Materialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism 

In philosophy and metaphysics, materialism is a form of monism holding that matter is the fundamental substance of nature, so that all things, including mind and consciousness, arise from material interactions and depend on physical processes, including those of the human brain and nervous system. It contrasts with monistic idealism, which treats consciousness as fundamental, and is related to naturalism, the view that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and to physicalism, the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Physicalism extends materialism by including forms of physicality beyond ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime, energy, forces, exotic matter), and some use the terms interchangeably.

Epicureanism is a philosophy of materialism from classical antiquity that was a major forerunner of modern science. Classical atomism predates Epicurus: 5th‑century BCE thinkers Leucippus and Democritus explained all change as the collisions of indivisible atoms moving in the void. Epicureanism refined this materialist picture. Epicurus held that everything—including mind—consists solely of atoms moving in the void; to explain how parallel falling atoms could meet, he postulated the clinamen, an extremely slight lateral deviation that initiates collisions without supernatural causes and that need not imply genuine indeterminism.

In late modern philosophy, German atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach signaled a new turn in materialism in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity, which gives a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach introduced anthropological materialism, a version of materialism on which materialist anthropology is the universal science. Feuerbach's variety of materialism heavily influenced Karl Marx, who in the late 19th century elaborated the concept of historical materialism—the basis for what Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined as scientific socialism.

Alternative philosophies opposed or alternative to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism, dualism, solipsism, panpsychism, and other forms of monism.

Overview

Stars and a nebula

Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology, and is thus different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism is in contrast to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism. It can also contrast with phenomenalism, vitalism, and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of determinism, as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.

Despite the multiplicity of named schools, philosophy ultimately confronts a single binary: materialism versus idealism. Uncompromising materialism—today often called physicalism—holds that the universe is nothing but matter‑energy in motion; every phenomenon, from stellar fusion to human thought, is exhaustively explicable as organised interactions of physical entities. Matter is self‑moving and self‑organising, so it is scientifically superfluous to posit immaterial substances or disembodied minds. On this view, consciousness is a higher‑order property of certain complex material systems, not an ontological primitive. Idealism, by contrast, reverses the causal arrow: it elevates mind, spirit or abstract Forms to constitutive reality and demotes the material world to a mere appearance—a position that historically provided philosophical cover for religion and other supernatural doctrines.

Although the Western canon was long dominated by explicit idealists—owing to church patronage, university control, and periodic censorship—materialist undercurrents never disappeared. Thinkers including the pre‑Socratic atomists, Lucretius, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and 20th‑century analytical naturalists advanced naturalistic explanations of mind and society even when such views risked condemnation or suppression. Contemporary debate subdivides materialism into identity theory, functional and non‑reductive physicalism, eliminative materialism, and other variants, but all share the thesis that whatever exists is ultimately physical.

Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the spacetime continuum; some philosophers, such as Mary Midgley, suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.

During the 19th century, Marx and Engels broadened materialism into a materialist conception of history centred on concrete human activity—above all labour—and on the institutions that such activity creates, reproduces, or abolishes. Drawing on both ancient atomism and the modern materialism of their day, they forged what was later called Marxist materialism, eliminating residual idealist elements and unifying the results into a single, consistently materialist worldview (see Modern philosophy). Marx’s materialism long predated his encounter with G. W. F. Hegel. While still a student, Marx filled seven Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy (1839), analysing Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius from an avowedly materialist standpoint. His 1841 doctoral dissertation, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, likewise defends the ancient atomists against teleological speculation and affirms contingency in nature. These texts show Marx already rejecting metaphysical dualism a decade before Capital.

Marx's subsequent Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843–44) therefore did not convert an idealist into a materialist; rather, the work borrows small aspects of Hegel’s idealist dialectic, grounds it in material world, and rejects it very explicitly. Engels, arriving independently at a similar position, joined Marx in fusing Greek atomism, Enlightenment science, and a demystified dialectic into what later became known as Marxist materialism, a consistently materialist worldview that treats historical development as the product of human labour under definite social relations.

Non-reductive materialism

Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description—typically, at a more reduced level.

Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor held this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics.

History

See also: History of naturalism

Early history

Before Common Era

Leucippus (4th century BC), father of atomism and teacher of Democritus. Painting by Luca Giordano, c. 1653.

Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age (c. 800–200 BC).

In ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada and the proponents of the Cārvāka school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of atomism. The Nyaya–Vaisesika school (c. 600–100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism (although their proofs of God and their positing that consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists). Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued the atomic tradition.

Ancient Greek atomists like Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (99 – c. 55 BC) reflects the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called atoms (literally "indivisibles"). De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in Lucretius's work. Democritus and Epicurus did not espouse a monist ontology, instead espousing the ontological separation of matter and space (i.e. that space is "another kind" of being).

Early Common Era

Wang Chong (27 – c. 100 AD) was a Chinese thinker of the early Common Era said to be a materialist. Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha (The Upsetting of All Principles) refuted the Nyāya Sūtra epistemology. The materialistic Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400; when Madhavacharya compiled Sarva-darśana-samgraha (A Digest of All Philosophies) in the 14th century, he had no Cārvāka (or Lokāyata) text to quote from or refer to.

In early 12th-century al-Andalus, Arabian philosopher Ibn Tufail (a.k.a. Abubacer) discussed materialism in his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing historical materialism.

Modern philosophy

Atomists proposed that the universe consists of atoms moving in space. Of the Nature of Things by Lucretius, 1682.

In France, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to the attempts of René Descartes (1596–1650) to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist abbé Jean Meslier (1664–1729), along with the French materialists: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780), Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), German-French Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), and other French Enlightenment thinkers.

In England, materialism was developed in the philosophies of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1704). Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) became one of the most important materialist philosophers in the 18th century. John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822) believed matter has a moral dimension, which had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

In late modern philosophy, German atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach signaled a new turn in materialism in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity, which presented a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach introduced anthropological materialism, a version of materialism that views materialist anthropology as the universal science.

Feuerbach's variety of materialism heavily influenced Karl Marx, who in the late 19th century elaborated the concept of historical materialism—the basis for what Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined as scientific socialism:

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.

— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1880)

Through his Dialectics of Nature (1883), Engels later developed a "materialist dialectic" philosophy of nature, a worldview that Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, called dialectical materialism. In early 20th-century Russian philosophy, Vladimir Lenin further developed dialectical materialism in his 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which connects his opponents' political conceptions to their anti-materialist philosophies.

A more naturalist-oriented materialist school of thought that developed in the mid-19th century was German materialism, which included Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), the Dutch-born Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), and Carl Vogt (1817–1895), even though they had different views on core issues such as the evolution and the origins of life.

Contemporary history

See also: Contemporary philosophy

Analytic philosophy

See also: Physicalism and Scientific materialism

Contemporary analytic philosophers (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, and Jerry Fodor) operate within a broadly physicalist or scientific materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate the mind, including functionalism, anomalous monism, and identity theory.

Scientific materialism is often synonymous with, and has typically been described as, a reductive materialism. In the early 21st century, Paul and Patricia Churchland advocated a radically contrasting position (at least in regard to certain hypotheses): eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of such phenomena reflects a spurious "folk psychology" and introspection illusion. A materialist of this variety might believe that a concept like "belief" has no basis in fact (e.g. the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses).

In contrast, Christian List argues that the existence of first-person perspectives, i.e., one existing as oneself and not as someone else, refutes physicalism. List argues that since first-personal facts cannot supervene on physical facts, this refutes not only physicalism, but also most forms of dualism that have purely third-personal metaphysics.

Continental philosophy

See also: New materialism, Speculative materialism, and Transcendental materialism

Contemporary continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze has attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas. Contemporary theorists such as Manuel DeLanda, working with this reinvigorated materialism, have come to be classified as new materialists. New materialism has become its own subfield, with courses on it at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited collections and monographs devoted to it.

Jane Bennett's 2010 book Vibrant Matter has been particularly instrumental in bringing theories of monist ontology and vitalism back into a critical theoretical fold dominated by poststructuralist theories of language and discourse. Scholars such as Mel Y. Chen and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have critiqued this body of new materialist literature for neglecting to consider the materiality of race and gender in particular.

Métis scholar Zoe Todd, as well as Mohawk (Bear Clan, Six Nations) and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts, query the colonial orientation of the race for a "new" materialism. Watts in particular describes the tendency to regard matter as a subject of feminist or philosophical care as a tendency too invested in the reanimation of a Eurocentric tradition of inquiry at the expense of an Indigenous ethic of responsibility. Other scholars, such as Helene Vosters, echo their concerns and have questioned whether there is anything particularly "new" about "new materialism", as Indigenous and other animist ontologies have attested to what might be called the "vibrancy of matter" for centuries. Others, such as Thomas Nail, have critiqued "vitalist" versions of new materialism for depoliticizing "flat ontology" and being ahistorical.

Quentin Meillassoux proposed speculative materialism, a post-Kantian return to David Hume also based on materialist ideas.

Defining "matter"

The nature and definition of matter—like other key concepts in science and philosophy—have occasioned much debate:

• Is there a single kind of matter (hyle) that everything is made of, or are there multiple kinds?
• Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism) or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism)?
• Does matter have intrinsic properties (substance theory) or lack them (prima materia)?

One challenge to the conventional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. Relativity shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. In contrast, the Standard Model of particle physics uses quantum field theory to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and the energy is a property of the field.

According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model, less than 5% of the universe's energy density is made up of the "matter" the Standard Model describes, and most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, with little agreement among scientists about what these are made of.

With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists believed the concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the conventional position could no longer be maintained. Werner Heisenberg said: "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible...atoms are not things."

The concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries. Thus materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. According to Noam Chomsky, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.

The philosophical materialist Gustavo Bueno uses a more precise term than matter, the stroma.^[59]

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin argues that the truth of dialectical materialism is unrelated to any particular understanding of matter. To him, such changes actually confirm the dialectical form of materialism.

Physicalism

Main article: Physicalism

George Stack distinguishes between materialism and physicalism:

In the twentieth century, physicalism has emerged out of positivism. Physicalism restricts meaningful statements to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable or in principle verifiable. It is an empirical hypothesis that is subject to revision and, hence, lacks the dogmatic stance of classical materialism. Herbert Feigl defended physicalism in the United States and consistently held that mental states are brain states and that mental terms have the same referent as physical terms. The twentieth century has witnessed many materialist theories of the mental, and much debate surrounding them.

But not all conceptions of physicalism are tied to verificationist theories of meaning or direct realist accounts of perception. Rather, physicalists believe that no "element of reality" is missing from the mathematical formalism of our best description of the world. "Materialist" physicalists also believe that the formalism describes fields of insentience. In other words, the intrinsic nature of the physical is non-experiential.

Religious and spiritual views

Christianity

Main article: Materialism and Christianity

Criticism and alternatives

From contemporary physicists

Rudolf Peierls, a physicist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project, rejected materialism: "The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including knowledge and consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing."

Erwin Schrödinger said, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."

Werner Heisenberg wrote: "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible ... Atoms are not things."

Quantum mechanics

Some 20th-century physicists (e.g., Eugene Wigner and Henry Stapp), and some modern physicists and science writers (e.g., Stephen Barr, Paul Davies, and John Gribbin) have argued that materialism is flawed due to certain recent findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. According to Gribbin and Davies (1991):

Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert lumps. This development is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread attention.

— Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Chapter 1: "The Death of Materialism"

Digital physics

The objections of Davies and Gribbin are shared by proponents of digital physics, who view information rather than matter as fundamental. The physicist and proponent of digital physics John Archibald Wheeler wrote, "all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." Some founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck, shared their objections. He wrote:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie (1944)

James Jeans concurred with Planck, saying, "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter."

Philosophical objections

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued against materialism in defending his transcendental idealism (as well as offering arguments against subjective idealism and mind–body dualism). But Kant argues that change and time require an enduring substrate.

Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also express skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary Midgley argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea, at least in its eliminative materialist form.

Varieties of idealism

Arguments for idealism, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley, often take the form of an argument against materialism; indeed, Berkeley's idealism was called immaterialism. Now, matter can be argued to be redundant, as in bundle theory, and mind-independent properties can, in turn, be reduced to subjective percepts. Berkeley gives an example of the latter by pointing out that it is impossible to gather direct evidence of matter, as there is no direct experience of matter; all that is experienced is perception, whether internal or external. As such, matter's existence can only be inferred from the apparent (perceived) stability of perceptions; it finds absolutely no evidence in direct experience.

If matter and energy are seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualism results. Emergence, holism and process philosophy seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.

Materialism as methodology

Some critics object to materialism as part of an overly skeptical, narrow or reductivist approach to theorizing, rather than to the ontological claim that matter is the only substance. Particle physicist and Anglican theologian John Polkinghorne objects to what he calls promissory materialism—claims that materialistic science will eventually succeed in explaining phenomena it has not so far been able to explain. Polkinghorne prefers "dual-aspect monism" to materialism.

Some scientific materialists have been criticized for failing to provide clear definitions of matter, leaving the term materialism without any definite meaning. Noam Chomsky states that since the concept of matter may be affected by new scientific discoveries, as has happened in the past, scientific materialists are being dogmatic in assuming the opposite.

Dialectic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic 

Dialectic (Ancient Greek: διαλεκτική, romanized: dialektikḗ; German: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric; the object is more an eventual and commonly-held truth than the 'winning' of an (often binary) competition. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.

Hegelianism refigured "dialectic" to no longer refer to a literal dialogue. Instead, the term takes on the specialized meaning of development by way of overcoming internal contradictions. Dialectical materialism, a theory advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into a materialist theory of history. The legacy of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics has been criticized by philosophers, such as Karl Popper and Mario Bunge, who considered it unscientific.

Dialectic implies a developmental process and so does not fit naturally within classical logic. Nevertheless, some twentieth-century logicians have attempted to formalize it.

Classical philosophy

In classical philosophy, dialectic (Ancient Greek: διαλεκτική dialektikḗ) is a form of reasoning based upon dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses). The outcome of such a dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant proposition, or a synthesis, a combination of the opposing assertions, or a qualitative improvement of the dialogue. Socrates has become famous for his Socratic method of questioning conversation partners on topics until they agreed with him or admitted ignorance.

Platonism

In Platonism, dialectic assumed an ontological and metaphysical role in that it became the process whereby the intellect passes from sensibles to intelligibles, rising from idea to idea until it finally grasps the supreme idea, the first principle which is the origin of all. The philosopher is consequently a "dialectician". In this sense, dialectic is a process of inquiry that does away with hypotheses up to the first principle. It slowly embraces multiplicity in unity. The philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote that the dialectic in this sense is used to understand "the total process of enlightenment, whereby the philosopher is educated so as to achieve knowledge of the supreme good, the Form of the Good".

Aristotle

Aristotle has been traditionally understood as viewing dialectic as a lesser method of reasoning than demonstration, which derives a necessarily true conclusion from premises assumed to be true via syllogism. Within the Organon, the series comprising Aristotle's works about logic, the Topics is dedicated to dialectic—which he characterizes as argument from endoxa ("generally accredited opinions") where positions are subject to lines of questioning, to which concessions may be made in response. While Aristotle asserts "dialectic does not prove anything", he considers it to be a useful art closely related to rhetoric.

Medieval philosophy

In the medieval period, dialectic, was a foundational element of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), the essential curriculum in arts faculties at early universities. Drawing heavily on the works of Aristotle, as transmitted and commented upon by figures like Boethius, medieval thinkers employed dialectic as a rigorous method for analyzing texts and pursuing truth through reasoned argumentation. This practice was most notably formalized in the academic exercise known as the quaestio disputata (disputed question), a structured public debate where scholars presented arguments for and against a specific proposition drawn from authoritative sources such as Scripture, Church Fathers, or classical philosophers. The goal was not merely to win a debate but to use logical analysis to resolve apparent contradictions between different authorities, reconcile faith with reason, and arrive at a unified, deeper understanding of the subject matter. This method of systematic inquiry and rigorous logical consistency formed the bedrock of Scholasticism and the Western intellectual tradition, laying the groundwork for later developments in modern philosophy and science.

Following Boethius (480–524), who drew heavily on Aristotle, many scholastic philosophers made use of dialectics in their works, including Peter Abelard, William of Sherwood, Garlandus Compotista, Walter Burley, Roger Swyneshed, William of Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas.

This dialectic (a quaestio disputata) was formed as follows:

1. The question to be determined ("It is asked whether...");
2. A provisory answer to the question ("And it seems that...");
3. The principal arguments in favor of the provisory answer;
4. An argument against the provisory answer, traditionally a single argument from authority ("On the contrary...");
5. The determination of the question after weighing the evidence ("I answer that...");
6. The replies to each of the initial objections. ("To the first, to the second etc., I answer that...")

Modern philosophy

The concept of dialectics was given new life at the start of the nineteenth century by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectical model of nature and of history made dialectics a fundamental aspect of reality, instead of regarding the contradictions into which dialectics leads as evidence of the limits of pure reason, as Immanuel Kant had argued. Hegel was influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of synthesis, although Hegel didn't adopt Fichte's thesis–antithesis–synthesis language except to describe Kant's philosophy: rather, Hegel argued that such language was "a lifeless schema" imposed on various contents, whereas he saw his own dialectic as flowing out of "the inner life and self-movement" of the content itself.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Hegelian dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and retooled in what they considered to be a nonidealistic manner. It would also become a crucial part of later representations of Marxism as a philosophy of dialectical materialism. These representations often contrasted dramatically and led to vigorous debate among different Marxist groups.

Hegelian dialectic

See also: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel § Dialectics, speculation, idealism

The Hegelian dialectic describes changes in the forms of thought through their own internal contradictions into concrete forms that overcome previous oppositions.

This dialectic is sometimes presented in a threefold manner, as first stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. However, Hegel opposed these terms.

By contrast, the terms abstract, negative, and concrete suggest a flaw or an incompleteness in any initial thesis. For Hegel, the concrete must always pass through the phase of the negative, that is, mediation. This is the essence of what is popularly called Hegelian dialectics.

To describe the activity of overcoming the negative, Hegel often used the term Aufheben, variously translated into English as 'sublation' or 'overcoming', to conceive of the working of the dialectic. Roughly, the term indicates preserving the true portion of an idea, thing, society, and so forth, while moving beyond its limitations. What is sublated, on the one hand, is overcome, but, on the other hand, is preserved and maintained.

As in the Socratic dialectic, Hegel claimed to proceed by making implicit contradictions explicit: each stage of the process is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. In his view, the purpose of dialectics is "to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding".

For Hegel, even history can be reconstructed as a unified dialectic, the major stages of which chart a progression from self-alienation as servitude to self-unification and realization as the rational constitutional state of free and equal citizens.

Marxist dialectic

Marxist dialectic is a form of Hegelian dialectic which applies to the study of historical materialism. Marxist dialectic is thus a method by which one can examine social and economic behaviors. It is the foundation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which forms the basis of historical materialism.

In the Marxist tradition, "dialectic" refers to regular and mutual relationships, interactions, and processes in nature, society, and human thought.

A dialectical relationship is a relationship in which two phenomena or ideas mutually impact each other, leading to development and negation. Development refers to the change and motion of phenomena and ideas from less advanced to more advanced or from less complete to more complete. Dialectical negation refers to a stage of development in which a contradiction between two previous subjects gives rise to a new subject. In the Marxist view, dialectical negation is never an endpoint, but instead creates new conditions for further development and negation.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing several decades after Hegel's death, proposed that Hegel's dialectic is too abstract. Against this, Marx presented his own dialectic method, which he claimed to be "direct opposite" of Hegel's method.

Marxist dialectics is exemplified in Das Kapital. As Marx explained,

it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time, also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Class struggle is the primary contradiction to be resolved by Marxist dialectics because of its central role in the social and political lives of a society. Nonetheless, Marx and Marxists developed the concept of class struggle to comprehend the dialectical contradictions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. Hence, philosophic contradiction is central to the development of dialectics: the progress from quantity to quality, the acceleration of gradual social change; the negation of the initial development of the status quo; the negation of that negation; and the high-level recurrence of features of the original status quo.

Friedrich Engels further proposed that nature itself is dialectical, and that this is "a very simple process, which is taking place everywhere and every day". His dialectical "law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa" corresponds, according to Christian Fuchs, to the concept of phase transition and anticipated the concept of emergence "a hundred years ahead of his time". Stalin and Mao interpreted the transformation of quantity into quality not as a separate law, but as a special instance of the unity and struggle of opposites.

For Vladimir Lenin, the primary feature of Marx's "dialectical materialism" (Lenin's term) is its application of materialist philosophy to history and social sciences. Lenin's main contribution to the philosophy of dialectical materialism is his theory of reflection, which presents human consciousness as a dynamic reflection of the objective material world that fully shapes its contents and structure.

Later, Stalin's works on the subject established a rigid and formalistic division of Marxist–Leninist theory into dialectical materialism and historical materialism. While the first was supposed to be the key method and theory of the philosophy of nature, the second was the Soviet version of the philosophy of history.

Soviet systems theory pioneer Alexander Bogdanov viewed Hegelian and materialist dialectic as progressive, albeit inexact and diffuse, attempts at achieving what he called tektology, or a universal science of organization.

Dialectical naturalism

Dialectical naturalism is a term coined by American philosopher Murray Bookchin to describe the philosophical underpinnings of the political program of social ecology. Dialectical naturalism explores the complex interrelationship between social problems, and the direct consequences they have on the ecological impact of human society. Bookchin offered dialectical naturalism as a contrast to what he saw as the "empyrean, basically antinaturalistic dialectical idealism" of Hegel, and "the wooden, often scientistic dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxists".

Theological dialectics

Neo-orthodoxy, in Europe also known as theology of crisis and dialectical theology, is a theological approach in Protestantism that was developed in the aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918). It is characterized as a reaction against doctrines of nineteenth-century liberal theology and a more positive reevaluation of the teachings of the Reformation, much of which had been in decline (especially in western Europe) since the late eighteenth century. It is primarily associated with two Swiss professors and pastors, Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Emil Brunner (1899–1966), even though Barth himself expressed his unease in the use of the term.

In dialectical theology, the difference and opposition between God and human beings is stressed in such a way that all human attempts at overcoming this opposition through moral, religious or philosophical idealism must be characterized as sin. In the death of Christ humanity is negated and overcome, but this judgment also points forwards to the resurrection in which humanity is reestablished in Christ. For Barth this meant that only through God's "no" to everything human can his "yes" be perceived. Applied to traditional themes of Protestant theology, such as double predestination, this means that election and reprobation cannot be viewed as a quantitative limitation of God's action. Rather it must be seen as its "qualitative definition".

Dialectic prominently figured in Bernard Lonergan's philosophy, in his books Insight and Method in Theology. Michael Shute wrote about Lonergan's use of dialectic in The Origins of Lonergan's Notion of the Dialectic of History. For Lonergan, dialectic is both individual and operative in community. Simply described, it is a dynamic process that results in something new:

For the sake of greater precision, let us say that a dialectic is a concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change. Thus there will be a dialectic if (1) there is an aggregate of events of a determinate character, (2) the events may be traced to either or both of two principles, (3) the principles are opposed yet bound together, and (4) they are modified by the changes that successively result from them.

Dialectic is one of the eight functional specialties Lonergan envisaged for theology to bring this discipline into the modern world. Lonergan believed that the lack of an agreed method among scholars had inhibited substantive agreement from being reached and progress from being made compared to the natural sciences. Karl Rahner, S. J., however, criticized Lonergan's theological method in a short article entitled "Some Critical Thoughts on 'Functional Specialties in Theology'" where he stated: "Lonergan's theological methodology seems to me to be 'so generic that it really fits every science', and hence is not the methodology of theology as such, but only a very general methodology of science."

Criticisms

See also: Category:Critics of dialectical materialism

Friedrich Nietzsche viewed dialectic as a method that imposes artificial boundaries and suppresses the richness and diversity of reality. He rejected the notion that truth can be fully grasped through dialectical reasoning and offered a critique of dialectic, challenging its traditional framework and emphasizing the limitations of its approach to understanding reality. He expressed skepticism towards its methodology and implications in Twilight of the Idols: "I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity". In the same book, Nietzsche criticized Socrates' dialectics because he believed it prioritized reason over instinct, resulting in the suppression of individual passions and the imposition of an artificial morality.

In 1937, Karl Popper wrote and delivered a paper entitled "What Is Dialectic?" in which he criticized the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Engels for their willingness "to put up with contradictions". He argued that accepting contradiction as a valid form of logic would lead to the principle of explosion and thus trivialism. Popper concluded the essay with these words: "The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy should not be made a basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims. One task which they can fulfill quite usefully is the study of the critical methods of science." Seventy years later, Nicholas Rescher responded that "Popper's critique touches only a hyperbolic version of dialectic", and he quipped: "Ironically, there is something decidedly dialectical about Popper's critique of dialectics." Around the same time as Popper's critique was published, philosopher Sidney Hook discussed the "sense and nonsense in dialectic" and rejected two conceptions of dialectic as unscientific but accepted one conception as a "convenient organizing category".

The philosopher of science and physicist Mario Bunge repeatedly criticized Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, calling them "fuzzy and remote from science" and a "disastrous legacy". He concluded: "The so-called laws of dialectics, such as formulated by Engels (1940, 1954) and Lenin (1947, 1981), are false insofar as they are intelligible." Poe Yu-ze Wan, reviewing Bunge's criticisms of dialectics, found Bunge's arguments to be important and sensible, but he thought that dialectics could still serve some heuristic purposes for scientists. Wan pointed out that scientists such as the American Marxist biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (authors of The Dialectical Biologist) and the German-American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, not a Marxist himself, have found agreement between dialectical principles and their own scientific outlooks, although Wan opined that Engels' "laws" of dialectics "in fact 'explain' nothing".

Even some Marxists are critical of the term "dialectics". For instance, Michael Heinrich wrote, "More often than not, the grandiose rhetoric about dialectics is reducible to the simple fact that everything is dependent upon everything else and is in a state of interaction and that it's all rather complicated—which is true in most cases, but doesn't really say anything."

Formalization

Since the late 20th century, European and American logicians have attempted to provide mathematical foundations for dialectic through formalisation, although logic has been related to dialectic since ancient times. There have been pre-formal and partially-formal treatises on argument and dialectic, from authors such as Stephen Toulmin (The Uses of Argument, 1958), Nicholas Rescher (Dialectics: A Controversy-Oriented Approach to the Theory of Knowledge, 1977), and Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (pragma-dialectics, 1980s). One can include works of the communities of informal logic and paraconsistent logic.

Defeasibility

Building on theories of defeasible reasoning (see John L. Pollock), systems have been built that define well-formedness of arguments, rules governing the process of introducing arguments based on fixed assumptions, and rules for shifting burden. Many of these logics appear in the special area of artificial intelligence and law, though the computer scientists' interest in formalizing dialectic originates in a desire to build decision support and computer-supported collaborative work systems.

Dialog games

This section is transcluded from Logic and dialectic § Dialog games. (edit | history)

Main articles: Game semantics and Dialogical logic

Dialectic itself can be formalised as moves in a game, where an advocate for the truth of a proposition and an opponent argue. Such games can provide a semantics of logic, one that is very general in applicability.

Mathematics

Mathematician William Lawvere interpreted dialectics in the setting of categorical logic in terms of adjunctions between idempotent monads. This perspective may be useful in the context of theoretical computer science where the duality between syntax and semantics can be interpreted as a dialectic in this sense. For example, the Curry–Howard correspondence is such an adjunction or more generally the duality between closed monoidal categories and their internal logic.

States' rights

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights

In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess. Since the 1940s, the term "states' rights" has often been considered a loaded term, a euphemism, or a dog whistle because of its use in opposition to federally-mandated racial desegregation and, more recently, same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.

Background

The balance of federal powers and those powers held by the states as defined in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution was first addressed in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). The Court's decision by Chief Justice John Marshall asserted that the laws adopted by the federal government, when exercising its constitutional powers, are generally paramount over any conflicting laws adopted by state governments. After McCulloch, the primary legal issues in this area concerned the scope of Congress' constitutional powers, and whether the states possess certain powers to the exclusion of the federal government, even if the Constitution does not explicitly limit them to the states.

The Supremacy Clause

The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution states:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding. (Emphasis added.)

In The Federalist Papers, ratification proponent Alexander Hamilton explained the limitations this clause placed on the proposed federal government, describing that acts of the federal government were binding on the states and the people therein only if the act was in pursuance of constitutionally granted powers, and juxtaposing acts which exceeded those bounds as "void and of no force":

But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.

Controversy to 1865

In the period between the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, the states had united under a much weaker federal government and a much stronger state and local government, pursuant to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles gave the central government very little, if any, authority to overrule individual state actions. The Constitution subsequently strengthened the central government, authorizing it to exercise powers deemed necessary to exercise its authority, with an ambiguous boundary between the two co-existing levels of government. In the event of any conflict between state and federal law, the Constitution resolved the conflict via the Supremacy Clause of Article VI in favor of the federal government, which declares federal law the "supreme Law of the Land" and provides that "the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." However, the Supremacy Clause only applies if the federal government is acting in pursuit of its constitutionally authorized powers, as noted by the phrase "in pursuance thereof" in the actual text of the Supremacy Clause itself (see above).

Alien and Sedition Acts

When the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which provide a classic statement in support of states' rights and called on state legislatures to nullify unconstitutional federal laws. (The other states, however, did not follow suit and several rejected the notion that states could nullify federal law.) According to this theory, the federal union is a voluntary association of states, and if the central government goes too far each state has the right to nullify that law. As Jefferson said in the Kentucky Resolutions:

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party....each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which became part of the Principles of '98, along with the supporting Report of 1800 by Madison, became final documents of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. Gutzman argued that Governor Edmund Randolph designed the protest in the name of moderation. Gutzman argues that in 1798, Madison espoused states' rights to defeat national legislation that he maintained was a threat to republicanism. During 1831–33, the South Carolina Nullifiers quoted Madison in their defense of states' rights. But Madison feared that the growing support for this doctrine would undermine the union and argued that by ratifying the Constitution states had transferred their sovereignty to the federal government.

The most vociferous supporters of states' rights, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, were called "Old Republicans" into the 1820s and 1830s.

Tate (2011) undertook a literary criticism of a major book by John Taylor of Caroline, New Views of the Constitution of the United States. Tate argues it is structured as a forensic historiography modeled on the techniques of 18th-century Whig lawyers. Taylor believed that evidence from American history gave proof of state sovereignty within the union, against the arguments of nationalists such as U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall.

Another states' rights dispute occurred over the War of 1812. At the Hartford Convention of 1814–15, New England Federalists voiced opposition to President Madison's war, and discussed secession from the Union. In the end they stopped short of calls for secession, but when their report appeared at the same time as news of the great American victory at the Battle of New Orleans, the Federalists were politically ruined.

Nullification Crisis of 1832

One major and continuous strain on the union, from roughly 1820 through the Civil War, was the issue of trade and tariffs. Heavily dependent upon international trade, the almost entirely agricultural and export-oriented South imported most of its manufactured goods from Europe or obtained them from the North. The North, by contrast, had a growing domestic industrial economy that viewed foreign trade as competition. Trade barriers, especially protective tariffs, were viewed as harmful to the Southern economy, which depended on exports.

In 1828, Congress passed protective tariffs to benefit trade in the northern states, but that were detrimental to the South. Southerners vocally expressed their tariff opposition in documents such as the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1828, written in response to the "Tariff of Abominations". Exposition and Protest was the work of South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun, formerly an advocate of protective tariffs and internal improvements at federal expense.

South Carolina's Nullification Ordinance declared that both the tariff of 1828 and the tariff of 1832 were null and void within the state borders of South Carolina. This action initiated the Nullification Crisis. Passed by a state convention on November 24, 1832, it led, on December 10, to President Andrew Jackson's proclamation against South Carolina, which sent a naval flotilla and a threat of sending federal troops to enforce the tariffs; Jackson authorized this under color of national authority, claiming in his 1832 Proclamation Regarding Nullification that "our social compact in express terms declares, that the laws of the United States, its Constitution, and treaties made under it, are the supreme law of the land" and for greater caution adds, "that the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

Civil War

Main articles: American Civil War and Origins of the American Civil War

Over following decades, another central dispute over states' rights moved to the forefront. The issue of slavery polarized the union, with the Jeffersonian principles often being used by both sides—anti-slavery Northerners, and Southern slaveholders and secessionists—in debates that ultimately led to the American Civil War. Supporters of slavery often argued that one of the rights of the states was the protection of slave property wherever it went, a position endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 Dred Scott decision. In contrast, opponents of slavery argued that the non-slave-states' rights were violated both by that decision and by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. While historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery, they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict (ideological, economic, political, or social) were most important.

Southern arguments

Southern states had a long tradition of using states' rights doctrine since the late eighteenth century to support slavery. A major Southern argument in the 1850s was that federal law to ban the expansion of slavery into the territories discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states. In 1857 the Supreme Court sided with these states' rights supporters, declaring in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.

Jefferson Davis used the following argument in favor of the equal rights of states:

Resolved, That the union of these States rests on the equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property, so as, in the Territories—which are the common possession of the United States—to give advantages to the citizens of one State which are not equally secured to those of every other State.

Southern states argued against "states' rights" when it benefited them in the context of fugitive slave laws. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves, with the argument that this would make the institution null once a particular slave had crossed into a free state. The question was pivotal in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Northern arguments

The historian James McPherson noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies. Contemporary political thinkers like Karl Marx also noted this inconsistency regarding the Confederacy's actions during the war:

The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the "South" it confers, to be sure, the right to secede from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the Union.

The historian William H. Freehling noted that the South's argument for a state's right to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalienable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism. Historian Henry Brooks Adams explains that the anti-slavery North took a consistent and principled stand on states' rights against federal encroachment throughout its history, while the Southern states, whenever they saw an opportunity to expand slavery and the reach of their political influence, termed Slave Power, often conveniently forgot the principle of states' rights—and fought in favor of federal centralization:

Between the Slave Power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The Slave Power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision—all triumphs of the Slave Power—did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the Slave Power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.

Sinha and Richards both argue that the Southerners only advocated states' rights when they disagreed with a policy. Examples given are a states' right to engage in slavery or to suppress freedom of speech. They argue that it was instead the result of the increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and (some) Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver. As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the Slave Power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the Slave Power by and upon the federal government of the United States. The Slave Power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the federal government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the federal government, by means of military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred.

Texas v. White

In Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869) the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained a state ever since it first joined the Union, despite claims to have joined the Confederate States of America; the court further held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were "absolutely null" under the constitution.

Since the Civil War

A series of Supreme Court decisions developed the state action constraint on the Equal Protection Clause. The state action theory weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments, in that the clause was held not to apply to unequal protection of the laws caused in part by complete lack of state action in specific cases, even if state actions in other instances form an overall pattern of segregation and other discrimination. The separate but equal theory further weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments.

In case law

With United States v. Cruikshank (1876), a case which arose out of the Colfax Massacre of Black residents contesting the results of a Reconstruction-era election, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the First Amendment or Second Amendment to state governments in respect to their own citizens, only to acts of the federal government. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore fully applicable to states and local governments.

Furthermore, United States v. Harris (1883) held that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to an 1883 prison lynching on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to state acts, not to individual criminal actions.

In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court allowed segregation by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a statute that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodation. It again held that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to acts done by states, not to those done by private individuals, and as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 applied to private establishments, the Court said, it exceeded congressional enforcement power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Later progressive era and World War II

By the beginning of the 20th century, greater cooperation began to develop between the state and federal governments and the federal government began to accumulate more power. Early in this period, a federal income tax was imposed, first during the Civil War as a war measure and then permanently with the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Before this, the states played a larger role in government.

States' rights were affected by the fundamental alteration of the federal government resulting from the Seventeenth Amendment, depriving state governments of an avenue of control over the federal government via the representation of each state's legislature in the U.S. Senate. This change has been described by legal critics as the loss of a check and balance on the federal government by the states.

Following the Great Depression, the New Deal, and then World War II saw further growth in the authority and responsibilities of the federal government. The case of Wickard v. Filburn allowed the federal government to enforce the Agricultural Adjustment Act, providing subsidies to farmers for limiting their crop yields, arguing agriculture affected interstate commerce and came under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause even when a farmer grew his crops not to be sold, but for his own private use.

1948 electoral votes by state. The Dixiecrats carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received one additional electoral vote in Tennessee (colored in orange).

After World War II, President Harry Truman supported a civil rights bill and desegregated the military. The reaction was a split in the Democratic Party that led to the formation of the "States' Rights Democratic Party"—better known as the Dixiecrats—led by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond ran as the States' Rights candidate for president in the 1948 election, losing to Truman. The Dixiecrats carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

Civil rights movement

During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was confronted by the proponents in the Southern states of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws who denounced federal interference in these state-level laws as an assault on states' rights.

Though Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overruled the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were largely inactive in the South until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. § 21) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Several states passed Interposition Resolutions to declare that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown usurped states' rights.

There was also opposition by states' rights advocates to voting rights at Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was part of the Selma to Montgomery marches, that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Contemporary debates

In 1964, the issue of fair housing in California involved the boundary between state laws and federalism. California Proposition 14 overturned the Rumsford Fair Housing Act in California and allowed discrimination in any type of housing sale or rental. Martin Luther King Jr. and others saw this as a backlash against civil rights, while actor and future (1967) governor of California Ronald Reagan gained popularity by supporting Proposition 14. The U.S. Supreme Court's Reitman v. Mulkey decision overturned Proposition 14 in 1967 in favor of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Conservative historians Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman argue that when politicians come to power they exercise all the power they can get, in the process trampling states' rights. Gutzman argues that the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 by Jefferson and Madison were not only responses to immediate threats but were legitimate responses based on the long-standing principles of states' rights and strict adherence to the Constitution.

Another concern is the fact that on more than one occasion, the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from states which did not pass certain articles of legislation. Any state which lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse or both. Although the first such action (the enactment of a national speed limit) was directly related to highways and done in the face of a fuel shortage, most subsequent actions have had little or nothing to do with highways and have not been done in the face of any compelling national crisis. An example of this would be the federally mandated drinking age of 21, upheld in South Dakota v. Dole. Critics of such actions feel that the federal government is upsetting the traditional balance between itself and state governments.

More recently, the issue of states' rights has come to a head when the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission recommended that Congress and the Department of Defense implement sweeping changes to the National Guard by consolidating some Guard installations and closing others. These recommendations in 2005 drew strong criticism from many states, and several states sued the federal government on the basis that Congress and the Pentagon would be violating states' rights should they force the realignment and closure of Guard bases without the prior approval of the governors from the affected states. After Pennsylvania won a federal lawsuit to block the deactivation of the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, defense and Congressional leaders chose to try to settle the remaining BRAC lawsuits out of court, reaching compromises with the plaintiff states.

Current states' rights issues include the death penalty, assisted suicide, abortion, gun control, and cannabis, the last of which is in direct violation of federal law. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government, permitting the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to arrest medical marijuana patients and caregivers. In Gonzales v. Oregon, the Supreme Court ruled the practice of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is legal. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not withhold recognition to same-sex marriages. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was not constitutionally protected, and states could ban it. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the United States Supreme Court ruled that gun ownership is an individual right under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the District of Columbia could not completely ban gun ownership by law-abiding private citizens. Two years later, the court ruled that the Heller decision applied to states and territories via the Second and 14th Amendments in McDonald v. Chicago, stating that states, territories and political divisions thereof, could not impose total bans on gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.

These concerns have led to a movement sometimes called the State Sovereignty movement or "10th Amendment Sovereignty Movement".

10th Amendment

The Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been used as a prominent tool of invoking nullification, a common tactic of those that believe in the primacy of States' rights. The Tenth Amendment reads as follows:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Notably, the Tenth Amendment has been successfully utilized to nullify restrictive federal laws pertaining to gun rights, immigration, cannabis, and more. Additionally, organizations such as the Tenth Amendment Center seek to utilize the Tenth Amendment to achieve, "Liberty through decentralization". The Tenth Amendment center chiefly focuses on encouraging state representatives to submit bills that nullify federal laws by providing model legislation on their website that provides a rubric for state legislators to follow.

In 2009–2010 thirty-eight states introduced resolutions to reaffirm the principles of sovereignty under the Constitution and the 10th Amendment; 14 states have passed the resolutions. These non-binding resolutions, often called "state sovereignty resolutions" do not carry the force of law. Instead, they are intended to be a statement to demand that the federal government halt its practices of assuming powers and imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution.

States' rights and the Rehnquist Court

The Supreme Court's University of Alabama v. Garrett (2001) and Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents (2000) decisions allowed states to use a rational basis review for discrimination against the aged and disabled, arguing that these types of discrimination were rationally related to a legitimate state interest, and that no "razorlike precision" was needed." The Supreme Court's United States v. Morrison (2000) decision limited the ability of rape victims to sue their attackers in federal court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist explained that "States historically have been sovereign" in the area of law enforcement, which in the Court's opinion required narrow interpretations of the Commerce Clause and Fourteenth Amendment.

Kimel, Garrett and Morrison indicated that the Court's previous decisions in favor of enumerated powers and limits on Congressional power over the states, such as United States v. Lopez (1995), Seminole Tribe v. Florida (1996) and City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) were more than one time flukes. In the past, Congress relied on the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause for passing civil rights bills, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lopez limited the Commerce Clause to things that directly affect interstate commerce, which excludes issues like gun control laws, hate crimes, and other crimes that affect commerce but are not directly related to commerce. Seminole reinforced the "sovereign immunity of states" doctrine, which makes it difficult to sue states for many things, especially civil rights violations. The Flores "congruence and proportionality" requirement prevents Congress from going too far in requiring states to comply with the Equal Protection Clause, which replaced the ratchet theory advanced in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). The ratchet theory held that Congress could ratchet up civil rights beyond what the Court had recognized, but that Congress could not ratchet down judicially recognized rights. An important precedent for Morrison was United States v. Harris (1883), which ruled that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to a prison lynching because the state action doctrine applies Equal Protection only to state action, not private criminal acts. Since the ratchet principle was replaced with the "congruence and proportionality" principle by Flores, it was easier to revive older precedents for preventing Congress from going beyond what Court interpretations would allow. Critics such as Associate Justice John Paul Stevens accused the Court of judicial activism (i.e., interpreting law to reach a desired conclusion).

The tide against federal power in the Rehnquist court was stopped in the case of Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), in which the court upheld the federal power to prohibit medicinal use of cannabis even if states have permitted it. Rehnquist himself was a dissenter in the Raich case.

States' rights as code word

Since the 1940s, the term "states' rights" has often been considered a loaded term or dog whistle because of its use in opposition to federally-mandated racial desegregation and, more recently, same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.

During the heyday of the civil rights movement, defenders of racial segregation used the term "states' rights" as a code word in what is now referred to as dog-whistle politics: political messaging that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. In 1948 it was the official name of the "Dixiecrat" party led by white supremacist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who famously declared in his inaugural address in 1963, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" later remarked that he should have said, "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!" Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights. In that view, which some historians dispute, his replacement of segregation with states' rights would be more of a clarification than a euphemism.

In 2010, some claimed that Texas Governor Rick Perry's use of the expression "states' rights" was "reminiscent of an earlier era when it was a rallying cry against civil rights." During an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Perry made it clear that he supports the end of segregation, including passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Texas president of the NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, stated that he understood that Perry was not speaking of "states' rights" in a racial context, but others still claimed to feel offended by the term because of its past misuse.