The International Political Economy of Risk

Rationalism, Calculation and Power

Robert Deuchars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351146302
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The discipline of international political economy faces a number of critical challenges at present, as it seeks to incorporate a number of relatively new issues, one of these being 'risk'. This captivating and enlightening study redresses the neglect of 'risk' in this field by focusing on objectivist rationalism. Highlighting some of the calculative practices rationalism makes possible, it demonstrates the deeply political nature of supposedly value-neutral technical pursuits such as accounting, auditing, the practice of statistics, sampling, and credit rating. All these practices are implicated in modernist forms of power and governance. The volume draws on work from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political economy, and philosophy, to explain the apparent unravelling of the rationalist quest for more reliable forms of knowledge. It is highly suitable for courses on international relations/international political economy.

Part One
Pre-Modernist Precursors and Modernist Practices

Chapter 1
Narratives of Risk: Fortuna and Virtù

'it is not always easy to begin at the beginning, if only because the identification of a point of origin depends on where we think we are now'.¹

Introduction

In the pre-modernist western European world, prudence or practical reason was generally not privileged much in philosophical debate or in everyday conversation. These concepts were certainly debated and discussed but almost always within a framework of thinking that necessarily included the concept of fortune.² Suffice to say that fate and divine providence were the governing motifs in explanations of good or bad outcomes.³ It is safe to say that by medieval times Christian notions of the will of God had been successfully merged with the memory of Greek and Roman deities, including those concerning luck, chance and what we would today describe as risk.⁴

The purpose of this chapter is to explore what might be described as a significant turning point in Western thought. During the Renaissance and subsequent to it there was a revolution in the European outlook as the temporal power of the Christian Church diminished. I will characterise this change as an ontological re-orientation in that the 'common sense' of the era was to undergo significant transformation. In Europe the existing social ontology, dominated by the Church, had fixed notions of, for example, time and nature. The leading Church universities articulated these perspectives and used their position as the owners of official knowledge to maintain their power over the lay population.

Renaissance ideas were to lay the foundations for a substantive change in the social ontology of Europe that subsequently would firmly take hold as a consequence of attacks on religious orthodoxy, the advent of scientific discovery and a reconfigured attitude to what knowledge was, how knowledge was acquired and what its fundamental purpose should be. The outcomes of this shift in thinking may be characterised as a view of the universe fundamentally different from that of a cosmos created and wholly controlled by God. It marked a shift towards chaos inhabited by humans. Thinkers of this era were becoming aware of a new belief in their own power to intervene, powers over nature and over others, powers allowing them to secure, at least in theory, a more predictable future. Their ideas, over time, would infiltrate all aspects of human life in Europe and beyond.

The idea that man could substantively construct his own future, based not on a single plan laid down by God or by the submission to chance (Fortuna), emerged as a significant force during the Renaissance period. This period marked the beginnings of a world-view that objectified the universe, subjecting it, firstly, to philosophical subjugation, and secondly, to temporal and spatial conquest. Both of these aspirations were to be achieved through human endeavour.

In order to introduce and elaborate upon what I consider to be the emergence of a substantive shift in the human relationship to time, nature and human agency I will consider some examples of the recognition of the human ability to influence the future in the work of Niccold Machiavelli and his contemporaries. In doing so I will elaborate upon the themes that this work explores. The first of these themes is human reason as problem solving – the essence of the rationalism that would come to dominate Enlightenment thinking. The other major theme is that of control, i.e. human control over others and over nature, which is closely connected to the belief in the predictability of future outcomes. In Machiavelli's time these themes were explored within a framework of other competing themes. These other themes were that of virtù or the belief in the possibilities of action against the idea of fortuna, or chance. The long and steady erosion of chance paved the way for a more predictable and governable world.

The coupling of predictability and control was highly significant for the creation and the securing of wealth and was also arguably essential for the development of capitalism on a large scale, the classic examples being the maritime risk-takers, whose 'adventures', made them popular European heroes. It must also be noted here, that although a significant change in the European outlook did take place during this period, the full reasons are not well understood, and in all likelihood, will continue to remain the subject of competing attempts at explanation and understanding.

For the purpose of completeness, I will conclude this chapter with a short section on the departure point chosen by many for the investigation of western modernity and its leitmotif of rationalism, namely René Descartes. Descartes is quite rightly considered as the thinker in western philosophy that acted as the philosophical bridge between nascent modernity in the Italian humanist movement and Western modernity proper. The Renaissance can also be considered as the bridge that made a Descartes possible.

The Renaissance Context

It is fair to state that the Renaissance is considered to be one of the most explored periods in Western European history. Equally true is the level of disagreement as to the actual significance of this era for modernity.

Renaissance in translation means 'rebirth' so we must ask to what extent was this period significantly different from the Middle Ages, or dark ages, as they are sometimes referred to. There is considerable debate as to whether the Renaissance was a fast break with the past or simply an extension of the late medieval period.⁵ Whatever the case, the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism came to the fore, firstly in Italy from whence it spread to other parts of Europe as Italian scholars travelled abroad and as the scholars of other countries visited Italy to seek out and copy its texts and the new topics and methods of teaching.

According to Peter Burke, humanism is a term that cannot be precisely defined. It tends to be used in two distinct ways. The first refers to the belief in the dignity of man and a concern with secular issues. The second and narrower usage refers to '[t]he men known in fifteenth century Italy as humanistae, in other words the teachers of the studia humanitatis or 'humanity' (as opposed to divinity), generally defined to include grammar, rhetoric, ethics, poetry and history'.⁶ The humanists attracted considerable interest from abroad, very slowly at first, as there was a considerable degree of resistance as well as favourable reception to this new work, that stood so opposed to that of the northern European educational institutions, and to the established and rather fixed European cosmology.

It would appear obvious that the rediscovery of some texts from antiquity and their dissemination amongst a very narrow segment of the population cannot account for a whole movement. There is ample evidence that the medieval period was not devoid of awareness of classical texts, either.⁷ Humanism was not simply a concern with classical literature. To understand it better we need to place it within its social and political context.

By the mid thirteenth century Italian city republics had been in existence for around one hundred and fifty years, in the case of Venice even longer. Their influence was not widespread outside these politico-social arrangements that were quite specific to Italy. These arrangements included communes, republican institutions and notions of the common good, distributive justice and the theory of the mixed constitution. It is for these reasons, Rubinstein argues, that the positive reception of Aristotle's Politics at the time was a peculiarly Italian affair.⁸

The Italian republics shared some of the characteristics of the Greek civilization, or at least the interpreters of Aristotle, such as Aquinas, could find enough commonality between Aristotle and his own time for the Politics to be regarded as politically relevant and to be used to justify idealised modes of governance in the city republics. Some interpreters took Aristotle as justification for monarchical rule. Others used the same work to justify republican rule.

Along with the rediscovery of Greek texts, the Roman influence on early Renaissance thought was particularly apposite for the city based republics whose members identified their origins with the civic community of the Roman republic, not in terms of the Roman Empire but in terms of the idea of the city and its citizens. It should be noted that Italy during the time of the Renaissance was dominated by a number of principalities and petty tyrannies. Papal authority was influential but not completely hegemonic. The Italian city-states were also under constant threat from more powerful neighbours.

Luce Giard argues that whilst the universities did play a role in reconfiguring Renaissance culture the revival of the idea of the individual as a citizen was much more influential. The re-emergence of the citizen, he argues, helped to build the foundations for a vigorous civil society which managed to free itself partly from the bonds of the Church dominated universities and helped to constitute a larger lay intelligentsia, aided by the spread of printing and the practice of informal public gatherings.⁹ In simple terms, the idea of the citizen had to be inculcated into people. It did not fall from the sky. People had to learn firstly what it meant to be a citizen, how citizens behave and what the limits of citizenship mean. In other words people had to be trained to be citizens and if we accept Giard's assertions then we cannot overlook the considerations of power that a reconfiguration of this new individual invoked.

Jacob Burckhardt's much criticised but highly influential book the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has been central to the debate on the discovery or re-discovery of the individual. There are many examples to be found in antiquity that place the problem of the knowledge of man at the centre of philosophical inquiry and we should not imagine that the individual and his place in the world is a discovery peculiar to the Renaissance. It is fair to say that the humanist scholars of the Renaissance placed a greater emphasis on the nature of human beings as individuals than as members of the group, possessing themselves a more distinct inner sense of self than their medieval predecessors, had.

Burckhardt's thesis is basically that prior to the Renaissance in Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, man was essentially unaware of himself as an individual. Medieval conceptions of man always placed him into some other order, whether that be of family, faith or community.¹⁰ Burckhardt argued that the originality of the Italians was that they freed man from the closed world of the dark ages and he notes that once this had been achieved, 'the Italian mind ... turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and form'.¹¹

In their discussion of Burckhardt's thesis, Kerrigan and Braden focus on the importance of the apparent, but perhaps dim awareness of the power of objectification. They suggest that Burckhardt's thesis has a double significance. Firstly, that in order to view the world as an external object means breaking with tradition and medieval conceptions of man and the universe and secondly, that the realisation of the external world as something that lies outside man encourages introspection and a concern with the self as a distinct object of inquiry in its own right. Thus they note:

Burckhardt seems to have overestimated the extent to which the Renaissance actually contributed ... to modern scientific methodology; but his interest is not with achieved knowledge as such but with the psychic reflex to the effort of objectification, which does not straiten the subjective but clarifies it. To become conscious of the empty space between ourselves and external reality is to become newly conscious of the self as its own world, something separate from that reality. Detachment fosters a sense of particularized identity.¹²

Kristeller supports this distinction between involvement and detachment but he suggests that the current of individuality in the Renaissance was not so clear cut. According to Kristeller the notion of man and his 'natural' dignity was overemphasised by some Renaissance thinkers. Kristeller argues against the elevation of blind acceptance of the 'cheap and easy solution', being the centrality of man in the universe. He finds it quite appropriate instead to consider that opposing currents would be prevalent during the Renaissance as they were prior to the Renaissance and as they are today. Thus he notes:

The notion that man occupies an exalted place in the universe, and the opposite idea that he is a small and powerless creature at the mercy of far stronger divine, natural, or historical forces, are not on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE: PRE-MODERNIST PRECURSORS AND MODERNIST PRACTICES
• PART TWO: MODERNITY AS A PROBLEM
• PART THREE: MODERNIST ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM-SOLVING
• PART FOUR: METAMODERNIST ATTEMPTS AT CONTEXTUALISING RISK
• Conclusion: An International Political Economy of Risk
• Bibliography
• Index