The Politics of Formalization: Liberation or Oppression?

Techniques of formalization are widely used in philosophy and other disciplines as tools for analysis and research. While epistemological and methodological aspects of formalization have received quite some attention in the meta-philosophical literature, the politics of formalization—the entanglements of formalization with power relations, and in particular the impact of formalization for projects of liberation or oppression—has received comparatively little attention. To discuss the politics of formalization, the starting point of this paper is the idea that formalization can be understood as a technology; as such, the existing literature on the political import of technologies (from philosophy of technology and science and technology studies) can suitably inform an analysis of the politics of formalization. I then discuss different views on the politics of formalization: as instruments for liberation (Neurath, Carnap) or as tools of oppression (Horkheimer and Adorno, Nye). Next, I argue that the social and political conditions under which formalization has acquired the outlines now familiar to us—namely, Enlightenment movements, the European colonial expansion, and the birth of capitalist societies—invite a reflection on how this historical background may have affected the development of formalization techniques in the 19th and 20th centuries. To conclude, I sketch the contours of a social (and political) history of formalization against the background of the pervasiveness of algorithmic rules in the past centuries, drawing in particular on the work of Lorraine Daston.