Epistemic Liberalism

A Defence

Adam James Tebble

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138298460
• eBook ISBN: 9781317310327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the wake of what has come to be called the 'cultural turn', it is often asked how the state should respond to the different and sometimes conflicting justice claims made by its citizens and what, ultimately, is the purpose of justice in culturally diverse societies.

Building upon the work of a diversity of theorists, this book demonstrates that there is a distinct 'epistemic' tradition of liberalism that can be used to critique contemporary responses to cultural diversity and their underlying principles of justice. It critically examines multicultural, nationalist and liberal egalitarian approaches and argues that an epistemic account of liberalism, that emphasises social complexity rather than cultural diversity or homogeneity, is the most appropriate response to the question of justice in modern culturally diverse societies.

Epistemic Liberalism will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary political theory and philosophy, liberal political theory and the politics of culture and identity.

Part I

The knowledge problem revisited

1 Liberalism and the knowledge problem

Economics and the knowledge problem

Recent history has witnessed an upsurge in the normative significance of notions of culture and identity to politics and to political theory. In the words of Jürgen Habermas, political theory has witnessed a shift ‘from “issues of distribution” to a concern with “the grammar of forms of life”’.¹ At the same time, and writing with respect to the contemporary significance of Hayek’s epistemic brand of liberalism, John Gray has argued that the collapse of Communism, of which this Austrian School economist’s critique of central planning offers at least one powerful explanation, has rendered obsolete the central arguments of his corpus. There are, then, at least two difficulties that one faces when seeking to connect epistemic liberalism to issues of culture and identity in the theory of justice. First, the contemporary terrain of normative discourse now includes debates about justice, culture, identity and the legal and social positioning of the members of society’s diverse groups and communities to which epistemic liberalism’s largely distributive concerns appear tangential. Second, the kinds of institutions most susceptible to the economic arguments thinkers such as Hayek did make are for the most part no longer extant and the prospect of their reintroduction seems remote. Indeed, even in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, our political choice still remains largely one between varieties of liberal market order, and this too is a choice which theories such as Hayek’s may not be able to help us with.

One way to respond to these difficulties would be to follow egalitarian liberals such as Barry who argue that the consequences for political theory of the post-socialist paradigm shift are not to be welcomed. As we will see in Chapter 5, central to Barry’s thesis is the claim that the cultural turn in politics and political theory is not only a distraction from more important distributive concerns. In what is little more than a twenty-first century version of the politics of divide-and-rule, he claims that multiculturalism plays into the hands of those wishing to perpetuate economic inequality by enticing the most vulnerable to engage in divisive and internecine political conflict.² Rather than be unhelpfully preoccupied with culture and identity, Barry suggests that we devote attention to economic distribution, particularly unequal economic distribution. However, despite what we will see is the merit of much of what Barry has to say in this respect, it would be overly hasty to disregard the concerns of culture and identity insofar as they relate to justice. This is so not least because there are a host of issues, ranging from the social and legal positioning of members of vulnerable groups and the status of the values and traditions that give content and expression to their identities, to the question of the most appropriate response to social processes of discrimination and marginalisation, that are relevant to justice and therefore to which any adequate theory of justice needs to respond. Rather than following Barry’s approach it will be argued that the appropriate way for epistemic liberalism to respond to the cultural turn is to directly address its concerns. Crucially, however, doing this successfully requires reading Hayek in the appropriate way, and central to this is his conception of and approach to the economic knowledge problem.

Subjectivity, complexity and the knowledge problem

Hayek’s earlier work is famously marked by a concern with the knowledge that motivates and guides economic behaviour.³ More specifically, he is concerned with the implications the subjective nature this knowledge has for questions concerning the explanation of that behaviour and for the identification of the preconditions for adequate resource allocation in large-scale or, in his own terminology, complex societies.⁴ But what does Hayek mean by ‘subjective’ and ‘complex’ in this context and why were these notions significant? By the former he wishes to emphasise that an explanation of economic behaviour and of the allocation and use of resources and goods resultant from it can only be had with reference to the knowledge and beliefs of particular individuals. Thus, if we seek to explain or predict the economic activity of individuals, or the overall distributive outcomes resultant from their decisions, we need to attend to what they know and believe – about themselves, about others and about the world – and how this motivates their activity rather than seek an understanding of it in objective terms and independently of them. As the historical example of the disvaluation and subsequent valuation of land initially perceived as blighted by, but subsequently blessed with, abundant oil reserves makes clear, our understanding of the purposes to which a resource may be put, or even whether it should be considered as a resource at all, depends not upon its objective features, but upon what particular people know and believe about it.⁵ Subjectivity is also noteworthy insofar as agents’ motivating knowledge and beliefs may often be erroneous and contradictory but, crucially, nonetheless relevant to an explanation of why resources end up being used in one way rather than another.⁶ Thus, an explanation of a shortage of oil and of the consequent increased demand for it and its substitutes can only be had with reference to individual agents, in this case acting upon the belief that oil was about to run out, even if it transpires that the original rumour that prompted their precipitous behaviour was erroneous or false.

In addition to his emphasis upon the subjectivity of knowledge, which leads Hayek to defend methodological individualism as the appropriate way to study economic activity, the other important aspect of his work in economics was his emphasis upon social complexity and the implications this had for the coordination of that knowledge in furtherance of either our individual or collective economic purposes.⁷ In the first instance Hayek notes that except in the case of the isolated and self-reliant ‘Robinson Crusoe’ figure, individuals typically depend upon one another to bring their economic plans to fruition. That is, and granted that the success of one’s own plan is unavoidably implicated in and therefore influenced by the actions of others with whom one is in contact, the success of our individual plans is reliant upon our having reasonable expectations about what others are doing so that we can coordinate our actions with theirs. Thus, if I aim to secure bundle of resources p I need to know what others – such as producers, traders or consumers of p – are doing as their actions will impact upon the chances of my being successful. In Hayek’s own terms, ‘one person’s actions are the other person’s data’ upon which he in part bases and executes his plans.⁸

It is in connection with the question of how the action-guiding and subjectively held knowledge of all the rest may come to be known, so that each may adjust their activities to the overall context in which they find themselves that complexity is significant in another respect. For in addition to the postulate about the unavoidable necessity of interpersonal coordination for the successful execution of plans, of equal importance for Hayek is the insight that its terms are fundamentally altered depending upon the scale at which it takes place. Central here is the distinction between what we may call small-scale or face-to-face societies, where each actor either is or with relative ease can be brought into direct contact with all the rest, and large scale, complex or what Hayek also calls, following Adam Smith, David Hume and others, ‘Great’ or large societies, where this is not so.⁹ In the case of the former, neither the subjectivity of knowledge and belief nor social scale present significant difficulties to the successful coordination of actions either for individual purposes or for collective purposes previously determined by one, a few, or all, because knowledge of the conditions to which adjustments may be needed is either very similar or identical.¹⁰ Thus, if seeking to determine how one’s own actions should be coordinated with those of others, or of how to collectively decide what should be done with resources, all that would need to be done in a face-to-face society, such as that to be found in a remote tribe, is convene the equivalent of a campfire meeting. Here it may be decided, for example, that most will tend to crops and prepare food, a smaller group will go hunting, and a still smaller number will mend a leaking roof. Similarly, in the case of an unforeseen event disrupting the underlying context within which individual and collective purposes are pursued, coordination in a face-to-face society can be re-established without great difficulty, owing to the direct nature of social relations in it. Thus, to continue our example of the remote tribe, we can imagine a violent overnight storm destroying a number of huts, thus necessitating a significant shift in individual activities away from crop tending and other tasks to material sourcing and reconstruction, so that economic activity is smoothly realigned with underlying economic conditions. Similarly, and to take a more dynamic example, in face-to-face scenarios we can imagine how coordination would be seamlessly re-established in real-time, when for example the tribal hunting party’s chase trajectory is temporarily disrupted either by an unexpected manoeuvre on the part of its quarry, or by one or more of the hunters going in the wrong direction, or falling. In such scenarios coordination is re-established by those who are directly acquainted with what has happened signalling to the rest what additional adjustment manoeuvres are now required to bring the hunting party’s actions back into equilibrium and realignment with respect to its goal.

Matters for Hayek are quite different, however, in complex societies where ‘plans are determined upon simultaneously but independently by a number of persons’.¹¹ Central here is the idea that in the overwhelming majority of cases the members of such societies are not in direct contact with one another and are therefore generally unaware of one another’s existence, let alone of what they are doing, or of the subjective knowledge and belief that motivates their activity. Unlike social relations in face-to-face societies complex societies are marked by what we may call spatio-temporal distancing where each individual finds himself separated by time and by distance from the vast majority of all the rest. At the same time, however, and this is the crucial point for Hayek, despite being largely free of such direct social bonds, the success of each individual’s plan, or for that matter of a predetermined plan for all, still continues to be dependent upon the subjectively held and action-motivating knowledge and beliefs of now mutually unseen and unknown others insofar as the consequences of what all the rest do will impact upon what each decides ought to be done.

There are several corollaries of the subjectivity of economic knowledge and of social complexity for Hayek. Firstly, and precisely because in a complex society agents act overwhelmingly under conditions of isolation from those whose behaviour nonetheless impacts upon their own decisions, the knowledge upon which each agent’s successful economic activity depends is dispersed amongst many actors and as such is never given in its entirety to any particular individual or to society as a whole. Under such a ‘division of knowledge’ each actor possesses a tiny and typically unique fragment of all the knowledge of economic conditions that exists across society, including preferences, their relative intensity and the ways and means that different combinations of resources may be employed to satisfy them.¹² Related to the fact of its dispersal and disaggregated nature is the crucially important fact that this subjectively held knowledge is often circumstantial and fleeting. Unlike our religious, theoretical and scientific knowledge and belief, which is held to be true or false of the invariant features of the world, the vast majority of the knowledge relevant to economic decision-making – such as knowledge of the availability of a particular resource, of a factor of production, or of what somebody wants and of the value they attach to it – is knowledge of specific and temporary circumstances, or ‘of the particular circumstances of time and place’.¹³ This is not to say, of course, that our scientific, theoretical and other kinds of knowledge and belief may not also impact in important ways upon the kinds of economic decisions that we make. What we know and believe will undoubtedly play a vital role in this regard.¹⁴ But Hayek’s point here is that this is by no means the only type of knowledge which does so. Whilst perhaps not as edifying or stimulating as our knowledge of the laws of physics, or of our beliefs, if any, of our place in the cosmic order, our knowledge that a resource is currently in lesser or greater demand, or in shorter or greater supply than it was before in a particular locale, is often of greater significance insofar as its role in motivating our economic decision-making is concerned.

The fact of the fleeting and transient nature of much of the knowledge relevant to economic decision-making was also profoundly significant for Hayek with respect to the idea of complexity in another sense, for our actions are not just responses to unexpected external influences and shocks that cause sudden and relatively temporary changes in the availability of resources.¹⁵ As his earlier acknowledgement of the mutual reliance of our individual plans upon those of others makes clear, our decisions are also responses to constant changes in our economic context brought on by what other agents have decided to do in the past and are doing in the present. The knowledge indispensable to economic decision-making, therefore, is fleeting and transient precisely because of continuous changes brought about by the adaptive responses of unseen others to changes in their circumstances, of which we know little if anything at all. It is in his connection, moreover, that there emerges a strong parallel between Hayek’s economic thought and the idea, advanced for instance by Charles Taylor, that what we know and believe about the social world impacts upon the nature of that world.¹⁶ Central here is the idea of the economy of a complex society being what is known in more recent scholarship as a complex adaptive system (in contrast, we may say, to our earlier ‘simple adaptive system’ example of the tribal hunting party). Of particular significance in this respect are two features that complex adaptive systems are said to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part I: The knowledge problem revisited
• Part II: Justice and the arbitration of cultural practice
• Part III: Epistemic liberalism
• Bibliography
• Index