Enlightenment's Wake

Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age

John Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134713899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Now in paperback, Enlightenment's Wake stakes out the elements of John Gray's new position. He argues that all schools of contemporary political thought are variations on the Enlightenment Project - the Westernizing project of a universal civilization - and that this Enlightenment Project has proved self-undermining and is now exhausted. Fresh thought is needed on the dilemmas of the late modern age.

1
Against the new liberalism

It is a commonplace that political philosophy was reborn in 1971. In the interwar period, and then again for a quarter of a century after the Second World War, we are told, scepticism about the subject itself had inhibited any treatment of its fundamental questions that was systematic and comprehensive and, above all, that issued in rationally compelling principles for the evaluation of political institutions and the guidance of political conduct. The climate of opinion in general philosophy—as expressed in positivist accounts of meaning, emotivism in moral theory and the broader influence of the ordinary language philosophies—seemed to have rendered hopeless the projects of political philosophers working in an older and grander tradition that encompassed Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. It seemed to suggest that the most that could reasonably be hoped for was a succession of exercises in ‘the analysis of concepts’—that is to say, armchair investigations of recent and local uses of words which derived whatever interest or authority they possessed from an appeal to the linguistic and moral intuitions, not of the words’ users, but of philosophers in their armchairs—of the sort undertaken in 1965 in Brian Barry’s Political Argument.¹

Whatever else may be questionable in the conventional wisdom, it is sound in its judgement that we were spared the dismal prospect of political philosophy coming under the influence of an anachronistic methodology of conceptual analysis by the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice,² in which the classical enterprise of the subject was resumed in an uncompromising and architectonic fashion. Nor can it sensibly be denied that political philosophy since the early 1970s has been—at least in the English-speaking world—in very substantial part a commentary on Rawls’s work. It remains very doubtful that Rawls’s work has revived the enterprise of political philosophy in anything resembling its traditional forms. Indeed, it is arguable that the tradition of liberal theorizing it inaugurated has done little more than articulate the prejudices of an Anglo-American academic class that lacks any understanding of political life in our age—an age distinguished by the collapse of the Enlightenment project on a world-historical scale. Because political philosophy in the Anglo-American mode remains for the most part animated by the hopes of the Enlightenment, above all by the hope that human beings will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a universal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality, it cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities. As a result, the main current in political philosophy, which remains wedded to the Enlightenment project in the particularly uncompelling form of a species of eviscerated Kantian liberalism, has condemned itself to political nullity and intellectual sterility. Political philosophy may have been reborn in 1971, but it was a stillbirth.

The common tale of the recent death and miraculous rebirth of political philosophy is in truth a piece of academic folklore. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a number of seminal contributions to the subject—Berlin on liberty, Hart on law, Hayek on the constitution of a liberal state and Oakeshott on rationalism in politics, to mention only the most distinguished of them. Moreover, what is not often noticed is the peculiar, and for that matter parochial character of the species of political philosophy that Rawls’s work exemplifies, and whose hegemony within political philosophy Rawls’s work has assured. For Rawls, as for those who follow him in the most essential aspects of his project, such as Ronald Dworkin and Bruce Ackerman, political philosophy is the application to the constitution of the state of the moral point of view, where this is conceived as the impartial or the impersonal point of view. The enterprise of the political philosopher is that of propounding and grounding a political morality—one that is agent-neutral in that it does not rest on particularistic loyalties or conceptions of the good but instead has its foundation in universal principles of justice or rights. For these writers political philosophy is not, as it was for Aristotle and for John Stuart Mill, say, an inquiry into the human good that has as its precondition a theory of human nature. It is an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance. It is obvious that this project—the project of deriving principles of justice or right from the nature of the person—is a Kantian project. The oddity of this project, as it is pursued in Rawls and his followers, is that it is conducted without reference to the metaphysical doctrines—about noumenal self-hood, for example—that are the matrix of all of Kant’s ethics and political thought.

The Kantian liberalism sponsored by Rawls, which has secured a dominant place for itself in Anglo-American political philosophy, has the dubious distinction of lacking anything like a philosophical anthropology, or any other sort of metaphysical commitment. It takes its bearings, not from an account of human nature or of the more permanent features of the human circumstance, but from a conception of the person that is, avowedly in the work of the later Rawls, a distillation of the conventional wisdom of liberal democratic regimes. In the later Rawls the conventional wisdom is unmistakably that of the liberal establishment in North American universities—which perhaps justifies the description of his project as Kantianism in one country; certainly, it limits the interest of his project for those who do not share the unexamined intuitions of the US academic nomenklatura. This new liberalism prides itself in remaining on the surface, philosophically speaking, and in having as its telos a practical goal—that of securing agreement on principles of justice that allow for peaceful coexistence in a constitutional democracy of persons having divergent and sometimes incommensurable conceptions of the good life and views of the world. The oddity, and indeed the absurdity, of this new Kantian liberalism—one that has cut itself loose from the traditional concerns of philosophy so as to pursue the political objective of practical agreement—is that it is at the same time elaborated at a vast distance from political life in the real world. The theorists of the new Kantian liberalism speak for no political interest or constituency, even in the liberal democracies to which their reflections are directed; few members of the political classes in their respective countries know what these theorists are thinking, and none cares. Accordingly, the thoughts of the new liberals evoke no political echo in any of the liberal democracies: the project of securing practical agreement on principles of justice among metaphysically and historically neutered Kantian selves arouses little interest, inexplicably, among the political classes, or the voters, of the Western world, or anywhere else.

For the most part, in consequence, contemporary political philosophers of the presently dominant school are reduced to talking with each other, and to no one else, about topics of interest to no one else, least of all in the liberal democracies they are supposed to be addressing. In part, no doubt, the manifest political irrelevance of contemporary political philosophy, exquisitely ironic in view of the declared practical goals of its dominant school, is merely an aspect of the political marginality of the Anglo-American academic class itself. Its self-appointed role as the intellectual voice of an alienated counterculture, hostile to its own society and enamoured of various exotic regimes— of which it knows, in fact, nothing—has acquired a Monty Pythonish character, as the peoples and even the rulers of these regimes have exposed their failings to a pitiless scrutiny in which the pretensions of their ruling ideologies have been devastatingly deflated. (That the absurdist aspect of contemporary Western academic discourse about economic systems is lost on its practitioners is convincingly confirmed by a 1992 issue of the journal, Ethics, in which a motley crew of Western academics gravely discusses various aspects of market socialism—a conception exposed to universal derision in the transitional societies of the post-communist world where it originated decades ago. The contributors to Ethics might have done better to discuss the prospects of the restoration of monarchy in Russia—far less of an exercise in anachronism, and just conceivably a topic of some interest to those whose fates it might affect.) The collapse of any political model for the Anglo-American oppositional intelligentsia has done little for its political credibility, already negligible in domestic terms. The political vacuity of much recent political philosophy, especially that of the new Kantian liberalism, may, however, have causes other than, and deeper than, the political risibility of its practitioners. It may be explicable by reference to central features of recent political philosophy, and in particular to the continued hegemony within it of an Enlightenment project that history has passed by and which is now significant only as the modernist ideology of the liberal academic nomenklatura of Western societies that are themselves in evident decline.

Consider, in this regard, the central category of the intellectual tradition spawned by Rawls’s work—the category of the person. In Rawls’s work, as in that of his followers, this is a cipher, without history or ethnicity, denuded of the special attachments that in the real human world give us the particular identities we have. Emptied of the contingencies that in truth are essential to our identities, this cipher has in the Rawlsian schema only one concern—a concern for its own good, which is not the good of any actual human being, but the good we are all supposed to have in common, which it pursues subject to constraints of justice that are conceived to be those of impartiality. In this conception, the principles of justice are bound to be the same for all. The appearance of a plurality of ciphers in the Rawlsian original position must be delusive, since, having all of them the same beliefs and motives, they are indistinguishable. So it is that, even in its later version, in which it has suffered a sort of Hegelian or Deweyan mutation, Rawls’s project remains a universalist one, in that its results are the same for all those to whom it is meant to apply. The basic liberties—apparently a uniquely determinate and finally fixed set of compossible or dovetailing freedoms—will be, then, the same for all, as will the principles of distribution. It will not matter by whom we are governed, so long as governments satisfy common standards of justice and legitimacy.

Now there is in the recent literature a common objection to this Rawlsian project, made most lucidly and judiciously by Thomas Nagel in his Equality and Partiality,³ which captures something of its implausibility and strangeness. Like much else in modern moral and political theory that has been influenced by Kant and by utilitarianism, Rawls’s theory of justice equates the moral point of view with that of impartiality, and thereby denies moral standing to personal projects and attachments, except in so far as they are compatible with impersonal standards of justice. Nagel argues that this account of the ethical life accords an undue privilege to the standpoint of impartiality, whereas any acceptable view of morality must give full recognition to each, while accepting that their demands will never be wholly reconcilable. This is a refreshing departure from the myopic perspective of impartiality, but it is not a fundamental one, since the personal point of view which Nagel seeks to rehabilitate remains that of the Kantian cipher. In the real world, human beings think of themselves, not as essentially persons having a diversity of contingent relationships and attachments, but as being constituted by their histories and their communities, with all their conflicting demands. It is a fact of fundamental importance that the subjects of the former Soviet Union asserted themselves against its power not as persons, but as peoples. Nor is the disposition of human beings to constitute for themselves particular and exclusive identities, and to link the legitimacy of governments with their recognition, a phenomenon of modern times alone; it is as perennial and universal as the diversity of natural languages, and as distinctively human. It is wholly characteristic of recent liberal theory that, while prepared to acknowledge that political morality cannot be entirely agentneutral, Nagel refuses to allow that the subject of agent-relative moralities is often collective, not personal: persons may be thwarted if they lack opportunities for expressing the identities they have as members of groups, he tells us,⁴ but communities or peoples have no irreducible right to self-determination. The subject matter of justice cannot, except indirectly, be found in the histories of peoples, and their often tragically conflicting claims; it must be always a matter of individual rights. It is obvious that this liberal position cannot address, save as an inconvenient datum of human psychology, the sense of injustice arising from belonging to an oppressed community that, in the shape of nationalism, is the strongest political force of our century. It is not surprising, then, that the truth that human beings individuate themselves as members of historic communities having memories that cross the generations, not as specimens of generic humanity or personhood having a history only by accident, rarely figures in recent work, Stuart Hampshire’s Innocence and Experience being a noteworthy exception.⁵ Nor, given the unreflectively individualist bias of contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy, is it in the least anomalous that there should be only one comprehensive study of the philosophical dilemmas generated by principles of national self-determination, Allen Buchanan’s Secession—a profound investigation of the subject that is further enriched by its illuminating use of actual historical examples.⁶

The great distance from political life of most political philosophy is partly a result of the abstract individualism by which it is animated. It is far from being confined to works which defend an individualist minimum of government. Individualist assumptions are present, in a wholly unselfcritical fashion, in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia,⁷ and they are invoked in an incomparably more persuasive, if also ultimately unsuccessful way, in Loren Lomasky’s unjustly neglected Persons, Rights and the Moral Community⁸.Abstract individualism permeates Ronald Dworkin and Bruce Ackerman’s work, where it is harnessed to an egalitarian political morality. It is present (though in a far more reflective and historically self-conscious fashion than in Rawls) in David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement⁹. What all these have in common with Rawls’s work is the deployment of an unhistorical and abstract individualism in the service of a legalist or jurisprudential paradigm of political philosophy. The task of political philosophy is conceived as one of deriving the ideal constitution—assumed, at least in principle, to be everywhere the same. This is so, whether its upshot be Rawls’s basic liberties, Nozick’s side-constraints, or Dworkin’s rights-as-trumps. The presupposition is always that the bottom line in political morality is the claims of individuals, and that these are to be spelt out in terms of the demands of justice or rights. The consequence is that the diverse claims of historic communities, if they are ever admitted, are always overwhelmed by the supposed rights of individuals. The notion that different communities might legitimately have different legal regimes for abortion or pornography, for example, is hardly considered. Indeed, it becomes difficult to state such a proposition intelligibly, as the discourse of rights increasingly drives out all others from political life. If the theoretical goal of the new liberalism is the supplanting of politics by law, its practical result—especially in the United States, where rights discourse is already the only public discourse that retains any legitimacy—has been the emptying of political life of substantive argument and the political corruption of law. Issues, such as abortion, that in many other countries have been resolved by a legislative settlement that involves compromises and which is known to be politically renegotiable, are in the legalist culture of the United States matters of fundamental rights that are intractably contested and which threaten to become enemies of civil peace. The new liberalism that dominates Anglo-American political philosophy is a faithful image of the political culture that gave it birth.

It is not denied here that recent work contains some trenchant criticisms of the dominant school. In Joel Feinberg’s four-volume The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law,¹⁰ an older and wiser Millian tradition is revived in which the political philosopher, rather than posing as a constitution-maker, addresses the ideal legislator, who perceives the necessity of trade-offs among conflicting interests and values, A number of communitarian theorists have illuminated the questionable conceptions of the subject and the subject’s relations with common forms of life which underpin fashionable liberal ideals of the priority of justice over other political virtues and of the neutrality of justice with regard to rival conceptions of the good. Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,¹¹ in which Rawlsian theory is characterized as a theory appropriate to a society of strangers lacking any deep or rich common culture, is usually considered the first of these communitarian critiques. However, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s earlier and brilliantly destructive After Virtue,¹² the sources of latter-day liberalism in a fragmented moral vocabulary embodying no coherent conception of the human good are exposed, while in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,¹³ a no less interesting, if less successful attempt is made to combine the denial of any conception of rationality that tries to transcend the dependency of all reasoning on the authority of tradition with the thesis that the account of the good found in one tradition—the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition—nevertheless has a superior claim on reason. A similar argument, focusing on the etiolated conception of the self that suffuses liberal thought, is pursued at instructive length in the work of Charles Taylor. It is in Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice¹⁴ that the most ambitious attempt is made at developing an alternative to the spurious universality of liberal justice—one that forswears the standpoint of externality on our practices affected in Rawls and Dworkin in favour of a method of immanent criticism. Walzer’s book is arresting in its insistence that elucidating ideas of justice is a sort of social and historical phenomenology, not the statement of timeless verities; and it is welcome in its pluralist insight that justice is complex not simple, with different distributive principles being applicable to different goods according to the meanings those goods have in various social contexts. This phenomenological approach to justice is helpful, in that it turns us away from the hallucinatory perspectives of Kantian liberalism to the real world of human practices and forms of life—families, schools, workplaces, nation-states, and so on. Like other communitarian thinkers, however, Walzer is reluctant to accept that abandoning the universalist standpoint of doctrinal liberalism leaves liberal practice without privileges, as only one form of life among many. He will not see that the method of immanent criticism he advocates by no means guarantees outcomes congenial to liberal sensibilities—that it may well be subversive of liberal practice. This blindness in Walzer is one he shares with virtually all of the communitarian critics of liberalism, and it has the same root. The community invoked by these writers is not one that anyone has ever lived in, an historic human settlement with its distinctive exclusivities, hierarchies and bigotries, but an ideal community, in its way as much of a cipher as the disembodied Kantian self the communitarians delight in deflating. In our world—the only one we know—the shadow cast by community is enmity, and the boundaries of communities must often be settled by war. This is the lesson of history, including the latest history of the post-communist states. It is typical of recent political philosophy, even in its communitarian variants, that it should be so far removed from the actual practices of common life as it is found everywhere. Communi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Against the new liberalism
• 2: Notes toward a definition of the political thought of Tlön
• 3: Toleration: a post-liberal perspective
• 4: Enlightenment, illusion and the fall of the Soviet state
• 5: The post-communist societies in transition
• 6: Agonistic liberalism
• 7: The undoing of conservatism
• 8: After the new liberalism
• 9: From post-liberalism to pluralism
• 10: Enlightenment’s wake
• Notes