Restoring science and the rule of law
Book Alert: London, Palgrave-Macmillan 2024. Palgrave Studies in Austrian Economics (PSAE)
Restoring Science and the Rule of Law
by Michael Esfeld and Cristian Lopez (University of Lausanne)
A prosperity-bearing track
Romantic historians in the nineteenth century were keen to claim that Modernity had tainted (if not perverted) centuries of pure innocence, innate God-shaped goodness, peasantry peace, deep religious faith, and market-absent purity. In some way, they were right. In a more fundamental way, they were categorically wrong. Modernity did bring up a series of institutions, practices, and ideas that, when combined, changed humanity worldwide radically, as never seen before. However, pre-modern (also, pre-capitalist) lives were far from the bucolic and peaceful peasantry scenario that many Romantic thinkers imagined. In a mostly rural life, without modern science, without institutions that guarantee private property, free trade, and free contract; without an ethics based on individual rights, without impartial institutions that protect such rights, people’s lives were most certainly poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
We mean literally poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For centuries. Think of the following. Life expectancy at birth was 24 years on average during the first and third centuries in the old Roman Egypt. Little over ten centuries later, in England, life expectancy at birth was marginally higher, 24 years and three months. By the eighteenth century, Europe showed a slight improvement in some places: 34 years and 6 months for eighteenth-century England, 24 years and 8 months for eighteenth-century France, and 28 years for early nineteenth-century Spain. However, life was not only much shorter, but also terribly poorer. During the first millennium, GDP per capita in Western Europe was steadily around 450 USD per year (measured in 1990 USD). World’s GDP per capita was about the same and just grew 45% during the next eight centuries.[1]
In pre-Modern times, there were not many technological innovations either. Setting aside the Renaissance (a properly European and local phenomenon), technological innovation between the sixth and thirteenth century was basically circumscribed to refine and improve long-established techniques from Roman and Byzantine times. Agricultural labor hadn’t changed much either for centuries. Agriculture in West France during the Carolingian Empire looks very much the same as agriculture in Winchester in the thirteenth century. Famines and plagues were also recurrent and faced in exactly the same ways. Western Europe reacted to the seventeenth-century plague, when Isaac Newton was a student at Trinity College in Cambridge, with the same theories and medical techniques as it did with the fourteenth-century bubonic plague (The Black Death).
Poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives, and narrow horizons were the standard for Western civilizations for centuries. However, this radically changed during and after the nineteenth century. Just for comparison, life expectancy at birth in Western Europe tripled within a century and nearly quadrupled within 150 years. Millions and millions of people worldwide escaped starvation and poverty when global GDP per capita raised almost 900% in one century and a half.[2] That means almost nine times more food, more technology, more clothes, more houses, more transportation, more medicine, more education, more of practically everything. Urban life took over, but agricultural productions wildly increased, nonetheless. While famines were the rule for millennia, they were mostly eradicated in one hundred years with a global population many times bigger. Medicine not only revolutionized how health care was approached, but it was also made accessible to millions of people worldwide.
So, what happened? Why have people’s lives changed so radically in a minuscule span of time? How did people’s lives get longer, richer, and qualitatively much better? In our book Restoring Science and the Rule of Law (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-71186-2), we work out how a new systematic combination of ideas was key. Ideas that freed us from absolute political power, from traditional prejudices, from state-imposed religion, and from collectivist ways of thinking. One driving factor is of course the development and extension of (relatively) free-market capitalism based on the guarantee of private property, free labor, and free trade. Modern capitalism not only boosted innovation, but it also mobilized persons, ideas, technology and products from one continent to the other. But two pillars were architectonic of modernity as shaped by the Enlightenment age and of the prosperity it subsequently brought about: modern science and the rule of law. And the common element to both is the employment of reason as a means to limit the exercise of epistemic and political power.
Modern Science: objectivity and disciplined skepticism
The foundations of modern science reside in its striving for objectivity and its method of disciplined skepticism. Objectivity in modern science basically means that scientific facts must be deprived from all subjective traits and evaluative-normative judgments. René Descartes, who captured the spirit of modern science profoundly, thought that modern science should achieve a practical purpose and improves people’s lives; but in order for modern science to achieve this, it must understand the natural, non-human world as res extensa (i.e., pure extension and motion). Understanding nature meant understanding it in a mechanistic way, aimless and purposeless. The contemporary philosopher John McDowell captures this idea by the notion of “a disenchanted conception of nature”,[3] that is, of a realm governed by causes and laws, but not by reasons and intentions. This opens up a completely new way to obtain knowledge of the natural world, not mediated by authority, privileged access or social status. In short, scientific objectivity “encourages us to form beliefs according to theories supported by evidence and argument, and not to form beliefs along the lines of social status, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.” (Esfeld and Lopez 2024, 16). This way to understand nature and scientific knowledge is to a great extent the basis of the great theoretical and technological achievements of the last two centuries.
The strive for objectivity in the foundations of modern science stresses an aspect that is essential for its success: the sharp distinction between facts and norms. Modern Science does not aim to make us better human beings, it does not impose goals upon us either. Science cannot tell us which path we ought to follow, just objective facts about the consequences of following one path or another. If science were to prescribe norms, it would undermine its own objectivity, retracing its steps back to pre-Modern times. The distinction between facts and norms, at the core of modern science, sets clear off-limits signs to what modern science is for and what it can achieve.
Modern science’s objectivity must be complemented with the method of disciplined skepticism to really flourish. Contrary to some common opinions, it is not certainty but uncertainty what motorizes scientific curiosity and research. Certainty usually leads to dogmatism based on authority instead of reason, which hampers scientific innovation and development. Every scientific claim must stand up under continuous critical scrutiny by everyone that participates in the scientific methodology. Every scientific hypothesis can only be endorsed negatively: it is accepted not because it has been proven to be true, but because no weighty reasons have been found to deem it false. This essential feature of modern science shows to what extent it is at odds with the idea of scientific authority or scientific consensus. In science, plurality and dissonant voices reign and coexist. Modern science was successful and made progress not because it reached consensus, but because it constantly broke them.
The Rule of Law: legal equality, freedom, and individual rights
The other essential pillar of modernity was the idea of the rule of law, broadly construed. Against the background of the roots of individualism in Greek and Roman antiquity as well as the Jewish-Christian doctrine of man being created in the image of God and its secularization in the Age of Enlightenment, it was established that all human beings are endowed with reason, therefore free in their thinking and acting and consequently responsible for what they do. The defense of individual freedom, and the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights to self-determine their lives have shaped the way in which the relation between citizenship and the state was thought in the last two centuries. Where political freedom is restrained, economic growth, innovation and human development is severely hampered. In particular, the ethical principle that “each person is free to do as he wishes until some justification is offered for limiting his liberty”[4] has been the basis of all modern political philosophy. It gives individuals a frame of rights and obligations that must be protected. The rule of law appeared in history as a way to enforce rights and obligations in a frame of legal equality (non-arbitrariness) and freedom. It is important to stress that enforceable rights and freedom in this framework are mostly negative – they set limits to external unsolicited interference and protect voluntary agreements.
The rule of law is a regulative idea that constitutes the bedrock of modern society. It establishes mechanisms and institutions based on the idea of legal equality and individual freedom that deliver legal and political stability, and freedom for people to pursue their goals and plans. Without it, economic growth and scientific innovation would be rare and sporadic, if not impossible. The rule of law, as in modern science, is the exercise of reason to limit arbitrary power and the scope of any authority. Western, open societies have found in constitutional liberal democracies the best way to enact the idea of a rule of law. It thus comes to no surprise that Western, open societies have largely been not only the most advanced economically, scientifically, and technologically, but also the ones that have respected individual rights and freedom to the most.
Modern science and the rule of law, along with other elements, have brought unimaginable prosperity in the last two centuries. It just happened that the right ideas combined in the right ways for the first time in human history, unleashing human capacities as never seen before.
Diagnosis: sliding into actually existing postmodernism
When seen from a historical perspective, our recent past has been unimaginably much better than our not-so-distant past. Yet, Western societies are facing right now a worrisome departure from these prosperity-bearing ideas. The staging of the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, an overarching intellectual postmodernist ideology as well as growing welfare states and crony capitalism are severely erode the very foundations of modernity and the Western civilization: modern science and the rule of law. But how? Where did things start to get off the track? In our book, we focus on these questions and not only offer an in-depth analysis of the foundations of modern science and the rule of law, but also a diagnosis of our present situation and some tentative solutions that can put us back on the track to increasing prosperity and freedom.
Our diagnosis does not rely on global moral degradation. Nor does it resort to an elite-driven conspiracy that sets out to control the world. Our diagnosis starts off from modern science and the rule of law themselves, two incredibly successful ideas that have provoked a hubris that today risks ending up with their self-destruction. Modern science’s unquestionable theoretical and technological success has led it to trespass its own limits, to go far beyond such off-limit signs that were crucial for its appearance and development. Contemporary science has taken over the place of a state religion that does not circumscribe itself to describe facts, but to also prescribe norms, to control, shape, and steer people’s lives. The infamous slogan “Follow the Science” has become the motto of what we call “scientism”: the degradation of modern science to a secular religion that blurs the division between facts and norms. Scientism was indeed an early involution of modern science in the early nineteenth century with the search of a “social physics” that may pull the strings of society. It also appeared in the first half of the twentieth century with the eugenics movement, a very well-known case of social engineering that scientifically legitimized political action that violated human rights. And scientism makes its appearance again today: scientific knowledge was instrumentalized by a politically-motivated scientific elite to prescribe and justify policymaking that not only harmed societies severely, but also the very foundation and spirit of modern science. Scientism, in the end, amounts to using modern science as a weapon against the natural rights of people to self-determine their lives.
But scientism, as we argue in the book, rarely comes on its own. Scientism becomes political scientism when states employ the authority of self-proclaimed scientific experts to justify coercion. While the gold rule in constitutional states and liberal democracies is the presumption of liberty, political scientism justifies coercion on the basis of “The Science” and pervading risks. We say:
“[…] once claims to scientific knowledge are employed to derive political demands that override human rights, there is no longer any normative limit. The door is then opened to do anything in the name of science, from plunder and planification to the outright murder of human beings” (pp. 32-33, italics in the original)
We are indeed bearing witness to how constitutional and even liberal democracies trespass the limits of the rule of law and extend coercion far beyond it. Constitutional states claim that their role is not only to protect the negative rights of individuals in the framework of freedom and legal equality, but also to guarantee positive rights and to provide protection against all sorts of alleged scientific-informed risks, for which we all are causally and morally responsible. In this way, the rule of law is broken, and constitutional states become welfare states, with an increasing encroachment of individual rights and freedom. Scientism and welfare states thus push societies back to a pre-Enlightenment era, in which political power is limitless and arbitrary, and science is a secular religion. Our times are at the verge of what we call welfare totalitarianism: an ever-increasing state power that regulates every aspect of social and private life, justified by an elite of self-proclaimed scientific experts.
Scientism and welfare statism are two elements that erode the core and values of Christianity, the Enlightenment age and modern prosperity. But the trend to an increasingly closer welfare totalitarian regime could not be possible without an overarching ideology that took over the intellectual arena after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The intellectual void that was left when the narrative that demarcated the West from the Soviet communist block became obsolete was gradually filled by new, specifically postmodern collectivist narratives that have undermined reason as a means to limit power and authority. Intellectual postmodernism has left us unarmed in front of an ever-increasing welfare state and a rule-prescribing science. Intellectual postmodernism has taken over academia circles in the so-called woke movement: social constructivism, radical skepticism and cultural neo-Marxism have dismantled modern values and an ethics based on reason and replaced it by group- or community-relative values within power relations. Reason then becomes an oppression instrument by the modern bourgeoisie; a right-based ethics then becomes the values of a social class in a class struggle.
Prima facie an emancipatory movement, reality is that intellectual postmodernism undermines the means that individuals have historically devised to oppose authority, to impose limits to coercion, to form judgments on their own. If modern science aimed to describe facts truthfully, the notions of true and false are shattered under intellectual postmodernism and we are left with “community-relative logics” that are right or wrong depending on their place in a never-ending power struggle. Paraphrasing Michael Rectenwald,[5] we say in the book that we live under “actually existing postmodernism”: an influential and dangerous resurrection of actually existing socialism that encompasses overregulation of the social and private life, that relies on collectivist narratives to justify an elite’s view of the common good, and that weaponizes science in the form of political scientism.
The way out
Is there any escape from this nefarious development? Our diagnosis of what is at the roots of the current trend towards a new, specifically postmodern totalitarianism is that modern science and the rule of law, implemented in constitutional states have not only deviated from the right track, but also contain in themselves the germs of their own destruction. It would therefore be a mistake to simply appeal to their restitution. The errors of the Enlightenment must be avoided if we want Western societies to come back to a prosperity-bearing track. We show in the book how and why it was a mistake to conceive the republican, constitutional state as the only guarantor to implement the rule of law and to foster science. There is nothing wrong neither with modern science (objectivity and disciplined skepticism) nor with the rule of law (an impersonal, non-arbitrary common legal framework to protect negative rights). But the solution is to implement them independently from central states, whose organs have unlimited power in virtue of their monopoly of making, enforcing and interpreting law as well as their prerogative of calling a state of emergency in which the rule of law is de facto abrogated.
When examined closely, modern science and the rule of law were not really protected by central states, even in constitutional and liberal democracies, but quite the opposite. This is what we call in the book “the illusion of republicanism”, the illusion of thinking that modern science and the rule of law crucially depend on a central state that organizes the public sphere and guarantees them. This illusion, as argued in the book, is already present in the justification of the modern state by Thomas Hobbes. In the Leviathan (1651), Hobbes sets out a dilemma whose one horn is that to avoid a society in which uncontrolled violence reigns, a Sovereign must be erected and hold the monopoly of law making, law enforcement and judiciary; the other horn is that the so-erected Sovereign has therefore unlimited, monopolistic power, which can be used as the Sovereign estimates fit and thereby violate the same individual rights that it was supposed to protect. The state of emergency is a clear resource that all central states dispose of and that can be declared at any time by simply staging an existential threat, as with COVID-19, or climate change.
State-funding science has also created the conditions that undermine scientific innovation and development. Merging science and the state paves the way to political scientism. Hence, the way out is to separate state and science, as the separation of science and religion at the beginning of modernity paved the way for the success story of modern science: decentralize and de-regularize the production and transmission of scientific knowledge and education. In this way, scientific research, human capital, technology, and innovation go where it is needed, and not where state authorities say that it should go. In a world where resources are scarce, state funding of science through coercion in the guise of taxation does more harm than good, as state authorities must take decisions on what counts as science and what does not do so, which fields should receive higher funding and which less funding, which scientific innovations are in line with political interests presented as “the common good” and which ones are not, etc. In sum,
The twentieth century provides us with ample evidence of how centrally planned societies lead to devastating failures and overwhelming misery and of why open societies flourish: they are able to incorporate the knowledge and decisions of the many over the few. Mutatis mutandis, scientific knowledge succeeds when freely acting individuals overtly discuss arguments and evidence. The genius of one or a few in power will never match the knowledge that many scientific communities can produce. Quite the opposite is the case. Political power is employed by the self-identified experts to use coercion to impose their view on the rest, hampering open-minded scientific enquiry. (pp. 177-178)
Decentralization of the implementation of the rule of law, on the one hand, and the de-regularization and decentralization of scientific research, on the other, are two practical ideas that will help us escape from scientism and welfare totalitarianism. Our philosophical framework is nonetheless broader. It rests on a series of intellectual resources that not only allow us to understand the foundations of modern science and the rule of law, but also to devise what we believe is the most viable way to restore science and the rule of law. The philosophy of Enlightenment of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant shows us clearly the foundations of modern science as well as its limits in human thought and action. Bringing these historical sources together with the social-normative, linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy as well as with Austrian libertarianism from Popper and Hayek to Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe paves the way for a human science based on freedom that complements natural science. Finally, Austrian libertarianism also shows us how to overcome the monopoly of central states in realizing the rule of law.
Naturally, resuming the prosperity-bearing path that Western Civilization has taken in the last two centuries is not easy. But the ingredients for the intellectual cure against scientism and welfare totalitarianism are all in our minds and hands. We only have to bring them together and to implement them. The path to restore science and the rule of law is the path towards a society based on the free public use of reason and voluntary cooperation instead of regulation and coercion exercised by central state authorities. This is the way to continue unleashing the human creative and innovative capacities to prosper and to cope with an always uncertain world.
[1] All this data can be found in Angus Madison (2006). The world economy, vol. 1 and vol. 2. Development Centre Studies, OECD Publishing, Chapter 1, pp. 30-32.
[2] All this data can be found in Angus Madison (2006). The world economy, vol. 1 and vol. 2. Development Centre Studies, OECD Publishing, Chapter 1, p. 30.
[3] John McDowell, Mind and world, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1994, lecture IV.
[4] Gerald F. Gaus, Contemporary theories of liberalism, London: Sage 2003, p. 207.
[5] Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for snowflakes: “social justice” and its postmodern parentage, Nashville, TN: New English Review Press, pp. xiii, 114-117.
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