Notes for a Seminar
The topic of the seminar is political realism; to be more precise, the new political realism that has come to take shape in the last few decades – particularly so in the UK. Some introductory remarks are needed to motivate and explain this undertaking.
1. Why we need to be realists
On Sunday, December 4, 2016, a young man by the name of Edgar Maddison Welch entered a busy pizza parlor in Upper North-West Washington, DC and unloaded his AK-15 rifle into the wall of the restaurant. His purpose was to break the lock on a door which he was sure would lead to a basement where numerous small children were kept to be traded to pedophiles by the leadership of the Democratic Party. Welch was stunned to discover that the door opened only into a closet for the restaurant’s electrical equipment and that there was no other space where children might be hidden.
He had traveled all the way from North Carolina to Comet Ping Pong on the basis of information he had gathered from the internet. The story had started a couple of months earlier with an obscure Twitter posting which claimed that the New York Police Department had discovered a satan-worshipping pedophile ring led by Hillary Clinton in the emails of the former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. The story turned out to be fiction. But as it happened, the hacked emails of Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, were being published on Wikileaks at the same time. They looked innocuous enough, but suspicious internet users soon claimed that they were full of pedophile codewords. The word “hotdog” in them evidently meant a boy, “pizza” a girl, “cheese” a little girl, and “pasta” a little boy. The word “ice cream” was equally obviously code for a male prostitute, and so on. Where Podesta’s emails seemed to the unwary eye preoccupied with food, particularly Italian food, he was, in fact, using them to communicate nefariously with his fellow pedophiles. Among the most incriminating evidence, it was said, was the discovery that Podesta owned at one time a handkerchief with a “pizza-related’ image on it.
The lurid story of pedophilia and satanism that came to be known as “Pizzagate” might easily have been left to fester in the dark corners of the internet, had it not been for the presidential election on November 8. In early November the story was picked up by users of Reddit who added the claim that Comet Ping Pong Pizza was at the center of the pedophile conspiracy. The owner of the Pizza parlor was a known supporter of the Democratic Party which had once held a fundraiser in his restaurant. That seemed enough to make the connection. In this form the story was spread by various right-wing media outlets just in time to make a difference to Hillary Clinton’s election effort.
Once set into motion, the story did not come to an end with the election. In December, Welch appeared at Comet Ping Pong with his Ak-15 rifle, a gun, and a knife. Having failed to find any incriminating evidence, he regretted how he had handled that matter, but he still remained convinced of the essential truth of the story. His four-year prison sentence did not stop others. In 2019, Comet Ping Pong suffered an arson attack from another believer in the conspiracy story. Unrelated pizza parlors across the country also came under attack.
After lying dormant for a while, the story has recently sprung back to life. In December 2022, the French fashion house Balenciaga published some advertisements with children holding teddy bears that appeared to be wearing S&M-style harnesses. Balenciaga quickly withdrew the images, but not before the internet rumor mill had started to connect them to the Pizzagate story. John Podesta, the anonymous postings now said was or, at least, might be the owner of artwork similar to Balenciaga’s images. No evidence was offered for this, but Pizzagate was once again in the news. There was still mileage, it seemed, in suggesting that the Democrats were pedophile Satan worshippers.
Why do I tell this story? I do so in order to show how many people today find it increasingly to distinguish between fiction and reality and how this difficulty is politically exploited. Conspiracy stories have had a long history in politics, but modern communication technology has accelerated their spread and increased their reach. Contemporary politics is beset by the most fanciful theories, ungrounded rumors, false certainties, wishful thinking, imaginary hopes, apocalyptic fears, dubious ideologies, and quirky philosophies. Illusion is thriving in the political landscape. The algae bloom of illusion is proliferating wildly today with the help of new, more efficient vehicles of its transmission. Its fertile growth chokes off our sense of reality and makes for terrible political choices. We must rediscover the realities of politics, if we are to make sense of where we are and do what is needed to assure human survival and flourishing.
We can certainly do much better than we are doing right now, but not as long as our understanding is obstructed. Our illusions are of various kind and they produce as a result different kinds of obstacles to our view of the political situation. Some are psychological in character. There is our usual failure to think hard enough about difficult matters and our corresponding readiness to fall in with the untested opinions of others. More to the point is the political situation in which we find ourselves. The increasing complexity of the world we live in stands in the way of understanding; we let ourselves be satisfied with overly simple narratives. Faced with sweeping change we hold on to concepts whose usefulness has, in fact, been exhausted. Finally, there is the philosophical tendency to replace attention to actual politics with speculation about abstract principles, moral norms, cultural values, or a supposedly fixed human nature.
Political realism is what the hour calls for. But as soon as we say that, the questions multiply. To what does political realism commit us? What does it oppose? The term has already got a varied history. That a view conceives of itself as realist does not guarantee that it is. What is called “political realism” may actually stand in the way of a genuinely realistic grasp of political matters. The term “political” certainly needs attention and so does that of “realism.” What is the content and what are the boundaries of the political? And if we contrast political realism to political moralism, as is commonly done, we need to consider also how he moral is to be understood. But we may need to look at political realism more broadly as an anti-illusionism with moralism being just one of the illusions to which politics is prone. When we think of it in this way, new questions arise will: what is it not to be deflected by illusions? And to what extent is the real – political or otherwise – even accessible to us?
2. Classical political realism
The Greek historian Thucydides is often credited with having been the first to take a realist view of politics in his History of the Peloponnesian War, but the real, continuous story of political realism begins for us with Machiavelli and Hobbes. We try to explain this development by reference to the changing conditions of early modern Europe: the dissolution of the medieval world order, the decline of the authority of Christianity and the church, the beginnings of the modern state, etc. But those explanations must be deficient, if political realism flourished already in ancient Athens, as we like to believe. We should not even think of it as an exclusively Western conception. For the realist view of politics also took hold quite independently in China more than two thousand years ago at the time of the Qin empire and it found its classical expression in the writings of the philosopher Xunzi in the third century BCE. It is, in fact, impossible to understand Chinese politics without recognizing the continuing influence of political realism even on the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party just as it is impossible understand modern European and Western politics without an appeal to political realism.
Machiavelli ad Hobbes continue to influence Western political thought both directly and indirectly: directly in that we still read their works as contributions to political philosophy and indirectly because the lines of thought they initiated extend till today. One can speak accordingly of a classical political realism that stems from Machiavelli and Hobbes and that passes through the 17th/18th doctrine of raison d’état and the 19th century German conception of Realpolitik to 20th century International Relations Theory.
3. The new political realism
Political realism suffered a philosophical setback in the course of the twentieth century. The horrors of newly technologized warfare, extermination policies directed at minority populations, the subjugation of human individuals to an ever-expanding system of totalitarian rule seemed to call for a forthright response in moral terms. Where the political realists had spoken of a separation of politics and morality, a new generation of philosopher set out to build a political philosophy on moral principles and human rights. John Rawls, one of the protagonists in this moral turn, has described how his background in Protestant theology and his experience as a soldier in the Second World war brought him to his work in moral and political philosophy. The moral turn in political philosophy was particularly effective in America. Here it found powerful exponents in John Rawls and to a lesser extent degree in Robert Nozick. For some time, Rawls’ theory of justice became something like a new orthodoxy in philosophy department. Even so there remained able defenders of realism in political theory (Judith Shklar, Bonnie Honig).
Well-intentioned as the moral turn in political philosophy was, its weakness consisted in its reliance on unsecured notions of moral intuition, pure (practical) reason, and a priori argument and, more generally, on its detachment from actual ground-level politics. Given these shortcomings, it was inevitable for critical voices to become heard. These became particularly audible in England. While Rawls’ theory also made inroads there, political realism also gained a new life. Was it the continued presence of Hobbes in English culture that explains this, or Britain’s more turbulent political history, or perhaps the ingrained pragmatism of the English? Whatever favored it, there appeared a new political realism that differs substantially from the classical variety.
We can, in fact, distinguish two different strands of it: There developed, first, a liberal version of political realism represented by Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams with roots in the work of Isaiah Berlin. A more radical form of political realism was advanced by Raymond Geuss and John Dunn whose roots are respectively in Frankfurt School critical theory (Horkheimer and Adorno) and the Cambridge historical school (Quentin Skinner). Both these strands of thought deserve our attention.
It has been said that the new political realism is in essence an anti-moralism which, like Machiavelli’s version, rejects the idea that politics can be accounted for in moral terms. Such an anti-moralism is certainly evident in the writings of a Hampshire, Williams, and Geuss. It is perhaps most pointedly expressed in Geuss’s 2008 book Philosophy and Real Politics. But we find the same idea expressed in more tentative words by Williams who writes in one of hist posthumously published essays: “I shall call views that make the moral prior to the political, versions of ‘political moralism’ (PM)… I shall try to contrast with PM an approach which gives greater autonomy to distinctively political thought. This can be called in relation to a certain tradition, “political realism.” Political moralism can, of course, take on very different forms – such as a Platonic (Leo Strauss), Christian (Catholic), or Confucian one – but those have not generally attracted the attention of the new political realists. They have been concerned rather, more or less exclusively with the Rawls-Nozick variety of moralism.
For all its preoccupation with Rawls-Nozick style of moralism, the new political realism goes, however, far beyond an anti-moralist stance. While the realist insistence on a separation of the political from the moral will be one of our concerns, I do not be focusing specifically on the Rawls-Nozick variety of moralism. My goal is rather to look more generally at the notions in terms of which the new political realism characterizes itself – amongst which the distinction between the political and the moral is just one.
Some of those notions connect the new political realism with the classical variety but there are others that are distinctly its own. In order to make this clear, we need to consider first some of the defining characteristics of classical political realism.
4. Some characteristics of classical political realism
Perhaps the first thing to say is that Machiavelli and Hobbes looked at politics in a newly sober fashion, stripped, that is, of traditional religious and philosophical underpinnings. Theirs was, in other words, a newly secularized vision of politics. Medieval political theory had drawn on Cicero’s Platonic view of politics and in its later period on Thomas Aquinas who in turn was influenced by Aristotle’s political theory. But none of those three was of any interest to Machiavelli and an that attitude is matched by Hobbes’s dismissal of the political ideas of past philosophers, of Cicero, Thomas, and, in particular, of “the vain and erroneous philosophy, of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle.“
Gone were, in this way, also the hopes and expectations that theology had attached to politics. That meant specifically that the historical vision of politics of the Christian tradition – of politics as part of the story of human sin and salvation, of human government as deriving its legitimacy from the divine governance of the world and of rulers as having to account for themselves at the time of the Last Judgment – that this whole story was gone. Machiavelli opposed to it his own vision of history. History, rather than religion or philosophy, was, in fact, the key to political understanding. As exercise for the mind, Machiavelli wrote, “the prince ought to read history and study the actions of eminent men, see how they acted in warfare, examine the causes of their victories and defeats in order to imitate the former and avoid the latter.” Th teleological picture of history had thus given way to one in which political history was seen as being essentially always the same. In Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy we read accordingly: “Reflecting now upon the course of human affairs, I think that, as a whole, the world remains very much in the same condition, and the good in it always balances the evil; but the good and the evil change from one country to another, as we learn from the history of those ancient kingdoms that differed from each other in manners, while the world at large remained the same.”
While we are right in bracketing Machiavelli and Hobbes together as classical political realists, we must not overlook the significant differences in their outlook. Hobbes who lived and wrote a century later, did not attach the same weight to history. He also rejected the philosophical tradition, but, under the influence of Descartes, he sought reconstruct political philosophy as a science. Unlike Machiavelli he was also not much concerned with he distinction between private morality and political conduct. Machiavelli had insisted that “it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not to use it, according to the necessity of the case.” No equivalent statement can be found in Hobbes.
What they share and what makes them both political realists in the classical sense is that they seek to account for politics in natural terms, tat is in terms of the circumstances of the natural world and of the inherent properties of human nature.
There is always, they believe a shortage of resources and a competition for possessions, be it of goods or of land. We can speak of an anthropological conception of politics that has replaced the theological one in Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s thinking. That conception is, furthermore, an essentially negative one. Both Machiavelli and Hobbes assume that human beings are always motivated by self-interest; they are after self-aggrandizing, and given to quarrels. They are, above all, after power. Hobbes could thus write in the Leviathan: “In the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” In chapter 13 of the Leviathan, Hobbes tells us that human beings are entirely asocial in their natural condition. They fight for resources, fear each other, and seek to outshine each other. Everyone is everyone’s enemy.
Machiavelli and Hobbes do not tell us from where they have derived this picture of human nature but they were as sure of it as one could be. And that picture has certainly continued to motivate classical political realism in its later stages. But is it a realistic one? Is there even a fixed human nature which determines once and for all how we do, can, or ought to interact politically? From the start classical political realism was thus burdened in a dogmatic belief from which it could not liberate itself. It was called realistic, but without being able to live fully up to that label.
And there was yet another assumption that classical political realism operated with. It was that of the state as a quasi-person who is able to act out of its own accord and in its own interest. The commonwealth or state, Hobbes said, “is but an artificial man; though of greater staure and strength than the natural.” There emerged thus “the myth of the state,” as Ernst Cassirer has called it. But in what sense are states real? They are institutions. But where and how do institutions exist. And how do they relate to human individuals and their actions? In the same way the political realists were dazzled by the notion of power, they were also by that of the state. Their realism did not go so far as to think seriously about this entity that they considered to be so central to political reality.
5. Characteristic themes of the new political realism
If we are to understand political realism as a form of anti-moralism, that is, as a refusal to think about politics in moral terms, it is essential to be clear about the notion of the moral. If politics and morality are distinct, we need to determine their exact relation. Do they concern two different domains of human life, the public and the private, respectively? Machiavelli speaks often in this manner and so does Stuart Hampshire. Another view – voiced for instance by Williams, but known to us already from Aristotle – is that of the priority of the political over the moral. But what such priority consist in? In the case of Williams, it seems to come to skepticism about the possibility of a free-standing system of morality. Does this mean that morality must be assessed politically? One characteristic of the new political realism is surely that it seeks to grapple with those questions in contrast to classical political realism which has tended to take the question of the moral lihtly.
When Machiavelli rejected moralism, he had one single morality in mind – that of traditional Christianity. And he explained the conflicts endemic to politics as due to the fact that we are generally motivated by self-interest and, in particular, by the pursuit of power rather than the rules of morality. Following Isaiah Berlin, Hampshire and Williams speak, instead, of a “value pluralism,” that generates conflicting obligations and restrictions. They consider political conflict to be a by-product of that pluralism and concern themselves with the question by what mechanisms such conflicts can be mitigated. The assumption of value pluralism and of its resulting conflicts coincides to some extent with John Rawls’ theory of justice; Hampshire and Williams differ from Rawls however with respect to the mechanisms for mitigating value-conflicts. Their political realism follows Machiavelli and Hobbes in emphasizing the inevitability of conflict in politics.
The new political realism emerged under historical that differ from those in which classical political realism came about. New political realists like Hampshire and Williams accept liberal democracy as normative. But they reject moral justifications of liberalism which in this case means justifications on the basis of formal philosophical reasoning. They looks, instead, for a pragmatic justification such as the one offered in Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear.”
More generally speaking, the new political realism is historicist in outlook. It recognizes that moral value-systems, as well as conceptions of politics and political justice change over time. It acknowledges the contingency of history. Political circumstances are seen as unique rather than recurrent and this implies that there cannot be any precise rules for how to proceed in them.
The new political realists are also keenly aware of their own position in political space. In its more radical version, it rejects the idea of a comprehensive political theory and understands itself, instead, as engaged in a critical encounter with the present. (Geuss) It also assigns priority to political action and takes a skeptical view of political institutions. (Geuss)There is also among the new political realists an increasing awareness of the limits of political understanding. With this the new political realism is taking a decidedly epistemological turn (Dunn).
6. The critique of the new political realism
My discussion of the new political realism does not aim at a reconstruction of its historical trajectory. It is not meant to be a contribution to the history of ideas. I am motivated, rather, by my sympathy for its aspirations. In order to bring out what is attractive in the new political realism, I will focus my discussion largely on the its distinctive concepts.
There are, however, points where the new political realism needs critical rethinking. Is it realistic enough? Are its concepts sufficiently clear? Does it analyze its basic assumptions far enough?
My conclusion will be that we need to go still one step further than the new political realists. We need, so I want to argue, a diagnostic turn in political philosophy, We might think of that turn as another step in the evolution of political realism or, alternative, as a step beyond it. If you ask for an example of this diagnostic form of political thought, I would point to Michel Foucault an exemplary practitioner.
