A Short Word on Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I recently borrowed Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed from Henrik Sundholm. Henrik expected me to write a review of the book, but I told him I had nothing particularly intelligent to say about it. However there are a couple of points I would like to mention.

Hoppe’s main thesis is that hereditary monarchies are to be preferred over democracies. This does not mean that monarchy is the ideal social system, but merely that democracy is even worse. He has two main (interrelated) arguments for this.

The first argument is that monarchies are private governments. A monarch regards his nation as his own private property. Democracies are public governments. In a democracy, nobody owns the nation. Politicians who are elected for the highest offices only hold the nation in trust for a limited period of time; they always risk being ousted at the next election. And if there is anything we know about private vs. public property, it is that private property is always better managed than public property.

And the second argument is that monarchies have a lower degree of time preference than democracies – or, to say the same thing with different words, they are better at planning ahead for the future. Now, why is that so?

Everything else being equal, everybody’s time preference gets higher with old age, simply because there is less future to plan ahead for. If you are 80, 90 or 120 years old, you certainly have no incentive to save money, to take one obvious example. However, if you also have children and grand-children, and if you care for them at all, then you will make provisions that will help them in their future lives. This will tend to offset the high time preference.

And this applies to hereditary monarchies, simply because they are hereditary. The monarch cares not only about his own future but also about the coming generations of monarchs.

The exact opposite is true about the leaders in our democracies. They are extremely short-sighted. They cannot think or plan beyond the next election.

Does this sound plausible?

Most of the monarchies that exist today are monarchies in name only or, as I like to call them, decorative monarchies. The monarchs yield little, if any, real power. One exception I can think of is North Korea. North Korea is not called a monarchy, but in fact it is. The power of the leader is certainly hereditary.

Another example is Saudi Arabia (and some of the sultanates in that region).

But nobody, I hope, would claim that our existing democracies are even worse than North Korea or even Saudi Arabia. Hoppe’s reasoning just flies in the face of the facts.

The second point I want to take up flies even more in the face of the facts. He claims that monarchies are less warlike than democracies. Why is that? Well, because of their low time preference and their great foresight, monarchs won’t engage in war, unless it is totally necessary. And wars cost money, so waging war obviously impoverishes the nation and thus the monarch himself and his family. Furthermore, monarchs in times past did not rely on conscription for getting soldiers to fight[1]; they typically used mercenaries, and they have to be paid and well paid. Democracies rely on conscription and thus have no qualms about sending out young men to die on the battlefields.

Sounds very plausible, doesn’t it?

But it is certainly an established fact that democracies do not wage war against one another. (People who try to refute this thesis can only come up with some very minor skirmishes, such as the “cod wars” between Great Britain and Iceland. As far as I know, there wasn’t a single casualty in those “wars”.) Wars waged by democracies have always been against non-democracies.

Hoppe also claims that wars in the monarchical era were much more limited than wars in the modern era, and that they involved the civil population much less. In all fairness I should quote his reason for this:

Typically, monarchical wars arise out of disputes over inheritances brought on by a complex network of interdynastic marriages and the irregular but constant extinction of certain dynasties. As violent inheritance disputes, monarchical wars are characterized by territorial objectives. They are not ideologically motivated quarrels but disputes over tangible properties. Moreover, since they are interdynastic property disputes, the public considers war the king’s private affair, to be financed and executed with his own money and military forces. Further, as private conflicts between different ruling families the public expects and the kings feel compelled to recognize a clear distinction between combatants and noncombatants and to target their war efforts specifically against each other and their respective private property. (P. 34.)

And a couple of pages later:

In contrast, democratic wars tend to be total wars. […] It becomes more and more difficult for members of the public to remain neutral or to extricate themselves from all personal involvement. Resistance against higher taxes to fund a war is increasingly considered treachery and treason. Conscription becomes the rule, rather than the exception. And with mass armies of cheap and hence easily disposable conscripts […] all distinctions between combatants and noncombatants fall by the wayside, and wars become increasingly brutal. (P. 36f.)

There is a kernel of truth in this. Modern wars, such as the World Wars, have been far more devastating than earlier wars.[2] Conscription is certainly a factor here (and it goes without saying that conscription is profoundly immoral and a violation of the very right to life). But he does not mention the most important explanatory factor: that today we possess far more effective weapons than were available earlier. There were no nuclear weapons in those days, there were no machine guns, and there was no bombing from airplanes.

But it still remains true that democracies don’t wage war (much less then total war) against other democracies.

Now, democracy is certainly not the ideal social system. “Democracy” literally means majority rule and thus gives the majority the “right” to violate the rights of minorities, and – as Ayn Rand pointed out – the smallest minority on earth is the individual. The proper social system would be what is called a “constitutional republic” or simply “limited government”, a government that does nothing but protect individual rights. A constitutional republic was what the Founding Fathers of the US were striving for. It is not what we have today anywhere in the world, and the US has certainly deteriorated into a democracy. But whatever may be said against democracy, it still remains true that they don’t wage war against one another, so I would still say it is the second best alternative. It is infinitely better than the totalitarian alternatives.

But Hoppe does not believe in the possibility of a limited government. (I may have more to say about that later.)

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Hoppe’s idea, in a nutshell, is that the monarchical era (which was actually characterized by endless wars) was more peaceful than the democratic era (where wars, however devastating, are the exception rather than the rule). How does he arrive at this idea? The clue is a sentence in the beginning of his book:

A priory theory trumps and corrects experience (and logic overrules observation), and not vice versa. (p. xvi; emphasis Hoppe’s.)[3]

So if you can deduce from the fundamental fact of time preference that monarchies are peaceful and democracies warlike, then this trumps, corrects and overrules the observation that it is actually the other way around!

In all fairness I should say that Hoppe has many good things to say about the relationship of theory to practice. But this summary sounds like a reductio ad absurdum refutation of praxeology.

Theory (good theory, that is) explains experience – and “explain” certainly does not “trump”, “correct” or “overrule”. But the theorems of economic theory always come with the proviso ceteris paribus or “everything else being equal”. So if an economic theorem does not exactly match reality (or even contradicts reality), one has to look for the factor that is not equal. And that factor then should be explained by some other theorem. (I may have more to say about this another time; it requires some thought to be formulated more precisely.)

But to say that theory trumps, corrects and overrules experience is just to say that theory does not explain experience, but explains it away.

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This short word became rather long. And perhaps I even had something intelligent to say.

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Update May 11: There is also some discussion of this on Facebook.

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Update June 1: In the comments section it has been said that it was unfair of me to use North Korea as an example, since North Korea is a dictatorship, not a monarchy. But is there any essential difference between absolute monarchy and a modern, family-ruled dictatorship? In both cases, the state – the apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the police, military and courts – is owned by the ruler and his immediate family; and it is certainly hereditary.

But there is another point worth mentioning: Not all monarchies in the monarchical age were absolute. For example, France under Louis XIV was an absolute monarchy; but Great Britain, at least after the Glorious Revolution, was not: the power was divided between the king and the parliament. By Hoppe’s reasoning, this was a step in the wrong direction – a step on the slippery slope to democratization. If the power is partly vested in the parliament, then it is no longer private ownership of the state; it is at least partly public ownership.

And if Hoppe were right on this, one would actually accept better economic conditions and more progress in France than in Great Britain during this period. But the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Great Britain, not in France.

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[1]) This is a truth with some modification. I don’t know about every country, but Sweden, in the 30 Year War, relied heavily on conscription; recruiters were sent out to the villages in Sweden to pick one soldier from every village. This later was replaced by a standing army system, called “indelningsverket” (there is no good English translation for this term).

[2]) According to Wikipedia, WWII has been the most devastating war in terms of casualties; and WWI takes fifth place. In the places between, Wikipedia lists the An Shi Rebellion in China (755–763), the Mongol conquests of the 13^th century, and the Ching dynasty conquest of the Ming dynasty (1616–1662). But I think statistics from those early periods have to be taken with a big grain of salt.

[3]) Kudos to Henrik Sundholm for marking this very sentence in the margin.

Ludwig von Mises on Egoism vs. Altruism

A Facebook friend of mine, Jack Schwartz, recently drew my attention to an essay by Warren Orbaugh, Similarities and differences between Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand’s ideas. If you are interested in this subject, I recommend that you read it. I may have more to say about it later, but now I will just take up Mises’ view on egoism vs. altruism. Here are some quotes on this subject (from the section “Eudaemonistic Ethics and Socialism” in Socialism, p. 356ff):

The idea of a dualism of motivation assumed by most ethical theorists, when they distinguish between and altruistic motives of action, cannot […] be maintained. This attempt to contrast egoistic and altruistic action springs from a misconception of the social interdependence of individuals. […] There is no contrast between moral duty and selfish interests. What the individual gives to society to preserve it as society, he gives, not for the sake of aims alien to himself, but in his own interest. The individual […] cannot deny society without denying himself.

And, in the next section, “A Contribution to the Understanding of Eudaemonism”:

That everyone lives and wishes to live primarily for himself does not disturb social life but promotes it, for the higher fulfillment of the individual’s life is possible only in and through society. This is the true meaning of the doctrine that egoism is the basic law of society.

I quoted those passages in an essay I wrote a long time ago in Swedish, Varför behöver vi Ayn Rand? (“Ayn Rand: Why Do We Need Her?”). I tried to answer the question “Why do we need Ayn Rand, when we already have Ludwig von Mises? What does she contribute that goes beyond what Mises (and other free market advocates) have already told us? And my answer, in essence, was that Mises does not condemn altruism the way it should be condemned. From those quotes, it seems that he thinks egoism and altruism are compatible and that there is no conflict between them. He does not seem to have grasped that altruism actually means self-sacrifice.

Orbaugh quotes the whole paragraph of which I quoted a part above:

Nothing is gained when the teacher of morals constructs an absolute ethic without reference to the nature of man and his life. The declamation of philosophers cannot alter the fact that life strives to live itself out, that the living being seeks pleasure and avoids pain. All one´s scruples against acknowledging this as the basic law of human action fall away as soon as the fundamental principle of social co-operation is recognized. That everyone lives and wishes to live primarily for himself does not disturb social life but promotes it, for the higher fulfillment of the individual´s life is possible only in and through society. This is the true meaning of the doctrine that egoism is the basic law of society.

Well, this is eminently true. There is no such dichotomy as “living for one’s own sake” and “living in society” or “getting along with other people” (well, at least as long as those others are rational). There are, as Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness, no conflict of interests among rational men; and, as Mises and other good economists express the same idea, there prevails on the free market a “harmony of interests”.

The only valid objection I can raise against Mises is still that he does not see that “altruism” actually means self-sacrifice and thus has to be condemned as an evil doctrine. He sees it as “living with others and getting along with others”. He probably has not read this line by Ayn Rand:

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. (“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”, Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 71ff.)

But is this a mere semantic difference, or is it indicative of a deep philosophical gulf between Mises and Objectivism? I would say the former.

(Parenthetically, I have noticed over the years that as soon as there is a discussion about egoism vs. altruism between Objectivists and non-Objectivists, the discussion immediately becomes semantic. Our adversaries say we do not know the meaning of the words or that we have the wrong definitions. They bury their heads in dictionaries just like ostriches are said to bury their hands in sand; and the discussion never advances to real-life examples.)

As you probably know, the term “altruism” was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte – and he did mean “living for others” or “for mankind”, at the expense of “living for oneself”. Mises does have a caustic remark about Comte:

There was Auguste Comte. He knew precisely what the future had in store for mankind. And of course, he considered himself as the supreme legislator. …He planned to substitute a new religion for Christianity, and selected a lady who in this new church was destined to replace the Virgin. Comte can be exculpated, as he was insane in the full sense which pathology attaches to this term. But what about his followers? (Human Action, p. 72f.)

The theme of Orbaugh’s essay is that Rand and Mises

… although using the same words, are using different terms, and, I hope to prove, that while seemingly saying different things, are in fact, saying the same thing.

In this case, yes. The difference is merely semantic or terminological.  There are other cases like this. But then there are cases where the difference is not merely apparent but real. If I am not too tired, I will return to them later on.

Rand and Mises on the Importance of Philosophy

It is common knowledge that Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises held the same, or at least very similar, ideas on such issues as the superiority of laissez-faire capitalism and limited government. It is also common knowledge that their philosophical frameworks were rather different. (For example, there is a strong Kantian influence in Mises’ philosophy, and that is anathema to Ayn Rand and her followers.) Ayn Rand even went so far as to say that Mises had no philosophy. I quote from Ayn Rand Answers:

Q: What do you think of the Austrian School of Economics?

A: I think they are a school that has a great deal of truth and proper arguments to offer about capitalism – especially von Mises – but I certainly don’t agree with them in every detail, and particularly not in their alleged philosophical premises. They don’t have any, actually. They attempt – von Mises particularly – to substitute economics for philosophy. That cannot be done. (P. 43; from the Q&A session after a Ford Hall Forum lecture in 1977.)

This does not say that Mises had the wrong philosophy; it says he had no philosophy at all. But this is, to put it diplomatically, a gross exaggeration. Even the scantest perusal of his books would tell one that he does have a philosophy. Whether this philosophy is true or false, or to what extent it clashes with Objectivism, is a different matter. (I have discussed those differences elsewhere.[i])

Ayn Rand also stressed that philosophy is inescapable and that every human being does have a philosophy, even though it most often is held implicitly and subconsciously:

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation – or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown. (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 6.)

But this flatly contradicts her answer in the Q&A session above. If Mises (or any Austrian economist) is a human being, he cannot avoid having some philosophy. Or are we to assume that has only a subconscious philosophy that is a “junk heap of unwarranted conclusions [etc.] “? But then, where is the “solid weight of self-doubt” in Mises? I have read most of Mises major writings, and some writings of other “Austrians” as well; and whatever is screaming from those pages, it is not self-doubt.

But I am actually poking fun here; because one obviously cannot expect total intellectual precision in a short, improvised answer in a Q&A session.

But what about the allegation that Mises down-played the importance of philosophy and, in effect, tried to substitute economics for philosophy? Well, there is at least one objection to this: Mises regarded economics as one branch of a more general theory of human action (what he called “praxeology”), and that theory is obviously philosophical in nature; it deals with such things as the relation of means to ends, which is clearly a philosophical issue. And whatever the differences are between Rand and Mises, Ayn Rand’s own ethics deals with the same subject.

What made me think about this is that I recently bought two posthumous books by Mises. (They are transcriptions of lectures he delivered.) One of them is called Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction and is a transcription of a lecture series he delivered in New York in 1952. In the very first paragraph one can read the following:

Philosophy is important because every man, whether or not he knows it, has a definite philosophy, and his philosophical ideas guide his actions.

Although it is shorter than the Rand quote above, it is basically the same thought!

And Rand and Mises must have arrived at this idea independently of one another. I am fairly certain Ayn Rand did not listen to those lectures in 1952 (she was busy writing Atlas at that time), and Mises cannot be influenced by Rand, since the Rand quote is many years later.

But there is one allegation against Mises that can now be laid to rest: the idea that he down-played the role and importance of philosophy.

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1) See for example:

Objectivism versus “Austrian” Economics on Value

Objectivism and “Austrian” Economics – compatible or not?

Induction in Economics

Is Action an A Priori Category?

Scandinavian speaking readers may also read:

Till frågan om den ”österrikiska” skolans subjektivism

”Österrikarnas” subjektivism än en gång

Aristotle on egoism

It is also in The Nicomachean Ethics, book 9, that one finds Aristotle’s reasoning on egoism. Objectivists are probably already familiar with this reasoning; but I find it interesting from one particular aspect: it explains why egoism has gotten a bad name – why most people cannot even fathom the idea of rational egoism and think that egoism by its very nature has to be predatory. One can explain to them that “predatory egoism” is just the other side of altruism’s false coin – but if you have had any experience with discussing Objectivism with non-Objectivists, you will probably have found that they don’t get it anyway.

Speaking for myself: When I hear that egoism is “predatory” – that it is all about “ill-gotten gains”, swindling others out of their money, wanting to become a dictator, and all that kind of jazz – I usually ask: “From where did you get that idea? From introspection? Well, it has to be – for the only ego you have direct contact with is your own ego. So speak for yourself! Just because your ego is predatory, this does not mean that all egos are predatory.”

But I say this only because I get very mean when I have to polemicize against bad ideas. There is another reason people think this way about egoism: there are actually very few truly rational egoists around. So the only kind of “egoism” people are actually subjected to is the “predatory” kind.

Enough of my own musing on this subject; let’s see what Aristotle says. But first a semantic remark: The Greek word for “egoism” is “αυτοφιλος”, which literally means “lover of self”, and this term is used in the English translation. Now to the text:

The question is also debated, whether a man should love himself most, or someone else. People criticize those who love themselves most, and call them self-lovers, using this as an epithet of disgrace, and a bad man seems to do everything for his own sake, and the more so the more wicked he is […] while the good man acts for honour’s sake, and the more so the better he is, and acts for his friend’s sake, and sacrifices his own interests.

But the facts clash with these arguments, and this is not surprising. For men say that one ought to love best one’s best friend, and a man’s best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it; and these attributes are found most of all in a man’s attitude towards himself, and so are all the other attributes by which a friend is defined; for […] it is from this relation that all the characteristics of friendship have extended to our neighbours. […] [A man] is his own best friend and therefore ought to love himself best. It is therefore a reasonable question, which of the two views we should follow; for both are plausible.

Parenthetically, this way of reasoning is very characteristic of Aristotle: presenting two opposite views and then carefully weighing the arguments pro and con. End of parenthesis.

Perhaps we ought to mark off such arguments from each other and determine how far and in what respects each view is right. Now if we grasp the sense in which each school uses the phrase “lover of self”, the truth may become evident. Those who use the term as one of reproach ascribe self-love to people who assign to themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures; for those are what most people desire, and busy themselves about as if they were the best of all things, which is the reason, too, that they become objects of competition. So those who are grasping with regard to these things gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the irrational element of the soul; and most men are of this nature (which is the reason why the epithet has come to be used as it is – it takes its meaning from the prevailing type of self-love, which is a bad one); justly, therefore, are men who are lovers of self in this way reproached for being so. That it is those who give themselves the preference in regard to objects of this sort that most people usually call lovers of self is plain; for if a man were always anxious that he himself, above all things, should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with any other of the virtues, and in general were always to try to secure for himself the honourable course, no one would call such a man a lover of self or blame him.

Many words to make a simple (but important) point: that the egoism or self-love of a bad man is something bad. Now, over to an equally wordy explanation of why the egoism or self-love of a good man is something good:

But such a man would seem more than the other a lover of self; at all events he assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best, and gratifies the most authoritative element in himself and in all things obeys this; and just as a city or any other systematic whole is most properly identified with the most authoritative element in it, so is a man; and therefore the man who loves this and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self. Besides, a man is said to have or not to have self-control according as his reason has or has not the control, on the assumption that this is the man himself; and the things men have done on a rational principle are thought most properly their own acts and voluntary acts. That this is the man himself, then, or is so more than anything else, is plain, and also that the good man loves most this part of him. Whence it follows that he is most truly a lover of self, of another type than that which is a matter of reproach, and as different from that as living according to a rational principle is from living as passion dictates, and desiring what is noble from desiring what seems advantageous.

Notice how close Aristotle is to Objectivism here: good men follow reason; lesser men are driven by their emotions or passions. (I’m tempted to say that Aristotle must have read Ayn Rand carefully.) You may also notice how far he is from David Hume – who infamously wrote that “reason is, and should be, a slave to the passions”.

Those, then, who busy themselves in an exceptional degree with noble actions all men approve and praise; and if all were to strive towards what is noble and strain every nerve to do the noblest deeds, everything would be as it should be for the common weal, and everyone would secure for himself the goods that are greatest, since virtue is the greatest of goods.

In other words, there is no conflict between a good man’s egoism or self-love and the “common weal”.

And now we come to Aristotle’s conclusion:

Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does evil passions. For the wicked man, what he does clashes with what he ought to, but what the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason. (The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, Section 8; translation David Ross.)

Or in my own shorter formulation: The egoism of a good man is good; the egoism of a wicked man is wicked.

I mentioned in my earlier blog post, Aristotle on friendship, that only good people can be true friends, because a good man could never want to be “bosom friends” with somebody bad – which raises the question: Could bad men, then, be friends with one another? This question has to be answered in the negative; I will quote some more from Aristotle:

Such a man [a good or virtuous man] wishes to live with himself; for he does so with pleasure, since the memories of his past acts are delightful and his hopes for the future are good, and therefore pleasant. His mind is well stored too with subjects of contemplation. And he grieves and rejoices, more than any other, with himself; for the same thing is always painful, and the same thing always pleasant; and not one thing at one time and another at another; he has, so to speak, nothing to regret.

Therefore, since each of these characteristics belongs to the good man in relation to himself, and he is related to his friend as to himself (for his friend is another self), friendship too is thought to be one of these attributes, and those who have these attributes to be friends.

So this is why there can be friendship among good men. But what about wicked or evil men? Those men seek company, but they basically do it because they are afraid of being alone:

Wicked men seek for people with whom to spend their days, and shun themselves; for they remember many a grievous deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing loveable in them they have no feeling of love to themselves. […]

Therefore the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love […]. (The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, Section 4.)

And here is a nice rounding-out quote:

Thus the friendship of bad men turns out an evil thing (for because of their instability they unite in bad pursuits, and besides they become evil by becoming like each other), while the friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship; and they are thought to become better too by their activities and by improving each other […] (The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, Section 12.)

(My Scandinavian readers can also read an essay I wrote several years ago: The Historical Roots of Anti-Egoism.)

Rand debating Kant

James Stevens Valliant (the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics) recently published an article on Capitalism Magazine, Ayn Rand’s Critics. It is about the sad (and at this point in history, rather boring) fact that those who criticize Ayn Rand do not even bother to try to understand her ideas. Right at the beginning, he writes:

Can anyone doubt the truth of writer David Mamet’s recent comments about arguing politics?  Defining what he meant by “Brain Dead Liberalism,” he suggested that unless you can state your opponent’s position with such accuracy that he or she would agree, “Yes, that’s what I think,” no meaningful debate is even possible.

I read somewhere long ago that the medieval scholastics had a debating rule much like the Mamet test. Before you argue against your opponent, you were required to present a summary of his views, and he would tell you whether this summary was adequate or not. This might be laborious, but it would certainly serve to prevent straw man arguments. (I don’t remember where I read it, and it might not even be true. But it struck me as a very reasonable thing to do.)

Now, let me engage in a flight of fancy. Imagine a debate under this rule taking place between Ayn Rand and Immanuel Kant. Ayn Rand would start out as follows:

Man is blind, because he has eyes – deaf, because he has ears – deluded, because he has a mind – and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them. Is this a fair summary of your philosophy, professor Kant?

What would professor Kant answer? “Oh, yes, that is indeed the essence of my philosophy. Thank you, Miss Rand, for summarizing it so succinctly.”?

Or would he answer: “Oh, no, that is a total distortion of my philosophy. Before you come here to debate me, you should read my Critique of Pure Reason carefully. Or if this book is too heavy, you should at least read my Prolegomena. I know it is a common misconception that I should have claimed that the world of phenomena is a mere delusion; but this is precisely the misconception I answer in Prolegomena. As for the argument that I should deny the evidence of our senses, I refer you to my book Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: in this book I maintain explicitly that our senses neither betray us nor confuse us. Of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the English translations. But I have heard that you can read German, so you may consult the originals.”

Maybe I should turn the table and let Kant summarize Ayn Rand’s philosophy – but I haven’t figured this out. All I can say off-hand is that he would probably brand her as “the most evil woman in womankind’s history” – because she elevates to a virtue what Kant regarded as the “radical evil” in man: egoism or self-love as the base of ethics.

(As my Scandinavian readers may know, I have written quite extensively on Immanuel Kant in Swedish. I cannot do this in English, because I have to give illustrative quotes to prove my points, and I only read him in Swedish translations; occasionally, I check against the German original.)

Aristotle on friendship

(This is an adaptation of a blog post I wrote in Swedish a couple of days ago.)

On Facebook one is “friends” with all one’s contacts – even those one has never met in real life, and even those one has not heard about before one gets a “friends request”. The new competitor to Facebook, Google+, on the other hand, makes a distinction between a circle of “friends” and a circle of “acquaintances”. This made me wonder about where one draws the line between an “acquaintance” and a “friend”; and I recalled that Aristotle discusses various types of friendship in The Nicomachean Ethics.

In fact, Aristotle devotes two whole books (book 8–9) in The Nicomachean Ethics to this subject. To make a long story short, he distinguishes between three types of friendships: friendship for the sake of utility, friendship for the sake of pleasure, and true friendship, where people like or love one another for what they are. An example of the first type would be a business acquaintance; and this kind of friendship ends when the utility ends. Or one might be friendly with one´s dentist, because he performs a useful service; but this is a friendship that ends when one leaves the dentist’s office and does not come back until one’s next visit to the dentist.

Friends for the sake of pleasure are those who like to talk to each other, to sometimes share a beer or a dinner on the town, to go to sports events or the theatre or the opera together, etcetera, etcetera. This is a more lasting kind of friendship; but it also comes to an end, when the pleasure comes to an end. If such friends are separated (if, for example, one of them moves to another town), the friendship will tend to evaporate.

The third, and best, kind of friendship can only occur between good people (nobody would like to be “bosom friends” with somebody bad). Such a friend is, in Aristotle’s words, “another self”, an “alter ego”; such friends rejoice and grieve together; they always wish one another well; the affection or love one feels for such a friend  is akin to the affection and love one feels for oneself.

This is a short summary, and I have left out a lot. For example, Aristotle also discusses friendship within a family; and he has the interesting observation that young people easily find “friends of pleasure”, but those friendships are also easily dissolved; while old and sour people (such as myself) have a hard time finding such friends.

So what does this have to do with Facebook and Google+? The question is, how many really true and good friends could one have? This is what Aristotle writes about this:

Should we, then, make as many friends as possible, or […] should a man neither be friendless nor have an excessive number of friends?

To friends made with a view to utility this saying would seem thoroughly applicable; for to do services to many people in return is a laborious task and life is not long enough for its performance. Therefore friends in excess of those who are sufficient for our own life are superfluous, and hindrances to the noble life; so that we have no need of them. Of friends made with a view to pleasure, also, few are enough, as a little seasoning in food is enough.

But as regards good friends, should we have as many as possible, or is there a limit to the number of one’s friends? […] [F]or friends […] there is a fixed number – perhaps the largest number with whom one can live together (for that, we found, is thought to be the very characteristic of friendship); and that one cannot live with many people and divide oneself up among them is plain. Further, they too must be friends of one another; and it is a hard business for this condition to be fulfilled with a large number. It is found difficult, too, to rejoice and to grieve in an intimate way with many people, for it may likely happen that one has at once to be happy with one friend and to mourn with another. Presumably, then, it is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purpose of living together; for it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people. This is why one cannot love several people; love is ideally a sort of excess of friendship, and that can only be felt towards one person; therefore great friendship too can only be felt towards a few people.

What, then, has Aristotle to say about those who have hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends?

Those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one’s friend, except in the way proper to fellow citizens, and such people are also called obsequious. In the way proper to fellow citizens, indeed, it is possible to be the friend of many and yet not be obsequious but a genuinely good man; but one cannot have with many people the friendship based on virtue and on the character of our friends themselves, and we must be content if we find even a few such. (The Nicomachean Ethics. Book 9, Section 10; translated by David Ross.)

Well, I should not accuse those who have many Facebook friends of obsequiousness – it is Facebook that has defined “friend” in such a way that virtually anyone could be subsumed under the concept. But what about Google+? Well, I have quite a few “friends for pleasure” – people whose status updates and comments I like to read, and even some that I like to share a beer with. But friends that I would always rejoice and grieve with? With the possible exception of my lady-friend (and my mother, when she was still alive) I cannot even remember having had such a close friend. So I am content with having only acquaintances on Google+.

Is action an a priori category?

And was Mises a Kantian?

Sometime in the remote future – maybe 10 or 20 years from now, or even 50, if I live that long – I intend to publish an essay or treatise called Praxeology refuted. (If I cannot refute it, the title will be Praxeology validated.) Here is a head start.

The father of praxeology, the science of human action, Ludwig von Mises, did call action an “a priori category”. And he takes this terminology from the father of the a priori, Immanuel Kant. So let me begin with what Kant meant by this term.

“A priori” means “before experience” or “independent of experience”. Kant attempted to prove that such a priori knowledge lies at the base of all our knowledge. The sense provide us with the raw material of knowledge, but this raw material has to be ordered or structured by  a set of categories, which are known to us independent of all experience and, in fact, are required to even make experience possible. Those categories are twelve in number, nor more and no less, and they all have to do with the logic of our thinking. “Action” is not one of those categories, so it should be noted that Mises already deviates from Kant by adding “action” to the categories.

Nevertheless, there is much in Mises’ writings on praxeology that reveals a heavy Kantian influence. For one thing, he maintains that truth and falsehood are a matter, not of reality outside of us, but of the logical structure of the human mind. (I will devote a chapter in my upcoming treatise to this.)

But let me turn to this “category of action”. What is meant by it? The simplest formulation I can come up with is that man acts purposively and relates means to ends. When man acts, he does so with a purpose in mind. The purpose may be long-range (such as pursuing a certain career – or writing a treatise on praxeology), or it may short range (such as going down to the grocery to buy some food – or completing this blog post). But there is no such thing as purposeless action: even if a man just takes a stroll, there is the purpose of relaxation.

It might be objected that some actions (such as sneezing, or removing one’s hand from a hot plate) are involuntary. Mises answer to such objections is that those are not actions, but reactions. And human action also has to be distinguished from animal behavior: animals act in ways that promote their survival – lions hunt for food, and the zebras and antelopes run away from the lion to find a safer place to graze. But animals do not consciously set themselves goals and purposes; this is the distinctive mark of man.

So far, so good – there is certainly nothing here that an Objectivist should object to (or any thinking person, for that matter). But is it a priori? Is it independent of experience?

The point that man acts purposively may seem so self-evident and so all-encompassing that it eludes analysis. But I would say that we first know it by introspection: every one of us knows introspectively that we act with a purpose in mind and that we relate means to ends in order to achieve this purpose. That other men do the same is evident from their behavior; the assumption that other men act totally mechanically is too preposterous to seriously consider.

But – Immanuel Kant to the contrary notwithstanding – introspection is no more a priori than is extrospection.

Is Mises, then, a Kantian? Let me quote one of the foremost experts on Mises. Jörg Guido Hülsmann (from his Introduction to the third edition of Epistemological Problems of Economics):

The least one can say is that Mises’ theoretical analyses do not fit very well the caricature of the “Kantian” approach – studying the workings of the human mind, and nothing but this, in order to derive a priori insights about the rest of the world. If we want to do justice to what Mises actually said and did, rather than to squeeze his views into some preconceived epistemological scheme, then it seems we cannot avoid the conclusion that the affinities of Mises’s ideas with Kant’s philosophy are mainly rhetorical affinities. Mises is not closer to Kant than he is to any other rationalist philosopher.

Mises always stressed that the propositions of praxeology and economics were not derived from metaphysical (in the pejorative sense of “groundless”) speculation, but from facts of experience – though not experience of the kind that comes from the human senses. (P. liii.)

Well, fine – I like this. (I would like it even more, if it were true.)

It is true that introspective experience does not come through the senses – at least not the kind of introspective experience I wrote about earlier. But it is still experience – not an “a priori” that precedes experience and makes experience possible, the way Kant’s categories are supposed to do.

Let me follow Hülsmann’s advice and see what Mises himself actually said, to find out whether his affinities with Kant are “mainly rhetorical” or not. First from Human Action:

There is no means to establish an a posteriori theory of human conduct and social events. (P. 31.)

And so, such a theory has to be a priori.

In the field of human history a limitation similar to that which the experimentally tested theories enjoin upon the attempts to interpret and elucidate individual physical, chemical, and physiological events is provided by praxeology. Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, subject. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historic events. Without them we should not be able to see in the course of events anything else than kaleidoscopic change and chaotic muddle. (P. 52; italics mine.)

I would also like to quote from Epistemological Problems of Economics (translated from the German original by no less a person than George Reisman):

The science of human action that strives for universally valid knowledge is the theoretical system whose hitherto best elaborated branch is economics. In all of its branches this science is a priori, not empirical. Like logic and mathematics, it is not derived from experience; it is prior to experience. It is, as it were, the logic of action and deed. (P 13; italics mine.)

However, what we know about our action under given conditions is derived not from experience, but from reason. What we know about the fundamental categories of action – action, economizing, preferring, the relationship of means and ends, and everything else that, together with these, constitute the system of human action – is not derived from experience. We conceive all this from within, just as we conceive logical and mathematical truths, a priori, without reference to any experience. Nor would experience ever lead anyone to the knowledge of these things if he did not comprehend them from within himself. (P. 14.)

Those quotes show more than a “rhetorical affinity” between Mises and Kant. Mises’ epistemological framework is clearly Kantian. And saying this is not to “squeeze his views into some preconceived epistemological scheme”; he squeezes himself into that scheme.

Now, the question in my mind is: Is this Kantian framework really necessary to validate all of Mises’ numerous insights. I think not. But this is a large subject, so I will return to it later. Maybe soon, maybe in some remote future.