Political Philosophy E-Book

Adam Swift

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, liberty, equality, community. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values?

This new edition of Adam Swift's highly readable introduction to political philosophy answers these important questions, and includes new material on global justice, feminism, and method in political theory, as well as updated guides to further reading. This lively and accessible book is ideal for students, but it also brings the insights of the world's leading political philosophers to a wide general audience. Using plenty of examples, it equips readers to think for themselves about the ideas that shape political life.

Democracy works best when both politicians and voters move beyond rhetoric to think clearly and carefully about the political principles that should govern their society. But clear thinking is difficult in an age when established orthodoxies have fallen by the wayside. Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern politics. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the democratic process and this new edition will continue to be essential reading for students of political philosophy and theory.

Leseprobe

Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy

A Beginners’ Guide for Students and Politicians

THIRD EDITION

ADAM SWIFT

polity

Copyright © Adam Swift 2014

The right of Adam Swift to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-7239-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Preface

Preface to Third Edition

Introduction

Further reading

Part 1: Social Justice

Concept v. conceptions: the case of justice

Hayek v. social justice

Rawls: justice as fairness

Nozick: justice as entitlement

Popular opinion: justice as desert

Social justice v. global justice

Conclusion

Further reading

Part 2: Liberty

Two concepts of liberty?

Three distinctions between conceptions of liberty

1  Effective freedom v. formal freedom

2  Freedom as autonomy v. freedom as doing what one wants

3  Freedom as political participation v. freedom beginning where politics ends

Freedom, private property, the market and redistribution

Resisting the totalitarian menace

Conclusion

Further reading

Part 3: Equality

The egalitarian plateau

Equality of opportunity

Gender equality

Equality and relativities: should we mind the gap?

Positional goods

Three positions that look egalitarian but aren’t really

1  Utilitarianism (or any aggregative principle)

2  Diminishing principles, priority to the worse off, and maximin

3  Entitlement and sufficiency

Equality strikes back

Conclusion

Further reading

Part 4: Community

Correcting misunderstandings and misrepresentations

Objection 1: Liberals assume that people are selfish or egoistic

Objection 2: Liberals advocate a minimal state

Objection 3: Liberals emphasize rights rather than duties or responsibilities

Objection 4: Liberals believe that values are subjective or relative

Objection 5: Liberals neglect the way in which individuals are socially constituted

Objection 6: Liberals fail to see the significance of communal relations, shared values and a common identity

Objection 7: Liberals wrongly think that the state can and should be neutral

Summary

Outstanding issues

1  Liberalism, neutrality and multiculturalism

2  Liberalism, the nation-state and global justice

Conclusion

Further reading

Part 5: Democracy

What is democracy?

Degrees of democracy

1 Directness or indirectness of the decision

2 Accountability of representatives

3 Equality (of opportunity) for influence

4 Scope of authority of democratic will

Procedures and outcomes

Is democracy paradoxical?

Subjectivism, democracy and disagreement

The values of democracy

Intrinsic 1: freedom as autonomy

Intrinsic 2: self-realization

Intrinsic 3: equality

Instrumental 1: good or correct decisions

Instrumental 2: intellectual and moral development of citizens

Instrumental 3: perceived legitimacy

Conclusion

Further reading

Conclusion

Further reading

Index

Preface

The idea for this book came when I read that Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, had written to Sir Isaiah Berlin, shortly before his death in 1997. Berlin had been Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and Blair’s letter had asked about his famous distinction between negative and positive liberty. I was lecturing to undergraduates at the time, on ‘core concepts’ in political theory, devoting two lectures to the variety of ways in which Berlin’s distinction was confused and confusing. Shortly afterwards, a newspaper reported that Blair regretted not having studied political philosophy at university. (He did Law.) Then an ex-student of mine who worked at 10 Downing Street rang to say that the prime minister was thinking about the way in which New Labour drew on ideas from the liberal tradition. Could I suggest anything that it might be helpful for them to read? I mentioned the first couple of books that came into my head and, a week or so later, was amused to wake up to a radio report of a speech by Blair that seemed to owe quite a bit to my somewhat arbitrary recommendations.

This book tries, a bit more systematically, to tell politicians some of the things they would know if they were studying political philosophy today. More generally, it is written for anybody, from whatever country and with whatever political allegiance, who cares enough about the moral ideas that lie behind politics to value a short introduction presenting the insights of political philosophers in an accessible form. Recent years have seen an explosion of books popularizing developments in science. Many think that that is where the intellectual action is nowadays. They are probably right. But enough has been happening in my neck of the woods to justify, perhaps even to demand, the attempt to make it available to a wider readership. And the issues treated by political philosophers clearly ought to be a matter for discussion in the public culture, not confined to academic journals and books intelligible only to fellow professionals.

In the old days, of course, before specialization and professionalization, this divide did not exist. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) is a classic that was written for a general readership. I don’t think that anything worth saying must be easy to understand, and have no doubt that the development of a distinctively academic idiom has been conducive to intellectual progress. So I have nothing against the kind of difficult, precise, complicated work that political philosophers typically engage in. (And I can’t promise that everything I say here will be plain sailing. Some difficulty and complexity are inevitable, just because the issues under discussion are difficult and complex.) But I do think that they – we – ought to be able to express some thoughts that would interest the non-specialist in a way that she could, with a bit of effort, understand. Or at least we ought to try.

My publishers assure me that most of those reading this will be students, not politicians. But students are intelligent lay readers. They are not fully socialized into the mysteries of academic discourse. Nor are they expected to engage with the issues at the level of sophistication where that discourse is helpful. So writing for a non-academic audience is quite compatible with the demands of a genuinely introductory introduction for students. The main difference is that students are more likely to have the time and inclination to read more about the topics than can be said here. They may be expected to know who first came up with which idea or argument, or to go a bit further or deeper than I do. For them, each chapter is followed by suggestions for further reading, including sources of the more important positions discussed.

*

My greatest debt is to those political philosophers whose original thoughts are presented here in simplified form. I hope they forgive the simplification. Much of my understanding of their ideas comes from arguing about them with my students – listening to essays, trying to work out what they are saying, and challenging it. (Yes, I get paid for this.) I’m grateful to all of you and well aware of how lucky I am.

Martin O’Neill first suggested that my lectures might make a book. Angie Johnson turned tape into text, Clare Chambers helped with research assistance and indexing, and Lin Sorrell provided secretarial support. Sophie Ahmad’s wise editorial advice and Janet Moth’s expert copy-editing decisively improved the book in its final stages. Many friends, colleagues and current students read a draft and offered helpful suggestions. Thanks to Bill Booth, Selina Chen, Shameel Danish, Natalie Gold, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Margaret Holroyd, Sunil Krishnan, Kirsty McNeill, David Miller, Naina Patel, Mark Philp, and Micah Schwartzman. I’m grateful also to a number of anonymous referees, but especially to two non-anonymous ones – Harry Brighouse and Matt Matravers – whose efforts far exceeded the call of duty. Where it’s still wrong, the fault is mine.

The book was finished while enjoying the luxury of a British Academy Research Readership. Since I was given that award to work on something else, I’m not sure whether the Fellows of the Academy will appreciate my gratitude, but they have it anyway. Nuffield College very generously offered me a Research Fellowship for the period of my leave. Thanks to it for taking me in and to Balliol for letting me go.

My father’s inability to make any sense of one of my journal articles stiffened my resolve to write something even he might understand. I dedicate the book to him, with much love and fingers crossed. Danny and Lillie are already argumentative enough. I’m glad it’ll be a few years before they’re ready to read it.

Preface to Third Edition

As well as bringing the suggestions for further reading up to date, and tidying up a few points of detail, I’ve taken the opportunity to add discussions of global justice and gender equality, and to say a bit more about how political philosophy can be applied to the real world. Some of the examples and allusions have been brought up to date: Tiger Woods has become Usain Bolt; the ‘Big Society’ has come onto the scene; Seamus Heaney has turned into Doris Lessing; death dates have been added, alas, for Ronald Dworkin and my dear friend Jerry Cohen. I’m grateful to Dan Butt and Zofia Stemplowska for advice on the new bits and two anonymous referees for their suggestions. For Polity, Emma Hutchinson and Sarah Lambert have been patient and supportive editors, Sarah Dancy the perfect copy-editor. To my surprise and delight, a dramatization of some of the discussion of Berlin on liberty has made it to YouTube, thanks to Liam Shipton who was using the book at school. Those who can cope with Sir Isaiah as a young black woman in a miniskirt and extremely strong language can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2qvoESODOk. Those interested in the ethics of the comedy of gendered abuse may enjoy the discussion at http://crookedtimber.org/2010/11/07/swift-versus-berlin-on-positive-liberty/.

Introduction

Politics is a confusing business. It’s hard to tell who believes in what. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether anybody believes in anything. Politicians converge on the middle ground, worrying about focus groups, scared to say things that might be spun into ammunition by their opponents. There is some serious debate about policies, but little about the values that underlie them. When it comes to principles, we have to make do with rhetoric, the fuzzy invocation of feel-good concepts. Who is against community, democracy, justice, or liberty? This makes it look as if values are uncontroversial. Politics comes to seem a merely technical matter: politicians disagree about how best to achieve agreed goals and voters try to decide which of them has got it right.

The reality is different. Beneath the surface, concealed by the vagueness of these grand ideals, lurk crucial disagreements. Politicians who share the view that liberty matters, or that community is important, may have very different ideas about what they involve. Even where they agree about what values mean, they may weight them differently. These disagreements feed through into policy. What we ought to do about tax rates, welfare, education, abortion, pornography, drugs and everything else depends, in part, on how and what we think about values. Some politicians may be clear about which interpretations of which ideals guide their policy preferences, and how important each is compared to the others. Many are not. And even where they are, that doesn’t necessarily help those of us whose job it is to choose between them. To do that we need to be clear about our own principles. We need to be aware of the different interpretations of these ideals. We need to see where claims presented in their terms conflict and, when they do conflict, we need to decide which is right. We need political philosophy.

Clarity is more important than ever before. Of course, it has always been better to work out exactly what you think than to rest content with vague generality. But vague generalities are less of a guide than they used to be. To simplify extravagantly, political views used to come in blocks, pre-packaged. If you were on the left, right, or somewhere in the middle, you knew what you thought about a wide range of issues, and you knew what your opponents thought too. This made life much easier. It was easier for politicians because they didn’t have to grope around trying to work out their precise position on difficult questions – the kind where competing considerations pulled in different directions. They just referred to their block of views, which usually supplied an answer. It was easier for voters because we knew which block politicians subscribed to and could judge them by seeing what we thought about that, without getting involved in the messy details. (What we thought about it often depended on our identification with a particular party – usually the one we had inherited from our parents – so there wasn’t all that much thinking going on in any case.)

Today we are suspicious of these pre-packaged blocks. Politicians are keen to leave behind the old dogmas and orthodoxies, to move beyond left and right, to adopt a mix-and-match approach. They have to make it up as they go along. They are willing to look at what works, to borrow good ideas from the other side. In the UK, one can now be a ‘Red Tory’ or endorse ‘Blue Labour’. This brings the charge of opportunism, of lacking any clear guiding principles. Politicians reply that they are not selling out; rather, they are adapting the traditional values of their party to a new context, which may include an electorate less sympathetic to those values than it used to be. Political philosophy provides the tools that politicians, and the rest of us, require to work out what they – and we – really think about the values and principles that can guide us through these complexities.

*

This book does not tell the reader what to think. Its aim is clarificatory and expository, not argumentative. It tries to present some of the more important arguments developed by political philosophers in a way that will help the reader to understand the issues at stake and to decide for herself what she thinks about them. True, getting a clearer sense of what a particular position involves may make that position less attractive or plausible than it seemed when things were less clear. True, I am critical of the way in which some arguments are formulated, mainly when they obscure what is really at stake. (Part 4 gives some appeals to ‘community’ a rough ride.) But I’m not trying to persuade the reader of any particular political views. When abstract topics like social justice, liberty, equality or community come up in political debate, or in my students’ essays, my usual reaction is not ‘I disagree with this person. Can I persuade her to change her mind?’ It is more: ‘This person is confused. Can I help her see some distinctions that would help her understand what she really thinks and why?’ I don’t pretend that my own views are irrelevant, or inscrutable to the careful reader. Making a distinction, or clarifying the precise meaning of a claim, is often the first step towards exposing the kind of simplification or ambiguity that leads people to get things wrong. (‘Now that you’ve seen what you’re actually saying, you can’t go on believing it, surely?!’) But it really wouldn’t bother me if, having read this book, somebody continued to hold all the political views that she did before she started, however mistaken. What matters is that she should understand better why she holds them, and have considered the reasons others might have to reject them.

Some of the book is ‘conceptual analysis’. Don’t worry. This is just a fancy name for the obviously important job of working out what people mean when they say things. (Asked at a New York cocktail party what philosophers actually do, one replied: ‘You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It’s a living.’) But this is just a first step. Philosophers – at least my kind of philosopher – want to know what statements mean in order to decide whether they are true. We decide that mainly by thinking hard about all the reasons there might be to think them true (including whether they follow logically from other propositions there are reasons to believe are true) and all the reasons there might be to think that they are not true. We make arguments in support of particular conclusions, trying to explain where those who disagree with us have gone wrong. So although this book doesn’t argue that one view is right and others mistaken, that’s only because this is a beginners’ guide. I do care about truth and trust that readers will make their own judgements about which of the various arguments gets closest to it.

This distinguishes me from a different kind of philosopher, the postmodern kind who regards my interest in truth and reason as terribly old-fashioned. Postmodernism comes in a variety of (dis) guises, but, applied to politics, it tends to involve scepticism about the idea that there is such a thing as ‘truth’ and a mistrust of ‘reason’ as itself ‘socially constructed’ rather than a genuinely independent or objective basis for assessing and criticizing society. Since some postmodernists are doubtful about the idea of truth in sciences such as physics and biology, it’s hardly surprising that they should be wary of the suggestion that one can apply that category to claims of the kind made in politics. I don’t know a better defence of my approach than the rest of the book, so I will leave it to the reader to judge whether the kind of thing we ‘analytical’ philosophers do is indeed worth doing.

This is not a guide to the history of political philosophy. That history is fascinating and important but it’s not – for me – what matters. I know something about Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx and the rest of the gang. Occasionally they’ll get a mention (with dates). But, when I read or teach the writings of these great thinkers, what grabs me is not the historical context in which they were written, or how what they thought developed over their lifetime, or anything ‘historical’. I want to know what they believed, how their arguments went, and whether what they believed is true, their arguments valid. Of course, working out what they believed – exactly what they meant when they wrote something – may well require detailed knowledge of the intellectual and other contexts in which they were writing. Of course, tracing and explaining changes in their ideas, or apparent inconsistencies between their various writings, can help us render their views more precise. I greatly respect those historians of political thought whose careful scholarship and interpretative sensitivity has brought us a clearer understanding of what these great thinkers believed. But, for me, this is all preparatory to the task of analysis and assessment, of deciding whether they were right. I certainly don’t think that the pantheon of all-time greats holds a monopoly on wisdom. Just as scientists working today hold many more true beliefs about the world, and more precise ones too, than the greatest, most brilliant, scientists of the past – Galileo, Newton, Darwin – so even ordinary political philosophers can have profited from the genius of a Hobbes or a Rousseau without needing to spend their lives in historical scholarship, and without knowing all that much about what those extraordinary thinkers had to say.

Political philosophy is philosophy about a particular subject – politics. Any definition of ‘the political’ is controversial. If the personal is political, as the feminist slogan has it, then institutions like the family, and other personal relationships, have a political dimension. Perhaps politics happens wherever there is power. There is a lot to be said for such a view. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this beginners’ guide I’m going to stick to the narrower perspective that sees ‘the political’ as concerned specifically with the state. Political philosophy asks how the state should act, what moral principles should govern the way it treats its citizens and what kind of social order it should seek to create. This isn’t as narrow as it looks actually, since it includes the question of what we should do, as individuals, when the state isn’t doing what it should be doing. It also includes the crucial question of what should and should not be subject to political control – what is and is not the proper business of the state. (Recent enthusiasts for the ‘Big Society’ in the UK think that the state has taken on too much, getting into areas that should be left to private or voluntary associations.) So even on my narrow view, political philosophers have plenty to think about.

As those ‘shoulds’ suggest, it is a branch of moral philosophy, interested in justification, in what the state ought (and ought not) to do. The state, as political philosophers think about it, isn’t – or shouldn’t be – something separate from and in charge of those who are subject to its laws. Rather, it is the collective agent of the citizens, who decide what its laws are. So the question of how the state should treat its citizens is that of how we, as citizens, should treat one another. The state is a coercive instrument. It has various means – police, courts, prisons – of getting people to do what it says, whether they like it or not, whether they approve or disapprove of its decisions. Political philosophy, then, is a very specific subset of moral philosophy, and one where the stakes are particularly high. It’s not just about what people ought to do, it’s about what people are morally permitted, and sometimes morally required, to make each other do.

From the range of concepts addressed by political philosophy, this book looks at five: social justice, liberty, equality, community and democracy. I’ve limited myself to five to keep the book manageable. I’ve chosen these five partly because they form a reasonably coherent group and partly because they are the ones that come up most frequently in actual political debate. This means they are the most relevant to those seeking guidance through the confusions of contemporary politics and increases my chances of presenting philosophical arguments in an accessible way. The cost is that some very important concepts are left out. Two are the closely interrelated issues of authority and obligation. What, if anything, gives the state the authority to make people do what it says? Under what conditions, if any, do citizens have an obligation to do what it says? These are touched on, in passing, in the discussion of democracy, but are not the focus there and receive nothing like the thorough treatment they get in other introductions to the subject.

One last warning. The fact that the book is written for politicians as well as students does not mean that it is practical or policy-oriented. This will frustrate some, perhaps confirming the suspicion that philosophy – even political philosophy – is so much hot air or self-indulgence. (The ‘intellectual masturbation’ take on my chosen career.) On the few occasions when I have been at think-tank seminars bringing together political philosophers and politicians, that sense of frustration has been all too evident. For many politicians, a seminar (and presumably a book) is useful only if it yields a policy, or at least a slogan, ideally one that will go down well with focus groups and electorates. This is a problem, sometimes two. In the first place, philosophers do not take kindly to the suggestion that they should tailor their conclusions to what other people happen to be willing to vote for. So even where sound principled arguments yield clear implications for policy, the policy that’s implied might well be an electoral disaster and hence of little use to politicians. But there can be a second, deeper, problem. It can be genuinely unclear what policies are implied even by clear principles. Conclusions about what we should do, in a particular context, can depend on a whole range of facts about the world that philosophers may know little or nothing about. It’s social scientists – economists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists – who are (supposed to be) the experts when it comes to questions about how the world works. Take a simple example from Part 1. Suppose one agrees with the most influential political philosopher of our time, the American John Rawls, that inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth are justified only if those inequalities help, over time, to maximize the income and wealth enjoyed by the worst-off members of society. It is still a very good question, as Rawls himself acknowledges, what kinds and extents of inequality are indeed justified by that principle, what tax rates, what kind of welfare state it implies, and so on. Rawls even accepts that the principles he comes up with are indeterminate between capitalist and socialist ways of organizing the economy.

It’s not only politicians who get frustrated, and the problem isn’t only that we need social science as well as philosophy to tell us what to do. Over the past decade or so, the kind of political philosophy that Rawls goes in for has come under attack from other philosophers (and anti-philosophers) for being utopian and irrelevant. (Greek topos = place, ou = ‘not’, so ‘utopia’ = ‘not a place’.) These critics object to ‘ideal theory’ – theory which tells us what the ideal society would be like – though it’s worth noticing that there are two versions of the critique. Some focus on the utopianism. The charge here is roughly that philosophers who come up with ‘ideal theory’ are naive about human beings, overestimating their capacity for altruism and putting too much faith in rational moral principles. According to these ‘realist’ critics, the results are implausibly ambitious visions of an ideally just or good society – visions that can never be realized and that it might even be dangerous to aim for. Some claim that these philosophers misunderstand the nature of the political, neglecting the irrational, the emotional and sometimes the downright nasty that are inevitable parts of the struggle for power. From this perspective, philosophers who work on ideal theory are too idealistic.

Others worry more about the irrelevance. Even where philosophers’ visions are realistic and desirable as long-term goals, they aren’t that helpful when it comes to the here and now. There is a gap between the principles that would be followed in the ideal society and those that apply in the, alas far from ideal, real world. Suppose you believe that, in a just society, rich parents would not be allowed to buy their children a better education than is available to poor children. The principle at stake here is some version of equality of opportunity (see Part 3) and it tells you that elite private schools should not exist. Does it follow that it would be wrong for you to send your own child to such a school if you had the money? The law allows it and other people are doing it; perhaps your local state schools are really poor. (Perhaps they’re poor partly because the law allows it and other people are doing it.) Does it follow even that you should vote to abolish elite private schools if you were given the option? Other countries permit them. Maybe we need to allow rich parents the option or they will simply send their children abroad, or move abroad themselves. It’s not obviously wrong to send your child to, or vote to allow, the kind of school that would have no place in an ideally just society. The issues are complex. But ideal theory doesn’t help us. What’s needed, according to this second criticism, is more non-ideal theory. Theory that helps us think not about the perfect society but about what to do in our actual circumstances. From this perspective, philosophers who work on ideal theory are answering the wrong question.

I’m sympathetic to some of this. Political philosophers could helpfully devote more attention to the practical questions that confront us. They could do more to help us as citizens, when we come together to make, or at least to decide who is going to make, policy. And they could do more to help us as individuals, in our daily lives, as we make choices about how to act within the existing policy framework. (In another book I had a go at the issue of school choice.) But it’s not either/or. Philosophers who work on ideal theory don’t only tell us what the ideal society would look like, they also explain why that kind of society would be ideal. They explore and articulate the values that are needed for us to judge whether one policy, or personal decision, is better than another. Even if some of their overall visions are indeed utopian, we need careful thinking about ideals – such as social justice, liberty, equality, community and democracy – simply to understand the issues at stake in the choices that we make, implicitly or explicitly, here and now.

Nonetheless, those hoping for guidance on policy – like those wanting to be told what to think, those interested in the history of political thought, and deconstructors of truth and reason – will be disappointed and might do best to stop here. This book is for those who want to think for themselves about the moral ideas that structure political argument. The concepts to be discussed form the backdrop in front of which everyday political debate is played out. Consciously or otherwise, and with less or more clarity and control, politicians conceive and couch their positions – including their positions on specific policies – in terms that invoke particular interpretations of those concepts. This book aims to help those politicians, and those of us judging between them, to become more conscious of these background ideas, and better able to assess the interpretations and arguments framed in their terms.

Further reading

Four introductions to political philosophy stand out from the crowd. One is Jonathan Wolff’s An Introduction to Political Philosophy (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2006), which manages at once to cover all the big areas in political philosophy (including democracy and authority) and to give readers a glimpse of the big names in the history of political thought (Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx). And all this in a genuinely introductory and accessible way. Another is Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2002). This is not really the introduction it says it is, but it is an extremely helpful guide to contemporary debates, and should be useful both for advanced undergraduates and for the more determined lay reader. Catriona McKinnon’s Issues in Political Theory (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2012) assembles an authoritative collection of survey articles and is linked to an Online Resource Centre. David Miller’s Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2003) is very short and very good.

The brief remarks about the nature of politics are filled out in my ‘Political Philosophy and Politics’, in Adrian Leftwich (ed.), What is Politics? (Polity 2004). The book about school choice is How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (Routledge 2003). For ways into the debate about ‘ideal theory’ and the practical relevance of political philosophy, I’d suggest Raymond Geuss’s polemical Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton University Press 2008), Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane 2009), and Adam Swift and Stuart White’s ‘Political Theory, Social Science and Real Politics’, in David Leopold and Marc Stears (eds.), Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford University Press 2008).

Part 1

Social Justice

The idea of distributive justice has been around for a very long time – the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote about it. Social justice is different. That idea is relatively recent, creeping into use from about 1850 on, and not everybody likes it. It developed only as philosophers came to see society’s key social and economic institutions, which crucially determine the distribution of benefits and burdens, as a proper object for moral and political investigation. Some philosophers aren’t happy with it. People can act justly or unjustly, but what does it mean to say that society is just or unjust? Some politicians aren’t crazy about it either. For them, those who talk about social justice tend to hold the mistaken belief that it is the state’s job to bring about certain distributive outcomes, which means interfering with individual freedom and the efficient working of a market economy. (To get a common confusion out of the way, let’s be clear from the start that social and distributive justice are usually regarded as different from retributive justice. That is concerned with the justification of punishment, with making the punishment fit the crime. So we’re not going to be dealing with the kind of justice administered by the criminal justice system, the kind where we would talk about ‘miscarriages of justice’.)

Given that it is controversial, and relatively new, wouldn’t it make more sense to begin with liberty, or community – ancient ideas that everybody values? I start with social justice for two reasons.

First, and most important, most political philosophers would say that it was the publication of a book on social justice – A Theory of Justice (1971) by the American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) – that transformed and revived their discipline. I would agree with them. For many years before Rawls, academic political philosophy was either the history of political thought or quasi-technical linguistic analysis of the meaning of political concepts. Since Rawls, there has been systematic and substantive argument about what the societies we live in should actually be like. (‘Substantive’ means ‘to do with substance or content, not just form’.) Much of what has been written since then can helpfully be understood as engaging with Rawls’s theory – like it or not, those writing in his wake have to think about how their arguments relate to his – so it makes sense to lay out the basics of his position right at the beginning. His theory invokes and incorporates ideas of liberty, equality and community. These concepts are all closely interrelated, and thinking about his approach to justice provides the most convenient way in.

Second, one of Rawls’s most famous claims is that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’. That is debatable, as we shall see: one might judge that other goals, goals that conflict with justice, are more important. But it is at least quite common for people to believe that other goals can only be pursued to the extent that that pursuit is compatible with the claims of justice. Think about the situation where one can make a lot of people very happy by killing an innocent man. (Suppose they mistakenly think he is guilty and that’s why they would be happy.) Most people feel that to do that would be wrong, because the most important thing is not to treat people unjustly. Something similar underlies the thought that it is better to let the guilty go free than unjustly punish the innocent. On this kind of view, justice is a constraint on what we can do. It doesn’t tell us everything – remember we are talking about the virtues of social institutions, not the virtues we might exemplify in our individual lives. But it does tell us what must be our top priority when it comes to deciding the rules we are going to live under.

Concept v. conceptions: the case of justice

Let’s begin with an elementary but very useful analytical tool: the distinction between a concept and the various conceptions of that concept. Much confusion can be avoided by holding on to this distinction, which applies to many political concepts, not just those discussed in this book. With this clearly in mind, it gets a lot easier to see what is going on in political debates where, typically, those on different sides use the same word to mean things that, when probed, turn out to be rather different. Understanding how they differ, and what underlies the disagreements, is the first step towards deciding which side is right.

The ‘concept’ is the general structure, or perhaps the grammar, of a term like justice, or liberty, or equality. A ‘conception’ is the particular specification of that ‘concept’, obtained by filling out some of the detail. What typically happens, in political argument, is that people agree on the general structure of the concept – the grammar, the way to use it – while having different conceptions of how that concept should be fleshed out. Take the case of justice. The basic concept of justice is that it is about giving people what is due to them, and not giving them what is not due to them. (This, at least, is how a lot of people think about it, though it is true that there might be disagreement even about this. I don’t want to get on to that, more properly philosophical, terrain.) What is due to them. Not what it would be nice for them to have. Not what it would be polite to give them. Not even what it would be morally good to give them. (I’ll explain this one in a minute.) What they have as their due.

This analysis, then, ties justice to duty – to what it is morally required that we, perhaps collectively through our political and social institutions, do to and for one another. Not just to what it would be morally good to do, but what we have a duty to do, what morality compels us to do. And, of course, there are many different conceptions of this concept, because people who agree that this is what ‘justice’ means, as a concept, can still endorse different conceptions of justice, can (and do) disagree about what justice ‘means’ in terms of the content fleshing out the grammar of that term. This part of the book will say a bit more about the overarching concept of justice, and then lay out three influential conceptions – Rawls’s justice as fairness, Robert Nozick’s justice as entitlement, and the conception of justice as desert. Most people endorse bits of all three. Sometimes this is done in an informed self-reflective way that has worried about whether the overall package of beliefs about justice is consistent (for there are ways of combining elements of these – and other – conceptions into a coherent whole). More often, however, it happens unthinkingly, in a way that turns out, on inspection, to contain a deal of confusion.

Back to the concept of justice. There might be things it would be morally good to do that aren’t requirements of justice. Think of justice as a specific subset of morality. If Rawls is right that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, then that means that the most important set of moral considerations relevant to politics and the organization of society is that which concerns giving people their due. And what is due to people has a good deal, though not everything, to do with what they have a right to. That’s why justice and rights are so closely connected. Consider the contrast between justice and charity. One might think it was morally good to give charitably to those in distress without thinking that it was a requirement of justice. Indeed, if one thought of oneself as giving charitably, then one would precisely not be thinking of one’s act as a requirement of justice. (Of course you might give to particular needy individuals or organizations calling themselves ‘charities’ because you felt that their claims on you were indeed claims of justice, but then you would not be giving charitably.) It is quite common, I think, for people to regard their reasons for helping those who are starving in far-off countries as reasons of charity, or as deriving from a principle of humanity (say, a concern and respect for fellow human beings), but not as reasons of justice. We ought to help them in times of need, it is morally praiseworthy to do so, and the reasons to do so are moral ones, but there is no duty to do so, for their claims on us are claims of common humanity, not claims of justice. The same kind of thinking is applied by some – such as the libertarian Nozick, whose views we’ll examine shortly – to our obligations to help needy members of our own society. It’s a morally good thing to do, but justice is about protecting legitimate property rights and it should be up to the individual to decide whether to help or not.

This brings us to the big reason why the distinction between justice and other kinds of moral claim is typically seen as so important. The state is justified in making sure that people carry out their duties to one another. It is justified in using its coercive power to force people to do what they might not do voluntarily. This is a big deal. As I said in the introduction, the state, as political philosophers think about it, is not something separate from and in charge of those who are subject to its laws. It is – or should be – the collective agent of the citizens, who decide what its laws should be. So to say that the state is justified in forcing people to comply with their duties is to say that citizens are justified in using the coercive apparatus of the state (laws, police, courts, prisons) to force one another to act in certain ways – including ways that some citizens might believe to be wrong. This, of course, raises big and difficult issues to do with the justification of state authority and whether, or in what circumstances, individuals are obliged to obey (and perhaps sometimes to disobey) laws they disagree with. Fortunately, this book is not about those big and difficult issues. What matters here is the significance of justice, given a common and plausible view of what the state can and cannot make people do. If you think that the state can justifiably force people to be charitable to one another, you are guilty of conceptual confusion. But thinking that the state can justifiably force people to carry out their duties to one another is, for many, part of the point or significance of the concept of duty. So justice is central to political morality, because of the widely held claim that once we know what our duties are to one another then we also know when we can justify using the machinery of the state to get people to do things they might not otherwise do, and might even regard as wrong.

Clearly, if justice is about identifying the scope and content of coercively enforceable duties, or if we think that by definition the duties that arise are coercively enforceable, then it becomes particularly important correctly to identify the scope and limits of justice. And it’s not surprising that there are big disagreements about that scope and those limits. Everybody will agree that it is legitimate for the state to (try to) enforce the law against murder. We all have a duty not to murder one another, and a duty to do what we can to prevent people performing the unjust act of murdering others. That some people might want to murder others, or might disagree that they have a duty not to, is neither here nor there. But claims about social or distributive justice go way beyond this kind of claim, in terms of the extent of the duties they imply. Do talented, productive people have a duty to forgo some of the money they earn to help those less fortunate than themselves, a duty, compliance with which we can – or even have a duty to – enforce upon them? Or is that properly a matter of charity – something beyond the realm of the state? The three conceptions of justice we will look at shortly give different answers to these questions.

Justice can be the first virtue without being the only one. This is an instance of a quite general point that it is always useful to keep in mind. Different morally valuable political concepts – justice, liberty, equality, democracy – need not coincide completely. This is a hard thing for politicians to accept, since they tend to be reluctant to acknowledge that their preferred policies or positions might involve anything other than the complete and harmonious realization of all good things. You don’t often find a politician being honest enough to say something like: ‘I believe in social justice of type x. I accept that this involves significant restrictions of individual freedom, that it does not provide anything I could honestly call equality of opportunity, and that its realization requires substantial limitations on the scope of democratic decision-making. Nonetheless, here are my reasons for believing in it.’ Why not? Because their opponents would make a big fuss about the loss of freedom, the lack of equality of opportunity and/ or the restriction on democracy – each of which would doubtless be described in terms much more confused and vague than they intended. Compared to real politicians – who have to worry about how their statements will be interpreted, twisted, used and abused rhetorically, and spun – political philosophers have it easy. They can say precisely what they mean, with a reasonable degree of confidence that they will be taken as meaning precisely what they say.

This point about conflicts between political values should not be misunderstood. Of course, our aim is indeed to achieve the best reconciliation possible – in the sense of coming up with an overall position which does the best job of giving proper weight to these differing values. Of course there are different conceptions of the various concepts in question, and which conception we favour may in part reflect our other value commitments, which will in turn influence our preferred conception of another concept. We may well have an overall vision about how society should be that informs the way we think about all of them. But none of this means that we should start by simply assuming that, since equality and liberty or justice and democracy are good things, we must be looking for a way of thinking about these concepts which avoids the possibility of conflict between them. On the contrary, clarity is best achieved by keeping concepts as distinct as possible, resisting the temptation to let them melt into one another.

The most common example of confusion on this issue concerns the idea of democracy, a concept with such positive connotations that it is typically stretched in all sorts of directions. Who will confess to not being a democrat? But democracy, at core, is to do with the people as a whole having the power to make decisions about the rules under which they are going to live. This, on the whole, is a good thing – for lots of reasons. Who is more likely to make good rules than those who have to obey them? Rules restrict people’s freedom, but those restricted by rules they have themselves been involved in making retain a kind of freedom – at least when compared with those subject to rules made by others. It’s fair – it treats citizens as political equals – if rules are made by citizens as a whole rather than by some subset of the population. It’s good for people’s characters and personalities that they should take an active role in the public life of their political communities. These are four, different, weighty reasons that do indeed make a very strong case for democracy. Part 5 will add more to the list. But even the weight of these combined does not mean that democracy is always a good thing, or that all good things must, because they are good, therefore be ‘democratic’.

To think that a decision should be made democratically is to think that it should be made by the people as a whole. Do we really want all decisions to be made this way? Aren’t some decisions better regarded as private, better left to individuals than to the political community? Imagine two societies. In one, there is a democratic vote on what religions people are to be permitted to practise. In the other, there is a constitution granting every individual the right to practise the religion of her choice. Which society is better? The second. Which is more democratic? I think the first. To be sure, some individual freedoms can be regarded as necessary for democracy itself. Freedom of association or freedom of expression are like this. If a society denies its members the right to say what they think, or to get together with others who agree with them, then we may well judge that it is denying them things that are needed for that society to be regarded as democratic. This is because of the connection between expression, association and political activity. So some constitutional rights may be necessary conditions of, not constraints on, democracy. But is freedom of religion like this? Suppose a society doesn’t prevent would-be followers of a religion from putting the case for why they should be allowed to practise it, or from organizing with would-be coreligionists to advance their cause. It simply prevents them from practising it. Is there anything that should be called undemocratic about this? Or what about freedom of sexuality? One might well think freedom of sexuality to be a central human freedom. A society that allows its members to do what they like sexually – as long, of course, as they don’t harm others – is, other things equal, better than one that doesn’t. But I don’t think we should say that it is also a more democratic society. In fact, we should say that it is less democratic. It removes an issue from the scope of democratic control.

If we judge that the individual has a right to freedom of religion, or of sexuality, then these freedoms can be regarded as central to social justice. A society that denies them treats its individual members unjustly – being willing to violate people’s rights and to impose the will of the majority on a matter that should be left to the individual. There is, then, plenty of room for conflict between justice and democracy. Both are good things. We are ultimately going to be looking for the best balance between the different values that they embody. But we are not helped in thinking about the real issues by the misguided idea that the two concepts must coincide. On the contrary, we make intellectual progress by focusing precisely on the places where they come apart.

A society could be perfectly just – everybody is getting what they have a right to and all are acting dutifully towards one another – without its being a perfect society. Perhaps the vast majority of its members are bored (or, worse, not bored) couch potatoes, spending vast amounts of their time watching daytime TV. Justice is one dimension along which we can judge societies as better or worse than one another, but it is not the only one. It matters also how people live their lives within the social institutions that embody principles of justice – what they choose to do with their various rights and their just share of goods. Where things get interesting, of course, is where we think that justice and other good things are in some sense competing with one another. Then it really does matter whether we agree with Rawls about justice being the first virtue. There is a famous climactic scene on the big wheel in the classic movie The Third Man, where Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, sketches the relative merits of Switzerland and Florence under the Borgias. Florence was savage and violent – not much social justice there – and it gave us the Renaissance. Switzerland has been a model of peace, fair-mindedness and social solidarity – and it gave us the cuckoo clock. Lime’s thought, of course, is that this is not coincidence. It’s not simply that there are more good things than social justice, but, worse, that social justice is actually inimical to some good things. Justice, from this perspective, can start to seem a rather tedious, tame virtue. A virtue, to echo the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), fit for slaves, not for people capable of actions nobler and more heroic than the petty, cowardly concern to treat one another justly.

The idea that justice might be inimical to excellence has other, less drastic, incarnations. Some defences of inequality appeal not to the idea that inequality is just, but to the claim that disproportionately concentrating resources in the hands of the few is a necessary precondition for intellectual or artistic progress. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), the French aristocrat who wrote about democracy in America, thought that the system whereby estates were divided equally between sons rather than passing intact to the first, as happened in France, meant that America would necessarily produce fewer, perhaps no, great thinkers. Great thinking requires people with leisure and an aristocratic culture committed to the cultivation of the intellect so that, for example, children are not expected to pay their way but rather devote many years, perhaps their whole lives, to the acquisition of intellectually valuable but financially useless skills. America’s commercial and democratic culture, though better in many respects, and, for Tocqueville, overall, was bound to lead to a kind of intellectual mediocrity. Similar arguments abound today. Is it right to spend large amounts of public money subsidizing cultural activities, such as opera, that tend disproportionately to be valued by the better off – especially if, as is the case with the UK’s National Lottery, the money is disproportionately raised from those who are less well off ? Can the British universities of Oxford and Cambridge justify the claim that the state should provide any of the extra resources required by their labour-intensive tutorial teaching methods – especially if it is children of the better off who are disproportionately likely to receive such an expensive education? We are surrounded by what, at least at first sight, are hard choices between social justice and other values.

Hayek v. social justice

According to Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), the very idea of social justice is a ‘mirage’, or the kind of confusion that philosophers call a ‘category mistake’. Hayek, an Austrian, was Prime Minister Thatcher’s favourite intellectual, and a major influence on the development of the New Right in Britain and the US during the 1970s and 1980s. In his view, the idea that ‘society’ is something that might be just or unjust involves a misunderstanding of the concept of justice. Justice is an attribute of action, a predicate of agents. A person acts justly when she undertakes a just action. The aggregate distributions of resources that result from individuals interacting in the market are unintended by any individual agent, and therefore not susceptible of being judged just or unjust. The idea of ‘social justice’ involves a fundamental failure to see this point. ‘Society’, not being an agent, is not the kind of thing that can be just or unjust.

Hayek says other influential things too. He thinks any coercive redistribution by the state beyond the meeting of common basic needs involves an unjustifiable interference with individual liberty. The title of his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), conveys the key idea. For Hayek, the state’s ambition to realize ‘social justice’ implies a centralized authority making people do things they might not want to do, interfering with their freedom to do what they like with their resources – and all this in the name of a conceptual confusion. Relatedly, Hayek thinks that state policies in the area of welfare and redistribution necessarily involve the state making judgements about the criteria that should govern distribution. Should goods be allocated on the basis of need or merit? If merit, what counts as merit? And so on. Hayek is a sceptic on these matters. He is doubtful that there are right answers to such questions and thinks that the only thing to do is to leave judgements of this kind to individuals. Finally, Hayek thinks that, just as long as the state doesn’t stick its nose in and distort the process, individuals interacting freely will produce a ‘catallaxy’ or spontaneous order that crystallizes the information and wisdom dispersed in their individual heads. The free market represents such a catallaxy – with the price signal supplying knowledge of a kind in principle unavailable to any central planner, and guiding individuals towards economic activity conducive to the general good. This critique of the planned, socialist economy – a variant of the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s (1723–90) ‘invisible hand’ defence of the market – means that, for Hayek, attempts to plan the economy, or to redistribute resources in pursuit of particular distributive goals, are not just invasive of individual freedom, they also amount to inefficient distortions of market processes which, left to themselves, would tend, in the long run, to benefit everybody.

These are all big and controversial claims – too big to discuss here. But it is worth saying something about Hayek’s distinctive rejection of social justice as a mirage. To begin with, even if it were true that