Digressions&Impressions

On Charles Larmore and the Legitimacy of Political Order in Political Realism

It is important to recognize that legitimacy, though not the same as authority, still depends on it. Since the overall relation between the two concepts is somewhat complex, let me review again. The state must seek to justify its rule if it is to achieve the authority, the acceptance of the right to institute binding rules on society, that is necessary if order and social cooperation are to be possible to any significant extent. For that reason, it must address its claim of legitimacy only to those within its territory whom it considers to be full-fledged members of society, for it is their allegiance alone that it seeks. From others (e.g., resident or visiting aliens) it demands merely submission.--Charles Larmore (2020) What is Political Philosophy? Princeton UP: 98.

l had not seen or spoken to Charles Larmore, one of my wonderful supervisors, for more than a decade when a visit to Brown brought us together a few years ago. Since I had not read his (2013) article, I was surprised by the direction of his thought (because unaware by his engagement with the revival of political realism in the reception of the (recall) posthumous works of Bernard Williams). Since I had then just taught Enzo Rossi's pro-seminar to the graduate students (Rossi is one of the contemporary leaders of this new type of political realism), and working with Paul Raekstad (another colleague and himself developing a version of political realism) on a paper, I was by accident fully immersed in the political realism literature ((recall here; here; here). I was also surprised by Larmore's resigned pessimism about the future of liberalism.

The engagement with political realism and the resigned pessimism are on display in What is Political Philosophy? A lucid and focused work that is simultaneously metaphilosophy and political philosophy. Larmore agrees with the political realists that the question of legitimacy is constitutive of political philosophy and helps distinguish it from moral philosophy (e.g., p. 5). He also claims it has priority over other questions in the field. In addition, in virtue of addressing the question of legitimacy, "political liberalism," and here Larmore also speaks for, and (simultaneously) corrects, Rawls, undertakes "a refoundation of the liberal tradition." (151)

Larmore's political realism responds to, and simultaneously accepts, reasonable disagreement as a feature of modernity. That is to say, and Larmore is explicit about this, he treats liberalism as a latecomer in the history of political theory (16; 123; 169). In addition, this entails that Larmore explicitly accepts Carl Schmitt's "important truth" that "every principle of political inclusion" is "also a principle of exclusion," (166-7) that is, consensus on the content of legitimacy is impossible.

At this point, one may well wonder what is so liberal about Larmore's political liberalism since it gives up on liberalism's universalism and the thought that each individual counts. (Recall that Schmitt's claim presupposes the existence of collectivities.) For, in Larmore's hands, while the principle of justification of legitimacy -- a "principle of respect" for persons -- is supposed to be moral in character, it is addressed to those who are or taken to be "citizens" or would be citizens and their "reasonable agreement," (77; see also 158-162).* Larmore is admirably frank about the (possible) exclusionary implications of this in some contexts (102-3/ 116).

Now, as an aside I consider the question of legitimacy, while important, a dead-end for the revival of the liberal tradition. You may ask why; short answer: liberals should stop focusing on justifying the state's coercion of people, and rather focus on articulating theoretically salient, emancipatory solutions to concrete problems individuals face in contemporary (political) life in light of an ambitious theoretical vision and, thereby, help re-invent the tradition. 

Be that as it may, here I focus on what is, for lack of a better phrase, a mistake of articulation. For,, in the quoted passage above (and other places in his argument), Larmore conflates the nature and needs of political philosophy with the nature and needs of political life. For, let's grant, for the sake of argument, that Larmore is right about the centrality of legitimacy to political philosophy. And let's also grant him that "political rule" is the "solution" to the "need for cooperation and the basic human tendencies that render it difficult if not impossible." (82) This need and difficulty "form...the circumstances of politics." (82;** his "impossible" conveys a sense of Larmore's pessimism.) If true, it also gives a heroically, tragic quality to political life.

For, Larmore assumes without argument that authority and legitimacy presuppose an articulated attempt at justification. His reason  for this presupposition is that Larmore wants to distinguish (again, let's stipulate), correctly, between mere (psychological) acceptance of a state's legitimacy by its citizens and the fact of legitimacy. And the fact of legitimacy must, according to Larmore be ground in some moral principle. He thinks a failure to do so muddles Williams' argument (and confuses Max Weber's readers). So, in what follows my objection is not to Larmore's attempt to ground the authority of political power in moral principles of some sort. 

There are really two mistakes here: (i) Larmore assumes that a state can only be legitimate if it offers some kind of legitimation story, what Larmore (repeatedly) calls "a justification," (e.g., 105; 97, etc)  for its authority; (ii) Larmore assumes that such authority is de facto required if the circumstance of politics are to be solved (" if order and social cooperation are to be possible to any significant extent.") While the first claim (i) can be interpreted as a conceptual claim, the second claim (ii) is a claim in political sociology or psychology. It is notable that Larmore offers no evidence for (ii). Machiavelli, who knew something about the circumstance of politics (in Larmore's sense), would deny (ii). For Machiavelli authority is maintained if "property nor...honor" of citizens "is touched."

Now in treating (i-ii) as mistakes I do not wish to deny that legitimations are recurring features of political societies. But to establish the legitimacy of a state (from a liberal perspective), the question is not what they say, but what they do (do the oppress, silence, terrorize, etc.). That is, what matters for liberal legitimacy -- say from the perspective of liberalism of fear -- is how people are treated, and can be expected to be treated, over time. It is odd that Larmore does not note this because as he says, the "guiding conviction of liberal thinking" really is "with how we should treat others." (12)

Now Larmore may response that since legitimacy involve the justified imposition of "enforceable rules" (e.g. 5)-- and enforceable rules must be articulated -- what is said is essential. The reason why Larmore would claims something like this is that he considers only two possible options to tackle the problems generated by the circumstance of politics: (a) reliance on "moral convictions." (39) This he (correctly) rejects because, as Mozi has taught before him, moral disagreement is (also) the predictable effect of the use of our reason. And if all people were systematically capable of acting from moral conviction no state would be needed among them. And (b) "the binding authority of laws, arrived at by legally established procedures." (39) Since he endorses (b) it means that for Larmore authority, and the legitimacy it helps generate, is essentially juridical in character (even if it is, in turn, secured by appeal to moral principle).  And this is why Larmore slips, without commenting on it, between conceiving authority in terms of binding rules and in terms of binding laws. Once one thinks of authority as juridical in character, it might seems self-evident that justification of their authority has to be verbal.

Now, liberalism does have a fundamental commitment to the rule of law. And its absence is indeed a way in which a state may be (partially) illegitimate. (Larmore nicely argues that legitimacy comes in degrees.) But it does not follow that the justification for the rule of law is required for its authority. That is while liberalism is self-consciously philosophical in character (this is partially a feature of its lateness), it does not require the state to be philosophical in this way for it to have authority and be legitimate.

As Hume teaches, for rules to function as rules they do not require or originate in justification (even if they can be justified post facto). All effective authority may require is the coordination and stimulation of the right sort of rules long before they give rise to 'legally established procedures' or generate skilled citizens to justify them. Of course, once authority presents itself as principled, the principles appealed to can be evaluated and judged "by the moral assumptions on which they rest." (49) But Philosophy even political philosophy is a true human need, but it is not required for (liberal) authority. 

 

 

On Counter Cyclical Political Theory, Bernard Williams, and the Liberalism of Fear

The liberalism of fear has historically been taken to have such [empowered] listeners. But when it is so taken, it naturally attracts the traditional criticisms, because what it can be taken to enjoin is the extreme limitation of state power, the message that indeed it has traditionally conveyed. And that will not do for us, now, because it is not state power that we have most to fear. And when we ask what it has to tell legislators who are in that situation, it is less than clear what it has to add. [p. 59]

It asks, too, how secure what has been secured is. It is disposed not to be too sanguine about that, particularly since it remembers to look beyond national boundaries. It is conscious that nothing is safe, that the task is never-ending. This part of its being, as Judith Shklar said, is resolutely nonutopian. But that does not mean that it is simply the politics of pessimism which has not collapsed into the politics of cynicism. In the words that Shklar quoted from Emerson, it is very importantly the party of memory. But it can be, in good times, the politics of hope as well.---Bernard Williams, "The Liberalism of Fear," in In the Beginning was The Deed (2005), edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn, [p.61]. [HT Nakul Krishna in The Point]

Posthumously, Bernard Williams (1929 – 2003) has become increasingly remembered as a political philosopher. In part, this is so because various scholars (primarily working in Britain and the European mainland and) influenced by Geuss' version of political realism (their term) have found it convenient to treat Williams as one of their main sources of inspiration. If somebody had told me this around 2003, I would have been genuinely surprised. I think I would not have been alone in thinking that Williams was primarily a moral philosopher in the broadest possible sense of that word (and perhaps anti-moral philosopher) who, of course,  had genuinely political interests and had served the public in politically salient matters. Williams the political philosopher is a construction, a very successful construction I hasten to add, by a very astute selection of his writings (by Geoffrey Hawthorn and Patricia Williams). So, while I am about to be critical, the underlying affect is gratitude. 

"The Liberalism of Fear" is a lecture delivered at, it seems, Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1994 as the fourth Isaiah Berlin Lecture (see here). Berlin was still alive, and presumably in the audience. One subtext, even framing-device, of lecture is, in fact, Berlin's own status as a political philosopher in the context of the sociology of philosophy (of the 1930s and 40s) in which to situate Berlin's career. Williams leaves no doubt that Berlin is a political philosopher (recall this post!), but he notes, astutely, that "Berlin...led people to agree with him that he got of out of philosophy" and so that he was a political philosopher was "concealed."  (53)* I will return to Williams' sociology before long. But it is clear we, the readers of the essay (and perhaps some in its initial audience), are meant to understand that Williams, too, was in a certain sense a concealed political philosopher visible to the astute eye (Berlin). 

Joking aside, the point of the passage about the work concealing the political philosopher in the text is to assert that political philosophy has a tight connection with history and that, in fact, its true intelligibility -- Collingwood is in the air -- requires "historical commitments," a "sense of the past," and "strongly developed historical memory." (54-55) A more important point is, by an act of legislative fiat, to inscribe Shklar's "the liberalism of fear" into political philosophy (recall my posts which I presuppose here, and here). I am grateful for Williams' act. 

Even so, I fear Williams misunderstands a key point of Shklar's project and, in so doing, his own historical moment. The mistake can be revealed when we re-read this sentence: "that will not do for us, now, because it is not state power that we have most to fear." The problem is not here Williams' attempt to respond to the critic of Shklar who sees in the liberalism of fear only a minimalist, mitigating program. That a response to such a critic is required is easy to feel (I have felt this myself). The problem is also not, primarily, Williams' use of the pluralis maiestatis. But Williams' royal 'we' is manifestly not the we of the powerless and vulnerable, who even in 1994 have plenty to fear from the state,+ even the liberal nation-state. (For a more thoroughgoing analysis of the problematic features of Williams's stance in several of his essays, see Kate Manne's excellent essay here.) In 1994 police brutality, unjust convictions, unfair convictions, improperly rejected asylum requests, and -- as Williams notes -- torture all existed.

More subtly, and here I follow Williams' surprising parochialism by focusing on the US, the accumulation of executive power in the office of the American's president has, despite a post-Nixon lull, continued apace. The main insight that the liberalism of fear accepts from the Republican tradition (I learned it from Sophie de Grouchy), is that latent despotic power, is to be feared greatly. It is galling that critics of President Trump only wake up to this fact, when it is too late.** 

Of course, it is quite possible that despite many known evils, Stateside, 1994 was one of the better times to be alive in the history of the world. But, and here's my disagreement with Williams, the liberalism of fear is most needed in (self-proclaimed) "good times;" these are not the main periods when "hope" is required; what's needed is to guard against hubris, to shine a light on the hidden corners that our self-satisfied propaganda misses, etc. And, by contrast, in bad times we don't need the liberalism of fear. Then its message is self-evidently true,++ but we do need a source of hope that can organize our collective longings; this it cannot provide. That is to say, "the liberalism of fear" is a durable, counter-cyclical political philosophy.***

 

 

On Shame and Masculinity; on Earthsea (IV) and SCUM Manifesto

All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it.  Ursula Le Guin, Tehanu, Eartsea Book IV, 

I have been meaning to write about the role of shame and masculinity, which I sensed is an important theme in Tehanu. After the Archmage Ged loses his powers, he  escapes from being encountered in his weakness by people who previously knew his great power (up close), and chooses a humble life of anonymity herding goats (going by [and back to] the name, Hawk [recall this post on the significance of this]). This perspective is expressed by Tenar, who (like me) does not understand his shame (which she understands as a humiliation).* After all, neither the loss of status (he was an Archmage) nor the loss powers (which he loses in a great act which is also an act of great virtue) seem to be the right cause to feel shame. 

I do not mean to deny that shame is intrinsically connected, as Bernard Williams notes, of being seen (nakedly) by the  wrong people in the wrong condition. This presupposes an acknowledgment of the significance (of the judgment) of another or (the aptness of) a norm/value.** But since Ged's actions would be/are approved (by a worthy judge, Tenar) the situation was puzzling. It's  possible, of course, that Ged shares in the sexism of his society and so does not treat Tenar as a worthy judge. There are sufficient hints that this may explain the whole issue; sexism is a problem in the patriarchies of Earthsea, the mages/experts and many of the women in it are not excepted in this judgment.

But as the wording of the quoted passage suggests, shame precedes great acts. In fact, the passage suggests that shame contributes materially to the greatness. This means that shame cannot be a consequence of his fall even if his fall may be part of the conditions that make his (pre-existing) shame visible to others. 

In SCUM manifesto [recall yesterday's post], Valerie Solanis makes pretty much the same claim (while denying greatness to any male product): according to her men are ashamed of their animality and produce a whole number of cultural salient practices that are meant to displace and cover this shame including f om men themselves. In the manifesto, Solanis has a tendency to pair and conflate shame, guilt, contempt, and disgust, so I don't want to treat her claims with more precision than she manifests. Even so, in Earthsea, the Mage acquires the greatest worldly expertise by foregoing his animal/sexual nature. The ability to name truly (theoretical wisdom) and at the right moment  (practical wisdom) is not just a product of natural talents and great training/cultivation of them, but also a displacement of one's sexual nature such that self-mastery is second nature. How shame is the driving cause of these effects remains unclear.

Earthsea shows how fragile this edifice can be. And by re-imagining Plato's Aristophanic comic myth of the splitting of our natures (in terms of a human/dragon composite--and women as bearers of the dragon element), it strongly implies -- shades of original sin, Augustine, etc. -- there is a structural deformation of human nature that our self-mastery hides from ourselves most of the time.*

As a an aside, it is no surprise, then, that the only Mage,  Ogion, who is receptive to seeing this, qua Mage, is the one who refuses to his powers in worldly matters and for whom worldly acknowledgment is so indifferent. Ogion is a way of expressing unity.

Regular readers know, I think of Ursula Le Guin as one of the wise. I won't try to convince you see is right or that this is the true path; I doubt there is a conclusive way to do so unless, perhaps, we relearn (to echo Hobbes) the art of reading ourselves. 

On Being Solitary in the Desert

There came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude, that incomparable sensation of pure aloneness never known in another circumstance. The solitary figure upon an unchanging expanse of desert is not so alone as is one list in the infinity if a crowded city. He who is alone on the desert is always aware of his own significance, however small, and his relation to the space that he can see. But one who is solitary in the midst of a teeming swarm loses awareness of himself as an individual. The hundreds of strange bodies which press against him unknowingly, the hundreds of strange eyes which look upon his face blankly without recognition, the voices which speak above, around, but never to him--in these lies true aloneness. Of these things he was dimlyt aware as he tumbled and drifted along.--John Williams (1948) Nothing but the Night

At a book-seller peddling recent remainders, I was surprised to discover, Nothing but the Night, a slim novel "by  the author of Stoner." I had been under the impression that Stoner (1965; recall), Butcher's Crossing (1960; recall),  Augustus  (1972; recall here and here), and a collection of poems exhausted his oeuvre. I admire these three books greatly (while I do not share in the euphoria about Stoner, I think I understand its popularity).

Reading Nothing but the Night comes as a great shock because while it has literary qualities it lacks the astounding control over language of the later books. In fact, the main character is unsympathetic exemplar of what we may call broken masculinity (and so anticipates John  Stoner): a self-loathing Harvard college-drop out, who is homophobic ["he had no sympathy for the sort of person Stafford was. Stafford's particular perversion constantly repelled him,"] prone to violence toward the women who are kind to him, excessively judgmental of the women his self-pitying father (a widower who travels to forget his despair) dates, but unable to defend himself against the violence other men. He has no genuine agency ["some unnameable power pushed him from one place to another, down paths he had no wish to travel, through doors he did not know and had no wish to know" & "some obscure powers controlled....their destinies'] He understands himself  -- there are deliberate echoes of Stoicism here -- as a puppet of the divine. This is a book that could be taught in a course on toxic masculinity (with a nod to a recent war whose existence is only hinted at).

That he is carrying childhood trauma and is haunted by the memory of his dead mother is revealed early and helps explain these behaviors, but does not endear. To pity somebody is not a means toward sympathetic identification or admiration (if anything, as critics of Christianity -- one thinks of La Rochefoucauld and Hume -- noted, it is a means to feel superior.)*

Loneliness is the great theme of Nothing but the Night. The quoted passage expresses an important truth, not the least  the significance of recognition. But it also allows me to explain why I found the books so hard to read; the implied narrator reveals (ahh) his superiority to the protagonist. I find that grating (as well that use of 'incomparable,' 'pure'--later Williams is more taut and more effective).  Even so, there is a more important point lurking here.

By revealing his perspective the narrator reminds the reader, without having to mark it explicitly, that there is another kind of solitariness--that of the reader. Reading is a form of thinking prompted by another's train of words. One is alone in the company of an author, who (to partially quote another line of the work) reveals his/her ideas 'to him sentence by sentence.' When a book succeeds in grabbing one's attention, one's solitariness may well be  forgotten or one is seduced into a silent dialogue with a book's character(s)'s or point of view. But when a book grates, one is like a disappointed lover alone in one's frustration, awkwardly aware of the imperfect desires of a needy self.

 

On Realism and Modernity/Progress

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.

 

On Realist Political Theory, Immanent Critique, and Systematicity

Second, realists deny that we need such a regulative idea to guide us here and now: just because we cannot have certainty about what perfection demands, it does not follow that we cannot pick out injustices that ought to be remedied (Sen, 2010). There is no reason to believe that such an anti-theoretical approach must engender a worrying complacency towards the status quo (contra Nussbaum, 2000). If we recall that our ways of life and our ethical and political concepts have a history, there is little temptation to assume that our political world ‘is a satisfactorily functioning whole’ as ‘some widely accepted parts of it may stand condemned in the light of perfectly plausible extrapolations of other parts’ (IBWD: 36–37). Working from within, we can therefore reinterpret ‘what is ethically significant, so as to give a critique of existing institutions, conceptions, prejudices and powers’ (IBWD: 37).17 Conflict between our moral sentiments is a ‘historically, socially, and probably psychologically conditioned phenomenon’ – a result of the pluralistic nature of modernity and the cultural changes that have accompanied it – and it is not a rational requirement that it be avoided (PHD: 162). Rather than attempting (unsuccessfully) to resolve such conflicts theoretically, the most useful thing philosophical reflection may do is to explain why they have a basis in various sentiments we hold dear (PHD: 164)....

We all have prevolitional or pre-reflective concerns; commitments to actual states of affairs and courses of action among actual people which will give our prescriptive political arguments their purpose. While philosophical enquiry can help us to understand them better, there is not a great deal it can do to either systematise them or justify them in the ways political moralists typically desire. If we take seriously the idea that we must make sense to those whom we speak, there is little reason to assume this activity cannot guide political action. As a result, realists ‘should not concede to abstract ethical theory its claim to provide the only intellectual surroundings for such ideas’ (ELP: 198 [quoting Bernard Williams--ES]).--Edward Hall "How to do realistic political theory (and why you might want to)" European Journal of Political Theory, Vol 16, Issue 3. [Emphases in original]

Realism in recent political theory (drawing on a long history going back to Thucydides and quite a bit of Nietzsche), a movement centered on analytic political theory as practiced in Britain, is inspired by the writings of Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss and their rejection of  Rawlsian ideal theory [although G.A. Cohen and Ronald Dworkin often make more convenient targets]. Realists dislike moralism in political theory -- and especially symbolic moralism, they often invoke the image of Kant at the Court of King Arthur -- and dislike the 'applied ethics' sensibility that permeated political philosophy for the last few generations.* A central example of this is the desire to resist treating legitimacy as reducible to questions of justice; and to see the question of political authority and order as fundamentally a political issue first. It does not follow that realists are non-normative; but they tend to prefer, when they turn to normative questions, as the quoted passage reveals, immanent critique with references to historical and social conditions that are politically salient and accessible to existing political communities. (And so reject moralizing with abstract, ideal theories relatively far removed from political life).

As regular readers will know, I share with the realist a resistance to treating political philosophy as a species of applied ethics. I also dislike the moralism of our political philosophy and also reject the assumption of full compliance because, as I once noted in a controversial piece, if people  were moral, we could do away with a lot of our liberal, democratic practices; liberalism is a set of institutional responses to human imperfection (including immorality). It should not presuppose moral behavior (even if it encourages it in various ways). 

Even so, realists have a tendency -- it's not a necessary entailment -- to dislike and reject the demand for systematic theory. They much prefer reliance of contextual judgment (because realists have a healthy and admirable suspicion of the technocratic tendency in much contemporary liberal theory). But even if one were to fully grant their criticisms of ideal theory, one need not throw out systematic theory.  One can embrace the fruitfulness of systematic theory without becoming technocratic. And that's because systematic theory has three political virtues (recall also this piece on Adam Smith and Jacob Levy):   

1. A system can allow one to risks of always acting in ad hoc fashion and, thereby, allow one to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine one's political, strategic, and (yes) moral  aims.
2. That is, some kind of system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled and, where possible, foreseen. 
3. Being guided by a system generates the possibility of consistency over time.  

Now, obviously 1-3 are connected in various ways. One underlying connection is a kind of rationality requirement that is most obvious in 2-3. And so obviously some of these virtue can also can be claimed by the technocrat or the central planner. (This is where realists come surprisingly close to Hayekians who also reject systematic theory because they worry it will become a source of social control.) But this kind of rationality is very different from the expectation that individuals or collectives are by nature or by inclination rational (which realists are rightly suspicious off) or moral.** 

For, it is worth noting (and I close here) that by being able to model these trade-offs transparently one need not have to trust the expert (and her hidden wisdom, practice, knowledge etc.) That is to say, an overarching, systematic theory can also be a way to combat reliance on local experts because it provides the constraining guidance/constraints in which they (say) optimize. 

As I said above, the rejection of systematic theory is not a necessary entailment of realist political theory. So, one may understand this post an invitation to realists to reconsider their instinctive dislike of systematic theory.

 

 

 

On Shame and Exchange (Graham Greene's The Tenth Man)

He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things  one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't possess that remained the same and welcomed him.--Graham Greene [1985] ca. 19944] The Tenth Man.

Graham Greene's The Tenth Man was a story intended for a film.* It starts out set in a prison where 30 French hostages are told that three of them will be shot in retaliation for murders in town the night before two of which ("aide-de-camp of the  military governor" and a "sergeant" -- the dead, French girl alongside them explicitly not) must be avenged:

You know what you are here for, living comfortably, on fine rations, while our men work and fight. Well, now you've got to pay the hotel bill....My orders are that one man in every ten shall be shot in this camp...Your allotment then is three. We are quite indifferent as to which three. You can choose for yourself.

What interests me here is not the question of blame (I have deleted that part). Rather it's the logic of exchange here. A German soldier's life has to be compensated by other life. But rather than finding some kind of explicit equivalence between a German soldier's life and a hostage's, the measure picked -- one in every ten -- has an air of the random about it; the lives of the hostages have no intrinsic worth, they can be reduced symbolically to a mere and fully arbitrary ratio. I won't comment here on the many ways these themes (the nature of fair exchange, the role of randomness) return in the short story.

While (earlier) the story start with the narrator's observation that prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go, the prisoners have no trouble establishing that the only fair approach is drawing lots after rejecting two decision mechanisms, first one based on age, and then, second, one based on marital status and then, third, recognizing that there will be no volunteers. After the three (and the word is significant throughout the novella) "marked" lots are picked, one of the unfortunate, Chavel (a well-to-do-lawyer), in "despair" and with "hysteria" ends up offering "everything I've  got" to exchange his place with somebody else. His offer is finally accepted by a relatively young man, Janvier. Some of the other, poorer) prisoners (including the two other unlucky ones) object, on grounds of fairness, that they cannot buy their lives, but Janvier quells the feeling. He exchanges his life for property and money, and he then immediately writes a will in which it is left for to his "mother and sister in equal shares."

As an aside, the age criterion is rejected on the authority of one of the prisoners, the mayor, without argument. (That is to say, Greene does not let the prisoners develop the incipient arguments they start to mention.) The marital status criterion is rejected because one of the prisoners foresees that splitting the hostages into a privileged class, "the ones who are left to end" who will be hated by the rest (the hostages who will run greater risks). This will undermine the civil peace among the hostages. (The novella would be a good fit not just for a normative ethics class, but also for a political theory course.) The narrator does not comment on the fact that the outcome of the favored decision procedure then gets overturned by another form of privilege.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the voluntary exchange between Janvier and Chavel is permissible, even morally permissible, and a valid contact. That is, we leave aside both complications surrounding the fact that they are hostages as well as second-thoughts that may originate in the observation that when he offers the trade, Chavel is non compos mentis overcome as he is by fear/panic induced dyspair/hysteria. Even so there is something off, not to say (ahh) polluted, about the contract. This stain is felt both by Chavel and the exchange's other beneficiaries.  Or, to be precise, Janvier's sister prevents his mother from finding out the truth. His sister makes his mother believe that Janvier has made a fortune somewhere (and is still alive). She does so clearly not only to spare her mother the worst kind of grief -- the death of one's child --, but also because her present fortune has a dishonorable source. (Janvier's sister is not grateful; she thinks her dead brother a fool.)

 What's more interesting is that Chavel understands his own act not merely as cowardly (a point repeatedly emphasized), but also -- and this is stressed throughout the novella -- as shameful. Now, sometimes the story suggests that to be cowardly is shameful. Let's accept that. But in addition, the story also suggests that the (remember) permissible trade itself is shameful, too (it's the successful offer that generates his shame).** It's this shame not his lack of money that prevents him resuming his previous life as a lawyer after the war. He is stained by fate (the lot) and his response to it. Once one recognizes this the conclusion of the plot (which has plenty of exciting twists) is fore-ordained: there will have to be compensatory atonement (which happens--Chavel pays with his life at the end).

Bernard Williams has done enough to revive the moral significance of shame; but he has done so at a cost. To simplify, he has done so by removing it from the idea of pollution (with which it is accompanied in his Greek source material) and connected it firmly to (to simplify) one's failure to live up to proper image of oneself or one's worthy norms/standards (etc.) [a point I have long thought is made very nicely in Plato's Laws]. Contemporary philosophers have little room for pollution. In her review of  Williams's Shame of Necessity, Striker may be thought to speak for many that "we may be justifiably grateful to be rid of the notion of pollution." (I got thinking about this sociological fact because of the resistance to my analysis of the role of the piacular in Adam Smith's treatment of moral luck by Keith Hankins and Roger Crisp, both excellent ethicists, who prefer to keep their distance of a pollution-ethic that makes space for a marked/stained agent and prefer the less charged idea of agent-regret when one is the involuntary, blameless cause of another person's harm (recall also this recent post).)

Now, I would not wish to deny that pollution has played -- among other harms -- an oppressive role in (biblically inspired) regulations of sex relations and reinforcing women's subordination. There is no reason to return to such a notion of purity. And I also do not deny that outlooks that embrace pollution (and purity) as a relevant moral category often generate sources of fanaticism. But that, I think, is true risk with most moral outlooks. If we rid ourselves of the notion of pollution we fail to understand not just Oedipus Tyrannus, but also some of the taints, that is, of why sometimes even morally permissible trade can be stained. And this strikes me as a useful idea to maintain given the significance of exchange in our lives.

Stoner and Augustus On Love and Freedom (and Parenting)

There is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die, and the children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of low in which you…have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.

And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surround this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power…It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.

I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, thought it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. "Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus"--John Williams Augustus: A Novel (306)

In the face of death and delirium (when one can be "more reasonable than most men"), there are, we are told, three kinds of love:

1. One consequent the pleasure of, let's say, body-coupling. (This is fleeting.)
2. One (Platonic) consequent our intellectual awareness of our lack of knowledge about our intimates—a form of unstable, self-knowledge that is revealed to be an imprisonment.
3. An enduring love that the scholar-craftsman feels for one's necessary creations, which – upon further reflection – is revealed as love of power.* 

It is no surprise that an emperor would identify his own ruling passion with a love of power; nor surprising that a novelist would have him say so. It is a bit more surprising that at the end of this novel about the art of ruling, which is simultaneously about the art of parenting, the novelist would allow his reader to entertain the thought that her immersion in the written text is a form of subjugation to the author's craft.

So, we are back in familiar terrain of the modern novel: the novelist as prosecutor of his own craft. We might say that the main defense of the novelist is that he acts from "necessity" ((305) or "destiny" (295)). While the propagandist's utility for the novel can be aimed at directly (recall), if there is genuine utility to the novel – elevating minds toward greatness (recall this post on Grunberg/Coetzee) – it is an unintentional byproduct of the love of power. (This is the secondary defense.) Williams lets us enjoy the irony that the emperor is wiser on the novel's possibility, and takes it more seriously, than his poet-propagandist (recall Maecenas here and here). But this very possibility is also destabilizing psychologically and politically; for the novel leaves no doubt about the dissatisfaction that follows from wise rule. Our excellence is revealed under duress (privation), not in prosperity.

This writer's necessity is not opposed to freedom (although there seems little room for the readers's/subjects' freedom--John Williams's sudden popularity offers a window on our limited aspirations). On the contrary, Augustus is recorded as claiming:

On Starting Out as A Fool

No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a but of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward. I was a bit luxuriant then, and fancied that a poet must play the part. There is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.-- Maecenas to Livy (John Williams Augustus: A Novel, 15-16 [emphasis in original--ES])*

I have been hesitant to post about John Williams's (1971) Augustus: A Novel because I have been eager to re-read Yourcenar's (1951) Mémoires d'Hadrien, which, I suspect, inspired Williams, first. But  impressions are fleeting and by their very nature can never complete what they aim for. So, I cut a corner here.

The novel tells an exciting story, but is a serious (sometimes too serious) exploration of the most fundamental political philosophy by way of a mixture of letters and notes/diary fragments by a number of characters. This is a clever device in a novel set in history because it allows the author to introduce relevant material that frames the action rather than engage in lengthy, explanatory asides. Chapter One (of Book 1), the thematic introduction of the book, which contains two letters and two such fragments does not let Augustus speak in his own voice. In fact the four entries give us schematic types. The four 'entries' jump around in time  and exhibit indirect form, a theme explicitly stated at the start of the book:

I am a poet, and incapable of approaching anything very directly.--Maecenas to Livy (12)

And indeed, the book is an extended meditation -- an unfolding -- on art (both in the literary sense and in the art of ruling). The novel reaches its climax with a long set-piece (a letter from a dying, nearly delirious Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus which occupies the whole of Book Three) in which the poetic art and the art of being emperor are said to spring from the same kind of love and involve analogous ordering patterns and self-deceptions. So, the novel calls attention to the oblique status of its presentations. The reader is expected to do some work.

As an aside, we are also warned** that this work of figuring out the oblique point is tricky because of human nature. For, the first chapter closes on: "death and greatness...the two words go around in my head, around and around, until they seem the same." (26) Williams never gives us the latin (Mortem et Magnitudo (allow a gymnasiast his play)), but while there are a great many deaths -- the historical, temporal start of the novel is the final part of the great age of Roman civil war -- the novel is, in fact, also an investigation of the nature of greatness, especially greatness of soul. But in these lines  we are also reminded that the mind has a capacity of conflation, of effacing difference, such that homogeneity results (we might say, there is nothing greater than God, or the universe, and it coincides with death--not a strange thought amidst war). These words ("death and greatness..." etc.) are spoken, as we learn in the novel, by a traitor. (Perhaps some readers will dimly recall this from their school days.)

One of the schematic types (or part-players), a hybrid, poet-politician/patron, (Maecenas) presents himself in the lines quoted at the top of this post, as an anti-philosophical philosopher: "No man may know himself." If true, this would imply that the philosophical life ('know thyself' etc.) is doomed to failure for everybody. If it didn't violate guild-rules on acceptable philosophical speech, it would have the form of a philosophical claim! After all, it's one thing to stake one's claim on the familiar trope that the path or search is more important than the destination; it's another thing to claim that the destination is a kind of two-level mirage (not just no possible self-knowledge, but even no access to the image of you by your intimates).

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.