"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II)

In my last post here on common sense in American history, I promised to connect the serious intellectual foundations of common sense with the philosophy of Mortimer J. Adler and his mid-twentieth-century community of discourse. In today's post I will show _why_ Adler moved in the direction of using and promoting common sense as an antidote for 1960s political troubles in the United States. This involves a short study of his motivations for writing two different (but related) books, as well as a look, counter-intuitively, at their reception. In next week's third and last post on this topic, I will discuss and analyze _how_ Adler articulated, defined, and applied the idea of common sense in both books. In other words, I hope to arrive at an explanation of his "common sense liberalism."

By the late 1960s Adler [right] had spent many years trying to bridge the gap between philosophy as an abstract study of argument and distinctions, and philosophy as a usable, accessible entity that could aid society in overcoming its troubles. My argument is that he engaged in that endeavor as a means to help foster and refine a democratic culture. This is a theoretical structure, with a longer history, I use to make long-term sense of Adler's work. Yet the idea of a democratic culture is never explicitly discussed by him in his writings. I don't want to get into all of the details of my theoretical structure here, but will at least offer a brief sketch of how it relates to common sense.

I use democratic culture as a shorthand for a non-authoritarian culture ('culture' as understood in the Geertzian tradition) that promotes equal and just citizenship (i.e. human rights at a minimum), as well as a shared public ethics, arrived at through free consensual means. It is a culture that---working properly---supports, permeates, and promotes democracy in political and social structures. A democratic culture the engages the body politic would ideally sustain and enable democratic states. To get there, however, some degree of common experience and sense are necessary in allowing for communication, shared understandings, and consensus building. The existence of a democratic culture implies some degree (thick or thin?) of common sensibilities among the body politic.

In the 1969-1970 period, Adler offered up a theory of ethics, or moral philosophy, that he hoped would help foster a democratic culture. He wanted to help those navigating the intellectual, social, and political turmoil of the Sixties. In this period of crisis and contradiction, he wrote two books aimed at readers seeking to reconcile the emergent ethic of personal liberation (or satisfaction or expression) with a social ethic that respected equality and justice. In so doing, he hoped to protect liberalism---the mixed-economy welfare state, as progressively improved in existing institutions over the twentieth-century---from the plans of revolutionaries and anarchic youthful radicals. Adler sought a third way between the reactionary politics of the left and right.

What were Adler's credentials for doing this? Why would people attend to his prescriptions?

In the Sixties Adler had added to a reputation built during the prior three decades. A biographical brief is in order. Adler became a public figure in the early 1940s due to the popularity of his super bestselling How to Read a Book (1940), which advocated, ideally, for a liberal education for all as a cure for ills of anti-intellectualism and mindless ideology in democracies. Practically it advocated for great books discussion groups for adults. Adler also wrote on education reform in conjunction with his charismatic, popular friend Robert Hutchins. After a retreat into philosophical work in the 1950s, when he worked extensively on The Idea of Freedom with his Institute for Philosophical Research, Adler re-emerged in the 1960s writing for both academic and popular audiences. He wrote popular and semi-scholarly books on philosophical topics and education. Articles by Adler, on the same topics and others (esp. the great books), appeared in magazines, including Playboy. He made an appearance in 1962 as a lecturer before select members of the Kennedy administration. By the end of the decade Adler had also convinced Britannica to engage in an extensive rewrite of the Encyclopedia Britannica (think Propaedia, Micropaedia, and Macropaedia---the 15th edition of the set, or Britannica 3). By 1970, then, Adler was a well-known, well-respected, and established public intellectual.

Despite his name recognition and propensity to write on relevant topics, Adler was not at all an activist in the mold of those outlined by Kevin Mattson in Intellectuals in Action (2002). The closest Adler came in his career to being activist "liberal" intellectual was during late 1940s and 1950s, when he gave numerous speeches in support of world federal government. Even so, he never contributed any of those writings, for example, to left-leaning publications like Alfred Bingham's Common Sense magazine. By the late 1960s Adler was living a quiet life in Chicago. He worked heavily for Britannica, spent his summers in Aspen, lectured at the University of Chicago (via the "Britannica Lectures" subsidized by William Benton), raised a family with his new wife Caroline, and fostered various intellectual projects through his Institute for Philosophical Research. In other words, his activism was restricted to reading, writing, philosophizing, avoiding paper cuts, and wrestling with his young children (no small feat for a man who was 67 in 1970).

Despite his then sedate, practical commitments, Adler clearly stayed on top of the news. He was painfully aware of the injustices of the decade. References to well-known problems of the Sixties are all over his 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense and, to a lesser extent, his 1971 book The Common Sense of Politics (hereafter TOL and CSP).[1] Both grew out of his Britannica Lectures; TOL from those given in 1969, and CSP in 1970. The text and notes of the former convey knowledge of its intellectual, political, and social context. In TOL Adler makes mention of the generation gap, military drafts, angst, the popularity of existentialism, the atomic age, the New Left, civil disobedience, free love, the sexual revolution, and the problem of playboys.

In both books Adler cites relevant, contemporary thinkers and figures, established and otherwise, such as Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Irving Kristol, David Riesman, Christopher Jencks, Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Justice Abraham Fortas, and even Allan Bloom. Mention of these people and contextual factors does not imply a full understanding of all that they represent, but both books relay enough signals about contemporary society to give the reader some confidence of the Adler's relevance.

Without yet delving into Adler's philosophy of common sense, as offered and utilized in TOL and CSP, I will at least introduce Adler's goals in both books. The "Preface" to TOL, written in October 1969, explains the purpose of the book and its relation to CSP (bolds mine):

In [TOL], ethics and politics are treated as related branches of moral philosophy; but the present book deals with the shape of the good society [i.e. politics] only to the extent that it bears on the external conditions required for the pursuit of happiness to give every individual the opportunity he should have to make a really good life for himself. It does not address itself primarily or directly to questions about the nature of the state, the necessity of government, the realization through political means of the fullest possible measures of liberty, equality, and peace, and the progressive development of the constitution that makes democracy the only perfectly just form of government. I plan to devote the next series of...Britannica Lectures to these basic questions of political philosophy, which I hope subsequently to publish as...The Common Sense of Politics (p. xiv).

And here is what Adler added in CSP (bolds mine):

[TOL and CSP] dovetail as reciprocally interdependent parts of a single whole---moral philosophy, of which the part that is ethics deals with the problems of the good life, and the part that is politics deals with the problems of the good society. Distinct in substance by virtue of the quite different problems with which they deal, they are alike in method and approach: both offer themselves as philosophical refinements of common-sense wisdom, and both are normative rather than descriptive---both attempt to prescribe ideals that ought to be pursued and the steps that ought to be taken toward their realization (p. xxiii).

Now that Adler's topics and goals for each book are stated, and I've hopefully intrigued you on their contents in relation to common sense, I am instead going to take a potentially strange narrative step. At this point we can learn something more about _why_ the two books were written by looking at their reception---at what happened after publication. This tactic is legitimated, in part, because Adler himself offered an opinion on the potential reception of CSP in its "Preface." Here is is prediction (bolds mine):

If the political theory here set forth is rejected, as I think it will be, by both the old right and the new left, that will confirm my judgment of its soundness. To the professed or unwitting anarchist of the new left, its controlling principles will appear to bespeak reactionary conservatism. To the reactionary conservative of the old right [or paleoconservatives], the ideal of the classless establishment that it projects will appear to be revolutionary, and may even evoke such epithets as 'anarchistic' or communistic.' That is, perhaps, as it should be, for the doctrine of this book is both conservative and revolutionary (p. xxiv)

Put another way, Adler's normative and prescriptive common sense liberalism leads one to maintain mid-century institutions; so it's conservative relative to New Left. But Adler's plans in TOL and CSP also maintain the progressive ideal of endless governmental refinement (practical and pragmatic, though Adler would've rejected the latter philosophical label). In CSP, then, Adler articulates a philosophy that reinforces slow, patient institutional change, or reform, and rejects any revolutionary philosophy that would destroy or deregulate existing institutions. As such, you can see why he made his prediction.

Truth be told, however, these books provoked little response---in spite of Adler's sometimes reactionary tone with regard to New Left and countercultural excesses. Indeed, both books seem to have either gone unread or been swallowed up in the events of the period. Based on the mid-1990s reprints and introductions from intellectuals, the books were clearly not forgotten. And contemporary reviews of both books were either relatively sparse, or positive in a perfunctory fashion. Two exceptions, both for CSP, come from recognizable names. The aforementioned Alfred Bingham, a moderate Democrat by the early 1970s, praised Adler's call for a world community while recognizing that the book targeted "student anarchists." One-time William F. Buckley-protege-come-liberal journalist Gary Wills dismissed CSP as having "minatory usefulness."[2]

Excepting the then-left-wing convert Wills, most reactions to Adler's common-sense liberalism were tepid. Why? I think there are four reasons for this---the last and most important being actually related to his philosophy of common sense. And all four reasons speak somewhat to why Adler wrote the books.

First, the non-revolutionary program, or at best targeted radical program (in education---an explanation of this is coming in my next post), outlined in both books excited neither left nor right-wing intellectual-activists of the day. His rational program for reform missed the emotional notes of the New Left and emerging New Right. Adler wrote both TOL and CSP precisely to counteract what he perceived as shrill, sometimes irrational calls for cultural, social, and political revolution.

Second, readers on the left and right perhaps felt Adler's philosophy did not adequately account for, or address, liberalism's failings in relation to justice, liberty, and equality. Adler did address the fact that justice had to rule over equality and liberty to create (CSP, p. xiv-xv, 122). In this way Adler foreshadowed, in a much-less detailed way, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.[3] But Adler was writing, in the eyes of some, to celebrate the very institutions responsible for oppression. He was, to a certain set of readers, avoiding hard truths about injustice and inequality in American society. Adler was able to write both books because he was not presently on the receiving end of social, cultural, and political injustices.

Third, Adler wrote as a public intellectual ensconced in "the Establishment." This is of course related to my second point. Though Adler titled his 1977 autobiography Philosopher at Large, he was only just free the University of Chicago (by association) at that point; he remained employed by Britannica through the 1970s. Adler's Institute for Philosophical Research, despite being unconnected with the academy, functioned more as a personal research group than an effective marketing tool for his work. Even so, Adler's connections to the Establishment---meaning the Aspen Institute, Britannica, and the University of Chicago---allowed him to be the patient advocate of change he was in both TOL and CSP. For his part, in CSP Adler wrote objectively about "the [dyslogistic] Establishment" as if he were not in some way a part of it (p. xxv, 161-162, 235n9).

Finally, neither Adler's philosophy of common sense nor his expression of it held much appeal for intellectuals, academic or otherwise. As such, he had to write these books, in a particular tone, to find an audience for his solutions to the era's problems. There are two reasons for this lack of intellectual appeal, one essential and the other historical. It is essential to being an intellectual, of her habits and tendencies, that she will either heavily caveat or reject common sense as an explanatory trope for phenomena. Intellectuals look for and see complexity, which by definition is not necessary to common sense explanations---which seek simplicity first (simplicity being easier to share).

The historical-contextual reason is that philosophers in the period about which I am writing were deeply engaged in either analytic philosophy or structuralist/poststructuralist language theories. In either case, practitioners in both arenas were generally employed by the academy and wrote for each other. The findings of those language theorists, however, explicitly weakened--or even denied---the possibility of anchors between the sign, signifier, and "reality"; this clearly lessened the possibility of shared senses of experience.[4]

At this point in his career, Adler's connections to the academy were also waning. He maintained contacts with Thomistic philosophers at Catholic institutions; they did not reject the "common sense realism" Adler had developed in relation to Arthur Lovejoy and Jacques Maritain.[5] In addition, Adler's explicit claim on Aristotle as influential, though Adler was in fact neo-Aristotelian in his extensions and applications, narrowed his potential for influence in an academy that valued up-to-date, novel thinking. These factors kept Adler's common-sense philosophy, as well as his liberalism, from obtaining significant traffic with academic intellectuals.

As a minor digression, or counterpoint, in relation to Adler's historical appeal, I should say that he was not completely ignored by philosophers. Despite his eclectic and apparently anachronistic influences, as well as a lack of trusted philosophical credentials (though it came from Columbia University, Adler's PhD was in psychology), several noteworthy twentieth-century philosophers and intellectuals saw Adler as a significant legitimate force---or at least an intriguing thinker and philosopher. Examples include Paul Weiss [right], Charles Hartshorne, Anthony Quinton, Arthur Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, Vergilius Ferm, and even an oppositional figure, Morris R. Cohen.[6] Despite their respect, or even admiration, these figures were not a part of Adler's immediate community of discourse in the writing of TOL and CSP. That group was composed of significant, but less eminent, thinkers like Clifton Fadiman, Arthur Rubin, Otto Bird, Robert Hutchins, Charles Van Doren, and John Van Doren. Maritain and Hutchins (to whom CSP is dedicated), while still friends with Adler as of the early 1970s, were not active participants in the discourse that formed these books.

To finish off this last point about Adler's philosophy of common sense, a word must be said about his expression of that philosophy in the context of his philosophical biography. His lack of appeal to intellectuals and academics in the 1980s and onward went beyond mere philosophical eclecticism. It was in the period discussed in this post, the Sixties and Seventies that is, that he began a slow shift to writing for non-academic audiences. Though Adler had long maintained that philosophy should be "everybody's business" (since the late 1940s), he only explicitly abandoned academics as an audience in the late Seventies. That said, TOL and CSP feature lengthy discursive notes, as well as notes using contemporary literature and Great Books authors beyond just Aristotle. And the prose in both books is neither overly simplistic nor in the jargon of a specialist. Like his old-school philosophical influences, Adler's accessibility likely made his books less-than-useful to academic scholars seeking to obtain cultural capital for advancement and peer recognition. Adler expressed his philosophy of common sense in a way that he hoped would appeal to the common person.

Having now covered _why_ Adler moved in the direction of common sense, or common sense realism, in my next (and final) post I will discuss _how_ he did it---the nuts, bolts, and concrete merits of his philosophy as presented in TOL and CSP. Stay tuned! I promise to lead you on no further. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Here are the full citations of the editions of TOL and CSP used in this post: (a) The Common Sense of Politics, with an Introduction by John Van Doren (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1971; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996); (b) The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, with an Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996)

[2] Alfred M. Bingham, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, Saturday Review 54 (May 8, 1971): 30; Gary Wills, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, The New York Times Book Review (May 8, 1971): 27; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 158, 272-73, 322, 325-26; Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), chapter two passim; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 176.

[3] As far as I know, Adler's only encounter with Rawls, in writing, was in the former's 1981 book, Six Great Ideas (NY: Macmillan). Here are the relevant passages (p.188). I've never heard of Rawls being tweaked for defining down justice as "solely...fairness." Can anyone verify that for me? Adler also called A Theory of Justice "a widely discussed and overpraised book." Bennie Crockett's dissertation (full citation below) attempts, in a few spots, to address Adler's work in relation to Rawls.

[4] J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Simon & Schuster/Twayne Publishers, 1996), 16-22; Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246-47.

[5] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 238-246; Bennie R. Crockett, ‘Mortimer Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wales, 2000), 9-11, 51n153, 83, 85; Tim Lacy, "The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 124-127.

[6] Crockett, 9n6; Adler, Second Look, 238n5.

"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II)

In my last post here on common sense in American history, I promised to connect the serious intellectual foundations of common sense with the philosophy of Mortimer J. Adler and his mid-twentieth-century community of discourse. In today's post I will show _why_ Adler moved in the direction of using and promoting common sense as an antidote for 1960s political troubles in the United States. This involves a short study of his motivations for writing two different (but related) books, as well as a look, counter-intuitively, at their reception. In next week's third and last post on this topic, I will discuss and analyze _how_ Adler articulated, defined, and applied the idea of common sense in both books. In other words, I hope to arrive at an explanation of his "common sense liberalism."

By the late 1960s Adler [right] had spent many years trying to bridge the gap between philosophy as an abstract study of argument and distinctions, and philosophy as a usable, accessible entity that could aid society in overcoming its troubles. My argument is that he engaged in that endeavor as a means to help foster and refine a democratic culture. This is a theoretical structure, with a longer history, I use to make long-term sense of Adler's work. Yet the idea of a democratic culture is never explicitly discussed by him in his writings. I don't want to get into all of the details of my theoretical structure here, but will at least offer a brief sketch of how it relates to common sense.

I use democratic culture as a shorthand for a non-authoritarian culture ('culture' as understood in the Geertzian tradition) that promotes equal and just citizenship (i.e. human rights at a minimum), as well as a shared public ethics, arrived at through free consensual means. It is a culture that---working properly---supports, permeates, and promotes democracy in political and social structures. A democratic culture the engages the body politic would ideally sustain and enable democratic states. To get there, however, some degree of common experience and sense are necessary in allowing for communication, shared understandings, and consensus building. The existence of a democratic culture implies some degree (thick or thin?) of common sensibilities among the body politic.

In the 1969-1970 period, Adler offered up a theory of ethics, or moral philosophy, that he hoped would help foster a democratic culture. He wanted to help those navigating the intellectual, social, and political turmoil of the Sixties. In this period of crisis and contradiction, he wrote two books aimed at readers seeking to reconcile the emergent ethic of personal liberation (or satisfaction or expression) with a social ethic that respected equality and justice. In so doing, he hoped to protect liberalism---the mixed-economy welfare state, as progressively improved in existing institutions over the twentieth-century---from the plans of revolutionaries and anarchic youthful radicals. Adler sought a third way between the reactionary politics of the left and right.

What were Adler's credentials for doing this? Why would people attend to his prescriptions?

In the Sixties Adler had added to a reputation built during the prior three decades. A biographical brief is in order. Adler became a public figure in the early 1940s due to the popularity of his super bestselling How to Read a Book (1940), which advocated, ideally, for a liberal education for all as a cure for ills of anti-intellectualism and mindless ideology in democracies. Practically it advocated for great books discussion groups for adults. Adler also wrote on education reform in conjunction with his charismatic, popular friend Robert Hutchins. After a retreat into philosophical work in the 1950s, when he worked extensively on The Idea of Freedom with his Institute for Philosophical Research, Adler re-emerged in the 1960s writing for both academic and popular audiences. He wrote popular and semi-scholarly books on philosophical topics and education. Articles by Adler, on the same topics and others (esp. the great books), appeared in magazines, including Playboy. He made an appearance in 1962 as a lecturer before select members of the Kennedy administration. By the end of the decade Adler had also convinced Britannica to engage in an extensive rewrite of the Encyclopedia Britannica (think Propaedia, Micropaedia, and Macropaedia---the 15th edition of the set, or Britannica 3). By 1970, then, Adler was a well-known, well-respected, and established public intellectual.

Despite his name recognition and propensity to write on relevant topics, Adler was not at all an activist in the mold of those outlined by Kevin Mattson in Intellectuals in Action (2002). The closest Adler came in his career to being activist "liberal" intellectual was during late 1940s and 1950s, when he gave numerous speeches in support of world federal government. Even so, he never contributed any of those writings, for example, to left-leaning publications like Alfred Bingham's Common Sense magazine. By the late 1960s Adler was living a quiet life in Chicago. He worked heavily for Britannica, spent his summers in Aspen, lectured at the University of Chicago (via the "Britannica Lectures" subsidized by William Benton), raised a family with his new wife Caroline, and fostered various intellectual projects through his Institute for Philosophical Research. In other words, his activism was restricted to reading, writing, philosophizing, avoiding paper cuts, and wrestling with his young children (no small feat for a man who was 67 in 1970).

Despite his then sedate, practical commitments, Adler clearly stayed on top of the news. He was painfully aware of the injustices of the decade. References to well-known problems of the Sixties are all over his 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense and, to a lesser extent, his 1971 book The Common Sense of Politics (hereafter TOL and CSP).[1] Both grew out of his Britannica Lectures; TOL from those given in 1969, and CSP in 1970. The text and notes of the former convey knowledge of its intellectual, political, and social context. In TOL Adler makes mention of the generation gap, military drafts, angst, the popularity of existentialism, the atomic age, the New Left, civil disobedience, free love, the sexual revolution, and the problem of playboys.

In both books Adler cites relevant, contemporary thinkers and figures, established and otherwise, such as Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Irving Kristol, David Riesman, Christopher Jencks, Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Justice Abraham Fortas, and even Allan Bloom. Mention of these people and contextual factors does not imply a full understanding of all that they represent, but both books relay enough signals about contemporary society to give the reader some confidence of the Adler's relevance.

Without yet delving into Adler's philosophy of common sense, as offered and utilized in TOL and CSP, I will at least introduce Adler's goals in both books. The "Preface" to TOL, written in October 1969, explains the purpose of the book and its relation to CSP (bolds mine):

In [TOL], ethics and politics are treated as related branches of moral philosophy; but the present book deals with the shape of the good society [i.e. politics] only to the extent that it bears on the external conditions required for the pursuit of happiness to give every individual the opportunity he should have to make a really good life for himself. It does not address itself primarily or directly to questions about the nature of the state, the necessity of government, the realization through political means of the fullest possible measures of liberty, equality, and peace, and the progressive development of the constitution that makes democracy the only perfectly just form of government. I plan to devote the next series of...Britannica Lectures to these basic questions of political philosophy, which I hope subsequently to publish as...The Common Sense of Politics (p. xiv).

And here is what Adler added in CSP (bolds mine):

[TOL and CSP] dovetail as reciprocally interdependent parts of a single whole---moral philosophy, of which the part that is ethics deals with the problems of the good life, and the part that is politics deals with the problems of the good society. Distinct in substance by virtue of the quite different problems with which they deal, they are alike in method and approach: both offer themselves as philosophical refinements of common-sense wisdom, and both are normative rather than descriptive---both attempt to prescribe ideals that ought to be pursued and the steps that ought to be taken toward their realization (p. xxiii).

Now that Adler's topics and goals for each book are stated, and I've hopefully intrigued you on their contents in relation to common sense, I am instead going to take a potentially strange narrative step. At this point we can learn something more about _why_ the two books were written by looking at their reception---at what happened after publication. This tactic is legitimated, in part, because Adler himself offered an opinion on the potential reception of CSP in its "Preface." Here is is prediction (bolds mine):

If the political theory here set forth is rejected, as I think it will be, by both the old right and the new left, that will confirm my judgment of its soundness. To the professed or unwitting anarchist of the new left, its controlling principles will appear to bespeak reactionary conservatism. To the reactionary conservative of the old right [or paleoconservatives], the ideal of the classless establishment that it projects will appear to be revolutionary, and may even evoke such epithets as 'anarchistic' or communistic.' That is, perhaps, as it should be, for the doctrine of this book is both conservative and revolutionary (p. xxiv)

Put another way, Adler's normative and prescriptive common sense liberalism leads one to maintain mid-century institutions; so it's conservative relative to New Left. But Adler's plans in TOL and CSP also maintain the progressive ideal of endless governmental refinement (practical and pragmatic, though Adler would've rejected the latter philosophical label). In CSP, then, Adler articulates a philosophy that reinforces slow, patient institutional change, or reform, and rejects any revolutionary philosophy that would destroy or deregulate existing institutions. As such, you can see why he made his prediction.

Truth be told, however, these books provoked little response---in spite of Adler's sometimes reactionary tone with regard to New Left and countercultural excesses. Indeed, both books seem to have either gone unread or been swallowed up in the events of the period. Based on the mid-1990s reprints and introductions from intellectuals, the books were clearly not forgotten. And contemporary reviews of both books were either relatively sparse, or positive in a perfunctory fashion. Two exceptions, both for CSP, come from recognizable names. The aforementioned Alfred Bingham, a moderate Democrat by the early 1970s, praised Adler's call for a world community while recognizing that the book targeted "student anarchists." One-time William F. Buckley-protege-come-liberal journalist Gary Wills dismissed CSP as having "minatory usefulness."[2]

Excepting the then-left-wing convert Wills, most reactions to Adler's common-sense liberalism were tepid. Why? I think there are four reasons for this---the last and most important being actually related to his philosophy of common sense. And all four reasons speak somewhat to why Adler wrote the books.

First, the non-revolutionary program, or at best targeted radical program (in education---an explanation of this is coming in my next post), outlined in both books excited neither left nor right-wing intellectual-activists of the day. His rational program for reform missed the emotional notes of the New Left and emerging New Right. Adler wrote both TOL and CSP precisely to counteract what he perceived as shrill, sometimes irrational calls for cultural, social, and political revolution.

Second, readers on the left and right perhaps felt Adler's philosophy did not adequately account for, or address, liberalism's failings in relation to justice, liberty, and equality. Adler did address the fact that justice had to rule over equality and liberty to create (CSP, p. xiv-xv, 122). In this way Adler foreshadowed, in a much-less detailed way, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.[3] But Adler was writing, in the eyes of some, to celebrate the very institutions responsible for oppression. He was, to a certain set of readers, avoiding hard truths about injustice and inequality in American society. Adler was able to write both books because he was not presently on the receiving end of social, cultural, and political injustices.

Third, Adler wrote as a public intellectual ensconced in "the Establishment." This is of course related to my second point. Though Adler titled his 1977 autobiography Philosopher at Large, he was only just free the University of Chicago (by association) at that point; he remained employed by Britannica through the 1970s. Adler's Institute for Philosophical Research, despite being unconnected with the academy, functioned more as a personal research group than an effective marketing tool for his work. Even so, Adler's connections to the Establishment---meaning the Aspen Institute, Britannica, and the University of Chicago---allowed him to be the patient advocate of change he was in both TOL and CSP. For his part, in CSP Adler wrote objectively about "the [dyslogistic] Establishment" as if he were not in some way a part of it (p. xxv, 161-162, 235n9).

Finally, neither Adler's philosophy of common sense nor his expression of it held much appeal for intellectuals, academic or otherwise. As such, he had to write these books, in a particular tone, to find an audience for his solutions to the era's problems. There are two reasons for this lack of intellectual appeal, one essential and the other historical. It is essential to being an intellectual, of her habits and tendencies, that she will either heavily caveat or reject common sense as an explanatory trope for phenomena. Intellectuals look for and see complexity, which by definition is not necessary to common sense explanations---which seek simplicity first (simplicity being easier to share).

The historical-contextual reason is that philosophers in the period about which I am writing were deeply engaged in either analytic philosophy or structuralist/poststructuralist language theories. In either case, practitioners in both arenas were generally employed by the academy and wrote for each other. The findings of those language theorists, however, explicitly weakened--or even denied---the possibility of anchors between the sign, signifier, and "reality"; this clearly lessened the possibility of shared senses of experience.[4]

At this point in his career, Adler's connections to the academy were also waning. He maintained contacts with Thomistic philosophers at Catholic institutions; they did not reject the "common sense realism" Adler had developed in relation to Arthur Lovejoy and Jacques Maritain.[5] In addition, Adler's explicit claim on Aristotle as influential, though Adler was in fact neo-Aristotelian in his extensions and applications, narrowed his potential for influence in an academy that valued up-to-date, novel thinking. These factors kept Adler's common-sense philosophy, as well as his liberalism, from obtaining significant traffic with academic intellectuals.

As a minor digression, or counterpoint, in relation to Adler's historical appeal, I should say that he was not completely ignored by philosophers. Despite his eclectic and apparently anachronistic influences, as well as a lack of trusted philosophical credentials (though it came from Columbia University, Adler's PhD was in psychology), several noteworthy twentieth-century philosophers and intellectuals saw Adler as a significant legitimate force---or at least an intriguing thinker and philosopher. Examples include Paul Weiss [right], Charles Hartshorne, Anthony Quinton, Arthur Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, Vergilius Ferm, and even an oppositional figure, Morris R. Cohen.[6] Despite their respect, or even admiration, these figures were not a part of Adler's immediate community of discourse in the writing of TOL and CSP. That group was composed of significant, but less eminent, thinkers like Clifton Fadiman, Arthur Rubin, Otto Bird, Robert Hutchins, Charles Van Doren, and John Van Doren. Maritain and Hutchins (to whom CSP is dedicated), while still friends with Adler as of the early 1970s, were not active participants in the discourse that formed these books.

To finish off this last point about Adler's philosophy of common sense, a word must be said about his expression of that philosophy in the context of his philosophical biography. His lack of appeal to intellectuals and academics in the 1980s and onward went beyond mere philosophical eclecticism. It was in the period discussed in this post, the Sixties and Seventies that is, that he began a slow shift to writing for non-academic audiences. Though Adler had long maintained that philosophy should be "everybody's business" (since the late 1940s), he only explicitly abandoned academics as an audience in the late Seventies. That said, TOL and CSP feature lengthy discursive notes, as well as notes using contemporary literature and Great Books authors beyond just Aristotle. And the prose in both books is neither overly simplistic nor in the jargon of a specialist. Like his old-school philosophical influences, Adler's accessibility likely made his books less-than-useful to academic scholars seeking to obtain cultural capital for advancement and peer recognition. Adler expressed his philosophy of common sense in a way that he hoped would appeal to the common person.

Having now covered _why_ Adler moved in the direction of common sense, or common sense realism, in my next (and final) post I will discuss _how_ he did it---the nuts, bolts, and concrete merits of his philosophy as presented in TOL and CSP. Stay tuned! I promise to lead you on no further. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Here are the full citations of the editions of TOL and CSP used in this post: (a) The Common Sense of Politics, with an Introduction by John Van Doren (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1971; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996); (b) The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, with an Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996)

[2] Alfred M. Bingham, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, Saturday Review 54 (May 8, 1971): 30; Gary Wills, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, The New York Times Book Review (May 8, 1971): 27; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 158, 272-73, 322, 325-26; Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), chapter two passim; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 176.

[3] As far as I know, Adler's only encounter with Rawls, in writing, was in the former's 1981 book, Six Great Ideas (NY: Macmillan). Here are the relevant passages (p.188). I've never heard of Rawls being tweaked for defining down justice as "solely...fairness." Can anyone verify that for me? Adler also called A Theory of Justice "a widely discussed and overpraised book." Bennie Crockett's dissertation (full citation below) attempts, in a few spots, to address Adler's work in relation to Rawls.

[4] J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Simon & Schuster/Twayne Publishers, 1996), 16-22; Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246-47.

[5] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 238-246; Bennie R. Crockett, ‘Mortimer Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wales, 2000), 9-11, 51n153, 83, 85; Tim Lacy, "The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 124-127.

[6] Crockett, 9n6; Adler, Second Look, 238n5.

Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Mind

If you had learned your U.S. intellectual history solely from this site over the past four years, you would have seen Robert Nozick's name explicitly mentioned only once in a post---as a secondary reference. His name has appeared indirectly, in a few books reviewed or mentioned here, such as Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture. That aside, Nozick has essentially been absent from USIH discussions until today. Why? I'm not sure. So let's begin at the beginning:

Who is Robert Nozick?

Born in New York City, he lived from 1938 to 2002. Nozick was a professor at Harvard University, where his fields of study were moral and political philosophy---in the analytic vein. His most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) contains a nice summary of it.[1] Some have called Anarchy, State, and Utopia the libertarian response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. After his most famous work, here is what the IEP article says about Nozick's professional trajectory:

Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical questions and made significant contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In metaphysics, he proposed a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity.

Nozick also delved into public philosophy, as you will see in the titles of a few of the following books by him:

- Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
- The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
- The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
- Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
- Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)

Before diving too deeply into the contents of any one book, or Nozick's most significant ideas, let's look ahead a bit. What is Nozick's significance to later thinkers and scholars? A consideration of subsequent works about him may tell us something. With that, I've put together select list of significant books, theses, and dissertations that look at Nozick and his thought (located below, in order of oldest to most recent, gathered from here). A quick perusal of the list reveals that Nozick has received more attention over the last ten years.

On Nozick's significant ideas and influence, estimates like these are hazardous, but a quick study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) reveals 106 references to, and citations of, his work. About 75-80 percent of those are related to Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Qualitatively speaking, Stephen Metcalf recently wrote the following, for Slate.com, about Nozick's historical significance (bolds mine):

--------------------------------------------------

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian [read: cautious and gradualist] consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

--------------------------------------------------

It should be noted that the point of Metcalf's polemical piece is to discuss why Nozick gave up libertarianism. The title reveals the article's thesis: "The Liberty Scam: Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired." [Aside: This article, by the way, is the best short take-down of extreme libertarianism I've ever read.]

That aside, the lines I excerpted from Metcalf's article seem to demand the following conclusion: Nozick is a major marker figure in the intellectual development of the New Right.

Before leaving Nozick for reader discussion, let me provide a final plug from historians on why Nozick matters. I don't have Daniel Rodgers' excellent book on hand (Age of Fracture), so I can't relay his passages on Nozick. But I do happen to have J. David Hoeveler, Jr.'s The Postmodernist Turn at my desk.[2] Hoeveler ends his book---in the last passages just before his Afterword---with a four-page reflection on Nozick. Here are few passages (bolds mine):

In the 1960s and early 1970s, libertarianism found outspoken defenders in Ayn Rand, science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein, and Murray Rothbard. ...When Rothbard happened to have a conversation with young Harvard professor, Robert Nozick, the professor decided to write a book.

Nozick took a circuitous route to libertarianism. In high school in the 1950s he had joined the youth branch of the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and as an undergraduate at Columbia he founded another Socialist group. But Nozick gradually yielded to the persuasive forces of individualism and of moral and economic systems that gave highest priority to the free individual. ...

Nozick's book [Anarchy] is not an easy matter. It flourishes with the philosopher's love of dense logic-chopping and finely-tuned disputation. The reader will find many pages full of mathematical symbols. In its analytical depth it resembles the work of Nozick's rival Rawls. ...One reviewer called [it] "a major event in political philosophy."...[noting] that recent political theory generally assumed the necessary distributive role of the state. However correct, he added, after Anarchy...these axioms could no longer be taken for granted. (pp. 168-69)

From here Hoeveler spends a great deal of time summarizing the book, discussing Nozick terms and axioms like "the entitlement theory," "end-result" or "end-state" principles, and Nozick's long (50-page) direct critique of Rawls. Here is Hoeveler's final statement on Nozick---which happens to also be the last page of the text (again, bolds mine):

Anarchy, State, and Utopia offered a theoretical, philosophical defense of libertarianism. ...It often gave illustrations, but too often came up short of details. Nonetheless, reviewers took Nozick's book to be, ultimately, a polemic against all the apparatus of the modern liberal state---welfare operations, public health care, compulsory social security, state-sponsored education, progressive taxation, and legislated equality of any kind. Some conservatives therefore welcomed Nozick's ideas. But Nozick wanted to be consistent. His libertarianism, however welcomed by conservative businessmen...aspired to give them no privileges. Nozick insisted that he opposed any government favoritism, as, for example, no subsidies to businesses (the airlines) or in protective tariffs. ...True and consistent libertarianism, like Nozick's, always confounds the liberal-conservative dichotomies. (p. 172).

With that, I ask the reader: How important does Nozick seem to be in the spectrum of conservative political (and social) philosophy? How significant was he to neoconservatives, or the New Right generally? If a "libertarian mind" exists (I don't necessarily believe ~one~ does), how has Nozick helped in its formation? How have you seen Nozick cited in USIH-type works beyond Rodgers and Hoeveler? - TL

--------------------------------------------------

[1] The IEP article is probably the most comprehensive of those I found online. It was written by Edward Feser of Pasadena City College. For what it's worth, Feser is a self-proclaimed political conservative and "traditional Roman Catholic" in matters of religion.

[2] The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers/Simon & Schuster Macillan, 1996).

--------------------------------------------------

Select, Significant Books, Dissertations, and Theses About Nozick

(Listed from oldest to most recent)


- Golash, Deirdre. "Entitlement and Equality: A Response to Robert Nozick." Thesis--University of Maryland, College Park, 1976.
- Goldsworthy, Jefferey Denys. "Robert Nozick and the Justifaction of Coercive Government." Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983, 1983.
- Luper, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
- Paul, Jeffrey, ed. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Roberts, P. M. "Historical Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick and Hillet Steiner." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wales Swansea, 1994, 1994.
- Jovic, Dejan. Robert Nozick: between Anarchy and State. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
- Hailwood, Simon. Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sydney: Avebury, 1996.
- Lacey, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Casey, David T. "Negative Rights and Social Indifference: Trying to Resuscitate Robert Nozick's Libertarianism." Norton, MA: Wheaton College, 2001.
- Schmidtz, David, ed. Robert Nozick. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [right]
- Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
- Payne-Johnson, Jesse Paul. "Anarchy, State, Utopia & the Social Contract: The Contractarian Foundations of Nozick's Libertarianism." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Bakaya, Santosh. The Political Theory of Robert Nozick. Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006.
- Schwab, Alexander B. "Rectifying Justice in Rectification: Dealing with Historical Injustice in Nozick's Minimal State." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Philosophy)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Murray, Dale F. Nozick, Autonomy, and Compensation. London: Continuum, 2007.
- Boaheng, Paul Biredu. "Nozick's Non-Libertarianism: A Philosophical Reconstruction." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2007, 2007.
- Bader, Ralf M. Robert Nozick. New York: Continuum, 2010.
- Papaioannou, Theo. Robert Nozick's Moral and Political Theory: A Philosophical Critique of Libertarianism. Lewiston, NY [u.a.]: Mellen Press, 2010.
- Bader, Ralf M., and John Meadowcroft. The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [right]

Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Mind

If you had learned your U.S. intellectual history solely from this site over the past four years, you would have seen Robert Nozick's name explicitly mentioned only once in a post---as a secondary reference. His name has appeared indirectly, in a few books reviewed or mentioned here, such as Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture. That aside, Nozick has essentially been absent from USIH discussions until today. Why? I'm not sure. So let's begin at the beginning:

Who is Robert Nozick?

Born in New York City, he lived from 1938 to 2002. Nozick was a professor at Harvard University, where his fields of study were moral and political philosophy---in the analytic vein. His most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) contains a nice summary of it.[1] Some have called Anarchy, State, and Utopia the libertarian response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. After his most famous work, here is what the IEP article says about Nozick's professional trajectory:

Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical questions and made significant contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In metaphysics, he proposed a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity.

Nozick also delved into public philosophy, as you will see in the titles of a few of the following books by him:

- Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
- The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
- The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
- Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
- Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)

Before diving too deeply into the contents of any one book, or Nozick's most significant ideas, let's look ahead a bit. What is Nozick's significance to later thinkers and scholars? A consideration of subsequent works about him may tell us something. With that, I've put together select list of significant books, theses, and dissertations that look at Nozick and his thought (located below, in order of oldest to most recent, gathered from here). A quick perusal of the list reveals that Nozick has received more attention over the last ten years.

On Nozick's significant ideas and influence, estimates like these are hazardous, but a quick study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) reveals 106 references to, and citations of, his work. About 75-80 percent of those are related to Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Qualitatively speaking, Stephen Metcalf recently wrote the following, for Slate.com, about Nozick's historical significance (bolds mine):

--------------------------------------------------

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian [read: cautious and gradualist] consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

--------------------------------------------------

It should be noted that the point of Metcalf's polemical piece is to discuss why Nozick gave up libertarianism. The title reveals the article's thesis: "The Liberty Scam: Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired." [Aside: This article, by the way, is the best short take-down of extreme libertarianism I've ever read.]

That aside, the lines I excerpted from Metcalf's article seem to demand the following conclusion: Nozick is a major marker figure in the intellectual development of the New Right.

Before leaving Nozick for reader discussion, let me provide a final plug from historians on why Nozick matters. I don't have Daniel Rodgers' excellent book on hand (Age of Fracture), so I can't relay his passages on Nozick. But I do happen to have J. David Hoeveler, Jr.'s The Postmodernist Turn at my desk.[2] Hoeveler ends his book---in the last passages just before his Afterword---with a four-page reflection on Nozick. Here are few passages (bolds mine):

In the 1960s and early 1970s, libertarianism found outspoken defenders in Ayn Rand, science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein, and Murray Rothbard. ...When Rothbard happened to have a conversation with young Harvard professor, Robert Nozick, the professor decided to write a book.

Nozick took a circuitous route to libertarianism. In high school in the 1950s he had joined the youth branch of the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and as an undergraduate at Columbia he founded another Socialist group. But Nozick gradually yielded to the persuasive forces of individualism and of moral and economic systems that gave highest priority to the free individual. ...

Nozick's book [Anarchy] is not an easy matter. It flourishes with the philosopher's love of dense logic-chopping and finely-tuned disputation. The reader will find many pages full of mathematical symbols. In its analytical depth it resembles the work of Nozick's rival Rawls. ...One reviewer called [it] "a major event in political philosophy."...[noting] that recent political theory generally assumed the necessary distributive role of the state. However correct, he added, after Anarchy...these axioms could no longer be taken for granted. (pp. 168-69)

From here Hoeveler spends a great deal of time summarizing the book, discussing Nozick terms and axioms like "the entitlement theory," "end-result" or "end-state" principles, and Nozick's long (50-page) direct critique of Rawls. Here is Hoeveler's final statement on Nozick---which happens to also be the last page of the text (again, bolds mine):

Anarchy, State, and Utopia offered a theoretical, philosophical defense of libertarianism. ...It often gave illustrations, but too often came up short of details. Nonetheless, reviewers took Nozick's book to be, ultimately, a polemic against all the apparatus of the modern liberal state---welfare operations, public health care, compulsory social security, state-sponsored education, progressive taxation, and legislated equality of any kind. Some conservatives therefore welcomed Nozick's ideas. But Nozick wanted to be consistent. His libertarianism, however welcomed by conservative businessmen...aspired to give them no privileges. Nozick insisted that he opposed any government favoritism, as, for example, no subsidies to businesses (the airlines) or in protective tariffs. ...True and consistent libertarianism, like Nozick's, always confounds the liberal-conservative dichotomies. (p. 172).

With that, I ask the reader: How important does Nozick seem to be in the spectrum of conservative political (and social) philosophy? How significant was he to neoconservatives, or the New Right generally? If a "libertarian mind" exists (I don't necessarily believe ~one~ does), how has Nozick helped in its formation? How have you seen Nozick cited in USIH-type works beyond Rodgers and Hoeveler? - TL

--------------------------------------------------

[1] The IEP article is probably the most comprehensive of those I found online. It was written by Edward Feser of Pasadena City College. For what it's worth, Feser is a self-proclaimed political conservative and "traditional Roman Catholic" in matters of religion.

[2] The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers/Simon & Schuster Macillan, 1996).

--------------------------------------------------

Select, Significant Books, Dissertations, and Theses About Nozick

(Listed from oldest to most recent)


- Golash, Deirdre. "Entitlement and Equality: A Response to Robert Nozick." Thesis--University of Maryland, College Park, 1976.
- Goldsworthy, Jefferey Denys. "Robert Nozick and the Justifaction of Coercive Government." Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983, 1983.
- Luper, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
- Paul, Jeffrey, ed. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Roberts, P. M. "Historical Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick and Hillet Steiner." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wales Swansea, 1994, 1994.
- Jovic, Dejan. Robert Nozick: between Anarchy and State. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
- Hailwood, Simon. Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sydney: Avebury, 1996.
- Lacey, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Casey, David T. "Negative Rights and Social Indifference: Trying to Resuscitate Robert Nozick's Libertarianism." Norton, MA: Wheaton College, 2001.
- Schmidtz, David, ed. Robert Nozick. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [right]
- Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
- Payne-Johnson, Jesse Paul. "Anarchy, State, Utopia & the Social Contract: The Contractarian Foundations of Nozick's Libertarianism." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Bakaya, Santosh. The Political Theory of Robert Nozick. Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006.
- Schwab, Alexander B. "Rectifying Justice in Rectification: Dealing with Historical Injustice in Nozick's Minimal State." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Philosophy)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Murray, Dale F. Nozick, Autonomy, and Compensation. London: Continuum, 2007.
- Boaheng, Paul Biredu. "Nozick's Non-Libertarianism: A Philosophical Reconstruction." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2007, 2007.
- Bader, Ralf M. Robert Nozick. New York: Continuum, 2010.
- Papaioannou, Theo. Robert Nozick's Moral and Political Theory: A Philosophical Critique of Libertarianism. Lewiston, NY [u.a.]: Mellen Press, 2010.
- Bader, Ralf M., and John Meadowcroft. The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [right]

The Curse of Communitarianism?

Below is Adolph Reed Jr.’s assessment of Obama shortly after the latter won his first Illinois state senate race—written in Reed’s now (in)famous article, “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996 (reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene):

In Chicago… we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.

In Reading Obama, James Kloppenberg links Obama’s political thought to three American intellectual traditions (traditions that Kloppenberg claims are interrelated): pragmatism, civic republicanism, and communitarianism. In his review of Reading Obama, John Summers takes Kloppenberg to task for, among other things, too rosy a view of the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and democratic politics—a debate that goes at least as far back as Randolph Bourne’s classic 1917 “Twilight of Idols,” where Bourne lashed out at John Dewey for supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War (albeit, on the grounds that Dewey had betrayed the pragmatism of William James, not out of a rejection of pragmatism per se).

As opposed to pragmatism, I’d like to focus on community, the subject of Reed’s irate 1996 article, and communitarianism, one of the philosophical traditions Kloppenberg thinks has influenced Obama. Kloppenberg rather obviously comes to different conclusions about community than Reed. Whereas Reed sees community as a cover for repressive neoliberal policies, Kloppenberg thinks communitarianism can serve the ends of justice—when he (tepidly) criticizes Obama, he does so for not living up to the ideals of communitarianism (and pragmatism and civic republicanism). Although Kloppenberg is careful to note that communitarianism can operate as a means to diverse ends, including ends that Kloppenberg—a self-described progressive—does not support, on the whole he seems rather favorable to communitarianism as a political philosophy. He writes that “the work of radical reformers has been informed by, and has been driven forward through the work of, communities—frequently religious communities… (78)

In a compelling bit of recent intellectual history, Kloppenberg examines the trajectory of John Rawls’s thought in light of communitarianism. At first, Rawls was predisposed to favor community as a political principle, made evident in his 1942 undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (which I blogged about here)—in which Rawls related the search for justice to religious traditions. But later, in A Theory of Justice, his 1971 tome that proved his most influential work, Rawls grounded justice in a more individualistic social contract theory. Behind a veil of ignorance, so Rawls theorized, people would opt for a reasonably just society on the grounds that they would not want to be on the lowest social rung if such a position were intolerable. Extending this line of thought, Rawls supposed that a just society would operate along the lines of the difference principle: degrees of inequality would be tolerated so long as inequality brought greater freedom and justice to all members of society, including those on the proverbial bottom rung. But then the late Rawls—he of Political Liberalism, his 1996 book that was, in effect, a response to his communitarian and feminist critics—partially came around to his earlier views about community. This he made clear in his elaboration on what he called “overlapping consensus,” where people enmeshed in communities could find political common ground with people enmeshed in other communities so long as the focus was indeed on common interests.

Kloppenberg maintains that the most “widely read version” of the communitarian critique of A Theory of Justice was written by one of Charles Taylor’s students, Michael Sandel, namely, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Kloppenberg writes: “From [Sandel’s communitarian] perspective, Rawls not only ignored, he ruled out of bounds, the most precious of all human commitments, the basic commitments that make us who we are” (99) Other communitarians influential to late-twentieth century American social thought include Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Putnam organized the communitarian Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, dedicated to “civic engagement in America,” which Obama attended in the late 1990s. This is one kernel of evidence that Kloppenberg applies to his thesis that Obama’s worldview is saturated with the lessons learned from the recent intellectual history of communitarianism. Another is that Obama learned from his community organizing days on the Chicago south side that people were more inclined to political activism if such activism was within the constraints of communities, usually religious. None of this convinces me that Obama is particularly familiar with the debates over Rawls that dominated one variant of social thought, but insofar as Obama does adhere to the principles of communitarianism, which both Reed and Kloppenberg maintain, from very different positions, how is this of consequence? Is communitarianism a viable political philosophy towards the ends of justice?

Count me a skeptic. I’ve always thought communitarianism a vacuous political philosophy. No, I don’t think it always operates as a cover for repression, though it often does, sometimes unwittingly. But I do think it works better in the descriptive than in the prescriptive. Of course critics were right to point out to Rawls that people are motivated by things other than individually-defined interests, as ever, and that such motivations should not be deemed irrational. But what does this mean going forward as a political philosophy?

Historical example is the best way I know how to demonstrate the problems of community as a political philosophy. In the late 1960s, blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political support from liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay and with Ford Foundation largesse, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. Community control activists sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers, on the grounds that black teachers would not only better relate to black students, but also because, unlike their white counterparts, black teachers would not be beholden to “culture of poverty” presumptions that lowered expectations.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control had powerful opponents, especially the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the teacher’s union that represented the vast majority of New York City teachers, led by the outspoken Albert Shanker. Thanks to a flourishing public sector unionism in the 1960s, the UFT was powerful enough to help the centralized New York City Board of Education govern the largest school system in the nation. And as part of its collectively bargained contract, teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests that they took at several points along their career. This system, which the UFT described as objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but left black teachers behind. Thus, as part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several of the white teachers in their neighborhood, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control, but less qualified by UFT standards. This, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker. In a battle that included three citywide teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, the UFT decisively defeated Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

Although raw power defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, power was not the only principle guiding it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville communitarians believed that their values were more consistent with justice than the values of the white teachers. They contrasted their belief in mutuality with the individualistic materialism of the white middle-class world inhabited by the teachers. They theorized that they were better equipped to make education relevant to black children.

The problem, as explained by Gerald Podair in his excellent book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, is that community meant different things to different people. Whereas Ocean Hill-Brownsville blacks could plausibly claim that their communitarianism served the ends of justice, if only because it was a response to institutionalized racism, community looked very different when whites in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn organized to bar blacks from being bussed into their schools. Jonathan Rieder, author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, calls the protest the result of “deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” As one Canarsie resident addressed the media: “You and the God-damned liberals, you screamed along with the blacks in 1968 for community control... now whites want what the blacks have, and you say we can’t have it.”

So to return to Rawls: how could blacks and whites in Brooklyn have found an overlapping consensus? Didn’t “community” prevent such a consensus from prevailing? As both Podair and Rieder argue, a new consensus was formed, that between formerly antagonistic outer-borough Jews and the city’s mostly Catholic Italians. Blacks were left in the lurch, especially when the city responded to its fiscal crisis of the 1970s by cutting social services that blacks were most dependent upon. Blacks were powerless to stop these cuts because they no longer had many white allies in the city. The Jews whom blacks previously relied upon as a sort of cosmopolitan buffer between themselves and the rest of the white population could no longer be counted on as such, in part because of the anti-Semitic-baiting that accompanied the 1968 controversy.

To conclude: to me, the history of Ocean Hill-Brownsville serves as a warning against community as a political principle. Am I missing something?