Thesis on Marx

Everything begins with arms. Even the ownership of the means of production requires the material means to enforce such ownership. And this enforcement dependts on the relations that spring from the distribution of the means of coersion. The accumulation of the means of production is absolutely spurious if it is not backed by the appropriate means of coersion. The form of government emerges out of the social relations produced by the distribution of the means of coersion available in a society. In politics it is of little relevance who is rich and who is poor, but who wields the weapons. Even if we acknowledge that the means of coersion are produced in the realm of the economic, the one that ultimately controls, holds and wields them is the one who is politically dominant.

Response paper to Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom, Ch. 1

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Wittgenstein

I want to make some remarks on Amartya Sen’s notion of freedom, i.e. what he calls “substantive freedom.” The purpose is to demonstrate how easily his notion can be proved to be fallacious and nonsensical. Independently of the good intentions of a theory, if the logical structure of what is being uttered makes absolutely no sense, the truth is that what is happening is that nothing is being actually said. In this sense Amartya Sen thinks he is saying something important about freedom when in fact he is just uttering senseless noise.

He says of “freedom: the ability to survive rather than succumb to premature mortality. This is obviously a significant freedom, but there are many others that are also important. Indeed, the range of relevant freedoms can be very wide.” (p. 24) In few words, there are many freedoms that are not the same thing, so freedom is not equal to freedom, which of course, makes no sense. If there is freedom it must have a core meaning to which everything else converges. If not, the concept is meaningless. Here Sen says that freedom is survival, as opposed to death. Interestingly enough we are all condemn to die some way or the other, so freedom has become an impossible enterprise. Moreover, no one can predict if by chance tomorrow I am going to be stroke by a lightning bolt and die, so there must be a freedom not to be killed prematurely by lightning bolts. Otherwise, what is the difference between dying prematurely by starvation, by being murdered in the middle of the night, by an unpredictable flood, by the explosion of a gas leak in your kitchen, by slipping on the floor and breaking your neck; all of them are premature deaths (and that is assuming that we can have an intelligible meaning for the adjective "premature"). This is a reductio ad absurdum.

When talking about quality of life, (Ibid) (a notion that is linked to historical and cultural contexts, and cannot be detached from them without losing any tangible meaning) Sen uses Aristotle, and his famous ethical theory of eudaimonia (good life). Interestingly enough Aristotle never speaks about freedom, or never makes his ethical life a function of freedom. Freedom and liberty are notions developed by the later Roman republican tradition, and especially among historians and not philosophers, at least not in Ancient times. Sen’s use of Aristotle’s ethics to make a defense of individual freedom strikes us as alien. The latter Aristotelian tradition of freedom was interpreted by the late Romans, and especially in the early Modern Europe as self-government. Never as the freedom of personal fulfillment, and especially never as individual freedom that, after Locke, is tantamount of the sovereignty of the individual over his own body. Sen’s reading of Aristotle is outrageous.

Then Sen addresses the notion of market freedom (p. 26) that, somehow, is the inheritance from the Hobbesian notion of negative liberty. So far so good, until he makes the connection between this logically coherent concept with the Aristotelian idea of personal self-fulfillment that not only Hobbes, by recently Berlin, considered to be contrary to what they were talking about when uttering the word freedom. He actually goes as far as to criticize economists that have moved from this notion of development as linked to freedom and prefer talking about utilities (p.27) when in fact this move is logical; because consumption is a different act than the phenomenon we call freedom. They might be related, but they cannot be considered to be the same without making both concepts nonsense.

He also addresses the problem of dictatorship and slavery as a problem for freedom, which is completely reasonable. However these are the problem addressed by the Neo-Roman/Republican notion of freedom as absence from a relation of servitude. Sen doesn’t seem to tell the difference, nor understand why these different notions are logically incompatible. Three concepts of liberty: (a) the Hobbesian negative liberty of non interference, (b) the Aristotelian-inspired positive liberty of self mastery and, (c) the Machiavellian liberty of non domination. Logically speaking one of them is correct, or all are incorrect, but the three of them in conjunction cannot be correct without rendering all of them nonsensical. Sen is not a logician, but the field considers his opinion to be one of high standing, when in fact , in this case, is corrosive of the academic debate. He is concerned about economic development, which is one of the original concerns of economists. But he takes concepts from the fields of ethics, political science and history in a way that destroys their intelligibility; an approach that is offensive for the scholars in these respective fields.

A praise of Political Severity

I've added to the list of prominent men that I admire the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Many might know by now that when regarding to Rome I focus on the republic, and by the name Rome I always mean the republic. Consistent with this vision I consider everything that happened after Julius Caesar to be a tragic story of tyranny and slavery. I do not depart from this vision, but my recent immersion into Machiavelli's thought has given me the extraordinary tool to twist and change my vantage point according to necessity and fortune, something that is essential, if not mandatory, to understand anything that has to do with politics. In this new approach, now that I'm rereading the Prince, I've been impressed by Machiavelli's high praise of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a man famously recognized for his unscrupulous political actions. Like any other emperor, he was a tyrant. But when we leave the republic and its freedom behind, and we set our play in the realm of absolute and long-lasting tyranny, our value judgments and normative claims must shift, something in which Machiavelli was extraordinarily skillful at.

Machiavelli writes that "because of what Severus did was remarkable and outstanding for a new prince, I want to show briefly how well he knew how to act the part of both a fox and a lion, whose natures, as I say above, must be imitated by a new prince" (P XIX). Interestingly enough the nature of both the fox and the lion were the beastly natures that the humanist tradition, the inheritance of Cicero, would condemn as unworthy. Machiavelli would turn this tradition upside down, being his praise of Severus one of the turning points of this break with the humanists (Skinner, 1981, 40). This led me to Herodian of Antioch, the source from which Machiavelli draws his portrayal of the Roman Emperors in chapter 19 of the Prince.

Of Severus Herodian says that "he was surely the most accomplished of all men in pretending to pledge his good will, but he never kept his sworn word if it proved necessary for him to break it; he lied whenever it was advantageous to him, and his tongue said many things which his heart did not mean" (History of the Roman Empire, II). He ruled for almost eighteen years, his son Caracalla succeeded to the throne successfully and he brought peace and stability in a moment in which the empire's structure of political authority was about to collapse after Commodus deserved death. What does this say about the ancient Ciceronian and today's Kant/Mill-liberal moralities and their relations to politics? Maybe that they don't worth a penny when the chips are down, and that the true nature of political power is tested precisely in these moments of emergency. Recently this vision of politics was exposed by Carl Schmitt, who might be blameworthy of his Nazi allegiance, but whose political insight and sincerity cannot be denied. So with Machiavelli.

Reading about how Severus managed to take over the empire by using the cunning of the fox in bamboozling everyone into his own scheme, and then defeating his enemies with the ferocious strength of the lion, produces nothing but awe and admiration (the charm of evil). But the most interesting contrast regards the unsuccessful attempt by the previous Pertinax to establish his imperial authority by the "strength" of moral convictions and reasonable arguments, in a lame attempt to imitate Marcus Aurelius, which led him to be butchered by his own praetorian bodyguards, thereby ending his less-than-three-months rule. His incompetence to understand politics could have sunk the Roman Empire into long-lasting anarchy, if it weren't because of the skillful and vigorous intervention of Severus. Which lead me to my conclusion: those that want to hold their moral integrity at all cost in the face of impelling necessity, at least in the realm politics, can be the most irresponsible actors of all; because instead of weighting the good of the community as the main reason of their historical position, they prefer the maintain their conscience clean, i.e. the paradoxical conclusion that acting morally can be utterly selfish.

This is so obvious, so common sense, that hearing the self-righteous liberals and left-wing socialists speak about justice, fairness, equality and progress makes so much noise in a world of wretched human beings. John Stuart Mill praised Marcus Aurelius as the most glorious and virtuous Roman Emperor. And he is right in doing so, because under his rule the Empire enjoyed the peak of its accomplishments. But he is deceived in believing that Marcus Aurelius example can be taken to be a fixed rule in a world of ever-changing conditions, not to speak of the almost silly discourse of modern Kantianism.
Septimius Severus, 21st Emperor of the Roman Empire (14 April 193 – 4 February 211)