The Mythic Liberal Voter in the Solid Crystal of Society:In Response to Michael Hannon’s “Disagreement or Badmouthing?”
This document came about because of a public (however small that public might’ve been) Twitter conversation. I lamented that people fail to read a great deal of very useful political epistemology literature. As evidence, I (not realizing that what I took to be an inconsequential complaint would unexpectedly turn) pointed to what I saw as a disappointing volume—that which Michael Hannon recently edited. For me, this document serves to respond to Hannon’s challenge and to demonstrate how a rather large body of literature could solve the problems that present themselves in Hannon’s (but not only Hannon’s) volume. I understand the result of my response to be evidence of the problem in the academy by which ever-increasing specialization leads disciplines and sub-disciplines apart, never again to cross paths. Were Hannon and his colleagues to have taken seriously some literature in certain strands of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, anthropology, social psychology, and related areas, many of the philosophical mistakes that appear in the volume’s chapters would likely have been avoided, but alas, here we are: Hell.
Hannon argues that, because many people don’t really hold beliefs on political matters, it’s often the case that people neither agree nor disagree on political matters. At certain points in Hannon’s chapter, he (whether intentionally or not) gestures toward possible ways of explaining why people often appear unconcerned with facticity, coherence, or consistency. That is, in political matters, people often appear to make claims that they couldn’t believe, to make claims that appear inconsistent with other claims that they make, and to arbitrarily change their minds and even change their minds back again. While Hannon’s explanations for these phenomena ultimately fail, on the surface, it’s reasonable to assume—from the way that these phenomena appear—that people, at least sometimes, really don’t have political beliefs. How else could one explain the glaring appearance by which people seem either to obviously lie or to have no convictions about matters of fact?
In fact, Hannon’s explanation for these doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Hannon argues that, while people often don’t really have political beliefs, they do express what appear to be political beliefs. What occurs, in Hannon’s conception, is a substitution: people often express political allegiance when they make claims about their beliefs: (I neither believe nor disbelieve in climate change, but) I support the Republic Party, and so on. For Hannon, there are sneaky political actors among us who pretend to have political beliefs, but really don’t. Why would they do so? This is one problem that Hannon’s argument faces.
Hannon offers no explanation for why people would claim to have political beliefs that they don’t have. Realizing the absurdity of claiming that no people ever have political beliefs, he assures the reader that some people, at least sometimes, do have political beliefs, but this might make matters somewhat worse for him. If it were the case that some people do always have political beliefs and some people never do, then one could understand people’s statements of political commitments by realizing that some political discourse is about people’s political beliefs and some political discourse is about people’s political allegiance. So long as everyone is always only ever someone with political beliefs and the other people are people who never have political beliefs, sorting people, and sorting discourse, into either one bucket or the other might not be very difficult.
Hannon repeatedly divides those who have no political beliefs from those who do have political beliefs. By this formulation, there are those whose political activities express political beliefs and those whose statements of political belief actually express mere allegiance. As far as I’ve been able to tell, he never claims that anyone both has political beliefs and expresses allegiance in their political activities. He appears to begin to hedge: “[S]ome voters may initially get their political allegiances by enculturation, but this does not preclude them from genuinely coming to believe some (or a lot) of the things their political party stands for. This may occur through a process of reflection on the attitudes they inherited from their community.” (p. 305) For Hannon, reflective thinking on people’s attitudes may lead them to actually adopt the beliefs (or at least what appear to be beliefs, Hannon clarifies) that the party prescribes, but here, reflection is not a process for someone to break from their community, so insofar as it’s belief, it’s belief in that to which one’s already committed. The reflective thinking that leads to what appear to be beliefs is, for Hannon, merely a matter of “post hoc reasoning.”[1] In other words, this is reasoning as performance; I’ll return to this point. What matters is that, for Hannon, it appears that some people never really hold political beliefs. Does this mean that no one does? Hannon writes, “[P]olitical realism”—the idea that “one’s kind” of person belongs to the political party to which they, themselves, belong—“is implausible as an account of political elites and people who devote their careers to politics. These people surely have genuine beliefs about the issues. My point, however, is that many people are not like this.” (p. 305) For Hannon, there are two classes of people: those elites among us who hold political beliefs and we (they?) plebes who’ve never held a real political belief in their life. For Hannon, one must suppose, the two sides really speak two different languages that merely appear identical.
A better way to understand what Hannon rightly observes—that people can appear contradictory and inconsistent—is that, whether some people always do have political beliefs and/or some people never do have political beliefs, many people sometimes do and sometimes don’t have political beliefs. This could help to explain why people who make political statements, even when they don’t have political beliefs, express their political allegiance in a form identical to that of political belief even though their expression isn’t really one of political belief. This seems to be right, but then, much more explanation is required; at least two things must be established. First, why does political allegiance get expressed in the idiom of political belief?
Why it should be the case that people act as if they hold political beliefs, even when they don’t, isn’t intuitive. It’s not clear that the political agent would lose anything at all by claiming that their political activity is a function of their allegiance rather than a function of their belief. In fact, many people do and have based their political activity on allegiance alone. Hannon even refers to this (p. 300); we know it as identity politics. It’s the politics of nativism, fascism, and the like, and many people’s political activities adopt these forms. It’s the idea that I belong to some naturalized, or dehistoricized, group, and my political actions only reflect my membership in that group and my wish for my group to benefit as much as possible and be harmed as little as possible. If one’s politics are only motivated by their desire to benefit their group as much as possible, then don’t they risk alienating, or at least confusing, their group and, therefore, losing support? What’s gained by translating allegiance into belief? If some people, sometimes, are willing to acknowledge that their politics only express their allegiance, then Hannon offers no explanation for why those whose political activity only expresses allegiance, when that’s the case, go through the process of converting their expression of allegiance into an idiom of belief. Obviously, we seem to have encountered a mistake, and it’s a mistake that leads Hannon to make other mistakes and to fail to account for phenomena that are highly relevant to what he means to explain. So, why would people without political beliefs act as if they do have political beliefs? This is the second problem with Hannon’s “as-if” argument.
How is it that two apparently unrelated things—allegiance and belief—become associated with each other in the first place? This relates closely with the above problem, as we will see, but the point here is that it’s not obvious why people’s beliefs would ever bring about parties, party allegiance, and so on. Someone might avoid the issue of belief altogether by way of participation in identity politics’s forms, but that’s irrelevant to the case that Hannon describes by his as-if argument; in other words, there could be no reason for the as-if style of politics if politics were all a matter of identity politics (that people only, on some occasions, justify post hoc). Hannon doesn’t explain how people whose political activities are based on allegiance and people whose political activities are based on belief might come to form a party. Aren’t they interested in very different things? Clearly, the latter are interested in reasons related to policy choices, and the former are interested in a reified conception of identity. Why would someone with no political belief ally with people who do have political beliefs? If Hannon wanted to argue that people in a geographical area always ally with others in their geographical area, then that could be plausible if the evidence bore it out. Of course, it doesn’t. If people’s political allegiance were always fully explained by familial identification, then that could make sense, but it isn’t. How is it that people without political beliefs ally with people who have political beliefs? In fact, these two problems—the problem of the political idiom and the problem of allegiance—share an explanation.
One must explain how political beliefs and political allegiance can be converted into each other. Sometimes, Hannon writes, “people count support for a politician or party as a sacred value.” (p. 302n6) If Hannon is right, then one might even claim that support for a political party is itself a kind of political belief. How so? Political beliefs, of course, aren’t completely different from other kinds of beliefs; they always express transcendence in terms of value but also in terms of descriptive difference. Furthermore, beliefs necessarily always relate temporal moments, but Hannon consistently runs into problems by failing to incorporate considerations of temporality and history.[2] The simplest kind of belief is perhaps that entailed in what Wilfrid Sellars refers to as the “ostensive tie”[3]—the mapping of a signifier onto a phenomenon. When one points at a chair, and calls it a “chair,” they believe that their understanding of chair-ness, which comes from the past, is reliable enough that they can project it onto the somewhat mysterious[4] phenomenon that lies before them. Similarly, the statement, “I believe in gravity,” can be meant as a proleptic statement by which one assumes that available evidence allows for one to make a prediction. To say, “I believe in my mother,” can be to attribute to her a kind of authority based on past experiences. This authority entails assignation of value: the chair’s chair-ness, my mother’s word, or the concept of gravity, is valuable because of the reliability entailed in each. In fact, if authority can always be defined as partly having to do with reliability[5], then all statements of belief are statements that implicate the phenomenon of authority.
We have many ways of determining authority. Erving Goffman notes that things like people’s dress, their gestures, their uses of language, etc. can all signal forms of authority.[6] I wouldn’t entrust a car mechanic to conduct brain surgery and I wouldn’t entrust a brain surgeon to fix my radiator. The fact that someone’s status as a kind of subject depends on what they do exemplifies why, as Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue shows, Hume’s is-ought distinction breaks down. What a car mechanic is depends on them appearing to do what a car mechanic ought to do, and these can’t be separated without breaking down the concrete meaning of each. If the mechanic can’t locate the transmission or properly turn a wrench or assemble an engine, then they’re really no mechanic at all. Whether or not someone understands themselves to be a mechanic, if they can perform all the functions of the mechanic and if they incidentally present themselves as a reliable mechanic, then they happen to be a mechanic. In fact, the degree to which they count as a mechanic depends on the transcendent value of their mechanic-ness—their authority as a mechanic. A person is recognizable as a person because they perform the functions that they ought to perform in order to be legible as a person.
To tie this back to Hannon, he’s right to bring transcendence—the “sacred”—into the conversation. Our values often are made sacred because of the importance of certain possible outcomes, our love for one another, our dedication to certain issues, our attachment to inspiring leaders, and so on. All collectivities only can be collectivities by way of transcendence and its close relative, authority. Because all distinctions entail both descriptive and normative differences, all uses of language entail a transcendent dimension and all uses of language implicate at least the possibility of a kind of authority however vaguely-conceived.
All this granular discussion of transcendence serves the purpose of pointing out that Hannon’s problem has already been solved in a vast, long-standing body of literature. Hannon appears to be wrong when he writes that there are people whose political behaviors reflect allegiance and there are other people whose political behaviors reflect reasoned beliefs. Instead, all political activities necessarily entail both of these dimensions because all social behaviors entail both. To return to our car mechanic, their activities align them with a group of people—car mechanics. They perform their identity as a car mechanic in their professional actions, but also in the different ways that unrelated actions and choices relate them to their identity. The car mechanic isn’t necessarily compelled by their employer to refrain from washing the black grease that distinguishes their hands from those of others, to wear blue coveralls, to speak in a distinct accent, and so on, and yet, one often knows the car mechanic when they see them, just as they—with nothing to go on other than superficial signals unrelated to the actual work—know the professor, the doctor, the construction worker, or the tech bro. People know the members of their group, too, even if they’ve never met them in person.
People recognize styles of dress and speech, social rhythms, expressions of patterns of choices and other types of thinking, and so on. When people who share aspects of their lived experience—what Ernst Bloch calls their “temporality”[7]—they treat them as people who share certain interests and values. In fact, people’s interests and values are constructed through their historical social experiences.[8] The more people appear to share interests and values, the more they can be trusted to reflect shared interests and values. The more people can convincingly express those interests and values in political statements (but not only), the more they’ll be trusted—the more they gain authority among members of their group.[9]
By now, it might be obvious to my reader that there can, in no instance, be a strict division between the values embodied in statements of political belief and allegiance to one’s chosen (or, at least, non-unchosen) political community. Any statement of political belief will be mediated by one’s sense of where their interests lie and by how their interests relate them to a group of people or to multiple groups of people. On the other hand, anyone’s expression of political allegiance demonstrates their commitment to certain political beliefs. At the bare minimum, political allegiance expresses that one values a certain political community and/or political leader. Someone’s allegiance might sometimes appear more important to them than their concern over any particular issue because of how they value allegiance. People sometimes compromise on particular issues because they believe that their perceived group will benefit when their party wins. Their party might not take their own stance on every issue, but they’re better off winning the election than losing it. Different people differently weigh the value of their party winning against the loss by which their particular views won’t be represented. Hannon quotes Liliana Mason on this point, who argues, “[S]ocial identity [… results] in individual differences in identity strength.” (p. 299) Mason seems to be claiming that everyone identifies with a group or with certain groups, but they identify themselves with others to differing degrees. Mason’s claim appears right because it must be the case that anyone who expresses thoughts through uses of human language identifies themselves (whether consciously or not) with a group of people.
Any use of language necessarily commits the language-user to a set of descriptive and normative associations. The language-user can only use language because they’ve learned to use their particular language from their experience in social situations.[10] Every language-user participates in a linguistic, and even cognitive, tradition.[11] Anyone’s statements can only be understood by anyone else if the language-user’s simultaneous articulation of both descriptive and normative associations in whatever statement can be understood by the receiver.[12] In this way, every statement is constituted by the foreground of the signifiers—what Ferdinand de Saussure calls “syntagm”—and the background of those signifiers’ sets of associations—the “paradigm.”[13] What Saussure fails to recognize is that the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships between signifiers could never be “arbitrary.”[14]
Every statement entails historically- and socially-determined values that help to constitute that statement’s background.[15] This background entailment of values, especially because these values relate closely to people’s social positions and ethical and political commitments, is what we mean by “ideology.” V. N. Vološinov shows that all uses of signifiers are ideological because signifiers’ descriptive and normative associations depend on the social situations within which people learn language and put it to use. If, in my community, we tend to value croissants more than biscuits, then this evaluative association is already entailed in the background of my statement: “I want a croissant.” Someone might say that they would prefer to have a biscuit. It would be sensible to think that the person might not be a part of my community because, if they were a member of my community, then they would most likely prefer a croissant. If croissants are more expensive than are biscuits, then these signifiers—croissant and biscuit—also imply class differences. The lower-class person might express that they value biscuits whereas the upper-class person might express their preference for croissants. However, this expression isn’t only unidirectional. Within what Pierre Bourdieu calls a social “field,” the interactions between actors express, and form, relations between what he calls “economic,” “social,” “cultural,” and “symbolic” forms of capital.[16] People with similar economic capital tend to interact in shared situations, leading them to create social ties that Bourdieu refers to as “social capital”—access to particular people and particular sorts of people. People’s economic capital allows them to consume certain commodities but, perhaps, not others. Members of social groups—especially groups with relatively equal amounts of economic capital—tend to consume certain sets of commodities with certain qualities that grant them “cultural capital.” A rich person has access to expensive food, high art, and certain patterns of language use to which a poor person doesn’t normally have access. Among a social group, then, cultural capital—valuable understanding of certain artifacts and processes—expresses economic capital in a way that relates to social capital—the value of knowing certain people and groups of people. In fact, if one can gain cultural capital, then, even without economic capital, they can, in some cases, convert that cultural capital into social capital that they can then, sometimes, convert into economic capital. Of course, concrete social practices ground all of this. My expressed preference for a croissant expresses something about my history of cultural consumption as it’s mediated by the possibilities afforded by my economic capital. These both tend to relate me to certain groups of people, including, more broadly, to an entire economic class. Because these phenomena form the patterns that constitute daily-life associations, my social practices form my ideology as my ideology helps to constitute my choices and behaviors.
This all restates the claim from MacIntyre that I referred to above: All uses of language situate one in a community of people who share aspects of a tradition of thought and practice—a tradition full of various rituals and unconscious commitments. Language-use is always, in some way or another, practical, historical, and social. There is no signification that doesn’t arise from shared processes and that doesn’t also bear potential implications on shared processes.[17] Getting back to Hannon, then, when people express political beliefs, this is never merely an exercise in truth-telling for the sake of truth-telling. The practical implications obviously run deeper than this. In order to understand, for instance, why it might sometimes appear that people lie about political beliefs, one has to understand what kinds of political practices people engage in, what are the stakes of those practices, and how people understand the relationship between their social situation and the statements that they make.
Hannon gives examples of people who, when looking at photos from Obama’s and Trump’s inaugurations, seem to lie, and people who seem to lie about changes in employment levels (pp. 301-2). When one views the two photos, it seems obvious that more people appear in the photo of Obama’s inauguration than in Trump’s. Survey participants were asked, “Which photo has more people?” (p. 301) The correct answer, Hannon writes, is that Obama’s inauguration photo has more people in it. We could all look at the two photos and see that he’s correct to write this, but, because rightness is constituted by various criteria, the question’s simplicity makes ambiguous what the right answer might be. In order to know what is the right answer for the respondent to give, one must know how the survey participant understands their role in their situation. On the surface, the most obvious interpretation of the question seems to be this: The question asks the respondent to determine, to the best of their ability, according to the most reasonable possible method, which photo contains more visible people. This might seem obvious, but the situation isn’t without ambiguity. For some people, the value of their political party winning an election is vital. For such a person, any way by which they can reasonably help to secure that outcome puts them on the side of the good—of their “sacred value.” It need not be the case that they ought to act in accordance with an unstated standard that they would—if they thought of it—understand the survey administrator to have intended. It’s easy to imagine ways by which a respondent might ask themselves if perhaps the photos are distorted or if perhaps there are slivers of people barely registering in certain pixels in one photo whereas, in the other photo, eccentricities make there appear to be more people than are really there, and so on. One could call this dishonest, but the respondent themselves might think that every step along the way was perfectly honest—perhaps, even more honest than if they’d tried to meet the expectation of the elitist (read: “evil”) bureaucrat administering the survey! This doesn’t mean that they necessarily don’t realize what the expectation is, but it also doesn’t mean that they understand the expectation to map onto the absolutely and necessarily correct answer. Are they really lying? Maybe.
In Hannon’s other example, people’s responses change when they’re offered money to be more honest (including to say when they’re unsure; p. 302). The findings seem to support Hannon: people’s responses are more correct when they’re rewarded for honesty. What does this tell us? What it almost definitely tells us is that, when people are asked to account for whether or not they’re doing what’s expected of them, they change their answer. Does it mean that they go from lying to telling the truth? The evidence isn’t sufficient to say that this is so. According to Hannon, one of the questions asked is “whether the level of employment has gotten better or worse.” (p. 302) Better or worse for whom? Better or worse in what way? Someone might live in an area where the reality that’s constructed for them—and that they reasonably believe—is one by which the wrong people—people whose employment shouldn’t count—are employed at the expense of the right people being employed. They may be mistaken in facts around this understanding, but it may be that the overwhelming majority of reliable evidence, based on the consensus and authority that they find reliable, clearly indicates to them that the reality of employment contradicts the story that they read in the newspaper (or have editorialized to them by Fox News) each day. Hannon denies that this is what’s happening.
Responding to the claim that “Democrats and Republicans are allegedly seeing ‘separate realities,’” Hannon writes, “An alternative explanation is that such patterns merely reflect a desire to praise one party or condemn another.” (p. 303) Hannon would seem to be right that people sometimes really do cheerlead for their party and badmouth the other, but Hannon’s problem takes a familiar form. Once again, Hannon claims two things to be mutually exclusive[18], rather than addressing the complexity of people’s social interactions. Here, his use of the term “merely” betrays what would seem to obviously be the case: people can cheerlead while they attest to what they believe. In fact, it’s necessarily the case that this is what they really do. One cannot have beliefs without having preferences and one cannot prefer a party without valuing what that party appears to represent. Republicans want to win because they want the good team to defeat the evil team, and the Democrats feel the same in the other way around. It’s true that polarization has changed the nature of this tendency, but Hannon also denies the history of polarization.
When Hannon writes that “those who are the most polarized are […] more motivated to watch partisan news; thus, partisan news may not be the cause of affective polarization” (p. 300), this relies on magical thinking where the consensus on polarization’s history would be much more convincing. Study after study shows that polarization has grown in recent decades. One need not look back more than fifty years to see a dramatic shift in the degree to which Republicans and Democrats claim to dislike and distrust each other and to which Republicans and Democrats claim to hold mutually exclusive views (however inaccurately they may believe this to be so). Moreover, where Hannon denies that historical media tendencies have led to polarization, the explanation appears extremely straightforward. The erosion of the equal time rule and the fairness doctrine has coincided with a decades-long project (especially on the right) to create more extreme and partisan media—from partisan radio to various political and religious cable shows to Fox News to MSNBC to the birth of the unregulated internet, and so on. One can neatly map the graphs of increasing polarization onto the history of eroding regulation and increasingly partisan media. Where does Hannon think that polarization started, and how? Apparently, the Devil made it happen.
That said, polarization can also be explained by a much longer historical process. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes, “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”[19] Relative to previous times, people today lack the shared socio-cultural resources to be able to meaningfully discuss important issues. He writes that this is for three basic reasons. First, interlocutors’ socio-cultural frameworks are often conceptually incommensurable.[20] Second, the modernist style of debate—characterized by impersonality—implicates a fictional universal and, therefore, transhistorical truth meant to compel people by its naturalist forcefulness.[21] Much of what runs Hannon into logical traps, for example, flows from this tendency. Finally, people argue from the bases of different thought traditions, producing “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments.”[22] It’s not simply that our concepts are incommensurable but that our thinking tends to be full of bits and pieces of systems of thought that contradict one another. MacIntyre, continues, “[A]ll those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived. Moreover the concepts we employ have in at least some cases changed their character in the past three hundred years.”[23] This reinforces Bloch’s point—that people live not only different lives but different temporalities. They live according to different rhythms and tempos; different lifecycles; different transcendental, or even eschatological, ends; different relations to their ancestors, differently conceived of; and different repetitions and novelties.
Of course, one kind of temporality is that liberal temporality characterized by abstraction—as in what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time.”[24] The liberal tends to erase history’s role in conditioning phenomena, including people’s subjectivities. Often, by the liberal account, subjects appear free and autonomous, floating in empty space, without the friction or force of learned values, desires, and concepts—let alone bodies with limits. Ideational phenomena are often understood to have been constructed without any influence from any history whatsoever. This isn’t the only kind of abstraction, though. What Theodor Adorno calls “the cult of the existent”[25] is another form of abstract givenness.[26] With only a thin concept of history—mostly as the kind of national history that celebrates barbarism for its own sake[27]—liberals often overestimate the degree to which phenomena are transhistorical. To be clear, this kind of violator isn’t necessarily in the worst company. Nietzsche mistakenly transhistoricizes the conflict between the person and society. Sigmund Freud does the same. Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty follows Hobbes’s translation of authority into authoritarianism, erasing the modern history of this shift.[28] Of course, there’s good news. Karl Marx writes, “[T]he present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.”[29] It turns out that, in spite of liberals’ best efforts, there is, after all, history. I’ll end with my immediate reaction, after having been challenged by Hannon on Twitter, to the first page of his chapter—not because it’s a significant part of my argument, but because, in spite of its hurriedness, its mistaken interpretive framing, and, in the light of this whole document, diminished relevance, it still captures the essence of the problem with Hannon’s chapter.
Hannon writes, “In the U.S., nearly half of all Republicans and Democrats say they ‘almost never’ agree with the other party’s positions. When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people disagree.” (p. 297) Initially, one may dismiss the egregious overstatement of the case as merely a matter of style, but the implications run much deeper than some consideration for aesthetic difference. To state the obvious, Republicans and Democrats agree on far more political questions than those on which they disagree. They overwhelmingly agree that murder is a crime, that free speech is valuable, that the government should take responsibility for maintaining roads, educating children, regulating lead content in commodities, and an almost uncountable number of other possible policy questions. On how many questions could we say Republicans and Democrats clearly tend to disagree? Ten? Twenty? Maybe 100? Revised, then, Hannon’s claim really ought to read, “When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people agree.” Of course, the diligent Platonist would automatically know this to be true. Differences are only meaningful when phenomena are brought into mediating relation according to the categories by which those differences are constructed. Put in Hegelian terms, individuals’ universal participation in politics is mediated by particular political differences. Still, why does this matter?
The aesthetic (which is to say, perceptual) effect of claims like Hannon’s is that they lead the reader to accept a world in which the things on which Republicans and Democrats agree don’t appear as matters worthy of discussion. If the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats appear endless, then the agreements worthy of consideration must be relatively few. Of course, this is nonsense. The disagreements between Republicans and fascists, or Democrats and communists, are clearly far greater in number and intensity than those between Republicans and Democrats. Yet, by Hannon’s formulation, the disagreements between non-liberals and liberals (by which I mean Republicans and Democrats) are made insignificant; they become the background to the handful of major disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. So long as those things that Republicans and Democrats agree on aren’t to be considered, then they are taken for granted and they become invisible in political discourse. In other words, they become ideology. This is all to say that, by rendering certain considerations invisible, or ideological, Hannon’s claim does aesthetic work toward creating a liberal epistemology.
[1] He gets this idea from, of all people, Jonathan Haidt lol (p. 308)
[2] Later in this response, the importance to my argument of temporality’s consideration will become clearer.
[3] Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
[4] Of course, every phenomenon is necessarily somewhat mysterious to us—we are mysterious to ourselves, others are mysterious to us, and those things and happenings that can’t communicate to us through human language are, in important ways, even more mysterious to us than are people.
[5] I here borrow Massimiliano Tomba’s distinction between authority and authoritarianism. Authority is a category by which social relations are related to shared values. Authoritarianism is authority’s modern (and, to some degree, proto-modern) simulacrum—deference to thin signalings of reliability. Tomba, Massimiliano. “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23(1): pp. 1-12.
[6] Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
[7] Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Heritage of Our Times.
[8] This point is made by many people: in addition to above-cited texts by Bloch, Sellars, and MacIntyre, also in G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, V. N. Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice,Lev Vygostsky’s Mind in Society, Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” and, despite that Hannon might have never read any of this literature (or at least learned this lesson from it), this list could really go on forever, to include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as a host of authors between them and Hegel.
[9] In this way, authority is constructed as the values and understandings of the group; they appear as socio-historical propriety in people’s appearance and in their various practices.
[10] Again, this point is made repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy, but it’s a point that Hannon seems to miss, and it’s particularly emphasized in Vygotsky’s Mind in Society.
[11] MacIntyre, After Virtue.
[12] Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” See also Vygotsky’s discussion of the “zone of proximal development,” in Mind in Society.
[13] De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.
[14] Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
[17] Marx, Karl. The German Ideology.
[18] Here, one explanation is standard, and the other is “alternative.” As becomes clearer as his argument goes along, he regards the alternative explanation to be true and the standard one to be incorrect.
[19] MacInyre, After Virtue, p. 6.
[20] Ibid., p. 8; this relates closely with the “separate realities” argument that Hannon disputed but I reaffirmed.
[21] Ibid., p. 9.
[22] Ibid., p. 10.
[23] Ibid., p. 10.
[24] This can be thought of simply as Newtonian time. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389-400.
[25] Adorno, Theodor. “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda.” The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 227.
[26] On givenness, see Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
[27] See Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History.”
[28] Tomba, “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.”
[29] Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 93.