If we compare the general fortune of these thinkers of the radical Right to that of more conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, may have accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation with express commitments, is no doubt part of the reason. But it is also to do with the distance between a discourse of justice, however Olympian, and the realities of a society driven by power and profit. The quartet considered here had the political courage of their convictions. But these also went, more largely, with the grain of the social order. So although they could often appear marginal, even eccentric figures to their colleagues, their voice was heard in· the chancelleries. Schmitt counselled Papen and received Kiesinger; Straussians thronged the National Security Council under Reagan, and surround Quayle; Hayek earned formal homage from Thatcher on the floor of the Commons; and Oakeshott, under the anaesthetic Major, has entered the official breviary. Even arcane teaching can reach gentlemen. They are the heirs.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 28 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]
Once upon a time political radicals were Utilitarians. I also am going to ignore the acrobatics required to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. Rather, my interest in Anderson's comments is in his treatment of the failure of a scholarly community devoted to political philosophy to have political uptake.
Let's stipulate, with the Marxists, that the aim of political philosophy is to shape political life. Here Anderson suggests that the manner of so doing is in terms of what Machiavelli and Hobbes would call 'council' to the politicians by the students of the magister or by the magister himself in person or through his books. Anderson explains the absence of Rawls and Rawlsians in the corridors of contemporary power in virtue of the fact that a discourse of justice does not sell in a social environment devoted to power and profit. The political failure of the Rawlsian project is, then, plainly due to the demand side: successful politicians have no use for it (and lurking behind them an indifferent electorate). But he also hints at something else -- "express commitments" -- is lacking in the Rawlsian "academic industry," which seems to be engaged in cheap talk which, if I sense the drift of his remarks correctly, involves mostly servile people echoing each other, or at least sharing considerable common ground. There is striking evidence of this claim in Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. She observes that "when [in 1979] Amartya Sen gave the Tanner Lectures, he took for granted that there was no need to justify his focus on equality." (208)+
As I noted in my first two essays (recall here; here) on Forrester's booke, it's easy to exaggerate the political impotence of Rawls' political philosophy in the corridors of power. A year after Anderson wrote these lines, the then most visible public interpreter of Rawls, Norman Daniels -- who started his political career as co-chair of SDS and gave a once famous speech on the steps of University Hall April 9, 1969 -- , was asked to be a member of Hillary Clinton's healthcare taskforce in 1993.* In a nearby possible world America would have had health care provision along Rawlsian lines. (Of course, Anderson will not be impressed by such possibilities.)
One may well suspect that Anderson's Machiavellian focus on the halls of power misses an important step. Unlike, say, Locke or Bentham, it is not entirely obvious that Rawls proposed an art of government. Given the Rawlsian focus on the basic institutions of society, one may well argue that the day to day political tactics of the executive are far less important than the role of ideas in shaping fundamental institutions of society: law, education, healthcare, criminal justice, welfare, etc. So, if one is interested in establishing and diagnosing the failure of the Rawlsian project outside the academy it would be useful to study how and to what extent (or not!) Rawlsian ideas percolated through the law and welfare provisions, etc.
I do not mean to suggest that the lack of political uptake (by the political class) of Rawls during the last half century isn't striking. I have often mused about the fact that as political life seemed to be moving toward the right, political philosophy seemed to have moved leftward. And so I was thrilled that Katrina Forrester addressed the issue in a scholarly context. It's an important sub-theme throughout the book -- where it is often operationalized rather narrowly in terms of the influence of Oxford philosophers on the British Labour Party--, and is, in fact, the major theme of chapter seven, where it is introduced as follows:
Liberal philosophers underestimated how high the New Right would rise. Many did not see or did not object to the process of marketization taking place, whereby social relationships were subordinated to market logic and new aspects of life were commodified. In part this was because they were preoccupied not with the rising right, but the left. For political philosophers, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initially provided an opportunity to consider the nature of the social democratic left’s egalitarianism. The collapse of affluence during the previous decade, particularly in Britain, had looked at first like it might benefit the socialist left. “In the 1950s many of us thought that inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous,” wrote the Labour Party grandee and later founder of the Social Democratic Party Roy Jenkins in 1972. “It is now clear that this view was at best oversimplified and at worst just wrong.” Over the course of the 1970s, the Labour Party had responded by returning to ideas of industrial democracy and public ownership. In the United States, even as the traditional working- class constituency of left politics fragmented and was recomposed, and the political efforts to sustain it were abandoned, the Cold War thaw and leftward tilt of academia enabled the radicalization of philosophy, seen in the appeal of anticolonial global redistributive politics and Rawlsian engagements with socialism. With the relationship of capitalism to democracy under scrutiny following the fiscal crises, a socialist resurgence gradually became visible within political philosophy. “The apparent pause in economic growth, the crisis in stabilization policy occasioned by the current inflationary threats and realities, and the loss of purpose in redistributional measures all combine,” Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1978, “to raise anew the question of alternatives to capitalism.” By the 1980s, liberal political philosophy was being pushed to the left. Marxism was poised to enter the philosophical mainstream. Katrina Forrester In The Shadow of Justice, p. 205
Forrester echoes Anderson's point that elite political philosophers simply underestimated the more right wing thinkers amongst them. Lurking in Forrester's description is a very different kind of explanation of the irrelevance of Rawls to political power. In her account, political philosophy is sensitive to and tracking major social changes to which it responds and, one may, say offers solutions to. It just so happens, one might say, that its preferred policies are not popular among the political class (either because it is corrupted or because it senses there is no electoral gain to be had from pursuing democratic socialism). I return to this below. Furthermore, Forrester suggests that the end of the cold war, alongside a perhaps contingent leftward orientation of the academy, facilitated this leftward turn of liberal egalitarianism. I hasten to add, as Forrester notes, that in this period even the theories of analytic Marxists were "populated by individual rather than collective agents and focused on distribution and ownership rather than labor." (206)
Later in the chapter, Forrester suggests, however, that while political philosophers were tracking something, they did not really understand, or at least failed to register important changes to their own societies:
The irony of this change in focus was that it did not help philosophers identify the transformation in the state they were witnessing. Those [among liberal egalitarian philosophers] most focused on the New Right overlooked the decline of democratic control that followed from the depoliticization, privatization, and weakening of the welfare functions of the state that occurred in the 1980s. By contrast, many who maintained Rawls’s assumptions and sought to deepen liberal philosophy’s democratic procedures did not engage with the radicalization [within philosophy] of egalitarianism.(207) [Insertions added to facilitate discussion--ES]
It's a bit of shame that Forrester does not engage with Melinda Cooper's Family Values (which she cites in different context, see p. 332 n 127). I want to pick up two themes from that book (recall this post; and here). First, Cooper shows that Stateside in non-trivial respects welfare reform (which drew on libertarian and socially conservative ideas) entailed the intensification of the state's involvement with and micro-management of the lives of poor people (who are, say, exposed to invasive drug-testing requirements) not the least massively increased incarceration. These illiberal and inhumane policies were democratically enacted and hugely popular at the time (perhaps still are) not the least because of the racial undertones of such policies. (Forrester notes this, too, on p. 228.)
As an aside, I suspect Forrrester falls victim here, not uncommon among left-leaning-theorists of idealizing (true) democracy, and of being unwilling to countenance that democratic processes often produce manifestly unjust outcomes. (I call this 'democratic innocence'). It's also not obviously true that democratic control really lessened in the 80s. While the administrative state expanded with delegated powers, those powers could be and sometimes were clawed back. In the UK (in the 80s), most changes involved centralization of control, but that does not entail lessening of democratic control. A lot of British privatization created monopoly suppliers that were regulated, and while such regulation was often at arm's length of government and parliament, the absence of de facto democratic control was more due to lack of political will (and perhaps the corrupting influence of revolving doors between industry, politicians, and civil servants) than lack of political power.
Second, Cooper notes (and I am simplifying here) that by focusing on the male-gendered family wage and by ignoring the emancipatory desires of women and ethnic minorities (pertaining to work, sexuality, life style, etc.), social democratic/left-liberal parties missed out on changes in the electorate that gave the New Right part of its dynamism, and demanded from the Left new kind of reactions. And this suggests that Forrester is right to claim that the philosophers of the age did not understand their own society, but provides the wrong diagnosis of it.***
Given the demographics of professional philosophy at the time -- overwhelmingly male and white --, it is no surprise (after the fact) that political philosophers focused either arguing for egalitarian outcomes from individualist premises or doubling down on democratic procedures completely missed the boat on issues pertaining to race, ethnicity, diversity, sexuality, environmental health, etc. Many such issues were discussed in other disciplines, and these were disparaged, or when philosophers did approach them it often entailed giving up on, or delaying greatly, a career at the "elite institutions" (p. 242) that are Forrester's focus. (The career trajectories of, say, Iris Marion Young and Charles Mills are instructive.) That is to say (and now i am using Forrester's vocabulary), the internal politics of (elite) political philosophy left it in a bad epistemic position to develop the conceptual structures needed to be salient for a refashioned Left policy because, in part, its own elite demographics was out of step with social developments.+ And this meant, again quoting Forrester, that while there was conceptual room for "bottom-up challenges to the basic structure, to widen its scope and to include gender, racist, and interpersonal injustices. But there were few top-down reassessments." (237)
This second point is, thus, in the spirit of Forrester's own analysis. Her book starts, in fact, by telling us "this is the story of the triumph of a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. It is a story that includes few women, except at the margins, and fewer people of color." (xvii) So, she is highly aware of the facts I am appealing to. Recall from my earlier posts that the official main focus of Forrester's "[i] book is about the politics of political philosophy and [ii] the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi; numbers added to facilitate discussion.) Now, Forrester is careful not to suggest a causal connection between [i] and [ii]. But nothing prevents it.
Let me close with two final observation inspired by Cooper. First, Forrester correctly notes "the horizons of philosophers [of that generation] were shaped by defenses and critiques of the market, and so, like nearly everyone else, many misdiagnosed the changes they were living through." (238) It's hard not to agree here. When I started blogging about philosophy of economics, I vowed not to recycle the state vs market debates that had been suffocating twentieth century political philosophy. (It's pretty clear that states constitute markets, and that markets shape states.) But Forrester misses that it was, in part, the dynamic effects of markets (alongside education and immigration) that created the constituencies among the non-wealthy for whom the family wage was not the highest priority.
Second, it's natural to read this digression, and suspect that I think demography is destiny and always decisive. By contrast, Forrester's "like nearly everyone else" suggests that knowing one's age is generally out of reach to those in elite echo chambers. (Here she and Anderson end up close together again.) But whatever one thinks of Foucault's interventions in politics, in his theoretical work he clearly understood his own age in a way that those working at "Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford" did not. And while the sample size is incredibly small, one can't help but wonder if the very different educational trajectories and internal gate-keeping didn't (and doesn't continue) to play a role here. To be continued...
*Full disclosure, I took introduction to Bioethics with Norman a few years before.
**It's worth noting that Sen's and Nussbaum's capability approach (which is also a huge academic industry) has had some political influence, and it would make for an interest study alongside the Rawlsian study.
***Here's another example of where I agree with Forrester that influential political philosophers manifestly did not understand their own society, but where I disagree with her diagnosis:
"Writing in the aftermath of Thatcher’s first electoral victory, Dworkin argued that that election represented not an “ideological revolution”— a collapse of faith in the welfare state or a belief in “free enterprise”— but a signal of the “non- ideological” nature of the British electorate and the failure of the Labour Party to persuasively set out its core egalitarian principles. Labour, Dworkin continued, “must give up trying to deduce a vision of the fair society from its historical association with the trade unions. The basis of that association must follow from the party’s principles, not the other way around.” Like many British liberals who championed the left’s move to the center in the aftermath of Thatcher’s victory, Dworkin wanted a social democratic theory of equality that could be decoupled from its historic association with the labor movement. He, like them, underestimated the rise of the right in part because he underestimated how this decoupling of equality from collective bargaining would hasten the hollowing out of social democracy." (209)
+
I too agree with Forrester that philosophers did not understand their own society. But does anyone really understand her own society?
Perhaps the idea is that one "understands" in a practical sense when one can accomplish something in society. If so, then we need to specify which political actions we are talking about. Revolution? Rawls isn't going to help us with that!
How about civil disobedience? Rawls is not going to help us with that in a substantive way. His writings are not going to be used for nonviolence training prior to a demonstration. What Rawls does is to show how an appeal to an ideal can, at least in that particular kind of situation, be a effective part of how one acts politically in the non-ideal world.
In my opinion, Rawls's discussion of civil disobedience is the heart of "Theory." Forrester did great archival work on Rawls and civil disobedience for which I am grateful, and I eagerly read that part of her book. But I didn't learn anything about civil disobedience from it.
I also agree with Forrester, in the passage quoted by Kogelmann, that we want "an account of interest, collective action, control, class, crisis." I do my best (and fail) to understand all of that. But I would look for a history book, not a philosophy book. Adam Tooze. Or maybe sociology.
Posted by: Aaron Lercher | 02/17/2022 at 01:30 AM
Rawls was, in broad terms, providing a philosophical basis for views that were already dominant in the US political class at the time he wrote, and have remained so in the liberal section of that class. So, it's unsurprising that his impact on practical politics,
The same is true, AFAICT, of Schmitt and Heidegger. The Nazis had no need for their philosophical support, even though it was eagerly offered. It was only in democratic societies that their ideas had any impact.
Posted by: John Quiggin | 02/22/2022 at 11:12 AM