In a certain sense, much of Karatani’s book is a brief in favor of the claim that Western philosophy was born in Turkey, not Greece, and then promptly destroyed by the Athenians, though some of the true Turkish philosophy occasionally reappears. But it’s difficult to ascertain why this slight geographic shift across the Aegean Sea should matter so much.(Karatani is Japanese, and so might have some slight preference for locating philosophy’s origins on his continent rather than the European one, but….) But like Heidegger before him, this allows Karatani to argue that the most prominent philosophical voices—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were actually suppressing the insights that they stole from elsewhere and rebranding the whole enterprise.
The Axial Age: State, Market, Temple
Speaking very, very roughly, Buddha and Lao-tzu are contemporaries of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. What happened in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE to launch these philosophical traditions? The main candidates are novel political organizations(states and empires), population growth, and agricultural innovations.
Of course, it’s important to understand that there isn’t actually much evidence that the axial age was unique in generating egalitarian ethics, moralizing religious ideals, and wisdom traditions; there was a market for satirical stories like The Eloquent Peasant a millennium and a half earlier. But perhaps for the first time, following the Axial Age these innovations stuck.
Karatani’s claim, ironically, is that they didn’t stick. Instead, Ionia’s egalitarianism was replaced by Athens’ democratic inequality, where equality for a few was purchased at the expense of the domination of many more. Most political units, Karatani claims, went from tribal units to tribal agglomerations dominated by one tribe and structured by class contestations mapped onto those tribal lines. This, he argues, produces a despotic Asian state, characterized by bureaucratic price fixing. A market where buyers and sellers agree on prices through negotiation is thus a major innovation—one he credits to Ionia. And unlike in other city-states and empires, the free market did not amp up economic inequality in Ionia. Instead, it led to economic equality. Despite his disdain for neoliberalism, Karatani here sounds like a classical liberal: if only markets were truly free, there’d be no permanent winners and losers and free markets would produce both affluence and equality.
The Ionians were somehow able to dissolve their older tribal allegiances and create something he calls a“covenant community” without either tribal boundaries or fixed class identities. And they did this by embracing the commodity fetish of coinage, market pricing, and somehow refusing to form a state, not in the sense that all tribal societies refuse to be joined into states(until they are conquered) but in some independent way. This last refusal then becomes the basis of “moralizing” religions in which even prayer and sacrifice are understood as primarily reciprocal relationships with the divine.
Later, of course, Ionia was conquered by the Delian league, and then by the many antecedents of modern Turkey. But something briefly flared in Ionia that was eventually perverted into Athenian democracy: Karatani calls it isonomy.
Defining Isonomy
The term“isonomy” is usually defined in English as“equality before the law” in the sense of equal civil rights. I usually follow Herodotus in defining it as a kind of maximally inclusive government, such as election to public office by lottery would produce. However, there are two other candidates: isonomy sometimes refers to“home rule” or independence from foreign domination, and it was used by Hannah Arendt to refer to a kind of resistance to government which she calls“no-rule.”
Karatani starts with Arendt. Here’s the relevant passage from On Revolution:
“Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between ruler and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule(the‘archy’ from archein in monarchy and oligarchy, or the‘cracy’ from kratein in democracy) was entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word‘democracy,’ expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is‘no-rule’ is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.
Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville’s insights, frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost identical with it.”
Most readers of Arendt will know and love this passage. But it’s at odds with Herodotus and may well misread the historical political theory, if Karatani is correct. Karatani argues that the Ionians of the ancient Mediterranean world were able to achieve no-rule isonomy only through economic equality. From this economic equality they were able to dependably and sustainably preserve the possibility of equal self-government. And this economic equality was only possible because of a strong cosmopolitan right to immigrate and emigrate, along with a refusal of tribal or any other form of cultural or geographic loyalty to“origins.”“No-rule” then is only possible as“no-source,” no arche.
The Forgetting of Isonomy in Athenian Democratic Theory
The Athenians, in contrast, prioritized positive liberties like voting and speaking in the Assembly over exit. This meant that their democracy was founded both homogeneity and several forms of domination: the domestic domination of slaves and immigrants, on the one hand, and the imperial domination of foreign cities on the other.
Solon’s term as archon might have had some hope of creating the conditions for true equality, as he eliminated debts and granted membership in the newly formed assemby to resident foreigners. But it took a tyrant to institute these reforms, and the tyrant who followed Solon, Peisistratus, was able to seize power in large part because he executed land redistributions. This accustomed Athenian citizens to a novel form of equality, achievable only through the strong-man tactics of a tyrant who would enrich himself and his allies and thus preserve class relations.
Later Athenian tyrants would turn abroad to find resources to redistribute rather than risk their own wealth, like Percles who used profits from the Delian League to pay off Assembly members. Thereby, Athenians discovered something (seemingly) better than domestic equality: foreign conquests. Where the Ionians found true egalitarian isonomy through statelessness, the Athenians could only achieve a facsimile of isonomy–democracy–through a strong state and an adventurous military. An active military requires a clear distinction between agricultural labor (slaves) and the standing army and navy (citizens), so this is the foundation of Athenian democracy, which is why all efforts to learn modern lessons from Greek demoratic forms are doomed to fail.
Exit and Voice
Political philosophers are more likely to argue about the contrast between positive and negative liberty, or between freedom and equality, than to focus on the pairing of exit and voice that derives from Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Understanding negative liberties like freedom from censorship or freedom from the establishment of a state religion primarily in terms of individual liberty and restrictions on state power creates the wrong impression. It’s an impoverished ideal of free speech rights that conceives of them merely to allow unlimited self-expression. When we defend free speech to ensure the effective support for each citizen’s policy preferences—in terms of positive liberty and effective political participation—we similarly run into questions about how much to tolerate intolerable ideas beyond leaving them uncensored.
The Hirschman paradigm suggests that we are better off if we think of two kinds of engagement: effective voice and cheap exit. Consumers and workers can always express their distaste for a product or working condition through mere complaining, but effective voice requires that the companies we work for or purchase from actually listen and respond, even if they don’t always give us what we want. For our exercise of voice to be effective, we need to feel heard and we need to feel that the exchange of reasons that follows is not merely a distraction. In the same way, the right of exit cannot be merely notional but impractical. Where exit costs are high, as when competing products are much more expensive, or other job prospects are poor, there is no cheap exit and threats to leave or switch brands are implausible. The nation-state often combines weak voice and expensive or impossible exit: it’s almost impossible for most people to effectively emigrate legally, and most citizens do not have an effective means to exercise their voice. Instead we are exhorted to practice loyalty—patriotic displays—and for some reason many of us accept this hostage situation with the forced loyalty of Stockholm syndrome.
Karatani argues, however, for an alternate: equality is realized through freedom. “The ability to move is a fundamental precondition of isonomy.” But where could they go? Karatani argues that emigrants could easily form new colonies in Ionia, or join older ones without penalty or prejudice. The underlying commitment to cosmopolitanism is distinct from the kind of ease of travel we now associate with the nation-state. (And note that fewer Americans move for jobs than we used to do.)
A Positive Role for Colonization?
According to Karatani, the Ionian system of isonomy was based on the priority of cheap and easy exits. It’s hard to think of colonialism as a positive political impulse, but in this case it’s closer to the ideology of the frontier: rather than wrangle with entrenched interests or demand to be heard, an Ionian could simply pull up stakes and leave. As Karatani tells it, this both empowered Ionians in their effort to gain effective voice in the endeavors of their current states, and it ensured that all market transactions occurred in a truly reciprocal and ultimately egalitarian manner, without rent-seeking activities which could create permanent class divisions. Trade with neighboring city-states was carried out privately, while Athenian trade leagues were state affairs with plenty of skimming by elites. Conquest of other states could create a revenue stream for division as well.
In part this is based on Karatani’s claim that the ease of emigration and new city-state formation meant that no large farms and landholders could emerge. In contrast, the capture of slaves enables larger farms and a division of labor that then grounded the class system. The “despotic Asian state” always lurks as a possibility so long as human beings are too closely attached to the land, whether as serfs, slaves, or ethno-state citizens.
What is Faith to Free Men?
The most provocative claim in chapter one of Karatani’s book is his speculative comparison of Ionia to Iceland, where he notes that both Iceland and Ionian literature are characterized by a rejection of the gods: the Icelandic sagas seem to reject or ignore the Norse gods, while the Ionian philosophers are uncharacteristically naturalistic for the time. In the same way, 18th century American towns were also the product of migrants fleeing the strict class structures of a homeland, where many of them had been deeply religious. And yet these Americans formed relatively egalitarian communities once they arrived, characterized by easy exits to new frontiers, and a curiously deistic and pluralistic society blessed by Nature’s God. (Karatani doesn’t comment on the murder of indigenous peoples that made that frontier possible, however.)
Karatani thus sees freedom of movement, naturalistic religion, and social and economic equality as the key to isonomy. Returning to Arendt, he advocates for the ward system to help to broaden the sphere in which freedom can produce equality.
TLDR; Hannah Arendt never wrote a "moral philosophy." It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world. Yet as she has become more popular and is taught more and more often by moral philosophers, she is developing an unearned reputation as a moralist that perverts both what we should mean by moral philosophy and what she hoped to show us about the world we now inhabit.
Starting in the mid-nineties and then accelerating in mid-2000s, the publishing house Schocken Books has been publishing impressive thematic collections of mostly unpublished or inaccessible papers by Hannah Arendt. Edited by Jerome Kohn, the collections take up themes like Arendt’s approach to her Jewish identity, or the themes of understanding, politics, or judgment. The first “Essays in Understanding” collection was originally published in 1994, but seemed not to find an audience, and so was not completed: after the successful publication of a new version of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2004, the series was rekindled in 2005 by the publication of The Promise of Politics.Promise was a hit, as were the followups, and a new volume of essays on understanding is due at the beginning of next year.
This has been a great service to Arendt scholars, but it has also had a peculiar impact on the uptake of Arendt in the contemporary era. As I will argue here, these four volumes have completely transformed the disciplinary identification of her work and, perhaps, undermined her own account of how she ought to be read and understood.
Some background: I wrote my dissertation on Arendt. Though I attended Bard College where Hannah Arendt is buried, I first encountered her work in graduate school under the tutelage of Holloway Sparks, a political theorist, when I took a seminar on her work. We read Arendt–as I think was then the fashion–in chronological order, after a brief introduction by way of this interview (transcribed in the Penguin Portable Arendt as this was pre-Youtube):
At the very beginning of the interview, Arendt claims that, “I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted by the circle of philosophers as you so kindly suppose.”
The interviewer, Günter Gaus, protests: “I consider you to be a philosopher.”
Arendt responds: “I can’t help that, but in my opinion, I am not a philosopher. I’ve said good-bye to philosophy once and for all.”
Later, she explains: “I want to look at politics with an eye unclouded by philosophy.”
That was enough to situate Arendt as, in some sense, anti-philosophical, and to highlight the important distinction that motivated much of her work: an antagonism between politics and philosophy. Philosophers, Arendt argued, were too obsessed with objectivity in their assessment of nature and metaphysics to be able to take up the situated thinking of a political theory. Where political theory essays to understand what has happened, which is just what we expect from philosophy of science or metaphysics, when it tries to be political, philosophy retreats to a kind of impotent moralizing. Contrast Marx and Rawls and you’ll see the difference immediately.
It was, at the time, also quite au courant to cite Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt on the question of Arendt as an ethical thinker:
The myriad currents of political opinion represented by Arendt’s critics flowed over or around the larger issues Arendt had raised–and not answers. These issues loomed larger in American political life as the war in Vietnam escalated. Rosalie Colie, Arendt’s Wesleyan friend, ended a letter about the war with a plea: “Please write your morals. We need it, I do anyway.” For a “morals” there was–and still is–a great need, but Eichmann in Jerusalem would not satisfy it.
Thus, Young-Bruehl too assumed that Arendt had left philosophy and its effort to separate normative issues from political ones behind.
Now, of course, we have since that time received the Schocken Books collections with great pleasure. Much there is collected around themes, and perhaps because of this great interest in Arendt’s morals the papers I hear most often cited are the papers on personal and collective responsibility. In other words, the desire for Arendt’s “morals” is so great, produced so much secondary scholarship and archival research, that Jerome Kohn decided to publish the primary source material that might best represent this theme.
The impact of this decision has been, I think, far ranging. I wrote my dissertation just as these collections were being published, so I feel that my own experience of Arendt bridges the pre- and post-Schocken worlds. An ethical reading of Arendt that at the time felt fresh and only available to those who had spent time in the archives at the Library of Congress has begun to feel fairly well accepted. Yet I sometimes wonder whether we have lost the political theoretical version of Arendt in the shuffle.
Consider five ways to read Arendt for the first time: (1) the exhaustive chronological reading of a graduate seminar, (2) in order of impact and importance, (3) a thematic tour through works relevant to your interests, (4) an exhaustive reading focusing on lines of argument and thematic connections, and (5) brief dips into relevant essays, ignoring the larger project.
While I still think (1) is the proper way for upper-level students to imbibe Arendt’s oeuvre, I can acknowledge that completeness is not always a friendly initial goal. Most of my colleagues and readers are pursuing some version of (3) or (5), although a few may get seduced by the exhaustive thematic approach. When my friends James Stanescu and Joseph Trullinger asked me to rank Arendt’s works by importance, I discovered that as much as I hate to admit that some of her books and essays are more important than others, I do have strong feelings about how they ought to be read if (2) is at stake. The ideal read order by impact and quality would be:
The Human Condition
Between Past and Future
On Revolution
Origins of Totalitarianism
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Life of the Mind
Love and Saint Augustine
Crises of the Republic
Men in Dark Times
This is in many ways a conventional order: though many students will start with Eichmann, I believe one can’t appreciate it as an Arendtian text without having a grounding in her other work, both on politics in general and on totalitarianism in specific. I also happen to think that two works which are not as often read today deserve to be more carefully studied: her work On Revolution comparing the French revolution to the American one, and her collection of linked essays, Between Past and Future, which is both deeply philosophical and shows–as she protested in the interview–how political theory is truly a different method than political philosophy.
The publication of the four Schocken volumes (with a fifth coming in January) have radically changed this ordering, however. First, it made available her unpublished piece, “Introduction into Politics” which she intended as a followup to Between Past and Future. (Recall my lengthy treatment of one of its themes here.) Second, it made easily available a triptych of pieces: “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” which together are often read as supplying the necessary “morals” from Arendt.
Let me say a few things about this triptych: written as lectures and addresses, they are clear and easy to read and teach. They also address some of the questions that most bedeviled critics of her account of Jewish leaders’ collaboration with Nazi authorities, and her strange half-indictment of Adolf Eichmann less for what he did out of hate than for what he did out of stupidity. These essays are certainly in conversation with the startling results coming out of social psychology (Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo) regarding the terrible things people will do out of compliant respect for authority or subsumption into a role or job. How can seemingly ordinary men and women–who love their families, attend church regularly, and might never scruple to steal or cheat–engage in horribly violent acts?
Yet is this, this moral psychology, really all we want from moral philosophy? In some sense, the horrors of the Shoah are plain to all who care to look, and “speechless horror” is a perfectly adequate response. After that, Arendt’s moral philosophy constantly returns to a conception of self-consistency, regular reflection, and seems to conclude that most evil-doing is a kind of superficial self-deception. The totality of her moral philosophy might be boiled down to: a) “No one has the right to obey,” and b) “Morality is being able to live with yourself and what you’ve done.”
Arendt says as much in “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” which largely summarizes the argument of Between Past and Future and is primarily about confronting the collapse of morality into manners, the loss of abstract principles or autonomy in the pursuit of social conformity, and the ease with which mores and customs can be turned towards wickedness.
As such, I’ve begun to worry that these new collections may cause us to ignore Arendt’s political theory. It’s as if a new edition of Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer became all the rage and we began to ignore the Critiques. Reading Arendt through the lens of her disgust with moral philosophy–which, like religion and theology was utterly unable to prevent or even explain the Nazis–means that we ignore what, to my mind, she was able to help us see about the world. It also means that we too readily accept that moral philosophy can never be anything other than a kind of degraded political theory. I think there are many more interesting lines of inquiry to be had from moral philosophers than how to avoid committing genocide!
But I won’t defend moral philosophy from Arendt here. Too many of her critics read her looking for flaws or weaknesses to attack. Instead, here’s an act of appreciative theory:
Joshua Miller’s Top Ten Things that Arendt Got Right About Political Theory
Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of the rise of totalitarianism is a mammoth book, but the basic argument is simple: you can’t hate Jews for their race until you think of the fundamental flaw with Judaism in racial terms. Thus, race-thinking comes before racism. Before race-thinking, Europeans hated Jews for completely different reasons: religion! You don’t exterminate other religions, you convert them. But once you have race-thinking, you can create justifications not just for anti-Semitism but for colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery of Africans.
The Holocaust happened because Europeans started treating each other the way they treated indigenous peoples in the rest of the world. Europeans learned to think racially in the colonization of Africa, and the European model for dealing with resistance involved murderous concentration camps. Thus, when race-thinking eventually returned as a form of governance in the European continent, so too did the concentration camps.
Totalitarianism is largely caused by the growth of a class of “superfluous” people who no longer have a role in their economy. In an industrializing society, much traditional work can now be done with fewer workers. One possible solution to this oversupply of workers is to put some of that surplus labor force to work monitoring, policing, and murdering the rest.
Ideologues ignore counter-evidence. A very good way to understand ideology is as a logical system for avoiding falsification. There are alternatives theories of ideology that aren’t immune to counter-evidence but instead merely exert constant pressure: for instance, there’s a difference between what Fox News does and what Vox does, and Arendt’s account is more useful for criticizing Fox’s constant spinning than Vox’s technocratic neoliberalism. But Arendt supplied us a useful account of ideology that is closest to our standard use and our current need.
The language of human rights is noble and aspirationally powerful. However, statelessness renders most rights claims worthless in practical terms and in most judicial institutions. Someone who must depend on her rights as a “man” or a human is usually worse off in legal terms than an ordinary criminal.
You don’t discover yourself through introspection. You discover yourself through action. The main set of claims she made in The Human Condition about the role of public and political life strikes me as pretty important, especially insofar as it denigrates economic and racial identity politics. Think of the cocktail party version of this: on meeting a new person, some people will ask, “Where do you work?” in order to get to know them, identifying them through their profession, their economic role. Others will ask: “What are you into?” as if to say that our recreation and consumption is what defines us. But for Arendt, the appropriate question is: “What have you done? What do you stand for?”
If you take that seriously, “identity” politics is frustratingly restrictive. A person is not defined merely by the class or race they come from: they are defined by the principles upon which they act. While it is often necessary to step into the political sphere as a representative of Jews or women–and Arendt acknowledged that this becomes unavoidable when one is attacked as a woman or a Jew–the best kind of politics allows us to enter the political sphere as ourselves, not knowing what we will discover about those selves until we have acted. So the need for identity politics is an indication of larger injustices: we respond as members of our groups when systematic and institutional forces oppress us as members of these groups.
Revolutions that aim for political goals are more likely to succeed than revolutions that aim for economic goals. Misery is infinite and thus insatiable; political equality is comparatively easy to achieve. Thus it’s important to connect economic complaints to a deprivation of political equality: the important problem with white supremacy, for instance, is not that whites “have” more than Blacks, but that we count for more, that it is uncontroversial that “White Lives Matter.” (Though an important indication of that “counting for more” is that white people have more than Blacks because we continually plunder Black people and are able to get away with it systematically.)
Philosophy as a discipline is fundamentally at odds with politics. This is a problem for political philosophy, and it helps to explain why so much of political philosophy is hostile to politics and tries to subsume the agonistic nitty-gritty of the public sphere under rules of coherence and expert knowledge. This is because thinking as an activity is a withdrawal from active life, and especially politics: the fundamental conflict between the eternal and the ephemeral is not one that can be usefully bridged, and most often those encounters are pernicious for both thinkers and doers.
Work and labor are different. Some activities are repetitive and exhausting, and only biological necessity forces us to continue them. Some activities make the world and our lives within it meaningful and fruitful. Many people have economic roles that mix the two activities, but still and all they are distinct. What’s more, there’s not shame in wishing and working for a world without labor, perhaps a world of automation. But a world without work would be fundamentally meaningless.
One last thing: the Schocken collections are admirable and beautiful texts, but Jerome Kohn sometimes turns to salesmanship in his introductions. Perhaps one reason they play such an outsized role in recent readings of Arendt is that he argues in the introduction (and many readers seem to accept) that “her unwritten volume on Judging… may have crossed some of the t’s and dotted some of the i’s of ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.'” In short, Kohn bills these lectures as filling in the unwritten volume. (While he disavows this interpretation in the next line, he also writes assertively if schematically about what Judging must be given these essays.)
Lectures given in 1965 and 1966–which only set up questions and ostentatiously end in uncertainty rather than answer them!–are supposed prefigural accounts of Arendt’s thoughts a decade later. It’s really a shame: a Heideggerian anxiety over mortality and the unfinished projects it portends that is deeply un-Arendtian. As with Beiner’s transcription and interpolation of the Kant lectures and indeed as with my own dissertation on her work, we are so focused on what we lost with her death that we ignore what she gave us.
I know it’s become standard fare for liberals to criticize Republicans for injustice. But I want to take a strong stand against this disgusting display, in which the Governor of Ohio, acting as a public official, told the world: “We want all the immigrants to come to Ohio, because we know how much they contribute to America!”
Notice that “all”? Kasich is edging for a monopoly. And that’s where I have to draw the line: this country was built on competitive federalism, and Ohio doesn’t have the right to all the DREAMers. Ohio should have to woo them the same as everybody else. Maryland has a right to DREAMers, too, and I’d argue we need them more.
Now I know many people will argue that Kasich is just engaging in salesmanship, a crucial part of the job as governor. He’s making a rhetorically strong pitch, not actually trying to use his office to allot an unfair advantage to his state. Maybe so. Donald Trump set off this absurd bidding war by changing the rules of the game in ending DACA. That was a dumb move, because now there’s a feeding frenzy as states compete to fill in the vacuum left by the federal government. Some states will win and some will lose. I think Congress should act to reset the playing field levelly, calm the market for the best and brightest citizens, workers, and entrepreneurs, by passing the DREAM Act.
Once they’re done, it’ll be time to deal with this gluttonous monster, Eli Bosnick:
Bosnick seems to think that his home state should get all the refugees, too. There are five million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and the United States already has far fewer of them than we deserve.
Bosnick exacerbates the problem by bogarting the Syrian refugees for himself. Steve Jobs was a Syrian immigrant, and Bosnick is saying, basically, “I want all the iPhones!” (Which, to be absolutely honest, just isn’t quite as good of a get since Jobs died.) But that’s not the American Way! Americans should be able to all have an opportunity to resettle Syrian refugees through their churches, synogogues, and mosques! Matthew La Corte and David Bier have argued just that, and we should listen.
(I’m sorry for the uncharacteristic satire, but I don’t know how else to express the intensity of my anger and outrage. We all feel some issues so deeply that we can’t engage in careful policy arguments about them; this is one of my weaknesses. I can tell you about the economic impact on growth, the effect on employment for native-born, the benefits to the home country through remittances, but it just seems silly to make this fight about numbers. Immigration makes me feel practically biblical:
When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
But here’s something sort of rational: I’ll be voting on this policy. So far, Kasich is the only potential candidate for 2020 who has come out this strongly: that means that right now, Republican or not, he has my vote. (If Kamala Harris can get the DREAM Act passed, though, I’ll definitely reconsider. And if we can get serious action on refugees from some public official of any party, I’ll be sold.)
In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (See chart.)[1] Yet philosophy is not without famous co-authors (e.g., Marx and Engels). What’s more, some monographs ought properly be considered co-authored, like John Stuart Mill’s collaborations with Harriet Taylor Mill: “when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen.”
There is little scholarship on co-authorship in philosophy, but a steady trickle of blog posts suggests that there is interest and anxiety on this point. (Helen de Cruz, Mark Zelcer, Robert Paul Wolff)
1. What is co-authorship generally?
Co-authorship in the sciences is ideally ruled by two rules rooted in a particular sociology of labs and research groups. First, co-authors contribute to the scholarly endeavor for a piece of publishable scholarship by planning, executing, or analyzing the results of some sort of research. Second, co-authors compose the written portion of the research, either collectively or through some division of labor.
Both of these ideals are violated, of course—there are plenty of massive multi-authored articles where scholars receive token authorship (gift authorship) or someone who made substantial contributions is not credited as an author (ghost authorship.) In that way, these are “endorsed” norms, not the “enforced” ones: violations abound and are even legitimated as common practice in some “big science” research areas. But this remains the practical ideal.
2. Why is co-authorship deprecated in philosophy?
Professional philosophers collaborate, usually through disputatious conversation, but usually not in a way that counts multiple thinkers as the author of a single paper. We are also much less likely to cite our peers than the agenda-setting papers in our sub-fields, especially as a part of a generic literature review. (See Kieran Healey’s data.) It is more common for close collaborators to co-edit than to co-author: for instance, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum famously created the “capabilities approach” together without co-authoring any of their foundational papers. They did, however, co-edit the seminal volume, The Quality of Life in 1993.
So while we do not imagine ourselves to be lone geniuses communing with the ancient canon, it is the case that many philosophical papers are projected as manifestos of a single principled thinker. Indeed, philosophers are particularly prone to a kind of “subauthorial collaboration” that is formalized in lavish acknowledgements in the text or an early footnote. (Cronin, Shaw, La Barre, 2003)
“This paper mostly presents the latest lessons I’ve learned from my students. Under the customs of the natural sciences, it should have been a joint paper, the coauthors being (in alphabetical order) John Collins, Ned Hall, myself [David Lewis], L.A. Paul, and Jonathan Schaffer. But under the customs of philosophy, a paper is expected to be not only a report of discoveries but a manifesto; and, happily, the five of us have by no means agreed upon a common party line.”[2]
Yet analytic philosophers often imagine themselves by analogy to the natural and social sciences, and American and continental philosophers increasingly emphasize the collaborative nature of our enterprise. Why, then, do we not use co-authorship more?
One obvious reason is the relative paucity of grants and research support compared to the natural and social sciences. Without an incentive to adopt the lab or research group model, most working philosophers are not members of a funded research unit with reporting requirements. Rigorous research is understood to support ‘research-led teaching,’ and so the single-author model is based primarily on the single-teacher model. We should thus expect the introduction of larger private grant-making institutions, like the Templeton Foundation and the Berggruen Institute, and public European grant agencies, to usher in an era of increasing research group size in philosophy, and the more frequent co-authorship.
We expect that new collaborative technologies will decrease the costs and difficulties of collaboration to the extent that philosophers will more often overcome them, even without any increased funding or benefits. Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, and simple Microsoft Office sharing, versioning, and commenting will all tend to ease the speed with which scholars of all varieties—including philosophers—create collaborative documents. Social media, chat programs, and email ease collaboration over distance to replicate the proximity by which labs and research groups co-compose.
Lastly, we might think of philosophical research as long-shot bets (Langhe and Schliesser, 2017) that explore concepts, methods, or techniques that may be generally applicable. As such, it will be difficult to trace any particular result in the world back to a paper or monograph, and it is preferable to have many such long-shot bets rather than focus the efforts and attention of a highly skilled research team on sequential elaboration of just one of these gambles. It will generally be better to encourage idiosyncratic work done by individuals and small teams in hopes that one of those bets pays off. In the age of increasingly easy collaboration some enduring, virtual small research teams will emerge without, hopefully, fully displacing lone wolfs and disputatious research groups.
3. What norms of co-authorship might philosophers embrace?
If philosophers do adopt co-authorship norms, which ones should we adopt?
We should start with the ideal of recognition of actual contribution to the research and knowing participation in the composition. Co-authorship should never be merely “honorary” inclusion for a member of a team or department who contributed to neither the research work nor the writing endeavor. However, the division of labor in some disciplines has the result of producing co-authored pieces where some credited contributors don’t even understand the paper they have helped to produce. Should we extend co-authorship to a student assistant who writes the literature review for a piece of research without understanding the rest of the paper? Should we accept co-authorship for a paper whose conclusions we do not endorse, if we supplied the formal modeling or computer code that underwrites it?
Our current professional ideal is consensus. On this ideal all authors must give credence to every jot and tittle of the work, even if their confidence varies slightly. Co-authorship in philosophy is stricter because philosophers can and should endorse all the claims, arguments, and conclusions of the paper. Papers can be thus be co-authored in philosophy when two or more researchers find a common interest, discuss it at great length, and truly co-compose the entire paper, contesting each argumentative move and turn of phrase until agreement is reached. As such, it should be very unlikely to see large groups of co-authors writing together, given the difficulty of producing such an exacting meeting of the minds, and we even look askance at philosophy papers co-authored by three or four scholars.
Another possibility is that philosophers working on closely-related research might try to divvy up the tasks in a field of research around some question such that only one or a few of the authors of a work understand the whole thing, while others are credited for their contributions without being “first” or “lead” author status. This requires trust in each other to handle sections of the paper that address relevant issues from their sub-fields; perhaps a paper that is 12,000 words long is written in two halves, with only the introduction and conclusion truly a joint project. On this ideal, co-authors retain to right to veto truly abhorrent claims made outside of their assigned sections, but only by threatening to dissolve the partnership. Otherwise, they can only register objections and hope to be heard.
A third possibility would be to follow the norm in law courts, where empaneled and en banc judges issue both dissenting opinions or in some cases join the majority in parts of their decision but not others, perhaps affirming the result but not all of the methods used to arrive at it. In such cases, a minority might dissent vehemently, while the court is understood to have rendered the opposite verdict: that minority dissent is clearly a separate research project in philosophical terms. They are not understood as co-authors of the majority opinion but as co-authors of a distinct opinion which did not win a majority of support. The more instructive question is what to do when judges affirm parts of the main decision but not all of it, and by analogy, situations where co-authors affirm parts of a research project but not all of it. Can it be possible for one of the co-authors to “sign on” to parts 1, 2, and 4 of a paper, while dissenting from arguments found in part 3 and in the conclusion? For example, in the past one of us has used a footnote to signal an alternative position from the one arrived at in the body of the paper.
A fourth possibility is majority voting. Bright, Dang, and Heesen (2017) argue that scientific work should aggregate researchers’ judgments. Claims and propositions should be made in a paper that receive the assent of the majority of the authors. One might well find oneself outvoted in some cases, and this would be fine so long as there was agreement that voting had not produced a contradictory or logically incoherent set of claims.
A fifth possibility would be a kind of deliberative dictatorship: a lead author could write a paper, assign sections for others to compose, and bounce ideas off of possible co-authors. At the conclusion, all participants who agreed with the final product could sign on as co-authors, while dissenters could produce their own dissenting papers to be published alongside. This is related to proposals that might allow peer reviewers to receive more recognition for their work as initial gatekeepers.
Could all of these modes of co-authorship flourish in philosophy? Are some of them inimical to the discipline?
4. Philosophers should co-author more of our work
Given the fact that some forms of collaborative recognition do exist, why suggest co-authorship as an alternative model for philosophy? Let’s start by dividing the reasons for co-authorship into roughly epistemic and roughly ethical categories, even if this is a division that is easily collapsed. Co-authored papers may simply be better for having multiple composers, readers, and researchers attached to them. The division of epistemic labor will often lead to better-written, more carefully crafted, or simply more copious publications: many minds make light work.
At the same time, co-authorship is partly about recognizing the contributions of our peers. In that sense, it is ethical. This is a weaker defense of co-authorship, since there are alternative methods for providing recognition. If a paper issues from a conversation with a colleague or a good objection raised at a conference or blog post, we philosophers would normally expect to mention that in a footnote, not to grant the colleague or objector co-authorship status. Philosophy papers are sometimes imagined to be the record of the thoughts or analysis of a single agent, and group agency seems much more difficult in these cases because we are so rarely in anything resembling agreement. We are rarely of a single mind, ourselves, so this is no big impediment, but this also ignores the fact that one can commit to a written product while having varying confidence in its disparate elements.
But there’s a significant ethical claim that might recommend co-authorship: the ideal of scholarly friendship. Co-authorship can be a way to channel professional philosophical relationships in productive ways, a norm for guiding conversations and arguments towards shared, potentially overlapping projects. There is independent reason to believe that shared projects are an intrinsic good tied closely to well-being. (Korsgaard, 1992) Thus we should, if possible, prefer to share the tasks associated with philosophical research with others, not just after publication but throughout the scholarly endeavor. Philosophical co-authorship is desirable just because philosophical friendship is desirable.
Shared projects are possible both between equals and between mentors and students. As such, co-authorship is a way to encourage productive collaboration within departments and with undergraduate and graduate students. In the pedagogy-first model of much philosophical research, departmental colleagues at most small schools should not co-author their research because this leads to overlapping areas of interest and knowledge. A department with only a handful of philosophers should instead hope that its faculty have as little in common as possible, even if they must share governance of their department and spend their careers working side-by-side. But if co-authorship underwrites philosophical friendship, then even a maximally pluralistic department should seek opportunities to co-create research, actively seeking agreement and shared methods, research areas, and conceptual terrain.
Like friends, co-authors need not agree on everything.[3] Finding some method for adjudicating those disagreements is important, but philosophical writing can encompass these minor dissents or majoritarian procedures, just as our departments do. The key is that the commitment to co-author—like the commitments of friendship—is a commitment to resolve disagreements using whatever methods are available. Friends do not obsess over decision-procedures, though we adopt them to ease tensions for the sake of shared projects. The same should go for co-authors.
Like friends, co-authors need not be equals. We see in the sciences that co-authorship allows a kind of scholarly mentorship, and in philosophy graduate students experience intense collaboration for the first time while writing their dissertation with a senior scholar. We even acknowledge that this is akin to co-authorship by treating dissertation advising as something close to co-authorship for some professional purposes.
More of this sort of mentorship should be encouraged. The practice of learning from another scholar does not end when a philosopher receives a PhD, and probably we shouldn’t pretend that it does. Perhaps newly-minted PhDs aren’t yet ready for the full burdens of a research program, or perhaps they would benefit from mentorship when they move on to a new research program. Or perhaps not: perhaps this would end with more domination by senior scholars, as the division of labor creates permanent hierarchies. But it’s not as if our current, academic political economy is hierarchy-free.
A final reason is merely accuracy: our authorial norms give a false idea of our practices to the rest of the academy. We should consider revising them to align ourselves with our fellow academics. Let’s not pretend that scholarly productivity metrics are irrelevant or that Deans do not look askance at our publication records compared to other disciplines.
[1] Despite the best efforts of some of the authors of this post!
It’s France’s fête nationale–Bastille Day–marking the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine. The crowd of revolutionaries were mostly looking for guns and ammunition held by the garrison of soldiers stationed there, but they also suspected that the prisoners were being tortured. (They weren’t.) Seven prisoners were freed that day: four forgers, two mentally-ill people, and one aristocrat.
In the US we should celebrate today as Prison Abolition Day.
I consider myself a prison abolitionist in the same way that Angela Davis is: I think the United States massively over-incarcerates its citizens, especially its Black citizens. I think that prisons ought to be spaces of education and care rather than domination. And I think that our communities must be redesigned to prevent the crimes for which we send people to prison.
In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of using an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete. There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population. (Abolition Democracy, pg. 96)
That’s still a lot of people, of course, but we currently incarcerate roughly seven times the global average of our population, without having seven times the crime. Our violent crime rate is on par with or even much lower than countries like the UK–though it’s true that our gun ownership rates make our assaults more often fatal murders–but we incarcerate many, many more people. So I propose we should start by aiming to shrink our prison population by 6/7s. This is an odd fraction, but it just represents the over-incarceration rate in the US compared to the rest of the world. It’s also deliberately a bit inexact: many countries have fewer than 100 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. Perhaps the US could achieve the lower, more civilized rates of incarceration found in Finland and Norway, over time, but in any case, 6/7s abolition strikes me as a good place to start.
Sometimes I hear from other prison abolitionists that this is still 1/7 too many. But I don’t really know what to make of this. The majority of American prisoners are incarcerated for violent crimes, and I don’t know what it means to wish for impunity or restorative justice in every such case. Surely some people deserve some punishment; all I ask is that we radically remake the entire carceral character of American life.
This means drastically lower sentences: closer to the sentences prisoners served in the 1970s than the ones they serve today. It means prosecuting fewer crimes, too. But it doesn’t mean sacrificing our safety: it means focusing policing and imprisonment on the kinds of wonkish policies that we know work, while reinvesting the savings from incarceration in social supports.
Of the seven prisoners at the Bastille, I propose that one–perhaps the stray aristocrat, the Comte de Solages, who some records suggest was a rapist and attempted murderer and whose noble birth very nearly granted him impunity–deserved to be there. For the sake of the other six, however, we must still storm the carceral state!
Bosnick seems to think that his home state should get all the refugees, too. There are five million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and the United States already has far fewer of them than we deserve.
In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (
That’s still a lot of people, of course, but we currently incarcerate roughly seven times the global average of our population, without having seven times the crime. Our violent crime rate is on par with or even much lower than countries like the UK–though it’s true that our gun ownership rates make our assaults more often fatal murders–but we incarcerate many, many more people. So I propose we should start by aiming to shrink our prison population by 6/7s. This is an odd fraction, but it just represents the over-incarceration rate in the US compared to the rest of the world. It’s also deliberately a bit inexact: many countries have fewer than 100 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. Perhaps the US could achieve the lower, more civilized rates of incarceration found in Finland and Norway, over time, but in any case, 6/7s abolition strikes me as a good place to start.