Right Reason

Kling on Coordinated Specialization

In "Co-ordinated Specialization," Arnold Kling meditates on the problems of teaching economics from an emergent perspective. He departs from a quote taken from the textbook, The Economic Way of Thinking, that he lauds as progress from Samuelson's seeing-like-a-state textbook. In the quote, the authors, Paul Heyne, Peter Boettke and David Prychitko, argue that economics is a theory of choice that studies the unintended outcome of purposive action within the market order:

I prefer something more Smithian and less Misesian. I would be inclined to start with something like this:

The most striking economic feature of modern society is that we can consume the products and services requiring millions of tasks while performing only a few tasks ourselves. Obviously, this requires some form of coordinated specialization. How can this coordination take place? Consider three possible extremes.

1. Decentralized decisions, but with no prices and profits. People just spontaneously decide on their own what would be most useful to society.

2. Centralized decisions, made by an expert planning bureau.

3. Decentralized decisions, guided by prices and profits, and regulated by competition.

The problem with (1) is that you will get imbalances. Suppose that getting milk to urban consumers requires both dairy farmers and truck drivers. If too many people would rather be truck drivers than dairy farmers, then there won’t be enough milk to transport. If too many people would rather be dairy farmers, then the milk will spoil on the farms. More generally, the jobs that no one wants to do will tend to go undone. Computer programmers will all work on video game hacks, not on inventory control systems. Basically, (1) only works when there are very few tasks to be divided among a small number of people who all get along.

...

Returning to Heyne-Boettke-Pryhitko, I would prefer not to put as much emphasis on the methodological dogma that people choose in response to expected benefits and costs. Instead, I prefer to emphasize the question of how a society can operate with each individual performing a few tasks while consuming the products of vast multitude of tasks.

I lean towards Mr. Kling's sentiments on this matter. Unlike orthodox Austrians, such as Boettke, I don't see economics first and foremost as the study of human choice. Rather, I think that the scope of economics is the study of economic order first and foremost.

Economics is about the study of human choice insofar as that choice is a cause of economic order, but we shouldn't let the focus on the emergent order, which cannot be expressed from the point of view of any single maximizing agent, drift from view. The ecological features of economics are most pronounced in this study of coordinated specialization. Just as species adapt to the different niches that other species have taken in an ecosystem, so do people adapt to the different specializations that people have taken in a commercial society. Here, the effects of variation and selection, be it market or natural, are to be emphasized above individual choice. 

The Smithian emphasis on the concatenation of activities within the market order, as illustrated by his parable of the workman's coat in The Wealth of Nations, must come before the Misesian emphasis on the logic of human action, as illustrated by the first hundred pages of Human Action. 

Smith Contra Praxeology

 

From Smith's 1762-63 lectures on jurisprudence:

A free commerce on a fair consideration must appear to be advantageous on both sides. We see that it must be so betwixt individualls, unless one of them be a fool and makes a bargain plainly ruinous; but betwixt prudent men it must always be advantageous. For the very cause of the exchange must be that you need my goods more than I need them, and that I need yours more than you do yourself; and if the bargain be managed with ordinary prudence it must be profitable to both. It is the same thing with regard to nations. The exchange must always be profitable if they act with prudence, and as the number of the prudent will be pretty much the same on both sides, and this will be the far greater part, the benefit will be mutual. For it is evident that the other nation stands more in need of it than the other does of its own, and this must be the case on both sides (Lectures of Jurisprudence B: vi.160).

 

Clearly, Smith wouldn't go along with Mises' idea of praxeology. Smith wasn't trying to establish his study of the commercial society as a science as Mises was trying to do with praxeology. Instead, he was simply trying to understand the effects that people's interactions would have in the commercial society. He was a moral philosopher - one who believed The Theory of Moral Sentiments,rather than The Wealth of Nations,was his magnum opus - and so the notion of virtue was never far behind his writings, and here the virtue of prudence is on display. 

In the quote above, Smith depicts the commercial society as an ecosystem of virtue. Surely, yes, it's important that most trades in the commercial society are mutually beneficial, but also important from Smith's moral point of view that people who exercise prudence are the ones who most gain from trade.  The commercial society encourages virtue, which is a layer of analysis absent from Mises.  

 

In Human Action, Mises, ever the Kantian, was very much trying to elucidate a series of schemata of human behavior all architectonic by the principle that man acts. The first hundred and so pages of Human Action is largely simply a recapitulation of Immanuel Kant's method from The Critique of Pure Reason. Whereas Kant used the schema to establish the possible forms of our perception, Mises used his schema to establish all of the possible forms of purposeful behavior. Whereas Kant established his architectonic of transcendental idealism under the idea that all forms of perception are determined a priori, Mises established his architectonic of praxeology under the idea that human beings always trade a less satisfactory world for a more satisfactory one.  

 

Motivating Mises' use of schemata is his view that economics should be treated as a science: "Science always is and must be rational. It is the endeavor to attain a mental grasp of the phenomena of the universe by a systematic arrangment of the whole body of available knowledg" (Mises 1998: 10).  Throughout Human Action, Mises pounds the table that economics is a science, and that it should be treated as a science. Yet, I find that annoying.  

A discipline doesn't have to be a science to make meaningful statements about the world nor is being a scientist the badge of epistemological soundness that all too many. Even scientists can talk jibberish when they should know otherwise.  

Myself, I don't see what the fuss is all about. The modernist obsession with science is something we should grow out of. It would be nice if we could easily categorize sense and nonsense as 'science' and 'non-science', but we should know better. Gaining understanding is a more worthwhile goal than doing science, and we should leave no options to gain understanding untouched. 

 

The "Harmony of Interests," or the Lack Thereof

 

 

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

-Geroge Santyana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

 

Conflict, in the broader sense of the world, is caused in society by divergent interests. At best, these divergent interests lead to interactions that leave at least one party at the table despondent. At worst, they will lead to opportunities for individuals to use others as means towards their own interests without the consent of those means. The worst case can lead to institutionalized patterns of subjugation and domination within society if there is no force from countervailing against the temptations to dominate as the norms of the dominators replicate themselves across other mind's across space and time.

An obvious set of statements, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be continually repeated. After all, there have been naïve attempts to argue that within certain modes of social cooperation there can only be a harmony of interests. Ludwig von Mises does this in Human Action, in a section titled “The Harmony of 'Rightly Understood Interests,'” when he argues that the interests of all in society are made harmonious by a concern for the multiplication of wealth via cooperation within the division labor. For him, it is the market order that brings into harmony all of the interests of humanity. His is one of the best statement of the optimistic view of many classical economists that the progressively increasing productivity of labor made possible by the division of labor unites everyone within that division of labor with a concern for its continuation. Mises argues that within such a system of cooperation, the irreconcilable conflicts of competition in the Malthusian state of nature are replaced by the mutually-beneficial conflicts, if they can even be called that, of catallactic competition.

 

 

Mises ignores that even within human society today there are winners and losers as long as we move away from equilibrium and introduce institutional imperfections. Of course, we could simply transform the question into a Kantian discourse about whether the only way of considering whether somehow is truly benefited is when we think of those decisions as being made universal across all of society. Hence one could argue that even though a businessman benefiting from protectionism may be harmed by free trade policies, but since the policies he benefits from cannot be universalized across society, then he cannot said to be really losing from a justice point of view because he benefits from the universalize of free-trade norms. There is thus a harmony of interests because people have their “rightly understood” economic interests best pursued without any reference to their particular situation. It is an argument from beyond Rawl's veil of ignorance before Justice as Fairness.

However, during the course of this argument, it transitions from a positive question about whether human relationships are actually harmonious within the division of labor as it is into a normative one about how human beings ought to see their relationships in some Platonic heaven. The normative content is snuck into his analysis from the start right at the section title: “The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests.” Yes, an economist may very well be right in pointing out to people that their interests are best served in general under the conditions of cooperation under the division of labor. However, there will be situations in which people have their own best interests served in that particular situation by acting with means contradictory to the maintenance of a market order. There will be opportunities for businesses to gain profit not by cutting costs or innovating, but by constructing barriers to entry, and by securing subsidies for themselves. In addition, even though in some long run those who defected from capitalist norms may be hurt by their actions, not everyone will survive to see that long run, and so the economist is left with no means of arguing that their interests are best served under the division of labor.

 

Human social interaction often takes the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma, and whether there is a genuine harmony of interests may very well influence the strategies that people play in such circumstances. Under a regime where the harmony of interests is the case, it would not be unbelievable that people would choose to cooperate, despite the costs to themselves, believing that their interests are best pursued by the overall health of the system which they know, knowing their rightly understood interests, that they will profit from in the future. Busy bees them all! Gone are the days of shirking and the principal-agent problem in this world for everyone knows that their interests are all connected by a great chain, to steal a metaphor of Andrew Ryan's, that they should all tug together on in one collective effort!

However, this is clearly not the case. Both the problems of shirking and of the principal-agent variety remain in this world. People play defect the world over. Despite what the economist may say, people believe that, at least occasionally, the best way to advance their own interests is to play defect and to harm the overall welfare of society. Human society, even though the modern extended order has harmonized the interests of its constituents to an unparalleled degree, is still an arena of conflicting interests. An obvious statement, to repeat what was said in the beginning, but one that needs repeating.

 

The Evenly Rotating Economy and the Societies of the Social Insects

 

 

“In the evenly rotating economy consequently nothing is altered in the allocation of goods for the satisfaction of wants nearer and in remoter periods of the future. No one plans any change because – according to our assumption – the prevailing allocation best serves him and because he does not believe that any possible rearrangement could improve his condition.”

-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

 

 

 

The evenly rotating economy is one of the most insightful foils as to the working of actual human societies that our conceptual heritage has to offer us. Within the evenly rotating economy, there are no profits to be had. This in turn has the queer result of necessitating that there is no longer uncertainty within the world. By the time that society has reached such a state of perfect foresight, people have made plans for every single changed taste, every single technological improvement, and every single act of God until the world finally dissolves into dust, and Homo sapiens has finally reached the end of its phylogenetic line.

 

What is really interesting about the evenly rotating economy (or at least really interesting for me here) is not that the opportunities for profit have all evaporated with not even a spurious mirage left behind to lead a passerby astray. Nor is it even that, as would be implied by the previous condition, that the world is now completely certain and even human errors already provisioned for. What is really of interest is instead the effect that such a world would have on human interactions.

After all, human interactions are not simply a mechanistic bumping together of n people such as what happens when one person at a cashier's register meets another with a basket of groceries in hand. For better and for worse, human interactions are more often than not more complicated than that. More often than not, they have a strategic dimension by which the two have to play a complicated game of showing intentions, perhaps hiding others, guessing what the other person's intentions are, and deliberating on a strategy Edward O. Wilson notes this aspect in all higher primate societies in his landmark book Sociobiology (Harvard University Presss 1975, pp 517):

In addition to monitoring multiple signals, higher primates evaluate the behavior of many individuals within the society simultaneously. The animal lives in a social field in which it responds to multiple individuals simultaneously, in ways that take differing relationships into account and often entail compromise.

All of this is the game of society, we all want something out of it, and in return we have to provide other people with something they want. It applies to bureaucracies, specialization in a free-market economy, friends, and even to family. The strategic dance, kept alive by the self-regarding maxim of do ut des, is simply the normal mode of human interaction, inherited from our mammalian heritage.

 

However, within the evenly rotating economy, any room for strategic interaction within the economy is assumed away along with uncertainty. After all, every single person within the evenly rotating economy follows a plan of action set by the necessities of profit-maximization. There is nothing that someone will do that someone else cannot figure out. Human interactions are now grammatical in their form, and all interactions transformed into invisible-hand games (more on that later) in which everyone plays the Pareto-efficient strategy (and in those cases Homo behavioralis fails to do, someone else's preordained plan will pick up the slack).

What's curious is that this is a society that doesn't look mammalian, but instead has much more similarities to the societies of the social insects. It is a society based not on strategic interactions in which people have to deliberate about their best tactic in approaching another human being, but rather one in which everyone follows a preset plan with no considerations needed. Everyone is but a worker drone happily, or not so happily (the evenly rotating economy certainly doesn't care one way or another), being provided a plan for its life upon birth. Whether that drone has free will and can deliberate is outside of the question. The outcome of Aristotle's sea battle has been determined ahead of time, and along with it the profit-maximizing reaction to the outcome; choice is emasculated, and fatalism reigns supreme.

 

What mammalian society actually looks like is an outcome of the cooperation of self-regarding units, each being potentially independent, seeking to exploit the gains from the group in order to improve its own welfare, even if that means succeeding at the expense of the group. The nature of cooperation varies from species to species, but cooperation between mammals is in general more often than not rudimentary and difficult to sustain. After all, as long as each individual's can be independent of his society, then each can gain from defecting from the rules of cooperation that benefit the group, even if this unravels cooperation. It is thus the endemic presence of the prisoner's dilemma (or as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis refer to it as in A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, the altruist's dilemma) within mammalian societies that causes the difficulty of sustaining cooperation within them.

It is only with the evolution of intelligence, and hence the capability for strategic interactions between unique individuals across time, that has made the cooperation of such self-regarding animals possible. These types of interactions are able to combat the corrupting influence of the prisoner's dilemma that decays social cooperation within these societies by allowing for repeated strategic encounters between unique individuals within the society. After all, it takes an intelligent animal to not only be able to tell individuals within her society apart, but also to be able to process the information needed to use strategy. Edward O. Wilson also noted this:

Intelligence is the prerequisite for the most complex societies in the vertebrate style. Individual relationships are personalized, finely graduated, and rapidly changing. There is a premium on the precise expression of mood. Higher primates have extended the basic mammalian tendency away from the elementary sign stimuli and toward the perception of gesalt, that is, toward the simultaneous summation of complex sets of signals. (Sociobiology, pp 516-517)

This evolution culminates in the extremely complex and high strategic society of the most intelligent animal, let alone mammal, to have walked the Earth: H. sapiens, and similarly culminates in the most complicated society ever seen upon the Earth.

 

Moving onto the social insects, their societies, on the other hand, are based upon the cooperation of a large population divided into specialized castes that, are guided towards increasing the reproductive success of the single mating female, the queen. The prisoner's dilemma does not within within this social context because the constituents of the society have been chosen by natural selection to be entirely subservient to the queen. They are not potentially independent, but rather phenotypical extensions of the queen herself. Because of this, there are generally no conflicting interests between the members of the colony, and they all act as but one superorganism striving for its own holistic success within the world.

What is this superorganism, you ask. The superorganism is a community striving towards a single end of increasing the fitness of the whole. Within the phylogeny of the social insects, the superorganism came about with the mutation of a single queen insect and a host of neuter workers around her. With this, a remarkable step was taken in insect social behavior that allowed for cooperation to be exploited as it had never been exploited in natural history since among the polyp colonists of phylum Cnidaria. Now all selective pressures upon the insect society could be isolated upon the queen alone, and so forms of cooperation could be chosen for by natural selection that maximized the queen's fitness alone.

With the queen now the sole member of the social-insect society a player in the further evolution of those societies, cooperation among the neuter castes that surround her could be perfected so as the selective forces continue to choose for a greater cohesiveness within the colony surrounding the queen.¹ This is why the social insects like bees and insects are so ferocious: Individual neuter insects simply have no instincts for self-preservation. Instead, they are the embodiment of altruism in the biological sense of the word, willing to choose self-destruction for the benefits of their community. Thanks to the selective pressures upon the colony being isolated upon the queen, the only reproducing member of that society, an orderly system of cooperation between the members of that colony, all chosen because the increase the queen's own fitness, has emerged in which the prisoner's dilemma plays no characteristic role.

 

This brings us to the greatest similarity between the evenly rotating economy and the insect superoganism: It does not pay to deviate from the set plan of action. Within the superorganism, each constituent part is functioning within a system highly calibrated by millions of years of evolution, and its functioning ensures the Pareto-efficient outcome of that system. Within the evenly rotating economy, every individual, each a clone of that prudent fellow Max U, abides by a single plan, and by virtue of that plan achieves the most satisfactory state of affairs for himself possible.

Both societies are thus societies of cooperation in which everyone is made better off by following the conduct of her caste (certainly the distribution of plans within an evenly rotating economy would have a sort of caste-like nature from the point of view of the impartial spectator), and thus cooperation within both can be modeled as an invisible-hand game:

	A	~A
A	5,5	2,1
~A	3,4	0,0

The Invisible-Hand Game

Within this situation, each player is better off playing A, which we shall assume is either their caste or the plan they follow, than from defecting, and so this is a common-interest game in which the by playing their own best option, each player also contributes to attaining the Pareto-optimal outcome for their society at large. In the end, simply by nature of how the interests are aligned within the two societies, one aligned by natural selection, another by the selective force of profit and loss, all members have the incentive to continue to cooperate according to their roles in the society.

 

In the end, the grand similarity between the society of the social insects and the evenly rotating economy is that the interactions within each can be described by the form of the invisible-hand game. This is of import for the study of human society since it shows that by virtue of a certain mode of cooperation, that mode being capitalism, and by virtue of human beings being sufficiently intelligent to recognize that his own self interest is advanced by following the rules of that mode of cooperation, human society is able to overcome the endemic problem of prisoner's-dilemma interactions within other mammalian societies that promote the decay of social cooperation. Indeed, as human society advances towards the state of the evenly rotating economy, however imperfect those advances may be, it looks like mammalian, and more insect-like.

 

 

 

1 Note that I avoid using the mechanisms of kin selection, and I do so purposefully. Although the theory that insects have evolved eusocial behavior because of their genetic similarities is a appealing theory that can be beautifully mathematically modeled, it hasn't stood up to empirical testing. When W.D. Hamilton first published his piece of kin selection, he was trying to explain the statistically significant presence of eusocial behavior among the genus Hymenoptera though the Haplodiploid hypothesis, but since then the inclusive-fitness theory has had meager empirical success with even the presence of eusocial behavior in Hymenoptera falling beneath statistically significant levels.

Of Law and Choreography

 

Mark what unvary'd laws preserve each state,
Laws wise as Nature, and as fixed as Fate.

-Alexander Pope 

 

The rule of law is a matter of institutions providing predictable constraints to human plans in the future which can form patterns of human action from those individual plans over both time and space. These institutions, inventions of human action, are able to conquer the dark forces of time and ignorance in order to provide those influenced by them certain factors that they can count on in the future. Thus the effect the rule of law has on the creation of patterns of human action brings into play that ubiquitous theme in the study of human society: coordination.

 

Coordination itself is a word that is often thrown around without much thought given to its implications for how we should think about human society, and frame our questions about it. Yes, economics, to take on of the most important disciplines studying human society, is often described as a coordination problem by its practitioners, but that focus on coordination rarely goes much further than talking about how human action is coordinated in dyadic exchange, and rarely is it pushed into an understanding about the understanding of how the ecology of human action, otherwise known as society, is created as a spontaneous, evolutionary order from the intentional actions of individual human beings. As Peter Boettke has noted in a recent post, “Econ 101 is What is Needed Most”: “Human purposes and plans permeate the analysis from start to finish.” Coordination, in turn, is a matter of the synchronization of those human purposes and plans together into a single, non-contradictory pattern of action across all members of society. It is this synchronization across individual plans of action, their intermingling and intermeshing across time, which creates coordination.

Indeed, the social ecology of human society can be poetically described as choreography without a choreographer. There is no omniscient and omnipotent choreographer determining the plans of each individual; rather, each dancer creates his own plans by his own free will, and those plans, especially within the bourgeoisie era, have created perhaps the most spectacular spontaneous order in the universe. There is no choreographer and yet there is still choreography. The primary force facilitating this possibility is that it more often than not serves the best interest of each dancer to maintain the choreography, as Ludwig von Mises would say there is a harmony of interests within the dance. There is no need for a choreographer for each within the grand dancer prefers to be within the order, capable of benefiting from its fruits, than outside of it. Thus harmony ensures made possible by the congruence of interests within it.

 

However, this harmony of interests, which Mises himself confined to an imaginary catallactic order, should not be overstated for the prisoner’s dilemma pervades human interactions within society. Even though it may generally be in everyone’s best interest to continue the dance, there will always be scenarios in which it will be in the best interest of an individual to defect from the dance for her own benefit despite the harm that would do for others. To alleviate the effects of the prisoner’s dilemma, institutions have emerged over the course of history to align the interests of the dancers with the continuation of the choreography. They do this by establishing rules of the game which help form human plans despite human ignorance and avarice, and so aiding to keep the choreography going despite the odds.

From this prospective, the best institutions are those that ensure the harmony of interests and ensure that the choreography is self-supporting. It has also happened that societies with more complex systems of social interaction are able to enjoy greater gains to cooperation (i.e. a higher productivity) because of the fruits of the division of labor. Furthermore, the spread of the habits and institutions that make these complex systems of social cooperation possible by either peaceful diffusion of culture or by belligerent hegemony has helped to ensure their survival.

 

The rule of law is one of the most important institutions that make the coordination of human intentions possible for it is the rule of law that defines the abstract codes of conduct that are enforced throughout society. Without it, the legal proscriptions that regulate criminal and illicit activities are a matter of uncertainty, and as a result people are not certain as to what will the consequences of their future plans will be. This is problematic because when human beings act, they do so in order to attain a better state of the world. Without being able to know the consequences of their actions, and so lacking confidence in the best strategy to attain the most desirable state of the world, people will not have well-formed future patterns of actions.

The coordination of human intentions is not merely a matter of synchronizing present actions, but synchronizing the plans people have for their future conduct. A perfect choreography would then imply perfect certainty as to the future actions of everyone in society; an equilibrium in which there is no incentive for anyone to change their plans for the future and in which everyone has perfectly planned (the use of the pluperfect tense is important since there is no real planning going on within equilibrium, but rather people plan up to it) their actions conditioned on the plans of everyone else. In Human Action, Mises called this perfectly harmonized choreography the evenly rotating economy.

 

The legal system which helps to ensure the rule of law is itself, like all other human institutions, choreography of its own. After all, it is a human institution necessitating the coordination of human behavior towards the end of ensuring that the legal institutions actually support the rule of law, which often they do not (an obvious statement perhaps, but one that deserves restatement for restatement's sake). Beholding this complex choreography of both getting people with their own so-often divergent interests to cooperate to ensure the rule of law, and ensuring that the laws being ensured are just gives proper perspective as to why unjust laws have been so prevalent in human history. Indeed, there are simply so many institutions that have to be gotten right, and so many opportunities for single individuals to undermine the system for their own interests that it takes time and a certain bit of luck for the right system to emerge that can provide both. The just legal system, with the rule of law being understood as a condition for such a thing, must then be capable synchronizing the future actions of its agents, and so create an integrated choreography between them to ensure justice.

For this to happen, the institutions that create that choreography must not victims of uncertainty, but instead must be able to provide rules of the game that people can have confidence in and rely on in creating their plans for the future. The servants of the government of the United States can count on Congress as being the supreme legislative body within the nation until they die, and they can count on the Supreme Court being the supreme judicial body able to provide a counter to any bill passed by Congress that contradicts the Constitution, which itself is a two-hundred-year old piece of paper that people can still treat as the ultimate source of legal justification in America. All of institutions help to provide a human-created path through time and ignorance in order to provide a stable foundation for the operation society in the future. Even though they may certainly always guarantee just outcomes, the Jim-Crow laws being a pertinent example, the American legal institutions do guarantee that there is a sturdy basis for future social interaction in the future.

 

Confidence in planning for the future is a sine qua non of the coordination of human action within society. Without that confidence, there can be no choreography because such an order relies on the dancers knowing where their fellow dancers will be lest mistakes happen and the choreography decays into chaos. The rule of law helps to ensure that those within society can have confidence in the abstract rules that help determine the consequences of future action, and so its existence is vital for the maintenance of spontaneous order within society.

Roundtable: What is Democracy?

From On the Laws by Cicero, I.41:

Now every people (which is the kind of large assemblage I have described), every state (which is the organization of the people), every commonwealth (which, is, as I said, the concern of the people) needs to be ruled by some sort of deliberation in order to be long lived. That deliberative function, moreover must always be connected to the original cause which engendered the state; and it must also be either assigned to one person or to selected individuals or be taken up by the entire population. And so, when the control of everything is in the hands of one person, we call that one person a kind and that type of commonwealth a monarchy. When it is in the control of chosen men, then a state is said to be ruled by the will of the aristocracy. And that which everything is in the hands of the people is a “popular” state – that is what we call it. And of these three types any one, even though it may not be perfect or in my opinion the best possible, still is tolerable as long as it holds to the bond which first bound men together in the association of the commonwealth; and any one may be better than another.

This is a rather classical view deriving from Aristotle's taxonomy of different types of poleis within the Hellenistic world. The emphasis on who within the population deliberates on the functions on the government, though, is an attribute of democracy that any sound notion of it must capture. T

he notion that democracy is the deliberation about laws among the entire population has been emphasized by contemporary theorists like Amartya Sen. In his own work, Sen has argued that the reasons that there has never been no major famine in a modern democracy is this deliberative aspect of democracy. Since everyone can have a say in the deliberation of policies within a democracy, few within government cannot hide the facts behind famines for long and the outcry for famine-relief cannot be long kept quiet.

 

Another aspect of democracy is highlighted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol I., pg. 124: 

(W)e may distinguish two main types of government. The first consists of governments which we can get rid (sic) without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of (sic) except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term “democracy” as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term “tyranny” or “dictatorship” for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage.

Popper's assertion that a democracy is a changable government brings to mind something that Edmund Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”No doubt, the authoritarian style of the Bourbon kings and the centralization of political power in the halls of Versailles created a political climate in which change could only be achieved via bloodshed and the great tragedy that was the French Revolution.

Ludwig von Mises also emphasizes that a democracy is a government that can change as to best suit the will of the governed. From Liberalism, pg. 21:

Democracy is the form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.

 

When speaking about what democracy is, it is also important to keep in mind what democracy is not and Friedrich Hayek writes about this in The Constitution of Liberty, pg. 103:

Equality before the law leads to the demand that all men should also have the same share in making the law. This is the point where where the traditional liberalism and the democratic movement meet. Liberalism (in the European nineteenth-century meaning of the word, to which we shall adhere throughout this chapter) is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive powers of all government, whether democratic or not, whereas the dogmatic democrat knows only one limit – current majority opinion. The difference between the two ideals stands out most clearly if we name their opposites: for democracy it is authoritarian government; for liberalism it is totalitarianism. Neither of the two systems necessarily excludes the opposite of the other: a democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act of liberal principles.

There can be both illiberal and liberal democracy. Of course, as both Popper and Mises have noted, the benefit to an illiberal democracy as opposed to, say, an illiberal monarchy is that an illiberal democracy can be changed if there are enough votes against it.

 

Finally, we have our last perspective in this roundtable from “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” by Immanuel Kant:

A republican constitution is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens). It is the only constitution that can be derived from the idea of original contract, upon which all rightful constitution of a people must be founded. Thus as far as right is concerned, republicanism is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution, and it only remains to ask whether it is the only constitution which can lead to a perpetual peace.

While Kant does not describe here his notion of what “Democracy” is, but our modern notion of democracy is so close to his notion of republicanism, just as it is close to what the American founders like Madison thought of as republican government, that he mind as well be talking about modern democracy. That modern theorists like John Rawls have tried to create normative standards for democracy around notions like Kant's original contract is even more evidence that Kant speaks here of what we call “Democracy” today. Then again, we need to keep in mind Hayek's lesson that we cannot equivocate Liberalism and democracy.

This is a typical Kantian attempt at trying to understand something as well. Like Aristotle, I often think of Kant's philosophical style of taxonomic: he tries to augment our understanding of philosophical objects by immediately creating categories and systems of classification. Indeed, one of the reasons the Critique of Pure Reason can be so intimidating is just how many new words Kant creates in order to classify reason in its many functions.

However, I am greatly skeptical of the entire philosophical project of trying to deduce the nature of government via a priori constructions like the original contract. I think that Burke succinctly summarized all the errors of this rational constructivist approach when he wrote in his Reflections: “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.

 

 

Bibliography:

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Commonwealth in One the Commonwealth and On the Laws ed. James E.G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hayek, Friedrich. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 2005.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.