PFHCSC: Semana 5, Legitimidad y Realismo (Septiembre 8)

Week 5: Williams 2005: Realism and Legitimacy

Central Problem: Political theory has been dominated by an account of the morality of politics concerned mainly with justice. This view contrasts with distinctively political thought interested in earthlier aims like order, protection safety, trust, cooperation, etc.

Central Thesis: The concept of politics can be thought independently from morality.  The central notion of this concept is legitimacy.

Political Moralism. Constitutes a continuation of Kantian morality as the basic framework for political theory adding morality to prudence (2).

·       Enactment model.  Politics is the instrument of morality. The purpose of political theory is to formulate principles, concepts, ideals, and values; and politics expresses these in political action (persuasion, basic education, use of power). The paradigm of such a theory is utilitarism (1).

·       Structural model. The purpose of political theory is to lay down moral conditions of coexistence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised. The paradigm of such a theory is Rawls’s TJ and PL (1). Morality constrains politics. Political theory turns into applied morality (2).

The First Political Question. Who or what can guarantee a stable regimen able to secure order, protection safety, trust, and cooperation (3)? The answer to this question is…

·       It is diachronic: it is not a matter of arriving at a solution to the first question and then going on to the rest of the agenda. The first question needs to be solved all the time (3).

·       It is necessary but not sufficient for legitimacy (LEG) because there are more than one set of political arrangements, even in given historical circumstances, that may solve the first question (Vs. Hobbes).

·       It’s not identical with a reign of terror. If the whole point was to save people from terror; then it is essential that the state can be the solution and not become part of the problem (4).

The Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD). it’s a plausible and credible solution to the first question

·       We must distinguish between meeting the BLD and meeting the requirements of other political virtues such as liberal justice because there are LEB non-liberal states. But it is also possible that circumstances arise in which the only way to be LEG requires liberal political virtues (4).

·       Requires justification of the use of political power to each subject

·       Mere incompetence to protect a radically disadvantaged group is an objection to the state (5).

·       The mere circumstance of some subjects’ being de facto in the power of others is no legitimation of their being radically disadvantaged.

·       Thus slavery is imperfectly legitimated relative to a claim of authority over the slaves: it is a form of internalized warfare (Helots).

·       Given a group of people which is in the power of others and which is systematically and radically disadvantaged (being without no protection at all from the operations either from the state or other subjects). This group is in fact treated like an enemy of the state. there is nothing to be said to this group to explain why they shouldn’t revolt (5).

·       BLD is not a moral principle external to politics. Rather it is a requisite function of politics to avoid the situation of one lot of people terrorizing another lot of people. This is precisely the state of affairs that politics seeks to eliminate.

·       Typically, the power of one lot of people over another is a solution to the first political question. But it easily can become part of the problem. In order to avoid this something has to be said to explain (to the less empowered, to concerned bystanders, to children being educated in this structure, etc.) what the difference is between the solution and the problem.

¿How the demand for justification arises? Might does not imply right: The power itself is no justification. Justification then cannot simply be an account of successful domination. It has to be something in the mode of justifying explanation or legitimation: hence the BLD (5).

·       BLD does not imply by itself that a Hobbesian state of nature violates rights (6).

·       It is false that it is either a necessary or a sufficient condition of there being a (genuine) demand for justification, that someone demands one.

·       Critical theory principle: The acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified

·       So a sufficient condition of a genuine demand for justification is this: Constrain of equal acceptability: “A coerces B and claims that B would be wrong to fight back: resents it, forbids it, rallies others to oppose it as wrong, and so on. By doing this, A claims that his actions transcend the conditions of warfare, and this gives rise to a demand for justification of what A does. When A is the state, these claims constitute its claim of authority over B. (6)”

·       In the language of rights this obtains:

§  Anyone over whom the state claims authority has a right to treatment justified by the claim of LEG.

§  There is no right to be a member of a state, if one is not a member—or, at any rate, no such right that follows from just this account

§  there is no claim of authority over enemies, including those in the situation of the Helots because such people do not have a right of the kind mentioned in the first point.

§  The central problem then is when the radically disadvantaged are said to be subjects and the state claims authority over them [because this undermines LEG].

Problem. The account of BLD and LEG does not necessarily lead towards liberalism. How do get to it? (7) Liberals in principle establish more stringent conditions for LEG than other states that meet the BLD: they raise their expectations of what a state can do, they take more sophisticated steps to stop the solution becoming part of the problem. Crucially, liberals pose the following requirements for LEG:

a.     Rationalizations of disadvantage in terms of race and gender are invalid. Rationalizations associated with racism, and the like, are all false or by every-one’s standards irrelevant.

b.     Hierarchical structures which generate disadvantage are not self-legitimating.

Before we reach liberalism Williams wants to reject PM on two grounds:

1.     Liberalism does not provide all-the way down foundations. It can only use the liberal conception of the person to explain some features (8).

2.     Liberalism has a poor account, or in many cases no account, of the cognitive status of its own history. PM has no answer in its own terms to the question of why what it takes to be the true moral solution to the questions of politics. Moralistic liberalism cannot plausibly explain why or how liberalism constitutes an increase in moral knowledge or why, when, and by whom it has been accepted and rejected (9).

(a) Williams rejects the basic relation of morality to politics as being that represented either by the enactment model or by the structural model. This does not deny that there can be local or contingent applications of moral ideas in politics. The idea is that at the basic level the answering of the First Question requires BLD. But the approach is different from PM because the satisfaction of the BLD has not always or even usually, historically, taken a liberal form. But if the demand for justification of coercive power genuinely exists, it is implicit in the very idea of a legitimate state, and so is inherent in any politics including liberalism but not only (8).

(c) Here and now in our historical conditions the BLD condition permits only a liberal solution and other forms of answer are unacceptable.

 (d) The foundations of liberalism rely in its capacity to answer the First Question (provides an acceptable answer to the BLD). Foundations of liberalism have nothing to do with some liberal conception of the person. Of course insofar as things go well, the conceptions of what is to be feared, of what is an attack on the self, and of what is an unacceptable exercise of power, can themselves be extended. This may indeed be explained in terms of an ethically elaborated account of the person as having more sophisticated interests, which may involve, for instance, a notion of autonomy. This account might be, or approximate to, a liberal conception of the person. But this is not the foundation of the liberal state, because it is a product of those same forces that lead to a situation in which the BLD is satisfied only by a liberal state (8).

Necessary condition for legitimacy (LEG): There is a basic sociological point: LEG + Modernity = Liberalism. This includes organizational features (pluralism, etc., and bureaucratic forms of control), individualism, and cognitive aspects of authority (9).

1.     Considerations that support LEG are piecemeal so binary cut LEG/ILLEG is artificial (10).

2.     [Considerations that support LEG integrate different levels of analysis](10).

·       [Prescriptivist mode]: Political moralism, particularly in its Kantian forms, has a universalistic tendency but these judgments are useless and do not help one to understand anything.

·       [Descriptivism mode] The notion of LEG, however, distinguished from the idea of what we would now find acceptable, can serve understanding.

·       [Evaluative mode] It is a human universal that some people coerce or try to coerce others, and nearly a universal that people live under an order in which some of the coercion is intelligible and acceptable, and it can be an illuminating question (one that is certainly evaluative, but not normative) to ask how far, and in what respects, a given society of the past is an example of the human capacity for intelligible order, or of the human tendency to unmediated coercion

3.     [The basic ordering idea is to make sense (MS) of an authority structure]: This is an hermeneutical approach to historical understanding: At a given historical structure can be (to an appropriate degree) an example of the human capacity to live under an intelligible order of authority. It makes sense (MS) to us as such a structure. (10-11). In any case MS is not normative: in principle we do not think, typically, that these considerations should guide our behaviour, and there is no point in saying that they ought to have guided the other people’s behaviour.

4.     [MS looks normative inside liberalism] because what (most) MS to us is a structure of authority which we think we should accept. But we do not have to say that these previous societies were wrong: some of what MS to them does not MS to us because we take it to be false. “In any case, there is no problem about the relation between the “external” and non-normative “MS” that we apply to others, and the “MS” we use about our own practices, which is normative: this is because of the hermeneutical principle, which is roughly that what they do MS if it would MS to us if we were them.”(11).

The Concept of the Political. A definition of the nature of politics is not provided. Instead two contrasts with PM are offered (12):

PM is addressed to ideal subjects. But this is unhelpful. Real people know that their convictions have to a great degree been the product of previous historical conditions, and of an obscure mixture of beliefs (many incompatible with one another), passions, interests, and so forth (13). Otherwise we would be merely naive if we took our convictions, and those of our opponents, as simply autonomous products of moral reason rather than as another product of historical conditions. Crucially this view implies that decisions among political opponents does not necessarily result in a judgment announcing that one party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.

Our attitude to Non-liberal LEG states: It may be true that the idea of “LEG” is normative for us as applied to our own society; so it is also normative in relation to other societies which co-exist with ours; but (14)

We can have or refuse to have various kinds of relations with other states. One important constrain for applying or withholding “LEG” are stability constraints:

(a) who does and who does not accept the current legitimation.

(b) If the current legitimation is fairly stable, the society will not anyway satisfy the other familiar conditions on revolt.

(c) The objections to traditional hierarchical setups are typically based in part on the mythical character of the legitimations.

(d) This will also apply to what come to be seen as targets of the critical theory principle.

Political Representation. How far idealized conceptions of political relations should play a part? Williams again refrains from answering this question. Instead he discusses political representation (15): Any theory of modern LEG requires an account of democracy and political participation, and of course such an account may take its place in a programme of improvement. But, how we can defend this without relying in morality? Particularly how can we constrain public deliberation in a way that does not defeats the purpose of democracy? (16). Those constrains cannot be blankly normative. Morality could say: “it cannot work—in other words, the system will break down, and the political process will begin to lose significance in relation to other activities and the life world.” But Williams remains sceptical: “No transcendental or partly transcendental argument—one might say, more generally, theoretical argument—could serve to resolve these conflicts.” 

Tarea: Leer con atención el capitulo III del libro sobre Neoliberalismo

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wr4f3d34myu7f3l/breve-historia-del-neoliberalismo-_-david-harvey-espac3b1ol.pdf?dl=0

Contestar las siguientes preguntas:

1.     ¿qué es propiamente el neoliberalismo?

2.     ¿según el neoliberalismo qué tipo de estado es legítimo?

3.     ¿por qué el neoliberalismo es una teoría de la justicia equivocada?