REVIEWS
RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, London, Faber, 1993. 363pp,
£9.99 pb, 0 571 169732.
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London,
Hutchinson, 1993. 583pp, £20 hb, 0 09 1753449.
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, London,
Harper Collins, 1993. 491pp, £18 hb, 0 00 255267 1.
‘Alive,’ claims Macey, ‘Foucault would have rejected the advances of any biographer; in death he still struggled to escape
them.’ It is certainly true that Foucault did, on many occasions,
profess what might be termed a ‘will to anonymity’; and in a less
directly autobiographical register, it is this same urge which
prompts so much of his argument, or – perhaps more accurately
– which figures as its utopian horizon.
Foucault denied the interest of his own life, and was sceptical
about the relevance of his personal formation to the understanding
of his work. The philosopher, he suggested, is not ‘born’ but
‘exists’. Despite his many interviews, little is disclosed about
himself, and even that is frequently masked by an impersonal
mode of commentary, as if the experience in question were that of
another. Moreover, in his disposition to live his ‘many lives’ in
relati ve separation from each other, there is evidence that Foucault
sought to elude the totalising gaze not only of the biographer, but
even of those with whom he was most intimately involved.
In his philosophy, the ‘will to anonymity’ underlies the project
to disperse the dialectic and its philosophical anthropology into
the language which ‘dispossesses’ it. In his literary criticism, it is
manifest in his fascination with the voice of all those speaking to,
or spoken by, the ‘absence of being’ and the yearning for the
‘dissolution ofthe ego’. It is an inspiration of his commentary on
sexuality, and, it would seem, a compelling dimension of his own
jouissance: that which is gratified in the utopia of ‘bodies and
pleasures’, and that which finds him speaking of the reversal of
the sexual and the individual – of individuals as the mere
‘pseudopodic’ vehicles of its trans-personal prolongation. It is
also, one might add, a thematic of his politics, expressed most
controversially, perhaps, in his enthusiasm in 1978 for the anonymity of the collective religious forces of the Islamic cause, and
his dismissal of the prospect of a Khomeini regime on the grounds
that the Ayatollah was no more than a ‘focal point’ of this
transcendent populism.
So, yes, Macey is right. Foucault did, in both the life and the
work, dismiss the relevance of the biographical understanding,
and sought to elude its grasp. But as a celebrity who clearly
enjoyed his fame, he did so only to encourage a certain scepticism
44
about his motives; and, it would seem, further to excite the interest
in charting the life of one so professedly in quest of self-effacement. For in the short time since his death, he has inspired three
biographical studies, the two most recent of which – those of
Macey and Miller – are major works of scholarship. To say this
is not to dismiss Eribon’ s pioneering effort. It is a sensitive and,
in many ways, revealing portrait, and the most succinct guide of
the three. But the works of Macey and Miller are of a different
order. Macey’s in virtue of the altogether more scholarly and
comprehensive account it provides of Foucault’ s life and work;
Miller’s in virtue of the way it trespasses beyond all the previous
limits of Foucault study.
Both these volumes are the work of authors with a profound
empathy for Foucault, and a Foucaultian resistance to the adoption of any moralising stance. Both recognise that if Nietzsche
was the major influence, he was certainly not the only one, and
that Foucault owes as much to Beckett, Artaud, B’ataiile, Roussel,
Blanchot, Klossowski and de Sade (the last especially, according
to Miller) as to any more strictly philosophical writing. And both,
through the extensive coverage they give to these lines of influence, aid a keener sense of where Foucault is, and where he is not,
so original a thinker. By situating Foucault’s work in the context
of Surrealism, Modernism and the post-war avant-garde, these
biographies provide the materials for a more adequate consideration of its contribution.
Yet their differences of style and approach are very striking,
and are, in a summary way, reflected in the respective titles of
these volumes: for Macey, Foucault is a man of ‘many lives’; for
Miller, he is driven by a singular passion with the extinction of
life. Macey, we may say, has written in the spirit of Montaigne’ s
advice that ‘those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are
never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one
whole; while Miller has sought to see what discoveries may be
yielded by deliberately flouting it. Thus, where Macey tends to
emphasise the diversity of Foucault’s life, Miller dwells on its
unity of purpose; and where Macey invites us to think of Foucault
as in some sense securing ‘anonymity’ through a deliberate
compartmentalisation of his multiple roles, Miller interprets the
life as a whole in terms of a more literal and openly acknowledging dicing with self-obliteration.
Precisely by virtue of this concern to show us the many facets
of Foucault’s life activity, Macey offers in some respects the
fuller picture. It is more comprehensive in the data it provides
about the events and chronology of Foucault’ s life and a richer
source of the kind of anecdotal detail that can sometimes prove so
illuminating. (It is here, for example, not in Miller, that we learn
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
ofFoucault’s obsession with Rorschach testing, of his misogynist
displays, his dislike of sunsets and Simone de Beauvoir, his
petulant responses to criticism, and so on.) Macey also traces the
course of development of Foucault’s academic career more
closely, is more informative on his role as a kind of unofficial
cultural ambassador, and tells us a great deal more about his
political activities and their motivations. Indeed, in his coverage
of Foucault’ s political involvement, Macey produces, almost as a
kind of by-product, one of the best accounts in English to date of
the events of May’ 68 and their immediate aftermath.
In Macey, too, there is much illuminating’ archaeology’ of the
reception of Foucault’ s writings, and of the differential readings
to which they were subject as a result of changing political
circumstances. For example, the hostile criticism directed at Folie
et Deraison by the ‘official’ psychologists, once the book had
become a bible of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, appears in
marked contrast to the reception they accorded it on publication,
when it was percei ved as a respectable academic treatise. Foucault,
for his part, though not averse to this turn of events, had also to
recognise the irony of the adoption of his book by a campaign
primarily inspired by Sartrean existentialism, and this
misconstruction of his purposes may well have helped to concentrate his mind upon the questions of power and repression so
central to his later argument. In these and similar discussions, one
is given real insight into the complexities of the relations between
readership and author, and the role of the former in the development of the latter.
These, then, are some of the ways whereby, through the
adoption of a more conventional approach, Macey offers the kind
of historical and concrete exposition without the benefit of which
one may find it harder to appreciate the force and coherence of
Miller’s work. Moreover, at a number of points, Macey offers
commentary which illuminates the questions that Miller makes
central to our understanding of Foucault’ s project. For example,
is Foucault’s early work driven by a romantic conception of
madness as a Dionysian truth silenced by the discourse of reason?
Is he, or is he not, seeking to uncover and free some primitive and
fundamental pre-discursive experience in his zeal always to
exceed all normatively constituted limits? Miller suggests yes,
while recognising that the answer is by no means clear-cut.
Macey, in his tracing of the analogies between Foucault’ s conception of madness as ‘absence d’oeuvre’ and the writing of Artaud
and Nerval, helps us to see why the answer might have to be no.
For, as Foucault himself puts it in his Naissance de la Clinique,
discovery here ‘no longer means finally reading an essential
coherence beneath a disorder, but pushing a little further the
foam-line of language, making it cut into that region of sand that
is still open to the clarity of perception, but already no longer open
to familiar speech. In introducing language into that penumbra
where the gaze has no more words.’
The question, in short, as to whether Foucault’s primary
concern is with a Dionysian experience, or with the ways in which
exclusions from the ‘human’ community are normatively constituted and continuously revisable, is by no means clear-cut; and
Macey and Miller useful complement each other in allowing us to
see how equivocal Foucault can be on the matter.
But Miller is less concerned with the reading to be given
specific texts than with revealing where and how they fit into
Foucault’s Nietzschean quest to realise his own genius and
become the ‘one that he is’. What matters to Miller is the nature
ofFoucault’ s personal odyssey, a voyage of self-discovery which,
he insists, can only be understood in terms of Foucault’s love
affair with death. Miller, indeed, begins with the death as the key
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
to the meaning of the life, and then traces the route – via suicide
bids, the induced self-loss of drug-taking, the mini-deaths of
intense pain and anonymous sexual orgy – whereby Foucault
comes finally to embrace his death from AIDS as a kind of lyrical
apotheosis of all that had gone before. Hence the central role
which Miller accords to Foucault’s sado-masochistic practices,
since it is through these, he claims, that Foucault attained the most
ultimate forms of self-obliteration short of death, and on account
of these, essentially, that he finally passed beyond the limits of
their ‘limit experience’ itself. Sado-masochism informs the life
and work – not in the sense that we can read their ethos and
philosophy as the consequence of an original sexual disposition,
but insofar as it was always towards this corporeal transgression
and experimentation with the self that everything in his thinking
was tending.
It is, as Miller himself recognises, contentious whether this
pursuit of Foucault’s daimon may strictly count as biography, as
opposed to an inspired and quasi-fictional post-mortem reconstruction of the life. But there is no doubt that it is Miller rather
than Foucault’s other biographers who has had the audacity to
probe where Foucault himself invited us to probe when he
remarked that the writer’s ‘major work is, in the end, himself’ , that
sexual preference, private life and work are interrelated, and that
the ‘work includes the whole life as well as the text’. Nor is there
any doubt that by venturing where others have feared to tread,
Miller opens up new perspectives, not only on Foucault himself,
but on the implications of a great deal of current, professedly
emancipatory, thinking on the body and sexuality. In this dazzling
and disturbing study, Miller has produced what, to my mind, is
one of the most important commentaries on the Foucaultian
legacy – a book that is deservedly controversial, but which must
certainly be read before it is judged.
Part of the power of Miller’ s work lies in the fact that it is itself
a driven book, propelled by a passionate concern to get to the
bottom of the rumour that in 1983 Foucault frequented the
bathhouses of California with a deliberate view to infecting others
with AIDS. Miller’s verdict is that he did not do this. What he did
do was to engage in a potentially suicidal wager with consenting
partners, ‘most of them likely to be infected already’. The distinc-
45
tion is clearly a little too nice for comfort, and it is reflected in
many other judicious discriminations which Miller draws, all of
them tending in Foucault’s favour, but explored with the kind of
honesty that allows the reader to pursue their more contrary
implications to the limit. No doubt some will react to Miller’s
empathetic investigation as a romanticisation of all the more
morbidly adolescent, phallocratic and irrationalist dimensions of
Foucault’s project. But to do so would be to miss the dialectical
character of Miller’s study, and to abstract from one of its
important, if not entirely intentional, effects – namely, that it
brings so clearly into view the sinister side of the Foucaultian
engagement with the ‘limit experience’: its potential to flip over
into legitimation of everything which Foucault himself professed
to deplore.
Other commentators have noted the licence which Foucault’ s
relentless assault upon the barriers imposed by conventional
ethical thinking may give to fascism, torture and totalitarianism at
the political level, or to solipsism or narcissism at the more
personal. But they have generally done so as part of an academic
engagement with the inconsistencies of the professor. What
Miller does is rather different: he shows us a Foucault bent on
exposing the equivocal nature of the very distinctions which are
fundamental to the possibility of ethical judgement, a Foucault
who would question any clear-cut discrimination between pleasure and pain, torment and bliss, life and death; and who, in a sense,
advised, and revelled in, cruelty as a liberation from the governance of the humanistic obsession with happiness. Miller’s preparedness to penetrate to the wilder reaches of Foucault’ s originality
highlights the seriousness with which we ought to think about the
acclaim he has received in our culture as an emancipatory thinker,
about the nature and extent of his influence in the academy, and
the reasons for it. Miller quotes Edmund White’s remark on
Foucault – that he was’ a man deeply attracted to power in its most
totalitarian forms, politically and sexually. Throughout his life, he
struggled against this attraction. That is what I most admired
about him.’ In his sympathetic investigation of the struggle,
Miller’s study may go to the heart of Foucault’ s particular genius,
but only to leave us thinking more deeply about the admiring
attention that has been paid to one so compelled by that attraction
in the first place.
It also leaves us with a number of more specific questions
about the coherence of the struggle. If sado-masochism is recommended as a creative exercise which releases us from the constraints of the sexualised body, why are all its techniques so
focus sed on the genitalia and ‘standard’ erotic zones? Is the
importance attached to the self-loss experienced in pain finally
consistent with the importance which must also be attached to
individual consent to its infliction, if we are clearly to discrimination between S/M and torture? What exactly is so constraining and
regressive about the sexual body, and a more individualised mode
of pleasure? Why should we not regard the sutured ‘masochist’
body without organs and orifices as a product of Catholic puritanism rather than a release from its repressions? And finally, if what
is at issue is the struggle against sexual power, what justifies the
presentation of any set of sexual preferences as collectively
preferable?
The questions raised by Foucault’s struggle against political
power are of a somewhat different order, since the accounts of
both Macey and Miller make it clear that he was continuously
revising his thinking on this in the course of his career – and had
come, by the end of it, to embrace much of the liberal discourse
and argument that his earlier gauchisme had found repelling (at
least rhetorically: Foucault, it seems, was always less bravado in
46
deed than word). In his political struggles, then, he emerges as
more cautious about going to extremes than in his sexual engagements, even if he appears more volatile in consequence. Macey
and Miller together amply fill out the picture of the shifts and turns
here, and note a number of naivities. But I missed any sustained
discussion in either of Foucault’ s positions on the Cold War, his
failure to perceive the ways in which the ‘new philosophy’
analysis might play into the hands of reactionaries on both sides
of the Iron Curtain, his abstraction from military dimensions (a
chauvinist disdain for the European peace movement admittedly
shared by most of his left-wing compatriots at the time). Macey
does not fall into Miller’s error of presenting Foucault as if he
were an uncomplicated ally of feminism, but there is little attempt
by either study to engage with Foucault’s androcentrism or to
consider the nature of his contribution in the light of feminist
critique. There is also, it seems to me, insufficient consideration
of the more thoughtless aspects of his ultra-leftism in the light of
the reputation he has acquired as a sophisticated political analyst
of our times. In fact, one has to say that, loud as he may have been
in his denunciations of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, Foucault’ s
activism reveals him as a little too quick with the complexities of
democracy in the West.
Nor, more generally, do any ofthese biographies sufficiently
discuss the central tensions of Foucault’ s arguments on power. If,
as Habermas has suggested, Foucault’s influence on the Zeitgeist
has to do with the ‘productive contradictions’ of his thought, it is
the productive rather than contradictory dimensions which receive the most attention here. Others have, of course, submitted
Foucault’s political argument to intensive critical scrutiny but,
given the extent to which Foucault has been taken up on the left
as the alternative guru to Marx, one could have wished for more
recognition of the controversies he has generated, and more
engagement with key criticisms (those of Habermas included).
But if the biographies are less exacting in these respects than
one might have hoped, what they do offer is powerful documentation of the extent to which Foucault lived, if not exactly in
contradiction with his theory, then in a rather disarming disregard
for some of its solemnities. The same Foucault who would have
us appreciate the manipulative application of the doctrine of
human rights was a fairly energetic campaigner on their behalf,
especially in his later years, and explicitly contests oppression in
their name on several occasions. The same Foucault who invites
us to question the truth of lived experience and the autonomy of
the subject is also a Foucault who, according to Miller, cannot be
understood except in terms of this experience, and certainl y a man
whose highly spontaneist political activity scarcely testifies to
doubts about the authority of moral feeling or the efficacy of
individual initiative. The same Foucault who is taught in the
classroom as an anti-Enlightenment sceptic and theorist of the
investment of the subject by power, is a Foucault who is everywhere in pursuit of progress and clearly trusts to the authenticity
of his most immediate passions and erotic promptings. For
someone, in fact, who is so reluctant to allow any humanist
register in his writings, Foucault appears surprisingly impulsive
in his personal and political responses; and, while he may have
persuaded many a reader to re-think their identity and patterns of
behaviour in the light of the power-knowledge nexus, there is
little in these biographies to suggest that Foucault turned the same
reflexive gaze upon Foucault, or not very systematically, at any
rate. On the other hand, one could no doubt argue that it was only
consistent of him to have lived his life in a certain resistance to the
disciplinary codes of his own thinking.
Kate Soper
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
FAIR ENOUGH?
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993. 416pp, £19.95 hb, 0 231 05284 O.
As is now all too well known, the publication in 1971 of John
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice inaugurated a renaissance of normative political philosophy in Britain and America. It was also in
itself a classic work which did much to establish the hegemony of
liberal ideals and presumptions in Anglophone political theory.
We inhabit a post-Rawlsian world and to that extent we are all
now liberals of various shades and hues.
Since publication Rawls himself has not been silent. In various places he has defended, developed and modulated the claims
of A Theory. Political Liberalism brings together the most important arguments ofthese pieces. It would be harsh to accuse Rawls
of simply offering a rehash. The original articles have been
considerably modified, and there is more than enough evidence of
an underlying argument to warrant the publication of a single text.
Nevertheless, Political Liberalism does show the signs of its
origins and it is not always attractive. There is repetition. The list
of primary goods, for instance, is defended in two separate places
without apparent cross-referencing. Rawls says that his concern
in Political Liberalism is not to clarify the meaning and application of the two principles of justice defended in A Theory. Yet in
the last chapter of Political Liberalism he does just that by
explicating the content and priority of the first principle which is
concerned with the basic liberties.
The format of Political Liberalism does have one appealing
feature. Rawls acknowledges its source in lectures, and this is the
title he gives the various chapters. It is also their form and as a
result we can recognise the eloquent, elegant voice of their author.
A Theory, by contrast, had a somewhat disembodied quality. In
Political Liberalism John Rawls speaks directly to his audience
with a passionate concern to make his ideas perspicuous, to fill in
gaps and clear up misunderstandings.
So what has Rawls been doing since 1971? Some critics take
him to have been backtracking in an alarming manner. In his
Guardian review of Political Liberalism Brian Barry accused
Rawls of abandoning the defence of liberal principles. Other
critics see him as rebuilding his theory by offering an entirely new
account of his own fundamental ideas. Others, yet again, see
Rawls as concerned with the politics of his political philosophyeither construed pejoratively as pragmatic compromise or, more
ideally, seen as the public forms of democratic and fair-minded
social co-operation. Rawls himself is explicit as to what he is
doing in Political Liberalism. He is correcting a serious failing of
A Theory and attempting to solve a problem which that work did
not adequately recognise.
We need then to be clear what A Theory tried to do. It defended
a recognisably liberal conception of ‘justice as fairness’. This
consisted of two principles guaranteeing equal liberty , but permitting socio-economic inequality so long as there was equality of
opportunity and the position of the worst -off could not be bettered
(the so-called ‘difference principle’). To simplify greatly, Rawls
offered three defences of this conception of justice. The most
celebrated was the contractarian. The two principles would be
chosen by us even if we were intent on pursuing our own
advantage so long as we were constrained by an ignorance of
where our advantage lay. Without being fair-minded we could,
under the right conditions, be minded to choose fair terms of
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
social co-operation.
The second defence rested on foundational notions of the
person, principally a Kantian one of the individual as autonomous. The third defence which appeared in Part III of A Theory
appealed to the ideal of a ‘well-ordered society’. This was a
society whose members could live with and by the principles of
justice regulating its basic structure. That is to say, each citizen of
such a society could publicly acknowledge and accept these
principles in the mutual assurance that others would do so also.
Other principles – a utilitarian one of maximising average utility,
say – would not do the job and could not conduce to good social
order in this sense.
None of this now passes muster as far as Rawls is concerned.
The elements of the contractarian argument – the Original Position, veil of ignorance and contracting parties – were, he says, no
more than ‘devices of representation’ . They modelled considerations whose justification lay elsewhere. Just as well, in view of the
standard criticisms of the argument. These were that the description of the contract was packed to show just what Rawls wanted
it to show. Under another description it would signally fail to do
this. And, anyway, a hypothetical contract has no force and
certainly does not bind those who live outside its peculiar,
artificial constraints. As for the second defence, Rawls denies that
his theory of justice presupposes any metaphysical understanding
of the self. There is, and only needs to be, a political conception
of the individual.
However, it is the idea of a ‘well-ordered society’ which
Rawls is most concerned to refashion. The citizens of the ‘wellordered society’, as A Theory understood things, accepted the
principles of justice only because they subscribed to a broader
moral or philosophical doctrine, that which Rawls himself took to
underpin ‘justice as fairness’. But Rawls now thinks this is
unsatisfactory. Why? Because – and political liberalism posts this
as its starting-point – a modern democratic society is characterised by a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines which are all
entertained for good reasons, but which need not be compatible
with one another. A ‘well-ordered society’ cannot rest on an
agreement which, as it were, goes all the way down; or even at
least as far down as its citizens’ basic moral and philosophical
commitments.
All is not lost, however. Rawls thinks that an ‘overlapping
consensus’ is possible. This, he is careful to elaborate, is not a
compromise or modus vivendi. It is a political agreement to live
by a set of principles even though all the parties to this agreement
hold to these principles for different reasons, rooted in their
various comprehensive doctrines. The problem of A Theory was
to understand and explicate the character of the good – that is, just
– society. For Rawls this is the fair society governed by his two
principles. The problem of political liberalism is: ‘How is it
possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of
free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though
incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?’
Rawls’s answer is, in so far as a ‘freestanding’ conception of
justice (that is, one which stands free of any doctrine beyond its
own political terms) has the support of an overlapping consensus
of various comprehensive doctrines in the society whose basic
structure it regulates. Rawls still thinks that his principles best
define the terms of fair co-operation. He now seeks to show that
these terms would be acceptable to, and politically unite, a society
47
divided by its citizens’ views on life as a whole. Put simply, A
Theory argued that fair’s fair; Political Liberalism argues that fair
is fair enough.
Is it enough? A lot turns on how we are to understand
‘reasonableness’ . This has application in two areas. Rawls insists
that political liberalism starts from the existence within any
democratic society not just of any old plurality of world views, but
a reasonable pluralism. The diversity of doctrines is not due to
‘brute forces of the world but to the inevitable outcome of free
human reason’. Rawls does not deny that there are unreasonable
comprehensive doctrines. He does not so much discount their
existence as imply that, were they to gain widespread currency,
democratic society could be neither stable nor fair. A secure and
just regime requires the support of a ‘substantial majority of its
politically active citizens’. We need not all be reasonable, but
enough of us must be.
Reason is exercised, second, in the public conduct of society’s
political business. The one wholly original chapter of Political
Liberalism is devoted to ‘The Idea of Public Reason’, the proper
terms under which citizens make their political claims, politicians
defend their principles, and, above all, a Supreme Court reviews
policy. Public reason is rational inasmuch as it conforms to
standard forms of reasoning and presumes uncontroversial, commonly accepted beliefs. It is public in so far as its content is limited
by the agreed terms of the political conception of justice. In sum
a society is well ordered when a majority of citizens affirm
different views of life with good reason, yet also discourse
politically with a shared reason.
There are two worries about all of this. The first is that it
reveals a misplaced naivey. It is surely more plausible to see
unreasonable doctrines and their conflict as presenting the problem for contemporary political philosophy. We need to know both
why people subscribe to such doctrines and how a good society
can be sustained in the face of such beliefs. Incidentally, the
frequency with which it is referred to in reviews of Political
Liberalism suggests that Islam has definitively supplanted totalitarian communism as the illiberal bogey for our times.
The second worry is that Rawls makes it too easy for himself.
When he does give a model case of an overlapping consensus the
liberal political conception is supported by a Lockean religious
view, the moral liberalism of Mill or Kant, and a tolerant pluralism. With enemies like that who needs friends? The goal of a wellordered society is easily reached when its disagreements are
confined within a family of reasonable liberalisms. As unreasonable doctrines should trouble liberalism, so too should a reasonable non-liberal (not necessarily illiberal) politics. This worry is
compounded by the fact that, as Jeremy Waldron has noted, Rawls
uses the term ‘reasonable’ , by contrast with rational, to characterise that disposition of individuals to maintain fair terms of social
co-operation. It should be evident that it is all too simple for fairminded people to play fair with others of a similarl y fair mind. But
not all ‘reasonable’ disagreement will be moderated in this
automatic fashion. The general point is that a well-ordered society
is unlikely on Rawls’ s own terms, but only theoretically plausible
because it is constructed on his terms.
The disjunction between ‘brute forces’ and an exercise of ‘free
reason’ offered by Raw Is in explanation of ideological difference
is itself rather brutish. It exposes a general difficulty with his
approach right from A Theory. He seeks theoretical foundations
free from the contingencies of any particular society and time, and
yet also wishes to articulate the underlying ideals of modern
Western liberal democracies. For this last phrase we can now read
‘American constitutionalism’ , and this makes the witty definition
48
of Rawls’s philosophy, coined before Political Liberalism, as
‘Kantianism in one country’ even more apposite. Rawls acknowledges that his own conception of justice ‘starts from within a
certain political tradition’, and that the content of any political
conception is expressed in terms of ideas ‘implicit in the public
culture of a democratic society’. Yet it can seem as if these
conceptions spring new-born from the head of free reason.
He now stresses that his principles apply to ‘closed societies’.
This means that they are to be seen as self-contained and having
no relations with other societies. More pertinently, we enter our
societies at birth and leave them only by death. But the closer this
abstraction comes to the real world, the more troubling the
admission is. Why are there particular societies bounded in time
and space? And why is it that each society has its own ‘culture’
and ‘tradition’? We are born not only into our society but its
cultural traditions. These, and our allegiance to them, are neither
the product of brute forces nor the exercise of free reason. Yet it
is surely from an understanding of these facts that a plausible
political liberalism must start.
John Locke suggested in his Second Treatise of Government
that America supplied a good example of what the state of nature
looks like. It is tempting to think Rawls might suggest that, if you
want to know what a free exercise of political reason is like, you
should also look to America. Yet it is clear, as Bernard Williams
has commented, that Rawls’s deep commitment to the virtues of
American constitutionalism betrays a lack of ‘sociological imagination’, an awareness of the peculiarities of its history, and the
habits of its citizenry’ s heart. Rawls is troubled by the claim, most
centrally defended by Michael Walzer, that political philosophy
is the articulation of a society’s shared understandings. Yet his
response to this view in a tantalisingly brief few pages is unhelpful. Political philosophy, we are told, is turned to when our shared
understandings break down and come into conflict. It does not
withdraw from society and expound its own a priori truths. Yet
the abstractions to which we as philosophers ascend in order to
resolve these conflicts are somehow uncovered through fundamental ideas which are deep, but implicit, within our society’s
culture. If ever Rawls needed to be clear and fill in the gaps, it is
here.
There is a related point. Rawls insists that his political philosophy of a well-ordered society does not presume a view of human
nature and does not need to be analysed in terms of any nonnormative theory of human beings. ‘We strive for the best we can
attain within the scope the world allows.’ But political philosophy
is not autonomous of brute facts, for ‘we’ and ‘the world’ are not
independent of the way our society is structured and its history has
been conducted. In Part III of A Theory, which Rawls now
repudiates, there is a sketched account of moral education and the
maintenance of a public culture to show how these may conduce
to the good order of a fair society. It sought to indicate how we
may become and remain the kind of citizens who acknowledge
and accept the terms of our social co-operation as just. Rawls now
has little to say about education, save that its function and content
should be constrained by the agreed terms of the political conception. Nothing more comprehensive is warranted. But how and
where are the diverse comprehensive doctrines acquired? How is
a freestanding conception of justice to be taught when it is set
apart from any broader philosophical views? How do we become
the citizens of the well-ordered society?
Part of the problem is that, once again, a crucial disjunction is
too crude. For Rawls the choice is between the facts of reasonable
pluralism and the ‘fact of oppression’ – namely, that ‘one comprehensive doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
state power’ . In this he too literally sees political liberalism as the
secular inheritor of post-Reformation tolerance of religious difference. His model is the Inquisition and the suppression of heresy
in the name of the one true faith, or toleration. But a liberal like
Raz has convincingly argued that there are non-coercive means of
sustaining those values a society holds central. And these values
may be sustained by less than a plurality of doctrines but more
than a single one.
In Political Liberalism Rawls remains silent on certain matters and has little to say about others. Throughout he presupposes
the conception of justice defended in A Theory and, on a number
of occasions, repeats that he sees no reason to relinquish that
works’ understanding of fairness. It might seem as ifhis remarks
in Political Liberalism are addressed not to critics of liberalism,
but to other liberals, such as Dworkin and Raz, whom he calls
‘moral liberals’. There is thus an unfortunate feeling of blithe
disregard for the radical opponents of Rawlsianism. He deftly
summarises Nozick’s libertarianism (is it accidental that Nozick
does not appear in the index?), but only to illustrate its failure to
accord a central role to the basic structure. The more fundamental
strictures ofNozick’ s case are simply not met. Rawls is obviously
bemused by the communitarian challenge, and seems to believe
that Sandel’ s critique simply, and badly, misses the point. He
strives to make clear that a well-ordered society cannot – save by
the coercive imposition of a single doctrine – be a community in
the substantive manner communitarians demand. But, as I have
suggested, he does not adequately deal with that strand of
communitarian writing which emphasises the contingent particularities of our social and historical situation.
He does not answer Susan Moller akin’s sustained critique of
A Theory for its failure to show how a just society can rest on
unjust foundations – namely, a blindness to gender inequality and
the oppression of women within the ‘private’ family. Indeed, his
response is all too dismissi ve and brief. The family ‘in some form’
can be assumed to be just, and, though he cannot spell it out,
problems of gender inequality can be overcome. This attitude is
unfortunate.
Rawls shows an awareness of other ‘traditions’ of political
philosophy. He shares with Oakeshott a view of democratic
society as not being a purposive association, and alludes to
Habermas’s work on the notion of free rational agreement between reasonable persons. But in neither case is the import of
these comparisons spelt out.
Finally, and most regrettably, Rawls does not meet the challenge of socialists and radical egalitarians. He does not appear to
see any reason to examine afresh questions of social and economic justice. The difference principle is simply reaffirmed, as is
Rawls’s belief that social and economic inequality need not
undermine an equality of basic liberties. Once again he insists that
questions of whether there should be private property or social
ownership of the means of production are subsidiary to, and
independent of, more fundamental constitutional matters.
All of this is unfortunate not simply because it neglects the
work done by socialists in the wake of Rawls’s original Theory,
but because in that text Rawls himself offered compelling, if
deeply contested, arguments for redistributing the benefits accruing to persons from natural and social advantages. A Theory was
a theory of distributive justice, and it is easy now to forget how
radical some of its proposals and reasoning are.
Of course the title of that original work employed the indefinite article. It defended a conception of the good polity and Rawls
has now complemented that defence with a theory of political
good order. Political Liberalism thus allows us to see more clearly
and afresh the powerful vision of a great liberal thinker. We can
more easily separate the comprehensive doctrine of Rawls from
the overlapping consensus in political philosophy which he has
helped to create. Political Liberalism is not quite a retreat from
original principle, but neither does it fully or satisfactorily explore
the domain of the political. There are gaps which Rawlsianism
cannot fill, and challenges which it has yet adequately to meet.
Much needs to be done to convince us that a liberal-democratic
society in Rawls’s image solves the fundamental political problems of our time. Political liberalism may be fair enough. Whether
it goes far enough is doubtful.
David Archard
THE REMAINS OF DECONSTRUCTION
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge,
London and New York, Routledge, 1992. 456pp, £40 hb, £12.99
pb, 0415 900565 hb, 0415900573 pb.
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, edited, translated and introduced by
Ned Lukacher, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska
Press, 1992. 80pp, £18.95 hb, 0 8032 1689 O.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s
Europe, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. N aas,
introduction by Michael B. Naas, Bloomington and Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press, 1992. 129pp, £13.50 hb, 0 253316936.
There has long been a split between those who regard the work of
Jacques Derrida as exclusively philosophical, and those who see
his texts as narrowly literary. This is arguably a false opposition,
which ignores the fact that deconstruction, as an approach to texts,
has profound implications for all intellectual disciplines, and is of
particular relevance to both philosophy and literature precisely
because they are fields of inquiry that have always been broadly
concerned with ways of reading, writing, and representing. Those
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
who see Derrida as having nothing to offer either philosophy or
literature are perhaps assuming a more independent and clearly
defined terrain for each sphere of study than the history of either
subject would comfortably allow.
It could be argued that literature and philosophy are
interdisciplines, which overlap each other and other disciplines.
The interface between them certainly draws a more complex
figure than is suggested by any simple juxtaposition or forced
assimilation. It is perhaps the interdisciplinarity of deconstruction,
its refusal to respect jealously guarded divisions of knowledge,
which critics eager to mark out the boundaries of their own
particular field find most disturbing. Derrida has often insisted
that it is deconstruction’s inclination to tamper with language,
reason, genres and disciplines that renders it more radical, less
easily assimilated, than, for example, Marxism.
Philosophical deconstructionists like Rodolphe Gasche have
accused literary deconstructionists of simplifying Derrida’ s
thought, and of overemphasising the notion of ‘freeplay’. For
Gasche and others deconstruction is an electrifyingly radical
philosophy that is earthed immediately it passes into the all-too-
49
fertile soil of literary studies. For English Marxist literary critics,
the attachment to ‘freeplay’, with its concomitant suppression of
history and politics, and its tendency towards extreme conservatism, if not nihilism, is what characterises deconstruction American-style.
Predictably, it is within the relatively modern, highly resilient,
and incorrigibly imperialistic academic discipline of English that
deconstruction has encountered its most amenable host, as well as
its greatest site of resistance. Acts of Literature, a collection of
Derrida’s writings on literary texts and themes, opens with an
interview between Derrida and the volume’s editor, Derek Attridge,
in which Derrida lays out in remarkable detail his attitude to what
he refers to as ‘that strange institution called literature’. Derrida’s
earliest interest was in literature, or rather in ‘a certain promise of
“being able to say everything”‘, which he decided could be best
explored institutionally from the standpoint of philosophy. Indeed, Derrida now claims that philosophy presented itself to him
at the outset of his career as ‘more political’ than literature, and
thus ‘more capable of posing politically the question of literature
with the political seriousness and consequentiality it requires’.
Critics of Derrida, those who see deconstruction as a subversive movement that would wish to abolish literature, melting it
down in the crucible of philosophy, and dispensing with the
canon, tradition, and the sanctity of literary criticism in the
process, will be surprised to find its chief proponent saying: ‘I
would very much like to read and write in the space and heritage
of Shakespeare, in relation to whom I have infinite admiration and
gratitude; I would like to become (alas, it’s pretty late) a “Shakespeare expert”; I know that everything is in Shakespeare: everything and the rest, so everything or nearly.’ Followers of Derrida
might be reassured by his subsequent qualification: ‘But after all,
everything is also in Celan, and in the same way, although
differently, and in Plato or in Joyce, in the Bible, in Vico or in
Kafka, not to mention those still living, everywhere, well almost
everywhere … ‘ Derrida proceeds to offer an authoritative and
insightful reading of Romeo and Juliet which eschews historical
context, showing why the drama remains relevant rather than
placing the play in its period.
Derrida perceives ‘that strange institution called literature’,
where there is ‘in principle the power to say everything’, as one
based upon texts that are deemed to be ‘literary’ which offers a
50
way of interpreting those texts. It is doubtless both the philosophical grounds of literary criticism, and the origins of literature in
diverse ways of writing, which make literary studies susceptible
to deconstruction. Of course, none of this should surprise anyone
who has read Derrida. After all, it was he who declared, back in
1979, that he would like to live for two hundred years so that he
could read the Romantics. To say that Derrida is a lover of
literature is nothing new. It is an old flame of his. Derrida’s
approach to the literary text corresponds to Attridge’ s own theory
of literature as ‘peculiar language’ . Both are determined to retain
an idea of literature as something that remains once all of the
things that have attached themselves to it, of which it is composed,
and which make it literary, have been removed. Neither argues for
an ‘essence ofliterature’. Rather, each maintains that recognising
the composite nature of literature is not the same as saying that it
does not exist. Literature is greater than the sum of its parts.
The relationship between philosophy and literature has always been central to deconstruction. Surrealism and existentialism had an impact on the early formation of Derrida’ s thought. He
was deeply impressed from the very beginning by philosophers
who wrote in a ‘literary’ style – Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus – and
whose writings could not easily be classified or compartmentalised.
Since embarking on a doctorate entitled ‘The Ideality of the
Literary Object’, Derrida has written in the margins of philosophy, where the notion of a language peculiar to either discipline
is most difficult to sustain.
One approach to contemporary literary theory would say that
it was both a return to language and a return to history which
exposed the common roots of literature and philosophy. The ‘rise
of English’ theory would maintain that literature as a discipline
grew directly out of philosophy, and literature as a category is
only sustained by the existence of literary criticism, itself a kind
of philosophy. As Terry Eagleton puts it, literature is what gets
taught. The net result of this account of literary liistory is that the
distinction between creative and critical writing, between fiction
and non-fiction, between the literary and the literal, has been
steadily eroded. In some ways this version of events squares with
Derrida’s idea of literature. Derrida is less interested in the
philosophical pursuit of defining and fixing ‘the literary’ than he
is in asking who decides what is and is not literature. But this is
not to suggest that for Derrida literature is merely a privileged
discourse that depends for its survival solely upon the university
and its related critical apparatuses – publishers,journals, reviewers, and so on. There is a point at which Derrida’s view of
literature departs from the apocalyptic tone characteristic of much
recent debate on the nature of literature and the place of literary
studies. The ‘end of English’ is not something with which
deconstruction is overly concerned. For Derrida, the difficulty in
defining literature is part of its uniqueness, as is its ability to
absorb a whole matrix of discourses and make them its own.
Something survives in literature. Indeed, it exists according to this
principle of survival. The graphic mode ofliterature, its physicality
as material remains, its archival status, is, for Derrida, that which
marks it out as ‘the most interesting thing in the world, maybe
more interesting than the world’ .
One can readily see the temptation to project the theory which
says that ‘a text is a text is a text’ onto deconstruction. After all,
it was Derrida who recast the concept of text and produced a
generalised theory of writing. It was Derrida who claimed that,
although genres were ‘not to be mixed’, they invariably defied
that injunction. It was Derrida who traced the deployment of
metaphor in philosophical texts. And it was Derrida who, trained
as a philosopher, adopted a philosophical approach to the quesRadical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
tion: ‘What is Literature?’ Indeed, for Derrida, this can only ever
be a philosophical question. It is tempting to conclude that
Derrida is concerned with the deconstruction of the opposition
between philosophy and literature. Tempting, but erroneous. For
Derrida, this impulse to dissolve literature into philosophy, or
vice versa, is both premature and naive.
For Derrida, saying that literature and philosophy share some
of the same formal rhetorical features is not the same as collapsing
them together. According to Attridge, Derrida’s argument in
‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ is ‘that
metaphor is a thoroughly (if not simply) philosophical figure’ and
rhetoric belongs by and large ‘within the domain of philosophy’.
Derrida, Attridge claims, sees metaphor as a purely philosophical
feature – the classic philosopheme, in fact – rather than something
which denotes literariness. This is a reading of Derrida that
complicates the notion of metaphor and rhetoric as ‘literary’
features of language which literature and philosophy hold in
common. The fact that genres are always mixed problematises the
concept of a literary text which can be comfortably designated a
novel or short story, but it is precisely this mixing of genres which
constitutes the literariness of texts, and indeed challenges the idea
that literary and philosophical discourses constitute mutually
exclusive genres. They are not homogeneous, but nor do they map
directly onto one another. They can be radically interactive as
well as conservatively incorporative entities.
Cinders, one of Derrida ‘s most poetic texts – and again it is the
literary pyrotechnics of Derrida’ s own language which has lent
weight to the claim that deconstruction dissolves the distinction
between philosophy and literature – is a moving disquisition on
what endures in a culture beyond human life, its residue, its ashes.
Sounding at times like a funeral oration, this brief work, written
in 1982, and published in book-form like so many of his essays
and lectures, traces Derrida’s central thematic concerns over the
preceding fifteen years.
The Other Heading is arguably the most ‘political’ of Derrida’ s
works to date. It confronts questions of racism, imperialism,
Eurocentrism, journalism, and public opinion in a direct and
forceful manner. But, even as he is at his most engaged and
committed, Derrida relentlessly problematises the politics of
commitment and engagement, with its glib responses to complex
issues.
If those opponents of deconstruction who have announced its
downfall, in the wake of the furore surrounding the Paul De Man
affair, were to arrive at these three new publications expecting to
sift through the dying embers of a burnt-out intellectual process,
then they might find that they are playing with fire. There is more
than a spark of life left in the remains of deconstruction. At his
peak, Derrida is still active.
Willy Maley
FLUX AND SUPERFLUX
Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, ,Polity, 1992. 129pp,
£29.50 hb, £9.95 pb, 0 7456 1047 1.
liirgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical
Essays, Cambridge, Polity, 1992. xx + 241pp, £35 hb, 0 7456
07349.
In social theory and philosophy, most conversations these days
are about dissolution: the end of history, of modernity, the demise
of metaphysics, the death of the subject, the disappearance of art
and community. An inevitable depression in the face of the
diffusion of knowledge, or an indication of social transformations
affecting the world at large?
Much has recently been said about the modern and the
postmodern. Today, at the turn of the twenty -first century, we are,
many would argue, witnessing new and profound institutional
transformations. Globalization, new communication and information technologies, the industrialization of war, universal consumerism: these are the core dimensions of modern institutions
and affairs. Yet what are the connections between changes at the
level of social institutions and those happening in everyday
communication, the domains of cultural and aesthetic reflection?
How do contemporary social processes affect political existence
and the possibilities for democratic communication?
It is to Gianni V attimo’ s credit that he focuses his attention
upon the ontological consequences of contemporary global transformations. Drawing on the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche,
Vattimo has for some time been examining the nature of rationality in a world in which there are no global, privileged points of
interpretation. The Transparent Society joins The End of Modernity (1988) as a work ofhermeneutic philosophy aimed at rejecting the quest for totality, and instead embracing the postmodern
world of ambiguity and flux.
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
What exactly is the philosophical and cultural relevance of
postmodernism? According to Vattimo, the birth of postmodern
society – which he links to the diffusion of systems of communication – means a general explosion and proliferation of world
views. The end of modernity, says Vattimo, means the end of
unilinear history. In postmodernism, by contrast, history is
decentred; there are only images of the past framed from different
points of view. The multidimensional, chaotic world of the
postmodern ushers in a plurality of local rationalities – ethnic,
religious, sexual, cultural and aesthetic. For Vattimo, the distinguishing feature of this giddy proliferation of discourses is that it
opens individuals and collectivities to ‘Other’ possibilities of
existence. ‘To live in this pluralistic world,’ writes Vattimo,
‘means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between
belonging and disorientation.’ In short, the erosion of the ‘reality
principle’ opens the way for a liberation of differences.
The emancipatory potential of the proliferation of local
rationalities, however, is not for generalisable knowledge – such
a position is simply too metaphysical for the likes of Vattimo.
Rather, the emancipatory significance of the liberation of repressed differences and dialects lies in the general disorientation,
contingency and ambivalence of world and community itself.
Autonomy, here, consists in ambiguity and flux. Significantly,
Vattimo identifies the experience of oscillation in the postmodern
world as of capital importance for rethinking the nature of
emancipation, though his remark that freedom as continual oscillation is ‘problematic’ is surely a masterpiece of intellectual
understatement.
From this theoretical backdrop, Vattimo argues strongly for
utopian social thinking, albeit in substantially revised form. The
transformation from modernity to postmodernity, he says, has
involved a recasting of aesthetic utopia as heterotopia, an expe-
51
rience of the beautiful in worlds and communities which explicitly constitute themselves as plural. Within this multiplicity of
cultural forms we find an aesthetic process of referrals to other
possible life-worlds; worlds that displace and dismantle the
technological and scientific rationalization set by modernity.
Echoing Herbert Marcuse, Vattimo argues that the world of the
technical, with the development from mechanical technology to
information technology, may herald a new realm of aesthetic and
cultural experience. The multiplication of perspectives generated
through the diffusion of systems of communication opens the
experience of Being, and of belonging, to socio-political ambiguity and flux. Above all, this involves a pluralization of the ethics
of communication itself; the age in which we live, says Vattimo,
suggests possibilities for a ‘democratic heterotopia’. For Vattimo,
the postmodern condition presents itself as an overcoming of
modernity’s ‘forgetfulness of being’ . In this connection, we learn
that, as political subjects, we are increasingly capable of ethical
choice, that is, of morality.
The Transparent Society manages to combine all sorts of
theoretical interests (ethical, political, aesthetic); and, from this
angle, it is enjoyable to read and deeply provocative. From the
tradition of herme ne uti cs, Vattimo reminds us that the postmodern
world is a world of symbolic creation and constitution; a world
forged by individuals whose experience is rooted in belonging.
However, my main problem with Vattimo’ s argument is that, like
many authors working within the hermeneutic tradition, he displaces attention from the destructive and pathological effects of
the social-historical world as a realm of power and force. He
seems to find it difficult to see that symbolic articulations and
interpretations are often masks which function to sustain relations
of oppression. Similarly, Vattimo shows little interest in the
psychical or internal dimensions of subjectivity, and thus leaves
unexamined how subjects might be able to move beyond the
colonizing pressures of technological and scientific rationalization. This may seem an unfair criticism to make of a book which
is, after all, only a short and quite speculative study. Yet, when
reading it, it is difficult not to feel that the author cannot really
think outside of a very specialized intellectual matrix.
The same cannot be said of Jiirgen Habermas’s recent collection of essays, Postmetaphysical Thinking. Developing arguments outlined in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
Habermas continues his preoccupation with tracing the conditions of rational decision-making in the life-world and of specifying the intersubjective dimensions of subjectivity, meaning and
truth. The essays demonstrate an attempt to come to grips with an
extraordinary variety of standpoints and theorists, ranging from
Kant, Humboldt and Kierkegaard to Rorty, Derrida and Beck.
Throughout Habermas is concerned to appraise social analysis in
the light of our inherited conceptions of reason and the rational
subject.
From a post -structuralist or postmodernist angle, of course,
Habermas’s work looks terribly out of date. To postmodern
opponents, his project appears as a last-ditch attempt to maintain
the scaffolding of Enlightenment reason. In the eyes of some
critics, Habermas’ s universal pragmatics – the belief in the ‘force
of the better argument’, truth-claims, critique of consensual
values, and so on – is itself a discourse of mastery and power. To
this end, it is argued, the (illusory) belief in a transcendental
universal always wins out over and against the interests of the
individual.
The essays that comprise Postmetaphysical Thinking should
interest critics in this respect since they raise issues which
Habermas has often been accused of unduly neglecting, espe-
52
cially the individual, otherness, and difference. Perhaps the most
groundbreaking article here is ‘Individuation through
Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity’ . The theory of the subject, Habermas argues, has always had
as its main focus reflection: reflection upon the world of objects
of which the subject is conscious. This is true from the mirrormodel of self-consciousness to be found in German Idealism,
through to the self-reflexively steered personality systems theorised by Beck in contemporary sociology. By contrast, the theory
of intersubjective communication, as elaborated from Humboldt
to Mead, captures the cognitive, expressive relations established
between human subjects. Intersubjectivity, Habermas says, is
what makes an instituted relation-to-self possible. Individuals
draw from, and project into, intersubjective contexts, and thus
establish a relation to the norms of a universal community.
But how should we understand the relation between the
supposition of a universal community and the individual?
Habermas argues that a universalisation of norms presumes
individual differences in concrete forms of life. He writes: ‘the
transitory unity that is generated in the porous and refracted
intersubjectivity of a linguistically mediated consensus not only
supports but furthers and accelerates the pluralization of forms of
life and the individualization oflifestyles. More discourses means
more contradiction and difference. The more abstract the agreements become, the more diverse the disagreements with which we
can nonviolently live.’ Greater universalization thus underwrites
the individual, otherness, and difference.
This line of thought will be familiar enough to readers who
have followed the trajectory of Habermas’s work over the past
few years. His theory of universal pragmatics attempts to educe
the projection of the unlimited communication community from
the structure of language itself. I have sympathy with the core
social-theoretical topics identified by Haberm.as: the intersec-
tions among communication, power relations and violence. But,
whatever the relation between universalism and particularism in
Habermas’s theory, I remain unconvinced by his attempt to derive
right from fact, the normative from the empirical. It leads him, I
believe, to imagine a utopian foundation at the heart of linguistic
mechanisms without giving due consideration to the psychical
and social constitution and reproduction of communication such as the location of dialogue in a certain episteme (in Foucault’ s
sense), or the configuration of social imaginary significations
which support language (in Castoriadis’ s sense ). Yet, whatever
these limitations, no one can doubt that Postmetaphysical Thinking represents a major contribution to social-theoretical debates
on the nature of dialogue and debate in the world of late
modernity.
Anthony Elliott
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
THINK IT OUT
David Watson, Hannah Arendt, London, Fontana Modern Masters, 1992. 143pp., £5.99 pb., 0 00 686237 3.
Jeffrey Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion, London,
Yale University Press, 1993. 320pp., £17.95 hb., 0 30005203 O.
Hannah Arendt was born into a relatively prosperous middlecl~ss Jewish family in Hanover in 1906; fled from Germany when
HItler came to power in 1933; and finally arrived in the United
State~ where she remained until her death in 1975. She probably
remams best known for her two most controversial books: The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1963). The publication of The Origins brought her a level of
public recognition bordering upon fame, and earned her a central
place amongst the Jewish intellectual community that had adopted
her since her arrival in the United States in 1941. But her later
reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann – which appeared to some
of her critics to qualify Nazi responsibility for the holocaust provoked fierce public recriminations, particularly from Jewish
intellectuals. Arendt’s work also offended the sensibilities of
many academic commentators. Her disregard for conventional
standards of rigour, consistency and accuracy have forced even
her admirers to concede that a sympathetic evaluation of her work
depends upon the suspension of traditional categories and a
sensiti.v~ty to her peculiar approach to the ‘business of thinking’ .
Her cntIcs have often simply disdained to take her work seriously.
As David Watson emphasises, the obstacles to reaching a
balanced assessment of her highly idiosyncratic writing are partly
due to its peculiar recalcitrance to received categories. The
‘humbling task’ of writing a brief introduction to Arendt’ s thought
therefore poses a peculiar challenge: not only to do justice to what
she said, but also to attempt to explain exactly what it was that she
tho~ght she was doing. Watson is therefore occupied with reprising
the mtellectual genealogy of her work. He stresses her enduring
iden~ification with the ‘existential’ pole of the Kantian legacy,
argUIng that she should be understood as having continued the
philosophical project passed on to her by Martin Heidegger and
Karl Jaspers, both of whom she had studied under at university.
From them she had inherited the problem of coming to terms with
‘the fact that man is not the creator of the world’: that is, of
confronting the existential dilemma inscribed in the Kantian
severance of essence from existence, and of doing so without
recourse to a Hegelian transcendence of the phenomenal world.
She sought the basis for some kind of reconciliation of the
‘thinking and reasonable being’ with the nightmarish events of
the twentieth century; but a basis for reconciliation that did not
depend upon fleeing the slaughterhouse of contemporary history
for a ‘region beyond appearances’.
Arendt has typically been read as a political theorist, leading
most recent commentators to concentrate upon her most accomplished works in this field: in particular, The Human Condition
(1958) and On Revolution (1963). Watsonchallenges this reading
of her work. He argues that she is more profitably approached as
a ‘philosopher’, in view of her enduring preoccupation with the
question of ‘how to achieve philosophical detachment in the
twentieth century, leading on to questions not only about how to
assign responsibility for individual and group actions but also
about how an individual qualifies himself or herself to judge these
actions’ . This approach leads him to concentrate, unfashionably,
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
upon her later works -especially the posthumously published and
unfinished The Life of the Mind – and to approach her earlier and
better known writings primarily ‘in terms of the philosophical
ground they cleared’.
The Life of the Mind deals with ‘thoughtlessness’; with the
human potential for rebellion; and with the cultivation of ‘conscience’. Watson traces Arendt’s engagement with these themes
back through her writings on totalitarianism. Her encounter with
Adolf Eichmann was particularly significant. Eichmann did not
turn out to be the embodiment of some ‘radical evil’ , but emerged
rather as a pathetic clown who would have willingly accepted any
bureaucratic task allotted to him. The perpetrator of unimaginable
crimes turned out to be a ‘family man’, who ‘for the sake of his
pension, his life insurance, the security of his wife and children …
was to sacrifice his beliefs, his honour, and his human dignity’.
Such a man was able to reason instrumentally and to make
deductive inferences, but proved to be incapable of ‘thinking’ which Arendt conceived as the conducting of a ‘two-in-one
dialogue between me and myself’. The individual deprived of this
inner space – in which to appear, as it were, before himself or
herself – became a mere ‘sleepwalker’: incapable of thought,
detachment, refusal, rebellion or judgement, and therefore peculiarly susceptible to totalitarian ideologies. The quest for ‘philosophical detachment’ was not, then, a narrowly intellectual project,
but the precondition for any kind of salvation from the moral,
political and existential crises that confront us in the modern
world. There was nothing inevitable about ‘the crisis of our
century’, but resistance and subversion depended upon the rediscovery of that inner space that preserved the human capacity for
rebellion against the given and therefore for the initiation of new
beginnings in the world.
Watson’s nuanced interpretation of Arendt’s project and
intellectual genealogy inform a highly readable and illuminating
introduction to the work of this challenging thinker. But neither
his classification of her as a ‘philosopher’ nor his approach to her
political thought are entirely convincing. Watson acknowledges
that Arendt was certainly not a ‘philosopher’ in the received
sense. Her hostility to the Western philosophical tradition had a
profound basis. Its displacement of the duality of ‘thought’ with
the linearity of deductive inference evinced a curious affinity with
the intellectual processes of ‘mass man’. Arendt’s discussion of
‘thought’ offers an insight into her own approach: its preconditions included detachment, the cultivation of imagination, and a
sympathetic quality that she calls ‘love’ (rarely seen as an academic virtue). Watson’s efforts to subsume her work under
traditional categories sits somewhat uneasily with his painstaking
investigation of the specificity of her approach. For example, he
considers the legitimacy of her claims to serious consideration as
a ‘philosopher’, ‘historian’, ‘theologian’, ‘literary critic’, ‘political scientist’, and ‘political theorist’. But Arendt was none of
these things in anything resembling the received senses, and
explicitly reformulated these practices in the course of her writings.
Watson also appears to underestimate the relevance of Arendt’ s
political thought to the problem of ‘achieving philosophical
detachment’. When he writes that ‘the work strives towards and
finally, in the last phase, becomes philosophy’, he seems to have
its thematic content in mind. But exploration of the fragile
conditions under which the human capacity for thought, free
53
action and judgement are secured is also a central theme of her
political writings. The ‘thoughtlessness’ ofthe family man arises
under definite historical conditions. Arendt insisted that ‘politics’
was properly understood as an intrinsically rewarding engagement in public dialogue with one’s ‘peers and equals’ . The ability
to ‘think’ depended upon the capacity to view the world from
different viewpoints, and this could only be acquired in the public
realm. For Arendt the widespread inability to acquire ‘philosophical detachment’ was integrally connected with the corruption of
the political sphere, which had become a mere guarantor of the
private interests of isolated individuals, deprived of the public
space for intersubjective communication in which the habit of
detachment was acquired. The ‘philosophical’ problem had a
social and political dimension; her political writings engaged this
theme under a particular aspect, rather than simply clearing the
ground for her later work.
J effery Isaac is preoccupied with Arendt’s political theory,
which he explores through a rewarding comparison with the
works of Albert Camus. He argues that both these thinkers had
struggled to come to terms with terrible and unprecedented
experiences which have disturbingly been ‘erased from the institutional memory of academic political theory’; both were engaged social critics responding to the crises of their times; both
were sympathetic to the modern revolutionary experience and
preoccupied with the nature and potentialities of modern rebellion; both sought an alternative to American-style capitalism and
Soviet-style communism alike; and both were hostile to parliamentary politics and sought to reassert an agonistic and dialogical
conception of political interaction. Direct participation within a
properly constituted public sphere would encourage solidarity
with, and recognition of, other participants, while protecting each
against the monological intellectualisations characteristic of ‘mass
man’. The revitalisation of public life was a precarious business,
offering no escape from the ambiguities and uncertainties that
haunted modern consciousness. But it was precisely the preservation of these tensions that guarded against the possibility that
human beings might sleepwalk back into the nightmarish deformation of the human condition that had been epitomised by
totalitarianism, and was secreted in the foundational assumptions
of modern liberalism.
Isaac writes with considerable insight into the political thought
of these two writers. He argues convincingly that their work
merits more serious attention than it is often granted, and shows
that it is a profound relevance for contemporary political, ethical
and theoretical discourses. While recognising that there are serious flaws in the work of both writers – in particular, a refusal to
engage with any form of critical social theory – he argues that they
initiated a project with considerable potential for further development. In their rejection of Enlightenment faith in reason and
science, and their eschewal of all forms of essentialism, they
anticipated many of the concerns of postmodernism, while managing to avoid the relativist impasse. While refusing to appeal to
any conception of human nature they both insisted that there was
a common human condition from which a normative political
theory could be derived. This condition was not immutable, and
the human predicament was perhaps ‘absurd’ , but it still had to be
engaged and endured. Indeed, they argued that it was imperative
to preserve a sense of the ‘absurdity’ and mutability of the human
predicament, as well as of the severe limitations upon our powers
to transform the world, in order to guard against the monstrous
deformations of the human condition which their generation had
witnessed.
Marcus Roberts
54
PUBLIC LIFE
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her
Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
281pp., £35.00 hb, 0 521 41911 5.
John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public
in the Age of Popular Media, London, Routledge, 1992. 223pp.,
£11.95 pb., 041501542 1.
Margaret Canovan has produced an excellent reinterpretation of
Arendt’s work. Primarily through a reconsideration of Arendt’s
writing on totalitarianism and an analysis of her unpublished
lectures, Canovan’s timely revision of a previous book offers an
investigation into theoretical conceptions of the public and the
private. For Arendt the public realm constituted a common world
where plural human beings could ‘enlarge their mentalities’ in
open communicative discussion. It was human beings’ common
capacity to build public institutions in the space that lay between
them that so impressed Arendt. Here the public provides a critical
realm where citizens could develop new and original webs of
thinking, out of their capacity to act as plural beings. Where
others, like the early Frankfurt school, found little to be optimistic
about amidst the barbarism of the twentieth century, Arendt
resisted their pessimism. The source of hope for Arendt lay in
attempts to act publicly without guarantees of success, interrupting predictable chains of events, in a responsible and humane
fashion. Such creative forms of agency, as Arendt saw it, avoided
the pitfalls of totalitarianism. Political ideologies that reduced
humanity to a common biological condition or to helpless actors
swept along by the tide of history unwittingly sacrificed all that
was worthy about human conduct. However, the values of personal goodness could not be counted on to pr.otect democratic
forms of engagement from its enemies. Indeed attempts to bring
the private into the public were threatening for Arendt, in that
obligations towards friends are radically distinct from those to the
political. While private citizens would do well to heed the words
of Jesus and Socrates their tenderness would provide little defence against Hitler and Stalin.
There is much here for scholars of Arendt’s work, but those
expecting an exploration of Arendt’ s contemporary relevance are
likely to be disappointed. Canovan does little to bring Arendt’s
writing into dialogue with contemporary feminism or modern
institutional processes. She could have offered the reader much
more on Arendt’s resistance to feminist attempts to deconstruct
the opposition between the public and the private. It is surely an
obvious point to make that Jesus’s advice that we should love our
enemy makes little sense to ‘private’ victims of male violence.
Further, it is not altogether clear how the republican values of
public participation are to be maximised in a depoliticised and
globalising culture. Again, Canovan could have written more
critically on Arendt’s failure to engage with the ‘social question’,
given the obvious limits it places upon political expression.
If Arendt feared that democratic forms of politics faced their
biggest threat in totalitarianism, according to John Hartley she
need not have worried. The distinction, according to Hartley,
between the public and the private is as redundant as the plan of
the Roman Forum which appears at the start of the book. Democratic forms of politics are now controlled by large bureaucracies
leaving the masses plenty of free time to gape at the wonders of
popular culture. Hartley does not celebrate human plurality through
the people’s capacity to act publicly, but, somewhat bizarrely,
presents them through a series of photographs smiling in their
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
living rooms. The public sphere has disintegrated under the
ideological constructions of a domestic popular press. Tabloid
newspapers reveal a fundamental truth (not a word Hartley is very
keen on) about late capitalism. The editor of the Sun and sophisticated cultural critics both recognise that the ‘real’ is discursively
constructed, making redundant distinctions between illusion and
reality. For Hartley the recent moves towards a privacy bill and a
right to accurate information would not be so much wrong as
irrelevant. From country picnics with Charles and Di to the
pleasures of synchronised swimming we are asked to give up on
the masculine preoccupations of democratising the public, and sit
back, relax, and enjoy our happy smiling culture. The superficial
ramblings of this book not only fail to address the social and
political reasons for the attractiveness of the tabloid press, but also
completely ignore the maintenance of a rational public through
informed journalism.
While Hartley has virtually nothing of critical interest to say
on the subject of privatised culture, he does pose questions for
those who would seek to defend Arendt’s version of republican
politics. For example, the decline in traditional forms of political
participation can perhaps be connected to the removal of economic and political levers from national and local control. In this
context, it would seem perfectly rational to spend one’s leisure
time reading horoscopes rather than warnings on global warming.
While there remains much that is rich and suggestive about
Arendt’s republicanism, it needs to be reconstituted along global
and economic lines. Perhaps the alternative is the private blissful
world of John Hartley coupled with the realisation of the worst
nightmares of Hannah Arendt.
Nick Stevenson
SELECTIVE
AFFINITIES
George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity,
Athens, Ohio University Press, 1992. 379pp, £37.95 hb, 0 8214
10377.
It is well known that Nietzsche showed enduring partiality for
Emerson long after other of his intellectual passions had faded. It
is surprising, therefore, that a detailed study of the correspondence of ideas between these two literary philosophers has only just
recently emerged. But, while Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective
Affinity offers an illuminating portrait of Emerson, it offers the
Nietzsche scholar little more than Stack’s overstated and
‘overdetermined’ (his claim and my counterclaim) thesis that
Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual and spiritual relationship [with Emerson]
is so profound and pervasive that the word influence doesn’t do
justice to it.’
The selective affinities teased (and at times forced) out by
Stack fall under the following heads: nature; history and existence; power in nature; fate and existence; the paradox of good and
evil; aristocratic radicalism; and the image of the Ubermensch.
Among these, the two chapters which focus on philosophical
paradox are, from a critical perspective at least, the most interesting. In ‘Fate and Existence’, Stack describes Emerson’s (and, by
implication, Nietzsche’s) commitment to both fate and freedom
as ‘realistic idealism’ , an oxymoronic designation which captures
the impracticabilities intrinsic to a paradoxical marriage of free
will and determinism, of the exigencies of nature and the imp eraRadical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
tives of nurture; while in ‘The Paradox of Good and Evil’, the
antinomianlism inherent in Emerson’ s naturalistic theodicy – a
theodicy which, like Nietzsche’ s, is based on a metaphysical ‘will
to power’ and the ‘sublimation’ of ‘evil’ into good-is highlighted
and the ‘immoralist’ tendency in the ‘benign’ Emerson’s thought
thereby disclosed.
Stack’s principal aim, however, is to reveal a ‘new’, radical,
Emerson, with which to counter the popular image of Emer son the
‘genteel’ optimist (and, by implication, of Nietzsche the radical
thinker). To this end, Emerson’s transcendentalism is overshadowed by a darker philosophy of immanence – a shift of ‘metaphysical emphasis’ which considerably eases the passage of
transmission from Emerson to Nietzsche – and Nietzsche’s brilliance is all but eclipsed by the systematic reduction of his ideas
to ‘mere’ variations on Emersonian themes. We are thus surprised
to learn that what have hitherto been regarded as distinctively
Nietzschean ideas and images are ‘in fact’ no more than synthetic
elaborations on scattered in sights ‘culled’ by Nietzsche from his
‘heavily underlined’ German copy of Emerson’s Essays. For
example, ‘an embryonic version’ of Nietzsche’s hypothetical
‘eternal recurrence’ is to be found in the motto to ‘Illusions’, his
ontological ‘will to power’ can be seen as a ‘carefully developed
version’ of Emerson’s ‘bio-spiritual’ interpretation of man and
nature; the notorious ‘blond beasts’ are ‘obviously derived’ from
Emerson’s writings; and the heroic image of the Ubermensch is
merely ‘an appropriation’ of Emerson’s aesthetic vision of man
perfected.
What Stack offers his reader is not so much a comparative
study of Nietzsche and Emerson as a reductive one. In the light of
the ‘perspectivist’ tendencies of the two thinkers under review,
the dogmatism of his approach is, to say the very least, somewhat
inappropriate. The assimilation of ideas is a complex and irreducible process and any claim to originality must b~ relative. What
does it mean, therefore, to say that Nietzsche speaks ‘in an
Emersonian voice’ or that certain of Nietzsche’s words, phrases
and ideas ‘are Emerson’s’? It is true, of course, that Nietzsche
speaks in many voices, but all of them in some sense belong to
Nietzsche. Nor is Stack’s methodological approach at all consistent in so far as he fails to apply the same genealogical tools to
Emerson as he does to Nietzsche. In the case of Nietzsche, for
example, every tonal nuance and stylistic flourish deemed to be
‘in the manner of’ Emerson, every idea that so much as suggests
a whiff of an idea even implied by Emerson, is meticulously
recorded; whereas, in an astonishing instance of double standards, Stack remarks of one of Emerson’s assertions that ‘Whether
Emerson is citing Mme de Stael or paraphrasing Hegel here is not
particularly relevant’ . Had Stack paid more attention to Nietzsche’ s
description of inspiration in Ecce Homo – ‘like lightning, a
thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding
its form – I never had any choice’ – he might have withdrawn from
many ofNietzsche’ s ideas his emphatic and relentless charges of,
at best, ‘refinement’ and ’embellishment’, ‘exaggeration’ and
‘amplification’, ‘modification’ and ‘adaptation’; and, at worst,
‘assimilation’ and ‘incorporation’; ‘recapitulation’ and ‘paraphrase’; ‘derivation’ and ’emulation’.
On the subject of synonyms, Stack’s partiality for these is
everywhere in evidence. Indeed, the book as a whole is marred by
unnecessary repetition which arises out of a totally redundant
introductory chapter, the contents of which are subsequently
incorporated into the book’s remaining chapters, and by incessant
paraphrase which serves solely to accompany and accommodate
the maximum number of citations. Without this verbiage, Stack’s
prolix work could easily have been halved.
55
From an Emersonian perspective, Stack’s book is to be
welcomed for its fresh, radical, and insightful reading of the
American poet and essayist. From a Nietzschean perspective,
however, although this book (over-)fill s a lacuna in Nietzsche
scholarship, it is to be read with circumspection. For, by failing ‘to
employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in
the service of knowledge’ (Genealogy of Morals), Stack reduces
Nietzsche to a mere ‘disciple’ of Emerson and thereby violates
that ‘perspectivism’ which is central to the thought of both
thinkers.
Francesca Cauchi
CLASS SOCIETY OR
RISK SOCIETY?
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated
by Mark Ritter, London, Sage Publications, 1992. 260pp, £35 pb,
£12.95 pb, 0 80398345 X hb, 0 8039 8346 8 pb.
Beck’s Risk Society is another contribution to the postmodernist
opus, with the interesting twist that he sees ‘industrial society’ as
only semi-modem. The new ‘risk society’ which is displacing it
results from the extension of modernisation to its own products,
exposing and eventually overcoming the ‘feudal’ elements of
industrial society through the process of ‘reflexive modernisation’. ‘We are eye-witnesses to a social transformation within
modernity, in the course of which people will be set free from the
social forms of industrial society – class, stratification, family,
gender status of men and women’ – and from fai th in science, now
so differentiated and complex that its results are invariably
contentious. Beck concludes with surprising optimism, describing the ‘unbinding’ of science and politics through reflexive
modernisation, which both robs politics of any control over the
forces that really structure society (‘so what’s new?’ mutter those
whom Beck calls ‘neo-Marxists’), and simultaneously permits
new forms of democracy, alliances and social movements. Only
this new pluralism, Beck believes, can challenge the ‘sub-politics’ of the techno-economic system and subject research to
public scrutiny before the event.
This is a patchy book: sometimes brilliant, always engaged;
sometimes engaging, sometimes turgid; and, I shall argue, undermined by two philosophical flaws characteristic of postmodernism.
Beck argues that technology and social welfare measures have
overcome scarcity, bringing about a ‘change from the logic of
wealth distribution in a society of scarcity to the logic of risk
distribution in late modernity’. The production of risks through
modernisation has become more socially significant than the
production of wealth, spawning new markets: ‘a cosmetics of risk,
packaging, reducing the symptoms of pollutants, installing filters
while retaining the source of filth’. While the problem for class
society was to make inequality socially acceptable, for the ‘risk
society’ it is to legitimise the production and distribution of
hazards. Assisted by the bland term ‘industrial society’, Beck
insists that ‘risk society’ is the successor of capitalism rather than
its apogee. He admits that in some respects inequality of risk
follows class lines; poverty attracts risks, and wealth can buy
some measure of escape. But ‘poverty is hierarchic, smog is
democratic’, and even on a world scale the greatest risks – of
nuclear disaster, poisoning of air, food and water – affect all
classes and create a new potential solidarity of fear. The trouble
is that Beck cannot seem to decide whether he is talking about
56
Germany or the world, or simply taking Germany as the direction
in which the rest of the world is heading. In Germany, those
exposed to hazards are ‘often prosperous; they live in a society of
mass consumption and affluence … they are mostly well educated
and informed but they are afraid’. With good reason, for they have
seen their children fighting for breath with the ‘pseudo-croup’
associated with air pollution. Here the claim that we now face a
new, classless form of ‘immiseration’ has some plausibility. But
when we consider the world as a whole, the coincidence of risk
and class inequality is striking. Beck recognises that the Third
World faces both sorts of immiseration, that ‘the devil of hunger
is fought with the Beelzebub of multiplying risks’ . Certainly, this
process is ‘contagious for the wealthy’, but that does not justify
Beck’s assertion that ‘risk positions are not class positions’ , or his
counterposition of the production of wealth and the production of
risks, as distinct and comparable categories. For the production of
wealth is the motor of risk production, and Beck nowhere offers
any alternative mechanism. This point is politically crucial, for
unless ‘risk society’ is as pluralist as Beck claims, his proposed
solutions are mere voluntarist dreams. Unfortunately for us,
perhaps, I think he is wrong, and his argument derives its plausibility from a confusion of epistemology and ontology.
Beck is in no doubt about the reality of ecological hazards. Yet
he writes: ‘They induce systematic and often irreversible harm,
generally remain invisible, are based on causal interpretations,
and thus initially only exist in terms of the (scientific or antiscientific) knowledge about them … Bluntly, one might say: in
class and stratification positions being determines consciousness,
while in risk positions consciousness determines being.’ Is he
merely asserting that social perceptions of risk have their own
social effects, or is he refusing to distinguish between risks in the
world and our perceptions of them? The latter, it would appear, for
again and again he confuses the effects of the accumulated
toxicity (for instance) of industrial emissions witli the· effects of
beliefs about that toxicity. This, I think, must be why Beck so
cavalierly underestimates the overlap of class and risk positions.
Educated people know more, they perceive themselves to be at
greater risk, so they are at greater risk: ‘because risks are risks in
knowledge, perceptions of risks and risks are not different things,
but one and the same.’ Only this flirtation with post-structuralism
can allow the dubious thesis of a historical rupture between class
and risk society.
Despite his intermittent idealism, Beck reluctantly insists on
the ‘paradox’ that the critique of science and its role in the
production of ecological threat must itself use (counter-) science.
This is a conceptual mistake, since the ‘paradox’ depends on
confusing current institutions of science (the social position of
scientists, the modes of organisation of their research, etc., which
certainly have crucial effects on scientific methodology) with the
general project of empirical, systematic, rigorous and self-critical
study of the world. Sociologist though he be, this confusion stops
Beck offering any structural reasons for scientists’ collusion in
the construction of so-called ‘objective constraints’, which appear to require endless and profitable applications of Band-Aid
rather than a removal of the industrial causes of risks. In turn this
lack of sociology allows Beck simply to appeal to reason, hoping
that reflexive modernisation allows scientists to alter the selfconception of science as infallible, and publicly to parade their
doubts so that we ‘choose developmental variants that do not
close off the future’. I have no quarrel with this intention, but its
realisation demands a more accurate demarcation of friends and
enemies than Beck’s philosophy allows.
Caroline New
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
i
ETHICS AND INSTITUTIONS
Elizabeth Wolgast, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations, Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1992. x + 161pp, $29.50 hb, $10.95 pb, 0 8047
20347 hb, 0 8047 2103 3 pb.
Institutions, their functionaries and agents, who speak and act in
the name of others and so constitute, in Hobbes’s phrase, ‘artificial persons’ , are held to be subject to moral praise and blame. The
theme of this book is that their artificiality prevents them from
being properly responsive to such criticism. Wolgast argues that
the attempt to make corporations, the military, and the legal
profession morally responsible, by imposing codes of conduct
and sanctions for their transgression, is a vain attempt to solve the
problem of institutionalisation by a further process of institutionalisation. Retrofitting with codes cannot compensate for the loss
of personal reactivity and the social vulnerability which supports
ordinary moral life. There is thus a ‘deep and intractable dissonance’ between organisations and moral theory. One central
function of organisational hierarchies, in addition to the manufacture of their product – whether goods and services or legitimated
violence – and the reproduction of their own structure, is the
dissipation of moral responsibility either by its arbitrary assignment or by its diffusion throughout the organisation.
Wolgast shows how the role-theory and moral pluralism
introduced by sociologists following Durkheim straddled the
descriptive and the normative. The notion that professionals are
required, in some general sense, to be morally reflective and
susceptible to moral criticism in their private lives, but can
otherwise rely on the operating codes of the profession, which
define what it is to be a good lawyer, executive, or military
commander, she finds a pernicious extension of role-theory. That
the notion of the ‘person’ has both legal and theatrical aspects, and
that they are supposed to be unified through the notion of a
coherently planned and executed action, was an insight of Amelie
Rorty’s, noted by the author. But roles, although they help to
constitute a person’s identity, by their nature encourage bad faith;
the persona is, by definition, not the person, and the performance
of a role – whether that of waiter, grocer, teacher, or doctor requires acting and dissembling in ways which undermine responsibility. ‘Comparing a professional to an actor in a role
encourages the exclusion of certain actions from moral criticism. ‘
On the other hand, the persona is in danger of becoming the
person, leaving her without any perspective from which to criticise her behaviour in the role.
Recently, philosophers such as Peter French have tried to
argue that bureaucracies are morally accountable insofar as they
possess a derivative kind of personhood. Wolgast rejects these
attempts. She insists that, in the paradigm case of moral action,
one reflects on it, chooses it, and effects it through one’s own
agency. The phenomenology of responsibility, with its guilts and
satisfactions, is lacking in corporate action, given its failure to
integrate decision, execution and consequences. For example, the
marketing branch of a pharmaceutical company may decide to
release a dubious drug. The repercussions of so doing are experienced by the firm’s legal department. The firm as a whole may
be said to want to avoid fines or to preserve its reputation and
clientele. But there is no person who is concerned not to do
something wrong or who might feel ashamed by it. As a result, the
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
firm can only care about appearing good, not about being goodand this can be accomplished by skilful public relations. Certainly, professionals experience scruples and inhibitions. And it
is necessary, Wolgast points out, to distinguish between the nonmorally relevant revulsion one might feel at being asked to
perform a particular task in the line of one’s professional duty
(enbalming a corpse, amputating a limb), and the morally relevant
revulsion which might be experienced by a soldier asked to carry
out the performance for which he has been trained. But neither
role-theory, nor ‘professional ethics’ as normally understood, can
help to clarify this distinction.
Some readers will find Wolgast too uncritical towards a
Kantian paradigm of moral action. One might argue that individual persons are more fragmented – more corporate – than the
Kantian picture suggests, in that their planning, executive, and
reactive behaviour is frequently disconnected, especially in morally difficult situations. Wolgast does not consider recent and
radical criticisms of the notion of the subject which stress its
artificiality. But her arguments are not vitiated by this. It is not
clear that concerns about institutional irresponsibility can be
expressed other than with the help of such an idealised notion of
autonomy.
It may be thought that Wolgast looks for morality at the wrong
level and so naturally fails to find it. The US legal system, which
she criticises as amoral, is in fact designed so that lawyers are
specifically required not to evaluate the moral desert of their
clients and to try to bring it about that they receive their just
deserts. The lawyer is required only to evaluate the degree of fit
between how the client’s case can be made to appear, under the
circumstances – including the existence of an opposing legal
counsel – and the law as written. The assumption is that moral
desert will in fact be tracked by this system better than by any rival
system over the long run. As one quoted apologist (Susan Wolf)
argues, ‘If lawyers were to model their professional selves according to an ideal that consistently made the promotion of truth
and justice the direct overriding aim, it would make no sense for
persons to contract the services of a lawyer.’ One would, however, be hard-pressed to apply this hidden-hand argument to
military or corporate systems which, unlike the protocols of the
law, can be seen to have arisen from human aggrandising tendencies and can make no serious pretence of tracking morality.
‘The ability to speak for others that makes artificial persons
both useful and attractive also frustrates the conditions of responsibility,’ Wolgast concludes: ‘This fact casts a moral shadow on
all such practices and institutions.’ Wolgast’s positive proposals
for enhancing the accountability of institutions do not balance her
critique and should have been either omitted, or developed more
thoroughly. Indeed some of these proposals, such as random
representation, merit serious attention. As Wolgast argues, it only
seems paradoxical that one may make institutions more like moral
agents by emphasising their artificial character, not by trying to
make them into persons. In the end, Wolgast is less concerned
with the question of amelioration than with exposure of the
illusion of the personhood of institutions and the equivalence of
codes of conduct and moral imperatives. This is a worthwhile
book, rich in concrete examples, which combines W olgast’ s
moral conservatism with social radicalism.
Catherine Wilson
57
MichaeI Lessnoff, Social Contract
Theory, Oxford, BIackwell, 1990. 233pp.,
£35.00 hb., £10.45 pb., 0 631163131 hb.,
o 63116314 X pb.
This anthology brings together selections
from some of the most original and important thinkers in the tradition now called
social contract theory. Michael Lessnoff’ s
helpful introduction combines a sketch of
the basic outlines of contractarian thought
with a brief survey of the history of this
idea. Countering current amnesia concerning the pre-modern beginnings of contract
theory, he traces the elemental concepts
from the late eleventh century Alsatian
monk, Manegold, to contemporary refinements growing out of the work of John
Rawls.
Besides Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and
Kant, whose contributions to social contract theory are by now so widely recognised that they hardly need anthologising,
Lessnoff has included excerpts from
Johannes Althusius and Samuel Pufendorf.
Five ofthe eleven excerpts’are fairly new.
Selections include excerpts from Rawls,
James Buchanan, James Coleman, David
Gauthier, and B. J. Diggs. Without doubt
the most worthwhile feature of this anthology is the singularly handy juxtaposition
of the historical with the contemporary,
the ‘brand names’ with the ‘off-brands’,
and the familiar with the unfamiliar. In one
short edition one can find a fascinating
variety of angles on a closely linked set of
ideas. Lessnoff’s ably assembled anthology fills a need for those of us who are
searching for a convenient compendium
of selections from representative works in
social contract theory.
Scott Davidson
Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause:
British Communism, 1920-1991, London, PInto Press, 1992. 266pp., £12.95
pb. 0 7453 0579 2.
Thompson’s book makes an attempt to put
into focus the ‘complete’ history of the
Communist Party of Great Britain from
the cradle to the grave. Thompson’ s narrative method is a familiar one. History becomes a selective enumeration of events
where the ‘facts speak for themselves’.
Although the book is supposed to be an
account of the CPGB’ s historical development and subsequent disappearance from
the political map, what is missing is any
attempt at a theoretical analysis.
So far, our knowledge of the CPGB’s
life is restricted to a handful of published
works that do not go beyond its early or
mid-life days. For this period Thompson
self-confessedly relies heavily on existing
literature. What is really needed, and what
58
historians, political scientists and any other
interested parties long for, is a full story of
the Communist Party’s post-war history
covering such events as the CPGB’s 1951
British Road to Socialism, making a break
with the pre-warpolicies advocated in For
a Soviet Britain (1935), and especially the
1977 British Road to Socialism, which
heralds the rise of the Eurocommunist era.
Thompson’ s book says surprisingly little about 1970-1991 – a period which
really marked the beginning of the end of
the Communist Party, and in which
Thompson himself was active. Consequently, Thompson’s narrative becomes
an endless list of cabals, factional publications, bannings and expUlsions. No real
attempt is made to understand why things
happened, to what extent – if any – they
reflected changes in society, and which
forces were successful in articulating them
politically. Instead, what we are left with is
an enthusiastic appraisal of Martin
J acques’ s Marxism Today and the CPGB ‘ s
post-Marxist and post-fordist stand in Facing Up To The Future (1988) and Manifesto For New Times, A Communist Party
Strategy For the 1990s (1989).
Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian analysis
ofThatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism’
is endorsed together with Eric Hobsbawm’ s
conclusions on the diminishing role of the
working class in ‘The Forward March of
Labour Halted?’. In short, the message of
Thompson’s book is that the working class
is dead; communism is dead; internationalism is dead; but Martin Jacques lives
OK!
Filio Diamanti
Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the
Idea of Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. 269pp., £27.50 hb., 0
19 506507 7 hb.
Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom is a
study of the influence of the Western concept of freedom on the Civil Rights movement. It proceeds through a discussion of
the relation of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’
freedoms. ‘Virtue’ (duty, enforceable by
the state) is contrasted with the negative
freedom from coercion (guaranteed by the
state). To this is added the distinction between autonomy and freedom proposed by
Dworkin; here freedom to do what one
wants is opposed to freedom to act upon
reflection, though this latter clearly carries
a trace of the concept of virtue mentioned
above. Two other forms of freedom, the
collective derivations of ‘virtue’ and negative freedom, have special pertinence to
the Civil Rights movement and are discussed next. ‘Participatory freedom’ is a
collective duty to maintain the public institutions of freedom and to extend them as
necessary: ‘collective deliverance’ is a kind
of negative freedom operating on a collective level, for example the deliverance
from racial discrimination.
Self-interest and self-respect are contrasted in their differing influences on politicallife. A sense of identity or personal
worth is seen as providing a key motivation for active political involvement in
dangerous conditions. King appeals to
Hannah Arendt’s explanations of connections between self-respect and collective
political action on public institutions.
Two kinds of participatory politics are
suggested by contrasting the approach of
Martin Luther King with that of the Students’ Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC); leadership and marches as
opposed to federalism and self-help. Both,
however, evoked non-violent direct action
as a means to a sense of self as worthy.
The final chapter traces the passage
from civil rights to black power and notes
the role played by the ideas ofFranz Fanon,
and describes the movement away from
non-violent direct action towards the legitimation of violence. In what is described
as an American tragedy, the history of the
SNCC is charted, from a loose, mixed,
‘help you to help yourselves’ group, motivated from the bottom up, and committed
to ‘enablement’, to its later form as a
separatist organisation complete with a
cult of leadership. From integration and
equality the path had been taken to black
nationalism and terror. The causes for this
reversal are given as individual burnout,
disappointment, and, last, but by no means
least, the intractability of the white establishment.
This book refuses to provide a prescriptive theory of politics as resistance,
but its description of the Ci viI Rights movement provokes questions about means and
ends, reminding us that different types of
action produce different types of people.
‘Self-respect is not just a state of mind; it
implies some form of action which transforms self-respect from a subjective or
private certainty into a public one.’
Peter Nesteruk
Mary Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, Oxford, BIackwell, 1992. 243pp.,
£35 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 63118038 9 hb., 0
6311853 6 pb.
This book comprises fifteen lectures to
‘non-philosophical audiences’. The hope
is that they will show how a ‘peculiarly
philosophical’ way of thinking can illuminate ‘issues which also engage moralists
andjournalists, doctors, lawyers, and politicians’. Some of the chapters work well,
issues are clearly presented in well-focused discussions with numerous examRadical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
pIes; conclusions are neatly derived. The
best is probably ‘Religious Imagination’.
Distinctively philosophical techniques and
texts are skilfully deployed to extend our
grasp of a difficult concept and challenge
traditional boundaries. Even Sartre’s contribution is not excluded. In ‘The Nature of
Choice’ a philosophical rhetoric is deployed to offer a less pessimistic view of
old age.
But there is too much emphasis on
what others can learn from philosophy and
not enough on different contributions to a
common dialogue. For example, ‘The
Concept of Inner Experience’ misses a
chance to learn from psychology by continuing to defend what philosophers have
chosen to call the common sense conception of ‘inner experience’. Too often the
outcome is to rule challenging ideas out of
order. The issues at stake in ‘Man and
Other Animals’ and ‘The Human and his
World’ ought to open the question whether
our concepts of persons and values must
necessarily be articulated in relation to
human beings and their concerns. B ut such
a development is explicitly disallowed.
Similarly, ‘The Good of the Child’ elaborates an argument that a right can only be
defined within some associated concept of
law. The purpose seems to be to point up
the limitations of the UNICEF Convention
on the Rights of the Child. B ut the possibility that new ideas and attitudes are being
formulated is not considered, and the effect is to create confusion.
Some discussions stop short at the point
where philosophical thinking might have
begun. In ‘Towards a Moral Consensus’ ,
Warnock concludes that society can survive without a general moral consensus
provided that there is respect for the law
and its members are prepared to continue
talking to each other. But the obstacles to
creating and maintaining these conditions
are not considered. ‘Honesty and Cynicism’ does give a persuasive analysis of
some of the difficulties. Greater ‘candour’
in public life would help, but ‘a style of
presentation that commands belief’ is not
enough to sustain a dialogue. Again, in
‘The Human Genome Project’, Warnock
suggests that ‘slippery slope’ arguments
can be blocked by legal boundaries and
that the inertia of the legislature is a way of
maintaining them. But those who see a
boundary drawn with no proper rationale
are not likely to respect the law that draws
it or the institutions that prevent change.
The boundaries and the tasks of
Warnock’s lectures reflect her conception
of philosophy and its role. Her approach
derives without much self-questioning
from Oxford in the’ 50s and’ 60s. Alternatives get scant recognition. There is a nice
side-swipe at the ‘Death of the Author’ in
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994
the introduction. If it had been pursued, it
would have opened up the closed circuit of
the orthodox debate in ‘Personal Continuity’. Instead, Bergson comes in for the
routine analytic debunking treatment. In
general, these lectures are too contained
within their limits to demonstrate the special challenge of philosophical thinking.
Claude Pehrson
Jacques Le Gorr, History and Memory,
translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992. xxiii + 265pp., $29.50
hb., 0 231 07590 1.
J acques Le Goff is best known in Britain
for his work on the Middle Ages, as a
prominent member of the second generation of the Annales School of historians
(Bloch, Febvre, Braudel) which transformed French historiography in the 1930s
and 1940s through its critique of eventorientated historical narratives, its broadbased interdisciplinarity, and its emphasis
on a new conception of historical time.
Like other members of the School, he has
also been concerned with questions of
historical methodology, co-editing two
important French anthologies, Faire de
[‘histoire (1974) and La nouvelle histoire
(1978).
History and Memory is a translation of
four often essays originally written for an
Italian encyclopedia at the end of the 1970s,
and subsequently published as a book in
France. Each surveys a general historical
concept, or pair of concepts – ‘Past/
Present’, ‘Antique (Ancient)/Modern’,
‘Memory’, and ‘History’ – historically,
from the standpoint of current debates. As
such, the book is indicative of recent interest in the ‘history of history’ , whilst situating that interest within its framework of
self-reflection.
The first two pieces conform most
closely to the conventions of the encyclopedic overview, reviewing familiar ground,
albeit with an uncommon wealth of erudition. The other two (‘Memory’ and ‘History’) demand a more explicit engagement
with current debates. Work from the last
two decades has seriously discredited traditional ways of conceiving of the opposition of orality to writing; while the new
oral histories and the development of electronic media and the computer have introduced technical means with far-reaching
theoretical implications. At the same time,
the political stakes of collective memory
in constituting social identities have been
raised in struggles over democratisation.
Anyone seeking an introduction to these
issues that connects them up to history’s
past will find the essay on memory an
excellent point to start.
Of greatest interest, however, is the
long essay ‘History’, in which the transformations in historiography in the twentieth century brought about, first, by the
Annales School and, more recently, by the
‘new history’ inspired by Foucault are
placed at the end of a wide-ranging historical survey. The Foucaultian critique of the
document, with its emphasis on the productivity of history’s archaeological auxiliary, appears here as the culmination of a
deep-rooted process which continues to
revolutionise (and to problematise) the
historian’s craft. Since the middle of the
nineteenth century, the professional historian has been keen to distinguish him- or
herself from the amateur, the populariser,
and the philosopher of history alike, by the
systematic rigor of a variety of methods.
This model is currently in danger, less
from any philosophical critique (to which,
as Le Goff shows, historiography has generally responded) than from the increased
volume and complexity of ‘sources’ . What
Le Goff calls ‘the crisis in the world of
historians’ is in this respect as much a
product of success as of anything else.
It is a pity, given Le Goff’ s concern for
the historian’s craft, that the editors of this
translation have attended so little to their
own. No attempt has been made to provide
references to the English-language editions of foreign-language texts listed in the
bibliography, even when,’as in the case of
de Certeau’ s important The Writing of
History (1975), they have the same publisher, and even appear in the same series.
The text itself is littered with errors of
transcription. It is particularly galling, for
example, to have a history ofhistoriography
distorted by polemics allegedly occurring
in 1949 appearing in texts published in
1933, with both references given on the
same page (181); or to have the founding
date of the Annales journal listed a decade
too early (xiii). New history demands reflection on its own institutional conditions; but I doubt if Le Goff intended to
provide quite so graphic a demonstration
of its necessity.
Peter Osborne
Frank Furedi, Mythical Past, Elusive
Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age, Pluto Press, 1992. ix + 310pp.,
£25 hb, £9.95 pb, 0 7453 0530 X hb, 0
7453 0531 8 pb
The central topic of this book is contemporary society’s negative perception of
change. Furedi argues that we have an
‘overwhelming preoccupation with the
past’ and that ‘veneration of the past reflects a mood of conservatism’. He seeks
to combat a view of history which sees the
59
past as a means of legitimating contemporary human action, and instead ‘restates
the case for the main in sights of the Enlightenment, in particular the potential for
progress’. There is an obvious paradox
here, in that Furedi too is appealing to the
past – the Enlightenment – to authorise his
own project. How could such a contradiction go unnoticed? The reason, no doubt, is
Reason: the assumption that there are rational standards which transcend any local, historical, or merely traditional ones.
But belief in Reason, like belief in God,
seems to be getting rarer all the time.
To bolster his plea for rational progress,
Furedi aims to ‘provide a sociological account of history and a historical analysis of
our view of society’. By this, he means to
show how debates over history reflect contemporary society’s concerns, and also
how those concerns have developed historically themselves. His book is primarily
concerned with public debates over history, rather than with academic
historiography.
Furedi suggests that conservative ‘defenders of the established order’ seek to
purvey history as a source of moral lessons
and as a means of promoting national pride
in a supposedly heroic past. He elaborates
this thesis through a detailed and convincing consideration of historical debates in
America, Germany, Japan and Britain. The
project of conservative historians is problematic, however, since national histories
can contain compromising episodes, and
also because of the lack of consensus over
whose history should be represented, which
in turn reflects a contemporary impasse
over values. Another symptom of the
present moral crisis is the conservative
attack on education, which denigrates
teachers for failing to inculcate a proper
respect for traditional values and institutions.
But Furedi goes on to make the much
more controversial claim that ‘the characteristic distinction between left and rightwing thought has little meaning today’
since both reformers and conservatives
‘share anti-Enlightenment assumptions’
and that this ‘represents a belated triumph
for the conservative reaction against the
Enlightenment’. But surely the opposition
between left-wing and right-wing thought
is contrastive rather than absolute? Even if
both groups now appeal to tradition and
are wary of the idea of progress, they
appeal to different traditions. There is a
distinction to be made between accepting
values because they are traditional and
locating ourselves in a tradition because it
reflects our values. There is nothing contradictory in the idea of a ‘reforming tradition’, for instance. Science is formally
committed to cognitive progress, but this
60
does not preclude the existence of a scientific tradition. So the strict dichotomy of
tradition and reason seems to me to gloss
over the fact that reason is itself a tradition,
as well as eliding the all-important question of whether either can help us make
true value-judgements. Indeed, the root of
the moral impasse that Furedi alludes to
seems to be the difficulty of finding any
source for values that can compel agreement.
Furedi writes cogently and with conviction. But it is noteworthy that his commendation of rational change seems to
entail no substantive ethical, political or
social prescriptions. Although his occasional use of the term ‘bourgeois thought’
suggests political radicalism, he accepts
the ’empirical recognition that there is at
present no ideological alternative to liberal capitalism’. Hence Furedi’s commitment to Reason is apt to seem like an
expression of faith rather than a rational
option. To be fair, he is critical of reason as
a ‘transcendental idea’, destined to be
achieved in history, since he feels that this
minimises the role of human agency in
achieving progress. But it seems to me that
Furedi is still committed to reason as a
principle which transcends place and time.
For how can we tell whether change is
merely change or whether it is progress,
without Reason as a standard of evaluation?
Gary Kitchen
Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn:
Essays in Philosophical Method, with
two retrospective essays, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 407pp.,
$17.96 ph, 0 226 72569 3
Since the appearance of The Linguistic
Turn in 1967, its title has taken on a life of
its own. The phrase has been used to cover
a vast and supposedly progressive tendency in twentieth-century thought as a
whole, and it has been joined by lots of
other performers with turns of their own:
phenomenological, transcendental, and
deconstructive turns for instance, and historical, aesthetic and, of course, postmodern
ones. The history of all former philosophy,
it seems, is the history of turns.
Originally, though, the ‘linguistic turn’
meant something quite precise and controversial. The term was coined in 1953 in an
article on Logical Positivism by Gustav
Bergmann, which echoed Husserl’ s earlier conception of a ‘transcendental turn’ .
The linguistic turn, for Bergmann, was a
radical doctrine about the nature and goals
of ‘technical philosophy’. It involved renouncing the ambitions of traditional philosophy, and transforming it into a modern
scientific discipline, distinguished by a
special relationship to language. The linguistic turn, according to Bergmann, had
been initiated by Wittgenstein’ s Tractatus;
it had caught on in the 1930s and 1940s,
and then divided into two tendencies:
‘ideal-language philosophy , (e.g. Carnap)
and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (e.g.
Ryle).
Rorty’s book was an anthology of classic documents about the linguistic turn in
this narrow sense. It ranged from Carnap,
Ryle and Schlick in the early 1930s to
Quine, Strawson and Cavell in the 1960s.
The longest piece in the book was the
Introduction, where Rorty gave a superb
elucidation of the ‘metaphilosophical difficulties oflinguistic philosophy’ . Rorty’ s
diagnosis was that the linguistic turn was
only the latest of numerous would-be revolutions in philosophy. Like its predecessors, such as the Kantian and Cartesian
revolutions, it aimed to provide philosophy with a method by which all the old
controversies could be settled once and for
all, either by being exposed as non-issues
or by being settled through systematic
inquiry. Rorty praised the linguistic turn
for ‘putting the entire philosophical tradition on the defensive’, and indicating the
possibility of getting beyond the
‘spectatorial’ account of knowledge. On
the other hand, he argued that it had failed,
like every other revolutionary programme
in philosophy, to provide an incontrovertible method for resolving philosophical
disagreements. The great choice, as Rorty
saw it at this time, was between continuing
with the idea of ‘philosophy-as-discovery’ or opting for a ‘post-philosophical’
idea of ‘philosophy-as-proposal’.
Followers of Rorty’ s later work will
know that he himself has opted for ‘postphilosophy’, thereby risking his former
self’s scorn for would-be philosophical
revolutionaries. This edition of The Linguistic Turn comes with two postscripts
which chart Rorty’s own turnings. The
first, from 1977, focuses on the idea that
the results of Davidson’s theory of language make the whole idea of language
‘representing’ reality untenable. In the
other, written in 1990 for a Spanish audience, Rorty laughs at himself for having
supposed that the linguistic turn was
‘among the great ages of the history of
philosophy’. Having pondered further on
Davidson, Rorty can no longer believe in
such entities as ‘language’ or ‘philosophy’ . Consequently the questions of philosophical method which preoccupied him
twenty-five years ago now strike him as
‘likely to prove unprofitable’. However
that may be, the essays in The Linguistic
Turn, including Rorty’s, are the best possible introduction to them.
Jonathan Ree
Radical Philosophy 66, Spring 1994