‘Philosophy and Real Politics’: A Return to Realism
A review of ‘Philosophy and Real Politics,’ by Raymond Geuss; Princeton University Press, 2008.
For many, politics is something like ethics in action. The job of the politician, or political party or government, is to apply ethical principles for the betterment of society. But Raymond Geuss, in a slim but dense volume called Philosophy and Real Politics, takes aim at just this common-sense idea. For him, any approach to politics that dismisses or downgrades the brute realities of power, coercion and the many ambiguities of life is at best naïve, and at worst dangerous. Politics, for Raymond, is not a sphere of moral perfection, but a messy business that rests on context and relies on compromise.
The book opens with a flat rejection of the ‘ethics-first’ attitude I have sketched above. Far too many thinkers, Geuss argues, try to run society from the comfortable perch of ideal justice. He urges a return to a ‘realist’ perspective: one that starts with a concern for how power actually operates in the world. Borrowing from Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School and others, he asserts that we must analyse institutions, question ideologies, and consider historical forces before dreaming up utopias. And he hammers his point home by turning his attention to various figures who embody, in his eyes, the ethics-first approach and its failings.
Far too many thinkers, Geuss argues, try to run society from the comfortable perch of ideal justice.
First among these is John Rawls, who assumes we can deduce principles of justice without grappling with real-world complexities. Rawls proposed the following thought experiment: imagine you were to be born into a society, but not to know which society it was or what your role in it would be. How would you want that society to look? It is a question that would seem so readily to answer itself that it seems almost rhetorical. Of course, we would not want to be born into an oppressive tyranny, lest we find we are among the slaves and not the masters. But Geuss points out, rightly in my view, that the idea of making a choice ‘under the veil of ignorance’, as Rawls puts it, is pure fantasy. We, and so our choices, are shaped entirely by our particular circumstances. Rawls’s question, says Geuss, is incoherent. It assumes a level of universality and consensus that does not exist in real life. We do not reason in a vacuum. ‘The good life is not a template to be imposed but a struggle within the particularities of time and place.’
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is the basis of much social democratic or ‘progressive’ thinking. But Robert Nozick, so beloved of right-libertarians, is just as deluded, Geuss says, and for the same reasons. His Anarchy, State and Utopia begins, memorably, with the line: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’. This captures the essence of the ‘non-aggression principle’, which is a prior for much libertarian thinking; and to Westerners, it can seem almost to go without saying. But Nozick’s view of individuals is just as abstract and ahistorical as Rawls’s. Both state, rather than show: and as Geuss argues, rights are not natural or pre-political but socially constructed and contested within specific historical frameworks. Roger Scruton has argued in his Meaning of Conservatism that the English tradition of individual liberty emerged out of the relative peace brought about by English institutions over a very long time. It was not created ab nihilo, but was a by-product of social order.
Geuss warns that ideologies hide special interests and that appeals to universal principles can dignify tyranny. He foreshadows thinkers like Patrick Deneen in his critique of liberalism, whose theorists assume (or pretend) their principles are neutral when they are in fact steeped in historical and cultural conditions. We may affirm liberal principles, or democracy, or human rights; but that does not make them natural or pre-political. They are bound up in a web of conditions. In the state of nature, anthropologists and historians tell us, human societies were highly hierarchical, interdependent, governed by tradition and custom. This is not to say that this is the best shape a society should take. It is to say, rather, that many of the political values we hold to be sacrosanct are contingent, anomalous.
Geuss warns that ideologies hide special interests and that appeals to universal principles can dignify tyranny.
Clearly, Geuss is not looking to comfort us. His realism is bracing and austere. Politics, for him, is a sphere of competing interest, where ideals tend to mask self-interest or the want of control. On his view, this grim, ‘realist’ picture of politics is preferable to one that shows us utopia. Like Michael Oakeshott, he sees the quest for the perfect society as the real danger to human beings. What, then, is the alternative? Geuss feels no pressure to articulate one vividly. It can only be a historically and sociologically informed realist polity, for if there is some notion of the ‘good’ without reference to which we cannot analyse power then it must emerge from the context in question. In other words: it depends.
Philosophy and Real Politics is not a map; and indeed its central point is that as to politics, we should abandon maps and embrace experience. Ideal theories might console or charm or even thrill, but they are dangerous, for they emerge not out of the world as it is, but out of the heads of intellectuals whom, however well-meaning, risk marching us towards the abyss with their ideas. His call is for a politics rooted in the messy realities of life.
