David Hume and contemporary realism in political theory

Below is the abstract and list of references of my MA thesis in political science. The full article can be downloaded here.

Abstract

Proponents of the recent movement of realism in political theory have expressed dissatisfaction with the typically Kantian and ideal theoretical assumptions that guide much political and normative theorizing. In this paper it is proposed that these realist theorists could find support for their critique of the Kantian legacy, as well as building blocks for a realist alternative, by drawing on the moral and political thought of David Hume. The paper constitutes a reading of Hume’s writings with the contemporary realist critique in mind. The result highlights four themes in Hume’s thought: (1) The empirically informed approach to normative reasoning. (2) An emphasis on that political theorizing must be conducted on the basis of a realistic political psychology. (3) The critique of social contract doctrines, a critique that is directed at idealistic and rationalistic versions of liberalism. (4) Hume’s account of human sociality and the origins of political authority. Lastly, it is suggested that the fact that Hume combines realism with liberalism makes him of additional interest to the many realists who are seeking to correct rather than reject liberal political theory and who are thus wary of finding themselves too close to Machiavelli and Hobbes, the usual realist predecessors.

Key words: realism, moralism, ideal theory, legitimacy, normativity

Length: 19 200 words

References:

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Frazer, Michael L. (2010), The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press).

Fukuyama, Francis (2011), The Origins of Political Order (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Galston, William A. (2004), ‘On the Rapproachment between Political Philosophy and Empirical Inquiry: A Comment on Rogers Smith’, in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson (eds.), The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).

Galston, William A. (2009), ‘Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy: Isaiah Berlin’s Heterodox Liberalism’, Review of Politics, 71 (1), 85-99.

Galston, William A. (2010), ‘Realism in Political Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (4), 385-411.

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Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Pocock, J. G. A. (2009), Political Thought and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Rawls, John (2005), A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press Harvard University Press).

Rawls, John (2007), Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

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Sabl, Andrew (2002), ‘When Bad Things Happen from Good People (and Vice-Versa): Hume’s Political Ethics of Revolution’, Polity, 35 (1), 73-92.

Sabl, Andrew (2009), ‘The Last Artificial Virtue. Hume on Toleration and Its Lessons’, Political Theory, 37 (4), 511-38.

Sabl, Andrew (2011), ‘History and Reality: Idealist Pathologies and ‘Harvard School’ Remedies’, in Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (eds.), Political Philosophy versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 151-76.

Sleat, Matt (2007), ‘Making Sense of our Political Lives – On the Political Thought of Bernard Williams’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 10 (3), 389-98.

Sleat, Matt (2010), ‘Bernard Williams and the Possibility of a Realist Political Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (4), 485-503.

Sleat, Matt (2011), ‘Liberal Realism: A Liberal Response to the Realist Critique’, The Review of Politics, 73 (03), 469-96.

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Williams, Bernard (2005), In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

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Tony Judt om Raymond Aron

In Tony Judts bok The Burden of Responsibility kan man finna några passager som kärnfullt beskriver Raymond Aron och det slags liberalism som han var närmast ensam om att torgföra i det samtida radikala Frankrike.

Ever since his student years in Germany, Aron was absorbed with, perhaps even obsessed by, the fragility of liberal polities and the threat of anarchy and despotism. This marked his writings in away that nothing about his comfortable childhood and youth could have predicted, and it sets him apart from almost every other French intellectual of his generation. [...]

The link in Aron’s thought between political stability, civil order, and public liberties is clear – and as with Tocqueville, it was in essence a product of experience and observation rather than theory. This helps us understand his way of thinking about liberty in general, and the totalitarian threat to it. [...]

[It] was not enough to lay bare the unpalatable facts about totalitarianism. There were some uncomfortable truths about free societies, too, that intellectuals were equally disposed to ignore. For Aron’s generation in the twenties and thirties, the widespread appeal of the writings of the philosopher Alain (Emile Chartier) had lain in his treatment of all political authority as incipiently, potentially tyrannical. [...] But Aron reasoned that it is absurd to propose that the sole task of the theorist of freedom in a free society lies in opposing and restricting authority wherever it may touch him. For resisting and denying the moderate claims and capacities of government in a free society is precisely the way to clear the path for the immoderate variety (Weimar, again). The lesson of totalitarianism, in short, was the importance of order and authority under law – not as a compromise with freedom, nor as the condition of higher freedoms to come; but simply as the best way to protect those already secured.

Tony Judt (1998), The Burden of Responsibility. Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), s. 149-153.

Isaiah Berlin and the Liberal Dilemma of Education

Below is the introduction to my paper ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Liberal Dilemma of Education’ (unpublished).

* * * *

Liberal-democratic societies are often faced with a dilemma regarding educational policy. While inclined to proclaim individual autonomy and critical thinking to be vital educational aims in its public schools, and as necessary conditions for running private schools, liberal democracies often incorporate cultural or religious minorities that will feel threatened by such aims. These groups might claim that such an education threaten the values, perhaps even survival, of their community. Hence they might demand that, in the name of tolerance and diversity, exemptions must by made for their children from certain parts of the curriculum: the teaching of evolution theory, for instance, or of education in sexual matters. Some groups might demand separate schooling of the children of their community: a withdrawal from the wider society, the mixing with which they see as at odds with their fundamental values or deep religious convictions.

How should liberals respond to groups or parents making demands such as these? The basic liberal commitment is to let people live their lives as they themselves see fit. Hence, the explicit will of some group of individuals to live in a certain way cannot easily be dismissed. Yet, the same commitment make liberals favour an education that give children the capacity for critical thinking, an ability to deliberate on normative issues and on one’s own identity and life plan; in short, an education that aim at individual autonomy and self-direction. But these very ambitions and ideals, the dissenting group now claim, constrain a legitimate way of life: the non-autonomous life of deep moral convictions and group belonging.

The present paper will approach this liberal dilemma of education by investigating the political thought of Isaiah Berlin. Being one of the foremost liberal thinkers of the twentieth century, one may hope to find in his writings some valuable insight pertaining to the dilemma at hand. Not least since Berlin was a liberal unusually alive to the tension between individual liberty and the human need for belonging, and his political thought in general is permeated by the insight of the necessity of clashes and conflict between genuine human goods and ways of life.

Since William Galston’s influential paper ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism’ (1995) debates on this kind of issues are often framed in terms of a tension between two branches of liberalism; branches that stem, as it were, from different historical roots. On the one hand, we have a type of liberalism that finds its roots in the Reformation, the religious wars, and consequently focus on toleration and peaceful co-existence of dissenting groups and religious communities. This toleration-liberalism,[1] which has John Locke as its most prominent figure, is always on alert against the power of the state, rejecting the claims for state intervention however benevolent its ambitions may be. On the other hand we have the kind of liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment concern for the autonomy of the individual, in the face of not only the state but also of oppressive cultural practices, ignorance and clerical authority. This autonomy-liberalism finds it inspiration in John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant.

When it comes to schooling these variants inevitably clash. Galston’s paper was in fact prompted by considerations on educational policy, namely on the famous case of Wisconsin v. Yoder. Galston supported the verdict in favour of the Amish family Yoder to withdraw their children from public education, thus agreeing with the court’s ruling that the mandatory school attendance law constituted a violation of the Yoder parents’ religious freedom. According to Galston, a liberal state must, in order to protect diversity, allow “wide parental rights” and have a “non-autonomy-based system of public education, supplemented by private education” (Galston 1995: 529). From the view of Reformation liberalism, to give the final authority over education to the state is certainly illiberal, a measure doomed to disrupt the civil peace. As the family, on this Lockean view, “function as the last, best obstacle to the complete politicization of life,” parental control over education must be extensive (Ruderman and Godwin 2000: 527). And hence, communal or religious groups have the right to educate its young members according to the values they cherish, without being subjected to restrictions and conditions of state-sponsored liberal virtues.

But is it not — the Enlightenment liberal might reply — the obligation of society to intervene on behalf of the weak as against the strong? And if so, what if the weak are weak simply because they are not yet adults? Should then not the process of them becoming so be guaranteed against the strong, against the-already-adults, as it were, in whose interest it may be to inculcate them into obedience, to believing certain religious dogmas about the sinfulness of this or that, or into unduly deference to authoritarian community leaders, into a narrow identity of clan or tribe, or acceptance of confined and oppressive gender roles? This line of thought can be said to have prevailed in the almost equally famous case of Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education. Here the court ruled in favour of the authorities, against the parents’ complaint and demand for exemption for their children from a set of textbooks used in their children’s school. The Mozert parents claimed that the books were offensive to their religious beliefs and community by depicting girls and boys in gender roles at odds with their traditional values, by teaching the theory of evolution, and by implying the notion that salvation was possible for believers of different faiths.

Even though the rulings of Mozert and Yoder go in opposite directions, liberals have applauded both. This is revealing, notes Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg, editors of the book Citizenship Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies, of the continued battle between the Reformation and the Enlightenment: “Public education in virtually every Western country is in the cross hairs of this internal conflict within liberalism” (McDonough and Feinberg 2003: 8). There are difficult cases where the two kinds of liberalism clash, and the “distinctions, exceptions, and priorities that are needed to anticipate and resolve these cases are in the process of being created” (2003: 8).

This paper constitute a reading of Berlin’s writings on liberty[2] with this conflict in mind. Is it possible to find in Berlin a case for a certain set of “priorities”? I will attempt to answer this question by discussing the Yoder case. This is a well-discussed and contested case, and so could constitute a good background for a consideration of Berlin’s thoughts on education. In explaining the liberal dilemma in the Yoder case I will present William Galston’s arguments for his stance. And Galston will continue to be relevant throughout the essay, as presenting a view that I will contrast and compare Berlin to. My presentation of Galston is primarily based on his (1995) article, which discussed Yoder as the background for explaining his version of liberalism. But since then he has come to support his version of liberalism by invoking Isaiah Berlin’s notion value pluralism (2002, 2005). Though these later books will mostly be outside the scope of my paper, this fact of course makes Galston of additional interest as theorist to compare Berlin with.

There are two major passages of Berlin that my discussion will focus on. The first is expressing a very marked emphasis on the children and their future as free individuals. The second passage is in the same vein, though it also contains an interesting viewpoint on education in general, emphasizing that to educate mean by necessity to force and to ‘mould’ the young. On what basis can such a phenomenon be justified at all? Here I will make the suggestion that autonomy, viewed as a species of positive liberty, must be a legitimate condition for education. I will argue against Neil Burtonwood, a theorist who has written plenty on Berlin and education, who suggests that Berlin is bound to a position much closer to that of Galston. The point I wish to make here is that schools are institutions of a special character, with implications for how we adjudicate between autonomy and other values. Taken together, the picture that emerges from these passages is that Berlin is committed to educational ideals of making children capable of free choice and self-direction.

The structure of the essay is the following. Section 2 introduces the dilemma posed by the Yoder case, as well as the theoretical reasoning used by Galston to support the verdict. Section 3 briefly covers the key concepts in Berlin’s thought as they are expressed in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Section 4 then turn to Berlin’s explicit views on education, and here I will venture to draw out the implications of these. The concluding section 5 will briefly summarize the main points of the preceding arguments, and indicate where Berlin stand in relation to the divide between Reformation and Enlightenment ideals in these educational issues.

* * * *

---

[1] Galston calls it ’diversity liberalism’, but toleration-liberalism has become the more established term.

[2] The volume Liberty (2002) comprise the original four essays on liberty together with two other longer essays and a number of shorter texts.

References:

• Barry, Brian (2001), Culture and Equality (Cambridge: Polity Press).
• Berlin, Isaiah (2001), The Power of Ideas (London: Pimlico).
• Berlin, Isaiah (2002), Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Berlin, Isaiah (2004), ’Democracy, Communism and the Individual’, (The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library).
• Berlin, Isaiah (2006), Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Brighouse, Harry (2006), On Education (London & New York: Routledge).
• Burtonwood, Neil (2002), ’Must Liberal Support for Separate Schools Be Subject to a Condition of Individual Autonomy?’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 269–284.
• Burtonwood, Neil (2003), ’Isaiah Berlin, Diversity Liberalism, and Education’, Educational Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 323–331.
• Burtonwood, Neil (2006), Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism and Schools (London & New York: Routledge).
• Callan, Eamonn (2006), ’Galston’s Dilemmas and Wisconsin v. Yoder’, Theory and Research in Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 261–273.
• Cherniss, Joshua L. (2007), ’Berlin’s Early Political Thought’, i Crowder & Hardy (2007).
• Crowder, George (2004), Isaiah Berlin (Cambridge: Polity Press).
• Crowder, George (2007a), ’Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism’, Political Theory, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 121–146.
• Crowder, George (2007b), ’Value Pluralism and Liberalism: Berlin and Beyond’, i Crowder & Hardy 2007.
• Crowder, George & Henry Hardy (eds) (2007), The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books).
• Feinberg, Joel (1992), Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Galston, William (1995), ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism’, Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 3, pp. 516–534.
• Galston, William (2002), Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
• Galston, William (2005), The Practise of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
• Lilla, Mark, Ronald Dworkin and Robert B. Silvers (eds) (2001) The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review of Books).
• McDonough, Kevin, and Walter Feinberg (eds) (2003), Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Miller, David (ed) (2006), The Liberty Reader (Edinburgh: Paradigm Publishers).
• Müller, Jan-Werner (2008), ’Fear and Freedom: On ’Cold War Liberalism’’, European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 45–64.
• Ruderman, Richard, and Kenneth Godwin (2000), ’Liberalism and Parental Control of Education’, The Review of Politics, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 503–529.
• Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).

Avslutningen på ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ och ett brev om liberalismen

Här kommer ett citat ur ett brev Isaiah Berlin skrev den 30 december 1952.

I think that what I am pleading for is really what used to be called Liberalism, i.e. a society in which the largest number of persons are allowed to pursue the largest number of ends as freely as possible, in which these ends are themselves criticised as little as possible and the fervour with which such ends are held is not required to be bolsterad up by some bogus rational och supernatural argument to prove the universal validity of the end.

Everyone does, in fact, have purposes and values for which they live and for which they are occasionally prepared to die. In times of crises, when a large number of people appear to be living and dying for ends which we find repellent, it is desirable to make explicit what it is that we are prepared to fight for [...].

Ends are not demonstrable, they just are held and in a healthy society there are great many of them, occasionally colliding with each other, and this needs a machinery of conciliation etc. [. . .]

What I believe, I think, is all that J.S. Mill said in his essay on liberty, and the Russian revolutionary, Herzen, in a work called From the Other Shore, a society in which liberty is more important even than happiness, people are forced to choose, though they do not necessarily like it, people do not accept supernatural or scientific sanctions for their ultimate ends but are content with the fact that they are ultimate for them individually (which is all that is ever true).

Och här kommer de avslutande orden ur föreläsningen ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958).

It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed.

Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian’. [Schumpeter] To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practise is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

Berlin, Isaiah (2002), Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press), s. 217.

Berlin, Isaiah, Enlightening. Letters 1946—1960, Chatto & Windus, London, 2009, s. 350–1.

William Galston’s liberalism

Kort sammanfattning av Galstons liberalism.

William Galston’s liberalism is built on two basic concepts: “expressive liberty” and “political pluralism”. In the “diversity state” which William Galston sketches as an ideal, individuals have expressive liberty, which basically is “a robust though rebuttable presumption in favour of individuals and groups leading their lives as they see fit” (2002, 3). More specifically, it is defined as:

[The] absence of constraints, imposed by some individuals on others, that make it impossible (or significantly more difficult) for the affected individuals to live their lives in ways that express their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning or value to life. (2002, 28)

What does this entail? One illuminating example is Galston’s stance on the case of Ohio Civil Rights Commission v. Dayton Christian Scools, Inc. The case involved a private fundamentalist school that decided not to renew the contract of a female teacher due to its religious views on gender roles, views that included the belief that mothers with small children should not work outside their homes. Galston supported the faith school and argued that to force it to rehire the teacher would hinder the religious community (that send their children to this school) to exercise its religious views in practise (1995, 532). To decide otherwise would be an infringement on expressive liberty, as this is meant to protect “the opportunity to enjoy a fit between inner and outer, belief and practise” (2002, 28). Expressive liberty thus carries over into an emphasis on freedom of association; it implies a presumption against “external interference with individual and group endeavors” (2002, 3). In the case of Dayton, this means that the sexual discrimination committed by the school does not warrant intervention by the state (to force it to rehire and compensate the woman). There must be limits on “the polity’s ability to enforce even core public commitments on subcommunities when these principles clash with religious convictions” (1995, 532).

Still, the presumption for non-intervention is “rebuttable”. Galston enumerates four kinds of reasons that may licence liberal public institutions to restrict the activities of individuals and groups:

[F]irst, to reduce coordination problems and conflict among diverse legitimate activities and to adjudicate such conflict when it cannot be avoided; second, to prevent and when necessary punish transgressions individuals may commit against one another; third, to guard the boundary separating legitimate from illegitimate variations among ways of life; and finally, to secure the conditions — including cultural and civic conditions — needed to sustain public institutions over time (2002, 3).

This might be seen as a fairly conventional list; what makes for Galston’s diversity-state is rather his conception of where the boundaries are to be drawn regarding each of these conditions. Importantly, the boundaries are to be drawn in such a way that there exist ”social space” even for illiberal groups to live as they please. Looking at the conditions above this involves both the third condition, a wide scope of the range of legitimate ways of life; and the second, a narrow conception of what is to count as “transgressions” between people. Specifically, Galston does not in general count as a transgression those illiberal practices between individuals within such groups.

This idea of social space brings us to the second key concept in Galston’s thought: political pluralism. This is the recognition of that social life comprises of multiple sources of moral authority; and that none of them — individuals, civil associations, religious communities, the state — ought to be dominant in all spheres of life and on all occasions (2005, 1-2) Liberal public institutions should not be “plenipotentiary”: there exist no carte blanche for intervention in the internal life of groups or the workings of all the intermediate bodies and associations that make up civil society.

Expressive liberty and political pluralism together provide a case for giving great priority to freedom of association whenever this clashes with other values. Galston’s liberalism thus implies a “systematic deference to associational claims”. The state “bears a burden of proof whenever it seeks to intervene” (2002, 9).

Not to take this burden of proof seriously, and thus regard the state as plenipotentiary, Galston in his latest book calls “civic totalism” (2005, 24–28). Totalism is the rejection of political pluralism: it is the demand that the liberal principles guiding the political institutions must also “ramify through the rest of its citizens’ lives” (2005, 28). Hence the intermediate associations and communities in between the individual citizen and the state — in short, civil society — must be organized along these principles. Galston, however, rejects this notion that “the inner structure and principles of every sphere must mirror those of basic political of basic political institutions” (2005, 3). One recurrent example is that religious communities may fill its positions of authority along gender-based norms. While such norms would be forbidden in public and business life, the state must not interfere with such communities. The public principle (in this case gender-equality) might be both liberal in content and democratically chosen, and yet liberal-democratic societies should not impose it.

“We often use the phrase “liberal democracy,” but we don’t always think about it very carefully. The noun points to a particular structure of politics in which decisions are made, directly or indirectly, by the people as a whole, and more broadly, to an understanding of politics in which all legitimate power flows from the people. The adjective points to a particular understanding of the scope of politics, in which the domain of legitimate political decision-making is seen as inherently limited (2005, 1).

In reminding about this notion of the limited scope of politics, Galston emphasise that liberalism’s principal value is that of toleration. A notion that, “rightly understood”, Galston says, “means the principled refusal to use coercive state power to impose one’s views on others” (2005, 4).

These are the general features of Galston’s liberalism. To support them theoretically he now invokes the notion of value pluralism. This is “the account of the moral world offered by Isaiah Berlin” (2002, 4). As Galston notes, the closing pages of Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in which Berlin propounded the idea of value pluralism, sparked a lively interest in this idea amongst political and moral philosophers. Let us now turn directly to those passages in Berlin, and then to one of those philosophers, Bernard Williams, before returning to Galston and the way he makes use of these ideas.

Referenser

William Galston (1995), ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism’, Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 3, pp. 516–534.

William Galston (2002), Liberal Pluralism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

William Galston (2005), The Practise of Liberal Pluralism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).