Abstract
Political philosophy is seldom an obviously efficacious mode of political action. Nonetheless, because it is always articulated in the context of a struggle for justice and power which shapes human lives, its efforts to make sense of the conditions for beneficial collective human accomplishments are far from irrelevant to responsible political practice.1 Its analyses are never fully independent of the historical context in which they arise. And they always contain at least implied recommendations for future conduct. As a consequence of its time-bound character the arguments proper to political philosophy are for the most part enthymematic rather than demonstrative. They claim persuasiveness rather than conclusiveness.2
Martin Jay’s comments on an earlier version of this essay were most helpful.
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Notes
See John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 171-172. Hereafter cited as RMPT. See also Sheldon Wolin, “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,” Political Theory, Vol. 9, no. 3, 1981, esp. 404.
On the enthymematic arguments and their proper subject matter see Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 24a21-24bl5 and Rhetoric, 1356b3-1357al8 and 1402b21-23.
In political thought, if anywhere, one must start in medias res. There is no Archimedean point of either support or departure.
My account of the domain of politics is heavily indebted to, but does not simply repeat, Wolin's. See his Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960) 7-11. Hereafter cited as PV.
Aristotle, Politics, 1252al-1253a38.
Paul Ricoeur, “Ethique et politique,” Esprit, no. 101, mai 1985, 1–11.
Wolin has accurately pointed out antipolitical tendencies which would either eliminate politics or so fragment it so as to render it practically impotent. See PV, 407-429.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, tr. by Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 56-57 and 203-204, and his Themes From The Lectures At College de France 1952-1960, tr. by John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 40-41.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 4, 35. For some details of the unavoidable international character of contemporary life see Soedjatmoko, “Education Relevant to People's Needs,” Deadalus, Vol. 118, No. 1, Winter 1989, 211-218. I do not, though, endorse all of Soedjatmoko's recommendations. How indebted I am in this essay to Merleau-Ponty can be seen from my The Politics of Hope (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) esp. 23-42. Hereafter cited as PH.
See in this connection, Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983) esp. 1-24. Hereafter cited as IR.
See Robert Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 92-137. Charles Taylor, from a quite different point of departure, reaches much the same conclusion. See his Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) esp. 70-154.
See Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957) esp. 78–80, and his Models of Man, Social and Rational (New York: Wiley, 1957) esp. 196-200. For noteworthy criticisms of this managerialism see PV, 419-429 and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981) 24-30.
See Ferenc Feher, “Redemptive and Democratic Paradigms in Radical Politics,” Telos, no. 63, Spring 1985, 150-154. Hereafter cited as RDP.
See Joel Whitebook, “The Politics of Redemption,” Telos, no. 63, Spring 1985, 157. Hereafter cited as POR.
See RPD, 148, 151-154, and POR, 158.
Martin Jay, “Fin-de-Siécle Socialism,” Praxis International, Vol. 8, No. 1, April 1988, 10. As Jay makes clear, some Leftist thinkers, e.g., Paul Breines and Richard Wolin, still maintain faith in the possibility of redemption. Hereafter cited as FSS.
FSS, 10, citing Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, trans, by Winston Moore and Paul Commack (London: Verso, 1985) 190.
See Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, ed. by Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1986) 212.
POR, 162. Whitebook cites in his support Agnes Heller's “The Dissatisfied Society,” Praxis International, vol. 2, no. 4, January 1983, 361.
POR, 165. The same reasons which prompt one to accept a politics of maturity show the bankruptcy of what I have elsewhere called the politics of vision and the politics of will. See PH, 2-3 and passim.
The gerundive form desideranda unlike the participial form desiderata, has normative connotations.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in many ways exemplifies these desideranda.
See in this connection Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Michael Walzer's review of it entitled, “Flight from Philosophy,” The New York Review of Books, Vol XXXVI, no. 1, February 2, 1989, 42-44.
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 179. Hereafter cited as LLJ.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 285 and his Reason In The Age Of Science, tr. by Frederick G. Laurence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981) 80.
See LLJ, 183. Sande's argument is directed against political liberalism of the Rawls and Nozick sorts. To the extent that the politics of Mündigkeit shares Enlightenment roots with liberalism, his argument also affects it.
Julius Moravscik, “Communal Ties,” Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, Supplement to Vol. 62, no. 1, September, 1988, 220.
See Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. by George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 1-2 and passim. See also my “Ideology, Utopia, and Responsible Politics” in this volume, and Anthony Giddens, “Reason Without Revolution? Habermas's Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns” Praxis International, Vol. 2, no. 3, October 1982, 333-334.
See Richard J. Bernstein, “The Rage Against Reason,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 10, no. 2, 205. Bernstein's cautions against the dangers of violently imposed “virtuous” interaction are well taken.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Man and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 280.
John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 42. Hereafter cited as RMPT.
See my “Hope and Its Ramifications for Politics,” in this volume. Hereafter cited as HRP. See also PH, 105-119.
It is worth noting that in the Philebus Plato says that human existence is determined not merely by the aisthesis which receives the present but also by the mneme of the past and the elpis (hope) of the future.
Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982), 277. Lash argues that Marx's “vision of the future … remained optimistic, prematurely transcending desperation in the imagination, and did not, therefore, mature into hope,” 270. See also Jerald Wallulis, “Hope, Loyalty, and the Need for Critical Distance,” Logos, Vol 5, May 1984. I abstain from comment here on Lash's criticism of Marx.
The superhuman, of course, is not always construed as personal. But it is always construed as potent and as something with which it is both sensible and beneficial to be linked. The superhuman is never merely impersonal, if the term “impersonal” is taken to refer only to the negation of the personal, to that which is wholly indifferent to human persons.
RMPT, 102.
See Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope (Dodrecht: Mar-tinus Nijhoff, 1987), 142-146 and passim. Hereafter cited as HH. Godfrey does not draw the implications of hope for politics. But his study, building as it does upon analyses of hope presented by Kant, Ernst Bloch, and Gabriel Marcel, makes a significant contribution to political reflection.
Godfrey shows that any defensible ultimate hope rests on some set of background beliefs. See HH, 169-175.
For a good discussion of the difference between mere desire and hope, see Gabriel Marcel, “Desire and Hope,” in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. by Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O'Connor (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967) 277-285.
So far as I can tell, my account of hope is consistent with Ernst Bloch's description of what he calls subjective or hoping hope. If there is a disagreement between us, and I am not sure that there is, it would be about his view of objective hope. Objective hope, for Bloch, is hope for the “highest good.” People give content to this formal notion by way of “real symbols.” “And a real symbol,” Bloch says, “is one where the thing signified is still disguised from itself, in the real object, and not just for the human apprehension of that thing.” An example of these symbols is the Christian symbol of the kingdom. These symbols, however multiple and diverse, must all point to some as yet indiscernible unitary objective, some definitive terminus that Bloch speaks of as an Ithaca. Nothing in my account requires that there be this sort of unitary, “noumenal,” Ithaca for hope to make complete sense. How strongly Bloch would insist upon this unity is open to question. Further, it is not clear that Bloch would give, as I do, unequivocal priority to the persons in whom one hopes over the state of affairs for which one hopes. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, tr. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), III, 1312-1376, esp. 1346-1347 and 1365-1373.
Disagreements about how and to what extent the future is open can lead to distinctions between sensible hopes and foolish or vain hopes.
Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator, tr. by Emma Cranfurd (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951) 67. Hereafter cited as HV. My description of hope owes much to Marcel. But it does not imply, as he seems to, that all genuine hope ultimately presupposes the existence of a personal God. See in this connection HRP, 460.
Alasdair MacIntyre has seen something of the sort of political hope which I describe. He argues that the Hegelian, and Marxian, concept of alienation and its overcoming rests upon a hope which is distinct both from “ the religious faith that was its predecessor, and from the scientific dependence on would-be predictions of inevitable progress.” Strictly speaking, MacIntyre says, Marxist humanism does not claim to make a warranted prediction about a transition to socialism. It does not pretend to prescribe a specific solution for the problem of alienation. But it does claim to specify certain characteristics that any solution must possess. If one admits that no solution to political problems is definitive, then this sort of specification of characteristics of solutions is what I too claim as the result of political hope. See his Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 89–90. I neither endorse nor reject MacIntyre’s claims about Marxism. I only note our agreement about the existence, or at least the possibility, of political hope.
On the possibility and importance of such a belief, see HH, 172.
See PH, 2-3, and passim.
The negative connotations associated with presumption and despair can not be avoided. But since each of them can animate politics, their candidacies deserve consideration here.
I was guided to see these two possible orientations as forms of despair by Kierkegaard's analysis of despair in Sickness Unto Death.
For a good example of politics of containment in practice, consider the dealings of the several governments arranging the treaties terminating World War I. Each government tried to contain every other one, whether ally or foe. For a clear account of these dealings see David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II, 44, 65, and 70, and his Epístola de Tolerantia, ed. by R. Klibansky and J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 15-16. See also RMPT, 42-43 and 46.
I have no conceptual basis for claiming that it is impossible that there be other candidates for this role of fundamental orientation. But to my knowledge history provides no grounds for considering any others. All political claims concerning proper attitudes of which I am aware can be analyzed in terms of the candidates I have discussed here.
See in this connection IR, esp. 1-10. It is of course virtually certain that biological factors will eventually lead to the termination of the human race. But that will be unavoidable. Hope precludes avoidable risks of annihilation of the human species.
See CT, 220. See also Heidegger's distinction between proper and distorted care or solicitude (Fürsorge) in Being and Time, tr. by John Macquar-rie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 158-159.
Godfrey, following Marcel, sees hope as ideally aiming at mutual love. See HH, 45-46 and esp. 113. Also see HV, esp. 49-50. This linking of hope to love leads me to think that the sort of hope Marcel and Godfrey have in mind is religious rather than political.
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Dauenhauer, B.P. (1991). The Place of Hope in Politics. In: Elements of Responsible Politics. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3564-1_9
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