In his seminal An Essay on Civil Society,
Adam Ferguson tackles frontally the problem of how human beings can be studied
scientifically. Specifically, he decries the tendency of all purportedly
scientific theories of human society to reduce human affairs to a few
fundamental axioms or hypotheses from which it then seeks to draw almost
syllogistically conclusions about the past, present and future course of human
history. Indeed, argues Ferguson, this Euclidean axiomatic tendency,
misguidedly thought to be the only “scientific” method valid, has the
inevitable effect to eschew and extrude all historical perspectives from the
analysis of human society. According to Ferguson, it is a fallacy to try to
reduce human beings to specific aspects of their existence for the purposes of
ostensible scientific analysis for the simple reason that human beings cannot
be examined as isolated atomic indivisible individuals. This ontogenetic
approach must be supplanted instead by a more holistic phylogenetic one because
human beings cannot exist in separation from one another and because indeed
they are incomprehensible without this socio-logical approach. Human beings are
congenitally – and therefore genetically and physiologically – inseparable from
one another. They are zoa politika in the literal physiological sense - because
all human attributes, even the most anatomical, are incomprehensible without
reference to the historical development of the human race. Insensate, therefore,
is the attempt to reduce human behaviour to that of the single individual
because such a hypothetical individuum simply does not exist – not in terms of
actual separate existence away from human association, and not in terms of
hypothetical possessive individualism or selfishness surmised to take primacy
over all other human instincts. Who says – that human beings are naturally and
ineluctably selfish and possessive? Where is it written – that the reduction of
human beings to incurably self-interested egoistic beings is the most or even
only “scientific” way to begin the study and theorization of human society? So
far as we know, maintains Ferguson, from the study and observation of human
behaviour throughout history, human beings exist not as atomised individuals
but rather within organized societies or groups. Nor are human beings more
prone to be selfish than they are to be altruistic toward one another.
Therefore, the tendency for the “scientific” study of human society to begin with
the hypothetical positing of an atomic self-interested and infinitely
possessive individual is so counterfactual and fictional as to be simply
unscientific!
It must be noted
that here Hobbes’s social theory quickly rejoins that of Adam Ferguson in a
devastating reproach to Adam Smith’s Panglossian optimism of the capitalist
market’s Invisible Hand. Both Hobbes and Ferguson realize that human beings are
equally prone to conflict and to co-operation. But in that case it is undeniable
that the possibility of all-out conflict obliterates the sustainability
of a “liberal State”, let alone its unproblematic emergence as a “state of
natural rights” theorized by Locke. Once we allow that it is “possible” for
human society to degenerate into all-out civil war, then the liberal State theorized
by Locke becomes theoretically unsustainable because there can be no historical
and theoretical recuperation for human society from universal conflict!
Put
differently, whereas it is possible to conceive of a civil society degenerating
into civil war, it is theoretically impossible to see how a state of civil war
could ever progress to a civil state! It
follows that Hobbes’s devastating critique of liberalism is founded on both
the theoretical impossibility and the historical unviability of a liberal
State of Right. For Hobbes, a liberal state as that theorized by Locke is theoretically
unstable and historically doomed. Indeed, (as Cacciari notes in Dialettica)
it is arguable that Hobbes’s Sovereign state is one by acquisition and not by
institution, given that his state of nature of “war of all against all” could never
have existed historically! For there is simply no return from civil
war. Civil war is the Euclidean axiomatic hypothesis on which the
bourgeoisie builds its conventional parliamentary representative
politics. Thus, the avoidance of all-out civil war must set out the conditions
for a coercive hypothesis for a capitalist state of exception on which
and from which all consensual conventions – the free market, parliamentary democracy
– must later be founded and originate.
The principles of
political economy set out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, which
have since become the unassailable foundation of all “economic science”, are
based on strictly Hobbesian pessimistic assumptions. This may seem strange
in the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiment. For in this later work,
Smith finally welcomes the theses presented by his noble predecessor in the
Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Ferguson, who, in his path-breaking An Essay on
Civil Society, adroitly and perspicaciously demolishes the notion of an
elemental and invariant “human nature” – and most pointedly the presumption
that human beings are indivisible atoms, in-dividuals, whose only purpose
is to protect and enhance their self-interest. In a devastating tirade against
philosophical pessimism – and with Thomas Hobbes clearly in mind – Ferguson shows
irrefutably that human “moral sentiments” are just as likely to be altruistic
as they are to be selfish. And that not only have human beings established
historically their ability to live in civilised society, but also indeed such
communion or common-wealth is an ineluctable aspect of being human!
Yet, in laying
out the principles of political economy, Smith chose to ignore completely the irrefutable
arguments advanced by his illustrious predecessor. Surely enough, Smith
elaborates his scientific principles in such a manner that ultimately
individual self-interest turns out to be “enlightened”, to lead to economic
“equilibrium” and even to increase “national wealth”. But this Panglossian optimism
is reached through the stultifyingly unjustified intervention of an “Invisible
Hand” that – like the Deus absconditus of mediaeval theology – providentially
leads humanity to the best of all possible worlds. Given the axiomatic
assumptions laid out by Smith in Wealth of Nations, this optimal
end-result can only be the redistribution of existing wealth between freely-exchanging,
self-interested individuals. It stands to reason, of course, that if self-interested
individuals are allowed to exchange “freely”, then the “self-interest” hypothesised
by Smith can only be “enlightened” in that it will lead to an economic
equilibrium that maximises individual welfare! These assumptions are (a) that human
beings are entitled to their possessions, (b) that they agree on exchanging
them “freely”, and (c) that these “exchanges” do not include their living
labour.
Smith’s
political economy – the foundation of all future bourgeois economic theory – is
based then on the Hobbesian hypothesis of the unlimited selfishness of
humans, on one side, and on their simultaneous ability to agree to conventions
including rules of exchange and of ownership. It is this combination of pessimistic
hypothesis and optimistic convention in the founders of bourgeois capitalist
theories of economics (Smith) and politics (Hobbes) that is our central focus
here.
Because he chooses
to begin with the atomised self-interested in-dividual, Smith wrongly assumes
that it is through the “exchange” of produced goods that human beings maximise
their individual welfare by choosing to engage in time-saving specialised
production. Thus, for Smith, it is exchange that leads to the division
of labour. Two erroneous conclusions follow from Smith’s assumptions: the
first is that exchange between individuals precede and engender the division of
social labour, when in reality the contrary is true. The second is that “labour”
is seen as a homogeneous quantity that can be dissected and divided, and
not as “social labour”, that is to say, as a totality of human living productive
activities that are ineluctably social and heterogeneous in nature. Had he
followed Ferguson instead, Smith would have seen and understood that it is the
human division of social labour that makes exchange possible –
and not the other way around! And that because, in John Donne’s fatidic words, “no
man is an island unto himself”.
Smith then
believes that this occurs through a natural division of labour as “separation/appropriation”
- when in fact it occurs through a particular political form of social
co-ordination – a “division of social labour” that emanates from a “civil society”
that already contains a ‘State-form’,
a status politicus, in which social labour has been forcibly
homogenised into an abstract quantity called “labour” and in
which the “possessions” of individuals have been set as the ‘preservation’ of
“natural rights” presumably “acquired” in or “transferred” from the “state of
nature”!
This leads us
neatly to the third false assumption made by Smith – that of possessive individualism
which Smith adopted from John Locke. Locke, the founder of liberalism, relies
on the social contract merely “preserving” pre-existing “natural rights” that
first arose in the status naturae. In Locke there is “the pre-supposition”
of the political State, the status politicus, in the status
naturae. This is perhaps one of the most important and delicate passages in
the whole of political theory. It is here that Hobbes’s political theory poses
a fundamental challenge to the “ideology” of liberalism. That ideology, as we have
seen, was founded on two premises: first, the existence of “natural rights” in
the status naturae accruing to “self-interested individuals” which form
the basis of “civil society” in which these “natural rights” are guaranteed by
the State pursuant to “positive laws” under which the State is “constituted”. And
second, the reconciliation of these “self-interests” in the “self-regulated market”
through “the price mechanism” – the identity of supply and demand.
Both Hobbes and
Smith describe a pre-statal, pre-political state of nature to which the State
is purely extrinsic, in which the State does not arise organically but
is rather mechanically super-imposed as the guarantor of social peace (salus
publica), as Police. But whereas for Hobbes the State is fundamentally
necessary to the institution of human civil society, for Smith instead
the State is merely the adventitious seal of the intrinsically “enlightened”
self-interest of individual atomistic human beings. Whereas for Hobbes the state of nature that precedes the foundation of political society by the State does not and cannot be a civil society without conflict degenerating into all-out civil war, for Smith this is possible and the State is merely the guarantor of this pre-existing civil society in the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes does not canvass the social fabric as independent of the State as "mortal God" (deus mortalis), as the founder of civil society, Smith fails to explain how self-interest could ever be "enlightened" and give rise to a civil society in which atomistic individuals can exchange their wares peacefully, without conflict. In Hobbes, of course, no
such “enlightenment” is possible – no agreement to exchange goods is
imaginable: human beings decide to abandon their blind self-interest and to
erect a State solely to preserve their own lives! For him, the State
constitutes a restauratio ab imis fundamentis of human society – a total
constitutional order (Habermas).
No comments:
Post a Comment