Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T14:36:10.879Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Logic of Legitimacy: Ethics in Political Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2013

Hans-Jörg Sigwart
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article examines the recent debate on a genuinely realist perspective in political philosophy and argues that the core idea of realism is a certain type of ethical theory. In spite of the notorious polemic against “moralism” in politics that is characteristic of realist thinkers since Machiavelli, political realism as put forth in the current debate is not to be understood as a strictly fact-oriented perspective on politics, but rather as a perspective that itself is founded on a theory of political ethics. This peculiarly realist theory of political ethics can be characterized by its focus on the theoretical importance of political application problems, by a genuine priority principle underlying its understanding of political ethics, by its distinctive understanding of the concept of legitimacy and, finally, by its claim that any form of ethics, as far as it is concerned with political questions, is necessarily ambivalent in character.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 407 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hall, Ian, “The Triumph of Anti-liberalism? Reconciling Radicalism to Realism in International Relations Theory,” Political Studies Review 9, no. 1 (2011): 49Google Scholar.

2 For an overview of this current debate on “political realism” and of the realist critique of Rawls's political philosophy see the summaries in Galston, William, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 385–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galston, William, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory: The Legacy of John Rawls,” in Reflections on Rawls: An Assessment of His Legacy, ed. Young, Shaun P. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 111–30Google Scholar.

3 Weber, Max, “Politik als Beruf,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958), 536–48Google Scholar.

4 Galston also lists Stuart Hampshire, John Dunn, Richard Bellamy, Geoffrey Hawthorne, William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Shklar, Jeremy Waldron, and Stephen Elkin as current realist thinkers (“Realism in Political Theory,” 386).

5 Owen, David, “Die verlorene und die wiedergefundene Wirklichkeit: Ethik, Politik und Imagination bei Raymond Geuss,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58, no. 3 (2010): 432Google Scholar. An English version of this article is available at http://soton.academia.edu/DavidOwen/Papers/326716/Reality_Lost_Reality_Regained_Ethics_Politics_and_Wishful_Thinking_in_the_Imagination_of_Raymond_Geuss (quotation on pp. 3–4).

6 Galston, “Realism in political theory,” 396–98.

7 Ibid., 398.

8 Ibid., 390.

9 Ibid., 391.

10 Ibid., 393–94.

11 Ibid., 392.

12 On the traits and the specific logic of “corporate agency” described from a realist perspective see Newey, Glen, “Two Dogmas of Liberalism,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 449–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For a critical discussion of the historical contextualism as inspired by the Cambridge School see Kelly, Paul, “Rescuing Political Theory from the Tyranny of History,” in Political Philosophy versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, ed. Floyd, Jonathan and Stears, Marc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 13–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 In both respects the most exemplary author is John Gray: see, for instance, his reference to ancient animism in Gray, John, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002), 17 and 33Google Scholar; see also Gray, John, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta Books, 2004), 100–108Google Scholar, where Gray links his somewhat fin-de-siècle perspective with the one assumed in the work of Joseph Conrad.

15 Geuss, Raymond, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 65Google Scholar.

16 See also Geuss, Raymond, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 107n49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Geuss, Outside Ethics, 65.

18 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 23–30.

19 For the quotation see Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” 386. See also Raymond Geuss's idea of critique, which he develops in his reflections on Adorno's “negativism” in Geuss, Outside Ethics, 161–82 and 234–47. (On Geuss's understanding of critique see also Menke, Christoph, “Neither Rawls nor Adorno: Raymond Geuss' Programme for a ‘Realist’ Political Philosophy,” European Journal of Philosophy 18, no. 1 [2010]: 139–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sangiovanni, Andrea, “Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16, no. 2 [2008]: 161–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) Quentin Skinner, incidentally, in his study on Machiavelli argues that a fundamentally dissenting position against the dominant humanist discourse of his time is a crucial feature to be considered in order to understand Machiavelli's fundamentally polemical style of philosophical argument (Skinner, Quentin, Machiavelli [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985]Google Scholar).

20 See, for instance, Geuss, Raymond, “Realismus, Wunschdenken, Utopie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58, no. 3 (2010): 419–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Gray, John, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 271–88Google Scholar. Gray considers realism not only to be one of the most important classical positions within the history of Western political thought but also to be the position most apt to balance and to tame the various utopian reductionisms and extremisms that are characteristic of the philosophical and the political history of Western modernity in general, and of some dominant tendencies he sees involved in current developments, in particular. For critical assessments of Gray's political theory see Horton, John and Newey, Glen, eds., The Political Theory of John Gray (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.

22 Gray, Heresies, 3–4.

23 For a similar critique of the idea of progress in political philosophy see Graham, Gordon, “Political Philosophy and the Dead Hand of Its History,” in Political Philosophy versus History?, 84–102Google Scholar.

24 Gray, Heresies, 13.

25 Ibid., 8 and 6.

26 Ibid., 3.

27 For Geuss's position see the remark in Honig, Bonnie and Stears, Marc, “The New Realism: From Modus Vivendi to Justice,” in Political Philosophy versus History?, 184–85Google Scholar.

28 Gray, Straw Dogs, esp. 16–20 and 33–34.

29 This exemplary character of Gray's radicalized version of realism becomes obvious particularly if we compare his arguments with those of other realists with regard to the general orientation of his understanding of history and religion. For very similar arguments in this respect see, for example, Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 68–70Google Scholar.

30 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics. In his essay Geuss partly reformulates ideas that he had already discussed in some of his earlier writings. See, for instance, Geuss, Raymond, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar and Outside Ethics (quoted above).

31 See, as another example, the inversion argued for by Glen Newey who, to be sure, seems to radicalize this argument to the point where its specific argument for a genuinely political ethics gets substituted by an unlimited moral relativism: “Liberal political design takes morality as fixed, and politics as negotiable. … One can equally well take the facts of corporate existence as given, and morality's standing and content as variable” (Newey, Two Dogmas of Liberalism, 463).

32 Philp, Mark, “Political Theory and the Evaluation of Political Conduct,” Social Theory and Practice 34, no. 3 (2008): 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Ibid., 393.

34 John Rawls himself stresses in A Theory of Justice not only that such priority problems belong to the most intricate and complex questions in political philosophy, but also that the answer of his own “ethical” theory—namely, his lexical ordering of the principles of justice and, in certain respects, his principle of the priority of the right—claims only to be preliminary in nature. See, for instance, Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1971), 31, 39–45, 303Google Scholar.

35 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 6–7.

36 Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” 386.

37 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 11.

38 Geuss's account in this respect resembles Michael Oakeshott's understanding of political rationality. See ibid., 15–16: “Politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art, than like traditional conceptions of what happens when a theory is applied. It requires the deployment of skills and forms of judgment that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinised, and that do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories. … One of the signs that I have acquired a skill, rather than that I have been simply mechanically repeating things I have seen others do, have been applying a handbook, or have just been lucky, is that I can attain interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances.” For Oakeshott's argument see Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 5–42Google Scholar.

39 For a very interesting account of this peculiarly realist priority principle see also Sangiovanni, “Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality,” 156–63. Sangiovanni particularly emphasizes concrete institutional conditions as the frame of reference for an interpretation of normative principles as well as their specific functions within concrete political contexts (ibid., 158–59). He only alludes to the problem of political application as “realization,” however (ibid., 158). See below.

40 On the complex relation between ideal and nonideal perspectives in Rawls see Simmons, A. John, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 5–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 The major objects of Williams's critique are philosophical as well as commonsense conceptions of “morality” in general in the sense of exclusively deontological conceptions of ethical conduct and reasoning. See Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), 174–96Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 203–4.

43 Ibid., 205.

44 Ibid., 212.

45 Ibid., 198.

46 Williams, Bernard, “Modernity and the Substance of Ethical Life,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Williams occasionally uses the adverbial theoretical term “the political” in order to underscore the genuine inherent logic of the political sphere as clearly distinct from other social or cognitive spheres. He therewith takes up the most general implications ascribed to the term by Carl Schmitt, who most famously argued for the importance of such an adverbial concept to grasp the peculiarities of politics. See Williams's reference to Schmitt in Williams, Bernard, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Williams, “Modernity and the Substance of Ethical Life,” 46.

49 Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 77.

50 Williams, “Modernity and the Substance of Ethical Life,” 49.

51 Ibid.

52 Williams, Bernard, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Geuss's concept of legitimacy also has peculiar normative implications in this sense. Honig and Stears's interpretation of Geuss's perspective as eventually implying an almost cynical theory of political ethics is, in my opinion, overstated in this respect. While it is true that for Geuss “the process of legitimation is never above but always rather historically located in the fray of political struggles,” this does not mean “that stories of legitimation in politics are ultimately offered in order to secure only one thing: power” (Honig and Stears, “The New Realism,” 182). It rather means, as I already outlined above and as it will become clearer in the following, a reversal of priorities with regard to the legitimation of power. See also Geuss's assertion that studying politics can never be a “strictly value-free enterprise” (Philosophy and Real Politics, 1).

54 Williams, Bernard, “Pluralism, Community and Left Wittgensteinianism,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such a functional conservatism in terms of the ethical represents a type of culturalist and functional relativism which Williams explicitly criticizes not only for its problematic practical implications, but also for its logical incoherence. See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 156–60, and Williams, Bernard, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 20–25Google Scholar.

55 Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 77. See also Rossi, Enzo, “Reality and Imagination in Political Theory and Practice: On Raymond Geuss's Realism,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 504–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on Geuss's concept of legitimacy; and Sleat, Matt, “Liberal Realism: A Liberal Response to the Realist Critique,” Review of Politics 73, no. 3 (2012): 469–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the realists' general attempt to conceptualize an account of legitimacy that can recognize “the realist insight into the essentially conflictual nature of the political” (476).

56 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 35.

57 Philp, Mark, “What Is to Be Done? Political Theory and Political Realism,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” 5.

59 Ibid., 6.

60 See ibid., 12: “I want a broader view of the content of politics, not confined to interests, together with a more realistic view of the powers, opportunities, and limitations of political actors, where all the considerations that bear on political action—both ideals and, for example, political survival—can come to one focus of decision. … The ethic that relates to this is what Weber called Verantwortungsethik, the ethic of responsibility.” See also Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 94: “I take it that the following is a universal truth: legitimate government is not just coercive power. It is true, moreover, in the sense of ‘legitimacy’ I am using, in which the idea is relativized to local understandings: everyone everywhere where there is such a thing as government recognizes some distinction between legitimate government and a mere conspiracy of effective coercion, even if many people have lived and do live under such a conspiracy or in a state which is not much more.”

61 Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” 5.

62 See Honig and Stears, “The New Realism,” 191, who point to the “curiously rationalist conception of legitimacy” implied in Williams's first-political-question argument, yet without examining the peculiar priority principle which in my opinion more specifically renders the “rationalist” ingredient in Williams's account of political ethics. This rationalist connection, however, should not be overinterpreted. Although Williams's argument here is primarily logical in character, it does not, in my opinion, articulate an overall “rationalist” conception of legitimacy. Particularly when read against the background of his critique of the abstractness of the deontological “system of morality” sketched above, it is reasonable to understand Williams's first-political-question argument within the frame of his general perspective, which is contextualist and hermeneutical rather than rationalist. See in this respect Williams's understanding of “confidence” as a distinctly contextual and “social phenomenon” necessarily involved in any political questions of ethical conduct (Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 170–71) and his critique of purely “rationalist” ethical theories (Williams, Modernity and the Substance of Ethical Life, 47–48).

63 In its logical or “rational” structure this argument resembles the understanding of the philosophical status of the problem of “application” as put forth in Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy. In contrast to Williams's argument, however, in Gadamer the paradigmatic model of “application” in this sense is philological, theological, or jurisprudential in its inherent logic, not political. See Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Schriften, 6th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990), 1:312–16Google Scholar.

64 Gray, Heresies, 109, 114.

65 Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 90, 92.

66 Owen, “Die verlorene und die wiedergefundene Wirklichkeit,” 431.

67 The neorealist priority thesis therefore also illustrates why the political for most realists implies a rather areligious form of ethics, or at least why also many classical realist authors particularly see the political role of Christianity as substantially ambivalent. To be sure, the major significance of the question of religion and politics is emphasized also in the current realist discourse, and the perspective of the various authors on this question is particularly complex and equivocal. Yet, notwithstanding the crucial political role that Gray, for instance, ascribes to religion, and notwithstanding his harsh critique of modern secularism, he also stresses that as far as religion is concerned with absolute truth and absolute individual goodness or salvation, its logic is inherently apolitical (Gray, Heresies, 1–3; Gray, Black Mass, 260–71).

68 Gray, Straw Dogs, xiv.

69 Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” 393.

70 Ibid., 392.

71 Gray, Black Mass, 277–80.

72 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 197Google Scholar.

73 Ibid., 197.

74 Williams, Liberalism and the Limits of Philosophy, 217.

75 Gray, Black Mass, 272–73.

76 See also, as further examples, Bellamy, Richard, “Dirty Hands and Clean Gloves: Liberal Ideals and Real Politics,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 412–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lebow, Richard N., The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 306–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Philp, Mark, Political Conduct (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 41–46, 80–114Google Scholar.

77 The peculiar “Bereichsethik” which applies to and is valid only within the sphere of politics, but within it somewhat exclusively, for Weber necessarily involves any person who enters the sphere of politics in unsolvable ethical contradictions (Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” 541–47).

78 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 74–75Google Scholar. The last sentence quoted is to be found only in the German version (Über die Revolution [Munich: Piper, 1986], 107Google Scholar); its translation is mine.

79 Arendt, Hannah, Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ludz, Ursula, 3rd ed. (Munich: Piper, 2007), 66Google Scholar.

80 Walzer's essay is also a point of reference in the current debate on realism. See, for instance, Bellamy, Dirty Hands and Clean Gloves, 414, and Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics, 15n9.

81 Gray, Straw Dogs, xiv.

82 Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” in Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 292–93Google Scholar.

83 For a realist account of citizenship see also Philp, Political Conduct, 193–213.