Political Contingency

Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen

Ian Shapiro, Sonu Bedi

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814740729
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

History is replete with instances of what might, or might not, have been. By calling something contingent, at a minimum we are saying that it did not have to be as it is. Things could have been otherwise, and they would have been otherwise if something had happened differently. This collection of original essays examines the significance of contingency in the study of politics. That is, how to study unexpected, accidental, or unknowable political phenomena in a systematic fashion. Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. How might history be different had these events not happened? How should social scientists interpret the significance of these events and can such unexpected outcomes be accounted for in a systematic way or by theoretical models? Can these unpredictable events be predicted for? Political Contingency addresses these and other related questions, providing theoretical and historical perspectives on the topic, empirical case studies, and the methodological challenges that the fact of contingency poses for the study of politics.

Contributors: Sonu Bedi, Traci Burch, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Gregory A. Huber, Courtney Jung, David R. Mayhew, Philip Pettit, Andreas Schedler, Mark R. Shulman, Robert G. Shulman, Ian Shapiro, Susan Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and David Wootton

Part I

Roots of Contingency

Chapter 1

From Fortune to Feedback
Contingency and the Birth of Modern Political Science

David Wootton

Events, dear boy, events.

—Harold Macmillan when asked what might prevent his government achieving its objectives

Hydraulic Engineering: Machiavelli and Naudé¹

This chapter is about a curiously elusive subject: the idea of contingency in early modern thought. It is not that the subject does not exist, for the concept of contingency was clearly understood. But early modern thinkers, with a few striking exceptions, found it almost impossible to focus on contingency: for most authors it was at best something glimpsed at the periphery of their vision, a liminal concept that represented the point where knowledge inevitably shaded into ignorance. In 1623 Sir Edward Digby wrote, “The eyes of human knowledge cannot see beyond its [human knowledge’s] horizon; it cannot ascertain future contingents.”² In 1625 Francis Bacon wrote, “But it is not good to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy.” The world of contingency was thus also the world of the unpredictable and the disorderly. John Donne, in a sermon of 1616, spoke of being “Exposed to the disposition of the tyde, to the rage of the winde, to the wantonness of the eddy, and to innumerable contingencies”; over three centuries later Macmillan was to find himself similarly at the mercy of events.

The problem early modern thinkers had with the contingent was not just that they saw it as shapeless, formless, disorderly, to be compared to a wind or an eddy. For scholastic philosophers and for Cartesians all knowledge was knowledge of things which were necessarily true (in the case of the scholastics, capable of being expressed in the form of a syllogism). By definition, the contingent thus lay outside the territory of the truly knowable, in a world where one had to make do with prudence, at best, or else with opinion: for Abraham Fraunce, writing in 1588, there were necessary reasons, “whereof cometh science,” and contingent reasons, “whence cometh opinion.” To enter the world of the contingent was to enter the world of homespun wisdom, of the maxim and the adage: a stitch in time saves nine, forewarned is forearmed, buyer beware. It was also to enter the world of human agency: “As these impediments are contingent,” wrote William Petty in Political Arithmetick (1687), “so also are they removeable.”

This brings us to a third order of difficulty. For orthodox early modern Christians, God’s omniscience meant that He had perfect foreknowledge of all future events. The future, seen from God’s point of view, was never contingent but always necessary. As Robert Burton put it in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “Columbus did not find out America by chance, but God directed him . . . it was contingent to him, but necessary to God.” A particular problem within the general territory of foreknowledge was presented by the question of freedom of the will. Some thinkers defined the contingent as everything that was not determined in advance, as Thomas Hobbes did: “By contingents, I understand all things which may be done and may not be done, may happen or may not happen, by reason of the indetermination or accidental concurrence of the causes.” But others defined the contingent as specifically that territory of uncertainty that was associated with freedom of choice and voluntary action. Thus for John Salkeld (1613) the contingent was synonymous with that which is “dependent of man’s will.” For these authors the whole territory of the unknowable was made up of the contingent together with the accidental, which consisted of unpredictable events, such as an ax head flying off its shaft and killing a passer-by.

Theologians divided into two groups. The Augustinians (Jansenists, Calvinists) denied that there was such a thing as free will. Jonathan Edwards, in 1754, described it as “This contingency, this efficient nothing, this effectual no-Cause.” For them, contingency was either an illusion or, at best, a purely subjective experience, a sense of not being compelled by any external agent. The will was in fact determined and enslaved, and thus there was nothing inherently unpredictable about human action. Their opponents (Jesuits, Arminians, Socinians) argued that human beings had real freedom of choice. At the extreme, this might lead to the claim that even God could not know for certain what would happen, that he too could only know the future conjecturally. More conservatively, it led to the claim that where free choices were involved, one could not predict the future on the basis of the past, and so no human being could know in advance what would happen. God, however, being outside time, did not need to predict in order to see the future. The whole of this vast literature can be briefly summarised in a single sentence from David Hume: “To reconcile the indifference and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, and yet free the Deity from being the author of sin, has been found hitherto to exceed the power of all philosophy.”³

Moreover all orthodox Christians believed in divine providence: thus they held that God not only foreknew what would happen, but also ensured that what happened served his purposes. The doctrine of divine providence was generally held to be incompatible with the view that there might be random or chance outcomes, even, for example, when drawing lots. Rather, the underlying purpose behind events had been concealed from us. Columbus’s discovery of America was thus doubly necessary: God knew it would happen, and it was part of God’s plan that it should happen.

There were thus four good reasons for dismissing the contingent as unknowable: it was random; it was illogical; it was arbitrary; it was impenetrable. And yet, despite these apparently insuperable obstacles, there is an early modern discourse on contingency in the context of both politics and history.

To be sure, this discourse has not been widely acknowledged in recent literature on the subject. Thus, for example, in The Science of Conjecture, James Franklin represents Machiavelli as someone unable to formulate an account of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Franklin points to Machiavelli’s discussion of trade-offs in The Discourses (bk. 1, ch.6): all courses of action can have unfortunate unintended consequences, and so one must assess the costs as well as the benefits of a course of action before deciding whether to adopt it. Any consideration of costs needs to take into account the probability of different outcomes. “To consider only the payoff, and not the probability of occurrence, will not lead to a satisfactory decision theory,” Franklin writes, accusing Machiavelli of doing just that.⁴ But in fact in the course of the chapter Machiavelli does turn from payoffs to probabilities.

Sparta and Venice, Machiavelli argues, represent a type of republic well adapted to preserve itself over time, as both occupy a defensible site while presenting little threat to their neighbors. There is thus a high cost involved in attacking them, and only a limited motive to engage in such an attack. “But,” he then adds, “since everything to do with human beings is always in movement, and cannot be held steady, things are always getting better or worse.” A stable equilibrium is impossible to achieve, so one must construct a political system that is able to deal with unexpected eventualities. Only a state that is capable of conquering its neighbors has the capacity to respond to all possible eventualities. Thus Machiavelli identifies a course of action which appears to have high benefits and low costs, and rejects it precisely because what Franklin terms “the probability of occurrence” has been overestimated; instead he favors a course of action with higher costs (internal conflict and external hostility), higher benefits (imperial conquest), and a higher probability of occurrence (the capacity to deal with changing circumstances).

This is, I would argue, a paradigmatic example of Machiavelli’s mode of analysis. At every point he recommends strategies that increase the capacity to control events, and reduce vulnerability to events outside one’s control. A strong army is the central strategy. But a collective leadership is also a valuable resource. A leader whose style of decision- making ideally suits one situation—Fabius Cunctator resisting Hannibal, for example—may prove completely useless in a very different situation, such as when invading the territory of an enemy. Ideally leaders should adapt to changing circumstances, but this is normally beyond human capacity. In a monarchy leaders cannot easily be changed when new circumstances occur, but in a republic they can: republics are therefore inherently more resilient and adaptable than monarchies.⁵

In chapter 7 of The Prince, Machiavelli discusses what is for him a test case, the political strategy of Cesare Borgia. The paradox here is that Borgia failed, and yet Machiavelli recommends that anyone placed in his position should follow exactly the policies that he followed. On first seizing power, Borgia was dependent on support from his “uncle” the pope. He took every possible step to make his power independent of the papacy, so that when the papacy changed hands he would be able to survive; unfortunately it turned out that he only had five years before his uncle died, which was not quite enough time. Even so he would have been successful but for two things. First, although he had not acquired enough power to ensure the appointment of a pope of his choice, he did have the capacity to exercise an effective veto over who was selected, and he misused this veto. Second, none of his preparations allowed for the possibility that he might be severely ill at the key moment. This unforeseen event was fatal to his plans.

The key elements of Borgia’s strategy were thus entirely sound; he was defeated by a minor misjudgment and by an unlucky occurrence. One of Machiavelli’s central points here is that no policy can be guaranteed success. Borgia had a very high chance of succeeding; as it happens, he failed, but his failure is not in itself proof that his strategy was misconceived.

Franklin says “probabilistic discussions never occur with those of fortune,” for fortune is seen as a form of fatality, incompatible with the calculation of odds.⁶ If we turn to the famous penultimate chapter of The Prince, it is apparent that Franklin has once again misunderstood Machiavelli’s argument. There Machiavelli argues against those who believe that events are governed by chance, by fortune, by God, even though he admits that events are highly unpredictable. Roughly speaking, he thinks, half of our actions have the intended outcomes. Fortune, he goes on, is like a river which breaks its banks, destroying crops and buildings as it floods. But if one builds banks, barrages, and flood channels before the rains come, then one can either prevent the flood or minimize its consequences. He compares the Italy of his day to a plain without banks or barrages, while other states have taken better precautions and are more resilient and robust. Thus Machiavelli’s argument is that the extent to which one is at the mercy of events depends to a considerable degree upon the long-term strategies one has adopted. There are, he believes, strategies that give you the capacity to survive any deterioration in your circumstances—a deterioration that is bound to come one day, just as every river floods at some point—while others leave you defenseless. In short, the core of what Machiavelli tries to teach in his political theory is how to adopt strategies that prepare in advance for unpredictable events.

Machiavelli is also concerned with the more immediate tactics of contingency-control. The longest chapter in The Discourses is on conspiracies, more specifically assassinations. In it he seeks to establish the tactics that give one the maximum chance of killing a ruler before one’s plot is discovered: involve as few people as possible in the conspiracy; put nothing in writing; act as rapidly as possible; and be prepared to change plans quickly in response to unforeseen eventualities. Thus, whether a ruler or a subject, one does not have to be swept away by the flood of events, but can stand firm against it. Machiavelli may not use the language of probabilities, but it is quite clear that he thinks flood defenses are a perfect example of intelligent decision-making under conditions of uncertainty; all one needs to do is to identify in politics the equivalent to flood defenses. It is worth remarking that Machiavelli had practical experience of hydraulic engineering: together with Leonardo da Vinci, he had been involved in a plan to divert the Arno so that it no longer flowed through Pisa, thus cutting off Florence’s longstanding enemy from maritime trade.

Few later theorists followed Machiavelli’s line of argument. There are some obvious reasons for this. One is that there was soon an effective ban on any discussion of fortune because the term was regarded as pagan and anti-Christian. Another is that in The Prince Machiavelli was explicitly concerned with new rulers who were building institutions from scratch: later reason-of-state theorists assumed they were advising established rulers with pre-existing institutions. In The Discourses he sought to show the superiority of republics over monarchies: later theorists assumed they were advising kings. Their focus therefore shifted from strategy to tactics. A third is that reason-of-state theorists primarily concerned themselves with rational actors. Their assumption was that if one’s opponent acted irrationally, it would be easier to defeat him than if he acted rationally. Thus one need not consider the full range of possible human behavior; one need only consider and counter the likely actions of a rational agent. This enabled such theorists to treat political action as if it were highly predictable, even though they were aware that this was not in fact the case. Almost without exception, Machiavelli’s successors cease to concern themselv...