A Few Words about the Writing, Publication, and Title of Dialogues concerning Natural Politics

Why, why, why?

You live in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2023, not Ancient Greece in the immediate wake of the Peloponnesian War. Why the hell did you write a philosophical dialogue? What, do you think you’re Plato or something?

First of all, let’s be clear, I would much rather be David Hume than Plato. Filthy ol’ Edinburgh is much more my speed than Ancient Athens. Hume was pretty good at the dialogical artform, too. More on this anon. So, yes, I aspire to be (a thinner and less dead, but surely much stupider) David Hume, and the choice to write a dialogue was consciously influenced by his example.

Simply put, I wrote a philosophical dialogue for the fun and the challenge of it.

I decided to try writing a dialogue over the summer of 2020, as I was locked in my apartment, separated from friends and family, and gloomily watching my beloved companion of 16 years, my Coonhound-Ridgeback, Larry, at first gradually, and then, ever more precipitously, near his final end. I needed a distraction.  

The philosophical dialogue is a dying artform. More exactly, it is as dead as Plato, Hume, and Larry. There have been dialogues published in the semi-recent past – John Perry’s (1978) Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is probably the most famous example – but few philosophers are writing, perhaps because even fewer readers are clamoring for, new dialogues these days. Of course, who is clamoring for any philosophical writing these days, other than other philosophers?

Nevertheless, I had always found the idea of writing a dialogue rather appealing, if only as a personal challenge to myself. I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

I had little thought of trying to publish any dialogue that I might happen to write. I didn’t expect it to turn out well enough to be worth the effort of attempting to find a publisher. I may not have been wrong in this, but I leave that to readers to judge.

So, with little ambition other than to distract myself from various unpleasant circumstances, I sat down in the summer of 2020 to sketch some characters, a setting, and an argument that might be sufficiently interesting to engage readers.

What explains the structure, characters, and settings of Dialogues? Why are the characters philosophy graduate students? Why are they having seemingly drunken conversations at parties and bars?

The characters and settings of Dialogues are all based on real people, places, and events. The content of the conversation is made up, and the characters’ names have been changed, but, otherwise, the circumstances are mostly accurate. I wanted to create a setting that anyone who had been to college (if not necessarily to graduate school in philosophy) would immediately recognize.

Dialogues is meant to take place in the fall of 2009. I was a graduate student in philosophy at the time. I had friends, fellow graduate students, who were rabid Obama acolytes, other friends who were committed Randian libertarians, and many friends who were moderate fence-straddlers. We used to drink, constantly, and smoke a lot of pot. We bickered non-stop, if not about politics, then about more standard philosophical fare, free will and determinism, consequentialism and deontology, the natures of matter and time, and the best episodes of Seinfeld. Although vehemently conducted, none of these arguments ever led to blows or even to much offense. We all stayed friends and, often, the most intense friendships were, like that between Connor and Jack in Dialogues, between defenders of diametrically opposed positions. We all understood that people would inevitably disagree and that was OK. Indeed, such disagreement was the source of much of our fun.

I used to throw a party at the start of every semester. We used to go out for drinks after almost every seminar, which conveniently ended at the same time when happy hour began. I was about a decade older than most of the other students in my grad-school cohort. I was studying philosophy of science, working as an advisor to undergraduate students in the philosophy department, and dating a woman much smarter than me and more knowledgeable about philosophy.

Hi, I’m Andre. It’s nice to meet you.

All of the business in Dialogues about the university re-orienting away from humanities and liberal arts toward the STEM disciplines is veridical. So, too, is the story about the name and resulting acronym that was initially proposed for the philosophy department’s new school. It wasn’t “SHPIT,” but it was similarly embarrassing, and it didn’t last longer than a weekend.

Why are you publishing Dialogues on Substack rather than through an academic publisher? How do you expect to get tenure by giving your work away for free on the internet?

I am publishing Dialogues on Substack for two reasons, one negative and one positive.

As I said above, I never planned to publish the book. I wrote it for my own and not for anyone else’s satisfaction. However, after finishing the first draft, I shared it with several colleagues and friends (indeed, some of the same friends whose fictionalized versions appear in the book), all of whom encouraged me to continue working on the project.

Compared to the final manuscript, the first draft was far less serious, far more “jokey,” and focused on the characters’ circumstances and relationships. I stripped much of that material out and re-focused the book on the central argument about policymaker ignorance.

Once I had a second draft that I liked, I set about sending it to academic publishers for review. I was aware of the potential difficulties involved in finding a market for a philosophical dialogue, so I was not surprised when most of these publishers quickly, but politely, declined. Nevertheless, two publishers expressed an interest in the manuscript and sent sample chapters to external referees for review.   

Several months passed before these referee reports were received. All of the reports were positive and recommended publication. Nonetheless, one of the publishers declined to publish the book at that time. I then revised the manuscript on the basis of the referees’ comments. One suggestion that I received from multiple reviewers was to frame the book as a possible teaching text. So, I added the instructional guide, suggestions for further readings, and discussion questions that are highlighted in the final manuscript. I then sent the revised manuscript back to the one press that remained interested in possibly publishing the book.

A few more months passed before I received a single referee report back on the full manuscript (the second referee having apparently ignored all the publisher’s queries, a not uncommon eventuality). This report was also positive about the book and recommended that it should be published.

Unfortunately, the commissioning editor that I was working with – who was always very supportive of the project – could not convince his colleagues that there was a sales market to be had for a philosophical dialogue about policymaker ignorance (this despite the many obvious manifestations of policymaker ignorance that emerged during the pandemic years).

So, I was stuck, stuck with a book that I thought had value, that everyone who read it thought had value, too, but without anywhere to publish it. What to do?

I started thinking about alternative publication routes, none of which seemed very appealing to me. I didn’t want to self-publish the book on Amazon or anything as pedestrian as that. I could have just posted the book on SSRN, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu, but I wanted people to find it, read it, and, hopefully, enjoy and learn something from it, not to have it (figuratively) grow mold on a virtual bookshelf in the database of some preprint server.

Substack seemed like an excellent alternative. By this time, several of my favorite journalists – Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, to name a few – had decamped from their traditional journalistic outposts to Substack. John McWhorter had pre-published chapters of his book, Woke Racism, on the online newsletter platform. It seemed like the whole world was moving to Substack.

So, the negative reason why I am publishing Dialogues on Substack is that I could not secure a contract with an academic publisher, despite the praise it received from referees. The positive reason is that it seems like Substack – or something quite like it – might be the future of all publishing. Much of the best journalism is already published on Substack. I wonder how long before much of the best academic writing is published there, as well.

Why “Dialogues concerning Natural Politics”? That’s a dumb name. Why not “Four Conceited Drunks Bicker Endlessly about Pointless Nonsense”?

In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics does for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books undermine the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena.

In the Prologue to his own Dialogues, Hume put in the mouth of his narrator a justification for using the dialogical form rather than the more standard “methodical and didactic” form of argumentation:

“Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious, that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important, that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it […] Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation […] Happily, these circumstances are all to be found in the subject of NATURAL RELIGION”

These circumstances are likewise to be found in the subject of the proper conception of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis. That policymakers are just ordinary human beings and, thus, like all other human beings in their limited epistemic capacities is (or should be) obvious. How we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of inquiry is important. At the same time, given that the question has yet to be seriously raised in the history of political thought, it must be considered rather obscure and the answers to it uncertain. Like the question whether the assumption of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God has any role to play in explaining the physical universe, the question whether the assumption of an epistemically privileged policymaker has any part in explaining social phenomena is conducive to the dialogical form.