Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Fifth Series PDF
Preview Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Fifth Series
PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS AND SOCIETY FIFTH SERIES Philosophy, Politics and Society FIFTH SERIES A collection edited by Peter Laslett and James Fishkin BASIL BLACKWELL • OXFORD 1979 © in this collection Basil Blackwell 1979 All rights reserved. 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 Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Philosophy, politics and society. 5th series 1. Social sciences I. Laslett, Peter II. Fishkin, James 300'.8 H35 ISBN 0-631—1011 i-X Filmset in Great Britain by Northumberland Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear Printed in Great Britain by Billing and Sons Ltd., London, Guildford and Worcester. Typography by Douglas Merritt MSIA Contents page i Introduction I A Well-Ordered Society page 6 John Rawls JOHN COWLES PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY HARVARD UNIVERSITY 2 Famine, Affluence and Morality page 21 Peter Singer PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY MONASH UNIVERSITY 3 The Conversation Between the Generations page 36 Peter Laslett FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 4 Capitalist Man, Socialist Man page 57 Robert E Lane EUGENE MEYER PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE YALE UNIVERSITY 5 Paternalism page 78 Gerald Dworkin PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO CIRCLE 6 Procedural Democracy page 97 Robert A Dahl STERLING PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE YALE UNIVERSITY 7 A Principle of Simple Justice page 134 Douglas W Rae PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE YALE UNIVERSITY 8 Is Democracy Special? page 155 Brian Barry PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 9 Tyranny and Democratic Theory page 197 James Fishkin ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE YALE UNIVERSITY IO Political Obligation and Conceptual Analysis page 227 Carole Pateman SENIOR LECTURER IN GOVERNMENT UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY I I Justice as Reversibility page 257 Lazvrence Kohlberg PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY HARVARD UNIVERSITY 12 Relativism and Tolerance page 273 Geoffrey Harrison LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF READING 13 The Problematic Rationality of Political page 291 Participation Stanley I Benn PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Introduction ‘No commanding work of political theory has appeared in the 20th century.’ So said Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1962 in the second volume of Philosophy, Politics and Society, in answer to the question Does political theory still exist? He was taking up a point made six years earlier in the introduction to the first volume. The outstanding difference now, in 1978, is that Berlin’s assertion is no longer true. It ceased to be so in 1971, when A Theory of Justice by John Rawls of Harvard was published in Cambridge, Mass.1 2 Quite some part of the pursuit of political philosophy in the English-speaking world since that time has been taken up with the discussion of this Olympian work. Philosophy and Public Affairs, an American journal, began its career at exactly the same time and has had an important impact too. In its columns, as in those of other journals including Political Theory (1973 on, also American) a new descriptive adjective has been coined, Rawlsian, a word which will be found to be accepted currency in the collection we now present. The most influential book to come out during what should perhaps be called the post-Rawlsian era, Anarchy, State and Utopia2 by Robert Nozick, also of Harvard, appeared in 1974. It is regarded by many as a work of stature in its own right, probably as important as any other whose appearance we have recorded in earlier introductions in this series. Its author may perhaps have reason to regret that euphony has prevented his name, as it prevented the name of Montesquieu, from developing an adjectival form. These most welcome happenings are recorded with enthusiasm here. They make the writing of this little introductory survey and assessment very much easier than it has been these twenty years or more. An English editor may be allowed a twinge of regret that none of this has occurred in his own country, and it is evident from our list of authors how heavily the balance has now come down on the Western side of the Atlantic. But we can have no sensation other than delight to be relieved of the necessity of asking anxious questions about political philosophy and the present quality 1 Harvard University Press. British edition, Oxford University Press, 1972, during the course of publication of the previous volume of Philosophy, Politics and Society. 2 Basic Books, New York; Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 2 Introduction of its life. It obviously flourishes, all over the English- speaking world and outside it too, and for numerous reasons other than the birth of a contemporary classic in the field. We are conscious that we may have been able to cover these other developments rather less effectively. And we rather wonder if the growing company of political theorists have properly met the challenge of the times even now. Both Rawls and Nozick appeared earlier in the series, and the discussion of their positions is very evident in the present collection: the studies by Rae, by Fishkin and by Barry are particularly directed towards them. Scarcely any of the others fail to cite their names or to confront the Rawlsian theory, veil of ignorance contractarianism as one of us has ventured to call it. Part of our difficulty has been to prevent this theory from dominating the volume, for much recent work has already been devoted to it.3 In making our selection we have had in mind a formidable array of issues in philosophy, politics and society which have come to the fore in the middle and later 1970s. Some have close connections with the Rawlsian debate, or are involved within it. But others stand some intellectual distance away, and all have independent origins and areas of importance. We may lay these sets of issues out under three heads. First, those to do with the growth of human populations and with the effect on the environment, and so upon futurity, of our own relentlessly expansive activities. Second, those to do with what might be called arithmetic humanity in relation to politics, especially the correct boundaries which should surround any human collection so that a proper political society may appear. Third, those to do with the obligations owed to their polity by the subjects of contemporary authoritarian states. We may begin with the third set of issues, which, though in the last few years it has come to face us with a surprising 3 See, for example: Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Razvls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Razvls (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); and the symposium in the American Political Science Reviezv, vol. 69, no. 2 (June 1975)- 3 Introduction urgency, is most easily fitted into a traditional framework of political philosophy. Those whom Western journalists call the dissidents and especially the Russians amongst them— the writers in what we all know as Samizdat—persistently, and in our view justifiably, protest against the failure of Western academic intellectuals to rescue them from the propaganda machines of government and the military. They insist on their incontrovertible right to be taken seriously in the republique des lettres. No writer from the authoritarian socialist world, or from under the domination of dictatorships of other kinds, or any who takes part in the conduct of thought in Western European Communist parties, makes an appearance here. Nor do our contributors refer directly to the situation in which these thinkers and authors find themselves, though Robert Lane comes closest perhaps in his reflections on capitalist and socialist personality. Nevertheless we hope that our readers, when they address themselves to A Well-Ordered Society, to Relativism and Tolerance, or to the theory of democracy in the sophisticated form they find it being discussed here, will do so remembering these other writers and their completely different sets of conditions: their entirely different vocabu¬ lary as well, in which democracy might be called a blocked word. The debate in which Carole Pateman engages with Hannah Pitkin4 bears rather more directly on such problems than at first sight might be supposed. Perhaps the reader may think that the complexities of democratic theory as elaborated by our contributors are too refined: the message scarcely plain enough for the political world as it actually is, especially where authoritarianism is in possession. But this is not the first time in the history of thought when moral perplexity has given rise to refined distinctions and the intricate manipulations of exact defini¬ tions. The issues to do with arithmetic humanity are continuous with those to do with democratic theory, and two-fold in their character. They are geographical, as when Peter Singer talks so urgently about our duties to distant yet contemporary humans in times of famine, and temporal when Peter Laslett 4 For Pitkin’s study, see Philosophy, Politics and Society IV. 4 Introduction addresses the problems of generations past and generations yet to come. They are intermediate between the two when we consider the consequences of the ageing of high industrial society, where a huge company of the economically inactive now share the time space with those who have conventionally been supposed to constitute effectively the whole of society. As for the geography of political and moral association, Robert Dahl, and to some extent Robert Lane and Brian Barry too, take up this crucial yet neglected theme when they find themselves asking who has to be included in a body politic to give it moral authenticity. This inevitably raises questions which go to the bottom of our assumptions about society, state, individual and the democratic process. It does so in a way which is particularly important when micro¬ nationalism, small scale political societies clamouring for an identity of their own, is almost as urgent as the challenge which comes from considering humanity as a whole. As for the first set of issues, the present position may be set down in little space. Rawl’s theory is addressed to certain classical questions of justice—the distribution of income and property, rights and liberties, the ‘basic structure’ of a just society. There are many other pressing questions which it leaves unanswered. A Theory of Justice is not sufficient, and was not intended to be sufficient, to meet the intellectual demands made upon us by environment, population and futurity. An entirely new moral perspective may accordingly have to be worked out now, an effort on a Kantian scale, at the problems of all humans considered over time. Kant is perhaps not the writer to call to mind after all: better the Stoics to whom appeal was made in 1956,5 a philosophy of all mankind for the latest decades of the 20th century. Nevertheless, scripturalism, as is said on p. 43 of the present book, is decidedly not enough. The collection we publish in 1978 may be taken to show forth, even in its insufficiencies, the still present danger of preoccupation with a small traditional agenda of classical ‘problems’ in political philos¬ ophy and of too much reliance on respected names from the past. There have been intellectual events, eddies of opinion, bursts of speculation, during the last few years which might perhaps have engaged our attention here. One has been the 5 Philosophy, Politics and Society I, Introduction, p. xiv.
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