In the Midst of Life We are in Death, Etc.*

Sometimes the decrepitude of open-source software can be a blessing. Firefox crashed as I was typing my original post, and so you will all be spared a drawn-out assault on divine command theory, a siege against the citadel of C. S. Lewis that saw the nasty application of the Euthyphro dilemma, shocking psy-ops use of the scary parts of the Old Testament, and even a haunting visit from the well-preserved corpse of Jeremy Bentham.

Instead, you will only get a brief glimpse at the state of my shell-shocked thoughts -- lucky you. Basically, I've been wondering a lot these days about whether we humans, either as theists, atheists, or happily indifferent apatheists, really need to discover a single, universal, and objective moral law in order to be good people. I'm sidestepping the question of God altogether, for two reasons. First, there are plenty of pure atheists out there who nonetheless believe in transcendental moral law, whether that be utilitarian ethics, Kantian deontology, Rawlsian liberalism, or -- Rand help us -- Objectivist individualism. I myself have lived my life according to a modified Benthamism, examining food labels for animal parts with a rabbinical fervor, but using pilfered rights-based logic whenever the consequentialist calculations get to be too intractable, or a Huxelyan awareness of the necessity of suffering comes over me. I don't want to end up like these guys.

Yet I remain as skeptical about the ultimate moral foundations as I am about the existence of God. I am tugged along by a "common sense" feeling that moral laws do exist. But two unlikely thinkers who have recently been moving my mind in a new direction are Virginia Held and F. A. Hayek. I've already written quite a bit about Hayek's empiricist liberalism, but Held's feminist "Ethics of Care" has recently seized upon my attention for similar reasons. Held's argument, as far as I can express it in so brief a format, is that traditional ethical theory has been distorted by an masculine agenda, and has focused too exclusively on "global" concerns instead of local, feminine responsibilities. I don't know how much credence I would give to the alleged gender dichotomy here -- I tend to find such an approach rather patronizing, and anyway it is not essential to the argument. What is essential is the idea that an ethical world can result from ordinary human concern for our families, friends, pets, and and neighbours, without an overriding focus on the world as a whole. The ethics of care places a new emphasis on the importance of emotions and human sympathies, instead of abstract rule-keeping.

There is a correspondence between Held's ideas and Hayek's views on social institutions, rooted in the Scottish school of "moral sentiments," of which Hume and Smith were members. The connection between Austrian economist and the feminist care theorist is ironic, since I don't think that Held would agree with Hayek's insistence on the rule of law and the unfettered operation of the market. But both ways of thinking about ethics ought to be given careful consideration by skeptics, for both seek to place ethics to a more naturalistic and humble footing.

What would a world without overriding natural law look like? Would it be a world of continual, wanton cruelty? I tend to think that the overwhelming tendency would be towards cooperation and fair play. Certain results of economics, such as the folk theorem, give me hope, and this hope is reinforced by the experience of living in a world in which the overwhelming majority of people I encounter are kind (without necessarily being moral philosophers). Like Hayek, I think that the moral rules evolve in a direction to promote greater social welfare, and I am with Virginia Held on the importance of freeing individuals to look after those who are closest to them. At the same time, I worry that terrible traditions can survive the selection pressures of cultural evolution, and that an excessive Hayekian obsession with precedent can prevent us from overturning bad institutions. I worry that an ethic of care, without the global view, will leave us blind to the cruelties inflicted on the distant, the unlovable, and the lonely.

However, a glance at history confirms that some really, really nasty and vicious people have existed, and we all are too painfully aware that these sorts are still out there doing their best to make things worse for everyone. The theories upon which classical liberalism is based claim that rational people will interact in mutually beneficial ways when freed from constraints -- but this idea rests upon the assumption that people are rational. In reality, some people seem to be actively, malevolently, irrationally, evil.

Faced with that sort of evil, ordinary rational people of the chestless variety will tend to go along with the general flow, out of prudence if for no other reason. In order to confront the mad evil of tyrants and thugs, we need people who are willing to be crazy in the cause of righteousness. The particular insanity of the cruel needs to elicit an equal -- or superior -- counterforce of compassion. The world has a surplus of irrational villains. We are still in need of mad saints to save us from them. I for one am not bothered if the ideas which inspire them are not my own.

*Title courtesy of The Book of Common Prayer and The Smiths.

Chez Ricardo

The WTO is in session this week, and so it is that special time of the year in which protesters take to the streets to demand fewer choices and a higher cost of living. But don't stress yourselves out too much by taking on those Chinese riot squads. Highly paid negotiators are working hard to keep prices high — so you don't have to.

Johann Norberg offers a gastronomic metaphor:

How They Turn Us All into Losers: Picture this. You walk into a restaurant and the waiter hands you the menu. But there is something wrong. The menu offers you too many choices and the prices are very low. You can see that people at the other tables chose from a menu with far fewer choices at much higher costs. And you demand that the waiter restricts your choices as well, and increases your prices, unless and until all the other visitors at the restaurant also accept more freedom of choice and lower prices.

What do you think the waiter would say? That you are insane? I don’t think so. I think that he would ask if you are a top trade negotiator.

Ein Ungemein Hübsch Doktor der Theologie

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was surprisingly cute.

Breaking the Law

The word "miracle" is one of those fluffy, feel-good sorts of words that have become worn out by overuse. When queried on miracles, people sometimes like to reply that "everything is a miracle!" — or perhaps in slightly more sedate tones that "love is a miracle." We'll have none of that. Pedantic rigour is what we're after, and if we can't reach it, we'll die trying.

It has become a tradition in The New Analytical Review's brief history to quote from David Hume, and we're going to keep at it. His definition of miracles has become the canonical one: "A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent." (Source: David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sect. X, n. 3.)

Actually, Hume's definition isn't quite so precise. Pretending for a moment that there was some sort of consensus about the meaning of "the Deity," there would still be some confusion about that "invisible agent." Is an invisible agent necessarily a higher being, like the Medium Lobster? Or could an invisible agent simply be some sort of physical cause we know nothing about, like radio waves in years gone by? The word "agent" implies an intelligence, but at the same time there's nothing necessarily supernatural about intelligent beings. We ought to keep in mind Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Baffling events have often been ascribed to gods and goblins by the masses, but these days, folks are also keen to invoke space aliens as their favored explanation. I suppose that's an improvement, of sorts.

Another problem of defining miracles gets back to the first part of Hume's definition: a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature." The problem here is that we really don't know what all the laws of nature are. These "laws" aren't like human laws, cruel restrictions that elementary particles are always trying to evade. They're simply regularities that we observe in nature. If we start to observe frequent violations of those "laws," we we'll have to adapt out understanding to the empirical reality. Saying "God did it" whenever we discover unexpected phenomena does not really advance our understanding at all.

It is important to be humble about the state of our scientific knowledge, and to always be prepared for a surprise from nature. Yet any arguments about "miracles" are bound to be contentious, for believers of all religious groups are bound to claim them as evidence for their own pet dogmas.

Ironically, the strongest critics of miracles have been religious thinkers -- and by that I mean simply people who believe in God. You'll see why in a minute. Here some quotes--

Benedict de Spinoza:

"As God's existence is not self-evident it must necessarily be inferred from ideas so firmly and incontrovertibly true, that no power can be postulated or conceived sufficient to impugn them. They ought certainly so to appear to us when we infer from them God's existence, if we wish to place our conclusion beyond the reach of doubt; for if we could conceive that such ideas could be impugned by any power whatsoever, we should doubt of their truth, we should doubt of our conclusion, namely, of God's existence, and should never be able to be certain of anything. Further, we know that nothing either agrees with or is contrary to nature, unless it agrees with or is contrary to these primary ideas; wherefore if we would conceive that anything could be done in nature by any power whatsoever which would be contrary to the laws of nature, it would also be contrary to our primary ideas, and we should have either to reject it as absurd, or else to cast doubt (as just shown) on our primary ideas, and consequently on the existence of God, and on everything howsoever perceived. Therefore miracles, in the sense of events contrary to the laws of nature, so far from demonstrating to us the existence of God, would, on the contrary, lead us to doubt it, where, otherwise, we might have been absolutely certain of it, as knowing that nature follows a fixed and immutable order."

Source: Benedict de Spinoza: A Theologico-Politocal Treatise, Chap. VI

Thomas Paine:

"Mankind have conceived to themselves certain laws, by which what they call nature is supposed to act; and that a miracle is something contrary to the operation and effect of those laws. But unless we know the whole extent of those laws, and of what are commonly called the powers of nature, we are not able to judge whether any thing that may appear to us wonderful or miraculous, be within, or be beyond, or be contrary to, her natural power of acting.
...
Of all the modes of evidence that ever were invented to obtain belief to any system or opinion to which the name of religion has been given, that of miracle, however successful the imposition may have been, is the most inconsistent. For, in the first place, whenever recourse is had to show, for the purpose of procuring that belief (for a miracle, under any idea of the word, is a show) it implies a lameness or weakness in the doctrine that is preached. And, in the second place, it is degrading the Almighty into the character of a show-man, playing tricks to amuse and make the people stare and wonder. It is also the most equivocal sort of evidence that can be set up; for the belief is not to depend upon the thing called a miracle, but upon the credit of the reporter, who says that he saw it; and, therefore, the thing, were it true, would have no better chance of being believed than if it were a lie."

Source: Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason, Part 1.

We could also add a Voltaire's belief that "It is impossible that the infinitely wise Being has made laws in order to violate them," or the example of the The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Thomas Jefferson's abridgement of the Gospels, from which all miraculous references have been removed.

Of course, none of the deists and pantheists were traditional religious believers. All of them were skeptics who believed in the primacy of reason over faith. Yet they all had a certain theological conception of divinity, in which God's grandeur was revealed in the glories of natural law.

That religious sensibility lives on even in scientists who are atheists, or at least pantheists like Einstein or Spinoza. The orderly operation of physicsal law -- what Russell called "the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux" -- inspires an aesthetic reaction in all who come to know it. That beauty survives even in the peculiar world of quantum mechanics, which still obeys mathematics, albeit mathematics of the probabilistic variety. There is sometimes expressed a fear that as physicists come to know the ultimate reality, it may turn out to be somewhat inelegant. After all, there is no reason the universe has to obey our own aesthetic preferences. Yet most scientists have confidence that there really are some sort of ineluctable laws at work in the universe. Otherwise, the observed regularity of the cosmos would be grossly improbable.

Improbabilities can't be eliminated, however. Many claimed miracles are most likely improbable events that were bound to happen after a very long while. You may be the one to survive that incurable disease. You may be the sole survivor of an airplane crash. You may win the lottery. Somebody is bound to. In his recent book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins describes the "miracle" of the trans-Atlantic transport of monkeys from Africa to South America, via rafts of matted leaves and branches:

"Usually, in everyday life, massive improbability is a good reason for thinking that something won't happen. The point about intercontinental rafting of monkeys, or rodents or anything else, is that it only had to happen once, and the time available for it to happen, in order to have momentous consequences, is way outside what we can grasp intuitively. The odds against a floating mangrove bearing a pregnant female monkey and reaching landfall in any one year may be ten thousand to one against. That sounds tantamount to impossible by the lights of human experience. But given 10 million years it becomes almost inevitable."

Source: Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale, p. 142.

In a world we barely understand, we are bound to come across many peculiar phenomena and hear many strange stories. It is important to be open-minded and skeptical at the same time. We may never no with certainty whether any given miracle occurred, but we ought to bear in mind that each such claim entails a counter claim. Either it happened, or it didn't, and both propositions must be examined in the light of all our knowledge to decide which is more improbable. Keeping true to tradition, I'll close this post with another quote from David Hume, that great non-dogmatic atheist:

"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable, that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be, that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.' When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."

Source: David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. X

The Second Part of the Contention

In the previous post, I discussed F. A. Hayek's division of classical liberalism into two contending camps. Once alerted to this dichotomy, I began to see it everywhere. For instance, David Hume, whom Hayek clearly takes to be on his side, distinguishes two schools of philosophers in the following passage:

Moral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind. The one considers man chiefly as born for action; and as influenced in his measures by taste and sentiment; pursuing one object, and avoiding another, according to the value which these objects seem to possess, and according to the light in which they present themselves. As virtue, of all objects, is allowed to be the most valuable, this species of philosophers paint her in the most amiable colours; borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence, and treating their subject in an easy and obvious manner, and such as is best fitted to please the imagination, and engage the affections. They select the most striking observations and instances from common life; place opposite characters in a proper contrast; and alluring us into the paths of virtue by the views of glory and happiness, direct our steps in these paths by the soundest precepts and most illustrious examples. They make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments; and so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.

The other species of philosophers consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavour to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners. They regard human nature as a subject of speculation; and with a narrow scrutiny examine it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action, or behaviour. They think it a reproach to all literature, that philosophy should not yet have fixed, beyond controversy, the foundation of morals, reasoning, and criticism; and should for ever talk of truth and falsehood, vice and virtue, beauty and deformity, without being able to determine the source of these distinctions. While they attempt this arduous task, they are deterred by no difficulties; but proceeding from particular instances to general principles, they still push on their enquiries to principles more general, and rest not satisfied till they arrive at those original principles, by which, in every science, all human curiosity must be bounded. Though their speculations seem abstract, and even unintelligible to common readers, they aim at the approbation of the learned and the wise; and think themselves sufficiently compensated for the labour of their whole lives, if they can discover some hidden truths, which may contribute to the instruction of posterity.

Source: David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. 1.

One example of that "other species of philosophers" who springs easily to mind is William Godwin, whose densely-written Enquiry Concerning Political Justice is precisely the sort narrowly scrutinizing examination of human nature that Hume and Hayek treat with so much skepticism (although Hume, of course, predates Godwin). Godwin believed quite strongly in a moral order that could be approached through reason, and he made it the basis of his political philosophy that a society composed of free-thinking citizens could attain a moral consensus by exercising their minds. But this approach by no means leads Godwin into an embrace of totalitarianism, nor even to seek liberty "in government," as Hayek's quote from Francis Lieber scurrilously implies. Godwin was the first philosophical advocate of anarchism, after all. His rationalist (one musn't say "rational") approach to moral questions was meant not only to tear down immoral institutions, but also to reassure himself that under conditions of total liberty, men and women would still follow basic and "reasonable" morality by their own volition.

Of course, that's a difficult case to make. It rests the case for liberty on two very doubtful propositions: first, that there really exists some sort of universal and "Platonic" moral law, accessible by all rational beings; and secondly, that humans are the sorts of rational beings capable of and interested in pursuing that moral truth. No one has ever really convincingly argued in favor of the first proposition, and the second proposition is empirically refuted daily by the evening news.

Hayek's approach to the problem posed by morality and liberty is a refreshing one, and it employs the insights he gained as an economist in the debate over socialism. Hayek's essential idea was that the amount of information embodied in society is so vast that no central committee, no board of philosopher kings, and no single individual could ever possess it all. The progress of society depends on the freedom of individuals to use the limited information at their disposal to safeguard their own interests, to put into fruition their own plans, and to pioneer new ways of living. In this way, economic success will depend not on the theoretical talents of government mandarins, but only on the real circumstances of life, which will be discovered by trial and error. The task of living will become easier over time as people in society observe the plans of others, adopt those that succeed, and reject those that fail.

Hayek's vision of progress mirrors the biological process of evolution by natural selection -- although, as Hayek insightfully points out, the original inspiration for evolutionary ideas did not come from natural history, but from social history: "[T]here can be little doubt that it was from the theories of social evolution that Darwin and his contemporaries derived the suggestion for their theories." (The Constitution of Liberty, p. 59) Just as Darwinian theory succeeds at explaining life by clipping away supernatural processes and teleological intentions, so too does Hayekian social evolution achieve great explanatory force by removing the improbable "leap of reason" from the world of "Is" to the world of "Ought" that rationalist ethics is supposed to be able to provide. Hayek argues that moral evolution occurs by small steps, and that mistakes are weeded away by impersonal forces. Social "institutions" take the place of neo-Darwinian "genes."

Institutions, in the Hayekian sense, need to be distinguished from the government ministries and policies with which they might be confused. The name instead refers to much broader patterns and practices within a society, including the mechanisms whereby specific policies are chosen. Institutions are the infrastructure of economic life, and the grammar of social interaction. The right to private property, the tradition of common law, and respect for contract are all examples of the institutions to be found in Hayek's "free societies." Hayek suggests that even very basic moral ideas and practices can be included in this category. Like genes, they can survive the death of the "organisms" that embody them -- individual cultures, in this extended metaphor. They are potentially immortal. Institutions are capable of reproduction by imitation and mutation by experimentation. They are either retained or eliminated by the numerous decisions of individuals in society. These individuals need not be ethical philosophers in order to decide which habits to adopt -- they need only be observant as to which practices promote their own welfare. Economic theory suggests that the decisions of welfare-maximizing individuals will tend to stabilize around mutually beneficial arrangements. These spontaneous arrangements then become codified as moral customs and social institutions.

Hayek's theory of moral evolution is compelling for the same reasons as Darwinian theory: to use Daniel Dennett's terminology, both Hayek and Darwin replaced "skyhooks" with "cranes." Darwin succeeded in showing that the natural mindless processes of mutation and selective reproduction can generate the illusion of design, closing the explanatory gap previously filled by creator gods and other improbable hypotheses. Hayek eliminates the need for a transcendental Natural Law by showing how numerous social "laws" have arisen naturalistically, by a process which is not exactly mindless but which is nonetheless undirected.

Hayek's insights on cultural evolution were profound, but they were not quite as original or conclusive as Darwin's. As befits a student of social evolution, Hayek had many intellectual predecessors. Among these, the most important was probably Edmund Burke, who famously argued against the French Revolution by claiming that overturning tradition in favor of a master plan leads us to lose the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. In more recent years, ideas of cultural evolution have evolved in a new direction, as Richard Dawkins's neologism, the "meme," has taken over the cultural environment.

Memes are cultural replicators -- "viruses of the mind," as some have called them. Quintessential examples of memes include catchy tunes, political cliches, and annoying forwarded emails. Hayekian institutions clearly parallel memes in many ways, yet the two categories are not completely overlapping. Memes can be stored in individual brains, and they can be taken down and transcribed on pieces of paper or magnetic tape. Institutions, on the other hand, demand a social context. It makes little sense to consider the role of institutions such as common law, free markets, or even private property on an island with a single inhabitant.

Institutional evolution and "memetics" are both to be admired for the attempt at applying Darwinian lessons to the cultural sphere. Yet there are deep complexities in social life which frustrate any such program. Biological replicators -- i. e., genes -- mutate at random, and new variants are never rationally examined before being put into operation. Evolutionary improvements are solely the result of blind tinkering. On the other hand, cultural replicators -- both institutions and memes -- are the products of more or less intelligent human beings. It is true that an institution or an invention can prove to be a wild success, even when the originators of the idea have put little thought into their production. Yet most of the time, the most succesful ideas floating around the culture will be the result of intense intellectual effort. As Steven Pinker writes in How the Mind Works, "[a] complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors. It arises because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints or invents something" (p. 209) .

I tend to think that the opposition between rationalist and empiricist liberalism is a red herring. Hayek, like Burke before him, provides a powerful warning to would-be reformers that they ought not to radically overhaul society in the hopes that they can reinvent all social institutions from scratch. The empiricist, evolutionary school provides us with reason to believe that many institutions work better than we think they do -- and certainly better than whatever hare-brained scheme we could come up with on our own. On the other hand, we are often confronted by institutions which clearly do not work at all. In those instances, we have no better path to improvement than reason, guided by our moral sensibilities. And when a society gets to be as corrupt and unjust as Europe was in the eighteenth-century, it's not surprising that lovers of liberty will prefer to take their chances on a revolution.

There has been an interesting discussion going on at Positive Liberty in recent weeks. Please take a look at Timothy Sandefur's opening remarks on Hayek; Jason Kuznicki's reply (in dialogue format); Sandefur's response; and his later reflections on the conflict between Hayek and "constructivist rationalism."

Hayek and the Analytical Review Crew

The Austrian economist F. A. Hayek is probably best known for his book The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against totalitarianism and economic centralism, which after its publication in 1944 inspired the free-market conservative movement that wandered in the political wilderness until the years of Reagan and Thatcher. But Hayek defied the easy characterizations of mid-century political arguments, and his particular brand of thorough-going minarchism has much more to say to the libertarian tendency in modern politics than to the theocratic and imperial conservative movement that presently reigns in America.

Hayek himself shunned both the conservative and libertarian labels, the former because conservatism offered "practical maxims" but no intrinsic "guiding principles," and the latter simply because it seemed a rather artificial term. Hayek instead called himself a liberal, and he placed himself within the grand tradition of classical liberalism that had been born in Europe and achieved apotheosis in America. As a scholar, he sought to examine the history of the liberal creed, and diagnose the reasons whereby it had become, in his view, corrupted.

Hayek's magnum opus, The Constitution of Liberty, draws an interesting distinction between two schools of classical liberalism:

...[W]e have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic — the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully.

Source: F. A. Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty, p. 55

Hayek's contempt for utopianism is so strong that he cannot conceive of rationalism as a legitimate liberalism. In his view, any sort of plan for society, no matter how liberal in intention, will by necessity require totalitarian methods if it is to be put into effect. The only hope for a free society is by the undirected evolution of social institutions, in which traditions may be tinkered with, but not overthrown. Freedom and tradition are for him inseparable. Hayek's critique of utopian liberalism draws heavily on the ideas of Edmund Burke, for whom the French Revolution was a living example of reason run amok.

Bearing in mind the example of la République jacobine, Hayek quotes a nineteenth-century German-American writer, Francis Lieber, who describes the unsystematic empirical liberals as "Anglican," and the speculative rationalists as followers of "Gallican Liberty," which "is sought in the government, and according to an Anglican point of view, it is looked for in a wrong place, where it cannot be found."

The alleged national origins of this "Cartesian" liberalism might be damning enough in the eyes of most free-market enthusiasts, who tend not find much use for the political philosophies of the French (with the notable exception of the pamphleteering œuvre of St. Bastiat). Yet Hayek quickly points out that the situation is more complex. The most recognizable British members of the empirical school were actually Scots such as Adam Smith and David Hume, who were joined by the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke and many French writers, such as Montesquieu and de Tocqueville. While the paradigmatic rationalist liberals would be the French Encyclopedists and economists like Condorcet, Hayek discovers in England a group worth singling out for ambiguous condemnation, "the whole generation of enthusiasts for the French Revolution, like Godwin, Priestley, Price, and Paine..."

What these men shared, beyond their nationality and and a common ideological approach, was a connection to the intellectual circle of Joseph Johnson. This fact, combined with the gift of new dichotomy to play with, led me to spend a lot of time on this area of Hayek's argument. I suppose that I also wanted to defend my eighteenth-century friends against the calumny of the right. After all, isn't the accusation that the left is in the service of France getting a bit stale now? It's certainly one the Analytical Review had to fend off repeatedly in its heyday, from critics who sometimes lacked the academic sobriety of F. A. Hayek.

In the next post, I will discuss the reasons why I find some of Hayek's criticisms to be valid, but also why I think he goes too far in impugning the ends of the rationalist radicals.

A New Blog, Conceived in Liberty...

This weblog is dedicated to the spirit of an older and much nobler publication: the original Analytical Review, published between 1788 and 1798 by Mr. Joseph Johnson, of No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard, in London. Its original full title exhibits some of the interests of that encyclopedic age:

THE

ANALYTICAL REVIEW,

OR

HISTORY OF LITERATURE,
DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN,

ON AN ENLARGED PLAN.

CONTAINING

SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACTS OF IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING WORKS,
PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH;

A GENERAL ACCOUNT OF SUCH AS ARE OF LESS CONSE-
QUENCE, WITH SHORT CHARACTERS;

NOTICES, OR REVIEWS OF VALUABLE FOREIGN BOOKS;

CRITICISMS ON NEW PIECES OF MUSIC AND WORKS OF ART;

AND THE

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE OF EUROPE, &C.

Many publications, then and now, have attempted such a broad-ranging field of view -- though few would go so far today as to publish incisive and witty articles on all topics from international politics to the art of farriery and the goings-on of the Linnean Society. Yet the Analytical Review surpassed all of its rivals, thanks to its publisher's talents for seeking out brave and intelligent writers, and supporting them through difficult times. Some of those contributors who have remained famous to this day include Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Fuseli, and William Cowper. Others who were equally colorful have been unjustly forgotten.

The Analytical Review also benefited from its position in history. Its publishing span stretched from the eve of the storming of the Bastille almost until the declaration of Napoleon's First Empire. The scientific and economic developments of the time were equally revolutionary. As NYU professor Marilyn Gaull has said in reference to Johnson's generation, "[t]heir colonial expansion was our space exploration; their electricity was our quantum physics, their photosynthesis, our DNA." The Analytical Review kept up with these currents by engaging with the ideas of Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Thomas Malthus -- men of science who were also associated with Johnson through his book trade.

Joseph Johnson was a quiet man by all accords, but his bookshop and home at St. Paul's Churchyard was the focal point of vibrant dinner parties and conversations, fueled by the spirited intellects of Thomas Paine, Maria Edgeworth, and William Blake, among others. The intellectual chemistry that Johnson catalyzed led to the production of new books, new ideas, and new species of politics. Although Johnson's political sympathies were broadly liberal, in the classical sense, his veneration for the freedom of the mind led him to propagate the ideas of conservatives and radicals as well. But the mood of the ruling establishment in Britain at the end of the eighteenth-century was so reactionary and paranoid that Johnson, a humble publisher, found himself convicted and punished for the crime of selling a book that dared to dissent from the opinions of a leading Anglican cleric.

My primary wish for this website is to rekindle some interest in the writings of a more passionate and rational age. But I also hope, more vainly, to absorb some of the energies, if not the talents, of those combative writers. I can't match the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints that makes the Analytical Review exciting to read after two hundred years, but hopefully my ever-shifting interests and commitment to free inquiry and open debate may make a visit to this site worthwhile for some. I would especially welcome the comments of all readers interested in the implications of ideas.