Abstract
This book investigates and weighs the complaint that contemporary political philosophy is, for the most part, too abstract, ahistorical and moralist. “History” then is shorthand for another type of political philosophy, one that is concrete, contextual and realist. Following Bonnie Honig and Marc Stears in this volume, I call this alternative take on how we should be thinking (it is still philosophy after all) about politics “new realism.”
Who are the new realists? Raymond Guess, Bernard Williams, Quentin Skinner, are central figures here but also mentioned are John Dunn, Stuart Hampshire, Judith Shklar, James Tully, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The poster child for the abstract, ahistorical, moralist type of political philosophy is John Rawls with some mention of Jürgen Habermas in a supporting role and scattered references to sundry analytic types like Robert Nozick and Gerry Cohen. None of these people dead or alive contribute to the book. Rather the book is a second-order assessment of the claims made by the new realists against the old moralists. Even contributors to the book who are practitioners of new realism (here I include Andrew Sabl, Bonnie Honig, and Marc Stears) spend a great deal of time talking about the intellectual figures who have helped define this movement. But this is all good. New realism is cutting edge and it is gaining a growing number of very talented political theorists to its cause. This book offers an engaging and thought-provoking portrait of the controversy.
The first part of the collection deals with the challenge posed by contextualism and in the second section the challenge made by realism. Although the four essays in the first part (Paul Kelly, Jonathan Floyd, Bruce Haddock, Gordon Graham) are all good, the contextualism challenge as a whole is a bit murky. The problems begin in the introduction as well as the blurb where the new realists are said to challenge the “pretensions to universality,” which involve understanding “political principles as timeless prescriptions, applicable and determinate in all times and places” (p. 2). While I agree that contemporary political philosophy (and by this I mean the study of politics in philosophy departments and not political theory found mostly in politics departments) is often frustratingly abstract and ahistorical, few endorse a naive universalism of this type. With the possible exception of Straussians, the issues that divide political philosophy today are not “timeless blue print” versus “plurality of local codes” (p. 3). This, at any rate, does not capture the difference between, say, John Rawls and Quentin Skinner or Jürgen Habermas and Raymond Guess. And most of us no longer read or teach the canon as purveyor of timeless blue prints. In our postmetaphysical world, we are all contextualists of one sort or another (even champions of universalist ethics) if by contextualism we mean a rejection of the full-on view from nowhere. What is meant by contextualism is further complicated by Jonathan Floyd’s essay which tags Charles Larmore as a contextualist (which of course he is). But Larmore is also a political liberal guilty of the same abstract moralism as Rawls.
For Kelly, Haddock and Graham, contextualism is associated with the specific claims put forward by Quentin Skinner—not his methodological claim about how to read a text but his historicist epistemological claim that political ideas and ideals have very little shelf life as they are tied so closely to context and shot through with ideological biases of the times. In contrast, I associate contextualism with the work of Michael Walzer and Joseph Carens (not discussed in this volume) who raise important objections to abstract philosophy. Walzer and Carens are interested in concrete contexts of politics and what we can usefully say about them. Should we or shouldn’t we ban niqabs in this place at this time, for example. Here contextualism sets itself against the abstraction of extended hypotheticals and what might be called trolley-car-casuistry that has come to dominate some philosophy departments.
In one way or another, Kelly, Haddock and Graham all show how Skinner’s claims overreach. Kelly’s criticism is particularly trenchant despite opening his essay (and the volume) with a generous and coherent reading of the genealogy and allure of realism. In general, no clear picture of a contextualist challenge emerges from the first part despite interesting discussions about the effect of historicism on studying and doing political philosophy.
The most interesting issue touched on in this book is the accusation that contemporary political philosophy has abandoned real politics for abstract moralism. The challenge here is deep and significant. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the problem with “high liberalism” is that it cannot connect to the real world of politics. This is implied in the title of the book with the appeal to “real politics” but this is not a tenable claim. See for example Joshua Cohen’s Boston Review interview connecting Justice as Fairness to the Occupy movement if there is any doubt that Rawls’s work speaks to contemporary politics (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.6/joshua_cohen_seth_resler_john_rawls_occupy_wall_street.php). By real politics, the new realists usually do not mean actually happening politics but rather what politics really is. They complain that much of contemporary political philosophy is a branch of moral philosophy and has little or nothing to do with politics properly understood. Politics properly understood just is power, struggle, conflict, interest, competition, violence, and coercion. All this appears completely absent (displaced to use Honig’s term) in the so-called political philosophy of the day. Instead of politics, dominant moralism focuses on ideal institutions, well-ordered societies and aspirations to justice. So a new realist might say that while Joshua Cohen can easily discuss why the Occupy movement gives concrete expression to Rawls’s egalitarianism, Rawls’s philosophy does not speak to the politics here: for example, the ruthless and violent exercise of power by economic interests and the tactics one needs to use to mount even minimal resistance. The desire to bring about justice is a desire to do away with politics. This represents an important and philosophically interesting divide in contemporary political philosophy. But it is misrepresented if seen as a mere methodological divide and is trivialised if seen as a disciplinary dispute about what falls under moral philosophy versus political philosophy.
While the four essays in the first part all touch on this argument, especially Kelly’s, it is the second half of the book with essays by Iain Hampsher-Monk, Melissa Lane, Andrew Sabl, and Bonnie Honig and Marc Stears which take it up directly. Again all the essays are good but it would have been nice to include a spirited defence of neo-Kantianism somewhere in there. Hampsher-Monk’s essay invests rhetoric with the claims of realism and sets it against both the history of political thought and political philosophy. Philosophy and intellectual history can only be political to the extent that they can sway large numbers of people. For the most part these academic disciplines are unable to do this. Truth and the history of truth have nothing to say to power and it is silly arrogance to think they might. The picture is bleak and one wonders what has kept Hampsher-Monk in the business so long if what we do is so very irrelevant.
Melissa Lane has written a very sensible essay articulating a certain necessary resistance to history, here understood as the way things just happen to be, that characterises normative neo-Kantian political theory. While “is” and “ought” are not fully severed in contemporary normative thought, there is a desire not to be overly limited by “crooked timber” when conceptualizing how things ought to be. Lane acknowledges that it would be a gross misreading of Rawls and Habermas to see them as without history, but suggests that neo-Kantians can usefully appeal to history more than they do to pursue their normative agendas.
Andrew Sabl champions the Harvard school realism of Judith Shklar, Carl Friedrich and Samuel Huntington, to name only three of this large and diverse group. What defined this group was, on the one hand, the shared realist belief that “interest, conflict, and power are permanent and fundamental components of politics” (p. 151) and, on the other, a reliance on history and fact to justify political conclusions, normative suggestions and practical principles. This made their claims in principle refutable. Abstract political philosophy by contrast is not refutable as it relies on utopian projections and hypotheticals. The argument is compelling but the essay ends on a somewhat intemperate note reducing ideal theory to worthless “speculative fiction” and “fantasy.”
Honig and Stears offer a helpful comparative survey of new realists that takes seriously the charge that realism is deeply pessimistic, must be satisfied with modus vivendi solutions and offers no normative foothold from which to see a better future. Moving from Raymond Guess through Bernard Williams to James Tully and finally their own view, which they call “agonistic realism,” they build an ever more normatively robust brand of realism which “seeks to prepare subjects more fully for the often violent contestations of political life” (203).
The primary contribution of this collection is to map out and assess the impact of Guess, Skinner, and Williams on contemporary political philosophy. As Guess, Skinner and especially Williams are shaping a new generation of political theorists, this book is well worth the read. It takes notice of a real frustration with a political philosophy lost in the minutia of ideal theory. The endless debates about the difference principle in the 80s and 90s, for example, seem beside the point (or worse, akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic) in a world where inequality is alarmingly on the rise. It is time to make room for realistic, concrete, historically situated political thought in the pages of Philosophy and Public Affairs. But it is possible to be realistic, concrete and historically situated and not be a realist. The deeper divide articulated in this book is not about addressing real politics, drawing on contextualist considerations or using history. The deep controversy is between those who see politics primarily through the lens reason/principle and those who see it through the lens of power/interest. This is a very old divide that goes back at least as far as Plato versus Thucydides with Aristotle a figure claimed by both sides. The new realists are reinvigorating this tradition in interesting and worthwhile ways. I would hope that political philosophy could construct a big enough tent to contain both these traditions.