The market for philosophers: an interpretation of Lucian's satire on philosophy.

• Author: Bragues, George

I can't imagine how you can think philosophy and wine are similar--except in this one respect, that philosophers sell their learning as shopkeepers their wares; and most of them dilute it, too, and defraud customers.

--Lucian

with the recent publication of Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner (2001) once again has extended the reach of economics beyond its traditional confines of industry and commerce, taking it to the arena where political and ideological themes are discussed before a general audience. Although the book represents, as Posner mentions, the first application to intellectuals of the complete arsenal of analytic tools now available to economists, a precedent had already been established eighteen hundred years ago, albeit not in so systematic a fashion as Posner's, by a Syrian-born rhetorician and satirist who made his mark in the Roman Empire, Lucian of Samosata.

Among the eighty-two works credited to him by the Loeb Classical Library, we find two dialogues, Hermotimus ([153-65?] 1965a) and The Sale of Philosophers ([160-70?] 1965b). The first portrays a committed follower of Stoicism convinced by a skeptic to give up on philosophy and live an ordinary life, and the second depicts a fictional auction of the major philosophical schools in the ancient Greek-Roman world. In both, key elements of the economic approach are present, inasmuch as Lucian adopts methodological individualism, presumes self-interested pursuit of utility, insinuates a theory of stable preferences, gives a rich description of the high information costs of philosophy, refers to the impact of sunk costs in explaining the dogmatism of philosophers, uses a risk-return framework to assess philosophic investments, and suggests that the interaction of consumer preferences and costs determine the following and prestige of different teachings. Just as Posner does with the present-day market for public intellectuals, Lucian concludes that the second-century A.D. market for Greek-Roman philosophers, the public intellectuals of the time, fails to deliver anything of real informational value. In other words, no philosopher succeeds in providing the truth.

Rather than taking the economic approach, philosophers and intellectual historians have either interpreted philosophical activity as the independent and disinterested pursuit of truth (1) or adopted a sociological approach that treats philosophic thought as being determined by the class, religious, cultural, and political imperatives of the day. (2) Neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory.

The former cuts against the strong correlation between philosophers' teachings and the ideological currents of their societies and times. To give just a few examples, Aristotle offered arguments in support of slavery in a society where slave ownership was accepted; medieval philosophers generally insisted on reason's capacity to prove the existence of God; and virtually all the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers criticized the landed nobility's value system and defended private property at a time when commerce and industry were in the ascendant and agriculture in relative decline. Thus, the chances that philosophers have been entirely disinterested and independent are slim.

By contrast, the other view, sometimes called the sociology of knowledge, is plagued by a self-referentiality dilemma. The proposition that all thinkers are bound by their spatiotemporal conditions must include the person who is advancing it. Yet this person is implicitly asserting that his mind can escape the confines of space and time by grasping how people think in every era. Hence, the proposition does not really apply to all thinkers, but only to everyone but the person making it. Why this exemption? An economic approach, however, does not automatically rule out the capacity of philosophers to think outside their spatiotemporal boxes, while still underlining the incentives they have to fit their doctrines to the preferences of local consumers.

The prevailing approaches' weaknesses point to the necessity of a more fruitful way of looking at philosophy. The fundamental purpose of this article is to explore the economic approach by laying out a model of the philosophic market culled from Lucian's writings and supplemented with the insights of contemporary economists. The article follows in the spirit of other economic analyses of what Karl Marx referred to as part of the superstructure of society--that is, the realm of ideas and symbols. Thus, Walstad (2002) and Goldman and Shaked (1991) put forward an economics of science; Iannaccone (1990, 1991, 1995) advances an economics of religion; and Cowen (1998) applies economic principles to elucidate art. The chief difference between these efforts and the Lucian-inspired one in this article is that I depart from the rational-actor model that most economists assume, favoring instead a behavioral view that pictures the human mind as systematically vulnerable to cognitive biases.

In essence, Lucian views philosophy as a risky investment in human capital with high information costs. In making such investments, consumers irrationally take excessive risks. Lucian also sees philosophy as satisfying a demand not just for truth, but for firm conviction, status, solidarity, justice, equality, freedom, moral guidance, consolation, and reduction of environmental uncertainty. Supply, in turn, is generally motivated by the quest for followers, status, money, and power. The market fails to produce truth precisely because the pursuit of truth is far from the only incentive operating on the demand and supply sides. Instead, the popularity of philosophical schools depends on how well their attributes meet consumers' mostly nontruth preferences.

Key Definitions and Structure of the Article

I define philosophy as information embodying a set of claims, backed up with logical and evidentiary arguments rather than with explicit appeals to ultimately arbitrary assumptions, about the fundamental principles of both the nonhuman and the human universe. This definition is essentially in keeping with the way the subject has been understood for most of the past two and a half millennia, since its introduction in ancient Greece. (3) Consumers of philosophy refer to those engaged in the activity of seeking information about the ultimate issues the subject deals with by making use of oral and written presentations: by attending lectures, talks, workshops, and interviews or by reading books, journals, and articles. Suppliers of philosophy are those who specialize in providing information about the subject matter by making oral and written presentations: by giving lectures, talks, workshops, and interviews or by writing books and articles. Suppliers can also be on the demand side by using other philosophers' ideas as inputs for their own productions, though a consumer need not play a role on the supply side.

Of course, the precise range of philosophy's subject matter has shifted over time, the most obvious examples being physics and astronomy. Today the latter are separate sciences, but at one time they were components of what was called natural philosophy. Our economic approach accepts the range of topics that happened to be established under the rubric of philosophy during the time and place being studied here. In Lucian's setting, second-century Rome, that range included metaphysics, theology, physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, logic, ethics, and political science. This restriction, however, does not preclude the application of Lucian's suggested model to all historical manifestations of philosophy. Throughout its entire existence, philosophy has consistently embraced topics whose claims, at least when thinkers advanced them, were very difficult if not impossible to verify. History accordingly demonstrates that subjects that become systematically capable of generating verifiable assertions drop out of philosophy, as physics and astronomy did. Philosophy is essentially a credence good inasmuch as its quality--that is, its truth value--cannot be readily settled either before or after someone invests in it. It is philosophy in this sense, as the rational investigation of the contemporaneously unverifiable, that our Lucian-suggested model is designed to explain. What Lucian says, then, about astronomy and physics does not necessarily apply to how these sciences are practiced today, yet it sheds light on topics that have remained philosophical. Obviously, too, what he says about the latter topics--which now include metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, political and ethical theory--is more directly relevant to current conditions.

In the balance of this article, I proceed by presenting a critical commentary on Lucian's relevant dialogues, interpreting them as offering a compelling if somewhat inadequately developed economic theory of philosophy. Starting with Hermotimus, I focus on Lucian's description of philosophy as a risky asset with high information costs. Next, I identify the sources of demand and supply in addition to the philosophic market's failure vis-a-vis truth production. Then The Sale of Philosophers takes center stage as I illuminate the market structure of the philosophy industry and how competition there proceeds along quality lines.

The Risk and Information Costs of Philosophy

It would certainly shock many of Lucian's commentators and readers that his works can be plumbed for philosophic purposes, much less economic insight. After all, Lucian is typically classified as a satirist who specialized in the comedic-dialogue form to deride the foibles and pretensions of the leading figures and symbols of Greek-Roman civilization. In this view, philosophy features in Lucian's work only as one of the chief targets of his satire, and economics and philosophy combine with the auction in The Sale of Philosophers only as a...