Herbert Simon's satisficing life

Herbert Simon was a remarkably fertile thinker in the social and "artificial" sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1969, first edition)).  His most celebrated idea was the notion of "satisficing" rather than "optimizing" or "maximizing" in decision-making; he put forward a theory of ordinary decision-making that conformed more closely to the ways that actual people reason rather than the heroic abstractions of expected utility theory.

Essentially the concept of satisficing takes the cost of collecting additional information into account as a decision maker searches for a solution to a problem -- where to eat for dinner, which university to attend, which product to emphasize in a company's short-term strategy.  And the theory commends the idea that we are best served overall by accepting the "good-enough" solution rather than searching indefinitely for the best solution.  Rather than attempting to inventory all possible choices available at a given point in time and assigning them utilities and probabilities, the satisficing theory recommends setting parameters for a problem of choice, and then selecting the first solution that comes along that satisfies these parameters.  It means searching for a solution that is "good enough" rather than optimal.

And why not go for the optimal solution?  Because the cost of collecting the additional information associated with a broader choice set may well exceed the total benefit of the current decision.  This is obvious in the case of the decision of which restaurant to go to; slightly less obvious in the case of the decision of which university to attend; and perhaps flatly unpersuasive in the case of decisions where the outcome can influence life and death.

I've described the theory of satisficing in a little detail here for an unexpected reason: Simon took some interest in the art of autobiography, and it turns out that he interprets his own life as a series of satisficing decisions.  His autobiography Models of My Life appeared in 1996, and it's an interesting narrative of the intellectual and personal choices that led Simon from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh and beyond.

The idea is particularly apt for Simon's view about how a life unfolds.  He rejects the idea that one's life has an overriding theme.  He discusses the fact that the title of the book is a plural noun -- "Models of My Life".

There is a further reason for using the plural [models].  It is a denial -- a denial that a life, at least my life, has a central theme, a unifying thread running through it. True, there are themes (again the plural), some of the threads brighter or thicker or stronger than others.  Perhaps clearest is the theme of the scientist and teacher, carrying on his persistent heuristic search, seeking the Holy Grail of truth about human decision making.  In my case, even that thread is woven of finer strands: the political scientist, the organization theorist, the economist, the management scientist, the computer scientist, the psychologist, the philosopher of science. (xviii)

Rather than one underlying theme that underlies a person's biography and career, there are multiple choices, directions, and emphases -- that add up to a woven lifetime of contribution when the choices work out well.

Simon accepts the implication that this vision of a life presents: that there is no single "self" underlying all these changes and choices:

Which of the wanderers through these different mazes will step forward at the call for the real Herbert Simon?  All of them; for the "real" self is an illusion.  We live each hour in context, different contexts for different hours.... We act out our lives within the mazes in which Nature and society place us. (xviii-xix)

The analogy between daily decision-making and living a life is a direct one: instead of setting upon a course with very specific goals and objectives, and then taking the steps necessary to bring about the achievement of that system of goals, Simon is recommending a more local form of life decision-making. Build capacities, recognize opportunities, take risks, and build a life as a result of a series of local choices.  It is a form of bounded rationality for living rather than an expression of a fully developed life plan.  So we might say that Simon's "philosophy of living" is entirely consistent with his theory of bounded rationality.

There are a few real surprises in the book -- for example, a conversation between Simon and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina in 1970.  Simon was fascinated by Borges' use of the idea of a labyrinth in his novels, and wanted to find out from Borges how he was led to this family of metaphors.  Simon himself was drawn to the idea of a series of choices as a maze -- incorporating the insight that there are always unexplored outcomes behind the avenues not taken.  So a labyrinth is a good metaphor for choice within uncertainty and risk.

I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life's path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right.  The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice. (xvii)

Here is a snippet of the conversation between Simon and Borges as quoted in the book:

SIMON: I want to know how it was that the labyrinth entered into your field of vision, into your concepts, so that you incorporated in your stories.

BORGES: I remember having seen an engraving of the labyrinth in a French book -- when I was a boy. It was a circular building without doors but with many windows. I used to gaze at this engraving and think that if I brought a loupe close to it, it would reveal the Minotaur.

SIMON: Did you see it?

BORGES: Actually my eyesight was never good enough.  Soon I discovered something of the complexity of life, as if it were a game. In this I am not referring to chess. 

...

SIMON: What is the connection between the labyrinth of the Minotaur and your labyrinth, which calls for continual choice? Does the analogy go beyond the general concept?

BORGES: When I write, I don't think in terms of teaching. I think that my stories, in some way, are given to me, and my task is to narrate them. I neither search for implicit connotations nor start out with abstract ideas; I am not one who plays with symbols. But if there is some transcendental explanation of one of my stories, it is not for me to discover it, that is the task of the critics and the readers.

And a final surprise -- it emerges from the conversation that Borges had read "a very interesting book" early in his life, Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy -- not exactly the most predictable influence on the creator of magical realism.  And Russell's mathematical logic was likewise a formative influence for Simon, at a comparably early age.

There is an interesting short section where Simon discusses one of the directions he did not take in his own personal career maze -- the step of trying to become a college president at Carnegie Mellon or elsewhere (262 ff.).  Simon writes briefly about the reasons why this might have been a realistic aspiration for him -- a history of administrative competence at the department level and a stellar academic record.  But he decided not to pursue the presidency at CMU:

However that may be, I did not seriously consider taking on the context. ... I have never regretted the decision, especially in view of Dick's stellar performance on the job, a performance made possible by a "deviousness" that our colleague Leland Hazard admiringly attributed to him, and that I surely did not possess. (263)

He adds that he didn't have the personality needed to cultivate the community of wealthy businessmen whose support would be essential to Carnegie: "In fact, the close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president of a university such as Carnegie Mellon would have been uncomfortable for me" (263).

But here is the way this discussion strikes me (as a person whose career did take him in that direction). Simon gives no evidence here of understanding even the most basic facts about this domain of choice: what the job of president actually is; what the qualities of personality and leadership are that would lead to success; and what the intellectual satisfactions might be in the event that he became a university president. He seems to be working from a very shallow stereotyped view of the job of university president. In other words, Simon had none of the information that would be needed to make an informed career choice about this option. And this suggests that his decision-making on this issue was narrowly bounded indeed -- driven by a few stereotyped assumptions that were probably a poor guide to the reality.

(Here is a lecture by Herbert Simon on organizations, public administration, and markets:)

Herbert Simon's satisficing life

Herbert Simon was a remarkably fertile thinker in the social and "artificial" sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1969, first edition)).  His most celebrated idea was the notion of "satisficing" rather than "optimizing" or "maximizing" in decision-making; he put forward a theory of ordinary decision-making that conformed more closely to the ways that actual people reason rather than the heroic abstractions of expected utility theory.

Essentially the concept of satisficing takes the cost of collecting additional information into account as a decision maker searches for a solution to a problem -- where to eat for dinner, which university to attend, which product to emphasize in a company's short-term strategy.  And the theory commends the idea that we are best served overall by accepting the "good-enough" solution rather than searching indefinitely for the best solution.  Rather than attempting to inventory all possible choices available at a given point in time and assigning them utilities and probabilities, the satisficing theory recommends setting parameters for a problem of choice, and then selecting the first solution that comes along that satisfies these parameters.  It means searching for a solution that is "good enough" rather than optimal.

And why not go for the optimal solution?  Because the cost of collecting the additional information associated with a broader choice set may well exceed the total benefit of the current decision.  This is obvious in the case of the decision of which restaurant to go to; slightly less obvious in the case of the decision of which university to attend; and perhaps flatly unpersuasive in the case of decisions where the outcome can influence life and death.

I've described the theory of satisficing in a little detail here for an unexpected reason: Simon took some interest in the art of autobiography, and it turns out that he interprets his own life as a series of satisficing decisions.  His autobiography Models of My Life appeared in 1996, and it's an interesting narrative of the intellectual and personal choices that led Simon from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh and beyond.

The idea is particularly apt for Simon's view about how a life unfolds.  He rejects the idea that one's life has an overriding theme.  He discusses the fact that the title of the book is a plural noun -- "Models of My Life".

There is a further reason for using the plural [models].  It is a denial -- a denial that a life, at least my life, has a central theme, a unifying thread running through it. True, there are themes (again the plural), some of the threads brighter or thicker or stronger than others.  Perhaps clearest is the theme of the scientist and teacher, carrying on his persistent heuristic search, seeking the Holy Grail of truth about human decision making.  In my case, even that thread is woven of finer strands: the political scientist, the organization theorist, the economist, the management scientist, the computer scientist, the psychologist, the philosopher of science. (xviii)

Rather than one underlying theme that underlies a person's biography and career, there are multiple choices, directions, and emphases -- that add up to a woven lifetime of contribution when the choices work out well.

Simon accepts the implication that this vision of a life presents: that there is no single "self" underlying all these changes and choices:

Which of the wanderers through these different mazes will step forward at the call for the real Herbert Simon?  All of them; for the "real" self is an illusion.  We live each hour in context, different contexts for different hours.... We act out our lives within the mazes in which Nature and society place us. (xviii-xix)

The analogy between daily decision-making and living a life is a direct one: instead of setting upon a course with very specific goals and objectives, and then taking the steps necessary to bring about the achievement of that system of goals, Simon is recommending a more local form of life decision-making. Build capacities, recognize opportunities, take risks, and build a life as a result of a series of local choices.  It is a form of bounded rationality for living rather than an expression of a fully developed life plan.  So we might say that Simon's "philosophy of living" is entirely consistent with his theory of bounded rationality.

There are a few real surprises in the book -- for example, a conversation between Simon and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina in 1970.  Simon was fascinated by Borges' use of the idea of a labyrinth in his novels, and wanted to find out from Borges how he was led to this family of metaphors.  Simon himself was drawn to the idea of a series of choices as a maze -- incorporating the insight that there are always unexplored outcomes behind the avenues not taken.  So a labyrinth is a good metaphor for choice within uncertainty and risk.

I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life's path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right.  The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice. (xvii)

Here is a snippet of the conversation between Simon and Borges as quoted in the book:

SIMON: I want to know how it was that the labyrinth entered into your field of vision, into your concepts, so that you incorporated in your stories.

BORGES: I remember having seen an engraving of the labyrinth in a French book -- when I was a boy. It was a circular building without doors but with many windows. I used to gaze at this engraving and think that if I brought a loupe close to it, it would reveal the Minotaur.

SIMON: Did you see it?

BORGES: Actually my eyesight was never good enough.  Soon I discovered something of the complexity of life, as if it were a game. In this I am not referring to chess. 

...

SIMON: What is the connection between the labyrinth of the Minotaur and your labyrinth, which calls for continual choice? Does the analogy go beyond the general concept?

BORGES: When I write, I don't think in terms of teaching. I think that my stories, in some way, are given to me, and my task is to narrate them. I neither search for implicit connotations nor start out with abstract ideas; I am not one who plays with symbols. But if there is some transcendental explanation of one of my stories, it is not for me to discover it, that is the task of the critics and the readers.

And a final surprise -- it emerges from the conversation that Borges had read "a very interesting book" early in his life, Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy -- not exactly the most predictable influence on the creator of magical realism.  And Russell's mathematical logic was likewise a formative influence for Simon, at a comparably early age.

There is an interesting short section where Simon discusses one of the directions he did not take in his own personal career maze -- the step of trying to become a college president at Carnegie Mellon or elsewhere (262 ff.).  Simon writes briefly about the reasons why this might have been a realistic aspiration for him -- a history of administrative competence at the department level and a stellar academic record.  But he decided not to pursue the presidency at CMU:

However that may be, I did not seriously consider taking on the context. ... I have never regretted the decision, especially in view of Dick's stellar performance on the job, a performance made possible by a "deviousness" that our colleague Leland Hazard admiringly attributed to him, and that I surely did not possess. (263)

He adds that he didn't have the personality needed to cultivate the community of wealthy businessmen whose support would be essential to Carnegie: "In fact, the close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president of a university such as Carnegie Mellon would have been uncomfortable for me" (263).

But here is the way this discussion strikes me (as a person whose career did take him in that direction). Simon gives no evidence here of understanding even the most basic facts about this domain of choice: what the job of president actually is; what the qualities of personality and leadership are that would lead to success; and what the intellectual satisfactions might be in the event that he became a university president. He seems to be working from a very shallow stereotyped view of the job of university president. In other words, Simon had none of the information that would be needed to make an informed career choice about this option. And this suggests that his decision-making on this issue was narrowly bounded indeed -- driven by a few stereotyped assumptions that were probably a poor guide to the reality.

(Here is a lecture by Herbert Simon on organizations, public administration, and markets:)

Herbert Simon's satisficing life

Herbert Simon was a remarkably fertile thinker in the social and "artificial" sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1969, first edition)).  His most celebrated idea was the notion of "satisficing" rather than "optimizing" or "maximizing" in decision-making; he put forward a theory of ordinary decision-making that conformed more closely to the ways that actual people reason rather than the heroic abstractions of expected utility theory.

Essentially the concept of satisficing takes the cost of collecting additional information into account as a decision maker searches for a solution to a problem -- where to eat for dinner, which university to attend, which product to emphasize in a company's short-term strategy.  And the theory commends the idea that we are best served overall by accepting the "good-enough" solution rather than searching indefinitely for the best solution.  Rather than attempting to inventory all possible choices available at a given point in time and assigning them utilities and probabilities, the satisficing theory recommends setting parameters for a problem of choice, and then selecting the first solution that comes along that satisfies these parameters.  It means searching for a solution that is "good enough" rather than optimal.

And why not go for the optimal solution?  Because the cost of collecting the additional information associated with a broader choice set may well exceed the total benefit of the current decision.  This is obvious in the case of the decision of which restaurant to go to; slightly less obvious in the case of the decision of which university to attend; and perhaps flatly unpersuasive in the case of decisions where the outcome can influence life and death.

I've described the theory of satisficing in a little detail here for an unexpected reason: Simon took some interest in the art of autobiography, and it turns out that he interprets his own life as a series of satisficing decisions.  His autobiography Models of My Life appeared in 1996, and it's an interesting narrative of the intellectual and personal choices that led Simon from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh and beyond.

The idea is particularly apt for Simon's view about how a life unfolds.  He rejects the idea that one's life has an overriding theme.  He discusses the fact that the title of the book is a plural noun -- "Models of My Life".

There is a further reason for using the plural [models].  It is a denial -- a denial that a life, at least my life, has a central theme, a unifying thread running through it. True, there are themes (again the plural), some of the threads brighter or thicker or stronger than others.  Perhaps clearest is the theme of the scientist and teacher, carrying on his persistent heuristic search, seeking the Holy Grail of truth about human decision making.  In my case, even that thread is woven of finer strands: the political scientist, the organization theorist, the economist, the management scientist, the computer scientist, the psychologist, the philosopher of science. (xviii)

Rather than one underlying theme that underlies a person's biography and career, there are multiple choices, directions, and emphases -- that add up to a woven lifetime of contribution when the choices work out well.

Simon accepts the implication that this vision of a life presents: that there is no single "self" underlying all these changes and choices:

Which of the wanderers through these different mazes will step forward at the call for the real Herbert Simon?  All of them; for the "real" self is an illusion.  We live each hour in context, different contexts for different hours.... We act out our lives within the mazes in which Nature and society place us. (xviii-xix)

The analogy between daily decision-making and living a life is a direct one: instead of setting upon a course with very specific goals and objectives, and then taking the steps necessary to bring about the achievement of that system of goals, Simon is recommending a more local form of life decision-making. Build capacities, recognize opportunities, take risks, and build a life as a result of a series of local choices.  It is a form of bounded rationality for living rather than an expression of a fully developed life plan.  So we might say that Simon's "philosophy of living" is entirely consistent with his theory of bounded rationality.

There are a few real surprises in the book -- for example, a conversation between Simon and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina in 1970.  Simon was fascinated by Borges' use of the idea of a labyrinth in his novels, and wanted to find out from Borges how he was led to this family of metaphors.  Simon himself was drawn to the idea of a series of choices as a maze -- incorporating the insight that there are always unexplored outcomes behind the avenues not taken.  So a labyrinth is a good metaphor for choice within uncertainty and risk.

I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life's path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right.  The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice. (xvii)

Here is a snippet of the conversation between Simon and Borges as quoted in the book:

SIMON: I want to know how it was that the labyrinth entered into your field of vision, into your concepts, so that you incorporated in your stories.

BORGES: I remember having seen an engraving of the labyrinth in a French book -- when I was a boy. It was a circular building without doors but with many windows. I used to gaze at this engraving and think that if I brought a loupe close to it, it would reveal the Minotaur.

SIMON: Did you see it?

BORGES: Actually my eyesight was never good enough.  Soon I discovered something of the complexity of life, as if it were a game. In this I am not referring to chess. 

...

SIMON: What is the connection between the labyrinth of the Minotaur and your labyrinth, which calls for continual choice? Does the analogy go beyond the general concept?

BORGES: When I write, I don't think in terms of teaching. I think that my stories, in some way, are given to me, and my task is to narrate them. I neither search for implicit connotations nor start out with abstract ideas; I am not one who plays with symbols. But if there is some transcendental explanation of one of my stories, it is not for me to discover it, that is the task of the critics and the readers.

And a final surprise -- it emerges from the conversation that Borges had read "a very interesting book" early in his life, Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy -- not exactly the most predictable influence on the creator of magical realism.  And Russell's mathematical logic was likewise a formative influence for Simon, at a comparably early age.

There is an interesting short section where Simon discusses one of the directions he did not take in his own personal career maze -- the step of trying to become a college president at Carnegie Mellon or elsewhere (262 ff.).  Simon writes briefly about the reasons why this might have been a realistic aspiration for him -- a history of administrative competence at the department level and a stellar academic record.  But he decided not to pursue the presidency at CMU:

However that may be, I did not seriously consider taking on the context. ... I have never regretted the decision, especially in view of Dick's stellar performance on the job, a performance made possible by a "deviousness" that our colleague Leland Hazard admiringly attributed to him, and that I surely did not possess. (263)

He adds that he didn't have the personality needed to cultivate the community of wealthy businessmen whose support would be essential to Carnegie: "In fact, the close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president of a university such as Carnegie Mellon would have been uncomfortable for me" (263).

But here is the way this discussion strikes me (as a person whose career did take him in that direction). Simon gives no evidence here of understanding even the most basic facts about this domain of choice: what the job of president actually is; what the qualities of personality and leadership are that would lead to success; and what the intellectual satisfactions might be in the event that he became a university president. He seems to be working from a very shallow stereotyped view of the job of university president. In other words, Simon had none of the information that would be needed to make an informed career choice about this option. And this suggests that his decision-making on this issue was narrowly bounded indeed -- driven by a few stereotyped assumptions that were probably a poor guide to the reality.

(Here is a lecture by Herbert Simon on organizations, public administration, and markets:)

The politics of cultural despair

The last century gave us far too many examples of the rise of extremism in mass societies -- both democratic and authoritarian.  Some of the political mechanisms of extremist seizure of power are well known -- paramilitary force, extremist organizations, demogogic leaders, hyper-heated rhetoric, appeals to nationalism and racism, and inflammatory mass media.  But it's also worth asking -- what is the cultural basis for the rise of various extremisms?  What factors in the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of a population have sometimes led to the rise of extremist states -- fascism, ethnic cleansing, murderous nationalism, or deranged communism such as the killing fields of Cambodia?  Does philosophy play a role in the rise of extremism?

For observers born since 1930 a natural place to raise this question is the rise of National Socialism in Germany.  How could a party dedicated to an explicit programme of racism, repression, and murder have gained mass support and control of the state in Germany?

A particularly important early effort to answer this question was Fritz Stern's pathbreaking The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961), now fifty years old.  The book is a careful intellectual history; but it is more than that.  It is an effort to link a set of philosophical ideas to a series of political developments that involved increasingly wide circles of German citizens.  So it serves as one example of how we might think about the relationship between large cultural ideas and currents, and more specific developments in politics.

Stern opens the book with these words:

This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism.  By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair.  Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck--their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich--attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit.  But they were more than critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well.  Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth.  Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian.  It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality. (1)

These three figures were important cultural voices in Germany, even though they were undistinguished within the academic world.  Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) were intellectual and cultural precursors for the ideology of National Socialism.  They were harsh, vitriolic critics of modern German social life; they were anti-Semites; and they were wedded to a discourse of passion and hatred as devices for influencing their readers.

The central focus of this cultural criticism was the fact of modernity -- liberalism, secularism, Manchesterism, consumptionism, and individualism.  These were conservative critics; they favored an earlier time that was more traditional, moral, hierarchical, and religious.  They preferred villages and towns to cities; they preferred cultivated thinkers to merchants and professionals, and they feared the rise of the proletariat.

By liberalism they meant to encompass several ideas: individualism, self-interest, parliamentary government, and glorification of commerce and the market.  And their criticisms were unswerving: they hoped to turn back all of the liberal democratic and industrial transformations that modern Europe was undergoing.

The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them.  They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance. (7)

The conservative revolutionaries denounced every aspect of the capitalistic society and its putative materialism.  They railed against the spiritual emptiness of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of intellect and virtue in a mass society.  They attacked the press as corrupt, the political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as ineffectual mediocrities.  The bleaker their picture of the present, the more attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were peasants and kings true rulers. (9-10)

In addition to their critique of a rising liberalism in Germany (and Europe more generally), these critics were also united in a virulent anti-Semitism.  Their denunciations of the Jews became a common thread in Nazi propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stern makes the important point that these three writers depended on the emotions and the passions rather than reason and argument to express themselves.  "All three wrote with great fervor and passion.  They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, denied reason, and exalted intuition" (4).  Here is a particularly important observation of the nature of this cultural criticism that appears to be relevant in our own time as well.  Julien Benda, a liberal thinker, noted that political discourse "began to play the game of political passions.... Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds" (6).

Stern has two fundamental aims in this study.  First, he hopes that the study of these three cultural critics will illuminate an important current of history: Germany's drift towards extremism and anti-Semitism.

This study, then, takes up the origins, content, and impact of an ideology which not only resembles national socialism, but which the National Socialists themselves acknowledged as an essential part of their legacy.  But it will also point to another link, admittedly less tangible--to wit, that the Germanic critics in the peculiar tension between their lives and their ideological aspirations anticipate the type of malcontent who, in the 1920's, found a haven in the idealism of the Hitler movement.  ... We may not have sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture. (5)

But second, the book is interested in popular culture as well.  How did ordinary Germans fall prey to mobilization and propaganda based on nationalism, violence, and anti-Semitism?  Stern tries to show through a detailed study of the cultural framework expressed by these thinkers, that we can also attempt to reconstruct the modes of popular consciousness that percolated through German society in these decades.  These ultra-conservative currents helped to make even ordinary people susceptible to the efforts at mobilization that were directed towards them by the National Socialists.

Are there parallels in twentieth-century America?  Stern thought there were, in 1961.

Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today.  As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism. ...  There is a discontent in the Western world that does not stem from economic want or from the threat of war; rather it springs from dissatisfaction with life in an urban and industrialized culture -- a dissatisfaction that the three critics discussed in this book felt and fostered. (13, 14-15)

Two elements seem especially relevant in today's political culture: the willingness of some voices in the political sphere to engage in the emotional hyperbole and hatred that were the stock-in-trade of these German critics; and the extremist language surrounding the rejection of "liberalism" that is to be found in the airwaves today.  Today too we are confronted with a virulent rejection of many aspects of a "liberal" world, and an apparent yearning for an earlier (mythical) time when there was one defining moral-religious framework to which all of society subscribed.

One of the greatest failures of German liberals and academics in the 1920s and 1930s was their inability -- perhaps even their unwillingness -- to make the positive case for a modern, liberal society.  The values of justice, equality, citizenship, and mutual respect embodied through decent economic and political institutions need to be defended; and German thinkers fell short in this historical task in the early twentieth century.  It is certainly important for Americans in the early twenty-first century to be more successful in making this case.

(Here is Fritz Stern on Fora.tv:)

The politics of cultural despair

The last century gave us far too many examples of the rise of extremism in mass societies -- both democratic and authoritarian.  Some of the political mechanisms of extremist seizure of power are well known -- paramilitary force, extremist organizations, demogogic leaders, hyper-heated rhetoric, appeals to nationalism and racism, and inflammatory mass media.  But it's also worth asking -- what is the cultural basis for the rise of various extremisms?  What factors in the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of a population have sometimes led to the rise of extremist states -- fascism, ethnic cleansing, murderous nationalism, or deranged communism such as the killing fields of Cambodia?  Does philosophy play a role in the rise of extremism?

For observers born since 1930 a natural place to raise this question is the rise of National Socialism in Germany.  How could a party dedicated to an explicit programme of racism, repression, and murder have gained mass support and control of the state in Germany?

A particularly important early effort to answer this question was Fritz Stern's pathbreaking The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961), now fifty years old.  The book is a careful intellectual history; but it is more than that.  It is an effort to link a set of philosophical ideas to a series of political developments that involved increasingly wide circles of German citizens.  So it serves as one example of how we might think about the relationship between large cultural ideas and currents, and more specific developments in politics.

Stern opens the book with these words:

This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism.  By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair.  Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck--their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich--attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit.  But they were more than critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well.  Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth.  Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian.  It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality. (1)

These three figures were important cultural voices in Germany, even though they were undistinguished within the academic world.  Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) were intellectual and cultural precursors for the ideology of National Socialism.  They were harsh, vitriolic critics of modern German social life; they were anti-Semites; and they were wedded to a discourse of passion and hatred as devices for influencing their readers.

The central focus of this cultural criticism was the fact of modernity -- liberalism, secularism, Manchesterism, consumptionism, and individualism.  These were conservative critics; they favored an earlier time that was more traditional, moral, hierarchical, and religious.  They preferred villages and towns to cities; they preferred cultivated thinkers to merchants and professionals, and they feared the rise of the proletariat.

By liberalism they meant to encompass several ideas: individualism, self-interest, parliamentary government, and glorification of commerce and the market.  And their criticisms were unswerving: they hoped to turn back all of the liberal democratic and industrial transformations that modern Europe was undergoing.

The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them.  They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance. (7)

The conservative revolutionaries denounced every aspect of the capitalistic society and its putative materialism.  They railed against the spiritual emptiness of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of intellect and virtue in a mass society.  They attacked the press as corrupt, the political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as ineffectual mediocrities.  The bleaker their picture of the present, the more attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were peasants and kings true rulers. (9-10)

In addition to their critique of a rising liberalism in Germany (and Europe more generally), these critics were also united in a virulent anti-Semitism.  Their denunciations of the Jews became a common thread in Nazi propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stern makes the important point that these three writers depended on the emotions and the passions rather than reason and argument to express themselves.  "All three wrote with great fervor and passion.  They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, denied reason, and exalted intuition" (4).  Here is a particularly important observation of the nature of this cultural criticism that appears to be relevant in our own time as well.  Julien Benda, a liberal thinker, noted that political discourse "began to play the game of political passions.... Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds" (6).

Stern has two fundamental aims in this study.  First, he hopes that the study of these three cultural critics will illuminate an important current of history: Germany's drift towards extremism and anti-Semitism.

This study, then, takes up the origins, content, and impact of an ideology which not only resembles national socialism, but which the National Socialists themselves acknowledged as an essential part of their legacy.  But it will also point to another link, admittedly less tangible--to wit, that the Germanic critics in the peculiar tension between their lives and their ideological aspirations anticipate the type of malcontent who, in the 1920's, found a haven in the idealism of the Hitler movement.  ... We may not have sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture. (5)

But second, the book is interested in popular culture as well.  How did ordinary Germans fall prey to mobilization and propaganda based on nationalism, violence, and anti-Semitism?  Stern tries to show through a detailed study of the cultural framework expressed by these thinkers, that we can also attempt to reconstruct the modes of popular consciousness that percolated through German society in these decades.  These ultra-conservative currents helped to make even ordinary people susceptible to the efforts at mobilization that were directed towards them by the National Socialists.

Are there parallels in twentieth-century America?  Stern thought there were, in 1961.

Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today.  As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism. ...  There is a discontent in the Western world that does not stem from economic want or from the threat of war; rather it springs from dissatisfaction with life in an urban and industrialized culture -- a dissatisfaction that the three critics discussed in this book felt and fostered. (13, 14-15)

Two elements seem especially relevant in today's political culture: the willingness of some voices in the political sphere to engage in the emotional hyperbole and hatred that were the stock-in-trade of these German critics; and the extremist language surrounding the rejection of "liberalism" that is to be found in the airwaves today.  Today too we are confronted with a virulent rejection of many aspects of a "liberal" world, and an apparent yearning for an earlier (mythical) time when there was one defining moral-religious framework to which all of society subscribed.

One of the greatest failures of German liberals and academics in the 1920s and 1930s was their inability -- perhaps even their unwillingness -- to make the positive case for a modern, liberal society.  The values of justice, equality, citizenship, and mutual respect embodied through decent economic and political institutions need to be defended; and German thinkers fell short in this historical task in the early twentieth century.  It is certainly important for Americans in the early twenty-first century to be more successful in making this case.

(Here is Fritz Stern on Fora.tv:)

The politics of cultural despair

The last century gave us far too many examples of the rise of extremism in mass societies -- both democratic and authoritarian.  Some of the political mechanisms of extremist seizure of power are well known -- paramilitary force, extremist organizations, demogogic leaders, hyper-heated rhetoric, appeals to nationalism and racism, and inflammatory mass media.  But it's also worth asking -- what is the cultural basis for the rise of various extremisms?  What factors in the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of a population have sometimes led to the rise of extremist states -- fascism, ethnic cleansing, murderous nationalism, or deranged communism such as the killing fields of Cambodia?  Does philosophy play a role in the rise of extremism?

For observers born since 1930 a natural place to raise this question is the rise of National Socialism in Germany.  How could a party dedicated to an explicit programme of racism, repression, and murder have gained mass support and control of the state in Germany?

A particularly important early effort to answer this question was Fritz Stern's pathbreaking The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961), now fifty years old.  The book is a careful intellectual history; but it is more than that.  It is an effort to link a set of philosophical ideas to a series of political developments that involved increasingly wide circles of German citizens.  So it serves as one example of how we might think about the relationship between large cultural ideas and currents, and more specific developments in politics.

Stern opens the book with these words:

This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism.  By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair.  Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck--their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich--attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit.  But they were more than critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well.  Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth.  Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian.  It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality. (1)

These three figures were important cultural voices in Germany, even though they were undistinguished within the academic world.  Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) were intellectual and cultural precursors for the ideology of National Socialism.  They were harsh, vitriolic critics of modern German social life; they were anti-Semites; and they were wedded to a discourse of passion and hatred as devices for influencing their readers.

The central focus of this cultural criticism was the fact of modernity -- liberalism, secularism, Manchesterism, consumptionism, and individualism.  These were conservative critics; they favored an earlier time that was more traditional, moral, hierarchical, and religious.  They preferred villages and towns to cities; they preferred cultivated thinkers to merchants and professionals, and they feared the rise of the proletariat.

By liberalism they meant to encompass several ideas: individualism, self-interest, parliamentary government, and glorification of commerce and the market.  And their criticisms were unswerving: they hoped to turn back all of the liberal democratic and industrial transformations that modern Europe was undergoing.

The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them.  They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance. (7)

The conservative revolutionaries denounced every aspect of the capitalistic society and its putative materialism.  They railed against the spiritual emptiness of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of intellect and virtue in a mass society.  They attacked the press as corrupt, the political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as ineffectual mediocrities.  The bleaker their picture of the present, the more attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were peasants and kings true rulers. (9-10)

In addition to their critique of a rising liberalism in Germany (and Europe more generally), these critics were also united in a virulent anti-Semitism.  Their denunciations of the Jews became a common thread in Nazi propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stern makes the important point that these three writers depended on the emotions and the passions rather than reason and argument to express themselves.  "All three wrote with great fervor and passion.  They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, denied reason, and exalted intuition" (4).  Here is a particularly important observation of the nature of this cultural criticism that appears to be relevant in our own time as well.  Julien Benda, a liberal thinker, noted that political discourse "began to play the game of political passions.... Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds" (6).

Stern has two fundamental aims in this study.  First, he hopes that the study of these three cultural critics will illuminate an important current of history: Germany's drift towards extremism and anti-Semitism.

This study, then, takes up the origins, content, and impact of an ideology which not only resembles national socialism, but which the National Socialists themselves acknowledged as an essential part of their legacy.  But it will also point to another link, admittedly less tangible--to wit, that the Germanic critics in the peculiar tension between their lives and their ideological aspirations anticipate the type of malcontent who, in the 1920's, found a haven in the idealism of the Hitler movement.  ... We may not have sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture. (5)

But second, the book is interested in popular culture as well.  How did ordinary Germans fall prey to mobilization and propaganda based on nationalism, violence, and anti-Semitism?  Stern tries to show through a detailed study of the cultural framework expressed by these thinkers, that we can also attempt to reconstruct the modes of popular consciousness that percolated through German society in these decades.  These ultra-conservative currents helped to make even ordinary people susceptible to the efforts at mobilization that were directed towards them by the National Socialists.

Are there parallels in twentieth-century America?  Stern thought there were, in 1961.

Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today.  As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism. ...  There is a discontent in the Western world that does not stem from economic want or from the threat of war; rather it springs from dissatisfaction with life in an urban and industrialized culture -- a dissatisfaction that the three critics discussed in this book felt and fostered. (13, 14-15)

Two elements seem especially relevant in today's political culture: the willingness of some voices in the political sphere to engage in the emotional hyperbole and hatred that were the stock-in-trade of these German critics; and the extremist language surrounding the rejection of "liberalism" that is to be found in the airwaves today.  Today too we are confronted with a virulent rejection of many aspects of a "liberal" world, and an apparent yearning for an earlier (mythical) time when there was one defining moral-religious framework to which all of society subscribed.

One of the greatest failures of German liberals and academics in the 1920s and 1930s was their inability -- perhaps even their unwillingness -- to make the positive case for a modern, liberal society.  The values of justice, equality, citizenship, and mutual respect embodied through decent economic and political institutions need to be defended; and German thinkers fell short in this historical task in the early twentieth century.  It is certainly important for Americans in the early twenty-first century to be more successful in making this case.

(Here is Fritz Stern on Fora.tv:)

New ideas about taxes in France

The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists with long expert knowledge of the French fiscal system. The book is Pour une révolution fiscale: Un impôt sur le revenu pour le XXIe siècle, and it offers a stringent critique of the existing system and a set of proposals for a reformed system. The book has a companion website here.

In a word, these experts conclude that the existing tax structure in France is seriously unjust because it is anti-progressive at the very high end of the income distribution -- the top 1 percent decline steeply in the percentage of their income that is collected in the form of the several tax vehicles.  Only 20% of the state' revenues derive from taxes that are truly progressive (Nouvel Obs, 2411, p. 18).

As we can see from the graph, the total tax burden of the top 1 percent of income earners declines sharply from 48% to about 32%. And the reason for this is the portion of the French tax system devoted to funding social services (Cotisations sociales et taxes sur les salaires). This assessment is roughly flat from the 30th percentile to the 99th percentile, and then it declines rapidly. (The other components of taxes represented here include the income tax, a tax on returns on capital, and taxes on consumption including the TVA.)

Here is what the distribution of tax burdens would look like on the basis of their proposals:

So what is their proposal? It is to significantly revamp the income tax and the cotisation. The cotisation needs to be progressive rather than regressive; and the income tax needs to be higher. Their proposal is revenue-neutral in this particular sense: the median tax payer today bears a 47% tax burden, and this remains the same under the reform.

Ce livre plaide pour une revolution fiscale précise et opérationnelle, dont tous les détails sont chiffrés au grand jour. Nous proposons en particulier la création d'un nouvel impôt sur le revenue, remplaçant un grand nombre de taxes existantes, notamment la contribution social généralisée (CSG), l'actuel impôt sur le revenu (qui, sou sa forme actuelle, serait purement et simplement supprimé), le prélèvement libératoire, la prime pour l'emploi et le  bouclier fiscal.  Ce nouvel impôt sur le revenu, payé par tous les Français et socialement adapté a la France du XXIe siecle, sera entièrement individualisé, prélevé directement a la source sur les revenus du travail et du capital. (18)

Also of interest are the summary graphs that the authors provide of the distribution of income and wealth in France:

Two things are particularly striking in this discussion. One is how significantly different the French fiscal system is from the U.S. system. Income tax is less than 10% of income for all income levels. And the cotisation is a substantially larger share of total taxes than the Social Security tax in the U.S.

But the other striking thing is the significantly different perspective that these authors take on taxes, compared to almost all discussions of taxes in the U.S. They are fundamentally concerned about the fairness of the tax burden; they care about progressivity; and they are concerned to prevent the ability of "les tres aisées" to exercise political influence in order to reduce their share. "Fiscal rigor" doesn't mean severe budget reductions and elimination of the social security net for French citizens; it means creating a tax system that is adequate to the spending commitments of the French state, and that is fair in its distribution of tax obligations across the whole of society.

I think most observers of French politics doubt that this kind of progressive and sweeping fiscal reform is in the cards in the coming decade. But it is at least encouraging that the issues are being raised.

New ideas about taxes in France

The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists with long expert knowledge of the French fiscal system. The book is Pour une révolution fiscale: Un impôt sur le revenu pour le XXIe siècle, and it offers a stringent critique of the existing system and a set of proposals for a reformed system. The book has a companion website here.

In a word, these experts conclude that the existing tax structure in France is seriously unjust because it is anti-progressive at the very high end of the income distribution -- the top 1 percent decline steeply in the percentage of their income that is collected in the form of the several tax vehicles.  Only 20% of the state' revenues derive from taxes that are truly progressive (Nouvel Obs, 2411, p. 18).

As we can see from the graph, the total tax burden of the top 1 percent of income earners declines sharply from 48% to about 32%. And the reason for this is the portion of the French tax system devoted to funding social services (Cotisations sociales et taxes sur les salaires). This assessment is roughly flat from the 30th percentile to the 99th percentile, and then it declines rapidly. (The other components of taxes represented here include the income tax, a tax on returns on capital, and taxes on consumption including the TVA.)

Here is what the distribution of tax burdens would look like on the basis of their proposals:

So what is their proposal? It is to significantly revamp the income tax and the cotisation. The cotisation needs to be progressive rather than regressive; and the income tax needs to be higher. Their proposal is revenue-neutral in this particular sense: the median tax payer today bears a 47% tax burden, and this remains the same under the reform.

Ce livre plaide pour une revolution fiscale précise et opérationnelle, dont tous les détails sont chiffrés au grand jour. Nous proposons en particulier la création d'un nouvel impôt sur le revenue, remplaçant un grand nombre de taxes existantes, notamment la contribution social généralisée (CSG), l'actuel impôt sur le revenu (qui, sou sa forme actuelle, serait purement et simplement supprimé), le prélèvement libératoire, la prime pour l'emploi et le  bouclier fiscal.  Ce nouvel impôt sur le revenu, payé par tous les Français et socialement adapté a la France du XXIe siecle, sera entièrement individualisé, prélevé directement a la source sur les revenus du travail et du capital. (18)

Also of interest are the summary graphs that the authors provide of the distribution of income and wealth in France:

Two things are particularly striking in this discussion. One is how significantly different the French fiscal system is from the U.S. system. Income tax is less than 10% of income for all income levels. And the cotisation is a substantially larger share of total taxes than the Social Security tax in the U.S.

But the other striking thing is the significantly different perspective that these authors take on taxes, compared to almost all discussions of taxes in the U.S. They are fundamentally concerned about the fairness of the tax burden; they care about progressivity; and they are concerned to prevent the ability of "les tres aisées" to exercise political influence in order to reduce their share. "Fiscal rigor" doesn't mean severe budget reductions and elimination of the social security net for French citizens; it means creating a tax system that is adequate to the spending commitments of the French state, and that is fair in its distribution of tax obligations across the whole of society.

I think most observers of French politics doubt that this kind of progressive and sweeping fiscal reform is in the cards in the coming decade. But it is at least encouraging that the issues are being raised.

New ideas about taxes in France

The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists with long expert knowledge of the French fiscal system. The book is Pour une révolution fiscale: Un impôt sur le revenu pour le XXIe siècle, and it offers a stringent critique of the existing system and a set of proposals for a reformed system. The book has a companion website here.

In a word, these experts conclude that the existing tax structure in France is seriously unjust because it is anti-progressive at the very high end of the income distribution -- the top 1 percent decline steeply in the percentage of their income that is collected in the form of the several tax vehicles.  Only 20% of the state' revenues derive from taxes that are truly progressive (Nouvel Obs, 2411, p. 18).

As we can see from the graph, the total tax burden of the top 1 percent of income earners declines sharply from 48% to about 32%. And the reason for this is the portion of the French tax system devoted to funding social services (Cotisations sociales et taxes sur les salaires). This assessment is roughly flat from the 30th percentile to the 99th percentile, and then it declines rapidly. (The other components of taxes represented here include the income tax, a tax on returns on capital, and taxes on consumption including the TVA.)

Here is what the distribution of tax burdens would look like on the basis of their proposals:

So what is their proposal? It is to significantly revamp the income tax and the cotisation. The cotisation needs to be progressive rather than regressive; and the income tax needs to be higher. Their proposal is revenue-neutral in this particular sense: the median tax payer today bears a 47% tax burden, and this remains the same under the reform.

Ce livre plaide pour une revolution fiscale précise et opérationnelle, dont tous les détails sont chiffrés au grand jour. Nous proposons en particulier la création d'un nouvel impôt sur le revenue, remplaçant un grand nombre de taxes existantes, notamment la contribution social généralisée (CSG), l'actuel impôt sur le revenu (qui, sou sa forme actuelle, serait purement et simplement supprimé), le prélèvement libératoire, la prime pour l'emploi et le  bouclier fiscal.  Ce nouvel impôt sur le revenu, payé par tous les Français et socialement adapté a la France du XXIe siecle, sera entièrement individualisé, prélevé directement a la source sur les revenus du travail et du capital. (18)

Also of interest are the summary graphs that the authors provide of the distribution of income and wealth in France:

Two things are particularly striking in this discussion. One is how significantly different the French fiscal system is from the U.S. system. Income tax is less than 10% of income for all income levels. And the cotisation is a substantially larger share of total taxes than the Social Security tax in the U.S.

But the other striking thing is the significantly different perspective that these authors take on taxes, compared to almost all discussions of taxes in the U.S. They are fundamentally concerned about the fairness of the tax burden; they care about progressivity; and they are concerned to prevent the ability of "les tres aisées" to exercise political influence in order to reduce their share. "Fiscal rigor" doesn't mean severe budget reductions and elimination of the social security net for French citizens; it means creating a tax system that is adequate to the spending commitments of the French state, and that is fair in its distribution of tax obligations across the whole of society.

I think most observers of French politics doubt that this kind of progressive and sweeping fiscal reform is in the cards in the coming decade. But it is at least encouraging that the issues are being raised.

Violent rhetoric and violent behavior

Is there a possible causal relationship between an increasing occurrence of violent political rhetoric in broadly available media channels and the occurrence of violent political behavior?   How would a social scientist investigate this hypothetical relationship?   (Here is a pretty worrisome timeline of events, statements, and actions over the past several years involving violent rhetoric against the government and violent actions.)

Much of the debate since the Tucson shootings has focused on what seems like the wrong question: was there a direct influence from the extremist rhetoric of the past two years to the violent actions of this particular assailant?  Sometimes the answer to this kind of question is "yes" -- Timothy McVeigh was directly inspired by the violent ideas and passions associated with the right-wing militia movement.  But the harder question is that of indirect and diffused influence: is it possible for a pattern of virulent media communications to create a culture of violent attitudes that leads through indirect mechanisms to political violence directed against individuals and institutions?  

In order to think carefully about this set of issues, we need to think through the ways in which individuals are led to commit violent actions.  We might model the potentially violent person along these lines: Anger and hatred are emotional states that motivate violent attacks. Social inhibitions and processes of self-control work in most people to inhibit acting on hateful, violent impulses. Some social and physiological influences have the effect of weakening inhibitions. Individuals are most likely to engage in violence when hateful emotions are strongest and inhibitions are weakest. They are most likely to direct violence against symbols or representatives of the object of their anger and hatred.

Media and public discourse can affect each of these three factors. Angry speech can increase feelings of anger in the listener. This is very much the purpose of the speech; it is aimed at whipping up the passions of the viewer.  Second, it can focus angry impulses towards a specific group. Again, this is the goal; it is to focus anger on government, or government officials, or other groups. And it can lower inhibitions by positively valorizing violent action. "Your peers will admire you for taking action; other people have done so too. You are justified."

We might model the media ranters as involved in a game of escalation, competing against each other for greater shock value and virulent language. They have an interest in generating a committed audience, and they are competing with other voices for that audience. They have an interest in escalation.  "Shock radio" is intended to shock.

It doesn't appear that direct psychological research has yet been done on this question.  But there is a related question that has been very extensively studied, and that is the effect of dramatized television violence on children's propensity for aggression.  It appears that there is fairly strong evidence in the social psychology and developmental psychology literatures for a causal link between exposure to television violence in children and increased aggression.  Here is a paper in Developmental Psychology by L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard Eron (link), where the authors find a significant link between childhood exposure to TV violence and adult aggression.

Over the past 40 years, a body of literature has emerged that strongly supports the notion that media-violence viewing is one factor contributing to the development of aggression. The majority of empirical studies have focused on the effects of watching dramatic violence on TV and film. Numerous experimental studies, many static observational studies, and a few longitudinal studies all indicate that exposure to dramatic violence on TV and in the movies is related to violent behavior (Huesmann & Miller, 1994; Huesmann, Moise, & Podolski, 1997). Furthermore, a substantial body of psychological theory has developed explaining the processes through which exposure to violence in the mass media could cause both short- and long-term increases in a child’s aggressive and violent behavior (Bandura, 1977; Berkowitz, 1993; Eron, 1963; Huesmann, 1988, 1998; Zillmann, 1979). Long-term effects with children are now generally believed to be primarily due to long-term observational learning of cognitions (schemas, beliefs, and biases) supporting aggression (Berkowitz, 1993; Huesmann, 1988, 1998), whereas short-term effects with adults and children are recognized as also due to priming (Huesmann, 1998), excitation transfer (Zillmann, 1983), or imitation of specific behaviors. Most researchers of aggression agree that severe aggressive and violent behavior seldom occurs unless there is a convergence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors such as neurophysiological abnormalities, poor child rearing, socioeconomic deprivation, poor peer relations, attitudes and beliefs supporting aggression, drug and alcohol abuse, frustration and provocation, and other factors. The evidence is already substantial that exposure to media violence is one such long-term predisposing and short-term precipitating factor. The current longitudinal study adds important additional empirical evidence that the effects of childhood exposure to media violence last into young adulthood and increase aggressive behavior at that time for both males and females. (201)

And here is a 2003 article from Psychological Science in the Public Interest by Anderson, Berkowitz, Donnerstein, Huesmann, Johnson, Linz, Malamuth and Wartella summarizing research leading to similar conclusions (link).  Here is their abstract:

Summary—Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear larger for milder than for more severe forms of aggression, but the effects on severe forms of violence are also substantial (r = .13 to .32) when compared with effects of other violence risk factors or medical effects deemed important by the medical community (e.g., effect of aspirin on heart attacks). The research base is large; diverse in methods, samples, and media genres; and consistent in overall findings. The evidence is clearest within the most extensively researched domain, television and film violence. The growing body of video-game research yields essentially the same conclusions. 

Short-term exposure increases the likelihood of physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions. Recent large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spouse abuse. Because extremely violent criminal behaviors (e.g., forcible rape, aggravated assault, homicide) are rare, new longitudinal studies with larger samples are needed to estimate accurately how much habitual childhood exposure to media violence increases the risk for extreme violence. 

Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to media violence increases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing physiological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. Media violence produces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to the acquisition of lasting (and automatically accessible) aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression-supporting beliefs about social behavior, and by reducing individuals’ normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization). 

Certain characteristics of viewers (e.g., identification with aggressive characters), social environments (e.g., parental influences), and media content (e.g., attractiveness of the perpetrator) can influence the degree to which media violence affects aggression, but there are some inconsistencies in research results. This research also suggests some avenues for preventive intervention (e.g., parental supervision, interpretation, and control of children’s media use). However, extant research on moderators suggests that no one is wholly immune to the effects of media violence. 

Recent surveys reveal an extensive presence of violence in modern media. Furthermore, many children and youth spend an inordinate amount of time consuming violent media. Although it is clear that reducing exposure to media violence will reduce aggression and violence, it is less clear what sorts of interventions will produce a reduction in exposure. The sparse research literature suggests that counter-attitudinal and parental-mediation interventions are likely to yield beneficial effects, but that media literacy interventions by themselves are unsuccessful. 

Though the scientific debate over whether media violence increases aggression and violence is essentially over, several critical tasks remain. Additional laboratory and field studies are needed for a better understanding of underlying psychological processes, which eventually should lead to more effective interventions. Large-scale longitudinal studies would help specify the magnitude of media-violence effects on the most severe types of violence. Meeting the larger societal challenge of providing children and youth with a much healthier media diet may prove to be more difficult and costly, especially if the scientific, news, public policy, and entertainment communities fail to educate the general public about the real risks of media-violence exposure to children and youth. (81)

Significantly, both reviews single out mechanisms that appear relevant to hateful and violent language by widely disseminated media commentators.  Here are some of the important psychological mechanisms cited in these two survey articles:

• long-term observational learning of cognitions (schemas, beliefs, and biases) supporting aggression
• imitation of specific behaviors
• priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions
• increasing physiological arousal
• triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors
• reducing individuals’ normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization)

These articles seem to go some ways towards framing an answer to the question posed above: can exposure to violent speech in the media create indirect causal influences leading to more violent behavior by individuals?  The psychological literature appears to support the plausible prior belief that exposure to extreme and violent language in the political media can make individuals somewhat more disposed to aggressive behavior.   And this effect doesn't need to proceed through the direct "true believer" mechanism; virtually everyone who has a television or a computer is exposed to this kind of speech, and the literature suggests broad and diffused effects on behavior as a result.

Here are a few possible mechanisms that seem relevant today when we consider the possible causal connections from over-the-top political rhetoric to the occurrence of acts of political violence:

• Exposure to violent language directly motivates some individuals to become "true believer" violent actors.
• Exposure to violent language causes some unstable individuals to focus their aggression against a specific range of targets.
• Exposure to violent language gradually reduces inhibitions against violence, leading to more readiness to commit violent acts.
• Exposure to violent language influences groups and networks of individuals to be more favorable to the use of violence.

So these seem to be fairly strong empirical reasons for being very concerned about the inflammatory language that has become increasingly common in political discourse and media rants.  The issue isn't simply the value of political civility; it is the very real possibility that extremist rants can influence a small number of listeners to be more prone to engage in acts of political violence, and even people who aren't listeners can be influenced by those who are.