Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality

by Stephen G. Engelmann

Overview

Imagining Interest in Political Thought argues that monistic interest—or the shaping and coordination of different pursuits through imagined economies of self and public interest—constitutes the end and means of contemporary liberal government. The paradigmatic theorist of monistic interest is the English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), whose concept of utilitarianism calls for maximization of pleasure by both individuals and the state. Stephen G. Engelmann contends that commentators have too quickly dismissed Bentham’s philosophy as a crude materialism with antiliberal tendencies. He places Benthamite utilitarianism at the center of his account and, in so doing, reclaims Bentham for liberal political theory.

Tracing the development of monistic interest from its origins in Reformation political theory and theology through late-twentieth-century neoliberalism, Engelmann reconceptualizes the history of liberalism as consisting of phases in the history of monistic interest or economic government. He describes how monistic interest, as formulated by Bentham, is made up of the individual’s imagined expectations, which are constructed by the very regime that maximizes them. He asserts that this construction of interests is not the work of a self-serving manipulative state. Rather, the state, which is itself subject to strict economic regulation, is only one cluster of myriad "public" and "private" agencies that produce and coordinate expectations. In place of a liberal vision in which government appears only as a protector of the free pursuit of interest, Engelmann posits that the free pursuit of interest is itself a mode of government, one that deploys individual imagination and choice as its agents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822384946
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	322 KB

About the Author

Stephen G. Engelmann is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Imagining Interest in Political Thought

Origins of Economic Rationality

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By Stephen G. Engelmann

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Stephen G. Engelmann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822331353

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Chapter One

Introduction

To make sense of contemporary politics, we must first make sense of neoliberalism. By promoting markets as the preferred regulatory mechanism of everyday life, neoliberal doctrines turn states into enforcers of a global financial and trade regime. Although these "privatizing" trends put governmental power into the hands of economic actors lacking democratic accountability, they have attracted only minimal attention from American political theorists. The problem can be attributed in part to the predominance of a liberal tradition that puts the individual subject and freedom of choice at its center. Encompassing both theories of normative liberalism and explicitly economistic rational-choice theory, this tradition orients political theorists toward assessments of whether government preserves and enhances individual choice or restricts and erodes it. The liberal tradition is ill equipped to appreciate choice itself as government, and thus it is ill suited to a clear appraisal of neoliberal reform.

"Neoliberalism" is a contested termprimarily used by critics of the politics that it names. My own use invokes a complex of theories, proposals, and policies that by and large activate interest-governed choice in the pursuit of collective efficiency. Efficiency calls, wherever feasible, for the "private" ownership of (material and spiritual) goods and for an increase in the scope and intensity of profitable transactions among owners. Some see neoliberalism as a throwback to classical liberal theory and practice, but this view is misleading. Classical liberalism viewed market exchange as a distinct sphere and mode of practice. Its political economy was a study and pursuit of collective wealth. And its orientation was juridical; its rule was a matter of law. Neoliberalism's market is by contrast without boundaries, and its political economy is a study and pursuit of collective value, not wealth. Its orientation is scientific and governmental; its rule is not so much a matter of sovereign law as a matter of regulatory policy.

Neoliberalism is rightly associated with the Chicago School of economics and with the New Right reforms of the Thatcher and Reagan years (minus much of the latter's substantial cultural-conservative baggage). What distinguishes the Chicago School, and the work of its leading theorist Gary Becker, is not that it promotes free markets, but that it applies market analysis to all areas of life. It would be a mistake, however, to associate neoliberalism narrowly with the Right, and not only because Clinton and Blair extended and advanced programs of neoliberal reform. The neoliberal story is not only a story of rightist mobilization and leftist capitulation. That we privilege, for example, choice, value, and policy over right, wealth, and law is also the product of discursive shifts in which the movements of the New Left played a powerful role. The forward-looking, self-actualizing individual, guided by a liberated and liberating imagination, has taken up a permanent place in contemporary government. Neoliberal government renews the mobilization of individual interest-in all its spiritual, creative, and altruistic manifestations as well as its crass, routine, and selfish ones. To grasp neoliberal government we need to unlearn some of our current approaches to politics and the theoretical frames that guide them. Theory is a way of seeing, and Americans tend to see government in a state that intervenes in the spheres of society and economy for better (welfare liberalism) or for worse (market liberalism). To understand neoliberalism we require another way of seeing, one that does not focus on distinctions among state, society, and economy and notices instead that markets are always regulated and that they always govern conduct. The mode of government advanced by neoliberalism is rather peculiar in its circumvention of sovereignty: here government serves neither the people nor a ruler but instead an economy. And while this economy's agencies include transnational corporations, international organizations, and even nation-states, it also requires millions of individuals acting as self-inspecting governors of themselves-consumers making self-empowering and self-realizing choices in the pursuit of their interests. The economism of the neoliberal political order thus implicates not only governing institutions and policies, but in addition, the very intelligibility of a "choosing" subject. Any attempt to understand this economism will fail if it adheres to the conceptualizations of self and society, market and state, and intervention and nonintervention that characterize contemporary liberal debate. Indeed, in their focus on agency, the preoccupations of many American political theorists risk facilitating rather than comprehending neoliberal politics. What we need is an account of how individual imagination and initiative are coordinated in the pursuit of interest. In short, what we need is a reconceptualization of economy.

In this study I present a historical and analytical framework that enables us to see self and society themselves as organized economies. I argue that the tradition of Anglophone liberalism, and in particular the apparently illiberal liberalism of Jeremy Bentham, articulates a mode of government centered on what I call monistic interest. "Interest" may call to mind a particular desire for or connection to something or someone. Monistic interest, by contrast, subordinates this notion of plural attachments and concerns to a logic of commensurability. Bentham almost always writes "interest" in the singular rather than the plural because any interest that directs individuals or communities-that is, any self-interest or public interest-is already an aggregate of commensurable goods. Monistic interest depends on the imagination, not only to construct commensurables that can be balanced and thus maximized, but also to produce expectations. And while monistic interest is thus always prospective-it works through individuals perpetually imagining their future-its prospects are shaped to fit with one another in a system that governs by coordinating the self-government of its members.

In the course of elaborating this system of government I develop four related arguments. First, although interest-especially economic interest-calls to mind the worldly and the material, monistic interest comes out of a tradition of introspection. Eighteenth-century philosophy commonly invokes a complex plurality only to arrange it into imagined economies that are themselves undergirded by monistic interest. My analysis will trace puzzling correspondences between eighteenth-century and contemporary theory. Second, I argue that the rationality specific to monistic interest-economic rationality-is not merely instrumental. Instrumental reason finds the most efficient means to fixed and given ends. Economic reason is more comprehensive: all ends as well as means are subordinated to a calculus that weighs priorities against one another and against present and future resources. I maintain that only by appreciating how economic reason directs ends as well as means can we see how monistic interest governs. Third, the polity governed by monistic interest structures expectations; the imagination is stimulated, and confirmed or disconfirmed, in the service of aggregate interest. I argue that the imagination, which is often seen as preceding or transcending politics, has become a target for and instrument of government. Fourth, I demonstrate a curious continuity between monistic interest and the logic of reason of state (raison d'etat). Ideas of the interest of the individual and the interest of society are complementary, and both derive from arguments first applied to early modern states. Rather than critical sociology's account of market encroachment on society or lifeworld, I will tell a more directly political tale of the origins of a particular regime of security: the emergence and proliferation of economy as government.

Understanding my first argument, which insists that we notice the role of introspection in the construction of interest, requires revisiting our very notion of "self-interest." By self-interest one often means one or more of the following: prudence, egoism, atomism, private utility, rational greed, whatever benefits the self or its circle of concern. These senses of interest presume that self-interest enters into and shapes relations with others. I will demonstrate, however, that self-interest is itself shaped and sustained by a relationship. Typically, we focus on what is in one's self-interest, expanding or contracting it or asking it to give way under certain circumstances. In order to understand self-interest as a species of monistic interest, however, we need to attend not to its multiple contents but to its singular form. If every interest is a relation, monistic interest is a reflexive relation that renders commensurable all other relations, thereby subordinating each of them, however construed, to its logic of economy. Monistic interest demands introspection, or what the third earl of Shaftesbury calls "home-Survey": the self 's inspection of its internal economy. Introspection draws boundaries between inside and outside; monistic interest, in its designation of what counts, additionally points to what is real and what is not-what is, for example, merely imagined. I show through my reading of Bentham how these ostensibly foundational distinctions are drawn and how the full force of the imagination is put at the heart of the interest relation, making it really matter, and making it matter at the expense of specific commitments, connections, or needs. The commonly assumed viscerality of Benthamic interest is belied when he notes that "it is no otherwise than through the medium of the imagination, that any pleasure, or pain, is capable of operating in the character of a motive." The reflexivity endemic to monistic interest is fully present in contemporary rational-choice theory. Consider for example James Coleman's axiom for all individual and group action: "The two parts of the structure of the simplest possible actor correspond to what I have called ... the object self ... and the acting self ... ; interests constitute the linkage between the two." Monistic interest allows Bentham and his heirs to exploit and reproduce a subject-centered way of seeing that facilitates our insertion into a broader economy. I argue that the "simplest possible actor" is not so much a structural premise as a structural effect, and thus the social theory that identifies this actor as a premise serves as a branch of the government that it studies.

The notion of economy that animates neoliberal theory has roots in what we think of as moral or psychological theories of interest. In this book, I retrace these connections through discussions of Shaftesbury and Bentham. These writers are typically contrasted as theorists of natural altruism (Shaftesbury) and egoism (Bentham). I argue that they are better seen as having initiated the framework for such oppositions by emphasizing the arrangement of self and society as economies. In contrasting egoism and altruism we accept the prearrangement of a personal and social economy, and the problematic of introspection in which these economies are grounded. But a concern with the fit between self and society renders invisible the monistic interest that structures both as economies. I argue that the self-society dyad-which posits a self and a public interest served respectively by egoism and altruism-squeezes out alternative conceptions of private and public such as those that are unconcerned with the interior of the self or those that understand the private as one's stake in the public. In my treatment of the English seventeenth century I look behind the opposition between self and public interest, to explore what is imposed and what is excluded by that pairing.

The history of changes in the meaning of interest offers insights into changes in the forms of interested life. Despite the continuing complexities and multiple senses of "interest," formerly dominant juridical and existential meanings are currently overshadowed by psychological and prospective uses. The term has strikingly recent and pan-European origins, and derives from the Latin inter esse: to be between. The rise of monistic interest suggests a turn away from relations between interested beings. In their accounts of interest, Shaftesbury's introspective hedonism sets the stage for Bentham's own fantastic materialism: both theorists foreground and yet retreat from the viscerality of feeling bodies and their plural concerns. Pleasure and pain in Bentham's scheme are the aesthetic pleasures and pains of Shaftesbury's spectator self, retooled as visions of the future. My reading of Bentham offers an important challenge to his rational-choice heirs and their critics, both of whom tend to read him as a crude materialist. I demonstrate that just as Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699, 1711) counters religious enthusiasm with a secularism that extols the pleasures of introspection, so too Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780, 1789) and A Table of the Springs of Action (1815, 1817) attack the imaginary creations of discourse only to locate materiality in the imagination.

Even the most sophisticated of Bentham's revisionist interpreters have not questioned his appeal to the self-evident viscerality of pleasure and pain. My alternative reading suggests that pain and pleasure for Bentham, like preferences for microeconomists today, are elements of a rhetoric that facilitates our insertion into a project of government and participation in it. The constituents of interest-pain, pleasure, and more generally preference-are taken to name the pre-existing reality to which the economic polity responds. In arguing, by contrast, that the elements of interest are imaginatively composed, I am not asserting that they are merely imaginary. According to Bentham, interest can only be made up of "expectations," a subset of imaginings that are accompanied by a "sentiment of belief" in their probable occurrence. These prospects are produced and arranged by systems of what he calls direct and indirect legislation. Expectations are grounded and secured by a range of institutional measures that join the crucial initiative of the motivated self to the interest of the whole. Thus the process of prospectively imagining the things and relations between us as economic commensurables is a critical dimension of government. And theories that model this process perform a function of government.

Monistic interest is made up of the individual's imagined expectations, and these are constructed by the very regime that maximizes them. The regime is no less liberal for this: it does not frustrate individual goals with collective ones; rather, only individual interests count. The construction of interests is not the work of a self-serving manipulative state; rather, the state is only one cluster of myriad "public" and "private" agencies that produce and coordinate expectations. Moreover, the state is itself subject to a very strict economic regulation. In place of a liberal vision in which government appears only as a protector of the free pursuit of interest, I argue that the free pursuit of interest is itself a mode of government, one that deploys individual imagination and choice as its agents.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Introduction 1

2. Against the Usual Story 17

3. Virtuous Economies 35

4. Imagining Interest 48

5. State Rationality 77

6. The Public Interest 104

7. The Economic Polity 141

Notes 151

Index 185

Editorial Reviews

"Imagining Interest in Political Thought is an extremely impressive, powerful, and exciting work which casts important light on a crucial yet surprisingly neglected aspect of the history of political thought: the emergence of utilitarianism as a major political theory and its subversion of conceptions of natural law and civic humanism as the basis for social cooperation."—Philip Schofield, General Editor, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham

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