Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization: A Brief History from Antiquity to the Digital Era [1 ed.] 9781003363736, 9781032422275, 9781032426716

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 1: To rule with justice
1.1 The beginning of school and empire
1.2 Ancient imperialism
1.3 Socrates as a model
1.4 Ancient economics and education
1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress
1.6 Threshold
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Humans as property
2.1 Monasticism and secular state
2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community
2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law
2.4 Tension in the late medieval state
2.5 John Locke: liberating property
2.6 Liberty after Locke
2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Human-God-Machine
3.1 The divine and the artificial life
3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature
3.3 William Petty: valuing each head
3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy
3.5 (A)political economy
3.6 Instrumentalizing nature
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Utilitarianism and market divinity
4.1 Nature and justice
4.2 The benevolent market
4.3 Market reformed morality
4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society
4.5 Bentham and education
4.6 Behavioural technology
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Human capital theory
5.1 Labour and capital
5.2 Capital, desires, and education
5.3 Economists dreaming of education
5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality
5.5 Human capital: contradictions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Understanding the present
6.1 Education reform and data politics
6.2 Datafication and de-localization
6.3 Reconsidering
6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital
6.5 Transgression
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SCHOOLING, HUMAN CAPITAL AND CIVILIZATION

This book explores the formation of human capital in education, interrogating its social and ethical implications, and examining its role in generating policies and practices that govern curriculum studies as an academic field. Using an inquiry approach and offering an intellectual history of human capital theory through a genealogical methodology, the author begins by contextualizing the formation of the theory and explores its correlation with the history of imperialism. Tracing the concept of human capital from ancient slave societies to colonial empires, the book arrives at the modern formulations of the concept in education systems and explores its impact on curriculum and pedagogy in the digital age. Asking whether an approach that represented slaves, machines, animals, and property in its history is appropriate for forward-­looking democratic societies, the author then uncovers crucial implications for educational equity and teacher development. Presenting a unique genealogy of schooling humans as economic resources and offering a descriptive and critical analysis of its impact on education as lived experience, the author excavates ideas and mentalities by which we think about modern schooling processes. This approach supports the intellectual development of teachers and offers a critical assessment of power–knowledge relations in curriculum studies. Discerning associations between the human capital theory of education and technological progress with implications for ethics in the digital age, it will be an outstanding resource for scholars and graduates working across comparative and international education, the history of education, curriculum studies, digital education, and curriculum theory. Bruce Moghtader is an instructor in the Department of Educational Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada.

Studies in Curriculum Theory Series Series Editor: William F. Pinar University of British Columbia, Canada

In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that one publisher offers a balanced, solid, and forward-looking series devoted to significant and enduring scholarship as opposed to a narrow range of topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is conceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on to deliver important scholarship in the various “discourses” that comprise the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory. The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and limited (only important, lasting scholarship)—including but not confined to historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, international, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this series are intended for scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels. South Korean Education and Learning Excellence as a Hallyu Ethnographic Understandings of a Nation’s Academic Success Young Chun Kim, Jae-seong Jo, Jung-Hoon Jung Currere and Psychoanalytic Guided Regression Revisiting the Kent State Shootings Karl Martin Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization A Brief History from Antiquity to the Digital Era Bruce Moghtader For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS

Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization A Brief History from Antiquity to the Digital Era Bruce Moghtader

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Bruce Moghtader The right of Bruce Moghtader to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-42227-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-42671-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36373-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Notes 5 Bibliography 7

1 To rule with justice

9

1.1 The beginning of school and empire  10 1.2 Ancient imperialism  13 1.3 Socrates as a model  20 1.4 Ancient economics and education  23 1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress  28 1.6 Threshold 32 Notes 32 Bibliography 39

2 Humans as property 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Monasticism and secular state  45 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community  49 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law  54 Tension in the late medieval state  59 John Locke: liberating property  63

44

vi Contents 2.6 Liberty after Locke  70 2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom  73 Notes 74 Bibliography 84

3 Human-God-Machine

89

3.1 The divine and the artificial life  90 3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature  97 3.3 William Petty: valuing each head  99 3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy  103 3.5 (A)political economy  110 3.6 Instrumentalizing nature  114 Notes 115 Bibliography 122

4 Utilitarianism and market divinity

127

4.1 Nature and justice  128 4.2 The benevolent market  135 4.3 Market reformed morality  138 4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society  145 4.5 Bentham and education  149 4.6 Behavioural technology  153 Notes 154 Bibliography 163

5 Human capital theory 5.1 Labour and capital  170 5.2 Capital, desires, and education  174 5.3 Economists dreaming of education  181 5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality  185 5.5 Human capital: contradictions  193 Notes 194 Bibliography 204

168

Contents  vii

6 Understanding the present

210

6.1 Education reform and data politics  211 6.2 Datafication and de-localization  215 6.3 Reconsidering 219 6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital  222 6.5 Transgression 224 Notes 226 Bibliography 231

Index 236

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to William F. Pinar for his mentorship, intellectual generosity, and support for this book. I am thankful to Peter Grimmett and Peter Taubman who graciously read and provided invaluable advice on the initial draft of the manuscript. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to David G. Smith, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, and André E. Mazawi for providing insightful comments and thought-­provoking conversations. This book was written on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land is and has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next. I am grateful for learning and living on this land and am committed to work towards decolonization. I owe my deepest gratitude to my family, aunts and uncles, friends, teachers, and many kindred spirits I have met along the way. I thank Kate Porter, Firouzeh Peyvandi, Richard Porter, Hans Troelsen, Blaire Steinwand, Anthony Clarke, Taylor Webb, Kshamta Hunter, Nicole Lee, Sam Rocha, Anne Phelan, Penney Clark, Ido Roll, Adriana Briseño-­Garzón, Susan Grossman, Elise Chu, and Alan Jay for their support and encouragement. I am grateful to Ian Hacking, James Tully, Wendy Brown, Bernard Harcourt, Walter Mignolo, and Colin Koopman who have influenced my thinking. Moreover, I extend my thanks to the team at Routledge and Straive for assisting the publication of this book. This research has been supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, for which I am thankful. There are excerpts and ideas expressed in this book that were previous published in:

Acknowledgements  ix Moghtader, B. “Human capital and education of desires after Michel Foucault.” Journal of Self-­ Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4 (2017): 35–52. Moghtader, B. “Pastorate power, market liberalism and a knowing without knowing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35. Moghtader, B. “Schooling humans as a form of capital: The national and imperial context.” In World Yearbook of Education 2022, pp. 103–118. Routledge, 2021.

Introduction

Today, it is impossible to say precisely what we mean when we call persons forms of capital. Throughout history, capital has represented slaves, machines, animals, and property. How is it that in forward-looking democratic societies, capitalists and socialists alike, schools are focused on developing human capital? Concerned with the historical present in which human development is subsumed by economic development, this book is an invitation to deliberate on how we have arrived at the present and rethink the values that are transforming education systems. In modern education, the ancient question of “Who are we?” is evaded in the painted humane, liberal, and economically reduced notion of human subject.1 The question invites reviewing the assumptions that as humans we ought to be something. Seventeenth-century Europe reformulated the ancient question by reliance on science and technology. As the production of systematic knowledge, science grew from an orientation to “singular experiences or observed particulars” collected as evidence and understood as accumulation of “useful facts.”2 Transfiguring life experiences into useful facts influenced reasoning about wealth and society. This is the context of the scientific thoughts of William Petty (1623–1687) who developed the application of money into economic policy. Petty’s monetary valuation of each individual directed legislators to consider the economic value of humans as part of the national wealth in imperial Britain. The valuation of humans as part of national wealth remained relevant to Adam Smith’s accommodation of liberal individualism in the reworking of mercantilist state control. In the 20th century, the economic valuation of human life intensified: After the second world war, a theory on human capital formulated a return on investment approach to human development. Michel Foucault, who identified the proponents of the theory as American neo-liberals, diagnosed that the renewed emphasis of human capital accompanied an adaptation of “the legal order” as well as “scientific discoveries to the progress of economic organization.”3 The primary neo-liberal proponents of human capital theory were Milton Friedman, DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-1

2 Introduction Theodore Schultz, and Gary S. Becker. Targeting education policies, they diverged from classical political economy by conveying a notion of human subject who exchanges liberties, rights, and self-interests to self-maximize; thus, self-maximizing becomes an economic enterprise. During the Cold War, the integration of human life within the economic domain at once un-tied and united the geopolitical duality of communism and capitalism. Human capital theory prescribed an economic approach to human development that transcended political ideologies and used educational infrastructures for production of economic outputs. However, in instrumentalizing human development for social and economic production, human capital theorists failed to make a distinction between education and schooling. “Education is, first and foremost, the education of persons,” Sugarman emphasized: “Schooling is never an impartial instrument in human development”; schooling follows from what societies desire of people to be and do.4 In this context, human capital theorists thought of knowledge based on its transferability to economic returns and social utilities.5 The proposal for generating economic growth from schooling demoralized human learning and labour. It posed the possibility of disinvestment in humans when returns on investment do not secure the expected outcomes. Valuing knowledge by market rationality harbours conditions of ignorance, makes self-development subject to economic valuations, and consequently demeans liberty by subjecting self-knowledge (a necessary element of freedom) to economic cost and benefit calculations. In proposing an economic approach to human development, human capital policies and practices continue to facilitate the internalization of economic principles in education systems. Although there are multiple ways to excavate the history of a concept, this book offers one approach to the study of human capital with attention to the geography of reason.6 In redeploying Foucault’s method of genealogy, I attend to the contribution of certain historical figures to show transformations in human capital conventions and examine the conditions and effects that render certain thoughts and experiences possible. In this context, tracing the history of Western rationality contributes to the better understanding of the institutional structures and practices that informs personhood. “Genealogies start with the present in order to trace the conditions of the emergence of the present in which we are present.”7 Koopman describes genealogy as an approach to investigate the conditions of possibility of the present to transform this present. With little understanding of the traditions and forces by which we are oriented to live as human capital, transforming the present proves to be another project lacking self-awareness. This book draws on historians and historical texts not to discover a truth about human capital but to work towards layered understanding of ourselves. As a synoptic text,8 it explores historical contingencies to invite deliberations on ways of being and knowing ourselves.

Introduction  3 As a guiding approach, genealogy enables self-examination of knowledge by looking into the formalization of thought. Knowledge is not merely information. For an educated person, knowledge is, inalienable property, reflected in living a certain life. And so, the present study is an analysis of the games of truth by which it became possible to think and experience ourselves as certain subjects, irreducible to a form of capital. Foucault informed my inquiry into knowledge production and detaching power from truth: Let us not, therefore, ask why certain people want to dominate, what they seek, what is their overall strategy. Let us ask, instead how things work at the level of on-going subjection, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes, which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours etc.9 Let us ask how economic conceptions are made, reinforced, and normalized to govern human life among economic things. The need to control human capital is reconfigured in emerging data economies where machine learning directs human learning and automation replaces human labour. According to the political economist, Harold Innis, technological inventions harness forces that reform civilizations. Historically, the shifts in the system of communications introduce “monopolies on knowledge” that direct human reflexivity and secure the rise and fall of empires.10 Innis showed that the advancements in information communication technologies altered science and polity with local and global magnitudes. Educational institutions are not exempted. They continue to evolve in tandem with social practices and values that lead humanity into a way of life.11 Situating human capital in a broader historical context elucidates the role of science and technology in introducing uniformity to human life. It also deliberates on philosophical and theological assumptions that inform the apprehension of freedom, agency, and wellbeing as central values of an education. Each chapter threads the needle between contrary and complementary concepts that contributed to the formation and reformulation of the construct of human capital. The study begins in agricultural economies, where adults and children are integrated in the economy of the household. Chapter 1 outlines the development of social organization, marks the contribution of ancient Greek to Western culture, and exposes historical associations shared between schooling and empire that will shape global futures. It demonstrates how ancient rationalization, much like modern economic rationality, utilized hopes and fears in schooling humanity in a mode of liberty and government. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the notions of “property” and “machine,” invoked by Milton Friedman and Theodore Schultz to characterize the human person as a form of capital.12 Chapter 2 relays that the legal

4 Introduction underpinnings for property and ownership aimed at social order—their initial aim was not to cherish a culture of accumulation and privatization. The legitimization of ruling and consuming another’s life for increasing profit (private or social) is associated with a notional progress rooted in genocide, slavery, and colonization dating from the occupation of Americas to (covert and overt tactics of) militarization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Chapter 3 contextualizes the accommodation of Gnostic movements by modern science in exploring how the metaphor of human– machine increased acceptance of moral sentiments that welcomed unrestrained economic commercialism. At the roots of the political economy of self-interest and self-management rests a conception of human nature and society under the spell of automata. Chapter 4 attends to the formalization of the science of wealth as the industrial elites of the class-based societies free themselves from social responsibility by reliance on market divinity. While competition and surveillance became justified as means to greater good, education became a response to social and economic problems.13 These processes implied a challenge to the idea of natural growth as a metaphor for social progress.14 In this context, utilitarianism prescribed the use of scientific control in schooling to produce citizen-workers governed by the prospects of rewards and punishments. However, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey, the recognition of the interdependence of individual and social dimensions brought forth the argument that the education that exploits the malleability of humans (manipulating and schooling them by economic incentives) violates agency, liberty, and civility. Nevertheless, the moral and legal justifications for the human capital theory in the 20th century grew from the 19th-century utilitarian rationality and market freedom.15 There was no “theory” of human capital before the Cold War. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the early proponents of the theory introduced education reforms to meet the economic and military demands inside and outside of the United States. Aside from instilling national unity and harmonizing private and public interests, human capital theory advanced globalization by the way of the World Bank, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Today, human capital policies uphold the marketization and privatization of schools on a global scale and destabilize local education governance.16 According to Foucault, the theory had micro and macro implications from attending to a child to interventions in the Third World economies. It furthered “the Western economic take-off in the 16th and 17th century” by the “programing of the processes.”17 The cultural and ethical connotation of the new practices concerns the incentivization of social processes and the production of “homo economicus” as “someone who is eminently

Introduction  5 governable.”18 In 2012, Gary Becker agreed with Foucault’s overall evaluation. Becker commented that the human capital theory was a “useful fiction” and added, “maybe, 20 years from now, we will have a different fiction that will be better.”19 Derived from the Latin word fictio, fiction means to shape, mould, or form. Fictions are potent teaching materials. They institute narratives and establish consequences. They participate in making meaning, help others to look into the world for evidence, and in the case of human capital theory, interpret and produce other fictions.20 Human capital fictions have had the power to reformulate social understanding of education and life. The book concludes by marking the transgressive impact of human capital theory on social and personal development. As a fiction, human capital continues to offer a scientific approach to training humans in competitive individualism. The fiction has been essential for advancing economic conventions of the digital age and commercialization of the flesh by transforming life into data. Ian Hacking has investigated “the ways in which scientific classification may bring into being a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a person.”21 Hacking asks, “how do we change in virtue of being classified … and how do the ways in which we change have a sort of feedback effect on our system of classifications themselves?” 22 According to Hacking, the first instance of such efforts was carried out in Mesopotamia where inhabitants of various districts were classified and administered under the Persian Empire created by Cyrus. Hacking generalized: “[e]mpires can succeed only if they foster quasi-autonomous local administrations that are run by the peoples themselves.”23 I begin in Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire of Cyrus to showcase a model of government explored in modern globalization. Notes 1 William F. Pinar and Madeleine R. Grumet, Toward a Poor Curriculum, 3rd ed. (Kingston: Educator’s International Press, 2014), 194. 2 Mary Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8. 3 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 161–62. 4 Jeff Sugarman, “Neo-Foucaultian Approaches to Critical Inquiry in the Psychology of Education,” Psychology in Education 1, no. 1 (2014): 53. 5 Theodore Schultz, Origins of Increasing Returns (Cambridge: Blackwell Publisher, 1993), 27. 6 Walter Mignolo. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 7 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 25.

6 Introduction 8 William F. Pinar, The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Development After the Reconceptualization (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Pinar has called for a type of research that includes consideration of the “pedagogical processes” and “the psycho-social and intellectual development of the subjectively existing individual” (p. 3). For an example see, William F. Pinar Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2019). 9 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 35. 10 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). Innis has developed the term “monopolies on knowledge” in his work. 11 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge, 2010). 12 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 100; Theodore W. Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education,” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83. 13 Daniel Tröhler, “Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World,” in Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. Michael Peters (Singapore: Springer, 2016): 8-1. 14 Bernadette M. Baker, In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History and the Child (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Baker acknowledged that “the idea of natural growth as a metaphor for progress in some form emerged in Greek and Hebraic thought, was modified through Christian theology, and was secularized through the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (p. 480). 15 Jimena Hurtado. “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and Economic Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3 (2008): 335–57. 16 David G. Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006); Susan L. Robertson, “Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas,” Comparative Education Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 584–607; Joel Spring, Global Impacts of the Western School Model: Corporatization, Alimentation, Consumerism (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2019). 17 Foucault, Lectures of the Biopolitics, 232–33. 18 Ibid., 294. 19 Gary S. Becker, François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper, no. 614, (2012): 15. 20 For an example, consider Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). By the way of signalling theory, Caplan claims the employers should decide on what sort of education choices are needed. For him, education has been a “private profit and social waste” (p. 5). As a professor, he wonders why “spend over a decade learning piles of dull content” that students “won’t use after graduation” (p. 288). For signalling theory, see Michael Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–374.

Introduction  7 21 Ian Hacking, “Kinds of People: Moving Targets,” Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 285. 22 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 99. 23 Hacking, “Kinds of People,” 289.

Bibliography Baker, Bernadette M. In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History and the Child. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Becker, Gary S., François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt. “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures.” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper no. 614, 2012. Caplan, Bryan. The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Foucault, Michel. “Two Lectures.” In Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/ Habermas Debate. Edited by Michael Kelly, 17–46. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–79. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962. Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hacking, Ian. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 285–317. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/ 2043/pba151p285.pdf Hurtado, Jimena P. “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and economic imperialism.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3 (2008): 335–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837208000321. Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Koopman, Colin. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/ book/21123. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pinar, William F. The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Development after the Reconceptualization. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Pinar, William F. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2019. Pinar, William F. and Madeleine R. Grumet. Toward a Poor Curriculum. 3rd ed. Kingston: Educator's International Press, 2014.

8 Introduction Poovey, Mary. The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Robertson, Susan L. “Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas.” Comparative Education Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 584–607. https://doi. org/10.1086/667414. Schultz, Theodore W. “Capital Formation by Education.” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83. www.jstor.org/stable/1829945. Schultz, Theodore W. Origins of Increasing Returns. Cambridge: Blackwell Publisher, 1993. Smith, David G. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2006. Spence, Michael. “Job Market Signaling.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010. Spring, Joel. Global Impacts of the Western School Model: Corporatization, Alimentation, Consumerism. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2019. Sugarman, Jeff. “Neo-Foucaultian Approaches to Critical Inquiry in the Psychology of Education.” Psychology in Education 1, no. 1 (2014): 53–69. https://brill. com/view/book/edcoll/9789462095663/BP000005.xml Taubman, Peter M. Teaching by Numbers; Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge, 2010. Tröhler, Daniel. “Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World.” In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Edited by Michael Peters. Singapore: Springer, 2016. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_8-1

1  To rule with justice

The neolithic period is marked by the development of social and technological innovations as hunters and gatherers experimented with living together. Humans’ identities began to form in the process of domesticating natural instincts and social ties of other mammals.1 These early developments provided humans with a degree of protection against nature but subjected them to their dealing with each other. Mesopotamian cities, Uruk, Akkad, Assur, and Babylon, of Western Asia (Iraq, Syria, and Iran) were the forerunner geographical places of thriving human population along rivers (Tigris and Euphrates for Mesopotamian cities and Nile River in Egypt). The agricultural settlements saw the development of city-­states as a collective cooperative form of associations. “With the city came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labour, organized religion, monumental building, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics and law.”2 However, this is an epoch in which plants and animals played a central role in cultural production.3 Human agency was contained by what sustains life rather than any notion of economic growth. The historical perspectives explored here are, indeed a generalization, focused on the conditions of conceiving humans as economic resources. “Whatever the origin and nature of the evidence at hand, history is simultaneously both explanation and interpretation.”4 This chapter begins with three paramount attributes of economy invented by the Ancient East: (1) A system of recording and accounting, (2) a system of laws and authorities, and (3) a system of evaluating goods for exchange incorporated in future civilizations. Next, I turn to ancient Greece and review the political and economic thoughts that continue to inform modern civilization. The governance of humans as a form of capital is not an advent of modernity but was also an essential element of sustaining and growing ancient empires.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-2

10  To rule with justice 1.1 The beginning of school and empire Agricultural societies were designed around toil and sacrifice. They introduced a basic model of specialization and exchange as well as “a definite polarization of society into those who controlled resources, such as land, manufacturing or trading enterprises, and those dependent on them.”5 The early agricultural societies nurtured the beliefs in supernatural powers and deities in maintaining their communities. These beliefs often informed norms around health and fertility associated with the recognition that the higher number of abled men meant more harvest. Susan Pollock’s study of Ancient Mesopotamia demonstrated that patriarchal political roles and economic conventions of the household were not two separate domains.6 Such a conception produced by agricultural society lived on in the institutional, political, and judicial formations that followed. Familial relations and identities were transported and restructured into the communal norms. “People came to believe that city states were aboriginal creations of their gods, and that the gods had decreed all aspects of human society from the beginning.”7 Social hierarchies within the cities were not solely based on managerial requirements to support agricultural production. They governed the inequalities of large-­scale irrigation farming by managing beliefs. In this context, Wengrow explained that the early civilizations did not develop autonomously but rather in relation to each other: It was through contact with their gods that the societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia expressed their uniqueness, their distinct attachments to land, locality, origins, and place. Yet the earthly bodies of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods were ritually manufactured, nourished and cared for in similar ways, using similar materials that could not be found locally in either area.8 Manufacturing truth integrated human flesh into rituals. The formation and emergence of dynastic elites relied on the power of those long dead to establish power within the Mesopotamian households. “As with modern banking, the accumulation of capital involved—not just bureaucracy—but also a strong element of faith and trust, reinforced by ritual.”9 Over time, faith, trust, and rituals transformed fabrications into reality as authorities fastened spiritual and material conceptions together in sacrifice and credit. The hierarchical authorities protected economic relations and served centralized economies organized by the temples. The temples were sources of religion and law. They also oversaw and supported the economic activities of households (by providing a workforce and the material needs) and assisted the circulation of goods among the citizens.10 The governance of the material affairs of towns necessitated systems of record keeping. Clay was

To rule with justice  11 used for pottery, packaging goods for transportation, and also record keeping. Clay seals, tokens, bullae, and numerical tablets were used to maintain information about economic exchanges. Protocuneiform scripts, ideographs, and pictographs on clay represented objects or ideas by depicting them naturalistically. As record keeping improved, so did the ability to represent things in signs; these ranged from seals and tokens of the 8th millennium to numeric tablets of the 3rd millennium BCE. The representational abstraction emerged from accounting and led to a development in writing.11 In tracing the evolution of writing, Dominique Charpin noted that “as time passed, it came to be recognized that not only did the written document serve to transmit information through space, it could also allow the spoken word to survive the person who had uttered it.”12 The development of writing began to surpass its initial planned aims from managing economic transactions to the reprogramming of social and personal cognition. In the case of economic exchange, writing made accountability possible among the overseeing organizational bureaucracy. The uncovering of the clay tablets has provided evidence that the “taxes were often paid in agricultural products and certain royalties were related to land tenure.”13 Recorded taxation is one example where writing led to securing systems of bureaucracy. “There are still disagreements about whether the advent of writing made possible the emergence of the state or whether it was simply an enabling factor.”14 Because writing assisted with the management of the material world, it instituted rules that brought further stability to social conduct. It introduced multitudes to the reward systems of kings and priests and those loyal to them. In Egypt and Babylon, writing aided the maintenance of dynastic rule and religious “universal ethical standards.”15 Writing facilitated “education and training that gave literate members of society a source of power that was denied to others [and] also served to indoctrinate them deeply in the prevailing ideology.”16 The will to write and read made it possible to form and inform understanding of human alterity. There is a relevancy of ancient clay tablets that transfigured those who invented them—after generations strengthened the existing principles of authority in political, economic, and judicial systems of Mesopotamia— to modern digital tablets. As clay tablets surpassed their initial aims and conveniences, they became instruments of social organization. Among Mesopotamian cities, Sumer thrived in the development of cuneiform writing and established schools for training scribes. The Sumerian schools served to fulfil the “economic demands of the land, primarily those of the temple and palace” but over the years they expanded to include “scholar-­scientists, the men who studied whatever theological, botanical, zoological, mineralogical, geographical, mathematical, grammatical and linguistic knowledge that was current in his day.”17 The existing norms determined that schools excluded women and poor citizens. Writing was

12  To rule with justice made affordable to the sons of administrators and those active in economic affairs. This by itself was a lesson to those excluded. And the rewards of education required the learned to serve their elites. The schools’ obligations, to those they received, were to equip them with competency in the Sumerian language. According to Kramer, the “curriculum” was divided into “two primary groups: the first may be described as semi-­scientific and scholarly; the second as literary and creative.”18 Kramer continued by noting the lack of evidence of the degree the students were expected to become specialized in what they studied. Specialization may be the added element conceived by measures of modern industrial schooling. Not only did memorization and clay textbooks play a significant role in early learning but the ancient Sumerian schools point to an organizational body: a school father for teaching, a big brother for mentoring, and a disciplinary figure for whipping. Whipping as a technique to correct students was the initial system of efficiency to shepherd humans into learning a way of life. Punishment seemed to have been introduced into schools from training animals in the field. The practice of whipping and flogging dealt with identity formation, Pinar noted, its lessons contained claims on another’s body and such lessons stayed relevant and became regimented during the European Renaissance.19 Physical punishment derived from primitive societies was given social functions and cultural rationales in European history long before the rise of behaviourism as part of educational technology in the 20th century. Despite the primary purpose of training scribes to fill certain administrative or civil service posts, the Sumerian school known as edubba left behind a number of legacies: [E]dubba was instrumental in the dissemination of knowledge and literature throughout Western Asia. The early growth of trade—and later march of empire—carried the Sumerian system of cuneiform writing and with it some imitation of the Mesopotamian school, from Sumer to Iran, Syria and Asia Minor.20 The “march of empire” that Oates cites references the Akkadian king Sargon, who conquered Sumer and all the other Mesopotamian city-­states. He became a personification of Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism. The Akkadian model of authority necessitated a centralized legal system to manage disputes in the geographical areas and the king’s officials acted as judges. From the Akkadian period onward, land, the immovable resource, was the subject of appointed elects who directed the livelihood of the people.21 Not only did the elites and officials make decisions regarding the ownership of resources and drew economic boundaries but they also asserted their dominance over productive means, thereby weakening and ruling the

To rule with justice  13 indigenous. “The temples, palaces, and estate—collectively referred to as oikoi,” according to Pollock—“formed large socioeconomic units with a dependent (and unrelated, in kin terms) workforce, managerial personnel, flocks of animals, pastures, fields, orchards, storage facilities, and artisans’ workshops.”22 The scope conveys large corporate units that by their existence necessitated the creation of social strata. Those impoverished individuals who worked in “varying states of servitude” included those of local birth and slaves (who lacked family connections or were prisoners of war) and the distinction “may not have been entirely clear-­cut.”23 Early legal conceptions based on an authority’s rule developed and facilitated a shared system of value for exchange. “Silver was used in Acadians Mesopotamia as standard of valuation, as a medium of exchange, and as a form of stored wealth.”24 Only through wide dissemination and transformation could silver become valued as such. Metallurgy, begun in fifth millennium BCE, was later developed in standardizing the values of silver and gold and to build luxury goods. Technology, social values, and cultural authorities united to erect a system of valuation (i.e., money).25 Before the coin system was invented, Mesopotamians had established a system similar to modern-­day money. But this did not discourage barter. “Barter must have taken place everywhere and often in ancient Mesopotamia and is probably the major reason we have so little evidence for exchange of cheap commodities—especially in small amounts—in cuneiform documents.”26 Silver, gold, barley, lead, copper, and bronze constituted different value categories and were used in exchanges; other moveable properties (capital) such as cows, sheep, and horses also had money functions. However, economic activities were not governed by sole reliance on material valuation of life forms. Mesopotamian and Egyptian commerce were accompanied by a cosmology that mediated the status of living things. Similar to modern-­day technology and science, cosmology allowed certain groups to profit and impose orders.27 The productive force of elitisms occupied the sacred and the profane as “parallel worlds.” Wengrow continues: “The contrast between these two categories of object,” sacred or profane, “was maintained through contrasting of moral and behavioural norms that cause the same materials—usually drawn from outside society itself—to move within different spheres of exchange.”28 These two distinct but parallel realms of meaning making directed moral and behavioural norms. 1.2 Ancient imperialism William Ferguson defines an empire as a rule of one state over another. He noted that an empire accepts any form of government (monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy) and is compatible with any form of constitution:

14  To rule with justice The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Christian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Angelo-­Saxon, as the case may be, modern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to control inferior races.29 Ferguson is using his words with care and clarified that what the modern West knows of imperialism comes from Romans and as well as what they learned from the costly errors of Greeks and Macedonians. Roman success was due to a mode of accumulation of military knowledge learned from their predecessors. Before the Romans, the Greeks of the 5th century learned about rulership during peace and rivalries among city-­states within ancient Greece. The rivalry between Athens and Sparta, for example, was initiated by the elites’ fear of domination of one city by the other and led to civil stasis.30 At the root of the rivalry, one can find incompatibility of values that influenced socialization. Where in most Greek states education was the province of family, in Sparta, vocational training separated boys at a young age from their families; its planned curriculum included military endeavours and survival skills. This was interwoven with social values, demonstrating courage and obtaining virtues, and practices that governed Sparta’s citizens as hoplites (military and economic agents) to support the luxurious lives of their leaders. Athenians, led by their general, Cleon, objected to the overall Spartan way of life. Ferguson references Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) (between the Athenians and Spartans), with a cautionary note: No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves the state from imperialism. Even this country, …which uprears [sic] the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation; — even this idealistic republic has become empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it.31 Ferguson writes aware of the inequalities of race, education, religion, and occupation of his time in the United States. He documented the impact of ancient Greece history and philosophy on Renaissance England illuminating the historical consciousness that informed modern science and literature were present at the turn of the 20th century in his country, the United States. In ancient Greece, prior to the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian democracy offered “a new social pattern,” while Sparta’s constitution perpetuated an old one of kings and oligarchs.32 Athens’ liberal

To rule with justice  15 democratic constitution was established based on a moral pride that was productive in protecting it against Spartans. Love for knowledge, participation in the city government, and conceiving wealth for use led Athenians to judge that they “exhibit a more fully developed personality than man elsewhere.”33 Athenian democracy excluded the women, the workers, and the enslaved populations. However, democracy made Athens a force to be reckoned with; ancient historian Herodotus concluded that the Athenian growing military and economic strength was due to their democracy: [W]hen freed of rulers they [Athenians] became very much the leaders, while they were the subjects of a ruler they refused to do their all, since it seemed that they were fighting under the compulsion of a master; but once freed, each man was eager to do his job, knowing that his efforts were on his own behalf.34 Democracy placed the responsibility for freedom on the Athenian citizens. War and peace were central to the Athenian pride in their models of government that included kingship. They believed those who made sacrifices for the city-­state and adhered to its value profited from honour and respect. They were said to be “happy.”35 Their bravery, courage, and ambition satisfied citizen-­soldiers and statesmen alike. Thucydides began his History of the Peloponnesian War claiming his identity: an Athenian, a citizen of a modern city of his time. Thucydides found that it is at times of war that the inhabitants of the city-­state are forced into conformity and pushed to do anything against their will. Thucydides stated that “war, which removes the comforts of daily life, runs a violent school and in most men brings out passions that reflect their condition.”36 And it was “the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambition, leading in turn to the passion of the party rivalries” that supplied the war he was writing of.37 The war at stake was a civil war, brought after Greece defended their freedom against the Persians’ invasion, which was charged by the Ionian revolt against the Persians.38 Besides learning from internal wars among the city-­state, the Greeks also learned from the ancient Near East. The Persian kings became archetypes of imperialist triumphs. In my references to the East and West, I am not endorsing the common belief of separate cultures, people, and civilizations. Such a preconceived separation flies in the face of the ancient intellectual history that demonstrates cultures and people evolve by contact with each other.39 The East and West are imaginative entities and continue to be in intimate relation and influence of each other.40 For example, Alexander’s (331–323 BC) expansion into the East reflects a history of living with perceived dangers and fears of the Persians empire. To overcome centuries of rivalry, the personal and political were intertwined in Alexander’s arranged marriages of

16  To rule with justice his Greek and Macedonian commanders to Persian brides. In Alexander’s attempt for alliances, gender played a major role in having Greeks and Macedonians as husbands and Persians as wives. The Greeks often referred to the Persians, as they did to any other enemy, as barbarians in antiquity. For Aristotle who served as Alexander’s tutor, barbarians by nature were to be slaves.41 Although these marriages aimed to defuse tension, they pointed to the assimilation of Greeks and Macedonians masculine citizenry norms. The marriages to Persian women, however, nullified the claim that the Persians were barbarians since in marriage it is “men as ‘barbarians’ who must be ‘tamed’ by women who create ‘civilization’ by ‘transforming male lust into love.’”42 Alexander’s attempt was more than symbolic and served political aims to end rivalries that had origins in myths and epic poetry. However, the myths materialized when Cyrus the Great, in 546 BC, defeated the Lydian king, Croesus. According to Herodotus, “Persians had no luxuries of any sort before they conquered Lydia,” and they did not conquer Lydia for luxury. It was Croesus who sought alliance with Sparta and launched against the Persians.43 After losing the battle to the Persians, Croesus served Cyrus. Herodotus’ history clarified that the intent to attack Persians had its origins in misinterpretations, greed, and fear. Over time, the Persian empire extended its geographical, political, and economic dominance. By drawing on historical and archaeological evidence, Warwick Ball concluded that the Romans “suffered an inferiority complex. It was towards the East that conquerors cut their teeth,” Ball continued “[t]he East was also the source of wealth above all others, and the endless round of civil wars in the Roman Republic was costing money that easterner coffers could recoup.”44 And “Iran was the greatest power to oppose Rome, so there is understandable Roman preoccupation with eastern policies.”45 Such a preoccupation sustains itself in the West, to define military and economic positions and forming identity politics against the background of an external threat, not limited to Iran.46 The prospect of warfare carried moral and political lessons and the misery they brought were both public and private.47 Warfare often produced social unity against fictional or real enemies and expanded the borders of imperial power. Wars were not the only teachers in antiquity. The intellectuals and historians of the Greek civilization educated the public. Among these intellectuals was Xenophon, whose texts offer a window to a connected web of government, politics, and economics.48 Xenophon’s oeuvre presents what may have lived, transformed, and survived. His writings served as educational texts enduring cultural changes throughout Western civilization. For example, Tim Rood noted that Xenophon’s Anabasis (The expedition of Cyrus) was a school text and played a major role in the Victorian education system. He added, Anabasis informed the “personal narratives of

To rule with justice  17 participants in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”49 Xenophon did not write to legitimize imperialism, violence, and conquest but to document and often narrate political approaches to government. Xenophon’s texts were reinterpreted by Machiavelli and contributed to his “view that government requires the prudent alternation between moral virtue and moral vice.”50 The re-­appropriation of Xenophon’s text by Machiavelli in the Renaissance signals distancing from Socrates as the founder of pre-­modern political thought and beginning modern political science. For Machiavelli, the ideal ruler seeks stability to rule by variable means. This was coupled with Machiavelli’s admiration of Rome’s expansion to rule the world. “What is generally referred to as ‘Republican Rome,’ from around 500 B.C. through the changes in the 1st century B.C., was never a democratic republic as we usually think of it today,” Atkinson noted, “it began as an aristocracy, and ended in a kind of oligarchy in the hands of the senate.”51 However, Atkinson noted a balance between the consuls, the senators, and the tribunes of the people conveyed a notion of democracy. Machiavelli focuses, however, on the social and political inventors such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as rulers emerging during unstable times.52 They reform constitutions and establish norms of conduct. In contrast to Xenophon’s clear objection to tyranny, Machiavelli’s The Prince is “characterized by the deliberate indifference to the distinction between king and tyrant,” evident in Machiavelli’s reliance on Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia) and Xenophon’s other text on tyranny, Hiero.53 By confronting the teachings of the Prince with those transmitted through the Hiero, the decisive difference between Socratic political science (society cannot be just unless the ruler is just) and Machiavellian political science (society is managed by ends pursued) surfaces.54 One of Machiavelli’s examples, Cyrus, balanced justice and imperialism while looking after the good of his people. Cyrus’s desire for ruling for the sake of ruling casts justice as an instrument of the exercise of power not an end in itself. Cyrus is a model of strength, discipline, and endurance. He also befriended, praised, and rewarded his subjects for their strength and obedience. When Cyrus conquered a territory, he would collect the military artefacts to ensure he ruled the colonized people peacefully. He eased the existing tax system and gave liberty by incorporating a system of gifts to the ruling class and rewarded those thriving in their occupations, so the prospect of incentives kept his people at work. The re-­examination of the example of Cyrus did not single-­handedly set in motion the observed discontinuity in Renaissance from the Classical tradition. However, it contributed to Machiavelli’s political philosophy. Machiavelli subscribed “to the notion of ‘oriental despotism’ elaborated by Greek thought” and considered “freedom conducive to both power and flourishing of a political community.”55 He wrote at a time that colonizing tendencies, maximizing wealth, and the growing self-­assertion of the elites

18  To rule with justice sought to decode history for political expediency. In this context, Cyrus provided an archetype—at times he was compared to Alexander—focused on the management of material goods inclusive of human bodies. The preserved account of Cyrus conveys that, while he lived similarly to the people, he expected courage, forwardness, “strength and boldness”56 from them. Cyrus governed by sharing with those loyal to him profits earned. There are two accounts of Cyrus in Antiquity, neither written by Persian people. For example, Herodotus’ Histories advanced a slightly different account of Cyrus than did Xenophon in his Cyropaedia. The two accounts, however, are consistent in Cyrus’s natural abilities to rule (by utilizing freedom as an instrument for imperialism) and his education in two different climates: Medes, where the laws were designed for people by a monarchical authority, and Persia, where the laws were made by people for their commonwealth before he claimed power.57 Xenophon’s biography of Cyrus, Cyropaedia, began by describing the circumstances in which Cyrus was raised. Xenophon referenced a dialogue between Cyrus and his mother. Cyrus is attempting to show his maturity to gain autonomy and stay in the kingdom of his maternal grandfather, Medes, instead of returning home, Persia. This is young Cyrus speaking of how he settled a judicial dilemma to justify to his mother that he has advanced in the learning of justice, a sign of maturity: A great boy, having a little coat, did unclothe a little boy, having a great coat, and caused that the one did wear the other’s garment. I being [the] judge in this matter did give [a] sentence that was best for both parties, either to have his coat meet for him. At which sentence my master did beat me, saying, “When you are [the] judge in a controversy of fitness and convenience, then must you judge after this sort. But when you must determine whose is the coat, then you must consider who had right possession, whether he that taketh away a coat by violence, or he that hath caused it to be made for him, or else hath bought it. For that is just, which is lawful, that that is not lawful, is violent. Wherefore sentence must be given always of the judge according to the law” [sic].58 Cyrus’s judgement gave priority to suitability where both parties get not what belonged to them but what they are to be fitted for. The “right possession” accompanies a judgement to decide fitness for others. Xenophon explained that Cyrus interpreted his verdict as a case for his understanding of justice; Cyrus conveyed to his mother the things he does not know he would rather learn from his maternal grandfather in Medes. Persians learned about justice in school and attendance was required for holding political office. In the case of Cyrus, the beating he received may not have been effective. Cyrus’s mother insisted that Cyrus should return

To rule with justice  19 to Persia: “the justice of your grandfather, and of the Persians do not agree. For he here, in Medes, had made himself lord of all; among the Persians to have equality is thought just. [sic].”59 In ancient Persia, laws applied to all citizens equally and those who made laws had to obey them. Cyrus’s mother recognized that the land of her father was different. Instead of accepting his mother’s objection, Cyrus took it to be the strength of his grandfather, “that he can teach men to have rather less than more” and prove to others “to have less than himself.”60 The power of the grandfather rested in teaching his subjects a mode of acceptance of inequality. Cyrus convinced his mother to return to Persia without him, and in the remaining sentences, Xenophon described young Cyrus’s liberal talk and gentle behaviour by which he won over admirers and friends, including his grandfather. Failing to comply with a mode of justice where the law is applied to all equally, Cyrus became a model for justice to some—and eventually continued his education upon returning to Persia—whether that is attributed to being truly just or because he taught others to be and have less than himself, we do not know.61 Cyrus’s justice could be derived from the notion of transcending justice and examining things from “the point of view of the good as distinguished from that of justice.” However, this is Strauss’s claim for Socrates who put forth that “all good things belong to the wise man, and only to him [sic].”62 Unlike Socrates, Cyrus rewarded those who thrived and by rewarding them kept them in subordination and preoccupied with hard work. He was the Prince intimately close to his subjects and concerned with equal treatment among them. As a Prince, Cyrus was “a good father, the father always providing that the child should not never lack.”63 This came from Cyrus’s spokesman, Chrysants, to the Persians in an assembly. Chrysants praised Cyrus for protecting, providing, and imposing laws to govern the will of his people, but this Prince also looked after maximizing happiness for his subjects. Chrysants associated the task of ruling with happiness and obedience. Those who are governed in Cyrus’s Persia are not “servants” for servants obey from “fear” and Persians obey Cyrus “from love,” as a gratitude for their liberty and security.64 Obedience is associated with liberty and liberty with salvation and security. This praise for Cyrus’s reign should be taken in the context of his approach to virtue and politics. Cyrus did not question traditional virtues. He questioned the “good” virtuous citizens acquired “being such” and by this questioning; according to ancient political philosopher Robert Bartlett, Cyrus scrutinized “the idea that virtue must be practiced for its own sake alone.”65 Cyrus did not transcend the law and virtuosity but set contingent outcomes to them. In contrast, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology demonstrated that Socrates submitted to the law, for its own sake, and in this way, Socrates transcended not only justice but injustice, submitting to death, for the sake of lawfulness.

20  To rule with justice In antiquity, Xenophon’s text, “Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia) seems to have been frequently paired with Plato’s Republic, either as its complement or rival”; in the Renaissance, it held “an equal importance.”66 Jane Grogan noted that “in bringing the Persian Cyrus to England, Xenophon’s humble translators made bold bids for favour of royalty and aristocracy. Conjuring up identifications with Xenophon, these disenfranchised pedagogues sought to realize the humanist dream of power through education, however vicarious.”67 For Xenophon, Cyrus offered an exemplary contrast to Socrates’s ethical justice for the good of the persons and the community. 1.3 Socrates as a model In contrast to Cyrus, Socrates’s politics was devoid of politics, at least in terms of how we now understand politics. Xenophon’s Memorabilia gave numerous examples of Socrates’ dialogue with his interlocutors: one was the exchange between a sophist, Antiphon, and Socrates. In response to Antiphon’s challenge that Socrates’s knowledge is not worth anything since he doesn’t charge, Socrates responded that he is making friends with those who are gifted to be good citizens. Socrates does not want anything except “good friends” (he is avoiding the phrase students), and he teaches “them all the good” he can, not for the sake of power or profit but for that “they [his friends] will get some moral benefit.”68 This response is challenged by Antiphon: “How can you suppose that you make politicians of others, when you yourself avoid politics…?” and Socrates responded: “[S]hould I play a more important part in politics by engaging in them alone or by taking pains to turn out as many competent politicians as possible?”69 Socrates thereby disrupted and reversed values and norms perpetuated in his culture. By being an exemplary friend, Socrates teaches his interlocutors about a way of life, a life devoted to friendship. He did not instruct but played a role in the lives of those who learned from him. Those who followed him were inspired to not become subjected to misrule nor bring others to economic and political subjection. Socrates orientated others to love knowledge. “[K]nowledge is not just plain knowing, but knowing-­what-­ought-­to-­be-­preferred, and hence how to live,” Hadot continued, “the content of Socratic knowledge is thus essentially ‘the absolute value of moral content,’ and the certainty provided by the choice of this value.”70 It was this orientation to knowledge that in Republic and Statesman Plato posed: that the law must be subordinate to knowledge.71 Plato’s Republic begins by defining justice. The reliance on love for knowledge is necessary but insufficient for justice. There are no prescriptions discerning why justice is to be chosen over injustice. Those who are just are capable to rule over themselves and manage their desires

To rule with justice  21 and interests. Philosophers present such a character and unlike the oligarch, democrat, and tyrant, the philosopher does not sacrifice justice for short-­term pleasures. “In order to live well we must break away from the confining assumption that ordinary objects of pursuit—the pleasures, powers, honours, and material goods that we ordinarily compete for—are the only sorts of goods there are.”72 Following Socrates as a model, Plato required that those seeking power concern themselves with justice in private and public life.73 Men and women are equally competent to rule; they spend most of their time in contemplation of knowledge and the cultivation of virtues; they find it a privilege to guide and serve their fellow citizens. Plato’s guardians are distinct from the imperialism of the Near East. Plato conveyed the guardians were learned in the goals of life and common happiness. In his allegory of the cave, Plato begins by considering “the effect of education or the lack of it—in our nature.”74 Prisoners kept in a cave from early childhood become accustomed to shadows; they take shadows as true forms. They conceive themselves as learned actors, not finding their activities limiting. One of the inhabitants stands and turns towards the light outside of the cave. Following the light he sees the reality outside. The person then returns to the cave to lead others out. Re-­entering the cave to educate others, the person lacks the sufficient sight in comparison to those accustomed to the cave. Seeing this, the inhabitants of the cave discover the dangers associated with being freed. They “kill” anyone who attempts to take them outside.75 The allegory begins with educational responsibility and ends with ethical and political risks. Socrates who outlined the allegory in Republic continued by mentioning disciplines worthy of teaching to the guardians; he rejected arithmetic and geometry, for example, have other utility rather than directing those receiving this knowledge towards truth of existence.76 Socrates enacted his care for truth and for persons with whom he came to contact. There is a distinction between Socrates who did not seek power over others and Plato’s Socrates, the philosopher advocating a model of ruling according to natural fitness. However, both Socratic love for truth and Platonic rationalism offered no signs of utilitarian maximization (of efficiency and profit), nor reasoning solely based on representations drawn in figures and tables. Plato trusted the knowing faculty within each citizen to rule and be ruled.77 And his valuing of the good and beautiful—the conception that the beautiful approximates with the useful—brought together the state and the citizen. There was no trace of depersonalization of human actions to markets as Plato condemned the neglect of public good for the pursuit of profit. And wealth was neither a signifier of liberty nor an end to itself. For example, in Eryxias, Socrates showed that wealth serves feeding, clothing, and

22  To rule with justice protecting oneself and those in need, and its usefulness is limited to securing health and wellbeing. The dialogue, depending on who wrote it, may clarify that Plato (prior to Aristotle) distinguished between wealth and money.78 This differentiation of wealth from money began by mentioning that money, as a possession in one context, is valueless in another context. In the dialogue, Socrates questioned, “what kind of useful thing is wealth,” “[w]hat is the use of wealth and to what end has the acquisition of wealth been invented as drugs have been discovered to counteract disease?”79 Socrates developed the metaphor that wealth is a remedy to expel disease and poverty and explained its use to cease suffering. Knowledge is commensurable with wealth. In another example, Alcibíades I, Socrates offered an alternative to the moral and social problem of pursuit of knowledge for the sake of prestige and power over others. This dialogue demonstrates the necessity of educating a person desiring to hold public office. Socrates reminds his interlocutor, Alcibiades, he must not only learn about justice and injustice but also about peace and war. By alleging that Athenian politicians are ignorant, Alcibiades justifies his ambition to hold power. Socrates reminds Alcibiades that he has to contend not only with Athenians but also with those outside of Athens. To remedy his inadequate education, Alcibiades learns he must give primacy to knowing himself. He must take care of his soul and the forces that direct his will and actions.80 This dialogue is consistent with two other Socratic dialogues: Apology and Republic. In Apology, Socrates “conscious of knowing practically nothing” sought “the greatest benefit, by trying to persuade” his interlocutors to “not care for” their “belongings before caring for” themselves and “not to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself.”81 Socrates’s concern for human beings transferred to conventions of an ideal state. “In Greek states, the purpose of education was to socialize the young people and to inculcate in them the values of their elders—particularly their fathers—and of the community,” Jennifer Roberts explains, adding that “this persisted until teachers like the sophists (‘intellectuals’) came along toward the later part of the 5th century, urging the young to question authority.”82 Questioning authority formulated and reformulated the intellectual history of education. Questioning authority and speaking truth to power occurred before Socrates. However, Socrates challenged social conventions that neglected the care of the self and others—and defended the examined life above sacrificing one’s body and soul to obtain political and economic power. Socrates also rejected the use and misuse of the body of the youth for pleasure and profit. Athenian democracy left the young men at the mercy of older men who subjected the young in their effort of training them in manliness. Socrates offered a model for a ruler who did not subject young and old. He activated Plato’s critique of the democracy of his time. And

To rule with justice  23 Plato’s critique of unequal freedom in democracy may enable a reflection on modern democracy centred on private interests that indoctrinate the next generation into a preconceived economy.83 Plato’s rulers were deprived not only of private property but also of self-­interest. Their monastic life was devoted to community and higher truth.84 Those who took on the role to rule were expected to function as “father and family, Captain and ship, general and army, shepherd and flocks, doctor and patient, farmer and plants, ….”85 The metaphors represented the relationship of actors to steer others to safety, health, prosperity, and peace. According to Desmond, the metaphors informed the fundamental ontology of governing. While Desmond designates kingship as Homeric, it is worth considering that “[o]n the basis of the evidence available it is impossible to determine to what degree Greek epic and myth was indebted to the Near East.”86 The references to the ancient Near East did find themselves not only in the writings of pre-­Socratic thinkers and in Plato but also in the iconography of the European Middle Ages. 1.4 Ancient economics and education It was by Socrates’s precepts that Plato sided with lovers of knowledge, who understood the balance between pain and pleasure, pleasure and freedom, and freedom and discipline. The philosopher monarch, the lover of knowledge, is admired over the profit-­loving monarch and over the monarch as the lover of power and honour. Thirty years after Republic, in Laws, Plato referenced the Persian king, the monarch concerned with honour and profit, as someone who is admired for his ability to strike a balance “between subjection and liberty,” and this allowed the Persians to become masters of numerous peoples. Plato noted the king’s willingness to allow free speech “at the disposal of the public service. Hence the combination of liberty with amity and generally diffused intelligence led, for the time, to all-­round progress.”87 The progress was not sustained, and this praise is accompanied by Plato’s critique that Cyrus, in particular, paid little attention to the education of his state due to his perpetual preoccupation with wars. Herodotus, at the time of Cyrus’s growing power, explained that the state of education of Persian was “three things only: to ride, to shoot the bow, and to tell the truth.”88 Here too, the complexity of education is not solely in the service of imperial and economic success; it is an initial and integral element sustaining a balance between subjection and liberty. In place of externalizing psychic power towards materiality, Socrates sought harmony within individual persons with the city-­state. Socrates lived as a philosopher and a teacher of just Politeia. His justice came from him being conscious of the limits of knowledge. In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Socrates is presented as a model student and teacher conversing

24  To rule with justice on affairs of managing the household. Once again, Cyrus is referenced; this time during the dialogue of Socrates and two interlocutors, Kritoboulos and Ischomachos, the former needing to learn about the management of his possessions and the latter a gentleman, successful manager of his estate, and in modern terms an economist. According to Strauss, even when Cyrus was not referenced during the conversation, he was present in the suggested comparison by Xenophon: “Socrates could have taught the art of generalship as well as the art of managing the household but, as is shown by the Oeconomicus, he taught only the peaceful art of managing the household as distinguished from warlike art.”89 Socrates is depicted as the recipient of knowledge and by learning, Socrates aspired to help others, including Kritoboulos. In ancient Greece, farming, like military training, was perceived as a physical and moral training. Oeconomicus indicated that Cyrus did concern himself also with agriculture. Cyrus not only rewarded those who advanced the art of cultivating the land but also took part in it.90 He was a model commander of an army and of a household, rewarding hard work and sacrifice. Cyrus’s reward system is noted when Xenophon mentioned the slaves needed “stimulus” of good hopes “even more than free men, to make them steadfast.”91 Xenophon proceeded to Socrates’s conversation with Ischomachos, where it becomes evident there are similarities between managing the households and the armies. Both households and armies consist of humans, animal, and artefacts in need of order. The role of gods, their help, in place of sole reliance on human manipulations and formulas in the operation of army and husbandry, is also acknowledged. According to Strauss, the difference between Ischomachos and Cyrus, as model managers, is diminished in the dialogue.92 If it is agreed the best economist acquires and preserves the greatest wealth, then the Persian king is a model: “the Persian king devotes himself most effectively to both arts [peace and war]. If the Persian king is then the model for the economist, the economic art would be identical with the kingly art.”93 Since peace and destruction are both productive means of ruling, economics (as a field of knowledge) begins by examining examples of those who conduct life and death. Oeconomicus also conveyed ethical concerns regarding diligence, obedience, order, and justice. These moral lessons were aimed at maintaining and maximizing the production of the estate (e.g., the ordering of material objects and directing the workers). The lessons are twofold: One unfolds in the form of dialogue between Ischomachos and Socrates, the other on how Ischomachos teaches the members of his household. The first concerns the relationship and the modality of teaching and learning. During the conversation, Socrates questions the “how to” of carrying out the administration of the house. Concerning the second, the exchange between Ischomachos and Socrates itself served as a teaching method on obtaining

To rule with justice  25 knowledge. “The lessons offered by the Oeconomicus extend beyond economics, to include the very processes of learning…. In sum, Socrates looks and learns.”94 During the conversation, Socrates is not observing Ischomachos’ household, as the two men are sitting outside, but Socrates by the way of the conversation imagines how the household operates. This imagining is orientated towards the nature of beings and not solely to the performance of tasks. This, akin to other texts on Socrates dialogues, follows from question-­ and-­ answer, “dependent upon the observations of the learner and the skill of the instructor, whose questions generate knowledge in the student.” Hobden continues: “the translation of visual experience into practical know-­how through interrogation might be applied to other areas of knowledge,” and in this, “Oeconomicus encourages the very mode of learning it promotes.”95. Oeconomicus is an educational text. It teaches those who create and transform educational institutions to teach others how to manage themselves. Xenophon’s Oeconomicus focused on administration as a priority for growth of the estate. The text “remained at the base of European society well into the 18th century,” Moses Finley observed, as “there is not one sentence that expresses an economic principle or offers an economic analysis, nothing on efficiency of production, ‘rational’ choice, the marketing of corps.”96 The text offered lessons on techniques for the direction of self and others as it describes dispositions. During the conversation with Socrates, Ischomachos spoke of training the members of his household, starting with his wife and then the slaves. The exchange between Ischomachos and his wife are detailed accounts about what they spoke about. But when Ischomachos referenced the education of the stewards and slaves, no dialogue is provided. Ischomachos noted the importance of self-­control in them and only by observing this self-­control he would be able to educate them by praise and punishment. While in educating his wife Ischomachos relies on reason and persuasion, the primacy in the education of slave involved inspection and surveillance, by which Ischomachos could punish negligence and reward diligence, extolling his slaves to toil and profit. I am not suggesting gender was not at stake. In the book, Ischomachos explains to his wife that God has made women for indoor tasks and management of the household. Ischomachos’ teachings extend beyond the objects and their material use and placement in the house. His teachings demonstrate compliance to a tradition, where both Ischomachos and his wife are beneficiaries of the same virtues. Acknowledging Oeconomicus is “a text devoted to ‘masculine’ art of governing,” Foucault noted that the “virtuous virility of women—strength of character” and “the high mindedness”97 relied not only on obedience to man but also on shared virtues (self-­control, sacrifice, and care) communicated by the husband for the common goal of maintaining their household. Xenophon considered a

26  To rule with justice basic unity of virtue in men and women. In contrast to Xenophon, “Aristotle explicitly rejected the Socratic argument for a basic unity of virtue which implied that this was identical in men and women.”98 The fundamental dissymmetry of gender in Aristotelian conception of man and woman is “‘political’: it is the relation of ruler and ruled.”99 Foucault suggested that Aristotle initiated the politicization of the household. The ancient household served as a model for the construction of the modern state as the legitimizer of economic conditions. In Xenophon’s text, Ischomachos’ wife learned through listening and speaking, in contrast to the education of slaves, who, from an early age, were taught by surveillance. Ischomachos’ wife also reaps the benefits of the same virtue of moderation as him, not immediately, but over the years. The more she invests herself and is invested in the work of managing the house, the greater her honour.100 Part of her education is to “establish a relationship of superiority over herself” that reflects “strength of character and dependence on the man.”101 In her didactic education, she is also praised for her memory (mnḗmē) of the order of what is taught and the care (epimeleia) she exercises towards the common purpose of maintaining the household. In contrast, the education of slaves is centred on rewards: promotion to stewardship, better meals, and clothing. Examining the education of slaves and stewards enables discerning the spirit in which training for various vocations was operationalized. For Ischomachos, slaves who have exhibited self-­control (enkrateia) are more disposed to care (epimeleia) for the household. As a result, they are to profit, both as individuals and as part of the corporate house. The modality of self-­control was hierarchical, first exhibited by the man who marries willing to act as a head of a family, then exhibited by the woman who willingly performed the required tasks within the household, and then by slaves who were under the command and surveillance of the master. The common purposes of prosperity moved the master and slave to be self-­governed in search of honour and respect. The institutions that governed the life and the work of the slaves prevented their children from becoming decision-­makers in the political and economic affair. In antiquity, estate management was often approximated with the art of statesmanship. “The perfect gentleman is an educator,”102 Strauss writes, differentiating between Socrates and Ischomachos. The latter found he is capable of instilling benevolence and “good will” towards himself and in anyone he wished. Socrates asked Ischomachos how. Once again, Ischomachos’ response references Cyrus as an exemplar who did not resort to coercion but to diligence and benevolence, noting these traits are not taught by force, nor sufficient for a slave to become a steward, leader of slaves. Here, Socrates pressed, asking how Ischomachos taught his stewards to be “masters of human beings” because “who can make men fit to rule others

To rule with justice  27 can also teach them to be masters of others.”103 In response, Ischomachos likened human beings to other animals, noting that “animals learn obedience in two ways—by being punished when they try to disobey, and by being rewarded when they are eager to serve you.”104 However, Socrates posed that if “men” are rewarded and punished it is “to train men for corporate effort” such as protection of their freedom “against an enemy and the cultivation of soil” to sustain themselves.105 Socrates emphasized the use of reward and punishment for preservation of life and protection of freedom instead of serving political and economic interests, for if the city was taken, the citizens become slaves. The rewards and honour that encourage the risk of one’s life to avoid slavery served the individual and collective freedom. Ischomachos suggested there are additional capacities in humans, noting that humans also become obedient by word of the mouth and by being shown that they would profit by being obedient. These two interrelated precepts offered by Ischomachos are connected to learning about justice and hard work. Slaves and stewards who are more ambitious for praise and reward learned that there is justice: reaping a profit from their hard work. Slaves learned that their obedience often results in better food and clothes. They learned to serve the economy of the household diligently and without question. Self-­control, ambition, and courage were rewarded as long as they were in line with honest labour. There are echoes of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus in Aristotle’s Oeconomicus. Aristotle opens chapter one of Oeconomicus by asserting that the main difference between governing the nation and household is that a nation is in the hands of many, whereas the household is in the hands of a single ruler. But he continued by noting the management of household is also similar to statecraft, as a nation is an assemblage of houses. Aristotle removed ambiguities about the held views on gender by noting: “Divine Providence has fashioned the nature of man and of woman for their partnership. … For Providence made man stronger and woman weaker…. It is the mother who nurtures, and the father who educates.”106 In contrast to Xenophon’s narrative approach, Aristotle preached axiomatic positions that focused on “craftsman analogy” to associate “maleness with activity and form” and “femaleness with passivity and matter, and in so doing displaced any notion that the female is the procreator.”107 Aristotle also found children were a form of investment for the parents. In old age, parents would receive benefit from the toil they underwent to raise their children. However, an expected return for parents from children was first and foremost a moral precept, irreducible to economic calculations. Aristotle went as far as perceiving politikē as the highest science to which other sciences are subordinate.108 Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics readdressed Platonic ideals and integrated reason and virtues in statecraft, offering an analytic conception of economics as a science of wealth. According to

28  To rule with justice Joseph Schumpeter, even though Aristotle continued to view economic action as bounded by moral philosophy and natural law, he considered the problem of individual interests in public economy. However, Aristotle “fought against a purely individualistic approach” and “laid the foundations for the theory of the inherent sociability of men living together.”109 Paradoxically, those who (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Adam Smith) later relied on Aristotle’s contributions to politics and economics gradually positioned the individual at the centre of economic analysis. Over time, recognition of the Socratic unity of virtue and knowledge and self and society were reformulated. 1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress Although Xenophon and Aristotle present differing treatments of slaves, their commonality rests in perceiving that the master and slave serve the same ends and interests.110 This did not mean that the statesman, and the economic elites, had the analogous power over ruling citizens. Finley stressed this symbolism and paradox: the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression— most obviously Athens—were cities in which chattel slavery flourished. The Greeks, it is well known, discovered both the idea of individual freedom and the institutional framework in which it could be realized.111 The use of humans as economic resources continues to both exploit individuals and shape institutional frameworks. Today too, it is articulated that the elite and the free poor share the same national (economic growth) and legal (liberal and democratic) interests. This stands in contrast to the Ancient East, a world without free men: Persians recognized their freedom not as a standard for political practice but in relation to a common good. However, it was in Mesopotamia and under the Hammurabi Code (2250 BC) that commercial treatment of humans gained legal emphasis and governed free and unfree persons (including women and children). By the time of Aristotle, when a human slave is called property by law, it is demonstrative of the “inescapable contradiction, which compelled Aristotle to acknowledge that a dichotomy existed between the freedom of man in nature and the enslavement of man in law.”112 Against the political and economic hierarchies, the Aristotelian dichotomy of nature and law enabled Enlightenment thinkers, such as Locke and Rousseau, to argue for individual rights as political rights. Such rights, not always derived by consent, were judged as fitted by the elite powers to institute societies that accepted not only slavery, peasantry, feudalism, and mercantilism but also socialism and capitalism alike.

To rule with justice  29 In the case of antiquity, it would be a mistake to assume slavery as the background for programming freedom and/or assume the relationship between a slave and a master was solely an economic relation. The education of slaves reflected the self-­mastery of the master and there was not one overarching formula to treat slaves. For example, Epictetus cited Diogenes, whose only slave, Manes, had ran away. When Diogenes “was informed where” Manes was, “he did not think it worthwhile to have him brought back. He said, it would be a shame if Manes could live without Diogenes, and Diogenes could not live without Manes.”113 The morality of the master was expected to be a form of internalized self-­reliance, not solely limited by certain contractual judicial rights to use and control other beings. Diogenes expressed a moral relation to himself as he indicated his relation to his slave. In reference to Epicurean and Stoic schools that followed Socrates, Foucault noted, “a slave, after all, may be more free [sic] than a free man if the latter has not freed himself from the grip of all the vices, passions, and dependences.”114 Self-­control was associated with the notion of freeing the self from unexamined desires by way of reason. Here, reasoning was not reduced to a cognitive capacity, manipulated, and evaluated under (un)certain conditions or instrumentalized by an economic doctrine for optimization or predictability. Reason (Pneuma) is what human beings share with divinity. Unlike other animals, “it is this share that allows us to make right choice about our perceptions and impulses” providing us with the capacity to “deliberate about how to act.”115 This power for reason and deliberation became ever more connected to divine providence after Christianity. And later to the exercise of individual rights and freedom after the European Enlightenment. In antiquity, the status of being free was not a sufficient condition for economic liberty. Land ownership, as the main form of wealth, played a major role in the maintenance of ancient societies, situating the landless citizen below the slave—at times, devoid of political rights due to their debts to a landowner. “Free men were found in all occupations, but usually as self-­employed workers” and their “labour was casual and seasonal.”116 This did not create a “feeling of competition between slave and free labour.”117 The slave “had a more secure place in the world thanks to his attachment to an oikos, a princely household, an attachment more meaningful, more valuable, than the status of being juridically free, of not being owned by someone.”118 As slavery became institutionalized, it was common to find highly educated physicians, teachers, and merchants as slaves, who, by the defining features of freedom, did not own land nor participate in civil decisions. During the Roman Empire, the boundaries were further complicated as the poor citizens sold their children as slaves, and some slaves after generations of subordination were liberated. The replacement of the city-­state by an authoritarian Roman monarch dictated a notion of

30  To rule with justice citizenship where the majority lost their role in the selection of officials and found their place in the army, by then professionalized where the untrained faced inequality and competition. “The path to American slavery began in Rome, not Athens,” William Phillips asserted, noting that slavery’s main defining element was marginalization.119 The transformation of slavery within society through time revolved around economic reliance on free poor. There was also a counter-­movement to the Roman Empire, not to slavery but its economic imperialism. There were certain elements of the ancient Greeks, those in particular orientated towards the whole of which the individual is a part, that were reawakened and intensified in the formation of Christian communities. Referencing Didache, Aaron Milavec noted that such a community also “offered an alternative way of doing business. This alternative roundly condemned the exploitation and aggressive aspects of Roman commercialism as unacceptable to God.”120 The metaphors of the father and the kingdom were transmuted to transcend worldly desires. The spiritual kingdom provided mental distancing from the commercial Roman kingdom and its impositions. Initially, Christianity was a cultural, social, and behavioural transformation by initiation into a way of life: This Way of Life cut members off from banquets, festivals, and associations calculated to serve their commercial interests. Having partnered together in defense against the economic exploitation and expansion in their society, they fashioned new bonds of reciprocal aid and service that effectively placed the resources of each to the disposal of all.121 This way of life was revolutionary, animated by knowledge and rituals (fasting, feasting, and baptism) aimed at cleansing the private and public body. Christianity grew in the 1st and 2nd centuries alongside Jewish practices; gradually, it moved out of Jewish communities, shaking the Roman Empire at its centre, Rome. “The growth of the Christian community was matched by an expanding organizational presence, as the bishops of Rome expanded their control over different aspects of Christian life in the city,” with the church “extending and centralizing its administrative and ritual control.”122 The growing number of Christians was unsettling to Emperor Decius, and in 250 CE, he decreed that the Christians follow and make sacrifices to the gods. Several years later, his predecessors resumed their attacks, this time on the increasingly powerful Persian Christians. Both efforts produced intractable results. The cultural shift in beliefs was transformative, Stephen Dyson observed, it intersected with one of the greatest construction projects in Roman history: Aurelian Walls. Noting the fiscal

To rule with justice  31 and defensive motives for building the walls, Dyson pointed out that it served to extend the sacred bounds of the city. Only half a century later, the walls no longer represented Roman “pride” but were instead “interpreted as an indication of a new defensiveness and of imperial insecurity.”123 Construction projects (bridges, monuments, and bathhouses) spoke of instability and fears of the Empire’s internal divisions, eventually accepting Christianity in the 4th century. Given that the emperor was the largest landowner, the church of the 6th century accepted imperial power and provided a legal foundation to slavery.124 Slavery flourished in the Roman world and in Christian and Islamic societies as well: everywhere divine providence was believed to legitimize it by law. Slavery progressed because the slave trade became a vocation for profit seekers. By 700–900 CE, slaves exported to the Islamic world played an important part in generating income.125 Eventually, slavery provided limited means to economic development in late medieval Europe; the rise of agriculture and sugar during the early Renaissance foreshadowed the decline of human trafficking. In its place, serfdom, free and paid labour grew.126 However, slavery continued through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment. It was not the poor of the same city but the Africans—perceived to be strong in body and spirit—who faced subjection. Slavery, then a legal trade, justified separating African children from their parents by force and selling them for profit. The monetary value of younger slaves was higher since they were more easily controlled and teachable in comparison to the elders. Humans as a trainable form of capital were not a consequence of modernity. However, in Children Slaves in the Modern World, Campbell, Miers, and Miller elaborate on the significance of history to the modern era when they note: [T]he key issue in the modern era is not whether children are literally bought and sold…. The crucial issue, notably in the contemporary world, is how children in servitude are treated—the multiple forms and degrees of coercion used to enslave, trade, and control and thus deprive them of freedom of choice and movement.127 Treating children as a form capital points to the multiplicity of forms and degrees of coercion that has been normalized and centred on seamless connectivity to platforms that exploit their attention. The deprivation of freedom of choice and movement is materializing in schooling processes that optimize the production of human capital by incorporating technologies that better enable monitoring the behavioural, social, and emotional outputs of children and enculturating the next generation to surveillance as they move in space and time.

32  To rule with justice 1.6 Threshold The Greeks were preoccupied with the problem of political rule; many thought it is by nature (phusis) that humans do not rule their kind. The political problem reflected the dissimilarity between humans and animals by nature. “Cyrus proved to be the exception to the problem of the political rule because he knew how to rule in a knowledgeable way. Cyrus’s knowledge enabled him to rule over human beings.”128 Those ruled by Cyrus obeyed him willingly. In ancient references, Cyrus was depicted as the king of Persians and not as the king of Persia; he governed the people and not just the territory. His benevolence towards his friends and subjects did not solve the problem of political rule. Xenophon showed that the power of Cyrus rested in blurring the distinction between politics, city life, and the economy of the household. According to Whidden, Cyrus treated those under his rule as women, children, and slaves. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia offered a “critique of imperial ambition” instituted by Cyrus.129 Unlike Machiavelli, who held up Cyrus as a model for princes, Xenophon remained ambivalent towards Cyrus’s authority. The ideal political leader for Xenophon, as for Plato, remained Socrates, treating the citizens not as material objects but as his friends. Renaissance philosophers wrestled with the intellectual history of antiquity. Imperialism gained new impetus when European global expeditions colonized land and bodies in nation-­building efforts. “Xenophon’s book on Cyrus, on how a diverse society might be managed, remained popular well into the Enlightenment, inspiring the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution.”130 Imperialism evolved. Scientific and technological advancements supported military expeditions to increase economic gains and encompassed rationalities that granted the use of humans as resources. Imperialism continues by reconstructing reason, freedom, and faith as the military and economic destruction of what is now known as the Middle East continues to erase almost everyone’s memory of the first global empire. Notes 1 Alan H. Simmons, The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007). 2 Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 20. 3 Linda M. Hurcombe, Perishable Material Culture in Mrehistory: Investigating the Missing Majority (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164. 4 Pierr Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002). 5 Joan Oates, Babylon (New York: Thomas & Hudson Ltd. 1986), 14. 6 Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

To rule with justice  33 7 Henry W. F. Saggs, Babylonians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 35. 8 David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31. 9 Ibid., 98. 10 Lauren Ristvet, Ritual, Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The temple’s communal orientation not only served religion and kingship but also provided an orientation towards urbanization. 11 Kristina Sauer, “From Counting to Writing: The Innovative Potential of Bookkeeping in Uruk Period Mesopotamia,” in Appropriating Innovations, ed. Philipp Stockhammer and Joseph Maran (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017). 12 Dominique Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 176. 13 Odette Boivin, “Agricultural Economy and Taxation in the Sealand I Kingdom,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 68, (2016): 46. 14 Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, 247. 15 Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 44. 16 Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 169. 17 Samuel, N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-­nine Firsts in Recorded History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 4. 18 Ibid., 6. 19 William F. Pinar, Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity: Selected Works of William F. Pinar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 165/170. 20 Oates, Babylon, 163. 21 Benjamin Foster, The Age of Agade (London: Routledge, 2016). “Sales, loans, and transfers of moveable property were written out and witnessed, as were sales of real state and significant changes in social status” (p. 38). 22 Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 118. 23 Ibid., 121. 24 Foster, The Age of Agade, 117. 25 Jack M. Weatherford, The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997). 26 Marvin A. Powell, “Money in Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39, no 3 (1996): 228. 27 Gwendolyn Leick, “Sexuality and Religion in Mesopotamia,” Religion Compass 2, no. 2. (2008): 119–33. Cosmological texts insist that the gods had created human beings to provide them with sustenance and to alleviate the drudgery of having to maintain the world. Although the gods withheld immortality from humans, they made them from their own substance. This common nature that binds together creators and their creatures includes the divine force of sex as the generative principle. (p. 120) 28 Wengrow, What Makes Civilization, 111. 29 William S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 2.

34  To rule with justice 30 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 31 Ibid., 38. 32 Moses I. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 155. 33 Athenian Statesman, Pericles cited in Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War, 80. 34 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom: Selections from the Histories, trans. Tamuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 94. 35 Ibid., 11. Croesus set in motion the military rivalry with Persia in 600 BC asked Solon: “Who is the happiest man you have ever seen?” Solon’s examples were virtuous man devoted to their family and the public service. 36 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Book III, 82. 37 Ibid, 82. 38 Andrew R. Burns, Persian and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c. 546– 478 B.C. (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1940). 39 Warwick Ball, Towards one World: Ancient Persia and the West (London: Olive Branch Press, 2011), 12. 40 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Since the 18th century the study of the East is integrated with “broadly imperialist view of the world” (p. 12). 41 Ernest Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 7, no. 4 (1958): 425–44. 42 William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 948. 43 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom, 17. 44 Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London: Routledge, 2016), 1. 45 Ibid., 1. 46 Said (1979) demonstrates that the modern colonial aggressions inverted the European’s inferiority by ethnocentrism in literature and science. 47 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 205. Profiting from war was an “unintended, by-­product, not essential to the motivation of war and conquest,” Finley explained that “the profits of empire in antiquity are well enough understood today, but the profits of war remain insufficiently examined” (p. 205). The large empires such as Persia and Rome eventually came to the place where they could no longer increase their financial and military force. They also suffered from growing self-­assertion of their elites. 48 Flower (2017) notes that Xenophon’s Anabasis, Hellenica, and Cyropaedia are, respectively, microhistory, macrohistory, and biographical. An examination of these texts highlights cross-­references to Xenophon’s other writings. Both Anabasis and Cyropaedia were used as pedagogical texts in the European Enlightenment and contained lessons on leadership and loyalty (Flower, 2017, 301–22). 49 Tim Rood, “Introduction,” in Xenophon the Expedition of Cyrus, trans. Robin Waterfield (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), xi. 50 Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 57. 51 James B. Atkinson, “Introduction,” in Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, ed. James B. Atkinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill Company, 1976), 34.

To rule with justice  35 52 Cyrus is referred to as a model ruler in Machiavelli’ Prince (Chapter 6). The ruler does not rely on God for fortune. He relies on his own virtues and actions. In this context, Strauss (1978) noted, “fear of God is desirable or indispensable in soldiers and perhaps in subjects in general, while the prince need merely appear religious” (p. 73). For Machiavelli, both Cyrus and Moses demonstrate an ability to disrupt the existing beliefs and initiate a new order. 53 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Virto Gourevitsh and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), 24. 54 Ibid., 24. 55 Giovanni Giorgini, “The Place of the Tyrant in Machiavelli’s Political Thought and the Literary Genre of the ‘Prince’,” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (2008): 235/237. 56 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia (The education of Cyrus), ed. James Tatum (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987). This sentence comes in reference to “The institution of Cyrus” (p. 85). Instead of adopting the modern translations, I choose William Baker’s 1567 as the first published English translation of Renaissance. 57 Cited in Xenophon’s The School of Cyrus. 58 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia, 20. There are multiple recent and modern translations of Xenophon’s text; the reliance on a Renaissance edition and translation is intentional and in line with the argument put forth. 59 Ibid., 20. 60 Ibid., 20. 61 The ancient understanding of Persia is derived from “overwhelming reliance on Greek historiography” (Briant, 2002, p. 8). Few to no written account by Persians have survived and so there is an appropriation of Cyrus in the West by Western authors. 62 Leo Straus, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse; An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 97. 63 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus, 182. 64 Ibid, 182–83. 65 Robert C. Bartlett, “How to Rule the World: An Introduction to Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus,” American Political Science Review 109, no. 1 (2015): 146. 66 Christopher Nadon, “From Republic to Empire: Political revolution and the Common Good in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus,” American Political Science 90, no. 2 (1996): 361–74. 67 Jane Grogan, “Many Cyruses: Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and English Renaissance Humanism,” Hermathena 183 (2007): 63. 68 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. vi (13), 73. The practice of virtues concerning common good for the Persians were not only associated with taking pleasure in being “good” and “noble” but also associated with moderation in pleasures and accompanied training the soul in self-­restraint. 69 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. vi (15), 75. 70 Pierer Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2002), 33–34. 71 Socrates even knowing that he was wrongly sentenced to death still followed the law. The relationship of law and knowledge is complicated. In order to know, the human being must conform to a system of rules and be led by a set of norms, beliefs, and behaviours.

36  To rule with justice 72 Richard Kraut, “The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato’s Republic: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Karut (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 205. 73 Plato, Republic, V.473c-­e. There is no end to suffering, Glaucon, for our cities, and none, I suspect, for the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become, real, true philosopher. (p. 175) 74 Plato, Republic, 514a, 220. 75 Plato, Republic, 517a, 223. 76 Plato, Republic, 527c, 233. Pointing to the benefit of “contemplation of the nature of numbers by means of thought alone,” Socrates explained: “it should not be for the sake of buying and selling, like tradesmen and deals” (p. 223). 77 Plato, The Republic, 415a, 108. The order mattered for it distinguished if one ruled by truth or by desire. After mentioning that all citizens are brothers, Socrates is quoted saying when god used a mixture of gold in the creation of those of you who were fit to be rulers, which is why they are most valuable. He used silver for those who were to be auxiliaries, and iron and bronze for the farmers and the rest of the skilled workers. But Socrates clarifies if a child of iron and bronze is born to fathers of gold (the guardians) “they must feel no kind of pity” for their child, sending them to “join the skilled workers or farmers.” Mentioning this, Socrates asked whether his interlocutor thinks people would believe this. The reply was “Not the actual people you tell it to. But their children might, and their children after them, and the later generations” (pp. 108–110). This example reflects the power of ideologies in social organization. 78 If Eryxias is not a Platonic dialogue, the views on wealth and knowledge it presents are in line with Xenophon’ Memorabilia account of Socrates—and in line with Herodotus’s account of Salon’s defining feature of happy and moral life. According to Eichholz (1935), the dialogue attracted the “eighteenth century” thinkers “as a work of enlightened ethical purpose,” where the “nineteenth century” thinkers condemned “it as an inept imitation of Plato’s early writing” (p. 129). This conveys a shift in historical consciousness and scholarship of two different centuries in approaching an ancient text. 79 Max L. W. Laistner, “Dialogue called ‘Eryxias’,” in Greek Economics, ed. and trans. M. L. W. Laistner (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), 55. 80 Plato, “Alcibiades I,” in Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). Alcibiades became aware he does not know the art of ruling. Socrates responded that Alcibiades should not despair for he is young and can learn: “In taking care of what belongs to you, you do not take care of yourself… the art is not one which makes any of our possessions, but which makes ourselves better” (p. 3372). It is the soul that rules and directs the body. Respectively, Socrates is talking to Alcibiades’ soul. 81 Plato, “Apology,” In Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. Edited by M. A. Grube, 21–44. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002, 40. 82 Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017), 28. 83 Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

To rule with justice  37 84 Michael Jackson, “Philosopher-­Kings and Bankers,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 107 (2005): 19–35. 85 William Desmond, Philosopher-­kings of Antiquity (London: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2011), 6. The image of the ruler has transfigured through times. Emphasizing the dominant Greco-­Roman understanding of kings is Homeric, William Desmond noted, “the king is the best of his people…. In valour, eloquence, birth and wealth, he shows that human beings are not equal, that he is better than most and that he should lead therefore and others follow” (p. 5). 86 Carol G. Thomas, “The Roots of Homeric Kingship,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 15, no. 4 (1966): 391. 87 Plato, The Laws of Plato (III, 694), 76. 88 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom, 40. 89 Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 87. 90 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, IV, 15–25. Cyrus not only sets the example for his people but also publicly rewards those who obey him (and follow his example) willingly. 91 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, V, 14–18, 405. 92 Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 144. 93 Ibid. 114. 94 Fiona Hobden, “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus,” in Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, ed. Michael A. Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 165. 95 Ibid, 168. The projectors, electronic devices, and artificial intelligence are the common tools of modern classrooms. What do they promote to the next generations about how to live a human life? 96 Moses I Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19. 97 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 84. 98 Ibid., 84. 99 Ibid., 84. 100 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, VII (42), 429. 101 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 84. 102 Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 167. 103 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 473. 104 Ibid., 473. 105 Ibid., 405. 106 Aristotle, “Oeconomia,” in Aristotle in Twenty-­Three Volumes, XVIII: Metaphysics Books x–xiv, Oeconomica and Magna Moralia, trans. H. Thredennick and G. C. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Book I (4), 333. 107 Maryanne C. Horowitz, “Aristotle and Women,” Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 2 (1976): 196. The context of the analogy of craftsman was first offered by Plato in Republic and was changed to the biological reproduction theory by Aristotle. “While Aristotle’s Politics was a standard textbook in medieval and early modern universities, Plato’s Republic was not widely read in the West until its translation from Greek to Latin during the early fifteenth century” (p. 187). 108 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Politics makes use of remaining sciences, Aristotle continued, “because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from,” and by this, it encompasses other knowledge of “human good” (p. 3).

38  To rule with justice 109 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 13. 110 Paul Millett, “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens,” Greece & Rome 54, no. 2 (2007): 181. 111 Moses I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 114. 112 William L. Westermann, “Slavery and the Elements of Freedom in Ancient Greece,” in Slavery in Classical Antiquity, ed. Moses I. Finley (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 18. 113 George Long, The Discourses of Epictetus (London: George Bell & Sons, 1890/2000), 294. 114 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 118. 115 Peter J. Anderson, “Introduction,” in Seneca: Selected Dialogues and Consolations (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2015), xxi. 116 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 73. 117 Ibid., 185. 118 Ibid., 66. 119 William D. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 4–5. 120 Milavec Aaron, Didache: Faith, Hope and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities (New York, Newman Press, 2003), 176. 121 Ibid., 227. 122 Stephen L. Dyson, Rome. A Living Portrait of an Ancient City (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 341. 123 Ibid., 342–45. 124 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 86–89. 125 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic World. (Ontario: Broadway Press, 2014), 141. Cordoba and Baghdad were at the centre of slave transactions. 126 Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 106–07. 127 See Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller, Children in Slavery Through the Ages (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009). The quote is from the second volume of Children Slaves in the Modern World (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011). (2011, p. 10). 128 Christopher Whidden, “Cyrus’s Imperial Household: An Aristotelian Reading of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia,” The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 25, no. 1 (2008): 32. 129 Ibid., 32. By using the household as a blueprint for his empire, Cyrus discovers an incredibly effective means by which to create an empire the sheer size of which the ancients had never seen and to avoid the problem of political rule that other less visionary rulers had, according to Xenophon, always faced— at least until Cyrus. (p. 58) 130 Niedl MacGregor, “The Many Meaning of Cyrus Cylinder,” in The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A new Beginning for the Middle East, ed. John Curtis (Hong Kong: The British Museum Press, 2013), 11. Cyrus’s religious toleration situated him enjoying the protection of many deities.

To rule with justice  39 Cyrus Cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah speaks in words very similar to those used by Marduk. … It is impossible to know whether the Jewish and Babylonian writers are merely attributing to their own gods the action of the king, or whether the Persians themselves encouraged the different people to see Cyrus as enjoying the particular protection of the many deities of the empire. (p. 13)

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40  To rule with justice Charpin, Dominique. Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Desmond, William. Philosopher-­kings of Antiquity. London: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2011. Dyson, Stephen L. Rome: A Living Portrait of an Ancient City. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010. Eichholz, D. E. “The Pseudo-­Platonic Dialogue Eryxias.” The Classical Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (1935): 129–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/636604. Ferguson, Frances. Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Finley, Moses I. Thucydides. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942. Finley, Moses I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Viking Press, 1980 Finley, Moses I. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, edited by Brent Shaw and Reichard Saller. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981. Finley, Moses I. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Flower, Michael A. “Xenophon as a Historian.” In Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, edited by Michael A. Flower, 301–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Foster, Benjamin. The Age of Agade. London: Routledge, 2016. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol 2.: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de Franc 1981–82, edited by Frederic Gros. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Giorgini, Giovanni. “The Place of the Tyrant in Machiavelli’s Political Thought and the Literary Genre of the ‘Prince’.” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (2008): 230–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26224004. Grogan, Jane. “‘Many Cyruses’: Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and English Renaissance Humanism.” Hermathena 183 (2007): 63–74. www.jstor.org/stable/23041680. Gwyn, Campbell, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C. Children in Slavery through the Ages. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009. Gwyn, Campbell, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C.. Children Slaves in the Modern World. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011. Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2002. Herodotus. On the War for Greek Freedom: Selections from the Histories. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003. Hobden, Fiona, “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” In Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, edited by Michael, A. Flower, 152–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Horowitz, Maryanne C. “Aristotle and Women.” Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 2 (1976): 183–213. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330651. Hurcombe, Linda M. Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory: Investigating the Missing Majority. New York: Routledge, 2014. Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971.

To rule with justice  41 Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Jackson, Michael. “Philosopher-­Kings and Bankers.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 107 (2005): 19–35. www.jstor.org/stable/41802289. Kramer, Samuel N. History Begins at Sumer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956. Kraut, Richard. “The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic.” In Plato’s Republic: Critical Essays, edited by Richard Karut, 199–221. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. Kriwaczek, Paul. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Laistner, Max L. W. “Dialogue called ‘Eryxias’.” In Greek Economics, edited and translated by Max L. W. Laistner, 41–64. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923. Leick, Gwendolyn. “Sexuality and Religion in Mesopotamia.” Religion Compass 2, no. 2. (2008): 119–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-­8171.2008.00063.x. Long, George. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: George Bell & Sons, 1890/2000. https://archive.org/details/discoursesofepic033057mbp. MacGregor, Neil. “The Many Meaning of Cyrus Cylinder.” In They Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning for the Middle East, edited by John Curtis, 9–15. Hong Kong: The British Museum Press, 2013. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by James B. Atkinson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill Company, 1976. Millett, Paul. “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens.” Greece and Rome 54, no. 2 (Oct. 2007): 178–209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383507000150. Nadon, Christopher. “From Republic to Empire: Political Revolution and the Common Good in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus.” The American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 361–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082890. Oates, Joan. Babylon, 2nd ed. New York: Thomas & Hudson, 1986. Phillips, William D. Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Pinar, William F. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison, Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Pinar, William F. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity: Selected Works of William F. Pinar. New York: Routledge, 2015. Plato. “Alcibiades I.” In Dialogues of Plato, edited and translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892. Plato. The Laws of Plato. Translated by Alfred Edward Taylor. London: J. M. Dent, 1934. Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, edited by M. A. Grube, 21–44. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002. Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, 2nd ed. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002. Plato. The Republic, edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Plato. Theaetetus and Sophist, edited and translated by Christopher Rowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

42  To rule with justice Pollock, Susan. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Powell, Marvin A. “Money in Mesopotamia.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39, no. 3 (1996): 224–42. http://www.jstor.org. Ristvet, Lauren. Ritual, Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Roberts, Jennifer. The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017. Rood, Tim. “Introduction.” In The Expedition of Cyrus. Translated by Robin Waterfield, vii–xxxiv. London: Oxford University Press, 2009. Saggs, Henry W. F. Babylonians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sauer, Kristina. “From Counting to Writing: The Innovative Potential of Bookkeeping in Uruk Period Mesopotamia.” In Appropriating Innovations, edited by Philipp Stockhammer, and Joseph Maran, 12–28. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Simmons, Alan H. The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Strauss, Leo. Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse; An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Strauss, Leo. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1978. Strauss, Leo. On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Virto Gourevitsh and Michael S. Roth. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Thomas, Carol G. “The Roots of Homeric Kingship.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 15, no. 4 (1966): 387–407. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library. ubc.ca/stable/4434948. Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Martin Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Weatherford, Jack M. The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace. New York: Crown Publishers, 1997. Wengrow, David. What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Westermann, William L. “Slavery and the Elements of Freedom in Ancient Greece.” In Slavery in Classical Antiquity, edited by Moses I. Finley, 17–32. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968. Widden, Christopher. “Cyrus’s Imperial Household: An Aristotelian Reading of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.” The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 25, no. 1 (2008): 31–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996. Xenophon. “Memorabilia.” In Xenophon IV: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology, edited by E. H. Warmington. Translated by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, 3–359. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968 Xenophon, “Oeconomicus.” In Xenophon IV: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology, edited by E. H. Warmington. Translated by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, 363–525. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

To rule with justice  43 Xenophon. The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia (The education of Cyrus), James Tatum ed. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987. Yolton, John W. and Jean S. Yolton. “Introduction.” In Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke, edited by John W. and Jean S. Yolton, 1–74. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

2 Humans as property

What factors initiated the transition from oikonomia to the divine economy and eventually to the political economy? One facilitating element was the shift in the political and legal conceptions interdependent with the rise of commercial and imperial expansion from the 13th to the 18th century in Europe and the formation of nation states concerned with liberty and equality. Discourses on property rationalized this transformation and were connected to wider networks, conventions, and themes concerning human agency in relation to divine will. Such a notional agency was contingent on learning from historical events, including the decline of the Byzantine Empire, the rise of Islam in Asia Minor, and the rise of the Normans in Europe. This chapter explores the shifts in positioning the human person in relation to property by examining the contribution of Christian thought to modern economics. In this respect, Weber’s examination of the role of religion in economics argued that transcendental ends were “rationalized” for the advancement of worldly pursuits and organization of bureaucracy in support of capitalism.1 Weber did not compare the rationality of the Reformed against Catholicism but identified the contribution of “Western monasticism” in developing “a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status of nature to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature.”2 With this came a mode of “self-control” that “trained the monk, objectively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of God, and thereby further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul.”3 The association of self-control and living a happy life was the connecting link between the self and the ancient household management. Christian thinkers revised that link and contributed to the legal and political conceptions of modern individual and nation-state.4 Under religious practices, self-control developed methodically in relation to rational conduct and advanced in association with property and labour. Conceiving the self as a property is a central pillar of human capital theory. This chapter examines those ideas proceeding DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-3

Humans as property  45 to political economy, where the apprehension of the individual person underwent transformation and the reason of the state became focused on worldly government. 2.1 Monasticism and secular state The Roman Empire “never had displayed sufficient regard for the peasants and slaves at the bottom of the social pyramid,” Brian Tierney reminds; it was a system in which the richest men were exempt from taxation and enjoyed opportunities to grow richer while “a crushing burden was laid on the poor.”5 This misuse of political and economic power, attributed to corruption and political civil war, does not necessarily explain the fall of the Roman Empire but contextualizes its gradual weakening and the growth of religion. The Christian Church at first diverged from the Roman state but gradually by the privileges it was granted—legal (allowing bishops to act as judges in civil disputes involving Christians) and economic (tax exemption for the clergy)—became integrated into the imperial government. Constantine was the first Roman emperor that welcomed the church. In return for his support, he required “that the bishops would conduct themselves as loyal servants of the imperial government.”6 The church’s teachings on love and the heavenly kingdom were reformulated over time by the demands and impositions of the empire. According to Tierney, the Western world endured a long period of chaos after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. This was followed by further acceptance of the role of the Church in government. Siedentop explains that “the ancient family had provided the building blocks for an entire society underlying the ancient polis”; by the 6th century, Christian beliefs and practices had “destroyed the ancient family” as a religious association.7 Strengthening the ecclesiastical order had both direct and indirect impacts on economic organization. It provided control to the lay lords who exploited the common people by the way of the church.8 During the early Middle Ages, regulations and orders made by the ecclesiastical authority of the church became integrated with the Roman legal system and codes of conduct. One impacted area concerned the attitudes and laws towards wealth and poverty. From the Church’s teaching, “voluntary poverty was a form of asceticism good in itself, a state pleasing to God,” where “involuntary poverty gave rise to strong temptations to theft and perjury.”9 Even though idleness was condemned, the medievalists did not perceive poverty as an individual responsibility. Poverty had a spiritual and economic currency within the intertwined universal order normalized for the rule of lords.10 Property and poverty slowly became central to the theological, legal, and philosophical debate. Theologians thought through worldly management by the way of charity

46  Humans as property towards those who decidedly abandoned the world for spiritual transcendence. The early Christian monasteries developed their practices perpendicular and parallel to the feudal society. They were private foundations of the proprietary class endowments, and landlords retained a large measure of control over them. By the 9th century, monasteries were expected to produce revenues for the founder or his family. The growth of the monastic life was not solely an economic calculation at first.11 The monastic life was a retreat from military and economic commands. Its educational and communal benefits were aimed at higher goods beyond the material world. Monasteries provided those who were inclined to study and serve with a shelter from the outside world. Feudal conditions influenced these missions. According to Thompson, the “founding of a monastery in the Middle Ages was a lucrative form of investment,”12 with the only restriction on landlords and their heirs being that the monasteries could not be secularized or abolished. By the 13th century, however, not only monasteries served certain economic ends but the mixture of religious and worldly motives provided them with a degree of control beyond a “tract of land, but entire villages” in some cases obtaining rights such as “right of market, right of collecting tolls and tithes, toll and tithe exemptions, coinage privileges, right of administering justice.”13 Obtaining such rights made some monasteries richer than bishoprics, since they were not hampered by military and financial burdens. Even though there were costs associated with the daily support of the inmates and the maintenance of schools and hospitals, the wealth generated from monasteries was disproportionate to the practical benefits they provided to the society. “The ‘dead hand’ kept much of their surplus wealth from free circulation for the advantage of society,”14 Thompson explained, adding: The incongruity between the enormous wealth enjoyed by many monasteries and the vow of poverty taken by the monks is apparent. … Individually the inmates possessed nothing; as a group their incomes were very great and—unless a stern abbot rigidly enforced the Rule—the monks lived in luxury.15 Monasteries were not solely a place of learning, devotion, and meditation. The stern abbots as managers kept the monks in poverty and at work, while benefiting landlords (the modern equivalent of shareholders). Monasteries and the livelihood of the monks were also influenced by the policies of the church. The later medieval church was a complex organization with evidence suggesting that “through usury and other monopoly-maintenance policies may have inadvertently and unintentionally encouraged temporal market

Humans as property  47 developments.”16 Its effect, according to Tierney, was to establish the “doctrine of the just price.”17 Such power accompanied the acceptability of ecclesiastical orders as the institutions responsible for private and public welfare. This plentitude of power underwent reassessment by the scholastics. After the Germanic and Viking invasions, Europe was fractured and divided on “every dimension: between church and state, and within them between multiple layers of authority from emperor and pope through baron and bishops”; Harold Perkin explains that the rise of universities in France and England was a response to society’s “demanded allegiance of two systems of law, canon and civil, with equal jurisdiction over the faithful.”18 With this orientation came a discontinuity and blending of monasteries and universities. According to Willinsky, medieval learning encouraged the development of “intellectual property transactions” in three steps: First the nobility transferred deeds of property to the monastery to enable monastics to devote their lives to prayer. Second, monastics transformed these lands, through skilled management and husbandry, into sources of sufficient wealth that enabled some to devote time to learning… Third, as monasticism gradually accepted and acknowledged learning as pious practice, the monastery’s production of learned text could be thought of as transposing the original gift of property.19 These transformations brought the acceptance of and devotion to learning as they also transposed human understanding of property and ownership. At the time universities were taking shape, there was a gradual merger of the old aristocracy (landlords) and the commercial families (owners of moveable capital) across Europe.20 Janet Coleman associated this with social and economic changes that carried debates over dominion and property from the 12th to the 17th centuries. According to Coleman: “The increasing use of money and the development of an elaborate structure of financial credit in the new market economy… gave rise to impersonal transaction unaffected by considerations of the status of buyer and seller” producing early conventions of “capitalism.”21 Even though natural law trusted reason to justify the conventional uses of property between theological and legal tenets, there existed a gap in specifying how private property should be obtained. Ecclesiastical power had grown in its administration of private and common property and used its authority to direct worldly affairs. The question of dominium became an avenue to conceptualize the limits of authorities concerned with temporal and spiritual government. Within the economic feudal system and its theological dominance, dominium served as an entry point to clarify the natural law and those legal rights derived from it.

48  Humans as property Objection to the Church’s power grew from scholastics’ commentary on the jurisdiction of the Pope and Emperor and their exercise of authority in God’s kingdom. The rediscovery of the text of Aristotle and Arabian thinkers at the end of the 11th century presented an intellectual challenge to Christian worldviews and theological dogmas. Aristotelian ethics, politics, and metaphysics stimulated the development of a theory of the state that had no requirement for the involvement of Church and papacy.22 The implication was an inchoate conception of acting authority in accord with the reason for worldly management. In the integration of Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy, scholastics’ conceptions of civil codes developed with attention to the growing power of the church. The relationship between papacy and empire as the central subject of political debate precipitated reflections on the notion of human and divine agency, a relationship with no need of a mediator. “Whereas many ancient thinkers held that reason and passion are alternative sources for action, medieval thinkers hold that the agent has an underlying rational faculty that chooses between different alternatives.”23 This underlying rational faculty was theological and moral rather than economic and epistemic. It imposed limits on human actions, desires, and passions. Aristotelian philosophy and its eventual integration with Christianity had a great effect on conceptions of human will (and agency) emphasized during the Renaissance and modernity. For example, the Aristotelian notion of time as infinite and the world as permanently governed by the laws of nature stood in contrast to the Augustinian time as finite.24 “Time,” according to Ernst Kantorowicz, gradually “became the symbol of the eternal continuity and immortality of the great collective called the human race:” It gained, through its connection with ideas of religious and scientific progress, an ethical value when one recognized that ‘the daughter of Time was Truth.’ Finally, the unlimited continuity of the human race itself bestowed a new meaning on many things. It made meaningful, for example, the craving after worldly fame, the perptualdi nominis desiderium, which increasingly became a decisive impulse for human action.25 The conceptions of time as continuous and nature as an inner principle challenged Christian assumptions. With its clear stance on creation and the Last Day, the church objected to Aristotelian conceptions of nature and time. This new apprehension of time influenced the Western civilization and its scientific, legal, and political approaches to describe the human race.

Humans as property  49 2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community The cultural and theological circumstances determined the interpretations of Aristotle. For example, Thomas Aquinas adjusted Aristotelian philosophy to align it with the hierarchical view of the natural order in Christian theology. For Aquinas, “the most important aim was to promote the teaching and work of the Church. The result was that Aquinas did all his writing as a theologian, not as a philosopher.”26 This is to say that the natural philosophy of Aristotle underwent a synthesis of Christian philosophy. Aquinas thought: “since the very act of free choice is traced to God as the cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of free choice must be subject to divine providence.”27 Human nature was a participation in divine laws and operations. Aquinas conceived “the law directs man in his actions” but is ordained to look after the “common good” and certain “particular ends.”28 In this rested a commensurability of the common good for its own end and also with particular ends that direct human action. Michel Villey noted the classical doctrine of natural law “attributes a transcendental end” in “the service of justice. It does not recognize in it any other end, neither ‘utility’, nor ‘wealth’, nor ‘order’, nor ‘security’.”29 However, Aquinas’ philosophy had implications for hermeneutics of utility and private property. The material world fulfilled transcendent ends and private property ruled worldly affairs. As Aquinas lays the foundation for natural rights outlining the ethics of the preservation of humans and the worship of God, the notion of dominium natural took precedence over private property. Aquinas thought: … in the state of innocence man had mastership [dominium] over the animals by commanding them. But of the natural powers and the body itself man is master not by commanding, but by using them. Thus, also in the state of innocence man’s mastership [sic] over plants and inanimate things consisted not in commanding or in changing them, but in making use of them without hindrance.30 Human ownership is for use of things and this right of use is governed by reason and will. This notion of use did not leave out human use of other humans who were conceived as animals, but its primary aim was the preservation of individuals and their communities. By the same logic, when Aquinas reasoned about the relationship and superiority of the monarch over others, it was for the sake of trust that “one” instead of many should “look after the common good” and ensure that those trusted with “knowledge and virtue” act in “benefit of others.”31 The order is relevant here, as one can, regardless of knowledge, care for the common good in the

50  Humans as property Aristotelian sense, but it becomes necessary to benefit others when one has the knowledge and virtue to do so. Drawing from Aristotle, Aquinas had also argued “that private property is not merely legitimate but essential to the satisfactory conduct of political life.” He feared that “if all things are instead held in common, everyone will avoid working and in consequence help to bring about a state of gratuitous poverty.”32 The construct of private property was a functional element in preventing confusion and disorder in the state; just as the monarch was given the right to exercise power over a specific domain, so were his subjects entitled to certain rights. This notion of right (jus) had God as the primary owner and humans as the secondary owners of natural property. The antithesis of private property was justice. Placing justice above other virtues, Aquinas found “equality” as the central element directing human relations, where “right is the object of justice.” And “justice implies equality.”33 The circular logic is hierarchical as it positions humans in relation to God. The divine law (fas) transcends human law (jus).34 This distinction clarified that positive rights are created by common consent and are decreed from the Prince (above the people) who acted as the administrator of rights for each person in accordance with their military, magisterial, and priestly position.35 Aquinas situated the King’s persona from a religious constitution to a legal administrative body, and the position that the legal authority trusted by divine will to the King was to defend and preserve the body politic. The human will and intellect are derived from nature; they are insufficient by themselves or together to ensure “the good of another and thus act in accordance with the right of others.”36 Not only administered justice also ought to be a cultivated habit—that is, it should act in control of the persons. Natural faculties are at the mercy of dispositions but directed by will and capacity for action. Habits are not conditioned in a behavioural-science sense. On the contrary, they are part of human development and preservation as well as measures for the exercise of self-control. Habits are distinct from that which they are disposed of, meaning they are not based on associations eliciting a desired response but prompt human potentiality to act or to forbear an act. This is the first condition of forming good habits, which enable movement towards self-perfection. “The second condition is that what is in potency in regard to something else, should be capable of determination in several ways and to various things.” The third condition of Aquinas’ good habits (such as prudence) is to “direct us to the proper means, and as a result, to the true end.”37 Moral virtues and disposition are finetuned by living in accordance to the principles of reason. Accompanied by making decisions, acts are prerequisite to forming habits; habits can be diminished and strengthened by acting in the world. Humans are not to be controlled or manipulated so they develop the right habits and arrive at

Humans as property  51 their welfare. Noting that the definition of virtues is incorporated into the idea of a morally good habit, Nicholas Austin differentiates Aquinas’ understanding of habit from a reductive modern psychological understanding by noting its goodness is oriented towards wisdom and love—a caring act to another as well as to one’s self.38 For Aquinas, virtue ethics dominated moral precepts. He clarified: “Things referable to oneself are referable to another, especially in regard to the common good. Wherefore legal justice, in so far as it directs to the common good, may be called a general virtue.”39 The common good is not solely shaped by legal institutions but also by virtue and by fair treatment of one and another. This individualism elaborated the need for “particular justice” oriented “to the good of another individual.”40 The notion of the common good and the good of another were integral to virtue ethics’ affirming good for others. Coleman emphasizes that Aquinas’ philosophy had “twofold and interrelated” aspirations: “to know the truth about God and to live in society.”41 Aquinas brought the common good closer to the individual concerned with salvation. This notion of common good relied on reason and prudence; it derived from Aristotle. The individual’s reliance on reason was no calculation for solitary self-preservation. Coleman noted that ius naturae/ius naturale reflected “every person has an obligation not only to sustain his own life but also that of others once his own needs are met,” noting that “Aquinas does not have a notion of subjective rights.”42 Within this tradition of natural law, the self-exercise of reason is moral. The movement towards subjective rights—corresponding to a person’s use of reason as a private entity—came later. “We are masters of our own actions by reason of our being able to choose this or that. But choice regards not the end, but the means to the end….”43 Centuries later, choice became redefined in terms of economic freedom, focusing humans’ will in this world on manipulating nature as a commodity. Choice also became the metric for (ir)rational behaviour. For Aquinas, choice was not economic and psychological nor was it induced by preferences for and manipulations of observables. His writings demonstrate the person as primarily a moral being, where the notion of dominium only applied to material things and slaves. The divine laws that were expected to transcend human laws failed to extend equality to the slaves—as it is today, justice was contorted to justify inequality. Slavery was “the only case in which” that “natural right” and “universal equality” were inconsistent, as noted by Buckland: “the slave was not only rightless, he was also dutiless.”44 The underlying logic stemmed from the conception that the slave was an object (Res)—“No taming or educating process was necessary to give their owner control over them”45—but by the time of Aquinas, commercial relation had led to a conception of slaves as human in need of learning, still without natural rights, after certain training to meet the needs of their masters. Aquinas

52  Humans as property thought that being a slave is not based “on natural reason, but on some resultant utility, in that it is useful to this man to be ruled by a wiser man, and to the latter to be helped by the former.”46 Aquinas maintained and affirmed the Aristotelian dissymmetry of power (between slave and master, father and son, and wife and husband) and justified it by utility. The dissymmetry was now facilitated by the logic of a mutual benefit. Both the slave and the master were to find utility in Aquinas’ reason. Perhaps similarity can be detected to today’s corporate elites looking after consumers, workers, and taxpayers, and to the acceptance of the mutual benefit arguments that sustain wealth inequality. The legal and social views based on natural rights crisscross with economic views throughout the Western history, where the same elements can be perceived differently by the prevailing sentiment of a given culture. For example, the medieval views on “fair prices were much less rigid than is often supposed,” and among value theories based on “utility, scarcity, or cost of production,” the “most commonly accepted doctrine” was that of “Thomas Aquinas, [who] held simply that a ‘just price’ was one fixed by fair bargaining on an open market.”47 Market was a trusted place for the exchange of human consumables; it brought the merchant and the shopper into direct physical contact to negotiate measurable valuation. Even though Aquinas, unlike Aristotle, found moderate profit justifiable “to support a family, the poor, or to contribute to the public good,” he was against “immoderate accumulation” that came with the society in which increase of money transactions increased “the range of avarice.”48 For Aquinas, markets were not instruments for liberality nor were they to indoctrinate populations by the logic of salvation. “Liberality” was perceived as that “attitude of indifference towards one’s own possessions, creating an inner freedom which alone allows them [humans] use rather than the enjoyment of material goods. This liberality is the founding virtue of a good society.”49 One’s liberality consisted not in consumption or accumulation of possessions but in the capacity to be indifferent to them. Liberty was not centred on the enjoyment of material goods. In the Middle Ages, Coleman clarifies, the “material goods were taken to be means to a higher end … [and were] to be used rather than enjoyed in their own right.”50 After the Middle Ages, material goods gradually became interpreted as a means for transcending human consciousness via science and systematic categorization of nature (see Chapter 3). Later conceptions of liberty suppressed the theological view that only God has dominium, and humans have a natural dominium for their use.51 Aquinas and his contemporaries saw the right use of property as precedent over the right of acquisition for profit. This required rational judgement and just elaborations of the laws of “civil society” that were concerned with “equality” wherein the role of law was to maintain the dignity and the rights of persons

Humans as property  53 affected by injury and uncovered losses brought by another.52 According to Finnis, Aquinas’ attention to the “inability of the state rulers to succeed in supervising movements of the human spirit” underpins modern concerns for “status of freedom” and “self-possession.”53 Finnis’ account leads one to ask: what led humans to think about freedom and self-possession instead of virtues and charity? In contrast to Aquinas, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) explicitly argued for a secular state and limiting the role of the Church in worldly affairs. Dante attacked the churchmen and the papacy for their greed and corruption. He found papacy a political hindrance to the emperor who looks after God’s will on earth. Dante’s “image of the Prince or Monarch—though composed of innumerable mosaic tesserae borrowed from theology and philosophy—reflects a concept of Man-centered kingship and of a purely human Dignitas.”54 In his book Monarchy, Dante, following Aristotle, made the argument that the best form of government is monarchy. “[M] ankind is most like God when it is ruled by one ruler, and consequently is most in harmony with God’s intention; and this is what it means to be in a good (indeed, ideal) state.”55 These words provide a glimpse at the overlapping of Aristotelian trust in the intellectual faculty and Platonic and Christian ideals for a ruler. They also hint at the conception of human aspirations to be like God, as divine will guides nature and human purpose (elaborated in the next chapter). Although “the will of God in itself is indeed invisible, … the invisible things of God are clearly perceived by being understood through the things he has made.”56 According to Dante, the divine “will” that positioned the Romans “by right” to possess the world was for the sake of protection of the world rather than domination. Such misconceived beliefs continue to contribute to modern imperialism. For Dante, this was not only a matter of reason but faith that God’s judgement passed on to a monarch is in harmony with nature’s intentions and that humans are sacrificed to defend it. Dante asserted that the authority of the Roman Empire was independent of the authority of the church. In his outline of the relative autonomy of the pope and emperor, Dante was exposing the “Church[’s] pretence of justice” as it no longer helped the poor.57 In order to delimit the Church’s influence in worldly affairs, Dante reclaimed the authority of the monarch, noting that monarchical authority derives directly from God. The monarch’s authority was thus rationalized on moral philosophy, commanding the monarch to fight the “waves of seductive greed” (in Dante’s language) and to guide humankind in temporal happiness. Whereas the dutiful monarch is concerned with freedom and peace, the pontiff is tasked with immortal happiness.58 Wicksteed noted: “the systematic parallelism between the sacred and secular examples of virtue and of vice” is complimented by “Dante’s steady assertion of the intrinsic worth of the

54  Humans as property secular life.”59 Whereas for Aquinas, the humanity’s work rests in contemplation of God; for Dante, contemplation is not sufficient. By “training of the intellect,” humans will fortify themselves “against false inferences” and “against the seduction of the pretenders who declare themselves guides to blessedness.”60 Before the constitution of modern state, the main concern of freedom was not an individual whose rights can be affirmed (and hence violated) by the state but the limits to the exercise of power by way of educating the intellect. Education could ensure that humans do not take axioms as givens. That said, the notion of individuality and accountability in Dante’s optimus homo is held for those trusted to public office. In “Dante’s general concept of the final ends of mankind, it was quite indispensable that imperial and philosophic authorities should coincide and ultimately unite to lead mankind to the blessedness of the present life.”61 The emperor and the pope belonged to the same species of mortal beings, measured not only by the standards of God or angel but also by their worldly conduct. 2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law William of Ockham (1287–1347) continued working under the shadows of the Aristotelian objection to the omnipotence of God and the existing theological corpus. He challenged Aquinas’ proposition that Christian theology is a successor to classical metaphysics and ethics. Ockham rejected the prototypically Catholic intellectual project of unifying classical philosophy with Christian faith in such a way as to exhibit the latter as the perfection of the former, and yet that stops short of disdaining the light of natural reason in the manner of radical intellectual separatism.62 Although the works of Aquinas were viewed within the rationalist tradition, proposing that natural laws are normative, binding, and discoverable by reason, Ockham’s voluntarism situated natural law as an imperative, to be accepted on faith as an expansion of divine will. His theological perspective assigned a more predominant role to the will over the intellect. He emphasized the separation of will from natural inclination.63 Thus, Ockham contributed to a “notion of freedom that does not understand freedom in terms of a pre-established order of goods, but rather in terms of an ability to choose indifferently between alternatives in spite of natural teleology, reason’s dictates, or the objects’ goodness.”64 In moving in the direction of the contemporary notion of freedom, Ockham was grounded in the tradition of the Franciscans and their renunciation of ownership.

Humans as property  55 Working within the Aristotelian syllogism, Aquinas and Ockham each reached different conclusions on human freedom. Aquinas thought freedom was rooted in the ability to reason about what is good and specify different acts; Ockham challenged the intellectual determinism in Aristotle and objected to Aquinas’ cooperative causality—of divine and natural reason in human action—since God is the ultimate nature and cause of reality, human will is derived from God. Aquinas’ intellectualism began with God as a maker that by the way of analogy was extended to humans, who were connected to His nature and reason. Ockham’s emphasis on free will led him to distance reason from will; the implication spilled into increased acceptance of the activity of the will and the separation of the moral from the natural. Osborne points out that the “increasing tendency toward a dualistic view according to which the mind’s causal structure can be described in terms that also apply to mechanistic causality in the physical world” accepted by “modern philosophers of mind” may have origins in Ockham and his contemporary, Duns Scotus.65 These tendencies, of the medieval philosophers, have to be contextualized in the form of monastic life that abandoned all claims to possession and ownership and was coming under scrutiny by the Church. As a member of the Dominican order, Aquinas’s theory of natural dominium threw doubt on the life of apostolic poverty of the Franciscan order of Ockham. The doctrine of apostolic poverty would allow the Franciscans to use all the commodities necessary for their lives without dominium. Such a right to poverty situated the Franciscans outside of the network of commercial exchange. On the other hand, Aquinas had considered the material object in two ways: One is with regard to its nature, and that does not lie within human power, but only the divine power, to which all things are obedient. The other is with regard to its use. And here man does have natural dominium over material things, for through his reason and will he can use material objects for his own benefits.66 Ockham presented an argument for the right to poverty (no dominium). His theory of right affirmed the life and dignity of the Franciscan order and also affirmed a mode of human existence outside of commercialization. This view, however, was problematic, as the church and monasteries had gained positions of influence and power due to ownership of land and property. For Ockham, according to Oakley, “[w]ill not reason, is found to be at the heart of law,”67 and this idea was strengthened by disputes over the metaphysical and legal stand of the Church in relation to the conception of dominium and jus (right). In 1323, Pope John XXII made the claim that

56  Humans as property there could be no just use without the right of using it. Stressing this “is a moral right, not a legal right,” John XXII neglected that the use of some things (for example, food) requires consumption.68 The pope’s interpretation of the scripture and situating Christ’s life within the Roman law was an attack on the foundation of the Franciscan life: Christ’s life as exemplary of life lived in the human world. Christ came into the Roman world but lived outside of its structure, … this included both lack of property and the lack of any temporal rulership. The life of Christ represented a return to or reliving of the original natural life of the state of innocence.69 John XXII’s interpretation was not only an attack on Franciscans but also a heresy as it relocated the life of Christ into the condition of dominium. “Ockham’s thesis, that property did not exist in the Garden of Eden and is an institution of human law, was the standard view of theologians before John XXII (Aquinas included).”70 Ockham’s refutation of the Pope’s position carried “on an established tradition of juristic discourse, sometimes in new and interesting ways.”71 His objection—relying on existing Franciscan literature and canon law—defended the right to poverty by distinguishing between consumable and corporate poverty.72 Ockham was objecting to the separation of positive law and morality, focusing on licence to use (or consume): “A license to using, then, which is ‘permitted’ under natural law, could be licit just outside of the concerns of positive law.”73 Ockham’s aim was not to establish an active ius (right) above active dominium. The licence to use pointed to the preservation of one’s life as a sufficient case for taking consumables such as food when one had no dominium. Agamben observed that the distinction was “to realize a human life and practice absolutely outside the deamination of the law,” for “neutralization of law with respect to life.”74 Beyond the divine and state laws for property, the Franciscans offered the thesis of abdication of ownership and this was integral to their monastic form of life. Once again, the legal and political arguments that followed from the medieval idea of “ius” derived from canon law and were in service to human preservation and remained distinct from the legal laws. According to Tuck, the “medieval natural rights theories undoubtedly grew out of” the property-and-poverty controversy.75 Property rights elicited further arguments against the plenitude of the power of the Church. The dominion of the pope and clergy belong first to God and second as common goods belonging to the emperor. This further limited the church’s jurisdiction on secular matters.76 Ockham was clear that worldly possessions were subordinate to the faith and spiritual duties the church was obligated to honour. He wrote:

Humans as property  57 … for papal power regularly in no way extends to temporal, nor does the pope have the power of taking away the rights and liberties of others, …this would be against the liberty of the evangelical law, by which each ought to enjoy his own rights and liberties, unless he himself should have spontaneously renounced them or should be deprived of them because of some fault of his own or from reason and manifest cause.77 Ockham’s analysis of the spiritual power in relation to liberties was a protest against papal power. It called for differentiating the role of spiritual and worldly government. For Franciscans, this was not a protest for better rules or norms to be imposed on life. On the contrary, according to Agamben, it was so they can renounce even the ownership of laws and in doing so neutralize the distinction between rule and life, affirming their aim to follow the life of Christ. Ockham’s affirmation of the connection between divine law and positive law exhibits the influence of medieval canonists in the history of individual rights. Situating the notion of “jus” in Ockham’s theology, however, suggests the notion of right was not to be understood in exclusively individualistic and subjective terms or even as a law. The individualized and subjective will were fashioned gradually and emphasized centuries after. Right-based individualism would have little grounding in the ecclesiastical order of charity and fraternalism.78 Following Robinson, my point concerns the legal and scholastic tradition and the difficulty of transportation of Roman “jus” to “modern ‘choice’ theories of right” that Brian Tierney and John Finnis induced from Ockham.79 Modern choice theories are devoid of transcendence. Their approach to developing and sustaining human life gravitates towards cost–benefit calculations and investment–return rubrics. As long as there is a monetary value for human life and development, natural rights of equality and freedom are recycled for utilities, functions, and/or profits (see Chapter 5). Ockham was not proposing a choice theory or an elaborated human rights theory. According to Robinson, there is little pertaining to Ockham’s notion of ownership and use that can by itself be taken as setting in motion the modern understanding of rights: “An important difference between medieval and modern conceptions of rights, then, lies not in whether rights are ‘subjectively’ possessed, but in the medieval belief that rights were from ‘ius’ rather than against it.”80 The right at stake in its natural conception was supplemented by Ockham’ nominalism and defended by his objection to universals. “Ockham and the poverty controversy in general are often, and with good reason, singled out for their role in the long history of individual rights,” Robinson continued, the lessons drawn from Ockham “has less to do with the inviolability or sanctity of these rights, and more to do with

58  Humans as property how much the justice of the established political order… has in common with the ethics of one’s actions.”81 If there is a rights theory to be uncovered in Ockham’s, it began with differentiating the right to use from the right to ownership derived from Roman law. Following the Franciscans’ commitment to the life that renounced possessive desires, Ockham maintained the de facto use of things. The “idea of separability of use from ownership” was “an effective instrument” giving Franciscans legitimacy to “living without property.”82 It also provided a negative argument to reducing life to a property governed by laws. It was the anti-Franciscan argument that helped the transition to a fully fledged natural right theory, and Jean Gerson (1363–1429) was a paramount facilitator. Not only did Gerson attack apostolic poverty he also offered “a modification” of Aquinas’ position by his development of “nonnatural dominia.”83 Richard Tuck stated that the relation between Gerson’s rights theory and his theology rested in the “belief that man’s relationship to the world is conceptually the same as God’s,” and although Gerson acknowledged the distance between God and human, this distance “was not a categorical break between two different kinds of being, as it was to be in Luther’s theology” but underlined “the similarity in the dominium which God and men possess over the world.”84 While Renaissance thinkers often challenged Gerson’s assimilation of God into the human, Gerson’s influence remained, giving impetus to the movement against both the church and scholastics’ interpretations. Acknowledging that Gerson’s theology radically differed from Ockham, Tuck noted, “like Ockham… he elevated the free wills of both man and God together” removing the “opposition between them.”85 There was a coupling effect in Gerson’s mysticism and Ockham’s nominalism that moved in the direction of the modern science. Emphasizing contingency, Ockham’s materialism directed reason towards propositions characteristics of physical science86 and his logical bent often emphasized experience and observation, functioning to delimit theological authority. Seen “as a forerunner of [Francis] Bacon,” Rychlak noted, that “Ockham placed the greatest possible emphasis on the sense organs by claiming they were the root of all knowledge.”87 Firmly situated in Christian beliefs and a world that is governed by God, Ockham’s orientation is far from the utilitarianism introduced by Bacon. For Ockham, human knowledge is “completely dependent on the divine choice,” Oakley notes, explaining that “from Ockham’s fundamental insistence on the omnipotence and freedom of God follow, not only his nominalism, not only his ethical and legal voluntarism, but also his empiricism.”88 Oakley stressed that Ockham’s interpretations “carry over into a positivist interpretation of law in general” as his “metaphysical presuppositions” were “necessary for the development of an empirical or quasi-empirical natural

Humans as property  59 science” and legal positivism.89 Ockham’s nominalism and his emphasis on observation harbour doubts about ancient science and examinations of natural theology in the next centuries. Ockham’s influence ought to be measured against other historical movements and also the influence of Gerson’s mystical theology concerned with human use and ownership of the world. Foreshadowing the Reformation, Gerson’s thoughts went beyond property and natural rights. Situating this mystical theology in the context of personhood, “the affective powers of the soul” were extended by Gerson as “the means of purifying and redeeming the whole soul and so of providing not only the means of mystical union but ultimately of salvation.”90 Gerson acted as an organizer and an educator of spiritual wisdom for a broad audience. He “addressed his peers and students at the university” and also “the parish priests, monks and nuns… the increasingly literate laity, including women; [and the] bishops, popes, nobles, and the royal family.”91 His method of teaching and his approach to property proposed a unity in human will and activity in the world. 2.4 Tension in the late medieval state “Gerson developed a sophisticated model of ‘scholastic’ reading, according to which scholars mined old books for arguments and gave little thought to style or historical context”; Hobbins continues by noting that Gerson selected “books that could safely guide theology students in their studies” and “shared a common theological vocabulary.”92 As a teacher, Gerson endeavoured to correct the common mistakes in instructions that had become routine. He modelled a theologian as a defender of faith— Hobbins stresses that the common vocabulary proposed by Gerson was central to both the establishment of reading and writing as educational activities in the following centuries and the proliferation and preservation of orthodox teachings. Gerson’s mystical humanism found its imprint on learning and the modality of “schola monastia” by which “theology was first of all experiential rather than intellectual.”93 Contemplation remained central to Gerson’s experiential exercises; his teachings influenced Luther, Erasmus, and other theologians across Europe, as Hobbins describes: Looking ahead to mid-fifteenth-century Germany, we find Gerson’s program receiving its warmest reception among early humanists, who profoundly admired and revered him as a doctrinal and spiritual authority, who prized clear expression, and who saw no contradiction between eloquence and piety… This was the century of Gerson, and we must make room for it in the stories we tell.94

60  Humans as property Gerson distinguished his works from other scholastics. He did not incorporate the complexities of existence into a system: “Gerson wrote no summa.”95 However, as a precursor of the Reformation, Gerson’s approach to theological systems set directions for the next generation of clergymen. His interpretive form of rationality influenced the culture of teaching the laity. During Gerson’s lifetime, the idea of learning was becoming connected to gaining political and social status across Europe. By the middle of the 13th century, the notion that “educated citizenry was advantageous to government was gathering force.”96 Although learning remained centred on Ancient Latin and Christian doctrine, its aims were moving away from the monastic life and the theological debates towards advancing aristocratic positions at court. However, the monastic way of life, even though subjected to desires for power and control, continued to offer guiding principles for organization of social life in line with Plato’s Republic. Thomas More’s (1478–1535) Utopia is reminiscent of the order of monasteries and their approach to commonwealth. Written as fiction, Utopia depicted monasticism and communistic orientation as a possible mode of government against the escalating competitive norms for accumulation of wealth. The monastic “distrust of personal possession,” according to John Hale, was seen as a viable avenue in “avoiding extremes of poverty and wealth as being the chief thread of civilized order.”97 More’s humanistic attempt was to decentralize nobility based on “lineage and inherited wealth.” Quentin Skinner explains, More did not aim to “abolish the institution of private property” but rather show that “private property” rights “do not necessarily avoid the twin dangers of poverty and disorder.”98 The attention in monasteries given to the role of the rulers continued to be accompanied by reflections on human nature and place in the cosmic system. Meanwhile, the presumably natural categories of humans (lords and peasants) were becoming gradually subject to the development of the cities and the affirmation of bureaucracy that played a central role in transforming the agricultural feudal societies. The expansion of commercial activities necessitated changes to communitarian visions of agrarian society. The nature of reason for government moved further away from Plato’s political philosophy and a parallel between just city and just soul shifted to management of dominion. The Italian jurist, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), offers an example of this development in The Reason of State. Although criticizing Machiavelli’s amoral Prince, Botero followed Machiavelli’s practice of advising the Prince in self and public management. Under the influence of Jean Bodin (1529–1596), who had witnessed the Bartholomew Massacre (1572) and found the solution to civil and theological unrest in the unlimited power of the despotic monarchy,99 Botero offered a model of rationality for state.

Humans as property  61 Botero wrote: “State is a stable rule over a people and Reason of state is the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved and extended.”100 The people were the dominion and the reason of the state was the knowledge of the means for governing them. The natural dominions constituted those governed willingly and the acquired dominions constituted those bought by money, won by arms, or negotiated through treaty. These are Botero’s classifications of dominion as the Italian explorer-colonizer, Christopher Columbus led the European colonization of the Americas. “The wealth of the ruler,” Botero explained, “depends upon that of his individual subjects, which comprises property together with the actual commerce in the fruits for the earth and of industry,” including imports, exports and transportations.101 This state as a material reality was based, then, on rational economic management. It was no longer limited to geographical space. Here, “‘reason’ has an instrumental sense, meaning the capacity to calculate the appropriate means of preserving the state.”102 Not only reason gained an instrumental sensibility but also the reconfiguration of Aristotelian politics offered Renaissance’ political thinkers a common language of reform for rewriting ancient and Roman civil philosophy. Machiavelli was one of the robust defenders of this new notion of politics.103 However, Machiavelli’s intentions were more complicated than simply instructing an amoral and calculative Prince. His writings can be interpreted “to instruct the nations under pretext of instructing the Prince.”104 Botero’s writings offered a reversal to this. Botero’s politics is an exercise of control based on allocation of values by the knowledge of the material world. And those who produced this knowledge (policymakers) act on the political subjectivity of the governor and governed alike.105 The Prince does need to learn the fluctuations in his estate and whether and how (not) to manage them by the way of knowledge.106 This is not contemplative knowledge. It is knowledge of “geographical situation, age, fortune, and education” that is concerned with “man’s nature, characteristics and temperament.”107 The ruler is to surround himself with those learned in such a profession. Religion receded in this notion of politics and is placed in the service of the state. The spiritual order is utilized to the management of the people as the Prince must “make every effort to propagate it, because… a people devoted to religion and piety is much more obedient than one without a guiding principle.”108 This represented the economic advice that continued to draw from the Romans’ integration of Christianity into the institutionalized life of the empire. By Botero’s terms, the Prince is not exempt from his responsibility. As a distributor of “bread and circuses,” Paul Veyne noted, “an eternal relation of obedience or depoliticization … unites” the governor and governed.109 In this unity, while the Roman law and the Roman thinkers continued to be influential, on

62  Humans as property various occasions, Botero drew from the Persians, Turks, and Chinese civilizations to show the range of the knowledge he saw useful for the rationalization of state. Meanwhile, the two principal foundations of discipline, “reward and punishment,” remained. The Greco-Romans rewarded enthusiasm, virtue, and courage, encouraging self-sacrifice by conferring worldly gains as well as honour. However, even those incentives were insufficient for those soldiers who feared not death but pain and disability. Noting the bravery exhibited by “the knights of St. John” who “never abandoned the struggle against the infidel,” Botero taught the Prince that the soldier’s “fear can be removed by the certain knowledge that a benevolent ruler will provide for him, will help and acknowledge responsibility for him.”110 Thus, promises and rewards became useful in encouraging sacrifice for the sake of the state. For example, the people were also to be given certain liberties in learning and studying. Botero thought that the act of learning not only reflected the individual’s discipline and obedience but it also contributed to the greatness of cities. According to Botero, the “commodity of learned schools” brings the young in pursuit of wealth, promotion, and honour to the cities a prerequisite to an individual’s liberty. Botero wrote: “Study is a matter of great labour, both of the mind and body… And therefore, it stands with good reason that all convenient privilege and liberty be granted unto scholars.”111 At the University of Paris, for example, Botero noted that the aim of scholarly work was not solely directed to industry and production but also to leisure and to the development of human spirit, mind, and body.112 Although Botero focused on the usefulness of knowledge, he did not assign particular ends to it. Botero emphasized that the power of the ruler resides in “valorous people, money victual, munitions, horses and weapons of attack and defence.”113 However, he stressed that although the ruler should manage his wealth and increase it, the accumulation of wealth should not be the end of government. Since people, money, and land are contributing factors, the aim is the proper management of these; their preservation means the preservation of the state. On numerous occasions throughout The Reason of State, Botero notes that the Prince shepherds his people by encouraging them through education and supporting them in various industries. It is not the soul and the afterlife but the “numerical strength of a people”114 that demands the attention of the ruler. An early economist, Botero advised the Prince to assist the poor, help the needy, and “provide employment for those who are able to work and means of subsistence for those who are not.”115 Botero’s state was no liberal state, nor was it a neo-liberal state in which the individuals were left to compete, manipulated by behavioural techniques and misinformation to secure National Domestic Growth while transnational corporations increased their dominion.

Humans as property  63 Political rationalities were derived from natural rights that were intermingled with divine laws. They were becoming dependent on a particular mode of reason and subject to systems of bureaucracy for the sake of the state. By the start of the 17th century, Skinner reports, a tension existed resembling the historical “accounts of Rome’s early transition from monarchical to consular government”: Roman Law had laid down, however, to depend on the will of another is what it means to be a slave. If you wish to preserve your freedom under government, you must therefore ensure that you institute a political order in which no prerogative or discretionary powers are allowed.116 Political arguments further pressed that the monarch ought to respect the will and desires of the people. The state ceased solely as a dominion of the monarch as property rights affirmed the scholastics’ conception of human making as an extension of God’s making. God creates man “after his own likeness, makes him an intellectual creation, and so capable of Dominion.”117 This gained wider expression in the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704), who argued for a theological conception in placing humans as “the middle link”118 between God and the rest of creation. 2.5 John Locke: liberating property Locke was writing in relation to the works of two influential predecessors, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Robert Filmer (1588–1653). Hobbes’ philosophy marked a distancing from theological conceptions of natural law. He is often credited for his scientific approach to moral theory based on observation of human behaviour. This he learned from his teacher, Francis Bacon (whose ideas will be examined later). In Hobbes’s writing, human nature is categorized, whereby “passions, characters, temperaments, intentions, and motives, become central interests. Knowledge of these phenomena is provided not by (traditional) philosophy, but by history.”119 The invocation of history served to construe a particular notion of human nature. Fear and pride were seen as sufficient motives for human behaviour; they also served as justifications for human submission to an overseeing authority. Hobbes’s natural laws are contingent to humans’ desires and “hope” for “peace,” but if they “cannot obtain it,” they “may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war [sic].”120 Hobbes renounced the tranquility of the Stoics in achieving happiness and the self-control required to maintain it. Ethics became a “science of passions”121 instead of a way of life. What continued to be at stake, as it had been for the scholastics, was the differentiation between right and law; in this, Hobbes saw liberty as a right that each person was obliged to protect. Rights became commodities

64  Humans as property governed by contracts “as in buying and selling with ready money; or exchange of goods, or lands: and it may be delivered some time after.”122 This notion of right anticipates human capital theory, as it eroded the Aristotelian notion of the human as political and rational. Fear also played an integral role in Hobbes’ liberal state that looks after securing itself by promising security to its people. “Fear, Hobbes first insists, is what prompts us to subject ourselves to government.”123 Not servitude by force but fear prompts individuals’ willingness to seek the protection of the state. In this manner, the state too becomes an economic agent in Hobbes’s conception of society. According to Bobbio, for Hobbes, “the state of nature becomes a faithful mirror of (private) economic relations, that it may appear as the idealized description of mercantile society.”124 Hobbes facilitated the transition of the Aristotelian notion of household as the nucleus of economic life to a type of society organizing relations of production and everything else relating to it. The conceptual model of natural law was reconstructed and with it “the distinction between domestic society and political society” and “the distinction between state of nature and civil society.”125 Although Locke revised the contractual rights of Hobbes, his main criticism was directed at Robert Filmer. In Two Treatises of Government, Locke refuted Filmer’s historical argument for monarchical paternalism and private dominion. Filmer’s book Patriarcha put forward that all evidence of human society came from the Bible. His interpretation proposed that God positioned Adam to naturally possess and populate the world, and by this, society as a family was descended from one man. Adam being the first authority had other implications besides the patriarchal values it established. First, “the concept of a free human being subject to no authority but his own will was absolutely impossible… All men were born unfree and unequal.”126 Second, Adam’s sons have lawfully inherited the private dominion of the world, and no other mode of property ever existed, except private property.127 This proposition, which constituted an absolute monarchy, rejected other forms of governance and postulated that the common laws of the political society did not derive from intellectual and rational agreements. They come from the King who is the “author, interpreter and corrector of the common law.”128 Filmer’s society was governed by the exercise of power as naturalized as unavoidable. Such a reasoning resembles modern behavioural economics: Because the people are inefficient decision-makers and quasi-rational economic agents to look after themselves, and because their superiors are constituted by scientism to look after their wellbeing, an exercise of power in designing choices for people is normalized. Modern paternalistic conventions of behavioural economists defend libertarians. Filmer defended the King. Filmer’s declarations represented an archetypal application of the use of divine law to the sovereign power. His natural law accommodated a familial hierarchy analogy to justify inequality.

Humans as property  65 In the face of Filmer’s argument “[t]that no man is born free,” Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, argued for “a right to natural freedom.”129 Locke began his objection to absolute monarchy by noting that the Princes do not have a divine right to absolute power. Scrutinizing Filmer’s analogies drawn from scripture to justify patriarchy and absolute dominion, Locke drew on natural law to argue that God constituted private dominion to all in place of making them dependent upon the will of one person or group for their subsistence.130 He did, however, accept that “Regal power is founded in property of land, and follows private dominion, and not in paternal power or natural dominion.”131 Locke’s challenge to paternalists of his time was aimed at claiming autonomy, freedom, and equality for the person and found the bases for its support in theology. “Locke’s natural law is a species of divine law,” Steven Forde explains, “for natural law to be natural rather than revealed, unassisted reason would have to be able to establish these underpinnings, the existence of the providential God it postulates.”132 Locke reconstructed the morality of selfpreservation as well as reward and punishment within this providential order. Locke’s moral theory positioned God as the ultimate administrator of reward and punishment, a position that delimited the authority of the state. In the civil government of Locke, the state of freedom and equality is shared by birth, “unless the lord and master of them all, should by any manifest declaration of his will set one above another.”133 This lord and master is God, and humans constitute his workmanship. The workmanship of God served as the model for moral relationships. And Locke thought that when humans’ “own preservation comes not in competition, … [he/she] tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb or goods of another.”134 Protection of human life in a society required placing liberty and health outside of the competitive markets. This was also emphasized by Dante: regardless of nobility, humans also have an animal-like nature, and their greed would have them “like horses, prompted to wander by their animal nature, not held in check ‘with bit and bridle’ on their journey.”135 For Locke, competition hinders the second law of nature: the preservation of the life of others. He was also clear that if one designed an argument for the exchange of political freedom for market competition, everything else is undermined. “He that in the state of nature, would take away the freedom, that belongs to any one in that state must necessarily be supposed to have a design to take away everything else.”136 This account differs from future economic monetary devaluation of human nature by a market mindset and technologies that would manipulate apprehension of freedom, both unfamiliar to Locke’s culture and time. Civil society was not to be established by competition but by laws that united individuals “for mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which,” Locke “call[ed] by the general name, property.”137 The

66  Humans as property referenced unity is reflected by human society as a collection of rational creatures who conduct themselves under the law. This, for Locke, was not conceived as a source of nationalism. According to Locke: “we are born free, as we are born rational; not that we have actually the exercise of either; age that brings one, brings with it the other too.”138 This rather developmental perspective complemented Locke’s evaluation of the individual when he wrote of labour and its associative values. According to Locke, “labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things.”139 Labour, associated with the notion of securing one’s industry, accompanied the right to own the product of one’s work. The role of law had political underpinnings: “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”140 The context here is that Locke was advising the monarch in establishing “laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of party will.”141 Industry is coupled with a right to transform nature into useful goods. While there is little to support the capitalist and individualistic conventions of profiting in Locke’s theory, in the next two chapters, I shall explore the ways in which industrial progress directed his political individualism towards economic individualism, including the commodification of human nature. In Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke claimed that the theory of nature is not some “inward moral principle written in our mind”—rather “reason and sense perception” make it possible “to teach and educate the minds of men [sic] and to provide what is characteristic of the light of nature.”142 Reason directs humans to inquire into nature and without the senses reason cannot apprehend anything. Meanwhile, sensory data by itself cannot discover or prove anything true and relies on reason’s operations, general principles, and axioms. Axioms are not matters of general consent; they are a set of beliefs, I add, helping humans to reinterpret their world in time and place. Locke’s rejection was aimed at Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) who argued that general consent served prior to natural law. Instead, relying on Aquinas, Locke claimed since self-preservation is the first law of nature, natural law is prior to consent.143 Secondly, Locke rejected the idea that self-interests can be taken as the basis of the law of nature. In doing so, he was defending natural law against the proposition that “living creatures are driven by innate impulse to seek their own interests,”144 reducing law to utility. He argued that natural law provided the standard and measure of creation for other laws, including human obligations beyond self-fulfilment. Locke’s thesis was later revised by François Quesnay and Adam Smith who insisted that self-interest was a functional element of economic governance. Noting that utilitarian laws bent towards constituting self-interest as the basis for moral judgement, Locke pointed to their insufficiency as a binding force in recognizing another’s needs. Utility and self-interest, together

Humans as property  67 and separately, cannot serve to protect private property, a concept that included, for Locke, human actions and rights. Utilitarian laws subordinate action and virtue to certain outcomes (ends) and thus limit human liberty at the start. Locke thought that “utility is not the basis of the law or the ground of obligation, but the consequence of obedience to it.”145 Promises and duties are of little relevance since as soon as they become hindrances they are recycled. This idea was associated with the rejection of a right to control the freedom of others based on social utility and/or individual welfare arguments. Although moral good in natural law is advantageous to the agent, an act cannot be morally good because it is advantageous.146 In this context, similar to Filmer, Hobbes, and Bentham, Locke accepted the state’s responsibility for security and happiness of people but added that these are conditions (not ends) that must be available to all. Altering someone’s action, liberty, and life then requires consent even if it were in service to their security and happiness. Tully explained: The condition that man can act in the state of nature without the consent of others is an analytical feature of natural liberty. It is met, without developing a Hobbesian state of war and without infringing the liberty of others, by deriving the range of liberty from natural law. Man’s [sic] freedom to act with respect to earthly provisions is the ‘Liberty to use them, which God has permitted’147 The natural condition of freedom is to be protected by laws. And protection of liberty and autonomy in human affairs discouraged misrule by those in power. Liberty and freedom rested on capacities for reflection and judgement. If there is a rational choice theory in Locke, it concerns the capacity to examine human will and desires as he worked under the Hobbesian justification for integration of desires in government. However, Locke’s notion of liberty rests not only on the ability to act freely in relation to what is desired but also to freely examine desires and to judge good and evil for oneself. If Locke is regarded as a proponent of individual choice, it is because he was an opponent of paternalism, the administration of individual choices by authorities. No scientific, political, or theological authority is justified to interfere with human reason and liberty to obtain their consent. When judgement and examination are hindered and manipulated by the authorities “the nearer we are to misery and slavery.”148 There is in Locke an objection to “hasty compliance to desires” and an advocacy of “moderation and restraint of passions,” together setting direction for conduct and “true happiness.”149 Happiness rests in the capacity for free examination—free in a sense that the will, thoughts, and actions are not elicited by manipulation. Free examination was a matter of care and effort, not utility,

68  Humans as property convenience, or efficiency. Locke acknowledged that free examination and true happiness are at the mercy of misinformation and lack of access to knowledge; they are also subject to the pain and pleasure inflicted by the self or another. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke developed the idea of freedom in relation to power in its active and passive forms. He approached power from two angles: to act and to forbear from an act. In this context, understanding, examination, and judgement protect humans against the settling of “irregular desires which custom has made natural to us” to attend to a “remoter absent good.”150 Locke warned: “Repeated trials often reconcile us to that which at distance was looked on with aversion, and by repetition wear us into a liking of what possibly, … displeased us [at first].”151 It is difficult to reject something that we ourselves practice. The ongoing actualization of certain practices and habits can, over time, limit human agency. For Locke, the liberty to forbear is an important part of freedom to choose one’s happiness. Here, happiness was not based on the notion of collective “greater good” and/or individualized pleasure.152 Making choices is not a signifier of rationality. They are equated with an exercise of freedom for the sake of individual autonomy from misrule, suggesting that a free person has the capacity for self-making. The necessary element of deliberation on choices and courses of action rested in aligning oneself with the workmanship of the creator. Liberty and freedom are not ideological tools but portals to self-actualization: “the idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind,” and this power is in accord with each person’s “volition”153 to be left un-manipulated. Locke’s position on liberty implied a broad definition of property, as he questioned the powers that defined the right to one’s self. The notion of property, public and private, was to extend and secure human freedom and civility. When it was referenced as one’s right to action and willingness, it was distinct from the ownership of physical goods. Capitalist conventions, such as integration of health and education within markets, undermined Locke’s notion of political self-ownership and autonomy.154 Three centuries after Locke, steeped in the logic of wealth accumulation as a good, Milton Friedman reconstructed Locke’s liberal ideals. Individuals are a form of property, thanks to Locke, and “investment in human capital [is] precisely analogous to investment in machinery, building or other forms of non-human capital.”155 This investment was to be made through an education that ensured there was an economic return on humankind. In the next chapter, I explore the history of approximation of humans and machines. For now, the distinction between human life and non-human is obliterated by the misuse of the notion of property. Friedman’s state is not the authority of civil society; its interventions were

Humans as property  69 justified so far as to remove obstacles, strengthen the operation of the markets, and ensure “the individual who received the training would in effect bear the whole cost.”156 Here, the person (not his/her labour) is analogous to an object, with no power to forbear either the cost or the investment logic applied to their education—Friedman’s logic moves humanity towards slavery. In contrast, Locke had not only placed humans above other species but he also claimed their work was analogous to God’s. For Locke, education was moral and developmental. It undid customs that hinder human power and freedom. There is no foreshadowing of a self that is directed by heuristics, standardized rubrics, and information processing machines to pass tests as 21st-century education compels. “Nature, not custom, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery” and “[t]he role of custom and habit in the breeding of children is to use those desires as motives, as well as to free the faculty of reason from the control of those desires.”157 Locke’s theology “grant[ed], that good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature,” he warned that, “misplaced reward and punishments sacrifice their virtue.”158 For Locke, there is no discipline without hope and fear, and disciplining comes by constant observation and correction so there would be little need for physical punishment. While Locke relied on shame and displeasure to keep the child in order, he emphasized, “children are to be treated as rational Creatures.”159 Here, hope and fear served as guiding curricular instruments for the internalization of expectations and the idealization of the rational human adult as the product of childhood. While advocating for play and leaving children to unrestrained activities, Locke developed a technology for correction of the child’s behaviours and inclinations. Parents were to observe their children, detect their natural dispositions, and intervene later. Idleness was to be corrected to cultivate the image of the child as a maker. The parents’ role was to direct the child’s desire towards goals that ensured development, for “where there is no desire, there will be no industry.”160 Locke objected to buying games for children. Purchased games “teach the mind to wander after change, and superfluity” and constitute a practice in “perpetually stretching itself after something more still, and never to be satisfied.”161 He continued to note that the point of play is not only variety but also the exercise of the will, so children “seek for what they want, in themselves, and in their own endeavours: whereby they will be taught moderation in their desires, application, industry, thought contrivance, and good husbandry.”162 This aspect of play engaged children with material life that had implications for developing political and economic habits. Education was not reduced to factual knowledge but also, as Locke cited Seneca, it was about learning how to live.163 For Locke, what was at stake was learning to govern oneself, adopting virtues that enable self-sufficiency. Education should foster the capacity

70  Humans as property to assess reality and to work towards self-improvement. Such education constituted an apprenticeship in freedom, actively developing dispositions while taking pleasure in learning, living in relation to an authority who is benevolent to liberty and understands liberty’s limits. Locke is a proponent of instilling reverence in the child by love and fear whereby authority becomes internalized through constant practice, producing habits of civility and respect. Locke noted there is something that children love more than liberty “and that is love of power and dominion,” the “two roots of almost all the injustice and contention, that so disturb humane life,” and these need to be “weeded out.”164 Possession, in particular, is a pleasing power to children seemingly giving them a right. The actual “right,” Locke emphasized, is the ability to abandon one’s possession as the exercise of liberty. By practice of such a right, children learn they have lost nothing from acts of “kindness,” and “good nature may be settled in them into habit, and they may take pleasure… in being kind, liberal and civil to other.”165 Locke emphasized that rules and duties were to be avoided for true learning to take place. If he had discouraged disciplining children by stressing duties, it was because comprehending right and wrong is insufficient for justice— justice can only be cultivated by improved reason and serious meditation. Locke did resort to punishment should shame prove insufficient to deter children from unjust possession of another’s property. Did Locke practice what he preached? 2.6 Liberty after Locke From the 17th century to the 20th century, English society entertained a number of partly competing and partly complementary approaches. Jonathan Clark explained that the providential orders survived during and after Locke: Filmer’s origin of government is exemplified everywhere: Locke’s scheme of government has not ever, to the knowledge of any body, been exemplified any where (sic). In every family there is government, in every family there is subjection, and subjection of the most absolute kind: the father, sovereign, the mother and the young, subjects. … Under the authority of the father, and his assistant and prime-minister (sic) the mother, every human creature is endured to subjection, is trained up into a habit of subjection.166 According to Clark, “Filmer’s use of patriarchy was intended to deny that naturally-generated social forms provided coherent and legitimate structures alternative to those of the State, and here Locke and most

Humans as property  71 Englishmen until the 1790s agreed.”167 Family was more than an anthropological notion but a proof for linear succession of masculine authority in homes, schools, church, state, and society. Gender, race, and class were embedded in the familial order that sanctified, trusted, and maintained power and knowledge for the elites in administering the body politic. Support is found in Bentham’s claim that, “in the language of the Aristocratic School, property and virtue are synonymous terms.”168 By a certain measure, Locke restructured this order but left open reason “as the capacity to obey law of private property” and those who do not follow the law placed themselves “into a state of war.”169 The global powers who prescribe and universalize the law of private property themselves do not obey it. They wage into the state of war as part of their imperialism. Locke’s notion of the state of nature was utilized against the Aboriginal peoples, as hunters and gathers (and therefore in the first economic stage), who presumably would benefit from systems of private property and commerce. Locke bypassed the law of private property. He even justified torture and murder. Tully quoted Locke: Since the Amerindians have no governments to deal with and no rights in their hunting and gathering territories, they violate the law of nature when they try to stop Europeans from settling and planting in America and Europeans or their government, may punish them as ‘wild Savage Beasts’ who ‘may be destroyed as a Lyon’.170 The discourse of divine right and property ownership further legitimized European violence during the 18th and 19th centuries when other cultures lacking constitutional government and systems of commerce unfamiliar to Europeans were deemed primitive. Locke and his like-minded contemporaries were possessive, incapable of obeying the law of private property. Their love of dominion rapidly moved through the stages of colonization from military forces to disciplinary techniques of schooling the Indigenous people by force and violence. Living in accord to nature contrasted with European theological commercial faith on private property and love for possession. Imperialistic expansion and land claims were based on “economic argument in the justification of planting European constitutional systems of private property and commerce around the world and in justifying the coercive assimilation of Aboriginal and other peoples.”171 Economic arguments often carried an air of theological humanism to improve the lives of Aboriginal peoples. Improvement was possible by land grabbing as well as military force and repressive discourse of development to align the Aboriginal people with the European ideals. Economic improvements often resulted in genocide and overrode the right to self-government.

72  Humans as property From the Aboriginal perspective, “the land they had lost was more than simply occupied by others. They had become defined by bundles of rights and values that were foreign to their ways.”172 Although Aboriginal people resist(ed) with humility and intelligence, the aggressors continue(d). Europeans utilized various strategies to demand conversion. In this context, the theological underpinnings of the universal European economic system of value become even more visible only when it comes against other forms. Consider the colonization of India, a place with diverse faiths, which, after centuries of trade with the Roman Empire, came to be subjected to Portuguese, Dutch, and British hegemony. The elites could reflect on Locke’s thoughts on property, liberty, and education and contemplate the divine rights they drafted for themselves, while destroying the lives of those they claimed as property. Hobbesian contractual rights, the missionaries, militaries, and schools continue to be in play in the global restructuring of value systems today. The subtext of modern globalization has embedded in it those theological and economic undertakings173 that historically installed a particular form of reason. Locke’s effort to balance individual freedom and the demands of political authority influenced the individualism of the 18th century. Locke’s individualism coincided with “emerging capitalist society” that “does not exclude but on the contrary demands the supremacy of the state over the individual.”174 Liberalism’s humanistic tenets offered a modality of the state authority that at once freed individuals and subjugated them to laws of private property.175 The construction of individuation as a response to absolute authority, by a way of discourse on property, served to safeguard freedom only for certain groups. The crucial point for Locke in any distribution of property is twofold: that everyone has the means necessary for comfortable subsistence; and that everyone is able to labour in, and enjoy the fruits of, his calling in a manner appropriate to man, and analogous to God’s activity as a maker.176 Such universal notions, Tully notes, neglected the equality of non-European people. The development of individual rights of ownership had implications for the particularities of the liberal state. Liberalism developed as both an economic and political ideology to assert the autonomy of the individual—defended by the state’s laws. The state did not obstruct freedom but utilized it for the frugal government. Modern liberalism reflected a triangulation of Hobbes’s economic sentiments, Filmer’s patriarchy, and Locke’s individualism. The notion of a person as property legitimized both chattel slavery and colonization in economic imperialism. Locke’s involvement with slave trading companies and his justification of the imperial system177 point to

Humans as property  73 the ideals he left behind. Locke was an “heir of Puritan rationalism,” and his rejection of the Christian state “was not to affirm the notion of secular state.”178 The economic logic that promoted violence, as natural, was imagined as preventing anarchic competition for resources at the dawn of political economy.179 The resources of African nations continue to be exploited by economically and militarily advantaged nations with their rationalizing contractual right theories, and the colonial aggression of Locke’s time strikes a resemblance to the colonial presence in the invasion of Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Examining the militarization of the Middle East, Derek Gregory points out that “the supposedly secular world of modernity had not triumphed over religion but, on the contrary, was now reaping the whirlwind of ‘God’s revenge’ in the form of global religious revivalism.”180 After the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Nel Noddings suggested that such disturbances found their trace in education181 endorsed by religious and economic extremism, nationalism, and support for violence. 2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom According to Siedentop, the papal claim to act as a sovereign authority in spiritual and temporal matters made individuals (souls) the unit of legal jurisdiction and initiated arguments for moral equality. “The example of the church as a unified legal system, found on the subjection of individuals, gave birth to the project of creating states.”182 The papal claim to plenitude of power also awakened the defence of the secular state and after Reformation led to the creation of nation-state as a sovereign authority. However, “[t]he Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life,” Max Weber explained, “but rather the substantiation of a new form of control for the previous one.”183 One element that Weber sets as central to the spread of Protestant ethics is the change in value of education, within homes and communities, towards administrative and industrial roles. Writing in the early 20th century, Weber noted that legal power “has in many respects grown weaker rather than stronger as compared with earlier conditions.”184 This decline has led to the realization that “legal guaranty by the state is not indispensable to any basic economic phenomenon.”185 Moreover, the disintegration of tradition has led to the state’s declining attention to fairness as market conventions give centrality to the concept of private interests and ownership. Here too, in relation to Locke, the modern state is reductionist in its approach to protecting the public by assuming that the protection of private interests and properties are sufficient for the constitution of civil justice. Thirdly, Weber observed that the “economic life by its very nature has destroyed those other associations which used to be the bearers of law and thus of legal guaranties.”186 As shown above,

74  Humans as property these transitions had psychosocial concomitants; legal rules became standard measures for subjective rights. Although Weber did not overlook legal factors, his “rigorous canons of factual objectivity in historical research” and his “emphasis on economic rather than formal legal factors” complicated understanding his aims.187 The progression of the state as a regulator of freedom minimized its power in the face of monopolistic capitalism, gradually relocating it within markets. Weber did not foresee the entrepreneurial state188 as a rational authority. The emphasis on property drove the Europeans’ rationality, installing imperial rule and legitimizing cultural hegemony by the way of modern constitutionalism. As later chapters demonstrate, the state became an active partner in economization schemes while science and technology informed reasoning about private and public. Initial discourses of ownership, rights, and freedom accompanied a discourse of active self-dispossession to ensure that personal freedom did not become reducible to another form of property and at the mercy of the economic sentiments of the elect. Over time, the conceptual frameworks of property allowed commercial practices to include human development as part of the economic system. As humans become defined, categorized, and treated in terms of property, they become ever more in need of protection against the possibility of being dispossessed. Notes 1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 118. 2 Ibid., 118. 3 Ibid., 119. Weber credited Puritanism with carrying “the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labour” found in modernity (p. 166). 4 Max Weber (1966) noted that across Europe “the military, judicial, and industrial authority was taken away from the cities. … The separate states had to compete for mobile capital, which dictated to them the conditions under which it would assist them to power. Out of this alliance of the state with capital, dictated by necessity, arose the national citizen class, the bourgeoisie in the modern sense of the word. Hence it is the closed national state which afforded capitalism its chance for development…” (p. 249). 5 Brian Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300–1475 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1970), 18. 6 Ibid., 29. 7 Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 115. 8 Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 6. 9 Ibid., 11. Tierney noted: “While, however, idleness was condemned and poverty was not automatically equated with virtue, there was no disposition to go to the opposite extreme and assume that a state of destitution was necessarily indicative of moral turpitude.” (p. 12).

Humans as property  75 10 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933). 11 James Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300–1300): Volume II, (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), 603. “The remedy for monastic corruption always was more Monks,” noted James Thompson, “[i]t rarely seems to have struck the medieval mind that perhaps the proper remedy was not more, but fewer monks.” Thompson showed the number of monasteries grew from 11 in 4th-century France to 710 in the 12th century. 12 Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300– 1300), 608. 13 Ibid., 622. 14 Ibid., 623. 15 Ibid., 627. 16 Robert B. Ekelund, Robert F. Hébert, and Robert D. Tollison, “An Economic Model of the Medieval Church: Usury as a Form of Rent Seeking,” Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 5, no. 2 (1989): 330. The authors noted that the “institutional framework of the medieval church provided many opportunities for rent seeking and created numerous problems of enforcement for ecclesiastic authorities” (p. 228). The monasteries often found a way around the bureaucratic and financial strains. 17 Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 226. “According to medieval doctrine, any interest charged for the loan of money was sinful,” this changed in the 13th century by the development of a money economy which influenced the social codes of the 12th and 13th centuries (p. 226). Tierney notes the “civilizing influence of the Church” in “warfare” and “business” (p. 226). 18 Harold Perkin, “History of Universities,” in International Handbook of Higher Education, ed. James J.F. Forest and Philip G. Altbach (Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 159. According to Perkin, the university went through five stages. With the first stage concerned with the “role in the destruction of the medieval world order at the reformation (12th century–1530s)” to the fifth stage concerned with “the transition from elite to mass higher education and the role of the university and its offshoots in post-industrial society (1945– present)” (p. 161). 19 John Willinsky, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 85. 20 Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). “They [merchants] had capital, extended credit and promoted their business through market research” (p. 124). 21 Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. James H. Burns (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 608. 22 Brian Tierney, The Crises of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 159. 23 Thomas M. Osborne, Human action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus & William of Ockham, (Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 2014), xvii. 24 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 275. 25 Ibid., 277.

76  Humans as property 26 Joseph Owens, “Aristotle and Aquinas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 44. 27 Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: God and the Order of Creation, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Hackett, 1997), 234. 28 Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality and Politics, ed. W.E. Baumgarth and R. J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 13–14. 29 Michel Villey, “Epitome of Classical Natural Law,” Griffith Law Review 9, no. 1 (2000): 82. 30 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I, QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Q. 96, 2. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 334. 31 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I, QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Q. 96, 4. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 331. 32 Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the language of Renaissance Humanism,” in The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 138. 33 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 105. 34 Ibid., 106. 35 Ibid., 112. 36 Henry Renard, “The Habits in the System of St. Thomas: Prologue,” Gregorianum 29, no. 1 (1948): 89. 37 Ibid., 97. 38 Nicholas Austin, Aquinas on Virtues: A Causal Reading (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2017). Austin drew on Nel Noddings’ philosophy of care in interpreting Aquinas: “Virtue, she [Noddings] says, ‘is built up in relation. It reaches out to the other and grows in response to others’” (p. 206). 39 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 122. Because nature and reason are not independent and innate, nor instruments, Aquinas suggested that one faculty (reason or intellect) by itself does not dominate the operative potency of humans. 40 Ibid., 126. Aquinas equates injustice to a mortal sin and contrary to charity (p. 142). 41 Janet Coleman, “Are There Only Individual Rights or Only Duties?” in Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Rights Discourse, ed. V. Mäkinen and P. Korkman (Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 8. 42 Ibid., 22. According to Coleman, Aquinas promoted a sense of autonomy to humans “as the master of his [her] own affairs” that stood in contrast to neoAugustinians tendency “to use recta ratio primarily as an authoritative communication to Christ’s vicars and not to all men” (p. 23). 43 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I, QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 137.

Humans as property  77 44 William W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 3. During the reign of Romans, the laws of manumission, contract, and debt were to establish a system of dependency to one’s master. Buckland showed that the legal system improved the relation between the Dominus (owner) and slave. 45 Ibid., 11. 46 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 110. 47 Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 226. This was based on the assumption that merchants “did not misrepresent their quality [of the goods] and had not distorted the market by creating an artificial scarcity through hoarding” (p. 226). 48 Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. James H. Burns (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 624. 49 Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” 624. This early orientation to liberality continued to be Platonic in considering the freedom of individuals within a community. 50 Ibid., 622. 51 Ibid., 622. 52 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 175. According to Aquinas, there are two kinds of losses: first, one is deprived from what he actually has lost and justice acts for repayment. The second kind is when one prevents another “from obtaining what he was on the way to obtain.” And in this “he is bound to make some compensation, according to the condition of person and things” (p. 175). This second loss is virtual or potential loss in which the profit and loss may have hindered another person in many ways. 53 John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 241. 54 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 453. While admitting the dangers of both isolating a single strand of Dante’s thought and reading into his work doctrines which, though perhaps impeccable all by themselves, could never have crossed his mind, it will be possible nevertheless to indicate a theme which illustrated Dante’s mode of apportioning theological thought to the secular world and which is inextricably intertwined with the duality of his fundamental concepts of mankind and man, and of man’s ultimate goals in this world and the other. (p. 454) 55 Dante Alighieri, Monarchy, trans. and ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Dante saw “since it is greed alone which perverts judgment and obstructs justice, it follows that he [the monarch] alone, or he more than anyone else, can be well disposed to rule” (p. 23). Because the monarch has this sober judgement, it was believed that God wanted the people to abandon their own judgement and accept him as an executor of the laws.

78  Humans as property 56 Ibid., 33. For Dante, “God wills in human society must be considered true and pure right” (p. 33). Roman’s nobility by race, their deserved rightful dominion of the world was affirmed by God’s judgement, since nature does not act contrary to God’s will. 57 Ibid., 58. 58 Ibid., 92–94. 59 Philip H. Wicksteed, Dante & Aquinas (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913), 134. While Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles had argued that human blessing rested in contemplation of God, Dante’s orientation to actualization of human potentials aimed at “spiritualizing of the secular order of things” (p. 134). 60 Ibid., 139. 61 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 455. See page 461–464 for the concept of Homo Optimus in relation to ethical, natural, and supra-natural goals. 62 Alfred J. Freddoso, “Ockham on Faith and Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 346. 63 Francis Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,” Natural Law Forum, 60, (1961). http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/60 64 Ibid., 59. 65 Ibid., 225–27. Ockham thought, “that merit is entirely a result of God’s choice” (227). 66 Thomas Aquinas cited in Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19. 67 Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law,” 70. 68 John Kilcullen, “The Political Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 308. 69 Annabel S. Brett, “Introduction,” in On the Power of Emperors and Popes, edited by Annabel S. Brett, 7–51(Virginia: Thoemmes Press, 1998), 17. 70 Kilcullen, “The Political Writings,” 309. 71 Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights-origins and Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2004): 9. 72 Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in Context (Boston: Brill, 2013), 225. Ockham “offer[ed] a richer account of what a license [to use] was and how it worked” and “Ockham’s version would be useful for maintaining the Franciscan desire to use goods licitly without any connected property right…” (p. 203). 73 Ibid., 374. 74 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 110–11. The Franciscan principle articulated “the idea of the life of Christ as model and image of life… [this] complete and total equation of rule and life of Christ [offered] a radical transformation in the way of conceiving both life and rule” (p. 99). 75 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The controversy continued “even into the early seventeenth century” (p. 20). 76 William Ockham, “Whether a Prince can Receive the Goods of the Church,” in Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-century England: Treatises by Walther of Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 166.

Humans as property  79 Ockham wrote, “for the sake of his own person… more special than others in need” the king has to be given access to “the goods of the church” (185). 77 Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, 133. 78 John Finnis (2011) agreed with Tierney in his objection to Villey: the “definition of ‘jus’ developed by Ockham can be seen from his definition of ‘jus utendi’”:“A jus utendi is a lawful power of using an external object; a power which one ought not to be deprived of against ones’ will except for fault or other reasonable cause; a power such that, if one is deprived of it, one can institute legal proceedings against the person so depriving one” (p. 228). 79 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 228. Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights-origins and Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2004):1–13. 80 Jonathan Robinson, “Ockham, the Sanctity of Rights, and the Canonists,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 31 (2014): 157. This may be due to interpreting St. Thomas’ argument that everyone has a right to the law’s equal treatment as everyone has the right to justice. Robinson continued to note that “modern conception of rights have lost sight of this connection to ‘ius,’ or confused it with ‘lex’ [the law]” (p. 157). This may be due to interpreting St. Thomas’ argument that everyone has a right to law’s equal treatment as everyone has right to justice, but in a modern individualized society, it also has led to personal notions of rights against the laws of civil society. 81 Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in Context (Boston: Brill, 2013), 318. 82 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life, 137. 83 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development, 29. 84 Ibid., 30. 85 Ibid., 30. 86 William Ockham, Philosophical Writings William of Ockham: A Selection, trans. Phiotheus Boehner (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 1990). 87 Joseph F. Rychlak, Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 268. In the domain of political theory, Tully (1980) noted Ockham’s position stood in contrast to “Bacon’s logic which would mitigate” scepticism and from Descartes’ argument “that the real essences of substances can be known” (p. 23). 88 Francis Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law,” 82. 89 Ibid., 83. Ockham’s writings contributed to the work of influential figures such as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Hobbes. 90 Jeffrey Fisher, “Gerson’s Mystical Theology,” in A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Boston: Brill, 2006), 223. “Gerson would like to retain affirmative and negative, affect and intellect, but in the context of their mutual relativity—a relativity based ultimately in a radically negative understanding of the mystical project. Gerson’s efforts in this respect reflect his typical pastoral concerns and his ‘conservative progressivism’” (p. 248). 91 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 148. 92 Ibid., 15. Gerson’s aims were educational: “In Gerson we see a more humanist approach to books and to reading, but in the service of preserving the orthodox teaching” (p. 15).

80  Humans as property 93 Yelana Mazour-Mauservich, “Gerson’s Legacy,” in A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Boston: Brill, 2006), 364. 94 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print, 218. At the outset of his book, Hobbins wrote: “My point here is not to overthrow the schoolmanhumanist opposition but to complicate it and to suggest that the standard view moves too rapidly from 1200–1500” (p. 20). 95 Ibid., 218. 96 John R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1994), 398. A combination of personal ambition for self-improvement at a time of enhanced but competitive job opportunities, and of the humanistic emphasis on education, meant that more pupils were in any case going to schools whose teaching methods became less lackadaisical. (p. 398) 97 Ibid., 416. 98 Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” 140/155–6. 99 Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). According to Bodin, despotic monarchy, like slavery, was a derogation from the law of nature usually arising from an act of conquest… Yet in admitting its legitimacy, Bodin observes that it is a kind of power that is liable to abuse, and that it is associated with barbaric times or place. (pp. 84–85) Franklin elaborated it is by the way of private property rights that Bodin explained some limitations to the exercise of absolutism with exception of punishment for crime. 100 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley (London: Routledge, 1956), 3. Botero praises Jean Bodin, who like Hobbes had extended .the role of absolute sovereignty. 101 Ibid., 21. Here, Botero did not disagree with Bodin’s proposal that the “Princes and other governors have an obligation not to inconvenience but to protect both ‘the subject in particular’ and ‘the whole bodies for the state’” (Skinner, 2010, p. 327) and to impose on the prince a responsibility to those who come under his rule. 102 Viroli Maurizio, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4. 103 Ibid., 9. 104 Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 314. Stacey cited Diderot: “It was very much the fault of the reading and not of Machiavelli, that they mistook ‘a satire for eulogy’” (p. 315). 105 Harald E. Braun, “Knowledge and Counsel in Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di Stato,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 270–89. 106 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. and ed. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley (London: Routledge, 1956), 34. Knowing “many things,” including “wide knowledge of all that pertains to human feelings and behaviour,” gains primacy in conceptualization of the ruler (p. 34).

Humans as property  81 07 Ibid., 34–38. 1 108 Ibid., 67. 109 Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 154. Veyne elaborated that [t]he governed is too vague a term, and it does not exist as an entity…. The object [of reason of the state] is only the correlative of the practice; prior to practice there exists no eternal governed that could be targeted more or less accurately and with respect to which one could modify one’s aim so as to improve it. (p. 155) 10 Botero, The Reason of State, 192. 1 111 Giovanni Botero, The Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency and Greatness of Cities, trans. and ed. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley (London: Routledge, 1956), 251. 112 Ibid., 252. 113 Botero, The Reason of State, 131. 114 Ibid., 153. 115 Ibid., 156. 116 Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2010): 344. 117 James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 37. 118 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 186–91. Lovejoy cited John Locke and William Petty who conceived that between God and humans might be other creatures more intelligent than humans. The “link” was based on the “spiritual beings and successive hierarchies above human” (p. 190). 119 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 108. Strauss found in Hobbes: there is no real good outside sensual goods and the means to acquire them. Even science—however great the pleasure it may afford the individual—has no other publicly defensible aim than the increase of human power and human well-being. Well-being is achived mainly by labour and thrift. The gifts of nature are less important for its acquisition than trade and industry. (p. 119) 20 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1962), 67. 1 121 Donald Rutherford, “In Pursuit of Happiness: Hobbes’s New Science of Ethics,” Philosophical Topics 31, no. 1/2 (2003): 369–93. 122 Hobbes, Leviathan, 69. 123 Quentin Skinner, “On the Liberty of the Ancient and the Moderns: A Reply to my Critics,” Journal of History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 134. 124 Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. Daniela Gobetti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13. 125 Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, 13–14. 126 Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 12. The state of the Middle Ages was gradually separating its reliance from the church by other analogies. And family is upheld as an example to define the domestic

82  Humans as property obedience for the patriarchal state of Robert Filmer and his contemporaries: Bellrmine, Suarez, Arnisaeus, and Grotius (p. 27). The idea had its root in ancient Greece. 127 Ibid., 12. 128 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 106. 129 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 160. 130 Locke was aware of the equivocity of the Latin terms such as ius and dominium, according to Tully (1980), who noted Locke’s notion of property in its broad sense was in line with scholastics’ conception of property as a “right to something which belongs to all” (p. 60). Locke follows Aquinas by affirming that natural law is given by God; it applies to all human beings. 131 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 216. Natural dominion is referred to human access directed by reflection and reason, a right “to make use of those things that were necessary or useful to his [their] being” (p. 223). 132 Steven Forde, “Natural law, Theology, and Morality in Locke,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (2001), 397. 133 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 287. 134 Ibid., 289. 135 Locke is affirmative of Dante’s observation that humans need “two guides,” worldly and spiritual. They are guides not controllers—see Monarchy (p. 92). Tully (1980) observed for Locke “[m]oney disrupts the natural order,” government is required to reconstitute this order and bring human action inline with God’s intentions (p. 154). 136 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 297. 137 Ibid., 368. A few pages later, Locke wrote of the legislative powers that look after properties, peac,e and safety of the society by the positive laws they established and they too are governed by the fundamental natural law of preserving the society (p. 374). 138 Ibid., 326. 139 Ibid., 314. 140 Ibid., 324. 141 Ibid., 316. 142 John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 147. Here, Locke drew from both natural law and natural right theorists. 143 Ibid., 161. Locke added “the power of custom and opinion based on traditional ways of life is such as to arm men even against their own selves, so that they lay violent hands upon themselves and seek death as eagerly as others shun it” (p. 173). 144 Ibid., 205. 145 Ibid., 215. 146 Ibid., 215. Locke wrote, “the rightness of an action does not depend on its utility, on the contrary, its utility is a result of its righteousness” (p. 215). 147 Tully, A Discourse on Property, 128. Does this “liberty to use” give human beings a right to use other human being? Not in Locke but see Chapter 5 and the conclusion. 148 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (New York: Dutton, 1968), 218.

Humans as property  83 149 Ibid., 221. “Free examination” and “care and endeavour” are Locke’s phrases (pp. 220–22). 150 Ibid., 216. 151 Ibid., 232. 152 Locke had noted earlier in his Essay that although some pleasures (for example, security) are commonly held, there is great variety in finding certain things agreeable among each person. The greatest good rests in the condition in which humans exercise their judgement and experience whether they find pleasure in excess of eating and drinking or in study and moderation. 153 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 197. 154 Harry Braveman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). Braveman highlighted that the notion of freedom and equality became slowly absorbed in “social division of labour” in 18th century’s revision and uptake of Locke’s civil society (pp. 72–75). 155 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 100. 156 Ibid., 105. If the government is to intervene and subsidies are provided, it should play a contractual role to ensure returns are repaid by taxation. 157 John W. Yolton and Jean Yolton, “Introduction,” in Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 23. 158 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke, ed. W. John and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 114–15. 159 Ibid., 115. Locke explained the need of open air, exercise, sleep, clothing, and diet before he turned to education as a way of caring for “Children’s mind” and the idea that children must be treated with “dignity and excellency of a rational creature” (p. 103). 160 Ibid., 188. 161 Ibid., 191. 162 Ibid., 192. 163 Ibid., 157. While Locke’s concern was the training of the sons of “gentlemen,” their education would prove to be useful also to those around them. 164 Ibid., 164. 165 Ibid., 170. 166 Jonathan C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832. Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 174. 167 Ibid., 175. The French and American Revolution and the transformation of Patriarchal state to multi-layered bureaucracy centred on individual freedom were facilitated by the control over information production by the elites. 168 Ibid., 178. 169 John McMurty, Value Wars: The Global Market vs. the Life Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 66. 170 James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73. 171 Ibid., 75. 172 Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94, no.1 (2004): 177–78. 173 David G. Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2006).

84  Humans as property 174 Crawford B. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 256. 175 According to Locke (1967) humans “give up all their natural power to the society which they enter into, and the community put the legislative power into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed by declared laws, or else their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the same uncertainty, as it was in the state of nature” (p. 377). 176 Tully, A Discourse on Property, 169. 177 William Uzgalis, “John Lock, Racism, slavery and Indian Lands,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2018). Uzgalis explained that, Locke’s legitimate and illegitimate theoretical constructs of slavery and his “extraordinary involvement with the slave trade” and colonial administration reflects a contradiction in Locke and some of his contemporaries (p. 29). See also Brad Hinshelwood, “The Carolinian context of John Locke's theory of Slavery,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 562–90. 178 Winthrop S. Hudson, “John Locke: Heir of Puritan political Theorists,” in Calvinism and the Political Order, ed. by George L. Hunt (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 196), 127. “In the one realm God was known through the light of nature that was common to all mankind. In the other realm, God was made known in Christ, an apprehension peculiar to the elect” (p. 127). 179 David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27. 180 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 56. 181 Nel Noddings (2011), in her examination of American culture, noted that “there is a surprisingly large volume of literature on peace education. However, not much of it appears in the standard school curriculum, and we are left to wonder where it would fit” (p. 141). 182 Ibid., 221. 183 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, 36. 184 Weber, On Law in Economy and Society, 37. 185 Ibid., 39. 186 Ibid., 39–40. 187 In his introduction to Weber’s Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons differentiates Weber’s approach to economic history from Karl Marx. 188 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2015). The triumph of financial market over commercial market has left “risk taking” to be “an increasingly collective endeavour… while the returns have been much less collectively distributed” (p. 195).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Alighieri, Dante. Monarchy. Translated and edited by Prue Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Humans as property  85 Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Part I, QQ. CIII-CXIX. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1922. Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ. XLVII-LXXIX. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929. Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I, QQ. LXXV –CII. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938. Aquinas, Thomas. On Law, Morality and Politics, edited by W.E. Baumgarth and R. J. Regan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Aquinas, Thomas. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: God and the Order of Creation, edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Hackett, 1997. Austin, Nicholas. Aquinas on Virtues: A Causal Reading. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2017. Bobbio, Norberto. Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition. Translated by Daniela Gobetti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Botero, Giovanni. The Reason of State. Translated and edited by P. J. and D. P. Waley, 3–224. London: Routledge, 1956a. Botero, Giovanni. The Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency and Greatness of Cities. Translated and edited by P. J. and D. P. Waley, 227–80. London: Routledge, 1956b. Braun, Harald E. “Knowledge and Counsel in Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di stato.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 270–89. https://doi. org/10.1163/22141332-00402007. Braveman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Brett, Annabel S. “Introduction.” In On the Power of Emperors and Popes, edited by Annabel S. Brett, 7–51. Virginia: Thoemmes Press: 1998. Buckland, William W. The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908. Coleman, Janet. “Dominium in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Political Thought and Its Seventeenth-century Heirs: John of Paris and Locke.” Political Studies 33, no. 1 (1985): 73–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1985.tb01562.x. Coleman, Janet. “Are There Only Individual Rights or Only Duties?” In Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Rights Discourse, edited by V. Mäkinen and P. Korkman, 1–34. Netherlands: Springer, 2006. Coleman, Janet. “Property and Poverty.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, edited by James Henderson Burns, 607–48. London: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Robert Filmer. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer. Edited by Peter Laslett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1949. Finnis, John. Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press,1998.

86  Humans as property Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fisher, Jeffrey. “Gerson’s Mystical Theology.” In A Companion to Jean Gerson, edited by Brian Patrick McGuire, 205–48. Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2006. Forde, Steven. “Natural Law, Theology, and Morality in Locke.” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (2001): 396–409. https://doi.org/10.2307/2669348. Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Freddoso, Alfred J. “Ockham on Faith and Reason,” in The Cambridge companion to Ockham, edited by Paul Vincent Spade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1994. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1962. Hobbins, Daniel. Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Kilcullen, John. “The Political Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, edited by Paul V. Spade, 302–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Laslett, Peter. “Introduction.” In Ptriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, edited by Peter Laslett, 1–48. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949. Locke, John. Essays on the Law of Nature, edited by W. von Leyden. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by John W. Yolton, New York: Dutton, 1961. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke. Edited by John W. and Jean S. Yolton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Lopez, Robert S. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Maurizio, Viroli. From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Mazour-Mauservich, Yelana. “Gerson’s Legacy.” In A Companion to Jean Gerson. Edited by Brian Patrick McGuire, 357–99. Boston: Brill, 2006. Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2015. Noddings, Nel. Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Oakley, Francis. “Medieval theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition.” Natural Law Forum 60, no. 1 (1961): 63–83. https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/60

Humans as property  87 Ockham, William. Philosophical Writings William of Ockham: A Selection. Translated by Phiotheus Boehner. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 1990. Ockham, William. On the Power of Emperors and Popes. Translated by Annabel S. Brett. Durham: Thoemmes Press, 1998. Ockham, William. “Whether a prince can receive the goods of the Church.” In Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-century England: Treatises by Walther of Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham. Edited by Cary J. Nederman, 153–97. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. Osborne, Thomas M. Human action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus & William of Ockham. Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 2014. Owens, Joseph. “Aristotle and Aquinas.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, 38–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999a. Perkin, Harold. “History of Universities.” In International Handbook of Higher Education. Edited by James J.F. Forest and Philip G. Altbach, 159–205. Netherlands: Springer, 2007. Renard, Henry. “The Habits in the System of St. Thomas: Prologue.” Gregorianum 29, no. 1 (1948): 88–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23569757. Robinson, Jonathan. William of Ockham's Early Theory of Property Rights in Context. Boston: Brill, 2013. Rutherford, Donald. “In Pursuit of Happiness: Hobbes’s New Science of Ethics.” Philosophical Topics 31, no. 1/2 (2003): 369–93. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/43154419. Rychlak, Joseph F. Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Skinner, Quentin. “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism.” In The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Anthony Pagden, 123–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2010): 352–70. Skinner, Quentin. “On the Liberty of the Ancient and the Moderns: A Reply to my Critics.” Journal of History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 127–46. doi:10.1353/ jhi.2012.0010. Stacey, Peter. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Strauss, Leo. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Thompson, James Westfall. Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300– 1300): Volume II. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966. Tierney, Brian. Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Tierney, Brian. The Crises of Church and State 1050–1300. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

88  Humans as property Tierney, Brian. Western Europe in the Middle Ages 300–1475. New York: Knopf, 1970. Tierney, Brian. “The Idea of Natural Right-origin and Persistence.” North-western Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2004): 1–12. https://scholarly commons.law.northwestern.edu/njihr/vol2/iss1/2. Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Tully, James. A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Uzgalis, William. “John Lock, Racism, Slavery and Indian Lands.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. Edited by Naomi Zack, 21–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Veyne, Paul. “Foucault Revolutionizes History.” In Foucault and His Interlocutors. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson, 146–82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Villey, Michel. “Epitome of Classical Natural Law.” Griffith Law Review 9, no. 1 (2000): 74–97. Weber, Max. General Economic history. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New York: Collier Books, 1966. Weber, Max. On Law in Economy and Society. Edited by Max Rheinstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. Westfall, Richard S. “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.” In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity. Edited by David C Lindberg and Ronal L. Numbers, 218–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Wicksteed, Philip H. Dante & Aquinas. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913. Willinsky, John. The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

3 Human-God-Machine

The notion of property played a central role in conceptualizing human alterity and rationality. Property had ontological implications in the age of conquest. The promise of missionaries to the Aboriginal people, dispossessed from their way of life, was to make them human. “In the JudeoChristian tradition, human nature was treated not as a fact or as a bundle of potentialities, but as a problem.”1 Colonization and commercialism led by the Europeans made property part of the mental furniture of humanity. “Property makes capital ‘mind friendly,’” de Sato Polar has stated, and “capital results from the ability of the West to use property systems to represent their resources in virtual context.” Only then “can minds meet to identify and realize the meaning of assets for humankind.”2 Certain conventions of property strengthened the grip of control for those who made claims on knowledge to unleash a particular truth about human nature. Truth-making about human nature intensified instrumentalization of faith, myths, and procedures by modern science. The scientific desire to know did not deviate from religious approaches. It broadened its techniques to define, refine, and minister Nature. European Enlightenment conceived liberty as a matter of acting in the natural world, by no means was the surrendering of religion possible. For the Enlightened thinkers, “light was not just an attainment of individual minds; it was something to be disseminated through collective activity. They were concerned with the transformation of social practices and institutions through knowledge—with putting knowledge to work.”3 Putting knowledge to work meant putting bodies to work. The ideas of autonomy, happiness, freedom, and responsibility became embedded in scientific interpretations and organizations of human activity. According to Lloyd, there were “conceptual shifts with regard to providence” rather “than a succession competing definitions of a unitary idea.”4 As the ideas of providence underwent reconfigurations, the conception that we ourselves were in possession of divine substance and connected to universal reason

DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-4

90 Human-God-Machine gradually made room for other analogies. Such analogies often animated human agency and activity in the world by the desire for knowledge. 3.1 The divine and the artificial life According to John Watson, the ancient religions continued to inform Christians as they appropriated certain myths. For example, Philo of Alexandria (20 BC to 40 CE) elaborated on the conception of God as a creator by the analogy of God as an architect. It was not that God was a human creation— even though Philo’s analogy implied as much. Presumably, humans were made “after the image of God,” not in the “sense that man shares in a measure the nature of God, but in the sense that man is a copy of the ideal man, which, like the whole ideal world is a product of Divine Reason [sic].”5 The activity of God is impressed upon the visible universe. It is this impression that may become knowable to humans. For Philo, God is diffused in time and space—although he “is above both”—and his “creative will is manifested in every part of his creation,” as his “infinite goodness” is communicated to “the finite as much as it is able to conceive it.”6 The ancient Greek method of allegory was appropriated by Philo in a new way that rejected the “modern distinction between scientific and religious truth, … the world is first produced in the Divine Mind, and is thus the archetype of the visible universe.”7 Philo drew from the Jews, Palestinians, and Alexandrians who conceived of God as transcending all finite existence. Humans were to contemplate His nature. It was impossible to know God. Philo’s conceptualization of God as an architect, “upon the analogy of a human artist,”8 was reworked by St. Paul to say that while the nature of God is unknown it reveals itself. After Philo, patristic fathers reflected on Imago Dei and the Incarnation through Platonic ideas and forms. Gregory of Nyssa’s Making of Man outlines the distinctions “between mind and body, spiritual and material,” making the claim that humans have been “created to be ruler and beholder of the divine manifestation in the universe.”9 The mind, not the soul, gradually became the primary mover of man. This shift reflected a reality when human life was conceived as having been created to behold and enjoy the world. However, asceticism asserts that mind and body are not separate dualities. “Just as a musician depends on the form of his instrument for the production of his music,” humans rely on “bodily parts to be a rational animal,” Hudson explains, referencing Gregory that giving the mind “selfexpression through the body is evidence of an understanding of the unity of the mind and the body, intellectual and physical existence that anticipates the philosophy and psychology of a later age.”10 In Gregory’s historical context, these attempts to define the scope of human agency were not for the purpose of self-gratifications but in service of attunement to the nature of God.

Human-God-Machine  91 Human apprehension of God would be achieved by grace and not by intellect. According to Lossky, the “Fathers of the Church, … agreed in seeing a certain co-ordination, a primordial correspondence between the being of man and the being of God in the fact of creation of man in the image and likeness of God” but took different paths in expressing this truth.11 For example, St. Augustine takes as his starting point the image of God in man and attempts to work out an idea of God, by trying to discover in Him that which we find in the soul created in His image. The method he employees is one of psychological analogies applied to the knowledge of God, to theology. On the other hand, St. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, starts with what revelation tells us of God in order to discover what it is in man, which corresponds to the divine image. This is a theological method applied to the knowledge of man, to anthropology. The first way seeks to know God by starting from man created in His image; the second wishes to define the true nature of man by starting from the idea of God in whose image man has been created.12 Later, when discussing the notion of divine light, Lossky clarified that “union with God is a mystery worked out in the human persons,” enabled by “awareness” and “growth in consciousness.”13 Those in power dictated to what ends this mystery could be oriented and by what means it can be operationalized so that some humans govern their own kind. In Catholic doctrine, the primitive Church—having no claim over repentance—gradually changed its practices from the 6th century onward. According to Henry C. Lea, St. Augustine’s “vaguest possible conception of what was the nature of [the] mysterious power”14 left open the delegated power of the Catholic Church to conceptualize confession as a key to knowledge and sacerdotal control. Lea asked: Who can deny that Catholic theology is a progressive science, and who can predict what may be its ultimate development? Yet the satisfaction with which modern teachers may well regard their conquests over the infinite must be tempered with regret that for the greater part of its existence the Church misled the faithful as to the extent of the gifts bestowed upon it by God.15 Lea elaborated that this science managed by the scholastics maintained “human impotence in its attempt to act for the Omnipotent” while it was “conducive to the peace of mind of those who paid money or mortification for salvation.”16 God’s judgements were made irrespective of the action of the priests. Objective facts ruled medieval society as people accepted the

92 Human-God-Machine active function of another human being in penance. In mystical practices, God was the archetype of a desired self-determining agent breathing life into spiritual and material bodies. What God did was deemed natural; what humans did was follow His archetype. These symbolic–mystical aspirations gradually translated obtaining mastery over oneself to obtaining mastery over nature—including human nature—owing this too, to inferences made based on the archetype of God and His exercise over his dominion. Prior to Gnosticism and Christianity, gods were artificers with supernatural abilities. These higher powers made their existence knowable in myths and stories of transformations of the inanimate and the animate. Although the exact nature of artefacts varied—divine or human, imagined or real, magical or technological—they all dealt with hybrid entities. I am drawing from Kang’s documentation of Daedalus, the architect of Labyrinth and the creator of Homeric automaton, Minotaur, half-man halfbull. Daedalus was “as famous for his construction of self-moving statues as he was for his winged escape from the labyrinth of King Minos.”17 Kang noted that the image of Daedalus persisted in time, was reactivated in the late Middle Ages, and played a role in setting in motion the arts and sciences of the Renaissance. “The persistent use of the automaton for conceptual purposes” during the 14th to 16th centuries “points to two major continuities: the elevation of mechanics as a respectable field of scholarship and the further elaboration of the experimental methodology in the study of nature.”18 During the scientific revolution, the word machine, derived from mechanics (relating to manual labour), was established in direct opposition to the magical and preternatural conceptions of automaton. The gradual transformation of “the artificial wonders” and their separation from myth, theology, and magic during the late medieval period highlights their “significant intellectual role in the early modern period” and their “direct and indirect” influences in “mathematics, mechanics, [and] natural philosophy” as well as in the literature of the Enlightenment.19 Daedalus affirmed another dimension of human consciousness. “He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods.”20 Was this interpretation of Daedalus, accepting science as separate from the God the West knew? “The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus, as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission and proud of it”; John Haldane explained: Christianity has the “most flexible morals of any religion” and since “Jesus left no code of law,” “a loophole has been left for moral progress” which did not exist “in other religions.”21 Writing after Darwin, Haldane’s statement confirmed that mythology and religion continued to play a role in directing and reforming morality

Human-God-Machine  93 even though the scientific workers were presumably not concerned with God or gods. The gap between the symbolic–mystical aspirations and literal–scientific endeavours, reflects a “partial dichotomy between technology and mysticism.”22 They were interwoven when desires to achieve “technical mastery” of nature became desires “to become as one of the gods, … transcending” both matter and the self.23 It had been ancient civilizations that taught medieval scholars about the existence of (real or fictional) objects that brought humans to awe and wonder. The possibilities of selfmoving artefacts developed and were sustained in the face of theological rejection of sorcery and magic. However, from the beginning of Western thought a notion has persisted that if one grants life, even a semblance of it, to what began as a lifeless thing, there is always a possibility that it will go beyond one’s control, to flee or to revolt, Kang noted that “Adam and Eve disobeyed their creator, and many of their descendants went on to defy, offend and challenge God.”24 Paradoxically, the desire for revolt concerns human’s likeness to God. Humans defy Him so as to breathe life into the inanimate. The mystical approach offered intervening conceptual links of the capacity to “animate lifeless matter using the spirits—benevolent and malevolent—of the universe: this is the accomplishment attributed to ancient Egyptian priests, who brought statues to life.”25 The West’s conception of automata is also indebted to the Eastern science. The earliest documentation of the man-made automation was that of the Philo of Byzantium (280–220 BC) who, inspired by the Iliad, “invented an automaton in the form of a woman who served wine.”26 The creation of self-moving objects resembling the work of human beings had political and economic implications. Aristotle thought that “servitude might be abolished, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in anticipation of the need.”27 The conception of servitude based on labour did not mean the desire to exert power over others would disappear if labour disappeared. The ambiguities in the Aristotelian theory of slavery left open the use of bodies to the master. The body of the slave acted as an extension of the body of the master. “The body of the slave is situated in a zone of indifference between the artificial instrument and the living body”; in the context of the Aristotelian philosophy, the slave “is the human being without work who renders possible the realization of the work of the human being, that living being who, though being human, is excluded—and through this exclusion, included in humanity….”28 The “use” of the body did not belong to “a productive nor a praxis but neither assimilable to the labour of moderns.”29 Agamben’s distinctions supplement Mayer’s insight that the ancients were also thinking of artificial devices to replace the

94 Human-God-Machine human slave. However, a value on humanity existed by the distinction of being born not made.30 Today, being born may no longer grant sufficient cause of differentiation. In her book In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Man, Maureen Caudill noted that we have given birth to artificial intelligence in the 20th century that can see, hear, remember, speak, reach, learn, and sense the world. Caudill suggested that today it is the soul, not the ability to give birth, that separates humans from their metallic children. If the difference between living and nonliving is the ability to reproduce, then what do genetic algorithms modelling asexual reproduction portend? “Genetic algorithms” enable “adaptation of a system to an environment,” evolving over the course of generations.31 The distinction between human and other selfministering entities no longer occupies the realm of myths and magic. Twenty-first-century self-learning machines are directing the potentials and problems of human life. Artificial intelligence is changing the scope and boundaries of machines’ capacity to learn and teach. Caudill is cognizant that “economic, legal, political and social pressures” need to be “exerted to keep our creations as property rather than as partners who share our world,” while nonetheless acknowledging the self-making machines are able to “redefine the measure of human species.”32 Caudill suggests that considering ourselves as creatures with souls can distinguish us from our creations. The soul was a relevant concept, in ancient Greek civilizations, at the time when Heron of Alexandria (10–70 BC) expanded on the work of Philo of Byzantium, and when the Alexandrian school and later the Muslim scholars, such as Ismail Al-Jazari (1136–1206), contributed to the design of the self-moving objects. As the automaton moved from myth to reality, attention to human soul diminished. Automata enabled the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world’s advances in military, art, and luxury. Introducing and incorporating the intellectual frameworks of Persian, Sanskrit, and Hebrew traditions had a double effect. While the produced power over natural forces and advancement in material wealth was desirable, “automata originated in a place that Latin Christians viewed with a mixture of envy and suspicion.”33 According to Truitt, 12th and 13th ­century fictional and factual manifestations of the automata did not privilege mechanical knowledge. But “[b]y the middle of the fourteenth century, artisans and engineers began to create richly ornamented self-moving machines that incorporated human and animal figures as centerpieces for courtly pageantry for the glory of the Church.”34 Truitt acknowledged the contribution of the Muslim scholar Al-Jazari to mechanics. Al-Jazari’s invention of the mechanical water clocks was transported to Christian monasteries. The clocks reinforced an orderly life and regulated the monk’s daily routine.

Human-God-Machine  95 Mechanical objects forced the Latin West to reflect on natural laws and to interrogate human identity and actions. Truitt referenced the influence of the 13th-century empiricist, Roger Bacon (1214–1292). In his Discovery of the Miracle of Art and Nature, Roger Bacon had written of moving ships and flying machines as well as of the technologies that led to the creation of telescopes. Bacon’s conception of astral science disclosed a form of knowledge man-made with the ability to harness celestial forces to powerful ends. Further attempts to make the inanimate speak were made by scholastics such as Robert Grosseteste and Albertus Magnus.35 The creation and possibility of the existence of these objects, although at times associated with sorcery and fiction, gradually found acceptance in the arts and mathematics of the Renaissance. The transition from the workmanship done by scholastic magicians to that of scientists expresses that “the attractive as well as disturbing power of the automaton is derived from its capacity to go beyond mere representation.”36 For the scientifically minded early Renaissance scholars, giving representations autonomy continued to be considered idolatry. However, the utility of knowledge gradually overruled this concern. “Puritans judged the study of nature to be an act of worship, revealing the glory of the Creator,” Lindberg explains, “[t]hey believed that one might also glorify God by engaging in utilitarian activities that would contribute to the material betterment of the human race.”37 Devotion to utilitarian activities became one of the hallmarks of Puritanism, Lindberg suggests, as Christianity and science became more intertwined in 17th-century Europe. The “idea of the Divine Architect, who created a smoothly running world machine and left to itself, was more appealing theologically than the image of a Divine Repairman, forced from time to time to fix his imperfect creation.”38 During the scientific revolution of 17th and 18th centuries, natural forces became increasingly subject to human-centred interpretations that encourage human interference and control in the world. Fragments such as the following by Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) provide examples of how scholars, bishops, and clergies began to conceptualize (human) nature: Such is the dependence amongst all the orders of creatures; the animate, the sensitive, the rational, the natural, the artificial; that the apprehension of one of them, is a good step towards the understanding of the rest. And this is the highest pitch of the human reason… This is truly to command the world; to rank all the verities and degrees of things so orderly upon one another; that standing on the top of them, we may perfectly behold all that are below, and make them all serviceable to the quiet and peace and plenty of Man’s life. … thereby to look the nearer into heaven; an ambition, which though it was punished in the old

96 Human-God-Machine World by an universal confusion, when it was managed with impiety and insolence; yet, when it is carried on by that humility and innocence, which can never [be] separated from true knowledge; when it is designed, not to brave the creator of all things, but to admire him the more; it must needs be the utmost perfection of human nature.39 Among all the creations in the first sentence, the presence of the artificial is noteworthy. The boundaries for perfecting human nature needed both ambition and humility in the conceptualized scientific “command.” The telos continued to be accompanied by recognition that the human place in nature is not by choice—affirming the human being’s likeness to other animals. However, the pursuits of happiness began to be defended in terms of the future as human beings made nature serviceable to themselves. Sprat was acquainted with John Wilkins, the author of the Mathematical Magick: Or the Wonders that May Be Performed by the Mechanical Geometry, a two-volume text, the first of which began by acknowledging the Greek mathematician, Archimedes. At the outset, Wilkins categorized human studies of divine, natural, and artificial knowledge. From the mechanical powers of the wheel, lever, and screw, Wilkins demystified the construct of primitive engines. In the second book of Mathematical Magick, called Daedalus, Wilkins discussed fixed and movable automata as well as the utilization of wind for movement. The English churchmen were writing of new desires for applications of knowledge. Wilkins and Sprat were working under the shadows of Francis Bacon and René Descartes’ proposed methods of inquiry informed by faith. Bacon got to God through Nature. Descartes got to Nature through God. Their approaches were supplemented by a shift in the study of mechanics at the time of Galileo. “Whereas throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages mechanics was the science of artificial objects, that is, objects fabricated by human beings to force nature to act in mankind’s service,” Hadot observed: [W]ith Galileo, physics and mechanics began to be definitively identified. On the one hand, mechanics consists in application of the laws of nature, and on the other, in order to study nature, Galilean physics made use of the calculations and mathematical notions that ancient mechanics used to build artificial objects. The scientist therefore operated like an engineer, who had to reconstruct the gears and functions of the machine known as Nature.40 The new modality of scientific endeavour claimed to extend the religious ambivalence towards nature by a new methodical approach. For Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, the theological standing that on the one hand

Human-God-Machine  97 advocated the imitation of God and on the other hand located humans in a separate realm than His, encouraged human desire for participation in creation. This was the condition for the realization of modern science. In reflecting on “the rise of science and the decline of Orthodox Christianity,” Richard Westfall noted that “the central events of the sixteenth century, the Reformation and all that flowed from it, lead irresistibility to the conclusion that ‘Christian’ continued to be the single most suitable adjective to describe European civilization when the seventeenth century opened.”41 Such self-conscious endeavours diverge from ancient and scholastic conceptions of science but did not deviate far from the deism that justified human power. 3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature Ockham’s ideas on individual experience and observation advanced a gradual shift in the authority of the church over science. However, with Francis Bacon, this progressive movement not only nourished positivism but also further emphasized human dominance over nature. Bacon’s Organum begins by conceiving humans capable of grasping nature’s mysteries and equipped with administering power to direct nature “[t]o generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures, upon a given body.”42 The pursuit of knowledge continued to purify faith in God. By gazing into the intelligible, measurable, and predictable regularities, humans could come to know themselves as subjects of divine power. Bacon found “natural philosophy” offered a better understanding of “the Word of God, the surest remedy against superstition, and the most approved support of faith.”43 As a lawyer, parliamentarian and politician, Bacon went beyond natural philosophy. His “entire program” was dedicated to “the reform of human learning.”44 Bacon defined learning as the “acquisition of God’s wisdom” and “regarded divine wisdom as the archetype for human learning.”45 His arguments for improvement of learning criticized the rigid orders that limit the “progress of sciences” and the “liberty” of “thoughts and contemplations of the mind.”46 Liberty became the key for humans’ unlocking nature and tradition. Bacon claimed that “the activity of Adam in Eden was that of the natural philosopher.”47 His interpretation of the universe and human role to experiment with it differed from Calvin’s interpretation of the doctrine of the Fall and humanity’s total depravity. For Bacon, humanity’s fall did not entail the corruption of humankind’s faculties. Our receptivity to knowledge to improve our earthly status was a gift conferred by the power of the Maker for humankind to know and direct nature. What is nature if it is incapable of escaping human’s limits? But Bacon’s question was instead: What is human if it cannot perceive, learn, represent, and direct nature?

98 Human-God-Machine The need for confidence over nature gradually eclipsed the divine knowledge. It also questioned and transformed Aristotelian assumptions and previously held measures of human reach. The first Aristotelian assumption was cosmological: essences and nature were arranged in hierarchical and logical structures. The second assumption held an epistemological regard for the nature of the human mind and its divinely gifted capacity to see the universal in the particular. For Aristotle, concepts were “derived immediately from ordinary experience, what characterized a body is its habitual mode of behaviour, some ‘natural motion’ which express its ‘form’.”48 According to Shea: “Quantity is irrelevant because it can only tell how much of a substance we have, not what kind. In this perspective, science was basically a descriptive enterprise.”49 In contrast, Bacon’s desire to look into the properties of nature required that: “The secrets of nature are better revealed under the torture of experiments than when they follow their natural course,” and “human reason ultimately has a discretionary power over nature,” confirmed “by biblical revelation.”50 Bacon’s method of inquiry legitimized human “authority to proceed in judicial manner and interrogate nature by every means if, in some way, it refused to talk.”51 The active questioning of nature under certain conditions defined by the human experimenter supplemented priestly eyes and ears with a power of dissecting, counting, and recording. From learning what it was that nature could have done (nature has agency for the ancients), humanity gradually moved to “obliging nature to do what it cannot do by means of artificial and fabricated instrument, or ‘machines’—scales, winches, levers, pulleys, wedges, screws, gears— which can serve, for instance, for the construction of war machines or automata.”52 According to Hadot, the progression of this form of violence towards nature closes the gap between the scientist and the magician. “Against the Greek idea that Nature has a kind of divinity, … Bacon retorts that the Bible elevates man above the rest of creation and sets no limit to his use of it, aptly,” by the claim that “‘[t]he spirit of man is as the lamp of God.’”53 Biological and social sciences follow Bacon’s faith and desire to look into: those impressions of nature which are imposed upon the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not extern; and again, those which are caused by the extern fortune; as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, … and the like.54 Bacon continued to assert that understanding “complexions and constitutions” of nature served the utility of healing the body and “the diseases and

Human-God-Machine  99 infirmities of the mind” and “is of special use in moral and civil matters.”55 We might conquer nature if we could conquer our own nature, thus an asceticism of knowing for the sake of control predated Bacon. However, his conceptualization of the feedback mechanism for knowledge emphasized utility, never-ending alterations (later framed in terms of progress), and improvements in the study of the individual person. In deliberating on the usefulness of knowledge for material governance, Bacon touched two major themes of “justice and natural law and the need to base policy on accurate empirical knowledge.”56 Bacon conceived politics as an administration of humans and things: both dealt with numerical calculations. According to Greenleaf, this “approach, was wholly empirical, and, out of context, wholly amoral.”57 In replacing ancient conventions with a detached scientific gaze, the “sovereign’s necessary knowledge” became the “knowledge of things” which is “statistics.”58 Over time, Bacon’s method became synonymous with the study of nature by mathematical positivists. “The more numbers that we have, more inductions we shall be able to make”—referring to the integration of the Baconian method with Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) statistical approach—Ian Hacking noted that “the empty soils of human behaviour began to overflow with laws of human nature.”59 The production of laws about human nature accompanied advancement in the print industry and the distribution of information. Such laws were also supplemented by technological tools that enabled the study of microorganisms in biology, whereby the diversity of species and their continuum from God to its creation was put to test. However, this was far from a sudden uncontested progression as those attuned to empiricism, such as Locke, were cognizant that a systematic unity of knowledge was governed “by virtue of some arbitrary definition defined by us,” humans.60 The uptake and expansion of Bacon’s philosophy gradually reshaped the religious responsibility in looking after human happiness. The acceptance of the use of statistics for the documentation and organization of civil life was contingently marked by linking the body politic to a machine. “For Bacon, both mechanic and (by extension) machines inhabited a social as much as an intellectual sphere,” as the word “mechanics” in Bacon’s time suggested “routine…unthinking activity.”61 Sawday continues: “In Bacon’s mechanical future, machines will spawn further machines, …. Daedalus, for Bacon, expressed a larger sense of mechanical arts,” connected to the “labyrinth.”62 Bacon’s influence on the members of Royal Society who followed him (Petty, Hooke, and Boyle) cannot be easily estimated. 3.3 William Petty: valuing each head As a physician, scientist, and philosopher of the Royal Society, Petty extended the machine–body analogy of his teachers, Bacon and Hobbes, to

100 Human-God-Machine the public sphere by creative use of numbers. Acknowledging the influence of Hobbes’s political philosophy on Petty, Johnson noted that, Petty “saw more virtue in the modern than in the ancient world and following the steps of Bacon he sought to resolve problems by a direct rational attack rather than by means of history or precedent.”63 Such a reliance on rationalization served certain ends. The class-based society of Petty’s time saw the labouring people as working machines and subject to management and control. “The labouring class was not considered to have an interest; the only interest was the ruling class view of the national interest,” Macpherson clarified, citing Petty’s words: People are… the chiefest, most fundamental and precious commodity, out of which may be derived all sort of manufactures, navigation, riches, conquests and solid dominion. This capital material being of itself raw and indigested is committed into the hands of supreme authority in whose prudence and disposition it is to improve, manage and fashion it to more or less advantage.64 Petty’s “supreme authority” could become any authority willing to improve, manage, and fashion human beings as a form of capital. In the wake of weakening of the monarch by the judicial measures, the House of Lords produced knowledge that legitimized the commercialization of human life for maximizing profit. According to Ursula Franklin, during the 17th century, many aspects of governance began to align themselves with the economic activities of material production. And Petty’s philosophy reflected the emerging practices of division of labour that led the manufacturers to assert and exercise firm control over the process and product of those they employed. For Petty, the working beings are likened to the components of the working clock and their existence is reduced to functions.65 Such conceptions focused on maximizing economic output and increasing efficiency while treating humans based on their economic value. The human economy of Petty nurtured “economic individualism” and “lack of control over the market” as “essential ingredients [for] producing the double system of value.”66 The idea of economic individualism associated with the Renaissance remained to be under the influence of Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that “divine providence” is not, as Trinkaus puts it, “in any way a limitation of human freedom, because freedom of the will is in itself a participation in the providential government of the universe.”67 Economic conception of human freedom served as a pillar of political economy and followed Petty’s creative approach. Petty’s Political Arithmetic addressed the King. Petty aimed to educate his majesty concerning national competitive mercantilism.68 Not only numbers gained primacy but they also enabled comparisons to be made

Human-God-Machine  101 between cities, reassuring the King on the state’s economy. “Petty tried to master the material theoretically and to interpret it purposefully in a way in which this had hardly been attempted before,” Schumpeter explains, and “created for himself theoretical tools with which he tried to force a way through the undergrowth of facts, and in consequence we find theoretical considerations full of vigour and thoughtfulness at every step.”69 The tools and interpretations that Petty created for himself later gain scientific status. Even though economic analyses were not adopted in his lifetime, Petty’s numeric conventions made a lasting mark, extending the boundaries of economic analysis and modelling the use of statistics in other fields. The quantification of the public sphere was well underway in Italy before the Reformation. As early as 1427, Maifreda reports, “the Florentine Land Register was the supreme expression and patrimonies of the city’s 250,000 subjects” but this “quantifying exploitation” did not go without “confrontation” from spiritual institutions.70 The preoccupation with the management of the material world continued to be formed in complex relation to the Church and its Christian doctrine—negotiating, integrating, and reformulating the theological and spiritual thoughts of divine providence during the Renaissance. This tension between the theological roots of the exercise of government and scientific concerns for managing people continued in Petty’s lifetime. National competitions, colonial wars, and mercantilism offered the condition for Petty’s calculations of the monetary value of “each head”: Whereas the Stock of the Kingdom, yielding but 15 millions of proceed, is worth 250 millions; then the People who yield 25, are worth 416 ⅔ Millions. For although the Individuals, of Mankind be reckoned at about 8 years purchase; the Species of them is worth as many as land, being in its nature as perpetual, for ought we know. …. If 6 millions of People be worth 417 millions of pounds Sterling, then each head is worth 69l. or each of the 3 millions of workers is worth 138l. which is 7 years purchase, about 12d. per diem [sic].71 Economic individualism meant determining the monetary value of each body. Petty did not offer a general thesis on national wealth. However, when Petty compared London economically to other major European cities, he considered housing, health, and mortality rates of the people. Petty connected the military values to economic values and the economic values to education and health. This is evident in his advocacy for industrial schools, which were run by desires for profit and fears of poverty. When addressing the elites, Petty spoke openly against the “unworthy preachers in divinity”; he wanted the young, “instead of reading hard

102 Human-God-Machine Hebrew words in the Bible,” to become “apprentices” in trades. Petty was sure that gentlemen “would know how to make use of” these tradesmen and handicrafts. He concluded his plans for industrial schools by noting that there is no value in “dignity wherof [it] cannot be valued or computed.”72 The neoliberal subordination of human life through market rationalization exploits Petty’s sentiments towards dignity. The instrumentalization of education for employment originated at a time when the rich elite determined the values of life and learning of those they employed by calculation. The religious themes were not altogether abandoned. They were incorporated flexibly as Petty rationalized his approach when he was addressing the King. The monetary rectification of body politic in Petty’s cost–benefit analysis of the value of people considered: “Whether the speedy peopling of the earth” would “fulfill the revealed Will of God” and at the same time be “advantageous” to the state.73 Such alignment of population growth with the well-being of the state secularized the will of God and the pastorate role in sustaining the public good. Both were directed towards economic ends. Evidently, Petty’s objective knowledge was not impartial. It advanced numerical representations for private and national economic outcomes while valuing his computational mastery as superior to the experiential knowledge of merchants and farmers. “Petty linked impartiality to numbers to enhance the authority of one kind of experience over another,” poovey noted, but “that the impartiality he associated with numbers both implied and entailed interpretation—of how to use and understand the numbers themselves.” Thus his “policies also served a personal agenda.”74 As a mercantilist entrepreneur, Petty defended his self-serving principles in terms of national and religious benevolence—each incorporated in his science. To those who later construed economics a science, Petty offered a grid on why certain things are of value, how their value can be measured, and the utility of such knowledge.75 His experimentalism was unique compared to economic writings of his humanist predecessors, such as John Hales, or his contemporary statistician, John Graunt. “Functional analysis and quantitative precisions … became the chief ends” for Petty, and “experiment was the most trustworthy means of obtaining new truths.”76 Truthmaking followed Petty’s commitment to economic individualism by way of numbers. He supposed that “if every man’s Estate could be always read in his forehead [sic],”77 both elites (like himself) and the state government can benefit. Petty’s philosophy continues today in data economies that conflate the responsibilities of the state with the interests of private enterprise, both harvesting more and more data on each consumer. For example, as of 2011 the United States Environmental Protection Agency calculated the value of the life of each citizen to be worth, on average, at 9.1 million.78 This monetary value of consumers and workers, “include a variety of human capital

Human-God-Machine  103 measures, such as education and job experience, as well as other individual measures, such as age and union status,” “job characteristic variables,” “the worker’s industry, and measure of physical exertion associate with the job.”79 Financial instruments have gained greater influence in determining the value of human life. Possessive individualism continues to proceed from the “need” for scientific accuracy in a depersonalized economy. Labelling humans with numbers and monetizing all activities continue to inform how we ought to know and treat ourselves. Petty’s analysis constitutes the initial conceptualization of humanity as a national commodity. His monetary valuation of human life persists to have implications for modern health and education policies. Health and education are not only similar, they are inseparable. Since they have become conceived as industries they are, Blaug notes, subject to capital markets: “Health is similar to education in that it is partly carried out for investment and partly for consumption motives.”80 In societies organized around investment and consumption, cost–benefit analysis of education and health paves the way to rationalize ignorance and disease as intended outcomes of prioritizing economic interests. 3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy René Descartes (1596–1650) began his Principle of Philosophy with a reflection on human judgement. He accepted God’s wisdom while he affirmed doubt towards human knowledge, including knowledge obtained from mathematics.81 His view relied on mind and body distinction. For Descartes the “proposition, I think, therefore I am” represented the “correct order”; but he was cognizant that propositions by “themselves do not provide knowledge.”82 Living in the wake of the Church treatment of Galileo for heresy, Descartes could have had little doubt about the risks he took when thinking. He insisted that his propositions—when accompanied by the knowledge of God—extend human knowledge. Prior to Descartes, scepticism as an intellectual movement was often concerned not only with questioning the reliability and access to but also the authenticity of knowledge. As a practice of assessing dogma, scepticism can be traced to ancient Greek thinkers. Its revival from the 14th to 17th century began with the rediscovery of these Greek sceptics. Its gradual association with irreligiosity has to be contextualized; it occurred during an age that affirmed religion, questioned worldly affairs and maintained that only God has absolute knowledge. However, the “‘skeptic’ and ‘believer’ are not opposing classifications.”83 Richard Popkin contextualized Descartes’ thought in a movement originating within theology that also influenced thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, as well as the members of the Royal Society such as John Wilkins,

104 Human-God-Machine Robert Boyle, and Joseph Glanvill. Referencing scepticism entry into various schools of thought, Popkin pointed out that its form in Puritan and Angelic scholars reached a new high in the works of Pierre Bayle (1647– 1704): “Whether sacred or secular, Bayle makes it clear that reason fails to make the real world intelligible.”84 Acknowledging the influence of Calvin on Bayle, Popkin pointed out that Bayle did not reject the possibility of basing one’s faith on one’s consciousness in contrast to accepting authority. One of Bayle’s targeted attacks was Christians’ accommodation of the commercial society. Bayle found that if the “inhabitants of another world” were to look into “the morals of Christians,” it becomes evident that Christians “do not conduct themselves according to the light of conscience” that there is “a Paradise for those who obey the law of God and a Hell for those who do not.”85 Bayle was not alone in his observation. Pierre Nicole’s Moral Essays (1674) had proposed “just as the selfish, and thus conflicting, wants of individuals could be harnessed to politically beneficial ends, so too could competing social and economic interest be made to obey similar constraints.” Nicole assumed that “unintended consequences of certain historically domesticated form of self-aggrandizement” had both “social utility and communal benefit.”86 These views of elevated commercial morality posed the question of whether knowledge of God kept in check human passions and inclinations. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) provided the most comprehensive analysis of the disparity between the theological morality and civil laws and practices. In The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville argued moral corruption had been useful to individuals’ prosperity. If the English society was an example of such success, it was due to the self-rationalizing speculation of their elites that their vices had public benefits. He wrote: nothing can render the unsearchable depth of the divine wisdom more conspicuous, than that Man, whom Providence had designed for Society, should not only by his own frailties and imperfections be led into the road to temporal happiness, but likewise receive, from a seeming necessity of natural causes, a tincture of that knowledge, in which he was afterwards to be made perfect by the true religion, to his eternal welfare.87 Mandeville showed what had become of values of piety and charity. He saw that Christian morality rested on making humans “believe reward and punishment from an invisible cause, and the more this belief always influences them in all their actions, the closer they’ll keep to justice”—this at first converted Pagan priests and soldiers to doctrines of peace and duty but later became the seed for the new priests and soldiers’ doctrines to rule

Human-God-Machine  105 their own kind.88 Piety and charity were customs so the elites fulfilled their need for self-admiration and social attention. They were means to justify libertarianism and paternalism of the self-interested industrial elites. As fire, water and air have destructive and productive nature, by the same analogy, Mandeville showed that pride, self-regard and vanity are ­components of profit-driven society. Mandeville’s writings are the window onto the epitome of the early Enlightenment’s morality. Irreducible to economics or moral philosophy, Mandeville’s influence was on the project and direction of social and behavioural sciences and the conceptual affirmation of human instincts. In his scientific and secular association of humans to animals, Mandeville insisted that his observational approach disclosed the invisible part of human existence. However, the notion of the human as animal offered by Mandeville was no longer situated in either the cosmological or the theological chain of being.89 In his medical dissertation Mandeville had argued for the Cartesian case of animal automatism. As an anatomist, he applied his scientific methods to the “analysis of society.”90 After Mandeville, it became difficult to argue that the cruel social circumstances and human appetite have no functions in the prevailing logic of economic progress. Mandeville also must be credited for rationalizing economy of wants in place of economy of needs: People have misunderstood the word evil as having wants that on the multiplicity of those wants depended all those mutual services which the individual members of a society pay to each other; and that consequently, the greater variety there was of wants, the larger number of individuals might find their private interest in labouring for the good of others.91 This was an initial exposition of an economy of self-interests. As fire, water and air have destructive and productive nature, by the same analogy, Mandeville argued that pride, self-regard and vanity are necessary elements of society. By drawing on England, Mandeville argued self-preservation does not need to be intentionally extended to help another so the society benefits. For example, acting to help those in need depended on physical and social proximity to those who suffered and relating to their needs. He observed that the more distance the rich kept from those who suffered, the less likely the rich were to become troubled by human suffering. He noted that acts of charity were also subject to the rational capacity of the elites who relied on charity to compensate for their shame, malice, and cruelty. Mandeville was highlighting that charity had become “destructive to virtue or religion,” making the rich “believe that giving money to the poor, though they should not part

106 Human-God-Machine with until after death, will make a full atonement in the next world for the sins they have committed in this” world.92 He is writing in the context of the debate on the expansions of charity schools for less fortunate—the bases of which presaged the organization and arguments for public and universal education—during the 1720s. He reminded the elites that knowledge outside of Christian dogma harms the poor by enlarging their desires and wants; additional knowledge for the poor also harms those in power for the learned poor will have no reason to submit to their equals. For Mandeville, the poor who survived to the age of forty with no literacy have “good qualities” conducive to “the public peace.” Compared with those with “university education,” whose “irreconcilable hatred, strife, envy, calumny and other vices destructive to mutual concord,” the “illiterate labouring poor are hardly ever tainted” by these traits “to any considerable degree.”93 In the Fable, Mandeville had explained that the English lords had written laws for the purpose of exercising their power; in his objection to charity schools he asserted that the children of the poor are happy and useful as they are, and if they continue to commit crimes as they grow, their crimes would not match the crimes committed by the elites directing the society. Mandeville also explained the “tension between a methodological individualism and a resort to Providence” in Christian morality and natural law was learned from early organized civilizations to enable the “cunning” few rule the majority. Self-taught “skillful politicians” and “priests” governed vast numbers of humans with “the greater ease and security.”94 Such inferences did not settle with Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) whose lifework emphasized an egalitarian morality. Hutcheson’s effort was partly directed to rework “the narrowly interest-based interpretations of the natural law theory” in Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke, by elaborating that natural morality facilitated sociability in humans. Hutcheson thought this moral sense was “universally distributed” to serve “the production of the greatest pleasure for the greatest number.”95 Mandeville’s argument that such a production and such a pleasure was directed by custom and education to meet the self-interest of a small group provided a different and plausible scenario of the moral senses. The preached ethical codes were impossible to achieve according to Mandeville, since in their articulated usefulness and rationality rested selfish passions. Although Hutcheson had no convincing response to this objection, he attacked Mandeville for his reduction of virtues to passions. However, he agreed with Mandeville that reason alone could not provide “independent standard for action,” and no truth about the “principle of morality could be established without a thorough examination of human nature.”96 While disagreeing with Hutcheson’s moral thesis, Mandeville accepted utilitarianism as a guiding principle for the practical purposes it offered. Mandeville’s acceptance had an ironic spin: “The utilitarian viewpoint is highly practical, but it will send you to

Human-God-Machine  107 Hell.”97 The Hell at stake is the evil brought by instrumental self-interested actions for maximization of utility, wealth and happiness. The intellectual battle between Mandeville and Hutcheson provides the context for the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776), an adversary of religious superstition and a proponent of scepticism. Hume also cautioned that scepticism is not immune from the dangers of becoming unending speculation that haunts the pleasures in life. Meanwhile, Hume argued: “In all the incidents of life, we ought still to preserve our scepticism. If we believe that fire warms, or water refreshes, it is only because it costs us too much pain to think otherwise.”98 Learned in ancient philosophy, Hume was aware that religion was built in relation to a particular model of philosophy that included scepticism; early Christians had applied it to the teachings of the Eastern ancient religions and also in reformulating the legacies of the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans. With recognition of this history, Hume’s ambition sided with science. His approach remained Baconian as he aligned himself with the advancement of knowledge. He insisted: “Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected,” and he endeavoured “to bring it little more into fashion.”99 The gradual intensification of utilitarian philosophy from Bacon to Hutcheson and to Hume directed the faith on human thought and action. While scepticism accommodated utilitarianism, the growing scientific approach to human nature had moral implications to society. Hutcheson had given further emphasis on the direction of knowledge of human nature, stressing its “use” for the end of human “happiness” and “pleasure.”100 Hume was partly in agreement. He objected to characterizing reason and utility as innate causes and focused on human behaviour as a source for producing scientific knowledge about morality. In his scientific approach to ethics, Hume also distanced himself from the underlying assumptions of natural law. Since the knowledge of the past consists of instances that are strengthened by belief and habits, these very beliefs and habits cannot be the absolute causes of human behaviour. He stressed that: We must, therefore clean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility, to any other of human comprehension.101 Hutcheson’s moral utilitarianism and Bacon’s scientific approach unite in rationalizing the study of human nature. The last quoted sentence is demonstrative of Hume’s faith in procedures and applications of science.

108 Human-God-Machine Hume’s scepticism concerned mainly religious conceptions of human nature and neglected both human interest in assigning utility to certain behaviours and the limitations of scientific experiments in grasping the complexities of moral life. How was morality constructed as the faith in science grew? Hume stated: “The chief spring of actuating principle of the human mind is pleasure and pain.”102 We take pleasure in the idea of beautiful and useful, Hume explained, not only in what is pleasing to ourselves but also what is pleasurable for strangers and other creatures. This he called sympathy. Sympathy is an ability to take pleasure both in human beings and in objects that produce an end agreeable for both the individual and society. Hume explained that sympathy produces our sentiment of morals in artificial virtues, enabling us to become proper members of society. A preoccupation with happiness and pleasure, not suffering, directed Hume’s conceptualization of human nature. When faced with the pain and sufferings of other human beings, sympathy was an experience of “uneasiness” but implied no action, for Hume. Hume’s sympathy was coupled with an affirmation that “selfishness” is “inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our fame and constitution.”103 While Hume saw a degree of pride as necessary for functioning in society, he also saw that the beauty of visible objects causes us to sympathize with those “possessed of the advantage of fortune,” explaining that: First, to that immediate pleasure, which a rich man gives us, by the view of the beautiful clothes, equipage, gardens, or houses, which he possesses. Second, to the advantage, which we hope to reap from him by his generosity and liberality. Thirdly, to the pleasures and advantage, which he himself reaps from his possessions, and which, produce an agreeable sympathy in us.104 The first and second suggest that the “rich” are “capable of contributing to the happiness or enjoyment of his fellow-creature, whose sentiments, with regard to him, we naturally embrace.”105 Hume continued by stressing that we ought to be “preferring the third principle to the other two, and ascribing our esteem of the rich to a sympathy with the pleasure and advantage, which they themselves receive from their possessions.”106 Hume left little room for misinterpreting to whom he was most sympathetic. The rich were to be admired for their natural abilities. In this instance, Hume’s concerns for utility vanished. On the one hand, his abstraction and rationalization of sympathy diverted attention from Mandeville’s truth-telling. On the other hand, in his contribution to economic fiction, Hume conceptualized a human nature in which some naturally submit their right to happiness to secure the happiness and enjoyment of the rich.

Human-God-Machine  109 Hume’s untying justice from vice and virtue and rationalizing self-interest were distinct from the moves his predecessors made. Eugene Rotwein points out that Hume’s position differed from natural right theorists as his “treatment of the principles of human nature permit no place for anything compatible to ‘natural rights’ and he never accepts anything but ‘utility’ as the criterion for evaluating social policy.”107 However, Hume agreed with natural law theorists that the state has to respect the individuals’ liberty and interests. But he did sympathize with a particular group over others: the merchants. For Hume, merchants created more value than physicians and lawyers. Merchants deserve the highest respect because their desire for fortune through commerce increases industry; they also employ others “in the arts of gain, which soon engage their affection, and remove all relish for pleasure and expense. … and make the love of gain prevail over the love of pleasure.”108 Hume did not say that merchants should be respected because they create employment. They deserve respect because they embody the value system by which others become industrious and alert to profit. The elites were an end in themselves. They transformed the landlord and peasant system by promoting industry and mastering the art of profit. Love of profit, no longer called greed, became a desirable value. Hume’s economic analysis, with its focus on human behaviour, had scientific implications for future policies that treat humans as machines. Anticipating contemporary economism, Hume offered that “[t]he spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy,” by the “refinement in the mechanic arts” which impacted philosophers, politicians, generals and poets alike.109 According to Simon Schaffer, Hume’s critique of innate causal powers was central to the development of the so-called Scottish philosophers and their claim for the progress of machine philosophy. Schaffer situated Hume’s philosophy within the “culture that viewed the labourers as machines with one that saw machines as sources of power.”110 The Cartesian automata was often adopted creatively to explain the scientific approach to body politic. It also had implications to explain human nature. Hume’s contemporary, La Mettrie, in his book Machine Man, had not only contested the possibility of human souls but also promoted the authority of science, de-emphasizing divine reason and natural law. La Mettrie argued that “the study of nature results to produce unbelievers.”111 While rejecting Descartes’ religious views, La Mettrie deployed Descartes’ approximation of animals to machines to compare human to animal: “Man was trained like an animal; he became an author in the same way he became a porter.”112 This assertion deemphasizes humans as inherently rational animals. Evolutionary philosophy influenced the assumptions about education that aligns humans with the notion of scientific progress. This is indicative of La Mettrie’s conception of humans as machines, learning by

110 Human-God-Machine the way of languages, signs and symbols, “to express their new feelings by movement dictated by the economy of their imagination.”113 However, the class-based industrial society imposed economic conditions where the working class were to be and become autonomous, self-regulated, productive, and docile. In this context, the process of learning to be an animal emphasized the resemblances between humans and machines. When the 11th-century Muslim scholar and inventor, Ismail Al-Jazari, outlined the mechanism and method of automata and other technologies such as water-raising pumps and modern clocks, he had not conceived these self-moving instruments as analogies for human beings. He was following the work of his Chinese and Muslim predecessors, not foreseeing the speedy mechanization of the Enlightened Europe nor the growth of robotics and automations of the technological age where the workmanship of human beings is framed secondary to the machines.114 By the 18th century, the writings of La Mettrie demonstrate that the scientific orientation had enabled a mechanistic approach to humans and society. From this approach followed formal justification for two registers, one from “the anatomic-metaphysical register” to align the body with the society and one concerning the “technico-political register” to constitute regulations “by empirical and calculated method.”115 La Mettrie’s postulation of the human machine did not only produce a body without soul but it also proposed that human beings evolved from their need to express emotions and fulfil their desires, rather than deliberating on reason and virtues. He thought that humans are the most perfect of animals not because we are created in the image of God but because nature has enabled us to be as such. La Mettrie’s book demonstrates that the Cartesian accounts were not narrowly applied to economic administration; they were broadly absorbed into scientific approaches to self and society. The ongoing discovery of a new human nature—between machine and animal—supported colonial and aristocratic desires for eliminating error in social life and advanced nation-building by misconstruing social progress. 3.5 (A)political economy Not only did humans have gradually become compared to the likeness of machines but also our moral conducts and sentiments have changed. The social order also became engineered as a machine and “those who did this engineering could represent this condition as natural.”116 The admiration of machines for their beauty and usefulness grew from awe to utter acceptance. Automata did not disappear; today they are inserted into the flesh of the living, penetrating their very cellular movements.117 With automatization came a shift in creed and ritual of participation in a society (explained by Newtonian laws) that privileged power in social control for the sake of progress.

Human-God-Machine  111 In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith referred to machines as useful, and beautiful in their facilitation and abridgement of labour. He explained their applications for manufacturing and projected their uses in agriculture.118 While distinguishing between human labour and that of the machine, he saw both in service to the same end: profit. “All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the inventions of those who had occasion to use the machine.”119 Smith insisted that those who invent ought to continue to do so. Scientists, merchants and philosophers enhance their capacities by directing their attention towards their specializations. Well-defined divisions of labour de-emphasized economic fairness, as power belonged in the hands of business elites: When a company of merchants undertake, at their own risk and expense, to establish a new trade with some remote barbarous nation, it may not be unreasonable to incorporate them into a joint stock company, and to grant them, in case of their success, a monopoly of trade for a certain number of years. It is the easiest and most natural way in which the state can recompense them for hazarding a dangerous and expensive experiment, of which the public is afterwards to reap the benefit. A temporary monopoly of this kind may be vindicated upon the same principles upon which a like monopoly of a new machine is granted to its inventor, and that of a new book to its author.120 In Smith’s theory, the state played a role in inter-national economic ventures, granting temporary monopoly to those who took risks. The risks voyagers, merchants, and inventors took should be rewarded—not banked as a status—so the “public” also benefited. In contrast to mercantilism, the nation state rewards economic activity. However, the state ensures capital does not accumulate in the hands of the few. Smith also adopted Hume’s rejection of the “utility of poverty argument,” namely “the claim that low wages were an incentive to industry.”121 What has not received sufficient attention to this day is the utility of wealth argument and whether the high wages of CEOs, shareholders, angel investors and hedge fund managers— as they name themselves—deliver benefits to the public and its civic organization. In The Theory of Moral Sentiment Smith followed Hume, acknowledging that: “Pleasure and pain are the great object of desire and aversion,” but Smith also sided with Hutcheson that “the principle of approbation was not founded on self-love.”122 For Smith, the three categories stated by Hume—sympathy with the agents for their own sake, for their utility to another and the possible societal good—are to be balanced. Unlike Hume, Smith delimited reliance on utility in the general rule of justice.123 Smith agreed with Hume’s effort to establish moral philosophy as a science of

112 Human-God-Machine human nature and followed Hume’s philosophy, diverging from the cold objectivism of the Hobbesian self-interest and providing an avenue for the reconstruction of genial sociability.124 However, he did little to disrupt the rich from exploiting the poor: The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands of whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are let by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants, and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.125 Although Smith affirmed the activities of the rich, he was clear that they also have to contribute to the lives of others; their desire for luxury ought to be contained and admiring them as idols corrupts society. Meanwhile, Smith postulated two different human natures. The poor lack the natural selfishness and rapacity, and the rich act without intending and knowing. The “without knowing” was dropped in Smith’s most cited passage of the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, since those who advance the society towards progress (and its eventual fall) presumably must be in possession of both desire and knowledge. The governing principle legitimizing this classified society was Providence. “Providence” had not “abandoned those who seemed to have been left out,” Smith thought, but continued to look after “the real happiness of human life…[since] the beggar, who suns himself by the side of highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”126 Was it for Providence that the rich did not abandon their wealth for the security of the beggar? Smith suggested that the entrepreneurial life is counterintuitive to real happiness and security. Only certain religious aspects were absorbed into the discourse of political economy.127 Smith believed that “every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author, and we may admire the wisdom and goodness of God even in the weakness and folly of man.”128 He did not elaborate on natural law or Christian charity. However, he used providence as a governing principle to explain away economic and social inequalities as he emphasized the state as an authority.129 How was this authority to be managed if Smith remained ambivalent towards the natural and divine sentiments?

Human-God-Machine  113 A close look at the Theory of the Moral Sentiments confirms the symbolism of the metaphor of the machine, particularly when Smith is reflecting on “the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine… to promote the happiness of those who live under them.”130 He regarded the universe as a “complete machine” and a “coherent system” governed by general laws that progressively undid the natural conceptions of the body politic.131 The notion of human machine that surfaces when Smith wrote of education requires further analysis as it maps the future directions for human capital policies and conventions. Smith wrote: A man educated at the expense of much labour and time to any of those employments which required extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be compared to one of those expensive machines. The work which he learns to perform, it must be expected, over and above the usual wages of common labour, will replace to him the whole expense of his education, with at least the ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital. It must do this too in a reasonable time, … in the same manner as to the more certain duration of the machine.132 Smith explained that “education, study or apprenticeship” is a form of “capital fixed and realized” in the person, while the “improved dexterity in the workman can be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument.”133 It was also this “improved dexterity” and not the human person that Smith asked us to consider as an upgraded machine. The educated person—who may be compared to a machine—Smith thought should be treated as a moral being. Unlike the proponents of human capital theory, Smith affirmed the roles of virtues and emotions in human conduct. Not only virtues but also Smith’s concept of “reasonable time” would be later adjusted by his neoliberal counterparts. When Smith argued for limits of state administration over education, he did so not to enable private profiteers to monopolize public education for monetary gains. In Smith’s case, Spengler explains, “[t]he arrangement under which teachers worked did not maximize incentive to good performance.”134 Smith had no formula for maximizing the utility of education. His main concern was to “describe and seek establishment of a politico-economic environment within which [hu]man’s desire and efforts” are directed to improve both the individual and society.135 He emphasized that education ought to be useful for the person and not needlessly expensive and cautioned that a system of private or public incentive would be a hindrance to liberty. Smith’s admiration for the mechanical metaphors corresponded to the stoic model of self-constitution and included the management of individuals’ self-interest. Smith relied on the ancient theme of “self-command” to

114 Human-God-Machine encourage readers to “abstain from present pleasure, … in order to secure greater pleasure to come.”136 His admiration is explained as a “resolute firmness of the person” self-governed by keeping in mind fulfilment of his future goals. Smith’s appreciation of stoic manhood and his abandonment of pure and rational religion “agreed with Isaac Newton that God has ordained Nature to operate by second cause and that to know the laws of Nature is to know the decrees of God’s will.”137 Smith was not hostile to rational religion. His chain of being from God to human spilled into the working of the society in a “‘general’ rather than [confined to] ‘special’ Providence.”138 Lloyd describes Smith’s moral consciousness as capable of integrating the perspective of another human being.139 Smith spoke to believers and atheists alike. For Smith, the account of the impartial spectator “may be made ‘in the image of God’, but it is nonetheless subordinate to divine judgment.”140 Although he accepted the role of benign providence in merit and fortune, his impartial spectator is capable of emotions and actions. Such capability requires attention to what sustains humanity. It requires an education concerned with understanding instead of competing, self-maximizing, and accumulating. 3.6 Instrumentalizing nature Bacon’s metaphor of “a passive and possessable female nature strikingly altered the traditional image of nature as Dame Kind, and ‘all-creating’ and bounteous Mother Earth who single-handedly bore and nourished her children.”141 Mary Shelly alleged that in contrast to “ancient teachers” the “modern masters promise very little … They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”142 Does the reconstruction of the invisible hand serve to justify power, greed and violence? What exactly distinguishes humans from other animals, those hunted for leisure, those locked up for spectators’ pleasure, and those plugged into machines that monitor, feed and then slaughter them for the good of humanity? The technologies of commanding nature, including human nature, and possessing capital developed interdependently in European history. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application.143 Bio-power, a power that seeks the application of knowledge to the management of human population, marked the adoption of procedures that instructed humanity “what it meant to be a living species in a living world.”144

Human-God-Machine  115 Biological existence was not only to be disciplined but altered and treated as malleable livestock. In 1923, the biologist John Haldane argued that the application of biology had not affected society sufficiently. Haldane noted the biological sciences had prolonged life and made health improvements and, as a result, had prepared public opinion for what would be the ultimate goal and application of biological sciences beyond medicine: “a conscious attempt at the education of biology to politics”145 and subsequently the social (and artificial) engineering of life forms. Next, I turn to the initiation of processes and practices that further eroded human–machine distinctions: market instrumentalism and utilitarian philosophy. Notes 1 Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 57. 2 Hernando de Sato Polar, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic books, 2000), 218. 3 Genevieve Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. 4 Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4. Spinoza had developed “an ethic of freedom and virtue based on the acceptance of necessity,” however, over time, he had come to symbolize an atheist rejection of God’s concern, a global reception of his thought for Leibniz and Voltaire meant an influential critique of providence (Lloyd, 2008, p. 238). 5 John Watson, The Philosophical Bases of Religion (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1907), 212. 6 Ibid., 216 7 Ibid., 217. 8 Ibid., 244. 9 Nancy J. Hudson, Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 17–18. Mankind was created to be ruler and beholder of the divine manifestation in the universe. There is something of God in creation so valuable that God created man to witness it. Mankind did not “fall” into the world, but he was created for it (indirectly) and it for him. (p. 18) 10 Hudson, Becoming God, 19. 11 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 114. 12 Ibid., 15. 13 Ibid., 217. If God is called Light, it is because He cannot remain foreign to our experience. Gnosis, the highest stage of awareness of the divine, is an experience of uncreated light, the experience itself being light: ‘in Thy light, we shall see light’. It is both that which one perceives, and that by which one perceives in mystical experience. (p. 218)

116 Human-God-Machine 14 Henry C. Lea, A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church Vol I: Confession and Absolution (Philadelphia: Lea Brother & Co., 1896), 118. 15 Ibid., 156–57. 16 Ibid., 157. 17 Minso Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19. 18 Ibid.,100. 19 Ibid., 85. 20 John B. S. Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923 (London: Trubner & Co., 1925), 48. 21 Ibid., 91–93. 22 John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), 99. Ancient cults expressed the contrast under consideration as esoteric, as against exoteric knowledgae, which was open to all and taken as its face value. The realm of the esoteric or symbolic was not limited to uttered words or written texts but embraced all the objects and events of nature as well as the actions of man himself. (p. 99) 23 Ibid., 7. In the context of gnostic myth-makers Cohen (1966) wrote: “By invoking revelations or secret tradition allegedly deriving from Christ and the Apostles, the Gnostics claimed to give a transcendent interpretation to the entire visible and invisible world. They regarded themselves as privileged ‘knowers’…superior to the common ‘believers’….”(p. 36). 24 Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 21. 25 Elly R. Truitt, “Mysticism and Machines,” History Today 65, no. 7 (2015): 72. 26 Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 146. There is a difference between stories of gods wishing or commanding inert matter to become alive, as in the biblical Adam and the myth of Pygmalion’s statue, and gods using superior forms of technology to construct artificial life, even if the inner workings are not described. (p. 23) 27 Ibid.,152. Aristotle cited in Mayor. 28 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 23. For Aristotle, the assimilation of the slave to ktema implies that he is a part (morion) of the master, and part in an integral and constitutive sense. The term ktema, which, as we have seen, is not a technical term of law but of oikonomia, does not mean ‘property’ in a judicial sense, and in this context, it designates things insofar as they are part of a functional whole…. The slave is a part (of the body) of the master, in the ‘organic’ and not simply instrumental sense of the term, to such an extent that Aristotle speaks of a ‘community of life’ between slave and master. (p. 13) 29 Ibid., 23.

Human-God-Machine  117 30 Mayor, Gods and Robots. John Cohen (1966) also noted: “In the Talmudic belief that in the making of any person there are three partners: The father, the mother and God Himself. … God gives ‘the breath, the soul, the physiognomy, sight, hearing, speech, movement, understanding, wisdom’” (pp. 41–42). 31 Maureen Caudill, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 196. Caudill writes: “We are learning more all the time about how our visual system works and how to imitate it in an artificial system. Someday soon we will be able to translate that understanding into our android Children” (p. 42). 32 Ibid., 221–22. 33 Elly R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 5. 34 Ibid., 8 35 Ibid., 71. Truitt notes that “venturing outside the conventional intellectual avenues, mainly to pursue knowledge from Arabic and ancient sources … talking heads, dramatize concern about the introduction of new natural knowledge, its power, un-Christian origins and abilities of those who sought it” (p. 95). 36 Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 34. 37 David C. Lindberg, “Introduction,” in God and Nature, Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 4. 38 Ibid., 12. 39 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London: Gale, 1667/1734), 110–11. 40 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Case (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 125–26. 41 Richard S. Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity, ed. David C Lindberg and Ronal L. Numbers (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 218. 42 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, book 1, Rev. Ed. (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), 368. The two books of Novum Organum are titled: “On the interpretation of nature and the empire of man” and “On the interpretation of nature or the Reign of man.” 43 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Joseph Devey (New York: Collier, 1902), 71. 44 Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 55. 45 Ibid., 58. “Bacon regarded the order in which God operated, placing light before production and spending a significant amount of time in creating light, as normative for human method” (59). 46 Bacon, Novum Organum, 72. 47 Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon, 61. “The human mind and its potential for knowledge remained as great as before the fall, and humans had the freedom to make the most of it if they so choose” (p. 61). This point is important for understanding Bacon’s later statement in Aphorism 28 of the second book of the Novum Organum that human understanding is “depraved by custom and the common course of things,” rather “than by sin” (p. 73). 48 William R. Shea, “Introduction,” in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism: In the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New York: Science history publications, 1975), 14.

118 Human-God-Machine 49 Ibid., 14. 50 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, 93. 51 Ibid., 94. According to Hadot, the judicial metaphor was carried from Bacon to Kant. 52 Ibid., 94. 53 William A. Armstrong, “Introduction,” in The Advancement of Learning Book 1 (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 40. Armstrong noted that “Bacon’s interpretations of the biblical themes of creation, temptation, fall, and charity are fundamental to the arguments of Book I” of The Advancement of Learning (p. 40). Meanwhile, Bacon’s influence on Darwin was “immeasurable” (pp. 23–24). 54 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Eugene: Generic NL Freebook Publisher, 1605/1996), 66. 55 Ibid., 66. 56 William H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 220. 57 Ibid., 229. 58 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 274. 59 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 62–63. 60 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 229. Emphasizing that the eighteenth century held two theologies of God: One Absolut and other-worldly and selfsufficient and the other “whose essential nature required the existence of other beings,” Lovejoy notes that the dualism led to rejection of the logic and the conclusion that the imitation of an otherworldly God, even assuming such a God, could not be the good for man, or from any creature, since the reason or the goodness of God demanded that each grade of imperfect being should exist after its distinctive kind. (p. 316) 61 Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 211. Sawday elaborated that Bacon’s endeavour was to release the idea of ‘mechanics’ from sense routine…unthinking activity’, while also linked the term to the contemplation of machines or mechanisms… to act upon nature in some way… For Baconian nature was made up of matter that could be ‘reshaped, rearranged, beaten, jostled around by heating, and suchlike’. (p. 212) 62 Ibid., 215. 63 Edgar A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938), 96. 64 Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 228. 65 Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: Anansi, 1999). Petty cited in Franklin:

Human-God-Machine  119 In the making of a Watch, if one Man shall make the Wheels, another the Spring, another shall Engrave the Dial-plate, and another shall make the Cases, then the Watch will be better and cheaper, than if the whole work be put upon any one Man. (p. 58) 66 Charles Trinkaus, “The Problem of Free Will in the Renaissance and the Reformation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 10, no. 1 (1949): 53. 67 Ibid., 53. 68 William Petty, Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic (New York: Mershon company, 1888). 69 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch (London: George Allen & Unwind LTD, 1954), 30. 70 Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2012), 60–61. 71 William Petty, The Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality, ed. Charles H. Hull(London: Cambridge University Press, 1899), 108. 72 William Petty, “Plan of an Industrial School,” in Education, the School and the Teacher in English Literature: Republished from Barnards American Journal of Education, ed. Charles Henry Hull, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1862), 207–08. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680. Petty, William, S. Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Henry Hull. London: Cambridge University Press, 1899. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680. 73 William Petty, Essay on Mankind and Political Arithmetic (London: Cassell, 1888), 22. 74 Mary Poovey, A History of Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 128. 75 Peter C. Dooley, The Labour Theory of Value (New York: Routledge, 2005), 62. 76 Edgar A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought, 96. 77 Petty cited in Poovey (1998, p. 128). Poovey notes that “no matter how we interpret his [Petty’s] motives for making these particular recommendations, he stood to profit from making economic expertise part for the production of economic matters of fact” (p. 128). 78 Binyamin Appelbaum, “A Life’s Value,” The New York Time, Feb 17, 2011, national edition. 79 Viscusi W. Kip and Joseph E. Aldy, “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World,” Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business Discussion Paper Series, paper 392 (2002): 8. 80 Mark Blaug, An Introduction to the Economics of Education (London, Penguin Press, 1970), 318. 81 René Descartes, Principle of Philosophy, trans. Valentine R. Miller and Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984). God who can do all things, and by whom we are created for we do not know whether He chose to make us in such a way that we are always mistaken, even about those things which appears to us to be the best known of all. (p. 4)

120 Human-God-Machine 82 Ibid., 6. 83 Richard H. Popkin, History of Scepticims: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxi. 84 Ibid., 445. 85 Pierre Bayle, “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Comet of 1680,” in The Fable of the Beesand Other Writings, ed. Edward Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 11. 86 Edward Hundert, “Introduction,” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. Edward Hundert, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), xxiv. 87 Bernard Mandeville, “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Volume 1 (1723),” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. Edward Hundert, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 44. 88 Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and Usefulness of Christianity in War 1732 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 33–34. Mandeville accepted the use of fear in governance as suggested by Hobbes but noted principles of contracts cannot sufficiently contain passion and ambitions. As a defender of liberty for the people, Mandeville’s government acts against tyrants while transparently favoring natural aristocracy (this is shared by Benjamin Franklin, who associated with Mandeville) for growth of the commonwealth regardless of economic disparity within it. Below we see Hume reuses the same language while criticizing Mandeville’ views. 89 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Agamben is not making a reference to Mandeville but Heidegger’s conception of animal in its theological context. Heidegger thinks that the animal in its captivation is essentially held out in something other than itself, something that indeed cannot be manifest to the animal either as a being or as a non-being, but which, insofar as it disinhibits…bring an essential disruption into the essence of animal. (Heidegger quoted in Agamben, 2004, p. 61) 90 Edward G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4–6. Hundert explores the influence of Mandeville on Rousseau, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Condillac, Malthus and Kant. 91 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, with an Essay on Charity and Charity-schools (London: J. Tonson, 1729), 340. 92 Mandeville, “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Vol. 1 (1723),” 114. 93 Ibid. 127. “There is not a more contented people among us than those who work the hardest and are the least acquainted with the pomp and delicacies of the world.” (p. 127) Mandeville continued, I question whether the condition of kings would be at all preferable to that of peasants, even as ignorant and laborious as I seem to require the latter to be. The reason why the generality of people would rather be kings than peasants is first owing to pride and ambition, that is deeply riveted in human nature, and which to gratify we daily see men undergo and despise the greatest hazards and difficulties. (p. 129) See Adam Smith’s juxtaposition of king and peasant in the next chapter. 94 Bernard Mandeville cited in Edward G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78.

Human-God-Machine  121 95 Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 79. 96 Ibid., 81–82. 97 F. B. Kay, “The Influence of Bernard Mandeville,” Studies in Philology 19, no. 1 (1922): 95. 98 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 270. 99 Ibid., 273. 100 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1725/2012), 2. Hutcheson’s end of knowledge for human happiness differed from Mandeville’s materialistic arguments articulated in Fable of the Bees. 101 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, xxiii. 102 Ibid., 574. 103 Ibid., 583. 104 Ibid., 616. 105 Ibid., 616. 106 Ibid., 616. 107 Eugene Rotwein, “Introduction,” in David Hume Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), lxxxi. 108 David Hume, “Of Interest,” in David Hume Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 53. Hume argued that policies must be considered in light of the merchants’ needs in order to contribute to the wealth of the nation state. 109 David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 22. 110 Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Science in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 132/135. 111 Julien O. De La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24. 112 Ibid., 13. “Despite all of man’s prerogative over animals, to put him in the same class as them is to do him a great honour” (p. 18). La Mettrie denied that Humans are above animals by virtue of natural law instead he argued that “nature made us to be beneath the animals” and it was the “miracles worked by education” that helped humans to surpass their superiors (p. 19). 113 Ibid., 13. 114 Ibn Al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Netherlands: Springer, 1974). 115 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 136. “The celebrated automata, on the other hand were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power” (p. 136). 116 Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 148. 117 Stephen Wolfram, “Statistical mechanics of cellular automata,” Reviews of Modern Physics 55, no. 3 (1983): 601–45. 118 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Vol. 2, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), 174. 119 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol 1, 12. 120 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, 245. 121 Andrew S. Skinner, “David Hume: Principles of Political Economy” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 223.

122 Human-God-Machine 122 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 379. 123 David Raphael, “Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972): 95. According to Adam Smith (2002), “we approve of another man’s judgment, not as something useful, but as right, as agreeable to truth and reality” (p. 25). 124 Smith (2002) explained that “though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character” (p. 374). 125 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 215. While the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship the rich and the powerful” is conceived as “necessary” by Smith “both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society,” is, at the same time, “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” (p. 72). 126 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 216. 127 Bruce Moghtader, “Pastorate power, market liberalism and a knowing without knowing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35. 128 Ibid., 124. 129 Ibid., 64. 130 Ibid., 216. 131 Ibid., 225. 132 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, 103. Smith looked beyond the monetary evaluation of workers (of William Petty) and considered social life. 133 Ibid., 265. 134 Joseph J. Spengler, “Adam Smith on Human Capital,” The American Economic Review 67, no. 1 (1977), 36. 135 Ibid., 36. 136 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 222. 137 Lisa Hill, “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith,” European Journal of History of Economic Thought 8, no. 1 (2011): 5. 138 Ibid., 15. 139 Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows, 80. 140 Ibid., 94. 141 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her life, Her Fiction, Her Monster (New York: Methuen, 1988), 111. 142 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008), 39. 143 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I., 141. 144 Ibid., 142. 145 Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics, 57. Haldane noted Daedalus’ “interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled his only recorded success in experimental genetics” (p. 47).

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Human-God-Machine  123 Al-Jazari, Ibn. The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Netherlands: Springer, 1974. Armstrong, William A. “Introduction.” In The Advancement of Learning Book 1. Edited by William A. Armstrong, 1–47. London: The Athlone Press, 1975. Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning. Eugene: Generic NL Freebook Publisher, 1605/1996. Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. London: The Colonial Press, 1900. Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Edited by Joseph Devey. New York: Collier, 1902. Bayle, Pierre. “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Comet of 168.” In The Fable of the Bees: And Other Writings. Edited by Edward Hundert, 9–18. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Blaug, Mark. An Introduction to the Economics of Education. London: Penguin Press, 1970. Cohen, John. Human Robots in Myth and Science. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966. Descartes, René. Principle of Philosophy. Translated by Valentine R. Miller and Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984. Dooley, Peter C. The Labour Theory of Value. New York: Routledge, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage books, 1978. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–78. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Franklin, Ursula M. The Real World of Technology. Toronto: Anansi, 1999. Greenleaf, William H. Order, Empiricism, and Politics; Two Traditions of English Political Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Translated by Michael Case. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Haldane, John B. S. Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923. London: Trubner & Co., 1925. Hill, Lisa. “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith.” European Journal of History of Economic Thought 8, no. 1 (2011): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/713765225. Hont, Istvan. “The Rich Country-poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy.” In Wealth and Virtue. Edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, 271–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hudson, Nancy J. Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Hume, David. “Of Interest.” In Writings on Economics. Edited by Eugene Rotwein, 47–59. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.

124 Human-God-Machine Hume, David. “Of Refinement in the Arts.” In Writings on Economics. Edited by Eugene Rotwein, 19–32. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Hundert, Edward G. The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hundert, Edward G. “Introduction.” In The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Edited by Edward Hundert, x–xx. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1997. Hurtado, Jimena P. “Citizens, Markets and Social Order: An Aristotelian Reading of Smith and Rousseau on Justice.” In Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics. Edited by Paganelli Maria Pia, Dennis C. Rasmussen and Smith Craig, 214–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Revised ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1725/2012. muse.jhu.edu/ book/18165. Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984. Johnson, Edgar A. J. Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought..New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938. Kang, Minso. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Kaye, F. B. “The Influence of Bernard Mandeville.” Studies in Philology 19, no. 1 (1922): 83–108. www.jstor.org/stable/4171820. La Mettrie, Julien O. “Machine Man.” In Machine Man and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Ann Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lea, Henry C. A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church Vol I: Confession and Absolution. Philadelphia: Lea Brother & Co., 1896. Lindberg, David C. “Introduction.” In God and Nature, Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. Edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, 1–18. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Lloyd, Genevieve. Providence Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Lloyd, Genevieve. Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933. MacPherson, Crawford B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Maifreda, Germano. From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. New York: Routledge, 2012. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, with an Essay on Charity and Charity –schools. 6th ed. London: J. Tonson, 1729. http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=3406573 Mandeville, Bernard. An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and Usefulness of Christianity in War 1732. Hildeseim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990. Mandeville, Bernard. “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Volume 1 (1723).” In The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Abridged and edited by Edward Hundert, 19–148. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Human-God-Machine  125 Matthews, Steven. Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. Mayor, Adrienne. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her life, Her Fiction, Her Monster. New York: Methuen, 1988. Moghtader, Bruce. “Pastorate Power, Market Liberalism and a Knowing without Knowing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35. Petty, William S. “Plan of an industrial School.” In Education, The School and the Teacher in English Literature: Republished from Barnards American Journal of Education, 188–208. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1862. https://archive.org/. Petty, William S. Essay on Mankind and Political Arithmetic. London: Cassell, 1888. https://archive.org/details/essaysonmankindp00pettuoft. Petty, William S. Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Henry Hull. London: Cambridge University Press, 1899. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680. Petty, William S. The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Together with The Observations Upon Bills of Mortality, Vol 2. Edited by Charles Henry Hull. London: Cambridge University Press, 1899). https://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/1680. Polar, De Sato Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere else. New York: Basic books, 2000. Poovey, Mary. A History of Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Science of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Popkin, Richard H. History of Scepticims: From Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ProQuest UBC Ebook Central. Raphael, David. “Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972): 87–103. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy. library.ubc.ca/stable/4544835. Rotwein, Eugene. “Introduction.” In David Hume’s Writings on Economics. Edited by Eugene Rotwein, ix–xc. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. London: Routledge, 2007. Schaffer, Simon. “Enlightened Automata.” In The science in Enlightened Europe. Edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer, 126–65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Shea, William R. “Introduction.” In Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism: In the Scientific Revolution. Edited by Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, 1–25. New York: Science history publications, 1975. Skinner, Andrew S. “David Hume: Principles of Political Economy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Edited by David Norton, 222–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Vol. 1. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904.

126 Human-God-Machine Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Vol. 2. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Spengler, Joseph J. “Adam Smith on Human Capital.” The American Economic Review 67, no. 1 (1977): 32–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1815877. Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. 4th ed. London: Gale, 1667/1734. http://find.gale.com. Trinkaus, Charles. “The Problem of Free Will in the Renaissance and the Reformation.” Journal of the History of Ideas 10, no. 1 (1949): 51–62. https://www.jstor. org. Truitt, Elly R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Truitt, Elly R. “Mysticism and Machines.” History Today 65, no. 7 (2015): 72–72. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/mysticism-and-machines Viscusi, W. Kip and Joseph E. Aldy. “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World.” Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business Discussion Paper Series, no. 392: (2002). http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard_olin/392 Watson, John. The Philosophical Bases of Religion. Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1907. Westfall, Richard S. “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.” In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity. Edited by David C Lindberg and Ronal L. Numbers, 218–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Wolfram, Stephen. “Statistical mechanics of cellular automata.” Reviews of Modern Physics 55, no. 3 (1983): 601–45

4 Utilitarianism and market divinity

Those concerned with ethics often question the role of science and technological progress to human betterment. For example, Bertrand Russell was “compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make man happy.”1 Cognizant that economics, sociology, and psychology were moving under the advancement of biological sciences, Russell wrote: “Darwinism and the idea of evolution affected men’s imaginative outlook.”2 Darwinism did not take form independently from cultural and historical forces, even though Darwin focused on nonhuman species. According to Peter Bowler, the idea of evolution was presented by a number of Victorian thinkers, in utilitarian philosophy and laissez-faire theories, before Darwin. They found “individualism as a license for unlimited competition” to “eliminate the weakest members of society,” but they stopped short in translating the ethos of capitalism into a natural principle.3 “Market theory introduce[d] the logic of social Darwinism before Darwin.”4 With its emphasis on private enterprise and individual wants, market theory advanced a model of self-regulatory government. Initially, market theory helped the transition from land aristocracies to liberalism and accommodated the development of political economy as a science for policy. The market served as the legitimizing mechanism for easing excessive regulation but gradually became a regulatory doctrine for organization of the public in terms of costs and profits. Overtime, rivalries to control the global markets led to devoting “more energy to war.”5 In the wake of the World War I, Russell found “liberal ideals as free trade, free press, [and] unbiased education, either already belong to the past or soon will do so”; and “those who possess military and economic power can control education and the press, and therefore secure a subservient democracy.”6 The next chapter contextualizes Russell’s propositions. This chapter demonstrates that the political economy moved away from concepts of natural laws, transported conceptions of nature into the markets and became organized around utilitarian calculations. Modern human capital DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-5

128  Utilitarianism and market divinity theory thrives on the utilitarian philosophy that institutes ends-means orientations to learning and labour while it relies on the market as a scapegoat rationale for responsible government. 4.1 Nature and justice The arguments for free trade occurred during the transition from despotism to liberal democracy. The juxtaposition of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau with those of Adam Smith exposes two approaches the 19th century inherited concerning equality, civility, and liberty. Rousseau and Smith began with similar concerns but arrived at different processes and solutions. Rousseau saw in the admired technical progress of the 18th century a new model of slave society. His focus on inequality affirmed the constitution of persons free from enslavement of material progress. Smith’s concern centred on the satisfaction of economic needs, the pursuit of which eventually was expected to bring a distributive justice to rich and poor.7 Commercial society’s demands led Smith to argue for further economic progress and led Rousseau to consider conditions for equality if progress was to be concerned with civil justice. Smith had read the early works of Rousseau, but by adopting a scientific approach rooted in Hume and Newton, he had rejected Rousseau’s approach to inequality.8 Smith’s rejection of Rousseau was not due exclusively to scientific approaches. It unfolded in accord with the context of the historical rivalry between France and Britain. According to Hurtado, Smith’s position also reflected his interest in replacing the French and Cartesian systems with “the English System of Bacon and Newton.”9 Rousseau’s historical argument for egalitarian laws were distinct from Smith’s faith that economic inequality would eventually be remedied by economic growth and, that legislators would intervene to institute justice. Influenced by Locke, Rousseau felt that private property offered the passage to civil society. Private property was necessary for civil society and was not a source of inequality. However, Rousseau thought that “whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men, and that while they may be unequal in force or genius, they all become equal through conventions and rights.”10 He saw scientific, technological, and economic conventions prolonging inequality and found rights theories an avenue to mediate their power. Rousseau followed Aristotle in conceiving justice to be equivalent to virtue; it was necessary for political life.11 In the context of pre-Revolutionary France the nobility, by virtue of their ancestry, over-extended the exercise of their rights in social and economic affairs. It was not until the 1780s that both bourgeoisie and nobility, under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, united in their opposition to

Utilitarianism and market divinity  129 “‘despotism’, and in the belief that liberal, representative institutions were essential if property owners who bore the bulk of the direct tax burden were to have any say in the way their money was spent.”12 According to William Doyle, all leisured groups participated in educating the public for change since the ultimate aim was the defeat of despotism. The seminal democratic thinker of the modern state, Rousseau stressed “that, sovereignty…is nothing but the exercise of the general will—can never be alienated, and that the sovereign—which is nothing but a collective being—can be represented only by itself.”13 Citizens’ sovereignty delimited monopolies of economic powers by reliance on state government and coincided with industrialization. Unlike physical differences granted by nature, economic inequalities—Rousseau thought—are conventions that need to be limited by political (public) economy, which he at times called government. Rousseau’s text on political economy had instructed the elites to act in conformity to the general will, to “establish the reign of virtue,”14 In Rousseau’s other writings, the reign of virtue and instituting general will suggest a society concerned with justice. In such a society, the wealthy are responsible to the public, not simply exploit it for profit. Rousseau began his Discourse on Political Economy by referencing the distinction between the ancient household and the commercial economy of his time in order to highlight that the economy can no longer be conceived as a private matter. Rousseau utilized the metaphor of the machine to reconceptualize the body politics, arguing that the citizens “make the machine live, move and work; and no part of this machine can be damaged without the painful impression being at once conveyed to the brain.”15 The “painful” impression on other parts of this body helped the brain to attend to the whole. Along with Cartesian and mechanistic conceptions of economy were metaphors of the state as a father that educates and a sovereign maternal figure that nourishes her children, the citizens. Citizens were not at the mercy of a system of natural liberty nor were they subjects of a republic that secured their collective entity by reformulating their individual will. Since their “stoic self-comment” is not directed for meeting individual needs but for remaining free from “temptation to compete” once again “[v]irtue would become natural, that is fully social because society should remove the incentives for envy.”16 And thus a society designed by competition could not be a means to security and civility. Unlike Smith’s economy of self-interests, Rousseau recognized as the economic “body grew larger, and more complex, it began to lose its ability to function as a whole” and, at the individual level, one’s “interests may occasionally coincide with those of others, and justice may occasionally be expedient. But there is no reason to believe that these

130  Utilitarianism and market divinity conditions will always hold.”17 Rousseau’s citizens were entitled to sovereignty distinct from market utopia. For him economics remained subordinate to human life; liberty was no instrument for economic co-operation and competition. Humans were not a form of capital. Liberty was not a means to justify inequality. Liberty was the condition and effect of equality. However, before the age of mass media brainwashing, Rousseau had seen the importance of managing public opinion as part of the education of the citizen. The press and communication systems generally informed the modality of social agency. He referred to public opinion as a law not “engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens,” which “daily acquires new force,” and it revives the old laws; Rousseau wrote “of morals, customs and especially opinion—a part of the laws unknown to our politicians, but upon which the success of all the others depends.”18 Education was distinct from control or indoctrination as it aimed at the aspiration of the individual. Cultivating certain virtues (e.g., respect), education was interconnected to the overall project of egalitarian laws. In Émile, Rousseau often acknowledged “the Author of things” to emphasize his conception of the nature of humanity as not separate from Providence. He was, however, clear about human autonomy (“Natural man is entirely for himself”); values are recognized “in relation to the whole, which is the social body.”19 This whole is a society—concerned with both the material and spiritual—transforming the way primitive humans lived by establishing civil relations. In the examples he provided in Émile, Rousseau retained his moral and political stand that the laws of nature are not before and above human laws and associations. Rousseau relied on “different and vacillating meanings of nature” to convey that, “something can be done with the young to offset some of the more problematic aspects of civil society.”20 By cultivating the ability to converse, question, and reason, humans learn to recognize freedom and its limits. Anticipating advocates of socialization in education, Rousseau was suggesting that it is the moral content of education that informs the power, autonomy, and will of the individual. However, Rousseau moved away from establishing norms and values to support utility in education. As Egan observed, Rousseau “suggested that the mind is like the body” and education “a matter of encouraging the fullest development of a natural psychological process, and thereby fulfilling as far as possible the potential of each individual student.”21 The idea that education should focus on the development of individuals was potent but at the mercy of utilitarianism and dismissal of Rousseau’s equality. By examples, interactions, and conversations, Rousseau’s pupil, Émile, learned that his desires to possess or to rule others were unjust regardless of rationalization, utility, and/or self-interest. As he stood in relation to the

Utilitarianism and market divinity  131 interests and reason of others, Émile developed an understanding of himself. For example, in one situation the young Émile had planted seeds and nurtured a garden that he later learned belonged to someone else. He discovered that his work had undermined the labour of a gardener who had come to the land before he had. Instead of justifying his own purpose, or seeing the work of others as inferior, Rousseau, Émile and the gardener find an arrangement that suits all parties. Émile learned of “the idea of property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant by labour.”22 From this example, Rousseau concluded that moral ideas could not advance if the instructor forgets it is in “action” that children learn. In contrast to Locke, Rousseau’s instructions were not solely for those who learn, but for anyone trusted to guide and teach others. Unlike Locke and Mandeville, Rousseau defended public education (e.g., education for all). Education was not a charity but a necessity for the “rules of popular or legitimate government,” as “the most important business of the State,” and aiming to cultivate “public confidence.”23 Education was more than instilling order and nurturing the employability of citizens. The role of government does not simply end in funding education institutions in anticipation of a return from consumers and taxpayers. For Rousseau, the lessons, precepts, and instructions are fruitless and the authorities, democratic or oligarchic, lose public trust if they themselves do not practice what they expect of citizens. At stake are prudence and justice and not an entrepreneurialism, moulding natural passions (which Rousseau conceived as necessary for preservation and self-love). Education connects the person with wider networks of governance in appreciation of laws that facilitate respect among citizens as equals. Rousseau’s attempt to articulate a secular modern apprenticeship in freedom can be read from different angles. One reading is indicative of the ways in which humans are learned in a particular mode of freedom. Rousseau wrote: “There is no subject as perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom. Doubtless, he [the student] ought to do only what he wants, but he ought to want only what you want him to do.”24 He continued, “[b]y never doing anything except what suits him, he will soon do only what he ought to do.”25 In describing the activities of the adult and the child, Rousseau was describing apprenticeship in modern freedom. The appearance of freedom, freedom reduced to doing what one wants, allowed for surveillance and directing human will. The appearance of freedom instils docility. Émile outlined the mode of the nurturing individuals’ interest as they come to understand nature and civility: Thus, not seeing you eager to oppose him, not distrusting you, with nothing to hide from you, he [the student] will not deceive you, he will not lie to you, he will fearlessly show himself precise as he is. You will

132  Utilitarianism and market divinity be able to study him at your complete ease and arrange all around him the lessons you want to give him without him ever thinking he is receiving any.26 The person learns not to see the shortcoming of an authority; he even lacks recognition that the central lessons are designed for implementation of soft control to rule him by his own preferences and choices. It is hard to reconcile Rousseau’s Social Contract and Essays with some passages of Émile that can only be read as supplements to Machiavelli’s Prince. Rousseau’s views on childhood suggest a malleability of human nature, alterable by customs and education. Rousseau left little doubt that his claim for education based on his conception of human nature is a deliberate if not calculated preparation of a certain citizen, despite defending a moral politics against an immoral economy of interests. He directed the child neither by reward and punishment nor by shame of an invisible providence but by reformulating the nature of freedom and autonomy. Human nature is not wicked. It is malleable and develops in relation to others. Thus, when a child desires something that he sees and one wants to give it to him, it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the object to the child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropriate to his age, and there is no other means to suggest it to him.27 Rousseau made it clear: “The Abbe de Saint-Pierre called men big children. One could, reciprocally, call children little men.”28 It is always better to carry humans to the object of their interest—be it freedom—instead of being ordered by them or ordering them. Co-operative governance was distinct from despotic paternalism and aristocratic libertarians. Rousseau’s principle of justice by which the laws of the body politic are enacted were centred on conventions of natural liberty based on property as a necessary condition of citizenship.29 In this respect, Lemos pointed to the inconsistency in Rousseau’s philosophy that labour alone gives a title of property and the acceptance of “a class system based on differences of inherited property, on the ground that there are certain rules of conduct and duties of the rich that can adequately be learned and observed only through being trained from childhood.”30 The gross imbalances in the distribution of property led Rousseau to conceptualize self-sovereignty by taking labour as a property. Such a mode of self-sovereignty was the initial step towards claiming certain rights for workers who were vulnerable; to satisfy their material needs, they were dependent on the nobility.31 The duties and obligations of various persons differed while social contracts, envisaged by Rousseau, maintained the overgrowth of intergenerational

Utilitarianism and market divinity  133 economic inequality. Rousseau did offer a critique of commercial inequalities where the poor renounce their will to satisfy the self-interests of the rich. If Rousseau conceived labour as a commodity, he did not justify its exploitation based on “greater good” arguments. He also emphasized labour’s non-monetary value for human development and culture. Rousseau’s principles “limit economic inequality to the extent necessary to avoid domination” and “it is worth asking … how precisely inequality of opportunity is related to domination.”32 (This question remains central to modern predicaments.) Rousseau also accepted that the utopia of Nature is no longer a possibility. Conceiving equality simply as a utopian pursuit misses Rousseau’s point that equality is the condition for civil life. John Dewey agreed. Dewey also stressed that focusing education on employability undermines democracy. He sought “the proper place” for “vocational factors,” but for him education was an avenue to find one’s calling instead of training the young to compete as opportunists.33 While Rousseau informed Dewey’s attention to psychosocial development, Dewey objected to the notion of “control for [the] child’s good, of conformity merging into obedience, and of wills acting in harmony” implied in “the laissez-faire pedagogy of Émile.”34 Rousseau’s liberty and equality were reformulated in the obedience demanded by the laissez-faire advocates, in particular by Jeremy Bentham, who revised Adam Smith’s visions of political economy. More than intellectual debts, Ignatieff implies the choice of words in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments are “so close to those of Rousseau” that they “cannot be mere coincidence.”35 Smith adopted and reformulated some of Rousseau’s views on public economy. While Smith criticized Rousseau, he too recognized political economy could not be left to the elites; it required regulation. Smith also admitted that the concern for justice had to extend to the public and the individual. Smith’s notion of sympathy echoes Rousseau’s notion of natural compassion (pity). Rousseau and other French intellectuals of the 18th century worked through Mandeville’s truth-telling of commercial elites and offered a distinction between egoism and self-respect. Rousseau’s idea of “passions” as “principle instrument of our preservation”36 became absorbed as part of liberal self-governance. Rousseau’s contrasts between Indigenous and European people (aimed at showing civil inequality grew from social conventions) set the direction for Smith’s justification of commercial civilization and open trade as a facilitator of social progress. Smith rationalized political injustice by economic reasons that subverts rights. Smith wrote: “Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour” and yet they “are miserably poor.”37 In explaining the manipulative power of the commercial elites in so-called civilized nations, Smith observed a great number of people do not

134  Utilitarianism and market divinity labour at all and yet the produce of the whole labour of the society offers them excess and luxury. This valuation led to the assumption that the poorest members of European society live in better conditions than hunters and gatherers. It also legitimized those who, by manipulation, controlled capital and worked the labouring class were contributors to social progress. Smith found merit in the European model of economics to justify colonization. He was not blind to the “savage injustice of the Europeans,” but he judged the injustice was going to be “beneficial” to the Indigenous people.38 Praise for the market economy grew from acknowledging its cruelties as part of its benevolence. The approximation and treatment of the labouring poor to those subjected to the savage injustice of colonizers is not without significance to the directions of political economy as a science for contemporary policy. Those subjugated, Smith evaluated, eventually will reap the benefits of progress if they survived the initial violence. Colonization and national rivalry were processes informed by a faith in the productive fruits of trade. The trust in trade made a shift from imperialism by guns and religion to imperialism governed by imports and exports. Smith reasoned that international trade “might be” beneficial to either side of trade even for powerful countries such as Britain and France, if mercantile jealousy and national animosity were put aside, implying trade facilitates peace. The idea that trade maintained rich nations in positions of power was initially expressed by David Hume, who construed people and industrial technology as the main sources of national wealth; what crossed the borders supplemented this existing wealth.39 Adam Smith remained committed to Hume’s ideas, but he was also aware that trade by itself may not bring improvements for overall population, thereby making it necessary for the legislators to intervene.40 Smith’s political economy did find inequality a problem, a problem he entrusted to a system of natural liberty but also to the intervention of policymakers. Smith did not imagine that sanctions and financial manipulations can misuse trade to prolong the “savage injustice” of colonial and imperial powers. Similar to Rousseau, Smith’s political economy became more transparent when considering his thoughts on education. He emphasized that the education of the “common people will require the attention of the state”; it should not be left to the people “of rank and fortune.”41 By this Smith did not leave out considerations of private pursuits. He postulated that the common people are to be taught what ensures they meet the demands of their occupations—not necessarily about their natural liberty. However, he emphasized the responsibility of the public in paying for necessary elementary learning. His advocacy of education rested on the reason that it “instructed and intelligent people besides” being “decent and orderly… [and they] are more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors.”42 After Smith,

Utilitarianism and market divinity  135 the directions were set to justify the low-paid labour for the greater good so far as it meets the interest of those whose political economy was deemed lawfully superior. 4.2 The benevolent market Drawing from French 18th century court records and historical documents, Judith Miller shows that the ideas of free trade initially came to be formulated as a result of the state’s active role in managing the forces of supply and demand in order to protect the population from uncontrollable economic forces that could fuel revolts. Administrative authority over trade did not cease after “the free-trade legislation of the 1760s,” rather it “leaned more toward behind-the-scenes coercion, directed especially at grain owners and bakers.”43 Since the authorities did not want the population to be a party in the negotiations with producers and merchants, their “evolving policies required the goodwill and coordination… in supervising the trade.”44 According to Miller, ideas for increasing economic freedom had been in circulation since the 1730s in France. However, such ideas became part of economic liberalism in the 1750s and 1760s, aimed to remedy the food shortage and the devastation brought by the Seven Years’ War. This is the context of political and intellectual arguments that linked fears of food shortage (and impeding tax policies) with the liberalization of markets. Miller emphasizes that the state created free trade and its moderate role in administering market contributed to the founding of economic liberalism. The initial ideas of the market as a natural entity and as a self-regulating system were developed by French physiocrats. Physiocrats advocated for changing the conditions of mercantilism. Having François Quesnay (1694–1774) as an authority led to the formation of a school of thought with shared visions. Quesnay, who served Louis XV as a medical doctor, published his first economics article, Fermiers, in 1756, attracting reformists such as Jacques Turgot, Mercier de Riviere, Le Trosne, Abbe Baudeau, and others in favour of an economic model informed by agriculture. In the face of the economic upheavals of the 18th century—including factory owners’ increasing power and the suffering of the poor working class—the physiocrats “appeared to be a system of advance liberalism or a foundation for a constitution of a peasant democracy.”45 The peasant democracy at stake drew extensively from the Chinese despotic agricultural economy. The Europeans’ preoccupation with China had begun in the 14th century. By the time of Quesnay, the occident had reaped profits from Chinese sciences in military and printing technologies. For Quesnay, China offered a portal to reformulate the role of the state in economic affairs.

136  Utilitarianism and market divinity Quesnay explained that “the great empire of China” offered a model of “political and moral constitution … based upon a knowledge of Natural Law, … worthy to be used as a model for all states.”46 Similar to his Christian predecessors, Quesnay’s idea of natural law had its origin in the will of a “supreme creator,” but its main emphasis rested on “the aggregate of the laws of the physical order.”47 He explained that the economic order of the nation must focus on laws aimed at reproduction of wealth: these laws require on the part of legislator and of those who enforce them, a very extensive knowledge and elaborate calculations, the result of which must present, with proof, the advantages to the sovereign and to the nation, especially the advantages to the sovereign, for he must be induced by self-interest to do right thing. Happily, his interest, when properly understood, always agrees with that of the nation…. 48 The sovereign’s interests are aligned with the production of national wealth and the production of wealth are informed by the “elaborate calculations” for the purposes of drafting positive laws. The extensive knowledge draws from the physical order to direct policies. In the roundabout economic framework, rigidity dissolves to preserve the state; the sovereign was to trust and rely on the knowledge of the legislators. Such a trust was foundational to political economy. The concept of natural order was not new to the Europeans; however, it was in need of new emphasis to direct government regulations.49 Noting the “novelty in Quesnay’s handling of the natural order,” Maverick points out that it articulated different visions from those formulated by Locke, for it proposed that a natural order “will supervene if obstructive laws of men are removed.”50 The idea transformed medieval thought that had relied on the model of a monarch who governed by divine and natural laws. The conception of natural economic order that can be observed and calculated aimed at sound legislation. Prior to Adam Smith, Quesnay’s reawakening of natural order pointed to the possibility of synchronizing national wealth with the pursuit of self-interests. Quesnay disengaged economic process from its anthropological role as servant of the socio-political order and established its claim to be the direct manifestation of the natural order. In other words, he argued that economic process itself embodied natural law and should thus dictate the sociopolitical order.51 The argument for the naturalness of economic transactions followed from revaluation of an overly regulated economic order. It did not claim that the market can serve as a sole regulator of economic processes.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  137 Although Quesnay relied on the ideas of natural order to reinterpret the Eastern despotism, he drew on “Petty’s description of land as the mother of wealth and the labour that cultivated it, the father.”52 Quesnay’s reliance on Petty helped his scientific emphasis on both freedom and positive laws that regulate freedom in state management. While Bacon and Petty accepted that government calculation must concern wealth, labour, and taxes, they never envisaged the population as economic subjects who were capable of autonomous behaviour.53 Quesnay’s economic approach worked towards making certain associations—such as growth of capital with the growth of population, increased demand conditions with supply of labour and competition among workers resulting in profit for the landlords—possible.54 After Quesnay, many of these associations were reworked. However, his method of representation of economic processes by numbers and diagrams remained central to economic science. In the introduction to the fifth printing of Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations—the final publication during Smith’s lifetime—Edwin Cannan wrote: “The confession of faith of the Économistes is embodied in Quesnay’s Tableau Économique … described as worthy as being ranked, along with writing and money, as one of the three greatest inventions of the human race.”55 This new faith, along with writing and money, was influential in orienting humans and directing their attention. In the context of the Tableau économique, Quesnay’s attempt was to present an economic system that can function “much like an engine may function as a perfect whole so long as one adds fuel.”56 Although Quesnay’s sole reliance on agriculture was the subject of criticism for advocates of industrial progress, this did not prevent Adam Smith from adopting many of Quesnay’s ideas. “Smith’s reading of Quesnay as promoting ‘prefect liberty’ was the product of their personal acquaintance,” Harcourt elaborated, for Smith: “Selfinterest and the natural desire of all men to improve their own condition would still provide the engine for economic growth in the absence of perfect liberty.”57 Recognizing imperfect liberty, both Quesnay and Smith viewed the role of impartial policymaker as a given for sustaining social order and limiting economic exploitation. The organic conceptions of the economic system offered by Quesnay normalized that motives and impulses are natural contributors to economic growth and eased the need for stringent regulatory power. The sense of nationalism familiar to mercantilist’s lords as well as a new model of individual liberty born from its limited paternalism were not so distant from what natural law theorists believed. “As Locke was the father of political individualism, so Quesnay was one of the fathers of economic individualism.”58 This individualism was co-dependent on managing public opinion for preservation of the elites. In their short-lived triumph over mercantilism, French economists, Turgot, Condorcet, and Quesnay left

138  Utilitarianism and market divinity their Scottish and British counterparts the conceptual tools to develop a science for studying individual capacity for profit maximization. Although political economists derived “their pedigree” from Quesnay, they diverged from his advice in learning from the past and from his construct of limiting trade to certain chosen activities.59 The exponents of commercial freedom develop their ideas in the context of food scarcity and targeting the ineffective Corn Laws—trade restrictions designed to keep prices high to favour domestic producers (by British mercantilists). The initial ideas of self-regulative markets were meant to protect the public against scarcity, as commercial freedom advocates thought free commerce could prevent famine. Rothschild suggested that “self-interest and competition,” “institutions and corporations,” the “market,” and the “state” meant different things in the 18th century than in the 20th century.60 According to Rothschild, the efforts of the 18th century thinkers were misinterpreted later “as a simple prescription that commerce is good and government bad.”61 The market was not simply an instrument for trade; the elites utilized it to weaken the role of government. In the progress and improvement proposal of laissez-faire advocates, the markets gradually became an excuse to exempt elites and government from their responsibilities. According to Williams, “Queen Victoria once sent a message to two African chiefs” indicating that “‘England has become great and happy by the knowledge of the true God and Jesus Christ. To the Manchester Capitalists, ‘Jesus Christ was Free Trade, and Free trade was Jesus Christ’.”62 The Manchester capitalists were manufacturing elites who propagated their labour market policies as causes for social improvement. The commercial capitalism of the 18th century, built on slavery and trade monopoly, “helped to create the industrial capital of the 19th century, which turned around and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery and all its works.”63 Williams clarified that the capitalists’ interest was on the side of the colonial empire. By reliance on utilitarianism, they also advanced market mentality to govern the lives of the working class. 4.3 Market reformed morality According to John Maynard Keynes, laissez-faire philosophy first appeared in the response given to the French economic minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) by French aristocrats when asked how the mercantilist government could support them. Keynes noted that the phrase found its full support in the political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.64 Bentham had read Smith’s texts reworking the English ancien régime. Smith’s arguments for self-interest and free trade gained a new momentum under the laissezfaire “dogma” that “got hold of the education machine.”65 According to

Utilitarianism and market divinity  139 Kanth, laissez-faire advocates “find Benthamite utilitarianism a better guide to the functions of the state” than Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” that welcomed justice.66 Although Smith explained “a society in which every human is in some measure a merchant,” he did not foresee that the “science of the legislator” and “science of jurisprudence” would one day serve as a science for limitations on the “political vision of society.”67 The new laws of market providence held by laissezfaire advocates were to determine how social progress takes its course. While Quesnay and Smith articulated the intellectual underpinnings for the market, it was in the disputes of the Poor Law Reform that their views were creatively altered. From 1795 to 1834, regulations were introduced for the sake of abandoning the laws of Tudor legislation, relieving poverty by government and ecclesiastical action, instituted since the late 15th century. This desertion of the poor relief laws began by the Speenhamland system, as an aid-in-wages for employees, which relied on public means to mitigate rural poverty brought by the mechanization of agricultural labour. Speenhamland was proposed as an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Relief Act of 1601 which instituted taxation of the wealthier citizens to provide basic shelter, food, and clothing to those physically incapable to work. According to Polanyi, “Speenhamland was an automaton for demolishing the standards on which any kind of society could be based … it put a premium on the shirking of work and the pretense of inadequacy” and “increased the attraction of pauperism precisely at the juncture when a man was straining to escape the fate of the destitute.”68 The Reform Bill of 1832 and the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 abolished the Speenhamland system. The industrial revolution dehumanized the poor and inserted them within the machinery of the material production. According to Poovey, pauperism—a moral designation—came to be distinguished from poverty, an economic category.69 The new sentiment was that of willing self-renunciation for subsistence. The natural liberty arguments began to be misconstrued so that the industrial elites are supplied with labourers. The free circulation of labour supply went hand in hand with the training and policing of the public. As Kanth observed: “the old Poor Law was not so much in violation of ‘natural law’…, as it was an impediment to social expediency on the classical road to social improvement and material advancement.”70 The elites’ claimed that economics as a science can improve the conditions of the poor. This claim scandalized the parish origins of the Poor Laws. After abolishing the Poor Laws, the poor were no longer poor. According to Polanyi, they were a “working class, whose immediate self-interest destined them to become the protectors of society.”71 The new society that emerged in the 19th century “was subjected to laws which were not human laws.”72 Human laws become subservient to the market laws. The economic elites nurtured the predatory logics of markets by

140  Utilitarianism and market divinity euphemism for social progress. The gradual transition from Elizabethan Poor Laws represented an instrument for popular demoralization and dehumanization. At the same time the capitalists relied on the presumptive power of the market to claim agency, freedom, and autonomy on behalf of the poor. Natural self-regulatory principles of the physiocrats were reinterpreted to claim that markets can look after putting the poor to work. Those with authority conveyed to the working class that there is no survival outside of the market. To rationalize the neutralization of their moral values, early proponents of political economy resorted to a scientific objective approach in scrutinizing laws that aimed at human preservation. Despite their many disagreements, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, thought society could only be harnessed by the extension of markets into the management of human affairs. They agreed on abolishing the Poor Laws and establishing a science for economic growth. They adhered to Mandeville’s rejection of supporting the poor, while judging Mandeville’s system was distinct from their science.73 They each utilized an objective approach to the government of the working class. For example, Malthus applied a market analysis in thinking that as population rises, the supply of labour rises and its cost falls. This requires labourers to work harder which subsequently discourages marriage, making corrections to the population increase. He recognized the Poor Laws were instituted for the most benevolent purposes; however, Malthus, a clergyman by training, reassured his interlocutors that the market is more benevolent: The fear of the Lord is very justly said to be the beginning of wisdom; but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord, and the admiration of moral good. The denunciation of future punishment, contained [in] the scriptures, seems to be well calculated to arrest the progress of [the] vicious, and awaken the attention of the careless; but we see, from repeated experience, that they are not accompanied with evidence of such a nature, as to overpower the human will, and to make men lead virtuous lives with vicious dispositions, merely from a dread of hereafter.74 Malthus was cognizant that he was departing from a long tradition that went back to the Gospels. At the same time, he implied that scientific utilitarianism upgrades and supplements theology. Whether from God or man, the new laws were “calculated” to serve the purpose of the creator. These laws evidently justified the decisions not to preserve human life. Abolishing the state’s intervention in the livelihoods of the poor would allow the markets to do what they do: look after life and death. In the next editions of the Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus suggested that education offered social improvement in place of the Poor Laws. However, he maintained his position in the first edition where he had

Utilitarianism and market divinity  141 outlined an economic approach to population. Against the growing sentiments of his contemporaries’ utilitarian defence of secular education, Malthus wanted the Church to remain in charge of schooling.75 During this time, the elites began to explore the implications of education for lowering crime and avoiding revolt as well as for improving the conditions of the poor by reinforcing strong work habits. Committed to religious virtues, Malthus wanted to teach the poor about patience and frugality. Not only did education function for self-management but Malthus also thought it had civil and political purposes: “its obvious tendency to teach the lower classes of society to respect themselves, by obliging the higher classes to respect them.”76 Malthus’ arguments for universal education accompanied his recognition of civil liberty and respect in society; however, he shared with his aristocratic contemporaries a calculative approach to social progress. “Malthus’ law of population,” and the “idea of a law of struggle throughout living nature,” Robert Young informs us, impressed Darwin, “and provided a convenient mechanism for a natural analogue to the changes which he was studying in the selection of domesticated varieties.”77 Young was drawing from Darwin’s notebooks and letters written from 1838–1858 in which Darwin confessed his intellectual debt to Malthus for the theory of natural selection. Darwin interpreted Malthusian “concept of struggle” in two ways: first in relation “to the competition between different individuals of the same species” to survive and reproduce and, second, in reference to the struggle of “species against the environment.”78 While Malthus provided a logic of struggle to secularize government, Darwin’s idea of a law of struggle naturalized the discourse of competitive individualism. Malthus indicated that unless “compelled by necessity” humans “sluggish and averse to labour”79 may never seek progress. Markets were gaining force as mechanisms that facilitated struggle and competition as means for social and economic progress. For Malthus, the poor’s motivation to labour and improve their moral and social condition went hand in hand. However, Ricardo’s technical approach only concerned the economics of wealth. He reworked Smith’s general thesis of self-interest by according centrality to the motivation of the rich to maximize profit from exchanging goods that included labour as a commodity.80 Ricardo also “consider[ed] money as invariable in value,” allowing for “relative variation in the value of other things,” including “the different quantities of labour required to produce them, and their being altered by a variation in the value of money itself.”81 Adam Smith’s conception of labour as the measure of value had diverged from Locke’s conception of labour as a property. Ricardo, Polanyi points out, “completed what Locke and Smith had begun, the humanization of economic value; what the Physiocrats had credited to Nature, Ricardo reclaimed for man.”82 Ricardo’s emphasis on the distinction between employment of

142  Utilitarianism and market divinity labour and employment of capital worked towards producing a theory of value that secured profit for those who held capital. They were in charge to direct human society by employing labour and capital.83 An advocate for abolishing the Poor Laws, Ricardo understood that technological improvements increase profit for the capitalists but not for the wage labourers. Indeed, he acknowledged, “that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interest of the class of labourers.”84 Characterizing the survival of the working population as an “interest” demonstrates his lack of empathy and ethics. Ricardo reasoned that if technology increases efficiency and profit for the capitalists, it should also increase the net revenue of the nation; that, by itself, is a sufficient reason for its development. Machinery was not solely for the sake of producing certain goods; for Ricardo and his followers who claimed society is a machine, technology secured a profitable future. At times contested, these views coincided with the growing role of science for social welfare but also control. As health and education became institutionalized, “scientific method” also “authorize[d] certain people to interfere in the interior lives of the poor.”85 The disinterested scientific approach had social and cultural significance beyond purely economic formulations of the body politic. As anatomical and mechanical metaphors for managing society overlapped, they produce a contradiction in understanding nature. On the one hand, mastery and exploitation of nature for the increase of wealth was found problematic. On the other hand, the utilization of natural resources and humans were unavoidable for social progress.86 No contradiction discouraged Ricardo. The “value system” of Ricardo, according to McMurty, “instructs people to see their preferences as ‘rational’ and proclaims the value ground’s unlimited expression as ‘liberty’”87 And markets gave the pretence that liberty is reducible to preferences and economic choices. In market liberty, those who own capital employ those who do not. The latter are made willing to sell themselves as property. Ricardo’s use of physical laws of production offered a systematic alteration of Smith and Quesnay’s conceptions of the market. Ricardo, McMurty noted, set in motion the “market theology,” facilitating the trust put on the market as an administrator of reward and punishment that once referenced the invisible hand of God.88 Ricardo reconstructed the religious underpinnings by positive analysis of wealth, based on facts devoid of moral content. According to Klaver, it was Ricardo who provided “a secular alternative to divine law and a bourgeoisie version of ‘virtue’ that places capitalist economic organization at the center of reassuring narrative of human development and progress.” In Ricardo’s decontextualized approach, economic processes become a “natural law unto themselves.”89 Hollander praised Ricardo not for his contribution to economic theory but for his method that “established the title of economic

Utilitarianism and market divinity  143 inquiry to the rank of positive science.”90 Hollander admitted that “his data may have been inadequate, his method in part defective, and his conclusions sometimes misleading,” but Ricardo was essential in “converting economic speculation to an organically related body of general principles.”91 Thus, pseudoscience informed the general principles of the economic conceptions. Although almost all of Ricardo’s propositions were disputed by the 1870s, his lasting impact was felt in the adaptation of his outlook for economic growth. Ricardo’ authority had established “the fear that in rejecting Ricardo entirely the case for free trade might be jeopardized.”92 Mark Blaug concludes by acknowledging that Ricardo’s influence has stood the test of time; Ricardo guided, for example, William Stanley Jevons—the father of neo-classical economics—and supported mathematical approaches that made utility quantifiable. Ricardo’s treatment of human life as a mean for economic ends had been informed by Bentham. For both Ricardo and Bentham, James Bonar explains, “political individualism was part and parcel of economic principles… and, when Bentham made self-interest a leading principle of politics, Ricardo, to follow him, needed only to make clear to himself the underlying political basis of his economic ideas.”93 Economic fictions reformulated political individualism: the market acts as a natural lawgiver of prices, wages, and profits. In this context, the interest in popular education was directed by desires to train people in competitive individualism and to advance laissez-faire on a large scale. Stark points out that “Bentham and Ricardo shared belief that [the hu]man is essentially a selfish animal” and it is “useless” and “unnecessary to fight that selfishness.”94 They envisaged “personal and public welfare is perculated by the admirable mechanism of modern market relations.” Stark continues, “Ricardo clothed these doctrines into the stern forms of economic theory; Bentham developed their implication in a host of philosophical, psychological, jurisprudential, educational, and political writing. [While] Ricardo was a Benthamite, Bentham was not exclusively a Ricardian.”95 Perceiving humans as selfish animals strengthened and normalized the laissez-faire doctrine. Bentham’s conception of humans as “pleasure-seeking and pain-fleeing animals”96 inevitably justified humans to treat their own kind as they treat animals—a resource. Bentham’s approach to political economy as a “science” of improving society informed public opinion. For example, a popular educational text, Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy brought the thoughts of the early economists to households. The book presents a dialogue between two women discussing the major themes of economics while citing passages from Smith, Malthus, Say, Bentham, and others as authorities. Among the major themes are capital and labour. While capital is equipped with agency and power, labour is dependent on capital, machinery, and industry. Mrs. B. teaches Caroline:

144  Utilitarianism and market divinity It may appear paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that whatever abridges and facilitates labour will eventually increase the demand of labourers… [italics in original]. Caroline: Or, in other words, to turn people out of work is the most certain means of procuring them employment! This is precisely the objection I was making to the introduction of new machinery.97 Caroline feared that all resources—which included the labour of the working class—would become exhausted because technological development promotes long-term consumption but not employment. Mrs. B. responded: “No, that cannot be the case, where there is capital the poor will always find employment.”98 Capital had found a faceless identity: ensuring that the poor would work. The capitalist who employs the new machine “is the immediate gainer,” Mrs. B. transparently claimed, and the “working classes” have something to gain from the “abridge of manual labour” and that is “the cheapness of the goods.”99 The working class became consumers of what they produced but from which they did not profit. Caroline was pressed to believe the new science and had to understand for herself that the civilized economy differed from primate economies. In the so-called civilized economy, those without wealth must be schooled and believe that efficiency in using and exploiting life is what brings social progress. The use and accumulation of capital dictates the survival of the fittest. The definition of “capital” given is “any accumulated produce which tends to facilitate future productions.”100 The book’s transparent educational aim was to convey that the interest of the working classes is labour and the interest of the capitalists is the accumulation and employment of capital. Mrs. B. claimed economics is a form of “knowledge” the “general diffusion” of which “excites greater attention in the lower classes to their future interests,” and Caroline asked, “you would not teach political economy to the labour classes, Mrs. B.”101 Mrs. B. answered: “No; but I would endeavour to give the rising generation such an education as would render them not only moral and religious, but industrious, frugal and provident.”102 This new mentality, merging the old and new providence discourses, depended on printing presses. Before the Education Act of 1870 created a new demand for the publishing industry, the propagation of political economy through print had begun and narrowed the gap between moral values of capitalism and Christianity. Capitalists’ orientation to material progress relied on religious ideas for changing social sentiments. And the growth of literacy in the working class was expected to strengthen faith, capitalism, and nationalism.103 The reliance on market as a system of social organization took form along the lines of divided classes as the British Empire revised rights and liberty.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  145 4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society Bentham’ idea for panopticon management of public institutions was borrowed from a small factory in Russia during his visit in 1787. The factory was operated with no machines but humans who worked as if they were machines. For the remaining of his life, Bentham stood in admiration of the model of architecture that had located an inspector where he had the “power to commence and conclude a survey of the whole establishment”104 without the workers knowing whether they are being observed. This design was, he thought, universally applicable. Bentham wrote: “Note,—that it was for persons of the unoffending class,” the working people, “that this new plan of architecture was originally draft[ed].”105 It increased the economic value of each child: [T]he pecuniary value of a child at its birth – that value which at present is not merely equal 0, but equal to an oppressively large negative quantity, would under that system of maintenance and education which I had prepared for it, have been a positive quantity to no inconsiderable amount.106 The prospect of monetary profit from human life took hold of morality. The panopticon ensured not only self-conduct but also accountability established by principles of universal and constant inspectability. Božovič points out that: “Bentham creates the fiction of God in the panopticon” by the pragmatics of “a gaze and a voice that cannot be pinned down to any particular bearer.”107 Bentham claimed that “the panopticon is a living entity, ‘an artificial body’, which is kept alive by the inspector with his gaze and his voice”; this artificial body was inseparable from the plan to build “out of bricks, iron, glass” divine like attributes.108 Bentham referred to panopticon as an “engine” by which: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the guardian knot of the PoorLaws are not cut, but united – all by a simple idea in Architecture! [sic].”109 Against the background of the Poor Laws controversies, Bentham’s idea aimed at cultural reforms by which human beings become frugally g­ overned and useful. The calculative approach to maximize pleasure by administering and managing pain gave utilitarian doctrine a new force. In reference to Bentham’s defence of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” Parekh detected an ambivalence in Bentham’s oeuvre, noting that “the phrase excluded the happiness of the rich and privileged few, and therefore implied political radicalism to which he [Bentham] was unsympathetic for a long time.”110 Political radicalism did articulate a progressive liberal ideology

146  Utilitarianism and market divinity towards the common people. This radicalism had been generated by the French Revolution. It had opened doors for Bentham’s employment of “economic methodology” to “representative institutions… grounded on hedonistic standards.”111 Bentham believed an accurate economy of incentives would enforce the reign of economic enterprise, help the penal system in dealing with crime, and act on God’s behalf to secure the greatest happiness of all living things. “Radicalism,” Bowler clarifies, “reform of existing institutions to get rid of the straight jacket imposed by the legacy of the aristocratic rule, thus freeing society to allow maximum exploitation of its economic potential.”112 According to Bowler, utilitarianism and laissezfaire economics underpinned political radicalism and “the belief that individuals left to themselves will” provide the “most effective social and economic order” sustaining a link “with the deist tradition in which the Creator’s laws ensure the balance of nature.”113 Bentham’s focus on calculating utility, in his arguments for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, concerned “all social habits” and was paralleled to “the natural theology” that “influenced Darwin in his youth.”114 Before Bentham, the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” appeared in Cesare Beccaria’s (1738–1794) On Crime and Punishment, a book that had changed the administration of criminal justice.115 Beccaria’s influence went beyond crime and punishment. Schumpeter noted that Beccaria had educated the Enlightenment thinkers about “utility and scarcity.”116 His arguments “for more humane punishments,” expanded into the realm of institutions in service to “a more effective, efficient and persuasive form of social control,” combining the two domains of policing and economy, rendering them “seamless and continuous.”117 For example, in his text on political economy Bentham had explained that “if idleness [is] to be discouraged, it is not because it is the non-acquisition of wealth, but because it is the source of crime.”118 For Bentham the science of wealth moves towards incorporation of pain and pleasure principles and utilizes these principles for economic development. Bentham acknowledged his debt to Beccaria for orienting him to economic applications of pain and pleasure.119 In a society where the powerful and powerless live differently, pain and pleasure were mediated and measured (and continue to be) according to the economic status. Bentham defined the instrument of pleasure as “anything that goes under the name of a possession: whether that possession be a real or fictitious entity” and concluded that “[m]oney therefore is the only current possession, the only current instrument of pleasure.”120 Possessions and money are rendered as instruments to govern: “As pleasure is given by giving money, so is pain by taking it away.”121 While Bentham’s contemporaries applied money to relationships of supply and demand, Bentham found a utility in money beyond the market and into the governance of bodies. His moral compass was reduced to “valuing

Utilitarianism and market divinity  147 every thing in money.”122 By limiting government’s role in economic affairs, Bentham’s model of jurisprudence left a door open for those in possession of money to profit from the use of others. Children were no exception. Children of the poor were taken from their families and placed in the school of industry (receiving allowances for maintaining the child) and/or placed into new families as an apprentice or servant. Bentham found this separation of children from their caretakers and parents justified by “the utility of the legal subordination”; he considered the arrangement “a source of instruction” that played an “important function” (e.g., instilling “good behaviour”) for public benefit. Bentham rationalized by writing: “He, who takes the apprentice with and for money, may have employment for the money without having any for the apprentice.”123 Neither the children nor their parents deserved money—they must be grateful that they were saved by Bentham’s principles from being left to themselves. This was not, presumably, a “forced system of casts” but “a system of equal and unexpansive liberty.”124 Apparently, the liberty of the poor had to also bring money to the wealthy. Bentham’s model of liberty went hand in hand with legal subjection justified by calculations of utility. The duration of apprenticeship of the young depended on profitability. By the early decades of the 20th century, Bentham’s industrial schools were recognized as prisons. Subsequent shifts in the mistreatment of children were not governed by valuing the principle of money but by recognizing humanity and human rights. The French Constitution of the Rights of Man and the Citizen decreed that all humans have a right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. “Liberty” for Bentham was “conceived of not as an expression of a dynamic self,” Long noted, “but as subjection to the hedonistic dictates of sensory organism in a world of potentially dangerous ‘inanimate or irrational bodies.’”125 Bentham’s liberty was restructured by self-defence. He relied neither on the Aristotelian conception of humans as political by nature nor on the theological natural right. For Bentham “a natural right was a contradiction in terms” and “he preferred the word ‘security’ to the word ‘liberty’, so he thought… the term ‘right’ in its political sense should be replaced by the term ‘securities against misrule.’”126 According to Dewey, for Bentham “‘right’ is nothing but a round-about means for the hedonistic end of private satisfaction.”127 Bentham’s reconceiving of the sovereign masters as pain and pleasure at once retained liberty and subjected it to obedience. Bentham found obedience as a precondition for the happiness he promoted. And security was the rationale by which authorities instituted obedience. As Bentham became gradually sympathetic to democratic thinking, obedience became the interest of the subjects. The gap between democracy and totalitarianism started to close as increasing

148  Utilitarianism and market divinity security and happiness meant increasing control and surveillance. Obedience is internalized and expressed by looking after one’s interest. Bentham “speculate[d] that people must have originally obeyed their sovereign because of their fear,” Parekh explained, but “the advantages of civil society would have led them to continue their obedience and so converted it into a habit and later into a disposition.”128 Bentham’s commitment to utility translated into the internalization of obedience as part of one’s civil disposition. However, Bentham would never have advocated subordination to tax-dodging elites and transnational corporations.129 His advocacy of a system of taxation rewarded obedience through legislative power that positioned government, not a few technocrats, as the authority in matters of civility. According to Parekh, for Bentham “political life can be fully explained only in terms of man’s desire for pleasure and aversion to pain.”130 Bentham’s hedonism tied individuals to calculations that constrained existence to a never-ending search to maximize happiness. “What is happiness? It is the possession of pleasure with the exemption from pain. It is in proportion to the aggregate of pleasures enjoyed, and of pains averted.”131 Bentham failed to specify the judge of this happiness. He continued to define virtue as “that which maximizes pleasures and minimizes pain,” and vice as, “that which lessens happiness, or contributes to unhappiness.”132 What was vice? Vice may be defined to be a miscalculation of chances: a mistake in estimating the value of pleasure and pain. It is false moral arithmetic; and there is the consolation of knowing that, by the application of a right standard, there are few moral questions, which may not be resolved, with an accuracy and a certainty not far removed from mathematical demonstration.133 Moral questions were to be trusted to mathematical demonstrations. If vice is a miscalculation of chance than what gains prominence is the very process of reducing chance. For Bentham morality can become efficient if accurate calculations take hold of human problems. Meanwhile, Bentham acknowledged the impossibility of detaching ourselves from our self-interests; nor can we sidestep those pleasures and pains we experience when we dedicate ourselves to social welfare. Bentham’s moral arithmetic echoed the numerical approach of William Petty’s political arithmetic. Together they demonstrate an intensification of a numerical approach to human life and pave the way to the age of surveillance capitalism. The enjoyment and suffering produced conduct and their accurate calculation keeps humans in check. In this circular logic, Bentham made a systematic assault on virtue ethics. Bentham and those who followed him

Utilitarianism and market divinity  149 reduced matters of welfare and morality to calculations by reliance on their science. What they advanced was not an ideology nor science but vanity, indicative of a distorted mind that sought to reconcile self-interest and benevolence: “Bentham says of himself, in one of his latest Memoranda—‘I am a selfish man, as selfish as any man can be. But in me, somehow or other, so it happens, selfishness has taken the shape of benevolence.’”134 The self-flattering Bentham called himself a “man” as he treated other humans as animals; even so, the next chapter demonstrates, he became an influential idol for economists, policymakers, and psychologists of the 20th century. 4.5 Bentham and education To secure a promising future, Bentham thought “increase in the quantity of useful knowledge possessed by the middle classes” will manifest “probable results” of “improvement in respect of health, domestic economy and personal comfort.”135 Improvement in the conditions of the lower and middle classes was thought to bring proportionate improvement to the conditions of their superiors. Schools became associated with the programmes of social and economic improvement. The monitorial schools of Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) not only saved money and time but they also realigned the charity schools of the 18th century with the values of an industrial society. While Bell’s schools affirmed the role of religion, it was Lancaster who advanced that “moralization of the poor be based on nonsectarian religious principles.”136 Lancaster’s ideas resonated with Bentham’s manufacturing of ambitions in accord with market revolution. According to David Hogan, Lancaster’s Improvement in Education inspired Bentham to write his own text detailing the content and administration of schools. In Chrestomathia, meaning conducive to useful learning, Bentham argued that his “panopticon principles” improved the monitorial system by “minimizing the distance between the situation of the remotest scholar and that of the master’s eye.”137 He clarified the value of panopticon: it “prevents remoter objects from being eclipsed by nearer ones; partly by enabling the Master to see without being seen.”138 The aims of surveillance in Bentham’s schools were not to teach but to inform human identity. “Chrestomathic precepts” posed that if children could “be sufficiently filled with information, they would be more likely to make the more advantageous choices between pain and pleasure, indolence and work, crime, and honesty, and so on.”139 Bentham insisted that school money is to be used towards administrating useful instruction and that excluded religion. However, schools ought to have no instruction repugnant to religion in general and to “Christian Religion in particular.”140 Bentham’s rhetoric did serve the purpose of minimizing the

150  Utilitarianism and market divinity differences between the two dominating monitorial systems—Bell and Lancaster’s—by “stressing that the school provide a system of ‘social cooperation’” since “school coaxed student[s] with varying disposition[s] into unified patterns of action” and “coordinated trajectories for individual advancement while simultaneously avoiding ‘controverted points of Divinity.’”141 Bentham’s educational schemes were connected to his advancement of utilitarianism and his insistence for the reorganization of institutions by pain and pleasure principles. The dominating doctrines for education defended by the wealth-based society of England would travel to the United States and Canada but these were Lancaster’s views before incorporating Bentham’s view. Lancaster argued that the “hope” for “reward sweetens labour”; and “[t]he very nature of expectation,” and “the prospect of something to be attained in future” was “to operate as a wire-drawing machine to human industry.”142 A factory model of education was in play long before public schools came into existence. The probable prospect of the future returns, however, were not defined narrowly in terms of economic outputs. Lancaster influenced the formation of a national system in which the models of monitorial system were structured by metaphors familiar to those who took responsibility for the economy and society.143 Lancaster’s schools gained full force in the early decades of the 20th century when the very conception of teacher as a machine dispensing rewards and punishment was promoted by the behaviourists.144 The incorporation of Lancaster’s ideas in North American schools meant that teachers were conceived as part of the “‘technology’ of the school classroom,” as part of “the promotable package of ideas that would allow the school be visibly successful to policy makers and other stakeholders.”145 In wanting schools to become systematized, Lancaster prioritized the design of its daily activities, stressing their economic contribution to the country in making children useful. Lancaster’s ideas received an upgrade from Bentham’s utility-based schools. Bentham’s principles of pain and pleasure directed schooling as a means for economic self-government and crime reduction. Bentham combined the concerns for learning with concerns for the applications of control and explained both in terms of maximizing happiness in the future. The act of learning becomes subject to reward and punishment. And the value of learning was judged by its utility. “Panoptic classrooms began with a random order,” Ferguson explains, they aimed to provide a rational order that converted the arbitrariness of numbering into a series of statements of the relative value of each individual in the group.”146 According to Ferguson, Bentham’s schools introduced practices that made social recognition itself (praise and blame, precedence and neglect) central to pedagogy and “employed a game model of examination designed to confer a number on everyone” to subject individuals, undergoing exams, to an

Utilitarianism and market divinity  151 artificial order.147 In noting that “learning for learning’s sake” was replaced by usefulness of what was learned, Ferguson stressed that “Benthamite utilitarianism was committed to identifying who was good, who was better, and who was best at various specific and comparatively small activities” and for this it often relied on “a model of public examination.”148 Such a model enabled individuals to rank themselves in relation to “a perceptible and justifiable hierarchy.”149 This ordering was the source of a social structure wherein persons became motivated to seek self-improvements and engage in self-analysis as such self-conduct became rationalized as an expression of liberty. The frugal self-management carried an air of economism. Bentham was conscious that monopolies on power impede commerce and politics. However, as Guidi noted, Bentham’s emphasis on “market competition” and his “economic analysis of representation,” carried “a distinctive libertarian flavour.”150 Bentham was not alone in his convictions; he wrote in a culture of libertarianism and paternalism. His contemporary, Marquis de Sade, too thought of the human body to be under the supervision of the two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure; he, too, found human beings to be rational maximizers of their own happiness. He relied on pain and pleasure to teach his subjects that their bodies were mere vessels. And in a similar manner to Bentham, Sade’s materialistic atheism had excluded “any need for God’s existence” to rationalize worldly rites and rituals and nurtured “an unlimited rational exploitation” of the disadvantaged groups.151 In fiction and practice, Klossowski noted that Sade exposed the bourgeoisie mentality. Despite universal rights, Sade acted on the “belief that his superior social position gives him special rights. Chief among these rights [was] his right to revise the notion of what [hu]man is,” based on “an experimental right.”152 Sade may help us understand the early 19th century reconstruction of freedom by hedonistic utilitarianism. He showed that the maximization of pleasure cannot be devoid of selfinterest and often involves inflicting pain on others. His targets were the vulnerable members of his society: women and children. His fictions demonstrate how preoccupation with pleasure results in demolishing moral, judicial, and theological conventions; Sade’s morality, however, was not as advanced as Bentham’s, for he stopped short in transmitting what he practiced to social and institutional conditions. “Sadean pornography joins Benthamite consequentialism and a host of class-forming practices in eighteenth-century civil society to make action more visible in relation to other people than in relation to individual intention,” Ferguson points out, as the two shared a philosophy “of action in which morality is extremely imperfectly assimilable to rule of conduct, codes of behaviour that may be taught.”153 Bentham and Sade both positioned economic principles above the law and reduced the body to be a

152  Utilitarianism and market divinity substitute for money.154 For both, the human body becomes an object, an instrument for consumption, and a commodity manipulated by the sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. Bentham and Sade both recommended reforming moral values, so the economically privileged group, in their own terms, can command those in need of care and compassion. Bentham’s consequentialism accepts Sade’s philosophy and morality towards childhood by imposing an economic approach to their education. The utilitarian calculus of Bentham and his likeminded economists justified child labour from age five by relying on the greater happiness of the greatest number principle. Here is one expression of his differentiated but personalized happiness: Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care. …whoever sets up and inspectionschool upon the tiptop of the principle [of the panopticon], had need to be very sure of the master; for the boy’s body is not more the child of his father’s, than his mind will be of the master’s mind; with no difference than what there is between command on one side and subjection on the other. Some of these queries which I have been treating you, and finer still, Rousseau would have entertained us with; nor do I imagine he would have put his Emilius into an inspection-house; but I think he would have been glad of such a school for his Sophia.155 Sophia was thought to be by nature modest, attentive, and reserved and her education was centred on patience, gentleness, zeal, and affection necessary for maintaining the family.156 The economic reasoning of Bentham’s time implied that the “[w]eak men should be treated as women.”157 And Bentham’s happiness was socially engineered for this treatment. He did not care whether the humans were soldiers, monks, or machines: the “boy’s body” and mind are under command. His happiness is a fiction to be written by experimentalist masters. Bentham’s treatment towards childhood systematized inspection and experimentation. His libertine attitude penetrated the will and body from an early age. Bentham’s logic of maximizing greatest happiness is partially distinct from Sade in its reliance on contractual and legal rhetoric. Bentham thought “no consensual mode of sexual gratification should be condemned” if it was conceived to maximize the “greatest happiness of the community.”158 How would children fare? Writing of the relationship of a pupil and teacher, Bentham reasoned: Deriving from his intercourse with his pupil, in addition to whatever may be his remuneration in the ordinary form, the preceptor, finding in the exercise of this his function pleasure in a sort and degree never in the

Utilitarianism and market divinity  153 present state of things experienced, may apply himself to it with a degree of zeal and assiduity correspondently increased [sic]. The pupil on his part, experiencing, instead of that moroseness and haughtiness which, from that commending situation, is at present so frequently met with, a degree of attention and kindness so extraordinary, may find a pleasure in an occupation which otherwise would have been a painful and laborious one.159 Bentham found sexual relationship was justified to increase improvement in the pupils. Self-limitation of sexual expression is not based on moral or religious obligation but on calculation of its cost. It is unclear whether Bentham justified reward and punishment in order to obtain consent from the young. It is clear, however, that Bentham asked all parties to suspend consideration of sympathy and focus on utility maximization. The legal and scientific measures revised certain rights to meet certain interests. Bentham’s novelty was in articulating a universal conception of the selfish individual whose intention and life is manipulated by actions of even more selfish others.160 Bentham, the jurist, promoted experimentation with poor children from the moment of birth “to make of” children what the master pleases.161 His thoughts travelled to the United States and were adopted by jurists and economists who defended treating children as a form of capital. I begin the next chapter with Richard Posner and Gary S. Becker’s defence of Bentham’s philosophy. 4.6 Behavioural technology The marriage of hedonistic utilitarianism to laissez-faire economics was not an accident. Both opposed egalitarianism. Today, those who observe, direct, and examine the modes of co-operation and competition rely on the logic of the market to legitimize their manipulations of human capital by managing information and misinformation. The messages from the unseen continue to be communicated not from an omnipresent God but an omnipresent market and the technologies that help it to surveil.162 Uncritical acceptance of the self-governing power of the markets created the neo-liberalism of our era. Bentham’s promulgation of the principle of utility as the standard for right action continues to inform public and private policies whereby the right action is decided by monetary cost–benefit calculations. When Edward Thorndike argued for the primacy of measurement in education the thoughts of his utilitarian predecessors had become mainstream. Thorndike characterized “education as a business” dedicated to the “production and prevention of changes in human beings” the products of which not only concerned employability skills but also “refinements of taste, ideals of honor, service, and truth.”163 Thorndike was not alone; he

154  Utilitarianism and market divinity was an influential theorist expressing a culture that reimagined control and efficiency as indispensable elements of human development. Behaviourism and social utilitarianism distracted from Jane Addams’ and John Dewey’s school curriculum dedicated to community and democratic life. According to Cremin, the intensifying influence of social utilitarianism and scientific measurement in education was gradual; it gained full momentum only after the Second World War.164 In the next chapter, I show that utilitarianism became internalized in the disciplines of psychology and economics.

Notes 1 Bernard Russell, Icarus; or the Future of Science (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924), 8. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 96. 4 John McMurty, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998), 76. According to McMurty, it was the gradual force of market theory that gave realization to human labour as a commodity and instituted wage-slaves who privately own their labour power but are left at the mercy of the market doctrine of supply and demand (p. 95). 5 Bernard Russell, Icarus; or the Future of Science, 9. 6 Ibid. 38, 40. [I]n time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. (p. 49) 7 Michael Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 108–10. “For Smith this blind upward spiral of needs delivers men from natural scarcity, and on this ground alone enlarges human freedom. For Rousseau, the spiral of needs is a tragedy of alienations” (p. 110). 8 Jeffrey Lomonaco, “Adam Smith's ‘Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 659–76. 9 Jimena P. Hurtado, “Bernard Mandeville's Heir: Adam Smith or Jean Jacques Rousseau on the Possibility of Economic Analysis,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11, no.1 (2006): 3. Acknowledging the similarities between Mandeville and Rousseau, Hurtado noted that, their treatment of pity differed: “Rousseau believes pity is an original feeling in human nature and considers it to be the source of all virtues. Mandeville accepts the existence of pity but seems to believe that every virtue is nothing but vanity disguised” (p. 3). 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract”, in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. John T. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 178. 11 Jimena P. Hurtado, “Citizens, Markets and Social Order,” in Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics, ed. by Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  155 Rasmussen and Craig Smith (Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 226. Rousseau rejected slavery as natural. 12 William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137. 13 Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 179. 14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on Political Economy,” in The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. George D. H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 140. 15 Rousseau, “A Discourse on Political Economy,” 140. 16 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 123. 17 Nancy Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87. At the same time, Rousseau, “worried women might pursue interests separated from those of men, [and] feared that self-interest would undermine social solidarity” (p. 95). 18 Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 202. 19 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile or on Education, trans. Allen Bloom (New York: Basic Books Publishers, 1979), 39–40. “This Being which wills and is powerful, this Being active in itself, whatever it may be, which moves the universe and orders all things, I call God” (p. 277). 20 Bernadette M. Baker, In Perpetual Motion, 221–23. Baker noted that Rousseau deviated from Locke but yet the familial reliance on education retained conventions of masculinity. 21 Kieran Egan, “Education’s Three Old Ideas, and a Better Idea,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 31, no. 3 (2010): 259. 22 Rousseau, Émile, 99–100. 23 Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy,” 149. 24 Rousseau, Émile, 120. 25 Ibid., 120. 26 Ibid., 120. 27 Rousseau, Émile, 66. 28 Ibid., 67. 29 Ramon M. Lemos, Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpretation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 168. Rousseau followed Locke in conceiving “the laws of the body politic are compatible with principles of justice, the possession of property, rather than being a source of political liberty, provide an additional motive for complying with these laws” (p. 168). 30 Ibid., 169. 31 Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 159. 32 Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219. Controlling economic opportunity counts as a form of domination in Rousseau’s sense because when one group has a long-term advantage in determining the laws that another group must obey, the former have succeeded in getting themselves obeyed by the latter, even though this obedience takes the form of obeying laws. (pp. 219–220) For example, see the functions of super PACs (political action committees) in the United States. 33 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 258.

156  Utilitarianism and market divinity 34 Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 152. 35 Michael Ignatieff, “Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs,” in Scotland and Europe 1200–1850, ed. Christopher C. T. Smout (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 197. 36 Rousseau, Émile, 212. Rousseau continued, “Our natural passions are very limited. They are the instruments of our freedom; they tend to preserve us. All those which subject us and destroy us come from elsewhere” (p. 212). 37 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan, (London: Methuen, 1904), 2. 38 Ibid., 414. 39 Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country-Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Smith, like Hume in the ‘Jealously of Trade’, realized that the selective trading policies of the rich would prevent the poor countries from benefiting from their various advantages. He maintained that only free trade between nations could eventually lead to the wealth of all. The mutuality of markets would guarantee this…. (pp. 301–302) Unlike Hume, Smith did not “pin his hopes for the rich country remaining rich simply on the industry of the towns” (p. 303). The case of the colony of India standing as late as 1948 proves appropriation of Smith’s ideas as suited for the profiteers. 40 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), 460. 41 Ibid., 270. Smith wrote: “Though the state was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed” (p. 272). Thus, the initial expressions of human capital theory did not lean towards nation-building strategies. 42 Ibid., 273. 43 Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26 44 Ibid., 26. 45 Max Beer, An Inquiry into Physiocracy (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1966), 15. Beer noted that Alexis de Tocqueville found physiocrats as precursors of the French Revolution. 46 François Quesnay, “Despotism in China,” in China, a Model for Europe, ed. Lewis Maverick (Texas: Anderson, 1946), 264. The model, Quesnay explained, is both “physical” and “moral,” combining the two “together” (p. 265). 47 Ibid., 273. 48 Ibid., 271. 49 Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 50 Lewis Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (Texas: Anderson, 1946), 31. 51 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 9. 52 Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1995): 442.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  157 53 Ibid., 278. 54 Walter A. Eltis. “François Quesnay: A Réinterprétation 1. The Tableau Économique,” Oxford Economic Papers 27, no. 2 (1975): 167–200. 55 Edwin Cannan, “Introduction,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Vol. 1. Adam Smith, ed. Edwin Cannan(London: Methuen, 1904), xxxi. 56 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 28. 57 Ibid., 28. 58 Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the 18th Century (London: McMillian, 1897), 46. 59 Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origin of Political Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 284. “Cary and Quesnay both feared that specializing in the wrong kind of trade would lead a country astray. Ricardo solved the issue in 1817 by de facto claiming that manufacturing and agriculture were qualitatively alike” (p. 282). 60 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25. 61 Emma Rothschild, “Commerce and State: Turgot, Condorcet and Smith,” The Economic Journal 102, no. 414 (1992): 1197. 62 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 136. “The colonial system was the spinal cord of the commercial capitalism of the mercantile epoch” (p. 142). 63 Ibid., 210. 64 John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (London: L. & Virginia Woolf, 1927), 18–21. 65 Ibid., 24. 66 Rajani K. Kanth, Political Economy and Laissez-Faire (New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), 119–23. Laissez-faire, for Bentham and Mill “was a ‘war cry,’ a militant creed” (p. 22). 67 Donald Winch, “Adam Smith’s ‘Enduring Particular Result’: A Political and Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 257. Winch is writing in the context of Laissez-faire, and the ways in which Smith was reinterpreted as an advocate of the market to impose limitations on the state. 68 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 99. 69 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11. 70 Rajani K. Kanth, Political Economy and Laissez-faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era, 70. The demolishing of the Poor Laws was a legal and economic affirmation for starving the rural poor to death. 71 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 101. Speenhamland was designed to prevent the common people from becoming wage labourers. The poor Law Reform of 1834 did away with this obstruction of the labour market: the ‘right to live’ was abolished…. Psychological torture was coolly advocated by and smoothly put into practice by mild philanthropists as a means of oiling the wheels of the labor mill. (p. 82) 72 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 125.

158  Utilitarianism and market divinity 73 Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 239–41. Malthus echoed Smith in claiming that benevolence could only be effective in a state of ‘perfect knowledge’ unavailable to men. But God, in making self-love a stronger passion, had providentially benefited humanity, since ‘by this wise provision the most ignorant are led to promote the general happiness, an end which they would have totally failed to attain, if the moving principle of their conduct had been benevolence’. (p. 240) 74 Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (London: A.M. Kelley, Bookseller, 1965), 237–38. 75 Maureen A. Turner, “The Educational Ideas and Influence of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)” (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1991). Turner points out that for Malthus: “Religious instruction, however, was not recommended only in the hope that it would make children ‘wise unto salvation’; it would also make them more law-abiding citizens…” (p. 76). 76 Thomas R. Malthus, “Essays on Population, Volume 4,” in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, eds. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, Electronic Edition (Virginia: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 207. After 25 years from the first publication the aristocratic tone of the first edition was replaced by a discourse on civil liberty. 77 Robert M. Young, “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist 55, no. 3 (1971): 452. What Newtonianism and its analogies in psychology, politics and social theory had failed to bring about—including man and society in the domain of natural law—had finally been achieved by the patience of someone [Darwin] who could somehow integrate Paley and Malthus (both in their ways representatives of the naturalist movement in its utilitarian aspect). (p. 486) 78 Peter J. Bowler, “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 4 (1976): 632. 79 Robert, M., Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45. 80 David Ricardo, Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. E. C. K. Conner (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). 81 Ibid., 40. 82 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 126. 83 Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 76. Certainly Ricardo never saw the issue as clearly as Bentham had done 20 years earlier: in an unpublished MS Bentham considered the effect of an increase in the quantity of money on prices when there is unemployment of labour as contrasted with the situation in which ‘all hand capable of employ were full of employment’. (p. 76) 84 Ricardo, Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, 379.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  159 85 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 84–85. There was a defense against treating humans like machines, as a basis for authorizing programs of surveillance and control, and as a license for politically unrepresented groups to claim some of the power that reformers also struggled to seize from each other. (pp. 77–78) The context here is the overlapping of religious, political, and economic discourses in the wake of the poor law reforms. 86 Nathaniel Wollach, “The Liberal Origins of the Modern View of Nature,” The Tocqueville Review 34, no. 2 (2013): 107–31. Wollach named Malthus, Ricardo, Mills and Tocqueville as liberals who in varying degrees integrated Bacon’s legacy of dominating nature in political economy. 87 McMurty, Unequal Freedoms, 31. 88 Ibid., 68. In reference to Ricardo’s value system, McMurty cited Gorge Gilder, one of the advisors to Ronald Reagan writing: “Under capitalism …the ventures of reason are launched into a world ruled by morality and providence… Capitalism entails faith in the compensatory logic of the cosmos” (pp. 68–69). 89 Claudia C. Klaver, A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-century England (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 3/7. 90 Jacob H. Hollander, David Ricardo: A Centenary Estimate (New York: Augustus M. Kelly Pub., 1968), 129–30. 91 Ibid., 134. 92 Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study, 229. According to Blaug, both Marxist and the Neo-classical economists drew from Ricardo’s conception of production and possession, the former would appropriate Ricardo towards socialism that eventually became associated with John S. Mill; the latter would take it towards utility maximization. 93 James Bonar, “Preface,” in Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus 1810–1823, ed. James Bonar (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1887), xiv. 94 Werner Stark, “Jeremy Bentham as an Economist,” The Economic Journal 56, no. 224 (1946): 584. 95 Ibid., 584. 96 Ibid., 595. 97 Jane H. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy (Philadelphia: Maxwell, 1817), 90. 98 Ibid., 90. 99 Ibid., 92. Evidently, the lessons of political economy instruct the poor to be independent from the charity of the rich or protection of the state. 100 Ibid., 95. Later when Caroline quoted a poem to argue against the rise of poverty facilitated by abolishment of poor laws Mrs. B. rejected her points explaining poets are not a “very good authority in political economy” (p. 130). 101 Ibid., 133. 102 Ibid., 133. 103 Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946). 104 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol 11, ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 97. The architecture was implemented in a “large workshop” which had no “steam engines,” but populated by workers (p. 97).

160  Utilitarianism and market divinity 05 Ibid., 102. 1 106 Ibid., 103–04. 107 Miran Božovič, “Introduction,” in The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995), 11. There is perhaps no other work of human hands, no icon, that can bring God closer to us, through which God can reveal himself to a greater extent than through Bentham’s panopticon, although the God of the panopticon nevertheless always remains deus absconditus, a God who jealously hides his face. (p. 11) 08 Ibid., 19. 1 109 Ibid., 31. 110 Bhikhu Parekh, “Introduction,” in Bentham’s Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Groom Helm, 1973), 16–17. See also James H. Burns “Happiness and Utility: Jeremy Bentham’s Equation,” Utilitas 17, no. 1 (2005): 46–61. 111 Marco E.L. Guidi, “Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution, and the Political Economy of Representation (1788 to 1789),” European Journal of History of Economic Thought 17, no. 4 (2010): 580. “Only those people who have great talents and great ambitions can conceive of the hope of obtaining an office the value thereof can indemnify them against the expense necessary to purchase a seat” (Bentham in Guidi, 2010, p. 599). Human capital theorists later utilized “talent” as an explanation for inequality. 112 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 94. 113 Ibid., 94. 114 Ibid., 95. 115 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 53–60. 116 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 306. 117 Harcourt, The Illusions of the Free Market, 21. For both Smith and Beccaria, the two spheres [policing and economy] overlapped. To Smith, the umbrella category was police, and that category subsumed the discussion of public economy and the wealth of a nation. To Beccaria… the overarching category was public economy, within which police formed one important sector alongside commerce and finance. (pp. 21–22) 118 Bentham Jeremy, A Manual of Political Economy (McMaster: University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, 1843), 40. 119 Jeremy Bentham, “Value of a Pain or a Pleasure,” in Bentham’s Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Groom Helm, 1973), 117–18. 120 Ibid., 118–19. 121 Ibid., 120. Bentham (1973) continued, since taking away money causes pain, money can be constituted as “not only the measure, but the producing instrument or cause” (p. 121). 122 Ibid., 121. 123 Jeremy Bentham, Observation on the Poor Bill, ed. William Pitt (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1797/1838), 30–31. William Pitt noted in the introduction that Bentham’s text, although unpublished, appeared to influence members of the Legislature, and that the Observations powerfully contributed to the abandonment of the measure in question, influencing Ricardo and Malthus.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  161 24 Ibid., 33. 1 125 Douglas Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation to his Utilitarianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 18. 126 Ibid., 77. 127 John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 78. 128 Parekh, “Introduction,” in Bentham’s Political Thought, 21. 129 Takuo Dome, Political Economy of Public Finance in Britain, 1767–1873 (London: Routledge, 2004), 67. Bentham’s advocacy for the market was not one-sided. He considered both business and government. Dome also noted: “To Bentham, the natural and only original object of taxation was ‘revenue’” (p. 69). 130 Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Introduction,’ in Bentham’s Political Thought, 17. Werner (1946) added Bentham expected that “Men and State must subordinate themselves in the same way to this hedonist imperative” while noting that his psychology remained rational and empiricist (p. 56). 131 Jeremy Bentham, Deontology; or, the Science of Morality Vol. 1, ed. John Bowring (London: Longman, 1834), 17. 132 Ibid., 17. 133 Ibid., 131. In his desire for maximizing happiness by mathematical calculations, Bentham distanced himself from asceticism associated with practical wisdom and well-being. For the ancient philosophers, eudemonia meant active deliberation and participation in happiness. Eudemonia was a practice as well as a psychology contained in virtue ethics. 134 Bhikhu C. Parekh, Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessment, Vol 1. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34. “Bentham’s vanity was so excessive as to stop short, but by a very little, of that which sometimes leads to, and almost always indicates a distorted mind” (p. 34). 135 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. Smith, M. J. and Burston W. H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 45. 136 David Hogan, “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of Early Classroom System,” History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1989): 384. 137 Bentham, Chrestomathia, 106. 138 Ibid., 106. Italic in original. 139 Eric Midwinter, The Development of Social Welfare in Britain (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000), 56. 140 Bentham, Chrestomathia, 92. 141 Mark Canuel, “Bentham, Utility, and the Romantic Imagination” in Selected Writings, Jeremy Bentham, ed. Stephen G. Engelmann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 510. 142 Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education: As it Respects the Industrious Classes (London: Darton and Harvey, 1803),18. 143 Leopoldo Mesquita, “The Lancasterian Monitorial System as an Education Industry with a Logic of Capitalist Valorization,” International Journal of the History of Education 48, no. 5 (2012): 661–75. 144 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge, 2010).

162  Utilitarianism and market divinity 145 Jennifer M. Muller, “‘Engines of Educational Power’: the Lancasterian Monitorial System and the Development of the Teacher's Roles in the Classroom: 1805–1838” (Doctoral Diss., The State University of New Jersey 2015) 9–11. See also Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Education (London: Methuen, 1983), 19. 146 Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19. 147 Ibid., 20. 148 Ibid., 17. 149 Ibid., 17. 150 Marco E.L. Guidi, “Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution, and the Political Economy of Representation (1788 to 1789),” European Journal of History of Economic Thought 17, no. 4 (2010): 601. 151 Pierre Klossowki, “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, ed. Pierre Klossowki (New York: Grover Press: 1996), 71. 152 Ibid., 71. 153 Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Action, 73. 154 Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency, ed. Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar and Daniel Smith (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). For the similarity and differences between De De Sade and Adam Smith (and their agreement to see ethical relationship in economic terms) see David Martyn, “De Sade’s Ethical Economies,” Romantic Review 86, no. 1 (1995): 45–63. 155 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995), 89–90. 156 Folbre (2009) explained, the “pursuit of individual self-interest” was based on calculation while passion connoted “impulse and emotion, femininity and heat.” “Self-interest arises from self-love, or amour-propre, a term the French particularly liked” (p. 44). The French, viewed self-interest in masculine terms, as a force of nature (and an instrument of pleasure). But in a sense, they welcomed its domestication in a marriage of commerce and the rule of law, a marriage in which small infidelities on either side might be permitted. Passion could, after all, be a unifying force. (p. 46) 157 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 94. It was by acceptance of radical individualism that both Bentham and Sade would target those who had little inclination to self-maximize as objects of use and pleasure. 158 Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel Quinn, “Editorial Introduction,” in Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), xii. 159 Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), 106. 160 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 106. “Bentham treated pleasure and pain as dimensions of ‘utility’—a term he appropriated from David Hume, but treated as a scientific concept analogous to Newton’s conception of gravity… (p. 106).

Utilitarianism and market divinity  163 161 Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 91. An inspection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from their birth, might afford experiments enough that would be rather more interesting. … taking the children out of the hands of their parents as much as possible, and even, if possible, altogether. …. and then you make of them what you please. (p. 91) 162 Matt Phillips, “The Stock Market is Making a Comeback. Was It Something the Fed Said?” New York Times, January 20, 2019. When the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates on Dec. 19, [2018], and the stock market slid 6 percent in the days afterward, its chairman, Mr. Powell, had said “‘We’re listening with, you know, sensitively to the message that—that markets are sending… And we’re going to be taking those downside risks into account as we make policy going forward.” Today, not the theologians but central bank officials, economists, chief investment officers, and hedge fund managers tell us what messages they hear. 163 Edward L. Thorndike, “The Measurement of Educational Products,” The School Review 20, no. 5 (1912): 289–99. 164 Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 200. The reference here was to Franklin Bobbitt, a contemporary to John Dewey. Bobbitt’s scientism undermined Dewey’s psycho-social and democratic ideals for education (p. 200).

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Utilitarianism and market divinity  165 Higgs, Henry. The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the 18th Century. London: McMillian, 1897. Hogan, David. “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System.” History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1989): 381–417. https://doi.org/10.2307/368910. Hollander, Jacob H. David Ricardo: A Centenary Estimate. New York: Augustus M. Kelly Pub., 1968. Hont, Istvan. “The Rich Country-poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy.” In Wealth and Virtue, edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, 271–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hundert, Edward G. The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hurtado, Jimena P. “Bernard Mandeville's Heir: Adam Smith or Jean Jacques Rousseau on the Possibility of Economic Analysis.” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11, no. 1 (2006): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 967256032000171489. Hurtado, Jimena P. “Citizens, Markets and Social Order: An Aristotelian Reading of Smith and Rousseau on Justice.” In Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics, edited by Paganelli Maria Pia, Rasmussen Dennis C. and Smith Craig, 214–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. New York, Viking Penguin, 1984. Ignatieff, Michael. “Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs.” In Scotland and Europe 1200–1850, edited by Christopher C. T. Smout, 187–206. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986. Innis, Harold. Political Economy in the Modern State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946. Kanth, Rajani K. Political Economy and Laissez-Faire. New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986. Keynes, John Maynard. The End of Laissez-faire. London: L. & Virginia Woolf, 1927. Klaver, Claudia C. A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-century England. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Klossowki, Pierre. “Nature as Destructive Principle.” In The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, edited by P. Klossowki, 65–86. New York: Grover Press, 1996. Klossowski, Pierre. Living Currency, edited by Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar and Daniel Smith. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education: As it Respects the Industrious Classes. London: Darton and Harvey, 1803. Lemos, Ramon M. Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpretation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977. Lomonaco, Jeffrey. “Adam Smith's ‘Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review’.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 659–76. https://doi. org/10.2307/3654165. Long, Douglas. Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation to His Utilitarianism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.

166  Utilitarianism and market divinity Malthus, Thomas R. An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. London: A.M. Kelley Bookseller, 1965. Malthus, Thomas R. “Essays on Population, Volume 4.” In The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. Virginia: Pickering & Chatto, 2001. https://www.library.ubc. ca. Marcet, Jane H. Conversations on Political Economy. Philadelphia: Maxwell, 1817. Maureen, Turner A. “The Educational Ideas and Influence of Thomas Robert Malthus (17661834).” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1991. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2015/ Maverick, Lewis A. China, a Model for Europe. Texas: Anderson, 1946. McMurty, John. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998. Mesquita, Leopoldo. “The Lancasterian Monitorial System as an Education Industry with a Logic of Capitalist Valorization.” International Journal of the History of Education 48, no. 5 (2012): 661–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2012 .658159 Midwinter, Eric. The Development of Social Welfare in Britain. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000. Miller, Judith A. Mastering the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Muller, Jennifer M. “‘Engines of Educational Power’: The Lancasterian Monitorial System and the Development of the Teacher’s Roles in the Classroom: 1805– 1838.” Doctoral diss., The State University of New Jersey, 2015. Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Parekh, Bhikhu C. “Introduction.” In Bentham’s Political Thought, edited by Bhikhu Parekh, 13–44. London: Groom Helm, 1973. Parekh, Bhikhu C. Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessment, Vol 1. New York: Routledge, 1993. Phillips, Matt. “The Stock Market Is Making a Comeback. Was It Something the Fed Said?” New York Times, January 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/20/business/stockmarket-recovery-federal-reserve.html Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Reinert, Sophus A. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origin of Political Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Ricardo, David. Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, edited by E. C. K. Conner. London: George Bell and Sons, 1891. Rothschild, Emma. “Commerce and State: Turgot, Condorcet and Smith.” The Economic Journal 102, no. 414 (1992): 1197–210. doi:10.2307/2234386. Rothschild, Emma. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile or on Education. Translated by Allen Bloom. New York: Basic Books Publishers, 1979.

Utilitarianism and market divinity  167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “A Discourse on Political Economy.” In The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by George D. H. Cole. London: J. M. Dent, 1993. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “On the Social Contract.” In The Major Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Translated and edited by John T. Scott, 153–252. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012a. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discourse on Inequality.” In The Major Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Translated and edited by John T. Scott, 37–152. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012b. Russell, Bernard. Icarus or the Future of Science. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924. Schofield, Philip, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michel Quinn. “Editorial Introduction.” In Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michel Quinn, xi–xxix. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014. Schumpeter, Joseph A. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Vol. 1, edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904. Stark, Werner. “Jeremy Bentham as an Economist.” The Economic Journal 56, no. 224 (1946): 583–608. https://doi.org/10.2307/2225988. Stark, Werner. “Introduction.” In Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1, edited by Werner Stark, 12–78. London: Routledge, 2004. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315017013. Taubman, Peter M. Teaching by Numbers; Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge, 2010. Thorndike, Edward L. “The Measurement of Educational Products.” The School Review 20, no. 5 (1912): 289–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1076195. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Virginia: William Byrd Press, 1944. Wollach, Nathaniel, “The Liberal Origins of the Modern View of Nature.” The Tocqueville Review 34, no. 2. (2013): 107–31. Young, Robert M. “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory.” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45. http://www.jstor. org/stable/650113. Young, Robert M. “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist 55, no. 3 (1971): 442–503, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197155322.

5 Human capital theory

In the early decades of the 20th century, the ideas of competition and market remained as safeguards “to national welfare.” The American journalist, Talcott Williams found “free competition, free contract and personal freedom for all men [sic] is the last gift of high civilization.”1 Williams praised the United States government for protecting its citizens from the economic elites. He acknowledged the role of trade unions in accepting stratified income was for the greater good of society. By making comparisons to Britain and providing the example of railroad construction, he showed that the monetary return on wages for labour was higher in the United States compared to Britain. In contrast, the interest earned on capital was higher in Britain compared to the United States. Williams, a journalist learned in economics, wrote during the years in which the United States replaced Britain in industrial production. One significant contributor to industrial progress was railway construction. And an important part of the labour force of the railroads were African Americans who did not share the free competition and liberty Williams enjoyed. The railroad managers and federal government officials participated in unfair employment practices towards African Americans; the case for hiring them aimed at directing white racism to agitate unions.2 Neglecting the prevailing racial violence, Williams praised the “Sherman Act” and the role of American judicial power to institute competition, not merely an instrument to exploit labourers.3 Nearly 50 years later, the “Sherman Act” came under scrutiny by Alan Greenspan. He argued the Act was hampering innovation and harming society. Greenspan began by scrutinizing the role of government, calling the constructions of railroads “true monopolies” where the “power was not derived from a free market. It stemmed from governmental subsidies.”4 Greenspan failed to recognize that no single private investor or corporation had the capacity or willingness to carry such a grant project. He failed to mention that railroads ultimately secured the mobility of humans and goods that led to the maximization of profit for some more than others. Unlike Williams, who DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-6

Human capital theory  169 calculated returns on capital and labour, Greenspan failed to provide numerical evidence for his argument. When Greenspan provided an example, he drew from the Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller. At the turn of the 20th century, the company controlled over “more than eighty percent of refining capacity,” and Greenspan speculated that a monopoly made “sense” for it “accelerated the growth of the American economy. Such control yielded obvious gains in efficiency.”5 Unlike Williams, who provided the four-way cross comparison on returns, Greenspan failed to support with empirical evidence how and in what ways the “control” he praised brought the obvious gains and efficiency. Greenspan insisted that “the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market.”6 What happened to the old myth of the free market? What had made the word “free” interchangeable with “capital”? Greenspan called for “a laissez-faire economy of ‘active’ competition,” assuming that it has within it, as a machine does, “a built-in regulator that protects and preserves it.”7 Preserving markets had nothing to do with preserving humans and so state laws were not simply inefficient but obtrusive. Greenspan made not one single reference to the “citizens” mentioned in Williams’ essay. But he defended the “businessmen,” who, driven by self-interest, presumably take care of societal happiness. Greenspan’s conception of capitalism resulted in the 2008 economic recession, requiring governments to rely on public funds, increase national debt, and rescue the “too big to fail” economic entities. The monopolies had become strong enough to reason that competition gives businessmen immunity to be free from prosecution. In the face of profound financial insecurity, human capital was pressed to retrain, seek work, and pay taxes to support the United States’ ongoing military expeditions in the Middle East. In a slightly different argument than Greenspan’s, Richard Posner criticized the “arbitrary power” and “arbitrary law enforcement” of the antitrust laws and asked the government to limit its role in “maintaining competitive markets.”8 Affirming Bentham’s legacy, Posner argued that the laws must be designed based on economic approaches. Posner saw that the market and the economic analysis as sufficient for making policy decisions.9 Posner was cognizant that Bentham’s economic approach to legal conventions differed from Smith’s. Posner acknowledged that “Bentham was a pioneer in developing techniques of brainwashing;”10 and he agreed that Bentham’s calculative approach radically departed from natural right theories. However, Posner praised Bentham for postulating that “human beings act as rational maximizers of their satisfactions in all sphere” and he recommended that the “sovereign masters of pain and pleasure” be in effect yardsticks for legal judgements.11 Posner was in search of “a moral theory that goes beyond classical utilitarianism and holds that the criterion

170  Human capital theory for judging whether acts and institution are just or good is whether they maximize the wealth of society.”12 He argued for an economic approach to justice, instead of the obvious opposite (e.g. arguing for a just economy). Aware of Bentham’s ambivalence towards equal rights, Posner proclaimed that Bentham’s “approach allows a reconciliation among utility, liberty and even equality as competing ethical principles.”13 In the classical conceptions, utility, liberty, and equality were not posed as competing ethical principles. Posner and Greenspan exemplify the mode of reasoning generated during the Cold War. For example, the long-standing associate of Posner, Gary Becker wrote that the “panic in the United States engendered by the more spectacular Soviet accomplishments has in turn spawned a re-examination of American policies and procedures relating to economic growth and military technology.”14 Among these policies were education policies which necessitated stronger emphasis on “science and engineering” to aid “economic and military development.”15 While Becker indicated it is difficult to calculate the economic returns from college education, he postulated “a policy designed to spread such information, especially among the low-income families,” may strengthen economic outputs.16 The Cold War provided an opportunity for producing policies that aligned educational institutions with economic and military development. This realignment of education away from citizenship and child development towards the production of economic outputs was exported to other countries, often pressured to reform their own education system to align with the United States.17 This chapter examines the historical context of human capital theory as it became rationalized and gained adherence. 5.1 Labour and capital Bentham had postulated political economy as the system that guides the use of capital to direct human labour and liberty. Bentham thought that: “No kind of productive labour of any importance can be carried on without capital,” adding that “labour, and not money, is the real source of wealth.”18 It can be inferred that determining human labour is a source of wealth. Those in pursuit of wealth must labour and understand that labour itself is enabled by capital. Note that while Bentham supported the discourses of administering the human capital, he anticipated and normalized the absorption of mental and bodily power granted by the technological progress: Under the general denomination of labour, considered as employed in the giving of increase to wealth in any shape, two particulars may be distinguished: 1. The mere bodily energy employed in the production of

Human capital theory  171 the effect in question; 2. The skill or mental power displayed in the exercise of the bodily act, in the choice of the bodily operation carried on in that view, and in the mode of carrying them on.19 In the first denomination labour is “mere bodily energy” but irreducible to the work of agricultural or industrial society. It extends to technological society and the production of effects and affects. It can be understood as timeless: in both ancient slavery and contemporary machine-learning the human body is an instrument for production. Bentham’s second definition of labour was novel from the point of view of economic theory and bound to affect the definition of capital.20 While the two denominations of labour were distinguishable for Bentham, they were becoming blurred in theories and practices of capitalism. The abstraction of labour and capital functioned to dissociate the social and ethical responsibility of the capitalists by reframing their role as increasing the wealth of the nation and granting them privileges over the common good. The Austrian school’s leading economist, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk (1851–1914), rejected the emphasis on “national wealth” explained by the English economists including Bentham. Böhm-Bawerk saw capitalists’ role as infused in social relations. He defined labour as a force to be realized in terms of capital. Böhm-Bawerk was cognizant that, in modern political economy, capital had been defined differently to explain social and private processes within the economic affairs: For Adam Smith, capital was defined as a stock of goods for production and national wealth; for John M’Leod, it had been “stock of accumulated labour”, “purchasing power” and “circulating power”; for Jevons as “wealth employed to facilitate production”; for Karl Marx, capital represented as an “instruments for the exploitation” of the labourers; for Karl Knies, as an “available stock of goods… to satisfy wants in the future.”21 For Böhm-Bawerk capital is a capacity to rearrange nature by human power; while it can be understood in terms of the distinction of social and private, capital is a force that erases the public and provide distinction. Social Capital we shall call a group of products, which serve as means to the socio-economical acquisition of goods; or, as this acquisition is only possible through production, we shall call it a group of products destined to serve towards further production; or, briefly, a group of intermediate products.22 What he held as social capital was a group of products but not a common good. He recognized that private capital, as long as it concerns production and acquisition, as extracted from the social capital.23

172  Human capital theory Böhm-Bawerk envisaged capital’s power would reinvent not only things but also values. The first thesis of his theory proposed “the use assumed by Use Theory as having an independent existence has really no existence at all.”24 The second posed, “the value of the use joins” with the “value of substance of capital,” and “the two together make up the value of the product.”25 It is based on the first assumption of interdependence that the second assumption is possible. According to Smart, for Böhm-Bawerk “the value does not arise in the production, nor is it proportional to the efforts and sacrifices of those production. The causal relation runs exactly the opposite way.”26 Because there is production there are needs and desires. At their discretion, capitalists relied on scientific methods of “induction and deduction” to evaluate subjective values by “psychological links” to guide and inform motives and action.27 Depicting capitalism is an open system that gives and takes value to utilities and functions, Böhm-Bawerk responded to Marx’s criticism of capitalism as a closed system of production and consumption. Böhm-Bawerk found the relative “equality” thesis Marx had drawn from Aristotle to formulate a just exchange based on “commensurability” to be “old-fashioned” and explained that “as the matter of fact modern political economists agree that the old scholastic-theological theory of ‘equivalence’ in the commodities to be exchanged is untenable.”28 As Chapter 2 demonstrated, the scholastic theory of “equivalence” was the basis for not only economic liberties but also ethical and political rights. Böhm-Bawerk’s assertion that “labour is not paid because it makes sacrifice” but, “because it makes products which obtain value from human wants,” neglects (Smart asserts) the fact that “all production sacrifices life, and capital sacrifices immediate enjoyment.”29 The primacy of satisfying wants replaced the old theology of sacrifice while establishing new norms to meet the sacraments of capital. Böhm-Bawerk redefined social capital in seven categories: land; buildings such as factories, shops, and railways; tools and machines; useful animals; raw and auxiliary materials; finished consumption goods; and money. Evidently what was defined as social was to be held privately. He regarded labourers as serving the aims of private capital and acting as if they were capitalists themselves. While criticizing English writers who included “the maintenance of productive labourers under social capital,” he argued because human food, clothing, fuel, and lighting of their homes constitute private capital, human maintenance is consumption: “Productive labourers are not simply consuming subjects, but are also active economic instruments; and that, consequently, the subsistence which does directly serve for the maintenance and furtherance of their life indirectly serves towards the further production of goods.”30 Böhm-Bawerk continued by noting that English economists considered labourers as a machine

Human capital theory  173 of production and considered wages as an element of production cost. He wanted to secure the economic outputs without caring for the workers. Looking after the labourers, in his eyes, would force cuts on profits for the capitalists. Böhm-Bawerk’s views reflected the conditions of capitalism: investment in technologies and techniques to automate value creation accompanied by negligence of innovations that automate value extraction from humans. Capitalism depends on profiting from neglecting workers. It depends on fears of scarcity to make people not only productive but also self-governing. Böhm-Bawerk’s revisions to the classical economics and natural right theories were in sync with the work of his contemporaries— William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Carl Menger, and Knut Wicksell— who made similar attempts at rethinking the boundaries of labour and capital for the sake of calculating interest and utility. Their theoretical focus extended the scope of economic analysis and intensified economic individualism. And their reliance on mathematical models strengthen underlying presumptions about economics as a science. The mathematical models often assumed that the standard of judgement is pursuit of selfinterest and sought to utilize this assumption to predict, direct, and control human behaviours. The ideas of Austrian economists travelled to the United States and were gradually absorbed.31 However, it is difficult to summarize their influence. For example, consider Friedrich Hayek, who offered a competing logic to Böhm-Bawerk, when he wrote: There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom’ that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.32 Written during the Cold War, these sentences resemble the scholastic–theological defence of life. The old-fashioned became fashionable once again as Hayek expressed freedom in terms of “security” that could be designed. Responsibility is projected onto the state to look after that “minimum” survival needed to inject confidence in the population. Cognizant of the history and the “cruel exploitation” of “the less fortunate members,”33 Hayek recognized a dilemma, namely “whether we should direct and organize all economic activities according to a ‘blueprint’, that is, ‘consciously direct the resources of society to conform to the planners’ particular views of who should have what.’” He rejected “planning” in favour of “dogmatic

174  Human capital theory laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument does not advocate leaving things just as they are; it favours making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts.”34 In laissez faire 2.0, the technocratic state lays the conditions for guiding and coordinating individuals’ efforts, not leaving things as they are, as it assists expansion of social Darwinism. Hayek also suggested the “growth of monopoly” is not so much the “consequence of the advance of technology” but “the result of the policies.”35 He wanted a particular mode of control in which markets facilitate collaboration of the private and the public sectors. In an attempt to define capital, Hayek thought of “a general definition of capital only in the negative form of saying that the only things which never will have to be regarded as capital are really the permanent resources in the strict sense of the term.”36 Immediately, he added the “particular definition of the term capital can of course come only from its use as a tool of analysis” to reflect its “comprehensive character.”37 What was this comprehensive character? By the time of Hayek, the concept of capital had become an instrument for calculating profit from natural and human resources. The character of capital allowed economists and capitalists to calculate and speculate both the function and the value of goods before, during, and after use. Just as humans had objective and subjective capacities to study themselves so could capital, given its comprehensive character. Hayek wrote: [T]here will almost always exist potential but unused resources which could be made to yield a useful return, but only after some time and not immediately; and that the exploitation of such resources will usually require that other resources which could yield a return immediately or in near future, have to be used in order to make these other resources yield any return at all. This simple fact fully suffices to explain why there will nearly always be possibilities of increasing the output obtained from the available resource by investing some of them for longer period.38 Similar to his predecessors, Hayek hedged his assertions, inserting “almost always,” “could,” and “usually” but arriving at a “simple fact” that justified unbounded exploitation of whatever was deemed as a source of profit. His definition is broad enough to include human life. However, the conceptual ascendency of capital cannot be attributed to any one single person or school. It resided in the wake of capitalism’s reliance on technology and science. 5.2 Capital, desires, and education Whether in the utilitarian liberalism of the British Empire or the ordo-liberalism of Germany,39 the conceptualization of humans as a form of capital proceeded to make national economic growth part of the mental

Human capital theory  175 furniture of people who accepted it as part of modern liberal democracy. In this, the before-and-after the Second World War literature shows an intensification of the effort to secure a certain desired future through mass education of the Americans. An example of pre-Second World War thought, consider that of the late 19th-century economist, Joseph Nicholson. He acknowledged Petty as he drew attention to those “American economists” who relied on statistics in making claims that “increase of population in a given area more than proportionately increases the productive power of the people.”40 Nicholson saw this proposition as a justification for Petty’s thesis but recognized that, unlike land and machine, humans were mortals. However, Nicholson assumed while individuals perish their “profession or trade survives, like a Platonic idea,” and by this he reasoned that, similar to land, and even more so, people “are permanent sources of [national] income.”41 Land and population together and by themselves were insufficient explanations for national economic growth. Cycles of boom-andbust followed a combination of cultural, social, and technological factors—in powerful nations.42 Nations that had been empires thrived economically for multiple reasons, they often contrive effective control over mental and physical working bodies. Among the pre-Second World War American economists Nicholson mentioned was Irving Fisher. Fisher added clarity to mathematical models by explaining labour (its subjective and objective values), capital (stock of wealth), and income (flow of wealth) by including psychological factors. Fisher differentiated between in use and future use of capital.43 Although he drew from Böhm-Bawerk’s analysis of interest, Fisher’s ideas aligned with the English economists, in particular those who furthered Bentham’s theories of pleasure and utility by mathematical approaches.44 In a book devoted to nature of capital, Fisher noted that “the important facts,” for him were “that capital is productive, that it is antithetical to income, that it is a provision for the future or that it is a reserve.”45 The “or” was becoming a feature of economics conceptualization, for it accommodated inclusivity. Fisher defined wealth as moveable and immovable material and added the third category: human beings. From observation of commodities as raw materials and as finished products, and by thinking that it is not the fertility of land that counts as wealth but the fertile land that is wealth, Fisher reformulated what it meant to be educated. When a person “studies law, medicine, journalism, music, or prepares for any other profession,” Fisher thought, “he [sic] is investing in his own person, with the hope that the same thus invested may ultimately be returned to him (with interest).”46 That historical hope of self-improvement had had a theological underpinning, but now was reformulated as a mean to toil for an expected worldly return. This expectation of economic reward integrates the psychological factor of desire into economics. Fisher explained that “pleasure is not the

176  Human capital theory desire, but the satisfaction of the desire …. Desirability, which means the intensity of desire of an individual under certain conditions” is fulfilled when pleasure the “derivable” of desire sees an increase in “future years.”47 The intensity of desire informs individuals’ decisions and conducts. Fisher’s point of view demonstrates a concern with the psychological factors and their applications to economic organization. For Fisher, neither the person nor the work has any value until they come in contact with a system of exchange. The conception of an engaged self, for whom time recedes to the background, due to the pleasure labour and love can provide, is challenged by the formulation of a human oriented to a future filled with hopes and anxieties for return. Time becomes an instrument for contractual measures of self-accountability. Wealth is what we (humans) desire, according to Fisher, but what is wealth? “Wealth consists of material appropriated objects, and property, of rights in these objects; that wealth in its broadest sense includes human beings.”48 Wealth is not solely a possession; the concept was extended to include rights to not only what humans deem as objects, but also humans themselves. Wealth becomes associated with an anticipation that sustains lack.49 Where “wealth in its broadest sense includes human beings,” Fisher stressed, “all capital yields income and that all income flows from capital – at least when the term ‘capital’ is used in its broader sense, which includes human beings.”50 Fisher’s account differs from Alfred Marshall, who did not prescribe rigid lens to education as a mean for pursuit of wealth. Fisher credited Marshall for correlating utility with desire and measuring the force of an economic motive based on the prospect of pleasure. Marshall maintained a balanced view of the two extreme views of desire, one informed by the “Buddhist doctrine” to root out as “many wants and desire as possible” and those of Herbert Spencer, for whom “desire is always beneficial because it stimulate[s] people to increase exertions.”51 Marshall noted that society must make a place for those who prefer moderation and steady work that “offers them the best opportunity for the growth of those habits of body, mind and spirit in which alone there is true happiness.”52 He interpreted the notion of flow and use of capital expressed by Fisher’s definition of capital “without a rival,” and identified this aspect of Fisher’s definition incorporated production and consumption. Marshall explained that Fisher’s definition of capital was inclusive of the “past efforts and sacrifices” and was forward looking to future gratifications.53 However, Marshall’s objection to Fisher’s definition of capital was “that it was too radical a departure from established usage” and “it failed to satisfy the requirement, not of science, but of terminology.”54 In response, Fisher clarified he was offering both a negative and a positive definition.55 While both Marshall and Fisher agreed on the ordinary business use of capital in production and consumption, Marshall objected to

Human capital theory  177 the synonymous use of funds and stock and wanted to see a separation between use and profit—and posed that the income a person “derived from land, capital and labour” is different from the “benefits which a person reaps from the use of his own clothes [and] furniture.”56 This distinction is relevant to education, for the mental and spiritual enlargement education brings to the person is self-valuable; if it ends up being useful at some point, so be it, but if its sole purpose is directed by its economic usefulness, it will subordinate the person, rather deterministically, to socioeconomic demands. The intricacy and tension in defining capital and its scope did not disappear. However, if Marshall and Fisher could not come to agreement on the definition of capital, who could? For the next half a century, attention shifted to statistical and mathematical approaches they each had advanced in the study of utility (not as a value for Marshall). In the first half of the 20th century, new approaches to income and utility began to include the economic value of human persons in their calculations. However, such approaches were challenged on ethical and political grounds. For example, Zhan argued that since the abolition of slavery, there is no longer any private economic value for human beings as such. Zhan lamented that “calculation about the economic value of” the human offends the “dignity” of the person; he proposed “that exception should be taken to placing human service and material goods in the same category.”57 Zhan’s reflection on the value of human morality and dignity were cautionary notes, weighing the cost of economic returns. Initially, instead of reducing humans to material goods, the human capital conceptions focused on economic values of education and utilized statistical data to make a case for investing in higher education for its national and personal economic returns. For example, John Walsh suggested professional capacities gained by education should be included as national wealth irrespective of the model of government. He showed a correlation of higher education (of lawyers, doctors, engineers, business executives and teaching professions) with higher income. The return on income exceeded the cost of acquisition of education; it did not become debt. Walsh acknowledged that parents “only incidentally” acted as “investors; they are parents first of all, … should they have savings remaining after providing for the education of their own children, they experience no incentive whatever to spend it on the education of the children of others.”58 Simultaneously altruistic and selfish, parents were confined to caring for their own children. At the time, on various occasions, Walsh adopted a careful terminology to convey that college education “may be considered a form of capital,”59 not that it was simply all that. He also provided an example of the lawyers and emphasized his doubt that innate qualities were in play for their income, which had exceeded the income of other professions during

178  Human capital theory the time he studied them. Walsh explained that the demand for lawyers presented a special case in which they collected a large surplus return. He recognized that in such cases a system of taxation was to be incorporated by government to facilitate market equilibrium and in this “the investment made in professional ability and material capital act in the same way.”60 The Great Depression had created a social concern that affirmed that the state ought to be an active agent in the wealth management. After the Great Depression, the idea of education as an investment was supplemented to include a discourse of consumption. The modality of consumption dealt with refraining from spending and investing for returns that could fuel future consumption. Marshall had stated that a theory of consumption has to serve as the “scientific bases of economics,” stressing the “study of consumption must come after, and not before, the main body of economic analysis” for it followed from learning about desires and wants in order to invent and satisfy them.61 He acknowledged that Bentham’s analysis of pain and pleasure had enabled the study of consumption. Marshall also complained that the English school—following Bentham’s direct influence—had been too focused on deducing theories from statistics.62 Statistical approaches had gained momentum in the later part of the 19th century when their primary focus was on designing programmes for social welfare rather than for increasing private capital. For example, Walsh, in his paper discussed above, drew on statistical data. Similar to his contemporaries he relied on objective knowledge to influence subjective decisions for public good.63 Walsh was working within the realm of classical economists who had deemed the state’s role as necessary for the maintenance of unmonopolized market. Nearly a decade after Walsh, Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets studied five professional practices: medicine, dentistry, law, certified accountancy, and consulting engineering. In their Income from Independent Professional Practice, Friedman and Kuznets left out the data from business executives and teachers that Walsh had considered. Perhaps the business executives were distinguished from the rest of professions, attuned to an invisible hand—as Adam Smith had thought—and for this, they were above the knowledge economy and thereby enjoying exclusive privileges. Friedman and Kuznets anticipated that the growing reliance on capital will set directions for the knowledge economy. Business executives were to be seen as moral entities applauded by economists and state policymakers, not for their charity but for providing humans with precarious employment. Friedman and Kuznets also left out the teaching professions, as teaching was on the way of becoming anything but an independent practice. Teachers were to surrender their relative independence as nationalism controlled public opinion, redirecting educational institutions away from citizenship concerns towards economic growth, just as independent

Human capital theory  179 scholarly research was redirected to meet certain dictated ends.64 The socalled independent professions, judged worthy of academic study, thereby depended upon college education; all required time and financial investment to support the individuality that the concept of “independent” signified. All except the “consulting engineers” were under state licensure. To acknowledge that these professions were often regulated, the authors’ cited Harold Rypins, the Secretary of the New York State Board of Medical Examiners: In all the profession there has developed in the last few years, an aristocratic, or at least a restrictive movement which, in a sense, is reminiscent of the medieval guilds. The trend is still in an early state, but in law, medicine, dentistry and other professions under state licensure, the signs are apparent…65 By quoting this statement Friedman and Kuznets made the point that such control is necessary to ensure the quality of training but also to make the professions competitive. Romanticizing the Middle Ages, Friedman and Kuznets showed little recognition that membership in guilds protected the medieval men economically only by subjecting them to the rigid hierarchical systems that permitted no vertical movement socially and politically. Friedman and Kuznets noted (in the footnote) the competition between individuals managed by the professional organization was important. They nudged the National Bureau of Economic Research to “study” it as a model for the future organization of society: “Medicine offers an opportunity to observe a form of politico-economic control that promises to become increasingly important that offers one type of pattern for the future organization of society.”66 The role of associations, councils, and examinations as governing bodies was to make it difficult to enter a profession and this has social implications for it evidently offer a form of control wherein competition remained triumphant. Few decades later, Friedman came to attack government control but also reformulated the bases of democratic society, equality. He pressed that “like every ideal, equality of opportunity is incapable of being fully realized.”67 He placed equality against personal liberty to condemn government interventions in protecting citizens against corporate elites. Meanwhile, he promoted the control advanced by “free enterprise, competition, laissez-faire.”68 In his study of institutional economics in America, Rutherford noted that the First World War set in motion the idea that economics is relevant to the modern problem of social control encouraging economists to accommodate pragmatist philosophy and experimental approaches. Employment was only one of the “problems that seemed to demand new forms of ‘social control’ to supplement the market,”69 but one in which big business and the state had a shared

180  Human capital theory interest. The First World War had created a movement in which “all belligerent powers ‘moved in the direction of organized capitalism and war collectivism.’”70 The furthering of business conventions in the public sphere served to protect the freedom espoused by profiteers. The five professions Friedman and Kuznets studied shared another common feature: they were not under the threat of being replaced by machinery. Moreover, by the way of education they made individuals into productive enterprises. The five professions showed resemblance to the guild system as each provided the possibility of self-autonomy. Unlike the guild system, in which the “apprentices were bound to a master” and a master committed to individual persons (“the master boarded and lodged both the apprentices and paired workmen in the family rooms above the shop and store”71), trainees were put through an impersonal training programme. In modern economic models, education was conceived to be an investment that carried risks, so individuals could conceive themselves as accountable decision-makers.72 Friedman thought about income inequality from the angle of preferences and choices, a view that garnered public opinion, a shared belief that certain people were seemingly more rational self-maximizers than others. Such views reflected the utilitarian assignment of value to acts. Utilities and outcomes reformulated the question of natural and political equality. Individualizing the problems of income inequality distracted attention from the conditions of life in a country apprenticed in racial violence against African Americans.73 Friedman diverted attention from justice as he explained equality in terms of buying power. Both the emphasis on markets, that they reflect all relevant information and provide sufficient means for competition, and the use of mathematical models in economics often lacked attention to social justice. Meanwhile, there was growing faith placed in Kuznets’s proposal that “income inequality would automatically decrease in advance phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy choices….”74 By the end of 1950s, citing Friedman’s work on preferences and choices, Mincer acknowledged that “the emphasis of contemporary research has been almost completely shifted from the study of the causes of inequality to the study of the facts and of their consequences for various aspects of economic activity, particularly consumer behaviour.”75 The attention to “behaviour” of so-called “consumers” was narrowing the gap between psychology, economics, and education as entirely separate disciplines. This focus also set in motion the use of “statistical techniques to noneconomic data”76 to economize life itself, as Friedman later confessed. In 1955, while making the case for the privatization of vocational and professional education, Friedman coined the phrase “human capital.” For support, he cited his own study and those conducted by Kuznets.77 In his eyes, education played a dual but unifying force for the production of

Human capital theory  181 citizen-workers. He saw education as training which could be improved if it were only trusted to private enterprises, thereby mobilizing competition, and encouraging innovation. Limiting the role of government in education, allowing businessmen to rule the schools, and denationalizing education would presumably widen the range of choices available to parents and individuals. He felt sure that a private enterprise governed by profit-seeking interests had a better chance than government to reduce stratification. Forty years later when discussing the voucher system, Friedman admitted that vouchers by themselves would not change the education system. However, they “can promote rapid privatization” and “constitute a real incentive for entrepreneurs” if “the acceptance of vouchers” comes free from interference with “the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore and to innovate.”78 Here was a play of freedom and incentives. Entrepreneurs were to enjoy unbounded freedom to experiment with public education while the parents and children dealt with the choices made for them. This treatment of freedom and incentives originated from Friedman’s position that the equality of opportunity should not be interpreted literally. His misconceptions misled policymakers and diverted attention from democratic education practices. Later, Becker and Becker clarified that the “introduction of school vouchers primarily” was meant for the “poor children.”79 The schools of the British empire have also been designed for the education of the children of the poor, and their theories and practices were appropriated in the colonies. 5.3 Economists dreaming of education Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker supplemented Friedman and Kuznets’ assumptions. Aware of Marshall’s criticism of Fisher, Schultz opted for Fisher’s definition that thought of humans as the form of capital that possessed capital and were possessed by it. Schultz thought “Marshall’s view of capital” and his valuation of human had neglected whether the knowledge, skill, and training provided by education is a national investment.80 Schultz acknowledged that the Cold War with the U.S.S.R had demanded a change in the United States policies, and he thought that if people are “an important part of the wealth of nations,” then education becomes “a special priority.”81 The policies that target education were not separable from the Cold War. They aimed at generating economic growth to combat political and military adversaries. Education was a consumption that consumed the individual persons in order to increase their monetary output. However, as an undertaking that required money, discipline, and time, education was not to be considered as labour. Schultz relied on the distinctions made between labour and capital by his predecessors. He criticized conceiving labour based on time and wages for it projected a rigid

182  Human capital theory expectation on the worker. In his eyes, “not only bureaucrats and farmers but also labourers, students, housewives and consumers are entrepreneurs.”82 Anticipating the gig economy, Schultz imagined a society in which economic risks are naturalized as part of human life. His understanding of labour in terms of capital emphasized that the quality of labour has improved over time. This improvement was due to labour’s dependency on capital investments and technological improvements. Thus, the entrepreneurial discourse that emphasized the human role in a dynamic economy formulated human agency in terms of capital investment. Schultz, who was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Behavioural Sciences and financially supported by the Ford Foundation during 1956–1957, helps us to better understand the role of economics in education. Schultz worked closely with Ralph Tyler, the director of the Centre.83 Tyler’s work was responsible for the de-professionalization of teachers by accountability measures and the movement of “principles” that drained the school curriculum from academic and practical experiences by linking objectives with assessment.84 Schultz acknowledged his debt to Tyler before explaining the role of economics in education concerns examining major “inefficiencies in the way resources are used,” considering the “relative factor prices,” calculating the “value of schooling,” and managing the “incentives” and the “earnings that students forgo.” Cognizant that the intensifying intrusion of “efficiency experts” into education had undermined the “human factor,” Schultz believed that by “adopting new techniques” and “new kinds of inputs… educational services” can improve “economic output.”85 Evidently, the role of economics was to deemphasize the “human factor” by prioritizing only the economic factors. The discourse of efficiency injected business values into education institutions.86 On another occasion, Schultz noted education’s commitments to train “responsible citizens” but then clarified what he meant by that phrasing: “What is implied is that, in addition to achieving these cultural goals, some kinds of education may improve the capabilities of a people as they work and manage their affairs and that these improvements may increase the national income.”87 Positioning humans at the service of the nation also meant education may accomplish other objectives. Education “can be pure consumption or pure investment, or it can serve both these purposes.”88 Education is a service that is conceptualized by market terminology. Educational values become competing goods and are given price tags. Nationally, the relocation of productive forces from the United States, in search of higher profits and also as a way to combat organized union demands for fairer wages as well as life and work balance was not without implications for rates of unemployment. The promotion of higher education, advanced by human capital theorists, delayed entry into the labour market, deferring the shock of relocations and automation. Even if the

Human capital theory  183 factory employment had remained within the United States—which was impossible given capitalists’ obsession with reducing costs and increasing profits—it did not necessarily mean that the gross national product would continue to increase at the same rate as it had during the Second World War era. Human capacity for production, by itself, was not a sufficient cause of economic growth. A combination of factors, including new means of communication and mass schooling had led to increased economic production, but these were supplementary to what William Petty had introduced and Simon Kuznets developed: humans as central contributors to national gross domestic product (GDP). Consumer society vitalized an economy centred on human choices and behaviours. There was also a contingent rapid shift from an economy based on the production of goods to financialization of economic productivity whereby money (not labour) made money. According to Abramovitz, the increased productivity since the 1870s—withholding the effect of population increase—was not due to “increase of labour input per head” but to “the complex of little understood forces which caused productivity, that is, output per unit of utilized resources.”89 Labour productivity had increased. However, since the productivity, explained as output per individual, fluctuated during the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Robert Solow proposed the one essential contributing factor to be technical change, which directed the “slowdowns, speed ups, improvements in the education of the labour force.”90 Technical changes followed from investments and directed human capital development. Schultz had observed that the transformation of labour in agriculture was due to the growth of economic organization and investment in knowledge.91 So, the growth of unemployment generated by the advancement of machinery necessitated certain flexibility towards knowledge as a consumptive good that produces certain humans. As a consumption education is consigned to economic demands. Education’s ethical and political commitment to public good is sidestepped as public imagination became accustomed to human capital theory’s emphasis on economic incentives. Schultz felt the need to stress that the humans he deemed as a form of capital ought to trust the “political and legal institutions” that “have been shaped to keep [hu]man free from bondage.”92 The previous chapter showed, in reference to the Poor Laws, that the arbitrary use of power by knowledge producers enabled political and legal reforms that erased elites’ obligations towards the economically vulnerable population. Schultz considered that conceiving humans as “akin to property” has a potential to return to “slavery” and “bondage,” if legal protections were manipulated.93 Bondage is a technical, legal, and economic term. It differs from slavery: for the slave can exercise a degree of self-control. The slave was used for his/her utility and this utility was reasoned to be beneficial to both

184  Human capital theory the master and the slave. But in bondage, even that minimal reciprocity is reformulated by the logics of control and predictability. In the age of ongoing connectivity, the problem is not only that humans become integrated into the ecosystem of large technological corporations (i.e. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) in order to learn and labour. There is also an element of bondage. The choice architects of these large businesses utilize behavioural feedback in their platforms to manipulate mental, emotional, and physical processes in order to increase predictability and profit. Slaves recognized their helpless position and, if they did not run away, a punishable or suicidal decision, they accepted they were born to secure the economy of the masters. Their labour did not serve their dignity but served a socially constructed economy. For the liberal classical thinkers, the conception of labour as an activity linked to human flesh offered the defence of the right to oneself. As “social relations become the economic system” humans become “the raw material for capital via data.”94 Human beings conceived as resources are consumed by information communication technology (ICT) platforms and their data is used for profit. This mode of profit making uses the technological doctrine of efficiency, incorporates ideals of consumer society, and thrives on market rationality to mediate and expand control on social relations. Before the age of the Internet, the market approach to human development had argued for revising social values such as democratic and responsible government. For example, unlike Schultz, Gary Becker, held no faith in “government intervention” for he imagined “an ideal democracy is very similar to an ideal free enterprise system in the marketplace.”95 Becker makes no mention that the market is undemocratically structured by economic inequalities (and monopolies). He wanted the state to run as a business firm but also as a business firm that subordinates public good to the reign of private enterprise. Becker sounded convinced that even politicians are for sale as they sell themselves to voters and interest groups. “Just as managers of firms are hired,” Becker wrote, “so too are politicians and bureaucrats assumed to be hired to further the collective interests of pressure groups, who fire or repudiate them by election and impeachment when they deviate excessively from these interests [the interests of the owners].”96 He also thought voters’ “‘preferences’ can be manipulated” through managing information and feeding them misinformation, all provided “by interested pressure groups.”97 Becker and Murphy asserted that “people cannot simply ‘choose’ the value they want, they must get values hardwired into preferences for them to be effective.”98 It is presumed that the cost-benefit calculations are by themselves sufficient to legitimize the hardwiring of “norms,” “values,” and “habits” for certain ends, “especially among children” since they are the group for whom the exchange is not voluntary.99 This economic outlook conceived humans as hardwired to be

Human capital theory  185 self-interested rational maximizers. In his book, Human Capital, Becker explained this hardwiring in terms of specific and general training that becomes an integral part of the human person. 5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality Becker began Human Capital with a citation from Marshall: “The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.”100 Becker stopped where Marshall continued: and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts, and has not been hardened by the strain and stress of unfeminine work.101 Marshall characterized maternal care as an uncalculatable investment. Becker’s economic approach to human behaviour included that which had been free from economic calculation. The unselfish instinct recognized by Marshall was later explained by Nel Noddings as “natural caring” and not limited to mothers, but nonetheless associated with women’s emphasis upon “subjectivity” and relationships.102 Marshall’s evaluation recognized that economics could not quantify such caring activities. Becker reformulated Marshall’s thesis and, under the influence of Schultz and Friedman, moved towards reinterpreting familial relationships through the lens of the market and the assumptions of rational choice theory.103 Marshall had recognized: [I]n estimating the cost of production of efficient labour, we must often take as our unit the family. At all events we cannot treat the cost of production of efficient men as an isolated problem; it must be taken as part of broader problem of the cost of production of efficient men together with the women who are fitted to make their homes happy, and to bring up their children vigorous in body and mind, truthful and cleanly, gentle and brave.104 Marshall understood human character in relation to other cultural activities aside from work. He also had thought that in paying workers “high wages and in caring for their happiness and culture, the liberal employer confers benefits which do not end with his generation” but extend to their “children.”105 Here is an acknowledgement of caring again. Marshall showed that the utilitarian calculus need not be sadistic, analyzing human relations only on the basis of maximizing profits. In contrast, Becker focused on individuals and families as utility maximizers. Part of Becker’s effort in introducing “utility functions” was to

186  Human capital theory connect the “utility of the parents” and their consumption to the “utility of each child,” reformulating parental care towards children as utility functions.106 The implication was to subtract attention from public welfare as the responsibility of the government and employers. For Becker, welfare is governed by private wealth and resources. For example, people invest in education to maximize their existing resources. This is often due to their expectation of future returns; as a result, the “young people have a greater incentive to invest because they can collect the return over more years.”107 And so Becker thought that: “Women spend less time in the labour force than men and therefore, have less incentive to invest in market skills.”108 He thought that the priority to invest is based on age and gender. By Becker’s logic, individuals and families became business firms who calculated their returns when deciding to fall in love, get married, and care for their children. “The increasing importance of human capital dramatizes the realm of family life. Much as we like to think of ourselves as producers, we are, ourselves, produced.”109 Becker also revised employers’ responsibilities as stated by Marshall. On various occasions, Becker had stressed that “the trainees, not the firms … bear the cost, … [e]mployees pay for general on-the-job training by receiving wages below what they could receive elsewhere.”110 Moreover, businesses “shift training costs to trainee and have an incentive to do so when faced with competition for their services.”111 Faced with competition, financial incentives determined the ethics of employers. Becker showed that employees, in one way or another, pay for the cost of general or specific training—training aimed at making them more productive for the firms— through low wages and additional work hours. Becker thought that “school can be defined as an institution specializing in the production of training,” adding: “School and firms are often substitute sources of particular skills.”112 It can be inferred that he wanted children to cover the cost of their education. For Becker, human “learning” was to be “treated symmetrically with other investments.”113 There are two modalities of learning at play. One is the statistical and computational learning that belongs to the convention of investment finance. Second, closely knitted to the first, is psychological behaviourism. Both came together in their acceptance of logical positivism that nurtured anti-metaphysical approach.114 In Becker’s model the “rational person would invest only” if the expected rate of return and the risks associated with the investment made economic sense.115 The rational person is rational in-so-far as s/he engages in such calculations. Individuals “or society choose learning only if it is a sufficiently good investment,” Becker thought, “the conclusion must be that learning is a way to invest in human capital that is formally no different from education, on-the-job training, or other recognized investments.”116 Unlike Marshall, Becker was not

Human capital theory  187 suggesting that it is capital which is invested in humans. The actual investment is in training people to learn to become certain beings. This is the investment wherein humans become a form of capital. This conception of learning abandons the idea that knowledge is important for its own sake. The notion of learning as becoming human capital is often neglected, for its emphasis is on incentivizing education by the prospects of rewards in the unforeseen future. The “learning” Becker had in mind was derived from Bush and Mosteller’s Stochastic Models for Learning, a book that describes the applications of probability and mathematical laws for making people and machines learn by reliance on behavioural technologies. Bush and Mosteller acknowledged that they “have been strongly influenced by the Hullian and Guthrian schools thought” and that their “approach is similar to Skinner’s….”117 Behaviourism had developed from the works of Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, and Burrhus F. Skinner, whose experimental participants were dogs, cats, and pigeons. In this manner, human learning was informed by experiments on animals’ learning before it extended to the education of children. Pavlov showed that manipulation by a technician can induce certain responses from a dog. A dog in bondage became attentive to his food as a stimulus which was accompanied by a bell applied before its delivery. Over time, the sound elicited the conditioned response, the dog’s saliva. This proved that, by association, the dog had internalized an order. This is important for if one postulates that the dog learned in the human’s sense of the word that would mean that the dog understands the intent of the bell, as does the experimenter. Or it might lead to indicating that the experimenter attempted to teach the idea of the bell to the dog. Nevertheless, the pain animals experienced informed the lives of the controller and the controlee. At the start of the 20th century, Edward Thorndike suspected that the study of animal “behaviour” would enable him learn something about the “mental development of young children” and by this association “the chaotic dream of early childhood” came under the “the logical world-view of the adult scientist.”118 By studying animals under certain conditions, Thorndike speculated that animals learn “as man so commonly does, by the indirect connection of a response with a situation.”119 The Chain of Being from God down to animal—humans were located in the middle— was displaced by the indirect connection between animals and children. Thorndike was not alone, the primacy of stimuli—and the prospect of incentive—was vital to behaviourists’ locus of control, in which the experimenter focused on desired ends. All parties, including the experimenter, learned by incentives. As a movement, behaviourism normalized data-driven practices and the incentivization of social processes. Becker’s economic approach (to behaviours) sought to show how economic variables—including incentives—can

188  Human capital theory impact learning in controlled and uncontrolled environments. He stayed committed to Bentham’s behaviourism and to utilitarianism, supplementing these by considering individual and social “interactions.”120 He assumed that humans possess “stable preferences” and “accumulate… information and other inputs” from the “markets” in order to “maximize” their utility.121 Information (as a stimulus) directed choices, preferences, and activities, and also reframed assumptions about human agency and ethics. Becker adapted Bentham’s legacy to “all kind of behaviours,” determining “what we ‘shall’ do as well as to what we ‘ought’ to do.”122 According to Long the social implications of Bentham’s philosophy gained renewed force in behavioural technologies during the Cold War: Long after Bentham’s proposal for a fresh ‘scientific’ analysis of human motivation and a corresponding technology of environmental manipulation at the sociopolitical level had fallen on unreceptive ears, the cry for the creation of a ‘science of human behavior’ has in our own generation been raised once more by B.F. Skinner… [for] a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.123 Bentham’s philosophy influenced the “standard of judgment.”124 Long’s observations extend to those whose constructs of social welfare rely on nudges and choice architectures so certain individuals in power can influence the behaviours of others.125 Skinner suspected that it was a “philosophy of human nature which has been useful in implementing” the modern notion of democracy, “its method of control” requiring “very little engineering” but “[t]hrough a masterful piece of misinterpretation, the illusion is fostered that these procedures do not involve the control of behavior”; they are simply a matter of “getting someone to change his mind.”126 Skinner alluded to break “the illusion” of the conception of choice when he wrote: “The government manipulates variables which alter the behavior of the governed and is defined in terms of its power to do so. The change in behavior of the governed supplies a return reinforcement to the government….”127 He added that he was writing of systems which “may be as simple as a strong man taking property from the weaker members of a group or as complex as a modern government embarking upon educational program[s], which will generate the skilled manpower it needs.”128 Skinner’s behaviourism was aligned with economistic deployments of educational programmes to generate what the strong man and the state desired: A form of capital that learned and laboured for incentives. According to Aldous Huxley, Skinner’s treatise, Science and Human Behavior, “is solidly based upon facts. But unfortunately, the facts belong to so limited a class.”129 Huxley’s reference was to Big Government and Big Business and their increased use of

Human capital theory  189 behavioural sciences to govern the masses. Huxley’s comment reflects the cultural movement in Anglo-American social sciences, including economics, to both explain and direct human behaviour to pre-conceived ends (e.g., economic growth). Becker thought of his “economic approach” as “a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour,” by which he viewed humans as maximizers of their utility by accumulating “information and other inputs in a variety of markets.”130 This economic behaviourism and its assumptions fell under growing scrutiny by psychologists. For example, Richard Herrnstein acknowledged utilitarianism as the “common intellectual ancestors to modern psychologists and economists” and noted Bentham’s pain and pleasure principles “continue to be the flywheel of behavioral and social science, as well as of political, moral and legal philosophy.”131 Recognizing “the possibility of peculiar and self-destructive utility functions,” Herrnstein worried they can “lead to maladaptive behavior,” warning “that people may need help in their pursuit of subjective satisfaction” and “objective well-being.”132 The help offered assumed that psychology was a more suitable science than economics to comment on (and command) human behaviours. As “descendants of Bentham,” Herrnstein agreed with Becker on “the primacy of pain and pleasure” as the basis for “social science” to design social institutions.133 However, Herrnstein’s case for the adaptation of the “inductive” method of psychology to formal structures of economic theory followed his recognition that: “Behavioural psychology has searched for the processes that control behaviour, rather than” being distracted by “equilibria” and processes that “might produce” it.134 Herrnstein was transparent about the goals of behavioural psychology: Controlling humans. According to Blakely, social sciences “competing theoretical instantiations may be read as expressive of a particular kind of modern ethical self, one that is technocratic and manipulative in its dealings with others.”135 Social sciences of psychology and economics conjured forth the human being they interpreted. The applications of psychology to economics showed little interest in improving social ethics. It rebutted the overgeneralized theses (of Becker, Friedman, and Schultz) that humans always optimize their utility, act rationally to achieve their self-interests, and maintain stable preferences. This literature followed the works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose psychological research on judgement and decision making studied human subjects under uncertain conditions.136 Their findings trimmed the overgeneralized notion of humans as self-interested utility maximizers. When Kahneman and Tversky began their collaborations they focused on subjective probability, but as they moved away from psychology to economics in the 1980s, they began to acknowledge Herbert Simon’s efforts to

190  Human capital theory replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacity that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which organism exist.137 Unlike Becker, who thought that humans accumulate an optimal amount of information and other inputs from markets to self-maximize, Simon thought humans self-managed according to the available information. Simon had turned to psychology—when it was beginning to become intermingled with information-processing metaphors—to examine learning phenomena as an essential avenue to remodel global rationality. He agreed with behavioural psychologists concerning conditioning principles governing an organism’s (human, animal, and machine) action, but instead looked into information-processing capacities under certain conditions. Certain imposed conditions allowed Simon to find that human “rationality is very limited, very much bounded by the situation and by human computational powers.”138 This bounded rationality constituted a different approach to reason. Becker’s defence of rationality had accepted a degree of inefficiency and even irrationality in economic agents. In one instance Becker wrote, “that economic theory is much more compatible with irrational behavior than had been previously suspected.”139 Irrational behaviour was infused into the overall body of economic theory, evident in the idea that “the market would act as if ‘it’ were rational not only when household, [individuals and firms] were rational, but also when they were inert, impulsive, or otherwise irrational.”140 Becker regarded rationality as subject to the standards of judgement held; it was stable as far as it bent backward to meet changing demands. Becker’s faith on economic individualism conveyed that humans’ rationality is reflective of their ability to adjust themselves to market demands and to digest (mis)information in order to maximize utility and satisfy their preferences. The phrase “as if” introduces a flexibility so that irrational decisions can become rationalized. Markets act as a representative of accepted rationality. And firms act to survive competition by planning and executing profit-maximizing behaviours. Even when demonstrating a variety of irrational behaviours, they nonetheless calculate demand conditions and change production to maximize profit. For Becker, “the irrational units”—be it households, firms, or individuals—are “‘forced… to respond rationally.”141 Becker explained human rationality in terms of market forces and contributing factors included access to information, personal background, and economic talent. Simon considered the “as if” processes explained by Becker had neglected how people go about making decisions and had failed to explain the mechanisms of variations and selections. He thought “survival” is governed by adaptation but not necessarily optimization. Simon wanted us to

Human capital theory  191 “speak of the survival of the fitter rather than the survival of the fittest.”142 The central mechanism in his approach is the competition for niches, since humans developed altruism and aggression due to environmental demands. Simon found humans’ survival depended on their programmability to think and learn. “Programmability is also conducive to social existence and most effectively exploited in social environments rather than [in] an isolated one,” Simon elaborated humans’ “susceptibility to accepting programs under social influence and pressure,”143 which he called docility. Docility is a valued trait for it is part of adapting to a culture. Docility assists in acquiring transmitted traits; Simon suggested, “extensive borrowing by competing groups can be prevented,” and provided the example of colonization: “The European conquest of North America provides perhaps the clearest example of this process in modern times.”144 The example of European conquest admitted that the conquerors were possessed by the illusion of the “superior fitness” over their own kind and those they conquered were in possession of “strong altruism: unrequited sacrifice of fitness for the benefit of other organisms.”145 Simon was providing revisions to the history of homo economicus and the overall theory of political economy Smith and Malthus had postulated. Survival comes at the expense of competition; it is enforced by “processes of specialization and niche elaboration”146 that made the dominance of colonizers non-competing. Once “again the treatment of Indigenous people gave expression to a range of colonial ideas about how best to privatize, register, and protect private property and how to organize commercial transactions among individuals, corporations and government.”147 Simon’s work concerned administration of behaviours to attain organizational ends for corporations and government. For Simon, individuals should not be left to themselves; if public and private governing bodies are involved in investing, they ought to be involved in the design of things to ensure efficiency, accuracy, and predictability in outcomes. Social engineering refined its gaze into education institutions.148 And Simon’s reformulation of learning remained central: “Individual learning in organizations is very much a social, not a solitary, phenomenon,” Simon asserted, and yet he thought “[a]ll learning takes place inside individual heads.”149 His work on computers had convinced Simon to think of the human brain as a device that is reprogrammable to adopt to organizations’ values. Organizations exploit rewards, hierarchies, and networks to lead individuals to abandon their personal values and reformulate their choices to meet administrated demands.150 Simon preferred an inductive approach to incentives that began with “money and goods” but expanded to personal comfort, pride, and satisfaction to influence humans to abandon their will and accept an organization’s values. Simon found that socialization builds “conformity to habitual practices and

192  Human capital theory attitudes” desired by administrators of the organization. Simon postulated that any group is organized around value and factual elements; if there is difficulty in separating the two, it becomes a task of the organized bureaucracy to make its “participants behave in terms of organizational values to a sufficient extent.”151 What is at stake is not simply a change of opinion but “long-range, cumulative influences that are internalized and become part of their outlooks and personalities.”152 While Becker trusted markets as a source for value creation, he also, similar to Simon, admitted that organizational values ought to be hardwired through training. Both approaches pave the way for social engineering. The notion of information and inputs occupied both Simon and Becker and the concepts of environment remained as an ambiguous ground for their theories and experiments. According to Pinar, the “‘environment’” had been for a “long-time term of preference for a social and behavioural science that has too often stripped history and culture from its efforts to understand what it observes,” neglecting “ever-widening circles of significance.”153 In this respect, Simon’s desire “to replace” a concept and treat it as an object speaks to his conception of rationality as a possession. And, as any possession, it was vulnerable to scrutiny, theft, replacement, and control. While Becker’s assumptions concerning the human capacity to maximize utility and seek self-interests were scrutinized by Simon, humans remained hostage to an economic approach and incentivizing logic that he, along with Friedman and Schultz, advocated. In his Nobel Laureate lecture, Becker characterized his “indebtedness to Milton Friedman” as “unlimited.”154 Friedman and Schultz were not Becker’s PhD supervisors, but their approach encouraged his thinking to apply an economic approach to societal issues. For example, Friedman and Schultz were responsible for putting forward how the question of discrimination may be addressed by economists. The question became the topic of Becker’s doctoral dissertation; Becker associate[ed] with each person a taste for discrimination. This taste or prejudice would be measured based on how much income an employer is willing to forfeit in order to avoid hiring somebody who he didn’t like from a group that he didn’t like….155 Such calculations applied market mentality to racism and failed to address ethical conduct. Becker rationalized that the market may facilitate a taste for discrimination as much as it may hamper discrimination under certain conditions. Becker also recalled that, in his first presentation on human capital theory at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in late 1950s, discussants “were absolutely outraged,”156 by his treatment of education as a commodity. The first time he explained his economic

Human capital theory  193 analysis of the family, making “an analogy” between the demand for children by parents and the demand for durable consumer goods, “everyone started laughing.”157 But in the face of disapproval and ridicule, Friedman defended Becker. Little had changed by 1992, when Becker received the Nobel Prize in economics; his work remained contested in Western Europe. In private, he was told there were members of the Nobel Prize committee who did not want to award him. Moreover, he was informed that the public announcement of his award had brought protesters into the streets. Despite these facts, Becker felt that the “prestige and financial rewards” provided “validation” that “the economic approach to human behaviour is acceptable work and that we are doing real economics.”158 Was Becker doing real economics? Or real economics was altered after 40 years of neoclassical economics? In the third edition of Human Capital, Becker confessed the “long subtitle” for the first edition was composed to gain acceptance for the idea of treating education as an augmentation of labour power and to protect him from the common criticism that he was “treating people like slaves or machines.”159 However, by the time of the third edition, there was little need for protection. The language of human capital was circulating beyond the field of economics and beyond the United States. What was it that drew politicians, nationalists, school principals, academics, and journalists to the phrase? The concept of human capital had become a “good rationale for obtaining public monies,” and, according to Becker, “this partly explains its success.”160 The logic of obtaining money had influenced the standard of judgement in the United States. Categorizing humans as underdeveloped, developed, and used resources also had implications for materialistic ideology of nation states. The theory helped nations to calculate the costs involved in producing a product: Human capital. 5.5 Human capital: contradictions The proponents of the human capital theory were transparent about three things. First, Milton Friedman openly acknowledged the “deterioration” of the “education system” in the United States after four decades of incorporating human capital policies.161 And Friedman recognized that the “technological and political revolution threaten advanced countries with serious social conflict arising from a widening”162 income gap, but failed to recognize the diversions from the moral economy as a condition of social conflict. Second, Becker did not leave out the possibility of “disinvesting” in humans for the sake of maximizing economic outputs.163 Third, Schultz found knowledge production as an important part of training humans to become certain kinds of social animals—entrepreneurs, who could not “escape” the economic measures dominating their private and public life.164

194  Human capital theory The internalization of the economistic conceptions of social life had a gradual global impact, leading to teachers and students being conceived “as commodities.”165 Did an economic approach to human development foster equality, freedom, and democracy? According to Piketty, “since the 1970s income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries, especially [in] the United States.”166 While “net private wealth” had increased, so had the “burden of national debt” owed by future generations.167 While inequality has been reduced at the global level, it continues to grow in the rich countries. According to Piketty, inequalities in education contribute to inequalities in opportunities and there is little evidence that human capital policies have increased intergenerational mobility.168 Piketty found that investment in education is vital for social development, but he rejected the assumption that “the progress of technological rationality is supposed to lead automatically to the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate.”169 Without democratic governance “economic rationality” by itself won’t “automatically give rise to democratic rationality.”170 Democratic rationality considers human participation in decisions and processes that concerns social life. In the face of revisions to the rational and utility-maximization thesis of proponents of human capital theory, economic approaches to human life continue to participate in the treatment of humans as properties, commanded by technologies that have incorporated behavioural techniques to control and expropriate human life.171 Notes 1 Talcott Williams, “Competition as a safeguard to National Welfare,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 42, (1912): 74. 2 Eric Amesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). From the Civil War to the Civil Right movement of the 1940s, African American railroad workers continued asking the juridical institutions (that Williams praised) for equality and justice as they suffered unfair employment practices. 3 Edward Berman, Labor and the Sherman Act (New York: Harper, 1930). The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was passed to eliminate the evils of trusts and business monopolies. The act was intended to punish illegal trusts and not the labour unions. However, [f]rom 1890 until the Supreme Court, on March 22, 1897, rendered its first decision under the statue against a business combination, the lower federal courts had held in only one case that such a combination had violated the law. On the other hand, they had, during the same period, declared certain activities of labour unions to be violations of the act on twelve different occasions. (p. 3)

Human capital theory  195 4 Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ed. Ayn Rand (New York: New American Library, 1966), 58. 5 Ibid., 59. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ibid., 61. Ayn Rand’s fictions claimed regulations were an “assault on integrity” of businessmen. She influenced generations of conservative politicians in the United States who neglected the common good. 8 Richard A. Posner, “Conglomerate Mergers and Antitrust Policy: An Introduction,” St. John’s Law Review 44 (1969): 532. 9 Richard A. Posner, “Value and Consequences: An Introduction to Economic Analysis of Law,” Chicago Working Papers in Law and Economics 53 (1998): 1–13. Posner’s advocacy of removal of the anti-trust laws worked towards giving employers more “control” over the use of “human capital” (p. 9). See Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner, Uncommon Sense: Economic Insight from Marriage to Terrorism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). Posner wrote: Privatization is a perennial issue in economics… The issue reflects the fact that there is no hard-and-fast line between the provision of services by government and by the private sector, and that private provision of services is generally more efficient than public because political interference is less. (p. 291) In acknowledging the “long history of mercenaries,” Posner pressed that the “non-American employed by private security companies in Iraq are mercenaries. … Instead of just providing weapons and recruits, why not let the private market provide entire military formation?” (p. 292). 10 Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 40. 11 Ibid., 42. 12 Ibid., 115. 13 Ibid., 115. See also Richard A. Posner, “Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory,” The Journal of Legal Studies 8, no. 1 (1979): 103–40. 14 Gary S. Becker, “Underinvestment in College Education?” The American Economic Review 50, no. 20, 1960): 346. 15 Ibid., 352. 16 Ibid., 343–4. 17 William F. Pinar, ed. International Handbook of Curriculum Studies (New York: Routledge, 2014). Authors from Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Italy, Mexico, Turkey and Portugal make references to the adverse impact of human capital theory on educational practices and policies. See also Joel Spring, Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations, Skills-Based Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2015). 18 Jeremy Bentham, A Manual of Political Economy (McMaster: University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, 1843), 43 and 45. 19 Jeremy Bentham, “A Manual of Political Economy,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1, ed. Verner Stark (London: Routledge, 2004), 260. Bentham had elaborated on the second mode of labour, “the mode of carrying” the labour of others from schools to workshops. 20 Verner Stark, “Introduction,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1, ed. Verner Stark (London: Routledge, 2004). Stark noted the first definition was “the classical one; but the latter had its attractions for the left-wingers among the economists… Bentham showed that he was a liberal with a

196  Human capital theory difference, and not a blind doctrinaire” (p. 53). Bentham’s ideas for competition extended to the bankers and “all monied men” and had proposed a 20% tax on their profits (p. 77). 21 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, trans. William Smart (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co, 1923), 32–33. 22 Ibid., 38. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory, trans. William Smart (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 264. 25 Ibid., 264. 26 William Smart, “Translator’s Preface,” in Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory, trans. William Smart (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), xii. Böhm-Bawerk rejected the Abstinence theory, production theory and the exploitation theory. 27 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Karl Marx and the Close of his System,” in Karl Marx and the Close of His System & Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ed. Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 67. We can, by a combination of induction and deduction, much used in our science, investigate the motives which direct people in carrying on the business of exchange and in determining the exchange prices on the one hand, and on the other hand which guide them in their co-operation in production…. (pp. 66–67) 28 Ibid., 68–69. 29 Smart, “Translator’s Preface,” xv. 30 Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 66–67. Bentham was one of the English writers that was concerned with the subsistence of the. He was also concerned with over accumulation of capital. His position was different from those of William Goodwin (1756–1836) who had argued for instituting “equal property” in order to diminish the “evil propensity of man.” Goodwin questioned the benefits of “accumulating property for the purpose of obtaining some kind of ascendancy over the mind of our neighbours” and diagnosed an unbound right to accumulation will be “contrary to the general good” (p. 437). See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1793/2013). 31 Larry J. Sechrest, “Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Critics,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 271–97. 32 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1944/2001), 67. 33 Ibid., 67. 34 Ibid., 45. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Ibid., 60. 37 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital (London: MacMillan and Co., 1941), 56–57. 38 Ibid., 60. 39 Michel Feher, “Self-appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21–41. 40 Joseph S. Nicholson, “The Living Capital of the United Kingdom,” The Economic Journal 1, no. 1 (1891): 97.

Human capital theory  197 41 Ibid., 100. Nicholson (1891) acknowledged that “some allowance must be made for the people themselves (apart from their wealth producing power)— the difficulty” was “to determine the most reasonable measure” (p. 103). 42 Geoffrey Crowther, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Claremont: Claremont College, 1957). 43 Irving Fisher, “What Is Capital?” The Economic Journal 6, no. 24 (1896): 509–34. Fisher was cognizant of Böhm-Bawerk’s view that “capital is not ‘lent’ at interest but sold for interest” (p. 515). Although Fisher partially agreed with this view, he found it incomplete. Fisher (1906) distinguished labour from work: “The work is objective; the labour is subjective. Properly speaking, an employer does not pay man for his labour, but for his work” (p. 175). 44 Nathalie Sigot, “Jevons’s Debt to Bentham: Mathematical Economy, Morals and Psychology,” The Manchester School 70, no. 2 (2002): 262–78. 45 Irving Fisher, The Nature of Capital and Income (London: MacMillan Company, 1906), 57. 46 Ibid.,107. 47 Ibid., 43. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1923) had arrived at the same conclusion. 48 Ibid., 51. 49 Bruce, Moghtader, “Human Capital and Education of Desires After Michel Foucault,” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4 (2017): 35–52. 50 Ibid., 184. 51 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2013), 112. The “mistake” of Herbert Spencer and those who followed him was that they supposed “that life is for working, instead of working for life” (p. 112). 52 Ibid., 113. 53 Ibid., 650. 54 Irving Fisher, “Precedents for Defining Capital,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 18, no. 3 (1904): 387–88; Alfred Marshall, “Distribution and Exchange,” The Economic Journal 8, no. 29 (1898): 37–59. 55 Irving Fisher, “Precedents for Defining Capital,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 18, no. 3 (1904): 386–408. 56 Alfred Marshall, “Distribution and Exchange,” The Economic Journal 8, no. 29 (1898): 56. 57 Friedrich Zahn, “Economic Value of Man—Is It an Object of Statistics?” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, no. 4 (1934): 428–29. 58 John R. Walsh, “Capital Concept Applied to Man,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 49, no. 2 (1935): 276. 59 Ibid., 284. 60 Ibid., 285 61 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 76. In this respect, Marshall noted that no other successor matches Bentham’s contribution to economics. 62 Ibid., 629. 63 For example, in early standardized tests, such as Intelligence Quotient tests, statistics offered individuals an understanding of themselves by comparing them to the average score of a sample population. The test was used, and similar tests continue to be developed, in order to establish social categories for educational placement, assessing disabilities and evaluating job applicants. The statistical apparatus also gave form to conceptualizing education in relation to income distributions.

198  Human capital theory 64 Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1946). 65 Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, Income from Independent Professional Practice (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1945/1954), 12. 66 Ibid., 21 67 Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harvest Book, 1990), 132. Friedman’s attack on control concerns his political favouritism of the conservative party. Friedman stated that the Democratic party of the United States has the chief instrument for strengthening the government power which Jefferson and many of his contemporaries viewed as the greatest threat to democracy. And it has striven to increase government power in the name of a concept of ‘equality’ that is almost opposite of the concept of Jefferson identified with liberty and Tocqueville with democracy. (p. 131) Politically motivated, Friedman pressed that “equality of opportunity” should not be “interpreted literally” (p. 132). 68 Ibid., 133. 69 Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19. “The emergence of institutionalism as a defined and selfaware movement in American economics can be dated to the period around the end of World War 1” (p. 53). The institutionalists were active in the development of institutions of education and research in economics. Institutionalists were not only associated with the NBER, but also with the Institute of Economics, The New School for Social Research, the Brookings Graduate School, the Social Science Research Council, and with other programs of education and research. In these endeavors, institutionalists were able to gain the substantial support of Foundations such as Rockefeller. (p. 52) 70 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 28. 71 Ellwood P. Cubberley, A Brief History of Education: A History of Practice and Progress and Organization of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 109. 72 Milton Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income,” Journal of Political Economy 61, no. 4 (1953): 277–90; Milton Friedman and Leonard J. Savage. “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk,” Journal of Political Economy 56, no. 4 (1948): 279–304. 73 William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 210–14. “Before emancipation, the lynching of slaves occurred only in exceptional circumstances, as the economic interests of slaveholders ran counter to mob violence” (p. 169). Pinar documents, mob violence grew after emancipation and by 1893 and: “Statistical data suggest that lynchings in cotton-producing regions occurred when the need for labour was greatest” (p. 211).

Human capital theory  199 74 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 11. According to Piketty, Kuznets’ interpretations of the statistical income data of 1913 to 1948 “was a product of the Cold War” (p. 14). Piketty wrote: “Since the 1970s, income inequalities have increased significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States” (p. 15). 75 Jacob Mincer, “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 4 (1958): 281–302. 76 Milton Friedman, “Milton Friedman,” in Lives of the Laureates: TwentyThree Nobel Economists, ed. William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 73. See also: Spencer H. Banzhaf “Retrospectives: The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 4 (2014): 213–26. 77 Milton Friedman, “The role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1955). Human capital was yet not a theory; in fact, he reflected on the “imperfection” of the capital market in the investment in human beings. 78 Milton Friedman, “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Education Economics 5, no. 3 (1997): 341–44. Forty years later while writing about privatization of education, Friedman resorted to his authority when he argued for a voucher system to face off the “serious social conflict arising from a widening gap” in “income” (p. 341). 79 Gary S. Becker and Guity N. Becker, The Economics of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 6. 80 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s view,” Social Service Review 33, no. 2 (1959): 111–12. 81 Ibid., 109. 82 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Entrepreneurial Ability,” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 82, no. 4 (1980): 437. 83 Theodore W. Schultz, The Economic Value of Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), viii. For some purposes ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ are interchangeable, but for other purposes a concept is required to represent the activities that are an integral part of teaching and learning of students, and another concept to represent particular a function for the educational establishment. (p. 3) 84 William F. Pinar, Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstance, Intellectual Histories (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2012). Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). See William F. Pinar (2013), “Plagiarism and the ‘Tyler rationale’,” Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum 9, no. 2 (2013): 1–13. 85 Schultz, The Economic Value of Education, 12–13. 86 Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 87 Theodore W. Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education,” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 572. 88 Ibid., 571. 89 Moses Abramovitz, “Resource and Output Trends in the United States Since 1870,” National Bureau of Economic Research (1956): 6.

200  Human capital theory 90 Robert M. Solow, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–20. 91 Theodore W. Schultz, The Economic Organization of Agriculture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953). In discussing “the declining economic importance of agricultural land,” Schultz mentioned “that advances in techniques, improvement in skills, use of more capital and better organization have been about as applicable to agricultural production as to the production in the rest of the economy” (p. 125). Becker (1994) reminds us: “Compelling evidence of the link between human capital and technology comes from agriculture…. Education and training are also helpful in coping with changing technologies” (p. 25). Becker clarified what he means by education does not deal with knowledge passed on from “parents to children.” 92 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s View,” 110. 93 Ibid., 110. 94 Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2019), 117. 95 Gary S. Becker “Competition and Democracy,” The Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1958): 106. “It may be preferable not to regulate economic monopolies and to suffer their bad effects, rather than to regulate them and suffer the effects of political imperfections” (p. 109). 96 Gary S. Becker, “Theory of Competition among Pressure Groups for Political Influence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, no. 3 (1983): 396. 97 Ibid., 392. Becker, later, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. 98 Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 144. 99 Ibid.,145. 100 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). 101 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 469. 102 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). According to Noddings, care concerns “reciprocity” which— is not an exchange or “contract” (pp. 4–6). 103 Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). The market approach is applied to a household as a business enterprise. 104 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 469. In the footnote to this, Marshall acknowledged William Petty for his conceptualization of human capital. 105 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 670. 106 See Gary S. Becker and Robert J. Barro “A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 103, no. 1 (1988): 1–25; Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy and Robert Tamura, “Human Capital, Fertility, and Economic Growth,” Journal of Political Economy, 98, no. 5 (1990): 12–37. 107 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital, A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 50. 108 Ibid., 51. 109 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 301.

Human capital theory  201 110 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 12–13. Those who put others to work were under no obligation to bear the costs of specific training and/or general training. 111 Ibid., 18/22. 112 Ibid., 29. 113 Ibid., 46. 114 Daniel L. Smith, “Behaviourism and Logical Positivism: A Revised Account of the Alliance” (PhD dissertation: University of New Hampshire, 1983). Retrieved October 11, 2019, from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. According to Smith, behaviorism and logical positivism shared a common style as movements…. In light of the rejection of their disciplines’ historical problems, both movements were viewed from within and without as radical developments. As a result, both were often promulgated with radical rhetoric and propaganda. Because both arose in somewhat hostile intellectual environments, they were defended in aggressive and polemical fashion. Finally viewing their movements as the key to progress in their respective disciplines led behaviorists and logical positivists alike to express widely optimistic claims about the future benefits of acting on their presuppositions. The writing of both groups frequently showed a sort of missionary zeal, a zeal which was reflected in their occasional references to winning ‘coverts.’ (p. 5) 15 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 55. 1 116 Ibid., 46. 117 Robert R. Bush and Frederick Mosteller, Stochastic Models for Learning (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955), 333. The noted psychologists, Edwin R. Guthrie and Clark L. Hull were behaviourists. Hull’s theory remained to be focused on reinforcements and Guthrie’s on associations. The two approaches differed and were thought not compatible with each other. For Bush and Mosteller (1955) this was not an issue. Grouping Hull, Guthrie and Skinner together reflects the commitment to their mathematical approaches to human learning rather than the commitment to democratic education. 118 Edward Thorndike, Animal Intelligence (New York: The Macmillan company, 1911), 292–93. 119 Ibid., 114. From his experiments Thorndike had formed an “opinion” that animals do have representations and that such are the beginning of the rich life of ideas in man. …” (p. 113). Thorndike added that he did not think that animals “thought of getting freedom or food” but he thought they learned about the environment designed for them by reward and stimulus (p. 293). 120 Gary S. Becker, “A Theory of Social Interactions,” Journal of Political Economy 82, no. 6 (1974): 1063–93. See Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Becker had “analyzed discriminatory behaviour by incorporating race, religion, and sex” into the “utility functions” and in the second publication incorporated the standard of living of the “poorer” person into the utility function of “richer ones” (p. 1065). 121 Gary S. Becker, An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976/2013), 14. 122 Ibid., 8–9. See Jimena Hurtado, “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and Economic Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3 (2008): 335–57. 123 Long, Bentham on Liberty, 216.

202  Human capital theory 124 John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1932), 263. Dewey and Tufts began their assessment of “Benthamite School” as “anti-historic.” They find the “chief interest” for Bentham was to influence the “standard of judgment” and “his acceptance of hedonistic psychology was, in the broad sense, an historic accident” (p. 263). 125 Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein and John P. Balz. “Choice Architecture,” The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy 25, (2013): 428–39. 126 Burrhus F. Skinner, “Freedom and the Control of Men,” The American Scholar 25, no. 1 (1956): 47–65. 127 Burrhus F. Skinner, Science and Human Behaviour (New York: McMillan, 1953/2005), 345. 128 Ibid., 345. 129 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 122. 130 Gary S. Becker, An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, 13. 131 Richard J. Herrnstein, “Behaviour, Reinforcement and Utility,” Psychological Science 1, no. 4. (1990): 217–18. 132 Richard J. Herrnstein, “Behaviour, Reinforcement and Utility,” in The Matching Law: Papers in Psychology and Economics, ed. Howard Rachlin and David I. Laibson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 264. 133 Richard Herrnstein, “Behavior, Reinforcement and Utility,” Psychological Science 1, no. 4 (1990): 224. 134 Ibid., 217–18. 135 Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press), 84. The digital revolution supported the upsurge of technocracy by granting elites abilities to commercialize human behaviours via datafication. 136 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Making Under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–92. 137 Herbert A. Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 69, no. 1 (1955): 99. 138 Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 34. 139 Gary S. Becker, “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory,” The Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 1 (1962): 2. 140 Ibid., 2. 141 Ibid., 12. 142 Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 49. 143 Ibid., 55. Simon is reinterpreting and expanding Malthus’ thesis. “A species that can change its culture is defined as ‘programmable’” (Simon, 1983, p. 55), to do so it sacrifices some of its own kind and in the process rewards some genes over others. 144 Ibid., 57. 145 Ibid., 57. 146 Ibid., 73. 147 Anthony J. Hall, Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), 33. 148 Herbert A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality: Volume 1, Economic Analysis and Public Policy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). In place of utility formulas, Simon was concerned with the way the government can be more

Human capital theory  203 efficient. He recommended that public policy intensifies the use of statistics, not for ranking but “for the analysis of the factors making for efficiency or inefficiency.” And “statistics must be considered not so much a means of visiting judgment upon cities as a means of pooling their experiences in arriving at factually based principles of administration” (p. 13). 149 Herbert A. Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 2, no. 1 (1991): 125. 150 Herbert A. Simon, “The Function of the Executive Revisited,” (1986). Retrieved July 30, 2019 from: http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/ awarchive?type=file&item=38869 151 Herbert A. Simon, Donald W. Smithburg and Victor A. Thompson, Public Administration (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 61–62. 152 Ibid., 67. 153 William F. Pinar, What is Curriculum Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Rutledge, 2012), 52. 154 Gary, S. Becker, “Gary Becker,” in Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-three Novel Economists, 5th ed., ed. William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 255. Becker recalled Milton Friedman’s approach made economics a tool. 155 Ibid., 256. 156 Ibid., 261. 157 Ibid., 263. 158 Ibid., 269. 159 Becker, Human capital, 3rd ed., 16. 160 Becker, “Gary Becker” in Lives of the Laureate, 261. 161 Milton, Friedman, “Why Government is the Problem,” Essays in Public Policy, no. 39 (California: Hoover Institution Press Publication, 1993). 162 Milton Friedman (1997) “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Education Economics 5, no. 3 (1997): 341–44. 163 Becker’s 1992 laureate speech, the Economic way of Looking at Life, made clear that “the process of investing and disinvesting in human capital often alters the very nature of a person…” (p. 392). 164 Theodore Schultz, Origins of Increasing Returns (Cambridge: Blackwell Publisher, 1993). “Given our dynamic economy, people cannot escape being entrepreneurs in their life span… whether a person is bad or good in performing this function is quite another matter” (Schultz, 1993, p. 3). 165 Peter, P. Grimmett, “International Teacher Education: Liberal Cosmopolitanism Revisited or Post-modern Trans-nationalism,” Teacher Education Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2009): 7–25. See also Peter, P. Grimmett, “The Governance of Canadian Teacher Education: A Macro-political Perspective,” Counterpoints 334 (2009): 22–32. 166 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 15. 167 Ibid., 567. 168 Ibid., 420. Piketty mentioned that the unequal access to higher education is not a problem solely in the United States, but also in countries such as Germany, France, Italy, and Spain (p. 485). 169 Ibid., 21 170 Ibid., 21 171 Jathan Sadowski, “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction,” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1, (2019): 2.

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Human capital theory  207 Mincer, Jacob. “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution.” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 4 (1958): 281–302. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1827422 Moghtader, Bruce. “Human Capital and Education of Desires after Michel Foucault.” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4 (2017): 35–52. Nicholson, Joseph S. “The Living Capital of the United Kingdom.” The Economic Journal 1, no.1 (1891): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/2955843. Couldry Nick and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2019. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pinar, William F. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Pinar, William F. Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstance, Intellectual Histories. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2012. Pinar, William F. What is Curriculum Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pinar, William F. “Plagiarism and the ‘Tyler rationale’.” Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum 9, no. 2 (2013): 1–13. https:// doi.org/10.14288/jaaacs.v9i2.187724. Pinar, William F. International Handbook of Curriculum Studies. New York: Routledge, 2014. Posner, Richard A. “Conglomerate Mergers and Antitrust Policy: An Introduction.” St. John's Law Review, 44 (1969): 529–32. https://chicagounbound. uchicago.edu/journal_articles/1901/. Posner, Richard A. “Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory.” The Journal of Legal Studies 8, no. 1 (1979): 103–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/724048. Posner, Richard A. The Economics of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Posner, Richard A. “Value and Consequences: An Introduction to Economic Analysis of Law.” Chicago Working Papers in Law and Economics 53 (1998):1–13. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics. Rutherford, Malcolm. The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Sadowski, Jathan. “When Data is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction.” Big Data & Society (2019): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549. Schultz, Theodore. Origins of Increasing Returns. Cambridge: Blackwell Publisher, 1993. Schultz, Theodore W. The Economic Organization of Agriculture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. Schultz, Theodore W. “Investment in Man: An Economist’s view.” Social Service Review 33, no. 2 (1959): 109–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30016430.

208  Human capital theory Schultz, Theodore W. “Capital Formation by Education.” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83. www.jstor.org/stable/1829945. Schultz, Theodore W. The Economic Value of Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Schultz, Theodore W. “Investment in Entrepreneurial Ability.” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 82, no. 4 (1980): 437–48. doi:10.2307/3439676. Sechrest, Larry J. “Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Critics.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 271–97. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41560284. Sigot, Nathalie. “Jevons’s Debt to Bentham: Mathematical Economy, Morals and Psychology.” The Manchester School 70, no. 2 (2002): 262–78. https://ssrn.com/ abstract=309314. Simon, Herbert A. “A Behavioral model of Rational Choice.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 69, no. 1 (1955): 99–118. Simon, Herbert A. Models of Bounded Rationality: Volume 1, Economic Analysis and Public Policy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982. Simon, Herbert A. Reason in Human Affairs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. Simon, Herbert A. “The Function of the Executive Revisited.” (1986). July 30, 2019 http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file& item=38869. Simon, Herbert A. “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning.” Organization Science 2, no. 1 (1991): 125–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634943. Simon, Herbert A., Donald W. Smithburg and Victor A. Thompson Public Administration. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. Skinner, Burrhus F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: McMillan, 1953/2005. Skinner, Burrhus F. “Freedom and the Control of Men.” The American Scholar 25, no. 1 (1956): 47–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208055 Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Smart, William. “Translator’s Preface.” In Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory, edited by William Smart, v–xx. New York: Brentano’s, 1922. Smith, Daniel L. “Behaviourism and Logical Positivism: A Revised Account of the Alliance.” PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1983. https://scholars.unh. edu/dissertation/1396 Solow, Robert M. “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–20. Spring, Joel. Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations, Skills-Based Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2015. Stark, Werner. “Introduction.” In Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1, edited by Werner Stark, 12–78. London: Routledge, 2004. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315017013. Thaler, Richard H., Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz. “Choice Architecture.” The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy 25, (2013): 428–39. http://dx.doi. org/10.2139/ssrn.2536504

Human capital theory  209 Thorndike, Edward L. Animal Intelligence. New York, The Macmillan company, 1911. Tyler, Ralph W. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Walsh, John R. “Capital Concept Applied to Man.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 49, no. 2 (1935): 255–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884067. Williams, Talcott. “Competition as a Safeguard to National Welfare.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 42 (1912): 74–82. Zahn, Friedrich. “Economic Value of Man—Is It an Object of Statistics?” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, no. 4 (1934): 427–31. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40383978.

6 Understanding the present

In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener argued “that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it.”1 He pointed out communication between machine and human and between machine and machine escalates the problem of control in human learning and labour: “If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control.”2 According to Hiems, Wiener’s analysis considered “the sources of learning” to expose the “inhuman use of human beings” through “manipulative control of communication.”3 As a pioneer of the field of cybernetics, Wiener cautioned that economic prospects drive public and private institutions to adopt communication technologies “irrespective” of their “long-time damage” to individual and society.4 He was concerned about the impairments of an economic system with increased emphasis on informational activities. Both Gary Becker and Herbert Simon relied on information theory and technological development, in a complementary and contradictory manner to treat humans as economic goods.5 For Becker, information was a means to increase economic outputs since it directed investment decisions. The focus of information production in human capital theory is on making people learn themselves as certain beings. In this respect, human capital theory erodes the distinction between education and other conventional investment. According to Becker, human capital theory allows for combining “the physical and psychological factors associated with learning theory” with technologies that can transform and utilize these factors to increase economic outputs.6 On the other hand, Simon explained that “what information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”7 Like any poverty, tracing the accumulation of wealth helps finding who profits from humanity’s poverty of attention. The economic emphasis on functions, optimization, and efficiency has increased investment in ICT DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-7

Understanding the present  211 and normalized the role of for-profit corporations in public education.8 This chapter contextualizes the role of human capital theory in globalization and digitalization. It concludes by offering possible reconsiderations. 6.1 Education reform and data politics As early as 1907, the “desire to buy the new technological and commodified leisure products” was thought to “spur people to work harder.”9 Theories of consumption, as indicated in previous chapters, were forward looking. From the time of Quesnay, an emphasis on production, consumption, and expenditure conceptualized freedom and voluntary action in economic terms. During the 20th century, economic approaches to organization of society encouraged the state to act as both a contractor and a partner for business. By the 1930s, public intellectuals were becoming concerned about the impact of this transition on individuals and society. For example, John Dewey had warned that, “business is conducted upon the basis of ruthless competition for private gains.”10 Dewey cautioned against reliance on business mentalities in social, economic, political, and international affairs. He was wary of the personhood business mentalities engender: “The self is not a mere means to producing consequences because the consequences, when of a moral kind, enter into the formation of the self and the self enters into them.”11 The self, as long as it was to remain moral, could not be reduced to an instrument for certain ends—production of economic outputs. A society subservient to the economy not only neglects personal morality it negates social solidarity. Dewey’s concerns came before Callahan’s study of the business elites and their support for standardized measures of performance, thereby restructuring schools during the first decades of the 20th century. Businessmen relied on scientific, mechanical, and organizational concepts to subordinate educational questions to business considerations.12 Callahan’s research was followed by other studies that examined the historical transitions of schools to benefit the businesses. This was due to new tendencies in economic theory that combined “the myth of educational decline” of the Cold War era with complementary “myth” that “the so-called business people are capable of solving a variety of problems from the management of publicly funded hospitals to deciding the appropriation curriculum for the different levels of schooling.”13 By the 1990s, such myths, promoted in the United State, proliferated in Canada, England, and Australia; reducing the role of public education to training workers and universities as service providers of the marketplace.14 The political force of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher strengthened the Anglo-American global influence and fused national concerns with economic policies to control educational institutions, as producers of human capital.

212  Understanding the present The transference of business mentality and audit culture into education established practices in collecting data from teachers and students and normalized widespread surveillance. In Teaching by Numbers, Peter Taubman explains that discourses of standards and accountabilities facilitated the national transformation of public education in the United States. “It is impossible to separate the transformation that has occurred in education from the economic policies,”15 Taubman stressed. While economic policies conceived education within markets and imagined schools within the realm of business world, quality insurance strategies targeted human development: Policies “informed by corporate agendas and the language and practices of the marketplace” were translated “seamlessly into the language of learning objectives, information processing, metacognition, and performance outcomes, which were forged in a nexus of military personnel, psychologists, and computer scientists and programmers.”16 One impact of this transformation was to reduce learning to accessing information, thinking to “problem solving,” and reducing education to training “intellectual capital.”17 These transformations further contributed to the conception of humans as “decontextualized social identities or data.”18 The decontextualization of human life had begun by conceiving an economic value on each person. Deeming humans as information processors permeated the information economy and reliance on the World Wide Web. The digital economy grew on infrastructural logics of industrialization and colonization. The dominance of the English-speaking world in monopolizing information production was already underway before the verdict of human capital took hold of globalization as Americanization. For example, Theodore Schultz had set directions for the future proponents of human capital theory as he defended the investment logic to remedy the problems of the “poor countries.”19 Schultz failed to recognize the rich countries had robbed now poor countries, for nearly five centuries of colonization, exploitation, and genocide. The economic conceptualization of labour, education, and life itself hardly eased fears of communism nor did it enabled the administration of justice and reparation. Schultz’ emphasis on the role of global markets did not solely promote capitalism, it also suggested the creation of a multi-tiered government in which the financial sector would play a key role in directing investment. The Global South would then adhere to the obligations that would secure predictability for investors. This new logic of so-called investment in humans meant to align the “poor nations” with Americans’ values and markets.20 The preoccupation with accumulation of human wealth had, then, both national and international implications. Human capital theory was explained as an avenue to develop and to change other nations. It helped those nations to emulate the United States’ economic model. The supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization of Economic Co-operation and

Understanding the present  213 Development (OECD) serve as engines of information production that universalize human capital approaches and promote marketization of education across national borders. At the turn of the 21st century “human capital theory remains a powerful political influence,” Williamson observed, producing “‘flexible specialists’ who can adapt to fluctuations and changes in market demands.”21 Today’s markets make only demands. Even facts and content are jeopardized where “market demands” direct investment and divestment on humans. Equipped with technological surveillance, markets’ demands for self-sacrifice show no mercy towards the precariat.22 As flexible learning continues to be associated with flexible labour, Jane Marcet’s lessons in Conversations remain to be instructive that those who control and produce capital occupy separate socio-political realms than those who put themselves to work as a form of capital. And thus, the logics of human capital theory have done little to decentralize the locus of control applied on human life since industrialization. Two centuries after Marcet, the financial investment on educational technology enables elites to profit from both selling commodities (software and hardware) to education institutions and appropriating the data they gather from human capital as digital assets to expand their scope of power. On the one hand, monitoring platforms are changing the role of teachers by misconceiving computational facilitation of behavioural feedback to students as teaching and transforming pedagogical relationships to nudges. On the other hand, policy entrepreneurs that keep governments focused on economic rewards of education aim to influence decision-making by prioritizing certain expertise to alter the future of schooling across national borders. Williamson understands that the “two main expert groups … controlling the agenda for the curriculum of the future” are “psychologists and computer scientists.”23 Ignoring teachers signifies an escalation of brainwashing and control exerted by the business-state partnership. By the second half of the 20th century, “politicians and policymakers” claimed “education is a business” and “singled out” the teaching profession as “accountable” for social and economic reality.24 Today, not only teachers but politicians and policymakers—even the state—are disposable. “The state is no longer the central source of authority”; new authorities in education adhere to human capital religion and invest in the making of the “cyborg identity” of learners.25 There is a shift in power from the state-business partnership to the stateless trans-continental corporations with no or little legal and political obligations to protect people. Cyborg identities offer a prospect of an “‘eroding distinction’ between public and private, production and reproduction, work and leisure in a technological world.”26 The hybridization “of humans with information technologies” provides further economic justification of “psychic as well as behavioral” manipulations.27

214  Understanding the present Cyborgs are economic entities: producers and products of an age in which human activities and aptitudes are processed by devices and transported by cloud technologies. New capabilities in time-space compression efforted by digitization and datafication has revised the exercise of colonial powers on a geographical territory to continuous and seamless value extractions in transforming life to data and data to capital. Scaling technological innovations in education often come with corporate interests, lacking sufficient attention to history, locality of knowledge and diversity of experience. Presently corporate interest and venture philanthropy unite market logics and social responsibility by investments that expand the influence of tech elites over teaching and learning to better control the future of education.28 The existential threat of big tech is sensed by their “craving monopoly” and “concentration of power” in expanding their “networks” to “escape competition.”29 The discourse of probable future progress remains relevant to technological monopolies steering human transgression to the labyrinth of animals and machines so that algorithms govern human capital, from the womb to the coffin. Human capital conventions systematically positioned human life at the mercy of a totalizing digital culture in which every click, gaze, and word uttered or written is integrated within cybernetic networks that construct and automate constraints and possibilities. What else could the final aims of increasing efficiency by the measures of technological progress be other than to decode humans for more predictable economic outcomes? By securing comfort, ease, delivery, and convenience, technocracy gets a hold of civilization. The current indicators convey that the future of education should be trusted to the technological infrastructure that are designed to maximize predictability and profit and upgrade human capital verdicts by seamless commercialization of the flesh. This future is actively sought by a group of investors, policymakers, and administrators, misguiding parents and teachers that the public and private interests are mutually compatible. With little understanding of history, technocrats and social engineers misconceive technological progress as social progress. While the gap between feudalism and industrialization had been shortened by experimental logics of the libertarians and bureaucrats, who looked after security and happiness of people, transnational corporations and entrepreneurs are appropriating science and technology for the brave new world of digitalization. In this respect, surveillance has become both the cause and conditions of a new order that monitors, computes, and categorizes human capital. Harcourt points out that the logic for digital monitoring of schoolchildren and employees cannot be reduced to sole aims of security and maximizing welfare. Digital technologies are in the process of restructuring selfhood, installing the “feeling that one has no

Understanding the present  215 control over oneself.”30 In this regard, endless affirmation of connectivity is the admission of submissions to quantification processes. The argument that if “we do not have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear” is promoted by the mechanisms of digital exposure that are “radically transforming our subjectivity,” demanding the “moral transformation” of values that protect social spaces, personal privacy and intimate lives.31 From the discourses of utility, efficiency, and welfare of economists to the self-mortifying conception of human capital, freedom is restrained by the apparatus of computing machines and their mathematical models to manage human capital. 6.2 Datafication and de-localization At the end of the 20th century, Gary Becker acknowledged that his works and those by “Schultz and others on human capital are extensively used in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. Even before the recent reforms, economists, and planners there had no trouble with the concept of investing capital in people”.32 The popularity of the concept cuts the ideological divide between capitalism and communism. As a framework to approach human development, human capital theory diminishes ethical and political considerations by giving primacy to predestined outcomes. This benefited nations and individuals with capital, and proactive in knowledge production about economic means and ends. What would be the significance of human capital to the digital economy monopolized by a handful of corporations experimenting with artificial intelligence and algorithms that alter decisionmaking and mediate relations? It legitimizes applications of political and economic imperialism by hardwiring how humans know themselves as individuals and groups and what they believe to be true. Competition for controlling resources, including human resources, has positioned some nation states as a primary beneficiary of technological innovation. Today, the technological race between the United States, China, and Russia continues to subject people, constitutions, and traditions by information and misinformation. Anthony Smith observed: The threat to independence in the late twentieth century from the new electronics could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that de-colonization and the growth of supra-nationalism were not the termination of imperial relationship but merely the extending of a geo-political web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a ‘receiving’ culture than any previous manifestation of Western technology.33

216  Understanding the present Edward Said added that the effective “unopposed expansion of various forms of cultural control that emanated from the United States has created a new mechanism of incorporation and dependence” by which “handful of American trans-national corporations” not only control and manufacture information but also fracture national policies and commodify and dispossess people.34 Globalization of the 20th century developed on the bases of “American exceptionalism,” indicating that the United States is at once a model for other nations and different from other nations.35 Spring documents that human capital policies supported the global expansion of the United States’ technological corporations by the way of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum: It “resulted in a scenario of the Bank loaning money to developing countries that, in turn, use the money to buy educational technology from global firms.”36 Increasing purchases of education technology and advancing trade went hand in hand with building economic dependencies and communicating new objectives for local governance. The emphasis on trade encouraged consumerism on an international scale and promoted the Anglo-American model of marketized schooling through economic interventions in the Global South. New technological networks, spread globally from 1960 to 2000, were powered by assertions that the distribution of information would democratize the world. Democracy is “jeopardized,” Mosco cautioned, “by a world in which key economic, political, social and cultural dimensions” are “dominated by a global network of firms.”37 The firms at stake are cyber technology corporations that influence how individuals and societies conduct themselves. The romanticized power of technology to democratize the world has faded. Technological devices are used to disrupt social, economic, and political processes by allowing interest groups to meddle with democratic processes and providing elites with new means to increase their influence over society.38 In this context, datafication supplements the goals of transforming life into capital when recoding human development for economic development. Human capital practices are united with technological capabilities to embed certain universalized priorities that reduce chance and limit choices by assigning competencies to human development. In emphasizing a set of human capital competencies, OECD policies neglect cross-national diversity and classify the “world-cultures” based on Euro-American percepts.39 Such policies driven by scientific categorization often homogenize treatment of human life. Rappleye observes that globalization awakened “cross-national transfer” of policies and practices that challenged “state’s exclusive role in education” and advanced “generalizability and adaptability of concepts” across national and international organizations.40 This is evident in OECD’s emphasis on human capital production in standard

Understanding the present  217 assessments generated by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA produces cross-national rankings that often contribute to the national rhetoric of educating citizens. For example, Takayama and Apple explain that the measures and metrics of PISA helped transport the politics of “educational reform” of the United States to Japan and enabled “Japanese conservatives” to legitimize their own “reform” through the combination of “nationalistic and quasi-market interventions.”41 The practice of ranking and ordering countries by PISA projects certain Western values, upheld by science and control, in a global scale. They transmit Anglo-American values, such as competitiveness and entrepreneurship, to students and introduce marketization and multi-tier governance to education institutions. The marketization of education has also downstream effects towards the techniques of datafication and incorporation of information systems to automate the production of human capital. In this context, technological corporations play an ever-increasing role in determining the values and metrics adopted in national and international education policies.42 The instruments and methods of data extractions reduce complexities in human development to information. They wage a mass internalization of possessive individualism in their desires for improving personalized learning, producing self-regulated learners, and optimizing economic outputs. For example, most recently, the global standard tests of OECD are turning to “techniques, metric and instruments to measure” social-emotional learning.43 The digital techniques in capturing “intimate data of students’ social-emotional personal qualities might then be shaped in ways that fit politically and economically preferable forms of emotional conduct” and utilized “for purposes of evaluation and accountability.”44 The intrusion of the private realm of self is explained by the policy entrepreneurs on the bases of increasing economic opportunities. The use of socio-emotional learning measurement has created an infrastructure for psychologists and economists to aid the technological frontiers in educational governance across the OECD countries. The standardized frameworks of socioemotional learning are repackaged within “changing accounts of human capital which emphasizes the ‘noncognitive’ aspect of valuable skills.”45 According to Williamson, while psychologists translate human q ­ ualities “into psychometric data,” economists explain these quantitative measures as having “potential economic value (human capital)” and conceive data as the source for “nudging” and “control.”46 Gary Becker needed a theory in order to approach human development in economic terms. “If enough data are available, no theory is needed. The possibility of enlisting Big Data to discern the masses’ patterns of behaviour heralds the beginning of digital psychopolitics.”47 Big Data activates a power that acts on human consciousness through audio-visual capabilities (e.g., cameras,

218  Understanding the present microphones, and sensors). Such capabilities come from investment in technologies instead of human wellbeing. Han explains that the new technologies extend Bentham’s panopticon surveillance from behaviours and movements to thoughts and emotions: “psychpower is more efficient” and subtler “than biopower insofar as it watches over, controls, and influences human beings not from outside but from inside.”48 Psychpower mediates the relationship to oneself and seeks predictability in processes. It builds dependencies on technologies that both help and hinder selfmanagement. Digital surveillance normalized at work, school, and homes camouflages control through ongoing connectivity while it promotes selfdisclosure and self-exploitation. In Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Benjamin provides various examples of the continuation of unequal treatments brought by algorithms and codes, often undisclosed to the users. Benjamin observes educational institutions are becoming increasingly subject to “vague and unsubstantiated claims about efficacy of design thinking”49 by technology corporations and administrators. However, “many tech insiders choose a more judicious approach to tech [by] … opting to send their children to schools in which devices are banned or introduced slowly, in favor of ‘pencil, paper, blackboards and craft material.’”50 Benjamin points out that, “the latest products” are sold with “a concern that all students deserve access—yet the more privileged refuse it.”51 Those who can “afford the luxury of opting out” are concerned with “tech addiction” and worry about the lack of “data privacy, because access goes both ways with apps and websites that track users’ information.”52 The elites’ concern about the privacy of their children is a concern about protecting and preserving their families. A study of over 60 “cross-sectional, longitudinal and empirical studies” found that “smartphone and social media use contributes to mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among youth.”53 The medical experts, Abi-Jaoude, Naylor, and Pignatiello, advocate for an active role of classroom teachers and find the campaigns of public awareness necessary. If by any stretch, the proponents of human capital were advocates of health would they have something to say about protecting wellbeing and agency of those they deemed as capital? As the 19th century elites relied on “propaganda” to institute taxation for public education in the “interests of both public and private welfare,”54 the 21st century elites are on a mission to privatize public schools by discourses of access and flexibility in advocacies for personalized learning. Roberts-Mahoney and colleagues show that while personalized learning technologies advance corporate school reforms, they fail to “render, or even recognize education as an individual private good,” and there is “zero scientific evidence that personalized learning systems enhance educational efficacy.”55 However, widespread adoption of learning technologies enable

Understanding the present  219 efficient management of human capital to achieve predetermined socioeconomic outcomes.56 Technological systems aim at reducing costs and increasing speed. They do so by eliminating human work and transferring responsibility to algorithms. The logics of access, speed, and usefulness of technological devices not only secure profit for certain economic elites in the global north but they also supplement the logics of empire by homogenizing schooling with little recognition of place and history, increase digitization of society by translating human life into bits of information, and undermine human agency/decision-making by transforming human interactions into input and output data. 6.3 Reconsidering If education was to be “a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits,” John Dewey recognized that, it “would then become an instrument of perpetuating… the existing industrial order of society.”57 The emphasis on the technical skills and the competencies of human capital theory of education has perpetuated the industrial order. Dewey hoped for a democratic society in which every person shall be occupied in something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible—which breaks down the barriers of distance between them.58 Writing in 1916, Dewey was concerned that “intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes both the employing and the employed class. While the latter often have no concern with their occupation beyond the money returns it brings, the former’s outlook may be confined to profit and power.”59 Had Dewey anticipated the prospect of money returns becoming an avenue for social engineering, he would have elaborated on his critique of market democracy. Today, both pragmatism and behavioural sciences emanate Western perspectives and suppress the possibilities of alternative worlds to market democracy. However, understanding and separating pragmatism from the current movement of behavioural politics proves central to deciphering their applications in the glocal governmentality of education institutions and re-evaluating the economic approaches to human development. Writing a century after Dewey, Martha Nussbaum observes that the overemphasis on technical skills and factual knowledge for the sake of economic growth has neglected personal and social values such as sympathy, thoughtfulness, and imagination. Investment in technical skills increased national economic growth. However, “producing economic growth

220  Understanding the present does not mean producing democracy. Nor does it mean producing a healthy, engaged, educated population in which opportunities for a good life are available to all social classes.”60 Democracy is hospitable to diversity, humility, and vulnerability. Its ethical and political values for education are irreducible to producing human capital. Nussbaum reports that “the economic growth culture has a fondness for standardized test, and an impatience with pedagogy and content that are not easily assessed in this way.”61 The result is a neglect of humanities and liberal arts. Standardization, when applied to human life, erodes recognition of diversity and also justice. By acknowledging the role of place and history in international economic development, Nussbaum elucidates that the “rules of global competition are in many ways advantageous to the richer nations, as are the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”62 She indicates applying a single set of values to all the world’s people is a form of imperialism that benefits the economically and technologically advanced nations. Nussbaum draws from Amartya Sen, who has conceptualized the “capability approach,”63 a normative ethical framework to consider human wellbeing outside of commercial forces. Sen has repositioned commodification of human development by considering those elements that are intrinsically valuable as well as by considering plurality in economic and social functions.64 From the capability approach, Sen gives primacy to “the well-being and freedom of people; their indirect role through influencing economic production; and their indirect role through influencing social change.”65 According Nussbaum, the capability approach recognizes “a theory of what human nature is” takes on “evaluative and ethical form”; and so among the many things that human beings might develop is the capacity to do things while they live in a “just society” that nurtures them.66 Sen suggests that human life should not be valued and governed based on a set of preconceived unnegotiated economic outputs (e.g., to be developed as a form of capital). “The question of the valuation of the output can be quite complex and much would depend on from whose point of view the valuation is made.”67 The capability approach attends to the processes of value creation. In this respect, it allows for local and small-scale government, non-government, and self-organized community groups to contribute to policy decisions. It also encourages “quite diverse specifications and empirical and theoretical applications”68 in the design and evaluation of policies. Instead of developing and utilizing humans as sources of national and corporate profit, capability approach starts with recognition of the diversity among people and proceeds with attention to conditions of life. It prioritizes preservation of people, place, and history as social and economic contributors. Capabilities, as considerations, may offer an avenue to

Understanding the present  221 revise the outdated value system made by the economic measures of colonial, imperial, and slave societies. According to Nussbaum, acceptance of a set of capabilities also harnesses recognition of the “relationship between education and human dignity.”69 One of the capabilities Nussbaum mentioned is “control over one’s environment,” having equal rights to “govern” and “reason” in the political-material realm.70 Such a consideration calls for imposing limitations on hierarchical and technological control systems that overrule the right to privacy by conjuring up the right to use human data for public and private profit. In this context, critical digital literacy is a curricular necessity often overlooked in today’s education. Both engaging young people in conversations about growing dependencies to platforms that treat humans as economic resources and examining misconceived economic notions that have served as imperatives to extracting information (data) in order to predict, modify, and direct behaviours contribute to education that cultivates agency, freedom, and wellbeing. Sen has shown the reliance on “engineering” in the 20th century has “shift[ed] the directional focus of ethical reasoning” and “that the nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished by the distance that has grown between economics and ethics.”71 He notes that adopting utility as a stand-alone economic value has legitimized treating “rights” as “entirely instrumental to achieving goods or particular utilities.”72 Sen has also challenged the narrowly defined notion of selfhood described by behavioural economists, emphasizing that studying behaviours are not matters of facts but expressions of normative judgements, embedded in history and place. He has addressed the shortfalls of modern-day utilitarianism, contractualism, and welfarism and its impact on individuals and groups.73 He advocates for “the need for improving the standard informational accounts of states of affairs.”74 Information management and production must give primacy to agency, freedom, and wellbeing. Instead, the monopolistic power of international corporations (such as Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) over the information economy contributes to existing economic and political inequities.75 The global reach of big tech into education and healthcare indicates their desire for power over life. It is worthy to remember that the conventions of a free capitalistic society are not compatible with the monopolistic practices of transnational and global corporations. Particularly, in relation to data ownership and data sovereignty, the big tech operations of data collection and information management challenge the elemental right to oneself and selfgovernment. Even Hayek was worried about monopolies over information management, worrying that such monopolies represent instruments of totalitarian control wherein “people’s loyalty to the system become the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed.”76 Hayek added that such a monopolized control

222  Understanding the present leads to a situation in which even the pretence of the “search for truth is abandoned and that the authorities decide what doctrines ought to be taught and published.”77 Hayek indicated that the centralization of information processing powers leads to the deconstruction of the liberal ideals of privacy and right to oneself and nurtures the rise of authoritarianism. Currently, the discourses of technological optimization, social innovation, and economic maximization are obfuscating the ethical and political questions that once preoccupied economists. 6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital Sen suggests that “the self-examination induced by the Socratic question, ‘How should one live?’” may once again reawaken ethics,78 and thereby ease engineering efforts of rewriting human nature. Subsuming human capital theory within Socratic questioning may enable a “change in perspective that allows for a reconceptualization of one’s self [and ones’ practice], under a given regime.”79 After his lectures on human capital theory and American neoliberalism, Foucault too turned to Socrates in search of an ethical framework. Socrates, who cared for the young and old, treating people from Athens and outside as friends, contested the convention of caring for mind and body as only vessels to obtaining power and wealth.80 Socrates’ attention to the question, what makes a good life? can awaken recognition of ethics in education. Socrates’ philosophical truth-telling about ethos in the form of parrhesia, reconstructed by Foucault’s call for truth-living can inform educational theories and practices that foster human development.81 “The vivifying quality of teaching-as-truth dwelling (as it may be called) gets blocked if teaching is understood primarily as an act of implementation, with the curriculum as a settled commodity,” David Smith appreciates, adding that “personal truth is not a commodifiable thing that can be applied through diligent training….”82 Teaching-as-truth is no cultivation of the mind to produce yet more useful knowledge by means of which entrepreneurs can enrich themselves at the expense of others. Truth dwelling may encourage practices (such as studying, meditating, walking, and drawing) that support attention to diverse ways of being and knowing ourselves as moral subjects. In his turn to ethics, Foucault offers an examination of truth as he attends to present history. “History plays an essential role in the constitution of the object, where the objects are people and the ways in which they behave.”83 Foucault’s deliberation on formalization, normalization, and dominance of ways of being and knowing ourselves as certain subjects concerns practices of freedom. In considering the axes of knowledge, power, and ethics, he asks three interconnected questions: “How are we

Understanding the present  223 constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?”84 Foucault’s attention to the relation between being (historical ontology) and knowing (epistemes) assists in the problematization of economic approaches to personhood. One might apply this critical lens to the capability approach. For example, an increase in societal capacities through institutional justice may not result in “increased agency equally for everyone,” Sugarman explains, “advances in capabilities may benefit some social groups, but constrain others.”85 Considering human capital theory and commercialization of human life, Foucault’s problematization of the present can also enable evaluating power-knowledge relations and transforming ourselves as ethical subjects, through self-care and self-examination. In the context of the global hegemony of Anglo-American approach to education, Carusi also finds Foucault’s contribution relevant to working towards “non-instrumental” approaches to education policies.86 In considering globalization and digitalization, Foucault’s scholarship is potent to: 1) disassemble interventions aimed at the entire social body by information production and 2) address the lack of distinction between words, things, and beings in policies and practices. His work has awakened realizations that scientific theories (and metaphors) are not neutral vehicles of understanding. They arise in a historical context and have ethical, political, and economic dimensions. In the case of human capital theory, we are left with a narrative that has altered institutions and constitutions across the globe, informing how we must develop humans to live in a marketized and privatized world. It has distracted attention from developing both culturally sustainable education and alternative economic systems. What would education look like if it was concerned with humanity and the world that sustains humanity? Instead of social engineering of human capital to produce economic outputs by schooling, education institutions would attend to human development and social ethics. Education can include a set of activities that include “care of the self, of others, of the community and of the environment.”87 Here innovation in education can begin by examining the hardwiring values of competitive individualism, attending to homogenizing schemes of neoliberal economics, and reconsidering the ongoing commercialization of children and adults through technological infrastructures. Education informed by history, philosophy, and geography and integrated by arts (theatre, painting, dance, and music) may affirm our humanity across borders, genders, and ethnicities. Education in liberal arts has personal, ethical, and economic consequences as it can strengthen our moral, spiritual, and social dimensions.88 This is particularly important in cultures where some (caught in plagiarizing and buying university admission) are genuinely puzzled why education is not another

224  Understanding the present consumer option like any other object. In nations where students’ debt and precarious employment are growing, some are realizing education is not necessarily for profit making and that seeing it so only furthers the distance between social beings. In societies preoccupied by economic returns, it may be more cost-saving to educate persons in the liberal arts rather than entrusting humanity to self-maximizing actors behind artificial intelligence and automation. As mental health issues intensify in countries where economic growth, competition, and militarism have taken centre stage, unmediated face-to-face conversations may support efforts at self-knowledge and recognition of our socio-emotional lives. Authentic and mindful conversations as a practice that requires empathy, play, love, and deliberation strengthens characters and societies—as do meditation, study, and reflection on how to care for beings (and things). What could be an educated person? “An educated person, first and foremost, understands that one’s ways of knowing, thinking, and doing flow from who one is,” not “an island unto oneself, but is a being-in-relationwith-others, and hence is, at core an ethical being.”89 Ted Aoki recognized, being educated is more than “possessing knowledge and acquiring intellectual or practical skills,” but being and becoming concerned with “thoughtful living with others.”90 These are the thoughts of a teacher attentive to the relationships that sustain humanity, including relationships with the rest of the living world. Human capital approaches to education advance commercialization of all relationships, even the relationship to oneself. This is not without cost. The cost of schooling children as an implicated form of capital is their agency and freedom. Embracing possibilities to live as human beings requires educational opportunities so that the next generations will be able to deliberate on the kind of life they want to lead. 6.5 Transgression The 21st century schooling has become a system of creating human capital. While the 19th century schooling conflated political and economic responsibilities, it hardly suggested that individuals be schooled as flexible enterprises who adapt to market demands. Such a transformation relied on pseudoscience and bureaucracy to think of human lives as economic resources and schooling as a means for generating economic outputs; it was supported by investments in information production that conflated private and public interest. As educational institutions are asked to engineer human capital, technological corporations’ exploitation of the interdependence of all things becomes the Internet of things. Norbert Wiener recognized that practices and policies prescribed by computer programs further their penetration of human affairs. These “machines on which we depend are themselves a source of communication and control and in

Understanding the present  225 practice are in some respects not subject to human interferences.”91 Writing during the Cold War, Wiener noted the enemy was not Russians. “To Wiener the primary enemy was … the inhuman use of human beings, and for him this included exploitation, imposition of rigidity, and absence of feedback and honest two-way communication in the social organization.”92 Half a century after Wiener, Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician by training, observed that algorithms now micromanage social institutions. In the case of schools, O’Neil noted, the “value-added” logics of “efficiency” and “optimization” of algorithms “have different payoffs. For the school district, the payoff is a kind of political currency, a sense that problems are being fixed. But for businesses it’s just the standard currency: Money.”93 This distinction is erased when schools are run as businesses, organized on technological platforms so that children become flexible for the use of libertarians eager to put them to work. O’Neil recognized that “software is doing its job. The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for truth.”94 Algorithms facilitate control of information and money. They do not incorporate transparency and their calculations are not without costs: Privacy, liberty, and health is “increasingly a luxury that only the wealthy can afford.”95 As markets influence human development, it becomes difficult to estimate the impact of digitization, digitalization, and datafication of education. Over time, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether we are raising and caring for children or producing cyborgs who have internalized labels, classifications, and categories as truths about who they are. The 20th century brought humans back to the problem of the ancient Greeks and their rejection of treating humans as apolitical animals and slaves. In their limited conception of democracy, Greeks recognized that selfhood is intricately associated with the modalities of educating citizens.96 For the Greeks, only slaves had to renounce their liberty in order to socially and economically self-maximize. The slaves were deemed quasirational agents who entrusted their work and welfare to external control. They were told by their masters to be concerned that their children learn to become economic instruments. Are we detached from slave, serf, and colonial societies as we live by proxies that track and classify our behaviours, shape, and control our beliefs, capture, and record our desires? “By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by the means of electric [digital] media,” Marshall McLuhan knew, “we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hand and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls—all such extensions of our bodies, including cities—will be translated into information system.”97 The new technologies as extension of the human nervous system and bodily powers—in the Aristotelian sense the slave was an extension of the master’s body—have delivered civilization to the age of information capitalism in which few can afford to live as an ends to themselves.

226  Understanding the present Digital technologies have advanced translating one kind of knowledge into another to the point that they have built infrastructures and systems over socio-spatial processes. Financial investment on educational technology and knowledge production about the prospects of technological development has distracted policymakers and administrators from the long-term consequences of automation and the ways in which technological mediums change and govern social beings. Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, was clear about the social, personal, and economic impact of automation and digitization monopolized in the hands of corporate elites: Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labour. Any labour which competes with slave labour must accept the economic condition of slave labour.98 The discourses of competitive individualism and developing humans as economic resources have camouflaged the emergence of economic condition of slave labour. Education could help. It is by education that we are able to reassess the fictions we are told about ourselves and the world. In an age of communication and control, examining the truth about human life, what we know to be true of ourselves and why, has personal and moral currencies. Notes 1 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor books, 1954), 16. “Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust it, and make our adjustment felt upon it” (p. 17) 2 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: MIT Press, 1961), 39. 3 Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), 303. 4 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 161. 5 Whether the person acts to optimize or satisfy certain ends, both Becker and Simon admit that the informational inputs impact public and private investment decisions. 6 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 47. 7 Herbert Simon cited in Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Thread of Big Tech (Penguin Press: New York, 2017), 88. 8 See: Alexander Koch, Julia Nafziger and Helena Nielsen, “Behavioral Economics of Education,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 115 (2015): 3–17; Emiliano, Grimaldi, and Stephen J. Ball. “The blended learner: Digitalisation and regulated freedom-neoliberalism in the classroom.” Journal of Education Policy 36, no. 3 (2021): 393–416.

Understanding the present  227 9 Joel Spring, Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital Mind (New York: Routledge, 2012), 159–60. Consumerism as an economic doctrine developed in the early 20th century in the United States in part out of a fear that technological advances would reduce work time. Fear of workers having too much leisure time was rooted in a Protestant Christian belief that “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” The argument for an economic system driven by consumption was made in a 1907 book by economist Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization. (p. 159) 10 John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Self (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 118. 11 Ibid., 148. 12 Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 244–46. 13 Peter P. Grimmett, “Reconceptualizing Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers for Revitalized Schools,” in Changing Times in Teacher Education Restructuring or Reconceptualising? ed. Marvin F. Wideen and Peter P. Grimmett (New York: Routledge, 2005), 206. 14 Peter P. Grimmett. “The Governance of Canadian Teacher Education: A Macro-political Perspective,” Counterpoints 334 (2009): 22–32. 15 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers; Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge, 2010), 96. 16 Ibid., 170. 17 Ibid., 169. 18 Peter M. Taubman, “William Pinar’s Contribution to Our Understanding of Sex, Gender and curriculum,” in The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, ed. Mary Aswell Doll (New York: Routledge, 2017), 154. 19 Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s View,” 113. 20 Ibid., 113. 21 Ben Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum: School Knowledge in the Digital Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 48. 22 Wendy Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no. 1 (2016): 3–14. 23 Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum, 65. 24 William F. Pinar, The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service (New York: Routledge, 2009), 46. 25 Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum, 122–23. 26 William F. Pinar, What Is Curriculum Theory (New York: Routledge, 2004), 148. Pinar offered a cautionary note that: “In today’s politics of public miseducation, the computer becomes the latest technological fantasy of educational utopia…” (p. 8). 27 William F. Pinar, Education Experience as Lived Knowledge, History Alterity: The Selected Works of Williams F. Pinar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 90–91. 28 Stephen J. Ball, Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori, Edu. net: Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2017). 29 Franklin Foer, World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2017), 12. 30 Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 219.

228  Understanding the present 31 Ibid., 232–33. International information processing companies, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, rely on “neoliberal governmentality” to secure corporate profit. For example, “Facebook assumes and promotes the idea of the entrepreneurial self, so closely tied to Chicago School Theories of Human capital,” while it “hides the profit motive associated with all the advertising and highlights the open-market features of sociability” (Harcourt, 2015, p. 99). 32 Becker, Human Capital, 3rd ed., 16–17. 33 Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information cited in Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 292. 34 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 292. 35 Martin S. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996). 36 Joel Spring, Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations, Skill-based Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2015), 120. 37 Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 60. 38 Ronald Deibert, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2020). 39 Keita Takayama, Arathi Sriprakash and Raewyn Connell, “Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education,” Comparative Education Review 61, no. 1 (2018): 5. 40 Jeremy Rappleye, “Theorizing Educational Transfer: Toward a Conceptual Map of the Context of Cross-National Attraction,” Research in Comparative and International Education 1, no. 3 (2006): 227. 41 Keita Takayama and Michael Apple, “The Cultural Politics of Borrowing,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 29, no. 3 (2008): 289–301. 42 Taylor P. Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson, “Policy Scientificity 3.0: Theory and Policy Analysis In-and-for this World and Other-worlds,” Critical Studies in Education 56, no. 1 (2015): 161–74. Stephen J. Ball, Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori, Edu. Net Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility (London: Routledge, 2017). 43 Ben Williamson, “Intimate Data Infrastructure,” in Comparative Methodology in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks. World Yearbook of Education, ed. Radhika Gorur, Sam Sellar and Gita Steiner-Khamsi (London: Routledge, 2019), 69. 44 Ibid., 69–70. 45 Ben Williamson, “Psychodata: Disassembling the Psychological, Economic, and Statistical Infrastructure of ‘Social-emotional Learning’,” Journal of Education Policy 36, no. 1 (2021): 145. 46 Ibid., 135. 47 Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 78. 48 Ibid., 80. 49 Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 177. The technological innovations support existing complex social differentiation and ordering that sustain inequality in race, gender and age, legitimized by utilities and value functions that look after capital. 50 Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 16. 52 Ibid., 16.

Understanding the present  229 53 Elia Abi-Jaoude, Karline Treurnicht Naylor and Antonio Pignatiello, “Smartphones, Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 192, no. 6, (2020): 136. Reviewing 60 empirical studies, the authors acknowledged “there is a dose–response [media consumption] relationship, and the effects appear to be greatest among girls” (p. 136). 54 Ellwood P. Cubberley, A Brief History of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). In England the conception of “education as a private and voluntary and religious affair” was “deeply ingrained” but reworked by the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (pp. 347–348). In the case of the United States, “School societies and Educational Associations, organized by propaganda had already established” before people demanded “the free education of their children as a natural right” (pp. 365–366). 55 Heather Roberts-Mahoney, Alexander J. Means and Mark J. Garrison, “Netflixing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the Corporatization of K-12 Education,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 4 (2016): 417. 56 Svetlana M. Murzina, Sergey V. Revunov, Elena N. Lavrinenko, Roman V. Revunov and Anton D. Murzin, “Education Digitalization as a Factor in Human Capital Asset’s Development: Modern Challenges and Development Prospects,” in Innovative Trends in International Business and Sustainable Management. Approaches to Global Sustainability, Markets, and Governance, ed. E. I. Lazareva, A. D. Murzin, B. A. Rivza and V. N. Ostrovskaya (Singapore: Springer, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4005-7_35. 57 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (New York: Free Press, 1916/1997), 316. 58 Ibid., 316. 59 Ibid., 317. 60 Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15. 61 Ibid., 48. 62 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 116. 63 Sen, Amartya. 1980. “Equality of What?” in S. M. McMurrin (ed.) Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reprinted in Sen 1982, pp. 353–69. Capability approach began as an alternative approach to utilitarian equality, total utility equality, and Rawlsian equality. One of its central premises is to recognise the diversity among people and so define some capabilities as universal and others as culturally (locally) specific. 64 Amartya K. Sen, “Well-being, Capability and Public Policy,” Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, Nuova Serie 53, no. 7/9 (1994): 333–47. Here, the “opportunity to choose” is not governed by “instrumental” procedures for certain preconceived welfare or for the sole aim to increase economic output. 65 Amartya K. Sen, “Human Capital and Human Capability,” World Development 25, no. 12 (1997): 1959–961. 66 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 28. 67 Amartya K. Sen, Employment, Technology and Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975/1999), 7. 68 Ingrid Robeyns, “An Unworkable Idea or a Promising Alternative? Sen's Capability Approach Re-examined,” CES discussion paper 00.30 (Katholleke Universiteit, Leuven, November 28, 2000), 28.

230  Understanding the present 9 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 75. 6 70 Ibid., 34. 71 Amartya K. Sen, On Ethics and Economics (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987): 7. Although Sen acknowledged the engineering elements are also evident in Aristotle and Smith, they inform understanding “the importance of rules of conduct” (p. 78). Sen found their considerations of ethics still relevant to economic reasons. 72 Ibid., 49. Sen notes that “the ‘engineering’ aspect of economics has tended to go hand in hand with sticking to a very narrow view of ethics,” namely choice theories and utilitarian philosophies (p. 50). 73 Amartya K. Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002); Amartya K. Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Sen asked for correction to utilitarianism that simplifies human choices and behaviours and translate them into numeric utilities, contractualism that continues to set no limits to private wealth accumulation at the expense of the societal rights, and welfarism that lacks attention to agency and freedom and serves as a means for libertarian paternalists to control choices. 74 Amartya K. Sen, “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4 (1985): 184. 75 Joel Spring, Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace and The Digital Mind. New York: Routledge, 2012); Elena Aydarova, “Shadow Elite of Teacher Education Reforms: Intermediary Organizations’ Construction of Accountability Regimes,” Educational Policy 36, no. 5 (2022): 1188–221. 76 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell (London: Routledge 2014), 176. 77 Ibid., 176. 78 Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 2. 79 Andrew Dilts, “From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neo-liberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,” Foucault Studies 12, (2011): 145. 80 Plato, “Apology,” in Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002). “Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good … individually and collectively” (p. 34). 81 James P. Burns, Power, Curriculum and Embodiment: Re-thinking Curriculum as Counter-conduct and Counter-politics ( New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018); Stephen J. Ball, “A Horizon of Freedom: Using Foucault to Think Differently about Education and Learning,” Power and Education 11, no. 2 (2019): 132–44; Bruce Moghtader, Foucault and Education Ethics (London: Palgrave, 2016). 82 David G. Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006), 27/31. The ancient Greeks understood well the slippery character of truth when they assigned it a word with a double and contradictory meaning. Aletheia indicates both ‘unconcealment’ and ‘concealment.’ Just when I think I have discovered something to be true, unconcealed, revealed at last, for all time, something with which to secure myself into the future, suddenly it slips away into concealment, confusion, into the cloud of unknowing. (p. 29) 83 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002), 49.

Understanding the present  231 84 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 49. 85 Jeff Sugarman, “Historical Ontology,” in The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, ed. Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman and Kathleen L. Slaney (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 168. Sugarman was considering the role of psychology in education. His evaluation also applies to the discourse of economics. 86 Tony F. Carusi, “The Ontological Rhetorics of Education Policy: A Non-instrumental Theory,” Journal of Education Policy 36, no. 2: (2019): 232–52. 87 Jordi Collet-Sabé and Stephen J. Ball, “Beyond School. The Challenge of Coproducing and Commoning a Different Episteme for Education,” Journal of Education Policy (2022): 13. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2022.2157890 88 Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 120–30. An “education that gets both students and teachers more passionately involved in thinking and imagining reduces costs by reducing the anomie and time wasting that typically accompany a lack of personal investment” (p. 120). Nussbaum added: “Teaching of the sort I recommend needs small classes, or at least sections, where students discuss ideas with one another, get copious feedback on frequent writing assignments, and have lots of time to discuss their work with instructions” (p. 125). 89 Ted T. Aoki, “Inspiring the Curriculum,” in Curriculum in a New Key: Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, ed. William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (New York, Routledge, 1990/2004), 365. 90 Ibid., 365. 91 Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 310. 92 Ibid., 310–11. In Wiener’s words: If the rules for victory in a war game do not correspond to what we actually wish for our country, it is more than likely that such a machine may produce a policy which would win a nominal victory on points at the cost of every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival. (p. 310) 93 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2017), 12. 94 Ibid, 12. Mathematical models govern public and private decisions. 95 Ibid, 170. 96 Plato, “Alcibiades I,” In Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892); Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). In their masculinized ethics of liberty, Greeks rejected treating other free men as slaves, women, children, and animals. 97 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 57. 98 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 162.

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Index

Aboriginal peoples 71–2, 89 Aoki, Ted 224 Aquinas, Thomas 49–54 Aristotle 26–8, 49–50 artificial life 90, 92–6, 115; body 145; intelligence 94, 215, 224 automaton 93–4, 98, 109–110 Becker, Gary S. 2, 5, 153, 170, 181, 184–190, 192–4, 210, 215 behaviorism 153–5, 187–9 Bentham, Jeremy 133, 169, 171, 188–9; education 149–153; society 145–9 Benthamite 138–9, 143 Bacon, Francis 58, 63, 96–100 Bacon, Roger 95 big data 217 big tech 214, 221 body politic 50, 71, 99, 102, 109, 113, 132, 142 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen 171–3, 175 Capability approach 220–1, 223 capital 89, 171, 174–7 capitalism 28, 44, 47, 74, 127, 138, 144, 148, 169, 171–3, 212 China 135–6, 215 Christianity 29–31, 48, 61, 92, 95, 97; and capitalism 144 colonization 4, 61, 71–3, 89, 134, 191, 212 colonial 73, 101, 110, 138 Cold War 2, 4, 170, 173, 181, 188, 211, 225 Communism 2, 212, 215

Curriculum 12, 14, 154, 182, 211, 213, 222 Cyrus 5, 16–20, 23–6, 32 cybernetics 210, 226 cyborgs 213–4, 225 Daedalus 92, 96, 99 Dante, Alighieri 53–4 Darwinism 127, 174 democracy 13, 127, 184, 188, 194, 216, 220; Athenian 15, 22–3, 225; modern 128, 133, 135, 147, 175 Dewey, John 133, 147, 211, 219 digitization 214, 219, 225–6; economy 212, 215 datafication 214, 215–7 economic imperialism 30, 72, 215; individualism 66, 100–2, 137, 173, 190; inequality 128, 133, 180, 194; liberalism 135; value of person 1, 100–1, 141, 145, 150, 177 economics as science 27, 102, 139, 143, 173, 175, 177, 180; discipline 44, 105, 130, 144, 189, 193; in education 177 education ethics 221–3 empire 3, 9, 13, 14, 31, 68, 45; American 181, 215; British 145, 174, 181; Persian 5, 16; Roman 29, 30, 45, 53, 72 empiricism 58, 99 Finley, Mosses 25, 28 Foucault, Michel 1, 3, 4, 25, 26, 29, 222–3

Index  237 Friedman, Milton 3, 68, 178–181, 185, 189, 192–3 Franciscans 55–6 genealogy 2–3 Gerson, Jean 58–60 globalization 4–5, 72, 211–2, 216, 223 Hacking, Ian 5, 99 Herodotus 15–6, 18, 23 Hayek, Fredrich 173–4, 221 Hume, David 107–9, 111 Indigenous 133–4, 191 industrial schools 101–2, 147 industrialization 129, 212, 213 information 11, 68, 69, 99, 149, 153, 170, 180, 188–190, 192, 210, 212, 215–7; information communication technology 3, 184; data 221 Innis, Harold 3 laissez-faire 127, 133, 138–9, 143, 153, 169, 174, 179 liberalism 72, 127, 135, 174 Locke, John 63–73 Machiavelli, Niccolo 17, 32, 60–1, 132 Malthus, Thomas R. 140–1, 191 Mandeville, Bernard 104–6 market 127, 130, 134, 135–140; liberty 142–4 Marx, Karl 171–2 neoliberalism 1, 62, 153, 222 Noddings, Nel 73, 185 Nussbaum, Martha 219–22 Ockham 54–9 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 4, 222 Petty, William 1, 99–103, 175, 183 Pinar, William F. 6, 12, 192 Plato 20, 21, 22, 32 political economy 44, 73, 100, 110–2

policy 99, 109, 127, 134, 170, 213, 220; economic 1, 180; education 2, 103, 170, 217, 223; makers 137, 150 progress economic 105, 110, 112, 128, 141; industrial 66, 137, 168; scientific 48, 91, 97–9, 109; social 133–4, 137, 140, 142, 144; technological 127, 170, 194, 214 psychology 90, 127, 154, 180, 189 psychpower 218 Quesnay, François 135–7, 142, 211 Ricardo, David 140–3 right natural 49, 51–6, 63; political 28, 29, 172; property 59; theory 58, 73, 109, 169, 173 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 128–133 Schultz, Theodore 2, 3, 181–3, 185, 192–3, 212, 215 Sen, Amartya 220–2 Skinner, B. F. 187, 188 Simon, Herbert 189–192, 210 Smith, Adam 66, 111–4, 128, 133, 134, 137, 139, 142, 178 slavery 28–3, 72, 93, 171, 177; natural law 51, 67; modern 69, 138, 183 social capital 171–2 Socrates 17, 19–24, 25, 27, 32, 222 statistical 99, 177–8, 180, 186 surveillance 4, 25, 26, 31, 131, 148, 149, 212; technological 213–4; panopticon 145, 149, 218 technological platforms 31, 184, 213, 221, 224 Thorndike, Edward 153, 187 truth 2–3, 10, 21–3, 51, 89, 108, 222, 225–6 Tully, James 67, 71, 72 utilitarianism 130, 139–141, 146, 150–4, 169, 188–9 Winer, Norbert 210, 224–6 Xenophon 16–20, 24, 26, 28, 32