Responsibility, Convention, and the Role of Ideas in History*
Thomas L. Haskell
...My debt to Quentin Skinner is already apparent. In the interest of brevity, my plan here is to hoist myself up on the shoulders of two other scholars, neither of them historians, who have had penetrating things to say about the conventions that had to prevail before "responsibility" could take on its present range of meanings. The first is Friedrich Nietzsche, who had no qualms at all about asserting the priority of convention over reason, just so long as he secured recognition that both were subordinate to the "will to power." The second is the philosopher Bernard Williams, whose recent book, _Shame and Necessity_, addresses (among other issues) a classic problem: the puzzling absence from ancient Greek culture, in spite of its undeniable philosophical sophistication, of any conception of responsibility capable of sustaining an attack on slavery. Although the judicious balance Williams strikes between the claims of reason and the force of convention has much to commend it, I shall argue that certain amendments might yield a still more satisfying formulation.
"Responsibility" is a word of surprisingly recent coinage. Like "individualism" and "altruism." French imports that entered the English language only in the 1830s, "responsibility" plays such a central role in the form of life we inhabit today that it is not easy to imagine how our ancestors ever got along without it. Yet the word is as young as the United States, its first recorded usage having occurred in 1788, during the debate over the Constitution. Federalist paper 63, written by James Madison, speaks of frequent elections as a means of ensuring "a due responsibility in the government to the people," and notes that "responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party."[5] "Responsibilité" first appeared in France at about the same time.
Although born under political auspices, the word's meaning has never been confined to politics. This is not surprising--although the abstract noun "responsibility" was new in 1788, the adjective "responsible" was not. No counterpart either to the noun or to the adjective existed in classical Latin, but "responsible" or its equivalents existed in French as early as the thirteenth century, in English by the end of the sixteenth century, and in German by the middle of the seventeenth century. These dates considerably lengthen the word's lineage, yet even they seem surprisingly recent, given the primal quality of the values and practices to which the word refers. Once coined, "responsibility" was easily assimilated to philosophical controversies that had been begun in other terms, such as "free will," "accountability," "answerability," and "imputability." Richard McKeon found the earliest philosophical treatment of responsibility in 1859, when Alexander Bain mentioned it only to recommend an alternative, "punishability." Bain contended that "a man can never be said to be responsible, if you are not prepared to punish him when he cannot satisfactorily answer the charges against him." John Stuart Mill agreed, declaring in 1865 that "responsibility means punishment." By the 1880s, L. Lévy-Bruhl was using the term in a more ambitious way that made it a touchstone for moral inquiry of all kinds, but precisely because the term could be so easily substituted for older alternatives, McKeon concludes that its introduction did little to alter the course of philosophical debate.[6]
The element of continuity should not be exaggerated, however. What is most intriguing about the comparatively short etymological lineage of "responsible" and "responsibility" is the thought that our conceptions of morality and human agency, in which these terms figure so prominently today, may be less a timeless feature of human nature and more the product of changing historical conditions than is commonly recognized. No one would argue that the consequentiality of human choice only began to be noticed in 1788, but it puts no strain on common sense to suggest that the emergence of a new word signifies something new in the lives of those who use it. At the very least we might say that a relationship between persons and events that had hitherto been a comparatively compartmentalized matter, discussed in other terms by theologians and philosophers, took on in these years a sufficiently novel prominence or centrality in everyday political and civil affairs to prompt the adoption of a new word, one sufficiently attractive that it came into wide use, eventually displacing established alternatives. Praise and blame obviously were not new in 1788. but conventions governing their imputation may well have been changing--possibly in response to rising standards of accountability in government, triggered by democratic revolutions in America and France; or more broadly in response to an escalating sense of human agency, fostered not only by political events but also by economic development and the accelerating pace of technological innovation in societies increasingly oriented to the market....
The "ripest fruit" of this stupendous development was what Nietzsche called the "sovereign individual," who, having earned the right to make promises, could not but be aware of his "mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures." "The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct. What will he call this dominating instinct, supposing he feels the need to give it a name? The answer is beyond doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience" (59-60). Ironically, it was this great historical drama--the advent of the responsible, conscientious, sovereign individual, an "animal soul turned against itself" so as to become worthy of "divine spectators"--that inspired Nietzsche's grandiose fantasies about the coming of an overman, a still higher and more godlike specimen of humanity who would exercise his will to power without guilt, thereby rescuing Europe from self-loathing and rendering the choice between good and evil obsolete (85)....
Max Weber, who read and respected Nietzsche, took the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century to be the great watershed between "traditional" and "rational" (or modern) ways of life in Europe. If Weber was right, the ascetic values that largely define responsible conduct in Western culture today were initially cultivated in monasteries and oriented to other-worldly goals, but they were carried into the marketplace of everyday life and evolved in close conjunction with capitalism from the time of the Reformation forward. Any thought of a link between capitalism and rising standards of responsibility may seem paradoxical, yet Weber's point was sound: Even though market economies live by the rule of Caveat emptor and deliberately shrink responsibility in some dimensions (e.g., the limited-liability corporation), they also depend on a norm of promise keeping and cannot thrive without an ample supply of calculating, self-disciplined "economic men" (and women), alert to their interests and acutely attentive to the remote consequences of their conduct. It is among people of just this consequentialist cast of mind that perceptions of responsibility are most likely to flourish.[14] My assumption is not that the market elevates morality, but that the form of life the market fosters may entail the heightened sense of agency and enlarged causal horizon without which Nietzsche's "long-willed" sovereign individual cannot function, whether for good or evil. The expansive causal imagination that enables the entrepreneur confidently to assume responsibility for constructing a profitable future is no less necessary for ambitious projects of humanitarian reform than for brutal schemes of self-aggrandizement.
Recent research by social historians suggests that, as a cultural and psychological phenomenon, the ethic of responsibility had not achieved dominion at all levels of European society even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.
Middle-class moralists of the Victorian era no doubt indulged their own hunger for amour-propre and underestimated the degree to which responsible conduct presupposes economic security, but they were probably not wrong to sense in working-class culture an attitude more fatalistic and more tolerant of irresponsibility than that of their own class. Evangelical Protestants in England certainly felt that they were fighting an uphill battle as they tried to inculcate habits of foresight, repression of impulse, and delay of gratification in working-class populations.[15] "Thinking causally" and anticipating "distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present" are not built into human nature. These traits are no less historical than the rational forms of acquisitiveness that Weber associated with the market and traced back to the worldly asceticism of the early Protestants. Such traits helped constitute the cultural phenomenon that Nietzsche thought so momentous, but the triumph of responsibility may have been more recent than either Nietzsche or Weber recognized--if, indeed, it is complete even today....
*[Chapter 10 in a twelve chapter collection of essays. The author's introduction asserts that the themes developed in this part of the book are the "most important...and the ones I am most eager to follow up in future work." (p. 11) With respect to the postmodern challenge to traditional intellectual history, Haskell states "I unreservedly admire the broadly epistemological questions postmodernists have raised" but positions himself with late nineteenth-century "fallibilists" such as Max Weber (seeker of understanding rather than infallible truth). Haskell explains: "Although I have no quarrel with those who remind us that history and fiction are not easily separable, I do resist those who glibly dismiss the distinction, as if it made no difference to the conduct of life or scholarship." (pp. 8, 9) Of Chapter 10 Haskell confesses not much is new: "Parts of this essay draw on three previous essays of mine on humanitarianism and antislavery that first appeared in the _American Historical Review_ between 1985 and 1987. Those essays now appear together with vigorously critical rejoinders by David Brion Davis and John Ashworth in _The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation_, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Reviews of the Bender volume include Seymour Drescher, in _History and Theory_ 32 (1993): 311-29, and Morton J. Horwitz, "Reconstructing Historical Theory from the Debris of the Cold War," _Yale Law Journal_ 102 (1993): 1287-92. An important comment on and extension of the argument appears in David Eltis, "Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation," _American Historical Review_ 98 (Dec.1993): 1399-423. Another essay by Seymour Drescher, "The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Perspective," _American Historical Review_ 99 (Feb. 1994): 44-69, is also relevant. "I have received valuable advice about this essay--often taking the form of vigorous dissent from its conclusions--from Don Morrison, David Nirenberg, Larry Temkin, and Martin Wiener. What I say here has undoubtedly been influenced by all these critics and commentators but of course they bear no responsibility for my views, and this essay is not meant as a response to any of them." What the essay does seem to represent is the distillation of fifteen years of thinking about the problem of understanding the notions of generations past.]
[The full text of the essay is available at <http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~sprague/hask1.htm>.] *****
Thomas L. Haskell, _Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History_ (2000): <http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/f00/f00haob.htm>
Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality Rhetoric vs. Practice In Peter Novick's _That Noble Dream_," <http://www.famu.edu/acad/colleges/cas/histpol/eidahl/Fall/HIS3104/objectivity.pdf>
Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1," _American Historical Review_ 90.2 (April 1985): <http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di951440/95p00067/0>
Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2 ," _American Historical Review_ 90.3 (June 1985): <http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di951441/95p00045/0>
_The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation: Contributions by John Ashworth, David Brion Davis, and Thomas L. Haskell_, ed. Thomas Bender, 1992: <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5259.html>
David Brion Davis, "Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony," _American Historical Review_ 92.4 (October 1987): <http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di951452/95p00056/0>
John Ashworth, "The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism," _American Historical Review_ 92.4 (October 1987): <http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di951452/95p00067/0>
Thomas L. Haskell, "Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth," _American Historical Review_ 92.4 (October 1987): <http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di951452/95p00077/0>
David Brion Davis: <http://www.yale.edu/glc/info/staff.html>
John Ashworth: <http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/american/staff/jash.htm>
Thomas L. Haskell: <http://dacnet.rice.edu/Faculty/?FDSID=648> -- Yoshie
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