The Game of Justice : A Theory of Individual Self-Government [1 ed.] 9780791480236, 9780791470558

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The

Game of

Justice A Theory of Individual Self-Government

R U T H

L A N E

THE GAME OF JUST ICE

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The Game of Justice A Theory of Individual Self-Government

Ruth Lane

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2007 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production by Michael Haggett Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lane, Ruth The game of justice : a theory of individual self-government / Ruth Lane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-7914-7055-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Justice. 2. Democracy. I. Title jc578.l36 2007 320.01'1-dc22 2006016536

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CONTENTS

Preface

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Prologue:

Politics, Democracy, and the Game of Justice

1

Chapter 1: Pitkin’s Dilemma: The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science 19 Chapter 2: Political Society: A Blind Spot in the Liberal Field of Vision 41 Chapter 3: Standing Aloof from the State: Thoreau on Self-Government 61 Chapter 4: Wittgenstein’s Games: The Philosophy and Practice of Justice 81 Chapter 5: Foucault’s Justice: Agent-Centered Theory and the Game Position 103 Chapter 6: Rousseau on Self-Government: The Late Individualist Model of the Promeneur Solitaire 123 Epilogue:

Politics, Strategy, and the Game of Justice

Notes

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References 187 Index

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Preface

Typically I do not write prefaces, feeling that a book should explain itself without outside help, but The Game of Justice has had a sufficiently irregular provenance that a brief introductory comment may be in order. The book centers on three themes, which are not so much controversial in themselves as they are unexplored. First, I have separated the political from the state, so that politics is not restricted to the citizen’s relationship to the national government, but occurs over the breakfast coffee, in the office corridors, everywhere one individual person relates to another. These interactions are political because they allocate human values, and the allocation is authoritative—for good or for ill—for the person involved. Second, I have brought game theory to bear on this micropolitical world. Game theory as I use it here has two aspects: social science and social philosophy. Both originated in ordinary technical game theory but have escaped that narrow origin to provide an expanded framework for considering the human political condition in all its complexity. The game of justice defines the micropolitical world in two ways. On the one hand, every individual interaction between everyday people is seen as allocating values, implicitly and silently, for themselves and others who may resemble or emulate them. Justice is being decided whether the participants notice this or not. On the other hand, the game of justice designation suggests to participants in the quotidian political processes that they might wish to revise some of their behavior in light of the game concept. Institutions may seem solid and immovable, but are sustained only by human actions, and in a game new actions can be devised to assert and reassert claims to just treatment. As this makes plain, these games of justice are open to new strategies that transform them. It is Wittgenstein most prominently who suggests that these open existential games have philosophical quality in that, as we define them, we define ourselves. But social scientists have a role, too, in explicating just how the grassroots interactions work. The book’s third theme is the idea of individual self-government. To some this seems paradoxical. Can the individual as an individual be political and thus an appropriate site for self-government? In fact, such a perspective, affirming vii

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the necessity of individual self-government, entails a new dignity for the political person. Rather than being restricted to a narrow range of civic duties directed toward the state—voting, paying taxes, and so on—the individual takes on a fully developed range of political experience. Within that wide band of daily activity where no federal or local law reaches, the individual assumes the right and responsibility of self-government, able and willing to define personal values and goals, accepting the norms of political maturity that this allows. Such self-governed individuals are able to participate creatively in the game of justice. Self-government is a particularly American value, bringing to a new concentration that individualism which has been our contribution to the exploration of human political possibilities. The democratic state has shown some of the marks of human self-government, but leaves more to be accomplished. Individual self-government, in the context of the themes of micropolitics and the game of justice, is a new step in this political inquiry. The game of justice has debts in many fields of inquiry. I have been a student of game theory since graduate student days when I first encountered that formative generation of thinkers who brought modern analytic rigor to the study of politics: Anthony Downs, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and especially Thomas Schelling. I have relied also on a newer empirical approach, agent-centered modeling or self-organization theory, with which as a computer programmer I had a long experience before it became stylish, and without which I would never have proposed the questions that launched the inquiry, nor could I have found any resolution to the problems the questions created. In all this my debt to Wittgenstein is large and documented in the text, but the debt is equally large to Nietzsche, less fully documented here but pervasive nonetheless. Classic political theory is another important debt, especially the work of Rousseau, with whom the inquiry began, since I have never quite recovered from the Second Discourse; also important is American political theory, in the work of Thoreau, where a theory of individual self-government had been more fully defined than even my New England upbringing could have predicted. Then of course there were the Europeans, Foucault and Bourdieu and others, who seemed to share my interest in the overlap between political theory and social science, and the straight political scientists, such as Migdal, who built substantive theories of self-organization in all countries at all levels of political experience. The book is therefore political theory, political science, social science, and social philosophy. I hope I have not entirely failed to make a coherent whole out of these parts, in an attempt to provide a response to the oldest of all political questions. Two of the chapters have appeared in different forms in Perspectives on Politics, and the Review of Politics. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to use them here.

Prologue Politics, Democracy, and the Game of Justice Watermelon, Marching Bands, and Fireworks Democracy means many contradictory things to many different people, and most definitions of democracy are unsatisfactory because their high level of abstraction fails to capture the ambiguities of the democratic experience. Sometimes a metaphor is more effective. Picture one of the Independence Day celebrations that have traditionally marked the Fourth of July in communities of all sizes in the United States. For generations, the Fourth has been a major summer holiday, marked by community and individual festivities, colorful parades, marching bands, flags flying, flowers blooming, speeches by local officials and visiting politicians, feasts of watermelon and ice cream, and finally the long anticipated fireworks display in the evening, spectacular and beautiful against the night sky, but too short; the performance never lasts long enough thoroughly to satisfy the enthusiastic audience. And after the fireworks die down, the revelers go happily home to bed, waking the next morning to find that life has returned to its normal everyday routine. The storekeeper shortchanges his customers, the parade marshal is indicted on drug distribution charges, the mayor leaves town taking the road funds with him, the marching band and the volunteer firefighters have a disagreement so severe that the police must be called, the high school students stage a sit-down strike against the principal’s new grading policy, the bank president resigns from the zoning board charging corruption and cronyism, the school valedictorian is found painting graffiti of questionable taste on the fence around the ballfield, and, in general, people must change back into their working clothes and take care of life’s daily challenges.1 1

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This colorful picture makes an austere point: democracy, like such political celebrations, can be something of a disappointment after the initial euphoria is over. The fireworks are fun, but, on the morning after, democracy turns out to be not so much a glorious solution to the political problems of human organization as a very preliminary beginning. The real work remains to be done. The inauguration of new democracies is good and is gratifying, as is the flourishing of old democracies, but both represent only partial steps along the road toward self-government. The real challenge begins on July Fifth, the day after the celebrations. The problem is more than just the frictions and irregularities to which all human associations are prone. Even when democracy is the official constitution of a society, there remains in place a silent government that represents old hierarchies, old status systems, old exploitations, old favoritisms, old illusions, and old power relations. This silent government remains sufficiently effective that it permeates all the apparently democratic institutions on which so many people place their hopes. The mayor, who ran off with the road funds, would, for instance, never have been elected in a truly fair election based on candidate merits; in fact, he was a known scoundrel, elected only because he was from the town’s traditional elite class, while his opponent was from an ethnic group that had not traditionally been considered worthy of public office. The marching band, involved in the postfestivity fracas, had been formed as a direct challenge to the Volunteer Fire Company several years earlier when the firefighters were shown to have used their central position in town affairs for personal enrichment. The zoning board members had a record of granting appeals from code regulations when their friends and relatives were involved, but denying comparable appeals from town newcomers. The valedictorian’s disaffection occurred when the school guidance counselor told him that despite his intellectual talents he should not aspire to attend college but should find a manual trade more appropriate to his social group. One might go on to ask which customers the storekeeper shortchanged, and so on, but enough has been said to make the point.2 July Fifth is not just normal human irregularity but a manifestation of the implicit value structures found in every known human group, whether that group is a society, a community, a state, or even the local bowling league. These value structures are not ‘democratic’ in any idealistic sense, but are political; they define a value structure that ensures that some members of the group get most of what they want, given gladly, while other members of the group get very little of what they want and it is given grudgingly. This is the phenomenon I call political society, the micropolitical foundation of all states and nations, a foundation that serves to allocate the rights and the duties of the members to different kinds of persons. Political society exists in all societies of course, not just in democracies; but it is most

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troublesome for democratic societies—and for democratic theorists—because it is often inconsistent with the professed and constitutional norms characteristic of democratic governments. It is a frequent boast of democracies, for instance, that any man, however humble his background or low his station, can hope to become president; we teach this to our sons, and our daughters get the implicit point. Once upon a time, when members of privileged social groups were given silent, ‘private’ preference in school admissions, in employment opportunities, in promotions and economic advantages, such preferences seemed ‘natural’ and went unchallenged. Later, when ‘public’ programs were instituted to give opportunities to other, nonprivileged groups, such preferential treatment was sharply challenged and was seen as unacceptable and unconstitutional. It all depends, as folk wisdom has it, on whose ox is being gored. Or, in more formal terms, it depends on the exact shape of the silent value system I call political society, and whether the speaker benefits from, or suffers from, that value allocation. My purpose here is not to quarrel with these manifestations of political society but to study the idea of political society with some theoretical care, and to attempt to bring it within the purview of political science and political philosophy as an element of the democratic experience to which it is, in the twentyfirst century, now appropriate to turn.3 My analysis of political society takes place within the context of traditional democratic theory: I assume the basic institutions of democratic government, that, as Downs (1957: 23–24) so concisely put it, leaders are chosen by popular election between at least two parties, elections are periodic, all adults vote, each adult gets one vote, that the majority wins, that the losers never try to prevent winners from taking office, and that the winners do not use their victory to destroy the losers. I assume also as the context for my discussion that a variety of liberal democratic provisions are in place to protect the disabled, the unemployed, and the needy; and that a legal structure is in place to deal with the usual crimes.4 Within this conventional democratic structure I go on to argue, however, that there is a great deal of political space that is untouched by the state, yet still deserves recognition for its political qualities and the political opportunities and challenges it presents. This ubiquity of politics is the starting point because it brings politics directly in contact with the individual woman and man, rather than restricting it to a far-off, official state. In everyday action and in interaction with others, individual behavior defines political society and the values that are distributed there. This is the arena in which the game of justice is played, where individual persons consciously or unconsciously negotiate with one another over their status in the society. To take effective part in this strategic game, individuals need their wits about them, need what I call individual self-government. Individual self-government is based on a full, personal understanding of the self, as well as a strong understanding of other people and

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the social world in which everyone lives. The game of justice includes several levels of analysis, from the practical to the existential; from questions of classical philosophical inquiry, to social scientific techniques of sociology and political economy, to practices on various types of playing field. What the term “game” provides for political scientists and citizens as well is a radical opening of all established institutions. In a game perspective, the status quo is neither absolute nor inevitable, but is the result of past political controversy, a result created by the winners to express and consolidate their victory. But winners and losers change places over time, which serves as encouragement to past losers and a cautionary reminder to past winners. Traditional rights lose the patina of legitimacy, as do traditional wrongs. The gaming field is open to talent.5

Who Governs Whom, When, How? Modern political theory has traditionally centered on the state, its sources, its premises, its principles, its legitimacy, and its justification. But in recent years a vibrant and creative dialogue among political theorists has turned into something of a standoff, where no one is gaining ground, no one is giving ground, and no one is breaking new ground. The debates among liberals, communitarians, classical rationalists, genealogists, and libertarians over the condition of the liberal democratic state have converged toward a conclusion that the state and the self are inextricably related. Like it or not, political society and the political system mold their inhabitants; that the opposing schools agree on the central role of the state may be just the factor that makes the debate so intractable. If the state is the causal force theorists assume it to be, then any amelioration of the modern condition—toward community, rationality, aesthetic liberation, freedom, or justice—must be accomplished by the state. This possibility seems so unlikely that the debates have come to seem chimerical. The problem is that the liberal democratic state, long viewed as the culmination of Western, and perhaps universal, political development, has ceased to satisfy observers.6 Classical rationalists claim the state undermines human values and human capacities, communitarians charge that the liberal state has deprived its members of the close human relations essential to human development, genealogists argue the state disciplines and distorts its subjects, and liberals are left with the residual argument, which is by that point obviously true, that in the face of such dissensus, the liberal pluralist state is the best we can expect. Dead-end paths can be creative if they provoke people to leave well-tried solutions and break into more open and perhaps uncharted country. Observation of recent activity in a number of intellectual domains suggests that some

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such process may be under way. Especially relevant to the present argument is the impact of late modern and postmodern criticism of the metaphysical bases on which political science and political theory have historically based themselves.7 While few thinkers have accepted an absolute relativism in respect to the traditional truths of democratic liberal governments, most theorists have come, if reluctantly, to accept the difficulty of defending any absolute claims in respect to individual or group rights and liberties, the norms of contract and representation, or the justifications of state sovereignty. In this more contentious world, where rules are less clear and expectations are less secure, the division between political science and political theory is fast fading. What should be, in political systems, is increasingly influenced by what is.8 Political theory is thus being transmuted into political science; political science, with a new responsibility to explain human behavior beyond the state, is open to all of the social sciences and to questions hitherto considered normative. If individual women and men are to flourish in an everyday world permeated by politics, political science increases in both extent and content. Self-government at the state level becomes only a starting point, and theoretical interest shifts to the ways and means by which a greater self-government, individual selfgovernment, is achieved. Modern liberal democracies cannot be expected to ‘correct’ their course in accord with the hopes of their critics. Modern societies continue in the direction they have already established, where the miracles of modern technology are counterbalanced by the evils of crime, drugs, consumerism, media triviality, and social irresponsibility. If the modern state has any ameliorative power here, it has failed to manifest it. If the state cannot be depended on to improve the modern condition, some new direction in political thinking is needed. This new direction will not include burning bridges or abolishing the fruits of the political past, nor will it discard the liberal democratic politics to which we have all become accustomed. Where there are felt interests to be defended and reconciled, modern democracies work passably well. But if state-centered politics is not the problem, neither is it the solution. Those who seek higher meanings of freedom, community, or justice in the operation of state-centered politics are doomed to a long and fruitless search. Neither will those who seek amelioration of social inequity find solutions in the state. To put the matter baldly, the liberal state is not the problem. It does not burn churches, it does not establish glass ceilings, it does not mandate social discrimination and violence.9 People of various kinds in modern liberal societies do face serious threats, but these are not of the state’s making; they are created within and by political society, the grassroots everyday interactions that form the invisible basis of human institutions. Political theory needs to address these issues with both philosophy and political science.10

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My argument is that an approach to these kinds of issues can be found in the notion of individual, personal self-government, and in the participation of such self-governed individuals in the complex social process I call the game of justice. If the citizens of modern democracies are to achieve results worthy of their resources in time, wealth, education, and purpose, they will stop focusing on the state and look elsewhere. ‘Civil society’ is not the solution because, despite the pious hopes of its advocates, civil society is often uncivil.11 Solutions will instead look to the modern individual and the personal political games in which such individuals take part. Such individuals need to be defined in a different way, not as self-indulgent paradigms of democratic whim but as self-governing individuals, placed within existing legal and constitutional structures but looking beyond them for fulfillment. The model to be investigated here begins with micropolitics, which surrounds individuals on all sides, among their friends, family, teachers, and associates. In this political society, values are allocated by an invisible interactive process, most effectively defined as a game that is both existential, in Wittgenstein’s sense, and practical, in standard game theoretic terms. Effective participation in such a daily political environment is achieved only by individuals who are themselves self-governed; in other words, the center of the political experience is not the state but real persons. Individual self-government is distinguished from other contemporary norms, such as authenticity or autonomy, by its deeply political nature. Self-government for individuals, as for states, involves the active protection of borders and a close attention to matters of domestic order. It is an ongoing exercise in the construction of justice. My purpose is to extend the idea of self-government from states and societies to individual women and men. Such an extension would suggest that individual or personal self-government is the next stage in political development. It will occur when liberal democratic states have freed their citizens from tyranny and want, and left them the political space in which to investigate this particular type of individual value. Self-government in respect to groups, societies, or nations is of course an ancient ideal, but it has always contained considerable ambiguity in reference to the central issue of just how, in practical terms, any group can actually govern itself.12 Should decisions be made by representative leaders, by group consensus, by majority vote? Do any of these methods of self-government provide legitimacy sufficient to compensate for the opportunities they offer—opportunities for some members to take advantage of other members, through the manipulation and coercion of the weak by the strong, or the domination of the tractable by the stubborn? Only perhaps at the level of the individual person does self-government achieve clarity of definition and coherence of purpose because only in the individual case is the political system reduced to its most basic elements and brought under individual control.

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Self-Government in Political Society The picture I would like to sketch includes the following elements. • The concept of self-government is a familiar and justly valued aim in politics, and deserves to be given a wider usage in political discourse now that in many industrialized societies its principles have been largely satisfied in various forms of constitutional government. The idea of individual self-government, moving to a more personal level of government, provides this wider scope and suggests new directions of analysis. • The concept of individual self-government builds on trends already more than evident in most advanced societies, trends based on denigration of states and governments and the associated idea that the more local government is, the better it is. • The problems of society in modern liberal democracies are not state problems and the state cannot be asked to solve them. Blaming the state is impractical and fruitless because states have neither the will nor the power to meet such challenges. • Political systems are not simply the sum of state, citizen, and (sometimes) ‘civil’ society; they include also ‘political’ society where individuals work out through personal interactions with one another what are to be the basic principles of the system. • These implicit, negotiated principles include silent categorizations of different types of people. Some types of persons are accorded most of the rights in society, others are assigned most of the social duties; some individuals are defined as those worthy of admiration, others are worthy of scorn; some types are given opportunities, others constraints; some people are to be trusted, others are not worthy of trust. • These categorizations do not, as is sometimes claimed, reflect ‘natural’ categories, nor are they the result of merit and performance. The categorizations are political, created by the winners in the ongoing interactive negotiation called the game of justice, and politics can be played with high principles or low blows. Either may win, depending on the luck of the game. This imposes on the individual player both a discipline and an opportunity. • Modern societies are beset by ills often attributed to individualism. Rather than attempting to change individualism into some wholly different belief structure, the idea of self-government accepts the modern trend and builds on it. The focus of this analysis is on individual politics, the game of justice played by women and men in the micropolitical society in which we all live our daily lives. It is an arena where political theory and political science meet.

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The Original Position The basic argument of political theories going back to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke has been the premise of free men entering society only as a result of freely given consent to the terms of a more or less explicit social contract. From this it often followed that citizens had, from the very beginning of their association, rights against the state, claims that could not be denied if the state were to continue to call itself legitimate. Of course no one meant these states of nature to be historical facts; they were ‘as if ’ models designed to gather one’s thoughts and direct them along certain paths. The current problem is that, even allowing the liberal model great poetic license, the model has become implausible. Everything modern social science has discovered about human behavior—and political theory cannot entirely ignore the basic research of the social sciences—flies in the face of such an idealization. People are born embedded in, and at the mercy of, society. Even their goals are learned (e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1967). Political theory needs therefore to reconsider its premises. One approach to such a reconsideration would be to begin with inherently social beings and ask what becomes of them in the course of their own and others’ political development. Political theory thus takes on a whiff of realpolitik, covering the ways in which individual women and men strategically and tactically may find freedom in confrontation with other individuals and institutions that seek to deny them that freedom. In such a discussion, government and politics (in both the highest and the lowest sense) play a central role. Traditional philosophers, nontraditional political theorists, contemporary deconstructionists, and political commentators find place in the inquiry, from Nietzsche to Garfinkel, from Rousseau to von Neumann and Morgenstern. The inquiry casts a new light on what may be going on behind the veil of ignorance.13 Self-government at the individual level is much easier to handle than selfgovernment at the group or whole-society level. At the individual level of selfgovernment there is one decision-maker legislating for one (and the same) person.14 This reformulation not only simplifies many of the old problems, it also directs theorists toward new questions, such as the criteria by which we judge government as an actual condition. At the state level, government is considered adequate if it is orderly, legal, and provides for the feasible expressed wants of the governed. Indeed government is often considered adequate if it maintains itself in power, with the observer applying no criteria at all, beyond the bald fact of a state’s existence. By bringing the question of government to the individual level, much sterner questions can be raised about what it means to govern or to be well-governed. What general criteria should be employed in assessing government? Is good government the same as democracy? What would self-government entail for individual women and men? What circumstances

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hinder self-government? Does the state hinder individuals? Or do individuals perhaps hinder themselves from self-government? A balanced evaluation of the major players in the discussion surrounding liberalism (Digeser 1995) emphasizes several areas of agreement between the contending schools. Communitarians, rationalists, and genealogists all tend to agree, Digeser argues, in their “willingness to judge the quality of political and cultural life, at least in part, by their effect upon our identities,” in their perception of selves as “deeply political,” with an “internal politics” reflecting preferences about external politics, and in their belief that political and social organizations are responsible for counteracting the negative effects of present regimes (Digeser 1995: 59–60). Despite these areas of agreement, however, rationalists, communitarians, and genealogists speak different languages and valorize contrasting models of human experience. By their strong disagreements, the various contending schools give support to the basic liberal argument that social and political agreement is impossible in the modern world and that, because of this diversity, contractual pluralism is the only workable solution for modern societies.15 The liberal democratic argument has always been based on the social contract model which, although it may lead the theorists in many different directions, as with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or Kant, nonetheless implies and perhaps cannot be supported without the existence of individual consent to the contract (Kukathas and Pettit 1990). Vigorous challenge to this assumption of individuals’ consenting freely to membership in social and political groups has been mounted by Alford (1994), who argues that the ‘state of nature’ is an inaccurate model of society. The classic theorists, according to this approach, had their argument exactly backward: The political problem is not “to socialize autonomous individuals” but “to help group members individuate themselves . . . so that they may come to live freely and critically” (Alford 1994: 7). This argument suggests that the state of nature may more closely resemble William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies (1954) than the pure and abstract original position. The story describes what happens when a group of hitherto “well-brought-up” boys find themselves marooned on an uninhabited island. The resulting events are neither Hobbes’s war of all against all, nor Locke’s industrious mixing of labor with land under the natural law, nor Rousseau’s General Will where perfect unity is created through complete self-sacrifice. Instead, the basic picture Golding draws in The Lord of the Flies is of people caught in a situation and in a group over which they have had no choice and in respect to which they have little control. The interesting element of the novel is the precise particular way in which the inherent structural dynamics work out in actual practice. First, one of the older boys slips into a leadership position, supported in his role by the smartest member of the group who is, however, because of physical

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weakness, the butt of the group’s scorn. These two leaders ‘rationally’ decide that the primary task must be to keep a fire going so that some ship will see it and rescue them. As they struggle with this task, which is hard, boring work, a challenger to the leaders emerges and lures away the smaller boys, who think it much better fun to paint their faces with clay and conduct war parties hunting wild pigs than to do the heavy work necessary to maintain the signal fire. The new leader also makes war on any who do not voluntarily join him. By the close of the narrative, the former choirboys have killed three of their members, one by accident, one during a savage orgy, another in calculated cold blood. They have also set fire to the entire island, and this disaster threatens all their lives (until the smoke finally attracts a naval vessel, whose officers restore order).16 The story gives color to theory such as Alford’s and corresponds with recent theory in comparative politics (Migdal 1988) that emphasizes that the basic political—indeed human—problem is to protect oneself and one’s interests in the teeth of threatening social and physical conditions. The lost boys on their uninhabited island could not choose their fate or the attributes that forced them into certain relations with others in the group. The young deferred to the elder, the slow-thinking leader needed a smart advisor, who, however, faced group hostility that he could not, given his physical appearance, escape; the work needed for survival created discontent and a niche for a new leader; keeping one’s group happy required enemies, and so on. Events quickly progressed to murder and conflagration. Even readers with knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ rationalistic interpretation of an innocent state of nature cannot escape the lesson of The Lord of the Flies, that life and politics are inextricable and they may take a severe toll on unprepared individuals.

Defining Self-Government Critics of liberal democracy often make the error of prescribing remedies that fly in the face of obvious facts. If everything in the liberal democratic economy and culture has led to the ever-increasing individualization of the citizen, then the role of theory seems to be defined as ‘talking people around’ until they reform themselves and adopt whatever principles the theorist himself prefers. Charles Taylor (1992) has spoken against this patronizing strategy, arguing rather that one should study what is actually happening and try to find the logic of it. The culture of narcissism, he contends, is not simply self-centered or self-indulgent but an (albeit flawed) attempt at “ethical aspiration.” The ideal that makes “self-fulfillment the major value in life” and that denies “moral demands or serious commitments to others” is an “ideal that is not fully comprehended, and which properly understood would challenge” many of its own

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practices (Taylor 1992: 55–56). Yet there is no ‘trend’ in this modern debate, he concludes, only the possibility that social theory can enter into the current culture and try to show the true meaning of its animating ideal (79). The popular ideals of agency, autonomy, authenticity, and autarchy, for all their intuitive appeal, are extremely difficult to defend. As Digeser (1995) sympathetically shows, the wise are not necessarily just or moral, the self united with the community is not necessarily realized, autonomy is not necessarily the most satisfying way to run a life, and an ideal of authenticity is difficult to maintain in a deconstructionist world where inherent meanings are absent— what is one authentic to, when there are no essences?17 The threat of solipsism that dogs authenticity need not, however, be wholly destructive; its selfreferential nature need not mean that the substance is narrowly personal, but may include a political cause, stewardship of the environment, or anything “that stands beyond” the merely personal (Taylor 1992: 82). The concept of individual self-government works in this direction. Modern practice has debased the idea of government by using it to refer to the powers that be, regardless of their excellence, justice, or values. In thinking about individual self-government, therefore, it is useful to return to the ancient metaphor of government: the pilot of a ship. She does not pilot the ship well, does not govern it, if it runs aground and sinks, if it fails to take in sail and capsizes in a storm, or if it makes port at the wrong destination. Government in this metaphor meant to govern well, and it is used here in that sense. The self is only governed if it is well-governed. A preliminary definition of selfgovernment might be the following: Individual self-government entails the construction of a personal value and goal structure answering the specific needs, resources, and desires of the individual person; the defense of these goals against invaders; the basing of social relations on a respect for the selfgovernment of those with whom one disagrees; and on a respect for, and an affection for, those with whom one agrees. This individual self-government does not replace public forms of government but supplements them from within. Self-government occurs within the usual existing democratic structures, toward which one displays vigilance but not interest. In modern democracies, the state is not the problem. One drives on the right side of the street, pays one’s taxes, and never finds the Leviathan a personal issue.18 This leaves the citizen with a good deal of spare time, time that is—despite the absence of the state—still political because it needs to be defined, ordered, and defended. The game of justice bridges several philosophical distinctions within theory and social science. It is, on the one hand, classical, recalling Socrates’s personal

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politics in respect to the meaning, practice, and rewards of the just life, but it has learned much from the study of the modern state, beginning with Machiavelli’s political realism, and extending into Hobbesian wars of all against all and Rousseau’s social origins of inequality. The game of justice also bridges epistemological divisions current in present-day social science and social philosophy. Its approach is on the one hand modern, emphasizing operational goals of strategy and tactical calculation, and the belief that there are, within some limits, laws of human behavior that can be known and utilized. On the other hand, along with its allegiance to modern norms of science, the game of justice has a distinctly postmodern dimension, expressed best by Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, that exemplifies an openness of definition and an acceptance of previously uncharted possibilities in the human condition. Such an approach is not normative in the absolute sense of defining ideals that ought to inhere in political action, yet the approach is not without an ability to be useful in respect to the problems of individual women and men and the societies they create, maintain, or destroy with their actions. The model of the game of justice has the following basic elements. • First, that justice is politics, in all the high and low meanings of that ambiguous word. • Second, that politics is always micropolitics, close to ordinary people; it is not a far-off phenomenon located in some abstract institution known as the state. • Third, that individualism does not entail, as sometimes charged, a vacuous narcissism, but is politically disciplined, based on selfdefinition, self-defense, and, most important, on the goal of selfgovernment. • Fourth, that the concept of game provides a new appreciation of the possibilities of creating justice because the game model shows that both winners and losers may be temporary; this gives courage to the underprivileged, and caution to the overprivileged. • Fifth, that playing the game well requires ordinary folks to become self-governing individuals who are able to find in themselves their own definitions of justice, and to live by those definitions as responsible participants in a personal political world. • Last, that social science is a useful tool for everyday women and men, in understanding and in playing the games that make and remake the societies in which we live and work. The game of justice is played in a challenging world that makes serious demands on participants, in terms of self-knowledge and individual selfgovernment, and also in terms of understanding of social behavior, the actions

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of people around them. The subtitle of the book summarizes this as a theory of individual self-government, in which “government” entails the ability to know one’s deepest principles, the courage to maintain them in good times and in bad, and the skill to carry them proudly into practical games. Self-government of the individual woman or man means that, where all else fails, individual persons find justice within themselves, independent of circumstances. Politics is, in short, not only local, it is personal.

Summary of the Argument The following chapters are built around several related themes, weaving them together within a single model of the potentially independent individual within a rich and omnipresent political milieu that is both the source of individual growth and a constant challenge to that growth. Fundamental to the entire argument is the assumption of the expanded definition of the political, leaving the state behind in intellectual terms and exploring the possibilities of politics beyond the state’s traditional borders. Equally important to the discussion is the microanalytic method, which begins from the bottom up and seeks to understand the human experience from the viewpoint of everyday women and men, allowing their actions and interactions to define the relevant field and any institutions that may arise within its purview, rather than working from top down, squeezing people into the shape prescribed by ‘higher’ or macro institutions. Related to the microanalytic approach is the bringing together under a single model of research and theory from social sciences such as sociology and economics, along with political thinkers from the past and present. Because of the diversity of human experience and of the social sciences as they attempt to encompass that experience, the idea of the game is given a central position, and game theory is expanded to allow it to cover the several analytic levels important to understanding micropolitical experience. I emphasize the openness of the game model, as well as its rigor; and argue that because it allows observers to give structure to micropolitical activity but does not impose artificial constraints on the analysis, it is particularly appropriate to the development of both knowledge and wisdom in the actual practice of politics. The central political concept in this inquiry is justice, and how in a systematically imperfect world, justice is formed from the bottom up, through accident or through the efforts of individuals who are caught in games they have not willingly joined and of which they are perhaps unaware. The educational aspect of the game of justice is advice to the unwary; suggesting that only self-governing individuals can sufficiently rise to the challenges the game imposes on each of the participants. As a corollary to the thesis that the state is now of less political interest than it once received, the model emphasizes the relation of self-knowledge to

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self-government, to government, and to justice. While the game model used here is open-ended, with many stages and no immediate solution (in any mathematical sense), there is a reliance also on the concepts involved in selforganization theory, which allow the participant-observer in the game of justice to recognize the implication of sociopolitical interactions over time, as the individual members of a group or society work with and against one another to develop the institutions that, at any given moment, define the values honored by that society. This merges with game theory to give individual participants the sense of their role, an empirical and strategic role, in constructing the worlds within which they live and perhaps flourish. Chapter one, “Pitkin’s Dilemma: The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science,” begins from the question of how political theory can theorize about society without, as an inextricable part of its theorizing, imposing its own viewpoint tyrannically upon the people about whom it theorizes. I argue that modern political science has created a false and dysfunctional separation between political theory and empirical political research that impoverishes both sides and is becoming increasingly outdated. Using the work of Michel Foucault, with its unexpected philosophical emphasis on the phenomenon of power relationships, I suggest that his work is better understood in terms of social science rather than philosophy, and that the empirical research of Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Thomas Schelling makes plain, in a manner not achieved by philosophic analysis, how the social world can be deeply disciplined by institutional structures and yet open to change as a result of modifications in the underlying texture of social life. Such an approach has the associated benefit that it increases the existential significance of empirical social theory by placing it within Foucault’s rigorous philosophical framework. Foucault’s use of an open “game” context converges with the positions of both Wittgenstein and Schelling to suggest a theory that provides insights into the nontyrannical theory Pitkin sought. It also opens prospects for a theoretically integrated agenda for empirical and normative political research. Chapter two, “Political Society: A Blind Spot in the Liberal Field of Vision,” builds on Foucault’s power theory by providing case-study evidence of how the phenomenon operates in the most basic of human interactive situations, at home, at work, in school, and even in recreational groups. Where liberal thought assumes that only the state, or official government institutions, are politically relevant, I show that micropolitics exists everywhere and is the foundation structure that allocates social values, placing some persons high, and other persons low, in the status hierarchy that determines “who gets what, when, how” in the political system. What is particularly revealing in this regard is that it is often one’s friends, rather than one’s enemies, who initiate and maintain this social exploitation. Each member is tacitly given a particular status within the group, and woe betide the individual who attempts to escape

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the limitations of his or her assigned role. William Foote Whyte’s study of Boston gangs reveals how bowling with friends can be dangerous to one’s skill and psychology; demonstrating that even in the simplest groups, where there are neither official institutions nor elections, leaders control followers and followers control each other, so that the group structure can be maintained even while its component individuals may grow and try to change. This pattern of social tyranny has also been studied in contemporary political science, in the field of comparative politics, where Joel Migdal’s (1988) “survival model” suggests that micropolitics is ubiquitous at all levels of political development in developed and undeveloped nations, and is amenable to theoretic treatment through study of the way in which social arguments are not so much about the distribution of goods as they are about the right to make the rules by which everyone will live. Illustrations from contemporary political science show how these abstract factors become concrete in public policy, where the blind spot distorts public vision. Chapter three, “Standing Aloof from the State: Thoreau on SelfGovernment,” directs itself to a specific theorist who exemplifies several of the major themes of the present study. Although Thoreau is well known and much honored in the American cultural tradition, he has often been seen as a somewhat eccentric representative of that tradition, important primarily in his outrage over the slavery system that prevailed in his nineteenth century, and for taking a couple of years off to live in a hut on the shores of an isolated pond. This bucolic picture, however, underestimates Henry Thoreau’s contribution to American political theory. Now that scholars have considered the whole body of his many works and essays, rather than just the obviously political essays, it has become clear that even a boyhood jaunt on the Merrimack and Concord rivers was deeply infused with political insight about American development and the costs and benefits of the bloody wars that produced the nation as he knew it. Thoreau is unique, even in relation to his contemporaries Emerson and Whitman, in his willingness to define himself apart from the state, sometimes in outrage over its policies but most often standing apart simply because he had more important concerns to pursue. Thoreau’s model of individual self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state, but deeply involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than an escape to it. From this new viewpoint, precepts like “mind your own business” take on a new resonance as exhortations to achieve full individual maturity; the requirements of such growth are often harshly defined, as in his famous passages on weeding his bean field. The discussion extends into the new Nietzschean interpretations that explain why self-government directs itself inward and thus represents no danger to the community but is in fact benign in its impact.

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Game theory has long been the prerogative of mathematicians, but in chapter four, “Wittgenstein’s Games: The Philosophy and Practice of Justice,” I argue that Wittgenstein’s use of the game context suggests a more flexible approach to the definition of justice by making it internal to the social process. I focus on the concept of the Wittgensteinian game in parallel with standard game theory, and on the possibility that these two apparently dissimilar models are mutually supplementary. Wittgenstein’s game theory provides philosophical height along with standard game theory’s vigorous method regarding the interpretation of human society and individual dignity as existentially both concrete and universal. Particularly interesting in respect to the introduction of game theory to the fields of social science and theory is the history of game theory and those men who pursued it with such fascination. Where standard mathematical game theory has traditionally been associated with the name of John von Neumann, inquiry into other game theorists shows that they placed a far higher value on the openness of the game context and the importance of creativity in learning to play well; they were highly skeptical of the importance of the minimax theorem and the proof of game solutions. Oskar Morgenstern, von Neumann’s partner in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, had originally conceived game theory as a paradigmatic model for all the social sciences. A concluding sketch from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man suggests that the game metaphor can itself be liberating, and can lead to social scientific analysis of what are often thought of as solely normative questions. In chapter five, “Foucault’s Justice: Agent-Centered Theory and the Game Position,” I turn explicitly to complexity theory and its relevance for normative analysis. The debate over justice launched with the publication of John Rawls’s first article in 1958, “Justice as Fairness,” is best interpreted not in philosophical terms but according to the paradigm model of scientific change. I suggest that the initial use of the microanalytic rational choice approach, and its subsequent development, has led theorists such as Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer, and Jon Elster to an innovative but poorly understood convergence on agent-centered or self-organization theory as their fundamental analytic model. Nozick’s Anarchy has not been appreciated as a methodological contribution, perhaps because of its sterile substantive conclusions; both Walzer’s and Elster’s theories are substantially weakened by their combination of empirical analysis with unexamined normative preconceptions. Explicit recognition of the radical self-organization premises of their approaches makes it possible to reconstruct the thrust of their conclusions, and this brings the discussion sharply back to the game model, with its emphasis on participant awareness of just what is at stake as people engage in their apparently casual and sociable interactions. I suggest an alternative to the original position, the “game position,” that better meets contemporary hopes for, and constraints on, practical action. I define two modes of play and

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the repercussions of each. While such a model is empirical, self-organized justice is not therefore postmodern justice because the paradigm has its origin in the mathematical sciences, and is still used there. This reinforces the idea that there are scientific possibilities, in respect to social events, that do not collapse before postmodern critics. Of all the theorists who would apparently disagree with the individualistic self-government model, Rousseau would seem to take precedence because of the centrality of communal unity in his Social Contract. In chapter six, “Rousseau on Self-Government: The Late Individualist Model of the Promeneur Solitaire,” I suggest that despite the conventional interpretation that equates Rousseau’s political theory with his Social Contract model, late works of Rousseau such as Les Solitaires and Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire offer an alternative individualist model of man’s place in the political world. Men and women in Rousseau’s late works achieve this individualist model through a self-knowledge found in the rough-and-tumble real world rather than in Emile’s hothouse environment. I reinterpret the Rêveries as a manual of philosophical self-inquiry, in which Rousseau pursues the exercise of “unraveling what there is of my own in my own conduct,” and trace a little-known late work, Emile et Sophie: Les Solitaires to show that Rousseau magnificently overthrew in this work his whole educational program, designed to make Emile a perfect social man. Les Solitaires shows that, without his tutor, Emile’s education takes a radically new direction, largely negating the unstable alliance with Sophie and society in general, and returning Emile to his earlier independence through a roughand-ready education as he copes with life in the lower echelons of French society and becomes a far more attractive figure without the artificial gloss of his nuptial contract. The conclusion that Rousseau’s last word is in favor of individualism is reinforced by evidence from his novel Julie in which the perfect Clarens society is recognized as a nest of mutual manipulation, and the inhabitants are all left equally naked when the institutions fail. The importance of these factors lies in the light they shed on Rousseau’s understanding of the relationship between individual and society. The chapter draws on Bourdieu’s habitus to clarify Rousseau’s meaning at the practical level. Finally, the epilogue, “Reflections on Self-Government,” recapitulates the argument of the book, bringing in Mansfield’s recent and revolutionary appraisal of Machiavelli’s Prince, to the effect that he speaks not only to leaders but to everyone who is willing fully to appreciate his meaning. The self-organization theme of the book becomes important here, both in interpreting government and in thinking about self-government at the individual level, as it relates to the wider game of justice within which all individuals live and play the cards that circumstances deal to them, among other individuals who are vigorously doing the same.

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Born How? Modern democratic theory often rails against its citizens because they refuse to take great interest in political affairs, frequently not even enough interest to get out and vote. The approach taken here to individual self-government and individually defined justice does not condemn such slack citizenship but rather admires the citizen’s indifference to great affairs. Modern democratic theory regularly calls for better leadership as a solution to the social and political ills that seem egregious and impervious to solution. The individual self-government approach sees appeals to leadership as self-defeating and perverse, hampering recognition of the real nature of the democratic problem. Rousseau is rightly honored for his many discoveries about human society, but he was wrong in the opening sentence of the Social Contract when he said that men are born free yet everywhere are in chains. The reverse is true: people are born into various kinds of chains, and sometimes over the course of a lifetime they escape and actively become free, if they are willing to rise to the challenge. For this reason, individual self-government is not a one-shot solution to human maturity but an ongoing exercise in which individuals define themselves progressively through the practice of governing themselves, within the context of a political system like democracy that makes this possible. American traditions have a strong element of the eighteenth-century notion that human individuals stand apart from society and use their inborn, innate values as a defense against the society and political system of which they are a part. This is shown in constitutional documents that affirm rights independent of society, and truths that supersede written laws. But scholarship over the past two hundred years has shown that this view of the human experience is true in only an idealistic sense, not in an empirical one. Human beings are apparently born with no innate ideas at all, but only a capacity to learn the rules, norms, and customs they are taught by their parents, their peers, their teachers, and their authorities—drawing on the resources and ideals of existing political systems and prevailing political cultures. Our debt to democracy is therefore greater than we may realize. Democracy is not just a set of institutions that we cherish and grumble about, but a way of living that has inoculated its citizens with ideas that were created in the course of historical political development, ideas that might not otherwise have been ours (Lowi 1992). Individual self-government, an underexamined possibility lying within democracy, is an opportunity to continue this human developmental sequence. It is not intended to eliminate government, for without order nothing can be achieved. Individual self-government is not shapeless freedom, leaving everyone to run amok in her or his favorite way, but an assertion that one will be governed, and that such government will be by principles one has oneself chosen for individual guidance. On this basis, the game of justice is played.

Chapter One Pitkin’s Dilemma The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science

The Problem of Political Theory Thirty years ago in the conclusion to her study of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s significance for political philosophy, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin posed a dilemma that arose from Wittgenstein’s transformation of philosophical method and the impact of this change on traditional political theory. Traditional political theory, Pitkin argued, had been inherently tyrannical. Plato solved the political problem “by eliminating politics” and theorized justice “by eliminating the need for, and thus the real nature of ” justice. But leaving Plato aside, as one often criticized for totalitarian tendencies,1 Pitkin found that even a Rousseau or a Marx, both committed to human liberation, followed the same pattern: “There seems to be something in the enterprise of theorizing itself that makes the resulting system seem totalitarian and in that sense nonpolitical. The theorist stands outside the political system about which he speculates and writes; of necessity he deploys and manipulates its citizens without considering their wishes or opinions” (Pitkin 1993: 326). In the attempt to create intellectual order, the theorist simultaneously imposes order on individuals. It is, Pitkin concludes, not easy “to have an overview of political life, without also seeing in a . . . basically nonpolitical way—without seeing other men as objects and oneself as the only person” (Pitkin 1993: 327). This is the ancient issue of the relationship between knowledge and power, and relates not only to classical political theorists but to current methodological issues in political science. While the behavioral revolution’s rift between political science and political theory leads us to separate the normative, the positive, and the empirical, Pitkin’s dilemma transcends these divisions, reaching to the 19

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basic issue of human knowledge about human affairs, and theory’s innate tendency to tell people how they should see the world and their own place in it. The dilemma arises, however, not simply because theorists impose order. If that were so, the solution would be to stop doing political theory altogether.2 This would fail to meet Pitkin’s problem because, as she writes, “without some foundation in stable truth, men are unable to orient themselves toward the world or toward each other and hence lack a stable sense of self.”3 Her question is whether a Wittgensteinian-inspired theory, a “piecemeal” theory that emphasizes “partial overviews” and ad hoc solutions, can be intellectually satisfying, can provide “the sense of coherence and mastery” people need in their political lives and actions (Pitkin 1993: 326, 328). Pitkin sought escape from the dilemma she had posed through philosophy, but found this inadequate. She turns, on the final page of the book, to Wittgenstein’s idea that the problems of the human condition are not to be solved by philosophy but only by individual actions. “If [our lives] are to change, we must change them in our actions, in our lives; and ultimately that means we cannot change them in isolation.”4 “A Wittgensteinian approach . . . requires of us, that we take other people, and other cultures, seriously, that . . . we become able to see from the perspective of another. But it also makes possible, and requires of us, that we take ourselves seriously” (Pitkin 1993: 339). What is required is a framework within which such exploration can proceed, providing meaningful guidance without imposing predetermined answers. Pitkin’s challenge has not gone unnoticed in the political theory discipline,5 but, to my knowledge, no one has proposed a concrete empirical approach to the problem she posed, and it is toward this goal that the present chapter is directed. I will suggest that a major barrier against the development of an individual-level, nonauthoritarian political theory and political science appropriate to the democratic experience is the conventional assumption that ‘the state’ is equivalent to ‘the political.’6 If political theory is limited to the study and justification of the state, then it is very difficult to see how citizens, in their very narrow civic roles, can be anything but subordinate players, objects for the theories of other people. But if it is recognized that political experience is present in everyday human relationships, whenever there is an asymmetrical or potentially asymmetrical relationship between individuals, then the field of political science in general, and of political theory in particular, expands in interesting ways. Individual people, in all their idiocyncratic variety, replace the abstract, neutral citizen. A wide variety of human behavior, from the highspirited to the underhanded, replaces the narrow right to vote. Individual selfgovernment replaces state-centered hierarchical control. Instead of an abstract and skeletal political system, such a viewpoint reveals fully defined political people participating constantly in fully political environments that have no direct relation to the state and its institutions but are political in their determination of “who gets what, when, and how.”7

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The idea that strategic interactive behavior is the central phenomenon of politics is of course not new, but developments in the modern social sciences and social philosophy give us the opportunity to pursue the approach with new vigor. It needs to be emphasized before we go any further that I am not here proposing we become anarchists. The state is a fact, and will continue as a fact no matter what philosophers say about it; political theory will continue to pay the state appropriate attention; and citizens will continue to exercise their rights and duties under the state. But, for the average person, the modern democratic state, whatever its size, leaves a large amount of space empty. It is often urged that this ‘private’ space is our own, our locus of perfect freedom, our arena for self-satisfactions of whatever sort we choose.8 This book seeks to counter this conventional interpretation. I will argue that the supposedly empty, personal, nonpolitical space is actually political, and that everyday citizens in their apparently private lives are constantly engaged in power relations with one another. This is not in abstract conceptual terms but in empirical and sometimes unseemly political practice where sharp strategy may prevail even in the most private games. To explain why this change in viewpoint seems perhaps unexpected requires a brief step back into the theory of democratic politics. Modern political theory9 has been defined by its focus on the state as the essence of the political since the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. This definition was brought into the twentieth century by Max Weber, with the idea of the state’s having the right of legitimate force over a geographic area,10 and was brought into behavioral political science by David Easton, who defined politics as “the authoritative allocation of values for a society.”11 This otherwise very broad and useful definition is made conventional by the final clause, “for a society,” which seems to restrict allocation to only the official government level. Only recently the centrality of the state in the discipline of political science has been reaffirmed in the American Political Science Association’s survey of political science over the past decade, which uses the state as a major thematic focus (Katznelson and Milner 2002; especially Part I: “The State in an Era of Globalization”: 27–230). While postmodernists have sought to deconstruct the state, and historians and political scientists have complained about its unacceptably royal nature and its negative influence on political research (Mitchell 1991, Engster 2001, Bartelson 2001), overall the state retains its centrality as the focus of the political.12 This consensus frequently involves a second dimension, that the state is preferable to politics, that the state is ‘the solution’ to politics.13 Yet the welldocumented decline in voting, not only in the United States but in other advanced industrial democracies, suggests that many citizens have lost some of their old enthusiasm for the government as an object of democratic participation.14 In large part this attitude may result from the growing sophistication of the electorate. Under the aegis of the modern liberal democratic state, citizens

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have markedly increased in economic, social, and educational resources over the past half-century. From this new and privileged position they have been able to scrutinize their institutions more carefully, and have often found those institutions inadequate. It is these sociopolitical changes that suggest the possibility of expanding the scope of the democratic experience by recognizing that politics occurs universally in human relationships, in every interaction between individual persons.15 Giving politics this wider definition provides clues into solving Pitkin’s dilemma, the articulating of a political theory that provides intellectual order and perhaps guidance to individual activity, yet is integral to the participants rather than imposed from outside.16 The central framework is that of an open-ended strategic process through which individual women and men attempt, with uncertain chances of success, to define themselves, their goals, and their place in society. The process is political in that it allocates values, but it is controlled by no outside authority; individual women and men create it by their own efforts, from the bottom up. The contemporary philosopher who has shown the greatest attention to the widest possible definition of politics is Michel Foucault, who did so much to bring madness, criminality, and sexuality into intellectual consideration, and who late in his career turned to questions of self-government and politics, using power as his central philosophical concept.17 To those familiar with his work, Foucault may seem an inappropriate choice as a theorist of micro-level politics because he is so well known for his studies of the ‘disciplinary’ society, from whose surveillance none escape.18 Foucault himself argued against any inconsistency, on the grounds that a proper understanding of his ideas showed discipline and freedom to be two sides of one coin. But, to make this argument fully clear, I believe we must stop treating Foucault solely as a philosopher and recognize his role as a social scientist, which is the realm in which his political analysis proceeds and from which his conclusions follow. Foucault’s contribution at this micropolitical level is to bring a variety of well-known sociological and empirical facts into philosophical focus. Where Foucault is less successful is in tracing the empirical, sociopolitical microprocesses in which everyday people engage and in which winners and losers are defined. In this respect, therefore, I bring together several classic sociological works, and others in political economy, to fill out Foucault’s political model. Students of the state have tried to avoid this micropolitics as being too confusing or inchoate to be amenable to scientific study. I argue that this is no longer so, and that philosophy and the social sciences converge to provide a viable empirical model. One cannot help recognizing that such an inquiry will be seen as controversial, an egregious example of mixing French philosophical apples with American sociopolitical oranges, but I do not think this criticism should deter the exercise. The Foucault interview discussed here gains in power as social theory by being given empirical explication; American scholars are enriched by

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being placed in Foucault’s large ethical framework. In themselves these American works have been deeply original, but their implications have been difficult to assess. Bringing the two traditions into conjunction is therefore effective in assessing resolution of the objective-subjective dilemma of political theory, the search for theory that is intellectually coherent but not coercive.19 Foucault provides an axiomatic base; Garfinkel adds experiential depth, Goffman reveals the constant challenge of social interaction, and Schelling reminds us that winning and losing create the realities within which individuals live.

Foucault’s Philosophical Argument The breadth and diversity of Foucault’s published books, lectures, and interviews have meant that no unified interpretation of his work has yet emerged. Canguilhem is considered authoritative on the early period, Hadot essential to the understanding of the final period, and Deleuze essential if not definitive on the middle period.20 The reception of Foucault among American political theorists has focused on his theory of the disciplinary society, but here, too, scholars have taken several directions in response to the concept.21 At one time classified with French structuralism, Foucault promptly rejected any such affiliation,22 and seemed to take pleasure in violating the expectations his audiences sought to impose.23 The social science aspect I emphasize in this chapter is supported by two considerations: (1) Foucault’s publication in French methodology journals, and (2) the way in which Foucault’s politics theme ties together his work from Madness and Civilization through The History of Sexuality.24 The first step in my analysis is to show how strongly Foucault himself emphasized the micropolitics theme. In a 1984 interview, conducted five months before his death,25 Foucault was questioned by interlocutors who persistently presented him with conventional abstract concepts, such as the relation between truth and power, liberalism and domination, power and evil, subject and truth; Foucault just as persistently tried to direct the discussion instead toward concrete behavior. Foucault presented a perspective that was to some degree foreign to philosophical discourse by virtue of its being more consistently microanalytical than his listeners expected or were willing to appreciate. Central to an understanding of this novel perspective is Foucault’s discussion of “relationships of power.” The relationships of power have an extremely wide extension in human relations. There is a whole network of relationships of power, which can operate between individuals, in the bosom of the family, in an educational relationship, in the political body, etc. This analysis of relations of power constitutes a very complex field; it sometimes meets

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what we can call facts or states of domination, in which the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing different partners a strategy which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an individual or a social group manages to block a field of relations of power, to render them impassive and invariable and to prevent all reversibility of movement—by means of instruments which can be economic as well as political or military—we are facing what can be called a state of domination. It is certain that in such a state the practice of liberty does not exist or exists only unilaterally or is extremely confined and limited.” (Foucault 1988:3, emphasis added) Several points in this passage need to be emphasized. First, it should be observed that Foucault has completely abolished the conventional limits on the types of power typically studied by theorists and philosophers, that is, power in the state or its rulers, or system-wide economic power. Foucault instead emphasizes repeatedly that every human interaction involves the relations of power, giving as an example the very interview in which he is participating, in which at one point he has precedence as being the older, more mature scholar, yet in a moment he may lose that position faced with a critical challenge from an upcoming, younger man (Foucault 1988: 12).26 This ubiquity of the relations of power remains a persistent theme to the end of Foucault’s discussion in the course of this interview.27 The second point of particular interest in the quoted passage is its distinction of relations of power and states of domination, which Foucault says later are frequently mixed up and used interchangeably only because we fail to define our terms (Foucault 1988:19). States of domination are but a subset of relations of power, according to the model Foucault defines here. He uses, he says, the term “power” in a way quite different from the way most people use it as suggesting “political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the master facing the slave.” Instead, Foucault uses power only as a shortcut for ‘relations of power’ and means by this “that in human relations, whatever they are—whether it be a question of communicating verbally . . . or a question of a love relationship, an institutional or economic relationship—power is always present . . . the relationships in which one wishes to direct the behavior of another” (Foucault 1988:11). The essence of such relationships is that they exist “at different levels, under different forms,” and they are “changeable relations, i.e., they can modify themselves, they are not given once and for all” (Foucault 1988:12). The criterion that distinguishes between relations of power and states of domination is the availability of complete change in the relationship, the ability of participants to invert the relation so that roles are effectively and substantively reversed.28 Foucault’s third important point in the quoted paragraph, beyond the ubiquity of relations of power and their difference from states of domination, is

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the importance of the “whole network of relations,” the “complex field” in which human beings operate. This is the point at which listeners to or readers of the interview seem forced to ask if Foucault is not here doing something quite different from standard philosophy; indeed, one of the interlocutors in the 1984 interview asked Foucault whether his approach might be “the center of a new philosophical thought, of another kind of politics than the one we are seeing today.” Foucault shied away from this suggestion, but did admit that his interest in Greek and Roman experience reflected a shift from the traditional approach to political philosophy characteristic of Hobbes and Rousseau (Foucault 1988:13–14). Much of the interview centers on these ancient ethical relations under the second major aspect of Foucault’s philosophical model, the well-known “care of the self ” that occupied so much of his concern in the late Collège de France lectures. Where to an American reader the individualism of the phrase, care of self, seems culturally familiar—if not in quite the sense Foucault used it—to his interviewers it was difficult to understand or accept. After being told firmly by Foucault that care of the self is “ethical in itself,” quite independent from any associated care for others, an interviewer pushes him to affirm that “care for self always aims at the good for others.” Foucault fights off this interpretation, insisting that “the relationship to self takes ontological precedence” in his model (Foucault 1988:7). The reader, considering the interview several decades after it was recorded, can see in this struggle between a philosopher and his audience the difficulties that arise when paradigm shifts are under way; in Foucault’s case, the shift from traditional, highly abstract philosophy to what might today be called agent-centered modeling.29 What Foucault means by care of self is most fully explicated in the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality (Foucault 1985, 1986), but the 1984 interview highlighted the structure and context of the idea of relations of power perhaps better than the fuller work. Foucault in the interview restates the basic theme, that for the ancient Greeks care for self meant knowing and improving one’s self and the effort “to surpass one’s self, to master the appetites that risk engulfing you.” Knowledge is essential to this project, both in the Socratic-Platonic sense and in “the knowledge of a certain number of rules of conduct or of principles which are at the same time truths and regulations. To care for self is to fit one’s self out with these truths. That is where ethics is linked to the game of truth” (Foucault 1988: 5). Foucault then states the political conclusion of his whole argument: “relations of power,” defined as the “means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others,” cannot be eliminated from society. “The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be

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played with a minimum of domination” (Foucault 1988:18). The interviewers bring up Sartre’s ‘power is evil,’ but Foucault is not to be turned. “Power is not an evil. Power is strategic games.” The essence of an open strategic game is “where things could be reversed”; the relations of power are “strategic games between liberties,” resulting from “the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others” (Foucault 1988:18). Power comes at several levels, Foucault adds, but while government is a major source of domination, relations of power between individuals exist everywhere, even to the apparent privacy of the home and the most personal relations; his typical example, in the interview as elsewhere, involves sexual relations. Care of self enters this dynamic sociopolitical milieu because only through care for the self is the individual capable of entering freely into the strategic games of power and truth. The point of resistance to political power, a state of domination, involves the relationship of self to self but also the practices as a whole “by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other.” It is free individuals “who try to control, to determine, to delimit the liberty of others and, in order to do that, they dispose of certain instruments to govern others” (Foucault 1988:18–19). Finally, Foucault is asked whether philosophy has anything to say about why people try to determine others’ conduct. Foucault says this will take different forms in different societies; in some, things are so well settled in advance “that there is nothing left to do.” On the other hand, in our society, in family, in sexual and affective relations, there are many opportunities for games and “thus the temptation to determine the conduct of others is that much greater.” The more people are free in relation to each other, the greater the temptation on both sides. “The more open the game, the more attractive and fascinating it is” (Foucault 1988:20). That evil is merely an artifact of the libido ludendum is surely a startling conclusion to the interview, and an indicator of how far readers must go in the attempt to catch up with Foucault’s forays beyond the usual philosophical boundaries. His axiomatic demonstration that politics is inherent in individual behavior, not restricted to closed state institutions, lays down the primary axiom relevant to responding to Pitkin’s problem of autocratic theory.

Empirical Sociology and Political Action Foucault complains in this 1984 interview that as a young scholar he had objected to existentialism and phenomenology because of the way they begin with a predefined theory of the subject and construct theories of truth not analytically but along preconceived lines. Foucault himself, as a university teacher

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for many years, sought to escape this philosophical trap through specialization in experimental psychology;30 he was also familiar with American microsociology.31 While Foucault’s concern with power and strategy might suggest that this chapter could directly turn to political economy, I believe a full appreciation of his argument benefits from a consideration of the movement within American sociology that was variously called social psychology, microsociology, ethnomethodology, or the psychology of interpersonal relations.32 Perhaps the most radical analysis of the microsocial milieu was undertaken by Harold Garfinkel, who published his Studies in Ethnomethodology in 1967, and my analysis of social scientists useful in the understanding of Foucault’s politics begins with this work,33 which so closely examines the lived experience of ordinary folk, and reveals thereby the creativity and courage involved in such experience. Where traditional sociology defined social systems as objective realities, Garfinkel was awed instead by the contingency, the creativity, the subjectivity, and the inherent mystery of social systems. He saw social behavior not as a thing that was simple and concrete and self-evident, but as a complex, ephemeral, and almost miraculous process by which ordinary individuals contrived to adjust their behavior so that coherent and reasonable social outcomes would occur. Foucault’s appreciation of the delicacy of relations of power is made concrete in Garfinkel’s method. Garfinkel’s analysis often begins with a small group of individuals, frequently strangers, who are brought together to carry out some institutional task, such as admitting patients to a hospital, or conducting an investigation, or agreeing on a jury judgment in some criminal case. What struck him forcefully was that people are able to do these things, even though they have no specific experience in the matter, nor adequate instructions. Society has not completely taught them their roles, in other words, so people must figure things out for themselves through their interactions with each other, using a fund of deep, unstated knowledge on which their ambiguous discourse depends. People do not say everything they are thinking, but what they are thinking determines their ability to cope with daily situations. This “practical sociological reasoning” works from the bottom up, in Garfinkel’s view, rather than from the top down. Each participant tosses forth a possible definition of what might be done in a particular case, but because phrases are incomplete and ambiguous, a consensus emerges only gradually as one person finds that her or his remarks are interpreted to mean something that person did not quite mean in the beginning, but it is too late to readjust the conversation so the modification is accepted and becomes the premise for further interaction. The picture Garfinkel presents sheds a sharp light on the way in which Foucault interpreted social discipline and how he replaced it with power strategies. Of course human experience is subject to discipline, but human life is too complicated for that discipline to be complete, so that, as Garfinkel shows, each individual must to

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some extent consciously fend for herself or himself, creating and re-creating, or destroying or modifying, the parameters of the immediate social group by the specific actions that are chosen. The uneasiness caused by Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology results from the need to belong to the groups of various sizes in which circumstances force us to participate. To be members in good standing of such groups is important both for practical and symbolic reasons, and membership is based almost completely on the individual’s ability to show that she or he knows the socially sanctioned facts of life, in that society, that any member knows. One’s membership card, according to Garfinkel, is one’s ability to demonstrate familiarity with the common understandings of “family life, market organization, distributions of honor, competence, responsibility, goodwill, income, motives among members, frequency, causes of, and remedies for trouble, and the presence of good and evil purposes behind the apparent workings of things” (Garfinkel 1967:76). Foucault could not have said it better. Garfinkel’s approach to social knowledge clearly brings out the connection between everyday activities and moral certainties. It is not the activities themselves that are important; the importance rather lies in the conclusions, moral conclusions, that activities lead us to make about members of the group and outsiders. For Kant the moral order ‘within’ was an awesome mystery, for sociologists the moral order ‘without’ is a technical mystery. From the point of view of sociological theory the moral order consists of the rulegoverned activities of everyday life. A society’s members encounter and know the moral order as perceivedly normal courses of action— familiar scenes of everyday affairs, the world of daily life known in common with others and, with others, taken for granted. (Garfinkel 1967:35) Garfinkel is concerned to make vivid to unthinking social actors how they participate actively and constantly in creating a reality that they then feel is objective, independent of them and their activity. He is particularly interested in the degree to which the ‘rules’ of this activity are so complex and unwritten that they can never be completely tabulated but will always require further explication by more rules, and these rules again by further rules, until the cultural milieu of even a modestly sized group or organization becomes infinite. Moreover, participants are concerned that the structures be rational, that their accounting practices will create and sustain “recognizable sense, or fact, or methodic character, or impersonality, or objectivity . . . independent of the socially organized occasions of their use” (Garfinkel 1967:3–4). For participants, “the rational properties of their practical inquiries somehow consist in the concerted

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work of making evident from fragments, from proverbs, from passing remarks, from rumors, from partial descriptions, from ‘codified’ but essentially vague catalogues of experience,” how things were done. “Somehow is the problematic crux of the matter” (Garfinkel 1967:10). It would seem to be exactly in the ‘somehow’ that Foucault’s relationships of power are located. But Garfinkel is not fully sensitive to power relationships in strategic terms, and this aspect of Foucault’s vision requires amplification. Individuals create their theories not alone but within social communities that have their own logic to contribute.

Collusion and Power The second step in my attempt to emphasize the practical political infrastructure of the philosophical viewpoint expressed so vividly in the late Foucault interview involves the work of Erving Goffman, a social scientist with whose writings Foucault was familiar (Rabinow 1984:247, 380). What Goffman adds to Garfinkel’s perspective on the ‘subject and knowledge’ is an acute sensitivity to the various forms of collusion that shape our social and intellectual lives. Foucault asserts the presence of power in every human relationship, even the most casual; Goffman documents the exact processes by which this power is manifested, and the subtle way in which human weakness and uncertainty become transmuted into strength and intelligence—or into domination and exploitation—within ongoing social interactions. Goffman will not be the end of the story because he is one-sided on the implications of power as well as its deeper malpractices, but his work forms an essential step in bringing Foucault’s always evocative but sometimes gnomic principles into clear concrete view. The emphasis on how things are done is one to which Foucault repeatedly returns, especially in respect to care of self.34 Foucault’s emphasis on rules as constitutive and deeply sociopersonal is illustrated by Goffman’s empirical studies. Goffman begins his earliest major work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, with the analysis of social situations in which individuals, in the presence of others, present themselves to one another, explicitly and implicitly, and begin in concert to develop those social regularities we call systems or institutions. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance to emphasize a perspective that was, at the time, unique: “I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impressions they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them” (Goffman 1959:xi). There are inadequacies to the dramaturgical model, Goffman says, in that the “stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well-rehearsed,” but there is also an eerie similarity. His many publications,

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which achieved considerable popularity with lay audiences, attest to the fascination exerted by his unusual viewpoint on human behavior. Goffman’s approach was essentially naturalistic. Where Garfinkel indulged in reality-bending experiments, Goffman simply looked around him. There are two levels of individual expressiveness, in Goffman’s analysis, what he calls “given” information such as verbal statements, and “given off ” information such as actions or impressions resultant from actions (Goffman 1959:2). On meeting someone, for instance, the spoken words of the person are not the only information; one also notices physical characteristics such as clothing, manner, and the look on the other person’s face as major elements in defining the situation. Individuals may have many purposes in social interaction, Goffman notes; they may wish to sustain it, to defraud the other, get rid of the other, confuse or antagonize the other, or insult the other. Whatever the specific purpose, the individual seeks to control the conduct of other people, especially their response to the self, and will attempt to project on others the impression that the self wishes them to have of herself or himself. In any interaction much will be concealed or not revealed; participants may know neither the real beliefs, nor the attitudes or emotions of the other performers (Goffman 1959:3–4). All knowledge in these interactions is inferential, in Goffman’s model, and the participants cannot know anything for certain. Each participant will, however, even if passively, project a definition of the situation, and ordinarily these definitions are sufficiently attuned so that no open contradiction occurs, although there will not be any consensus—real meeting of the minds—among the participants. Rather, each individual suppresses her or his own deepest feelings and projects a definition of the situation that she or he thinks the other will be able to find acceptable, at least temporarily. There is thus created a veneer, a surface agreement, in which everyone participates, and to which they feel obligated (Goffman 1959:9). Such behavior is of course the soil in which everyday politics grows, and such informal organization is not always benign. It is interesting that the French philosopher/theorist Foucault is so much more sensitive to the power implications of the pattern than is the American social scientist. Like Garfinkel, Goffman emphasizes that definitions established in such social processes have a moral character. Individuals with certain characteristics have a moral right to expect that they will be valued and treated in an appropriate way. From this viewpoint, the apparently innocent idea of defining a situation turns into actions that make a moral claim on other participants (Goffman 1959:13). Goffman’s distinctive contribution to microsociology is his emphasis on the social structure that controls the roles played by individual members who find expectations waiting for them and have extreme difficulty if they attempt to make major changes. Even actors who seek to change their way of fulfilling a

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role will find that they cannot create novelty, but only choose among several already established ways of playing the role (Goffman 1959:28–29). The socialization process tends to idealize roles, according to Goffman, so that performances are “socialized, molded, and modified” to fit the observers’ understandings and expectations. Eventually, performers exemplify “the officially accredited values of the society” and each performance becomes a ceremony, “an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation” of the community’s moral values, and a celebration. People who seek upward mobility within the group do this not simply for prestige but because they want “a place close to the sacred center” of the common values of the society (Goffman 1959:35–36). In other words, they play Foucault’s cultural power game, the game of truth. Goffman would later shift his approach slightly, from the individual to the small groups of people who work together and are to some extent forced to ‘perform’ as a group for others, either audience or customers or observers. The central group, known as the team, is characterized by the familiarity of all the members with each other, by solidarity among themselves, and by a set of shared secrets about how their ‘act’ works, which would ‘give the show away’ if revealed to the audience (Goffman 1959:85–89). Social behavior, the show, takes place within a particular establishment, and the team of performers cooperates in ‘impression management,’ that is, the presentation to the audience of a desired definition of the situation. All members of the group, team members and audience alike, willingly conspire to maintain the desired definition of the situation, which includes the conceptions of the team, the expectations of the audience, and “assumptions concerning the ethos that is to be maintained by rules of politeness and decorum” (Goffman 1959:238). A major requirement is to keep separate the back region of the establishment, which is where the performance is prepared, from the front region where the performance is actually presented; audiences do not expect to see the back region, nor does the team wish this to happen (Goffman 1959:139). While Goffman chose to focus on relatively harmless examples of this social behavior, his analysis extends easily to other situations, such as that of the overprivileged members of society justifying their position to the audience of the underprivileged, or the tyrant making an impassioned speech about democratic freedoms. Readers who follow Goffman into his later work expecting to find a larger theoretic perspective are frequently disappointed. The corrosive analytic vision Goffman directed on everyday society continued to provide striking vignettes of amusing or appalling social behavior, but the hoped-for glimpses of a social philosophy never emerged (e.g., Goffman 1974). This is one of the reasons I believe it is valuable to bring Goffman and Foucault into the same field of scrutiny; it brings empirical evidence to the one, and philosophical resonance to the other. Foucault’s critics have been much exercised to understand how he could

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simultaneously see society as disciplined and yet free. As abstract terms, freedom and discipline are contradictory; but as concrete processes they may coexist, as Goffman repeatedly shows. As Wittgenstein argued, actual practice is the only recourse when confronting philosophical dilemmas, and the rich prepolitical infrastructure provided by Garfinkel and Goffman is an essential element in unraveling Pitkin’s dilemma. This theme is taken further by moving to the work of political economists, who share so much of Foucault’s emphasis on power and strategy, but from a different tradition and discipline that gives concrete expression to his philosophical viewpoint.

The Economic Dimensions of Politics and Theory Of the classic generation of political economists who first introduced rigorous analytical arguments into political science,35 one member in particular worked consistently at the level of micropolitical issues and is therefore particularly appropriate as the social scientist who provides empirical referent to Foucault’s strong yet difficult model of power relations. This was Thomas Schelling, who worked in the high tradition of foreign policy and the cold war but nonetheless directed his analytic attention to individual political behavior, usually far distant from state institutions. The similarities between Foucault’s responses in the 1984 interview and Schelling’s work in strategy are striking once the step of comparison is taken. Both see power in all human relations; though Schelling calls it the “mixture of conflict and cooperation.” Both understand games as being played within social and ideological contexts that shape and constrain them, and may mandate winners and losers independently of the merits of the play. Yet on the other hand the two write in worlds as far apart as economics and philosophy. Consideration of Schelling’s work from a Foucauldian point of view sheds a doubly revealing light, showing how serious American social theory can appear when placed next to a major French thinker and how empirically acute at least one French philosopher may have been when forced to that position by the intellectual puzzles he chose to pursue. Schelling’s classic work, The Strategy of Conflict, was slightly mistitled; the strategy of conflict erroneously implied that his primary emphasis was conflict rather than the many other forms of human interdependence he discusses. Better titles turn up in the course of Schelling’s discussion—a theory of precarious partnership, a theory of incomplete aggression, or most accurately the theory of interdependent decision.36 Games of strategy are “those in which the best course of action for each players depends on what the other players do,” and the term strategy “is intended to focus on the interdependence of the adversaries’

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decisions and on their expectations about each other’s behavior” (Schelling 1963:3). Where, traditionally, social theorists have been expected to make a choice in respect to the nature of society, to come down on one or the other side of the issue of whether society is basically competitive or basically cooperative, Schelling is at pains to emphasize that neither horn of this supposed dilemma is correct. There is no friendship so close that it cannot contain some conflict, some differences of values, he argues; nor is there any relationship so hostile that it will not contain some mutuality of interests. The “richness of the subject” arises from the “common as well as conflicting interests among the participants” (Schelling 1963:4). This firm neutrality of approach is of course exactly Foucault’s. Schelling’s use of game theory in The Strategy of Conflict sharply distinguishes him from the majority of political economists, then and now, because he uses the theoretical concepts provided by game theory in a manner so flexible, fluid, and creative that his results often overthrow the theory’s own assumptions. On the vexed issue of rationality, for instance, Schelling points out what no one else had explicitly recognized before him, that where rationality is pitted against irrationality, irrationality may work better; you cannot successfully bargain with a four-year-old, a madman, or a fool.37 Schelling’s insight here rests on his premise that rationality is not a one-dimensional attribute that people either have or don’t, but is a multidimensional collection of attributes involving value systems, information systems, and communications systems. His approach to value systems is wide, unlike the narrow self-interest axiom of many political economists, and encompasses the whole range of motives unearthed by psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, and inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems. (Schelling 1963:16) Bargaining as Schelling defines it falls into two basic categories, explicit and tacit, which are separable analytically but inextricably mixed in practice. Both types of bargaining involve the making of threats, promises, and commitments; the creation of credibility for one’s actions or threats; the minimization of one’s own flexibility (notice how this counters the usual idea that flexibility

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is desirable); and the search after focal points for settlement. The objective is to avoid actually using one’s strengths, but instead to exploit them as potential forces. As long ago as the classic writings of Clausewitz, it was obvious that war was a waste of resources; successful threat was more efficient because it accomplished its aim without using up any goods (Schelling 1963:6–7). Foucault’s facing various interviewers and recognizing the dynamics of his own situation is a micro-example of Schelling’s point here. In an argument particularly relevant to Foucault’s approach to social relations, Schelling argues that, in observing groups and societies, it is not correct to think that because peace is maintained the participants must be understood to share “trust, good faith, and mutual respect.” Instead, Schelling suggests, people should recognize that apparent agreement may overlay deep hostility, and that implicit bargaining is constant among participants (Schelling 1963:20). Achieving success, according to Schelling’s analysis, is both conceptually simple and straightforward in practice; it results from individuals so limiting their options that they cannot do what they do not want to do. Obviously this involves some delicacy, because one must know one’s opponent well enough to estimate what one can get away with, know the situation well enough to estimate what will be appropriate behavior, and know one’s self well enough to know the strength of one’s nerves and courage on this particular issue with this particular person. This latter aspect highlights a major aspect of political games: the individual’s level of determination. Schelling describes pure bargaining as the case in which “each party is guided mainly by his expectations of what the other will accept,” and where the contest is purely one of will—of bold initiative and cool head. One participant may concede because he is convinced that the other will not (Schelling 1963:13–14, 21). The psychology of this aspect of the political contest has rarely been studied in any systematic way. Foucault does not begin to handle it with Schelling’s calm familiarity, which is what makes Schelling so useful in this regard. Common opinion argues that bargaining strength means that the success of a participant is directly related to background resources, and that the weaker competitor may be forced to give way, trapped by the logic of the game’s structure. In a pure contest of wills this need not be so. ‘Bargaining power,’ ‘bargaining strength,’ ‘bargaining skill’ suggest that the advantage goes to the powerful, the strong, or the skillful. . . . But, if the terms imply that it is an advantage to be more intelligent, or more skilled in debate, or to have more financial resources, more physical strength, more military potency, or more ability to withstand losses, then the term does a disservice. These qualities are by no means universal advantages . . . they often have a contrary value.38 (Schelling 1963:22)

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What gives Schelling’s work its particular importance in respect to Foucault’s model of the relations of power is Schelling’s recognition that this political bargaining process creates not just individual deals between private persons, but in fact is the process underlying the construction of whole political societies. The construction of social reality is not quite the collegial process some social theorists seem to imply but is usually a game of intense and perhaps hostile bargaining. The results will determine not just who wins in the short term, but who triumphs in the long-term game of social valuation. The result of this civic battle may be to define, for a long time into the future, who is honored in a given society, who scorned, who has rights, who has only duties, who is entitled to justice, and who must eat bitterness. The deeper Schelling proceeds in his analysis, the more he leaves behind the abstractions of game theory and begins to incorporate those perspectives already presented in earlier sections of this chapter, issues of cognitive difference, personal creativity, social inequalities, and the strategic factors so decisive in bargaining.39 Game theory has, according to Schelling, by pursuing “too abstract a level of analysis,” “by abstracting from communications and enforcement systems, and by treating perfect symmetry between players as the general case . . . overshot the level at which the most fruitful work could be done” (Schelling 1963:119). Symmetry between two abstractly rational players is unrealistic, Schelling says, because “in too many exciting cases one plays an opponent who is a wholly different kind of person” from oneself (Schelling 1963:117). Even in the classic book that established game theory in American social science, Luce and Raiffa argued that prediction of behavior is foolish “without first having a complete psychological and economic analysis of the players” (Luce and Raiffa 1957:120; Schelling 1963:125). The conduct of a game can be altered, for instance, by one player’s choice to alter her own commitment structure, where this change in commitment alters the opponent’s expectations about possible payoffs and therefore constrains the opponent’s options (Schelling 1963:121–122), but psychology tells us little and game theory tells us nothing about what types of players can or will make changes in their own psychological structure. One thus arrives at questions that are the prerogative of political theory, in respect to the nature of the individual and the individual’s political goals and capacities.

Democratic Gaming An academic division of labor between philosophy, sociology, economics, and political science may be the key to increased depth of scholarship and knowledge, but it may also be Procrustean. After learning from philosophers,

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sociologists, and economists that individual human beings participate ‘up close and personal’ in the construction of their life realities, the interested reader may naturally inquire how this model plays out in other fields of interest such as politics. Frequently the inquiry fails because the issue is not within the disciplinary purview of those who made the initial discoveries. I have therefore tried to pull together some theoretical aspects of the political interactions in which women and men find themselves, within a political system, outside its actual government but involved in daily political relations with other persons of no official capacity whatever; where the ‘political’ resides in the asymmetries, real or potential, of the relations, and in the allocations of social values these asymmetries entail. In conclusion, it is time to ask whether these ideas offer suggestions about the Pitkin problem of finding a theory that is embedded within people’s experience and control rather than imposed from outside by an ‘objective’ observer, and yet has the capacity to provide meaning to human affairs and a “sense of coherence and mastery” sufficient to guide political action (Pitkin 1993:328). The strategic politics model that is defined at the intersection of Foucault’s micropower approach and the detailed empirical context provided by Garfinkel, Goffman, and Schelling seems to provide a broad epistemological metaphor appropriate to a new form of bottom-up analysis of political issues and political systems. It is a game model, but it would be incorrect to identify it with game theory as typically practiced; it might be called a Schelling Game, to emphasize the flexibility combined with rigor that is typical of his work.40 A microtheory of this sort would not try to so simplify events that they could be squeezed into mathematical form, but would attempt to amplify our sense of the game so that it was broad enough and richly detailed enough to provide space for the many kinds of everyday politics we experience and wish to engage, either as researchers or participants. Wittgenstein, who inspired Pitkin’s original work, offers examples of this approach in terms that recall Garfinkel’s appreciation of people’s irrepressible spontaneity. We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on. . . . And is there not also the case where we play and—make up the rules as we go along? And there is even one where we alter them—as we go along. (Wittgenstein 1953:39 [# 83]) Wittgenstein took this approach even further in another passage:

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You are in a playing field with your eyes bandaged, and someone leads you by the hand, sometimes left, sometimes right; you have constantly to be ready for the tug of his hand, and must also take care not to stumble when he gives an unexpected tug. Or again: someone leads you by the hand where you are unwilling to go, by force. Or: you are guided by a partner in a dance; you make yourself as receptive as possible, in order to guess his intention and obey the slightest pressure. Or: someone takes you for a walk; you are having a conversation; you go wherever he does. Or: you walk along a field-track, simply following it. (Wittgenstein 1953:70 [#172]) A comparable flexibility with the nature of the game is suggested by a political scientist, Kenneth Shepsle (1995:205–206), who argues that where political scientists often implicitly equate rules with official regulations or laws, it would be preferable to be imaginatively empirical and consider how rules work in such children’s games as Kick the Can or Hide and Seek, or baseball played not on a regulation lot but in a backyard with trees and brooks. Such games come with standard rules received from the past, but “kids are known to alter the rules.” Sometimes these changes respond to an irregular environment (hitting the baseball into the brook is considered a double), or the changes may reflect the type of players (young players get special help), and so on. Children may also change the rules in mid-game, as the result of conflict over some unforseen outcome. If the argument grows sufficiently hot, some players may pack up and leave. Such situations are comparable to institution-creation, Shepsle argues, because these games are not invented behind any veil of ignorance but by players who know themselves and each other. They will therefore engage in “distributional conflicts” over different definitions of the rules and those rules’ impact on profits for specific individuals. These broader approaches to the concept of the game and more flexible theories of the game do not imply that we will stop doing conventional, mathematical game theory and switch entirely into a new paradigmatic framework where games are created in the field by human action and ingenuity. Formal game theory is elegant and useful. But the game idea, in all the complexities suggested by Wittgenstein, Shepsle, and the theorists discussed earlier, need not be narrowly held by a single group of scholars but can, with the perspectives of microsociology, be seen as a philosophical exercise, much of the sort that Wittgenstein proposed. What would such an expanded game model contribute toward dealing with Pitkin’s dilemma?

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• Intellectual coherence and order: The game concept provides the everyday person with a framework that is entirely familiar yet newly understood. There are players, strategies, tactics, payoffs, alliances, good play, cheating, and so on. However, the terms apply off the ballfield, off the court, off the game board, and human interactions appear in a new light when there is a new attention to the other and a new definition of the self. • Equalization of participants: There are no authority figures in the philosophically defined game, but only players: winners, and losers. The winners have no permanent status and no arbitrary rights; they may have won by virtue or by luck, and will have to face further encounters to prove their position. Similarly, the losers are temporary; they perhaps learn from the successful strategies of others, but they can define the game for themselves and by inventing new tactics may transform it. • One game doesn’t make a season: People win some, lose some, and live to fight another day. The game metaphor reminds people, even those who have lost regularly because of foul play on the part of their opponents, not to give up, not to disappoint their fans. • Strategy is decisive: The individual may be poor in physical or social resources because of the accidents of past games, but can turn always to her or his own ability to out-think the opposition or seize a hitherto unnoticed opportunity. • Game ethics: Fair play is a virtue recognizable by all players in everyday games. It may be honored sometimes only in the breach, but as players gain skill and judgment the value often grows in importance.41 But game theory as a metaphor retains the sharp edge of its rational choice origins; if the opposition cheats, even those who prefer fair play may want at least to consider going for the jugular.42 How is such a micropolitical strategic approach different from standard game theory? It is diametrically opposite on the crucial dimension of analytic purpose. Technical game theory came to its flower in von Neumann and Morgenstern’s theory of games, in which the whole mathematical point of the exercise was to ‘solve’ the game, to devise the right strategy for winning under all conditions (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). Decision theory and at least some of political economics had a similar concern: rigorous calculation of probabilities in order to achieve desired outcomes (Raiffa 1968; see also Luce and Raiffa 1957). The Foucault approach, combined with the empirical infrastructure of Garfinkel, Goffman, and Schelling, takes as a major premise that there is no solution to the micropolitical gaming world they have defined. The interaction is ongoing and the outcomes unpredictable; players learn through their engagement in the

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exercise, and the theorist’s role is to watch carefully and intelligently, to understand the creative process as it unfolds. What is important about Foucault is perhaps less his emphasis on the ubiquity of politics than his insistence that women and men become strongly aware of the political nature of the everyday worlds within which they live. The very virtues of modern civilization, its openness and complexity, create the new challenges and, according to Foucault, individuals who fail to rise to their occasions may fail politically, existentially, or ethically. But the learning process is their own, and is left to their discretion. Garfinkel’s work sensitizes the innocent to the way the political field is constituted at bottom by apparently minor and unimportant bits and pieces of behavior that despite their seeming triviality serve as a basis for status within not only one’s personal groups but the human group in general. Goffman then documents the small strategies through which groups emerge, cohere, control, and confront one another, and shows how status hierarchies emerge, maintain themselves, and sometimes collapse as the result of apparently small pressures. Schelling is the capstone of the model, showing that within the appalling richness of human interaction in time and circumstance it is possible to find analytic focus by a close attention to simple strategic concepts, such as players, resources, payoffs, and rules, and by a recognition of interactive patterns and strategies that control the resulting institutions of various political systems. The strategic model defined here is spartan. It makes only one assumption: that people define themselves and their social institutions through their strategic interactive behavior. The model as developed through the theorists included in this chapter gives no specific advice, sets no preferred goals or strategies, is silent on outcomes and even on preferred ethical systems. The model offers a picture of how the world appears to work, but the picture is not prescriptive. The model asks only what actual people do, and have done, throughout various periods of history. Political theorists are then entitled to ask what have been the results of this process, and may wish to point out that certain behaviors entail certain results. If provided with such information, directly related to their perceived problems, individuals in the public at large might come to read and admire the work of political theorists. Political science would profit from the same approach.43 It would be a nice reintegration of a political science discipline too long split by methodological disputes, if political theory and empirically oriented political science worked together on understanding the wider shores of political experience. A great deal of intelligence, creativity, and courage is involved in political activity and, as I have tried to suggest, it is activity in which all women and men daily participate. That it be recognized as political, and that theorists and scientists may help in showing how it may be done well, expands the realm of democratic theory and raises the possibility that resolution of Pitkin’s dilemma may not be completely beyond our reach.

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Chapter Two Political Society A Blind Spot in the Liberal Field of Vision

The Locus of Politics Political theory has traditionally directed its attention exclusively to ‘the state,’ that is, to the (1) officially constituted government and institutions of (2) the whole society, as a united, self-governing collectivity. Classical theory was more flexible in this regard, and broader in its approach to the political, but modern theory has made the state its central problem and its primary solution. The consensus is so pervading that it is possible to treat it as part of a Kuhnian paradigm.1 Kuhn (1970) of course denied paradigm status even to social sciences, so there is necessary caution in applying it to a field of normative inquiry like political theory; yet paradigm is now widely used to describe the way in which ideas tend to cohere into systems that define the ‘reality’ of those who use them, and to shut out facts that are conceptually inappropriate to that reality. Whether one calls it social construction, higher-order discourse, epistème, or perspectivism, there is widespread, although certainly not universal, agreement that theories are parametrically constrained by the larger conceptual structures within which they are located (compare variously Berger and Luckmann 1967, Foucault 1970, Gunnell 1998, Nehamas 1985).2 What liberal political theory rigorously ignores is a section of the political spectrum I designate as political society. Political society is found in that wide band of political behavior that lies below the state and its supporting institutions and associations (including civil society), and reaches directly down into what is called private life.3 Political society is where individual persons, members of the different social categories and groups that make up the social fabric, engage in competitive interaction over the distribution of social values to 41

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themselves and to each other. This sort of one-on-one interaction is not official, not acknowledged, sometimes not even noticed because it seems part of the ‘natural’ world, into which the members of a society are all schooled by the traditions within which they have lived their lives. But even if it is not official, this behavior is deeply political in the classic Easton sense (1953) that it allocates values for a society and does it authoritatively.4 A woman or a man does not have to be told that a law bars them from a particular job, from a particular neighborhood, from a school, or a sports team; it is sufficient for them to know that if they try to participate, they will be harassed or made unwelcome. That the wrong is unofficial, even illegal, does not make it the less powerful, less authoritative. I do not mean, of course, to suggest that liberals have not noticed this kind of behavior; indeed it is exactly the kind of behavior against which they struggle. But their theory is severely hampered because they do not bring concrete political society into their axiomatic base, do not see it in its full colors. Their theories are therefore structurally weakened.5 Such a claim will raise sharp protest. Has not Rorty (1989) argued that cruelty is the basic political sin? Does not Gutmann (1980) argue that only system-wide equality can counter such asymmetrical political realities? Does not Young (1990) make domination and injustice the entire focus of her analysis of contemporary political relationships? Is there not a new interest in injustice (White 1991) among political theorists, replacing what many feel to be the artificialities of contractually established constitutional systems (Rawls 1971)? All this is of course true, but it is necessary to remind ourselves that, for instance, Rorty moves from the perception of cruelty to an affirmation of existing Western democracies as the best solutions to the human condition, drawing upon himself charges that he thinks this the best of all possible worlds. In other cases, the failure to engage fully with political society leads to unrealistic proposed solutions, such as proposals for equality, which can pretty easily be shown, in the American context, to be unnecessary and unrealistic (Kane 1996). Other theorists who accept the abstract existence of injustice may nonetheless advocate, apparently to those very persons who are dominating and exploiting others, that they turn to an ethic of caring for those other persons. This seems to confuse the reprobates with the choir, and overlooks the fact that overprivileged people are predisposed against the sermon and are not, in any event, listening to, or hearing, the lesson.6 In respect to the field of political theory as a whole, I believe that this artificial narrowing of the range of acceptable data leads to theoretical approaches that are not only unrealistically optimistic, but inevitably patronize the everyday people who make up real, everyday sociopolitical systems. Political theorists are aware of the threat, and seek to avoid it; yet in varying degrees their theories take a stand outside actual human systems and attempt to legislate for them. On the one hand, these efforts are threatened by the failure to adequately see what

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is going on in the real political-social world. On the other hand, efforts to ‘save the people from themselves’ are undemocratic in the most profound sense of seeking to impose elite solutions on the common woman and man. I readily grant that this is sometimes convenient, but it should not be prolonged as an elite privilege, in modern Western societies with their comfortable material circumstances and their high educational levels. If people do not vote, perhaps it is because they have come to think they are entitled to a fuller participation in a fuller politics. Strong (1990) argues that politics has retreated from modern people, leaving them impoverished as human beings, and I concur with that viewpoint. But in contrast to his solution, I suggest that real politics is closer and more abundant than we recognize, and that an emphasis on political society is a first step in recapturing a more classic kind of politics.7 My present argument focuses on the elucidation of political society as a practical phenomenon, so that observers may see just what it is that I claim liberal theory overlooks. In doing this, I will breach boundary requirements within political science, using empirical studies (Whyte 1943/1955, Migdal 1988) in an attempt to supplement the axiomatic grounds on which traditional liberal theory bases its analysis. This approach is justified in part because it is often desirable to have facts before getting to values, and discussions in the abstract of cruelty, injustice, exploitation, and domination are weakened by not fully specifying exactly how, and among whom, such behaviors occur. My first example (Whyte 1943/1955) will indicate, for instance, that injustice and cruelty begin within groups, not just between them. My second example is from political science (Migdal 1988) and shows that this outside-the-liberal-paradigm behavior can be theorized, and may be in some new sense universal. Finally, in my attempt to convince the reader that political society is real and even philosophically recognized, I use an example from the late Foucault (1985–1986); again it indicates that one’s closest associates may be one’s most dangerous enemies. Having established as a first step the existence of political society, I turn to the obvious sources of criticism: (1) We already know all about your political society, but we call it civil society . . . and of course it is quite different from what you describe; and (2) You have missed the major conceptual distinction with which we have settled the issue you raise, and have decided that what is not public is private, and not our business. The first criticism tends to answer itself, when fully stated, since it is exactly my point that political society is different from civil society, and is a much more dangerous, and more interesting, place. The second criticism is perhaps no longer entirely appropriate, in that the public–private distinction that is so clear, for those who work within the standard liberal paradigm, has yet in the modern era quite lost whatever force it may once have had (Geuss 2001, Hénaff and Strong 2001). It further becomes clear that blind spots are ideologically driven, and can be considered in cost-benefit terms, because they serve to benefit the overprivileged and undermine social stability.

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Bowling with Friends Political society is not always easy to observe because it is the context within which human beings learn what social interaction means, and it has, by very early in life, settled into the background of our activities. We think of it as natural, and it is outside the perimeter of our attention. But while many scholars recognize this cognitive pattern, it is still not entirely clear just what it is, exactly, that we are missing. Because this is the central core of my present argument, it is important to give a convincing illustration of just how this supposedly natural but in fact social or cultural process works. My text for this illustration will be the famous study done by William Foote Whyte of gang behavior in a Boston slum, Street Corner Society (1943/1955). What is unique about the study is its intimate level of detailed examination of group life, combined with an untutored curiosity that dissected the society he observed. Robert Putnam (2000) has captured contemporary public attention by observing that where we once used to bowl sociably, in community-based bowling leagues, we now bowl alone, and this is a sign of a deteriorating civic sense and loss of social capital. It is therefore appropriate that some of Whyte’s most interesting observations centered on the bowling matches in which his subjects engaged at least one and often several nights of the week. These observations describe with great vividness the socially constructive and socially destructive mix of interactions involved in what I am calling political society. I briefly recount some of Whyte’s details only because they are necessary to understand what happened when the gang bowled. Whyte noted, in all the gangs in what he calls Cornerville,8 the presence of a leadership structure. This was created not by vote but by informal interactional criteria, and expressed the degree to which each member exemplified, or failed to exemplify, the values of their small society. If there were no leader, there was no group; when a leader left the gang or the neighborhood, his associates simply dissolved or migrated to other groups. The origin and nature of leadership status were simple; the man Whyte called Doc had, through his elementary and high school years, defeated all the other boys in physical fights. His initial position had been vulnerable because his mother dressed her favorite son in fancy clothes that led his peers to think him a sissy. Doc rose to the challenge. “I was a tiger when I was a kid. I wasn’t afraid of anybody. Most kids when they fight just push each other around, but I had a knockout punch in my right. . . . It wasn’t just the punch. I was the one who always thought of the things to do. I was the one with half a brain” (Whyte 1943/1955:4). Doc was also, as described in his adult form by Whyte, an intelligent, fairminded, helpful human being, but it seems clear from Whyte’s account that these virtues, without winning fights, would not have made him a leader. Beneath Doc in the leadership structure were two lieutenants, Mike and Danny,

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each of whom had his own followers who were incorporated in the Norton Street gang, and Long John, a close friend of Doc but without his own followers. In addition to these leaders there were nine followers. In everyday activity the gang members were bound together by a web of mutual obligations; each was able to ask others for help when he needed it, and each was expected to provide help when others made requests. The “distinctions in rank” of the leadership structure were based on certain individuals’ “greater capacity for social movement,” that is, leaders had “friends in many other groups” and were “wellknown and respected throughout a large part of Cornerville.”9 What is important to the present argument is to note the nature of exactly what Whyte is describing in this detailed study of one particular group. His description is in effect a description of any purely natural group, held together by no formal structure and devoted to no long-range purposes, but centered on activities that were social and recreational. The behavior of the men may appear communal, even egalitarian (since all members recognized their obligations to one another), but in fact the Whyte group is wholly political in the sense that it allocates value differently between the members, according to the status hierarchy. What Whyte shows is that this apparently nonpolitical milieu is actually rife with all the elements we usually describe as political. The larger point is that if such behavior occurs in so minimal a social organization as the Norton Street gang, it will be all the more present in larger situations and organizations, and, by implication, in any group, however formal or informal. The politics of the social structure becomes visible at the bowling alley, which became a popular recreational activity at about the time the Norton Street gang came together in 1937. There is of course competition between gangs, when the members of one contending group try to defeat another group; this is partly a matter of skill, but also of politics, as each party seeks to rattle its opponents by shouts and taunts during the actual process of bowling. As Whyte remarks, “There are many mental hazards connected with bowling . . . critical moments when a player needs the steadiest nerves if he is to ‘come through’.” In reading the following passage, one should note that the form of the situation occurs in life as well as bowling—whether one has confidence in one’s job, taking an examination, or meeting any social challenge. The triviality of the topic ought not, therefore, to keep us from recognizing how fundamental the pattern is. When a bowler is confident that he can make a difficult shot, the chances are that he will make it or come exceedingly close. When he is not confident, he will miss. A bowler is confident because he . . . is accustomed to making good scores. But that is not all. He is also confident because his fellows, whether for him or against him, believe that he can make the shot. If they do not believe in him, the bowler

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has their adverse opinion as well as his own uncertainty to fight against. When that is said, it becomes necessary to consider a man’s relation to his fellows in examining his bowling record. (1943/1955:17) This pattern of behavior is precisely the type of behavior I wish to characterize as political society. Beneath the level of any formal organization there is a hierarchy of status positions, and the group actively participates in enforcing on members at each level of the hierarchy the rules appropriate to that ranking. When leading members of the group bowled, they “kidded one another goodnaturedly” but did not try to ruin the others’ performances; indeed, if a leader occasionally bowled badly, he would be consoled by being assured it was just “bad luck” or a temporary lapse. When, however, the reverse situation occurred, not a leader bowling badly but a follower bowling exceptionally well, the group response was reversed. The follower was harassed as his score went up, and if he succeeded anyway in winning he was told scornfully it was just a lucky break, not a result of his talents, which everyone agreed he did not have.10 When a follower threatened to better his position . . . the boys shouted at him that he was lucky, that he was bowling ‘over his head.’ The effort was made to persuade him that he should not be bowling as well as he was, that a good performance was abnormal for him. This type of verbal attack was very important in keeping the members ‘in their places.’ It was used particularly by the followers so that, in effect, they were trying to keep one another down. (1943/1955:25) The comparison of such behavior with known social tactics such as indicating that women and minorities can’t do math and therefore are not good students and therefore should not participate as leaders, and so on, is too obvious to miss. Whyte was perplexed at first by the coincidence of leadership status and bowling scores because there was considerable unevenness in the men’s performance. Many bowled well with casual acquaintances, but put in miserable performances when they were competing within their home gang. A case that particularly provokes his interest was one of the low-status gang members who was sufficiently good in baseball to gain a tryout with a professional team, yet who always struck out and failed to catch fly balls when he played with friends. Whyte’s explanation is the point made in the previous quotation—that men of low status in the group were repeatedly discouraged from any kind of excellence in performance until they internalized the belief that, faced with this particular group of men, it was impossible, indeed unnatural, for them to succeed. If this phenomenon is widespread in many kinds of social groups, as I argue here, it indicates both that politics is not confined to the state, and equally that the state must be ill equipped to counter anything so ubiquitous and subtle.

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The process of socialization is of course well known in the social science literature, but in political science the emphasis is frequently on the way in which socialization processes teach all members of a group the same thing— how to be a good student, a good Republican, a good citizen, a good parent, and so on. What Whyte observed and documented was not, however, a universalized set of social lessons but a particularized socialization process in which learning was asymmetrical; some of the boys learned to behave as overprivileged members of the group, while others were trained to remain as underprivileged. This was illustrated in the behavior of the primary leader of the Norton Street gang who at one point was called upon to run for the state’s house of representatives. Doc was doing apparently well in the campaign, drawing good crowds and many volunteer workers, when he suddenly quit the race.11 When Whyte asked why he had done this, Doc said he had felt he could not, being at the time without regular employment, maintain the requirements of a leadership position, the ability when called upon to contribute money to various supporting groups. This so unhinged him, Doc said, that he could not tolerate the strain, even though he might have won the state race because the field was divided and he was well liked (1943/1955:35–41). Doc was subject also to dizzy spells when he went for employment interviews, so deeply had his self-confidence been damaged by his loss of the resources with which to act as leader. Whyte devotes a whole chapter to this phenomenon (1943/1955:255–268), and concludes: “The individual becomes accustomed to a certain pattern of interaction. If this pattern is subject to a drastic change, then the individual can be expected to experience mental health difficulties” (1943/1955:328). This indicates the authoritative way in which political society, despite its apparent informality, allocates values to members both high and low. The example also indicates why the presocial, independent Enlightenment man model is so inappropriate a basis on which to build contemporary political theory.12 Whyte’s basic model is simple and hard to escape. His street-corner society shows a pattern in which a group of people, no matter how informal its structure, contains a status ranking; this status ranking is enforced by the members themselves, even those who suffer under it. Members are taught, for instance, that they are no good at bowling and they come to believe it to be true. Such a society allocates life values as clearly as does any state or form of government, but it does so less openly. This pattern, this ‘political society,’ is not included in the premises on which most normative political theory builds. The reasons for this may be obvious, or they may be subtle. Leaving aside the reasons that political society has been ignored in the past, I wish here only to suggest that greater attention be given to it in the future because, as I discuss later, it is an important part of the problems studied both by political theory and political science.

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Street-Corner Society Abroad Whyte’s study is more than a half-century old, critics may remark, and was not by a political scientist but a social anthropologist. Can it be acceptable to suggest that such a study has relevance for political science today? One answer to this challenge comes in Whyte’s effort to provoke a response among political scientists to his work by publishing in their major journal, the American Political Science Review (1943), and getting responses from such major scholars as John Hallowell (1944), Gabriel Almond, and Lewis Dexter, which reflect controversies that are still active today in the discipline. But before discussing this debate, there is a recent work in political science that addresses the idea of political society from a viewpoint that coincides with Whyte’s, yet takes the issue much farther in theoretical scope and geographical extent. Joel Migdal’s Strong Societies and Weak States (1988) is a work in comparative politics that brings new life to the out-of-date idea that political science is a unified discipline in which ideas in one subfield may enrich thought and research in other subfields. While Migdal’s purpose is the study of state development in the Third World, he describes a model of political behavior that is the same as Whyte’s, in which individual actors seek to survive in the face of a status hierarchy that overprivileges some and underprivileges others. Where Migdal surpasses Whyte is in his breadth of attention— which expands to include the whole underdeveloped world and potentially the developed world also—and his interest in the fundamental process of political interaction in an open environment. The street-corner model centers on settled social conflicts, with established status rankings. Migdal’s model, on the other hand, is explicitly dynamic and political. Both describe political society: Whyte at the personal level in a particular milieu, Migdal at the personal level in a universal context. This is not survival against the forces of globalization or capitalism in any abstract sense, but survival against particular people, against the concrete other. This is political society as I intend it here, more swept by pettiness and particularities than by grand historical or economic movements. Migdal’s research interests are primarily in the field of comparative politics, but I will focus on his model in its general structure before indicating its practical implications beyond that field and into political theory. Migdal calls his model a “melange” model of social authority, and bases it on two primary premises. The first premise is that the groups that exercise social control in any society will be heterogeneous in form, anything from a small family to a sprawling tribe to a government institution, and heterogeneous in the rules they apply, from loyalty to self-interested maximization and other patterns. The second of Migdal’s premises is that the distribution of social control may be among numerous autonomous groups in a state, rather than in a centralized

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government, and that the level of authority need not coincide with the coherence or form of that authority (1988:28). As a dynamic process, the model begins with individuals who are “sensitive to what the social organizations around them have prescribed,” organizations that control individuals because they can provide or deny the means to livelihood. Persons within this process must weigh the society’s rewards and sanctions, but these rewards and sanctions are not presented for selection one at a time but in packages that may combine both goods and bads (1988:26). In Whyte’s picture, for instance, a potential gang member would perhaps be offered the desirable option of being a member and becoming a part of its mutual-aid system, along with the undesirable circumstance of being at the bottom of the status hierarchy. In Migdal’s terms, the peasant can choose between defying the local strongman and losing all possibility of help in time of need, or of accepting the strongman’s authority in the hope of assistance in planting and harvesting, while knowing he will have to obey orders that are inconvenient. Or, in the terms of contemporary social problems, minority individuals can opt to be ‘uppity’ and try to succeed on their own, knowing they will therefore get no help if they fail; or they may keep their heads down, not challenge social values, and hope for sympathy if at some point in the future they find themselves in need. Midgal characterizes this situation as one of “survival,” and characterizes people’s behavior choices as “strategies of survival.” Liberal thinkers often stress that choice shall be free and among positive options, without recognizing that free choice is rarely possible in any society, developed or undeveloped, liberal or otherwise, and that many of the options among which one chooses may be less than desirable (Gutmann 1980). The social groupings that make up political society, the groupings described by both Whyte and Migdal, are part of an intensely dynamic political process. Even when things appear stable, as with the Norton Street gang and their recreational evenings at the bowling alley, there is constant member activity directed to keeping the rules (of status or value distribution) firmly in place. When things are not stable, however, the politics becomes more visible because there is overt conflict. Political scientists and political theorists have long centered their attention on the state, as noted in the discussion of Kuhn and the power of paradigms in the opening section, but Migdal gives no special authority to the state in presenting the melange-survival model. The state attempts to impose its rules on the members of society, Migdal argues, but it is incorrect to assume that behavior that does not comply with state rules is “simply personal deviance or criminality or corruption.” In fact, he says, every struggle is not over right and wrong but over which set of rules is going to be adopted, and especially over who is going to make those rules. “Social control is the currency over which organizations in an environment of conflict battle one another” (1988:31– 32). In such circumstances, “many ballgames may be played simultaneously. In

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weblike societies, although social control is fragmented and heterogeneous, this does not mean that people are not being governed; they most certainly are. The allocation of values, however, is not centralized. Numerous systems of justice operate simultaneously.” This new perspective, Migdal concludes, “can give us very different insights into political inertia and political change” (1988:39). The present chapter means to make exactly that point: that the political world looks different, for both theory and for science, when political society is recognized for the force that it is, beneath the surface of the more obvious institutions.13 In addition, if the fabric of human life is seen from this perspective, a perspective that seems immanent in many current theoretic discussions, then it poses a challenge for political theory to answer the question of how justice can be defined in such a milieu.

Philosophical Politics As a final example of the ubiquity of political society, I turn again to Foucault and his description of the phenomenon in his celebrated History of Sexuality (1985–1986). Foucault did not draw extensive conclusions from this particular analysis, and often tried to maintain a much more conventional liberal perspective (Kritzman 1988). However, in the second volume of the History, Foucault paints a memorable picture of a society that is in one sense a harmonious community but also a world full of serious social threats to the individual. These threats are not from criminals or other Lockean inconveniences, but from the very best circles in the society. Foucault begins with issues of social valorization as the culmination of his pursuit of problems of self-government in diet, the household, courtship, and medicine and philosophy, but his interest centered on the peculiar social position, in Greek society, of the young male, around whom a complex strategic game was played, with the boy’s honor at stake (1985:213). This case adds specificity to Foucault’s general analysis of micropower, discussed earlier. Foucault’s analysis in the History of Sexuality uses this special case of the young male as a metaphor for the social situation in general, a situation that involves relations between superiors and subordinates, those who dominate and those who are dominated; and argues that in the Greek context the role that was valorized was the role of the active, dominant player—leaving the youth in a paradoxical position, at one point weak and submissive (and attractive) but at some not too distant future point a candidate for the active dominant role of the society’s most valued members. However, the youth would never achieve this high-status role if he allowed himself to be captured by those who sought his favors. Self-government in Foucault’s sense is therefore based on the necessity fully to recognize political society, to realize that one’s patrons and role

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models were a threat to one’s full flourishing in society. The situation is patently political, and has nothing to do with the state. Philosophy was designed, according to Foucault’s picture, to give such individuals self-mastery and allow them “to triumph over others in the difficult game of ordeals to be undergone and honor to be safeguarded” (1985:212). Reflection on sexual behavior served thus as a means, in this minority of free adult males, to develop “an aesthetics of existence, the purposeful art of a freedom perceived as a power game, involving the exercise of freedom, the forms of his power, and his access to truth” (1985:253, emphasis added). Much has been said in the literature about aesthetics, but very little about those power games. Foucault is concerned not only with self-government but with the self-knowledge that is required to practice such self-government; a self-knowledge centered on understanding the texture of the individual life insofar as the individual is a social creature, raised within a controlling and usually imperceptible context (see also Foucault 1970). In the later Roman experience discussed in Foucault’s third volume (1986), where the political structure of the city and the laws have unquestionably lost some of their importance, although they have not ceased to exist for all that, and where the decisive elements reside more and more in men, in their decisions, in the manner in which they bring their authority to bear, in the wisdom they manifest in the interplay of equilibria and transactions, it appears that the art of governing oneself becomes a crucial political factor. (1986:89, emphasis added) What Foucault shows is that those who are favored by society are analytically no different from those who are beaten down and exploited by society. There are of course practical differences, in that being seduced need not be entirely equivalent to being kept in slavery (as was a whole class in Greek society), yet the position is fundamentally the same, a politics of survival that has little or no relation to the state yet is a power game. This leads to two major points in reference to political society. On the one hand, persons who are not highly valued by society have a need to free themselves from those other persons who devalue them and their capacities. On the other hand, even those persons who are the focus of the highest social approbation may be threatened with demands that, if accepted, negate their high value and reduce them to obloquy. The audience response to Foucault’s work has tended to be apolitical, and has ignored the face-to-face politics he described, but I believe his approach adds strength to my argument that political society is everywhere, and that in democratic societies the same patterns recur in which individual women and men contest with one another, far from the state, over the rules of valorization in their societies.

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Is Political Society Civil? Public? Private? The patient reader may say at this point that these descriptions of political society are all very well, but we already know about this world, which we call civil society. Perhaps the description given is rather darker than usual, but surely the only thing that lies between the state and the individual is the familiar phenomenon known as civil society. Therefore the whole argument falls. Furthermore, the impatient reader will chime in, your argument violates an immemorial tenet of liberal theory, that the relevant distinctions within the political are merely those between the public and the private, and that your self-designated political society is neither, and so is quite beyond the theoretic pale. While there is a prima facie plausibility to these complaints, closer inspection shows that civil society is not equivalent to political society, although they sometimes overlap; and that the public and the private, as theoretical concepts, give very little leverage to the analyst concerned to understand political society and its ramifications in regard to liberal theory. First, let us consider the sense in which these complaints are true, that civil society in fact describes, among other things, what I have attempted to distinguish as political society. On the one hand, civil society has meant, throughout history, so many things that it cannot easily be tied down to a specific meaning (Dryzek 1996:481; Ehrenberg 1999; Putnam 2000). Civil society can be traced in substantively different formulations and functions through the classical heritage, Christian theory, modern approaches including Hobbes, Kant, and Tocqueville, and up to Mansbridge and Verba (Ehrenberg 1999). Leaving this history aside and seeking a useful contemporary definition of civil society, Dryzek’s (1996) summary is worth quoting in detail: As a first approximation, civil society may be defined as all social interaction not encompassed by the state or the economy. In its political aspects it also excludes private life, although recent attacks by feminists and others on the public/private distinction make this boundary less clear. When discussing the prospects for democracy, the politicized aspects of civil society are most interesting. In this political sense, civil society consists of voluntary political association oriented by a relationship to the state, but not seeking any share in state power. (1996:481) Several points within this definition help to clarify the difference between civil society and political society. Primary is the attribute that almost universally is seen as characteristic of civil society, that it has a “relationship to the state.” This necessary relationship to the state is always combined with the qualification that civil-society associations in no sense seek to take over state

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power directly. Associated with this criterion is the exclusion, by most analysts, of “private life” from civil society, thereby sharply narrowing the broad initial suggestion that civil society represents “all social interaction not encompassed by the state or the economy.” This broader definition, “all social interaction,” would have encompassed, at least by implication, my definition of political society as described here. But the narrower definition, in conjunction with the earlier “relationship to the state,” works to distinguish civil and political society. Political society stands separate from civil society, at least conceptually, because it is very personal (I leave aside the private for the moment), and because it does not seem to reach out for, much less touch, the state. The people described by Whyte, Migdal, and Foucault in the earlier sections of this discussion were not participants in associational groups, with formal offices and rules of procedure, or even explicitly acknowledged structures and norms. Instead, these people were “self-organized,” members of groups into which they fell almost accidentally on the basis of their personal characteristics and purposes, or representative of statuses that stood in an implicit relationship to other social statuses and roles, and the demands incumbent on those relationships. A peasant may be a member of a social movement that organizes to makes demands on the state and, insofar as his purposes are not revolutionary, he is a member of civil society. But he need not be a social-movement peasant but an ordinary everyday peasant, enmeshed in relationships with landlords, local tyrants, richer and poorer neighbors, and so on. In this sense, he is interesting as an element of political, not civil, society; this distinction can also be made for the members of other societies, including advanced industrial ones. If this distinction is accepted, if there is a political society separate from the state and civil society, then liberal theory’s blind spot is preventing its dealing with a definable and important part of people’s political experience. Serious students of civil society will notice another problem area here, touching the distinction between civil and political society; this is the issue of what types of associations are to be considered as civil. Generally accepted candidates have been bourgeois society in general, in the early development of democracy; later, such groups as workers, farmers, African Americans and women; and, most recently, the democratic oppositions in Eastern Europe that preceded the government changes that occurred there, as well as the continuing activity of social movements in many different types of society. The problem is that if civil society associations are defined as socially integrated groups of individuals who seek, by their common action, to bring about social and political changes that realize their goals, then a motley crew can be seen demanding admission within this definition: white citizens councils, the Michigan Militia, the Mafia, neofascists, and so on (Ehrenberg 1999:231). “Not everything in oppositional civil society represents discursive democratic vitality” (Dryzek

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1996:481). If these undesirable groups are a part of civil society, then that inclusion might seem to undermine my claim for political society, since it would bring within civil society the sort of repressive forces suggested, at least in part, by my earlier examples.14 Yet aside from the unpleasant implications of designating racist and similar associations as part of civil society,15 such designation would still fail to bring in the type of phenomena I have termed political society, for the simple reason that these groups are organized in more or less formal terms, and political society is not so organized, but lies in a background culture in which it institutionalizes the ideas that constitute the political premises of a society. For example, if I believe that members of Group A are profoundly different from (and vastly inferior to) members of Group B, then as a result of that belief and its prevalence in my society, I can gather with my like-minded fellows and form a committee against affirmative action for Group A. The social belief, and the prevalence of such beliefs among substantial elements of a group, support the kinds of allocative activities I designate as political society. Quite separate from this foundational interaction is the specific activity of organization that creates the institutions of what we call civil society (or may so call, depending on how we feel about the group’s contribution to democracy). Even as the two phenomena are certainly linked in causal terms, I argue that they are certainly separate in conceptual terms. Recall that in many cases, when such background beliefs are not threatened, and where there is no threat to a status quo value structure, we may never see associational activity because it has not become necessary, yet the socially organizing beliefs will still be present in the society, controlling all its members and underprivileging many of those members.16

Public and Private Realms? The distinction between the private and the public makes this same point from a different perspective. The terminology was initiated by Benjamin Constant in 1814, and distinguished a private domain centered on the family, personal friends, individual work and consumption, and private beliefs and preferences, and a public existence that involved action in the world of official politics. Constant believed that “the ‘private’ sphere had come in the modern world to be the source of especially vivid pleasures, and the locus for the instantiation of especially deep and important human values” (Geuss 2001:1). A further step was contributed by the general assumption that there were different evaluative conceptions appropriate to the public and the private realm, and this made it particularly important to be able to distinguish the one from the other. John Stuart Mill suggested that a private action affects only the agent, while a public action also affects others; but history has changed our appreciation of what

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“affects only the agent” might mean. Geuss argues that even beliefs are not private, because “you may hold beliefs I find repellent or I myself may think that God will hold all those who live in a certain society responsible for homogeneous conformity of ‘true’ belief in that society.” The implications of this difficulty are extensive, since even if your behavior toward me is, at this moment, irreproachable, yet “surely it does affect me if all my neighbors are fantasizing about me . . . as an ‘infidel’ who must (eventually, when the time comes and the balance of power shifts) be given the choice between conversion and extermination” (2001:82). Such an attitude may seem far from the quiet realms of life in advanced industrial societies, but it perhaps seems far removed only to members of the mainstream societies. And in addition, the well-documented cases of civil wars in areas of the world where different ethnic or racial groups had lived in peace for years, until one day Group A rose up and murdered Group B, must suggest that the social norms that usually remain only in the background political society may, under certain circumstances, break into open warfare. Indeed, the liberal theorists who fear instability above all other social problems are an implicit argument for this possibility. At any rate, where such belief patterns may exist, nothing is private; political society extends right to the bottom, the personal end of the political continuum. In my present argument, this means that the private is no protection against the political, and supports my case that the kind of behavior I have described must be seen as part of the political, not blocked off in some private category. Hénaff and Strong (2001:23), like Geuss (2001:106), agree that there is no longer a distinction between the public and private, and analyze the problem explicitly within the larger context of democratic governance and the ambiguities of the common political experience in democratic societies. Recalling an ancient political case, when the son of Odysseus called the Achaians to assemble so that he might complain about the suitors who refused to leave his longabsent father’s house, Hénaff and Strong (2001:1–2) argue that the nature of the public and political was in that case, and always is, contestable. It was not clear that the Achaian assembly had any right to enter this private issue, and in fact it made no decision. Public space “is the space created by and for humans that is always contestable, precisely because whereas there are criteria that control admission to its purview, the right to enact and enforce those criteria is always in question” (Hénaff and Strong 2001: 4). If, according to Geuss, there is no private sphere, and if, according to Hénaff and Strong, the public is completely claimable and contestable, then political society cannot be rejected from theoretical consideration because it seems to fail to fall into one of the two traditional categories of public and private, but is entitled to take its place within the political spectrum, filling what I have called the liberal blind spot where powerful hidden institutions control people who may think themselves free.

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In the course of an original analysis of the nature of contemporary democracy, based on the theatrical metaphor of classic Greek democracy, which is beyond my purview in the present work, Hénaff and Strong pause briefly over an issue that is directly relevant to the issue of political society. Noting that the rationality of the public sphere was a proposed solution to the establishment of its legitimacy (as in Rawls’s Theory of Justice), they suggest alternatively that the social bond is not rationalist but symbolic, based on fundamental human emotional responses to common territorial experience; “the genesis of the symbolic order by which any community comes into being” is “tied to a territory, a memory, a language, customs, symbolic figures” (Hénaff and Strong 2001:25). This process is, exactly as in my Whyte example, the process observed in the formation of small groups, “clubs, gangs, cults, athletic teams” as well as larger organizations (ibid.). They go further than this, however: The social bond is, before anything else, a web of affects and symbols. Rational legitimizations always come after the fact, and most often, in order to conceal that core made of immemorial bonds, as if the acknowledgment of this uncontrollable origin of sociality constituted a threat to a state of law that claims to be based upon clear principles and upon a reason that, since the Enlightenment, has set as its task to conquer all darkness.” (Hénaff and Strong 2001:26, emphasis added) Clearly such a statement is debatable in several ways, especially in its questioning of the primacy of rationality, by which so many theorists have set so much store. The authors argue, however, that this web of affects and symbols, if not recognized and taken into account, will bubble up from below “and be glorified in perverted forms,” as in populism and fascism, or indeed in the symbolic ceremonies in which every democracy supports the allegiance of its citizens. Hénaff and Strong identify the worst form of such symbolism as that which occurs when the political is restricted to the marketplace, consumption, and image advertising: “Democracy thus loses its rationality. Images displace arguments. . . . The show never stops” (2001:27). This aspect of their argument thus strongly supports my argument that political society needs recognition, not just for analytical clarity but for social stability. The italicized phrase in the Hénaff and Strong quotation deserves special emphasis in respect to blind spots, and the admission of political society into the range of phenomena that deserve consideration by political theory. When they say that our rejection of social politics, of the kind illustrated by the Whyte, Migdal, and Foucault examples, is done “in order to conceal that core made of immemorial bonds,” Hénaff and Strong encourage theorists to recognize that Kuhnian paradigms (and their associated anomalies) are not the result of partial or temporary failures of intellectual insight, are not simply cognitive

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models with their random errors, errors made accidentally during the course of theoretical inquiry. “In order to conceal” suggests that people benefit from paradigms, especially paradigms that systematically refuse to see phenomena that are visible to other persons within the same experiential field.

“Us” and “Them” William Foote Whyte’s brief argument with political scientists, in the pages of the American Political Science Review, emphasizes this normative quality of paradigms. Whyte (1943) roundly chastised political scientists for their disinterest in all the nonmainstream ethnic groups of the day, their lack even of courtesy to non-middle-class politicians.17 Political scientists, Whyte claimed, demonstrated “unquestioning acceptance” of ideological givens, such as John T. Salter’s statement that “We have no hierarchy of classes, and therefore no hierarchy of values” (quoted from The Pattern of Politics [Whyte 1943:695]). “Unfortunately, this attitude has a very limiting effect upon the nature of research,” Whyte grumbled. “A political organization is a system of personal relations which binds together men of different grades of prestige, authority—and social position.” One cannot understand personal relations except against “the background of the social structure” (ibid.).18 Whether or not political science suffers criticism from social anthropologists gladly, Whyte does make the point that blind spots are caused by ideologies, and that ideologies protect the overprivileged from noticing the underprivileged. My point would only be that it is hard to theorize democracy unless one sees its whole spectrum, including political society. Political society can matter in very specific ways that affect the overall texture of democracy. Schneider and Ingram bring the theoretic issues discussed here directly into the American policy process, with a theory about the “social construction” of the American policy process in terms of the “deserving” and the “undeserving” (1997:102–149) that makes concrete several of the major themes of the present chapter. Schneider and Ingram define four types of policy targets, based on the social power of various social groups and categories, and the nature of society’s high or low evaluation of each group: (1) the advantaged, “who are powerful and positively constructed” (business, middle class, senior citizens, veterans, scientists); (2) the contenders, “who are powerful but negatively constructed as undeserving or greedy”(gun owners, the rich, CEOs, “big unions,” and “Wall Street bankers”); (3) the dependents, “who are positively constructed as ‘good’ people but relatively needy or helpless,” with little power (mothers, children); (4) and the deviants, “who are negatively constructed as undeserving, violent, mean,” and have no political power (criminals, gangs, drug kingpins) (1997:102, 108–109). The authors argue that these social valuation categories result from both objective and subjective experience of

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events, persons, groups, regions, and countries, and “sometimes are so ingrained that most people accept them as real and as the only interpretations they can imagine,” although change may occur over time (1997:106). The policy process based on these types of categories is not neutral but socially biased to reflect the underlying beliefs I have described as arising in the informal personal relationships of political society. Rather than undertaking scientific inquiry, policy-makers “actively search for issues that have been constructed in such a way that they present an opportunity to gain power, claim credit for popular policy, or increase the legitimacy and stature of the policy maker.” Policy-makers, according to these authors, “carefully select from among the available issues or events the ones that will enable them to confer beneficial policy on advantaged populations . . . or punishment on deviants” and look for cases where there is an opportunity to put a “public interest” label on a policy designed for more narrow interests. This behavior is not unfamiliar to us, of course, but Schneider and Ingram neatly tie it to the subject here at issue. “Policy designs contain both instrumental and symbolic messages that teach lessons about democracy, justice, citizenship . . . these messages . . . are the translation dynamics that link policy to societal conditions.” Such policy designs “exacerbate inequality in wealth, status, and power as those who already have the most tend to gain even more” (1997:104). Again it should be emphasized that I do not claim that this picture is at all new; rather I argue that the well-known phenomena described in the Schneider and Ingram study take on their full significance only if recognized within a larger theoretical matrix that includes consideration of the conceptualization that is my subject, political society. Where political society is allowed to exist only beneath the surface, not recognized by prevailing paradigms, it leaves theorists with universalized abstractions that preclude empirical resolution. Liberal theorists have, under the prevailing paradigm, moved off to theorizing about “delight” and “enchantment” (Bennett 2001, Fisher 1998), as if all basic problems within liberal societies had been long ago solved, without giving sufficient attention to the many people in the political world for whom these issues will not be, for perhaps generations, a next-on-the-list option. As Cavell puts it, in respect to original-position liberal argument: “What if there is a cry of justice that expresses a sense not of having lost out in an unequal yet fair struggle, but of having from the start been left out” (Cavell 1990:xxxviii, emphasis in original). It is this paradigmatic oversight that needs recognition.

Closing Remarks The present discussion has suggested that political theory restricts itself inappropriately by focusing solely on the state, and can profitably expand its scope

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of interest to include what I have called political society, the web of social relationships that in every group, of whatever size, forms the foundation, background, and invisible government on which more formal and visible institutions arise. This may seem ominous. Political society is not a happy group of folks gathered under the neighborhood oak tree. Perhaps not everyone has been invited to attend such gatherings in the first place. Even among those who are included, agendas vary. Participants may carry weapons of various sort, and may be delighted to use them. Political society is not universal but particular, not fair but biased, not egalitarian but hierarchical, the realm of socially created and socially sanctioned injustice. Outsiders to the core leadership group are taught to believe they are worthless, and they come to believe this as if it were natural. If they forget their place in a moment of absentmindedness, they are shouted down, as were Whyte’s socially subordinated bowlers. What is the political theorist to do with such a potentially unpleasant bundle of facts? It is not enough to recognize them. Recent difference theories (Connolly 1991, Young 1990) typically restrict themselves to the state level, and as a result of this first restriction they inherit a second restriction to universal solutions at a level of government so high that it does not reach everyday life.19 I would argue that the fault here is not the theory so much as the axiomatic blind spot; to perceive only the state as real is to place severe limitations on the ability to theorize the everyday politics that creates the over and underprivileged roles of everyday political society. Flathman’s (1992, 1998) theory of “willful individualism” comes closer to providing guidance in the pursuit of a wider theory that fits with the kind of political society discussed here because voluntarism is put forth not as a program of public policy but as an ideal for individuals who will “go their own ways” in political society without giving full attention to social conventions (1992:13, 205). Flathman emphasizes that this modified Nietzschean imperative, original because it is based on a personal rather than an institutional notion of aristocracy, permits collective cooperation and republican virtue as much as solitude, and contains an almost scientific understanding of the foundation of institutions—institutions that are recognized but not unduly honored. Such persons, guided by will rather than reason, “discipline themselves against activities that are grossly destructive of self and others” (1992:210). This approach is clearly individualistic, in contrast to mainstream liberals who have a strong collective orientation, and it is therefore appropriate as a first approximation of the kind of attitudes toward which a theory based on recognition of the harshness of political society might explore; yet it is both more liberal and more voluntarist than is required here.20 What seems called for in respect to the construction of the individual, faced with the socially sanctioned system of privileges that is political society, is something closer to Migdal’s survival theory (1988). From this viewpoint, what

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is called for is not so much a rootless freedom to realize and enact a constantly expanding selfhood, which is a childlike ideal, more suited to naive idealists than to political philosophers, but a political construction of the self in which the individual governs her or his own self, within the constraints imposed by political society and the physical world. The state continues to exist, and one obeys its laws because its agencies take one to court otherwise; but one does not idealize the state, or direct one’s political self entirely in the state’s direction. Part of the liberal blind spot shows up in the general belief that participation in politics means discussing national (state-oriented) issues with one’s fellows, seeking political satisfaction, therefore, in call-in shows and Internet chat sites. Such participation is unsatisfying because it makes no difference in the actual political world; it is pure chat, ephemeral and uninformed. Contemporary declines in the rates of voting undoubtedly stem from the same source—voting might matter, every once in a while it does matter, but in general it does not matter much. Recognition that politics inheres in our daily life in political society opens a variety of more interesting possibilities.21 Recognizing that political society is composed both of well-meaning people and ill-meaning people, and that the individual is entitled only to the everyday rights to which she or he can stake a convincing claim, the individual becomes truly political and may come to enjoy that responsibility as political entitlement more inspiring than the abstract duties imposed by the state.22

Chapter Three Standing Aloof from the State Thoreau on Self Government

A man may have other affairs to attend to. —Henry Thoreau

Introduction Henry Thoreau’s vigorously critical attitude to the state, his refusal to be considered a party to any contract he had not explicitly acknowledged, and his belief that human beings have more important things than the state with which to concern themselves,1 have long ensured his exclusion from the canons of political philosophy. Even in American political theory his contribution is usually restricted to the essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” and Thoreau is considered relevant only in reference to minority protest rather than to the philosophical mainstream. This attitude is understandable in light of Thoreau’s strictures on constituted government, as in “Slavery in Massachusetts” in which he defines the slaves as those officials and citizens who cravenly give their obedience to the lawful government.2 And when he was driven to outrage, Thoreau the writer was capable of extremes of rhetoric that have lost him many potential friends.3 The critical tide has recently been shifting in Thoreau’s favor. He has come to be recognized as a theorist sensitive to both the positive and the negative sides of American democracy,4 as a theorist with a rich appreciation of the breadths and depths of human freedom, as an advocate and defender of democratic individualism, and even as a precursor of postmodernism (Bennett 1994, Cavell 1981, Jenco 2003, Kateb 1992, Richardson 1986, Rosenblum 1987, Taylor 61

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1996, Walker 1998). I extend this growing appreciation of Thoreau as a political theorist through a consideration of his ideas on self-government, particularly individual self-government, a concept that unifies his diverse writings into a theory with direct relevance for today’s interests and concerns. Serious students of American democracy have increasingly recognized that modern liberal democratic states cannot properly be characterized as self-government.5 This suggests that if self-government is still a valid ideal, its locus may lie elsewhere than with the state. My suggestion is that self-government may properly lie in the individual person rather than in the state or in society, and my argument is that Thoreau’s political philosophy speaks to exactly this purpose. The originality of Thoreau’s theory of individual self-government stems from his reaching back to classical Socratic questions (how must he live?), from his rejection of social contract theory (he is party to no contract he has not signed), and from his recognition that in the woods and the fields there is no authority structure to set one man over another. The self-scrutiny this understanding of the state and nature brought upon him was like the approach of Socrates, but in Thoreau it comes to us without the Socratic reverence for the human laws of the polity. For Thoreau, such laws were those that abetted the abomination of slavery; and the government under which he lived could not even do a decent job of maintaining lifesaving stations on Cape Cod (“The Beach”; Moldenhauer 1988:57–60; see also 209).6 The laws of Athens, in the Crito, could claim to have provided Socrates with “all the good things” with which his life had been blessed (Plato 1954:92); the laws of the United States could make no comparable claim that Thoreau could accept. Because the state could not provide existential justifications, Thoreau turned for guidance to the natural world and its operations, and to the human individual’s place in that world. He saw, as Darwin would shortly also see,7 that the natural world worked from the bottom up to create itself. In such a world men and women had no preeminent place but were joint participants with natural forces, some of which were benign to man, while others were hostile or indifferent. Thoreau’s conclusion from this analysis was that we must “mind our own business” (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971: 18, 92, 98, 326, passim) becoming self-governed individuals, where government implies neither absolute sovereignty nor autonomy but the affirmation of self-chosen principles in the face of whatever challenges the environment may impose.8 Readers of Walden will recall that Thoreau was an eminently social person—the hut is frequently full of visitors, or his sister is coming across the back lots with fresh cookies, or he is staying so late in the village that he must stumble home in the dark; he even borrowed the ax with which to hew beams for the Walden hut because it was “the most generous course” “to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise” (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:41). But Thoreau’s definition of the self-governed individual means that

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such an individual has higher responsibilities that take precedence over assistance to or care for others.9 Help to one’s neighbor consists primarily in the leading of one’s life well; it is one’s duty, one’s right, and very often one’s delight.10 He does, after all, urge, in one of his most quoted phrases, that we march to our own drummer (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:326). Thoreau’s works, when seen in their entirety, contain an integrated and powerful political philosophy. His economics speaks directly to Adam Smith and the division of labor, and he anticipates Karl Marx on alienation. His social theory reaches into the history of Concord to study the ways in which both native Americans and settlers were constrained by their circumstances, and how history has no favorites—when necessary, everyone acts badly, and yet the outcome may be positive.11 Finally, there is his biological theory of how each individual plant, animal, or man, seeks its niche. In such a landscape, Thoreau’s individual person explores his own multiple dimensions of mind and body, and grows to maturity as some of those dimensions prove preferable to others. Such self-government is so engrossing that Thoreau centers life on it, having little attention left to spare on official government institutions. From these he remains aloof except when their activities pass his threshold of outrage, at which point he is able, as conventional citizens are not, to take independent action.12 Thoreau did not wish to overthrow the state—he even thought someday it might make itself useful in saving mountains and forests. But he is almost alone in thinking the individual man or woman will always be more important, and more deeply political, than the state.13

Integrating Government and Self What did Thoreau mean by individual self-government? The question has been difficult to answer, difficult even to pose, because Thoreau was a complex man, and the diversity of his writings tended to obscure the shape of his political philosophy taken as a whole. Readers familiar only with Walden and “Resistance to Civil Government” might reasonably assume that Thoreau was a solitary egoist, without concern for community or history; Thoreau’s lifelong friend Emerson worried about his wildness (Richardson 1986:224, 226). Recent scholarship is righting the balance in this respect, simply by bringing all of Thoreau’s works together for unified consideration. In this light, the old charges against Thoreau fall to the ground. He was as aware as anyone that human beings owe one another something, as joint participants in an existentially uncertain enterprise. But there is always a balance to be struck between the requirements of the individual and the community, and Thoreau struck this balance in a way many critics have found unexpected, at best, and unduly harsh, at worst. Thoreau’s overall theory is better understood if we resist the attempt to categorize his work

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under single labels and accept the breadth of his writing as those of a social theorist,14 as indeed all political philosophers have been social theorists. “Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings” (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:78). This arresting sentence carries considerable political weight in Thoreau’s model. It mandates help to others in extreme situations; the individual is not expected to explore the wilder shores of individualism if and while there are human tasks that require immediate attention. But there is a second burden in Thoreau’s phrase, placed by the mandate to tie one’s own shoelaces. Freedom is not infinite, according to this approach, but requires and is based on primary attention to the imperatives of everyday life. Thoreau in this sense is a bridge between liberals, who emphasize rescue, and conservatives, favoring self-reliance; he puts practical limits on the possibilities of self-reliance, and ethical limits on the necessity of rescue. Thoreau’s approach to self-government summarizes these two dimensions in a refrain that occurs throughout his writings, the principle of “mind your own business” (e.g., Shanley 1971:18, 19, passim), a phrase which in Thoreau’s work has a philosophical implication quite beyond the colloquial sense that makes it equivalent to “get off my back” or “get a life.” “Mind your own business” does in part certainly mean that people should stay out of each other’s lives (except where ‘drowning’ is an issue), that one should not give charity or expect it (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:74). Thoreau’s preferred form of assistance is indirect; it is better, by one’s individual strength, to give other persons the courage to face their own lives calmly, individually, and independently, rather than to give them pity or money (ibid.). But “mind your own business” has a far broader meaning as it relates to a person’s own search for personal selfgovernment, the thesis that the individual’s primary activity in life is to identify what that business is, and pursue it with vigor and intelligence. The goal of this search for one’s “own business” is obviously not a financial one; Thoreau enthusiastically excoriates those who seek wealth, profit, or commercial success. Beyond designating the quest for gold as unworthy of anyone’s life, Thoreau is open-minded about what sort of business each individual may find. Unlike the high-minded but perhaps conventional Emerson, Thoreau does not require one’s business to be elevated and inspiring; and unlike the inspired but perhaps effusive Whitman, Thoreau does not mandate only lives of high artistic or philosophical achievement. Walden instead honors the Canadian woodsman (Walden, Visitors; Shanley 1971:144–150), a person of no pretensions whatsoever who nonetheless loves his work and does it with small refinements such as cutting trees close to the ground so sleds can ride safely over the stumps.15 A man of simple background himself, and one on whom the citizens of Concord tended to look down as a man who never held an honest job, Thoreau was thus not an elitist in any of the usual senses.16 But Thoreau had very definite ideas about what a well-governed individual would be.

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To inquire more thoroughly into what Thoreau means by self-government, it is useful to begin with what he thought it was not. First of course was his conviction that self-government was not achieved by sacrificing oneself to the prison of a farm or a business, activities that occupied time best spent elsewhere (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:4–6; Conclusion; ibid. 84). This was not just a loss of time but a loss of self. But what was the ‘elsewhere’ in which one should properly invest oneself? This second point brings up Thoreau’s entirely Marxian sense that the division of labor entails the alienation of the worker. A person who works at many tasks or at many aspects of a single task must (or may) at some point stop for a moment to consider what she or he will do next (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:46). This pause represents a moment of human intelligence and human self-government, of which the one-task laborer is deprived. The long opening chapter of Walden, which Richardson (1986:167) identifies as Thoreau’s answer to Adam Smith, details this phenomenon of alienation, to which the hut at Walden Pond was to be a solution.17 Beyond these negative mandates, designed to allow escape from conventional, other-directed tasks, there are everywhere in Thoreau’s writings positive rules of guidance toward achieving individual self-government. First was the mandate to do one’s real work, whatever it is, with overwhelming concentration and intensity. Thoreau exaggerates the point, but nonetheless gives a useful iconic model of it in the tale of the artist of Kouroo “who was disposed to strive after perfection” and determined to carve a staff, a work that he carried out with such devotion that it took him generations to find the appropriate wood; dynasties fell over long years as he strove to bring his task to perfection. In his devotion to his work, the man transcended time and found himself. “He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions”; such work, and the truth of a person’s commitment to it, alone “wears well,” while all else is false (Walden, Conclusion; Shanley 1971:326–327). Some admirers of Thoreau interpret him as exemplifying an unconditioned and unconstrained personal freedom, but such interpretations ignore much of Thoreau’s writings and indeed his own life, which were dedicated to hard work and a study of nature that grew over his lifetime into a scientific career that anticipated some of the Darwinian revolution (Harding 1982:429; Richardson 1986:376–384). Freedom was not an inchoate subjectivity, for Thoreau, but the option to choose his own work, and to do it with dedication.

Freedom as Maturity A major dimension of what Thoreau’s writings define as self-government is that the individual’s life be based on what he called, with a New Englander’s emphasis, “granitic” truth and not on illusions or baseless optimism.18 This is

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perhaps what made Thoreau so unpopular with modern readers who condemned his dogmatism. Thoreau was not, however, mindlessly dogmatic but a prescient student of the phenomena of modern life, such as the way the newspapers, even in his day, made granitic truth hard to come by (compare Edelman 1988). As a somewhat choleric early social scientist,19 Thoreau was also, as Bennett (1994) emphasizes, aware of the threat to self-government constituted by the ‘They,’ those who spoke so firmly through his tailoress when she announced, when he asked for a garment of a particular form, that “They do not make them so now” (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:25). More than most American democratic theorists, Thoreau was sharply aware of the disciplines exerted by anonymous social forces, forces lodged in even Thoreau’s own proclivities to accede to conventions (Bennett 1994:1–15). Because of these direct and indirect external threats, Thoreau says we must treat our minds as children and ourselves as guardians, “careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.” The newspapers mislead, and even science may obscure truth if it clouds with dusty facts the clarity of the whole of existence, which unifies human with natural purpose (“Life Without Principle”; Rosenblum 1996:116). The path to individual self-government begins with one’s ability to cut oneself loose from distracting social forces and the illusory values they impose. We do not need stylish or new clothes, do not need coffee or tea, do not need Greek- or Gothic-style houses; these empty not only our pocketbooks, they also cloud our minds and spirits. But Thoreau’s freedom from social constraints is not the unlimited freedom some liberal democratic writers would make it, a private realm of limitless satisfactions separate from the public political world.20 For Thoreau, freedom is quite literally pedestrian. Thoreau describes himself as free when his house is in order, his debts paid, and his work done (“Walking”; Atkinson 1937:599; Walden, The Village; Shanley 1971:167), and he is released for his daily hikes over the hills of Concord. This is not so much an emotional or affective freedom as it is a state brought on by his fulfillment of what he minimally defines as his human obligations. As Thoreau’s ideas on the division of labor coincided with those of Marx, so did their attitude toward human freedom coincide in a belief that necessity is its major foundation.21 Finding the self meant, for Thoreau, first the recognition of necessity and then the adaptation to it, finding just how much life space had to be given up in recognition of physical needs.22 Furthermore, in a society in which medical knowledge was inadequate, necessity rather than unlimited freedom constantly intruded on human existence. The goal of his theory would not be a freedom seen daily to be unrealistic; rather his theory would designate such a freedom as illusion, to be peeled away and discarded by the self-governing person. This hardheadedness deprives Thoreau’s theory of an easy romanticism, and may be one reason Thoreau’s readers have chosen not to notice the political qualities of his writing, amply evident though they are.

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Finding the self is the same as building it, in Thoreau’s writings, because the contradiction between a modernist approach (finding) and a postmodern one (building) was not yet relevant. For Thoreau it was largely a matter of finding the pieces within oneself and putting them into good order, building with them a coherent structure. This indeed is probably the most concise way to describe his theory of individual self-government. The process of finding–building was neither the work of a moment, nor was it unobstructed. In an interesting metaphor, Thoreau describes a house, a large house without internal walls and open to the rafters, where each individual resident can be seen by all the others, who thus appreciate their own and the others’ roles in keeping the household operating (Walden, House-Warming; Shanley 1971:243–244). The importance of the house’s, or the self ’s, being in good working order is emphasized by Thoreau’s recognition that individuals, like governments, may be faced with serious threats to survival and potential breakdown. If all the different components of the self are not aware of one another, response will be inadequate, for what is hidden cannot be well assembled, or well governed. Courage is therefore a major component of individual self-government for Thoreau, and he is as usual hardheaded in his acceptance of this limitation on human possibility, although in the specific cases that faced him he did his best to oppose such limitations. Courage is primarily quotidian for Thoreau; the goal of individual self-government is to give one pleasure in the sunrise—that is, to take satisfaction in the everyday of life (Walden, Higher Laws; Shanley 1971:216; Conclusion; ibid. 328). This theme closes the circle begun by his original emphasis on freeing the self from social and intellectual screens that keep the individual from knowing who she or he actually is; and lacking that knowledge, unable to know what anything else is, in the real world (Walden, What I Lived For; Shanley 1971:94, 96). The weight of Thoreau’s philosophy thus falls not on the expressive or emotional side of human experience; it is not a refuge from political or other realities, not a dream of personal escape. Rather, Thoreau’s political theory of individual self-government is Apollonian (Richardson 1986:192–193), emphasizing human clarity, purpose, and wealth of experience, but giving the greater importance to cognition, intellectual honesty, science and understanding. Thoreau’s political metaphor is the well-known bean field behind the hut at Walden Pond (Shanley 1971:155–166); he was quite explicit about the field’s condition—it was neither fully cultivated nor fully wild. Rather it was halfcultivated as a deliberate choice of its farmer. We understand the importance of its not being fully cultivated; for Thoreau, this means that the ‘They’ have not taken it over; the field, or the self, has not been fully civilized, not fully disciplined by social forces. The self, like the bean field, is partly cultivated; it does its job, it contributes to society, it makes itself useful, but other things are allowed to grow—something wild remains.

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Thoreau’s chapter on the bean field (Shanley 1971:155–166) has been harvested of several philosophic lessons by later interpreters, but I do not know of any who have given full importance to the fact of weeding.23 In a postagricultural world, readers may not sense the full impact of this process, but what Thoreau is talking about is the deliberate choice of which plants are to live and which to die. Translated into personal terms, the lesson might be that all individuals have a variety of alternatives available for the construction of their lives, and they inevitably choose which to encourage and which to discourage. When Thoreau was young, he hunted and fished and believes this to be valuable still for the young; as he has matured, however, he has found first hunting, then fishing, to be distasteful (Walden, Higher Laws, Shanley 1971:211–213). More explicitly, he remarks that one should so act that one’s higher self, at a later point, will find nothing to criticize (Walden, Where I Lived . . . 90). The norms are internal to the individual, but they do imply standards, standards of sanity and maturity. The beauty of such a field is, for Thoreau, that it is a world in itself, perfectly capable of minding its own business without any outside help. The field can grow in its own way, governed by its own natural laws, self-governed as Thoreau himself, as an individual, sought to be self-governed. For Thoreau, individual self-government is a way of living within the boundaries of freedom and necessity, and an acceptance of one’s inescapable personal responsibility for the res privata rather than the res publica. As for the state, it will have to accept that its citizens must mind their own business, and that they may not give the state a great deal of attention. The state must also recognize that, as Thoreau so vividly showed, individually self-governed people will be formidable if they become thoroughly annoyed with the state’s activities. They accept everyday error in state policy, will “let it go” without concern, as Thoreau remarks (“Resistance to Civil Government”; Rosenblum 1996:9); but larger faults will get the citizens’ full disapproving attention. So individual self-government is not at all apolitical—quite the opposite. Women and men who hold themselves to standards of behavior will do no less for the state.

The Nature of the Self If the student of Thoreau’s political philosophy is to take his ideas about selfgovernment in an at least partially literal sense, it is necessary to consider whether Thoreau can be said to adhere to the view that the self is multiple. This is important because if Thoreau’s psychology is based on either Locke’s Enlightenment man or Hobbes’s rational man, then self-government is a moot issue. Lockean man is assumed to have a natural constitution already formed when he

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enters political interchange, and there is no issue of individual self-government because the individual is, by hypothesis, already unified (Simmons 1992:110–111).24 The rational man model that has achieved such prominence in every field from economics to philosophy similarly does not need or permit individual self-government because such individuals are given a predetermined and unchangeable structure by the presumption of rationality. Coherence is entailed by the definition of self-interest, maximization, knowledge of goals, singlepeaked preference curves, and the like. In such models the individual is considered, a priori, to be an established, fixed, naturally coherent human being, and the question of how such an individual became coherent is outside the field of theoretic discourse. Such models are increasingly questioned in political theory (Strong 1992), and in economics (Arrow 1994), but it is perfectly possible that in the early nineteenth century, Thoreau still adhered to one or another version of this approach and, if he did, then the fact would undercut my present argument. The evidence in Thoreau’s writings is not entirely clear, but if full consideration is given to the proportions of material on either side of the issue, there is strong support for his acceptance of the postmodernist view of the matter, that the components of the self are multiple and that therefore selfgovernment can be problematized. While it is agreed by authorities on Thoreau’s life and works that he did not, from an early age, adhere to the family’s traditional Christianity, it is also agreed that Christian ethics were harder for Thoreau to escape (Harding 1982, Richardson 1986). In some cases, he seems to adhere to a classical psychology that separated soul and body, or mind and body, or mind and soul. This is suggested by Thoreau’s well-known remark on his doubleness, the sense that there was a spectator in him that looked on his actions from a certain distance and remained in some way separate from his everyday self (Walden, Solitude; Shanley 1971:134–135). Thoreau also emphasizes, at one point, a New England sense of individual character, as pervasive in a human being’s every action, as inborn, and as perhaps outside the individual’s real control. Human nature was not for Thoreau constant across humanity, but might seem constant within each individual. On the other hand, and far outweighing these conventional elements of psychological analysis, is Thoreau’s vivid appreciation of the multiplicity of an individual’s psychological components, as well as the skills and roles by which and within which persons learn what they can do, what they may do, and therefore who they are. This view is aptly summarized in his poem, “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied/ By a chance bond together” (Week, Friday; Hovde 1980:383).25 Of course this might refer to mere transient attitudes, impulses, random actions, not component parts of a self-governable individual; or it may represent merely poetic fancy. But Thoreau’s own life and career emphasize how multiple and how enduring these self-elements might be.26 All these

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selves were important to him, and taught him the extent to which human roles are not merely social accidents but may represent dimensions of the individual self ’s definition of its own community of needs and purposes. Related to this openness of personality is Thoreau’s emphasis on the uncultivated areas of the self, new possibilities and interests that should never be closed off because they represent the creative, growing edge of the self, its connection with physical nature. This sense that the self is never complete is central to the idea of individual self-government because direction over a changing system is always uncertain, always active in striving to recognize, evaluate, welcome, and incorporate new possibilities. One may speculate that Thoreau’s attitude to the natural world was stimulated by his prematurely postmodern sense of human uncertainty, and that he found in the regularities of nature a stability and regularity that human beings could not achieve. Yet he also affirmed the sensitivity of this environment, as in his unexpected portrait of the Walden ice cover as it first gently and then dramatically cracked and melted under the sun of the oncoming spring (Walden, Spring, Shanley 1971:301–302). If nature was, for Thoreau, a source of stability, it was also a source of an exquisite sensitivity, and an object of study in order that human beings might better achieve both qualities. Taught by ill health, loss, and depression, that human existence cannot fully be defined by its highest moments of affirmation, Thoreau took as his great question the issue of how to create order, sanity, and wisdom in a self confronted by all the exigencies of human transience, political ignorance, and indifferent time. Overall, the texts provide strong support for the idea that Thoreau’s definition of the self is, as with Nietzsche, a multiplicity that may, or may not, be brought into a condition that might be called self-government.

Getting Past the State The degree to which Thoreau is properly at home among political philosophers is emphasized by recent scholarship and is evident everywhere in his writings, once the reader throws off the easy initial preconceptions about Thoreau. There are throughout his works almost constant references to, or echoes of, the political philosophers of his time and of earlier periods. Richardson (1986:138, 267) draws attention to Thoreau’s familiarity with the work of Adam Smith and the degree to which Walden’s opening section on “Economy” is a direct challenge to Smith’s economic doctrines. Taylor (1996) emphasizes Thoreau’s deep and abiding concern with social analysis of the early American republic, and his effort to comprehend analytically the inequities inherent in American national development in such works as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that are often considered mere nature-writing or bucolic travelogue. Walker (1998:845, 855)

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argues that Walden is not “the work of a petulant and disaffected Romantic individualist” but “may well be one of our most resonant and useful works of political theory.” It is interesting also to observe the similarities between Thoreau and Rousseau, as in the Walden sections that anathematize the arts and sciences (as in Rousseau’s First Discourse [Bennett 1990:569]). A contemporary of Marx, Thoreau shows an equal interest in the problems of the capitalist division of labor and its relation to human despair (Walker 1998). There is also the unexpected discovery of Nietzschean themes in Thoreau’s work (Bennett 1994, Kateb 1992), in respect to the nature of human psychology and the problems of political experience. The argument for Thoreau’s entitlement to consideration as a full-scale political theorist, as a political philosopher, has thus strong grounds both in his texts and the critical commentary on those texts.27 Quite apart from Thoreau’s resemblances to other famous philosophers, however, I believe Thoreau presents us with a radically original thesis in respect to the boundaries of political theory. Foucault (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991:ix) has thrown in the face of political theorists the challenge that we have never “cut off the king’s head,” have never escaped completely from the ancient political authority structure that still defines, and constrains, our theories of the human condition.28 Foucault’s charge is difficult to deny because liberal theorists now seem invariably to restrict their attention primarily to the state; the state is the sine qua non, it is the problem, it is the solution. And since so many of the theories designed to criticize liberal theory have recently been more and more incorporated in its ample bounds, Foucault’s challenge seems unanswerable.29 Except of course for Thoreau. In the context of state-centered liberalism, it is clear why Thoreau has been so generally ignored: he entirely lacks reverence for or care for the state. In the mainstream context it is difficult to classify Thoreau as anything but an anarchist; and while anarchism may be intellectually interesting, no one can take it seriously as an ordering principle for large-scale societies. In its lack of attention to political theory’s classic concern with the state as the epitome of human politics, therefore, Thoreau’s theory has not until quite recently received appropriate attention.30 Thoreau is not the anarchist31 he appears to be if one studies only the socalled political writings on civil resistance, slavery, and John Brown. A wider reading in Thoreau’s works, which scholars now generally agree are everywhere political (Bennett 1994, Kateb 1992, Richardson 1986, Rosenblum 1987, Taylor 1996, Walker 1998), shows that he hoped as much as anyone that the state might come to represent justice, and in his optimistic moments Thoreau thought the state might even be useful, might help save important social resources such as forests and wild lands (Richardson 1986). Yet Thoreau does, almost alone, take a radical stance in respect to the state and does, almost alone, stand up to Foucault’s challenge and cuts off the head of the state, figuratively, by denying it his respect or his attention.

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I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject. . . . I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. . . . I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion. (“Resistance to Civil Government”; Rosenblum 1996:17)

Self-Government as Self-Control The issue of self-government and its relation to social behavior and commitments has been explored in depth by a number of theorists attracted to the premises of individualism but wary of the lack of social control it seems to imply.32 The issue has been joined especially in the case of Nietzsche’s work, interpretations of which have recently come to emphasize the inward directed rather than socially exploitative aspects of his philosophy. These interpretations have direct relevance to the political theory of Thoreau as it has been defined in this chapter, and their analyses serve to answer questions readers may have about the tractability of self-governed individuals, tending to themselves and aloof from the state. Several political theorists (Flathman 1992, Thiele 1990, Warren 1988) have emphasized Nietzsche’s radical postulate with respect to the self, and used this thesis to reformulate his theory in greater consonance with democratic norms and with my present argument.33 Although Thiele directs his attention to self-government especially at the elite levels of philosopher, artist, and saint, I believe his analysis applies equally well to what we think of as less heroic personalities.34 Flathman’s emphasis on the ordinary is admirably appropriate to Thoreau’s ideas. Both, however, agree on the central structure of self-government. Their argument begins with Nietzsche’s statement in Beyond Good and Evil (#19) that “our body is nothing but a social structure of many souls” (Flathman 1992:165), or, in other words, “the individual [is] a community” (Thiele 1990:37). Thiele’s interpretation of Nietzschean individualism focuses almost entirely on the importance of politics within the individual, especially under circumstances in which “no transcendental standards exist” and the individual must “embody his own justification” (12). Thiele emphasizes, as does my present inquiry, that the direction of government is not external to the self but is internal, the self-overcoming theme of Nietzsche entirely separated from any assumption that this will create power over others. “Quite likely the Nietzschean hero will remain bereft of all forms of worldly achievement”; will be one who “tends to go silently through the world” (Human All Too Human #134), engaged in a constant struggle to transcend his own boundaries (Thiele 1990:20– 21). “The paradigm being offered is that of one who has become sovereign and

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unique, a law unto himself, not others.” He is not even an exemplar because his virtue is incommensurable (42–43). Thoreau’s advocacy of self-finding and selfaffirmation shows how close the theorists are on this postmodern point: “Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road,” though ordinary folk miss it. “His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two” (“Life Without Principle”; Atkinson 1937:719). Flathman expands this view by placing it at a central position within liberal practice, which instead of a passion for “commonality, transparency, and cooperation” should substitute an appreciation of “diversity, disagreement, and mutual indifference” (Flathman 1992:166, italics added). Flathman makes also an argument that is essential to the present approach to self-government, in removing the connotations of elitist from the Nietzschean individual. Free-spiritedness and self-overcoming, according to Flathman, may not be appreciated by everyone, but nonetheless are designed “for anyone, not for a distinct political, social or cultural stratum.” Liberalism, Flathman continues,”must credit the great preponderance of human beings with considerable capacity for self-command or self-control” (210). If this leaves some question as to how one is to distinguish the individual from Nietzsche’s herd, the criterion is a commitment to purposes “that complicate and endanger, amplify, heighten, and intensify” life (211). The reason that such a self-governing individual is compatible with an everyday society is that her or his energies are directed inward, toward the political problem of order. In the initial creation of the soul, passions were “pitted against each other rather than loosing them in the public realm” (Thiele 1990:54). Instead of the Platonic division into reason and passion, Nietzsche provided multiple passions, “each with its own capacity for reason and will to dominate” (56). The internal regime will be an aristocracy, which makes a rule of the exception (67), but self-control will not be so much mastery as coordination of the individual’s instincts (171). Freedom is not an excuse for anarchy (53), and “style” in living is the creation of unity out of diversity (63). The goal is not absolute good order, however, but a process of improving order; the real distinction is between souls that are “being put into order” and those “falling into disorder” (91). Growth is a process defined politically; there is a “rearrangement of drives, a change of political regime” (209). Is it certain that this process of self-realization is not dangerous for other persons who find themselves in the environment of this self-centered, selfenhancing individual? Both Flathman and Thiele agree on the interpretation central to my investigation of the term self-government, in believing that the essence of the matter is self-discipline (Flathman 1992:197), and that free individuals tend to be moderate because their energies are directed to internal goals (Thiele 1990:23). Both scholars make another point that is relevant to selfgoverned individuals: that the consciousness of personal order and its sense of

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power makes such individuals magnanimous, on the Nietzschean principle of self-interest that magnanimity solves problems before the unhappy others become inconvenient to the self (Thiele 1990:75). Flathman suggests that selfordered individuals are so flushed with strength that they can endure with equanimity or at least indifference the ills they may suffer (Flathman 1992:204). But he warns against noblesse oblige because it evokes both the arrogance of the elite and the lack of gratitude of the masses, who may not appreciate the largesse of their betters (206). Thoreau stated the same principle from the bottom up: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. . . . No, I would rather suffer evil the natural way.” Thoreau concludes (Walden, Economy: Shanley 1971:74) that man’s only safe way to help others is to give them his example of a courageously lived life, for anything else intrudes on their individuality.

Other Interpreters Well then, are we so sure Thoreau is not an anarchist after all? I argue that the answer is still No, he is not an anarchist. What Thoreau does is rather to give a new meaning to self-government, a meaning that transforms it from national self-government (democracy) to individual self-government—within the state, insofar as possible accepting of the state, but with a higher conception of selfgovernment than the state is able to represent. Under such a revised interpretation of Thoreau’s approach, much that seems nonpolitical or antipolitical about his writings falls into its proper place and takes on its directly political meaning. Scorn for the state becomes not Thoreau’s central political characteristic but a sidelight; Walden takes on its full dimensions as a rounded, original, powerful theory with implications beyond solely American political experience. The idea of individual self-government is different from many of the other concepts used so frequently in recent literature to describe the self (such as autonomy, authenticity, agency; see Digeser 1995) because individual selfgovernment is not an escape from politics but is itself deeply political. The idea of individual self-government, as I argue here that Thoreau defines it, does not represent a limitless and illusory freedom from rule (Rorty 1989), but a reinterpretation of the locus of and responsibility for rule and government as residing in the individual self. Where liberalism has come to emphasize collective norms of care and public assistance, the concept of individual self-government implies that the true frontier of democratic development is within the individual person, a person who has other affairs than the state to attend to. Thoreau charts not a wide highway to endless freedom, but a rocky path “across lots” to human self-government. It is the difference between irresponsible self-maximization and mature political personhood.35

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My interpretation of Thoreau’s writings builds on and develops the work of a number of recent political theorists. Kateb (1992) takes the most comprehensive view of Thoreau’s new relevance, arguing that Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists are the true “second generation” of American political theorists after the founding generation, and that they make a unique contribution to our understanding of American democracy. On them he bases a theory of democratic individuality, which, in contrast to recent liberal approaches to democratic development, emphasizes the positive qualities of individualism, in a special form of individuality created by, and fruitful for, practical democratic politics. Kateb (1992:24–27) convincingly argues that traditional authority relationships are radically undercut, in democratic societies, by the mere spectacle of leaders’ asking for support; and that this process puts all sorts of new ideas into the human imagination. But I believe Kateb’s conjoining Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman loses much of Thoreau’s separate contribution, and in light of Schoolman’s (1995:xxii) comments I wish to emphasize Thoreau’s greater intellectual concentration and balance, as distinct from his peers.36 Kateb is furthermore incautious in categorizing Thoreau as an adherent of liberal democracy ( Jenco 2003). My interpretation draws also on the work of Rosenblum (1987, 1996), who emphasizes Thoreau’s deep concern with self-guidance. “The great interest and originality of Thoreau’s political thought is precisely the way he situates democratic citizenship in the larger contours of a life well spent” (Rosenblum 1996:xxvii). However, I do not find Rosenblum’s label of “romantic heroism” entirely appropriate for Thoreau, even while recognizing that it corrects what she views as the more sterile Lockean view of the self (Rosenblum 1987). Romantic as a descriptive term for Thoreau may not be wrong, but it is misleading, suggesting a Whitmanesque self-exhibitionism that I do not believe well captures Thoreau’s particular quality of composure.37 Bennett’s (1994) constructivist approach to Thoreau, which discards his standard essays on resistance to government and provides a Foucauldian interpretation of Thoreau’s concern with self-fashioning, is original and convincing, but she sees Thoreau primarily as an “artist” “who does not explain his design: he enacts it” (1994:xxiv). I concur with this interpretation, yet find that Thoreau, the theorist, explains more than the artist model suggests, and I attempt to emphasize this theoretic quality. A number of works have taken social scientific approaches to Thoreau. Richardson’s (1986:171) study of Thoreau was among the first to recognize the “strong, if frequently overlooked, social themes” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, themes of friendship, settlement, and Indian life (see also Burbick 1987), and this approach is expanded by Taylor (1996) into a detailed set of cross-sectional analyses of the process by which the English settlers took over the land in New England (which, as Thoreau noted, would without several battles have been New France [Week; Taylor 1996]). Thoreau wants

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Americans to remember, according to Taylor (1996:18), that the country’s founding was “as bloody and unjust as any,” but also wants “to explain the complexity and ambiguity of the historical processes” that made the history uncivil—uncivil both because it included “violent, brutal” acts, and because it is not the history the nation wants to believe. The work also contains the wellknown story of Hannah Dustan, who was captured by an American Indian war party and carried off, and who in the night murdered her captors, took their scalps for proof, and fled back to her own people. Thoreau has been much condemned for his objectivity in respect to this tale, since he draws no moral conclusions from it (Mosher 1998). There is an objectivity in all this that weakens the romantic or artistic account of Thoreau’s oeuvre.38 While building on these recent interpretations of Thoreau, my own argument here is different in several ways. First, it removes the term “selfgovernment” from the institutional level and applies it directly to the self, to the individual person. This entails thinking of the individual as inherently a part of an expanded appreciation of the political milieu, not someone who is separate from politics, or excluded from politics, or trying to escape politics, or should do his narrowly defined citizen duties more assiduously. Everyday life allocates values, authoritatively for the individuals who live in society; this makes it political in Easton’s classical sense (1953:129–134). My shift of emphasis also entails a reconsideration of the meaning of government because in seeking to understand government of an individual, we must use, and reconsider, our existing ideas about politics and government in order to apply them to individuals. The implications of self-governed individualism also change the direction of social remediation. Liberalism often argues that fully realized individuals will be more generous to others, will recognize and accept human differences as a positive part of their experience (e.g., Connolly 1991, Kateb 1992). Thoreauvian self-government takes a less patronizing approach (Pitkin 1993), arguing that those who are different need not base their human worth on the possible beneficence of the mainstream but can and should stand up and affirm themselves, without asking or expecting social charity. Thoreau seeks to give courage not only to unconventional individuals, but to all who do not fit neatly into mainstream categories, and to give them pride in their ability to live honestly, deliberately, and to march to their own drummer. This is a relevant issue in contemporary political theory (see, e.g., Flathman 1992), and should ensure recognition of Thoreau’s contribution as an original and powerful analyst of still-salient issues of political life.

Care of the Self Americans generally, and political theorists in particular, are apt to think of Henry Thoreau as a traditional icon, respected but inescapably old-fashioned,

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with little or nothing to add to contemporary questions and problems. There is just too much boondocks about Thoreau to allow us to think confidently of him as a full-fledged political or social philosopher. Yet students of Thoreau emphasize his similarities to the Socratic paradigm in thinking about and caring for the self (see especially Taylor 1996:64, 77–80), and I have tried to emphasize throughout the degree to which Thoreau works at both the political theory that explains existing institutions and the political philosophy that inquires into a full range of existential questions. Yet his individualism is extreme, and represents perhaps another reason why Thoreau is frequently the last among his generation to attract attention within American theory, and why he is not even considered as a member of the canonical writers of the modern political theory tradition. The problem is whether individualism can be ethical. We may begin to discuss that issue by reviewing the idea of government, which throughout this chapter has been considered at a personal rather than a state level. If a system can be said to be governed when decisions are made according to a consistent principle or set of principles acceptable to the participants; and if a system is said to be well governed when those principles result in the system’s maintenance (at least) or flourishing (at best) within its physical environment, then the Thoreauvian model is principled. Using principles taken from a nature defined scientifically, Thoreau defines his system around simplicity, sensitivity, independence, freedom, concentration on the self ’s highest business, responsibility, and the pleasure of everyday relationships with uncultivated nature, which one treats with both affection and awe.39 Nature’s principles infused his vision: there is no overall rule in the universe, so the individual must tend to what he can handle, the government of his own life. It is harsh advice; it may also be quintessentially American advice. In favor of Thoreau’s position is the widespread recognition by theorists of society that modernity breeds individualism, and that political development inexorably moves women and men away from the small, close-knit communities of a fondly remembered past toward a future in which family, community, and whole nations have been revolutionized by the increasing priority given by individuals to their own concerns. Since Thoreau speaks directly to this direction so characteristic of American life, we can begin to answer the question of the ethical by considering nature as he defined it around nature’s neutrality and of its multiplicity of goals. Sometimes nature was so neutral toward humanity that it approached hostility (Ktaadn, the shipwrecks in Cape Cod, or the wildlife in The Maine Woods), sometimes it was useful (providing beams for the hut at Walden Pond, or a pathway for exploration as in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), sometimes a good companion on walks. Thoreau was not the nature mystic he has often appeared, however, because he is always aware that he is the observer only, and that the natural world within which he lived was basically minding its own business, indifferent to his presence.

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Moreover, nature’s own business is multiple, not unified. The whole ecosystem works not because there is a preestablished organization or plan, but because each natural agent works for its own growth in whatever context is provided by the environment of other agents around it. The acorn does not defer to the chestnut (Resistance, Rosenblum 1996:14), nor does one animal step aside for another. Instead, each agent goes its own way; some win and some lose.40 If as political theorists we are seeking to avoid teleological commitments, Thoreau and his Darwinian strong-mindedness would seem to be our man, completely accepting the principle of random behavior and natural selection as the foundation principles of natural organization and change. But does this not then lead to all the worst of the charges leveled against theories based on narrow individualism? Thoreau here leads in a different direction, because of the way he defines freedom, not as overwhelming and ceaseless self-aggrandizement but as the freedom to grow, to grow to the fullest maturity of which each creature is capable. Human beings are not animals, merely to follow what their genes dictate, but thinking individuals who thus may pass through and transcend many different types of behavior, according to Thoreau.41 Out of sheer self-ish principles, thus, human beings learn principles that are progressively more mature. Given Thoreau’s microanalytic viewpoint, that there is no overall purpose, no teleology, but only the purposes of the individual agents in any system, natural or human, then the mark of maturity is the recognition that each person has a personal responsibility as an upholder of humanity’s own, not yet fully defined, self. At this level of maturity, individuals, schooled in the rigors of minding their own business, engage with other individuals working on the same project and are in a position to appreciate a well-played life, at whatever level it is lived (as Thoreau admired the Canadian woodsman and others). It is difficult to find a more evocative conclusion than Cavell’s (1981:119)—that Thoreau’s individualism leaves us in each other’s keeping, but it should be emphasized that this keeping is not close. What does Thoreau’s theory of individual self government entail at the level of national politics? It is important to understand that his work does not constitute democratic theory42 in the usual sense because Thoreau makes it abundantly clear that he despises democratic practices, root and branch: “Voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions, and betting naturally accompanies it” (“Resistance to Civil Government”; Rosenblum 1996:6). While some scholars (Kateb 1992, Rosenblum 1981, Walker 1998) have been willing to find Thoreau’s ideas consistent with liberal democracy, Jenco’s (2003) challenge to this viewpoint is wholly convincing. She finds that the easy reconciliation of Thoreau with our present ideas of democracy misses

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Thoreau’s “larger challenge” that it is “moral tyranny” to sacrifice the individual “to the vagaries of representation and voting” ( Jenco 2003:357, 366). Thoreau demands of us, according to Jenco’s reading, that we face the possibility that democracy as a political system is not “the best we can do” and that there are unexamined, perhaps even presently inconceivable, alternatives to democracy (381). Thoreau’s theory of individual self-government offers an intermediate possibility. As he has brought government to the personal level, so Thoreau brings politics there. Both the example of his life and the commentary of his writings cause us to remember that when we act in everyday life our choice to discriminate for or against a given person is not a matter of private preference but a political act, and we need to judge our actions according to the stringent criteria appropriate to such acts by those who govern themselves by Thoreau’s model. As he said, “The only government that I recognize,—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,—is that power that establishes justice in the land” (“Plea . . .” Rosenblum 1996:151). From the viewpoint established by his theory of individual self-government, Thoreau’s mandate contains implications far beyond those it carries when government is solely a matter for the state. Because we are political beings even when we are alone with ourselves, we are subject to all the rights and responsibilities attendant on that condition.

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Chapter Four Wittgenstein’s Games The Philosophy and Practice of Justice

The Philosophy of Games The game model has tied together the major themes of the present work, from the micropolitical hazards of interpersonal social interaction to the selfgoverned integrity of a Thoreau confronting those challenges. The game concept has been used here, both explicitly and implicitly, as a light but firm analytic structure, one that is simultaneously empirical in explaining human behavior, and theoretical in integrating the multiple aspects of human experience within a single framework. But game theory, in its technical guise, is generally considered far too formal and mathematical a tool to be used in such a wide array of applications, and it is important now to focus directly on game theory as an intellectual phenomenon that is far more significant than its use to calculate the value of winning legislative coalitions or to determine the rational response to specified types of military confrontation. Wittgenstein has, in effect, demonstrated that game theory is inherently philosophical, as I have argued in chapter one, and this entails a reconsideration of the nature of games at the paradigmatic and philosophical levels.1 But while considering games in their larger implications it is important also to retain the hard edge of game theory as a strategic science. The game of justice is not played in abstract realms, but by real women and men who may, during the course of their rich and complicated lives, wish to win, or at least strongly compete in, real games. In the process of understanding the silent political society that surrounds them, and the process of developing their own understanding of their individual selves and opportunities, women and men may as social scientists find utility in a theory that has implications at all levels of the human experience. 81

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This change in the interpretation of game theory is in line with the methodological approach used here; ideas, like people, must make their way in a social environment that may wish to define them in ways appropriate to the intellectual status quo, to fit them neatly into a preexisting division of labor or a predefined community. A philosopher uses games to define human linguistic interaction as a way of clarifying what he conceives to be verbal muddles posing as profound metaphysical puzzles. An economist seizes on the game concept as a way of bringing precision to the inchoate social sciences. The very concept of a game entails the idea of winning, and a mathematician takes up the challenge of finding a formal solution to games. Military strategists seize on these solutions as rational responses to the ambiguities of war. The theoretic concept is everywhere and nowhere, and earns itself enemies as well as friends as it is used in the social conflict over the definition of truth and of power. Retrospect is perhaps the only solution for such problems, and of course teaches only transient lessons as men and ideas move constantly forward into new epistemic circumstances. But at the present time game theory can be seen in the process of taking on its own shape, escaping from the rigidities imposed on it by the popular mathematical emphasis of the twentieth century. Behavioral game theory comes into vogue, emphasizing games in actual political life and soft game theory extends its reach beyond highly structured formal institutions; the theory comes to be seen as postmodern, allowing the analyst to extract from empirical events interpretations that reflect an effort to understand the behavior in the participants’ own terms rather than forcing on them some preconceived theoretical framework. What is slightly dangerous in these developments is the possibility that rigor will be lost as universality is achieved; I therefore emphasize both the philosophy and the method—each is equally important in the understanding of justice.

Just Gaming Social scientists and theorists are deeply divided over the formal versions of game theory.2 Some, like William Riker, see game theory as the ultimate solution to social inquiry, indeed to the possibility of a truly scientific social science.3 This position is enthusiastically positivist, and sees the mathematically powerful tools of game analysis as defining a route of escape from the ambiguities, and the intellectual inadequacies, of traditional social research. Other social scientists view game theory with an emotion that can, without exaggeration, be described as horror. The revulsion of these social scientists stems, at its best, from a passionate commitment to the richness and vagaries of life, the complexities of which they feel mathematical game theory is too violently abstract adequately to express or appreciate. A third position on formal game theory, neither wholly

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for nor wholly against, was held by one of the two men who wrote the book that marks the emergence of game theory onto the stage of modern intellectual discourse, the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). While the book’s mathematical author, John von Neumann, was motivated solely by the formal aspects of game theory, and devoted his acknowledged genius to proving its central pivot, the minimax theorem, his partner, Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, is reported to have held a more open-ended viewpoint on game theory, one that hoped game theory might be a method suitable to capture the wonderful irregularities of the social world within a flexible conceptual framework. Tradition has tended to denigrate Morgenstern’s role in the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. While conceding that it required an exceptional man even to remain in the same room, or in conversation, with the mathematical genius4 everyone called by the diminutive Johnny, most commentators have suggested Morgenstern’s importance to game theory ended when he managed to arouse Johnny’s interest in the economics field. After that initial contribution, Morgenstern’s role was thought to be basically pedestrian, acting as amanuensis. As time passed, however, voices began to be raised in Morgenstern’s defense (Leonard 1992:55; Mirowski 1992; Schotter 1992). Initially, these writers said, Morgenstern had seen game theory as a middle-range vehicle for conceptual clarification and synthesis, the kind of theory advocated by the sociologist Robert Merton (1949). Game theory, Morgenstern believed, would provide a rigorous yet flexible methodology for the analysis of complex social phenomena, retaining some of their rich detail but adding a conceptual discipline that would facilitate the development of an empirical, but also a theoretical, science of human behavior (Schotter 1992:97). Morgenstern, according to this interpretation of his intentions, saw game theory as a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, an intellectual structure that would define, summarize, and guide inquiry (Leonard 1992:55–56). None of this alternative vision of the purpose of game theory appears in the final version of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, however, because mathematicians are not concerned primarily with empirical questions but with formal analysis. Von Neumann’s influence on the book outweighed Morgenstern’s and the project became centered on turning game theory into a mathematically intelligible form. Both von Neumann and Morgenstern came originally from the AustroHungarian empire,5 and it is probably no mere coincidence that another writer who contributed to the history of the game concept came from the same milieu. Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (1953), bridged in his own work something of the division seen in the contradictory approaches of von Neumann and Morgenstern. The Tractatus was an intensely positivistic contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, laying out with a clarity so pure it verged on the incomprehensible6 the world in all its conceptual simplicity, seeking in this way

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to purge philosophy of its mistakes ( Janik and Toulmin 1973). Wittgenstein’s second major work, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), appeared utterly to repudiate the earlier logical model and replace it with an at times anguished analysis of language, in which he utilized the metaphor of words as pieces in a language game. From the perspective of Wittgenstein’s language games, words (and realities) had no meanings in themselves but gained substance only as they were actually used, between particular men, in particular circumstances, and with particular purposes. Wittgenstein certainly never conceived his task as social science, yet much of his oeuvre becomes social science if one defines philosophy as Wittgenstein did—as the study of men’s actual behavior, in the attempt to see the human existential condition in its purity, without bias or philosophical illusions. The understanding that developments in modern philosophy may have blurred its border with the social sciences leads to a shift in the standard British interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work as linguistic analysis in the tradition of the Principia Mathematica and more toward the Viennese interpretation that the Tractatus was a book on ethics.7 This ethics was, however, of an unexpected sort. Even those readers with the most casual acquaintance with Wittgenstein know of the abrupt conclusion of the Tractatus, which can be very colloquially translated as “What can be said, can be said clearly, and what you can’t say, you should shut up about” (Gintis 2000:xxviii). Deeper students (Cavell 1979, Pitkin 1993) have found that the subtleties do not disappear on close analysis—indeed they grow. Clearly, Wittgenstein throws into the greatest doubt any possibility of human communication about those aspects of life that carry its central meaning, if there is such meaning. A different interpretation is advanced by scholars who take Wittgenstein’s Viennese background into account because they emphasize in a way that other analysts have not done that Wittgenstein believes things that cannot be said directly can nonetheless be shown. Suggestions can be given and individuals may come to understand, over time, other persons and the worlds in which they all live. This crosses the bridge from philosophy to social science, but it reaches a kind of philosophical social science that does not concern itself solely with the empirical details of human interactions, but looks to the wider implications as well. Witttgenstein is renowned for his concentration on the details, the search for the exact quality of the recollection of the color red, for instance (Wittgenstein 1953). Less attention has been given to the substantive and methodological scope of his overall analysis. His language games are not merely linguistic but existential. They define women and men at the beginning of, and in the midst of, the process of devising the principles by which they will organize their places in the universe. The present argument suggests how this philosophical level of the game method can be brought to bear on formal game theory to enrich both, within an empirical framework that reunites political philosophy and political science.

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Present at the Creation The history of game theory is difficult to systematize in a coherent way (Weintraub 1992),8 and its ambiguities are important in the analysis both of presentday game theory and its extensions within social science practice. The earliest interest in the theory of games appears to have emerged in reference to the theory of probability, as gamblers (and their advisors) sought to discover winning strategies for playing roulette, dice games, chess, and cards. Games of chance naturally extended their reach to games of strategy, where men played not against nature alone but also against one another, and psychology became an important factor. To win at dice games required luck (or loaded dice), but good cards alone would not win at poker or bridge unless the hand were well played, which included insight, strategy, signaling, bluffing, and often deceit. Games and their theory left the world of parlors, gambling dens, and back alleys when mathematicians first became interested in the perspectives they offered. Historians give the date of the first official interest in game theory as 1713, in a letter to the mathematician Nicholas Bournoulli from Waldegrave, suggesting a card game between Peter and Paul and proposing a minimax solution. This early breakthrough was not noticed until 1865, and then only in a book that was not widely read, on the history of probability theory; but minimax, along with expected utility, risk aversion, and strategic form, would become part of the core theory of games (Dimand and Dimand 1992:16–17). The mathematician preeminently associated with the theory of games in the period prior to the publication of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s magisterial book on the subject was Emile Borel (1871–1956), who was a leading French mathematician specializing in complex analysis, a prominent academician, and active in French public life as a cabinet minister ( James 2002:283–292). As a mathematician, Borel had an unusually wide range of interests, and published several works of popular science for the educated lay public. Borel’s interest in games arose from his work in early probability theory, including the famous Petersburg Paradox, involving the best way to place bets in an ongoing lottery (Borel 1963:92–97; Dimand and Dimand 1992:17).9 He decisively entered the field of game theory with a 1924 paper on games of chance and skill, which developed the concept of game equilibrium and defined pure and mixed strategies. That paper may also have stated the minimax theorem, central to all mathematical game theory because it ‘solves’ games, that is, it finds a winning strategy that can be achieved despite anything the opponent does. This was to achieve much greater prominence two years later when the young John von Neumann (1903– 1957) defined a “general competitive equilibrium” and gave a valid if reportedly inelegant proof (Dimand and Dimand 1992:24; Leonard 1992:44).10 From this point on, the major name in game theory would be that of John von Neumann, and this predominance of the mathematical viewpoint had a

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decisive impact on game theory’s development. Biographers and historians find that the source of von Neumann’s interest in games “remains something of a mystery,” since his early training was in mathematics and physics (Leonard 1992:23). Because von Neumann showed no interest in Borel’s studies, and barely mentioned him in published work, it has been suggested that his route to game theory was largely a mathematical one, influenced by Hilbert and the formalist school of mathematicians (Mirowski 1992:117). When Gödel’s Proof11 decisively undercut the Hilbert program, von Neumann lost “the epistemological anchor of absolute mathematical rigor in the very prime of his intellectual life” (Mirowski 1992:122). Game theory, along with von Neumann’s later interest in computers and computing as a way of studying brain functions, was according to this interpretation an attempt to reestablish mathematics on either an empirical or logical basis, as a substitute for the lost “absolute rigor” of pure mathematics (Mirowski 1992:123). Whatever the explanation, von Neumann’s interest exclusively in the mathematics of games rather than their substance had an instant impact on the history of game theory, overriding the richer perspectives of his predecessor Borel and swamping the empirical concerns of his collaborator, Morgenstern.12 Borel had taken a wide stance on games, dividing them into those based on pure strategy, those based purely on chance, and those involving ruse or bluff, “where a player can gain an advantage by knowing the opponent’s intentions” (Leonard 1992:45), implying that the game player must be, at least in part, a psychologist. In place of mathematical proofs,13 Borel emphasized the role of player ingenuity and creativity, which “is what makes games interesting” (Leonard 1992:48). Borel’s critique excluded even the concept of “good play” in a game, on the grounds that rules for such play were designed only for novices and that better players would transcend them. If a game could be completely described, Borel argued, it would be abandoned by sophisticated players who would seek for more complicated and challenging games. Borel argued that the idea of a mixed strategy, so essential to developing solutions to games without simple equilibria, would simply confuse the player and his partners and therefore not be a practical way of actually winning games. Ultimately, Borel was opposed to the whole idea of mathematicizing games because he felt it caused them to lose their “mystery and delight” through “elegant but inapplicable mathematics.” Beyond a final book in 1938, Borel never returned to game issues (Leonard 1992:49). The collaborator on the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Oskar Morgenstern, also began his affair with game theory for broad researchoriented reasons, but his interest in games as a universal methodology was outweighed by the mathematical approach of his eventual collaborator. Born in Silesia in 1902, Morgenstern moved to Vienna in 1914 and obtained his doctorate there in 1925 with a thesis “focused, in the Austrian tradition, on epistemological

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difficulties in economic forecasting” (Leonard 1992:51). Morgenstern’s interests took many directions—he was sometimes compared to an impresario rather than a musician—including attendance at meetings of the Vienna Circle, which was based on a highly slanted interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and he played a major role in popularizing positivism as a philosophy of science.14 Caught in the United States by the Nazi rise in Germany, Morgenstern met von Neumann at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study in 1938 and accomplished what many observers feel was his only role in the origin of game theory, getting Johnny interested through a criticism of conventional economics, which they together decided needed radical reform (Leonard 1992:51–52). Morgenstern was by all accounts a penetrating critic of the economic discipline at that time, and he had strong ideas about the kind of new model he thought ought to be constructed to replace it. First, it would be methodologically individualistic; second, it would center on social interaction and social interdependence. His interest was in economics only because he thought it was ripe to serve as an entry point for developing a general theory of social behavior (Leonard 1992:55). His conception of game theory was a process of economic behavior in which individuals had “less than perfect foresight” and incomplete facts, and therefore “act with subjective, rather than objective, rationality” in an institutional setting that constrains choice in various ways over time (Leonard 1992:55). His emphasis was on “the problem of strategic interaction” among economic players as the central problem of economics, and he saw the individual maximizing model of standard economic theory “as an inadequate representation of it” (Schotter 1992:97).15 Morgenstern’s first chapter in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior shifted economic interest from the isolated Robinson Crusoe model in which the individual plays against fixed parameters, to one in which each decision matters and exchange is modeled as an n-person game; this would, he believed, enable economics to return to its interest in institutions in a manageable, formal way. His particular concern was to define the possible institutional arrangements that could emerge from particular social situations; this differed from the neoclassical approach by adding, for instance, cartels (Schotter 1992:99–102). Morgenstern saw the book as “a general theory for all social science,” based on “a new, and more flexible” approach to cooperative behavior, and would not have endorsed later innovations that emphasized unique solutions of starkly simplified game matrices. He is reported to have liked indeterminacy. “The world is uncertain and social situations are interesting only because they contain indeterminacies that many physical situations do not” (Schotter 1992:107). The search for equilibria, based on an assumption that all players saw the situation in the same way, would have gone against Morgenstern’s Austrian instincts, according to some commentators, because such assumptions were too simplistic. “Morgenstern would have been more inclined

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to think of the agents in the world as adhering simultaneously to many theories and to think, in truly Austrian fashion, that many subjectively correct models of the world exist, reality being determined, in part, by the different subjective models that people use” (Schotter 1992:110). Morgenstern’s hope that von Neuman’s collaboration would bring “truly exact reasoning and truly exact methods” (Schotter 1992:52) to the economic field was more than amply fulfilled. The planned “small volume” by von Neuman and Morgenstern turned into the 632-page Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in which Morgenstern’s dynamic approach was replaced by static analysis, where Borel was never mentioned, and Morgenstern’s introduction had been cut back to bring it into accord with von Neumann’s mathematics.16 In some sense, the book was stillborn; von Neumann was dissatisfied with the economic community’s response and took game theory into the newly burgeoning defense community, but intellectually he would lose interest in the theory of games and never returned to it. Morgenstern’s original ideas were, according to at least one historian of the period, “trampled and mangled in the final text” (Schotter 1992:144).

The Game of Advice-Giving A brief example of early game theoretic analysis may make clear the reasons behind the fork in the game theoretic road taken by its development subsequent to the publication in 1944 of the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. A self-described “academic moral philosopher,” Richard Bevan Braithwaite, gave a University of Cambridge lecture in 1954, soon published as Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (1955), which put game ideas to practical use in solving what he conceived to be the central problem of human interaction. “Can the philosophical moralist give any advice to people with different aims as to how they may collaborate in common tasks so as to obtain maximum satisfaction compatible with fair distribution?” Braithwaite asked, and added, “I need not elaborate upon the practical importance of securing such collaboration in all spheres of life, domestic, social, national, international” (ibid. 4).17 Braithwaite then defined the circumstances of the game between two players, Matthew and Luke, to the solution of which his analysis would be devoted, and laid down the following assumptions, which he admitted were quite simple but he hoped were not entirely unrealistic. The two men, both bachelors, inhabit a house “which has been converted into two flats by an architect who had ignored all considerations of acoustics.” Matthew and Luke can hear any sound from the other’s apartment above normal speaking voices. Further suppositions follow: there is no legal way for either to suppress the other’s

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noise; neither man can move to other accommodations; both have only one hour a day for recreation and it is the same hour for both. Finally, the crux of the moral problem: “Luke’s form of recreation is to play classical music on the piano for an hour at a time,” while “Matthew’s amusement is to improvise jazz on the trumpet for an hour at once,” and these choices are independent of each other. “Whether or not either of them performs on one evening has no influence, one way or the other, upon the desires of either of them to perform on any other evening.” However, the pleasure of each man in his music is affected by whether the other is playing at the same time (ibid. 8). The question they put to the moral philosopher is whether there is “any plausible principle” that will tell them “how they should divide the proportion of days” when both play, when neither plays, when Matthew alone plays, or when Luke alone plays (ibid. 9). Having thus cleared the ground for analysis, Braithwaite set numerical values to each of his players preferences, using indifference comparisons. Luke may be, for instance, indifferent between, in the first place, both the men remaining silent, in the second place, his housemate playing alone on one-third of the nights and both playing together on two-thirds of the nights, and from this develops ratios that produce a scale of preferences (ibid. 9–10).18 The system is adequate to handle simple utilities, but also allows for “envy, malice, and all uncharitableness.” Assuming each knows the other’s preference scale, this knowledge becomes incorporated in the utilities, when, for instance, Matthew may feel differently about playing his trumpet alone when he knows how much Luke would enjoy playing the piano alone. “Or, if he is a disagreeable man, the prospect of thwarting Luke may increase his satisfaction” (ibid. 14). Having justified his use of utility theory, at this early period of its flourishing, Braithwaite then explores various possible scenarios, utilizes various mathematical techniques, and concludes with perfect serenity that the two housemates “should divide their playing time in the ratio of 17 to 26,” that is, that Luke shall play alone 17 nights out of 43, while Matthew shall play alone on 26 nights (ibid. 52–54). Faced with this sort of analysis, some readers will be enchanted by its clarity and its acute resolution. Other readers will ask, in some anguish, why Luke didn’t just move out. These are the standard, antithetical reactions to game theory as von Neumann devised it, and his enforced definition has simultaneously advanced and hindered game theory as a vehicle for social scientific analysis. Scholars who advocate game theory are frequently more interested in the mathematics than the reality it is designed to describe, while scholars who are disgusted by game theory in its mathematical form are just those who, like Borel and Morgenstern, would most welcome it as a more widely based analytic method.

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Wittgenstein’s Social Philosophy Wittgenstein’s approach to games was entirely different from that of theorists who tried to use games to pursue mathematical theorems or uncover perfectly stable equilibria in human affairs. Wittgenstein used games as deconstructionist tools with which to convince academic philosophers that their supposedly important problems were nonsense, conceptual figments created by the philosophers’ own preconceptions and illusions. For Wittgenstein, the game was a way of showing that all reality was practical, created in the behavioral interactions between everyday human beings. For this reason the persons to whom he introduces his readers in the Philosophical Investigations are not caged within a rigid set of rules or within known games with standard moves and rock-solid payoff structures. Wittgenstein’s players are rather out in real fields, grassy places with room to move about and to handle objects, interact with casual passersby, or develop patterns of interaction; one actor may shout at another, or throw a ball, or they may all decide to dance, to fight, or simply to each go his own way indifferent to the setting.19 Notably, these are people in action. They use words sometimes, but they often act without explaining themselves. Sometimes Wittgenstein’s players give tips into what they are doing, what goals they are pursuing, what responses they seek. Sometimes Wittgenstein’s people do none of these things and the new participant must figure out the parameters of the light-footed game by himself. All these Wittgenstein games are open, fluid, ambiguous; they may lack direction, or they may seem to lack direction, or they may seem to lack direction when actually they have direction. In all these conditions, each game has its own perfection, in time and locale, for its players. As Garfinkel and Goffmann probed the interstices of human interaction, finding endless voids where there are neither road signs nor even cleared pathways, so Wittgenstein drew the philosophical implications of a playing field without base lines, without goalposts, without rules, without umpires. In the philosophical field in which Wittgenstein labored, he tried to observe without preconceptions how the players make their own games and create their own worlds. Wittgenstein found this phenomenon both appalling and absorbing, and strove to make it intelligible, insofar as it could be made intelligible, to the honest men for whom he wrote, as well as for the stubbornly misguided philosophers whose illusions he tried to untangle (Engelmann 1968, Janik and Toulmin 1973). As beginnings are important in understanding events, either in the real world or in philosophy, it is useful to consider Wittgenstein’s oeuvre with a wider viewpoint, to chart the course that led him to this existentially open field full of ambiguous, life-creating, and life-threatening games.20 Wittgenstein’s decisive role in defining the language-game as a model for linguistic analysis is beyond dispute (Cavell 1979, Crary and Read 2000 [Part

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I], Hacker 1986, Pitkin 1993), but the background of his use of the concept, the sources within which he found the term, are obscure. It is tempting to associate the origins of the game concept with theoretical trends at the time in middle Europe, since John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, and Wittgenstein shared a similar background there, but aside from a very thin history within obscure reaches of the mathematics field, game theory did not become prominent until The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), and even then was not widely noticed (Leonard 1992). Wittgenstein himself, to my knowledge, never provided in his works any specific explanation of where the game term first struck him. Beyond a reference to games as widely used in analysis, there are no references to specific theorists such as Condorcet as there are to Augustine. If the game concept seems to have for Wittgenstein an importance or a role beyond the language-game, it must therefore be investigated as he uses the term in the pursuit of other purposes. There are two major reasons for arguing that Wittgenstein’s concept of the game goes beyond its use in linguistic analysis narrowly considered; the first is the ‘people in a field’ paragraph (Wittgenstein 1953:#83), the second is his equation of language-games with life forms. The people in a field section21 comes in a discussion of language-games, but seems anomalous in that context because language-games rarely have the openness Wittgenstein describes in this particular passage. That there is implicit here a conception of the game that is subtly different from and of wider scope than the language-game is suggested most strongly in the striking passage. His professed intention is to shed light on the ambiguities within the rules by which language is said to be governed, but I believe the passage has a further reach. On the one hand, the picture makes Wittgenstein’s point that language cannot be understood as a system that runs according to definite rules comparable to logical propositions; on the other hand, it overstates the matter. While Wittgenstein insists elsewhere (492) that language-games can be invented, it is not permissible (apparently) to use “bububu” for “if it doesn’t rain, I shall go for a walk” (#38 insert:18). Except for James Joyce or Yogi Berra, language is not entirely open. If the purpose of a language-game is communication, then, in general, speakers do not make things up in this manner. The passage is far more applicable to the whole array of human interactions, social, economic, or political behavior in which individuals from choice or necessity take new and unconsidered courses of action. In such cases, games are being created rather than played. Players use whatever imagination they possess to invent new actions, and the way the actions of two or more players fit together—or fail to fit together—is casual, accidental, open. In such cases, should we use the term “game” at all? An alternative term would be difficult to find; there are players with (perhaps half-formed) purposes, and players’ choices are linked so that outcomes depend on joint interaction, and there are

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various kinds of winners and losers. If the games we ordinarily ‘play’—chess, basketball, roulette—are formalizations of human experience in manageable, highly artificial form, then the people in a field paragraph describes the origins of such games in open and fluid situations invented by the kind of interplay Wittgenstein describes here. Of course it is the standardized game situations that became the origin of the mathematical forms of game theory current today. Yet what Wittgenstein suggests here is the idea of games as a much wider analytic tool; philosophical games as ways of studying life games. Games of justice fit within this wider definition, especially because of Wittgenstein’s emphasis that concepts must be studied not only in actual use but in actual behavior, in “life forms.”

Not Just Language-Games A major theme in the Philosophical Investigations is the idea of “forms of life,” but perhaps because it has sociological rather than philosophical implications the term has not received sustained attention. Yet it is clear that languagegames are always embedded in these forms of life; language-games are, for Wittgenstein, important as manifestations of such forms, not simply for the study of language as so many interpreters have assumed. Commentators on Wittgenstein have not overlooked the close relation placed on languages and forms of life in his later works, although I believe they have failed to carry out to its full extent the line of thought implicit in the argument. The textual evidence is abundant and clear: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (#19:8); “here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (#23:12); “human beings . . . agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life” (#241:88); “only those who have mastered the use of language [can hope]. . . . [T]he phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life” (II:i:174). In respect to the fact that mathematicians do not quarrel with one another, “what has to be accepted, the given, is . . . forms of life” (II:xi:226). Wittgenstein sometimes combines language and action explicitly in the single term language-game, as when he says “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” is called the language-game (#7:5), but more typically he separates the two to emphasize that the ‘speaking’ of language is part of a (separable) activity, a form of life (#23:11). On other occasions, forms of life seem to be introduced as ‘circumstances,’ as when moving a chess piece is not merely moving a piece but solving a particular set of circumstances in the course of a game (#33:17). Forms of life may also refer to details (#51:26), or even to the concept of paradigm, as in his references to historical changes in

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mathematics (#23:11). Form of life is implicit every time Wittgenstein emphasizes that in linguistic analysis we must always ask how a term is actually used (e.g., #115:48), and in the idea that the meaning of justification for people “is shown by how they live” (#325:106). Intentions do not exist in the mind but are embedded in external situations, in customs and institutions (#337:108). The meaning of any action (as with any word) depends on its circumstances: a smile may be kind or malicious depending on the context I give it (#539:145); even a picture means nothing without its story (#663:168). These remarks indicate that what is said about language-games can pass directly into the wider sphere of human activity. In respect to the meaning of form(s) of life, Wittgenstein gives no definitions and very few examples. This is appropriate to his philosophic method, which is directed to the freeing of thought from abstract definitions with their incumbent illusions, and it leads the reader appropriately to evaluate the term by the way Wittgenstein uses it. In the early passage where Wittgenstein first links language use to forms of life, his examples include “orders and reports in battle” and “questions and expressions for answering yes and no,” but these are narrow sectoral examples (#19:8). Later he gives a listing of a wide variety of language-games after reminding the reader that speaking language is part of the activity that is a form of life. Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them—Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements—Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)—Reporting an event—Speculating about an event—Forming and testing a hypothesis—Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—Making up a story; and reading it—Play-acting—Singing catches—Guessing riddles—Making a joke; telling it—Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—Translating from one language into another—Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying—(Wittgenstein 1953:#23, 11–12). This is both intensely interesting as a list of possible forms that might be integrated into a game, and seriously deficient as a guide to any of the later sections of the Investigations. The last section of the Investigations refers to problems in the discipline of psychology, which he compares more to branches of mathematics such as set theory rather than to physics, in its origins. However, this placement is due to the editors (Wittgenstein 1953:iv) and too much weight cannot be placed on it. The form of life theme is a constant presence in the Investigations, although the reader keeps getting it from different points of view. It provides conceptual support for Wittgenstein’s analysis of rules, grammar, intention,

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and understanding (#199, #295, #337, #526). Sometimes form of life becomes empirical and sociological, as where obeying a rule, making a report (used earlier as an example), or playing a game of chess “are customs (uses, institutions)” (#199:87). At other times the idea shades into the universal, as in “the common behavior of mankind [their form of life?] is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (#205:82). Most consistently, form of life appears in Wittgenstein’s repeated references to circumstances, context, and situation; “an intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions” (#337:108); “do I understand this sentence? . . . [No] but all the same I should know how [it] might perhaps be used; I could myself invent a context for it” (#525:143, emphasis added). This example is followed immediately by the words “a multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction”—a remark that offers as much in the way of illustrative definition as we are likely to get.22 The first branch of my argument is therefore that Wittgenstein should not be construed as analyzing language only but may be considered a hair’s breadth away from the kinds of issues of human behavior that are directly relevant to political theory and social science. At every step and turning, his analytic attention is spread over the whole scope of human behavior, articulate and inarticulate, for which language serves him as a partial symbol. In effect, Wittgenstein has blocked out a whole new range of questions that are simultaneously relevant as social philosophy and social science. Wittgenstein’s games are • played rather than solved; the emphasis is on patterns of play over time, ongoing dynamics, one thing leading to another, usually in an unanticipated way; • creative rather than formalized; the right word at the right time may entirely transform the field of play; • action-based rather than rule-based; behavior speaks and has a life independent of words; • educational rather than predefined; what the players learn from their interaction is more important than their transitory wins and losses; • existential rather than practical; payoffs are not simple utilities but may include the creation of, or the loss of, worlds. Above all, Wittgenstein’s games are defined by the actual participants, not the observers, or the audience, the referees, or the police. Some may define themselves as umpires, but they are part of the game and their status, as well as everything else, is in play, not settled. Such games raise the question central to all science: What is really going on here? Beyond that, they raise the sociopolitical questions of Who plays how? With what impact on whom? Since justice

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is one of the possible outcomes of people’s behavior, Wittgenstein’s games are philosophical as well as empirical.

The Method of Games Standard mathematically defined game theory is not typically seen as a philosophical endeavor, quite the contrary (e.g., Morrow. 1994, Ordeshook 1986, Shubik 1984). Both its proponents and its critics agree that it represents the cutting edge of behaviorism, positivism in its most narrow guise. There is every justification for such a viewpoint; in standard game theoretic discourse, the human individual is reduced to a quasirationalistic decision machine, human goals are reduced to monetary payoffs, human choice is narrowed to the decision between game-specified strategies, and human existence is defined as a form of sociological war.23 Game theory has been, for many of these reasons, extraordinarily useful in cutting through scholarly illusions, to expose fundamental regularities of human behavior; Schelling’s work (1960) is the poster case here.24 Standard game theory’s25 power lies in its radical condensation of the complexity of human lives, and intercourse, and institutions, into a single conceptual instant when one person faces another in a situation that makes the results of either person’s actions dependent on the other person’s choices. Zerosum games are perhaps the most popularly recognized examples of this situation, but of course are only a small set of cases; the game may be cooperative as well as competitive, the game may result in possible payoffs for both players, and even one-person games can be played if nature is postulated as the other player. The striking aspect of game theory is its transparency. Hearing the term “game,” everyone can conjure up its basic elements—players, goals, payoffs, strategies, wins, losses. Of course this transparency is illusory; each observer has a different game in mind and, as Wittgenstein emphasized, the different games, connected only by family resemblances, may share no complete set of attributes in common. Standard game theory reduces this openness by adopting specific conventions, assumptions, definitions, and simplifications. From a philosophical viewpoint, it is essential not to take either a pro or con stance on game theory’s choices here, but to recognize simultaneously both sides of the coin: the brilliance of the methodological rigor and the narrowness of its axiomatic assumptions. Wittgenstein’s strengths, being exactly the inverse of those of standard game theory, are useful in this context; he supplies epistemological if not ontological routes out of the overly narrow method, yet benefits from the addition of more behavioral rigor in the working out of game situations. Standard game theory has always been highly abstract, concerned not with how to play games

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but with how to solve them, which is not at all the same thing. Its applications, from this viewpoint, were particularly impressive among theorists of war, where its statistically mixed strategies had direct application to such puzzles as trying to defend, with limited defensive hardware, the Straits of Gibraltar from enemy ships. How do you schedule flights to maximize the possibility of finding the enemy? Or, alternatively, if you are the enemy, how do you schedule ships to avoid the surveillance planes? (see Leonard 1992:60–69).26 Beyond kriegspiel applications, there was interest in applying standard game theory to more everyday social interactions, but this was less effective because of the very abstraction that makes the theory mathematically tractable. Standard game theory, caught between the desire to picture empirical events of some complexity and the radical simplifications required by the theory, tended to side with the theory; the emphasis fell on the elegance of the game rather than the flavor of the actual historical situations. Political science, for instance, seized on the now notoriously well-known case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) (Axelrod 1984), which proved that when actors were given the choice of stonewalling the sheriff or turning state’s evidence on their former partner, the prisoners would rationally squeal, missing out completely on the possibility of mutual benefit by keeping silent. Given the PD situation and its unhappy demonstration that cooperation was not rational in at least some cases in which cooperation would be good policy, political science might have tried several alternatives. It might have tried an empirical inquiry into the relationships between players and circumstances, asking what types of authority figures put people in such situations for what purposes, and what kinds of people keep faith with one another anyway, and so on. Instead political science turned the PD into an ideological battle over democracy, bemoaning or rejoicing in men’s inability to cooperate in their own salvation. Standard game theory has generally preferred to avoid empiricism; although there have been exceptions such as Thomas Schelling (1963) and his upside-down worlds where rationality can be defeated by four-year-olds, and recently Shepsle (1995), who has suggested that game theory has a role well beyond those highly structured situations (legislative coalitions, etc.) to which it is typically confined. To these voices Wittgenstein offers support.

The Philosophical Individual To appreciate Wittgenstein’s impact on an inquiry into game theory, it is useful to notice explicitly the nature of his definition of the individual, which is not the unified actor of standard game theory but an actor without personal integrity.27 This one change underlies and infuses his whole game approach. Students of standard game theory would find themselves surprised to learn that it

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was possible to question the coherence of the actor. According to standard game theory, people may not be rational all the time, or their cognitive capacities may be ‘bounded,’ or their goals may be inconsistent and difficult to model. Such qualifications stand within the scope of positivist interpretations of any theory. To question human experience at its foundations is quite another matter. Here my interest is not in the full philosophical issue but only in the question of what this change in assumptions does to our appreciation of game theory. Wittgenstein shows that self-knowledge is difficult, and knowledge of other persons is fraught with ambiguities in even the simplest interactions; one might expect therefore that if someone wanted to kill standard game theory completely, Wittgenstein is the silver bullet. But this need not be the case; it is possible to rethink the implications of standard game theory when it is deprived of the assumption of a stand-alone, independent, cognitively stable actor. Rather than a baseball team with uniforms, equipment, and a set of official rules of play, one has with Wittgenstein a loose cluster of people crossing that unmarked field and communicating with one another only as their various impulses dictate, in various informal ways, without roles or rules. In this new kind of situation, if games are played, they will be more or less spontaneous inventions; their exact form will depend on the attitudes of the particular persons who happen to be present. The game may be a race, an orchestra, a scrimmage, a war party, or a philosophical discussion. Wittgenstein’s games are thus existential games, created by the participants on the basis of existing conditions and available personnel; such games may harden into institutions or forms of life, or they may dissolve without remembrance by any of the participants. The essence of Wittgensteinian games is distinguished by the parameters of their creation rather than their result. Where standard game theory has stock characters engaged in stock games with stock moves and stock outcomes, all of them defined from the outside by detached observers, Wittgenstein games are internally generated and can be sustained, destroyed, or recreated by the participants themselves as they develop over time and change as the result of play itself. This perspective effectively ties together the idea of the self-governed individual and the process within which such individuals seek both themselves and justice. For the advocates of standard game theory, this picture of Wittgenstein games will eliminate all the virtues for which they adopted game theory in the first place because this new model cannot be used to predict behavior, cannot be used to identify rational choices, cannot be ‘solved,’ and cannot be used, as Braithwaite did, to give correct advice. But it must be remembered that such complaints are associated with a now-outdated behavioral paradigm, one that is concerned not with explanation of human behavior but with justification of often very narrow-gauge empiricism (Giere 1988, Hempel and Oppenheim 1986, Lane 1996). Nor is it true that Wittgenstein’s approach to game theory is

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unscientific; indeed it leads toward several of the social sciences, toward psychology (an inquiry into the self ), toward sociology (an inquiry into our relations with others), and even political science (an inquiry, in part, into justice). Consider, for instance, a thoroughly well-intentioned person who desires to ‘do justice’ to some other person. Then recall that the justice such a person will do will be in accord with the doer’s personal sense of justice, and that Wittgenstein constantly cautions us to remember that the other person very likely does not define justice in that specific way. Justice, according to Wittgenstein, cannot be ‘done’ to others in any simple straightforward manner because, in general, we do not, cannot, understand each other well enough to make this possible. Such a conclusion is arresting: if justice can neither be asked for with the expectation of being heard, nor given with any hope it will be appreciated, then inquiry must indeed seem to have hit a stone wall. Here, however, I believe standard game theory can be useful in adding a methodological and political dimension to Wittgenstein’s characteristically undefined philosophical arena. A key point to note is that both standard game theory and Wittgenstein’s epistemological games place a prime emphasis on human behavior, behavior rather than on rhetoric. In Wittgenstein’s games, the observer cannot easily understand the motives or even the patterns behind the behavior in the field, but this is not so for the participants themselves. As individuals, players in the Wittgenstein games can come explicitly to recognize the game structure of which they are a part; repeated interactive patterns may become clear as well as repeated payoffs to the various participants. Ultimately, strategy may become clear, and this change in self-consciousness may transform the entire game.28 Wittgenstein was himself not inattentive to social and political currents in real forms of life. In his analysis of inner experience, for instance, Wittgenstein often uses recognizing faces or colors, but sometimes unexpectedly seems to become less philosophical: “at that moment I hated him” (# 642:165); “if I now become ashamed of this incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing; of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc” (# 643); “what about the case where I at one time make an apparently innocent remark and accompany it with a furtive sidelong glance . . .” (# 690:172). Of course Wittgenstein is using these examples, along with many others, to inquire into a philosophical issue—the nature of inner experience and its relation to outer behavior—yet the examples have an interesting flavor, as if he knew a great deal about human interactive games despite, or because of, his relatively cloistered academic experience. The same point emerges in Part II of the Investigations. Is there such a thing as ‘expert judgement’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling?—Even here, there are those whose judgement is ‘better’ and those whose judgement is ‘worse’.

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Correcter prognoses will generally issue from the judgements of those with better knowledge of mankind. Can one learn this knowledge? Yes, some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’.—Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip—This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here.—What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules. What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words. (Wittgenstein 1953:IIxi:227)

The Lion’s Mouth The game perspective does not mean that all wars can be won; sometimes the constraints of history pose very high barriers. But Wittgenstein’s concern with “putting the indefiniteness into words” can yield a measure of transcendence. Recall in this regard the grandfather of Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man, the grandfather who achieved a kind of triumph through the game metaphor, despite the hardness of his destiny. Ellison’s narrator was a young man with a particularly severe propensity to delude himself. He steadfastly believed, in the racially rigid society of the early twentieth century, that if he behaved well enough, the society that so brutally discriminated against his people would relent, would allow him to succeed in that society, in some meaningful way as a full human participant. The slowness with which the narrator learned that success would not be the case, but that the social power planned to “keep him running” forever, can only be appreciated through the original novel, with its hairraising detail. But one immediate lesson can be drawn here in respect to game theory and its role in the pursuit of justice. In retrospect, the story is a vivid case of the Wittgensteinian argument about the difficulty of losing, or escaping, the illusions with which society equips us all. My interest here is, however, not in Ellison’s narrator but in his grandfather, who was a natural game theorist. The old man described in Ellison’s novel has the true eye of the game theorist, an eye that sees fundamental structures and fundamental patterns in their abstract clarity. Ellison describes how the grandfather, born a slave and freed by the Civil War, and all his life “the meekest of men,” had, at the close of his life, called the whole family together around his deathbed and presented an interpretation of their lives. His oration is shocking to the family. You live “with your head in the lion’s mouth,” the old man says, and “after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good

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fight” in a life that is a war. Tell this to the children! he commands, and then he dies, leaving the family horrified. Everyone in the family is sworn to secrecy, to forget the whole incident entirely, to forget this insane rebellion in the silent ranks (1981:16). Grandfather’s strategic recommendation, which haunts and perplexes the narrator to the very end of the novel, is to “agree ’em to death and destruction” (575), “let ’em swaller you till they burst” (16). The following game matrix illustrates the elements of grandfather’s game. There are essentially only two players; by designating them as (1) insider and (2) outsider, we generalize Ellison’s ideas to a broader realm. The players are placed within a matrix so that the interaction between their actions can be shown in the individual cells, where the column player’s payoffs are placed in the upper right corner of each cell and the row player’s payoffs are shown in the lower left. “You live with your head in the lion’s mouth” is reflected by the asymmetrical power of the two players, an uneven stance reflected first in the available moves: the insider, by inherent status, has the right to reward or punish; the outsider can only petition for admission (recognition) or bow his head. The intellectual exercise, and the insight, of the game approach arises from the challenge of filling in the players’ payoffs in a way that both describes and explains actual behavior in the situation under study. I will return to the ambiguity of these payoff numbers shortly. Grandfather’s Game, or The Lion’s Mouth

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The numbers indicate that if the outsider seeks recognition (equality, rewards, identity), the other player may grant this and the payoffs will be as shown in the upper left cell: the outsider gets a payoff of four and the insider’s payoff is zero, perhaps reflecting a trade-off between losing some social resources while achieving some satisfaction in a sense of rectitude. A second outcome occurs when the outsider chooses the same seek recognition strategy as before, but the insider denies it; the payoffs are shown in the lower left cell, where a punishment of minus six is laid on the outsider and the insider gets a plus eight, representing his reinforced high status (and possibly his pleasure in punishment). In the second column, two different outcomes are possible under the outsider’s meekness behavior. If the outsider decides to reward dutifulness, the meek inherit two points; the insider gets ten points, representing his pleasure in maintaining dominance over a willing (meek) subordinate. But the outsider may lose under the meekness strategy as well, if the insider decides to punish him anyway. What grandfather meant by the lion’s mouth is just this lower right cell. The insider, at whim, can punish the outsider and, as the payoff of 4 suggests, the insider gets the satisfaction of affirming his perfect freedom of will. The game matrix emphasizes a fundamental truth, that the freedom of choice society bestows on its members is often subject to considerable bias. How will the game play out? Game theory argues29 that each player’s choice of strategy is based on a rational calculation of the player’s possible payoffs. This calculation must include the outcomes that follow from one actor’s choices combined with the choices of the other actor. In the Lion’s Mouth game, the outsider looks at the payoffs that might possibly occur in the seek recognition column and sees that the 4 and –6 give an expected overall value of –2, while in the humility column 2 and –3 give a expected overall payoff of –1. The outsider’s rational choice is therefore humility; this is grandfather’s advice to the children. Looked at from the insider’s point of view, the reward option provides an expected overall value of 10 points and the punish option 12 points. The insider’s rational choice would then be to choose punish more or less consistently, since the expected value is higher. But the highest reward for the insider, according to the payoffs postulated in the matrix, is the upper right cell where the insider payoff is 10; this represents a situation in which the social hierarchy, the precedence of insider over outsider, is intact and there is apparent submission by the outsider. When the insider can rely on the outsider’s absolute and continued use of the meekness strategy, therefore, the insider will rationally choose to reward. Grandfather saw this as the only road. Let ’em swaller you till they burst. The matrix makes a more important contribution to the present chapter in that it forces the analyst into a kind of puzzlement that is scientifically, and perhaps philosophically, progressive. The reader may already have become annoyed by the payments in the matrix, asking what justified a particular number and

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what assumptions were being used to establish the relations between the strategies. Ellison considered grandfather’s game and decided there was no escape; a game theorist would ask instead, “Are the payoffs correctly shown? Do all insiders play the game as you have shown it?” Such questions are the major benefit of game theory itself because they push the observer onward into social practice. Do all insiders act in the same way? Imagine an insider with no long-term objection to admitting outsiders, or an insider with a inherent aversion to punishing people, and the game transforms itself because the insider would tend to play the top row consistently; this regularity of choice would create new circumstances of choice for the outsider. But that is not realistic either, since society is not made entirely of generous personalities any more than it is made up of bigots. Given that every society is composed of people who have a wide variety of attitudes toward the persons with whom they may come into contact—that the actors may be charitable or uncharitable, aggressive or peaceful, sociable or solitary, foolish or wise—then the game approach provides a methodology appropriate to the circumstances. Intelligent play in the game of justice can only occur when players develop an interest in, and an appreciation for, the variety of human behaviors and motivations. This again leads the participant in justice politics toward a better acquaintance with the insights of the social sciences, and to a better understanding of other people. Ellison’s theory of invisibility cuts two ways: inward toward the self and outward to other persons in society. A person who lives according to the everyday stereotypes imposed on people, the self as well as the others, rather than on a full understanding of human complexity, will be less in touch with reality and less likely to pluck justice from the game of politics. No one plays well when the participants are invisible. The standard theory of games, with its formal rigor, provides structure to the analysis and the practice of the game; while the philosophical theory of games provides insight both into the self and into the opportunities inherent in the rich ambiguities of human experience. Everyman becomes, under such a regime, both a social scientist and a political theorist. Democracy provides a starting point for this journey because it frees women and men to appreciate the fully political nature of their own everyday lives and of the justice they may achieve within the worlds they themselves create and re-create in the course of their daily experience with one another and with themselves.

Chapter Five Foucault’s Justice Agent-Centered Theory and the Game Position

The Self-Organization of Society The use of a game framework in analyzing human behavior has implications beyond the micropolitical aspects of everyday affairs into the construction of societies as wholes and the claims of legitimacy made for those societies. From a naive social perspective, it is tempting to believe that existing societies have been established on immemorial principles laid down by farseeing statesmen. One’s position in such societies, whether high or low, is in this view justified by tradition and is in some larger sense normal and immutable. The game concept opens this view to question, suggesting that the people who now rule are more accurately seen as the winners of past contests. The rules they make for the whole society are therefore rules that benefit themselves; this is perfectly understandable as self-protection or as a natural bias toward the self ’s own values and preferences, but the system lacks sacred status. Beyond game theory’s attention to immediate concerns, therefore, is an empirical extension of its principles across time and history, reflecting this recognition of self-reference in the rule-makers, and the impact of this self-reference on the individual’s situation and choice of strategy. Self-organization theory as a rigorous methodology has come into prominence only in the past decade, usually in relation to computer methods, although in hindsight one can recognize its use by many well-known theorists and scientists. The basic premise of self-organization theory is that actors come in a great variety of kinds—of different physical, cognitive, and motivational attributes—and that the result of any interaction between them depends significantly on the mix of attributes each possesses. This interaction of individual 103

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agents creates and re-creates its own environment, operating only according to the interactive principles specified for individuals; the marketplace is a subcase of this phenomenon, but self-organized societies need not be happily ordered by Smith’s invisible hand. Instead, they are likely to be irregular stacks of not entirely interdependent institutions ranging anywhere from Utopia to Armageddon, depending on who meets whom and under what circumstances. The idea of self-organization, the empirical weaving together of the actions of particular individuals with particular goals in a situation they cannot control, with unexpected and unintended outcomes emerging in all directions, gathers together and puts into a sharpened perspective the themes already introduced here. Whyte’s street people were self-organized in their groups; they were defined by their peers and consigned to roles they could neither understand nor change. Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s people combined coherent experience out of almost random components, responding to a gentle Wittgensteinian push here, or a hefty von Neumann shove there, if the combat grew rougher. Participation in such organization requires a Thoreauvian composure, a disciplined self-knowledge that accepts the necessity of living in the world as it is and being willing both to hear, and to march to, one’s own values. The combination of the self-governed individual in a self-organized environment returns the argument of the present chapter to the issue raised earlier as Pitkin’s Dilemma, and the role of theory both in defining and confronting the exigencies of the everyday political world. As one of the first scholars in political science to engage with Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective, Pitkin had questioned whether any theory, in a post-Wittgensteinian epistemology, could presume to provide guidance for, much less appropriate interpretations of, the human dilemma. The present work consequently nears its conclusion by returning to the issue of justice and the way in which game theory at the philosophical level implied by Wittgenstein’s writing can clarify both the nature of justice in an imperfect world and the strategies for playing the game of justice by imperfect individuals willing to rise to the circumstances.

The Logic of Justice In a 1971 confrontation on Dutch television, the third debate of the International Philosophers’ Project, Michel Foucault of the Collège de France and Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took part in a theatrical but nonetheless revealing discussion on the nature of justice in contemporary society. Chomsky argued passionately that a sense of justice is fundamental to human nature, that justice has a real meaning, and that he made war against the police because it was just (Davidson 1997:136, 138). Chomsky did not base his position on a hope of absolute justice, but argued that the

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intellectual’s task was “to try to create the vision of a future just society . . . a humanistic social theory that is based . . . on some firm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature” (ibid. 131). Because of the leverage provided by such a concept of innate justice, Chomsky was able to argue that “the state has the power to enforce a certain concept of what is legal, but power doesn’t imply justice” (ibid. 133). Foucault met Chomsky’s argument with total, paradigmatic disagreement, responding sharply at one point that “one makes war to win, not because it is just” (ibid. 137). Foucault then went on, in what he called a “Nietzschean” vein, to announce a disparaging proposition about justice, quite contrary to Chomsky’s ideal. Instead of being a quality inherent in human nature, Foucault said, “it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented . . . as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. . . . The notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for” the claim (ibid. 138). “It is true that in all social struggles, there is a question of ‘justice,’ ” he continued, “the fight against class justice, against its injustice, is always part of the social struggle. . . . But if justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is as an instrument of power” (ibid. 135–136).1 Foucault’s opinion was not in accord with public sentiment at the time; in the published transcript, all the subsequent audience comments and questions were directed to Chomsky alone. And in American political theory Foucault’s opinions appear to have been equally unpalatable. From Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971), through Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983), Barry’s Theories of Justice (1989), to Elster’s Local Justice (1992), and including such rights-based approaches at Kateb’s Inner Ocean (1992), the consensus has appeared to continue to put justice in its usual normative position where it functions as an evaluative concept for existing societies, existing institutions, and other sociopolitical arrangements. It is true that the plural has worked its way into the discussion of justice: spheres rather than sphere (Walzer), theories rather than theory (Barry); indeed even Rawls’s original theory became political rather than transcendental (Political Liberalism 1993). But there has been no movement in American political theory explicitly to throw out the whole ideal of justice—bathwater, baby, and all—as does Foucault. It may be suggested, however, despite this apparent consensus in the field of justice theorists on the normative sanctity of the term, that students of modern justice are not always in full control of the direction taken by their own inquiries. Intellectual choices, as Wittgenstein argued, are like branch processes in a decision tree. Once one scholar has expounded a particular point in a particular way, or couched an argument in a particular form, other scholars may find it difficult or inconvenient to radically shift direction, and may adopt the other’s point of view as a new starting point, rather than challenging it. Over

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the course of time, in this way, a debate may lead in directions not anticipated even by its participants. Thomas Kuhn (1962) suggested the term “paradigm” for the way this process works in the physical sciences, and the term is not wholly inappropriate to the social sciences, including political theory. The question now is where the contemporary colloquy about justice has taken us, perhaps somewhat absentmindedly and without overt intention. The answer seems to be that it has taken us very close to Foucault’s justice, but with the possibility of reaching conclusions that may not be the same as were his. The path from Chomsky, or Rawls, to Foucault is obvious in retrospect as being determined first of all by the individualistic postulate implicit in the American experience and ideology, explicit in the rational choice theory on which Rawls based his initial approach (1971). One branching alternative, from this point of individualistic postulate, was Nozick’s (1974) work, the unexpected results of which encouraged further search in different directions, concluding in studies of justice that were social scientific, naturalistic, or purely empirical. However, as a recent review of the justice literature concluded (Waldron 2002:267), the results of this post-Rawls inquiry were interesting, but lacked theoretical vigor. The original position and the veil of ignorance may not have succeeded in establishing Rawls’s original argument, but they did have a methodological bite generally lacking in later works. My argument here is that there is more method in these later justice studies than has been recognized, and that they bring the study of justice to a unexpected view of the entire problem. The new kid on the block in terms of methodological inquiry is agentcentered method.2 Recognized also under the labels of self-organization theory or complexity theory, it has turned up in such widely varying fields as political theory and mathematics, and its practitioners can be found in all the social and political sciences (Arthur 1994, Axelrod 1997, Epstein and Axtel 1996, Holland 1998, Jervis 1997, Mandelbrot 1982, Pierson 2000, Poundstone 1985, Schelling 1978, Simon 1969, Tetlock and Belkin 1996, White 2000:ix–x).3 Agentcentered theory is so widely used in the hard sciences, as well as the social sciences, that the observer is perhaps justified in seeing it as not just another trendy fad. Further, the approach recommends itself on lines of Occam’s razor, since it carries few a priori assumptions or postulates in terms of social analysis and meets Wittgenstein’s criteria in terms of philosophy. That is, the agentcentered method tends to argue that certain concepts are not difficult, but are instead impossible. We are therefore encouraged to “do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (Wittgenstein 1968:109:47e). Agent-centered theory or method is not difficult to summarize, although its implications may be both radical and elusive. As an approach to the analysis of anything from human behavior to the growth of trees, agent-centered method is (1) based on the individual actor or unit,4 (2) an individual or unit acting according to a specific repertoire of behaviors in relation to its existing

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environment, (3) one in which individual acts are interactive,5 in that actions have result only within the environment formed by other actors and their actions,6 and (4) large-scale results are contingent on the mix of actions taken by the component individual units. Finally, (5) the result of such processes is open-ended and the analyst of such processes models them in an iterative, recursive form.7 Each unit acts, in a burst of activity or a neat sequence, and the sum total serves as starting point for another burst or sequence of individual activity. There is no necessary end to this process nor does it necessarily improve. The term “self-organization” indicates that sometimes this recursive behavior results in increasing levels of organization among the participants. But the method contains the possibility of complete collapse of the nascent institution into chaos. Agent-centered method has deep roots in political philosophy,8 going back to Plato’s analysis of how imperfect governments gradually decline into anarchic democracy (Plato 1968), or to Hobbes’s individualistic analysis of men in the state of nature (Hobbes 1958).9 The modern form of agent-centered theory has drifted into prominence, however, from an entirely technological source. Computer programmers have discovered that computers are not clever like human minds, but work out problems by massive force and endless repetition, using basic algorithms or mathematical formulas to repeat simple instructions, leaving it to the machine, not human intuition, to discover the results. Had Hobbes been equipped with a modern computer, he would not have needed to narrow the problem to what happens when “all” men have hope of equality, but could have written a program to discover what happens when fifty percent have the hope of equality and fifty percent do not. Or when nine out of ten lack hope, and so on. The method is radical in Wittgenstein’s sense because it precludes the use of convenient summary concepts, forcing the analyst’s nose to the grindstone of a world in which every institution is either the result of determinate individual acts or is hypothetical and false. Agent-centered methods have a peculiar epistemological status for this reason. They are partly postmodern, attacking social ideologies as concepts built on sand, disguising domination and exploitation. Agent-centered methods are also quintessentially modern because of their reliance on mathematical techniques and technologies and their conviction that certainty is possible. In respect to the discussion of justice, agentcentered methods encourage a reevaluation of the justice theorists themselves, as implicitly self-organized, as well as a reevaluation of their theories, which seem less benign than expected, under the method’s harsh glare. My discussion begins with Rawls’s first essay on justice (1958), which gives greater access to my present thesis than does his later work. I continue by considering Nozick as more a methodological innovator than was apparent in the initial reaction to his Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). I identify Walzer (1983)

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as a proponent of self-organization theory who does not sufficiently recognize its implications, and I inquire into Elster’s interesting interpretation of Local Justice (1992), which is exemplary of self-organization theory and sharply emphasizes the ambiguities created by explicitly failing to consider selforganization processes. In the effort to evaluate these theorists and what I argue to be their emerging paradigmatic framework, I accept Waldron’s (2002) complaint that Rawls’s successors have failed to give their discussion the high methodological level of the Theory of Justice, and I therefore suggest a game position, implicit in the new theories of justice, as an alternative to the original position.10 Instead of entering the debate over whether justice entails universal principles, or whether it should be founded on a maternal image of generosity and ‘care’ (Dumm 1996:153; Gutmann 1980:219, 224; Kateb 1992:ch. 10; Okin 1989:ch. 8; White 1991:127–132), the theorists I consider here take an agent-centered view emphasizing not that one party bestows justice on others, but that all (including those who have not received it) negotiate over justice. In the world painted by Nozick, Walzer, and Elster (and perhaps even Rawls himself ), the principles of selforganization will deal harshly with those who fail to rise to their neighbors’ challenges. The picture gives new life to the idea that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.11 But it also converges with Dillon’s (1999:172) “another justice,” which emerges beyond negotiation as “an irruptive and inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances” that links justice and politics in an open, uncertain lattice of possibility to which observers must “bear witness.” “Politics becomes that way of being (politeia) whose composure is an art of intimation, articulation, intervention, and judgment.” In such a case, all are participant observers, and justice ‘as politics’ is acceptable only if all players so recognize it.

The Original Rawls Position In beginning to evaluate the concepts of self-organization theory in respect to the apparent discrepancies between several recent approaches to justice, I turn first to Rawls’s original essay (1958) to ground the discussion. That essay has a directness and freshness that make it useful for such a comparison. Indeed because of its several differences12 with the later formulation (Rawls 1993, 2001), Rawls’s theory in this early article is particularly appropriate both in finding contrasts to, and inquiring into resemblances with, self-organization theory’s approach. The essay, “Justice as Fairness,” was written in explicit opposition to welfare economics’ definition of justice as a social distribution of goods, and the general utilitarian equation summarizing justice over a particular group of persons, calculated by an efficient executive (1958:184–192).13

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It is interesting that in this initial essay on justice Rawls does not use the original position from which to develop a concept of justice but rather takes his actors in media res and defines a more empirical situation where, in the course of living within established institutions, “complaints” may arise and people must figure out how to resolve them. Since Rawls has defined an ongoing integrated community as background, the members do not merely despatch complainers in any rough way, but, like good Kantians, invent a principle. One notes that the consideration due to others is based on wariness rather than ethical constraints. Their procedure for this is to let each person propose the principles upon which he wishes his complaints to be tried with the understanding that, if acknowledged, the complaints of others will be similarly tried, and that no complaints will be heard at all until everyone is roughly of one mind as to how complaints are to be judged. . . . Each will be wary of proposing a principle which would give him a peculiar advantage. (1958:171)14 Allow this to stand as one statement of liberal thought and it provides a ground against which one may partially evaluate the alternative presented by agent-centered or self-organization theory. The primary point of similarity is that both methods share an individualism (as Rawls noted, at best an ambiguous term), a methodological commitment common to trends in social philosophy when Rawls first wrote, based on economic premises that showed their power in diverse fields (Simon 1945/1965, Downs 1957, Buchanan and Tullock 1962/1965, Riker 1962, Schelling 1963, Olson 1968). At least on the surface, Rawls seemed to embed theory in egalitarian human practices, so that as Pitkin had urged in her study of Wittgenstein, theory was intrinsic to human experience, not imposed from without by all-knowing theorists (Pitkin 1972/1993). On the other hand, of course, Rawls’s people were not real individuals but miniature Kantians formed not just by the felicities of their supposed social circumstances (equality, complementarity, non-envy), but also by presumptions about human behavior that would be hard to sustain in any known society. In the early article, Rawls explicitly notes that he is dealing with justice as “a virtue of social institutions” and not “as a virtue of particular actions or of persons” (1958:164–165). The first major difference between the Rawls essay and self-organization theory relates to this issue of individualism. Where Rawls’s people are abstract and interchangeable units, self-organization theory defines agents in the most practical sense (with proper names attached, if it comes to that). There are multiple differences among the actors, differences in qualities, interests, and attitudes. Where rational choice often assumes actors are similar or the same,

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agent-centered methods postulate that some persons are not only stronger or smarter, but some may be pointlessly envious. Furthermore, self-organization theory’s actors are described not in terms of the abstract principles on which they might agree, but in terms of actual behaviors or strategies they might use. The results are therefore radically different from those postulated by Rawls. Self-organized actors might assault their Kantian fellows with the principle that “might is right,” and might be strong and confident enough to foresee that this would be a principle they would always gladly accept. In a self-organized world, the weak, faced by disorder and threats rather than Rawlsian collegiality, might bind themselves to the strong, agreeing ‘willingly’ to the principle (“the strong will protect their clients”). So Rawls’s “practices” may be consensual but would not necessarily fit Rawls’s own definition of fairness.15 This exemplifies the often-criticized liberal tendency to look at the privileged center of society, ignoring both the overprivileged and the underprivileged, and to assume a benignity of attitude in the mainstream for which there is little or no empirical support. But it is important to emphasize that though Rawls perhaps turned aside from the radical results of his own method, it is to his work that we owe the beginning of self-organization theory in relation to problems of justice.

Nozick’s Game Methodology It may seem surprising to include in the present chapter a discussion of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) because Nozick did not after the book’s appearance attempt to develop further the ideas contained in it and because his arguments are today little used in contemporary analyses of issues of justice. However, in retrospect, Nozick’s substantive argument about the minimal state seems less important to the issue of justice than his methods and procedures, which now stand out sharply as precursors of agent-centered theory.16 It is clear that in Anarchy Nozick was doing complexity theory long before that term was coined. He used an agent-centered model, analyzed largely dyadic relations between participants, and focused on process rather than on crosssectional analysis; he even utilized the phenomenon of unexpected consequences long before the term became popular. Several features of Nozick’s argument are strikingly similar to agentcentered theory. • The “principle of justice in acquisition,” based not on end-states but on individual contestations and their results, is individualistic as few other theories of justice are.

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• The “original acquisition of holdings” focuses directly on the getting of things ‘between consenting adults’; justice is thus personalized and relativized. • As a non-“patterned” theory, entitlement theory achieves its “intelligibility” from the idea that holdings “can be seen as arising from the operation of a small number of principles” (Nozick 1974:157). This belief in a severe underlying simplicity is typical of self-organization theory. • The “principle of justice in transfer,” by which a holding is legitimate if acquired through principles (even if Nozick does not fully explicate these principles), directs attention to historical processes, and in various examples suggests the eccentricities that personal preferences may yield in the resulting outcomes. What distinguishes Nozick’s argument from the agent-centered model presented here is its decision to build a theory of the state on this microanalytic basis, and its choice of a normative rather than an even superficially empirical perspective. Even normatively, Nozick’s argument is seriously incomplete, since the entitlement theory (150–153) never explicitly states what acquisition “in accordance with the principles of justice’ ” is (151); theft, fraud, and seizure are ruled out (152), but nothing is clearly ruled in.17 But where Rawls recoiled from the ‘game’ aspects of social interaction at the political level (recall the trumpeter and the pianist; Rawls 1971:134, note 10; see also Barry 1989:30–33), Nozick affirmed the game structure, even if he did not dig very deeply into its actual content. And, of course, he rather thoughtlessly conferred on his players “rights,” which the state could not violate, without asking (1) whether the state really could not violate those rights, and (2) whether violations of rights might arise from persons outside the state. Full acceptance of his model as an ongoing framework for analysis and theory construction was seriously weakened by Nozick’s style of argument, as well as the content of his conclusions.18 But as a clear contributor to political philosophy’s journey toward Foucault’s justice, Nozick’s method takes on new significance.

In Contrast to Walzer’s Theory On the surface, Walzer’s theory of justice (1983) may seem to have anticipated and even outrun self-organization theory as I suggest it here. Walzer’s book opens with a discussion of the process of sorting. Every time a meeting occurs, Walzer notes (1983:xi), equality flies out the window. “Someone will be elected chairman; someone will make a strong speech and persuade us all to follow his lead. By the end of the day we will have begun to sort one another out—that’s

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what meetings are for.” It is a main pillar of Walzer’s argument that this sorting out is natural and legitimate, and he makes it the basis of his theory of distributive justice in a political system characterized not by liberal equality of persons but by complex equality (1983:17–20). Rejecting a rights perspective for one that analyzes goods, Walzer allows that in the social distribution of various goods, monopolies may arise and these he determines to be acceptable so long as the different distributions in different social spheres do not dominate one another.19 Inequalities themselves do not violate norms of justice, Walzer argues; inequalities are unacceptable only when one group so dominates all spheres that it can “grind the faces” (1983:xx) of those in other groups, demanding deference, admiration, and reverence along with economic subordination.20 Throughout Walzer’s central chapters on the various goods involved in his analysis,21 he consistently advocates the allowing of different groups to organize themselves internally; this is in fact the foundation of that group and sphere “autonomy,” which is central to his whole argument that nondominance is ensured when each sphere is internally organized, therefore autonomous. From immigration policy to educational reform, Walzer is wont to argue that group members have the right to make their own decisions—select their own members, who will be let in and who kept out, and run their institutions as they wish.22 Unless one is a confirmed elitist, this is hard to argue against, but Walzer accepts the social results of such processes with only a one-sided scrutiny. Faced with the issue of how, in Walzer’s neat phrase, people “sort themselves out,” self-organization theorists begin by setting up a simple model of the decision-maker: in a given set of circumstances, what options are available? If the model is to be a realistic picture of the decision circumstances, a representative set of available (conceivable) actions must be presented; if this is not done, then the real people one is trying to describe may, in the circumstances the theorist studies, do something unexpected and defeat the purpose of the model, which was both to understand and to predict. Walzer’s model of human behavior is not open to all options in the manner a self-organization theorist would require. Heavily influenced by economic categories and the general Adam Smith metaphor of the benign marketplace, and despite Walzer’s acute sensitivity in many places in Spheres of Justice to the racial, religious, or other discriminations in society, he invariably assumes that the actions on which people sort themselves out are ‘nice’ actions, socially beneficial in the medium to long run, therefore acceptable as grounds for differentiation. Walzer’s leading chapter on “complex equality” opens with a listing of the ways people may deal with the various kinds of goods they are in the process of distributing: they may share, or divide (1983:3); they may “give, allocate, exchange, and so on” (1983:6, 8). The tendency to assume that allocations are rational, based on good reasons, shows in Walzer’s first vignette of the sortingout meeting, where someone acquires my favor by the power and intelligence

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of his rhetoric (1983:xi), someone else will be elected chairman, other roles will be allocated; the assumption is that these discriminations are understandable, appropriate, positive in effect. The fallacy is unexpected in a scholar who has read widely, as Walzer so clearly has, in Marx’s texts.23 That force is ruled out of Walzer’s system of distributive justice is his normative choice to make; but to ignore its presence in the societies on which he bases his arguments leaves a writer in a position of ignoring half the relevant data and half the relevant questions. Walzer states his purpose in the book as understanding social behavior so that it may be regulated (1983:21), but to rely wholly on free exchange as the mechanism of human interaction at the descriptive level, sharply distinguishes Walzer’s work from self-organization theory. Walzer shares the benign bias that, aside from an occasional rapacious capitalist, everyone else is basically good in nature, needing only to be freed of economic oppression to manifest this natural human decency. Thus, Walzer’s whole argument is set in a political community he defines as a world of common meanings, of “language, history, and culture”; a world of a “collective consciousness” with shared “sensibilities and intuitions,” although he admits this is sometimes not the case (1983:28). Communities are shaped also, he says, by politics, and each new fight among the participants is shaped “by the outcomes of previous fights”; but he ignores the implications of his own statement, instead emphasizing that the human community is really the highest good because there is no alternative except humanity as a whole, or a global society, in which to locate justice (1983:29). As a step toward full affirmation of justice as an empirical phenomenon, therefore, Walzer makes a major contribution in carrying self-organized justice into multiple spheres. But, like Rawls, he recoils at its full-scale applicability.

Elster’s Local Justice Elster’s study of local justice is a two-sided work: on the one hand an informative descriptive study of decision making in the allocation of scarce goods by officials in specific policy areas; on the other hand a deeply critical analysis of elite cynicism in devising and applying the principles of a local justice that means quite the opposite of its usual definition. His reluctance to draw together these quite disparate viewpoints leaves his conclusions ambiguous and unclear. Reinterpreting Elster’s model from the agent-centered point of view clarifies his findings by bringing them within a single perspective and, in addition, extends the scope of local justice to more fully include the circumstances of the recipients of such justice. As indicated by its title, Elster’s Local Justice distinguishes itself from other works on the subject of justice by selecting as its object of study a set of quite

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specific social allocations; not just the economist’s general goods, nor the political scientists’s general values, but everyday administrators’ specific decisions about organ transplants, college admissions, job layoffs, military service, immigration, adoption, child custody, and so on (Elster 1992:1). All these goods and bads are allocated, in his core model, by “relatively autonomous” institutions that choose their own decision principles and apply them to specific individuals, within a context of higher officials who provide funds and may attempt to exert policy influence (27). Elster distinguishes his approach from that of Walzer on grounds that his own approach is not normative, but seeks simply to describe concepts “held by actors who are in a position to influence the selection of specific procedures or criteria” (281). Elster says that he had originally hoped to develop a “framework for the study of in-kind allocation of goods and burdens,” but that he failed in this goal, finding only “messy and ugly” principles with neither simplicity nor parsimony (1992:vii). Elster may be too modest in his disclaimers in respect to a general theory of justice because, in effect, his chapter three lays out a comprehensive list of principles that his research has uncovered as the possible guiding principles of local justice. This list of “the elementary building blocks of local justice” (103) is unusual, however, in containing both obvious principles of fairness and equity (lotteries, rotations, queues) along with other, quite different, principles that seem to stand in egregious contradiction to everyday definitions of justice (e.g., caste, nobility, religion, age, ethnicity). Elster’s focus on specific allocative arenas tends both to document the unfair as well as the fair local mechanisms of justice and obscure their difference.24 What is difficult about Elser’s argument as a whole is that he shows elsewhere, especially in chapter four, that any principle may be used for its secondary effects of excluding (unfairly?) specific individuals not named directly by the principle (115–123).25 Elster’s discussion gives support to the thesis of the present discussion by showing how many ingenious principles may be used to deprive individual persons of the justice they expect or hope for. When Elster turns to injustice explicitly, the discussion is separate from the local procedures discussed earlier in the book and shows no recognition that they may be unfair, although he himself has shown exactly how such unfairness works in practice. In his philosophical chapter six, which deals briefly with several contemporary theories of justice, Elster outlines a summary model of allocative decision-making for responsible officials that has no direct relevance to his list of actually used local principles from chapter three but emphasizes welfare, rights, and fairness (244). Elster makes occasional reference to global justice, by which he means society-wide justice (132–134), but he does not integrate it with his earlier discussion of biased justice principles. Elster briefly considers the allocative process from the position of the subordinate members of the process, those who may or may not receive the good

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for which they have made application. Such individuals, Elster notes, may see the process of local justice quite differently than decision-makers who focus on a single area of allocation. The individual may find, Elster says, that in every case of allocation he has the “bad luck” to receive the burdens rather than the goods, and that there “is no mechanism of redress across allocative spheres” (133). Elster postulates “ethical presentism” (“the past doesn’t count”) and “ethical individualism” (“groups don’t matter”) (195) in discussing justice generally. The underlying model is, for Elster, that life is “a series of uncorrelated stochastic events” and most people expect in their individual experience to ‘win some and lose some’ encounters, and end up with a reasonable balance (134). The possibility that systematic discrimination may occur, in multiple spheres, against specific groups does not enter his calculations.26 With both Elster and Walzer—and Rawls has been charged with the fault as well—the status-quo society and its middle sector individuals get all the attention. Either members of a community are engaged in civil debate (Rawls), or people are sorting themselves out on justifiable grounds so that some lead and some obey (Walzer), or officials are doing their best to be fair and impartial (Elster). When this does not occur, the theorists condemn but ultimately dismiss the problem as not central to their inquiry.27 This pattern of theorizing about justice brings up rather sharply the obvious point that the underprivileged members of society cannot rely on such theorists for any direct conceptual or practical assistance. Yet the situation does provide an implicit lesson that since theorists seem to legislate from their personal positions, nontheorists are given the example to do likewise. They find themselves in game position and are, in effect, authorized to play the game of justice out to the best conclusion they can achieve. Self-organization theory, once one sets one’s foot on it, leads directly to an empirical justice, which is Foucault’s justice. The question is whether there is any light at the end of this tunnel.

The Meaning of Self-Organization In addition to its ability to explore the underpinnings of human interaction, and to demonstrate the unjustifiable optimism of the assumptions frequently made about normative concepts, the agent-centered method has the unusual ability to work out the implications of its empirical analysis. This is accomplished through iteration or, more properly, recursion.28 The paradigm case of how such a process works is the Game of Life model invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970, building on the work of John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam (Poundstone 1985:13–15). The Game of Life is a simple lattice in which each cell repetitively takes on a particular quality solely on the basis of

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conditions in its immediate environment at a single point in time.29 While the patterns that result from this constant cycling can be wildly complex, apparently idiocyncratic, and unexpected, they result from generative rules that are simple to the point of parody.30 What is important about such cellular automatons is that the results are generated by simple rules acting on simple conditions. At the end, the results are explained in a precise manner by studying the exact path taken from one set of conditions to the next, as a result of the application of the specified rules. No one is outside the system. Complete adherence to such postulated rules within a recursive process makes logical softening impossible. The analyst is trapped by the postulated rules and their repeated application under the constantly new circumstances the rules have themselves created. The analyst therefore can make no optimistic skips past unpleasant results that turn up from the operation of his or her own initial logic.31 Both Rawls and Nozick seem to have recognized this logical constraint—Rawls by giving up his attempt to situate people at least temporarily beyond politics and turning to mere political justice, and Nozick by following his own rules into a set of state institutions he himself found dull. Later writers have often been less consistent in this regard. Perhaps the most extensive use of self-organization analysis in the area of normative behavior has been Axelrod’s (1997:44–68) computer simulations. With a precision that is either edifying or shocking, depending on one’s predilections, Axelrod (48–49) models rule-following behavior as the result of two basic choices by the individuals who constitute the system. First, an individual may follow some (unspecified) social rule or fail to follow it; this is the boldness coefficient. Second, an individual may choose to punish defectors (violators of the basic rule) or not to punish them; this is the vengeance coefficient. There are both costs and rewards for all types of action.32 Because of the precision with which the model is specified, Axelrod is able to trace out the ramifications of different ranges of coefficients over longer and shorter time periods to discover long-run system patterns.33 Where Foucault’s justice stops with the state of war, agent-centered models allow things to move on to see what various combinations of impulse will produce over time. Much of the computer-based agent-centered approach is extremely abstract (e.g., Epstein and Axtell 1996), and for that reason often fails to reach many of the concrete problems that attract political scientists and political theorists. What if members of Congress behaved according to two simple rules? Public policy-makers? Rousseauian legislators? Political candidates? Political theorists? The issue of justice is amenable to such analysis, as I have suggested here, and is illustrative of its possibilities. Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978) emphasizes the relevance of asking a question in basic, local terms, and then working it out through perhaps a dozen exemplary steps. If I decide not to sell my home (in a neighborhood where the ethnic balance is

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in flux), who will be affected and what will my neighbors do as a result of what I do? Furthermore, what will their neighbors do as a result of their actions? And where will that leave me?34 Such a pattern of thinking would encourage laypersons, in their own self-interest, to learn to evaluate personally, at the micro level, the effect of their own individual behavior on issues that are often considered to be the result of broad government policy, determined elsewhere. That is one practical result, but the possibilities may go further than neighborhood organization. What is Kant’s categorical imperative but a question of the same form as that involved in selling one’s house? Kant asked whether we could will our actions to be universal principles (Kant 1949:38). Agent-centered theory asks, somewhat more empirically, do I want to act in such a way that other persons do the same thing; in other words, do I want everyone to do what I am planning to do and thereby change my own environment, by their actions, in a way I may find distasteful in personal ways? Such a tool for thinking hard thoughts would probe the self and its future, and enforce individual political responsibility for entirely self-centered reasons. Empirical rather than normative, ‘selfish’ rather than ethical, practical rather than principled; Wittgenstein might have approved of such a shift in language, for it avoids meaningless abstract discourse and instead directs its attention to real behavior. All of the justice theorists considered in this chapter, from Rawls on, avoid recursion because they want justice to be settled once and for all. Agent-centered theorists sensitize us to an alternative approach in which justice is an openended, living exercise that everyone participates in. But if justice is openended, it is not without standards, and agent-centered theory reminds us that different patterns of behavior have different repercussions for the persons who choose them.

The Game Position Waldron properly argues that without a strong methodological framework, social philosophy turns into mere political advocacy (2002:267). I accept this point as central in the development of empirically relevant theory and, toward the end of proposing an alternative methodological apparatus, attempt to sketch here some of the concepts that describe an approach to justice as an entirely individual process. Drawing directly on the Rawls tradition of an original position, yet turning it on its head, I define a game position as the central framework for my analysis of justice. The game position will be defined from the viewpoint of each participant, the concrete, particular individual who is engaged in an interaction with some other individual, the result of which will be an affirmation of, or a change in, the distribution of some social good.35 Unlike

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the immaculate abstraction of individuals in the original position, individuals in the game position are specific persons with socioeconomic and political characteristics; each such person comes complete with personal physical and mental attributes, including a rough estimate of his own and the other’s relative resources. The game position is postulated to occur within a reiterated series of encounters. Unlike the original position, where the events occur once at the foundation of a society, the game position at any point is a slice of action taken from an ongoing sociopolitical process. The individual’s strategic situation, in the game position, is that as a result of the accomplished interactive moment, the individual’s position in respect to the allocation of value in the dyad and the society as a whole will either be affirmed, raised, or lowered. The individual’s goal in this strategic interaction is to get from the other actor as much as possible of that behavior or goods allocation to which the first individual feels entitled. The individual in this game position may take one of two modes of play: the active or the passive. Active play I define as descriptive of a player who recognizes the nature of the interaction as game-like, involving both danger and opportunity, and who rises to this challenge to the extent to which his or her personal and psychological resources allow. Passive play I define by default, as describing a player who neither recognizes the nature of the interaction as game-like nor rises to its challenges.36 Outcomes in the interactive process are defined in terms of the individual’s value status within the group as a whole. Value status measures the individual player’s rank within the given group in terms of whatever factors are used by the specific group to allocate the goods and bads, the rights and duties, the praise and blame. Each individual in game position enters a particular interaction with a starting value status, which may be affirmed by the interaction, or changed in an upward or downward direction. The actual value status of the individual player is compared by the player to his or her own expectation level,37 to give a rough estimate of whether, at its temporary conclusion, the play has succeeded or failed, and to what degree, in the view of the actor who is under study.38 Use of the game terminology here does not imply that a specific, predefined, fully worked-out game is being played by the participants. The games are defined spontaneously, even accidentally, by the individuals’ independent choices of what action to take, and the implications of their joint or interdependent choice. Such agent-defined games do not fit neatly into the standard game matrices (Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Colonel Blotto, etc. [Gintis 2000]), but explore the daily texture of social life through the give-and-take of normal human interaction (Shepsle 1995:205–206).39 Individuals in the game position create their actual, sociologically defined games from scratch,40 making up the rules tacitly as they take succeeding actions and responses, changing their strategies as a result of experience, accident,

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or redefinition of the values they are allocating. They learn as they go what they will consider, for this subgame, as game justice, and plan for the next game where other circumstances may prevail and other outcomes may be possible (Schelling 1960). In every case, there is the possibility of wholesale re-creation of the game by one or both actors’ choice of novel actions. The resources with which the participants enter the play may be concrete, as in various forms of wealth and power, but resources will also include the individual’s game stance, whether that strategy is active or passive. The game metaphor also makes explicit the threat faced by highly valued or highly placed members of the group, who may in any specific interaction lose out and thereby lose more or less of their original status. Using the game position allows the observer to see more clearly the uncertain position of everyone in the model: the weak may fall lower and the strong may rise higher—or the strong may fall and the weak rise. It is for this reason that justice is associated with the game. While in any single game an actor may not achieve what she or he expects in terms of value allocation, in the long run the allocative process will reflect the players’ strategies and skills. This justice is individual: first, because individuals struggle for justice on their own initiative, rather than waiting for society to bestow it on them gratuitously; second, because individual actors define what they choose to consider as justice, and these choices are accepted in all their particularity, in all their individuality. This is not abstract justice, but political justice. Insofar as everyone participates in it, and participates constantly, it is also democratic justice.41 But participation here means something entirely different from public debate or voting; it is an ongoing participation in creating the individual and social texture on which such public activity depends.

Claim, Challenge, Defend Is Miller (1999:253) correct that “postmodern justice is no justice at all”? Where justice is left to the push and shove of claim and counterclaim, this conclusion would seem inevitable. My argument has been that the contemporary discussion of justice has unintentionally brought itself to that point: if people are entitled to organize their own lives, as norms of democracy suggest, then that organization will be accomplished through social interaction that places a premium not on abstract ideals of justice but on narrowly personal interests. The result is that contemporary theories of justice, despite their benign surface appearance, culminate in Foucault’s war of all against all, where justice must be self-organized, the product of bottom-up interactions among free but ordinary agents without foresight, leading to unintended consequences at the societal level. Surely this is a postmodernism from which there is no recovery? If justice is merely what the community says it is, here

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and now (and this is Walzer’s and Elster’s solution), then the discussion has indeed worked its way back to Thrasymachus. As a stage in my argument, I have advanced, instead of the Rawlsian original position, a game position in which individuals are challenged, as in Foucault’s model, to win; but then to go even further and define their ethical roles by their participation in the game itself. Rather than await the generosity of those persons who constitute the status quo, the game position gives attention to the social challengers and their opportunities when facing opposition and exclusion. This approach, I have argued, is in fact widespread in major writings on justice, and owes more to von Neumann and Morgenstern (1953) than to Lyotard (1985) because the issue is as much strategic as existential. Foucault’s contribution is his emphasis on winning as the crux of the issue, which shifts responsibility from the insider’s willingness (or lack of willingness) to grant justice to others, and more to an outsider’s ability to claim justice. The question then is whether politics can be fairness. All the theorists considered here have tried in varying degrees to escape this question, and have to a greater or lesser extent ignored their own understanding that justice as we know it is either partial or illusory or both. Foucault alone accepted flatly that justice, if it exists at all, is the product of winning and losing in a political process that extends over historical sequences of agent interactions. Foucault did not spend a great deal of time on a theoretic solution to the problem of justice as war or politics, but the game metaphor he so frequently used in discussions with various interviewers (Davidson 1997 passim) contains an inherent answer. The individual’s response would be defined as game theorists define any individual’s stance: a coherent value structure, an appreciation of the strategic field faced by the particular individual, and a gathering of the individual’s personal resources to meet the challenges posed. Justice is, from Foucault’s explicit viewpoint, and from the implicit viewpoint of the other theorists discussed here, not a right to be demanded, but a claim to be staked. Rather than rely on the generosity of the opponent, the game model invests the individual player with central importance. In this view, the priority is with the claimant, to assess, assert, challenge, and defend. The conclusion may seem unexpected, but is in fact more in accord with the ideas of the justice theorists discussed here than they have sufficiently noticed.42 Using self-organization theory as a lens through which to consider the issue of where justice stands in a post-Rawlsian context has an interesting spinoff in respect to epistemological and even ontological issues. Self-organization theory is anomalous because it is not postmodern but is empirical and frequently mathematical, manifesting, that is, a sometimes elegant but thoroughly traditional ontology. This interpretation is supported by its epistemological roots in scientific realism, which is currently accepted as applicable to the sciences generally (Bhaskar 1997, Giere 1988, Harré 1986; on the social sciences

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see also Gunnell 1995, Lane 1996, MacDonald 2003). It may be that the game position model, by encouraging group members to exercise their unit-veto capacities, places a healthy responsibility on the individual as well as on the community. If in self-organization theory it is the actors themselves who create the environment in which they and all other actors act, the game position may be a rough-and-ready but still not wholly ineffective substitute for grander solutions. It may also be a fertile field for the interaction of political theory and political science.

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Chapter Six Rousseau on Self-Government The Late Individualist Model of the Promeneur Solitaire

The End Is the Beginning At the end of his life, isolated, ill, and paranoid, Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined in the Tenth Walk of Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire what may have been the central obsession in an amply obsessed life, the task of “unraveling what there is of my own in my own conduct” (Butterworth 1982:141; emphasis added).1 Rousseau had initiated this existentially important inquiry in his early years with Mme. de Warens, but seems not to have faced it fully until the Rêveries, using the broad perspective that only old age can bring because then, and only then, the individual has a reasonably full set of data to work with, data to analyze with the paradoxical question in mind: What is there of my self, in myself? That the question was still an open one for the aged Rousseau is astonishing, given the amount of time and literary effort he expended on himself, from the Confessions through the Dialogues. But it emphasizes Shklar’s interpretation of Rousseau, that his source of primary interest for us is not his political theory of the state: “for Rousseau politics was but a part of that study of the human heart that he had made his province,” and it is this study of the individual that is the “chief reason for his enduring relevance” (Shklar 1969:186–187).2 This suggests that republicanism and civic virtue may not be Rousseau’s major contribution to political philosophy, and that an individualist model is his ultimate solution to the paradoxes of political life. It is customary, among those students of Rousseau who allude at all to Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire to pass it over lightly (e.g., Wokler 1995), as the mutterings of a brilliant but old and neurotic man,3 and not therefore directly relevant to the larger republican argument of Rousseau’s oeuvre. Yet Rousseau 123

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professes in this work, as does the disillusioned Emile in Les Solitaires, that he has achieved in this his final solitude the height of human happiness, and the Rêveries seem to refute,4 by their sharp contrast, such central precepts of the earlier model as that expressed in the Lettre d’Alembert, where “the only joy is public joy.” For the late Rousseau, joy is private and achieved through a radical selfknowledge that makes individual self-government possible. What Rousseau discovered in the Rêveries, as he admits not to have done in the Confessions (Butterworth 1982:43),5 was that self-knowledge is a more difficult thing than he had earlier recognized. Knowing what one has done, even in a life as eventful as Rousseau’s, does not explain why one has done it. Without understanding the underlying principles of action, Rousseau argues that one is living, in effect, with a stranger who is beyond one’s reach and potentially disruptive of one’s stability. To us this may recall Freud, but Rousseau’s approach is civic rather than clinical.6 Self-knowledge as Rousseau defines it in the Rêveries is open-ended, empirical (Reisert 2003:14), and self-conducted.7 The basic analytic strategy by which this result is achieved is, according to Rousseau’s demonstration, the disentangling of one’s self, as a social creation, from one’s own instinctive personal predilections. Only this analytic strategy of the self makes individual self-government possible. To focus on the political individual in Rousseau’s work cuts in a direction contrary to the more orthodox interpretations, which emphasize social unity and loss of the self in that perfect contractual sovereignty underlying the General Will. Yet Rousseau’s individualist model is equally a response to the question, which guides all of Rousseau’s inquiries, of how to achieve freedom and justice in a corrupt world, a question that goes back to the First and Second Discourses (Masters 1964). If one solution to Rousseau’s problem is to create a noncorrupt political system in which men as citizens may lose themselves in transparent total community, a second solution,8 also proposed by Rousseau, is the creation of a human individual who is able to live, alone, an uncorrupted life despite the corruption of the community, through the creation of an internal government.9 Particularly in the Rêveries, Rousseau suggests that such selfgovernment is a function of a radical method of self-knowledge that has the capacity to free the individual from the corrupt society that initially created him and without which he could not have achieved personal maturity.10 Such self-governed individuals are neither the unrealistically autonomous philosophes of the Enlightenment, nor are they the atomistic, abstract individuals that liberalism is said to require (Rorty 1989:85). Rather, they are men deeply implicated in corrupt worlds; men who have been created by their societies and by their formal or informal educations and life experiences in those societies. But in these late works of Rousseau, these individuals are also men who have been so separated from that same society and their own past by later accident that communal solutions are impossible for them. They stand alone

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not by their own choice, but they do stand alone and, in the final analysis, they stand alone gladly.11 The paradox that Rousseau has dealt with since the First Discourse is that man as we know him is created by his society, by the patterns of behavior brought about as men come together and build complex institutions within which they live and within which civilization develops.12 As men become civilized, they become corrupt, but, for Rousseau, this is not the work of evildoers but of everyone who comes to value his or her place in society. The paradox, that civilization both creates and corrupts individuals, dissolves when one accepts at face value the later works of Rousseau, where the solvent is time. Men at one point in time create their societies (though not as they please), and at a later point these societies create other men; men may finally outgrow their societies, as did both Jean-Jacques and Emile.13 Rousseau shows, in the Rêveries and in Les Solitaires (and indeed in Julie) that individualism is the only trustworthy solution to the political dilemma of man in society,14 and Rousseau appears to demonstrate, both in his own life and his tale of the Algerian Emile, that such individualism is exhilarating. This is not a new model of Rousseau’s oeuvre but a new implication of the old model, in which the issue is the meaning of freedom, and ultimately the meaning of politics. My thesis is that Rousseau settles the question on the individual and not on the group.15 In a late modern period marked by increasing individualism and the apparent decline of the citizenship ethic so essential to philosophical definitions of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s model of republican virtue may appear increasingly anachronistic. The possibility that selfish individual interests can be blended or transformed into a General Will, in which man’s freedom is increased by his submission to a just community, is increasingly difficult to sustain. Political theorists still turn to him—Strong (1994:2) says Rousseau is, right or wrong, part of our education—yet the disappearance of the conditions Rousseau imposed on his social contract16 leaves Rousseau’s ideas on the General Will seemingly out of date and declining daily.17 The sheer abundance of Rousseau’s oeuvre, and its diversity, ensure Rousseau’s continued relevance for political theory. Despite Rousseau’s apparently raging misogyny, for instance, feminists have turned to his works and found sometimes striking possibilities there (Fermon 1997, Marso 1999, Morgenstern 1996, Wingrove 2000).18 Yet many of these new interpretations remain bound by the traditional idea that Rousseau’s primary contribution is advocacy of the seamless community; they reject his individualism as narcissistic, destructive ultimately of both the self and other human beings. Much of the ongoing interest in Rousseau has been accomplished by expanding the number of Rousseau’s texts that are considered relevant to political theory (e.g., Christopher Kelly 1987, Reisert 2003). Political theorists and philosophers once focused largely on the model of social organization defined by

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the Social Contract (Cavell 1979, Strong 1994); for years no one read Emile;19 and the political implications of Rousseau’s Julie were ignored because it seemed literary and therefore off-limits to political analysis.20 This has all of course now changed. But Rousseau’s rugged late individualism has not yet been established, in the form in which it emerges in the Rêveries and in that late overlooked exercise in self-criticism, Les Solitaires, in which Rousseau turns Emile on his head. To supplement the positive argument of these two works, I add a brief negative discussion of Julie to suggest that Rousseau had no faith in the solution Clarens appeared to offer. To clarify the implications of Rousseau’s late method, I suggest that Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice (1990) translates into a modern idiom what Rousseau may have intended, and how it may proceed in solving the initial question he posed.21

Reverie as Empirical Self-Analysis A major barrier to the full appreciation of what Rousseau is attempting in the Rêveries is the title itself, sometimes translated as Dreams, which suggests ephemerality and a deliberate lack of seriousness.22 Examination of the text shows, however, that Rousseau is not dreaming or daydreaming but doing some very hard thinking. George Kelly (2001:13–16) makes a distinction between Rousseau’s analytic and his empirical cognitive modes that is especially useful in understanding Rousseau’s approach in the Rêveries. Rousseau’s analytic thought, according to Kelly, is involved in the rational analysis of such questions as what can make legitimate the situation of men who are born free yet are everywhere in chains. With his comments in the Rêveries, Rousseau appears to attach the label “thinking” only to this analytic exercise, and it is why he seeks a different label for what he’s doing in the Rêveries. But the alternative was not dreamwork; instead it was empirical analysis, which took, in the Rêveries, a standard form, comparable in retrospect to standard social science model building (Lave and March 1975:19–20): observe some facts, speculate on what processes might have brought them about, then test the conclusions. Rousseau used this method in his personal pursuit of his long-term goal of achieving human freedom, here by separating his own patterns of behavior from those imposed upon him by society, which were an element in his becoming himself and yet corrupted that self in the process of creating it. There are two particularly interesting examples of the way in which Rousseau practices this exercise of separating within himself the two different aspects: one example involves the lie from his youth that condemned poor Marion, the other relates to a route he finds himself inexplicably avoiding on his regular walks. Both analyses start from external, almost trivial circumstances, and extend themselves logically into the very center of Rousseau’s mind and character, as a man and as a philosopher.23

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Rousseau’s analysis of lying and his personal relation to it fills the Fourth Walk; he calls it a self-examination and admits self-knowledge is not as easy as he once thought (Butterworth 1982:43). Aside from the case involving Marion24 Rousseau finds himself to have lied in various ways in various circumstances. Sometimes he lied to protect others (55–56), sometimes for literary effect (49), sometimes (in the Confessions) because he forgot the real facts (55); and most chillingly for Rousseau interpreters, he admits to lying sometimes to make a point for the sheer “pleasure of writing” (57). His judgment that the various lies were inexcusable is easy for Rousseau to make; getting down to a full explanation is more difficult. The search takes him back to what he describes as a fundamental fact of his own character, that he lies in conversation because group dialogue and repartee go too fast for him; he would like to say the truth, but cannot think through the situation in time to meet the requirements (52).25 But it is not his social sluggishness that is the major problem. Underlying this slowness in response is his habit of weighing his acts according to what he owes others, when he should have emphasized “what I owe myself ” (58). From here, Rousseau moves to a brief analysis consistent with my thesis of his late flowering as a radical individualist. One has no obligation to others to tell the truth, Rousseau implies, because one cannot be sure enough of one’s own, or others’ reality, for truth to be an epistemologically coherent concept (47). Truth is ultimately justice, and resides within the individual rather than in society (51).26 The social contract can have no place in such a worldview; only individual self-knowledge is appropriate. This is, of course, a stunning reversal of all the republican ideals of the Social Contract. The second case of political self-examination Rousseau undertakes fills the Sixth Walk, which opens with the remark that our “automatic” impulses have empirical causes “if we only know how to look” for them (74). The starting point this time is not an enduring grief over bad behavior, as in the case of Marion, but an apparently eccentric reluctance to travel a road where a child beggar had established himself. Rousseau gives many examples of his pleasure in alms-giving, so this particular resistance seems odd to him; he does not understand his own behavior. The reason emerges after application of the analytical probe he is using so diligently. Once Rousseau has given any gift, out of the spontaneity of impulse, he finds that the other person interprets the freely given gift as an obligation that he then imposes on Rousseau; in other words, a free act has been snapped up by an institution (74). In this transformation, Rousseau finds himself absolutely revolted by what it implies, that he has a duty to engage in the designated act. “The true and primary motives of most of my actions are not as clear even to me as I had long imagined,” he remarks, chastened by his own analysis (75). Self-knowledge brings him to the belief “that all natural tendencies including beneficence itself ” may become harmful (76) and must be avoided (79). The

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once republican Rousseau therefore comes to assert “that I have never been truly suited for civil society where everything is annoyance, obligation, and duty” (83). This is far indeed from the Lettre d’Alembert. Because political theorists customarily emphasize the community as Rousseau’s solution to the human problem, it is important to remark that philosophers, often outside the political field, have more readily accepted his individualism and affirmed their discovery that Rousseau is as political in his individualism as he was in his earlier societal models. George Kelly (2001:36) shows that the distinction between independence and community sorts itself out in historical time because institutions always fail, as argued in the First Discourse. “If no wider field of expansion can be imagined, it becomes a task to place oneself ‘in order,’ ‘adding no other chains to those which nature and the laws impose’ ” (38; emphasis added). “For Rousseau, there were essentially concentric circles of order, most valid at the greatest circumference, most intense and reliable at the narrowest” (38). Kelly concludes that by the end of his life, “Rousseau’s own radius had finally shrunk to a point where center and circumference were congruent, where memory and imagination had fallen on the undifferentiated moment; the man himself had become the god of a minuscule cosmos . . . beyond good and evil” (39). In asking ourselves how seriously we are to take this final flowering of Rousseau’s philosophy, it is helpful to recall the early work that first brought Rousseau to general attention, and to observe there a theme consonant with that of the Rêveries. In the rhetorical opening to the first part of the First Discourse, Rousseau exclaims on how “grand and beautiful” it is to see man “rise” by his own efforts, “soar” intellectually, and return to himself to know “his nature, his duties, and his end” (Masters 1964:35). The reference is to man, in generic terms, rather than individuals, or one’s self, but Rousseau soon brings it closer to himself personally by recalling the fate of past philosophers. Wise men today, he says, fare worse than Socrates and the hemlock because they receive “ridicule and scorn” (46) and those who refuse to dumb down their work to popular taste “will die in poverty and oblivion” (53).27 Rousseau pleads, in the First Discourse, the case for wise men: they do not seek riches, he says, but they are “not insensitive to glory” and grieve at seeing it distributed badly (58); this suggests that he has individuals in mind, not just mankind. Years later in the Rêveries he confesses he had not then realized how much he himself cared for public opinion. If at least some people seemed sensible, their judgment mattered to him because he thought it equitable, Rousseau says, but now he believes that even good public judgments are only “the effect of chance” and even when correct arise from bad principles (Rêveries 113, Eighth Walk). In the First Discourse, his diagnosis was the same, but at that early point he hoped his analysis of the fate of the wise was only a “prediction” and would not be his “own experience” (Masters 1964:53). Yet the suspicion

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that social judgments could never be trusted remained vivid to him. At the close of the First Discourse, speaking not even for the talented but just for “common men,” he states flatly that happiness is not to be found in others and men must accept obscurity to find it. One must learn “to commune with oneself ” and listen without passion to the self (64).28

Life Without Tutor: LES SOLITAIRES This theme is also emphasized in another late work, Les Solitaires (Rousseau 1969),29 which is almost more logically central to my present argument than are the Rêveries; although Les Solitaires is often dismissed as a mere fragment or sketch. Yet since Rousseau considered Emile to be among his most important works, and since Les Solitaires directly refutes Emile, it is incautious to underestimate the importance of the late Solitaires. While most commentators who refer to the work at all merely note that in this sequel Sophie bears another man’s child and Emile falls into slavery in Algiers, the story is much more complex than that.30 Emile’s education, while often autocratic, was carefully designed to produce a noncorrupt adult able to live in society without being corrupted by it; he has been taught independence of mind, direct intellectual contact with nature and science, and finally introduced into the duties of a conjugal adulthood centered on the love of virtue. Sophie, with her quite antithetical education, has been turned into the flawless companion. Everything is perfect, the tutor leaves the young pair balanced on the head of their pin, facing the future, and, as commentators ruefully note, the two perfect young people promptly fall off (Kelly 2001:27).31 In other words, Rousseau’s perfect educational project seems utterly to fail. What makes Les Solitaires so important in evaluating Rousseau’s political architecture is that the failure of the education undercuts the educator’s original argument, but in effect launches another phase of education that is both more interesting and more plausible, either in eighteenth or twenty-first century terms. The efficient cause of the debacle described in Les Solitaires after the departure of the tutor is a series of deaths, first of Sophie’s parents and then her young daughter (Rousseau 1969:884), by which she is overcome. Although Emile shows abundant practical sense later in Les Solitaires, he is unable, when this first crisis strikes his young family, to effectively help Sophie in her grief. He instead bundles the family off to Paris (Rousseau 1969:885), as if his tutor had never mentioned that this was the major hazard to be avoided; as if his perfect education had taught him how to avoid getting lost in a forest, but not how to negotiate the thickets of society. The efficient cause of the downfall becomes irrelevant; the formal cause is Emile and his education, which has left him without adaptive foresight (Shklar 2001:174).

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In Paris, Rousseau’s idealized young man falls into every snare that his education was designed to spare him. He takes up frivolous company (Rousseau 1969:886–887), fails to care for Sophie (who was raised to be obedient only to others, never to exert her own will, and so relies on the wisdom of her husband), fails indeed even to pay sufficient attention to her. By the time Emile decides to take a new interest in Sophie she is pregnant by someone else (Rousseau 1969:890) and Emile’s real education begins.32 Emile’s first phase of education,33 it will be recalled, was that of the pre-adolescent. Rousseau summarized this in the following terms, which take on greater resonance here than they would have had without the later (unscheduled) adventures. Emile is laborious, temperate, patient, firm, and full of courage. His imagination is in no way inflamed and never enlarges dangers. He is sensitive to few ills, and he knows constancy in endurance because he has not learned to quarrel with destiny. . . . He demands nothing of anyone and believes he owes nothing to anyone. He is alone in human society; he counts on himself alone. . . . Without troubling the repose of anyone, he has lived [for his first fifteen years] satisfied, happy, and free insofar as nature has permitted.” (Bloom 1979:208) The second phase in Emile’s education was built around his relations with Sophie, which were, as Bloom argued, vital to Rousseau’s social project; but the inclusion of the tutor made the relationship a ménage à trois involving both love and authority.34 If Emile and Sophie can be constituted as a unit and individualism thereby surmounted, then Rousseau will have shown how the building blocks of a society are formed. (Bloom Introduction 1979:22)

[Emile] joins in what might be called a sexual contract which is the original of all other contracts he will make in his life . . . this first contract contains all the others. The obligation to Sophie which Emile learns to fulfill leads to the obligations to the family and these in turn to those [of ] civil society. (ibid. 25) The third phase of Emile’s education, described in Les Solitaires, is marked by complete rejection of the second phase and a utilization of the first, practical, phase in unexpected ways. Deprived of his social cocoon of illusions, Emile becomes a formidably independent adult.35 Dressed as a common man, always able to find work because he has been taught carpentry and is quick to learn

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other trades, he moves freely past borders and frontiers because no one pays any special attention to him (Rousseau 1969:913). His health is good and he rarely needs assistance from the people among whom he works and travels, but he nonetheless devises a policy of never asking for help: first, because he is too proud; second, because he finds people are willing to help others who do not make demands on them, and one gets more assistance if one doesn’t ask for it (Rousseau 1969:914). Emile becomes a risk-taker, instead of a coddled youth; he has his wits about him and is a careful observer of others and their behavior. Arriving in Marseilles and following his rule of getting ever farther away, Emile signs onto a ship as a common seaman (Rousseau 1969:914). The captain of the ship has had a somewhat irregular past, and Emile is offended by the irresponsible way the ship is operated, but being without power or allies he does his assigned work and watches events unfold. His attention is eventually drawn to the fact that the ship is off course for its stated destination; the compass shows it is heading correctly, but Emile learned as a child to study the stars and knows it is not on course and that something is awry (Rousseau 1969:915). Suddenly one day the ship is overtaken on the high seas and boarded by pirates; it becomes clear (Emile has found the magnet attached to the compass to distort the true direction) that the attack is no accident—the captain has delivered the ship to the pirates. Outraged by this faithless behavior, Emile seizes a sword from the first pirate he encounters and after warning the captain justice is about to fall on him, beheads the captain. Emile then turns to the pirate chief, who has rushed in on them in witnessing the act, and offers him the sword, hilt first, so that the pirate leader may impose on Emile an equal penalty and behead him in turn. The pirate chief, grasping the situation, spares Emile’s life and indeed indicates his approval of his action by treating him more kindly than the rest of the captives until the ship docks (Rousseau 1969:916). This interesting little transaction, despite its theatrical aspect, is philosophically important; Emile is an isolated individual, without friends or social commitments, and on the open seas where the law has no control; he acts to uphold what he believes to be the requirements of justice, and Rousseau is optimist enough to believe the pirate chief (another renegade from society) affirms Emile’s definition of justice. Emile not only exacts justice, he accepts the implications for himself in a lawless arena. The pirate chief makes a choice between his co-conspirator, the ship’s captain, and Emile, and comes down on Emile’s side in the contest.36 Rousseau provides one more episode in Emile’s post-Sophie career that contains the same basic elements as the pirate scene but these elements are presented in a more broadly social context. The ship’s captives, including the seamen and various merchants, are taken to Algiers and, after some are ransomed, the rest are sold as a group. They are worked so hard under the harsh rule of a slave overseer that their physical endurance is exceeded. Emile endures better

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than most of the slaves because of his youth and strength, but finally even he feels his survival is at risk. Rallying the other slaves, who are fearful of revolt, Emile stages a strike, work comes to a complete halt, and the slave owner is called (Rousseau 1969:920–922). Where a normal European would have simply killed him without bothering to ask questions, Emile says, the barbarian slave owner asks him the reasons for his behavior in refusing to work. Emile is sufficiently self-possessed to recognize a strategic opportunity and explains that the overseer is ruining everyone by misallocating work and failing to organize the work properly so that the slaves are being killed by the inhuman conditions, and the slave owner is being deprived of both property and profit. The slave owner responds by telling Emile to take over the job himself and show whether he can do better. Emile’s success in getting more work out of everyone without killing them is so dramatic that his fame spreads throughout the countryside (Rousseau 1969:923).37 Shortly the Dey of Algiers hears the story and asks to see Emile, and in an act of generosity the slave owner gives him to the Dey, in whose administration he serves as chief operating officer. Rousseau concludes Les Solitaires by describing the Dey’s ascent to power, which has been entirely honorable—the result of meritorious military service, then election by the warring tribes over which he rules fairly and to the general satisfaction; the common people, Rousseau adds, are well fed (Rousseau 1969:923–924). To summarize all this by saying merely that Emile ends up in slavery is to waste most of Rousseau’s rich and revolutionary text. Rousseau reportedly told friends that Les Solitaires would have a happy ending when he completed it, but since the text indicates Sophie is no longer living by the time the letters are written (Rousseau 1969:882; and note 1, 1712), the happy ending would have to take Emile’s career forward rather than backward.38 Lessons can be drawn from the text as it stands, without trying to speculate on what else might have happened. Overall, of course, Emile’s education has not proven irrelevant; his ability to act in the world traces back to the tutor’s early lessons, as do his scientific and practical skills. What he has lost of that early education is every illusion that tied him to social unity. By the end of Les Solitaires friends have proven false, spouses have betrayed, and to count on anyone but one’s self is to court failure. Emile’s ‘third’ education, the one he gives himself, has been learned through independent confrontation with the corrupt world. He does not deny its corruption, but he is no longer touched by it. He makes no demands on others, and many respond in positive ways to this decision. He works even under slavery up to his honest capacity, only balking when life itself is threatened. He recognizes when men treat him decently; he responds in kind, willing to explain himself, willing to take responsibility for his acts. He administers others efficiently, increasing productivity. While this is not the world of the Social Contract, Emile finds himself free in it. He has come to know himself, in a way

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the tutor would never have allowed, by being forced into direct confrontation with unscheduled men and unplanned events.39

The Games at Clarens In proposing an individualist interpretation of Rousseau as an alternative to the standard model, there are two complementary approaches. First, one may direct a fuller attention to those texts that represent the new interpretation; in these texts, carefully documented detail shows in the theorist’s own words the evidence on which one relies. I have attempted to accomplish this task, showing that in two decisive cases Rousseau cast his social contract model into the trash bin of theory, and substituted an individualist model.40 A second approach works per contra, and will draw the argument toward its conclusion. This approach looks at a work that seems to refute the individualist argument and shows that not only does it not refute the new interpretation but reinforces it. Briefly therefore I turn to Rousseau’s novel Julie, which he is said to have intended as a portrait of a society in which he himself would have liked to live (Wokler 1995:104–105), a society in which each member found true fulfillment not in himself but in the whole. If Rousseau believed there was a social solution to the paradoxes of human freedom, he should have found it in Julie.41 The plot of Julie, thin as it is, covers two phases: the love affair between Julie and St. Preux,42 which is not relevant to my concerns here, and the idyllic society at Clarens established by the man Julie eventually marries, which is directly applicable to the present discussion. The Clarens household centers on the way in which an autarkic economy and society may be put together so that the major actors, along with the servants and laborers, are able to live wise and virtuous lives in a pure society. The guiding figure of the group, M. de Wolmar, has been compared in his wisdom to Rousseau’s benevolent legislator, and sometimes to a god.43 The characters in the novel, and many later readers, accept the claims Rousseau makes for the household—its love, its harmony, the mutual care of the participants for one another, and the seamlessness of a perfect social system. What becomes increasingly clear to the modern reader, however, is that the happy community at Clarens is in practice a complex nest of mutual deception, quotidian manipulation, self-interested domination, and systematic exploitation (Morgenstern 1996:102–103; Shklar 2001:175, 185; Wingrove 2000:102ff ).44 It is useful to the present argument to discuss just how this conclusion emerges because it is, in effect, Rousseau’s little text on sociology, and connects to the following discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus.45 The social machinery by which the household is brought to its perfections forms the subject of an extended letter from St. Preux to his patron (Part Four, Letter x; Rousseau 1990:363–386), which professes to find the arrangements

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instituted by Wolmar at Clarens to be the epitome of reason and foresight. A sample of the practices that underlie the Clarens social economy will give the sense of the regime St. Preux seems so to admire. Domestic servants are acquired young, from local families overburdened with children (Rousseau 1990:366); after surviving a probationary period they are paid a standard wage that increases by one-twentieth every year.46 Men and women at Clarens are kept rigorously separated, not by rules that they might choose to break at will, but by organizing their work so that the sexes never meet (370), and everyone is kept so constantly occupied that there is no spare time for social interaction (371).47 “In a Republic citizens are restrained by morals, principles, virtue,” St. Preux explains, but in normal life restraint can come only “by constraint and coercion” (373). The whole art of domestic economy, he continues, lies “in hiding this coercion under the veil of pleasure or interest, so that they think they desire all they are obliged to do” (373). This domestic Prisoner’s Dilemma game begins when the masters at Clarens (Wolmar makes the rules, Julie happily applies them) bind the servants by an ingenious custom: any request by a servant or underling is more apt to be granted if made by someone other than the one primarily interested. This gives each servant “a palpable interest in being loved by all his comrades,” and they are “more or less forced” to render one another any service asked, so that they may get reciprocal response when they themselves need a favor (380). Beyond this ‘positive’ rule there is a second, ‘negative’ one in which servants are forced to inform on one another’s sins because the custom of the house is “what whoever sees a wrong perpetrated against his masters without reporting it is even more guilty than the one who committed it.” The principle here is that the perpetrator is somewhat excused by his self-interest in his misdeed, while the observer who fails to report the act has no such excuse, and is condemned either as being too forgiving because he is himself a knave and sympathizes with the crime, or he has “a profound indifference to justice, to the good of the house he serves” (381).48 Nor is all this machinery restricted to the servants and farm workers. Julie is made to accept her father’s choice of husband by a spurious but psychologically very effective argument that equates filial piety and autocratic rule (Part Three, Letter xviii; Rousseau 1997:286).49 The major actors are kept in ignorance of the basic facts of other players; M. de Wolmar gives his wife a brief history of his past only after they have been married six years. It also turns out that the lovers’ letters, which Julie had been allowed to watch as they were burned, somehow were not in fact burned but were turned over to her new husband.50 Indeed throughout the novel, serving perhaps as part of its literary charm, the actors selectively tell one another incidents or feelings that they do not share with everyone in the group. In other cases, arguments are made that are designed to persuade others by manipulating the facts so that they serve

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the purpose of the letter-writer rather than being at all candid.51 Society, according to Rousseau, if it is to be at all liveable when constructed of diverse and self-interested individuals, must be stitched together with an infinite array of sanctions, small and large, positive and negative, if its integrity is to be sustained. And since Clarens collapses at the death of Julie, according to Rousseau’s account, not only do real-world institutions always fail (as argued in the First Discourse), even idealized fictional societies fail. In contrast to Les Solitaires and the Rêveries, what is educational about Julie in terms of Rousseau’s individualist model and its implications for human justice is that the participants are, until the very end and perhaps even then, unable to separate self and society. Julie and St. Preux apparently convince themselves they are no longer in love and that she is now happily married to another man. Then her final letter, written on her deathbed where lies are no longer necessary, admits this was not true, that she loved St. Preux still.52 M. de Wolmar was perhaps all the while quite clear on the differences between himself and the Clarens society, but in any event he is left naked without the community in which he had tried to clothe himself. Again, as in the First Discourse, even carefully constructed institutions are doomed to failure. Like Emile and Jean Jacques, therefore, all the Clarens actors are disappointed by social unity and have nothing but themselves to rely on in the end. So even Julie does not contradict my claim of Rousseau’s individualism, and this I believe gives added weight to the conclusions I have drawn from Les Solitaires and the Rêveries.

Bourdieu’s HABITUS and the Practice of Justice Like all novels, Rousseau’s Julie enjoys the luxury of telling just the facts without being required to state clearly the principles those facts are intended to demonstrate. But the facts are always infinite and Julie is a very complex work. As one of its translators remarks, there are “many small engines” at work in Julie, because “private and domestic life, far from being vapid and tedious . . . was full of tension and power” (Stewart, in Rousseau 1990:xviii). In order therefore to gain greater leverage on the analysis of Julie’s principal results and the individualist model of Les Solitaires and the Rêveries, it can be helpful to turn to the work of a recent social scientist53 whose approach emphasizes the point that is relevant to my present argument, the mix of self-defined and society-defined elements within each individual’s personal psychological system, and the importance of distinguishing these elements if the individual is to be capable of either individual self-government or participation in the game of justice. The approach is particularly useful in explicating why we as human beings have such difficulty defining what is truly natural to us.

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What makes Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of the habitus so useful for studying the inquiry of Julie, and the Rêveries as well, is its integration of theory with empirical practice. The habitus is a set of structuring principles within a particular society, which are worked out over long periods of time by successive generations, so that the resulting practices of the society mesh efficiently with the particular socioeconomic environment in which the group lives. The habitus is made up of systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcome without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (1990:53) As new members are born into such a society the principles of the habitus allocate to each his or her place, and each place in society comes with expectations about normal behavior for that person in that society. The principles that structure the society are replicated so often in different sectors of activity that they come to be encompassing ideas, without alternatives and therefore natural and unquestionable by members.54 Self-knowledge, for Rousseau, was essentially the task of locating the principles that had formed him, and of separating himself from those principles sufficiently to recognize them as other than himself. Rousseau did not always succeed in this exercise, but more than any other philosopher except perhaps Wittgenstein he made an extended, explicit effort to do so.55 Bourdieu designed the concept of habitus to avoid two approaches to the study of men, or of individual man, that he considered incorrect, and it is his pursuit of a third, mediating approach that makes the habitus so useful in considering Rousseau’s endeavor in respect to self- knowledge. On the one hand, Bourdieu objected to scholars who assumed their own perfect objectivity as scientific observers (1990:30–41). The other methodological polarity that Bourdieu rejected was subjectivism (1990:42–51).56 Bourdieu does not reject either of these two positions wholesale; rather he works them into a dynamic model that, by including time explicitly, tends to resolve their apparent contradictions by looking at actual social practice of specific individuals, following but also remaking the habitus as they live out their lives. One of Bourdieu’s complaints about anthropologists is that they study real-world behavior as if it was controlled by large, mathematically precise collections of rules that cover all occasions and

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dictate all of an individual’s actions. Bourdieu’s objection to this procedure is that it substitutes theory for practice; it intellectualizes, and kills, a process that is dynamic and living. Certainly Rousseau’s own development, as well as that of his fictional characters, represents this process. Bourdieu’s work provides an intuitively accessible example of this dynamic process in the marriage game played by his Kabyle subjects of study. Many observers think marriages in traditional societies can be predicted as a more or less direct inference from kinship patterns and rules, but Bourdieu sees marriage as an integral part of a society-wide game of symbolic capital accumulation. His analysis helps to articulate what was going on at Clarens, and also gives it a clearer theoretical foundation. The participants in the Bourdieu game are not passive automatons created by their social position; instead they actively arrange and rearrange and sometimes reinvent the relevant customs, and they ordinarily cannot explain what they are doing, either to themselves or to outsiders. At Clarens it is just these explanations that are avoided, as a deliberate policy, because they destroy the illusion of innocent felicity. Bourdieu defines the Kabyle family in a wonderfully odd way that the late Rousseau himself might have appreciated (Bourdieu 1990:147–161). Starting with husband and wife, over time children are born into the household, and the specific nature of these children can be compared to cards dealt in a game: some types of children are of high value, some types of low value, with various relations between them (four of a kind, etc.). When it comes time to marry off the children, the family is not following clear rules but is creatively playing the hand it has been dealt, attempting to win against other players. The quality of the hand (the children) is a constraint, a starting point in bidding, and the known social rules are to be considered along the way only as peripheral; ultimately, the success of the family in respect to accomplished marriages will depend on ingenuity, vision, goals, and strategic skill. To the extent that the game is well played, the participants have a fairly clear idea of what they are doing; that is, they are capable of separating themselves from the rules they use and are able to manipulate them consciously. Within the confines of the game, therefore, they educate themselves about themselves, and they change themselves (in the eyes of the other members of their society) by their success or failure.57 From Bourdieu’s perspective on the habitus and the way people are created by it, and the way by which their existence also challenges and changes it, Rousseau’s problem of achieving self-knowledge becomes empirical rather than philosophical in any normative sense. The child outgrows his tutor because the tutor’s advice never fully fits the maturing child’s problems; the woman outgrows her husband because the husband can never fit her completely into his intended mold; finally, even the philosopher outgrows his own early model when men burn his books and stone his dwelling and he must adapt to a world different from that for which he had hoped.58

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The Government of Self Self-knowledge and individual self-government are intimately related, but not identical. Both share the attribute that they are not completed solutions but ongoing projects, continuing infinitely over time. Self-knowledge at a given point in an individual’s history can refer only to an understanding of those of one’s own individual principles that have so far been evoked by practical or intellectual experience. Similarly, individual self-government can refer only to the experiences of having surmounted problems presented by the past; it is not possible to predict future confrontations and their outcomes. But while selfknowledge and self-government share some characteristics, it remains to investigate what self-government entails at the individual level, in the present analysis of Rousseau’s late works. It is often assumed that Rousseau’s individualism is nonpolitical: romantic, solipsistic, even mystical. The late texts suggest another interpretation: that by bringing government to the individual level Rousseau has clarified it.59 The model of individual self-government described in the Rêveries might be called the St. Peter’s Island model, which is where Rousseau seats it in the Fifth Walk (Butterworth 1982:62–73). Rousseau revels in the isolation of the island; its location separates him from any meaningful society (62)60 and provides natural beauty (64). The Rêveries repeatedly emphasize the importance of solitude to the whole endeavor on which Rousseau is reporting; a rich environment distracts him from self-government (13); success and a busy life cause him to lose track of himself (110–111, 132). Only when he is alone can his thought concentrate and follow its own guidance (12, 30, 31). Although Rousseau’s insistence on the value of solitude frequently makes him sound like a simple hermit, in fact it was not an end in itself but a means to an important goal: self-analysis (66). He is with himself as a younger friend, in thinking over his past (7), and he is actively engaged in putting his own inner dispositions in order, correcting any evils he uncovers (6). He phrases this as being quiet but not silent (70), and warns that weakness is to be avoided because even in nature the strong destroy the weak, as the larger of the islands among which he lives tends to create currents that reduce the smaller island still further (63). Strength and freedom make men good, he says; weakness and slavery make them bad (82).61 By the Seventh Walk, Rousseau has concentrated his attention more fully on himself as a particular human individual, and writes of his efforts to explore his own propensities and find out why he likes what he likes (89, 90), and to clarify the principles on which his own temperament is based (120). Where liberal thinkers today sometimes cast themselves happily adrift in underspecified ‘inner oceans,’ Rousseau’s self-government is based on a detailed mapping of a real individual and historical topography. His is not Nietzschean abandon but the kind of solitary self-inspection one might expect of a sociological neurotic.62

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Despite the rigor of Rousseau’s self-inspection, however, he finds within himself only friends—the friends made up of his past and present selves, what he has been and what he is (7), and all are governed by their mutual recognition of what constitutes good order. Harmony prevails only to the extent that society’s rules remain excluded. To demand justice of other persons is to make oneself vulnerable to those others—one makes oneself their “plaything.” To forget oneself and have hope in social recognition is simply the dangerous amour-propre in a particularly deceptive new guise (115–116). In terms of Rousseau’s definition of individual self-government, his individualistic model can also be summarized by the contrasts it presents to existing society. An individual is misgoverned by that society: • when the individual’s talents are not allowed by the group to be exercised, • when the individual’s virtues are not recognized by the group or its leaders, • when the individual is falsely defined by the group or its leaders, • when information is not shared with the individual, and lies are passed as truth, • when the role allocated to the individual is menial and without honor, • when the individual is bribed with false gifts (membership) rather than real values, • when the individual is given no role in the overall direction of the system.63 Under these circumstances, Rousseau in effect argues, the individual must define his own political system based on his own independent understanding of justice, based on the complex self-knowledge that has considered “what there is of my own in my own conduct” (Butterworth 1982:141, emphasis added). If the individual’s political sense has been adopted from society without personal evaluation or affirmation, it is alien to the individual. But where, as with Bourdieu’s Kabyle parents, individuals understand both the society they face and themselves as strategic participants in that society, they become themselves political beings in the full sense of that term, able to stand by themselves where necessary. The possibility of such a strategic stance is not given by any outside authority; it is taken by the self-educated individual. Rousseau’s late model of self-government has another dimension that emphasizes the degree to which he has come full circle to an individualist solution to the problems posed as far back as the First and Second Discourses: the issue of saving men from themselves through the outside intervention of a tutor, a wise legislator, or a philosopher. By the time of the Rêveries, all such solutions fall under the ban Rousseau places on domination, which is the attempt, he now

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says, by one man to control another man for whatever reason. Given the total control of Emile by his tutor, and of the Clarens company by Wolmar, Rousseau’s condemnation of domination reemphasizes his distance, at the end of his life, from those earlier solutions. Men “enter the lists” at birth, Rousseau argues, and must be free to control their own rules in the contest (Rêveries Butterworth 1982:28); outside control is always exercised not for the good of the supposed beneficiary but for the good of the dominator. One recalls the man who first fenced a plot of land, said this is mine, and found men foolish enough to believe him (Second Discourse; Masters 1964:141). Rousseau’s late individualist model may be designed to lead to a reduction in the number of individuals willing to be cast in the role of pawns in the everyday political drama.64

Epilogue

Politics, Strategy, and the Game of Justice Closing the Circle The inquiry into the game of justice has led along diverse paths and has arrived at sometimes unexpected locations: Boston bowling alleys with William Whyte; the politics of everyday life with Foucault, Garfinkel, and Schelling; through the backwoods of Concord with Henry Thoreau; along the faint trails left by the participants across Wittgenstein’s open fields; into the intricacies of everyday sorted-out and local justices with Walzer and Elster; and back to eighteenth-century France for Rousseau’s late thoughts on self-knowledge as a central requirement for and a central component of justice. Now, in conclusion, it is appropriate to consider whether these varied strains can be summarized, brought together under a single roof, made part of a single model. The basic themes should be by now familiar. The precondition for the whole exercise that has defined the game of justice is the universality of the political connection between all human beings, the expanded scope of politics that makes the state seem not the center of the political world but a minor aspect only. Politics, as has been repeatedly emphasized, can be both high and low, or anywhere in between. The ubiquity of politics does not mean we are all in constant battle with one another, for our alliances may be many and affectionate, but it does mean that in our daily interactions we allocate important values, for ourselves and for others. Sometimes these allocations are grand and self-sacrificing, sometimes low and mean. The understanding that all human actions are inherently political phenomena, components in an ongoing and sometimes dangerous game, places on everyone a sovereign opportunity and responsibility. If no actions are casual, idle, or unimportant, but potentially change or maintain an 141

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existing self and a social structure, this fact creates individually defined but nonetheless exacting standards for the evaluation of such behavior. Within the basic premise that the everyday world is infused with political significance, the central theme of this work has been that of individualism and individual self-government. Individualism is often seen as a license for selfindulgence, bestowing rights that it is claimed the individual is entitled to exercise in complete liberty, without reference to any limits or constraints. The interpretation offered here takes a different direction, defining individualism as an opportunity for self-government, amplifying the thin political experience offered to women and men as citizens of a distant state, where the pleasures of voting are brief and often hollow, with a complete range of political life, from constitution-building, to legislation, to administration, all within the daily life of the self as a participant in multiple human interactions, including those within the self. The concept of personal politics, within which everyone has a major role, and within which individual self-government is a positive challenge, restores real politics to the people from whom it was originally abstracted.1 The game of justice is intimately connected with a third theme, beyond the universality of politics and the importance of individual self-government. This third theme is self-knowledge, and while it has been advocated by thoughtful individuals from Socrates to the present, the practical difficulties of knowing one’s self have not always been sufficiently appreciated. It is sometimes thought that a few moments of contemplation will reveal the self, or that a good humanist education, built on the liberal arts curriculum, will elicit selfknowledge, but this is rarely the case. If social science is correct that human beings are born with no innate ideas but have the ability to learn what their cultures teach them, then each individual is, as a maturing adult, faced with the question of just what the self is, coated and covered with all the socialized habits and procedures that have been laid by society, layer upon layer, on the surface of the self. Scraping away these cultural residues, to reveal the components of the self that the individual wishes to affirm and uphold, and discarding those that are best defined as unnecessary baggage, is a complicated process that takes time and a full engagement with the games of justice of which each individual willingly or unwillingly forms a part. The central difficulty is the circularity of the exercise: to know oneself, one needs to know the world; to know the world, one needs to know one’s self. Selfknowledge is therefore not a one-shot solution but an exercise that is worked out gradually, and sometimes with difficulty, over time. At the end of such a process, with courage and luck, and with a careful mixture of philosophy and the social sciences, the individual becomes capable of placing her or his own definition on justice, and of carrying that banner, where necessary, into battle. All these themes are gathered together in the model of the game of justice, which assumes that women and men are continually participants on a political playing

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field, where their actions define themselves, and other players, as all together engage in the challenge and response, the daily interaction, that allocates values as winners and losers emerge from various, perhaps silent but deeply serious, scrimmages. The game of justice restores politics to everyday people, advising them only in respect to the importance of their activities as personal but high politics, and of the patterns to be observed in such political encounters, and of the results of strategic choices. Political science provides us with a theorist of exceptional acuity in the articulation of this pure political model, the man who put a strategic micro-model of human behavior together for the first time, in all of its components, in the sixteenth century, and it is with him that the present discussion will, by way of synthesis and appreciation, draw itself to a close.

Master of the Game Niccolo Machiavelli is not popular with all people. His tendency to propose radical solutions to hard political problems has made him notorious. Recall chapter 7 of The Prince, where a new leader finds it necessary to make reforms he knows will be unpopular. The leader hires a factotum who does his master’s bidding to the ultimate extent, terrifying the people and driving them to an outrage that will at the next injury become a fury that may overthrow the state. Machiavelli recounts the leader’s strategy with what can only be described as honest admiration. As he knew that the harshness of the past had engendered some amount of hatred, in order to purge the minds of the people and to win them over completely, he resolved to show that if any cruelty had taken place it was not by his orders, but through the harsh disposition of his minister. And having found the opportunity he had him cut in half and placed one morning in the public square at Cesena with a piece of wood and blood-stained knife by his side. The ferocity of this spectacle caused the people both satisfaction and amazement. (1940:27) Public officials have naturally found this sort of advice to be dangerous and completely unacceptable, but even those not so intimately involved have also felt it to be a bit strong.2 Machiavellian became a term of disapprobation, scorn, even disgust. Yet other men have been unable to withhold their affection from a theorist who speaks with such clarity of vision and so full an appreciation of the politics of the real world. Machiavelli is famous for his ability to see through superficial appearances and institutional structures and to recognize the realities beneath. “Realities” is used here, cautiously, to indicate that whatever really may be in a

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philosophical sense, in the practical sense it is composed of the laws of human behavior, those regularities of individual actions that are the proper sphere of social science. Machiavelli is also exquisitely sensitive to the way in which these regularities of human behavior may tell a story quite different from the interpretations with which women and men may decorate, may rationalize these actions, trying to soften their cruelty and their harshness. In the centuries since Machiavelli wrote his analysis of the human condition, a major debate has evolved on the question of his intended audience. For whom, exactly, did he write The Prince and The Discourses? Initially, it was assumed that his works were directed to the obvious audience, toward leaders of states, the princes of the title, as in the traditional genre of advice to princes that flourished when such regimes were the norm. From such an interpretation, Machiavelli seemed at first to be an enemy of all citizens because his advice seemed designed to thwart, control, and if necessary destroy, any one who got in the way, who barred the prince’s ascent to and maintenance of political power and its attendant glory. But there were other possible interpretations of the audience toward whom Machiavelli directed his writings. A major argument here was the idea that, under the guise of advice to princes and hidden from princes themselves because they might otherwise be angered and take revenge upon the writer, Machiavelli really advised citizens. His documentation of the prince’s possible strategies against all sorts of opponents, high and low, was not intended to guide princes’ behavior, according to this account of Machiavelli’s work, but to warn citizens. By teaching those at the bottom of the political system about the exact mechanisms by which their leaders exploited and tyrannized them, Machiavelli gave advance warning to citizens. With such a thorough knowledge of their princely opponents in hand, by the courtesy of Machiavelli’s insights, citizens would be better able to devise strategies to defend themselves from leaders. The citizens would have been conditioned by Machiavelli’s theory to look beyond a prince’s false words, doubt his facile promises, to question his commands, and protect themselves rather than foolishly relying on his whimsical benevolence. Recently an equally radical interpretation of the nature of Machiavelli’s audience has been tendered, the suggestion that Machiavelli wrote neither for highstatus political leaders nor for simple citizens with their narrow desire to escape the depredations of socially and politically powerful groups.3 Perhaps, according to this new approach, Machiavelli wrote for people who are not defined by the state at all, either as lords or servants, but are themselves deeply and personally political and need philosophical advice on the best way to exercise that larger political vocation. Harvey Mansfield’s (1996) writing on Machiavelli makes full use of the possibility that Machiavelli wrote for everyone, that the Machiavellian model centered on the prince is better seen as a general model applicable to “all who understand” (1996:20). Mansfield’s argument is particularly applicable to my

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July Fifth theme, the claim that the institution of democratic government is a beginning rather than the end of political growth in individual persons because Mansfield uses Machiavelli to move outside the conventional liberal understanding of politics, centered wholly on formal government institutions, and considers the more individualized care of self implied by Machiavelli’s texts. While a central aspect of Mansfield’s analysis in Machiavelli’s Virtue is how we are to understand Machiavelli himself and his political purposes, I focus on only the subsection of the discussion that is germane to the relevance for political theory of the microphilosophical field in which the game of justice is conducted. Mansfield’s central insight in respect to this theme is that Machiavelli wrote not for princes, although they gladly read and follow his advice, but for all “those who understand.” Many live under the delusion . . . that it is possible to live privately in society without involvement in politics, but they do not understand the necessity of their situation. The basis of their security is the accomplishment of a prince who must always look out for himself and cannot therefore be trusted to take care of them should a conflict arise between the two goals. Relying on others . . . brings ruin. For those who understand—and . . . only for them—society is radically politicized, leaving no refuge for those who would rather not be involved. Everyone who understands is either a prince or a potential prince who deserves to be one. (Mansfield 1996:20) This suggestion of course transforms Machiavelli’s theory both in its details and in its overall conception. One is no longer dealing with an unpleasant and often dangerous collection of politicians who seek glory through rampant domination over others, and a collection of innocent lambs who want merely to be left alone. Instead, one has moved beyond the boundaries of the state and its politicians and is dealing, in grassroots social interaction, with the wise and the unwise, the players and the pawns, the virtuous and the somnolent. As in Foucault, formal government is not a solution to anything, but a facade covering the constant jousting and competition inherent within all human life. Real life, according to Mansfield’s Machiavelli, lies in intelligence, in a recognition that one is, even in apparent prosperity, surrounded by dangers, and in a spirited willingness to rise to the challenges this presents. Mansfield argues that this is the very opposite of the “dull life” and the “flat soul” admired by bourgeois liberals (1996:28). Mansfield’s Machiavelli, like Foucault, explains that care of the self is ethical “in itself ” because it brings the human individual to his highest point of self- and social-knowledge, and the necessities inherent in that knowledge. Mansfield’s Machiavelli is a master of the politics that means winning “with no reference to a standard above politics” (1996:xiii).

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Mansfield contrasts Machiavelli primarily to Aristotle, who saw virtues in the soul ordered by prudence. Machiavelli, on the contrary, saw such virtues as being mere rhetoric and self-flattery, and defined virtue instead as acquisition, acquisition that will be endless because men must either scratch existence from a reluctant nature or, even in prosperity, fight to stay ahead of their rivals (1996:13–14). Now that Mansfield has extended the advice from the prince to all those who understand, the frequently repeated Machiavellian theme of relying on one’s own arms becomes universally relevant and exactly matches a central aspect of the game of justice, that one cares for the self because no one else can be trusted with the task. Anyone not a prince must depend on some prince, and “to the extent that he understands his own necessities, he wants to become a prince so that he can depend on ‘his own arms’ instead of [on] someone else” (1996:19). All the prince’s relationships are political. “Virtue made impressive is virtue politicized, virtue understood by its political effects” (1996:20). Virtues thus are no longer part of virtue but are qualities, with none of the natural ordering that the end of perfection would define. The virtues are equal, “on a level,” or “democratized.” There is “no other way to look at virtue than politically, that is, for what it gets you. In Aristotle, virtue is shown in politics; in Machiavelli it is defined there” (1996:21– 22). Moral virtues in The Prince involve “the prince’s relationships with others, not with his own perfection.” Unlike Aristotle, Machiavelli’s virtues “are social without qualification or exception; they are about how the prince appears to and deals with ‘subjects and friends.’ ” If modern man were defined as Machiavellian, he could not so easily be accused of a dull life, a flat soul, and a lack of patriotism. Machiavelli enlightens princes and those who want to become princes but leaves good people in the dark they want and make for themselves. The latter are shown the seamy side of moral virtue and offered instruction in scheming evil, but Machiavelli knows his teaching will not take, for it is the good, not the evil, who are incorrigible. The evil can be brought to see that their glory requires action for the common benefit, but the good are self-sufficient and ineducable because they think goodness is enough. (1996:28–29) Mansfield seems here rather harder on the simpleminded good people than is Machiavelli himself, but the point is nonetheless clear that the challenges imposed by political necessity create virtue. Necessity “goes from a support of virtue, to a condition of virtue, to a producer of virtue, and finally to a virtue itself ” (1996:15). Ultimately, the prince’s self-interest, the prince’s “necessity,” becomes equivalent to virtue itself. Yet for those who “understand” but are not in positions of authority, the lesson requires further clarification.

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The Politics of Self-Government Machiavelli’s writings, taken to their fullest scope, give a succinct summary of my central themes, based on a definition of politics—in all its rich tapestry of meanings from the most practical to the most transcendent—as it is played in the high game of human experience. Machiavelli blends, with masterly coherence, those complementary threads of psychology, sociology, economics, and politics woven together in the course of this book on the game of justice and individual self-government as it is sought within the parameters of that game. The analysis also highlights a higher appreciation of the ways in which the freedom of the state is essential to the self-government of the individual, not as an environment but as a pattern, a model of what self-government means in principle and practice. The normative climax of Machiavelli’s Prince comes in chapter 26 with his exhortation for the creation of political order. This discussion is as applicable to the individual in any period of history, including the present, as it was to sixteenth-century Italy, and emphasizes two countervailing ideas: first, that life under sociopolitical oppression is not necessarily a bad thing. This is true, however, only when it is seen in combination with the second principle, that oppression may create the desire to escape from it, and this act of will is vital to the individual enterprise. In other words, if men were born free, this would not be a good thing. Benefits that are lightly received may be lightly given away. Escape from oppression is necessary to full human development, and it must be done by the individual alone, and by the will of the individual alone, because no one else can be trusted. If anyone else could be trusted, this would merely deprive the individual of the necessary opportunity for taking independent action. Stripped of its ancient patina, this advice is both postmodern and postliberal; it has never been matched for the harsh vigor and bitter balance with which Machiavelli presents it. Oppression may be necessary, Machiavelli argues eloquently, to give scope for greatness and courage. Perhaps only when one is “without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated” is there recognition of the need for a new order (Prince ch. 26; 1940:94–95). But opportunity and motivation are not of themselves sufficient. The task of self-government must be undertaken by each individual alone because, Machiavelli argues, otherwise there would be no free will, and the success of the endeavor would not redound to the individual’s glory (1940:96). The two themes intermingle in Machiavelli’s mind: the justice of the cause and the opportunity for will. Even where there is strength in the parts of the whole, this strength will be lost unless there is unity; suffering instills the fervor that creates this unity and the will to freedom (1940:96–97). No matter how severe the oppression, Machiavelli reminds his reader, the enemy has weaknesses and defects that can be used to defend and free the self.

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Machiavelli is particularly modern in his appreciation of the individual’s existential dilemma, caught between the attempt to conduct a life on rational grounds and the almost random nature of the circumstances in which this attempt must be made. Here Machiavelli invokes the ancient notion of fortune, but denies that fatalism is the appropriate response; fortune, he says, rules only half our actions, and our own intelligence, forethought, and planning masters the rest. Fortune is to be compared to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings . . . everyone flees before it, and everything yields to its fury . . . and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will . . . not be so wild and dangerous. (Prince ch. 25; 1940:91) Self-defense is always an art, however; sometimes a strategy will fail, sometimes the very same strategy will succeed. Those seeking self-government must therefore study terrain and circumstances, and plan carefully, but also remember that impetuosity sometimes succeeds where prudence fails (1940:93).4 Implied in this advice is the suggestion that those who are not oppressed may have more difficulty finding and keeping self-government than those who are victims of society because, like traditional monarchs, persons who have favored positions in society may grow lazy or idle or incautious—and thereby lose the happy position into which they were born. All the more shame, “a double shame,” falls upon those who are born lucky and lose their sovereignty, Machiavelli argues; failure in this case is never the fault of fortune but must be debited to the individual, who fails to foresee threats or rise to challenges (1940:89–90). “Only those defenses are good, certain and durable, which depend on yourself alone and your own ability” (Prince ch. 24; 1940:90). A major threat to personal self-government is found in those persons who surround the individual. Machiavelli calls them “flatterers,” but the term “friends and acquaintances” would be the modern equivalent; they are dangerous because their opinion is important to the individual’s survival and this contains a paradox. “Because there is no other way of guarding one’s self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by telling the truth; but when every one can tell you the truth, you lose their respect” (Prince ch. 23; 1940:87). To counter this hazard, the individual must take command of the interaction process and accept advice only when it is specifically asked for; she or he must be sure to “ask them about everything” and let people understand that the more freely they speak the more they will be acceptable. The individual “ought to be a great asker, and a patient hearer of the truth about those things of which he has inquired; indeed, if he finds that any one

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has scruples in telling him the truth he should be angry. . . . [But it is also true] that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised” (1940:88). What does Machiavelli mean by wise? His psychological theory is considerably briefer than most, but its compactness makes it all the more devastating. In the context of the prince’s choice of ministers, Machiavelli remarks: “There are three different kinds of brains, the one understands things unassisted, the other understands things when shown by others, the third understands neither alone nor with the explanations of others. The first kind is most excellent, the second also excellent, but the third is useless” (Prince ch. 22; 1940:86). Wisdom consists in sorting out the advice one receives: some advice comes from persons who are more interested in their own profit than anyone else’s and these should be shunned, but counselors who show themselves honest and faithful should be rewarded by honor, wealth, and kindness. Machiavelli is unusual in such advice; rather than urging us to our ruin through universal trust, or to cynicism through universal mistrust, he says we must study people and make close judgments. Not everyone deserves to be trusted, of course, but not everyone deserves to be mistrusted, and many strategists have ignored this. Again the point is made that social science is deeply useful in crafting everyday strategies, and in successful play of the game of justice.

Political Affirmation The same lesson carries into social interaction, especially in cases of conflict, where Machiavelli advises people not to waffle in the face of danger but to demonstrate themselves as true friends or true enemies to the combatants—that is, to declare themselves without reserve or favor for one or against another. This policy is always more useful than remaining neutral. For if two neighboring powers come to blows, they are either such that if one wins you will have to fear the victor, or else not. . . . If you do not declare yourself, you will fall a prey to the victor, to the pleasure and satisfaction of the one who has been defeated, and you will have no reason nor anything to defend you and nobody to receive you. For, whoever wins will not desire friends whom he suspects and who do not help him when in trouble, and whoever loses will not receive you as you did not take up arms to venture yourself in his cause. (Prince ch. 21; 1940:83) This is high and honorable advice from a theorist often charged with cynicism about the nature of human motivations; Machiavelli unequivocally counsels bravery, honor, and fidelity, and warns that while no strategy can provide a

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perfectly safe outcome, it is nonetheless possible to take the high road (1940:84). But his attitude retains its hard edge: since it is difficult to be sure who are truly friends, one must be willing to work with enemies and perhaps bring them over. Indeed, Machiavelli considers the provoking of enmity useful, where it allows the individual to show decisiveness in dealing with it and earn the esteem of those among whom she or he lives (Prince ch. 20; 1940:79). The reinterpretation of Machiavelli’s Prince at the individual level rather than the state level puts much of his advice into a new context in which it may be freshly considered, leaving behind the layers of traditional commentary that have grown up over it and obscured its sometimes breathtaking rigor. Consider in this light the discussion of whether it is better (for a prince) to be loved or feared or hated. Hate is easy to achieve, he points out; one need merely steal and injure and oppress. And hate is not useful because it may have a dangerous backlash. The real issue is between love and fear. Which is better? Machiavelli turns the question slightly, substituting safer in place of better. His answer to this revised question is famous, and deserves attention even if it seems harsh in terms of the present discussion about individual people and the techniques of self-government. Defer judgment on the harshness, however, and follow his logic alone. It is safer to be feared, Machiavelli argues, because people are selfish and “as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours . . . when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt.” And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails. . . . I conclude, therefore, with regard to being feared and loved, that men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince, and that a wise prince must rely on what is in his power and not on what is in the power of others. (1940:61, 63) Surely this is a bit excessive in respect to individuals and their search for and exercise of self-government? Not necessarily. Think back over the sociologists with their microscopic study of the dark sides of everyone’s social experience, the social psychologists and their understanding of the importance of social circumstances in creating our personalities, the cognitive psychologists and their insights into the vagaries of human perceptions and motives, and the political economists and their appreciation of the virtues of minimal winning coalitions.5 Then ask if Machiavelli is too hard on humanity, too hard on us? Better to follow his advice with greater sympathy. His advice to princes provides guidance as well to all human beings, locked securely into their social positions

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and molded by the expectations imposed by family, friends, and associates. In these circumstances, Machiavelli advises, it is necessary to be both lion and fox, a fox to “protect himself from traps” and a lion “to defend himself from wolves” and under dangerous circumstances both skills must be brought into play (Prince ch. 18; 1940:64). The words evoke nature “red in tooth and claw” and perhaps seem applicable only to the politics of war, but Machiavelli’s underlying message is much wider in its implications. He gives advice about the tactics of invasion and defense, discusses the virtues of mercenary troops, of terrain, and so on. But beneath all the specific provisions is a single rule that is directly applicable to the study of individual self-government, the idea that the wise prince, or the wise human being, is master of the self. In the context of the admiration that accrued to Cesare Borgia, who after finding his French allies unfaithful and his mercenary troops themselves dangerous, finally relied only on his own soldiers; Machiavelli concludes that he “was never so highly esteemed as when every one saw that he was the sole master of his forces” (1940:51). This emphasis on selfmastery explains Machiavelli’s advice on virtue, when he warns against generosity, clemency, liberality, and kindness, giving this apparently hard advice solely out of practical caution: generosity may bankrupt the treasury, clemency may encourage enemies, liberality may create weakness, and kindness encourage laxness. The principle transfers easily into the context of individual selfgovernment. “For if one considers well, it will be found that some things which seem virtues would, if followed, lead to one’s ruin, and some other which appear vices result in one’s greater security and wellbeing” (Prince ch. 15; 1940:57). There are two threats to self-government in Machiavelli’s model. First is attack, or threat of attack, from outside; second is internal weakness. In respect to external attacks, Machiavelli is of course notorious, and much of his advice to princes is excessively vehement for application to civilized individuals. Yet his fundamental premises remain applicable. Anyone who does not make provision for defense and attack is culpable, he argues, for everyone may be threatened, and everyone has resources if they will but use them (Discourses Book I, 21). One need never lose one’s sovereignty to fools. Internal corruption is the other threat to self-government, and it is applicable to individuals as well as to states. In terms of individual self-government, corruption translates as meaning that the individual listens only to her or his own personal worst instincts, failing to allocate authority intelligently, living under self-made but selfish laws. Good laws, Machiavelli insists, are directed to the good of the whole, to the overall balance of the system (Discourses Book I, XVII, 168, 170). And this relates exactly to the self-governed individual system. The creation of a new order of self-government is difficult, Machiavelli urges, but is possible if one aims high enough, imitating good models and depending only on one’s own strengths, which develop as a result of experience

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and practice. And while it requires skill to rule well, as Machiavelli constantly emphasizes, once a city has known self-government, has “tasted” it, no one will ever conquer it again (Prince; 1940:18–19).

The Self-Organized Group A central theme of this work has been self-organization, both at the individual and the group level, and Machiavelli deserves recognition as the first political theorist to fully utilize the concepts of self-organization in his analysis of the sociopolitical system. The conventional approach to the fact that most societies have a reasonably stable order, that they represent some kind of organizational principles in their characteristic formal and informal institutional structures, is to assume that the form has been given from the outside. Plato’s philosopherking, Thomas More’s Utopus, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the wise founding legislators postulated by many theorists, all attest to the idea that some theological source, or some high-minded leader, or some deep natural principle, was the cause of the arrangements. In many circumstances, there is a belief, fostered by at least some groups in the society, that the regime created in the past is a sacred blessing, something its present-day members are privileged to enjoy and to which they must devote loyalty and sacrifice. Machiavelli’s premises are radically different from this attitude; he has faith neither in the possibility of outside help in solving political problems, nor in the possibility that beneficent institutions can be deliberately created to satisfy the people’s needs. With a clarity of vision that put him well before his time, Machiavelli recognized these conventional justifications of government as the fairy tales they were; myths perhaps noble or perhaps not, but distinctly myths, not relevant to political science.6 Many who are shocked by the strategic advice he gives the prince fail to understand fully the reasons behind the importance Machiavelli places on that office. Why is the prince necessary? The answer, for Machiavelli as for more recent self-organization theorists, is that no other solution exists; there is in the real world neither wise philosopher nor benign constitutionwriter to solve the problems of human organization. If the political system is to achieve either stability or a modicum of justice, a member of the society is needed to impose or somehow otherwise create that order. A theoretical figment of some theorist’s imagination will not solve the problem; real people must do it, if it is to be done at all. This strand of hard-headed political theory constitutes a direct connection between normative theory and empirical political science.7 What is the impact of the social and strategic games played by individuals, in their daily intercourse, on the group as a whole? In part, the impact may be political in the concrete sense, where like-minded and active individuals

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choose similar strategies and, depending on the skills and attention of their opponents, may win the battles they choose to undertake. Winners make the rules, so each step in such battles adds to the accumulation of institutions under which all players then live. An ongoing society’s history can be written through an analysis of these rules: once upon a time, Peter conquered Paul, and a new rule structure was created that condemned Paul to apparently permanent inferiority; there David outfought Goliath and an existing rule was abandoned. Machiavelli reminds us that we are not sufficiently awed by this political process. He also reminds us that we are the central participants in this process, whether actively or by default, and that it is more interesting to rise to the occasion rather than to play one’s part passively, hoping to escape politics. Such upright and quiet virtue fails, as Plato pointed out in his discussion of imperfect political systems in the Republic. If the virtuous step aside, their renunciation results only in leaving space for rogues. In the everyday politics within which all individuals live, there are standards to be upheld. While the game of justice has been defined throughout as an individual game, played in everyday relationships, with the players strengthened by their own individual self-government, it also has implications for the relationship of individual women and men with their official political systems, their states and their local governments, the myriad of officials, from the departments of motor vehicles to the highest appellate courts of the land, with whom they may deal. There are two ways in which the game of justice is relevant to the interpretation of those aspects of human behavior we ordinarily think of as political. In the first aspect, the game of justice should remind everyone that an informal kind of politics is present everywhere, as repeatedly stated here, and that means it occurs in the White House basement just as it occurs in the basements of ordinary citizens. One official is trying to score points over another official, one policy-maker is trying to undercut her opponent’s program, one legislator is voting against a law in order to pay back a colleague against whom he has a personal grudge. Good public policy is not always the central consideration for government players, and grassroots spectators should bear this in mind as they attempt to follow the apparently chaotic spectacle of national government. Politics is not irrational, not difficult to comprehend, as so many kindly people believe. The framework of the game provides a short, concise, and effective tool for making sense of government by constantly reminding observers that government is a game, and can be understood just as everyone understands sports, an exercise in competition, strategy, and the single-minded desire to win.8 This viewpoint provides a corrective to unthinking loyalty, a loyalty that may become less and less appropriate as citizens find their own self-government. The second way in which the game of justice is effective in defining people’s relationships with official government institutions is to bring the game metaphor to that relationship itself. Traditionally, representative government

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relies on the premise that the women and men elected to office, in free and fair elections, are somehow representative of the citizens by whom they are elected. There are difficult issues involved in the notion of representation, and as far back as Edmund Burke there have been legislators who took the electoral mandate rather lightly, but the present-day disillusionment with public politics, a disillusionment progressively evident in the decline of voting participation, suggests the radical metaphor of the game is more appropriate than the more mythical metaphor of representation. Anthony Downs (1957) was the first to state this argument in all its force: politicians choose their actions and propose their policies for one reason, and one reason only. Their purpose is to win elections. That is the game politicians play, and it is dangerous only if citizens fail to appreciate the motivations involved and their implications. There are fairly simple tests that the independent citizen, one who has taken the responsibility to develop her or his own capacity for individual self-government, can make in evaluating government. Do legislators raise their own salaries, promptly and regularly, while other legislation languishes in chamber? Do legislators pass policies such as affirmative action, but exempt their own hiring practices from such policies? Do legislators regularly speak in favor of and then vote down even modest term-limit proposals? Do legislators, when they find themselves in the majority, gerrymander districts so that their own seats are safe and those of their opponents are eliminated? Citizens who have come to appreciate the game aspect of everyday living will equally recognize the gaming implied in such governmental practices, and can judge their own options in response. Individual self-government is not therefore without important implications for the government of the nation at large.

NOTES

Prologue 1. Readers may recall the famous July 5 speech in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, in which he asked his audience the meaning of the holiday to the American slave and eloquently answered: “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery” (included in Foner-Taylor 1999:188–206; the quotation is at 196). My point is broader, but certainly includes this perspective on the democratic experience. 2. Inequities of this sort are of course familiar to everyone, including theorists of the liberal democratic state, but there is a widespread belief that the state can and should be the solution to such problems, whereas in practice the state exists because it represents these biases and draws its strength from representing them. Hayward (2003:503) has recently argued further that the state reinforces differences either by ignoring them (as private matters with which the state cannot interfere) or exacerbating them by public policy. For instance, states may build upon existing neighborhood inequalities by “localizing collective problems on the ‘other’ side of [racialized urban boundaries]”; that is, locating polluting facilities in black communities. 3. Several historical developments make the present an appropriate period in which to consider a widening of the discourse about democracy. Two major elements are the extremely large increases in education that have occurred since the Second World War, which along with economic prosperity give women and men options not previously available. In addition to this increase in human capital is the decline in citizen interest in, and respect for, existing governments, a lack of interest reflected in declining electoral participation; prestige rankings of members of Congress, in addition, usually put them somewhere below used car salesmen. On the overall critique of contemporary democracy see, for instance, Bok (2001), Hibbing and Theiss-Moore (2002), Nye et al. (1997). 4. The Downs approach, combining individualism with a bottom-up approach to democracy was characteristic of a wide array of theorists, from political economy to political philosophy (Simon 1945/1965, Buchanan and Tullock 1962/1965, Riker 1962,

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Schelling 1963, Olson 1968, Rawls 1971); it has remained largely outside the specific field of political theory, where scholars emphasize either the state as the sole political institution or identity-based social groups as the alternative affiliation for the underprivileged. 5. The idea of individual self-government as a perspective alternative to the conventional idea (of group self-government as a process that occurs only for societies as wholes) joins with the theme of everyday human activity as an open-ended existential game, to move the analysis toward a classical model (Socrates and Plato) rather than the modern one (Hobbes, Locke, and so on). The emphasis is on personal analysis and participation in social activity, rather than the justification for the existence of government. 6. John Gunnell has argued that the state as a meaningful concept was never relevant in the American context but was merely imported by German-trained political scientists who sought thereby to define political science as “an autonomous field” of study, and to “underwrite the legitimacy and authority of political science” by separating it from the vulgarity of politics (1993:58). Criticism from postmodern political science was similar to that from political theorists; Mitchell (1991) argued that the supposed state was so intertwined with social and economic forces that no boundaries could be empirically drawn to define its existence. Connolly (2000:169) comments that “the secular idol now gives off a hollow sound whenever it is tapped.” Dumm (1996: xxiii) remarks that “the primary framework for being free in the modern age of Western capitalist democracies is losing its grip on the imagination of the citizens of the world.” 7. Political science and political theory participated in a consensual but not entirely amicable divorce as a result of the so-called behavioral revolution of the 1960s, when new methods of data gathering and statistical analysis became popular among members concerned with empirical research, while students of theory preferred to remain associated with an older normative tradition. Efforts to bridge the gap, from both sides, failed in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, but have continued and show greater prospect of success in the present day. 8. A recent example is White’s (2000) analysis of theorists representing four schools of theory, evaluating them not in absolute terms but in respect to their own premises and the specific contexts on which they base their analyses. See also Gunnell (1993) and Lane (1997a). 9. The state may sometimes directly participate in violent social repression, as was the case under the apartheid regime in South Africa, but more typically it is state officials as individual persons rather than in their officially designated duties who use their legal authority to impose their personal wills on others. As such, they are not state actors but members of the political society I here describe. 10. In many areas of the world, including Western democracies, the problem of limiting and controling the state is still important, still a matter of life and death. In such cases, traditional theory is adequate. But we should not think that such problems, once addressed, leave nothing for political theory to accomplish. 11. Putnam (1993, 2000). In Bowling Alone, Putnam devotes a chapter to the darker sides of civil society, but does not integrate this problem with the overall argument. At

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the 1998 American Political Science Association meeting, Putnam remarked, in the course of a plenary session on civil society, that “not all social capital is good”; but this side of the coin has been underemphasized in public discussion. 12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spent much of his career on the intersection of political theory with political science, was perhaps the first to point out that citizens within representative governments have only the briefest of freedoms: the English people, he said, is free “only during the elections” of parliament members, and after that, “it is a slave, it is nothing” (Social Contract III:15; Masters 1978:102). 13. As is now so well known as to no longer require explanation, John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (1971) postulated that the basic principles of justice in society could be conceived of as taken by men in an original position where, because of the veil of ignorance, they did not know their own personal attributes or social position in the ensuing society. This original ignorance, Rawls argued, kept men from trying to benefit themselves in the rules they proposed and accepted, and led to justice as fairness. In later works, Rawls modified many of these ideas; see, for example, Political Liberalism (1993). 14. Later discussion will suggest that this integrity of the self is not absolute, but as a working assumption it seems fair to say that the human individual is certainly more naturally coherent, and therefore more governable, than a highly complex modern institutionalized state system. 15. A number of students of decision-making and political culture have observed that political actors tend to fall into four groups in respect to their defined value structures: those who value social consensus, those who prefer economic models, those who emphasize power, and those who give ethical norms central importance. If this empirical viewpoint has wider philosophical implications, it suggests that the disputes between communitarians, individualists, rationalists, and so on, are nonnegotiable; see, for instance, Lane (1973), Snyder and Diesing (1977), and Wildavsky (1987). 16. A television version of the novel ended with a close-in shot of a small, muddyfaced, terrified little boy, with the jungle fire in the background, staring up in awestruck intensity at an adult figure of which one sees only the legs, clad in immaculate white knee socks and white shorts, the uniform of the Royal Navy. The picture is a tribute to the terrors society can inflict on itself, as a self-organized system, without any individual person being culpable because no one individual is ever in charge, with the ability fully to control the forces that emerge within a group because of its own internal structure, that is, the particular mix of persons who constitute the group. 17. Digeser deals with the various schools of rationalism, communitarians, and so on (1995:76, 112, 169, 165). 18. Members of minority communities, or anyone who wishes to parade the streets of capitol cities protesting government or quasigovernment policies, may find the Leviathan not distant but very much an immediate threat. Individual self-government is even more important in these cases where the game of justice is played hardball, with a strong institutionalized opponent.

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Chapter One 1. Popper (1962) is among the best known of these critics. 2. Pitkin (1993:325, 21–22) notes that this was the conclusion drawn by some students of Wittgenstein, the idea that he had made philosophy impossible, brought it to its end. Pitkin shows that this is a “misunderstanding” of Wittgenstein, who no more brought philosophy to an end than did Socrates; however, Wittgenstein did insist on an alternative method to that used by traditional philosophy. 3. Pitkin (1993:329); she is discussing the work of Hannah Arendt. 4. Pitkin (1993:340); she is discussing the work of Stanley Cavell. 5. White (1991:4–8) emphasizes as characteristic of the postmodern problematic the “increasing incredulity toward metanarratives” and the associated search for intellectual direction. Strong (1990:122, 132) urges that the theorist “does not impose his or her order on the world” but “makes available the particular limitations of different ways of being in the world,” but also notes the need for outside reference point. Sandel (1996: ix), though concerned with ‘public’ (i.e., group) philosophy, also notes that “we may resist such ultimate questions as the meaning of justice . . . what we cannot escape is that we live some answer to these questions—we live some theory all the time.” A recent White work (2000) perhaps best fulfills the mandate, by viewing his task as standing by a vacant lot, watching children play and trying to determine how to describe the rules of the apparent game, but his subjects are political theorists (George Kateb, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, William Connolly), who are not quite the laypersons that Pitkin seems to have had in mind. 6. By saying that the state is the conventional assumption in political theory, I do not mean to suggest its role has gone unchallenged. Feminist theorists, racial theorists, and postmodernists have all recognized the difficulty of finding a clear boundary between daily behavior and official institutions. Gunnell (1993:58) has, however, pointed out the state’s importance to the modern development of political science: the state “defined the domain of political science as an autonomous field, and . . . served to underwrite the legitimacy and authority of political science. . . . It was, for many, a secular substitute for the mystery and social bond of religion.” Pateman, who defines participation as occurring well outside the formal boundaries of the state, in the workplace and in families, traces the alternative view (1970:4–5) to Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which emphasized elite government through formal institutions, with the public important only as audience (1970:4–5). The difficulty of going beyond the state, even for those who explicitly recognize the importance of everyday life as political, is seen in the works of scholars who find the roots of injustice deep in the experience of the family unit, but then propose policies by which the state should rectify such inequities. Okin’s work is exemplary on both points (1989:3–24, 170–186). 7. The well-known phrase is from Lasswell 1958. Various observers have also remarked that while Lasswell posed the question in the book of the same title, the book does not answer it but is a study of elites. This reinforces the point I am about to make in the text, that attention has always been on the state and its elites rather than on the full range of political behavior.

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8. Richard Rorty (e.g., 1989) is the classical source for the division of human behavior into a public sphere where one should act in the terms described by John Stuart Mill, and a private sphere available for Nietzschean abandon. Digeser’s (1995) careful discussion of theories of self-development shows the complexity of outside theorizing about the private sphere. Hénaff and Strong (2001:4, 25–26) claim, as does this work, that the public and private are inseparable, and argue that failure to recognize the political nature of the private leaves it unseen and uncontrollable. Alford (1994:26–32, 40–44) emphasizes the pathological nature of many of these private group relationships, especially exclusion and aggression. The interpretation of Nietzsche’s work has also changed in recent years; see the discussion in chapter three. 9. I use the term in its academic sense, in which the modern period begins with Machiavelli. 10. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Gerth and Mills (1958:78); “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” “Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.” Weber has remarked, just prior to this definition, that a wife may have a political policy for guiding her husband, but he does not follow up this interesting suggestion (ibid. 77). 11. Easton (1953:129). Easton sharply criticizes the term “state” (ibid. 106–115), but retains the idea that politics involves only whole-society policy-making in which citizens have their sole political role in respect to the political system. 12. Development theory often associates the state with increased secularization, but this is correct only in part, according to Engster (2001:198), whose study suggests “that the state is best understood as a remnant of an early modern worldview in which politics was given the task of imposing a static and universal order upon a contingent social world.” The thesis of the state’s divinity goes back to the work of Carl Schmitt. See Engster’s overall summary (2001:197–202) for a balanced discussion of the issues involved. Among the prominent critics of the unified view of the state is Young (1990). 13. Honig’s (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics is built around the thesis that conflict has been eliminated from political and replaced by law or administration; or, in her terms, virtue has replaced virtù. According to Gunnell (1993:58), the state “offered a way for political science to talk about its subject matter in a manner that distanced the discipline from the perceived dangers and baseness of political life.” 14. Leaving aside books with titles like “the best government money can buy,” serious scholars have also taken note of the problem; see, for instance, Nye et al.’s (1997) Why People Don’t Trust Government; Hibbing and Theiss-More’s (2002) Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work; and Bok’s (2001) The Trouble with Government. 15. When in everyday life, for instance, person A discriminates in favor of, or against, another person B, it need not be an act of simple personal preference but may be a political act, and in a democratic culture one is entitled to evaluate the action in those terms.

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16. Pitkin’s argument was advanced in the context of Wittgenstein’s writings and the present analysis finds much of the answer there; see the discussion in chapter four. However, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is still typically associated with ordinary language analysis, and even ‘new Wittgenstein’ scholars maintain the linguistic emphasis, although there is now a greater attention to its therapeutic side (Crary and Read 2000) and individual self-knowledge and self-command (Eldridge 1997). See also Hacker (1986). 17. The choice of Foucault from among other French theorists is directed by his unique position in relation to philosophy and social theory, to both of which he directed himself over the course of his career with a balance not typical of other theorists. Bourdieu, a close contemporary, threw his lot in with social sciences and survey research methods (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; see also Harker et al. 1990). Structuralists such as LeviStrauss, Lacan, and Barthes, despite their similar concern with microanalytical approaches, have focused on myth and culture without Foucault’s sustained interest in political theory; postmodernists such as Lyotard (1993), while consistent with some of my present argument (especially in respect to the uses of game theory broadly conceived) lack the methodological discipline that is important to my argument here; see, for example, Lyotard (1985). Sartre, regnant in the prior generation, was the tradition against which all in various ways rebelled (Kritzman 1988:23–32; and see the discussion in Eribon 1991). Deleuze and Guattari (1977), despite their originality, deal with social interaction in a normative context that is distinct from Foucault’s social science (see also Goodchild 1996). 18. The primary texts here are Foucault 1965 and 1978. 19. It is also an interesting return to the ancient ideal, articulated by Aristotle, that political science is the master science that integrates a wide range of human knowledge in order better to understand political issues. Easton (1965:7) restated this as part of his behavioral program. 20. Georges Canguilhem’s report accepting Foucault’s thesis for the Doctor of Letters degree emphasized that the work (which became Madness and Civilization) called into question psychology’s scientific status by associating madness with social interactions of exclusion; it is reprinted in Davidson (1997:23–27). Davidson’s collection is particularly useful by its inclusion of scholars who were personally acquainted with Foucault; his introduction to the section written by Pierre Hadot (198–201) argues that Hadot’s work on ancient askesis was central to Foucault’s entire final work. Gilles DeLeuze’s (1988) Foucault was welcomed by Foucault when it appeared, but commentators now find it less successful, putting too much emphasis on metaphysics and losing Foucault’s “ironic negation” (Bové 1988: xxxiv). For a general selection of Foucault’s writings on governmentality in general see Burchell et al. (1991). 21. Foucault’s American influence can be seen prominently in the work of Connolly (e.g., 1987, 1991,1995), Dumm (1987, 1994, 1996, 1999), and Flathman (1992, 1998, 2003), among others. All direct their attention to bringing Foucault within the discipline of political theory, unlike my social science emphasis here; beyond that, however, their approaches differ markedly.

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22. This curious French quarrel is described by his friend and biographer (Eribon 1991:160–168). 23. In an often-quoted passage from The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault mocked his critics, those who demanded predictability and consistency, with the cheerful “no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you!”(Foucault 1972:17). 24. Foucault’s work appeared in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, the journal of the Centre for European Sociology, directeded by Pierre Bourdieu, along with a variety of American sociologists (e.g., Goffman, Gregory Bateson); see the discussion in Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes (1990: xii–xiii). The political theme connecting the early and late work is discussed in the course of the interview analyzed in this chapter. 25. The interview was conducted 20 January 1984 by Raul Formet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Muller and published in Concordia: Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie 6, pp. 99–116. The interview is reprinted in Bernauer and Rasmussen (1988:1–20). I refer to it subsequently as Foucault (1988). 26. This suggests also that power enters even into such relations as that of mentoring, where the mentor may unconsciously be seeking to mold the student in the mentor’s own image, while the student seeks assistance with the expression of the student’s own aspirations, rather than wishing entirely to follow the mentor’s guidance. As Nietzsche noted, a mentor could ask for no better success than to be outgrown by the student, but the very statement of the principle indicates Nietzsche’s suspicion that it is not always the case. 27. Critics argue that the term “power” is unacceptably vague, but I believe the term “strategic interaction,” which Foucault uses later in the interview as the equivalent of power, has sufficient scientific foundation to vitiate the claim. As Foucault says, by power he always means relations of power, and he claims, as does Schelling, that these are ubiquitous. 28. This point is central to understanding both sides of Foucault’s argument, about discipline and freedom. The solution to discipline is not merely to recognize it, or even to rebel against it, but to take actions such that the relationship is reversed. This emphasis on action rather than debate distinguishes Foucault from philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas. 29. Axelrod (1997). The importance of this attitude to the self as an essential element in the individual’s ability to survive successfully in strategic interactions is discussed in the concluding sections of the present chapter, and is the central focus of chapters four and five. 30. Foucault’s interest in psychology and psychiatry was shown in his first major publication, Madness and Civilization (1965), and he maintained this interest as a teacher. Before achieving his position at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970, where he was not required to teach regular classes, Foucault had taught at various institutions inside France and abroad, and placed much emphasis on experimental psychology (Eribon 1991: especially chapter 10).

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31. This was apparently stimulated by his interest in penal reform (Eribon 1991:126). 32. For example, Homans (1950, 1974), Thibaut and Kelley (1959). 33. Garfinkel is often considered to be a marginal figure and ethnomethodology a peripheral discipline, but the field is currently undergoing a resurgence in popularity (e.g., Coulon 1995, Kim 2003, Lynch 1997, Rawls 2002); and Garfinkel himself (1996) has recently issued a restatement. I believe the difficulty with ethnomethodology is that it is philosophical and thus difficult to classify within the empirical social sciences. It is just this philosophical aspect that makes his work appropriate in this book. 34. This interest is also a major element in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy; see Pitkin (1993:132–139) on his concept of “forms of life.” 35. Simon (1945/1965), Downs (1957), Buchanan and Tullock (1962/1965), Riker (1962), Schelling (1963), Olson (1968). For a similar listing of this classic generation, see Shepsle (2003:308). 36. Schelling (1963:15, 83, 89). Schelling insists, I think correctly, that all relationships contain elements of both cooperation and conflict, but it cannot of course be proven and must be taken as an methodological axiom, one shared by Foucault. 37. Schelling (1963:17–18, 22). One may of course use force with a four-year-old but such a response is outside the realm of strategy and constitutes a declaration of war. Schelling’s discussion of Eisenhower’s use of a rhetorically aggressive secretary of state, as a way of claiming there were forces he, Eisenhower, could not control is perhaps a more appropriate example of the uses of irrationality. 38. Note that Schelling does not argue that weakness or irrationality always succeeds, but raises the counterintuitive point that it may sometimes do so. 39. For explicit references to social psychology, see Schelling (1963:165–169). 40. Schelling (1963) frequently restates his argument that game theory should not be restricted to mathematical treatment (e.g., note on page 10, and page 162). 41. Even formal theorists have devoted attention to this factor, for instance, in searching for ways of escaping the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Axelrod 1984; see also Axelrod 1997). 42. It may be useful to insert here a reminder to the reader that these games proceed within established governments, so it is not a question of disobeying the nation’s laws, but rather of strategies that are perhaps unexpected but not illegal. 43. An example of such an approach can be found in Migdal’s (1988) survival theory, which postulates a continuous micro-level struggle over the construction of rules. I have argued for a similar micro-theory (Lane 1997a, 1997b).

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Chapter Two 1. Dryzek (1996:475) finds the assumption of the primacy of the state “so universal and unremarkable that it is often not noted,” and cites as “rare” Robert Dahl’s (1989) explicit acknowledgment that “advocates of the democratic process have always meant it to be applied to the state” because the point is usually beneath notice. Dryzek argues the exclusive focus is inappropriate, but for reasons quite different from those I suggest here. Strong (1990:11, 144–145), talks of paradigms or epistemic wholes, and uses normal science to characterize periods within political theory; this adds some authority to the use of the terminology here. 2. Liberalism’s concentration on the state is interesting because it seems almost deliberately to overlook everyday, ordinary, political behavior—the political interaction that takes place between individuals as individuals. Ehrenberg (1999:225, emphasis added) remarks in passing on “liberalism’s lack of interest in coercion that lies outside” formal politics. Liberalism is of course also interested in, along with the state, the individual; but tends to see the individual in a private, protected place of freedom, distinct from the public politics of the state (e.g., Rorty 1989:85). Beyond the right to vote, which is important although episodic (and frequently not exercised), the individual’s life is nonpolitical. 3. The dichotomy between the state and the individual is closely related to the distinction between the public and the private, and my argument here is that this conceptual polarity was never tenable and has become increasingly inappropriate to political theorizing today (Geuss 2001, Hénaff and Strong 2001). The dichotomy misleads in two ways relevant to the interpretation of the political. First, it suggests that all politics is formalized (and indeed legalized) and tightly enclosed within the state, and that the state therefore is either (or both) the problem and the solution. Second, it implies that individuals are political only as citizens, not as human beings. The term I have chosen for this field of activity, “political society,” is perhaps too mild-mannered to be memorable but has the virtue of both simplicity and accuracy. 4. Political society, as I use the term, refers not to citizens in their abstract normative equality but to whole people, people with their concreteness, their peculiarities, their loves and their hates, their charities and their cruelties. Civil society gathers itself into like-minded groups to solve community problems, to build hospitals, to help the unfortunate. Political society may do all these things but it may also, at its worst, burn churches, destroy community institutions, and discriminate against the vulnerable. 5. The separation of state and individual leads to a kind of Kuhnian anomaly, in that the liberal theorist, in pursuit of democratic stability, advocates adoption of John Stuart Mill as patron saint of the public democratic realm, but turns to Nietzsche for the expression of the private individual’s full self-realization (e.g., Rorty 1989). While I admit that politics makes strange bedfellows, and that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I think there may be alternative ways of developing a coherent model of the liberal political experience. 6. This is the hidden political world that the liberal blinders hide from our view, the unnoticed, informal political foundation of the entire state system. It is a realm of

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social challenge and response in respect to what a wide variety of theorists designate as value allocation or social valorization (Easton 1965, Foucault 1985–1986). Political society may also exist within the state, as those informal normative structures that support or undercut official norms and regulations, but this is a separate subject and I do not deal with it here. 7. The existence of such political phenomena is not in dispute, for it would be very difficult to argue that they do not exist in all known societies; the only question is whether this kind of everyday politics, which is authoritative for those who participate in it and have little recourse from its allocations, deserves to be given explicit treatment within liberal theory. There are strong arguments to the contrary. Rawls’s (1971) Theory of Justice deliberately excludes from its foundations all possibility of politics by putting everyone’s socially relevant attributes behind the veil of ignorance; despite the criticisms levied against the book, it has served as a defining text in liberal theory. Mainstream liberal theorists often try to work around the politics problem by devising universal solutions: agonistic respect (Connolly 1995), equality (Gutmann 1980), magnanimity (Bennett 2001), wider citizen participation (Barber 1984), and so on. But I believe these solutions suffer from the blind spot problem, which allows many liberals, as it allowed Dr. Pangloss, in Voltaire’s acid parody, to build theory on a hidden assumption that things are better than they are. 8. These gangs were street corner clubs, with members often unemployed because of the depression of the 1930s; unlike present-day gang behavior, Whyte’s gangs engaged primarily in social activities, with only a few men involved in minor rackets such as craps and the numbers. Their fights occurred largely during grade school and involved little beyond fists. Whyte’s observations therefore refer not to marginal or violent behavior but mainstream social behavior. 9. The leaders were noted also for intelligence and “powers of self-expression,” with Doc particularly distinguished by his ability in verbal debates to outmaneuver his opponents “without humiliating” them. Physical force no longer mattered in group relations, since they had all fought their battles as kids in the neighborhood (1943/1955:11–12). 10. I have been told by African-American students that W. E. B. DuBois called this phenomenon the “crabs in a bucket” model, where if any one crab manages to get to the top of the bucket and might escape, the others pull it back, but I have been unable to document the exact source. It nonetheless tends, as a dimension of everyday minority experience in social relationships, to support my arguments about the importance of political society in opposing social justice, and liberal theory’s loss of insight through choosing to ignore it. 11. His followers were so outraged by this defection that it led, shortly after, to the demise of the gang (Whyte 1943/1955:41). 12. Ironically, the problems experienced by Doc were the result of his high expectations, formed during his leadership years. Followers, who had been taught lower expectations, seemed better to tolerate difficult economic circumstances. 13. Migdal’s theoretical essay is particularly intriguing in its demonstration that what I am calling political society exists within the government as well, and that no

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leader is safe from this informal politics; his example is Nasser’s difficulties of balancing the powerful groups on which he depended to maintain control (Migdal 1988:181–205). My argument here is only about political society in ordinary life, but it is applicable also to deconstructing the state. 14. Putnam (2000:21–22) freely admits it was social capital “that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City,” and cites the curious case of the Ku Klux Klan, which protested, on grounds that it was no different from the Lions and Elks, its exclusion from Florida’s “adopt a highway” program. However, his later chapter on “The Dark Side of Social Capital” (350–363) does not seek to explain the difference between bonding and bridging social capital theoretically, but seeks direct policy solutions without rigorous theory. Granted that this was not his purpose, it does leave unanswered many important questions. 15. Most theorists rule them out, either because of their hierarchical internal structure or their failure to contribute to the process of democratization. 16. Affirmative action programs, and their critics, are a case in point. In earlier periods, individuals from high-status social groups received implicit affirmative action by being favored for jobs, schools, and leadership positions according to the informal norms of political society. When persons who were hurt by this implicit affirmative action had laws passed to encourage explicit recognition of their claims, this was considered, by the former beneficiaries of the old system, a violation of equal treatment. The distinction made in the present chapter between political society and state politics makes clear the social structure of this protest. 17. Gosnell had characterized a ward committeeman’s complaint about electoral changes as “whining about loss of patronage”; Whyte said Gosnell would not have used the word “whining” for the League of Women Voters or the Chamber of Commerce (1944:694). 18. Political science made a response that ironically confirmed Whyte’s charge; Hallowell (1945), for instance, dismissed the whole article as positivism, and said the discipline had tried it, found it unsatisfying, and progressed beyond it. 19. Young, for instance, although she emphasizes the same kinds of oppression discussed in the present work, “the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes,” seeks “structural” sources of oppression rather than individual ones, shies away from the hard edges of one-on-one political behavior. This is clear in her kindly reference to generally well-meaning people and in her preference for the abstract structural problem level despite her understanding that individual persons do “intentionally harm others” and that there are personal benefits to this behavior (Young 1990:41–42). Connolly’s recognition of the importance of differences among the persons in social groups is similarly abstract: he urges agonistic respect, without to my knowledge specifying to whom this advice is given and whether it is likely to be effective in behavioral terms (Connolly 1991, 1995). 20. Among Flathman’s list of virtues for his almost-anarchist individuals is “magnanimity,” which is standard for liberal theorists (e.g., Bennett 2001, Connolly 1995,

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perhaps even Rawls 1971), but is, Nietzsche pointed out, bad policy because magnanimity leads the persons toward whom it is directed to vanity rather than gratitude. And Flathman’s individual is more voluntarist than my approach to political society requires by shifting sharply between the private pleasures of “visions and fantasies” and the sterility of public action (Flathman 1992:212; compare Kateb 1992). 21. I do not wish here to seem to advocate another version of discursive communication and the rational achievement of justice through listening and speaking (Habermas 1984–1987; see also White 1991). As I believe all my examples illustrate, words are frequently incapable of breaking through the opacities of political society, which seems covered by tradition and habit. I believe political action, rather than discourse, is a more practical alternative. This is the importance of my emphasis on the game model, discussed in chapter one and expanded in chapter four. 22. Political theory is made up of a set of arguments of a well-recognized form, beginning with assumptions or premises (or axioms) and moving systematically onward in terms of more or less deductively rigorous syllogistic forms to reach various conclusions about political life and behavior. I do not mean to indicate that political theory is intended to be in any sense scientifically oriented, or even ought to be constrained by some Hobbesian geometric rigor, but only that it must contain a coherent structure if it is to be persuasive. This allegiance to classical forms of argument has been illustrated in recent decades by the enthusiasm with which Rawls’s theory has been admired and attacked; agree or disagree, readers are stimulated into contention by the clarity of the model Rawls presents. But if deductive logic is essential to such arguments, so also are the arguments’ premises, and my present effort is to clarify these premises by looking more closely at that starting point of normative human behavior, political society. See the related discussion in chapter five.

Chapter Three 1. This statement, from the “Plea for Captain John Brown,” in its original context dissociates the author from public debates and the politics associated with the slavery issue, but I use it here in its fully general sense because it so neatly captures Thoreau’s attitude to the state and the self. The quotation is found in Rosenblum (1996:153). Thoreau repeats the point in “Resistance to Civil Government”: “I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” Similarly, “I was not born to be forced, I will breathe after my own fashion” (Rosenblum 1996:9, 14). 2. A review in The American Political Science Review described Thoreau as “a strange mosaic of impressions,” including “transcendentalist, theist, temperate revolutionary, individualist, libertarian, humanitarian and pragmatist” (Atkinson 1976:1296). 3. Taylor (1996:1–7) reviews the remarkably adverse literature on Thoreau over the years, involving criticism of his anarchism, self-righteousness, inconsistency, and so on. Much of the problem, as Eulau (1962:118) remarked, was that readers tried to read “their

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own preferences” into his writing. Walker (1998:845, note 1) gives an interesting example of how writers on Thoreau accused him of attitudes he did not hold; specifically, Walden was called a diatribe against village life, when the entire book expresses his attachments to such life. 4. Taylor (1996) draws attention to Thoreau’s study of American colonial history, with its violence and cruelty to the precolonial peoples and to nature itself, and provides a strong example of Thoreau’s peculiar approach to the difficulties of self-government, either of self or nation. 5. Kateb, for instance, makes the obvious point that the proper term is representative or constitutional democracy (1992:23–24), since it is impossible to conceive any way in which large modern states can be governed directly by the demos gathered under some ancient oak. But as Jenco (2003) argues, Kateb and others too incautiously classify Thoreau’s theory as consonant with current definitions of liberal democracy. 6. As a convenience to readers, I henceforth give the title of the Thoreau work involved so it can be located in editions other than the ones I cite. The editors of complete works and the editors of collections are listed in the references under the editor’s name. 7. Thoreau refers (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:12) to “Darwin, the naturalist,” but Walden was published in 1854 and the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species not until 1859, so Thoreau would not have been referring to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in its fully developed form. 8. Government I define as the management of a system according to consistent principles of organization; self-government is when the management is exercised by all or most of the participating elements. These are rough definitions, refined further in the later text. Politics I define at the micro-level, meaning the patterns of influence individuals attempt to exert over one another. When I use the term “democratic” or “democracy” it refers to a principle of nonhierarchy and not a specific political institution. I accept Jenco’s (2003) point that Thoreau is a critic of democracy as an institution, and does not therefore contribute in quite the usual way to democratic theory. 9. Contemporary political theorists, from all sides of the political spectrum, tend to emphasize openness and care for the other as mitigations of the perceived harshness of liberal democracies (e.g., Connolly 1991, White 2000). Thoreau vigorously opposes this approach because he sees it as disguised domination. It is we who are charitable, generous, tolerant, and we give the other what we think he should have, without asking for his viewpoint. 10. The whole conclusion to the Economy section of Walden (Shanley 1971:69–79) speaks to the necessity of finding one’s own way and living it thoroughly even if the life was a mean one; even in the poorhouse, he said, there were moments of joy (Conclusion; ibid. 328). See also the remarks on stars (Higher Laws; ibid. 216–217). 11. Battles between native Americans and various settlers were cruel and destructive, Thoreau shows, yet they left behind them a peaceful countryside in which two boys might safely journey, enjoying both human and natural contacts without endangering their lives (Week, Taylor 1996).

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12. It was notably Thoreau, not Emerson, who hitched up the horses when fleeing slaves arrived in Concord and drove them to a railhead where they might safely continue their journey north. Thoreau also spent his famous night in jail, on similar principles. 13. I find a modified version of David Easton’s well-known definition of the political to be helpful in appreciating Thoreau’s point. If the political is “the authoritative allocation of values” (Easton 1953:129–134), then the self-governed person is political as he creates order in himself through that process of intelligent allocation. I eliminate Easton’s final clause, which restricts the political only to allocations for whole societies, thus limiting politics to the state in the conventional manner. Thoreau’s individual allocation is far more interesting. 14. The term “social theorist” is used here to emphasize (1) the scope of Thoreau’s theory, which goes beyond narrow attention to the state and civic duties, and (2) the empirical nature of his analysis. Of course classical political philosophy included all of what we today classify as social science (psychology, sociology, economics, politics), but it is rarer in recent times. 15. Thoreau also discusses (Walden, Visitors; Shanley 1971:151) with something resembling awe the case of the pauper who baldly described himself to everyone as “deficient in intellect”; this was “so simple, and sincere and so true” that Thoreau found it overturned itself and became wisdom. 16. As Walker (1998) notes, Thoreau is probably the only philosopher who ever worked as a day laborer. 17. Thoreau repeatedly emphasizes his disapproval of the division of labor: for instance, demanding that men build their own houses, not hire contractors, because doing it themselves would develop their faculties and make many into poets (Walden, Economy; Shanley 1971:46). He also emphasizes in various ways how his own multiple roles were educational: being his own gentleman as well as his own scullion and cook taught him how ugly certain dishes were and therefore simplified his diet (Higher Laws; ibid. 214). 18. He would rather be sober than drunk: “I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven” (Walden, Higher Laws; Shanley 1971:217). 19. In Thoreau’s day, before philosophy was denounced by materialist theorists as mere ideology, it included what we now call the social sciences. I use the term here in that sense. 20. Richard Rorty (1989:85) is the recent locus classicus of this position, with the argument that we must behave according to the principles of John Stuart Mill in public life, but may abandon ourselves to Nietzschean ecstasies in our private lives. Its unfortunate side implication is that there is a difference between public and private, a difference that Thoreau’s theory rejects. The interpretation of Nietzsche is also outdated; see later. 21. Modern readers of Walden may wonder why Thoreau stayed at the bucolic pond only two years; but they undoubtedly have not experienced the difficulties of growing, catching, or shooting one’s own food, or the work of cooking bread on hot stones in an

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outdoor pit, or hiking over to a spring under Brister’s Hill to get drinking water when Walden was too warm (Harding 1982). Walden Pond was not a free lunch. 22. Walden showed that monetary outlay was small, but the time required was large. 23. Walker (2001:163) treats the bean field as a field of war, where Thoreau cuts down a lusty weed that is threatening the crop. This echoes Rosenblum’s (1981) emphasis on Thoreau’s militancy, but fails to account for Thoreau’s fondness for weeds, all of which he knows by name and describes with affection (Walden, Spring; Shanley 1971:309–310). The bean field is less a war and more of a bittersweet choice between beauty and utility. Or at least one may say that Thoreau’s emphasis is more Darwinian than military. 24. Locke’s position is frequently discussed without reference to his educational writings (1989), which draw a more complex picture, but it is fair to say that at maturity Locke’s man is fully defined by his nature and upbringing and is not, as with Thoreau, a work in progress. 25. The full text adds emphasis to this point. Thoreau says he has “seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself ”; he goes on to say he wishes for deeper and richer soil, rather than stems “dangling this way and that” (Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Hovde 1980:383). 26. In addition to his being a classical scholar, Thoreau also ran the family’s pencil business, making many technical improvements in the machinery and the composition and manufacture of the pencils; later in life he expanded his mathematical teaching materials and took up land surveying, doing a lively business at it. Thoreau also wrote for magazines, studied the history of the American Indian, worked as a handyman for Emerson and various others, and of course spent a great amount of time tramping the woods. 27. The new agreement on Thoreau’s stature does not imply consensus on the substantive interpretation of Thoreau’s political theory, but I do not focus here on those differences, preferring to suggest an understanding of his work that moves in a new direction, emphasizing and drawing conclusions from his attitude to state and self. 28. See also Foucault (1980:121): “What we need . . . is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, not therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.” The king is of course still with us as the state. 29. Connolly (1991:201) writes, for instance: “But the state is the official center of self-conscious collective action. It is the institution of last recourse’s highest appeal, the one that symbolizes what we are. . . . It is the sovereign place within which the highest internal laws and policies are enacted. . . . if the state does not serve as a center of selfconscious collective action in pursuit of common purposes, then nothing does.” 30. There are of course other reasons for Thoreau’s neglect, especially the bias against American writers; even within the American context, the elitism that prefers Emerson to the man who did odd jobs around Emerson’s home. 31. I do not intend to malign anarchism here, but simply use its everyday sense of disorderly to summarize what is sometimes the response to Thoreau’s writings. Classical

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anarchists of course advocated forms of rule other than the state; few, however, were as individualistic as Thoreau in this matter. 32. Rorty (1989) insists on the difference between the individual as “self-creator” and the individual as “public liberal” (85) and discusses the issue in his chapter 4 “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” (73–95, esp. 88–95). He groups Nietzsche with Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov as “exemplars,” “illustrations of what private perfection can be like” (xiv), and emphasizes Nietzsche’s desire in his private selfcreation for “the sublime and ineffable,” for the “incommensurable” vision of himself and reality whole (101). More recent theorists, like those I discuss here, have seriously revised this interpretation of Nietzsche’s work. 33. Kateb (1995: xxiv) remarks that Nietzsche read Emerson’s work and “had feelings of admiration tending to reverence.” I can find no reference to Nietzsche’s having read Thoreau, but Richardson (1986) frequently refers to Thoreau’s ideas as anticipatory of Nietzsche’s ideas. 34. Thoreau’s argument can almost be summarized as the belief that everyone is potentially heroic. 35. Thoreau makes this point with the curious tale of the New England bug that gnawed its way out of a table that had been a tree when, long ago, the bug was first deposited there. As the bug subsequently matured, escaped, and enjoyed its full growth, so may mankind (Shanley 1971:332). The point, while hardly couched in philosophical terms, is plain enough. Thoreau valorized human maturity, which he defined in individual political terms as self-government—individual self-government as a supplement to the formal governments under which all people live without finding them satisfactory. 36. Kateb rests his hopes of escaping the problems inherent in individualism heavily on Emerson and Whitman and a kind of “ecstatic contemplation” that is “a preference for consciousness over action, for the indefinite over the social, for the intense over the well-rounded, for the episodic over the uninterrupted, for uncertainty over a false sense of completion, for the true over the fictional” (Kateb 1992:92). I believe this fits two of the transcendentalists, Emerson and Whitman, far better than it does the third member of the group. Thoreau’s works, and indeed his life, describe a far less narcissistic model. 37. The verdict on Thoreau’s composure depends on which works one consults. Rosenblum (1981:82) emphasizes his “preoccupation with violence,” but her citations are largely to the John Brown Plea, “Civil Disobedience,” with some references to Walden— a choice that was typical at that period of Thoreau research. Recent work emphasizes the whole oeuvre and reduces the outraged Thoreau to a smaller scope. 38. Walker’s (1998) analysis of Walden illustrates still another way of approaching Thoreau’s work, since he defines it on almost exclusively economic terms, as advice to the least advantaged citizens of a democracy on how to achieve a “new ethos of everyday life” consonant, if necessary, with “voluntary poverty” (1998:851, 854). 39. It would be a mistake to think that Thoreau’s model is social Darwinian. Thoreau does not define nature as “red in tooth and claw” but in the context of his neighboring woodlands and fields, where things tried to make their way without much outside help.

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But even when the tooth was red, he did not suggest using that fact to affirm the rightness of such behavior; rather he urged the prey to take care of itself. 40. Thoreau, for instance, remarks (neutrally) on the field mice who one hard winter fed on the grove of young pines near his house, girdling and thus killing them—but goes on to observe that the trees were too thick and would anyway have killed each other off (Walden, Winter Animals; Shanley 1971:280), so it is not appropriate to condemn the field mice for their behavior. 41. Thoreau’s major example is his own giving up of the hunting he had enjoyed as a child, as he gradually came to find it inappropriate to his adult way of life. 42. It is useful here to repeat my earlier point, that democratic theory usually refers to theories that justify the institutions of the modern Western industrialized state; in this sense, Thoreau is not a democratic theorist. He does, however, do a different sort of democratic theory, one that involves principles of individual politics and justice.

Chapter Four 1. This larger interpretation of game theory was there from the beginning, in the early work of Emile Borel, and the ideas of Oskar Morgenstern, but this level was temporarily obscured by the mathematical emphasis imposed on game theory by important contributors to its popularity. I will discuss this history in more detail. 2. The heading to this section is adopted from Lyotard’s (1985) title, although my argument is unrelated to his. 3. Riker’s first major publication in this line was The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962). For an appreciation of Riker’s work by a former student, who emphasizes its ethical implications, see Shepsle (2003). The inspiration Riker found in game theory is discussed in Riker (1992). 4. Von Neumann’s intellect tended to over-awe even other mathematicians, not just laypeople. The eminent mathematician Polya, who taught the young von Neumann, at one lecture mentioned a theorem that had not been proved and would probably be difficult. Five minutes later, von Neumann raised his hand, went to the board, and wrote out the proof. Polya said he was thereafter “afraid of von Neumann” ( James 2002:413). 5. Budapest was at the time “an exceptionally fertile breeding ground for scientific talent”; von Neumann is reported to have explained this as resulting from the extreme insecurity in individuals “and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction” ( James 2002:412). 6. Bertrand Russell, who wrote an introduction to the Tractatus and was instrumental in its publication, was thought by Wittgenstein to have completely misunderstood the work; Frege indicated “that he did not understand a word of the book” (Engelmann 1968:117 note 1).

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7. This ‘Viennese’ interpretation begins with Englemann’s (1968) biographical notes on his early association with Wittgenstein, and is the center of Janik and Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973). 8. This attempt at history, based on a 1990 conference sponsored by the Duke University economics department, concluded that the “potted” standard history of game theory is “misleading in all its details,” but the conference found itself unable to develop a new theory since there is confusion about the origins of game theory, its central issues, and its impact either on economics, mathematics, or on the many scholars who claim, in widely varying ways, to have been influenced by it; see Weintraub’s Introduction (1992:6–7). 9. Game theory often rose and fell without anyone’s notice; Steinhaus, a Pole working on his doctorate in 1911 under Hilbert, discovered games and explored hunting and evading, but the work was completely forgotten at the time (Leonard 1992:37–38). 10. The closeness of the dates of the two mathematicians’ publication engendered a priority dispute of some animus on both sides; it was aggravated not only by FrenchGerman tensions but severe differences in the manner of defining games and the purpose of studying them (Leonard 1992:31, 58). 11. Gödel’s discoveries on the extent to which “the intuitively certain goes beyond what . . . is capable of mathematical proof ” left open “the ultimate foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics.” Mathematics was thus perhaps “a creative activity of man” like language or music (Kramer 1970:Vol. 2, 370). 12. The impact of von Neumann’s emphasis lived after him in the type of followers that were attracted by game theory; early among them, for instance, were military strategists who appreciated the formal rigor of game analyses rather than their empirical utility (Weintraub 1992:61–69). But many social scientists were brought on board for research-oriented reasons (e.g., Coleman 1990; Thibaut and Kelley 1959). 13. Borel included in his book on games a proof of the minimax theory by one of his students, a proof reputed to be more elegant than von Neumann’s; but Borel downplayed such proofs, finding them irrelevant (Leonard 1992:48). 14. Morgenstern was also interested in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and studied with Whitehead at Harvard (Mirowski 1992:130). 15. Morgenstern was fascinated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Holmes and Moriarty, “probably the first instance of a game with a mixed strategy equilibrium,” that is, breaking the circularity of “I think that he thinks that I think . . .” by use of a mixed (randomized) strategy (Mirowski 1992:129; Schotter 1992:97–98). 16. Game theory was not an instant success: Von Neumann’s lectures at Princeton were poorly attended, and no interest was shown by either the mathematics or the economics departments; the book itself was well reviewed (in a front-page story in the New York Times). Subsequent interest was frequently in the earlier papers of von Neumann rather than the book itself (Leonard 1992:58–59). 17. Braithwaite reduced this overwhelmingly large problem, in the manner common to game theorists, to two persons, each of whom has only two ways of acting (ibid. 6), and fitting them into a game matrix that would show their interpersonal situation

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and potential payoffs (ibid. 7); explaining that to deal with a n x n case would be inconveniently large. 18. He justifies this use of “weak” measurement of the two men’s valuative structures by emphasizing that both the zero point and the unit are arbitrary, citing von Neumann and Morgenstern as justification (11). 19. See, for instance, the passages from Philosophical Investigations quoted in an earlier chapter (1953: no. 83, p. 39; no. 172, p. 70). 20. Recent philosophical discussion sometimes uses the game analogy, but usually only in respect to an attempt to understand the notion of rules, which is quite different from my present point. Cavell (1979:294) evaluates Rawls in these terms but, I think, wrongly argues that one cannot, on having three strikes called against one, suggest that a fourth try is in order (295); in Wittgensteinian games this may be exactly what occurs, and may be carried through. 21. “We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on. . . . And is there not also the case where we play and—make up the rules as we go along? And there is even one where we alter them—as we go along” (Wittgenstein 1953:39, # 83). 22. Readers of the novels of Henry James will perhaps best appreciate Wittgenstein’s point here. 23. In principle of course the concept of rationality is open; the individual is judged on whether a choice is rational relative to the individual’s goals (which are not themselves judged); in practice, however, the goals tend to be monetary. It is said that von Neumann “never totally gave up his original tendency to think of payoffs in terms of money” (Mirowski 1992:142). 24. In this sense, standard game theory shows a stylistic similarity to Wittgenstein’s philosophic method, which was at its most basic the endeavor to see reality plain and unvarnished. 25. I use the term “standard game theory” to refer to the approach presented in such works as Ordeshook (1986) and Shubik (1984). There are many schools within the methodology, but the differences are not relevant here. 26. According to Leonard (1992), game theory found its first military application in naval operations as well as an air force mathematics group later connected with RAND. Game theory also had links with linear programming and statistical decision theory (ibid. 60). The Statistical Research Group (ibid. 62–66) emphasized proper placing of machine guns, and so on. Minimax was used to devise strategies for patrolling the Gibraltar straits (ibid. 65). Game theory “became one strut in the framework of ideas developed under immediate post-war military patronage,” including linear programming, statistics, and other mathematical areas (ibid. 69). 27. Hacker’s (1986) rigorous analysis of this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is detailed and convincing. He shows that Wittgenstein is neither a realist nor an antirealist,

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but that any personal pronoun becomes entirely grammatical rather than psychological; see especially ch. VIII. 28. The idea that justice can be politicized in this way (Williams 1995:81) has met sharp negative response (Baker 1995). But Baker’s alternative suggestion, that since people in general have difficulty with defining justice it might better be left to legislators and judges, is chilling indeed. 29. The analysis of strategies here is deliberately simple; it would be inappropriate to bring standard game theory’s sophisticated mathematical aspects into the present discussion, which is based on a rejection of their artificiality and their inapplicability to Wittgensteinian games.

Chapter Five 1. Foucault’s most stubborn statement of this position may be found in Dits et ecrits IV (Foucault 1994:130): “Comprendre la justice comme , comme , en prendre la mesure et l’analyser tel qu’il est, quoi de plus utile en ce temps de réarmement de l’accusation pénale?” 2. I use the terms “method” and “theory” interchangeably here; method would be the correct term, as I use the approach, but the term theory is frequently attached to it and no harm ensues by using it, in careful context. 3. The origins of agent-centered or complexity theory begin, in mathematics, with the work of Stanislaw M. Ulam, John von Neumann, and John Horton Conway in the middle decades of the twentieth century (Poundstone 1985:ch. 1), and in the political sciences with innovative work by Herbert Simon (1969), John Steinbruner (1974), and Thomas Schelling (1978), all of whom combined highly formal analytical techniques with a sharp focus on immediate concrete problems—watch-making for Simon, nuclear policy for Steinbruner, racial segregation for Schelling. 4. Complex agent-centered models have obvious roots in and affinities with rational choice models in economics and politics, but are more flexible and more empirically descriptive. One economist who has played a major role in the development of complexity theory points out that economists “have long been uneasy with the assumption of perfect, deductive rationality in decision contexts that are complicated and potentially ill-defined,” but have not known what to use as an alternative (Arthur 1994:411). Recently, however, complexity theorists have come to emphasize “inductive” adaptation instead of classical rationality. In inductive rationality, agents apply decision rules, evaluate their success, and retain those that seem to ‘work’ in practical cases. Such an approach allows the social theorist “to deal with complication: we construct plausible, simpler models that . . . deal with ill-definedness . . . our working models fill the gap [between reason and practice]. It is not antithetical to ‘reason,’ or to science for that matter. In fact, it is the way science itself operates and progresses” (Arthur 1994:407; see also Holland 1986).

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5. Complexity theory is defined by Axelrod (1997:3) as involving the study “of many actors and their interactions” where the possible interrelationships are “too difficult for a mathematical solution” and computer simulation is necessary. “The trick is to specify how the agents interact, and then observe properties that occur at the level of the whole society.” The technique is epistemologically somewhat odd, not fitting neatly into the old categories. “Like deduction, [agent-centered theory] starts with a set of explicit assumptions” but inductively analyzes generated data rather than proving theorems. However, unlike induction, the data “come from a rigorously specified set of [hypothesized] rules” rather than from the real world (Axelrod 1997:3–4). 6. The environment is conceptualized, in its most extreme form, as a lattice or checkerboard where each cell or square may contain actors who deal with each other and the environment according to rules, usually a very small set. The term “rules” is misleading, however, because the principles are not rules of the sort that, if you break them, the referee throws you off the field. Rather the rules are hypothesized descriptions of how each individual will act under various circumstances. For instance, Schelling’s (1978:147–148) “self-forming neighborhood model” hypothesizes that each member of one racial group “wants at least half its neighbors to be” like itself and “gets up and moves” if this is not the case. 7. As each actor is considered in turn, these rules along with the environment (what the neighbors are like) determines the next state of each actor. There is thus “coevolution” of the agents and the environment: “Agent society represents an evolving rule ecology; the rule ecology constantly restructures its environment; the environment selects among rules and thereby restructures agent society” (Epstein and Axtell 1996:163). This does not mean there is no free will in the model, but only that the rules are framed to describe what a particular actor tends to do with its free will given various options; they are descriptive not deterministic. 8. These classical models of agent-centered theory were, however, used as sideline arguments, foils for the creation of more orderly societies, emphasizing the disasters inherent in individual social relations, and the resultant necessity for the creation of order through the state. Contemporary agent-centered models are seen in a different light, as primary foci of organization. There is in such models no wise outside legislator, nor any vantage point (such as an original position) outside the social field where participants can escape the system. 9. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is a particularly vivid example of the approach. 10. Readers may object that if justice is seen as self-organized then we are back with Thrasymachus (Plato 1968:336b-354c), and Hobbes (1958: book I chapter 11), and have no way to escape. There are two responses to this criticism. First, self-organization today takes place within existing societies and their institutions, and those institutions—whether or not legitimated by political philosophy—place limits on interpersonal outcomes. Individuals in self-organizing situations may battle over control, but the weapons are social rather than military. The second reason that self-organization principles are not necessarily self-destructive is that the theories of justice discussed here move the problem to a different level where easy targets are lacking and opportunistic aggression is reduced. Institutional constraints even in liberal democracies are not

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always sufficient to ensure order of course; see recently the evidence of state and congressional complicity in social inequity (Hawkesworth 2003, Hayward 2003). 11. The original version of this commonly abbreviated saying is even more applicable here. “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. . . .” Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (12th edition) attributes this to John Philpot Curran in a 1790 “Speech upon the right of election.” 12. I do not attempt here to evaluate these differences, which have been discussed in many scholarly compendia; see recently Freeman 2003. 13. Rawls complained, as readers will recall, that such an approach confronted the issue of slavery by balancing the advantage to the slave holder against the disadvantage to the slave and finding it socially inefficient; he argued that this left open the door to the possibility that in some cases it would not be wrong (188–189). 14. Two points need to be made before turning to consider how self-organization theory coincides with and departs from this Rawlsian point of origin. First is his situation of the entire discourse over justice within what he defined as practices (1958:164 note 2): “any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure.” Second is what Rawls means by use of the term “persons,” which is not individuals (who may be “bound by ties of sentiment and affection” and willingly act against their own self interest) but “families, or some other association” such as nations and churches (170). 15. It is interesting that Rawls brackets families (based on sharply asymmetrical allocations of role and value), churches (almost invariably hierarchical, often to the benefit of the hierarchs), and nations (each of which discriminates against some of its own subgroups). 16. Waldron (2002:279) also emphasizes Nozick’s methodology but gives more attention than I do here to his substantive philosophical arguments. 17. It is difficult to give citations for a lack of something, but there is no entry under “justice, principle of,” or under “principle of justice.” The only citations are to pages 150– 153 and 157–160, all of which surround the discussion I have quoted. He discusses Locke (174–178) only to conclude with “the proviso” of ‘enough and as good left over,’ but this is fraught with ambiguity, as he notes (177). 18. Nozick himself found the minimalist state “without luster,” and “pale and feeble” as an ideal (297). 19. Power in one sphere, say the economic system, should not be convertible into power in any other system, such as education or political office. 20. Whether Walzer is entitled to object to grinding subordinate faces, in the context of his otherwise consistent support of social self-organization, is open to question, but I do not pursue that particular issue here. 21. Walzer includes membership, security and welfare, money and commodities, office, hard work, free time, education, kinship and love, recognition, political power.

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22. Walzer has ceteris paribus clauses in this advice, and suggestions about when certain groups really should be admitted and what kinds of educational tracking are acceptable, but basically he returns regularly to the premise that people are entitled to do what they want, within their groups. 23. Walzer quotes (but perhaps oddly in the chapter on free time) the Marx passage on the argument between factory owner and factory worker that ends with Marx’s judgment about both sides being right and, when this is so, force or politics must decide (Walzer 1983:187). 24. Eye color may be an appropriate criterion for choice of artificial insemination partners, and family membership may be appropriate for hiring in a small family business, and Elster seems to claim justice on this basis for all such biased choices (1992:112). 25. Literacy tests’ real purpose in immigration decisions may be, in the example Elster often uses, to exclude undesirable Southeast Europeans; keeping Jews out of Yale University may be achieved by principles that disguised the real bias (ibid. 123). 26. Elster takes on the issue when he turns to a discussion of “moral hazard” as a solution to the ethical difficulties he has shown (124–126, 134). Elster’s recommended programs of assistance to those whose bad luck is not stochastic are primarily directed to young people, those who are out of work or in over their heads on home mortgages, on grounds that one cannot have unhappy and discontented citizens causing potential disruptions in the society. In the case of the young, programs of social support do not seem to violate their rights as moral individuals, although he admits they have brought their troubles on themselves, by failing to study the job market or being premature in seeking home ownership (240–241). 27. The question with which these theorists seem to leave those concerned with justice is whether there is any conclusion less indifferent to the problems they themselves have raised about the inequities of allocation by conventional decision-makers. The game-position model has been developed in partial response to this opportunity. 28. Iteration is mere repetition; recursion includes the further idea of a set of rules repetitively acting on itself, changing its own foundation environment or the rules themselves. 29. This neighborhood may be defined as the four cells in the four cardinal directions (the von Neumann neighborhood), or including the diagonal cells as well (the Moore neighborhood). 30. A cell is born if it has three neighbors, remains alive if it has two or three, and otherwise dies; in other words, it dies both of loneliness and overcrowding. Other cellular automata are more complicated: one model by von Neumann allowed up to twentynine states per cell (Poundstone 1985:14). 31. Hobbes made such skips, according to agent-centered theory. The war of all against all was classically recursive, but the sudden decision to give up all rights to the Leviathan is not explained in any direct way by Hobbes’s postulates. According to Hobbes’s rules, either all would have killed all, or the strong would have killed the weak.

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The flash of insight that allowed someone to imagine safety in the Leviathan is not in the premises. 32. According to Axelrod’s payoff structure the defector gets 3 points while all the others get minus 1; the effort of punishing another actor costs minus 9 to the defector, and minus 2 to the enforcer. The chance of being seen is 0.5 (ibid. 48). 33. Axelrod (ibid., 53–54) describes a more complex situation in which an individual can also choose whether or not to punish another actor who sees an infraction but fails to punish the perpetrator. 34. The problem is not as difficult as it sounds. Schelling works it through with dimes and pennies on a chessboard (1978:147–155 ff.). 35. As in the game theoretic model, the other participant in the dyadic interaction would be modeled separately, as an independent actor with its own personal viewpoint. The focus on any one individual at a given point in time does not imply the other actor has a secondary role. That is, there is no generalized other against whom the primary individual plays; there are only particular others with independent claims to analytic space. 36. Studies of the Prisoner’s Dilemma have suggested a third possible role, that of the sucker or victim, who in the terms used above recognizes the nature of the situation but does not take the rational response required by it (the research is summarized in Axelrod 1984). 37. Readers will be familiar with this concept from the social psychological work of Thibaut and Kelley (1959), where they use the term “comparison level” for what I term “expectation level.” 38. Since particular individual actors may have expectations that are different in both kind and quantity, both may win or both may lose, or one win and one lose, in the outcome of any subgame or series of subgames. 39. See White (2000) for an example of this approach. 40. Recall the discussion in chapter one of Garfinkel and Goffman, as well as Foucault, in this regard. 41. A quality of the game position in the context of political theory is that it meets the criticism (Shapiro 2002:241) that democratic theorists too often build their theories on what they, the theorists, think people ought to value. It would be preferable to find out, he argues, “what people [themselves] regard as the most important questions (which includes the heroic assumption they all agree on this)” before giving them advice on democratic procedures. 42. Axelrod’s work (1984, 1997) on self-organization theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, and Rapoport’s tit-for-tat strategy, illustrate this principle, as does Machiavelli’s Prince.

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Chapter Six 1. The Tenth Walk is thought to have been written on April 12, 1778; Rousseau died July 2, 1778 (Butterworth 1982:142, vii). 2. On the same point, see recently Reisert (2003:14–15): What is novel in Rousseau is his moral psychology, “his understanding of the passions that move the human heart.” Rousseau’s purpose is to “predict and direct their [the passions’] movements—a physics of the soul”; biology is fixed, but we develop and change over the course of life. 3. Starobinski’s concluding chapter tends in this direction: Rousseau “stands between the hostility of mankind and the Last Judgment to come. . . . Cold overtakes him. He must write, he must talk to himself, or else consciousness will be utterly empty. . . . Nothing outside him is true or real” (1988:266). George Kelly (2001:17), on the contrary, takes the Rêveries with full seriousness, arguing that they reflected the transfiguration of Rousseau’s whole existence in his later years. 4. While a number of theorists give the Rêveries only scant attention, only Reisert (2003:89) appears to argue that Rousseau’s claims in respect to his psychological condition were “hollow.” 5. Rousseau comments that the exercise left him “quite confirmed in the previously held opinion that the ‘know thyself ’ of the temple of Delphi was not as easy a maxim to follow as I had believed in my Confessions” (Butterworth 1982:43). 6. Had Rousseau been more clinical, he might have delved into his own attitudes toward women. Strong (1994:133–135) provides interesting perspectives on the way in which Rousseau mixes the feminine and the philosopher, and the varying degrees of individualism between the two genders. 7. Shklar (2001:186) remarks that if the tutor role is essential to education, then, to encompass an entire population, we are going to need a lot of tutors. Rousseau’s practice, directing each man to take that role for himself, effectively solves the problem she poses. 8. The child educated in Emile is not a second, independent solution to the problem but a lemma to the original republican argument, since Emile’s education beyond boyhood is designed to make him capable of full adherence to social contracts, not to make him an independent individual. Later this would change, as I discuss in respect to Les Solitaires. 9. Individualist interpretations of Rousseau’s work within political theory and philosophy are rare to nonexistent. Even scholars who emphasize Rousseau’s direct impact on the individual reader and her or his happiness (e.g., Reisert 2003:168–184) conclude that social attachments increase happiness (ibid. 118) and that achieved strength of soul allows the individual to carry out duties to others rather than the self (ibid. 8). 10. This self-knowledge goes well beyond anything anticipated in the Confessions, as Rousseau himself acknowledged. Such self-knowledge is also unlike, for example, Starobinski’s (1988) transparency, because it is rigorously rational, even empirical, rather than subjective or mystical. On the inner voice being the voice of society see, for instance, Hulliung (1996:28).

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11. As Jean-Jacques says: “I am a hundred times happier in my solitude than I could ever be living among [men]” (Butterworth 1982:4). Emile, after leaving every social tie behind, says similarly, “J’ai bu l’eau d’oubli; le passé s’efface de ma Mémoire et l’univers s’ouvre devant moi” (Rousseau 1969:912; Lettre Deuxieme). 12. Rousseau’s genealogy of this process, that inequality creates wealth, which creates idleness (and science) and luxury (and the arts), was developed in the course of correspondence with critics of the original essay (Cranston 1982:243). The inequalities are of talents (Masters 1964:58). There is also corruption through the social emulation that transmutes amour de soi (normal care for self ) into amour propre (egotism and vanity). 13. Wingrove (2000:17) points usefully to the “recursive logic” of the Discourse on Inequality; I extend the approach to Rousseau’s work as a whole. 14. “For since our vices are acquired and not innate, we feel their power in just the same way as we feel external compulsions, as oppression imposed upon us against our will”; “It is false public opinion, as we absorb it and make its poisonous ways our own, that destroys us” (Shklar 1969:73). 15. In a larger sense, the individualist theory is not inconsistent with the collectivist Social Contract theory because each is appropriate in specified circumstances, but since “institutions always fail” the individualist model is more empirically appropriate. 16. The small size of the polity, the manners of the people, the psychological attitudes underlying civility. 17. It takes heroic imagination in the early twenty-first century for anyone to strongly sympathize with statements such as the following: “Your true republican is a man who imbibed the love of the fatherland . . . with his mother’s milk. That love makes up his entire existence . . . . The moment he is alone, he is nothing” (Rousseau 1972:19; Government of Poland chapter IV; the translation is that of Hulliung [1996:36]). 18. Wingrove’s conclusion that citizens are effectively raped by the state, which refuses to believe that they mean ‘no’ when they say it, is particularly telling because it so closely parallels Rousseau’s actual text; Wingrove (2000:243–244); see also Bloom’s Emile (1979:359). This lends encouragement to an individualist alternative. 19. Bloom introduced his 1979 edition by noting he did not need to justify a new translation (as he had with Plato’s Republic) because in fact there were no extant translations of Emile that were adequate; “the book itself is not held to be of great significance and has little appeal to contemporary taste” (1979: vii). 20. It was Shklar (1969, chapter 4) who seems first to have focused full attention on Julie. 21. Shklar emphasizes the importance of opinion in Rousseau (chapter 3, “The Empire of Opinion,” 75–126), but places it in the traditional context in which the public happiness, the General Will, and sovereignty are his main focus (ibid. 165), rather than the individualistic approach defined by Bourdieu and the present text. 22. Masters, for instance, consistently uses the terms “dreams” and “dreamer” in referring to the Rêveries. This is partly a linguistic convenience in referring to the actor; “dreamer” is a convenient existing term, while there is no such term for a “person who

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has reveries.” It also involves overall interpretation however. Masters (1968:96) refers to the happiness of the promeneur solitaire as romantic, with freedom “the unfettered enjoyment of . . . the sentiment of one’s own existence.” I believe the larger context of the Rêveries shows the reveries to be empirical thought rather than idle dreams. 23. Both cases also show, in quite different ways, why society may be intolerable for persons with a psychology resembling that of Rousseau, and why individualism, as selfgovernment, is his only political solution. 24. Marion and Rousseau, servants in the same household, were accused of a theft, which Rousseau denied with such vehemence that he was considered innocent, and Marion was dismissed from her position. That Rousseau lied in this case and deeply injured another person obsessed him until the end of his life. 25. Rousseau gives the example of being asked by a pert young woman whether he had any children and of telling her no, which was a lie (to a question that had been asked with the intention of evoking the lie). Given time to think, he says, he found a better answer, which was to challenge the right of a young woman to ask such a question of an old bachelor (Butterworth 1982:53–54). Since it was not a new issue, he was correct in his self-criticism. In the context of the later Emile, Rousseau here failed to defend himself in strategic terms from assaults that he should have anticipated. 26. He comes to the same conclusion in Les Solitaires; see the following discussion. 27. It is worth noting in the First Discourse a passing reference to a much later theme, that a man’s worth may be defined as “the price he would fetch in Algiers” (Masters 1964:51). 28. And of course in the years intervening between the First Discourse and the Rêveries, Rousseau entirely ignored his own advice, since obscurity was the last term one could use to describe his subsequent career. 29. The full title is Emile et Sophie: Les Solitaires; I refer to it as Les Solitaires to avoid possible confusion with Emile. Rousseau states the importance of Emile to his overall theory in the 1762 letter to Malesherbes; Rousseau’s August 1749 “illumination” infused his three principal works, the two discourses and Emile. The “three works are inseparable and form a single whole” (Cranston 1983:22). See also Kelly (2001:23). 30. I go into the details at some length because the text is unfamiliar to even some specialists in Rousseau, yet the tale deserves serious attention by anyone willing to follow Rousseau where he leads, even if it is over the cliff, as he works out his most central human and social concerns. 31. The tutor’s education created Emile as a “hothouse plant” and when he was finally thrust into the world “it proves immediately to be an unequal combat.” However, Emile was reduced to stoicism, not villainy (ibid.). 32. I skip his extended ravings over whether his wife is to blamed or forgiven (Rousseau 1969:891–903), which take up much space in a short work. The bottom line is that he refuses to raise another man’s child (904), and Emile therefore takes to the road (910–914). Emile has in this flight from his past entered the third phase of his education, a phase planned by no tutor, but imposed by complex reality itself.

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33. Commentators agree on the two phases of Emile’s education, but label them somewhat differently: Bloom designates them as first the Socratic, second the romantic; Reisert (2003:142) says the first education develops conscience and the second develops virtue. 34. The second of the quotations from Bloom’s “Introduction” to Emile includes both Emile’s contract with Sophie and his slightly prior contract with the tutor where Emile exchanges obedience for advice on love. The slight blurring of the line in respect to which contract is higher is entirely faithful to Rousseau’s text. 35. One is tempted to say, in colloquial terms, that Emile acquires attitude. 36. Readers may suggest that the definition of justice was learned from the tutor, but surely the context is so different in these later adventures that only Emile is entitled to get the credit for it. This is of course the late, individualist Emile, not the naive youth or husband coaxed into social norms by his tutor. 37. Emile gives credit to the tutor’s lessons (in what I have called the first educational phase) for enabling him to deal effectively with practical and productive problems. 38. Others have also tried to rewrite Les Solitaires to provide an ending more suited to their preferences about Rousseau; see, for instance, Starobinski (1988:128). 39. Readers who comment on Les Solitaires often remark how much more interesting is this late Emile than the indecisive puppet created in Emile. Wingrove (2000:63) remarks on his heroism; by contrast Reisert (2003:143–144) refers only briefly to Les Solitaires and does not see that Emile ever becomes morally self-sufficient. 40. This is certainly Rousseau’s expressed belief in the Rêveries, but it is intemperate; in fact, there are two equally valid models. Each, however, depends on prerequisite conditions, and the conditions necessary for the collectivist model never, according to Rousseau, pertain in historical fact. 41. That the Social Contract and Julie advance essentially the same argument is assumed by, for example, Starobinski (1988:84–85) where Clarens society is based on “unanimous consent, like the society in the Social Contract.” In both cases, “purity and innocence are restored because people are willing to place absolute trust in one another,” with each totally alienated so that each is “open and visible to all the others”(85). 42. This first phase is beautifully covered by Shklar (2001). 43. Wolmar recreates the Golden Age through his “godlike powers.” “To be the head of a full household and to run it properly . . . is to be like God. In fact, it is to be better than God, who has left mankind to flounder so helplessly” (Shklar 2001:175). 44. Shklar (2001) analyzes Julie by accepting Rousseau’s explicit theme of the Clarens system’s perfection, and even she comes to the same conclusion, that by the end of the novel love has proved to be the source only of anguish and “it is clear that everyone will be better off in the single state” (170). 45. I can find no evidence of conscious irony in Julie, but the tale speaks for itself. 46. If they get into trouble but are kept on through the master’s mercy, the wage drops back to base pay (367), which serves to make them the more docile the longer they have been in service.

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47. The women are entertained together after church on Sundays, playing children’s games and eating confections (371); the men are kept occupied by domestic competitions and sports (373–375), which keep them out of local taverns and prevent the resultant ruin of their morals. In the winter months, there is dancing on the Clarens premises where the sexes do meet together but are restrained by the location “where the eyes of the public, constantly focused on them, oblige them to watch themselves extremely carefully” (375). The underlying concern of the legislator Wolmar is actually not so much their sexual behavior per se, but the fear of conspiracy or rebellion among the servants. When simple surveillance fails, the masters of the household become inquisitors, and all the underlings become informers (381). 48. As for workers outside the house, overt surveillance replaces internal politics; all farm hands are given a base salary, but receive a bonus only if they are observed to work diligently (“are found satisfactory”). In fact, everyone works harder than necessary because M. de Wolmar is so “principled and stern” that they seek to avoid any appearance of lacking ardor in their work; for the little extra he pays, therefore, Wolmar gets more than its worth in return. M. de Wolmar checks “several times a day” on all this, and Julie herself gives small prizes to the one worker who has been most diligent during a given week (365). 49. Julie’s father beats her in outrage over her love affair (Part One, Letter LXIII:143) but eventually he finds her as stubborn as himself and conquers her by falling in tears at her feet (286). And as Morgenstern points out (1996:201), her father is selling Julie off to pay a debt owed to Wolmar. 50. M. de Wolmar’s hypocritical relationship to the Clarens society is neatly summarized when he writes to St. Preux after Julie’s death that a major source of his grief is that he had put the household together solely to prevent his undergoing a solitary old age and now he must return “in my old age to this solitary state, of which I was tiring even before” the marriage (Part Six, Letter XI; Rousseau 1990:580). 51. It has been plausibly suggested that the reason Julie’s best friend, Claire, is determined to break up the liaison between Julie and St. Preux is that she is herself in love with St. Preux. See Part Six (Letter I:527) where she describes her feelings for her friend’s lover in terms that suggest duplicity in her earlier actions toward the pair. 52. The one case of a character who wholly gave herself up to another, Julie’s inseparable cousin Claire, shows the horrors of this solution by her descent into madness with Julie’s death. Claire never recovers her real self, which was apparently extinguished in her relation to Julie. 53. Strong (1994:33) remarks properly that there is a good deal of anthropology in Rousseau. 54. Rousseau noted, in this regard, that “the law acts only externally, governing the actions; custom [les moeurs] alone penetrates within and directs the operations of will” (Kelly 2001:33; the quotation is from Fragments OC III, 555). 55. Specific individuals may not fit the roles they have been allocated—Rousseau’s Confessions are an extended account of all the roles society unsuccessfully tried to impose on him—but the verities established by the common habitus are nonetheless lodged in the individual’s psychology as normality.

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56. The objectivist school was represented, for Bourdieu and French social scientists of his generation, by Claude Levi-Strauss and the structuralists; the subjectivists were represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and, perhaps unexpectedly for American readers, sometimes by rational choice theory, where the decision-maker was assumed to have free choice, unconstrained by the environment (46). 57. This process is not the same as that which Rousseau describes as the development of amour propre but is, as shown in the late Emile of Les Solitaires, in the late Rousseau of the Rêveries, and even in the dying Julie, a radical rejection of society’s legitimacy as a source of self-understanding. In Rousseau’s individualist model, the person is fully aware of what society expects, but uses that knowledge for manipulation or, if all is lost, as an object of scorn. 58. I refer here sequentially to Emile, Julie, and Rousseau himself. The details of Rousseau’s late troubles are summarized in Cranston (1997). 59. Government of the self is distinguished from classical or humanistic ideals of balance or ataraxia by its emphasis on structure and practice, and Rousseau’s insistence on its close relation to justice both in the individual and beyond. The point is not philosophic distance from the political but the creation of the political within the individual as a conscious substitute for inadequate social structures. 60. The presence of the tax-collector’s household, and of course Thérèse, provided Rousseau with a support system that made no intrusive claims on him, so did not seem to violate his solitude. 61. Emile’s “slavery” does not fall under this condemnation, since it is strong rather than weak. 62. The term is taken from Kelly (2001:45), and expresses his thesis that Rousseau’s psychological structure was not pure idiosyncrasy but had structural social roots; in any event, it was intellectually productive. This view contrasts with, for example, Starobinski’s (1988:201), which puts much greater emphasis on Rousseau’s mental pathology itself rather than its results. 63. See Reisert (2003:52) on citizens who accept the oppression of the state only in order to have authority over those beneath them in its structure. 64. Since my approach has been social-scientific rather than philosophical, it is perhaps interesting to suggest that this conclusion is similar to that of Cavell: “The work of seeing that we are not in a cave, though we may be staring at a wall, is thus not only a philosophical preparation for politics: it is politics. If this doesn’t look like what politics has been thus far for us, that, presumably, is the point” (Norris 2002:843–844).

Epilogue 1. Foucault’s approach to history is educational in this respect, although incomplete. Beginning with Madness and Civilization, Foucault showed how mental deviance was, at a particular point in history, identified and separated from the normal population; later works showed this same process occurring in respect to criminals and sexuality. The process is one

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in which an attribute, once diffused throughout a population, is set aside and reserved only for a particular group. There is no record that Foucault applied this approach to politics to analyze how people who once in fact governed themselves and at some point were by definition removed from the political sphere. Hobbes and Rousseau give answers that are not dissimilar, despite their other disagreements. 2. Although leaders frown on such Machiavellian advice, it may be observed that many new leaders, both in politics and industry, do use it, at least metaphorically, by firing a great many of the office administrators who worked for their predecessor, and who are, perhaps correctly, believed to be less than loyal to the new regime. 3. Hénaff and Strong (2001) note, perhaps too strongly, that the moralization approach to Machiavelli has ended, and his theory now can stand as a sample of a new space in politics, with a “conception of power as a calculation of actual forces,” and open competition for power (2001:17). They make the point that as in the world of art, medieval perspective (all things seen in the universal eye of God) was replaced by Renaissance perspective (things seen in relation to a viewer), so in politics infinity was replaced by time and the prince becomes he who defines his political space. “It could even be said that what makes him Prince is his taking up” the point of origin; the exercise of power was “the ability to occupy the right focus, of which there was only one”; being at that one point amounted to controlling action (2001:19). 4. Machiavelli’s comment that “fortune is a woman” has been taken unkindly by feminists, but it seems quite possible that it becomes, in the whole context of his work, a compliment. The minimax solution to games sometimes require mixed strategies, guided by some randomized function. 5. Thibaut and Kelley (1959) show how fate control overprivileges some players; see also Riker (1962) on the size principle, in which, theoretically at least, all but the essential players are thrown aside. 6. The scholarly consensus on the framing of the American Constitution has been protected from such myth-making by The Federalist Papers, in which the authors, particularly James Madison, showed a Machiavellian appreciation of the difficulties of creating government from the inside, working with self-interested men and imperfect information. The economic theme was emphasized in Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). For the more traditional interpretation see Farrand (1913). 7. Compare, for instance, Mansfield’s (1996) affirmation of political virtue as an empirical matter, thus crossing the divide between theory and science; and Huntington’s (1968) recognition that kings enact reform policies only to deprive their opponents of the discontents which might overthrow them; this suggests how close political theory and political science have come in their convergence on issues that are no longer normative. 8. It is commonplace to refer to political campaigns as horseraces, but I mean the game analogy here to apply to all the behavior of public officials, from dealing with constituents to passing laws, from foreign policy to urban redevelopment, from environmental regulation to personal career considerations, to making political friends and enemies quite apart from the impact of those actions on the public sphere.

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Index

Alford, C. Fred, 10, 159n8 Almond, Gabriel, 48 American Political Science Association, 21 The American Political Science Review, 48, 57, 166n2 anarchy, 169–70n31 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 16, 105, 107–8, 110–11, 176n16 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 161n23 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 158n3 Aristotle, 160n19 Barry, Brian, 105 behavior: individual, 3; pattern of, 46, 164n10 Bennett, Jane: constructivist approach to Thoreau, 75 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 72–73 Borel, Emile, 85, 171n1, 172n13 Bourdieu, Pierre, 126, 161n24, 180n21; on justice, 135–37 Bournoulli, Nicholas, 85 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 156–57n11 Braithwaite, Richard Bevan, 88–89, 172–73nn17–18 Butler, Judith, 158n5 Canguilhem, Georges, 23, 160n20 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 158n6 Cavell, Stanley, 20, 58, 158n4

Centre for European Sociology, 161n24 Chicken, 118 Chomsky, Noam, 104–5 Collège de France, 25, 104–5, 161n30 collusion: power and, 29–32 Colonel Blotto, 118 communitarians: on democracy, 4–5, 156nn7–8; on liberalism, 9, 157n15 community, 5, 156nn9–10 complexity theory, 175n5 conduct, 26 Connolly, William, 158n5, 169n29 Constant, Benjamin, 54–57 Conway, John Horton, 115–16, 174n3 Curran, John Philpot, 176n11 Dahl, Robert, 163n1 Darwin, Charles, 62, 167n7 democracy, 1–18; communitarians on, 4–5, 156nn7–8; contemporary, 155n3; critics of liberal, 10–11; definition, 1–4, 155–56nn1–5; gaming, 35–39; genealogists on, 4–5, 156nn7–8; liberals on, 4–5, 156nn7–8; modern democratic theory, 18; society and, 2; structure, 3–4, 156n5 development theory, 159n12 Dexter, Lewis, 48 Digeser, Peter, 11, 157n17, 159n8; on selfgovernment, 74 Dillon, Michael, 108 discipline, 161n28 domination: states of, 24, 161n28 Douglass, Frederick, 155n1

203

204

Index

Downs, Anthony, 3, 155–56n4 Dryzek, John, 163n1 DuBois, W. E. B., 164n10 Easton, David, 159n11, 168n13; on politics, 21, 159n11 economics: Thoreau on, 63 education, 155n3 Ellison, Ralph, 16, 99 Elster, Jon, 16, 105, 177nn25–26; on justice, 113–15, 177nn24–27; theory of justice, 113–15 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15 Emile et Sophie: Les Solitaires (Rousseau), 17, 179n8 ethics: of games, 38, 162n42 ethnomethodology, 27 existentialism, 26–27 First Discourse (Rousseau), 128–29 Flathman, Richard E., 59–60, 73–74, 165–66n20 Foucault, Michel, 14, 43, 104–5, 174n1; American influence, 160n21; approach to history, 184–85n1; on collusion and power, 29; interview, 23, 161n25; on justice, 103–21; on philosophical politics, 50–51; on politics defined, 22, 160nn17–18; on power, 23–26, 160nn20–21, 161nn22–29; theory of disciplinary society, 23, 160n21; theory of games, 38–39 freedom, 5, 156nn9–10, 161n28; as maturity, 65–68, 168–69nn18–23; as a power game, 51; Rousseau on, 157n12 Game of Life model, 115–16 games: of advice-giving, 88–89, 172–73nn17–18; advocates of standard game theory, 97–98; at Clarens, 133–35; creation, 85–88, 172nn8–10; democratic, 35–39; equalization of participants, 38; ethics, 38; formal versions, 82–84, 171–72nn2–7; freedom perceived as a power game, 51; game-

position model, 177n27; within government, 162n42; grandfather’s, 100; history, 85–88; intellectual coherence and order, 38; of justice, 92; justice model elements, 12–13; of language, 92–95; language-game for linguistic analysis, 90–91; the lion’s mouth, 99–102; master of, 143–46; matrix, 100; metaphor, 38; methodology of Nozick, 110–11; methods, 95–96, 173nn23–25; microanalytic method, 13; minimax theory, 172n13, 173n26; model, 81, 171n1; outcome, 118, 178n3; overview, vii–viii; perspective, 99–102; play, 118; position, 117–19; quality of game position, 119, 178n41; standard game theory, 173n25; strategy, 38; structure, 34; theory of, 16, 35, 82, 101, 174n29; of Wittgenstein, 94. See also justice gangs, 15, 164n8; behavior, 44–47, 164n8; leadership structure, 44 Garfinkel, Harold, 14, 27–28, 90, 162n33; on ethnomethodology, 28; on everyday activities and moral certainties, 28 genealogists: on democracy, 4–5, 156nn7–8; on liberalism, 9, 157n15 General Will (Rousseau), 9, 125 Geuss, Raymond, 55–57 Gödel’s Proof, 86, 172n11 Goffman, Erving, 14, 29–30, 90 Golding, William, 9–10, 157n16 government, 41; definition, 167n8; of self, 138–40 grammar, 93–94 Gunnell, John G., 156n6 Gutmann, Amy, 42 Habermas, Jurgen, 161n28 Hallowell, John H., 48 Hénaff, Marcel, 55–57 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 23, 25, 50–51, 161n24 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 68–69, 107, 177–78n31; on political theories, 8 Honig, Bonnie, 159n13

Index

205

individualism, 7, 12; dichotomy between state and, 163n3; order and, 19; philosophical, 96–99, 173–74nn27–28; politics, 171n42; self-government and, 156n5; state and, 41, 163nn3, 5; value status, 118, 178n37 Inner Ocean (Kateb), 105 International Philosophers’ Project, 104–5 Invisible Man (Ellison), 16, 99

libido ludendum, 26 linguistics, 90–91, 92–95 Local Justice (Elster), 105, 113–14, 177nn24–27 Locke, John, 9, 68–69, 169n24; on political theories, 8 Logic of Practice (Bourdieu), 126, 180n21 The Lord of the Flies (Golding), 9–10, 157n16

James, Henry, 173n22 Julie (Rousseau), 17, 133–35, 182nn41–46, 183nn47–52 justice, 5, 156nn9–10; Bourdieu on, 135–37; definition, 182n39; Elster’s theory, 113–15; Foucault’s, 103–21; game model elements, 12–13; games and, 92, 119–21; logic of, 104–8; Nozick on, 110–11; overview, vii–viii; philosophy and practice, 81–102; politics and, 12; Rawls on, 107–8, 157n13; Walzer’s theory, 111–13. See also games “Justice as Fairness” (Rawls), 16, 108, 176n13

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 17, 12, 185n2 Madison, James, 185n6 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 23, 160n20, 161n30 The Maine Woods (Thoreau), 77 Marx, Karl, 63 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 104–5 Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Schelling), 116–17, 178n34 micropolitics, 6, 12, 14, 41–60; structure, 13 microsociology, 27 Migdal, Joel, 15, 48, 162n43; on comparative politics, 48–50, 164–65n13 Mill, John Stuart, 159n8 minorities, 157n18 morals, 30–31 Morgenstern, Oskar, 16, 83, 86–88, 91, 171n1, 172nn14–16; theory of games, 38

Kane, John, 42 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 28, 117 Kateb, George, 105, 158n5, 167n5, 170nn33, 36; on self-government, 75, 170n36 Kelly, George, 126 knowledge: power and, 19–20 kriegspiel applications, 96 Kuhn, Thomas, 106 language, 92–95 leadership: structure, 44 Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Rousseau), 123–24, 129–33, 179nn3, 4, 180–81n22, 181nn29–32, 182nn33–39 Lettre d’Alembert, 128 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 184n56 liberalism: communitarians on, 9, 157n15; concentration on the state, 163n2; genealogists on, 9, 157n15 liberals: on democracy, 4–5, 156nn7–8

narcissism, 10–11, 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72–73, 159n8, 170n33 Nozick, Robert, 16, 105, 106, 176n16; game methodology, 110–11; on justice, 110–11, 176n16 On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy (Rousseau), 17 Origin of Species (Darwin), 167n7 The Pattern of Politics (Whyte), 57 PD. See Prisoner’s Dilemma Petersburg Paradox, 85

206

Index

phenomenology, 26–27 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 83–84, 90, 92–95, 171n6, 173n19 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 19–39, 160n16; on Arendt, 158n3; on Cavell, 158n4 Pitkin’s Dilemma, 104 Plato, 19, 107 pluralism: contractual, 9, 157n15 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 105 political realism, 12 political science, 5, 156nn7–8; experiential understanding, 39, 162n43; Pitkin on, 19–39; versus political theory, 156n6 political society, 2–3, 41–60, 155n3; definition, 41–42, 163nn4–5; description, 52–54, 165nn14–15; philosophical politics, 50–51; as a practical phenomenon, 43; public-private realms, 54–57; social groupings, 49–50 political systems, 7 political theory, 5, 8, 156nn7–8, 157n13, 166nn21–22; modern, 21, 159n9; Pitkin on, 19–39; versus political science, 156n7; Wittgenstein on, 20, 158n2. See also state; Thoreau, Henry D. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Honig), 159n13 politics, 1–18; affirmation, 149–52; bargaining process, 35; campaigns, 185n8; comparative, 48–50, 164–65n13; definition, 168n13; development theory, 21, 159n12; economic dimensions, 32–35; individual, 171n42; justice and, 12; philosophical, 50–51; of self-government, 147–49; of social structure, 45–46; sociology and political action, 26–29; virtues, 185n7 Popper, Karl R., 19, 158n1 power: collusion and, 29–32; definition, 161n27; knowledge and, 19–20; relations, 25–26; types of, 24, 161n27 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman), 29–30 The Prince and the Discourses (Machiavelli), 17

Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, 87 Principia Mathematica, 84, 172n7 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), 96, 118, 162n41, 178nn36, 42 psychology: of interpersonal relations, 27 Putnam, Robert D., 44, 156–57n11, 165n14 racism, 54, 165n16 rationalists: on liberalism, 9, 157n15 rationality, 33, 162n37 Rawls, John, 16, 42, 56, 105, 164n7, 176nn13–15; on justice, 157n13; on selforganization, 108–10 relativism: absolute, 5 “Resistance to Civil Government” (Thoreau), 63–64, 168n14k Richardson, Robert D., Jr.: on selfgovernment, 75–76 Riker, William H., 82–83, 171n3 Rorty, Richard, 42, 159n8, 168n20, 170n32; on self-government, 74 Rosenblum, Nancy L.: on selfgovernment, 75, 170n37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, viii, 9, 17, 18, 71, 129–33, 133–35, 179nn5–6, 9–10, 180nn11–12, 181nn29–32, 182nn33–39, 41–46, 183nn47–52, 54–55; on freedom, 157n12; on self-government, 6, 123–40, 157n12 Russell, Bertrand, 171n6 Salter, John T., 57 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 184n56 Schelling, Thomas C., 14, 116–17, 162nn36–40, 178n34; on politics and theory, 32–35, 162nn36–38 Schmitt, Carl, 159n12 self: care of, 76–79, 170–71nn39–42; definition of its own community, 70; finding, 67; integrity, 157n14; nature of, 68–70, 169nn24–26 self-government, 6, 61–79, 138–40, 157n12; concept, 7; definition, 10–13, 157nn17–18, 184n59; individual, 3–4, 62,

Index 156n5, 167n5; individual versus group level, 8–9, 157n14; in political society, 7; politics of, 147–49; Rousseau on, 6, 123–40, 157n12; as self-control, 72–74, 170nn33–34; Thoreau on, 15 self-knowledge, 13–14 self-organization, 175–76n10; group, 152–54; as group members, 53; justice and, 120–21; meaning, 115–17; radical, 16; Rawls on, 108–10; of society, 103–4; theory, 103–4, 106, 174nn2–4, 175nn5–8 sexual relations, 26 Shepsle, Kenneth A., 37 Shklar, Judith N., 179n7, 180nn20–21; on Rousseau, 123, 182n44 Smith, Adam, 63, 65, 70–71 Social Contract, 126, 127, 132–33, 180n15, 182nn39, 41 social Darwinism, 170–71n39 socialization, 47, 164n11 social psychology, 27 social science, 12, 168n19 social structure: politics of, 45–46 social theory, 11, 168n14 social tyranny, 15 society, 41; civil, 52, 53–54; democracy and, 2; political, 163n4, 165n16; problems, 7; self-organization, 103–4. See also political society sociology: political action and, 26–29 sociopolitics: process, 118 Socrates, 11–12 solipsism, 11 Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 105, 112–23 state, 20, 158nn5–7, 163n1; control, 156n10; development in the Third World, 48; dichotomy between individual and, 41, 163n3; as meaningful concept, 156n6; social repression and, 156n9; Thoreau on, 61, 166n1. See also political theory The Strategy of Conflict (Schelling), 32–35, 162nn36–38 Street Corner Society (Whyte), 44–47, 164nn8–9, 164nn11–12 Strong, Tracy B., 55–57

207

Strong Societies and Weak States (Migdal), 48 structuralism: French, 23, 161n22 Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), 27, 162n33 Taylor, Charles, 10–11, 158n5 Theories of Justice (Barry), 105 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern), 16, 83, 86–88 Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (Braithwaite), 88–89, 172–73nn17–18 Theory of Justice (Rawls), 56, 105, 108, 164n7, 175–76n10 Thoreau, Henry D., 15; on American colonial history, 167n4; definition of self-governed individual, 62–63, 167nn9–10; description, 166n2; on labor, 168n17; model of individual self-government, 15; personal freedom and, 65; philosophy, 67; on postmodernism, 61–62; on self-government, 61–79, 62, 64, 78–79, 167n6; selfguidance and, 75 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 83–84, 171n6 tyranny, 6 Ulam, Stanislaw, 115–16, 174n3 values, individual, 6 Vienna Circle, 87 Von Neumann, John, 16, 83, 85–86, 91, 115–16, 171nn4, 5, 172n12, 174n3; lectures on game theory, 172n10; theory of games, 38 voting, 21–22, 159nn13–15, 160n16 Walden (Thoreau), 10, 15, 62, 63, 167nn7, 8, 170n38 Walzer, Michael, 16, 105, 177nn22–23; theory of justice, 111–13, 176nn19–21, 177nn22–23

208

Index

Weber, Max, 21, 159n10 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Thoreau), 70–71, 75–76, 170n38 White, Stephen K., 42 Whitman, Walt, 15, 64 Whyte, William Foote, 15, 47, 164nn11–12; on gang behavior, 44–47, 164nn8–9; on political science, 57–58, 165n18

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 32, 37, 81–102; games of, 94; post-epistemology, 104; on social philosophy, 90–92 Young, Iris Marion, 42, 59, 165n19

POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Game of Justice A Theory of Individual Self-Government RU T H L A N E The Game of Justice argues that justice is politics, that politics is something close to ordinary people and not located in an abstract and distant institution known as the State, and that the concept of the game provides a new way to appreciate the possibilities of creating justice. Justice, as a game, is played in a challenging environment that makes serious demands on the participants, in terms of self-knowledge and individual self-government, and also in terms of understanding social behavior. What the term game provides is a radical opening of all established institutions: the status quo is neither absolute nor inevitable, but is the result of past political controversy, a result created by the winners to express their victory. At the same time, the game of justice, like all games, is played over and over again, with winners and losers changing places over time. This serves as encouragement to past losers and provides a cautionary reminder to past winners. “Lane argues that all politics is very local: it mostly occurs inside the person. What could be more local than her claim that responsibility ultimately lies with the individual? This is a very significant book, both because of its ambition to unite conceptions of justice with strategy, and because of its success in achieving those ambitions.” — Michael C. Munger, author of Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practices Ruth Lane is Associate Professor of Political Science at American University and the author of Political Science in Theory and Practice: The ‘Politics’ Model and The Art of Comparative Politics.

State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu