Book Review: Politics and the Search for the Common Good,by Hans Sluga

In his mature reflection on what the philosophical study of politics can best contribute to the understanding of politics and to practical political orientation, Hans Sluga presents a diagnostic approach to political thought in which philosophical reflection and political situatedness are intertwined. Politics and the Search for a Common Good thus offers criticisms of normativist and naturalistic political thought, contests political philosophy’s understanding of its relationship to politics, genealogically elicits and fleshes out a diagnostic tradition in the history of political thought, and sets out an agenda of pressing concerns for diagnostic practice today.

Motivated by an existential concern with a present lack of political orientation in the face of quickly changing technological, demographic and environment parameters, as well as an “increasing confusion about the nature and meaning of politics” (p. 1), Sluga unfolds the diagnostic approach in theory and practice in several steps. First he presents a criticism of what he conceives as “traditional political philosophy” (in its “normativist” and “naturalist” variants), which shows why we are in need of diagnostic political thought. Traditional political philosophy is remote from the exercise of politics because it mischaracterizes politics, either through reducing the political to questions of moral decision making (in the normativist tradition) or through downplaying the specificity of historical human collective action (in the naturalist tradition). ¹ Traditional political philosophy is thus unable to provide the resources to attain the political orientation required for practically addressing the current challenges and loss of political orientation.

The diagnostic approach set out to redeem political orientation is “a more modest form of political philosophy: one more observant of the political realities and more attentive to our limited grasp of them, more alert to the fluidity of the political field, more aware of the fact that we always think about politics under political conditions; a political philosophy not given to the pronouncement of grand principles, but focused, instead, on the language and concepts of politics, more cautious in its practical conclusions, and altogether more skeptical in its outlook” (p. 7). If the nature and meaning of politics (and the political) is open, if only in order to accommodate the complexity and transitoriness of political constellations, the diagnostic approach needs to interpret practices and vocabularies of the political to grasp how the openness of politics is filled in the particular context. In contrast to traditional political philosophy, Sluga consequently rejects the goal of defining the political. Instead he offers a “family resemblance” notion of politics—politics as the search for the common good—even if this means “superimpos[ing] a concept with boundaries on an open, unbounded area” (p. 3). Helping to revive the understanding of politics as the search for the common good marks a particularly important task for the diagnostic approach to political thought in the face of the current lack of political orientation, as Sluga maintains that “human life cannot do well without a shared pursuit of the good and a sense of community” (p. 203).

Diagnostic interpretations cannot start from an Archimedean viewpoint, but rather from within the “political plain.” As Sluga rejects normativist or naturalist criteria external to the practices in question, the evaluation can only be based on standards which are gathered from the context in question, that is, internal standards. However, the diagnostician is by no means privileged in her perspective on the context and hence cannot claim to explicate objective internal standards. Rather, diagnostic activity is inseparable from the values and goals which the diagnostician brings to bear on his diagnosis. These “perspectivist” diagnoses aim for a high level of complexity and self-reflection, which could fruitfully be related to Foucault’s notion of “problematization,” yet will remain at least minimally incomplete and underdetermined. Whilst these diagnoses particularly explore the present of a political context through its history, their serving of a particular goal orients them toward the future at the same time. What will become of the diagnoses, however, is not in the hands of the diagnostician.

So rather than offering a systematic theory of diagnostic political thought which would be in tension with its methodological outlook, Sluga aims to substantiate his approach through offering a “genealogy” of diagnostic political thought. Following a discussion of (proto-) diagnostic thinkers—Machiavelli and B. Constant—and early diagnosticians such as Marx and L. von Stein, Sluga concentrates on what Nietzsche, Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault add to the furnishing of the diagnostic approach to political thought. These interpretations are supposed to exemplify diagnostic political thought in action and offer a reflection on its complex and nonteleological lines of development. Sluga’s genealogy focuses on how these thinkers wrested political thought away from timeless morality and human nature into the analysis of particular historical political and social relations. The insightful treatments of the latter four thinkers further offer a contribution to the understanding of the political in the history of political thought. Sluga critically draws attention to Schmitt’s reductionist tendencies, the tensions between Arendt’s different uses of the political, and Foucault’s lack of self-reflection with regard to applying a diagnostic approach to the choice of his own conceptual toolkit.

With his criticism of traditional political philosophy, the outline of diagnostic political thought and a selective interpretation of exemplary elements of its development in place, Sluga engages further in the diagnosis of pressing current concerns: The problems of new forms of technology, especially technologically advanced terrorism, population and the environment. These challenges, which take place within an arena of politics characterized by insecurity and potentially “insidious” problems, are specific to our present context and have yet to be addressed by diagnostic thinkers, particularly with regard to their repercussions for future generations.

Sluga may “recoil” (p. viii) from the label of realism in political theory, but the importance of his ambitious and multifaceted study may be more fully appreciated if viewed against the canvas of current debates about the relationship between political philosophy and politics that touch on the nature and concept of politics and on the sources of the critical purchase of political thought. Politics and the Search for the Common Good has the potential to enliven these debates as an orthogonal contribution: it could open them up to the full-blown questioning of the self-conception of political philosophy, particularly with regard to how the answer to the question of what politics is relates to how political philosophy shapes its inquiry into politics. It also makes a case for reconsidering the link between the currently predominant methodological outlook and substantive normative positions.

Rather than offering a strictly historical or analytical treatment of the diagnostic approach to political thought, Politics and the Search for the Common Good offers a refreshing invitation to rethink how to practice political philosophy, full of un-methodological judgments and reflections on how to interpret politics. The entanglement between politics and philosophy in diagnostic political thought is an important and hitherto insufficiently explored focus for political philosophy. How the relationship between the political and philosophical aspects in diagnostic political thought is conceived, however, remains somewhat unclear. Such analytical distinctions may not make much sense from within Sluga’s perspective, as what matters more here is what the whole complex of politico-philosophical reflection contributes to our practical political orientation and what horizon it offers for the search of the common good. The lack of discussion of this relationship is still regrettable.

Despite the overall sobering tone of the book, a few beacons of hope regarding the practice of diagnosis and the notion of politics as the search for the common good merit particular attention. Sluga’s “genealogy” brings to the fore that diagnostic political thought does not need to hide the fact that the political thinker is part of the “political plain” and that the reflections of the thinker are unlikely to fully comprehend the context, as politics is fleeting. In order to minimally comprehend the transitions involved in viewing politics as a historical and fleeting process, however, reflection of conceptual innovations, or at least redescriptions, is an important part of the orienting function of diagnostic political thought. A question which is not addressed in, but thrown up by, the book, is how to evaluate such (and any) diagnoses. More specifically, one could ask: What if the diagnostic inquiry results in an understanding of politics which is incompatible with the understanding of politics as search for the common good?

Whilst Sluga seeks to distance himself from defining politics, he still offers the idea of the search for the common good which he views as standing at the very beginning of the Western tradition of political thought (to which Sluga’s discussions are limited). However, it is at least a matter of dispute to what extent the focus on the search for the common good can avoid the kind of normative presuppositions about what the activity of politics consists of, which Sluga criticizes in normativist and naturalist political philosophers. Even if one assumed that the notion of politics as the search for the common good was a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of politics and left the particularities of the understanding of politics underdetermined, the notion is reminiscent of Sheldon Wolin’s search for commonality in Politics and Vision and may be viewed to contain an undiagnostic eulogy for a historically contingent understanding of politics (as the search for the common good). Reflecting on how this understanding of politics relates to the important question of whether and how politics, as a contingent human “good,” will have a future, would be a much-needed contribution to contemporary political philosophy.