The Book Extract
As we write this introductory chapter the news is on in the background giving the world a briefing on those things that are of real importance to us.
The news is of war in the Middle East, of the Presidential elections in the USA, of the UK government appearing before a public inquiry, of tax laws and public-sector wages, of education reform, international business, of refugee crises, asylum seekers and immigration and of continuing starvation in the developing world. As we think about these issues over our morning coffee we are already engaged in political thought. We are being asked to reflect on some very difficult and profound issues. Was it right for the USA/UK alliance to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq or should the United Nations have made the decision? Is war ever right and, if so, under what conditions should we interfere in the affairs of other countries? Who should rule and how should they be accountable to the people? How much tax should we pay and why? Do we have a duty to those suffering outside our immediate society? If so, what should we do about it? How, if at all, should we adapt to a multicultural world?
These are not abstract questions. The fact that they arise in the normal run of things and require an urgent answer impacts heavily upon our lives and the lives of others. Thinking about politics is unavoidable and not just for those of you beginning university courses. Everybody has to do it. More importantly, we believe that everyone has a right to do it. This last sentence is worth thinking about a little more.
First and foremost note that it is a normative, or moral, claim. We think that everyone has a right to an equal stake in politics. This kind of statement is characteristic of political thought. Answering any of the questions mentioned above requires us to make normative judgements.
The role of political thought is to explore the nature and character of such judgements with a view to helping us understand the reasons for past judgements and to help us make better ones. Why do we think that everyone has a right to an equal stake in politics? On what grounds can we discriminate between this claim and counter-claims that assert that the poor, or women, or immigrants should not be allowed a voice? Exploring the normative claims that permeate our social world is a fascinating and demanding experience. The task of courses in political thought (sometimes called political theory or political philosophy) is to help you explore these issues.
The study of political thought will not give the right answer to moral and social questions. It can, however, introduce you to the complexities of the questions themselves and to the conceptual tools you can use to address them. When we do grapple with the big questions of political life we are dealing with some profound issues.
What is justice? What does it mean to say we know what is morally right or wrong? These are, for most people coming to the subject for the first time, new and unfamiliar sorts of questions. But they are questions that have been a constant feature of human society for millennia. It is certainly the case that the ways in which they have been posed and answered over the years vary across time and place. But in one form or another all human civilisation, from the ancient Greek poleis (city-states) through the modern nation-state to the contemporary globalised world, asks challenging normative, moral and political questions. This is an introduction to political thought. Our goal is to make the unfamiliar familiar and to give you a conceptual toolkit that will help you understand and engage with political ideas.
One of the principal driving forces of this book is the belief that there are two sets of tools that students of political thought need in order gain critical purchase on the subject.
The first is a basic sense of the history and development of political thought;
The second is a critical grasp of the theoretical or philosophical issues at the heart of politics.
A sense of the historical context of political debates gives us a clearer grasp of the issues that confront us. For example, our contemporary understanding of the importance of human rights to justice has its own specific history. It is a product of the post-World War Two environment. It was not until we realised the danger that some sections of a society could face from their own government that we really pressed ahead with the idea of a universal set of individual rights that were to be policed across sovereign borders.
In the face of Hitler’s genocide we decided that the suffering of citizens of other countries really was our business. A grasp of how the emphasis on human rights arose allows us to appreciate the role such rights have in our political context and thus to refine the instruments of their development and execution. An understanding of how other, earlier, attempts to claim universal rights for man (sic) arose, the issues they were addressing, their successes and failures, gives us further conceptual leverage when we are thinking about the issues at stake.
Similarly a grasp of the historical development of concepts such as ‘the state’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘citizenship’ or ‘justice’ offers huge insights into the basic building blocks of politics.
We still need, however, to supplement this historical understanding with a critical perception of the core theoretical issues at stake. Human rights are not just defended as measures designed to cope with a specific historical threat. They are also defended as morally correct. They are viewed as the most ethically important rights, which may not be violated for any other political, religious or cultural reason. How do we evaluate this sort of claim? Over the centuries there have been many arguments about who, or what, should be accorded moral standing. It has been variously claimed that only fellow citizens count (and that foreigners can be killed or enslaved), that the interests of the state are more vital than those of its individual citizens (and thus people can be sacrificed to the greater good), that only white men count (and that women or coloured people are simply not worth the same and should be treated differently), that only law-abiding citizens count (and that criminals lose even the right to life) or that only adults count (and that children have no rights in their own person). On what grounds might we discriminate between these claims and the current thought that all persons, simply by virtue of their being human, have a certain moral standing that endows them with inalienable rights? In order to face this normative challenge we need to learn the language of moral and political argument.
In order to develop this conceptual toolbox we have split our table of contents into two parts. One table of contents is organised according to a chronological history of political thought, arranging chapters around particular thinkers and the development of political theory. The second table of contents is organised conceptually and highlights the theoretical questions and issues that each theorist is used to illustrate. Each chapter explicitly draws out important elements of both the historical and conceptual vocabularies. In doing so the reader is guided through the construction of their own critical glossary of important terms in political theory, thus furnishing them with a basic political vocabulary. This is intended to leave the reader with an historical and conceptual map to aid them in further study and a clear grasp of the basic vocabulary in which such study is undertaken. Most importantly it should give them the ability to add their voice to the debates. Beginning with the idea that laws and constitutions (the instruments of politics) are only good laws and constitutions in so far as they give effective expression to our considered moral and political beliefs, we invite the reader to explore the suggestion that moral and political ideas are the foundations of politics. Our aim is not only to highlight what, in the history of political thought, has counted as an adequate foundation, but to show the reader how (at an introductory level) such arguments work. In exploring these issues we guide the readers through a critical engagement with key arguments in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. Just as importantly, we guide the readership through a critical engagement with their own moral and political beliefs. The structure of the book is guided by these twin aims.
The story of the development of political theory is told only in so far as it highlights key theoretical ideas and so this book does not aim to be comprehensive as a history. This is true in two ways.
Firstly, while our book stretches from the work of Plato to contemporary antifoundationalism we do not cover the Roman philosophers or the medieval thinkers such as St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas. Doubtless there is much to be gained from such a study but in the first instance the key conceptual ideas can be expressed more clearly in the works of Plato and Aristotle than in Christian neo-Platonism or neo-Aristotelianism. For similar reasons we do not examine the works of Machiavelli, Kant and Hegel. The omissions are to be regretted but in striking a balance between a conceptual and an historical introduction some tough decisions needed to be made. In any case we do not view this work as anything more than a comprehensive introduction to the discipline and console ourselves with the thought that this book may (we hope will) encourage you to delve deeper into the history of political thought.
Secondly, we do not aim to do full justice to any particular thinker. Individual theorists are included to highlight key ideas. For example, in dealing with Plato we examine his contention (in The Republic) that political rule is a technical skill and the foundation to this argument that one can, given the right intellect and education, come to know what justice is. It is beyond doubt that this does not explore all there is to know about Plato. Nevertheless it is also beyond doubt that the reader will have learned something vital about Plato and about the nature of justice and politics and the type of arguments that support claims about justice and political institutions.
Making normative judgements: the nature of political theory
In approaching the subject this way we intend to give the reader a conceptual vocabulary that is indispensable to a critical and knowledgeable discussion of political issues. This is all the study of political thought can offer. It cannot offer you an easy route to the right answer or the truth about politics. Moral and political positions are not measured on a single scale with ‘truth’ at one end and ‘falsity’ on the other. In fact there is even considerable disagreement about what standard they are to be measured on at all. Indeed giving reasons why one set of moral and political claims has firmer foundations than others and should be thus given priority over them forms a large part of the debates in political theory.
We can approach this issue by contrasting political thought with another aspect of political studies, political science. Most people coming to the study of politics for the first time will take a variety of courses. Almost everyone will take political science, which is the study of political institutions, constitutions and policy processes. Political science aims at an accurate description and explanation of these features of politics. It is an empirical (or positive) science in that it seeks to collect data and analyse it much as a natural scientist would collect a sample and put it under the microscope. The accuracy of an empirical claim can be tested against what is out there in the world.
Either the civil service plays a positive role in policy-making or it does not. Either the Supreme Court has the power to veto unconstitutional legislation or it does not (of course political science can be much more complex than this).
The empirical study of institutions and laws is a vital part of any study of politics. Political thought (or political theory/philosophy) is a very different discipline. Rather than being empirical it is normative.
A normative project seeks standards that enable us to judge human action or to prescribe the best course of action.
If political science asks ‘what are the key building blocks of politics?’ political theory may ask ‘why are these the key building blocks of politics?’. If political science identifies human-rights legislation as a key feature of contemporary politics, political theory might ask ‘is this just?’.
Political science is the study of facts and political thought the study of values. The advantage that political science has over political thought is that the standards by which the claims of political science are to be judged are generally accepted.
Scientific objectivity is a standard we are all familiar with (at least in principle). The idea is that we can establish, through the application of scientific methods of data collection and analysis, the verifiable truth. This is certainly an important standard and the world has benefited hugely from its refinement and application. However, there is no reason to believe that it is the only standard by which knowledge is to be judged or that it is appropriate to normative reflection.
The very first step a student of political thought has to take is to recognise this. It is a difficult step to take partly because nonscientific standards of judgement receive so little attention in our education systems and partly because science and the belief in scientific progress is the ideology of the contemporary period.
Between the 1920s and the 1970s the scientific paradigm (pattern), the belief that all that counted as knowledge had to be scientific, came to be imposed upon the social sciences and humanities. The claims popular around this time were that we had left our religious and metaphysical infancy and developed science. Thus 2,000 years of philosophical and normative thought were dismissed. This quirk of intellectual history went beyond empirical study to make claims about the very nature and possibility of knowledge. These debates, called epistemological debates (from the Greek episte¯me¯, meaning knowledge), are key to political theory and we will explore them over the course of this book. Our first step along this route has to be a brief examination of the claim that all knowledge must be scientific. Here we are not concerned to deny the role or importance of science but simply to establish the place of normative political thought within the social sciences and humanities.
Between the 1920s and the 1970s the belief that scientific knowledge was the only true form of knowledge gained huge support. Empiricism became the mainstay of logical positivism through the work of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. Positivism became further refined in the behaviourist movements of the 1950s. These hyper-empirical schools of thought argued that scientific verifiability was the sole criterion of knowledge. In very broad terms they argued that there were only three types of statement.
The first were statements of empirical fact such as ‘the cat is on the mat’. This is acceptable as we can verify the statement by simply looking at the mat.
The second were analytic statements of logical necessity such as ‘all bachelors are unmarried males’. This is acceptable as its truth is given logically. Finally there were normative utterances. These were dismissed as ‘ejaculations’ (A. J. Ayer) or as ‘nonsense’. They were treated derisively as they could not be subjected to empirical verification or falsification (for a very good discussion of these debates see Ball 1995). The obvious starting point for a case against the claims of the hyperempiricists is simply that their position is counter-intuitive. It goes against our general thinking on the matter. Nearly everything we do or say that is of any interest to us is normative and to dismiss all this as nonsense is a little startling. Take the statement ‘it is wrong to eat babies’. This is not merely a frivolous example. In 1729 Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet proposing that the starving Irish should sell their children as food, thus solving the associated problems of poverty and high birth rates amongst Irish Catholic families. The proposal was made to shock and highlight the issues but its shock value relies upon the moral idea that it is wrong to eat babies. This is not an empirically verifiable idea but it does say something very important. To deny this statement the status of ‘knowledge’ and to dismiss it as ‘nonsense’ is to say that we cannot make such a judgement. But society is structured by such judgements. ‘The government should be responsible to the people’, ‘theft is wrong’, ‘all human beings are equal in dignity and rights’: these statements are the core of politics. Laws, governments and institutions are structured and restructured to reflect our considered moral and political judgements. Our lives make no sense without this ‘nonsense’. Political thought is not primarily concerned with the facts of political life. It is normative in that it is concerned with values, moral codes, social standards and ideals. Normative standards often conflict. Disputes over social welfare, capital punishment, abortion, gender equality, political accountability, warfare etc. are commonplace. The standards by which people live their lives cannot be measured scientifically. So how do we begin to think about the issues? The first step is to abandon the thought that all ‘knowledge’ can be judged on a single scale. Normative concepts are most often value judgements. People come to their values, beliefs and opinions in a whole variety of ways and because of this we have come to think of normative concepts as ‘essentially contested concepts’ (for a very useful discussion of this idea see Gallie 1956). This means that we recognise that there is a whole variety of perspectives that we can take on most issues, even the most fundamental ones. We generally accept that there is no single right answer to profound normative questions such as ‘what is right and wrong?’ or ‘what is justice’. Nevertheless there is a huge difference between accepting this basic idea and accepting the further idea that all opinions are equally worthy. This last idea is termed relativism and it gives us no critical purchase on the debates. Relativists claim that because there is no one standard by which we can judge normative claims we have to accept that each claim is as valid as the next. Thus if one section of society wishes to prevent its children from receiving certain types of health care or education, or if it wishes to enforce certain gender roles within the family, or wishes to use capital punishment, or is pro-abortion, then there is nothing that another section of society that may view these practices as unjust can say, let alone do, about it. We do not want to encourage you to make a judgement about these specific issues here. What we do want you to do is to consider the twin facts that (1) normative clashes are an everyday occurrence and (2) unless we can generate standards that help us to solve or at least mitigate these clashes then the prospects for peace and prosperity are negligible. Normative thinking is essential to political stability. There is no one correct set of answers to the issue of what is to count as an appropriate normative standard. So how do we go about discriminating between them? Political thought is concerned with exploring this very issue. Its role is the criticism of bad standards and the search for good, beneficial or defensible ones. Its goal is to discriminate between the good and bad opinions, practices and ideals that structure human society. It does this by subjecting the core principles of political and social life to critical scrutiny. Behind every moral and political principle is a justifying argument, what we term the theoretical foundations of a principle. More often than not the foundations of a principle are hidden away in the background. Foundational claims are the reasons people have for holding certain opinions. When people say they support human rights or despise racism they are expressing an ethical principle. The foundations of their argument may well be a belief in the moral equality of all human beings. Exploring this foundational claim, its relative validity in the face of claims to the contrary, is a core part of political thought. There are many different moral and political opinions in the world and throughout the course of this book we will be exploring the foundations of many different positions. Foundational arguments take many forms. A cursory glance would reveal moral, religious, rationalist, epistemological, historical and sociological arguments. We will also explore anti-foundationalist arguments that criticise this way of thinking about ethics and politics. We need to learn to identify these arguments and to develop the critical and technical skills that help us assess them. This is where the real battles of politics are fought. We build democracies because we believe that each person should have an equal stake in politics. We build complex legal systems to give institutional expression to our understanding of justice. We build armies and fight wars, under the auspices of the United Nations, because we believe that genocide is wrong. The foundational arguments here are the specific conceptions of equality, justice and human rights that support the political, legal and military processes. Democracies, legal systems and armies are merely the instruments of our considered moral and political judgements. But they are immensely powerful instruments. They have a dramatic effect on our lives and those of others and so it is important that we keep a critical eye on the validity and coherence of the foundational arguments that drive them. Here we shall not say any more about the role of political theory in general. Each theory that we will meet in the coming chapters has its own view of what (if anything) makes a solid foundation for political ideals. Each theory will enhance or deny all that we have said in this introductory survey. Each stage of this book will introduce you to a clear moral and political argument and will begin to show you how each position is defended. Engaging with these positions and exploring the claims they make is a fascinating experience. Typically people coming to the subject for the first time are so taken by each encounter that it is not unusual for them to agree wholeheartedly with each argument they come across (even when it contradicts the position they embraced the week before!). There are at least two good reasons why this is the case. First, each argument is so powerful that it has carved a place in history. The arguments we examine here have had a profound influence on their time and ours. Some have played vital roles in revolutions and others have had a more subtle influence but all are classic examples of political thought. Second, it is often the case that readers have not encountered the foundational arguments in support of each position before. The sheer power, or explanatory force, of these arguments can be amazingly compelling. It is quite easy to get overwhelmed by the depth and detail of these arguments but remember this is only an introduction. You are not expected to come to a complete understanding or any easy moral and political decisions straight away. Our immediate goal is to help you get a sense for the ‘shape’ of normative political thought. Our secondary goals are to enable you to make critical judgements about the arguments and to help you enjoy what is necessarily a life-long engagement with the world around us.
An introduction to the book
By way of further introduction to the discipline and to the book we shall take a brief overview of its content. This will introduce you to the variety of ideas we shall confront and to the structure of the book. The book is organised into four major parts, each of which is given structure by the dual table of contents discussed above. These four parts are: I Classical Origins of Political Thought; II Modern Developments in Political Thought; III Contemporary Understandings of Political Thought; and IV Challenges to Universalism and Foundationalism. We have chosen to begin with Classical Greek thought partly because Plato and Aristotle have had such a huge influence on political theory as a discipline and partly because their work illustrates some key ideas. The question that dominates Plato’s Republic is ‘what is justice?’. For Plato, and arguably for us too, this is the key question of political thought. Plato’s answer to this question (which he gives to us through his portrayal of the character of Socrates) begins to show us what an answer that aspired to objectivity might look like. One of the key issues that we are looking at here is the question of how a normative argument might be objectively true, rather than subjective – just what we do around here. In examining this we come to Plato’s account of metaphysics and his claim that it is possible to come to know for certain what justice is. For many of you this is the first time you will have come across metaphysics and it is important that you do not get overwhelmed or intimidated by the term or its meaning. It really only means that which is beyond the empirical or physical world and as we have already seen that is the area that normative thinking must engage with. Having gained some idea of what a metaphysical argument looks like we then turn to Aristotle’s famous claim that ‘man is by nature a political animal’. Aristotle also offers a metaphysical argument but it is very different from Plato’s. Here we have our first example of how metaphysical arguments differ from one another and we can begin to try and discriminate between them. Both Plato and Aristotle argue that politics is natural to humans. As we come to understand human nature and the idea of ‘the good’ or ‘justice’ we can see how to make political judgements. But Aristotle’s conception of human nature and his understanding of how we come to know what morality is are very different from those of Plato. In reading Aristotle and Plato we begin to think about the relationship between ethics and politics and to critically engage with differing positions within normative argument. The next section of the book leaps straight to modernity. We have chosen to do this because it gets us into arguments that are vitally important to our own reflections about the political world. There is much we could take from a study of the Roman and medieval political philosophers such as Cicero, St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas or from key Renaissance figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli. But this is not intended to be a comprehensive retelling of the history of political thought. The next challenge we want you to face is the very modern idea that politics is in fact artificial, rather than natural as both Plato and Aristotle believed. By the middle of the seventeenth century the political world (in western Europe at least) was changing. One of the driving forces of that change was the idea that we are naturally free. This radically changes the way we look at politics and our relation to its institutions and rules. It opens up the issue of why we have politics at all and how, if it is an artificial creation, we should structure it so it reflects, enables or mitigates our natural freedom. The assumption that we are morally free agents is the foundation for much modern and contemporary thinking. In this second section of the book we confront three attempts to show why we should begin our explorations of politics here and what natural freedom means to us. In Chapters 3 and 4 we take three of the greatest thinkers on the social contract, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke, and invite you to compare and contrast their conceptions of natural liberty. What does it mean to say we are naturally free? What follows from it and how does this feed in to our political needs and aspirations? Once again we will encourage you to begin to seek out the differences in the arguments to see what makes each account of freedom differ and to think about which you find more compelling. It is truly stunning just how much any one view of human freedom affects one’s political viewpoint. Here again our focus is on equipping you with the vocabulary to draw insight from and to judge between these extraordinarily influential arguments. The final chapter of the ‘Modern Developments’ section (Chapter 5) looks at another hugely influential tradition that plays a large and critical role in our political and intellectual history. Here we invite you to discover the force of the arguments of Karl Marx and the socialist writer Robert Owen. The challenge laid down by this tradition is to the assumption that there is a fixed human nature (whether naturally social or naturally free) that forms the necessary true foundation for politics. For Marxists and socialists human nature was itself an artificial creation. What we view as natural about ourselves, and the political institutions that we view as flowing naturally from it, are themselves the creation of a particular time and place. Just as we underwent political revolution to get rid of the idea that the natural political order was hierarchical along monarchical or aristocratic lines, so, argue the socialists, we need a revolution (violent or moral) to rid ourselves of the view that free human relations are naturally competitive, productive and based on a capitalist hierarchy. Having rid ourselves of aristocratic privilege and established the basic premise that all men (sic) are equal we felt that free competition was the fairest way to distribute goods. Those that lost in the marketplace of life were lazy, unlucky or simply not good enough but they were not treated unfairly and they had the same chance as everyone else. It is this myth that the socialists challenge. They show that this conception of freedom (which had been wrapped up in a picture of human nature) is itself a product of a specific time and place and point to its weaknesses. This challenge to capitalism found massive expression in socialist and communist movements and also features heavily in left-wing liberalism. The ‘left wing’ appears to have fallen out of fashion but in these traditions we can find the supports for claims about ‘fair trade’ goods and services, criticisms of the World Trade Organization and the desire to reduce or drop the debt the developing world owe to the rich Western states, which do form a vital part of our political agenda today. Armed with this broad understanding of the debates that inform the history and development of our normative political sensibilities we then turn, in the final two sections of the book, to contemporary political thought. The first of these sections, ‘Contemporary Understandings of Political Thought’, introduces the reader to three mainstream debates. The first examines the question of whether ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’ (FOG Preface: 2; see Chapter 6) or whether we should think of each individual as having rights that are inviolable. The issue is a fairly clear one: if sacrificing one person is to benefit society overall should we do it? On the ‘yes’ side of this debate we have utilitarianism and in particular the work of one of its founders, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham believed that talk of rights was ‘nonsense upon stilts’ (AF: 405). In its place he proposed to put a consequentialist calculus. This sounds complicated until we realise that he was proposing to judge all things by the overall level of happiness (or utility – hence utilitarianism) they produced. In defending this idea, the foundation of utilitarianism, Bentham showed that everything was good in so far as it tended to produce a higher rather than lower level of happiness in society. This was true of political institutions such as laws and prisons (indeed he argued that it would be possible to work out how much disutility a criminal caused and thereby work out the tariff to be paid) and people. The utilitarian argument defines what is right in terms of what is good. For society to sacrifice one life for the greater good (providing you can demonstrate the good to be gained) is therefore right. On the other side of this argument are those who believe that there are uninfringeable rights and that therefore the right is different from (and morally superior to) the good. This is a familiar position and one we will have had some experience of in our reading of modern thought. In this instance the argument is developed for the contemporary reader by Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Here, even if the sacrifice of one was to the benefit of the many, we are obliged to respect the rights of the one. They are morally unchallengeable. The sorts of arguments and foundations that underpin these two traditions of thought are discussed in Chapter 6. Learning the vocabulary of both allows us to judge between them and this is important because we do need to judge the actions of ourselves, of others and of our societies. Some societies claim that they are founded on the rights of man (sic). Yet we are used to our politicians relying upon internment (or imprisonment without trial), or conscription, in times of crisis. If we have a right to due process, or to life, then it seems incongruous at best to argue that these rights can be removed for the greater good in times of conflict. Indeed it seems that our governments were backsliding from a moral commitment to rights to a consequentialist conception of the good when they interred Japanese immigrants during the Second World War, Irish men and women during the ‘Troubles’, or Al-Qaeda suspects during the second Gulf war. Judging our rulers requires that we have the conceptual and historical tools provided by our exploration here. Building on these key traditions in contemporary thought we then move on to an exploration of two further debates. The first (Chapter 7) focuses on the issue of distributive justice or how we allocate benefits and burdens in a society. These are the principles that inform our taxation and social-welfare systems, and public education and health care provision. The second (Chapter 8) examines multiculturalism. These debates are distinct but share a common concern. How do we work out what we owe to each other? When doing so should we take account of different tastes or preferences? If so, which preferences are more significant or morally relevant? The multiculturalist debates take culture, ethnicity and religion as the morally relevant sources of preference. The claim is that our very identity is given through our cultural affiliations and heritage and that to ignore it is to make the idea of social goods irrelevant to us. For example, a decision to distribute a pork surplus equally throughout a society that contained among its citizens Jewish and Muslim people would not only fail to realise its goal of equity; it would be hugely insulting. Of course justice is about more than merely avoiding insulting our fellow citizens. The question is wider and concerns how far we ought to go to accommodate ethnocultural difference. It may be, so the multiculturalists argue, necessary to treat people differently in order to treat them equally. This position is also present in the wider debates concerning distributive justice and Chapter 7 divorces the issue from the specific subject of culture and searches for the wider principles of justice. This asks us to dig deep into the foundations of our moral and political lives. The answers you will meet range from the claim that justice demands that we treat every individual equally and thus in the same way to the claim that we need to take account of certain morally relevant differences. This latter position is itself divisible into a wide range of positions. Here the real foundation lies in discovering what morally relevant differences are and in working out how a society might go about taking account of them. Some argue that it is necessary to arrange the distributive mechanisms of society to take account of undeserved constraints on freedom such as educational ability or physical prowess, gender or race or class. A society that limited freedom (consciously or unconsciously) based on these characteristics might be considered flawed. Some positions go further and argue that we have to take account of different tastes and preferences. Michael Walzer claims that we need a grasp of ‘complex equality’ that can take into account the social meaning of certain goods. Some communities value health care more highly than education and thus social equality requires us to take account of this when distributing goods across communities. In these chapters we ask you to explore the complexities of the notion of justice. In equipping you with the vocabulary to critically evaluate different claims and in giving you prominent examples of how some people have proposed to resolve the debates we intend to introduce you to a deeper understanding of the nature of politics. The understanding of how distributive mechanisms (such as public health or education services) work that you might gain from the news or, in rather more detail, from political science classes is supplemented with a grasp of why things are arranged as they are. The knowledge that some sections of society believe that it is wrong to require them to obey laws that reflect the social norms of the dominant culture in society rather than their own customs and moral traditions is supplemented with the critical vocabulary to engage in this real-life debate and to begin to think about the justice or otherwise of culturally differentiated rights as opposed to a unified conception of citizenship. The second section concerned with contemporary political thought focuses on challenges to universalism and foundationalism. These are challenges to the whole idea of normative political theory as we have presented it in this book. In ending our introduction with these challenges we do not want to suggest that the normative project of political theory is finished. Rather, we hope to lay down a series of real challenges to normative political theory in the hope that, by this stage in your reading, you will be equipped to engage critically with them and to draw some important insights from them. The challenges we explore in this final section are very serious ones. Such challenges are not entirely novel. In one sense political theory is all about normative challenges and some of the responses to multiculturalism that we examined in Chapter 8 can also be viewed as challenges to universalism and foundationalism. Nor are such challenges the sole product of contemporary debates. Just War Theory (Chapter 9), Conservatism (Chapter 10) and Feminism (Chapter 11) all have long histories. In Chapter 9 we explore questions of international politics. Often thought to be a distinctive realm of politics, and one resistant to universal moral ideas, the international has been presented, over many years, as a pluralist, amoral form of anti-politics. Here we show how vital normative political theory has been in tackling the challenges of a war-torn and anarchical world. The conservatives in Chapter 10 challenge the positions that we engage with in the rest of the book. They do so by attacking the commitment of these other positions to abstract philosophical projects that underpin normative interventions in politics. They accuse political philosophers of simply failing to come to terms with the complexity of the social world, with dangerous consequences. Humanity’s capacity for reason is not sufficient to meet the demands of practical politics and so we should rely on tradition rather than reason to guide our actions. In the first part of Chapter 11 we explore the contribution of feminist political theory to the canon. It is overwhelmingly obvious that the vast majority of voices in political theory have been male. What does this say about the history of politics and the discipline of political thought? The history of politics is a history of gender discrimination. Some feminists have sought to deal with this fact by exploring the place of the rights of women within the discourses that have traditionally been about the rights of man (and here finally we can drop the rather apologetic ‘sic’ that usually follows such statements). These thinkers, from Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century to thinkers such as Susan Moller Okin and Carole Pateman in the contemporary period, are usually thought of as liberal feminists. These thinkers seek to reform and extend liberalism from within its basic theoretical boundaries. For other feminist thinkers, however, the very basis of liberal thought is suspect. Its claims to universality are challenged because they are the product of a male-dominated development that seeks universal human reason but finds only universal male reason. For some theorists the claim that women have different conceptions of morality and thus different political needs and aspirations is a product of a sexually particular way of being in the world. This claim is (to put it rather simplistically) based on the view that such differences are biologically hardwired into women and have been repressed by centuries of patriarchy. An importantly different claim is that women have a different conception of morality and thus different political needs and aspirations because of their gender or their experience of being treated as ‘women’ and given certain social, most often reproductive, roles (Gilligan 1982). Here gender is a social rather than biological fact. In exploring these challenges we explore the thought that all that has gone before has been hideously one-sided and does not speak for (or to) more than half of the world’s population. In the second half of this chapter we begin to explore antifoundationalism. In this present chapter we have begun to think about the foundations of politics (moral arguments, conceptions of human nature, of the good and of the right) as central to the understanding of politics. Antifoundationalism views this as utterly wrong. Indeed our principal proponent of this view, Richard Rorty, believes that this way of thinking about politics is wrong, outmoded and part of the problem rather than part of the solution (Rorty 1993). In addressing this challenge we are asked to consider, at a more general level, a concern (shared with some feminist thinking) that the way we are inviting you to do political theory will cause you to discriminate, against people. Political theory has been used to justify war, slavery, genocide, gender and sexual discrimination to name just a few of its achievements. After 2,000 years it may be time to try something else. This last thought asks you to think about what that ‘something else’ might be, or even to consider the prospect of a future that cannot rely upon modes of moral or social justification. We end with these challenges because they confront us here and now and require us to think deeply and critically about our normative projects. It is a lot to ask you to face up to in an introductory book but if you accept the challenge the rewards can be immense.
Conclusion
As an introduction to political thought this book is both wide-ranging and intellectually demanding. It has to be because the issues we have to deal with as scholars, students, citizens and as human beings are wideranging and demanding. As you begin to immerse yourself in 2,000 years of political and moral argument remember that your task is not to learn by rote the answers given to difficult political questions by those figures we explore here. Rather you are encouraged to get a sense for the broad sweep of the history of political thought and for the ways in which moral and social positions are justified and defended. It is, in our experience, much easier to engage with the detail of these vital arguments armed with a broad grasp of what political theory is all about. In one sense there is far more detail in the rest of the book than you will need in your first engagement with the subject. This detail is there to help frame the general debates and to offer you something to encourage you to revisit them. You are not required to have mastered each chapter before you go on to the next. Nor are you required to agree with everything you read. Every engagement with the issues turns out to be a new experience and every new voice in the discourses of politics brings new inspiration. We hope that this book encourages you to add your voice to them.
Aims and Objectives / Glossary:
1. What is normative thought?
2. What is the relation between ethics and politics?
3. Why do political theorists think that scientific standards of judgement are not the only standards we need to think about? Are they right?
This book has two main aims. Firstly we intend to introduce you to a broad range of some of the most important issues in political thought. This survey covers a wide variety of philosophical and historical traditions, drawing, for example, on ideas developed in Ancient Greece, Enlightenment Europe and in the present-day USA and UK. In doing so it examines questions such as ‘why should we obey the rules of politics?’, ‘what is freedom?’ and ‘are contemporary political institutions justifiable?’. The second aim of this book is to give you a firm grounding in the complex philosophical and technical concepts that surround the analysis of politics. When individuals or governments give their support to (for example) human rights or democracy they often do so by referring to an enormous range of moral and practical reasons. Our aim is to introduce you to the necessary skills that will allow you to critically engage with such claims. You need to able to understand the way arguments work, the consequences of holding any particular moral or political position and the origin and content of these arguments if you are going to be able to make an informed judgement about the validity or otherwise of various political issues. While a large part of this knowledge can be acquired by learning about the development of political thought this book makes the expansion of your awareness of the issues and your analytic skills a priority. A recurring theme is the construction and organisation of what we have called a critical glossary. As we go through the course we will add words and concepts to our glossary, drawing out the key themes and ideas that will play a part in your study of politics. Someone defending liberal democracy will often do so for ‘individualist’, ‘universalist’ and ‘deontological’ reasons. In order to critically assess the argument for liberal democracy you must be aware of what these arguments are, their strengths and weaknesses and any plausible alternatives. At the end of this book you will. The ideas covered by this glossary are not presented as dictionary definitions. Instead we focus on the use of each concept in the context in which you come across it and aim to show you how it informs the argument or expresses a core principle. Each term may have alternative or broader meanings in other contexts and, because of the nature of political studies, many terms have contested meanings. Each term is intended to start a discussion about its meaning, not to end it. Important terms that you have dealt with in this chapter include:
Normative:
Normative refers to the complex (and hotly contested) web of standards, concepts and ideals through which we make value judgements.
Political Thought:
Political thought is synonymous with political theory and political philosophy. It refers to that part of the discipline of political studies that concerns itself with the values, ideas, norms, and concepts (theories) that inform politics taken generally. The place of theory in the study and practice of politics is itself contested because there are contested understandings of the role and content of theories. In this book political thought refers to the normative aspect of political and social life and is contrasted with political science.
Foundations:
The foundations of politics are the moral, social and cultural ideas and customs that justify political institutions. One important role of political thought is to elaborate and scrutinise these (often unspoken) foundations.
Political Science:
Political science is used in two ways. First, it is often used as a generic term for the study of politics and suggests a unidisciplinary approach to the subject. Second, there is a more technical usage and this is the one we will adopt in this book. Here political science is taken to be the empirical (scientific) branch of political studies. An essential aspect of political studies, it concerns itself with the recording and analysis of observable data such as policy processes, institutional structures and government.
Empirical:
Empirical refers to that which is based on experience. This is often contrasted with normative (as normative standards are not necessarily based on empirical experience).
Epistemological:
From ‘epistemology’, meaning theory of knowledge. How do we know what is good, bad, just or unjust? A surprising amount of moral and political theory is tied up with epistemology. It focuses both on the status and authority of knowledge (for example as truth or as consensus) and on the justification of claims to knowledge.
Relativism:
The idea that there is no absolute or universal criterion sufficient to generate cross-cultural comparisons or value judgements. The idea is simply that such standards are relative to specific times and specific places.