A Passing Comment on the Establishment of Platonic Utopias

Ishaan Jajodia

E.R. Dodds’ essay on the ancient concept of progress, which found mention in a recent post, included an interesting comment on Plato’s Republic that worthy of further discussion, namely, that:

“Alternatively, the dream could be projected as a blueprint for the future, one of those ‘rational Utopias’ of which Plato’s Republic is only the most famous example. Utopias of this kind are less a sign of confidence in the future than of dissatisfaction with the present; their authors seldom have much to say about the practical steps by which Utopia is to be achieved.”[1]

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The False Altar of Progress

Ishaan Jajodia

Writing in the midst of this pandemic always brings up this unavoidable question: is there such a thing as progress — progress not commiserate with the material terms in which we qualify, quantify, and evaluate our lives otherwise? We chide the medieval world for being subject to the whims and fancies of nature, of being subject to the arbitrary and capricious diktats of small living and semi-living entities completely invisible to the naked eye, but are we any better?

I would dare venture to say that after the rise of civilisations, progress has been sketchy at best, that economic and commercial growth is mistaken for a change in the human condition, that the times we live in seem to be wholly unrecognisable but are merely the hypostatisation of some cycle of historic occurrence that is outside our control and repeats itself in broad strokes, and that those who study the past well enough can only see the various occurrences and reoccurrences but nothing more, nothing less.

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Schumpeter’s Soirée with the Ancients and the Schoolmen

Ishaan Jajodia
Schump
Joseph Alois Schumpeter at Harvard, c. 1948.

Joseph Schumpeter is the rare economist whose interest and work extends outside of the small, technical field of economic analysis. In his History of Economic Analysis, he looks deep and wide, but of particular interest to us are his comments on the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the medieval Scholastics.1 The book is more widely known for the provocative claim that the man regarded as the father of classical economists was merely derivative of his French brethren — Turgot being the main source of ‘inspiration’ — but that is a claim that I will reserve for examination at another time. For now, of key interest are: {1} the distinction he makes between thought and analysis, {2} the distinctions he draws between Plato and Aristotle, {3} his discussion of the development of the concept of usury alongside the flourishing of industry in medieval Europe, and {4} his discussion of the ‘welfare state’ and its relation to the thought of the medieval scholastics.

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  1. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (London: Routledge, 2006). ↩

Smith’s Laissez Faire Solution to Happiness

Ishaan Jajodia

I was led to the following passage in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments by Joseph Crospey’s book, Polity and Economy, which has found mention and discussion on this blog previously. The passage in concern is at 4.1.10, and is of considerable length: long enough to jump across pages and, faced with justified type, blend into a whirlwind of serif lettering with no sense of time or space. For ease of comprehension, I ought to break it down.

The opening lines of the passage refer to the conclusion of the preceding (and comparatively minuscule) one: “The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it” (TMS 4.1.9). This is what Adam Smith will refer to as nature’s imposition upon man: it makes outward riches seem more attractive than they actually are, deluding and misleading the senses. But wealth is characterised by Smith in terms of its grandeur, beauty, and nobility — in aesthetic terms before moral ones. Why, precisely, wealth confers nobility upon its possessor is a question not for those content with their station, or those who seek knowledge and may well prefer inner wealth to outward displays of it. Wealth is clearly not desirable in itself, but only for the aesthetic embellishments it can afford. But, one may ask, what does the acquisition of wealth have to do with honour? This is a question one can only turn back to Smith. Honour is ambiguously defined in Smith’s work, and definitions of it are often provided in contexts such as this, where it is contextually implied that it is a good thing, but it is not conferred by outward, material goods. Honour belongs to the non-material world, and for the material world to be responsible for its production is precisely the wool that is pulled over one’s eyes by nature.

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Marcel Mauss’ Curious Indian Gift

Ishaan Jajodia

I wrote only yesterday of Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift, which has an intriguing section on the gift in ancient India. It was insightful, but left a sense of incompleteness that could not be fully gauged, until the realisation dawned upon me that the issue was hiding in plain sight, and oftentimes the most obvious — and appropriate, in this case — solution is always lying in plain sight.

In his study of ancient India, he refers to the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic of some antiquity and of more considerable length. But Mauss did not address the question of the gift and of sacrifice in that small yet integral part of the Mahabharata — the Bhagavad Gita — that is the religious and philosophic centrepiece of the entire epic. His analysis of the Indic system, particularly that of the Vedic tradition and the epics that follow them, are deep-reaching and show erudition, but the lacunae are serious, and it is my contention to only expose one part of the umbra to light. “The epic and the Brahmin law still survive in the old atmosphere,” Mauss argues. “presents are still obligatory, things have special powers and form part of human persons.”1

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  1. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002), 72. ↩

Self-Interest as a Moral Maxim

Ishaan Jajodia

Economists have moral compasses that are suspect to being overruled by any variety of unrelated concepts: utility, loss, advantage, opportunity cost, maximisation, and so on and so forth. They claim to be disciples of the market, astute learners whose educations piqued in one area, and one area only. It is suprising, then, for an economist — much less a former banker — to be spotted using that dreaded word, ‘moral,’ which has caused many an economist unspeakable terrors. The man responsible for that is Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and popular economist.1

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  1. Raghuram Rajan, ‘Pursue Self-Interest by Helping Other Economies Too’, Financial Times, 7 July 2020, July 7, 2020 edition, sec. Opinion, https://www.ft.com/content/cf12c2ad-616f-4c11-936f-d8ac1b0880bb. ↩

The Curse of the Gift

Ishaan Jajodia
Endymion
Anne-Louis Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791. | Was Endymion’s gift of eternal beauty a fatal curse as well?

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is an extraordinary book, one that contends with the common yet defeatist and fatalist line of thought that results in self-regulating markets and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.1 Mauss’ anthropological project is not just that: it lays bare a particular conception of the gift that Mauss sees. As we shall see, there are issues with this conception, but on the whole, the gift seems to be a particular contrivance of his with implications for the way in which we construe our socioeconomic relations and question the existence of a market unfettered from man. Mauss’ is out to prove that in most archaic societies, “exchange and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality, they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” (3). His theory goes into remarkable detail about the operations of what he calls ‘potlatch’ in communities still extant around the world, but also examines how the ‘potlatch’ evolved from its primitive form to the more complex concepts we know today in the form of the market. Mauss’ book is rich, and I borrow liberally from it, at least in its descriptive form.

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  1. All inline citations  are from: Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002). ↩

Short Note #3: Change

Ishaan Jajodia

Change refers to the slow, measured process by which laws are passed and conventions and norms come into being. It represents a sceptical attitude toward revolution in general: change is necessary, but revolution is not. Advances in science and technology can change the skin of society, but on the inside, much stays the same. This scepticism about outward change does not imply a craving or preference for stagnation, but a cautious outlook toward things in general, and a marked indifference to the new-fangled for its own sake.

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Short Note #2: Duty and Obligation

Ishaan Jajodia

There are two kinds of obligations with which we are concerned here: legal and moral obligation. Both are important in the context of the polis. Legal obligation is concerned with the observance of the law, broadly understood, in both letter and in spirit. Moral obligation, which we shall refer to as ‘duty,’ relates to broader questions of right and wrong and with hierarchy in general. Legal obligation is important, especially when the polis is ruled in accordance with a series of non-arbitrary rules, codified into laws, which are sovereign over the polis. Both these forms of obligation, in the context of the polis, find their articulation in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s treatise, On The Commonwealth.

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Short Note #1: The Importance of Politics

Ishaan Jajodia

To know man fully is to know first what politics is. Aristotle’s arguments for the importance and primacy of politics still maintain their vitality today. They go as follows.

For Aristotle, “nature … makes nothing in vain” (Politics, 1.2, 1253a8–9). Everything that arises from nature has an end, a telos. Man’s telos is determined by Aristotle by the possession of faculties of speech that go beyond expressions of “pleasure and pain” (1253a12). The Epicureans would like to reduce most things to pleasure and pain, but Aristotle does not: he restricts them to the domain of animals, not humans. Humans use their speech to express more complex ideas; for example, “man alone possesses a perception of good and evil” (1253a16). Man’s ability to converse has an end, and it cannot be realised in solitary existence.

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