Harvard University Press Blog

These Things Called "Ideas"

This fall, with its American presidential election leading right into the fiscal cliff/curb/cudgel, has given us all ample time to consider the ethical implications of free market capitalism. It’s a system to which inequality is inherent, and the debate we’ve been having is ostensibly over the extent to which government should help to ameliorate the harm our economy visits on many. Which, of course, means we’ve just been stuck in a prolonged moment of inertial uncertainty on a pendulum that’s been swinging since at least the early 20th century.

Throughout these months we’ve also been treated to a rare appearance on the public stage of these things called “ideas.” The word’s usage this fall, so often in rhetorical connection to that Republican idea-man Paul Ryan, has mostly been so emptied of meaning as to depress anyone who’s ever actually had one. “Idea,” in its employment this political cycle, has been code for the stripping down of recycled policy proposals to their “big,” “brave,” or “bold” kernel.

Nevertheless, their brief center stage has provided fine occasion to think on the role of ideas in politics and public opinion, as has the timely publication of Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, a history of the evolution of conservative economic thinkers in the decades after a global economic crisis forced a reconsideration of their worldview. See? Timely.

Burgin’s focus is the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek and later helmed by Milton Friedman. Burgin shows that, in contrast to the popular telling, an awful lot changed in the transition from Hayek to Friedman, both in the particulars of conservative economic opinion and in the assumed role of the economist in its dissemination:

Friedman shared Hayek’s understanding of the importance of ideas and the long horizons of ideological change, but they parted ways on the question of rhetoric. Friedman’s public utterances, unlike those of his predecessor, are marked by their near-total instantiation of [British constitutional lawyer Albert Venn Dicey’s] warning against qualifications in the presentation of an economic philosophy. While Hayek remained aloof from politics and confident in the influence of his ideas unaided by his public persona, Friedman embraced the reductive language of the American public sphere as one more lever in the provocation of ideological change. He recognized the absence of limitations in his advocacy of laissez-faire as a primary source of its polemical strength.

Earlier this year we spoke with Burgin about that evolution, and Friedman’s turn towards the public:

 

When you consider the multiplying effect of each generation consciously stripping nuance from the public presentation of their ideas, and the ensuing game of reducti-phone, well, today’s political sphere becomes far more intelligible. Nevertheless, as Burgin explains, the history of the Mont Pèlerin Society should be read as “an extended plea for the relevance of the history of ideas to the history of politics,” and should also help us to understand that ideas themselves are “sites of contestation” subject to reformulation, not merely the static tools for which they’re often taken.

The Anarchist Odyssey of Sasha and Emma

Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism, collected stories about Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman for decades. When he died in 2006, he left his unfinished manuscript on the pair in the hands of his daughter, Karen Avrich. Below, she describes Berkman and Goldman, and the story she and her father tell in Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

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Q: Your father, Paul Avrich, wrote extensively on the history of the anarchist movement in both Russia and the U.S. How and when did he first become fascinated with the story of Sasha Berkman and Emma Goldman?

My father once said, “I’ve always wanted, even as a scholar, to write about individuals and understand what was on their minds.” Indeed, throughout Paul Avrich’s career, compelling characters animated his work. He first developed an interest in Russia as a student, and was attracted to the radical underpinnings of the country’s history. In 1960, while a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad when Soviet libraries were opened to Western students. As a professor, he devoted his early books to Russian anarchism, which he thought was perhaps the purest, most uncompromising political philosophy.

In the 1970s, my father became acquainted with a number of American anarchists whose youths were spent in the thick of the action, from the meeting halls on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the utopian colonies on Puget Sound. Many went on to lead more conventional lives as academics, scientists, artists, and lawyers, yet they nevertheless retained the dangerous sparkle of the true revolutionary. My father was enchanted by their electrifying tales and audacious spirits, and interviewed them extensively. They all were brimming with stories about the brave, brilliant Alexander Berkman.

Sasha’s comrades equally admired his famous friend, the charismatic and formidable Emma Goldman. Emma achieved renown (and notoriety) as a leading radical activist while Sasha was locked away in prison, but their friendship sustained, and they remained the closest of companions their whole lives. Comrades later told my father about that unbreakable bond and deep love, a love that infuses Sasha and Emma from beginning to end.

Q: What was it like taking over this project after your father passed away?

When my father became ill, it was clear he would not be able to complete the book. I began working on the manuscript at my father’s request several months before his death. In that first difficult year, as I sorted through his notes and interviews, I was conscious of his voice and style, the strength of his professional legacy. Yet as I was drawn further into the story of Sasha and Emma and grew to understand them as people, their voices also guided my work. I read their published essays and private letters, studied their memoirs and journals, and learned about their comrades. I now realize that some of the older ladies and gentlemen who visited our home when I was a child, to whom I served tea sandwiches, lent their firsthand insights to Sasha and Emma. One wizened fellow, who brought me a box of fancy Belgian chocolates when I was five, fought alongside Emma Goldman in the Spanish Civil War.

As Paul Avrich’s daughter, anarchism was a component of my life, but one that remained on the periphery of my personal experience. As I worked on Sasha and Emma, the anarchists in the book became as vital to me as they were to my father—fascinating and complicated, estimable yet censurable, hugely influential but often overlooked. I am thrilled that this story of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman will be told, and I feel honored to have experienced my father’s life work in this manner.

"The Most Crippling Sanctions in the History of Sanctions"

“Look, imagine had we let the Republican Congress work out the sanctions. You think there's any possibility the entire world would have joined us, Russia and China, all of our allies? These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period. Period.” That was Vice President Joe Biden’s response when Congressman Paul Ryan criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Iran during last week’s VP debate. From there the two men sparred over which party’s approach would more “peacefully” resolve the threat posed by Iranian nuclear efforts, apparently each taking for granted that the sanctions themselves are nonviolent.

If we take Biden at his word and accept that these sanctions are the strongest ever imposed, Americans should be neither encouraged nor permitted to imagine them as peaceful. Not after witnessing the U.S.-orchestrated sanctions on Iraq from 1990 until 2003, recognized as the most devastating in history, and now judged by some to have verged on genocidal. Joy Gordon presents that view in Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, a chilling study of how the U.S. steered the UN Security Council towards the creation and perpetuation of a sweeping humanitarian tragedy.

The following excerpt from Invisible War details how the world developed a sense of sanctions as innocuous, a view that encouraged complacency and indifference despite mounting evidence of the injustice of punishing a nation’s people for the transgressions of their leaders. The passage also presents then-Senator Biden arguing for continued reliance on the Iraq sanctions, in an exchange much like that of last week’s debate.

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The Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define genocide as including “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such . . . [by d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Some have argued that the U.S. role in shaping the sanctions on Iraq turned an act of international governance into a genocidal enterprise; that U.S. officials deliberately and knowingly brought about the indiscriminate destruction of life as well as destroying the means to sustain life in Iraq.

The possibility that economic sanctions could be a human rights violation, or even a form of genocide, was not something that anyone imagined when the sanctions were first imposed on Iraq in 1990. Sieges and blockades in time of war, such as the siege of Leningrad, caused terrible loss of life. But economic sanctions, as a form of political pressure outside the context of war, had not. If nations of comparable size imposed sanctions on each other, as was the case with the United States and the Soviet Union, then the impact was little more than symbolic. If the United States sanctioned a small nation, such as Cuba, then the targeted nation could shift its trade to the Soviet bloc. Consequently, economic sanctions during the Cold War were never devastating. In fact, they were viewed as a “middle route”: they were seen as nonviolent, in contrast to military intervention, but also as having more of a bite than diplomatic efforts. As of the late 1980s there was little concern about the ethics or humanitarian impact of sanctions. For the most part, those who wrote about sanctions were concerned with whether they were likely to succeed in getting the target state to change its policies, or with the difficulty of keeping sanctions in place when the members of an alliance were losing trade opportunities.

Not only were sanctions seen as innocuous, but the case of South Africa made them seem quite attractive. The Black South African population itself—the population most likely to be harmed by economic sanctions—called for sanctions against South Africa as an act of international solidarity. The sanctions imposed on South Africa were effective for a combination of reasons. They were accompanied by international diplomacy and social isolation of the apartheid regime within the international community. In addition to the international pressure, there was growing domestic opposition from labor, students, and political organizations, which emerged as forces within South Africa’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. One commentator noted that the “hurting stalemate” resulted in moderates from both sides negotiating with each other, and there were also reformist elites that emerged within the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. In any event, there was little ground to claim that the sanctions were hurting an innocent population against its will. In the end the apartheid regime gave way to democracy and sanctions were viewed as having an important and effective role in accomplishing this.

But the sanctions regime imposed on South Africa was anomalous in every regard: typically there is little support from the population that is harmed, and sanctions rarely induce the targeted state to change its practices. On the contrary, the more typical response is a “rally ’round the flag” effect in which the population supports the state in the face of what is seen as aggression by a foreign power. Furthermore, the most optimistic studies of sanctions in the twentieth century found that sanctions influence the target nation only about one-third of the time. Critics have argued that even this number includes cases that are overdetermined, and that if we look only at the number of cases where sanctions are clearly the determinative factor in changing a state’s policies, sanctions were clearly effective in only about 5 percent of the cases in the twentieth century.

When States Decay

Continuing our election-season series of consulting with the Classics, we turn today to Polybius, and the brief conclusion to his “Treatise on the Roman Republic,” as offered in Book 6 of The Histories, contained in Loeb Classical Library Volume 138. This translation, published in 2011, is a thorough revision of W. R. Paton’s 1922 text.

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That all existing things are subject to decay and change is a truth that scarcely needs proof; for the course of nature is sufficient to force this conviction on us. There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process. I have already stated what kind of state is the first to come into being, and what the next, and how the one is transformed into the other; so that those who are capable of connecting the opening propositions of this inquiry with its conclusion will now be able to foretell the future unaided. And what will happen is, I think, evident. When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life becomes more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on increasing, the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse-proud display; and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob rule.

What Can Mitt Romney and Barack Obama Learn from the Ancient Greeks?

In his new book Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored (published by Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies), Howard University professor Norman B. Sandridge discusses the timeless ideals of leadership in Greek historian Xenophon’s work Cyropaedia (Education of Cyrus). In Cyropaedia, written in 4th century BC, Xenophon presents a fictionalized account of a real historical figure, Persian king Cyrus the Great. Politicians throughout history have embraced Xenophon’s model of leading with attention to humanity, learning, and honor, and we asked Sandridge about the lessons available to voters and candidates today.

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Q: You write that the Education of Cyrus captured the interest of Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Jefferson, among others. Why do you think these leaders read this work?

Many people, ancient and modern, read the Education of Cyrus because it is full of amusing and enlightening stories about leadership. What does a great leader look like as a kid? How do you train leaders? Can leaders have wild, romantic passion and still benefit their followers? How should leaders treat their rivals? Why do people follow leaders? These are all questions that ancient theorists wrestled with, but Xenophon did us a favor by casting them in a narrative form. In the ancient world Greeks and Romans thought that one of the best ways to become a better person was to contemplate and then emulate the examples of great people. The fact that Xenophon’s Cyrus was a historical figure gave readers an even greater sense of what was possible not only in theory but in practice.

Q: What are Xenophon’s major pieces of advice for politicians, and what specific advice do you think he would give to today’s presidential hopefuls?

I think Xenophon’s first lesson would be, “look outside of your own culture for inspiration.” When Xenophon wrote the Education of Cyrus, the Greeks had been fighting wars with the Persians for well over one hundred years. These wars turned out to be as much military as cultural; Persians were often seen as either deficient or hyperbolic of everything it meant to be Greek. And yet Xenophon looked to the example of Cyrus to theorize about the best kind of leadership. In part this was because Xenophon himself had served with Persians on campaign and had personal admiration for their prince, Cyrus the Younger. But also I think Xenophon found it liberating to think outside of his own culture.

By contrast, ever since September 11th, we have witnessed a disappointing trend in chauvinism in America (more positively cast as “American exceptionalism”), which no major politician seems to be able to escape. In so many other fields like art, math, science, and engineering, we recognize that progress is achieved only with global collaboration and imagination. How liberating for the American psyche would it be to hear President Obama or Governor Romney express a fondness for an ancient Iranian king like Cyrus!

Secondly, I think Xenophon would tell any potential politician that leadership is a lifetime intellectual and ethical pursuit—not something learned as an afterthought to other previous ambitions. As Xenophon conceives of it, young Persians go to school to learn the moral virtues they will need to lead their community, virtues like gratitude, justice, self-restraint, and mastery over hunger, thirst, and sleep.

Finally, I think Xenophon would also remind us, and our politicians, that a good community is a prerequisite to good leadership. Cyrus grows up in a Persia whose members are as trained in civic virtue as he is, even if he turns out to be the greatest practitioner of it. When he speaks to them about their interests, he is doing so from a shared set of values. Thus, if we want better leaders, we must strive to be better people ourselves.

Gandhi, History and the Liberal State

Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, gives us a new understanding of the Mahatma as a radical political theorist with ideas powerfully relevant to present-day issues. In the piece below, which appeared originally on the blog of the book’s UK publisher, Hurst, Devji outlines Gandhi’s conception of history and the violence inherent to liberal society.

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The empire against which Gandhi fought was legitimized in historical terms, for at their most generous its supporters claimed to be holding India for the benefit of her people, who had not yet attained the political maturity to rule themselves. British imperialism, then, was conceived as a vast pedagogical project, one in which a backward country was tutored by a more advanced one in order that it might achieve the kind of freedom that only history could give it. Informed as it was by the language of progress, evolution and development through time, imperialism was a thoroughly modern enterprise, and for good or ill its logic thrives today in the practice of development as well as regime change and humanitarian intervention. Unlike some among his compatriots, however, who accepted the argument upon which imperial legitimacy rested while questioning Britain’s good faith in upholding it, the Mahatma saw historical knowledge itself as a form of violence and wanted as little to do with it as possible. Perhaps the first of his many statements on the violence of history is to be found in Hind Swaraj, the manifesto on Indian Home Rule published in 1909. Gandhi is the only political figure to disdain history in a modernity defined by utopias and revolutions that sought its fulfillment.

Gandhi pointed out that history as commonly conceived was nothing but a narrative of conflict to whose violence alone did historians attribute any real change, regardless of whether this was to be praised or condemned. Yet societies could only sustain and reproduce themselves, he argued, in nonviolent ways, by quotidian and unexceptionable practices that didn’t deserve the name of history. For it was not the violence either exercised or prevented by law and the state that provided the parameters for nonviolence but rather the reverse. Instead of trying to expand the reach of historical knowledge by including everyday life within its ambit, in other words, the Mahatma insisted upon describing the historical record as providing both an account of violence and its justification. After all, since narratives of persecution and revenge, peace and war, stood on the same historical footing and indeed overlapped one with the other, none was innocent of violence. And by this token nonviolence was not merely unable to provide a subject for history, it was incapable almost by definition of possessing a history.

Now by suggesting that nonviolence had no history, Gandhi did not mean that it was entirely removed from the world of violence. On the contrary he held that violence was present in every aspect of life, from eating to giving birth, so that even reflexive processes like blinking or digestion, which preserved life, also ended up wearing down the body and finally destroying it. Nonviolence therefore could not possibly imply the more or less successful avoidance of violence, something that the Mahatma would in any case have considered cowardly, but rather entailed an engagement with it. Violence had to be seduced from itself and converted into its opposite by acts of love and practices of sacrifice. And this had to be done not by posing one historical narrative against another but instead by disregarding such narratives altogether. Only by refusing to situate present-day moral and political action within an historical account that could only constrain it, thought Gandhi, might new possibilities for the future emerge. Nonviolence, in other words, worked by breaking up narrative histories and thus freeing human action, though it did so not by opening up some dazzling new future for it, but rather by focussing exclusively on the present as a site for moral action.

More than altering our perspective on history, Gandhi asks us to distrust it as a form of knowledge, even going so far as to recommend that we forget the past. By this, of course, he doesn’t mean that we tolerate violence and injustice, or banish all that has happened from our memory, but rather that we refuse to identify either with the victims or the perpetrators of historical violence. The Mahatma was well aware of the fact that nations, races, religions and other collective categories of belonging were in his time being forged by such vicarious identifications, which, whether true or false, all worked in some way like contemporary accounts of ‘repressed memory syndrome,’ that is to say as practices by which identity was recovered for therapeutic as much as political reasons. Repelled by the alternating forms of resentment and fear that he saw emerging from these practices of historical recovery, Gandhi determined that he would have nothing to do with them.

Are Americans Better Off?

At this stage of the American presidential contest, we’ve become locked in debate over the fairly abstract question of whether or not Americans are “better off” now than they were when Barack Obama took office in early 2009. At his party’s convention, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made clear where he stands:

This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office. America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith. But today, the time has come to turn the page.

The following week many of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention offered direct rebuttals of Romney’s claim, which by then had become the central talking point for him and his surrogates. With no settled criteria for actually debating such a vaguely defined bit of sloganeering, this question is likely to remain front and center as we approach November 6th.

Leaving aside the disappointingly solipsistic suggestion that a citizen should judge their country’s course based only on his or her own well-being, though, we actually DO have a well-established and widely-embraced rubric by which to measure the fullness and quality of human lives. It’s just that we’re more accustomed to applying it in developing nations than in places like the United States. Indeed, having recognized the deficiencies of using Gross Domestic Product to gauge a developing country’s progress, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and others pioneered an alternative, commonly known as the Capabilities Approach.

Nussbaum presented the basics of the Capabilities Approach in Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, which we published last year. In the book she explains the need for a system to measure the degree to which a given government supports or impedes development across the various areas of human life in which people move and act. She outlines a threshold level of ten Central Capabilities required for a life worthy of human dignity. We offer them below, as presented by Nussbaum in the book, and encourage you to consider them in light of this roiling debate over whether or not Americans are now “better off” than they were four years ago.

Or, even more directly, take what you know of the country’s two major presidential candidates, and use this list to imagine the development of an American’s capabilities under the next administration. Even with what little specifics either candidate has actually offered, and regardless of whom you’re inclined to support, there are very clear ways in which this election will affect the ability of Americans to pursue dignified and at least minimally flourishing lives across nearly every one of these ten Central Capabilities:

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

2. Bodily health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

3. Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

4. Senses, imagination, and thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain.

5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)

6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)

7. Affiliation. (A) Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.) (B) Having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of nondiscrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

10. Control over one’s environment. (A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. (B) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

What We'd Have Shown at APSA

While we regret missing the opportunity to meet with attendees at the American Political Science Association conference this week, we recognize the wisdom in cancelling a New Orleans event in the midst of a hurricane. As ever, we’re grateful for the APSA’s hard work and planning.

Since we won’t be there to show them off in our booth, we wanted to take a moment here to highlight just a few of the recent and forthcoming books that we’d been looking forward to presenting at the meeting. (And also to extend our 20% conference discount order form to all would- and even wouldn’t-be attendees. The offer includes free shipping.)

So, imagine you’ve just walked up to our booth. Just past the smiling face of Mike Aronson, our Executive Editor for Social Sciences, you’d have seen four posters arrayed as follows:

Left to right, that’s Monica Prasad’s The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty; Thane Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia; Edward N. Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy; and Harold James’s Making the European Monetary Union.

In addition to those, and among many others, we were looking forward to displaying Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech; James Block’s The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society; Victor Nee and Sonja Opper’s Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China; Steven Bilakovics’s Democracy without Politics; Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India; and Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance.

As it happens, just a couple of weeks back we caught up with Krippner at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver. We sat down with her for an interview about her award-winning empirical analysis of the long-term historical evolution underwriting the rise of financialization in the U.S., which she details in this short video:

 

You can also download our 2012 Law & Social Science brochure to check out all the rest of our latest relevant books. 

Okay, we’ll see you all next year in Chicago. For now our thoughts are with those in Isaac’s path. Stay safe.

In Which Lady Spambots Tweet of John Rawls

Those anime-avatarred spambots are hitting the books again, spending this week brushing up on political philosophy. We are honored to play any small part in their continuing education.

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Secret Document, Invisible Hand

Earlier this year, the Planet Money Podcast did an episode on “The Secret Document That Transformed China,” a story they describe as follows:

In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut. They were afraid the document might get them executed. Instead, it wound up completely transforming the Chinese economy.

 

The episode, which you can listen to via the embedded player above, describes how farmers in Xiaogang and across China had their working hours and planting patterns dictated by Communist Party officials, and had to communally share their harvests. Under that system they were barely subsisting, often reduced to begging for food, a shameful experience for those whose work was to grow it. So a small group of farmers agreed in secret to try something new. The farmers would keep a portion of their own yield, and so be inspired to work harder with the knowledge that their own families would benefit.

Of course, in the villages of Communist China there was no personal property. As one of the farmers told the Planet Money reporters, every single piece of straw belonged to the group. According to Party officials, even the teeth in each farmer’s mouth belonged to the collective. Knowing how boldly their plan contradicted Party directives, the farmers all agreed to provide for the families of any one of them who was killed or banished as punishment for their new system.

As the podcast details, their pact was a great success. They all worked much harder than before, and had harvests to match. Those things couldn’t go unnoticed, though, and they were found out by a local official who planned to shut down their arrangement, until he was overruled by a higher bureaucrat who demanded the farmers be allowed to continue. The Party decided to treat these farmers and their twist on the Protestant ethic as an experiment, and their success led to the arrangement’s wide adoption across Deng Xiaoping’s newly reform-minded China.

The Planet Money folks characterize the drafting of that secret document as a watershed moment in Chinese history, and, given the prevailing conception of the CPC as steadfast in its resistance to change, it’s easy to imagine this “transformation” of China as the result of a rare and unlikely willingness to experiment. But a recent book from the Harvard University Asia Center suggests otherwise.

In Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, a group of distinguished scholars details China’s “guerilla policy style,” which flowed from and resembled Mao’s revolutionary strategy. The book’s contributors argue that constant adaptation is in large part responsible for the ability of the Chinese Communist system to survive such disruptions as Tiananmen Square, outlive rapid economic expansion, and outlast the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations that were all ostensibly defined by their shared institutional structure.