Philosophy and Real Politics

Raymond Geuss

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781400835515
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Many contemporary political thinkers are gripped by the belief that their task is to develop an ideal theory of rights or justice for guiding and judging political actions. But in Philosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss argues that philosophers should first try to understand why real political actors behave as they actually do. Far from being applied ethics, politics is a skill that allows people to survive and pursue their goals. To understand politics is to understand the powers, motives, and concepts that people have and that shape how they deal with the problems they face in their particular historical situations. Philosophy and Real Politics both outlines a historically oriented, realistic political philosophy and criticizes liberal political philosophies based on abstract conceptions of rights and justice. The book is a trenchant critique of established ways of thought and a provocative call for change.

Part I

Realism

Modern political philosophy begins in Europe in the seventeenth century when Hobbes attempts to find a solution to the problem his contemporaries have in living together without assuming either a divinely ordained and enforced order, or a naturally implanted, invariable, and irresistibly powerful human impulse toward one particular form of cooperative action. Any entity that modern political agents would recognise as a human being in the full sense has grown up as a member of a human group, that is, among other humans who interact with each other in a certain way, minimally in what is called a “nuclear family” and most likely in a family embedded in a variety of larger kinship groups, loose networks of friends and neighbours, and perhaps more formal political structures. Although, however, it seems a natural and not an artificial fact about humans as we know them—to the extent to which one can make this distinction at all—that we are in this sense social and not solitary creatures, it is also the case that in modern societies human interaction is not something that can ever be taken for granted; it is always potentially disrupted, unstable, and conflict-ridden. The members of a human group are not parts of a single organism, like the hands or feet of an animal, who have no will of their own, nor are we like bees, ants, or even herd animals whose strong natural instincts can be counted on, at least in some areas, to be powerful enough to assure more or less harmonious coordination. Rather, humans, even in the most repressive societies we know, grow up to be individuated creatures who are separate centres for the formation, evaluation, and revision of beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires, and for the initiation of action that puts these beliefs and desires into effect. So coordination of action in our societies, either of a negative kind (that I don’t act so as to thwart your plans) or of a positive kind (that I act so as to maximise the attainment of some goal that can be reached only by joint effort) is always a social achievement, and it is something attained and preserved, and generally achieved only at a certain price. People are very quick to observe that there is a wide variety of different ways in which collective action can be organised, and, given that different forms of collective action are also differentially beneficial, this in itself may well motivate some to try to change existing patterns.

What I wish to call “the realist approach to political philosophy” develops this basically Hobbesian insight. It is centred on the study of historically instantiated forms of collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons. This is a historically specific study if only because the concepts of “order” and “intolerable disorder” are themselves variable magnitudes. That is, people’s general level of tolerance of unregimented, unpredictable, or random action, and the extent to which specific kinds of lack of order particularly trouble them, vary considerably from one time and one society to another. Thus few modern Western European populations would tolerate the anarchic freedom to own private firearms that is held to be a positive constituent of the good life in the United States, or the freedom from a nationally organized form of health insurance; and from the twelfth to the seventeenth century a society not based on religious uniformity was almost unthinkable. One person’s disorder is sometimes another’s freedom, and so much conceptual confusion reigns in this area that even Baghdad in 2003 could be described with a straight face by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as an instance of “untidy freedom.” The variation in the perception of what counts as “order” or “freedom” is oft en itself a source of tension between individuals and groups. One of two neighbouring countries can accept levels of petty border raiding as a natural concomitant of social life, while the other sees, or pretends to see, in it a casus belli.

The way to develop the realistic spirit of Hobbes in the contemporary world, I wish to suggest, is not by assuming that one needs an antecedent ontological specification of a distinct domain called “politics,” but by considering a set of questions. When we speak of politics, we are generally thinking of possible answers to one or another, or several, of three kinds of question. For ease of reference I will call these the questions of Lenin, of Nietzsche, and of Max Weber. These questions will be rather loosely specified, and conjoining them means lumping together enquiries that actually differ in content and meaning, depending on the time at which they are posed, who is asking the question with what intention, who is being interrogated, and the purpose of the interrogation, but, then, that is precisely part of the point I wish to make.

Who Whom?

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?” (

) What this means in the first instance is that the impersonalised statements one might be inclined to make about human societies generally require, if they are to be politically informative, elaboration into statements about particular concrete people doing things to other people. The sign in the Underground that reads, “Non-payment of fare will be punished” means that a policeman may arrest and fine you, if you fail to buy a ticket; “Unemployment has risen by x percent” means that certain people who have control of particular economic organisations have done something concrete, terminated the employment, of certain other people.

To say that the question “Who whom?” “keeps recurring” does not, of course, mean that for literally every single human society that has existed or will exist this is a question that “necessarily” arises in every context. The extent to which it does arise, the forms in which it arises, and the importance of the question will vary historically. Perhaps there are contexts and societies in which this question is irrelevant, but for most of the societies with which we have direct dealings, and the ones to which we have relatively straightforward cognitive access, this is a question that arises again and again, and for what we can see are good reasons. One strand of “liberalism,” represented, for instance, in the early writings of Humboldt,¹¹ is devoted to trying to imagine a structure of free political institutions, relative to which this question would be so unimportant that it would become irrelevant to ask who were the rulers and who were the ruled. The centrepiece of the argument was the idea of a strict limitation of government. If government was sufficiently limited, the thought ran, it would not matter who was in a position to operate the state apparatus, and who was subject to it. Utopian speculation, of course, is free and in some senses highly desirable, but if this liberal suggestion was intended to imply that such a free form of political organisation was actually realisable under nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century economic conditions, that was certainly an illusion.

Obviously, how specific the answer to the question “Who whom?” needs to be will depend on the time and place, and the purpose of the question. In some relatively simple cases and for some purposes the answer to the question might be the name of particular persons—Brian is Paul’s line manager, so “Brian” is the “who” and Paul the “whom”—but in most cases in complex societies the answer will be the naming of an office, position, or institution. It is “a policeman”—whichever individual member of the police force is assigned that role—who arrests me for nonpayment of fare. That he happens to be PC John Jones is not relevant. How important it is to specify the individuals concerned, for instance designating them by their proper names, rather than simply referring to the roles or positions involved, will depend on the problem at issue and the kind of society in question. An important part of answering the question will be to discover what kind of answer is required in the specific circumstances, which is a question of proper categorisation.

Although Lenin’s formula is basically correct, it is perhaps too dense and needs to be developed or extended: actually, I would argue, it needs to be extended twice. 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. Who—which individuals or the bearers of which offices, positions, or roles—has control of employment in the society, and who have lost their jobs? Will those who have lost their jobs have access to alternative modes of subsistence or not? Who will provide those alternatives, and what exactly will they be (provision of cash payments, vouchers, or jobs in the public sector by the government, or of shelter and food by charities)? Are the unemployed organised, and capable of collective action, or are they disorganised and inert, and if they are organised, what form does this organisation take? What concretely has one party done to the other: How exactly will the policeman punish me? Will he give me a warning, impose a fine, hit me with his truncheon, or take me to jail? Will he also expect a bribe? Finally, who benefits and who does not from the transaction in question? Who derives distinct positive benefits from any individual action or type of action in a given society will oft en be an extremely complex question.

The second extension of Lenin’s formula is connected with another important feature of our social life. We relate to other people not merely in terms of what they have done to us or are doing to us, but also with regard to what they will or could do to us. If I have certain effective powers, these may have a sufficiently intimidating effect on others that I get my way without ever needing actually to exercise these powers. So if we wish to understand how human action in a certain society comes to be coordinated, how some individuals or groups bring it about that others embark on certain courses of action or refrain from embarking on others, one of the things we will need to take into account is not just who actually does what to whom, but also who has what powers, i.e., who could do what to whom for whose benefit. One must also take account not only of what powers an individual or group actually has, but also of how those powers are perceived, or not perceived, and what powers agents are, rightly or wrongly, thought to have by others (and by themselves). To think one has a power that one does not can give an agent self-confidence, which may be self-reinforcing (but also may not, depending on circumstances). Given the role that intimidation can play, one important “power” that an agent, whether an individual or a society, can have is the ability to control how others perceive its powers or what they imagine these powers to be.

In this account “power” is to be construed as connected with general concepts like “ability to do” (such as that I have the power of speech or of locomotion), rather than as designating exclusively a form of coercion (such as “the hostages remained in the power of the gang until they were freed by the police”) or domination (“the Athenians reasserted their power over the island of Chios”). It is probably a mistake to treat “power” as if it referred to a single, uniform substance or relation wherever it was found. It makes more sense to distinguish a variety of qualitatively distinct kinds of powers. There are strictly coercive powers you may have by virtue of being physically stronger than me, persuasive powers by virtue of being convinced of the moral rightness of your case and having special training or a natural talent for speaking; you may be more powerful than I am by virtue of being a charismatic figure who is able to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support from others, or by virtue of being able to see and exploit a strategic, rhetorical, or diplomatic weakness in my position. Contemporary political scientists oft en contrast “hard” and “soft ” power, and there is nothing wrong with this contrast provided one takes it as no more than a first, preliminary account of the different types and forms of power that one can discover in a given society. How many types one would have to distinguish would depend on the context of the enquiry.¹²

If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix for 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 in complete abstraction from the way in which these items figure in the more motivationally active parts of the human psyche, and particularly in abstraction from the way in which they impinge, even if indirectly, on human action. This, in turn, requires an understanding of the existing social and political institutions. In politics “It would be good if … (e.g., the tsar were overthrown)” means someone has decided that it would be desirable or advisable if this were to take place, or at any rate has entertained the possibility that this might be done. “Who is that?” is always a pertinent question. It also means that someone is in principle willing to try to implement “the good” that has been determined, even if the form that attempt at implementation takes is a series of weak and ineffectual actions that amount to no more than some seditious conversations, or committing to memory a subversive poem.¹³ This in no way implies that there is no such thing as truth. Lenin famously claimed that Marx’s theory was powerful because it was true, and not the other way around.¹⁴ Still, neither the good nor the true is self-realising, so it is not generally a sufficient explanation of why people believe that X that X is true or of why people do Y that Y is “good.”

There is one further element to be found in Lenin’s writings that is of special importance for political theory: his discussion of the principle of partisanship.¹⁵ That is his claim that there are only two philosophical ways of looking at the world: materialism and idealism. These are incompatible global theories that constitute the respective correctly understood worldviews of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and they are as irreconcilably at war with each other as are their respective hosts. Every theory to some extent takes a position in this war; every theory is “partisan.” Therefore, intellectual honesty requires that one reflect on the contribution one’s theory makes to the class struggle, and acknowledge it openly. One does not have to accept the specific claim that there are two, and only two, mutually exclusive worldviews to one of which any theory must commit itself, to accept the general claim that entertaining, developing, and propounding a theory are actions, and as such they represent ways of taking a position in the world. This means that any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorisation, including the politics of whatever theory is itself at the given time being presented for scrutiny as a candidate for acceptance. One need not assume that “honesty” requires one specifically to elaborate and call attention to the partisan commitments of one’s theory in every possible context, because contexts and the legitimate questions to which they give rise differ, and there is nothing in principle wrong with accepting a certain amount of intellectual division of labour.

Still, the general point that a political theory is, among other things, potentially a partisan intervention is well-taken, so questions about the actual political implications of a theory cannot be excluded as in principle irrelevant.

Priorities, Preferences, Timing

That, then, is the first and by far most important of the three questions the conjunction of which in some sense—namely, for the realist view with which I am concerned—maps out the realm of politics. The second question is, by contrast, one that represents not a new line of thought, but something more like an addendum to the first. The best way to think about how the second question arises is to think about Nietzsche’s insistence on the finitude of human existence and on the fact that the structure of human valuation is always differential. The model for most politics, according to Nietzsche, should not be that of an irresistible

that draws individuals on, so that they follow looking neither to the right nor to the left. To the extent to which the pull that moves me really is irresistible, like an invincibly strong addiction, then the normal procedures of evaluation, deliberation, choice, decision, etc., that constitute the substance of our political life are not operating. The same is true of overwhelming aversion. The person being tortured who simply wants it to STOP (PERIOD) is also not a good model for an agent acting politically. Politics as we know it is a matter of differential choice: opting for A rather than B.¹⁶ Thus politics is not about doing what is good or rational or beneficial simpliciter—it is not even obvious that that is an internally coherent thought at all—but about the pursuit of what is good in a particular concrete case by agents with limited powers and resources, where choice of one thing to pursue means failure to choose and pursue another.

I would like to group here a number of phenomena having to do with order, sequence, priority, and the temporality or historicality of collective action. To propose that we do X is always to propose that we do X rather than any other possible action, or at any rate that we do X before we do something else. In many cases, the specific order in which one makes decisions is of crucial importance for the actual medium-term result. In an ideal discussion (e.g., of the kind envisaged by Habermas) in which one has, as we say, “all the time in the world,” it might not make much difference which topic is discussed first because we will eventually make it our task to get to everything, and can revisit topics without restriction in the light of changes in our views. Whether or not that is the case in idealised academic discussion is not a matter I wish to discuss now, but however that might be, in countless cases of political action what comes first is of great importance for obvious reasons. Once I have done something, I have changed the situation, sometimes for good. As the Bush administr...