Political Philosophy After 1945 1138084662, 9781138084667

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AFTER 1945

By the mid-twentieth century interest in political philosophy had dwindled, with one writer even pronouncing the subject ‘dead’. Things were to change in 1971, when the subject experienced a renaissance with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The story didn’t end with Rawls however, as other avenues through which to approach the subject became available. In Political Philosophy After 1945 Alan Haworth tells the story of political philosophy from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first. First, he considers why the subject should have become marginalised by mainstream philosophical movements such as logical positivism and the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ inspired by Wittgenstein. Subsequent chapters explain the fundamentals of Rawls’s theory, and then compare and contrast his contribution with that of other philosophers from across the political spectrum. These are followed by chapters in which alternative approaches are examined. There are in-depth accounts of works by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as an evaluation of the claim that political philosophy exemplifies the pursuit of a moribund ‘Enlightenment project’. Throughout the book, Haworth strikes a balance between historical perspective and close analysis of major texts, and he is careful to emphasise the relevance of theoretical issues to questions which arise beyond theory. As such, Political Philosophy After 1945 is an essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy, but also serves as an introduction for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences approaching the topic for the first time. Alan Haworth is a Senior Research Associate (emeritus) of London Metropolitan University. He is the author of numerous articles, and his books include Totalitarianism and Philosophy (2020), Understanding the Political Philosophers (second edition, 2012), Free Speech (1998), and Anti-Libertarianism (1994). All are published by Routledge.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AFTER 1945

Alan Haworth

Cover image: CHUNYIP WONG / Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Alan Haworth The right of Alan Haworth to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Haworth, Alan, 1944-author. Title: Political philosophy after 1945 / Alan Haworth. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022019957 (print) | LCCN 2022019958 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138084667 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138084704 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315111674 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science‐‐Philosophy‐‐History‐‐20th century. Classification: LCC JA83 .H29 2023 (print) | LCC JA83 (ebook) | DDC 320.01‐‐dc23/eng/20220812 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019957 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019958 ISBN: 978-1-138-08466-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-08470-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11167-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Matt and his Friends

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1 Introduction: Death by Language? PART I 2 A Case Study: Logical Positivism

ix xi 1 7 9

3 A Note on Expectations

26

4 ‘Ordinary Language’ and Political Philosophy

37

PART II

55

5 The Rawlsian Renaissance

57

6 Rawls: Comparisons and Contrasts

69

7 Patterns of Thought

89

8 The Liberal Self

97

viii Contents

9 Historicism: The Self Through Time

113

10 Postscript

140

References Index

142 148

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To write a critical study of recent political philosophy is to find oneself presented with some interesting challenges. One arises from the absence of a tradition – a canon of ‘great works’ to serve as a guide to structure. (The task with which I was confronted here contrasts, in that way, with the task with which I was presented when working on my earlier study, Understanding the Political Philosophers: From Ancient to Modern Times. In that case, I knew that I would have to start with the Greeks and proceed chronologically up until the present.) Another arises from the way one finds oneself less of a bystander and more of a participant. More territory is contested, and the more one has to take sides. Then again, the earlier part of the period with which I am primarily concerned in this text was marked – in ‘Anglophone’ philosophy at least – by a lack of interest in political philosophy. After that, with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971, a single approach became dominant. I didn’t want to come up with a book which could be summarised in one sentence as, ‘For a long time nothing happened and then there was Rawls’. For one thing, everyone knows that story and, for another, its an over-simplification. In the following pages, then, I open with an explanation of why it should have been that political philosophy tended to take a back seat during the early twentieth century. Later, while I attempt to give due weight to Rawls’s arguments, I also pay equivalent attention to alternatives. The book is an account of the course taken by political philosophy throughout a period during a part of which I have been actively engaged with the subject myself. (I began by asking myself how I would describe that course to someone unfamiliar with the subject.) Consequently, and for all my efforts at objectivity, there is – inevitably – a personal element to the story. There is, after all, no such thing as the view from nowhere. I am hugely indebted to David Edmonds and Jonathan Wolff. Both took the time and trouble to comment on draft chapters of this book This can be a chore,

x

Preface and Acknowledgements

especially when one is busy meeting other commitments. I am absolutely sure that, thanks to their comments, this book is much better than it would otherwise have been. Finally, and as ever, thanks to Rowan for her humour, and for keeping things on an even keel when we have both been locked down and I have been, so to speak, ‘locked up’ while working on this text. I have dedicated this book to my son Matt and his friends because I wanted to pass something on to the next generation. If there are only two lessons to be learnt from this text they are these: first – that it is important to take the study of ideas seriously; second – that one thing to be learnt from the study of history is that, quite often, things in the past were never quite as they have been represented in the popular imagination. The same goes for the study of the history of ideas.

ABBREVIATIONS

I use the following abbreviations: AV HC OT PI

TJ2 WJ

After Virtue (Alasdair MacIntyre) The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt) Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) (Note: Philosophical Investigations, Part I is divided into short, numbered sections. Except where otherwise stated in this text, where ‘PI is followed by a number’, the number is that of the section referred to. (e.g. ‘PI: 19’ refers to Investigations, section 19.) A Theory of Justice, Second Edition (John Rawls) Whose Justice?: Which Rationality? (Alasdair MacIntyre)

1 INTRODUCTION: DEATH BY LANGUAGE?

My subject is the course taken by political philosophy from the middle years of the twentieth century up until the present – the present being, as I write, the earlier part of the second decade of the twenty first. I am assuming that readers will fall into one or the other of two groups. There will be some who come to it with a prior knowledge of philosophy. Such readers will treat this book as they would treat any other work of philosophy – that is, as a record and a critical assessment of certain theories and arguments. On the other hand, there will be others who are relatively unfamiliar with the subject, and for whom this book will serve to increase their knowledge of it – or so I hope. Either way, there are points which require emphasis, and some features of the approach I shall be taking which require explanation. I should begin with those. A first point to emphasise is this: A work of political philosophy should be just as concerned with philosophy as it is with politics. That is because, at any one time, the state of political philosophy will inevitably reflect the state of philosophy more generally. How could it not? Political philosophy is not an island, cut off, as it were, from the intellectual mainland, and if philosophers are to bring their ideas to bear upon the understanding and practice of politics, that will be with habits formed elsewhere. The point is especially apposite in the case of the period with which this book is concerned, for there was a time when philosophers – those writing in English at any rate – did little to bring their ideas to bear upon political questions. It is a fact which stands in need of some explanation, if only because, in the past, so much important work in philosophy has been primarily motivated by political concerns. (Think of Plato’s despair at what he saw as the degenerate character of the politics of his time, and his attempt to describe the contours of a perfect state in response. Or think of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and his prediction that it would eventually be superseded.) Accordingly, the opening chapters of my narrative are concerned with just that explanation. DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-1

2 Introduction: Death by Language?

It should be clear then – secondly – that I do not favour what is sometimes called the ‘underlabourer’ view of philosophy, according to which it is the job of the philosopher to correct infelicities and ‘conceptual confusion’ in the work of others – merely that, and no more. (This might equally have been labelled the ‘bossy schoolteacher’ view, with the philosopher pictured as returning your essay, having peppered it with discouraging comments, awarded it a grade, and written ‘could do better’ at the end.) Nor do I favour what might be called the ‘instruction manual’ view of philosophy. This pictures the philosopher as laying down rules for politicians and others engaged in the practicalities of life to follow. Of course, political philosophers can make it their business to draw attention to confusion in the work of others, and they can also lay down rules for others to follow, but there is so much more to it than that. As I see it, and as I say in a later chapter, political philosophy is a fundamental human activity – like art, literature, or science. It works at many levels and in diverse ways. Thirdly, although my subject is the state of political philosophy, as it has been since 1945, there are sections of my discussion which reach much further back in time than that – for example, to the formation of the Vienna Circle in 1924, to the ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, and to the work of Plato, whose Republic made its appearance in the fourth century BC. The reasons for this may seem obvious to readers familiar with philosophy, but it could well puzzle others. I should explain, then, that those reasons lie in the nature of the relationship between philosophy and its past. It may be helpful to compare philosophy and natural science here. There is a similarity, namely that, like philosophers, scientists make it their business to increase our understanding. In each case, the point of the activity is – let us say – to arrive at an accurate description of the way things really are. The difference is that, whereas science proceeds in a linear manner, from past to future, philosophers must continually interrogate and reinterpret their discipline’s past. The differentiating fact is – of course – the experimentum crucis; that is the observation sufficient to discredit this or that scientific theory. Once such an observation has been made, the theory has to be rejected, and science is constrained to find new ways of understanding the world. (These days, no one believes in phlogiston, the spontaneous generation of life from inert matter, or the existence of the ether.) By contrast, philosophers do not have the luxury of being able to test their theories through observation. Theirs is a purely critical activity, and they must always seek to ‘place’ their arguments within the context of debates which are already taking place. (Put it this way: Scientists march directly forward into the unknown, hoping to discover new terrain, or so you could say, whereas philosophers are engaged in a conversation which began long before they were born, and which will continue long into the future.)1 Fourthly, although my title suggests that I am out to paint a general picture, a ‘broad-brush’ account of the main currents to have run through political philosophy from 1945 onwards, there are large sections of my discussion in which I concentrate on the work of specific philosophers. (Examples discussed in this book

Introduction: Death by Language? 3

include Wittgenstein, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre.) Again, this is a feature which may come as no surprise to readers familiar with the subject, but is likely to surprise readers who are not. Still, surprise or not, there are reasons for these exercises in close analysis. One is that there have, in fact, been periods during which the work of a single philosopher has proven dominant. Talk to any English-speaking political philosopher, even now, and you are likely to be told that the years since 1971 have been the years in which Rawls’s work on justice has been the dominant influence. (This is not guaranteed but, as I say, its likely.) It means that no account of recent political philosophy would be complete without an account of Rawls’s work. Another reason is that a study of any branch of philosophy must explain how arguments actually work. It is no good ‘standing outside’ an argument, as it were, and simply listing its main elements. You have to think it through. That means taking in argument and analysing it in detail, and – since time and space are limited – that means limiting your choice of examples. In limiting my own choice, I have – I hope – chosen work which is representative of positions taken within political philosophy more generally. In making my choice, I have also tried to follow what I have always taken to be one of philosophy’s golden rules, and that is always to concentrate on the best examples of the philosophical position you have chosen to discuss. Straw men are out. What of the year 1945?: Eighteenth months ago, when I wrote the first draft of this introduction, I said this: ‘It was – of course – a year which marked a distinct change in the world’s fortunes. For one thing, it was the year in which the Second World War came to an end, and in which fascism and totalitarianism – whose progress had seemed inexorable – had been stopped in their tracks’. As I write now, in March 2022, things do not look so hopeful. But – who knows? By the time this book is published, times may have changed again. Still, the point is that, for my purposes, 1945 is really no more than a marker date, a rough indicator of when the period with which I am concerned began. The changes which took place after that date are reflected in some of the work I discuss. For example, there was a new concern with fairness and social justice. In the United Kingdom, this showed up in the establishment of a Welfare State; in the United States in Harry Truman’s ‘New Deal’. At the philosophical level it is, I am sure, reflected in Rawls’s concern with justice. (Rawls’s first essay, ‘Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics’, was published as long ago as 1951, only six years after the end of the war.) (1951/1999a) Again, the title of Hannah Arendt’s, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in the same year, is enough to tell you that its an attempt to make sense of what had recently happened. Otherwise though, tracking the relationship between ideas and events will not be the main business of this book. My subject will be, not that, but the ideas themselves. In the following pages, then, the portrait I am setting out to paint is drawn from a personal perspective (inevitably so. Can there be such a thing as a work of philosophy which is not drawn from such a perspective?) I have tried to represent developments in the subject, as they have appeared to me, throughout a period during which I have been closely engaged with it myself. This is not a polemical

4 Introduction: Death by Language?

book however, as so many books on political subjects are. I suppose it is inevitable that my own political leanings will show through as my discussion proceeds. Even so, there is a difference between describing things as they appear from a certain perspective, one’s own, and – on the other hand – the partisan advocacy of a specific political line. I shall try to avoid the latter and, if this book has a ‘message’ at all it is simply that ideas are worth taking seriously. With that, let me turn to the state of political philosophy as it appeared to many in the years immediately following the end of World War Two; that is, in the early years of the period with which we are concerned.

Death by Language? For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead. (Laslett 1956: vii) If I needed a motto for the theme running through these opening chapters, it would be Peter Laslett’s remark. Laslett was writing in 1956, at a time when philosophers who wished to be considered serious and ‘respectable’ were working, for the most part, in fields such as the theory of meaning, the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. (They were dealing with questions, such as, how do words acquire meaning? Can there be a private language? How do we know that an ‘external’ world exists? Do we have free will? and How can we know what other people are thinking?) If Laslett was right, it seems that, in contrast, political philosophy would have to be consigned to the garbage dump of history. In fact, Laslett was wrong – at least, he was wrong strictly speaking. Serious work in the subject was being produced.2 In fact, he wouldn’t have needed to look any further for examples than to the contents of the volume of essays to which his own is an introduction. It is the essay from which my opening quotation is drawn. The books and articles which were being produced were isolated examples however. They were not representative of the contemporary mainstream, so, while Laslett’s comment may not have been strictly true, it was certainly no more than a mild exaggeration. How can it have been that political philosophy had become so marginalised? In answer, the conventional explanation connects the subject’s fall from favour with the fact that, during the twentieth century, the attention of philosophers had become increasingly focused upon the nature of language. They had been taking an interest in language for a long time before that of course – since the seventeenth century at least – but in a way which treated language as just one phenomenon amongst others requiring explanation. By contrast, language itself had now come to be seen as the source of all the other problems which had traditionally been held to form philosophy’s subject matter. It had come to be held by some that those ‘problems’ were not really problems at all, but that they were misunderstandings; misunderstandings arising from a failure to grasp the way in which language

Introduction: Death by Language? 5

actually works. In his ‘later’ work, Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein put it aptly. ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’, he wrote, and, ‘The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work’. (PI:109 & PI:132) The implications of this movement for philosophy in general were radical – revolutionary even – or so the explanation holds. At any rate, they were held to be so by philosophers working in many areas of the subject. There was great appeal in the idea that by paying close attention to the workings of language one might find some sort of solution to – for example – questions concerning the difference between knowledge and belief, or the relationship between mind and body, or to metaphysical questions relating to the existence of God, the nature of free will, and so on. In the case of political philosophy, however, the implications were less auspicious – or so the story continues – for the ‘linguistic turn’ taken by philosophy in general had created an intellectual climate which was quite inhospitable to political philosophy in particular. Laslett himself is, thus, sure of who to blame. ‘The Logical Positivists did it’, he writes, ‘It was Russell and Wittgenstein, Ayer and Ryle who convinced the philosophers that they must withdraw unto themselves for a time, and re-examine their logical and linguistic apparatus’. (Laslett ibid: ix) All of which is true enough so far as it goes. There are, however, two reasons for thinking that the story as I have just told it cannot be the whole story. One is that it fails to account for the influence of intellectual fashion – which can often be more powerful than intellectuals themselves care to admit. I have my own experience to testify to that. I well remember that, when I was first offered a job teaching the subject, I would sometimes feel like the person who has just turned up at a classy event wearing a pair of worn-out trainers. (It wasn’t quite the done thing.) Wittgenstein’s attitude must have had something to do with it too. It is well known that he wielded enormous influence throughout the period in question, not just through his intellectual originality, but thanks to his strange, charismatic personality. His hostility to the idea that ethics can be an academic study was legendary. He wrote; ‘if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. (1965: 7) With that attitude, it should come as no surprise that once, at a meeting in Cambridge, he should have threatened to smash a visiting speaker, Karl Popper, over the head with a steel poker, simply for Popper’s having had the temerity to invoke the notion of a moral rule.3 It is reasonable to surmise that he would have taken a similar attitude towards the idea that philosophy has much to teach us about politics – political philosophy, like ethics, being a subject which requires the making of value judgements. In fact, we have some evidence for the supposition. What else are we to make of one commentators’ remark upon his planned visit to Russia, namely that ‘it had more to do with Tolstoy’s moral teachings, with Dostoyevsky’s spiritual insights, than with any political or social matters’. (Fania Pascal recorded in Monk 1990: 342)

6 Introduction: Death by Language?

A second, and more interesting, reason for doubting the adequacy of the conventional story – as I have just told it at any rate – is that it cannot explain why political philosophy in particular should have become so far removed from the mainstream. If the renewed interest in the workings of language had reinvigorated philosophy to such a radical extent, why should political philosophy be an exception? Wouldn’t you expect that renewed interest to have wielded the same refreshing influence upon the latter? The fact that it did not requires explanation, and for that explanation we must look to the schools of philosophical thought which were dominant throughout the period during which political philosophy became marginalised. The question at issue, then, is; what was it about the arguments characteristic of those schools which rendered them intrinsically antithetical to the notion that political concepts might be open to philosophical treatment. It is with that question in mind that, in Part One, I turn – first – to Logical Positivism, the philosophical theory which became the official doctrine of the Vienna Circle, formed in the 1920s. I shall treat it as a case study; that is, as an example of a doctrine which prioritised language in a manner which thereby marginalised the idea that politics could be a serious subject for philosophy. Later in Part One turn to the ‘ordinary language’ approach by which philosophy was characterised from the late 1940s up until the late 1960s, and which had a similarly marginalising effect upon political philosophy. After that, things were to change, and in ways which form the subject of Part Two.

Notes 1 It is inevitable that there should be some philosophers, and even some scientists, who would question this picture of science as a linear forward march into the unknown. However, it is – I think – the conventional and the most widespread view, and there is no need to question it here. 2 One obvious example is Karl Popper’s two-volume study, The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, and another is his The Poverty of Historicism. (1945 & 1957) Both are works in which Popper conducts a sustained piecemeal critique of totalitarianism’s intellectual foundations. Later years, the late 1950s and early 60s saw the publication of – for example – C.B. MacPherson’s Marxian interpretation of the seventeenth century social contract theory, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Michael Oakeshott’s work of Burkean conservatism, Rationalism in Politics (1991), first published in 1962, and Brian Barry’s ‘analytical’ treatment of political concepts, Political Argument. (1965). Admittedly, these are works which made their appearance in years later than that of Laslett’s much quoted remark, but they do illustrate that it is quite possible for significant works of political philosophy to exist within an environment largely dominated by the ‘linguistic’ school of thought. Moreover, none of this is to mention philosophers working within other, non-‘anglophone’ traditions of European thought. 3 For the full story, see Edmonds (2001).

PART I

2 A CASE STUDY: LOGICAL POSITIVISM

‘Logical Positivism’, as it became known,1 originated with the Vienna Circle, an association of scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians whose meetings took place in the 1920s and 1930s. For a comparison, one might take the Bauhaus: the more widely known association, or ‘school’, of architects, designers, and artists, founded by the architect, Walter Gropius, at around the same time. The similarities are more than coincidental. Both movements saw themselves as modernising, and they saw modernisation itself as a matter of insisting upon simplicity and functionality. Informed by this ideal, the Bauhaus manifesto of 1919 insists upon the rejection of ornamentation. Accordingly, Bauhaus design – and especially Bauhaus architecture – is notable for its clean, geometrical, simplicity of line. In a similar way, the Vienna Circle insisted upon the rejection of ‘metaphysical’ verbiage and the imposition of clarity through the application of a clear and straightforward principle. This was the famous ‘principle of verification’. As its own manifesto stated, the Circle’s purpose was to promote what it described as ‘the scientific view of the world’.2 It’s clear that there was a progressive, modernising, ‘spirit of the times’ abroad in those days. As I write, however, almost one hundred years have passed since then. Logical positivism has lost its initial shine – inevitably so. Even the philosopher who was once the doctrine’s most enthusiastic British proponent, A.J. Ayer, is on record as having remarked, that, ‘The most important of [its] defects was that nearly all of it was false’,3 and I doubt that there are many – if any – philosophers working now who would describe themselves as logical positivists. Still, I’m discussing the doctrine here, not in any forlorn hope of reviving it, but in order to determine why it should have left so little space for questions in political philosophy. What was logical positivism, then? In answer, I’ll begin with the principle which lies at its heart – the verification principle. DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-3

10

Part I

The Verification Principle The ‘Preface’ to Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic opens with a specification of the verification principle. This is what he says: The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume. Like Hume, I divide all genuine propositions into two classes: those which, in his terminology concern ‘relations of ideas’ and those which concern ‘matters of fact’. The former class comprises the a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics, and these I allow to be necessary and certain only because they are analytic. That is, I maintain that the reason why these propositions cannot be confuted in experience is that they do not make any assertion about the empirical world, but simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion. Propositions concerning empirical matters of fact, on the other hand, I hold to be hypotheses, which can be probable but never certain. And in giving an account of their method of validation I claim also to have explained the nature of truth. (Ayer 1936/2001: 31) At first glance, the distinction Ayer draws, with its distinction between just two classes of proposition, appears straightforward enough. As so often in philosophy however, things here are less straightforward than they initially appear. A certain amount of ‘deconstruction’ is necessary. For example, there is the question of precisely what we are meant to understand a ‘proposition’ to be. I’ll begin with that.

Propositions and Their Relation to Facts Ask any philosopher what is meant by the term ‘proposition’ and you will be told that, in language, the expression of a proposition is a sentence, or statement asserting that such-and-such facts are the case and that, accordingly, some propositions are true and others false. Thus, ‘three plus two equals five’ and ‘the moon orbits the earth’ state propositions which are true. ‘Three plus two equals ninetyseven’ and ‘the moon is made of green cheese’ state propositions which are false. ‘The cat is on the mat’ expresses a proposition which might be true or which might be false, depending upon where the cat is. You will undoubtedly be told, also, that while all propositions can be expressed in sentences – sentences such as, ‘the cat is on the mat’, and so on – not all sentences express propositions. Examples of sentences which do not express – or which also do something other than express – a proposition are ‘Please pass the salt’, ‘Not another one!’, ‘I wish that she would hurry up!’, ‘Where do I get the train to Birmingham?’, ‘I wonder if it will stop raining after Christmas’. These sentences are, respectively, a (polite)

A Case Study: Logical Positivism

11

imperative, an expression of surprise, an expression of exasperation, a request for directions, and a surmise. So far, so good, but note that complications arise, even here, thanks to the fact that there are different ways of interpreting the relationships which hold between (i) the sentence which expresses the proposition, (ii) the proposition itself, and (iii) the fact to which the proposition corresponds (if it is true) or allegedly corresponds (if it is false). There are two possibilities here. One is to treat the sentence stating that suchand-such facts are the case and the proposition that the same facts are the case as equivalent, in other words to treat ‘sentence’ and ‘proposition’ as synonymous (and likewise for ‘statement’ that such-and such facts are the case). That is how most philosophers use the word ‘proposition’ most of the time, and it is how I propose to use it throughout the rest of this book. The really problematic questions here are those of what a ‘fact’ is meant to be, and – related to it – of how a proposition is meant to ‘correspond’ to a fact. We shall come to that later. For the moment, its worth noting that, on this interpretation, the relationship in question is, as it were, bipolar, with the proposition (or sentence) located at one pole, and the fact to which it corresponds at the other. It is worth noting the latter point if only to emphasise the existence of an alternative interpretation of the relationship which is, so to speak, tripolar. According to it, the three elements are distinct, with (i) the sentence expressing (ii) the proposition – this being something other than the sentence – and corresponding, in turn, to (iii) the fact. It is a view which is rather hard to grasp mainly because it is hard to see what, on this interpretation, a proposition is meant to be, and equally difficult to understand what is meant by the ‘expression’ of a proposition. One possibility is to distinguish ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ language from a hypothesised ‘ideal’ language – the latter being the language which reflects the structure of the world with total accuracy – and to define ‘proposition’ as referring to an element in this ideal language. In this case, or so one might argue, the sentence in everyday language, ‘It is raining’, uttered on a Sunday expresses a different proposition from the same everyday sentence uttered on a Monday; the two propositions in question being the elements of the ideal language which correspond, respectively, to two separate facts, one being the fact that it rains on the Sunday (if it does) and the other being the fact that it rains on Monday. (If you believe in the possibility of there being such an ideal language, that wouldn’t be pure pedantry. If you don’t then it would be.)4 Still, I mention the tripolar interpretation of the relationship between sentence, proposition, and fact here, only to acknowledge its existence and then to get it out of the way. That is partly because it rests upon a thesis concerning the way the world is structured to which few philosophers would subscribe these days. However, it is also because it is hard to see how a thesis resting upon the supposition that a description of the world’s underlying structure can be comprised within the single unitary set of propositions – these, together, making up an ideal language – can do much to illuminate the nature of political discourse ‘the latter

12

Part I

being’ in essence, a matter of conflict and contest between opinions. From hereon, then, I shall concentrate for the most part upon the ‘bipolar’ interpretation of the principle, as I am calling it – the interpretation which treats ‘statement’ and ‘proposition’ as equivalent in meaning.

Two Categories of Proposition With that, let me turn to the distinction between two categories of ‘genuine’ proposition, drawn by Ayer in the passage quoted, one being the category of propositions concerning ‘relations of ideas’, the other of propositions concerning ‘matters of fact’. As the point would be more usually expressed these days, it is the distinctions between propositions whose truth (or falsity) is a matter of logical necessity and those whose truth (or falsity) is contingent. Ayer’s distinction is clear and concise and, in the case of his account of necessary truth, there is little to quarrel with. It is true, for example, that – as Ayer says in the passage quoted – ‘the reason why these propositions cannot be confuted in experience is that they do not make any assertion about the empirical world’ (ibid.) Take the proposition, ‘A triangle is a three sided figure’. Its truth is obvious because it’s just a tautology. All it tells you is that a triangle is a triangle. You wouldn’t try to refute it by searching for triangles which have a different number of sides. That would be silly. Or, take the proposition stating that three plus two equals five. This is similarly immune to disproof through observation. If you thought that you had taken three objects, and then another two objects, and found that there were – say – six, you would assume that you had made a mistake, not that you had disproved the proposition. (Inevitably, there are points of detail in Ayer’s characterisation of necessary truth with which some logicians might quarrel, but none which need detain us here.)5 Ayer’s characterisation of contingent truth is more problematic, however, and for reasons to which we shall come shortly. Before that, its worth remarking that it’s easy to see why the verification principle should have appealed to scientists, for science is an activity which makes use of a considerable body of a priori knowledge, namely mathematics. (Of course, the category of necessary truths includes rather more than obvious trivialities, such as ‘A triangle is a three sided figure’.) Scientists also spend a great deal of time testing theories through observation and experiment. Indeed, it wouldn’t be stretching things too much to say that science is by definition a method of searching for truth which involves subjecting hypotheses to empirical test. It is therefore easy to appreciate how the idea that genuine propositions must either be true (or false) by logical necessity or else subject to verification (or falsification) through observation might appeal to a sophisticated scientist. (In saying this, I am – of course – bearing in mind that the membership of the Vienna Circle included a number of eminent scientists and, moreover, that the Circle’s manifesto was entitled, ‘The Scientific Conception of the World’.) On the other hand, however, it is equally worth remarking that there are some propositions which do not appear to fit within Ayer’s binary schema too easily, and that includes some of the examples I listed earlier. Take, ‘I wish that she would

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hurry up!’. If you say this – and if it is indeed the case that you are wishing she would hurry up – then you are stating a true contingent proposition. But in what sense can you be said to have ‘verified’ it ‘through observation’. However you have come to know its truth, it doesn’t seem analogous to the way you come to know the truth of – for example – ‘The grass is green’. Perhaps there is a way round this difficulty. For example, perhaps you could argue that you know its truth through introspection, the observation of some inner ‘mental state’ maybe. But that seems artificial. (And what of the fact that when you say, ‘I wish that she would hurry up’ you are also doing something in addition to ‘stating a proposition’. You are expressing a feeling – a wish. If that is a more than extraneous feature of your utterance m – if there is, perhaps, a connection between its meaning and its function within a specific context – then maybe that is a reason for assigning it to some special category, but it is hard to see how it can be easily accommodated within Ayer’s schema.) Still, those difficulties may only be apparent, and its possible that logical positivism might find a way of handling them. It would be rather beside the point to pursue that avenue however. Instead, let me remark upon a further feature of Ayer’s classification, namely that it is misleading if it is taken to suggest that, in science, what is at stake is the truth of individual propositions. The purpose of scientific experiment is not that. It is to provide further confirmation for, or else to falsify, hypotheses which have themselves been formed on the basis of theories – fully fledged theories which contain elements of the a priori, as well as elements which are open to test by experiment. (Just for example, the observation, made in 1919, that, during a solar eclipse, certain stars appear at a different point in the sky, was to confirm a prediction made by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, not the truth the single proposition ‘Stars appear at a different point … …, etc.’) It’s a point which is especially relevant when it comes to the implications of verificationism for political philosophy, the main purpose of this chapter being to determine what those implications might be. We shall return to it.

Pseudo-Propositions In addition to the category of propositions which concern relations of ideas, and the category of those which concern matters of fact, Ayer distinguishes a third category. This includes the type of proposition – or rather ‘proposition’ – which appears to makes sense, through having the same grammatical structure of a meaningful proposition – but which is, in fact, meaningless. Ayer labels propositions of this type, ‘pseudo-propositions’. The point here is that the logical positivists equated the method for assessing a proposition’s truth with that of assessing its meaningfulness. For an example, consider again the proposition, ‘the cat is on the mat’. You will verify this, let’s suppose, if you turn your head in the right direction and look towards the other side of the room. There you will see the cat on the mat and you will know that the proposition is true. Fair enough but, in addition, logical positivism holds that the

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proposition, ‘the cat is on the mat’ actually means, ‘If you turn your head – and so on – you will see the cat’. Hence the slogan, ‘the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification’. The slogan reflects one of the Vienna Circle’s main projects, which was to rid the world of ‘metaphysics’, a term which, in their vocabulary, referred to pretentious nonsense. There was certainly a lot of it about, for example in the work of the Circle’s contemporary, Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who was treated by its members as a major bête noir. It was Heidegger who observed, for example that. ‘“nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in’. (1926/1962: 232) Heidegger adds, ‘Nowhere’, however, does not signify nothing: this is where any region lies, and there too lies any disclosedness of the world for essentially spatial Beingin. Therefore that which threatens cannot bring itself close from a definite direction within what is close by; it is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere. (ibid.) What can this mean? Admittedly, it can sound profound, especially, perhaps, if you read it out loud while adopting a certain Shakespearean exaggeration of tone. (People might mistake you for a ‘real philosopher’.) That said, I should add – hastily – and that there are critics who would consider my foregoing remark quite unfair, and that I shall add a more ameliorative comment in a later chapter. (That will be in my discussion of Hannah Arendt, for whom Heidegger had been a mentor for a time.)6 However, while it is possible to agree with the logical positivists that there are such things as pseudo-propositions – that is, sentences which bear the appearance of genuine propositions, but which are, in fact, meaningless – it is still possible to question the positivist’s criterion for determining what counts as a pseudoproposition. Here, then, is an example. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously The example is drawn, not from Ayer’s work, or from the work of any other verificationist philosopher, but from Noam Chomsky’s influential treatise on linguistics, Syntactic Structures (1957). As Chomsky says, it will be recognised as grammatical by any speaker of English. (1957: 15) However, it is also, quite clearly, nonsensical, which makes it a pseudo-proposition in Ayer’s sense; that is, a sentence which conforms to the rules of grammar, but which is meaningless. Note, however, that the meaninglessness arises from the incompatibility between the referents of the terms which make up the sentence. That is to say, nothing can be both colourless and green, the suggestion that ideas can be green is questionable, and how on earth do you sleep furiously?

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By contrast, Ayer’s own example is this. God exists. According to Ayer, there is no logical demonstration capable of establishing the fact of God’s existence, and nor can the latter be established empirically. (1936/ 2001: 114ff) This leads him to conclude that, ‘all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical’. (ibid: 115) But Ayer’s inference here must surely be mistaken, for while it is true enough that there is no method, available for the verification, or falsification, of the proposition stating that God exists – or, at least, no such method available to anyone living – it is nevertheless the case that the proposition means something. It means that the all-powerful all-good being who created the universe and is worshipped by a number of religions actually exists. In fact it easy enough to think of parallel examples with which to contradict Ayer’s claim. For example, it may be true that there is a planet, thousands of light years away, similar to Earth, inhabited by intelligent beings similar to ourselves, and known to those inhabitants as ‘Planet Zongo’. By hypothesis, we will never know of the planet’s existence. For one thing, it’s so far away. Even so, the statement that such a planet exists is perfectly meaningful or take the example of events which will take place in the far future. Suppose that the monarchy will be restored in France in – say – three hundred years’ time. We have, available to us, no way of verifying the proposition, ‘The French monarchy will be restored in the year 2322’. It may be true of course, and it is certainly meaningful. It is to handle such objections that, in the passage I quoted earlier, Ayer describes ‘propositions concerning empirical matters of fact’ as ‘hypotheses, which can be probable but never certain’. (1936/2001: 31) This suggests that one would be able to verify such propositions if one were in the right circumstances (if one were in a spacecraft flying near Planet Zongo, for example, or living in the year 2322). But this doesn’t help Ayer, for ‘God exists’ can also be construed as a ‘hypothesis’, awaiting confirmation when the right circumstances arrive. (It’s unfortunate for us that those circumstances are only likely to arrive once we have reached that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, by which time it will be too late to come back and tell the others. But my point stands.)7 Still, there are enough textbooks of philosophy in which the defects of the verification principle are analysed in detail, and my purpose in discussing logical positivism in this chapter is only to illustrate why, as a theory, it should have proven inhospitable to political philosophy. So, let me now move on to consider another of its features.

Words and Facts: Correspondence Throughout Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic it is assumed that there is a relationship of correspondence, or ‘mirroring’, between language and the world. In other words, it is assumed that, for every true proposition – for every true

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Part I

contingent proposition, that is – there is a fact to which it corresponds or which it names, and that it is from this relationship that words and sentences derive their meaning. A similar assumption is fundamental to the ‘early’ Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. As the point is put in the English translation of that work, ‘The proposition is a picture of reality’. (1922: 4.001 my italics)8 Of course, there is nothing wrong with the assumption that language can function in a descriptive way. That is beyond dispute. What is questionable, however, is the further assumption that there is something special about this particular feature of language, something privileged, and that it is the one feature upon which we should concentrate if we are to gain true philosophical understanding. It is an assumption which runs throughout Language, Truth, and Logic, and which is fundamental to the argument of the Tractatus. Bertrand Russell, who shared the assumption, put it this way in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s book, The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts’. (1922: 8) But why ‘essential’? Against this assumption, it can be objected that language can function in many ways, and that there is, in fact, no reason for philosophers to treat just one as its ‘true’ function, singling it out for special attention. (Think of my earlier diverse list of sentences: ‘Please pass the salt’, Not another one!’, and so on. Each fell into a different category, and none derived its meaning from straightforward correspondence to a fact.) In fact, it’s hardly necessary to labour the point, as it’s become something of a truism – largely as a result of the linguistic revolution which took place in philosophy during the years immediately following the Second World War. We’ll come to that in a later chapter.

Ayer on ‘Sense Contents’: Wittgenstein on ‘Picturing’ Philosophers who hold that language’s primary function is descriptive – a matter of correspondence between proposition and fact – can nevertheless differ in their accounts of the precisely what a ‘fact’ might be. Even so, there is – so far as I can see – no version which can make much room for political thought, and it is worth commenting upon the point. By way of illustration, then, compare Ayer’s version of the correspondence view with Wittgenstein’s.9 In Ayer’s version – which is a variant of the more usual version – empirically verifiable propositions are held to correspond to what he calls ‘sense-contents’. (In the twentieth century, the more usual term became ‘sense data’. In fact, Ayer uses the term himself in his later work.) ‘Sense contents’ are defined by Ayer as ‘immediate data … . of sensation’. (1936/2001: 53) On this view, reference to a material thing – a table or a coin – is thus a ‘construction’ based upon experience of sense contents which tend to go together. In the case of a coin, ‘the shape of the sense-content, which is the element of the coin that I am actually observing’ may not be round. Like the image of a coin on a flat surface – as in a painting or a photograph – it may be oval, and the idea that there is a round coin out there will

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be constructed, by the observer, from the constant conjunction of such infinitesimally close ‘sense contents’. In line with this view – according to which one is never directly aware of the coin itself, but only of some subjectively perceived intervening entity – Ayer holds that, strictly speaking, the suggestion that there is a ‘material substance’ or ‘invisible substratum’ lying behind the experience is a ‘metaphysical belief’. (1936/2001: 68) As this makes clear, a sense content is a kind of image. Indeed, Ayer himself acknowledges that, with this account, he is following Berkeley, for whom ‘ideas in the mind’ clearly were images. (ibid: 53–4)10 (In fact, the origins of the view that we are directly aware of ‘little pictures in the mind’, as it were, can be traced even further back in time, to Descartes’s Discourse on Method and his Meditations.) (1637/1999) At his point, it may be worth noting a difference between Ayer’s version of the correspondence view with Wittgenstein’s, mainly because Wittgenstein has a major role to play in a later chapter of this present book. By contrast with Ayer’s, then, Wittgenstein’s version contains no reference to images – images which are literally that; images in the sense in which photographs are images. For Wittgenstein, the operative concept is ‘representation’. It is true that, in the English translation of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein is recorded as having said, ‘The proposition is a picture of reality’ (1922: 4.01), but this is a misleading rendering of ‘Der Satz its ein Bild der Wirklichheit’, the German bild being ambiguous between ‘picture’ and ‘representation’.)11 For Wittgenstein, the crucial point is that there has to be something about the proposition’s structure which reflects the structure of the fact to which it corresponds.12 Such differences notwithstanding however, there is – so far as I can see – no version of the correspondence view which can make much room for political thought. One reason why lies in the way it standardises, and thereby oversimplifies the notion of a fact. We’ll come to that in this chapter’s concluding section. Another lies with its difficulty in accounting for the meaning, and force of moral terms. Let us now turn to that.

Verificationism and the Language of Morality By ‘the language of morality’ I mean the range of linguistic activities connected in one way or another with the fact that, just as we are rational animals or political animals, so we are moral animals. It’s a broad category. It includes judgements we make concerning specific actions by one or another of our fellow creatures; that some person’s action was good or right, or that it was bad or wrong. So much is obvious. It also includes further terms of appraisal, as when we judge that a person’s action was saintly, noble, or selfless – or else that it was unworthy, deceitful, or thoughtless. There are many such terms. The category, ‘the language of morality’ also includes the language with which we frame broader conceptions – the cosmological, theological, or philosophical conceptions in terms of which we conceive our situation in the world and our relationships to others. Accordingly, it also includes the language we use to defend those conceptions in intellectual terms

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against criticism – including criticism coming from those who hold other conceptions. I could elaborate further. However, my point is to draw attention to the discrepancy between the wide and diverse range of linguistic activities by which the language of morality is in fact constituted and, on the other hand, the spare picture painted by Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic.13 According to Ayer, when it comes to ethics, the problem facing verificationism is simply that of accounting for the meaning of propositions which fall into a special category of their own; what he calls ‘statements of value’. These are propositions which describe an action or a state of affairs as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’. There may be a few more items on the list. Even so, it’s rather limited range of predicates. (In Language, Truth, and Logic, Ayer’s example of a ‘statement of value’ is, ‘Stealing money is wrong’.) This is, to say the least, an etiolated account of what is really involved in the formulation of moral judgements. In reality, moreover, we do not – or not normally – behave like sniffer dogs trying to locate the drugs by their particular smell. Nor, for that matter, do we behave like wine-tasters, sensitively attempting, with their taste-buds, to separate the excellent from the bland, and both from the downright undrinkable. But, in effect, that is what Ayer’s assumption that the task of moral philosophy is to determine the meaning of ‘statements of value’ – statements that ‘x is good’, (or bad, or right, or wrong) – amounts to. With that, together with other assumptions informing verificationism, it is no wonder that he had difficulty in accounting for the meaning of moral language. To take those assumptions in turn, there is (i) the assumption that language’s main function is to describe, and (ii) the accompanying assumption that description itself is a matter of there being a correspondence between propositions on the one hand and facts on the other. With those assumptions, verificationism is faced with the question of determining what facts there can be to which ‘statements of value’ correspond. According to the verification principle, (iii) to be meaningful a proposition must either be necessarily true (or necessarily false) of, if not that, it must be open to test empirically. However, a moral ‘value judgement’ such as ‘stealing money is wrong’ appears to be neither. If it is true, that is not because it does no more than assert a logical relationship between certain terms. On the other hand, nor are there bundles of sense data corresponding to ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’. Therefore, ‘stealing money is wrong does not resemble’ – say – ‘the bus is red’, for only in the latter case is there a sense datum – a red sense datum – corresponding to the predicate term. In the case of the language of morality, the foregoing difficulties are compounded by a further complication. This arises from the fact that propositions which are purely descriptive carry no implications for action. To put it bluntly, if ‘the bus is red’ is true, it doesn’t follow, either that you should get on the bus or that you should not. By contrast, ‘stealing money is wrong’ carries with it the implication that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else should steal money. A verificationist theory of meaning ought to be capable of explaining why this should be so. Moreover, it ought to be capable of explaining why this difficulty arises only in

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the case of moral evaluation, and not in the case of, say, aesthetic evaluation. In the latter case, you might be persuaded that some work of art – a painting, say – is an excellent example of its genre. However, while that might persuade you to visit the gallery where it is on show, it wouldn’t put you under an obligation to do so. (It might be that you are just not interested in art.) To summarise: Verificationism has difficulty in accounting for the language of morality (i) because it construes moral language narrowly, on the model, of propositions which ascribe certain predicates (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’) to their subjects; (ii) because, by focusing upon language’s descriptive function, it is faced with the problem of defining what it is that ‘judgements of value’ describe, and (iii) also by focusing upon language’s descriptive function it has difficulty in explaining why moral judgements should carry implications for action.

Ayer’s Solution Ayer’s solution to these difficulties is well-known – ‘notorious’ might be a better word. It’s shortcomings are equally notorious. It is to argue that since, ‘the fundamental ethical concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur’ – since, in other words – they fit into neither of the categories defined by the verification principle – they must be ‘mere pseudo-concepts’. They are unanalysable, according to Ayer, because, ‘the presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content’. He goes on to argue that, if I say, ‘Stealing money is wrong’ it is ‘as if I had written “Stealing money!!” – where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed’. This is, in short, the famous ‘emotive theory of ethics. Ayer writes: It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false. Another man may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that he may not have the same feelings that I have, and he may quarrel with me on account of my moral sentiments. But he cannot, strictly speaking, contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement, not even a statement about my own state of mind. I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments. And the man who is ostensibly contradicting me is merely expressing his moral sentiments. So that there is plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is asserting a genuine proposition. (1936/2001: 107) The main difficulty with the emotive theory is, I think, well-known. It is that the theory assimilates ethical judgements to the expression of preference or taste. Against this, suppose that two people, P and Q, are dining in an Italian restaurant. Suppose, also, that P likes pasta but dislikes pizza, and that P therefore has a reason for selecting

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pasta from the menu. Conversely, if Q dislikes pasta but likes pizza, then Q has a reason for choosing the latter. The point is that there is no genuine disagreement between the two – no sense in asking which person is in the right – for there is nothing at issue here except preference. If Ayer’s emotivism were right, a case of disagreement over the rights and wrongs of stealing money would parallel this example. But that cannot be right, for assimilating these examples would be to ignore the imperative element in moral judgement. Whereas, pasta-loving P does not say to Q, ‘I like pasta, so I’m going to choose pasta, and you should choose pasta too’, the person who states, ‘I think that stealing money is morally wrong’ does mean to suggest that no-one ought to steal money’, not even those who claim to disagree. The manner in which each statement serves as a reason – it’s force, if you like – is, thus, different in each case. (To this familiar point, it’s worth adding that another way to appreciate the inadequacy of Ayer’s emotive theory is to measure it against cases of absolute moral catastrophe. For example, what if someone was to deny that the Holocaust was evil? Would it really be an adequate response to this person to say, ‘Oh well. Its up to you. It’s just a matter of taste, I guess’?)

Other Solutions Before moving on to the concluding section of this chapter, it’s worth pointing out that, out of possible accounts of the nature of moral language, emotivism is not the only alternative available to moral philosophers who adhere to a ‘correspondence theory’ of meaning and truth such as that enshrined in the verification principle. Two other possibilities are worth mentioning here, if briefly. One is the alternative taken by G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica. (1903) According to Moore, moral terms, such as ‘good’ and right’ denote a certain type of property – a ‘non-natural property’; one which can become known to us through our exercise of a peculiar faculty we are mysteriously supposed to possess, namely the faculty of ‘non-natural intuition’. But this claim is, at best, contentious and, at worst, mystificatory. In any case it is open to the uncomfortable question to which all arguments from intuition are open, the question of how to tell the difference between actually having the ‘right’ intuitions and mistakenly believing that you’re having them. Yet another alternative might be to follow Wittgenstein, who seems to have been a kind of mystic when it came to our apprehension of the ethical; someone who held that the realm of the latter is too deep, too fraught with significance, to be captured in mere words. Wittgenstein believed that by determining the boundaries of what can be ‘said’ in language, he was at the same time, determining those of what cannot be said and that, out of the two, the latter – the realm of the ethical – is where true value lies. That is, at least, one way to interpret the famous closing sentence of the Tractatus, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. (1922: 7)14 More to the point here, Wittgenstein’s attitude towards the political appears to have been similar. At least, it does if we are to believe his teacher of Russian, Fania Pascal, who remarked: ‘To my mind, his feeling for Russia would have had at all times more to do with Tolstoy’s moral

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teachings, with Dostoyevsky’s spiritual insights, than with any political or social matters’. (Monk: 1990: 342)15 On this, I can only comment that, while one might admire, or envy, Wittgenstein’s attitude to the inexpressible ‘ethical’ – lying beyond the bounds of ‘what can be said’ – this isn’t much help if you lack the capacity, or the seriousness, to apprehend that realm. (In other words, Wittgenstein, like Moore, offers no guidance when it comes to action.)

Conclusions The first conclusion I draw is that there is rather more to verificationism than the verification principle itself. On the contrary, verificationism in the hands of a philosopher such as Ayer conceives the principle as forming just one part of a structure – a framework of assumptions. To recap, those assumptions are as follows: 1.

2.

3.

The assumption that, if a proposition is meaningful, it must be possible to establish its truth, or its falsity, in one or the other of two way. On the one hand, its truth, or falsity, may be a matter of logical necessity. On the other hand, it may be open to empirical test. (through ‘verification’) Statements which are verifiable in neither way are meaningless ‘pseudo-propositions’. The assumption that those propositions which are open to empirical test derive their meaning through standing in a relationship of ‘correspondence’ (or ‘picturing’) to ‘sense data’ (Ayer) or ‘facts’ (Wittgenstein). The assumption that value judgements, including moral judgements – being neither necessarily true or false nor open to empirical test – fall into a special category, and that their capacity to convey meaning requires special explanation – if they are not to be meaningless, that is.

Recall, too, that my overall aim in this chapter has been to treat logical positivism as a case study. The conclusion to which my discussion is leading, then, is that the framework defined by the foregoing assumptions creates an environment within which it is difficult for the pursuit of political philosophy, in any meaningful sense, to find a place. Consider, then, the following list. Each item, below, refers to a claim or an argument advanced by a political philosopher. a. b.

c.

The claim that there are ‘human’ or ‘natural’ rights, and that these rights are so fundamental that any state ought to respect and protect them. Hobbes’s claim that humans are motivated by the desire for that which tends towards their own preservation, and aversion to that which tends towards their destruction (i.e. by fear): or Bentham’s claim that we are motivated, on the one hand, by the desire to achieve pleasure and, on the other, the desire to avoid pain. Plato’s observation that democracy must inevitably lead to rule by those skilled in manipulative oratory, and thereby deteriorate into tyranny.

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d.

e.

Part I

Likewise, Marx’s prediction that tensions inherent in capitalism’s structure will eventually culminate in a more or less violent revolution, bringing with it the system’s collapse. Rawls’s argument that rational individuals, negotiating from an ‘original position’ of equality would treat his two ‘principles of justice’ as fundamental to their system of cooperation. Proudhon’s claim that property is theft: The countervailing ‘libertarian’ claim that the taxation of property is theft.

Leaving the question of their truth or falsity to one side, I shall take it that none of the claims listed is actually meaningless. The question at issue is that of how successfully they can be handled by the verificationist assumptions with which I have been dealing in this chapter. First of all then, it is pretty clear that none can be successfully accommodated by the first assumption; the assumption that to be meaningful, the truth or falsity of a proposition must be open to logical demonstration or, if not that, open to empirical test. On the contrary, each has its place within the context of a sustained chain of philosophical reasoning, the latter being an amalgam of a priori and empirically founded elements. (Similarly, Arthur Eddington’s observation of the stars during a solar eclipse, referred to earlier, acquired its significance from its relevance to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.) By way of example, take the claims listed at (c); Plato’s that democracy must inevitably degenerate into tyranny, and Marx’s that capitalism’s eventual collapse will take the form of a violent revolution.16 These are claims based upon the analysis of specific formations – one which is political in Plato’s case, economic in Marx’s. They are claims that there is something about the structure of democracy (Plato) from which such-and-such consequences must flow. It would be hard to argue, however, that we should understand these claims to be logically necessary (and certainly not in the sense of being straightforwardly analytic in the way that ‘A triangle is a three-sided figure’ is analytic’). (On the other hand, nor are the claims in question straightforwardly open to empirical test. Show Plato a democracy which has not degenerated into tyranny, and it would be open to him to say, ‘Not yet!’. Marx could make the same response to an example of a capitalist system which had not (yet?) collapsed with a revolution.) What of the second assumption, that propositions which are open to empirical test derive their meaning through standing in a one-to-one relationship of ‘correspondence’ – to ‘sense data’, for example. There is little point in dwelling on this. It stands and falls with the first, for it simply describes to what it is that those propositions which are open to empirical test are supposed to correspond. To the extent that the meaningful character of the claims made by political philosophers is not a matter of their being straightforwardly open to empirical test, the assumption is irrelevant. The case of the third assumption, that there are ‘statements of value’ which stand in need of special explanation is more complex. If this assumption were applicable in the case of political philosophy, there would need to be political claims – ‘statements of political value’ as I suppose they could be called – which

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were analogous to these. However, the list of claims (a) to (e) does not suggest that there could be any such category, for while each item on the list refers to a claim or an argument, advanced by a political philosopher in the context of a wider theory, there is no feature other than that, which is common to all the claims listed? In fact, the differences between the claims listed are fairly wide. It is, thus, pretty obvious – or so I should think – that, out of the list, only claim (a) – the claim that we have ‘human’ or ‘natural’ rights – counts, straightforwardly, as a claim of morality (or ‘ethical statement’.) I suppose that something similar could be true of the claims listed at (e) – Proudhon’s claim that property is theft and the ‘libertarian’ claim that isn’t. Other items on the list are more problematic. The claims listed at (b), for example, refer to what are (according to Hobbes and Bentham, respectively) the fundamental factors by which humans are motivated to act; claims listed at (c) is are predictions, one by Plato and the other by Marx, and claim (d) a description of the factors which, according to Rawls, make a choice rational. From the absence of any common factor here, it follows that there cannot be a distinct class of propositions – ‘statements of political value’ – with special characteristics of their own. In fact, some of the claims listed might have been ‘standalone’ in the sense that they might not have figured in any political philosopher’s argument.

‘The Scientific View of the World’: Descartes’s Legacy It is no wonder, then, that Peter Laslett should have held logical positivism largely to blame for the murder of political philosophy. Of course, his charge would have been unconvincing had logical positivism not been a major presence within philosophy, and there was a period during which it was just that. The really powerful influence at work here, however, is not that of a particular philosophical doctrine, logical positivism, but that of the assumptions around which it is framed. Their origins can be traced back to the seventeenth century – at least as far back as then – and they have continued to maintain a powerful hold upon thought ever since. Indeed, the verification principle itself is, arguably, a recent descendant of Descartes’s view that there is such a thing as a scientific ‘method’; that is a set of procedures which, if routinely followed, will lead to the discovery of previously unknown facts. (See, for example, Descartes 1637/1999) In Descartes’s version there are ‘rules for the direction of the mind’ which supposedly resemble the procedures followed by mathematicians. In the verificationist version of the story, you start by sorting propositions into boxes labelled ‘necessary’, ‘contingent’, or ‘meaningless’ and then you move on from there. (I am not a scientist myself, but I am sure that qualities, such as imagination and intuition have a greater role to play in the process of scientific discovery than this ‘science by numbers’ model suggests.) But more influential than even that is the particular representation of the relationship between the self and the world which lies at verificationism’s heart. We are pictured in a passive role, as receptors of information. In most versions,

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including Descartes’s and Ayer’s, it is held to reach us in the form of ‘ideas’ or ‘sense data’ – images which are projected, as it were, upon an inner cinema screen. Language is portrayed as the reflection of the latter, ‘corresponding’ to sense data or, as in Wittgenstein’s version, ‘picturing’ facts in some other way. With that picture, it is no wonder that verificationism has trouble explaining – for example – the relationship between our knowledge of moral ‘facts’ and the requirement for action consequent upon that knowledge. It seems to me that some such picture – some half-articulated set of assumptions – lies at the heart of many a philosophical doctrine. If the verificationist picture is at all ‘scientific’ it lies, I suppose, in the suggestion that taking a scientific attitude means observing reality and describing it rather than interacting with it (and I’m sure that even that suggestion can be quite misleading.) But then there are alternative ways to represent our relationship to the world around us. One is to recognise that we are, as Aristotle put it, ‘political animals’, by which he meant that it is part of our biological nature that we come into the world as inhabitants of organisations, such as cities and states. (See Aristotle 335BCE/1981: 59) Almost as soon as we become aware of anything at all, we become aware of others with whom we must share the world, of the consequent necessity to form and negotiate relationships with them, and to formulate principles upon which to base those relationships. In short, we come into the world as actors – nor as mere observers – and we have to figure out how to act. Viewed in this light, political philosophy is simply one aspect of the manner in which we seek to deal with the relationships which hold between ourselves and others within the political realm. View the world in that light, and it is difficult to see how the factual claims made by political philosophers could not have implications for action.17 It’s a theme to which we shall be returning.

Notes 1 The doctrine’s founders preferred to call it ‘logical empiricism’. 2 For the Bauhaus manifesto go to https://bauhausmanifesto.com. There is an English translation of the Vienna Circle’s manifesto The Scientific Conception of the World in Sarkar (1996) pp. 321–40. 3 See Magee (1978): p. 107. 4 Something like this appears to be Wittgenstein’s view, ‘The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world’. (Tractatus 4.014) (Wittgenstein held that a proposition is a ‘logical picture’ of a fact.) 5 For example, some logicians may quarrel with Ayer’s contention that all logically necessary truths are ‘analytic’, and to invoke Kant’s notion of the ‘synthetic a priori. These issues are not epecially relevant to the present discussion. 6 Another example is, ‘The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of evolution and progress’. (Moritz Schlick, cited by Ayer at 1936/2001: 36) Schlick is citing a line from F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. The choice is hardly accidental. Bradley was a neo-Hegelian ‘idealist’ philosopher, someone whose work embodied just the sort of ‘metaphysical’ windbaggery the positivists detested. 7 It’s ironic that, in 1988, Ayer should have had a near death experience. He was seriously ill with pneumonia. He records, for example, having been ‘confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright and also very painful’, and having been ‘aware that this light was

A Case Study: Logical Positivism

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10 11 12

13 14

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responsible for the government of the universe’. Like the good atheist he was, however, Ayer writes that these experiences, ‘have not weakened my conviction that there is no god’. (Sunday Telegraph: 1988). The reference is to Tractatus, paragraph 4, sub paragraph 001. It’s the numbering system Wittgenstein uses in that book. Both were attached to the Vienna Circle, although somewhat tenuously. Ayer spent time with the Circle, as a visitor, for a short period in 1933. Wittgenstein was more heavily involved with the group, but there were various aspects of the programme with which he felt ill-at-ease. For one thing, his somewhat mystical attitude to the ethical realm was at odds with their ‘hard-headed’ anti-metaphysical stance, specifically, in their manifesto of 1929, and in their rather too rigid adherence to the verification principle. (See Monk 1990: 283 & 387–8.) Without this supposition, Berkeley’s critique of Locke on ‘abstract general ideas’ wouldn’t make sense for Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s doctrine, see Berkeley (1988–1710) p.38ff. See Janik and Toulmin (1973), chapter 5, especially p.139ff. In my case, the most obvious example with which to illustrate the difference between a picture and a representation is the map of the London Underground system. (If you’re not familiar with that, then I guess pretty well any big-city metro-map will illustrate the same point.) This is a ‘representation’ of the system in the sense that it displays the lines upon which the various stations are situated and the relationships between those stations; the latter being the relationships you need to be aware of if you want to travel from one point in the system to another. It is, thus, a representation of the system’s structure It is not an image, though. The differences between stations are not represented as scaled-down versions of the distances which actually pertain – and stare at the map as long as you like and you will never see pictures of little trains as they move along the lines. Ayer’s account of ‘ethical statements is contained in Language, Truth, and Logic, chapter 6. Hence his remark that, ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one, and hence his further comment that, ‘I believe that … many others today are just gassing’. (Letter to Ludwig Ficker, cited from Janik & Toulmin, p. 192) (So that’s what he meant when he wrote that, ‘a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics … . would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. [Lecture on Ethics, pp. 2–3]) Wittgenstein had been planning a visit to the Soviet Union, along with his lover, Francis Skinner). Note that I’m referring to ‘the political’ advisedly here, and not to political theory. Wittgenstein was, apparently, hostile to Marxism. (Remember that this was less than twenty years after the Russian Revolution, and, in a place like Cambridge, Marxism would have been very much in the intellectual air.) As one of his friends remarked, however, ‘He was opposed to it in theory, but supported it in practice’. Such comments suggest that Wittgenstein would have drawn a clear line between philosophical treatments of politics, such as Marx’s, and the linguistically inexpressible goodness inherent in a true worker’s state; with the former belonging to the category of textbooks which ought to self-destruct in a huge explosion, and the latter belonging to the realm of what cannot be said. A similar impression is created by Wittgenstein’s own (reported) remark that, ‘I am a communist, at heart’. (Monk 1990: 343) For Plato’s critique of democracy, see Plato 375 BCE/1987: 32) For Marx’s prediction see Marx (2000/1859). With this point, I owe something to Hannah Arendt, See especially Arendt (1998/1958).

3 A NOTE ON EXPECTATIONS

It can often happen that there is a difference between the expectations of an intellectual discipline held by ‘lay’ individuals – those whose familiarity with it is, if anything, passing – and, on the other hand, the aims and objectives entertained by its actual practitioners. This can happen, even when the expectations in question are perfectly reasonable. The character of the contrast can differ over time, of course, and in the case of philosophy during the period with which we are concerned, it was particularly marked. In fact, it might be more accurate to describe it as having been a yawning gap. In this chapter, I offer a few reflections on the point. I shall return to my account of how the linguistic movement relegated political philosophy to the intellectual sidelines in the next. As a start, take two assumptions concerning the relationship of philosophy to politics. First: the presumption that political questions are one of philosophy’s special concerns. I do not mean the supposition that every philosopher is concerned with such questions, but I do have in mind the idea that a great many philosophers will be interested in bringing their ideas to bear upon them. In my experience, it is an assumption made by many, and it is also – I think – a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. After all, ‘lay’ individuals are likely to have formed the (correct) impression that philosophy is a ‘deep’ subject, one whose business is to make sense of the world’s most fundamental features. Add to that the supposition that the political realm is one such feature – that we are, as Aristotle put it, ‘political animals’ – and it becomes impossible to avoid the assumption in question. Moreover, it seems to me that intelligent people who know little about philosophy are likely, even so, to have heard of Plato and to know that his Republic (375BCE/1987) is a political text. They will certainly be aware of Marx’s revolutionary, anti-capitalist intentions, and some will have read the popular essays contained in Russell’s Political Ideals (1917/2017) Many more will know something of his political activism. DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-4

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A second assumption relates to political philosophy in particular, and it is that the work of a political philosopher ought to make a serious, more-than-ordinary contribution to our understanding of political events. This is also an entirely reasonable view. After all, since philosophy involves the pursuit of understanding through the use of reason, shouldn’t political philosophy be a matter of applying philosophical reasoning to a specific set of questions, namely political questions? One might easily be forgiven for thinking so. Moreover, to think so is to take a view of the subject which is supported by the fact that so many of the discipline’s ‘classical’ texts are related, in one way or another, to some social or political upheaval. You only have to think of Plato’s Republic, for example, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government, or most of Marx’s writings. The first of those listed is more than an exercise in abstract utopianism. The imaginary state it describes is, in fact, an idealisation of the Spartan regime, and it was with Sparta that Plato, likewise his mentor Socrates, had tended to side during the Peloponnesian War (which lasted from 431 until 404BCE). As for Hobbes, doesn’t everyone know that Leviathan was written as a direct response to the events of the English Civil War (1642–51)? Locke’s hugely influential Second Treatise started life as a kind of manifesto (or apologia) for the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, a key event in British constitutional history, and there is an obvious relationship between Marx’s work and the seismic social alterations which went hand-in-hand with the industrial revolution. Of course, it would be artificial to associate every great work of political thought with a specific upheaval, but the connection is strong enough – and frequent enough – to make the point. And now think of events which took place during the period which stretched from around 1924, the year of the Vienna Circle’s foundation, to 1971, the year which saw the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. As ‘marker dates’ those are – I know – rough and ready, but they will serve to indicate the beginning and the end of the period with which we are concerned in these chapters. It lasted for about forty-five years. To have lived through that period would have been to experience the aftermath of the First World War, the latter followed by the great depression of the 1920s and 30s, and then another world war. It would have been to have witnessed the rise and subsequent collapse of fearsome totalitarian regimes, Hitler’s and Stalin’s, the perverted cruelties of the Holocaust, the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all this followed by a long ‘cold-war’ standoff. In addition to all that, readers will hardly need reminding that the technological changes which took place over that period were enormous. It’s a short and selective list, I know, but it’s enough to be going on with. With those assumptions, and that list, in mind, now recall Peter Laslett’s remark that, at the time of his writing political philosophy was actually dead. Suppose that his remark was true; suppose, that is, that the number of contributions to have been made to the subject had been absolutely zero. Given the enormity of the events and the changes which took place during the same period, that would be more than surprising. Indeed, if you think of political philosophy as I do – that is,

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as involving the use of reason in an attempt to make sense of events, including terrible events – it would seem to add up to a dereliction of duty. But then, as I pointed out in chapter two, Laslett was stating a half-truth. His remark stands to be qualified on the grounds that, in fact, significant contributions to political philosophy were made during his time.1 By way of example, I mentioned works by Karl Popper, C.B.MacPherson, and Michael Oakeshott. The list suggests that, contrary to Laslett’s claim, political philosophy was very much alive and kicking. The point about half-truths, though, is that they are only half false, and while it is true that the writers I mentioned did make significant contributions to political thought, it is also the case that there is no overall conception of philosophy – of what it is and what it is for – which they all shared. Poppers’s The Open Society and It’s Enemies is, thus, a critique of Plato, Marx, and Hegel from which he draws lessons for our understanding of modern totalitarianism. It’s an important piece of work in which Popper addresses seriously disconcerting contemporary questions. (Published in 1945, Popper described it as his ‘war work’.) It is sui generis however. MacPherson’s approach to the history of thought, in The Political Philosophy of Possessive Individualism, is broadly Marxist. Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics is an exercise in Burkean conservatism.2 This diversity of approach marks one respect in which these works contrasted with work being done in other areas of philosophy – especially in the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge, and the philosophy of mind; writers, such as Ayer, Austin, Ryle and – of course – Wittgenstein himself participated in the consensus that a focus upon the workings of language held the key to the resolution of philosophical questions. That is, at least, one reason for describing their view as ‘mainstream’. The truth in Laslett’s (half-true) remark, then is that political philosophy had been sidelined by followers of the ‘mainstream’.

Two Misconceptions To this, I should add that the latter was a mainstream of thought framed largely in the English language, and by writers who saw themselves as following ‘Englishspeaking’ philosophical traditions. In fact, the point that the latter is fundamentally apolitical was made by Ayer himself in an essay of 1969 entitled, ‘Philosophy and Politics’. As he put it in the opening sentence, ‘Whenever I have occasion to study the work of contemporary French philosophers, like Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, I am struck by the very great difference which there is between their conception of the scope and purpose of philosophy and the conception which has come to prevail in England in the course of the last thirty years’. (Ayer 1969) He went on to remark that, ‘They are very much less inclined than we are to regard philosophy as a special subject, with its own problems, its own technical terms, its own standards of proof and no very obvious bearing upon anything else’, and he described this as ‘one important issue’ which ‘may well not be to our advantage’ when it comes to the difference between British and French philosophy. (ibid.) Of particular relevance here, just at the moment, is Ayer’s observation that the French

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connect their philosophy ‘more closely’ with politics, so much so that, ‘Sartre’s demand that philosophers should be committed (engagés) does not mean only that they are expected to have views on political and social issues, but that they should give their views a philosophical backing’. (ibid) Ayer may well have a point. My only reason for raising the subject just here, though, is in order to dispel a misconception which I may have been in danger of fostering throughout this book’s discussion so far. I mean that I may have been creating the mistaken impression that philosophers working within the ‘analytic’ tradition (as it is sometimes called) took no interest in political affairs. In fact, twentieth-century history contains examples of notable philosophers, working within the latter tradtion, who were also politically committed and politically active. As it happens, Ayer’s own career serves as an illustration of the point. Especially in his earlier years, he was a politically active radical who sided with the Republican side in Spain. He flirted with the idea of joining the Communist Party although, in the end, he joined the Labour Party instead. As for Bertrand Russell, it is well known that he was politically active throughout his life; from World War One, when he served time in prison for pacificism, right up until the final decades of his life, when he was an active supporter of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.3 As for the Vienna circle, while it is true that logical positivism has no political implications – at any rate, while the theory itself has no such implications – the attitudes of its individual members provide an interesting case study. In fact, and as David Edmonds details in his historical study, The Murder pf Professor Schlick (2020), there were several reasons for which the fascists who ruled Austria during the 1930s would have been hostile to the Circle’s existence. One is the claim, in its manifesto, that ‘we have to fashion intellectual tools for everyday life, for the daily life of the scholar, but also for the daily life of all those who in some way join in the conscious re-shaping of life’. (ibid: 133) At the time, the Marxist connotations of this remark would have been clear. As Edmonds points out, ‘While the new apparatus of logic was to be used by the Circle to transform philosophy, so the technical, rational planning of the Austro-Marxists could and would [according to one member, Otto Neurath] transform society’ (ibid.) Another is that, while not Marxist, most of the Circle had leftist leanings; yet another, that there was a strong Jewish element to the membership. Add to this the consideration that Heidegger – a major object of the Circle’s hostility – was renowned, not only for the profound vacuity of his prose, but also for the cynical opportunism with which he had embraced Nazism and it’s a reasonable guess that there may have been tensions in the febrile atmosphere of ‘Red Vienna’ to which a relative tourist such as Ayer would have been oblivious. (Still, that’s a point for historians to consider.) If there is a difference here between the French approach to philosophy and that taken by philosophers working within the English-speaking tradition, it has been that, unlike the former, the latter have, as Ayer puts it, tended to treat their political activities as ‘extra-curricular’. In other words, they have tended not to bring their philosophical beliefs to bear upon their political views. On the

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contrary, they have tended to keep them quite separate. Ayer offers a number of explanations for this difference. He surmises that one lies in, ‘the Cartesian division of the French academic system’ with philosophy belonging to the Faculté des Lettres and not to the Faculté des Sciences’; that another lies in ‘the difference in the strength and appeal of our respective Communist parties’. Ayer’s comment on the latter point is that, while ’only a small minority of French philosophers are Marxists … the others tend to find it necessary not only to take a view about Marxism, but also to show that they have a better line of goods to offer in the same market’. I am not qualified to comment upon the former explanation. However, I am sure that the latter must be wrong, if only because the tendency of Anglophone philosophers to keep their work in epistemology and logic separate from their political writings goes right back to the seventeenth century, well before anyone had heard of Marx – in fact, well before Marx was born … When you consider just how influential some of those political writings have been, the disjuncture is almost comical. Think, for example, of the yawning difference between Locke’s (ponderous) Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his (imaginative, revolutionary) Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690/1993); or think of that between J.S.Mill’s (over-long and tedious) A System of Logic (1843/1970) and (inspiring texts such as) On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, or On the Subjection of Women.4

Weldon: ‘Positivist Opposition’ to ‘Futile Verbal Disputes’ A second misconception which I may well have been tending to create – and which I ought now to dispel – is that, during the period in question, there were produced no works of political philosophy which reflected what I have been calling the ‘mainstream’. Admittedly, there were few, but there were some, and for an example with which to illustrate the point, one could do worse than select T.D. Weldon’s The Vocabulary of Politics. (1953) Consider, for example, the way Weldon opens with an expression of what might be described as mainstream philosophy’s ‘official manifesto’. He writes: ‘During the last century there has occurred a great change in the methods and aims of professional philosophers in this country [i.e. Britain] and in the United States’ and, as he goes on to explain: What has happened is that philosophers have become extremely selfconscious about language. They have come to realise that many of the problems which their predecessors have found insuperable arose not from anything mysterious or inexplicable in the world but from the eccentricities of the language in which we try to describe the world’. (ibid: 9) Since Weldon’s book is one of the few works of political philosophy to have taken what was the ‘official’ line, it’s worth pausing, if briefly, to consider the arguments it contains. Some of these reflect positions commonly taken by philosophers

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during linguistic philosophy’s ‘later’ period – the period to which we shall be turning in the next chapter. One example is the thesis to which I have just referred; the thesis that, philosophical problems, including the problems of political philosophy, arise, ‘not from anything mysterious or inexplicable in the world but from the eccentricities of the language in which we try to describe the world’. (ibid) Another is Weldon’s critique of what he calls ‘the essentialist assumption’. This is the assumption that, for every word, there is a common entity – a common ‘something’ – for which it stands, and that it is from this ‘naming’ relationship that the word acquires meaning. It is, as Weldon puts it, a mistake which, ‘arises from the primitive and generally unquestioned belief that words, and especially words which normally occur in discussions about politics, such as “State”, “Citizen”, “Law”, and “Liberty” have intrinsic or essential meanings which it is the aim of political philosophers to discover and explain’. (ibid: 11–12) It’s a point which echoes the critique of essentialism contained in the earlier sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. (See PI: 65ff) Wittgenstein was not concerned with political conceptions, however. It’s a point which Weldon develops – quite unpersuasively – into an argument that variations of the same mistake form a line which can be traced running throughout the history of political philosophy from Plato’s time onwards. Accordingly, he spends a fair amount of time detailing three ‘illusions’ which, as he thinks, have tended to inform (what he calls) ‘classical political philosophy’. These are the ‘essentialist’ illusion, just described, ‘the illusion of absolute standards’ and ‘the illusion of geometric method’. In each case, the illusion consists in the assumption that purpose of political philosophy is to determine the extent to which this or that set of political institutions matches some theoretical ideal, which might be the essential element for which a word may stand when used in different contexts (essentialism), some standard of measurement akin to the physicists notion of absolute space or time (‘absolute standards’) or an abstract entity resembling the ‘ideal’ triangle studied by geometers. In a later chapter, a great deal of ‘classical’ political philosophy – Rousseau’s account of democracy, the idea that we have natural rights, the idea of a social contract, Hegelian dialectic, and more besides – is dismissed on the grounds that it rests on the mistaken assumption that the evaluation of political institutions can be shown to rest upon ‘foundations’. ‘The greater part of classical political philosophy’, he writes, ‘is concerned with recommending and providing worthless logical grounds for the adoption or perpetuation of axioms and definitions involving political words like “State”, “law”, and “rights”’. (ibid: 41) Fortunately, there is no need to dwell upon the specifics of Weldon’s argument here (although we shall be returning to his text, albeit briefly, in the following chapter). I will simply add that he also makes assumptions, similar to those which informed logical positivism. One is that the task of philosophers – including himself – is the removal of so much ‘metaphysical lumber’. (ibid: 15) Another is that abstract theorising needs to be replaced by hard-headed empiricism. The parallels between this and the logical positivists’ rejection of metaphysics in favour

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of the verification principle ought to be obvious, and it is with these assumptions that Weldon is able to portray himself as a soldier in the army of ‘positivist opposition’ to ‘futile verbal disputes’. As he puts the point in his concluding paragraph, ‘when verbal confusions are tidied up most of the questions of traditional political philosophy are not unanswerable. All of them are, however, ‘confused formulations of purely empirical difficulties’. According to Weldon, this means that, ‘writers on political institutions and statesmen, not philosophers, are the proper people to deal with them’. (ibid: 192–3, my italics) It is clearly Weldon’s view that political philosophy is rather a waste of time. For an illustration of the uneasy fit between the suppositions of the linguistic movement and the aspirations of political philosophy, you need hardly look further.

On First Impressions Finally on the subject of expectation, reality, and the gap between the two, let me turn to the difference between two passages; one drawn from Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949/1963); the other from Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, Existentialism and Humanism. (1946/1948) To take Ryle first, here is what he has to say in partial explanation of his contention that ‘“pleasure” [the word] can be used to signify at least two different types of things’. There is [one] sense [of the term ‘pleasure’] in which it is commonly replaced by the ‘verbs’ enjoy and ‘like’. To say that a person has been enjoying digging is not to say that he has been both digging and doing or experiencing something else as a concomitant or effect of the digging; it is to say that he dug with his whole heart in his task, i.e. that he dug, wanting to dig and not wanting to do anything else (or nothing) instead. His digging was a propensity fulfilment. His digging was his pleasure, and not a vehicle of his pleasure. (1949/1963: 104) Now suppose that you are a ‘lay’ reader; someone unfamiliar with philosophy, but lacking in expertise. Suppose, too, that you would like to know more about the subject. Perhaps you are such a reader, and perhaps that is why you are reading this book. My question is: What impression of the subject might you gain from having read the passage just quoted? In answer, my guess is that, while, perhaps, admiring the acute perspicuity of Ryle’s analysis – the accuracy of his observation that enjoying an activity is a matter of becoming completely absorbed in it – you might also wonder what the point of the exercise might be. Perhaps you will wonder if it can really be true that grownups – highly intelligent, highly educated grownups at that – waste their time upon pursuits as mind-numbingly trivial as that of trying to demonstrate that pleasure is not ‘a feeling’ (which is the purpose of Ryle’s argument).

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In fact, such an impression would be unfair, for Ryle was one of a whole set of philosophers, working during the 1950s and 1960s with the intention of breaking down the Cartesian representation of the mind–body relationship. By that, I mean the theoretical model which represents the mental world as if it consisted of events, activities, and objects contained within an inner ‘box’ – with sensations, for example, portrayed as if they are projected onto a sort of inner cinema screen and perceived by an inner eye. It’s an exercise which derives significance from the fact that the model has been so influential and for such a long period, not just in philosophy, but in fields such as psychology. (As we saw in the previous chapter, it has a role to play in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, published as recently as the middle years of the last century.) Nor were the concerns which originally informed the shift within philosophy to a preoccupation with language – a preoccupation clearly manifest in Ryle’s work – in any way trivial. To illustrate the point you need only consider the story of the Vienna Circle’s formation; although the debates which initially fuelled the latter – debates over precisely what scientific observation had established – have long since run out of steam. Still, I am talking about first impressions here, and you have to admit that, whatever its wider significance may be, it isn’t immediately apparent from the passage quoted that Ryle’s is much more than an exercise in pedantry. Now contrast Ryle’s description of enthusiastic digging with Sartre’s account of how he was once visited by a student seeking advice. This was during the 1940s when, of course, France was suffering under occupation by the Nazis. According to Sartre, the young man found himself in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a ‘collaborator’; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French forces or of staying near his mother and of helping her to live. He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. (ibid: 39–40) The example is famous, and some readers will be quite familiar with it, so perhaps I should apologise to those readers for having quoted Sartre in such detail. The detail is essential, however, for, without it, it would be impossible to convey the seriousness of the situation in which Sartre’s student found himself. We are, after

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all, talking about a decision which could be a matter of life and death (of the mother, of the student himself), and which involves a conflict of deep loyalties – to one’s family or to one’s nation. As Sartre put it himself in response to a question, ‘Obviously I do not mean that whenever I choose between a millefeuille and a chocolate éclair, I choose in anguish’. (ibid: 71)5 Readers familiar with Sartre’s example will know that its point is to illustrate that there is no ready-made, ‘off-the-peg’ system of moral principles upon which the student can draw in order to reach a decision. It is simply that, ‘he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity’ and that, at the same time he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. (ibid: 40) Such readers will also be familiar with the advice Sartre, proffered. It was simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do; no signs are vouchsafed in this world’. (ibid: 43) Well maybe: Like many, you may well be inclined to take Sartre’s advice as representing a seriously disturbing feature of the modern human condition. That is, clearly, how we are meant to take it. On the other hand, you might consider it one of philosophy’s most notorious cop-outs. Still, it is not my purpose just at the moment to question Sartre’s point any more than it is to question Ryle’s. It is simply to point out that we have two very different images of ‘the philosopher’ on offer here. On the one hand, with Ryle we are presented with the enthusiastic digger of gardens, someone who digs wanting to dig and not wanting to do anything else, and who, as we also learn, can sometimes become absorbed in some activity ‘such as golf or argument’. (Ryle ibid: 104) Garden-digging and golf may have their attractions but they are – it has to be said – typically pursuits of the middle-aged middle-class suburban male – and a middle-aged, middle-class suburban male who is, not only that, but preoccupied with fine distinctions between different attitudes to garden-digging is not an especially attractive figure (at least, not if you don’t fall into that category yourself). You wouldn’t want to find yourself having to talk to this person at a party. On the other hand, in Sartre’s case, we are presented with an image of the philosopher as someone especially qualified to offer serious advice upon how to act in serious situations. Moreover, it is advice which actually derives from a philosophical position. (As Ayer pointed out in an essay to which I referred earlier, it is characteristic of the French attitude towards philosophers, ‘[not] only that they are expected to have views on political and social issues, but that they should give their views a philosophical backing’.) (Ayer 1965) With that, now suppose, as I suggested, that you are interested in philosophy but that you do not, as yet, know a great deal about the subject. You would like to know more. If you like, suppose – more precisely – that you are thinking of taking a course in the subject. Perhaps you are young, and you are wondering what the

A Note on Expectations

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implications of your studies will be for the way your life will turn out subsequently. Out of the two hypothesised archetypes I have just sketched – the philosopher as an enthusiastic garden-digger on the one hand; the philosopher as a radical guru on the other – which would you choose to be your mentor? It’s hard to see why anyone would go for the former. On that score, it’s easy enough to appreciate the seductive power of a certain version of ‘existentialist’ life in Paris during the 1940s – all black sweaters, free sex, Juliette Greco’s singing voice (lyrics by Sartre), and clouds of smoke from a hundred Gauloises cigarettes. To that, add Sartre and de Beauvoir at tables in the Café Flore or the Deux Magots, writing or arguing late into the night, and you will get the picture. In her, At The Existentialist Café (2016), Sarah Bakewell eloquently describes how, as an adolescent living in the provincial town of Reading, she was inspired to study philosophy by reading Sartre’s Nausea. (1938/1963) She writes, ‘From then on, I too neglected my studies in order to exist. I had already been inclined to absenteeism; now, under Sartre’s influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. Instead of going to school, I got myself an unofficial part-time job in a Caribbean emporium selling reggae records and decorative hash pipes. It provided a more interesting education than I had ever had in a classroom’. (2016: loc.488) Something like the ambience of post-war Saint-Germain had been, it seems, transported to a record shop in suburban Reading. The only trouble was that. ‘on the other hand, he [Sartre] also made me [Bakewell] want to study philosophy’. (ibid) There are many who can tell similar stories – including me. I can well remember truanting from school on ‘games-afternoons’ and – avoiding cricket or the even-more-hated rugby football – walking to a nearby cinema, the Kilburn ‘Classic’ – where one or another of the latest French movies would be showing. (In suburban London, this was unusual at the time.) These were shot in the open street with hand-held cameras, they were in grainy black-and-white, and their scores tended to consist of no more than the occasional burst of classical music. In short, they had style, and were quite different from the Hollywood fare generally on offer. (In any case, who would want to be Tony Curtis or John Wayne, when it was obvious that Jean-Paul Belmondo was the guy to pull the sexy girl-friends.) Bakewell’s picture of ‘existentialist’ life is somewhat romanticised. In any case, the idea, or image, of philosophy which first attracts a person to the subject is something which can vary from person to person and, likewise, over time. For example, it’s obvious that it was Wittgenstein’s charismatic presence which drew a wartime generation of academics to the subject, and to pursue the ‘linguistic’ route through it. Or again, consider Douglas Hofstadter’s reminiscence of how, as a fifteen-year old, he discovered that the Vienna Circle had once existed. I will always remember my extreme curiosity, even excitement, when I espied the provocative series of paperbacks called the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science on the shelves at Kepler’s [a bookshop]. As I browsed through these volumes, I got the clear impression that the

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greatest questions of all time were being answered at this moment in history by deep thinkers who had once belonged to the now-defunct Vienna Circle and by their close colleagues. (Sigmund 2017: xi) Hofstadter’s enthusiasm requires a caveat, though. It is that, if the ‘analytic’ philosophers of the later twentieth century came to be viewed by the outside world as an inward-looking clique, of ‘professionals’, whose esoteric activities could hardly be intelligible to outsiders, they were, in part, themselves to blame. By way of illustration, compare Sartre’s account of the young man who came to him seeking advice, with Weldon’s snooty comment in the opening paragraph of The Vocabulary of Politics, that, to understand the nature of the ’great change which has taken place in the methods and aims of professional philosophers taken place in this country [Britain]’ … ‘is difficult and perhaps impossible without a fairly thorough investigation of the technical subject matter of logic and epistemology’. Weldon adds that, however, an attempt must be made if his book ‘is to be intelligible to the non-philosophical reader’. (1953: 9) With these condescending words, Weldon tosses a few crumbs of wisdom to the peasants in the hope that, while it may be against the odds, they will gain a little enlightenment. By contrast, Sartre’s story has a direct force which can be felt, even by readers who know nothing of philosophy. That’s the true half of the half-truth.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

See chapter 2, note 1. See, respectively, Popper (1945), MacPherson (1962), and Oakeshott (1962/1991). For an illuminating account of Russell’s political career, see Ryan (1988). All three texts are contained in Gray (1991). I have to protest here. Sartre holds that the source of angst for his student, isn’t just the seriousness of the choice he has to make. It is the very fact that it is, itself, a choice. But if it’s choice which causes angst, then Sartre ought to explain why angst isn’t generated by any choice – including the choice between a millefeuille and an éclair.

4 ‘ORDINARY LANGUAGE’ AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

A Shift in Perspective The story goes that a certain exchange once took place between two emigrés. The year would have been 1940 or thereabouts and each was in chosen exile from a mainland Europe suffocating in fascism’s iron stranglehold. One party to the exchange was an Austrian philosopher (Wittgenstein). The other was an Italian economist with Marxist leanings (Wittgenstein’s Cambridge colleague, Piero Sraffa). Here is the story. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’, Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ Sraffa’s example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same ‘form’. This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes. (Malcolm 1958: 69) If the story is true, it describes an event which initiated a shift in perspective, so crucial that it was to inform the subsequent course of English-speaking philosophy for almost three decades. In fact, it would be tempting to dismiss the story as apocryphal were it not that it originated with Wittgenstein himself, and that – in the above version,1 – it was relayed by Norman Malcolm, an erstwhile pupil and long-time associate of his. As it happens, it is – I suppose – unlikely that DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-5

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Wittgenstein’s damascene conversion was quite so sudden; but then who knows? He was clearly a man of mercurial, unpredictable temperament. For our purposes the truth on that score is irrelevant, however. The story may be apocryphal or exaggerated – on the other hand, it may be plain accurate – but either way it neatly encapsulates the perspectival shift in question, and it is the shift which forms the subject of this chapter.

Wittgenstein’s Descriptive Approach to Philosophy The shift in question lay in a movement towards the idea that the key to the solution, or ‘resolution’, of philosophical difficulties lies in the requirement to pay attention to the way in which language – language as we know it – actually works; to what is actually done with words, to the contexts within which words or expressions are used, for example, and to the purposes for which they are used. In short, the study of what came to be referred to as ‘ordinary language’ moved to the centre of the philosophical stage. (In Wittgenstein’s case, it saw, thus, a move away from the idea, central to the Tractatus, that it is possible to construct a language which is ‘logically perfect’, free of the imperfections by which everyday language is encumbered.) The subject of this chapter, then, is the ability of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to handle the questions by which political philosophy tends to be preoccupied. Let me stress that I do not intend the chapter to be to be ‘all about Wittgenstein’. I shall only refer to those sections of his later philosophy which make it a suitable model from which to draw conclusions relating to ‘ordinary language philosophy’ in general. (For example, I shall have nothing to say about those sections of the Philosophical Investigations which have come to be known as ‘the private language argument’.)2 It’s true that there are differences between Wittgenstein’s approach and that taken by other philosophers of the ‘ordinary language’ school. (For example, I don’t suppose that Gilbert Ryle or J.L. Austin would have been so arrogant to suppose, as Wittgenstein did of his own work, that theirs would lead to the entire dissolution of the problems of philosophy.) For the sake of gaining an accurate picture of the times, I should also stress that, although Wittgenstein’s work had a profound influence upon the way philosophy during the later part of the twentieth century was conducted, his legacy did not consist of a systematically worked out philosophical theory, something to be developed and re-interpreted by later thinkers. In that respect, it did not resemble, say, the philosophy of the utilitarians, or that of Marx. I mean that, whereas followers of Bentham and J.S. Mill would have treated some interpretation of the principle of utility as foundational – and whereas followers of Marx would have taken it as a given that capitalism is a corrupt system, destined to collapse – it is not the case that all those who fell under Wittgenstein’s influence were convinced Wittgensteinians. On the contrary, if post-war ‘Anglophone’ philosophy can be said to have inherited anything from the later Wittgenstein it is, rather, an attitude, an approach.3

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’Meaning as Use’; ‘Language Games’; ‘Family Resemblances’ For the purposes of this chapter, the obvious place to start is with the explanation of three guiding principles or presuppositions. Each is fundamental to the philosophy of Wittgenstein’s later period, and each is equally fundamental to his idea that philosophy should be a primarily descriptive activity. They are (i) the principle stating that, ‘For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. (PI: 43) (The italicisation of ‘large’ is Wittgenstein’s.); (ii) his argument that we play ‘language games’; and (iii) his observation that there are ‘family resemblances’ between the different ways in which any given word tends to be used. These are introduced early on in his ‘later’ text, the Philosophical Investigations. (1953) (Some readers will be familiar with these ideas already, so I shall try to be brief.) As Malcolm’s anecdote illustrates, then, the ‘later’ Wittgenstein rejected the idea that meaning resides in a relationship of correspondence, or ‘picturing’, between elements of language (such as propositions) and features of the world (‘facts’). As the story puts it, Sraffa’s interjection, ‘broke the hold’ of that conception upon on him’. (Malcolm: ibid.) It is, thus, for the latter conception that the first principle listed above, the ‘meaning is use’ principle is substituted by Wittgenstein. The appropriate term for what he has in mind, though, is not so much ‘use’ as ‘role’, for his guiding idea is that the understanding of a word or an expression is a matter of grasping its function within a context – a behavioural ‘system’, if you like – one which may contain non-linguistic, as well as linguistic elements. Early in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein illustrates this idea with an example of a language which is ‘meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B’. He writes: A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out; – B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. – Conceive this as a complete primitive language. (PI: 2) Now imagine a child learning to participate in this activity. In the course of doing so, the child will also be learning the meaning of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, and ‘beam’. But exactly what is the child learning? As Wittgenstein says, it will be true, of course, that the child is learning ‘to establish an association between the word and the thing’. It may even be that ‘a picture of the object comes before the child’s mind when it hears the word’. However, the occurrence of such a picture could only be, as it were, a concomitant ‘side-effect’ of the learning process.

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Within the context Wittgenstein envisages, the test of whether the child has learnt the meaning of – say – the word ‘slab’ will not be a matter of that child’s having learnt that the word ‘stands for’ some object – be it a ‘slab’ or a mental image of a slab – it will be a matter of the child’s having learnt to participate in the practice he describes. Wittgenstein asks, ‘Don’t you understand the call “Slab!” if you act upon it in such-and-such a way?’ (PI: 6). It’s a rhetorical question, to which the answer is meant to be obvious; that answer being that it’s the action which counts as decisive, not the presence of some inner object. Turning to the second thesis, it is fairly obvious that one can think of Wittgenstein’s ‘builder and assistant’ example as a sort of game. In the example, as in the activities normally called games, there is a regularity in the behaviour of the individuals involved. In the case of games normally the so-called such regularity can be, and usually is, rendered explicit as a body of rules. The regularities underlying our use of everyday language may not be so explicit. They are, nevertheless, there to be rendered open to view, albeit with more difficulty. As for the third Wittgensteinian thesis, the idea of ‘family resemblances’, this is a corollary of his view that there are many contexts within which words and expressions have a role to play – i.e. that language has a multiplicity of ‘uses’ – and that there is, consequently, no single formula in terms of which the function of language can be summarised. To put it in terms of the ‘games’ analogy, just as there are overlapping similarities between the different activities we call ‘games’ – ‘board-games, cardgames, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on’ – and just as there is no feature common to all of them, so there are overlapping similarities between the different language games we play, but no single feature common to all. Says Wittgenstein; ‘I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”, for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, etc, etc, overlap and criss-cross in the same way’. (PI: 66)

Implications The foregoing principles hold two implications which, for the purposes of this chapter, we should take special care to note. One is that philosophy, correctly understood, must be viewed as a purely descriptive exercise. This is an implication of the view that to use language is to engage in a rule-governed activity, as in a game; the rules themselves being set by the ‘use’ to, which language is actually put in specific contexts; (in other words when language is ‘doing work’ not when it is ‘like an engine idling’). (PI: 132) From this, it follows that the task of philosophy must be confined to that of rendering explicit, the rules which implicitly govern the use of language in those contexts. (As Wittgenstein puts it at one point, ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place’.) (PI: 109, Wittgenstein’s italics.)4 A second implication is that, generally speaking, it is a mistake to seek out an all-embracing formula to which all uses of a given word must conform; no formula beginning – say – ‘meaning is … ’ or ‘time is … ’; or to

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use Wittgenstein’s own example, a definition specifying some element, supposedly common to everything we call a ‘game’. This is an implication of the view that language has many uses; if you like, that the language-games we play form a diverse multiplicity.

From Ordinary Language to ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’ As I suggested, the three principles just outlined give a fairly full impression of what paying close attention to the workings of ordinary language involves (at least so far as Wittgenstein was concerned). But the purpose of ordinary language philosophy is, of course, to pay attention to the latter with a view to casting light upon specific philosophical questions. It isn’t just a question of describing ordinary usage, simply for the sake of engaging in the exercise. With that in mind, then, there are three further points of clarification to be made, before turning to consider the relevance of this approach to political philosophy. The first relates to today’s prevalent tendency to treat the expressions ‘ordinary language philosophy’, ‘linguistic philosophy’, and ‘analytic philosophy’ as if they were synonymous. They are not. For one thing, the philosophy of ordinary language under consideration here is just one example of an approach to philosophy which treats language as of central importance. If the two categories, ‘ordinary language’ and ‘linguistic’ philosophy, were coextensive – then the French postmodernist Jacques Derrida, whose work centres upon the phenomenon of language, and who can therefore be counted a linguistic philosopher, would also count as an ordinary language philosopher. But he clearly isn’t.5 As for ‘analytic philosophy’, this originated with Bertrand Russell’s ‘logical atomism’, a doctrine which portrayed philosophy as the resolution of relatively complex propositions into the simple elements of which they are composed.6 It’s a doctrine with which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had much in common. (Indeed, the two philosophers had been working closely at the time of the latter’s publication.) But then, Wittgenstein’s ‘later’ work, the Philosophical Investigations, is largely a repudiation of the Tractatus, not a development of its arguments. (As for ‘continental philosophy’ – another category against which ‘analytic philosophy’ tends to be juxtaposed these days – if that is taken literally to mean, ‘philosophy with origins in the European mainland’ then Wittgenstein himself would have to be counted a ‘continental philosopher’. He was, after all, originally motivated by concerns he shared with the founders of the Vienna Circle. That is, of course, not a point those who distinguish ‘continental’ philosophy from other forms tend to have in mind; but that’s another story.) A second point is this: Wittgenstein’s injunction: ‘Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use’ may be good advice, but it’s useless advice unless one knows how to follow it.7 I mention this, if only to stress that I do not favour what I am inclined to call the ‘Lego brick’ interpretation of Wittgenstein’s injunction. This holds that, according to Wittgenstein, a ‘fully-fledged’ working, natural language is a structure formed from individual components (the ‘language games’), rather in

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the way that a structure built from Lego is composed of the individual bricks. If this were a correct view, explicating the full meaning of a word or expression within natural language would be a question of noting the language games within which it features, and describing the role it plays in each. The totality of such descriptions would add up to an account of the word’s full meaning. This may be a prevalent view but, as one prominent commentator on Wittgenstein’s work, Ray Monk, has pointed out, it is, in fact, a misconception to suppose that ‘language game’ is ‘a theoretical notion, a key component of a general theory of language’. (2005: loc 965) As Monk puts it, ‘the construction of a general theory of language was the very last thing he [Wittgenstein] wanted to achieve’, although it is, nevertheless, ‘not uncommon to read commentators talk about Wittgenstein’s ‘ theory of language games’. To this, he adds that ‘[s]ometimes it is imagined that Wittgenstein thought of language games as entirely separate “islands of discourse” – there would be a language game of science, a language game of religion, etc. – each isolated from the others’. (ibid) To this, I would add, in turn, that it would be equally misleading to suppose that Wittgenstein might have entertained the idea of a ‘language game of politics’. Against the Lego brick interpretation let me state – though without much supporting argument – that I tend to favour a ‘looser’ interpretation Wittgenstein. On this view, neither his injunction to ask for ‘use’ rather than meaning, nor his idea that there are language-games, and nor his observation that there can be ‘family resemblances’ between the different ways in which particular words or expressions are used should be viewed as foundational assumptions upon which a philosophical system is built.8 They are, rather, heuristic devices, the purpose of which is to illuminate certain features of linguistic usage for particular purposes.9 The ‘builder and assistant game’ is a case in point here. It is used by Wittgenstein to portray an imaginary context; one within which the meanings of, ‘slab’, ‘pillar’, etc. might be learnt, in this case, by assistant B. For Wittgenstein’s purposes, its crucial features are (i) that B learns those meanings through conformity to a pattern of behaviour, i.e. to a ‘rule’; (ii) that the pattern is entirely public in the sense that it involves the participation of another person; (iii) that it requires rather more than somehow-or-other grasping that there is, (mysteriously) a relationship of correspondence between the words and the objects for which they ‘stand’; and (iv) (in anticipation of Wittgenstein’s arguments against the idea of a ‘private language’) it does so without invoking the possibility of there being objects which are irreducibly private. The example is, thus an ‘object of comparison’, as Wittgenstein puts it at one point. ‘meant to throw light on the facts of our language’ (PI: 130) but there is no general theory of language presupposed by its use. If there is analogy to be drawn here, it is not with building – with each languagegame ‘brick’ forming a part of the complete structures – but with psychoanalysis. As Monk puts it, ‘this is what Wittgenstein hoped to achieve with the method of inventing language games. He hoped that they might play a useful role in the “therapy” required to get a philosopher to acknowledge that his or her philosophical theory is just a confusion built upon a misconception’. (2005: loc.998)

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I mention the foregoing point for two reasons. One – the obvious one – is that it’s important to make my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s approach to ordinary language clear. But there is another too. This is that the Lego-brick interpretation can lead to a form of perspectivism, with each of us constrained to view the political world from within the particular framework of language-games we have learnt to play. (This framework might include a ‘language game of politics’ and it could be informed by another Wittgensteinian conception – that of a ‘form of life’.) However, perspectivism is a subject to which we shall be returning later in this book, so I shall set it to one side for the moment. A third point: There is a difference between two forms of argument, each of which invokes the way in which language is ‘ordinarily’ used. On the one hand there are arguments which rest, for support, upon examples of ordinary usage in a manner which is, I suppose, analogous to the manner in which scientific theories rest for support upon empirically gathered evidence. On the other there are arguments which invoke the underlying rules which govern the way words and expressions are used; the ‘logic’ or ‘grammar’ to which they conform. Where critical of others, arguments of the latter form make reference to misunderstandings of that grammar. For a well-known example of the former type of argument, take Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between two conceptions of liberty, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’. (see Berlin 1958/1969) The former is a conception according to which liberty is a matter of being unprevented. On this view, says Berlin, ‘I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity’. (ibid: 122) The latter is a conception according to which liberty is a matter of being uncontrolled. Says Berlin; ‘I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be an instrument of my own, not of other men’s’ acts of will. I wish to be a subject not an object’, and I lack ‘positive’ liberty to the extent that I am the latter. (ibid: 131) With his distinction, Berlin picks out two ways in which the words ‘liberty’, ‘free’, ‘unfree’, and the like are generally understood. (These may not be the only ways in which they can be understood, but are understandings which have featured with particular prominence within political philosophy.) As he says, they are on the face of it, ‘no more than negative and positive ways of saying the same thing’. (ibid: 131–2) His argument is that the latter conception, the positive has been, and is, open to by misinterpretation – even deliberate distortion – by political philosophers, often in the cause of sinister ideological interests. ‘Being the instrument of one’s own actions’, has thus, according to Berlin, been distorted to cover the idea that ‘true’ freedom lies in containing one’s desires to the extent that they never conflict with the wishes of one’s controllers or, if not that, the realisation of one’s ‘higher self’ or again, acting in accordance with reason; and one test of these (alleged) misunderstandings must surely be a matter of the extent to which they accord, or fail to accord, with the way words ‘free’, ‘unfree’ and their cognates are ordinarily used. (Think of ‘anteater’ sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. An accountant, with ambitions to become a lion tamer, has failed to notice that the animals he refers to as lions are in fact anteaters. If Berlin is right, then perhaps theories according to which – e.g. – true freedom is the recognition of

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necessity should be termed ‘anteater theories’.)10 This is a test which any philosophical thesis ought to pass. Call Berlin’s argument an example of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ if you like, but I’m not sure that its features are distinctive enough to warrant its being placed in a special category. At any rate, it is distinctively different from the type of argument which makes reference to the underlying ‘logic’ or ‘grammar’ according to which words or expressions conform. An example of the latter is Wittgenstein’s analysis of Saint Augustine’s misunderstanding for the concept of time. We shall be turning to that argument in the following section.

From Ordinary Language to Political Discourse But first, a question: What is so ordinary about ‘ordinary language’? It’s a question whose twofold answer might itself have been drawn from a text of ‘ordinary language philosophy’. That answer is – firstly – that the idea that there is language which is, in some sense, ordinary, implies a contrast between that and a type of language which is not at all ordinary. It is added – secondly – that there are many contexts within which a line dividing ‘ordinary’ from ‘non-ordinary’ language might be drawn, and that the line will be drawn differently in different contexts. Take the difference between language which is ‘ordinary’ in the sense that it is not jargon – legal or scientific jargon, for example – and the jargon itself. Or again, take the difference between ‘ordinary’ prose and the blank verse in which Shakespeare’s leading characters speak. If you would like yet another example, consider the difference between the descriptions people ‘ordinarily’ employ and the ‘purple prose’ often found in marketing literature – in the literature put out by estate agents, for example. Each of these is a distinction between ‘ordinary’ language and not-soordinary language, but the distinction drawn is different in each case. Philosophers are no exception to the rule here. I mean that, if we are to understand the work of someone purporting to be a philosopher of ‘ordinary language’, a useful way to make a start might be to consider what this person takes non-ordinary language to be. In Wittgenstein’s case it is, thus, clear that the ‘nonordinary’ language he is targeting is that employed by philosophers; and specifically philosophers concerned with the traditional questions of epistemology and metaphysics. For example, here is a passage in which Wittgenstein discusses the statement; ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’. It is as if I were to say: ‘You surely know what “It is 5 o’clock here means; so you also know what “It’s 5 o’clock on the sun” means.” It means simply that it is just the same time there as it is here when it is 5 o’clock”. – The explanation by means of identity does not work here. For I know well enough that one can call 5 o’clock here and 5 o’clock there “the same time”, but what I do not know in what cases one is to speak of its being the same time here and there. (PI: 350)

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The contrast to which Wittgenstein refers is quite clear. On the one hand there is the situation – the ‘ordinary’ situation here on Earth – within which we know perfectly well how to use expressions, such as ‘It’s 5 o’clock’, and ‘It’s the same time here as it is over there’. (We have after all, learnt to use watches, and so on.) This is contrasted with a situation in which it makes no sense to say – e.g. – ‘It’s 5’oclock here’. To recognise the latter fact – and here is the point – is to recognise that the latter is a situation, devoid of the features which enable our usual expression concerning time to, as it were, gain a foothold in reality. In Wittgenstein’s example here, the difference between the former situation and the latter is perfectly clear and obvious. (The example is intended to illustrate a point, of course.) It can happen, however, that a philosopher in pursuit of a definition or a theory is misled into discounting the true relevance of ‘ordinary’ context, and thereby into the delusion that there is a ‘problem’ to be solved. A good example of this phenomenon, discussed by Wittgenstein at a certain length, is Saint Augustine’s perplexity over the nature of time – so let me now return to that.11 The argument is introduced by Augustine in the following terms: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh: I know not: (397–400/1968: 40) In my paraphrase of his subsequent argument, it runs as follows:12 1. 2.

3.

Time consists of three elements; past, future, and present. But: The past does not exist. (It is now past); The future does not exist. (It is yet to come.); The present is a moving entity. It is composed entirely of elements which were future but are becoming past. (As Augustine puts it, ‘If time present (if it is to be time) only cometh into existence, because it passeth into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose cause of being is, that it shall not be; so, namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be’) (ibid). It follows that the present does not exist. Therefore, Since time consists entirely of past, future, and present – none of which exist – time does not exist.

Augustine, who has stated at the outset that he knows very well that time exists – as we all do – has, thus, proven by an argument that it doesn’t. He can’t have it both ways, so what is going on here? Wittgenstein’s answer is that Augustine is asking the wrong question for to ask ‘What, then is time’ is to suggest that time is an entity, there to be defined, as if the question were analogous to, ‘what is a chair’? (Wittgenstein 1958/1969A: 26) But then, if time is an entity, it is a special type of entity, one which is, as we say, flowing past in a particular direction. Think of the image on a cinema screen. Some parts of the movie are yet to come. Others

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are gone. As the image is moving there is no present to be grasped; no present distinct from the other two elements, that is. Or, to take Wittgenstein’s own example, think of logs floating down a river. Says Wittgenstein: In such a case we can say that the logs which have passed us are all down towards the left and the logs which will pass us are all up towards the right. We then use this situation as a simile for all happening in time and even embody the simile in our language, as when we say that ‘the present event passes by, (a log passes by), ‘the future event is to come’ ( a log is to come). We talk about the flow of events; but also about the flow of time – the river on which the logs travel. (1959/1969B: 107–8) In short, the resolution to Augustine’s difficulty does not lie in the discovery of new facts, as it might if he were asking a question in natural science.13 It is, rather, to recognise that he has been misled in various ways to misjudge the true ‘grammar’ governing the use of expressions involving time.

From Augustine on Time to Weldon on Oxford Railway Station In the previous chapter I noted that T.D. Weldon’s The Vocabulary of Politics (1953) is one of the few works in which a self-conscious attempt is made to apply techniques characteristic of ordinary language philosophy to questions in political philosophy. This makes it worth our while to turn, for a moment, to an argument of Weldon’s which bears a superficial resemblance to Wittgenstein’s deconstructive analysis of Augustine’s puzzle over the nature of time. (Not that Weldon’s argument is especially convincing. My point, rather, is that there is something to be learnt from the fact that it’s so unconvincing.) The argument in question concerns the meaning of the word ‘own’ (as in ‘ownership’). It is premised upon the claim that, ‘In ordinary language there is nothing obscure or complicated about “John owns that watch” or “That watch belongs to John”’. As Weldon explains, ‘We understand by [these expressions] that John can use the watch, give it away, break it, and generally do what he likes with it provided that he does not use it as a missile against other people.’(ibid: 26) Everything is, thus, ‘perfectly simple as long as most of things in which people are interested belong to somebody in this straightforward way.’ (ibid.) But, according to Weldon, the situation soon becomes more complex. ‘We have joint ownership to deal with, and then limited liability companies, nationalisation, and so on’. (ibid.) According to Weldon, this is what is likely to happen next. [w]e are liable to get puzzled and to suppose that questions like ‘Who now owns Oxford Railway Station?’ present a philosophical difficulty. We feel that there ought to be someone who is related to Oxford Railway Station in the same way as that in which John is related to his watch, for ‘X owns

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Oxford Railway Station is the form of a correct English sentence. Yet if we complete it and say, ‘The State owns Oxford Railway Station something seems to have gone wrong and we are tempted to ask ‘And who is the person called “the State?”, “Does such a person really exist?”, “Is he very rich”, and so on. (ibid: 26–7) At first glance, it might appear that Weldon’s argument here follows a similar course to that taken by Wittgenstein’s analysis of Augustine’s. The parallels are as follows: First, Wittgenstein’s argument rests upon the presupposition that there are contexts within which expressions relating to time are, so to speak ‘anchored’. It is from this that they derive their ‘ordinary’ use and, therefore, their meaning. Likewise, Weldon argues that there is an ‘ordinary language’ sense of ‘ownership’ according to which ownership per se is equivalent to private ownership. Second, Wittgenstein argues that Augustine’s bewilderment over the nature of time results from his failure to pay attention to the contexts within which their ‘ordinary use’ is anchored. Similarly, Weldon argues that puzzlement over precisely who owns Oxford Railway Station results from the misguided application of the ‘ordinary language’ conception of ownership to forms to which its application is, in fact, inappropriate. Third, Wittgenstein argues that bewilderment over the nature of time can be dispelled through the issue of reminders (that there are contexts within which certain expressions have a genuine use, that philosophy need not consist of a search for definitions, etc.) Likewise, Weldon argues that bewilderment over who owns Oxford Railway Station can be dispelled by drawing attention to new institutional structures; to the fact that, ‘in fairly advanced political and economic associations it is found more convenient to have some goods and services controlled by persons appointed by the central government than to leave the disposal of them in the hands of private individuals’. (Weldon: ibid 27) The analogy is only apparent, however. To appreciate why, note – as a start – that Weldon’s argument is historically inaccurate, because historically foreshortened. To read Weldon, you would think that there is an original sense of the word ‘ownership’ in which its synonymous with ‘private ownership’, and that the meaning of the term became stretched and altered with the advent of ‘new’ arrangements involving joint or communal ownership – nationalisation being a case in point. Admittedly, it is easy to see why Weldon should have thought such arrangements ‘new’. He would have been writing The Vocabulary of Politics at a time when the socialist government of Clement Attlee had recently introduced the British Welfare State, with its guarantee of education for all children and a National Health Service, and when it had nationalised certain key industries – including the railway system of course. These arrangements would have been ‘new’ in the sense that they would have been unfamiliar to British citizens living during the middle years of the twentieth century. But, except in that limited respect, ideas of joint and common ownership would not have been at all new at the time.

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In fact, philosophy’s most famous defence of private ownership, Locke’s argument in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689/1993) takes the fact of common ownership as its starting point, the Earth having been given, as Locke supposes – and as it states in the Bible – to mankind in common for his use and preservation. As he sees it, it is, therefore, ‘a very great difficulty how anyone should ever come to have a property in anything’. (ibid: 273) In short, for Locke the difficulty is to figure out how a system founded upon the institution of private property can have arisen from an initial situation of common ownership. It seems, then, that Weldon has simply put Locke’s narrative into reverse. Moreover, the actions of the Levellers, or ‘Diggers’ who, during the time of the English Civil War, took direct action to establish what they saw as their God given right to ownership of the land, make it clear that the idea of common ownership would have been familiar to the generation preceding Locke’s own. And then again, enclosures, whereby land was removed from the common stock and placed within the boundaries of private estates, were taking place throughout Locke’s time. Such considerations suggest that anyone who claims that, in its original and true sense, ‘ownership’ is equivalent to ‘private ownership’ is expressing a political bias (characteristic of the conservative Right), and not a knowledge of the term’s ‘ordinary language’ sense. There is an ordinary sense of ‘ownership’, of course. This is the sense in which, as Weldon puts it, the owner of a watch can use it, give it away, break it, and generally do what he likes with it provided that he does not use it as a missile against other people’. (Weldon: ibid.26) In this sense, to be the owner of an entity (which might be an object, an area of land, an idea or a patent) is to possess certain rights of control over that entity; rights which other persons don’t have. (There will be a law, or perhaps a long-standing convention, establishing that right.) In Weldon’s example, ‘John’ is the private owner of the watch. But other arrangements of such rules are possible. For example, I have certain rights of access to my local park, and rights to use it in certain ways – for exercise, and the like. However, I share these rights with others, and have no right to prevent them from exercising those rights. In other words, I own the right in common with the others. I am not its private owner. Of course, there is room for disagreement over the relative merits of differing systems of ownership. For example, libertarians who favour an economic system based upon the institution of private property are hardly likely to agree with Marxists who think that the wealth unjustly possessed by the bourgeoisie will eventually be commandeered by the proletariat. Such disagreements will cover a wide field, but they will not be disagreements about the meaning of a word. Moreover, I don’t believe that any of this would have seriously puzzled the academics of Oxford as they disembarked from the train. It’s true that Augustine was driven to desperation by his inability to grasp the nature of time. This is what he says: My soul is on fire to know this most intricate enigma. Shut it not up O Lord my God, good Father; through Christ I beseech Thee, do not shut up these

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usual, yet hidden things from my desire, that it be hindered from piercing into them; but let them dawn through Thy enlightening mercy, O Lord. (Augustine 397–400/1968: 45) But are we really supposed to picture those dons, having disembarked from the train, falling to their knees in the car park and beseeching God to reveal the identity of the station’s true owner? It’s an amusing scenario to contemplate. The possibility is unlikely, however and if there really were any dons who experienced such ‘puzzlement’, I’m pretty sure that ‘philosophical therapy’ wouldn’t be of any use as a technique for freeing them of it. So, what is the conclusion to be drawn here? Is it simply that Weldon’s ‘Oxford Railway Station’ argument is weak? If that were all there was to it, there would be little point in discussing the argument here; for, while it may be amusing to imagine those dons, stumbling about in the car park and, perhaps, wondering if there will even be trains any more – some of them approaching lampposts and saying. ‘Take me to your leader!’ – the prospect would be no more than a diversion unless the weakness of the particular argument in question exemplified a weakness, generally inherent in the very idea that an analysis of ‘ordinary language’ might be relevant to the questions, characteristic of political philosophy. Let us now turn to that point.

The Philosopher as Under-Labourer If Weldon’s view of philosophy’s role has an intellectual ancestor, then it has to that expressed in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ with which Locke introduces his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (1690/1997) Locke writes, of the philosopher, that, ‘it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’. (ibid: 58) It’s a modest but necessary role which he contrasts with the work of ‘master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity’; the latter including, according to Locke, Boyle, Sydenham, ‘the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton’. (ibid) In Locke’s view, it is, in short, the scientists who do the ‘real work’, leaving the philosopher to tidy things up a little.14 Weldon, thus, echoes Locke when he writes, of scientists, that, ‘Their first order talk is admirable, their second order talk is frequently pathetic’, explaining that, ‘The purpose of philosophy [then] is to expose and elucidate linguistic muddles; it has done its job when it has revealed the confusions which have occurred and are likely to recur in inquiries into matter of fact because the structure and use of language are what they are’. (Weldon 1956: 23) He is, accordingly, critical of the idea ‘that philosophers do, or ought to do, something different from this’ and – as for political philosophy – he holds that, ‘political philosophers in particular are thought to be concerned with the establishment and the demolition of political principles’; it being expected of them that their conclusions will have a direct bearing on the

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decisions of politicians’ and that, ‘they should be qualified to give advice and helpful criticism on actual plans for the framing of legislation, the reform of electoral systems, the government of colonial empires and so on’. The latter is, he says, ‘a strange view’. (ibid: 22) As Locke, and then Weldon see it, then, the role of the philosopher, in relation to intellectuals concerned with facts – the discovery of new facts or the reinterpretation of facts already known – is to observe, monitor, and correct the linguistic usage of the latter. The philosopher is portrayed, if not as an underlabourer, then as a police officer making sure that everyone sticks to the traffic regulations or, you could say, as a bossy schoolteacher, handing back essays to the pupils, having corrected their ‘linguistic muddles’. What an uninspiring picture!

Conclusion: The Limits of the Descriptive Approach Where, then, does Weldon go wrong? I am asking the question, of course, not because I think Weldon’s philosophy especially profound – or because it has been especially influential – but because his work represents, in graphic terms, a view which is typical of the period within which he was writing. On that point note, especially, that his representation distinguishes two distinct situations. One is the situation of the intellectual concerned with facts – the scientist, historian, or whoever it may be. The other is the situation of the philosopher, whose role is (supposedly) to monitor and correct the linguistic usage of the former. The observation would be of less interest, of course, were it not that the dichotomy permeates some notable works of ordinary language philosophy; works which are better known and more subtly argued than Weldon’s. As an example, take Gilbert Ryle’s observation, in his introduction to The Concept of Mind that, ‘Many people can talk sense with concepts but cannot talk sense about them; they know by practice how to operate with concepts, anyhow inside familiar fields, but they cannot state the logical regulations governing their use’, that, ‘they are like people who know their way about their own parish, but cannot construct or read a map of it, much less a map of the region or continent in which their parish lies’. (Ryle 1949/ 1963: 9–10) Or, as another example, take J.L. Austin’s contention, in A Plea for Excuses, that, ‘our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon’. (1956–7/1970: 182) Accordingly, Austin holds that, ‘When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or ‘meanings’ whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about; we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena’. (ibid) This as eloquent a manifesto for ordinary language philosophy as one is likely to come across.

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The analyses of ordinary language conducted in these texts, by Ryle and Austin, respectively, are conducted with a purpose. In Ryle’s case, the point is to, as it were, deconstruct, Descartes’s account of the relationship between mind and body. Ryle considers an array of psychological terms. (His chapter headings refer to knowledge, the will, emotion, dispositions, and the like; and I mentioned his analysis of pleasure in an earlier chapter.) The book is a close examination of the grammatical relationships between these terms, conducted with a view to demolishing what Ryle calls, ‘the myth of the ghost in the machine’. (His arguments have been open to criticism, of course. There are, for example, questions over whether his account is overly behaviourist ... But such issues are beside the point here.) Austin’s account is, as he thinks, relevant to questions concerning the nature of action, the law, and the nature of free will. It is also arguable, I am sure, that an account of the way words are ordinarily used can cast light upon such issues. My point is that it would only be possible for a philosopher to study a ‘common stock of words’ embodying ‘all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations’, as Austin puts it, in cases where the philosopher is standing apart, as an observer, from the common stock of words he she is studying. However, it is quite often impossible to draw any such distinction between observer and observed in the case of political philosophy. It depends upon the concepts which are being considered open to question. On the one hand, there are concepts which figure both within political discourse and elsewhere. In such cases, it may be possible to test their philosophical interpretation against the sense in which they are ordinarily understood. Earlier, I gave Berlin’s interpretation of freedom in his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ as an example of this. On the other hand, though, some concepts are purely political and the use of the terms associated with them is confined to concepts which are purely political. There is a whole list. Examples are ‘democracy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘state’, ‘authority’, and ‘rights’. There are many more; but take ‘democracy’ as an example. There is, I suppose, a sense in which ‘democracy’ can be ‘ordinarily’ defined, and that is the sense in which democracy is ‘rule by the people’. But that is a pretty minimal specification. Otherwise, there is no ‘ordinary sense’ of the term ‘democracy’ from which philosophers can, as it were, stand apart and describe. Everything else about democracy – any characteristic implicit in its definition as ‘rule by the people’ is open to interpretive grabs. For example, there can be disagreement over who ‘the people’ are presumed to be, what form their rule is supposed to take, the question of why democracy should be thought superior to other forms of government, if indeed it is at all. There are plenty of other disputes to be had of course, and something similar is, no doubt, true of many other concepts. So, the conclusion I draw here is just this. There are some concepts which are, by their very nature open to interpretation – and that includes political concepts. People can disagree over the interpretation of such concepts – and that includes ordinary people. In fact, it should go without saying that political concepts are

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concepts over which ordinary people ordinarily disagree. This being so, there is – in the case of such disagreement – no space for a dichotomy to be drawn between the ‘ordinary usage’ of political terms and, on the other hand, those who observe such usage, hoping perhaps to identify misunderstandings of the ‘logic’ or ‘grammar’ governing such usage. It turns out that, in the case of political terms, the idea of ‘ordinary language’ is itself a non-ordinary, somewhat technical conception. It’s a conclusion from which I would generalise as follows: Recall that, in chapter two, I offered a sketch of logical positivism. I attempted to define its main elements with a view to understanding why, as a philosophical doctrine, it should have left so little space for the practice of political philosophy. I drew the conclusion that, in the root of the difficulty there lay a particular view of the relationship between the individual and the experienced world; the individual being represented as a relatively passive observer and interpreter of sense data. It is – I said – as if you were now situated within an inner mental cinema; the sense data being images projected onto an inner screen. It turns out that post-war ordinary language philosophy tends to represent the individual in a similarly passive way, as the observer and interpreter, not of sense-data, but of a relatively independent system of rule-governed linguistic behaviour. To put it another way, within the political realm there is no such thing as the ‘common stock of words’ envisaged by Austin, a stock of words which ‘embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking in the lifetimes of many generations’ having ‘stood up to ‘the long test of the survival of the fittest’. (1956–7/1970: 182.) If there were, their meanings would be so settled, and the rules to which they conformed so well established, that all we would be able to do would be to observe that realm with a view to elucidating those meanings and rules. It’s a supposition which misrepresents our relationship to the political – likewise our relationship to each other.15

Notes 1 Apparently Wittgenstein told the same story to G.H. von Wright. See Monk (1990) pp. 260–1. 2 (For this, see PI: 243–315.) 3 In addition to a determination to pay close attention to the detail of linguistic usage, his legacy included a tendency to be sceptical of Cartesian ‘inner mental life’ talk and to be equally sceptical of grand theorising – but those points aren’t especially relevant here. 4 Note the words ‘all’ and ‘alone’ – this is radical stuff. 5 See, for example Derrida (1974). 6 (See Russell The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918/1972) especially pp.48ff.) 7 The maxim, as quoted, appears nowhere in Wittgenstein’s published writings. He is simply reported to have said this by one on his students. No matter. The maxim is obviously implied by what he says at Investigations: 43. 8 That said, you can hardly blame commentators for taking the ‘Lego-brick’ view to be Wittgenstein’s own. Many of his remarks lend themselves to such an interpretation. For example, in the Blue Book he states that, ‘we recognize in these simple processes [language-games] forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones’, and that, ‘we see that we can build up the complicated forms from the

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10 11

12

13 14 15

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primitive ones by gradually adding new forms’. (1958/1969A17–18). (This can be read as analogous to, ‘we see that we can build up the complex structure from the individual Lego-bricks’.) Elsewhere, in the Investigations, he supposes that, ‘new language-games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten’. (PI: 23) (This resembles, ‘Remove some bricks from the structure, replace them with others, and you get a new structure’.) Here, a discussion of these conflicting interpretations of Wittgenstein would lead up a side-track; so I shall avoid it. For an analogy, you could take a grammatical rule of the English language, the rule specifying that the letter ‘i’ precedes the letter ‘e’, except when the conjunction of the two is preceded by a ‘c’. This is a helpful guide when it comes to the spelling of a great many words, – ‘ceiling’ for example – but it is of no use when it comes to that of ‘irregular’ exceptions – e.g. ‘weird’. Here, ‘the exception proves the rule’, as my elementary schoolteachers used to say and – perhaps analogously – Wittgenstein asserts that meaning can be defined as ‘use’ only for ‘a large class of cases’. (PI: 43) See, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQlCOmXuHM&t=16s In the passage in question, Wittgenstein is actually discussing the argument from analogy, as it relates to pain – but, no matter. This does not affect the point I’m making here and, in any case, Augustine’s ‘time argument is specifically discussed by Wittgenstein’. For example, in the Blue and Brown books, as noted in a moment. I say ‘my paraphrase’ of Augustine’s argument because I’m sure that there will be experts on medieval philosophy who will think that I haven’t got it quite right. That apart, the argument is just one of three advances by Augustine. None of this matters for my purposes here, however. For a more subtle and illuminating account of Augustine’s arguments see McEvoy (1984). As Wittgenstein points out at (PI: 89). It’s ironic that Locke should have held this view, given that he was also the author of one of history’s most influential works of political philosophy, the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689/1993). For a judicious account of the relationship between the ‘analytic’ movement and political philosophy see Wolff (2013).

PART II

5 THE RAWLSIAN RENAISSANCE

The story of how the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 breathed new life into political philosophy is so widely known that its almost embarrassing to repeat it. In some versions, it resembles the biblical account of the raising of Lazarus, with political philosophy in the eponymous role and Rawls himself in that of the other main character involved. For my own part, I am inclined to be more circumspect. It seems to me that the really interesting question is that of how significant the Rawlsian renaissance will appear to have been to historians of ideas working in, say, one hundred years time. Still, one can only hazard a guess and, in any case, I ought to begin at the beginning. It is well-known, then, that Rawls’s text was greeted with fanfares upon its first appearance. For example, one critic, Stuart Hampshire, described it as ‘the most substantial and interesting contribution to moral philosophy since the war’. (1972) Another, Robert Nozick, asserted that, ‘Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’s theory or explain why not’. (1974: 183) More recently, another, Will Kymlicka, has described the event as initiating a ‘rebirth of normative political philosophy’. (Kymlicka 1990: 9) More interesting – and perhaps more surprising – is the manner in which Rawls’s argument has continued to maintain a strong hold upon the subject throughout the decades which have passed since its first appearance. This is evidenced by the fact that, as another commentator, Katrina Forrester, has pointed out, it was only a decade after the publication of A Theory of Justice that, ‘one bibliography listed 2,512 books and articles engaging with Rawls’s thought’. (2019: loc. 74) – and that was after only one decade. Then, for a further illustration of Rawls’s influence consider some of the obituary tributes carried by The Philosophers’ Magazine in 2003, the year which followed Rawls’s death. By then, thirty-two years had already passed since the publication of A Theory of Justice.: DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-7

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‘Few if any modern philosophers have had as decisive an impact on how we think about justice’ (Lawrence H.Summers, Harvard University President); ‘one of the greatest political theorists of our time’ (William Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard); John Rawls was widely recognised as the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century. His work revived and reshaped the entire field, and its profound influence on the way justice is understood and argued about will last long into the future (Thomas Scanlon, Harvard Philosophy department chair.); He was the dominant figure in political and moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century’ (Charles Fried, Harvard.); ‘Political philosophers, policymakers and lawyers are all in the debt of a modest man who mistakenly thought himself to be one of Keynes’s obscure academic scribblers, only to turn out to have been a genuine leader in philosophical and political thought’ (Richard A.Epstein, University of Chicago.); ‘A quiet but towering voice for a more tolerant and generous way of organising modern democratic societies’ (Michael Sandel, Harvard); ‘A Theory of Justice is likely to last after nearly all the philosophy written in the 20th Century is forgotten’ (Edward Craig: Cambridge)1 Not only that, that, by the time this present book appears in print, more than fifty years will have passed since A Theory of Justice was first published. Even so, new critical work on Rawls continues to appear.2 It is pretty clear, then, that it would be impossible to describe the course taken by political philosophy from the 1970s to the present without giving an account of Rawls’s argument. Accordingly, I have devoted the greater part of this chapter to a sketch of that argument. It has to be no more than a sketch because, just as Rawls’s dominant presence within the field has rendered a discussion of his work unavoidable, so the consequent wealth of critical material devoted to its analysis has made any attempt to supplement it with further commentary rather pointless. In other words, his argument has been subjected to so much close analysis already, that it’s unlikely that I would have anything original to say. In any case, if I did, how would I know? It seems that I would have to live for several hundred years if I were to manage to read through all the relevant material. With that in mind, I have, instead, devoted the next chapter to a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise; that is, to an elucidation of the features it shares with other approaches to political philosophy, as well as those which differentiate it from those others. My purpose will be to emphasise the features which render his argument distinctive. Of course, it would be surprising if Rawls were to turn out to have had the last word in political philosophy. In fact, it would be more than surprising. It would be remarkable, for it would make Rawls unique in intellectual history. In philosophy, no one has ever had the last word. It is in the nature of the subject that no one ever

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does. (It’s one of the things which makes it so interesting.) That is why, from chapter seven onwards, I go on to discuss philosophical positions which contrast markedly with Rawls’s own. What might those contrasts be?: Well, briefly, it’s a matter of ghosts – nineteenthcentury ghosts. In political philosophy these have continued to stalk the territory ever since. One is the ghost of John Stuart Mill, whose liberal principles are reflected in Rawls’s own work, so much so that Rawls’s philosophy can be seen as a reworking of Mill’s – a case of a similar social and political view, but supported by a very different argument. For both philosophers, Mill and Rawls, a liberal philosophy defines principles to which individuals, each seeking to pursue his or her own ends, must conform if they are to remain as free as is practicably possible. Diversity is a given. But there are other ghosts too. One is the ghost of Marx, for whom liberalism and its concerns are, in a sense, epiphenomena, reflections of a specific stage reached by an ongoing historical process, as it works towards a final culmination. Still, I am getting ahead of myself here. Before any of that, let me now sketch the argument contained in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. (1971/1999B – hereafter referred to as TJ2)3 For reasons I gave a moment ago, there would be little point in attempting any more than a sketch here. Moreover, I shall have little, if anything, to say on the subject of Rawls’s later work, neither in this chapter nor the next. There is a an article, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ (1985/1999a) in which he sets out to restate his conception of justice in a manner which avoids, as he puts it, ‘claims to universal truth’, for example, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons’. (ibid: 388) Rawls’s ‘later’ view is most fully worked out in his second major book, Political Liberalism. (1993) It is a change of emphasis which raises interesting questions concerning the relationship between Rawls’s ‘earlier’ and his ‘later’ philosophy and, had this present book been intended to be, specifically, a study of Rawls’s philosophy, I would have spent some time discussing those questions. But, rather than that, the book is meant to be a study in the history of ideas, and since it was A Theory of Justice which exerted a profound influence upon political philosophy, that is the text upon which I shall concentrate.4 I shall begin with the question Rawls sets out to answer.

The Question of Justice, and Rawls’s Answer to It The first section of the first chapter of Rawls’s lengthy text opens as follows: Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant or economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. (TJ2: 3) Accordingly, Rawls’s guiding aim is, as he says, ‘to work out a theory of justice’. (ibid: 4) It’s a task he construes as that of determining principles, namely the

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principles to which an arrangement of social, legal, and political institutions must conform if it is to qualify as just. As a statement of ambition, that seems clear and straightforward enough. Note that Rawls is not especially concerned with ‘retributive’ justice; that is, with the ‘just deserts’ exacted by those who are out for revenge, or meted out by judges to lawbreakers. On the other hand, and while it is commonplace to contrast retributive with ‘distributive’ justice – the justice which consists in making sure that everyone gets his or her fair share of some good – it would be too simple to describe Rawls as being primarily concerned with the latter. He is – but he is also concerned with rather more. To be precise, Rawls’s ‘theory’ is an attempt to delineate the contours of a conception he designates ‘justice as fairness’. It is a conception of which distributive justice forms only one component. For an explanation of the latter, it is crucial to understand that Rawls’s project is underpinned by a certain conception of society; one which construes it as, ‘a cooperative venture for mutual advantage’. ‘Let us assume’, he writes – oversimplifying things a little in order to ‘fix ideas’ – “that a society is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in their relations to one another recognise certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them”. (TJ2: 4) It is a conception which gives rise to the question of ‘justice as fairness’ thanks to the fact that there is, conceivable, a range of patterns of distribution under which persons can co-operate, with each gaining some advantage from the system. The challenge is, therefore, to determine which, out of the set, is the most fair. Rawls answers ‘the question of justice’, so construed, with his (by now famous) ‘two principles of justice’. In their ‘final statement’ – their final statement in A Theory of Justice, that is – they run as follows: First Principle: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. (TJ2: 266)5 It’s a question of more and less. According to Rawls, an arrangement of laws and institutions is the more just the more it satisfies the two principles, and it is the less just the less it does so. (Clearly, these are principles which require further explanation. We’ll come to that shortly.) A further point to note is that Rawls’s formulation of the principles ‘presupposes that, for the purposes of a theory of justice, the social structure may be viewed as having two more or less distinct parts, the first principle applying to the one,

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the second principle to the other’. As he explains, ‘we distinguish between the aspects of the social system that define and secure the equal basic liberties and the aspects that specify and establish social and economic inequalities’. (TJ2: 53) The first principle, then, is an expression of Rawls’s liberalism for, ‘important among’ the ‘basic liberties’ to which it refers are, he says, ‘political liberty (the right to vote and to hold public office) and freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person, which includes freedom from psychological oppression and physical assault and dismemberment (integrity of the person); the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law’.(TJ2: 53) Rawls states that, ‘These liberties are to be equal by the first principle’ (ibid.) The liberties listed are – clearly – the Rawlsian equivalents of the fundamental rights and liberties which have lain at the heart of liberal philosophy since the time of Mill, or, even earlier, since that of Locke.6 With the second principle – ‘the difference principle’ as he calls it – Rawls demonstrates a commitment to redistributivism, the idea that the state may be entitled to remove resources from the relatively advantaged – typically through taxation – in order to improve the situation of the relatively disadvantaged. It applies, he says, to inequalities in the distribution of ‘primary goods’, such as ‘income and wealth’ and also ‘rights, liberties, and opportunities’, and it states the terms upon which redistribution is justified. Finally, Rawls argues that, the principles, ‘are to be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second’. It is an ordering, he says, which ‘means that infringements of the basic equal liberties protected by the first principle cannot be justified, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages.’ (ibid: 53–4) It’s a view you could summarise as, ‘liberty trumps welfare’.

The ‘Original Position’ and Rational Choice I realise that the foregoing sketch of Rawls’s answer to the question of justice has left a great deal to be clarified but, before pursuing the point, let me now turn to the argument with which he supports that answer. It is by far the most innovative and interesting feature of his contribution to philosophy. Briefly stated, his argument is that his two principles, and only those principles, would be chosen by rational individuals situated within a hypothetical situation he calls ‘the original position’. The latter is imaginatively constructed by Rawls in a manner intended to reflect the circumstances from which a need to establish principles of justice arises. We are, thus, invited to suppose that each (imaginary) individual stands to gain through cooperation with the others. It is supposed that resources are not so scarce that there can only be violent struggle for their possession, and that neither are they so plentiful that cooperation is unnecessary. These strictures are said by Rawls to define ‘the circumstances of justice’. (Clearly, this is an idea which reflects his supposition that society can be viewed as an arrangement within which each stands to gain through cooperation with the others.) Other features of the original

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position are meant to reflect ‘common intuitions’ we have concerning justice. Rawls supposes, for example, that no party to the choice of principles is in a position to coerce any of the others. This is intended to preclude the choice of principles which privilege the interests of particular individuals or groups, and it reflects the requirement that justice should be impartial. For the same reason the rational choosers are imagined to be placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ which precludes them from knowing a great deal of what you or I would normally know. ‘Among the essential features of this situation’, says Rawls, ‘is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like’ and, ‘I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities’. (TJ2: 11) (‘Justice is blind’, as the saying goes.) It is with such strictures in place, or so Rawls argues, that rational individuals would select his two principles as a basis for cooperation. Given the nature of the strictures themselves it follows, further, that the principles are, genuinely, principles of justice. So we are intended to conclude. It is important to note two respects in which the first principle differs from the second. One is that, whereas the former is a principle of strict equality, the latter is not. According to the first principle there is, thus, a ‘total system of equal basic liberties’ and each person is said to have an equal right to it. (TJ2: 266) By contrast, the second principle allows for the existence of social and economic inequalities, provided that they are arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and, moreover, ‘attached to positions and offices open to all, under conditions of fair equality of opportunity’. (ibid.) It is a difference which reflects the second difference, namely a difference between the principles in the reasoning by which, according to Rawls, his rational choosers are led to select them.

The Choice of Principles: Equality and Inequality By what reasoning, then, are Rawls’s hypothesised rational choosers led to select his two principles? Well, ‘cake analogies’ abound in this area of philosophy, so here is a cake analogy: Suppose that a large cake is to be divided among the members of a group. Each person is quite hungry, and would like the biggest slice of cake he or she can get. However, no one is in a position to coerce anyone else (and so on, as in the original position) and a principle of division has to be decided upon. What principle would the members of the group select? In answer, it is difficult to see how the members would agree on anything other than a principle of equal division, namely the principle stating that each person should get the largest slice of cake he or she can have, compatible with every other person’s getting an equally large slice. The reasoning for the equal division of the ‘libertycake’, as specified by Rawls’s first principle is exactly equivalent. (You could paraphrase it, without too much caricature, as ‘Each person gets the largest slice of liberty he or she can have, compatible with every other person’s getting an equally large slice of liberty’.)

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But out of what is the liberty cake composed? As noted, Rawls states that the principle distributes ‘basic liberties’, and he assumes that some of the latter are so important that no one would want to play games or ‘take chances’ with them. (Analogously, no one would want risk getting less cake than the others.) He illustrates the point with reference to ‘liberty of conscience’, that is the liberty to hold and express moral, religious, or philosophical beliefs. Rawls argues that his rational choosers ‘cannot take chances with their liberty by permitting the dominant religious or moral doctrine to persecute or to suppress others if it wishes’. Rawls supports this claim by pointing out that, ‘to gamble in this way would show that one did not take one’s religious or moral convictions seriously, or highly value the liberty to examine one’s beliefs’. (TJ2 181) (On that last point, I shall take it that Rawls is obviously right.) Situated as they are behind the veil of, ignorance, Rawls’s choosers do not know what deeply held beliefs they will turn out to hold once the veil is lifted. In fact, they don’t even know if they will actually hold any such beliefs. However, they do know for sure that there is a possibility of their holding some such, and that, as Rawls puts it, they will therefore be unprepared to ‘take chances’ with the latter. Since nobody will be prepared to take such chances, it follows, according to Rawls, that the principle chosen will be one which guarantees each person’s liberty of conscience to an equal extent. According to Rawls, it is an argument which can be generalised in a way which supports the first principle, and to the choice of ‘a regime guaranteeing moral liberty and freedom of thought and belief, and of religious practice’. (TJ2: 186) Other liberties also fall under a ‘principle of participation’, which must be guaranteed if the terms dictated by the original position are to be preserved; or, as Rawls puts it, ‘If the state is to exercise a final and coercive authority over a certain territory, and if it is to affect men’ s prospects in life, then the constitutional process should preserve the equal representation of the original position to the degree that this is practicable’. (TJ2: 195) The liberties to vote and to be eligible for public office fall under this principle, as do freedom of speech and assembly. By contrast, when it comes to social and economic goods – the goods to which the second principle applies – Rawls is prepared to accept that justice can sometimes require that they should be distributed unequally. The principle’s proviso is that such inequalities are to be arranged to ensure that they are ‘to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged’. The principle is selected by the rational choosers because each wants be as ‘advantaged’ as he or she can possibly be, but – equally – each realises that he or she might find himself in the position of the least advantaged person once the veil of ignorance has been lifted. Under the conditions of a free market ameliorated by various state measures – that is, by the conditions which tend to prevail in the modern world – the principle can have a part to play in the ‘trickle-down’ defence of economic inequality. This is the argument, that, where there is economic inequality, those who are sufficiently rich, or some of them, will take risks by investing capital and starting new ventures, and that they will thereby generate wealth and employment for all. The process will leave

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everybody, including the worst off, better off than they would be under conditions of strict equality – so it is alleged. It is a claim which could be true, if only when certain conditions pertain. (For example, it clearly assumes that there must be, in place, a mechanism which enables wealth to ‘trickle down’ and become distributed throughout society as a whole.) The truth or falsity of the story need not concern us here, however, because all Rawls needs for his argument to work is the assumption that its truth is conceivable, that it might be true under certain circumstances. (But what if someone – a radical Leftwinger, say – were to argue against this that it is only after the coming revolution the position of the worst off will be significantly improved,? Would this bring Rawls’s principle into question? I think not. It would simply prompt a debate about what circumstances it is realistic to expect.)7

The Originality of a Theory of Justice The Social Contract and the Separateness of Persons It is easy to underestimate the originality of Rawls’s contribution to political philosophy. Today, reading A Theory of Justice is, in a way, comparable to listening to a piece of music which has become extremely familiar. However many times you play the recording, it will never strike you with the freshness which impressed those who first heard it. (In fact, the more you hear it, the less likely you are to appreciate its initial impact.) Likewise, Rawls’s approach to the subject has maintained such a strong presence in the field that the true originality of his work has tended to become obscured over time. That said, however, the originality of one feature of Rawls’s argument has indeed been highly recognised, and that is the manner in which he breathed new life into the ‘social contract’ approach to political theory. As he put it, ‘In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract’. (TJ2: 11) To explain: The history of modern social contract theory begins with the publication of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan in 1651. Rawls rated it highly. In fact, he described it as, ‘the greatest single work of political thought in the English language’ (2007: 23) Some forty years later, Hobbes’s work was followed by the publication of another exercise in social contract theory – one which is, in some respects, an answer to Hobbes’s argument – and that was Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. (1689/1993) For my purpose here – which is simply to explain the nature of the theory, it will be sufficient to take these two works as a model.8 Now, if you were unfamiliar with political philosophy, and if you were to read either of these works, you might be forgiven for gaining the impression that it is a work of history. In each, people are pictured as inhabiting an apolitical ‘state of nature’, a condition from which people have good reason to escape. In Hobbes’s version, life in the state of nature is portrayed as desolate and terrifying. As the famous passage has it, there is ‘no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society;

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and which is worst of all, continuall feare and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. (Hobbes 1651/1981: 83) In Locke’s version, life in the state of nature is more tolerable, but there are, nevertheless, ‘inconveniences’ resulting from the tendency of each person to interpret the law in a manner which suits himself, also from the presence of ‘noxious persons’. In each text, people are then portrayed as seeking to quit the state of nature by, as it were, ‘signing up’ to a ‘social contract’, the purpose of which is to establish a ‘sovereign’, the function of the latter being to make and enforce laws and thereby establish an order from which the conditions of the state of nature are absent. (The sovereign might be a single person, or it might be a governing body such as a parliament.) The seventeenth-century terminology – moving as it does from ‘state of nature’ to ‘social contract’ to ‘sovereign’ – can be misleading, however. Social contract theory, even in its seventeenth-century variants, is more accurately construed as an exercise in rational choice theory, and that, at any rate, is the construction placed upon it by Rawls. Viewed in this light, the state of nature is a hypothetical condition – imagined in a particular way with a view to answering particular questions. Both Hobbes and Locke are seeking answer to questions concerning political authority. They want to know why it is necessary and in what conditions it is justified, and that is why they begin by imagining a situation, the state of nature, from which political authority is absent. Their account of why rational persons would choose to quit the state of nature and establish a sovereign thereby yields answers to those questions. The parallels between the seventeenth-century conception of a state of nature and Rawls’s ‘original position’ hypothesis are, I think, fairly apparent, although the latter is, of course, designed to answer a different question, the question of the terms which would be agreed to by persons, each of whom stands to gain from cooperation with the others. One advantage of the contractualist approach so far as Rawls is concerned – and it is advantage which immediately became apparent to many other philosophers9 – is that it is capable of accounting for what is sometimes called the separateness of persons. In this respect, or so Rawls argues, it is superior to theories of justice which advocate the distribution some specific good throughout a population in accordance with some favoured principle. An obvious example is the principle, which advocates the distribution of happiness throughout a population. One might interpret this to mean that the total amount of happiness should be maximised, no matter how it is distributed, (‘classical’ utilitarianism), or one might take it to mean that the average person should be made as happy as possible (‘average utilitarianism’). Rawls points out that, either way, you end up with a principle which can justify sacrificing then happiness of some for the benefit of others. Against this, ‘Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others;, and, The reasoning which balances the gains and losses of different persons as if they were one person is excluded’. (TJ2: 25) Hence

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the expression ‘separateness of persons’. By contrast, because no one choosing from the original position would select a principle which mean sacrificing his or her own interests, the contractualist approach avoids this implication.

Conclusion: How to Think About Rawls’s Argument For all its originality – its radical inventiveness – there is also something quite traditional about Rawls’s argument. For one thing, it is clearly an example of theory-building in the grand style. Piecemeal investigation of the small-scale and particular – in the manner of, say, the later Wittgenstein – is clearly not Rawls’s style. Moreover, and as just noted, the particular tradition upon which Rawls draws has its origins in the seventeenth century. This suggests a couple of points at which probing Rawls’s argument for weaknesses could turn out to have results, and, although this chapter is meant to be no more than a sketch, it is a sketch which would be incomplete were I not to take note of them. First of all, there is the fact that Rawls’s argument is deductive; one which moves from premise, via purportedly logical steps, to conclusion. In this respect, it resembles the syllogism which every student of philosophy encounters in the first weeks’ of studying the subject. I mean the argument which moves from (i) the (major) premise stating ‘All men are mortal’, and (ii) the (minor) premise stating ‘Socrates is a man’, to (iii) the conclusion that, therefore ‘Socrates is mortal’. It would, no doubt, take a fair amount of simplification, but it is nevertheless possible to construe Rawls’s argument upon this model, and in a way which suggests where weaknesses in his argument may lie. Drawing a parallel between the simple syllogism and Rawls’ argument means setting the latter out as follows: 1.

The premisses: In the case of Rawls’s argument, these include (i) the presupposition he makes concerning the nature of society, namely that it can be thought of as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, and (ii) his description of hypothetical individuals, situated as they are within the ‘original position’. If Rawls argument is to be convincing, these have to be realistic. (Likewise, in the case of syllogism, it has to be true that Socrates is a man.) Of course, it isn’t true of many societies, perhaps of most, that they are in fact cooperative ventures within which each member benefits, but the point is that – ideally – society can be thought of that way for the purposes of formulating a theory of justice, hence the realism. In the case of the account of hypothetical individuals situated within the ‘original position’, realism means ensuring that description reflects requirements one would normally expect any account of justice to satisfy. The test here is to ascertain a match between the description and our “common intuitions” concerning justice, for example the intuition that justice should be impartial between persons. Put briefly, the point here is this: Just as, in the case of the syllogism, it helps to have true premisses if you are to reach a true conclusion, so the

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2.

3.

premisses of Rawls’s argument have to be realistic in the foregoing respects, if it is to be, genuinely, an account of justice, and not just a story about what some rather strange individuals would do when placed in a highly peculiar situation. The movement from premisses to conclusion by logical steps: In the case of the syllogism, this means the inference from the premisses stating that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. The inference has to be logically valid. In the case of Rawls’s argument, this means the reasoning by means of which, according to Rawls, individuals situated within then original position are led to select his principles. If it can be shown that they would not, his argument fails. So much literature has been devoted to this part of Rawls’s argument, that I shan’t add a contribution of my own.10 The conclusion: This takes the form of the two principles. Even if these can be shown to follow from the premisses by impeccable logical steps, they can still be subjected to a further check, namely be attempting to match them with ‘common intuitions’, as in the case of the premises.

Now, if I were about to embark upon an in-depth analysis of Rawls’s argument, I would use the foregoing schema as a guide. Instead, let me briefly mention what promises to be a further difficulty for Rawls’s argument. At least, it promises to be a source of difficulty in the long run. I mean that, like the great social contract theorists of the past, Rawls is concerned to establish principles which apply within the confines of a defined geographical area – within the boundaries of a nation state for example. Thus, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were largely concerned with the question of political legitimacy; that is, with the question of what gives a sovereign the right to exert authority over a populace. Similarly, Rawls is concerned with the principles an arrangement of social and political institutions and practices must satisfy if it is to be considered just. This suggests that the fate of Rawls’s argument is tied up with that of the nation state, and that will start to lack applicability the more the world order becomes internationalised. Still, it would be beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the likely fate of the nation state. Instead, in the next chapter, I shall now go on to consider similarities and differences which hold between the approach to the concept of justice taken by Rawls in A Theory of Justice, and that taken by certain other philosophers. The point is to illustrate just how distinctive his contribution has been.

Notes 1 See The Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 22, 2nd Quarter, 2003. It’s noticeable that many of those cited are American philosophers and, moreover, based at Harvard. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, given that Rawls was, himself, a Harvard professor. However, the issue also contained four full-length tributes from British philosophers, Julian Baggini,

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Jonathan Wolff, Chandran Kukathas, and myself. It also contained one from a French philosopher, namely Catherine Audard. Just for example see Forrester (2019), Gališanka (2019), and Mandle & Roberts-Cady (2020). All were published since I began writing this present book. References are to the second edition, published in 1999. But see my discussion of Political Liberalism in Understanding the Political Philosophers (2012), chapter 156. In this chapter, I am trying to focus upon the essential elements of Rawls’s thought and to leave the details to one side. That is why I have nothing to say about the ‘just savings principle’ or Rawls’s stipulation that advantaged positions should be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. It can be difficult to distinguish the essential from the inessential here, though. Locke is no exception, although he couldn’t have included the right to vote in a list of fundamental liberties, the reason being that he was writing before modern constitutional democracy had been developed. However, he did believe that government should be with the consent of the people. Imagine the following argument: The believer in the ‘neoliberal’ free market says, ‘Thanks to trickle down, the worst off are better off under free market conditions than they would be under any other arrangement’. The radical Left-winger says, ‘Not so! After the revolution they will be even better off.’. This would be a disagreement over what is realistically feasible and what is not. It wouldn’t bring Rawls’s second principle into question. (Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in the following century, differs from the others in significant ways., so I’ll leave it to one side.) (See Rousseau: 1762/1968). Both Nozick (1974) Dworkin (1977) treat the separateness of persons as fundamental. But see my discussion of Rawls derivation of the two principles in Understanding the Political Philosophers (2012) chapter 13, especially pp. 262–75.

6 RAWLS: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS

Rawls and Plato: Principles of Justice and Social Structure I’ll begin with a comparison between Rawls’s text and Plato’s Republic. (375BC/ 1987) That seems an obvious place to start, if only because both are concerned with the question of justice. Moreover, in each text, the discussion follows a broadly similar course. I mean that, in each, the earlier sections are devoted to the subject of principles – ‘principles of justice’. Later, their discussions move on to the description of structures. In Plato’s text, the principles evaluated are commonplaces, or, rather, what would have been commonplaces in the Greece of his time. One – the principle stating that justice lies in giving every man his due – is examined and rejected, as is the principle that justice lies in helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. The superficially realistic and no-nonsense principle according to which justice is simply the interest of the stronger party – either that or it is what the stronger party (rightly or wrongly) believes to be in his interest – is likewise discussed and rejected. (These definitions are advanced by various participants in the dialogue; the last by the boorish Thrasymachus, philosophy’s most notorious woodenhead.) The definition finally accepted (advanced by the ‘Socrates’ character) is Plato’s own. According to Plato, ‘justice consist in minding your own business and not interfering with other people’ (Republic: 433a)1; ‘minding your own business’ being a matter of sticking to the task for which one is best fitted. (It’s the usual translation, but a rather misleading one. In the context of Plato’s text, ‘minding your own business has nothing to do with keeping your nose out of other peoples’ affairs.) As for the structures Plato describes, these are the structures of a state which is ‘ideal’ in the sense that it exemplifies the virtues of justice to a perfect degree. It is in line with his definition of ‘justice’ that, within that ideal, each component of the structure is portrayed as performing its function with purpose DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-8

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and efficiency, with each class sticking to the task for which it has become especially qualified. He writes, ‘When each of our three classes (businessmen, Auxiliaries, and Guardians) does its own job and minds its own business, that … is justice and makes our state just’. (Republic: 434c) Actual states are to be judged relatively just or unjust according to the degree to which they match Plato’s ideal. The principles evaluated and rejected in the earlier sections of Rawls’s text are, as in Plato’s case, presented as rivals to his own. They include two versions of the principle of utility. These, he labels ‘the classical principle of utility’ and ‘the principle of average utility’, respectively. The former considers the distribution of fulfilment (or happiness) throughout society considered as a whole. It defines the correct distribution as that which maximises the total amount, paying no attention to the difference between individuals in the degree to which they benefit from the distribution. By contrast, the latter evaluates patterns of distribution in terms of their benefit to the average individual. Both principles are rejected by Rawls on the grounds that neither can avoid the implication that the interests and well-being of some individuals for the benefit of others may sometimes be justified. (As I pointed out in the previous chapter, they don’t account for ‘the separateness of persons’.) Rawls also considers and rejects ‘intuitionism’, which he describes as ‘the doctrine that there is an irreducible family of first principles which have to be weighed against one another by asking ourselves which balance, in our considered judgement, is the most just’. (TJ2: 30) According to Rawls, ‘the intuitionist maintains that there exist no higher-order constructive criteria for determining the proper emphasis for determining the competing principles of justice’. (ibid) The principles Rawls proposes as replacements for those he rejects are, of course, his two principles of justice. As for the subject to which his principles are intended to apply, Rawls takes pains to emphasise that this is (what he calls) ‘the basic structure of society’. ‘Many different kinds of things are said to be just and unjust’, he writes’, not only laws, institutions, and social systems, but also particular actions of many kinds, including decisions, judgements and imputations. We also call the attitudes and dispositions of persons, and persons themselves, just and unjust’. (TJ2:6) But, Our topic, however, is that of social justice. For us the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. By major institutions I understand the political constitution and the principle economic and social arrangements. (ibid.) In summary Both Plato and Rawls conceive the justice of a society as a matter of the ‘fit’ which exists between principles and structures. Each strikes a different balance between the two. In Plato’s case, the discussion of principles is relatively cursory, whereas the description of his ideal state’s structure is quite detailed. By contrast,

Rawls: Comparisons and Contrasts

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Rawls spends the greater amount of his time in the explanation and refinement of his principles. His description of structures is less detailed, although – as noted already – we are left in no doubt that the structures and institutions he favours are those of liberal democracy.

‘Justice’ in English and Dikaiosune in Greek So far so good and – I think – so unsurprising; but with that observation let me now turn to a second similarity between Plato and Rawls, one which is less frequently noted by critics. It is that each philosopher interprets justice in a way which bears an awkward, somewhat idiosyncratic relationship to the way the term ‘justice’ is ordinarily used in English. In Plato’s case, this is, of course, hardly surprising, for the English language didn’t exist in the fourth century BC, when he was writing. In fact, the term conventionally rendered as ‘justice’ in English translations of Plato is dikaiosune. Likewise, the term conventionally rendered as ‘virtue’ is aretē. These are terms which, in the original Greek, carried connotations of function. In the Greek of Plato’s time, the aretē of an axe, for example, would have been described as a matter of it’s being able to cut well. In the English of our own time, however, while it is perfectly acceptable to describe, say, an axe as having the ‘virtue of being able to cut well’, we do not carry the notion of function over to ascriptions of virtue to individuals or institutions. Strictly speaking, then, Plato does not say that the institutions of his ideal state exemplify the ‘virtue’ of ‘justice’. It’s a translation which may be unavoidable, but which is nevertheless loose. In fact, he says that their aretē is dikaiosune.2 It is no wonder that he represents the perfectly just state as a well-oiled machine within which each component performs its function well, but that is not a vision which is supported by the way the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘justice’ are ordinarily understood in English. In Rawls’s case, the relationship between his argument and the way ‘justice’ is used in ‘ordinary language’ is equivocal. It is – of course – hard to quarrel with his contention that the intuitions his principles are intended to reflect are ‘commonly held’. It seems plain obvious, at any rate, that anyone denying that justice requires that persons should be treated fairly and impartially must have failed to grasp the meaning of the term, ‘justice’. It is, nevertheless, worth reflecting upon his decision to restrict the focus of this theory to cover justice as exemplified in institutional structures. Now, it is, of course, true that such structures do, sometimes, manifest justice or injustice, and that they may be praised or criticised for such reasons. It is obvious enough that a system of law, welfare, or taxation may be considered just if it makes no arbitrary distinctions between individuals, or unjust if it discriminates on the grounds of, say, race or gender. On the other hand, there are systems to which the categories ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ do not apply. A system of traffic regulation, for example, is appropriately assessed in terms of its efficiency or inefficiency. Moral categories need not figure. Moreover, there may be systems which are, in themselves, perfectly just in that their design reflects no arbitrary bias towards some individuals and against others, but which are unjustly applied or invoked by those who operate them.

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To appreciate my point, consider the following possibilities: 1. 2.

The electoral system discriminates between individuals on grounds of race. Whites are entitled to vote. Blacks are not. The voting system does not discriminate. In its design, it is perfectly fair and just. All citizens are entitled to vote. Even so, coercive, manipulative, and discriminatory techniques are employed by the white authorities to deter blacks from voting.

In the former case, the injustice lies in the system; in its structure. In the latter case, it lies in the behaviour of the individuals whose responsibility it is to operate the system. (For an example of a situation to which the former description applies, you could take South Africa prior to, 1990, when the apartheid system was in operation. For an example of one to which the latter applies, you could take the southern states of the USA throughout roughly the same period.)3 My point is that, because his principles are restricted to the ‘basic structure’ of society Rawls’s argument applies directly to situations of the former type, but only indirectly – if at all – to those of the latter. What follows? Well, if I’m right it follows – at the very least – that, out of the contexts within which the terms ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ have an ‘ordinary usage’, Rawls argument only applies directly to a limited category; the latter being the category of contexts within which the terms are used to assess elements of the ‘basic structure’ (as Rawls calls it). There would be nothing especially wrong with that, however. It is perfectly legitimate for a philosopher to restrict the focus of his or her attention in such a way. Moreover, and as noted, Rawls is perfectly happy to acknowledge that he is restricting his focus of attention in this way, even though, ‘[M]any different kinds of things are said to be just and unjust, not only laws, institutions and social systems’. (TJ2: 6)

Stability Finally, another similarity between Plato and Rawls lies in the emphasis each places upon stability, although the reason for the emphasis is different in each case. In Plato’s case, it arises from the idea which lies at the core of his entire philosophical corpus; the idea that there are two levels of reality. At one level – the level of ‘true’ reality – there lie, according to Plato, permanent, unchanging ‘forms’. At the other level, there lie the entities which, together, compose the world we know through our senses – beds, tables, other people, etc. According to Plato, the latter are pale imperfect, and shifting representations of the former. (The things we take for real are, according to Plato, like shadows cast by a flickering fire upon the walls of a cave.) (Republic 514 ff) Viewed in the light of Plato’s ‘two-worlds’ theory, then, it transpires that the description of an ideal, perfect state contained in the Republic would have been intended by him to be a description of the state’s ‘ideal form’, something to which actual states could only hope to resemble imperfectly.

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In other words, only the ideal state could remain perfectly stable, but then no such state could exist in reality. In line with this, he argues, for example, that were any actual state ever to achieve such perfection that could only be for a time, and that it would soon begin to decay into a less than perfect condition. (See Republic: 546aff.) In A Theory of Justice, a concern with a stability shows up in a different way, namely in a form of an anxiety that a just society, founded upon his principles, will only continue to exist provided that the citizens to whom they are meant to apply recognise that they are just. He writes, At the beginning I characterised a well-ordered society as one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles. (TJ2: 397) To put it briefly, if Rawls’s society is to remain just and ‘well-ordered’, arrangements must be made to ensure that citizens develop a ‘sense of justice’. (By analogy, in any society whose legal system is founded upon a constitution, citizens must recognise the justice of its principles and – of course – they must know what the constitution’s basic principles are. The analogy is appropriate, if only because Rawls is an American writer.) In A Theory of Justice, Rawls devotes two lengthy chapters to the subject. (chapters eight and nine.) In his later work, Political Liberalism, the preoccupation with stability comes even more to the fore. There, he sets out to answer the following question: ‘How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’. (1993: 4 my italics) This is, clearly, a concern which further illustrates the point that Rawls concern is the basic structure of society, and not justice as it shows up in the actions and attitudes of individuals.

Liberalism: Rawls, J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin Mill As noted, A Theory of Justice places Rawls firmly within a tradition of liberal political philosophy. It follows that his text must bear comparison with that of other liberal philosophers, the most obvious point of comparison being with J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, and especially with the section of that famous essay in which Mill insists that, ‘there is as sphere of action in which society, as distinct from the individual has, if any, only an indirect interest: comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself or, if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent’. (1859/1991: 16) Mill lists the

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liberties which fall within the sphere as including firstly, the inward domain of consciousness, demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, `liberty of thought and feeling. absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific moral, or theological’ and moreover, ‘the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions’. (ibid.) It includes, secondly, ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow’ provided that we do no harm to others’ and thirdly, ‘liberty of combination among individuals; freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to others’. (ibid) Mill’s list of the actions and activities which fall within the ‘sphere’ is closely paralleled by Rawls’s list of ‘basic liberties’, the liberties which ought to be enjoyed by all citizens equally, and which his first principle is meant to protect. I referred to Rawls’s list earlier. It includes ‘political liberty (the right to vote and hold public office) and freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person’ …, and so on. There are differences between the two lists – Mill’s and Rawls’s – but both prioritise the liberty of individuals to live their own lives in their own way. As for Mill’s insistence that no society is completely free unless the liberties contained within the ‘sphere’ exist ‘absolute and unqualified’, (Mill ibid: 16) this is roughly paralleled by Rawls’s argument that the first principle takes priority over the second. The similarity is hardly lost upon Rawls himself, of course. On the contrary, it is explicitly acknowledged. In his (posthumously published) Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, for example, Rawls states that, ‘his [Mill’s] principles of justice and liberty, have roughly the same content as the two principles of justice’. (2007: 297) It’s just that he thought his own contractualist argument for liberalism superior to Mill’s utilitarian and consequentialist argument; the reason being – as noted earlier – that, according to Rawls, utilitarianism cannot preclude the sacrifice of some for the benefit of others.

Berlin: A Different Approach to Political Philosophy Rawls’s approach to liberalism contrasts in a different way with that of Isaiah Berlin. To illustrate the point, let me begin with the following claims or ‘axioms’ as I shall call them. I call them that because, as I see it, they are fundamental to a great deal of liberal political philosophy – ‘fundamental’ in the sense that their truth tends to be treated as plain obvious; that is, as standing in need of little, if any, proof. (It’s arguable that they are, in fact definitive of the liberal standpoint, in other words that no political philosophy which failed to incorporate them could qualify as genuinely liberal. However, that is a suggestion I shan’t pursue.) The axioms in question are these; Axiom One, Plurality: We are purposive creatures. We adhere to values and systems of value, and we attempt to carry out our plans, projects – indeed to live our whole lives – in the light of those values. But values can, and do,

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conflict. The values held by one individual may be inconsistent with those held by another. There is, thus, always potential for conflict between individuals as they seek to act – and to live out their lives – on the basis of the values they hold. (These are plain facts. There is nothing one can do to change them.) Axiom Two, The Value of Freedom: It is better that people should be free to act in accordance with their own values – to live their lives in their own way – than that they should be constrained or compelled to act in accordance with values they do not, in fact share. (So much is pretty obvious.) Axiom Three, The Role of Institutions: Social, political institutions should be organised in a way which accommodates the fact of plurality and, insofar as is possible, leaves people free to act, and to live out their lives, in the light of values they actually hold – in short, to live their own lives in their own way. (This is a corollary of Axioms One and Two taken in conjunction.) Each axiom is open to interpretation, and it should almost go without saying that different liberal philosophers interpret them differently. In the case of Rawls, his interpretation of Axiom One – the ‘plurality axiom’ – is tied up with his thesis that purposiveness is definitive of what it is to be a person. As he puts it at one point, ‘an individual says who he is by describing his purposes and causes, what he intends to do in his life’. (TJ2: 358 my italics)4 Purposive individuals are, thus said to follow ‘rational plans of life’ which go hand-in-hand with their ‘conceptions of the good’. A conception of the good will have been formed in the light of a ‘comprehensive doctrine’, which might be a ‘religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine’.5 These expressions – ‘rational plan of life’, ‘conception of the good’, ‘comprehensive doctrine’, and so on – are, I think, sufficient to indicate the central role played by philosophically technical conceptions within Rawls’s argument. By contrast, Berlin’s argument operates at no such level of abstraction. There is no attempt to demonstrate the inevitability of plurality and conflict of values through an account of the relationship between abstract conceptions, and no need to make such an attempt. For Berlin, such plurality and conflict are obvious facts. He writes: ‘What is clear is that values can clash – that is why civilisations are incompatible. They can be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between you and me’ (1990a: 12) Likewise: ‘Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries; but total liberty for the wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted’. (ibid.) Nor does Berlin need an abstract conception of ‘the person’ to support his contention that, ‘These collisions of values are the essence of what they are and what we are’. (ibid: 13) This particular contrast between Rawls and Berlin – between a striving for comprehension at the level of philosophical abstraction on the one hand, and, on

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the other, an emphasis upon inescapable contingency – is equally apparent in their respective interpretations of the other two axioms. In Rawls’s case, Axiom Two – the axiom stating that, insofar as possible, people should be free to live their own lives in their own way – is clearly supported by his argument that rational individuals, selecting principles from the original position, would opt for nothing less. (There are, he argues, ‘basic liberties with which they would not be prepared to ‘take chances’.) By contrast, Berlin tends to draw support for his arguments from an appeal to the empirical. Quite often, it is from an appeal to history; for example, from the occurrence of, ‘the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the explosions of nationalism, racism, and, in places, of religious bigotry’ (1990a: 1) Such horrors are held by Berlin to have their roots, in part, in ideas – in, for example, the erroneous idea that ‘contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle’. (ibid: 13) Then again, there is the undeniable fact that that ambitious schemes can have unintended, and unwelcome consequences. As for Axiom Three – the axiom stating that institutions should accommodate plurality while leaving people as free as possible – Rawls’s argument for this is, obviously, his argument for his two principles of justice. By contrast, Berlin is content to recommend ‘machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own, idiosyncratic, unique particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others’. This is not, he says, ‘a wildly exciting’ suggestion, but he adds that, ‘if it were adopted, it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world’. (1990b: 47–8) The difference in question is also reflected in a difference in the role played by principles in the thinking of each philosopher. In Rawls’s case, there are, as we have seen, special ‘principles of justice’ against which institutions and practices can be measured; but so far as Berlin is concerned, there are no such special principles. On the contrary, he takes a view of the history of ideas and events which represents efforts to address plurality of values as a series of accommodations and compromises. We must always be aware, he writes, ‘that certainty about the effect of [drastic] measures invariably leads to avoidable suffering of the innocent. So we must engage in what are called trade-offs – rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations’. (1990b: 17) He adds, Utilitarian solutions are sometimes wrong, but, I suspect, more often beneficent. The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices – that is the first requirement for a decent society. (ibid: 17–8) This doesn’t mean that no moral principles are involved in humanity’s efforts to establish ‘precarious equilibria’. The avoidance of suffering by the innocent, the

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prevention of desperate situations and intolerable choices, the striving for a decent society – all considerations mentioned in the passage quoted above – do involve moral principles which set boundaries to what can count as an acceptable equilibrium. My point is that Berlin’s approach, unlike Rawls’s, yields no requirement for the specification of special principles, specifically designed to measure the ‘justice’ inherent in particular sets of institutions and practices.

Utopianism Finally on the subject of liberalism, how utopian is Rawls? To be more precise, Is Rawls a ‘utopian’ in Berlin’s sense of the term? He writes, ‘Broadly speaking, western Utopias tend to contain the same elements: a society lives in a state of pure harmony, in which all its members live in peace, love one another, are free from physical danger, from want of any kind, from insecurity, from degrading work, from envy, from frustration, experience no injustice or violence, live in perpetual even light, in a temperate climate, in the midst of infinitely fruitful, generous nature’. (1990b: 20) (Descriptions of utopia are widespread. They figure in fiction, in religion, in satire, in predictions of how things will eventually turn out and in accounts of a supposedly golden age. The point is always to contrast the utopian society with the way things are in the real world, and in a way which is unfavourable to the latter.) According to Berlin, utopians make two assumptions, each of which is untenable. Let me take each in turn. The first is that there could be a state of affairs in which the diverse ends pursued by distinct individuals are harmoniously reconciled. Unless this were so, he writes, ‘Utopia cannot be Utopia, for then the perfect society will not perfectly satisfy everyone’. (1990b: 20–21) Against this, Berlin argues that the harmonious reconciliation of diverse ends imagined by utopians is, in fact, inconceivable, his reason being that there is a patently evident conflict between some values and others. He writes, ‘An artist, in order to create a masterpiece, may lead a life which plunges his family into misery and squalor to which he is indifferent’. ‘We may condemn him and declare that the masterpiece should be sacrificed, or we may take his side’, but that, we must recognise that, ‘both attitudes embody values which for some men or women are ultimate’. (1990a: 12) (Or, recall the example to which I referred in an earlier chapter – the case of Sartre’s pupil faced with a choice between staying with his sick mother or going to join the Free French. It may be tragic to be faced with such a choice, but the dilemma cannot be defined away.) Legislators can also find themselves faced with such conflicts, for example, between a concern for liberty on the one hand and equality on the other. As Berlin says, ‘Total liberty for the wolves is death to the lambs’. (ibid) Now, as I have been emphasising throughout this chapter, it is not at all Rawls’s view that all values can be harmonised. On the contrary, he holds that citizens may be ‘profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’. (1993: 4) The claim is fundamental to his philosophical outlook and, to that extent at least, he can be cleared of the charge at issue. On the other

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hand though, he also holds that conflicts of values can be managed within a specific institutional context. In Political Liberalism, for example, he argues that a democratic society will contain institutions within which comprehensive doctrines can be, so to speak, ‘sifted’ – a ‘just basic structure’ within which ‘permissible forms of life have a fair opportunity to maintain themselves and to gain adherents over generations’ (1993: 198) – True; the process Rawls envisages will not involve full, wholesale harmonisation of values, but it does suggest the possibility of their being reconciled to an extent. Similarly, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues that there can be a trade-off between ‘basic liberties’ – that the ‘total system of basic liberties’ must be assessed as whole – but that ‘liberty can only be restricted for the sake of liberty’ (and not to promote economic efficiency, for example). It would be wrong to describe the balancing of liberties Rawls envisages as a process of harmonisation, but it is certainly an attempt to contain a potential for conflict between values within a certain structure. Then again, what of Rawls’s insistence that the first principle must always take priority over the second? Isn’t this also an attempt to fit a potential contradiction within a specific pattern? There is a brief reference to Berlin In Political Liberalism. Rawls writes, ‘As Berlin has long maintained (it is one of his fundamental themes), there is no social world without loss; that is, no social world that does not exclude some ways of life that realise in special ways certain fundamental values’. (1993: 197) (It is one of Rawls’s few references to Berlin.) But ‘a recognition that there is no world without loss’ is an expression which can obscure the great difference between the ways in which each writer seeks to handle the fact that values come into conflict. Rawls’s contention that there can be institutions within which belief systems compete for attention, as it were – likewise his talk of ‘balancing’ liberties – are, of course, consistent with his main purpose, which is to define a ‘basic structure of society’ which is ‘just’. However, it appears to be quite at odds with Berlin’s representation of such competition as involving ‘trade-offs’ and the maintenance of ‘precarious equilibria’. Thus, if Rawls is defining the contours of an ideal structure within which conflicts of value can be managed or contained, so Berlin presents us with a real world in which such conflicts cannot be easily managed – a shifting world of uneasy, provisional, and impermanent compromise. According to Berlin, a second mistaken assumption fundamental to utopian thinking is the assumption that there is a single ‘right answer’ to the question of how to harmonise the actions of, and the lives led by, discrete individuals whose beliefs and values conflict with those of other individuals. It is as if ‘mankind has been presented with the scattered parts of a jigsaw puzzle: if you can put the pieces together, it will form a perfect whole which constitutes then goal of the quest for truth, virtue happiness’. Translated into political terms, the metaphor adds up to the claim that there is a single political order within which the harmonisation of values and ends can be realised. (1990B: 27) As Berlin says this is ‘one of the common assumptions of western thought’ (ibid), and it is an idea whose longevity he attributes to ‘the enormous triumph of the natural sciences’, of which he writes,

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As a result of the revolutionary discoveries of Galileo and Newton and the work of other mathematicians and physicists and biologists of genius, the external world was seen as a single cosmos, such that, to take the best known example, by the application of relatively few laws the movement and position of every particle of matter could be precisely determined. For the first time it became possible to organise a chaotic mass of observational data into a single, coherent, perfectly orderly system. Why should not the same methods be applied to human matters, to morals, to politics, to the organisation of society? (1990b: 33) It is easy to appreciate the force of the metaphor. There is, indeed, something counterintuitive about the idea that might be no single all-embracing description of the universe – a description into which everything fits and to the achievement of which the activities of all scientists are directed whatever their individual specialisms might be. When it comes to the design of social and political structures, however, it could be that the jigsaw puzzle provides the wrong metaphor and scientific enquiry the wrong model. For an alternative to the latter, it might be more appropriate to draw upon – say – architecture. I mean that the design of any building will inevitably have to meet certain constraints. Its foundations will have to be set in ground of a certain consistency, for example. It will be designed to serve a certain purpose. (It may be an exhibition hall, a railway station, an apartment block.) It will have to bear a certain relationship to the surrounding infrastructure. Local regulations will set aesthetic constraints, as they will financial constraints – and so on. My point is that, in architecture there will usually be a number of ways in which such parameters can be met – no single ‘right’ solution in other words. The immediate question, though, is whether Rawls makes the ‘one right answer’ assumption at issue. In answer, well, it’s certainly the case that, throughout his work, he never deviates from the view that there are just two principles of justice – his first principle and his second principle – and that these are foundational to any acceptable social and political order. He also gives a fairly detailed account of how certain rights and duties, certain sub-principles, and the shape of certain institutions are derivable from his principles. Clearly, his underlying assumption is that a description of a ‘basic structure’ which is ‘just’ must conform to a fairly specific pattern. Even if this doesn’t add up to the assumption that there is just one right answer to the question of justice, it does suggest a prima face case for supposing that Rawls is guilty of just that. By this point however, I have said enough to illustrate the point that there is more than one way to approach the question of how to characterise the nature of justice; and as I have remarked already, my intention here is to illustrate the character of Rawls’s approach – only that. I am not out to conduct a full critique of his argument. He takes the route of high theory, proceeding from first principles to his conclusions through chains of reasoned argument. Berlin proceeds

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through the analysis of texts; a critique of the work of other political writers and an account of the role played by their ideas in history. It is an approach which can sometimes look more like literary criticism than philosophy. (Whereas the work of Rawls, the grand theorist, is contained in lengthy textbooks, Berlin’s preferred form is the relatively short literary essay.) With its emphasis upon ideas, it is philosophy nevertheless.

Redistributivism: Rawls, Nozick, and Marx If the liberalism expressed by Rawls’s first principle invites a comparison between his work and that of other liberal writers, then the redistributivism expressed by the second invites a comparison with the work of philosophers who have placed the economy at the centre of their attention. With that in mind – and as a start – take a case of a market exchange, described in terms which are, admittedly, schematic. Since it is the ‘free market’ or ‘capitalist economy’ with which the philosophers in question tend to be concerned – consider, in particular, the market exchange which takes place between employer and employee. (The market in question is the labour market of course.) So, picture two individuals. I’ll call them C and W. That’s C for capitalist and W for worker. Suppose that C owns property in the form of capital. Suppose that it is a means of production – a factory perhaps – and that it is from ownership of the latter that C derives a livelihood. (That is what makes C a capitalist.) By contrast, suppose that W owns no such property and that, in order to survive, he must work in return for a wage. (As the point is often put by Marxists, W owns nothing but his own labour.) Accordingly, W places his labour on the market. C offers W a job. In effect – if not in so many words – C says to W, ‘Come to do such-and-such work for me and I will pay you such-and-such a wage’. Suppose that W accepts the offer. That may be a stylised, rather artificial, representation of the wage relationship, but it does sketch the elements of a conception with which Robert Nozick, Rawls himself, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx are largely concerned. It is, therefore, a helpful focal point – a conception upon which philosophical treatments of the market converge, although each from a different angle. One way to illustrate the differences between Rawls and the others, then, is to consider the differences between his own account of the market exchange and the accounts offered by the others.

Nozick I’ll start with Nozick, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was published three years after A Theory of Justice and was, in certain respects, a direct riposte to the latter. Nozick’s text is a defence of the ‘minimal state’; that is, a state ‘limited to the narrow functions of protection against, force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on’. (ibid: ix) His argument is that, ‘any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is ‘unjustified’.

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(ibid) When it comes to the market, then, and so far as Nozick is concerned, the operative concept is consent. There are, thus, only three ways in which property, or ‘holdings’ (Nozick’s word), can change hands legitimately, namely through inheritance, gift, or market exchange – or so Nozick holds.6 Each involves the transfer of rightful ownership from person to person in a manner which involves nothing more than the consent of the parties involved. Other means of transfer involve coercion and are therefore illegitimate according to Nozick. For example, taxation of earnings from labour is, he holds, ‘on a par with forced labour’. (ibid: 169) As for Nozick’s specific objection to Rawls, it is, in a phrase, that ‘liberty upsets patterns’. It’s an objection which hinges upon a distinction between (what he calls) ‘patterned’ theories of just distribution and ‘entitlement’ theories such as his own. According to the former, a distribution is just if, and only if, it matches a specific pattern; and it is clear enough that Rawls argument is patterned in this sense. The Difference Principle does indeed specify a pattern, namely that any inequality must benefit the least advantaged member to the greatest possible degree if it is to qualify as ‘just’. (A theory of just distribution founded upon the Principle of Utility or ‘greatest happiness principle’ would be patterned in this sense.) By contrast, an entitlement conception of justice, such as Nozick’s, justifies a person’s ownership of a specific item of property through an account of how he or she came to own it. If a chain of legitimate, because uncoerced, exchanges can be traced back through time, that person’s ownership of the property is legitimate, not otherwise. Accordingly, Nozick argues that, when property is legitimately transferred through a series of voluntary exchanges over time – that is through repeated instances of inheritance, gift, or market exchange – there can be no guarantee that the process will result in a distribution which matches a specific pattern. Any pattern might be the result. He argues, further, that the only way to restore a favoured pattern must be through the use of force (which must always be illegitimate according to Nozick). Nozick illustrates his thesis with a (well-known) example featuring Wilt Chamberlain, the famous basketball star. (At any rate, Chamberlain was famous at the time Nozick was writing. If you’ve never heard of him, substitute your favourite sports star or rock star in some version of Nozick’s story.) In Nozick’s imaginary story, Chamberlain is pictured signing a contract which states that, for each home game, twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. ‘The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-five cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it’. (1974: 161) Nozick then invites his readers to suppose a distribution favoured by a ‘non-entitlement’ theory of justice. He writes, ‘Let us suppose it is your favourite one and let us call this distribution D1; perhaps everyone has an equal share, perhaps shares vary in accordance with some dimension you treasure’. (ibid: 160–1) He imagines, further, that, ‘in one season, one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000’. (ibid.) Nozick’s point is that the resulting

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inequality between Chamberlain and his fans has arisen through a series of transactions each of which involves nothing more than consent and which is therefore legitimate. Nozick concludes that, if the initial distribution was just, it follows that the outcome (distribution D2) must be equally just, although there will be no specific pattern it happens to match. (‘If D1 was a just distribution’, he asks, ‘and people voluntarily moved from it to D2 … isn’t D2 also just?’ We are supposed to answer that, yes, it must be.) There are good reasons for taking Nozick’s argument seriously. One such is that, generally speaking, rights of ownership are held by specific persons or groups of persons. Accordingly, an argument that a distribution is fair or ‘just’ must show that such-and-such-person, P, holds such-and-such a property right, and not some other person, P1. Moreover, there is a general moral presumption that the possession of a specific property right by a specific person can be a matter of desert, and that desert can, in turn, be a matter of how the right was acquired. Nozick’s ‘entitlement’ thesis reflects this presumption with its argument that, in such cases, the possession of a specific right can be explained historically, by tracing the series of voluntary transactions which led to its acquisition by the person who now has it. A second reason is that, if Nozick’s argument were correct it would have wide significance, for it would apply to patterned theories in general – theories such as utilitarianism – and not just to Rawls’s argument. A third reason is that Nozick’s is one of the more philosophically sophisticated defences of the assertively pro-free market ‘libertarianism’ which, in the 1970s and 1980s enjoyed a renaissance in the form of ‘Reaganomics’ and ‘Thatcherism’.7 Whatever, it’s strengths may be, however, as a criticism of Rawls, Nozick’s objection misses its mark; and since it is one of my aims to illustrate the strengths of Rawls argument, I should say why. The point is that, crucially, Nozick overlooks the question of whether the Difference Principle states a condition which is sufficient to justify the existence of an inequality, or a condition which is both sufficient and necessary to justify the latter. To put it more formally, out of the following interpretations of the Difference Principle, which is correct? Interpretation One: Within a just structure, a social and economic inequality is permissible if it is to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Interpretation Two: Within a just structure, a social and economic inequality is permissible if and only if it is to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. The difference between these interpretations is this: Whereas Interpretation One does nothing to rule out inequalities which are neither to the benefit nor to the detriment of the least advantaged, Interpretation Two prohibits them. Now, I take it that – it is, in any case, arguable that – in the story as told by Nozick, the inequality which pertains between Chamberlain and his fans falls into just that category; the category of inequalities which are, as it were ‘neutral’ or ‘harmless’. The fans do benefit, of course, but only from the pleasurable experience of watching Wilt play.

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They gain no advantage from their position as ‘worst off’ within the distribution, D2, in which Nozick’s story culminates. In fact, each is worse off by twenty-five cents, a sum which is of minimal significance. But then, if Interpretation One is correct, Rawls is committed, neither to maintaining nor to eradicating such inequalities. In fact, he can just tolerate their existence. It is only with the help of Interpretation Two, according to which the Difference Principle permits social and economic inequalities only if they work to the benefit of the least advantaged, that Rawls can be represented as advocating the repeated re-imposition of a ‘pattern’ through the use of force. I can see that the latter interpretation would suit Nozick, as it is in line with a rhetorical ploy which is characteristic of the Right; that of hinting that behind liberal good intentions there lurk sinister ‘totalitarian’ shadows, but it is not, I believe, an accurate reflection of Rawls’s intentions. Here, it would take too much time to justify my view with detailed references to Rawls’s text. In any case, my objective is simply to paint a reasonably accurate picture of his philosophical view, not to defend it in any detail. Suffice it to say that Interpretation Two which would, as Nozick says, require repeated coercive interventions with the liberty of individuals, must surely run counter to the liberal intentions by which Rawls is clearly motivated. I will just add, too, that the inequality inherent in Nozick’s ‘Wilt Chamberlain’ story – an inequality which is neither beneficial nor detrimental to the worst off is, in my view, characteristic of the inequality between the wealth enjoyed by most ‘ordinary’ people and the vast sums earned by some popular figures such as sports stars and rock stars. It seems to me, at any rate, that ordinary people are less inclined to view the wealth of such individuals with hostility than they are that of highly paid company directors for example; and that – I believe – is because – ordinary people are more inclined to think of the inequality they exemplify as, to use my term ‘neutral’. Of course, it is also relevant to point out that, in Nozick’s story, Wilt Chamberlain is not portrayed as a capitalist and that neither are his fans portrayed as working for him. There can be no suspicion that Chamberlain is living at the expense of his fans – as there can be that capitalists, being engaged in the same joint enterprise – live at the expense of workers; and so, if Nozick intends his argument to carry a lesson for critics of the free market economy, it is wide of the mark.

Marx With that, let me turn to a further question concerning the Difference Principle, one to which it is more difficult to determine a clear cut answer. The question is precisely how to judge that an inequality is ‘to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged’ as the principle requires that inequalities should be. To appreciate the difficulty, imagine a group of poor workers – in the developing world perhaps – who find themselves having to choose between earning nothing at all and, on the other hand, working in dreadful conditions for terrible wages. Such workers, having agreed to opt for the latter alternative, will be in a situation which is

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preferable to the one they were in prior to their having been made the offer of work. (They wouldn’t have accepted the offer otherwise.) They have, therefore, benefited from an inequality, namely the inequality between themselves and the capitalist who employs them. Can their situation be justified on such grounds? One sometimes hears it argued that it can be, the reason being that there is no other alternative available. Whether this argument is outrageously cynical will depend upon just how credible the latter claim is. Usually it isn’t. To spell it out: Suppose that workers, W–WN agree to work for capitalist C, under terrible conditions and for dreadful pay. There are, thus, three situations at issue here, the following: i. W–WN’s situation prior to their acceptance of C’s offer of work. ii. The situation W–WN find themselves in after, their having agreed to work for capitalist, C. This is a poor situation but, so far as W–WN are concerned, it is preferable to (i). iii. A situation other than either (i) or (ii). Out of the range of conceivable possibilities, it is (iii) which W–WN would have found the most preferable, and which is, in that sense, to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. In my scenario, W–WN accept C’s offer and find themselves in situation (ii). In this way, they benefit from an inequality (between themselves and C). However, since (iii) is their most preferred alternative, it follows that the inequality has not worked for their greatest benefit. The difficulty is to determine what qualifies as situation (iii), and I take it that this has to be more than mere wishful thinking on the part of W–WN; in other words that (iii) has to be, in some respect, a ‘conceivable’ or ‘realistic’ possibility. In the cases such as that of W–WN, for example, it might be a straightforward matter for them to refer to other actually existing cases, comparable to theirs but in which working conditions are far preferable. (Imagine them saying ‘We want to be treated like those people over there!’) The latter would amount to situation (iii) and its actual existence would be a reason for holding that, in situation (ii), the inequality was not working to the greatest advantage of W–WN. The trouble is, however, that the line dividing wishful thought from realistic possibility can itself be a function of the theoretical perspective from which one views examples such as this. On the one hand, there are – I suppose – extreme proponents of the free-market who would argue that situation (ii) is the best W–WN can hope for in their particular situation; in effect that situation (iii) is an impossibility. That would be to take the view I dismissed earlier as outrageously cynical. On the other hand, consider some of the ways in which Marx portrays the market relationship between workers and capitalists. He says, for example, •

That it is a temporary phenomenon, being characteristic of a particular historical period. Earlier periods were characterised by different economic relations. They were different in feudal times, for example. By the same token,

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capitalism will pass away and be replaced by ‘future communist society’ within which capitalist market relationships will no longer dominate.8 That it is coercive, the labour of the worker being ‘forced labour’. That it is alienating. The worker cannot be fully himself where capitalist relations prevail. That it is exploitative, and akin to theft: The worker invests his labour in the creation of a surplus – a surplus which is rightfully his, but of which he is deprived by the capitalist.9

The list demonstrates a difference between Rawls and Marx in the perspectives from which they assess market relationships. The problematic situation is (iii), the arrangement which supposedly works to the greatest benefit of least advantaged workers, W–WN. This might be taken to mean that, from their perspective, it is the situation at which they arrive when circumstances (including the market) are working in the most efficient way possible to maximise their enjoyment of various goods. By contrast, for Marx it can only mean the situation at which they arrive once capitalist relationships – being intrinsically coercive, alienating, and exploitative – have been superseded; a time when, ‘all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed, and society inscribe on its banners; from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ (Marx 1875/2000c: 615)10 I can’t imagine Rawls writing that. It reflects more than a simple difference of opinion over how the market works. It is, rather, a difference in the categories brought by each to the assessment of market relationships.11

Conclusions: What Made a Theory of Justice Special? With that, let me bring this chapter to a close with a few observations of a general nature, the first being that reading Rawls can be hard work. His books and articles are packed with fine distinctions, technical terminology, and lengthy, drawn out, chains of reasoning. As a result, it isn’t always too easy to follow his arguments, especially if you are a relative newcomer to philosophy. In fact, it can be none too easy to follow his arguments even if you are not such a newcomer. With that in mind, and in response to anyone daunted by the prospect of reading Rawls’s work, I would say just two things. Firstly, I would say that Rawls’s argument is so interesting that the difficulty of following it is worth the effort. Secondly, I would say that it is worth the effort because his fundamental purpose is so serious. So, here is a thought experiment: Suppose that you were to be invited to some social gathering – to a party, say – and suppose that Rawls had also been invited. Suppose that you and Rawls were to meet, and that you were to ask him to explain the purpose of his work and to describe its nature. Suppose, further, that you knew absolutely nothing about philosophy, and that he would have to answer your question without deploying technical philosophical terminology. What might he say?

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Well, I think he might say something like this: A good place to start is with a couple of plain and obvious facts. One is that everybody is constrained to share the planet with everybody else. We may each be directly acquainted with just a few others, but there are many more – thousands if not millions more – with whom we do not have face-to-face contact. Where things are well organised, each person benefits from the efforts of others, including the efforts of those who belong to the group of those who are unknown to us personally. The second fact is consequent upon the first. It is that there is always potential for friction between individuals and groups. (Such friction can take many forms, of course. Potential for disagreement and antagonism can fall short of actual violent conflict.) Those are, as I say, plain facts. They are inescapable. Two features of the human situation, each with a potential for creating friction, merit special attention. One is that there tend to be differences between people in the values they hold and, as a consequence, in their ideas of how life ought to be led. The other is that resources are scarce, – at any rate that they are scarce enough to mean that not everyone can have as much as he or she needs or would like. In this case, friction can result from the fact that different individuals will lay claim to the same resources. These inescapable facts face us with the question of how relationships between people ought to be managed. There are many conceivable solutions to the difficulty. For example, one solution might be to enslave one group and make them work for the benefit of the more powerful group. It’s a terrifying solution which has been tried, even as recently as the twentieth century, – by tyrants such as Hitler Stalin for example. In certain circumstances, that might serve to contain – or, at any rate, suppress – the potential for friction. There are less extreme solutions – but, even so, they may be solutions which still distributed happiness or welfare in a way which benefitted one group at the expense of another. (It might even be that the worse off group could be persuaded to accept such a solution; through the indoctrination of a belief system, for example, or simply through coercion). But no such solution would be morally acceptable. It would be – to say the least – unfair, and a political system which sufairness” pported it would be, in my sense of the term, ‘unjust’. So, I have tried to figure out a solution in terms of principles; that is, I have tried to answer the question: What principles must an arrangement of institutions and practices satisfy if it serves to maintain relationships between individuals and groups in a manner which is fair and just.? That is why I call my philosophy a theory of ‘justice as fairness” Suppose that Rawls were then to continue with an explanation of how, in his search for an answer, he had begun by describing an imaginary situation, one he called ‘the original position’, that he were then to introduce his two principles into the conversation, …, and so on. The above sketch doesn’t go on to cover the details of Rawls’s argument for his two principles but it is, I believe, an accurate representation of the world view

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from which that argument derives its purpose or point. It is also, I hope, a representation which renders one feature of that world view apparent, namely it’s down-to-earth realism. There is nothing fancy, hyper-intellectual, or pretentious about it. (In fact, you don’t need a philosopher to tell you that the world is fraught with the potential for antagonism and conflict, just as Rawls supposes. You only have to read the newspapers.) And that is just one reason why it’s worth making the effort to read A Theory of Justice. My second observation relates to the fact that – as recounted in the previous chapter – the arguments set out by Rawls have continued to maintain such a strong presence within political philosophy. Of course, the fact that its initial impact was so great is not so surprising. It really was the most substantial and interesting contribution to moral philosophy since the war, just as Stuart Hampshire said (Hampshire 1972). The more interesting question is why Rawls’s influence should have enjoyed such longevity, and on that point I can only offer a few suggestions, the first being that Rawls account of justice – a concept supposedly fundamental to the evaluation of any arrangement of legal and political institutions – carries implications for many of the more specific issues which tend to be discussed by political philosophers. There are, just for example, Rawlsian arguments for preferring democracy to other forms of political system, and for defending human rights, such as the right to free speech. There is a Rawlsian explanation for why we should value individual human life. There is a muchdiscussed defence of civil disobedience.12 In short, Rawls’s theory brought with it a new perspective on many traditional debates. However, it also did more than that, for it also set up a new framework – a new context – within which conflicting political positions of a general nature could be discussed. Rawls himself was a liberal, but there are works of Marxist philosophy such as G.A. Cohen’s, defences of the capitalist free-market such as Robert Nozick’s; and arguments for collectivist ‘communitarianism’, all of which defend and define their positions through an account of their relationship those taken by Rawls.13 Nozick’s comment that, philosopher’s must now work within Rawls theory (1974: 183) is absolutely to the point. This is, undoubtedly, a respect in which Rawls achieved his ambition to formulate an alternative – even a successor – to utilitarianism, for it was utilitarianism which had supplied a foundational ethical framework for an earlier generation of philosophers. (A.J. Ayer, for example, stated that, ‘The Utilitarian position is the one to which I feel most sympathetic’ though with ‘one or two reservations’. Russell was also cautiously utilitarian’. (See for example Ayer 1969 & Russell 1902/1967.) Arguably, it was the replacement of utilitarianism with the construction of a ‘contractualist’ paradigm which was Rawls’s major achievement.

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Notes 1 My quotations are from Desmond Lee’s translation of The Republic. However, the page references are to the Stephanus edition of 1578. 2 On this, see Guthrie (2013): especially the discussion on p. 4ff. 3 It so turns out that this is not a thing of the past. As I write, the Republican government of Georgia, the US state, is planning to introduce a raft of voting laws which will make if more difficult for supporters of the Democrat party to vote. The latter group includes most blacks of course. 4 Rawls is citing an earlier American philosopher, Josiah Royce (1855–1916). 5 The idea of a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ comes to the fore in Political Liberalism, where it is contrasted with that of a ‘political doctrine’; that is, one which applies to the ‘basic structure’ alone. 6 Nozick’s argument is intended to parallel Locke’s, in the Second Treatise, that there is a natural right to property. However, unlike Locke’s, Nozick’s contains no account of how property rights are acquired ‘initially’; that is, over items which were previously unowned. 7 For a piecemeal deconstruction of pro-free market libertarianism, see my AntiLibertarianism: Markets, Philosophy, and Myth (Haworth 1994). 8 In the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, Marx predicts that, ‘At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society [will] come into contact with the existing relations of production’; that, ‘from forms of development of the productive forces these relations [will] turn into their fetters’ and that, consequently, ‘the entire immense superstructure [will be] more or less rapidly transformed’. (Marx 2000b: 45) 9 Versions of these claims – that capitalism is coercive, alienating, and exploitative are made in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. (Marx 2000a) 10 In one his few references to Marx, Rawls comments that, ‘a society in which there are no conflicting demands and the wants of all fit together without coercion into a harmonious plan of activity, is a society in a certain sense beyond justice’. (TJ2: 249) It is true that, in such a society, the ‘circumstances of justice’, as Rawls calls them, would be absent. I take it that Rawls is also expressing scepticism over claims, such as Marx’s quoted here in A Critique of the Gotha Programme, that, in future communist society, ‘all the springs of cooperative wealth [will] flow more abundantly’ and ’the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [will be] crossed in its entirety’. (See Marx 2000c: 614.) 11 Rawls discusses issues related to this at TJ2, chapter 5, sections 41–3, pp. 228–51. 12 According to Rawls, it is a major virtue of his theory that it makes sense of the idea that there are fundamental rights. The rights to vote and to hold public office figure in his list of ‘basic liberties’. (TJ2: 53) For the discussion of civil disobedience see TJ2: 319–43. 13 See Cohen (2000), Nozick (1974), Sandel (1982). See also my discussion in Understanding the Political Philosophers (2012), chapter 14.

7 PATTERNS OF THOUGHT

I shall take it that, typically, a systematically worked out political philosophy will comprise the following elements: (i) a particular conception of the self, (ii) a description of social reality cast in broad and general terms, and (iii) a set of normative claims. It will also provide an explanation of how these claims are interrelated; an explanation which places them within the context of an overall theoretical framework – a representation of ‘the way things really are’, if you like. (How else could it qualify as a philosophical system?) For a clear and relatively simple illustration of the point, take utilitarianism. In the hands of its nineteenth century exponents – Bentham and then John Stuart Mill – this comprised (i) a conception of the self according to which we are, each of us, motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It was, in other words, held to be an underlying law of human behaviour that we act in pursuit of happiness. Correspondingly (ii) they portrayed the social realm as being, fundamentally, an arena within which individuals, each in pursuit of his or her own happiness, follow paths which will inevitably cross. (There is an ever present danger of ‘collision’.) Hence (iii) the normative claims that it is the duty of governments to manage this atomised social reality with a view to ensuring that the principle of utility, or ‘greatest happiness’ principle, is satisfied to the greatest possible extent. Similarly – and as noted in the foregoing chapter – Rawls holds (i) a conception of the self according to which each person seeks to carry out a rational plan of life formed on the basis of a conception of the good, the latter having been framed in the context of a comprehensive doctrine; (ii) a corresponding conception of social reality (similar to the utilitarian conception) according to which individuals, each seeking to fulfil his or her rational plan of life, must inevitably follow paths which will cross; (iii) the normative claim social and political arrangements should be evaluated in terms of his two principles.1 Now, I propose to use this threefold classification as the basis for the discussion contained in the following chapters. There are, of course, other ways in which DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-9

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I could have constructed the remainder of this book, so perhaps I should explain why I have chosen this one. In short, the answer is that it’s a solution to the problem of how to portray recent political philosophy in a manner which is broad enough to do it justice when the field has been largely dominated by the work of a single philosopher. To put it another way, I don’t want this book to be ‘all about Rawls’. This means that possibilities which might have seemed obvious at first glance are, in fact, ruled out. For example, take the conventional threefold categorisation of political ideologies; the one which represents them as ranged along a continuum, with Marxism, various forms of socialism, and similar groups of ideas situated at one extreme – the ‘Left’ extreme. Conservatism accompanied other versions of traditionalism and some much nastier bodies of doctrine, fascism, for example, are located at the opposite extreme – on the ‘Right’ – and the centre ground is occupied by liberalism (portrayed as sensibly moderate or pathetically wishy–washy, depending upon whose version of the schema this is.) My guess is that it is the classification most people would come up with if asked to classify political points of view, if only because it represents the major lines of division which tend to separate political parties within contemporary liberal democracies. So why not use it as a basis for the discussion upon which we are about to embark, with chapters on philosophers of the Left and others on philosophers of the centre and the Right? The answer is that this is a work of philosophy, and that its purpose is to explore relations between bodies of theory, not just at the level of the attitudes their authors are out to defend (socialist, liberal, and so on) but at a more fundamental level, the level of the assumptions upon which they are founded and the principles around which they are framed, and when it comes to the latter, the conventional categorisation is of little use. That is because it turns out that political attitudes which differ widely – so widely that they can be ranged along the continuum from one end to the other – can be defended at the philosophical level by writers who share similar assumptions concerning the nature of philosophy and who, therefore, take a similar approach. In fact, a good illustration of the point is provided by the similarities between Rawls’s own approach to philosophy and that taken by some of his critics. Thus, and as noted in the previous chapter, Rawls is a liberal, A Theory of Justice being a defence of principles similar to those defended by J.S.Mill in On Liberty. But then many of Rawls’s assumptions concerning the nature of philosophy are shared by Robert Nozick, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is a defence of radically pro-free market ‘libertarianism’ and must therefore be regarded as a right wing text. (‘Libertarianism’ is the philosophical doctrine upon which now not-so-fashionable ideologies, such as ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganomics’ drew for support.)2 For an example of a shared assumption, take the fact that both texts, Rawls’s and Nozick’s, are premised upon the claim that a credible moral and political philosophy must take into account the fact that individuals have rights, and that such rights must be respected, even though the consequences of doing so, when considered from the standpoint of society viewed as a whole, are far from optimal.

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In Rawls’s case, the claim is manifest, early in A Theory of Justice, in the form of an argument that utilitarianism, founded as it is upon a principle which enjoins the maximisation of happiness across society consider as a whole, embodies a view of social cooperation which, ‘is the consequence of extending to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflating all persons into one through then imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator’. (Rawls TJ2: 24) As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, according to Rawls ‘it follows that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons’. (ibid) Against this, Rawls points out that, ‘It has seemed to many philosophers, and it appears to be supported by the convictions of common sense, that we distinguish as a matter of principle between the claims of, liberty an right on the one hand and the desirability of increasing aggregate social welfare on the other: and that we give a certain priority, if not absolute weight, to the former’.(ibid) To put it briefly and bluntly, Rawls’s point is that, if society is ideally, and as he says, ‘a cooperative venture for mutual advantage’ (TJ2:4), no one will sign up to a principle specifying that he or she will have to make sacrifices for the sake of some overall ‘greater good’. On the contrary, ‘Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others’(TJ2: 25) It is, thus, Rawls’s argument that, by contrast with utilitarianism, the ‘separateness of persons’ can be accommodated within the contest of his own contractualist theory, which takes as a starting point the assumption that individuals who stand to gain from social cooperation will, at the same time, require that their claims to be treated as separate – being claims of right – will be respected by the others. In a similar vein, Nozick baldly announces, ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’. (1974: ix) (It is the first sentence of his book.) Then again, a substantial section of Nozick’s critique of redistributivism consists of criticisms directed against Rawls’s second principle, his ‘difference principle’. These are, if you like, two philosophers playing the same game, but siding with opposing teams. As you will recall, it was Nozick who remarked that, ‘Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’s theory or explain why not’. (Nozick 1974: 183) So, you could say that there is an extent to which Nozick is ‘working within’ Rawls’s theory and that, where he is ‘explaining why not’ it is by defining his own position through a contrast between it and Rawls’s. But then there have been philosophers of whom as much can be said, but who have taken a Left political stance. For a notable example, take G.A. Cohen, whose work exemplifies his commitments to Marxism and to egalitarianism.3 There is a volume of essays, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re so Rich? (2000), in two of which Cohen defends a thoroughgoing egalitarianism through a critique of Rawls’s argument. 4 There are, for example, passages in which Cohen pays particular attention to the question of whether it was Rawls’s intention to count the family as one of the institutions which should be included in the basic structure of society. It is a point upon which

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Rawls himself appears to have wavered – there is a ‘wobble’ – but Cohen argues, firstly, that the family should be included in the basic structure and that, consequently, the difference principle has implications which are more egalitarian than many philosophers (including Rawls himself) have realised. It would – of course – be to stray from the point here if I were now to go on to conduct a critique of Cohen’s argument itself, just as it would if I were to do the same in the case of Nozick’s argument.5 That is because my point is quite simply that, while these are philosophers whose political affiliations differ widely, there is nevertheless a level at which they are in agreement, for both Nozick and Cohen recognise a value in the approach Rawls takes to the question of justice. Why else would each seek to define his own position by contrasting it with that taken by Rawls – and, not only that, but with a particular feature of Rawls’s argument, namely his interpretation of the difference principle? To the historian of political philosophy it is the agreement between these philosophers at the ‘deeper’ level – the level of theoretical orientation – which can be more interesting than their differences of political affiliation. Similar considerations apply in the case of arguments whose content may differ, but which take the same form – which match the same underlying ‘pattern’, if you like. For example, there is a group of arguments according to which the driver of long-term change over time is competition (or ‘conflict’ or ‘collision’) between entities of some specified type. It is a category which includes some famous examples. One is Darwin’s account of evolutionary change, his explanation of the origin of species as the outcome of competition for resources between differing varieties of organism – ‘the struggle for existence’ as he calls it.6 Another is John Stuart Mill’s argument, in On Liberty (1859/1991a) that it is only through the ‘collision’ of adverse opinions that humanity has any chance of reaching truth. More than that, according to Mill, it is competition between ideas, rendered possible under conditions of liberty of thought and discussion, which drives progress. ‘The well-being of mankind’, he writes, ‘may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths, which have reached the point of being uncontested’. (ibid: 49) Yet another – equally notable – example is Marx’s argument that’ ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’. (Marx & Engels 1848/2000d: 246) and that such struggles are driving society towards revolution, the collapse of capitalism, and the coming of a new order. Clearly, these are writers whose interests differ, and there would be little point in comparing them on the basis of their ability to deal with the subject matter with which each is, respectively, concerned. (There wouldn’t be much to learn from, say, an essay on Darwin’s speculations concerning the structure of post-capitalist society, should he have entertained any such. It is similarly safe to assume that there would be little, if anything, to gain from Marx’s description of the Galapagos tortoise – supposing that such a description exists.) On the other hand, though, it is easy to appreciate why the fact of their sharing a structure could be of great interest to the historian of ideas (especially when one adds to this, the further consideration that it was only during the nineteenth century that arguments of this

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form – like the idea of progress itself – came to prominence. There are, obviously, interesting questions to be asked as to why this should have been so, but they lie beyond the reach of this chapter.)

Two Models: Liberal and Historicist As these examples show, arguments framed with very different aims in mind can share an underlying pattern7. It follows that, in political philosophy, arguments and theories can be categorised in more than one way, not on the basis of the ideological intent with which they were framed (Marxist, liberal, or whatever), but on the basis of the underlying pattern they share. In the following chapters I shall concentrate upon two such categories; those which conform to what I shall call the ‘liberal’ pattern or model and, on the other hand, those which conform to the ‘historicist’ model, as I shall call it. The categorisation may not be exhaustive, but there is a clear line of division between the two, and a great many philosophical theories fall upon one side of it or the other. It also reflects the fact that, as I remarked in an earlier chapter, the political philosophy of our period has been haunted by nineteenth century ghosts. In saying that, I had two ghosts especially in mind, namely the ghosts of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. I am sure that I have said enough by now to demonstrate that Mill is Rawls’s intellectual ancestor. So far, though, I have had less to say on the subject of Marx’s legacy. I hope to rectify that in what follows, as I shall be treating Marx’s as an example of a philosophy founded upon the historicist model. As a start, then, I should summarise the main differences between the two models. I’ll begin with the difference between the conceptions of the self which figure in each, and by noting that, within liberal philosophy, the self tends to be as motivated by the desire to achieve certain ends. In their turn, those ends are portrayed as varying from individual to individual. To take a simple example, Benthamite utilitarianism portrays humans as motivated by the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain. This is represented as a fundamental law of nature. Those who attempt to question the fact, says Bentham, ‘deal in sounds instead of senses, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light’. (1789/2000b: 88)8 Rawls portrays motivation in more subtle terms. His portrait is, nevertheless, similar to Bentham’s in the sense that it presupposes a world of separate individuals, each of whom is acting in pursuit of his or her own ends. (In Rawls’s case, this means seeking to follow through a ‘rational plan of life’.) Note that this is, in a sense, a relatively ‘static’ representation of the self. That is to say, if we are, as Bentham held, essentially pleasure-seeking and pain-shunning creatures – or essentially happiness-seeking as Bentham and Mill both held, or Rawlsian actors attempting to conform to a rational plan – then so were people living in medieval times, as were ancient Greeks, and as were people living back in the Stone Age. By contrast, the conception of the self which figures within the historicist model is more complex. In Marx’s version individuals are, of course, portrayed as motivated to act as they do by constraints imposed upon them by capitalist

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conditions – the bourgeoisie by the need to make a profit, the proletariat by the need to find paid work and thereby to survive. But the crucial point here is that, according to Marx, capitalist conditions also have a distorting effect upon the human essence itself. ‘The more the worker externalises himself in his work’, writes Marx, ‘the more powerful becomes the alien, objective world that he creates opposite himself, the poorer he becomes himself in his inner life and the less he can call his own’. (1844/2000a: p.87) Marx continues, ‘It is just the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself’. (ibid) There is thus, according to Marx, a difference between the etiolated, ‘alienated’ beings who labour under capitalist conditions and the beings they have the potential to become – a potential which will only be realised, as Marx sees it, once capitalism has been swept away, and superseded by conditions within which humans can truly flourish.9 Now, the crucial point here is that the historicist model invokes a conception of the self as an entity whose essential character is a variable function of historical conditions, and which is, in that respect, quite different from the ‘static’ liberal conception. (On the historicist view there is, if you like, no such thing as the self per se, only the self as it is at such-and-such a point in historical time.) Of course, to be a historicist you don’t have to be a Marxist, or even left-leaning. It depends upon how you ‘fill in the gaps’ as it were. For example, you might be a follower of Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom a distinction between the self as it was conceived in the times of Homer, and the ‘emotivist’ or ‘intuitionist’ self of our own times is crucial. (‘Our own times’ here means ‘post-seventeenth century Enlightenment’.) We shall be considering MacIntyre’s argument in more detail in chapter nine. Now, to move on, it is consistent with the difference between these two conceptions of the self that each model should accord a different role to history. In the case of the liberal model, history tends to take a back seat. That is because the model takes as its subject, the human situation as it is at present (which it may or may not portray as the human situation as it always has been and always will be). Independent selves are represented as having to occupy the same world, even though the wants and beliefs by which they are motivated vary from individual to individual. The problem for philosophy is conceived as being that of formulating acceptable principles on the basis of which the situation can be managed. Of course, this is not to say that proponents of the liberal model have no sense of history. They do. For example, in his introduction to Political Liberalism, Rawls represents the need for a liberal political philosophy as an outcome of the European Reformation. This, he writes, had ‘enormous consequences’. It saw the division of medieval Christianity, ‘an authoritative, salvationist, and expansionist religion’, and the appearance of a rival, equally authoritative and salvationist religion, (1993: xxiii) and it was followed, in it aftermath, by ‘long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’. (ibid: xxiv) Hence ‘the problem of political liberalism’, namely ‘How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?’ (ibid: xxv)

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But the story Rawls tells is meant as an explanation of how the need for a solution to the problem of political liberalism came about, not as a description of features integral to the problem itself. In other words, the problem would remain exactly as it is, even if the explanation were untrue, or even if there were no explanation available. In the case of the historicist model, by contrast, an account of historical development is itself a component of a philosophical thesis. Here, as before, the obvious example is Marxism, according to which economic developments are determinants of change throughout society more generally. Important features of Marx’s philosophy presuppose the accuracy of this thesis. Marxism is not the only example of course, and differing versions of historicism are distinguishable according to the manner in which each accounts for historical change. Thus, whereas Marx believed the determinants of change to be economic, Hegel saw history as the progress of ‘spirit’ towards some absolute realisation. Again, MacIntyre accounts for change with a story of how differing ‘traditions of moral enquiry’ develop over time. There are, too, differences between these philosophers in their views as to where history is leading – of history’s ‘end point’ as it were. Marx is certainly an optimist. He believes that, after capitalism has collapsed, and after we have lived through a repressive ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ a new dawn will arrive, ‘all the springs of co-operative wealth [will] flow more abundantly’ and ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [has been] crossed in its entirety and society’. (1875/2000c: 615) MacIntyre is more of a pessimist. He believes that we are living through the final years of a moribund ‘Enlightenment project’ – one which is doomed to failure. Then again, it is open to historicists to argue that while history may be going somewhere, it is going nowhere in particular, that – like evolution – it is simply an ongoing process (the idea that the evolution of homo sapiens represents a culmination or high-point being a piece of wishful thinking.)

Where to Now? With that, and having sketched the terrain, I shall be going on to consider these points in more detail. I shall begin, in the next chapter, with a closer account of the conception of ‘the liberal self’ (as I have called it), the representation of social reality with which it goes hand-in-hand, and the normative claims it enjoins. I have said a fair amount on the subject already, but there is still more to be said. In particular there is a charge, frequently levelled at the liberal conception, that it is surreptitiously conservative in its implications. It seems to me that the charge is just wrong-headed, and I hope to explain why. Likewise, liberal philosophy is, as noted, sometimes criticised for its pursuit of a misguided and ultimately doomed ‘Enlightenment project’. As I shall argue, that charge is similarly misguided. In subsequent chapters I shall go on to discuss the work of Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two philosophers I treat as representative of (what I have called) the ‘historicist’ approach to political philosophy.

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Notes 1 For yet another example, take the argument of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes connects (i) a conception of human nature according to which we are, each of us, motivated by a desire for those things which tend to our own preservation, and by fear of those things tend to our destruction; (ii) a corresponding picture of social reality according to which, in the absence of authority, there would be a war of all against all; and (iii) the normative principle that a strong sovereign is needed to impose order. Still, you will get the point. It would be tedious to continue the list of examples ad infinitum. 2 These days, libertarianism is undoubtedly a doctrine of the Right. In the nineteenth century, though, it would have been considered liberal. 3 Cohen’s books include, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). His last book was Why Not Socialism? (2009). 4 The essays in question are ‘Justice, Incentives, and Selfishness’(Cohen 2000:117–33) and, ‘Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice’ (ibid: 134–47). 5 But see my Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy and Myth. (1994). 6 Darwin’s expression. ‘See, for example, The Origin of Species, chapter 3. (Darwin 1859/ 2009) p.585ff. 7 Not that the point was lost on Darwin’s and Marx’s contemporaries. In his speech at Marx’s funeral in 1883, Engels said this: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history’. 8 In fact, Bentham’s work is not entirely liberal. He does not place the same emphasis upon liberty as do J.S.Mill and Rawls. The point is irrelevant here, though. 9 The relevant texts here are the 1844 Manuscripts (Marx 1844/2000a).

8 THE LIBERAL SELF

As noted in the previous chapter, philosophers whose political stance is liberal have tended to deploy a conception of the self which is, in a certain sense, ‘individualistic’. The ontological separateness of persons, with each person seeing the world from his or her own point of view and each pursuing his or her own ends, is taken to be a fundamental – inescapable – fact. So is the conception of social reality which goes hand-in-hand with the latter, the conception of a world within which the paths of individuals will inevitably cross as each acts in pursuit of his or her own ends. It is supposed that there is nothing to be done about such facts. The most that can be hoped for is that such conflict and competition can be successfully managed. Viewed in this light, principles such as the principle of utility (according to which ‘the greatest good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number’), or Rawls’s two principles of justice, can be construed as specifying a basis for such conflict-management. In this chapter, I propose to examine this conception of the self more closely than I have so far, and with special reference to some of the criticisms to which it has been thought to be exposed. But first, as a preliminary to the ensuing discussion I should point out that, here, I shall be using the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ in a somewhat technical sense – albeit a sense which has acquired a regular and unquestioned usage within certain academic circles. I mean that, within the everyday world (i.e. outside ‘academia’), ‘liberalism’ is generally understood to be a set of political values which accords a central place to individual liberty. Liberalism so understood is, thus, distinct from conservatism, which prioritises tradition and order, and socialism, which tends to emphasise the values of equality and collective endeavour. Of course, the boundaries dividing these value-systems are not clear cut. It is possible to be a liberal and a socialist for example, but not to the extent of supporting the imposition of socialism through authoritarian measures. DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-10

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Still, be that as it may, my point is that, in this chapter, I shall not be using the term ‘liberalism’ in the everyday sense. Instead, I shall be using it to mean any political philosophy which rests upon the conception outlined above, the conception according to which selves are irreducibly separate. With that in mind, I open – in the following section – by pointing out that notion of selves as separate can easily mask a distinction between two forms of individualism. I call these ‘ontological’ and ‘ethical’ individualism. I then go on to address the following charges; first, the charge that the liberal conception is over-individualistic, together with the related charge that it is implicitly biased towards the values of the unrestricted (or ‘capitalist’) free market; second, Alasdair MacIntyre’s charge that the liberal conception of the self is an ‘emotivist’, or ‘intuitionist’ conception; third, the charge sometimes levelled at liberal political philosophy, that it exemplifies the pursuit of a failed ‘Enlightenment project’.

Individualism Ontological and Ethical Individualism: The Fallacy of Confusing the Two Ontological individualism (as I shall call it) takes the separateness of persons to be a plain fact. It holds that, rather as atoms are the fundamental components of matter, so individual persons are the fundamental components of society. By contrast, ethical individualism holds that the interests of individual persons, and their claims to be treated in specific ways, ought always (or almost always) to take priority over the interests and moral claims of collective entities – entities, such as ‘the group’, ‘the nation’, ‘the ‘working class’, or ‘society as a whole’. The salient point here is that there is no logical relationship between the two forms of individualism. Specifically, if ontological individualism – or some version of it – constitutes a true and accurate representation of reality, it doesn’t follow that ethical individualism, or some version of it, must be correct. To suppose otherwise is to entertain a fallacy. One of the best known – not to say notorious – examples of the fallacy at work is Margaret Thatcher’s argument that because (i) ‘there is no such thing as society’ but only, ‘individual men and women and families’, it is therefore (ii) up to people to ‘ look to themselves first’, it being ‘our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour’.1 To put it in terms of the distinction at issue, Thatcher was supposing – fallaciously – that an ontologically individualistic premise can be used to support an ethically individualist injunction. Of course, Thatcher was not noted for her expertise in logic, or for an ability to appreciate fine distinctions, so for an example of similar reasoning drawn from the work of a well-known political philosopher take Robert Nozick’s argument, premised upon the assertion (i) that ‘There are only individual people, different individual people with their own individual lives’. (1981: 33) According to Nozick, it follows (ii) that, ‘Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses

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him and benefits the others, Nothing more.’ (ibid) Nozick is objecting to the idea that there is ‘social entity’, a supra-individual with interests and a will of its own, and which has an existence over-and-above that of the ordinary mortals who compose society. In his view, referring to such supra-individualist entities, as if they were real things, is to indulge in a misleading fiction, and, if he is right, then – of course – the coercion of one person into the service of another, even if it is done for the sake of some (supposedly) overall social good, can only be, as he says, a case of ‘using’ that person. Notice, though, that Nozick’s argument is founded upon an ontologically individualist premise – i.e. that ‘there are only individual people’ and so on – from which he seeks to derive the ethically individualist conclusion that the concept of an overall social good requires the ‘use’ of some persons by others – using people being morally wrong, or so we are quite reasonably meant to take it. It follows that Nozick’s argument rests upon the fallacy at issue here, and that it fails as a consequence. At this point, however, it has to be said that – Nozick’s particular argument notwithstanding – there are reasons for empathising with the libertarian objection to the idea that there are supra-individual social entities. One such is that the invocation of such entities is characteristic of apologetics for tyranny and totalitarianism. Here is an example drawn from a speech by Mussolini. The capital point of the Fascist doctrine is the conception of the State, its essence, the work to be accomplished, its final aims. In the conception of Fascism, the State is an absolute before which individuals and groups are relative. Individuals and groups are ‘conceivable’ inasmuch as they are in the State. The Liberal State does not direct the movement and the spiritual evolution of collectivity, but limits itself to recording the results; the Fascist State has its consciousness and conviction, a will of its own, and for this reason it is called an ‘ethical’ State. (Mussolini 1933/2015: 41) Mussolini goes on to proclaim that, ‘the State is not a night-watchman, only occupied with the personal safety of its citizens, nor is it an organisation with purely material aims, such as that of assuring a certain well-being and a comparatively easy social cohabitation’ but, ‘as conceived and enacted by Fascism, [it] is a spiritual and moral fact’ and that ‘as it rises and develops, [it] is a manifestation of the spirit’. (ibid) You only have to bear in mind the role played by fascism during the earlier years of the twentieth century to appreciate that this is scary stuff, and to recognise the appeal of Nozick’s view – the converse of Mussolini’s – that only the minimal, or ‘nightwatchman’ form of state is morally justified. The trouble with the argument in question, though, is that it misses the target at which it is aimed. Nozick’s intended targets are neither fascism nor totalitarianism. His critique is, rather, directed at the idea of the ‘redistributive’ welfare state – a state designed to secure decent standards for all, including the least advantaged members of society,

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and financed through taxation. (Typically, such a state will include a national health service, as in Britain and other European countries, or some other system for securing affordable healthcare for all. It will secure education for all, up to a certain level, and endeavour to ensure that even the poorest members of society are decently housed.) There are many arguments with which a state of that type can be justified, none of which is defeasible by the simple assertion that, ‘Individuals have rights’. (Or rather, they would only be defeasible in that way with the help of a specific, rather questionable interpretation of what it is to have a right.)2 Still, it would be to stray from the point if were I were to develop any such arguments in detail here, because my only point is that, for a defence of the welfare state, you don’t need to invoke a mysterious supra-individual entity, such as ‘the overall good’. For one reason why not, you only have to consider that if Nozick’s comment that, ‘there are only individual people’ is meant to suggest that a society is no more than a random assortment of individuals located within a given area, then it is just false. On the contrary, for there to be a society, there have to be people who stand in certain relationships to each other. Some of those relationships are family relationships (as Thatcher inconsistently stressed), but others are defined by the structure of institutions of other kinds, including ‘collective’ institutions of various kinds. Think of the relationship between individuals who perform different tasks in the operation of a health service, for example, or a legal system. (Likewise, it is false to assert that a car is ‘only a bunch of components’ – nuts, bolts, gears, wheels, and so on. That’s because the components could just be piled up in a heap somewhere, and you don’t have a car until they’ve been put together in a certain way.) The point is that, since a state can comprise institutions, operated by individuals and for the benefit of individuals – and that it can be true in that sense that ‘there are only individual people’ – it ought to be possible to find arguments to justify a welfare state of the sort Nozick dislikes without invoking the existence of any fictional entities.3

‘Communitarian’ Objections Still, I have said enough by now to illustrate how the conflation of two conceptions of individualism – ontological and ethical – has played a role in certain versions of right-wing, pro-free market thought. To pursue the point further would take me beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, let me now turn to the role it has played in criticisms of liberal individualism which have tended to emanate from the centre and the left. In many versions, these tend to claim that ‘abstract individualism’, as it is sometimes called, is just too abstract and that, as a consequence, it tends to sideline values which are ‘communal’; or ‘collective’ in nature. (I’ll call these ‘communitarian’ values for short.)4 One interesting example is Alasdair MacIntyre’s objection to abstract individualism, that it relies upon an ‘emotivist’ conception of the self. MacIntyre states that, ‘For liberal individualism a community is simply an arena in which

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individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life’, and within which ‘political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible’, adding that, ‘it is on the liberal view no part of the legitimate function of government to inculcate any one moral outlook’. (1985: 195) MacIntyre’s is, clearly, a description of what I have been referring to as the liberal representation of the self and its place within the social environment. But why should it merit the epithet ‘emotivist’? The answer is that, by portraying a world in which each person pursues his or her own chosen conception of the good life, it rules out the possibility of there being moral principles which lie beyond such subjectively ‘chosen’ conceptions – and to which an appeal can be made in cases of disagreement. In the end – ‘when push comes to shove’ or so you could say – what passes as argument can be no more than persuasion, or so MacIntyre argues. As he puts it, emotivism ‘entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations’ and, ‘For emotivism the distinction is illusory because. It means that evaluative utterance can have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the attitudes and feelings of others’. (1985: 23–4 my italics) In short, whatever your values might be, communal or otherwise – and whatever mine – its just a matter of who can push hardest. MacIntyre’s reference to emotivism is an allusion to the logical positivist’s ‘emotive theory of ethics’, according to which statements containing moral terms – ‘good’, ‘bad’, right’, ‘wrong’, and so on – are, in fact, no more than expressions of sentiment of feeling. (This was discussed back in chapter three.) His objection to emotivism is related to certain other arguments, specific to his own philosophical thesis. For example, it is related to his representation of the liberal conception as embodying the (peculiarly modern) conception of ‘the individual’ as ‘a moral agent, freed from hierarchy and teleology’ who ‘conceives of himself and is conceived of by moral philosophers as sovereign in his moral authority’. (1985: 62) The individual, so conceived, is pictured as – so to speak – ‘standing back’ from the reasons which might motivate him (or her)5 to act, and choosing from the set. He writes: ‘From the standpoint of modern individualism I am what I myself choose to be. I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence’. (ibid: 220) It is also related to his observation that the most striking feature of the debates in which contemporary moral disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. By this he does not mean, he says, ‘just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus’ there being, ‘no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture’. (ibid: 6) However, since these arguments are specific to MacIntyre’s philosophy I will set them to one side for the moment. They will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. Just here, let me turn instead to an argument which has a wider currency, namely the objection to liberal ‘abstract individualism’ that it prioritises individual interest (if not exactly self-interest) at the expense of collective and communal values. Examples of this objection can be found in the work of writers

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right across the political spectrum, from right to left, although the nature of the collective values supposedly at risk, varies from case to case. We have already noted Mussolini’s argument, typical of the extreme Right, that liberalism misportrays what he takes to be the true relationship between the individual and the state, the latter being ‘a manifestation of the spirit’, (1933/2015: 41) (Mussolini was echoing his mentor, the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile according to whom liberalism ‘prioritises the ends of the individual over the demands of the state’, thereby ‘inverting’ the relationship which ought to hold. Gentile held the state to be ‘a wholly spiritual creation’.) (Gentile 1928/2015) (I am taking it that the state, like the nation, relies for its existence upon there being a large number of individuals organised in conformity with certain principles, and that it is – in that respect – a collective entity.) As for MacIntyre himself, he holds that liberal individualism sidelines the consideration that, ‘we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity’. Since the values of community and collectivity are at issue here, let me quote him at length. [I]t is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be good for one who inhabits these roles. As such I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. (1985: 220) According to MacIntyre, it is a ‘thought which is likely to appear alien and even surprising from the standpoint of modern individualism’ because, ‘from the standpoint of individualism I am what I myself choose to be’ and ‘I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence’. (ibid.) For the moment, my only comments on MacIntyre’s point are, firstly, that I don’t find the thought at all alien or surprising and, secondly, that I disagree. It seems to me that, while it is true enough that one’s identity may not be entirely a matter of choice, it is always possible to ‘stand back’, as it were, even from defining features of one’s social existence and ‘put them in question’.6 Compare MacIntyre with Sartre who, in a famous example, points out that, ‘the waiter in the café cannot immediately be a café waiter in a sense that this inkwell is an inkwell or the glass is a glass’ because this waiter is capable of forming ‘reflective judgements or concepts concerning his condition’. (1943/1958: 59) For Sartre, failure to recognise the fact is reprehensible, an act of ‘bad faith’. It seems to me that, similarly, one cannot ‘immediately be’ the bearer of a ‘particular social identity’, as MacIntyre suggests one can.

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Another, more familiar, version of the ‘objection from community’ tends to emanate from the left, and it states that, with its emphasis upon individual preference, liberal individualism sidelines (characteristically socialist) values, such as solidarity, cooperation, and community. In some versions, it is held to do so directly, the market being described by MacIntyre, for example, as ‘the dominant institution in a liberal economy’. (1988: 336) In others, it is argued that, within a liberal social order, relationships between individuals are organised according to principles which resemble market principles, the social order as a whole being an idealisation, or reification, of the market order. In his, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, for example, C.B. MacPherson argues that ‘the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory’ can be traced to a ‘possessive quality’ which has persisted within liberalism as it has developed from the seventeenth century to the present. (MacPherson 1962: 3) Similarly, MacIntyre holds that, ‘There are parallels between [the liberal] understanding of human beings in the social and political realm and the institution of the market’ on the grounds that, ‘In markets too it is only through the expression of individual preferences that a heterogeneous variety of needs, desires, and goods conceived in one way or another are given a voice’. (ibid.) What are we to make of this objection? It has to be admitted that there are indeed parallels between the liberal model’s portrait of the relationship between the self, it’s ends, and the social environment within which it moves and, on the other hand, the role played by the concept of ‘economic man’ within conventional economic theory. The objection gains a certain credence, too, from a certain contemporary usage. I mean the habit of referring to the advocacy of unrestricted free-markets as ‘neo-liberalism’. Since, I believe that free-market ideology is one thing and liberalism something else entirely, I dislike this usage, and I wish people would stop it. I don’t suppose there is much I can do about it, though.

Assessment of the Communitarian Objection How conclusive, then, are the foregoing objections to the liberal model, the objection that it marginalises communal values and the further objection that it contains an inbuilt bias towards free-market capitalism? The answer is that, while the model may lend itself to such objections, thanks to the way it sets things up, they are not at all conclusive. The reason is that the model is, in essence, a model of relationships, and of two in particular. One is the relationship between different individuals, with each pictured as separate from the others, and acting in pursuit of his or her own ends. The other is the relationship between each individual and the reasons by which he or she is motivated to act – each being pictured as, so to speak, ‘standing back’ and surveying the range of available reasons before acting. As such it is a model of ontological individualism. But, by contrast, the objection under discussion – that the model marginalises communal values and is biased towards self-interest – is an objection from an ethical perspective, and, as I argued

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earlier, ontological individualism carries no implications for ethical individualism, and the objection fails. Of course, there are specific interpretations of the model which have their difficulties. For example, there are well-known difficulties surrounding the utilitarian interpretation; the interpretation according to which, in seeking to carry out his or her own plans, each individual is pursuing happiness – a psychological state, akin to a sensation. (In the Benthamite version, happiness is, in turn, implausibly construed as a matter of there being a positive balance of pleasurable over painful sensations. It’s rather as if a successful life is one in which one remains permanently stoned.) It’s the sort of difficulty which Rawls’s interpretations of ‘pursuing one’s own ends’ as attempting to fulfil a ‘rational plan of life’ is designed to avoid. As Rawls’s puts it at one point, ‘The main idea is that a person’s good is determined by what is for him the most rational long-term plan of life given reasonable favourable circumstances’, explaining that, ‘A man is happy when he is more or less successfully in the way of carrying out this plan.’ (Rawls TJ2: 79–80)7 This is an account of happiness which does not equate it with the having of sensations. But these are difficulties which arise when the model is interpreted in particular ways. They do not reflect any weakness in its fundamental character. The main point, then, is that because the model is an expression of ontological individualism, and because it therefore carries no implications for ethical individualism, it places no restriction upon the type of reason by which individuals can be motivated. An individual might act for selfish reasons. (‘I should do action A because it will make me richer’) Another might act for altruistic reasons, or from a sense of community. (‘I should do A because I am such-and-such a person’s child, because – to quote MacIntyre – ‘I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation, …, etc.) In fact, in the passage quoted earlier, MacIntyre commits a non sequitur. I mean that, while my membership of specific family, city, tribe, nation, and so on, may define my identity, it doesn’t follow that I can’t view such membership ‘from the standpoint of modern individualism’ and ‘put it in question’. (see MacIntyre 1985: 220)

On ‘The Enlightenment Project’ Philosophers who favour the liberal model of the self are sometimes charged by their critics with the pursuit of ‘an Enlightenment project’. Such critics tend to describe that ‘project’ as misguided and doomed to failure. This chapter would be incomplete if I were not to offer some explanation of the charge. One reason for doing so is that, as I write, Rawls’s work remains a dominant influence within political philosophy, even though fifty years have now passed since the publication of A Theory of Justice, and Rawls is undoubtedly a philosopher in the Enlightenment mould. Another is that there has never been any such person as a philosopher who has had the definitive last word on a subject – not even Rawls. In other words, if I’m telling a story in this book, then it is undoubtedly a story with a sequel, and its important to recognise that alternatives are possible.

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With the following explanation of ‘the Enlightenment project’ (so called) I shall be moving this book’s narrative back in time, for the Enlightenment, as it came to be known, had its origins in the late seventeenth century. Please do not think of this as a digression, however. If it is the case that, as critics claim, philosophers writing now are pursing a project which had its origins back then, we may need to consider those origins if we are to understand their present activities. Another reason for including the following explanation here is that writers who, themselves, refer to ‘the Enlightenment project’ usually do little to explain what they mean by it. It seems to me that I owe it to readers to make up for this deficiency. With a view to gaining a clearer picture, then, it will help to distinguish (i) the Enlightenment attitude from (ii) the Enlightenment project itself and (iii) the movement of ideas, known as ‘the Enlightenment’ which originated in the seventeenth century and rose to prominence during the eighteenth. Let me take each in turn.

The Enlightenment attitude Here, then, are some well-known slogans. Each is drawn from a seventeenth or eighteenth century source, and representative of Enlightenment thought during that period. Nullius in Verba:: It means, ‘Take Nobody’s Word for It’, and it is the motto of the (British) Royal Society, founded in 1660. At the time, and ever since, the latter’s membership has consisted of a scientific elite. Its website states: ‘We published Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment demonstrating the electrical nature of lightning. We backed James Cook’s journey to Tahiti, reaching Australia and New Zealand, to track the Transit of Venus. We published the first report in English of inoculation against disease, approved Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, documented the eruption of Krakatoa and published Chadwick’s detection of the neutron that would lead to the unleashing of the atom’ As for the motto itself, ‘It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment’. ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ (Voltaire, 1694–1778): It means ‘crush the loathsome thing’, and it was the motto Voltaire was in the habit of appending to his signature. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom expression and an enemy of religious intolerance. He was especially contemptuous of the Catholic church, with its unfounded pretentions to exert moral authority. These were evils (infâmes) to be crushed (écrasées), just as a vile and noxious insect might be crushed underfoot. ‘The motto of enlightenment is [therefore]: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding: These famous lines encapsulate the

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Enlightenment attitude. They are drawn from one of its key texts, Kant’s essay, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment’? (see Kant 1784/ 1970: 54). You could paraphrase his advice in just two words, - Grow Up! Each motto illustrates the fact that defining the Enlightenment is as much a matter of describing an intellectual attitude as it is of categorising a specific body of ideas. Essentially, that attitude is a matter of systematically prioritising reason and evidence over unfounded claims to intellectual authority.

From Attitude to Project But how can there be anything wrong with that? In intellectual matters, shouldn’t one always follow reason and evidence to where they lead, and shouldn’t it be that one never takes anything on trust? You would think so, and you would also think that, without taking such a sceptical attitude, one could hardly count oneself a philosopher. Such questions would be right on target had there been nothing more to Enlightenment thought than an attitude. But there was more to it than that, for the thought of the Enlightenment period was further characterised by the supposition that, through the prioritisation of reason and a scepticism of intellectual authority – that is, through the maintenance of the Enlightenment attitude – it is inevitable that one will be led to conclusions of a certain form; conclusions stating that phenomena which are, at first sight, disparate can, in fact, be accommodated within the scope of a single explanatory principle or category. It’s a model of explanation which applies, with the least strain or distortion, in the case of natural science, for it can seem obvious that science just is the endeavour to accommodate apparently disparate phenomena within the context of a unifying explanatory framework. During the Enlightenment period, the pre-eminent example would have been considered by many to have been the formulation of three laws of motion by Newton – ‘the incomparable Mr Newton’, as Locke described him. (Locke 1690/1997: 58) Newton’s laws are ‘general’ in the sense that they purport to explain the behaviour of all bodies, some as large as planets and others smaller than billiard balls. Now, for the purposes of the present chapter, the relevant point is this: Generalise from this model to other fields – and especially to ethics – and you might be led to suppose that, just as there are scientifically ascertainable general principles governing the behaviour of natural phenomena, so there are universal moral principles, binding upon every human being, irrespective of historical or cultural situation. Generalise from it to politics, and you might be led to suppose that there are rights, ‘universally’ possessed by all, and which it is incumbent upon all governments to respect. In summary then, the Enlightenment project as I have characterised it so far, involves (i) an insistence upon maintaining an attitude of intellectual autonomy and (ii) the supposition that, by doing so, one will be sure to arrive at general principles – ‘general’ in the sense that a range of phenomena can be subsumed within them.

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But if that strikes you as reasonable and unexceptionable, note, firstly, that the inference from (i) to (ii) – the supposition that adopting the Enlightenment attitude must lead to the discovery of general principles – could turn out to be flawed. Specifically, it’s an inference which might apply within the realm of science, but not in ethics or politics. We shall be coming back to the point. Secondly, note that, when it comes to the relationship between general principles and the phenomena to which they apply, there are, if you like, different levels of generality. Thus, at the least general level, there is the relationship between a specific explanatory framework – a set of scientific laws – and a range of phenomena of a specific type. Again, Newton’s laws, which apply to a specific category, namely the movements of physical bodies, are an example. For an example drawn from a field other than physics, take the Darwinian law of evolution, which supplies a unifying explanatory framework for the similarities and differences between organisms. The claim that scientists endeavour to incorporate diverse phenomena within the context of such unifying frameworks is hard to fault. But now note that a further relationship between general description and observable phenomena would hold if it were the case that a complete, all-embracing description of the entire universe was a theoretical possibility, and it is with the supposition of the latter that we move from the conception of an Enlightenment project to that of (what I suppose you could call) and Enlightenment dream. This a dream of a description within which each fact would be allocated its appropriate ‘slot’, as it were. (The description would consist of the entire set of true propositions, including – for example – propositions stating that such-and-such physical objects exist, and that their behaviour is explicable in terms of such-and-such laws of nature.) It is easy enough to appreciate how the dream might come naturally – perhaps especially to those engaged in natural science. For example, I take it that physicists studying the behaviour of matter will be aware that there are evolutionary biologists studying the development of organisms, and that, likewise, members of the latter group will be aware of the efforts of the former. Why would the members of each group not assume that the results of their efforts, considered collectively, will eventually result in some exhaustive description of the way things ‘really are’ – their unification within a single explanatory framework? That said, I imagine that present-day scientists are a little more sceptical than were the intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom the possibility of arriving at such a description was real. For a notable example, take Descartes, who expressed it in the following terms: The sciences now have masks on them; if the masks were taken off they would appear supremely beautiful. On surveying the chain of the sciences one will regard them as not being more difficult to retain in one’s mind than the number series is’. (Descartes 1619/1954.)

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The idea that the sciences – and indeed all branches of knowledge – are interconnected is expressed with the help of the same analogy, that of a chain, by Jean le Rond d’Alembert in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, the document he co-edited with Denis Diderot. (The Encyclopedia, or to cite its full name in English, Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts was a document key to the history of the Enlightenment period.) As d’Alembert put it, ‘If one reflects somewhat upon the connection that discoveries have with one another, it is readily apparent that the sciences and the arts are mutually supporting, and that consequently there is a chain that binds them together’. (1751/ 1995: 5) Moreover, The universe, if we may be permitted to say so, would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view’. (ibid: 29)8 It’s a suspiciously ambitious claim, and it would be surprising if it were not open to question. I shan’t consider it here, however, the reason being that one can reject it without rejecting the more modest claim that there are categories of phenomena which can be unified within the scope of overarching principles, and this consideration applies in the case of ethics and politics, as much as applies in the cases of physics and biology.

Why Suppose that the Project Must Fail? In summary, then, the Enlightenment project (so-called) rested upon the assumption that an attitude of intellectual independence would lead to the conclusion that there are categories of phenomena which can be subsumed under general explanatory principles and, further, that the conclusion applies within the realms of ethics and politics just as much as it does in the case of the natural sciences. Those are the relevant points so far as the present discussion is concerned. There is more to the story, of course. For example, the movement of ideas, the ‘project’ itself is distinct from the fashion for the ‘enlightened’ lifestyle embraced by certain sections of the élite during the eighteenth century – the siècle des lumières, or ‘century of the enlightened ones’, as it came to be known. There are interesting stories to be told of the latter – for example, of how intellectuals, such as Diderot and Voltaire enjoyed the patronage of ‘Enlightened despots’, such as Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great – but none are especially relevant to the present subject. Moreover, the very idea of a project here ought to be treated with caution. It adds an element of intentionality to the story, for a project involves work carried out with particular ends in view, and which takes place through time. Against this, it is arguable that the true intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is simply part of the story of how the modern world picture came, over time, to replace the medieval world view. Again, that is of no special relevance to the issues with which we are presently concerned.

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But now, assuming that there is indeed an ‘Enlightenment project’, and assuming that there are, even now, thinkers in pursuit of that project, why assume that it is doomed to failure? Certainly, if the thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to assume that there must be general principles under which sets of apparently diverse phenomena can be subsumed and thereby explained, they can hardly be blamed for having done so, and one can hardly blame philosophers, even now, for making the same assumption. The question facing us here, however, is that of whether an assumption which guides the work of natural scientists can, with equal reasonableness, apply in other fields. In the case of the present book, that means in ethics and political philosophy. It is certainly true that the assumption is often made. One example – cited by MacIntyre – is the supposition of Benthamite utilitarianism, that a single principle, the principle of utility (or ‘greatest happiness’ principle, should be treated as foundational to morality. (1985: 62ff) Another example, or so it might be argued, is the idea that there are ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights, equally enjoyed by each person irrespective of the point in historical time at which they live and the specific cultural context within which they exist. (see for example Macintyre, ibid::66ff) And it is against such assumptions that contemporary critics of the Enlightenment project have tended to object. They have done so on a number of grounds. One objection is that the project, by treating natural science as its paradigm, is guilty of ‘scientism’. On this score, they are expressing a certain hostility to science which is prominent in some quarters – a hostility which arises from the idea that the influence of science upon the imagination is necessarily deadening; of science as the ‘philosophy’ which – as in Keats’s poem – ‘will clip an Angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air and gnomed mine’ and ‘unweave a rainbow’.9 It’s an attitude which pervades certain well-known critiques of the Enlightenment project. Arguably, the attitude is one strand which runs through Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment’. (1944/1979) According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment brings ‘disenchantment’ along with it. They write, ‘The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fantasy’ (ibid: 3) and, ‘On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning’. (ibid: 5)10 In a similar vein, John Gray writes of, ‘the disenchantment that trails in Enlightenment’s wake’, a malaise he attributes, in part, to ‘the Enlightenment’s ascription to science of a prescriptive authority whereby other forms of knowledge can be humiliated’. (Gray 1995: 154) So far as I can see, there are no good grounds for such hostility.11 Critics of the Enlightenment project have also tended to argue that it is misguidedly universalistic in its aspirations. It is argued, for example, that the idea that there are universal human rights – assuming, as it does, that there is a universal human nature, a set of features common to all individuals, irrespective of their historical or cultural location – is just wrong. Against this, it is argued that the idea must always include (surreptitiously introduced) values and prejudices specific to a

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particular culture. As MacIntyre puts it at one point, claims to the possession of rights ‘presuppose … . the existence of a socially established set of rules’ and, as he insists, ‘Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances. They are in no way universal features of the human condition’. (1985: 67.) Its an argument which critics tend to direct, with particular venom, against liberalism; for example, against what Gray describes as, ‘the absurd philosophical anthropology presupposed in liberal theory’. (1995: 150) On the basis of the forgoing anti-universalist premise, the liberal model tends to be further charged by its critics with a form of cultural imperialism – and, specifically, a ‘Western’ cultural imperialism. Gray again: ‘the Enlightenment project of promoting autonomous human reason and of according to science a privileged status in relation to all other forms of understanding has successfully eroded and destroyed local and traditional forms of moral and social knowledge’. (1995: 145) There may be merit in some of the foregoing arguments; less in others. However, I do not propose to address them directly. Nor shall I pursue the question of whether Rawls himself is in pursuit of the ‘Enlightenment project’, as characterised. I can see how a case can be made to suggest that he is. For example, his two principles of justice do appear, on the face of things, to have a certain universalistic flavour to them. On the other hand, and although his own comments on the subject are few and brief, it’s easy to see how he might rebut the charge. For example, at one point in Political Liberalism, he has this to say. Sometimes one hears reference made to the so-called Enlightenment project of finding a philosophical secular doctrine, one founded on reason and yet comprehensive. It would then be suitable to the modern world, so it was thought, now that the religious authority and the faith of Christian ages was alleged to be no longer dominant. And; Whether there is or ever was such a project we need not consider; for in any case, political liberalism, as I think of it, and justice as fairness as a form thereof, has no such ambitions. As I have said, political liberalism takes for granted not simply pluralism but the fact of reasonable pluralism; and beyond this, it supposes that of the main existing reasonable comprehensive doctrines, some are religious. (1993: xviii) In short, Rawls intends his philosophical arguments for political liberalism to be relevant to the human condition as it is at present. He thinks that the historical account of how it came about may be interesting, but it is of no special relevance to those arguments. Critics of the ‘Enlightenment project’ may disagree, but it is time to move on.

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The Story So Far Before turning to the next chapter, and in case its helpful, let me summarise the course my narrative has taken up to this point. Thus: In Part One, I set out to explain what it was about philosophy, as practiced in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, which rendered it so uncongenial to the branch of the subject which concerns itself with political questions. I suggested that the explanation lay, in part, with intellectual fashion, but I went on to argue that it also lay with the assumptions which underpinned the major philosophical movements of that period. To illustrate the point, I discussed two examples of such movements, the earlier being logical positivism (or ‘verificationism’), the later being its successor, the movement which placed an emphasis upon (what it took to be) ‘ordinary language’. But then, as I went on to point out at the beginning of Part Two, things changed in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls’s, A Theory of Justice. It was with this ‘Rawlsian renaissance’ that there came a major shift in perspective and in chapters five and six, I endeavoured to describe the features of Rawls’s philosophy which rendered it so distinctive, and which caused it to attract so much attention. Rawls is a liberal writer. In an earlier chapter, I distinguished two quite separate senses of the term ‘liberal’. Each has a prominent role to play, in the work of political philosophers if not elsewhere, and Rawls is a liberal in both. First, he defends a set of values which prioritises liberty and individual rights – ‘basic liberties’ as he calls them. These include such rights as the right to vote, freedom of speech, liberty of conscience, and freedom of the person.12 In this respect, he is reworking a liberal vision represented by earlier philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill – in Rawls’s case especially by Mill – and the ancestry of which can be traced back to the time of Locke if not further. That makes him a liberal in one sense. Second, he assumes that persons are – as I put it earlier – ‘ontologically separate’, with each person pursuing his or her own ends in the light of his or her own values. It is a picture which assigns to philosophy the task of formulating acceptable principles on the basis of which the ever-present likelihood of ‘collision’ between individuals, as they pursue their ends, can be managed. As a representation of the relationship between individual motivation, the social environment, and the task of philosophy, the picture is characteristic of liberal philosophy in the former sense, though not an essential component of every possible version. That makes him a ‘liberal’ in quite another sense of the term, and it is the sense we have been discussing in this chapter. That said, it is now time to turn from the liberal model of the self to the alternative model from which I distinguished it in the previous chapter – ‘the historicist model’ as I am calling it. Unlike the liberal model, which portrays the self as a kind of social atom – something which retains its essential character as things change around it – the historicist model represents the self as a variable whose essential character changes over time in a way which reflects long-term historical developments.

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Notes 1 Margaret Thatcher (1987), interview for Woman’s Own magazine. 2 Nozick tends to construe the what it is to have a right on the model of what it is to possess an item of property. He also tends to construe it on the model of what it is to have a bodily organ. I discuss these points in Anti-Libertarianism (1994) pp.78–81, and Free Speech (1998) pp. 74–5. 3 On this, see Graham (1986–7). There is also the example of Rawls’s second principle, of course. 4 I am using the word ‘communitarian’ to refer to a philosophical position which emphasises communal values. I do not mean it to refer to a type of political or religious movement – Owenite of Shaker – which advocates the virtues of collective life in small communities. MacIntyre has denied that he is a communitarian, but I think he is a communitarian in the former sense, though not in the latter. 5 Clearly, MacIntyre was writing at a time when the use of the male pronouns was still conventionally understood to include a reference tom females. 6 For an account of identity similar to MacIntyre’s, see Sandel (1982). For a critical account see Haworth (2005). 7 Rawls describes this as a familiar idea which goes back to Aristotle. 8 The famous frontispiece to the Encyclopedia represents the unity of the sciences with a different analogy, that of a tree – ‘the tree of knowledge’ – some of its branches (individual sciences) depending for their existence upon the branches nearer the roots, and from which they have sprung. 9 The lines are drawn from Keats’s poem, Lamia. The poem wass, of course, the inspiration for the title of Richard Dawkins’s. Unweaving the Rainbow (1998). 10 I assume, also, that Adorno and Horkheimer’s use of ‘disenchantment is also an implied reference to the animistic beliefs which were replaced by science and philosophy. A world of spirits and gods is, I suppose, more “enchanted” than one governed in accordance with scientific laws, but I doubt that it would be more “enchanting”’. 11 Which is not to say that there is no such thing as scientism. It is one thing to attempt a judicious assessment of the degree to which the methods and assumptions of natural science may serve as a model for those involved in other areas of inquiry, even if one gets it wrong, and quite another to indulge in a form of intellectual imperialism, for example, by supposing that natural science will actually replace, wholesale, the work of philosophers, political theorists, sociologists – maybe even literary critics. For an example, take the ‘sociobiologist’ E.O. Wilson’s claim that, ‘Scientists and humanists together should consider the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicised’. (Wilson: 562) According to Wilson, ‘The transition from purely phenomenological to fundamental theory in sociology must await a fill neuronal explanation of the human brain’. He prophesies that, ‘Cognition will be translated into circuitry. Learning and creativeness will be defined as the alteration of specific portions of the cognitive machinery regulated by input from the emotive centres’. (ibid: my italics) Note that Wilson’s claim is not that brain activity must play a part in the explanation of thought. Such a claim would be unexceptionable (it being impossible to think if you don’t have a brain). He is claiming that thought and brain activity are the same thing, and exactly how this would apply in the case of rules of conduct is a good question. 12 For the full list, see TJ2, p. 53.

9 HISTORICISM: THE SELF THROUGH TIME

Here I hit a problem, for there is no single exponent of the historicist model whose work can be counted as having been the dominant exemplar of the genre throughout the period with which we are concerned. In this case, there is, therefore no direct equivalent to Rawls, whose work has been, quite clearly, the dominant version of the liberal model. This means that were I to devote special attention to the work of just one historicist that would distort the picture I have been trying to paint, for it would exaggerate the degree of influence which has, in fact, been exerted by that person. On the other hand, though, it is important to stick to my golden rule, which is that, when discussing a particular philosophical position, one should always concentrate upon the best examples. It means I shall have to keep my focus relatively narrow. As a solution to the difficulty, I have chosen to devote this chapter to the work of two philosophers. One is Hannah Arendt and the other Alasdair MacIntyre. Arendt is best known in the world at large for two works, one being, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/2004), the detailed and scholarly study which she describes as having been written, ‘from 1945 onwards’ in ‘the first period of relative calm after decades of turmoil, confusion, and plain horror’. (OT: 387) The other is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963/1977), an account of the trial of the Nazi official charged with a special responsibility for the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps. (Arendt’s choice of subject reflects her biography. She was German and Jewish, and during World War Two, she had managed to escape persecution by the Nazis, first by moving to France and then to the United States.) In this chapter, I shall have something to say about both texts, but, because neither is entirely philosophical, I shall concentrate for the most part upon the argument of The Human Condition. (1958/1998) It is the work devoted to setting out the philosophical context for the analyses of fascism and totalitarianism represented in the others. In MacIntyre’s case, I discuss the argument developed throughout two DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-11

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of his ‘later’ works, After Virtue (1985) and Whose Justice?: Which Rationality. (1988) MacIntyre’s approach to political philosophy has been quite different from that taken by mainstream practitioners of the subject writing in English, and that is just one reason for taking an interest in this work. Arendt’s The Human Condition and the two books by MacIntyre are works within which each philosopher develops a philosophical position which is ‘historicist’ in the sense that it represents the self and the condition within which it is situated as variables which change markedly over the course of historical time.1 In fact, there are more similarities between them than just that. Thus; 1.

2.

Each is preoccupied by a sense that something has gone wrong; that there is a malaise, a kind of sickness infecting our social and political condition through to its very tissues. The ‘disease’ is diagnosed, by each, with an account of how our present condition has developed over the course of time.

Similarities notwithstanding, however, it is also the case that, while Arendt and MacIntyre both construct their arguments around a historicist model, there are great differences between the two in the interpretations they place upon it.2 That is one thing which makes it interesting to compare the arguments of the two, so let me now go on to do just that. I’ll take points (1) and (2), above, in turn. (Arendt devoted a lifetime to the development of her philosophical position, as MacIntyre has done to the development of his and so, needless to say, it would be impossible to devote a short chapter such as this to a full treatment of their views. I shall be concentrating, only upon the respects in which their arguments match the historicist model.)3

Arendt: ‘Worldlessness’ and ‘The Public Realm’ According to Arendt, the present condition of humanity is condition of ‘worldlessness’ or, if not quite that, a condition bordering upon worldlessness. Such is the sickness in our world, although worldlessness is not a condition in the sense that a physical or psychological illness is a condition. Being worldless is not equivalent to being depressed, for example. It is, rather, a ‘sickness in the world’; that is, a state of affairs defined by the broad framework of circumstances – social, political, historical – within which humanity finds itself. ‘Worldless’ people experience themselves as atomised, impotent and, in a certain sense ‘lonely’. Importantly for Arendt, they also become easy prey for totalitarian movements of one form or another. Other than that, worldlessness, as conceived by Arendt, is best defined, not with reference to features of its own, but as the absence of others. Specifically, it is state of affairs from which a ‘public realm’ is absent, the main characteristics of the latter being as follows. First, the public realm is an arena within which those who inhabit it confront each other as equals. Second, it is sphere within which each

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person is, in word and action, completely open and transparent to the others. You can think of it metaphorically speaking, as an ‘arena’ or ‘theatre’ in which each person is, as it were, ‘on show’ to the others. Third, it is represented by Arendt as an ideal state of affairs, not for any instrumental value it may have, but simply – as it were – ‘for itself’. The public realm is, thus, contrasted by Arendt with ‘the social realm’ as she calls it, the latter being a ‘realm’ within which public institutions and practices are brought into being and used for purposes which are essentially private. State institutions designed for the protection of private property would be an example. As she puts it at one point, the rise of the social realm, ‘coincided historically with the transformation of the private care for private property into a public concern’. Arendt adds that, ‘Society, when it first entered the public realm, assumed the disguise of an organisation of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth’. (HC: 68) (There are echoes’ here of the view expressed by Marx and Engels that the state is an arrangement for ‘managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, although I doubt that Arendt would have put it quite that way.) (1848/2000d: 247)4

Aristotle I have not yet mentioned Aristotle, even though his ideas play a major role within the context of Arendt’s thought. For a start, the relationship between the inhabitants of a public realm, as conceived by Arendt, is the relationship which – according to her – held between members of the ruling aristocracy in the small city–state, or polis, characteristic of ancient Greece, and that is just one point upon which she takes her inspiration from him. To explain: It was Aristotle who remarked, in his Politics, that ‘man is a political animal’. (c.335 BC/1981: 59) By this, he meant that, just as it is natural for birds to form flocks, fish to swim in shoals, and bees to inhabit hives, so man’s natural home is the polis.5 Moreover, the polis is held by Aristotle to be ‘an association of persons whose aim is the best life possible’ (ibid: 413) By this, Aristotle did not mean ‘the best life possible’ for all. He meant that the polis was an environment with which the lives of the ruling aristocratic group could most easily flourish. (For a concrete realisation of the relationship Arendt has in mind, I imagine such aristocrats confronting each other as equals – as in a theatre – at meetings of Athens’s governing assembly.) Arendt’s idealisation of Aristotle is a feature of her thought which led to certain misunderstandings, mainly because – the Greek polis was run by men and supported by the labour of slaves. This laid her open to charges of misogyny and elitism. For example, in an early review of The Human Condition, W.H. Auden described the book as an exercise in misplaced nostalgia, arguing that, ‘The necessary pre-political condition for the free community of persons is violence and slavery’ and that, ‘Miss Arendt is more reticent than, perhaps, she should be, about what actually went on in this public realm of the Greeks’. (Auden 1959: 74) But the reproach is misplaced (not to say absurd) for, so far as Arendt is concerned) the

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only feature of the public sphere which counts is the relationships which holds between its occupants. She writes, ‘The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organisation of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’. (HC: 198 my emphasis) Whatever the situation may have been in the Athens of the fourth century BC, it is presumably possible for women as well as men to be related in the relevant way, and equally possible – now – for that relationship to exist without the support of slaves. What Arendt’s invocation of Aristotle does indicate, however, is that history is important to her argument. Had it not been – had she intended to do no more than contrast the idea of a public sphere with the condition of worldlessness – then she needn’t have described the former as having actually existed. She could have portrayed it in hypothetical terms, writing, for example, ‘Suppose that there is a planet somewhere, and that those who live there confront each other as equals, are transparent to each other’, … … …, and so on. The fact that she does more than that shows that she also wants to tell a story – the story of how there was once a public sphere, and of how things changed over time with the result that now there is none. (We’ll come to that later in the chapter.) That Arendt was concerned with history should be obvious, in any case, from the fact that her magnum opus is The Origins of Totalitarianism. (1951/2004) It is a finely detailed study in which she traces the various historical currents which led to the rise of the totalitarian dictatorships in the 1930s, and with particular reference to the rise of Hitler’s regime. There are chapters on, for example, the rise of antisemitism from the nineteenth century onwards, the Dreyfus Affair, and the relationship between imperialism and racism. The narrative culminates in a description of a time in which, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from lies – a ‘lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations’ (OT: 464–5); in which concentration camps serve the ‘ghastly experiment’ of ‘transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not (OT: 565); in which the accused, in show trials, willingly confess to crimes they have not committed. Of the party member having been found guilty in such trials, she writes that, ‘to the wonder of the whole civilised world, he may even be able to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched’. (OT: 409–10) Under Hitler, it was a world in which camps, ‘no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form’, and ‘men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons’ became ‘drill grounds on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS,’ (OT: 585) In Arendt’s eyes such phenomena are, clearly, manifestations of a ‘worldless’ condition. Equally clearly, while her remarks contain an empirical element, they also come ‘theory laden’, informed by preconceptions derived from Arendt’s

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theory. There is a question here over how easily the two elements – empirical and theoretical – fit together. We shall be returning to it.

Macintyre: Morality in Disorder The source of MacIntyre’s concern is different. He is disturbed by what he believes to be the ‘gravely disordered’ state of morality in the modern world. At the very beginning of After Virtue, he illustrates the point with the help of an imaginary example. It is a kind of ‘science fiction’ story, and it runs as follows: Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. (AV: 1) And so the story continues, but here is the point. Nobody, or almost nobody, realises that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which are needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably (ibid.) It’s a good story. However, there is more than science fiction at issue here, for MacIntyre’s ‘disquieting suggestion’ has an allegorical purpose. Its elements parallel two key features of his philosophy. One is his thesis that in our own ‘modern’ times, the role played by moral conceptions in our thinking and our social life is very different from the role played by the earlier, ‘ancestral’ conceptions from which they have developed over time. (We shall come to that later.) The other is his suggestion that something has gone wrong; that, as he says, ‘in the world we now inhabit, the language of morality is in a state of ‘grave disorder’. (AV: 2) ‘What we possess, if this view is true’ he writes, ‘are the fragments of a conceptual

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scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality’. (ibid) As evidence with which to support his ‘disquieting suggestion’, MacIntyre refers to three contemporary moral debates in which the various sides to the argument are, as he puts it ‘incommensurable’. He opens the second chapter of After Virtue by summarising three. (AV: 6–7) The first concerns the nature of just war, and MacIntyre represents it as taking place between three parties; one holding that, under modern conditions, no distinction can be drawn between combatants and non-combatants, and therefore that no modern war can ever be just; another holding that wishing for peace requires preparation for war, and an actual preparedness to fight limited wars; a third holding that, while wars between Great Powers are purely destructive, wars of liberation waged by oppressed minorities are justified. MacIntyre’s second example concerns the debate over abortion rights. Again, he represents it as taking place between three parties; one holding that a woman’s rights over her own body mean that she has a right to make an uncoerced choice of an abortion; another holding that, just as one cannot will that one’s own mother should have aborted oneself, so – following the Golden Rule – one cannot will that others should be aborted; yet another holding that abortion is murder, and should therefore be illegal. As a third example, MacIntyre cites the debate between those who argue that justice requires the state provision of health care and education and those who argue for the abolition of government restraints on private practice. These are controversies with which readers will be familiar, and, as MacIntyre says, they have ‘articulate expert spokesmen’. (AV: 7) Versions of them make an appearance ‘in newspaper editorials and high-school debates, on radio talk shows and letters to congressmen, in bars, barracks, and boardrooms’. (ibid: 7–8) According to MacIntyre their allegedly incommensurable character arises from the fact that they involve rival arguments which rest upon conflicting premises, so much so that, ‘we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another’. (ibid: 8) It’s a feature which MacIntyre attributes to the fact that the premises in question ‘have a wide variety of historical origins’ – Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Lockean, and so on. (AV: 10) One result, according to MacIntyre, is that such debates acquire an ‘interminable’ character. We can argue back to our rival premises, he says, ‘but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion’. (ibid) Having reached this point, it is already worth signposting a number of reasons for treating MacIntyre’s thesis with a degree of scepticism. One is that, with his ‘science fiction’ example and its accompanying argument, he makes no distinction between moral principles and political principles. In this respect, he differs from, say, Rawls, for whom different individuals may adhere to differing moral principles while agreeing to cooperate in conformity with principles which are political, and

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which therefore fall into a different category. Since this present book’s subject is political philosophy, its worth noting the fact but also worth noting that, in the course of his discussion, MacIntyre has a great deal to say on political subjects – upon what he sees as the failings of liberalism, for example – which is why it is appropriate to include an account of his work here. A second reservation relates to the evidence of etymology. I mean that every day we use words; i.e. sounds and signs which derive their meaning from their use within a rule-governed context. Many of those words are descended etymologically from earlier words. Those earlier words were different in meaning, thanks to the fact that they were deployed in different contexts. However, it doesn’t follow that we are, in reality, nowadays using the very same earlier words without understanding their real meaning, or that the words we now use are – to use MacIntyre’s expression – ‘mere simulacra’ of those earlier words. It just means that we are using the same words with new meanings; or, on the other hand, that we are now using new words which happen to derive from other, older words. Put it whichever way round you like. In the absence of further explanation, there is no reason for supposing that the same considerations do not apply in the case of moral terms. You could argue that MacIntyre has chosen his example to suit his case. However, while these may be reasons for casting a sceptical eye over MacIntyre’s opening claims, it is not a reason for rejecting his main argument, which is far more interesting than either. Before moving on, though, it is worth remarking that – so far as I can see – the existence of fundamentally irreconcilable, ‘incommensurable’ viewpoints is no reason for supposing there to be grave disorder within our moral vocabulary. On the contrary, it seems to me to be the normal state of affairs – unsurprisingly so since, as MacIntyre correctly observes, our moral conceptions stem from a variety of historical sources. If I’m right, it doesn’t follow – as MacIntyre claims it does – that moral disagreement must, in the end, come down to no more than a matter of assertion versus counter-assertion. Nor does it follow that argument conducted between proponents of differing moral viewpoints, being interminable, is pointless; that it is ‘just a matter of going around in circles’. In fact, even journeys which end up nowhere can get you to some interesting places along the way, and the purpose of debate between such proponents need not be persuasion, with each person attempting to – as it were – bludgeon the others into submission. On the contrary, it can often be more realistic to think of debate as being conducted, with a view to exploration; the contending parties constrained to spell out their own points of view with care, to bring hidden assumptions to light, and so on. Of course, something may depend upon the purpose or point of the debate. For example, when physicists disagreed over the existence or non-existence of atoms – as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann disagreed in the years which prefigured the formation of the Vienna Circle – only one of them can have been right. That is to say, either atoms exist or they don’t. In philosophy, however, things are less clear cut, and it seems to me that Robert Nozick’s is the more accurate characterisation of the way things are. In his book, Philosophical Explanations, he writes,

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I see the situation as follows. There are various philosophical views, mutually incompatible, which cannot be dismissed or simply rejected. Philosophy’s output is the basketful of these admissible views, all together. One delimiting strategy would be to modify and shave these views, capturing what is true in each to make them part of one new view. While I know of no reason in principle why this cannot be done, neither has anyone yet done it satisfactorily. (Nozick 1981: 21) It’s a view which portrays philosophical debate as what goes on between proponents of the various positions contained within the basket, and it obviously raises the question which Nozick goes on to raise, namely. ‘Are we reduced to relativism then, the doctrine that all views are equally good?. He answers that we are not, for ‘some views can be rejected, and the admissible ones remaining will differ in merits and adequacy, though none is completely lacking’. (ibid) This seems right.6 Shortly, we shall be turning to MacIntyre’s account of how present-day morality’s supposedly disordered state has developed. Before that, let me now return to Arendt, and her own narrative of decline, her account of humanity’s descent into a condition of ‘worldlessness’.

Arendt: The Road to Worldlessness Arendt opens the first chapter of The Human Condition by distinguishing thee categories. These she labels ‘labour’, ‘work’, and ‘action’. They are, she says, fundamental activities – ‘fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man’. (HC: 7) They are also fundamental to the process through which according to Arendt, humanity’s condition has become degraded. So, let me start with those. First of all, then, labour, as defined by Arendt is ‘the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour’. (HC: 7) An example of ‘labour’, in the specific sense Arendt attaches to the term, would be the activity of tilling the soil. The soil is tilled, seeds are planted, crops grow, crops are consumed, and so the life of those who labour in this way is continued. Otherwise, no trace of the activity remains. Says Arendt; ‘One must eat in order to labour and must labour in order to eat’. (HC: 143) That is the whole story. By contrast, work, in Arendt’s sense is an activity with a legacy. ‘Work’, she says, ‘provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings.’, adding that, ‘Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all’. (HC: 7) As she puts it later, ‘The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labour of our bodies … … fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the

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human artifice’. (HC: 137) Thus, whereas the product of labour is immediately consumed by the labourer, the product of work outlives the worker and succeeding generations of workers too. To put the point another way, it is through ‘work’ that each generation transforms the world, and that, as a result, the subsequent generation inherits a world which is different from the world it inherited from those who came before it. Note the Aristotelian streak in Arendt’s distinction between labour and work. It shows up in the way it marks a difference between ourselves and other animals. To be sure, the necessity to labour, in her sense of ‘labour’, is something we share with all other animals. As she puts it at one point, ‘The time interval between birth and death’ is ‘driven by the motor of biological life which man shares with other living things and which forever retains the cyclical movement of nature’. (HC: 97) By contrast, ‘work’, as she defines it, is a specifically human activity. (This is, of course, a distinction between two conceptions and not between two groups of activity, some being carried out in one place or at one time, and others at another place or time. I mean that a single activity may qualify as labour when viewed from one perspective, and as work when viewed from another. (For example, a person working in a factory in return for a wage and motivated by the need to survive, just as the person who tills the soil is so motivated, will be labouring in Arendt’s sense, but if that person is helping to produce some object, he or she will also be working, in her sense.) 7 What of ‘action’ in Arendt’s sense of the term? This rests upon a number of suppositions, including: (i) the supposition that, within ‘the web of human relations’, action and speech play equivalent roles; (ii) that action, like speech, has meaning; (iii) that action, like speech, requires a context with which more than one person is present. One may quibble over these claims, but they are, broadly speaking right, or so it seems to me. A simple movement – raising one’s arm in a certain way, for example – only counts as, say, ‘signalling that you are about to turn right’, ‘pointing the way to the supermarket’, or ‘demonstrating a position in yoga’, it only has meaning, if it is performed in specific contexts and observable by other persons (other motorists, the person seeking directions, your yoga class). So much for ‘action’ as ordinarily understood, but the category of action, as interpreted in a particular way, is of particular significance for Arendt. As she states, it is ‘with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world’ adding that, ‘this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance’ and that, ‘This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labour, and it is not prompted by utility, like work’ but that, its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative’. (HC: 176–7) And; ‘In acting and speaking, men show who are they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice’. (HC: 179) There is, clearly, a strong connection between ‘action’, as Arendt understands it, and personal identity.

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As this indicates, ‘action’, for Arendt, is a form of activity which finds particularly fertile soil in the public sphere. The latter is also characterised by Arendt, in specific terms as a condition of plurality, the latter being ‘the condition of human action such that we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who has ever lived, lives, or will live’. (HC:8) (It is, you could say, that – for Arendt – it is plurality from which action derives its significance.) As noted earlier in this chapter, plurality – with each confronting the others as a unique individual, revealing himself or herself as such through speech and action – means that the public sphere has something of the theatre about it. Within it, each person confronts the others as an actor, not only in the obvious sense at issue here – the sense in which to be an actor is to be the initiator of action – but in the theatrical sense.8

Arendt’s Debt to Heidegger, and to Marx Unlike Rawls, who self-consciously revived the social contract approach taken by Hobbes, and who could assume a working knowledge of British utilitarianism in his readers, Arendt’s intellectual precursors include Hegel, Marx, and her mentor Martin Heidegger. As she put it herself, ‘If I can be said to “have come from anywhere”, it is from the tradition of German philosophy’. (1964/2000: 392) It is important to bear this in mind if one is to gain an accurate grasp of her distinctions between labour, work, and action. To take Heidegger first, in my view it is possible to make too much of his particular influence upon Arendt’s thought. At any rate, it isn’t true that, ‘You can’t understand Arendt unless you understand Heidegger’. There is certainly a Heideggerian line of thought running throughout The Human Condition, though, and it is a line which echoes Heidegger’s view of the nature of the world as it is ‘given’ to humans in experience. Like a number of other philosophers working in the earlier years of the twentieth century, Heidegger was, thus, concerned to break down the Cartesian model of the human mind’s relationship to the world. I mean the model which portrays the mind as a sort of non-physical box containing mental entities (‘ideas’) supposedly corresponding to physical entities located outside the box. (This was discussed earlier, in connection with logical positivism.) Accordingly, Heidegger spends time in an attempt to describe the world of phenomena, that is, the world as it is experienced. A hammer, for example, is portrayed by Heidegger as experienced by a carpenter in a particular way; one which reflects that carpenter’s activities and intentions. He writes, ‘The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is – as equipment’ and that, ‘The kind of Being’ which equipment possesses – in which it manifests itself in its own right – we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (1926/1962: 98) Heidegger’s way of putting the point doesn’t help, but we can agree with him that, however we experience the hammer, it is not in the way portrayed by the Cartesian model, as an image projected onto a screen from somewhere behind it.9

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Still, I shan’t pretend to be an expert on Heidegger here and, since I’m not sure that it even makes sense, I shan’t attempt an analysis of his concept of ‘Being’. (It’s easy to see why the logical positivists should have considered Heidegger the world’s number one petentious windbag, but perhaps they were over-reacting.) It’s worth taking note of one implication of his view, though, namely that, were humans to disappear from the world, so would the world as they experience it, the latter being a world of hammers, shoes, tables, chairs, and so on. Of course, I do not mean that the material of which they are composed would literally vanish into thin air. I mean that they are the things they are – hammers, shoes, and so on – only thanks to their relationship to human plans and purposes. The world as we experience it is, in short, freighted with intention, and that without human intentionality, all that would be left is the world as it might be described by a physicist – a world of atoms and molecules eternally interacting in accordance with the laws of physical nature.10 Arendt expresses the same thought in The Human Condition. She writes that, ‘Nature and the cyclical movement into which she forces all living things know neither birth nor death as we understand them’ and that, ‘Without a world into which men are born and from which they die, there would be nothing but changeless eternal recurrence, the deathless everlastingness of the human as of all other animal species’. Arendt holds that, by contrast, ‘The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural occurrences, but are related to a world into which single individuals, unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart’. (HC: 96–7) It should be clear, then, that when Arendt describes the activities of labour, work, and action as ‘fundamental’ in the sense that, ‘each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man’ (HC: 7), she means that they are ‘given’ in the Heideggerian sense – the sense in which the hammer is ‘given’ to the carpenter. Read in this way, The Human Condition becomes the story of the way in which human experience – fundamentally structured by a sense of plurality, a knowledge of one’s own separateness and one’s own unique individuality, and a knowledge that one’s life had a beginning and that it must come to an end – is nevertheless changed over time in response to changes in social conditions. In my view, however, the thinker whose influence is the most evident in the aspects of Arendt’s work under discussion here is not so much Heidegger but Marx – and particularly one of Marx’s early works, the essay, ‘Alienated Labour’ contained in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. (Marx 184/2000a) In that essay, like Arendt after him (and like Aristotle) Marx defines the features which, as he thinks, distinguish humans from other animals. For Marx, the distinguishing feature is the centrality of the role played, in human life, by the activity of production. ‘It is true that the animal, too, produces’ he writes, ‘It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But it only produces what it needs immediately for itself or its offspring; it produces one-sidedly whereas man produces universally’. (ibid: 90) Similarly to Arendt, Marx also holds that it is through production that humans change the nature of the environment they inhabit. He writes that it is

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through work that ‘he [man] duplicates himself not only intellectually, in his mind, but also actively in reality and thus can look at his image in a world he has created’. (ibid: 91) These are, as I put it in the previous section, capacities which distinguish humans, as a species, from others. Both thinkers hold that some environments are hostile to the development of such capacities, and that some are not. For Marx, the exercise of such capacities in a hostile environment results in ‘alienation’. For Arendt, it is the advent of ‘mass society’ in the anomic ‘loneliness’ conducive to the rise of totalitarianism. (So, was Arendt a ‘continental philosopher’? Well, she was German, spoke German, and she claimed to have ‘come from’ the tradition of German philosophy, so that makes her a continental philosopher – Germany being a country situated on the European continent. That said, I confess that, so far in this book, I have devoted little discussion to the much-hyped distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental philosophy’. That is mainly because I think these are rather useless ‘catch-all’ categories. People tend to use ‘analytic philosophy’ to cover anything which isn’t ‘continental philosophy’, and therefore to include thinkers whose work differs as widely as Wittgenstein’s does from Rawls within the same category. I am sure that similar considerations apply to the differences between Arendt and – say – Derrida Richard J. Bernstein has remarked that, in his view, ‘there is only good and bad philosophy – and there is plenty of both on both sides of the Atlantic. I agree with Bernstein.) (see Frega et al. 2014: 2)

A Mixture of Fact and Interpretation The Human Condition contains no especially detailed historical narrative. For Arendt, the significant contrast lies between the time of the Greeks and the present, the former being a time during which the public sphere, in the form of the polis, featured prominently; the latter witnessing the rise of ‘mass society’ – ‘the mass phenomenon of loneliness’ having ‘assumed its most extreme and most antihuman form’. (OT: 59) By contrast, and as noted earlier, the narrative contained in The Origins of Totalitarianism is an impressively detailed analysis of those origins. Even so, it’s undeniable that Arendt’s analyses are not purely empirical. There is a strong element of interpretation mixed in with them. For an example, take her description of the concentration camps as ‘laboratories’. This can only make sense when viewed in the light of her thesis that totalitarianism was something new – an experiment – and you can presumably tell the full horror story without making that particular claim. Or consider her account of how, in Stalin’s show trials, the accused would collaborate in their own prosecution, even if it meant a death sentence, rather than jeopardise their status as members of ‘the movement’. Contrary to this claim, mightn’t it be that the victims of the show trials had been ‘softened up’ through treatment so extreme that anything else – even death – had become preferable? It can happen. Again, take the book for which she is best known outside philosophy, her account of the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and its subtitle, A Report on

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the Banality of Evil. (1963/1977) What did Arendt mean by ‘the banality of evil’? Dictionary definitions of ‘banal’ tend to include the words ‘commonplace’, ‘ordinary’, and ‘trite’; and there is no doubt that Arendt thought Eichmann banal in these respects. More than that, from her perspective, his banality lay in the way he never thought beyond the demands placed upon any good bureaucrat. ‘Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all’ she writes, ‘and this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post’. (ibid: 287)11 Did she also mean to suggest that there is an explanation for the rise of ‘banal’ individuals, like Eichmann, in the ‘worldless’ conditions of totalitarianism? Perhaps so, but if she did, mightn’t she have a problem, for similar individuals have been thrown up, from time to time, throughout history. Take Robespierre, described by one historian as ‘a small, thin, dogmatic man of thirty-two with thick, carefully brushed and powdered hair’, punctilious ‘in the choice of the clothes he wore with such attention to their immaculate neatness and precision of cut’ and ‘highly strung: he walked very fast on high-heeled shoes’. (Hibbert 1982: loc.2994) In short, just like Eichmann Robespierre was vain, fastidious in small things and, at the same time, an official responsible for large-scale mass murder. I’m not sure that it’s a fact which would necessarily shake Arendt’s narrative, but I wonder how it might be judged by a philosopher of strictly empiricist temperament, by a logical positivist, for example; someone who made a strict distinction between the factual record on the one hand and its interpretation on the other. Mightn’t it be argued that since individuals like Robespierre (and, by implication, like Eichmann) can be produced by historical circumstances other than the ‘worldless’ conditions of the twentieth century, then Arendt’s thesis that there is a connection between the two is weakened? It’s a good question, and not – I think – one with an obvious answer. (Many a serious novel contains a mix of observation and interpretation, but that doesn’t invalidate the activity of writing novels.)

Macintyre: Change and Tradition Like Arendt, MacIntyre emphasises a contrast between Greek times and our own as of fundamental significance, although, in his case, it is a different contrast; one which reaches back even earlier than Arendt’s, to the late Bronze Age, and the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. With it, MacIntyre draws attention to the difference between the role played by conceptions of virtue in the ‘heroic’ societies of that time, and that played by moral conceptions in our own. On the one hand, or so he argues, to have lived during the heroic age is to have perceived oneself as inhabiting a particular place within an ordered structure; ‘the order over which Zeus and human kings reign’ and ‘structured in terms of hierarchically ordered social rules’. (AV: 14) Within the Bronze Age vision, ‘To know what is required of you is [thus] to know what your place is within that structure and to do what your role requires’. (ibid.) If you are a warrior for example, your actions will be evaluated on the basis of how well or

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badly they exemplify the virtues appropriate to the role of warrior. (Or think of Penelope in the Odyssey, patiently weaving and unweaving, keeping the suitors at bay while awaiting Odysseus’s return from the war. Her virtues – fidelity, patience, skill at the management of the household – are those appropriate to the role of aristocratic wife.) There is no further standard against which your actions can be assessed. As MacIntyre puts it, ‘Morality as something distinct does not yet exist’ in heroic society, ‘morality and social structure’ in that society being ‘in fact one and the same’. (AV: 123) By now, however, the Bronze Age vision of an ordered structure – a context within which it made sense to judge the actions of individuals solely in terms of how badly or well they fulfil specific roles has become defunct. It has been replaced, through stages, by a view of morality according to which there is a distinct category or sphere – the sphere of ‘the moral’ - which comprises rules of a specific type; ‘moral’ rules as distinct from rules which are, for example, theological, legal, or aesthetic. (AV: 39) The philosophers of the Enlightenment might have disagreed over the question of precisely which rules should be included within the sphere, but the fact of there being such a sphere was not held in doubt, or so MacIntyre maintains. Of course, it is an assumption which renders the rightness or wrongness of an action – its ‘moral’ rightness or wrongness - a matter of whether it can be justified in terms of some external ‘moral’ rule, whereas, by contrast, in the Homeric ‘predecessor culture’ it would have been a matter of (just) doing what one’s role requires. At one point, MacIntyre illustrates the difference with an example drawn from Homer’s Iliad. (AV: p.15) (The Homeric epics being -of course – the best evidence we have for the way people thought in those times.) Homer describes how, having suffered a Trojan attack of great ferocity, and his comrades having fled, Odysseus is left alone to stand firm against the enemy. Then, ‘What should I do’ he thought?. It would be a disgrace to flee because I am so outnumbered, but worse to be trapped alone’; but, ‘why do I need to debate things with myself? I know that only a coward retreats from then fighting; a brave man must stand firm, ready to kill or be killed’. (Iliad: 380)12 MacIntyre’ s point is that Odysseus does not consult a rule located in some ‘moral sphere’ in a way that one might consult a list of regulations. ‘What he says to himself stands to the action that he then performs, not as a premise to a conclusion, but as a statement of what is required’ by his warrior status. (WJ: 16) Odysseus’s thumos – his ‘better self’ if you like – is not saying, ‘Follow such-and-such a rule. It is saying, ‘Remember who you are’. As the example of Odysseus illustrates, then, one difference between his time and our own is a difference in the conception of what it is to live well. For Odysseus and his contemporaries, living well or badly would have been a matter of how successfully or unsuccessfully one fulfils the role for which one is destined. For our post-Enlightenment selves, it is a matter of how successfully one conforms to some moral rule. (I take it that MacIntyre is right on this point. It would be absurd to imagine Odysseus as a follower of Kant, and asking himself, ‘How can the maxim of my action become through my will a universal law of nature’; or,

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like some Benthamite utilitarian, wondering, ‘Should I retreat or stand firm? What will contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number?’) There has, thus, been a change in the way the relationship between the agent, or self, and the reasons for which he or she acts is conceived. It is only in the later period that the self has come to be pictured as, so to speak, ‘standing back’ from a range of ‘moral’ principles and, as it were, selecting a reason for action from that range. In short, we have witnessed the birth of the ‘Enlightenment project’ and, with it, the liberal conception of the self. It is unsurprising, then that MacIntyre should lament the passing of the Aristotelian world-view (as did Arendt, though for different reasons), for within Aristotle’s ‘teleological scheme’ moral conceptions are interpreted functionally; there being, ‘a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and manas-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-essential-nature’, ethics is ‘the science which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter’. (AV: 52) But then, Aristotle is the inheritor of an even earlier tradition within which ‘to be a man is to fulfil a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God’. MacIntyre points out that, ‘It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that ‘man ceases to be a functional concept’. (AV: 59) What has happened, then, is just that – the concept of man has ceased to be a functional concept. Also, it is noticeable once again that MacIntyre makes no distinction between the principles of morality and the principles of politics. This is one respect in which he differs from, say, Rawls, who makes a clear distinction between the two categories – the latter being (supposedly) principles to which individuals who hold very different moral views can agree. Arguably, this is a distinction one might expect a political philosopher to draw, but MacIntyre doesn’t. On the other hand, perhaps that is what one might expect given MacIntyre’s acknowledged debt to an article by Margaret Anscombe, an article in which she recommends ‘banishing ethics totally from our minds’. (Anscombe: 12, her italics) (Anscombe was a close associate of Wittgenstein, who once wrote that, ‘if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world’. She seems to have shared his attitude to academic moral philosophy.) (See Wittgenstein 1965: 7)

The Concept of a ‘Tradition’ Now, if the role played by moral conceptions in our lives has changed radically over time, what has driven those changes? MacIntyre’s answer is that such changes are to be understood as reflecting stages in the development of specific traditions of moral enquiry, and it is with the concept of a tradition that we come to one of the most interesting features of his philosophy. In my view, it is also one of the more questionable, and in a moment I shall explain why. Before that, let me try to sketch it in outline.

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As I understand it, then, it is MacIntyre’s view that a moral conception – its implications for action and so on - is to be understood as one element in a framework which also comprises a whole set of practices and institutions. (As he tends to emphasise, a moral principle is always someone’s moral principle.) The case of Odysseus, just described, is a case in point. Odysseus understood the requirements placed upon him by his role as a warrior, and that he should have understood those requirements in the way he did is explained by the place he perceived himself to hold within an ordered structure – ‘over which Zeus and human kings reign’. (AV: 14) But then, social and institutions and practices can develop over the course of historical time, and, with those developments, inconsistences and tensions which had been latent within certain moral conceptions can show up. Accordingly, MacIntyre defines a tradition as ‘an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined’. (WJ:12) He then explains that there are two kinds of conflict within the terms of which such definition and redefinition can take place. One type is conflict ‘with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements’. The other is through ‘internal interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress the tradition is constituted. (ibid.) What can this mean? In answer, let me try to illustrate his thesis with reference to his account of the transformations which had been undergone by the understanding of dikē, the conception roughly translated as ‘justice’, by the time of Plato and Aristotle, many centuries after the Trojan War. Specifically, it masks a distinction between what MacIntyre calls the good of excellence and what he calls the good of effectiveness. To be good in the former sense is, as MacIntyre puts it, to be good at some activity or in the performance of some role situated within such an activity. (WJ: 30) You may perform an activity badly, well, or extremely well, and in the latter case you will be exhibiting the good of excellence. By contrast, the goods of effectiveness are ‘the qualities of body mind and character generally required to achieve external goods. (As examples of the latter, MacIntyre lists riches, power, status, and prestige.) (WJ: 32) The difference between these interpretations of ‘acting well’ is, in a sense, a philosophical difference – a difference between two interpretations of a certain conception. During Homeric times, the difference would also have remained ‘philosophical’ in another sense of the term, the sense in which, had it been remarked upon at all, it would have remained latent’; no more than a distinction, drawn at the intellectual level. Even so, latent problems and tensions were there, waiting to emerge, and with the change in social conditions which had come about by the fifth to the fourth centuries BC – the rise of the polis, and so on – the two interpretations had come to ‘pull in different directions’, as it were. That is partly because, while the goods of excellence and the goods of effectiveness both require a disposition to obey certain rules of justice, ‘the content of the rules, and the nature of the binding force that the rules have for those who accept them is

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different in the two cases’. (WJ: 34) On the one hand, goods of excellence require to be defined in terms of merit and desert, ‘one who excels being one who wins under conditions of fairness’. (WJ: 33) (For example, a brilliant athlete, someone who repeatedly beats the competition, would be someone who demonstrates the good of excellence.) On the other hand, the good of effectiveness requires rules of reciprocity. That is because, ‘under the normal conditions of life in human societies’ – in the polis, for example - each person can only hope to be effective in trying to obtain what he or she wants through cooperation with others upon whom he or she can rely to behave in certain ways. ‘A rule governed mode of social life will be required’. (WJ: 36) By the time of the fifth century, such tensions were tending to show up at the intellectual level. Says MacIntyre: ‘[W]hen those conflicts became explicit, the underlying issues involved in them are best understood in terms of a systematic and radical disagreement over whether it is the goods of excellence or those of cooperative effectiveness which are to define the goals of the polis and with them the mode of life to which Athenians are to give their fundamental allegiance’. (WJ:42) In chapters four and five of Whose Justice?: Which Rationality? MacIntyre goes on to illustrate the point with an account of how the ‘conflicting conceptions’ to which he refers show up in ‘different and incompatible understandings of the role of Athens in the later fifth century’. (WJ: 47) For example, there is a ‘Periclean’ understanding, so-called with reference to the famous funeral oration, delivered by Pericles, the Athenian leader, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian war. (see Thucydides C.410BC/(1954): 143ff) According to MacIntyre, ‘what Pericles offered the individual member of the Athenian demos was, ‘an account of Athens itself as a hero-figure and of his citizenship as providing him with a share in that aretē which once belonged only to kings. (WJ: 48) (And indeed, there is a point in the speech at which Pericles proclaims, ‘Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more the case of our being a model to others, than of our imitating anyone else’; another at which he declares, ‘Our city is an education to Greece’.) (Thucydides, ibid.: 145 & 147) The speech is, thus, a certain articulation of the good of excellence. The implication of Thucydides history that, ‘the goods of effectiveness are paramount in the relationship of the Athenians to other city-states’ (WJ: 53) may thus be seen as standing in critical opposition to the Periclean understanding. Then again, Plato’s ‘well-articulated theory as to what human excellence in fact consists in and why it is rational in the light of that theory always to subordinate the goods of effectiveness to those of excellence’ (WJ: 69) can be easily construed as a rejoinder to Thucydides It is with such differences over interpretation that a tradition becomes, as MacIntyre says, ‘an argument extended through time’. And so the story continues. MacIntyre’s account is so detailed and so knowledgeable, that it would be impossible to do justice to its intellectual sophistication. Later in Whose Justice?: Which Rationality? MacIntyre describes how (according to him) the Aristotelian interpretation of justice came into contact with the ‘Augustinian’ conception, and of how the two were eventually reconciled in the

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work of Thomas Aquinas. Even if it were especially relevant to the study of political philosophy after 1945 I should have nothing to say about it. MacIntyre’s erudition is enough to scare anyone off. Rather than his account of specific traditions and how they developed, however, I do feel qualified to comment upon the conception of a tradition itself. Let me now turn to that.

MacIntyre: ‘Tradition’ and the Case Against Liberalism To begin with, its noticeable that, the way the term ‘tradition’ is generally understood, not every tradition matches MacIntyre’s definition of a tradition as ‘an argument extended through time’. There are, for example, traditions in art and music. Practitioners of those traditions contribute to them by building upon and reinterpreting them. Art has to be a human exchange, passed down hand to hand or else its not art. It’s endlessly old and endlessly new at the same time, because there are always young artists hearing and seeing work that’s come before them, ‘getting inspired and making something of their own out of what they’ve absorbed’. So writes Martin Scorcese in an essay on the Blues. (2003: 6)13 These are musicians who reinterpret what they have inherited, but they are not contributing to an argument – not literally. Then again, there are plenty of traditions which cannot be construed as arguments in any way. Take Christmas for example. Christmas might be a time when plenty of family arguments go on, but it is not itself an argument. It follows, not that MacIntyre’s definition is mistaken, but that it only applies to a range of cases. It is worth noting, too, that the explanation, ‘because its my tradition’ can be an argument-blocker. As an answer to, say, the question, ‘Why is it that, at Christmas, you buy each other presents, decorate fir trees and eat too much’, it is equivalent to, ‘That’s just what I do’. It leaves no room for any further questions. It also carries with it a certain relativistic implication, namely that just as I have my traditions, so its more likely than not that you have yours – Diwali perhaps – the latter being ‘just what you do’. Now, does MacIntyre’s specification of what counts as a tradition carry with it such a relativistic implication? I should like to know because I should like to think that my own egalitarian preconceptions – my dislike of racism and sexism, for example – are not beliefs I just ‘happen to have’ in the way that I ‘just happen’ to be someone who celebrates Christmas rather than Diwali. That his view might be just that is suggested by his dismissal of liberalism on the grounds that it, ‘does not provide a neutral tradition-independent ground from which a verdict may be passed upon the rival claims of conflicting traditions’. (WJ: 346) But would it be fair to interpret him in that way? In answer, it seems to me that something hangs upon the question of whether MacIntyre holds that all moral conceptions can only be understood from within the context of a tradition, or whether he thinks that only some can only be understood in such a way? Certainly, there is a great deal to suggest that he takes the former view (even though his specification of what counts as a tradition only

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applies to some understandings of the term.) For example, take the way he (contemptuously) dismisses what he describes as, ‘the recent redefinition of the task of moral philosophy as that of rendering coherent and systematic “our” intuitions about what is right, just, and good, where “we” are the inhabitants of a particular social, moral, and political tradition, that of liberal individualism’. (WJ: 176) The clear implication is that ‘our’ intuitions are not the only possibility; that they are mere reflections of a particular tradition at a particular stage of development. (Equally clearly, this is a swipe at Rawls whose theory, as we saw in chapter eight, is meant to reflect ‘common intuitions’ we have concerning justice.)14 Consider, too, the way his (just quoted) dismissal of liberalism for the reason that it does not provide a ‘neutral tradition-independent’ ground is followed by an allegation that liberalism’s failure in this respect, ‘provides the strongest reason that we can actually have for asserting that there is no such neutral ground, that there is no place for appeals to a practical-rationality-as-such or a justice-as-such to which all rational persons would by their very rationality be compelled to give their allegiance’ and that, ‘There is instead only the practical-rationality-of-this-or-that-tradition and the justice-of-this-or-that-tradition’. (ibid) It seems that, according to MacIntyre, you may view the world from the point of view of your tradition, and I from mine, just as you may be someone who celebrates Diwali, and I someone who celebrates Christmas, there being nothing more to the story. Its an implication summarised by MacIntyre himself, towards the end of Whose Justice: Which Rationality? in the following terms. The conclusion to which the argument so far has led is not only that it is out of the debates, conflicts, and enquiry of socially embodied, historically contingent traditions that contentions regarding justice and practical rationality are advanced, modified, abandoned, or replaced, but that there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality except from within someone tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition. There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other. (WJ: 350: my italics) True; MacIntyre then goes on to qualify the foregoing view, adding that, ‘It does not follow that what is said from within one tradition cannot be heard or overheard by those in another’. (ibid) Accordingly, the closing chapters of the book are devoted to a description of the processes of adjustment, compromise, and translation through which, as MacIntyre thinks, ‘contested’ traditions may become adjusted, each to the others. But if, as I think, only some moral conceptions fall within the ambit of specific traditions, MacIntyre could have saved himself the trouble of going to such lengths.

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Hence the relevance of my question, for while such processes of adjustment might well be necessary if it were indeed the case that all moral conceptions were tradition-dependent, it might well be unnecessary if there were at least some moral conceptions which were not; and, in fact, it is easy enough to think of examples of the latter. Take cruelty. This is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, untendentiously enough, as ‘callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering’. The point is that what counts as ‘indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering’ is – surely – not tradition-dependent and open to interpretation and reinterpretation. If an action counts as indifferent, in the way specified by the definition, then that will be a plain fact. Or, for another example, take bullying, a ‘bully’ being defined by the same dictionary as, ‘a person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate others who are weaker’. That such-and-such a person is someone who uses strength or influence in such a way must, surely be an obvious matter of clear fact, not a feature of behaviour which can only be judged as such when viewed from a certain tradition-dependent perspective. (Of course, it is also true that evaluations of cruelty can vary over time; for example that the idea that it’s acceptable to take pleasure in the suffering of other people, or of animals, may have come and gone at various points in history – as in the case of bullfighting – but that’s another matter. No-one could dispute that bullfighting is cruel to the bull.) My choice of cruelty and bullying as examples may be especially appropriate here, given that my subject is political philosophy, and that individuals who wield political power are so often cruel bullies; but rather than follow that avenue, let me turn to the following principle. It is drawn from one of liberalism’s founding texts, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. (1689/1993) there [is] nothing more evident, [than] that creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all, should by any manifest declaration of his will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. (ibid: 263) Shorn of the reference to ‘the lord and master of all’, the passage amounts to a statement of the principle that there is no natural difference between persons by virtue of which it is rendered evident that certain persons are entitled to exert authority over others. The ‘natural’ feature Locke had especially in mind was the family relationship, and most specifically, the relationship between the recently deposed king, James the Second, his brother, the late Charles the Second, and their father Charles the First, Locke’s purpose in invoking the principle was to challenge the doctrine that such relationships conveyed a ‘divine right’ to rule. Like many a philosophical principle, however, it has acquired a significance wider than that it was originally intended to have; and it has become fundamental to the

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thinking of many a modern egalitarian movement – to feminism, and to antiracism for example. It is, thus, obvious that differences of gender or skin colour are natural – in the sense of being non-artificial – and equally obvious that, as the principle states, such principles do not confer upon men a right to dominate women, or upon whites a right to rule over blacks. To summarise: Like Locke, I hold that, for any person, P, and for any natural feature of a person, F, the truth of statement (1), below, does not logically entail that of statement (2). 1. 2.

Person P possesses natural feature F. P is entitled to exercise authority over persons Q–QN.

The crucial point here is that the form of entailment at issue here is direct entailment. Like Locke, I am claiming that there is no feature of persons from which it can be inferred, without further ado, that those persons have a right to exert authority over others. things might have been different. As Locke puts it, ‘the lord and master of all’ might ‘by a manifest declaration of his will set one above another’ and thereby conferred on him ‘by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty’. For example, you might have been born with the word ‘king’ tattooed on your forehead, but God didn’t do that, and you weren’t. Even so, there remains the possibility that there may be some less direct logical route by means of which statements exemplified by (2), above, can be derived from statements exemplified by (1); that is, there may be some credible hypothesis by means of which the possession of some characteristic, or set of characteristics, can be connected with the right to exercise authority. In short, there could still be a convincing story to be told. By way of example, suppose that, as a believer in the principle that women and men are equals, you find yourself engaged in an argument with someone who is not. You hold that while there are many natural differences between women and men, it does not follow that women should be in any way subordinate to men. In other words, you subscribe to a particular application of Locke’s principle. Now suppose that your opponent in the discussion is W.E. Gladstone, the man who was Prime Minister of Britain on a number of occasions during the later years the nineteenth century. Gladstone was opposed to the proposition that women should be given the vote, and in a notorious letter he argued against it on the (quaintly Victorian) grounds that the measure might, as he put it, prove detrimental to, ‘the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her [woman’s] own nature’ – to the supposedly ‘womanly virtues’ in short. (Gladstone: 1892/2016)15 (It’s a view to which many more would have attached credibility in Gladstone’s time than in our own.) However, the point here is that Gladstone clearly held that their possession of certain natural characteristics – delicacy, purity, etcetera, etcetera – conveyed upon women a diminished entitlement to participate in the political decision-making process. Now, what argumentative strategy might you adopt in order to counter Gladstone’s argument? Well, I think it’s a safe bet that one thing you might do is

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challenge his view that ‘by nature’ women are what he says they -delicate, pure, and so on – in other words that they are nothing more than empty-headed house ornaments. In fact, this was a challenge issued by celebrated feminists of Gladstone’s own time; by John Stuart Mill, for example, The Subjection of Women. 1869/1991b.) A generation or two earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft had challenged Edmund Burke for holding that women are essentially delicate and submissive. ‘You have clearly proved’, she wrote (ironically), ‘that one half of the human species, at least, have not souls; and that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair, creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason to acquire the virtues that produce opposite, if not contradictory feelings’. (1790/ 1995: 47) Mill and Wollstonecraft were not denying that the qualities of ‘littleness’ and submissiveness were to be found in many of their female contemporaries – i.e. that there could be some truth in such descriptions. Their intention, rather, was to point out that the aspiration to exemplify such ‘virtues’ had been imposed upon women by social constraints and conventions; that there was nothing ‘natural’ about it, but that it was artificial. Now my point is that, while that might be an interesting strategy to pursue – the reason being that it could you lead you up some interesting theoretical sidetracks – there is, equally, another strategy available, and a far simpler one. In fact, all you would have to do is invoke Locke’s principle and, with it, a simple and obvious fact of logic namely that no ascription of a natural feature can logically entail an entitlement to rule. Being a fact of logic, it is a fact, the denial of which must surely equate to the denial that triangles have three sides, or to the affirmation that two plus two equals five; (and it would hardly be convincing for your opponent to say, ‘Two plus two might equal four in your tradition, but they equal five in mine.) This means that, by invoking Locke’s principle you immediately situate yourself upon ground which is far stronger than your opponent’s, for the only strategy available to that person will be to appeal to claims which are questionable and contentious. (Or, if you prefer, suppose that your adversary in the argument is a member of the Taliban. This person bases his belief that women should be subordinated to men upon passages drawn from a supposedly holy book. Clearly, the claim that the book carries authority, or even that is holy, is hardly likely to carry weight with anyone who doesn’t share his religion.) What, then, are the implications of this point for MacIntyre’s thesis that, ‘There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other’ (WJ: 350) I think they are clear, for my argument suggests that the laws of logic constitute just such a ‘standing ground’; that is, a standard which lies beyond the bounds of any tradition, and against which the claims of competing traditions can be measured. At any rate, my argument here presents a prima facie case for that conclusion.(Of course, if you agree with me that there should be no distinction between persons on the basis of race or gender, you are still following in a ‘liberal tradition’, but it is, nevertheless, a tradition which stands on firmer ground than some others.)

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Macintyre’s Debt to Wittgenstein And so, at the end of this chapter, we return to the subject with which this book began, the linguistic movement of the early to mid-twentieth century, and – in this case – to one of its major representatives, Wittgenstein. The reason for the return lies with MacIntyre’s penchant for rule-defined systems which can only be understood ‘from the inside’ as it were. The ‘tradition’, as he defines it, is just one example. Another is the notion of a ‘practice’. By this, he means, ‘any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity’. (AV: 187) Examples of practices given by MacIntyre are football, chess, architecture, farming, physics, chemistry, biology, history, painting, and music. In the same passage, he also mentions specific activities which are not themselves practices but may be performed within the context of a given practice. His examples include, throwing a football with skill, bricklaying, planting turnips, and so on. (These are long lists, and it could be that the range of activities to which each refers is more diverse than MacIntyre’s grouping suggests, but at this stage we can let that pass.) The operative term in MacIntyre’s definition is ‘internal’, and his point is that, for any practice, there are ‘goods’ and ‘standards of excellence which can only be appreciated ‘from within’, as it were’. In After Virtue, MacIntyre illustrates it through a comparison of the heroic rules of honour, as exemplified in the Iliad, with the rules of chess. As noted earlier, the former rules were one component of a perception of the world as an ordered structure and, with it, a perception of the self as having a particular place within that structure. Virtue, or the lack of it, was thus a matter of performing one’s allotted role well or badly. There are standards of excellence specific to the role of warrior, and so on. The analogy with chess arises because, in the case of the game there are – likewise – evaluations which can only be made ‘from the inside’ with acknowledge of how to play it. It is thus, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘a question of fact whether a man is a good chess player, whether he is good at devising end-game strategies, whether a move is the right move to make in a particular situation’. Indeed, ‘The game of chess presupposes, indeed is partially constituted by, agreement on how to play chess’. (AV: 125-6) There is also a contrast between rules internal to chess, and – for example – ‘external’ reasons which might motivate someone to play chess. It’s a distinction MacIntyre illustrates with the example of ‘a highly intelligent seven-year-old child whom I wish to teach to play chess, although the child has no particular desire to learn the game’. (AV: 188) MacIntyre imagines bribing the child with candy, and the offer of extra candy should the child happen to win. (In fact, the analogy is imperfect, for – as MacIntyre points out – the idea of an external reason for acting virtuously would have been unintelligible to a Bronze Age warrior such as Odysseus.) As for the relationship between the two conceptions discussed in this chapter – that of the practice and that of the tradition – MacIntyre writes that, every practice

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has its own history’ and that, To enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary practitioners but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose achievements extended the reach of the practice to its present point’. (AV: 194) We are, thus, invited to view a tradition, not so much as an argument extended over time, but as a practice so extended. Conceptions similar to MacIntyre’s conception of a practice have played a significant role in philosophy since the mid-twentieth century, and that – I suggest – is largely due to the influence of Wittgenstein, for there is a clear similarity between MacIntyre’s remarks upon the subjects of tradition and practice and, on the other hand, certain features of Wittgenstein’s later thought. Here, I am thinking especially of Wittgenstein’s occasional references to what he calls ‘forms of life’. Examples are his remarks that, ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’ (PI: 19); that ‘the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ (PI:23, Wittgenstein’s italics); that agreement in language ‘is not agreement in opinions but in form of life’ (PI: 241); and that ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life’. (PI: 226e) These allusive, ‘in passing’ remarks are hardly explained. Moreover, they are few in number. The Philosophical Investigations contains only four, the four I have just listed. None of this renders Wittgenstein’s meaning at all transparent (which makes it all the more surprising that there are some philosophers who appear to know precisely what he meant.) Still, my subject is not what Wittgenstein meant, but only a certain interpretation of what he could have meant, and that with a view to understanding, not Wittgenstein, but MacIntyre’s argument. With that aim, the particular question I’m raising here is that of how we are supposed to understand the relationship between ‘forms of life’ (whatever they might be) and ‘language games’. Recall that Wittgenstein first introduces the latter conception with a view to explaining his thesis that there is a relationship between the meaning of a word or expression and its ‘use’; and that he does so with the example of two people engaged in the construction of a temple. (PI: 2ff)16 Now, clearly, to play a game is – typically – to engage in a rule-governed activity. Moreover, to play a game you have to understand the rules ‘from the inside’ in the sense that the assistant, for example, has to know what he is meant to do when the builder shouts, ‘Pillar!’ or ‘Slab!’.) That is a point Wittgenstein means to illustrate with his example and, as noted above MacIntyre makes a similar point with reference to the example of chess.17 So the obvious similarity here lies between MacIntyre’s conception of a practice and Wittgenstein’s of a language-game. Now, in chapter four I discussed what I take to be a fairly common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, namely that he held a ‘Lego-brick’ theory according to which – just as a model made of Lego is an aggregate of individual bricks - so a fully fledged language is the aggregate collection of language-games actually being played. If this were right, and if any language game could only be understood by its actual players, it would follow that the speakers of any language inhabit a world of

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understanding which is, as it were, hermetically sealed, comprehensible only with difficulty – if at all – to speakers of any other language. (Attempts to communicate between any two would resemble encounters between people who only knew how to play chess and those who only knew how to play, say, mah-jong.) The two suggestions I have to make now are, firstly, that the Lego-brick model can easily be extrapolated to support the view that, like a fully fledged language, a form of life is the aggregate of language games actually played. Secondly, I’m suggesting that similar considerations apply to MacIntyre’s conceptions of practice and tradition. If so, that would help to explain his view that there is ‘no neutral tradition-independent ground’ but only ‘the justice-of-this-or-that-tradition’. (WJ: 346) But why suppose that the Lego-brick interpretation of Wittgenstein is mistaken? In chapter five I argued that it misconstrues the role played by language games within the context of Wittgenstein’s thought. Language-games are imaginary. They are not, as Ray Monk puts it, entirely separate ‘islands of discourse’ which, in combination make up natural language. On the contrary, to imagine a language game is to perform a thought experiment with a view to understanding particular features of the latter. (see Monk 2005: loc.965) To this, let me now add that it is, clearly, Wittgenstein’s view that not every feature of a language is to be understood through its having some part to play within a language-game. He also holds that there are facts, independent of any language game; moreover, that such facts can sometimes explain the features of the language games we actually play. It’s a point made especially clear by the following passage. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people, would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realising something that we realise – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. (PI: page 230e) Examples of language game-independent facts – ‘facts of nature’ as Wittgenstein calls them here – occur at a number of points throughout Wittgenstein’s later writings. One is the fact that it does not frequently happen for lumps of cheese ‘to suddenly grow or shrink for no obvious reason’. If it did, says Wittgenstein, ‘The procedure of putting a lump of cheese on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its point’. (PI: 142) This is, says, Wittgenstein, an illustration of the fact that ‘if things were quite different from the way they actually are … … this would make our normal language games lose their point’. (ibid) Later in the text he imagines that, ‘The surfaces of the things around us (stones, plants, etc.) have patches and regions that produce pain in our skin when we touch them’ and argues that, ‘In this case we should speak of pain-patches on the leaf of a particular plant just as at present we speak of red parches’. (PI: 312) It is a fact,

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however, that such patches and regions do not occur upon the surfaces of stones and plants – a fact from which, as Wittgenstein puts it, our normal language games derive their point. Now, to generalise from Wittgenstein’s remarks to MacIntyre’s argument, my suggestion is this. Both philosophers draw attention to the way in which certain distinctions and understandings can only be grasped, thanks to the latter’s role within a particular context – the ‘language-game’ (Wittgenstein), the ‘practice’ (MacIntyre), or the ‘tradition’. (also MacIntyre) But, if it is the case that context-dependent practices and distinctions can derive their ‘point’ from facts which lie beyond any context, in the way that, according to Wittgenstein, the specific language-games we play derive their point from certain ‘facts of nature’ – facts that the world is as it is and not otherwise – mightn’t something similar be true of the distinctions and understandings which, according to MacIntyre, can only be grasped from within the context of a practice or a tradition? Its hardly a wild suggestion. (Think of the sociological and psychological facts from which inherited traditions determining attitudes to marriage and the family derive their point. The traditions maybe vary widely, but – so far as I know – there is no culture within which a need to bring a new generation into existence, and to nurture it, goes unrecognised.) Wild or not, however, if I’m right it’s a suggestion which must serve to undermine an extreme relativism which is prominent in certain areas of political thought. With that, I have – I suppose – brought this book’s narrative full circle with an illustration of a fact to which I referred in the introduction, namely that the state of political philosophy must inevitably reflect the state of philosophy more generally; that it is not an island, cut off from the intellectual mainland. It’s an observation which hardly adds up to a full conclusion, however. I’ll leave that until the following postscript.

Notes 1 My use of the term ‘historicist’ simply relates to the fact that there is a historical dimension to the model Under discussion. It has no relation to the ‘historicist’ approach to social science critices by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism (1957). 2 Further similarities are that both writers take a cue from Aristotle and that both owe a certain debt to Marx, although neither would have been a Marist at the time they were working on the texts I’m discussing in this chapter. (Arendt never was a Marxist.) Still, I shall take it that these similarities are fortuitous, and that one can follow the historicist model without being either an Aristotelian or a Marxist. 3 I discuss Arendt’s argument at more length in my Totalitarianism and Philosophy (2020), chapters seven and eight. Chapter seven is a discussion of The Origins of Totalitarianism. 4 The analogies within which Arendt sometimes illustrates the conception of a public realm serve to emphasises this lack of instrumentality. For example, she states that ‘The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and prevents our falling over each other, so to speak’, and that, by contrast, ‘What makes mass society [our ‘worldless’ condition] so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. (HC: 52–3) To sit around a table with others is

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to stand in a certain relationship to them. There is no reason why sitting around a table should have any further, external purpose. Aristotle was a gifted zoologist. On this subject, his magnum opus is The History of Animals (c.335BC/1910.) (Not that I agree with Nozick about everything. In fact, I profoundly disagree with his ‘libertarian’ views on the role of the state and the organisation of the economy. See my Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy, and Myth. (1994) He is right on this point though. Nozick is an example of how a philosopher can become known for just one notorious work, when he or she had so much more to offer. Arendt is another example. She wrote so much more than Eichmann in Jerusalem. For a (surprising) example of this mistaken assumption see Canovan (1992) p.125ff. (As one commentator – Jacques Taminiaux – has noted, there is certainly something theatrical about Arendt’s conception.) (2000: 158ff) Heidegger’s book was published in 1926. It’s noticeable that two of literature’s greatest masterpieces were published at around the same time. In both, the author tries to create the ‘feel’ of reality through detailed description. One was James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922. The other was Le Temps Retrouvé (trans: Finding Time Again), the final volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, published in 1927. Being and Time compares with these works in some ways. Sarah Bakewell makes a similar point.) (See Bakewell 2016: 72) These are the amelioraative comments I promised back in chapter three. Arendts’ book provoked some hostility when it was published, partly because her description of Eichmann as ‘banal’ was construed as an excuse for his actions. Some argued that he was more of a monster. I do not believe she was excusing Eichmann, but that is not a controversy I propose to enter into. I’m using Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad here. I prefer it to the translation used by MacIntyre. MacIntyre himself gives the example of portrait painting. (AV: 189ff) It’s a swipe which misses its mark. For the reason why, see Rawls account of ‘reflective equilibrium, especially at (TJ2: 42–5). William Ewart Gladstone was British Prime Minister between 1868 and 1894. From the point of view of my argument, it’s ironic that he should have been leader of the Liberal Party. I discuss this earlier, in chapter five. For a comparison with Wittgenstein on chess, see esp[cially (PI: 563ff,) Wittgenstein writes, ‘Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game, …

10 POSTSCRIPT

My aim in these pages has been to tell the story of developments which have taken place in political philosophy during relatively recent times, and to focus especially upon the period which has run from the mid-twentieth century up until the present (the present being the early twenty-first century). It is, of course, my own version of the story; that is to say, it is a version which reflects the preconceptions I have formed and the perspective I take as a philosopher. How could it be otherwise? There is no such thing as the view from nowhere. On the other hand, though, I have tried to keep my personal political leanings, to the Left or the Right, out of the picture, although I am sure they will have shone through on occasions. Even so, while there is, I am sure, a place for polemical writing within political philosophy, it is also possible to deal with the issues it presents in a manner which is neither partisan nor polemical. That is what I have tried to do. The story, as I have been telling it, has taken place at a certain level of abstraction, a fairly high level. It has been a story of movements: the movement towards the elimination of ‘metaphysics’, epitomised in the work of the Vienna Circle; the subsequent movement towards the analysis of ordinary language – neither of the former being especially friendly towards political philosophy; the post-Rawlsian reinvigoration of contractualism; the reworking of the Marxian vision of a world whose condition represents the present state of ongoing, underlying processes, and so on. Consequently, I have had little to say about the more specific issues which form the subject of what has come to be known as ‘applied philosophy’. For example, I have had nothing to say upon the question of whether animals as well as humans can be said to have rights. Nor have I discussed the possibility that the interpretations of the self discussed in chapters eight and nine hold implications for – say – feminist controversies over gender identity, although I think it is likely that they do. Its just that my discussion has not been operating at that sort of level. (Out of the various theories I have discussed, it DOI: 10.4324/9781315111674-12

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seems to me that only the Rawlsian picture carries with it direct implications for practical action. That is because it serves as a blueprint for the way a liberal society ought to be structured and operated – a genuine point in its favour.) This is not to say that the higher level theories I have been discussing here carry no implications for questions in applied philosophy. On the contrary, the judgements we make concerning specific issues tend to be formed in the light of such theories. In any case, we are not headless chickens. We are creatures for whom ideas are crucial determinants of action – including political action. The purpose of political philosophy is to take those ideas seriously – to analyse them in detail, right down to their foundations. To this, it has to be added that the process is by no means guaranteed to come up with results, and that the ‘story’, as I have been calling it, is not really a story at all. Stories have endings, plots are resolved, loose ends are tied together, characters go on to live happily – or perhaps unhappily ever after. By contrast, I have been describing a process which is destined to continue for so long as this planet continues to be inhabited by the political animals we are. So, this has been not so much a story as a progress report. A final comment: It can often happen that innovations in technology bring with them a profound shift in the perspective from which we view the human condition. There is, for example, no doubt that the Catholic authorities were right to be alarmed by Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons and the consequent necessity to abandon the geocentric model of the universe. Later, in 1783, at the gates of the palace of Versailles, with the public demonstration of their newfangled balloon, the Montgolfier brothers violated the perspective from which the enclaves of the old order could be viewed and, with it, the foundations of a mindset deferential to traditional authority. As one historian has put it, ‘Instead of being an object of privileged vision – the speciality of Versailles – the balloon was necessarily the visual property of everyone in the crowd. On the ground it was still, to some extent, an aristocratic spectacle; in the air it became democratic’. (Schama 2004: 177) It seems that the balloon’s flight signified, not just the advent of the age of aviation, but the collapse of the ancien régime. Later still, in 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. It was an event, judged by Hannah Arendt at least, to be ‘second in importance to no other’, the reason being that it reflected a (misguided) human ambition not to remain bound to the earth forever’. (HC: 1) For a similar epiphany – one which became possible as I have been writing this book, and which you can easily share – you need only tap ‘Earth viewed from Mars’ into Google images. There it is – a photograph of the Earth, taken from Mars by NASA’s rover, ‘Curiosity’. That’s us up there – that tiny pinprick of light. All our endeavours and ambitions, our compromises, and our wars have been located on that. You can hardly see it. Our intelligence – our ability to reason and evaluate – may be an imperfect navigational instrument, but it is all we have to rely upon as we drift who-knows-where through vast and empty regions of interstellar space.

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodor 109, 112n10 Anscombe, Margaret 127 applied philosophy 140 Arendt, Hannah 3, 14, 25n17, 95, 113, 114, 138n4, 139n6, 139n8, 141; and Aristotle 115–7, 127; on ‘the banality of evil’ 125; as a ‘continental philosopher’ 124; and Heidegger 122–3; on labour, work, and action 120–2; and Marx 123–4; on the ‘public realm’ or ‘sphere’ 114–5, 116, 122, 124, 138n4; on totalitarianism 116–7; on ‘worldlessness’ 114–5, 116–7 Aristotle 24, 112n7, 115–6, 123, 127, 128, 138n2, 139n5 Attlee, Clement 47 Augustine (Saint) 44, 45–6, 47, 48–9, 53n11, 53n12 Ayer, A.J. 5, 9, 10, 12, 21, 24n6, 24n7, 28, 88; on correspondence 15–16; emotive theory of ethics 19–20; on French philosophy 28–30, 34; on God 15; on the language of morality 17–20; near death experience 24n7; on necessary and contingent truth 12–13, 24n5; on ‘pseudo propositions’ 13–16; on ‘sense contents’ 16–17; and the Vienna Circle 24n9 Bakewell, Sarah 35, 139n9 Barry, Brian 6n2 Bauhaus 9, 24n1 Bentham, Jeremy 21, 23, 38, 90, 93 Berlin, Isaiah 43–4, 51, 74–80

Bernstein, Richard, J. 124 Boltzmann, Ludwig 119 bossy schoolteacher conception of philosophy; see underlabourer conception of philosophy Burke, Edmund 134 Chamberlain, Wilt (Nozick’s example) 81–3 Chomsky, Noam 14 ‘Classic’ cinema, Kilburn 35 Cohen, G.A. 88n13, 91–2, 96n4 communitarianism; see individualism, communitarian objections to d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 108 Darwin, Charles 92, 96n6, 96n7 Derrida, Jacques 41, 52n5, 124 Descartes, René 17, 23–4, 107 Diderot, Denis 108 difference principle; see Rawls, second principle of justice Edmonds, David 6n3, 29 Eichmann, Adolph 113, 124–5, 139n6, 139n11 Einstein, Albert 13, 22 Engels, Friedrich 96n7, 115 Enlightenment, the 2, 94, 105, 109; see also enlightenment project Enlightenment project 95, 98, 104–110, 127 Forrester, Katrina 57

Index

Gray, John 109, 110 Gropius, Walter 9 Hampshire, Stuart 57, 87 Hegel, G.W.F. 28, 95, 122 Heidegger, Martin 14, 29, 122–3 Hobbes, Thomas 21, 23, 27, 64–5, 67, 96n1, 122 Hofstadter, Douglas 35–6 Homer 94, 126 Horkheimer, Max 109, 112n10 individualism, ‘communitarian’ objections to 100–4; and market values 103; ontological and ethical 98–100 instruction manual conception of philosophy 2 Kant, Immanuel 24n5, 106, 126, 139n13 Kymlicka, Will 57

149

to 123–124; conception of the self 93–4; and Darwin 92, 96n7; and Rawls’s difference principle 83–85 Marxism 25n15, 15, 28, 29, 30, 37, 87, 90, 93, 94, 138n3 Marxist philosophers; see Marxism Mill, John Stuart 30, 38, 59, 61, 73–4, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96n8, 111, 134 Monk, Ray 42, 137 Montgolfier brothers 141 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 43 Moore, G.E. 20, 21 Mussolini, Benito 99, 102 Neurath, Otto 29 Newton, Isaac 49, 79, 105, 106, 107 Nozick, Robert 57, 68n9, 80–3, 87, 88n6, 88n13, 90, 91–2, 98–9, 100, 112n2, 119–20, 139n6 Oakeshott, Michael 28, 36n2 Odysseus 126, 128, 135, 139n13 ordinary language 6, 37–52, 111, 149; Austin’s approach to 50–2; Berlin’s approach to 43–4; Ryle’s approach to; Weldon’s approach to 46–50; Wittgenstein’s approach to 38–41, 44–6 ordinary language philosophy; see ordinary language Oxford railway station 46–7

Laslett, Peter 4, 5, 6n2, 23, 27–8 liberalism 59, 61, 73–89, 90, 97–8, 110; ‘liberal individualism 102; and MacIntyre’s conception of ‘tradition 130–4; and ‘neo-liberalism’ 103; ‘problem of political liberalism’ 94–5 libertarianism 82, 88n7, 90, 96n2 liberty, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ 43 Locke, John 25n10, 27, 30, 53n14, 61, 68n6, 88n6, 106, 111; ‘no natural difference between persons’ principle 132–4; on property 48–9; as a social contract theorist 64–5, 67; underlabourer conception of philosophy 49–50 logical positivism 6, chapter 2 passim, 29, 30, 52, 111, 122; see also verificationism

Philosophers’ Magazine 57–8, 67n1 Plato 1, 2, 21, 22, 23, 25n16, 26, 27, 28, 31, 128, 129; on justice (comparison with Rawls) 69–73 Popper, Karl 5, 6n2, 28, 36n2, 138n1 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 22, 23

Mach, Ernst 119 MacIntyre, Alasdair 3, 94, 95, 96, 109, 110, 112n4, 112n5, 113, 114; conception of a ‘practice’ 135–6; ‘a disquieting suggestion’ 117; on the emotivist or ‘intuitionist’ conception of the self 100–2; on the heroic conception of virtue 125–7; on morality’s ‘disorder’ 117–20; on Odysseus 126–7; on ‘tradition’ 127–132; and Wittgenstein 135–8 MacPherson, C.B. 28, 36n2, 103 Malcolm, Norman 37, 39 Marx, Karl 1, 6n2, 22, 23, 25n15, 25n16, 26, 27, 28, 30, 38, 48, 59, 80, 88n8, 88n9, 88n10, 93, 95, 115; Arendt’s debt

Rawls, John 3, 23, 57–67, 69–87, 113, 122, 124, 127, 131, 139n15; conception of the self 89, 93, 104, 112n7; and the Enlightenment project 104, 110; first principle of justice 60–3, 74, 78, 79, 80; and Isaiah Berlin 74–80; and J.S. Mill 73–4; and Marx 83–85; and Nozick 80–83; and Plato 69–73; on the Reformation 94–5; second principle of justice (the difference principle) 60–3, 68n7, 79, 81, 82, 83, 91, 92, 112n3; on the separateness of persons 65–6, 91 redistributivism 61, 80–5, 91 Robespierre, Maximilien 125 Russell, Bertrand 5, 10, 16, 26, 29, 36n3, 41, 52n6, 87

150

Index

Ryle, Gilbert 5, 28, 32–3, 34, 38, 50, 51

utopianism 77–9

Sartre, Jean-Paul 28, 29, 32, 33–4, 35, 36, 36n5, 102 science 2, 35, 42, 112n10; comparison with philosophy 2, 6n1; and the Enlightenment project 107–8; and MacIntyre’s ‘disquieting suggestion’ 117; and verificationism 12, 13, 23 scientific method 23 scientism 109, 110, 112n11 separateness of persons 65–6, 68n9, 70, 91, 97, 98 Smith, Adam 80 Sputnik 141 Sraffa, Piero 37, 39

verification principle 9, 10–15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25n9, 32 verificationism 13, 17–19, 21, 22, 23–4, 111; see also logical positivism Vienna Circle 2, 6, 9, 10, 25n9, 35–6, 41, 119, 140

Thatcher, Margaret 98, 100 Truman, Harry 3 underlabourer conception of philosophy 2, 49–50 utilitarianism 65, 74, 82, 87, 90, 91, 93, 109, 122

Weldon, T.D. 30–2, 36, 46–50 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 5, 10, 16, 21, 24n5, 25n8, 25n9, 25n15, 28, 31, 35, 37, 52n1, 53n11, 66, 124, 139n17; on Augustine’s analysis of time 44–6, 47; descriptive approach to philosophy 38–41; on the ethical 20–21, 126, 135; on family resemblances 40; on facts of nature 137–8; on forms of life 43, 136; on language games 40; Lego brick interpretation of 41–3, 52n8, 136, 137; on meaning as use 39, 40, 52n7, 52n9; on picturing 17, 24 Wollstonecraft, Mary 134