Political Theory In Transition

Noel O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135359041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

During the past two decades there has been increasing dissatisfaction with established political categories, on the grounds that they no longer fit many of the facts of contemporary life, or adequately express many contemporary political ideals. Political Theory in Transition explores the principal reasons for this dissatisfaction and outlines some of the most influential responses to it.Key features of this textbook: * covers many of the important areas in political theory including: Communitarianism; Identity; Feminism; Liberalism; Citizenship; Democracy; Power; Authority; Legitimacy; Nationalism; Globalization; and the Environment
* includes chapters written by some of the foremost authorities in the field of political theory
* divided into four useful sections, beginning with the concept of the individual, and progressing to beyond the nation-state.

Part I
The concept of the individual

1 Communitarianism and its legacy

Andrew Mason

During the 1980s a body of literature formed around the idea that contemporary liberal theory, at least of the kind exemplified in John Rawls's work, was insufficiently attentive to the value and significance of communal relations. Prominent amongst those who developed this line of argument were Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer.¹ Although there were considerable differences in their critiques of liberal theory, they came to be regarded as defenders of a particular approach, which was labelled communitarianism. In this chapter I propose to explore three of the main communitarian themes,² assess the extent to which these have identified genuine problems with liberal theory (in its currently dominant form), and then say something about what I take to be the legacy of communitarianism for contemporary political philosophy.

The main themes of communitarianism

The main target of much communitarian writing has been John Rawls's work, especially his highly influential book A Theory of Justice, which was deemed to be the most sophisticated presentation of contemporary liberalism (Rawls 1971). In that book Rawls began from the idea of society as a co-operative venture for mutual advantage. He claimed that, so understood, a society requires principles of justice because it needs some way of determining how the various benefits and burdens of social co-operation should be distributed. In the face of widespread disagreement over which principles of justice should govern our major institutions, Rawls drew upon the social contract tradition in order to develop a mediod which he hoped could secure agreement on a particular conception of justice.

Rawls's guiding idea was that the principles which should be adopted are those which rational persons, concerned to further their own interests, would agree upon in an initial position of equality. In order to model this initial position, he employed a device he called the veil of ignorance, behind which people are presumed to be ignorant of various facts about themselves, such as their class or status, race and wealth, and their conception of the good - i.e. their views about what is of value and importance in life. This veil of ignorance was intended to secure a kind of impartiality or neutrality: if people are in ignorance of these facts, they cannot seek to benefit themselves by arguing for principles that are congenial to (say) their class, race or conception of the good.

Although they are behind a veil of ignorance, the parties are to make certain assumptions. First, each is to assume that they have some conception of the good, even though they don't know its content. Second, each is assumed to be rational and, because rational, to want the means to realize its conception of the good, whatever its content. Since things like liberty and opportunity, wealth and income, and self-respect are likely to make it easier for a person to realize his own conception of the good, it is assumed that persons in the original position will want as much of them as possible. Rawls calls these the primary goods, and the list of them he calls 'the thin theory of the good'. He regards it as a thin theory precisely because (he thinks) it does not presuppose any particular conception of the good.

Rawls argues that persons in this initial or original position of equality, behind the veil of ignorance, will choose two main principles. According to the first principle, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty to all. Rawls simply gives a list of the basic liberties, which includes political liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person (along with the right to hold personal property) and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. The second principle comes in two main parts. According to it, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are open to all - which he develops into the principle of fair equality of opportunity - and so that they are to the benefit of the least advantaged — which he calls the difference principle.

Those who came to be regarded as communitarians made a number of criticisms of liberal political theory which they thought Rawls's work exemplified. These criticisms were varied, and several of the writers I shall consider have subsequendy sought to distance themselves from the communitarian label which was later applied to them, but there is some justification for regarding their work as part of a unified critique. I propose to focus on three themes which are to be found in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, although not all of these themes are represented in each of their work.³

The first theme is given by the idea that the self is essentially social, whereas liberalism has supposed that the self is essentially asocial or presocial. Sometimes the point here has been to emphasize the way in which those capacities that are usually regarded by liberals as definitive of personhood, such as the capacity to be rational or autonomous, can only be cultivated in the context of social relationships (see, e.g., Taylor 1985: 190-1). But in its most robust forms the criticism has been metaphysical rather than empirical: that the self is pardy constituted by its social relations, not logically independent of them in the way that liberalism (it is alleged) supposes.

Sandel is perhaps the clearest exponent of the metaphysical critique.⁴ He says that Rawls regards the self as essentially a chooser, defined by its capacity for choice, and in this way logically prior to its ends and attachments, which it acquires as a result of exercising this capacity for choice.⁵ According to the conception of the self implicit in Rawls's theory,

to identify any set of characteristics as my aims, ambitions, desires, and so on, is always to imply some subject 'me' standing behind them, and the shape of this 'me' must be given prior to any of the ends or attributes I bear.

(Sandel 1982: 19)

In its place, Sandel proposes to put a conception of the self which regards the self as partly constituted by its ends and attachments, discovering them through a process of self-interpretation.

In Sandel's view, Rawls's conception of the self is impoverished because it deprives the self of moral depth. He says it implies that 'no commitment could grip me so deeply that I could not understand myself without it. No transformation of life purposes and plans would be so unsettling as to disrupt the contours of my identity' (Sandel 1982: 62). Practical reasoning, on such a view, can only consist in surveying one's desires to see which are the strongest and judging how they are to be best realized. It cannot, Sandel says, lead to transformations of the very identity of the self.

The second theme in communitarian writings is the idea that what counts as just depends upon a particular community's traditions or way of life, whereas liberalism has presupposed that justice is in some sense a universal value, which involves denying that the community's traditions play any essential role in the process of justifying claims about what is just. According to communitarians (or some of them, at least), the aspiration to create a universal political morality fails to appreciate that any adequate political morality must respond to our shared traditions of thought and practice, or our shared understandings, and cannot transcend them.⁶ Rawls's appeal to the original position cannot provide an 'Archimedean point' outside, or beyond, these traditions and understandings.

This theme is to be found particularly in the work of Maclntyre and Walzer. Both deny that they are cultural relativists, although their denial has met with some scepticism. The extent to which it can be sustained will depend on what is meant by 'cultural relativism'. Walzer takes the view that a just distribution of some good must respond to the shared social meaning of that good. What counts as a just distribution of a particular good, therefore, is likely to vary from one society to another. But Walzer believes it to be an implication of his view that it is always unjust for one culture to force others to live by its social meanings (Walzer 1983: 314), which shows that his theory has a 'universal' dimension. The social embeddedness of various goods, and the different meanings attached to them, leads Walzer to think that Rawls is mistaken in supposing that it is possible to arrive at a contentful list of universal primary goods. Either such a list would have to be so abstract that it had no distributive implications or it would have to vary from one society to another (Walzer 1983: 8).

Alasdair MacIntyre argues for the different but related view that conceptions of justice and practical rationality are always relative to particular traditions of thought and practice.⁷ In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, he maintains that liberal theorists have sought to justify their favoured social and political order by appealing to what they thought were principles of shared rationality independent of tradition. But he argues that, contrary to its self-image, liberalism is committed to its own tradition-bound conception of practical rationality, and to its own distinctive conception of the human good (MacIntyre 1988: 345). In MacIntyre's view, the idea that every conception of justice and practical rationality is embedded in a tradition of thought and inquiry does not entail relativism, properly so-called, for we are still able to assess whole traditions in terms of their success or failure in solving the problems they confront (MacIntyre 1988: ch. 18): one tradition (call it T₁) may fail in its own terms, and another tradition (call it T₂) may succeed even from the perspective of T₁.

The third and final communitarian theme which I shall mention focuses on the claim made by many liberals that the state should be neutral between competing conceptions of the good. For Sandel, this commitment to neutrality follows straightforwardly from the core idea behind liberalism, that

a just society seeks not to promote any particular ends, but enables its citizens to pursue their own ends ...; it therefore must govern by principles that do not presuppose any particular conception of the good. What justifies these regulative principles above all is not that they maximize the general welfare, or cultivate virtue, or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they conform to the concept of right, a moral category given prior to the good, and independent of it.

(Sandel 1982: 13)

As I have already indicated, some communitarians, such as MacIntyre, argue that liberalism is not in fact neutral between different conceptions of the good, but imposes its own particular conception. He believes that, as a result, liberalism's 'toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited' (MacIntyre 1988: 336).

Other communitarians have argued that it would be a mistake for liberalism to aspire to neutrality, even if it were a coherent ideal. They maintain that society can be enduring and stable only if it fosters a robust sense of belonging, cultivates strong feelings of civic responsibility, and nurtures its core values. Insofar as liberal political practice has been a reflection of liberal political theory, it has threatened the very fabric of society.⁸ Far from remaining neutral between conceptions of the good, the state should foster the civic virtues, promote a sense of belonging, and nurture the shared values which underpin it. This theme can be found in Taylor's work, and to some extent in Sandel's too (Taylor 1989a: 165; Sandel 1985: 39).

An assessment of the communitarian critique of liberalism

Although communitarianism has played a beneficial role in forcing liberals to clarify their main claims, in my view it has not shown liberal theory to be deeply flawed.⁹ Indeed Rawls's more recent writings have provided a partial answer to the communitarian critique (see especially Rawls 1996), and other liberals have indicated ways in which liberal theory can be formulated so as to evade the force of that critique. Liberals can allow that in some sense we are fundamentally social creatures, that there are important ways in which the value of justice is socially located and has social preconditions, and that in order to sustain itself a liberal society must be non-neutral in various ways. Let me expand on these responses.

Rawls's general approach in reply to his communitarian critics has been to restrict the scope of his theory: he maintains that it presents a political conception of justice, not a comprehensive philosophical doctrine. By this he means (in part) that it attempts to secure the agreement of citizens who subscribe to divergent philosophical, moral and religious ideas by not affirming or denying any of these ideas. In this spirit of avoidance, he rejects Sandel's accusation that his theory is committed to the idea that the self is logically prior to its ends and attachments (Rawls 1996: 26-7). He maintains that the original position is conceived simply as a device of representation, which has no specific metaphysical implications for the nature of the person. The idea is that we can enter the original position by observing the various restrictions on knowledge and information imposed by the veil of ignorance, in effect putting to one side facts about ourselves - for example, the nature of our ends and attachments. This does not imply that we are in some sense logically independent of those ends and attachments.

Not all liberals are political liberals in Rawls's sense, committed to a strategy of avoidance. But those willing to engage Sandel in battle over the correct metaphysical conception of the self will first need to clarify the thesis that the self is constituted by some of its ends and attachments. Sandel and other communitarians hold back from claiming that the self is wholly constituted by its commitments (Sandel 1982: 150; Sandel 1992: 23; Taylor 1989b: 27). But i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The concept of the individual
• 1 Communitarianism and its legacy
• 2 Identity, diversity and the politics of recognition
• Part II Citizenship, democracy and the nature of the political in conditions of social diversity
• 3 The new feminism
• 4 Cultural diversity and the limits of liberalism1
• 5 Citizenship beyond the nation state: the case of Europe1
• 6 For an agonistic model of democracy
• 7 Power, authority and legitimacy: a critique of postmodern political thought1
• Part III The significance of national and global contexts
• 8 Nationalism and political theory
• 9 Globalization, the nation state and political theory
• 10 The borders of (international) political theory
• Part IV The nature and limits of political theory
• 11 Political theory and the environment: the grey and the green (and the in-between)
• 12 Political theory in retreat? Contemporary political theory and the historical order
• 13 Theorizing political theory1
• Index