Review: Reality and imagination in political theory and practice: On Raymond Geuss’s realism

Not to be confused, of course, with the related but much more circumscribed realist tradition in international relations theory.

The work of theorists as disparate as William Connolly , John Dunn , John Gray , Bonnie Honig , John Horton , Chantal Mouffe , Glen Newey , Mark Philp , Judith Shklar , and Bernard Williams is beginning to be seen as contributing to the development of a distinctive realist corpus. For an excellent overview, see William Galston (2010) ‘Realism in Political Theory’, in this issue of the European Journal of Political Theory and the other papers in this special issue.

Raymond Geuss ( 2008) Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), Geuss (2010) Politics and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

See, for instance, Thomas Hurka (2009), ‘Review of Philosophy and Real Politics’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , URL (consulted June 2010): http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15086.

As Geuss shows in ‘On Bourgeois Philosophy and the Concept of ‘‘Criticism’’’ (2010, in n.3) pp. 167-185, the issue here is that mainstream philosophy’s way of ‘making sense’ of social reality through careful rational argument is in fact a bourgeois attitude predicated on an unwarranted cognitive optimism, itself resting on an implicit endorsement of the status quo. Also see Raymond Geuss (2010) ‘A World without Why?’, The Point 2, URL (consulted March 2010): http://www.thepointmag.com/archive/ a-world-without-why/

This is especially true of Politics and the Imagination, which does explicitly contribute to Geuss’s realist project, and yet is a collection of loosely related essays on themes ranging from the role of museums, to international relations, to literary criticism, to the thought of Heidegger, Kant, and Rorty.

( 2008, in n. 3), p. 8.

Ibid. pp. 9-15.

Ibid. p. 16.

Hurka (n. 4).

For an extended discussion of this reading of Leviathan see David Gauthier (1995) ‘Public Reason’, Social Philosophy and Policy 12: 19-42, and Michael Ridge (1998) ‘Hobbesian Public Reason’, Ethics 108: 538-68.

Thomas Hobbes (1994 [1651]) Leviathan, ed. E. Curley , p. 23. Cambridge: Hackett .

Think of the many versions of (liberal) legitimacy theory that rely on some form of public justification, reasonable acceptability or non-rejectability, idealized deliberation, and the like. For a general critique of those approaches see James Bohman and Henry S. Richardson (2009) ‘Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and Reasons that All Can Accept’, Journal of Political Philosophy 17: 253-74, and Enzo Rossi (2008) ‘Liberal Legitimacy’, PhD thesis, Departments of Philosophy, University of St Andrews.

Thomas Hobbes (1841) English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth , vol. 5, p. 194. London: John Bohn. Cited in Gauthier (n. 11), p. 30.

Note how in Hobbes ‘moral actions’ denotes in fact the social or political sphere: as David Gauthier observes, ‘‘‘Morall Philosophy’’, Hobbes tells us, ‘‘is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind’’’ (n. 11, citing Leviathan, 30).

Cf. Timothy Chappell (2009) ‘‘‘Naturalism’’ in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy’, in R. K. Balot (ed.) A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, pp. 382-98. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Cf. Raymond Geuss (2005) Outside Ethics, pp. 144-50. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

In fact Kantian approaches are the prime targets of much of Geuss’s discussion of contemporary political philosophy. Moreover, his view that Max Weber was the most important political philosopher of the 20th century ((2010, in n. 3), p. 40) certainly lends support to my placing the issue of legitimacy at the core of the realist project. Finally, the centrality of legitimacy also resonates with Geuss’s rejection of a sharp distinction between normative and descriptive theory - on the impossibility to disentangle these concepts when discussing legitimacy see David Beetham (1991) The Legitimation of Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Geuss (2010, in n. 3), p. 42.

A possibility envisaged by Geuss as a live option ((2008, in n. 3), pp. 50-5).

Geuss (2008, in n. 3), p. 93; emphasis added. Also ibid. pp. 34-6.

Geuss is in fact very sympathetic to Williams’s realism: cf. Raymond Geuss (2005) ‘Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams’, in Geuss (n. 17), pp. 219-33.

Bernard Williams ( 2005) In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, p. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

One can see this move as an extension of the argument from authorization I put forward in the previous section.

It is worth pointing out that Geuss also discusses aspects of the role of imagination in politics beyond the one I will briefly touch on here. See especially ‘The Actual and Another Modernity’, in Geuss (2010, in n. 3), pp. 61-80.

Geuss (2010, in n. 3), pp. x-xi.

Glen Newey (2009) ‘Ruck in the Carpet’, London Review of Books 31(13): 17.

On this point see Christoph Menke (2010) ‘Neither Rawls Nor Adorno: Raymond Geuss’ Programme for a ‘‘Realist’’ Political Philosophy’, European Journal of Philosophy 18: 140-1.

Geuss (2010, in n. 3), p. 42.