“I strongly suspect that much of political philosophy and political theory and not a little bit of ‘applied,’ policy-salient ethics of the last three to four score years, despite purporting to express eternal propositions that convey what we ought to do, went out of date this week.”
That’s Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam), a few days after the US presidential election, at Digressions & Impressions.
What does Eric mean by “out of date”? He says:
I mean that people literally will stop reading and engaging with it because they cannot imagine why the arguments and distinctions that count as good work are taken to be significant because the underlying puzzles and commitments will seem oddly lifeless and distant…
[Such works] will seem hopelessly optimistic about their own significance.
Why does he think this? Well, you should read the whole post. But I’ll include a few excerpts here. The main reason, he writes, is that the kind of political philosophy that has been popular in the discipline from roughly the 1960s onward
presupposes, as a quiet enabling condition, relatively corruption-free bureaucracies and relatively impartial rule of law in which public opinion formation is shaped by social activists, interest groups, and experts in a free press and political parties and in which ‘policy’ is primarily not performative nor aims to divide opposing coalitions but aims to solve social ‘problems.’
Such political philosophy (in the liberal tradition and in approaches that take themselves to be outside of it, such as various “critical” schools), Eric writes, has generally not grappled with “its own material foundations and existence conditions.”
And, he says, such material foundations and existence conditions are eroding:
I am ‘predicting’ a kind of regime change at the center of Empire that will change how political business is done inside of it and with the rest of world. I suspect the best terms for that will be ‘state capitalism’ and ‘oligarchic mercantilism’ or ‘organized clientelism.’…
[This] is an intensification and expansion of the existing border and security frameworks and practices that allow arbitrary and unaccountable detention, expulsion, torture, and even assassination… that will normalize more shameless grifting for access to the levers of power; that will see the continued erosion of the international human rights framework and the Geneva conventions. And that the pretense of trying to meet ambitious climate goals in coordinated fashion will evaporate altogether.
So we have claims about
- interest in a kind of political philosophy
- political philosophy’s sensitivity to its “existence conditions”
- how the world has been and will continue to change.
Eric is more knowledgeable than I am in regard to just about everything relevant to this discussion. Still, I am skeptical about his pessimism. I’ll explain why, and I invite you all to let me know what you think.
Let’s start with the claim about interest in “much political philosophy”.
Eric says people will stop reading and engaging with it. But which people? It’s not as if works in political philosophy over the past 80 years have regularly been on any bestseller lists. Rawls and Nozick are exceptions in that they are known to some people outside of philosophy, but even then I’d bet that 99.99% of the US population couldn’t tell us a single thing about their views.
If there’s going to be a noticeable decline in interest in political philosophy of the type Eric’s discussing—call it contemporary liberalishism—it will be among political philosophers and theorists. Will that happen? I don’t think so.
For one thing, contemporary liberalishism is pretty good at eating its critics. Feminists, communitarians, analytical Marxists, non-ideal theorists… delicious. But you are what you eat, and as different types of criticism have been absorbed by it, contemporary liberalishism changes. So sure, owing to that process (as well as to other factors, such as generational turnover—Rawls’s last students are now old enough to have their own “philosophical great grandchildren”) Rawls is not as central as he used to be. But contemporary liberalishism is alive and well, and since entry into the profession requires engaging with what its practitioners are up to, the attention and criticism it feeds on will keep it alive and well for a while—that is, so long as there are political philosophers. I don’t take Eric to be predicting the end of political philosophy, though. (This is not to ignore that the Trump administration seems to be keen on treating higher education as a kind of enemy.)
What about Eric’s claim that political philosophy has paid insufficient attention to its own “material foundations and existence conditions”?
This I agree with. In fact, it’s an accusation that could accurately be leveled at nearly all branches of philosophy, though perhaps it has more force in those areas concerned with some form of practical wisdom, broadly construed, such as ethics and political philosophy. As an element of professional self-awareness this neglect may indeed be a failing. (And so it has been heartening to see a seeming increase in works on “externalist” explanations of philosophy and greater attention to elements of the “sociology” of the profession.)
What I don’t see is the connection between this failing and the claims about the impending obsolescence of contemporary liberalish political philosophy. Suppose political philosophers had paid more attention to the existence conditions of their work. Would this have led to actions or events that would have averted the political changes Eric identifies as threatening liberalish political philosophy’s obsolescence? I don’t see how.
Last, we have Eric’s description of how the world is changing.
While I don’t disagree with his observations here, I don’t think they will have the kinds of effects on political philosophy he seems to. The world may be moving farther away from the depictions of ideal societies that liberalish theories of justice provide. But it is not clear to me that an increase in such distance (within limits) discourages the production of that sort of political philosophy, or interest in it. (It’s not as if the ideal city of Plato’s Republic was more “realistic” for ancient Athens than Rawls’s liberalism is for Trump’s America.) And sometimes adversity seems to prompt the invention of new ideals to articulate, develop, and realize.
Sometimes, adversity results in the supplementation of ideals with tools by which to handle problems. The rise of “non-ideal theory” over the past 25 or so years is one example of that. Related is the emergence during that time of work on “transitional justice.” Perhaps the current situation will lead to increased attention in political philosophy to political institutions and politics. As for the “material conditions” of basic moral and political values, attention to that seems to be increasing, too, in interesting ways (see, for example, the work of Matthew Noah Smith (Northeastern), here and here).
The political changes Eric describes are indeed threats to liberal values (and some conservative ones, too). They include threats to higher education, and insofar as the humanities seem to be generally more targeted than other parts of the university, we can predict that philosophy will, in general, be increasingly at risk. The changes may prompt the development of new lines of thought within political philosophy. But I don’t see those risks or developments as ones that will be all that bad for contemporary liberalishism. If anything, they may prompt a renewed focus on its core ideas, as a way of those resisting such changes understanding what’s at stake and why we care about it so much.
Discussion welcome.
Related: Patriotism, etc.
I have thought this for years. Katrina Forrester’s book In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019) gives support to the claim as well. The sun is setting on the hedgemonic Rawlsian Empire, and the future of political philosophy will be multipolar.
I want to second the Forrester recommendation. It’s a great book.
When I first started studying political philosophy in 1990s, I recall many declarations of the “demise” of liberalism (including especially its Rawlsian variant) by “communitarians” and the like. Since then, new obituaries are written every decade or so, reflecting changing intellectual fashions and reactions to real world political events.
I expect that this will be no different. In any case, “Rawlsian” political liberalism — and liberalism more generally — is a research project that continues to evolve and change over time.
For a work within the political liberal framework that directly applies to the current situation in the US (and much of the world), I recommend Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views by Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti (OUP, 2024).
Despite the fact that liberalism is still going plenty strong, I think there is something to the fact that communitarianisms on the right, left, and other directions, have become a larger part of public discourse on the political in the past decade or so.
Another passage from Schliesser:
I am ‘predicting’ a kind of regime change at the center of Empire that will change how political business is done inside of it and with the rest of world. I suspect the best terms for that will be ‘state capitalism’ and ‘oligarchic mercantilism’ or ‘organized clientelism.’
That’s a whole lot of sophisticated sounding verbiage to avoid using the term that most accurately describes what is happening right in front of us, THE threat to democracy in the US and worldwide: fascism.
But he’s not entirely wrong; once a fascist regime takes hold, all other forms of political discourse will indeed be obsolete, because critical analysis of the regime will not be permitted. ANY discourse the regime and its adherents find threatening or otherwise distasteful will be silenced, and proponents eliminated. That’s how fascism works, folks. Not mysterious. We’ve a had a century’s worth of examples to make this clear.
Some really bright, erudite, serious-minded people need to get the memo, and adjust their orientation to reality, because it’s going to fall on them whether they acknowledge that reality or not.
But that century’s worth of examples didn’t make political philosophy irrelevant then—fascist countries are not remote islands; even if the US became a fascist country, the rest of the world would still engage in political discourse. We might want to jettison a lot of mainstream theorizing if it no longer serves its purpose. But dissent goes on, philosophy changes. Critical theory thrived on the back of fascism. Non-ideal theory will thrive on the remains of ideal-theory liberalism. Anarchism may get a revival. Who knows.
Amen to anarchism getting a revival.
Rawls’s ‘A Theory of Justice’ was written when – at least in the privileged West – the battle against fascism and the battles for democracy, free speech and constitutional government had (seemingly) been fought and won. It was published towards the end of Les Trente Glorieuses when capitalism softened by social democracy appeared to be living up to its advertising. It thus reflects a certain smugness. The problem was not to argue for liberalism or democracy or for free speech against those who might reject it but to construct a theoretical basis for a liberal and social-democratic consensus. It is notable, for example, that the words ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ do not appear in the index to ‘A Theory of Justice’ nor is there any mention of Stalin, Hitler, Lenin or Mussolini. (The problem that actual societies were a lot less just than Rawls seemed suppose was effectively brushed under the carpet. See Charles Mill’s hilarious but biting critique at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVhLoTeR-lQ) Now it seems that some of these battles may have to be refought. Thus the writings of those for whom fascism was a real live issue and democracy, free speech etc not yet faits accomplis are likely to become more salient. Hence thinkers like Popper, Berlin, Russell, Arendt and Orwell are likely to enjoy a revival. (So too, perhaps some of the writers of the Frankfurt School odious as they are in many respects.) Indeed, since the American constitutional order seems be under threat, those who argued for its principles long long ago such as Jefferson, Madison and even John Locke are likely to become lot more relevant. (“What do you do when the chief executive weaponises the justice system to punish his opponents? A live issue for Locke as perhaps for present-day Americans.) More generally the separation of powers and its utility as a precaution against tyranny is another supposedly dormant issue that is now very much on the agenda. The slogan that it is better to be governed by laws than by men becomes problematic when the men set to administer the laws have no respect for the laws themselves or the legal order they have sworn to uphold – another set of dormant issues that are likely to revive. The writings of early feminists – as opposed to fancy third or fourth wave feminists– will again become relevant because the basic rights of women are now under threat in America. Then there are novel issues that have come to the fore since Rawls’s day, for example coming to terms with neo-liberalism, which in my opinion bears a large share of responsibility of the mess we are in, and the ‘death of a thousand concessions’ problem for social democracy which has made it so often an ineffective foe or even and an active accomplice to neo-liberalism. Then there is the further problem of what to do when the public sphere becomes corrupted by shameless lies so that nothing is but what is not. Collective responsibility is another big issue that is likely to come to the fore, especially with respect to the most important problem facing the world, namely that of climate change. To plug my own speciality, there is the problem of how to combat false conspiracy theories given that many conspiracy theories are true and that they cannot be dismissed en bloc. I could go on and on. There will be plenty of dormant topics that are likely to revive and plenty of long-dead thinkers who will be restored to relevance, and plenty of novel issues relatively neglected in the Rawlsian tradition that will rise to prominence. Political philosophy (if it is not actually suppressed) will be a lot more interesting than it was under Rawls aegis, but the reason for this is not a happy one – the reason is that we are cursed with living in interesting times.
I don’t remember Rawls mentioning any political leaders in AToJ, so I don’t know what to make of the observation that he doesn’t mention Stalin or Hitler when he also doesn’t mention, say, FDR or Churchill. (Rawls served in the Pacific theater in World War 2. Do we really think he regarded his experiences there as irrelevant to his thinking about justice?)
He also doesn’t mention civil rights leaders in his chapter on civil disobedience. I suspect he trusted his audience to know the relevant facts. Anyone reading AToJ in 1971 wouldn’t have to be reminded of fascists, totalitarians, or the spectrum of civil disobedience running from lunch counter sit-ins to the burning of ROTC buildings. So I don’t get the argument from Rawls’s non-mentionings.
I actually excised from my draft a parenthesis in which I mention Rawls’s war service and said that I did not really blame him for writing a book designed articulate the ideals of the kind of society that he had fought for. What’s the point of helping to defeat fascism if you can’t sit back and enjoy the fruits of victory? And, of course, one of these fruits is the ability to articulate liberal and social democratic principles without worrying too much about the threats to them. Rawls could afford to take high and relatively antiseptic line because for him the big battles –battles in which he himself had risked his life – had been fought and won. He was, so to speak, entitled to his smugness. For him the threat of tyranny was no longer an issue (there is no entry under tyranny in the index) . But it is an issue for us (and that includes people such as myself who are not citizens of the United States). The philosopher of complacent victory is likely to seem a lot less relevant in an era in which the battle for democracy and for basic liberal principles needs to be refought.
Dear Lord I stink as a proof-reader, especially of my own posts. Here it is again, hopefully minus the typos.
I actually excised from my draft a parenthesis in which I mention Rawls’s war service and said that I did not really blame him for writing a book designed to articulate the ideals of the kind of society that he had fought for. What’s the point of helping to defeat fascism if you can’t sit back and enjoy the fruits of victory? And, of course, one of these fruits is the ability to articulate liberal and social democratic principles without worrying too much about the threats to them. Rawls could afford to take a high and relatively antiseptic line because for him the big battles –battles in which he himself had risked his life – had been fought and won. He was, so to speak, entitled to his smugness. For him the threat of tyranny was no longer an issue (there is no entry under tyranny in the index) . But it is an issue for us (and that includes people such as myself who are not citizens of the United States). The philosopher of complacent victory is likely to seem a lot less relevant in an era in which the battles for democracy and for basic liberal principles need to be refought.
You know what some might say: “We don’t go back to pre-Rawlsian texts really. If you want something like that older stuff on the curriculum, you produce a version which meets contemporary standards of clarity and rigour and interacts with the Rawlsian literature. E.g. Nozick’s nightwatchman state (rather than Locke), G.A. Cohen’s analytical Marxism (rather than Marx), Sandel’s communitarianism, Raz’s liberal perfectionism (rather than T.H. Green).”
In answer to ‘What some might say’ my reply would be that ‘the older stuff’ produced by the mighty dead is sometimes (though ,of course, not always) a lot more relevant to current concerns than the work of their heirs, representatives and commentators. So to take two of your examples, Cohen does not have a lot to say about Napoleon III (whose name does not occur in the index to Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence) but Marx’s ’18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, analysing the preconditions for Bonaparte’s coup, has been catapulted into contemporary relevance by the advent of Trump. Locke’s Two Treatises was not composed as an abstract enterprise designed to justify the wholly impracticable ideal of the night watchmen state (an ideal that has served as an ideological cloak for the depredations of neoliberalism) but to justify a possible rebellion against the (supposedly tyrannical) government of Charles II. (The words ‘Tyrant’ and ‘Tyranny’ do not occur in the index of Anarchy,State and Utopia, though these are terms that are extensively discussed by Locke). Locke was actually an advocate for a set of institutions (to some extent embodied in the US constitution) that in his view would minimise the chances of tyranny. The real possibility that these institutions might fail makes Locke, as opposed to Nozick, highly pertinent to the current crisis.. ‘What went wrong?’ is is now a big issue to which Locke’s writings are highly relevant. Moreover the things that Charles II’s government was doing and to which Locke was opposed are very similar to the things threatened by Trump, eg. firing dissident academics (such as Locke himself) and using the judicial system to punish critics and opponents (which is why Locke himself was a political refugee). (Guardian Headline: Public officials targeted by Trump say they’ are preparing for extreme scenarios, including possibility of being arrested) Locke thought that these policies might justify armed rebellion. Was he right? If not, what kind of resistance, might be justified? Again, using Locke to help analyse these issues looks like a sensible strategy. Finally I would add (having recently been sifting through the Second Treatise with a fine tooth-comb) that I don’t think Locke is lacking in analytical rigour though many of his key arguments rely on theistic premises that are unacceptable to an atheist such as myself.
I suspect , Dr Edward that you are playing devil’s advocate in your post. But the devils of dogmatic modernity don’t have a case that deserves much of an answer. Political philosophy tends to be addressed to a range of issues some of which may become dormant for longer or shorter periods of time. When these issues revive philosophy (and philosophers) that had seemed passé may suddenly become salient and questions that had seemed absorbing can sometimes be shelved. Recent events suggest the need for a re-prioritisation of the issues and sometimes at least it is will be the work of philosophers of the past that gets a higher priority.
This, exactly. I think the sort of people who would exercise that sort of historical blindness – the ones who see nothing but contemporary standards of clarity and rigour, as if there were no other standards – are exactly the ones at whom Schliesser’s critique is most targeted. Their paradigm does not look to be holding up well. I think Justin is right that liberalish philosophies will continue to survive and even thrive – but they’ll need to do so from an approach that considers and rebuts illiberal alternatives in far more detail.
“It thus reflects a certain smugness.”
Yet, while Rawls became seen by many as the key philosophical defender of social democracy and/or American liberalism, he doesn’t endorse capitalism or socialism in A Theory of Justice, apparently regarding either as compatible (in principle) with his principles of justice. This was reflective of wider US academia and to a lesser extent Western society in general in the 1960s and 1970s, where both Soviet-style socialism (ideally with a lot more democracy) and capitalism of various sorts were both seen by most people as sustainable, largely efficient, and probably going to stick around for quite some time.
I would guess, having not been around at the time, Rawls became seen as more of a pro-capitalist philosopher because the majority of critiques came from the left, such as by Kai Nielsen, because that was where most political philosophers were in the 1970s (and since). Nozick stood out due to the peculiarity of his views in that context, rather than the popularity of them.
Am I the only one who doesn’t understand the word “liberalishism”? Is the thought that it is not really liberal, but liberal-ish, with -ism attached?
I don’t see why liberalism wouldn’t thrive in adverse conditions. It did before, it could do it again. Would it have to change? Probably. But it would still remain faithful to its central doctrines.
Besides, in dark times, people often turn inward, to do what they like and believe in privately. That is I suppose what will happen to a lot of philosophy (not only political) depending of course on the level of oppression. (Here it is important that today’s autocrats like to keep a semblance of democracy and the old liberal order, see Orbán’s Hungary). So what might happen is that there will be less liberal philosophizing in the public sphere and more at home.
The way I see it, it is not the regime change that is the threat here but late capitalism’s conditions combined with the climate crisis. These will (relatively) soon lead to social collapse in which case all this discussion about liberalism will indeed become obsolete.
“For, such work presupposes, as a quiet enabling condition, relatively corruption-free bureaucracies and relatively impartial rule of law in which public opinion formation is shaped by social activists, interest groups, and experts in a free press and political parties and in which ‘policy’ is primarily not performative nor aims to divide opposing coalitions but aims to solve social ‘problems.’”
Let’s call this The Presupposition.
I will just address distributive justice, a central topic in political philosophy.
First, note that no major theory of distributive justice explicitly endorses something like The Presupposition. Utilitarians, prioritarians, sufficientarians, luck egalitarians and libertarians generally describe fundamental principles that are not reliant on thick empirical commitments, let alone this very temporally and institutionally specific one. Even Rawls, who is more empirically committed, is overtly describing an ideal theory not necessarily applicable to the world as it happens to be at any particular time. A change in circumstances at odds with The Presupposition would have no bearing on the content of these theories or the arguments given for them.
So the “quiet enabling condition” is really a condition for popularity. These theories will remain equally well justified – or unjustified (they can’t all be right) – but without the condition in place, they will be less popular. This is confirmed here: “By ‘out of date,’ I mean that people literally will stop reading and engaging with it.” A couple of comments.
1) Who cares? If you’re here for mass appeal, you’re in the wrong business.
2) Do people really care less about distributive justice when it’s harder to do something about it? That seems to be the basic claim – policy no longer aims to solve problems, ergo, people aren’t interested in the solutions. Yet it seems, if anything, that the opposite is the case. Look at the large literatures on the ethics of global poverty and climate change, which are matched with large literatures on why these are such intractable problems. There have never been “relatively corruption-free bureaucracies and relatively impartial rule of law” operating globally, but that hasn’t stopped the theorizing. Their very absence might even be taken as the “quiet enabling condition” for the great philosophical interest in these topics – if global governance were more justice-orientated, there would be less injustice to theorize about. A reduction in justice-orientated domestic policy may come with the consolation of being similarly propitious for political philosophy.
“If you’re here for mass appeal, you’re in the wrong business.” Perhaps! But if political philosophy research in a certain country is taxpayer funded and a vote suggests a majority who reject the starting assumptions of this research (e.g. the priority of justice, the equality of persons), there is a puzzle over why the taxpayer should fund this kind of research. (I am sympathetic to the boring Rawls-and-critics system, but I am just saying…)
Hi Terence!
Maybe because the majority could be wrong? Or they could be right, but having their view challenged saves it from becoming dead dogma (Mill, On Liberty).
You might still wonder why the challenge should be coming from publicly-funded academics specifically. Couldn’t laypeople do it for free? I suppose the challenge tends to be in a stronger (=more likely to be right or at least dead-dogma preventing) form where it is presented by recognized subject experts. Typically these are academics.
A bit of a tangent, but does anyone have some recommendations for good, recent (2010 or later), general audience books by political philosophers?
I’m not sure whether you’re asking for an introduction to the topic or not. But if you are, Adam Swift’s ‘Political Philosophy: A Beginners’ Guide for Students and Politicians’ is exceptional. Admittedly I read it before 2010, but the 4th Edition was published in 2019 and I can’t imagine it got any worse!
You might like Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil.
I won’t apply evaluative labels to this book because I haven’t read it, but Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit (2020) counts as a recent general-audience book by a political philosopher. Perhaps another example is Chandler’s Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society (2023 [UK ed.], 2024 [U.S. ed.]).
P.s. I’m ignoring here the disciplinary lines between political theorists and political philosophers.
cfp: “people contain multitudes but some of them are friends and others are enemies (usually the ‘ethic’ ones), a conference celebrating the political philosophy of carl schmitt”
I had a very good and intensive graduate seminar on Rawls in the 2000’s, and it seemed clear to me that the United States at that time was nowhere near meeting Rawls’ conditions for a minimally decent society, and nor could it be without at least one full-blown political revolution. I suppose now it’s at least two revolutions away from minimal decency. The point being, Rawls’ bare moral minimum was already unreachabe by continuous incremental progress when he wrote ToJ.
Arguably, he agreed and that is one of the reasons that he wrote it. Or so one of his students suggested to me.
I disagree with Schliesser’s predictions (and with Rushlau’s). There is a real risk of authoritarianism taking hold in the United States, but it is not a done deal. The truth is that we do not know what is going to happen. What will happen depends on what many people (millions of people, not just “leaders”) decide to do in the coming months and years.
There is a quotation from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny that has been making the rounds:
To anyone who believes that authoritarianism in the U.S. is inevitable, and who has decided to try to protect themselves by obeying in advance: you are part of the problem.
I also disagree with Schliesser’s assessment of liberal political philosophy and its relevance today. Most serious political philosophy invites us to imagine possible worlds that are not nearby. We do not study or teach Plato’s Republic or Rousseau’s On the Social Contract in the hope of finding policy proposals that are politically viable in the short term. The value of studying Plato and Rousseau lies elsewhere. The same is true of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which presents an ideal that was nearly as far from political reality in 1971 as it is today.
Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chain.
We are often complict in our own oppression.
There’s a risk of thinking that the rise of Trump is more permanent than it is. Trump’s last presidency was immediately followed by arguably the most liberal or indeed Rawlsian administration in my lifetime, and also the most legislatively effective one. Trump didn’t win by much this time, even though the political landscape was tilted in his favor, and it’s not at all certain that he’ll be able to prevent us from throwing him and his people out in 2026 and 2028.
It may be that what we face going forward is wider pendulum swings due to polarization, rather than a sustained period of fascist or authoritarian rule.
Non-ideal theorists have done a great job thinking about the responsibilities of individuals in unjust conditions, and in thinking about the nature of structural injustice and oppression, but maybe less so in thinking about how to engage with power when, over any 5-year period, it can be expected to swing somewhat radically to and fro at least once if not twice.
I suppose the idea is that Trump and co have learnt from their mistakes, and not in a good way. So, from our point of view, the old Talleyrand saying applies: they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. You can give your pocket autocrat one chance, you never give them two chances.
I don’t disagree with the general principle that political philosophy should engage with real-world politics, but I do wonder about three things.
First, there’s a question about how to think about the US vs the rest-of-the-world. The discussion makes it seem as if Trump’s election necessitates a change of course, but that’s weird, because, even had he lost, there are significant, similar challenges across Europe (Meloni, le Pen, the AfD), and globally (most notably Modi). It seems odd to think that all political philosophy should be so sensitive to what happens in one country; arguably, issues around populism etc ought to have been top of the agenda regardless of what happened in the US. (I’ve found that people tend to respond to this concern by saying the US is a superpower. Sure. But if that’s our criterion for what is worth discussing, we should be spending a lot more time discussing the “Beijing consensus”).
Second, even if we focus on the US, there seems to be some background assumption that had a few thousand peoples in a few swing states voted differently, then the State would still demand technocratic input on the nature of equality. Is that really right? It seems rather implausible. If it is true, isn’t that a really interesting question itself – how can a rich, major country have created a system which is so sensitive to the preferences of a few thousand people?
Third, and here’s where people tend to go crazy, I worry that it is a mistake to think about the relationship between these political events and philosophy in specifically partisan terms. Here’s a weird example: reading up on RFK Jr this weekend, I was struck by the fact that half of his bugbears are extremely familiar from the literature on bioethics and philosophy of medicine: in those debates, loads of people think that profit-driven pharma companies are diverting attention away from structural determinants of health outcomes, such as awful diets. Of course, lots of his other obsessions are super-weird. Still, it’s notable that a pretty fundamental shift onto diet, rather than pharmaceuticals, is exactly the sort of thing many philosophers have called for. For a similar sort of story, it’s worth noting just how many philosophers think that questions of economic justice are about far more than aggregate measures like GNP, but who act surprised by political movements which challenge the notion that “the economy is booming”. I’m certainly NOT saying that I think there’s something to be said in favour of Kennedy’s public health policies or Trump’s economic policies; I think they will be disastrous, all things considered. I am saying that it is a mistake to think that a Harris administration would have been taking its cues from “Free and Equal”, because we have excellent evidence that the Democrats have been pretty relaxed about fundamental problems with the basic structure.
On the “Beijing consensus”, I do cover Deng Xiaoping theory with my students, as well as a bit of Maoism, when teaching political philosophy. Since Marxism should be covered anyway, students have a lot of the basic concepts by the time I reach Deng, while covering Deng’s ideas as such gives them a more precise grasp on Chinese policy than the vague and largely unhelpful “Is China capitalist or socialist?” debates that they might have encountered so far in their lives.
(I know there have been several new state philosophies since Deng, but these are mainly changes of emphasis within a space of positions mapped out by Deng and his fellow post-1978 leaders.)
I don’t think the claim is that political philosophy should be so sensitive to what happens in one country; if it were, that would be silly. Rather, I think the claim is precisely the opposite: that political philosophy will likely need to change precisely because of the changes in so many countries, from Thailand to Hungary. Until those month, it was possible for Americans to ignore those changes and wish they’d go away. Now, even the hegemon needs to pay attention to them.
That reading makes sense, thank you, but it seems to raise a (more complicated) version of my second question: what in the world is wrong with political philosophy that it requires a few thousand voters in some states to make it aware of the major global political issues of the day?
I think the claim that Trump’s success has made political philosophy obsolete is very odd. I mean, why hadn’t Putin’s success, or Orl
…ban, or Putin? There is so much political phiIosophy that is precisely about the risings of fascism.
I have to admit that an article of that type really makes me want to simply respond “Rawls, Shmawls.”
Even if Schliesser were right and much of recent political philosophy ‘went out of date this week‘, so what? It’s a small slice in the history of philosophy. We still have Machiavelli who is most apt right now (and Marxism, and Isaiah Berlin).