The list below is of topics for discussion. It is hoped to deal with two topics in each session. In an earlier incarnation of this course there was a lecture on each topic. Instead you now have a summary version of each lecture below, so that you can prepare yourself in advance for each discussion. It is therefore important that you read ahead. There will be things that don't make sense so you should come to each seminar meeting with questions.

2. Comparative History and Sociology: a method; Concepts and the war between Monteblanco and Ruritania

3. & 4. Rationality as a universal: Rational choice; Hawaiiains and Captain Cook.

5. Rationalities as games or grammars

6. Values

7. Rationalism as one rationality among many

8. Medieval and Classical Rationalities

9. Devotion

10 & 11. Buddhist and Christian monasticism

12. & 13. Law

14. Ethical systems

15. & 16. Administration as a world-historical problem

17. Capitalism

18. Motivation and Legitimation; the ‘rationality gap’

19. Irrationality

20. Events-history and rationality theory

EXAMINATION

coursework

Method, Theory, Empirical Investigation
In the seminar core-course you thought or will think a lot about theory, hisorical method, and perhaps interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation. Do you sometimes wonder if it all makes any difference to the history you actually do? It can, and not by making you think all history is propaganda play by the historian.

The present course starts from theoretical ideas, but that does not have to mean subjectivity or bias. Theory is 'enabling more than constraining'. It is not the same as a political world-view or a belief system, or at least it does not have to be.

Ideal-types: concepts and explanatory schemas:
Theory can be the ally rather than the enemy of empircal work. Think of it as a set of concepts and explanations based ultimately on previous empirical work and applied to new materials to enable one to manage the infinite complexity of the data - to see the wood for the trees. These concepts and explanations are 'ideal-types': deliberately too clear-cut for reality. You measure reality against them and you use them in different combinations. The concepts enable historians to talk about things for which they have no clear label in ordinary language. When you cannot name things, you cannot discuss them. Then again, theory provides a repertory of 'ideal-typical' explanations. These are schemas giving simplified relations of cause and effect. So: if a student keeps missing classes and doesn't write any essys, I look in my repertory of schematic explanations. Working too many hours for money to live on? Unmotivated? Psychological problems - depression or something esle? Having too good a time? Drama? Parent trouble? Accommodation trouble? And so on. The reality may be a combination of two or more of these, or they may come cose to the problem without quite reaching it, in which case I must be alert to how they fall short.
So theory is a set of concepts and schemas which one tries on for size, and combines and adaptgs as necessary, like ready-to-wear suits which may need alterations.

Other disciplines supplying concepts and schemas.
The theory used in this course comes from several other disciplines. I would distinguish four main strands.
I PSYCHOLOGY
II GAMES THEORY AND RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
III ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
IV SOCIOLOGY

Lecture 2. Specialized Concepts for Historical Analysis
A Lexicon for the Course
Irrationality
Value Rationality and Instrumental Rationality
Formal and Material Rationality
Motivating and Legitimating Rationality
The Rationality Gap
Remember this parable to fix the concepts in your mind.
Ruritania declares war on Monteblanco
~Haraldo joins up before conscription is introduced, and in a wave of pure emotion, because everyone around him is doing: he tells himself it is patriotism but later he realises that he was swept up in crowd hysteria (emotion, not rationality)
~Karolo joins the army because he is out of a job and needs the pay (pure instrumental rationality.)
~Sergio joins the army because he believes that struggle is the lifeblood of a nation (value rationality.)
~Henriko refuses to join the army because he believes that all war is wrong (a different value rationality)
~Michael the elder joins the army because he believes that in specific circumstances a war can be just, and that this war fits the category: when it is defensive, but also when there is a chance of success and when the good outcomes are likely to outweigh the bad (value rationality and instrumental rationality combined)
~ Michael the younger refuses to join up. He shares his elder brother's values, but believes that in this case the probably bad outcomes outweigh the good (a different value rationality combined with instrumental rationality).
~ George is from the U.S.A. He happens to be interrailing through Ruritania when war breaks out. He has never been their before and does not speak a word of Ruritanian. Still, he finds himself conscripted for military service. His great-grandfather was born in Ruritania and by Ruritanian law anyone descended in the male line from a Ruritanian can be called up in time of need. The law is almost a dead letter but a passport official invokes it in the hope of a bribe. George is out of cash so the law follows its course (formal legal rationality). However the American ambassador pleads with the dictator of Ruritania and George is released (material rationality).
~ Rikardo joins up and says it is because he is a patriot; really however he thinks it is the best way of persuading Silvana finally to sleep with him (legitimation differs from motivation). He has no desire to die for Ruritania, for which he cares nothing, but he continues to act like a hero because otherwise Silvana's admiration will turn into contempt (legitimation, though not sincere, still governs behaviour). Perhaps it is impossible for anyone else to know that his patriotism is insincere.
~ Gustavo, a wealthy young man, is called up claims to be a conscientious objector because he is a Quaker, but it turns out that he joined the Quakers only after conscription was introduced and that he holds shares in munitions firms (rationality gap)

Irrationality
Beliefs or actions are irrational insofar as their cause is different from the reason one gives oneself for them.
Irrationality can take the form of mental illness, say clinical paranoia. This can enter the mainstream of history: for instance if the paranoiac is a dictator. Paranoia is not the only form. Luther suffered from a kind of clinical scrupulosity as a young monk, arguably, and this may partly explain his theological development, which got him over the problem.
Irrationality is not confined to pathological conditions. We act irrationally whenever we say or do in the heat of the will regret. Sometimes we know we will regret. Sometimes we know that even as we do it. Sometimes we don't let ourselves think about it - a form of self-deception. In these cases emotion gets the upper hand of judgement. Collective mass hysteria can be a force in history. Anyone in London just after Lady Diana's death will have observed it. Look at the essay questions under Lecture 19: 'Irrationality'. It has been argued that some stock market booms are fuelled by 'irrational exuberance', and busts by panic. Collective emotions of fear and anger may have fixed on the Jews as scapegoats. It may have been the same with some other mass persecutions.
Wishful thinking is a partially distinct form of rationality. The medieval ordeal was perhaps the result of the desire to feel that crime could be controlled. Groups denied much chance of conventional success may develop subcultures which deride it - this may well happen in schools today.
In all these cases, irrationality may be mixed in with rationality. In that sense, students are right when they constantly come back at me with: 'perhaps it's rational to them'. Even someone with a mental illness caused by an identifiable chemical imbalance may well make amazing rational attempts to make coherent sense of the senseless data provided by the brain: like a decoder trying to make sense of a set of signals which are in fact randomly generated.

Value Rationality and Instrumental ('ends-means') Rationality
This crucial distinction was developed by Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1.1.2). It is often misunderstood, of which more below.
Examples of values in our own society are: 'Torture is wrong'; 'Free-Speech is a right'; 'All humans are equal'; 'Society is about individuals'. The last two examples show that 'values' are not always 'good or bad' judgements: they can claim to describe how things are as well as how they should be.
Many values are disputed even in the same society. Thus, in our own: There is no fundamental difference between the way computers, animals, and humans think; Animals have the same right to live as humans; War is always wrong.
Values are strongly present in religions: e.g., Mahomet is God's prophet; Karma (behaviour in this life affects the form in which one will be reincarnated), but the earlier examples show that they are not an exclusive province of religion.
Instrumental rationality is about ends and means. To take straightforward cases first: two soap powders wash equally white, so it is rational other things being equal to pick the cheapest. There are two tube routes from home to work, and the price is the same, so one takes the quickest.
Then to make things more complex: the bus is cheaper but slower than the tube: so the rational choice depends on how short of money one is, and whether one is in a big hurry.
Instrumental rationality is not only about choosing a means: a common mistake among interpreters of Weber. It can also be about choosing an end. For example, your parents give you £100 to have a good time: the condition is that you spend it only on legitimate fun. You have to choose what would be the most fun: trip to Paris, party at home, expensive restaurant, etc.
More important: instrumental and value rationality are not alternatives. Instrumental rationality operates in spaces created by value rationality. The framework of values can fundamentally affect the character of instrumental calculations. Instrumental rationality is like water added to different dehydrated meals: the common factor is hardly recognizable after the water has been combined with the various dishes.
For instance, where the values are individualistic, calculations take one form. Where the solidarity of a family, clan, regiment or nation is a fundamental value, calculations are different.
Utilitarians will make a different sort of calculation from people who believe that some moral principles hold good in all circumstances, regardless of the outcome. (Bernard Williams invented this example to illustrate the second view: a man refuses to take a job as concentration camp guard, even though he knows that otherwise the job will go to someone who will attempt to inflict the maximum rather than the minimum cruelty demanded by the job.)
Thus the instrumental rationality of the Benedictine rule or of Hindu devotion is wholly different from that of the stock marked or of information technology, though the calculation of ends and means is a common factor in all these cases.

Formal and Material Rationality
Formal rationality is compartmentalised rationality. One abstracts one aspect of a situation and follows through the logic of that aspect, ignoring whatever else may be involved in a situation. Thus formal legal rationality means paying attention only to the rules of law, even if they don't make overall human sense in a given case. To take a real case: the law has rules about when DNA samples may be retained. In this case a sample was retained against the rules, for whatever reason. Later it was used to convict a man of rape. On first appeal, the conviction was overturned because the evidence should not have been kept. It was certain that the man was guilty, but formal legal reasoning directed otherwise. To decide to forget about the formal rules would be material rationality.
British university examinations are a good example of formal legal rationality. Examination boards do not usually lower a mark just because they feel that the candidate does not really deserve a First and just got lucky in an examination. If they did suspend the formal examining rules, it would be material rationality.
An example of formal economic rationality might be for a government to buy steel from a another country because it is cheaper, without worrying about electoral consequences in steel producing regions.
Do not imagine that I am saying either kind of rationality is better: just that they are different.

Motivating and Legitimating Rationality
Sometimes peoples real motives are are rational but different from the reasons they give to other people or even. In such cases it is useful to distinguish between motivation and legitimation. This does not mean that one can ignore the legitimation. Often people or groups have to make their behaviour conform to the reasons they give to legitimate it, or those same reasons can be used against them, as in the case of Rikardo and Silvana. I call this Skinner's theorem, after Quentin Skinner, the man who invented it.
Example: A commodity is advertised as a 'fair-trade' third world product as a marketing device to get customers to purchase an otherwise inferior product. The manufacturers don't care about fairness to Andean farmers but they have to act fairly nevertheless, because their competitors will blow the whistle on them if they don't, turning the 'fair-trade' advertising against themselves.
The Rationality Gap
As with Gustavo in the parable, I speak of a rationality gap when the motivation is rational, and the legitimation is rational, but where the legitimation does not 'cover' the motivation or where there is a perceptible incompatibility between them.


* * * *
What is the point of creating a specialised lexicon, as I have just done? It can help to solve problems. For instance, I believe it can help solve the massive problem of whether all human societies reason in the same way. Anthropologists and philosophers debate whether there is one, universal human rationality or whether each culture has its own specific rationality. Advocates of a universal rationality might equate it with the kind of thinking that developed in Enlightenment Europe; or with modern science; or with Common Sense). Advocates of many, specific rationalities argue that each culture has its own rules just as each game does or each language does. One cannot judge performance at cricket by the rules of football or even of baseball. One cannot judge competence at German by the grammatical rules of French. So too, one cannot judge the ordeal as a way of reaching judicial decisions by modern legal standards of proof. I believe that the solution to this debate can be reached via between value rationality and instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality is like vodka, which tastes like orange when mixed with orange juice and coke when mixed with coke. The vodka or instrumental rationality is common to all cultures and individuals, but when mixed with different value rationalities it seems like a different drink. Yet is still has the same kick. That is the rationalities of different cultures and individuals seem both different and the same.

RATIONALITY AS A UNIVERSAL
RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
Rational Choice Theory is one of the main schools of social theory today, and it takes for granted the universality of rationality.
The theory of rational action of purposive action (sic) is a theory of instrumental rationality, given a set of goals or ends or utilities.' (James S. Coleman, The Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1990), 516
Rational choice theory makes some basic assumptions: preferences can be ranked; they are weighed before one acts together; each choice shoulders aside discarded choices; one takes into account the discarded outcomes; apparent changes in goals can be explained in other ways, just as switch from whisky to beer might be explained by higher tax, not chance of taste. Examples: a policeman who prefers single-minded pursuit of his job to an ideal marriage, but puts the survival of his marriage before his job; ~ a mathematician deciding whether to become a Vice-Chancellor
Rational choice is applied to marriage and divorce; average family size; crime; ideas
Rational Choice Theory seems to have come out of game theory and neo-classical (free-market) economics.
It leans heavily on free-market economics. For instance, James Coleman, a guru of Rat. Choice Theory, tends to draw on the policies of economic corporations for analogies to explain individual behaviour.
Despite this intellectual dependence on free-market economics, some of the most interesting results of Rat. Choice Theory tend to show that the rational pursuit of individual utility can produce collectively irrational outcomes
This can help the historian working back from the fact to the explanation of why groups of people act against their common interest. It is easy to explain this by panic, irrational hysteria, but that may not be the reason. Take a Stock Exchange crash. There is a rumour in the market which suggests shares may go down. Mr. Denaror the stockbroker knows that the best thing for everyone would be for everyone to hold on to their shares for the time being. However, he does not know whether the other stockbrokers will buy or sell. If he waits and they sell, share prices will plummet. When he finally sells, they will be worthless. Better safe than sorry. He sells immediately. But everyone else reasons quite logically in the same way. The stock market crashes and perfectly good stocks become worthless. No individual acted irrationally but the outcome is an economic collapse. It was not caused by panic but by individual rationality.
The theory that individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality can be demonstrated by two game theory examples.
In the famous Prisoner's Dilemma 'game' (actually quite close to real life), two suspected terrorists are under interrogation. They have been caught inside the White House carrying knives. They can be sentenced to a year for trespassing, but obviously the interrogators want more. Obviously they interrogate the suspects separately. They offer each a mere 5 years in prison if the suspect confesses and implicates his partner. They warn each suspect that if they stay silent and the other confesses, they will be executed or go to prison for life. If they both stay silent, they both escape with one year, but the risks of the other confessing are an incentive to confess first.
The game 'Shaft or Share' is a simpler form of the prisoners dilemma that we can all play while funds last. I pick two of you. You each decide independently whether to Shaft or to Share. If you both Share, you get £5 each. If you both Shaft, you get £4 each. If you Shaft and the other Shares, you get £9 and they get nothing.
Rational Choice theory looks very vulnerable to empirical evidence of altruism. Coleman does try to answer this by arguing that the self can expand to include others in some circumstances: when one is benefiting them, when they are successful (supporting Man U), when one has undergone a common experience, when one is dependent on them. There is some plausibility about these explanations of some unselfish behaviour, though they seem weak as explanations of other sorts.
Rational Choice theory can also survive the empirical evidence of self-destructive behaviour, if one conceives of the self as successive individuals whose interests do not always coincide.
I have done my best to show that Rational Choice theory is not stupid, but there are strong objections to it as a general theory of rationality, to which we must turn next.

(PART 2)
Rational choice theory on its own is not good at explaining the variety of ends that humans pursue, the negative limits they set to their own behaviour, and above all the fact that this variety occurs in blocks: in different periods and places - so it does not just come down to individual taste. Thus rational choice theory gives a series of explanations of the success of religious sects in the USA: 'compensators (something like 'pie in the sky'), competition driving down costs, etc, but it does not explain the divergence between countries like England and France, which seem to become less and less religous, and other regions which become more so: not only the USA, but Africa.

. It does not explain why some cultures and sub cultures define the set of players in the rational choice game differently from others. Some include animals, others exclude slaves or particular nationalities.

It does not account for the different kind of reasoning which goes with groups that believe the self should be denied or extinguished altogether: in varying degrees: puritanism, monasticism, Buddhism.

It does not explain why the whole starting point for reasoning in some groups is the assumption that the right way is revealed in a sacred book or books.

It does not explain the vastly different types of reasoning that anthropologists have found in tribal societies.

As a result, some anthropologists deny the possibility of a general rationality altogether.

A good compromise position is that of Obeyesekere in the Captain Cook debate with Sahlins

- Lichtbach, Mark Irving, and Zuckerman, Alan S., Comparative Politics. Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge, 1997)

- Stark, R., and Bainbridge, W. S., A Theory of Religion (1996 edn.)

- Obeyesekere, G., The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European mythmaking in the Pacific (19923)

Last week we looked at theories of society which see the same rationality in all cultures. Rational choice theory tends to take it for granted that the same principles of rationality apply universally. Obeyesekere develops a subtler view of the universality of pragmatic rationality.
Today I turn to theories which stress the differentness of the rationalities of cultures. Note that it may seem that I am advocating complete cultural relativism: trust me that I am not an advocate of complete 'cognitive apartheid;
~ 'COGNITIVE APARTHEID'
This is the view that each culture has its own rationality and that they are separate but equal. Thus: on Sahlins's view, the Hawaiians rationality dictated their treatment of Captain Cook as a god. Their system of convictions did not leave room for arguments for and against, for a practical rationality which could debate the question in a Western manner.
'Cognitive apartheid' is an unfairly loaded phrase. Do not let it make you prejudge the question. It means that each culture is a system to be judged only on its own terms. We cannot judge other cultures by the criteria of our culture. This is cultural relativism, a strong tradition in Anthropology.
Peter Winch's Idea of a Social Science provided a much discussed theoretical basis for cultural relativism.
His starting point was Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his second phase. Wittgenstein tried to answer the question: What is language? His first answer was: Language is like a picture. Later he came to think that there was no one element common to all linguistic practices. Linguistic practices are like games. Just as there is no rule or set of rules common to all games, so too with linguistic practices. Winch took the reasoning further. He regarded the rules of games and of linguistic practices as special cases of societies generally. There is no set of rules that apply to all societies.
(He was reacting against a different tradition in social science: the attempt to find general laws of society. Just as natural scientists discovered laws of nature, so too social scientists would discover laws of society (so they believed). There was disagreement even about the general character of these laws. Some looked for evolutionary laws. Others looked for functional laws, like those of physiology, so that a social institution would be explained by its function just as a bodily organ would be explained by its contribution to the working of the body.)
For Winch, there are no general, natural science-type laws for society and history. To look for them is misguided, like looking for laws governing both rugby and Solitaire.
This applies to rationality too. Modern Western rationality is one set of rules. It cannot be set over another set, say the rationality of an African tribe, to judge it.

He applies this to Azande poison oracles, as studied by Evans-Pritchard.
~ AZANDE POISON ORACLES THROUGH THE EYES OF EVANS-PRITCHARD
This is best explained by a examples, both from E.-P. Witchcraft, chapter on Oracles. This one is invented by Evans-Pritchard:
'First Test. If X has committed adultery poison oracle kill the fowl.
If X is innocent poison oracle spare the fowl. The fowl dies.
Second Test. The poison oracle has declared X guilty of adultery by slaying the fowl. If its declaration is true let it spare this second fowl. The fowl survives.
Result. A valid verdict. X is guilty.
The next is real, from his fieldwork. I quote him again:
If Bamina lives in the new homestead which he has just built for himself will he die? The fowl DIES, giving the answer 'Yes'.
If Bamina remains in hs old homestead will he die? The fowl DIES, giving the answer 'Yes'
If Bamina goes to live in the government settlement of Ndoruma will he die? The fowl SURVIVES, giving the answer 'No'.
(Corroboration of the last question.) Did the oracle speak truly when it said that Bamina would not die if he went to live in the government settlement of Ndoruma? The fowl SURVIVES, giving the answer 'No'. (The answers to [the last two questions] therefore contradicted one another. Someone suggested that the oracle was tired like a chief who has been sitting for hours listening to cases in his court and is weary. Another man said that the oracle saw some misfortune ahead, which was not death yet was a serious misfortune, and had taken this way of warning Bamina . . .
Winch argues that Azande magical rites 'do, or may, express an attitude to contingencies; one, that is, which involves recognition that one's life is subject to contingencies, rather than an attempt to control these. To characterise this attidude more specifically one should note how Zande rites emphasise the importance of certain fundamental features of their life...We have a drama of resentments, evil-doing, revenge, expiation, in which their are ways of dealing (symbolically) with misfortunes and their disruptive effect on a man's relations with his fellows with ways in which life cn go on despite such disruptions.'
Empirically, this line of explanation of Azande magic may not stand up. It does not really fit Evans-Pritchard's own account.
However, Evans-P's account does support Winch's view in another respect: the Azande notion of Magic is not vulnerable to refutation by Western science.
In addition to the get out clauses in the Bamina case, they could also explain a failure by:
· the donor of the magic poison's withdrawal of its power
· his dissatisfaction when he gave it, which impairs it
· interference with the oracle by witchcraft
And so on.




~ VALUE SYSTEMS ARE HAVE IMMUNE SYSTEMS
Hinduism and Buddhism immune to the 'challenge' of Western technical advances
Biblical fundamentalism can explain scientific evidence by saying God is testing faith
Enlightenment rationalism (Hume &c) can explain any empirical evidence of a miracle by saying it is in principle impossible.
Still once can impose some plausible limits to cultural relativism.

~ LIMITS TO RELATIVISM
· Even Winch's view is subtler than crude relativism. He does recognize that there are common points between all cultures, notably births, the relation between the sexes, and death. Furthermore he argues that when they seem to be simply wrong we may be simply misunderstanding what is going on.
Then there are the following objections to the image of cultures as self-contained systems each with their own rationality:
· Cultures are not usually monolithic: there are usually several value rationalities within them
· Each individual can have his or her own culture or value rationality: especially in a society like ours
· The marriage of beliefs with forms of social life, which is a source of the immune systems of value rationalities, is an unstable union
· Some cultures do have weak points through which others can penetrate to overthrow them: Confusion China faced with Western technology.
· Finally, the impossibility of refuting one value rationality from the standpoint of another does not logically prove that none of these rationalities is objectively right. This will become clearer as we analyse Values.

- Evans-Pritchard, Sir, Edward, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande

Previous bibliography, plus:

- Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic

VALUES

The Psychology and Logic of Values
Convictions are hard to shake by linear logical arguments. This is also true of prejudices and of opinions held out of deeply ingrained habit, but the psychology is different in those cases. I reserve the words 'values' and 'convictions' for rationally- held assents. Some of you will want to collapse this distinction, and see all values as emotions, not essentially different from prejudices. I would still want to distinguish between the conviction 'My country right or wrong' (which is not to say I share it), and a prejudice against all Germans which goes to the extent of shooting Dachshunds, as I believe happened in the First World War.
So why cannot convictions be easily shaken by logical argument? For the following two reasons:
FIRST: Logical argument is linear. It is like a set of Christmas lights: break one bulb, and the whole series of bulbs goes out. Values are more like the electricity grid. If one source of power fails, other sources supply power while the fault in the system is repaired.
Values, tend to be formed by a convergence from all directions of perceived probabilities, a multiplicity of small bits of evidence that together make a person certain. This sort of certainty does not so easily lend itself to linear demonstration - or refutation. How do we know that the Americans really put men on the moon, and that it was not a brilliant propaganda illusion? How do you know that Hawaii exists? You are certain, but a logical proof would be difficult and leaky. Similarly, on a personal level, knowledge of someone's character, a knowledge made up of an infinite number of small experiences of it, may make one quite certain that they could not have committed certain crimes.
Values tend to be part of a general system of how things are and work. If one piece seems vulnerable to an objection, one assumes that the objection is probably fallacious even if it looks plausible on the surface. Rather than give up a complex general way of looking at things, one assumes the objection must be wrong. Even if ten top Californian professors swore they had witnessed spacemen abducting a lab assistant, I would not believe them. I would attribute it to Budweiser, substance abuse, collective dynamics, anything rather than spacemen, because spacemen with a penchant for abducting earthlings do not have a place in my world view.
Note that this 'convergence of multiple probabilities and evidences' can also be found in much 'instrumental' reasoning. Instrumental reasoning can be either of this type or more linear and logical. However, when one is sure on the basis of this type of 'convergence' reasoning comes near to being a value or conviction.
Let us take 'Freedom' as an example of the mutual protection which the elements of a value system give each other. Imagine an educated Englishman circa 1800. The notion of Free Will, the idea that people should choose their own spouse, the idea that slavery is wrong, a classical education with a good dose of 5th century Athens, an idea of the Renaissance which put the Florentine republic at the centre, the idea that the English were free unlike the French - all these different notions would prop each other up.
Hinduism as another example of this mutual reinforcement. Three key ideas, Dharma, Karma, and Samsara all complement each other. Each makes the other so intrinsically plausible that an attack on any one of them individually will look like a mere attempt to be clever in the face of probability. This is especially true because the values in questions are embedded in vivid and concrete rituals, which takes one to the second point.

SECOND: Logical argument depends a lot on abstractions, and it is predominantly verbal, 'propositional'. Convictions or values are bound up with images, experience (especially during youth), and the memory of concrete decisions taken oneself. It is much more vivid than logical argument, and more likely to inspire emotion, though it is distinct from pure emotion.
So convictions or values are certainties based on convergence (rather than linear) reasoning, when they are held in the mind in a concrete way, rather than as abstractions.
This 'concrete' character of convictions explains why apparently abstract convictions like patriotism or class struggle are bound up with concrete symbols that may become almost inseparable from them. The flag in the U.S.A., or memories of singing the International for old-style communists are cases in point. The vivid images of the Holocaust have been important in the conviction of our own times that Racism is an evil. Images and memories of acts of devotion are important in many religions. Even in religions that disapprove of images, there are other kinds of concrete thinking at work: hymns in Protestant Churches, the call of the faithful to prayer and the concrete language of gesture, prostration, in Islam. The family religious ceremonies that punctuate the week and the year will be powerful in the thinking of any orthodox Jew.
# The Greek polis or city state had its own value rationality. It was concrete and visible in a way a nation state cannot be. One could see the city, not just symbols of the country. Religious ceremonies, temples, political decisions in open meetings, fighting in close formation together in war, all made devotion to the polis concrete.
Greek city states thought of inter-city war as a more natural state than peace - peaces could be made for a set number of years.
# In Judaism the reproduction of historical memories through ceremonies like Passover has helped to keep the identity of the Jewish people throughout the centuries.
# Nationalism has constantly been reinforced by memories of war, and reinforced by such symbols as flags and anthems. It feeds above all on repeated experiences of familiarity at home, and occasional experiences of strangeness abroad.
# The value of Freedom feeds on negative images of oppression.
# The same with human equality and the conviction that racism is wrong.
# Tribes in traditional Africa, and clans in classical China, were the basis of a value system in the same kind of way.
# In Hinduism, Catholicism, Greek orthodoxy, vivid ceremonies go together with belief: communion being especially powerful in the last two.
# The idea of individuality in modern times may start with abstractions, perhaps influenced by Nietsche, but is reinforced by memories of decisions, leading so many people whose life was a mess to choose 'I did it my way' as their favourite song.
# One of the strongest ways in which a value is made concrete is through being embedded in a form of social life. The analyses of Mary Douglas in her Natural Symbols are relevant here.
Distinguishing features of 'Values'
The foregoing discussion takes us near to a definition. Values are usually parts of a wider system where each part gives covering fire to any other part that is attacked; and values are concrete in the mind, rather than abstract.
Values and Charisma
There is a correlation between charismatic leadership and conviction rationality. A leader like Mahomet or Buddha or Garibaldi - they come in all varieties - will usually be animated by strong, concrete, vivid convictions, whose force is communicated to their followers.
Loss and Gain of Values
As noted above, values are relatively invulnerable to simple logical arguments, for reasons stated above. One has to attack a whole system not just one of its parts, and this is likely to be seen as an attack on the whole person. Moreover the system is likely to be embedded in concrete thought processes and in social life, and logical arguments will seem thin and faded in comparison.
Occasionally values can be overturned by experiences which are refutations in action, as, arguably, happened with Confucian China, which promised to deliver in this world so was vulnerable to Western technology where Hinduism and Buddhism have not been.
Often when people apparently change values there is much more continuity in their fundamental certitudes than meets the eye: e.g. female suffrage.
When people or countries convert to new values, they are often building on existing ones: e.g. conversion of Anglo-Saxon England.
There may be more convergence between apparently different value systems than meets the eye: it can be the combination of the experience-based perceptions, etc., with abstract formulations, which makes them incompatible.

- Breton, Albert, et al., ed., Nationalism and Rationality (Cambridge, 1995)

- MacIntyre, A. After Virtue

Previous bibliography, plus:

- Hazard, P., The European Mind 1680-1680-1715

Rationalism as one Rationality among Many
The Grand Narrative of the Progress of Reason
One of the grand narratives of European History is the triumph of the Enlightenment Reason. According to this narrative, there was a crisis of the European mind in the 17th century, in the 18th century a new view of the world had taken the centre of the stage, reason had replaced authority of Bible or Church as the touchstone of truth, questions were being asked about authoritarian structures in the state too, men like Voltaire passionately advocated tolerance and religious freedom, scientific laws were so understood as to make miracles in possible. Some Enlightenment thinkers believed in God but thought he left the universe alone after creating it. These were Deists. Others thought there was no God. Many of the foregoing views are still widespread today. For many people today they represent not just a view of the world but the true view of the world.
A Marxisant version: Habermas and the Public Sphere
The work of Habermas has attracted much attention in this connection. He developed the idea of the 'public sphere' as a setting for Enlightenment ideas. The 'public sphere' is the possibility of free discussion and debate about big issues transcending personal and private life. Coffee houses would be one setting conducive to such discussion. People of different social ranks could meet together and talk or read newspapers. Newspapers were a medium for public sphere debate. So were pamphlets. Censorship was decreasingly effective in suppressing such debate. Habermas clearly thought this was an objective advance in the history of rationality. As a sort of Marxist, he would also emphasize its limited character. Only a minority enjoyed this freedom of debate. Nor does he think we have yet reached the promised land of general rationality: we have democracy, but it is manipulated by media moghuls. All this is a different story: back to the Enlightenment.
Traditional Explanations of the Rise of Enlightenment Rationalism
The Enlightenment used to be explained by reaction to the wars of religion, the scientific revolution, the discovery of Chinese civilization, and by a chain of intellectual influences starting in England with thinkers like Hobbes, culminating in France with Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédie, and others, spreading from France all over Europe. I still think there is much in these explanations.
Spinoza
Recently, Jonathan Israel has argued that the key influence was Spinoza, in late 17th century Holland. He traces in astonishing detail the spread of Sinoza's influence. His argument may be overstated. Still, he must be right that Spinoza was a massive force for change in ideas.
Enlightenment Rationalism as a Value Rationality
The Enlightenment qualifies as a value rationality as defined in the previous lecture. The abstract reasoning of thinkers like Spinoza combined with concrete experience and images. One such experience will have been the Wars of Religions: much suffering, no winner. The sufferings themselves do not in my view explain the Enlightenment. We do not abandon our belief in democracy because of sufferings incurred in its defence. However, the memories of the wars of religion will have given powerful imaginative reinforcement to rational argument. Similarly, experience and images of the uniformity of nature were not new. They will have taken on imaginative force when combined with the theory that nature was governed by intrinsic necessary laws. Discovery of China, apparently so advanced without the help of the Bible, would apparently converge with the experience of the horrors of religious intolerance to reinforce the more abstract concepts of the Enlightenment. However, a thinker like Voltaire has tremendous flair in making these concepts vivid: e.g. through his novel Candide.
It is the marriage of vivid concrete thinking to abstract argument which has made Enlightenment attitudes such an influential package of value rationality. However, as historians we should stop short of treating it as rationality in an absolute sense. It may be one's personal value rationality. It cannot claim self-evidence in the academic community. Habermas and Israel clearly identify with Enlightenment rationality. Fair enough, but such autobiographical facts need to be distinguished from their impressive historical interpretations.
Arguments about Miracles and the Azande Poison Oracles
Enlightenment rationality can be profitably compared to the rationality of the Azande. You will remember how they could explain away all evidence that apparently undermined their belief in poison oracles. It is the same with Enlightenment rationality. Spinoza constructed a chain of reasoning which ruled out of court in advance any evidence for any supernatural occurrence or miracle. A Spinozist need not even take a look at the evidence: it could be discounted on logical principles. (See Israel ch. 12, and pp. 161-2 for fundamental concepts from which Spinoza's rejection of Miracles derives.)
Hume did the same, and it is worth dwelling on him because his discussion of miracles would end up better known than Spinoza's. It became common currency in rationalist thought. His essay on miracles seems more sophisticated. This is because he was combining a Spinoza-like notion that the nature of nature makes anything like a miracle inconceivable with his own idea of natural law as nothing but a recurrent conjunction, which he does not explain. The result is a bit of a smokescreen which makes his chain of logic hard to pin down. Nevertheless, as with the Azande, his approach makes system invulnerable to empirical evidence.
Hume argued thus: The less likely something seems, the stronger the testimony required to prove it, and when likelihood diminishes to vanishing point, no amount of evidence will do. Miracles are defined as deviations from scientific laws of nature. Scientific laws of nature are constant associations of one thing with another: say of death with decomposition. Testimony to the miraculous often turns out to be demonstrably false. Thus testimony to a miracle will never be strong enough, because a weak combination (testimony with truth) is trying to overturn an absolute combination (association of. Thus testimony to a miracle will never be strong enough, because a weak combination (testimony with truth) is trying to overturn an absolute combination (association of x with y: say of death with decomposition).
Hume's confidence in this argument arguably derives from two things which make it look very much like a value rationality. Firstly, the constancy of scientific laws seemed unassailable because of the repetition of concrete experiments: vivid concrete facts in the minds of anyone who had dabbled in science. Thus: concrete thought, one feature of value rationality. Secondly, Hume did not entertain even as a serious hypothesis the deliberate suspension of scientific laws by God to send a strong message, because he did not believe in an interventionist God. The different parts of his system supported each other, like different parts of an electricity grid. So to the objection: 'why should God not very occasionally change his own rules of nature to send a strong signal to humans?' Hume could reply: 'I have no reason to think there is a God who would want to do that'. An attack on one piece of his system would seem plausible because other parts of that system would support the part under threat - just as with the Azande.

See previous bibliography, and the following:

See previous bibliography

- Male, E. The Gothic Image (Fontana, 1961)

- Paton, B., Preaching Friars and the Civic Ethos: Siena, 1380-1480 (London, 1992)

- Fox, Robin, Kinship and Marriage. An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, 1983 edition),

- Lambert, M., The Cathars (1998)

- Murray, O., ‘Cities of Reason’, in Murray, Oswyn, and Price, Simon, The Greek City from Homer to Alexander

- Finley, Use and Abuse of History, ch. 10

28 Nov.
Medieval and Classical Rationalities
Additonal note on last week's theme.
The radical and moderate Enlightenments.
In the previous lecture I did not sufficiently distinguish between the 'radical' enlightenment and the mainstream enlightenment. The mainstream Enlightenment was not fundamentally at odds with Christianity. Robert Boyle (d. 1691) is a case in point. One of the greatest representatives of the new scientific method, and famous to this day through Boyle's law, he thought that science reinforced the argument from design. He thought that God could override scientific laws through miracles, but does so sparingly, only to sparingly, to make a point. (His attitude to miracles and the natural order is quite like that of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.)
The some social ideas associated with the Enlightenment were doubtless a challenge to social forms taken for granted by many Christians. Enlightenment thinkers rejected torture and slavery. They were sceptical about the ubiquity of witchcraft. They advocated representative government. They did not like reiteration of the hell-fire theme in preaching. Nevertheless events proved that there was no fundamental incompatibility between their attitudes and the existing mainstream churches, for the churches sooner or later assimilated most of these attitudes. Some of them grew up among Christians from the beginning. For instance, the reaction against witch persecutions does not seem to derive from a systematic rejection of the supernatural. The studies of Mandrou and Midelfort both show that persecutions ground to a halt when accusations reached high places. People continued to believe that witchcraft and sorcery was possible in principle: they just didn't believe all the accusations going around. They thought that mental illness could explain them.
Thus the mainstream Enlightenment was not an alternative value rationality to the existing Christian rationalities, but a thoroughgoing rethink of many peripheral assumptions. On the other hand the radical, Spinozan, Enlightenment truly was a different system of values.

The rationality of medieval scholasticism
The difference did not consist in the emphasis on reason, for reason was central to the next rationality to be considered, the rationality of scholasticism. 'Scholasticism' is a simplified schema to describe an intellectual method which was widely used from the 12th century on. Its characteristic form was the 'quaestio' question, a tight logical debate about a problem. This was a written form but also a way of teaching and learning, central in medieval universities and centres which preceded them in the twelfth century. Arguments would be presented for both sides of the point in dispute, then an attempt would be made to resolve the problem by the use of reason. Authorities played a part, but not the one most students ignorant of the Middle Ages assume. The focus was on conflicting authorities: texts of the Bible that seemed incompatible, a passage of Augustine that seemed to contradict a passage from Gregory the Great, and so on. Where authorities were in conflict, reason came into its own. An example at random: Supplement to the Summa theologica of Aquinas, Question 65, article 2: whether it can sometimes be licit to have several wives.
Scholasticism is a form of instrumental rationality, and instrument for problem solving. It had a very close relation to the value rationality around it. Established Christian doctrines provided a framework of common assumptions within which logical debate could go somewhere. Without a lot of common assumptions, philosophy tends to be a dialogue of the deaf. The most creative scholastic philosophy arguable came out of debates about topics like the Trinity. Such dogmas generated problems which could only be faced with philosophical tools.

A closely related rationality was that of medieval canon law. This too was an instrumental rationality which presupposed Christian values. Canon law operated in a space left free by the fundamental values of the system. It was designed to reinforce them, but there was room for debate and change about the mode. The law of kinship and marriage illustrates this variablility.

Yet another medieval rationality was the symbolic mentality. Its best known manifestation is the monastic theology of the early Middle Ages (before the rise of scholasticism). This too is instrumental in a way, but in a different way: an aesthetic way. Writers in this mode found structural analogies between concrete scriptural events and devout reflections. Natural phenomena were used in the same way. As with a pun in our culture, the criteria was fittingness or aptness; also, however, the power to stimulate pious meditation.
The setting of symbolic rationality was the monastery; later also popular preaching and vernacular literature read by pious and educated laypeople. The setting of canon law was twofold: academic, in the universities, and practical, in the courts, which culminated in the papal court. The setting of scholasticism was again the universities and the schools of the friars.
Tbe rationality of the Greek City State (polis - plural poleis)
One of the remarkable achievements of scholasticism was to assimilate the thought of Aristotle, and with it many of the values of the classical city state or polis. Aquinas's explanation of why 'humility' does not appear in Aristotle is a tour de force. Ultimately there were some strong affinities between the rationality of the polis and that of the western Church in the central and late Middle Ages. The cultivation of reason and disputation anticipated and fuelled the rational techniques of scholasticism, and the idea of laws as a means to virtue which worked on the aggregate but not in each individual case is common to the polis and common law. In Italy we even find city states whose structural similarities to those of Greece are uncanny.
Nevertheless there is a fundamental difference. In classical Greece religion was central to the life of the City. Religious festivals were state activities, and there was no distinction between 'religious' and 'secular' in the modern sense. Religious cult was a focal point of the city state's collective identity: perhaps the focal point. To get a vivid sense of this religious 'political' life, all you have to do is walk down Malet Street and look at the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum.
[Further reading on polis. For religion, Robert Parker, Athenian Religion. A History (Oxford 1996), pp. 78, 90-92) is useful. More generally, your bibliography at pp. 9-10.)
Religion is central in the life of the polis, but it was not a distinct sphere of activity. It was closely bound up with political and military life. The hoplite military system is another part of the whole form of life. The ancient polis has been defined as a 'Guild of Warriors'. These warriors fought as a solid group in close formation. Military tactics embodied visibly the solidarity of the polis. Behind it lay a rough social equality between the warriors who fought in formation together. The rise of hoplite warfare goes together with the decline of aristocracy. The whole attitude to war tended in the same direction: war between city states was the normal state, and peaces were made for fixed terms of years.
The military system of hoplite formation, the religious festivals, and the visibility of the city itself as the centre of the state, meet the definition of a value system: mutual reinforcing parts of a system of life and thought, and embodiment in concrete forms of thought.
Instrumental rationality finds a place within the value system and is coloured by it. Oswin Murray has argued that the Spartan military system, the Athenian democratic institutions of the fourth century are both the products of rational calculation.

- Weber, M., The Religion of India, transl. and ed. Gerth and Martindale (1958)

Weber, Max, The Religion of India. The sociology of Hinduism
and Buddhism. Translatedand edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale.
(Glencoe, Ill.,1958).

- Schmidt, L.E., Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the early Modern Period (Princeton, 1990)

- Metcalf, Barbara, Islamic Revival in British India; Deoband 1860-1900 (Princeton, 1982).

- Raitt, Jill, et al., ed. Christian spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (London, 1987)

- Weber, M., Economy and Society, transl. Roth & Wittich, p.541 ff.

- Lake, P., and Questier, M., eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, esp. ch. 1 by N. Tyacke on ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’

Dec5Devo
DEVOTION and ASCETICISM
Instrumental rationality includes techniques for arousing or heightening religious devotion. These techniques work best when the basic values of the religion in question are already accepted. The instrumental rationality of devotion is closely related to the values of the religion in question, but can be distinguished from it: consequently we find similar techniques occurring in religions whose values differ.
One of the most interesting techniques for the historian is revivalism: e.g. Allelluia of 1233, 'Great Awakening in 18th C. America, Methodism.
Other techniques tend to have a solid foundation in the parts of the body
The tongue: Monastic liturgy - Books or Hours - Rosary - Mantras
Singing: Hymns in monasticism - Laudi - Lutheran hymns - Moravian Brethren - Methodism - Hymns in Bhakti movement (Krishna sect of Hinduism) [Huyler, 36]

Hearing# Bells (in Hindu temple 'clanging of bells from the Sanctum' [Huyler, 49])
The stomach: Fasting: Ramadan; Day of Atonement; Lent; Hinduism: Sivaratri- part of devotion to Siva; Buddhism: 'fasting is enjoined for bhiksus [monks] from midday to the following morning, and may be followed by laypeople to gain merit, especially at new and full moon'[Oxford Dict. World Religions, 343]
# Holy Feast: In Hinduism Prashad, spiritual nourishment from consecrated food; Passover meal; Eucharist
The eyes: Images: Mandalas - Buddhas - Western religious art - crucifix - statues of saints - statues of gods in Hinduism
# - lights (Divali = short form of 'line of lamps'; lamps in Hindu worship generally; in Northern Buddhism, butter lamps often perpetually before images (Harvey, 175); Hannukah lights; lights in Christian churches
The feet: Processions
Sex: abstinence/celibacy: Buddhist bhiksus (monks); Hindu 'renouncers', fourth stage of Asrama (4 stages of life)
Sex marriage symbolism - Krishma with Radha his married mistress in N. India

Instrumental Rationality coloured by value rationality
No images in Iconoclastic christianity, Puritanism, Islam; conversion in evangelical protestant revivalism; confession in Catholicism; 'Historical' Character of Christian and Jewish liturgical year compared with say traditional Chinese religious year pattern; instrumental merges into value with Eucharist
Final Reflection: If value rationality is defined as a conviction or assent held in a vivid and concrete way, then the instrumental rationality can intensify the value rational character of a belief, and perhaps even turn an abstract view into a value.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
Buddhism
Mantras are sacred words of power, mostly meaningless syllables or strings of syllables, which give an arrangement of sound of great potency...When pronounced in the right way, with the right attitud of mind, the sound-arrangement of a mantra is seen as 'tuning in' the practitioner's mind to a being he wishes to visualise.' Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History, and Practices p.p. 260-61
A mandala or '(sacred) circle' is a device developed in India between the seventh and twelfth centuries...Its basic function is to protray the luminous world, or Pure Land, of a specific holy being, with other holy beings particularly associated with it arrayed about it. A mandala may be temporarily constructed, for a particular rite, out of coloured sands or dough and fragrant powders, using a raised horizontal platform as a basis. In a more permanent form, it may be painted on a hanging scroll...' Harvey, p. 264
Methodists
Halevy on Methodist preaching: 'Their great talent (which, they prided themselves, was much more than a mere clever stratagem) was to produce, in the breasts of those who heard them, a crisis of despair followed by a sudden relaxation and a mood of blissful peace.' Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, translated and edited by Bernard Semmel (Chicago, 1971) p.37
Moravians
'Each element of Moravian liturgy formed a separate service. Bible reading was confined to the Bible hour (in which a long con, continuous passage was red and allowed to take its effect without explanation or application), prayer occurred only in the litanies of the liturgy meeting, addresses were out of place anywhere except in the Preaching (a sermon) and in the quarter-hours (brief homilies coming from the heart and addressed to the heart), but at all services at least a few verses were sung, so song was the unifying factor. In the Singing Hour a series of veses from different hmns expounded and developed a text or theme in a logical progression. For Zinzendorf this service was second in importance only to the Communion, and superior to the homily; if religious truth was perceived best by the heart, it could be expressed most directly in song, and if singing was by heart, it would come from the heart. Since all participated by singing, this service expressed community better than most....' p. 147-149
Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728-1760 (Oxford, 1998)

- Encyclopedia of Religion: article on ‘Monasticism: Buddhist Monasticism’ (+ the article on Christian Monasticism which follows).

- Weber, Max, The Religion of India. The sociology of Hinduism
and Buddhism. Translatedand edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale.
(Glencoe, Ill.,1958).

- Habig, M., St. Francis of Assisi, Omnibus of Sources (1973): pp. 56-71

Buddhist and Christian Monasticism
There are striking parallels between Buddhist and Christian Monasticism. The following ideal type is constructed from Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism and Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism
# Ordination/Profession
# Chastity
# Rejection of possessions (to varying degrees)
# Special horror of money (Buddhists and Franciscans)
# Monasteries owned vast tracts of land and labour of people on them
# Study of Scriptures, & meditation on them
# Music and chanting
# Ideal of community harmony
# Tension between community and seeking for perfection as a solitary
# Disciplined eating day (Buddhists not after midday apart from a snack not requiring mastication
# Dietary restrictions: meat frowned upon to varying degrees
# A regulated day, starting very early (medieval Benedictines earlier than Buddhists)
#Confession of faults to other monks
# Reliance on generosity of lay donors
# Merit transferred to laity
# Helping the dead through merit and ceremonies (Memoria in West; between-lives intercession in Buddhism)
# Tendency of monarchy to organize and control monastic life in a country (10th cent. England; modern Thailand, + other far eastern countries before colonialism)


Instrumental Rationality plays a part in both monasticisms
Early Buddhist schismatic said monk said that 5 practices, including subsisting on alms and vegetarianism, should be made complsory. Buiddha refused.
Arguably, most western monasticism is a sort of instrumental rationality, serving values. The variety of orders is evidence of this
In both systems, instrumental and value rationality are very intimately connected
A close analysis show some fundamental differences between the values underlying the two types of monasticism
That makes the common 'technology of perfection' all the more striking: shows how instrumental rationality is tied in to values, on the one hand, yet can be common to different (but not all) value systems on the other.

12. & 13. Formal Rationality and Law

(Use preceding three bibliographies.)

- Turner, Stephen P., and Factor, Regis A., Max Weber. The Lawyer as Social Thinker (London, &c., 1994

LAW AND RATIONALITY (1)
I will begin by defining some key concepts for analysing legal history, then start the process of applying them to particular legal traditions, beginning with the one that has established itself in the U.K. (minus Scotland) and the USA.

The key concepts are three fundamental distinctions, between:
1. VALUE RATIONALITY AND INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY IN LEGAL SYSTEMS
2. FORMAL AND MATERIAL (OR SUBSTANTIVE) LEGAL RATIONALITY
3. RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL LAW: which ties in with the previous distinction, so that one can distinguish say formally rational from formally irrational law, substantively rational from substantively irrational law.
Carefully defined concepts of rationality can help one see differences between apparently similar legal phenomena, and similarities between apparently different legal phenomena. These concepts are 'ideal types', schemas which are never found in a pure form in real life, where they are all mixed up together in varying degrees: but one has to know the elements to understand the individual compounds, so to speak..

Law is value rational when it is thought to be identical with ethics. Illegal = immoral, because law expresses ethical imperatives. Value rational law in a pure sense is hard to find, but there are examples. Islamic law and Hindu sacred law are both instances. Classical Chinese Law may be another.

Much more commonly, legal systems combine instrumental with value rationality, in such a way that the instrumentality of the law serves the values of the community. That is to say, the rules of law are designed to promote morality as the community conceives it, but they are not identical with the rules of morality. For instance, some immoral acts are not illegal. Thus drunkenness or adultery might not be prohibited by law, because too hard to enforce, even if the society sees law as a moral instrument. Conversely, the law might go further than the society's morality. Thus it might ban drinking under 21, even if this is not regarded as actually immoral in all cases: but the ban is there because drinking by young people is thought to get out of hand more often than not.

This combination of value with instrumental rationality is found in the laws of ancient city states, in most modern laws, and, among sacred laws, in both Jewish and in medieval Canon Law.

The conceptual distinction proves itself helpful here, because it helps us see an essential and non-obvious difference between Jewish and Canon Law on the one hand, and Islamic and Hindu Law on the other.

The relative importance of value and instrumental rationality also differs greatly. In modern laws, such as English and American Common Law or the various Roman Law-based continental legal systems, the element of value rationality is relatively low. Law reinforces morality to the extent that it tries to stop people harming each other. Stealing is thought both wrong and illegal, ditto murder, even character assassination, and so on, but these are all negative prohibitions. There is little in modern western laws designed to make people good in themselves, as opposed to stopping them from hurting other people.

Here modern secular laws can be contrasted with Canon Law and Jewish laws (not to mention Islamic or Hindu Law), but also, less obviously, with the legal ideas of the ancient world. Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides see Law as promoting the virtuous life of a Polis (= City State) citizen: the virtuous 'political' life.

Laws can also differ in their degree of formal rationality. Here 'formal rationality' means subordination to a system of legal rules which is separated by convention from all other non legal considerations. It is because of this separation that people sometimes get off on technicalities, procedural or substantive.

One can contrast with this material rationality when ethical or other non-legal principles, rational considerations but from outside the sphere of law, decide the cases. This can happen when a jury thinks that the obviously right legal verdict would be unjust and acquits anyway.

The 'pure ideal type' of formally rational law would be a law consisting of general principles under which all individual cases are subsumed. Roman Law and Continental Law codes since the Code Napoleon aspire to follow this model.

Empirically rational law is formal but in a different way. The reasoning is not so form one individual case to another, by analogy. This is the precedent case law of English and American Common Law, or the kiyas reasoning of Islamic Law.

Law can also be formal but irrational, as (I would argue) with some early medieval law where the exact formulae had to be enunciated or one lost one's case. The medieval ordeal is also arguably irrational in a different sense.

So much for general categories. The next task is to use them to analyse the history of particular legal systems. I will start with the Common Law system which governs England and Wales (not Scotland), the U.S.A., and most Commonwealth Countries. It has been a massive force in history so if Rationality Theory can help us understand it that is an important intellectual service.

The Common Law (England, USA, etc.)

# There are many irrationalities in the history of English Common Law
~ Some have disappeared, such as the ordeal and trial by battle. The ordeal in criminal disputes was important until it was illegalized by the Church in 1215. (Bartlett argues that it was rational in the earlier middle ages according to the world view of the time, but I am not sure that it was rational even in this limited sense: it implied that God had to perform a miracle on demand.) Trial by Battle could continue after 1215: no priest was required. The system was fading out by the end of the medieval period. As late as 1818 a person accused by an antiquated procedure demanded to by tried by battle, without success. While they lasted, the Ordeal and Trial by Battle represent irrationality in the sense that they settle cases without reference to reasoning, consistency, or proof.
~ The same may be said of many jury decisions. Juries started out as bodies of sworn witnesses. In the last medieval centuries the jury evolved into a method of judging facts. The jurors were no longer supposed to have personal knowledge. In many complicated civil cases the judgement of facts by these legal laymen must have been fairly arbitrary.
~ Every now and again a judge has so much personal authority that they make law by quasi oracular authority. Lord Mansfield in the 18th century and Lord Denning in the later 20th century are good examples. As they depart from formal legal rationality, however, they approximate to material or substantive rationality: they give the judgement that they think is ethically right, and may in effect change the rules as they do so.
~ Justices of the Peace tended to give decisions without too much reference to formal law, guided (one hopes) by their idea of fairness.

~ English Law legal history also became increasingly irrational in an instrumental sense as it grew into a labyrinth of case precedents interspersed with specific statutes. There is no comprehensive, coherent, lucidly designed Code, as with most continental countries. Sir James Fitzjames attempted to reform criminal law. He was allowed to do it for India but not for England, at great cost in rationality. Precedents and Statutes without a code to synthesize them will be difficult to navigate. Lawyers will need to master a vast mass of scattered material. (If they don't, one will get judgements which contradict other judgements.) The legal educational system reflects and reinforces this: young lawyers do not work outwards from a set of broad coherent general principles, but acquire many detailed kinds of lore. Much of the education is in effect on the apprenticeship system, and this was even more true in earlier centuries. Young barristers quickly found and stuck to a speciality, at the expense of an overall grasp. Solicitors were better generalists, but did not until quite recently need a university education at all. The complicated specialisms of the law and the system of training danced around in a vicious circle.
It is time-consuming for lawyers to master a so much material: therefore expensive. Lawyers must be very good to stay on top of so much material: therefore they will cost a lot.

Again, Adversarial system much more expensive than the Civil Law system when much of the interrogation is left to the judge.
In short, it can be argued that from the point of view of society the English Legal system is wasteful in matches means (resources in time and money) to ends (justice): so, for society as a whole, the system is instrumentally irrational.
However, from the point of view of legal professionals it is a rational choice to keep the present system, because they have an economic stake in it. A simpler system requiring less knowledge of case law would provide less employment for them. A system which makes great calls on the time and expertise of lawyers tilts the balance of supply and demand in their favour

Material rationality also plays an interesting role in English law. We have noted that some decisions by juries and by exceptionally powerful judges tend towards material rationality as the depart from the rules of the legal came, i.e. formal rationality. However, there is an institutionalised example of material rationality: the early history of Equity Jurisdiction. In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth century the Lord Chancellor (a clergyman) is allowed to develop a court which does material justice when the Common Law is deemed unable to provide it for some reason. Eventually it changed its character, and became a new system of formal rationality, heavily rule-bound, as is clear from Dicken's Great Expectations. This process can be roughly assigned to the second half of the seventeenth century, though it was gradual.

CONCLUSION
Trying to sum up the analysis of the history of English Law in the light of the concepts developed in the first half of the essay, I would say that it has tended to be formally irrational at times, but precisely at those times when judges, Judges, Juries or Justices of the Peace are motivated by substantive/material rationality as they see it. It is instrumentally irrational from the point of view of people of modest means and possibly society as a totality, but instrumentally rational in providing for the legal profession.

In the following lecture we shall look at some of the other great legal systems of the world, then come back to the question: if the Common Law system is so irrational, why did it prove such a favourable framework for Capitalism?

LAW AND RATIONALITY II (CONTINUATION OF PREVIOUS LECTURE WITH SOME OVERLAP AT THE SEAMS)

LAW, PART II

Continuing the analysis of English Law:

Historians of English Law need to explain this paradox. It seems irrational in many ways. Some of this can be explained as a safety valve of substantive rationality which relieves the pressure on peoples sense of justice when formal procedures don't deliver just solutions. Hence Judges occasionally make new precedents with quasi-charismatic authority: e.g. Mansfield's decision that no-one on English land a slave. Hence juries sometimes acquit a man against the evidence because they think conviction would be just unfair. However, none of this justifies the huge complexity of the law and its cost in terms of the time of clever expensive lawyers who can sort out all the precedents.
Granted this irrationality, then, how was it that capitalism developed first in England? A rational predictable law would seem to be one of the preconditions that facilitates the development of capitalism.
The answer could be this. English law can deliver rational and predictable results if one can afford good enough lawyers. But the wealthy can do precisely that. They will have lawyers on retainer. This actually gives them an advantage in any legal dispute with anyone who does not have comparable financial resources. This may save them from much litigation. Potential opponents no they cannot afford even to start an action against them.
Common law is legitimated as justice for all, but some of its history can be explained differently at the level of motivation: by the interests of the wealthy and their wealthy lawyers. Since no-one said anything about history being fair, this may actually have helped Britain become for a time the most prosperous country in the world: at a price for many no doubt.

What fundamental rationality underpins the Common Law? The ideas of peace and justice, no doubt, but justice is understood in a particular way. Apart from punishing criminals, justice means the provision by the crown of means by which private persons (including institutions) can settle their disputes.

This seems pretty obvious, and the main interest may seem to lie in the means provided by the crown. However, even the basic postulate is not as obvious and universal as it may seem, as becomes apparent if one looks at classical Chinese Law.

CHINESE LAW OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
Here I have primarily used
Geoffrey MacCormack, The Spirit of traditional Chines law (Athens, Ga., 1996)
Wallace Johnson, The T'ang Code i, (Princeton, 1979
William C. Jones et al., The Great Qing Code (Oxford, 1994)
The fundamental rationality underpinning Chinese Law seems to be twofold. On the one hand, it is law seem from the perspective on an Emperor running a bureaucracy, rather than of private individuals with rights. The basic organisation follows the lines of the great administrative departments, rather than say: Civil v Criminal. This is not just bureaucracy, though. Imperial power was a value-saturated concept. The whole balance of nature depended on its proper application.
The second great principle is Confucianism, whose ethical principles (e.g. special respect for parents) flow through the system. This explains the great attention paid to family matters such as the relation between husband and wife or father and son.
Granted these values, Classical Chinese Law is highly rational. Features which look instrumentally irrational, such as the inclusion of practically unenforceable laws, turn out to be reasonable enough once one assumes that the law was supposed to give a symbolic reflection of the right order of things even when people could not be compelled to obey it. The Classical Chinese Law is designed to make a small number of rules generate solutions to innumerable concretes, using the principle of analogy to group similar cases. The methods of investigation are rational though they were probably harsh in practice. Torture is permitted, admittedly, but it is circumscribed by limits. Punishments are graded with tremendous care. There was a review board and full dossiers with depositions etc. Placed before it.

COMPARISON WITH COMMON LAW
A striking contrast is the vastly greater role of ethical considerations in Chinese Classical Law. It is designed to produce a right and ethically good order of society. Common Law on the other hand contents itself with preventing people from harming one another, and providing rules with which individuals can resolve their conflicts, especially about the contracts they have made with each other. Chinese law did not have much about that kind of conflict resolution, which was probably seen as administration, and dealt with at a lower level, but it does try to promote a good social world.

WHICH IS UNUSUAL IN HUMAN HISTORY?
Common Law is in this respect like the Roman Law tradition as codified by Justinian in the sixth century spread throughout Europe and the world after its rediscovery in Europe in the twelfth century.
On the other hand both these legal systems look a bit unusual in a broad world historical perspective. Islamic Law, Hindu Law, and the Law of Greek City States, notably, all try to make people good. They are ethically 'thick'. The Common Law is ethically 'thin': not unethical, but very modest in its ethical aims, which are essentially negative.

HOW TO EXPLAIN THIS?
Possibly as follows. The starting point for the influence of both Common Law and Roman Law in the modern world was the second half of the twelfth century in Western Europe. This was just at the moment when the religious law of the Western Church - Canon Law - was being turned into a coherent system. It dealt with the clergy but also with marriage and other matters with a religious aspect. It had its own courts, a firm administrative backbone, and a procedural system derived from Roman Law. Beyond it lay a quasi-legal system of penance. The existence of these systems of sacred law allowed a division of labour in which secular law could minimise ethical and religious preoccupations because they were dealt with by Canon Law and the penitential system. Common Law and other kinds of secular law could be 'ethically thin'. However, by the nineteenth century Canon Law had ceased to be a force except force in public life, so the secular laws and their minimalist ethics were left standing alone.

- Sidgwick, H, Outlines of the History of Ethics (sixth enlarged edn., 1967)

Ethical Systems
For the sociological historian Max Weber it is enough to say that rational action is a mixture of value and instrumentality. When writing with his academic hat on he does not try to say where the line between them ought to be drawn. Professional philosophers studying Ethics do just that, and they draw the line in different places. Here are some examples.
~ In Aristotle and Aquinas there is plenty of room for instrumental rationality within the framework of value ethics. In Thomas Aquinas, the distinction between primary and secondary natural laws leaves room for instrumental calculation: should the secondary natural laws apply in a particular case or in particular circumstances? This distinction enables him to solve the problem of bigamy in the Old Testament: see Supplement to Summa Theologica Question 65 Article 2.
~ Machiavelli in effects breaks up the assumed link between political value and ethical value. His concept of virtù is non-ethical.
~ Kant (late 18th century) also tends to maximise value rationality, though his yardstick of it is rather different. He proposes rational principles like the following: always act on principles which could be formulated as a universal moral law; always use other people as means rather than as ends. How would these abstract formulae become values to an individual? Presumably they would take the form of duty and unselfishness. I knew a famous historian who seemed to think that every decision about the syllabus involved a universal moral law, and quite a lot of people think that all moral action must be unselfish.
~ Hume (18th C) and A.J. Ayer (20th C) try to eliminate value rationality altogether.
~ Jeremy Bentham sees pleasure and the absence of pain as the values or something akin to them. Everything else is instrumental calculation.
~ For G. E. Moore, basic ethical values are intuitive, everything else is instrumental calculation.


These various systems belong to the history of theorising about values rather than to the history of values as such. The 'instrumental rationality/value rationality' distinction can clarify one's mind when interpreting different systems of thought and can draw attention to unexpected similarities. For instance, there is a surprising parallel between Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the twentieth. Both distinguish sharply between fundamental ethical goods and other ethical rules that turn out to be dependent on the fundamental ones and not applicable in all circumstances and ages of history. Since this course is an attempt to apply theory rather than give a history of it, however, the relevance of such philosophers is a little indirect and secondary. However, philosophical theories often acquire sociological influence. They can take root in the experience of followers, become concrete, and fit themeslves into a complex grid of beliefs, thus becoming values, and not just theories about values.
Here are four types of ethical systems which have become concrete values in social life and causal forces in history.

I. THE CATHOLIC/JEWISH TYPE
This type of system assumes that there are basic ethical principles which are always binding, but many others which are derivative and not quite always binding. Thus ther is much room for instrumental calculation. These may take the form of weighing the lesser of two non-moral evils, of deciding whether an evil may be passively permitted for the sake of a greater good, or of suspending secondary ethical rules when they fail to implement the primary ones. All this involves much calculation of consequences. The values provide general guidelines, but often the concrete answer has to be reached by instrumental reasoning.
Thus in Jewish thought monogamy is a good but not a primary value, so not always obligatory. ~ It is crucial in medieval Canon Law: instrumental calculation in a value framework lies behind the Dispensation system. - Understanding the relation of instrumental and value rationality explains apparent inconsistencies: as between the freedom in granting Dispensations and the Rigidity about annulments in late medieval canon law. Luther's entirely different standpoint made the whole system incomprehensible to him.
~ Similarly Pope John XXII was almost certainly influenced by this line of thought when he declared that specific poverty questions in the Franciscan Order must be left to the superiors in the order, because no general rules could be given to cover all such cases.
~ In the casuistry that developed in Catholicism, especially from the early modern period, instrumental rationality plays an important part in discussion of subjects as when it is permitted to incur the danger of sinning, or when a lesser (non moral) evil may be chosen.

II. ABSOLUTE ETHICAL VALUES DERIVED FROM SACRED TEXTS
~ In Reformation Protestant thought some writers try build a Christian ethics on the Bible alone. This tends to drive out instrumental rationality and leave only a value rationality based on Scripture. Lambert Daneau (1530-95) may have started this strand of thought. Not all protestant thinkers went with him. Others like Keckermann remained Aristotelian. Still, the Bible alone approach in very influential, not least on England. ~ This approach is quite similar to that of Islam, where law and morality are a continuum and where the law in principle does not allow exceptions and does not require supplementary human religious legislation. (This is surely an oversimplication but still there is a major difference with Jewish and Catholic ethics.) ~ The Hindu 'Dharma' ethics is of fundamentally the same sort.

III. POWER VALUE SYSTEMS
However Hinduism does have room for a completely different value system, Arthasastra, which comes close to Realpolitik. It exists side by side with Dharmasastra, without really affecting eachother.
These system has much in common with 'Reason of State' as developed in the West: the interests of the state as a value which overrides moral values. These actions are instrumental, but they serve the state, their value framework.
It was very influential in nineteenth-century Germany.

IV. INDIVIDUALITY + EMOTIVISM + UTILITARIANISM
This is the dominant ethical system of our own time in the West, but its roots go back to the eighteenth century at least. Philosophers like Hume and Ayer have fed the emotivism stream, Bentham and Mill the utilitarianism stream. The Individualism stream has deeper roots.
This is a very self-consistent system, and is the basis of rational choice theory among other things (to come back to theory), but oddly enough a rational choice type analysis of it can raise problems to do with social good, on the one hand, and self-destructive behaviour on the other.

- Weber, M., Economy and Society, transl. Roth & Wittich, vol. 2, p. 956 ff.

- Weber, M., Economy and Society, transl. Roth & Wittich, vol. 2, p. 956 ff.

- Weber, M., Economy and Society, transl. Roth & Wittich, vol. 2, p. 956 ff.

- Ekelund, Robert B., et al., Sacred Trust. The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford, 1996)

30Jan Administration as a World Historical Problem
THE BUREAUCRACIES OF WORLD HISTORY
# According to Weber the quantitatively greatest bureaucracies of world history are: i. Egypt at the time of the New Kingdom;
ii. the late Roman empire, especially from Diocletian and on into the Byzantine period;
iii. the Roman Catholic Church, especially from the end of the 13th Century;
iv. China from period of Shi-hoang-ti (Shi-Hwangti) on;
v. the modern European state;
vi. the modern Capitalist enterprise
IDEAL TYPE OF BUREAUCRACY
# W. develops the following ideal type of bureaucracy: - but note that not all the bureaucracies listed above have all these features. an ideal type is not a description but an aid to analysis.

p. 559: The specific ways in which modern bureaucracy functions can be expressed in the following ways:
I. In principle, spheres of competence are established by rules: laws or administrative regulations. This means that: 1. There is is a firm differentiation between the routine functions which are required as official duties for the structure which is ruled bureaucratically.; - The powers of command which are needed for the fulfilment of these duties are also firmly differentiated , and firm limits are set to them with respect to the means of compulsion attached to them (whether the compulsion is of a physical, sacral, or some other kind); 3. Planned provision is made for the regular and continual fulfilment of the duties thus distributed and for the exercise of the corresponding rights through the appointment of persons with a qualification, one governed by a general regulation.
II. In principle, there is a hierarchy of offices and appeals up the system...
(p. 560)...
III. Carrying out of official duties depends in modern times on written records, which are preserved in the original in draft form, an on a staff of lower officials and clerks of all kinds. The officials who together constitute an administrative body, with the material apparatus and records that belong to it, make up an 'office'... The modern administrative body draws a fundamental distinction between the Office and the Home. [I would add, the office should stay in one place, and the people who deal with it should have no difficulty in contacting the relevant officials.]
IV. The execution of official duties, at least when they are specialists - and this is the specifically modern thing - normally presuppose a thorough vocational training.
V. With fully developed bureaucratic office, official activity monopolizes the working time of the bureaucratic official, notwithstanding the fact, that the amount of time he is obliged to devote to office work can be firmly fixed. This only became the normal case with public and business bureaucratic offices after a long period of evolution. In earlier times it was, on the contrary, normal in all cases for business to be dealt with alongside official duties.
VI. The official duties are executed by bureaucrats according to general, more or less fixed and more or less exhaustive rules, rules which can be learned. The mastery of these rules thus represents a particular skill (according to the particular case: Legal Knowledge, Administrative Knowledge, Accountancy) possessed by the burueacrat....

(4th edn., p. 559)
Additional points
# Bureaucratic office is a career (Beruf)
# Bureaucrat seeks and gets a particular kind of social status
# Bureaucrat is appointed, not elected
# Job is for life
# Payment is in money, and there is a pension
# Developed money economy is presupposed

# 'The bureaucratic State …brings the whole cost of administering the State under its budget, and equips the subordinate authorities with the money they need for current expenditure, while regulating and controlling the way in which they use this money.' Weber, W& W., 575
'DEVIATIONS' FROM THE IDEAL TYPE
# Some ways of deviating from the ideal type
~ System of unpaid or part-paid part-timers: university departmental offices are an example close at hand
~ Remuneration in some other form than salary: e.g. in kind, in opportunities for contracts or to get patronage
~ No clear division of labour between administrators, and it is not clear who is in charge of whom
~ There are no clear rules: e.g., salaries fixed by boss's free decision, no clear criteria for appointments or promotion, different people do same task in quite different ways (e.g., some keep records of decisions, others do not.)
~ Offices held as if private property
BUREAUCRACY AND RATIONALITY
Bureaucracy is a form of instrumental rationality often coloured by a value rationality. The value rationality is the conviction that society 'normally' functions/ should function according to a finite system of rules that can be stated and learned. (For this value rationality of bureaucracy see the good article by Richard A. Hilbert, 'Bureaucracy as Belief, Rationalization as Repair: Max Weber in a Post-Functionalist Age', in Sociological Theory, 5 (1987), 70-86) . It may also be underpinned in a looser way by acceptance various different values that legitimate the rulers it serves: divine right, democratically elected government; competition in a free market.
# We tend to think of bureaucracy as a drag on efficiency: unnecessary record keeping, transparency to establish external inspectors, etc. There is a certain truth in this, but it is probably more wrong than right. At most one could make the following generalisation: 'a very high degree of bureaucratic transparency makes a good institution less efficient, but a bad institution more efficient'.
# However, bureaucracy is on the whole an instrument of incredible power, and most of the achievements of the modern state and the modern economy would be unthinkable without it. Note the achievements are evil as well as good. Arguably, however, a smoothly-running bureaucracy tends vastly to enhance the instrumental rationality of the system, whether or not one likes the values that inform the system, since:
~ the routine and the rules of bureaucracy enable the system to deal with vastly more business (there is no need to make ad hoc decisions)
~ people have specialised tasks, on which they can focus, so that they get more done and make better-informed judgements
~ nor do they get in each other's way, as happens without a division of labour
~ everyone knows the hierarchy of power, and whom they have to please
~ efficiency at the defined task, rather than personality etc., is the primary way to get ahead
~ salary symbolises and simultaneously promotes efficiency
~ status as well as money depend on competence in executing assigned tasks
~ dependence on salary and pension prevent resistence to 'line managers'
~ THE EXPLANATIONS OF THE RISE OF BUREAUCRACY often come down to the advantages offered by greater efficiency, so that the burden of explanation can be shifted back to the problem of why bureaucracy does not evolve in some situations and societies. Here the answers may be the lack of basic technologies like literacy, paper, or the kind of economy that can support bureaucracy; or in the case of small societies the answer may be that an ethos and personal relations and favours can get the job done.

Explanations of bureaucracy tend to be 'top downwards': it is in the interests of the regime to bureaucratise, for efficiency and perhaps also greater control of subordinates. A very interesting 'bottom upwards' explanation has been proposed by John Markoff, 'Governmental Bureaucratization: General Processes and an Anomalous Case' in Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975), 479-503
~ EFFECTS OF BUREAUCRACY, apart from efficiency, could include the following law: insofar as bureaucracy is coloured by the values described above, it will lead either to injustice or to inconsistency

BUREAUCRACY: SECOND LECTURE

Administration as a World-Historical Phenomenon: lecture 2
China circa 1000 A.D. shows that something close to Weber's ideal type of rational bureaucracy in existence nearly a millenium before it became general in the West.
Chinese Administration: page references unless otherwise stated to E. A. Kracke, Civil Service in Early Sung China 960-1067 (1953)
Entrance examination: see e.g. I. Miyazaki, China's Examination Hell. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China (transl. 1976). Examination system first introduced in the 6th century C.E., and comes to maturity in the 10th century C.E. (e.g. names of candidates covered for the first time in a top examination in 962). Early 18th century: novel about the examination class (The Scholars).
Division of labour: 'The administrative authority was divided broadly into three spheres: economic, military, and ordinary civil administration' (38) 'The organization of the Finance Commission varied during the early years of the dynasty. Its duties were usually divided among three offices: the Office of Salt and Iron, the Office of Funds, and the Office of the Census' (39) 'The judicial intendants supervised the judicial and penal administration within their circuits, which were identical with those of the fiscal intendants. First established for a short time in 991 as subordinates of the fiscal intendants, they were re-established with a more independent status in 1007. For a time they also held the duty of promoting agricultural development, with the concurrent title of agricultural intendant.' (51). Local government Subprefect 'assumed responsibility for the general welfare of the population under his jurisdiction. His duties included not only cae for public safety, justice, education, taxation, and the command of a local garrison contingent, but concern with the moral and economic well-being of the community as well' (47) Local government supervised by 'Circuit Intendants' (50)

Salary: in money, with 'allowances of clothing and grain, according to a fixed schedule varying by rank and circumstances of employment'
Rules: 'the qualifications for the holding of a given office were in considerable degree specified by rules' (84) 'the official normally had no reason to fear demotion or dismissal without formal action and without cause' (84)
Hierarchy and Promotion 'the rules of appointment were formulated so as to give the official some confidence in his prospect of advancement. At the same time, they sought to stimulate him to greater effort by basing his advancement partly on his achievement.' (84) Criteria for advancement included 'use of merit ratings, examinations for promotion' (84-5) 'Each promotion was preceded by a careful case review, in which the appropriate bureau considered all information on the candidate's character and performance. If an official believed that he had fulfilled the requirements for promotion, he might request an action on his case.' (p 87)
Retirement at 70 'permitted and made increasingly mandatory' with benefits: 'gift of money or sillk', permission 'to nominate son or grandson for office' (they would be looked after), 'promotion in titular office' with 'retirement pension half or all the salary for the new office, in money and grain' (p. 83)

Honoratiores: 'Many of the duties of local administration in the rural areas were carried out…by local functionaries who served without pay and who undertook such tasks as tax assessment, police duties, the management of storehouses, local public works, and the settlement of minor litigations'. (47) But these local gentry were likely to be people who had passed examinations but not entered government service for one reason or another.

Records 'The several offices at the capital which, as we have seen, divided the jurisdiction over appointment and promotion of officials, maintained registers containing relevant information on all civil servants. These registers contained the information derived from the annual merit ratings, and no doubt information from less formal reports…'
Thus the classical Chinese Civil Service comes quite close to Weber's ideal type of a bureaucracy.

Why did it come into being? To implement the emperor's role as director of a balance Confucian society, but above all to sideline the aristocracy. And this can be seen as a general motive for the creation of bureaucracy's which are staffed by the literate and where there is intellectual competition to enter. Perhaps the creation of the modern English and French civil services can be explained in similar terms. So it becomes worth asking why some bureaucracy's don't go all the way and become more like the Chinese or the modern Western bureaucracies?

Neither the medieval Church nor the relatively sophisticated royal government of medieval England achieved anything like the bureaucratic systems of classical China or the modern west.
ENGLISH ROYAL BUREAUCRACY
This had many of the features of the ideal type, but no examinations or rational scheme of promotion. Above all, it never came near to neutralising the aristocracy's influence on English life, which continued to be huge up until the mid-nineteenth century.
PAPAL BUREAUCRACY
The selection process for membership of the Roman Rota (central judicial tribunal) from the later 13th century has some of the characteristics of an examination: an approximation to the Chinese of modern approach. Academic attainment might help get promotion. Record keeping is quite sophisticated. However in other respects does not match the ideal type, and it can be regarded that in precisely these respects it is instrumentally less rational: i.e., inefficient in matching ends and means together. Note that this is an 'other things being equal' proposition.
# There was no question of bringing the cost of administering the Church as a whole under its budget. Local judges had entire budgetary independence. Popes had to get money in other. #Account keeping: budget not balanced; income not sorted out according to categories as under Avignon papacy; with outgoings, different kinds of coins not converted into common currency.
# Higher admin.: paid in kind (raw food and drink) at great expense.
# The Papal Chancery &c.: no office or fixed place of work: clients had to make rendezvous with the bureaucrat they were dealing with.
# There was no admin. hierarchy; paid by piece work. The absence of hierarchy of authority and income would remove the incentives listed above.
#Itinerancy: Disruptive to the administration; put papacy to some extent in power of host towns; very costly. Must have been inconvenient for people seeking papal justice. Only in the fourteenth century did the government settle down in one place: Avignon.
#Procedure: no clear rules about how summary summary procedure could be.
#Late Middle Ages: sale of offices




Why?
The crucial fact is that the central administration had no direct access to most of the wealth of the Church, which belonged to a multitude of individual institutions: bishoprics, parishes, monasteries, and other foundations of many sorts. The papacy made its life difficult by primitive accounting and methods of paying officials in kind, but still, all its methods of generating revenue ran into difficulties of one sort or another: papal state; provisions; taxes on the clergy.

Medieval instrumental rationality
The interesting thing about papal administration in a world historical perspective is the ingenious systems devised from the 13th century on to meet the demand for its judgements: the 'audience of contradicted letters' and judges delegate.
It is hard to think of any other judicial administration that displayed such elegant instrumental rationality in solving the problem of exercising power at a distance with minimal resources. Contrast for instance the role of the Emperor in the Roman World.

- Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

CAPITALISM AND RATIONALITY
CAPITALISM IN CLASSICAL CHINA
Capitalism in the sense of wealth and the pursuit of profit is common in world history. It is not a peculiarity of the modern West. Thus for example in China around about the first millenium (in an earlier lecture I analysed the Civil Service of this period). 'whole districts came to specialize in textile production….There was a corresponding revolution in water transportation, the perfection of a national network of canals and rivers, with a great expansion of commercial traffic…. Large parts of the countryside were "industrialized"… With the increasingly specialized division of labour came a finanacial revolution…' (R. Collins, Weberian Social Theory, pp. 61-2, following Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past).
Why did Chinese Capitalism not develop further, and anticipate the economic transformation of the West? The lack of a proper private law system may be a reason. In China, all law was public law or administrative law, codified from the perspective of the emperor and his officials running the country, not much interested in the resolution of disputes between private individuals. 'In the seventeenth century one of the greatest of Chinese rulers, the Emperor K'ang Hsi, went so far as to declare that "lawsuits would tend to increase to a frightful amount, if people were not afraid of the tribunals, and if they felt confident of always finding in them ready and perfect justice. . . . contests would then be interminable, and half the Empire would not suffice to settle the lawsuits of the other half. I desire therefore that those who have recourse to the tribunals should be treated without any pity, and in such a manner that they shall be disgusted with law, and tremble to appear before a magistrate."' (H. McAleavy, in J. D. M. Derrett, An Introduction to Legal Systems (London, 1968)
The dominant role of clans was also an obstacle. Since they ran private obligations, instead of the state, there is a connection here with the point about law.
This Chinese capitalism involved a considerable degree of rational calculation, especially on the part of Buddhist monks, but more common still is capitalism where a risk-taking speculative instinct and or reliance on government contracts and monopolies is the rule: e.g. the Capitalism of the Roman World.

TWO KINDS OF CAPITALISM
So at this point it is useful to define Capitalism or rather Capitalisms. Call Capitalism the dedicated pursuit of profit by people with a lot of wealth to invest. Distinguish state-contract capitalism, gambler capitalism, and rational capitalism. In the last, the profits are made by careful calculation. Marx's concept of industrial capitalism is useful: the capitalists own the means of production (money, and consequently factory plant etc.), and there is a formally free labour market (as opposed to slavery or rights over serfs). As a shorthand, 'modern western capitalism' refers to the combination of separation of labour from ownership, 'free' contracts between workers and capitalist enterprises, and rational calculation.
The 'rational calculation' element is the aspect that concerns us here. Though found elsewhere (in China, notably, as we saw), it is taken very far in the West. Tracing its history is a good opportunity to deploy some of the concepts and distinctions discussed in previous lectures.


MEDIEVAL CAPITALISM

Monasteries
Rational calculation of production and income becomes important in monasteries in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
It is particularly highly developed in the Cistercian Order, which produced wool for the international market, and at that level looks very capitalist indeed. Here the analogy with Buddhist monasteries in China is quite close.
So far we have been talking about instrumental rationality, but in the case of the Cistercians the instrumental rationality at the top end (distribution) was underpinned by a value rationality which fostered capitalism by accident. Cistercians valued work as a religious exercise. They were also very austere. Thus they produced much and spent little. In consequence the order grew rich. This is close to one of Weber's theses about Protestantism and Capitalism, as several scholars have noticed.
This capitalism differs from 'modern capitalism' at the labour level. Benedictine monasteries used peasants over whom they had legal rights; Cistercian production was in great part the work of lay brothers with religious motivation. All this is different from 'free contract' wage labour. In the Cistercian case the basis is value, not instrumental calculation.

Law
A crucial step for Western capitalism was the development of 'formal legal rationality': rules of law which made commercial calculation possible. Predictability is the key service that law can provide to capitalism. Here England was in the forefront. From the reign of Edward I, merchants were given a predictable law and the means to enforce debts, etc. For instance, the Statute of Merchants of 1285 extended the system of making official written records of debts and giving merchants access to these records [cf. Powicke, Thirteenth Century, p. 625]. It is true that the Common Law became an expensive form of justice, with irrational aspects, but commercial law was rational and predictable if you could afford good lawyers.

Papacy
The papacy also provided some protection, and thus the possibility of prediction and calculability, to Italian merchants in England.

Italian Merchants
Italian merchants created a refined instrumental rationality of international trade and finance. Their book-keeping techniques enabled them to tell which parts of their business were subsidizing other parts (this is what double-entry book keeping is for). Credit facilitated a complicated international trading network.. It was instrumentally more rational to conduct operations by entries in books rather than by lugging coins around. They ran their businesses in much the same way as merchant banks do now, except that they didn't have electronic communication or a proper stock exchange.

Values
According to the Weber thesis, religious values should have obstructed these developments. Here Weber has been overtaken, notably thanks to Raymond de Roover. 'The formula "In the name of God and of profit" does not date from the Renaissance but goes back at least to the age of Aquinas, since it appears in an account book of 1253. The Church's ban against usury did not arrest the development of banking; nevertheles, it affected this development very profoundly, because the bankers managed to evade the ban - in a licit way - by operating on the exchange instead of lending outright.' ('The Scholastic Attitude toward Trade and Entrepreneurship', in Business, banking and economic thought in late medieval and early modern Europe (1974), p. 345).

PROTESTANTISM AND CAPITALISM
Nevertheless Protestant values probably did further the development of Capitalism, in several ways:
~ For there are several different 'Protestantism and Capitalism' theses in Weber, not all involving predestinationIn the case of sects like the Quakers, you could not be a member at all unless you met high standards of morality. This included commercial morality: honesty and straight dealing. The medieval Church demanded that too, but since everyone was a member of the Church there was a wide spectrum of virtue and vice. If a Q uaker lost the esteem of fellow Quakers, he might find himself out of his religion. Membership of the sect provides a strong incentive not to forfeit everything by bad behaviour (though if the sect won over a whole society that would cease to work.) Now most capitalism can be illuminated by the 'Shaft/Share' game. If you aren't sure the others will share, it is in your interest to shaft. If supplementary values make you confident that someone will 'share', i.e. behave ethically, you will chose to do business with that person.
~ The combination of devotion to work in the world with austerity does work for many protestants, just as for the Cistercians.
~ There may be something in the view that virtue 'in the world' was relativised in the Catholicism by the still higher value attached to the religious (monastic) life. For protestants, there was no 'vocation' other than a vocation to 'virtue in the world'. Still, this argument can't be pushed too far. One might say that commercial virtue in Puritanism was relativised by the still higher value attached to sexual morality.
~ Weber's ideas about Predestination and Predestination - one needed to be successful to prove to oneself that one belonged to the elect - are not implausible.
~ Note however that there is a 'rationality gap' in this syndrome. The motivation is to think one is predestined for salvation. The gloss on one's own behaviour is that one is successful because one is chosen, not chosen because one is successful. Nevertheless, in reality it is the need to feel chosen that makes one work for success: so an element of self-deception, and consequently of irrationality, is involved.

ENGLAND
Why did industrial capitalism develop first in England? Libraries have been written on the question but I would foreground the following:
~ The values of the landed aristocracy permitted interest in agricultural profit: some contrast with France here.
~ The legal system allowed for rational calculation. Note especially the patent law of 1623, the first of the modern kind in Europe.
~ Rational calculation was also permitted by the relatively stable political situation
~ There was a ready labour market because of primogeniture on the land and the workhouse system which was so unattractive as to encourage people to fit in with factory life as the better alternative
* * *
ANALYSIS
THERE IS AN IRRATIONAL CAPITALISM WHICH IS COMMON IN HISTORY, BUT RATIONAL CAPITALISM DEVELOPED FIRST IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST
INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY
Rational capitalism is a form of instrumental rationality compatible with many different value systems: Protestantism, Catholicism, Liberal agnosticism, Communism in China
It is heavily dependent on a legal order which permits rational calculation
LAW AND VALUE
The Common Law and Civil Law traditions of the West both do that, but Chinese Law and Islamic Law do not.
NON-LEGAL VALUES
Other values may also be an obstacle to the development: clans in China, caste in India
The real question should not be: 'Why did rational capitalism develop first in the west?', but: 'What prevented it developing elsewhere?', and value rationality is crucial for answering that question.

MOTIVATION AND LEGITIMATION: THE RATIONALITY GAP AND RATIONALITY FISSURES
QUENTIN SKINNER AND TAKING PRETEXTS SERIOUSLY
Skinner argues that it does not matter if politicians are insincere, because they pay a penalty if their behaviour is inconsistent with their ideological professions: so the behaviour has to conform to the ideology. This is a very clever model but of course it is not intended to be universally applicable.
A CASE STUDY: The Opium War 1839-42
In the mid-nineteenth century the British Empire's balance of foreign trade depended on export of opium from India to China. The government was systematically involved in opium production in India.
1837: Palmerstone told the Superintendent of Trade 'to be... very careful not to assume a greater degree of authority over British subjects than you in fact possess': making it clear that he should not try to stop the opium trade.
1839: Commissioner Lin at Canton appealed to the foreigners to stop the opium trade, already illegal and continued by smuggling accompanied in some cases by violence. When they didn't, he had them surrounded until they gave up the stores of opium, which he destroyed.
The British opium traders use large amounts of money and good political connections to persuade the government and public opinion that an outrage has taken place: they wanted compensation as well as to continue selling opium. In 1839 Matheson wrote to Jardine that you may find it expedient to secure, at a high price, the services of some leading newspaper' (p. 146)

LEGITIMATION: At a parliamentary debate in 1840 the war was legitimated as necessary after the Chinese had 'confined our innocent countrymen, and insulted the Sovereign the presence of her representatives' (p. 159). One M.P. argued that Christianity could be introduced to China 'solely through the medium of commercial agency', and for this reason negotiations should be supported by 'physical powers' (p.160). Palmerstone argued that the Chinese were only worried about their own balance of payments: they wanted to produce their own opium rather than import it. Anyway, if India stopped producing opium and China did likewise the opium would be produced in places like Turkey and Americans would take over the opium trade. (The young Gladstone argued that the war was immoral - his sister was an opium addict - but no-one was impressed.)

MOTIVATION: The influence of the opium lobby on Palmerstone can be documented. The conservative opposition criticised the government's handling of the crisis but did not oppose an expeditionary force: why? Firstly, to win a debate they needed the radical M.P.'s to defect from the whigs for the vote. The radicals were free traders. The last thing they wanted was suppression of the opium trade. (This possibly on value grounds, rather than out of pure self-interest.) Also the conservatives were aware of the economic importance of the trade: suppose they won the vote and got into office, would they want to create a balance of payments crisis?
RATIONALITY GAP: The British had caused the crisis by producing opium on a massive scale, and conniving in the smuggling or at least making no effort to stop it. The Chinese reaction was hardly disproportionate. Palmerstone's allegations about the Chinese motives were objectively groundless. The emperor had been persuaded after a highly rational debate between officials that opium should not be legalised. Commissioner Lin sincerely tried to stop it, arranging treatment for addicts. There was no question of his wanting to substitute Chinese opium production.
The British rationale for war was rational: conscious, calculated, well presented and thought out, but there was a gap between the arguments and the motivation actual pattern of events.
In Matheson's 1836 treatise British Trade with China he doesn't even mention opium, (p.140). Jardine said in 1839 that 'it is the Chines officers who smuggle and who connive at and encourage smuggling; not we' (p. 190). We know from the Jardine Mattheson correspondence how different the real situation was.
A 'rationality gap' involves lying but there is more to be said about it than than. It opens out when the legitimation is rational in itself, and the motivation is also rational, but the two are not compatible. This can be hard to detect. The usual sign is a mismatch between behaviour and the reasons given for it. That can happen with irrational behaviour too. However, even when there is such a mismatch, the historian's first task is to look for a rational motivation. Only when that fails does one look for irrational causes of behaviour of one sort or another.
Note: Rationality gaps can be plugged by propaganda: money and manipulation.

THE MIDDLE AGES
The medieval ruling class legitimised its holdings of wealth in land by the 'Three Orders' doctrine and by Chivalric ideals. In the eleventh century there was not a n impossibly large rationality gap between social realities and the legitimation. Knights behaved badly as humans do, but there was no fundamental incompatibility between legitimation and social structure. Arguably, by the fourteenth century a large rationality gap had opened out.
Rationality gaps may be discerned most easily in high-level events history. Shortly before the 100 Years War started in the fourteenth century Philip VI uses a crusading tax to assemble a fleet in the channel. His preparations for war against England may be regarded as rational, the Crusade may have its value rationality, but there is a mismatch between the two.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
On 5 Jan 1918 Lloyd George spoke to a trade union conference. Among other things he wanted 'to impress the British public withthe reasonableness of Britain's case and so encourage them to make greater sacrifices', and to reassure Britain's allies (p. 203) He discussed the fate of Germany's colonies after the war, claiming that 'the primary consideration should be the welfare of their indigenous peoples through the establishment of administrations which were acceptable to them and which would prevent their exploitation by European capitalists' (p.204). On the previous day a telegram had been sent to Dominion governments 'cautioning them not to take the Prime Minister's words at their face value. The security of the empire meant tha t Britain intended to retain Germany's colonies, but "owing to divergence amongst Allies it has not been possible to secure acceptance of this view"' (p. 204)
LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN
In late twentieth century Britain, the theory that government should plan and intervene a lot through a large civil service is rational, and so is the argument that government should not interfere. However, redefinition of government funded offices as 'private' bodies (QUANGOS etc.) in order to give the appearance of reduced government betrays a rationality gap.
In the late twentieth century Conservative then Labour governments started to try to argue that they were not responsible for such matters as the functioning of the Railway network.. Such decisions had been devolved to other bodies. However, the historian can discern that some of these arguments were fictional: Cf. I. McLean, Rational Choice and British Politics (Oxford, 2001) p. 223.
Not for me to say whether Margaret Thatcher's policies were right or wrong. However, when she said 'There is no alternative', one senses a rationality gap. Not long after her T.I.N.A. speech '364 economists, including at least one future Nobel Prize winner… wrote to The Times expressing grave concern about the Thatcher government's economic policies, and offering alternatives.' (McLean, 225).
RANDOM EXAMPLES
The argument about the right to own arms for self-defence may be right or wrong, but it is rational. However, a rationality gap opens out when the right extends to types of weapons that go far beyond any need for self defence.
Arguably, there is a rationality gap between the common theory and the common practice of democracy

RATIONALITY FISSURES
A rationality gap is a special form of contradiction: it is a contradiction between ideas in action and ideas professed. One can also discern contradictions within a given set of ideas professed. Call this a rationality fissure.
Such contradictions may arise from the effort to unite ideas which are essentially heterogeneous (= of quite different character and origins). In Hinduism, there is perhaps a rationality fissure in the explanation of why cows are killed in the Vedas, though cow killing is strictly forbidden today.
Rationality fissures are tricky ground (no pun intended) because intellectual insight can sometimes reconcile contradictions quite successfully. It can be argued that Aquinas does this with Aristotle and Christianity: e.g. on Humility.
A final point: rationality gaps should be distinguished from irrationality, though they may be mixed up in practice. Racism is an example. Apartheid shows a rationality gap: The South African 'Separate but Equal' doctrine was belied by arrangements on the ground. Other racism may be the result of complex self-deception: turning economic interest into a 'functional prejudice' by the alchemy of self-deception. This really belongs with the topics treated in the next lecture.
Ultimately, the question of whether there is a Rationality gap is empirical: an open field for historians. The history of the British empire, for instance, is an excellent subject for this kind of investigation, which could draw together the kind of theory you get on the course and the kind you get from my colleague Catherine Hall.

- Shiller, Robert, Irrational Exuberance

- Nirenberg, D., Communities of Violence. Persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996)

- Given, James Buchanan, Inquisition and medieval society power, discipline and resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, N.Y., London Cornell University Press, 1997)

- Briggs, R., Witches and Neighbours. The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1996)

- Bartlett, R., Trial by Fire and Water. The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986)

- M. Weber, Economy and Society, Part II, ch. ii, 2, Wittich & Roth transl. pp. 341-42

IRRATIONALITY I
TWO UNCONVINCING EXAMPLES
Irrationality is a concept to be used with care. Some explanations that use pile speculation on guesswork. Two examples. # P. Loewenberg, 'The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort', American Historical Review, 76 (1971), pp. 1475-1502. Loewenberg's starting point is the decline in the quality and quantity of breast feeding during the first world war. Then: fathers were absent, mothers were in war work. There was hunger. The father returned and proved incapable of protecting the family against inflation. If a mother's love is not forthcoming, the child feels it must be evil, because rejected. The child projects its feeling of evil onto the world. Then there is glee at the absence of the rival father (remember that Oedipus killed his father). The result is repression of the feeling and overcompensation: so idealisation and adoration (reinforcing infantile homosexual tendencies) of the idealised father figure Hitler. What can one say? Too much ungrounded speculation. To much dependence on Freud. Only remotely convincing if the Freudian system axiomatic. Not enough if Freud a genius with insights mixed with mistakes: Loewenberg's argument presupposes adherence in detail.
Another example of excessive speculation to my mind is Dyan Elliot Fallen Bodies. Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999). She thinks that clerical celibacy in the Middle Ages led to repression, which 'in turn, fosters a turbulent unconscious, in which favourable conditions prevail for a solidification of women's association with the diabolical realm.' Freud at his best was very subtle. Elliott's version of Freud is pretty unsubtle, though her rhetorical devices are not. The assumption that sexual abstinence necessarily leads to neurosis is unproven (though it is Freudian). Her explanation of the rise of witch persecution seems wild by comparison with the sober and to my mind convincing accounts by Kieckhefer or Brian Levack.

A CONVINCING CASE OF IRRATIONALITY ANALYSIS
However, bad Freudianism should not drive out intelligent Freudianism. Lyndal Roper's Oedipus and the Devil (London 1994) does contain a lot of speculation, but it is subtle and serious, above all, starts from concrete cases where it is hard to find explanations without the help of psychoanalysis. Look at the story with which she starts her book. 'In 1686, Appolonia Mayr, a jilted servantwoman, confessed that she had murdered her newborn baby. The Devil had promised that if she killed her child, her lover would marry her….Describing the birth and murder, she said "The Evil Spirit left her no peace. It was only a moment, the Devil touched it [the child] as if he were a midwife, it happened quite quckly that the child came out. She strangled it immediately with the hand…" Then Appolonia walked on. "…The Devil did not go with her, but remained staying by the child…"' (p. 1) She had started the investigation going: she had gone to the Franciscans at Augsburg some months after the death to ask for a baptismal certificate for the child. 'There is a suicidal desperation in her attempts to obtain the piece of paper'. (p.2) Rational explanations of her behaviour do not work, so one must look further.





PRINCIPLES OF RATIONALITY ANALYSIS
So here are some principles of method:
# Irrationality should be a fall back explanation. Often the reasons that people give for their behaviour explain it adequately. ('Behaviour' is here shorthand for 'behaviour and thoughts'.) When they fall short of adequacy, one looks beyond them.
# First one looks for a rational motivation hiding beneath the inadequate justification. When such a motivation can be found, and when there is a miss-match between it and the justification, we have a rationality gap: no irrationality as such, just a logical contradiction between what is claimed and what is done.
# If an adequate rational explanation can't be found at the level of motivation either, then one looks for the irrational.
# The behaviour may not be wholly irrational. One looks for a disproportion between reasons and behaviour: excessive force or insistence, etc. Luther's 'scruples' are a case in point.
# One must recognise that when one plays the irrationality card, one will only convince scholars who share one's general beliefs about irrationality. So the less theory, the more people one convinces.
# Irrational behaviour may have physical or chemical course: a brain tumour, a chemical imbalance leading say to manic depression.
SELF DECEPTION
Often however the 'irrationality' is a type of self deception. It takes many forms. ~ I would argue that Freudianism is about self deception. One can miss this because his 'hydraulic' metaphor (block the flow in one place and it squirts out in another) partly conceals it. See A C MacIntyre, the Unconcious. A Conceptual Analysis (London, 1958)
~ The witch persecutions can be explained in this light. One merely needs to gather together explanations implicit in a sensible synthesis like Levack's. I will develop this example in the next lecture, where I will discuss rationality in relation to persecution.
~ Class attitudes may be forms of self-deception. The 'haves' develop self-deception strategies to make them feel O.K. about doing so nicely. The have-nots develop 'didn't want that anyway' strategies: an explanation of the way some subcultures make people content to accept their lot.
~ Properly understood, Weber's theory of prejudice is an explanation in terms of self-deception. Racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic prejudices may all be ways of concealing pursuit of a common economic interest, too unattractive to face directly.
~ Wishful-thinking is a powerful force in history and a form of self-deception. It is well analysed in Jon Elster's Sour Grapes. Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, 1983). Note especially his discussion on p. 154 of vol. I of Levenson's Confucian China and its Modern Fate
~ Wishful thinking can play a part in stock-market irrational exuberence. Taiwan c. 1986 is a case in point: see Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance,p. 125. The stock exchange book coincided with a 'gambling fever' that expressed itself for example also in an illegal numbers name called 'Happiness for All'
We can disengage from all this some criteria for evidence, beyond the inadequacy of rational explanations. Excessive insistence, and a common pattern, and common sense psychological plausibility are the things to look for from an 'irrationality' theory.

IRRATIONALITY IN HISTORY: SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR
There are various kinds of irrational behaviour, some chemically caused, but the theme here is self-destructive behaviour. The main stimulus to reflection is G. Ainslie's Breakdown of Will. This is an important book on its own terms but also suggestive of ideas for historians.
Here are a couple of the key ideas. Economists, utility theorists, rational choice theorists have got decision making wrong by misunderstanding the importance of where one is in time in relation to the decision. They know that a deferred good is worth less than a present one, but assume that the reduction of value is in direct proportion to the distance in time, so that value declines at an even rate the further away it is in the future. So imagine game-show one, long-running, where each contestant appears two or three times in the course of a year. Contestants are offered £10,000 in six months time, or a larger sum in a year's time. They are allowed to decide how much would compensate them for the wait. Let us say that you, the contestant, decide that a total of £15,000 would be worth waiting for. Then you reappear on the show in six months time. The £10000 is on the table in cash. According to the economists' utility theory, you have no reason to change your mind, but in reality people are likely to do so and take the money. This has been born out by a good deal of experimentation, and practical analogues are apparent in most peoples experience. This is how credit card companies make money. This is why people break diets. They plan to lose wait, but the immediate temptation is disproportionately attractive. Ainslie calls this 'hyperbolic discounting', as opposed to 'exponential discounting' which is the economists' kind that would make one wait for the £1500.
He thinks that this pattern can be understood if we imagine the dispositions of a person at successive moments in time as if they were separate persons. The disposition that decides a year in advance that an extra £5,000 is worth a wait of six months is not the disposition that is faced with £10,000 in cash. That disposition wants quite a lot of things now, and can be ingenious in thinking of good reasons for going for it. That disposition can leave the disposition six months later to look after itself.
The pattern appears in unexpected places. It explains outbursts of ill-temper or impatience that in the long term do your relationships or your career harm. You may be aware that this is so, but in the heat of the moment your disposition of the time seeks the reward of flaring up and snapping at someone. An bulemic person may be aware that the pattern of behaviour is not doing any good, but at one moment the disposition says eat, and at a later moment the disposition seeks the reward of feeling that the weight problem can be handled after all. Even itches and nervous tics fit the pattern. Ainslie thinks it can even explain an unaccountable attachment to pain. The pain gives a momentary reward, not because it is pleasurable but because it is vivid and attractive to the attention for that reason. This is of course an extreme case at the periphery of his argument.
Now is this irrational? Yes and no. The short-term choices are instrumentally rational to the disposition that adopts them, as are the long-term choices. They are incompatible however, so the overall pattern can be called irrational.
People have ways of dealing with weakness of the will: Ulysses lashing himself to the mast to prevent himself from being seduced by the Sirens' song is a fictional representation of a whole series of devices to physically prevent one's short term disposition getting its own way. There are milder forms of the same approach.
Several intertwined ways in which people dealing with hyperbolic discounting particularly interest Ainslie: 'bundling', bright-lines' and 'intertemporal bargaining'. 'Bundling' is treating the first lapses as standing for the whole category of surrenders to a given category of short term impulse. A drink is not just one drink, but a return to a pattern of alcoholism. 'Bright lines' are clear unambiguous definitions of what constitutes a lapse. If the rule is: 'two drinks and no more' that leaves open the size of the drinks, and any way it is just not so clearly marked a line as 'no alcohol'. Inter-temporal bargaining is a version the famous paradox of the 'Prisoner's Dilemma' to develop model of bargaining over time between successive dispositions, whereby the decisions of the early dispositions have a particular significance for the overall process.
Inter-temporal bargaining can be explained by another game show thought-experiment, a modified version of one used by Ainslie. The members of a studio audience are offered £5,000 one by one. They have the option of refusing. They are told that if three-quarters of the audience refuse, every member of the audience will get £10,000. The dozen or so to be asked first know that they have to rely a lot on the co-operation of the rest. On the other hand they know that if they all refuse the £5,000, the most of the remainder will be likely to follow suit.
The members of the audience asked in turn are dispositions succeeding one another in time. The bundling is the decision by the people asked first to see their decisions as setting the pattern for the whole audience. The bright line is to refuse the £5,000. The inter-temporal bargaining is between the members of the audience, or dispositions, at different points in time.
(This is a good way of explaining what Aristotle stressed without perhaps explaining, viz., that cumulative habit is a crucial determinant and predictor of behaviour.)
Now this is all very interesting, but can historians take away anything for their own use? Here are some ideas. They involve flipping back from the micro-micro economy of inner dispositions to the world of social interactions which provides Ainslie with models for the will. If the inner world and the social world are as structurally analogous as he quite plausibly suggests, then it can be illuminating in either direction (though reversing the direction may sometimes take one back to the obvious)
Narrative history. Much narrative history deals with intertemporal bargaining. Ainslie calls it 'limited warfare'. The mutual decision not to use poison gas in the Second World War, and the success of Russia and the USA in avoiding a nuclear war, are examples. Can Ainslie's reflections take us beyond what he took from these examples in the first place? His emphasis on the disproportionate importance of early decisions could help narrative and diplomatic historians get their emphases right. In inter-temporal bargaining situations, the early choices can be effective signs of the whole series, as with the early decisions in the second game show thought experiment. Incidents quite small in themselves will have a colossal effect on the series. This means that the old distinction between 'real' causes and 'events leading up to', or triggers, loses much of its meaning.
More interesting perhaps is the application to inter-temporal bargaining within the same social unit. This takes one closer to Ainslie, who is after all talking about bargaining within the same individuals life, between different dispositions.
Institutions too are liable to hyperbolic discounting. This is how elections are fought. And this leads to an uncomfortable thought. Democracies are especially liable to it. Investment in the London Underground infrastructure was a long-term gain in the 1990s, whereas ready cash for short-term popular measures seemed urgently needed before an election. This surely lead to a change of plans by the government, and surely it is a typical case. A political leader knows that they are likely to be out of office anyway unless they win an election. There is not much reinforcement by the system behind rational exponential discounting. That has to come from elsewhere: a responsible press, above all a rational bureaucracy. It could be argued that it is the Civil Service that has kept French and British democracy more or less on the rails by counteracting a tendency to hyperbolic discounting. The Civil Servants know that they will be there whoever wins the election. In the USA the Fed may have performed a similar service. Without some such cheque there is a tendency for democracy to lead to Peronism. Galloping inflation is the most natural form of hyperbolic discounting by the government.
When the leaders of an institution are measuring an immediate reward against something good after their death they are even less likely to discount exponentially. 'In the long run we're all dead', they say. This bodes ill for the environment. (I know I catch myself thinking in that way.)
It also mingles with another form of irrationality, prejudice. I believe that prejudice often has an economic motivation just below the threshold of consciousness. One set of people wants to reduce competition from another set. They cannot say so directly, so they conceive a prejudice against blacks (e.g. northern industrial cities in the USA), Flemish speakers ( Belgium), Catholics (N. Ireland) - and so forth. In their generation, they gain jobs and opportunities. Usually a subsequent generation has to bear the brunt of the accumulated bitterness.
One of the useful things about theories like Ainslie's is that they explain why institutions or societies become dysfunctional: inter-temporal bargaining breaks down and the overall sum of satisfactions is diminished. However, some institutions are well equipped to counteract tendencies towards hyperbolic discounting, which explains why they are so successful (in their own value terms of course).
Dynastic lines are programmed to take a very long view, far beyond the death of the members of the family at any given point. This helps explain the extraordinary long-term success of the French monarchy from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. Hereditary monarchy has many disadvantages, but suffers less from hyperbolic discounting than most other institutions. The same is true of great aristocratic families, once primogeniture is taken for granted, which explains a lot about the structure of politics and the rural economy in England from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Some institutions have a sense of community, diachronic as well as synchronic, which tends to protect them from hyperbolic discounting. Oxbridge Colleges are a conspicuous example, especially before dons were allowed to marry. Monasteries are another case. They are even better ensured against hyperbolic discounting when both their own members and potential patrons hope to remain part of the community after their death, through liturgical prayer.
Finally, the two sides of the analogy - the will populated by dispositions, societies populated by individuals - can be drawn back together. Social power tends to have a somewhat unrespectable air at the moment. 'Social control' is a negative sounding phrase. Foucault theories at least as popularly understood present pervasive systems of thought as power, not exercised by any particular set of individuals, but none the less oppressive of freedom. Ainslie's insights may be a useful corrective, a reminder that power is 'enabling as well as constraining' (to quote a favourite Giddens phrase). I am not thinking here of state power. I have in mind pervasive assumptions, beliefs and conventions of the sort Foucaultians tend to see as oppressive. Of course, everything depends on the values that inform the power. If they are bad, it is bad. Nor is it easy to demonstrate which is bad: we reach are values in other ways. However, those ways that involve bright lines, say Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, some Protestant sects, Islam, are better equipped to deal with hyperbolic discounting than the assumption that people know what they want. That doesn't prove they are right, but it is worth noting that modern western societies don't give their members much help with the problem of hyperbolic discounting and the break down of the will.

SECOND LECTURE

Irrationality and Persecution

A Grand Narrative
The history of persecution in the West can be seen as a grand linear narrative of accumulating prejudice activated from time to time so that it turns into persecution.
One sub-narrative is the history of religious intolerance. This tends to have a happy ending with the Enlightenment, though areas like Northern Ireland are regarded as atavistic throw-backs
Another is the history of witch persecution. This also ends with the Enlightenment. As religion declined, so did persecution of witches
A further sub-narrative is the history of the persecution of the Jews. This culminates in the Holocaust. The Christian belief system is often explicitly or implicitly held to be responsible: very explicitly in the case of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Others, like R.I. Moore, give a sociological or anthropological explanation of the original formation of a persecuting mentality, but see this as taking on an independent existence once formed.


Piecemeal Explanations
Other historians give more piecemeal explanations. For a good example see David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996). Go to him for general models of interpretation: he is complex but v. Intelligent. Go to him also for a topic I don't touch on here much: persecution of lepers.


Rationality Theory
More in the second style than the first, I will try to apply rationality (and irrationality) theory to the history of persecution.


Persecution of Other Christians
The problem for a value rational explanation is that it was believed that belief should be free. This is why one was not supposed to force Moslems or Jews to convert (which happened a lot, but contrary to the official value system).

The solution seems to lie in certain core assumptions. One is that any baptised person had been given sufficient opportunity to get the religious message right. If they failed, it must be at some level culpable or deliberate. They lacked a theory of value rationality as offered in this course! It would have explained why people don't convince others of what seems evident to themselves. Actually people to day are still not so good at doing that: i.e. we have trouble in conceiving of a Nazi executioner who came by his opinions honestly.

Granted this assumption, mutual persecution of Christians was not exactly irrational. It should also be remembered that it was not just a question of mutual tolerance, after the Reformation at least, but of who controlled all the Churches and their endowments: the physical plant of religion.

Northern Ireland is a different matter. Here I would turn to Weber's theory of prejudice.



Persecution of Witches
The problem here is timing. The stereotypes and beliefs about witches were all in place long before the persecutions themselves. Consequently, cognitive structures are not a sufficient explanation. They also fail to explain the panicky quality of the persecutions.
The use of torture helps, but does not explain why the legal rules of torture were systematically flouted.
This points to irrationality as a factor. It seems likely that there were great anxieties, especially about plague and rebellion, which account for the over-the-top character of the persecutions.


Persecutions of Jews
To some extent, the rationale of persecuting heretics applies (no psychology or sociology of sincere disagreement) but this does not explain forcible conversions or pogroms which were against the official belief system.
Rational fear that Jews would be more articulate and convert Christians is a factor behind the Lateran IV rules, probably.
Some animosity towards Jews could always be picked up from reading the New Testament, because of the circumstances in which it was composed.
The idea of an underlying structure of prejudice which explains everything does not account for timing or vehemence.
In the case of the First crusade, transference of hostility from absent Moslems to present Jews may be a factor.
Economic competition coupled with widespread indebtedness is a big factor. Since this had to be transposed into a religious mode, one can define the latter as irrational: the cause different from the reason given.
It is the same with royal manipulation of expulsions of Jews to win popularity.
Child murder accusations are a different case again: definitely irrationality.
Moving forward to the Holocaust, I don't find Goldhagen's explanation convincing as a whole, though parts work: quite apart from his tendency to generalise far beyond the evidence, I think one needs to factor in the life experience of the generation in question to explain their behaviour. His data on age profiles actually helps this line of explanation.





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EVENTS HISTORY
# French Royal Marriages in the Middle Ages
· ~Philip Augustus and Ingeborg in the early thirteenth century
The King of France repudiates his wife after their wedding night, and tries persistently and unsuccessfully to get the marriage annulled by the pope.
Not value rationality: doesn't explain the timing nor the dubiousness of the reasons; nor political instrumental rationality: doesn't explain the timing, the sudden change of mind. Either emotion, partly irrational, or sexual instrumental rationality: probably can't tell which.


· ~ Charles IV of France and Blanche in the early fourteenth century.
Before Charles became kind Blanche his wife had been accused of adultery. His sister-in-law too: and she was probably murdered. However, Charles marriage with Blanche was annulled in 1322 on the ground that her mother was his godmother. The motive for the annulment was clearly political: the French king needed an heir, relations with his wife had broken down; and the pope wanted to help out. However the grounds were legally solid: so no rationality gap. The pope kept strictly within the formal rationality of Church law.


# Nineteenth Century English Politics
· ~ The Opium wars: economic motivation (Empire's balance of payments, merchant pressure group influencing government and the public; free-trade rationality influencing the radicals; rational choice of parliamentary tactics: Conservatives wanted to bring the government down, without being desperately concerned about the specific issue, but had to launch an attack that wouldn't alienate the radical, free-trade M.P.'s
· ~1868 on in English politics: the imperial card: rational choice in English politics. Disraeli enlarges the electorate, probably to outflank the Liberals, but the enlargement of the class base would tend to leave the Liberals between the Conservatives and the median voter. Disraeli split the Liberal vote by playing the Imperial card. (McLean, Rational Choice and English Politics



# Genocide and Massacres
· ~Explanation of the Holocaust: Police Battalions. The explanation of the genocide policy of leaders like Hitler and Himmler is at least in part their value rationality, strange though that is for us. Probably wrong to extend this to the whole German people: that would fail to explain the efforts to keep the Holocaust secret so far as possible from the public. How to explain the behaviour of the 'ordinary men' who acted as shooting units and threw themselves into the task? What of the Japanese at the 'Rape of Nanjing', or the massacres that followed sieges in the Peninsular War, or the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war? In 'massacre situations' ordinary men do things that that others like them at home would never think of doing, so the type of situation may change people. The extremity of the behaviour does seem to ask for an explanation that brings in irrational emotions. The antisemitism is an element but there are other factors. The generation of the police battalions had lived through humiliating national defeat; as the economy began to recover, inflation had wiped out everyone's savings; as it began to recover again, the Depression made it collapse again. All that was hard to take and for many it must have been a psychological release to have a group to blame, the Jews.
· ~ The Turkish massacres of Armenians in the late nineteenth century can be explained by the Sultan's value rationality of the Muslims on top, informing his instrumental calculation of the implications of the social rise of the Armenian community at the time, and probably implemented with the help or irrationality: Moslems displaced by different Christians in other areas.

The examination will last an hour and a half, during which you have to answer only one question. There will be a selection of about ten questions to choose from. They will be more general than the essay questions in small type with bibliographies above: more like the questions in  large type. The examination accounts for 50% of the assessment.

Coursework accounts for the other 50% of the assessment. The deadline is the beginning of the second-last week of term..  If you meet it,  the essay will be returned individually in a mini-tutorial. Finally, my opinion of you if I have to write a reference for you will be affected by the evidence you have given of ability to meet a deadline.