Rationality in Politics and Its Limits

Draft introduction, special issue on Rationality in Politics and its Limits, Global Discourse 5 (2), 2015

Introduction

Rationality in politics and its limits

Terry Nardin∗

Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Keywords: reason; rationality; rationalism; political realism; political ethics;

political discourse; political judgment; theory and practice

The word ‘rationality’ and its cognates, like ‘reason’, have multiple contexts and

connotations. The rationality of calculation (as in ‘rational man’) can be contrasted

with the rationality of interpretation (a ‘reasonable interpretation’). There is the

rationality of proof (demonstration) and the rationality of persuasion (which may be

rhetorical as well as logical). There is rationality in tradition and rational criticism of

tradition. Rationalism (and rationalists) can be reasonable or unreasonable. Reason is

distinguished from revelation, superstition, convention, prejudice, emotion, and

chance, but these are also aspects of reasoning and – if Descartes’ error is indeed an

error (Damasio 1994) – some at least may be essential to it. Being clear about these

meanings must be part of the agenda of anyone who talks about rationality in politics.

This special issue explores alternative understandings of rationality in politics.

Leaving aside worries about the existence of rationality arising from the extremes of

post-structuralism and neuroscience (Webel 2013), it considers economic, moral, and

historical understandings of rationality in relation to politics and political theorizing.

Among the topics discussed are the character and limits of different kinds of political

reasoning, the role of imagination and emotion in politics, the various meanings of

political realism, the relationship between practices and principles, the nature of

political judgment, and the distinction between theory and practice. My aim in this

introduction is to situate the papers in relation to these themes and suggest how the

different kinds rationality they identify are related to one another and to efforts to

understand them.

∗

E-mail: [email protected]

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Rationality in politics

Three views of rationality have been especially important in thinking about politics in

the modern world: the economic, the moral, and the historical. These views can be

found in political thinking in many contexts and have invited investigations of the

claims, assumptions, and limitations of each. Theorists have asked whether they can

be reconciled and considered their implications for understanding political judgments,

decisions, arguments, practices, and institutions.

The economic view of political and other kinds of practical reasoning can be

ethical, as in utilitarianism, or explanatory, as in rational choice theory. It assumes

that what it calls values can be quantified, that costs and benefits can be measured and

calculated, and that the most choiceworthy outcome is that which has the highest

expected value. Rationality here is computational. In one version or another, this

understanding of rationality remains influential in policy-making and administration

as well as in the academic study of government and public affairs. It is central even to

a theory of justice like that of John Rawls, which is premised on choices that citizens

would make if they were fully rational. The main idea in economic rationality is that

the contribution of reason to making decisions is to evaluate the expected costs and

benefits of particular actions, policies, laws, or constitutional principles. Political

reason is used most successfully when we have full information about the probable

results of choosing a given course of action. Everything else is subjective, emotional,

prejudiced, or in some other way non-rational.

A weakness of this view, for many critics, is that it does not explain how

people actually reason and decide. People not only make ‘mistakes’ when reasoning

economically but may use heuristics to simplify their decisions or choose to ‘satisfice’

rather than to optimize (Kahneman 2011; Bendor 2010; Simon 1957). Economic

rationality also has ethical weaknesses, in the eyes of other critics, because it is hard

for it to entertain as rational a scenario in which morality prescribes a course of action

the results of which are on balance undesirable. It cannot adequately accommodate

principled decision-making because even when it makes room for rules it treats them

as instrumental short-cuts rather than as having an authority to which deference is due

for reasons other than economic ones.

These ethical concerns are captured in a second understanding of rationality as

the discovery of general principles of right conduct. According to this understanding,

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political reasoning must be concerned with principles of right that are universal

because they apply to all rational beings and that can be known (even if they are not

in fact known) by reasoning. These principles prescribe duties and their correlative

rights. If economic rationality is instrumental, moral rationality is noninstrumental.

The appeal of this way of thinking about political reasoning can be religious but it is

also evident in the contemporary ubiquity of human rights discourse. Any rights-

based approach to politics will identify considerations that constrain cost-benefit

calculations; an approach based on the idea of ‘human’ or ‘natural’ rights can also act

as a constraint on religious or other communal practices. Human rights are timeless

and cross-cultural because even if unrecognized in a particular community they

remain morally binding on the members of that community. It is sometimes claimed

that the gradual realisation of these principles constitutes the meaning of progress.

Though not all defenders of the moral view would go so far, some would argue that

the most important social changes of the last two centuries (such as the emancipation

of slaves and the liberation of women) have rested on arguments of this kind.

The third, historical, view of political reason emphasizes the importance of

culture and tradition, and therefore of meaning and interpretation. It treats economic

and moral views in a contextual fashion, not dismissing them but emphasizing their

roots in received beliefs and their limitations as disguised interpretations of those

beliefs. It holds, for example, that reasoning about costs and benefits always occurs

within a larger cultural horizon that sets the agenda by giving shape to what in a

particular time and place, or for particular societies or groups within a society, is

believed to be desirable. What is considered ‘rational’ can be shown to have changed

radically over time, both within and between societies, as beliefs have changed. In

other words, the ultimate ends of action, and therefore of political action, cannot be

said to be rational in a narrowly economic way. Moral reasoning too is more

particular, more historically and culturally grounded, than its advocates recognize.

There are no timeless moral principles that do not, on closer inspection, turn out either

to lack substantive content or to be the product of a particular cultural tradition. Both

the economic and the moral views, in other words, have a larger imaginative and

rhetorical dimension than they are able to acknowledge. Seen from this angle,

political reasoning is more closely tied than either would allow to the customs and

practices of a given society. Reason, at least moral and political reason, is local, not

universal.

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The continuing interaction of these three contrasting views of rationality is

visible in contemporary political theory, where a number of prominent debates can be

understood as expressing the tensions between them. Utilitarianism, dominant in the

middle of the twentieth century, was displaced by deontological or rights-based

theories ranging from the libertarianism of Robert Nozick to the liberal-egalitarianism

of Ronald Dworkin and Gerald Cohen. These academic debates were plausible in the

framework of prosperous liberal democracies but could appear illiberal or utopian

when dealing with ethnic or religious differences, economic development, or

international relations. One objection to universalist views of political reason was that

they ignored history, tradition, community, and identity, which could be seen as

providing contexts within which abstract rights and principles had meaning. Shared

meanings constituted the communities for whom the identified principles had

normative force. This objection seems particularly cogent when one moves away from

modern European politics to consider ways of seeing human conduct and therefore

morals and politics that come into view when one focuses on, say, ancient Greek or

Chinese thought. A different objection was that acting on principle was rational only

within boundaries set by political realism. For some, realistic decision-making meant

a return to an outcome-oriented ‘reason of state’ or another form of consequentialism

– in other words, to an economic view of political rationality. For others it meant a

new appreciation of history, context, and persuasive argumentation in politics. This

move toward the historical view of political reason, which in recent years has gone

under the label of political realism (as in the ‘new realism’ of Bernard Williams and

Raymond Geuss), is also found in the thinking of political theorists who emphasize

the importance of interpretation. Among these Michael Walzer and, earlier, Michael

Oakeshott in his criticism of ‘Rationalism’ (Oakeshott 1991), stand out.

Political realism

To be rational, for many, is to be realistic, and hence the perennial attraction of the

idea of realism in politics. Unfortunately for clarity, the word ‘realism’ stands for a

diversity of positions, often incompatible ones. Paul Kelly, in his contribution to this

special issue, takes his cue from the literature of international relations, where there is,

he thinks, more agreement about what realism is than is the case among political

theorists. The question of what rationality explains or prescribes is central to that

field. In its debates, insofar they are oriented toward policy-making, ‘realists’ favour

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consequentialist reasoning, ‘liberals’ invoke human rights or universal principles, and

‘constructivists’ emphasize the socially embedded and therefore cultural character of

rationality. Since critics of realism in international politics, unlike political theorists,

have a clear sense of what their target is, their categories can be helpful in making

sense of the revival of realism in political theory.

Thus, the moral scepticism that international relations theorists attribute to

Machiavelli, which Kelly thinks is better assigned to Nietzsche, can be found applied

to politics generally by Isaiah Berlin or, more recently, Williams and Geuss, to show

that the foundational projects of philosophers like Rawls and Dworkin are futile.

Kelly argues that the structuralist realism that international relations theorists ascribe

to Hobbes reinforces the view of new realist philosophers that politics has priority

over ethics. As Hobbes makes clear, a morality for politics must confront not only the

fact of disagreement but also the problem of order. This means that ‘the first political

question’ (Williams 2005, 3) cannot be ethical but must concern ‘securing order,

protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation’, which for Hobbes it is the

business of political authority to supply. It is, Kelly thinks, a question about the

conditions of political order rather than its moral character – one seldom addressed in

political philosophy of the Rawlsian sort, though in fairness to Rawls it must be said

that he did concern himself with the ‘stability’ of a just political order. These

conditions are historically specific, which brings to the fore the contingency of

politics observed long ago by Thucydides and emphasized today by Williams and

many others.

Although realism of this sort challenges the foundationalism of much liberal-

egalitarian political theory, Kelly thinks that it allows more modest efforts to theorise

justice, equality, and democracy to continue – a conclusion that Luke O’Sullivan, in

his reply to Kelly, finds unpersuasive given challenges from several directions to the

liberal project. Seizing on Hobbes as the theorist of order as prior to justice not only

runs up against the implausibility of making a realist theory of order the foundation

for liberal theorising but clashes with alternative readings of Hobbes that point in

quite other directions.

Hobbes is concerned as much with right as with order, and with persuasion as

much as with coercion. For Hobbes, human beings are appetitive creatures motivated

by desires and having interests, of which self-preservation and in particular avoiding a

violent death are foremost, but they are also imaginative creatures whose passions and

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fancies can sometimes trump their prudential calculations. As O’Sullivan observes, to

be a ‘realist’ in Hobbesian terms means paying attention to the place of imagination in

human affairs and therefore to passion, fancy, appearance, and rhetoric as well as to

economic rationality. Arguably, fear of violent death is a matter of imagination as

well as of rational prudence. If Hobbes is going to be invoked to lend credence to

realist claims, it becomes important to see how his argument works.

The question is complicated because Hobbes’s account of human conduct is

complicated. It is at once scientific and moral, and each of these dimensions is further

divided. On the scientific dimension, Hobbes presents the drive to avoid violent death

as explanatory but concedes that it is not always descriptive of how people actually

behave. It would seem, then, that to explain human conduct we need to understand not

only the nature of human motivation but also the contingent circumstances that

account for decisions that seem contrary to that motivation. On the moral dimension,

it is possible to identify maxims of prudence as well as principles of obligation and

right, which raises the question of the relationship between rational prudence and

rationally ascertainable duties and rights. There are, in short, tensions within the fields

of science and morals as well as between them. Sandra Field, in her contribution,

discusses these tensions and suggests a way to resolve them within a Hobbesian

framework.

The solution for Hobbes, Field suggests, lies in the manner in which natural

and civil philosophy are understood. Science is philosophy, that is, speculative and

explanatory, not merely descriptive of what contingently happens either to bodies in

the world of nature or to an artificial body such as the civil association based on the

wills and agreements of human beings that Hobbes called a ‘commonwealth’. But

science is also practical, allowing people to make use of its conclusions for their

benefit, according to whatever rationality they happen to have acquired. If science

concerns human conduct, Hobbes thought, it must concern itself with how human

beings ought to behave. Civil philosophy, then, is prescriptive as well as explanatory.

It is concerned with explaining the generation or decay of a commonwealth but also

with how the aim of the commonwealth, which is peace, can be secured and therefore

with what people need to do to secure it. The explanatory and the rational, as well as

the prudent and the moral, are joined in civil philosophy. Citizens have rights and

duties as well as interests and so do sovereigns. The interest of those holding the

office of sovereign authority, qua sovereign, is peace and their ultimate duty is to

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secure that peace by means of prudent government. This, it might be added, includes

guiding the religious imagination of subjects in such a way as to support rather than

undermine civil order.

The sovereign, however, is not outside the commonwealth but part of it. As

Field explains, whether the sovereign is an individual or a collective body, it is both a

public and a private person, which implies that its public and private interests might

diverge. How can we know that the public interest will prevail? Hobbes’s civil

philosophy, which holds that sovereignty is the foundation of peace, depends on the

possibility that sovereign power can actually put the common good above personal

concerns. His argument that a sovereign’s private passions can differ from its public

ones but that the consequences are unlikely to be fatal even if the difference is great

is, Field thinks, a weak one in the light of how often regimes become tyrannical or

collapse into civil war. The public interest, Hobbes understands, is also compromised

if rulers have to make deals with potential usurpers to remain in power. Hence the

‘ruler’ needs to be distinguished from the ‘sovereign’ and the power of the ruler

constrained by sovereign power.

We have in this distinction the seeds of republicanism seen as resting on a

separation of powers. The separation of powers emerges not as a conclusion proposed

by Hobbes himself but as a solution to a theoretical and practical difficulty in

Hobbes’s civil philosophy that this philosophy does not provide. It is rationality in the

form of more robust and effective institutions rather than as moral virtue that provides

an answer to the question of how peace can be secured within a material system:

peace depends not on virtue alone but on institutions that allow rule and regularity to

gain the upper hand in the struggle against contingency (‘fortune’) by constraining

destructive passions. But although institutions are important for some republicans, for

other republicans they are less important than the civic virtues whose cultivation is

urged by Plato and Aristotle or by recent communitarians (Haakonssen 2012, 732).

In his reply to Field, Luke O’Sullivan suggests that Hobbes’s confidence in

the rational exercise of sovereign power ‘relies on some heroic assumptions about the

capacity for self-restraint of the person or persons who will occupy the office of

sovereign’. It also looks to absolute authority to counter private passions, and here, he

thinks, there are reasons for doubting Field’s conclusion that Spinoza’s republican

way of solving the problem is more likely than Hobbesian absolutism to succeed. Can

a governing council constrain a monarch if the monarch can choose its members, even

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if there are procedural checks on abusing this power? And if democracy is of all

constitutional forms the most compatible with individual liberty, how can Spinoza’s

endorsement of it be reconciled with his view that a democratic constitution is also the

most difficult to maintain against the passions that individual liberty can from time to

time unleash? In the end, O’Sullivan argues, Spinoza and Hobbes were less interested

in constitutional architecture than in whether a state could keep itself going in the face

of the passions arising from people’s imaginations, especially with respect to religion.

It is here, especially, that the sovereign must have the final word. This conclusion

suggests the importance in any state of a civil religion, resting on the union of church

and state, to ensure that the popular imagination is channelled in such a way as to

support sovereign authority rather than undermine it.

Dealing with contingency

The contingency of human affairs, which Hobbes saw as a problem for civil order and

which remains a problem for the new realists and for Kelly, is also the theme of David

Martin Jones’s discussion of the early modern European literature on statecraft, which

understood politics and diplomacy as the exercise of prudence in circumstances that

are always particular and therefore cannot be reduced to general rules. If the insights

of this literature are sound, they should apply to international politics today, at least as

a reminder of the inherent contingency of political judgment and choice. And indeed

the tensions between the requirements of action in an unsettled and rapidly-changing

world and the moral ideals and principles of liberal internationalism are strongly

reminiscent of the tension between scholastic moralizing and the maxims of prudence

offered to princes and to the governors of republican states by sixteenth-century

politiques such as Machiavelli and Lipsius. Perhaps the biggest contrast, now as then,

is between the abstract and categorical injunctions found in discourses of justice or

rights and a ‘prudent rhetoric of reasonableness’ in approaching situations whose

complexities and uncertainties challenge efforts to deal with them by applying rules.

Prudence requires judgment in following rules and provides a bridge between virtue,

understood by Machiavelli and his followers in Roman rather than Christian terms,

and expediency. Indeed, the latter achieves the level of genuine prudence only when it

is tempered by virtue, just as virtue is reasonable only when tempered by prudence.

Lipsius’s influential, if now forgotten, Politica established a foundation for the

early modern ‘art of policy’ and, more generally, for the rhetorical need by rulers and

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their counsellors to control how various audiences responded to their actions and

justifications. The way an actor presented himself and his policy could make or break

that policy and his credibility as a policy-maker. In the rhetorical world of sixteenth-

century statecraft, the rhetoric of necessity and prudence proved more persuasive than

that of justice or Christian virtue. But this did not entail a complete rejection of right,

for the reason of state of the politiques was an appeal not solely to expediency

(‘necessity’) but also to the right of a state to self-preservation, since its continued

existence is (or was presumed to be) the indispensable condition of civil order and

public morality. Moral arguments, in so far as they could still persuade, needed to be

brought into decision-making by an exercise of situational case reasoning (‘casuistry’)

in which their proper application was shown to depend on the circumstances of the

situation at hand. Prudence, then, was a mysterious and changeable amalgam of moral

and expediential considerations (in Lipsius’s vocabulary, ‘mixed prudence’) that left

room for princely discretion and provided a powerful rhetoric of public justification.

Whether, as Jones argues, this Lipsian understanding of statecraft can provide

rational guidance for international politics in our own tumultuous age or, as Jeremy

Arnold suggests in his reply, it is no longer relevant in an age of democratically-

elected governments and public demands for transparency and accountability, remains

a matter for debate. But the Lipsian view also raises questions about the viability of

democratic government, which is, as Arnold reminds us, a question as old as political

philosophy itself. Equally pressing is how the ‘presentation’ of a policy using the

maxims of a Lipsian rhetoric of mixed prudence can stand up against the counter-

presentation of its arguments as hypocritical. And underlying both worries is the

deeper, philosophical, question of whether abstract moral principles can be dispensed

with altogether, as s moral sceptics and political realists continue to suggest. Arnold

joins Geuss (2008) in arguing that the vocabulary of prudence is as abstract and open

to interpretation as that of justice, and that bad judgment is possible in extracting

maxims from cases as well as in applying them to cases. And if the circumstances in

which we act are unjust, why embrace rather than resist the injustice? Perhaps the

lesson is that both prudence and justice display rationality or potential rationality and

therefore that a rational politics, besides acknowledging the limits of contingent and

abstract reasoning, must acknowledge and consider the claims of both.

Historically, how to reconcile justice and prudence remained a question for

successors to the sixteenth-century politiques. One can follow the thread of their

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‘mixed prudence’ through a variety of realist, republican, and natural law discourses

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is evident in Grotius’s reconstruction of

the law of nations as a kind of legal casuistry for managing relations between states

(Hunter 2014, 566), the writings of Vattel and other eighteenth-century writers on

diplomacy, Pufendorf’s construction of a civil philosophy that could achieve justice

and peace within and between the warring states of Europe, and similar efforts by the

American founders to construct a durable union of states in British America

(Hendrickson 2003). But the issue is not limited to politics and reverberates beyond

these contexts. For many moralists, satisfactions must be pursued within the limits

prescribed by morality. Prudence, understood as the effort to bring about desired

outcomes, is not allowed to override moral prohibitions. This is the Pauline principle,

that ‘evil is not to be done that good may come of it’ (Donagan 1977, 155). The

principle can be read as stating an analytical proposition as well as a moral

imperative: one cannot justly pursue good ends by morally forbidden means. Others

reverse the relation between ends and means, letting ends determine the jurisdiction of

moral limits on action or, as in rule utilitarianism, accepting the authority of those

moral rules the observance of which has the best consequences. Occupying the middle

ground is a pragmatic ethic, of which Lipsius’s mixed prudence is an example, in

which cases are decided neither by morality or expediency alone but some

combination of each, the ethical course being the best course ‘all things considered’.

It is doubtful that any middle-ground ethic (Navari 2013) can achieve such a result

while remaining distinct from consequentialism.

From imagination to virtue

Whether and how justice and prudence can be reconciled is not a uniquely modern

question but one that also exercised thinkers in the ancient world. Nor is it the only

reconciliation project that theorists of practical reason have attempted. Turning to

Plato, we are brought from the tension between justice and prudence, which is evident

in the exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Book 1 of the Republic, to the

tension between reason and imagination. O’Sullivan, in his reply to Kelly, highlights

the importance of imagination for Hobbes. It is also important for Plato, as Christina

Tarnopolsky shows when she argues that the Socratic rationality on display in Book 1,

which is not only demonstrative but combative, is tempered by imaginative rationality

in the myths, poems, and stories that shape a community’s identity. This imaginative

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rationality is illustrated in the idea of thumos (often translated by words like ‘spirit’ or

‘impulse’ that connote energy or passion), which in the Republic are often linked with

emotions such as patriotism, honour, shame, and indignation that presuppose and also

reinforce the bonds of community. It is, as Tarnopolsky emphasizes, an idea that not

only connects self and community but one that can also divide communities, as the

Greek world was divided during the Peloponnesian War and Athens divided internally

as that war gradually destroyed the polis in ways Thucydides had dramatized in his

History.

At issue here is the rationality of emotions and of the faculty of imagination

that plays an important role in emotional rationality, which is the rationality of mythos

rather than logos. And in fact Books 2 through 10 of the Republic are full of stories

and images, such as the cave and the divided line. But, as Loy Hui-chieh suggests in

his reply to Tarnopolsky, this aesthetic or rhetorical dimension is supplementary to

reason, not intrinsic to it. It is needed to reach those whose philosophical rationality is

not fully developed. It is not needed to reach those who have matured philosophically,

for whom philosophical argument alone is required. People like that will never be

more than a tiny minority in any community, however. Demonstrative reason in the

wrong hands can go astray and lead to disaster, but so can imagination and passion.

Hence, as Loy further suggests, the need for music and poetry in educating the most

‘spirited’ class in the ideal city – the guardians – who must learn to avoid treating

their fellow citizens with the ferocity they have been trained to direct towards

outsiders. For communities, as for individuals, a balance is necessary. The Republic

considers, among other things, how such a balance – and therefore ‘philosophic’

government, which is never solely logical or demonstrative – can be achieved.

Aristotle also explores these themes, both in the Nichomachean Ethics, with

its doctrine of the mean (which is always circumstantial and therefore to some degree

contingent), and in the Politics, with its argument for a mixed constitution (one that

enables rule primarily by a class of citizens who are neither very rich nor very poor).

In politics as in personal conduct, Aristotle teaches, balance depends as much on habit

and feeling as on abstract knowledge or constitutional rules. These ideas resonate in

current debates about whether liberal democracy can provide a foundation for civil

order and civic virtue, as Adrian Pabst’s discussion of Jürgen Habermas and other

liberal theorists illustrates.

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For Pabst, Plato and Aristotle offer a realism that rests on the kind of balance

just described and is evoked by the expression ‘practical wisdom’. The alternative to

abstract rationality in the form of reasoned principles or instrumental calculation is an

understanding of human conduct, individual and collective, that acknowledges the

importance of feeling, habit, tradition, and education in creating virtuous citizens and

therefore a virtuous political community. All these are kinds of rationality; to urge

their cultivation is not to repudiate reason, though it is to repudiate the errors of moral

absolutism and amoral instrumentalism.

Underlying this defence of embedded rationality, for Pabst and many others, is

the conviction that there exists a sovereign good for human beings, one that reflects

the reasonableness of reality and is at least in part accessible through reason even if it

cannot be fully comprehended. Now, as in the past, this conviction is challenged by

other kinds of rationalism, typically materialist or instrumentalist. Materialism and

instrumentalism often go together but their partnership is contingent rather than

necessary because instrumentalism can serve spiritual as well as material ends: as a

theory of means it is indifferent to ends. A view of rationality that leaves room for

habit and virtue, and indeed depends on them, is also challenged by religious

fundamentalism. Because it puts unquestioned belief above all else, fundamentalism

invites fanaticism by severing the connection between belief and intellect. Faith and

reason need each other if they are to avoid the excesses of religious extremism as well

as those of materialist instrumentalism. Triangulating these various concerns, Pabst

arrives at his own version of a political theology that can claim to be reasonable.

According to Pabst, efforts to find a middle ground such as Habermas’s post-

metaphysical politics or Rawls’s political liberalism must fail because they secularize

religious faith rather than take it on its own terms. Neither Habermas nor Rawls can

bridge the gap because their thinking remains rooted in the premise that reason can be

divorced from faith. Neither grasps how radically secular rationalism undermines its

own premises by denying the shared ethical values necessary to sustain a society and

guide its politics in a humane way that avoids the injustices inherent in market

competition or state coercion. Nor can the historical reason advocated by the new

realists provide that middle ground because their scepticism and ideological criticism

leave nothing to resist even more extreme forms of competition and coercion. In

short, whether its view of rationality is economic, moral or historical, contemporary

political theory denies the shared – and more importantly, for Pabst, transcendental –

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values needed to constitute and sustain a genuine, because legitimate, community. A

community based on the wrong values, secular and disputed values, is vulnerable to

extremism and will degenerate into anarchy or tyranny.

What liberal theorizing leaves out, Pabst argues, is attention to feeling, habit,

and religious faith. It fails to see that reason is always tied to emotion and indeed

depends on emotion even as it seeks to constrain it. The products of reason can appear

impersonal and objective but the experience of reasoning never is. Emotion also

connects human beings to one another and to the natural world through the virtues of

sympathy and benevolence. And it connects human beings to the transcendent through

a pre-rational trust in the reasonableness of reality that is the foundation of religious

belief. Habermas and Rawls made late-career efforts to broaden their understanding of

rationality and specifically to make room for faith, but those efforts fail, Pabst thinks,

because they remain wedded to proceduralist conceptions of reason that exclude the

possibility of an objective and transcendent common good. The only way forward, he

argues, is to embrace the pre-modern claim, rejected by modernity, that such a good

exists and that reason can apprehend it.

Pre-modern philosophy provides the necessary starting point in the idea of

phronesis (practical wisdom), which concerns the correct use of reason to avoid the

extremes of deficiency and excess. Practical wisdom is embedded in habit and the

cultivation of dispositions that earn the title of virtues because they support human

flourishing. Procedural principles and instrumental calculation cannot get us there

without virtue, which is primary in shaping the character of communities as well as

individuals. Pabst does not mention contemporary Catholic thinkers like Germain

Grisez and John Finnis (1980, 1998), no doubt because of in basing their arguments

on natural law they affirm the separation between reason and faith that he denies. But

the theory of basic goods they advance, drawing on Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotle

and Augustine, does offer a highly-developed alternative to individualistic theories of

modern politics from Hobbes and Locke to Habermas and Rawls.

Without rejecting Pabst’s line of argument, William Bain explains some of the

historical and theological contexts it presupposes. Like Leo Strauss, Pabst wants to

recover a Greek tradition that united philosophy with theology to provide a theory of

objective human goods – the kind of theory that modernity has largely abandoned.

But unlike Strauss, he draws upon Christianity to mediate this recovery and, as Bain

shows, it matters what kind of Christian theology is doing the mediating. There is, in

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particular, a tension internal to medieval Christian thought between the nominalism

that triumphed in modernity and the theological (‘metaphysical’) realism it displaced.

This realism appropriated Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of an objective and

rationally knowable good but also replaced their God, a craftsman who shapes pre-

existing material, with a God who creates the universe out of nothing. The result of

this replacement is a tension between God’s intellect and God’s will, for it is hard to

reconcile the idea of a rationally intelligible universe with that of an omnipotent God

who might choose to make the universe unintelligible or to manage it arbitrarily. The

modern conception of rationality that Pabst rejects provides one way to resolve this

tension: God made the world and it is for us to understand how it works and to live

according to how we understand it. But, Bain argues, there are other resolutions that

preserve both God’s power and the idea of a rational universe. One of these is the idea

of God as a lawgiver, whose laws reason can discern and obey even if it cannot know

what is ultimately good. This way of resolving the tension, one should notice,

introduces a distinction between the good and the right. Even if we cannot know a

final or objective good we can act rightly by obeying God’s law. It seems that we

must rely on faith that there is a connection between that law and the good we cannot

discern. But, Pabst suggests, modern conceptions of rationality also depend on faith

insofar as they decline to defend their assumptions. His essay can therefore be read as

an invitation to engage with ways of thinking that question those assumptions.

Customary and critical morality

We associate with Kant the idea that a reflective morality is superior to the moral

practices of a given society and the habits and virtues they encourage. ‘Morality’, on

this view, was not a synonym for ‘system of mores’ but, as Alan Donagan puts it, ‘a

standard by which systems of mores, actual and possible, were to be judged and by

which everybody ought to live, no matter what the mores of his neighbors might be’

(Donagan 1977, 1). For Donagan and other Kantians, this meant a single, universal

(‘common’) morality that is rational in being discernable by reason and binding on all

human beings as rational creatures. Those who challenge this conception of morality

do so from a variety of perspectives, of which the most penetrating holds that critical

judgments of mores need not rest on a single and universal standard. One can judge

one morality from the standpoint of another. And if a moral system is coherent – if it

has its own historical and contextual rationality – it provides resources for judgment

15

or criticism. The moral critic in a given society need not adopt ‘the view from

nowhere’ (Nagel 1986); he can, as Michael Walzer argues, stand ‘a little to the side,

but not outside’ (1987, 61). Even a minimal morality of mutual forbearance, which

presupposes freedom and moral equality, has cultural content: as Walzer puts it, ‘the

thin morality is already very thick’ (1994, 12). The common morality discerned by

Donagan is embedded in historical understandings from which it has been abstracted

but on which it nevertheless rests and cannot escape. For Walzer, the discoveries of

the moral philosopher, of a Kant or a Rawls, are not really discoveries; they are

disguised interpretations of the moral and political experience about which the

philosopher is theorizing (1987, 21).

Peter Finn makes this point in discussing a case that Donagan uses to illustrate

the capacity of common morality – which rests on philosophical rationality rather than

the rationality of habit or custom – to correct the pathologies of a tradition in which a

practice of reflective social criticism has not emerged, fallen into disuse, or become

corrupted. The case is that of the Catholic martyr Franz Jägerstätter, who was

executed by the Nazis for resisting conscription on grounds of conscience. Finn’s

argument is that Jägerstätter’s reasoning actually illustrates the kind of embedded

social criticism that Donagan thinks it challenges. Donagan rejects Hegel’s criticism

of Kant: that the morality Kant theorized, which rests on the categorical imperative, is

empty of content and that conceiving morality as the moral beliefs and practices of an

actual community allows it to embrace almost any content. Donagan holds that

common morality, as understood by Kant, puts limits on that content.

Because many of those who counselled him believed that serving in Hitler’s

army was morally permissible, Jägerstätter had to examine his conscience to reach the

moral conclusion it counselled. But the evidence we have about this case, Finn argues,

suggests that Jägerstätter reached this conclusion not by abstract moral reasoning but

by drawing on the moral resources of the overlapping communities to which he

belonged as a Catholic, an Austrian, and a husband and father. In doing so, he had to

reconcile the multiple personas he inhabited in these various communities as well as

weigh the consequences of his actions. In these reflections, the implications of his

decision for the future of a church caving under the weight of worldly concerns

played a crucial role. The church and other communities he resisted, even the German

military, were not univocal; they offered moral resources on which a conscientious

objector could draw, and those who urged his compliance were themselves divided on

16

the implications of their communal beliefs. The case, properly interpreted, shows how

a person might work to reconcile conflicting prescriptions not by applying an abstract,

rationally-derived standard, but by bringing his various moral personas into dialogue

with one another to reach a reasonable conclusion.

Kant had addressed, in the Groundwork, this tension between the morality that

reason can identify and unreflective moral judgment. ‘There is something splendid’

about the latter, Kant writes, ‘but what is bad about it … is that it cannot protect itself

very well and is easily seduced’ (Kant 1996, 59). This Kantian suspicion of the mores

of time and place is reiterated by Heather Roff, who argues that Jägerstätter’s case in

fact supports rather than undermines the Kantian argument. In choosing to resist

serving in Hitler’s army, Jägerstätter did not substitute the mores of the various

communities to which he belonged for a rational and universal common morality. He

assessed the arguments generated by those mores from the perspective of his own

conscientious examination of their claims, and with a conscience that in its search for

rational justification tracked the common morality that Kant argues is based on the

categorical imperative. This imperative, which Kant formulates in several different

ways, is expressed most intelligibly in the formula of humanity, which requires us to

treat other human beings as thinking creatures like ourselves, and who like us are

entitled to pursue their own self-chosen ends. And it is Jägerstätter, not those who

counselled him to submit his judgment of the justice of Germany’s war to that of the

Nazi regime, who came closest to discerning the implications of an ethic founded on

this fundamental principle which the idea of the categorical imperative in its various

formulations aims to capture.

In his reply to Roff, Finn argues that Jägerstätter may have acted consistently

with the common morality identified by Kant and Donagan but he did not ‘apply’ the

categorical imperative or principles derived from it to his situation. He arrived at his

conclusions by interpreting what he thought were the commitments he had to fulfil as

a member of various communities and on which he believed his integrity to rest, not

by identifying and using abstract moral principles. Without denying this, one might

still argue that in reflecting on these commitments he implicitly tested his judgments

against embedded moral principles that were powerful because they were expressions

of common morality. He was not a moral theorist and could not say, nor did he ask,

what these principles were or how they might fit together to form a coherent system.

That is the task of the theorist of morality, not the moral agent. Choosing and acting in

17

response to circumstantial challenges is not philosophy and the rationality it entails is

not propositional exactness but judgment. Perhaps Finn and Roff would agree on this

conclusion, though they arrive at it by different routes.

Theory and practice

Many political theorists think that theorizing about politics is, like politics itself, a

practical activity. The point of moral and political reflection is to navigate the

competing demands of morality and interest and to organize communities so that the

proper balance can be realized. Political theory is thus intrinsically prescriptive or

‘normative’. Normative ethics banished conceptual analysis and other meta-ethical

inquiries to the margins of moral philosophy half a century ago. Normative political

theory has done the same: the expression ‘political theory’ in contemporary discourse

is usually a synonym for normative political theory, as if there were no other modes or

registers in which political theorizing could proceed.

The writings of Michael Oakeshott offer a different view. Political theorizing,

Oakeshott thought, could be explanatory as well as prescriptive and in fact counts as

theorizing mainly to the degree that it is not prescriptive. It is important, he thought,

to distinguish theorizing from its objects – there is, manifestly, such a distinction and

therefore a good reason from the standpoint of avoiding confusion to recognize it.

One of the implications of distinguishing between theory and practice – or, as

Oakeshott preferred to put it, between the activities of theorizing and doing – is that

the rationality we expect in philosophy is not the same as that of political and other

kinds of practical activity. There are even grounds for thinking that the impulse to

move from ideas to action is a dangerous one, leading to political stupidity and

sometimes to despotism (Strauss 2013). One of the challenges of political theorizing

is to resist what Hannah Arendt, with Heidegger in mind, called an ‘attraction to the

tyrannical’ that has followed philosophy since its emergence in the ancient world

(Lilla 2001, 43).

Genuine philosophical rationality is ‘explanatory’ rather than prescriptive and

includes defining concepts, identifying assumptions, and other activities in which an

observer stands back and tries to figure out what is going on. If the object of attention

is human activity there is already a gap between doing (performing) and observing

(theorizing). On this view, Oakeshott’s view, there are different kinds of theorizing:

scientists and historians offer explanations, though they explain the things they are

18

trying to understand in different ways. Philosophy, too, seeks to explain, differing

from science and history, as well as from practical thinking, in the kinds of

explanations it provides. But its approach is sceptical: philosophy does not rely on the

presuppositions that determine scientific, historical, or practical inquiry but aims to

question (‘criticize’, ‘interrogate’) those presuppositions. And it must be willing to

seek and examine its own presuppositions. The expression ‘political theory’ embraces

a diversity of inquiries and modes of understanding, but to the degree that political

theory is philosophical in this sense, it acknowledges a distinction between engaging

in political activity and reflecting upon, explaining, or theorizing it.

Such a view of the separation of theory and practice is open to a number of

objections, of which two stand out. The first, which is central to self-styled ‘critical

theory’, is that to theorize about an activity is to do so for some purpose, which makes

theorizing itself a practical activity. Instead of a gap between theory and practice, we

have a unity of theory and practice that is achieved, in this argument, by reducing

theorizing to doing. The second objection, which is important in the discipline of

intellectual history, is that the distinction between theory and practice must like any

distinction be understood in its historical context, and that what looks like a gap in

one context can look like a unity in another. Whether a particular theoretical inquiry is

or is not practical is therefore a question best left to the historian. Both objections in

effect reduce theory to ideology, a reduction that is also evident in Steven Smith’s

reply to my paper on this topic.

The objections are self-contradictory because they presuppose the distinction

between theorizing and doing to which they object. In the case of critical theory, the

argument that theorizing is inescapably practically motivated implies that critical

theory itself is practically motivated, which directs our attention not to the truth of this

claim but to the motives for making it. And in the case of intellectual history, the

argument that all ideas must be understood in their historical context deprives the

historian of a warrant to make such a context-independent claim. Historians, whose

activity is to understand and explain the past, are presumably not engaged in an

activity that is practical in the sense of being prescriptive or ideological, but in one

that is explanatory or ‘scientific’ (in the sense of Wissenschaft, systematic inquiry).

Historical inquiry is therefore theoretical, in its own distinctive way, because it aims

at truth, not action. It is typical of ideological criticism to focus on motives as

revealing that those who are engaged in efforts to cultivate objectivity are either

19

deceivers or deceived. But only those confident that they have arrived at the truth,

understood not as provisional but as permanent and absolute, can be dismissed in this

way. The charge is hollow against the sceptic.

If these objections to distinguishing theory and practice are weak, they leave

Oakeshott’s defence of the separation thesis intact. For Oakeshott, theorizing starts in

the cave and cannot entirely escape it. But what distinguishes it from other kinds of

thinking and especially from practical thinking is its effort to interrogate rather than

use the theorems it generates. Political theorizing is practical when it applies those

theorems in judging or prescribing. It is theoretical – distinctively theoretical – when

it foregoes judging or prescribing political behaviour for understanding and

explaining it. If the theorist does not entirely succeed in this effort, only further

theorizing can remedy the defect. Theorizing politics is therefore not the same thing

as engaging in politics, and to the extent that theorizing is itself political it falls short

in its effort to be theoretical. The rationality of political theory is not the practical

rationality of politics, nor the scientific or historical rationality that defines those

modes of inquiry, but the sceptical (Oakeshott would say, ‘unconditional’) rationality

that distinguishes genuine philosophy from other kinds of inquiry. The distinctive

contribution of political theory to knowledge, then, is not to generate ideologies or

recommend policies but to improve our understanding of the different forms that

rationality in politics can take and the limits of each.

Most of the following papers were presented at a symposium in April 2014

hosted by the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore

and co-sponsored by the Singapore Chapter of the International Conference for the

Study of Political Thought. The symposium was organized by Luke O’Sullivan with

funding from the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Chandran Kukathas,

Knud Haakonssen, and Vijayalakshmi Rehunathan provided invaluable advice and

support, as did Matthew Johnson in producing the special issue.

20

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