The book I never wrote
Thoughts upon reading Jacques Rancière's homage to Eric Hazan
ERIC HAZAN est un aventurier qui n'a pas eu d'océan à franchir. Alors il a changé de vie.
This is how Le Monde announced Eric Hazan’s decision in 1983 to give up his life as a cardiovascular surgeon, at age 47, to take over the direction of his family’s business of publishing art books. His adventures may not have taken him across an ocean but he had crossed the Mediterranean Sea to work with the FLN during the Algerian War and again in 1975 to work as a surgeon with the Palestinians in Lebanon. By the time I encountered his name, in an article on Paris published in New Left Review in 2010, his adventures had become primarily intellectual and literary, though he remained uncompromisingly radical until the end of his life.
Hazan had strong opinions. His 2010 article complained about the planting of shrubs along Paris boulevards in a way I found irritating. But then I read his book The Invention of Paris and I was ready to forgive him anything. Reading it one has to keep in mind its French subtitle, Il n’y a pas de pas perdus, which means “there are no lost steps.” Paris grew out from its ancient kernel on the Île de la Cité in successive rings, and Hazan’s narrative follows its growth simultaneously as a literary setting, as an expression of power, and as the scene of persistant resistance to power, combining stylistic elegance, limitless erudition, and a passionate commitment to the city’s streets and its rebellious people that was unlike anything I had ever read.
So it was only natural that I would prevail on a mutual friend in Paris to put us in contact when I learned that Hazan was coming to New York to present his book at Albertine, the Fifth Avenue bookstore whose home page identifies it as “A project of the cultural services of the French embassy.”1 Another New York-based friend of our mutual friend wanted to meet Hazan for more practical reasons, and the three of us had lunch together while he was in town, with my presence irrelevant but helping to establish the basis to keep in touch with both of my new acquaintances.
Hazan is surprised that mathematics can raise ethical questions
By the time of our meeting Hazan’s art publishing company had been purchased by the multinational Hachette, and Hazan had founded a small publishing house called La Fabrique that specialized in publishing modestly-priced radical texts.2 Allyn Jackson and I had been curating a discussion in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society under the heading “Mathematicians Discuss the Snowden Revelations” and we were in the process of wrapping it up. Enough mathematicians had spoken up that I felt confident that I could convince a few of them to contribute to a book on the ethical challenges posed by mathematics and its applications.3
I approached Hazan with the idea at our meeting in 2015. Hazan had thought about the social responsibility of the sciences but he was taken aback by my claim that such considerations applied to mathematics as well. After we had spoken for a few minutes, however, he was convinced and offered to publish the book simultaneously in English and French. But he balked at the idea of a book of chapters by several authors and insisted that he would only publish a book that spoke in a single voice, namely mine.
In spite of Hazan’s lack of interest in publishing a multi-author volume, and (more to the point) my failure to obtain a manuscript from any of the potential authors, I had not completely given up on the idea of putting a volume together on the ethical responsibilities of mathematicians, and had even written an article4 that could have served as an introduction to such a volume. I had in mind separate chapters on topics including (among others) military research and funding, surveillance (both governmental and industrial), big data (in the spirit of Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction), financial mathematics, as well as (the likely abuse of) artificial intelligence. In addition to the introduction, I intended to contribute a chapter on how the prestige of mathematics is used to provide a veneer of objectivity to politically dubious propositions. The chapter would have elaborated on some of the material that I used in the introduction,5 including this quotation from Thomas Piketty:
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. … This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.6
I tried again, and failed again, to convince Hazan to change his mind and agree to publish my multi-author volume, when I saw him again in Paris. Shortly thereafter, however, I discovered Maurice Chiodo’s “Ethics in Mathematics” project7 at Cambridge University, and the participants in the conferences organized around the project, and decided the book I had in mind would have been superfluous.
How one of Hazan’s most distinctive authors remembers him
Jacques Rancière is one of the most prominent members of the group of philosophers that came of age immediately after the generation associated, for better or worse, with the postmodernist label. He has written extensively on literature and aesthetics but is best known for his radically anti-elitist philosophy of democracy, expounded in the sixteen books he published with La Fabrique (among others).8
Rancière speculates on the reason Hazan chose the name La Fabrique for his publishing house in an article published in Libération and translated in the New Left Review’s blog Sidecar.
For connoisseurs of workers’ history, the name recalls Echo de la fabrique, the newspaper of the Lyonnais canuts during their revolt of the 1830s. No doubt it was important for it to evoke the memory of the great days of 1848 and the Commune. But the word ‘fabrique’ also associated this tradition of struggle with a whole conception of the publisher’s work: a radical departure from the logic of profit and its associated strictures of management; an artisanal love of craftsmanship that neglected no aspect of book production; but also an idea of the fraternal workshop where men and women would bring the product of their labours which, as they intertwined, would be transformed into something else: a shared wealth of experience, of knowledge and insight, the sense of a collective capacity to build a world different from the one that our masters and their intellectual lackeys present to us as the only, inescapable reality. (Rancière, emphasis added)
Do mathematicians have “masters” and, if so, do the latter have “intellectual lackeys?” That mathematical practice is characterized by “an artisanal love of craftsmanship” seems to me indisputable; is this belief widely shared in the profession? Can mathematical practice escape domination by “the logic of profit” and if not, will it ever be able to organize its “radical departure?” Such were the questions on my mind when I approached Eric Hazan with the proposal to write a book on the ethical challenges of mathematics. They remain at the root of my motivation for maintaining this newsletter, which is what currently remains of the book I never wrote. So when I saw just those words in the middle of Rancière’s eulogy of Hazan I knew I would have to present them here, in their proper context, expecting that at least a few readers would understand what they are doing in the middle of a newsletter devoted to the implications of the mechanization of mathematics.
It’s not the least of the ironies of France’s complex attachment to promoting its culture that the French Embassy would roll out the red carpet for the publisher of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, whose anonymous authors were suspected of sabotaging a high speed rail line, and which earned Hazan the right to be interrogated in 2009 by the sous-direction de l'antiterrorisme de la police judiciaire.
Including The Coming Insurrection and the Invisible Committee’s subsequent titles, as well as 16 books by Jacques Rancière, whose homage to Hazan provided the excuse for this essay, and quite a few books by Hazan himself.
Chapter 4 of my book Mathematics without Apologies is devoted to (among other things) the ethical implications of financial mathematics, which had only recently demonstrated its destructive power in the form of the 2008 crisis.
Published as my contribution to B. Sriraman, ed. umanizing Mathematics and its Philosophy, Essays Celebrating the 90th Birthday of Reuben Hersh, Cham, Switzerland: Birkhäuser (2017) 115-124.
Ibid.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press (2014) p. 32.
Chiodo’s 2019 course syllabus explains that
We will not be discussing what is right and wrong, but instead explore the fact that there is right and wrong when doing mathematical work.
This was the idea that surprised Hazan and would have been the point of my book. Chiodo and his colleagues had already been working on the project for several years and had organized several conferences; I spoke (virtually) at the first one.
More recently, Chiodo and Dennis Müller have posted two papers on the arXiv: a “Manifesto for the Responsible Development of Mathematical Works” and a collection of “Teaching Resources for Embedding Ethics in Mathematics,” both of which I highly recommend.
A reading of Rancière’s book Aisthesis directly shaped the discussion of mathematics as an art form in my book Mathematics without Apologies. His writings on democracy are not quoted there, but since I wrote the book in France it inevitably shows the influence of his ideas.