for Progressive politics, the positivist distinction between facts and values, which corresponds to the distinction between administrative questions and political questions. . .preserves for the rulers alone freedom of choice and action. The “scientific” elites of the administrative state
I am taking this quote quite out of context. Please read the entire essay.
Back when I took Introduction to Philosophy, the professor taught positivism as an approach to epistemology, which deals with the question of how we know what is true. The positivist answer is that there is logical knowledge and empirical truths. Logical truths are embedded in the definitions of terms. Empirical knowledge comes from observation. Statements that are neither logical nor empirical are dogma.
The term dogma is meant to apply to statements such as “Jesus is the son of God,” or “Sodomy is wrong.”
Nowadays, it seems that what positivism means to Hayward (and others, including McCloskey) is the doctrine that we can and should separate fact from opinion, knowledge from preference, the news page from the editorial page. It links to progressivism in that the progressive imagines an ideal political system as one in which the voting public expresses preferences and then the experts with the knowledge design and execute policies to satisfy those preferences. It links to orthodox American economics, because those economists have always thought of themselves as having the knowledge needed in order to play the expert role.
Note that the progressive model cannot handle a situation in which the public expresses a preference not to be governed by experts. Such a preference does not compute.
There are some heterodox economists on the left and the right who deny that the facts/values distinction can be maintained. I think they have a point.
Let’s take as an example the effect of the minimum wage on employment. In principle, the question of how the minimum wage affects employment falls on the “facts” side of the facts/values divide. In practice, I think it is fair to say that the easiest way to predict where an economist will come out on the question of how the minimum wage affects employment is to find out where the economist stands on some other issue that divides left and right. So an economist who supports a higher military budget is likely to predict a larger adverse effect of an increase in the minimum wage on employment than economist who supports a smaller military budget. That is because the military spending issue and minimum wage policy “affiliate” with one another, even though they have essentially nothing to do with each other.
Still, I do not have a problem with the facts/values distinction in principle. I do not mind if economists try to keep facts and values separate, however much this tends to fail in practice. What I object to the most is the claim that economists have expertise that enables them to operate the administrative state as it exists today.
KIing: “There are some heterodox economists on the left and the right who deny that the facts/values distinction can be maintained. I think they have a point.”
You are in good company. I’m don’t know what economists offer on this topic, but its philosophical origins are nearly a century old. I recommend Hillary Putnam’s “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays” by Hillary Putnam. You and Putnam are, I think, on the same side of the issue.
I don’t think we read the same article, Arnold. Hayward was tracing the origins of the administrative state back to the Progressives, especially the vile Woodrow Wilson. Progressives believed and still do believe that they are on the side of Progress and History and the beliefs of the voters do not matter (except as a matter of tactics). That is precisely why they have used the permanent government of the administrative state and the judiciary to advance their causes when the voters are unwilling. The Progressives believe that “society” needs leadership and they are the leaders. They despise the Constitution with its checks and balances and limited government and have spent over a hundred years in undermining it.
As far as the difference between facts and opinion, Progressives do not recognize any difference – what they believe is fact in their view. Recall during the Bush administration the idea of “faith-based initiatives”. The response of Progressives was to declare themselves members of the “reality-based” community. We see the same intellectual arrogance in those who label skeptics as “climate science deniers” and who tell us the science is “settled”. We see the flowering of this totalitarian view on campuses, with the latest outrage being the intimidation and physical violence at Middlebury College. That’s Bernie country up there and the folks are very interested in people getting their minds right; no place for the racist Charles Murray.
What has happened is that the truly evil nature of the Progressive project is becoming clear to more people and the battle is being joined in earnest. The Democrats, the media and even a significant portion of the Republican party are defending the government establishment from the barbarian Trump and his supporters. No holds are barred in this struggle. It’s about time we have this out.
Woodrow Wilson was a truly evil man, as Hayward’s many quotes attest. He was too intelligent to have done this by accident.
Arnold;
I think there isn’t as much of a disconnect between the positivism of your philosophy class and the shorthand in the quote. You omit one key issue with positivism. It claims that _only_ logical and empirical knowledge are effectively truth.
Neopositivism claims that a special class of empirical facts which are universally observable by everyone (at least, theoretically) are the only foundations for anything done in the community (‘meaningful’ vs ‘dogma’ – an ugly bit of propaganda). The phrasing, at least in some sources, includes ‘verification’ – which is the rule from which universal observation (empiricism) can be deduced. This has all sorts of interesting second-order effects. For one, it implies that facts can be studied statistically because they are divorced from narrative context by definition. Secondly, if it doesn’t completely imply universalism, it gives politics a hard shove in that direction.
Release from the physics envy of neopositivism would suggest that some private truths are actually meaningful. These are not necessarily individually private truths, but can be collectively private truths. They reflect narrative, relationship, historicity, path dependence, etc.