The Mortal Futility of Contempt A Response to Macalester Bell’s Hard Feelings in the Era of Trump Jessica Li Swarthmore College Author Dorian Charpentier Galen Hall Nathan Mainster Ilana Duchan Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (15 pages) Abstract In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt , Macalester Bell argues that under certain circumstances contempt can be the appropriate—and indeed, even the best—response to answering those who exemplify what she calls the “vices of superiority.” But in grappling with our current political moment, this paper critiques Bell’s ethic of contempt. I argue that expressing contempt for those with whom we disagree is not effective in eliciting remorse or effecting change. In fact, contempt only further polarizes a body politic. Furthermore, I argue that contempt plays the role of holding others responsible less well than Bell thinks it does. Finally, I argue that a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. Theoretical Framework Contempt is in no short supply these days. In a politically turbulent era such as ours, contempt for public figures, institutions, and those with whom we vehemently disagree has become increasingly prominent. Calls to civility warn against this attitude, casting contempt as an ugly and corrosive emotion that damages our relations to one another and defies the respect we owe all persons. In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt, Macalester Bell argues intrepidly against this consensus. She contends that under certain circumstances, contempt can be the appropriate—and indeed, the best—response to answering those who exemplify what she calls the “vices of superiority.” Racism, one such vice of superiority, is best responded to with counter-contempt, she argues, because “contempt corrects [the racist’s] status claim and helps to restore the equilibrium between the esteem and deference he takes himself to deserve and the esteem and deference he actually merits.” Bell concludes that upon further investigation, contempt holds an important and essential place in moral life. The outpouring of contempt surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election and its aftermath calls into question whether contempt is the best way of confronting the vices of superiority. As I will demonstrate, contempt has done nothing to disrupt President Trump’s behavior, who, I argue, epitomizes many of the vices of superiority. Contempt has also made politics more divisive, Americans more narrow-minded, and public discourse more impossible. As many Americans have experienced, talking about politics with friends and family has become so strained that many have decided to avoid broaching the topic altogether. And increasingly, in a public discourse of contempt, people are curating their news and social media to avoid encountering viewpoints that differ from their own. In grappling with our current political moment, this paper argues against an ethic of contempt. First, I summarize Bell’s account of contempt. Then, against her account I argue that expressing contempt for those with whom we disagree is not effective in eliciting remorse or effecting change. In fact, contempt only further polarizes a body politic. After responding to Bell’s arguments on contempt’s instrumental value, I turn to her arguments on contempt’s non-instrumental value. Bell claims that contempt is non-instrumentally valuable because it plays an important role in our practices of holding others responsible; but, I argue that contempt plays this role less well than she thinks. Finally, I argue that a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. My arguments taken together do not defend a strict prohibition against contempt; however, they do demonstrate that contempt is much more morally suspect than Bell admits. In Hard Feelings , Bell begins by examining the nature of contempt. As she prefaces at the beginning of the chapter, contempt is difficult to define and make distinctive from other emotions like resentment, disgust, and anger. Nevertheless, she outlines four of contempt’s central features. First, contempt is a response towards persons who have failed to meet an important standard, and who have as a result compromised their status . Second, contempt is a globalist emotion, meaning it takes whole persons as its object. Third, the contemnor "sees the contemned as inferior to her along some axis of comparison.” And fourth, and most paradigmatically, contempt involves withdrawal. In contrast with neighboring emotions such as anger or resentment which motivate engagement, contempt motivates withdrawal. Withdrawal, she argues, can look like “refusing to invite someone to a gathering or declining to shake someone’s hand” on the one hand; and radio personality Don Imus’ contemptuous comments about “the Rutgers women’s basketball team, referring to them as ‘nappy-headed hos’” or the Egyptian protesters who waved their shoes at then-President Mubarak in Tahrir Square, on the other. The former examples she calls “passive contempt”; the latter examples “active contempt.” Passive contempt treats the target as non-threatening, as beneath notice. Passive contempt involves withdrawal in a literal sense: evading or dismissing the target. Active contempt, on the other hand, presents the target as threatening and involves a different sense of withdrawal. With active contempt, the contemnor withdraws from the target by casting her as dangerous and morally less than. Bell writes in a later passage, “contempt is a demoting emotion [original emphasis] that presents its target as having a comparatively low status.” In other words, the active contemnor purposefully distances herself by portraying the target as someone to be looked down upon, not as someone to be capitulated to or reconciled with. Thus, in expressions of active contempt, there is an aspect of communication : the contemnor tries to communicate to the target that she is being disengaged, and why she is being disengaged. Bell’s subsequent discussion focuses primarily on “active contempt.” Bell then turns to the looming question: What makes contempt morally valuable? Bell argues that contempt is the most effective way of confronting and defeating the vices of superiority, a term which encompasses a number of vices such as arrogance, hypocrisy, and racism. As she explains, those who exemplify the vices of superiority see themselves as entitled to more esteem and deference than everyone else, and insist that others treat them as such. Bell is skeptical that we can challenge their superbia by simply discussing or reminding them of the equal worth of all persons. She elaborates in a compelling passage: For those who evince superbia do not have false beliefs about others’ moral standing ; instead, their main fault is taking themselves to have a comparatively high status and lording this presumed status over people in a way that expresses ill will. Given this, reminding the arrogant or hypocritical that others are just as worthy of respect won’t answer their vices. Such people may concede the point but continue to harbor superbia and see it as justified. In order to properly challenge the target’s perception of his superior status, one must attempt to make his inferior status felt. That is why contempt’s characteristic demotion is such an apt response to the vices of superiority. Contempt best addresses the vices of superiority, she argues. As she sketches out earlier, contempt demotes the target and presents the target as having a comparatively low status. Contempt “thereby negat[es] his sense of entitlement and undermin[es] his attempts at dishonoring or exacting esteem and deference.” Moreover, being the object of contempt can “provide us with a morally valuable second-personal perspective and can shake us into the realization that we have failed to meet certain basic standards.” The paradigmatic example is Elizabeth’s contempt for Darcy in Pride and Prejudice . Darcy began reflecting on his arrogance and in turn, began changing his ways precisely because he felt Elizabeth’s contemptuous attitude. Bell hedges, however, that contempt does not cause the target to feel remorse. Instead, “what apt contempt does is provide reasons to change: it puts those who evince the vices of superiority in a position to appreciate their reasons to change; the experience of being put down and disesteemed makes one’s reasons to change particularly salient.” Contempt is not only morally valuable as a means of answering the vices of superbia; it also holds non-instrumental value. According to Bell, contempt is “a way for persons to maintain their integrity,” and “a person of integrity is someone who not only does the right thing but also has the right attitudes toward her commitments.” Contempt is moreover constitutive of “holding persons accountable for their actions and faults” and ensuring that we hold ourselves to shared standards. In the brief paragraph in which she makes this argument, she writes: “While resentment demands that its target take responsibility for the wrong done, contempt demands that its target change her attitudes and overcome her superbia. Responding with apt contempt, then, is the clearest way of holding persons accountable for their superbia.” In short, contempt is part of the moral practice of blaming those who fail to adhere to certain standards. Bell is convincing insofar as she persuades us that contempt can, in some cases, help “put the target in a position to appreciate the reasons he has to change his ways.” The example of Darcy and Elizabeth in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that Bell gives in her fourth chapter asserts her point forcefully; Elizabeth’s contemptuous rejection of Darcy’s proposal prompts in him a new awareness and inspires him to reform his character. However, Bell is less persuasive as to whether contempt is the best way of responding to the vices of superiority, and whether we ought to prefer an ethic of contempt to an ethic of anti-contempt. Does contempt always serve to jolt a person out of vice? What do we risk in contemning others? The rest of this paper interrogates these infirmities. As observers note, contempt is rife in contemporary politics. Screaming heads on television, Twitter trolls, and angry campus activists have become commonplace in American life. Yet, contempt has not proven effective in the ways that Bell anticipates. Perhaps the most glaring and well-known example of someone who exemplifies the vices of superiority is President Donald Trump. For example, he boasted about the purported successes of his administration to the United Nations General Assembly: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” He played more than six rounds of golf in his first month in the Oval Office, despite previously criticizing President Obama for doing the same thing. And he routinely fraternizes with white supremacists such as David Duke. Even his own supporters attest to his arrogance, hypocrisy, and racism. Michael Cohen, former lawyer and supporter of President Trump, said of him during his historic testimony before Congress: “He is a racist, he is a con man, he is a cheat.” Treating him with contempt, however, has not precipitated the kind of change that Bell anticipates, or as she argues, has not provided reasons for him to change. Despite the press exposing his hypocrisy for playing golf and the public responding with contempt on Twitter and Facebook, Trump continued to visit Mar-a-Lago for golf course outings. In a Twitter thread rebuking his behavior, dozens of people tweeted at Trump a picture of him tweeting in 2011, “I play golf to relax. My company is in great shape. @BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” except they crossed out “@BarackObama” from the picture and named Trump instead. Despite the widespread contempt he earned for his performance as president, coming from even his closest policy advisors, Trump said that “nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president.” In an anonymous op-ed, a senior official in the Trump administration called the president’s leadership style “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” And despite the contempt he received from civil rights organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Anti-Defamation League, Trump continued to highlight crimes committed by black and brown people, therefore emboldening the alt-right. As just one of many instances, consider how Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, expresses contempt for Trump in an op-ed piece about the border wall “emergency” when he writes: Trump's emergency declaration is a blatant abuse of power in the service of his anti-immigrant agenda and a brazen attempt to subvert the constitutional separation of powers. The federal treasury isn't a bank account that the president can just raid whenever he's in a bind. It's taxpayer money that the Framers specifically left in the hands of Congress. Trump is seeking to thwart Congress' will. Now we are asking the courts to give Trump another lesson in how the Constitution works. In the face of overwhelming contempt, Trump incredulously persists in being hypocritical, arrogant and racist—not once expressing remorse for his actions. Against President Trump, contempt proves unsuccessful in confronting the vices of superiority. Bell might offer two responses here. First, she might respond that one counterexample does not defeat the instrumental value of contempt. In her account, she did not venture to argue that contempt is guaranteed to answer the vices of superiority. If we read her work charitably, sometimes contempt will work, sometimes it will not. But in order to maintain that contempt has instrumental value and that it is the best way of responding to the vices of superiority, Bell must insist that by and large, contempt is effective. Second, she might assert that Trump is incapable of taking up contempt, and therefore treating him with contempt is inappropriate. She explains in a chapter about contempt’s characteristic withdrawal: The target must be able to understand what it means to fail to meet a standard and must be able to change his ways if he comes to accept the claim implicit in contempt. If a person is unable to understand what it means to fail to meet a standard or is utterly unable to take steps to address his fault, then one could not morally address him through one’s contempt. Even if we concede both responses—that presenting President Trump as one counterexample is not fatal to her argument, and furthermore, that her account can accommodate for President Trump and exceptional persons who are similarly immune from expressions of contempt—her account still faces the fact that contempt is ineffective towards ordinary Americans. For example, much of America has treated Trump supporters, including those who voted for him more tepidly, with unbridled contempt. Here, I assume that those who adamantly support President Trump and the policies that he advocates also evince the vices of superiority. Take the following headlines: “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant—Literally” which has the subtitle, “Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?”; “Maybe They’re Just Bad People”; “Racist Americans, Not Trump, Are The Problem. There Might Be A Cure.” Trump supporters are seen not merely as incorrect or misguided, but as terrible human beings. They are cast as bigots, uneducated hicks, and even “deplorables.” But liberal contempt has done very little, if anything, to change their minds. In general, Trump supporters still hold the same positions on policy issues, the President’s comportment, and his fitness to lead. As his steady approval rating shows, Trump remains exactly as overwhelmingly popular among Republicans as he was on the first day of his presidency. I argue that by and large, contempt has not prompted the national reckoning that Bell would expect on her account, nor has it inspired Trump supporters to rise to the standards that we have accused them of not meeting. Why is this the case? I argue that a culture of contempt in American politics is not as instrumentally valuable as Bell claims because it does not take effect in the way that she describes. Bell argues that contempt answers the vices of superiority by providing reasons to change. To reiterate the quote I cited earlier, she claims that contempt “puts those who evince the vices of superiority in a position to appreciate their reasons to change; the experience of being put down and disesteemed makes one’s reasons to change particularly salient.” Contempt in American politics, however, does not seem to function in this way. Contrary to Bell’s account, widespread and strenuous contempt has failed to make white supremacists better “appreciate their reasons to change.” Why? I argue that white supremacists do not feel the withdrawing effects of contempt because—and this is crucial—they champion the approval of the President. Although they may feel contempt from liberals, white supremacists are not “put down” or “disesteemed” precisely because they are bolstered by Trump when they witness him repeatedly accusing illegal immigrants of ruining the country. They witness him repeatedly associating himself with racists and repeatedly demonstrating fealty to alt-right groups. Consider how Trump began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants, saying: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best—they’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Consider how he has retweeted white nationalist accounts with handles such as “WhiteGenocideTM” without apology (Twitter has since removed this account). In the face of contempt, white supremacists have refuge in Trump, a figure with immense social and political cachet who tacitly approves their actions, and shares their views. Bell argues that contempt is supposed to withdraw from the target and thereby ostracize them from the moral community. But withdrawal is not meaningful if the target has recourse in a president who supports and often urges anti-immigrant rhetoric. Therefore, under the aegis of the president, white supremacists do not feel the withdrawing effects of contempt. Furthermore, I argue that contempt in American politics has not just been ineffective against the vices of superiority—it has only made matters worse. On all sides of the political spectrum, a culture of contempt has only entrenched the vices of superiority and alienated those whom we want to reform. To illustrate this point with an example, consider Hillary Clinton’s contemptuously calling half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Ostensibly, this highly controversial remark was meant as a way to answer racist, sexist, and xenophobic behavior demonstrated by those who had vocally advocated for Trump. Instead, her comment was met with public outrage and retaliation. An avalanche of stories commenting on the striking phrase flooded the Internet, conservatives were incensed, and the divide between the Democrat and Republican body politic widened only further. Consider these tweets: “Treating people as subhuman—irredeemable/deplorable—is no way to run for POTUS,” by Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush spokesman and fervent Trump opponent, and "What’s truly deplorable isn’t just that Hillary Clinton made an inexcusable mistake in front of wealthy donors and reporters happened to be around to catch it… It’s that Clinton revealed just how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America,” by Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser during the Trump campaign. As she explained in an apologetic statement that draws parallels with Bell’s arguments for the instrumental value of contempt, she intended for her contempt as a way to stand up to Trump’s turpitude and to commit herself and her campaign to moral values: But let's be clear, what's really “deplorable” is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called 'alt-right' movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values. It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people. It's deplorable that he's attacked a federal judge for his “Mexican heritage,” bullied a Gold Star family because of their Muslim faith, and promoted the lie that our first black president is not a true American. So I won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign. But calling millions of people a “basket of deplorables”—people whom she wanted to persuade—only drove them further into Trump’s arms. The “basket of deplorables” gaffe only made matters worse, and not just because it was said by a presidential candidate trying to win over voters—in other words, not just because it was a bad political play. It was also because using contempt as a means to address the vices of superiority, in general, risks alienating those whom we want to reform. Interviews with dozens of lukewarm Trump supporters bear this out. A New York Times article reports that incessant attacks on Trump are causing his supporters to rally around the President. Ms. Anders, one of the interviewees, said that when she hears “overblown” attacks on Trump, “it makes [her] angry at them, which causes [her] to want to defend him to them more.” The Times reports that Trump supporters feel protective of the President when asked the all too common question “How can you possibly still support this man?”, as well as further removed from the contemptuous liberal. Contempt, instead of addressing the vices of superiority on the other side, has only polarized our politics and cultivated an atmosphere in which contempt is traded back-and-forth, to no end. Our contemptuous public discourse also casts doubt on Bell’s arguments for the non-instrumental value of contempt. Although contempt, I agree, is an important reactive attitude that is part of our practice of holding persons accountable, I argue that contempt does not play that role as well as Bell asserts. Recall that in Bell’s view, contempt holds persons accountable by demanding that its target overcome her superbia. How does contempt issue this demand? She explains, “Through contempt’s characteristic withdrawal, its subjects do not simply seek explanations or apologies; instead, the contemnor seeks the target’s character change. If the target does not attempt to change his ways, then the contemnor will see him as someone to be avoided altogether.” Elizabeth held Darcy accountable for his arrogance by withdrawing from him, and thus morally engaging him. Shunning a person who exemplifies the vices of superiority can serve as a sort of punishment, holding persons accountable, but I argue that it is a particularly ambiguous and precarious way of doing so. It seems to me that there is an inherent tension between contempt’s characteristic withdrawal and the demand that it makes on the target—and that this tension undermines, or at the very least severely limits, the non-instrumental value of contempt. By withdrawing from the target, the contemnor does not expressly communicate the demand. The target may misinterpret, or may even be completely oblivious of, what is demanded of him. Moreover, by withdrawing from the target, the contemnor does not enforce the demand. The target is not in any way compelled to comply with the contemnor’s demand, aside from being subjected to the sanction of her ostracism. And as I argued earlier, ostracism is rendered impotent when another person or group embraces the target instead. Bell anticipates some of these worries when she writes: “It is true that contempt’s withdrawal may be misinterpreted. Silence and withdrawal are multiply ambiguous in ways that other forms of address are not.” But she seems more optimistic about contempt’s successes than wary of its risks. She argues, “But while the ambiguity of withdrawal can be disorientating, this disorientation can also be constructive. As targets think about what elicited the withdrawal, they may, like Darcy, come to recognize contemptible aspects of their characters that they had long overlooked.” She is confident that “if a target of contempt believes that the contempt directed at him is apt, then he will [emphasis added] respond with shame and an attempt to ameliorate his character,” often arguing as though the target’s response of shame and the target’s attempt to ameliorate his character are empirical inevitabilities. But I contend that we should be more skeptical of contempt’s ability to hold persons accountable. The ambiguity and precariousness of contempt that I have been discussing are especially acute in public discourse. Amid the din of daily, back-and-forth contempt about whatever news is dominating the day, it becomes especially difficult to determine what claim an expression of contempt is making and to feel compelled to answer that claim, when instead the target can simply dig in her heels and meet contempt with counter-contempt. Bell insists that if we reject an ethic of contempt, we would lose “relationships of mutual accountability for our attitudes in which we hold persons to certain standards and are held to certain standards in turn.” This seems to me to be an overly pessimistic conclusion. Holding persons accountable does not necessarily require an ethic of contempt; holding persons accountable might involve a myriad of other emotions such as resentment, disgust, shame, indifference, anger, and disappointment. Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he responds to criticisms made by several religious leaders in the South regarding the nonviolent protests against segregation. At different points, Dr. King expresses disappointment, indignation, and anger. For example, he writes, “But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church,” and, “I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed …” Note however that he does not express contempt for the clergymen. He does not dismiss their concerns or cast them as unforgivable human beings—despite all the good reason he has to do so. Instead, he takes up every line in their statement and thoroughly refutes each concern. By holding the church responsible for its hypocrisy without appealing to contempt, and indeed while remaining charitable, Dr. King demonstrates that “relationships of mutual accountability” are possible absent an ethic of contempt. In fact, one might argue that it was precisely Dr. King’s willingness to engage with his detractors that held them responsible and crucially served the success of the Civil Rights Movement. By countering each of their gripes head-on, relentlessly, it becomes unequivocally clear that their criticisms of the Birmingham demonstrations were made in bad faith and hold no water. Lastly, I argue that we should reject an ethic of contempt because a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. In treating those with whom we disagree contemptuously, we make the assumption that we are in the morally superior position to judge whether someone has violated the community’s standards. We appoint ourselves as arbiters of what is moral and what is immoral. Seeing ourselves as morally superior and others as morally inferior not only compromises our own character but also ignores the complexity of disagreement. Indeed, in expressing contempt for the Trump voter, much of America failed to listen to the many issues that Trump voters cared about—issues that Trump was addressing and Clinton was not. Pigeonholing Trump voters as immoral and bigoted obscured a broader debate about jobs leaving, terrorism, and the nuances of immigration. Ms. Anders, the interviewee whom I cited earlier, laments, “All nuance and all complexity—and these are complex issues—are completely lost… It’s either, ‘Trump wants to put people in cages, in concentration camps.’ Or, on the other side, ‘Oh the left just wants everybody to come into the country illegally so they can get voters.’ We can’t have a conversation.” Contempt has reached a fever pitch in public discourse and has shown no sign of abating anytime soon. In the context of our present political climate, I have argued that contempt is not as morally valuable as Bell claims it to be. Instrumentally, I have demonstrated that contempt is not effective in getting the target to reflect on his character and to make reforms. Moreover, contempt risks further dividing a body politic. Non-instrumentally, I have argued that contempt plays a much narrower role in holding persons accountable, given how ambiguous and precarious contempt is for the target who exemplifies the vices of superiority. I have also shown that it is possible to hold persons morally responsible without appealing to contempt. And lastly, I have argued that a culture of contempt encourages a culture of moral superiority, which not only compromises our own moral selves but also ignores the complexity of those whom we contemn. Taking seriously the arguments that this paper advances requires that our public discourse guards against contempt instead of embracing it. Works Cited Anonymous. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” New York Times. September 5, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html . Accessed April 7, 2019. Barlow, Rich. “Racist Americans, Not Trump, Are The Problem. There Might Be A Cure.” wbur . 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Acknowledgements Thank you to Lou Chen for reading over the draft of this paper. And thank you to Professor Krista Thomason for being an invaluable interlocutor. Our discussion about Macalester Bell’s Hard Feelings motivated much of my thinking on contempt in public discourse.

Divisive Identities: Exploring the Interplay of Personal and Social Identities Ella Neeka Sawhney Author Aimee Zheng Faith Li Editors I. Abstract Personal and social identity, whilst existing as two different entities, combine and interact to form our overall individual identities. Personal identity centres around how an individual’s fundamental beliefs and commitments are shaped by their personal experiences, whilst social identity arises from one’s belonging to various social groups, including one’s social relationships. This essay juxtaposes arguments from Amartya Sen and Bikhu Parekh to argue that our personal and social identities are profoundly intertwined and thus should not be viewed as separate from one another. By drawing on theoretical frameworks and real-life examples, I demonstrate how Parekh’s model offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of individual identity which encompasses personal and social dimensions as dynamic entities. Thus, through a critical examination of Parekh’s model and Sen’s respective criticisms, this essay concludes that Parekh’s model, by acknowledging the plurality and diversity of identities as well as the complex interplay between personal and social identities, provides a robust defence of individual identity as comprised of personal and social identities, expertly addressing concerns raised by Sen. II. Introduction Classical problems within this idea of personal identity can be categorised into families. For instance, the persistence problem and the personhood puzzle both focus on questions regarding the continuity and ethical implications of self-identity. I choose to concentrate on ‘The Characterisation Question’ which delves into what comprises our personalities. This question is important as it is one that we grapple with daily, permeating all aspects of our lives. Specifically, I focus on the debate between Parekh and Sen, as I find this debate to have strong implications for understanding individual identity In this essay, I investigate Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, scrutinising its effectiveness in addressing the concerns raised by Sen. My thesis contends that through his emphasis on plurality and diversity, Parekh efficiently responds to Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities, ultimately undermining Sen’s criticisms. First, I explore the intricacies of the concept of philosophical (including both personal and social) identity. Next, I explain Parekh’s model and juxtapose it against Sen’s criticisms. I then evaluate whether Parekh’s theory can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. Lastly, I debate Sen’s critique of over-conformity to social roles as a result of combining social and personal identity. Prima facie, our identity addresses the ubiquitous question ‘Who am I?’, encompassing the beliefs, ideas and qualities that shape a person’s character. Yet, philosophical identity, namely individual identity, explores the intricacies of how an individual may deduce their identity from their various distinctive features. This individual identity is what “distinguishes” (Parekh, 2009, p. 267) agents, functioning as a “predicate” (Sollberger, 2013) used to describe specific attributes of a subject and identify its differentiators. Individual identity comprises two components: personal (shaped by one’s personal life experiences) and social (arising from one’s belonging in groups or a relationship), according to Parekh (2009). By examining personal identity one can better understand and analyse ‘The Characterisation Question’: ‘What is it that makes me the unique individual I am?’, a question originally termed by Schechtman (2007) who presented ‘The Characterisation Question’ as: “The question of which beliefs, values, desires, and other psychological features make someone the person she is.. [it] concerns identity in the sense of what is generally called… an ‘identity crisis’” (p. 1) My analysis of ‘The Characterisation Question’ throughout the remainder of this essay investigates the features which define one’s personal identity and how they render a person differentiable from others. Moreover, viewing personal identity as “contingent and temporary” (Olson, 2023) suggests that one’s definition of self changes throughout one’s lifetime. For example, an only child’s identity shifts when becoming an older sibling, following their younger sibling’s birth. Hence, personal identity evolves alongside changing exogenous factors and is influenced by introspective processes, such as changing religious beliefs. III. Parekh’s model Parekh’s (2009) model of “overall” (p. 268) identity, alternatively referred to as individual identity, encompasses both personal and social identity. Parekh’s concept of personal identity centres around how an individual’s “fundamental beliefs and commitments” (ibid., p. 267) shape their perceptions of the world and their role within it. This recurrent journey of “self-definition” (ibid., p. 268) permits individuals to make sense of their convictions, including values, beliefs and opinions, thus developing their inner comprehension of personal identity. Moreover, Parekh describes social identity as a key aspect of individual identity, arising from one’s belonging to various social groups. He interprets social identity as “inherently plural” (ibid., p. 267), acknowledging its multi-layered influence on a person’s identity. Social identity includes relationships and groups a person feels they belong to, which play a crucial role in shaping their self-perception. Hence, these interconnected layers contribute to one’s personal identity, allowing social identity to, more broadly, impact individual identity. Yet, an interpretive challenge lies in Parekh’s vague explication of the relationship between personal and social identity, leaving the permeability of the boundary, and the extent of their interaction unclear. These ambiguities in Parekh’s model make it difficult to interpret how personal and social identities coalesce. This is showcased in Parekh’s example of the two teachers: “For one it is nothing but a job that she would readily give up if she got a better one”, for the other “being a teacher means a great deal to her. She identifies with it, sees it as an integral part of who she is and would not even dream of giving it up” (ibid., p. 274) Here, the first teacher is mechanically fulfilling their role, while the other integrates teaching into their personal identity. This quote illustrates the challenge of unravelling the complex, and deeply intertwined web of overlapping personal and social identities. The interpretive challenge concerning Parekh’s claim that may arise here is how individuals navigate their identities and to what extent their social identities integrate into their overall identities. Thus, I acknowledge that there are some tensions within Parekh’s view that are slightly contradictory. Namely, when comparing this difficulty in interpreting Parekh’s view of the interaction between personal and social identities with Parekh’s persistent assertion that our personal and social identities are inherently linked, inconsistencies arise. This is something that I shall discuss further in my discussion of ‘dogmatic sectarianism’. IV. Sen’s concerns Sen (2009) presents three key objections to Parekh’s model of personal and social identity which I outline below: The proposition that “a change in social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” is flawed. Our personal identity shouldn’t be “combinable” with our social identity as our social identities can change, without our overall identity changing (p. 286). “One’s personal identity is not threatened by one’s decision to depart from the activities of others belonging to the same group.” Moreover, over-emphasising our social identity results in a lack of reasoning and mutual understanding between members from different groups (p. 287). “Once the priority of a social affiliation is accepted as an integral part of one’s ‘overall identity’, something substantial is lost.” This leads to a person’s lack of deviation from their group’s views and affiliations (p. 288). Sen critiques Parekh’s viewpoint on the combinability of personal and social identity. Specifically, he faults Parekh for overemphasising the impact of social identity on overall identity, asserting that his view is likely to foster dissent hence contributing to societal divides. Sen (2007, pp. xiii-xiv) further encourages the separation of our social influences from our personal decisions. This derives from his argument that a singular or “dominant” social “classification” may hinder deviation from one’s societal or cultural norms, impeding personal decision-making abilities. He stresses that acknowledging our “pluralit[y] of identity” prevents rigid adherence to social groups so that our personal decisions are not entirely dictated by them. A. Dogmatic sectarianism A key feature of Sen’s (2009, p. 286) first criticism is that Parekh’s model is illogical in strongly combining personal and social identity because this view suggests that a change in social affiliation will result in an entire change of personality. Thus, Sen reasons that, according to Parekh’s model “a change of social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” (ibid.). From this, Sen asserts that a likely consequence is the emergence of “dogmatic sectarianism”, meaning that individuals unwaveringly adhere to a strict set of beliefs which often leads to ignorance towards the views of other groups. This creates a lack of willingness to deviate from these norms, as well as ignorance towards and dismissal of other groups’ perspectives, breeding intolerance and hindering understanding between groups. I applaud Sen for identifying the dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Specifically, he recognises a person’s reluctance to stray from their group’s collective views can foster strong antagonism towards outsiders with different opinions. For Sen, one must separate their personal and social identities to prevent this phenomenon. He asserts that through uncoupling one’s personal and social identity, one can retain a part of their social identity and remain associated with that social group without sacrificing one’s entire personal identity. Hence, Sen warns against Parekh’s model which arguably sees individuals as rigidly tying their personal identity to their social identity. An example supporting Sen’s reflections involves the separation of personal identity from religious affiliations, which falls within social identity. The consolidation of personal and social identity can lead to “sectarian violence” (ibid., p.287). Per Sen’s second criticism: individuals overly emphasise their religious identity and struggle to find areas of agreement or understanding with other religious groups. This is evident in the Northern Ireland conflict; a strong ethnoreligious divide which created a divergence between Catholics and Protestants (Ferguson, 2016). For the Northern Irish, this rigid adherence to religious groups blurred the lines between religious and social identity, fuelling violence and hostility between them. The entrenchment of religious identity within personal identity demonstrates the risk of overly combining personal and social identities, creating a scenario where separation becomes nearly unattainable. Moreover, one must acknowledge that Sen does not assert that dogmatic sectarianism is an inevitable result of combining personal and social identity. Instead, it is only a possibility that poses a significant threat and should be avoided. Thus, he envisions more than one potential outcome of combining personal and social identity, demonstrating his open-mindedness and nuanced analysis. However, I find that Parekh’s flexible and plural model can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. This is because Parekh’s (2009) emphasis on plural identities and his encouragement towards the usage of “plural perspectives” (p. 276) prevents the dominance of one single identity. Parekh’s interpretation allows a person to recognise different aspects of themselves, which combine to influence their overall identity. Sen fails to recognise the potential of Parekh’s model and emphasis on “plural identities” to counteract any dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Under closer examination of Parekh’s model, his awareness of plural identities can provide an alternative solution to Sen’s criticisms, thus demonstrating his model’s versatility and robustness. Parekh’s ability to respond to Sen’s criticism can be demonstrated by applying his model to the aforementioned example of the Northern Irish conflict. Taking a more pluralistic approach, one can see that his model does not succumb to the pitfalls of dogmatic sectarianism. If Northern Irish citizens embraced a pluralistic understanding of their identities, recognising their shared nationality in addition to their differing religious affiliations, conflict might have been reduced. Thus, mutual recognition of plural social identities allows Parekh to maintain his argument of multifaceted and inter-connected personal and social identities, defying Sen’s criticism that Parekh’s model encourages rigid and unfaltering social divides. Therefore, Parekh expertly responds to Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism as his pluralistic emphasis and encouragement to recognise our own diverse social identities counteracts Sen’s concern that tying personal and social identities fosters inflexibility. B. Over-conformity and Combinability of Social and Personal Identity Sen’s third point criticises Parekh’s model for its over-emphasis of social identity when combined with personal identity. He argues that excessively coupling our personal identities to societal and cultural norms, renders our personal identity secondary. Consequently, people become compelled to strictly adhere to their social norms, constituting a loss of their personal sense of self. Sen (2009) criticises the apparent “reductionism” of a person’s identity to one aspect of their social identity such as their ethnicity or nationality, (p. 288) which, as Sen believes, arises from combining personal and social identities At first glance, Sen’s argument seems logically valid as over-conforming to one affiliation could correspond with disregarding other aspects of one’s overall identity. Sen terms this “epistemic failure” (ibid.) whereby people cannot understand certain aspects of their identity because one affiliation has taken priority. He illustrates this with the example of different groups such as ‘British Muslims’ in which over-emphasising religious identity “miniature[ises] human beings and their many affiliations” (ibid.). This leads to a neglect of plural identifying elements beyond religion, whereby people are reduced to this “single category” (ibid.). Sen further demonstrates his argument by referencing British Bangladeshis who are merely “defined” (ibid.) as ‘British Muslims’. Although a majority of Bengalis in Britain are Muslim, this reduction disregards the distinct culture of Bengali individuals, which may be secular and not solely defined by their religion, demonstrating how combining personal and social identities oversimplifies the manifold nature of individual identity. Moreover, Sen’s argument is further developed by his assertion that over-simplifying our identities leads people to seemingly lose their innate autonomous abilities. By “reducing” (ibid.) one’s identity, it becomes very difficult for one to perceive their identity outside of their social categorisation, thus obfuscating decision-making and threatening individual autonomy. When an individual’s social affiliations determine their overall identity, they confine themselves to making decisions only within these affiliations. For example, women forced to conform to their societal gender role as homemakers may have to forgo personal endeavours that exist outside of the home. This demonstrates how over-emphasising gender as a social affiliation can confine women and prevent them from exerting their agency. However, I believe Parekh’s model withstands Sen’s criticism by recognising the complexity of our identity, where combined aspects of our identity influence decision-making. Particularly, he acknowledges that there is great “variation” (Parekh, 2009, p. 273) in our perception of what constitutes individual identity. Here, Parekh emphasises the diverse interpretations of our social identities which can be assigned varying importance to different aspects. He specifies people can “define and relate” (p. 274) to their societal roles in various ways, demonstrating an awareness that people may choose to identify with different social identities to varied extents. In the above example, British Muslims can challenge their simplistic categorisation by prioritising their religious identity differently. Consequently, Parekh’s model evades Sen’s criticism of over-conformity by acknowledging social identities as qualitative, rather than objective, with some holding greater significance. Sen argues that, in order to prevent over-conformity, individuals can and should completely separate their personal and social identities. Yet, I cannot deem this as feasible, as I believe that personal and social identity cannot be viewed as two separate entities; instead, they constantly combine and influence one another throughout our lives. Specifically, our personal values are often shaped by our social context and so aiming to separate this largely oversimplifies our complex human identity. For example, growing up adhering to the Sikh faith, I was taught the importance of seva (selfless service) and helping those less fortunate than myself. These values instilled in me a passion for charity and volunteer work, which have become an integral aspect of my personal identity. I thus find that my social identity as a Sikh is deeply intertwined with my personal values and I therefore find it inconceivable to attempt to separate them. Therefore, I find Sen’s proposed alternative to Parekh’s model–in which an individual must divide personal and social identities–incomprehensible in practice. V. Conclusion My essay explored Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, focusing on its capability to respond to Sen’s criticisms. Firstly, I disputed Sen’s point of dogmatic sectarianism, articulating the ability of Parekh’s pluralistic framework to evade Sen. Next, I asserted that Parekh’s acknowledgement of the differing importance of each social identity refutes Sen’s claim that Parekh’s combined framework leads individuals to over-conform to their social identity above personal identity. Ultimately, I conclude that Parekh’s framework expertly responds to each of Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities. References Ferguson, N. a. (2016). Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Conflict in Northern Ireland. In Understanding Peace and Conflict Through Social Identity Theory (pp. 215-277). Springer, Cham. Olson, E. T. (2023, June 30). Personal Identity . Retrieved from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/identity-personal/ Parekh, B. (2009). Logic of identity. Politics, philosophy & economics , 267-284. Schechtman, M. (2007). Introduction . In The Constitution of Selves (pp. 1-3). Cornell University Press . Sen, A. (2007). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Penguin Books India. Sen, A. (2009). 285The fog of identity. Politics, Philosophy & Economics , 251-352. Sollberger, D. (2013). On identity: from a philosophical point of view. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health volume , Article number 29.

Oedipus and Ion as Outsiders: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship Oedipus and Ion: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship An Analysis of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles and Ion by Euripides Claire Holland University of Chicago Author Marysol Fernandez Harvey Tathyana Mello Amaral Antonio Almazan Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (12 pages) Introduction In ancient Athenian society, the collective myth of autochthony[1] provided the basis for social order, determining who got the benefits of citizenship and who was excluded from the polis [2]. According to their autochthonous myth, the citizenry of Athens did not emigrate from elsewhere, but instead arose from the earth upon which ancient Athens stood. Theirs was not a city of immigrants; from their very origins, the people of Athens believed themselves to be the only population that had always belonged to Athenian soil. Thus, each true-born Athenian carried within them the essential spirit of the Athenian people, passed down from generation to generation. To determine and confirm their citizenship on an individual level, each Athenian had to demonstrate their autochthonous familial descent when they came of age in a dokimasia, an examination wherein citizen tribunals collected testimony from friends and family members in support of one’s claims to citizenship[3]. In this way, one’s lineage became the sole factor determining one’s inclusion in the polis . Once blood became the basis for citizenship, citizens who were established as autochthonous could not be excluded from the polis on the basis of class. The poorest citizens had the same right to participate in Athenian government as the elite, although in practice the higher classes enjoyed special privileges, such as training in rhetoric, which poorer citizens did not. For ancient Greek city-states, this level of inclusivity was groundbreaking; most city-states did not consider their lower- or even middle-class members to be citizens, even in democratic systems of governance. However, this is not to say that Athens was entirely without social divisions, for more than just fully-privileged citizens lived within the city walls. Overall, inhabitants were sorted into three groups: citizens, metics, and slaves. While citizens enjoyed all the rights and benefits of the polis , including the right to vote and to participate in public forums, metics were an in-between, catch-all group, not subjugated like slaves but not as privileged as citizens. They could not participate in government or vote, for example, but were still able to participate economically in Athenian society. Metics were what we today might call a migrant class, as they did not meet the full requirements for blood-based citizenship but were still free. Metics were not confined to only the lower classes; like citizens, metics existed in every economic stratum, from the poorest to the richest. However, regardless of economic class, citizens, being true-born Athenians, were more socially vaunted. While lauded by political theorists for its groundbreaking inclusivity, the Athenian genealogical grounds for inclusion, like any other such system, necessitated that some be excluded so that the polis might be defined and unified rather than indistinct and anarchic. This exclusion, at least theoretically, was to be on the grounds of blood-based requirements for citizenship[4]. However, as Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the second in his trilogy about the eponymous protagonist, and Ion by Euripides make abundantly clear, this distinction did not always play out as it ought. In fact, the existence of exceptions to the rule of blood-based citizenship reveals that its apparent legitimacy was, at its core, fallacious. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is in that the knowledge of their parentage, which should have moved them out of their marginal social positions and into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually prevented them from claiming their rightful places within society. This is due to the fact that in practice, blood did not stand alone in determining membership to the polis . Athenian society instead relied upon adherence to socially-codified, secondary behavioral implications of blood-based membership, as shown through a further examination of the Athenian city-state and the plays Oedipus at Colonus and Ion. What’s more, the rule of descent necessarily meant that any violations of these secondary behaviors were inheritable and thus contaminated an individual’s entire genetic line from their transgression onward. In examining the social structures as they are presented in these two works, in light of the historical context of ancient Athens, it is clear that the lineage-based autochthony myth was only the beginning of the implied social order. Literary Background Before diving into the social structure of Athens, a short summary of each play is in order, which will highlight the most relevant plot points. Thanks to Freud, most are familiar with Oedipus, or at least with his infamous acts: killing his father, marrying his mother, and fathering her children. Once he discovers all that he has unknowingly done, Oedipus blinds himself and is outcast from Thebes, his home and onetime kingdom. All of this takes place in Oedipus Rex , the first in Sophocles’ trilogy of plays about Oedipus and his family. Following these events is Oedipus at Colonus , which shows Oedipus in exile from Thebes as he approaches the Athenian acropolis. During the course of the play, Oedipus encounters a pair of Athenian citizens, who fetch Theseus, the Athenian king, to determine if Oedipus will be allowed to stay in Athens. After a lengthy debate, Theseus decides to accept him, thanks in part to the pleading of Oedipus’s daughters, who have been helping him in his blindness. At the conclusion of the play, Oedipus is led away into the forest of Athens where he dies without leaving a trace, with Theseus as his sole witness swearing not to say a word about what happened to him. The themes of Oedipus at Colonus reach their pinnacle in Antigone , the final play in Sophocles’ trilogy, wherein Oedipus’s children are all killed, save Ismene, whether it be by their own hands or those of their political rivals. Ion by Euripides centers around another family drama, although perhaps not as well known as that of Oedipus. In the play, Ion is an orphan like Oedipus, raised in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The play starts when Creusa, forebear and Queen of Athens, and her husband Xuthus, a war hero and metic, visit the Temple to ask for a prophecy concerning Xuthus’s prospects of having any children. There, the couple meets Ion, and the prophecy leads Xuthus to assume that the now-grown orphan is his true-born son. By the end of the play, however, Creusa and Ion discover his true parentage: that it is she who is really his mother, and that his father is actually the god Apollo, who raped her before she married Xuthus. Following council from the goddess Athena, they choose to keep this knowledge secret from Xuthus for reasons that will later be discussed, and Ion goes on to eventually found the Ionian race. The Athenian City-State With the above summaries in mind, we will begin our analysis of the Athenian city-state. Athenian democracy, while more inclusive of lower classes than any prior sociopolitical structure, necessarily imposed limits on those allowed into the privileged citizenry. Voting could only be meaningful if it were limited; absolute freedom to participate in the polis would be, as Jacques Derrida says of unconditional hospitality, “a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, for short.”[5] For order and social duty to exist, there must be a specific group to whom these imperatives apply, or else all is unordered chaos. The necessary trade-off in this collective unification is the creation of an out-group against which the citizenry can be defined and assert its exceptionalism. In this way, the social order itself creates the outlaw, the metic, the orphan, and the bastard: broad, inferior social categories designed to include those who do not adhere to the implied social code. Those considered “outside of the law” are not actually so, for they fall into categories created by the social order. The only individuals truly outside of the law are those who cannot be defined by it, which we shall see is the case for Ion and Oedipus. The social rule creates the social rulebreakers, and at the same time the rule-breakers throw the rule itself into relief. Each is the inverse of the other’s positive assertion, becoming a co-constitutive axis. They provide legitimacy by means of a relation of difference through which to define themselves, while in reality neither category exists outside of the artificial, dyadic social construction. In order for a society to function, however, it must be able to overlook the arbitrariness of social delineation and instead see it as legitimate, even inherent to its subjects. To that end, Athens turned to a system of social order that on its face seemed absolute, inherent, and infallible: blood-based citizenship dependent upon genealogical descent from an autochthonous original populace. In the way of legitimacy, autochthony appeared acceptable to its citizens because it could not be disproven, even though it was just as much of a social construct as any other conception of citizenship and justification of exceptionalism. Because the mythical original autochthonous population from which Athenians claimed citizenship was ancestral, its supposed existence could not be called into question based on facts, since there were none to confirm or deny its existence. Like the founding myth of any society, the lie at the core of Athenian structure not only persisted but, interestingly, added legitimacy to the regime. Autochthony also provides a reason to see status as inherent to the citizen, since it “grounds difference in claims of nature—specifically, in earth and blood—[which gives] these categories the appearance of an ontological status.”[6] That is, Athenian exceptionalism appeared justified since it was traceable back to inherent natural differences between people. The lie of one’s social status being inherent, especially in a system based on blood, means that both adhering to its standards and violating them are not seen as merely shifting status, but are actions sublimated into the person themself. Oedipus, answering the question the Chorus poses as to his identity, does not say, “I am in exile”—that is, inhabiting an external, imposed state—but “I am an exile” (italics added).[7] His status has become his being, since blood determines both. Just as Thomas Kuhn conceives of paradigm shifts in science as not only incorporating past scientific information, but also as proclaiming past paradigms unscientific, so too do new information and actions that cause a change in status retroactively re-write one’s entire self. Everything that previously signaled one’s status becomes a lie, and, in a world where statuses can change, passing becomes both possible and inevitable.[8] This is the unavoidable fallout of the idea of social status as inherent and blood based. While autochthony’s claims of being inherent certainly rested on shaky ground, these were not the only fallacious premises upon which Athenian self-conception depended. Because autochthony was meant to order, it centrally imposed its structure down to even the level of individual family, and in doing so, manifested itself as a myth of unity. Above all, genealogical claims were meant to be objective and clear, “largely to guard against the kind of mingling and confusion of identities that blurs discrete lines of demarcation in the social order.”[9] The ideological primacy of a clearly-ordered and unified family structure was designed to make orderly life possible, with a cohesive overall clan structure which mirrored the internal structure of the family. In this way, the polis functioned ideologically as a single entity, its uniform organization all the way down to the individual level supplementing its unifying claim to one collective heritage. This ideology is far from abstract, and is in fact visible in much of the literature Athenian citizens produced. In Pericles’ Funeral Oration, for example, “the ‘populus,’ in the general sense of the term, is not politically divided,” and, indeed, “is never divided in the works of the tragic poets.”[10] This broad claim of unity is seen in Oedipus at Colonus as well, when Theseus, reacting to Creon’s abduction of Oedipus’s daughters, proclaims, “Your [Creon’s] behavior is an affront to me, / A shame to your own people and your nation,” and that “the whole city [Athens] / Must not seem overpowered by one man.”[11] In a unified citizenry, any citizen exemplifies that citizenry, and thus the actions of one man can impact the reputation of the entire polis . In this way, the citizen is metonymic of the polis , and conflating one with the other is both an easy and powerful move in a mythically-unified city like Athens, especially by its figurehead Theseus. What this means, however, is that the broad-reaching social order determines not only social status, but behavior. One must act in accordance to its social prescriptions, or else one endangers the social ideal of collective unity. Thus, those who violate the social norms, especially those important enough to be codified into law, must either be expelled from the polis by being placed into one of the excluded classes—in extreme cases, such as with Oedipus, this meant being expelled from the city itself and branded an exile—or eliminated entirely. In a society founded on absolute, broad-reaching, inherent order, any person whose very presence defies that system of order threatens the entire conception of the polis, a conception that must be kept in place so that democracy and the state as a whole can function. In order to see why Oedipus and Ion are not able to take their rightful places, then, it is necessary to examine exactly which secondary social prescriptions they violate that threaten the order and unity of the polis .[12] The Social Implications Of Blood While the primary concern of a genealogical social organization is creating a clear order, it must also be a self-sustainable system. What this means is that in order to reproduce viable citizens, and thereby the entire social order, secondary behavioral prescriptions become necessary. A system meant merely to determine whether or not one was citizen (i.e., pure lineage) became instead a guiding social principle, dictating not only social standing but also desired social behavior. To borrow a term coined by James C. Scott, the requirement of pure lineage in a genealogical society set into motion “a process by which ‘a measure colonizes behavior’”—that is, what is meant to be descriptive becomes prescriptive.[13] In the quest to create social order and obtain clarity through kinship organization, a blood-based society generated secondary regulations that helped further its own existence. No longer did it merely order society, but the desire to adhere to the blood standard now shaped the ways Athenians lived their lives. For example, the stringency of claims to autochthony biased societal perceptions of preferable marriages. Athenian-Athenian matches, or, more generally, marriages between members of the polis with clearly-defined statuses were considered more appropriate in ancient Athenian society. These biases played into the need for social order: if one was certain who one’s parents were, one’s own status was clearly defined. Conversely, if one was uncertain about their parentage, their social status was diminished due to the social order. We see this bias throughout history, with orphans and bastards historically being treated as lower-class citizens, inferior to those of straightforward lineage. With unclear parentage, one is not immediately stateless, per say, but one experiences a sort of social statelessness. As Creusa says of Ion, “It was for your good that Loxias settles into a noble house. If you were called the god’s son, you would not have had a house as your inheritance or a father’s name.”[14] Because Athenian women could not hold property, Ion must pass as the son of a metic in order to inherit a name of any meaning. Indeed, we see at the beginning of the play that Ion has no name at all until Xuthus gives it to him.[15] Naming is a familial claim, but as a bastard of Apollo, Ion has no name to claim whatsoever. While his Athenian mother ought to make him Athenian as well, revealing his true parentage would render Ion not only destitute, but without any form of social identification. To have a subordinate place in the social order is better—at least as Ion is coerced to believe by Xuthus and Athena—than to have no place at all. While his parentage is clear, Ion’s social status is not, revealing one of the major failures of a blood-based system. Inheritance can only deal with facts that it was built to incorporate for it is based on the grounds that it stems from absolute fact. While being the son of a god ought to have positive effects on his social standing, the fact that Apollo has entered the social order from a place completely external to it means that Ion and all of his progeny are also unable to fit into the social system at all. Ion cannot even be defined by one of the catch-all categories such as “orphan” that have been built into society for extreme, non-standard cases. A social order based on genetic lineage “expresses a demand to repeat (over generations) what can only happen once (the original birth).”[16] Genealogical in-grouping made both citizenship and violations of its reproductive practices iterative: if one’s ancestors made a mistake in marriage or reproduction, it would be reproduced throughout the entire genealogical line with no chance of correction, save through covering it up. Once revealed, Apollo’s original sin of impregnating Creusa—or, as it was more likely to be seen in this society, Creusa’s original sin of giving birth to Ion—would haunt Ion’s family line forever. Ion therefore must follow Athena’s advice and pass as a metic until the end of his days, his knowledge of his true parentage keeping him from fully joining the polis lest he become disenfranchised and lose his social classification of orphan, along with the protection that classification affords. While Ion’s crime against the social order is his very birth, Oedipus’s crime is more nuanced, hinging on his transition from ignorance to knowledge of his own parentage. Oedipus at Colonus thus explores what happens when that which goes against the social order is revealed, instead of staying safely hidden. While Ion confounds orderly overall social classification, Oedipus hopelessly confuses the internal family ordering upon which the whole of Athenian society was based. Oedipus not only confuses this order by killing his father, upending the proper power dynamic and sinning against the polis ’s conception of the ideal family, but also by marrying his mother and having children by her. This creates social positions untenable within Athenian society: sister-daughters, son-brothers, father-siblings, grandmother-mothers, etc. In his ignorance, Oedipus commits crimes that, upon coming to light, make both himself and his entire family socially unclassifiable, for the social order has no way of coping with the complications of incest. Just as Ion’s potential outing could contaminate the legitimacy of his entire line, Oedipus’s revelation does contaminate his entire family structure because of the supposedly inherent and unifying qualities of blood. This inherited contamination is evident in the ill fate of Oedipus’s daughters in the following play, Antigone . What brings people together in the social order can just as quickly spread social contamination. Oedipus and his family, especially his offspring, each inhabit multiple social categories, which contradict each other in their implications of exclusion and inclusion. Despite Oedipus and by extent his children being at least doubly Theban, the revelation of Oedipus’s parentage means they cannot be allowed to remain in the polis . Society has no outcast category in which to put the members of this family, so they must be expelled. They have violated the social order and thus cannot stay in the city since their continued presence threatens the myth of broader social unity. While the concept of unity was not as important in Thebes as in Athens, at least from an Athenian perspective, incest was still taboo. To some extent, Oedipus’s family had to be Theban since Thebes served as Athens’ dramatic foil, a place where scenes were allowed that couldn’t play out in Athens, even mythically.[17] Thebes was a place to explore social possibilities. If Oedipus’s stories took place within Athens’ idealized system, even in fiction, they risked exposing too directly its fragility. The slight distance between the two cities, both physically and ideologically, was what made such socially-shattering myths as Oedipus palatable. They were allowed to explore the potential effects that taboo events such as incest could have within Athens without threatening the social order with its intense emotional baggage. Conclusion The Athenian social order tolerates certain types of aberrations as long as they fall within the outcast categories it has created so that its myth of unity can persist despite inevitable anomalies. If an individual falls outside of these catch-all categories then they must be eliminated. Indeed, we see this occur through the plays as Oedipus’s children—who break no laws but whose very existence as daughter-sisters and brother-sons exposes the fragility of blood-based social order—eventually kill themselves and each other. The sin must be cut off at the source or else it will grow exponentially with every following generation. All of Oedipus’s family must end to cleanse the blood and the city. Unlike with Ion, Oedipus’s familial social transgressions are known, precluding him from the approved social order. Therefore, Oedipus faces no other socially-viable option but to be expelled from the polis . He threatens the polis ’s behavioral unity, the myth of unity that the entire polis is founded upon, and therefore, the polis itself. The mythically-unified polis, for whom all included individuals are metonymic representatives, cannot include an individual who has violated its secondary socio-familial prescriptions even if those transgressions are not intentional. Interestingly, Oedipus is asked to conditionally rejoin Thebes after his expulsion because the metonymic power the polis has over its citizens supersedes all other considerations. The claim which Athens newly asserts over Oedipus infringes upon that primary consideration, and so his secondary sins can be overlooked in favor of his primary birthright. Oedipus’s parentage is revealed, while Ion’s is not, and these revelations are what shaped their tragic fates. However, in a genealogical system that gains legitimacy based on the claim that blood is objective, inherent, and unfakeable, how is it possible that either of their lineages, at any point, not be revealed? The answer, in short, is that despite its apparent objectivity, blood does not speak for itself. One cannot look at someone and tell who their parents are, and, like Ion, individuals might be mistaken about their true parentage. This opens up the possibility of acting and passing as a citizen, even unintentionally, when one is not. This possibility threatens the autochthonous myth of blood being self-evident and inherent—thereby threatening the entire Athenian social order. As the bastard child of a god and an Athenian, Ion, while objectively an Athenian, does not fit neatly into the social narrative. Revealing his parentage may lead to questions about his autochthony. To secure his high position of power, a palatable lie must be constructed to ensure the propagation of his own line and the social order as a whole. Blood in this case is a performance, willing or not, for the sake of the social order to which his own exceptional circumstances must be subsumed. Because the autochthonous genealogical citizen myth is founded on the basis that it has no exceptions, having a questionable figurehead at one of the most important family lines might incite social crumbling from the top down. As an inevitable consequence of the need to preserve the mythical unity that this society was founded on, Ion, whose familial transgressions can be subsumed into pre-existing social categories, is able to be a metic as long as he hides his familial transgressions under a socially-acceptable genealogical narrative. Oedipus, on the other hand, who reveals his familial transgressions under extreme emotional duress[18], must necessarily be evicted from his polis for his violation of its secondary prescriptions since the assertion of his status along family lines implicates his other behavior. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is that the knowledge they gain of their parentage, which should shift them from their marginal social positions into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually means that they cannot claim their rightful places in society. The knowledge of their parentage is inextricable from the knowledge that either they or their parents violated the secondary prescriptive norms of their genealogically-based society. Despite its claims to being inherent, providing clear order, and unifying the polis , (blood) autochthony failed in almost every one of these respects, as does any other basis for social organization and delineation of citizenship. In order to preserve and reproduce this order, the reproduction of individuals needed to adhere to secondary behavioral prescriptions that blood-based membership entails, lest their entire family lines be contaminated. Due to the different natures of Ion’s and Oedipus’s social crimes, as well as the secrecy of sensitive information or lack thereof, Ion is able to pass within the polis while Oedipus must be expelled in order to preserve the social myth. However, neither is able to claim what is rightfully theirs: the title of citizen. Endnotes [1] Autochthony: n., The quality, state, or condition of being autochthonous; an instance of this. Autochthonous: (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists. Oxford English Dictionary, “autochthony” and “autochthonous,” OED Online, December 2018. [2] Polis refers to a Greek city-state. Here, more specifically, it refers to the people allowed within government in Athens, the people who constituted the voter base and who were included in all aspects of civic life. [3] Dokimasia : n, The term δοκιμασία and the related verb dokimazein were used in various Greek contexts to denote a procedure of examining or testing, and approving or validating as a result of the test. Oxford Classical Dictionary , 2016, "dokimasia." [4] At the time in which Ion is set, the requirement for citizenship was having one Athenian parent, not two, as it was after Pericles’ citizenship law. For Oedipus, the distinction is irrelevant because both of his parents are Thebans—or, in his father’s case, a naturalized Theban ruler. [5] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond , Trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83. [6] Demetra Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion,” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013), 15. [7] Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus , trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 92, line 9. The exact blood-based social conventions Oedipus violates that lead to his expulsion from Thebes will be explored later. [8] Passing, or being perceived and accepted as something other than what one actually is, is certainly an important part of any strictly-delineated social order. For example, in the post-Jim Crow era, certain people who would legally have been considered African American could “pass” in their daily lives as white. Passing is especially important in relation to Euripides’ Ion, but further discussion is not within the scope of this paper. [9] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 15. [10] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus,” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 331; 334. [11] Sophocles, 132, lines 8-9; 136, lines 14-15. [12] Ion is the son of the sun god Apollo and the Athenian princess Creusa; Oedipus is the son of two Theban monarchs. Thus, both theoretically should be included in their respective poleis on the basis of blood, especially since it is the blood of the elite. [13] James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. [14] Euripides, Ion , trans. H.K. Lee (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997), 503. [15] Euripides, Ion , 403. [16] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 13. [17] Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities,” 334: “There is one place where stasis [social division] finds a special home: It is Thebes,…an anti-city.” [18] Euripides, Ion , 104, lines 17-18: “Nothing so sweet / As death, death by stoning, could have been given me.” Oedipus’s distress comes from his internalization of the prescribed external social standards, which hold so much weight as taboo that he, as a metonymic citizen, feels anguish from actively breaking these rules, even if unaware he was doing so. References Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Euripides. Ion . Translated by H.K. Lee. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997. Kasimis, Demetra. “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion.” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013). Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2014. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus . Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus.” In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Edited by Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

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Ria Modak Khadi Capitalism: Gandhian Neoliberalism and the Making of Modern India Ria Modak The postcolonial invocation of Mohandas Gandhi brings to mind a singular image: Gandhi dressed in a simple dhoti and shawl made from khadi, or home-spun and home woven cloth, sitting in front of his spinning wheel. This recollection of Gandhi positions him as both the embodiment of Indian national consciousness as well as a figure outside or above modernity, insulated from the hegemonic influence of Western reason and secularism. Modernity, encapsulated by the socio- political, economic, and cultural institutions and frameworks birthed by post-Enlightenment rationality, is seen as incompatible with the fundamental tenets of Gandhian political philosophy. Yet, in researching the massive corpus of Gandhi’s collected writings and speeches, I found that his entanglements of modernity, cap- italism, and nationalism were less straightforward than conventional Indian historiography might suggest. Gandhi’s political philosophy offers an entry point to address fundamental questions about nation thinking, modernity, and postcolonial futurity: can the postcolonial subject articulate political possibilities that move beyond the nation state without sacrificing the material considerations of global capitalism? Put differently, is it possible to imagine and enact a world order that transcends the hegemonic structuring forces of Western modernity? These questions are particularly resonant as we come to terms with the price of modern progress, which, in the stark words of Horkheimer and Adorno, has left us a world “radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). Critiques of modern living are boundless, ranging from Frankfurt school critiques of its reification of reason to Subaltern Studies’ lamentations of Western epistemological hegemony (2) to arguments from the Black radical tradition that colonialism and modernity are inextricably linked (3). However, as scholars look beyond the modern Western intellectual tradition and locate alternative ways of being to create more liberatory political realities, it is crucial that we think critically about how radical these alternatives truly are. Some alternatives, like those found in Gandhi’s political philosophy, cannot help but be, to invoke the work of David Scott, conscripts of modernity. While historians and political theorists of contemporary India alike argue that Gandhi summarily rejected modern frameworks of nationalism, industrialism, and rationality itself, I contend that Gandhian political philosophy, rather than existing above the conceits of Western modernity, is intimately tied to Western civil society and its social, political, and economic manifestations. More specifically, it closely resembles neoliberal forms of social relations and economy. The fundamental methodologies and frameworks undergirding Gandhian political philosophy ultimately reinscribe the hegemonic global capitalist order even while they seem, on inspection, to articulate a radically different futurity. This paper’s critical intervention, then, challenges the underlying assumptions of conventional Indian historiography by exposing its inability to reckon with Gandhi as a fundamentally modern political figure entrenched in the machinations of globalized neoliberalism. I suggest that a more critical reading of Gandhi-- one that accurately locates his political philosophy as a modern intellectual contribution-- is necessary in order to make sense of India’s postcolonial future. After an outline of conventional Indian historiography and its fixation with Gandhi within the nationalist paradigm, I turn to elements of Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy to expose its similarities to modern neoliberal ideology and economics. Nationalist Historiography: A Dominant Discourse The conventional story of the Indian nationalist movement emphasizes the role of prolonged popular struggle; the diverse political and ideological visions of its leadership; and a uniquely revolutionary atmosphere of freedom and debate (4). The first stage of the independence movement was defined by the cultivation of an elite consciousness and the emergence of moderate nationalist activity; statesmen and politicians like Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale sought to achieve piecemeal reform through constitutional methods while keeping faith in the British justice system (5). As these gradual efforts failed to bring about substantive change, a more extremist brand of nationalism emerged. Through the swadeshi movement, militant nationalists like Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak fomented wide-spread political agitation by boycotting British institutions and goods (6). In this highly charged political context, Gandhi launched several satyagraha , or non-violent resistance, campaigns, including the non-cooperation movement and the Quit India movement, successfully mobilizing the masses (7). The culmination of this protracted struggle for freedom was, of course, Indian independence and the ensuing violence of Partition. This dominant narrative of the Indian freedom struggle foregrounds nationalism as a guiding principle, first to unify the social, economic, and political demands of a vastly heterogeneous population, and later to create a sovereign and secular nation state that embodies the will of the people. In depicting nationalism as the primary structuring force in the making of modern India, the mainstream approach to Indian history is representative of other, more extreme, approaches to historiography, including Hindu nationalist, Marxist, and even subaltern perspectives. All Indian history, in other words, is told as nationalist history. Hindu nationalist retellings of the independence movement represent Indian nationalism as a brand of ethnic nationalism in which nationality is an inherent genetic characteristic (8). By villainizing Muslim subjects, it replaces the secular liberal state of conventional historiography with a Hindu state: the Indian nation is the Hindu nation (9). Marxist historiography, in contrast, traces the rise and fall of India as a socialist state through retelling history from below, analyzing the role of peasant revolts and general strikes in inciting nationalist fervor. It conceptualizes the positive aspects of the nationalist movement (i.e. the bourgeois-democratic values of secularism, women’s rights, freedom of the press etc.) as the initial points for a people’s front (10). While subaltern historiographical approaches drew inspiration from Marxist methods, their characterization of the nationalist movement splits Indian politics into elite and subaltern spheres, each of which articulated a unique form of nationalism (11). Each of these historiographical approaches, in summary, insist on reifying the defining characteristic of national- ism according to the field’s preeminent scholars: congruence between the political and national unit (12). Within this discourse, the figure of Gandhi emerges as the very embodiment of nationalist consciousness. During the freedom struggle, he acquired the informal, but highly popularized, title of Father of the Nation, an appellation which continues to inform Gandhi’s central role in Indian postcolonial imagination. Countless films, television programs, plays, and documentaries continue to memorialize his life and work both within and outside of India. From Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi to Doordarshan’s 52 episode-long teleserial Mahatma, the figure of Gandhi continues to pervade India’s nationalist project (13). Gandhi plays a crucial role in the symbolic consolidation of state power: his birthday and death day are both celebrated as national holidays; his image appears on paper currency of nearly all denominations issued by the Reserve Bank of India; and the International Gandhi Peace Prize is awarded annually by the Government of India as a tribute to Gandhian ideals. From the independence movement to our own political moment, Gandhi and the nationalist project have fused into an inseparable unit. Contemporary theorists of Indian nationalism argue that the conflation of Gandhi and the nation can be attributed to Gandhi’s refusal to adopt the values and assumptions of Western modernity. Partha Chatterjee suggests that by rejecting the modernizing ethos of Western rationality, Gandhi remained unencumbered by the Enlightenment thematic: “[n]ot only did Gandhi not share the historicism of the nationalist writers, he did not share their confidence in rationality and the scientific mode of knowledge” (14). Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar argue that Gandhi’s reliance on the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, allowed for the articulation of a novel religio-ethical orientation in the realm of politics, which he saw as intrinsically linked to Western modernity (15). This seemingly wholesale rejection of Western modernity, according to many historians of modern and postcolonial India, is clearly visible in Gandhi’s public image (16). As he embraced his role as a satyagrahi, he traded the Western robes of the barrister for a simple dhoti and shawl made from khadi. Gandhi’s khadi attire was transformed into a material artifact of the nation defined in terms of the contemporary politics and economics of self rule (17). Gandhi’s physical appearance, in other words, paralleled his ideological distance from Western modernity. Gandhi’s rejection of modern social, political, and economic frameworks is often contrasted to other leading statesmen and intellectuals of Indian freedom. He is most frequently counterposed with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Conventional Indian historiography narrates the differences between Gandhi and Nehru as such: where Nehru was a proponent of statist secular socialism driven by industrial growth, Gandhi was profoundly ambivalent about state intervention in agriculture and industry; where Nehru located India’s future in the creation of the modern city, Gandhi presented the self-sufficient and autonomous village as an alternative to modern civilization; where Nehru saw economic development as central to Indian independence, Gandhi sought self-purification and the cultivation of individual ethical consciousness (18). Scholars of modern India also juxtapose Gandhi’s religious orientation and appeals to Hinduism with the anti-caste, radical democratic humanism of B.R. Ambedkar, renowned Dalit leader and the architect of India’s constitution (19). Where Gandhi revered village life as a revival of the old social order, Ambedkar saw the village as a model of oppressive Hindu social organization which segregated upper caste communities from lower caste communities; where Gandhi turned to religion as a source of ethics, Ambedkar glorified the secular humanist ideals of the French Revolution; where Gandhi urged spiritual and religious education in Hindustani, Ambedkar demanded that English be used in schools to counter the Brahmin tradition of denying education and literacy to lower caste communities (20). In comparison to Nehru, Ambedkar, and others, Gandhian political philosophy is depicted in mainstream Indian historiography as irrefutably anti-modern. However, as I argue below, this characterization of Gandhi does not accurately reflect his political philosophy. Defining the Gandhian Problem Space Rather than articulating a radical alternative to Western modernity, Gandhian political philosophy was entrenched in the systems, structures, and frameworks of modernity, and more specifically, those of neoliberal capitalism. Before addressing the specifics of Gandhi’s political philosophy, it is first necessary to locate Gandhi more comprehensively within his problem space to better establish the stakes of my argument. In his work Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott introduces the idea of the problem space, which he defines as “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs” (21). Theoretical work cannot be read, in other words, without identifying the questions to which that work responds. Even while actors within a particular problem space may disagree on the answers in a particular scenario, they are all responding to the same set of unspoken questions while maintaining a shared sense of the stakes. Intellectuals, statesmen and activists may disagree on how to decolonize, for example, while implicitly agreeing that something must be done to address the condition of colonized people. In the previous section, I gestured to one aspect of Gandhi’s problem space by outlining the background against which he formed his ideas in the space and time of the Indian freedom movement; in that spatio-temporal location, Gandhi’s problem space was constructed by Hindu scripture and the formation of religion as ethics. However, the Gandhian problem space was not circumscribed by the borders of the Indian nation; rather, it existed concomitantly with other approaches to decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. On the whole, these other projects struggled, mostly unsuccessfully, to articulate a postcolonial future out- side the terms of nationalism and modernity. In the Anglophone Black Atlantic, statesmen and intellectuals like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams proposed federalism and non-domination on the global stage as solutions to the problem of empire (22). In the Francophone Black Atlantic, Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor sought to transform imperial France into a democratic federation with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity (23). Within this internationalist problem space of decolonization characterized by “an attitude of anticolonial longing, a longing for anti-colonial revolution,” actors from all over the decolonizing world sought to engage in a radical project of worldmaking. However, many reinscribed colonial legacies by adopting the institutions, bureaucracies, and borders of colonial domination. Within the context of this problem space, then, Gandhi’s apparent rejection of modernity took on additional stakes as one of the few truly radical alternatives to nation thinking and capitalist state formation, not just in the Indian context but in the decolonizing world as a whole. However, this perception of Gandhi’s ideological distance from modernity is fundamentally misguided. In the three sections that follow, I analyze some of the fundamental tenets of Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy to draw conceptual linkages to neoliberal capitalism. I first consider Gandhi’s attention to the individual as a unit of analysis in the struggle for independence, and argue that his conceptualization of swaraj as self-purification elided a structural understanding of colonialism as an oppressive force. Next, I critique Gandhi’s political ideal of Ramarajya and analyze his rejection of Western civilization. Finally, I turn to his visions of political economy, and in particular, his fixation with khadi to argue that Gandhi’s economic programme was, in fact, far closer to neoliberalism than most scholars would admit. Before addressing Gandhi’s political philosophy in full, it is helpful to first situate my argument within the field of Gandhi studies and critiques of Gandhi. Beginning in the early twentieth century, trade unionists like Shripad Amrit Dange took issue with the conservative strains within Gandhi’s economic thought, comparing it to the ideology of Soviet leaders like Vladimir Lenin (24). Contemporary scholars of India have taken up these critiques, pointing to his defense of the propertied classes, his ambivalence toward trade unions, and his philosophy of trusteeship as evidence of his imbrication in modern systems of capitalism and nationalism (25). However, few scholars have taken a theoretical approach to Gandhian political philosophy as a whole; those that do characterize his anticolonialism as fundamentally opposed to the modern state (26). My intervention complicates both of these approaches by engaging in a theoretical and deeply normative consideration of Gandhian thought. Swaraj as Self Purification and the Cultivation of Neoliberal Social Relations In his seminal treatise on political philosophy, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi puts forth a unique definition of swaraj , or self rule, that offers several dimensions through which to understand the stakes and motivations of the freedom struggle. First, Gandhian swaraj must be understood through the praxis of the individual, who is “the one supreme consideration” (27): it is “in the palm of our hands... Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself” (28). The practitioner of swaraj is the individual, not society or community (29). Gandhi’s focus on internal moral transformation leaves ambiguous the role of coalitional organizing and community building. In addition, Gandhi’s notion of swaraj is not generated in reaction to the brutality of colonial rule, but rather it emerges from an inner commitment to self improvement: “What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or because we want to retaliate, but because it is our duty to do so” (30). The political power derived from swaraj, in other words, must not be regarded as an end in itself. Indeed, a third characteristic of Gandhian swaraj is that it is not predicated on self determination or economic independence: “Now you will have seen that it is not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianised, we can accommodate them” (31). Rather, swaraj depends on moral development and ethical formation. As such, it is intimately tied to the cultivation of spiritual and religious sensibilities (32) rather than the material considerations of development and industry: “Impoverished India can become free, but it will be hard for an India made rich through immorality to regain its freedom” (33). Gandhian swaraj is not constructed exclusively by material forces, nor does it demand exclusively material solutions. Gandhi’s focus on the individual obfuscates the role of colonialism as a structure of domination. He locates the origins of colonial exploitation in the moral failings of the Indian populace: “The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them” (34). Gandhi’s discussion of the emergence of colonial rule is, unsurprisingly, limited in scope; the subject of his analysis is the upper class, upper caste colonized elite: “Who assisted the Company’s officers? Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this. In order to become rich all at once, we welcomed the Company’s officers with open arms” (35). His myopic focus on the individual blinds him to the many revolutionary movements led by farmers, mill-workers, and tribal communities to overthrow British rule that were organized on the basis of economic exploitation (36). Gandhi also absolves colonial officers from their role in fomenting religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims through a divide-and-rule policy: “The Hindus and the Mahomedans were at daggers drawn. This, too, gave the Company its opportunity, and thus we created the circumstances that gave the Company its control over India” (37). This revisionist retelling of Hindu-Muslim relations ignores the crucial role of colonial policies in exacerbating religious tensions. The Census of British India of 1871-1872 constructed modern Hindu and Muslim identities as incompatible while the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms created separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims (38), thus fracturing political power (39). Gandhi’s conceptualization of swaraj does not adequately address the systems that continued to uphold the violence of colonial rule through law, bureaucracy, and state violence. By privileging the individual over the systemic, Gandhi’s formulation of swaraj closely resembles the cultivation of neoliberal social relations. While neoliberalism as an economic principle only gained traction in the 1970s after the dissolution of post-war Keynesianism, it also embodies ideological principles which marshal values of human dignity, individualism, and freedom to theorize the free market as a force of domination (40). Ethics and morality under the ideology of neoliberalism, in other words, become highly individualized, as in the case of Gandhian swaraj . This moral dimension has been central to neoliberalism since the beginning of the twentieth century (41), and became particularly salient in the aftermath of the Second World War, when human rights discourse began to interface with neoliberalism to produce a modern version of the colonial civilizing mission by facilitating the emergence of a globalized market civilization in which individual rights and competitive market relations would spread across and within national borders co-constitutively (42). Neoliberalism as a method of understanding and critiquing social relations offers a theoretical framework through which to analyze Gandhian swaraj. To be clear, I am not conflating all forms of religiously inflected self making with neoliberal social relations. I am arguing specifically that Gandhian swaraj, in failing to attend sufficiently to the structural forces of colonial domination, mirrors the highly destructive individualism that constitutes a central feature of neoliberalism. In fact, the very religio-ethical orientation that Gandhi gravitated toward was used as a tool for collective liberation in the context of the Indian freedom movement itself. For example, Muslim revolutionaries like Ashfaqullah Khan and Abul Kalam Azad invoked Islam and Islamic liberation theology to mobilize In- dian Muslim subjects in the independence struggle by centering the mosque as a site of resistance and reciting the Quran and fasting for Ramadan while jailed as political prisoners (43). In contrast to Gandhian swaraj, their religious sensibilities confronted the colonial state by producing solidarity among many diverse Muslim communities. A Critique of Ramarajya: Caste, Capitalism and Gandhi’s Ideal Civilization To reiterate, Gandhi is understood by most scholars as rejecting modernity because of his scathing critiques of modern civilization. Modern civilization, rather than the violent state sanctioned brutality of colonialism, was responsible for India’s downfall according to Gandhi: “It is not the British people who are ruling India, but it is modern civilization, through its railways, telegraphs, telepoles, and almost any invention which has been claimed to be a triumph of civilization” (44). The West fell prey to the forces of materialism, hyperrationality, and uncompromising secularism, which are all the inescapable after-effects of modernity. Gandhi expresses his disdain for this civilization in no uncertain terms: “This civilisation takes note of neither morality nor of religion: this civilization is irreligion” (45). Even more lamentably, the West mapped these values onto the East through the process of colonialism. As such, he writes, “India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, law- yers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes have to learn to live conscientiously and religiously and deliberately the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a life giving true happiness” (46). These critiques of modern civilization are taken as evidence of Gandhi successfully rising above the conceits of modernity (47). However, it is not enough to consider Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization; rather, we must also analyze his alternative to modern civilization to assess whether or not it breaks free of the very systems Gandhi is opposed to. The fundamental values of Gandhi’s civilizational ideal are distinct from those of what he refers to as modern or material civilization, but their enactment reinforces neoliberal values. He defines true civilization as “that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty” (48). True civilization is morally inflected, and therefore spiritually inflected. According to Gandhi, India once adhered to the tenets of true civilization and must work to recover them: “The tendency of Indian civilisation is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilisation is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilisation even as a child clings to its mother’s breast” (49). True civilization was achieved in the past and can be achieved again if, Gandhi argues, India returns to its original methods of governance, agriculture, industry, and labor while modifying some of its less progressive elements like untouchability: “In order to restore India to its pristine condition, we have to return to it. In our own civilisation, there will naturally be progress, retrogression, reforms and reactions, but one effort is required, and that is to drive out Western civilisation” (50). The fundamental values of Gandhi’s civilization ideal defined a type of morality that was dependent on acting according to one’s duty. The fixation on duty as a morally and religiously constituted ideal is, as I hope to prove, entirely compatible with capitalism and casteism in their modern formulations. Before considering the theoretical implications of Gandhi’s civilizational ethos, it is first necessary to understand how he envisioned their political manifestations through Ramarajya, “ the non-violent state of Gandhi’s vision” (51), his most concrete articulation of an alternative to nation thinking. Admittedly, Gandhi was less concerned with the details of postcolonial institutions, instead preferring a “one step enough” approach (52). However, he wrote extensively on his conceptualization of the ideal state, which he derived from the ancient ideal of Ramarajya, the divine kingdom of Lord Ram. Ramarajya in Gandhi’s formulation consisted of a federation of self governing and semi-autonomous panchayats , or village councils. The authority of the federation would be limited to the coordination, guidance, and supervision of matters of common interest (53). As in the case of swaraj, Ramarajya asserted the supremacy of individual freedom; this individual freedom was to be manifested in each panchayat and the state itself (54). Yet, these individual freedoms were tempered by Gandhi’s insistence on maintaining the caste system. In order to overcome the “life-corroding competition” of materialism and capitalism, each individual must follow “his own occupation or trade” (55). The law of varna “established certain spheres of action for certain people with certain tendencies,” thus at once naturalizing and institutionalizing caste (56). The shadow of caste, a concrete manifestation of Gandhi’s civilizational ethos of duty and morality, hung over his Ramarajya. Caste as a structuring force in Gandhi’s Ramarajya was not simply an unsavory vestige of pre-modern India; it was central to creating a reformed political and economic system in the postcolonial context. While Ramarajya was highly idealized, in the decades following Gandhi’s death, the Indian government has tried to implement many of its elements through campaigns, most notably the 2014 Clean India Mission ( Swachh Bharat Abhiyan ). The Clean India Mission is a country wide campaign aimed to “achieve universal sanitation coverage” by eradicating manual scavenging, improving the management of solid and liquid waste, and sustaining open-defecation free behavior (57). It is undoubtedly inspired by Ramarajya: it was initiated on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday; volunteers are known as swachhagrahis, clearly in reference to satyagrahis ; and its messaging invokes Gandhian ideals of morality and duty (58). Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself proclaimed, “I must admit that if I had not understood Gandhi’s philosophy so deeply, the programme would not have been a part of my government’s priorities” (59). Yet, the Clean India Mission relied on coercive state action in its interactions with Dalit and Adivasi communities because prevailing ideas of purity and pollution drawn from the caste system perpetuate open defecation in rural India. To spread its message to lower caste and tribal communities, the Clean India Mission relied on the spirit of neoliberal capitalism, aggressive branding, and the monetary aid of multi-million dollar conglomerates like Hindustan Unilever (60). Neoliberal capitalism was the vessel through which casteism could inflict harm (61). The very ideals of morality and duty, when enshrined in the caste system, allowed Ramarajya to exist in accordance with the principles of neoliberal capitalism and state violence. When put into practice, Gandhi’s Ramarajya was not a rejection of modernity and materialism, but rather a manifestation of the most oppressive elements of Western modernity. His ideal form of political governance was invoked to complete a fundamentally modernist project. Khadi Capitalism: A Critique of Gandhi’s Political Economy Just as Gandhi’s political philosophy was highly compatible with neoliberal capitalism, so was his political economy. Like his conceptualization of Ramarajya and political philosophy, Gandhi understood political economy as inseparable from ethical and religious pursuits. Through this religio-ethical lens , individual and societal economic interests were to be collapsed to avoid conflict between the two. Economic progress in the material sense was antagonistic to “real progress” in the ethical sense (62). As part of his political economy, Gandhi urged plain living, which entailed the curtailing of material desires to lead a more sustainable lifestyle: “More and more things are produced to supply our primary needs, less and less will be the violence” (63). He urged small-scale and locally-oriented production that would not require large-scale industrialization or the use of machinery. Gandhi also emphasized the dignity of all forms of labor and suggested that every person, no matter their class status, should engage in manual labor, which he called, after Leo Tolstoy, “bread labor,” to understand the plight of agricultural laborers (64). Plain living, small-scale production, and bread labor, in summation, formed the basis of Gandhi’s political economy. The khadi programme was essential in enacting Gandhi’s political economy. Khadi was meant to be the national industry to benefit the masses by providing supplementary work to unemployed rural hands. The economics of khadi included a plan to produce, distribute, exchange, and consume hand-spun yarn and cloth. Its effects were meant to diminish unemployment, augment economic productivity, and increase the purchasing power and of the poor. As it was geared towards India’s rural population, khadi could rely on only the most simple and accessible technologies: the loom and the spinning wheel. It also had to rely on a local re- source base for production and consumption (65). As such, khadi played a crucial role in defining the structures of exchange in Gandhi’s political economy: each village had to be self supporting and self contained to adhere to the khadi programme. According to this highly fragmented doctrine, villages should only exchange necessary commodities with other villages where they are not locally producible (66). Although khadi was meant to deliver material economic benefits to India’s rural population, as with other elements of Gandhi’s political economy, it also took on a profoundly moral dimension. It was integral to establishing what Gandhi referred to as a “non-violent economic order” (67). While mill-made cloth was cheaper than khadi, it relied on “dishonesty,” “violence and untruth,” which is why it had to be opposed (68). In the scope of Gandhi’s political economy, khadi was necessary to address the economic and moral needs of the Indian masses. In promoting the khadi programme, Gandhi articulated an unequivocal opposition to industrialism and, by extension, state socialism. Labor-saving machinery, according to Gandhi, was highly detrimental to the lives of rural Indians; it was antagonistic to both man’s labor and true civilization: “Machinery has begun to desolate Europe. Ruination is now knocking at the English gates. Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation; it represents a great sin” (69). While states- men like Nehru urged state-sponsored large-scale industrialization to bring India’s economy onto the globalized stage (70), Gandhi insisted that “India does not need to be industrialised in the modern sense of the term” (71). His apathy towards state socialism was grounded in this uncompromising opposition to industrialism: if industrialism was a necessary step in implementing socialist policies, he would reject those policies. However, while khadi was avowedly anti-industrialist, it was not unambiguously anti-modern. Just as Gandhi’s political philosophy resembles neoliberal ethical formation by erasing the structural role of colonialism, khadi does the same by erasing the structural role of capitalism. Gandhi’s political economy addressed the problem of inequality primarily on the individual level by pleading for necessary changes in lifestyle to limit one’s needs and conceptualizing the economy in moral terms. The cultivation of individual economic health apart from the travails of industrialism and heavy machinery was the guiding principle in Gandhi’s political economy: ethics and morality became co-opted by the logic of neoliberal individualism. The more structural features of khadi -- its production, distribution, exchange and consumption schemes-- also reinforce aspects of neoliberal economy and ideology. The confluence of a lack of state regulation and the supremacy of individual will in the context of atomized, self-sufficient villages is not far from the neoliberal ideal that reifies individual rights and competitive market relations (72). Just as neoliberal ideology obscures class conflict by dissuading class consciousness through the vocabulary of individualism, the moral and ideological ramifications of khadi portray class warfare as an instrument of social violence and disharmony (73). Gandhian political economy sought to resolve economic inequality by pre- serving human dignity rather than ensuring material gains (74). Gandhi’s political economy, in sum, was not so distant from modern neoliberalism. Conclusion: Confronting the Postmodern Turn in Postcolonial Studies Thus, Gandhi’s political philosophy and political economy were not divorced from Western modernity. Contrary to the writings of most historians and political theorists of contemporary India, I suggest that Gandhi’s political thought closely resembles neoliberal ideology, social relations, and economy even while it may seem, on inspection, unequivocally anti-modern. The methodological individual- ism that undergirds his conceptualization of swaraj, the centrality of caste and labor division in his political ideal of Ramarajya and his khadi programme all point to significant conceptual linkages to neoliberal capitalism. Through a critical reading of his work, I contend that Gandhi was not above modernity: he was entrenched in the systems, structures, and ideologies of modernity. Understanding Gandhi’s political philosophy as a modern intellectual contribution is crucial in confronting the recent postmodernist and poststructuralist turn in postcolonial studies, which seeks to replace class analysis or history from below with textual analysis and cultural theory (75). This new orientation, through its methodological individualism, depoliticization of the social from the material realm, and wholesale refusal of programmatic politics, is both conservative and authoritarian (76). By prioritizing ideology over existing structures of domination, in other words, it fails to engage with the material realities of colonialism and capitalism. This brand of scholarship, as I prove, uses Gandhi as its shining example. In my paper, I have attempted to dislodge this conventional perception of Gandhi as the embodiment of pure Indian nationalism untouched by Western modernity by pointing to the material implications of his political thought. In doing so, I hope to challenge the postmodern impulse within postcolonial studies. More importantly, I strongly believe that a critical reading of Gandhi is necessary in our contemporary political moment. More than 250 million farm workers in India went on strike in November 2020 to demand better working conditions, including the withdrawal of new anti-farm bills that would deregulate agricultural markets by giving corporations the staggering power to set crop prices far below current minimum rates. Farmers are confronting neoliberal excess in its most globalized form, facing off against Prime Minister Modi as well as dozens of multinational corporations. While invocations of Gandhian political philosophy by far-right figures like Modi are often characterized as erroneous distortions of his thought within liberal nationalist scholarship, in reality they are the logical conclusions of his arguments (77). Within the corpus of Gandhi’s work lie the seeds of neoliberal exploitation. As farmers come to terms with an ever-growing and exploitative globalized economy, a careful examination of Gandhi’s political thought may inform what a just postcolonial future should, and shouldn’t, embody. Endnotes 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 3 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 9. 4 Bipin Chandra, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947, (New Delhi, India; Viking, 1998), 14. 5 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 92. 6 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, (Routledge, 2017), 92. 7 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 110. 8 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11. 9 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Bombay, India: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969), 2. 10 Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, (New Delhi, India: Tulika, 1995), 10. 11 Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1478. 12 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 13 Shanti Kumar, Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television, (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 17. 14 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 96. 15 Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 338. 16 For a good scholarly overview, see Sanjeev Kumar, Gandhi and the Contemporary World, (Taylor and Francis, 2019). 17 Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), xx. 18 Surinder S. Jodhka, “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 32 (2002): 3347. 19 Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and The Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 2. 20 Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 338. 21 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. 22 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 107. 23 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10. 24 Shripad Amrit Dange, Gandhi vs Lenin (Bombay, India: Liberty Literature Company, 1921), 15. 25 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 282. 26 Karuna Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 535. 27 Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 25 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989), 252. 28 Mohandas Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71. 29 Koneru Ramakrishan Rao, Gandhi’s Dharma, (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017), 105. 30 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 116. 31 Ibid, 71. 32 I conflate these terms carefully: according to Gandhi, religion and morality could not be disentangled. Throughout Hind Swaraj, he emphasizes that they are entirely co-constitutive. 33 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 106. 34 Ibid, 38-39. 35 Ibid. 36 Subho Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers Resistance in Bengal, 1890-1937, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 238-62. 37 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 40. 38 Rajmohan Gandhi, Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 6. 39 Of course, in reality this narrative is not so simple.There was a clear sense of difference and tension between Hindu and Muslim communities long before British rule. However, I argue that Gandhi’s telling of this history erases the role that British colonialism played in intensifying these tensions for political gain. 40 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12. 41 Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, (La Vergne: Verso, 2019), 4. 42 Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 8. 43 Pran Nath Chopra, Role of Indian Muslims in the Struggle for Freedom, (New Delhi, India: Light & Life Publishers, 1979), 6. 44 Gandhi, “Letter to H.S.L. Pollack” in Hind Swaraj, 128. 45 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 36. 46 Gandhi, “Letter to H.S.L. Pollack” in Hind Swaraj, 129. 47 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 98. 48 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 65. 49 Ibid. 50 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 104. 51 Rao, Gandhi’s Dharma, 210. 52 G.N. Dhawan, The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, (Bombay, India: Popular Book Depot, 1946), 126. 53 Ibid, 282. 54 Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, (New York: Oxford University Press), 86. 55 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 66. 56 Ramarajya also poses interesting and important questions about gender and patriarchy in village life, but unfortunately this line of inquiry is outside the scope of this paper. 57 “Swachh Bharat Mission,” Government of India, https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. 58 Swachh Bharat Mission,” Government of India, https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. 59 “PM Modi: Gandhi inspired me to launch Swachh Bharat,” Economic Times, Published October 2, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-modi-gandhi-inspired-me-to-launch-s wachh-bharat/articleshow/66045561.cms?from=mdr. 60 “Hindustan Unilever Limited: Spreading the message of Swachh Aadat across India,” The Hindu, Published April 30, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/hindustan-unilever-limited-spreading-the-message-of-swachh-aadat- across-india/article23729983.ece. 61 Anand Teltumbde, Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva, (New Delhi, India: Navayana, 2018), 24. 62 Gandhi, “Economic and Moral Development” in Hind Swaraj, 154. 63 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 22, 143. 64 Ibid, vol. 12, 51. 65 Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 81. 66 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51, 92. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 106. 70 Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 249. 71 Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51, 93. 72 Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 12. 73 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 16. 74 Madan Gandhi, Marx and Gandhi: Study in Ideological Polarities, (Chandigarh, India: Vikas Bharti, 1969), 32. 75 Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies,” in Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83. 76 Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20:2 (1994): 334. 328-56. 77 Mihir Bose, From Midnight to Glorious Morning? India Since Independence, (London: Haus Publishing, 2017), 122. Works Cited Basu, Subo. Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers Resistance in Bengal, 1890-1937. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bose, Mihir. From Midnight to Glorious Morning? India Since Independence. London: Haus Publishing. 2017. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. Routledge, 2017. Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chakrabarty, Dipesh and Rochona Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such,” Modern Intellectual History, 7, no. 2 (2010): 335-353 Chandra, Bipin. India’s Struggle for Independence , 1857-1947. New Delhi, India; Viking, 1998. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Chopra, Pran Nath. Role of Indian Muslims in the Struggle for Freedom . New Delhi, India: Light & Life Publishers, 1979. Dange, Shripad Amrit. Gandhi vs Lenin. Bombay, India: Liberty Literature Company, 1921. Dhawan, G.N. The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Bombay, India: Popular Book Depot, 1946. Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20:2 (1994): 328-56. Gandhi, Madhan. Marx and Gandhi: Study in Ideological Polarities. Chandigarh, India: Vikas Bharti, 1969. Gandhi, Mohandas. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Edited by Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 12. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 22. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 25. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. ———. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 51. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1989. Gandhi, Rajmohan. Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). Gellner, Ernst. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Habib, Irfan. Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception. New Delhi, India: Tulika, 1995. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. “Hindustan Unilever Limited: Spreading the message of Swachh Aadat across India.” The Hindu. Published April 30, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/hindustan-unilever-limited-spreading-the- message-o f-swa- chh-aadat-across-india/article23729983.ece Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder S. “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 32 (2002): 3343- 3353. Kumar, Aishwary. Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Kumar, Shanti. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Mantena, Karuna. “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures.” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 535-563. “PM Modi: Gandhi inspired me to launch Swachh Bharat.” Economic Times. Published October 2, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and- nation/pm-modi-gandhi-inspired-me-to-launch-swachh-bharat/ articleshow/66045561.cms?from=mdr. Rao, Koneru Ramakrishan. Gandhi’s Dharma. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017. Roy, Arundhati. The Doctor and The Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India: 1885-1947. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Bombay, India: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. “Swachh Bharat Mission.” Government of India. https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm. Teltumbde, Anand. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi, India: Navayana, 2018. Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Whyte, Jessica. The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. La Vergne: Verso, 2019). Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Previous Next

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Health/Disease Distinction Normative Uses Margot S. Witte Brown University Author Matthew Flathers Fengyi Wan Alex Vaughan Williams Editors Fall 2018 I consider the question of whether or not it is permissible to intervene, given a particular medical condition. Typically, we argue that healthy conditions do not permit interventions, while disease conditions do. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between “healthy” and “diseased” is too slippery to be practically useful, and suggest that we should do away with it in clinical practice, substituting a model of asking whether an individual needs help. Introduction Every time a physician faces a condition in clinical practice, they must determine whether or not to intervene. This is an ethical question: “When ought I to intervene?” The centrality of the question in the practical world means that it merits philosophical consideration. In this essay, I will be focusing on the distinction between conditions for which intervention is permissible and conditions for which it is not permissible. The first category of conditions can be further divided into conditions for which intervention is required and conditions for which it is merely permissible, but I will not be addressing this second distinction. It is also important to note that I am concerned in this paper with the question of whether or not intervention is permissible, not whether or not a physician will intervene. The answer to the second question relies on issues like resource allocation and standard practices, which are outside the scope of this paper. The distinction we draw between conditions that do and do not permit intervention ought to align with our general intuitions. There are two main reasons to pick an intuitive distinction over an unintuitive one. First, intuition is acceptable evidence in ethical decisions. We can see one simplistic reason for accepting this by considering ethical propositions that we take to be true independent of ethical analysis. For example, someone who isn’t familiar with moral theory would say that, all things being equal, it is worse to kill indiscriminately than not to kill indiscriminately. This person’s primary evidence is their moral intuition, and we think that they are justified in their conclusion. The second reason we should accept intuition as evidence in finding a normatively useful distinction between conditions that permit and do not permit intervention is that we require a practical theory. The intention of this distinction is for it to be used practically by real physicians in real clinics. If the distinction goes against general moral intuition, it will not be followed by the majority of physicians. Often, the distinction between “health” and “disease” is used to make decisions about intervention, where intervention is permissible in the case of disease and impermissible in the case of health – or, in some theories, we should be agnostic about whether to intervene in cases of health . The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate how helpful this health/disease distinction is and whether we need an alternative. I will consider various conceptual analyses of disease and see which, if any, are most helpful. Just as there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as diseased, there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as healthy. The World Health Organization defines health as more than just “the absence of disease and infirmity.” It is also a “complete physical, mental and social well-being” that every human has the right to.[1] This creates three categories: diseased, healthy, and an in-between category, in which people are neither diseased nor infirm, but lack complete well-being. Because I am focused on whether health/disease distinction works to guide us in determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene, a situation with only two options, I will be discussing the theories that have only two categories: healthy and diseased. The first part of my paper will be concerned with different versions of the health/disease distinction and specific counterarguments to each distinction. I will then consider the possible problems that arise from using the health/disease distinction, however it is drawn, to make the normative decision about whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Finally, I will propose another way to make this distinction and evaluate the shortcomings and potential areas of further investigation for this new theory. The “Health”/“Disease” Distinction There are three primary approaches to conceptualizing disease: naturalism (sometimes called objectivism), constructivism (sometimes called normativism), and the relatively recent addition of embedded instrumentalism. In this section, I will consider these three theories of disease and analyze their abilities to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for disease, with the assumption that if there are serious weaknesses with the theory as a definition, it is not advisable to employ it as a normative guide to distinguish between conditions that do and do not permit intervention. The first theory I will consider is naturalism. Naturalists believe that the label “disease” represents an objective, intrinsic category of conditions and that we can determine whether a condition falls into the category by making empirical observations. Proponents of the theory claim that it is completely value-free and non-normative.[2] Dominic Murphy summarizes naturalism with a two-step classification system meant to determine whether a condition is a disease.[3] The first step is to determine whether a biological organ or system is malfunctioning. The second step is to determine whether the malfunction is harmful to the person it is affecting. As Murphy formulates naturalism, a condition is a disease if and only if the answer to both questions is yes. Most accounts of naturalism follow a similar structure, even if they do not break it down as clearly as Murphy. There is some variation within naturalism about what counts as a “malfunction.” While some theorists appeal to a common sense notion of “functioning,” most argue that a system is functioning if it is working in the way it was evolutionarily intended to work. Under this definition, the structure of the eye was naturally selected for because of its ability to pick up a given range of wavelengths and activate the optic nerve in a given way. Christopher Boorse, a major figure in naturalism, argues for what he calls a “Bio-Statistical Theory” of what qualifies as normal functioning.[4] He claims that, for any system, we can determine a species-specific standard based on a reference class with an acceptable level of variation. If a particular organism’s system significantly varies from the standard, it is malfunctioning. So, if an eye fails to pick up a wavelength that the statistically standard eye in the appropriate population picks up, it would be considered malfunctioning. Boorse defends his Bio-Statistical Theory on the grounds that it allows us to determine whether or not a system is malfunctioning in an objective manner without inserting our own beliefs about what constitutes “normal.” The philosopher Elselijn Kingma points out that naturalism, especially as formulated by Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory, is not at all free of subjective value-judgments. She claims the organisms that we choose to include in the reference class are determined through normative ideas about what proper functioning is, so it would be circular to use the standard class to make determinations about what qualifies a system as properly functioning.[5] The Bio-Statistical Theory only moves the value judgment problem up a level: instead of making a value judgment about what functioning is normal, we make a value judgment in selecting which organisms are normal and should constitute our reference class. Besides the problem of circularity, general naturalists face another problem: an organ can be functioning in its proper way according to evolutionary biology, but still be considered “diseased.” Kingma gives the example of an overdose of paracetamol, an over the counter pain reliever that causes liver damage. A properly functioning liver will reduce in function when flooded with the drug. In this case, the liver certainly is not healthy, but it is functioning appropriately, given the unfortunate situation it is in. Even if an organ is functioning properly, external conditions that Kingma calls “stressors” can cause an organ to become diseased.[6] If someone came into a clinic with an overdose of paracetamol and the physician extended the naturalist theory of disease to a normative theory, she would find that the liver was not diseased and that it would be impermissible to treat the patient. The problem of circularity and the practical problem of a somewhat limited idea of diseased both seem to be major weaknesses that stand in the way of using naturalism as a normative guide in clinical practice. The second conceptual analysis of disease I will consider is constructivism, which makes no attempt to shy away from a value-based, normative conception of disease. Constructuralists see disease categories as formulated based on social constructions about which physical conditions are healthy and which are not. They claim that we cannot understand disease independent of social concepts like “culture, history, meaning, and the constructed nature of medical phenomena.”[7] Because this definition of disease is so rooted in social constructions, constructivists accept (and expect) that the conditions that are diseases will vary across cultures. Some constructivists, like Lawrie Reznek, explicitly reject the idea that a malfunction is necessary for a condition to be a disease. To support their theory, constructivists often cite conditions that used to be considered diseases but are no longer. A common example is that of homosexuality. Reznek explores the way that conditions can move between the categories of disease and healthy across time and space and uses that as evidence that these are not mere category mistakes, but that the categories themselves are variable.[8] Naturalists respond to this claim by maintaining that they really are category mistakes, and that the removal of homosexuality from the “disease” category was an example of psychologists realizing that they had mislabeled a condition in which all systems are properly functioning a disease, not that the category “disease” had changed to exclude homosexuality.[9] Constructivists claim that while a disease can be traced back to a real biological process, the determination of whether a specific biological process is a disease relies on social considerations. This determination is based on a shared idea of what constitutes a “normal” and “valued” state. The problem with this approach is that there is variation about what these states are even in a specific community. This begs the question, “What counts as a community?” which naturalists disagree on. It seems excusable that the variation of “normal” across cultures might bleed into a sense of variation of “normal” within a culture, but the theory is meaningless without an idea of “normal” specific to a culture. There are also structural problems with the constructivist position. Constructivists are most likely correct that some diseases, particular psychological disorders, are based on social ideas about what conditions are valuable, but are they right that the entire category of disease is socially constructed without any naturalistic basis? It seems possible that there are some conditions that are classified as disease merely due to social factors, but that there are others that are true biological malfunctions. This means that constructivists cannot make their case by pointing out individual conditions that have moved into or out of the “disease” category; they need to prove that the entire category is based on social norms and that there are no diseases that can be categorized as such by only empirical evidence without social judgment. The constructivists do not seem concerned with making that sort of argument, though. Constructivist Peter Conrad writes that he is “not interested in adjudicating whether any particular problem is really a medical problem… I am interested in the social underpinnings of this expansion of medical jurisdiction.”[10] This structural problem of constructivism may be accounted for by the fact that most constructivists are more concerned with social issues than with philosophical definitions, so their arguments sometimes read more as descriptions of the medical method, rather than “necessary and sufficient condition” based arguments. This problem may dissolve if we read constructivism in the tradition of social critique rather than philosophy, but if we are to consider using the theory as a normative – and necessarily philosophical – guide that can help us determine which conditions permit intervention, we must read it as a philosophical theory, and its structural problems become unavoidable. The second structural problem of constructivism is that society already makes a distinction between those who we think are diseased and those that we disapprove of for other reasons. We do not pathologize every norm-breaking condition (general laziness, ugliness, poor taste in house decor, for example) and when people do things we ethically disapprove of, we often question their morals, rather than their sanity. So if constructivists want to argue that those we classify as having diseases are merely breaking social norms, they need to account for why we classify them differently from other norm-breakers who we don’t classify as diseased. They must explain why those who are diseased are norm-breakers in a health-related way without appealing to biological notions of “health.”[11] This is a difficult explanation to provide, and there is no standard constructivist answer. The third and final analysis of disease I will consider is that of embedded instrumentalism. Kenneth Richman, who developed embedded instrumentalism, borrowed some elements from constructivism but worried that any theory of disease that is based on culturally-contingent factors could not be universal. He proposed a theory in which health is indexed to goals, such that how healthy an agent is determined by how well they can fulfill their goals. He wanted to propose “a theory of health which characterizes certain states as being valuable neither intrinsically nor merely because they are useful, but rather because of their being in an appropriate relationship to an individual’s actual values.”[12] Richman rejects the view that certain goals are intrinsically valuable. He argues that if we begin with fairly agreeable goals like “The proper functioning of a heart is an intrinsically valuable goal”, we will eventually get to more troubling organs and will have to make claims like “The proper functioning of a set of ovaries is an intrinsically valuable goal.” Of course, about 41.5% of reproductive-age people with ovaries in the United States use some form of hormonal birth control, with the specific goal of ensuring their ovaries are not functioning.[13] Richman thinks that it is impossible to form a coherent argument that a heart functioning is intrinsically good but a set of ovaries functioning is not. One possible objection to this argument is that someone with very low ambitions might be considered healthy merely by virtue of their laziness. Richman tries to account for this problem by introducing the Richman-Budson view of health. According to this view, a person’s health is not indexed to their actual goals, but to the set of goals they would choose for themselves if they were fully aware of their “objectified subjective interests,” by which he means the goals they would set for themselves if they were perfectly rational and had full knowledge of themselves and their environments. There is a counterexample to the Richman-Budson view, however. What if the goals we have are unreasonable? If I have the goal of playing 48 simultaneous chess games while blindfolded, but I can’t achieve that goal due to my poor visual memory, lack of practice, etc., am I ill? It seems like obviously, I am not, but that goal is compatible with a full (though generous) understanding of myself and my environment. Is a concept of disease helpful in deciding whether to intervene? Beyond the specific problems that each individual theory of disease faces, the structure itself of the healthy/disease distinction may not be a helpful guide for clinicians trying to decide whether or not it is permissible to intervene when faced with a specific condition. I will look at four potential issues with using the health/disease distinction to determine whether to intervene in a specific condition. First is the threat of circularity. Some philosophers of medicine explicitly use the normative distinction of whether or not a condition allows intervention to ground their healthy/disease distinction, which would make it circular for us to use the health/disease distinction as an ethical guide to determine whether intervention is permissible, and most implicitly use it. One example of the explicit use is John Harris’ “ER test,” in which he argues that a condition is a disease if the condition makes someone worse off and if we would think medical personnel would be negligent if they did not treat this person if they came into an ER.[14] If we were to try to use such a distinction to determine whether or not to treat someone, we would be stuck in a circular argument. Germund Hesslow makes a related argument that the concept of disease is not normatively useful in clinical practice because it “does not coincide with any clinically important or morally relevant categories.”[15] Regardless of what theory of disease we choose, there are examples of conditions that are not diseased that permit intervention and diseases that do not permit interventions. Hesslow considers three types of conditions where this nonequivalence surfaces. First, doctors regularly treat patients in healthy states. He cites the examples of plastic surgery, gender affirmation surgery, and vaccination. Surely, we do not think that a too-big nose, gender, or a natural susceptibility to infection make a person diseased. Second, there are conditions that are technically pathological which physicians rarely treat, including benign tumors like birthmarks. Third, physicians sometimes intentionally induce pathological symptoms. Hasslow gives the example of sterilization, but we can also consider Richman’s argument about birth control. According to Hasslow, if disease was a clinically useful category, then physicians would never intentionally induce disease-symptoms. A third argument against using the healthy/disease distinction to guide clinical practice is that the version of the distinctions discussed so far includes too much information in some ways and too little information in others. A theory of disease gets caught up in all the issues of a conceptual analysis. For instance, every theory requires a value-laden discussion of “norms” and “normality.” (Recall that naturalism claims that norms are biologically determined, constructivism claims that they are socially determined, and embedded instrumentalism that they are indexed to personal goals.) If we are only concerned with deciding whether or not it is permissible to intervene, it would be ideal to develop a theory that we can use as a clinical guide without having to develop an entire theory of disease. In other ways, the theory has too little information to provide practical clinical guidance. If we only consider “disease,” we have no way of determining whether to intervene in cases of disability or injury. But there is no obviously philosophical, ethical, or even ontological distinction between disease and injury or disability. It seems likely that the ethical norms that govern disease should also govern disability and injury, and conceptual analyses of disease fail to provide guidance in these cases. Ereshefsky makes a fourth argument again the entire project of a conceptual analysis of disease. He claims that there is a structural problem with the health/disease distinction.[16] The distinction must take into account at least two factors: the physical state of the individual and the social value or disvalue of that state. On one extreme is naturalism, which values only the former, and on the other is staunch constructivism in the vein of Conrad, which values only the latter. There are some approaches that try to balance the two, like instrumentalism. But like any philosophical problem of distinction, however we try to balance the two factors, there will always be counterexamples. In this way, Ereshefsky thinks that the project is doomed to fail. The distinction between health and disease does not map onto a permissible/impermissible intervention distinction. At best, it distinguishes between conditions that permit intervention (diseases) and conditions that require more consideration (health). If we say that all healthy conditions do not allow for intervention, we make preventative medicine impermissible. It would be much neater if we had a single theory that could give us normative guidance on whether or not it is permissible to intervene. A New Theory: “Do you want help?” I propose a new approach that is still normatively useful in that it helps decide between when intervention is permissible and when it is not, but it does not run into the same difficulties as a conceptual analysis of disease. On my account, the distinction between whether or not intervention is permissible comes down to the question of whether an agent wants help. If they do want help, one is permitted to intervene. If not, one is not permitted. This approach is most closely related to that of embedded instrumentalism but tries to eliminate the aspects of it that are not relevant to the normative distinction between intervening and not intervening. For now, I will take a relatively general view of what qualifies as “wanting help.” I imagine the theory would be used in clinical practice in which a particular symptom is brought to a clinician's attention and they have to determine whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Whether or not help is wanted would be determined by the agent, and “help” would be whatever the intervention the physician is considering. Typically, we think that the phrase “I need help” as remedying some status that the agent considers troubling, but what qualifies it as troubling is up to the agent. This approach solves some intrinsic problems of using a theory of disease as a moral guide. Although it may seem that this approach is just as circular as using a conceptual analysis of disease, it is not. To see this, we can consider the difference between asking whether someone wants help and whether one ought to help them. The first is a practical question, and therefore can be used to answer an ethical question – “Will I intervene?” – without the threat of circularity. The second is an ethical question and results in circularity when we try to use it in this case. With this new distinction, we are not substituting one distinction in for another; we are using the question of whether someone wants help as a guide to help us understand when we are permitted to intervene. Additionally, the question of whether someone needs help has exactly as much information as we need to determine whether or not to intervene. It is not bogged down by the complications of a conceptual analysis, but it covers disability and injury. Because the theory is not supposed to be used as a definition, only as a guide for action, there is no need to hold onto any “intrinsic idea of health” and we can limit the scope of our consideration to the agent’s desires. The theory is also immune to Hesslow's criticism that theories of disease are irrelevant to clinical practice. This approach is built with use in mind such that part of the theory itself is a normative guide for clinicians that clearly determines whether or not they are permitted to intervene. Although the theory draws significantly on instrumentalism, it doesn’t face the same problems. The primary counterarguments to instrumentalism are that it fails to provide a coherent conceptual analysis, which simply is not a problem for a theory that is explicitly not a conceptual analysis – the theory doesn’t have the same definitional burdens. Unlike instrumentalism, this theory doesn’t have to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to classify a condition as a disease. This new theory also aligns better with our intuitions about intervention than the normative extensions of the conceptual analyses of disease. As discussed in the introduction, it is in our interests to develop an intuitive theory both because intuition is valid evidence for ethical reasoning and because a theory that is unintuitive is much less likely to be followed and therefore considered useful. We can use case studies to test our intuitive distinction between who wants help and who does not. We can compare how closely the “help” distinction and the normative extension of the theories of diseases align with our intuitions. Case 1 : A person who knows they are pre-diabetic Intuition: Intervention (education, for example) is permissible. Case 2 : A person seeking an abortion for themselves Intuition: If we put aside the abortion debate, intervention is permissible. Case 3 : A person with delusion and hallucinations who is isolated from society (i.e. not a danger to anyone; harm to him does not impact others) and does not want help Intuition (crowd-sourced for three college students): Intervention is impermissible. A theory that relies on an evolutionary biology definition of “function” would respond that intervention is impermissible in both Case 1 and Case 2 because no system is (yet) malfunctioning. They would likely answer that intervention is permissible in Case 3 because some element of the delusional person’s psychological or physical systems is malfunctioning. These responses are the exact inverse of our intuitive responses. A constructivist based in a community similar to the one at Brown would respond that intervention is permissible in Cases 1 and 3 and not in Case 2. In Case 1, we value the condition of being pre-diabetic as undesirable. In Case 2, while we do not necessarily value the state of someone who has an unwanted pregnancy, we certainly do not pathologize the state as a disease. In Case 3, we generally see hallucinations and delusions as unacceptable. An instrumentalist would most closely align with our intuitions. They would likely respond that intervention is permissible in Case 1, assuming the person has some goals that would be more attainable if he were not diabetic. They would certainly respond that intervention is acceptable in Case 2 because we can conclude from the fact that the person is seeking an abortion that they have goals that would better be accomplished if they were not pregnant. The answer to Case 3 would depend on whether the instrumentalist subscribed to the Richman-Budson theory. If they accepted it, they would say that intervention is permissible because if the person had perfect knowledge of themselves, they would most likely have goals that would be better attained if their delusions and hallucinations stopped. If the instrumentalist accepted a more basic idea of instrumentalism where health is indexed to an individual’s actual desires, then they would claim that intervention is impermissible because the person does not have any occurrent goals that are better achieved by the cessation of their delusions. Independent of its comparison to the theories of disease, there are other reasons to adopt the “wants help” approach to intervention. By focusing on whether or not someone wants help, we are zeroing in on the normatively useful part of the much wider question of whether or not someone is in a diseased state. That is to say, when we ask whether or not someone has a disease in the context of deciding whether or not it is ethical to intervene, what we are really asking is whether or not they need help. Additionally, the theory is more humane and less pathologizing and paternalistic. It focuses on the individual and their self-determination, rather than a particular diagnosis, and it assumes that most people can properly practice their right to bodily autonomy most of the time. Shortcomings and areas of further investigation In this paper, I have laid out a new way of determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene in certain conditions, and there, of course, are major shortcomings of this theory. Some of them can be patched up, but most will require substantial consideration and reworking of the theory. The first potential problem is that if we keep the vague definition of “wants help” that makes paternalistic, value-laden ideas of “normal” and “healthy” unnecessary, we have to accept that some degree of “enhancement” (genetic, pharmaceutical, etc.) is morally permissible. If the agent finds their current situation troubling and wants an intervention that would help them, assuming that they understand the side effects, this theory would permit the intervention. This may be an acceptable conclusion, though, because the “wants help” question would be asked in a clinical setting and would not overrule any external rules or laws. So for example, a “neurotypical” person could not get a cognitive enhancer like Adderall for their SAT because it is against the rules of the College Board, but they could maybe get a prescription to keep themselves focused during a grueling day-long interview at a tech company. Another more serious problem is that our intuition about who needs help can sometimes differ from who actually wants help. Admittedly, there are significant benefits of posing the question as whether someone wants help, rather than whether someone needs help. It solves the problem of having to determine what it means for someone to need help, and it centers the agent’s autonomy and self-determination. However, someone who we may intuitively think “needs help” may not “want help.” The theory is threatened when we question someone’s ability to decide whether or not they need help. There are four types of cases in which we might think the agent lacks the ability to make these decisions: Someone who had the ability and lost it (e.g. someone with dementia) Someone who never had the ability (e.g. someone with a rare genetic disorder) Someone who may have the ability in the future but lacks it now (e.g. very young children) Someone who may be a reliable decision-maker but cannot communicate it (e.g. someone in a coma) When faced with these situations, we have two possible options. We could try to determine whether the person (or some proxy for them) wants help for themselves, or we could appeal to an idea of who “needs” help. In the first case, we have a reference of who the person was before they lost this ability, and they may even have a written account of what they want. Even though this is unlikely to answer the specific question of whether they want help in that moment, it may serve as a guide. The problem with trying to use what someone expressed in a previous state is that desires and values can change. Someone who we may not think can properly exercise their right to bodily autonomy due to illness may still be able to express feelings about whether or not they want help. The occurrent views may differ from those that they expressed in the past. In these situations, it is not necessarily clear which account to use. In the second, third, and fourth cases it seems reasonable to use a surrogate, ideally someone who has the agent’s best interests at heart and who we have reason to believe would make similar decisions to the agent if the agent had the ability (i.e. people in their normative community, family members, etc.). We could then base our action on whether the surrogate wants help for the agent. The benefit of this solution is that it resists a didactic idea of who “needs” help and places the responsibility as close to the agent as possible. On the other hand, there is no way of knowing who really has someone’s best interests at heart, and it opens up too much room for variation between what a surrogate wants and what the agent would have wanted in a counterfactual in which they could express whether or not they want help. Using a surrogate in the third case of the young child introduces new problems. The agent will actually regain the ability to express whether or not they want help, so having someone else make that determination for them is riskier because both the surrogate and the clinician are more accountable to the agent than in the first or second cases. On top of the accountability, it is difficult to determine whether an agent can exercise their bodily rights. With children especially, there is disagreement about what rights children at various developmental stages can exercise, and there is contentious literature to match.[17] ,[18] ,[19] How much bodily autonomy children, and particularly adolescents have, varies greatly across cultures and even across philosophical theories within cultures. Using a surrogate in the fourth case of the person in a coma introduces even more problems. In this case, a clinician would be overruling someone’s occurrent wants, even if they were to make the decision to intervene or not intervene that corresponded to the person’s wanting or not wanting help. Despite the fact that we have no access to them, there is something intuitively troubling about this. This new approach of asking whether or not an agent wants help and making a decision based on that information has advantages over appealing to a conceptual analysis of disease. The question of wanting help cuts straight to the normative question without being caught up in categorical issues and it aligns better with our intuitions. However, the theory has some structural problems, and it cannot account for any situation in which it is not clear what someone wants or in which we have reservations about what they want. Not only that, but fitting the theory into clinical practice would be difficult, if not impossible. Before we can consider what the theory would look like in practice, we must develop a coherent response to the situations in which what the person wants differs from what we think the person ought to have. Endnotes [1] Preamble to the Constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19 June - 22 July 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. [2] I mean “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific state as “normal,” as opposed to “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific course of action. [3] Murphy, Dominic. Psychiatry In the Scientific Image. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. [4] Boorse, Christopher. “On The Distinction Between Disease and Illness.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 58, no. 45 (1975): 49–68. [5] Kingma, Elselijn. "What Is It to Be Healthy?" Analysis 67, no. 2 (2007): 128-33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25597789. [6] Kingma, Elselijn. “Paracetamol, Poison, and Polio: Why Boorse's Account of Function Fails to Distinguish Health and Disease.” Br J Philos Sci 61, no. 2 (2010): 241-264. [7] Gaines, A.D. “From DSM-I to III-R; Voices of Self, Mastery and the Other: A Cultural Constructivist Reading of U.S. Psychiatric Classification.” Social Science & Medicine 35, no. 1 (1992): 3-24. [8] Reznek, L., 1987. The Nature of Disease, New York: Routledge. [9] Murphy, Dominic. "Concepts of Disease and Health." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/health-disease/ . [10] Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. [11] "Concepts of Disease and Health." [12] Richard, Kenneth A. and Budson, Andrew .E. “Health of Organisms and Health of Persons: An Embedded Instrumentalist Approach.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 339, no. 21 (2000). [13] "Contraceptive Use in the United States." Guttmacher Institute. September 23, 2016. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states . [14] Harris, John. Enhancing evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. [15] Hesslow, Germund. “Do We Need a Concept of Disease?” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 14, no. 1 (1993). [16] "Defining ‘Health’ and ‘Disease’." [17] Diekema, Douglas S., M.D., M.P.H. "Parental Decision Making." Parental Decision Making: Ethical Topic in Medicine. 2014. https://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/parent.html [18] Worthington, Roger. “Standards of Healthcare and Respecting Children’s Rights.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 4 (2006): 208–210. [19] Ruccione, Kathy; Kramer, Robin; Moore, Ida K; Perin, Gail. “Informed Consent for Treatment of Childhood Cancer: Factors Affecting Parents' Decision Making .” Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 8, no. 3 (1991): 112-121.

Sheldon Whitehouse is the junior United States Senator from Rhode Island. A Democrat, Sen. Whitehouse was elected in 2007, after having served as the Attorney General of Rhode Island between 1999 and 2003. He takes an active interest in environmental issues, advocating the need to find solutions to *Feature* Sheldon Whitehouse Sheldon Whitehouse is the junior United States Senator from Rhode Island. A Democrat, Sen. Whitehouse was elected in 2007, after having served as the Attorney General of Rhode Island between 1999 and 2003. He takes an active interest in environmental issues, advocating the need to find solutions to climate change. As of March 2018, Sen. Whitehouse gave over 200 speeches on the topic, urging his collogues to take concrete action. Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (3 pages) Every week that Congress is in session, I head to the Senate floor to urge my colleagues to take action on preventing climate change. In more than 225 of these speeches delivered since 2012, I have emphasized the mounting scientific evidence that our carbon pollution is driving dangerous changes in the atmosphere and oceans. I have also called out the powerful fossil fuel industry, which the International Monetary Fund reports enjoys a nearly $700 billion annual subsidy just in the United States. That immense conflict of interest—protecting that subsidy—is the reason the industry has marshalled its massive resources to promote climate change denial and prevent Congress from doing anything to reduce our dependence on dirty energy. Under President Donald Trump, former industry operatives fill executive branch posts, working to roll back climate protections. When the administration released its legally mandated National Climate Assessment in November, officials timed it for Black Friday during the Thanksgiving holiday, when it would be unlikely to get public attention. The report, written by 13 federal agencies, described the monumental damage the United States faces from climate change. It contradicted nearly every assertion Trump and his fossil-fuel-flunky Cabinet have made about climate change. Tellingly, the administration tried to bury the report, rather than contest it. That may be because the science of climate change is incontrovertible. (Back in 2009, even Donald Trump said it was “irrefutable.”) Damage from climate change is already occurring. There is no credible natural explanation. Human activity is the dominant cause. Future damage from further warming will be worse than we previously thought. Economies will suffer. And as the report declares, we are almost out of time to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. The effects of climate change are felt in every corner of the nation. From the Ocean State, we’re already seeing sea levels rise, as oceans warm and land ice melts. If fossil fuel emissions are not constrained, the National Climate Assessment says, “many coastal communities will be transformed by the latter part of this century.” Along coasts, fisheries, tourism, human health, even public safety are under threat from increasingly extreme weather events and rising seas. Out West, “more frequent and larger wildfires, combined with increasing development at the wildland-urban interface portend increasing risks to property and human life.” We need to look no further than the massive wildfires Californians battled last year for stark evidence. More than 100 million people in the U.S. live with poor air quality, and climate change will “worsen existing air pollution levels.” Increased wildfire smoke heightens respiratory and cardiovascular problems. With higher temperatures, asthma and hay fever rise. Groundwater supplies have declined over the last century, and the decrease is accelerating. “Significant changes in water quantity and quality are evident across the country,” the report finds. The government assessment finds that Midwest farmers take a big hit: warmer, wetter, and more humid conditions from climate change; greater incidence of crop disease, and more pests; worsened conditions for stored grain. During the growing season, the Midwest will see temperatures climb more than in any other region of the U.S. Climate change will “disrupt many areas of life,” the report concludes, hurting the U.S. economy, affecting trade, and exacerbating overseas conflicts for our military. Costs will be high: “With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states.” Danger warnings already flash in some economic sectors. The huge federal home loan corporation Freddie Mac has warned of a coastal property value crash, suggesting economic losses from climate change are likely to exceed those of the housing crisis and Great Recession. The Bank of England, as a financial regulator, is warning of a “carbon asset bubble.” The solution to climate change is to decarbonize, invest more in renewables, and broaden our national energy portfolio. A carbon price would allow this big shift to happen, all while generating revenues that could be cycled back to citizens, and help the hardest-hit areas of transition. The smart move we need to make does not have to be painful. It can actually be a big economic win. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has testified: “Retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth. Climate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction. The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more livable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.” Or we could do it the hard way, continuing to do the fossil fuel industry’s bidding and racking up the dire economic consequences of flooding, drought, wildfires, and stronger storms. The status quo is not safe. Which way we now go depends on whether Congress can put the interests of our people ahead of the interests of the polluters. The record is not good, I’m afraid. Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, which unleashed unlimited corporate money into our elections, the politics of climate change is a tale of industry capture and control. So far, despite the industry’s massive conflict of interest and provable pattern of deception, and despite clear warnings from scientists and economists, the Republican Party has proven itself incapable of telling the fossil fuel industry “no.” So it doesn’t look good. But the climate report does say we still have time—if we act fast. There is one major development gives me great hope for the future. Survey after survey shows that the generation coming of political age today overwhelmingly supports taking action on climate change. They have longer to live on this planet than members of my generation, and they are determined to make it a better place. I expect they will. I’ll close with a reference to The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill’s legendary book about a previous failure to heed warnings. Churchill quoted a poem, of a train bound for destruction, rushing through the night, the engineer asleep at the controls as disaster looms: “Who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak, and the couplings strain. . . . the pace is hot, and the points are near, [but] Sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear; And signals flash through the night in vain. Death is in charge of the clattering train!” We are that sleeping driver; the signals of a changing climate flash at us, so far in vain. It’s time to wake up.

American Jews The Political Behavior of American Jews A Public Choice Approach to Israel-influenced Voting Jake Goodman Brown University Author Eli Binder Audrey McDermott Ethan Shire Editors Spring 2018 The paper analyzes the voting incentives created by the relationship between American Jews and American-Israeli foreign relations. At the founding of the Jewish State in 1948, the United States recognized the establishment of a Zionist state through a press release from President Truman on March 14, 1948 (U.S. Recognition of the State of Israel). The two main political parties in the United States— the Democrats and Republicans—have both since maintained consistent political, economic, and military support for Israel. This support has come to be viewed by American Jewish voters, most of whom desire support for Israel, as a public good provided by the United States Government. This public good has direct ramifications on voter incentives. However, despite bipartisan support for foreign aid to Israel, American Jews have remained consistently liberal. While social scientists have offered various theories of why American Jews became and remain Democratic, a cogent explanation can be offered through the lens of public choice economics. Indeed, Jewish liberalism demonstrates a political anomaly that can be explained through the framework of voter incentives. Before explaining the impact of pro-Israel policy on Jewish voting, it is necessary to identify some additional factors that evidence how Jewish voting behavior remains a political anomaly. American Jews, despite job and social discrimination, have become the highest per capita income of any religious group in the United States (Wright, Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy, 1982, 1655-1660). While affluence in America generally tends to correlate with Republican affiliation, this trend does not hold true for American Jews (Cohen, American Jewish Liberalism, 405-430). Steven Cohen and Charles Liebman, in their research, also noted that more religious Jews tend to be less liberal, inclining religious Jews toward conservatism. They identify only a few issues on which Jews assert themselves as decidedly liberal: political identity as liberal, church-state separation, social codes, and domestic spending. Cohen and Liebman’s research illustrated that aside from pro-Israel policies, Jews have additional incentives to shift to the Republican party, yet they have remained consistently Democratic. On the other hand, Jews have higher education levels, which correlate with liberalism, compared to the general populace provides a common explanation of Jewish liberalism. Thus, while Jews demonstrate anomalous behavior, they also demonstrate typical associations that explain Jewish liberalism. While many incentives influence Jewish political behavior, a single-issue factor that unites Jews remains the support of Israel from the United States government. Professor Lawrence Fuchs defined American Jews as an “ethno-religious group,” which forms attitudes on social and political policy that align group interests with national interests (Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 1980). American Jews, as “partisans of Israel,” were thus instrumental in having the United States recognize the state of Israel (Fuchs, 1980). As Professor Steven Bayme noted, the pro-Israel consensus in the American Jewish community has been maintained remarkably well over the past sixty plus years, with the two primary oppositional sources, classical Reform and Satmar Hasidism, remaining largely uninfluential (Bayme, American Jewry and the State of Israel, 2008). To court the Jewish vote, Democrats and Republicans have functioned as “entrepreneurs selling policies for votes” — the policy, in this case, being bilateral economic assistance for Israel (Downs, An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy, 1957). If we assume that American Jewish citizens behave as expected utility maximizers, Jewish voters gain extra expected utility from electing the more pro-Israel candidate, aligning with the Jewish voters’ preference for a pro-Israel public good. The gain to the Jewish voter would be defined as the preferred more pro-Israel candidate (Ferejohn & Fiorina, The Paradox of not Voting, 1974). Indeed, due to American Jewish attachment to Israel, there is a rational reason to vote; by voting for a more pro-Israel candidate in the political market, the Jewish voter ensures a higher quality public good that suits the Jewish voter’s preference for a more robust pro-Israel political platform. An initial investigation must depict the nature of the collective good thus described. As the natural monopoly on tax spending and military power, the government provides public goods to citizens. The United States government, having such a monopoly, becomes the sole provider of military and economic support to Israel for American citizens. Israel first received U.S. government assistance in the form of a $100 million loan from the Export-Import Bank in 1949 and aid remained modest for the next two decades (Sharp, Federation of American Scientists, 2016). After several consecutive Arab-Israeli wars, US aid to Israel increased dramatically, with Israel becoming the largest recipient of US aid in 1974. Middle East Specialist Jeremy Sharp reported that Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since World War II, receiving $124 billion of bilateral assistance in non-inflation adjusted terms (2016). An additional State Department directive this year has pledged $38 billion over the next ten years to Israel. The majority of this assistance has come in the form of Military aid, which has led to a qualitative military edge for the Israeli military, developing anti-rocket technologies such as the Iron Dome, Arrow I and II, and David’s Sling. The United States has also provided economic aid to Israel in the form of emergency aid packages during times of recession. Aid from the United States has thus allowed Israel to transition from a fledgling nation-state to a modern industrialized nation. (Sharp, Federation of American Scientists, 2016). While the United States government is not the sole supplier of aid to Israel, it functions as a monopoly within the US political market as a government supplier of aid. Jewish voters thus form preferences and expected utility functions based upon the differing levels of aid provided by the US government, a monopolistic supplier. To further analyze the impact of US foreign policy toward Israel on Jewish voting patterns, it is necessary to examine the historical political alignment of Jews, from Jeffersonian Republicans to Democrats to Republicans, prior to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. While Jewish political equality did not emerge directly out of the American revolution, Jews achieved political equality in the five states they were most numerous in, and the growing movement in revolutionary America for the separation of church and state worked to the Jewish community’s advantage (Fuchs, 1980, p. 24). The first instance of Jewish political alignment began with a Jewish attachment to the Jeffersonian Republicans; in the 1830s, Jackson and the new Democratic party gained the Jewish devotion Jefferson and Madison had maintained (Fuchs, 1980, p. 29). By 1840, a large majority of American Jewry, around 15,000 at the time, joined Martin Van Buren’s coalition, buoyed by Van Buren’s protection of Jews in Egypt (Fuchs, 1980, p. 30). With the immigration of as many as 100,000 German Jews to the United States between 1848 and the beginning of the Civil War, Jewish political alignment shifted, splitting support between Democrats and the Whigs (Fuchs, 1980, p. 33). By 1860, Jews in the North, particularly German-Jews, welcomed the new Republican Party, as many Rabbis and Jews opposed slavery (Fuchs, 1980, p. 35). In the four decades after the Civil War, Jews were widely divided with a slight major party preference for the Republican Party (Fuchs, 1980, p. 50). With the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s Jewish majority in 1916, Jews continued to lean Republican in presidential elections from 1900 to 1928 even with an influx of nearly two million Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitism and poverty in Europe (Fuchs, 1980, p. 51). However, the 1920s showed a growing trend of Jewish support for the Democratic party, more rapid in certain cities but generally solidified by the Jewish commitment to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (Fuchs, 1980, p. 71). For example, in Boston’s Ward 14, a heavily Jewish area, 78 percent of enrolled voters were Republican in 1928, while only 14 percent of voters were Republican in 1952 (Fuchs, 1980, p. 72). The proportion of Jews who voted for the Democratic Party peaked at 90 percent for FDR in the 1940s (Rebhun, 2016, p. 141). To maintain Jewish support, the Democratic Party committed itself to fighting fascist anti-Semitism in Europe and to ensuring the military and economic security of the State of Israel (Schnall, 1987, p. 77). In all Presidential elections since 1932, 60 to 90 percent of American Jews voted for the Democratic candidate. (Rebhun, 2016, p. 141). While Jewish-American Democratic support has been in decline since the late 1960s, the Jewish vote has remained solidly within the Democratic camp (Rebhun, 2016, p. 143). Additionally, the Jewish vote declined in Republican support between 1980 and 2000 but has since risen from 2000 to 2016 (Kent, 2016). As evidenced by the above historical charting of Jewish political alignment, the Jewish community has shifted in partisan alignment multiple times in American history. Why then have Jews maintained their allegiance to the Democratic Party since 1932? While many factors are involved in addressing this question, a key factor absent in other eras of American history is the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the consequent United States’ support of Israel. The median voter theorem becomes especially relevant in addressing the Jewish-Democratic alliance. Anthony Downs observed that voters can cut the cost of information by comparing ideologies rather than policies — the lack of information thus engendering a demand for ideologies in the electorate (1957, p. 142). Downs reasons that stable government in a two-party democracy requires a distribution of voters approximating a normal curve in which both parties resemble each other closely (1957, p. 143). In terms of US-Israeli foreign policy, Democrats and Republicans resemble each other closely in that they have both maintained military and economic aid for Israel. According to the Median Voter Theorem, with both parties exhibiting similar ideologies of a pro-Israel consensus, one would expect the distribution to resemble a normal curve, but this has not been the case. Surprisingly, Democratic and Republican Israeli policy has had more in common than not; yet, a normal curve does not represent the Jewish vote. In the election of 1948, both party candidates were committed to Zionism, with both parties adopting pro-Israel positions in their national platforms (Fuchs, 1980, p. 81). Truman’s election allowed the Democratic party to yield pro-Israel results, beginning with Truman’s recognition of Israel, the $100 million loan from the Export-Import Bank in 1949, and the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 (Sharp, 2016, p. 36). Lawrence Fuchs identified 1952 as a key moment in the political market for the Jewish vote, in which despite being as “well paid, fed, and educated as the most successful Republican denomination groups” Jews continued to vote for Democrats (1980, p. 99). Eisenhower’s term, however, allowed for product differentiation in the political market; Jews could now compare the quality of the collective good provided by the United States government, economic and political aid to Israel, under two different political parties. Indeed, while several factors, as Lawrence Fuchs noted, contributed to Jewish loyalty to the Democratic party, the Eisenhower Administration's policy toward Israel hurt Republican chances with Jewish voters; Zionist rallies were held in October of 1954 protesting the Eisenhower Administration’s policy towards Israel (Fuchs, 1980, p. 117). Fuchs indicated that Zionist leaders criticized the Eisenhower Administration's decision to ship arms to “feudal Arab leaders” while holding back on Israeli military aid (Fuchs, 1980, p. 117). The Suez Canal, in which the United States strengthened its bond with Egypt and forced military Israeli withdrawal, provided another demonstration of Eisenhower’s lukewarm position toward Israel (“Suez Crisis, 1956,” n.d.). Weak Republican support for Israel did not shift Jewish political alignment to its benefit; American Jews thus exhibited a lopsided preference for Democratic US-Israeli policy during the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, with around 80 percent voting for Kennedy and 18 percent voting for Nixon — a major shift from the 1956 election in which 60 percent voted for Stevenson while 40 percent voted for Eisenhower (Weisberg, 2012, p. 217). Post-1948, several Republican administrations have seen fluctuations in their capturing of the Jewish vote. Professor Theodore Wright, writing in 1982, noted that in recent years Republicans had sought to “outbid the Democrats” in their promises to the Zionist state. Indeed, the election of Ronald Reagan demonstrated a partisan shift in the political market in reaction to the Israel policies of the Democratic Carter Administration. Professor Weisberg cited data showing that many Jews felt Carter was too hard on Israel and consequently 39 percent voted for Reagan and 45 percent voted for Carter (Weisberg, 2012, p. 228). This represented a major shift in the partisan distribution of Jewish voters, nearly approaching Downs’s normal distribution curve. However, despite Reagan’s policies being more pro-Israel than Carter’s, the Democratic party regained the Jewish vote in the 1984 presidential election, with 67 percent voting for Walter Mondale and 31 percent voting for Ronald Reagan (Weisberg, 2012, p. 228). Professor Weisberg notes that while Republicans saw a boost in their attainment of the Jewish vote in the 1970s and 1980s, it was followed by subsequent loss of the Jewish vote in the 1990s and 2000s (Weisberg, 2012, 232). However, another interesting data point occurred in 2012. The highly-publicized testiness of Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “dissatisfaction with Obama’s Middle East policy” during his first term boosted the Jewish Republican vote by 9 percentage points, from 21 percent for McCain to 30 percent for Romney (Rebhun, 2016, p. 144). The Republican resurgence was squashed in the 2016 election, falling to 24 percent for Trump despite visible strain in the Obama-era US-Israeli diplomatic relations. These various historical examples indicate that shifts in the partisan alignment of the Jewish vote occur in accordance with a greater expected utility of Republican Israeli policy after a strain in Democratic-Israel relations. Nonetheless, while Jewish voters demonstrate small shifts in political alignment, they often return to a high percentage of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate. This is a noteworthy behavior; if Republicans have proven to Jewish voters that they can successfully compete with Democrats with their pro-Israel policies, why have more Jews not shifted to the Republican party? Arye Hillman accounted for such a phenomenon by considering the expressive-voting hypothesis, which posits that certain people vote “to obtain the expressive utility from confirming identity” to themselves or a group rather than to decisively sway an election (2011, p. 250). Because American Jews have historically aligned with the Democratic Party, Hillman assumed that Jews, with exceptions, rationally vote for Democrats, though it is against their self-interest, in order to gain the expressive utility associated with expressing group identity (2011, p. 256). Hillman offered a variety of historical examples from Podhoretz’s book Why Are Jews Liberals?. In the 1960’s election, he noted that Kennedy’s father was openly anti-semitic, yet Kennedy secured 82% of the Jewish vote (Hillman, 2011, p. 254). In 1972, he cited that the Democrat McGovern received two-thirds of the Jewish vote despite McGovern favoring racially-based quotas in education that would have been disadvantageous to Jews and be inimical to the state of Israel (Hillman, 2011, p. 254). Additionally, in 2008, 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama despite Obama having “anti-Israel associations” and a record that showed less concern for Israel than his Republican opponent (Hillman, 2011, p. 255). There are obviously limits to how much Jewish identity impacts voting decision and how much Jewish identity is tied to Israel. However, despite its assumptions about Jewish identity, Hillman’s evidence provides a theoretically relevant public choice explanation of why Jews may rationally vote for Democrats despite competitive pro-Israel policies from the Republican Party. Rather than functioning as a singular issue which ultimately sways the Jewish voter, the Jewish preference for a robust pro-Israel policy represents a unique and influential indicator within the multifaceted preferences of the Jewish voter. By examining historical presidential voting data, specific instances when Jewish voters could have voted according to a pro-Israel preference based upon the partisan performance of the previous administration can be identified. While this analysis has been largely driven by market outcomes – Jews evaluating their voting decisions based off of the Israeli policy of the current administration – it highlights the impact of information on voting patterns. If a Jewish voter is provided with more information, via four years of governance by a certain party, about the perceived ideology of either political party, they will adjust their preferences according to this new information. While Downs notes there are costs to acquiring such information, the marginal return, or the increase in utility from making an improved decision concerning partisan Israeli-relations ideology, would presumably exceed the marginal cost of acquiring such information for Jewish voters who decide to vote. However, while it is important to analyze the behavior of Jews as an ethnic group, there exist differences within the Jewish community which should also be examined. Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz and Lawrence Sternberg researched the influence of the centralized institutions of the American Jewish community on political cohesion and division amongst Jews (2000, p. 23). The researchers amalgamated data proving that the political activists within major Jewish institutions in the United States, such as the Jewish Community Relations Council and the organized Federation system, display differences in measures of ideology, partisanship, political and social attitudes, and policy preferences than most synagogue members and donors and are decisively more liberal (2000, p. 40). Their research demonstrated that the participants in the most centralized set of Jewish institutions display political preferences “within a fairly narrow range, denoting political cohesion” (2000, p. 44). Kotler-Berkowitz and Sternberg’s research also showed that while Jews tend to lean liberal, the degree of cohesion within the American Jewish community should not be assumed to be absolute. For example, political division among American Jews, despite the overall liberalism of Jewish institutions, allows for the opportunity of Republican competition in the markets, specifically in the more traditional Jewish communities. Republicans have particularly thrived among Orthodox Jews, who are the most Republican in their voting (Weisberg, 2012, p. 225). Eytan Gilboa traced the historical arc of Jewish support for Israel and the complicated relationship between Jews and specific Israeli policy preferences. Beginning in 1948, he notes that 90 percent of American Jews supported the establishment of Israel and the decision of President Truman to recognize the State of Israel (Gilboa, 1986, p. 113). According to public surveys from 1957 to 1983, Jews remained highly favorable toward Israel, with all but one of the pro-Israel results ranking above 90 percent (Gilboa, 1986, p. 113). Gilboa’s research also notes that all surveys of American Jews in his research show overwhelming support for US aid to Israel — around 91 to 96 percent from 1971 to 1985 (Gilboa, 1986, p. 117). However, Gilboa also investigated public opinion surveys that show a less unified American Jewish community from 1967 to 1982 concerning positions and policies in the Arab-Israeli conflict (Gilboa, 1986, p. 121). Surveys between 1980 and 1984 further evidence a split Jewish opinion on the question of a Palestinian state (Gilboa, 1986, p. 123). The conclusion of Gilboa’s paper highlights the remarkable stability of Jewish support for economic and military aid for Israel despite diverging foreign policy positions of American Jewry. Gilboa’s data and conclusions highlight an interesting complication of the Jewish political market; American Jews, while supporting aid, may not uniformly support the same policy results. The complex interactions between Zionism, ethno-religious political behavior, and political support for Israel highlights the lack of information politicians acquire about the Jewish community and also provides evidence of why US aid for Israel has been sustained for so long. An additional complication is that the Jewish voting is not the only group incentivizing pro-Israel policy. In fact, since 1989, Israel’s favorability among general Americans has vacillated between 45 percent and 79 percent (Saad, 2016). Republicans have additional political incentives to support Israel that may influence the Jewish vote. Evangelical Christians, who number about 75 million in the United States, have become “increasingly mobilized” in support of Israel (Waxman, 2010, p. 15). Since the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, the Christian Right has become increasingly influential in the Republican political market. According to Professor Murray Friedman, the Christian Right, while showing strong support for Israel, disincentivized Jews from joining the Republican party out of fear that the Christian Right has become “too influential” in the GOP (2003, p. 436). The influence of the Christian Right on Republican foreign policy highlights that while Republicans compete with Democrats for the Jewish vote with pro-Israel policy, they also compete for the vote of the Christian Right through pro-Israel policy. Additionally, the bedrock of evangelical support for Israel has shifted incentives for Jews to vote as single-issue voters; support for Israel remains ensured for by the prominent support for pro-Israel candidates on the Right vying for the support of evangelists, allowing Jewish voters flexibility to vote for Democrats who may not be as pro-Israel as the Republican candidate. In recognizing that pro-Israel policy has not yielded strong Jewish electoral results, Republicans have continued to maintain pro-Israel policy because the Christian Right has incentivized them to do so. Thus, while the political market for the Jewish vote remains influenced by a multitude of factors, the widespread preference among Jewish voters for a pro-Israel collective good shifts incentives in the political market. How Jews collectively vote remains complex, and the historical Jewish alignment with the Democratic Party despite competitive pro-Israel policy from the Republican Party highlights this complexity. It seems likely that two trends will continue based on the political incentive structures described in this paper: Jews will continue to predominantly align with the Democratic Party and both Democrats and Republicans will continue to offer competitive pro-Israel ideologies. The public choice approach to Jewish political behavior thus offers insight into why these trends continue by examining the incentives that shape how Jews vote and how politicians respond in turn. References Aldrich, J. H. Rational choice and turnout. American Journal of political science, 1993: 246-278. Bayme, S. AMERICAN JEWRY AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL: HOW INTENSE THE BONDS OF PEOPLEHOOD? Jewish Political Studies Review, 20(1/2), 2008: 7-21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25834774 Baker, P. For Obama and Netanyahu, a Final Clash After Years of Conflict. 2016. Retrieved April 02, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-barack-obama.html Cohen, S., & Liebman, C. American Jewish Liberalism: Unraveling the Strands. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 61(3), 1997: 405-430. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749579 Downs, A. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. 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The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics *FEATURES * FROM GREG FISCHER Mayor of Louisville, KY Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, RI Economics Cannabis By Kaid Ray-Tipton Latent Effects of Cannabis Legalization: Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Washington State Drug Convictions, 2000-2015 Click to flip through the journal Philosophy A More Perfect Union Economics Energy By Benjamin Seymour Inclusive Norms and the Future of Liberal Unity By Jingpeng Shao Embracing Renewable Energy for Sustainable Job Growth in West Virginia economics Politics A.S.E.A.N Philosophy Transcendental Self By Hisyam Takiudin The Long Game: ASEAN, China's Charm Offensive and the South China Sea Dispute By Jennifer Kim Reconceptualizing the Idea of the Self Within Western Philosophy: The Existence-Reason Binary and the Nonrational Transcendental Self Politics Racial Capitalism Politics American Jews By Olerato Mogomotsi Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Challenging the Fallacy of Black Entitlement under Service Delivery Protests. By Jake Goodman The Political Behavior of American Jews A Public Choice Approach to Israel-influenced Voting