Empirical and Normative Without a Universal Human Nature

Abstract

I rally behind Floyd’s call to arms for an approach to political philosophy based on the broad hope ‘that we can successfully treat certain forms of human action as expressions [of] normative preferences ripe for conversion into political principles’. I have doubts, however, about his use of social science: it is too selective and is selected on the basis of the avoidance of two social evils and thus does not answer the fundamental questions of political philosophy about the good life and a polity that is based on positive ideals and aspirations. Nor do I see that the avoidance of the normative aloofness of ‘continental’ critical theory requires the postulation of a universal human nature, a postulate that in any case is unavailable.

I thought it was clear where I stood when I first came across Jonathan Floyd’s declaration of war on mentalism in favour of behaviourism. After all, my political theorising has a strong empirical anchoring. My concern is to identify the norms and the normative commitments and contestations that are at stake and are operative in preventing Britain and some other comparable countries from achieving some form of racial and ethnoreligious equality. More positively, I am particularly interested in not just the obstacles but in the ideas, politics, policies and leadership that will move us forward to attain those goals. The empirical concreteness of my normative interests surely means I am not a mentalist but a soldier for behaviourism, for political theory grounded in, and offering guidance to the real world. I certainly rally behind Floyd’s call to arms for an approach to political philosophy based on the broad hope ‘that we can successfully treat certain forms of human action as expressions [of] normative preferences ripe for conversion into political principles’ (Floyd, 2017: 20), especially if we interpret ‘forms of human action’ capaciously to include institutions, political traditions, political movements, contestations and so on. A position that might be captured in the slogan, ‘Practice precedes theory’, or more poetically in Hegel’s image of the Owl of Minerva flying out at dusk rather than at the dawn of a political project or even high noon.

Reading on, however, I discover two problems. First, in my own work, I do not focus on the two actions that Floyd picks on, namely acts of insurrection and acts of crime (Floyd, 2017). His primary factual claim is that these two actions happen less in liberal social democracy than in other political systems is interesting, if factually true. But is it? Authoritarian societies often boast they have less crime and less political agitation and disturbance than liberal democracies. For example, a few years ago, an analysis found that Abu Dhabi is the safest city in the world (Ahmad 2017). Similarly, Japan was for centuries a stable, authoritarian political unit with traditionally low rates of crime (Komiya, 1999). It has now had a form of liberal-social democracy for much less than a century, in which it has continued to have low rates of crime. What are the grounds for thinking that the continuing low rates of crime are due to democracy rather than tradition?

Liberal-social democracies, otherwise known in Europe as social democracy, have hardly existed any meaningful length of time. Surely less than a hundred year for the oldest, much less for the others and some that might once have been called social democracies like Britain may no longer be after decades of neo-liberalism, which in the case of Britain has lasted as long as its period of social democracy.

Specifically in relation to insurrections, in human history there have been long lived, stable polities, usually empires and kingdoms, which have had very few insurrections. They have sometimes had problems of succession, that is, a transition from one ruler to another, usually among a very limited number (sometimes just two) of rival claimants who have been willing to raise armies and create wars, or invite foreign invasions. However, on relatively few occasions, across a span of thousands of years across the globe, have there been popular uprisings of the kind we might call insurrections or revolutions.

It might be said that Floyd is trying to address our contemporary predicament and that the empires, kingdoms and traditional societies I am alluding to are not real options for us today, certainly not for people who will read his book or who he is thinking of. Indeed, the datasets that Floyd points to for assessing the merits of democracies versus authoritarian states are all contemporary. That actually is connected to my second problem, but before I turn to that, let me finish with my first problem.

My final complaint about Floyd’s focus on crime and insurrection for answering the question of what polities are best, or what polity we should live in, is that he points to outcomes we want to avoid not goals we want to achieve. As such, Floyd at best offers too minimalist a view of a good polity and the goals that ought to be pursued. So, even if Floyd’s factual arguments about crime and insurrection were true, they do not seem to answer the fundamental questions of political philosophy about the good life and a polity that is based on positive ideals and aspirations, not merely the avoidance of two social evils.

My second problem in rallying to Floyd’s banner is perhaps deeper. He assumes political philosophy is a search for universal principles, valid for all who engage in political philosophy, regardless of circumstance, time and place. This is very Socratic and Platonic. Plato’s Socrates does not ask how should Athenians of his time, namely his audience, students and interlocutors, live but instead asks: what is Justice? However, Floyd also says, as if it was synonymous, that the answers to the question of political philosophy, how should we live or what political system should we have, should be ‘rationally convincing to all those who live under them’ (Floyd, 2017: 192) or, ‘the system which people generally prefer, in practice, over all attempted alternatives’ (Floyd, 2017: 209). Leaving aside the no small matter of whether all these ways of phrasing the question of political philosophy are genuinely equivalent. The problem for me is that it does not capture my efforts to theorise politics.

My approach to political theorising has a very clear centre of gravity in terms of time and place. It is highly contemporary, drawing on certain historical threads only if they illuminate the present, and focused on Britain and, by extension, a comparative analysis of countries that are similar to Britain or are engaged with similar political problems. The problems are those of seeking equality in the context of racism, ethnoreligious difference and identity assertiveness. So, I am interested in what we might call ‘The British Story’, through which I want to show that people like me are part of that story not from the time that we or our parents arrived in Britain but from when Britons arrived on our shores. It is a political history with the competing legacies of racism, as well as developing notions of equal citizenship, national identity and belonging. I look at the new social movements from the 1960s onwards agitating for equality as respect for positive identity difference, especially the struggle for African-American identity. To do so, I draw on Charles Taylor’s argument about equal dignity and equal respect/recognition as a feature of modernity (Taylor, 1994) and Bhikhu Parekh’s related ideas of multiculturalism as the cherishing, not merely the passive, liberal acceptance (as with Isaiah Berlin) of diversity and therefore of intercultural dialogue and learning (Parekh 2006 [2000]). These give a political theory grounding – or at least a thickening – of what it means for ethnic minorities like me to have, value, struggle for and integrate a minority and a British identity. In engaging in arguments like these, I find myself not just drawing on empirical research but on rethinking concepts like racism, equality and British. Conceptual rethinking to do better, more insightful and accurate research but also to rethink these ideas normatively to answer questions about how to address political conflicts and controversies and guide policy debates; not always be able to answer specific policy questions but a basis for a broad intellectual public engagement orientation on the politics of multicultural diversity (Modood, 2019: chapter 1; 2022).

The phenomena I engage with empirically, theoretically or as public thinking are normative and contestation-laden socio-political phenomena, so the idea of a single set of valid principles as a goal would not make any sense. Yet, the norms in these phenomena are not unpacked in a purely descriptive way. Rather, as I have indicated, with a view to conceptual clarity, extension and development of some key normative concepts and positions in a particular direction, based on my normative commitments and use of concepts such as equal citizenship and recognition. Ultimately, it is to have a normative-conceptual position of one’s own, which is capable of pointing, in a general manner, the way forward in relation to the normative contestation; as well as a framework for empirical inquiry and be the basis of public intellectual engagement.

Now it so happens that Floyd finds theorising like this (in relation to his mentalism vs behaviourism dichotomy) problematic. In a 2016 article, he argues that theorising like the kind I have described is typical of European continental political theory; typically French or German although to some extent been taken up by North American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, James Tully and William Connolly (Floyd, 2016). He welcomes its critical focus on the assumptions underlying contemporary politics and its discursive constitution but believes it lacks two things that makes it fall below political philosophy proper and so should be thought of as ‘political theory’. First, this theorising, especially in its post-Marxist or non-Marxist, let’s say post-structural versions, is critical-descriptive not normative or evaluative of political practices (Floyd, 2016: 156). By ‘critical-descriptive’ – my term not Floyd’s – I mean forms of genealogical and deconstructive analyses that lay bare not just the power relations, structures and processes at work but the contingent, historically specific and non-universal nature of the ideas underlying the practices. Political philosophy proper, on the other hand, as in the ‘analytic’ mainstream, liberal Anglophone approach, is evaluative because its primary concern is not just to describe how things are or how they became what they are but how politics ought to be. The ‘continental’ approach has a critical attitude to how things are, it insists that things could be otherwise, there is nothing inevitable or fixed about how things are, but it excuses itself from suggesting what that better might be. No arguments are offered for what should or should not be done. My theorising, however, is normative as it does suggest ways that we should evaluate the past and the present and offers some justification for doing so by engaging with alternative evaluations and arguments. It is not simply ‘critical’ or ‘deconstructive’ but also constructive by seeking a positive intellectual engagement with the world as it is. That, then, can be a basis for interventions rather than critical aloofness in the world the theorising exists in and describes. Because one is not just studying a phenomenon or, to use Floyd’s phrase, a ‘form of human action’, but something one is part of and therefore wants it to fare well.

Yet, if this is a step away from the post-structural continental mode towards Floyd’s understanding of political philosophy, it is still less than that. Floyd argues that the reason the continentals do not offer a normative theory is because they do not believe that there is a single human nature across time and place that can be the foundation for what is good for all humans or what is human flourishing. Believing that human nature is constituted through and through by social processes, including coercive processes, the continentals have no basis for a trans-historical, trans-cultural evaluation of any particular society, including our own, but must simply display their diversity – typically a variety of human oppressions no better or worse than each other. I leave aside here to what extent this is an accurate view of post-structural theory as regards the absence of what might be called human nature. I want, instead, to query, whether it is indeed the case that normative political theory/philosophy must assume a determinate view of human nature or even what we might call a universal human nature.

I think human nature is too complex a thing or idea to be the basis of politics and therefore political philosophy. Nor do we need to postulate an idea of human nature as uniformity in order to do political philosophy. The politics we will be interested in evaluating, encouraging or discouraging will be far too historically specific, referring to inherited and new problems, and hopefully resources to engage with those problems, to be derivable from human nature. Human nature may be partly due to our biology, to our sexualised character, to various needs, including those to do with belonging to a group and the organising of a group, things that we might group together into a term such as ‘the human condition’; but they will be a very thin basis for answering questions such as the ones that Floyd raises about democracy versus authoritarianism or liberalism versus socialism, let alone for what version of democracy or liberalism among all the various contenders. To even get close to those questions, we will need a thicker conception of human nature. I endorse Parekh’s (2006 [2000]: 116) conceptualising of human beings as having a ‘common physical and mental structure’ at some very basic level but in all its actual manifestations, certainly in its political manifestations, it is thoroughly culturally conditioned. ‘Different cultures, then’, Parekh (2006 [2000]: 122) goes on to say, ‘define and constitute human beings, and come to terms with the basic problems of human life in their own different ways’. Moreover, ‘[s]ince human beings are culture-creating and capable of creative self-transformation, they cannot passively inherit a shared nature in the same way that animals do’ (Parekh, 2006 [2000]: 122).

So Floyd’s (2016: 167) suggestion that we might try to overcome the cliched dichotomy between ‘analyticals and continentals’ by showing that they can meet on the common ground of praxis, namely on what he calls ‘principle-expressing-action’ is worthwhile. While this means going beyond the post-structural disavowal of normative analysis, as I believe is the case in my own approach, I cannot accept that for such analysis to be more than relativistic question-begging, we need a concept of a universal, singular, thick human nature from which a politics can be derived, or indeed that such a human nature is available to do the work that Floyd intends it to do.

There are of course different ways of doing political theory/philosophy, some will be more anchored in time and place, and some will be more detached and abstract. But I cannot see that a postulate of an eternal human nature is what is necessary in order for political philosophy to be truly evaluative. I am reminded of Oakeshott’s idealist understanding of philosophy as ‘experience without presuppositions’, of an inquiry that questions all its presuppositions. I readily grant that my theorising an aspect of our times, an aspect of our socio-political world, does not do that. ¹ So, I do not claim that it is political philosophy. I am content for it to be something like contextualised political theory, or even, what I have called ‘normative sociology’ (Modood, 2022). My point here simply is that the difference between the two is not the presence and absence, respectively, of a concept of human nature.

Rather than seeking the establishing and using of universally valid principles, we get beyond cultural relativism through engaging principles that have traction in one context by engaging them in other contexts to see what is learnt about the relevant principles, what Simon Thompson and I have called ‘iterative contextualism’ (Modood and Thompson, 2018). Multiculturalist political theorists emphasise openness rather than cultural closed-in-ness by arguing for open-ended, intercultural dialogue and the promise of a fusion of horizons. This can be done without assuming all perspectival differences and different value positions and rankings will be reasoned away. We can, therefore, move forward without postulating an endpoint; and without postulating the character of that endpoint, specifically, without assuming that the endpoint must be universal principles or principles convincing to all.

And does Floyd really end up in a better place? He is willing to accept, on the basis of informed social science, that in relation to crime and insurrection, no less than to most matters, peoples’ responses to what they will do in different social circumstances and the preferences thus expressed in their actions will vary (Floyd, 2017: 215–216, 234–237 and 241) and so the best social science he can rest his case on is probabilistic (Floyd, 2017: 214–215). That is what we should expect. But, unless I am missing something, it means that Floyd’s political philosophy, by having probabilistic foundations, cannot satisfy its universalist postulates. Its goal of a single answer must be probabilistic, that is to say, the frequency of the human actions of crime and insurrection that Floyd (2017: 236) uses to offer a case for liberal-social democracy are qualified by particular and contextual factors.

To conclude, while I am pleased that Floyd has stimulated these reflections on my efforts in political theory and I am intrigued to learn that I am at base a ‘continental’, I do not accept that on matters on which I differ with Floyd, namely his use of social science and his postulation of universalism, allow him to reach a higher ground designated by a conferral of the status of full political philosophy. He seems to be as happy in contemporaneity, in probabilistic empirical inquiry informing evaluative theory and an aspirational public intellectual engagement as me – despite his angst about ‘is this all that political philosophy can be?’