The Practical Art of Politics and the Lost Cause of Political Philosophy

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Rationalistic Errors of Political Theory

The ambition to understand everything has its risks. Among these I shall highlight two: in the first place, we may treat something as if we understood everything about it, when, in fact, we do not. In the second place, we may keep looking for the wrong thing, as when we expect to learn everything there is to know about a thing, when, in fact, it is impossible to reach a stage of final and complete knowledge about the thing. These are two variants of rationalistic error.

In political theory, there is a habit — it becomes a full-blown compulsion in political philosophy — to treat its central themes as rationalistic puzzles in need or capable of being pieced together so as to yield a complete picture. The occasional admission that such an image has not yet been achieved is uttered as an expression of regret, as evidence of a momentous deficiency calling for redress.

It does not seem to occur to political philosophers that the whole point of politics is to get by in a world that does not provide us with a complete picture and a finite set of pieces waiting to be fitted into a perfectly interlocking whole. 

Modern Politics Is Practical, Accommodative, and Experimental

Modern politics is practical, accommodative and experimental, owing to its being saturated with the democratic spirit. Attempts at theoretical uniformity/ideological predominance are subjected to relentless challenges from many sides. What is more, in an open access society, people — in principle, everyone —  are allowed to go ahead with practical action in vigorous pursuit of their political ambitions while being forced to accommodate one another. Whatever the findings of political philosophy, if they do not survive excursions outside of the seminar room, the people will shout "rubbish!" and go ahead with their own plans.

The meaning of modern politics is: trying out what happens when people are allowed to have different opinions and act on varying interests and convictions, in the face of changing circumstances that are unpredictable and in some measure the result of the indeterminate consequences of competing views of the world.

Completeness, Consistency, and Intellectual Concordance 

Completeness, consistency, and intellectual concordance my be prominent features of mathematics. By contrast, we engage in politics, precisely because we do not find these characteristics in human interaction, at least not in sufficient measure. Also, by engaging in politics, we tend to add to the lack of these qualities. 

The political philosopher's compulsive search for common intellectual ground — the foundations on which we all are supposed to be standing — is misconceived; in reality, we act, cooperate, and coexist in the absence of comprehensive agreement on “the good society,” relying instead on countless fragments of tradition and improvised and emerging contemporary accommodation. 

It is simply not true that society works because we agree on certain things—vital enough to have to be agreed upon by us for society to work. If that were an indispensable requirement, society would never have been able to become as complex and huge an order as it has. Of course, we do agree on many things, and certain objects of concordance are more important than others and some are even very significant, but still, such unison is just an element of the overall conditions of societal functioning, no more exceptional than the habits and institutions that allow us to coexist in the face of innumerable differences between us. See more in my post Permeable Individualism.

It is not the neat completeness of the system — “we all believe in the same basic tenets” which the philosopher is hoping to discover — that keeps society ticking, but our capacity for adaptation and accommodation in the face of inevitable inconsistency—a capacity producing itself inconsistencies both in the form of challenges posed by incompatible structures (e.g. admitting people of different Weltanschauungen to the community e.g.) and in the form of means to cope with such challenges (e.g. keeping religious issues out of political debate).

The Transrational Function of Politics

If Betty fails to come up with a formula for walking the tightrope, this does not preclude her from crossing it nonetheless.

In order to understand politics and the origin of a functioning society, we should not be looking for a general theory of moral consensus but consider the multifarious ways in which society is made possible by mutual accommodation on the most diverse levels. This is not a task just for political theorising; it is an empirical challenge that transcends academic disciplines and even academia itself. 

Politics is a producer of transrationality. It helps us do things in the absence of a complete, comprehensive, mutually understood and agreed theory of doing them. It helps us go beyond ("trans") attainments—as in devising a watch—for which we depend on a strictly rational strategy ("rationality"). One of the outstanding features of political behaviour is its tendency to search out transrational practices, which I define as schemes of action that are practicable even though we lack a rational blueprint by which to implement them. Perhaps the most important type of transrational practice is the substitution of deadlocked rational propositions (relating to partial and perhaps short-term concerns) by incentives to compromise (to secure overall long-term advantages). 

Transrationality in Adam Smith — Self-Love, Prudence, and Social Values

Adam Smith, wisely differentiated human interest into a hierarchy of self-interest (short-term, personal interest), prudence (long-term, personal interest), and still "higher" values (coordinating the individual with his community). Man draws on these different rankings (rather than just one ranking) of values to come up with complex trade-offs which (can) take him beyond ("trans") the rationality pushed to the fore by immediate concerns, say, in the form of passionately held political views. Both the choice of the final ranking—which may be inspired by intuition, habit, or imitation—and the chosen strategy of transrational accommodation may be strictly transrational, i.e. unreasoned and not understood.

Transrationality in John Locke

In the below passage, John Locke seems to allude to a similar "landscape" of, or human susceptibility for, transrationality, when he writes: 

By reason, however, I do not think is meant here that faculty of the understanding which forms trains of thought and deduces proofs, but certain definite principles of action from which spring all virtues and whatever is necessary for the proper moulding of morals. 

Quoted from Hayek, Kinds of Rationalism, in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, London, 1967, p.84, where he comments:

It was mainly through ... [Descartes] that the very term 'reason' changed its meaning. To the medieval thinkers reason had meant mainly a capacity to recognize truth, especially moral truth, when they met it, rather than a capacity of deductive reasoning from explicit premisses.")

Politics - The Discovery of Good Governance

Politics is a thoroughly practical activity, which — in its democratic form — tends to save us from the horrific consequences of theoretical purism. Differentiating good governance structures from bad ones—by educated trial and error—seems to me a more promising, yet a less uplifting and far more cumbersome and intricate proposition than a general hankering after a theory pandering to the desire to understand everything, as if the political interaction of people followed the finite, readily grasped logic of a simple mechanism.

Politics is a discovery procedure whose subjects and findings are constantly changing, yielding indeterminate and unpredictable outcomes, whose contingency is a measure, up to a point, of the flexibility that makes social co-existence viable in the first place.

Is there an algorithm by which all results of scientific progress may be arrived at? No. Why would we expect to discover such an algorithm to be at the heart of human society? 

A Liberal Myth and an the Exaggerated Belief in Social Concordance

There is a certain incongruity in liberal thought insofar as it stresses both (1) the nature of freedom as a spontaneous order and (2) the need to justify freedom in conclusive terms. In so far as (1) is true, it will hardly be possible to attain (2). A society, in which freedom is a salient characteristic, is a grown organism with many components that have not emerged by purpose and design to be uniquely intelligible or form a moral unity with other of its aspects. The structure of a free society is not isomorphic to a sequence of deductive steps. 

All sorts of silly philosophical conundrums are brought to the fore by the academic obsession of according inordinate respect to the putative need for moral unity. Thus, liberals worry themselves to death at the thought that society demands obedience from a citizen even though he may not concur with other citizens on the basic constitutional principles. The fact of the matter is that no society will ever exist that does not produce dissension of this type—while nonetheless sufficient cohesion will be arrived at by a large number of accommodative processes.

Robust Tolerance of Dissension Is the Basis of Social Concordance 

A man who thoroughly disliked the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Bundesrepublik, may have lived the life of a perfectly respectable citizen and a happy person under all three regimes. There is more to life than enthusiasm for a state ideology. There are personal motifs and long standing traditions of leading a life and being part of a community that induce people to acquiesce in a political order that does not suit them. Of course, in a country where everyone is doing well, it is easy and natural to express agreement with the going ideology, but this must not mislead us to think that societies are first and foremost dependent on ideological unanimity among its citizens.    

Thus, assuming that society is built on concordance and agreement concerning certain basic political principles is a temptation easily, and indeed generally, succumbed to. I suggest, however, that — in terms of functional logic — first the constituents of society must work out arrangements, find institutions and chance on lucky circumstances so as to be able to congregate and live together in spite of their innumerable differences. Society does not congregate to act out some preordained solidarity or moral rapport. I suppose, this explains why for the longest time in human history societal cooperation has been dominated by massive repression and inequality. Agreement was neither natural nor readily achieved. People had to be made to "agree."

By contrast, modern free societies embrace a culture of mass dissension, where every idea and every value a person stands for, where the very identity of the individual is exposed to open questioning: why are you a Christian? Is your job in keeping with the times? What grounds do you have to espouse this political conviction? Why do you educate your children the way you do? This is possible, I surmise, not because concurrence on fundamental issues has increased, but because the art of living together in the presence of disparity has been developed to a particularly high level. We are better at being openly and avowedly different. As a trend, our disagreements are more peaceful, they often come with a learning curve and they tend to be mutually productive.