Biotech-Bashing: Is It Justified? (Part II)

In my last post, I began a broad discussion of the biotech industry and some of the concerns that have been raised regarding its ‘commitment’ to improving health care for the world’s population. I left it at a point where I had pointed out some evidence for change in the ways in which biotech companies perform research. Therefore, it is quite likely that the so-called chronic over-spending on R&D by biotech companies will start to bear fruit in the near future. This will come to pass as processes are streamlined, resources re-allocated, and, most importantly, biotech companies and big pharma begin to share expertise in a concerted manner in order to bring innovative therapeutics to market.

The state of the art in biological knowledge is now so advanced that most are in agreement regarding the vast and untapped potential for development of novel and effective drugs to treat hitherto incurable diseases. I, for one, am convinced that we need to look elsewhere for ways to enhance the efficiency of the biotech sector. The science is fine – it’s managing its utilization that is the problem. In many ways, this boils down to the standard question of ethics vs. profit. Worldwide, investors now have access to information of a quality and quantity never heretofore seen. Generally, large investors and the companies advising them have become accustomed to getting their returns – and lots of them – as regularly as clockwork, especially from high-tech industrial sectors such as telecommunications, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and, of course, biotechnology. Companies involved in health care have largely been unsuccessful in convincing investors to be patient – an issue I mentioned earlier.

The key is the fact that most companies in the biotech sector tend to react to, rather than anticipate, the expectations of society. This, as any switched-on business professional will tell you, is a recipe for disaster. Corporate conduct becomes hypocritical and untrustworthy, as companies feel the pinch of investor worries as well as customer dissatisfaction, and seek to at least carve out some security for themselves in the shark-infested waters of the global marketplace. A notable example of the consequences of pursuing the reactive, rather than pro-active stance was recently provided in the form of Novartis. The Swiss drug-maker is an active player in biotechnology, and its R&D programs had developed a small molecule drug, Glivec, that was amazingly active in treating a wide range of cancers – in particular chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a devastating blood-based form of cancer. Novartis purported to have instituted a program to ensure free access to Glivec for the extremely ill patients who couldn’t pay the normal price. In particular, the company’s philanthropic efforts were declared to be directed at patients in developing countries, such as India. However as the New York Times pointed out, Novartis was not entirely altruistic in its efforts. Firstly, the company was unable to (or unwilling to) find established charitable organizations with well-structured distribution systems to get Glivec to patients, instead going with a small group that eventually was shown to be woefully unsuited to the task. Second, in the case of India, Novartis imposed conditions, stating that it would supply the drug free of charge only as long as Indian companies promised not to develop and market generic versions of the compound. As soon as Novartis received word that the Indian drug-makers were willfully (and probably cheerfully) ignoring its edict, the company stopped its free distribution program.

Finally, and perhaps most ignominiously, Novartis dropped the ball completely in South Korea. This country was not classified as belonging to the developing world by the Novartis initiative. But terminally ill people are terminally ill people, right? The South Korean government refused to foot the bill for Glivec – the cost of which comes to several thousand dollars a month (nearly $20 per pill) – in order to treat a group of extremely sick people. These individuals then petitioned the South Korean Supreme Court to be granted the right to purchase cheaper generic Glivec from – ironically – India, under the compulsory licensing agreement issuing from the World Trade Organization. Initially, the Court ruled in favor of the patients. However, Novartis appealed and managed to overturn the ruling. In the meantime, the company had stopped all delivery of its drug to South Korea, citing the breakdown of negotiations with the government over pricing. When the patients – serious CML sufferers who had been declared refractory (unresponsive) to all other treatments – decided to go ahead and buy the generic Indian Glivec anyway, Novartis hired muscle to prevent the shipment from ever reaching the people it was designed to save.

Clearly, the motivation behind Novartis’s strong-arm tactics and the overall stance of big pharma is fear – pathological, all-consuming fear of loss of profit. However, time and again, history has shown that social concerns such as ‘life before profit’ are capable of having negative impacts on shareholders that no amount of blockbuster drug selling can overturn. Certainly, image is everything in the pharmaceutical industry for good reason.

So, what is the way forward? Does it even exist? Clearly, biotech-pharma partnerships should be broadened, since this maximizes the potential benefits for drug development. But what should not be ignored is the tremendous resources available in labs of the Third World. Researchers in Cuba, for example, have with almost no resources successfully created a meningitis B vaccine. This last was recently partnered with GlaxoSmithKline, a leading pharmaceutical company, for marketing and development. All the more inspiring, considering that Cuban chambermaids earn more per month, on average, than Cuban biotech scientists…

On a more macro scale, given the examples of corporate skullduggery that I have taken such pains to highlight, it is obvious that more attention needs to be given to the issue of embedding corporate accountability in global health care governance systems. Pharma and biotech companies need to transform their business ethics methodology and philosophy with respect to performance and quality assurance, making these pro-active instead of reactive. The public also needs to see more efforts made by the industry to clarify issues arising from the development and use of innovative genomics-based technologies. Finally, and perhaps most essentially, the biotech sector should find ways to address the health disparity that is growing seemingly inexorably between rich and poor countries. Global thinking is needed to combat the prevalence of the “me-first” mind-set.

Biotech-Bashing: Is It Justified? (Part I)

It has been a matter of some concern for several years that the promise so loudly trumpeted by advocates of the biotech industry, namely, that the quantum leap in comprehension of biological systems and processes would lead to a new era in medicine, seems to have volatilized into thin air. Being, first and foremost, an ardent supporter of scientific and technological advancement in the biotech field, and secondly a researcher working in this domain, I feel it incumbent upon me to attempt to clarify some of the issues that have arisen concerning the biotech industry’s inability to develop novel drugs. I believe this clarification to be necessary for two reasons: First, the critics of the biotech industry (while no doubt well-intentioned) have often chosen to aim at the most visible – and therefore vulnerable – target in this field, i.e. research and development. While it is clear that R&D in biotech is prohibitively expensive, I feel that there is much evidence to support the case that expenses associated with R&D are by no means the sole, nor even the primary, cause of biotech’s alleged inefficiency in producing solutions to unmet medical needs. Perhaps it is time to pinpoint a bottleneck elsewhere. Second, I think that recent organizational changes within the industry itself have gone a long way towards addressing the typically raised peeves of the not-so-silent “majority”.

Where to begin? I shall seem perfunctory in my approach to most of the subjects I touch upon, as there is little scope to discuss them fully. However, I would like to state at the outset that I intend to take a more philosophical tack, with the aim of trying to elucidate some fundamental issues that continue to affect biotech’s growth into a fully developed and therefore respected industry. In general, biotech still suffers greatly from the fallout of the bursting of the dot-com bubble in early 2000. The specter of biotech’s past (the ultra-volatility of the mid-1990s) has raised its ugly head, and young biotechs that had been created on the basis of so-called “platform technologies” and had never intended to enter the drug development business per se have recently been suddenly confronted with a very altered philosophy coming from venture capitalists. These last, rather than continuing to wax ecstatic about high-content screening technologies and the like, began to insist volubly that everything be bottom-lined. Rather than expecting to land lucrative partnerships with the big pharmaceutical companies, the money men argued, young biotechs should begin thinking about developing drugs on their own. Larger firms would not be willing, they said, to shell out millions and millions of dollars simply to get a license to databases containing terabytes of “potentially valuable” information. Rather, they had begun to want to see products with potential.

But even those large companies that made bets on comparatively late-stage products got burned. A notable example was Bristol-Myers Squibb, which literally lost its shirt on the debâcle surrounding Erbitux, a novel antibody therapeutic aimed at curing cancer. When Bristol-Myers’s partner on the project, a then-promising biotech firm called Imclone, suffered the ignominy of having its New Drug Application (NDA) thrown out of the window by the Food and Drug Administration, it seemed as if things were already pretty awful. Then came the harrowing tale of insider trading, investor bamboozling and the like, supposedly masterminded by Imclone’s CEO, Samuel Waksal, and his brother Harlan. The scandal snared even the hitherto unsinkable, the Queen of Home Improvement herself, Martha Stewart. However, in a nutshell, the case simply proved that large companies seeking to bet on late-stage products in the hope that this would place them nearer the finish line (with a marketable drug) might well be shooting themselves in the foot. Surely, it might be advisable to get involved at the start with a small biotech, getting to know its research and the quality of its people (particularly its management) before choosing to develop its product as a drug? Sometimes the short-term view can be disastrous. The typical product life cycle in the biotech industry is 8-10 years; with protein therapeutics, today all but immune to the threat of generic competition, it can be even longer. Obviously, patience counts for much.

This brings me to another basic point – the lack of patience in today’s society. It is clear that we look to advances in medicine more and more in order to address the enormous demographic shift currently taking place in most developed countries, namely the advent of a rapidly aging population in which a significant proportion of people are over the age of 65. However, the concern over this and its implications – in particular the potential loss of productivity and the “drag” that supporting retirees will place on social security structures – has seemingly begun to border on mass hysteria. Billions are being poured into research to identify cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, as before we visualize dropping dead from a heart attack or being hit by a car, we begin to fear lying in a nursing home unable to comprehend quite what is going on. Here in the developed world, more or less sheltered from the scourge of AIDS or malaria or cholera, we fear most the advent of a time when, bereft of our minds, we still are not bereft of life itself. The lack of patience, fueled by the mass media, has a trickle-down effect. It has given rise to an amazing sense of expectation and pressure on researchers within the biotech industry. Tools have not become exponentially better, because the small companies that were developing them have been suffocated by a lack of funds – since they were not ostensibly involved in developing drugs directly. Yet, the expectations have gotten higher. Biotech researchers have, some belatedly, awoken to the fact that they are being asked every day to do more with less. Additionally, there is an insistence on in vivo data – meaning experiments to be done on animals – to maximize the chances of identifying products that will succeed in the clinic. While this may be viewed as a clarification of objectives, it is also necessary to remember that a mouse is not a man.

It is, of course, necessary to note that problems do abound within the biotech industry itself. As with many other areas in which corporate structures exist, bureaucracy and administrative inefficiency contribute greatly to an overall incapacity to function reliably with respect to information dissemination and prompt responsive action. Tremendous emphasis is placed on gaining the advantage with regard to intellectual property, but this has come at the expense of considering what might be best as a therapeutic for the patient. I am not of the opinion that generic drugs are necessarily the greatest alternative, but sometimes the patient has no choice. Also, the unwillingness to promote dialogue over the realistic prospects for generic drugs within and outside the biotech industry has led to some alarming tendencies. India, for example, does not have the wherewithal to combat either rampant patent infringement or widespread propensities of doctors to yield to company pressure by illegally prescribing toxic anti-cancer drugs as infertility treatments. This damages both the credibility of the health care system and discourages local as well as foreign investment into medical research with the aim of developing novel therapeutics. Biotech companies are also extremely wary of disappointing investors. The dot-coms were made to pay dearly for not having basic things like a sustainable business model or a defined product line. Now, biotech companies are continually made aware of the fact that investors are asking them the same sorts of questions. Biotech investors are more likely these days to have medical or scientific backgrounds, and are more than eager to put their investment targets’ chief scientific officers on the spot with detailed and probing queries about their companies’ pipelines. Within some companies, it is rumored that scientists often spend more time boning up for investor road shows than working in the lab directing and coordinating their enterprises’ scientific endeavors.

Investment in R&D by biotech companies typically far exceeds the approximately 18% of sales normally spent by even the most profligate of pharmaceutical companies. Here, of course, it is important to note that by biotech companies I mean what are generally comparatively small organizations (even if they are making money, which is often not the case) engaged in developing products based on what we know about the human genome. Pharmaceutical companies, on the other hand, are massive corporations (the biggest, Pfizer, is currently the 6th largest company in the world) and have far more diverse ranges of operations. They may rely entirely on developing drugs to fight diseases, but can also (which is becoming more and more the norm) concentrate their efforts on so-called “lifestyle drugs”, such as Viagra and Cialis (developed to treat the euphemistically termed ‘erectile dysfunction’), or Lipitor (an anti-cholesterol compound or ‘clot-buster’). The massive amounts spent by biotech companies often raise the question of the inefficiency of their research programs. Yet, it is amazing how little time is spent discussing how this so-called inefficiency should be addressed. A close look at the most productive programs indicates how beneficial the synergy between biotech and large pharma can be. Even better, the bigger biotech companies tend to operate like super-efficient pharma companies. At the management level, they have a clear understanding of the requirements for getting a drug approved. However, in the labs, a corroborative and focused approach is taken and there is no sign anywhere of the large-scale screening campaigns that pretty much embodied the practice of ‘slinging stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.’ The combination of entrepreneurial thinking and the culture of the possible with cold realism and solid clinical expertise make for an excellent drug development paradigm. The successes of partnerships such as that of Novartis with Vertex Pharmaceuticals beautifully illustrate the effectiveness of melding scientific expertise with business knowledge. Selling drugs is still hard work, no matter what unmet medical need they are meant to address.

Aggression and the threat of nuclear terrorism

Graham Allison, author of the seminal Essence of Decision, has an article on nuclear proliferation in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that is as ambitious as it is flawed.

His argument goes like this. The availability of fissile material is the key to nuclear proliferation. If persons with terrorist intent could not get a hold of such material, there would be no terrorist nuclear threat. To bring about this end, Allison argues that the Bush administration must follow an aggressive three-pronged policy:

1. It must work, in cooperation with other legitimate nuclear states, to secure all existing stocks of nuclear weapons and materials, and do this transparently, so that all participating states can be sure of each other’s compliance.

2. The United States must ensure that countries with presumed nuclear ambitions do not have access to fissile material.

3. Consonant with the signing of the Nonproliferation Treaty, the international community must dedicate itself to preventing the emergence of new nuclear states.

The notion that the availability of fissile material should be the focus of preventing nuclear terror is a crude empirical simplification. It is true but trivial. And we should notice that Allison refrains from following the thought to its logical conclusion, namely that an even surer way of preventing such access would be to get rid of nuclear weapons (and possibly nuclear energy) altogether. Both statements are equally unrealistic.

The charge that Allison refuses to factor practicability into his prescriptive analysis is valid across the board. For example, he suggests that a new “International Security Standard” should be developed by the United States and Russia to guarantee that their nuclear stocks be insusceptible to terrorist pilfering. Presumably, this would entail U.S. inspectors having free access of inspection to the Russian nuclear inventory. But how plausible is it to assume that American politicians, not to mention the American public, would welcome the prospect of Russian inspectors regularly visiting the numerous nuclear holy of holies dotted throughout the Midwest? What international legal provisions would be put in place to guard against perceived breaches in security? The United States, notoriously protective of its sovereignty in domestic affairs, would be unlikely to subscribe to an initiative allowing Russians to judge its self-defined standards once they were in place.

A similar argument can be made against his proposed “Global Cleanout Campaign.” Here, the idea is that a coalition of nuclear states (those, presumably, that are signatories to the International Security Standard) use all means necessary to halt the worldwide production of fissile material. Allison holds that if diplomatic persuasion or economic sanctions fail in this regard, the use of force is a legitimate option. With a good portion of the U.S. military still bogged down in Iraq, and with their continued presence there over the next few years a certainty, I’m not sure why Allison thinks going to war with Iran, North Korea, and possibly Pakistan is even possible, or for that matter legitimate.

An analogous strategy is elaborated for preventing new nuclear states. If sanctions and diplomacy fail, the U.S. is compelled to use its military might in order to quell the possibility for these nations to become vendors of nuclear weapons selling to parties hostile to the America and the West. Given the recalcitrance of proud states and even prouder leaders to change their ways in the face of unilateral aggression (even when this is masked as a “coalition of the willing”), there is good reason to expect that force will eventually become a part of this endeavor. Thus, Allison shockingly remarks:

“Horrific as the consequence of a preemptive attack on North Korean nuclear facilities would be, the prospect of a nuclear North Korea willing to sell its weapons to al Qaeda and other terrorists would be worse.”

According to Philip Saunders of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the consequences of a preemptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear facilities could be disastrous. Although Pyongyang has limited air defense capabilities, it is reasonably certain that it has between 500 to 600 Scud missiles that could be deployed within minutes against targets throughout South Korea. Furthermore, the North Koreans also have 100 Rodong missiles capable of reaching targets in Japan. Add to this the fact that 70% of the North Korean military are stationed in close proximity to the demilitarized zone, and the truly horrific possibility of one or two fully operational nukes, and it is difficult to share Allison’s assuredness that preemption is better than a nonviolent alternative.

Clearly, this is a worst case scenario. However, in deciding whether to attack North Korea, American officials must weigh the probability of counterattack against the long-term danger of Kim Jong Il peddling his nuclear wares to our enemies. As a moral digression, we should also note that Allison’s argument is strongly consequentialist, asserting that it is better to kill one man so that the lives of ten can be spared. Such a calculation could only be made hypothetically, and the decision to strike North Korea, Iran, or another nation would ultimately derive its justification from the predictions of arm-chair analysts betting on an opaque future. Conversely, a principled foreign policy flatly claims that killing is wrong, and an act of war can never be sanctioned by analyzing the numbers of estimated casualties. Remember that at the height of the Cold War, similar reasons were given in order to justify a preemptory nuclear release of U.S. armaments against the Soviet Union. It goes without saying that this logic was as wrongheaded then as it is now.

To put my cards on the table, I am of the opinion that military means are never an attractive way to resolve an international crisis, though the use of force is sometimes unavoidable. But the contemplation of military action is ill-considered in the clearly laudable effort to limit nuclear terrorism.

The heart of the matter is not, as Allison contends, the presence of easily accessible and poorly controlled stores of fissile material. Rather, it is the willingness of clandestine groups and individuals to use them in the pursuit of nefarious and destructive ends targeting the citizens of any nation. The horror of a nuclear attack on the United States is unthinkable, but so is an attack using commercial airliners against innocents working in the steel and glass symbols of American capitalism. How can these incidents be ranked according to the macabre metric of comparative death tolls?

The real task before us, one that President Bush has rightly presented in word if not in deed, is the War on Terrorism, not the war on nuclear weapons. And this war, if “war” is the right term for it, must be carried out by the international community as a whole. In fact, it is not hard to see that lacking international cooperation, preemptive action is liable to court the ignominious shadow of preemptive failure. The war on terror is a war on the micro-motives of highly dispersed fugitives cultivating a murderous yen for theocratic revolution and willing the triumph of disembodied traditions generally unrecognized by their native cultures. The Muslim world is no more bent on jihad than Christian nations are on another crusade.

Rooting out individual terrorists and bringing them to justice inherently calls on the efforts of an enormous array of transnational and decentralized resources. The willingness of local police throughout the Arab world to go in search of terror-minded criminals is just as important as the work of financial experts tracing the sinuous routes of international cash flows. Similarly, the power to define the scope of anti-terrorist activities must be vested as much in the hands of national governments and regional territories as it is in the all too visible political gigantism of the United States. No rational person would deny that all persons living in today’s global community have a stake in bringing the latest and most insidious wave of terrorism to an end. But realizing this goal depends on recognizing that the world is not as global as theorists of international relations would have us believe, that the relevant individuals and communities must be given an autonomy and respect commensurate with the gravity of their task.

Allison concludes his article with the following:

“Of course, this new principle [the ‘Bush Doctrine’] has yet to be enshrined in international law. It has, nonetheless, already become a de facto rule of international relations.”

Although I am extremely uncertain that the Bush Doctrine does possess this de facto status, the implication that legitimacy will eventually issue from a state of affairs that weaker nations are powerless to change is demeaning and incorrect. Indeed, such logic is a demonstrated recipe for the rise of anti-American sentiment, rather than a comforting fact presaging an inevitable confluence of national will with international mandate. Indeed, a recent opinion poll of 11 nations suggests that more than 60% of those questioned bore a markedly unfavorable attitude toward George W. Bush. Allison’s ironic program of aggression as the preferred means of combating the nuclear ambitions of terrorists promises to increase, not reduce, this figure, while at the same time driving a stake of distrust and animosity through the still strongly beating heart of international cooperation.

It is tempting to think that having isolated a problem, further ratiocination will discover its solution right around the corner. Allison has managed to do neither. Curbing the potential for hostile militants to acquire nuclear weapons is but one particularly frightening tentacle sprouting from the Medusa of international terrorism. And, like Hercules, we must calculate our blow to take off the head. In the just enactment of this myth in the contemporary world, we need to ensure that our Hercules is invested with the collective strength of nations, and that his sword is sharpened by the principled action of naturally willing communities.

Heidegger and abortion

This article from World Magazine about Wesley Clark’s stance on abortion (pro-choice) predictably gets nearly everything about existentialism wrong. Only God knows why they would attempt to critique a philosophy they hardly understand in order to advocate a position that in its public guise is wholly untenable.

In World Magazine’s (hereafter WM) rendering of existentialist thought, there is cast of exactly two: Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Never mind that Heidegger never considered himself an existentialist, and that much of Sartre’s “anger” at bourgeois practices such as marriage, church-going, and the rule of law was a result of his Marxist convictions. WM states that: “For Heidegger, the masses, lacking a true will of their own, can only become authentic by becoming one with the will of someone greater.”

This is presumably a reference to Heidegger’s notion of das Man, and is simply incorrect. In Being and Time, he says: “Das Wer ist nicht dieser und nicht jener, nicht man selbst und nicht einige und nicht die Summe Aller. Das ‘Wer’ is das Neutrum, das Man (S&Z, 126).” Heidegger’s point (and it can certainly be disputed) is that there is no such thing, ever, as private thought or private conscience. Our choices, preferences, and life hopes are always already present in a public structure. That is, our decisions, our means for self-actuation, are made available to us by the society of which we are a part. For instance, a tribal dweller in Papua New Guinea does not have the option of becoming, say, a plastic surgeon. Nor can he even begin to contemplate such a path. Conversely, a citizen of any advanced industrial democracy does generally not have the option of becoming a shaman, or engaging in polygamy. In both cases, it is clear that our lives are pervasively and profoundly shaped by our respective societies, to such an extent that we cannot opt out of them.

The lesson WM draws from its cursory analysis of this idea is that, since the majority of human beings are inauthentic (i.e. they are defined by das Man), they are easier to kill! Indeed, the article implies that this would be a legitimate course of action for a Heideggerian existentialist, and cites his support of Nazism as proof. It then goes on to attribute a similar view to Gen. Clark.

I am not especially familiar with the intricacies of Clark’s position. WM suggests that, for Clark and all the other pro-deathers, life begins with a mother’s decision. This is a needless obfuscation. Heidegger, a former Catholic seminarian who retained a sense of piety throughout his long life, would probably be against abortion. However, a view consistent with his version of existentialism would simply remark that abortion is inextricably incorporated into the cultural fabric of democratic states for whom individual autonomy is a critical value. A woman’s reproductive autonomy is less a choice than a fact of public existence in this period of Western modernity. It is ethically or morally legitimate then, only because it happens to be available.

Clearly, this is not a good argument for either side of the abortion debate. But I believe it is a fairly accurate guess at what someone like Heidegger might say. This just goes to emphasize the patent unsuitability of the whipping boy resurrected by WM to show up the alleged horrors of Clark’s beliefs.

Theory

The publication of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory appears to have sparked a debate that has been brewing in the wings of Academe for a long time. After more than three decades of autonomous theory, often a strange admixture of structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, intellectuals are now ready to join a new and dynamic vanguard of anti-theorists.

In the heyday of postmodernism (I’m thinking of the mid-1980’s), everything was a subject, an obscure self shackled by the bonds of a dark and oppressive inheritance—and theory was the great emancipator. James Clifford, for example, in his 1986 work The Predicament of Culture, attempted to overturn the anthropological fascination with the other by emphasizing that we too, were autochthons dreaming in an imagined present. Objectivity, truth, and progress could only be hegemonic terms, authentic only in the eyes of the observer, and so impossibly limited. Whatever was said, was said as ad hoc qualification. The legacy of postmodernism is that of an extended and ignominious apologia for truth, with fear or laziness barring critical minds from access to the real.

While theory crept into every area of academic reflection, it is fair to say that its staunchest advocates dwelt in English departments across the Western world. In some cases, of course, these departments splintered into semi-autonomous centers and institutes, and in their joyous nativity spawned gender studies, post-colonialism, and Marxist critiques of just about everything. It is interesting to note that, unlike the group of analytical Marxists (e.g. Erik Olin Wright, Jon Elster, G.A. Cohen, Phillipe van Parijs, etc), the “Non-Bullshit Marxists,” theorists branding themselves with hammer, sickle, and class consciousness took mostly from the French tradition stemming from Alexandre Kojeve’s famous lectures on Hegel during the 1930’s. The lineage continues, with Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Barthes, Althusser, and countless others. Particularly in Althusser’s bizarre formulation, the chief characteristic of this Marxism was an almost theistic faith in the omnipotence of superstructure, a disembodied field of laws and symbols that invisibly determined the course of human events. Concrete studies of class, economic redistribution, and the rampant inequalities emergent in societies lurching into an ugly and often misunderstood phase of modernity were relegated to curiosa, the trivial vestiges of a theoretical revolution of which only the theorists themselves were cognizant.

And now to the anti-theorists, and a few predictions. First, it seems clear that any anti-theoretical movement is destined for the heights of abstraction. After all, a true anti-theory would simply dismiss the idea of theoretical description altogether, and get on with the real work of understanding society, politics, or literature empirically. They would swap ratiocination for statistical analysis, and interviews for deliberation with their fellow academics. And this is not going to happen, nor is there any compelling reason why it should. Anti-theory, I think, will probably turn out to be some revival of pragmatism, recanonizing American thinkers like James, Dewey, Peirce, and Holmes. Indeed, this anticipated course has already been taken by Judge Posner, in his recent book outlining a pragmatic theory of law and democracy. The idea is an attractive one, particularly because it appeals to the natural aggressiveness of academics for whom postmodernism provided only an oblique outlet. Second, anti-theory will push for a return to things in themselves (Ding an sich), and probably pick up a good dose of phenomenology along the way. The focus, I believe, will be on how to make theory relevant to contemporary problems—and this is hardly a revelatory thought, as much self-justification as scholarly zeal. In any case, we are looking at a change in theory, not an abandonment. And the results will be no more significant for that.

To close, I think it is important to be clear that in all this, normative thinking, about politics, society, and much else, still has a place, and should be largely insensitive to the squabbles of a self-proclaimed theoretical elite. Social and political theory, in its normative guise, has always set out to limn the contours of a possible future, and so only indirectly laments the follies of the present. It is crucial to ponder the basis of a just society, of fairness in the market and in government. To take only the most obvious example, we should realize that Rawls’s fact of pluralism, the empirical observation that there exists a multiplicity of complete and largely irreconcilable worldviews, poses a constant challenge to governments aspiring to greater levels of freedom and democracy, as ours surely does. Theories of politics are of use here, for though they are unlikely to predict our future actions, they can lend our thought and practice a considered consistency often precluded by the frenetic debacles so characteristic of normal democracy at work. They do not make claims so much as suggestions, and these are backed up with that most universal of human abilities, the use of common sense and reason.

The end of theory, were it a real possibility, would be welcome. Though this won’t happen, nothing prevents us from inquiring into the actual possibilities of abstract reflection. As I have argued, these are essentially prescriptive, and this defines both how they should be presented, and more importantly, how they should be put into practice.

Psychoanalysis in France

Psychoanalysis has always been animated by mysticism. This is particularly true in France, where a proclivity for verve in expression and design has long been taken as a sign of intellectual achievement, over and above the muddy and generally mundane world of fact—a little evidence goes a long way. What’s more, French psychoanalysis has evolved (devolved is perhaps better) a truly annoying proteanism, and become a rarified confection often sprinkled over philosophy, sociology, or literary studies, in order to make those pursuits more relevant. Of course, the result is often the inverse.

Jacques Lacan, peddling his synthesis of Freud and Saussure at the College de France and other public venues over decades, is the main culprit. Looking back at the heyday of French theory, including figures such as Satre, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault, we find in all cases a strong dose of psychobabble masquerading as ontological insight. In a world composed of signs, the data painstakingly drawn together in the cognitive acts of social scientists becomes simply an afterthought. After all, does one really need to give reasons for the ad hoc associations that we make on a near constant basis? One thing follows another, just because it does, and its ostensible randomness is proof positive that beneath the dross of the quotidian lurks a deeper level of mind and symbol, the ineffable and unknowable. They should have read Wittgenstein, and remembered his famous closing of the Tractatus:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

The worst thing, in my opinion, is that this trend has not abated. Derrida, after a series of highly intelligent commentaries on Husserl, set himself to worrying about Hegel’s schoolboy diaries and the evanescence of the Western tradition. At its most extreme, we have Deleuze and Guattari. I remember reading (trying to read) a Deleuze book on Leibniz, where he made the claim that ‘Alice (in Wonderland) clearly has teeth.’ Of course she does, and, for that matter, so do I.

It comes as a relief then, that the French government is attempting to set a new standard for regulating this culturally institutionalized form of witchcraft. Not, unfortunately, to the quiet opprobrium of practicing psychoanalysts. Here is a typical defense of their position, from Bernard-Henri Levy, a generic writer-philosopher-psychoanalyst-sage who enjoys tremendous popularity in France:

"When they speak of 'professionalizing' people whose business is human misery; when they speak of 'evaluating' needs and results; when they try to appoint 'super-prefects' of the soul, grand inquisitors of human sadness - it is to hard not to agree that psychoanalysis is in the firing line."

It is indeed on, if not yet in, the firing line, and if the French government is willing to assume the admirable role of intellectual executioner, we should urge these professors and pundits of the liminal soul to take just one more step forward.

The problem with Bush’s idea of marriage

The New York Times reports that President Bush plans to allocate $1.5 billion dollars in a campaign drive to promote healthy marriage. In this instance, “healthy” strictly denotes a union between a man and woman. Far more ominous, however, is the talk circulating around whether the administration will go after a constitutional amendment codifying marriage in this way, an initiative for which Bush has evidenced vague if consistent support. This is a damaging idea for two reasons.

First, the historical durability of the Constitution is due in part to its overwhelming simplicity. Indeed, in parts it stands as the greatest achievement of American political theory, the one text that has truly bridged the gap between theory and practice—ever since, similar and invariably failed motives have been the ideological calling cards of aspiring intellectuals across the political spectrum. The Constitution was never intended to enshrine the shifting mores of generations, a palimpsest to be changed at the whim of an incoming president eager to make American democracy his own. But this is precisely what amending the constitution means in this case. There is clearly no urgency involved. In a pluralist liberal democracy, conservatives, religious groups, and sociologists are free to pursue the traditional ideals of the nuclear family to their hearts content. No one is stopping them. Conversely, the logic motivating an amendment, and indeed Bush’s proposed campaign strategy, attack this pluralism in a way that does require an urgent and strong response from Americans concerned with the basal rights and freedoms that accrue to citizens in the United States. By codifying the nature of state sanctioned unions, Bush is really proposing to place brutal and far-reaching constraints on individual choice. At the same time, he is promising to muddy the legal and political integrity of the Constitution.

Second, I cannot think of any reasonable argument that convinces us that the adoption of a particular form of the good life is contingent upon universal (or rather, societal) adoption of that form. In other words, Bush and his supporters are suggesting that agents can only realize the full utility of some practice X if and only if all other agents either follow suit and do X, or choose not to do X, given that all other X-like practices are unavailable. This is clearly an institutionalization of the good life. Though some political theorists of a perfectionist bent, notably Joseph Raz, argue that the state is responsible for promoting some versions of the good life and discouraging others, they almost never expound their ideas at this level of specificity. There is, say, a pretty good reason for the state to discourage a life whose main higher-order interests involves stealing from others in support of a drug habit. But that is probably as far as it goes. The idea is that such activities are harmful, no matter how you look at it.

Now conservatives are apt to suggest that any form of marriage that is not between a man and a woman is inherently harmful, and they can probably back this up with evidence selectively culled from empirical social science. But the spate of reports and anecdotes sprouting in the wake of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage indicated that children raised by loving parents of the same sex were not placed at a disadvantage relative to peers raised in traditional familial environments. It is likely that concrete comparative studies of this phenomenon will emerge in the future that vindicate this allegation. Furthermore, no sane person can fail to recognize that the harm generated from actively curtailing civil liberties through the use of coercive legal and, I dare not imagine, constitutional force is incomparably greater than any residual harm incurred by children not raised in a manner consistent with the American form of totalitarian-socialist Christianity.

Lastly, it is worth noting that sweeping decisions of this sort promise to stymie social experimentation. In matters of great controversy, from Lochner to Roe vs. Wade, abortion and marriage, it seems best to let things play out in the public sphere, rather than opt for hasty and necessarily short-sighted preemption. For these reasons, the Bush administrations public scheming in the private life of the family deserves our closest attention.

Political Theory and Bioethics

Bioethics is big business, not just with academics looking for a niche market to practice their trade, but also for government-sponsored think tanks, the most prominent of which is the President’s Council on Bioethics, chaired by Leon Kass. With the promised ‘genetic revolution’ still waiting in the awnings, it is somewhat surprising that bioethics, an unremarkable field a decade ago, has gained such astonishing popularity. At base, the simple explanation for this phenomenon is that bioethical thinking has evolved as a sophisticated and more or less formalized expression of Luddite anxiety. Because genetic enhancements and their applications to human beings promise to alter the very nature of the self, bioethics has become a shield of natural, god-given integrity, even if many of its practitioners disavow an explicitly theological commitment. The question asked of any new genetic technology devolves to the impossibly abstract and uninformative query, “Is this technique good or bad, and will it promote this value in the future?”

I am not sure what can be learned from this type of inquiry, but it certainly eclipses the far more interesting and timely political questions that underlie the mass introduction of biotechnological capacities. Most obviously, genetic therapies that permit increases in height, intelligence, or longevity, will have to be paid for, either by the state or private individuals. The regime of justice expounded by political theorists, for one, will have to be expanded to cover instances in which the costs of genetic enhancements might be shouldered by the state to offset economic or social inequalities. In time, we’ll be speaking of genetic redistribution along with other forms of distributive justice. Similarly, we should be cognizant of how genetic changes alter the way in which citizens think of themselves as free and equal. For political theory, this is by far the most important consequence of the genomic age—liberalism, especially, is founded on the idea that persons enter a society through an unmediated birth. Thus, Rawls’s difference principle is intended to compensate those that hold a remedial share of natural and social talents. Its normative fruitfulness as an equalizer would be marred, if not incapacitated, if parents of differing status where able to affect the outcomes of social entry.

Professor Kass, in an interview published today, suggests that the real challenge of biotech has to do with the ability to transform human nature to such an extent that it might undermine the structure of our freedom. Hubris and caution, he says, should be the mainstays of ethical reflection in this instance. Otherwise, the danger seems to be that we will forget what it means to be a human being. But this is nothing new. Simply because the site of technological change will eventually shift to the human body, does not mean that the dynamics of this extensively studied process will follow suit. With the invention of the printing press, for example, our powers of communication and collective memory where forever altered, just as the introduction of mass transport has seemingly shrunk the planet to a ‘global village.’ These, and countless other technological innovations, have changed the nature of what it means to be human, though generally without the ethical fear that has accompanied biotech.

My point, simply, is that there is nothing particularly momentous, at least ethically speaking, about coming advances in the life sciences. What is relevant, however, is what these advances can and will mean for the conduct of every politics, and the normative descriptions of the political process furnished by theorists. In this light, the freedom and equality of the democratic citizen are suddenly subject to acute challenge—our theories will have to be revised.

For an excellent book on this topic, see Buchanan et al.

Time in the New Year

The arbitrary dawn of a new year inevitably jumpstarts our pursuit of manufactured promise, those dreams, resolutions, and vices that, with the studied fall of the minute hand, we are somehow empowered to realize, implement, and correct. The New Year, now two days old and aging at a constant rate, seems to be the most peculiar event regularly celebrated by human cultures, a saturnalia dedicated to time.

Brian Greene, in an evocative piece for the New York Times, outlines the cost of our adherence to a linear, Newtonian conception of time, and concludes that the price is measured in the reliability of our perceptions. Discussing the theory of general relativity, he points out that should we happen to hover in the near vicinity of a black hole for a year, upon our return to earth a million years would have elapsed. Similarly, persons separated by light years (billions, in this case) would be unable to agree, perceptually, on when a given event had occurred. Our clocks are only as good as the places we consult them from. Greene ends his fascinating and succinct route through relativity and quantum mechanics by suggesting that, though “the power of convention and experience” continues to hold sway over our daily lives, we all have a choice to make about perception, and what science tells us is beyond.

Reading his article reminded me of a passage in Paul Churchland’s small book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. In that work, Churchland argues that if on a starry night we venture outdoors and tilt our heads while concentrating on some simple ideas about the mechanical behavior of planetary bodies in our solar system, we would begin to notice that the world is turning, and we are falling down its side. Churchland continues in this vein for some time, arguing that knowledge of basic science is potentially set to change the very baseline of our perceptual reality.

But all this is beside the point. It is not just that intuitive experience regularly and consistently trumps theoretical knowledge, that our notion of time is probably closer to Aristotle than to Newton, that our understanding of the mind is Plato’s, and so on. Instead, I think the more salient question is whether a scientized perceptual attitude could be in any way relevant for the coping of human beings? On a Kantian account of reality, for example, does knowledge of science augment our capacity for reasonable behavior? Given the incredibly small differences Greene admits obtain on Earth, would we do better to know that the principles of physics are constantly at work in an unseen background, contradicting the norms of our experience? And in a consequentialist world, would these same principles lead us to evaluate the outcomes of our actions differently? The answer is no. How could they?

American pragmatism, and the American spirit of commerce and practical coping, clearly disavows metaphysical speculation at the most propitious of times, never minding the slog of day-to-day existence. We are dependent animals, clever but limited, and the gems of physical wonder that Greene extends for our cognitive enjoyment are just that, a pastime for the idle. At their most nefarious, such thoughts can lead to the sort of confusion that undermines rather than enlightens. The idea underlying this is simply the familiar one that there is no use in doubting that which no sane person would deny (i.e. that I have a body, that there are other minds, etc).

In short, thinking of time as the new year begins its race towards itself, on to a never-ending (in our lifetimes) successions of thresholds that promise to annihilate the past in the resplendent crucible of an open future, it is perhaps better to think about how, in our ordinary experience, we manipulate time to aid self-deception. Jon Elster’s discussion of hyperbolic time discounting, for instance, strikes me as a far more relevant theme for reflection in these newborn weeks of January than the foundational tenets of 20th century physics. Not to mention, of course, the startlingly different conceptions of time held by other cultures. Among the Telefolmin, a Papau New Guinean people studied by the anthropologist Dan Jorgensen, time is conceived as a finite substance, subject to entropy, something that drains out of their society like water from a leaky dam. Thinking about the human conception of time, in its uncontrolled variety, will begin to tell us something about ourselves, and how we deal with the movement towards death (Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode) that inevitably approaches as we stave off the next moment only to embrace the one that follows.

Consistency and the environment

The Washington Post has a useful update of the Bush administration’s environmental efforts since the Kyoto Accords. Not surprisingly, the upshot is that Bush and his cronies have overwhelmingly tended to favor corporate or more generally economic interests over any attempt to foster true cooperation and enforcement over emissions standards. Mostly, this turns on a very peculiar and contradictory interpretation of the regulatory state.

On the one hand, Bush stole power on the standard platform of neo-liberal (or more appropriately libertarian) economics. That is, the United States was intended to strive for free, unregulated markets. The imposition of steel tariffs to protect powerful domestic metal industries was perhaps the most salient violation of this intention. But when it comes to the environment, the Post reports, Bush seems to rely on the public spirit of industry leaders to adopt emissions standards and regulate waste?

The question, of course, is why the Administration assumes that in one area people will be willing to voluntarily conform to standards that, if ignored, will cost them nothing, while in another, it is incumbent upon the state to step in to protect domestic interests. The answer is simply that it doesn’t.

Voluntary initiatives will not work, for the grounding reason that undermines libertarianism in general: self-interest is by itself not a generator of collective goods. Mancur Olson, in his justly famous work The Logic of Collective Action, suggested that communal goods could only be realized on the small scale, and as organizations grew, the probability of establishing truly cooperative arrangements would diminish. The state, the megalithic organization par excellence, has no reason to rely upon standards not backed by some form of coercive power.

Liberal theory urges citizens to act for a common and reasoned good, and supports an activist and affirmative state. And I think on liberal grounds, there may be some good arguments for protecting domestic industries, or at least caring for workers made redundant by changes in the global supply chain. However, this also means that in making decisions about the environment, we choose not to rely on the poorly imagined altruism of corporate heads who (rightly?) measure their success in terms of profit. Emissions standards, and environmental initiatives in general, are universally beneficial, and should by understood as an obligation incumbent on a democratic leadership that holds power in trusteeship for its citizens.

Compassionate conservatism is at root inconsistent. What is continually striking is that this realization, so easily arrived at, is rarely acted upon. Surely, the duty of Democratic Congressmen and women is to persist in pointing out this chasm between belief and action, the real world incarnation of the frequently lamented gulf between theory and practice. The point I am trying to make is simply that we demand consistency of our elected officials. Not only does this demand force politics to become more transparent and understandable to a normally uninterested public, but it also harkens a more sophisticated form of democratic governance, whose flaws and triumphs then become far more difficult to conceal.

The Practice of Justice in America In Hampton Roads,

The Practice of Justice in America In Hampton Roads, Virginia, killing a man over sour cream will get you a recommended jail sentence of 30 days. In Aroostook County, Maine, however, growing marijuana will lead to a two year jail sentence, of which 50 days will have to be served. This is justice.

Who’s Right?

Who’s Right? The Supreme Court decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas earlier this year seemed to offer hope to Americans and liberals around the world that Bush’s doctrine of “compassionate conservatism” still had a long way to go, at least legally speaking. Still, the idea that citizens still need to periodically come to the defense of basic liberties embedded in liberal democracy is more than a little bit absurd.

Yesterday, the compassionate conservatives and their more visible allies on the Christian right struck back, in a move predictably spearheaded by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA). According to the New York Times, the Senate voted 64-to-34 in favor of a federal ban on intact dilation and extraction, a procedure otherwise known as partial-birth abortion. Should the bill become law, as it surely will when President Bush returns from his current tour of Asia, women undergoing the procedure, which typically occurs in the second or third trimesters, would be subject to a fine and incarceration for up to two years. In other words, a recognized medical procedure would gain the added status of a criminal act.

Santorum has said, “If your concern is women’s health, then you would be for banning this procedure.” On the other hand, if we are concerned with individual liberty, and have good faith in the autonomous capacity of citizens to decide what to do with their own bodies, then we should be adamantly against it. Abortion, like euthanasia and a host of other medical practices, is one in which the level of controversy is deeply tied to a certain conception of the person. For many theists, the moment of conception marks the beginning of autonomy, and hence the attribution of rights, while other groups regard the human status of fetuses and embryos incrementally. The point, of course, is not which view is correct, but whether any one view can be accepted by the public at large. And the bigger question, lest we forget, is to determine what value we place in our society on respecting the diverse and healthy pluralism that marks the Western conception of democracy. In my view, the bill as it stands does not, and can never do this.

Rwanda redux?

Rwanda redux? Samantha Power draws much needed attention to the current program of government sponsored ethnic cleansing now ongoing in Sudan in this New York Times Op-Ed. Since this week marks the ten year anniversary of the Hutu-led genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, the potential parallels are crucially important. Power writes:

On this anniversary, Western and United Nations leaders are expressing their remorse and pledging their resolve to prevent future humanitarian catastrophes. But as they do so, the Sudanese government is teaming up with Arab Muslim militias in a campaign of ethnic slaughter and deportation that has already left nearly a million Africans displaced and more than 30,000 dead. Again, the United States and its allies are bystanders to slaughter, seemingly no more prepared to prevent genocide than they were a decade ago.

The horrors in the Darfur region of Sudan are not "like" Rwanda, any more than those in Rwanda were "like" those ordered by Hitler. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has armed nomadic Arab herdsmen, or Janjaweed, against rival African tribes. The government is using aerial bombardment to strafe villages and terrorize civilians into flight. And it is denying humanitarian access to some 700,000 people who are trapped in Darfur.

Human Rights Watch has a detailed report of the crisis here (and a summary here).

It is banal to remark here that the fact that news of this has not made the international headlines is hardly surprising, given the far more important (sic) US presidential campaign and continuing American losses in Iraq. The United States under Bush seems less like a, in my opinion, welcome global policeman, and more like a homegrown vigilante with international reach. The world’s real trouble spots, most of Africa, Afghanistan, the Korean Peninsula, and much of South-East Asia, do not receive a fraction of the attention accorded to an anarchic black hole in the Middle East created by the present Administration. For more on this, read Power’s Pultizer Prize winning account of American non-response to genocide in the twentieth century.

Marxism and Liberal Political Philosophy, Part I

This is the first of what I hope to be a series of reflections on the meaning of Marxism for contemporary work in deontological liberal political theory, sparked by my reading of Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today?. The question is worth asking, if only because Wolff fails throughout his generally excellent discussion to address it head on.

First, let me briefly summarize a few of the points Wolff makes in his book. He begins by explaining some of Marx's key ideas, among them alienation, exploitation, the nature of labor, class exploitation, the theory of historical materialism, the falling rate of profit, and so on. For readers even slightly familiar with Marx's ideas, most of this will be old hat, though potentially useful in refreshing one's memory. Alienation is a key idea for social and political theory, and Wolff puts it nicely by suggesting that it is the severing of an expected, normatively or culturally anticipated relation: two things that are meant to relate to one another do not. In this sense, it becomes clear that we are alienated from pretty much everything in the contemporary world. We use things made by others, though in all likelihood these things were made by numerous people, in concert with an even greater number of specialized machines. Even our landscape is produced, and Wolff observes that, for example, natural parkland is only natural by decree i.e. someone decided that development would either not occur, or cease, in a given geographical locale. And despite the dubious assertion that we are now fully ensconced in a global knowledge economy, it is clear that the majority of highly skilled jobs involve the production of gross intangibles. We do not even have potential access to what we make, except symbolically in the form of money.

The other important thought that Wolff sheds light on is the basic thesis of historical materialism, namely that human history has been governed by its productive capacity: human history is the history of human production. Each epoch is characterized by a specific mode of production, and it continues to be plausible to argue that when productive forces exceed the economic structures that enshrine them, things will change. The question, of course, is whether free market capitalism is the only system capable of dealing with the radically proliferating complexity of our productive ingenuity. Indeed, the contradictions that Marx predicted would arise in his near future seem very distant from our present. Despite the growing prominence of anti-globalization movements and the like, capitalism seems to be doing pretty well, especially when we factor in the normal patterns of boom and bust predicted by standard theories of the business cycle.

Anyway, Wolff's main idea is that Marx's predictions, regarding the failure of capitalism and the rise of communist socialism, are far less important than his scathing critiques of capitalist society. In particular, he says that Marx made a clear distinction between political rights and human emancipation, and while the former are in a general sense good, they are by no means sufficient for the cause of greater human freedom and equality. The right to political participation, to vote and stand for office, may have little impact on my quality of life. Voting, when not done out of habit, requires some sort of intellectual commitment, some abstract perception of political obligation, that most people are not willing to make. That is, it is my democratic right to remain disinterested in democratic politics, even though in the long run my failure to participate could conceivably lead to the revocation of my freedom to not give a damn. Human emancipation, on the other hand, means actively ameliorating the human condition. In Marxian terms, this consists first and foremost in removing people from the oppressive conditions that go hand in hand with labor under capitalism.

The idea I want to touch on in this first part is the common sense one that most philosophical liberals probably desire that people realize the rights that it is their right to possess, but give little thought to how this would work in practice. Moreover, the kind of rights they focus on, freedom of expression, religious pluralism, political participation, are seldom the most pressing ones.

I can only think of three basic human rights: liberty, equality, and justice. All else, to my mind, is secondary. Clearly, freedom of expression, to take one example, is a species of liberty. I would not be truly free, were I not free to express my deeply held opinions without the threat of sanction. But what does freedom of expression really mean to persons who can hardly maintain the fundamental material conditions of their own existence, and that of their families? There are more important things for liberal political philosophers to worry about, even though their micro-interests generally pose fascinating intellectual problems. Marx reminds us that intellectuals thinking about society take on a real set of responsibilities regarding that society; and he urges us to treat them seriously. Even if this is only an intellectual engagement, well short of joining protesters in the street, it seems worthwhile. The first step of liberal political theory in the coming years, after the elaboration of grand theories from the likes of Rawls, Dworkin, and Scanlon, is to think about how the ideals of political democracy more often than not fail to be realized in the real world. Where Marx comes in, at least initially, is in reminding us that these ideals do not go far enough, that political thought is insufficient without a set concern for the real welfare of human beings. Economic, cultural, and scientific factors, must migrate into the ambit of political theory and political reflection. I discuss this further in the next part. In particular, I will be concerned with how the Marxist theory of alienation is to some extent relieved by the Rawlsian idea of public reason.