Aviezer Tucker

The experience of totalitarianism in its initial revolutionary-terrorist phase and later gray and corrupt terminal stage has generated a distinct tradition of political philosophy and theory among East-Central European dissidents. Much of this tradition has been ignored or misunderstood by thinkers who were ignorant of the social context from which it emerged and who had different concerns. Philosophers who consider the role of political philosophy to be the explication of concepts by drawing utopian blueprints for the reconstitution of societies, find the anti-utopian—indeed, anti-political—philosophy of the dissidents incomprehensible. The dissidents, and by implication their writings, enjoyed some popularity during the…

Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers. Originary sciences identify information preserving receivers and decode the signals to infer their origins. Paradigmatic cases of scientific origination such as the Big Bang, the origins of species, horizontal gene transfer, the origin of the Polynesian potato, and ideational origins in the history of ideas are analyzed to discover what is common to them ontologically and epistemically. Some causes are not origins. Origination supervenes on causation, but has different properties. The unique properties of origins that causes do not share shield theories of origination from the kind of counterexamples and counterintuitive results that challenge comparable theories of causation. The epistemology of origination may serve as a basis for founding a novel epistemic and methodological division of the sciences into originary historical sciences and causal theoretical sciences.

Panarchy suggests that an optimal framework for the emergence of the best states is that of free competition between states. In Panarchy, people and states negotiate the relationships between them, as sellers and buyers and formalize them in explicit social contracts. Different states may offer varying levels of services in areas such as health, education, and social security for different prices. Low costs for consumer mobility from state to state are necessary for competition. These can be optimized by non-territorial states that offer services to citizens instead of rule a territory and compete over customers in a political market. The right of such states to coerce their clients differentiates them from mere protective associations, and is founded on explicit social contracts (law codes) rather than on monopoly over territory-- sovereignty. First, I explicate the unique properties of Panarchy, non-territorial states and explicit social contracts. Then, following the theories of Douglass North (1986) and Albert Hirschman (1970) I explain why Panarchy appears to be an appropriate framework for avoiding political monopolies and increasing political competitiveness and efficiency through cheap exit mechanisms. Then, I consider possible challenges to Panarchy: Panarchy may be utopian if the state is a natural monopoly; Panarchy does not advocate any political utopia but it may reify the utopian element to the meta-political level, to the preconditions for the emergence of the best states. If non-territorial states are inconsistent with human nature, they may be utopian. I also consider possible ethical objections to Panarchy. I argue that: The territorial sovereign state is not a natural monopoly. A free market in non-territorial states does not have to assume a coercive monopoly regulatory “super-state.” The territoriality of the state is not natural. Though there are valid ethical criticisms of Panarchy, from a utilitarian perspective, they are outweighed by ethical arguments that support it. Finally, I argue that several recent technological innovations have rendered the sovereign nation-state increasingly obsolete, while facilitating and reducing the costs of establishing Panarchy and running non-territorial states.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Towards a Realist Philosophy of History by Adam TimminsAviezer TuckerTIMMINS, Adam. Towards a Realist Philosophy of History. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. 192 pp. Cloth, $95.00The debate about scientific realism, whether science represents reality or just discovers measurements and correlations that are followed by theoretical stories about them, is at the center of the philosophy of science. One potent and frequently discussed antirealist argument has been Larry Laudan’s “pessimistic induction”: Historically, all scientific theories, especially in physics, have been proven false. Hence, all contemporary scientific theories will be proven false and science cannot represent reality. This pessimistic induction relies on knowledge of the history of science, on historiographic realism. Luckily for the pessimistic induction, the history of historiography, the scientific representation of the human past, supports an optimistic induction: Since the revolutions associated with Ranke in historiography, Lyle in geological history, and Darwin in biological history, the historical sciences have made progress but have not [End Page 368] overhauled the founders’ representations of the past. We know more about the human past than Ranke did and much more about the biological past than Darwin did, but the modern historical sciences have not overturned their theories and conclusions. Though there are many new methodologies, historians still go to the archives to compare primary sources, and biologists still study fossils and assume natural selection.Though scientific antirealism assumes historiographic realism, it has received scant philosophic attention. Often it is perceived or presented as a naive “empiricist” concept of historiography that imagines historians “observe” history and then describe it in historiography. Radical antirealist theories of historiography that reduce it to fiction, myth, or manipulative ideology use this image of realism as naive empiricism to dialectically support its equally naive antirealist antithesis. Both ignore the evidential, mostly testimonial, justifications of historiography.Adam Timmins’s project is to articulate and justify a sophisticated historiographic realism that fits historiographic practices and premises. He argues that historiography is “successful in providing information and understanding about the historical past that is constrained by and reflects what actually happened in the past itself.”Timmins’s historiographic realism springs out of the philosophy of language rather than epistemology or philosophy of science. This distinguishes it from Murray Murphey’s historiographic realism, which argued that historiographic ontology is theoretical. Famously, Murphey compared George Washington to the electron as two well-corroborated but unobservable theoretical entities. Timmins retorts that Washington is a proper name and not a theoretical concept, and it is impossible to conduct experiments with Washingtons. Timmins inquires how the language historians use may be interpreted as referring to past events and how historiography can represent history. He does not devote much attention to how historians justify their statements about history to a degree that may warrant a realistic interpretation of historiography. Rather, Timmins assumes so. He proceeds through polemical dialogues with philosophers of historiography who took antirealist stances like Leon Goldstein, Frank Ankersmit, and Jouni Kuukkanen.Timmins’s realism is founded on the belief in a universally accepted core of historiographic facts. He does not inquire about the theoretical foundations of historiographic inferences that allow the emergence of such a consensus. Rather than consider historiographic epistemology, the critical methods of historiography, Timmins considers linguistic communities and entrenched uses of language. He confronts the problem of reference to the past in the absence of its perception by asserting that historiographic representations are of “mental files” that have names (for example, “the Renaissance,” “the Second World War”) and evolving core facts about those historical events (for example, Petrarch and Da Vinci in the Renaissance, the main battles in the war). Though the exact contents of these files may differ between historians, they still refer to the same events and have the same labels. Timmins suggests that experts gradually introduce fluid norms of reference on the basis of broadly accepted facts [End Page 369] whose references caused information chains that led to them. He suggests that complex or colligated concepts are in the mind but refer through mediation to some directly referenced events. For example, the First World War is a concept that through the mediation of facts like its main battles refers to real...

The first political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse. The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interest. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and consequentialist theories, conservative. Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education met New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identified opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. This book illustrates these legacies in the writings of Habermas, Derrida, and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidence, and totalitarianism.

Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on actual social contracts that are explicitly negotiated and signed between states and their prospective citizens. The explicit social contract, or a constitution, sets the terms under which a state may use coercion against its citizens and the conditions under which the contract may be annulled, revised, rescinded, or otherwise exited from. Panarchy does not advocate any particular model of the state or social justice, but intends to encourage political variety, innovation, experimentation, and choice. With its emphasis on explicit social contracts, Panarchy offers an interesting variation on traditional social contract theories. Today, Panarchist political thought is particularly relevant and interesting in the context of globalization, increased international migration, the weakening of national sovereignty, the rise of the internet "cloud" as a non-territorial locus of political and protopolitical social networks that are not geographic, the invention of cryptocurrencies that may replace national currencies, and the rise of urban centers where people of many different political identities live and work together. This is the first volume to bring together key philosophically and politically interesting yet often overlooked Panarchist texts. From the first published translation of de Puydt seminal 1860 article to contemporary Silicon Valley political theory, the volume includes Panarchist texts from different eras, cultures and geographical regions. The amassed wealth of theoretical insight enables readers to compare different texts in this tradition of political thought and distinguish different streams and varieties within this political tradition, in comparison with Cosmopolitanism, Contractarianism, and Anarchism

This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique singular events. Introspective historicism considers the epistemology of historiography to be founded on self-knowledge. Scientistic historicism considers historiography an applied psychology or social science that can expand to overtake the social sciences. Methodological historicism extends the use of historiographic methodologies to unreliable or dependent evidence. The first four historicisms are inconsistent with historiography within bounds and implode. Methodological historicism describes proper historiographic methodologies that are applied out of their proper bounds, but are used in historiography based on the epistemology of testimony and the tracing of the transmission of information from historical event to historiographic evidence.

The epistemology of the historical sciences has been debated recently. Cleland argued that the effects of the past overdetermine it. Turner argued that the past is underdetermined by its effects because of the decay of information from the past. I argue that the extent of over- and underdetermination cannot be approximated by philosophical inquiry. It is an empirical question that each historical science attempts to answer. Philosophers should examine how paradigmatic cases of historical science handled underdetermination or utilized overdetermination. I analyze such a paradigmatic case, Darwin’s phylogenetic inferences. Darwin proceeded in three consecutive stages. The initial inference that there was some common cause of homologies was usually overdetermined. The final inference of the character traits of ancestor species was usually underdetermined. The second stage inference of the causal net that connected the species that share some common cause was inbetween. A comparison with Comparative Historical Linguistics demonstrates similar three stages of inference that move from the over- to the underdetermined