If Modus Vivendi is the Answer, what was the Question (and was it the right question)? - Talk for conference on 'Modus Vivendi' held at the University of Muenster 2015

If Modus Vivendi is the Answer, what was the

Question (and is it the right one to ask)?

Matt Sleat (University of Sheffield)

The recent interest in modus vivendi has taken place either in

parallel with or as part of a 'realist turn' in political

theory (though that is undoubtedly too grand a title for what

has taken place), and as such I am intuitively sympathetic to

it.1 Yet nevertheless I have long harboured some nagging doubts

and uncertainties about modus vivendi, and this paper probably

does little more than express some of these as best I can (and

I would like to thank the organisers for giving me the

opportunity and impetus to try and think them through

properly). If there is any thematic thread that links these

doubts together, it may be a concern that modus vivendi not

only provides unsatisfactory answers to the questions that it

asks, but that it may also be guilty of not asking the right

questions in the first place. And I am more becoming convinced

that a main service political theory can do for our

1 For overviews of realism see: Galston, W. ‘Realism in political theory’,

European Journal of Political Theory, 9:4 (2010), 385-411; Rosse, E. and Sleat, M.

'Realism in Normative Political Theory', Philosophy Compass 9:10 (2014): 689-

701. John Horton has done the most to present modus vivendi in a realist

light (see his ‘Realism, liberal moralism and a political theory of modus

vivendi’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9:4 (2010), 431-48), though John

Gray's much earlier work on modus vivendi has been co-opted into the

realist cause in many discussions.

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understanding of politics is to help us ask the right

questions of it.

I take it that theories of modus vivendi share five

characteristics or commitments, which I'll only briefly set

out here as I take them to be familiar enough to colleagues

here. The first is an account of modern societies as

characterised by what we might call deep pluralism. People

disagree, fundamentally and radically, about matters of

morality, religion, and crucially, politics also. Contemporary

modus vivendi theorists, such as John Gray and David McCabe,

have explained this deep pluralism as a consequence of

fundamental truths of the moral universe: that human values

are plural, often incompatible with one another, and almost

always incommensurable.2 This value pluralism explains why

humans naturally and inevitably disagree. Modus vivendi

theories need not assume the meta-ethical truth of value

pluralism however; many other meta-ethical theories can

deliver the same conclusion. But it looks incomplete as an

account of ethical and political disagreement to put so much

emphasis almost exclusively on its moral sources. Self- and

group-interest clearly have their own role to play in

explaining disagreement, as do natural and not necessarily

regrettable human emotions such as love, loyalty, pride, envy,

and greed. There is no reason why modus vivendi should

overlook these sources, nor why they cannot include them in an

account of their explanation of deep pluralism.

2 Gray, J. Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000); McCabe, D. Modus

Vivendi Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

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In conditions of deep pluralism the only political goods

on which it is reasonable to expect any high degree of

consensus are peace, order and security. Modus vivendi need not make

the implausible claim that these are values that people

prioritise over all others all the time, and indeed can accept

that there are always important decisions to be made, for

instance, as to how much security we want at the cost of other

values such as privacy or freedom of speech. And there might

be times when individuals are willing to risk peace and order

to pursue other, possibly more noble, moral and political

goals. These are open questions to which theory is unlikely to

be able to shed all that much light. What modus vivendi

emphasises, however, is that peace and order are necessary

pre-requisites for achieving any other political goals,

alongside the Hobbesian notion that life without it would be

disordered, chaotic and likely violent. In this sense

individuals have to recognise that political life necessitates

a high degree of compromise insofar as we cannot sensibly expect

that when people disagree so radically politics is ever going

to live up to the ideals we may hold of it. Real politics is

instead better thought of as a 'second-best', inevitably

falling short of what we might ideally hope but nevertheless

providing the conditions for peace and order that are

necessary for anyone to pursue even a minimally decent life.

There is therefore a deeply anti-utopian element to modus

vivendi, inevitable for a theory that asks us to see politics

as more suited to avoiding universal human evils than

achieving common human goods. Finally, modus vivendi offers a

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broadly consensual theory of legitimacy dependent upon the political

order enjoying widespread (though not necessarily total)

recognition as a form of compromise between people with

fundamental disagreements that secures the minimum conditions

of peace and stability. It is of course the case that many

different forms of political order have throughout history,

and will no doubt in the future also, might be acceptable in

this way. Liberalism does not have a monopoly on securing

peace and order, and modus vivendi is historically and

contextually sensitive to the fact that in different

circumstances non-liberal associations may fare better in this

regard. The conditions for legitimacy are therefore universal,

though what arrangements might meet those conditions remains a

matter of historical and social contingency.

********

The place of modus vivendi theories within liberal political

philosophy more generally is often remarked to be a somewhat

uncomfortable one. If modus vivendi belongs in the liberal

family at all, then it is the black sheep or the 'vulgar

cousin'.3 But liberalism is a large and diverse family, and I

see no intrinsic reason why it is any more 'awkward' a member

3 McCabe (2010), p. 9; Neal, P. 'Vulgar Liberalism', Political Theory 21:4 (1993), 623-42. It is worth noting, though, that John Gray does not share this thought about the place of modus vivendi in the liberal family. Indeed, modus vivendi is not just the 'other' of the two faces of liberalism, it is also the first insofar as 'The liberal state originated in a search for modus vivendi' (2000, p. 1) - the second face of liberalismbeing the search for a rational consensus on liberal institutions and principles was, according to Gray, a later development.

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than, say, libertarianism, liberal perfectionism or liberal

multiculturalism, all of which press liberal theory on one or

more of its most central tenets. What explains the perceived

'awkwardness' is the fact that modus vivendi is a theory of

politics, not, at least in the first instance, a theory of

liberalism. It tells us something about the conditions in

which politics takes place and the human needs to which it is

a response, the basis of social order, as well as what it is

reasonable to expect of politics in those conditions. Modus

vivendi underdetermines any political prescription for the

very reason that, as a theory of politics, it recognises how

the needs to which it speaks can be met by a variety of

different political systems and that what counts as an

acceptable compromise will largely depend on the beliefs,

values and commitments held by the agents in any particular

context. It is a fact of politics that what counts as

acceptable will depend on the beliefs of those who need to do

the accepting. Much contemporary liberal thought has started

elsewhere by offering theories of liberal political morality

without saying too much about politics or the political

context in which that morality operates. Hence from the

perspective of much liberal political theory it is, quite

perversely, modus vivendi that seems to be somewhat off-topic.

But this tells us more about the state of liberal thought than

it does modus vivendi. And the motivation to rethink liberal

politics in the terms of modus vivendi is symptomatic of a

wider theoretical move to put the politics back into liberal

political theory. So if modus vivendi is awkward it is so in

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the best tradition of political theory in demanding others

start asking the right questions or recognise uncomfortable

truths.

In this sense it is probably a mistake to try and place

modus vivendi within the liberal family at all, but rather to

see it as a theory of politics that can be used to illuminate

how we think about and understand political life, including

liberal orders such as our own. But we should be careful not

to elide this difference between liberalism and modus vivendi

with another: whereas liberalism is explicitly a normative

political theory that seeks to both critique existing

practices and provide guidance on how we should act, modus

vivendi is a descriptive account of what politics is really

like, its character, content and limits, and the demands it

makes of us on how we do act (not the demands we should make

of it). Being an account of politics, modus vivendi is

'merely' descriptive; liberalism, on the other hand, is

normative. But I think this is to cut the distinction in the

wrong place. Modus vivendi might not be normative in the sense

that much contemporary liberal theory is, by starting with

moral commitments (autonomy, human rights, dignity, etc.)

which then provide a justification for particular

institutional designs, political practices or principles. That

much seems right; modus vivendi clearly attempts to begin our

theorising within politics rather than in any particular moral

theory or with specific moral principles (which I will come

back to shortly). But even from the brief outline of modus

vivendi offered above, it looks strange to say that modus

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vivendi is not normative at all. It clearly makes normative

judgements about peace, compromise and legitimacy, for

instance. And if that's right, then it would seem that the

difference between liberalism and modus vivendi hinges on that

between moralist and realist theories, which does not map on

to that between normative and descriptive theories. Of course,

just how realism can be normative without collapsing into

moralism is one of the most pressing issues in the current

realist debates.4 Realism, its advocates insist, can be

normative, but seeks a way of accounting for political

normativity that does not reduce politics to morality.5

So I wonder if the best way to make sense of modus

vivendi as normative is in a different and more subtle way

that moralism. Certainly many of its central concepts, peace,

order, security, compromise, legitimacy, are what we might

think of as thick evaluative concepts.6 They are clearly

descriptive, they describe features of the world, but they

contain a strong evaluative element also. Modus vivendi does

not just tell us as a brute fact that 'This association

enables a form of order free from violence' or 'These people

were willing to compromise on their ideals so as to live

4 See Erman, E. and Möller, N. 'Political Legitimacy in the Real Normative World: The Priority of Morality and the Autonomy of the Political' British Journal of Political Science 45:1 (2015), 215-33; Jubb, R. and Rossi, E. 'Why Moralists Should be Afraid of Political Values: A Rejoinder' Journal of Philosophical Research (forthcoming); Sangiovanni, A. 'Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality' Journal of Political Philosophy 16:2 (2008), 137-64; Sleat,M. 'Legitimacy in Realist Thought: Between Moralism and Realpolitik' PoliticalTheory 42:3 (2014), 314-375 Rossi and Sleat (2014)6 For Bernard Williams' famous discussion of thick concepts see Ethics and the

Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), ch. 9

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together peacefully', such descriptions are evaluatively

loaded. Peace is not just a state of affairs, characterising

something as having achieved the conditions of security and

order is to express a favourable attitude towards that state

of affairs also. Peace is a good thing. Likewise to say that

someone was willing to compromise is both a description of

their intentions and an evaluative statement of them. It is a

good thing that people are willing to compromise. Of course we

know that the willingness to compromise is not always a

virtue, nor that peace is always preferable to disorder and

violence. But these tend to be rarer cases, and when we use

these terms in less positive ways - when compromise becomes

appeasement, for example - we are often required to give an

awful lot of very detailed contextual detail in order to

explain the deviation from the terms' normal usage. To know

the content of a thick ethical concept is therefore in large

part to know when it is appropriate to use it. So as a theory

of politics modus vivendi does not have a separate evaluative

part and then a separate descriptive part ('The liberal

political order has features x, y, z, and these are good

because of reasons x1, y1, z1'). It seems more appropriate to

say that to understand political concepts we must understand

both their descriptive and evaluative elements as a whole.

I am already well out of my philosophical comfort zone at

this point, as may be evident. But I raise this possibility

for two reasons: First of all because I think it helps us

think about the relationship between modus vivendi and liberal

political theory along a different dimension, and to give us

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further reason to resist any notion that modus vivendi may be

'merely' descriptive. The second reason is because it may

allow us to make sense of the ways in which modus vivendi can

be a justificatory theory when the premises that it employs

may seem, especially from the view of the neo-Kantian

normative theory that has dominated the discipline, rather

weak and insufficient to do any real justificatory work. This

is because modus vivendi is likely to always be pushed one

justificatory step back than it usually wishes to go. It may

not be enough for some to say that the state in which we live

provides a context of peace and stability in which we can live

alongside others on terms that enable all to pursue at the

very least a minimally decent life, and that that might explain

the legitimacy of the political order, we need to also explain

why peace is something we should value, and why we should care

about the fate of those with whom we disagree. Stressing the

extent to which modus vivendi as a theory rejects the

fact/value distinction and employs thick evaluative concept

may present a way forward here. I offer that only as a thought

for future exploration.

Leaving this issue to one side, it is clear regardless that

one of the key attractions of modus vivendi for contemporary

theorists such as the Johns, Gray and Horton, and David McCabe

is its prospects for offering a justification of liberal

orders that are in several ways preferable to the prevailing

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idealist or moralist justifications that have otherwise

dominated the discipline in recent years. But I think we need

to be very careful when considering the sort of justification

modus vivendi can provide, not, at least in the first

instance, in terms of the content of the reasons it proffers

but rather the sort of philosophical justificatory projects

that are consistent with it as a theory of politics.

The justification of the liberal political order to all of

those subject to it, and for reasons we can expect them to

freely affirm through the use of common human reason, has

often been described as not only at the heart of liberal

theory but, as Jeremy Waldron claimed in a rightly famous

essay, the commitment that distinguishes liberalism from all

other forms of political life.7 That so much philosophical

effort has been spent exploring this issue is therefore

understandable, even if it has often taken increasingly

esoteric forms of exploring whether the justification offered

needs to give reasons that all persons can reasonably be

expected to accept or cannot reasonably reject, if people need

to actually accept the political order or whether it is enough

that it can be represented as an order they should accept, and

so on. It is in this intellectual context that McCabe situates

the main philosophical question driving his Modus Vivendi

Liberalism.8 The objective is to use modus vivendi to offer a

more plausible answer to what he calls the liberal project's

7 Waldron, J. ‘Theoretical foundations of liberalism’, The Philosophical

Quarterly, 37 (1987), 127-508 McCabe (2010)

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'justificatory requirement'. The nub of his argument, as I

understand it, is that mainstream responses to the

justificatory requirement have been deeply unsatisfactory

insofar as they have been unable to meet that requirement vis-

à-vis those who hold illiberal ideals of political

association. If we understand liberal orders in the terms of a

modus vivendi, as a 'second-best' compromise among people who

hold radically different moral and political ideals as an

inevitable result of value pluralism, then the liberal order

can be rationally vindicated to illiberal people also. Bar a

few mild concerns expressed right at the end of the book, it

seems that modus vivendi is the completion of the liberal

normative project.

The boldness of this claim is quite remarkable, and

admirable for that. If right it turns out that much

contemporary political theory has been barking up the wrong

tree by pursuing variations of neo-Kantian responses to their

central philosophical question; the broadly Hobbesian answer

was there and staring us in the face all along. It is worth

remembering, however, that the justificatory requirement is

not just a philosophical issue for liberals, it is, and more

importantly, a moral question also. This is because the

commitment to ensuring that the political order is justifiable

to all people is itself justified with reference to the moral

status of all individuals as free and equal: We make sure that

the political order respects the freedom and equality of all

those subject to it by ensuring that it be broadly acceptable

to them. Liberalism's commitment to the justificatory

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requirement is part of its political morality. I mention this

for two related reasons: The first is that it goes some way to

explain why the precise specification of what sort of

justification is sufficient matters so much for liberal

theorists. This is not just an issue of providing a

satisfactory answer to a philosophical question, but of

providing an answer that is morally sufficient judged in

relation to a very specific account of human moral agency

(autonomy, respect, equality, etc.). Hence the justificatory

requirement necessitates a certain sort of answer, one that is

actually highly demanding and particular. McCabe plays this

down; he attempts to remain agnostic throughout on questions

such as what counts as a sufficient justification for the

liberal order, who needs to be satisfied that an appropriate

justification has been offered, whether the justification

needs to be couched in terms of moral reasons or not, and so

on. And this is quite in keeping with the sort of broad

justificatory resources that modus vivendi can offer - or at

least the way in which modus vivendi stresses the plethora of

different reasons people might have for affirming the

political order, some of which may be moral though

considerations of self-interest and prudence have a role to

play also. But, and without wanting to get sucked into

questions of what conditions liberals do place on any

satisfactory response to the justificatory requirement (which

is something they disagree about anyway), liberals are

adamantly non-agnostic when it comes to these questions. Indeed,

one suspects that a reason why liberal theorists have not

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engaged modus vivendi is precisely because it is apparent that

it is not the sort of political theory that has the requisite

resources to answer the justificatory requirement in a way

that is consistent with their moral demands of it. Modus

vivendi does not give us the right sort of answer to the

justificatory requirement.

But the other reason I draw attention to the moral nature

of the liberal commitment to justification is because it

entitles us to reflect on whether, from the perspective of

modus vivendi as a theory of politics, it is the question that

we should be asking. If one starts from the premise that

politics takes place in conditions of deep pluralism then

clearly liberalism and its justificatory requirement must be

taken as but one competing political morality. Recognising

that in itself does not disqualify us from asking exactly what

the justificatory requirement demands and how it might be met

in both theory and practice, but they are questions that can

be asked of any value in the maelstrom of conflicting ideals.

Of course we need to start our political theorising somewhere,

and so we might think that starting with liberal political

morality is not only as good a place as any but the best place

to start if we happen to be liberals. To a certain degree that

is true. But it is important to recognise that modus vivendi,

as a theory of politics, starts somewhere else, with the

question of how order is possible between people with profound

and ineradicable disagreements, including about their

competing political moralities. The justificatory requirement

is one (morally thick and controversial) answer to that

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question, but because it is grounded in a specifically liberal

morality, it cannot be mistaken for the question of order

itself. So if one is committed to a modus vivendi theory of

politics then it would seem incongruent to think that

liberalism's justificatory requirement is the main question to

which political theory needs to offer a response, or, indeed,

to start our political theorising with the concerns internal

to any specific political morality.

Some may worry that the moral ramifications of not taking

the justificatory requirement seriously opens up the

possibility of the state persecuting or violating the freedom

of its illiberal members; after all, the justificatory

project, especially in its Rousseauean/Kantian guise, is

expressly set up such that universal consent is the

theoretical instrument that constrains what the state can

legitimately do to its citizens, thus protecting their status

as free and equal. The justificatory project is a moral

project designed to protect the individual, and in particular

those who might be disadvantaged or part of some religious or

ethnic minority, from the tyrannical possibilities inherent in

the modern state. McCabe is alert to this worry and at one

point implies that if we do give up on the justificatory

requirement that we condemn ourselves to a politics built

around 'force or fraud'.9 But the baby need not go out with the

bathwater: We can care about how illiberal minorities are

treated in liberal societies, how we might respect their

freedom and equality (moral and political), even if we do not

9 McCabe (2010), p. 153

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think the political order is justifiable to them. Indeed, that

concern should in a sense become more pressing to the liberal

than if he thinks that liberalism is justified even to those

who in practice reject it. It would mean taking more seriously

the question of how we respect those with whom we disagree,

and not assume that such respect is demonstrated through

living together under a common set of institutions and

practices which we take to be appropriately morally and

rationally justified but which illiberals judge as immoral and

may likely experience on a day-to-day basis as forms of

coercive imposition. Indeed, there is a value for us liberals

too in truthfully recognising the nature of our position in

this relationship to illiberal people within liberal

societies, one that I have called elsewhere a position of

'restrained mastery', mastery because we do indeed compel such

people to abide by laws, institutions and practices that they

reject, but restrained because we put self-imposed constraints

(normative and institutional) on how we can treat those who do

not hold the same fundamental moral and political values.10 Not

only does this recognition enable us to properly appreciate

and think through the question of how liberal orders

demonstrate respect to its illiberal members, free from any

illusions that they are being forced to be free or live

according to principles they should accept despite the fact

they might vehemently oppose them. It also enables a sort of

sincere or truthful acknowledgement as to our own status as

occupying positions of relative power over others within our

10 Sleat, M. Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)

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society, not just despite of but also because of our liberal

ideals of freedom and equality. There are ways of caring about

the fate of those with whom we disagree that do not rest on

any notion of rational justification.

The task of justifying a political order need not, of course,

be interpreted in the morally and philosophically demanding

way. Detached from its moorings in liberal political theory,

it seems fairly uncontroversial to think that any political

order needs to be able to provide plausible reasons for

thinking that they are acceptable to a wide swath of those

over whom they rule. And I take this to be the sort of more

modest justificatory project that is pursued by John Gray and

John Horton.

Modus vivendi provides two different lines of

justification. The first is the notion that liberal political

orders, when successful, provide the basic goods of peace,

order and stability, that are necessary for the provision of

any other moral and political goods and which, therefore, all

people have reason to value. It may very well be right that in

conditions of deep pluralism something as thin yet far from

unsubstantial like providing the conditions for peace and

stability might be the most we can hope that people can agree

on; whatever else we disagree about regarding what the ends of

politics should be, we can all agree that it should at least

do that. Yet my concern is that we need our political theory

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to tell us more about the value of politics than this for two

related reasons. The first is that we demand more from our

politics today than we have at any other time in human

history. The goods that we now expect politics to provide go

far beyond the provision of peace and security, as important

as that is and how difficult it remains to achieve. In part

this reflects the fact that the creation of the modern state,

and its hitherto unprecedented technological, financial,

administrative, and military capabilities means that politics

has the capacity to achieve more than it has before, though

what we demand of our states nevertheless still often exceeds

what it is even minimally realistic to expect of it. The march

of democracy has also meant that politics can never be seen to

close its ears to what 'the people' want, again regardless of

how unreasonable their demands may be. There is rarely any

problem today that is not seen as falling under the remit and

responsibility of politics. Moreover, these are expectations

to deliver goods the provision of which are now seen as

necessary for the legitimacy of political rule, and it is a

very open question as to whether such goods - human rights,

social justice, equality, respect, etc. - are in any way

secondary considerations when assessing the legitimation of

political power today. At one level we may insist that we are

wrong about this, that the basic condition of legitimacy

remains peace and order and we should recognise that hierarchy

of reasons. But the problem with any realist vision of

politics such as modus vivendi is that contemporary politics

has become deeply moralistic, and any theory that insists we

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need to take people's actual beliefs and motivations seriously

need to take serious heed of this.

It is also worth nothing that as politics has become

tasked with the provision of further goods such as human

rights and social justice so has the level of disagreement

within which politics functions increased also. For while we

might agree that politics should protect and promote human

rights, we disagree which rights state should take an interest

in, their content and limits, and their relationship to other

moral and political demands. The same can be said for social

justice, though there we not only disagree as to what the

principles of justice that regulate our political association

should be, who owes what to whom, which institutions and

practices justice applies, and so on, there is also a

significant force in politics today that denies the state

should be involved in providing social justice at all. Modus

vivendi can, of course, accommodate all this. Yet, and I'll

come back to this shortly, in such conditions it looks like

what is important about politics is that it makes decisions

that are mutually binding in ways that have little if anything

to do with compromise and possibly more to do simply with the

capacity to make authoritative decisions.

The focus on order and security makes a great deal of

sense if you think that at least one of the main features of

the modern state is its claim to the monopoly of legitimate

violence, in which case it is precisely that monopoly which

stands in need of justification especially when it itself

could become a threat to individual security (and one greater18

than that posed by any other individual or group in a state-

less world). Showing that the state does actually create or

foster order rather than threaten it is therefore imperative.

But the second concern I have with modus vivendi's focus on

peace and security stems from the fact that the power of

modern politics is more pervasive and hence potentially

pernicious than can be captured by a concern for its capacity

to exert brute coercion. Politics is profoundly enmeshed in

almost every part of our lives; there is barely an aspect of

modern life that politics does not either regulate or have

some influence over. These considerations have sparked a whole

academic industries on governance, the creation of the

subjective self, bio-politics, and so on. Yet the point is

that if this is true then we need a somewhat richer account of

the value of politics given how political (in this sense)

modern human beings have become. Put differently, we need a

justification of the liberal state that goes beyond justifying

its capacity for physical coercion through the creation of

order because the power that now stands in need of

justification is more permeating, ubiquitous, and imaginably

insidious, and does not necessarily have much if anything to

do with the maintenance of peace and stability (though the

state might claim that it does). My worry, therefore, is that

modus vivendi is asking a possibly outdated question regarding

the legitimacy of coercive power when the political reality,

and in particular the nature of the power in need of

justification, has changed considerably.11

11 This is an issue that I think might be true of much recent realist political theory

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While liberal political orders are in no way unique in being

able to claim that they provide peace and order - illiberal

associations can do so also (and may even do better at it) -

there might be something to be said for the idea that liberal

societies have a better claim to embodying the spirit and

practice of compromise than other forms of political life.

Many of the institutions and practices of liberal regimes,

religious toleration, free speech, the free market, equal

rights, the rule of law, democratic rule, and so on, can be

easily represented in terms of enabling or representing

compromise (e.g. 'We disagree about the ultimate ends of life,

but let's agree that we can each pursue what we think is

valuable unhindered'). It may be true that in a society in

which there was a limited amount of religious disagreement a

compromise could be reached that is nevertheless relatively

(what liberals would deem) intolerant and paternalistic, yet

few modern societies are going to be characterised by anything

other than the sort of deep pluralism that modus vivendi

assumes. Where that is true it is quite plausible to think

that a commitment to toleration, to live and let live, for

instance, or to assign to all people the same set of rights,

would be a quite reasonable and rational compromise for

individuals to make. In this sense liberalism may have a

better claim to allowing more people with conflicting values

and beliefs together in peace and security than other less

liberal regimes. 20

It is important to try and separate out the sort of

justificatory claims that could be made in the name of

compromise. There might be others, though two are worth

drawing attention to. The first would be a justification which

went something along the lines that a political order is

justified if it could plausibly be represented as the outcome

of a compromise between those subject to it, in which case we

can assume that it is an order worthy of their affirmation.

Every part of this would need cashing out in much greater

detail - would are the conditions for a plausible

representation? who are the relevant agents and what

capacities and powers can we assume of them? are there any

limits to what counts as an acceptable compromise? - but I

think the general outline of such a hypothetical justification

are fairly familiar to us now. The second, and I think this is

more in keeping with what John Horton has in mind, is the idea

that compromise is an activity that citizens have to in some

sense actually engage in to create a modus vivendi. After all,

and as Horton rightly point out, much politics does take the

form of compromise and bargaining. And it is also true that

that is a feature of political life that much ideal and

moralist contemporary political theory has simply overlooked.

So where decisions have actually been reached as a result of

compromise that political order is appropriately justified. A

rough but far from analogy here would be some interpretations

of public reason in the political liberalism literature: as

long as a decision has been reached by citizens who have

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engaged in deliberation in the right sort of way then it is

legitimate.

Another way of thinking about this difference is between

compromise being something that a political order has to in

some sense embody, by being plausibly representable as

consistent with what compromise demands, or as it being a good

that must be achieved in practice. It is not always clear what

mode of justification, so to speak, it is that modus vivendi

theorists are employing, and I mention this here just to draw

attention to the different ways in which compromise can

function in a justificatory capacity. Yet I remain sceptical

about the sort of justificatory work that modus vivendi's

appeal to compromise can actually do, and I think my concerns

might cut across both these modes.

Modus vivendi undoubtedly does a service by reminding

political theorists of the role and importance of compromise,

negotiation and bargaining in politics. That seems intuitively

right. But if we ask exactly what role does compromise may

play in politics then it is not clear to me that it has the

sort of significance needed to bear much justificatory weight.

A first thought is that compromise is a fairly exclusive

political activity. Few of us in liberal democracies are the

sort of political agents who are directly involved in the

decision making process where compromises are made and

bargains struck. Compromise and bargaining is indeed part of

politics, but it is a feature of politics most often

undertaken by politicians and in relation to the specific

activity of legislating or making political decisions where22

they may need to consider a variety of different perspectives

and conflicting interests. The art of being a successful

politician who is able to climb his way to anywhere near the

top of the greasy pole may also require the capacity to

compromise on your ideals and most cherished values to get on

and the ability to create coalitions and alliances, maintain

loyalties and allegiances and so on, through bargains and

concessions. But again, few of us pursue political careers or

see political advancement as a good worth pursuing. So it is

not clear that many of us do much compromising in our

political lives and so it may be hard to see why it is a good

that should weigh too heavily in our reasoning.

Even when as citizens we take part in democratic

elections, and our favoured party or candidate fails to win

power, it does not look right to say that we compromise in

accepting the legitimacy of the successful group to rule. That

is not a compromise; it is an inherent part of what it is to

be committed to democracy as a form of choosing who governs.

Accepting you have lost a contest to which you willingly took

part and the rules for which you endorsed, even if only

implicitly, does not require any sort of compromise at all.

The athlete who comes second in a race does not compromise

when they recognise the gold medallist ran faster than they

did. We might say that we concede that a different party from

the one we voted for has the right to rule, but that is not to

use concession as a synonym for compromise. Neither does

compromise feature in our best understanding of what makes the

outcome of democratic contests legitimate. Though there may be

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electoral systems that do aim specifically to reach a decision

that can in some sense be represented as a compromise such as

alternative vote systems, the objective of most electoral

systems is to be able to distinguish winners from losers in a

way that makes no appeal to the notion that those successful

were in any way 'compromise candidates'. They won because they

won the most votes, or because they won the most seats, and so

on, and the legitimacy of the procedure for deciding who is

successful is judged on grounds other than anything to do with

compromise.

A different claim might be that 'good' politics is

characterised by compromise between different interests and

values. It does not matter that it is not an activity few of

us engage in, the point is rather that when politics is going

well, doing what it should be doing by enabling people with

radical differences to nevertheless live together peacefully,

then compromise will be one of its main features. Even if we

grant that this is true, it would be going too far to say that

compromise is always a virtue of good politics. The fact is

that sometimes there is something (not always a lot, but

something) for so-called 'conviction politicians', those who

are unwilling to compromise with what they take to be the

mistaken and maybe evil beliefs and ideals of others.

Sometimes we want politics to be more decisive, to come down

strongly in favour of one-side of an argument rather than

another. 'Good' politics might actually be able to

discriminate when such conviction is required and provide the

sort of institutional framework in which single-minded and

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determined politicians are able to act in ways that do not

require compromise with opponents at all. We also tend to

think that politics has a necessarily agonistic element to it,

where politicians and parties fight for power, influence and

control. One of the purposes of politics is to push for the

projects to which you have committed yourself. A politician

who had no 'red lines' at all, who was truly willing to

compromise on anything and everything they believed in, would

be one of dubious political integrity. This is not only a

reality of politics (democratic or not), we also think there

is some value in politics as a competitive exercise; healthy

politics is agonistic.

In this sense modus vivendi may make a mistake that many

realist accounts of politics have been accused of making in

latching on to an aspect of real politics that much

contemporary political theory misses and then in some sense

making it either the cardinal virtue of politics or its

central and distinctive characteristic.12 Compromise is clearly

a feature of politics and it is something to be valued. But we

should not take it too far and say that it is the overriding

feature of even 'good' politics, nor that it is always of

value or even a value that we necessarily always prioritise

very highly. All that is unlikely to be surprising, but it

does again mean that it is unclear how much force or purchase

compromise could have in a justification of a political order.

12 See Finlayson, L. 'With Radicals like these, who needs Conservatives? Doom, Gloom and Realism in Political Theory' European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming)

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Another tack modus vivendi might take is to insist that

compromise is, contrary to what I said above, something the

vast majority of citizens make in our day-to-day lives living

in liberal political orders. This is because the existing

political order is likely to fall short of our own political

ideals and hence the best we can hope for is that we are able

to recognise it as some form of 'second-best'. This may be

most obviously true of those with illiberal beliefs, though we

should expect that most of us - even liberals - might

experience some disparity between the ideal and the reality of

life in liberal states. It might not be perfect, but it might

have the sort of features that enable all of us, despite our

differences, to live at least minimally decent lives. But

while this might make intuitive sense, to take this position

towards our social world has some deeply implausible

ramifications. For one, the very notion with which this

thought must start - that the political world ought to match up

to the way I wish it to be - looks like an incredibly

solipsistic and even petulant position from which to begin how

we think about our relationship to the political order in

which we (most of us non-voluntarily) find ourselves. Why

should we expect the world into which we were thrown, and

which has been shaped by many countless individuals and

powerful social forces that came before us, and in which we

are but a single person of little power and maybe even less

consequence, to take the form we wish it to take. The task of

political theory is not to reconcile us to a world as if we

somehow stood above it as some rightful but impotent Creator

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who has the right to shape it to his will but not the ability.

Rather the world existed before us and will continue to exist

once we are gone, and during that time it will have a profound

effect in shaping us considerably more than we shall ever

shape it. The point of political theory cannot be to reconcile

the world and ourselves as if they are two independent

objects, especially if the latter begins from a position of

disappointed judgement of the former. It must rather offer us

a way in which we can come to understand ourselves as part of

that world, literally both a product of it and an agent within

it, in a way that we can truthfully affirm as worthwhile. As a

place to start our thinking about the political world, why

would we start with the audacious and thoroughly unreasonable

thought that it ought to be as we wish it to be?

Furthermore, in what sense does recognising the political

order as a second-best represent a compromise at all, if, as

an individual again relatively powerless and subject to all

sorts of powerful social forces that both enable but also

constrain your agency, you were never actually in a position

to do anything other than submit to it in the first place? The

language of compromise and bargains is appropriate between

agents who sit in a certain sort of relationship to one

another, one of at least relatively equal power such that one

agent cannot simply compel the will of the other, and where

some sort of deal needs to be struck in the name of mutual

self-interest so that walking away from the table would not be

to anyone's benefit. It is easy to see why talk of compromise

might seem appropriate under certain assumptions and

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conditions - say if we think human beings are of relatively

equal power or where the alternative to a deal is a violent

world of disorder and chaos. Yet those are not the conditions

under which most of us ever face the political order which we

are asked to recognise as a compromise from our ideal. The

state does not present itself to us as an agent of relatively

equal power with which we can either reach some compromise or

walk away. Rather we can either submit to the offer the state

makes us, obedience in exchange for the provision of certain

moral and political goods, or we can reject that offer and be

coerced to obey it despite our refusal (and, it should be

said, regardless of just how short of our ideal we believe it

to fall). In modern political conditions where the state

enjoys such huge discrepancies of power over individuals, the

notion that we can honestly recognise our relationship to the

state as one where the language of compromise might even be

applicable cannot be taken seriously.

Much of what concerns me is whether, as an account of

politics, modus vivendi is able to ask the sort of questions

of the liberal state that we need to ask. The focus on order

and compromise is too narrow a basis from which to look at

contemporary politics, and though they are undoubtedly

necessary features of political life the importance of which

are often overlooked, they far from exhaust what we need a

political theory to help us make sense of. Nor is it clear to

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me that they can together bear the sort of weight required for

them to feature too significantly in our reasoning about the

legitimacy of the liberal state. This is not only for the

reasons set out above. Though it is a virtue of modus vivendi

that it recognises the possible legitimacy of various forms of

political life, nevertheless part of what we need to know is

precisely why this particular political association is

legitimate for us, what it is about the liberal state that makes

it authoritative to us and likewise what it is about ourselves

that makes the liberal state the only authoritative form of

politics we have available. While modus vivendi is ostensibly

sensitive to the sort of historical and social contexts in

which politics takes place, it is nevertheless continuous with

the Enlightenment search for reasons that can universally

satisfy the demands of legitimation. Hence everything that is

contextual and specific is filtered through the concepts of

peace and stability so as to make the universal question of

politics whether a given association represents a form of

legitimate order in which all can live a minimally decent life

(which the criterion of compromise is supposed to track). But

this leaves too many questions not only unanswered by unasked.

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