In this conclusive chapter of Part IV, we want to explore questions and perspectives that have come up in previous chapters but have not yet been specifically addressed. First comes what, since the outset of modernity, has been the thorny relationship between morality and politics, along with the issue of political realism (§1). The question of the ethics that should guide politicians is next (§2). Only partially overlapping with this complex is the question now known as the relationship of ideal and non-ideal theory, which touches once again upon the status and definition of political philosophy (§3). The so-called Critical Theory presents an arrangement of philosophy, ethics and politics that is different in more than one respect from what we have seen thus far; this is why we are going to briefly deal with it in §4.
Politicians and political theorists, along with clergymen and essayists, do often evoke this relationship, but mostly leave its first pole fuzzy in appearance, which is why we need first a short interlude in order to bring some order to the field. In the following, I shall restrict the use of the common wording ‘ethics and politics’ and replace the first term with ‘morality’, the attitude based on the moral point of view, that is the attitude to act on principles, to reject egoism, to regard what is good for other people as having equal dignity with what is good for me.1 Whatever the specific attitude and doctrine, morality is clearly opposed to a self-centred stance, aimed at an opportunistic evaluation of what is best in the given circumstances for oneself or one’s own community. This stance has sometimes been called prudence, in a last twist to the history (already mentioned in Chapter 1) of this word, far removed from Aristotle’s original understanding of φρόνησις/phronesis.
Moral theories, giving shape and justification to human acting, can treat the question of ‘what is right?’ (normative theories, assessing the morality of single acts or principles/rules of acting) or the very different problem of ‘how to achieve the (moral) good’. Normative theories can be deontological, assessing the rightness of acts from the point of view of principles allowing or prohibiting certain acts, such: as killing or lying; but they can also look at our acts from the point of view of their consequences (consequentialist theories). Kant’s morality is the paramount case of deontologism,2 the categorical imperative in its two formulas, its typical expressions. He who speaks of ethics (or morality) and politics with little philosophical differentiation usually intends ‘deontological ethics and politics’ – while a decent pluralism would require the examination of how other types of morality relate to politics. With utilitarianism, the main version of consequentialism and, since Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), a major current in the Anglo-Saxon cultures, the main political difficulty is the impossibility to lay a foundation for human rights, sidelined by the principle that right is what best contributes to the happiness or wellbeing (philosophical welfarism) of the greatest number of peoples. A very different relationship to politics can be found in the theories of the good, also called teleological because they assess our contribution to the good according to the overall balance of our moral life as seen from its end, the achievement, to put it with Aristotle, of the ‘good life’. Moral teleologism tends to converge with political communitarianism, but this is not a stringent link.
Back to the relationship of politics to morality in its, as it were, default version: deontologism. We have already reported Kant’s indication to re-establish harmony between the two by bringing politics back again under the auspices of morality or rather of the law as descending from Reason’s moral commands. This is a monistic solution that recognises only one principle as justified, but another monism with a different content can lead to the opposite conclusion: in Hobbes’s conception of human coexistence within the state, there is no room left for an individual morality that may differ from or contradict the laws established by the recta ratio/right reason that underpins the Leviathanic commonwealth, the only source of protection for individuals.
Hobbes represents one leading position in the wide field of political realism. In philosophical language, heeding a very ‘realistic’ view on all things politic – as it sounds in ordinary language – is only a marginal component of realism in the political sense. Essential to this are two tenets:
Within these coordinates variations have come up. The most significant is Machiavelli’s understanding of politics as being guided by principles no less imperative than morality is; but principles of different nature and enshrined in the Roman motto salus reipublicae suprema lex esto/the safety of the commonwealth has to be the ultimate law. The good of the commonwealth or country, its liberty and greatness, is seen as a universal good, no less so than the goods upheld by individual morality, and likewise worthy of personal sacrifice including that of one’s own life – as witnessed by many examples from antiquity, first of all Pericles’s obituary for the fallen Athenian soldiers quoted in Chapter 5.4 It would indeed be good, Machiavelli (1532) concedes, if a prince were to keep faith under any circumstance; but since men are evil (an anthropological statement) and do not act in this way, he who does not break faith would go down whenever keeping it would give him a disadvantage, yes, lead him to ruin – the ‘sexist’ language is in the original, though the former Florentine Secretary of state considers ruling princesses as well (Machiavelli 1532, Chapter 18).
This position confers politics a universalistic normative status not inferior to that of (deontological) morality and marks the birth of politics as an autonomous sphere of action – and, moreover, of political philosophy as not being a branch of moral thought. This ‘Machiavellian moment’ became crucial for the ‘republican’ current in modern political thought.5 But the legitimacy deficit of nation states after 1945, the universalism of worldwide human rights and the emergence of global challenges have largely modified the terrain on which classical republicanism flourished, so that the relaunch of it, recently attempted, seems to underrate the characteristics of our post-modern (in the sense defined in Chapter 7) time.
Another strain, among the attempts at recombining politics and morality, was the tradition of the ‘reason of state’, which took its name from the Jesuit Giovanni Botero’s work (Botero 1589). It pledges, dissimilarly and in opposition to Machiavelli, to respect the canons of morality, but with the exceptions made necessary in order to preserve the state. This tradition has long since extinguished in philosophy, but not at all in real politics, given the fact that, especially but not only in dictatorships, rulers have resorted to that same ‘reason’ in order to justify the brutal use of force. The issue of lying and deception in politics seems to belong to the question of what is morally allowed or prohibited, but does rather refer to a political normativity concerned with the health of the polity rather than to individual morality.6
Still on the side that disentangles politics from morals, but on a higher philosophical level, we find Hegel’s condemnation of the formal and abstract character of Kantian morality along with his celebration of the state as the dimension in which the substantial destiny of peoples and individuals is shaped in epochs whose succession represents the ascent of the Spirit (Geist) to full self-awareness and self-realisation (Hegel 1821). On this path, abstract morality of the Kantian type remains on a stair lower than the full Sittlichkeit (concrete ethical sphere) of the state in which the life of the individuals is comprised. Hegel has been much criticized, first by Marx because of his identification with Prussia’s oppressive and bureaucratic state, later by Karl Popper, who saw in him a precursor of totalitarianism and an enemy of the ‘open society’ along with Plato and Marx (Popper 1945). Nonetheless, his philosophy of individual, state and society – as it emerges also from the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and once it is read disregarding its systematic ambition – remains a rich, indispensable contribution to the understanding of modern politics; though not in the sense still present today among some German philosophers, who still believe – as it was the case 200 or 100 years ago – the fundamental choice political philosophy is confronted with in our days to be the same choice between Kant and Hegel.
The mapping of the positions regarding politics and ethics ends with a bipolar formula that, though a hundred years old, still preserves its grasp on the matter we are discussing and has not lost popularity in political and media debate. This is Max Weber’s idea that, in order to prove one person’s vocation to politics, s/he has to think and act according to two ethical principles that are in principle opposed to each other and must nonetheless both be practised in a balance.7 One is called by Weber ‘ethics of conviction’ (Weber 1919a), that is the attitude to act on principles and ideologies, anchored in one’s own deep beliefs, and regardless of the practical consequences; this was a much practised orientation in 1919, after the Great War, the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolutions and coups in the rest of Europe, but has never ceased to move masses and individuals up to our time and will probably not cease to do so in the future. The ‘ethics of responsibility’, on the contrary, directs us towards actions whose consequences we can stand up to, aware as we are that we cannot assume other humans are by nature as good as to do the best of our own intentions and acts. The underlying problem for both ethical orientations is that their own terrain, politics, is where even the best intentions are confronted with the inevitable, basic component of any politics: violence. This essential presence of violence lets Weber, himself a realist, acknowledge that politics is an ethically sensible business, which causes suffering and death – as we saw in Excursus 2. Against this background the danger for those following the ethics of conviction is thoughtless agitation and fanaticism, that is the proclamation of splendid, but unattainable ends, followed by the inability to stand up to one’s own responsibility, because the failure with its costs is entirely burdened on others’ shoulders (by evoking the evil allegedly essential to humankind, or the unreasonableness of fellow citizens). On the other hand, an orientation led exclusively by a sense of responsibility can lead to a political behaviour devoid of ideas and ideals, ending up in cynicism, barring any change and innovation.
The bipolarity found in Weber’s two forms of ethics is to be understood as an alternative to the sheer and unbridgeable dualism of other configurations given by philosophers and theologians to the relationship of politics and morality – though Weber’s two poles do not overlap with their traditional counterposition, as in Machiavelli’s or Kant’s design. Weber’s image denotes a tension between the two terms that can and should give way – he maintains – to a balance; this is never easy to find and can never be expected to last, because the vagaries of politics (as summary to those of society, economy, technology and culture), continuously upset and redefine the balance we believe to have found.
It is left to the readers to assess whether today’s politicians, worldwide or in a specific country, meet Weber’s criteria for being found endowed with a vocation to politics and enough professionalism as to decently practise it – this is the twin meaning (vocation and profession) of the German word Beruf. They should also find out if those criteria still express the requirements set by political reality in a globalised world, constrained by those nuclear weapons that make resorting to violence so absurdly suicidal, and in which international governance matters more than national parliaments and executives, the addressees of Weber’s argument. In the period between the World Wars, and still during the Cold War, the world risked to drown in a stormy sea of ‘convictions’, including, as a follow-up episode after its end, the ideological neocons rule during the presidency of George W. Bush in the USA; its political blunders (the Iraq war, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, the treatment of Iraqi Sunnis) contributed to the ignition of the horrors perpetrated by jihadism and lately an Islamist ‘state’ based on an illusionary ‘ethics of conviction’. On the other hand, the ‘responsibility’ (in the sense of business-as-usual policies) practised by politicians over the last three decades, particularly in Western countries, has shown little understanding of the under-the-surface processes going on in the middle-long run, such as: rising inequality, youth unemployment and youth disaffection, problems of the ageing population, environmental downsides of ‘progress’. In other words, to be ‘responsible’ without analysing the long-term trends or having a strategy, flexible though it may be, can also erode the basis of democratic governance. Even a political realist can agree on this. The fear of resuscitating big ideological convictions, such as the grand récits/great narratives on progress and/or classless society put to rest by postmodernists,8 has unfortunately led to the bloating of so-called pragmatism, as if being smart and flexible in the political business were only possible in the absence of deeper ideas and designs.
Let us now draw a more general conclusion. In its absolute version, the opposition of realism and idealism which we have some times alluded to shows ample signs of obsolescence and, furthermore, was never fully real. Plenty of thinkers, religious or secular, upheld idealism, but hardly any real political entity ever acted according to it. Look at the revolutionary regimes, such as the French one after 1789 and the Soviet-Russian after October 1917: the more they proclaimed to act on idealistic principles of liberty and equality, the more they used the bloodiest tools justified by realists in order to impose themselves, survive civil wars, eradicate the opposition. Politics is neither a gala dinner nor a religious service and mostly consists of a difficult entanglement of principled and selfish behaviours. The best we can hope to achieve as people of good will is to move weights inside this mix in favour of the former, also by manoeuvring the latter to the former’s advantage.9 In order to do so, a theoretical framework for ‘reading’ political events that is less rough than realism vs. idealism is helpful.
There is another reason why that opposition was never fully real or properly designed. Idealism or normativism, which is in my view the more adequate term, used to be, and still is, a purely normative doctrine, telling people and countries how they should ideally behave in order to uphold certain values. A realist approach to politics is, first of all, a privileged way to understand it and to make predictions, at least conditional (‘if A acts like that, B will be likely to react in this other way’); as such, it made the birth of political science possible, which would have never materialised if politics had always been looked at with normativist lenses. On the other hand, realism was and is not just an academic discipline or school, but also a practical intention of directing politics on its own terms. This was essential in Il Principe, much less in the (implicitly realist) political science of the twentieth century. Here methodological realism is paired with different political orientations, and not always on the right wing of the spectrum.10 The association of realism with figures, such as Carl Schmitt or Henry Kissinger has been misread as a necessary link between it and conservative or imperialist positions, as if progressive politics were only possible on the fragile and erratic shoulders of idealistic prescriptions.
There is more to say on the evolution of realism. Kenneth Waltz (1959) tried to disengage it from its questionable anthropological roots (the moral good is not possible in politics because, in humankind, evil and aggressive tendencies prevail) and to re-found it on systemic grounds (international anarchy between sovereign states makes war always a possibility, or Waltz’s third image, cf. above Chapter 6). It was wise to detach the realist pattern of explanation from philosophical views on human nature; on the other hand, this last issue cannot be excluded from debates on ethics and politics. It is unavoidable to question the hidden anthropological assumptions of normativism (the openness of human beings and – what is more doubtful – political communities to behave according to an universalistic legislation deriving from a reasonable top principle). Yet let us look at the realism of the systemic type: its substantive basis, international anarchy, has been significantly eroded in the sixty years after Man, the State and War was published. Nuclear weapons have made the world less immediately anarchical and the resort to war much less likely than it used to be; climate change has moved the entire international society to at least try to find a solution in favour of future generations; and human rights have become talked about more frequently and fought for more energically than it used to be before 1948, the year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).11 In the second and third case, normativity based on worldwide shared concern, fear and solidarity, is directly playing a role in politics, even in its darkest corner: international politics, in which, unfortunately, many actors keep behaving like Machiavelli’s beasts, the fox and the lion, or worse. In the case of climate change and nuclear weapons, we have seen in Chapter 7 how these man-made challenges raise in the very heart of politics issues of universalistic normativity that include future generations. This shows that, along with problems regarding the regulation of biotechnology, moral questions now arise in the middle of politics, and their separation is a tale from other eras. While moral pluralism (implying different moral approaches to different spheres of action or types of relationships) seems to take the stage in moral philosophy, also on the side of realism things are no longer so clear-cut, as if the world still consisted of only the likes of either St. Francis or of Cesare Borgia, the cruel prince much praised in Il Principe (clones of the latter do however abound).
What is ideal theory? Why are we discussing its justification and usefulness?
According to John Rawls, ideal theory ‘develops the conception of perfectly just basic structure and the corresponding duties and obligations of persons under the fixed constraints of human life and favourable circumstances’ (Rawls 1999a, 216). Non-ideal theory deals with the principles that are to be adopted ‘under less happy conditions’ and in the case of non-compliance to the norms issued by ideal theory, which assumes instead strict compliance with the principles of justice.
This sounds like a commonsensical stance, but Hegel warned us that what is called common sense contains plenty of metaphysical assumptions. In this case, it is the assumption that life, political life in a democracy in particular, will be better if we redesign it thinking that people have in mind high values that are rationally established and can build institutions perfectly adequate to them, except that the latter are to be reconciled with people not always compliant with the models, or with circumstances that are not exactly favourable to them. We know, however, that those perfect people never existed in history or were a tiny minority of losers or fanatics, sometimes with blood on their hands. We also know that models of justice or liberty or solidarity are effective only inasmuch as they are born from conflicts and movements in a particular country or area at a particular time, hence they are very much marked by history and anthropology; not as specification or readaptation of a systematic ideal honed by philosophers. Also, to become politically effective, the values we pursue, the concrete models of better institutions we may have in mind must be to a certain extent able to accommodate the less ideal and rather self-centred interests of the groups who are to support the movement aspiring to realise the model. Innovative policy shifts can be performed not by a company of the stainless, but rather by coalitions in which angels are ready to walk for a while hand-in-hand with less noble creatures, if not with devils.
The idea that political philosophy deals with perfect institutions that all citizens are loyal to, while non-compliance with those institutions is a matter for non-ideal theory as a sort of B-theory goes against this book’s basic view that politics is first of all about conflicts, in which by no means the parties are a priori on the right or the wrong side, because a perfectly just solution rarely exists, while the first and foremost problem is to develop institutions and policies that prevent conflicts from degenerating into war and disruption. The notion of ideal theory does not lack a certain naiveté paired with the philosopher’s arrogance: on the one hand, the belief that possessing the perfect model is prior and conditional to redesigning reality ignores how the reality of political and social life comes about, in a way very distant from conceptual engineering. A whiff of arrogance is, on the other hand, undeniable in the pretence to find criteria capable of reordering to the best problem-laden areas of human life by philosophical deduction from principles, doing better than the actors themselves and ignoring other types of knowledge, collaboration with which, rather, should be attempted. This unhappy complex is what makes ‘normative political philosophy’, both in general and applied to a specific sector, futile and boring every single time it does not even attempt at preserving in the theory the fullness of the stuff it pretends to ideally regulate.12 What is missing in this mental attitude is the sense of the obstacle one should keep alive and bring to bear when looking for theoretical formulas concerned with human life in politics and society; otherwise those formulas seem to be borne by solipsistic parthenogenesis.
Another trouble with ideal theory is that its very idea fails to recognise politics as the sphere in which ideas matter, but only do so if they can find cultural, social and political forces endorsing them and translating them into policy decisions. The great ideas that in the far or recent past moved the world had each a bearer or protagonist, whom theorists identified as the principal agent of their ideas: the monarchy for absolutism, the bourgeoisie for constitutionalism and liberalism, the working class and sections of the middle class for European socialism and the New Deal, peasants and intellectuals in the liberation movements of the ‘Third World’. The attempt at locating this agent is lacking in the recent, pale appearances of ideal theory; the need to provide, along with speculative formulas, a Zeitdiagnose/diagnosis of the times as their complement is disregarded and possibly felt as unphilosophical. With its two foci – ideal theory of communication and democracy as well as Zeitdiagnose – Habermas’s work displays a refreshing difference in perspective from this attitude. On the other hand, all this is not to deny the heuristic value of ideal theory whenever it contributes to defining concepts and alternatives without fully renouncing a more or less explicit tie to real political phenomena and anthropological or cultural components.
All of this can also be looked at from an evolutionary point of view. European modernity has already experienced a powerful endeavour to rethink the polity in the light of a morality shaped by the idea of Reason. This happened in the Enlightenment up to its philosophical culmination in Kant’s thought, but had hardly any influence on real politics, which continued to be better understood and managed on a realist path. Even the timid and for a long while (until the creation of the United Nations in 1945) ineffective efforts to build a collective security system were due to the reaction to the unprecedented bloodletting of 1914–1918 rather than to the teachings of the idealist tradition, though this helped formulate the theory of a new international order.13 After this evolution, something different from an updated and refined rerunning of Kant’s normativism, such as Rawls’s work in the substance is, was to be expected, for example a normative theory capable of integrating into its method the awareness of the real behaviour of actors and the role of the historical context, rather than throwing all that differs from the speculation called ‘ideal theory’ into the dustbin of ‘non-ideal theory’. All of this with full knowledge of the obsolescence of the ossified counterposition idealism vs. realism, as discussed above. Yet things have, so far, not moved forward in this direction.
Another notion that may seem to have some similarity with ideal theory, though it should by no means be mistaken for it, must be discussed here: utopia. Rawls himself resorted to this term when he spoke of the “Society of liberal and decent14 Peoples as a ‘realistic utopia’ ” (Rawls 1999b, 5–9); he did, not, however specify the meaning of ‘utopia’. This word comes from Greek οὐ-τόπος (no place), indicating the venue for an ideal polity as the one described by Thomas More (1478–1535) and located on the island of Utopia (More 1516). In the English pronunciation, this word is indistinguishable from Eutopia, which derives from εὖ-τόπος (good place), while in other languages one is able to distinguish eutopia and utopia. A further member of this word family is dystopia, which means a bad place that is better to be avoided, or a negative utopia such as the Brave New World described by Aldous Huxley (Huxley 1932) and the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four depicted by George Orwell (Orwell 1949).
The utopian current in political philosophy is rich and can be said to culminate in the work of the French writer Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Marx and Engels intended their socialism to be based on scientific knowledge, in opposition to the rather literary or rhetorical ‘utopian socialism’ of their predecessors and contemporaries; but critics maintain that Marx’s own theory is not free from ties to utopian elements of the Jewish tradition. ‘Utopian’ has very often been the damning word thrown at socialist and communist reform projects by conservative adversaries. As a reaction, the protest movement of the 1960s reloaded this term with a positive value, as for example in the writings of Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse 1967). In the warm and fuzzy version of ‘whatever is against the existing state-of-affairs and in favour of a better world’ this is still the (now rather seldom) use of the word in Western political rhetoric, yet it is deprived of any theoretical foundation, and found on the mouth of ideologues and literati rather than on that of the people who really need a change for the better. They – the poor of any age, destitute families, low-wage workers, migrants and more – do indeed deserve better than appeals to believing in utopia: well-carved programmes of economic and social reform, political strategies for gathering consensus behind them and implementing them, the upsurge of an appropriate leadership.
What we are going to talk about in this section is one of the paths followed by the thinkers who do not recognise the primacy or the legitimacy of ideal theory and also try to escape the frontal opposition realism-idealism. ‘Critical Theory’ comprises a thick and precise, as well as a thin and vague version. In the first one, it was institutionalised in the Institut für Sozialforschung, established by mostly Jewish academics of Marxist orientation in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where it is still active; it was renamed as the Institute of Social Research during the Nazi years, in which the Institute was hosted by Columbia University in New York City. The leading figure of this interdisciplinary group was Max Horkheimer, who in the 1930s defined the idea of ‘critical theory’ in opposition to the traditional one and redefined philosophical materialism; he was supported by the economist Friedrich Pollock and later by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Löwenthal and others. ‘Critical theory of society’ was the heading they used for their own view,15 while the more popular label ‘the Frankfurt School’ came up much later and was never endorsed by the founders – although being embedded in the liberal spirit of the city of Frankfurt am Main was an aspect of the group’s identity.16 Horkheimer and Adorno wrote around 1944 the already mentioned Dialektik der Aufklärung/Dialectics of Enlightenment, the major philosophical foundation of Critical Theory. From the 1960s onwards, the leading figure has been Jürgen Habermas. Endorsing Critical Theory in the thinner sense, often without connecting it to the founding period, means acknowledging his thought as defining. In a still thinner sense, ‘critical’ has become a fairly fuzzy adjective, applied to whatever is or pretends to be against the mainstream in philosophy or politics or literary criticism; this attitude has thus become itself a part of the mainstream on the market of ideas.
The old Critical Theory has been relevant to social movements, being a large part of the background for the student and protest movement in the 1960s in Europe and North America, here mainly in the wake of Marcuse’s radical theory of civilisation as formulated in Eros and Civilization (Marcuse 1955) and The One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1963). Being a theory of society based on Marx’s critique of political economy, it did not acknowledge the specificity of politics and gave nearly no contribution to political theory, except for the work of Otto Kirchheimer (1905–1965) and Franz Neumann.17 Starting in the early 1960s, this changed to some extent with Habermas, even if one does not take into account his prolific writing, lasting decades, on Germany and the European Union, which has made him the most respected public figure inside and outside Germany. The following is a brief account of Critical Theory as redefined in Habermas’s thought.
His main contributions regard a binary view (lifeworld vs. system) on society and politics (Habermas 1981) and a philosophy of law and democracy (Habermas 1999). In the first one Habermas, though being a critic of Luhmann’s holistic system theory of society, comes to regard as irreversible the rationalization, following an impersonal system logic, of the lifeworld18 into societal sectors such as the economy (regulator: money) and politics (regulator: Macht/power). The expectation of early Critical Theory for a revolutionary renewal of the whole society is thus abandoned. On the other hand, the sectors of life concerned with the cultural reproduction of society, the social integration among citizens and education must and can be shielded against imperatives coming from the sub-systems (economy and political-bureaucratic realm), which tend to ‘colonise’ spheres of interaction that are entrusted to the power-free communication among persons mediated by language. It’s the structures of language, as detected by the speech acts theory, that encapsulate the chance of a reasonable understanding among actors, far from manipulation and reciprocal instrumentalisation. In Western countries this attitude of Habermas has partly mirrored, partly itself fostered or at least justified the shift of democratic politics from income (in)equality and class conflict to questions of cultural or principled nature such as human rights and gender.19 It’s the so-called shift towards postmaterialistic values,20 though in the years following the economic crisis of 2008 the ‘old’ class-based discontents seem to have regained importance – now often immersed in a populist ideology – in the sections of the electorate that have suffered most from globalisation. A balance is still missing.
In Faktizität und Geltung/Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1993) focuses on law because of its contribution to social integration in a centrifugal society in which neither religion nor metaphysics give the people enough motivation to sticking together. In law, normative validity or legitimacy is as important as its legal facticity and formal correctness, which are the core of the positivist view of law. For Habermas’s discourse theory of the law, ‘only those norms are valid to which all persons possibly affected could agree as participants in rational discourses’ (Habermas 1999, 940). The legitimacy of the law in allocating liberties to individuals does not stem from morality; on the contrary law complements the weak post-traditional morality of late-modern societies. Though still in a normative terrain, we are, in this communicative conception of social interaction, far from the monistic rule of a single principle (of justice).
Habermas’s discourse theory consistently gives deliberation priority over decision by majority voting. He sees democracy and human rights as interdependent, and declares the insufficiency of both dominating traditions, the liberal (politics as compromise between self-interested actors) and the republican (ethical foundation of politics in justification and exaltation of the commonwealth) one; his design for an ideal procedure for deliberation claims to integrate elements from both traditions. That design is where Habermas comes closer to an ideal theory that should be a benchmark for the real interaction among diverging positions; alone, politics is almost never a cooperative and sober dialogue in search of a better understanding, akin to that between the four instrumental voices in the classical era of string quartets, from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven and Brahms (and Hugo Wolf).
With this proceduralist view of democracy, Habermas’s Critical Theory tries to respond to the quest for its normative foundation after the break-down of its original roots in the Marxian philosophy of history: if you have such a philosophy telling you how history came about and, what is more, how it will go on or end, you do not need to find out which principles of justice should govern your actions, because they are already inscribed in past and present history (hence Marx’s contempt for ‘modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Fraternity’ worshipped by liberals and utopian socialists).21 How far Habermas’s turn towards a normative theory that is proceduralist in nature answers the questions raised by the more substantive old Critical Theory, in particular Horkheimer’s, cannot be discussed here. On the other hand, his theory marks a different path from the unreflected normativism of the theory of justice.
1Cf. Baier 1958. I shall however resort to the more common ‘ethics and politics’ whenever the specific meaning of morality is not in play. The Greek root of ethics, ἦθος/ethos, means character or behaviour, and ethics includes a course of action that can be, but is not necessarily guided by morality.
2From the Greek δέον: regarding what ought to be done or the obligation.
3This relational structure, the security dilemma (see Chapter 7, §5), is a central notion in political realism.
4This example is not quoted by Machiavelli, and we do not know how far his knowledge of Thucydides’s text in the Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla (completed in 1452) went.
5The republican tradition has been in the past half century investigated by historians such as J. G. A. Pocock (1975) and Quentin Skinner (1978).
6A major example of this literature remains Arendt’s essay Lying in Politics in Arendt 1972, 1–47. Politics that is indifferent to the (argumentatively verifiable) truth, hence often hostile to it, seems to represent a very new chapter, which The Economist of 10 September 2016 has dubbed ‘post-truth politics’. Also, a philosophical inquiry into this complex under the conditions of the digital age would be welcome.
7Weber’s main text in this respect is Politik als Beruf/Politics as a Vocation a talk given in Munich at the end of 1919, a few months before Weber died, at the age of fifty-six, of the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the world immediately after the Great War; it has been already quoted several times in this volume (Weber 1919a).
8The original move in this direction was made by Lyotard (1979).
9A superb example of both these moves was Dr. Martin Luther King’s ability to force or persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to use his own clout as President and his shrewdness as former Democratic majority leader in the Senate in order to forward the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the US Congress back in 1964–65, cf. Kotz 2005.
10For reformist realism see Scheuerman 2011.
11Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), who as First Lady of the United States had acted against racial and gender discrimination, was the driving force behind the drafting of UDHR, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EleanorRooseveltHumanRights.png.
12I have examined these aspects of ‘normative political philosophy’ in the case of climate ethics (see Cerutti 2016).
13The key figure, in this sense, was US President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924, in office from 1913 through 1921), whose interventionist ‘democratic idealism’ as a tenet of foreign policy continues to build one of the recurrent strains in US diplomatic history.
14The term ‘decent’ describes ‘nonliberal societies whose basic institutions meet certain specified conditions of political right and justice’ (Rawls 1999b, 3n2).
15This label also had the advantage of not making explicit any reference to Marxism, suspicious to public authorities both in Germany and the USA in the Thirties.
16Walther Benjamin, a close friend Adorno’s, was never a member of the Institute, even if he was supported by them; nor can his thought be labelled as belonging to Critical Theory.
17See above Chapter 3, §2, note 3, Neumann also wrote Behemoth, an early political conceptualization of the National Socialist regime (1942).
18‘German Lebenswelt, … the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sciences, which employ the methods of the mathematical sciences of nature’ (from https://www.britannica.com/topic/life-world). The term was introduced in philosophy by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and developed in the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz (1899–1959).
19In Marx’s vocabulary, this means giving a higher relevance to Überbau/superstructure in comparison to the economic basis of society and politics; for this terminology see Marx 1859.
20The now popular concept of postmaterialism was introduced by the American sociologist Ronald Inglehart (Inglehart 1977).
21As Marx wrote to F.A. Sorge (Marx 1877).
Arendt, Hannah (1972) Lying in Politics, in Crises of the Republic, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1–47.
Baier, Kurt (1958) The Moral Point of View, New York: Random House, 1965.
Botero, Giovanni (1589) Della ragion di Stato/The Reason of State, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956.
Cerutti, Furio (2016) Climate Ethics and the Failures of ‘Normative Political Philosophy’ in ‘Philosophy and Social Criticism’, 42(7), 707–726.
Habermas, Jürgen (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns/The Theory of Communicative Action, Boston: Beacon, 1984–87.
Habermas, Jürgen (1993) Faktizität und Geltung/Between Facts and Norms, Boston: Blackwell, 1996.
Habermas, Jürgen (1999) Between Facts and Norms: An Author’s Reflections, 76 Denv.U.L. Rev. 937 1998–1999.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1807) Phänomenologie des Geistes/Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1821) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts/Elements of the Philosophy of Right, e-book available at www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Hegel%20Phil%20of%20Right.pdf
Huxley, Aldous (1932) Brave New World, New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Inglehart, Ronald (1977) The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kotz, Nick (2005) Judgment Days. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1979) La condition post-moderne/The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1532) Il Principe/The Prince, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Marcuse, Herbert (1955) Eros and Civilization, New York: Beacon Press, 1966.
Marcuse, Herbert (1963) The One-Dimensional Man, e-book available at www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odmcontents.html
Marcuse, Herbert (1967) The End of Utopia, e-book available at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/end-utopia.htm
Marx Karl (1859) Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Vorwort/A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Preface, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
Marx, Karl (1877) Marx-Engels Correspondence – Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/letters/77_10_19.htm
More, Thomas (1516) Utopia, New York: New American Library, 1967.
Neumann, Franz Leopold (1942) Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, New York: Reprint Octagon, 1983 (based on the expanded edition of 1944).
Orwell, George (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, e-book available at https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168091W/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Pocock, J. G. A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Popper, Karl (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Rawls, John (1999a) A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John (1999b) The Law of People, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scheuerman, William E. (2011) The Realist Case for Global Reform, Oxford: Polity Press.
Skinner, Quentin (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Θουκυδίδης/Thucydides (404 BCE) Περὶ τοῦ Πελοποννησίου πoλέμου/The Pelopponesian War available at http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.1.first.html (404 BCE is Thucycides’s presumtive year of death; title attributed in the Hellenistic era)
Waltz, Kenneth (1959) Man, the State, and War, New York: Columbia University Press.
Weber, Max (1919a) Politik als Beruf/Politics as a Vocation, in Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, 77–128.
Weber, Max (1919b) Wissenschaft als Beruf/Science as a Vocation, in Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, 129–158.
On philosophy and politics:
Geuss, Raymond (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
On the original Critical Theory:
Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994) The Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Polity.
On Habermas:
Rasmussen, David and James Swindal, eds. (2010) Habermas II, London: Sage, in particular Vol. 3.
