Weber II

In my first post, I argued that Weber does not adequately answer the question of can politics and science be separated. After the class discussion and some reflection, I would like to take a step back and look at Weber's argument more closely.

Though Weber advocates for the distancing of politics and science, his argument is more complicated then that. As Marguax pointed out in her post, Weber is concerned with the tension between the two vocation's commitments and values:

The commitment of the scientist and the politician are different. The scientist has a responsibility not to be swayed by power (77), the politician is committed to strive for power, but only as a tool for “substantive purposes” (77-78). The scientist has a responsibility to acknowledge facts that are incontinent to his/her political views(23), the politician must act with a balance of passion and distance(77).

But, also as Marguax pointed out, these distinctions only go so far. When you push science far enough, you reach the question.

"... The fact that science cannot give us this answer is absolutely indisputable. The question is only in what sense does it give "no" answer, and whether or not it (science) might after all prove useful for someone who is able to ask the right question" (17).

Then one might wonder, well how is this "right question" determined. This is where I would argue that is it unavoidable for politics comes into the mix.

In that vein, as the marvelous PTJ pointed out, if you push politics far enough, you get science.

On page 83, Weber argues that the politician is responsible for "the (foreseeable) consequence of [their own] actions." How in Weber's world, post-enlightenment Europe, does one find the foreseeable results of his or her own actions? It is through science.

Questions I am left with...

Both Carr and Weber focus on tension between two opposite concepts: utopianism and realism and politics and science. Where can this way of looking at things be traced to? Hegel? Kant? Someone who knew Kant and lived in Germany?

Weber I

I would like to reflect on the question that prof. PTJ's asked in his lecture-let
"can politics and science be separated?"

In Weber's lecture it is clear that he believes that politics and science should be separated, but he seems to have trouble answering the question of "can politics and science be separated?"

Weber repeats over and over that the role of the scientist is to create tools to understand the world, not to make value judgments.

On page twenty he acknowledges that "many of [his] highly esteemed colleagues are of the opinion that it is not possible to act in accordance with this self denying ordinance..."(20)

But he never again addressees this issue.

Instead, Weber continues to answer the question of should "Now we cannot provide a university teacher with scientific proof of where his duty lies. All we can demand of him is the intellectual rectitude to realize that we are dealing with two entirely heterogeneous problems."(20)

So according to Weber, though we can not scientifically prove that the two should be separated, Weber, the scientist, states the normative proposition that they should be. But can they be?

I think some signals for the answer to this question exist earlier in the text

"[science] might prove useful for somebody who is able to ask the right question?" Isn't the choice to try and answer that "right question" inherently a political choice? even if the researcher is just the one attempting to answer the "right question," posed by others, isn't the choice to answer this or that question inherently a political choice and isn't whom you answer that right question for a political choice?

What happens when this logic is extended to some real word situations

Let’s take the supposition that the scientist is responsible for creating tools and the politician is responsible for making value judgments and apply this supposition to some real world examples.

Were the scientist who created Napalm to incinerate Japanese, and later Vietnamese, civilian populations, making a political decision?

Were the scientists at IBM making a political decisions when they developed machines for Hitler--or was that value judgment beyond their responsibility?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then the question becomes, when does a scientific question not have political implications?

Further, the choice of who to lecture about is a political choice. For example, a friend of mine is in a class called "The History of the Workingman." The first text read in the class was Weber's “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Was the choice to start with Weber's “Protestant Ethic” and not Marx's "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy," a political choice? does that choice have political implications?

PS
I find this quote funny

"the qualities that make someone an outstanding scholar and academic teacher are not those that create leaders in practical life"(25)--hahha ha, is that why there are so many socially awkward people in the academy? OK that was just a joke--but FOR REAL!!!

Carr Talk

Like Kyle I want to take a stab at assessing the applicability of the crisis of Carr's day to our own world today.

What was the crisis:

According to Carr, the world crisis of his day was a crisis of understanding. Thinkers had failed to provide the appropriate framework for policy makers to understanding world politics. Utopian Bureaucrats made too many decisions only to become disillusioned with the outcome of these decisions. This disillusionment returned them to a nature like state. This return to nature, According to Carr, caused the violence that had for decades been limited to civilized on uncivilized to become civilized on civilized.

"For more than a hundred years, the reality of conflict had been spirited out of site by the thinkers of western civilization. The men of the nineteen-thirties returned shocked and bewildered to the world of nature. The brutalities which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were confided to dealings between civilized and uncivilized peoples were turned by civilized peoples against each other." (207)

How does it apply today?

Well, if President Bush is honest, I don't see any reason not to believe that he generally is, then he is defiantly Utopian thinker when it comes to IR. Unlike the cynics, I see no reason not to believe that the Bush Administration thinks that they are really bringing democracy to the Middle East--starting with Iraq.

The problem with there Utopian vision is that it lacks any grounding in realism. The Utopian Bush administration constructed itself as a liberator. The problem with this construction is that it ignores the real way that Iraqi Identity has been constructed. Iraqi identity, like identity in most former colonies, has been constructed as post-colonial. In opposition to colonists. And this is totally obvious. It is evident in the rhetoric of the baath party. Iraqi school children learn to celebrate their Wilsonian liberation from the British Colons.

The problem with the Bush Administration's logic is that the administration was trying to use what seemed to the Iraqi's to be the old colonial modes of liberation. But the world has been done with that project for nearly fifty years now (this is also a memo that the Israelis need to get)

The colonial world is gone, and any attempt to apply its old tools, in Iraq or Palestine, will be met by opposition from newly formed nationalist identities.

Race in the US?

OK, this is a far cry from IR, but I think white-liberals in the US have a similar problem with race today that the liberals who constructed the international order in 1919 did. Mainly, white liberals pretend to live in the post-racial utopia--which from what I understand is a far cry from the realities of our world. This makes it hard for white liberals to understand actions like the 1992 uprisings in LA, or for French liberals to understand the recent uprisings in Paris. Simply by not having the tools to identify a problem seems to have led to violence.

How does the text make me feel:

I am frustrated because I feel like Carr's argument has a lot of Marx and Keynes and to some extent Heidegger(with his ideas about how science tries to understand things--am I off base with this?). I think it would help if more of these canonized works were required by our program--because I feel like I only know sketches of these other authors (except Marx who I ardour)

Pre-class Carr

I found this reading refreshing.

I think it is interesting that Carr doesn't really seem to be criticizing the values of the enlightenment, equality ect..

Carr, instead, is pointing out the hypocrisy's of leaders, like Wilson, who, like Kant, believe that they can simply create systems as if the normative Kantian world has already been realized.

Taking a step back, Both Carr and Kant see a positive role for war. Kant believes war is useful for pulling people out of the state of nature and into Civilization. Kant argues that, once everyone has been liberated from the ignorance of the state of nature, nature will guide the world toward disarmament.

I read Carr as saying to policy makers, “hey...the world that Kant says is coming in Perpetual Peace, the one in which we all start to disarm, is NOT the world that we currently live in. And to impose the peace federation that Kant envisioned on the world right now, necessarily ignores the huge inequalities in power exist among nations.”

Carr gives agency to those who get the short end of these power imbalances and argues, that given the current construction of reality, a reality where the rhetoric of the class war has been transformed into rhetoric of war between unequal nations, peace can not be secured by simply telling everyone that they have an equal voice in some assembly while it is perfectly clear that in all other realms "some pigs are more equal."

I am also interested in Carr's understanding of the power/morality relationship on 217 and his uncomfort with the rise of the nation state as the most important actor in history.

Kant: Enlightenment or Negation

As per our post-class discussion, In this blog my reading of Kant's Perpetual Peace will informed by Spivak's "enabling violation."* Sorry that this post is so long, but the Kant discussion touched on a lot of things that have been bothering me.

OK, so, in this post, I am going to lay the case that Kant's "Perpetual Peace," creates an "enabling violation" for the negation of populations both in body and identity. I will then try to relate this reading of Kant to my activist/NGO experience in Washington--kinda of a large undertaking for a blog, so I have decided to break it up into subject headings for easier understanding.

Perpetual Peace and Religious Tolerance

Kyle and Monica both touched on Kant's belief in one universal religion--"differences in religion: an odd expression! Just as one spoke of differences in moralities."(125n)-- and asked the question of how Kant's universal religion should be defined. Although they both had interesting insights, I think they both missed the more important question of how does Kant NOT define universal religion.

According to Kant, universal religion is not defined by "different religious books (Zendavesta, the Vedas, Koran and so on)."(p125n) later on in the paragraph Kant continues "Those [faiths and books] can thus be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can only thereby be different in different times and places."(p125n) So this universal religion is clearly NOT defined by the texts of Zoroastrianism, Islam or Hinduism. Notably, the Christian Bible is not mention in his list of misguided texts. This may be because he believes that Christianity is the universal religion or it may be because he did not want to offend his Christian audience.

Regardless, Kant further agues that these differences in religion "dispose men to mutual hatred and the pre-text for war." Luckily, Kant believes that humanity is progressing toward "universal agreement." But, what is the peace minded policy maker to do with those that are not progressing...those who choose to remain Hindu or Muslim?

For Kant, nature is on a progression to negate the Hindu and Muslim identities. What are the implications for policy makers in the civilized world who are now aware that the uncivil identities are on the road to negation? Though Kant does not provide an answer to this, he does provide some simple policy recommendations for those who choose to remain in the state of nature.

Perpetual Peace and the State of Nature

Kant finds a positive function for military build-up and war when dealing with those in the state of nature.

Even if a people were not constrained by internal discord to submit to public laws, war would make them do it, for according to the natural arrangement explained above, every people finds itself neighbor to another people that threatens it, and it must form itself into a nation so as to be able to prepare itself to meet this threat with military might. (120)

Kant's assertion that military might, when employed against those in the state of nature, can have a positive function for those in the state of nature, and for world peace, has obvious implications for the policy maker.

Benevolent Negation

OK, I feel like one could read the blog thus far and think that I am accusing Kant of enabling genocide. To do this would be to take the above listed comments out of the context of Kant's narrative. Kant does not advocate extermination, only negation. On page 119 he adds this caveat.

…the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a cosmopolitan constitution. Compare this with the inhospitable conduct of civilized nations in our part of the world, especially commercial ones: the injustice that they display toward foreign lands and peoples (which is the same a conquering them) is terrifying. (p119)

Kant continues to describe behavior by imperialist entities that incited wars amongst nations, "famine, rebellion, treachery, and the entire litany of evils that can afflict the human race." Here Kant is again criticizing the conduct of the civilized world toward the uncivilized. However, Kant does not withdraw is broader argument that peace necessitates negation of the uncivilized.

Bush and Beyond

At this point, the easy thing to do would be to relate the "enabling violation" reading of Kant to George W. Bush's "War on Terror," George H. Bush's "War on Drugs" or Woodrow Wilson's war on Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I wont bore you with such obvious applications. Instead, I will write about my work as a "Human Rights" and "Economic Justice" activist.

My current job

The day of our class lecture, the NGO that I work for to sent me to a lecture on the effects of global warming on Africa. A Yale-PhD had done a regression model that showed that global warming would make many crops that are currently being grown in Africa not be sustainable in the future. Though the lecture was very good, the entire audience and the lecturer only had one prescription for the Africans, to avoid loosing all from global warming, they should be given donations from the west to develop industrail economies.

OK, I’m not argueing that this is a bad idea. Just that it totally ignores the possibility that Joe African Farmer wont just wake-up one morning and think, “hmm, my cattle are all dying-off, better breed more goats.”

How is this not granting of agency to indigenous knowledge related to Kant and the Enlightenment? I think, that, if I had fifty pages and a totally free schedule for the next six months, I could trace the Yale PhD’s regression model that did not grant any agency to Africans back to the Enlightenment's supposition that enlightenment reason is superior and will liberate the ignorant or negate them.

In sum, although this probably requires a much longer, well developed, essay to convince you, The Bush Administration, Amnesty International, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and nearly every NGO headquartered in Washington plays a role in the project that I have chosen to call "Enlightenment or Negation." This is because, as professor Jackson stated in his Hobbes Pod-cast, we still very much live in the world that the Enlightenment created. The intellectual community has not provided the practitioner other tools with which to understand the world. Even Foucault, who claims to have over come the normative values of the enlightenment, can not help but rely on them (see Derida's critique of Foucault).

So, as practitioners of International Relations that wants to work toward peace, we are left with a choice, either we work toward peace through Enlightenment Reason or don't work at all.

Unfortunately, peace though enlightenment reason will always leave the problem of what to do with those that the enlightenment defined as unreasonable, the practicers of sati, the practitioners of witchcraft, the students who would rather stand in the doors of WTO meetings then try to appeal to the negotiators "reason."

What is to be done?

As Dr. Jackson alluded to, the resolution to this problem can not be found in your years in the peace core, the day you sold your soul to the department of state, or the summer you spent in Guatemala helping indigenous people find pure water--although it may be informed by these experiences. The academy is the only intuition that I know of that can provide the space to develop the needed shift in discourse.

I know that I left a lot of whole in this post—but hell I’ve been writing for long enough and I think I was at least provocative.

*As many of my earlier post have been informed by this article as well, I thought that some of you would like to check it out and see why a friend of mine and I once woke up at 5am to drive 4 hours to Princeton to hear Spivak lecture (true story)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty "Righting Wrongs"The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 523-581 Its availble electronically through the database "Project Muse"--You can access it through the American Univeristy Library

Kant

It seems like Kant still buys into this the savages in America are inferior idea (the European savages know how to use the people. that are captured, while American savages do not) So I have the same question about this Kantian thought being used as an "enabling violation." (see my Locke post) (116 top)

I am also wondering how much Kant was required reading at Princeton around the turn of the last century (get it, haha)

Building off my Rousseau post, Kant definitely runs with the idea that success does not make right.(116 bottom) "Nonetheless, from the throne of its moral legislative power, reason absolutely condemns war as a means of determining the right and makes seeking the state of peace a matter of unmitigated duty." This quote exists within the context of Kant's argument that war is not a good way of determining who is right.

JJR: yeah, you know me

Before I begin, I would like to apologize for the egregious spelling/grammar errors that appeared in my last post. I mistakenly published non-spell checked text. This is not to say that my spell-checked posts contain excellent spelling and grammar.

Anyway, Rousseau.

Something that is really interesting to me, but we did not touch on at all in class is the distinction that Rousseau makes between the physical control over the citizen's body and ideological control over the citizen's thoughts.

"The strongest is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty." (143)

Up until this point in the class, all* the thinker that we have been reading have left the hole that a government rightfully rules, if a government continues to rule. Here Rousseau asserts that the master's physical control must be back by a “right” claim. The material domination of the government must be back by a construction of "right," but that construction of right is not necessarily the way that right, according to Rousseau, should be understood.

Rousseau makes a distinction between the "right"of the collective will, Rousseau's sovereign, and the "right" of the government. "We have two distinct moral persons, namely the government and the sovereign." (181, top)

This is different from Locke**, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, all of whom conflate the sovereign and the collective will--arguing that the sovereign is the manifestation of that general will. Rouseau argues that the government's "right" can be merely a mechanism of control (see 143).

But, you say, Machiavelli spoke of domination using the customs of the dominated to rule, Hobbes wrote about the importance of language and its usage--that "truth is the right ordering of words". So, how then can one claim that Rousseau is unique in his understanding of the use of vocabulary to control?

Rousseau is unique in pointing-out that the construction of "right" and "duty" are instruments of power that and are not necessarily the "right" and "duty" of the people. Machiavelli's observation is broader; it deals with the adoption of customs to aid domination, not the construction of a concept to dominate. Hobbes is merely concerned with keeping to precise language as to not obscure the truth.

Rousseau is concerned with the creation of an understanding; a particular understanding of “right” and "duty.” again, "The strongest is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty."(143)

In sum, Rousseau contributes to the literature by pointing out that the conception of "right" as an extension of "force" is faulty "let us agree that force does not bring about right."

It think this is particularly interesting, this transformation of “force” into “right,” when combined with Rousseau's observation that society lifts a mans soul out of ignorance, but often beats that soul down to a place that is worse then the state of nature.

I find this interesting because when you combine the two concepts, "right" as an extension of "force" and the society's creation and repression of a mans soul--you get a sort of primitive conception of Foucault's Knowledge/Power relationship.

"There is no power relation with out the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge [in Rousseau’s case “right”]...the soul inhibits him and brings him into existence..."(D & P 27-30) Of course there are quite a few theoretical break throughs between Rousseau and Foucault (ie Heidegger), but the foundation of the concepts of power and knowledge and the soul are there.

OK, now on to something more straight forward.

Elizabeth argued in her blog that Rousseau’s vision for how political society should be organized would come in conflict with such concepts as economies of scale.

I disagree.

First, Rousseau was writing before a time when economies of scale had really developed into a concept—a few years after Rousseau the idea of diminishing marginal returns would come to light.

Second, I do not see why small governance structures would not be able gain a comparative advantage is certain sectors and trade with each other.

In fact, a more Rousseauian world may even increase productivity.

In present times, and since the dawn of capitalism, production has been inefficient, not because of lack of economies of scale, but because an unproductive class of owners that has possession of the means of production and can charge workers outrageous rents (I know that that this claim has an underlying normative assumption, but I am not that post-enlightenment) to work. In situations where factory workers have been able to democratize the work place, oust the inefficient bosses, and produce without the extortions of the owner class, production has been more efficient.

So I think that Rousseau may be on to something there.

*With the possible exception of Thucydidies--I think the jury is out on this one and would welcome comments.

** Locke asserts that a revolution is just when it is successful.

Rousseau

I am particularly interested in Rousseau's concept of the soul and how it relates to the sovereign and the surrender of the individual to the sovereign. (page 151.)

I think it is interesting that, according to Rousseau, that submitting to the sovereign lets the individual lift his soul. I wandered what the implications of this are for the individual? If the sovereign has the power to lift the individual’s soul then does the sovereign then have power over his soul? Especially if, as Rousseua says, the abuses of the sovereign often knock the individuals soul down.

"His faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas are broadened, his feelings are ennobled, his entire soul is elevated to such a height that, if the abuse of this new condition did not often lower his status to beneath the level he left, he ought constantly to bless the happy moment that, pulled him away from it forever and which transformed him from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man."

so...this is just a clarification...there seems to be a difference between the sovereign and the master and that difference seems to be that the sovereign is just an extension of the will of the people. However, I am a little unclear on this.