HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: DeLong: "The Economist as...?: The Public Square & Economics"
In which I defend economists against Alasdair MacIntyre, for we are the quintessential expression of his bête noire the manager; yet I think a John Maynard Keynes is vastly to be preferred to...
In which I defend economists against Alasdair MacIntyre, for we are the quintessential expression of his bête noire the manager; yet I think a John Maynard Keynes is vastly to be preferred to either a Leon Trotsky or a St. Benedict...
Time to hoist this from the archives!:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2016. “The Economist as…?: The Public Square and Economists”. In Desch, Michael C., ed.: Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 0268100241. Pp. 182-213. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Public_Intellectuals_in_the_Global_Arena/2FQFDgAAQBAJ>
Why is it time to hoist this? First, as a follow-up to my taking exception to Matthew Yglesias’s saying that the purpose of humanities departments, insofar as their undergraduate-education mission in American universities is concerned, should be to teach at least semi-triumphalist versions of: Hum 1 “Classics of Western Literature”; and Soc Sci 2 “Western Thought and Institutions:
Education to Promote Public Reason in a Kinda-Sorta Free-ish Society
What would I do if I were Hum-Soc Sci nationwide General Education Czar?... It is probably not going too far to say that Matthew Yglesias thinks that the purpose of humanities departments, insofar as their undergraduate-education mission in American universities is concerned, should be to teach at least semi-triumphalist versions of:
And, second, because Henry Farrell on BlueSky crosses into my feed with a reference to a very interesting interview of Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre from 1991 <https://macintyrestudies.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/an-interview-with-macintyre.pdf>. And I feel like I should hoist my defense of economists against MacIntyre…
Now I should start by highlighting what Henry Farrell says, because it is 100% correct:
Agree or disagree with Macintyre, he has wonderful taste in literature (and I'd be fascinated to read him at length on Philip K. Dick)…. It's the kind [of reading list] that makes you want to invite yourself to dinner at someone's house so you can talk to them. Clearly, he's not only Catholic but catholic… <https://bsky.app/profile/himself.bsky.social/post/3kkguzsexas2r>
What is the reading list? This, as his list of non-philosophical works:
Leav[ing] out the clearly borderline cases… [of] Dante, Jane Austen, Dostoievski, Kafka and Borges…. Books that I have read every twenty years or so: Redgauntlet, Women in Love, To the Lighthouse, among books that I have read more often: Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Tao-Birds, short stories by Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor and Mairtin O'Cadhain; among books without which I might well not have lasted out the last twenty years: Saichi Maruya's Singular Rebellion, Randal Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, Robertson Davies's Rebel Angels, Patrick McGinley's Bogmail; among what I hope still be be reading twenty 73 years from now: The Táin Bó Cúailnge, Eileen O'Connell's lament for Art O'Leary, Akhmatova's 'Poem without a Hero', the poetry of George Campbell Hay, Sorley MacLean, lain Crichton Smith and Mairtin O'Direain; and of course a perpetual low-life diet of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, etc, etc, although perhaps reading them is still reading philosophy…
I do wish I were drinking a tenth as deeply from the Pierian Spring as MacIntyre does.
But then there are the other things in MacIntyre’s post-After Virtue writings that lead me to immediately think: BRAINWORMS! For he takes adoration of Hum 1 and Soc Sci 2 to the absolute max—to infinity, and beyond!:
What we need… are fewer subjects not more… [for] far greater depth…. What every child needs is a lot of history and a lot of mathematics, including both the calculus and statistics, some experimental physics and observational astronomy, a reading knowledge of Greek, sufficient to read Homer or the New Testament, and if English-speaking, a speaking knowledge of a modern language other than English, and great quantities of English literature, especially Shakespeare. Time also has to be there for music and art…. An education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims…
So Matt thinks that Hum 1 and Soc Sci 2 would fit people for the contemporary world. MacIntyre says that is not fundamental enough: Greek to read the real “Classics”—none of this Plutarch-in-translation stuff, or even Cæsar, Cicero, Virgil, and Augustine—that are Homer and St. Paul. And that would, MacIntyre says, make students unfit for the contemporary world.
There appears to be an unexpressed theory of social change back there somewhere…
I am a huge fan of all the works that MacIntyre wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially A Short History of Ethics, Against the Self-Images of the Age, and After Virtue. The books before 1960 I do not find interesting: they seem to me… jejune… expressions of a Christian Marxism in which he tries to pound history, morality, and human agency into a Procrustean Bed that it will not fit. I also do not find the books after 1985 interesting: they seem to me to be… fossilized… expressions of a Thomastotelianism in which he tries to pound history, morality, and human agency into a different Procrustean Bed that it will not fit. But in between! While he is in transit from believing 100% in his interpretation of Marx and Yeshua to believing 100% in his interpretation of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle!
In those in-between books he feels the force of all the different conflicting arguments, and wrestles with them all night long at the Ford of the Jabbok, and does so, I think, with more success and brings more illumination than any other modern moral philosopher.
But I cannot ride the tram driven by even middle-period to its ultimate destination.
At the end of After Virtue, MacIntyre calls for a transformation of our society, for a rejection of the dominant non-gospel or anti-gospel of liberal doubt and individualist anomie in favor of a gospel to be preached by a prophet. In his view, either following a Leon Trotsky or a St. Benedict would produce a better society. Why would the society be better? Because such a society would lack the moral disorder of modern liberal societies. It would, instead, have a consensus of what would be the good for human beings and human societies. With a Trotsky, the moral center would be a revolutionary zeal against injustice and inequality (and for collective, disciplined action). With a St. Benedict, the moral center would be the building-up of community life and moral virtues. Both would deprioritize individualistic pursuits of success. Both would recovery and then sustain virtues and practices that foster communal well-being and moral development, and thus human flourishing within communities.
After Virtue prominently features three bêtes noires: the therapist, the æsthete, and the manager.
MacIntyre condemns the therapist because the job of the therapist is to make the client feel good about themselves. And MacIntyre believes that only the morally good should be allowed or enabled to feel good about themselves. The therapist is not engaging in moral or ethical reasoning to help the client become good, but as helping the client achieve a personal well-being or happiness in which they can be satisfied even—especially?—if they are not good. In MacIntyre’s view, this is part of the fragmentation and subjectivization of moral discourse in modern society which is absolute poison. It is the opposite of what we need, which is consensus moral discourse based in community and tradition, where moral and ethical discussions are anchored in shared practices and understandings of the good life.
Put that critique to the side—I do have things to say about it, but they are not well developed at all. And any defense of the æsthete should probably be made by somebody other than me…
MacIntyre disdains the manager for making the trains run on time, for accomplishing the rationality of bureaucracy in the service of the individual and individualistic desires of the bureaucracy’s clients. The manager cares only about efficiency, productivity, and the achievement of organizational goals—devoid of any consideration for ethical virtues or communal goods. The manager adopts a pose of moral neutrality and technical expertise that is claimed to be value-free, but is actually deeply imbued with the values of efficiency and control over others for the sake of achieving predetermined ends. Rather then making our primary task of that making the trains run on time, MacIntyre thinks, we should focus on cultivating the virtues and arriving at a consensus with respect to the common good.
And I have things to say about this…
And so I am hoisting my piece from 2016 because in it I defend us economists, and I want to defend us economists, as we are the paradigmatic figure of the manager.
In my 2016 piece I make two points:
I make one point against MacIntyre—that common-good consensus and a resource base large enough for virtue-cultivation arrive only at the end of history, and we are far from there. These are not the Last Days. The time is still far from ripe for Kingdom Come:
Alasdair MacIntyre and his brilliant After Virtue [is] surely one of the best and most important books in history and moral philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. We economists are the epitome of one of Macintyre’s principal targets in After Virtue: we are those he condemns as managers.
Economists seek to leverage a narrow claim to limited technical and technocratic expertise to banish and dispel Trotsky and all his works. Alasdair Macintyre, by contrast, seeks to banish and dispel all economists—for we are the archetypes of what he regards as one of the most unhealthy and poisonous diseases of modernity, the disease of “managerialism”. What Macintyre sees as the vice of the manager—that he or she doesn't tell you to do X or not to do X—we see as the virtue of the economist: we are just supposed to tell you what is likely to happen if you do X.
Of course, to provide someone with knowledge of the consequences may be simply to give them the kind of freedom that is necessity: the freedom not to do anything except what is the right thing….
[…]
John Maynard Keynes… [agreed with MacIntyre] that economics was good for the body but taught moral values that were bad for the soul, yet in a world as poor as the world Keynes saw the needs of the body took precedence. When the world becomes rich, Keynes wrote: “We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. The love of money as a possession… will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease…” [That is a] rejection of “managerialism” and of economics as thorough as Macintyre could wish for….
[But Keynes continues:] “Beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight…”. [Perhaps] the fundamental difference between Keynes, at least in his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, and Macintyre is that Keynes believes that the Kingdom is still a century off, while Macintyre believes that the Kingdom is at hand…
I also make a second point against MacIntyre: that both Trotsky’s Bolshevik-Party and St. Benedict’s cloistered-monastery gospels were false gospels that failed to achieve the ends that they were supposedly aimed at:
MacIntyre, at least in his After Virtue mode, believes that good civilization are ones with moral consensus led by prophets, rather than ones with moral confusion managered by managers…. Trotskys (less preferred) or St. Benedicts (more preferred)… [are] to be preferred to managerial Keyneses.
If you step back, however… it then becomes very difficult to prefer the prophetic Trotskys to the managerial Keyneses [for] Trotsky’s gospel… is in reality… a managerialist gospel. Trotsky says that History speaking through Marx and him knows how to build a Communist utopia… a society in which people are prosperous: well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and well-entertained. Trotsky’s gospel is that Keynes’s market economy is incapable of even approaching such a utopia, while Marx and History have together told him how to accomplish it…. But what if Keynes’s managerialism does better at fulfilling what Trotsky claims will be the accomplishments of Trotsky’s gospel better than Trotsky does? It does…. Trotsky’s ideas about good organization of the economy were seen immediately by Keynes as and turned out to be a horrible disaster, even from the perspective of a Trotsky’s values—especially from the perspective of Trotsky’s values….
The same conclusions follow if you step back and inquire into… the St. Benedicts… [who] swing from following the ethical teachings of Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth to worshipping the Anointed Λόγος that is of a higher order of reality than we…. But when Rabbi Yeshua spoke of what the Anointed Λόγος commanded… [it was] to successfully attain managerial ends: “Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me…. Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me…’” That is a very powerful statement that what is sought after is successful managerialism—a successful managerialism with a preferential option for the poor: one that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, heals the sick, welcomes the immigrant, and visits the imprisoned. Right ritual, right moral orientation, right faith seem to be nowhere—at least in this part of Matthew.,,
References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2016. “The Economist as…?: The Public Square and Economists”. In Desch, Michael C., ed.: Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 0268100241. Pp. 182-213. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Public_Intellectuals_in_the_Global_Arena/2FQFDgAAQBAJ>
Farrell, Henry. 2024. “Agree or disagree with MacIntyre…”. BlueSky, February 2. <https://bsky.app/profile/himself.bsky.social/post/3kkguzsexas2r>
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics. New York: The Macmillan Company. <https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofet0000maci_h6s8>
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1971. Against the Self-Images of the Age. London: Duckworth. <https://archive.org/details/againstselfimage0000maci_h0j3>.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0268006040>.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1991. "An Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre." Cogito. Summer. Pp. 67-73. <https://macintyrestudies.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/an-interview-with-macintyre.pdf>
Pope, Alexander. 1711. An Essay on Criticism. London: W. Lewis. <https://archive.org/details/b33024066_0002>.
Yglesias, Matthew. 2023. “Thankful Mailbag”. Slow Boring, November 24. <http://www.slowboring.com/p/thankful-mailbag>.
Students aren't reading 90% of the list. Not even Ivy undergrads. They have other classes and social lives. Books the present revolutionary truths are difficult and terrible reading for all but the devoted specialist because the author had to precisely nail down 100 points for their contemporary critics. I'm all for classical ideas, but what's going to sink into the brain of an undergrad?
Interesting, I hadn't noticed the anti-reformist common ground between Christian and Marxist millennial. But of course, the good is the enemy of the perfect. The poor *must* always be among us until the coming of the kingdom of heaven / pure communism. But it seems oddly "faith not works" to be coming from Catholicism.