Month: August 2022

Raymond Geuss: The task of political philosophy

There is often a significant time lag between an idea and its expression. Being aware of that gap maybe necessary for appreciating the original idea for what it is. I am reminded of this in reading Raymond Geuss’ book Philosophy and Real Politics which was published in 2008 but draws its inspirations ultimately from the late 1960s and early 70’s when its author was a student at Columbia University in New York City. In his recent autobiographical essay Not Thinking Like a Liberal Geuss write: “Nothing that has happened in the fifty years since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 1971 has really had a radical effect in shaking the basic way of viewing the world which I had acquired.” How then – we want to ask – is Philosophy and Real Politics rooted in that earlier period and why is its lesson still useful to us in the third decade of the 21st century?

Columbia University was a place of political agitation during Geuss’ time as a student. He may not have been much of an activist, but he was certainly touched by the events. At one point his most important teacher and intellectual role model, Sidney Morgenbesser, was bloodied in a confrontation between the protesting students and the police. This local unrest was part of the political and social turmoil that extended at the time across the globe from the United States to France, Germany, China and numerous other places – including Tunisia where it spawned Michel Foucault political engagement. We can see today that the upheavals had far-reaching effects in all those countries. Our world would look entirely different without them – though they didn’t necessarily bring about the changes their protagonists had hoped for.

One outcome of these happenings was the revitalization of political philosophy in the United States, a topic that had been languishing for some decades. Starting in the early 1930s and accelerated by the arrival of émigré philosophers from Europe, American philosophy had come to focus on the study of logic, language, and the sciences, largely by-passing the problems of politics. What had come to dominate was a somewhat restrictive form of “analytic philosophy.” But in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s the philosophers were suddenly confronted with students who challenged the “relevance” of what they were doing. The result was a renewal of philosophical interest in political philosophy. Of particular importance in this turn were the Harvard philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls published his acclaimed book A Theory of Justice in 1971 and Nozick followed hm in 1974 with Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Each of those books defended a political view that was widely popular in America: Rawls a mainstream progressive liberalism and Nozick a libertarian anarchism. It was in this period that Geuss also turned to political philosophy.

But he moved from the beginning outside the emerging current of American political philosophy. In his autobiography he writes of his “naturally contrarian temperament” and his feeling “distant from the prevailing philosophical culture.” Having gone to Freiburg/Germany for the academic year 1967-1968 with an interest in Heidegger, he discovered there the writings of Theodor Adorno. Their critical, skeptical, even pessimistic tone attracted him. But this did not mean that he began to think of himself as a fully committed member of the Frankfurt School and its critical theory. He had, in particular, not much sympathy for Juergen Habermas’ attempt to construct a systematic socio-political theory. He remained, rather, true to Adorno and his critical approach to philosophy. It is with this in mind that we must approach Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics.

Geuss taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago in the early parts of his career but then moved to Britain in 1993 to take up a position of lecturer and professor of philosophy at Cambridge University.  There he discovered a more congenial intellectual environment than he had known in in the US. Where American political philosophy tended to be affirmative, optimistic, and moralistic, the English political philosophers proved to be more skeptical, more pessimistic, and more “realist” in their thinking. (Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Gray come to mind.)

While teaching in the US, Geuss had been slow to publish. His only book at the time was small volume on The Idea of a Critical Theory that appeared in 1983. But since then, he has published eight books, most of them collections of essays. In that series of publications, Philosophy and Real Politics may be the most important. It is certainly Geuss’ most programmatic statement in political philosophy.

Geuss begins the book by drawing a distinction between “ideal” and “realist” theories in political philosophy. In the book he clearly identifies with the latter but has since come to regret calling himself a political realist. A better description would, indeed, be to call him a diagnostic political thinker (a term he doesn’t us) because the starting point of his philosophical thinking is a diagnosis of what he conceives to be the dominant liberalism of our era. What he opposes, in particular, is the moralistic conception of politics in Rawls’ political liberalism. This, he thinks, derives ultimately from the philosophy of Kant. He writes: “A strong ‘Kantian’ strand is visible in much contemporary political theory, and even perhaps in some real political practice. This strand expresses itself in the highly moralized tone in which some public diplomacy is conducted, at any rate in the English-speaking world, and also in the popularity among political philosophers of the slogan ‘Politics is applied ethics.’”  He adds: “In this essay I would like to espouse and advocate a kind of political philosophy based on assumptions that are the opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view…”

In the introductory section of the boo, Geuss makes four observations about how we need to think about politics and political philosophy. The first is that “political philosophy must be realist.” It must be concerned “not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act … but rather with the way the social, economic, political etc. institutions actually operate.”  Political philosophy must recognize furthermore that “politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions.” Politics is, moreover, to be understood as “historically located,” And it is, finally, “more like the exercise of a craft or art” than an application of a theory. Its exercise relies on skill rather than theoretical understanding. He summarizes his view later in the book provocatively as a form of neo-Leninism. “In my view, if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism.”

To explain this surprising claim, he adds: “Lenin defines politics with characteristic clarity and pithiness when he says that it is concerned with the question that keeps recurring in our political life: ‘Who, whom?’ ” He admits that Lenin’s formula is perhaps too dense and needs to be expanded. “First of all, the formula should read not merely ‘Who whom?’ but, rather, ‘’Who [does] what to whom for whose benefit?’ with four distinct variables to be filled in, i.e., (1) Who, (2) What, (3) To whom, (4) for whose benefit? To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.” One consequence of this view is that it helps one to overcome some of the currently popular views in political philosophy. “If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix of political philosophy, certain consequences would seem to follow. The first is that it would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true or the rational.” Another implication of Lenin’s view is that “every theory is ‘partisan.’” This implies that “any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization.” Political philosophy must, in other words make itself a subject of examination. We must ask such things such as: What is the political background from which a political philosophy emerges? The political philosopher always occupies a place within a political context. So, how does his/her thinking reflect that context? And how does a political philosophy shape actual political practice?

Lenin conceived politics in terms of power and the understanding of the concept of power has to be, indeed, one of the tasks of political philosophy. But Geuss considers it a mistake to treat ‘power’ as a single, uniform substance or relation wherever it is found. We should, instead, speak of a variety of qualitatively kinds of power. “In this account ‘power’ is to be construed as connected with general concepts like ‘ability to do’ “To illustrate this, Geuss offers us these examples: (1) Coercive power by virtue of physical strength, (2) persuasive power “by virtue of being convinced of the moral rightness of your case and having a special training or natural talent for speaking,” (3) the power of a charismatic figure due to an ability to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support, and finally (4) power due to one’s belief that one has power and that one is perceived to have power.

But Geuss adds that the political philosopher needs to think about more than power; other major concerns should be the notions of political priorities, timing, and legitimacy.  Priorities involve an opting for A rather than B or before B. Politics characteristically demands the choice between different options, none of which may be ideal, rather than an unconditional pursuit of an absolute good. We always act politically under non-ideal conditions. Timing is all-important. We usually can’t wait to make decisions and are forced to take action when the opportunity or the need arises without having a full understanding of this situation, of the consequences of our actions, nor even of what the best outcome would be. There is finally also the question of legitimacy. Max Weber distinguished three sources of legitimacy, that is, our reasons for accepting political authority: tradition, charismatic leadership, rational-legal. All these notions call for clarification and providing such must be a basic task of political philosophy.

These then are the tasks of a realistic political philosophy:

  • Understanding: describing and analyzing the actually obtaining political reality
  • Evaluation: assessing features of this reality. Geuss holds, in contrast to Weber, that there can be no “value-free” political philosophy.
  • Orientation: providing us with a more or less comprehensive vision of the political situation
  • Conceptual innovation: by providing a set of new concepts the political philosopher may get us to see our situation in an entirely new way.
  • The critique of ideology as a form of power that is used “to shape opinions, attitudes, and desires and thus to manufacture what look like ‘consent.’”

In the second part of his book Geuss criticizes a number of “ideal theory” versions of political philosophy distinguishing “two influential contemporary views that represent almost the direct opposite of ‘realism.” The first involves an attempt “to construct a society along the lines of an idealized legal system structured around a set of rights.”  These rights may be conceived as “either legal rights or some more vaguely envisaged ‘human’ rights.” He takes as his target, specifically the first sentence of Robert Nozick’s State, Anarchy, and Utopia according to which: “Individuals have rights, and there are things which no persons or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” From where do these rights come? How is the claim justified? “It is not that Nozick got something wrong by specifying the wrong set of rights or making mistakes of argumentation, He does not ask the right questions, and by presenting ‘rights’ as the self-evident basis for thinking about politics, he actively distracts people from asking other, “highly relevant questions.”

Geuss’ second major target of criticism (here and in other writings) is John Rawls who wants to conceive of politics in terms of the implementation of the virtue of justice. His immediate target of attack is Rawls’ initial statement in A Theory of Justice that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Truth and justice are uncompromising.” Geuss comments: “This brings us to the most general line of criticism of Rawls as a political philosopher. If one looks at the body of his work … one is immediately struck by the complete absence in it of any discussion of what I have described as the basic issues of politics. The topic of ‘power,’ in particular, is simply one he never explicitly discusses at all… Rawls’ view is seriously deficient, because it does not thematize power.”

 We can read Geuss , perhaps, most profitably as spelling out the ways a diagnostic political philosophy should proceed. But he does not, in fact, offer us an example of a worked out political diagnosis. While his eye is critically focused on political liberalism as a formative conception of contemporary politics, he does not proceed to a detailed diagnosis of this conception either in this book or in his other writings. He proves to be, in fact, more of a critical than a constructive thinker and, in this respect, a faithful follower of Adorno. He is more eloquent in his attacks on ideal theories than in developing a realist  and diagnostic political philosophy of his own.

 

Hannah Arendt as a diagnostic political thinker

Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition is an unusual and entirely original contribution to political philosophy. It is distinguished, in particular, by the diagnostic approach to politics it pursues. The book can serve as an illustration of characteristic features of this type of political thinking.

The title of the work deserves our attention in this context since it may easily mislead us. Arendt does not, in fact, assume that there is a single and fixed “human condition” which determines how we can, do, and should act politically. She holds, rather, that the human condition changes over time; that it is historically specific and profoundly variable. It is because of her adherence to this view that Arendt avoids talk of “human nature” – a term which is usually taken to identify a determinate human essence from which we can deduce both how humans act and how they should act. For Arendt there is, in fact, no human nature in this particular sense. There are only the varied conditions in which we find ourselves. The conditions of life in “the modern age” which are the predominant concern of her book thus differ for her profoundly from those of previous eras – such as, in particular, the condition of life and politics in classical Greece at the time of Socrates. While she often refers back to the classical period, she does not believe that we can or should try to re-enact it. Her reference is meant, instead, to highlight the radically distinct character of our modern situation.

Arendt’s begins The Human Condition not with a general reflection on what that condition might be. The first sentence of her book reads: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man launched into the universe.” The book begins, thus, with a reference to a particular, contingent, and recent event, a singular historical fact: Russia’s 1957 launch of the first extra-terrestrial satellite (“Sputnik”) one year before the publication of Arendt’s book. To grasp the implications of that beginning, contrast it to the first sentence of Hobbes’ De Cive which says: “The faculties of human nature may be reduced unto for kinds.” Hobbes starts in this way with a general and dogmatic assertion about “human nature” from which he proceeds to derive the supposedly universal “conditions of society or of human peace “ as “fundamental laws of nature.” (De Cive, chapter 1) Equally striking is the contrast between Arendt’s first sentence and that of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia which asserts dogmatically that human beings are bearers of rights with which the state may not interfere. Where Arendt begins thus with a reference to a simple empirical fact, Nozick starts off from a large-scale and unargued normative claim. The contrast between Arendt on the one side and Hobbes and Nozick on the other, provides in this way a vivid illustration of the difference between diagnostic and non-diagnostic approaches to political philosophy. Where the one proceeds “inductively” from the particular to philosophical reflection, the other starts deductively from general, high-level claims about human nature or human rights and seeks to derive from them conclusions about politics. Where the one begins with a current contingent event, the other advances from supposedly timeless truths.

The Soviet authorities had launched Sputnik to signal the technical and military prowess of Russia. The event sent shockwaves through America’s political establishment and led to vast new investment in education, science, technology, and military preparedness. But this is not Arendt’s concern. She does not see herself as a political commentator. Her goal is, rather, to reflect philosophically on the event. She is concerned thus with the way the extra-terrestrial satellite changes how we see ourselves, our relation to the earth, and to the other living things on it. Quoting a contemporary comment that Sputnik signals a first step “toward escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth” she contraposes to this the fear that it might lead to a “fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living things under the sky.” The earth has until now been “the quintessence of the human condition.” Cutting that link or seeing it in a new way will thus transform that condition. An escape from the earth would mean that we cut our last tie that makes us “belong among the children of nature.” The future man who makes his appearance in this way seems to be possessed by “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift, from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange … for something he has made himself.” But is this how we want to turn? What will we lose of the human condition as it now is? Our question has to be “whether we wish to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this direction,” Arendt concludes, “and this question … is a political question of the first order.”

There are other signs of profound changes in the human condition to which Arendt proceeds at this point to draw our attention. The truths of the modern scientific world view, she writes, can only be demonstrated in mathematical terms and established through technological means, they “no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” This means ultimately that we can no longer understand the world in human terms and will need artificial machines to do our thinking for us. And that, she concludes, is surely a matter of political significance. Another disturbing fact is the advent of automation which may liberate us from “the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” While this development may be attractive, our problem is that the modern age has created a society in which human beings are measured entirely by their labor. “We are confronted, in consequence, with “the prospect of a society of laborers without labor… Surely nothing could be worse.”

Sixty-five years after the publication of The Human Condition the world looks somewhat different from the way Arendt describes it. She has no sense that extra-terrestrial life is a far way off and exists even today mostly only in the wild imaginings of Elon Musk and the writers of science fiction. Arendt has as yet no inkling of the digital media and how they have begun to transform all aspects of human interaction. She pays no attention to the growth of the human population and the shifts in global population patterns. She knows nothing of the devastations of the environment and their political bearing. She is unaware of a decline of Western power and the rise of other centers of global influence. A diagnostic view of our own time will, no doubt, look different from hers. This is to be expected because the diagnostic perspective is always limited and constrained by the place of the diagnostician.

What is surely of major interest in Arendt’s book is the way it illustrates the diagnostic approach to politics. This is how Arendt describes her own, diagnostic agenda: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears…. What I propose therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”