My case for realism needing to be comparatively strongly egalitarian around here and now depends on an argument about modernity and its character whose political importance Bernard Williams stressed throughout his career, from when he first he made it in his 1962 article, “The Idea of Equality,” up until the very end of his career. The emergence of the idea that someone’s “role in society is itself in some part the product of social arrangements,” that it is not “somehow foreordained or inevitable that there should be these orders,” alters the ways that strongly hierarchical societies can be justified (2005c, 105). After the emergence of that idea, such societies can no longer be seen as satisfactory from what Williams called the “human point of view,” which is “concerned primarily with what it is for that person to live that life,” rather than, say, merely the roles and titles they occupy (103). In the absence of such an idea, a strongly hierarchical society could sustain itself “without compulsion” and retain “human understanding” between the classes into which it divided its members, since that division would be unavoidable and so not a sensible focus of resentment (104). Once such a view spreads, however, markedly unequal membership becomes a deliberate frustration of aspirations those lacking a full status could have met, had they not been denied that status. If the hierarchy is to be maintained without naked compulsion, it must be by preventing others from coming to see the necessities they have structured their lives around are nothing of the sort, and that they have been systematically deluded. This is not acceptable from the human point of view, not even to those who benefit from or favour the hierarchy. Reflecting on one’s role in society and understanding it not as divinely ordered or in some other way required makes systematic inequality unacceptable, at least from a pretty minimally moral perspective.
Williams’s references there to “a sentimental picture of the Middle Ages” make it clear that this “reflective consciousness” was something he thought his contemporaries certainly had but those who lived earlier perhaps did not (2005c, 105). Likewise, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, for example, he says that the extent of our “urge to reflective understanding of society and our activities” makes recreating the “supposedly contented hierarchical societies of the past” impossible “since measures would have to be taken to stop people raising questions that are, by now, there to be raised” (2011, 181–82). The reference to Weber and disenchantment he makes there is repeated in Realism and Moralism in Political Theory, while an obviously similar distinctively post-Enlightenment attitude toward truth is central to the political consequences of a commitment to it in Truth and Truthfulness (Williams 2002, 231; 2005a, 9; 2011, 183). The most important of those consequences here is that “the “legitimations” of hierarchical states are perceived to be mythical” (Williams 2005a, 7), and that their justification from the human point of view requires political orders to be transparent in the way that Jeremy Waldron has argued is foundational for liberalism (1987; Williams 2005a, 9). Consequently, modern political orders must be liberal to be legitimate.
For Williams at least then, a central feature of modernity is that it has destroyed the possibility of justifications of social and political order which rest on treating that order as anything but a human construction. A major consequence of this is that the demands on explanations and justifications of those orders have increased. Raising “expectations of what a state can do” by making the social order it sustains a matter of human choice generates “more demanding standards” for an acceptable answer to the first political question (2005a, 7). Hierarchies will now be the subject of resentment, and that resentment must be ad- dressed in terms those who have it can understand. Members of societies’ hopes and ambitions may now range beyond the social and political position they happen to occupy, and they can sensibly demand an explanation when that position stifles or frustrates them (2005c, 104). This explanation must address them in something like their terms, since an order beyond human understanding can no longer be taken for granted and explanations that do not make sense to them can and will be rejected. The obverse of dis- enchantment’s removal of a certain kind of explanation of hierarchy is the thinning out of the material that legitimations can draw on by increasing the range of people and perspectives to which they must be accessible. Certain hierarchies cease to be acceptable, and the barriers to justifying any political system are raised.
Obviously, there is a question about the accuracy of Williams’s account, both of modernity and of its consequences. Both the temporal and the geographical boundarises of modernity have to be drawn very tightly to capture only states whose populations will not accept them unless they are liberal....Still, it does seem true that in the North Atlantic democratic states with which Williams was familiar, from the end of World War II and so for all his adult life, a basically liberal consensus of the sort he seems to have had in mind prevailed. Political hierarchies among citizens based on race or gender have at least usually needed a surface justification in terms that are ostensibly open to all, for example. Restricting my discussion to those North Atlantic democracies, as in effect much Anglophone political theory and philosophy anyway does, it seems reasonable to accept the set of constraints Williams sees as characterizing modernity as bearing on the discussion here...Robert Jubb, "The Real Value of Equality," The Journal of Politics, 77(3):685-6.
Yesterday, I called attention to realism in recent analytic political theory, a growing movement. The movement is inspired by the writings of Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss and their rejection of Rawlsian ideal theory and moralism. Yesterday I criticized that movement's distaste for systematic theory, because it overlooks the political virtues that accompany systematic theorizing; today's post raises a different concern. Much of the writings in that tradition is methodological and so is reminiscent of the carping by (a minority strain of!) critical theorists and continental philosophers about analytic philosophy. These writings are interesting, but one sometimes gets a sense that there are not a lot of resources to develop normative positions in them (while the movement claims to be interested in immanent critique and relies on the so-called Critical Theory principle.)* Here, too, one senses a similarity with, say, the work inspired by Foucault, which also finds it very difficult -- beyond the practices of unmasking and sense-making -- to articulate a justification for its own normative orientation (a problem in a lot of 'critical X studies.')
The previous paragraph is not meant to be critical; writings can be salutary even if they don't offer us a path toward the future. Even so, Jubb's piece is distinctive because he really tries to develop a normative stance within realism. He does so by appropriating Martin O'Neill's ideas on non-intrinsic egalitarianism and then recasting these in realist terms. There is much of interest in Jubb's strategy, but here I want to offer -- oh bitter irony -- some methodological and diagnostic observations. Because Jubb brings out with great deal of clarity and forthrightness some peculiar features of realist thinking that are prevalent among those inspired by Williams and who wish to be realist and broadly liberal.
A key feature of realist thinking is that the point is not engage in far-fetched, universalistic theorizing, but to "address the political practices we claim to be concerned with" [recall Hall, p. 12] in (to use a phrase many realists repeat regularly) the "here and now." My point today is not to discuss the ways in which this may facilitate status quo bias or (potentially) adaptive preferences in this procedures. Realists are aware of this challenge. Rather, my point is that the 'here and now' is understood in ways that are, frankly ideological (or self-delusional). For they buy into a self-congratulatory Enlightenment narrative in which we (in the North Atlantic) occupy modernity and in which we are the beneficiary of a certain amount of intellectual progress such that some ideas are impossible for us to take seriously and other ideas are (to quote a famous prophet) self-evident.
There are two central political problems with this self-understanding: (i) it ends up treating religion as something of the past, as something overcome, as something superstitious, and not an enduring possibly; (ii) it is systematically incapable of confronting the savagery at the heart of modernity--so fascism, nazism, white supremacy, and (this is more controversial) various forms of fundamentalism are treated as aberrations or backsliding (into darkness, etc.). One need not think that fascism is only a modern possibility, to recognize (say by inspecting election results or watching at the news) that, say, love of domination and fondness for hierarchy are enduring human options that have not been overcome by us.
There is also a more metaphysical-political problem: (iii) even when teleology is officially rejected (in the sense of divine providence or Aristotelian or Hegelian-Marxian final causes), this narrative of modernity is soft-teleological because it thinks there is no conceptual/normative backsliding. Once you reach modernity some ideas become impossible (see (i-ii). It is also relies (iv) on a soft-historicism where distant and past cultures are sealed of from us (and we from them)--this is captured in the mocking image Kant at the Court of King Arthur (that also shows up in realist writing). But this historicism does no justice to the history of ideas. While I would be the last to deny that conceptual novelty is possible, and while I would reject a kind of eternal return of ideas in history, it is also the case that lots of ideas do recur and get contested in various cultures (even if they do not fit the Weberian ideal type of those cultures).
That is to say, there is a more subtle problem lurking here: (v) Jubb wishes to conclude "that modernity has a particular character and that this imposed certain requirements of transparency on political legitimations around here and now, at least for some values of around here and now." (690) But that characterization of us, is a form of conceptual-ideological legislation that flatters part of the audience, and whose validity and truth is simply assumed. One may well say, in the spirit of realist unmasking, that such assumptions reflect the interests of those that posit them more than historical reality.
*Williams calls the Critical Theory Principle: “the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified.” [I linked to Sleat's presentation of it.] This, too, is primarily a negative principle. (It tells us how to reject justifications.)
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