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Le Banquet
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Nikolay Koposov
Today, most of us would find democracy logically irrefutable. No wonder, for democracy corresponds to the structures that our mind, at the present stage of its development, projects onto the world. The world we inhabit is an atomistic and nominalistic universe brought about by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its aftermaths. Although nowadays naturalists might not fully share such an ontology, we people from the street, including social scientists, still draw our metaphors from the classical mechanics that we have learned at school. However, democracy does not necessarily appear logical to those who perceive the structure of the universe in a different way. Thus, medieval people, who believed the world to be a hierarchy of ideal essences, could not help seeing monarchy as the most natural form of government. It is highly plausible that to the bearers of non-Western cultures democracy may look as counter-intuitive today as it looked to the inhabitants of the medieval West. The idea of this article comes from a feeling that the logic of democracy, as it has evolved over the last three centuries, is currently undergoing a very profound transformation, if not erosion. The intellectual revolution linked to the development of the modern science and the modern system of social and political concepts was also the birthplace of the logic of democracy. The emergence of the new logical standards was essential to the making of modernity. Aren't we now living through an intellectual transformation comparable to the one that occurred in the eighteenth century, in the period that Reinhart Koselleck calls Sattelzeit ("saddle period"), but a kind of "Sattelzeit in reverse" ? In this case, our logical standards can not escape change. According to Koselleck, the conceptual revolution of the Sattelzeit and the emergence of the contemporary system of social and political concepts were determined by the changing perception of historical time, which came to be dominated by the idea of progress. However, the formation of the new type of thinking involved a more complex mental change and began earlier. In this article I'll examine the birth of the atomistic universe and its consequences for the logic of democracy. I'll start by briefly summarizing the interconnection between the model of the "closed world," seen as a hierarchy of ideal essences ; medieval social theories and Aristotelian logic. In doing so, I'll be referring mostly to French medieval and early modern social thought, which is the classical case of the "society of orders." Then I'll consider theories of induction, developed by two mid-nineteenth-century British thinkers, William Whewell and John Stuart Mill, whom I find representative for the logic of democracy in its equally classical setting of English liberalism. Finally, I'll explore the conservative implications of the new approaches to logic, as reflected in German thought of the early twentieth century, and suggest that there exists a tendency toward a reanimation of this style of thought in the contemporary world.
Logic and Society in Medieval Europe The first attempt to present society as an atomistic structure was undertaken by Thomas Hobbes within the framework of radical absolutist thought. In the more standard versions of absolutist political theory, however, the idea of a society consisting of isolated individuals and opposed to the state was subordinated to the model of politeia, in which social groups were seen as socio-political entities. In contrast, the liberal model of society inherited Hobbes' notion of absolute individuals equal to and isolated from each other. This system of imagination came to replace the one that is usually referred to as the Aristotelian cosmos, or the world seen as a hierarchy of ideal essences. Aristotelian logic corresponded to the metaphysics of a "closed world." According to this logic, to define a concept one has to indicate its genus proximus and differentia specifica, the latter consisting in necessary and sufficient conditions of category membership. But a property selected as the basis for a definition can't be accidental for the concept's meaning. Good definition has to refer to a limited number of the most important properties of the objects in question and thus to "catch" their essence. But given that the definition of any concept refers to its genus proximus, the universe presupposed by the Aristotelian logic is nothing else but a hierarchy of essences having an all-inclusive genus (ta panta) on its top. The highest genus could be easily associated with the idea of a rational substance (logos), and thus the universe, seen as a logically ordained closed
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The Collapse of Aristotelian Cosmos From the seventeenth century on, we find more and more elements of the atomistic world view influencing both logic and social theories. In particular, the formation of philosophical empiricism, already resulted, by the time of Francis Bacon, in systematic attacks on Aristotelian logics. Nevertheless, the Aristotelian school continued to dominate British logic at least until John Locke, and it was only in the eighteenth century that a new logic centered on induction became firmly established. In France, "The Logic of Port-Royal" (1662) clearly introduced the distinction, still clumsy in medieval logic, between sense and reference (or the comprehension and extension of general names). This was a decisive step in the liberation of bodies from the power of essences . One of the major consequences of the gradual erosion of the "closed world" metaphysics was the break from the style of thinking based on direct inference from attributes to substances . Material bodies, and not their properties, came to be identified with substance. The world of qualities had been replaced by that of objects. Consequently, society appeared as consisting of individuals that were to be ordered empirically, and not of pre-established "orders" seen as essences. By the end of the seventeenth century, a multidimensional vision of social status became sufficiently widespread to allow for complex empirical classifications of society, similar to that reflected in the Tarif of the first Capitation (1695), the first general direct tax in French history. In this document, 569 "ranks" of Louis XIV's subjects were empirically grouped into 22 tax "classes" characteristically designated by figures, for there were no available names to be given to them. Class theories of society, which were gradually becoming popular over the course of the eighteenth century, also presupposed an image of the multitude divided into groups. In contradistinction to orders, classes were thought of not so much as essences logically preexisting to individuals, but rather as classificatory concepts referring only to a portion of the individuals' properties . From the mid-seventeenth century on, words like "nobility" and "bourgeoisie" were widely used to refer to social groups, so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century they came to be understood first of all as collective rather than abstract names. Characteristically, the concept of the working class which emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, was by no means an abstract
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A Prototype Theory in Victorian Britain : William Whewell A brief excursion into the theory of categorization is needed at this point . Empirical classification tends to produce categories that we often fail to describe in terms of Aristotelian logic. To the extent that the properties of empirical objects, including individuals, are grouped in an arbitrary way, the general and abstract names referring to these properties are of limited use for classification purposes. Most of these names tend to be understood analytically : we seek to define their meaning by emphasizing a limited number of their connotations. But whatever property we chose as the basis of our classification, we soon realize that our categories bring together individuals that are similar in some, but different in too many other respects. Confronted with such a situation, we often start to classify empirically, "calculating" synthetic individual ranks in our imagination and grouping together those ranks that resemble each other "in general," instead of distributing them according to the preexisting "analytic" categories designated by general names. In doing so, we produce prototypical (or polithetic) categories. They are built around the objects that in light of our previous experience appear as the "good examples" of a certain type (not always clearly defined). "Less good examples," and even marginal ones, can be associated to these objects on the basis of a holistic "family resemblance." Prototypical categories differ from Aristotelian ones in several ways : they do not have to satisfy the requirement of necessary and sufficient conditions, and they appear as internally structured (have a hard core and a periphery). It is possible to belong to a prototypical category to this or that extent. In the late 1970s - early 1980s, there was a strong tendency in the cognitive sciences to dismiss Aristotelian logic as a purely artificial one and to consider prototypical categories as the only kind of "natural" human categories. However, more recent research suggests that human categorization is multiform and that we often form categories that follow different logics at the same time. But although we can form prototypical categories, we may not have appropriate names to give to them. Empirical ordering operates with unnamed objects that preexist categories of language and produces groups of objects that do not have to coincide with those for which language has names. Under these conditions, the only consistent solution is to attribute to each object and to each empirical category a conventional sign, little different from proper name . But for the sake of cognitive economy we can't help relating general names to empirical categories. That is why in practice different kinds of compromises take place in our reasoning. Many notions that we use are designated by common names that have a general meaning, but at the same time refer to concrete occurrences ("good examples") and collective entities. They function partly as common and partly as proper names, to different degrees in different cases. We can come back to the logic of democracy. On the one hand, liberalism needs abstract individuals considered
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Prototypes and Universal Values : John Stuart Mill Mill had to respond to this. He was a liberal of a rather complex vintage who endeavored to give the idea of the absolute individual a more moderate form by relating it to that of culture. However, the framework of his social thought was undeniably atomistic. The individuals that he deals with are considered before they become members of any social group, including society itself . The moral sciences have to be based on the laws of individual psychology. But given that human nature, contrary to what Jeremy Bentham thought, can't be reduced to pursuit of pleasures, individual behavior is subject to the law of the plurality of causes. This is why, again in contradistinction to Bentham, who thought it possible to deduce the laws of society from those of human nature, Mill relies on a combination of inductive and deductive procedures. In doing so, he leaves more space for deduction than Whewell. This method Mill calls concrete deductive method . Hence, Mill's theory of classification seeks to marginalize prototypical effects and to include them in a system dominated by the logic of general names. The fact that some categories are actually structured in terms of types doesn't mean, for Mill, that feature analysis has nothing to do with empirical classification. An object can be apprehended as a whole, but also described as a list of properties . The gap between synthetic judgment and deductive reasoning no longer looks as dramatic as it appears in Whewell's writings. It is true that necessary and sufficient conditions of category membership cease to be necessary ; they become hypothetical properties that members of a category are likely to possess (nowadays the same probabilistic argument is used by the adversaries of the prototype theory). But these hypothetical properties are expressed by general names, which thus appear as an unproblematic tool used to refer to empirical categories. Atomism is safely complemented by a nominalism, thus allowing for the assertion of universal truths about the atomistic universe. Speaking more concretely about Mill's understanding of social structure, it is evident that he avoided thinking of social groups as heavy substances that could damage the vision of society as composed of equal individuals. By his time, "languages of class" had become widely spoken in Europe, a fact that contributed to a reification of the concept by suggesting that classes were fundamental entities of which society consisted . Mill took the notion of classes in its original physiocratic sense, according to which society is divided into three categories "laborers, capitalists and landlords" (although he thought this division inapplicable to many empirical societies). But given that human behavior obeys to the principle of the plurality of causes, classification based on wealth must be complemented by other classifications . Mill's emphasis on the plurality of factors of social differentiation was a means of achieving a balance between atomism and universalism such as would allow him to keep the idea of the autonomous individual and to exorcise anything like natural kinds that could destroy his atomistic world of universal of truths. To sum up, Mill's theory of induction seems to be most representative of a rather unstable logical balance achieved by the liberal thought of the nineteenth century, and implicitly contained in the contemporary notion of democracy, while Whewell was challenging the logic of democracy, exploring its limits and suggesting going beyond it, by drawing from atomistic metaphysics more radical logical conclusions than Mill.
Type Concepts in Germany : Neo-Kantians (Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber) Whewell was almost completely forgotten soon after his death. However, the tendency that he had exemplified was carried on by other thinkers, mostly in Germany, which seems natural given the affinity of his thought with some postulates of the German historical school. At the turn of the twentieth century, the German Neo-Kantians Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) and Max Weber (1864-1920) suggested a theory of concept formation in the cultural sciences,
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Type Concepts in Germany : Radical Conservatives (Otto Brunner) No wonder they were echoed in the thinking of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and other right-wing German intellectuals. Schmitt's notion of konkrete Ordnungen ("concrete orders") clearly develops the idea of historical individuals apprehended synthetically, related to concrete contexts and escaping definition in the analytical terms of "bourgeois-liberal" legal theory. From jurisprudence, this notion was transferred to history by Otto Brunner (1898-1982), professor of medieval history in Vienna, the founder of Begriffsgeschichte and, alongside Schmitt, one of the leading German intellectuals involved with the Nazi regime. For Brunner, konkrete Ordnung became a means to overcome the analytical distinction of state and society, and to oppose to these abstract notions "concrete
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