Akadēmiskā · Dienasgrāmata

The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality - the maximization of utility - does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of - or even consciously aware of - their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors. People seldom engage in a form of economic reason that could maximize utility.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.

[...] there is a sharp contrast between much academic writing on art and art criticism. Academic writing has tended to be caught up in the continued dominance of deconstruction, old Freudian and Lacanian models (widely discredited in other fields), and identity-based accounts. In one sense, this writing, which consists of apparently wilful readings, abounding in poetic associations and arbitrary leaps, is a reflection of the freedom ideally found in art itself. The writer's performance is as creative as the artist's. Yet much academic art writing, too, demonstrates a hidden uniformity, produced by institutional pressures, beneath its apparently various surfaces. The particular advantage of the dominant deconstructive and psychoanalytical accounts is that they can be arbitrarily applied to the most unlikely of works with predictably 'critical' results: traumatic voids have even recently been discovered in the glib, slick surfaces of pieces by Sam Taylor-Wood. Once the method is learned, any material can be fed into the machine. Thus the publication quotas that are instutionally demanded of academics with little research time are met.

Stallabrass, J., 2004. art incorporated: the story of contemporary art. New York: OUP.

Put differently, 'new constitutionalist' initiatives are designed to lessen short-run political pressures on the formulation of economic policy by implicitly redefining the boundaries of the 'economic' and the 'political'. Such boundaries police the limits of the possible in the making of economic policy. Legal or administrative enforcement is required, of course, since the power of normalising discourse or ideology is not enough to ensure compliance with the orthodoxy.
The initiatives thus presuppose a system of unequal representation in the institutions of the economy and in politics. Unequal representation gives more political weight to 'technocratic' cadres: neoclassical economists, financial administrators and central bankers, who are hardly representative of broader societal interests. The least democratic levels of governance in the emerging multi-level system tend to be, on the one hand, in local government (where participation often tends to be quite low) and, more acutely, at the level of regional and global governance in, for example, the European Commission and the international financial institutions, where there are significant 'democratic deficits'.

Because of the pressures of Maastricht, some EU national governments, which are more accountable to electorates than is the European Commission, may be tempted to resort to government by decree if normal measures to gain support for their policies fail. An extreme example of this logic, that of subordinating democracy to the dictates of a neoliberal restructuring of state finances, was seen in Belgium in 1996. Here we witnessed a peculiar combination of austerity and absolutism in order to meet EMU convergence criteria.32 The future may be worse. As the prominent US economist Richard Cooper has put it,

'Maastricht...creates a body of Platonic monetary guardians, accountable to no one, to frame and execute one of the most important aspects of policy in modern economies, affecting hundreds of millions of people. This was done in the name of insulating monetary policy—and its primary objective of price stability—from political pressure, and of endowing the new European central bank with political independence.'

In this context EMU has come to have a peculiar political logic, which to be charitable could be described as Homeric: in order to return safely home while on his long 10-year journey, Odysseus insisted on being bound to the mast (of fiscal and monetary rectitude) so he would not be lured by the song of the Sirens (and debauch the currency). In political terms, the effect of such measures, when implemented, would be to prohibit a wide range of policies to defend national or local interests. Indeed, many redistributive policies that a more ecologically and socially orientated government might seek to promote would be made more difficult or even illegal. These measures could be opposed as constituting a restraint of trade or freedom of investment or the right of repatriation of profits, and so on.

Stephen Gill (1998): European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union and
alternatives to disciplinary Neoliberalism in Europe, New Political Economy, 3:1, 5-26

Borders have guards and the guards have guns. This is an obvious fact of political life but one that is easily hidden from view—at least from the view of those of us who are citizens of affluent Western democracies. To Haitians in small, leaky boats confronted by armed Coast Guard cutters, to Salvadorans dying from heat and lack of air after being smuggled into the Arizona desert, to Guatemalans crawling through rat-infested sewer pipes from Mexico to California—to these people the borders, guards, and guns are all too apparent. What justifies the use of force against such people? Perhaps borders and guards can be justified as a way of keeping out criminals, subversives, or armed invaders. But most of those trying to get in are not like that. They are ordinary, peaceful people, seeking only the opportunity to build decent, secure lives for themselves and their families. On what moral grounds can these sorts of people be kept out? What gives anyone the right to point guns at them? To most people the answer to this question will seem obvious. The power to admit or exclude aliens is inherent in sovereignty and essential for any political community. Every state has the legal and moral right to exercise that power in pursuit of its own national interest, even if that means denying entry to peaceful, needy foreigners. States may choose to be generous in admitting immigrants, but they are under no obligation to do so.[1]

I want to challenge that view. In this essay I will argue that borders should generally be open and that people should normally be free to leave their country of origin and settle in another, subject only to the sorts of constraints that bind current citizens in their new country. The argument is strongest, I believe, when applied to the migration of people from third-world countries to those of the first world. Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. Like feudal birthright privileges, restrictive citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely.
Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics, Vol. 49/2 (1987), pp. 251–73 (minus 254, 256–7).

...since what is called "science," etc., is largely unfamiliar to me, let me replace it by "X," and see if I understand the argument against X. Let's consider several kinds of properties attributed to X, then turning to the proposals for a new direction; quotes below are from the papers criticizing X.

First category. X is dominated by "the white male gender." It is "limited by cultural, racial and gender biases," and "establishes and perpetuates social organization [with] hidden political, social and economic purposes." "The majority in the South has waited for the last four hundred years for compassionate humane uses of X," which is "outside and above the democratic process." X is "thoroughly embedded in capitalist colonialism," and doesn't "end racism or disrupt the patriarchy." X has been invoked by Soviet commissars to bring people to "embrace regimentation, murderous collectivization, and worse"; though no one mentions it, X has been used by Nazi ideologists for the same ends. X's dominance "has gone unchallenged." It has been "used to create new forms of control mediated through political and economic power." Ludicrous claims about X have been made by "state systems" which "used X for astoundingly destructive purposes...to create new forms of control mediated through political and economic power as it emerged in each system."

Conclusion: there is "something inherently wrong" with X. We must reject or transcend it, replacing it by something else; and we must instruct poor and suffering people to do so likewise. It follows that we must abandon literacy and the arts, which surely satisfy the conditions on X as well as science. More generally, we must take a vow of silence and induce the world's victims to do so likewise since language and its use typically have all these properties, facts too well-known to discuss.

Chomsky, N. (1995) Rationality/Science. http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1995----02.htm

It follows that profit earners, unlike rent and wage earners, have little interest in general economic progress. Though they have more economic understanding than the landowners, they tend to use it not in the general interest but in their particular interests (Smith 1976-83, 2:266f.). Businessmen, therefore, are bad advisers on general welfare.

...one cannot be forced to do what one cannot do, and one cannot do what one is not free to do. Hence one is free to do what one is forced to do. Resistance to this odd-sounding but demonstrable conclusion comes from failure to distinguish the idea of being free to do something from other ideas, such as the idea of doing something freely.

Look at it this way: before you are forced to do A, you are, except in unusual cases, free to do A and free not to do A. The force removes the second freedom, not the first. It puts no obstacle in the path of your doing A, so you are still free to. [...]

Marxists say that working-class people are forced to sell their labour power [...]. Bourgeois thinkers celebrate the freedom of contract manifest not only in the capitalist's purchase of labour power but in the worker's sale of it. If Marxists are right, then workers, being forced to sell their labour power, are, in an important way, unfree. But it must remain true that (unlike chattel slaves) they are free to sell their labour power. Accordingly, the unfreedom asserted by Marxists is compatible with the freedom asserted by bourgeois thinkers. Indeed: if Marxists are right, the bourgeois thinkers are right, unless they also think, as characteristically they do, that the truth they emphasize refutes the Marxist claim. The bourgeois thinkers go wrong not when they say that the worker is free to sell his labour power, but when they infer that the Marxist cannot therefore be right in his claim that the worker is forced to. And Marxists share the bourgeois thinkers' error when they think it necessary to deny what the bourgeois thinkers say. If the worker is not free to sell his labour power, of what freedom is a foreigner whose work permit is removed deprived?

Everything we call a social or economic opportunity depends cruelly on a person's being able to do certain things-for example, his being able to wash, to sleep, and to base himself somewhere. When someone is homeless he is, as we have seen, effectively banned from doing these things; these are things he is not allowed to do [in public places]. So long as that is the case, it is a contemptible mockery to reassure the victims of such coercion that they have the opportunity to play a full part in social and economic life, for the rules of property are such that they are prohibited from doing the minimum that would be necessary to take advantage of that opportunity.

Ironically, at the zenith of its accomplishment, republicanism is superseded and swallowed up by the classical liberalism of Bentham, Mill, and
Constant. In the political debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, liberalism, either in its classical or welfarist incarnations wields the cudgels against socialism, conservatism, nationalist revanchism, and other contenders. Except for occasional historical nods, republicanism became a vanishing presence.

What makes the story of more than antiquarian interest, according to its narrators, is that the great wave of post-Lockean liberalism, although undoubtedly a progressive force within political evolution, failed adequately to incorporate several of the genuine achievements of republicanism. Accordingly, the liberal order we have inherited is impoverished. Three alleged losses are prominently featured in this literature: (1) concern for a common good that stands over and above the various subjectively preferred ends of individual citizens; (2) active participation in political life by the citizenry at large, or at least a substantial cross-section thereof; and (3) recognition of a sense of freedom as non-domination that transcends the shallow negative freedom of liberal noninterference. Not all of these strands are equally prominent or even present in the proposals of each of the contemporary republicans, and it is not clear that they are mutually compatible.

However, if there exists a tradition of civic republicanism that merits revival, it will be in virtue of at least one of these three alleged deficiencies within liberal thought. Otherwise there will certainly be reason to attend to republican forebears so as better to ascertain the distant and proximate sources of liberal constitutionalism, but not thereby to improve it.