Genetic Accounts, Genealogy, and Lessons for the Study of Money by Graham Hubbs

In my previous post to the API blog, I closed by raising some questions about the relevance of history to the study of money’s ontology. I drew a comparison with chess. If you want to understand what chess is and how to play it, you study its constitutive rules. Its history might be interesting, but it doesn’t seem like you need to know anything about this history to understand the ontology of the game. The same line of thinking would seem to apply to pieces of mechanical technology, such as an automobile engine. If you want to know what an engine is and how it works, you can ask a mechanic; you don’t need an historian to learn what its parts are and how they work together. Theoreticians of money, however, have taken a different tack: the two basic accounts of money’s ontology are genetic accounts, saying what money is by explaining how it came to be. But if all we want to know is what money is today, why would we need to bother learning about its history?

I am once again going to push off answering this question to a future post, because prior to giving that answer, I think it will be useful to examine a handful of other genetic accounts from the history of philosophy. Studying the explanatory structure of these accounts, I hope, will help us see some of the ways that history can bear on social ontology, including the social ontology of money.

I’ll begin with the second part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men. It is commonly known as Rousseau’s “Second Discourse,” but I list its full title here to highlight that it is a genetic account, one that attempts to explain what inequality is by telling a story of how it came to be. The story, briefly, goes like this. Once upon a time a few people controlled most of the land as well as the stuff on that land. The rest of the people didn’t control very much stuff or land. Rousseau has a long story about how this disparity came to be, which, at present, we can ignore. The key moment for our purposes is this: Rousseau imagines those who control most of the land and stuff becoming increasingly nervous about how they will maintain that control. Their solution is to invent the idea of property rights. They go to those who control little or nothing and say, “We can agree that we are all equal, so let’s all treat each other equally. No one wants anyone else taking the land and stuff they control. So, let’s call the land and stuff that each of us control our property, and let’s agree that, under the threat of violence, no one will mess with anyone else’s property. These property rights are universal, and by them we are all equal under the law.” Such an arrangement, of course, is to the advantage of those who already control a lot of land and stuff; Rousseau says the masses go in for it as a trick, duped by the allure of equality.

There is no historical basis to this story. I don’t know if Rousseau really believed it. Its success, however, need not be tied to its historical accuracy, for one of its argumentative objectives is to provide an alternative to the sort of social contract tale that John Locke tells in his Second Treatise on Government. On Locke’s story, we are all naturally endowed with a right to our own bodies, and when we apply the work of our bodies to the world outside us, we acquire property rights to the fruits of our labor. We form government and make laws to protect these natural property rights. There is no more historical basis to this story than there is to Rousseau’s. What each story does, via its own fairy-tale history, is to explain the function of legal property rights in a way that aims at revealing their normative basis. For Locke, legal property rights exist to protect our natural property rights, and the former are good inasmuch as they succeed in protecting the latter. For Rousseau, legal property rights are a trick devised by a powerful minority to maintain their power. These rights are only good for the individuals who benefit from them, and they are fundamentally deceptive, enshrining inequality behind the guise of equality.

One point of genetic explanations, then—even those that are not grounded in history—is to help us be critical about our basic normative concepts and the institutions to which they are connected. Rousseau’s story gives us a reason to think that the idea of equality under the law, specifically as it pertains to property rights, functions to preserve something it would seem to oppose, viz., social inequality. Other genetic explanations give us reason to wonder whether some of our basic normative concepts, rather than being fundamentally deceptive, are absurd. G. E. M. Anscombe gives an argument to this effect about the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty. These concepts, she says, are intelligible only within a legal framework, for obligations and duties are expressed through laws. For a law to exist, it must first be created, so there cannot be obligations and duties without someone or something that makes them. In a community that believes in a Divine Legislator, the notion of moral—that is to say, eternal and universal—duties and obligations makes sense, for these are established through the Legislator’s laws. In a community that does not believe in a Divine Legislator, the notion of moral duties and obligations is absurd. The existence of the Legislator is a necessary condition on the possibility of these duties and obligations, and that condition is denied. Anscombe herself was Catholic, but she knew that most of her 20th-century contemporaries did not believe in a Divine Legislator, so she recommended that they find a way to study and discuss ethics without using the concepts of moral duty and obligation.

Anscombe’s analysis of these concepts is genetic. It explains where the concepts come from, and it does so to show what has to be in place (viz., a Divine Legislator) for them to be intelligible. The analysis also shows how people, such as her fellow philosophers, might unknowingly think and talk with absurd concepts, which can lead, in turn, to the production of and debates over absurd theories. If she is right, then a lot of philosophers, without knowing it, spend a lot of time seriously discussing nothing. Their failure to understand the origins of their basic concepts blinds them to the emptiness of their own talk.

Another sort of genetic analysis is the genealogical account Friedrich Nietzsche gives in the second essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals. His story there is elaborate and complex. One of his points is close to Anscombe’s point about moral duties and obligations. Elsewhere, Nietzsche famously announces that God is dead, and in the Genealogy, he asks why, in spite of this, his contemporaries go on experiencing the self-punishment of guilt, which makes little sense in the absence of a God to disappoint. Things only get more perplexing, Nietzsche argues, when we realize that the logic of guilt is the logic of debt. An obligation is something you owe to someone, so a moral obligation is a debt owed to God. When we fail God, we owe him, and we can pay off some of this debt through self-punishment, i.e., through the miserable feeling of guilt. If there is no God, then there is no moral debt and thus no reason to self-punish—and yet, Nietzsche’s contemporaries go on feeling the misery that is characteristic of this self-punishment and go on describing it as guilt. The real cause of these bad feelings, Nietzsche says, is our inability to let out our violent energy in polite society. That energy has to go somewhere, and so we redirect it onto ourselves, harming ourselves, making ourselves feel miserable. It makes no sense to harm oneself, so we need a story that makes the experience comprehensible. The story of punishing ourselves to pay off debts to God made sense—as long as we believed in God. Nietzsche’s contemporaries no longer believe in God, but they still harm themselves, and they still define and explain that self-harm as guilt, even though the concept is absurd in the absence of God.

Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis reveals a double mistake. The first mistake is internal to the interpretive framework of guilt and is similar to Anscombe’s point about the intelligibility of moral obligations. The concept of guilt only makes sense if there is a God to whom moral debts can be paid, so it is absurd to go on talking and thinking about guilt in the absence of belief in that God. The second mistake is the application of the interpretive framework to the feeling of guilt in the first place. That feeling is not caused by debts of any sort; it is caused by the inability to exercise one’s aggressive instincts in polite society. Nevertheless, much like the concept of moral obligation, the concept of guilt persists in spite of this double error.

These examples stand as evidence for Wilfrid Sellars’s famous claim that “philosophy without history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb.” For social ontology, it would be dumb to theorize about the nature and function of institutions without turning to our forebears to see what they had to say on these matters. When we look to history, we see that some of the greatest insights come from thinking about social ontology in a quasi-historical—i.e., genetic—way. A failure to study these accounts can lead us into the sort of blindspots that Anscombe and Nietzsche decry. When it comes to the social ontology of money, we want not only to turn to history and to the genetic accounts of previous theoreticians, but we also want to consider the historical moment at which they were writing, to the history that produced their (quasi-)histories. I will continue this line of inquiry in my next post.