Abstract
When writing a work reminding ideal political theorists of the “realities” of politics and the way the imperatives of political action reshape political ideals, there is always the danger of banality, of telling us what we already know about political necessity—the necessity to use power in the sense of getting others to submit to your programs or policy against their will; the necessity to gain the acquiescence of subjects and citizens in order to exercise political rule; the need to use force and deception as well as legal means for successfully exercising power and political rule; the need to acknowledge the often ironic relation between political choices and their consequences both for good and for ill; the need to acknowledge the role of chance in political success or failure; the impossibility of avoiding conflict between the few and the many and between factions and parties; and the difficulty of rendering political reforms plausible to citizens who have not yet experienced them. The problem is one of saying something significant, something fresh, something insightful, about how these necessities work together and how we should evaluate political commitments in light of how we understand them to work together. The challenge this poses for “realist” political theory, I would suggest, is twofold. First, it must navigate between reducing stable political forms to unstable situation-bound political advice and demonstrating how political action in contingent situations may harden into stable political rule. Second a political theory of “real” politics must draw from this back and forth movement some set of stable standards to evaluate political conduct. A sign of how difficult it is to successfully engage in such theorizing can be seen in the fact that there are so few works of this kind that we read with regularity within canonical and contemporary political theory. In canonical political theory, the works of Machiavelli and Weber represent the two poles of this approach. In contemporary political theory, Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, and at times Hannah Arendt are perhaps the main figures navigating between these two idioms of realist political theorizing. As said, this kind of political thinking is hard to pull off. Nonetheless, a number of political theorists under the name of a new “political realism” have more recently taken up this challenge. For almost all political theorists of this type, their inquiries start from a more academic starting point than a political one: namely, whether ideal political theory rooted in analytical moral philosophy can meet the test of “political reality.” Their answer is it cannot, though they often disagree over precisely how expansive our understanding of political reality should be, and the degree to which evaluation of political action should be derived exclusively from the demands of politics itself.
Mark Philp in Political Conduct is part of this trend. His specific contribution to this discussion is centered on evaluating political action as a form of “conduct,” much in the way that we speak of someone’s conduct as being worthy of praise or blame or as shaped by a particular context or set of norms. His book is full of insights about the way politics shapes political conduct and provides a strong argument for why the evaluations of “conduct” in politics should be derived from the internal demands of politics itself. The book tends toward a more Weberian-than Machiavelli-inspired political realism—though Machiavelli is indeed discussed at some length. Thus, but for a brilliant discussion of protest and resistance, the evaluation of conduct within orderly political rule tends to be favored over conduct in opposition to it. This said, the book is remarkably ambitious, casting its net widely over the full range of ways we conceive of and judge the conduct of political actors from the meaning of political virtue, political corruption, political loyalty, and the differential demands on the conduct of citizens, politicians, and administrators to the integrity of political institutions. Despite the book’s great range, it contains a great deal of penetrating argument and much to argue with as well.
Philp initially frames his account of political conduct—its setting, demands, and norms—with an interpretation of Machiavelli, or more accurately multiple interpretations of Machiavelli. In the first chapter, he seeks to correct Machiavelli’s account of how Caesar was an enemy of republican liberty and the source of corruption of the Roman republic by demonstrating that Caesar initially seized power as a proponent of republican values moved by a typical Roman desire for glory and the protection of his dignitas, but these values were transformed by circumstances beyond his control, and he emerged by accident as a dictator. For Philp, Caesar simply had to adapt to the political corruption that was already there; he did not create it. Philp renders Caesar’s dilemma paradigmatic of the situations political actors face in emergencies and in conditions of decay where the desire for political glory and honor driven by a distinctly political virtù require a sudden shift beyond what republican virtù might dictate. This “correction” of Machiavelli oddly overlooks the fact that Machiavelli has no interest in whether Caesar was acting out of accepted notions of high character but only the results he produced, and therefore he stylizes his account of Caesar to teach a prudential lesson to the people of a future republic: his lesson simply is that when the people rather than merely resisting the policies of the few seek to liberate themselves once and for all from domination and become the rulers themselves, they create the condition for a future tyrant like Caesar to seize power by playing the many off against the few. Caesar’s dignitas is irrelevant here. Philp’s subsequent accounts of Machiavelli alternate between a Machiavelli who provides the political virtues necessary to acquire and maintain political office and a Machiavelli who focuses on political acquisition, innovation, force, and deception and founding for the sake of glory outside of routine politics. Philp’s book is about political conduct and not simply about Machiavelli, but the variety of accounts of Machiavelli that appear in the book—as well as the missing account of his republican advice on avoiding tyrants—reveal a much more unstable and conflictual politics beneath Philp’s dominant focus on ordinary (liberal) politics as a “rule and norm governed activity” (214). I will have more to say about this at the end of the review.
The book finds a firmer footing in its fine account of the origins of political authority and the way political authority sets the rules for political conduct and judging political conduct. This discussion seems to be much informed by that other classic theorist of modern political action, Max Weber. Indeed, but for chapters on protest and resistance and on democratic citizenship, much of the book seems like an extended meditation on Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.” Philp’s working definition of politics is largely based on Weber’s famous dual definition of politics as the striving for power and the exercise of political rule (Herrschaft). And following Weber, his appeal to the realities of politics is largely concerned with the way the demands of striving for and maintaining political rule combined with the need to gain submission by the ruled at once shape political conduct, determine the possibilities for realizing fundamental political principles, and impose the responsibilities attending the exercise of power. Again, like Weber, Philp insists there is nothing intrinsically good about political rule; nor is it self-legitimating: it is a “conditional good that can be put to good purposes or bad” (74), but that political authority always requires some principled justification for compliance and assumes the ruled accept this justification. It is within the boundaries set by compliance based on the legitimating principle of political rule and the resistance of those dominated or excluded by the workings of this legitimating principle, Philp argues, that the political game is conducted. Philp rightly points out that given the constant struggle by groups over authority and legitimacy, there is no standard set of “rules of the [political] game” as political scientists are often wont to claim.
A most important political-sociological insight that follows from this—one that could potentially move beyond the Weberian frame of the argument—is Philp’s claim that political institutions are not merely instruments for the reconciliation of the various kinds of conflict endemic to politics but instead are interconnected with and defined by the conflicts they engender and to which they respond (67). That is, political conflicts and forms of political rule define one another in different historical settings. So it would seem political realism requires us to map the variety of forms conflict takes in politics and how they might be resolved or alternatively how they might subvert political authority. Philp initially does just that, including an elaborate matrix of the ways political authority might be undermined or resisted (from corruption to revolution). However, except for the chapter on protest, Philp focuses on the first part of this map as the ground for political realism and evaluation—“the underlying purpose of political action and struggle is its attempt authoritatively to manage order and conflict” (69). Thus, the potential for a dynamic account of political order as shaped by specific kinds of political order and its subversion is bypassed for a more conventional focus on political leaders and political leadership.
Philp then argues that our evaluations of political conduct are, or at least should be, directly derived from the attempt of political leaders to order these relations of conflict through political rule by gaining “compliance” from the ruled through some form of legitimation. Again, the emphasis here is on the struggle of the political leader claiming a right to rule or contesting that right in others while seeking to shape the aspirations of those who are led by getting the led to adopt his/her normative claims as theirs (76, 78). From the imperatives faced by political leaders in seeking to accomplish this, Philp seeks to elicit the rudiments of a kind of political virtue unique to politics, which in this case means unique to those who have in their hands political resources, including coercive ones, typically denied to ordinary citizens. Here he once again explicitly follows Weber in arguing that a political leader with a commitment to politics as well as a substantive cause must combine passionate but steady conviction with responsibility for using power, both leavened by a sense of judgment (80–83, 87, 236). And with Weber Philp wants to argue that part of this responsibility is taking facts about decision-making into account—presumably those related to the demands of power and of gaining compliance—that if ignored would discredit the fundamental goals for which the political actor stands. Indeed, a recurrent argument of the book is that political responsibility requires giving these facts about politics sufficient normative relevance in choosing one’s commitments, loyalties, and political activity, though Philp’s claim that these facts are ones we would expect any “competent political actor should recognize” (76) is a bit ambiguous given that what counts as the relevant facts of politics in particular decisions goes hand in hand with political commitments. At the same time, political leaders engage in a kind of “decisionism” in which they gamble that the rightness of their decisions will be vindicated through action itself. Philp insists the presence or absence of these qualities (and not individual motives) constitute the way we (should?) judge what counts as a “good” politician (85, 86–87, 89). But all of these qualities and capacities he wants to argue are internal to the demands of politics rather than derived from some supra-political moral criterion (237).
From this point on, Philps addresses a series of questions in which this version of political integrity and political virtue is at stake. The discussions are wide-ranging but the core strategy in each is to dissolve a notion modeled on an approach from outside politics—typically a binary derived from moral philosophy—into one addressing the internal logics and standards of politics that relativize and contextualize the problem. In the space permitted, I would like first to highlight two of the most astute of these discussions, Philp’s discussion of political corruption and his account of political protest and resistance, and then question whether his closing arguments on evaluating the conduct of citizens and institutions do justice to these two prior accounts.
Philp uses his account of political integrity and the political virtues to argue for a delimited concept of political corruption rather than a simple either/or account. Rejecting Acton’s famous phrase that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, Philps argues that corruption in modern liberal democratic politics takes two forms: the use of one’s public office to further one’s personal interest or those of one’s friends and cronies; and more importantly and less noticed, the tendency of politicians to feel that having arrived in office, the constitutional constraints on political power seem incommensurate with the exercise of power she/he had to acquire to gain the self-same office, and so politicians feel a desire and a sense of legitimate entitlement to break the rules and overreach. Indeed the ordinary exercise of corruption of the first kind stimulates the political leader’s desire to break the rules, “to act as they see fit,” for goals that seem self-justifying and are hindered by the first kind. This argument is complex and intricate—one of the best in the book—precisely because it sees the tendency for politicians to trade in the internal political virtues of responsibility, judgment, and passionate commitment in favor of the will to act beyond what is legitimate on a continuum. This continuum ranges from ordinary corruption to various compromises of principle in between to a desire to act beyond all restraints. Given the ordinary ambitions of politicians, Philp points out, political responsibility easily gives way to overreaching, but this is quite different from the claim that all power corrupts.
One of the very best discussions connecting the political virtues to the internal demands of politics centers not on ordinary political rule at all, namely, his sensitive discussion on the way we should judge political resistance and political protest. Philps is adamant that political theory needs “to identify the distinctive character and normative structure of this type of political conduct” as distinct from political responsibility within settled political institutions (175). Toward this end, he quite rightly finds the distinction between civil disobedience, which challenges particular laws but assumes the state will live up to its constitutional claims and principles, and political resistance, which challenges the very legitimacy of the state, to be an analytical distinction with little support in the empirical reality of actual protest. In part, Philp rightly argues, even civil protest against particular laws using nonviolent means is typically regarded by the state as an attack on its authority. More significantly, in a brilliant use of his earlier political sociology of the mutual interdependence of conflict and political rule, Philp points out that there is a recurrent asymmetry in the benefits attained by those within the institutional struggle for power and authority and the benefits attainable by political action of those on the bottom. And so this continuous asymmetry in benefits arising from power, even in a liberal state, produces a fund of political grievances that provide a constant occasion for protest and resistance, all the more so by groups excluded from political rule (180–81). So there are a variety of justifications for political protest and resistance built into the logic of politics itself. They are built into the intertwined logic of political rule and political conflict challenging that rule. This provides the ground for Philp to claim that the Weberian ethic of combining political responsibility for consequences with commitment to a cause is equally appropriate for those who resist political authority as those who maintain it, the only difference being that in the former case, the situations for the application of this political ethic are more contingent and unpredictable.
What Philp gives us in his remarkably subtle and often original account of how we should evaluate popular protest as political conduct, he takes away in his closing two chapters on democratic citizenship and institutional integrity. These latter discussions offer an account of realist politics that is a bit pale, fraught with self-defeating political mechanisms, and a rather restrictive view of relevant political “facts.” More specifically, Philp here is caught between defending procedural liberalism as a frail but realistic frame for responsible politics and a remarkably critical examination of the inability of this model to foster a relation of accountability between political officials and citizens and thereby secure trust in its institutions. Indeed, from this point on the account of a vigorous citizen-engaged politics of resistance and protest and how it too might fit an ethic of political responsibility is almost forgotten in favor of a diminished notion of the forms citizenship can realistically take within liberal democracy. Describing liberal democracy in largely procedural terms with low expectations of citizen involvement, Philp following Constant and de Tocqueville argues that the realistic problem for modern politics is how to keep liberalism as a set of rights and procedures from separating from democracy as civic involvement and civic virtue. This means specifically that the problem of liberal democracy is to hold political rulers accountable for their decisions given the tendency in liberal democracies for citizen support to be largely a matter of convenience, a “modus vivendi.” It would seem this would require a revival of republican citizenship. But Philp argues that as a matter of political sociology such republican civic virtue would require rejection of the standard features of modern democracies—pluralism, civil society, and the right to pursue one’s own life plan. So the only alternative to maintaining the thin nexus between liberalism and democracy is to foster “compliance” of citizens to formal democratic procedures such as regular elections, a right to vote, and rights of political expression along with the introduction of “accountability mechanisms.” Philp places his bet for political accountability on what he calls “surrogate participation,” by which he means intermediate institutions such as regulatory committees, interest groups, parties, the media, and investigatory bodies that function as a transmission point between citizens and political officials and administrators (218–19)—a classic pluralist solution, though at this juncture in the argument it is not clear how this solution will foster the Weberian political virtues so central to this book’s notion of “political” conduct.
But then Philp argues forcefully that in the end accountability cannot be produced by design. For no design can prevent political leaders from abusing the power invested in their office, nor can design by itself bring civic engagement into existence. And when it does occur, it often takes the form of protest and resistance rather than trust in civil and political authority: “institutional design cannot be an answer to political integrity” (236). And so Philp concludes that institutional trust is the only realistic approach to creating political accountability in liberal procedural democracy. But, for Philp, in keeping with his rejection of external normative ideals as the ground for political order, such trust in the integrity of institutions and political office holders must occur from within political institutions and the supporting culture itself.
But here we run into two problems, both of which Philp is aware but for which he does not offer an answer. First, if he is right that accountability cannot be engineered, this is all the more true of trust. Trust, as Philp himself acknowledges toward the end of the book, is self-perpetuating and depends on historical and cultural presuppositions. By the same token, if trust is missing, it is unclear how it can be produced, and if it has been lost, it is unclear how it can be reinstated. So if the integrity of political institutions depends on an already existing virtuous circle of civic engagement and responsive political rule, it would appear that accountability in modern procedural liberal democracy is at best fortuitous—the de Tocqueville-Putnam problem. Philp acknowledges this dilemma when he claims “whether or not a given accountability mechanism adds value in an institutional setting is a contingent and an empirical issue” (220).
But if this is so, we run into a second problem in his realist refashioning of democratic citizenship and institutions: namely, by arguing that one of the facts that undermines “the self-reinforcing character of liberal democratic institutions” is that “civic participation required to sustain political accountability is not easily generated, and where it is generated, it is not necessarily civil in character” and may even challenge trust in existing political institutions (218, 219), Philp seems to devalue the one dynamic within modern politics in the liberal state that keeps it democratic in the civic sense of the word, that renders its procedural structure responsive—the very protests and resistances that he finds in an earlier chapter to be so necessary as part and parcel of forcing the state and its political rulers, parties, and administrators to legitimate themselves and their policies. If, as he argues, “institutional design is not a panacea for politics” (219), and if trust is a fortuitous development, then it would seem that the very internal logic of the politics that Philp presents would leave us with resistance and protest as the complement to other institutional forms to make “government and the administrative order to be answerable for what they do” (220). It would seem that Machiavelli’s republican insight, central to his advice on avoiding ambitious politicians like Caesar, that a certain amount of uncivil conduct in the relation of political rulers and citizens is a condition for responsive republican government, would be of relevance here.
My specific criticisms of Philp’s closing argument should not take away from the high quality of this book as a whole. It is full of sharp and often original observations on the way the demands of day-to-day politics shape our evaluation of political conduct. And even if the bias is toward the Weberian side of political realism, it always keeps in view the more free-wheeling, rebellious Machiavellian version as well. This is quite an accomplishment for a genre of argument that all too easily collapses into delivering well-known political generalities in the name of hard realism.