A Theory of Justice as Ethical Consumption
Jim Josefson
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Bridgewater College
Bridgewater, VA 22812-1599
jjosefso@bridgewater.edu
540-828-5322 (o)
540-430-1018 (h)
540-828-5747 (fax)
11, 300 words
Political Theory
American Political Development
In this paper I argue that a
conception of justice as ethical consumption offers a way to
revive public discussion of justice that is superior to rationalist theories
such as Rawls’s. I ground the theory by
indulging in a common approach of theorists such as Arendt, a genealogy of
justice that goes back to ancient Athens.
If we have the wrong conception of justice, where did we get off on the
wrong foot? Of course, I finger the
usual suspect: Plato. I argue that a sense
of justice as ethical consumption underlay the democratic regime of circa 5th
century B.C.E. Athens and then suggest how Plato’s philosophy attacked this
sense and substituted a model of justice based on abstract rational
principles. I then turn to illustrate
the influence of Platonic thinking on justice, focusing on Augustine and
liberalism. I argue that movements for
distributive justice credited to liberalism have actually been based instead on
a sense of justice as ethical consumption. But even as such a sense of justice
has fostered the development of liberal democracy, liberal institutions and
liberal principles have increasingly undermined our ability to see justice as
concerned with ethical consumption.
Finally, consonant with Hannah Arendt’s project of recovering human
freedom, I suggest a sense of justice as ethical consumption needs to be
recovered by considering the importance of the middle class home for fostering
individual character and democratic citizenship.
In this paper, I explore an interest in justice and consumption, motivated by an interest in social justice, and what I see is the failure of such arguments to dent the public conscience and consciousness. Since Plato’s Republic, theories of justice have been based on abstract reasoning about what is ideally fair or right. The result is a long history of theories that define justice in terms of abstract principles. The leading theories in the canon of normative political theory— Kantianism, utilitarianism, Rawls’s justice as fairness, and even Nozick’s libertarianism— are all prime examples. While such theories have devoted adherents, I am struck by the inability of such theories to provide accounts of justice that command broad political support and motivate the policies of political leaders.[1] On the other hand, I notice the success of less abstract theories of justice such Robert Bork’s, who have responded to such calls for justice as Rawls’s with the argument that redistributive justice is nothing more than unjustly robbing the rich from the rewards of their virtues and giving to the un-virtuous on the basis of blind envy. On this view, policies intended to produce justice have the effect of discouraging virtue, both on the part of the rich and the poor.[2] The resonance of this argument with my students, and I sense the public at large, makes me wonder whether political theorists haven’t pursued not only unpersuasive principles of justice but also a generally unpersuasive way of thinking about justice in terms of abstract ideals.
I think such arguments about justice fail because they don’t have an adequate theory of consumption to back them up. Arguments for redistributive justice like Rawls’s are based on conceptions about what is rational and reasonable in an abstract sense. Hence the concern in A Theory of Justice for setting up constitutional principles and procedures that will be to the advantage of the least well-off members of a society based on the abstract deontological reasoning in the original position. Justice as fairness, in Rawls’s formulation, is just because it is rational in the formal game-theoretic sense, not because it is good in some more substantive way. The Rawlsian citizen concerned with justice is invited to assess his or her considered judgments in “reflective equilibrium” by placing himself or herself in the original position, not by looking at redistribution itself and evaluating whether the results are good for the taxed, the entitlement-recipient, or the state as a whole.[3] The latter is an argument about consumption rather than rationality, and it is precisely the kind of moral reasoning I think is required for a satisfactory theory of justice.[4] It’s simply not enough to argue that redistribution is right in any formal sense. It just doesn’t play in Peoria. A satisfactory theory of justice, instead, needs an argument about why consumption is good and why who consumes and how much matters for the character of individual citizens and the state as a whole.[5] Justice, I am arguing, requires an argument that accepts and accounts for materialism, not in the philosophical senses of the primacy of modes of production or opposition to idealism or substance dualism, but in the popular sense of what effects consumption has on the moral character of human beings. If scholars and politicians talk more about justice in this way, I hope, we might be able to have a richer conversation about justice with our fellow citizens.
In this paper I argue for a materialistic conception of justice by indulging in a common approach of theorists from Hegel to Foucault, grounding the theory in the practices of ancient Athens. If we have the wrong conception of justice, where did we get off on the wrong foot? Of course, I finger the usual suspect: Plato. I argue that a materialistic sense of justice as ethical consumption underlay the democratic regime of circa 5th century B.C.E. Athens and then suggest how Plato’s philosophy attacked this sense and substituted a model of justice based on abstract rational principles. I then turn to illustrate the influence of Platonic thinking on justice down through the ages in very broad strokes, focusing on Augustinian Christianity and liberalism. Following Dewey’s way of thinking about liberalism, I argue that liberal principles and institutions have their origin in practices and principles of republican “producerism”that express a strong sense of justice as ethical consumption. Thus, many of the successful movements for justice in 20th century America (especially Progressivism and the New Deal) have been inspired by a latent theory of justice as ethical consumption rather than liberal rationalism. Finally, I suggest a theory of justice as ethical consumption is necessary to complete the project for recovering human freedom begun by Hannah Arendt, and I suggest that project recalls the centrality of the middle class home to any contemporary system of justice.
We tend to think that consumption does not need to be explained. It is obvious that people want stuff. Stuff satisfies desires. Consumer goods are, therefore, generally seen as purely functional. They can’t play any substantive role in a theory of politics, for politics is about who gets what, the power of individuals or groups to satisfy their desires and not about the goods themselves. In this way of thinking the goods getting consumed are just incidental. In a theory of politics in which consumption plays a central role, however, politics is about the processes by which cultural meanings and values are produced and reproduced, a process in which consumer goods play a central role. For, as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood argue, consumer goods constitute the very medium of cultural communication and political identification. They are the means by which people make sense of their world and integrate themselves into a moral-political order. Words, of course, are communications that create the moral order, but they are generally too evanescent to fix meanings with the requisite force. Goods, however, especially when they are impressive and impressively displayed, transform simple communication into ritual, practices that give meanings much greater political clout. As Douglas and Isherwood contend, “consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events”.[6] Such rituals of consumption serve especially to communicate and enact the moral order of a society. What people eat, wear, and have in their domiciles establishes the basic values of a society, and who does or does not possess these valuable cultural markers are recognized as having distinct places in a hierarchical social order.[7]
A similar point can be made from the Lacanian perspective of Slavoj Žižek. Attempts to secure formal conditions of justice by reference to veils of ignorance or true interests fail to consider that such efforts threaten, what Žižek calls, the “fantasy-space within which a community organizes its ‘way of life’ (its mode of enjoyment): within this space, what ‘we desire’ is inextricably linked to (what we perceive as) the other’s desire, so that what ‘we’ desire may turn out to be the very destruction of our objects of desire (if, in this way we deal a blow to the other’s desire)”.[8] Thus all enjoyment of goods is fantastical, involving a particular “fantasy-organization” of desire that is paradoxically ascetic. Goods carry imputations about how the Others enjoy them that allow us to organize our own desire in contrast. This organization involves a certain ascetic restraining of desire because such restaint allows us to enjoy both our voyeuristic fantasies about the Other’s different enjoyment and the pleasure of marking them as Other— reprobate or profligate as appropriate.[9]
This view of consumption as a means for cultural communication and construction allows us to begin to explore how consumption is central to an adequate theory of justice. The way consumer goods are deployed to create a moral order can be clearly seen in the culture of 5th century Athens, for the kind of materialistic sense of justice that I’m advocating in this paper was central to the democratic culture of classical Greece.
The culture of Ancient Greece was fertile ground for the development of a democracy with a materialistic sense of justice. First, the poetry of Hesiod provided a mythological foundation for the materialistic sense of justice that democratic Athens required in the same sense that Homer provided the mythological foundation for the older aristocratic culture. In the Work and Days, Hesiod establishes the material culture of Attic small farmers as the crucible of citizen virtue and justice. In a way not unlike the myth of the yeoman farmer in Jeffersonian democracy, Hesiod placed the virtuous independent freeholder as the touchstone of Greek political culture. The immediate purpose of Work and Days is an appeal to Hesiod’s brother to turn away from injustice and towards justice. But justice is not defined by some set of abstract or rational principles. Instead, justice is found in the moral training of a life of work, which allows the workingman to exercise a more plebian aręte than is found in Homeric Greek writing, but it, nonetheless, still expresses the Greek aristocratic obsession with independence. This aręte is the aręte of the competent workman who enjoys virtuous consumption, consumption born as the fruits of his labor rather than profligate consumption which enflames the passions and leads to injustice.[10]
Second, the political economy of ancient Greece encouraged the development of a materialistic sense of justice and democracy. As Herodotus wrote, “Poverty has always been Greece’s foster sister”.[11] The arid climate and rocky soil made Greek agriculture relatively unproductive. With approximately 90 percent of the population involved in farming, you have a significant constituency with an interest in pressuring any landed aristocracy for political concessions. The common folk could also press for greater equality due to the tactical and strategic position of Greece militarily. Strategically, rivalries between polises, challenges from Persia, and (especially in Athens) the incentives of empire to secure imported staples, all made military strength a central goal of Greek politics. And these strategic goals could only be achieved tactically by armies of hoplites, ranks that could only be filled by common folk. So, if the Greek polis was to depend on the fighting spirit of its common citizens these same citizens had a basis for asserting greater political and social equality.[12]
Such pressures in Athens were fundamentally about claiming a portion of the aristocratic culture of consumption and its attendant aristocratic values of independence and virtue. To renarrate the culture in a way that makes it accessible to the masses required constructing, as E. P. Thompson argued about working class conflict in Britain, a “counterculture of the poor” that could challenge the cultural hegemony of the elite.[13] Constructing such a counter-culture, in Douglas and Isherwoods’ sense, meant that the Athenians needed to create new rituals of consumption that would undergird a new distinctively democratic moral order. This is precisely what they were able to accomplish.
Classicists tend to emphasize the achievements of Athenian democracy in terms of the creation of democratic institutions and values. For instance, we have extensive knowledge of the Athenian system of laws and conception of isonomia, the procedures of the assembly and its practices of isogoria, and the central importance of the Athenian judiciary with their huge democratic juries. We also have a dramatic sense of Athenians’ general commitment to democratic practice, notably from Pericles’ remarkable funeral oration in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian Wars. In the oration, Pericles famously says, “we do not say that a man who take no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say he has no business here at all”.[14] But the achievement of Athenian democracy does not just lie in the cultivation of such democratic institutions and values, but in an underlying order of ethical consumption that legitimated Athens’ policies of distributive justice.
We can see the outlines of this order of ethical consumption in some of the less frequently noted passages from the Funeral Oration. For instance, Pericles says,
When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits…. In our homes we find a beauty and a good taste which delights us every day and which drive away our cares. Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow into us, so that to us it seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products.[15]
Here Pericles places the material culture of his society as an important wellspring of Athenian virtues and democracy. He is clear that Athenian homes do not reflect an aristocratic sensibility of ostentatious display like that which Thorstein Veblen so famously indicted.[16] Instead, consumer goods, by being beautiful and in good taste (i.e. non-Persian), impart those same qualities to the Athenian citizenry. It is important to emphasize that Pericles is not talking about luxurious homes here. The archeological evidence is spotty, but it suggests that Athenian housing was modest with little difference between the homes of average citizens and elites. Almost all lived in simple stone dwellings of modest dimensions.[17] Thus the good taste that Pericles is celebrating here is a democratic good taste. In Athens simplicity is fashionable, and this fashion legitimizes a distribution of consumer goods that not only allows average citizens to possess some of the markers of Athenian aristocratic virtue, but it also assigns these modest possessions with the same meaning that richer ones have in a less democratic milieu. As Pericles says in another passage, “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance”.[18] Here we see that Pericles is concerned to emphasize the aesthetic moderation of the Athenians. A material culture that valorized ostentatious display would be one that would create class conflict. The Niciases of Athens would be tempted to usurp power in order to live more luxuriously, and common folk would be tempted to appropriate elites’ wealth for their own, what Madison would call a “leveling impulse”. Instead, in Athens, ‘the beautiful’ has been constructed in order to be available to all. Aesthetics has been deployed in alliance with a democratic culture.
We have significant material evidence of this democratic material culture in which ethical consumption is made an adjunct of democratic citizenship. Art in the age of Pericles was largely public, located in the public buildings and spaces that were the monumental achievements of democratic Athens. These buildings and artifacts carry over the sensibilities of democratic ethical consumption from the Greek home. Consumption in private life is restrained so that wealth can be poured into the public sphere, the creation of material goods that will inspire the populace to public democratic values. The only other place for the display of notable consumer goods was in the rooms of the Athenian rich where elites indulged in the joys of the symposium. But even here, the setting for such consumption was notably hidden (connoting its problematic status in Athens) and highly ritualized in a way that emphasized public democratic values of moderation and isogoria.[19] Just about the best evidence of Athenian material culture we have are drinking cups and pottery. These objects of everyday use often contain historical and mythological scenes that taught the democratic ideology of Athens.[20] And even when such decorations are not self-evidently democratic, Csapo and Miller argue that these vessels depict a much more democratic conception of time and narrative in the era of Athenian democracy than in older aristocratic ages, one in which action is efficacious and time progressive rather than static and conservative.[21] In a society in which such material goods were some of the main texts that inculcated the moral culture of the society, surely access to such goods by everyday people was necessary to the reproduction of that moral order. Thus it is significant that we have good textual evidence that even the finest red-ware drinking cups and vases were sold for only about a days wage (1 drachma) for an average citizen.[22]
The other places in which the Athenian moral order of democratic ethical consumption could be expressed and inculcated in the citizenry were the plays and court cases of which we have a significant record. Ian Morris argues that these texts reflect a “middling culture of civic manhood” that was the central norm of Athenian life. This norm emphasized that the ideal citizen exercises restraint and moderation. The metriori (‘middling men’) are modeled on the virtuous farmers of Hesiod who, again, have their virtue by way of moderate consumption, consumption that marks a person’s independence and allows enjoyment of beauty but that doesn’t arouse ones appetites and tempt one towards injustice. Those who violate the norms of the metriori were said to be guilty of hubris, a word that in the older mythology of Homer meant one who challenged the will of the gods. In democratic Athens, however, the definition of hubris had changed to apply to a person whose lust for excessive consumption undermines the independent self-control of a truly free Athenian. Such a man is tempted by his passions to neglect both a rational concern for his own welfare and the duties he owes to the state.[23] Indeed, Morris argues that the metrios culture of Athens was so dominant that much of the evidence of Athenian aristocratic culture, particularly in Plato’s Symposium, represents Athenian elites struggling to create a counter-culture to the hegemonic democratic one. Thus we have characters in Plato’s oeuvre appropriating cultural practices of elaborate consumption and religious ideas from Persia in an attempt to legitimize social hierarchy.[24]
James Davidson provides the richest evidence for this metrios culture. Davidson’s book was inspired by the curious place of opsophagoi (fish eating) in Athenian plays, prose, and court speeches. For the Athenians, calling someone an opsophagos meant more than commenting on a person’s love of tuna. Fish eating represented a central trope of Athens’ norms of ethical consumption. Fish were very popular in Athens, yet as the Mediterranean is a relatively poor location for successful angling, the price of fish was quite high—as much as 3 days wages for a single eel.[25] Thus indulging an appetite for fish beyond a few cheap anchovies violated Athen’s metrios norms of restrained appetite. For example, in Aristophanes’ Frogs we have a description of a wealthy man who dresses in rags to keep from paying taxes, but he is betrayed by his too-frequent visits to the fish-mongers.[26] Similarly, in Antiphanes’ play Rich Men, a character denounces a group of plutocrats who have conspired to control the price of fish with the complaint, “It’s not democratic for him to do this and chomp on so many fish”.[27] These lines reveal the ethical rather than ascetic character of Greek attitudes towards consumption. It is not as if fish eating is itself bad. Eating fish, drinking wine, and sexual relations with eromenos (young male protégés), pornai (prostitutes) and hetaerae (courtesans) were all inextricable elements of the Greek life of beauty and freedom. But democratic ideals insisted that appetites for these goods must be restrained or else desire would overwhelm the self-control that was essential for freedom in both the individual and the state. Indeed, for the Athenians those freedoms were largely synonymous. In Athens the worst epithet was to be called a katapugones, an untranslatable term that Davidson persuasively argues should be interpreted as connoting one whose desires cannot be satisfied. Such a person, in Athens, was understood not only to enslave himself in the pursuit of pleasure but to also sink the resources he owed the city into wine, women, and fish.[28]
This brings us to a brief discussion of distributive justice in Athens, for all the Greeks’ discourse on ethical consumption is intimately tied to what men owe the city. Athens is notable for combining a fairly minimal state with one of the most progressive systems of taxation on record. The 90-odd percent of common citizens paid no tithes to the state except service in the army. The richest citizens, on the other hand, shouldered an enormous burden of contributions to the polis. These contributions weren’t taxes in the modern sense because the Athenians had no modern bureaucracy that could assess property, incomes, or imports. Instead, the Athenians had a system of socially required offerings to the city. The most notable of these were underwriting the costs of theatrical productions and religious festivals (chorēgai) and outfitting the especially expensive warships of the Athenian navy (trierarchies). This system of progressive taxation was a central component of Athenian democracy, evening out patterns of consumption so that aristocratic values of freedom and beauty would be accessible to everyone.
But it is especially important for our purposes to see this system as inextricably linked to Athenian norms of ethical consumption. Such norms gave a strong ethical argument for why the demos should share in the fish eating as well as in the Assembly and law-courts. All citizens needed to have moderate wealth so that they could exercise the central Athenian democratic virtues of self-control, public participation and generosity. They also created strong social pressures that could enforce the system of taxation in the absence of an administrative apparatus. Furthermore, these social pressures encouraged the rich to buy into the norms of ethical consumption and the accompanying democratic order in that any displays of conspicuous consumption could lead to charges that someone wasn’t paying their fair share. If a rich man was seen buying 6 sea bass in the market he could find himself ponying up a few more talents for the new fleet of triremes.[29]
In The Republic, Plato created a radical revision of the Greek sense of justice with its emphasis on ethical consumption. Instead, Plato defines justice as a technē, a kind of special knowledge analogous to the knowledge of craft that a sailor or doctor possesses.[30] This takes justice out of its traditional Greek context as tending those organic practices of ethical consumption that reinforced the social fabric of Athenian democracy. Instead, Plato’s definition of justice as a technē makes justice a product of right reasoning, a rationalist enterprise in which the mind orders the soul and the world according to the transcendent principles revealed by the abstract workings of the dialectic. We see this conception clearly in Plato’s account of the three parts of the soul: appetite, thumos or spiritedness, and reason.[31] A just man is one whose reason rules over their appetite and thumos, making sure each performs only its proper function, and thereby creating harmony in the soul.[32] Plato is clear to distinguish this notion of justice from traditional Greek notions of justice as doing the traditionally right things. As Plato has Socrates say, “[Justice’s] real concern is not with external actions, but with a man’s inward self, his true concern and interest”.[33] Indeed, true justice in this “inward self” cannot be achieved through the practices of the Greek polis at all. For Plato, true knowledge is eternal and unchanging, and thus the practices that exhibit or produce justice in the city only share partially in the ultimate truth of justice.[34] Contemplation of tradition or following its dictates cannot produce true justice. That requires contemplation of the Forms in the abstract, first along the lines of mathematical reasoning, but ultimately in the almost mystical contemplation of the Forms through the dialectic.[35] Indeed such thinking requires that the seeker of true justice, the philosopher, leave the benighted realm of the polis whose practices are but shadows of the true justice, and enter a realm of pure intellectual contemplation of the Form of the Good, a place “out of this world in some kind of earthly paradise”.[36]
In this account of the soul and justice Plato seems to reject the materialistic sense of justice as ethical consumption that was central to Athenian culture. In fact, Plato at the very least takes justice out of the context of the public life of Greek citizenship and at the most makes it largely private, a feature of the individual soul to be achieved by individualistic striving for the Good.
But some sense of ethical consumption can still be seen in The Republic, and we should explore it before proceeding as it further illustrates the traditional Athenian notions of justice as ethical consumption at the same time as it illustrates Plato’s attitude towards this tradition. One place is in Plato’s description of what Glaucon calls the “community of pigs” in book two. Plato’s account of what he calls “the true [city], like a man in health” is described mainly in terms of ethical consumption. Its citizens are just due to the simplicity and beauty of their material culture. They “serve splendid cakes and loaves on rushes or fresh leaves, and will sit down to feast with their children on couches of myrtle and bryony”.[37] Of course, Plato’s aristocratic companions reject this city precisely on the grounds of its primitive material culture, but Plato’s invocation of it is indicative of some level of respect for and deference to contemporary democratic norms. Perhaps Plato felt that the old order was no longer capable of restraining his aristocratic friends such that a new culture had to be built.
Another indication of Plato’s limited sympathy for justice as ethical consumption can be seen in his training regimen for the guardians. Their education is a curious amalgam of Athenian ethical consumption and Spartan training, but the ethical consumption can clearly be seen in the prescriptions for simplicity, sobriety and continence in eating, drinking and sex and in Plato’s discussion of aesthetic forms.[38] He insists that “the graphic arts are full of the same qualities [of beauty and ugliness] and so are the related crafts, weaving and embroidery, architecture and the manufacture of furniture of all kinds”, and “ugliness of form” or “poor quality expression and character” in these objects “are akin to poor quality expression and character”. Thus the material culture the guardians are exposed to must be censored. Plato insists that, “We must look for artists and craftsmen capable of perceiving the real nature of what is beautiful, and then our young men, living as it were in a healthy climate, will benefit because all the works of art they see and hear influence them for the good, like the breezes from some healthy country, insensibly leading them from the earliest childhood into close sympathy and conformity with beauty and reason”.[39]
Such passages taken together with Plato’s avowal that the guardians are being trained like dogs and his broader message about the primacy of the abstract intellectual justice of the philosopher’s reasoning suggest Plato is playing some subtle homage to the democratic norms of ethical consumption in Athens while re-narrating those norms to serve his new aristocratic system.[40] But his invocation of these norms seems to indicate their durable power in ancient Greek culture rather than their centrality in Plato’s system. Clearly, Plato means such norms of ethical consumption to represent a lower level of justice, appropriate to a certain class of citizens whose natures only fit them to achieve such a low level. Thus even if ethical consumption can be said to be important to Plato’s system, what people have taken away from The Republic is what is new and revolutionary: a radical redefinition of the good away from the material world of the polis and an approach to justice associated with an even more radical reconceptualization of deity as transcendent Truth.
The hostility of Plato to materiality has dramatic consequences for the history of political philosophy as Christianity took up Platonism. Plato’s idea that the Form of the Good is the origin of all truth and intelligibility, an eternal “One-ness” that is the cause of everything yet sufficient unto itself and his location of this ultimate truth outside the material world became the foundation for Christian thinking about the character of God and the relationship between God and human beings. For Christian Platonists, the material being of things is a lower and finite expression of their infinite spiritual being, which participates with the eternal One-ness that gives it their ultimate truth or real being. This is especially true of human beings, whose souls are the spiritual, eternal parts of their being and whose true home is with the One (God) who exists apart from our material world. Our bodies are, therefore, temporary cages for the soul that wants to be reunited completely with the perfect truth of the Divine.
In this scheme the material world is a distraction from the true calling of human beings, reuniting with God.[41] Indeed, the material world may seduce us away from our true destiny with God, and therefore betray us onto a path that leads to damnation. Thus there is a tremendous hostility to materiality and the body that arises here, a hostility reinforced by other philosophical influences on Christianity such as Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Stoicism, all of which expressed broadly similar antipathy to the body.
The influence of Platonism on Christianity was amplified by the work of St. Augustine of Hippo, who absorbed the Hellenic and Platonic traditions in his home of North Africa. In the earlier part of his life, Augustine fully adopted the tenets of orthodox Platonic Christianity. Augustine especially accepted the notion of all being as a continuum between inanimate matter all the way up to God. The work of a Christian, to the early Augustine, was to use reason to perceive the relations within this continuum and thus follow it up to the divine. Since the human body was part of this continuum, at first Augustine was much less negative towards the body than he had been in his earlier Manichean incarnation. To Augustine, the body was a distraction from the rational work of the soul, but it was also a necessary instrument for the Pilgrim’s progress towards the Divine.[42] Thus the asceticism of Augustinian Christianity was present, yet muted.
Later Augustine, however, paradoxically becomes both more and less hostile to materiality. Reading the Apostle Paul in the 390s, Augustine rejected the view that human beings’ rational capacities and will were adequate to reveal the truth of God. Instead, a yawning chasm opened up between man’s rational strivings and God that could only be bridged by the unfathomable grace of God. This view led Augustine to reject the perfectionism of the Pelagians of his day in a way that embraced materiality to some extent. Augustine, for instance, did not believe that true Christians would be able to put the body aside completely and live utterly pure lives of sensual denial.[43] But at the same time, by placing the consummation of Christian unity with God outside the material world, in death or the end times, Augustine placed all of human material experience in the realm of a fundamentally inauthentic mode of being in an even more radical way than Plato had. Augustine recognized that some level of holiness and Christian community needed to be maintained on earth, but this is just a preparation for the possible reception of God’s grace or at best an imperfect state of spiritual healing.[44]
Since our true destiny and being will be revealed only in heaven, Augustine suggests that we don’t need to take this world too seriously. To see this, compare the understanding of hubris and humility in pre-Socratic Athens and in Augustine. To the Athenians, hubris entailed actions that did not submit the individual to the moral training of the polis’ norms of ethical consumption. Hubris for Augustine, on the other hand, involves acting like the will is sufficient for achieving virtue instead of realizing that the will is defective and recognizing ones dependence on the grace of God for right action.[45] Thus Augustine’s account rejects the polis and materiality as a source of virtue. The city of man is imperfect and can never be just or produce justice; it can only create good habits by force. True virtue is only possible in the City of God.[46]
Even though Augustine moderated the asceticism that was dominant among early Christians, his ideal of religious community would compete with the more austere ascetic ideals of Pelagius through the Middle Ages.[47] The result is a long tradition that is largely ascetic. The move was practical for the time. The monastic tradition served as a worthy ark for Western culture, for the austere life of the cloister allowed the abbeys the social surplus necessary to carry on the work of culture amid the chaos of the Middle Ages. But the effect of this thousand-odd years in which self-denial was the necessary precondition for both philosophical and religious development was to deeply ingrain Platonic metaphysical prejudices against materiality and materialistic justice in the Western tradition. Nietzsche provides the fiercest indictment of the impact of such asceticism on the Western tradition in The Genealogy of Morals, arguing that asceticism has the paradoxical effect of at the same time renouncing life and nurturing it, but in banal, domesticated, and sick form.[48]
On the surface, liberalism would seem to be a philosophy that embraces materiality, but it does so to only a limited extent. The liberal tradition, I will argue, encompasses ideas that express justice as ethical consumption but liberalism has moved away from this understanding of justice seemingly as a product of the ongoing historical dialectic in which liberalism has developed. As Dewey persuasively argued, liberalism is not born of an a priori set of rational principles, but is rather a reflective reconstruction of principles to justify and sustain practices that developed pragmatically in response to the contingencies of history.[49] These practices, associated with the pursuit of property and knowledge by common people in everyday life, expressed a new modern sense of ethical consumption centered on these practices, what we will call producerism. The progress of justice within the liberal tradition, I will argue, can be traced to this conception. However, liberalism’s construction of principles from these practices has fundamentally undermined them, for liberalism’s Platonic prejudices against materiality prevents it from fostering a satisfactory theory of justice along the lines of ethical consumption. Furthermore, the development of the political economy away from the producerist practices that animated early liberalism have increasingly denied us access to those older norms and practices of ethical consumption which animated movements for justice in the past. Whether we can reconstruct these norms and practices through acts of Deweyean reflection will be the subject of the conclusion.
Just as Plato’s Republic rested on vestigial notions of justice as ethical consumption, we can detect the centrality of ethical consumption to liberalism at the precise moment when it denies it. Liberal social contract theorists (especially Locke) share with Plato a foundational metaphor of craftsmanship that expresses a respect for materiality and ethical consumption. After all, craftsmanship arises from dialectical practices in which the self is simultaneously molder and molded as the apprentice pursues the moral goods embodied in both the aesthetics of production and consumption. But liberalism also follows Plato in abstracting from this kind of knowledge such that the original practices of materiality and ethical consumption are denied their status as real knowing.
Recall Plato’s fundamental move was: what if moral knowledge is like a techne, the knowledge of a craftsman? In Gadamer’s summary of this move, “Does man project himself on an eidos of himself in the same way that the craftsman carries within himself an eidos of what he is trying to make and embody in his material?”[50] If this is the case, then moral knowledge can be an object of scientific inquiry just like the knowledge of a doctor. If moral knowledge is a techne, modeled on the knowledge of craft, then the model of human experience embodied by the act of making (projecting the eidos or idea of self onto the material world) becomes the metaphysical foundation of philosophy. Here the self-consciousness or soul of the person expresses itself, its freedom, by acting on the world based on knowledge of that world. The idea that the self should be seen as molded as much as molder, constituted by the material world through conformity to social practices of ethical consumption appears in contrast as a less free and less authentic way of being.
In the liberal tradition, this is expressed through rationalism, in which the self expresses its sovereignty by first comprehending the ultimate eidos, the transcendent truths revealed by science, and then using this knowledge to project himself or herself onto the world in an act of mastery. The skill and judgment of craft, techne and phronesis thus becomes elevated to the level of truth, episteme. This move leads to the rationalist theories of justice such as Rawls’s justice as fairness, utilitarianism, and Kant’s deontology, in which justice is a transcendent eidos derived by abstract reason. Their most fundamental contribution to the history of thinking is to rehabilitate the passions and desires from being the core problem of moral knowledge (they must be transcended because they are sin or an obstacle to achieving the really good) to being the basis of moral knowledge. Liberalism conceptualizes individuals as bundles of passions seeking to rationally satisfy desire, because that way of thinking completely avoids the question of what we should desire (what is the Good), in favor of addressing the (hopefully) purely technical problem of satisfying those desires in the best way (the Right). Thus the answer to the search for the truth of justice in Hobbes, Locke and (especially) Hume is to define human beings fundamentally as consumers and justice as specifying abstract formulas for satisfying consumption.[51] Since the desires of individuals-as-consumers become a priori, the basic metaphysical conception of human beings, liberal justice resists thinking about how those desires are and should be shaped by certain notions of ethical consumption. Indeed, placing the Right before the Good (i.e. the “radical emptying, evacuation” of any “empirical contingent” considerations of the good in Kantian formalism) is the touchstone of liberal thinking.[52]
But, recalling Dewey, this move is only a retrospective reconstruction of principles that can only have reality when they themselves lead to new practices. Thus this liberal rationalism, for the most part, flits along on the surface of liberal societies. The real work of liberalism, then, is done by the nascent liberal practices on which liberal rationalism rests, the pursuit of property and knowledge by commoners freed from the constraints of feudal institutions. This nascent strain in liberalism is best characterized as producerism, which places the creative act of producing property at the center of philosophy. While the rationalism of liberalism preserves and expresses the aristocratic elements of Plato’s vision of man as an abstract thinker, producerism is the practical expression of the idea that justice is a techne, modeled on the knowledge of craft. Liberal producerism defines justice as respecting practices of pursuing property and knowledge because these practices are good rather than merely right. Producerism is good because it not only unleashes productivity but also fosters the virtues of hard work, the pursuit of knowledge, and the cultivation and enjoyment of beauty. In short, even though producerism celebrates the act of making, this is only shorthand for the overall social process that includes consumption as well as production. Thus producerism is deeply sympathetic to justice as ethical consumption.
In Locke, producerism is the core of his theory of property. According to Locke, when a person mixes his labor with some material in the state of nature, it becomes his property. The production and enjoyment of such property thus becomes the central act of individuation. It both enacts the individual as individual through the autonomous act of making and marks out what is individual rather than common. The insecurity of such property in the state of nature then later becomes the incentive for individuals to establish the social contract that establishes government. Justice thereby becomes defined as those activities of government that respect the sovereign character of individuals by protecting both personal and property rights.[53] Now, liberal rationalism can reflectively derive such abstract principles, but the normative power of liberal justice lies not in the rationality of these principles, but in the ethical appeal of producerism itself as a practice of ethical consumption. The rationalism of liberalism understands practices of producerism as grounding liberal individualism when, in fact, this abstraction is based only on a fundamental blindness to the social nexus of production as an integrated moral practice.
Indeed, we can clearly see how this works in Locke’s theory of the origin of property. When Locke says “the ore I have digged in any place…become my property” the logic of the argument rests on our respect for the moral qualities of the emerging marketplace of productive practices rather than an abstract derivation of individualism. The rightness of having the coal rest on the goodness of both the labor and enjoying the fruits of it that characterized the emerging English market economy. Indeed, when Locke likewise claims property in the “turfs my servant has cut”, we see the half-heartedness of his rationalism. If rationalism were truly operating here, the turfs would belong to the servant, or at least we would have a discussion of the complex rents involved in the transaction. Why aren’t the turfs the property of the servant? The only answer can be that Locke’s 17th century norms of ethical consumption include conservative feudal values about the corrupting effects of spoiling servants with too much consumption (even of “turfs”) and beneficial effects of leisure and refined consumption on the landed elites.[54]
In contrast to liberalism’s early evident blindness to its ground in producerism, Hegel was a thorough-going producerist, whose notions of justice was inspired by the materialistic sense of justice as ethical consumption developed in ancient Greece. Judith Shklar calls Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit an “elegy for Hellas”, a requiem for the tragic heroic individualist project that began with Socrates and an overture for the possibility of recasting the spirit of Pericles in the new constitutional state. Hegel, Shklar argues, saw democratic Athens as a “paradise of the human spirit” because of its lack of tension between individual and community, its “expression of a complete ‘character’ and of an objective social situation…. [t]hat is far superior to the modern (Kantian) morality which is merely a matter of abstract knowledge”.[55] Hegel interpreted this “objective situation” mainly in terms of Athens’ political and civic life rather than its aesthetics, its sense of beauty and freedom in ethical consumption.[56] But Hegel’s overall philosophy is one deeply consonant with a materialistic notion of justice. Human beings as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit, after all, are not individuals in the liberal sense at all. Rather, human beings create themselves through the social and material relations of the dialectic.[57]
Simple consumption, it is true, is relegated to the early and lower stages of the historical dialectic outlined in the Phenomenology. Consumption by itself, for Hegel, cannot give the self the sense of efficacy or freedom it craves. After all, consumption would get done with or without the consumer, for time obliterates all. The satisfaction derived from consumption, Hegel says, “is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence”.[58] But consumption that occurs within the communal practices that create ethical character are another story. For Hegel, such relations constituted the “work of social man”, the “undivided consciousness of free citizens in a free polity” who maintain “laws and customs that were the creation of each and all of them”.[59] The key point in the Phenomenology where the origins of this polity are sketched is in Hegel’s famous passage on ‘Lordship and Bondage’, where the creative work of production done by the slave gives to him a more free consciousness. Through the process of production, the self participates simultaneously in the production of a consciousness and a social world in which a higher form of human freedom can be developed.[60] As Hegel puts it,
Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing. The negative relation to the object passes into the form of the object, into something that is permanent and remains; because it is just for the labourer that the object has independence. This negative mediating agency, this activity giving shape and form, is at the same time the individual existence, the pure self-existence of that consciousness, which now in the work it does is externalized and passes into the condition of permanence. The consciousness that toils and serves accordingly attains by this means the direct apprehension of that independent being as it self.[61]
Thus Hegel’s producerism is very different from Locke’s. While for Locke production marks the sovereignty of the individual, for Hegel production is the moment in which the self accepts its true place in the world, as simultaneously constituting and constituted by the practices of the human community. In this dialectic consumption takes the place as the de-emphasized (because it is obliterated) but essential negativity behind the reflective positing of identity, giving it its concrete character.[62] In Locke the self is claimed in labor; in Hegel the self is reflectively reconstructed from the practices (of simultaneous production and consumption) of a particular historical moment.
If this understanding is right, that liberal principles are a reflective reconstruction from practices of ethical consumption and production, then we should be able to look back at political history and see how evolving practices and their associated substantive notions of the good (theories of justice as ethical consumption) have driven the development of liberal principles. I think this can best be demonstrated by reinterpreting the influence of republican thinking on the modern world. While scholars have been engaged in a debate about whether American political history was animated by either liberalism or republicanism, it seems to me better to say that republicanism provided a theory of justice as ethical consumption (what I will call moral environmentalism) that could serve as a midwife for the birth of a modern liberal world and its attendant liberal ideals.[63] Republican ideals of ethical consumption have kindled political movements for justice that are retrospectively given liberal justification.
The republican tradition is fundamentally
concerned with leading human beings towards the good life and away from the
personal and social disorder that are the result of unchecked passions. Thus, even at its most ascetic moments,
republicanism is concerned with how certain kinds of restrained consumption
inculcate good habits or virtues.
Property, for instance, is central to the republican citizen not because
it marks him as a sovereign individual but because it allows him the
independence from the authority of masters and the imperatives of biological
necessity such that he is free to develop the higher virtues necessary to see
the public good. It marks an individual
as having the status and virtues necessary to claim membership in the political
community as an equal citizen.[64] Such virtues are, especially, firmly rooted
in an order of ethical consumption (and a set of laws) that creates balance
between the classes of society. This
emphasis on the virtues, and the need to justify any existing social order in
terms of the virtues, has always made republicanism articulate some notion of
justice as ethical consumption that could provide the notions of the good for
justifying an emerging liberal world that liberalism itself could not provide.
In the early modern period the challenges of
liberalism, Protestantism and absolutism required the aristocratic republicans
of Europe, especially England, to provide a more positive defense of their
privileged place in the pecking order of consumption. Asserting a natural or God-given virtue no longer cut it. What resulted was a defense of consumption
in terms of the virtues attendant with property. The highest expression of this move can be found in the writings
of Edmund Burke, who defended the English constitution on the grounds that it
placed power in the hands of people bred to virtue (especially the virtue of taste) by the milieu of England’s hierarchical social system.[65] To return to the language of Douglas and
Isherwood, the consumption patterns of England that were challenged by the
French Revolution, for Burke, created a moral universe that was the genius of
English society. While apparently
conservative by today’s standards, Burke’s argument should be seen as a
republican justification for the liberal institutions that had been
consolidated in England up to that time, institutions that newly gave status
and consumption the bourgeoisie like Burke himself.
In America this republican vision of virtue
through property became radicalized by the wider availability of property and
the political mobilization occasioned by the American Revolution. In America, the availability of land meant
almost anyone could get the property necessary to claim the republican ideal of
independent citizen (especially after the Tories were shipped off). Thus, when English republicanism was
translated into the American context, it became much more egalitarian and
democratic. If property creates virtue
then it should be government policy to try to secure property for as many
people as possible so that the entire republic can become virtuous.[66]
Thomas Jefferson articulated this view most
famously. Jefferson thought that
farming and rural life was an environment that created the most virtuous
citizens. Government was to be
organized, according to Jefferson, in a way that would expand access to this
ideal and then absorb and express it in a system of participatory
ward-republics. This kind of moral environmentalism [67]
essentially expresses my notion of justice as ethical consumption, as it’s not
just labor that produces virtue but the material environment in which labor is
performed, property held, and citizenship exercised.[68] As this view gained dominance in America, it
became almost merged with the liberal tradition in the producerism of
Jacksonian political ideology. Jackson
extended the Jeffersonian ideal to all white male workers, regardless of real
estate holdings, on the grounds of the virtue inherent in free labor. But the resulting institutions and
principles were liberal rather than republican. For these republican virtues, the Jacksonians thought, could only
be protected by proto-libertarian principles and institutions, which would
separate the government from the aristocratic designs of economic and political
parasites. Jacksonian democracy is thus
a prime example of how liberalism is developed and justified by non-liberal
moral environmentalist values. Thus the
sense of justice as ethical consumption of the Jeffersonian yeoman and the Jacksonian
mechanic ironically helped found a liberal society that would gradually
threaten the consumption of just those yeomen and mechanics. [69]
Things only came to a head when the
industrial revolution gave the lie to the republican promise that the political
economy of America would produce virtue and prosperity. The result was a series of populist
movements in the late 19th century that attempted to revive the
Jacksonian (s)creed: the virtuous people were being cheated by the unvirtuous
parasites of monopoly capitalism and banking.
Of course, however, these movements failed.[70] They failed because the demand for
government help to restore the world of free producerist labor entailed a
contradiction in terms. How could
government act to restore independence by treating people as dependent wards of
the state?
The model for a more successful argument was
developed by early American women’s movements.
Claims based on liberal arguments wouldn’t work for women, since they
were, after all, women, and not free independent individuals. As a result, women had to make moral
environmentalist arguments for reform.
As women were guardians of morality, they needed to enter politics
through the suffrage, prohibition work, etc. in order to create an environment
in which virtuous citizens could be raised, protected and elected.[71] These arguments took 19th century
republican values and recast them to provide a substantive notion of the good
life for 20th century industrial America that would encompass the
working classes into the new middle-class norms of ethical consumption. This argument rests fundamentally on a sense
that a just society must provide amounts and kinds of consumption that will
foster the moral and democratic character of its citizens, a sense of justice as
ethical consumption.
In the early twentieth century, the Arts and
Crafts Movement, a middle class aesthetic movement advocating homes and
furnishings of simplicity and durability, took up this argument. The American Movement originated in the work
of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement, who combined a
moral environmentalist romanticism with Marxism.[72] American Arts and Crafts Movement leaders,
however, kept the moral environmentalism and largely ignored the Marxism. In the wake of the twin pressures of labor
unrest and robber-baron capitalism, Arts and Crafts ideologues argued that the
answer to the problems of industrialization lay in more enlightened patterns of
middle class consumption. If people
only lived more simply in bungalows with artistic mission furniture and
hand-crafted objects, the argument went, then business would have to reform
labor practices to provide such goods and citizens would become more virtuous
and democratic through the influence of such artistic surroundings.[73] The Arts and Crafts Movement thus replaced
the Jeffersonian yeoman with the middle class homeowner as the touchstone of
American politics.[74]
The implications were far reaching. If government could not act to ensure free independent labor it could act to make the virtuous environment of the bungalow available to ever more people in society. The middle class lifestyle of virtuous consumption would produce more moral individuals, better citizens, even more productive workers. This was the sea change that authorized the Progressive Movement, and later in more dramatic fashion, the New Deal. These were avowedly consumerist and materialistic political projects. They asserted that American values of middle class virtue could best be secured by providing government guarantees for ever-greater levels of uninterrupted consumption.[75] These arguments rested not on abstract Marxist, utilitarian, or liberal theories of justice but rather on the notion that it was just for the government to make the virtues of ethical consumption available to a broader class of citizens.
The Decline of
Producerism and Justice as Ethical Consumption
What I have sketched here is a kind of historical dialectic in which evolving notions of justice as ethical consumption have midwifed the development of modern liberal society. The irony is that while notions of justice as ethical consumption have been the voice of justice in history, the dialectic has conspired to dampen just that voice which has been its rallying cry. For the institutional and philosophical constructions born of this dialectic have been by and large increasingly liberal in a way that increasingly precludes the voice of justice as ethical consumption in the public sphere. The progress of the dialectic away from producerism and towards a more abstract notion of right has led us to neo-liberalism or Marxism. Both are dead ends.
The problem is that producerism, just about the only theory of justice as ethical consumption we have, no longer works. Producerism could underlie theories of justice only when producerism was relevant to the contemporary political economy. Thus producerism appealed to people whose labor intensive craft-based skills were suddenly priced out of the marketplace by industrialization. But gradually the social conditions of production have ceased to look like those on which the producerism of Locke, Hegel, and Marx was modeled. Production began to take place within ever-broader social networks of production in which the model of the autonomous individual craftsperson no longer seemed to fit. As jobs were deskilled and alienated labor the norm, people lost the memory of the cultural world of craft-labor that was the leitmotif of producerism. Furthermore, the rise of service-sector labor created a form of production that just didn’t quite fit with the heroic, manly, and agricultural/ industrial model of early modern producerism.
In sum, of course, we have the world of late-capitalism in which the disembodied universal right of capital operates without the compensation of a fair bourgeois consumer culture. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Hegel had this all figured out at the beginning in Philosophy of Right, where the market and the bureaucratic state together form “the actuality of the ethical Idea” first born in Athens.[76] At the beginning of this modern world we have the alienation of the individual’s will into the universal will of the constitutional state, but his particular will (supposedly) returns to him in the form of the consumer culture of the bourgeois state.[77] But as the historical dialectic develops in reality this is an “absolute freedom”, in which (sadly) “the subject ‘gets nothing in exchange for everything’. He ‘passes into an empty nothing’; his alienation becomes an abstract negation which offers no positive, determinate content in exchange”, lots of Right but hardly anything Good. Žižek points out that this burgled, empty subject is the subject of liberal rationalism, of Kant especially.[78] In the modern context, stripped of producerist values and any conception of justice tied to everyday ethical experience, this subject is supposed to freely recognize the “universal moral law”.[79] Increasingly this means a kind of justice that bows to the universal laws of neo-classical economics, liberalization in other words, rather than even any recognizable liberal justice.
Given the fading ability of producerist
theories of justice to triumph over the exploitation in capitalism, advocates
for social justice have been left in a quandary. Appeals to producerist values no longer work, yet they lack any
alternative conception of human freedom other than those within
producerism. Advocates for greater
justice were left with either new notions of Hegel’s “universal moral law” such
as Kant’s or Rawls’s or Marx’s.
The last option has been even less successful than the others. Marx successfully radicalized the producerism in Hegel, but he did so in a way that stripped any semblance of norms of ethical consumption from the products of labor. As Arendt argues, Marx is primarily concerned with winning consumption for the proletariat so that they can be freed from the drudgery of labor, leaving both consumption and leisure untheorized as ways to freedom.[80] This lack of a theory for how consumption relates to freedom and justice further leads to Marxist notions of false consciousness, in which consumption is cast as antithetical to true freedom. People have not embraced radical movements for justice, the argument goes, because they are co-opted by the fetishized consumer goods of late capitalist societies. These consumer goods blind them from seeing their alienation and exploitation. This is a central theme in works associated with the Frankfurt School such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.[81] But what such critiques miss is that the materialistic world of consumer goods constitutes a highly normative moral universe. Marx’s powerful vision of dereifying our social institutions and creating new ones that satisfy real human needs for unalienated labor, freedom and justice is compelling, but it ignores the fact that the current distribution of property and consumption is central to the existing moral order. There simply are no “true interests” or “use value” that can be deployed to enact a redistributive scheme. In Žižek’s terms, all consumption is fantastical, so the Marxist project for mobilizing citizens for justice by disrupting their fantasies invokes only anger.[82] It’s as if the call of justice has become like the voice of John the Baptist, a voice insisting that we join him in an ascetic wilderness of Stalinist public housing.
I see this argument as a supplement to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Like Arendt, I have performed a genealogy here, going back to the Greeks to find a lost element of the human condition necessary for true freedom. The element I have tried to recover, a materialistic conception of justice as ethical consumption, is suggested by Arendt, but not fully recovered. Arendt’s project was to recover the vita activa, the practices which are free, because they are “in full independence of the necessities of life and the relationships they originated”.[83] Following Aristotle she found three such activities: the beautiful (“that is, with things neither necessary nor merely useful”), politics (“in which excellence produces beautiful deeds”), and philosophy (“contemplation of… things eternal”), but through the work she generally only manages to recover the second two.[84] She neglects the beautiful as a way to freedom, thereby placing ethical consumption as at most a tertiary concern. The recovery of politics from its subordination in modernity is her main focus. Arendt does so by pointing to the freedom of true action possible among equals who transcend mere natural life through discourse in the public sphere.[85] Such freedom, she laments, has been crowded out of modern life as human beings are transformed into mere animal laborans, caught up in the hyper-natural cycle of capitalism’s orgiastic productivity and banal consumption.[86] This central concern with reinvigorating the Greek narrative of freedom as freedom from necessity and nature, places Arendt in an at least ambivalent, almost hostile, posture towards consumption such that the consumption of beauty is left untheorized as an avenue of freedom.
For instance, in an aside Arendt reflects on the French concern with beauty as a “modern enchantment with ‘small things’… within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last purely humane corner”. She describes all this as if it were only a nice delusion on the part of the French, an “enchantment” which is small recompense for the loss of their “once great and glorious public realm”. “Greatness”, she says, “has given way to charm”.[87] Thus, for Arendt, politics is the true expression of human freedom, and if that is no longer possible, as she seems to conclude by the very end of the book, thinking or contemplation is still.[88] Beauty is a rare consolation that isn’t really taken seriously as freedom.
So is there a serious role for the consumption of beauty in the pursuit of human freedom? Clearly, I think so. Such an ideal is synonymous with the ideals of justice as ethical consumption I’ve tried to outline. Indeed, I would argue that, whereas Arendt generally follows the philosophical tradition since Plato of deprecating consumption as a moral and human activity, I would argue that some notion of ethical consumption is absolutely essential to give politics and thinking something to discourse and cogitate on. Furthermore, norms of ethical consumption inform the world of work, providing Arendt’s homo faber some model on which to make the human world such that his or her work does not fall into mere utility, reducing the work of creativity to the labor of mere life. But although, these concerns are peripheral to Arendt, she nevertheless senses her need to integrate the beautiful into her system. For she says, “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech”.[89] How else can a world be fit for politics and thinking, such that it supports and evokes action and speech, except one that is beautiful, formed though norms of ethical consumption?
Ensuring the creation of such a world should be the task of justice. I have argued that adequate principles of justice are not adequately provided by contemporary normative theories along the lines of Rawls’s justice as fairness. More effective arguments should, as Rawls says, lead us to reflect on our moral intuitions about justice, but these intuitions do not need to be abstracted in the way Rawls advocates.[90] Rather we need to consider our intuitions and traditions that inform us about the morality of our practices of consumption, especially how the virtues require a certain level and kind of consumption.
The question I have left for the most part unanswered is: what is our substantive notion of ethical consumption? To sketch an answer to that question, let me conclude by suggesting that our norms of ethical consumption predominantly point to the importance of the middle class home as the wellspring of American political and private virtue.[91] Thus justice as ethical consumption still points back to the political project of the New Deal: expanding the middle class not because it is right in any formal sense but because it is good.
To demonstrate that this conception matches our moral intuitions, allow me a final illustration. In the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life there’s a debate between the town oligarch, Mr. Potter, and the town saint, George Bailey, who works his entire life so that working class people can enter the middle class world of home ownership. Mr. Potter says, “You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas.” Contrast this brand of conservatism with the appeal to justice as ethical consumption of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey: But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what's wrong with that? Why . . . Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You . . . you said . . . What'd you say just a minute ago . . . They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home? Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they . . . Do you know how long it takes a workingman to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about . . . they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so.[92] What’s missing here is a call for the public to secure that “decent home”, but the notion of ethical consumption is clearly there. I suggest appealing to this notion might be more productive of a theory of justice with an overlapping consensus than the original position or other rationalistic exercises on offer.
Notes[1] Reeher 1997; Klosko 1993.
[2]Bork, 1997.
[3] Rawls 1971.
[4] A theory of justice as ethical consumption is not meant to obviate the need to discuss traditional issues about justice such as desert, effort, efficiency, autonomy and the like. Many readers would like me to specify the relationship between justice as ethical consumption and these principles, but I think it would be unfortunate to lapse into normal (political) science. What I am searching for is a theory of justice that can recruit partisans rather than “fill gaps in the literature”.
[5] The impasse in normative political philosophy after Rawls is occasioned by the seeming failure of liberalism to live up to its principle of allowing neutral adjudication between rival claims from a plurality of religious and philosophical doctrines. Attempts to save or revive liberalism have commonly given up on liberal neutrality, what theorists call placing the Right before the Good, in favor of articulating a defensible but still distinctively liberal theory of the good, especially focused on liberal virtues of tolerance and rationality. My theory of justice is in this vein, but it is pragmatic in focusing more on what is good in liberal societies than what is good in liberalism.
[6] Douglas and Isherwood 1996, 43.
[7] ibid., 50-51, 66.
[8] Žižek 1993, 215.
[9] ibid., 206.
[10] Jaegar, 1962, 70-74.
[11] Davies1993, 22.
[12] ibid., 24-26.
[13] Morris 2000, 156.
[14] Thucydides
1986, 147.
[15] ibid., 146.
[16] Veblen 1994.
[17] Morris1998, 81-82; Burckhardt 1998, 235.
[18] Thucydides 1986, 147.
[19] Boardman 2001, 289; Davidson
1998 ,222-224.
[20] Boardman 2001, 294.
[21] Csapo, and Miller
1998, 110-125.
[22] Boardman, 2001, 302.
[23] Morris 2000, 112-116,
164-168.
[24] ibid.,182-185.
[25] Davidson 1998, 186.
[26] ibid., 226.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.,167-182, 222-238.
[29] Burckhardt 1998, 259;
Morris 2000,133; Davidson 1998, 238-246.
[30] Plato, Republic,
332c-e.
[31] ibid., 438-441.
[32] ibid., 441e.
[33] Plato 1987, 161.
[34] Plato, Republic,
476-480, 507-509.
[35] ibid., 509-511.
[36] Plato 1987, 262.
[37] ibid., 64.
[38] Plato, Republic, 389e, 404c-d, 403.
[39] Plato 1987, p.103-104.
[40] Plato, Republic,
375a.
[41] Bell 1989, 23-25.
[42] Markus 1990, 48-49.
[43] ibid., 50-55.
[44] ibid., 61-62.
[45] MacIntyre 1988,
155-158; Augustine, City of God, V, 9; XIV, 11-13.
[46] Augustine, City of God,
II, 21; V, 19.
[47] Markus 1990; Dawson
1975.
[48] Nietzsche1956, 250-257.
[49] Dewey1931,101-115.
[50] Gadamer 1994, 315.
[51] MacIntyre 1988, 267,
269, 295, 298, 300-301, 313-313, 338-9, 347.
[52] Rawls 1971, 446-452;
Žižek 1993, 221.
[53] Locke1980.
[54] ibid., 19-20.
[55] Shklar, 1971, 86-87.
[56] ibid. 88.
[57] Hegel 1949.
[58] ibid., 238.
[59] Shklar 1971, 77, 80.
[60] Hegel 1949, 237-238.
[61] ibid., 238.
[62] Žižek 1993, 119-122.
[63] For a review of the liberalism/ republicanism debate see Engelman1993.
[64] Duncan1995, 42-61.
[65] Burke1959; Beer1993,140-141.
[66] Wood1972.
[67] The term moral
environmentalism comes from Boris1987, 219.
[68] Onuf, 2000, pp.14-15,
163-163; Matthews1984.
[69] Hanson1985, 121-154.
[70] ibid., 183-222.
[71] Daniels1989, 22;
Kritzer1996,152; Sklar1993.
[72] Thompson, 1988;
Borris1986; Skoblow1993.
[73] Kaplan 1987.
[74] Josefson,
Tulli and Sutton 2001.
[75] Fraser1989; Mettler 1998, 190, 212; Hanson
1985, 281.
[76] Hegel 1949,
229-238.
[77] Žižek 1993, 23.
[78] ibid.
[79] ibid., p. 24.
[80] Arendt1998, 105.
[81] Slater 1997, chapter 4.
[82] Žižek 1993, 215.
[83] Arendt 1998, 12.
[84] ibid., 13.
[85] ibid., 22-32.
[86] ibid., 126-135.
[87] ibid., 52.
[88] ibid., 324-325.
[89] ibid., 173, emphasis
added.
[90] Rawls 1971, 34-40.
[91] Of course, the ideal here isn’t just materialistic 1950s nostalgia, but something like the way Dewey hoped the domestic or decorative arts could foster democratic citizenship. See Dewey 1936 and Mattern 1999.
[92] Capra 1945.
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