Social Ontology of Whoness

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The questionableness of distributive justice in an attempt to set up a just social order is voiced by Bertrand de Jouvenel who also fundamentally questions the notion of (re)distributive social justice: “No proposition is likelier to scandalise our contemporaries than this one: it is impossible to establish a just social order. Yet it flows logically from the very idea of justice, on which we have, not without difficulty, thrown light. To do justice is to apply, when making a share-out, the relevant serial order. But it is impossible for the human intelligence to establish a relevant serial order for all resources in all respects. Men have needs to satisfy, merits to reward, possibilities to actualize; even if we consider these three aspects only and assume that — what is not the case — there are precise indicia which we can apply to these aspects, we still could not weight correctly among themselves the three sets of indicia adopted.” Bertrand de Jouvenel Sovereignty London 1957 p. 164 cited in Hayek LLL2:177.

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Listen to Plato on state surveillance of its citizens commutations: “It is necessary for the law-giver to keep a watch on the acquisitions and spending of the citizens, how they come about, and to examine the sociations they have with one another, and the dissolutions thereof, whether they be voluntary or involuntary and with regard to what kind each of these sociating dealings is which they practise with one another, whether justice is in them or not, and in which it is lacking, [...].” (ἀνάγκη τὸν νομοθέτην τὰς κτήσεις τῶν πολιτῶν καὶ τὰ ἀναλώματα φυλάττειν ὄντιν' ἂν γίγνηται τρόπον, καὶ τὰς πρὸς ἀλλὴλους πᾶσιν τούτοις κοινωνίας καὶ διαλύσεις ἑκοῦσίν τε καὶ ἄκουσιν καθ⌝ ὁποῖον ἂν ἑκαστον πράττωσιν τῶν τοιούτων πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐπισκοπεῖν, τό τε δίκαιον καὶ μὴ ἐν οἷς ἐστιν τε καὶ ἐν οἷς ἐλλείπει, Plato Laws 632b). In the (money-mediated) dealings among citizens lies already the germ of the modern free individual as a practised form of sociation with many degrees of freedom of movement, and also the core of commutative justice as the fairness correcting the possibly unfair ugliness of these interchanges. But Plato aims also at surveilling and controlling the commutations in society in line with keeping them in line with a conception of the polis as an organic whole.

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Hegel puts it this way: “If the immediate means existed in [...] public property [...] to maintain the mass tending to poverty on the level of their orderly way of life, the subsistence of the needy would be secured without being mediated by labour, which would go against the principle of civil society and the feeling of its individuals for their own independence/self-reliance and honour.” (...oder es wären in anderem öffentlichen Eigentum [...] die direkten Mittel vorhanden, die der Armut zugehende Masse auf dem Stande ihrer ordentlichen Lebensweise zu erhalten, so würde die Subsistenz der Bedürftigen gesichert, ohne durch die Arbeit vermittelt zu sein, was gegen das Prinzip der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und des Gefühls ihrer Individuen von ihrer Selbständigkeit und Ehre wäre. Hegel Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke Bd. 7 Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1970 § 245.) Nietzsche is harsher: “one does not have any right, either to work or to exist, not to mention a right to ‘happiness’; the individual human being’s situation is the same as that of the lowest worm” (man hat kein Recht, weder auf Dasein, noch auf Arbeit, noch gar auf ‘Glück’; es steht mit dem einzelnen Menschen nicht anders als mit dem niedersten Wurm, 11 [259] KSA13:98; cf. KSA13:95, 100).

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Eldred 1984/2015 §23. A full, step-by-step development of the value-forms can be found in the Appendix to this work: ‘A Value-Form Analytic Reconstruction of Capital’ by Michael Eldred, Marnie Hanlon, Lucia Kleiber & Mike Roth. That the capitalist economic process is a game (an estimative value-interplay with competitive players) in a strict socio-ontological sense, as revealed by value-form analysis, has consequences for economics that can hardly be overestimated: “Form-analysis shows that there can be no economic theory in the sense in which this is attempted by economics. Economics (marxist and otherwise) is a futile attempt at a premonetary theory of capitalist economy. [...] Form-analysis restricts itself with good reason to the analysis of the contradictory form of bourgeois society. It does not need to engage in (endless) empirical research; the world to be conceptualised lies to hand in the form of everyday consciousness. Empirical details are merely embellishments, ‘roccoco ornaments’ to connect the general with a specific context. Those sociologists and economists who pursue their research of capitalist economies operate on the conceptual level of an avid newspaper reader. The complicated mathematical economic theories in vogue today are an obscene hoax which appropriate social wealth for the ostensible solution of problems which are in principle insoluble” (Eldred 1984/2015 § 66Aa). Economists, economic historians, sociologists et al. who pursue economic research make a career in and are honoured, estimated and even celebrated by learned institutions precisely because their endeavours conform to the will to effective power suffusing the modern age. That the will to effective power is the underlying motivation remains more or less entirely hidden to the actors on stage in this age, who may even regard themselves as contributing disinterestedly to ‘objective’ social research and human well-being. To be a science, i.e. to be estimated and validated as a science in today’s world, social science in all its variants must orient itself toward the mathematico-empirical blue-print for modern science already laid down explicitly in Descartes’ Regulae. All else remains invisible to today’s thinking, whose raison d’être is to deny the (socio-)ontological difference and keep it closed, which amounts to a closure and degeneration of the Western-cum-global mind.

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Karl Marx clearly saw the connection between reified exchange relations and individual freedom and equality: “Hence, if the economic form, exchange, posits the equality of subjects in all directions, then the content, the material, individual as well as factual, that drives to exchange is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange-values, but exchange of exchange-values is also the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are only idealized expressions of the same; as developed in juridical, political, social relations they are only this basis with another exponent.” (Wenn also die ökonomische Form, der Austausch, nach allen Seiten hin die Gleichheit der Subjekte setzt, so der Inhalt, der Stoff, individueller sowohl wie sachlicher, der zum Austausch treibt, die Freiheit. Gleichheit und Freiheit sind also nicht nur respektiert im Austausch, der auf Tauschwerten beruht, sondern der Austausch von Tauschwerten ist die produktive, reale Basis aller Gleichheit und Freiheit. Als reine Ideen sind sie bloß idealisierte Ausdrücke desselben; als entwickelt in juristischen, politischen, sozialen Beziehungen sind sie nur diese Basis in einer andren Potenz. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie Dietz, Berlin 1974 S. 156.)

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“Here people are talking a lot about the fact that now so much cattle has been bought by the Jews out of the villages and that the purchase of meat will be at an end in winter. Don’t you think we ought to buy some in advance if possible? [...] — the peasants up here too are gradually getting impertinent and we are inundated with Jews and black marketeers.” (Hier spricht man viel davon, daß jetzt so viel Vieh aus den Dörfern von den Juden fortgekauft wird u. daß es dann mit dem Fleischkauf im Winter zu Ende sei. Meinst Du nicht, daß wir, wenn möglich, etwas vorkaufen sollen. [...] — die Bauern werden hier oben allmählich auch unverschämt u. alles ist überschwemmt von Juden u. Schiebern. ‘Mein liebes Seelchen!’ Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970 ed. Gertrud Heidegger, dva Munich 2005, letter to Elfride from Martin in Meßkirch dated 20 August 1920, p. 113)

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Table of Contents for Social Ontology of Whoness

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Table of Contents for
Social Ontology of Whoness