Public political philosophy in Poland: Phacts,phictions,and philennials

Abstract

All over the world, political philosophers are increasingly told to deliver more ‘engagement’, ‘relevance’, or ‘impact’, without it being remotely clear what this should involve. Less analysis and more activism? Fewer principles and more policies? Less critique and more cooperation? Or something else altogether: a particular way of working with others that sits alongside, rather than replaces, what we already do as professional scholars. In support of this last possibility, my argument here has two stages. First, a flexible theory of ‘public political philosophy’ that others can adopt or amend as they see fit. Second, a development of that theory by way of a particular ‘case-study’: ‘inter-minority dialogue’ in Poland, and especially dialogue between, and about, Jewish and Muslim communities residing there. Note though, in advance, that this is not ‘development’ in the sense of either ‘testing’ an empirical theory or ‘applying’ a normative one. Instead I aim simply to sketch out a particular kind of conversation, between and amongst these groups, as well as local scholars, by setting out three ‘methods’ they can experiment with, each of which is intended to support, rather than supplant, whatever dialogues are already locally occurring. These three I call ‘phacts’, ‘phictions’, and ‘philennials’, and if they are far from a solution to any of the problems these communities face, they are at least a new contribution that philosophers are particularly well placed to facilitate.

Introduction

Public political philosophy (PPP) is a puzzle. On the one hand, we are not just increasingly encouraged to pursue it by friends and colleagues, but also expected to do so by the various funding bodies on whom, in turn,we increasingly depend, both when auditing past research and when judging applications for future projects. ¹ On the other hand, neither those encouraging nor those expecting seem any clearer than we are about what this practice involves. Must it be ‘impactful’ or merely ‘engaging’? ² Should it be safe and dull or exciting and dangerous? ³ And are we to boldly tell people how they ought to live together or just sketch out some of the options at their disposal (Floyd, 2017a, 2019)? Sure, there are a few role-models or ‘exemplars’ ⁴ we mostly agree upon, from activists to advisors and speechwriters to senators, but more who divide us, from Rousseau to Rand and Scruton to Stock, and it is far from clear what separates the two camps. What then ultimately do we want from our cerebral celebrities? How exactly should our Socratic superstars behave? Or, more precisely, what is it we need from them apart from a cheap and easy means to bolster support, via famous association, for our own more esoteric efforts - most of which tend to be pursued far from the public gaze, though often with public funding.

In response to this puzzle, my argument moves through three stages. First, I begin with the idea that PPP is political philosophy done both in and for the public, meaning both publicly accessible and politically applicable. This is a provisional but plausible starting point, especially when it comes to distinguishing our activity from others like it. Second, I make the case that we should do this work in pursuit of clarification rather than contestation, or, better yet, conversation over conversion. The aim is to do what we can to help those around us better understand the ideas and trade-offs involved in the options before them, and in turn the conflicts they might produce, without ‘calling’ for a particular decision, let alone ‘applying’ a particular theory. Third, I illustrate how such work could be pursued in practice, discussing both intellectual and institutional approaches in the unique context of inter-minority dialogue in contemporary Poland. This means, as I explain, imagining ourselves as public analysts of difficult ideas, philosophical story-tellers, and even civic educators, all in the pursuit of better thinking and talking amongst our fellow citizens. Or, put differently, as producers of, respectively, ‘phacts’, ‘phictions’, and ‘philennials’, all without forgetting that our goal is to support rather than supplant local conversations.

In and for the public: a provisional framework

My working definition of Public Political Philosophy (PPP), drawing on (Floyd, 2022), is as follows:

Public political philosophy (PPP) is political philosophy done both in and for the public.

This definition is the core of the framework and argument that follows, and conveys three key claims: PPP, in order to count as such, should be sufficiently accessible, sufficiently applicable, and sufficiently analytical - though not, importantly, in the narrow sense some might have in mind when discussing ‘analytical’ or ‘analytic’ philosophy (Floyd, 2016). In this section, I explain each of those three ideas in turn.

First, by sufficiently accessible, I mean a space between two limits, for which the guiding question is this: When do our efforts become either too simple to be philosophical or too complex to be public? This is a crucial question for our work here, though it can be misleading. After all, Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty, or Mill’s harm principle, or the basic shape of Rawls’ ‘original position’, are simple enough when explained, just as anyone, and this was part of her intention, could weigh up Wollstonecraft’s arguments against the subjugation of women by way of the accessibly concrete examples and experiences she provides, from the decadence of the rich to the boredom of embroidery. ‘Complexity’ then, in this case, is about articulation as well as content, with some of us good at rendering difficult ideas simple, and others, unfortunately, better at complicating the obvious. Sometimes, as we know too well, elaboration clarifies and sometimes it misleads; sometimes metaphors capture and sometimes they distort.

We have then here our first challenge of contextual judgement for doing good PPP out there in the ‘real world’, with the key point here, as elsewhere, being that we ultimately learn more of when we have judged well or badly from the audience rather than the author. That is, we can only say that difficult ideas have been well communicated when we see ordinary citizens successfully discuss, deploy, or re-design them themselves. That means working hard on articulation, on the one band, but also gathering and responding to audience feedback, on the other, for only then will our ideas get anything like the attention (we think) they deserve. Praxis makes perfect, as we might say, or at least would say if we weren’t using more accessible language.

Second, sufficiently applicable, or, if one prefers, sufficiently politically relevant. This is important because it is not enough for PPP simply to be understood, or even to have edified or entertained, in providing the understanding just described, given we also want to ‘make a difference’ to political opinions and, in turn, political behaviour. Paraphrasing our research councils, ‘engagement’ must have ‘impact’. ⁵ Paraphrasing Marx, interpretations should be interventions. Somehow, we need to address consequential issues with consequential arguments, in the sense of arguments that are not only justificatory for us but persuasive for others. Somehow, we need to find issues that either are of political interest or could quickly become so, and then illuminate them in such a way as to substantially change the thoughts and behaviour of our audience. A feminist, for example, could show why a personal issue is a political one, and then map out the principles on offer. A cosmopolitan could show how a global environmental challenge is also a domestic policy concern, and then highlight the dilemmas this leaves us.

How though are we to make this work persuasive without further polarising opinion? Naturally, if we are fully committed to our cause, then we will do as our conscience dictates, and try our best to ‘speak truth to power’, as the old Quaker slogan goes, but what if we simply want to help people discuss difficult issues amongst themselves? In this case, and for the purposes of our theory, ‘changed’ behaviour means something more minimal: Moving people from silence to dialogue without slipping into shouting. Somehow, you need to be persuasive and emotive enough to show that the issue matters, without closing off reasonable disagreement. Somehow, you need to map the principles on offer, and sketch out the trade-offs involved, without dictating the final decision. Or, put differently, you need to be interesting without being insistent, which again takes contextual judgement, and no doubt careful practice, but also observation. Remember here that you will know when you have made a difference, and thus had the described ‘impact’, simply by noticing a change in the trajectory of what people talk about, and in turn how they behave, without fixating on a particular result. You will have ‘mattered’, that is, and been ‘relevant’, simply by facilitating conversations that would not have otherwise happened, without yourself having to finish them. Or, from the opposite angle, you would be irrelevant here not by failing to convert the public, but by failing to get them to listen, reflect, and pursue new conversations amongst themselves. It is for the public, as a whole, to discuss and decide; it is for philosophers, as a small part of that public, to fuel that discussion, without forcing its conclusions.

Third, sufficiently analytical, or, if one prefers, sufficiently philosophical, though I doubt either term helps more than the other. Instead, given our subject’s almost self-defining struggle to define itself (Floyd, 2017a, 2019), we do better here to start with cases rather than clauses or concepts, and follow in particular Michael Walzer’s lead, not so much in how he practised PPP - though that is certainly of interest - but rather in how he once undertook something very close to our current enquiry, by choosing to study individual ‘critics’, as a set of case studies, in order to grasp, by extrapolation, the distinctive art of ‘criticism’ (Walzer, 2002).

Consider then, in this spirit of Walzer’s, the following three examples, Kwame Anthony Appiah discussing migration, identity politics, and cosmopolitanism, in an interview with the Financial Times ⁶ ; Martha Nussbaum giving a lecture on YouTube on how to create ‘capabilities’ in the world ⁷ ; and Jeremy Waldron contributing to a UK government enquiry on media reform, including careful and explicit references to theoretical ideas of ‘free speech’, ‘pluralism’, and ‘democratic accountability’. ⁸ Taken together, what do these three tell us regarding how philosophical our public work should be, if it is to merit the term ‘public political philosophy’, as opposed to other worthwhile activities, such as journalism, activism, lobbying, campaigning, or some other kind of political ‘engagement’ that could be done easily by both philosophers and non-philosophers alike?

Three things in particular stand out here. First, the range of formats and locations available for our work - interviews, lectures, ‘Ted-Talks’, tweets, podcasts, articles, speeches, public consultations, and beyond. This shows we have options. To be ‘philosophical’ is not to be tied to one kind of medium. Second, the kind of metaphors, simplicity, and concision any public communication requires, if it is to be accessible and applicable. These illustrate how to be engaging and effective, whilst still trying to ‘enlighten’. Third, and most importantly, the way in which you can pursue prose of this kind whilst still doing something that is recognisable as political philosophy, given that each of these scholars clearly uses various arguments from our field in order to illuminate a range of political concerns. That then is the really crucial point for the third and final part of our framework: Whilst public economists use economics in their work, and public scientists use science, public political philosophers use political philosophy.

What though exactly does that mean? After all, the connection or translation involved in such ‘usage’ will often not be obvious or explicit to those outside our field. That though is not the point. For those on ‘the inside’ it will be more than clear enough, especially as we already practise such judgement every day in our ordinary work, and especially in the history of political thought. We listen to a contemporary liberal scholar discuss homophobia and hear HLA Hart’s debate with Justice Devlin; we listen to Hart and hear John-Stuart Mill; we read Mill’s speeches in parliament and see, inter alia, Bentham and Tocqueville. Here, as elsewhere, we recognise the principles, concepts, and connecting arguments of political philosophy being deployed in digestible form for democratic publics to discuss and decide upon. Here, as elsewhere, we observe ideas from our world being carefully brought into the public domain, knowing that they would not otherwise be there at all, or at least not there with the same range and precision that philosophers, at their best, can produce.

Perhaps though, having described each of these three requirements of PPP in turn – accessible, applicable, analytical – it would help now to summarise them by saying, in broad terms, that what we now have here is an activity distinguishable from others by two things: location and content. Scholarship kept behind an academic paywall, or written in impenetrable prose, or addressing obscure technicalities, is not our interest here, any more than we would be interested in the opposite of those things - a simple slogan, for example, saying ‘vote conservative’ or ‘viva la revolution’. Of course, there is easy scope for variation along each of the three dimensions, but also limits, giving us a spectrum, or perhaps a Venn diagram, in which our subject can be spotted and separated from others. This is something we need going forwards, because amongst other things it helps us avoid becoming confused or distracted by the fact that our audience – our public – could be either local or global, whilst our authors, at least in theory, could be anyone at all, even if right now we expect them to remain those few professional political philosophers found in universities either old or large enough to value such work (Floyd, 2019). These though are not the variations that matter. What matters is the target, not the source. For an argument to count as PPP, it must aim at public consumption and public concerns, which means, once more, accessibility on the one hand (in public), and applicability on the other (for the public). Genuinely philosophical or analytical argument that is available and intelligible on the one hand, and relevant to politics on the other – that is what we are after.

We do though now need to add two small caveats to these three clauses set out so far, if only because both become important when considering, in the next section, just how we ought to be doing such work in particular contexts. The first of these is as follows: when philosophising in public, remember that you could be both closer to power and further from the public eye than any of those three ‘cases’ considered a moment ago would suggest, especially if working, say, as a high-level advisor or speechwriter. In such situations, you would be personally out of the public gaze yet still producing something philosophical for public consumption. One example here would be Marc Stears’ work as Chief Speechwriter to the Leader of the British Labour Party, in which he channelled theoretical ideas of pre-distribution into concrete policies of energy-market reform. ⁹ Another would be Philip Pettit’s work with Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, in which an entire policy-platform was shaped by the central value of ‘republican liberty’ (Marti & Pettit, 2010). ¹⁰

Or, at the other end of the ‘public’ scale, consider what might be called ‘philosopher-politicians’, however unlikely such people seem today. Cicero and Marcus Aurelius are perhaps the most romanticised examples, yet there are more attainable exemplars much closer to home. ‘Baroness’ Onora O’Neill and ‘Lord’ Bhiku Parekh, for example, both of the UK’s House of Lords, are strong contemporary examples of today’s philosophical legislators, whilst Amartya Sen’s role in shaping the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) clearly demonstrates why he eventually received America’s ‘National Humanities’ Medal for ‘applying philosophical thinking to questions of policy’ – and indeed, not just from anyone, but from a President occasionally described himself as a modern-day philosopher-king. ¹¹

Clearly, such examples hold inspirational value when it comes to promoting PPP, but also a clue about the importance of our second and last caveat, which is this: Whether working in Bill Clinton’s administration, as William Galston did in the 1990s, ¹² or as a member of Israel’s Knesset, as Yael Tamir did in the 2000s, it cannot be the case that everything a political philosopher does when in power is somehow public political philosophy just because they have done it. Bearing in mind the first three cases outlined earlier – Appiah, Nussbaum, and Waldron - remember here that our third criterion, for work to count as PPP, is recognisable use, by which we mean sufficiently philosophical or analytical public argument, whether in power or opposition, and whether in Parliament or the press. Private negotiations or procedural bureaucracy are not our concern, however much they matter in other ways, any more than chairing a committee, picking a cabinet, balancing a spreadsheet, or taking out the rubbish. Such things cannot be deemed philosophical just because a ‘philosopher’ did them, no matter how much they reflected on it afterwards.

Conversation not conversion

With the basic theory assembled, we now move to the philosophical implications of an important political fact – that yesterday’s utopians, before you know it, are tomorrow’s realists (Floyd, 2023a). The ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, from veganism to violence, change almost as fast as the ‘cool’ and ‘uncool’, which is why in one context you get ignored for being too radical, and in another for being too conservative, all whilst discussing the same ideals. Consider, for example, how Woodrow Wilson was once deemed too progressive by Americans for his internationalism, yet later too regressive for his segregationism (Floyd, 2023a: 356). Consider how democracy has gone from noble dream, for which there had never been any empirical ‘evidence’, to disappointing reality, as captured by a thousand case-studies, many of which now fuel stories of its ‘death’ (Applebaum, 2020; Levitsky &Ziblatt, 2018; Runciman, 2018). Or consider how discourses of racism, homophobia, or nationalism can be transformed into anti-racism, pride, and cosmopolitanism, and how one wave of feminism overtakes another, sometimes in a single generation.

Such shifts demonstrate how fast and fundamentally norms can change, and in turn how tricky it is for the public political philosopher to really know their audience in the way they need to, in the sense of knowing exactly what it is that they will listen to, and what it is they might be persuaded by, either now or in the near future. Knowing the contours of your current zeitgeist and milieu is hard enough - knowing its direction of travel even more so. So, how do we do it, given that complexity? Or, put differently, what exactly should we be aiming for within the parameters described above by those three clauses and two caveats? We know, so far, what it takes for PPP to exist, but not really what it takes for it to be good. We know that it means accessible, intelligible, and philosophical work, as done by a range of people in a range of settings, but even so, what precisely is it that such people should be trying to achieve?

The answer to that question comes in three parts, the first of which is probably the most disappointing, given that I will not say here that the point of PPP is obvious – to ‘speak truth to power’, and do everything we can to talk that truth into existence, in the form of sparkling new policies and institutions. Instead I urge something more modest, at least for now: that we chase clarification rather than conversion, or, better still, that we prioritise conversation over contestation, whilst doing everything we can to avoid violent conflict. On this approach, if we want ‘case-studies’, then two good ones would be Onora O’Neill and Jonathan Wolff, philosophers who have worked at various levels of the policy-making process, as well as in various parts of the public intellectual realm. Judging from their practice, as well as their public statements on the topic, ¹³ each of them always puts the greatest emphasis on illuminating the concepts and principles involved in policy trade-offs rather than insisting on how such decisions should be made. ¹⁴ Or, put differently, we can say that for them, as for our argument, we should certainly be part of the democratic process, but not all of it.

This modest and rather quiet approach might surprise, and perhaps disappoint, those who think our biggest problem in this domain is being ignored, given long-standing inequalities and more recent environmental crises, but that is naïve. Our biggest problem, if only potentially, is being incendiary. Of course it is sad when books go unread, and awful when they are burned, but worse still when they set the world on fire. Hobbes famously argued this point as a theorist, deploring the influence of ancient Greek and Roman authors on his contemporaries, but also experienced it first-hand as an intellectual, having once had to burn his own papers, in 1666, for fear of being ‘proven’ a heretic. Contemporary political theory, especially in ‘realist’ mode, also understands it when prioritising concrete injustices over perfect justice, legitimacy over any kind of justice, and order over any kind of legitimacy (Geuss, 2005; Sen, 2009; Shklar, 1990; Williams, 2005). Yet surely all of us should protect such priorities in our public work, despite it feeling frustrating and seeming complacent, when really the opposite is closer to the truth. Complacency here means thinking nothing you do or say could make things worse, and that it could never be mistaken, or even just misunderstood or mis-applied.

We might then put it this way: If the pen really is mightier than the sword, it can also do more harm. From posts to pamphlets, and Paine to Pankhurst, what we write can induce love or hate, unite or divide, build sustainable structures for the ages or, if sufficiently misguided, shiny towers that collapse on all those we sought to save. And not just them. It could be us, in our ‘ivory’ towers, as well as our nearest and dearest, costing promotion at one end of the scale and prison at the other, which is why -and this is important here - philosophers should never be forced to be PPPists. None of us, that is, should ever be forced into this role, given its vulnerabilities, or even nudged into it by funding or tenure ‘opportunities’, whilst those of us who do volunteer should be cautious. You could, for example, end up a patsy or stooge for the current regime, propping up their rotten status quo with the veneer of intellectual legitimacy, given how you ‘contributed to’, or even just got ‘consulted on’, their latest agenda. Or, more obviously, you could end up the guru behind the guillotine, however much you expected a happy and bloodless transition to what you thought was a brave new world.

Here it might be helpful to think of recent concrete cases in Western academia, from David Miller at the University of Bristol and Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex to of ‘neoliberal’ philosopher-economists such as Hayek to Friedman, as well as canonical ‘doyens’ such as Heidegger, Marx, Rousseau, Plato, and of course poor old Socrates. Each of these has been fired, executed, shunned, or simply detested and derided, whatever one thinks of today’s so-called ‘cancel culture’ (Norris, 2023). All of them could be you and yours if you mishear the cultural mood music, or misread the writing on the political wall, or just get things terribly wrong, in ways you might never recognise but cannot now retract even if you have. And sure, you might think such things unlikely, but that too is nothing new. No doubt many of those just listed thought the same, along with many of our contemporaries in recent years, from Hong Kong, to Hungary, to Ukraine. Even when the writing is on the wall, you might be too busy with your own writing to notice.

This then takes us to the second part of our answer regarding our aims, which is as follows: in order to achieve the modest aim of ‘clarification’, we first have to interpret the context in which we find ourselves. What are real people, right now, arguing about? How malleable are the positions expressed in their exchanges? And how combustible and liable to violence are the protagonists? The maxim here is simple: Know your audience. Know what they care about; know what gets them listening; know what they can be persuaded of either today or tomorrow. Have a sense, as best you can, of where your society has been and where it is currently drifting. Consider what’s possible now as well as what dangers are just around the corner. And remember: If you are truly to clarify things, by clarifying the values, principles, and trade-offs at stake in various pressing policy decisions, then think how you can do this in a way that gets both widely noticed and usefully understood. Again, our business, as PPPists, is sufficiently accessible and intelligible interventions. Again, we want to illuminate rather than obscure or, if possible, explode. Again, these are difficult questions requiring judgement, yet notice, despite all that, an encouraging parallel: we already face their equivalent, every year, as teachers of university students, so presumably at least some of us have at least some sense of how to solve them, despite the stakes normally being a little higher with political coercion than they are with philosophy curriculums - even if recently the two have been sadly combined as part of our lovely ‘culture wars’, and again in places where scholars might not have seen it coming.

We can, however, do more than just say ‘presumably’ here, by actually starting to pick out what seem to be key features of our world, right now, when it comes to cutting through the noise. These will be revisited, when it comes to the ‘case’ of Poland in the next section, but even so, it would help to already give a rough sense of the factors we need to consider when making these kinds of judgements, if we are to reach and help our audience accordingly. And indeed, in doing so, we should also stress something else: that just because the full list of such things is almost infinite, that scale should not become an excuse for not picking out those that are most important for our endeavours, which means, in today's world, the following trio in particular: post-truth, polarisation, and populism.

These, if you like, are the three awkward Ps that any successful PPP, right here and now, has to work with, from South America to Eastern Europe, and they ‘work’ roughly as follows (Floyd, 2022). First, ‘post-truth’: an epistemological culture in which I have ‘my truth’ and you have your ‘alternative facts’, as politically facilitated by liberal freedoms, and intellectually fuelled by, inter alia, post-modernism and therapeutic individualism. Second, ‘polarisation’: a tribal political culture in which grievance, identity, and cynicism about the motives of political rivals are central themes, as driven by social media and rising inequality. Third, ‘populism’: a world produced by those first two ‘P’s’, and in which only a few charismatic individuals manage to cut through the angry chatter, especially when offering ways for ‘the people’ to take back power from an untrustworthy ‘elite’ (Müller, 2017). Populists, crucially, carve out a route to political success that used to require established parties and the traditional authority of expertise, whether earned through individual achievement, embedded in those around you, or simply expressed through the positive commentary of an influential commentariat, from podcasts to partisan news channels. Today, with facts devalued and society divided, those with the right kind of story to sell find ever more willing customers.

There is, of course, much that should be nuanced or contested in this short sketch of contemporary politics, especially given its variations around the world, yet for the simple PPPist, operating as conversational facilitator, whilst also regarded as some kind of ‘expert’, it is this last point about ‘success’ that really matters, given scholars have never been able to reach wider audiences without some kind of recognised claim to special wisdom or knowledge. How then are they to proceed, given, shall we say, the relative lack of personal charm, sporting achievement, or business success-stories in our academic ranks? What are they to do, in a world ‘tired of experts’, ¹⁵ and in which even established scientists at the height of a pandemic struggled to get heard? Yes, they can point to institutional credentials, and hope for some intrinsic appeal in their ideas, but that will not be enough on its own, in our current intellectual climate, meaning we will somehow have to go outside our comfort zone.

What this means, in a world of infinite content, and tailored ‘steers’ by friends and algorithms, is that we shall have to be entertaining, or at least interesting. In a world that quickly judges faces and voices, both real and unreal, we shall have to be personable, or at least relatable. In a world of fast content and short attention spans, we shall have to be contemporary, or at least concise, before each window of opportunity to enrich the dialogue closes. And again, that is still not new, at least on one level. Character, and its presentation, has always mattered for both intellectuals and politicians alike – it’s just that the kind of character people want changes, with many of those changes more than welcome. Less Gladstone and Russell, more Zelensky and Srinivasan. ¹⁶ So: for those of us who aren’t great at pull-ups, ¹⁷ or didn’t happen to go to school or university with today’s leaders ¹⁸ , it is time to practise our public personas, as well as maybe try the kinds of project I describe in the next section as ‘phacts’, ‘phictions’, and ‘philennials’.

PPP in Poland

‘Citizens of the world, pick up your pens! Jasmine, the nice Muslim woman I’d spent the whole evening talking to, was telling me about her project: she wanted to encourage everyone in her country to write books. She had noticed that you don’t need very much in order to write a book – a bit of free time after work, not even a computer. Any such intrepid person might end up writing a bestseller […] If only we all read each other’s books, she sighed […] I love the idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly, moral obligation to one’s people’ (Tokarczuk, 2019: 79).

In order to develop further this new framework, consider now a rough sketch of Poland in 2023. Here, in terms of the relevent ‘context', we see several things at once. A state of 38.5 million people in Eastern Europe, a member of the European Union but not the Euro, and a population 87% Catholic and 99% white. ¹⁹ A state historically squeezed between Russia to the East, Prussia and then Germany to the West, and Hapsburg Austria and the Ottoman Empire to the South, with long memories of all that ‘squeezing’. A state that notably used to be more diverse than it is today, especially in key urban centres, with 3 million Jewish citizens before the Holocaust and only 15,000 at the last census – though that figure doubled from 7500 at the previous count, during which time English also overtook Silesian as the language most spoken at home after Polish, presumably due to émigré families returning from the United Kingdom and Ireland. ²⁰ Relatedly, we also have a constitution that protects the cultural and religious freedoms of minority groups (Chapter II: Article 35), provided that those groups can trace their ancestry within Poland back across at least one hundred years. This policy means, for example, that Ukrainians, Jews, and Muslim Tartars are officially ‘recognised’, but not more recent (mostly Sunni) Muslim immigrants, ²¹ despite their outnumbering ‘native’ Tartar Muslims by roughly 10 to 1, within a total Muslim population of 25,000. ²² The remaining ‘recognised’ national, ethnic, or linguistic groups are Belarusian, Czech, Lithuanian, German, Armenian, Russian, Slovak, Karaim, Lemko, and Roma. ²³

What then, when faced with this context, is the PPPist to do? How are they to pursue richer conversations? And how in particular might they foster new dialogue between these distinctive ethnic and religious minorities, both recognised and unrecognised, without unduly equating them to some of the more storied and studied majority-minority conversations around the world? (Kymlicka, 1995; Modood, 2014) In what follows, I sketch out three distinct methods, both in order to better illustrate the framework discussed so far and to provide options worth experimenting with and further developing on the part of local scholars and activists. These, to be clear, are neither fixed nor exhaustive. In the true spirit of conversation, they are just three starting points amongst many, as well as three points that could be given various names according to taste. For now, given that our ‘public’ need us to be as concise and memorable as possible, I label these three’ phacts’, ‘phictions’, and ‘philennials’.

First then ‘phacts’, by which I mean highly accessible and visible philosophical analyses of tricky yet important political concepts, whether published in newspapers, recorded on YouTube, or performed in community centres. What, for example, is a minority, whether in Poland or anywhere else? What is an ethnic group? What kind of power do such groups or the individuals have within them? What sort of rights and freedoms do they either enjoy now or demand for tomorrow? PPPists can shed light on such issues, just as they might similar conceptual questions all over the world, and as they already do in their core professional work. Can we, for example, think of a positive (not ‘toxic’) version of masculinity? Can we find better ways to measure poverty, progress, or happiness? Can we better explain the trade-offs between tradition and progress, religion and science, family and individual? Naturally, there are all sorts of ways of thinking about these things. What we can do, as public political philosophers, is share and compare them, across a range of mediums, so that others can more easily think and talk about them themselves.

Remember here, despite the ‘normativity’ of such issues, that our aim at all times is teaching not preaching. Call it enlightenment with a small ‘e’, or what Rawls once called ‘orientation’ (Rawls, 2001). We sketch and illuminate the different ways of thinking about such things in the hope that particular individuals become just a little less likely to misunderstand themselves and each other. We draw on academic theories of power, freedom, equality and so on, wherever it might help, in order to bring into focus the various options and trade-offs confronting us, without trying to dictate the final decision, just as O’Neill and Wolff, as discussed earlier, have long managed in British civil society, and as Nussbaum and Appiah have managed on popular global platforms. We try, at all times, to be as creative and innovative as we can, in pursuit of the accessibility and visibility required – an effort that will sometimes take us all the way into our second approach.

This approach starts with the thought that, when academic philosophers conduct their usual ‘conceptual analyses’, they often do so via ‘thought experiments’ (Floyd, 2017a, 2017b). They ask, for example, how we might behave in a clamshell auction on a desert island (Dworkin, 2000), how we might trade skills and resources on a camping trip (Cohen, 2009), or how we might choose political principles if we didn’t know certain distracting facts about ourselves (Rawls, 1971). In doing so, they produce what are, ultimately, fictions, echoing literature, as well as allegories, echoing religion (Floyd, 2023b). These though are not just any fictions. They are abstractions designed to produce distance, whereby we step just far enough away from local concerns and conflicts to see the universal appeal of those values on each side of the various dilemmas (Raz, 2001). This, if done well, takes some of the pressure out of the many concrete interests and identities that divide us, but also raises what is really the key question here: What would such ‘Phiction’ look like in the specific context of Poland?

This is where we have to be especially innovative, though still indicative in the sense that whatever we sketch out is still only a suggestion for others to replace or refine as they see fit. Think then, in this suggestive spirit, of the city of Krakow, given how, as a community, it exemplifies well that trend noted earlier, of being of much more diverse at the start of the twentieth century than it was at the end (Jasińska-Kania and Łodziński, 2009). Think here of the Jewish Quarter in that city, as well as the two mosques that sit quietly tucked away on ordinary streets, where few passers-by would ever notice them. And think too of something quite different, more culturally buried, yet less religiously embedded – the dragon that local legend tells us is sleeping in the hill underneath the castle. In this unique cultural setting, what philosophical stories might we put together, in order to help people explore and talk through their differences? Or, better yet, what tales might we start that others might finish, over and over again, in local story-writing circles, primary schools, library reading groups, and so on?

Imagine, for example, a situation in which several children disturbed this dragon, and had then to convince it not to cook and eat them. Perhaps they would tell this dragon that they are not so very different from him or her (or they), despite appearances, and that eating them would be an act of cannibalism. Perhaps they would point to their shared capacity for reason, or pain, or even a love of all things bright and shiny. Perhaps the children, from different cultural backgrounds themselves, would have to team up with each other in different parts of the story, learning to compromise despite their differences, and finding common ground and new relationships as a result of that cooperation. ²⁴ Or, better yet, perhaps they would find, at the heart of that dragon’s treasure, an invisibility ring that meant it would be all too easy for one of them to escape with gold whilst the others perished.

Clearly we get echoes of Tolkien's The Hobbit here but also, less obviously, Plato’s Republic, in which we encounter, early on, the tale of the ‘Ring of Gyges’, the thrust of which is to have us consider, as a thought experiment, why even an all-powerful individual would want to restrain themselves in order to be a good person. In this case, with our dragon and children, we do someting similar, by getting each character to think about, say, future relationships and bargains between communities, and in turn how smaller groups sometimes later become bigger than their ‘rivals’, and in turn what that does to the compromises reached across various contested values, policies, and budgets. This though is still just the start of the ‘story', because once up and running, we soon start thinking about how philosophers, when using such tales, might further develop the conversation just begun. Again, this means essentially sketching out some of the relevant normative dimensions, such as ‘minority’, ‘power’, ‘difference’, ‘right’, before then letting others decide where they want those stories to go. Should we, for example, have our characters think about guarding against future revenge? Might they consider minimums and thresholds as lines that none of us cross as solutions to their dilemmas? Could they find common ground or even work together for common aims? You decide, say the authors of ‘phictions’, where the goal is not to smuggle in hidden answers, as if each fable were a Trojan horse, but rather to aid the kind of reflection and conversation that enables authors and audiences to decide for and discuss amongst themselves.

Now, of course, some readers, from purist philosophers to practical politicians, will think this sketch, at least so far, rather light-weight. On the one hand, it seems too fanciful or indulgent for busy, grounded, ‘real’ people, without the same interest in words and ideas as flighty philosophers. On the other, it seems too tame or soft for properly philosophical thinkers, for whom the key work involves complicated arguments for and against particular rival principles. And that is true, as far as it goes, just as it is true that society can easily head in the opposite direction to what we had hoped for, despite our best conversational efforts. All the time, both majorities and minorities are being told, in no uncertain terms, what they should think of themselves and others. We are not the only game in town, let alone the most persuasive one. Those we are trying to reach are being told constantly who they are, what they want, and in turn why their enemies, as described, will never be their friends. That though is precisely why such ‘soft’ work, as proposed here, and as carried out in local schools and community centres, far away from front-line parliaments and TV studies, can be so important. In the face of polarisation, and in pursuit of inter-minority dialogue, what might be called ‘co-creative’ endeavours really matter. They need to be soft and small. They need to occur far away from the trenches, in order to produce the kind of contemplation, deliberation, and changing or at least expanding of minds desired.

This does though raise the question: How could such work be made, if not iron-clad, then at least as robust as possible? Or, more precisely, how might we give these dreamy, intellectual endeavours, a little more institutional grounding? This is where our third method comes in, starting with the thought that, although ‘phacts’ and ‘phictions’ do have real potential, as described, there remains a natural tendency for them to be consumed and carried out by those who are already curious about such things, and of course who have the time, space, and resources required. As a result, we need to create and develop institutions that expand access to them as much as possible, building where possible on examples of such work elsewhere. These include, for example, the pursuit of ‘civic education’ in secondary schools all over the world, whether channelled through specialist curriculums or particular parts of politics and philosophy courses, or even programmes like the UK’s ‘British Values’ project. ²⁵ When done well, such efforts carve out valuable spaces for political-philosophical conversations that cannot otherwise occur, though we should note straight away something important about them: That they tend to start off on a small and local scale, and most often in cities rather than countries.

Imagine then, in Poland, a project that put a philosopher or group of philosophers in every school in a city like Wroclaw. ²⁶ This could mean, for example, scholars giving talks on ‘how’ to reason about concepts and principles, as connected to local policy concerns, without ever saying ‘what’ to think about those things in a way that would have local parents and politicians starting protests. Instead, the focus would be on ‘upskilling’ those students, in the contemporary political language of ‘employability’, just as they are already upskilled in numeracy and literacy, though in this case with a focus on making them better citizens rather than better employees. These though would be ‘better' citizens, not because they are more partisan or even more ‘political’ in some divisive sense, but rather because they are more reflective and appreciative of the tough choices between principles involved in, for example, different systems of university funding, membership of the European Union, or the decision of whether or not to intervene in a nearby conflict.

Once more though, is this too small a change to be worth pursing? Certainly it is a subtle one, at the level of each individual, yet as with our ‘phictions' it would have to be in order to succeed, given the realities of today’s politics. There is then not insignificance here, once all those individual journeys add up, but rather a world in which we improve democracy, and its many dialogues, not by trying desperately to persuade existing democratic representatives, but by nurturing the wider ‘demos’, and in particular its capacity for deliberation. This is the real politico-philosophical potential of classrooms and community centres, from Krakow to Wroclaw, filled with old and new minority groupings, from Sunni Muslims to refugee Ukrainians to rural Tartars to returning Anglo-Poles. Yes it might not change today’s election, but just maybe tomorrow’s electorate, provided we are all patient and sensitive enough to see the change through. And that, once more, will be easier just so long as we remember something important, as noted earlier – that if we do not try to pursue gentle dialogue here, regarding all sorts of moral and political dilemmas, they will simply be shouted about somewhere else. Post-truth, polarisation, populism – these are all real problems, so PPP has to be patient if it is to be realistic in responding to them.

That then, in effect, is our last key point when it comes to ‘examples’ worth ‘experimenting’ with, because of course none of this is easy, and of course none of it is likely to solve, overnight, any major social ills. That though is not the measure of success or failure we should cling to. Our aim, especially with inter-minority dialogue, is simply to help people talk, knowing that conversations and arguments will happen, and that decisions will be made, whatever we try. All we can do is make those conversations go better, with more light and less heat. Either you have a little faith in political philosophy and its training and believe that what we work on has something to add to such debates, as compared to the inputs of others, or you do not – and if the latter then of course feel free to stay far away from any form of public engagement. After all, and as stressed earlier, no one should be forced to do such work, especially as it does not need all of us to succeed. If just a handful of scholars managed to publish useful public analyses, sketch out interesting stories, and contribute to classroom discussions, then that would be more than enough for now, and indeed for the future, because as approaches like these develop and grow, the wider cultural knowledge and appreciation of ‘academic’ political philosophy would itself grow exponentially. Think here, on this front, of how audience demand would rise with a growing professional philosophical response to meet it. Think of how government funding might increase, and so too the volume of work produced, and in turn the number of philosophers trained, at which point it would now be easier, as noted, not just for future political philosophers to ‘go public’, but also for the rest of us to get on with whatever else it is that interests us, safe in the knowledge that our general subject area is now both better known and better valued by the wider world around us. That, I take it, would be good news, not just for political minorities, but also that minority of the population we call philosophers.

Conclusion: provisional, experimental, institutional

Here then, once more, are the key ideas. Public Political Philosophy (PPP) is political philosophy done both in and for the public. To be done at all, it must be accessible, political, and philosophical. To be done well, it should aim at conversation whilst avoiding violent conflict. To be done as well as possible, it should experiment with various methods of engagement, including, but not limited to, public analysis in the pursuit of ‘phacts’, philosophical story-telling in the pursuit of ‘phictions’, and civic education in the pursuit of ‘philennials’. Crucially, nobody has to do this, but also crucially, all could benefit. No one, in other words, should be forced to be relevant, yet for those keen to nurture some of the many discourses governing our lives, including in particular between those minorities who are otherwise easily separated, perhaps the rest of us should do what we can in support. Some of that means working on planning, and some of it working on promoting the work of others, but also I suspect, a good deal of PPP itself, given the need for philosophers to talk as accessibly and persuasively as possible about how and why we should support, shape, and experiment with such work going forwards.