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Political Philosophers of the Twentieth Century 3£0. 5 L5604 1999 Political Philosophers of the Twentieth Century IB To David Raphael, my first teacher in politics Michael H. Lessnoff Department of Politics University of Glasgow, UK B BLACKWELL P u b l i s h e r s Copyright © Michael H. Lessnoff 1999 First published 1999 2468 10 9753 1 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford 0X4 1JF UK Blackwell Publishers Inc. 350 Main Street Malden, Massachusetts 02148 USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes 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. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lessnoff, Michael H. (Michael Harry) Political philosophers of the twentieth century / Michael H. Lessnoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-20260-9 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-631-20261-7 (alk. paper) 1. Political science—Philosophy—History—20th century. 2. Political science—History—20th century. I. Title. JA83.L39 1999 320.5'09'04—DC21 98-22981 CIP Typeset in 1014 on 13 pt Bembo by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frame, Somerset Printed in Great Britain by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. NR 04 '99 / Contents Acknowledgements vi 1 Introduction 1 2 Max Weber and the Politics of the Twentieth Century 6 Parti Critics of Consumerist Capitalism 37 3 Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: The Tyranny of Instrumental Reason 39 4 Hannah Arendt: Classical Republicanism and the Modem World 60 5 C. B. Macpherson: Possessive Individualism and Liberal Democracy 93 Part II Embattled Liberalism 111 6 Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism and Civil Association 113 7 Friedrich Hayek: The Theory of Spontaneous Order 146 8 Karl Popper: Critical Rationalism and the Open Society 176 9 Isaiah Berlin: Monism and Pluralism 208 Part III Contemporaries 227 10 John Rawls: Liberal Justice 229 11 Robert Nozick: The Minimal State 252 12 Jurgen Habermas: Discourse Ethics and Democracy 269 13 Conclusion: The End of History? 297 Index 300 Acknowledgements My thanks are due to a number of people who helped me in various ways with the writing of this book. Various chapters were read and commented on by Glasgow colleagues, including John Fowler on Weber and Robert Grant on Oakeshott. Paul Graham was very helpful in relation to the ‘Frank¬ furt’ authors, Marcuse and Habermas. The entire typescript was read, once again, by Mary Haight. Of course, responsibility for the text remains my own. But it could not have been completed without a huge amount of help from the Glasgow Politics Department secretaries, Elspeth Shaw, Avril Johnstone and Jeanette Berrie. I have relied greatly on their expertise with computers and other such paraphernalia involved in the production of books in the high technology age. In the course of our joint labours they also achieved a notable improvement in the legibility of my manuscript material. VI 1 Introduction I must begin by making plain the scope of this book, and justifying its inclu¬ sions and exclusions. Its subject, as indicated by the title, is the major politi¬ cal philosophers of the twentieth century. The book is, however, also intended to have a thematic unity, which cannot be expected to correspond exactly to chronological divisions. I therefore confine my attention (with one excep¬ tion, to be explained below) to what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the ‘short twentieth century’ — the era bounded at one end by the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and at the other by the dramatic collapse of the USSR and Bolshevism as a result of the advent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the subsequent ‘revolutions’ in East and Central Europe.1 Roughly speaking, the period of interest coincides with the life¬ time of the Soviet Union, 1917-91. The period has not only a political but also a cultural unity, at least in Europe and America (‘The West’) - using the word ‘cultural’ in a broad sense, to refer not just to intellectual issues, but to the general shape of society and the conditions of life of individuals in it, which rested, largely and increasingly, on an industrial economy and tech¬ nology. The recent striking and far-reaching technological developments known as the ‘information revolution’ seem to portend the rise of a radically different kind of society and, quite possibly, a different set of social and political problems. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that Western society during the ‘short twentieth century’ was a society of a specific kind, faced with specific kinds of problems. These problems, naturally, preoccupied the political philoso¬ phers of the period, so that the perennial problems of political philosophy took on, for them, a particular form, or slant. In part, then, the political philosophy of our period is shaped by the particularities of its social struc- Introduction ture. But only in part - equally important, needless to say, has been the need to grapple with the implications of the great shaping events - and, one must say, catastrophes - of the century: two world wars, revolutions, and the threat to human values posed by totalitarianism in its various forms. These latter issues are familiar. But it is also necessary, as indicated, to pay attention to issues of fundamental social structure. That is why I begin this study with Max Weber. Weber, although he lived almost entirely before our period (he died in 1920), is nevertheless the greatest sociologist of‘moder¬ nity’, that is, of twentieth century society. It is his work, above all others, that identifies the crucial social and cultural trends of our time, and the prob¬ lems to which they give rise - trends and problems summed up, in particu¬ lar, by the twin terms ‘rationalization’ and ‘disenchantment’. Although these phenomena are in part cognate (since disenchantment is, in fact, the conse¬ quence of rationalization in the intellectual sphere), together they produce an ironic predicament. In brief, there is, on the one hand, an ever greater capacity to achieve ends, based on ever greater intellectual understanding of the physical world; on the other a loss of confidence in the objective value of ends. Our stock of means (in the fonn of wealth, knowledge, etc.) is enor¬ mously superior to that available to previous generations, but the worth of the ends they are used to pursue is uncertain and disputed. The collapse of religious belief is of course crucial here. In a fairly obvious way, liberalism is a response to disenchantment in Weber’s sense - whether it takes the form of Isaiah Berlin’s value-pluralism, or John Rawls’s doctrine of the priority of the right over the good - this being the appropriate response to ‘reasonable disagreement’ about the good, which individuals should be free to define for themselves and to pursue subject to the restraints imposed by rules of right. Michael Oakeshott and Friedrich Hayek also, in their different ways, seek to limit the scope of pub¬ lic authority to the enforcement of rules, and correspondingly to reserve the pursuit of ends to the tree choices of private individuals and associations or ogamzations. Rawls, however, goes further than the others by proposing a method for determining the constraining rules of right (‘principles of justice ) — notably, a contractarian method based on hypothetical agreement rather than objective right or natural law, since the latter is not available. In so far as rationalization and disenchantment are two sides of the same com, the currency in question involves the monopolization of reason and knowledge by science and technology - knowledge of facts and of means. This technical view of rationality, and its societal implications, have been a majoi focus of attention - often hostile - on the part of twentieth-century 2