Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

 

Descartes’s Evil Genius reappears in Hilary Putnam’s Evil Scientist, who creates the world of the brains in a vat, beings who trust—but should not trust—their own ‘senses,’ which are in fact artificial creations of the Evil Scientist. Like Descartes, like Machiavelli, Putnam argues for a new epistemology and a new morality. He wants an epistemology that synthesizes ‘objective’ and ‘subjective,’ a morality that synthesizes ‘fact’ and ‘value.’ Can he do that, without merely rehabilitating Hegelian historicism? Or is that what he wants to do?

Or does he want to follow Plato? Without ‘synthesizing’ subjects and objects, the Platonic dialogue does bring them into coordination, although philosophers who fail to respect literary genre never see this. The dialogue is just that: someone make every argument to someone else. Two ‘subjects’ speak and listen to one another, about some ‘object’ or topic, and to some end or purpose. It is Descartes who veers from realism. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is every bit as dialogic as ‘Do you see, Glaucon…?’ Talking to yourself does not escape the ‘doubleness’ of thought. That fact forms the foundation of political philosophy.

Intentionality underlies representation, Putnam observes, rather Platonically. An isolated mental representation loses its intended meaning; show a tree to someone who’s never left the Sahara, and who knows what it might represent to him? “Thought words and mental pictures do not intrinsically represent what they are about” (5).

Hence the problem of brains in a vat. Descartes’s evil genius may have created the world in which we are nothing but brains in a vat, our minds ‘seeing’ artificial images fed in through artificial senses—rather like Plato’s prisoners in the Cave of opinion, but in a place much harder to get out of. Our sensually ‘self-evident’ data are false, but we have no way of knowing this. We can say all the things human beings say (at least if our brains are hooked with some device that enables us to vocalize), but they cannot refer to the things human beings refer to. To refer, a sentence or thought must have to do with the real world. A being comprehensively fooled has no effective intelligence in either the Platonic sense of noēsis or the Machiavellian sense of grasping.

If brains in a vat chorus, ‘We are brains in a vat,’ they’ve hit upon the truth randomly, like chimps typing Coriolanus. Putnam goes so far as to say that this randomly true statement is false, when said by the poor brains. He wants to avoid a God’s-Eye absolutism—which, unfortunately, his own audience, and indeed his creator-god evil scientist, cannot help but supply, and therefore to conceive of themselves similarly. The less dramatic way to proceed is the Socratic way: I begin with sense perceptions and opinion. I have various ways to test them; chief among these is the principle of non-contradiction, which is mentally and physically inescapable in certain ways. The results of my testing may eventually take me very far afield from opinion and even from sense perception: a theory of ideas, quantum physics. Those far-afield theories nonetheless play out in the world  of commonsense (sense perceptions + opinions), and can be corroborated sensually and ‘conceptually.’ (After hearing so much about the non-sensuality of modern physics, according to physicists who know a lot more math than I do, I am always entertained by their joy in announcing experiments that confirm empirically some theory worked out on paper, a century back.)

The claim that ‘concepts’ are “mental presentations” that do not “necessarily refer to external things” is, then, not entirely true. Concepts are mental presentations that necessarily refer to external things: the vat-brains’ ‘tree’ is the result of an external stimulus, provided by a real evil scientist, rather as the cave-dwellers image is the result of being shown an image by the opinion makers of the polis. Such mental presentations are false, a matter of some cunning artifice or convincing natural illusion, which are external though deceptive. Philosophers are wisdom-lovers who test whether the unassisted human mind can sift through commonsense impressions to determine if they are part of a larger whole or ‘nature.’

Putnam sensibly writes, “the whole problem we are investigating is how representations can enable us to refer to what is outside the mind” (27). Putnam rejects the neo-Machiavellian or Kantian claim that one should make a priori impositions on the world, call them “theoretical constraints,” and then test them. This “does not work!” he exclaims (32). You still need reference. ‘The cat is on the mat’ doesn’t mean ‘the cat is on the mat’ if by ‘cat’ I mean ‘cherries.’

Putnam also tries to dispose of a ‘Darwinian’ approach to epistemology—this one objectivist, not subjectivist. According to evolutionism, if our mental representations did not correspond to externals, we would perish. There is truth in this argument, Putnam concedes; there must be some correspondence between subject and object, lest objects smash into subjects with extreme prejudice. But this is not too helpful: A pigeon can make his way into New York as readily as I can, if not more so; yet, bird-brain though I may be, it’s clear to humans that humans do not perceive all the same aspects of reality that birds perceive. To this I only add: The correspondence I perceive must be disproved. What I think I see is what I get, as far as I know, until testing proves otherwise. Even a test-refutation may only bring out supplementary dimensions to what I see. Even a ‘paradigm shifting’ series of test (as a conservative Kuhnian conceives of them)—for example, as Einsteinian physics gives Newtonian physics a new frame, without refuting Newtonian physics altogether—confirms rather than disproves my provisional but strong trust in correspondence. (Putnam’s Kuhn, by contrast, is a thinker of “extreme relativism” [113].)

Putnam’s basic point looks sound. Believing and intending presuppose the ability to refer, but we need something more than naïve correspondence theory to know, or at least know more, about what it is we refer to. As for his dismissal of “metaphysical realism,” or “the externalist perspective” (49 ff.), it runs into a problem. First, if the world does not “consist of some fixed”—or why not changing?—”totality of mind-independent objects,” what was the world before minds of some sort came into it? Far from assuming a “God’s Eye point of view” (50), metaphysical realism accepts a world with or without minds. Further, while there may be no God’s Eye point of view “that we can know or usefully imagine” (emphasis added), this does not mean that the God’s Eye view cannot be theoretically valid. The problem with the God’s Eye view is the problem Gnostics propose: Maybe there are gods behind gods, each with his own Eye. But this problem disappears practically if you take the ‘conservative’ view that commonsense is valid until disproved. This does not mean that truth can be “independent of observers altogether if “truth” refers to an interaction of observer and observed. It does mean that there is reality independent of observers altogether—that, for example, the Milky Way would still exist whether or not there was anyone or anything to perceive it. “Truth”—so defined—and possibility are not coterminous. If the world does not send out ‘noetic rays,’ prove it, because that’s what common sense tacitly assumes. The mere raising of doubt proves or disproves nothing. The Cartesian command to doubt everything—insofar as it is not mad—really constitutes a philosopher’s critique of religious belief as a substitute for the workings of the unassisted human mind.

Putnam properly insists that his mixture of subjectivism and objectivism is no “facile relativism” (54)—leaving open whether or not it amount to some infacile relativism. Conceptual systems may be created, he says, but they are not created equal. He rather argues that commonsense “inputs” are “themselves to some extent shaped by our concepts” (54)—something that Socrates would hardly deny, having expended much effort to refine opinions or ‘concepts.’ As noted above, the modern ‘concept,’ stripped of epistemological Machiavellianism or creationism, looks very much like Platonic ‘opinion.’

To put it in Kantian terms, against Kantian theory, we do not know that we do not know the noumenal with respect to the whole. It is very likely, as Socrates says, that we know that we do not know the whole—but this is a Platonic point, not only a Kantian point. Neither Platonism nor Kantianism rules out mistakes. Indeed, Socrates became notorious for pointing them out. That this is a Platonic point, Putnam conspicuously fails to notice, supposing that Kant discovered the limitations off human knowledge. This may be because he speaks in Machiavellian/Kantian terms of grasping forms rather than in Socratic/Platonic terms of seeing them. (The further complication is: Did Socrates/Plato really believe the theory of the forms? But that’s another exegesis.)

Kant “suggested sublimating this ‘totalizing’ impulse [the God’s Eye point of view] in the project of trying to realize ‘the highest good in the world’ by reconciling the moral and empirical orders in a perfected system of social institutions and individual relationship” (74). True enough: and what a mistake! Moralizing Machiavelliansim remains all-too-Machiavellian, resulting in ‘the perpetual war fro perpetual peace’ when it does not result in some tyranny. Socrates sanely prefers to confine the “totalizing impulse” to precisely the realm where it can do the least harm: the city in speech, theory.

Putnam reasonably refutes logical positivism and epistemological relativism. The latter, he sees, is either a sophisticated form of the love of one’s own (120), or a not-so-sophisticated form of mental anarchism that cannot account for its own orderly, if mistaken, arguments. As for moral relativism founded upon Hume’s ‘fact/value’ dichotomy, Putnam wants eudaemonism-cum-Kantian-noumenalism, a position Kant conspicuously rejects. Putnam retains Kantian demi-historicism. Putnam does not give enough argument for me to tell if his deviation from the Kantian path is sustainable. Generally, what he says makes sense: ‘reasonable’ with respect to morality isn’t the same as ‘reasonable’ in math or science, as Socrates knows. Putnam needs some notion of prudence, but perhaps a vestigial Kantianism prevents him from developing one? He tends to reduce prudential reasoning to utilitarianism, very much as Kant tends to do. At the same time, Putnam wants a more flexible mode of reasoning than scientists will allow.

He is more concerned with showing the influence of conceptual frameworks on ‘values’ and ‘facts.’ “Today we tend to be too realistic about physics and too subjectivistic about ethics” (143); fair enough, but you need prudence to make such judgments, absent a God’s-Eye point of view. Otherwise, how can one speak ironically of physics as the One True Theory? Maybe it is only the wrong One True Theory. That is at least as possible as being a brain in a vat. To see the irreducibility of ethics to physics (145)—an Aristotelian point—one needs some common scale of comparison. As a result of this quandary, Putnam comes to a pluralist, tolerate-only-intolerance account of political philosophy (149), the inadequacy of which can be seen in the fact that citizens must not only tolerate but defend one another. ‘I tolerate you’ is too weak to serve alone as a bond of citizenship.

Putnam moves toward this realization in his seventh chapter, where he observes that “there are better grounds for criticizing cultural imperialism than the denial of objective values” (162), and that Plato and the medieval philosophers did not “conceive of experience as morally and politically neutral” (154-155). Modern rationalism/instrumentalism, coming out of Machiavelli’s radical instrumentalism, may or may not be majoritarian (as Putnam claims); it is only if the majority really is stronger than some elite. Still, the general critique of instrumentalism Putnam offers is sound. Instrumental rationalism does tend toward ‘might makes right,’ and, as that longtime ‘friend of the forms’ Michael Platt once wrote, it cannot tell us why it is reasonable to call the Tropiques “Tristes.” Scientific method “presupposes prior notions of rationality” (195); it does not exhaust them.

As Putnam concludes, the ‘fact/value’ dichotomy presupposes a mindless, an unteleological nature. But human beings are themselves part of nature. “The choice of a conceptual scheme is what cognitive rationality is all about” (212), but in order for the choice to be a choice—to be non-arbitrary—there must be some distinction between any existing conceptual scheme—’epistemological’ or ‘moral,’ insofar as those may be distinguished—and the act of choosing. That “presupposes our theory of the good,” including assumptions about human nature, society, and the universe (215). Socrates concurs.

To be a prince is to be principal, to be the one. To be a prince is also to be a principle, to embody the architectonic idea, forming and originating. ‘Principle’ and ‘prince’ in Greek are archē and archēgos. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Archegos, the Prince of Peace, both the one or the ruler and the principle of human life and salvation. Machiavelli-as-prince seeks to acquire the worldwide empire of the Prince of Peace.

To hold on to what you acquire, you must know the truth, feeling rather than merely hearing or seeing. But you cannot feel—much less hear or see—everything. You depend to some degree upon people who say they tell you what you need to know. Can you trust them? Might they not do to you what you did to the fool you deposed? Or, absent supreme ambition, might they not tell you what they believe you want to hear, instead of the effectual truth you need to know? John Adams makes observation into an argument for republicanism. Monarchy, the rule of the one, lends itself to excessive secrecy; the monarch cannot know his own enemies. Republics require men to state their opinions as a part of their quest for authority. Everyone knows his friends and his enemies. Republicanism thus rewards the “manly mind,” open in its loves and hates. [1]

Machiavelli prescribes a different remedy: As a prudent man, seek prudent advisers. To maintain a decent fear for your person, teach them to speak only when spoken to. But speak with them often. Make them fear not telling you the truth more than they fear deceiving you. (In Machiavelli, too, fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom—but it is wisdom at the service of the lord.) After thorough discussion, deliberate alone, decide alone, and execute swiftly, leaving no doubt of your resolve in the minds of other even as you leave plenty of doubt concerning what you have resolved. In counsel as in all things, the prince must fight with his own arms. “A prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counselled well.” The prince is alone. To really rule, he must really know; to really know, he must in the end create all things.

How, then, can a prince ever know he does not delude himself? If the effectual truth is the truth he effects, if he disciplines himself to turn his affects into effects, his thoughts into plots—if, when he writes, he supplant the master-plot of the Bible with his own vast ‘history’—then he has, to say the least, minimized the problem.

Or has he maximized it? If I dream of being Napoleon and then become Napoleon, how do I know that I am not still dreaming? For that, do I need a method? Bacon says: experiment. Descartes says: mathematize according to the ‘new math’ that grasps the new truth, the dynamic calculus that replaces static geometry and arithmetic’s tortoise-like plodding after change. Replace the faithful certainties of the Bible-believer with the palpable certainties of creative modern science, whereby theory and practice, thinking and making, fuse. Alone, Godlike, you know what you make. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is monotheism in it atheist formulation. Certainty replaces the wonder of the old philosophers. What Nietzsche will call the will to power, Descartes calls the master passion of technē. This form-giving and methodical or form-taking passion orders the private ‘soul’ or self and the public ‘soul’ or regime; the latter will be ‘enlightened,’ that is, founded according to the technocratic fusion of philosophy and the city, the fusion Socrates reject in disputing Protagoras.

For the public, any doubts concerning the prince’s ambition will be assuaged by enjoyment of the fruits of the tree of technique, whose roots extract and transform the minerals of the earth. As for the prince himself, doubt is no longer an affect but an effect, a technique for testing, feeling, nature—the better to caress or annihilate, to use, her parts. Descartes bids his techno-princes to wipe out their natural trust in the senses upon which Socrates began his philosophizing. What if God is the God of the Gnostics, an Evil Genius who comprehensively deceives his creatures? Then the very evidence of our senses is no longer trustworthy: Only the ‘I think, therefore I am’ is trustworthy. The unspeakable name of the Biblical God becomes the self-asserted identity of the thinking human self, the architectonic, auto-nomous or self-legislated act of world-creation that is the one sure way of world-ruling.

But how does the human ‘self,’ alone, indeed how does God, alone, know that it, that He, thinks sanely? Having learned from the Bible to put the highest emphasis on faith and certainty, and having been tempted to aspire to supreme creativity and power, modern philosophers find that human beings nonetheless have difficulty in making everything over in their own image. What if the core of Machiavellian ambition is itself the core of a delusion? What if power fantasies are the supreme human delusions? Solid empiricism—the Lockean attempt to re-ground Machiavellian certitude in the Socratic trust in sense perception by call sense perception ‘self-evident’—yields Humean doubt about precisely the things Machiavellians need most to master: cause and effect. Kant therefore begins anew, abandoning empiricism as a dead end.

He abandons empiricism in order to save empeiria. The distinction between phenomena and noumena, nature and freedom, science/understanding and morality, Newton and Rousseau, is in one sense precisely the attempt to ‘save the phenomena,’ and therefore to save empiricism from itself. Cause-and-effect is not an empirical phenomenon—there Hume was right—but a prior concept that frames our sense-data. Space and time are two more such concepts, indispensable for channeling the sensual stream to the human understanding. Noumenal limits make phenomena intelligible. Without such conceptual constraints, life would be what some narrative histories seem to make it: one damn thing after another.

At the same time, the concept of the noumenal saves human freedom from materialist determinism. Here is Kant’s link to Rousseau and, indirectly, to Machiavelli. The noumenal frees the mind from externals, from things. In the noumenal realm reason can perfect itself in autonomy—giving itself its own laws, it universalizable maxims. This noumenal, rational, moral law then feeds back into the phenomenal/natural world, in a variation of the Machiavellian fusion of theory and practice—effectively a predominance of autonomous human practice over ‘theory’ or the understanding of the determined, ‘Newtonian’ world.

This result is paradoxical because on its face (phenomenally, so to speak) Kantian morality seems the very opposite of Machiavellianism. “Let justice prevail though the world perish for it” lacks that Florentine tang. In establishing human autonomy, Kant follows Rousseau in trying to make Machiavellianism sincere. Kant revives the Socratic teaching about “the lie of the soul,” but then appeals, quite un-Socratically, to the thumotic passions of honor and contempt, along with the thumotic principle of “human dignity,” to extend the prohibition against lying to social relations. Kant also advances a quasi-Aristotelian argument: Speech is distinctively human; the purpose of speech is communication; lying impedes communication and thereby contradicts human dignity, making oneself the mere appearance of a human being rather than the noumenon of a human being. Lying means that one uses oneself, one’s own speech, as a means to an end—as Machiavelli commends.

The noumenal character of human being is humanly accessible, unlike the noumenal in external nature. This is so on Cartesian grounds. We really can know ourselves as we are ‘from the inside.’ That is why the noumenal is freedom for man. Kantian self-reflection yields the same urge to conquer nature that Machiavellian self-reflection does. But Kant additionally claims to discover a universalizable law commanding human beings to treat one another as ends, not as means. Kant wants the will to power, but only if its truth is honest, sincere. Noumenality limits itself by the principle of non-contradiction. As for Realpolitik, it allows the moral man to behave well and get what he wants, too. Let ‘history’—determined, phenomenal ‘history’—do the Machiavellian dirty work.

Nietzsche returns to a more nearly pure Machiavellianism, while never abandoning the ‘German’ inclination to make Machiavelli noble. He begins “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” with Lutheran sternness, condemning philosophic pride in reason as a form of human self-flattery. Like Descartes, he criticizes the senses. But he involves himself in a serious difficulty. If senses “nowhere lead to truth” but “are content to receive stimuli,” by what agency can Nietzsche say “are”? Not by reason, puffed up as it is with pride. Not by introspection, as in Descartes: “What does man know about himself?” If what is called truth comes into existence by way of social contract, by convention, then by what agency does Nietzsche perceive chaos, that tiger within the human soul? How does Nietzsche know that nerve stimuli transform into images, then into sounds, in an ever-falsifying chain of metaphors?

Further, if metaphors then become concepts, equating unequal things, why is that a problem? Do I need to be as good at playing basketball as Michael Jordan to be described truthfully as a basketball player? (If so, what does it mean to say ‘National Basketball Association’?) Is there any serious problem in saying that two leaves are oak leaves, or leaves, even though they are not in all respects identical or ‘equal’?

There is something other than an ‘argument’ going on. Nietzsche condemns epistemological egalitarianism in order to escape Kant’s universalizability criterion, which sets noumenal limits on noumenal freedom. Nietzsche condemns ‘truth’ in order to promote creativity or art, in which limits on freedom are thumotically not rationally willed. Hence the use and abuse of history, which recalls Machiavelli’s advice not to be but to use. To Nietzsche as for Machiavelli, the noumenally human is the will to power. But in Nietzsche even more than Machiavelli (who retain the wily fox) the will to power glories in its arbitrariness. Nietzsche too wants to be salvific creator-god, or perhaps, more modestly, the destroying ‘anti-Christ’ who will clear the way for the real creators. Perhaps the latter role makes him less cautious in principle–that is, as a prince—than the principal modern Prince, who wants to rule, not only ruin.

NOTE

1. John Adams: A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, in Charles Francis Adams, ed.: The Works of John Adams, Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851, IV. 289.

Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993.
John Exdell: “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Democracy.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994) 441-464.

 

Chantal Mouffe and John Exdell offer contrasting, though equally vigorous, critiques of John Rawls’s political liberalism from the ‘Left.’ In some respects the unintended dialogue between themselves is more illuminating than either of their dialogues with Rawls.

Exdell brings Rawls before the bar of feminism, arguing that political liberalism fails to join the battle against “the fundamentalist values of the religious right” with sufficient force. Rawls apparently consigns those “values” to the private realm, ruling them out of public discourse. Not good enough, Exdell rejoins: “To achieve justice for women, liberals must abandon the search for a legitimating consensus and take sides in what may be the most impassioned cultural and political struggle of our time.” What goes on in families, houses of worship, and workplaces affects what goes on in the public sphere in a thousand ways.

Perhaps Rawlsian liberals will altogether refuse to intervene in private life, or perhaps they will intervene but only in ways legitimized by public discourse. Insofar as they do interfere, Exdell contends, liberals will encourage secularization, making themselves anathema to fundamentalists. Thus, given the authoritative character of the public sphere, particularly its governance of public schools, the liberal state will threaten the religiosity of the children of many fundamentalists. At the same time, these interventions will likely be too flaccid to satisfy feminists. Neither side will rest content with the relativism (or, to put it more cautiously, the self-limitation) of Rawlsian liberalism, and therefore will work to undermine it as the agent of peaceful pluralism.

Feminists demand regime change—specifically, “a form of democratic socialism” in which “the state can provide much of the material and educational resources” to reconstruct social institutions. These resources will include sex education, abortion rights backed by abortion provision, and “various measures to alter the balance of power between husbands and wives.” The means by which democratic socialism will arrive at decisions concerning such provision will not be based upon liberal-democratic (even if ‘progressive’) pluralist “consensus” à la Rawls. “The quest for legitimacy through consensus cannot be undertaken without betraying core liberal commitments to equality and self-determination for women.” Because Rawls’s ideology cannot secure these types of equality and self-determination, liberal democracy must give way to social democracy.

I am calling Exdell’s position ‘neo-Hobbesian.’ By Hobbesian I mean the use of state power to enforce equality and to impose opinions. In his characteristic tough-mindedness, Hobbes sees that social life constantly generates inegalitarian institutions; churches and other associations are breeding grounds for authoritarianism. The Hobbesian monarch to some degree recreates natural equality by re-atomizing society: All members of civil society will be equal before the One who is unequal, the One who will use his power to enforce equal conditions on all others. (In this enterprise, atomizing economic competition will replace polarizing religious contention.) At the same time, Hobbesian civil society avoids the poverty, nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life in the state of natural equality by imposing ‘equality’—i.e., sameness—of opinions on his subjects.

By ‘neo’-Hobbesian I mean whatever it is that Exdell may mean by a statism that is social-democratic while at the same time ‘orthodox’ with respect to feminism. I am not sure exactly what that means, inasmuch as Exdell gives his readers no guidance. Monarchy need not apply, I trust, but some form of statism is involved. This state might or might not be overbearing; for example, it might use such mild means as tax incentives to foster family restructuring. Even so, tax incentives imply a tax code; a tax code implies tax lawyers to write the code and then spin through the revolving door to the ‘private sector’ in order to manipulate the code. This implies a certain priesthood, a certain inequality. Also, a state powerful enough to enforce a far-ranging tax code will likely gather inertia for any number of purposes, none of them unqualifiedly egalitarian. And of course the socialist side of social democracy must regulate and/or nationalize the means of production, again empowering the state apparatus. If the social-democratic state reaches into the household itself, as Exdell proposes, then it will need even more power at its disposal.

That is, the softer Hobbesianism gets the more it collapses into the arms of John Locke (‘liberal’ democracy). The softer Exdell’s neo-Hobbesian social democracy gets, the more it will look like Rawls’s liberal state, in practice if not in theory. The ‘harder’ it gets, it will end by out-Hobbesing Hobbes.

None of this will muffle Mouffe, who wants to get out from under liberalism, the Hobbes-Locke-Kant axis, altogether. Mouffe endorses Rawlsian pluralism, “the end of a substantive idea of the good life.” But she goes further. Do not recognize pluralism as a mere fact of modern life, she urges. View it rather as “constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of modern democracy.” That is, get rid of such overarching principles as natural right or the categorical imperative altogether and replace them with pluralism, plurality or ‘diversity’ as the principle of the regime. Liberalism from Locke onwards has wanted to preserve a balance between liberty and equality. Following Derrida, Mouffe wants for the first time to fuse liberty and equality by recognizing that equality must involve the perpetual deconstruction of all inegalitarian institutions. This sounds very much like Trotsky’s notion of the ‘permanent revolution,’ but apparently without the statism, apparently by starting with ‘the withering away of the state.’ Subordinating power relations can only be demolished freely, and the typical liberal problem of governing for equality can only be solved, by denying ‘essentialism’ and recognizing that “everything is constructed as difference.” Power is not an external relation among pre-constituted ‘atoms’ (as in Hobbes). Power constitutes the ‘atoms’ or identities themselves. E = MC, squared. Not Hobbesian or Lockean peace (a “dangerous utopia of reconciliation,” vulnerable to inegalitarian ossification) but Heraclitean conflict and flux can alone bring genuine equality or “democratic determinacy.” Professor Heidegger, meet the New Left.

Mouffe’s position might appear to lead toward the same goal as certain forms of ‘conservatism.’ Conservatism is obviously an empty term, its content dependent upon what a given ‘conservative’ wants to conserve. Throne and altar? The ‘free market’? The New Deal? There are at least two kinds of contemporary ‘conservatism that would oppose Exdell. Libertarianism of the sort defined by Murray Rothbard and Richard Epstein puts a premium not on equality but on liberty. It opposes inequality only insofar as it impinges upon personal liberty, and is particularly concerned with economic liberty. A second ‘conservatism,’ the small-government or Jeffersonian type espoused by such writers as the late M. E. Bradford and Thomas Fleming, would regard Exdell as the latest version of Herbert Croly—or maybe, horror of horrors, Abraham Lincoln—urging Hamiltonian means at the service of Jeffersonian ends. Sorry, they would say, but you can’t get to Monticello by way of Pennsylvania Avenue any more than you can get there by way of Wall Street. To these ‘conservatives,’ Mouffe would reply: smallness does not preclude inequality. It may only make it more concentrated and intense.

Even as Exdell does not say much about social-democratic statism, Mouffe does not say much about how the deconstructionist society would hold together—remain a society. It appears that Mouffe harkens to Derrida, who harkens to Heidegger, who harkens to Heraclitus. Mouffe and Derrida say that flux is not an invitation to authoritarianism, as Heraclitus and Heidegger evidently suppose, but the only ground (more accurately, anti-ground, anti-foundation) for radical equality. To which Hobbes would reply: ‘Congratulations. You have converted civil society into the state of nature, in which no human being will want to stay for long. Welcome back into my web, the tensile structure of egalitarian statism.’