, dissenting voices emerged: students at the Sorbonne, civil rights activists in San Francisco, and a new generation in Berlin angered by the persistence of former Nazis in government and industry. Economic growth, too, began to slow as the command-and-control model of post-war management reached diminishing returns -- just as a handful of oil-rich nations imposed their own rules on their European and American customers.
4
In response, much of the world -- this time including China, albeit very much on its own terms -- embarked on a process of “liberalization” intended to revive growth and roll back the frontiers of the State. The effort was partly successful: growth recovered from the malaise of the 1970s, though not dramatically, except in China, whose economy suddenly took flight. Many societies felt re-energized by the new freedoms and rewarded the architects of this shift with repeated re-elections. Financial deregulation -- arguably the most consequential reform of the era -- unleashed a surge in capital creation and deployment, fueling expansion in the sectors that produced and managed capital: banks, investment firms, and other financial intermediaries. With so much new money in circulation, debt inevitably rose as well. That this was, in effect, a mortgage on the future was well understood in specialist circles but seldom acknowledged in public.
5
What did not change was the State’s self-conception as the creator and arbiter of laws and regulations. As economies expanded and the State withdrew from direct production and provision, the demand for rules and guidance governing those who replaced it grew exponentially. Individuals and corporations were liberated from some forms of control -- able to move capital freely across borders or to compete with what used to be State monopolies -- but over time they became enmeshed in an ever-denser legal and regulatory web. More opportunities appeared on one side of the ledger, but more rules on the other. For a while, this trade-off was tolerable: the private sector’s capacity to create money through the fractional-reserve banking system made regulatory burdens manageable, and, in any case, many of these interventions, whatever their intent, tended to protect, even strengthen, the market position of incumbents.
2. 自由主義的理想與破產
6
Beautifully and coherently, this project of liberalization could now be taken global. If individuals and companies were to operate freely at home, why not also abroad? Free trade had a long and respected intellectual lineage, had flourished a century earlier, and promised mutual benefit to both sides of every exchange -- importers and exporters, consumers and producers alike. It also appealed to those whose moral calculus was shaped by concern for the world’s poor, for free trade seemed uniquely effective at raising global welfare even if it could cause some dislocation at home. For a time, it could be a zero-downside project that united economic reason with moral virtue.
7
Yet liberalization required rules. To sustain global commerce, trading standards had to be defined and enforced by national and international regulatory institutions, each backed by state authority. In this way, the regulatory state expanded even as markets were freed. Combined with the rise of the personal computer, the idea of the State as a vast, ultra-sophisticated computer -- able to monitor, analyse, and orchestrate thousands of activities across the globe -- became eminently plausible. What could such a machine not do? As the Soviet model of organization collapsed and China’s apparent embrace of liberalization gathered pace, optimism -- sometimes super-optimism -- seemed entirely reasonable, even amid stock-market crashes and acts of terror. The State as Computer, it was thought, could make everyone rich and happy.
8
There was another feature of the State-as-Computer that made it so attractive and its prospects so promising: everyone could believe they were equal and would be treated equally. A computer, after all, does not distinguish between you and me; it simply reads inputs and produces outputs according to its code. As long as everyone was entered into the machine in the same way, regardless of circumstance, the State would deliver fair and reasonable decisions. Nor was it necessary to know much about the countless sub-computers and the people operating them -- there were still many, for such a vast system of centralized rule-making, information management, and decision-making demands enormous resources -- as long as one could trust that the overall machine was properly coded and competently run. And by the early 2000s, who was seriously inclined to doubt that it was?
3. 席彌特的「唯權力論」政治哲學
9
And then the Great Financial Crisis happened.
If the post-war State had become a computer, perhaps Carl Schmitt was the thinker who best understood its limits.
Schmitt, the German legal and political theorist, has enjoyed a modest renaissance among English readers over the past quarter-century. His style, by the standards of early twentieth-century German academic prose, is relatively clear. That he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and remained antisemitic throughout his life is well known, but it seems to weigh little on his current reputation. Although never exonerated after the war, he was released without charge by the Allies on the grounds that his role in the Reich had been minor. Once the leading German political thinker of the interwar years, Schmitt had by 1936 already fallen out of favor with the regime -- by some accounts, only Hermann Göring’s intervention spared him a harsher, perhaps fatal, reckoning. However, soon he could resume his writing and lecture tours. The main consequence of his brief post-war internment was the sale of his library: the books had been seized by US Army Counterintelligence and later returned, though marked with U.S. occupation requisition stamps – a treatment Schmitt regarded as expropriation. He therefore sold them.
10
Schmitt’s initial revival coincided with the debate over how America should respond to the attacks of 9/11, and over the scope and limits of executive authority. A great admirer of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt argued in his 1932 The Concept of the Political that politics depends on a distinction between friend and enemy: a boundary of exclusion that recognizes conflict as an essential, identity-forming feature of political life (a view shared by Machiavelli in some form). For Schmitt, this friend–enemy opposition was primarily domestic and, in principle, peaceful -- an acknowledgement of difference rather than a call to annihilation, since the “enemy” was still understood as fully human, merely an opponent. Yet the concept lent itself to international application, and it resurfaced prominently during the “war on terror,” when the very humanity of the enemy was sometimes brought into question.
11
Schmitt’s renewed popularity in this century also owes much to his scepticism about liberalism. He regarded liberal constitutionalism -- a discursive political order built on the belief that detailed, prescriptive laws can apply equally to all, including the institutions of the state -- as romantic nonsense. As he put it in The Concept of the Political:
Liberalism […] has neither advanced a positive theory of state nor on its own discovered how to reform the state, but has attempted only to tie the political to the ethical and to subjugate it to economics. It has produced a doctrine of the separation and balance of powers, i.e. a system of checks and controls of state and government. This cannot be characterized as either a theory of state or a basic political principle.
12
Schmitt therefore dismissed those who devoted their lives to constructing an “objective theory of law” without designating those whom the law authorizes to enforce it. For Schmitt, effective political action required decisions, not endless debate. No system of rules could anticipate every contingency. True power -- true sovereignty -- was revealed in the exceptions to those rules, in the unpredictable events that demanded an individual response. Hence his famous postulate in Political Theology, written in 1922: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” a modus operandi brought to life by the frequent use of the exceptional powers granted to the President of the German Reich under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution.
13
In other words, it was futile to construct a theory of sovereignty -- a theory of the state -- upon abstract laws without reference to real people: “Sovereignty of law means only the sovereignty of men who draw up and administer this law.” Politics, for Schmitt, is made by people, not by the fictions of legal personality. The sovereign is a real individual who decides, and in doing so, embodies the state itself. The liberal faith that politics can be reduced to government by algorithm, as we might say today, is precisely what Schmitt sought to expose as an illusion at the heart of modern liberalism.
14
This is also an apt diagnosis of the crisis of legitimacy that has plagued many Western states since the Great Financial Crisis -- Britain foremost among them. That crisis exposed the failure of the post-war model of the State as Computer. Centralised, formulaic, impersonal, and legalistic, the Computer could not cope with the complexity, ingenuity, and diversity of human life. Events since have only deepened the problem, as the State doubled down on its program -- intensifying regulatory and legal interventions in an effort to repair and optimize the software without ever reconsidering the hardware. Other factors have been at play, in particular the comprehensive destruction of the old centralized system of production and consumption of news and information. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that efforts to mend a dysfunctional machine have failed to halt the erosion of trust in the institutions of the State.
4. 「萬能政府」 -- 神話與真相
15
Schmitt’s own life illustrates the flaw in his theory and the danger of conflating the sovereign with a person -- if you back the wrong person, you can be in real trouble very quickly. His focus on decisiveness also led him to abandon any belief in the desirability of a pluralistic democracy: too much debate with no action. Invariably, he ended up with a system of government consisting of one person. It was probably the inevitable intellectual destination of an intelligent, highly conservative and also very Catholic German who somewhat enviously looked at the singular source of power -- sovereignty -- in the Holy Church. In this view, autonomy within the law rests with the state alone. Individual autonomy has no real place here. Hegel wins, Kant loses. Embedded in this view is a distinctly reactionary preference for an authoritarian order that today many will describe as “realist”. It is certainly very undemocratic. It also carries a kind of epistemological hubris -- confidence that the “dictator” would not merely make decisions but make the right ones. In the later Schmitt there is, pace Hobbes, a sense that whatever decisions the leader makes are rendered “right” by the very fact of their occurrence -- what he called the “normative power of the factual” in Political Theology.
16
It is clearly unwise to personalize the State too much. We do not want to be ruled by Kings, and we prefer State actions to be constrained by fundamental rules because our conviction -- surely the correct one -- is that individuals, and their right to be left alone, rank prior to any rights of the State. The institutional architecture of modern states, therefore, combines checks and balances with focal centers of power – a necessarily intricate jigsaw that, in the United States, Donald Trump is currently trying to pull apart. But Schmitt also reminds us that too little personalization of the State can be equally problematic: government by algorithm risks being both ineffective and dehumanizing. A State without humans is inhuman and, in the long run, unlikely to endure. How can this be achieved without ending up with a king?
17
When I listen to critics of the “dysfunctional British state,” I’m often struck by their confidence in the very structure they condemn. They seem to believe that, if only different people -- better civil servants, smarter politicians, perhaps themselves -- were in charge, the ship could be steered back on course. Instead, they find themselves surrounded by enemies and a “hostile state.” This, then, situates Schmitt’s “exception” squarely in the present, providing a rationale for increasingly drastic, unitary, quasi- dictatorial interventions that not only suspend many constitutional arrangements but also centralize an already extremely centralized State -- culminating in the cushioned office of one person from which executive orders spill out like ticker tape. This series of decisive actions is then to endow people with that longed-for “sense of purpose”, all via the great leader… One suspects these people may have read rather too much Carl Schmitt. The same can probably be said of those Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs who are reinventing themselves as political philosophers.
5. 結論 -- 浴火重生之路
18
Surely, the better path is to reconfigure the original Computer that has been the cause of so many of the problems that are still afflicting the modern state, and in particular the British State. The United Kingdom requires not more central control but less: a radical redistribution of authority to reduce the distance between the people operating the computer and those operated by it, making the State more personal, more immediate, more responsive as a result. The dysfunction, if that’s what it is, stems from the concentration of fiscal and administrative power in Whitehall and the myth that a handful of mandarins and ministers can steer a society of 70 million through complex global currents. If legalistic ultra-centralization has been the problem, how can it also be the solution? Reform should begin by decentralizing decision-making, funding, and accountability -- granting smaller “mini-states” genuine fiscal autonomy and allowing experimentation in service provision, regulation, and taxation. The task of the center -- call it the “maxi-state” -- should be to provide reinsurance capital to these mini-states and manage certain extreme risks and investment programs that most likely benefit from the economies of scale of a centralized organization.
19
Decentralization of this kind would require a reconfiguration of Parliament to make it more legitimate and more representative. This can be achieved by making the House of Commons the sole chamber -- will anyone really mourn the passing of the House of Lords? -- and by introducing an electoral system that combines first-past-the-post and proportional systems, giving each citizen in effect two votes, one as residents of a “mini-state,” one as citizens of the United Kingdom, the “maxi-state.”
20
Alongside these structural reforms, the British State should reconsider its essential purpose -- and focus on doing a few things really well: building a world-class education system, an integrated health & social care insurance framework, and a national investment initiative forming the basis of an expanded retirement program, all supported by more hypothecated funding. Centralized regulation by computer should give way to more bespoke self-insurance structures in which firms take over primary regulatory responsibilities and are on the hook via industry-wide mutual guarantee schemes. The banking system, after the abolition of State-backed deposit insurance, would be an obvious candidate for this.
21
This State would be smaller yet more legitimate, with power more decentralized but also more personal. Decisions could be made at many levels rather than in a single centre. Schmitt need not worry: decisive sovereignty would persist, only in plural form and many layers. There is every reason to believe that such a State could be highly effective -- and numerous examples, Switzerland among them, show that it already is.
22
When we look back at the history of the (Western) world since 1945, we see that a system of governance that worked well for a time gradually ceased to do so. This should not be too surprising -- complex systems are, well, complex, and to remain effective they must keep pace with the ever-evolving complexity of their environment. That is no easy task, and probably an impossible one for social organizations such as the State. But a need for reform, even radical change, does not mean that the end of the world is at hand. Critics of liberalism often engage in a kind of competitive gloomerism. John Gray wrote in The New Statesman recently: “If what Hobbes called ‘commodious living’ cannot be reinvented by a strong state, our future will be a war of all against all, fought out not between individuals but identity groups -- a life that might not be solitary or necessarily short, but will be nasty, brutish and certainly poor.” Yet what is to be done? Too often these critics stop short of that essential question – why go beyond Hobbes’ famous and beguiling line? It carries a certain aesthetic of destruction that is undeniably appealing, but not constructive.
23
History, however, offers many examples of radical state transformation achieved in times of peace: Norway after 1814, Japan after 1868, Turkey after 1923, Singapore in the mid-1960s, Greece and Iceland more recently. Reprogramming the State’s hardware is no small task -- but unlike the old Computer, this one might have more human, and more humane, features. And it is achievable without being preceded by a war of all against all.
Andreas Wesemann is the author of After the Leviathan: A vision for a Future State. His previous books include Chronicle of a Downfall and The Abolition of Deposit Insurance.
Related Posts:
Hegel vs Marx: Ideas change the world not economics
How Mahler's symphonies reclaim Nietzsche from the far right
Why giving up Truth could save democracy
The Future of Sex Robots
If we insist on growth, the cost will be autocracy By Onofrio Romano
Progress is humanity's worst idea By Samuel Miller McDonald
Related Videos:
The philosopher behind JD Vance: Curtis Yarvin vs Alastair Campbell
The future of the right
The life and philosophy of Nicola Sturgeon
Lessons for the left
The end of free trade and the new world economy With Isabel Woodford, Greg Hands, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Ben Chu, Mark Littlewood
How neoliberalism broke economics with Abby Innes
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
現實主義：國際關係理論簡介 - Daniel J. Mahoney
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
Aron, Raymond：阿宏(法語發音)，阿倫(英語發音)
Getting Real About Realism
A brief discussion regarding theories of international relations.
Daniel J. Mahoney, 10/12/23
Among both the intellectual and political conservative worlds there is widespread frustration with “forever wars,” or ideological crusades to promote “democracy,” and the danger of “an escalation to the extremes” (as Clausewitz famously put it) implicit in our undeclared war with Russia. There is opposition to the foreign policy of the Biden Administration and its aggressive spread of a woke imperium—where LGBTQIA+ ideology and support for abortion-on-demand are prerequisites for belonging to the newly redefined democratic world. One also finds strong opposition to the “conservative” promoters of aggressive American power projection. The old conservative establishment is under attack.
Neoconservatism, for example, once stood for a proud and principled defense of the American republic, tied to realism about the hard choices that had to be made in a dangerous and contentious world. No friends of utopian illusions, the original neoconservatives preferred authoritarian regimes in South Korea and South Vietnam to their implacable totalitarian opponents to the north, and the imperfect regime of an ally such as the Shah of Iran to the fanaticism and unalloyed anti-Americanism proffered by the Shah’s most influential critics. The first neoconservatives were thus sharply critical of Jimmy Carter-style human rights promotion as a tenet of American foreign policy.
But at the end of the Cold War, Irving Kristol, the neoconservative par excellence, even called for the abolition of NATO, whose goal of preserving Western liberty during a civilizational emergency had been admirably achieved. President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who intrepidly stood up to her country’s communist and Third-World enemies, called in Making War to Keep Peace for the United States to become a “normal country” by ceasing the effort to be a global hegemon or hyper-power. But a new generation of soi-disant “neoconservatives” continued to look abroad for dragons to slay. For them, any act of prudent restraint was immediately stigmatized as “appeasement.” They invoked “Munich 1938” as ritualistically as the neo-pacifist Left saw “another Vietnam” in any vigorous defense of America’s vital interests. Even the prostrate Russia of the nineties, wracked by economic collapse, lawlessness, and unprecedented levels of corruption, was seen as a permanent danger. “Eternal Russia,” and not communist totalitarianism, for them was the real foe in the Cold War.
After 9/11, the very real threat of Islamist extremism was said to justify a Third or Fourth World War, with “Islamofascism” taking the place of Nazism and Communism as the new primary ideological foe. By a sleight of hand, “democracy promotion” was militarized at the service of bringing human rights and “democratic peace” first to the Arab Islamic Middle East, and then the rest of the world. There was more than a whiff of utopianism (and messianism) in George W. Bush’s 2005 Second Inaugural Address, with its declaration and conviction that love of liberty was the dominant impulse of the human soul in every time and place. To suggest, as some did, that Monrovia and Baghdad were hardly good candidates for democratic transformation made one an unprincipled foreign policy “realist” (at best), or a racist (at worst). This giddy democratic euphoria did its best to pass for the face of conservatism in the post-communist world.
Meanwhile, democratic nation-building proceeded in an Afghanistan that barely resembled a modern nation, and NATO began moving inexorably to the east, a shift already begun under the Clinton Administration. After the ill-advised Russian intervention in South Ossetia in August 2008, the Bush Administration declared its intention to expand NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia. The thought that Russia had national interests of its own, and that it was the West that was moving east and not the other way around, was considered almost treasonous in elite foreign policy circles. In these circumstances, conservatives wary of “democratic triumphalism” began reconsidering the tradition of statecraft called foreign policy realism.
Meanwhile, neoconservatism radicalized even further, with many of its proponents promoting “progressive democracy” at home and abroad. The active encouragement and not-so-covert support for the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 against a corrupt but elected government tilted Ukrainian politics heavily against its Russophone population and in the direction of Russophobic Galician nationalists from Ukraine’s east, and set the stage for the disasters that followed. A delicate balance was undone. This reckless interventionism was promoted and defended by the likes of Bill Kristol, Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, John McCain, and of course Victoria Nuland, the left-neoconservative who did so much to shape American policy toward Russia and Ukraine then and now.
While many prudent conservatives were ready to reconsider the virtues of foreign policy realism, some prominent conservative voices and venues saw, and continue to see, any departure from unrelieved hostility to post-communist Russia and support for limitless expansion of NATO as a dangerous departure from “Reaganism.” They simply assume that Reagan, a principled anti-totalitarian, would see in an authoritarian but non-ideological Russia a “revolutionary” state (in Henry Kissinger’s words from A World Restored) that aimed to upend the entire international system. The facts, however, do not justify that judgment.
After February 2022, the Russians could have destroyed Kiev in two weeks as the Germans did to Warsaw in September 1939. They did not do so because their aim was never to conquer Ukraine tout court. Only by falsely identifying Putin with Alexander Dugin’s “Eurasianist” imperialism rooted in Heideggerian fascism, by defining him as a mixture of Hitler and Stalin, and by ignoring important features of the post-communist Russian state (especially its aversion to Leninism and communist ideology), could Russia, weak demographically and far from powerful militarily, be turned into the permanent enemy of the human race.
It is true that Putin’s Russia is less free than it used to be, though it is much freer than the old Soviet Union. And there is a growing atmosphere of brutality that does not bode well for the future of the country. Putin has stayed in power for too long, thus crowding out the kind of political life that exists even in a moderately authoritarian regime. But, despite all this, Russia is hardly a revolutionary state. For instance, she is well disposed to Israel. She has no interest in restoring an empire in the east of Europe to replace the old Warsaw Pact, but she does have a palpable interest in preventing a Ukraine with NATO troops and nuclear weapons on her borders. One is hardly an “apologist” for recognizing this elementary point.
I therefore largely welcome (“two cheers”) the realist turn in conservative thought about statecraft and foreign affairs. Realism has always been a corrective, often a necessary one, to legalistic, moralistic, and utopian illusions. But it should be remembered that realism as a theory leaves much to be desired. Realists simplify the motives of statesmen, seeing rationality at work only in the calculation of forces and the judicious balancing of power, militarily and otherwise. This is to foreshorten our understanding of politics and statesmanship. Raymond Aron noted in his 1961 classic Peace and War (a book that Leo Strauss judged the greatest 20th century work on the subject) that realists tended to treat power or power politics as both an end and a means of foreign policy, thus ignoring “glory” and “ideas” as legitimate “goals of foreign policy.” Realism has always been more prescriptive than descriptive, despite its scientific pretensions.
There are other difficulties. In his 1951 classic In Defense of the National Interest, Hans J. Morgenthau, the most influential of the classical realists, took aim at the idea that a radical change of regime could do much to change the “national interest” of countries such as France, Germany, and Russia. To Aron, this dogmatic insistence made no sense. To recognize that all political communities calculate forces and work to maintain a reasonable balance of power congruent to a nation’s interests does not mean “that national interest might, can, or should be defined apart from the internal regime, the aspirations characteristic of the different classes, the political ideal of the state: the collectivity does not always change objectives when it changes its constitution, historical idea, or ruling elite. But how can the political units maintain, through revolutions, the same ambitions, and the same methods?”
Later in the same work, Aron wisely writes that “true realism…consists in recognizing the action of ideologies upon diplomatic-strategic-conduct. In our epoch, instead of repeating that all states, no matter what their institutions, have ‘the same kind of foreign policy,’ we should insist upon the truth that is more complementary than contradictory: no one understands the diplomatic strategy of a state if it does not understand its regime, if he has not studied the philosophy of those who govern it. To lay down as a rule that the heads of the Bolshevik party conceive the national interests of their state as did all other rulers of Russia is to doom oneself to misunderstanding the practices and ambitions of the Soviet Union.” Likewise, to see Russia today as a neo-Bolshevik state (in a country where Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public schools) or that “eternal Russia” is inevitably despotic, expansionist, and a sworn enemy of the civilized world, is to substitute ideology for the concrete study of diplomatic-strategic conduct. By separate but converging paths, both the old realism and the new neoconservatism obscure reality in the name of holding on to old antipathies and misplaced theoretical categories. Both obscure far more than they reveal.
What of the newer school of academic “structural realists”? Alas, their account of statecraft and state behavior is even more abstract and reified than the “realism” of Morgenthau’s type. They are not interested in the motives—generous, self-seeking, grasping, or measured—that constitute a (more or less) unchanging human nature,as even the old realists were. The nature of regimes—their ends and purposes, their animating principles—are of no interest to them. Domestic structure, as Kissinger called it, is for them arbitrarily separated from the conduct of foreign policy. In their new book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato identify rationality with a single-minded attentiveness to the “structural” relations that define international relations. But is any real statesman or diplomat concerned with “structural forces” alone? Because of this strained foreign policy rationalism devoid of all ethical criteria, Mearsheimer and Rosato find rationality at work in Japan’s imperialist quest for economic autarky in the late 1930s, in Hitler Germany’s aggressive efforts to rebuff Soviet Russia and the Western democracies to its east and west, and even in the French political class’s lame response to the German threat post-Munich! Even Neville Chamberlain, for a time, is neatly placed in the camp of the structural realists.
This is all terribly strained and finally incredible. Mearsheimer and Rosato convey little of the arrogance, brutality, and racism that led to the Rape of Nanking in 1937, the ideological fanaticism that informed Nazi foreign policy deliberations from 1933 on, or the decadence and defeatism that contributed to France’s summary collapse and dishonorable choice for an armistice in June 1940. This approach is, strictly speaking, unbelievable. One can add that Mearsheimer’s truncated criteria for “realism”—centered exclusively on “structural” considerations like the balls darting around in a billiard game—cannot fathom why Americans might care deeply about the fate of Israel in a particularly treacherous part of the world. For structural realists, Israel is just too small and too vulnerable to be of true geopolitical signifance.
Yet Mearsheimer gets one thing right: his single-minded attention to structural relations allows him to discern that Ukraine’s entry into NATO was a red line for the entire Russian political elite, including the liberal and anti-Putin opposition. American ambassador William Burns made clear in a memorandum from 2008, quoted in How States Think, that he could find no responsible person in Russia “who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests…I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.” The structural realists get the big picture wrong. But freed as they are from the post-political moralism of contemporary Western elites, they are still able to recognize rock-bottom national interests that would be non-negotiable for any political community. That is not everything, but it is something.
Let us give the final word to the wise and discerning Raymond Aron. Like realists old and new, he was suspicious of abstract moralism in foreign policy. In Peace and War, he took aim at the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 which vainly attempted to outlaw war once and for all. Aron acerbically wrote about this effort that, “Anyone imagining he was guaranteeing peace by outlawing war was like a doctor imagining he was curing diseases by declaring them contrary to the aspirations of humanity.” An anti-totalitarian thinker of the first order, Aron was sensitive to the inescapable moral dimensions of the Cold War while opposing a crusading spirit in foreign policy. Rather than calling himself a realist, which came with a crusading spirit of its own, Aron defended a “morality of prudence” against a unilateral “morality of struggle”—which was in truth a false realism—and a “morality of law” that too readily collapsed into utopia. The morality of prudence that he advocated and embodied does not eschew high principle, nor does it ignore that a statesman has a moral and political obligation to calculate forces for the sake of the freedom and independence of his country and the cause of civilization. But, Aron added, this complex morality of prudence “satisfies completely neither the moralists nor the vulgar disciples of Machiavelli.” Here we see an approach that can get us beyond the sterile opposition between realism and idealism, and that can look at statecraft from the perspective of the responsible statesman.
In the concluding paragraphs of his other great work on international relations, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (1976 for the original French edition), Aron took “run-of-the-mill professors” to task for lacking “a sense of history and tragedy.” They go back and forth between bloodless realism and the Wilsonian “crusade for peace,” with many even succumbing to the “great illusion” that men and states could once and for all say “goodbye to arms.” Aron strikingly concluded that “as a Frenchmen of Jewish origin,” he could never “forget that France owes her liberation to the strength of her allies and Israel owes her existence to arms and the chance of survival to her resolution, and, if need be, to American willingness to fight?”
Now, that is true realism, indeed.
Daniel J. Mahoney is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written widely on French politics and political thought and has also written extensively on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the moral grounds of opposition to totalitarianism. His latest books are The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation and Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton.
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
習近平其實笑得出來 -- C. Lau
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
或許，在爾虞我詐，風雲詭譎，面前喊領導、背後捅刀子的共產黨權力鬥爭世界，擺出凜然不苟言笑的模樣，才是生存之道。看來，「臉部肌肉控制」也是「統御領導」這門學問的必修課程之一。
The White House has shared images of Xi Jinping that most Chinese don’t see at home
Chris Lau, CNN, 11/04/25
Xi Jinping is not known for his easy smiles. China’s most powerful Communist leader in decades has built a reputation reinforced by state media during his 12-year rule as a serious and steady hand.
But images released by the White House show a different side of Xi – and one not apparent in images published at home.
Xi attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea, where he met US President Donald Trump for a bilateral meeting at Gimhae Air Base in Busan.
All eyes were on how the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies would sort out their differences on a range of topics from soybeans and fentanyl to rare earth minerals and high-end computer chips.
But aside from the hard-hitting diplomacy, photographs released by the White House captured a rare candid moment between the two leaders.
In a room filled with suited diplomats, Trump was seen in one image with his arm stretched across the negotiation table to show Xi a piece of paper. Whatever was written or printed on the paper remains unknown.
In another image, the Chinese leader appears to grin with his eyes shut, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi laughing by his side. It’s unclear if the images were arranged in chronological order.
Two days later, Xi was caught on camera cracking a joke when he exchanged gifts with South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung, according to a Reuters video.
Lee first presented Xi with a wooden board for the chess game Go. Then, the Chinese leader gave Lee and his wife two China-made Xiaomi phones, which an official said came with displays made in South Korea, home to electronic giants Samsung and LG.
Lee then jokingly asked: “How is the communication security?” drawing laughter from the room.
Xi, who was also laughing at this point, replied: “You can check if there’s a backdoor.”
A backdoor risk refers to a hidden method of accessing a users’ device without them knowing. The issue has prompted a raft of allegations between China and other countries.
Beijing has recently expressed concerns over a US proposal to have advanced chips sold abroad fitted with tracking, a suggestion that prompted US chipmaker Nvidia to say its chips had no “backdoors.” Meanwhile, numerous Western countries have raised cybersecurity concerns regarding certain China-made devices.
The two off-the-cuff moments from Xi contrast with his carefully crafted image at home, where he was recently shown presiding over a military parade in a Mao suit, an outfit associated with Mao Zedong, Communist China’s founding father.
Before his meeting with Trump, he chaired a party plenum, delivering speeches in a stoic demonstration of his tight control over China’s political apparatus.
Not all Chinese leaders projected such a tightly constructed image.
Xi’s predecessor Jiang Zemin, who served as president between 1993 and 2003, was known for his flamboyant personality, cosmopolitan flair and willingness to show off his language skills and interact with journalists.
However, Xi has charted a different course. Along with curbing freedom of expression in China, he has maintained strict control of his image and the flow of information. Elite politics has become so opaque under his rule that pundits look for any clue for China’s direction – from parsing Xi’s words for their real meaning to assessing the color of his hair.
Xi’s more relaxed international appearances in South Korea barely made it to China’s tightly controlled internet. Censors often remove any coverage of Xi that deviates from the official narrative in the country, where most Western news websites and social media platforms are banned.
Footage and images showing Xi’s light-hearted exchanges with his US and South Korean counterparts were nowhere to be found on two of the country’s most popular social media platforms: Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, and Xiaohongshu.
A few posts by Chinese-language news outlets based outside of China that reported Xi’s gift exchange with South Korea’s Lee were available on X-like platform Weibo.
The posts only displayed a few users’ comments despite hundreds of messages. Among the reactions that survived, one user posted a thumbs up emoji and another left a smiling face.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
韋伯的「行事原則」淺談
|
|
|
推薦2 |
|
|
|
0. 前言
韋伯的《論以政治為志業》被視為政治學中的經典之作(Weber 1920, 下稱《志業》)。他在這篇演講中所提出的兩種「行事原則」，在倫理學和政治學領域都引起相當廣泛的討論。它們不但是分析實際政治活動的工具或「理論模型」，也是重要的實踐依據。我不揣簡陋，試著詮釋和分析韋伯在這篇演講中提出的「信念原則」和「責任原則」。
本文內容分為兩部分：
1) 根據韋伯講詞的脈絡，詮釋上述兩種「行事原則」；
2) 討論韋伯何以認為政治人需兼守這兩種「行事原則」。
既稱「詮釋」，自然難有定論或(相對)普遍的共識，更無所謂(絕對的)「對」或「錯」(胡卜凱 2007, 2004a)。我的詮釋自然只是許許多多對這篇演講有興趣者看法中的一種。但只要是公共領域的「論述」，就要接受公評、公論、和「是否『說得通』？」的檢驗(胡卜凱 2004b)。
我所接受的基本假設以及我採取的立場，制約和限制我的思考模式，從而制約和限制我對事物和別人思想的了解、解讀、以及根據它們而形成的意見和/或態度。因此，我歡迎「就事論事」或「言之成理」的賜教和討論，以求切磋琢磨和學習成長的功效。
我不怎麼懂德文，以下討論和所使用的相關中文詞彙，除了少數關鍵字外，幾乎全部對應於Gerth和Mills的英譯(下稱GM)。下文中的《志業》、「講詞」、或「韋伯講詞」如果指文字脈絡，以他們兩位的英譯為根據；不是指韋伯的原文。以下引號中《志業》的文字，是我根據GM所做的翻譯。如果有誤解、誤譯、或不夠信、達之處，歡迎指正。我註明了引用文字在《學術與政治：韋伯選集(1)》(錢永祥編譯)中相對應的頁數，有興趣的網友可進一步對照參考。
1. 韋伯的「行事原則」
韋伯在《志業》這篇演講中，提出兩種「行事原則」(1)：
1) 以「信念」或「(最高)理想」為決策和/或行動的考量依據；我翻譯成「信念原則」或「理想原則」。
2) 以「責任」或「實務」為決策和/或行動的考量依據；我翻譯成「責任原則」或「實務原則」。
此處「原則」一詞也可以用「準則」或「風格」來代替。
如果一個人參與政治的主要動力是她/他的信念或理念，我們可以稱她/他為「信念型」或「理想型」政治人；如果一個人參與政治的主要動力人是她/他試圖推動某些政策或某些行動的成果，和/或這些政策以及行動可能導致的影響，我們可以稱她/他為「責任型」或「實務型」政治人。對政治人物做「理論模型」式的分類，是韋伯這對概念的應用之一。
1.1 正名
韋伯這篇講詞的中文翻譯裏，一般學者通常使用「倫理」一詞來表達我以上使用的「行事原則」。
在韋伯原文中，這兩個「行事原則」的德文分別是Gesinnungsethik和Verantwortungsethik。前者(至少)有三種不同的英譯，以及相對應的中譯：
an ethic of conviction(信念倫理)、an ethic of intention(意圖倫理)、以及an ethic of ultimate ends (理想倫理或最高理想倫理)；
後者則幾乎被一致譯為 an ethic of responsibility (責任倫理)。
我選擇使用「行事原則」來表達ethic；以「信念」(或「理想」)來表達conviction或ultimate ends。以下對我使用這兩個詞彙的理由及根據做個說明。
1) 「行事原則」vs「倫理」
我用「行事原則」來表達韋伯講詞英譯中的”maxim”和”ethic”兩個字。如上所述，它們也可以翻譯成「行事準則」或「行事風格」。我自信這三個詞至少都合乎嚴復先生標舉的「信」、「達」兩個原則。maxim這個字(「指號」)也有「格言」或「座右銘」的意思，但在韋伯講詞的脈絡中，它的「所指」是「原則」或「準則」。讀了該文的人應該都能同意，不用多做解釋。
我不用「倫理」來翻譯ethic一字，則基於以下的考量：
「倫理」，尤其在傳統的中文用法裏，不只是一種「規範」，它也是「社會規範」(2)。換句話說，「規範」蘊含人人「應該」遵守，和每個人「應該」時時遵守。如上所述，韋伯並沒有把這兩個「行事原則」當作「(行事)規範」的意思。否則，他不可能在註1所引用講詞中，說兩者「截然不同」和「無法調和」(3)。如果兩者都是行為的「規範」，則它們之間不可能有這兩種關係。這也是他明白指出兩者之間的選擇，要看各人的「世界觀」來決定的原因(4)。
韋伯在這篇講詞中，把政治人的種種「行事」方式或原則歸納成兩大類。由於他強調「研究學問不應該涉及『價值判斷』。」，(我認為)講詞中的”ethically oriented conduct”，相當於logically oriented conduct (或conduct with some kind of logic)。或者說，一個人在決定採取那一個行動過程中，有她/他所根據的「邏輯」。「邏輯」一詞在此指「思考脈絡」或「思考模式」。這是我認為「原則」、「準則」、或「風格」比「倫理」來得「信」、「達」的原因。這兩個(行事)「原則」是或不是「倫理」、「規範」、或「道德」，視各人的「價值觀」來決定。
韋伯在講詞中並沒有把「信念」當成一個值得遵守的「行事原則」，他在大部份的文字中，給予「信念」這個概念相當負面的評鑑(5)。直到講詞最後，他才把「信念原則」提升到具有「正面意義」的地位(6)。我會在第2.2節進一步討論這個議題。
同樣的，韋伯也沒有把「責任原則」或「實務原則」當成中文的「規範」。他肯定這個「原則」完全是基於「效益理性」的考量(7)。
相對於時下「政治倫理」和「企業倫理」之類的用法，maxim或ethic譯為「倫理」大概也可以接受。但我們必須了解，台灣社會所謂的「政治倫理」，指的是任命官員時講「輩份」；所謂的「企業倫理」，指的是職務升遷時講「年資」。在競爭激烈從而以能力掛帥的今天，(我認為)這種「倫理」其實是一種「陋習」。「倫理」在以上兩詞的「用法」，和「『義務論』以及『德性論』等是『倫理』學中的理論。」這句話裏的「倫理」一詞，在意涵上有段距離，甚至風馬牛不相及(8)。其實它的「用法」正相當於我說的「行事原則」。我認為將maxim或ethic譯為「倫理」，除了沒有表達韋伯的意思外，也會誤導讀者。
最重要的是，(我認為或堅持)我們必須根據「行動」本身和/或「行動」後果，來判斷一個人(行動)所根據的「邏輯」是或不是具有正面的意義或價值。我們不可能事前認定一個人所根據的「行事原則」是或不是具有「倫理」的性質或身分(9)。例如，一個人為了追求自己的理想而造成民眾血流成河，我們還能說他/她根據的是「存心『倫理』」、「心志『倫理』」、或「信念『倫理』」嗎(10)？
以上是我認為「倫理」一詞不適合拿來翻譯an ethic of ultimate ends和an ethic of responsibility這兩個概念中ethic一字或其複數形式ethics的「論點」。
2) 「信念」或「理想」vs「存心」或「心志」
「信念原則」或「理想原則」的德文和英譯已如上述。從講詞看來，我認為an ethic of intention不夠信、達；GM的譯文相當流暢(附註12)，但他們將Gesinnungsethik譯為an ethic of ultimate ends，則不免過度引申。(我相信) an ethic of conviction比較近於韋伯Gesinnungsethik一字的意旨，也就比較符合信、達、雅的要求。conviction和ultimate ends在韋伯講詞的脈絡，都可以用我選擇的「信念」或「理想」來表達。
何以我認為an ethic of intention不夠信、達？我舉一個例子來幫助說明我的意思。
promise和commitment的差異，大概跟intention和conviction之間的差異是同一個性質或類型。promise是「答應」。它表示：答應者(在答應當時)有做某件事的意願。她/他會不會實際去做；或她/他實際上做不做得到；要看(此人試圖落實此「答應」時的)客觀因素而定；它也要看答應者(試圖落實此「答應」時的)臨場情緒或情感而定。
commitment則表示答應者經過深思熟慮，或至少考慮過可預見的困難，然後決定(自己將努力)克服這些可預見的種種主、客觀因素，來完成自己所答應的事(13)。
我認為，intention和promise一樣，屬於「起意動念」的階段或層次；conviction則和commitment一樣，屬於經過「考慮」各種「選項」的過程後，到達「做了付諸實踐的『決定』。」這個階段或層次。
從韋伯講詞看，他用Gesinnung這個字時，指的是第二個層次的意涵。這也是我選擇「『行事』原則」而不用「倫理」的另一個考量。
intention是「意圖」、「企圖」、或「打算」的意思。既然intention的強度(和「所指」)不足以表達韋伯的意旨，這些中文詞彙在強度(和「所指」)上，自然也不符合韋伯講詞中德文Gesinnungsethik以及(英譯) an ethic of conviction或an ethic of ultimate ends中conviction或ultimate ends的用法。將Gesinnungsethik翻譯為「『意圖』倫理」，或接受an ethic of intention做為Gesinnungsethik的英譯，很可能表示(這樣做的)譯者或評論者沒有充分掌握(上一段所討論)韋伯的「意圖」。
我不清楚孟子用「心志」一詞的所指。我猜測他大概在談「志向」、「毅力」、或「性格」(即心理學上的「人格」)。這些概念並不相當於「信念」或「理想」(conviction或ultimate ends)。但它們是實踐或追求「信念」、「理想」等的基礎或條件。
「存心」一詞在日常生活中，如「存心不良」、「存心為善」、「存心害人」、或「心存不軌」等等用法，並不具備(我所了解)「心志」所蘊含(以上「志向」等三者)的意思。「存心」可以是短期(臨時起意)的「意識狀態」，它也是一個人行動的前提、基礎、或條件，但它的對象或內容不一定會表現在(實際的)行動上，即使它指「長期」的「意識狀態」，它並不具備「心志」所蘊含的「常態」或「習慣性」這些性質。因此，在邏輯、語意、和語用上，它自然都難以和「行事」(或「倫理」)建立直接的關係。
我認為以「心志」或「存心」來翻譯Gesinnungs，或接受an ethic of intention 為Gesinnungsethik的英譯，很可能是因為譯者或評論者沒有充分掌握韋伯的意旨。
我相信以上的說明合乎一般人對intention、「心志」、「存心」、和「意圖」等單字或詞彙的了解和用法。如果我的了解有侷限，或我思考有不周延的地方，歡迎賜教。
由於我對「倫理」這個概念所採取的立場(上一節的f)，以及此處對「存心」一詞的分析，加上韋伯在這篇講詞中明白的否定了信念或存心能給予手段以正當性(錢譯)。我認為：如果號稱「存心倫理學」一詞來自韋伯這篇演講，它是一個有爭議的概念。甚至於有些荒謬()。
根據以上我對韋伯這些關鍵概念的了解，以下就兩個「行事原則」分別提出我的詮釋。我有沒有誤解或誤判韋伯的意旨，需要接受公評和公論；歡迎賜教。
1.2 韋伯的「信念原則」
韋伯「信念原則」一詞中的「信念」包括四個不同層面的「所指」：
1) 根據基督教所產生的「信念」，這可從他至少四度引用《馬太福音》的文字看出()；
2) 根據其他宗教所產生的「信念」，這可從他引用佛教和印度教等教義看出()；
3) 根據其他各種意識型態所產生的「信念」，這可從他提及「斯巴達黨團成員」、「布爾雪維克黨人」、和「急進社會主義者」看出()。
4) 根據不同政客個人的「信念」，如他提及的「和平主義者」。
韋伯對「信念」或「理想」這個概念本身並沒有意見。他批判政治上「以『信念』為行事『原則』。」的原因在於：
a. 韋伯在這篇講詞一開始對對「政治」所做的界定：「政治以暴力來達到目的。」以及他認為「政治權力靠暴力來維持。」(14)
b. 一個政治人如果以「信念」為「行事原則」，她/他可能(至少)採取以下的行為模式：
b.-1 「只追求理想而不在意是否能達到這個理想。」(15)；
b.-2 「不計後果的追求理想。」(16)；
b.-3 「為達目的不擇手段。」(17) ；以及
b.-4 「拒絕採取某些有效但和(自己)『原則』不相容的手段。」(18)。
由於韋伯認為，堅持「以『信念』為行事『原則』。」的政治人物，很可能同時握有(國家)「暴力」，則b.-1到b.-3等三類以「信念」為行事原則的政治行為，很可能造成對公眾利益和/或福祉產生極大危害的「結果」；b.-4的政治行為則可能造成無法解決現實問題的後果。因此，韋伯在講詞這一部份一開始時，期期以為政治人物不應該「以『信念』」為「行事『原則』」。
1.3 韋伯的「責任原則」
一般人談到(政治)「責任」，通常有以下兩種意義：
1) 把需要做或應該做的事，做到公認的標準和預定的進度。
2) 當做不到需要做或應該做的事時，接受應該受到的處置，或離開(有權力處理該事務的)職位。
以韋伯講詞的脈絡及文字來看，在以上兩個通常的意義外，他進而強調「責任」的以下三種意義：
a. 在執行一個計畫或政策時，考慮或評估可能產生的後果，並預做防範；相當於現在「專案管理」的風險評估(20)。
b. 在可能產生後果的負面影響過大時，拒絕執行此計畫或政策(21)。
c. 必要時，一個政治人物要有勇氣採取不見容於世俗道德的措施，並面對其後果(22)。
要了解韋伯的「責任原則」或「實務原則」，我們需要考慮韋伯另外兩個大家熟知的概念。
a) 「效益理性」(或「工具理性」)；
b) 「學術研究不應該涉及價值判斷。」或簡稱「不涉及價值判斷」(或譯為「價值中立」)。
我對前者的詮釋是：
人們要達到目的，必須採取一些行動或作為，行動必須使用資源。由於「資源」有限，一個政府官員在考慮行動所造成的後果之外，也必須考慮這個或那個行動的效益。
至於後者，由於任何研究都涉及一些研究者的個人立場和基本假設，「不涉及價值判斷」的意思並不是說：
韋伯主張不講「道德」或他不在意「道德」。
這個命題在韋伯著作中指：
在選擇議題、取捨證據、思考推論、和形成結論等等的過程中，研究者的判準「不應該」涉及他/她個人的價值取向。
這個命題相當於我們常說的「就事論事」或「實事求是」(methodology)。
這篇講詞中所説的「責任原則」，可說是把「效益理性」和「不涉及價值判斷」這兩個概念應用到政治行為領域：
在不違反公認或約定俗成的「社會(道德)規範」這個前提下，政治人物選擇行動方案的判準，「只有」達成(既定)目標(或行動成果)的「效率」、「效能」、和/或「效益」；政治人物個人的(和/或某些特定群體的)原則、價值、或道德規範，在規劃公共事務時並非應該或需要考慮的事項。
如果我們接受孫中山先生認為：
政治是「管理眾人之事」的活動。
則韋伯肯定以「責任」為政治行為的行事原則這個觀點，當然更為理所當然。
1.4 韋伯對兩種「行事原則」的評論
1) 信念原則
(未完成)
2) 責任原則
(未完成)
1.5 何以(韋伯認為)這兩種行事原則「截然不同」和「無法調和」
(未完成)
2. 何以(韋伯認為)以「政治做為志業」的人需要兼守這兩種行事原則
我在上一小節討論了韋伯認為這兩種行事原則「截然不同」和「無法調和」的文字。但是韋伯在快要結束他這個演講前說：
「如果情況的確如此，『信念原則』和『責任原則』並不是絕對相反，而是相輔相成。只有當兩者合而為一時，一個人才可能成為大丈夫 – 一個有資格回應召喚的政治人(18)。」
這段話中的「情況」，指在它之前的一段文字，大意是說：
(未完成)
請參考原文或錢譯()。
「召喚」一詞本身有強烈的宗教意味。我雖然對韋伯生平不很熟悉，我認為他在這篇文章中用這個詞的「修辭」或激勵作用，多於它的宗教情懷。我相信韋伯對「召喚」一詞的用法，相當於我常常說的：
知識份子要有「任重道遠」的「胸襟」、「氣度」、或「格局」。
換句話說，「召喚」是個人對自己的期許，並不是回應外在或上帝的感召。韋伯「走出迷信」的說法，可以佐證我認為「召喚」一詞並不蘊含太多的「宗教情懷」這個詮釋。
這段話和1.5節中所討論的「截然不同」和「無法調和」相互矛盾嗎？我在下面略做分析。
2.1 兩種行事原則的關係
「信念原則」以「信念」掛帥；「責任原則」以「結果」掛帥。要分析兩種原則的關係，我想先就「結果」和「信念」的關係做個討論。
當我們考量「結果」或「效益理性」的時候，我們不是在真空、虛空、或象牙塔中考量，也不是做抽象或戲論式的考量。「結果」和「效益理性」兩者都預設某一個特定的「目的」(或「目標」，下同)。
「目的」指具體的、可量化的事務或情況；而「信念」(或「理想」)則是抽象的、一般性的事務或情況。「目的」和「信念」可能只有程度或境界上的差異。它們也許沒有「高貴」和「低下」的分別，但是，追求或執行「目的」和「信念」的結果，其利益和影響範圍則有個人性、群體(或集團)性、和社會性(大眾性)的區別。
「信念」(和「目的」，下同)具有時間性和局部性；但一個追求或執行「信念」行動的影響，往往具有長期性和廣汎性。因此，(我認為)「信念」並不總是能夠給予「手段」以「正當性」或「道德價值」。韋伯在這篇講詞中也論述了這個道理(錢譯)。也就是說，我不認為一個人可以用任何「手段」來達到一個所有人都接受的「信念」。在評估「手段」的「正當性」時，我們不能只考慮當下或個人(部份人)的「信念」。或許這也是韋伯在政治行為上對「信念」採取懷疑態度或至少保持某種距離和畫清某種界線的原因。當我們談論「結果」時，我們比較能夠具體、直接、和一翻兩瞪眼式的衡量以及評估它的影響與到底誰是受益者。
同樣的，「結果」、「手段」、或「工具理性」也都具有時間性和局部性。它們是否能被接受，以及是否具有「意義」或(任何)「價值」，也需要和整體的、長遠的「利益」，以及社會中多數人的福祉一併考量。在「整體」和「多數人」這類前提下，「實務」或「責任」往往可以昇華成為「信念」。例如，在做「系統分析」時，當最終「目的」不是一僦可及時，我們往往在達到最終「目的」的整個過程中，設定幾個階段性目標。前一個「階段性目標」可以看成是達到下一個「階段性目標」的「手段」。
由以上的分析我們可以看出，「結果」和「信念」並不是完全不相容的概念。從它們相通相容的地方，我們可以找到一位政治人需要兩者的基礎。
2.2 「信念」的功能
韋伯指出：激勵或驅動一個政治人努力、堅持、克服困難等等行為的力量來自她/他所選擇的「信念」或「目的」()。大多數人經過一番精打細算，往往會在現實考量下做出「妥協」或「放棄」的決定。一個成功或偉大的政治人，在於她/他不輕言妥協或放棄。也就是說，一個成功或偉大的政治人通常有一個支撐她/他面對險惡環境但仍然堅持奮鬥下去的「信念」或「目的」。我想這是韋伯不得不接受政治人必須要有一個「信念」或「目的」的原因。
2.3 責任和信念
「信念原則」提供一個政治人奮鬥的動力；「責任原則」則指導他/她必須解決人民生活上的問題。在堅持奮鬥和解決問題的雙重考量下，韋伯在同一場演講結束前修正或改變了自己先前的說法。難怪造成後人詮釋上的困難，至今沒有定論。我既無法替韋伯自圓其說，也想不出一個解釋這個近於自相矛盾行為的心理因素。以上討論只是我在推測他(當時)可能有的思想脈絡，以及指出政治人事實上需要兼具這兩個原則的理由。
2.3 比較研究 -- 中國經典中和韋伯兩種「行事原則」相近的文字
在中國典籍中，也有類似「信念原則」和「責任原則」的思路。以下各摘錄幾段文字做個代表。我們可以看出，在孔、孟思想中，也是兩者兼有或並重。
1) 「信念原則」
子貢欲去告朔之餼羊。
子曰：「賜也！爾愛其羊，我愛其禮。」(《論語 - 八佾第三》)
子曰：「君子喻於義，小人喻於利。」(《論語 - 里仁第四》)
子貢問「政」。
子曰：「足食，足兵，民信之矣。」
子貢曰：「必不得已而去，於斯三者何先？」
曰：「去兵。」
子貢曰：「必不得已而去，於斯二者何先？」
曰：「去食；自古皆有死；民無信不立。」(論語 - 顏淵第十二》)
子路宿於石門。
晨門曰：「奚自？」
子路曰：「自孔氏。」
曰：「是知其不可而為之者與？」(《論語 - 憲問第十四》)
孟子：「行一不義，殺一無辜而得天下不為也。」(《孟子 - 公孫丑上)
董仲舒：「正其誼不謀其利，明其道不計其功。」(《漢書 - 董仲舒傳》)
2) 「責任原則」
「兵者，國之大事。死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也。」(《孫子 – 始計第一》)
子謂顏淵曰：「用之則行，舍之則藏，惟我與爾有是夫。」
子路曰：「子行三軍，則誰與？」
子曰：「暴虎馮河，死而不悔者，吾不與也。必也臨事而懼，好謀而成者也。」(《論語 - 述而第七》)
子路曰：「桓公殺公子糾，召忽死之，管仲不死。」
曰：「未仁乎！」
子曰：「桓公九合諸侯，不以兵車，管仲之力也。如其仁！如其仁！」
子貢曰：「管仲非仁者與？桓公殺公子糾，不能死，又相之。」
子曰：「管仲相桓公，霸諸侯，一匡天下，民到於今受其賜。微管仲，吾其被髮左衽矣！豈若匹夫匹婦之為諒也，自經於溝瀆，而莫之知也！」(《論語 - 憲問第十四》)
齊宣王問曰：「湯放桀，武王伐紂，有諸？」
孟子對曰：「於傳有之。」
曰：「臣弒其君，可乎？」
曰：「賊仁者謂之賊，賊義者謂之殘，殘賊之人謂之一夫。聞誅一夫紂矣，未聞弒君也。」(《孟子 - 梁惠王下》)
3. 結論
我認為任何「政治行為」都必須考量實務和結果；而「信念」則是驅使政治人奮鬥的動力，也是指導行為方向的燈塔。因此，如韋伯所說，「責任」和「信念」之間並不是水火不容的關係，而是相輔相成的關係。在任何一個特定的情境，一個政治人必須要做一個適時、適境、和整體的考量。一個政治領袖的決定影響整個社會的人民，在決定行動時，他/她沒有執著於某個信念或原則的奢侈或餘地。
附註：
1. We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.'
2. 李明輝解釋倫理
3. 世界觀原文
4. 批判「信念」原文
5. 兩者兼具原文
6. 它(的「用法」)相當於「盜亦有『道』」一詞中「道」字的「用法」。如果翻譯成白話文，我們會說：「強盜也有他們的行事準則。」我相信85%以上的高中、職畢業生都不會認為「盜亦有『道』」指的是：「強盜也有『道德』。」或「強盜也講『倫理』。」
7. 行為動機和結果
8. 此所以笛卡爾強調「清楚明確」的概念；和我偶而會嘲笑台灣一些「學者」不認識字的原因。
9 “‘Gesinnungsethik’是一個非常難以妥當翻譯的字眼。在英譯中，有譯作‘ethic of ultimate ends’(終極目標的倫理)者(Gerth & mills)，有譯作‘ethic of conviction’(信念倫理)者(Bruun)，有譯作‘ethic of intention’(意圖倫理)者(Runciman & Matthews)，有譯作‘ethic of single-minded conviction’(專心致志的信念的倫理)者(Roth)。西島芳二、脅圭平的兩個日譯本皆作‘心情倫理’。Freund的法譯本則作‘ethique de conviction’(信念倫理)。在中文中，現存的譯法有三：李永熾先生根據日譯取‘心情倫理’、林毓生先生根據Runciman 與 Matthews作‘意圖倫理’”、高承恕先生則譯作‘信仰倫理’。……韋伯在區分‘心志倫理’與‘責任倫理’的時候，主要的著眼點，似乎是行爲本身的價值和行爲的可預見後果(後果不一定等於目的或意圖)之間的不同意義。若干德國學者曾經直稱‘責任倫理’爲‘後果倫理’(erfolgsethik)。前者屬於主觀的價值認定，主要涉及意圖或動機，後者則牽涉到客觀世界及環境中的現實運作。
至於‘Gesinnungsethik’一字，其字根是‘gesinnt’，泛指某種心態、心境、看法(用英文表示，就是如何如何disposed或minded)。我們非常勉強地用‘心志’一詞來譯‘Gesinnung’這個字，不用目前較爲通行的‘信念’或‘意圖’，用意即在於強調韋伯心目中主觀價值與客觀後果之間的對比。”(《韋伯作品集I：學術與政治》，錢永祥等譯，廣西師範大學出版社，2004年，第260－261頁。)
10. 解釋promise和intention的分別：I stayed single until I was 41. Along the way, I made a lot of promises and left a few broken hearts, but I never made a commitment until I met my wife.
11責任責任conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.
12 (待增補)
13 … in numerous instances the attainment of 'good' ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones -- and facing the possibility or even the probability of evil ramifications.
14.「只專注於堅持原則而不在意此原則是否適用於當下的現實。」conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends -- that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord'
15 If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil.
16 From no ethics in the world can it be concluded when and to what extent the ethically good purpose 'justifies' the ethically dangerous means and ramifications.
17 However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends -- that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord' – and ...
18 … In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man -- a man who can have the 'calling for politics.'
參考書籍和文章：
* Weber, M., The Net, TR., Gerth, H. H./Mills, C. W., Politics as a Vocation,
* 李明輝 網路1，《儒家政治哲學與責任倫理學》，http://www.confucianism.org.my/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=319&Itemid=40
* 李明輝 網路2，《存心倫理學、責任倫理學與儒家思想》，http://www.ceps.com.tw/ec/ecjnlarticleView.aspx?atliid=165222&issueiid=12088&jnliid=1452
* 林毓生 1982，《如何做個政治家? -- 為祝賀新生代臺北市評員當選而作》，《思想與人物》，頁405-6，聯經出版公司，台北
* 張爺 2009a，《誰說天下烏鴉一般黑》，https://city.udn.com/62607/3449397?cate_no=0&pno=1&tpno=1&f_ORDER_BY=#reply
* 張爺 2009b，《典範與聒噪》，https://city.udn.com/62607/3542070?tpno=0&cate_no=0
* 黃應全 網路1，《直線的道德觀與曲線的道德觀、天真的道德觀與成熟的道德觀 -- 重釋馬克斯·韋伯“心志倫理與責任倫理”說》，http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=9768
* 賴賢宗 網路1，《存心與規範奠基: 當代爭議中的康得存心倫理學》，http://web.ntpu.edu.tw/~shlai/phil/phil_doctor/phil_doctor.html
* 胡卜凱 2007，《「詮釋觀」 -- 詮釋系列之一》，https://city.udn.com/v1/city/forum/article.jsp?aid=2234990&tpno=0&no=2976&cate_no=0
* 胡卜凱 2004a，《「詮釋」和「後『現代』」》(尚未發表)
* 胡卜凱 2004b，《語言和論述 -- 對論述行為的建議》
* 韋伯 錢永祥編譯，《學術與政治：韋伯選集(1)》，
後記：
這篇文章是我2014年左右寫的，可能被其它臨時發生的事耽誤，所以沒有完成全文；請見未附序號的「附註」(空白())等處，以及「(未完成)」、「(待增補)」等段落。然後它就被放進「存檔」這個黑洞。最近因為此文提到「志業」一詞(該欄2025/10/22)，在搜尋檔案中的韋伯原文時，無意間找到它。從字數看，當年下了點工夫；雖不完整，或許仍有可參考之處。敝帚自珍，獻曝於此；尚請不吝賜教。 -- 2025/10/23
本文於 修改第 3 次
|
|
近代「『西方』概念」的起源 -- Max Skjönsberg
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
下文為書評：
The West: The History of an Idea 《「『西方』概念」：沿革》by Georgios Varouxakis；512 pages
The Origins of the West
Georgios Varouxakis re-examines when and why people began to conceptualize "the West."
Max Skjönsberg, 08/25/25
In The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis traces the modern idea of “the West” as a socio-political—rather than geographic—concept, and as the name for a political association based on cultural commonality. From 395 AD, “the West” could refer to the Western Roman Empire and later to the Catholic Church as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox Church. But the way we use “the West” today must be traced to the first half of the nineteenth century, argues Varouxakis in his learned book.
Varouxakis is an author with skin in the game. His preface places the book in an autobiographical context. Best known as a scholar of the thought of John Stuart Mill, Varouxakis was born on the island of Crete in Greece. He was seven years old when Turkey invaded Cyprus in July 1974, and his father was mobilized. While agreeing with the Greek prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, that Greece belonged to the West, Varouxakis’s grandfather had been born prior to Crete joining Greece in 1913, before which the island was an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, his grandfather referred to himself as “Roman,” which is what the Greeks within the Ottoman Empire called themselves, as they regarded themselves as the descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Varouxakis’s education was thoroughly Greek, the culture of his native Crete contained a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.
The question of whether Greece was Eastern or Western was critical to the story about the beginning of the meaning of “the West,” which Varouxakis traces to the early nineteenth century. In the process, he challenges a number of orthodoxies, and most importantly, the notion that the idea of “the West” emerged in the late nineteenth century in defense of European imperialism. On the contrary, he shows that the idea was first conceived as part of an anti-imperial program. Nor was the appearance of the concept related to the more explicit racial discourse of the period between 1890 and 1930. Instead, “the West” emerged and gained meaning in opposition to the rising threat from Russia in the east.
The Russian Threat
As Varouxakis demonstrates, “the West” was historically by no means identical to “Europe” or “Christendom,” and indeed emerged as an alternative when Russia appeared as a major European (and Christian) power under Peter the Great. Until the eighteenth century, the crucial distinction in Europe was between north and south, but the rise of Russia challenged this categorization, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with Russia being frequently described as an “Eastern” power. The need for a “Western” alliance against Russia became viewed as paramount.
Among eighteenth-century anticipations, Voltaire used the term Occident (West) rather than Europe to refer to what we would call Western civilization. But he did not conceptualize a West that excluded Russia, but rather understood Russia as a northern European power, as was common at the time. Indeed, Voltaire wrote a sympathetic history of Peter the Great and celebrated Russia’s advances.
In the early nineteenth century, Germaine de Staël promoted German culture in her De l’Allemagne (On Germany) in 1810, eventually inspiring Harvard graduates and other Americans to pursue doctoral studies at Berlin, Halle, Heidelberg, and Göttingen. In this work and elsewhere, Staël began to supplant the eighteenth-century North-South division with an East-West one. She was clear that Russians were in spirit Eastern, even if their courtiers might have acquired Western habits.
The East-West division was further promoted by Staël’s collaborator and lover Benjamin Constant. During the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire (1821–29), Constant argued in a pamphlet that the Greeks were Christians fighting against their Muslim conquerors. The struggle between East and West, for Constant, was one between civilization and semi-savagery. This meant that the Greek cause was the cause of the West (“La cause des Grecs est la nôtre”). But Constant and others remained convinced that the enfeebled Ottoman Empire was not the long-term Eastern challenge for the West. In this context, the abbé de Pradt suggested that Western Europe had to erect a federative system to be able to stand up to the might of Russia.
Auguste Comte
The French philosopher Auguste Comte is a crucial figure in Varouxakis’s history. Comte and his fellow Positivists wanted to form a “Western republic” that would abolish empire and conquest. Because of Russia, Comte found “Europe” to be too confusing for what he was describing (and prescribing). Varouxakis argues that Comte was the first political thinker to elaborate an explicit sociopolitical project based on the idea of “the West.” His project was based on the idea of abolishing empires and replacing them with a republic led by the five great Western nations: the French, Italian, Spanish, British, and German. His membership list was based on pre-Reformation, or Charlemagne’s Europe, and thus excluded Russia.
Comte is rarely read today, but he was a dominant intellectual figure in the nineteenth century. His motto was “order and progress,” which he viewed as two mutually supportive principles in opposition to revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. His many disciples were spread all over the world in the nineteenth century, and his motto can be found on the Brazilian flag (Ordem e Progresso), as the Brazilian republic was founded by Comtists in 1889.
The first systematic attempt to substitute “the West” for “Europe” in Britain was made by Comte’s British followers and their leader Richard Congreve, beginning with the volume on International Policy (1866). Congreve regarded Ottoman Turkey as more Western than Russia. Unlike Comte, who merely viewed the US as an offshoot of England, Congreve gave a great deal of attention to America. But he was convinced that it was the mass rather than the ideas of the US that made it weigh heavily in international affairs. In due course, however, America and Americans would play key roles in most narratives about “the West.”
America and the World Wars
For many Americans in the nineteenth century and beyond, “the West” meant the frontier, both geographically and, as Frederick Jackson Turner put it, “a phase of social organization.” The Anglo-American Encyclopædia Britannica had no entry for “the West” until 1929, and even then, it focused on the concept in its intra-American sense. But “Western civilization” had appeared nearly a century earlier, in Francis Lieber’s Encyclopædia, under an entry for “Woman.” Lieber, who was first known as Franz, as he spent the first decades of his life in Germany, also referred to “the West” in a lecture in Boston in 1829. But this was not his preferred terminology. Lieber went on to defend transatlantic Western unity and shared civilization under the heading of a term of his own coinage: Cis-Caucasian (all Caucasians did not belong to the West). Unsurprisingly, this term did not catch on.
Before, during, and after the First World War, German academics looked increasingly to the East. Meanwhile, the Great War played a key role in eventually bringing America into the Western alliance.
One of the first Americans to write widely about “the West” and “Western civilization” was the philosophically trained journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann, before “Western civ” courses became a staple at US elite universities. And Lippmann spoke of a “Western alliance” before the US had entered the Great War. In The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915), Lippmann contended that the appearance of a joint enemy tended to unite nations, enlarging the circle of fellow-feeling. More specifically, to meet the challenge of Japan, American isolationism was insufficient. Central to his scheme was that the “liberal powers of the West” must control sea power.
A heavily debated question in the wake of the First World War, which had wreaked havoc at the heart of Europe, was whether it had heralded the end of Western civilization. It was in this context that Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West (1918–22), in which he predicted that the dominance of Western culture was likely to be succeeded by Slavic. As Varouxakis shows, while Spengler’s book met with a negative reception from academics, its wider impact was immense.
Unsurprisingly, World War II stimulated plenty of discussion about Western civilization, especially after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and shattered the straightforward East-West dichotomy supported by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Lippmann interpreted the Second World War as a civil war within the Western world. In a famous lecture delivered in December 1940, he argued that the West had lost its democratic ethos because of educational decline in the last half-century and especially the neglect of Western culture. This was the culture which the Romans had inherited from the Greeks and passed on to the Church Fathers, and which had steadily expanded from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. It was the culture in which the Founding Fathers had been steeped. But modern education, Lippmann contended in 1940, was based on a denial of the religious and classical ideals of the Western world. The religious tradition of the West was particularly frowned upon, with disastrous consequences. Instead of seeing reason as the master of man’s appetite, it had been reduced to its servant. Moreover, Lippmann posited that a society could only be progressive if it conserved its tradition. “In developing knowledge men must collaborate with their ancestors,” he wrote in a Burkean fashion.
The Cold War
Though Russia was briefly incorporated into “the West” during World War II and its immediate aftermath, the Cold War changed that trajectory. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained in 1946 that it was “the Russian people and their army which saved Western civilization in the Second World War.” But many Westerners came to regard the Soviet Union as the greatest challenge to “the West.” The UK’s socialist foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, over dinner with the American secretary of state, George C. Marshall, spoke of the need for a “spiritual federation of the West.” As the Iron Curtain hardened, Bevin sought to strengthen the UK’s relationship with the “young, vigorous, democratic people” of the US.
In the early 1950s, the young Henry Kissinger, then a PhD candidate at Harvard, co-founded the “Harvard International Seminar,” whose mission he described as “create[ing] a nucle[us] of understanding of the true values of a democracy and of spiritual resistance to communism.” The people who attended the program included future presidents and world leaders.
Kissinger had written his undergraduate thesis on Arnold J. Toynbee (and Kant and Spengler). Toynbee, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, became highly fashionable in the US in the late 1940s, as an abridged version of the first six volumes of his A Study of History was published in 1947. After Truman asked Congress to approve funding to support Greece and Turkey against communist threats, Time magazine put a portrait of Toynbee on its cover along with a comment piece titled, “Our civilization is not doomed.” In the magazine, the former communist Whittaker Chambers implored the US to step up to the plate and fill the vacuum left by the decline of the British Empire. Ironically, however, Toynbee did not think highly of the US, and he believed that the Soviet Union had a powerful “spiritual” weapon in communism, as he argued in his 1952 Reith Lectures. This and other views made Toynbee a highly controversial figure in Britain.
A host of German-born thinkers wrote about Western civilization in Cold-War America, including Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Strauss was particularly concerned that historicist relativism had come to dominate the social sciences in “the West” and especially in the US. His student Allan Bloom targeted cultural relativism and nihilism in his best-selling Closing of the American Mind (1987).
Meanwhile, the Frenchman Raymond Aron offered a powerful liberal defense of “the West” in his seminal critique of the “leftist intellectual,” The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955): “The true Communist is the man who accepts the whole of the Soviet system in the terms dictated by the Party. The true ‘Westerner’ is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to criticize it and the chance it offers him to improve it.” In a similar vein, though ostensibly writing from a more conservative position, Allan Bloom argued that only Western nations, influenced by Greek philosophy, had the ability to be self-critical, whereas all other dominant cultures were ethno-centric, “think[ing] their way is the best way, and all others inferior.”
Bloom wrote against the backdrop of the self-criticism that had swept the young people of the Western world since the 1960s. But as liberal capitalism triumphed and communism faltered and ultimately failed, the key question thinkers increasingly asked was whether the West offered “a universalizable model for the whole world, or was it a distinct, unique, culture, that should look after itself and abandon universalist pretensions.” Samuel Huntington and his student Francis Fukuyama offered widely different answers. Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis made him famous, but it was controversial from the start and was challenged by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” For example, while Fukuyama had argued, in 1989, that Chinese expansionism had disappeared, Huntington retorted, also in 1989, that it had yet to appear. For Huntington, instead of exporting its values, “the West” had to learn to live alongside other, competing civilizations. Eight civilizations stood out for Huntington: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African. Most of these civilizations had little time for Western values such as democracy, constitutionalism, human rights, free markets, and separation between church and state. Rather than conflict, Huntington promoted co-existence and understanding of civilizational differences.
The West and Us
In the final chapters, Varouxakis considers how definitions and memberships of “the West” have once again been reconsidered in light of NATO’s expansion and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Here he demonstrates that some of the defining political questions of the present day, of the part of the West in the world, and particularly the role of the United States abroad, have a very long history indeed. It reflects the fact that this is not an antiquarian book but a must-read for anyone with an interest in current and world affairs.
The almost inevitable conclusion of a study as vast and wide-ranging as this one is that “the West” has meant different things to different people at different times. It is, as we like to say, an essentially contested concept. The book shows “the West” to have been a flexible and changing concept, and an immensely useful one in political and cultural debate. Yet, Varouxakis remains clear as to why “the West” has been so successful and resilient. As he points out, Comte chose the term “‘Occident’ [West] because of the historical, cultural, religious, and emotional baggage and associations that it carried.” It was bound to be more effective than Lieber’s “Cis-Caucasian.” And because of the missing deep-seated history, Varouxakis doubts that a new Chinese-led politico-cultural alliance has any prospect of being as successful, even with the Belt and Road Initiative.
Notwithstanding the elasticity of “the West” as a concept, Varouxakis further disagrees with those who claim that there is no such thing as Western culture:
Studying these things historically shows that most of the models, institutions or principles in question evolved out of the history of a particular culture of society for particular combinations of reasons. The outcomes were not inevitable or ‘providentially’ determined, but they are equally far from being completely accidental … at each of the phases of their history there are factors that reliably differentiate the civilizations or cultures of transnational societies such as ‘the West’ from those outside them.
Varouxakis concludes the book by taking issue with those who, since the Cold War, have almost habitually blamed the West for all the ills of the world. Instead, he offers a thoughtful defense of liberal, commonly known as Western, values. He is particularly critical of attempts to “decolonize” the so-called Western canon, as it would be mistaken to view thinkers such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Cicero as belonging to any specific cultural, “racial,” geographical, or even linguistic group. Though from the Mediterranean, “they belong to the world,” writes Varouxakis.
The West is a monumental achievement of scholarship. Its chief contribution is its decentering of imperial and racial paradigms, which have become politicized and turned into stale orthodoxies that have led to distortions in historical understanding. Notions that “the West” was invented to justify empire, racial hierarchy, and religion have led to a great deal of confusion, especially among the bien-pensants (「政治正確者」), as when Peter Beinart in the Atlantic asserted, in response to a 2017 speech by Donald Trump in Poland, that “the West is a racial and religious term.” It is Varouxakis’s great accomplishment to have shown that its origins were much more complicated, and more interesting. And more relevant, because “the West” is not going anywhere soon.
The West 請至原網頁觀看此書封面
本文於 修改第 1 次
|
|
「個人認知權」與社會公正 -- Mitch Woolery
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
下文的主題屬於法哲學領域；其應用則在社會和政治兩個層面。我把它放在此欄的原因是：我相信作者的重點和寫此文動機在於後者。
Knowledge and justice
Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied
Mitch Woolery, Edited by Sam Dresser, 07/22/25
Sheilah Miller (a fictional character, though representative of a widespread phenomenon) is a 39-year-old Black woman who was admitted to the hospital to give birth to her child. But there were complications. Hours later, she had lost a lot of blood and suffered a debilitating stroke. Her physician, Dr Smith (likewise, fictional but representative), a white man, repeatedly ignored her complaints of pain and discomfort due to his prejudice against her identity. The baby lived but Ms Miller was paralysed from the neck down. As a patient, she had knowledge to share about her pain, her discomfort, her suffering. But, for more than 10 hours, Dr Smith refused to consider her knowledge due to his bigotry.
Ms Miller suffered enormously as a result of Dr Smith’s medical malpractice. She was harmed financially with medical expenses from her hospitalisation, and lost wages due to time away from work. Her physical harm, paralysis, is obvious, and her emotional harm may manifest itself as anxiety or depression or other emotional maladies. But there is another kind of harm she suffered: epistemic. Epistemic harm, while real, is not widely known.
The term ‘epistemic’ is derived from the Ancient Greek word episteme, meaning knowledge. Knowledge, and especially seeking and giving knowledge, is essential to being human, as essential as breathing and loving. As profoundly social creatures, humans are givers of knowledge but, according to the philosopher Miranda Fricker in her groundbreaking book Epistemic Injustice (2007), epistemic harm prevents, denies and rejects that. If our ability to give knowledge is rejected, then so is our humanness and our dignity. To be harmed epistemically is to be humiliated and degraded as a human being; it is to be treated not as a someone but as a something. People don’t need to listen to things or regard them with respect or credibility. As the philosopher Pamela Ann Boongaling put it in 2022:
Suppose, for example, that we deny someone the right to be heard or the right to explain their position on an important issue based on a prejudice that we have regarding the social group that the person belongs to. By denying them that right, we would have, in effect, denied them as well of an essential part of their own humanity. After all, other things being equal, human beings possess rationality and autonomy, and these characteristics are constitutive of what it means to be a human being. Thus, an injustice of this kind cuts deeply since it affects the very core of what it means to be a human being.
A victim of epistemic harm is not regarded as a rational human being but as an infant or an animal or a piece of furniture.
A great injustice of the United States’ legal system is that it will allow Ms Miller to be compensated for her financial, physical and emotional harm but not her epistemic harm. Think about that: Ms Miller suffered serious epistemic harm and yet cannot be compensated for it, even though all (or almost all) of the other harms flowed from her original epistemic harm. Her attempt to give her knowledge was rejected and ignored for 10 hours. Imagine how frustrated and scared she must have felt – hours of pleading and yet being ignored by Dr Smith as one unworthy of care or credibility. At some point, Ms Miller may have started to doubt herself and her objectivity and reasoning. She might have thought: ‘Maybe I’m not in pain – after all, he’s the expert,’ or ‘Maybe I’m just being irrational or emotional.’
If Ms Miller did not suffer epistemic harm, she likely would not have suffered the other harms. Fix the epistemic harm, and the other harms likely never arise. If she is to be made whole, she needs to have a legal remedy for her epistemic harm.
表單的底部
How prevalent is serious epistemic harm resulting from bigotry? We don’t know precisely, but two recent empirical studies show that Black patients are more likely than white patients to suffer epistemic harm. Mary Catherine Beach and co-authors found that physicians discredited Black patients’ assertions more frequently than white patients’, concerning their pain levels. This is similar to what happened to Ms Miller; she expressed the severe pain she was suffering but her doctor ignored her. In another study, Kelly M Hoffman and co-authors concluded that some medical personnel have ‘false and fantastical’ beliefs about Black patients as compared with white patients, including such appallingly racist beliefs as that ‘Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s.’ As a result, Black patients are expected to endure pain that white patients are not expected to tolerate. Dr Smith might have assumed that, as a Black patient, Ms Miller was just tougher and could endure more pain.
In common law jurisdictions (like in the US and Great Britain), victims of civil wrongs can bring tort claims against their transgressors and seek monetary redress for wrongs. The US tort legal system purports to compensate victims for each type of harm they suffer (assuming certain legal standards are met like the burden of proof, timely bringing of claims, and the like). Damages are intended to make the victims whole (trying to return them to the status quo ante). In Ms Miller’s case, if she lost $100 in wages due to Dr Smith’s negligence, she could recover as damages the $100 she lost. For physical and emotional harm, the system approximates her damages with the intent to make her whole. Ms Miller’s legal complaint would have Claim I (for physical harm), Claim II (for emotional harm) and Claim III (for financial harm). But it could not have Claim IV (for epistemic harm) because epistemic harm is not legally cognisable. As I learned on my first day of law school: a right without a remedy is no right at all. Failure to compensate her for epistemic harm means that she has been injured but is not being made whole.
Various injustices can produce epistemic harm but often it results from ‘testimonial injustice’, a term coined by Fricker. Epistemic harm is inherent in testimonial injustice – it occurs in every case. In Ms Miller’s case, her epistemic harm resulted from Dr Smith’s testimonial injustice, which has three elements:
* Negative identity prejudice: the hearer (someone like Dr Smith) is bigoted against the speaker (someone like Ms Miller). (Identity prejudice can be negative or positive but testimonial injustice focuses mostly on negative identity prejudice.)
* Unjustified credibility deficit: the hearer unjustifiably gives the speaker less credibility than the speaker is due because of the hearer’s negative identity prejudice against the speaker.
* Epistemic harm: the speaker suffers epistemic harm from the unjustified credibility deficit.
Dr Smith’s negative identity prejudice against Ms Miller produced an unjustified credibility deficit. He should have listened to her complaints. Because he did not, Ms Miller suffered from Dr Smith’s testimonial injustice and experienced epistemic harm. Negative identity prejudice is what it sounds like: the hearer is bigoted or negatively prejudiced against some aspect of the speaker’s identity. The prejudice is based upon the speaker’s identity characteristics that are (more or less) permanent, characteristics that track the speaker through her life, such as race, gender, disability, ethnicity, accent and a panoply of other attributes.
Unjustified credibility deficit occurs when the hearer does not afford the speaker the credibility she would otherwise be due. In other words, there is a gap between the credibility that the speaker is owed and what the speaker is actually afforded due to negative identity prejudice. When Ms Miller repeatedly told Dr Smith that she was in a lot of pain, he might have thought she was lying or was an incompetent judge of her pain. But it is unlikely she lied for 10 hours, and even more unlikely she was not competent to judge her own pain. His negative identity prejudice – perhaps unconsciously – kept him from believing her.
Epistemic harm is different from emotional harm. The latter may result in PTSDs (post-traumatic stress disorders) or severe anxiety or depression or other debilitating emotional conditions. An epistemic-harm victim is prevented from giving her knowledge because the aggressor epistemically objectifies her. Objectification includes denying the victim’s autonomy and denying the victim’s subjectivity. Dr Smith might be denying Ms Miller’s autonomy, meaning she lacks self-determination and should be treated as a child or an incompetent person. Alternatively, Dr Smith might be treating her not as a rational subject but as an object like furniture, ie, one whose feelings and experiences need not be accounted for.
Tort claims can be created legally by legislatures and by courts. I will focus on courts. Judges have inherent legal authority to recognise new remedies for civil wrongs. As society changes, and the types of wrongs change, courts can recognise and then remedy the wrongs. This happens gradually. The law is conservative; it takes its cues from culture and society and, as appropriate, fashions remedies responsive to society’s demands. In broad patterns, the path involves naming, dissemination and acceptance. Naming a thing allows people to identify it and therefore focus on it. As Plato writes in Cratylus, naming a thing can be instrumental to understanding the thing named. Dissemination involves a broader societal understanding of the thing.
The case of #MeToo is instructive. Named in 2006, it did not have societal dissemination until 2017 when the actress Alyssa Milano Tweeted #MeToo, acknowledging she had been sexually harassed and assaulted. After that, the Tweet went viral and millions of people used the hashtag, sharing their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault. The sheer number of women sharing their stories profoundly altered the social landscape and, despite some immediate pushback, society started to accept that sexual abusers could not be tolerated any longer.
Acceptance comes in two forms: societal acceptance and legal acceptance. Societal acceptance almost always precedes legal acceptance. When societal acceptance occurs, the intent is for the thing named to be preserved and enhanced (in the case of a societal good), or to be rejected and diminished (in the case of a societal harm). Legal acceptance is when the thing named has a legally cognisable status. In the case of #MeToo, society is still working through what legal acceptance means.
Two tort claims – privacy rights and emotional distress – have followed this route of naming, dissemination and acceptance, and epistemic harm claims could too. Around the year 1900, courts and plaintiffs in the US recognised that the technology of photographic images could invade one’s private life, but a direct remedy for this privacy invasion did not exist. Society wanted privacy protected and courts fashioned a remedy for this wrong, relying in part on Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s seminal legal article, ‘The Right to Privacy’ (1890). Prior to publication, there was not a name for privacy rights but, afterwards, it was named and identified. Once named, it became easier to protect. In 1905, one of the first reported privacy rights cases was successful in the US.
Legal remedies for emotional distress took a more circuitous path. Although emotional distress claims are rooted in the ancient tort for outrage, courts were cautious in recognising emotional distress claims. Judges were sceptical, thinking emotional distress claims could be too speculative or frivolous. At first, judges allowed emotional distress claims only if they were based upon the aggressor’s intentional conduct or if they were tied to physical injury to the victim (or a close bystander). Later, these guardrails were relaxed or even abandoned in some jurisdictions as courts became comfortable with emotional distress claims. The courts allowed claims based upon the aggressor’s negligence. These are called NIED (or ‘negligent infliction of emotional distress’) claims. In addition, the courts allowed standalone claims, meaning the claims were tied to emotional distress only and did not require physical injury.
The ‘naming’ moment came in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association updated the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) to recognise PTSDs. Recognition by the DSM-III meant there was ‘[g]reater rigor in diagnosing emotional harm’, according to the commentary to the Restatement (Third) of Torts. Courts then had an independent assessment of emotional harms, as recognised by the psychiatry profession. As society understood the dangers from PTSD and other emotional harms, it demanded victims be compensated and wrongdoers be held liable. As an example of a standalone NIED claim, a mother sued her doctor for malpractice when her baby died after his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, causing deprivation of oxygen during his birth. The Supreme Court of California in 1992 allowed the mother to seek damages for her emotional anguish even though she was not herself physically injured.
Legal acceptance of epistemic harm claims could follow the same path as claims for privacy violations and emotional distress. Epistemic harm claims today are somewhere between naming and dissemination, but not quite at broad societal acceptance. The concepts of testimonial injustice and epistemic harm are fairly well known in academic circles, but they need greater dissemination to the general public. They need, in other words, their #MeToo moment. If that ever comes, epistemic harm might find social and ultimately legal acceptance but the process could take decades from naming to the first successful legal case (privacy rights claims took 15 years, and standalone NIED claims took 12 years).
Epistemic harm claims, if and when legally recognised, could parallel NIED claims because the types of injury claimed are adjacent (epistemic vs emotional), and both would be negligence claims, whose elements are familiar to courts. In a civil tort lawsuit, to prove a defendant is liable for a NIED claim, a victim must prove the following elements by a preponderance of evidence: the defendant was negligent; the victim suffered ‘serious emotional distress’; and the defendant’s negligence caused victims’ serious emotional distress. A similar process could well hold for epistemic harm. Of course, courts may become concerned about victims bringing meritless and frivolous claims for epistemic harm and, as such, might impose guardrails such as tying epistemic harm to victims’ physical injury. Ms Miller’s would be a good test case because physical harm resulted from her epistemic harm. Courts could later decide whether to allow standalone epistemic harm cases.
All negligence claims are predicated on defendants having a legal duty to certain persons to exercise reasonable care. The legal term ‘duty’ has a specific meaning in negligence torts, and is different from the philosophical term. Philosophers often think of duties as derived from natural rights or epistemic principles and as being imposed uniformly on everyone. Legal duties, however, are not imposed uniformly on all persons but apply only to limited persons, and are imposed solely by statute or contract and from common law relationships like the duties parents owe minor children, attorneys owe clients and doctors owe patients. Legal liability for negligence is imposed only on a person who has a legal duty to another person. ‘Negligence in the air’ (that is, negligence to the general populace, without a corresponding duty) is not a legally cognisable concept.
Applying the proposed epistemic harm elements to Ms Miller’s case shows that Dr Smith negligently caused her epistemic harm. Dr Smith, as a physician, had a legal duty to exercise reasonable care in his medical treatment of his patient, Ms Miller. That duty is implicit in the physician-patient relationship and is likely made explicit by various applicable statutes and contracts. Dr Smith was negligent: he had a negative identity prejudice against Ms Miller that produced an unjustified credibility deficit. Dr Smith did not believe Ms Miller and, in fact, he did not even listen to her, in breach of his duty of reasonable care. Ms Miller would be entitled to monetary damages from Dr Smith for any serious epistemic harm she suffered. Thus, she could add Claim IV (epistemic harm) to her legal complaint.
Unjustified credibility deficit may be the most difficult legal element to prove because hearers generally do not have any obligation to afford credibility to speakers. Hearers can listen to speakers, or not; believe them, or not; believe select parts, or not. Legally, hearers don’t have to extend any credibility to anyone unless they have a legal duty to that person. The extent of the credibility that is due varies from situation to situation, and any formulation must be flexible in recognising this. There is not some Platonic ideal providing an algorithm that the speaker is owed, say, 70 units of credibility but received only 30 units, leaving a 40-unit deficit. Rather, it is the legal duty that provides the context for what credibility is due. So a balance must be struck.
How much credibility is the speaker owed and was the speaker’s credibility decreased due to the hearer’s negative identity prejudice against the speaker? Typically, plaintiffs would try to establish an unjustified credibility deficit through testimonial, documentary, expert and other evidence, which is then sifted and weighed by the jury. Ms Miller may be able to adduce her own testimony (‘I told Dr Smith repeatedly I was in pain!’) and perhaps nurses or other staff could corroborate her statements. Expert testimony might be shown allowing the jury to infer that doctors, in general, may have negative identity prejudices or unduly assign credibility deficits to Black patients, citing the aforementioned Beach and Hoffmann studies. The doctor’s notes would be produced if they included incriminatory or exculpatory language. Consider, in the alternative, the following statements from Dr Smith’s hypothetical notes about Ms Miller:
Note 1: ‘Patient’s pain is 8 on a scale of 10.’
Versus
Note 2: ‘Patient claims her pain is 8 on a scale of 10.’
In a lawsuit, Note 1 might be used to assert that Dr Smith knew of Ms Miller’s pain and yet did nothing for it. Note 2 is ambiguous but one reading is Ms Miller ‘claimed’ she was in pain but Dr Smith did not believe her. There is a significant but unfortunate difference between a doctor describing the pain of a Black patient as she ‘is in pain’ and as she ‘claims she’s in pain’, according to a 2024 study by Courtney R Lee and co-authors. The Lee study reviewed clinicians’ notes about their patients and found clinicians were more likely to cast doubt when Black patients said they were in pain, compared with white patients. As one Black patient put it, doctors ‘just don’t believe us.’ In philosophical terms, the clinicians had an unjustified credibility deficit against the Black patients likely due to a negative identity prejudice. Proving an unjustified credibility deficit may be difficult but it should not be insuperable.
Philosophers have named the concept of epistemic harm. Now it is being disseminated into the broader society. Miranda Fricker stated that her goals for exploring testimonial injustice are identifying it, protesting it, and avoiding it. These goals are laudable. To that list, I would add one more goal: remedying it.
Mitch Woolery is a former partner at the law firm Kutak Rock in Kansas City. He is now an adjunct professor in philosophy at Park University in Parkville, Missouri.
本文於 修改第 3 次
|
|
羅馬共和體制對後世的貢獻 -- Miguel A. Faria
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
作者法瑞雅醫師應該是大腦神經科學家；下文是他新著的摘錄。序號為原文所無；我打算寫一篇簡單的讀後，略做申述，所以在各段落前加上序號以便引用。
The Glory and Legacy of the Ancient Roman Republic
Miguel A. Faria, 07/25/25
1.
The ancient Romans expanded their power and influence by treaties, alliances, and wars, eventually controlling the Italian peninsula, assimilating the neighboring Etruscan culture to the northeast and the Greek culture in the southern part of the peninsula. From Italy, the Roman power extended over the littoral Mediterranean, gradually incorporating a large part of Europe, Asia Minor, and much of the North African coast–conquests in three continents, from the British isles to the Middle East. The Romans reached a pinnacle of civilization disseminating the Graeco-Roman culture stemming from the west and the Judeo-Christian legacy coming from the east–the two major pillars of Western civilization. In the words of The World Book Encyclopedia, “The Roman Empire was the highest achievement and the crowning glory of ancient civilization… Fifteen hundred years after the fall of Rome, Latin culture is still a vital force in the world… The Latin language still lives wherever Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese is spoken.”
2.
We should give specific credit to ancient Rome and Graeco-Roman civilization, not only disseminated to Romanized nations but also non-Latin nations of the West, such as Great Britain, and particularly the United States, where the system of laws and jurisprudence assimilated so much from ancient Rome in both form and substance. One may be surprised in visiting Washington DC–the American founders’ “new Rome on the Potomac.” One marvels at the architectural style of the government buildings in the city–the glorious classical Graeco-Roman architecture of the public buildings, such as the Capitol, the Supreme Court building, the various museums, Lincoln’s Memorial, the Union Station, etc. It is as if there had been a wonderful rebirth of the new imposing buildings of ancient Rome and, with enough imagination, reconstruction of the Forum at the time of such Roman Emperors as Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, or even as far back as Caesar, reborn in the modern world.
3.
Mortimer Sellers, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore wrote a 1994 book in which he detailed how the ancient Romans contributed not only to modern languages, political science, government, and technology, but also art, literature, architecture, and engineering. The ancient Romans created a res publica (“in the public interest”) form of governance rather than a democracy (“majoritarian people’s rule”), which was an inspiration for modern republics, especially the United States of America. Roman civilization preserved and disseminated Greek culture and civilization, including the arts, aesthetics, literature, history, and philosophy. In religion, the ultimate contribution was immense–namely the assimilation and dissemination of Christianity, perhaps its biggest contribution.
4.
Rome laid the foundation for the system of jurisprudence that later formed the basis of civil law in Latin nations, like France, Spain, Portugal, and countries of Central and South America. Even English-speaking countries, such as the United States, England, Australia and New Zealand, whose laws were based on evolving English common-law, were influenced by the Roman civil system. As world historians C. Brinton, J.B. Christopher, and R.L. Wolff noted, “... the English-speaking countries] too, have shared in the enduring ideals of equity and natural law bequeathed by Rome.” As these authors correctly pointed out, the tradition of deciding cases according to the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law” was a Roman concept. Influenced by the Stoics and the lawyer and stateman Cicero, the Romans believed in the concept of “natural law”–a higher law, above those created by the state, that was divinely inspired and applied to all men in all states by virtue of their humanity. As the Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 BC) proclaimed:
5.
[W]hat is right and true is also eternal and does not begin or end with written statutes... From this point of view it can be readily understood that those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but ‘laws.’ It may thus be clear that in the very definition of the term ‘law’ there inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true....Therefore Law is the distinction between things just and unjust, made in agreement with that primal and most ancient of all things, Nature; and in conformity to nature's standard are framed those human laws which inflict punishment upon the wicked but defend and protect the good.
It is therefore with good reason that objective historians have with zeal and ample documentation described the glory that was Rome, the city founded on the Palatine Hill, which set down the moral and ethical standards that not only influenced developing Western thought, but in later centuries, preserved, fortified, and disseminated the Judeo-Christian legacy that was evolving in Western civilization.
6.
If we look more pointedly and specifically at America’s form of government, which is not as easily seen, we also find more remnants of the great Roman legacy. We find not only the idea of citizenship, separation of and balance of power and, specifically, the creation of the United States Senate in its original form enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but, as written in my book Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (2024), the idea of the veto, of course, was developed from the tribunician power of the people’s tribunes of the Roman Republic. The Constitutional power extended to the U.S. Senate, both in foreign and domestic affairs, was inspired by the august power and prestige of the Senate of the Roman Republic.
7.
But that great legacy to Western civilization seems to have been forgotten or ignored. What is remembered are the tragedy of wars and the brutality of gladiatorial entertainment in the Colosseum as depicted in Hollywood and the popular culture, or the reprobation that is launched by the progressive academia for this blood and gore and because slavery was ubiquitous in the Roman world. The Romans are not judged by the standards of their times but by the prejudices of modern academia. The fact that slavery was a fact of life worldwide, practiced by all ancient peoples is not mentioned. The chronicles have been revised by shallow learning, deliberate omission, political biases, and academic neglect, but all the facts, the good, the bad, and the ugly, that have been uncovered should be added to the historical mixture, as to reach the highest pinnacle of truth.
Dr. Miguel A. Faria is Associate Editor in Chief world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI) and the author of numerous books. This article is excerpted from his newly released book, The Roman Republic, History, Myths, Politics, and Novelistic Historiography (2025).
本文於 修改第 1 次
|
|
黑格爾、馬克思史觀的對比 -- Jacob McNulty
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
雖然黑格爾是哲學家，標題和內容又在討論「唯心史觀」和「唯物史觀」；但下文主旨屬於「政治學基本論」；故置於此欄。
在我看來，作者麥克勞提教授的思路相當有問題。我轉載下文的目的有兩個：
1) 做為一個反面教材：哲學或政治學不是這麼玩的；
2) 做為討論和闡明我觀點的案例。
請參見我的《評論》(可能要拖些日子)。
Hegel vs Marx: Ideas change the world not economics
There will be no world state
Jacob McNulty, 07/01/25
Editor;s Notes：Marx thought he turned Hegel on his head, ditching ideology for class struggle as the driver of human history. But in writing off the state, war, and law, Marx missed something crucial. Yale philosopher Jacob McNulty argues for reviving a tougher, more realist Hegel, in line with the realist school of international relations, one that sees history not just as a battle of classes, but of states.
Marx and Engels criticize Hegel for his idealist account of history as driven by the world spirit, a godlike rational force seeking self-knowledge. They advocate replacing it with a materialist account of history as the history of class struggle. Yet historical materialism is unconvincing in its treatment of the state, war, and law. To solve this problem, I recommend returning to the “realist” branch of Hegelian thought.
In their early writings, Marx and Engels embark on a series of polemics against Hegel and his school, defending the superiority of their historical materialist outlook to that of Hegel’s idealism. In these writings, Marx and Engels describe Hegel not just as mistaken but as having an inverted “topsy-turvy” view of the world and our place in it. This is the idea behind Marx’s statement that when he encountered Hegel, he found a philosopher who was standing on his head, and was therefore viewing the world upside down. Hegel would have to be placed back on his feet again if reality were to be seen aright. A more sophisticated statement of this idea is that Hegelians “reverse subject and predicate,” mistaking for the underlying substance what is in fact the superficial or accidental property inhering in it—and mistaking the substance for the property. However, this familiar critique overlooks important strengths in Hegel's approach to history.
Marx and Engels suspect Hegel and his school of drastically overestimating the role of ideology in human affairs, treating ideas like Christianity as the fundamental drivers of historical progress and change. By contrast, Marx and Engels themselves locate the true basis of history in the realm of economic production. The mode of production, the way in which a society’s members cooperate to produce what they consume, constitutes the basis of everything else in society: its legal and political system; its religious and philosophical outlook; its art; and so on. In their critique of Hegel and his school, Marx and Engels relish the opportunity to mock the backwardness of Germany, a nation they saw lagging behind England and France in politics and commerce. To the German, who still lives under an archaic and oppressive system of government with one foot in the feudal world, the only possibilities for self-expression are in the domain of thought. Hence, Germany’s greatest philosophers look on history as essentially a contest of ideas. To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Professional scholars of Hegel and Marx are often skeptical of the dichotomous account of their relationship I have sketched here. As they point out, it is not the case that the superstructure (law, politics, culture, and ideology) is the wholly passive effect of a wholly active cause, the economic base. There is reciprocal interaction with agencies like the law and the state, stabilizing the economy. Yet, while this is true, it still seems clear that Marx and Engels want to prioritize the economy. To cite a famous letter of Engels’, it is decisive “in the last instance.”
For their part, Hegelians often remind us of Hegel’s holism and organicism. For Hegel, societies resemble (or even are) living beings, organisms. They are systems whose parts are interdependent, inseparable from one another. As Aristotle said, a hand severed from the body is a hand in name only. A society’s parts, like those of a body, are members, inseparable from the whole and from one another.
This holism and organicism seem to militate against any view that prioritizes one part of society over another, e.g. ideology or law over economic production. Such a view would be appropriate only if societies were mechanisms.
I disagree, however. An organism is a system of interdependence, but it is also a hierarchy with some sub-systems serving others. We are justified in posing the question of which one dominates in a given area, such as which of the body’s organ systems is ultimately responsible for one of its core functions.
While there is some truth in Marx and Engels’ critique of Hegel and his school, I think it neglects a more hard-nosed strand of Hegelianism, a strand later picked up by a school of thought not often thought of as Hegelian in any sense: the “realists” of international relations (Morgenthau, Mearsheimer et. al.). The strand of Hegelianism I have in mind can be drawn out by noting that ideology is not the only world-historical force Hegel and his school prioritize over economic production. They are also defenders of the idea that history is, above all, the history of states, their legal and political systems, their wars and revolutions, their rise and fall.
Marx and Engels are no less scornful of Hegel’s state-centrism than they are of his idea that history is governed by ideology, but here Hegelianism has more of a fighting chance. For Marx and Engels, the state, too, is part of the superstructure, dependent on the economic base. States are beholden to the dominant economic classes and to a well-functioning economy more generally. They are, after all, financed by taxation (a point stressed in recent work by Leiter and Edwards). Marx is known for his conception of modern states as organizing committees for the affairs of the capitalist class. The view implies that states represent the interest of this class as a whole, if not of any individual member.
In their earlier writings, though, Marx and Engels offer a more sophisticated argument for the primacy of economic production: it is in the economic domain that we provide for our needs, those that must be met if we are to survive. As Marx and Engels remind us, people must eat and drink before they philosophize. But must they do so before they have laws and states? The work of need-satisfaction must continue hourly, daily, and if it were interrupted for even a brief time, the consequences would be catastrophic. This seems to give economics clear priority over politics and law.
Hegel’s philosophy provides a response to this. In the first place, Hegel conceives of history proper as beginning when a people is capable of meeting its basic needs and has a surplus to devote to other pursuits. Accordingly, the likelihood of mass starvation or death is low once history proper begins, which is not to deny that hardship and want remain problems. Marx and Engels’ idea that economic production is primary owes its plausibility to the primacy of the biological imperative to survive. However, the idea of survival is too vague to be a trump card of this kind. It invites questions like: how much of the population? For how long? For how many more generations? To what standard of health and fitness or flourishing? Is the right to survive distributed equally or unequally among society’s classes and groups?
Marx himself made a version of this point in his later writings when he argued that workers received only those wages they required to reproduce their labor power and return to work another day. As Marx points out, however, reproduction of labor power includes, but is not the same thing as, biological subsistence. To reproduce her labor power, a person in the modern-day knowledge economy requires education and training. Reproducing the labor power of a person building a railroad will have different requirements. Marx notes, furthermore, that reproducing one’s labor power includes rearing children who will one day replace oneself. Finally, he is aware that the standards for a decent and dignified life will differ across space and time. Survival, then, turns out to be a more complex, ill-defined and shifting notion than it appears.
Even assuming the concept of survival were clarified, however, survival is not exclusive to the economy. As feminist critics of Marx note, the reproduction of life occurs within the family through care work. The family is an institution Hegel presciently distinguished from the economy and the state. But Hegel does not take seriously the idea that the family is an important force in human history. He views it as belonging to pre-history, and to a period when people are little more than appendages of their extended family, clan or tribe. Still, the feminist idea that social reproduction requires not only economies but families inspires us to look beyond the economy—upward, as it were, to the state, rather than downward to the family.
Hegel’s account of the state has been criticized, beginning with Marx himself, for being anti-democratic: Hegel is a defender of a constitutional monarchy, an extensive state bureaucracy, and a legislature with an upper and lower house. Though intended to uphold the interests of the people, all these institutions “mediate” (i.e. filter and refine) the popular will, which Hegel did not trust in its raw form.
Yet there is another side to Hegel’s theory of the state: his insistence that its main role is diplomacy and war. Sovereignty is exercised twice over, both domestically and on the world stage. The constitution (the government) represents just one inward-facing part of the state. It also faces outward to the international arena, where its conduct in diplomacy and war determines its historical fate.
With the state’s role in war and diplomacy in view, we can answer Marx and Engels: the security and well-being of the populace is at least as much a matter of its ability to defend itself as it is of its economic productivity. Indeed, one can envision scenarios where military preparedness takes precedence, for example a wartime economy. Foucault spoke of an inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum: not that war is politics by other means, but that politics is war by other means. Given the key diplomatic and military importance of economic productivity and technological innovation in war, one could expand this thesis: economics is war by other means, even in so-called peacetime.
One Marxist perspective on war is that it is a function of economic production: essentially a contest whose typical outcome is pre-decided by which party is more economically advanced. Counterexamples abound (Vietnam, Afghanistan), but even if Marx and Engels’ principle is accepted as a generalization, it tends to work against their main thesis. It at least admits the view that productivity is not an end in itself but one subordinated to state projects. It further suggests the Hegelian notion that only those states will survive and thrive that can convert economic productivity into diplomatic and military prowess.
Another “superstructural” factor that Hegel prioritizes is law. For Hegel, not every group of people constitutes a state—instead, it is only those that have begun to organize their lives according to laws. Hegel makes the interesting point that only law-governed peoples are relevant to history because only they leave genuine records of their way of life. Laws must be recorded and promulgated—although today’s social and cultural historians will balk at the idea that the only genuine sources are legal ones.
In any event, the Hegelian prioritization of law in the philosophy of history helps clarify why historical materialism is untenable for Hegel. The economic base is made up not only of forces of production but of relations of production, or classes. These classes are defined by ownership of the means of production, or lack thereof. Yet ownership is defined by the law. Like Marx, Hegel thinks that one of the most pivotal transitions in history is between slave-holding societies and non-slave-holding ones. Slavery, however, constitutes a legal status. It is a matter of the possession of certain rights; or, rather, the lack of possession of those rights.
Some Marxists, noting this, insist that primacy must belong not to the entire base but only to productive forces. However, the result is the odd view that technological progress becomes an unexplained explainer of the entirety of social and historical evolution. Marx and Engels do not include scientific research in their materialist scheme, as part of either the base or superstructure. Hegel, however, regards the rise of science—pure rather than applied—as one of the decisive developments in modern history. He also insists that modern science was only possible in a certain political and ideological environment. He further, and rightly, regards technology or applied science as presupposing innovations in the pure variety. In science and technology, therefore, we also find grounds for prioritizing superstructure over base. This will be especially tempting if one is impressed by the role of modern states in promoting innovation in military technology. It is sometimes said that the United States military is the largest ever investor in scientific and technological research. Whether this is correct or not, it seems undeniable that technological progress is not completely endogenous to the economy.
The account of Hegel I have offered here is incomplete. It is missing Hegel’s metaphysics, as set out in his Logic, and the set of doctrines about reality that ultimately ground his philosophy of history. For Hegel, the deepest explanation for history and why it progresses as it does belongs to something he variously calls the “world spirit,” “reason” or the “idea”: a pseudo-divine entity. In a famous passage, Hegel speaks of “the cunning of reason,” the way in which the world spirit’s end of realized freedom can be obscure even to the very actors who help to bring it about: Caesar, in crossing the Rubicon, is motivated by personal ambition; but “behind his back” the world spirit is pursuing the loftier aim of human progress.
The earliest controversies in Hegel’s school were over whether he should be understood religiously or humanistically, and his idea of a world spirit presiding over history can be interpreted differently. Still, however it is interpreted, Hegel’s metaphysics is among the least popular aspects of his thought today, and even Hegelians will frequently demur from its excesses or attempt to reconstruct it in terms more palatable to contemporary philosophy.
Yet, surprising as it may sound, I think Hegel’s metaphysics can be put to one side in the debate with Marx and Engels over materialism. Even if absolute priority belongs to the world spirit, reason, idea, this is compatible with ideology, the state, and the law having relative priority over economic production. The full Hegelian account requires us to clarify the hierarchy, the rungs on the ladder that represent the forces governing history. We will need to treat ideology as an expression of the world spirit; law and the state as expressions of ideology; and the economy and family as ultimately beholden to law and the state, and so on. However, in responding to the historical materialist critique, we can meet it where we find it, as it were, halfway up the ladder. We can insist on the priority of the state over the economy.
For its metaphysical idealism, its optimism, its rationalism and its teleology, Hegel’s philosophy of history has earned scorn and is among his least enduring legacies. Marx’s historical materialism, though often accused of being reductive, seems more of a live option today. Yet there is one respect in which Hegel out-cynics Marx. Marx looked forward to a global communist state, not unlike the world state that Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers believed would conclude history. Hegel, however, does not believe this is likely or even desirable. To him, an international arena marked by conflict between states is inescapable. Bitter experience teaches that this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy of history may have more to say to us today than its Marxist counterpart.
Jacob McNulty is the Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of Hegel’s Logic and Metaphysics and Marcuse.
Related Reaings:
If we insist on growth, the cost will be autocracy
Nationalism and the Left
Happiness as an act of resistance
Humans aren't special, and why it matters
Related Videos:
The end of good and evil
Surplus happiness
The enlightenment and its alternatives
Martha Nussbaum: A new theory of ethics
Mearsheimer and the death of ideology With John Mearsheimer
本文於 修改第 8 次
|
|
民主在美國失敗的原因與補救之道 -- Mordecai Kurz
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
這篇評論有其可取之處；在我看來，也有所偏失和沒有抓到重點。例如，「全球化」的另一個面向是：第三世界(或落後地區、發展中國家)人民的知識和技術水準提高，從而導致勞動力的全球提升；用馬克思的術語來說是：「產業預備軍」數量急速擴充。這自然造成原本工資高勞工的失業。這個面向不是「政策議題」，更和「民主政治」或「市場經濟」無關；它是人類演化過程中一個不可能避免的趨勢。
Why US Democracy Is Failing – and How to Restore It
Mordecai Kurz, 05/30/25
The image of a mega-rich, high-tech, unelected oligarch gloating at the side of an elected president confirms that America is in a second Gilded Age. The ultra-wealthy are now openly running the country, and millions of workers without a college degree have turned against liberal democracy.
STANFORD – Although democracy has been in retreat worldwide for at least a decade, Donald Trump’s re-election and chaotic first months back in the White House have put the United States squarely at the center of this global crisis. It may even mark a tipping point. The flood of analyses of this authoritarian turn in the US has been all too predictable, with many people blaming the Democratic Party because it lost touch with American workers.
Some commentators, however, point to cultural factors, such as race, abortion, or so-called “woke ideology,” as central causes of the country’s social and political polarization. Others argue that US politics has lost its civic voice, that democratic norms have deteriorated, or that economic policy has come to serve only the interests of the rich.
Though all these perspectives contain a glimmer of truth, they mainly describe symptoms of a declining democracy, rather than offering a convincing diagnosis. Why has American democracy lost its civic voice? Why do politicians break democratic norms? Why does economic policy serve the interests of the rich and not others? If we cannot answer these questions, we cannot develop a coherent policy road map to restore democracy’s legitimacy.
Two forces have driven democracy’s retreat. The first is the information technology (IT) revolution that began to reshape the economy in the 1970s. The second is the free-market policy agenda initiated by President Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981. Until 2020, Republican and Democratic administrations alike supported this agenda, which was exported worldwide under the banner of the “Washington Consensus.”
表單的底部
The combination of these two forces concentrated enormous wealth and political power in the hands of a very few, and not for the first time in our history. However, while previous rounds of technological change provided considerable benefits and enabled upward mobility for workers, the past four decades have been different. During this period, technology and policy were especially destructive of the jobs held by less-educated workers, who comprise 62% of the US labor force.
Because economic and technological forces explain the decline of democracy, reversing the trend requires drastic changes in public policy. The first several months of the second Trump presidency have further underscored this conclusion. The sight of the world’s richest person, an unelected high-tech oligarch, gloating at the side of the elected president speaks for itself.
Monopolistic Impunity
Everyone knows that the US economy has generated vast private wealth. But how was it created? In my 2023 book, The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age, I show how innovations and new technologies – the source of economic progress – also result in rising market power: the ability of a firm to charge a price higher than the incremental cost of producing the product, resulting in monopoly profit. Because an innovative firm is awarded ownership of its technology, it has an advantage over competitors who cannot avail themselves of the same innovation. This monopoly is then leveraged to gain market power over the price of any commodity whose production requires the proprietary technology.
My analysis shows that under a free-market economic policy, the initial market power awarded to innovators becomes a permanent feature of the economy. Innovators who win a technology race may use a wide variety of strategies to lock in their initial success and build up their market power.
They may use technology updates, such as when a firm creates an interrelated patent system that extends the duration of the monopoly power granted by earlier patents. They may leverage scale economies and network effects that are unavailable to new market entrants. They may acquire competitors or their technologies. They may harvest information about customers and suppliers that competitors cannot access. And they may intimidate would-be challengers with threats to offer a low-cost competing product even at a loss, frivolous legal suits, public shaming campaigns, and more subtle tactics like supply-chain manipulation.
Moreover, an exemption of technology-based monopolies from antitrust law facilitates the increase in market power. The exemption is supposed to prevent a contradiction between antitrust and patent law, but it ultimately negates the purpose of antitrust. After all, technology is the source of most monopoly power, and reaping monopoly profits is the primary motive for most business innovations.
Another key fact is that, contrary to Silicon Valley’s constant talk of “disruption,” technological competition does not eliminate market power. All research on the matter concludes that an incumbent technological monopolist will defend its market segment, and that it will be challenged only very rarely. Instead of competing, technology-based companies frequently cooperate by pursuing joint projects or delegating research and development to small firms that are acquired if successful.
Virtually every Silicon Valley startup plans, from its inception, to develop its new idea up to some level and then be acquired by a leading firm. This preference reflects the fact that while price collusion is illegal, technological cooperation is not. Consider OpenAI. It has the potential to become a competitor to the software leader Microsoft. But instead of competing, OpenAI secured an investment of $13 billion from Microsoft, becoming a partner of the much larger firm. All other young AI firms are doing the same.
No Contest
These economic and technological dynamics explain the rise of today’s multitrillion-dollar firms. Their high rate of acquisition of smaller firms explains how they became corporate empires spanning many technologies. Because innovations arrive in waves, market power accrues simultaneously to multiple firms, creating an economy in which one or two large firms with monopoly power dominate each market segment. In some segments, a few weak firms, existing only on the margins, may offer cheaper versions of the product.
Innovation is the source of monopoly profits, the greatest share of which goes to those who own a significant fraction of the firm that is created to market the innovation: the early investors, financial advisers, and venture capitalists who acquired the firm’s initial shares at very low prices. If the innovation is successful, the firm’s stock becomes publicly traded, its value rises sharply, and the owners become wealthy overnight.
This explains how most billionaires are created. As the firm grows, the risk declines, and the general public also starts buying its shares, but at much higher prices. Meanwhile, ownership of the wealth created by the initial innovation remains highly concentrated among the very wealthy. Hence, most monopoly profits, and the wealth created by those profits since the 1980s, have benefited only a small minority of Americans.
That is what happens when firms can freely use the market-consolidation strategies noted above, and when low corporate and individual taxation allows the wealthy to keep their gains. Such were the conditions during the two American Gilded Ages – the first from 1870 to 1914, and the second from 1981 to the present.
Fundamentally different conditions prevailed during the New Deal era that began in the 1930s. While inequality was very high in the 1920s, the Great Depression destroyed a significant amount of wealth, reducing economic inequality and undermining the credibility and social stature of the wealthy. The view at the time was that wealth inequality had contributed to the depression, and that America should set an upper limit on anyone’s after-tax income. Based on this egalitarian thinking, the top marginal income-tax rate was set at 79% in 1936.
Then, in his 1942 message to Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a top marginal income-tax rate of 100% on income over $25,000 (about $510,000 in 2025 dollars), but Congress set it at 94% for incomes over $200,000. Nonetheless, a high rate of 91% was retained after World War II until the 1960s, and 70% until 1981. The mega-crisis of the Great Depression and WWII, along with the New Deal antitrust and regulatory regime, had renewed American social cohesion, promoted patriotism, and established the credibility of democratic government during the half-century from 1933 to 1981.
Private Power in a New Gilded Age
How do rising market power and massive accretions of private wealth threaten democracy? The first direct effect is rising economic inequality. Market power originating in technological domination leads to monopoly pricing on products whose production requires that technology. The resulting monopoly profits are extracted from the market at the expense of others.
As Silicon Valley technologists and their associated investors earn rising monopoly profits, they suppress the shares of income earned by both labor and capital, including income flowing to retirees and other savers. Hence, I estimate that monopoly profits were less than 5% of total income created by US corporations in 1980, compared to about 25% in 2019. Today, the share is even larger.
Monopoly wealth is the component of stock prices created by monopoly profits. Since a stock price is determined by investors’ expectations of future profits, monopoly wealth is the market valuation of the monopoly profits that stockholders expect to receive. Total monopoly wealth in the US stock markets was close to zero in 1980, but by 2019 it had risen to more than $25 trillion, and probably exceeds $35 trillion today.
Since most of this wealth went to a relatively small segment of American society, it has contributed decisively to rising income and wealth inequality. From 1980 to 2019, US per capita inflation-adjusted income grew by 97.3%, while manufacturing workers’ real wages rose by 4.8% – an annual rate of 0.12%. Manufacturing workers generally do not have college degrees, which implies that workers without a college degree gained little from rising productivity after 1980.
But most importantly, vast economic inequality leads to vast political inequality, which undermines democracy because rising private wealth increases private power, which is the ability to impose one’s will on other people. Although power originates from different sources, private wealth is the standard tool for gaining private power, which erodes democratic institutions founded on the principle that private power should be limited to the right to vote.
In the first Gilded Age, a few robber barons gained the power to control the nomination of presidents. In the second Gilded Age, vast wealth inequality has allowed a few Americans to exert outsize influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and threats to finance challenges to incumbents. They have had a significant impact on policy formation, legislation, and regulation. The US has become an oligarchy, headed by the wealthy individuals whom Trump appointed to top positions, the billionaires who lined up at his inauguration, and the wealthy CEOs who have supported him.
Individuals like Miriam Adelson, Marc Andreessen, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, the Koch brothers, George Soros, and Peter Thiel have demonstrated publicly how wealth is translated into political power, and many other wealthy Americans regularly use their wealth to exercise power and impose their will on politicians through donations and other means. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is merely the latest and most grotesque example of such a transaction. Since the origin of much of this wealth is the market power of the underlying firms, DOGE accentuates the fact that market power and economic inequality drive political power and political inequality. Such inequality erodes the political power and civic participation of ordinary citizens and causes many middle and lower-income citizens to lose faith in their democracy.
The Crucial Role of Technology
None of this could have happened without a free-market economic policy. Such a policy also reflects a desire for individual freedom and the conviction that people should be responsible for their actions. In its pure form, such a policy rejects all public safety-net programs, including those geared toward retraining or otherwise supporting workers whose jobs are destroyed by technology or free trade.
American politicians often express an Ayn Rand-like reverence for heroic individualism, but this dispensation has far-reaching consequences. A free-market, technology-based economy enables some people to profit and others to be harmed by innovation. The required self-reliance results in those who are harmed being left to their own devices, creating the political problem of angry people who are victims of a policy they consider unjust. The actual outcome is a weakened democracy.
The key variable here is the impact of technological change on worker skills. In the early twentieth century, the major innovative technologies were electricity and the internal combustion engine, but the one that really launched American industrialization was the assembly line (invented by Ransom Olds in 1901 and perfected by Henry Ford, who developed the moving assembly line in 1913 to produce the Model T). This method of mass production destroyed some skilled jobs, but, unlike today’s technologies, it created many higher-productivity jobs for workers without college degrees.
The moving assembly line cut costs by breaking down complex operations into simple, repetitive tasks, enabling Ford to hire unskilled workers with the ability to perform such tasks on a sustained basis. He rewarded those who could endure assembly-line work by raising their wages higher than those of ordinary unskilled workers, thereby creating the traditional “blue-collar worker” who could pursue the American Dream without a college degree.
Over time, blue-collar workers emerged in other industries, performing different repetitive tasks to mass-produce many different goods. Many white-collar jobs, such as bookkeepers and checkout cashiers, were also transformed into repetitive work.
Thus, workers without a college degree – accounting for about 85% of the US labor force in 1920, and still more than 65% in 1950 – were the primary beneficiaries of twentieth-century technologies. They received on-the-job training, and they earned enough to educate their children, access medical services, take vacations, and develop self-esteem as members of a vibrant American labor force and a rapidly expanding middle class.
The IT revolution and globalization destroyed all that. IT-based automation displaced workers who had prospered under the prior technologies, because it replaced jobs requiring the performance of repetitive tasks. Many of the previously thriving blue-collar workers were forced to take lower-paying jobs, a trend that destroyed many vibrant communities and drove a breakdown in family life and health, and an increase in what Anne Case and the Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair” (from suicide, drug overdose, and liver disease).
The Underside of Globalization
Free-market globalization after 1981 was the other major source of significant job losses. Although international trade is theoretically beneficial, it does inflict costs on some groups that exceed the benefits. The opening of trade with China, for example, eliminated about 2.4 million US jobs from 1999 to 2011.
While workers under the age of 39 found alternative jobs, most older workers, whose specialized skills did not fit the industries they would need to enter, could not adjust to the “China Shock” and left the labor market. And, because the trade-induced displacements tended to be geographically concentrated, initially isolated job losses eventually led to regional economic decline and then further job losses. This regional decline was intensified by the shift of some Northern manufacturing to the non-union South, and the outcomes have been long-lasting, with research conducted in 2019 showing almost no recovery in the affected regions.
The adverse effects on workers without a college degree have been unprecedented in scale. The US economy was growing, but the majority of American workers were being harmed by the nature of the growth experienced. Free-market policy and technology destroyed the proud culture of the blue-collar worker, and while this destruction was unfolding, America’s educated elites ignored the problem, insisting either that the market would take care of it or paying lip service to occupational retraining for displaced workers. When this process turned into a populist political storm, most Americans, especially elites, were taken by surprise.
We now know the outcome: the rise of Trump’s MAGA movement and the decline of democracy. Ignored by democratic institutions for two generations, workers without a college degree lost hope. When given a chance, they rejected what they have come to regard as a corrupt elite that has used false scientific arguments to justify the policies that harmed them. From their perspective, if the past four decades are what “progress” looks like, they have no use for it.
It isn’t easy to estimate the number of people sympathetic to this point of view, but we can try. In my forthcoming book, Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy, I arrive at two figures. One is the 40 million Americans whose economic conditions were directly affected by the job displacements of the last half-century. This includes workers, their family members, and extended family who experienced declining living standards. It also includes local workers and family members who lost their jobs in declining regions, owing to the same forces.
The second figure consists of the first group, plus workers without college degrees who have lost faith in the possibility of upward mobility in America for those who work hard. My estimate is 110 million Americans, with the difference of 70 million comprising a large number of workers, including young ones, who are concerned about their future. They reflect the high and rising anxiety in the American labor market about the potential impact of future technologies, particularly AI, which may also threaten the jobs of educated people.
These estimates include elements of the various culture-based anti-democratic forces (such as fundamentalist religious groups and various racist and extremist movements) that have always been present. Their small number meant they could never win elections. But when combined with workers who considered themselves the economic victims of liberal democracy, they achieved a critical mass.
This is what Trump did when he formed the MAGA coalition in the 2016 election. The implication is that cultural factors, though exploited by politicians to attack their opponents and promote their own agenda, do not explain the rise of MAGA. Their marginal contribution certainly made a difference in 2016 and 2024, but the main force advancing MAGA is the large number of workers without a college education who turned against liberal democracy.
The forces driving the decline of democracy in the US are evident in other countries, but vary with local conditions. In particular, the severity of democratic backsliding depends on the extent of countries’ policy efforts to help workers cope with the impact of major economic changes. Scandinavia, Germany, and Japan present examples of such an explicit policy effort.
Saving Democracy
We can have democracy or a free-market economic policy, but we cannot have both. The restoration of democracy requires achieving two central goals:
The first is to suppress private power and eliminate the extreme economic and political inequality that has turned the US into an oligarchy.
The second is to ensure that the benefits of innovations and economic growth are more equally shared, so that no group is left behind and forced to pay the price for gains enjoyed by others.
The good news is that rising market power and the high economic and political inequality that accompany it are not inevitable. Policy reforms can reverse it. The New Deal era demonstrated that active antitrust policy and enforcement can prevent large firms from acquiring small ones, and that a combination of antitrust and taxation can hold market power in check.
A strategy for controlling private power can be broken down into five essential reforms.
The first is to update the Sherman Antitrust Act so that it states explicitly that public policy aims to control market power while preserving the incentives to innovate. Today’s antitrust policy has been restrained by legally conflicting arguments about the act’s intent.
Second, we need to prevent technological concentration by tightening restrictions on acquisitions. Technological concentration is as anticompetitive as concentration in product marketing, since both lead to monopolization. Beyond some specific minimal size that varies by industry, acquisitions that result in higher technological concentration should be prohibited.
Third, patent law should be reformed to prevent firms from using intellectual-property protections as a strategy to build market power. We should strengthen the novelty requirement for patents and distinguish between truly innovative primary patents and secondary patents whose description depends on a primary patent. Secondary patent protections should be granted only for half the life of primary patents.
Fourth, taxation must be viewed as a tool to counter private power. The corporate income tax rate should rise to 45%, and the top personal marginal income tax (above $1 million per year) should be increased to 60%.
Lastly, policymakers should eliminate legal restrictions on unionization, while also requiring stringent public audits of unions’ financial accounts and governance to prevent corruption. Since unions strengthen workers’ agency and help to improve the balance of power in the market, they also advance the second policy goal: leaving no one behind.
This brings us to the second component of democratic restoration: more equal sharing of the benefits of technology and growth. This means that America needs a new policy approach toward innovation and growth that prevents massive numbers of people from losing their livelihoods whenever a significant technological change occurs. The prevailing free-market approach is promoting such outcomes, when policymakers should be ensuring that winners share some of their gains with those who lose out.
Again, we can break the solution down into its components. For starters, the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 and benchmarked to the consumer price index. Going further, the US should establish a federal right to livelihood restoration. Such a policy means that each worker displaced by an economic or market development that has been supported by public policy should be guaranteed restoration of his or her family’s livelihood.
Support would take the form of fully subsidized retraining, retirement funds (if retraining is not feasible), income to replace lost wages while being trained, medical care in the transition period, moving costs (if needed), and social services to preserve family life. Such policies are standard in Scandinavia, Germany, and Japan, with variations among countries. The program would be financed through taxation on newly introduced products and technologies.
The US should also introduce a subsidy to promote the invention of easy-to-operate and easy-to-maintain AI-based products and services, thus creating more advanced technology jobs that do not require college degrees. No-cost training and skill-development programs would also make it possible to expand the range of good jobs available for workers without college degrees. This requires investing more in trade schools, community colleges, and apprenticeship programs.
Cooperation between labor and management is essential. Given the complexities of current and anticipated technologies, collaboration would be more constructive and would lead to higher productivity. With a tax-financed livelihood-restoration policy in place, firms would have greater freedom to adjust their technology and labor force, and this economic flexibility would ultimately benefit employers and workers alike.
Trump’s increasingly brazen lawlessness highlights the urgency of the challenge that Americans face, as oligarchy consolidates its grip on the US. If we want a just democratic society, we must confront private power and the monopoly profits that feed it. True, much will have to change to bring to power a coalition that will restore democracy. But such a change is becoming inevitable because the Trump administration will not improve the lives of the workers who brought it to power.
Mordecai Kurz, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford University, is the author of The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age (Columbia University Press, 2023) and the forthcoming Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, 2026).
Trump’s Unworkable Trade Formula
Stephen S. Roach thinks pursuing a global minimum tariff while also penalizing China increases the risk of a global recession.
本文於 修改第 3 次
|
|
|
本城市首頁
看回應文章
等級：8
