Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality.

By Stephen G. Engelmann. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 194p. $74.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

The concept of interest looms large in libertarian and neoliberal thought, which holds that only individuals (and not collectivities, like states) are real and only they know what is in their own best interest. If there is a public interest, that is only a summation or aggregation of individual interests. These individual interests exist prepolitically; that is, they are prior to the individual's engagement in politics (which is viewed as a high-stakes game played by self-interested players), and serve as the main (if not sole) motive for political engagement. The state has no business being in or interfering with business—thus the rationale for “privatization” and “deregulation.” Given the choice between allocating values via “politics” or “markets,” always choose markets. And then extend the logic of “economic rationality” to cover all aspects of human life, including the choice of one's mate and the dispensation of justice. So say the neoliberal theorists of the “Chicago” school, most notably Gary Becker and Richard Posner.

Stephen Engelmann's aim in Imagining Interest in Political Thought is to trace, in a nonchronological way, aspects of the history (or, if you prefer, genealogy) of a certain conception of interest that he calls “monistic interest,” which he takes to be foundational for neoliberal thinking. He nowhere offers a clear and concise definition of this suggestive concept, but, roughly, the idea is this: An interest is not a single material thing but a complex ideational structure involving imagined futures. Engelmann—following Shaftesbury and (especially) Bentham (as ingeniously interpreted in the recent work of Douglas Long)—holds that the imagination plays a central and indeed indispensable role in constructing interest. To use a crude Benthamic example: Suppose I am to be punished for some offense. Punishment is the intentional infliction of pain. As a rational utility-maximizer, I have an interest in avoiding pain (from punishment or any other source). The pain I experience is not confined to the moment of its material or visceral infliction; it is experienced first and repeatedly and perhaps most vividly in my imagination. (The old saw that “a coward dies a thousand deaths and a brave man but one” is untrue; imagination doth make cowards of us all.) The law uses our uniquely human capacity to imagine future states to constrain our behavior by having us impose our own internal discipline.

This, Engelmann claims, is the “logic” that Benthamite political and legal thought shares with modern neoliberal theory and practice. In a neoliberal regime, thought and action are shaped and constrained not externally, by the state, but by an internalized “economy” constructed out of interests that do not exist prior to that regime but are instead its creations. The watchword of neoliberalism is “choice,” and each of us is supposedly a sovereign chooser. But in a neoliberal regime, we do not so much have choice as choice has us: Our imaginations, and hence our interests, are prodded and goaded in particular directions, and (to borrow a phrase from Marx) behind our backs. And this is done, again, not by the state but by what Engelmann (roughly following Foucault) calls “government,” that is, the surreptitious internalized regime that rules each of us so easily and effortlessly, even as we fail to recognize its presence and its all-pervasive power.

If this seems a bit murky, it is. Engelmann's intended meaning is too often ensnared in the toils of his clotted prose. This is most unfortunate, for there is a fine intelligence at work here. A competent editor could have worked wonders with this manuscript and thus have done the author—and most especially the reader—an enormous service. As it is, we encounter sentences such as the following: “Finally and most importantly, state interest is contained by the state. This means that it is limited in the extent to which it can attack the institutions that are its basis, whereas Bentham was not” (p. 81).

Much of Engelmann's history is potted, and rather reminiscent of the historical spoof 1066 and All That (WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, 1931): “The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of course quite bloody” (p. 82). But more than that, the veracity of his history is sometimes questionable. For example, Chapter 2 is directed, as its title tells us, “against the usual story.” “According to this progressive story,” Machiavelli and Hobbes were both theorists of interest; indeed, “Hobbes was Machiavelli's more systematic successor” (p. 17). Engelmann does not identify even a single teller of this tale, and unsurprisingly so: It is false. For starters, Machiavelli was a republican who emphasized radical contingency or fortuna, whereas Hobbes was an ardent antirepublican who called recourse to “fortune” mere “ignorance of causes” (there are, of course, many other differences, including radically incommensurable conceptions of “liberty”). Engelmann further asserts without argument or evidence that Hobbes “had [little] use for the language of interest” (p. 19) and was “not a philosopher of interest” (p. 23), which is patently false. As Quentin Skinner has shown in some detail, Hobbes held that most men are moved not by rational argument but by rhetoric or “eloquence” and a due regard to their interests (Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes [1996], esp. pp. 348–50). Other errors, no less astonishing, appear throughout. We are told of “Calvin's emphasis on the worthlessness of all that is human” and that “Shaftesbury is … schizophrenic” (p. 83)—the latter because Shaftesbury wrote two books on different topics. We are also informed that “the medieval mirror-of-princes tracts can reasonably be called conduct books for rulers” (p. 84). Well, yes, except that this particular genre was not uniquely medieval but began much earlier, with Cicero's De Officiis (44 b.c.) and Seneca's De Clementia (a.d. 56), and extended up to and beyond such Renaissance treatises as Machiavelli's Prince (composed ca. 1513) and Erasmus's Education of a Christian Prince (1516). These and other mistakes and misstatements mar what might otherwise have been a fine book.