5 Questions in Political Philosophy

Although John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), as well as what many consider to be its ideological and philosophical counterpart, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), could be construed as alluding to or reflecting, or in some way speaking to or about, politics, they were distinctly contextless works written by professional philosophers which lifted the perennial debates about liberalism and the ground of values to a new level of abstraction while apparently allowing academic commentators to believe that they were actually saying something about politics.

John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, Chicago, 1993, pp. 272-3.

JE, I knew that was your comment by the sixth line. This can only mean I have been on the internets/unfogged for far too long.

I, too, am most interested in what people have to say about question 3. What did they say? (I’m sort of writing about this at the moment, so maybe I should lay hands on the book. Sadly, our library doesn’t have it.)

Q6: “Who in your view will be first against the wall when the revolution comes?”

Yeah, I know: ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’ Frankly, I don’t like this idea. Just interpret the friggin world, man, if you’re good at it; don’t mess it up. It’s a different kinda job.

Touchy, touchy, Matt. Like it or not, Gunnell is part of the field.

Emerson:

1. Why would it matter if they were “distinctly contextless”?

2. What makes you think that Rawls is “distinctly contextless” other than a bit of mere assertion by some bloke? To us outsiders, the context looks rather obvious. Rawls couldn’t have written his book other than against the background of US constitutional and legal tradition, the civil rights movement, Lincoln’s conception of the American polity etc.

It’s really no use arguing w/ Emerson on this, Chris, as I’m sure you know. He’s read a few minor works and made up his mind dispite regularly showing he doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about, either in the philosophical or the sociological sense. He trots the same garbage out time and time again. He’s sometimes amusing but on most things just a somewhat more literate troll.

Emerson at 14:

My interpretation of Gunnell’s argument is that Rawls’ and Nozick’s works had nothing much to do with any political activities or events or movements or developments taking place anywhere in the world within their lifetimes, and probably would not have much future impact either.

OK, suppose that’s true. So what? Is that a criticism? Why, if so?

Eh? It’s a criticism to you but not to me? How does that work? Do you actually have an argument here, or was Matt right and you’re just trolling?

I believe that Gunnell argues that, throughout the history of academic political theory in the US, many American political theorists have aspired to have a direct impact on contemporary politics, but that they have largely failed to do so. So, at least for Gunnell, the criticism quoted by John Emerson is part of a larger claim that American political theorists have failed in their own aspirations to have a direct impact on US politics.

vivian: “did they mostly cop out and say the neglected questions were the ones they each just happened to be working on?”

From Philip Pettit’s response to Q5: “I hope it won’t appear to be self-serving if I say that from my own perspective the most pressing problems arrange themselves around the topics of my current concern.”

At least he’s self-aware.

The dig at Bahro was unfair — I agree its interesting, like lots in those old SRs I just hated the title! (and the concept).

Can’t answer the other questions right now – suffice to say, though, that I would have refused to answer the second question, having not really made a contribution… (yet??).

Emerson at 22:

It means that I think that works about politics should have some relevance to actual politics, whereas you think that that kind of criticism can be waved away.

No, I don’t: try responding to what’s actually said to you. What I asked you was to explain why you think that being abstract is a problem. Then, when you changed your criticism to lack of ‘relevance to actual politics’ (which is not the same thing) I wondered, again, why you think that’s a problem. Why is that particular kind of ‘relevance’ the criterion for a successful work about politics? In other words, I asked you to give reasons for your claims, so we could discuss them, precisely because I don’t think they can be waved away. If I thought that, I wouldn’t have bothered commenting. I don’t at the moment agree with you, but I’m open to argument if you can offer any.

Instead of offering reasons, you’ve responded by shifting the goalposts, trying to brazen out the fact that you don’t know the subject you’re pontificating about, talking rubbish (‘it’s a criticism for me’ is not a defence of a criticism), and making laboured ironic remarks. The usual Emerson tango, in fact.

Looks like an interesting and entertaining book to read – perhaps for the darkest days next Winter – thanks Harry (or should I say Adam?) for drawing our attention to this.

Several of the interviewees have some sort of direct experience of politics, and it seems as if all of them have found that the level of precision needed at policymaking level is much less than the level needed in philosophy.

My experience with doing PT-work for policy makers is that it needs to be simple, since they have little time (or interest) to spend on figuring out the details; sometimes they simply do not understand (though they believe they do understand) since they are not trained or used to read this kind of scholarly work; and very often they think that the added cost of this level of detail is not worth the difference it makes at the level of policy evaluation, design and implementation.

Do other readers have similar experiences?

I share the abstraction problem I think Emerson refers to with e.g. Rawls and Nozick, as well as others. But it is not these thinkers are not “relevant” to politics. I’m not sure what “relevant” means here…certainly one can derive policy prescriptions from a Rawlsian or Nozickian framwork that are very different than current policies. Perhaps that makes them “relevant”, I don’t know.

My problem is that they abstract away from politics. I read them as attempting to demonstrate something in moral philosophy and then say that these results should be politically binding. But that’s wishing away politics and just replacing it with moral philosophy. Just because the morality is a morality of social arrangements doesn’t make it political. Politics is about the institutional frameworks used to translate the desires of different constituencies into policies. People make moral arguments to try to convince constituencies of what their policy desires should be, but that’s only one type of political rhetoric and one type of political action among many. I’d like to see political philosophy be about politics, not just the morality of policy preferences.

Of course, there is definitely political philosophy about politics out there, likely a lot more than I’m aware of (not being a political philosopher myself), but from my casual knowledge there’s less of it than I’d like to see. And at least some of the politically focused political philosophy also seems to be based on strangely unexamined assumptions about the virtures of political participation and the nature of dialogue, but that’s another story.

I’m definitely not an expert on political philosophy (aside from Rawls and Nozick I’ve read very little), but can’t it be argued that Rawls and Nozick have both influenced “real” politics? Nozick, as already cited, in the libertarian movement and Rawls’ work has made the rounds as a justification for the welfare state.

Or is the argument that since politicians and their campaigns don’t directly cite political philosophers that their work is not of value? That would seem to be as much a problem of the electorate as anything else. The average American voter isn’t interested in well-thought out philosophical discourse on social problems, just like they aren’t interested in facts and statistics.

To me, this doesn’t suggest that we shouldn’t think deeply and clearly about problems of politics, or that there aren’t useful and practical insights in abstract work. It just suggests that, unfortunately, the audience that pays attention to these arguments is relatively small, and that they aren’t making any effort to apply theory to practice.

But I’m completely unfamiliar with the debate and the literature, so I could be completely missing the real issues here.

Rawls has certainly had a quiet, long-term influence on actual politics; one small marker of this is that his former student Onora O’Neill is now in the UK house of lords.

But political influence is yet another proposed measure of success for political philosophy, along with lack of abstraction and political relevance, and I’m still not clear why any of them should be accepted. Of course, political philosophy that isn’t about politics has gone wrong (or turned into something else). But ‘politics’ is an essentially contested term. To say that Rawls fails because he doesn’t write in the same style as, say, George Orwell, is about as sensible as saying that Freud failed because he didn’t measure skulls.

In passing: MQ makes a good point about doing moral philosophy and then applying the results to politics. It’s the point which motivates Rawls’s later work.

I did a bit of political philosophy – study and teaching – and one of the reasons I said to myself I left (though it was probably more the combination of cheap expensive tastes and the lack of a private income) was a growing feeling that while the tone of our debates seemed to imply that there was a set of people (policy makers?) just off the page or outside the room ready to take the conclusions and do something with them, it seemed to me even then that the content of the debates didn’t warrant that. After a short spell doing something very different I have spent the last four years in politics and policy; and after seeing it from the other side, my view hasn’t changed. I think mq’s comments in 32 are perhaps a bit charitable to policy wonks but they aren’t too far off the mark. There are plenty of us (not all) who are perfectly capable of engaging with detail generally and this kind of detail in particular – and I would include my colleagues who aren’t ‘trained’, pace the post at 29, which jarred a bit. Some of the best philosophers weren’t ‘trained’ – indeed I thought this was something philosophy as a discipline was meant to be proud of.

I completely respect the view that political philosophers should not be trying to influence policy or politics directly; that the best of them are likely to do so indirectly and over time. But if you do want to have a direct influence, a bit of empathy, constructive engagement, flexibility and persistence are essential.

I think that’s right about Galston (and that the recommended approach is the right one). But there’s a reason why Galston is a rare bird — which has to do not with the nature of the practice of political philosophy, but a combination of the unfortunate incentives in academia and the rarity of the combination of personal characteristics Galston seems to have. Its very hard to be an expert in one thing and simultaneously enough of an expert in other things to be taken seriously and patient enough to see why other people aren’t interested in everything that you are interested in. (I say that, as someone who aspires to this, but for whom it is perhaps even more difficult than for Galston because, as he says in his interview, he’s really not that interested in the most arcane aspects of political philosophy — I am, even though I realise that policymakers have no reason to be).