Newey Two Dogmas of Liberalism

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European Journal of Political

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DOI: 10.1177/14748851103740072010 9: 449European Journal of Political Theory

Glen NeweyTwo dogmas of liberalism

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European Journal of Political Theory

9(4) 449–465

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E JPT Article

Two dogmas of liberalism

Glen NeweyUniversity of Keele

Abstract

This article is on political normativity. It urges scepticism about attempts to reducepolitical normativity to morality. Modern liberalism leaves a question about how farmorality can be accommodated by the form of normativity characteristic of politics.

The article casts doubt on whether individual moral norms carry over to collective, forexample, political, action, and whether the former ‘trump’ other kinds of reasons inpolitics. It then sketches an alternative view of politics as an irreducibly collective enter-prise. Reasons for acting politically, including the understandings on which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are largely artefacts of the political culture and thus only marginally subjectto generic conditions of validity: this is true in particular of liberal acceptability-conditions.Thus legitimacy, though not a redundant notion, must be geared to local political norms.

Keywords

liberalism, morality, normativity, political design, politics

Introduction

This article examines political normativity and its limits. It does not deal at all with

the scope, and only tangentially with the source, of that normativity. Its main focus

is on the type of normativity which is appropriate within politics, and, by extension,

which is the appropriate object of philosophical theorizing about politics.

In fact, the focus is narrower still, since I deal only with certain aspects of the

typology. I do not have much to say, for instance, about the notion of bindingness,

except insofar as that raises the question about the possible role of morality in

grounding politics.1 I argue, particularly with respect to Rawls’s work, that certain

features of modern liberalism leave a question about how far morality can be

accommodated politically. I urge scepticism about attempts to reduce political

normativity to morality, in particular via the philosophically cohesive but also

morally very demanding moral theory of Kant, particularly the notion that moral-

ity trumps reasons of all other kinds. I shall question how far Kantianism can show

that moral reasons have this trumping quality, as a demand of pure practical

Corresponding author:

Glen Newey, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs, ST5 5BG, UK

Email: [email protected]








rationality. I also cast doubt on an assumption often tacitly mobilized in support of

Kantian reductivism, namely that the norms which justify an individual in acting in

a certain way carry over to the sphere of collective action. This does not however

demand a wholesale abandonment of Kantianism, in attempting to construct aserviceable notion of political normativity.

Then the argument moves to the second dogma of liberalism, namely the attempt

to reduce collective to individual rationality. The main point here is that, even were it

the case that at the level of individual action there were an argument to show that

morality overrides other kinds of reasons for action because it is a demand of pure

practical rationality, this would not warrant the conclusion that political reasons for

action can be inferred from this demand. Politics is a sphere of collective action, and

the rational constraints which bear on collective action relate to what can coherently

be authorized by those on whose behalf the collective is taken to act.2

Towards the end, I sketch an alternative view of politics. This will assume that

politics is a collective enterprise. It also takes the presumption of authorization as a

basis for political legitimacy. But it does not presuppose an originative account of

that authorization or, consequently, political legitimacy, and does not attempt to

establish a pre-existing order of reasons by reference to which legitimacy is to be

understood. Reasons for acting politically, which include the understandings on

which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are as much a part of the local political culture

as are, say, political institutions. This dims the prospects for theories which seek to

lay down foundations for politics using reasons with purportedly universal domain.There is however no special reason to greet the specificity of political reasons

with dismay.

Liberalism and moralism

Rawls famously remarked at the start of Theory of Justice that justice was the ‘first

virtue’ of societies. By this, it becomes clear, Rawls means that the overriding

demand to be made of a social and political system is that it conforms to certain

moral requirements, whose content is generated by a philosophical theory: the very

one which Rawls unfolds after making that remark. In this section I wish to ques-

tion whether it is reasonable to impose moralized demands on political arrange-

ments at the most fundamental level, that of the ‘basic structure’. Rawls exemplifies

philosophical liberalism’s project of political design,3 namely devising a blueprint

for politics, including designing institutions, procedures, entitlements and so on.

The philosophical task is taken to be the justification of a particular conception of

political design. The project of justification is often seen as giving moral reasons

why the favoured conception would be adopted, for example because it is the only

one consistent with persons’ moral standing as free and equal agents.

The assumptions behind liberal moralism are often not elucidated. But frequentlythe idea seems to be that morality trumps other practical reasons, so political design

must fit a moral template.4 It would be over-simplified to suggest that the source of

this idea lies wholly within Kantian moral theory, but Kant, whose influence Rawls

450 European Journal of Political Theory 9(4)








of course acknowledged,5 provided the most cohesive and systematic statement of the

trumping view. Indeed it is quite hard to think of a philosophical argument for this

conclusion which is both clearly non-Kantian and not clearly inadequate.

The liberal moralist approach to political design could be expounded using thefollowing argument.

1. Morality consists (at least) of obligations.

2. (Moral) obligations trump other kinds of reason for action.

So

3. In any practical project, moral obligations trump other kinds of reason for

action.4. Political design is a practical project.

So

5. In the project of political design, moral obligations trump other kinds of reason

for action.

This is obviously very schematic, and various qualifications need to be entered.

For one thing, although talk of obligations makes it more perspicuous, 1 and 2could be replaced with the claim that moral reasons trump other kinds of reason

for action, the rest of the argument then being couched in terms of moral reasons

generally. Second, it makes an important difference at what stage in the process

morality is thought of as coming in. How far an option may be thought binding

may depend, for instance, on what else has been rejected, how and on what

grounds. Relatedly, how a norm binds may be seen as an artefact of the process,

rather than one of its initial conditions.

Liberalism fills in the moral reasons which apply to political design, such as

those arising from persons’ status as free and equal. In what sense, however, can it

be said that the obligations, or other trumping moral reasons, ‘apply’ to the proj-

ect? The most obvious reply is that the obligations always apply to everyone, or to

all rational beings, etc., so they apply in the circumstances of political design. This,

however, does not dispose of the query, which seeks an explanation of why the

obligations, etc., are salient in the circumstances imagined. If they are salient

always and everywhere, any specification of these circumstances seems redundant.

On the other hand, if the circumstances matter, then one can ask what justifies this

starting-point, given the wider project.

Most practitioners of political design opt for a measure of circumstantial spe-

cificity. Notably, Rawls begins A Theory of Justice with a description of theOriginal Position, while many 17th-century contract theorists began from an

account of the state of nature in which certain norms, those of natural law,

apply. That the set-up envisaged people as occupying some ur-situation, from

Newey 451








which they had to find their way to politics, clearly influenced the conclusions

drawn from it, and that was part of the point. The initial set-up serves its justifi-

catory purpose only if it is compelling in itself, since a different starting-point may

yield different conclusions. In Rawls, the set-up is thought compelling because theOriginal Position encapsulates an idea of justice as fairness. Unlike classical state-

of-nature theory, it starts in medias res, assuming that society already exists as a

scheme for mutual benefit; the question is how to share the goods accruing

from cooperation.

One can imagine social and political institutions dissolved, take some moral

claims as given and make human beings as motivationally plastic as is needed to

get them to act as the theory demands. But nothing compels one to begin just there.

It is not obvious why the balance between the given and the counterfactually

revisable should be struck this way. Someone may say that that morality obviouslytrumps other kinds of reason for action. This is not an argument, but a contention

in need of validating premises. The contention can be made stipulatively true, by

identifying ‘morality’ with reasons which come out top in practical deliberation.

That leaves the field open regarding any independently specified class of reasons for

action. The claim gains philosophical shape if it is held, for instance, that there is

one kind of thing with unqualified or supreme value, such as subjective internal

states of human beings; so the most important task is to realize this value, in which

morality guides us. There is the question whether that axiological claim, or the

ethical naturalism which seemingly underlies it, is right. But even if they are, it isnot obvious how these thoughts guide political design; nor how they mould politics

to a distinctively liberal shape.6

I shall not seek to refute the trumping thesis directly. My aim, more narrowly, is

to suggest that modern liberalism’s own commitments make it difficult to use the

thesis in the project of political design. Some of the reasons for this, as I shall

suggest, derive from specific commitments of modern liberalism. In addition,

morality does not present itself in a form which is usable straight off. Of course,

even (or especially) constructivism has to start with some raw materials. But it is

not clearly more compelling to take morality as given, and resolve for politics, than

to take politics as given, and resolve for morality.

Consider, for instance, the notion of the public interest. Little, if anything, is

simply given as constitutive of the public interest. A functional theory might say

the public interest must at least include whatever the constitutive ends of

political association are, since that is a condition of there being a public in the

first place. But whatever was disputable about the concept of the public interest

may well remain so when the discussion turns to the ends of association. Of course,

one may say that the public interest demands the upholding of certain moral

norms. But why treat such a judgement as authoritative? Moral judgements

can serve as inputs into deciding the public interest. But it does not follow thatthese judgements should commandeer the whole process, either by filtering out

certain substantive judgements at the start, or determining how the process

unfolds.









What, if anything, is the basis of the normative authority of political proce-

dures?7 The question arises, for instance, with democratic theories which hold that

political decisions have authority because they express the collective will of the

citizens to bind themselves by them. Can the procedures, or their outcomes, con-tradict the basis of political authority, given that the people confers that authority,

and that its status as an agent seems to require the procedures? Behind this lies a

more general question: how does the normativity of political authority relate to

that of the justification on which it is held to rest?

There seem to be two possibilities. Either the normativity of political authority

is sui generis, with respect, in particular, to that of morality, or it is not. If it is,

then there is no reason why political authority, expressed in the bindingness of its

procedures’ outcomes, should conform to the dictates of independent moral

norms. Political authority and morality are disparate sources of normativity.Insofar as it makes sense to talk of the bindingness of decisions made by political

authority, this will not be because it is a species of morality. Different judge-

ments can then be made about what happens when there is apparent conflict

between the two sources of normativity. It can be argued that one source must

‘trump’8 the other in such apparent conflicts; or that each has its own discrete

sphere of operation; or that there is some more complex negotiation to be made

between morality and political authority as sources of normativity when they seem

to be in conflict.

On the other hand, if political normativity is a species of moral normativity,then whatever binding force it has will derive from morality. So, when the political

procedures throw up results seemingly at odds with morality, there is a prima facie

conflict between two manifestations of moral normativity: one issuing from the

justification of the procedures, and the other from whatever justifies the moral

objection to their outcome. But this is a conflict within moral normativity, not

between political normativity and it. Rawls holds that no political procedure could

guarantee morally indefeasible outcomes, assuming an independent standard of

moral assessment exists. Rawls argues, accordingly, that politics embodies imper-

fect rather than perfect procedural justice.9 However, there is no politically author-

itative standard by which to ratify political outcomes. Any situation where the

outcomes’ authority is at issue must also put in question the authority of objections

to them. Liberals’ endorsement of reasonable disagreement about ideals of the

good makes such objections likelier.10

Alternatively, politics embodies pure procedural justice:11 political processes

generate the norms’ content and binding force. If so, a form of decisionism results:

the content of norms is valid just because the procedures yield them as outcomes.

Moral ideals can enter into formulating the procedures and in choosing outcomes.

But any moral residues left by the procedures will not be correctible by an author-

itative independent standard. Pure procedural justice allows for no such standards,so the notion that they could find political outcomes wanting – for instance, by

affronting an individual’s moral intuitions – must be illusory. The upshot is pro-

cedural decisionism.

Newey 453








Collective action and individual agents

Politics involves collective agency. Here, I am using the term ‘collective agency’

generically. For a particular action-token to instantiate collective agency, theaction must be ascribable to each of n individuals, where n is greater than 1;

where ‘is ascribable’ means roughly that it can be attributed to the individuals

concerned on a basis which makes true the usual act-descriptions, such as holding

responsible, imputing relevant intentions, beliefs, etc. The primordial political

question is What do we do? – though the reference of ‘we’ need not be well-defined.

This account is intended to deal with corporate rather than merely cooperative

agency. Uncontroversially, agents often cooperate, as when they join forces to

push-start a car. More controversially, agency is ascribed to supra-individual

bodies like governments, civil-society associations, etc., at which methodologicalindividualists may balk. For irreducibly corporate agency the relevant action, while

meeting the conditions for collective agency, must not be truth-functionally reduc-

ible to propositions about individual agents.12 The question is whether liberalism’s

standard approach, justifying political design by reflecting on what individuals

have good reason to do, makes sense of politics as collective agency.

There is no obvious general way in which to construct collective agency from

individual reasons for action. This applies even in rational choice theory, which has

aimed to reduce collective to individual agency. For example, if maximizing pay-

offs is defined as rational in respect of an agent and a choice situation, then inthe standard one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma the sector<Defect, Defect> is a Nash

equilibrium: Defect is strictly dominant for each player. Then, given that rational-

ity is defined as maximizing payoffs relative to an agent and choice situation,

<Defect, Defect> emerges as rational for each.

In the PD matrix the Nash equilibrium is Pareto-suboptimal with respect to a

non-Nash equilibrium (<Cooperate, Cooperate>). So, the latter’s aggregate utility

exceeds that of <Defect, Defect>. It is unclear however why one cannot define a

corporate agent which will rationally pursue utility-maximization, on the definition

of rationality already given. Of course, if rational collective action is identified with

the aggregated rational actions of each individual, then the players each rationally

defect. But what compels one to say that? To assume that that is what must be done

seems simply to beg the question as to how individual and collective rationality

relate to each other.

The conclusion that<Defect, Defect> is a Nash equilibrium follows only given

the revealed preferences of individual agents. Discussion sometimes confuses the

quantitative measures arising from the actions available to the players with their

associated utilities. If the payoffs are defined as utilities, it follows trivially, on the

assumptions already made, that the rational course of action for each player will

result in <Defect, Defect>. But it does not follow that in any description of thesituation where the utilities are not specified, defection must be the rational action.

For example, it doesn’t follow that players confined as described in the standard

exposition, even with the ordinal rankings of (say) penal tariffs, must rationally









choose Defect. That depends on the associated utilities. Access to the utilities is via

revealed preferences, and the preferences are revealed by the agents’ actions. So the

collectively rational action cannot be elaborated from a prior specification of indi-

vidual utilities.It is not my aim to suggest a way out of such problems, such as some non-

aggregative decision-procedure. Intuitively compelling constraints on rationality at

the individual level may be be breached at the collective level if one follows a

procedure which aims to construct decisions from given individual preferences.

Of course, this does not show that one cannot treat a collectivity, once a decision

has been arrived at, as an individual writ large, as regards the rational constraints

to which such a body is subject. For instance, it is no doubt still an intuitively

compelling constraint on the preference-orderings of a collective that they avoid

violating acyclicality. But that applies once the ordering has been determined.It does not show how to arrive at the ordering without violating such constraints.

There are various ways one might construct politics from individual actions.

Perhaps the most obvious is simple analogy: whatever an individual agent has

overriding all-in reason to do, in circumstances C, is what the collective agent

has overriding, etc., reason to do in C. As it stands, this is far too simple. First,

certain kinds of action-description cannot be appropriately applied to individual

rather than corporate agents, at least in non-traditional societies, so some political

actions are not covered by the supposed analogy. Moreover, the notion of ‘given

circumstances’ needs elaboration. The circumstantial description risks begging thequestion, by making an analogy look compelling which from a broader perspective

is arbitrary. It is unclear why what individuals have overriding, etc., reason to do,

such as acting on a moral obligation, should be dispositive for political agencies

like the state. The method suffers the failing of all analogical argument: it is induc-

tive, and so begs the question against the sceptic. Such arguments infer from a set

of analogical properties between A and A* that a further property of A must also

belong to A*; but this inference is powerless against someone who denies that the

analogy holds for the disputed property.

Political design usually seeks to construct politics out of individual reasons for

action. Since it usually draws no analogy between individual and collective reasons,

it avoids the problems facing the argument from analogy. Again, however, its

exponents need to show why a (usually hypothetical) description of individuals’

reasons for action supports inferences about collective action. The initial descrip-

tion may be arbitrary when used in its intended justificatory role. Such, for

instance, is the nub of Rousseau’s objection in the second Discourse to Hobbes’s

description of the state of nature: it imagines as given traits which are not native to

human beings, but artefacts of socialization.13

Finally the problem is that there are no compelling grounds for thinking that

collective agency, now or at the notional point of its origin, can be constructed outof individual reasons for action. The fact, if it is one, that a corporate body like the

state can be the subject of action and associated ascriptions such as belief, reasons,

intention, and so on, shows only that some analogy can be drawn between

Newey 455








individual and corporate agents. That does not mean that action-ascriptions to the

latter must be reducible to those of individuals. It may be hard to prise away in

thought the state from the individuals whom it represents, particularly when ques-

tions of justification slip so easily into foundational ones. But one can think of thestate as being simply there, a fact of social nature.

Kant again

Liberal political design owes its inspiration above all to Kant. For Kantians, the

requirement to act morally follows from pure practical rationality. They have

offered several explanations as to why Kant thought this; that someone whose

maxim fails, say, the first formulation of the categorical imperative, stands con-

victed of a contradiction in the will, so that the proposed course of action is one towhich no rational agent could assent, or in the maxim’s conception. In Kant’s own

writings, of course, the demands of practical rationality are thought of as applying

paradigmatically, or even solely, to individual agents. But, to repeat, politics

involves collective agency. The question is whether demands appropriate to indi-

vidual action must apply at the collective level.

Collective action requires authorization. In fact, authorization goes all the way

down through agency. It was an insight of Hobbes’s mature political theory that

agents, whether individual human beings or corporate bodies, can be seen as a

compound of two elements, the author and the authorized.

14

In the case of ‘naturalpersons’, these elements are combined in a single individual. The repertoire of

ascribing blame, praise, responsibility, and so on, follows from seeing the individ-

ual as self-authorizing: as at once author and authorized. Freedom is in fact a

condition of regarding the agent, qua natural person, as being such, i.e. someone

whose acts are self-authorized. Only someone who is free and therefore self-author-

izing will bear the ascriptions necessary for agency, as an originator of action.

For Hobbes, individual agency merely instantiates a more general relation of

authorization.

A further instance of this relation, as Hobbes noted, is the authorisation of one

person by another, i.e. ‘artificial’ personation.15 For one person to authorize

another to act on her behalf, she must be thought free as regards authorization

itself. No doubt in some cases, such as mental incapacity, it may be necessary to

authorize someone on a person’s behalf. But insofar as this action is undertaken for

the incapacitated person, it is only through fiction that it can be represented as

authorized by her; just as with inanimate objects, such as bridges, it is only by

fiction that these things count as authorizing the acts done in their name.

Corporate action requires authorization. A single fictional person represents the

collective by the latter’s consent. They have to be thought free regarding the act of

authorization itself, as a condition of their incorporation, though there need be nooriginating act of will which effects this incorporation.16 But individuals must

identify themselves as a part of the corporate body. In the political case, there is

no reason to think that all citizens will do this, so to the extent that such an act is









deemed necessary for political obligations, not everyone within a state’s jurisdiction

will be so obligated.17 In Kantian terms, a citizen the determining ground of whose

political will lies outside himself must act heteronomously (or not act at all). The

very possibility of politics, as a field of corporate action which embraces individualwills, demands that the individual be self-determining as regards the incorporation

of his will into that of the collective.

Since it involves authorization, corporate action is a form of prosthetic agency.

The prosthesis consists in a relation between an author, and an agent acting on the

author’s behalf. While this relation often is one-to-one, in politics it is typically

many-to-one. For instance, in democratic theory, the author is usually regarded as

one collective, the demos, while the agent is another, the government, acting

(within limits) on the author’s say-so. Admittedly, each of these collectives may

sometimes be viewed as a corporate individual, such as in civil litigation. But evenhere, it is not obvious that rational constraints on action duplicate those of the self-

authorizing agent.

The state, and politics, confront us in their facticity, as extant features of the

social landscape. In what sense does one freely assent to coercion by the state? The

point is not that assent in this environment is elicited by the very power which it

endorses. Nor is it that the facticity of the state alters individual actors’ feasible set

of actions, and their rankings of them. It is that the citizen comes already incor-

porated, and in adopting the fiction that this body resulted from an originative act

of authorization, one moves beyond the rational constraints which bear uponindividual action.

One might think that since for Kantians the legislator is the paradigm of indi-

vidual moral agency, there is no disanalogy between individual and corporate

agency. But the universality of legislation need not apply exceptionlessly or

derive from an abstract paradigm of individual rational agency. In the first instance

law presents itself to those on whom it is incident as a manifestation of will ,

of which citizens may or may not regard themselves as authors. To whatever

constraints, such as those arising from pure practical rationality, such a will may

be subject, its status as practically rational will depend only on what it can con-

sistently conceive of and will to enact. What can be rationally authorized by citi-

zens, as incorporated agents, can be inferred back from what the state can

rationally do.

An obvious example involves the use of force. On Weber’s well-known defini-

tion, states are agencies claiming a monopoly of legitimate force (Gewalt). Now,

one can say that any situation involving the use of force by one agent on another is

necessarily one in which consent is withheld, or at least not granted (as in cases

where consent is not overridden, but bypassed). If an agent acts in a certain way

only because force is applied, she must withhold her consent at that time. If force

always overrides consent, it will override the consent of rational agents. A rationalagent cannot consent to be forced: this forms the basis of Robert Paul Wolff’s

Kantian case for philosophical anarchism.18 But most Kantians are not anarchists.

For them, presumably, the impossibility of enforced consent will not make

Newey 457








illegitimate all uses of force by the state, even though in the nature of force some-

one to whom it is applied cannot, at that time, consent to it. One cannot consent to

the state’s achieving its ends by this means.

One can argue, for instance, that the authorization model can be applied in thisinstance. If the state coerces me, I necessarily do not consent to this treatment. But

this hardly precludes my authorizing coercive treatment of me in advance, as

indeed voluntarist accounts of ‘political obligation’ envisage. To do so requires a

contradiction neither in ‘conception’, nor in the ‘will’: its very intelligibility shows

that authorized coercion involves no contradiction in conception. Nor is there any

volitional contradiction in directing that in certain situations, one’s will may be

overridden or ignored. Someone may say that there is a contradiction between my

will now and my will then: I will now that I be coerced in conditions which include

my refusal to act or refrain from acting in a certain way, but in those conditions mywill must oppose this. But even here there is no contradiction either in the will

present or in the will future.

The validating ground of authorization lies in the freedom of self-determination.

The ‘will’ can be imagined as making pure practical rationality its determining

ground. But it is far from clear that this constrains action in the same way as

the individual moral legislator. One has to regard oneself as free in relation to

acts of authorization as a condition of being incorporated with others. A practical

constraint on action could arise if one thought that certain things contradicted the

possibility-conditions of authorization. But this does not seem to preclude, forexample, voluntary enslavement. The problem, again, is that no contradiction

arises in binding one’s future will by one’s present will. That is what contracts

do. Perhaps one could argue that a contradiction would arise with the possibi-

lity-conditions if such acts were adopted universally, since there must be at least

one, an enslaver, whose will remains free, for there to be an enslaved. This assumes

that any consistently willed authorization must be based on a universalizable

maxim. But even here the maxim seems consistently universalizable, given that it

can be made conditional on an act of will.

As a further example, consider lying, which Kant saw as an important test of the

working of the categorical imperative. Commentators offer different explanations of

why the theory rejects maxims to lie. It is said, for instance, that there is a contra-

diction in the would-be liar’s will, because the project of lying wills the inculcation of

falsehood while willing belief in the very institution of truth-telling which the lie

subverts. Or it is said that the liar’s conception of her act is contradictory because

she relies on the dupe’s capacity for rational consent to her purposes while using his

agency in a matter to which he cannot consent. Again it seems clear that no contra-

diction arises if I authorize an agent to lie to me, for example, in certain circum-

stances. Someone may suggest that if I recognize that these obtain I will then be

forewarned against the lie, and this is a kind of contradiction. But no contradictionarises if I instruct you to lie only when you know that I do not recognize this.

In cases of prosthetic agency, then, it seems that the contradiction in the will or

in conception which is held to be ruled out by practical rationality does not arise.









The explanation is fairly obvious if contradiction is located in the will: authoriza-

tion is a mode of willing, and there is no contradiction between willing Z at one

point and willing not-Z at another, or between willing the authorization and

including, as part of what is authorized, that one’s later will may be overriddenin certain situations. Equally, however, no contradiction in conception arises

either, just because one can conceive without contradiction of willing contents

which Kant took as paradigmatic of practical impossibility.

The conditions of authorized agency are those of free agency itself. As a result,

the limits on how an individual can authorize others to act on his behalf are

broadly those of contract, seen as an undertaking by free individuals to determine

their future acts on the basis of mutual agreement. A knowledge condition will

apply at this point, of course, as with ordinary commercial contracts. But it will not

apply very robustly. First, one can ask what a free contracting party would expectto know as a condition of corporate agency. Then there are questions about knowl-

edge itself: who knows what, and what distinguishes knowledge, for these purposes,

from mere opinion. These questions are highly politicized. The prospects for an

apolitical specification of antecedent epistemic conditions for valid contracting are,

accordingly, dim. That provides reason for doubting that the foundational enter-

prise of contract theory can succeed. But this not mean that, in thinking about their

political agency, citizens can dispense with the notion of freedom.

Politics and holism

In ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, to which this paper owes its title, W. V. O. Quine

advocates a form of epistemic holism.19 I suggest that a form of political holism can

be asserted in place of the two liberal dogmas identified: morality as trumps and

corporate-to-individual reductivism. That holism rejects strong foundationalism,

as a set of (say, moral) norms, resting on intuitively compelling premises, which

determine basic political and civil rights and obligations, the design of key institu-

tions and procedures, and the distribution of basic goods. It also questions general

claims to political authority constructed from individual reasons for action. Above

all, it takes seriously the idea that politics can generate reasons for action with

normative force.

I take the following statements to be true, indeed truisms, of political life.

Politics is a form of collective action. The basic political question is ‘What do we

do?’ for some imputed but not necessarily determinate ‘we’. The holism applies to

the habits of thought and action which mark recognizably political life. There is

good reason to avoid defining the political here, not least because disputes over the

extension of ‘politics’ are themselves irreducibly political:20 attempts to fix that

extension raise the very question they aim to settle.21 Accordingly, the holism

aims not to delimit the political, for example via philosophical construction.Someone may say that if there is no antecedent definition of the political, there

is no reason why politics should not be constructed philosophically, for example on

moral foundations.22 That will lack, however, the authority to forestall further

Newey 459








disputes about whether, say, politics should rest on such foundations. The project

of political design, except as a provisional contribution to the very process which it

aims to conclude, is chimerical.

The holism does not work at a high level of determinacy. The justificatoryresources available to political actors need not enable them to specify outcomes

very closely, and reasons given for outcomes can be challenged more the more

outcomes are defined. But even at a general level resources may be limited.

Take, for instance, Dworkin’s claim that liberty is subsumed in equality, since

citizens only have a claim in liberty regarding some political outcome if the

claim does not contravene equality.23 If Dworkin is right, many political objections

to egalitarian policy are, straightforwardly, wrong. But it remains possible that a

theory with this consequence is itself wrong, when set against the judgements with

which it is inconsistent. The holism implies that the implications of theory can beused contrapositively against it. How far this is true in any particular case will vary,

among other things, with the intuitive compellingness of the premises.

Someone may ask whether, on this view, there are any normative considerations

at all which bear on collective action. This question has two answers. First, con-

straints on collective action will be generated collectively. What considerations are

normatively salient is decided by political processes. This again limits the contri-

bution of philosophy. There is no obvious reason why considerations can only

be salient in virtue of their ‘binding’ quality. Any theory which gives binding-

ness special prominence will be tabling matters for consideration, like any otherpolitical claim.

Of course, anyone can think of constraints which they dislike, such as gag rules.

But nothing saves politics from going badly. As already argued, there is no credible

prospect that appeals to the public interest will guide action very closely, without its

being determined collectively what the public interest is. In any concrete political

situation, such as in taking the decision whether to go to war, people will offer

different assessments of where the public interest lies, and the issue will then be

determined by political means, such as by majority vote. This is not, however, to

say that the public interest must coincide with the upshot of the political process.

Nonetheless, there is nothing which in general can determine the public interest

more reliably than do political processes themselves, although specialist knowledge

will clearly contribute to making specific decisions.

The second, more general, response to the question about normative constraints

interprets it as about the source of political normativity. This is not a question which

gets asked much politically. I believe that the only ultimate source it can have is as an

object of agreement which is thought of as free. But this needs to be correctly

understood. That the source of normativity lies in free agreement follows from the

conditions on collective action. It is necessary, for me to incorporate my will in a

collective, that I regard its will as my own. That is, I have to understand the basis forthe collective’s will as one in relation to which I can think of myself as being auton-

omous, or self-determining. In regarding myself and my relation to the collective in

this way, I think of myself as free in relation to it, as an author of its actions.24









The justificatory resources which this yields are rather limited. They fall well

short of what theorists have hoped for from contract-based and other voluntarist

theories. This is implicit in the critical argument made so far. A problematic move

made by these theories is to posit agreement as necessary for incorporating one’swill, but then to finesse the notion of agreement to encompass what individuals

would agree to if, for example, they were fully rational. But this amounts to saying

that they should agree, since the normative force of the theory lies in its telling

people what their reasons for action are here and now. But then the notion of

agreement is an idle wheel, since the theory mobilizes a strongly normative account

of reasons for action.25

The conception of agreement in the present holistic account is post factum, or

not essentially ante factum. It accepts that political reasons, such as reasons for

agreement, are often artefacts of the political process itself. As such they aresuspect to foundationalist liberals and exponents of Ideologiekritik alike. But it is

not obvious why reasons for action have to be regimented into an abstract general

theory. The reasons which people do accept are variously the product of domina-

tion, misinformation, etc., as well as the predictable effects of egoism or limited

altruism. This follows the guiding idea that reasons commanding people’s agree-

ment, as called for by standard notions of legitimacy, cannot operate at any very

great distance from the reasons which they accept. It follows, given the heteroge-

neity of modern societies, that the reasons themselves will be diverse. If so, the

prospects are dim for political theories which assign specific reasons for agreementto individuals, and base the justification for political authority on that.

Of course, the phrase ‘cannot operate at any very great distance’ is vague. It is

meant to allow adjusting for cognitive error in framing the reasons one has for

acting. It will immediately be said that it is often unclear whether some attitude

expresses cognitive error or malfunction. That is true, and is a prime reason why

the formulation has to remain vague. For example, should liberals see some

women’s acceptance of practices like cliterodectomy as invalid? There is no

reason to think that questions like this can be decided pre-politically by a prescrip-

tive account of justified belief.

The holism allows a significant role to political power. It is indeterminate what

invalidates acceptance of a regime. For example, does it matter that power-rela-

tions influence a person’s normative beliefs? People often seem more attached to

their beliefs than to a particular method of arriving at them. Attempts to free

people by relieving them of dubiously acquired normative beliefs will have familiar

perverse effects. It is not just that we lack a credible general account of the justi-

fiable use of power in shaping belief, or that it is hard to tell when power has played

a causal role in generating unjustified beliefs. Even if we had these things to hand, it

remains questionable whether beliefs acquired unjustifiably must invalidate the

acceptance of some norm by a person who holds them.At least two ripostes may be made at this point. First, what people will accept is

strongly influenced by the penalties for non-compliance. Unless might indeed

reduces to right, surely an agency which uses coercion, such as the state, cannot

Newey 461








be legitimate if people accept it only because of that coercion. This may seem like

cosa nostra’s ‘offer you can’t refuse’. But there are important differences. For

instance, in the case of the Mafia or protection rackets, the victim is essentially

blackmailed: the threat promotes, in the list of one’s preferences, an option which,but for the associated threat, would not come top. But an executively competent

state puts everyone in the same boat as regards coercion, and this affects what it is

rational for individuals to do. Then the choice for the individual is not between

Mafia-style coercion superadded to the extant coercion of the state, but between

coercion of everyone, on the one hand, and on the other, no monopolistic coercive

agency, where one is prey to the random coercion of private individuals.

So the fact that acceptance is made under coercion need not make it illegitimate.

It may be part of a coercive system which one prefers to any achievable alternative.

It may be said that people would not or should not accept the system, even if thealternatives are presented in such a way. But that will then be an argument about

the conditions under which coercion is legitimate in general. The argument is not

ended by noting that acceptance would have been lacking without coercion.

A second objection urges that the disposition to accept a justification may result,

not from the immediate threat of coercion, but from power. Williams suggests26

that legitimacy can be vetted by means of a ‘Critical Theory Test’, which states that

a justification fails if someone’s acceptance of it is itself produced by the coercive

power supposedly justified by it. One trouble27 with this test is that it is hard to

spell it out without resorting to counterfactuals whose truth-conditions are inde-terminate. Suppose, for example, the counterfactual is understood as follows: in no

possible world where the coercive power is absent would people accept the justifi-

cation in question. But presumably there are possible worlds where people accept

it, even though no coercive power compels them to do so. Moreover, it is very

unclear what ‘produced by coercive power’ means here. Education and wider accul-

turation help to shape which justifications people will accept. How far are these

processes coercive, and how far does this vitiate acceptance as a test of legitimacy?

I do not have an answer to these questions. I do not think that there is an answer

to them which enjoys the generality which political theorists, both liberal and

others have aimed for. The holistic position I am sketching itself suggests that

no clear-cut answer to them is to be had, at least if that means that it takes the

facts of acceptance and subjects them to certain tests, such as counterfactual ones,

in order to decide whether the acceptance has legitimacy-conferring force. At the

same time, it suggests that the fit between presented legitimations and the status

quo need not be a particularly close one. The experience of normative incoherence

is widespread and is not exclusively an artefact of modernity. The holism itself

implies that imposed coherence will leave normative residues.

The holism advocated here lies open to the charge of ‘vulgar’ relativism, neatly

encapsulated by Martin Hollis as ‘liberalism for liberals, cannibalism for canni-bals’. Relativism comes in various flavours and strengths. But suppose we charac-

terize it along the following lines. According to political relativism, there are

political systems, call them Lib and Can, such that for some normative judgment









N , Lib asserts N whereas Can denies (or at least fails to assert) N ; and there is

nothing in respect of which the disagreement between Lib and Can over N can be

authoritatively adjudicated.

Thus stated, the formulation of political relativism follows those used in discus-sions of epistemic relativism, with the notion of that in respect of which disagree-

ments can be authoritatively adjudicated , replaced by one of extra-systemic truth.

Then the question, however, is whether anything in the political case can play the

arbitrating role of truth does in realist analyses of epistemic justification. If the role

is allotted to agreement, or orientation to agreement, it is not a condition – such as a

transcendental condition – on the intelligibility of making normative judgements

that one be orientated towards agreement. No doubt there is an orientation at least

to understanding, since that is spurned on pain of unintelligibility. But that orien-

tation does not, in itself, carry any further commitment to agreement, even in anideal world. Still less does any commitment to agreement, which may be highly

localized, do the job of extra-systemic arbitration.

One can of course substitute for truth the notion of validity, as the goal to which

normative discourse is orientated. But either that notion is abstracted from the

outcomes of real discursive processes, or it is not. If it is, it functions essentially

like a moral norm, laid down in advance of politics, which discursive processes – for

example, those of politics – need to respect, as either a goal or a side-constraint.

Clearly, in view of what has already been said, the validity of these normative con-

straints on the processes will itself need to be established, presumably in some wayindependent of the processes themselves. If, conversely, they are real processes, they

will be subject to the same vagaries as any real process of collective deliberation.

Then the notion of validity itself will be contingent on discursive outcomes.

It is quite hard to see any standpoint from which the dispute between Lib and

Can could be authoritatively adjudicated, other than real political or quasi-political

processes. In some cases, of course, the dispute will be notional rather than real, if

for example it results in no conflicts over jurisdiction or resource allocation. While

the conflict between modern western societies, say, and the Aztecs regarding human

sacrifice is notional rather than real, conflicts elsewhere are real enough. But there

is no purely theoretical object which delivers authority either as a repository of

legitimacy in itself, or as a matrix for creating valid norms.

Conclusion

No doubt all theorizing has to take some points as fixed and others as negotiable.

Liberal political design takes morality as fixed, and politics as negotiable.

It imputes to individuals a certain significance in constructing political principles

from its preferred starting-point. This is one way of doing political theory. But the

notion that it is the definitive way of doing it needs to be justified. One can equallywell take the facts of corporate existence as given, and morality’s standing and

content as variable. What is fixed will clearly limit the scope of the negotiable.

There is no reason to think that justification should play no role in the activity of

Newey 463








politics, including the political activity of theorizing about politics. But it does not

follow that political design must be subject to moral norms, for example because it

is held that power must be subjected to a regime of strong moral justification.

The holism sketched here itself predicts a lack of fit between the subject-matterof justification, and the justificatory resources which are, in large measure, fur-

nished by that subject-matter. As far as that goes, both the basis for extraterritorial

theorizing and its inconclusiveness are already implicit in the possibility of making

an immanent critique.

Notes

1. Blank distinctions between source and type may be questioned, on the grounds that

reflecting on the source of normativity may yield conclusions about the type to which it

belongs: Kantians, in particular, will incline to see the two as closely related.2. This is most obviously true of democratic politics, but in principle applies to any system

in which the executive is thought of as acting under authorization.

3. For the term political design, see Glen Newey (2001) After Politics: The Rejection of

Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy. London: Palgrave.

4. ‘Justice’, seen as a pivotal normative concern in political design, might be regarded as

straddling the line between moral and specifically political normativity. But very often

‘justice’ is understood simply as the political branch of moral normativity.

5. E.g. in Rawls (1980) ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, Journal of Philosophy

77: 515–72, but also frequently elsewhere.

6. Dworkin contends that utilitarianism must rule out ‘external’ preferences, and derivesfrom this a utilitarian defence of the ‘right’ to pornography. See Dworkin (1981) ‘Is

there a Right to Pornography?’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1: 177–212. But why

must my desire to stop you getting the porn you crave give way to my desires regarding

my getting it? I may not care either way about that.

7. It is a further question what kind of normativity characterizes politics. It may be a

version of bindingness. But there is no reason to assume that this must be so. A more

relevant category is likely to be that of practical necessity.

8. The term ‘trump’ is due to Ronald Dworkin; see his ‘Rights as Trumps’, repr. in

Dworkin (1977) in Jeremy Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford

University Press 1984), pp153–67.9. I here summarize an argument developed more fully in my paper ‘Just Politics’, Critical

Review of International Social and Political Philosophy; also in Emanuela Ceva & Enrico

Rossi (eds.), Justice, Legitimacy and Diversity (London: Routledge 2012).

10. The justification of political arrangements requires that they not be reasonably reject-

able; so either, implausibly, there can be no reasonable disagreement about political

questions, or political arrangements predictably fail the justification test.

11. In my view Rawls’s third option, perfect procedural justice, is chimerical, as I argue in

‘Just Politics’.

12. I ignore the complication that, when the relevant contexts are non-extensional, it is

doubtful whether truth-functional equivalences are constructible even in principle.13. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in V. Gourevitch (ed.) (1997) Rousseau:

the Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, pp. 151 ff. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.









14. Hobbes (1996) Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, chs 16–18. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

15. Hobbes introduces the notion in Leviathan and develops it in Hobbes, ed. William

Molesworth, Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Secunda De Homine in Molesworth ed.,Opera Philosophica vol. II pp1–132 (London 1839).

16. E.g. non-voluntarist theories, such as associationalism, which deny that political obli-

gations require an originating agreement. See John Horton (2011) Political Obligation,

2nd edn. London: Routledge.

17. One response to this would be to deny that ‘political’ obligations, which are not uni-

versal, should be identified with legal obligations, which are incident on citizens and

resident aliens alike.

18. R. P. Wolff (1970) In Defense of Anarchism. New York: Harper & Row.

19. Quine (1951) ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Philosophical Review 60: 20–43.

20. I argue this at greater length in Newey (n. 3), ch. 2.21. Compare, for instance, the idea, due to Harold Lasswell, that politics concerns ‘who gets

what, when, how’. No doubt political issues often revolve around these distributive

questions. But if that is definitional of politics, it will make incoherent the intelligible

claim that some issue involving distributive questions (such as the criteria for awarding

honours or public recognition) should not be political.

22. I assume that this underlies Paul Kelly’s claim that endemic disagreement about its

scope ‘weakens the force’ of my contention that politics is an autonomous sphere of

human activity: if disagreement is possible, it must be possible to claim that politics is,

say, applied morality. (Kelly (2005) Liberalism, p. 106. Cambridge: Polity.) However,

the autonomy of politics comes out in the fact that, since such claims are disputable anddisputed, they can only constitute one move in a wider political argument. Any partic-

ular claim about the ‘nature’ of the political can be countered by another one. But that

fact, by itself, does not end the political argument.

23. See Dworkin (1987) ‘What is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty’,Iowa LawReview73:1–54.

24. This seems to be true even of avowedly non-voluntarist accounts of political member-

ship, such as associationalist ones. It may be that membership is thought of, in these

accounts, as independent of an act of will by the members. But, insofar as they seek

to provide a justification of membership, they are providing reasons in relation to

which members can regard their incorporation in the association as assented to and

therefore free.25. Scanlon’s sophisticated contractualist theory holds that people are motivated to reason to

seek agreement on terms that nobody can reasonably reject. This is not meant to

explain why we should seek agreement on these terms: only unreasonable persons would

demur from this. See Scanlon (1998) What we Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA:

Belknap Press.

26. Williams (2005) In the Beginning was the Deed , p. 6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press. Cf. Williams (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, pp. 225 ff.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

27. Williams acknowledges the problems with the formulation, though he thinks that they

arise because of the vagueness of ‘produced by’. While it is true that the aetiology of people’s acceptance of modes of justification is sometimes unclear, a further and larger

problem arises not because the causal mechanisms are not clear, but whether these

mechanisms should be described as coercive.

Newey 465

Newey Two Dogmas of Liberalism

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