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    Philosophy and Real Politics
    Philosophy and Real Politics
    Philosophy and Real Politics
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Philosophy and Real Politics

    By Raymond Geuss

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 28, 2008
    ISBN9781400835515

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    • 4/5
      This is worth reading for footnote 49 alone: "I think it possible to retain much of Adorno's analysis within a (revised) Leninist framework, but this is not a claim I propose to discuss in these pages."

      Not exactly the kind of thing you get in standard political philosophizing, which ignores Adorno (probably because Habermas's horrifically bad reading of him has become the accepted understanding in the anglosphere) and regards Lenin as kind of Hitler with better prose. So at least Geuss is doing something different.

      That said, there's a bit of a Wittgenstein feel to this project: it's really for people who buy the current philosophical mainstream approach to the matter, but feel a bit uncomfortable, and would like to know why. Just as Wittgenstein is a helpful purgative for analytically trained thinkers, Geuss would be for contemporary political theorists. But is there anything else to it? Perhaps not much that you don't already think.

      i) don't construct ideals without attending to material circumstances. There is no 'justice,' only justice for...
      ii) politics is about how people *act*, not what they believe. Their beliefs will contribute to actions, but the latter are the really important bits.
      iii) political theory, and politics, is historical, and can't be understood aside from history.

      Okay, sure. And he's right to bring ideology back into political discussion; and he's right to point out that standard liberal political theory just is ideological (i.e., it points us away from real problems). He's right that politics is about power relations, not about abstract good like justice/equality/fairness etc... But it's hard to see how any of this matters to anyone who doesn't already believe that standard liberal political theory is the way to go.

      In other words, this is at best a ladder to be kicked away. The arguments are inconsistent (he wants to 'start with today,' rather than ideals, but doesn't want to start with rights discourse--which just *is* today's discourse), the prose pleasant, the length just right. But the audience is tiny and unimportant.

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    Philosophy and Real Politics - Raymond Geuss

    Cover: Philosophy and Real Politics by Raymond Geuss

    Philosophy and Real Politics

    Raymond Geuss

    Philosophy and Real Politics

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

    Princeton and Oxford

    Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,

    New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX

    All Rights Reserved

    First paperback printing, 2024

    Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-25869-0

    eISBN 9781400835515 (ebook)

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

    Geuss, Raymond.

    Philosophy and real politics / Raymond Geuss.

         p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-691-13788-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)    1. Political science—

    Philosophy. I. Title.

    JA71.G46 2008

    320.0—dc22               2007052740

    Version 2.0

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    press.princeton.edu

    Contents

    Prefacevii

    Introduction1

    Part I  Realism

    Who Whom?23

    Priorities, Preferences, Timing30

    Legitimacy34

    Tasks of Political Theory37

    Understanding, Evaluation, Orientation37

    Conceptual Innovation42

    Ideology50

    Part II Failures of Realism

    Rights60

    Justice70

    Equality76

    Fairness, Ignorance, Impartiality80

    Power90

    Conclusion95

    Notes103

    Works Cited109

    Index113

    Preface

    The following text is an expansion of a lecture I gave at the University of Athens in April 2007 under the title (Lenin), Rawls, and Political Philosophy. The original lecture has since appeared in the journal Cogito, in a translation into Modern Greek, for which I wish to thank Dr. Vasso Kindi. My thanks also to Katerina Ierodiakonou for the kind invitation to speak in Athens. The death of my friend Michael Frede while swimming in the Gulf of Korinth in August 2007 prevents me from thanking him for three decades of hospitality and illuminating conversation, and specifically for the strong encouragement he gave me to publish the lecture. A mainstay of my intellectual life during the past year and a half has been the fortnightly German-language Philosophisches Forschungskolloquium based in the Cambridge Faculty of Philosophy; I have had the great good fortune to be able to discuss most of the material in this text extensively (in one form or another) with the members of that group: Manuel Dries, Fabian Freyenhagen, Richard Raatzsch, Jörg Schaub, and Christian Skirke. My thanks also to Rüdiger Bittner, John Dunn, Zeev Emmerich, Peter Garnsey, Istvan Hont, Quentin Skinner, and Ursula Wolf for discussions of the issues treated here and comments on the draft of this text. Needless to say, none of these individuals should be construed as necessarily agreeing with any particular claim I make in the text. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to Hilary Gaskin for acute comments that have improved virtually every page of the manuscript. Ian Malcolm of the Princeton University Press has, as usual, been an unfailing source of sound advice, and a pleasure to work with.

    Philosophy and Real Politics

    Introduction

    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 moralised 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. Slogans like this can be dangerous precisely because they are slickly ambiguous, and this one admits of at least two drastically divergent interpretations. There is what I will call the anodyne reading of the slogan, which formulates a view I fully accept, and then there is what I will call the ethics-first reading.

    The anodyne reading asserts that politics—meaning both forms of political action and ways of studying forms of political action—is not and cannot be a strictly value-free enterprise, and so is in the very general sense an ethical activity. Politics is a matter of human, and not merely mechanical, interaction between individuals, institutions, or groups. It can happen that a group of passengers in an airplane are thrown together mechanically when it crashes, or that a man slipping off a bridge accidentally lands on a tramp sleeping under the bridge. The second of these two examples is a salutary reminder of the role of contingency and of the unexpected in history, but neither of the two cases is a paradigm for politics. Political actors are generally pursuing certain conceptions of the good, and acting in the light of what they take to be permissible. This is true despite the undeniable fact that most human agents most of the time are weak, easily distracted, deeply conflicted, and confused, and that they therefore do not always do only things they take to be permissible. One will never understand what they are doing unless and until one takes seriously the ethical dimension of their action in the broadest sense of that term: their various value-judgments about the good, the permissible, the attractive, the preferable, that which is to be avoided at all costs. Acting in this way can perfectly reasonably be described as applying ethics, provided one understands that applying has very few similarities with giving a proof in Euclidean geometry or calculating the load-bearing capacities of a bridge, and is oft en more like the process of trying to survive in a free-for-all. Provided also one keeps in mind a number of other important facts, such as the unavoidable indeterminacy of much of human life. Every point in a Cartesian coordinate system is construed as having a determinate distance from the x-axis and from the y-axis. This way of thinking is of extremely limited usefulness when one is dealing with any phenomenon connected with human desires, beliefs, attitudes, or values. People oft en have no determinate beliefs at all about a variety of subjects; they oft en don’t know what they want or why they did something; even when they know or claim to know what they want, they can oft en give no coherent account of why exactly they want what they claim to want; they oft en have no idea which portions of their systems of beliefs and desires—to the extent to which they have determinate beliefs and desires—are ethical principles and which are (mere empirical) interests. This is not simply an epistemic failing, and also not something that one could in principle remedy, but a pervasive inherent feature in human life. Although this fundamental indeterminacy is a phenomenon almost everyone confronts and recognises in his or her own case all the time, for a variety of reasons we are remarkably resistant to accepting it as a general feature of the way in which we should best think about our social life, but we are wrong to try to evade it. A further reason to be suspicious of quasi-Cartesian attitudes to human life is that people are rarely more than locally consistent in action, thought, and desire, and in many domains of human life this does not matter at all, or might even be taken to have positive value. I may pursue a policy that is beneficial to me in the short term, but that in the long run will undermine itself. This may not even be subjectively irrational, given that in the long run, as Keynes pointed out, I will be dead (along with all the rest of us), and I may very reasonably, or even correctly, believe that I will be lucky enough to die before the policy unravels. When Catullus expresses his love and hate for Lesbia, he is not obviously voicing a wish to rid himself of one or the other of these two sentiments. Not all contradictions resolve into temporal change of belief or desire. Any attempt to think seriously about the relation between politics and ethics must remain cognitively sensitive to the fact that people’s beliefs, values, desires, moral conceptions, etc., are usually half-baked (in every sense), are almost certain to be both indeterminate and, to the extent to which they are determinate, grossly inconsistent in any but the most local, highly formalised contexts, and are constantly changing.¹ None of this implies that it might not be of the utmost importance to aspire to ensure relative stability and consistency in certain limited domains.

    Humans’ beliefs and desires are in constant flux, and changes in them can take place for any number of reasons. Transformations of specific sectors of human knowledge are oft en accompanied by very widespread further changes in worldview and values. People have oft en claimed that Darwinism had this effect in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition, new technologies give people new possible objects of desire and, arguably, new ways of desiring things. It is by no means obvious that the hunger which was satisfied when Neolithic humans tore apart raw meat with their fingers is the same kind of thing as the hunger that is satisfied by dining in a five-star restaurant in 2008.² Technological change can also make it possible for people to act in new ways toward each other, and sometimes these need to be regulated in ways for which there are no precedents: once it begins to become possible to transfer human organs from one person to another, and manipulate the genetic makeup of the members of the next generation of humans, people come to feel the need of some kind of guidance about which forms of transfer or manipulation should be permitted and which discouraged or forbidden. Changes in political or economic power relations oft en make it more or

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