Top political philosophy books of the noughties

I would say two plausible candidates are:

Jeff McMahan, Killing in War
Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances

Two books which I really enjoyed are Liam Murphy’s Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (2000) and David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice (2006). I disagree with the overall argument of the former and with almost everything in the latter, but they’re terrific books.

Here are ten political theory/political philosophy/history of political thought books from the past ten years that stand out in my mind, and strike me as potentially having a lasting influence, either on the relevant scholarship or as foundational works or both:

Daniel A. Bell, East Meets West
G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Soveriegnty: God, State, and Self
Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire
Nancy Rosenblum, On the Side of Angels
Michael Sandel, Justice
Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality

All of these were new, stand-alone books when they were published, not collections of essays. If we wanted to include any of those, I would add Sheldon Wolin’s update of Politics and Vision, Cohen’s If You’re an Egalitarian, and probably several others.

It’s addressed to a broad audience rather than just a scholarly one, but Alan Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism is a book that I recently read and reviewed. Not flawless, but very readable and, in parts, interesting.

Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics
George Harris, Reason’s Grief
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness

I haven’t quite finished it yet, but Sen’s The Idea of Justice certainly seems to be a contender.

I’m curious what people think of Serena Olsaretti’s Liberty, Desert, and the Market? I haven’t read it, but was intrigued by the summary of her argument in David Singh Grewal’s Network Power.

I am having a bit of a hard time. Many of my initial choices turned out to actually be from the 1990s.
Here are a few shots:
Mandle. What’s Left of Liberalism? An Interpretation and Defense of Justice as Fairness (2000).

Barry. Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (2001).

Pogge. World Poverty and Human Rights (2002)

Nussbaum. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006)

Still, I agree with Chris that these will not stand up in the way that the greats of the 1970s and 1980s have.

I didn’t want to get into discussing other people’s works, but since the new Sen volume has been mentioned twice now by people who haven’t finished or even read it, let me suggest that it is in fact not that good. (I finished it a little bit ago.) I’ll soften that- for non-philosophers it’s likely to seem like an inspiring volume, and if it can help make people in development, economics, etc. think about things other than GNP or whatever it will be useful. But as a work of philosophy it’s not very good at all. Much of it is devoted to criticism of Rawls that’s based on, at best, seriously contentious readings. I’d go further and say that they are pretty gross mis-readings. That alone was very annoying. (I suspect that welfarists will also find his attacks unfair but am less able to say for sure.) Next, the positive theory is a hodge-podge of ideas that are not at all clear and do not add up to a theory of, or even really an idea of, justice. It’s also not in the least clear how they would be applied, and this is more of a flaw than one would normally think in a philosophy book as Sen makes real-world applicability one of his goals. We are left with a vague intuitionism where we are supposed to compare different states of the world (possible or actual) in pair-wise ways, but with multiple, partly incompatible, values being considered in each pair. We then pick the one that’s most just. How this is supposed to be done is left a complete mystery. The book is also over-long. Many people have mentioned the invocation of Indian history, stories, and philosophy, but as far as I could see this was all a side-show: they really added nothing and could have been just left out. One could write several interesting types of books using these examples- exploring their history, working out a full theory in light of the, and so on, but Sen doesn’t do either- they just clutter things up. Finally, every idea he’s ever had is in there, whether it moves things forward or not. The book is a sort of vague, rambling summing up of a great man’s life. If you want that it’s a fine book, but as philosophy it’s not good at all. People would be much better off spending the time reading his earlier works.

Two very recent books on political authority are among the best I’ve read in the field in the last couple of years:

Anna Stilz: Liberal Loyalty. PUP 2009

Arthur Ripstein: Force and Freedom. HUP 2009

I also loved A. John Simmons’ brief introduction “political philosophy” published at OUP last year. I think it is the first serious contender for Kymlicka’s classic “contemporary political philosophy”.

I have Ripstein’s “Force and Freedom,” and though I haven’t read it yet, I have read several of the articles that provide the source material for the book. I find it to be an excellent account of Kant’s political philosophy that, among other things, provides a compelling defense for the special moral status of the basic structure of society.

I’d also nominate Rawls’ “Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.” It isn’t “Theory,” of course, but it’s stellar as a history text.

I agree with both of Chris B’s initial recommendations, though I’d say Rescuing is the deeper, more important book. I also agree with Dan B’s two suggestions (and his opinions of them), as well as Javier’s recommendation of McMahan’s Killing in War, which is fantastic. But I’m really surprised that no one so far has mentioned what seems to me the most obvious choice: Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue (2000). OK, it’s really a collection of papers, but for me it is roughly tied (with Rescuing) for most important and likely-to-be-enduring book of the decade.

I’m going to change the subject slightly to an assessment of the past decade. If the books mentioned here – including many fine ones, I’d add – are the best political theorists have produced, the enterprise is in a sorry state. There is not a single title mentioned thus far that has staying power in the field. And I’d argue that not a single one will be noticed outside the field (Sen’s recent work perhaps will be an exception but manly because he is an economist). I’d say we face a sort of stultifying scholasticism.

I’d be interested in reactions.

Odd, indeed. Though I mainly read what I “have to” in philosophy, I have been struck by the vibrancy and diversity of political philosophy over the last ten years. By comparison, I’m sad to say, ethics–normative and meta–seems stagnant, entrenched in tired or refashioned debates carried on with increasing rigor.

I’d bet on the second Cohen (not the first), Waldron (GLE), Buchanan, Barry, Pogge, and Nussbaum all being attended to outside the field (plus, obviously, Sen and Sandel). As for staying power — well, again, the second Cohen, Buchanan, Nussbaum (Frontiers) and Waldron all have it (probably). What, from the eighties, do we still read? (That’s not the rhetorical question it seems to be, I’m curious).

Thanks Matt. Almost all of those are ones I do read, and with the exception of Raz I have in my head that they are from the 70s and 90s (MacIntyre, Shue, Simmons, Sandel, Walzer in the 70s; Okin, Larmore in the 90’s). The ones I think of as being from the 70s were, presumably, written then!

Sure Russell- I was basing my list almost entirely by what’s in my library, so can’t say it’s representative. (I have some other Taylor, but not that one.)

Chris,

I was not clear. I’d bet none have much staying power in the sense of being “essential reading” in a couple of decades. And I am pretty confident too that none will have much impact outside a narrow readership in political theory/philosophy.

Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? is a repackaged article. (I really like the repackaging, but still …) His recent argument against Rawlsi (however smart) is, to my mind, an insider’s game. The same goes for Waldron’s Locke. Unless you are concerned with the history of ideas – and of liberalism in particular – I don’t see much outside impact. It wi ll be another citation in a long list (C.B. MacPherson anyone?) but is not bound to set the world off its axis. As a set of lectures it is not meant to do so.

I am not saying that this (in either case) is not smart work. But it is not setting an agenda. And it surely is not going to have influence across disciplines or outside the academy. (Again, that is a bet or a prediction.)

Taylor’s book might be the best bet to meet the second expectation. But its heft alone will likely make it oft cited, little read.

If we combine the nineties & the ‘noughties’ there is nothing to rival: Social Choice & Individual Values; The Human Condition; A Theory of Justice; Anarchy, State & Utopia; The Theory of Communicative Action; Discipline & Punish …. indeed, I’d add Karl Marx’s Theory of History to that list!

Maybe I’m being unfair. It may simply be year-end despair at the state of the field. But as I look down the title’s people have suggested, I don’t have much enthusiasm.

Jim

Oh, and to add to my earlier list: Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory.

David,

Benhabib (and Honig, Waldron, Kymlicka), Another Cosmopolitanism

Good call. That’s an excellent essay-with-responses volume.

Chris,

with keepers of the Rawlsian flame, having seen off the communitarians…

Are the communitarians aware that they’ve been sent off? Perhaps outside of Etzioni and his crowd few people use the communitarian language which many pushed in the 80s, but if you look at the whole communitarian argument broadly, which would surely include debates over social capital, civil society, republicanism, and virtue ethics, and thus would include folks as diverse as Elshtain, Sandel, Pettit, and many others, it seems to me that the communitarian response(s) to Rawls continue quite vibrantly.

I like Chris’s comment #1, about the keepers of the Rawlsian flame enforcing orthodoxy via institutional controls (see The Journal of Rawlsian Studies, passim). I don’t see any caricature there at all.

But about “seeing off the communitarians”: one of the very bad things about 1980s political philosophy was its assumption that there are only two serious views: Rawlsian liberalism and communitarianism. But communitarianism was a mixture of independent views that don’t have to be accepted together, e.g. you can be a non-neutralist about the good in political philosophy but no kind of relativist, i.e. you don’t think that what’s good in a culture depends on culture-relative facts such as what its members believe, and you can also be entirely individualist about the good. The Rawlsians thought that by dismissing the crazy parts of the communitarian mix they were dismissing all alternatives to themselves. Not remotely true!

And I can’t believe that people are seriously suggesting Geuss’s book for this list.

Tom Hurka @43: I haven’t read Geuss’s book, but since it’s on my wish-list, would you mind elaborating a little?

I’m struck by Chris Bertram’s initial comment “Global justice has obviously been the defining topic.” Do others think that’s obviously so?

If it is so, has it been “defining” in anything like the sweeping way that justice as such was for the 70s, communitarianism and distributive justice/ ‘equality of what’ were for the 80s, and deliberative democracy and multiculturalism/ nationalism/ recognition/ etc were for the 90s?

I guess it’s been the most frequent topic in PPA; and it’s one of the few topics I can think of that’s shared by two or more of my own inchoate list of books (Buchanan’s and Miller’s). But it’s also seemed very self-contained to me, whereas those ‘defining topics’ of the 70s/ 80s/ 90s tended to draw people in– lots of people who weren’t devoting their whole intellectual projects to the subject nonetheless decided that they either wanted to bring the subject to bear on their own interests or wanted to bring their own interests to bear on the subject.

From where I sit there are two trends that I’ve noticed a lot more frequently. One is that work in democratic theory has gotten much, much better than was typically the case during the 90s boom– sometimes philosophically deeper and richer (Christiano, Estlund); often institutionally engaged at a much more serious and sophisticated level (Ober, Rehfeld, Schwartzberg, Brettschneider, Fung and collaborators, Goodin’s new book, Rosenblum, Young, etc.) And the second is the attempt to broaden post-Rawlsian liberal and democratic theories to take better account of emotions, passions, and affect, including in particular the use of rhetoric in democratic politics as a way of reaching others (Nussbaum, Garsten, Krause, Elster, the Kingston ed. volume, etc.) Without being a part of any of the three, I guess I’ve noticed interesting conversations going on in these two areas more often than I’ve noticed them in global justice.

Still thinking about my own list of books, though it’s got overlap with Chris Brooke’s, djw’s, and (to a lesser extent) Russell’s. And I’m sure it includes one that hasn’t been mentioned here: J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion.

I would also say that the communitarian text most mentioned in the thread (Taylor’s A Secular Age) struck me as an ill-focused historical ramble rather than a decent bit of argument and that Taylor’s yearnings for the enchanted consciousness of the middle ages didn’t enlighten (sorry!) all that much for me.

Fair enough, Chris; as I said (I think over on Jacob’s original Facebook entry) I think A Secular Age is a complete mess of a book, but a glorious mess, bursting with fascinating ideas. I would add, though, that I would be hard pressed to make an accounting of that book which resulted in it being labeled a “communitarian text.” Those sorts of arguments, however varied, aren’t central to its thesis (or theses) at all. If Taylor penned anything truly “communitarian” (however defined) in the last ten years, it wasn’t A Secular Age, but rather his contributions to the Bouchard-Taylor report on Quebec (which I would argue deserves to be taken seriously as a work of public political theorizing).

Jacob, give us your list!

I haven’t read (or, for that matter, heard of) any of the books published above, and so therefore feel free to recommend a book that none of you will have read or heard of.

Michael Steinberg’s The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning and the Culture of Capitalism, strikes me as being one of the genuinely great books of our era, unifying contemporary cognitive psychology, contemporary political philosophy, geography, history, and moral philosophy in a genuinely stimulating and profound manner.

David Graeber correctly states: that (this book) ‘is a groundbreaking work of ethical theory and a fascinating read. I don’t know if this book will be considered important fifty years from now. But I certainly hope so, because it deserves to be.’

http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/fictionthinkableworld.php

But it’s also seemed very self-contained to me, whereas those ‘defining topics’ of the 70s/ 80s/ 90s tended to draw people in—lots of people who weren’t devoting their whole intellectual projects to the subject nonetheless decided that they either wanted to bring the subject to bear on their own interests or wanted to bring their own interests to bear on the subject.

Jacob, I take no position on whether global justice has been the defining issue of the 00’s, but I do think that if you take a broader view of what constitutes the literature on global justice than an intra-Rawlsian debate about the the boundaries of distributive justice, it has drawn a number of people in. Not just young scholars, but notable senior scholars whose work wasn’t directly about global political theory before but have recently turned their attention to the subject include: Fraser, Nagel, Young, Habermas, Miller, Connolly, Benhabib, Singer, Derrida, Connolly, Dallmyar…

#54 Judging by your website, I think you will particularly enjoy it.

Merry Christmas!

written, even.

One book which no one has mentioned which I enjoyed is ‘the Persistence of Poverty’ by Charles Karelis.