I have, for a while now, considered myself an LPE person. More specifically, I’ve considered myself someone at the edges of LPE. This is partly ideological, as I’m a Marxist and LPE is a non-Marxist space — by which I mean it is not exclusively reserved for Marxists, preferring instead a “big tent” approach. It’s not only ideological, though.
The Law and Political Economy movement is, as far as I can work out, a network of professionals committed to professing and lawyering in ways that are professionally respectable and creditable and in ways that are politically progressive. Being lawyers and professors, the network and its participants hope to do lawyering and professoring well and in ways that do good in the world. That’s all understandable and, in some respects, laudable. But the center of gravity around which LPE orbits is not simply any group of professionals; it is, first and foremost, law professors at elite law schools, and people from those arenas. Being included in this group, to put the point in the nicest way possible, is a bit like being invited along out of politeness to work drinks with people who work in a different industry and who are, frankly, a lot better paid. I mention this because, in my view, the LPE movement bears some marks of its origins and context, which are in tension with the big tent-ness, and which I have not seen explicitly thematized: I don’t get the sense that LPE is officially self-reflexive about this reality.
This lack of self-awareness has been on display in some recent work by Sam Moyn. To be blunt, as someone paid a medium-sized five figure salary to teach six to eight classes year and whose parents are blue collar workers, I find it grating to read Moyn writing in the New York Times about so-called gerontocracy and with some appeal to his own work experience, and to read Moyn at the LPE blog implying that critics of his views are class reductionists. I count myself something of an acolyte of E.P. Thompson and it’s arguable that there was nothing Thompson loathed more than reductionism. That said, reductionism is fundamentally a normative term: it indicates overemphasis on one facet of social life at the cost of underemphasis on other facets.
What degree of emphasis counts as too much or too little is to a significant degree a political position — with political positions themselves informed by values tied to unevenly distributed life experiences — rather than a value-neutral explanatory exercise. It seems obvious to me that Moyn’s position near the peak of the legal academy and my position and family background somewhere lower in the food chain make us likely to differ on the salience of class. As readers consider these matters, I would ask them to also consider to what degree they think each our — my and Moyn — and their own class positions and experiences are relatively common in society, and within the institutions that govern society. I would also like to submit the general proposition that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands so highly.
This is in part to say that Yale law faculty and their peers in elite institutions represent a distinct social location and set of labors within a set of processes arising from and reproductive of our deeply hierarchical social structure. The life lived in and afforded by residing in that location is very much not the norm. This means we should be careful about policy suggestions rooted in such lives and, without meaning to be reductive, we should scrutinize policy suggestions from people in such circles carefully, to ask if how they might be unconsciously marked by their originating social context.
This is also in part to say that Moyn’s work, insofar as it is focused on the lives and working conditions of this set, should be understood as form of intra-elite politicking. That politicking may have some beneficial elements — after all, we could, and do, certainly have far worse elites — but part of how I understand the world is that even the most beneficial elites are, as elites, products and producers of social arrangements fundamentally incompatible with human dignity. I don’t mean that mean in the long term and arguably utopian sense, like ‘wouldn’t it be great if some day society wasn’t hierarchical?’ but in the short term: part of the work of elites in general, even ones who dissent among their fellow elites, is turning the gears of various machineries that produce deep disrespect and often intense violence in the lives of ordinary people. What I’ve said of Moyn here goes for LPE to an extent as well, which is why I think it’s worth raising here at the blog. (My first impulse was to ignore Moyn’s writings on age, but it seems the presence of those ideas within LPE circles point to some issues worth discussing about the character of these circles.) There are issues regarding what LPE is and does, tied to what I suggested above are only partially acknowledged tensions regarding who LPE is and who LPE is for.
Let me try to illustrate and sharpen this point via recourse to some recent life experiences as a, well, nothing-like-Yale person, in background and in current employment. Over the past few years, my employer sought to downsize. It was hard, some of the worst experiences of my professional life. We fought back, with mixed success, though even the successes didn’t feel much like success. Within this process, my employer sought to encourage faculty to retire early, via some relatively meager buyouts. Some faculty close to retirement age took them, as far as I can tell, less because the buyouts were generous and more because those faculty were generous: taking the buyout saved other people’s jobs. And doing so involved real costs: yes, they got to retire a bit sooner, which frankly sounds amazing to me, but they did so with less money and thus less security. An earlier but worse retirement, opted into under coercion, specifically a threat to other colleagues.
As they’ve left, they’ve taken with them skills, expertise, institutional memory, and the kinds of good will and relationships that define collegiality. They’ve not generally been replaced with tenure-track hires (that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen much outside Yale-world). My workplace is simply poorer as a result. Of course, it would be even worse if those faculty hadn’t taken the buyouts and management had fired some early and mid-career colleagues, but we shouldn’t let this alternative distract us from the badness and resulting harm of this situation as it played out. I will add that, during this same period, I’ve watched my parents struggle with what it means to age in this society as people who spent a life in at best modestly paid and blue collar jobs, an experience which is widely shared and which it is offensive to dismiss via sneering about ‘class reductionism.’
These experiences make Moyn’s suggestion that academia would be better off if mandatory retirement were brought back something that very much sticks in my craw. It is, to be blunt, offensive management bullshit. If Moyn’s hypotheticals were implemented, it would mean employers like mine would have even more power and leverage over an increasingly precarious workforce. Maybe mandatory retirement would improve ‘academia,’ if by academia we meant Yale and a handful of other elite institutions. I’m open to that, and I simply don’t care about it. The fate of elites is not my concern.
That’s glib, I know. For the sake argument and attempting to actually think meaningfully, I will try to bracket the frustration that I assume my tone makes clear, but I would like to first point out that not everyone has to do this kind of bracketing: different life experiences fit more and less neatly into different institutional positions. Bracket engaged! Begin attempt at meaningful thought!
I said the fate of elites is not my concern, and I meant it, but I am of course aware that there are elites, and then there are, so to speak, ELITES. Ivy League law faculty are fairly far up the food chain, but they are not Musk, Bezos, and so on. In important respects, LPE affiliated faculty who strike me as shockingly well-heeled are themselves class traitors in a laudable way, as they are in circles of minor elites who are generally expected to and rewarded for providing services to major elites. That some are much more critical speaks well of their character and intentions. And yet, there is an important difference in approach to politics here, in terms of the degree to which one thinks social justice is best served by the contributions of specialists and minor elites or of ordinary people taking collective action. This matter of who is the actor also has important ramifications regarding what sort of action we envision as especially important. As I’ve argued elsewhere with regard to labor law, my own view is that advances in social justice are above all effects of upheaval generated by ordinary people refusing the roles and scripts they are afforded, which is different from an emphasis on policy design accomplished by the minor elites who specialize in such design. In a word, my view is that justice comes from far more from breaking things than from fixing things.
There is, unfortunately, a relatively common pattern wherein in-group elites-talking-to-elites sort of conversations — of the sort which Moyn specializes in and which exert a pull (a pressure resistible, but less so when unacknowledged) on LPE generally — form part of the process by which policies, both public and in private institutions, are formulated to which the rest of us are subjected and which have significantly more intense ramifications in our lives. More simply: maybe gerontocracy really is a problem for someone who lives near the peak of the food chain. It’s simply not for the rest of us, and if Moyn is a representative example of those rarefied circles, then the rest of us should worry that fights among people standing up there near the peak – including people who genuinely mean well but for whom mistakes consequential for others are hard to avoid due to their social location – will cause rocks to tumble down onto the rest of our heads. One such rock is a policy that Moyn calls for, mandatory retirement. From where I stand, somewhere in the middle of the hillside, that just looks like age discrimination that would provide no benefit to anyone whose well-being I care about and would worsen the lives of a lot of people I do care about. This is a position, I hasten to add, far more representative than life up near the peak, and that ought to be recognized.
So far, so grumpy, and boring — BREAKING: Area Man Wishes He Had More Money And Free Time. I am, I assure you, very aware of how tedious such complaints are, as someone in whose mind they echo daily! Still, I am bothering to grump here because I think some of what’s going on here is that within LPE there is — or at least, some people like Moyn enact, without much comment from anyone else in LPE — a tendency wherein some people’s very distinct experience as occupiers of relatively elite positions in society are implicitly treated as closer to universal than they in fact are. I think in important respects this will only ever at best be a matter of a tension that is managed, as it is rooted in differences of background and social location. I do not, to be clear, enjoy talking about any of this — it feels better to be simply in the room and on the team like anyone else — and perhaps that too is part of the problem. Perhaps those of us lower down the hillside and who wonder if we are fully in the ‘we’ of LPE ought to be more vocal more often. I’m unsure.
Less important than who feels welcome to what degree, I think, is the matter of what the character of LPE as political project is: the degree to which a political project is progressive or not is not reducible to the make-up of the persons conducting that project — no reductionism here, officer! — but the politics and who is in the room, and, crucially, who is quietly, hegemonically running the room do have an important relationship. It’d be nice if LPE acknowledged that a bit more, in my view from here at the edges. And more simply, it’s notable to me that LPE is a place where some academically famous and fancy, certainly someone well-heeled in a Yale sort of way, can write an op-ed in the paper of record calling for policies of discrimination — that’s what mandatory retirement is, age discrimination — and apparently have it have no consequences within LPE. Perhaps I should be glad to be only at the edges, as a group of progressives who don’t bat an eye at a call for strengthening management’s hand against employees is not one I’m sure I’d want to be more in the center of.
I’m being a little glib, because angry. I think Moyn’s political positions would harm actual people in my actual life in ways that I’ve seen actual employers seek to do. This involves some sticky theoretical issues: if it’s offensive to consider an idea, then how do we discuss whether and why it’s offensive? I get that, and as someone who was an enthusiastic undergraduate philosophy major I can see the appeal of getting into those meta-level matters: how are we to determine how we shall determine the bounds of acceptable ideas in this intellectual community? It’s all so complicated. But I’m not an undergraduate anymore. I’m a middle-aged man with aging working class parents and coworkers.
The indulgence of complexity is often a coping mechanism, a distancing technique that turns matters with real stakes in people’s lives into an abstract logic puzzle, a bit of a game the playing of which is fun, even beneficial as it hones some of the skills that we — well, not me, I just teach for a living, and the people I teach won’t run the world, but, to be blunt, some of you — will need as the enlightened social engineers of tomorrow. The theoretical details of how to determine bounds of acceptable and unacceptable speech is the wrong matter to fixate on here. Instead, what kind of community are we (or perhaps ‘we’?) in LPE in terms of our gut level moral sensibilities. Are we one that strokes our chins, ‘hmm interesting, yes, let’s consider the nuances’ when faced with a prestigious one of ‘us’ suggesting discrimination against others of us? So far, it seems like the answer is yes, and for me anyway, over here near the door of the big tent, that makes my gut tie itself in a knot, and I begin to wonder if my ticket to the big top might be refundable.
