Philosophy and Real Politics by Raymond Geuss
(Princeton University Press)
£13.95/$19.95 (hb)

Philosophy and Real Politics is a manifesto for a new political philosophy. Political philosophy must be realistic and so take empirical research seriously. It must be sensitive to the context in which political claims are raised, so it must be particularistic and historicist. It must concern itself primarily with action, the motives and ambitions of real political agents, so it must not be squeamish about interests and power. Finally it must aim for only so much precision as its object allows. Politics is a craft, Raymond Geuss reminds us, and so the political philosopher resembles not the geometer drawing shapes after an ideal form but rather the craftsman fashioning tools fit for the task at hand.

Geuss develops this proposal with ideas drawn from Lenin, Nietzsche and Weber. Lenin’s “who, whom” directs us to look for the political agents in each situation, their roles, actions and power relations; Nietzsche has a message about the timing and perspectives from which particular actions make sense; and Weber considers the context in which “why?” questions arise and within which they are satisfied. Geuss’s realist proposal brings forcefully to the contemporary political discussion the idea that philosophy is an engaged discipline, both in the sense of engagée, of directly speaking to the political issues of the day, and in the sense of having its own historical cultural commitments firmly in view.

Among Geuss’s targets are political philosophers, chiefly John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Jürgen Habermas; the moralising tone that infects much Anglo-American public diplomacy; and finally specific policy decisions, such as the war in Iraq. Liberal political philosophy is criticised for perpetuating deceptive idealisations of ourselves, dazzling us in the process.

Strictly speaking, we have been here before, Richard Rorty has already done much to “de-divinise” liberal thinking, by drawing attention to the contingency of each of its constituent elements. True, unlike Geuss, Rorty claims that these contingencies produce the lucky accident of the North American political system. For Geuss this would be an instance of liberal complacency, similar in spirit to Rawls’s choice of North American lineaments for his vision of the just society. But why should this pragmatic move in Rawls, which merely becomes more explicit and polemical in Rorty, offend Geuss’s realist spirit? One would expect that Geuss would praise these “realist” elements. Instead they are presented as instances of liberal complacency.

Complacency certainly seems to underpin the moralising tone of public diplomacy. The more convinced we “bourgeois liberals” become of our righteousness, the more inclined we become to preach to others. It is a pity that Geuss associates such preachiness with Kant, given Kant’s aversion to moralistic politics. But the charge does not seem to fit Rawls and Habermas either. When they seek to identify key principles of ethics or the basic features of justice, they do not indulge in philosophical whimsy. Both projects have a reformatory and critical element in which idealisations are intended to function as correctives of our current political habits.

Two questions may be posed here. First: does Geuss’s realistic political philosophy have the resources to be critical? That Geuss himself is master of incisive critical argument is beside the point, which is about philosophical resources not about argumentative skill. Second: if political philosophy must concern itself with the particular, the empirical, and the historical, then why should anyone listen? There is more expertise – and methodological affinity with Geuss’s proposal – among historians, social and political scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers.

Both questions address the relation between philosophy and real politics. Let us consider this title again: “philosophy and real politics”. The cover presses this message with a photograph from the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. Yet despite brilliantly executed miniatures of political analysis, this is not a book about philosophy addressing real politics. Philosophers who want to address real concerns in the real world must be able to provide a convincing case as to why anyone should listen. Apart from the corrosive effect of too much philosophical humility, another reason one may not want to listen to philosophers is historical precedent, the few but striking examples of philosophers who displayed a marked lack of political judgement, whose brilliance in their field seems to have blinded them rather than helped them see through the shadows in the cave. A book that addressed the connection between philosophy and real politics would and should have something to say about these things. That Geuss only addresses philosophy’s connection to reality in terms already internal to a recognisable philosophical discourse about liberalism and its problems shows that his audience is other philosophers. His is a philosophy of real politics.

“One result of taking seriously the reflections presented in this book,” Geuss writes, would be to give up “focusing our thinking exclusively on the set of highly peculiar and historically contingent intuitions about ‘justice’ that we happen to find in one contemporary society.” Here, we reach the source of Geuss’s exasperation with the state of current political philosophy: it is not idealisations and abstractions so much that are the problem, but the lack of imagination, the stultifying incapacity to think otherwise than we find. It is to this failure of imagination that Geuss responds with his daring “realist” proposal.

Katerina Deligiorgi is senior lecturer in literature and philosophy at the University of Sussex