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IN WHAT SENSE MUST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY BE POLITICAL?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2016

David Miller
David Miller*
Affiliation:
Political Theory, University of Oxford
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Abstract:

Political philosophy appears to have recovered from its alleged death in the middle of the last century, but now faces the realist charge that in the work of John Rawls and those influenced by him it fails to be political in the right way; it is merely “applied moral philosophy.” I dismiss the hyper-realist position of authors such as Raymond Geuss for taking an implausibly narrow view of politics. There is more merit in Bernard Williams’s claim that legitimacy, not justice, is the central problem of political philosophy. Yet we cannot understand the significance of legitimation without referring to the moral values that are realized when it succeeds. Thus, Williams fails to show that political normativity can be detached entirely from ethics. Moreover the legitimacy requirements of a liberal state, according to Williams, are substantively close to the requirements of justice according to Rawls. In light of the latter’s turn to “political liberalism,” they appear also to hold convergent views about the status of the theories they are advancing. I conclude by suggesting that the “applied moral philosophy” charge would apply only to philosophers who believe that general moral principles, like utility or rights, can do all the work of political evaluation. Politics does indeed have special features that impose distinctive justificatory requirements on its procedures and the outcomes they produce.

Keywords

Raymond Geussjusticelegitimacyliberalismpolitical realismRawlsBernard Williams
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 33 , Issue 1-2 , Fall 2016 , pp. 155 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2016 

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References

1 See, for example, Laslett, Peter, “Introduction” in Laslett, Peter, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956);Google Scholar Wollheim, Richard, “Philosophie Analytique et Pensée Politique,” Revue Française de Science Politique 11 (1961): 295–308;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Berlin, Isaiah, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G., eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962);Google Scholar Quinton, Anthony, “Introduction,” Quinton, Anthony, ed., Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

2 An influential text in this vein was Weldon, Thomas D., The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953).Google Scholar As he remarks at one point, “I fear that what I have written . . . may give the impression that the traditional political philosophers have for the most part been wasting time by asking and attempting to answer general questions to which no answers can be given because they lack any precise meaning. To put it crudely, they have formulated questions of a type to which no empirically testable answers could be given, and such questions are nonsensical” (74). This was indeed the discouraging thought that his book conveyed to young readers like myself.

3 For the thesis that our views about the nature of political philosophy, and how it relates to moral philosophy, are crucially dependent on the conception of political life that we adopt, see Larmore, Charles, “What is Political Philosophy?” Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (2013): 276–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The dampening effect of a certain conception of philosophical method on political philosophy can be seen clearly in the quotation from Weldon cited in n. 2. For a fuller analysis, see Bernard Williams, “Political Philosophy and the Analytical Tradition,” in Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. Adrian Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

5 Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ibid., 15.

7 Geuss does at one point consider the charge that what he is recommending to us is not political philosophy because it is not normative, but after briefly casting doubt on the descriptive/normative distinction, he goes on to say that “there is no single canonical style of theorising about politics. One can ask any number of perfectly legitimate questions about different political phenomena, and depending on the question, different kinds of enquiry will be appropriate” (ibid., 17). This is of course perfectly true, but it immediately invites the reader to ask: “For what kinds of question about politics are philosophical methods of enquiry appropriate?”

8 I am therefore a little skeptical of recent attempts to create a “realist school of political philosophy” out of themes that are found in the work of Geuss, Williams, and several others. The chief architect (or culprit) here is William Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (2010): 385–411, but see also Matt Sleat, Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), esp. chaps. 2–3; Mark Philp, “Realism without Illusions,” Political Theory 40 (2012): 629–49; Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, “Realism in Normative Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass 9 (2014): 689–701. For a good account of the distance that separates Geuss from Williams in particular, see Bonnie Honig and Marc Stears, “The New Realism: From Modus Vivendi to Justice,” in Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears, eds., Political Philosophy versus History: Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

9 David Miller, “A Tale of Two Cities; Or, Political Philosophy as Lamentation,” in David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). There is a long history of apolitical utopias, among which (arguably) Plato’s Republic is one of the most distinguished.

10 One might compare and contrast the reminders that Michael Walzer assembles to counterbalance the fashionable view of politics as a form of deliberation in Michael Walzer, “Deliberation, and What Else?” in Michael Walzer, Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory, ed. David Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

11 Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Williams distinguishes these two political philosophies as exemplifying an “enactment model” and a “structural model,” respectively (1–2), but the distinction is not important for what follows. Note also that for these purposes Williams uses a wide understanding of “moral” that is different from the more specific idea of “morality” that was the object of his critical attention in Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985). The distinction between “ethics” and “morality” plays no part in his defense of political realism.

12 Ibid., 3–6; see also Bernard Williams, “Human Rights and Relativism,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 62–63.

13 Ibid., 5.

14 For a fuller investigation of these questions than I can attempt here, see Hall, Edward, “Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand: A Defence,” Political Studies 63 (2015): 466–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Hobbes’s phrase in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 186.

16 Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, trans. Richard Hildreth (London: Trubner and Co., 1871), 96–99. On this point, see also Philp, “Realism without Illusions,” 633.

17 Williams, “Human Rights and Relativism,” 62–64.

18 Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” 13.

19 Cf. here Alice Baderin, “Two Forms of Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 13 (2014): 140.

20 Ibid., 5.

21 Williams does not make clear to whom exactly the claim about liberalism as the only acceptable solution to the BLD applies. “Now and around here the BLD together with the historical conditions permit only a liberal solution,” he says (ibid., 8). The historical conditions in question are those displayed by “the modern state,” and involve such things as bureaucratic forms of organization and “disenchanted” authority — which suggests that contemporary China, for example, would qualify. But if “around here” is meant to exclude societies like China, then the claim about the BLD and liberalism is in danger of becoming circular: liberal societies need to be legitimated by liberal principles.

22 Williams’s fullest discussion of the critical theory principle can be found in Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 9.Google Scholar

23 Bernard Williams, “Toleration,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 136. For a fuller discussion of Williams’s treatment of people who won’t accept the legitimation narrative that is offered to them, see Sleat, Liberal Realism, 123–26.

24 We can see Rawls doing just this in, for example, Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 136–40.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 11. Williams refers to this in Bernard Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 77.

26 John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 482. See also John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14. It seems that when Rawls denies that his theory of justice is “applied moral philosophy,” he understands the latter as involving the application of a “comprehensive doctrine” such as utilitarianism to political questions. So for Rawls, “moral” sometimes means “comprehensive” and at other times simply means “normative.”

27 See Williams’s review of Political Liberalism: Bernard Williams, “A Fair State,” London Review of Books 19, no. 9 (1993): 7–8. Williams’s residual complaint against the later Rawls seems to be that his theory of social justice is not backed up by a sufficiently realistic sociology, and in particular that it fails to recognize how dependent it is on the peculiarities of American historical experience.

28 Rawls says that “the problem of stability is fundamental to political philosophy” (Political Liberalism, xvii). The more usual charge against him is that he is excessively preoccupied with this problem in a way that distorts his account of justice — this charge coming from philosophers like Barry and Cohen to whom the charge of “political moralism” might be more readily applied. See, for example, Barry, Brian, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics 105 (1995): 874–915;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cohen, G. A., Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 327–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 See the empirical evidence surveyed in George Klosko, Democratic Procedures and Liberal Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The implications for the Rawlsian theory of justice are discussed in chapter 7. For the different versions of reflective equilibrium canvassed by Rawls, see Rawls, Justice as Fairness, section 10.

30 Shklar, Judith, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Rosenblum, Nancy, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

31 Bernard Williams, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed.

32 Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” 7.

33 There is a question here about whether the difference principle, especially in its “strict” form — social and economic inequalities are to be permitted only if they serve to raise the position of the worst-off group — can be justified in the way I am suggesting. One might envisage a member of the elite asking why she should not be allowed to benefit further if this had no effect on the prospects of the worst off, or more generally why it was not enough to provide everyone with a fairly generous “floor” in the form of a level of income and access to other resources that was guaranteed to everyone.

34 Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” 473. Rawls’s concern is that this form of justification would deliver only a modus vivendi version of liberalism that would shift its shape as the balance of power between different classes altered.

35 This poses a problem for political philosophy that aspires to be “realistic,” as Runciman has noted: “The risk is that realistic political philosophy gets caught between two stools: it looks rather abstract by the standards of non-philosophical accounts of legitimacy, but it looks rather thin by the standards of ideal political philosophy” (David Runciman, “What is Realistic Political Philosophy?” Metaphilosophy 43 [2012], 67).

36 A criticism leveled by Jeremy Waldron is that Rawls-influenced political theory has been excessively preoccupied with the ends or goals of political life, while neglecting normative questions about the political institutions that are supposed to deliver these goals. See Jeremy Waldron, “Political Political Theory: An inaugural lecture,” Journal of Political Philosophy 21 (2013): 1–23.

37 An individual person can of course be “a representative” (if she has been elected) and she can also be “representative” of someone of her age and gender, say, but these are descriptive uses of the term, whereas when we describe parliamentary institutions as “representative” (or complain that they are not), this is a form of commendation.

38 Rawls believed this all along — see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), sec. 2 — though the description of social justice as a specifically political value comes later — see, for example John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” in Rawls, Collected Papers, or Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus.”

39 See Bernard Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed.

40 One can make this point while remaining agnostic about the extent to which states need to rely on coercion, as opposed to voluntary compliance, to achieve their ends. The relevant points are the magnitude of the state’s impact on the lives of the people it governs, and the fact that there is usually no realistic alternative to experiencing this impact. Christopher Morris has suggested that it is authority rather than coercion that chiefly characterizes the modern state: see Christopher Morris, “State Coercion and Force,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29 (2012): 28–49.

41 Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, 191. On the shaping of philosophy by its historical context, see also Larmore, “What is Political Philosophy?”

42 Ibid., 194.

43 This may need to be modified to deal with phenomena such as “international politics,” “revolutionary politics,” and so on, where the surrounding framework is less clear-cut than in domestic politics, but even here I would want to insist on a distinction between, say, revolutionary politics and revolutionary violence.

44 To say nothing of more general questions of feasibility: to raise this question is to invoke realism of a different kind — see the valuable distinction between “detachment” and “displacement” versions of realism in Baderin, “Two Forms of Realism in Political Theory.” I have argued for the importance of applying feasibility constraints in political philosophy in David Miller, “Political Philosophy for Earthlings,” and Miller, “A Tale of Two Cities,” both in Miller, Justice for Earthlings.

45 I am thinking, for example of liberal arguments for open immigration that fail to ask the question whether a society that is willing to take in all-comers regardless of numbers or of the cultural affiliations and political beliefs of those who enter can sustain its liberal institutions over time; or liberal arguments for “open education,” in the sense of education that aims solely to develop students’ critical faculties without implanting liberal values, or national loyalties, or other ways of creating commitment to the political system on their part. On the latter, see MacMullen, Ian, Civics Beyond Critics: Character Education in a Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar