Mariana Mazzucato's political theory of economic value

  Professor Mariana Mazzucato is everywhere. According to the Wikipedia, she teaches Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, she chairs the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, is member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisers, the South African President's Economic Advisory Council, and the United Nations' High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs. She has been advisor of the Italian, Swedish, and Brazilian governments, the British Labour Party, the OECD, the World Economic Forum, and the European Union, among others. Apart from a number of books, she publishes her opinions in The New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times. In 2022 she was a speaker at the World Trade Organization in Geneva and the World Economic Forum in Davos.

     She has received the Leontief Award For Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought, an All European Academies Award, the von Neumann Award, the Grand Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, and honorary doctorates from many universities (among them the Argentine Universidad de San Martín).

     And Pope Francis cites her work with admiration.

     Nevertheless professor Mazzucato defines herself as outside the mainstream (?). She advocates a bigger role of governments in the economy, which perhaps is music not entirely disagreeable to the institutions she advises.

     In books like The Entrepreneurial State and Rethinking Capitalism she describes government as a main source of technological innovation and prosperity ―she even condemns outsourcing tasks to private companies. In her latest book Mission Economy she writes that governments must shrug off traditional budgetary parsimony and assume missions modeled on the Apollo moon landing. She selects three main tasks for a government's mission: a Green New Deal, health care, and narrowing “the digital divide”.

The root of all problems (according to Mazzucato)

     But it is in her book The Value of Everything that Mazzucato deals with the deeper source of all the failures she attributes to modern capitalism: the very concept of economic value. She is convinced that without challenging mainstream notions about value all efforts will lack substance and will end in mere patches.

     The first chapters of the book set the scene for the rest. There Mazzucato tells the history of the various theories about economic value, starting with the oldest and finishing with the marginalists, the modern theory of value.

     Mazzucato tells us “This book does not try to argue for any theory of value” (p. 18). Nevertheless she makes a very positive description of Marx's theory and a very negative account of those who succesfully challenged it, the marginalists. What is more, in her treatment of Marx's theory of value she omits obvious objections to it and does not even mention well known refutations, like the famous one written by Bohm-Bawerk (one of the ten greatest economists in history according to Joseph Schumpeter). On the other hand, the chapter Mazzucato dedicates to the marginalists is full of disparaging remarks. In subsequent chapters she connects marginalism with the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, the growth of what she calls “casino capitalism”, excessive salaries for managers, and growing inequalities of wealth.

     Already in the Introduction Mazzucato writes that “I will argue that the way the word ‘value’ is used in modern economics has made it easier for value-extracting activities to masquerade as value-creating activities. And in the process rents (unearned income) get confused with profits (earned income); inequality rises, and investment in the real economy falls”. Along the book she castigates modern capitalism and puts the blame on the modern theory of value.

     Nevertheless, she says that her purpose is not to defend any theory but to promote debate. In spite of such disclaimers, it is perplexing to find that someone writes a whole book on the theories of economic value, blames the modern one for all sorts of calamities, but declares to have no definite preference for any theory. Worse, for someone who just wants to revive debate, it is odd that Mazzucato omits references to views that oppose her own. That approach is not limited to this book. For instance, as we will see later, Matt Ridely's book How Innovation Works makes significant objections to the role Mazzucato assigns to governments concerning innovation. The author and the book are very well known. Still, in her most recent book and in her many speeches on the Web Mazzucato does not even mention them.

     She follows the same tactic in her treatment of the subprime mortage crisis of 2008, for which she blames the private financial sector. She does not mention the many authors that point out the part of the blame that corresponds to governments.

The marginalists as defenders of privilege

     Mazzucato puts the emergence of the modern (or "marginalist") theory of value in what she considers to be its historical context and purpose. She writes that by the end of the XIX century socialists became more and more influential, Marx and Engels challenged those who “had no proper analysis of why things were going wrong”. Unions grew stronger. In Britain, the Labour Party was founded, in Germany the Socialist Workers' Party, and in France the Federation of Socialist Workers. Then she writes “Faced with these threats to the status quo, the powers that be needed a new theory of value that cast them in a more favourable light” (p. 58) . In case those words were not enough to prepare the reader for the arrival of the new theory, on the same page Mazzucato adds “Above all, perhaps, the rising power of capitalists in a society long dominated by aristocratic landowners and local gentry meant that a new analysis of capitalism was required to justify their standing”.

     Then Mazzucato proceeds to describe the theories of the economists that would pop up around 1870 to satisfy that need, Leon Walras in Switzerland, Stanley Jevons in Britain, and Carl Menger in Austria. Mazzucato follows the standard procedure of lumping together these three economists, although they show differences that are not limited to the use of mathematics. That unfortunate starting point is followed by more confusion. Mazzucato links the new theory ―marginalism― to a long tradition in which she includes the medieval theory of the “just price” and Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number (ps. 60-61).

     Now to clarify: although Jevons cites Bentham with admiration, neither the medieval “just price” nor utilitarianism has anything to do with marginalism and in many respects both are incompatible with the new theory. At the center of the marginalist revolution is the idea that individuals are the ones who judge and get value from goods, that there is no such thing as a collective utility to be decided by a coterie of experts. Certainly, a bridge may be valuable to a large number of people both directly and indirectly, but then that is all the value it has. A bridge that serves nobody apart from “the fatherland” and some government's notion of prestige has no economic value.

     But Mazzucato does something worse than provide erroneous historical influences, she reverses the meaning of what the marginalists actually wrote. Through the book she repeats again and again that according to marginalist theory “price determines value, not vice versa” (p. 66). Already in the Introduction Mazzucato says that the modern theory was “a swing from value determining price to price determining value” (p. 7, similar statements in pages 8, 271, 272, 273).

     Actually, the new theorists said the opposite of what Mazzucato attributes to them. Carl Menger wrote in one of the most famous books in economics history that “the price of a good is a consequence of its value to economizing men, and the magnitude of its price is always determined by the magnitude of its value” (Menger Principles, p. 173).

What really was the new theory?

     The new theory rejected that value is a property of goods themselves, like the amount of labour employed on them. Instead the marginalists related the value of goods to the people who supposedly are to use or enjoy them. They wrote that when men realize that a good or a number of them are necessary for their well-being, and when they perceive that such goods are scarce, i.e. that losing one or more would mean that some needs won't be satisfied, then they economize such goods, which for that reason are ―unlike air― economic goods. Or in other words, that they have economic value.

     As Carl Menger wrote in 1871 “Value is thus the importance that individual goods or quantities of goods attain for us because we are conscious of being dependent on command of them for the satisfaction of our needs” (Principles p. 115). Then value is necessarily value for some individual, and changes with an individual's circumstances and needs. Lost in a desert he would value a bottle of water as his most valuable good, but he would not care about it if he is close to an abundant fountain.

     The word “marginalist” thought traditionally used to name the new theory is somewhat confusing because it refers to a corollary of the theory and not to the central theses mentioned above. For that reason sometimes the name “subjective” theory is used in order to stress that value is always value for an individual subject. Unfortunately “subjective” suggest caprice and arbitrariness which according to Menger is not part of the theory ―although some other thinkers would say so. Certainly abundance of goods may allow people to become capricious consumers and there is always the possibility of error in the appreciation of the usefulness of goods. But the central point is that value is always value to individuals in individual circumstances as they are able (or not) to recognize. It doesn't make sense to consider the value of goods in the abstract unrelated to persons, their needs, and their choices. That was the mistake of the old theories.

     The marginal theory of value does not assume that people have perfect knowledge and always make correct judgments. That is a straw-man often used to make the task of its adversaries ―like Mazzucato― easier. Carl Menger even treats the case of fake remedies and love potions, and more fundamentally dedicated a whole section of his Principles to “Time and Error” where he analyzed various production processes and said that economic judgment often requires thinking about the future, which is always uncertain.

     It is true that economists have occasionally pondered about the advantages of perfect knowledge, perfect competition, and other imaginary situations. They concluded that if we were perfect thinking machines with infinite knowledge about the present and the future, we would make perfect decisions. That is at best a tautology that adds nothing to our understanding and in no way is required by the marginalist theory of value. Nor does it serve to advocate more government intervention, unless we think that ministers and councils have infinite knowledge of present and future.

Who started the debate about value?

     Piling more bad consequences against the new marginalist theory, Mazzucato says that because of it economists have ceased to discuss value, which used to be at the core of economic thinking (Preface XVIII). But in fact the marginalists were the ones that initiated the debate about value ―and they won it. Before them the labour theory of value had been accepted without any serious challenge. Indeed, I suspect that it was adopted by Malthus and Smith almost by accident in their commendable but misguided effort to limit the notion of economic value. Carl Menger traces back that wrong turn in Malthus, a turn that might have seemed to solve a theoretical mistake but created another one that had lasting consequences.

     In 1820 Malthus published the first edition of his book “Principles of Political Economy” in which he defined wealth as “those material objects which are necessary, useful, or agreeable to mankind”. That definition was both too narrow and too broad. Too narrow because it excluded services, and too broad because it included non-economic goods like air. Nobody denies that air is useful, indeed indispensable to life, but it does not need economizing. We don't need to care about how much air we breath and so, although valuable in a broad sense, air has no economic value. Seven years later Malthus tried to correct that second mistake ―although he persisted in the first one, in limiting value to objects.

     In his book “Definitions in Political Economy” Malthus assigned value to “the material objects, necessary, useful or agreeable to man, which required some portion of human exertion to appropriate or produce”. In the second edition of his “Principles” Malthus wrote that “the latter part was added, in order to exclude air, light, rain, etc”. Menger tells us that Malthus himself recognized that this way of restricting the definition was unsatisfactory and that he tried other paths in later books, but failing again to elaborate a correct definition (Menger Principles p. 291). Leon Walras, another pioneer of the modern theory of value at the second half of the XIX century, tells us that Adam Smith too, like Malthus, offered only hesitant remarks that put labour as the sole source of value but contradicted those remarks when he included land along labour as social wealth (Leon Walras Elements of Theoretical Economics, parag. 158).

     That is why I think that the labour theory of value first appeared as an unfortunate effort to mend a definition that was too broad but without much debate or analysis of the issue. Later on, Karl Marx saw in it an opportunity, a bedrock on which to build his theory of exploitation. Still, he never considered alternatives, never dared question whether the foundation he found ready-made by Smith was solid. The marginalists Jevons, Menger and Walras were the ones that independently of each other challenged those assumptions and analyzed the whole issue. And now, more than a century later Mariana Mazzucato blames them for the lack of debate about the source of economic value (ps. 12, 76). Sure, the same way Copernicus is to blame for the lack of debate about whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun.

Collective creation does not require collective direction

     Mazzucato writes that value is a collective creation and so it is the innovation that promotes progress. (ps. 160, 184, 185, 191, 222). From that she argues for a fairer collective distribution of profits and an entrepreneurial State.

     Once again Mazzucato confuses the real question, which leads her to the wrong answers. Staunch defenders of free markets have always recognized that valuable goods are the result of collective efforts. What they deny is that this effort is or should be collectively directed.

     We must recall here the instructive story of how a pencil is made. It was first told in an essay by Leonard Read and it has been fondly repeated by Milton Friedman and many other champions of economic freedom. In the story, a pencil tells us: nobody knows how to make me. Those who fell trees to get the wood from which I am partly made know nothing about mining lead. And neither miners nor lumberjacks know or care about how the paint that covers my body is made. None of them have the faintest idea about the work of those who make the rubber tip attached on me as eraser. Or about the construction of the trains and the ships that carry those raw materials from the place where they are produced to the place where I will be assembled.

     It is no news to tell defenders of free markets that production, even of humble pencils, involve collective efforts. What Leonard Read and Milton Friedman tried to show is that the process is not directed and that precisely is what makes it efficient, even possible.

     The story of the pencil should prove to everybody something that is seen everywhere in reality but nevertheless looks counter-intuitive. How is it possible that a complex production process works when nobody directs it? Indeed, how is it that the absence of direction is what makes it possible?

     Mazzucato is not interested in these questions and has no time for a humble pencil. It was Carl Menger who in 1883 posed those questions in his book Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics. There he showed how money and markets originated in the past without any direction from above. So Menger wasn't simply one of the earliest in challenging wrong theories of value, he was a pioneer in revealing the pervasive presence of spontaneous order in the economy. Later on, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises followed in his tracks.

     Mazzucato chooses to skip all that. She goes on to apply her collectivistic approach to innovation and from there she ―again― castigates high private profits and argues for more government. Here too the true question is not whether technical and scientific innovation are collective efforts but whether they are or should be collectively directed. Matt Ridley has written a book, How Innovation woks, and Why it Flourishes in Freedom, were he describes how ideas combine in unexpected ways to foster innovation without a central direction. Ridley says that as in the pencil story “One person may make a technological breakthrough, another work out how to manufacture it and a third how to make it cheap enough to catch on. All are part of the innovation process and none of them knows how to achieve the whole innovation” (p. 256).

     In chapter 9 Ridley makes objections to Mazzucato's views on innovation. First, if government plays a central role in it, how is that the Industrial Revolution took place at a time when government had a negligible role in research and technical innovation? Ridley admits that “In the second half of the twentieth century, the state did become a sponsor of innovation on a large scale, but that is hardly surprising given that it went from spending 10 per cent of national income to 40 per cent in almost all Western countries. As Mingardi put it: ‘With such extraordinary growth, it is improbable that public spending wouldn’t end up in the neighborhood of innovation-producing business at one point or another.’ So it is not a matter of whether the state has caused some innovation. The question is whether it is better at doing so than other actors, and whether it does so in a directed fashion” (p. 276)

     Secondly, Ridley points out that “Mazzucato’s examples of government-funded innovation are mostly cases of ‘spillover’, rather than direction. Nobody has claimed that government set out deliberately to create a global internet when it funded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s computer networking. Indeed, the internet only took off when it eventually escaped the clutches of the Defense Department and was embraced by universities and businesses” (ps. 276-277).

    Moreover, says Ridley, the Soviet Union was a clear case of entrepreneurial state that founded a great deal of research and allowed virtually no private entreprise. The result was dismal lack of innovation in almost all sectors.

     Ridley's book was published in 2020. The same year, McCloskey and Mingardi published a direct challenge to Mazzucato's theses “The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State”. However, when in 2021 Mazzucato published a new book “Mission Economy. A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism” she gave no answer to any of these objections, she didn't even mention these authors. As said, for someone who claims to have a vivid interest in fostering public debate, Mazzucato has an odd tendency to avoid any reference to different views.

The political theory of value

     When Mazzucato writes that value is a collective creation she does not mean merely that, as in the pencil story, lots of people intervene in the production of valuable things and services. She means that the creation of value must be politically directed. And at times it seems she also means that the very concept of economic value is a collective creation. At the beginning of the book she writes “The definition of value is always as much about politics, and about particular views on how society ought to be constructed, as it is about narrowly defined economics” (p. 14). But then, what should we believe, politics or economics? For my part I would say that the labour theory of value was as wrong in Adam Smith's time as it was in ancient Egypt. No matter their political convictions, at no time people asked how much labour a thing had demanded in order to establish its usefulness. If someone digs a hole in search for water and finds none, he would not be able to sell the hole by pointing out that it demanded a lot of work. That was true in ancient Egypt as it is today. That is what modern theory of value says and it has nothing to do with politics.

     As we noted before, one of the problems with Mazzucato's book is that it contains disclaimers that she immediately discards. She says that she is not arguing for one theory of value (p. 18). Well no, only arguing that Marx's theory was extraordinary in its insight that capitalism is dynamic, that Marx is the first to give capital a social dimension (p. 49), that Marx “introduced a powerful new idea which has informed thinking ever since: class struggle” (p. 51), that Marx was “acute in his understanding of the capacity of technology to transform society” (p. 52), that “In Marx's hands, value theory became a powerful tool for analysing society” (p. 57). All glowing marks for Marx.

     As we saw, when Mazzucato turns to those who challenged Marx, she introduces them by saying that the powers that be needed a justification for their privileges. Not a brilliant presentation. Then she goes on in many chapters blaming the new theory for almost all economic troubles, theoretical inaccuracies, and social injustice. It would have been much more useful if Mazzucato had disclosed her views and defended a theory of value openly.

     In another disclaimer Mazzucato declares that “the point is not to create a stark divide, labelling some activities as productive and categorizing others as unproductive rent-seeking”. But then she immediately adds “I believe we must instead be more forthright in linking our understanding of value creation to the way in which activities (whether in the financial sector or the real economy) should be structured, and how this is connected to the distribution of the rewards generated. Only in this way will the current narrative about value creation be subject to greater scrutiny, and statements such as ‘I am a wealth creator’ measured against credible ideas about where that wealth comes from” (p. 14). If she won't label some to be inside and others outside the “production boundary” how would she know which sector needs “structuring”? And how does she “subject to greater scrutiny” claims about value creation if she won't categorize some as falling on the wrong side of the boundary? Indeed, she does exactly what she says she won't do when she writes that today the financial sector lies outside the production boundary (p. 19).

     Besides, if Mazzucato doesn't want a stark divide, why is she concerned that the marginalists blurred a production boundary so neatly established before them? (p. 15).

Is economic value to be defined by referendum, or by committee, or by each individual?

     Mazzucato says that people should publicly debate who creates value in the economy, thus making everyone participate in a controversy that before was limited to experts. We must assume that she means debate not just for the sport of it but to adopt decisions.

     Any country that follows that advice (and it seems that there are many people in high positions eager to adopt it) will have to establish a political procedure to decide questions about value. Maybe a referendum with a form where people would tick what sectors in the economy they see as value creators. Then governments would have to decide the fate of those left outside. Or, what is more likely, a council of experts would advice ministers and legislators where to trace the “production boundary” and its consequences. Or perhaps the question would be deferred to international organizations that would issue regulations to member countries. In any case, it would then be a political decision about what is economic value.

    That would be a regression to ancient times. In modern times politicians do not decide what professions are worthy of respect, who produces valuable things, and who must be seen as leechers extracting value from the masses of toilers. Not even majorities are asked to decide such things. Concerning economic value, each adult is his sovereign, and the 51 percent does not rule over the 49 percent. Where that principle is lost, there is no longer economic freedom.

Note: book pages refer to Kindle editions of the books I cite, except for Menger Principles, in which case I cite the Mises Institute paper edition. Kindle pagination should correspond to that of the paper edition but there might be slight differences.

Stanley Fish against George Orwell on Politics and Language

     I was surprised when I found that the American academic Stanley Fish described Orwell's famous article “Politics and the English Language” as “perhaps the worst essay ever written by a major figure”. Fish made his remark at the beginning of a debate that can be seen on YouTube (link at the end of this article).

     Orwell's essay has been cited thousands of times as a masterpiece. In it, Orwell provided examples taken from British books and newspapers that show how stale phrases and abstract language can be used to distort facts and hide the truth (link at the end of this article). It introduced many of the ideas that later Orwell developed in 1984.

Stanley Fish's caricature

     After the host finished presentations, Stanley Fish mounts his attack (starts at 6.30 in the video).

     Fish, a linguist who lectures on law, hate speech, and university politics —among other issues— and whose contributions —according to the Wikipedia— decorate the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, tells us that “nothing is sillier” than Orwell's essay. Fish adds that it was “not only linguistically naive and philosophically inept but was absolutely racist through and through”.

     He chastises Orwell for saying that language had been infected by politics and citing Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany as instances of that disease. Orwell feared that this disease was infecting the English language. According to Fish, Orwell's advice was to use only good Anglo-Saxon words and avoid borrowing from French and Italian. That is something that the English —Fish adds— have been saying for 800 years, namely, that the French and Italian stand for effeminate decadence. Fish says that Orwell told his readers not to use words, to think without words as far as possible, and put into words thoughts that have been fully formed. By this time the audience seems very amused and laughs at Orwell's naive solution: think in pictures, to which Fish retorts “pictures of what?” He asserts that objects are distinguished from each other only within a language, so even if you use pictures, you rely on a system of language. To complete his caricature of the article, Fish mocks the “English antidote” to the ill that caused Orwell's concern. Fish finds it in Johnathan Swift's Gulliver Travels, in which we are told about a curious country where people try to avoid words and therefore carry with them bags with objects so that when they have to refer to them, they pick them out and just showed the objects to other people. By this time the audience laughs loud.

     The other academic in the debate, the linguist and English literature professor John McWorther, does not join the general merriment but apart from looking down when Fish makes his attack on Orwell, he does not contradict any part of it.

The charge that the essay is “racist through and trough”

     It seems that at the beginning of the XXI century, a progressive American academic cannot make a point without adding the charge of racism to his arguments. But think a bit: the English race —if there is such thing— is not so different from the German race —if there is such thing. It is difficult to assume, as Fish does, that Orwell had a racial prejudice against other white European people. But more importantly, Orwell does not put the blame for bad English on foreign influence. Right on the second paragraph of the essay he writes that English has become “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” He adds that “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed”. That is according to Orwell the main reason for bad English, not effeminate European words.

     Then Orwell enumerates four key defects: dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. Orwell only mentions borrowing from other languages —including Latin— as one of the many ways in which one incurs the third fault, pretentious diction. One might say the same thing about German writers borrowing from English or academics using unnecessary jargon.

     In one of the most interesting parts of his essay Orwell shows how a paragraph in good English can be translated into bad English. And he admits that perhaps he himself would have used the bad version, simply because it is easier. None of that is a property of this or that language, or of race.

     So the charge of racism is silly (to use Fish's adjective). Moreover, if Fish or people in the audience had had any interest in Orwell's work, they would have discovered that he also wrote about the sins of nationalism (“Notes on Nationalism” link). There he said:

     "By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'. But secondly —and this is much more important— I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

     And in a footnote to that paragraph, Orwell added:

     “Patently absurd remarks such as ‘Germany is naturally treacherous’ are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless generalization about national character (‘The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat’ or ‘Every Englishman is a hypocrite’) are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly international outlook, e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them.”

     So much for the charge that Orwell hated Germans or any other nationals, or that he made any assumptions about their national character, or classified humans as good or bad according to their race. But there is more. In July 1939 Orwell published his article “Not Counting Niggers.” We must remember that shortly after that, the 1^st of September of that year, Germany invaded Poland and that two days later the United Kingdom and France declared war to Germany. In his article Orwell criticized a book that made a proposal for confronting Hitler but failed to take into account the voices of the subjugated peoples of Africa and Asia. If there is something to object in that article, it is an underestimation of the Nazi menace and the assertion that the European dominion over its colonies was an evil worse than the Nazi regime, a comparison that Orwell tried to base, among other things, by showing that salaries were much lower in British India than in Nazi Germany. In the last lines of the article Orwell expressed his hope that a mass party would emerge “whose first pledges are to refuse war and to right imperial injustice” —all that written days before the war. Surely that wasn't one of Orwell's most insightful pieces. But the one thing that cannot be said about the article is that it showed hatred or disregard for other races.

     Perhaps Stanley Fish ignored all that. But one would think that John MacWorther, who according to the Wikipedia teaches comparative literature at Columbia, would have some acquaintance with Orwell's work. If that was the case, he chose not to spoil the merriment by pointing out the errors in Fish's caricature.

The rise of fake scholarship

     Not satisfied with his attack against Orwell, Stanley Fish further increased the ignorance of his audience by linking Francis Bacon, the renowned politician and philosopher, with a medieval project to reinstate the language used in the Garden of Eden. But “ignorance”, the plain lack of knowledge, is not the right word to describe the result of Stanley Fish's efforts. He spreads disinformation. As any undergraduate knows, or should know, Bacon was one of first thinkers who successfully promoted modern ways of reasoning against medieval scholasticism. He wrote “The New Organon” to replace the old one that had prevailed since antiquity. If you simply ignore that, you may open an encyclopedia, search the web, or —better— read Bacon's books. But once you have learned a distortion, your chances to gain true knowledge are drastically reduced.

     Stanley Fish has written against fake news, but he engages in something far worse. From high academic positions and from mass media he supplies vast audiences with caricatures of Bacon and Orwell. He makes his readers and listeners believe that they can laugh at the naive thoughts of previous generations. Unlike plain ignorance, which offers an opportunity for future knowledge, then people would be satisfied that they don't need to waste time reading Orwell's silly article or Bacon's preposterous medieval project. Once a man comes to them surrounded by an aura of academic titles and sells a story that not merely simplifies but distorts ideas, there is a huge obstacle on their path to knowledge.

     Fake scholarship has an influence that goes deeper than fake news. And Stanley Fish is not alone in pursuing that enterprise. Besides, fake news are usually promptly refuted so only some blockheads remain persuaded by them. But fake scholarship deludes a far larger number of people, those who looked for knowledge and think that they have gained it after attending events such as the one in the video. Consequently, academics who don't engage in fake scholarship should understand that it is not enough to laugh in private at the nonsense taught to general audiences. They should make a stand against it.

The vegetarian butcher: Eugenio Zaffaroni

I wrote the following article many years ago, when Eugenio Zaffaroni was appointed at the Supreme Court. At that time I worked in the judiciary and decided not to publish it, as I always thought that members of the judiciary -even in humble positions- must not engage in debates that might be considered political in nature (a rule that many in high positions often disregard). Now I am free to publish it

Think what would happen if the owner of a butcher's shop appointed a zealous vegetarian to run his business. Or imagine that the owner of a bar chose a strict prohibitionist as the person in charge of selling whiskey, wine, and beer. Imagine that there has been no mistake involved in these selections. Think, for instance, that the prohibitionist has assured the owners beforehand that his efforts will be directed to reduce the consumption of alcohol and, if possible, to prevent any drinking. You will say that the owner is very stupid; but perhaps you would think as well that, no matter how zealous the prohibitionist is concerning his cause, he should refrain from accepting a job in which he is bound to betray the confidence of a fool.

In fact, that has actually happened, and in an issue far more important than sausages and drinking. In 2003, the Argentine government appointed Eugenio Zaffaroni to the Federal Supreme Court. Never before had a criminal law scholar been appointed to the Supreme Court, so it is assumed that, for the next decades, he will be the one who will lead the Court in this most important branch of the law. The trouble is that the man has said in several speeches, and asserted in a host of books and articles, that he thinks that criminal law is useless, "illegitimate", and morally reprehensible. We must be clear here: Zaffaroni doesn't tell us that this or that law is bad; he claims that a law system that punishes criminals —no matter how gruesome their crimes— is wicked. As it may sound too odd and too absurd a theory, it is better to say it again: Zaffaroni has declared many times, and written in the clearest of words, that he doesn't restrict his loathing to the law of a particular nation or of a particular age: he thinks that legal punishment can never be justified. He is a strict prohibitionist. He is the barman refusing customers all alcoholic drinking. He is the vegetarian butcher.

In a speech he gave in 1993 in Mexico City¹, a decade before he was appointed to the Argentine Supreme Court, Zaffaroni declared that he would sum up the purpose of punishment in two words: "no way". He boldly added that all those thinkers that, along the centuries, have tried to justify punishment were simply wrong. Punishment has no legal function, he asserts, though it may happen to be useful to politicians. Of course, judge Zaffaroni has no objections against providing psychological treatment to criminals. Furthermore, he thinks that we are entitled to impose fines, and that we (or more precisely, he, as the judge we appointed) may order criminals to ask for the victim's forgiveness. He also thinks that a judge may be justified in prompting both the criminal and his victim to negotiate between themselves the outcome of the trial. But to send a criminal to prison, Zaffaroni says, can never be right.

Nor was this speech the only one in which he had stated his doctrine. Shortly before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Zaffaroni had been engaged in a debate with Carlos Santiago Nino, a law philosopher very close to Alfonsin's government. His well known ties to the first democratic government that befell Argentina after the defeat in the Falklands allowed Nino a safe position from which to criticize Zaffaroni, without the risk of being called "fascist" and accused of supporting the military juntas (a risk which anyone dissenting with Zaffaroni must face). The debate took the form of an exchange of articles.² Startled at Zaffaroni's refusal to send criminals to prison, Nino asked whether Zaffaroni would maintain his doctrine in cases of genocide, mass murder, and similar gruesome crimes. The master, as many people now call Zaffaroni, proved impervious to reason and asserted once more that punishment (other than fines, of course) is always unjustified. He must have felt that he had gone a bit too far in his foolishness, so he allowed that pain (he does not permit the word "punishment") might be imposed to mass murderers. But even this concession was belittled by burying it into theoretical debris: Zaffaroni said that giving pain to mass murderers (or maybe cruel rapists) was only an "alternative use of law", a device, he explained, which is not limited to Marxist theory. What he meant by that is difficult to say; or more precisely, it is likely that its meaning, if it had one, was too absurd to be put in plain words.

Now, apart from the general unsoundness of Zaffaroni's doctrines (a fact that must be expected of a man that the Argentine intelligentsia finds admirable), there is an immediate objection to Zaffaroni's appointment to the Supreme Court. Namely, how can he honestly accept a job that requires him, either to betray his moral convictions, or to betray the laws he has vowed to enforce as a judge? In other words, how can a strict prohibitionist honestly accept a job as a barman? Well, he can't, honestly. But, of course, if the prohibitionist takes the job anyway, he will be in a position that will enable him to root very effectively for his doctrine. It would be as effective as to have strict vegetarians running butcher shops, and puritans running porn shops. Success would mean total collapse.

Zaffaroni himself is aware of this most obvious objection. In his Mexico City speech, he pondered on the possible justification of a jurist that decries punishment, and still vows solemnly that he will enforce a Criminal Code which commands prison to about three hundred different crimes, from murder to fraud. Ever confident about human gullibility, Zaffaroni proceeded to explain the moral puzzle. He said: well, there are many other facts in politics that can't be justified, and this is one of them.

This sounds right: imagine someone promised you to do something and then failed to keep his word. You meekly mention that to him. Then he answers: you know, there are many things that cannot be justified, and my failure to keep my promises is one of them. Certainly, you will admit your mistake and apologize: now I understand, I am sorry I have bothered you, what a simpleton I am !

As children do when they are caught throwing stones, Zaffaroni pointed out that others do the same. He explained that he is not the only one that profits from contradictory positions: others do the same. War, he said, is illegal according to international law. Nevertheless, international law has rules concerning the treatment of war prisoners. There you have a contradiction: how can anyone have rules about things that should not have happened in the first place? It is like banning robbery, and then telling robbers that they must spare your bed and your chairs. The audience must have been fascinated by the master's powerful logic. Fortunately, his words have been preserved in text form, so that future generations can profit from them as well.

Zaffaroni's reasoning has such number of mistakes that it is often difficult to decide which must be tackled first. For a start, it is not true that international law declares war illegal. A number of attacks might have been declared so, but not war in itself. For instance, England declared war to Germany at a time in which Germany was at peace with England and nobody has ever suggested —with the possible exception of Hitler— that this was illegal. So, the very starting point of Zaffaroni's reasoning involves a falsehood of which he cannot be unaware.

But there is more: even if —at a moment nobody was paying attention— all wars had been declared illegal by international law, this does not mean that there is any contradiction in having rules concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. If you engage in an unlawful activity (war), you may make you crime worse if, on top of that, you mistreat prisoners of war. The same happens with common crimes: if you rob and kill you are more blamable than if you simply rob. Where is the contradiction? How does this relate to Zaffaroni's moral choices?

If we follow Zaffaroni's meandering line of though, we will find that it leads to something worse than bad logic. Explaining how he was justified in vowing to enforce laws he regards as illegal and immoral, or —to be precise— explaining why he thinks himself entitled to break his vow, Zaffaroni continued with his comparison. He told his audience at Mexico City that those who dictate international rules for the treatment of prisoners escape logical contradiction only by taking war as a mere fact. War cannot be justified, never. But as it exists, international law givers can try at least to curb its more awful consequences.

At this point, one might wonder why all this relates to Zaffaroni's vow as a judge. He left those in his audience to guess by themselves; but the comparison is easy to understand. He takes legal punishment as a fact he cannot justify but cannot avoid. He knows that only highly trained law scholars would think right that, say, savage murderers get away with their crimes with only psychological treatment. He knows that legislators —let alone voters— would never admit the reforms that Zaffaroni deems necessary to make criminal law morally acceptable. Confronted with this evil fact he cannot change, he thinks himself entitled to thwart the evil from inside. In other words: the illegitimate fact against which Zaffaroni dedicates all his efforts is not crime, but criminal law; at least, that major portion of criminal law that commands prison to major crimes, and not just psychological counsel, fines, a dialog with the victim, etc.

Criminal law is selective –yes, it must be selective

In the previous paragraphs, I have pointed out the dubious moral character of a war against criminal law that is waged from inside, while pocketing a high salary, and with all the advantages of treachery and irregular fighting. But let's forget all that for a moment, to consider Zaffaroni's objections to prison as if they involved only a confrontation from outside, and not treason from within. Let's consider the more favorable case of a scholar who takes issue with criminal law, someone who has not vowed to enforce it. Why should we remove prison from the Penal Code? How has Zaffaroni come to such a complete rejection of punishment?

First of all, Zaffaroni argues —in every article he writes on the subject— that those taken to prison are mostly brutish and clumsy criminals, the less proficient, the losers. The more cunning kind of criminal is seldom caught. So what? Is Zaffaroni arguing that our failure to catch all criminals is a good reason to free those who we manage to catch? I have heard boys sustaining this line of argument; indeed, probably I have used it myself when I was a child. But it appalls me to hear a law scholar repeating over and over: others are wicked too, and they have not been caught!

Zaffaroni assures us that those in prison are there because they are stupid losers. So what? Is it true that stupid criminals are less dangerous than clever criminals? No, they are often more dangerous. They are not able to rob without threatening and beating their victims; they cannot refrain, once they have entered a house, from hitting the husband, raping the wife, and setting fire to everything. A clever thief would not act under the effect of alcohol and drugs; stupid thieves do it all the time, and it is more likely that, in such state, they will behave recklessly.

Besides, how do you define stupidity in criminals? Criminal skill has many sides, and a criminal might be very proficient in killing the victim, but clumsy in hiding the corpse. I remember a case in which a gang attacked a bank truck —which is seldom an easy enterprise. The robbers had managed to get precise information about the route the truck would follow. They had armed themselves with machine guns. In short: they were quite good on that side of crime. The attack was successful —success meaning, a truck guard dead, others wounded, and the money taken. The robbers went to a safe house they had prepared beforehand. To spend their time pleasantly, they took some girlfriends with them. One day, one of the chicks had a row with one of the neighbors. Two of the gang went out and threatened the neighbor, making a display of their weapons. That probably looked great and pleased the girl. Unfortunately for the robbers, the neighbor returned to his home, picked up the phone, and told the police that there were men carrying weapons nearby. The entire gang was caught and the money was recovered (except a small amount they had already consumed). The robbers had been very clever in almost everything; but when they thought they were safe, they made one fatal mistake; and that was enough.

It is useless to discuss the exact combination of intelligence and stupidity the robbers showed. What is certain is that their stupidity didn't make them less dangerous. Try telling the guard's widow that those sent to prison were nothing more than stupid men. Well, it is likely that Zaffaroni would say it. Moreover, he declares that Criminal Law must be redefined so that its goal becomes to encroach, and if possible to eliminate, the power of punishing criminals (see his Mexico City speech, paragraph 10). Of course, as he himself has been given the power to punish, and at the highest court in the country, he is now in the very place where he can easily thwart the enforcement of criminal law.

In a most Orwellian style, Zaffaroni tells us that the meaning of "crime" must be redefined: it is only the imprisonment of people that constitutes a crime. So, he boldly adds, "reducing crime" really means reducing the number of inmates. That a law scholar and a judge would say this, and that his audience would cheerfully agree with him, seems hard to believe. But you can read these assertions in Zaffaroni's Mexico City speech. He ruefully mentions the "black numbers of crime" referring to the number of inmates, whom he calls "victims". This is my conclusion: I will make use of Zaffaroni's additions to Orwell's newspeak: if someone stabs you, you know that the stabber is the victim —unless, of course, he manages to avoid being sent to prison, which then will be counted as a small triumph in the long struggle against crime. This degree of confusion, these redefinitions of words that would make the Party leaders of 1984 blush, in a word, this nonsense, may be thought to be incompatible with the highest positions both at the bench and at the University. In normal times and in normal countries, it must be thought impossible. In Argentina, and at the beginning of the XXI century, high nonsense is not incompatible with high rank: it is its most important requisite.

When he had to confront Nino, Zaffaroni was more guarded. He refrained from absolute definitions; he didn't dare, as he did in his Mexico City speech, to make use of his "no way" answer to the question of the legitimate functions of punishment. In his debate with Nino, Zaffaroni made a strategic retreat to a more safe position, which —not surprisingly— is the position of someone who has doubts. This time, Zaffaroni said that there is no evidence that sending people to jail works as deterrence of crime. I would have suggested a trip along an area devastated by a hurricane or an earthquake, where gangs operate freely, killing, robbing and raping: that would give Zaffaroni a clearer idea.

On the other hand, in his debate with Nino, Zaffaroni admitted that there is no evidence that punishment doesn't, to some extent, actually prevent crime. He declared that, as to the affects of incarceration, he is an "agnostic". But then, how can he say, when he is safe from criticism and just addressing a mob of professors, that he is certain that it is a crime to send criminals to jail? Moreover, is Zaffaroni sure that fines do prevent crime? If not: how is it that he sees no objection to them?

In fact, it is useless to search for consistency in Zaffaroni's opinions. Nevertheless, we must tackle them because they are becoming the official ideology of the judiciary, of the government, and of the universities. Let's see another reason Zaffaroni often mentions for his rejection of punishment. He says that statistical studies made on US jail populations have proved that poor people outnumber the middle and high classes. Worse than that, statistics prove that there is no proportion between the number of black inmates and the black population of the US. Zaffaroni presents these revelations as if they where evidence of a secret plot. After discovering this lack of proportion, he lost his faith in criminal law, he would never believe again, he lost his virginity. He realized that law was just the cruel tool of the dominant classes. I must say that Zaffaroni's faith in law must have been very little if it was shaken by statistics that simply confirm what every adult (and most children) already knows.

So now we know that prison populations are not representative of the whole population. Why should they be? Old ladies do not engage in crime as often as young men. In fact, I would start to suspect a bias if I were told that we have sent to prison an equal number of young men and of old ladies. And, what about the proportion between the number of inmate drug addicts and the number of drug addicts in the whole population? Is there a fair and representative proportion kept? It is easy to see the mistake in Zaffaroni's argument: it consists in requiring a proportion between the various sections of the population and the number of inmates, and not between those who actually engage in crime and those sent to prison.

Zaffaroni believes that he has discovered a fundamental objection against all criminal law systems. He says that all of them are "selective". Well, somebody should have told him earlier in life that the law must be selective: criminal laws say how this selection must be made. Of course, a number of laws may be wrong and should be amended, and it is certain that judges and public prosecutors often fail to apply the law correctly. But this is no ground for rejecting punishment: it is a reason to avoid wrong punishment.

In his articles and speeches, Zaffaroni often makes use of the phrase "white collar crime" —its Spanish equivalent is "delincuencia de guante blanco". Pampering the worst instincts of his audiences, Zaffaroni suggests that criminal law is too lenient with white collar criminals, and here he finds another imbalance, and another objection against punishment. But, if he were truly concerned with the evils of prisons (and there are such evils), he would celebrate leniency —wherever it fell— and not frown at it. But apart from this contradiction, he and all those who constantly shout "white collar crime" fail to see that there are obvious reasons for the imbalance they criticize. First of all, "white collar crime" is often more difficult to detect; as Zaffaroni himself acknowledges, some criminals are more clever than others, and it is hardly a surprise that those not so clever are the ones who are caught. Secondly, what are "white collar crimes"? By far the most common one is tax evasion. But then, we must think that if it were heavily punished, most Argentinians would have their residences in prison. And this comprises both the rich and the poor: in a rare example of national unity, tax evasion joins the large majority of Argentinians in a common endeavor.

Third, Zaffaroni fails to see that criminal codes punish violent crime more severely than any other thing. And, by definition, "white collar crime" is not violent. Even a law scholar would understand that it is one thing to take money from people by forging credit cards, and quite another to take the same money by threatening them with a gun. Unfortunately, the brutish losers pitied by Zaffaroni are better at using guns than at using forging tools. Besides, according to the Argentine Penal Code, fraud (art. 172) and robbery (art. 164) have exactly the same punishment. Indeed, mere theft is punished less severely than fraud. Of course, robbery with firearms is worse than fraud (art. 166). But, is this difference the result of a conspiracy against poor brutish losers? Or is it just common sense?

The “crime” of punishing criminals

In his debate with Nino, Zaffaroni admitted that violence might be used against criminals. But he allows it only if violence is directed to prevent a crime they are about to commit. For instance, says Zaffaroni, a policeman may be permitted to take the arm of somebody who is about to stab his victim (thank God!). But if the murderer succeeds in killing his victim, then it would be a crime to send him to prison. Zaffaroni treats Nino as a simpleton for not being able to distinguish these two different uses of force. "Direct coercion" ("coacción directa") directed to prevent imminent danger is permissible; but punishment is different: it is always immoral and —according to the view that defines law as those opinions shared by judges— it might be illegal.

Zaffaroni vowed to enforce laws he know he will betray. This is the only way in which he will be able to force millions of citizens, and not just a mob of intellectuals, to accept his doctrines. He has said in the clearest of words that he believes that the only possible goal of a judge is to fight criminal law from inside. Indeed, long before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, in his Mexico City speech, Zaffaroni devised a plan to reduce crime. We must remember that, in his parlance, it means to reduce the number of criminals in prison. He acknowledged that people at large would not accept his doctrines; nevertheless, as in his view punishment has no true function, people’s wish to see criminals in prison may be satisfied by just choosing a figure, and deciding that this will be the number of inmates we want to have. Though we cannot put an end to the foolish practice of punishing criminals, we may put a limit to it: we must choose a number of inmates that will keep the voters happy.

We must choose a number. Actually, “we” won’t decide anything. A board, or perhaps judges –Zaffaroni is not very clear as to whom he would trust the decision—will set a number. Any criminal who is convicted above this number will then be exempted from prison, or —alternatively— some other inmate will be freed, so that the limit is respected. In this way, the number of inmates will never exceed the limit and, by setting the number low enough, crime (remember the redefinition of words) will be reduced. In Zaffaroni’s parlance, the plan consisted in putting a limit to the number of victims (read "inmates").

His plan, said Zaffaroni, required a freeze in the construction of prisons, otherwise, he insisted, it won't have any chance. Why is it so? At first glance, it seems that if the limit to the number of inmates is enforced, it doesn't matter whether there is more wasted space inside prisons. The freeze seems to be only a matter of avoiding useless constructions, but not a requirement for the plan. Strictly speaking, of course, the construction freeze is no requirement. But if a freeze on the building and expansion of prisons is decided, then it would be possible to argue that there is no room for new inmates, and Zaffaroni's plan would look simply a device prompted by practical considerations. But that is not the real motive: it suffices to read Zaffaroni's 1993 speech to understand that the plan has nothing to do with lack of facilities.

A decade after the plan was announced, it has been put into practice. No freeze has been adopted, but in fact, in this issue as well as in others, the legendary Argentine carelessness amounts to an actual freeze in new constructions, and probably even in the repair of old prisons. Now at the Federal Supreme Court, Zaffaroni is engaged in a battle against the Buenos Aires Province government. A maximum number of inmates has been chosen, but there is still some wrangle as to whether it is the right one. Nobody has been able to say what to do with those convicted beyond the limit.

Of course, a judge cannot order anything unless he has a case. Accordingly, and most conveniently, a journalist —the former terrorist and now influential journalist Horacio Verbitsky— sued asking that Zaffaroni's plan was adopted, which Zaffaroni, now in the role of judge, said was indeed required by federal and international law.

Nino had pointed out that it is undemocratic that judges, unelected officials who enjoy life tenure, force their pet plans on the whole population. Zaffaroni retorted by saying that, on the same grounds, no resistance against Hitler could ever have been justified, because he had been democratically elected. Again, this is nonsense. Democratic elections do not mean rule of law. We don't need to go as far as to Germany to learn this; here, in South America, people routinely and cheerfully vote tyrants that oppress dissenters, protect criminals, plunder bank accounts, and apply retroactive law both in civil and criminal cases. For those who want to have a whiff of the odor of the intellectual atmosphere, it is enough to remember that democratically elected governments in Argentina still pay homage to a general, Rosas, who ordered that a pregnant girl was executed for the crime of loving a priest.

But nothing of this proves that elections are irrelevant. Besides, the fact that there are elected tyrants that break the rule of law is hardly a good reason to justify unelected tyrants that do the same. In South America, as it once happened in Germany, these two kinds of tyrants usually work in accord. And yet, as long as elected tyrants don't suppress elections, we may hope of removing them in the next election. Against unelected tyrants, we don't have that chance. This is the only difference between them.

Zaffaroni, an expert on many things

A couple of years before he was appointed to the Argentine Supreme Court, in a speech he gave in Guarujá, Brazil,³ Zaffaroni made another of his startling comparisons. He declared that he followed a maxim he described as the logic of the reasonable butcher. He asked his audience —a mob of criminal law professors attending an international conference— to imagine that people started going to a butcher, asking him medicines, plane tickets to New Zealand, and trying to open bank accounts. A reasonable butcher –Zaffaroni continued- must reject these requests and honestly tell people that he only sells meat and sausages. But the butcher might become mad, and start trying to provide all the different things people ask from him. That, Zaffaroni asserted, is what many criminal experts do. On his part, he adopts the logic of the reasonable butcher, and acknowledges that criminal law is not the proper tool for the achievement of all the goals that people assign to it.

The comparison has an obvious flaw. Although the reasonable butcher will acknowledge that sausages aren't tickets to New Zealand, he will never fail to tell us that sausages have some good and proper use, namely, to eat them. Zaffaroni, on the other hand, says that punishment, which is present in every penal law, has no good and proper use: he tells us that punishment is the wicked tool that "the system" uses to oppress his victims. Zaffaroni would have been more precise if he had told his audience that he was a vegetarian running the butcher's shop. He will make his job to tell the customers that sausages are bad, that it is immoral to eat them, and probably illegal. Zaffaroni is the vegetarian butcher.

When comparing himself with a reasonable butcher, Zaffaroni tried to show himself as a modest man, a man dedicated to his own branch of the law, and perfectly aware of his ignorance about other issues. I'm only a criminal law scholar, he said, not an omnipotent wise man. But immediately after having made these declarations, Zaffaroni started to rant against globalization, politicians on TV, and the small amount of investment dedicated to tackle social problems. Not content with this, he assured his audience that international finance is very similar to the Mafia, and that its methods are those of the Mafia. Next, he denounced those who claim that international terrorism must be tackled by criminal law (what an absurd idea!) accusing them of using the fear for terrorism to encroach civil liberties. He, the meek scholar limited to his own research field, denounced that the world has been transformed into a big slave ship, with a few rich people enjoying a first class deck, and a multitude of others who are only waiting to die, without food, water, and even without light. He said that those at the bottom would think it better to commit suicide rather than to keep living, but that they will try to kill others while killing themselves.

I wonder whether it was lack of food, lack of water, or lack of light, that led a group of young English born Muslims to kill themselves and hundreds of others in London, shortly after they had returned from their hatred-learning trip in Pakistan.

Eight years before Zaffaroni made such measured technical survey of his own legal branch, he had alerted his Mexican audience about a change in the US economic system. He declared that it has been transformed from one centered on production, to one centered on services, and concluded that this most wicked turn has created an hypertrophic criminal law system. He further complained against the US, saying that it managed the world currency.

I almost forgot: in 2001, in his measured and scholarly survey, Zaffaroni denounced that globalization was exempted from costs (I think that he had some sort of tax in mind), and regretted that governments everywhere had lost their power to mediate between the forces of capital and the forces of labor. He warned that capital was directed only to those places where there is less investment in social care (yes, everyone is investing in Africa), and where workers are treated as slaves. One must remember that Zaffaroni was vomiting all this at the members of an International Congress on Criminal Law. To that meekest of all audiences he repeated the list of commonplaces one may hear at Muslim and Marxist madrasas around the world, but at the same time he pretended that he was only making a humble contribution to his own branch of knowledge, regretting that others who think themselves omnipotent venture to address issues about which they are not qualified. But then, what are Zaffaroni’s qualifications on international finances, globalization, the effects of the service sector on the economy and on society, the role of the state on labor disputes, and terrorism? If Zaffaroni thought he was qualified to harangue his colleagues on these issues, then it seems that, when criticizing the omnipotent pretensions of wisdom of others, he excluded himself from a similar restriction. Yet it is clear that outside his field of study, and perhaps even inside it, Zaffaroni knows as much as the man who will sweep the floor after he and his audience have departed to the next international meeting in their agenda.

The darling of the establishment

It was already bad that Zaffaroni had been in charge for so long of the education of future lawyers and judges. But now, “the system” he never ceases to denounce has also appointed him judge at the Supreme Court, which shows once more how little truth there is in his theories about power. It is certain that from his high position, this man, who presents himself as a humble scholar, will try to enforce his doctrines on us. We'd better know what he is up to.

Note about web references: I have provided web addresses in which Zaffaroni’s articles can be read. Sometimes web sites change contents, or disappear. In that case, you may simply google for the articles. For instance you may search for “Zaffaroni Nino debate”, or “Zaffaroni Guarujá” (his speech in Brazil) or “Eugenio Zaffaroni qué hacer con la pena” (his speech in Mexico).

1 http://psicopenal.org/pdf/quehacerconlapena.pdf

2 http://www.pensamientopenal.com.ar/nhd/.

3 http://www.homenajeazaffaroni.com.ar/confezaffa.htm.