Truth and lies. Content and form

Does liberalism without individualism, human rights at its foundation, and a belief that the state should stay out of people’s lives even make sense? Joseph Raz, who died on May 2nd, believed it did.  Raz was a world-renowned legal and political philosopher whose book, The Morality of Freedom, offered a way of marrying liberalism with a traditionally opposed political philosophy: perfectionism. 

Bruno Maçães in the New Statesman

A large part of the crypto space will never reconcile itself with this outcome. For the true revolutionaries, Terra’s implosion showed crypto is not going far enough. Stablecoins still look to fiat currencies as their model and so suffer from the same flaws the US dollar and its peers have always exhibited. They are tools of power, ways to control wealth and channel it in certain directions. Crypto utopians picture a world where mathematical truth becomes the overriding political authority. If this sounds like Platonism, it’s because it is Platonism. But there is a reason Platonism continues to attract us. Behind the notion of an immutable blockchain lies the dream of the unmediated rule of truth over society.

Evgeny Morozov reinvents... 

Algorithms have their limits; so do humans. At The Syllabus our human curators work side-by-side with technologists to discover outstanding new content.

Every week we index, rank and review tens of thousands of newly published pieces across text, audio, and video - and in 6 languages.

Our team then hand-picks the most interesting material from this ever-growing pile of information. We call this “artisanal automation”.

The result? More than a dozen weekly syllabi with all the best new material to read, watch and listen to.

3 Quarks Daily was founded in 2004. It's blurbed by Richard Dawkins and David Byrne. The Syllabus is blurbed by Brian Eno.

A friend's ex-girlfriend updated an old old film that's getting a new release.  Ex-Catholics, ex-porn stars,  and ex-geeks. "She's still got it." It's all still there.  It's reflex.

Oliver Sacks

What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President’s speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking ...

There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practiced rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal—and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving—but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak ‘naturally’, naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave unnaturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues—tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one’s expressions, one’s gestures, one’s entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one’s person, and total depersonalization of one’s voice, even to using a computerized voice synthesizer) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called ‘tone-color’ (Klangenfarben) or ‘evocation’. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech—somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek—that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Why all this? Because speech—natural speech—does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) ‘propositions’ alone. It consists of utterance—an uttering-forth of one’s whole meaning with one’s whole being—the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs’ understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with ‘tone’, embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal— and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved—and often more: preternaturally enhanced ...

This too becomes clear—often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way—to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true— but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that—at least with emotionally laden utterance—the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to ‘tone’ and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of ‘feeling-tone’ in his (1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs.

Thus the feeling I sometimes have—which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have—that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily ...

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, was published in 1985, the English translation of The Name of the Rose, in 83. I was reading Calvino in the 70s, and then Borges. By the time I got to Borges I knew the problem.

2 decades ago as a 21 year old I read Gravity's Rainbow and a pair of fragments from it became touchstones of my intellectual life: the description at different points in the novel of two acts of self-destruction, the mass suicides of the Herero in Südwest as a refusal and denial of the authority of their masters, and of the Schwarzkommando as the final act of nihilism. The significance was context: that identical actions could signify categorical opposites. Academic freedom historically has been tied to general freedom of thought and to democracy, but now it's linked to institutional privilege and defended with references to monarchy. 

The classic defense of the free market is that its openness and vulgarity act as an astringent, testing and tightening thought what would otherwise risk becoming arid blather. But now that the market has reached the academy it wants to escape its roots. So we have an academy predicated not on the hopes of the humanities and of democracy but on the technocratic logic of reactionary schoolmen. Welcome to the 14th century.

Argument itself may be epiphenomenal, but it's not an argument to say that perfectionism is anti-democratic. Whatever the cause, Joseph Raz now has a tag.

"Crypto and the politics of money", Tooze and Morozov 

EM: The whole new field of “cryptoeconomics” seems to ignore the macro-level and just focuses on getting the Homo Economicus to behave through better-designed incentives… If one were to write an intellectual history of cryptoeconomics, it’s going to be almost exclusively dominated by mechanism/market design and game theory, its non-existent macro-economics stuck in denial somewhere between the extremes (all on the far-right) of someone like Murray Rothbard and his libertarian opponents who preach Free Banking. This ignorance of the macrofinancial is premised on what seem like wrong-headed ideas about the nature of fiat money and it not being “backed” by anything… Could you briefly tell us why in your opinion the standard crypto critique of fiat money makes a mistake in ignoring the ways in which the structures of macrofinance actually do back, say, the US dollar?

AT: Well it is a vertiginous realization isn’t it? That money is not backed by “anything.” I’ve shocked year after year of smart college students by forcing them to face that reality. There are always a significant minority who cling to some version of the gold standard. They actually do believe that when you “take the note to the central bank,” you will get “something” in exchange. It’s not an easy idea to give up. It’s not unlike the vertiginous feeling that is engendered by realizing that language is not “backed” by anything. We are familiar with solutions to this problem. Create a physical object that can be used as a reference for a word, a definition, a standard, etc.

I pasted the above a week ago and set it aside. It made me laugh. I had that "vertiginous feeling" a long, time ago, but I wanted to put this to good use.

Leiter just posted "Realism About Precedent" to SSRN 

In jurisdictions with a doctrine of precedent (or stare decisis), later courts are supposed to be bound by the decisions (the ratio or holding) of earlier courts, either those above them in a chain of authority (vertical precedent) or their own earlier decisions (horizontal precedent, where the later incarnation of the same court usually retains the option of overruling its earlier decision). The later court, in either the vertical or horizontal cases, is bound only by those decisions which are “on point” or “the same in relevant respects” to the case currently before the court. Since cases are never identical in all particulars, this always requires figuring out which general categories that subsume the particulars of different cases are the relevant ones: I will call this “relevant similarity” in what follows. Relevant similarity is typically assessed in light of either the reasons the earlier court actually gave for the decision or the reasons that can be imputed to the earlier court based on the legal decision that court reached. Analogical reasoning figures crucially in ascertaining whether an earlier case that might be precedent is, in fact, “relevantly similar.” Indeed, there is no doctrine of precedent without analogical reasoning, since in any jurisdiction with a doctrine of stare decisis, any earlier decision by a court is a possible precedent for a later court considering the same legal question, and any earlier decision considering the same legal question is potentially distinguishable as involving facts that are not “relevantly similar.” Uncontroversial judgments of relevant similarity deal with most of the former cases. 

Leiter pretends to be an observer, not a player; he thinks his arguments are "backed" by something more than pedantry. Using his own definition, trial lawyers are the only legal realists. 

My only real comment on Morozov is from 2013, but his name's come up a few times. I'll give him a tag

A repeat from 2014, with additions, relating to Mark Fisher, art as life, fascism, and the rest.

A friend of mine had it on vinyl, or maybe on a tape. I remember him translating it for me, laughing. 

"Everything is going according to plan." The line gave me a flashback from 20 years ago.

I didn't know about the Adam Curtis Massive Attack collaboration.

Curtis is a political romantic who uses irony only to put himself beyond irony. He refers to desperation and nihilism to indulge without admitting the indulgence, and the denial magnifies it. If art is reification, it describes the maker's desires as the desires of a person, not absolutely as the state of the world. Art is response; it's not the world. The little space between the two is irony.  Curtis collapses that space. What's left is simple determinism.

Curtis is the Chris Marker of the BBC, a romantic reporter of fact. Marker by comparison is just a man observing and responding to what he sees, while admitting that what exists may be something else entirely.

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Better to say Curtis is cross between Marker and Errol Morris. Curtis annoys me. Morris disgusts me.

Mirowski, "Hell is Truth Seen Too Late"

Recall that neoliberalism predicates itself on the observation that most humans are one or two bottles shy of a six-pack when it comes to rational thought. Hence, anyone who had read Hayek, such as Cass Sunstein, long ago projected that the internet would promote the isolation of people within their own filter bubbles and that this might have implications for the way politics would play out in the future (Sunstein 2007). Sunstein’s reading of the situation was characteristically superficial, leading to his own prescription that people might be “nudged” toward certain political activities without realizing that they were being manipulated by their political over-lords. Others, starting from the same premise, took the position that the internet just naturally tended to degenerate into dreck, especially because so much of it came to depend on “user generated content [UCG]” (Feldman 2016). Neoliberals do not mind blaming any debilitating epistemic fallout on the agents themselves because it reinforces the message that the market just gives the masses whatever they want. Here, however, is where some on the left attempt to push back. Evgeny Morozov, for one, insists that the onus rests solidly on the economic organization of the platforms that structure internet activity (2013). While this points us in a promising direction to understand the neoliberal character of fake news, the indictment may still be misleading: Is the dumbing down of the populace a mere unintended natural consequence of the pursuit of profit, an unfortunate by-product of progress, or is it something else? 

The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has long been warning us that something much larger and more pervasive has been going on well before the contemporary moment of frenzy over posttruth. As he puts it, “We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can’t counter it with a coherent narrative of their own.”27 Curtis finds one incisive theoretical discussion of the new regime in the work of the Russian Vladimir Surkov:

[The pervasive] defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control—and to understand how this is hap- pening you have to look to Russia and to a man called Vladislav Surkov who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisors and has helped him maintain his power for fifteen years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career say that what Surkov has done is import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.

His aim is to undermine people’s perception of the world so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly-changing piece of theatre: he sponsored all kinds of groups, from Neo-Nazi skin-heads to liberal human rights groups, he even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake.

As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable,” which is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion as the war began Surkov published a short story about something he called Non-Linear War, a war where you never know what the enemy are really up to or even who they are. The underlying aim Surkov says is not to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.

Here Curtis suggests the approach derives from the traditions of 1980s conceptual art, but in his earlier films, he sought the inspirations in political developments of neoliberalism. While one sector of recent punditry (at least in the United States in 2017) seeks to pin the practice of “fake news” on the Russians, in a manner similar to Curtis, it may be more pre- cise and more comprehensive to regard its advent as a distinctly global phenomenon, with earlier roots. Of course, falsehoods, propaganda, and misinformation have been with us since time immemorial, but what Curtis and others point toward is something far more insidious than George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Once the neoliberal image of the market as both means of conveyance and validation of ideas took hold, then it consequently shaped and informed changes in the very means and conduct of argumentation in general. Befuddlement became an active political strategy very different from the top-down broadcast model of early twentieth-century “propaganda.” The recent fondness for Orwell’s 1984 as master narrative turns out to be another red herring. Now, disinformation rests on the creation of a fog of confusion and disillusion, and less directly on straightforward media manipulation (the bugaboo of the nostalgic Left) than the harvesting through social media of the inchoate folderol of the general populace, subsequently feeding it back to the masses through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and new model “journalism.” Dissimulation rechanneled becomes its own special “spontaneous disorder.”

Surkov saw the chaos and fragmentation in the politics in western consumer societies and sped up the process. He studied theater just like David Bowie and Richard Spencer, but he's the manager. He "discovers" people. Curtis on Russian despair, punks, Letov and Limonov.  I hate fans, and especially fans of the avant-garde in 2021. 

In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg, aptly titled Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of left-wing high seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that. 

Mannerism is the continuing defense of old beliefs revealed as empty. They're all you have, and if they're empty you are too, so you embrace the morbid symptoms. The love of knowledge devolves to the love of bureaucracy and filing systems. The love of art becomes the love of style.

Curtis' films are documentaries about heroin with a cast of pixellated fashion models and a humming soundtrack. They work in a narcotic flow. They're made for fans of Gerhard Richter who can't admit to sharing his nihilist passivity. After all the films are merely "documentaries".

Moralizing poets are read in the long run because they describe their failure honestly. Dishonest journalists evade responsibility by living vicariously through their subjects, and as fans they're voyeurs. But a suicidal fascist is no less a fascist because he's suicidal, and the adoration of a fascist is still the adoration of a fascist. See also Jon Ronson.

"Fake news." Before there was Murdoch there was Hearst. 

"Post-truth."  Orwell again, and Henry Farrell and Truth. 

Mirowski isn't defending democracy; he's defending one institutional elite against another, both equally sure of their own status.  

Friedman, as usual, dumbed down the Hayekian message for those with limited attention spans: “Businessmen, who may be bankrupted if they refuse to face facts, are one of the few groups that develop the habit of doing so. That is why, I have discovered repeatedly, the successful businessman is more open to new ideas . . . than the academic intellectual who prides himself on his alleged independence of thought” 

Merchants vs priests, academics, and "scientists". Disinterested reason defends either unbridled self-interest or itself. Either way "truth" is key. And the choices for the majority are few.

STS and Democracy. When political theorists are called scientists, and are horrified that awards granted for theology are given to "charlatans", it's no wonder people are suspicious. But no one demands a democratic vote on how to install their kitchen sink.

Hippie drug dealers didn't start out reading Hayek; they discovered him after the fact. Neoliberalism wasn't invented in a lab. The Lippmann Colloquium wasn't a cause; it was an effect.  "By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."

repeats.

Quinn Slobodian and Mirowski were two of the editors of Nine Lives of Neoliberalism.
Slobidian blocked me on twitter for reminding him that intellectual history is not synonymous with history. The French, most of them, have a sense of irony that American academics will never get.
It's good that Americans are reading Piketty now and not Bourdieu.

But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.

The best defense of democracy is pessimistic. Neoliberalism, vanguardism, radicalism, are all modern forms of inflexible elitism. A program of broad-based public education is a guard against the rise of a ruling class in all its forms: of wealth or expertise.

"Evidence Based Practice" Dumb and Dumber

The Journal of Strategic Studies
The 1983 Nuclear Crisis – Lessons for Deterrence Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT This article distills insights for the scholarship of deterrence by examining the 1983 nuclear crisis – the moment of maximum danger of the late Cold War. Important contributions notwithstanding, our understanding of this episode still has caveats, and a significant pool of theoretical lessons for strategic studies remain to be learned. Utilizing newly available sources, this article suggests an alternative interpretation of Soviet and US conduct. It argues that the then US deterrence strategy almost produced Soviet nuclear overreaction by nearly turning a NATO exercise into a prelude to a preventive Soviet attack. Building on historical findings, this article offers insights about a mechanism for deterrence effectiveness evaluation, recommends establishing a structure responsible for this endeavor, and introduces a new theoretical term to the strategic studies lexicon – a ‘culminating point of deterrence’.

A new set of rules that eliminate the risk of human error.

The academic terminology, the passive voice, the "new theoretical term", a new label for the filing system, the ethics and aesthetics of bureaucracy.

Where Jerome Groopman meets Evgeny Morozov.

Henry Farrell makes the case for ignorance.

11
MPAVictoria 07.09.13 at 5:58 pm
...Your impressions about how aristocratic they can be differ from mine. I have sat in on dinner parties where every single person there (besides me) arrived in an expensive German vehicle and listened to them complain about the gall of cashiers asking for 12 dollars an hour. So naturally your impressions made me curious.

12
Rakesh Bhandari 07.09.13 at 6:06 pm
Well that complaining does not seem very aristocratic to me, more petit-bourgeois.

13
Henry 07.09.13 at 6:09 pm
Rakesh – look up the etymology of the word aristocrat (‘aristoi’+'kratein’= …)

'Aristoi' - The best, the most noble.

SE: "Arguments for the nobility of greed are a recent development" 
Bertram: "If, by 'recent' you mean 1705, you may be right."

If the definition of nobility has changed, the definition of aristocracy has changed.
How the fuck did Henry Farrell, or any of them, get this far in life claiming to be a member of an intellectual elite?

Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim’s point more pithily – "the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one."

"History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but does not deepen it."

Philology is dead and "History is Bunk"

All my sympathies to Rakesh Bhandari 

John,
I am obviously frustrated participating on this list and to some extent the blogosphere.

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Evgeny Morozov rediscovers the obvious and reinvents the wheel.

In To Save Everything . . . I quote from Ken Alder's fascinating book on engineering and the French revolution, where he argues that engineering is actually one of the most revolutionary professions, since engineers are so keen to “disrupt” and are always eager to look for the most efficient solution. Here is what he wrote:

Engineering operates on a simple, but radical assumption: that the present is nothing more than the raw material from which to construct a better future. In this process, no existing arrangement is to be considered sacrosanct, everything is to be examined in the light of present aspirations, and all practices refashioned according to the dictates of reason.

Now, there's much to like about this revolutionary spirit, at least in theory. I'm not the one to defend current practices because that's how we have always done things (even though I do realize why so many conservative commentators endorse my work; the best review I got is probably from Commentary; I'm not yet sure how to react to such applause to my work). But this doesn't mean that everything should be up for grabs all the time—especially when efficiency is our guiding value. This to me seems dumb, not least because many of our political and social arrangements are implicitly based on the idea of inefficiency as the necessary cost of promoting some other values.

Take rent control or common carriers like taxis. Those two norms introduce a lot of inefficiency, as the proponents of AirBnB and Uber like to point out. But to say that these cool start-ups are good because they promote efficiency is not to say much—since efficiency may not be what we actually want. There's something odd happening here and I think we ought to explicitly recognize that inefficiency can be a good thing—at least when it allows us to get something else. To put this in broader theoretical context, I think we ought to stop being in denial about the foundations of modernity; it could be that opacity, ambiguity and inefficiency always played an important role but we never had to defend them because they were never under threat. The situation today is different and we ought to defend them—if only to make it harder for the “disruptors” to keep appealing to efficiency and transparency as if those are unalloyed goods. They aren't and we ought to make this clear.

 My comment

Books and articles like this depress me, not because I disagree with them but because the authors don't know enough of the history to realize how much of they're recapitulating old arguments that've been forgotten.

"I am however quite old-fashioned and excessively utopian in that I believe that it wouldn't be such a bad idea for citizens to know what they do and have some basic understand[sic] of why it matters—even if we have the option of achieving a better outcome with them doing it without any awareness."

That sentence is a mess, even with the irony. The definition of "utopia"  is that it's impossible: a fiction. Gamification is only the most recent example of engineering fantasy, predicted as all others have been on the distinction between designers and players, governing and governed. Morozov speaks like an earnest adviser to the Czars; his defense of democracy isn't nearly strong enough to make the case. "Virality" like the language of "memes" always resolves to "determinism for thee but not for me." Techno-fantacists and revolutionists are products of the same culture as the rest of us; there's no way for them to escape it.  But since they look foreward and not back, there's no way for them to see what made them.

Ask a historian the definition of humanism and they'll talk about the Renaissance and the rediscovery of history, and the sense of historical knowledge as both valuable and imprecise. Renaissance humanism is both curiosity and irony, an escape from the arid formalisms of the Rationalism of the scholastics ["Assume an Angel"] and the Church.  Ask a philosophy professor the definition of humanism and you'll get a different answer entirely. You'll get the optimism of engineers.  Renaissance humanism is empiricism not as philosophy but practice. Enlightenment humanism is the primacy of theory, ideas writ from above, perfection imposed on an imperfect world, on the imperfection of others. It's not even the science of practicing scientists, since science itself is empiricism. The "sciences" of history, economics, politics and philosophy all originate in models built by lovers of modeling, of engineering: rationalism not empiricism.

Descartes: "History is like foreign travel. it broadens the mind but does not deepen it"
To a historian of the Renaissance that's not humanism that's anti-humanism.

"the community of people writing about “the Internet” is just so stuffy, boring, and self-absorbed (in their defense, most of them were trained as lawyers)"

Perhaps, but they've never spent much time in courtrooms. The culture of the web is self-selecting for  tech specialists, economists, political scientists, political philosophers and theorists. Practicing lawyers don't see themselves as engineers they see themselves as tradesmen: professional storytellers who work for a fee, the sort of people Plato inveighed against. Ask a jobbing lawyer and that's what they'll say.

The the most amusing thing about all this for me is that I'm a hard determinist. I've been following this for 25 years, watching the changes. The only thing that amuses me more is watching the rise and secularization of Islam. European secular humanism over the past 200 was more than anything a Jewish tradition. "Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship." Gershom Scholem was a Zionist. The leaders of the scholarly tradition over the next 200 years will be Muslim.

The European scholarly tradition.
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"Philosophy is garbage." The quote is Burton Dreben. The original is here and it's not Scholem.  Just lazy.
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later addition on the history of the anti-bourgois right, and left.

George Lefebvre

The great majority of nobles either did not know how, or did not wish, to get rich. The great majority of younger sons had no desire to "derogate." They sought the remedy elsewhere, in a growing exclusiveness. Some held that the nobility should form a body like the clergy and be constituted as a closed caste. For the last time, in stating grievances in 1789, they were to demand a verification of titles of nobility and the suppression of automatic creation of nobility through the sale of offices. Likewise it was held that, if the king was to count on "his loyal nobility," he should recognize that they alone had the necessary rank to advise him and to command in his name; he should grant them a monopoly of employments compatible with their dignity, together with free education for their sons.

"The great majority of nobles either did not know how, or did not wish, to get rich."