Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies

Charles Blattberg Professor of Political Philosophy Universit de Montral Chapter 1 of Blattberg, Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009). Earlier version appears in Public Affairs Quarterly 15, no. 3 (July 2001): 193-217.

I want to proffer a schema. Im going to present, one at a time, four contemporary political philosophies I call them neutralism, postmodernism, pluralism, and patriotism 1 and then show how they relate to political ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, green ideology, nationalism, fascism, and so on. This will involve more than just advancing a particular typology, however, for in so doing I shall also be putting forth an argument: namely that, given a proper understanding of the relation between philosophy and ideology, postmodernism is superior to neutralism, pluralism to postmodernism, and patriotism to pluralism, making the patriots approach the best of the lot. But first I need to explain what I mean by both political philosophies and political ideologies. And to do that requires saying something about my conception of politics. As I define it, politics consists of responding to conflict with dialogue. Otherwise put, when peoples values or goods conflict, if they are to deal with the conflict politically, they must strive to hear each other out rather than use violence the latter, at the end of the day, serving as the basis of war as distinct from politics. Note that Im referring here strictly to public conflicts, those that take place between many people, since the private realm is the locus of ethics rather than politics (although ethics, too, must be dialogical). Premodern politics, which is to say in its classical republican form, drew the line between public and private quite sharply: the household, a domain of inequality and force, was considered private, and the agora, wherein all citizens (which excluded, of course, women, metics, and slaves) were considered equal, was public. Modernity,

I first introduced these four in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
1

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2 and so modern politics, has witnessed the rise of a new domain between the home and the agora (now the state): civil society, which may be subdivided into the public sphere and the market economy. Civil society can thus be said to straddle a now rather blurry public-private divide; indeed, rather than divide, it makes more sense to speak of a spectrum with public and private at either pole and civil society spread out over the centre. Modern politics, we might thus say, distinguishes itself from the premodern in that its dialogues take the existence of civil society for granted. This means that modern politics upholds to varying but always significant degrees respect for the individual, which, of course, is the basis of civil societys integrity. Political philosophies are distinguished by their different conceptions of political dialogue. Being philosophies, they are obviously going to be very general conceptions, although they differ as to how general they conceive themselves to be: some claim to be abstract and to have a universal relevance, while others are affirmed as more relative to context. Either way, conceptions of the form that political dialogue does and ought to take will be connected, whether implicitly or explicitly, to positions regarding other philosophical matters, such as the nature of the interlocutors as well as of the medium of their speech (i.e., language). As for the substance or content of what is said, political philosophies may offer us accounts of certain modes of justification important to politics such as governance, recognition, and welfare but being philosophies they will, again, do so only in general ways. So while we can expect to hear about certain overarching principles or maxims, political philosophers will have relatively little to say about specific political issues. Political ideologies, on the other hand, being much more programmatic than political philosophies, are concerned with little else. Instead of offering general accounts of the form and content of political dialogue (although ideologies always assume, even if only implicitly, some such accounts and so are always related to one or other political philosophy), ideologists are more interested in guiding us as regards how we should respond to particular conflicts. They will make proposals, that is, about the kinds of things that we ought to be saying while participating in actual dialogues. So when values or goods conflict, those who would respond by invoking an ideology tend to assert at least two kinds of things: (1) how the values or goods in question should be understood (e.g., liberty is freedom from interference or liberty is being true to yourself); and (2) what the proper relationship between them should be (e.g., honour is more important than equality or love is stronger than justice and so on). Ideology, then, is the stuff

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3 of political culture, of law, institutional design, and policymaking. By defining it in this way, it should be evident that I mean to avoid the pejorative connotations that Marx and others have given the term and so return to the less polemical use of it found in the writings of Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idologues, who were responsible for its coining. Not that I have nothing critical to say about ideological thinking, for as I will show it plays an important yet not always helpful role in politics. That said, it is enough at this juncture to suggest that anyone who asserts a more or less coherent account of what a number of values or goods ought to mean and how they should relate upholds an ideology; whether their doing so constitutes, crudely put, an illusory rationalization of their material interests is another matter.

I i This past century, there have been four major types of neutralism advanced within AngloAmerican political thought: the utilitarian,2 Kantian, 3 contractarian, 4 and analytical Marxist. 5 Evidently, by calling all these approaches neutralist, I am using the term in a much wider sense than is typical in the literature. Essentially, I mean to refer to the stance one must take when applying a theory of justice, understood as a systematic set of thin, or decontextualized, principles (or perhaps just one principle). How neutralists arrive at their theories varies, but one of the best known routes consists of the reformulation of thick (i.e. contextual) and incommensurable ethical articulations, such as those that take the form of everyday moral

See, for example, Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); R.M. Hare, Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism, in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and John Harsanyi, Rule Utilitarianism, Equality, and Justice, Social Philosophy & Policy 2, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 115-27.
2

See, for example, Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); and, though no Anglo-American, Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987).
3

See, for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and David Gauthier, Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
4

See, for example, G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes From Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and John Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
5

4 maxims, into thin and commensurable basic goods, as John Rawls refers to them. These are then interlocked together to form the theory of justice. But however arrived at, what is essential to all neutralists is that there be such a theory, since it is only by applying one that we are said to be able to respond to conflicts justly. Such theories can be considered analogous to the rulebooks of sports or games, since just as the referee or umpire must be neutral vis--vis the players, those charged with applying a theory (e.g., the justices of a countrys supreme court) must be neutral vis--vis the politicians, political parties, interest groups, and so on. 6 Notice that, when people talk during the application process, they plead, as when the captains of opposing teams plead their cases to the referee or when citizens hire lawyers to plead their cases in court. But pleading, we should note, lacks the exchange of, and so the change to, ideas that are characteristic of genuine dialogue. True, judges certainly ask questions, but when it comes time to really decide, they dont do so with counsel but go off alone, returning only when they are ready to hand down their decisions. Implicit here is the notion that the rules being applied should not be altered because of something that happens during the application process, just as a games rulebook should not be rewritten while the game is being played. And so although some neutralist theorists in particular, the contractarians and some of the Kantians model their theories on imaginary dialogues, all assert that those theories should not themselves be subject to the dialogues of actual, everyday politics. The work of the political theorist, in other words, is to be completed before the theorys application.7 Pleading is thus a unidirectional mode of discourse, which is why we should not consider the application of a theory to be a genuinely dialogical process (one meaning of the ancient Greek dia is between, which suggests the number two or greater since otherwise there would no things to be in between of). And so, given our definition above of politics as the practice of responding to conflict with dialogue, this means that we should consider neutralism to be an antipolitical philosophy.

On the well-ordered, i.e., theory-governed, society as like a game and citizens as like its players, see, for example, Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 527. For the idea that the political theorist is comparable to an arbiter, see Plato, Laws 62d11-628a4; Plato, Eighth Letter 354a1-5; and Aristotle, Politics 1284b25-34, 1997a5-7. Hence, for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 161: Liberal principles meet the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority. Doing this takes those guarantees off the political agenda and puts them beyond the calculus of social interests.
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5 Some neutralist theorists, however, those who defend what has been called deliberative democracy, 8 do aim to give a role to genuine dialogue in their politics. Yet they also tend to distort it by requiring the interlocutors to respect certain rules established by their theories in advance. Moreover, the issues eligible for deliberation are highly circumscribed, since the assumption is that the more fundamental questions have already been answered by the theory. For in neutralism it is always theory, never politics, that must establish the ground rules upon which the latter must transpire. 9 Ideology is another thing thats decided on before politics may begin. To the neutralist, the kinds of positions that I have claimed to be the purview of ideology are, in a sense, logically derived from philosophical tenets (i.e., from the theory of justice). In fact, neutralists consider philosophy and ideology to be so closely connected that they often fail to distinguish between the two. Think of the liberalisms defended by the Kantians or utilitarians such as Bentham or Mill; or of the socialisms advanced by utilitarians such as the Webbs or by the analytical Marxists; or of the libertarianism upheld by most of todays contractarians. In laying down the theoretical ground rules for politics, neutralists thus see themselves as having also determined its ideological basis, even if they often fail to identify the latter as such. Somehow, neutralism aims both to set up a neutral referee and to favour one of the teams playing. But all this neglects an important feature of ideology, namely its at least partial autonomy from philosophy. To derive an ideology from a philosophy is to assume that the philosophy is systematically unified, that it can be and indeed has been articulated as a self-sufficient and wholly noncontradictory theory. By self-sufficient, I mean that one need not rely on material outside the theory for its application, and by wholly noncontradictory, I mean the idea that all of the theorys parts are completely interlocked and so in that sense fully reconciled with each other. This allows the neutralist to claim that certain values those at the core of his or her preferred ideology ought to be granted an uncompromisable status, which is to say that they should not be subject to everyday political dialogue. After all, it is only within the chaos and flux of everyday politics that such values are ever put into question; by incorporating them within a

See, for example, James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
8 9

See my Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy (chapter 3 of this volume).

6 theory, they are thus supposedly sealed off from that flux and hence from the corrosive waters of political practice. The belief in systematic unity is thus essential to neutralism; but it is unwarranted. Rather than argue the point here, however, all I will say is that it has been my experience that the incommensurability of values or goods is not something that can be theorized away. To assume otherwise is, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, to hold perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers. 10 For the reduction of incommensurable values to a theory can only distort or, worse, fail to grant some of them a place outright. Thus the Kantian tends to neglect or distort very real consequentialist concerns, the utilitarian the various formal duties, the Marxist the respect for the individual, and the contractarian pretty much everything but this respect. One might say that there is something inherently Procrustean about the projects of neutralist theory about any attempt to force the inherent incommensurables of an always messy and sometimes even dirty world into the purity of a systematically unified order. This, I suggest, explains why there has never been, and never will be, a universally accepted political theory, and it also tells us that, if we want to respond to conflict reasonably, we simply cannot do so by turning to some prefabricated theory for guidance.

ii Yet should we even be trying to respond to our conflicts reasonably? Postmodernist political philosophers would say no, or at least, not exactly, because theirs is a paradoxical relationship with neutralism; indeed, we might even describe them as antineutralist neutralists. For they assert that theoretical reason is both totalizing not a good thing yet also, to a degree, inescapable. When faced with a theory of justice, then, the first thing the postmodernist will do is deconstruct it in order to uncover its self-contradictions and demonstrate that it is not a systematic whole after all. This means that it cannot be applied neutrally and so that any attempt to do so will always do violence to those others who do not fit in the system. By deflating the neutralists pretension to unity, then, the postmodernist aims to make room for difference, for making spaces, and so room for all those who suffer from being fixed within a

Berlin, From Hope and Fear Set Free, in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 198.
10

7 theorys sights (thoria, we recall, means viewing or contemplation). As Emmanuel Levinas once asked: How can the Other ... appear, that is, be for someone, without already losing its alterity and exteriority by way of offering itself to view? 11 Yet, although subversive of theoretical reason, postmodernists do not consider their approach completely separate from it. For one thing, they tend to begin their works by deconstructing those of theorists such as the neutralists, a tendency so marked that they sometimes appear parasitic on the latter. For another thing, just as theories are articulated in language, the practice of deconstruction is itself recognized as linguistic, and the inability to escape from language means that there can be no complete break from theory. As a result, what we get, as Linda Hutcheon has described, is a

paradoxical postmodernism of complicity and critique, of reflexivity and historicity, that at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces of the twentieth-century western world ... [It is] a critique both of the view of representation as reflective (rather than as constitutive) of reality and of the accepted idea of man as the centred subject of representation; but it is also an exploitation of those same challenged foundations of representation. Postmodern texts paradoxically point to the opaque nature of their representational strategies and at the same time to their complicity with the notion of the transparency of representation a complicity shared, of course, by anyone who pretends even to describe their de-doxifying tactics. 12

Fragmentation and paradox, and the openness to difference that their embrace is said to provide this is the heart of the postmodernist endeavour. There are at least two distinct forms of contemporary postmodernism: the poststructuralist and the pragmatist. The former tends to emphasize the indeterminacy of all meaning and the role of power in fixing particular meanings, while the latter stresses how the rigidity of theoretical reason interferes with what works. Both, however, would sever the
Levinas, The Poets Vision, in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 130.
11 12

Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002, 2nd ed.), 11, 17.

8 logical tie that neutralists assume exists between philosophy and ideology. For if all theories are inherently contradictory, it cannot be possible to derive particular ideologies from them. Hence the pragmatist Richard Posner on the relation between pragmatism and liberalism: The connection between the liberal-visionary and the pragmatic is purely historical and contingent. 13 And here is Richard Rorty on pragmatism and feminism: Pragmatism considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language is neutral between feminism and masculinism ... Neither pragmatists nor deconstructionists can do more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these [masculinist] practices on something deeper than a contingent historical fact the fact that the people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time. 14 The poststructuralist feminist Judith Butler would certainly agree: there are no necessary political consequences for [poststructuralism], but only a possible political deployment. 15 Evidently, the relation between political philosophies and ideologies is as underdetermined in postmodernism as it is overdetermined in neutralism. Not that this has prevented postmodernists from asserting their own ideological preferences. Posner and Rorty, for example, have both declared themselves pragmatic liberals, as has Charles Anderson, while among the postructuralists we might place Hlne Cixouss feminism alongside Butlers and recognize William E. Connollys liberalism or Slavoj ieks, Ernesto Laclaus, and Chantal Mouffes socialisms. 16 But none of these thinkers will ever be found claiming that philosophy itself endorses their ideologies. All this is in keeping with the postmodernists aim of maintaining an openness to difference. Doing so, however, is understood to consist of much more than being sensitive to
13 14

Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 46.

Rorty, Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View, in Slavoj iek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 232-3. Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism, in Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), 8. See, for example, Rorty, Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Connolly, Identity and Difference in Liberalism, in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990); Cixous, Extreme Fidelity, trans. Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hlne Cixous, ed. Sellers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988); iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso: 2002), ch. 5; and Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 1985).
16 15

9 incommensurables. Indeed, whats required is the kind of openness associated with the artist rather than with the sensitive critic. For according to iek: Politics itself is, in the final analysis, always the politics of fantasy. It needs to imagine answers to antagonisms. 17 Or as Rorty has put it: because immanent criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective, we need to see that the freer the imagination of the present, the likelier it is that future social practices will be different from past practices.18 Postmodernists, in other words, would have our response to conflict be creation, not interpretation. So when they talk, as they sometimes do, of conversation, they dont mean to invoke that everyday dialogical activity, wherein people exchange interpretations in order to make sense of something, to reach a shared understanding about an issue. Rather, whats intended is much more along the lines of the kind of talk that artists sometimes engage in, and this, it must be said, is not especially rational. This means that, in advocating a creative or aesthetic politics, the postmodernist is really advocating yet another form of antipolitics. As we might expect, the problem with this antipolitics is different from that associated with neutralism. It arises from the assumption that ones ideological preference is ultimately a matter of aesthetic taste. The question almost poses itself: does the postmodernist have adequate resources to respond when a Benito Mussolini, for example, asserts something like the following:

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity ... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. 19

iek and Noam Yuran, Disaster Movies as the Last Remnants of Utopia [Interview with ieck], Haaretz, May 21, 2003.
17 18 19

Rorty, Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction, 227, 231.

Quoted in Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 41.

10 To reply that Mussolini is wrong to derive his fascism from his philosophical relativism does not say very much; indeed, Rorty himself has admitted that pragmatism is as useful to fascists like Mussolini and conservatives like Oakeshott as it is to liberals like Dewey. 20 That said, it seems to me that a concern for maintaining a creative openness to difference is not, in fact, compatible with an ideology such as fascism, since this form of creativity lends support to a minimal ethic that would rule the ideology out. 21 Nevertheless, I would claim that, regardless of what they say, postmodernists dont really affirm their preferred ideologies as though they were merely matters of taste. Moreover, if creativity really is their primary concern, they should accept that neutralist theories are in their own way also creative. The only complaint postmodernists should have about neutralist ideologies is thus with their exclusivity. But surely everyone who prefers one ideology over others hopes that his or her compatriots, at least, will prefer that ideology as well. Regardless, if we return to the distinction between creation and interpretation, it seems to me that the existence of the latter allows us to say that there is indeed a place for reasoned dialogue as a response to conflict, and hence for what I am calling politics. But interpretation is a form of reason that neither the neutralist nor the postmodernist seems willing to recognize: a practical reason of the kind that Aristotle distinguished (albeit insufficiently) from the theoretical. 22 Whereas thoria, as we noted, means viewing or contemplation, and creativity has long been associated with inspired vision, this practical reason is an aural capacity, of the kind required if one is to participate in a dialogue. It aims to be as sensitive as possible to the particulars of a given context, which is why Berlin has identified it with what he calls our moral sensitiveness. 23 Practical reason as so conceived tells us that incommensurability does not have to mean rational incomparability as long, that is, as we use our reason to hear rather than look

Rorty, Feminism and Pragmatism, in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213n23.
20 21 22

See my On the Minimal Global Ethic (chapter 10 of this volume), sec. III.iii.

I say albeit insufficiently because of Aristotles claim in Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1112b33-34, that phronsis, or practical wisdom, is grounded in a theoretical conception of eudaemonia, or well being. For to him, we deliberate about what promotes an end, not about the end. To me, however, we reason practically about means and ends. See, for example, Berlin, Equality, 97. Note that, as Berlin explains in The Pursuit of the Ideal, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 2, this sensitivity is relevant to politics for the same reason that political philosophy ... is but ethics applied to society.
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11 for the truth. Otherwise put, one can respond to a conflict of incommensurable values or goods reasonably, but only if one is willing to engage in dialogue and so in politics.

iii Pluralist political philosophers advocate doing just this. Given their own wariness of theoretical reason in politics, they, or at least many of them, share in the postmodernists opposition to any attempt to derive ideology from philosophy. Among the exceptions here are the pluralist liberals Michael Walzer, Joseph Raz, Robert Dahl, and George Crowder. 24 Once, Berlin could have been counted among this group, but that was before he declared: Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic. I believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected. 25 This is also Stuart Hampshires position, although Hampshire is, for the most part, a pluralist socialist. 26 Regardless, like Berlin, he believes that pluralism, the recognition that there are many incommensurable and often conflicting values in the world, requires neither pleading before an authority responsible for applying a systematic theory nor relying on creativity. Rather, people need to be willing to negotiate with each other, to make concessions in the struggle for balanced accommodations. Although neutralists can sometimes also be heard talking favourably of balancing, they do so because they believe that it can be guided by a theory, the values involved

See, for example, Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (New York: Continuum, 2002). I distinguish between these weak pluralists and the strong ones, those for whom pluralism-in-itself cannot endorse any particular ideology, in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 2. John Kekess pluralist conservatism is also relatively weak, although not because he thinks that philosophical presuppositions can grant absolute, overriding status to the values favoured by his preferred ideology. Rather, he argues that endorsing pluralism leads to quintessentially conservative approaches to practical reasoning when values conflict. See Kekes, A Case for Conservatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). A great deal of what he claims to be exclusive to conservatism, however, is true of all pluralist ideologies. Finally, I should note that I see William A. Galstons Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) as an unsuccessful attempt to defend a pluralist liberalism that is somehow both strong and weak. For Galston asserts (1) that everything is negotiable, (2) within certain limits, (3) which are themselves non-negotiable. Obviously, the first and third assertions contradict.
24

Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1991), 44. See also Berlin and Bernard Williams, Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply, Political Studies 62, no. 2 (June 1994): 306-9, 308-9.
25 26

See Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 3.

12 having in that sense been commensurated. That is why they conceive of this balancing as taking place without the hard choices that negotiation often requires. The formal pluralist imperative to negotiate is distinct from what Hampshire has called substantive justice, which is concerned with the actual positions that parties advance within negotiations what I claim is relevant to ideology. Substantive justice is always relative to given societies since what ones moral sense hears in one context is, we might expect, going to be different from what it hears in another. 27 Thus Hampshire: Opinions about substantial justice and the other virtues arise from, and are explained by, natural and widespread human sentiments [i.e., values] greatly modified by very variable customs and social histories. 28 So it is when these opinions clash that there needs to be negotiation. And negotiation, we should recognize, is a genuine form of dialogue, there being a real exchange between all sides, albeit of a sort that requires compromise and hence that we maim and degrade the values involved. 29 Yet pluralist negotiation is what it is because it is carried out in good faith. The parties, that is, do not make concessions simply because they believe it to be in their strategic interests to do so (i.e., because they have more to gain by doing so than by using violence). That would make for realpolitik rather than good-faith negotiations, and realpolitik should not be confused with real politics since it is never dialogical it may be dia, but it has no place for logos (reason/speech from the Greek). For politics requires that negotiated concessions be driven not only by the pressure put on one by the opposing party but also by toleration, which is pluralisms key political virtue. Pluralists come to it through their recognition of the plurality of values in the world, which is said to mean that there will always be others who, although they do not share ones own values and so are potential enemies, are nevertheless moral beings and therefore deserve a minimal respect. Hence the need to negotiate with them in good faith. This does not mean abandoning an adversarial stance, however, only accepting that while one pursues ones distinct aims, it is legitimate for the other to do likewise. Thus can we understand why, say, the Irish Republican Armys willingness to decommission its arms was so important to the peace
27 28 29

See ibid., 27-37. Ibid., 37.

As Joseph Schumpeter puts it in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, 6th ed.), 251.

13 process there, as was the famous September 1993 handshake between PLO chairman Yassar Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. Indeed the handshake is probably the most powerful symbol of the willingness to engage in dialogue and so politics: while shaking hands, one physically touches ones opponent, who is thus especially vulnerable, yet no harm is done, this indicating in the clearest possible terms ones intention to forgo violence. In calling for good-faith negotiations, pluralists can be said to rule out all the antipolitical ideologies, including not only the inherently antipolitical ones such as fascism, anarchism, and libertarianism but also those versions of liberalism, conservativism, socialism, and so on that are affirmed by the neutralists and postmodernists. At the same time, pluralists make way for a wide range of political ideologies. A given decision to favour one over the others will never be as indeterminate as it is with the postmodernist, however, because pluralists believe that such decisions can be derived from interpretations of the given political culture. They have never really been explicit about this, but I think that it clearly derives from their fundamentals. For if different contexts demand different compromises when values conflict, we should expect that different societies will tend to assert different traditions of compromise and hence come to assert different accommodations. So pluralist political philosophy helps us to appreciate the extent to which ideology must be independent of philosophy. Pluralists come to their ideologies neither from theory nor from a creative openness to the other but from the dialogues of everyday politics. And indeed, one cannot turn to either philosophy or art for an account of why, during the past century, the Scandinavian countries were homes to democratic socialist political cultures, the United States moved from its New Deal liberalism to the conservatism that characterizes its politics today, and Canada, despite the powerful ideological winds blowing in from the United States, managed to remain largely liberal. In Hampshires terms, all these are largely manifestations of how the negotiations over substantive justice in these countries have played out. There is thus, at least relative to neutralism, a great deal of room for change in pluralist politics. Nevertheless, I want to claim, there is not enough. For this change is restricted to determining the various balances that pluralists assume need to be struck in response to political conflict. This balancing takes place in the dimension of the thick since it is here that values are understood to clash and so here that accommodations must be reached when they do. Pluralists

14 also assert the existence of a thin, universalistic, and decontextualized dimension of meaning, which is where they believe the cores of values are to be found in isolated, and hence pure or uncontaminated, forms. 30 These cores, then, are assumed to be fixed; they are essentially ahistorical souls or skeletons upon which a values flesh is fastened when it is present with others in given thick contexts. Now it is precisely this flesh, we might say, that gets maimed by the compromises negotiation requires. No surprise, then, that we tend to decry compromises as shabby, especially when we feel that we have made too many of them in response to a given conflict. So it is often very difficult to claim that the changes wrought are for the best, that they contribute in some sense or other to progress, to some kind of improvement to the practices that express the values in question. 31 Such progressive change is also ruled out because pluralists have room for only a very tenuous conception of the whole of a society, and hence for the notion that making concessions can contribute something positive to that whole, to the common good. For pluralists must believe that societies, or at least the increasingly multicultural ones in the West, consist of nothing more than the plurality of ways of life that they contain, each of which is made up of various groupings of values. Behind this belief is the assumption that values have thin and isolable cores. For it leads to the supposition that the ways of life that the values constitute can also be conceived as separate, and this implies that, when they conflict, the conflict consists of their clashing or colliding, of the banging together of what are fundamentally independent entities. The result is an adversarial conception of conflict, one that makes it seem as though the best that can be done is to compromise, to balance the values against each other. Thus, by virtue of their analytical meta-ethic, their assumption that values can be conceived as like atoms, pluralists end up limiting political dialogue to the zero-sum terms of negotiation and the compromising that is essential to it.

See, for example, Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
30

Thus while I would not go as far as Paul Dumouchel, who claims in his La tolerance nest pas le pluralisme, Esprit, no. 224 (Aug.-Sept. 1996): 165-81, 181, that pluralism is inherently conservative, I do think it assumes a very limited conception of politics-led change.

31

15 Whats missing is a place for a more reconciliatory approach to conflict, one that strives for integration rather than balancing or compromise. This, however, requires a different understanding of moral concepts and of how they may conflict, one that conceives of them not as separable, independent entities but as integral parts of a whole. A holistic conception of conflict is thus made possible: rather than a clashing or colliding of separate adversaries, one imagines a series of disharmonies or disturbances arising within particular regions of the whole. This allows us to focus on the whole rather than on its parts and hence makes possible the transformation of that whole so that the values, or (better) goods, 32 can be reconciled, further integrated with little or no compromise. Considered from a society-wide or even global perspective, it thus becomes possible to think of reconciling whole groups or ways of life and thereby contributing to the progressive development of their shared political communities.

iv So aspires the patriot. Negotiation, as patriotism would have it, certainly entails compromise, but it may also be thought to bring the polity as a whole to a better place overall. Moreover, the holism characteristic of the patriots conception of goods one that, it is worth noting, draws on the philosophy of language articulated by such hermeneutical thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer 33 allows us to say that there are occasions when political dialogue can consist not only of negotiation but also of conversation. In a conversation, interlocutors strive to achieve not an accommodation but a shared understanding of what they are discussing. This requires that they genuinely listen to each other, which entails more than simply granting the hearing necessary for attaining clarity about the demands being brought to a negotiation table. For one listens to determine not the minimum trade-offs or concessions necessary for accommodating ones opponent but whether they are saying something that has some truth, some justice to it. The question becomes: can I learn from them? And it is one that can be answered only if there is a willingness to transform ones position in order to incorporate, and so to share in, the truths if there are any of the other.
With goods, one avoids the Nietzschean connotations of the term values and so, among other things, a subjectivist understanding of moral concepts. See, for example, Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989, 2nd ed.), esp. part 3.
33 32

16 Thus can we arrive at the integrating or reconciling, rather than compromising, of the goods in conflict and so further develop our understanding of the common good. The ideal of the common good, it should be noted, is one that modern patriots inherit from such classical republicans as Aristotle and Machiavelli. 34 Indeed, it was classical republicans who first praised others as patriots, long before nationalists began to do so. Fulfilling the common good brings with it its own particular difficulties, some of which are even more challenging than are those of negotiation. For transformation requires transforming the whole of ones goods, given that all are assumed to be intrinsically connected or integrated (as distinct from interlocked, the term I use above to invoke the systematic holism of neutralist theory). Following contemporary hermeneutics, patriots conceive of meaningful wholes of the kind dealt with in the human sciences and humanities as organic rather than systematic, meaning that a significant adjustment to one part of the whole always impacts on all the others. Transformation is thus a comprehensive phenomenon, and therein lies its difficulty. One might even say that, although the bodies of the goods in question are not maimed, conversation can bruise them, the hope nevertheless being that they will heal into something stronger than they were before the conflict (i.e., that they will become truer, in their newly articulated and better understood form, to the whole of which they are all a part). So where the pluralist would have us reverse Clausewitzs famous dictum and assert that politics is like war carried on by different means, the patriot urges that we contradict a line from Yeats instead: labour is blossoming or dancing where / the body [is] bruised to pleasure soul. 35 A politics that aims to give reconciling transformations a significant place is thus going to be (potentially) progressive in a way that is impossible to the pluralist. Just think, say, of how a Wikipedia article develops. So a patriotic politics strives for something more than just accommodation or damage control 36 and hence has the potential to offer its practitioners more than just the dirty hands
See, for example, Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Hannah Arendt is the leading contemporary classical republican. See her The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Anchor Edition, 1959).
34

Yeats, Among School Children, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 215.
35 36

Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 4.

17 that come from making compromises. 37 Yet, if one finds oneself amidst people who are willing, at most, only to negotiate, then conversation, no matter how much one desires it, will just not be viable; the reality is that all involved must be willing to engage in the kind of speaking and listening that conversation requires. But even when negotiating is the best that we can do, at least patriots can call on the negotiators to strive for those accommodations that are of the greatest importance to the common good as a whole. Nevertheless, it must be said that politics today is dominated by the practices of neutralism, postmodernism, and most of all, pluralism. 38 This means that attempts to reconcile our conflicts with conversation are going to be largely futile. Yet the patriot refuses to give up hope. That is why I find so moving anecdotes such as the following, recounted by the patriotic feminist Susan Bickford:

[This is] the story of a particular exemplary action that happened several years ago when, in the midst of feminisms sex wars, I attended a protest on the campus where I was a graduate student. A feminist group at this public university had originally designed the action to protest the student unions sale of pornographic magazines like Playboy. News of this protest spawned a simultaneous counter demonstration by feminists supportive of anticensorship principles and alternative sexualities. So there we were, lines of feminists, both sides chanting and holding signs, one side with a bullhorn, the other without. I was not involved in organizing either protest, and frankly I do not remember

For pluralist emphases of the pervasiveness of dirty hands in politics, see Walzer, Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 160-80; Berlin, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. 11; Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1989), esp. 170-7; and Bernard Williams, Politics and Moral Character, in Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For a compelling account of the prominence in the English-speaking world of uncompromising stances (which, I would claim, are encouraged by neutralism) and of stances that go no further than being willing to negotiate (which are supported by pluralism), see Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue Dialogue (New York: Random House, 1998). Two qualifications to my praise of this wonderful book: there are times (e.g., ch. 4) when Tannen fails to appreciate that dialogues involving compromise necessarily have an adversarial dimension, as well as others (ch. 8) when she mistakenly equates criticism or opposition with zero-sum adversity (a mistake because one can criticize or oppose with the aim of reconciling with others rather than of pressuring them to compromise).
38

37

18 being very thoughtful about my own participation; I had not done much representative thinking, let us say. That failure was made clear to me by the gutsy act of a woman on the other side, who came over and spoke with several of us. I cannot remember her exact words, but what she said was something like I want to hear what you have to say, I dont want us to just yell at each other. Tell me what you want, why youre doing what youre doing. It was not a loving or peaceful act. Her face was tight and pinched, her compadres were chanting in the background, and what she was doing was clearly difficult for her, perhaps more so because she was the only one, on either side, who made that effort. She must have felt acutely vulnerable, appearing in that particular way and place not as someone who floated above the conflict, not as someone who stayed at home, but as someone who, quite literally, travelled: from her group to ours and back. 39

If that woman had said only Tell me what you want and left it at that, we could identify her as a practitioner of pluralist politics, as someone willing to negotiate with her adversaries, to hear their demands so that she might determine what concessions might satisfy them. In asking to know why they were doing what they were doing, however, she was announcing her willingness to really listen, to come to understand and perhaps share their position, or at least to develop a new one that all of them could endorse, together. Patriotisms central aim, then, may be situated between the neutralists attempt to unify political society on the one hand and the pluralists fragmentation of it on the other, all the while striving to avoid the paradoxes of the postmodernist. Patriots also tread a path between the neutralists unification of philosophy and ideology and the postmodernists and pluralists separation of them. For patriots accept that although their philosophy may help them to say certain things in general about politics, it cannot on its own, outside of the context of a given polity lend support to any particular ideology. Moreover, because the common good can also sometimes be fulfilled in creative as distinct from interpretive ways, 40 we have reason to make room for an apolitical but still not antipolitical patriotism. But given that creative solutions
Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 172.
39 40

See my Good, Bad, Great, Evil (ch. 12 of this volume).

19 tend to be the exception, never the rule (for after all, sometimes the inspiration just does not come), and given the well-known dangers attending any nondialogical approach to conflict, it (almost) always makes sense to try dialogue, and hence politics, first. Thus patriotisms central political maxim: conversation first, negotiation second, violence third. A patriotic conception of politics can also, I believe, make way for a better conception of the political spectrum than those that have been on offer so far. It is to this conception that I now wish to turn. II Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many have concluded that the very idea of a political spectrum has lost its relevance and thus that the terms left and right no longer carry much meaning. 41 Others, however, continue to assert their efficacy. Leon Baradat, for example, conceives of the spectrum as based on the notion of attitudes to direction of change. Those on the left are progressive in the sense that they favour change from the status quo to something new, whereas those on the right are retrogressive, concerned with a return to a previous state of affairs. 42 Norberto Bobbio, alternatively, argues for a spectrum based on attitudes to equality, with those on the left favouring the value and those on the right being more open to inequalities. 43 Baradats approach, it is true, has the problem that it would require us to describe liberals in the United States today as right-wing since they would have American public policy approximate the countrys New Deal past. But Bobbio fails to explain why one particular value, equality, should be given a special status vis--vis all the others; nor can he account for the popularity of describing American neo-conservatives or Russian communists, each of whom favour the forceful imposition of their preferred brands of equality (democratic and economic respectively), as being on the right. Of course, one could always argue that the mistake lies with those who would refer to American liberals as left and to their neo-conservative compatriots or Russian communists as
See, for example, Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), esp. the Introduction and chs 1-2 (although note the qualification on 251); and Berlin and Steven Lukes, Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, Salmagundi, no. 120 (Fall 1998): 52-133, esp. 124.
41

See Baradat, Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997, 6th ed.), ch. 2.
42

See Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
43

20 right. I nevertheless believe that there is something to these descriptions. That is why I want to suggest an alternative conception of the spectrum, one that helps us to make sense of why they are compelling as well as better captures how the idea of the spectrum has, or at least should have, been used throughout its history. That history, it is worth recalling, originated in postrevolutionary France, when those who sat on the left side of the National Assembly were said to be for progress and against reaction and those on the right the reverse. The conception I want to advance takes its cue from Gianni Vattimos claim that nonviolence is the central characteristic of the left. Vattimo makes this assertion in the context of a polemic against fundamentalisms, particularly those inspired by metaphysical philosophies. 44 But putting that argument aside, I would like to suggest the following: given the assumption that one may respond to a conflict with either conversation, negotiation, or violence, we should refer to those doves for whom progress through conversation is feasible as being on the left; to those more pessimistic hawks who consider violence unavoidable as being on the right; and to those in between, who favour negotiation, as being in the centre. This is the patriotic conception of the political spectrum, and it is one that we can sum up as being based on attitudes to conflict. Now given that conflicts can be both very different and changeable, it makes no sense to demand that people situate themselves on this spectrum in any permanent way. I have long thought it odd that so many, so often, choose to declare themselves lifelong members of the left or inherently right-wing and so on, as though where they happen to be as regards both time and place is somehow irrelevant to their politics. I suspect that vastly overreaching conceptions of rationality or human nature are at work here or, less intellectually grandiose, that people are simply letting their relatively rigid personal sensibilities interfere with their judgment. Regardless, the basic point I want to make is that ones decision about how best to respond to a given conflict is something that should depend on that conflict and nothing else. Of course, one source of those relatively rigid personal sensibilities is ideological thinking. The problem, we might say, is that people often turn to their preferred ideologies for guidance too soon. For ideology is helpful only after the conversation has unavoidably broken

As cited in ibid., 94. See also Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 28-34.
44

21 down. Prior to this, one should be willing to listen and so should be open to transforming oneself on the basis of what one hears. The problem with ideologies is that they interfere with this since, as the historian Lewis Namier once noted, there is a certain fixity to them; the less, therefore, man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma, the better for his thinking. 45 But when the time for negotiation, and so for ideology, has come, patriots, like pluralists, will invoke the one that they believe best expresses the identity, the common good, of their political community. And this, it should be said, by no means has to be conservatism. For while conservatives are often said to exhibit the greatest love for their country, patriotism is in no sense biased in favour of their ideology. The reason is that patriots love what they consider to be the true identity of their country (or countries if they feel loyalty to more than one), and whether its current practices best express that identity is something that must remain an open question. It is always possible that radical reforms to those practices will be necessary if citizens are to be truer to their ideals. At least as regards such cases, then, Hannah Arendt is quite right to point out that intense discontent [is] the hallmark of true patriotism and true devotion to ones people. 46 True patriot love, in other words, can require criticism. Although not biased in favour of any particular ideology, however, patriotism does rule out all the antipolitical ones. All these ultra-right doctrines must be distinguished from the political ones since they consistently reject dialogical responses to conflict in favour of nondialogical forms of talk or of other, more overt forms of force. This is something explicit in the case of fascism or revolutionary Marxism, implicit with the legalism of neutralist liberalism, and inevitable when it comes to narrow, one-dimensional ideologies such as libertarianism. One might thus ask whether, given their antipolitical nature, such ideologies even merit a place on the political spectrum as I have been defining it. For it is, after all, a political spectrum, whereupon positions are to be found that assume there will be at least some occasions when dialogue can serve as a viable alternative to violence. In ruling that dialogue out virtually a priori, antipolitical

45 46

Namier, Human Nature in Politics, in Personalities and Powers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 7, 5.

Hannah Arendt, Herzl and Lazare, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 338. See also the distinction that Theodor W. Adorno and his fellow authors draw between genuine and pseudo patriotism in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality: Part One One (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1950), 107-8.

22 ideologies take positions so far to the right vis--vis our spectrum that they may be said to have fallen off it. Note that, in the case of those ideologies that can be placed upon it, there is no call for doing so in any permanent way. Because each country claims its own political culture, each may be said to have its own home ideology at a given point in time, and this is something that can not only change but also move along our spectrum. For example, conservatives in the United States today might, for whatever reason, decide to abandon their ideology or perhaps continue to uphold it while nevertheless moving either more to the centre or to the right (i.e., becoming either more or less open to the prospects of negotiating given conflicts). One constant, however, is that those political parties whose foremost aim is electoral success will always be found competing over their countrys home ideology, which may also consist of a mixture of ideologies. That is why American Republicans and Democrats have, since the mid-1970s, been right-wing and centrist conservatives respectively (there being, admittedly, a few liberals remaining among the Democrats). And it also explains why any Canadian party that genuinely wishes to form the government whether it be the Liberals, the Conservatives, or the New Democrats has for a very long time now needed to present itself to the electorate as the best representative of Canadian liberalism. 47 Of course, not all countries have had the luxury to develop their political cultures to the point where their home ideologies are as sophisticated as conservatism or liberalism, not to mention socialism or those somewhat less developed relative newcomers, feminism and green ideology. 48 Modern Israel is a case in point. Since its creation in 1948, its citizens fundamentally existential concern with security has, understandably, been given a virtually overriding place in its politics. Its home ideology, in consequence, has remained that of the nationalisms of its two national communities, the majority Jewish and the minority Arab. Nationalism, however, is an ideology that, in more mature political cultures, tends to exist only

See, for example, H.W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and William Christian and Colin Campbell, Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990, 3rd ed.).
47

For an authoritative study of these five, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
48

23 as an adjunct to the other, more sophisticated ideologies. 49 One can only hope that the day will come when Israelis will be able to conceive of it in this way.

III There are, it seems to me, a number of benefits that come from interpreting the relations between political philosophies and political ideologies in the way I propose. For one thing, it helps us to overcome the inherently misleading terms of what has been called the liberal-communitarian debate within contemporary political philosophy. 50 In that debate, the liberalism invoked is almost invariably restricted, and without justification (indeed, without even the hint that such justification might be required) to the neutralist, usually Kantian, variety; non-neutralist liberalisms are rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, however, two of the debates major communitarian representatives, are actually pluralist and pluralist/patriotic liberals respectively. 51 Indeed, even Alasdair MacIntyre, who clearly is a nonliberal participant in the debate (he affirms a premodern form of politics), has vehemently rejected the term. 52 Nevertheless, there are those such as Michael Sandel who continue to equate liberalism with the various forms of neutralist liberalism, 53 thus perpetuating the misrepresentation of an ideology that, as Michael Freeden has shown, has long exhibited much

49 50

See Michael Freeden, Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology? Political Studies 46, no. 4 (Sept. 1998): 748-65.

See, for example, Adam Swift and Stephen Mulhall, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 2nd ed.). This is surely one reason why neither has been comfortable with the label communitarian. Walzer lumps himself in with the liberals in Walzer, Liberalism and the Art of Separation; and in Walzer, The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism, Political Theory 18, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 6-23. And Taylor gives one of the many reasons why he is unhappy with the term communitarian, in his Charles Taylor Replies, in James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 250. Alasdair MacIntyre, The Spectre of Communitarianism, Radical Philosophy, no. 70 (Mar.-Apr. 1995): 3435, 34: I have myself strenuously disowned this label, but to little effect. Daniel A. Bell is, to my knowledge, the only nonliberal who has embraced it; see his Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Amitai Etzioni, who has also done so, is better described as a pluralist liberal (though one who also occasionally voices patriotic concerns). See, for example, Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
52 51

See the following by Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 2nd ed.); Introduction, in Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); and Democracys Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 1.
53

24 richer forms than are compatible with a neutralist framework.54 This leads me to recommend that we not only refuse to limit liberalism the political ideology to those versions of it associated with neutralism the political philosophy but that we also drop the term communitarian altogether. Doing so would, at the very least, help us to acknowledge such realities as the fact that Isaiah Berlin, universally recognized as a liberal, is more open to compromising the liberty of the individual, one of liberalisms core goods, than is a so-called communitarian such as Walzer. 55 Moreover, we would also make room for the fact that ostensibly anticommunitarian neutralist liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin actually embrace a strong (although I would claim misconstrued) conception of the common good, something that Taylor, for one, has acknowledged. 56 All this should help us to appreciate that liberalism is but one modern political ideology among many, albeit the most popular among Western political thinkers today. That is why we ought to eschew the oft-used but misleading description of the West as the home of the political culture of liberal democracy, as this only obfuscates the fact that democratic socialism, conservatism, feminism, and green ideology, to name just a few, still claim places as respectable ideologies among the diversity of Western democratic political cultures. The relevant distinction should be not between liberal democracies and other regimes but between regimes that are political and those that are not. Finally, the spectrum I have been proposing could help us to account for the tendency of those on the left to exhibit a unique form of bitterness towards their opponents. This is something they do in addition to the natural aversion that all who take their politics seriously feel towards fellow citizens who are sympathetic to ideologies different from their own. I want to suggest that the lefts feelings here are born of the frustration of thinking that one has found a reconciliatory, noncompromising solution to a given political conflict, a solution that contributes to the common good of all, yet those to the right, for whatever reason, refuse to go along. Think of that old
See Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, chs 4-7; and his Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
54

Walzers (weak) pluralist liberalism upholds a political scheme that aims wholly to shelter that liberty from compromise. This is implied, for example, by his declaration in Spheres of Justice, 279, that the autonomous person [is] ... the ideal subject of the theory of justice. See Taylor, Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate, in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 172, 179-80.
56

55

25 proverb about leading a horse to water but not being able to make it drink; then imagine how embittering it would be if one felt that the horses obstinacy was preventing many others from drinking as well. That said, there are also those who, while claiming to be members of the left, are bitter for a reason that has little, if anything, to do with an interest in reconciliation. These are the fascist left, as they are sometimes called, and they are not really on the left, as I have been defining it, at all. To them words are not the carriers of dialogue but weapons in disguise, arrows that, tinged with self-righteousness and what Nietzsche called ressentiment, are aimed at those who are perceived to be self-serving enemies of equality. But the reality is that the opposition to equality is more often than not an ideologically legitimate one. Such leftists, we should thus recognize, are actually as antipolitical as the soldiers of realpolitik; their place, in consequence, is on the far right.

IV I want to conclude by saying something about where patriots in the West today should be situated on this political spectrum of mine. My admittedly contestable claim is that many factors have, at this time, combined to make conversation a truly viable response to a number of political conflicts, certainly much more so than was the case during the Cold War. For the realities of that war served only to infuse right-wing tendencies into politics both between and within states. Its end, while making way for the flaring up of a number of hot wars including the so-called war on terror has also allowed us to interpret the world anew, without the limitations that war inevitably brings. Indeed, the fact is that the global citizenry has come to enjoy a dramatic drop in casualties from violent conflict, 57 and despite the very real threat today of terrorists acquiring and using a nuclear device, Edward Luttwak has rightly pointed out that there remains a very great difference between this and the earlier prospect of nuclear Armageddon. 58 Our world, in other words, is simply far more secure than it has been in a very long time. And with security comes the ability to listen that conversation requires.

See Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
57 58

See Luttwak, Tales of the Cold War, Times Literary Supplement, March 22, 2006.

26 Moreover, it also makes sense today to refer to what Geoff Mulgan has identified as the rise of four new unleashings of energy as regards politics and its possibilities. First and most important are the sweeping democratization movements that have arisen throughout the world, from China to Brazil, Kazakhstan to Turkey. Every time an antipolitical regime falls or is challenged, ones hopes for the possibilities of dialogue, as conversation and not only negotiation, should only grow. Second is the transition towards an era of human capital, one that follows the previous shifts from merchant to industrial and then finance capital. When it is human capital that is valued, organizations tend to give resources such as skill and ingenuity greater prominence, and this can only help to develop the reconciliatory solutions for which conversations aim. Third is the growing demand on states, public bodies, and in particular global organizations to evolve and often extend their responsibilities. This requires reforms that are sure to produce new contexts and so, once again, new possibilities. Finally, there is the fact that, at least when it comes to the prosperous societies of the developed world, many have found that consumer consumption cannot fulfil their needs for self-realization. The effect has been to catapult the questions and languages of ethics, as distinct from economics, to the forefront. 59 The result of these four? The terms employed in dialogue are becoming richer and its potential especially should states come to make the common good and the virtue of conversation central to their programs for civic education that much greater. To accept this interpretation of world politics today is to acknowledge the generally leftist orientation that comes from endorsing the tenets of patriotic political philosophy at this time. The fact is that there is significant opportunity for conversation, or for making room for conversation, that simply was not there before. Acknowledging this does not, to repeat, dictate an adherence to any particular political ideology; rather, it requires only that we listen, rather than fight, for justice. The irony, then, is that while many have pointed to the demise of the Soviet Union as the largest factor contributing to the current fragmentation and decline of the left, its fall may, ultimately, have the opposite effect. For we are now, as sentimental as this unavoidably sounds, living in a time when it is genuinely possible to make a better world. Patriots of the world, converse!

See Geoff Mulgan, The Renewable Energies of Politics, in Politics in an Antipolitical Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 186-7.
59