(Atlanta) This site was hacked this week, and someone loaded malware that caused Google to list the site as dangerous. Thanks to help from Wordfence (recommended), I believe that everything is OK now. Since the site was down, I didn’t post anything new after Tuesday. I expect to resume usual activity next week.
In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”
A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.
In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:
The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).
Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.
Source: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False necessity: anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy: from Politics, a work in constructive social theory. London: Verso, 2004. See also: the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments
Many people are fleeing social media, and my friend James Stanescu is trying to bring back blogging in response. He has an excellent post summarizing some of the differences between the pragmatisms of William James and C.S. Peirce. (I’ll call them “James” and “Scu” here for clarity.) Scu is drawing especially on Cheryl Misak’s capsule history, which itself is worth a read for reinvigorating the study of folks like Chauncey Wright and C.I. Lewis.
Peirce and James fought over the proper definition of pragmatism, as well as the term itself, but the simplest shared sense of the project is that truth and meaning are tied to use and inquiry. But Peirce emphasized inquiry, and James use, and that has made all the difference:
Peirce: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.”
James: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”
I’m thoroughly with Peirce on this. But for Scu, ever the debater, this post is an occasion to also pick a fight with Peirceans on behalf of James:
Against Peirce’s metaphysical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer’s critique turns out to have some weight, James’ pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical.
My sense is that Peirce is not really a metaphysical deflationist like the logical positivists. For one thing he spins up a very complicated system of triadic relationships as categories or conceptual schema, and for another thing, he was some sort of pan-psychist. That said, he was at base a Monist (THE Monist) and so in some very, very specific sense he’s more a deflationist than, say, substance dualists. But not really like the logical positivists or scientistic materialists would be. Still, his monism is in stark contrast with the pluralism of William James.
To suck the nuance out of these debates, it helps to wonder: to what extent is pragmatism relativistic? I think neither James nor Peirce are truly relativists, and I find the Rortyan shrug as irritating as everyone else did. But Williams James was… an enthusiast. He sometimes let himself write and say things that smacked of relativism–more in line with his radical empiricism than his pragmatism, to be honest–and some of his adherents have taken this too far.
Scu was partly provoked into writing this up by Patricia Lockwood’s review essay on Simon Critchley’s mysticism book. It’s one of those wonderful takedowns that shows off the reviewer’s erudition at the expense of the author:
…as the inquiry wore on I began to experience a hysterical sympathy: there was such a rhythm of anxious restatement, so much of Critchley telling you what he was about to do and then not doing it, such endless throat-clearing and adjectival gooeyness and such a tendency for his mind to explode whenever he encountered a juxtaposition like ‘the ravishing far-near’.
It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised.
I loved the review, too, and so I guess she’s provoked us both. I’ve also spent more than a little time dabbling with mystic texts and traditions, and so I sometimes flirt with the academic study of the same–even though I can’t for the life of me find much value in it. There’s some kind of performative contradiction in studying such things.
Now, I think Scu’s post captures where I get off the bus with the Jamesean tradition–in both pragmatism and mystics. (While appreciating James’ psychology and his religious sociology all the more!) Ineffable spiritual traditions are fun to play around with, but the manifold claims of all the alternative practices that academics group together under that label can’t all be true! Most of them have to be false because they contradict each other, and I’m not impressed by efforts to embrace contradiction as some kind of deep logical wisdom. “Ah, yes, well after Gödel we must understand that contradiction exposes a deeper truth!” Sigh.
Here’s Scu again:
James’ system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James’ terms). The world is, as James puts it, “ultra-Gothic.”
The line I hate most here is “there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy,” such that–as he goes on to explain–aesthetic and scientific modes of determining truth are unable to correct each other but are instead equally true.
Whenever I sit with relativists, I find that two things seem to be true of their position:
I know it seems arrogant to say “actually, your heart is not being pierced by the nails from Christ’s cross, you’re just hallucinating real good,” but that’s my position! And in some sense Scu himself recognizes that this kind of relativism/pluralism of “no actually lots of contradictory things are true” runs into its own arrogance problems. His own work depends on the idea that the exclusion of alternative forms of experience leads to error and, in fact, to evil! For instance, there are true claims to be verified about animal cruelty that a thoroughgoing relativist would be tempted to ignore because so few people are really interested in them. But I maintain that genteel relativism is an attempt to one-up folks just trying to make sense of our shared world by saying that actually we don’t need to share it at all: everyone gets their own.
For the things that matter, like fascism or climate change, that’s not really true. It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence–and its joy!–is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a (Jamesean) pragmatist about criminal guilt or innocence, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the side, like whether a particular artwork is beautiful.
(Scu cites Kandinsky’s aesthetics here, right on cue: K: “It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad.” Which Scu glosses: “Kandinsky’s truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry.”) It strikes me that we built aesthetics precisely to get such truly relativistic judgments out of the way for science and ethics and ontology.
Now, I say that as someone who really loves pluralistic work. I also love fiction, even science-fiction and fantasy! I want to inhabit a political world where plural life-worlds and sources of meaning can flourish, where people are constantly inventing and imagining something other than the pure scientific truth.
I’m also more than happy to acknowledge that the technocratic liberal reality principle tends to its own abuses: in a world of deepfakes and misinformation, fact-checking can go too far. We can be overconfident and “correct” a true claim by reasserting an error, or a value as a fact. In that sense, I think that fallibilism is just as important as pluralism, and that fallibilism requires a reality principle to which we can return, reconsider, and correct ourselves or be corrected by others. A relativistic world is one with few reasons to change your mind!
That’s why I say that, practiced badly, Jamesean pagmatism tends towards a kind of solipsistic arrogance: if every relation with the world bears its own form of verification from which there is no hierarchy, corrective, or escape, then there’s no outside from which to hear criticism and reconsider, either. Deliberation, doubt, critical reflection, and reconsideration are all missing!
It’s worth noting, here, that Scu’s Jamesean pragmatism is in service of his radical/weird empiricism, and ultimately a challenge to anthropocentrism:
Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations.
Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours–weird truths from weird worlds.
And that idea, that animals have experiences that can act as a corrective to our epistemic and practical domination of them, strikes me as requiring fallibilism and ultimately undermining relativism. So I think what Scu says makes it clear that the terms of that pluralism can’t be metaphysical or ontological. I, too, want to enable as many compatible life-worlds as are mutually compatible! But there’s a ground truth out there that makes those shared horizons possible.
In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct:
Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.
In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill had not forecast such a future as explicitly as Eliot would do, but he used it as a thought-experiment to demonstrate that the point of life is to develop one’s own capacities, not to accomplish any practical ends. A life in which important matters are handled by other minds–or by machines–is a life devoid of value:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
The possibility that AI will render us extinct remains speculative, 150 years after Eliot posited it. But there is an urgent, present threat that AI tools will “guide” us along “some good path” and thereby block “the free development of individuality,” which “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”
See also: the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; artificial intelligence and problems of collective action; what I would advise students about ChatGPT; the human coordination involved in AI; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human etc. I owe the reference to Eliot to Harry Law.
I’m thinking about the differences among strategies, policies, and skills, mainly because the Tufts Civic Studies Major, which I direct, aims to teach all three. I assume that definitions of these concepts have been extensively discussed, but without consulting any literature, I’m inclined to categorize them as follows:
These categories relate and overlap in many ways. Policy analysis and strategic planning are skills. Good strategy involves the application of available skills. (For instance, the first part of a strategy might be to deploy skilled people to recruit members.) A strategy can aim to affect policy. A policy can be part of a larger strategy. Institutions may enact and implement policies to develop skills. And so on.
Nevertheless, these concepts are sufficiently distinct that I hope that we offer each to our students.
I would also note that skills, strategies, and policies can be good or bad. The difference depends on their ethics and their outcomes–both their means and ends. Therefore, normative analysis and argumentation must complement any education about skills, policy, and strategy.
Soon after the November election, I predicted that grassroots resistance would rise in response to Donald Trump.
Some activity is underway. There was, for example, a march in Boston over the weekend. Dana Fisher offers valuable statistics about the march in Washington. Still, I perceive less activity than I had honestly expected by this point.
I think some reasons are psychological. Many people who oppose Trump are tired and discouraged. Eight years ago, many retained a faith in the basic democratic process because Trump had lost the popular vote and had lost all the age groups under 45. It was easy to envision that future elections would go better. The courts, big media platforms, and the press were are at least making noises about defending democratic institutions.
In 2025, Trump’s popular-vote majority, his gains among some younger groups and some people of color, and his reelection after the events of 2016-21 are demoralizing and may suggest that the American people are to blame for the situation. Even if this blame is fair, it discourages democratic solutions. Meanwhile, media moguls are bending the knee, and the Supreme Court has a pro-Trump majority. And perhaps some people who would otherwise resist a 78-year-old president in his second term are counting on time to do their work.
Such psychological challenges can be addressed. If morale is low, maybe it’s time for planning and recruitment. If a march or a public meeting would draw small numbers, maybe it’s time for one-to-one meetings. We can develop messages for various types of people that renew their energy in the face of discouragement and alienation.
But there is a deeper problem. Not enough people have roles and resources that allow them to address psychological barriers to participation.
Imagine an organization that draws enough money from its own members that it can afford to hire at least one part-time organizer, and it elects a leadership team of volunteers. Its organizer and its leaders can–right now–combat resignation and spur action in their specific context. I’m sure that some of this is happening.
On the other hand, let’s say there are many people in a given community who have expressed abhorrence for Trump and are willing to give time or money–but they have no relevant organization. Then, even if some of them discuss ways to energize people, it’s not likely that anyone will get working on it. This is the situation in most places.
That is why, for me, it’s so important to build power for resisting authoritarianism and provide the tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy.
There is a debate about the ideology and political objectives of the first Trump resistance, with some arguing that it provoked a backlash because it was too radical. (See Adam Gurri’s rebuttal to these views.) Without going into that debate, I would note that the ideology of a movement is only one variable–and it tends to change over time. Three other variables are its methods, structures, and composition. We need a large and diverse movement that is self-sustaining and autonomous (not dependent on grants or celebrities) and that allows its participants to discuss, debate, and develop while taking the actions that are appropriate for the moment.
We do have many elements of this movement, but we must expand and strengthen it greatly.
See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement
My favorite object in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition “Power of the People: Art and Democracy” is Paul Shambroom’s Maurice, Louisiana (Population 642) Village Council, May 15, 2002 (shown above).
This large exhibition presents works from ancient Athens to contemporary America, including some famous and powerful objects. In this context, Shambroom dignifies democracy as the rule of regular people. (His photograph is also the favorite of Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney.)
Shambroom’s village councilors are middle-aged Americans in mostly casual clothes, including polo shirts for the two men. They all seem to be listening to the speaker at the right–three of them watching her face, one staring attentively into the distance.
The flags and seal behind them convey authority. These people represent the state, which ultimately wields the power of life and death. (Compare the empty juror chairs in Jim Dow’s eloquent photo, “Grady County Courthouse, Jury Box, Cairo, Georgia, 1976,” also in the exhibition.) But the councilors are not evidently bossing anyone around. They are probably trying to decide whether a proposed building conforms to the city plan.
The councilors occupy a dais that sets them apart from any constituents who might attend, whether to petition them or to oversee their work. The woman at the center, presumably the council chair, is raised higher, and she seems to be listening with mild amusement.
The large scale of the photograph (33 x 66 in) makes it monumental, in the tradition of public history painting. In fact, the exhibition invites a comparison to “The Magnanimity of Lycurgus” (1791), a large and histrionic oil painting by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, which was made for the Paris Salon at the height of the Revolution. Shambroom’s photo suggests that representative Americans deserve the same kind of recognition as the Lawgiver of Sparta.
Shamboom has made many such images. Compare Wadley, Georgia (population 2,468), City Council, August 13, 2001, which is in the Whitney.
The word “populism” is being used today mainly to criticize political ideologies that posit that the true people of any given country form a homogeneous and intolerant bloc. The people have enemies–domestic and foreign–and can be led by a single, charismatic figure. For me, Shambroom’s city council images are quiet statements of a different form of populism. Here, the people are diverse and deliberative, and they merit the right to do the unglamorous and endless work of self-government.
I will be teaching 20th-century political philosophy as a new course this spring. One could choose many different readings for such a course. My list reflects my own interests, to some extent, plus some advocacy by the prospective students. Just as an example, Tufts’ political theory students tend to study Nietzsche intensively, so I have omitted Nietzsche from the “background” part of this syllabus.
Jan. 16: Introduction to the course (we’ll look together at “W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”)
Part I: Background
(A review of five major schools of thought that were already well developed before 1914 and that most subsequent authors knew and addressed.)
Jan. 21: Liberalism
Jan. 23: Liberalism
Jan. 28: Marxism
Jan. 30: Psychoanalysis
Feb. 4: Modernity
Feb 6: Faith and/or nation
PART II: Responses
Feb. 11: Friedrich Hayek
Feb. 13: Isaiah Berlin
Feb. 18: Marxism after Marx
Feb. 25: Fascism
Feb. 27: Pragmatism I: John Dewey
March. 4: Pragmatism II: other authors
March 6: W.E.B. DuBois
March 11: The Frankfurt School
March 25: Hannah Arendt
March 27: Hannah Arendt
March April 1: Simone de Beauvoir
April 3: Frantz Fanon
April 8: Michel Foucault
April 10: late Foucault
April 15: Jürgen Habermas
April 17: Habermas
April 22: Left open to pursue gaps we have identified (or else texts from the Habermas-Foucault debate]
April 24: Concluding discussion
Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.
Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.
I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.
As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.
In 1968: Radical Protest and its Enemies (HarperCollins, 2018), Richard Vinen describes the ideals and mores of people he calls “68ers.” (He discusses the USA, France, Germany, and Britain and acknowledges that he omits Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the world where the events of 1968 were probably more consequential.) For him, the 68ers include Black Panthers in Oakland, Maoist professors in Parisian grandes écoles, striking French industrial workers in shrinking factories, Berlin squatters, and more.
How should we define such a meaningful but heterogeneous category? A similar challenge may emerge when we try to define any religious or aesthetic movement or historical period. This is not only a scholarly but also a practical issue, because words like “68er”–or “expressionist,” or “fundamentalist”–can be used to motivate or to criticize. We should be able to assess whether such words apply.
One option is to apply a general scheme. For instance, 68ers were on the left. That statement invokes the ideological spectrum that originated in the French Revolution. But 68ers often differentiated themselves from the Old Left, and both sides in that debate claimed to be further left than the other.
One could define the spectrum independently and then use the definition to settle the question of how far left the 68ers stood–but surely they did not agree with each other. Nor would they all endorse anyone else’s definition of the ideological spectrum. They devoted considerable attention to debating issues (with their opponents and among themselves) such as race, sexuality, violence, Israel, and voting. Where specific views of these matters fall on the left-right spectrum seems hard to establish without taking a substantive political position.
Another option is to use an exogenous characteristic that is directly observable to define the category. For example, surely 68ers were college students during the year 1968–hence, early Baby Boomers. But most college students were not 68ers (by any definition of that term), and some classic 68ers were considerably older or had never gone to college. Even the founders of Students for a Democratic Society were as old as 32 (Vinen, p. 30), and many important 68ers were industrial workers.
A third option is to use concrete behavior to define the category. Maybe 68ers are those who participated in mass protests during the year 1968. But the largest protest in Paris was in support of de Gaulle and the regime. Some classic 68ers never literally protested. Probably few thought that the act of protesting defined their movement. And “1968” was not constrained by the calendar year. Vinen thinks that most of Britain’s ’68 took place during the 1970s. The “hard hat riot”–in favor of the Vietnam War — took place a bit late (May 1970) but is still part of Vinen’s narrative.
A common approach in the social sciences would be to treat “68er” as a latent construct that can be detected statistically. Imagine a survey with numerous items: “Do you have a poster of Che on your wall?” “Would you abolish prisons?” “Do you live in a commune?” “Do you like the main characters in Bonnie and Clyde?” After many putative 68ers had completed the survey, researchers would use techniques like factor-analysis to detect patterns. The data might show that an individual’s aggregate score on a small set of the questions defines the category of interest. Then we would have a reliable “68er scale.”
I think that kind of method is helpful, but it cannot be presented as innocent of concepts. We might ask about communes and Che Guevara because we already have a loose mental model of a 68er. We wouldn’t ask people their favorite flavors of ice cream. If we did, and the answer happened to correlate with the whole scale, we would treat that result that as a curiosity, not part of the definition of a 68er. But, if we asked about food and found out that 68ers ate lentils, that would be meaningful. Evidently, we must already know something about what a 68er is as we draft the survey. What is already in our minds?
My own view would build on Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance. In Philosophical Investigations (67), he writes, “the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cris-cross in the same way.” He’s arguing that many useful words point to groups of objects that need not all share any single feature but that tend to share features from a list, much as a surname can point to a cluster of people who tend to display some of the same physical characteristics. (“Lots of the Joneses have curly red hair.”) Statistical procedures like cluster analysis can point to these resemblances.
But we know why physical features recur in families: DNA. Why would certain musical choices, political opinions, recreational drugs, hairstyles, and career choices cluster to form the group that we identify as 68ers? Is there an underlying cause?
I think of it this way: Each person holds many beliefs and values. Ideas come and go, and individuals hold them with various degrees of confidence. But ideas are not independent of each other. People think one thing and conclude something else as a result, thus linking two of their beliefs with a reason. For example, they might start by liking Joan Baez and come to oppose the Vietnam War, or vice versa. But there are many ways to put ideas together, and few do it in just the same way. You could hold a strongly anti-authoritarian premise that takes you to anarchism or to capitalism. You could begin by opposing the Vietnam War and find yourself against capitalism or against the state. (I’ve known some Boomer libertarians for whom Vietnam was the formative experience.)
Thus a group like the 68ers (and many others) consists of a cluster of people with a family resemblance, but the reasons that connect their individual beliefs and values together tend to recur, and they recur for discernible reasons. In that sense, a satisfactory account of the group is a list of many of their common specific beliefs and values plus a discussion of the ways that they tend to fit together. The resulting map will not describe everyone but it will capture some of the common patterns and explain on what basis members of the group disagree with each other.
See also: Levine, P. (2024). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2024.2344994