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| Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen on Justice (6) - Institutions and Persons (a) - Social Justice |
Disregarding the ongoing nuisance of idolising Rawls and, although Amartya Sen has all the pieces together to argue contrariwise, pretending that Rawls's naive and disjointed pronouncements of bad philosophy are in actuality a great feat of the discipline, the author of The Idea of Justice deserves to be commended for making valuable points of his own.
IGTU's Intermediary Conditions and Sen's Institutional Fundamentalism
In essence, Sen delivers a variant of what I refer to as the need to observe intermediary conditions as a prerequisite to assessing the quality of a social vision such as freedom.
For more, see my The Gap of Intermediary Conditions.
In my own research, which led me to appreciate the pivotal role of intermediary conditions, I did not see the objects of my critique - Hayek and other libertarianism (like von Mises) - as culpable of institutional fundamentalism, or to put it more accurately: the problem of neglecting intermediary conditions did not appear to me as the problem of institutional fundamentalism. Not surprisingly, as I suppose that the neglect of intermediary conditions is likely to be a more general deficiency in theory-building than the special defect entailed in institutional fundamentalism.
Hayek's Institutional Fundamentalism
To be sure, Hayek et al. are guilty of institutional fundamentalism. They offer us outlines of an institutional structure that is fundamentalist in as much as their blueprints are not reflected in reality and hence cannot be checked against it. Hayek's institutional fundamentalism is blatant in his strictly dichotomous approach to modern economic systems. He compares pure capitalism to pure socialism, predicts a transition of the former toward the latter as a consequence of softening the conditions underlying an ideal-typical capitalist economy, rather than offering a theory of the mixed economy that we experience as a result of modifying the conditions of an ideal free economy.
Why My Theory of Intermediary Conditions Is More General Than Sen's Theory of Institutional Fundamentalism
As Sen would no doubt happily admit, there are other approaches to "the Good Society" which do not follow the path of institutional fundamentalism. Yet these alternatives may still be guilty of insufficient consideration of intermediary conditions, as my example of Marxist expectations indicates.
In fact, social visions may collapse on account of many other intermediary conditions outside the field of institutions. In a word, intermediary conditions are a more comprehensive tool of analysis than institutional fundamentalism, which can only be discovered and specifically analysed by looking for intermediary conditions.
Sen selects a particular aspect of intermediary conditions that regulate the quality of a vision - namely, the results of the actual implementation of institutions deemed ideal.
To be sure, I define intermediary conditions as those conditions that determine whether the premises of a vision (“ … instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat …”) will actually result in the consequences expected to follow from the premises (“ … will overcome exploitation and lead to bliss … ”), or whether "intermediary conditions" distort or preclude the outcome.
Perceptively, Sen identifies a penchant in a number of important thinkers of liberty to express their ideals in terms of institutions (often rules, but also organisations). Against them, Sen raises the charge that the habit of defining the desired world by institutions is accompanied by an attitude tacitly assuming that institutions, once established, will take care of the envisioned ideals. This attitude Sen refers to as institutional fundamentalism.
The problem with institutional fundamentalism is, according to Sen, that it fails to inspect the actual performance of the recommended institutions. It leaves out the
To be sure, I define intermediary conditions as those conditions that determine whether the premises of a vision (“ … instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat …”) will actually result in the consequences expected to follow from the premises (“ … will overcome exploitation and lead to bliss … ”), or whether "intermediary conditions" distort or preclude the outcome.
Perceptively, Sen identifies a penchant in a number of important thinkers of liberty to express their ideals in terms of institutions (often rules, but also organisations). Against them, Sen raises the charge that the habit of defining the desired world by institutions is accompanied by an attitude tacitly assuming that institutions, once established, will take care of the envisioned ideals. This attitude Sen refers to as institutional fundamentalism.
The problem with institutional fundamentalism is, according to Sen, that it fails to inspect the actual performance of the recommended institutions. It leaves out the
- factors that are decisive in actually setting up the intended institution,
- the feasibility of their establishment,
- the nature of the institutions that are actually realised, as well as
- the specific performance of the realised institutions relative to the ideal.
An important point, yet also one that is in a specific sense trivial, showing how far removed political theory can be from the real world. Sen's observation is trivial in so far as such a reality check - in practice usually far from being trivial - ought to be a top concern of any social theory and should automatically and conscientiously applied.
Hayek's Institutional Fundamentalism
To be sure, Hayek et al. are guilty of institutional fundamentalism. They offer us outlines of an institutional structure that is fundamentalist in as much as their blueprints are not reflected in reality and hence cannot be checked against it. Hayek's institutional fundamentalism is blatant in his strictly dichotomous approach to modern economic systems. He compares pure capitalism to pure socialism, predicts a transition of the former toward the latter as a consequence of softening the conditions underlying an ideal-typical capitalist economy, rather than offering a theory of the mixed economy that we experience as a result of modifying the conditions of an ideal free economy.
Why My Theory of Intermediary Conditions Is More General Than Sen's Theory of Institutional Fundamentalism
As Sen would no doubt happily admit, there are other approaches to "the Good Society" which do not follow the path of institutional fundamentalism. Yet these alternatives may still be guilty of insufficient consideration of intermediary conditions, as my example of Marxist expectations indicates.
In fact, social visions may collapse on account of many other intermediary conditions outside the field of institutions. In a word, intermediary conditions are a more comprehensive tool of analysis than institutional fundamentalism, which can only be discovered and specifically analysed by looking for intermediary conditions.
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