Honor and Esteem

I've organized a panel for the next APSA in LA.  If you are planning to be at APSA, please come.  I'd love to see you.  

As I've been getting more engaged with Pufendorf, I've decided to present a paper at APSA on some of the foundations of Pufendorf's moral theory.  

One area that caught my attention (and I've been puzzling over) has been Pufendorf's treatment of reputation or esteem [existimatio] and honor, anticipating a major theme of Enlightenment social thought such as in Rousseau and Smith.  There are two places in Pufendorf's corpus where he explains his position on these themes.  One is in De Jure Naturae et Gentium VIII, 4.  The other place is in this work:

The work is valuable for me because it presents an orderly catalog of major legal concepts that will later be repurposed in his grand theory of natural law.  

'Esteem is the value of persons in common life, according to which they are fit to be regarded as equals or to be compared with other persons.'  Among the notable features of this definition is Pufendorf's suggestion that esteem is, at least in principle, a quantitative measure of a person's worth (and actually, Pufendorf states explicitly that value simply is the quantitas moralis of the thing being measured).  Just as the value of commodities [mercium aut rerum valor] in a marketplace can be measured by price, so too can the value of persons theoretically be measured by something similar to price.  

But the measure of a person's value isn't money (or at least not primarily money).  Instead, the currency of esteem, so to speak, is honor.

There are several points that I find so remarkable about this passage (and I'll have more to say about at APSA).  The first is the principle of proportionality that ties esteem and honor.  Honor 'corresponds to the intensity of another's esteem.'  To wit:  Greater esteem attracts proportionally greater honor, whereas lesser esteem attracts proportionally lesser honor.  The implication, then, is that existimatio is a variable - and, indeed, a dependent variable at that (dependent upon the honor paid by others).  And since esteem depends on the honor given by others, Pufendorf's reasoning does not allow for anything like what we today might call 'self-esteem.'  

Note also the point about metonymy:  'Actually, honor is not in the honoree, but rather, in the one honoring the honoree.  Although by a kind of metonymical logic, esteem, or that which has merited honor, is designated by this word.'  

The same point is repeated in the De Jure Naturae et Gentium VIII, 4, §11, but with some additional authorities in Scripture (John 8:54: 'If I honor myself, my honor is nothing.  It is my father that honoreth me'), Aristotle, and Hobbes.

What's notable in this latter version, however, is a new sentence: 'Although anyone may place whatever value he pleases upon himself, just as a seller may for his merchandise, the price of goods are ultimately set by the buyer.  And so, it can be seen that it is up to others to determine the value of a person.'  Not only is it an economy of esteem, but even a marketplace of esteem, where we are all buyers and sellers.  Pufendorf is clearly borrowing from Hobbes' Leviathan, Ch. 10 (s.v.: §'Worth') which makes a similar remark - it is the buyer who sets the price.  

I'm left with two thoughts that I hope to have more to say about at APSA.  First, is there a 'right' to be honored by others?  This notable chapter seems to suggest there is - albeit an imperfect right, but a right nonetheless.  The implication, then, is that one can be 'wronged' if one has not been properly honored by others.  As an imperfect right, the injured party can't sue to remedy the insult, so something analogous to a legal remedy must allow satisfaction of that imperfect right.    

The other point is simply the norms of reciprocity that seem to structure these remarks in Pufendorf.  I am teaching a seminar for my undergraduates this fall on the politics of honor.  To give and receive honor in due proportion is a moral practice that liberal democratic politics is ill-equipped to support.  I'm eager to see how undergraduates encountering Pufendorf and Montesquieu, perhaps for the first time, will deal with what appears to be, in Pufendorf's eyes, critical shortcomings of democratic politics.  Democratic equality 'over-pays' honor to those who don't have a right to it, while also 'under-paying' honor to those who have a claim to even more.

I suppose what needs to be scrutinized is a central axiom of liberal political theory - the equality of persons.  What seems to emerge from these sources (Pufendorf isn't the only one) is a strikingly inegalitarian view of the relations between persons.