Market Socialism Vs. Market Capitalism (and the Centrally Planned Economy)

Seth Ackerman’s Jacobin essay (via Yglesias) is well worth your time, although I have to say that I don’t buy it at all as a wholesale alternative to our current system; it seems to me though that this could well be a model for certain parts of our system.  Ackerman starts off by suggesting that the problems of Communist or centrally planned economies was not that they were inefficient (by standard economics measures of efficiency/equilibrium) but their firms lacked autonomy.  He suggests instead a system where the management of firms is autonomous but the financial system is socialized, and therefore the “public” owns the firms collectively but does not really manage them.  He suggests that (a) this system is superior to the traditional social democratic apparatus where the role of Government is seen to be regulatory i.e. erecting checks and balances to the system of capitalist profit-seeking while still seeing profit-seeking as the engine of development and innovation.  He suggests that this system is never really sustainable because it ignores politics and the relative power of capital.  And (b) that this is the system we’ve been moving to all along.  Capitalism started off from a place where the management of the firm and the owners of capital were the same, to one where the two were different (a.k.a. the managerial corporation).  The logical outcome, he suggests, is one where the shareholders themselves are the “public” and are publicly accountable.  His “market socialism” is thus a logical culmination of capitalism itself (a la Marx).

What is needed is a structure that allows autonomous firms to produce and trade goods for the market, aiming to generate a surplus of output over input — while keeping those firms public and preventing their surplus from being appropriated by a narrow class of capitalists. Under this type of system, workers can assume any degree of control they like over the management of their firms, and any “profits” can be socialized– that is, they can truly function as a signal, rather than as a motive force. But the precondition of such a system is the socialization of the means of production — structured in a way that preserves the existence of a capital market. How can all this be done?

Start with the basics. Private control over society’s productive infrastructure is ultimately a financial phenomenon. It is by financing the means of production that capitalists exercise control, as a class or as individuals. What’s needed, then, is a socialization of finance — that is, a system of common, collective financing of the means of production and credit. But what does that mean in practice?

You should all just read the whole thing.    But let me just point out what I think is the main flaw in this model (although admittedly the devil is always in the details).  His proposal is essentially one where the economy consists of a huge, dominant public sector, but where the management of the public sector is radically separated from ownership (which is “public”).  I think this is not as easy as he thinks it is.  In particular, the relationship between the management (and workers) and the shareholders (the public) will now be mediated through the political process.  Ackerman thinks that by eliminating the profit-mechanism, his system will make the prices more rational or efficient, but I suspect that the political process will step in and provide its own irrationality.  In other words, Ackerman’s system, which he thinks is the golden middle between profit-seeking capitalism and centrally planned socialism may actually end up looking like one or the other eventually.    

Performativity, Realism and Social Construction

[This post is going to be a little abstract but I hope, not too jargon-ridden.  I wrote it mostly to clear my own head.  But hopefully, it's useful to others too.]

A largely problematic concept in contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) is the issue of performativity.  Performativity was explored first by Robert Merton in his discussion of what is sometimes called a "self-fulfilling prophecy."  The classic example is bank-runs.  A line forms outside the bank of people who think that the bank is going bust and who'd like their money back.  These people are seen by others who join the queue, and so on and on until the bank actually goes bankrupt because all its depositors demand their money back.  Whether the bank was really going to go bankrupt before that initial group of people queued up to demand their money is largely beside the point.  A bank run is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that brings its referent into existence. 

Merton used the word "self-fulfilling prophecy" when the prophecy itself was false.  And self-fulfilling prophecies are considered, on the whole, to be bad science, at least according to normative theories of science like Karl Popper's.  Take, for instance, Popper's notion of falsifiability as being the key idea that distinguishes science from mere pseudo-science.  Psychoanalysis was, according to Popper, a pseudo-science because it was not falsifiable.  Thus, the analyst could diagnose his patient as suffering from a certain psycho-sexual malaise; if the patient denied that he suffered this way, the analyst could attribute that to denial.  Thus there was no way in psychoanalysis to prove the analyst wrong.  Here, the psychoanalyst’s diagnosis is a self-fulfilling prophecy; by denying what the analyst has posited, I am indirectly confirming his hypothesis.  Marxism too, Popper thought, was something similar, despite its pronouncements about being scientific.  Instead of denial, Marxism used the trope of ideology and false consciousness to refute its detractors - thereby rendering itself impervious to falsification. 

Self-fulfilling prophecies, then, are considered to be bad science, by Popperian standards.  Or at least, they are not science.  Are scientific theories self-fulfilling prophecies?  This is an interesting question, philosophically speaking, but not a very interesting one [1].  [These numbers stand for the end-notes at the end of this post.] It is in the social sciences like economics that ideas about performativity (which is understood as a self-fulfilling theory performing itself into existence) start to become really interesting.  An interesting issue explored by economic sociologists is performativity of prices.  Are prices "real"?  Is there something out there in the world that prices correspond to -- stable, unchanging features that are outside human intervention?  Or are prices self-fulfilling prophecies?  If prices are self-fulfilling prophecies, how do we know that "bubbles" -- which are scenarios where prices have shot through the roof and are clearly out of sync with "fundamentals" -- exist?  As the title of Donald Mackenzie's famous book suggests, financial models are "an engine, not a camera."  That is, financial models are self-fulfilling prophecies; they bring the realities they describe into existence.

In a long, thoughtful, meditative blog-post, Kieran Healy points out the different senses in which the word performativity is used, and in particular, how one can understand the word in order to make sense of Mackenzie's argument -- without understanding financial models are complete hoaxes.  Because, clearly, one could interpret performativity trivially -- this is that economic models have no correspondence with reality. (Which would mean that economists are fraudsters and economic models are a hoax.)  This is clearly a possibility but only turns out to be the start of the problem.  For, if economic models have no correspondence with reality, whatever that is, then what really constrains these models?  Could it be that economists could just say whatever they like, and their scholarly ideas would just perform the economy into existence?  Just intuitively, this seems untenable.  It is not so easy to change the world.  I may have any number of ideas about how to do things -- but there is no way for me to just "perform" them into existence. Changing the world is hard and difficult.

In what sense then can economic models be said to perform, or enact, economic realities?  Here, Healy draws on Wittgenstein's ideas about rules, languages games and forms of life.   Briefly, in his analysis of rules, Wittgenstein shows that rules only make sense when considered against a form of life.  That is, rules take for granted a certain social form.  The rule "if the light is green, then start driving the car" can only be understood in a world of cars, traffic lights, roads and junctions.  One could modify the rule to say "if the light is green but there is a car at the intersection, start driving only after that car has left the intersection," or "if the light has just turned green, then decide depending on the traffic on the road if you can just stay at the intersection for a bit to decide which is the right way to go."  And so on.  IN ordinary life, these are routinely ways in which this rule is "followed" and there could be infinite variations on this.  Social life needs to be understood not as a following of rules; rather, rules need to be understood as the reifying of conventions that draw on the largely taken-for-granted background of social life. 

A further distinction made by analytic philosophers is the notion of regulative rules versus constitutive rules.  Regulative rules are rules like the ones I used as examples in the last paragraph: "if the light turns red, stop the car" or "if the light turns green, start driving."  These rules are supposed to regulate activities.  Constitutive rules, on the other hand, do not merely regulate, but constitute activities.  Thus the rules of chess, for e.g., "the bishop only moves diagonally," "the rook moves in straight lines," actually make up the game of chess.  [A rule like "if the player's hand is on the chess-piece, then he has not yet completed the move" can be seen to be a regulative rule.]  What Wittgenstein shows is that the difference between regulative and constitutive rules is a difference in degree, not in kind.  All rules are at heart constitutive rules.  They constitute a form of life, and the form of life constitutes them. 

Healy explains the performativity of economic models in the sense of being transformative rules.  In this case, some rules merely constitute a form of life -- but other rules, game-changing ones, can actually transform the form of life itself radically.  This is like the notion of finding a "trick," say, in a card game. If the trick is trivial, then the game remains the same.  If the trick is truly radical, then others start imitating it, and in time, it transforms the card game completely. 

Economic models (like the Black-Scholes formula) are like truly game-changing tricks (or rules).  They are performative in the sense that as they are increasingly adopted (primarily because they seem to confer an advantage on those who use them), they change the game itself -- in this case, finance.  And it is that sense that financial models *have* truly been transformative: an engine, not a camera.

Is Healy's argument a form of social construction, or is it not?  I think it is, although arguments about whether a theory is constructionist or realist are often debates over values and postures that theory-makers should adopt.  Because, Wittgenstein, as I see him, was a social constructionist: he argued that all rules ground themselves in social conventions; that, at bottom, most structured activities are a matter of how we agree or disagree with each other.  Our methods for agreeing or disagreeing with each other, of checking up to see if we believe an assertion or don't, are all different in different fields of activity.  The BSM formula, in Mackenzie's case, "worked," in some sense -- and the fact of its working was what allowed it to be a game-changer, performing a different kind of economic reality into existence. 

Orgtheory had a separate post (part 1, part 2) from Ezra Zuckerman who argued against "pure" social construction.  Again, his blog-posts are about the performativity of prices: how are prices constrained by more than just the beliefs of market participants?  Zuckerman suggests that a sociological theory about prices must take insights from both, a realist, and a constructivist perspective.  The constructivist perspective, he argues, has taught us that beliefs play an important role in price determination (why else would people talk about a "bubble"?).  But they make it seem as if prices are only constrained by what he thinks are "subjective" factors.  He argues that there are "objective" factors that also determine/constrain prices -- and it is not enough here to say that prices are conventions, although not easily changeable.  Rather, a theory must specify what factors constrain prices -- and the list of these factors must include both subjective and objective ones. 

However, his definition of "objective" is cultural.  Objective factors are those, he suggests, drawing on Andrew Abbot's work, that resist and cannot be changed by short-term cultural work.  Thus our beliefs about the price of Manhattan apartments and GE stocks as being worthwhile investments are objective; because short of an earthquake destroying both Manhattan and all GE plants, this is a reality that is not going to change soon.  (One could probably undertake a long-term project, a social movement, to change Manhattan's status, but that might take hundreds of years, if not more.)  Prices, he therefore argues, have lower bounds (say for an apartment in Manhattan) that are not amenable to short-term cultural work.  So there are objective features that determine/constrain prices.    

This also explains, for Zuckerman, why bubbles exist and proliferate despite the existence of skeptics who warn that a bubble is occurring.  However, these skeptics were not able to express themselves in practice -- which is why the prices of homes rose and rose (until they fell, in his view, because they violated the objective constraints).  This explains bubbles: a bubble happens because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that violates the objective reality (which is not amenable to short-term cultural work).  It also explains the presence of skeptics who doubt the bubble -- but who are unable to do anything about it in substantive terms.  It explains why a bubble happens even when so many people think that there is a bubble.

I find Zuckerman's analysis largely persuasive [2]. But here's the rub: he would argue that it is a realist (or at least, semi-realist) account while I think it is a through-and-through constructionist account.  Why is this?  Does this difference between what I see as social construction and what he sees as a form of realism tell us something about how these terms are used - and where the substantive difference between them is?  I think so -- more on this below.

First, I think the really real realists would disagree with Zuckerman over his definition of objective factors as those that are not amenable to short-term cultural work.  This suggests that objective factors are amenable to long-term cultural work (even if the possibility that this cultural work will be successful can never be predicted), something that true realists will disagree.  The truly objective never changes; it is timeless.

But I think there is a second, and perhaps, an even more important point where even semi-realists like Zuckerman would differ from social constructionists like me.  That point, I think, is about the variability of social worlds.  Let me explain. 

Let's take the lower-bound on the price of a Manhattan apartment as an example (Zuckerman's objective factor).  Let's say I am able to wind the clock back two thousand years and start again.  Or to put it differently, assume the world is a video cassette, which I rewind back 2000 years, and then play again.  Will we reach the same place we are in today?  In particular, in this alternate world, will a Manhattan apartment still have that lower bound?  Will Manhattan still be Manhattan? 

I suspect that the answer to this question will separate the realists from the constructivists [3].  A committed realist would argue that this alternate world will not be that significantly different from the world today; because the world is full of objective, unchanging, and timeless factors.  As a constructivist, I would argue that there is a large chance that this alternate world will be significantly different because the world is shaped by human actions and social institutions, just as much as it is shaped by objective realities.  And the social world is, as Barry Barnes has argued, largely a self-fulfilling prophecy, as actors act based on how they are expected to act, thereby reinforcing those very expectations.  If the world is shaped by actions and the expectations of actions (i.e. beliefs about those actions) then an alternate world that is produced by my video-cassette time-machine would be, quite possibly, a very different one.

But a semi-realist might say: that even if Manhattan is not Manhattan, there would still be lower bounds on prices.  The real lower bound would be Chicago real-estate prices.  There would still be lower-bounds on some prices, and there would still be objective factors (in Abbott's sense) that constrain prices.  I agree.  The difference though is that as a social constructionist, I can offer no predictions on how this world will look like.  The so-called objective factors in this alternate world will be different -- but the beliefs of market participants (the subjective factors) will still influence the prices.  Once we see that the objective factors are not predictable in this alternate world, the subjective factors (people's beliefs, the way they act on those beliefs and so on) start to seem more fundamental.

To put in yet another way, the difference between constructivists and realists is over the issue of prediction, and in particular over the issue of long-term prediction.  Short-term predictions are possible for both the realist and the constructivist.  But long-term predictions, say, about housing prices or computer prices 50 years from now, will be more difficult for constructivists to make than realists.  It is difficult only because even objective factors that determine prices can be changed by long-term cultural work; and this cultural work is impossible to predict.  The more confident you are about prediction, you shift to the realism side of the spectrum.  The less confident about prediction you are, will make you more of a constructivist.

And this explains, finally, some of the arguments that have been happening in the Orgtheory comment threads.  Would you like your regulator to be a realist or a constructivist?  Realists argue that even the existence of regulators is premised on realism; for if there were no objective factors constraining social facts (like prices) then how would one even begin to regulate something in the first place?  I would disagree.  I think it depends on the time-frame that the regulator is supposed to regulate.  A regulator who is thinking about the future 50 years from now is simply deceiving himself or herself.  For a regulator who is thinking 5 or 10 years down the line: it simply doesn't matter whether he is a realist or a constructivist.

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Endnotes:
 

1.  Clearly, in one key sense, they are not.  Because one is able to do things with scientific theories: predict the behavior of projectiles with reasonable accuracy, build rockets, make aeroplanes fly, manufacture cars and plastics and so on.  But in another, perhaps minor, sense they are.  A theory is a piece of representation that can "fit" many different worlds and situations.  I put fit in quotes because the process of "fitting" takes a lot of work and labor (until it gets routinized when that labor simply becomes taken-for-granted).  Galileo's key insight is said to be that he saw the motion of a body on an inclined plane as similar to the motion of an oscillating pendulum.  When students learn mechanics in high school and early college, they are taught to see (to "apply") the problem-sets as examples of the canonical practice problems that they study (Kuhn 1969).   In this way, one might say, is a self-fulfilling prophecy: more and more things can be seen as examples of the theory; the theory essentially fulfills itself. 

Naturally, the skeptic might ask: well, the theory actually works.  In some sense or the other, one can verify or check up whether it works.  This is true.  But with one qualification, which is of course, how the word "works" is understood.  The sense in which the theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, is that there might be some alternate theory that "works better."  Or "works," but in a different sense.  And a dominant theory, by working reasonably enough, might be letting us overlook other possible theories, because we only care about a theory "working," in one particular sense.  As long as there is only one sense of "working" that we are preoccupied with, then that one dominant theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All that said, the performativity of scientific theories is not really an interesting issue.  [Because the way a theory is taken to "work" is a pretty much unproblematically taken for granted notion in science.  Unless, in Kuhnian terms, there's a scientific revolution brewing, in which case, this becomes a fiercely debated issue.]

2.  There's also an element of cheating in Zuckerman's model.  It is easy to see that there is a lower bound for Manhattan real estate prices.  Could one think of a lower bound for, say, Phoenix real estate?

3.  For another take on this, see Chapter 3 of Ian Hacking's "TheSocial Construction of What," titled "What about NaturalScience?" where Hacking offers three factors that separate realists from constructivists: the contingency of scientific theories (or in our case, social facts like prices), the nominalism of the analyst, and explanations of the staying power of theories and social facts. 

Links for the Week [March 26 - April 1 2012]

Most of my reading this week was health-care.  Obviously, the Supreme Court's hostile questioning of the Obama Administration's signature legislation was a big shock.  Still, it was  useful to see the ACA defended in ways that the Administration wasn't able to before the Supreme Court.  Here's a Tumblr summary of some of the arguments I found interesting.  

About a "creepy" application called "Girls Around You" and what it says about social networking, data and privacy. 

John Lancaster on Marx in the London Review of Books.  A wonderful piece on what Marx means to us today -- and what he was right about. 

Dahlia Lithwick on the twisted idea of "liberty" that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court has.  I usually find Lithwick's prose a bit too hectoring but I agree with every point she makes here. 

How to be an Academic Failure: A Guide for Beginners.  The title says it all.

When writers have as much power as J. K. Rowling, they can transform the publishing industry single-handedly.  More seriously, the Web has given writers more bargaining power w.r.t. publishers and distributors. 

How much work is it to teach at a community college? Probably a lot.  Henry Farrell comments. 

I am very late to this really really good Ethan Zuckerman post on the blurring lines between advocacy and journalism.  The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention, by Ethan Zuckerman.

And finally, a dense philosophical meditation on computation.  Ian Horswill: What is Computation? Crossroads Magazine, March 2012, ACM
 

Some notes on Kahaani

Perhaps the best decision I made was to watch Kahaani from bwcinema.com rather than in the cinema hall.  Or perhaps it was the worst since the visual quality of the streaming video was abysmal.  Perhaps, in the cinema hall, the improved visual quality as well as the audience participation would have made the movie seem better than it was.  As it stands, the movie is incredible - and by that I mean not remotely credible (apologies to David Edelstein). 

Kahaani is what I call a by-the-books thriller with a twist in the tail.  And perhaps if you don't read the said books (spy thrillers, murder mysteries, espionage tales), the juxtaposition of a thriller plot, a demonstrably grubby (and sometimes colorful!) middle-class Indian setting, and a bonafide star like Vidya Balan would be something unique and that may perhaps explain why Kahaani has received such rave reviews.  It isn't a bad film, by any means.  But it isn't particularly good either. 

It's main problem, from my perspective, is that its thriller credentials are extremely thin.  Granted, all thrillers are, to some extent, ridiculous, with events that stretch one's imagination.  But Kahaani's plot is so by-the-books, so conventional, that it never works: the movie skips from one point to the next and there is no texture to these events; random people are identified by random strangers who presumably saw them years ago.  To reveal more than this would be to spoil the story for others.

Vidya Balan is an elegant and wonderfully restrained actress but even she can't do much with the material (she's made to deliver some cringe-worthy lines to the young actors).  The worst of the lot is the movie's sudden plunge into moral theatrics -- "collateral damage" says the callous Agent Khan from the Intelligence Bureau about the sacrifice of civilians for national security and the way he says it is so preposterous that you wonder why the movie even had to go there -- but it does, to its detriment.

As for the final plot twist, it is like the rest of the movie -- by the books, and not remotely credible. 

[For an example of a movie that follows a fairly standard mystery thriller plot, but does it elegantly, with detailed attention to the milieu it creates, see Navdeep Singh's vastly superior Manorama Six Feet Under.]

Links for the Week [March 18-25 2012]

My new years resolution this year was that I would write a blog-post every week.  Something meaty, something substantial, blah blah, you get the idea.  Alas, that hasn't happened.  So I've decided I'm going to cheat.  I'm going to post at the end of every week, the articles that I read and found interesting.  This will probably involve me posting stuff straight from my Tumblr page - but oh well, that's life.  So, without further ado, here are some interesting reads:

• William Saletan reviews Jonathan Haidt's latest book "The Righteous Mind."  I am ambivalent about Haidt:on the one hand, I find his views on reason convincing, but I am not too happy with the way he "naturalizes" his ideas by grounding them into the structure of the human brain.  

• The sociologist of knowledge, Donald MacKenzie gave a talk here at MIT about high-frequency trading and what it might mean for sociologists who are trying to understand the nature of prices in the economy as an aspect of social organization.  So I was naturally intrigued by this Wall Street Journal  piece which talks about the IPO of a trading firm that fizzled because of the wide fluctuations in price (a consequence of high-frequency trading).  (H/T: Kevin Drum).  

• The India Ink blog at the NYT ran a fascinating series on the problems faced by the National Archives in New Delhi.  The whole series is worth reading in full: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

• We read Alfred Chandler's magisterial "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" for class last week.  And Aaron Swartz (yes, that guy) has a really nice summary of the book that I found very useful.   

• Finally, have you heard of Pinterest?  I hadn't - not until last week, that is, when I read this piece.  (Yes, it's another social bookmarking site, except that it collects bookmarked images and is often used by its users to curate different kinds of commercial products.)  The most interesting part is Pinterest's business model:

  Unlike other social networks, which waited years to monetize through advertising, Pinterest has taken a different route. They’re monetizing already by taking a cut on sales that pins on their site help generate. They partnered with a firm called SkimLinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it goes to a retail site with an affiliate program. If it finds that kind of link, it secretly adds an affiliate code that ensures Pinterest will make some cash from sales that derive from that link. It’s a clever game, particularly given the site’s users’ retail focus, but Pinterest probably should have disclosed the practice more openly.

Gosford Park and Downton Abbey: The social vs. the psychological

I enjoyed the first season of Masterpiece's show Downton Abbey very much, and like many people, sat down to see the first episode of the second season last Sunday.  The new episode wasn't bad at all, although it felt like the writers crammed down a lot of points today to set the stage for what I assume will be the "real" developments that follow. But this seems as good a time as any to remark on the show's strengths and weaknesses.


Julian Fellowes, the creator of Abbey, wrote Robert Altman's Gosford Park and I remember watching that movie alone in my dorm room, a bad pirated print with bad sound (the overlapping Altman-style dialogue didn't help matters).    The murder mystery at its center was interesting and kept me watching, yet there were these surreal things that didn't quite gel: the wet, rainy opening sequence, with the picture of the wet maid keeping an umbrella over her mistress was one.  What was the movie's point, I wondered.



And then, it all came together in a kind of moment that movies should strive for.  [SPOILER ALERT].  The lady's maid played by the wonderful Kelly Macdonald has discovered that it's not the brooding valet (Clive Owen, the first time I've ever watched this charismatic actor) who's murdered the aristocratic owner of Gosford Park, even though, he is, in fact, owner's illegitimate son.  Rather, it's the valet's supposedly long-dead mother, the housekeeper of Gosford Park, Mrs. Wilson (played by Helen Mirren) who never knew of his existence until very recently.  And she did it because she knew her son, who isn't even aware that she is his mother, wanted to murder his father.  She's also angry because she was assured that the son she would give up would be adopted by a family and have a good life; instead he was actually given away to an orphanage.  She kills her employer to protect her son.  It's his life that matters, Mrs. Wilson says, concise and matter-of-fact. But what about your life, the maid asks.  In a line that can seem didactic on repeated viewings, but resonates like whip-lash when you hear it for the first time, Mrs Wilson replies: I am the perfect servant.  I have no life. 

In those two lines, the film distills itself to its essence.  The life of a servant under the aristocracy is about being invisible.  Fellowes and Altman had made a murder mystery that's not actually about the usual psychological motives for murder at all.  While we are teased with all the usual motives for murder - love, hate, anger, money - it turns out that this is a murder driven by hate for a certain kind of social arrangement.  [SPOILER ENDS]


Downton Abbey is almost the complete opposite of Gosford Park, almost as if Fellowes wanted to make amends for having created a biting critique of aristocracy. The aristocrats here are almost the embodiment of saintliness.  While they are, of course, used to a life of privilege and to being waited upon hand and foot, they are also unfailingly courteous to, and extremely fair to their servants.  The servants, in turn, are all suitably grateful: there is little griping about class here.

When I saw Downton Abbey for the second time, I noticed things I really hadn't the first time, when I was too engrossed in the plot to notice.  The first is that literally every "downstairs" character (except for the unscrupulous Thomas and cunning O'Brien, on whom more later) is "good."  Good, meaning that they're all hardworking, unfailingly fair,  industrious, and nice within the boundaries of reason.  The butler Carson is a bit ridiculous --  think The Remains of the Day - but he's self-aware and beyond his occasional pomposity, he's still a good guy.  They're all in stark contrast to O'Brien and Thomas who are positively Machiavellian in their dealings (not to mention that they're the only two to smoke cigarettes while they plot everyone else's downfall). 

This, I suppose, is the equivalent of political correctness in the show.  Since the show is not a critique of class, but rather an old-fashioned melodrama (heartbreaks, mild intrigue, passion, love), it won't do to have servants who are embittered for social reasons.  The bad servants clearly need a psychological reason for their badness and indeed, it is supplied for Thomas: his repressed homosexuality has led to an internalized homophobia (the cook refers to him as "damaged," a surprisingly charitable, and therefore anachronistic, assessment for those times).  I suspect that in subsequent seasons we will see why O'Brien is the way she is (the show is already starting to redeem her character in certain ways, notice her sympathy to the new valet who has shell-shock).

Which is why the "upstairs" characters are far more interesting.  Since their motivations can be seen to be free of class (after all, if you're upper class, class doesn't really exist for you.  And besides, since these guys are all good aristocrats, they're free of any taint of snobbery as well), they are allowed to be far more psychologically complex: they all have a touch of meanness and hardness that's not straightforwardly evil (like Thomas and O Brien).  My favorite was the Lady Mary Crawley, who comes across as impossibly hard and brittle in the first episode, wondering if she has to wear black when her fiance dies -- but somehow comes to have the richest inner life of all the characters in subsequent episodes.  Her motivations range from jealousy (that her cousin Matthew has become the son that her father longed for) to a certain striving for something she isn't quite sure about which is why she hesitates to marry him.  Her motivations for all her actions are never quite clear-cut (even the scene where she tells Matthew she likes him comes after she sees Matthew becoming more interested in her sister, Sybil).  She can also be incredibly vicious: the Edith-Mary relationship is probably the most daring thing that the makers of Abbey have ever portrayed.

All in all, the artistic choices of film-makers are constrained by what their film is about. Since Gosford Park was explicitly about class, the downstairs characters were far more interesting: their motives were an irresolvable mix of the social and the psychological.  The upstairs characters, on the other hand, were expectedly shallow (the fantastic British actors notwithstanding) -- which was, in a sense, the point.

Downton Abbey, because it tries to neutralize class differences, is almost forced to make its downstairs characters sympathetic (and when not, to give them clear psychological motivations for being the way they are).  It has no such problems with its upstairs characters, who can all be seen as "good" socially because they don't exploit their employees.  Which therefore makes possible ambiguous and indelible characters upstairs characters like Mary Crawley with her on-again, off-again romantic relationship with Matthew Crawley as well as her venomous attitude towards her sister Edith.  I am curious to see what journey the writers take Mary Crawley on next.

Social Construction as Conservatism

The release of Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind" and some of the high-profile unfavorable reviews it elicited has led to a backlash in the blogosphere. 

Mark Lilla's dismissal of the book is on first principles.  He argues that the core principle that unites all the different strains of self-identified conservatives -- and therefore the key difference between liberals and conservatives -- is not, pace Robin, their stance on the progress of the underprivileged, but rather, their stance on human nature.  For conservatives, says Lilla, society comes before individuals: it shapes human nature and constitutes individuals.  Therefore conservatives are loath to tinker with tradition: a slow change in traditions is preferable to the vast upheaval of revolution.  Liberals, on the other hand, do not hold tradition in the high esteem that conservatives do.  They are therefore far more eager to dismantle social structures if they think these structures are impeding human freedom and potential.  For liberals, Lilla argues, individuals come first, society, a distant second.

This is not new, of course and this is a great illustration of what separates, say, Edmund Burke from John Stuart Mill.  But then, after positing this as the main principle distinguishing conservatives from liberals, Lilla goes on to say:

Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. Some of them have drawn from European conservatism when they write about the constructive role of civil society, the habits and mores needed to exercise liberty, and the limits of government action. But strictly speaking, they are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S. Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of early liberalism, not conservatism. This is important to bear in mind.

All right then!  After positing that it is their stance on human nature that divides liberals from conservatives, it turns out that this distinction is moot in the contemporary American context because, well, everyone is a liberal: they all believe that individuals come before society.  What separates them, then?  Well, it seems to me that it's their stance on the welfare state.  Self-identified conservatives (from the early Public Interest neo-conservatives to the Tea Party) take a far more skeptical stance on the possibility of the welfare state to do good; whereas self-identified liberals are more optimistic about this.  (Note that we've now talking about the American context.) 

But there's another point here.  The ability of the welfare state to do "good," it turns out, is in a specific context: of providing government services to the underprivileged (poor blacks, foreclosed homeowners, and so on).  The difference between liberals and conservatives is thus over two points: (a) the possibility that a some kind of systemic injustice exists.  Liberals will admit to this, and possibly some conservatives will too.  (b) The possibility of doing something about this systemic injustice: It is here that the key difference between conservatives and liberals comes through.  With some oversimplification, one might say that liberals typically agree that if the injustice is bad enough then some steps (i.e. government actions) need to be taken to mitigate it, even if they impede human freedom (within limits).  Conservatives might think that the so-called injustice is not an injustice at all and even if it is, the costs of mitigating it are far more than the expected benefits.  This skepticism may range from Ron Paul-style complaints that, say, forcing Jim Crow-supporting restaurant owners to admit black people into their restaurants is an insupportable infringement of basic liberty to a cautiously Oakshottian stance that since changing social mores rarely works out the way we want it to, strict government regulation might lead to results that we may not quite like, and that therefore policies to remove, say, racial discrimination need to be a little less heavy-handed.

It turns out then that Corey Robin is right after all: the dispute between liberals and conservatives is indeed about the existence of system-wide injustices and over the means to mitigate them.  The question of whether human nature is contingent or fixed, or whether society is ontologically prior to individuals, becomes relevant only in the context of debates over the existence of systemic injustices.  Conservatives are indeed counter-revolutionaries, in the sense that they see no need (or are afraid of) agressive action to remove systemic injustices.  This might be out of the genuine fear that agressive action can have unexpected consequences (which comes out of an ontological belief that society is prior to individuals) or the idea that the systemic injustice in question isn't an injustice at all, but merely a matter of just desserts (which is an apotheosis of extreme individualism).

Indeed, the problem with Robin's book (which I haven't read!) may be what Matt Yglesias points out: it is too mean to conservatives.  And as Sheri Berman points out in her insightful review: it cannot account for fascists who were indeed revolutionaries, not traditionalists.  Far more importantly, it does not account for why conservative ideologies have such populist appeal, even to the very people whose "interests" it is supposedly against (at least, not without using false consciousness as an explanation, which, as Berman points out dryly, is "always a bad sign.").  

Indeed, this brings me back to the reason why I began writing this post.  As Lilla remarks, Americans are all liberals today, in terms of their stance on human nature.  Indeed, the only people who may be truly conservative in the Burkean sense are academics, who are often disparaged as part of the "academic left."  My own discipline of STS (Science and Technology Studies) is explicit about its assumptions: that a great deal of work has gone into constituting human nature as we think about it today, even if that work is not really obvious.  This is often called "social construction": the idea that the institutions that consitute society (say, gender, the family, merit and so on) did not arise spontaneously , in and of themselves, but that they are what they are as a result of a great deal of work (anonymous and overt) and particular historical circumstances. 

This is in itself a conservative argument: that "tradition" is prior to individuals.  Yet, the conclusion it takes is the opposite: if one can show that the deepest traditions are made, it is also possible to change them, and indeed they do change with time.  Most social constructionists will agree with conservatives: that changing our deepest traditions requires hard work, with the ever-present possibility that this work will yield unexpected consequences.  Yet social constructionists are not conservatives (and nor are they considered to be) primarily because they agree that the institutions of society often contain systemic injustices and that work that addresses these inequities is necessary and urgent (even if not easy).