Epistemic' arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we a... more Epistemic' arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we are better off accepting some particular social practice or institution rather than trying to consciously improve it. I critically examine and defend here one such argument, claiming that there are some domains of social life in which, given the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of the social world, we ought to defer to those institutions that have robustly endured in a wide variety of circumstances in the past while not being correlated with intolerable outcomes. These are domains of social life in which our ignorance of optimal institutions is radical, and there is uncertainty (rather than quantifiable risk) about the costs of error. This is an argument for the preservation of particular institutions, not particular policies or outcomes, and it specifically identifies these with the institutions that John Rawls called 'the basic structure of society.' The argument further implies that to the extent that there is any reason to change these institutions, changes should be calculated as far as possible to increase their 'epistemic power.'
sion of its own right, and characterized by horizontal equality and broad-based participation, re... more sion of its own right, and characterized by horizontal equality and broad-based participation, requires institutional shaping. Second, nondemocratic governments do endure, but without expressing the normative ideal of action (potentia agendi) in possession of right, instead only producing effects (potentia operandi) with right. And third, oligarchic elites and associations in the people do undermine the state: yet formal and informal balancing (civic strengthening) rather than Hobbesian repression (chapter 9) is an alternative way to prevent oligarchy and sustainably ensure collective participation equality in the people. The institutional detail that Field provides to flesh out civic strengthening, across different regimes in Spinoza’s Political Treatise (PT), is a further strength of this book. In the monarchy, the size of the king’s advisory council, combined with a close to randomized selection procedure, minimizes the risk of oligarchic capture. In aristocracies, syndics ensure...
Can “virtue” help overcome the tragedy of the commons? A growing body of work suggests that one i... more Can “virtue” help overcome the tragedy of the commons? A growing body of work suggests that one important way of dealing with the protection of the commons is the inculcation of certain sets of virtues, that is, dispositions or character traits that internally motivate individuals to habitually do the kinds of things that promote common benefits in the particular context. In this paper I suggest that the virtue-ethical approach to such problems, though not without merit, has important limitations. I begin by making a distinction between “robust” and “conditional” virtues in the context of commons dilemmas. Empirical evidence suggests that “robust” virtues are very rare, and hence cannot be relied upon to solve the many commons dilemmas we confront today. While conditional virtues are much more common, their “supply” is itself an endogenous effect of the potential solutions to the commons dilemma which virtuous agents may promote, resulting in trade-offs between solutions that can de...
Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as pro... more Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as propaganda that portrays the leader positively, or as rituals of leader worship. The first model stresses the forms of communication that make possible the transformation of bureaucratic state power into charismatic (extrabureaucratic) authority, while the second emphasizes the forms of participation that make possible the construction of charismatic authority in micro-interaction contexts. These two ideal types are not mutually exclusive, since leader-focused propaganda and rituals of leader worship can interact and amplify each other. But each of these ideal types has distinctive origins and political consequences. Moreover, each conceptualization leads to distinctive scholarly emphases: on the persuasive aspects of cult messages, on the one hand, or on the diversity of reasons for participation in rituals and the signaling function of such participation, on the other hand. In this paper I argue for a greater focus on the signaling and ritual aspects of leader cults, and show how it pays dividends in understanding these multifaceted phenomena. I illustrate this argument with a case study of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Me... more I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010)'s Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) from 2015 all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century (and in some cases to the late 18th century), adding information from several democracy datasets not included in their original paper or subsequent releases. The resulting scores are easy to recalculate by individual users depending on the purpose of the research, and come with smaller measurement uncertainty than the original UD scores. I use this method to produce an "extended UDS" dataset that covers 24111 country-years for 224 states and several non-state territories, including all of the country years in the updated Gleditsch and Ward panel of independent states since the Congress of Vienna (Gleditsch and Ward, 1999), all microstates in Kristian Gleditsch's list of microstates, and several unrecognized defacto states.
This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Dra... more This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Drawing on the work of Collins (2004), I understand a cult of personality as a set of interaction rituals, linked in chains, focused on symbols that refer to a political leader, and saturating a significant part of the public space of a polity. I argue that when interaction rituals focused on leader symbols are embedded in patronage relations, processes of “flattery inflation” are likely to emerge. I illustrate this model by looking at three very different cases: the short-lived cult of Caligula in the early Principate in Rome, the cult of Mao in China, and the emerging cult of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Egalitarian-liberal theories of justice are in principle very demanding, imposing substantial epi... more Egalitarian-liberal theories of justice are in principle very demanding, imposing substantial epistemic and justificatory burdens on citizens and requiring substantial changes to social and economic structures. Yet existing democratic institutions show little tendency to manage such burdens well or produce egalitarian outcomes over the long run. I argue that these facts imply a principle for the political realm analogous to John Rawls’s famous “difference principle” in the economic and social realms: a political and legal order should be maximally accountable to the representative occupants of the most powerless positions defined by that order, consistent with the equal liberties and fair equality of opportunity principles. This principle may license deviations from the usual institutions of representative democracy in many non-ideal circumstances. I explore the implications of this claim by describing and defending an electoral system where voting power is inversely proportional to income.
Abstract: Drawing on Weber and Foucault, I argue that the modern state can be best conceived as t... more Abstract: Drawing on Weber and Foucault, I argue that the modern state can be best conceived as the center of gravity of the set of social technologies that enable the delimitation of communities, the establishment and control of territories, and the production of legitimacy. These technologies are then deployed in organizations, embedded in political regimes, and operated by governments and others who put them to use for a variety of purposes. This technological view of the state, I argue, enriches the traditional Weberian ...
Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1524000 The Problem of Stability i... more Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1524000 The Problem of Stability in Classical Political Thought 1 Xavier Márquez Lecturer Political Science and International Relations Programme PO Box 600 Victoria University of Wellington ...
Abstract: The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in politica... more Abstract: The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in political theory and political discourse. The idea is typically used both to explain the stability of a political order by pointing to acceptance of discursive justifications for that order, and to evaluate its normative appropriateness by comparing the conditions of the actual acceptance of discourses of justification to the conditions of their rational acceptability. The normative and explanatory roles of the concept of legitimacy are linked insofar as actual ...
Ever since Morrow's seminal contribution to the study of Plato's Laws, the Nocturnal Council desc... more Ever since Morrow's seminal contribution to the study of Plato's Laws, the Nocturnal Council described in book XII of the Laws has been generally agreed to be consistent with the rest of the work. In a recent piece in Political Studies, however, George Klosko revives the older argument against Morrow's interpretation, arguing that the Nocturnal Council really is inconsistent with the overall project of the Laws, and that the best explanation for this inconsistency is that Plato changed his mind in the course of writing the Laws but was unable fully to 'work out' the 'philosophical implications' of this change before he died. I argue in this article that Klosko's arguments do not succeed, and that Morrow's interpretation of the Nocturnal Council is still the best account of its role that we possess. But beyond the narrow point concerning the interpretation of the role of the Nocturnal Council in the Laws, I argue that Klosko misinterprets Plato's arguments for the rule of law. A proper interpretation of these arguments shows that Plato's defence of the rule of law never rules out the possibility of improving the law through the accumulation of new experience, and hence is nowhere incompatible with a commitment to institutions like the Nocturnal Council.
Abstract Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about v... more Abstract Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about visibility and power. In an Arendtian “space of appearance,” the common visibility of actors generates power, which is understood as the potential for collective action. In a Foucauldian “space of surveillance,” visibility facilitates control and normalization. Power generated in spaces of appearance depends on and reproduces horizontal relationships of equality, whereas power in spaces of surveillance depends on and ...
I first contextualize the question of political knowledge in relation to the questions of the nat... more I first contextualize the question of political knowledge in relation to the questions of the nature of philosophy and sophistry with which it is intimately bound in the Sophist. There, philosophy is shown to be different from political knowledge; it is at best a striving for such knowledge. I then carefully dissect the way in which the nature of this knowledge is brought to light in the Statesman. There political knowledge is shown to be a form of human care with a troubled relationship to practice, which is the province of the technai or what we might ...
Abstract: I argue for the originality and interest of Cicero's views on the stability of pol... more Abstract: I argue for the originality and interest of Cicero's views on the stability of political communities. After a survey of ancient ideas on the mixed constitution (the framework for thinking about the stability of political communities in the ancient world), I show how Cicero adapted these ideas to analyze the Roman situation of his time. Cicero's version of the theory of the mixed constitution is notable for two innovations: an argument that stability is possible even under conditions of high inequality, and an account of constitutional mixture ...
The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In this book Marquez argues that Pla... more The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In this book Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as different from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city's stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city. Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous re-evaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a "philosophical" attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.
* I wish to thank Kevin Cherry, Jeff Church, and Emma Cohen de Lara for their comments on earlier... more * I wish to thank Kevin Cherry, Jeff Church, and Emma Cohen de Lara for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A previous version was presented at the 2008 meeting of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy in Nottingham, England. ... Drawing on ancient and ...
Epistemic' arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we a... more Epistemic' arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we are better off accepting some particular social practice or institution rather than trying to consciously improve it. I critically examine and defend here one such argument, claiming that there are some domains of social life in which, given the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of the social world, we ought to defer to those institutions that have robustly endured in a wide variety of circumstances in the past while not being correlated with intolerable outcomes. These are domains of social life in which our ignorance of optimal institutions is radical, and there is uncertainty (rather than quantifiable risk) about the costs of error. This is an argument for the preservation of particular institutions, not particular policies or outcomes, and it specifically identifies these with the institutions that John Rawls called 'the basic structure of society.' The argument further implies that to the extent that there is any reason to change these institutions, changes should be calculated as far as possible to increase their 'epistemic power.'
sion of its own right, and characterized by horizontal equality and broad-based participation, re... more sion of its own right, and characterized by horizontal equality and broad-based participation, requires institutional shaping. Second, nondemocratic governments do endure, but without expressing the normative ideal of action (potentia agendi) in possession of right, instead only producing effects (potentia operandi) with right. And third, oligarchic elites and associations in the people do undermine the state: yet formal and informal balancing (civic strengthening) rather than Hobbesian repression (chapter 9) is an alternative way to prevent oligarchy and sustainably ensure collective participation equality in the people. The institutional detail that Field provides to flesh out civic strengthening, across different regimes in Spinoza’s Political Treatise (PT), is a further strength of this book. In the monarchy, the size of the king’s advisory council, combined with a close to randomized selection procedure, minimizes the risk of oligarchic capture. In aristocracies, syndics ensure...
Can “virtue” help overcome the tragedy of the commons? A growing body of work suggests that one i... more Can “virtue” help overcome the tragedy of the commons? A growing body of work suggests that one important way of dealing with the protection of the commons is the inculcation of certain sets of virtues, that is, dispositions or character traits that internally motivate individuals to habitually do the kinds of things that promote common benefits in the particular context. In this paper I suggest that the virtue-ethical approach to such problems, though not without merit, has important limitations. I begin by making a distinction between “robust” and “conditional” virtues in the context of commons dilemmas. Empirical evidence suggests that “robust” virtues are very rare, and hence cannot be relied upon to solve the many commons dilemmas we confront today. While conditional virtues are much more common, their “supply” is itself an endogenous effect of the potential solutions to the commons dilemma which virtuous agents may promote, resulting in trade-offs between solutions that can de...
Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as pro... more Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as propaganda that portrays the leader positively, or as rituals of leader worship. The first model stresses the forms of communication that make possible the transformation of bureaucratic state power into charismatic (extrabureaucratic) authority, while the second emphasizes the forms of participation that make possible the construction of charismatic authority in micro-interaction contexts. These two ideal types are not mutually exclusive, since leader-focused propaganda and rituals of leader worship can interact and amplify each other. But each of these ideal types has distinctive origins and political consequences. Moreover, each conceptualization leads to distinctive scholarly emphases: on the persuasive aspects of cult messages, on the one hand, or on the diversity of reasons for participation in rituals and the signaling function of such participation, on the other hand. In this paper I argue for a greater focus on the signaling and ritual aspects of leader cults, and show how it pays dividends in understanding these multifaceted phenomena. I illustrate this argument with a case study of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Me... more I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010)'s Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) from 2015 all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century (and in some cases to the late 18th century), adding information from several democracy datasets not included in their original paper or subsequent releases. The resulting scores are easy to recalculate by individual users depending on the purpose of the research, and come with smaller measurement uncertainty than the original UD scores. I use this method to produce an "extended UDS" dataset that covers 24111 country-years for 224 states and several non-state territories, including all of the country years in the updated Gleditsch and Ward panel of independent states since the Congress of Vienna (Gleditsch and Ward, 1999), all microstates in Kristian Gleditsch's list of microstates, and several unrecognized defacto states.
This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Dra... more This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Drawing on the work of Collins (2004), I understand a cult of personality as a set of interaction rituals, linked in chains, focused on symbols that refer to a political leader, and saturating a significant part of the public space of a polity. I argue that when interaction rituals focused on leader symbols are embedded in patronage relations, processes of “flattery inflation” are likely to emerge. I illustrate this model by looking at three very different cases: the short-lived cult of Caligula in the early Principate in Rome, the cult of Mao in China, and the emerging cult of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Egalitarian-liberal theories of justice are in principle very demanding, imposing substantial epi... more Egalitarian-liberal theories of justice are in principle very demanding, imposing substantial epistemic and justificatory burdens on citizens and requiring substantial changes to social and economic structures. Yet existing democratic institutions show little tendency to manage such burdens well or produce egalitarian outcomes over the long run. I argue that these facts imply a principle for the political realm analogous to John Rawls’s famous “difference principle” in the economic and social realms: a political and legal order should be maximally accountable to the representative occupants of the most powerless positions defined by that order, consistent with the equal liberties and fair equality of opportunity principles. This principle may license deviations from the usual institutions of representative democracy in many non-ideal circumstances. I explore the implications of this claim by describing and defending an electoral system where voting power is inversely proportional to income.
Abstract: Drawing on Weber and Foucault, I argue that the modern state can be best conceived as t... more Abstract: Drawing on Weber and Foucault, I argue that the modern state can be best conceived as the center of gravity of the set of social technologies that enable the delimitation of communities, the establishment and control of territories, and the production of legitimacy. These technologies are then deployed in organizations, embedded in political regimes, and operated by governments and others who put them to use for a variety of purposes. This technological view of the state, I argue, enriches the traditional Weberian ...
Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1524000 The Problem of Stability i... more Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1524000 The Problem of Stability in Classical Political Thought 1 Xavier Márquez Lecturer Political Science and International Relations Programme PO Box 600 Victoria University of Wellington ...
Abstract: The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in politica... more Abstract: The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in political theory and political discourse. The idea is typically used both to explain the stability of a political order by pointing to acceptance of discursive justifications for that order, and to evaluate its normative appropriateness by comparing the conditions of the actual acceptance of discourses of justification to the conditions of their rational acceptability. The normative and explanatory roles of the concept of legitimacy are linked insofar as actual ...
Ever since Morrow's seminal contribution to the study of Plato's Laws, the Nocturnal Council desc... more Ever since Morrow's seminal contribution to the study of Plato's Laws, the Nocturnal Council described in book XII of the Laws has been generally agreed to be consistent with the rest of the work. In a recent piece in Political Studies, however, George Klosko revives the older argument against Morrow's interpretation, arguing that the Nocturnal Council really is inconsistent with the overall project of the Laws, and that the best explanation for this inconsistency is that Plato changed his mind in the course of writing the Laws but was unable fully to 'work out' the 'philosophical implications' of this change before he died. I argue in this article that Klosko's arguments do not succeed, and that Morrow's interpretation of the Nocturnal Council is still the best account of its role that we possess. But beyond the narrow point concerning the interpretation of the role of the Nocturnal Council in the Laws, I argue that Klosko misinterprets Plato's arguments for the rule of law. A proper interpretation of these arguments shows that Plato's defence of the rule of law never rules out the possibility of improving the law through the accumulation of new experience, and hence is nowhere incompatible with a commitment to institutions like the Nocturnal Council.
Abstract Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about v... more Abstract Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about visibility and power. In an Arendtian “space of appearance,” the common visibility of actors generates power, which is understood as the potential for collective action. In a Foucauldian “space of surveillance,” visibility facilitates control and normalization. Power generated in spaces of appearance depends on and reproduces horizontal relationships of equality, whereas power in spaces of surveillance depends on and ...
I first contextualize the question of political knowledge in relation to the questions of the nat... more I first contextualize the question of political knowledge in relation to the questions of the nature of philosophy and sophistry with which it is intimately bound in the Sophist. There, philosophy is shown to be different from political knowledge; it is at best a striving for such knowledge. I then carefully dissect the way in which the nature of this knowledge is brought to light in the Statesman. There political knowledge is shown to be a form of human care with a troubled relationship to practice, which is the province of the technai or what we might ...
Abstract: I argue for the originality and interest of Cicero's views on the stability of pol... more Abstract: I argue for the originality and interest of Cicero's views on the stability of political communities. After a survey of ancient ideas on the mixed constitution (the framework for thinking about the stability of political communities in the ancient world), I show how Cicero adapted these ideas to analyze the Roman situation of his time. Cicero's version of the theory of the mixed constitution is notable for two innovations: an argument that stability is possible even under conditions of high inequality, and an account of constitutional mixture ...
The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In this book Marquez argues that Pla... more The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In this book Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as different from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city's stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city. Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous re-evaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a "philosophical" attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.
* I wish to thank Kevin Cherry, Jeff Church, and Emma Cohen de Lara for their comments on earlier... more * I wish to thank Kevin Cherry, Jeff Church, and Emma Cohen de Lara for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A previous version was presented at the 2008 meeting of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy in Nottingham, England. ... Drawing on ancient and ...
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2753830
I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Me... more I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010)'s Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) from 2015 all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century (and in some cases to the late 18th century), adding information from several democracy datasets not included in their original paper or subsequent releases. The resulting scores are easy to recalculate by individual users depending on the purpose of the research, and come with smaller standard errors than the original UD scores. I use this method to produce an " extended UDS " dataset that covers 24111 country-years for 224 states and several non-state territories, including all of the country years in the updated Gleditsch and Ward panel of independent states since the Congress of Vienna (Gleditsch and Ward, 1999), all microstates in Kristian Gleditsch's list of microstates, and several unrecognized de facto states.
Uploads
Papers by Xavier Márquez