Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies 1 Charles Blattberg Professor of Political Philosophy Universit de Montral I want to proffer a schema.

Im going to present, one at a time, four contemporary political philosophies I call them neutralism, postmodernism, pluralism, and patriotism 2 and then show how they relate to the various political ideologies, including liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, as well as feminism, nationalism, fascism, and so on. This will involve more than just advancing a particular typology, however, for in so doing I shall also be putting forth an argument. It is that, given a proper understanding of the relation between philosophy and ideology, postmodernism is superior to neutralism, pluralism to postmodernism, and patriotism to pluralism, making the patriots approach the best of the lot. But first I need to explain what I mean by both political philosophies and political ideologies. And to do that requires saying something about politics. As I define it, politics consists of responding to conflict with dialogue. Otherwise put, when peoples values or goods conflict, if they are to deal with the conflict politically then they must strive to hear each other out rather than use force the latter, at the end of the day, serving as the basis of war rather than politics. Note that I refer here strictly to public conflicts, those that take place between many people, since the private realm is the locus of ethics as distinct from politics (though ethics, too, must be dialogical). Premodern politics, which is to say in its classical republican form, drew the line between public and private quite sharply: the household, a domain of inequality and force, was considered private, and the agora, wherein all citizens (excluding, of course, women, metics, and slaves) were considered equal, was public. Modernity, and so modern politics, has witnessed the rise of a new domain in-between the home and the agora (now the state): civil society, which may be subdivided into the public sphere and the market economy. Civil society can consequently be said to straddle a now rather blurry public-private divide; indeed
Previous versions published in Public Affairs Quarterly 15, no. 3 (July 2001): 193-217; and as chapter 1 of Blattberg, Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009). I first introduced these four in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2 1

2 rather than divide it makes more sense to speak of a spectrum with public and private at either pole and civil society spread out over the centre. Modern politics, we may thus say, distinguishes itself from the premodern in that its dialogues take the existence of civil society for granted. This means that modern politics upholds to varying but always significant degrees respect for the individual, which is the basis of civil societys integrity. Political philosophies are distinguished by their different conceptions of political dialogue. Being philosophies, they are obviously going to be very general such conceptions, although they differ as to how general they conceive themselves to be: some claim to be abstract and to have universal relevance while others are affirmed as more relative to context. Either way, conceptions of the form that political dialogue does and ought to take will be connected, implicitly or explicitly, to positions regarding other philosophical matters, such as the nature of the interlocutors as well as of the medium of their speech, that is, language. As for the substance or content of what is said, political philosophies may offer accounts of certain modes of political justification the main ones being governance, recognition, and welfare but being philosophies they will, again, do so in very general ways. So while we can expect to hear about overarching principles or maxims, political philosophies will have relatively little to say about specific issues. Political ideologies, by contrast, being much more programmatic than political philosophies, are concerned with little else. Instead of general accounts of the form and content of political dialogue (although ideologies always assume these, even if only implicitly), ideologists are more interested in guiding us as regards the positions that we should take on particular issues. So they will make proposals about the kinds of things that we ought to be saying during actual dialogues. That is why, when values or goods conflict, those who would respond by invoking an ideology tend to assert at least two kinds of things: (1) how the values or goods in question should be understood (e.g. liberty is freedom from interference or liberty is being true to yourself); and (2) what the proper relationsh ip between them should be (e.g. honour is more important than equality or love is stronger than justice, and so on). Ideology, then, is the stuff of political culture, of law, institutional design, and policymaking. By defining it in this way it should be evident that I mean to avoid the pejorative connotations that Marx and others gave the term and so return to the less polemical use of it found in the writings of Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idologues, who were responsible for its coining. Not that I have nothing critical to say about ideological thinking, for as I will show it

3 plays an important yet not always helpful role in politics. That said, it is enough at this point to suggest that anyone who asserts a more or less coherent account of what a number of values or goods ought to mean and how they should relate upholds an ideology; whether their doing so constitutes no more than a rationalization of their material interests is another matter.

Neutralism This past century there have been four major types of neutralism advanced within AngloAmerican political thought: the utilitarian, 3 Kantian, 4 contractarian,5 and analytical Marxist.6 Evidently, by calling all these approaches neutralist , I am using the term in a much wider sense than is typical in the literature. Essentially, I mean to refer to the stance one must take when applying a theory of justice, understood as a systematic set of thin or decontextualized principles (or sometimes just one principle). How neutralists arrive at their theories varies, but one of the best known routes consists of the reformulation of thick or contextual and so incommensurable ethical articulations, the kind expressed in everyday moral maxims, into thin and commensurable basic goods, as John Rawls calls them. These are then interlocked to form the theory. But however arrived at, it is essential to all neutralists that there be such a theory, since it is only by applying one that we can respond to conflicts justly. Such theories may be considered analogous to the rulebooks of sports or games, since just as the referee or umpire must be neutral vis--vis the players those charged with applying a theory (e.g. the justices of a countrys

See, for example, Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); R.M. Hare, Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism, in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and John Harsanyi, Rule Utilitarianism, Equality, and Justice, Social Philosophy & Policy 2, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 115-27. See, for example, Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); and, though no Anglo-American, Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987). See, for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and David Gauthier, Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See, for example, G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes From Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and John Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
6 5 4

4 supreme court) must be neutral vis--vis the politicians, political parties, interest groups, and so on.7 Now when people talk during the application process they plead, as when the captains of opposing teams plead their cases to the referee or when citizens hire lawyers to plead their cases in court. However pleading lacks the exchange of, and so change to, ideas that are characteristic of genuine dialogue. True, judges often pose questions, but when it comes time really to decide they do not do so with counsel but rather go off alone, returning only when they are ready to hand down their decisions. Implicit here is the notion that the rules are not being altered during the application process, just as a games rulebook should never be rewritten during play. So although some neutralists (in particular, the contractarians and some of the Kantians) model their theories on imaginary dialogues, all assert that the theories should not themselves be subject to the dialogues of actual, everyday politics. The work of the political theorist, in other words, should be complete before the theorys application.8 It is because pleading is a unidirectional mode of discourse that I do not consider the application of a theory of justice to be a genuinely dialogical process (one meaning of the ancient Greek dia is between, which suggests more than one since otherwise there would no things to be in between of). In consequence, given the definition of politics as the practice of responding to conflict with dialogue, I think we should conclude that neutralism is an antipolitical philosophy. That said, some neutralist theorists, those who defend deliberative democracy, 9 do aim to give a role to genuine dialogue in their politics. But they also tend to distort it by requiring the interlocutors to respect certain theoretical rules established in advance. Moreover, the issues eligible for deliberation are highly circumscribed, since it is assumed that the more fundamental

On the well-ordered, i.e., theory-governed, society as like a game and citizens as like its players, see, for example, Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 527. For the idea that the political theorist is comparable to an arbiter, see Plato, Laws 62d11-628a4; Plato, Eighth Letter 354a1-5; and Aristotle, Politics 1284b25-34, 1997a5-7. Hence, for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 161: Liberal principles meet the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority. Doing this takes those guarantees off the political agenda and puts them beyond the calculus of social interests. See, for example, James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
9 8

5 questions have already been answered by the theory. Because in neutralism it is always theory, and never politics, that should establish the ground rules upon which the latter must take place. 10 Ideology is another thing that gets determined beforehand. The reason is that, to the neutralist, the kinds of positions that I have claimed are the purview of ideology are, in a sense, logically derived from philosophical tenets, that is, from the theory of justice. Indeed neutralists consider philosophy and ideology to be so closely connected that they often fail to distinguish between the two. Think of the liberalisms defended by the Kantians or utilitarians such as Bentham or Mill; or of the socialisms advanced by utilitarians such as the Webbs or the analytical Marxists; or of the libertarianism upheld by most contractarians today. In laying down the theoretical ground rules for politics, neutralists view themselves as having also determined its ideological basis even if they often fail to identify the latter as such. It is as if the theory somehow both establishes a neutral referee and favours one of the teams playing. 11 All this neglects an important feature of ideology, namely, its at least partial autonomy from philosophy. To derive an ideology from a philosophy is to assume that the latter is systematically unified, that it can be and indeed has been articulated in a self-sufficient and wholly noncontradictory way, that is, as a theory. By self-sufficient I mean that one need not rely on material outside of it for its application; and by wholly noncontradictory I mean that all of the theorys parts are completely interlocked and so in that sense fully reconciled with each other. This is what allows the neutralist to claim that certain values those at the core of his or her preferred ideology ought to be granted an uncompromisable status and so not be subject to the vicissitudes of actual political dialogues. Because it is, after all, only within the chaos and flux of politics that such values are ever challenged. By incorporating them within a theory the assumption is that they have been sealed off from that flux, from the corrosive waters of political practice. The belief in systematic unity is essential to neutralism; and yet it is unwarranted. Rather than argue the point here, however, all I will say is that it has been my experience that the incommensurability of values or goods is not something that can be theorized away. To assume
10 11

See my Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy, in Patriotic Elaborations, ch. 3.

Thus does Ronald Dworkin, for example, propose an explicitly liberal theory as the basis for the fair playing field upon which he expects both liberals and conservatives to confront each other in American politics. See Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7.

6 otherwise is, as Isaiah Berlin once put it , to hold perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers. 12 Because the reduction of incommensurables can only distort or, worse, fail to grant some of them a place outright. Hence the Kantians neglect or distortion of very real consequentialist concerns; the utilitarians of the various formal duties; the Marxists of the respect for the individual; and the contractarians of pretty much everything but this respect. One might say that there is something inherently Procrustean about the projects of neutralist theory about any attempt to force an inherently messy, and sometimes even dirty, world into the purity of a systematically unified order. Indeed I would suggest that this is why there has never been and never will be a universally accepted political theory, and it is why, if we truly wish to respond to our conflicts reasonably, we cannot do so by turning to theory for guidance.

Postmodernism Yet should we even be trying to respond reasonably? Postmodernist political philosophers would say no, or at least not exactly. Because theirs is a paradoxical relationship with neutralism; in fact we might even describe them as antineutralist neutralists. For they claim both that theoretical reason is totalizing and yet, to a degree, inescapable. When faced with a theory of justice, the first thing the postmodernist will do is to try and deconstruct it, to reveal its self-contradictions and thereby demonstrate that it is not systematic after all. It is the belief otherwise that makes it totalizing, for it is what leads to the attempt to apply the theory in a neutral fashion, with the inevitable result that violence gets done to all those others who do not fit in the system. By deflating the neutralists pretension to unity the postmodernist thus aims to make way for difference, for creating spaces and so room for all those who suffer from being fixed within a theorys sights (thoria, we recall, means viewing or contemplation). Because as Emmanuel Levinas once challenged: How can the Other...appear, that is, be for someone, without already losing its alterity and exteriority by way of offering itself to view? 13

Berlin, From Hope and Fear Set Free, in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 198. Levinas, The Poets Vision, in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 130.
13

12

7 But although subversive of theoretical reason, postmodernists do not consider their approach to be completely free of it. For one thing, deconstruction often applies to theories, so much so that it may even be considered parasitic on them. For another, language is understood to require theory in order to fix its meanings, and as the deconstructing practice is itself recognized as linguistic this means that it cannot break completely from theory. As a result, as Linda Hutcheon has described, what we end up with is a

paradoxical postmodernism of complicity and critique, of reflexivity and historicity, that at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces of the twentieth-century western world... [It is] a critique both of the view of representation as reflective (rather than as constitutive) of reality and of the accepted idea of man as the centred subject of representation; but it is also an exploitation of those same challenged foundations of representation. Postmodern texts paradoxically point to the opaque nature of their representational strategies and at the same time to their complicity with the notion of the transparency of representation a complicity shared, of course, by anyone who pretends even to describe their de-doxifying tactics.14 Fragmentation and paradox, and the openness to difference that their embrace is said to provide this is the heart of the postmodernist endeavour. There are at least two distinct forms of postmodernism present in political thought today: the poststructuralist and the pragmatist. The former tends to emphasize the indeterminacy of all meaning and the role of power, especially theoretical power, in fixing particular meanings, while the latter stresses how the rigidity of theoretical reason interferes with what works. Yet both would sever the logical tie that neutralists assume exists between philosophy and ideology. For if all theories are inherently contradictory then it cannot be possible to derive particular ideologies from them. Hence the pragmatist Richard Posner on the relation between pragmatism and

14

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

8 liberalism: The connection between the liberal-visionary and the pragmatic is purely historical and contingent.15 Or here is Richard Rorty on pragmatism and feminism: Pragmatism considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language is neutral between feminism and masculinism... Neither pragmatists nor deconstructionists can do more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these [masculinist] practices on something deeper than a contingent historical fact the fact that the people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time.16 The poststructuralist feminist Judith Butler would certainly agree: there are no necessary political consequences for [poststructuralism], but only a possible political deployment. 17 It seems, then, that the relation between political philosophies and ideologies is as underdetermined in postmodernism as it is overdetermined in neutralism. Not that this has prevented postmodernists from asserting their own ideological preferences. Posner and Rorty, for example, have both declared themselves pragmatic liberals, as has Charles Anderson, while among the poststructuralists we might place Hlne Cixouss feminism alongside Butlers as well as recognize William E. Connollys liberalism or Slavoj ieks, Ernesto Laclaus, and Chantal Mouffes socialisms. 18 Yet none of these thinkers will ever be found claiming that philosophy itself supports their favoured ideologies.

15 16

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

Rorty, Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View, in Slavoj iek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 232-3. Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism, in Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), 8. See, for example, Rorty, Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Connolly, Identity and Difference in Liberalism, in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990); Cixous, Extreme Fidelity, trans. Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hlne Cixous, ed. Sellers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988); iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso: 2002), ch. 5; and Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 1985).
18 17

9 All this is in keeping with the postmodernist goal of maintaining openness to difference. Doing so, its worth noting, consists of much more than being sensitive to incommensurables. Because what is required is the kind of openness that is often associated with the artist rather than with the sensitive critic. Hence iek: Politics itself is, in the final analysis, always the politics of fantasy. It needs to imagine answers to antagonisms. 19 Or as Rorty has put it: because immanent criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective, we need to see that the freer the imagination of the present, the likelier it is that future social practices will be different from past practices.20 Evidently, postmodernists would have us respond to conflict by using our imaginations. But then when they talk, as they sometimes do, of conversation, they should not be understood as referring to that dialogical activity wherein people exchange interpretations in order to make sense of something and so achieve a shared understanding. Rather, whats intended is much more like the kind of talk that artists sometimes engage in. But then, in advocating what is essentially an aesthetic politics, postmodernists should be seen as advocating yet another form of antipolitics. The problem with this antipolitics is, as we might expect, different from the neutralists. It arises from the assumption that ones ideological preference is ultimately a matter of aesthetic taste. The question almost poses itself: does the postmodernist have adequate resources to respond when a Benito Mussolini, for example, claims something like the following:

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.21

iek and Noam Yuran, Disaster Movies as the Last Remnants of Utopia [Interview with iek], Haaretz, May 21, 2003.
20 21

19

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

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

10 To reply that Mussolini is wrong to derive his fascism from his philosophical relativism does not say very much; indeed, Rorty himself has admitted that pragmatism is as useful to fascists like Mussolini and conservatives like Oakeshott as it is to liberals like Dewey. 22 That said, it seems to me that a concern for maintaining an openness to difference is not, in fact, compatible with an ideology such as fascism since, properly understood, it supports a form of creativity, one which lends support to a minimal global ethic that would rule the ideology out.23 Regardless, despite what they sometimes claim, postmodernists cannot not really affirm their preferred ideologies as though they were but matters of taste because, practically speaking, no one can. Moreover, if imagination really is their primary concern, then they should accept that neutralist theories are in their own way also imaginative. The only complaint (although it is an important one) that the postmodernist should have with neutralist ideologies is with their exclusivity. But then surely everyone who prefers one ideology over others hopes that his or her compatriots, at least, will favour it as well. One also has to wonder about the supposed irrationality of imagination: isnt it more like a skill, hence a form of technical reason? Artists surely rely on it but perhaps, to be really creative, they also require something more, that which is often referred to as inspiration. In any case, there exists, alongside the theoretical and the technical, at least one other form of reason that people might turn to in order to respond to their political conflicts, one that neither the neutralist nor the postmodernist seems to recognize: prudential reason. Aristotle distinguished it (albeit insufficiently) from the other two with his account of phronsis (practical wisdom).24 Whereas thoria is, as noted above, associated with the ocular, this prudence is essentially an aural capacity, which is why it is essential for dialogue. It is a capacity, moreover, that aims to be as sensitive as possible to the particulars of a given context, which is why Berlin may be read as having identified it with what he calls our moral sensitiveness. 25 In any case, prudence entails
Rorty, Feminism and Pragmatism, in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213n23.
23 24 22

See my On the Minimal Global Ethic, in Patriotic Elaborations, 180-3.

I say albeit insufficiently because phronsis as Aristotle conceives of it is grounded in a theoretical conception of eudaemonia or well-being. Because, to Aristotle, we deliberate about what promotes an end, not about the end. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1112b33-34. The end, in other words, is supplied by theoretical reason. See, for example, Berlin, Equality, 97. Note that, as Berlin explains in The Pursuit of the Ideal, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 2,
25

11 that incommensurability does not have to mean rational incomparability as long, that is, as we use our reason to hear rather than look for the truth. This means that one can respond to a conflict of incommensurable values or goods reasonably, although only if one is willing to engage in dialogue and so politics.

Pluralism Pluralist political philosophers advocate doing just this. And given their own wariness of theoretical reason in politics, they can be said to share in the postmodernists opposition to any attempt to derive ideology directly from philosophy. This is why Berlin has declared: Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic. I believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected.26 This is also Stuart Hampshires positio n, although he is more of a pluralist socialist.27 Both recognize the many often incommensurable and conflicting values in the world and believe that we should respond to conflicts between them neither by pleading before an authority responsible for applying a systematic theory nor by imagining; rather, what we should do is to negotiate with each other and so make concessions as we struggle to arrive at a balanced accommodation. Neutralists can also sometimes be found invoking balancing but since they require it to be guided by theory it means that the values being balanced have been commensurated. This is why they believe that any compromises made along the way should be understood as being cancelled out and so why those doing the compromising should not be said to have dirtied their hands. 28 Pluralists are far from as sanguine, since to them compromise means inescapable dirtiness and dirtiness means tragedy. 29
this sensitivity is relevant to politics for the same reason that political philosophy . . . is but ethics applied to society. Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1991), 44. See also Berlin and Bernard Williams, Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply, Political Studies 62, no. 2 (June 1994): 306-9, 308-9.
27 28 26

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

See my Dirty Hands, in Hugh LaFollette, ed., International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Hoboken, NJ and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1968686. See, for example, Berlin, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. 11; Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1989), esp. 170-7; and Bernard Williams, Politics and Moral Character, in Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
29

12 It is worth noting that the pluralist imperative to negotiate is strictly formal and so distinguished from what Hampshire calls substantive justice. It is concerned with the actual positions that parties advance while negotiating what I have been claiming is relevant to ideology. Substantive justice is, moreover, always relative to given societies since what ones moral sense hears in one context is, as we might expect, going to be different from what it hears in another.30 Hence Hampshire: Opinions about substantial justice and the other virtues arise from, and are explained by, natural and widespread human sentiments [i.e. values] greatly modified by very variable customs and social histories. 31 So it is when these opinions clash that there needs to be negotiation. And negotiation, we should recognize, is a genuine form of dialogue, there being a real exchange between, and change to, the values involved. But because this involves compromise we must accept that it is change of a sort that can only maim and degrade32 them. And yet pluralist negotiation is what it is because it is carried out in good faith. The parties do not make concessions merely because they believe it to be in their strategic interests to do so, that is, because they have more to gain by negotiating than by employing force. If so, then we would have to speak of realpolitik rather than pluralist negotiations, and realpolitik should never be confused with real politics since it is not dialogical it may be dia, but it certainly has no place for logos (reason/speech from the Greek). Genuine politics requires that negotiated concessions be driven not only by the pressure opposing parties put on each other but also by toleration, which is why toleration can be said to be pluralisms central political virtue. Pluralists come to it through their recognition of the plurality of values in the world: there will always be others who, though they do not share ones values , are nevertheless moral beings and so deserve a certain minimum of respect. So while we cannot avoid taking an adversarial stance when we conflict with them, we should accept that it is legitimate for them to pursue their distinct aims. This is why, say, the Irish Republican Armys willingness to decommission its arms was so important to the peace process there, as was the famous September 1993 handshake between PLO chairman Yassar Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn.
30 31 32

See Hampshire, 27-37. Ibid., 37.

To use an expression from Joseph Schumpeters Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, 6th ed.), 251.

13 Indeed the handshake is probably the most potent symbol of the willingness to engage in dialogue and so politics: while shaking hands, we physically touch our opponent who is thus especially vulnerable, and yet no harm is done. In calling for good-faith negotiations, pluralists can be said to rule out all of the antipolitical ideologies, including not only the inherently antipolitical ones such as fascism, anarchism, and libertarianism but also those versions of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and so on that are advocated by the neutralists and postmodernists. At the same time, pluralists make way for a wide range of political ideologies. Yet the decision to favour one over others will never be as indeterminate as it is with the postmodernist since pluralists believe that we can arrive at such decisions through an interpretation of the political culture, the general pattern of life in which we believe.33 Pluralists have rarely been very explicit about this but I think that it clearly derives from their fundamentals. Because if different contexts demand different compromises when values conflict, then we should expect that different societies will tend to assert different traditions of compromise, different accommodations, and so different ideologies. Pluralist political philosophy thus helps us to appreciate the extent to which ideology must be independent of philosophy. Pluralists come to their ideologies neither from theory nor from a creative openness to the other but from the dialogues of politics. And indeed one cannot turn to either philosophy or art for an account of why, during the past century, the Scandinavian countries were homes to democratic socialist political cultures, the United States moved from its New Deal liberalism to the conservatism that characterizes its politics today, and Canada, despite the powerful ideological winds blowing in from the States, managed to remain largely liberal. In Hampshires ter ms, all these are largely manifestations of how the citizens in these countries have negotiated the questions of substantive justice. There is thus, at least relative to neutralism, a great deal of room for change in pluralist politics. And yet, I would say, there is not enough. Because any change is restricted to determining the various balances that pluralists assume need to be struck in response to genuine political conflicts. They assume this because while the balancing takes place in the dimension of the contextual or thick, it being here that values are understood to clash and so here that

Berlin, Introduction, in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 47; see also p. 42 and Berlin, Pursuit of the Ideal, p. 18.

33

14 accommodations must be reached when they do, pluralists also believe in a thin and universal dimension of meaning, one in which a values fixed and isolated core, its soul or skeleton, is to be found. It is upon it that its body or flesh is fastened when the value is present with others in given thick contexts. Now it is precisely this body or flesh, we might say, that gets maimed by the compromises of negotiation. No surprise, then, that there is a tendency to decry compromises as shabby, especially when we feel that we have made too many of them in response to a given conflict. This is why it is often very difficult to claim that the changes wrought are for the best, that they contribute in some sense or other to progress, to some kind of improvement to the practices which express the values in question.34 Such change is also ruled out because pluralists have room for only a fragmented conception of society as a whole, one incompatible with the idea that a citizenry could be said to share a common good and that the making of concessions can contribute something positive to it. Because when it comes to multicultural societies, at least, pluralists envision no more than a plurality of ways of life, each constituted by the distinct group of values that it affirms. Behind this belief, I would claim, is the assumption that values have thin and isolable cores. Combined with the idea that these are encased in irreducibly thick meanings and we are led to the supposition that when the ways of life that express them conflict they clash or collide like separate things that have banged together. This is an inherently adversarial conception of conflict, one that makes it seem as if the best that can be done is, again, to compromise, to balance the values against each other. So it is by virtue of their meta-ethic, their assumption that values can be conceived as like incommensurable atoms, that pluralists end up limiting political dialogue to the zero-sum terms of negotiation. Whats missing is a place for a more reconciliatory approach to conflict, one that strives for integration rather than balancing or compromise. It requires a different way of conceiving of values and so of how they may conflict, one according to which they are not separable entities but integral parts of a whole. This makes way for a holistic conception of their conflicts: instead of the clashing or colliding of atoms we may picture disharmonies or disturbances as having
Thus while I would not go as far as Paul Dumouchel, who claims in his La tolerance nest pas le pluralisme, Esprit, no. 224 (Aug.-Sept. 1996): 165-81, 181, that pluralism is inherently conservative, I do think it assumes a very limited conception of politics-led change.
34

15 arisen between some regions of the whole. As a result, we can focus on the whole rather than on its parts and this makes conceivable its transformation such that the values or, better, goods35 can be reconciled, further integrated with little or no compromise. Considered from a societywide or even global perspective, it thus becomes possible to think of reconciling whole groups or ways of life and so contributing to the progressive development of their shared political communities.

Patriotism So aspires the patriot. Negotiation, as patriotism would have it, certainly entails compromise but now of something that can be shared by the polity as a whole. Moreover, the holism characteristic of the patriots conception of goods one that, we may add, draws on the philosophy of language articulated by such hermeneutical thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer36 allows us to say that there are occasions when political dialogue may consist not only of negotiation but also of conversation. In a conversation, interlocutors do not aim merely for damage control37; rather, as suggested above, the goal is to arrive at a shared understanding of what is being discussed. This requires those involved genuinely to listen to each other and that means more than simply granting the kind of hearing necessary for attaining clarity about demands being negotiated. Because one listens to determine not the minimum trade-offs or concessions necessary for reaching an accommodation but whether what ones opponent is saying has some truth, some justice to it. The central question is: can I learn from them? It may be answered only if we are willing to transform our position in order to incorporate, and so share in, the truths of the other (if there are any). This is what it means to integrate or reconcile rather than merely compromise goods in conflict and so to further develop ones understanding of the common good. The ideal, its worth noting, is one that modern patriots inherit from classical republicans, who were the first to praise others as patriots, long before nationalists began doing so.
With goods, one avoids the Nietzschean connotations of the term values and so a subjectivist understanding of moral concepts. See, for example, Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989, 2nd ed.), esp. part 3.
37 36 35

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

16 Not that conversation in politics is ever easy; indeed in many ways it is even more challenging than good-faith negotiation. The reason is that transformation requires change of the sort that is brought to the whole of ones goods. This is because all of them are assumed to be more or less intrinsically connected or integrated as distinct from interlocked, which is the term I used above to refer to the systematic holism of neutralist theory. Following contemporary hermeneutics, patriots conceive of the common good as an organic rather than systematic whole, this being a type of holism according to which a significant change to one part always has an effect on all of the others. Transformation is thus a comprehensive phenomenon, and therein lies its difficulty. One might even say that, though the bodies of the goods in question are not maimed, conversation can still bruise them, the hope being that they will heal into something stronger than they were before the conflict that they will become truer, in their newly articulated and better understood form, to the whole of which they are a part. So where the pluralist would have us reverse Clausewitzs famous dictum and assert that politics is like wa r carried on by other means, the patriot may be said to urge that we contradict a line from Yeats instead: labour is blossoming or dancing where / the body [is] bruised to pleasure soul. 38 A politics that aims to give reconciling transformations a significant place is thus going to be potentially progressive in a way unavailable to the pluralist. But only potentially because, if one finds oneself amidst people who are willing to do no more than negotiate, then conversation, no matter how much one desires it, will just not be viable. Otherwise put: everyone must be willing to engage in the kind of speaking and listening that conversation requires. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that our politics today is dominated by the practices of neutralism, postmodernism and, above all, pluralism. 39 Faced with this, we must accept that attempts at reconciling our conflicts with conversation are going to be largely futile.

Yeats, Among School Children, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 215. For a compelling account of the prominence in the English-speaking world of uncompromising stances (which, I would claim, are encouraged by neutralism) and of those which no further than being open to negotiation (as advocated by pluralism), see Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (New York: Random House, 1998). Two qualifications to my praise of this wonderful book: there are times (e.g. ch. 4) when Tannen fails to appreciate that dialogues involving compromise necessarily have an adversarial dimension, as well as others (ch. 8) when she mistakenly equates criticism or opposition with zero-sum adversity (a mistake because one can criticize or oppose with the aim of reconciling with others rather than of pressuring them to make concessions).
39

38

17 And yet we patriots still refuse to give up hope. That is why I find so moving anecdotes such as the following, recounted by the patriotic feminist Susan Bickford:

[This is] the story of a particular exemplary action that happened several years ago when, in the midst of feminisms sex wars, I attended a protest on the campus where I was a graduate student. A feminist group at this public university had originally designed the action to protest the student unions sale of pornographic magazines like Playboy. News of this protest spawned a simultaneous counter demonstration by feminists supportive of anticensorship principles and alternative sexualities. So there we were, lines of feminists, both sides chanting and holding signs, one side with a bullhorn, the other without. I was not involved in organizing either protest, and frankly I do not remember being very thoughtful about my own participation; I had not done much representative thinking, let us say. That failure was made clear to me by the gutsy act of a woman on the other side, who came over and spoke with several of us. I cannot remember her exact words, but what she said was something like I want to hear what you have to say, I dont want us to just yell at each other. Tell me what you want, why youre doing what youre doing. It was not a loving or peaceful act. Her face was tight and pinched, her compadres were chanting in the background, and what she was doing was clearly difficult for her, perhaps more so because she was the only one, on either side, who made that effort. She must have felt acutely vulnerable, appearing in that particular way and place not as someone who floated above the conflict, not as someone who stayed at home, but as someone who, quite literally, travelled: from her group to ours and back. 40 If that woman had said only Tell me what you want and left it at that, then we might identify her as a practitioner of pluralist politics, as someone willing to negotiate with her adversaries, to hear their demands so that she might determine the concessions that might satisfy them. In

Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 172.

40

18 asking to know why they were doing what they were doing, however, she was announcing her willingness to listen, to come to understand and perhaps share their position, or at least to develop a new one that all of them could endorse together. Patriotisms central aim, then, may be situated in between the neutralists belief in the possibility of a unified political society, on the one hand, and the pluralists fragmentation of it , on the other all the while striving to avoid the paradoxes of the postmodernist. Patriots can also be said to tread a path between the neutralists unification of philosophy and ideology and the postmodernists and pluralists separation of them. For patriots accept that while philosophy may help us to say certain things about politics in general it cannot on its own, outside of the context of a given polity be understood to support any particular ideology. More than this, because the common good can also sometimes be fulfilled in creative as distinct from interpretive ways, 41 we have reason to make room for an apolitical but still not antipolitical patriotism. But given that creative solutions tend to be the exception, never the rule, and given the well-known dangers associated with such an approach, it (almost) always makes sense to begin with dialogue, and so politics. Hence the patriots central maxim: conversation first, negotiation second, force third.

A New Political Spectrum The patriotic conception of politics can also make way for a better conception of the political spectrum than those that have been on offer so far. It is to this conception that I now turn. Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many have concluded that the very idea of a political spectrum has lost its relevance, that the terms left and right no longer carry much meaning. 42 Others, however, continue to assert their efficacy. Leon Baradat, for example, conceives of the spectrum as based on the notion of attitudes to direction of change. Those on the left are progressive in the sense that they favour change from the status quo to something new, whereas those on the right are retrogressive, concerned with a return to a previous state of

41 42

See my Good, Bad, Great, Evil, in Patriotic Elaborations, ch. 12.

See, for example, Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), esp. the Introduction and chs. 1-2 (although note the qualification on 251); and Berlin and Steven Lukes, Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, Salmagundi, no. 120 (Fall 1998): 52-133, esp. 124.

19 affairs.43 Norberto Bobbio, alternatively, argues for a spectrum based on attitudes to equality, with those on the left favouring the value and those on the right being more open to inequalities. 44 Baradats approach, it is true, has the problem that it would require us to describe liberals in the United States today as right-wing since they would have American public policy approximate the countrys New Deal past. But Bobbios fails to explain why one particular value, equality, should be given a special status vis--vis all of the others; nor can it account for the popularity of describing American neo-conservatives or Russian communists, each of whom favour the forceful imposition of their preferred forms of equality (the democratic and the economic, respectively) as being on the right. Of course one could always argue that the mistake lies with those who would refer to American liberals as left and to their neo-conservative compatriots or Russian communists as right. I nevertheless believe that there is something to these descriptions, which is why I want to suggest an alternative conception of the spectrum, one that helps us to make sense of them as well as of how the idea of the spectrum has (or at least should have) been used throughout its history. That history, it is worth recalling, originated in post-revolutionary France, when those who sat on the left side of the National Assembly were said to be for progress and against reaction and those on the right the reverse. The conception I want to advance takes its cue from Gianni Vattimos assertion that nonviolence is the central characteristic of the left. Vattimo makes it in the context of a polemic against fundamentalisms, particularly those inspired by metaphysical philosophies. 45 But putting this aspect aside, I would like to suggest the following: given the assumption that one may respond to a conflict with either conversation, negotiation, or force, we refer to the doves for whom progress through conversation is feasible as being on the left; to the more pessimistic hawks who consider force unavoidable as being on the right; and to those in between (chickens, for they fear the other two?) who favour negotiation as being in the centre. This is the patriotic conception of the political spectrum and it is one that we can sum up as being based
See Baradat, Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997, 6th ed.), ch. 2. See Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). As cited in ibid., 94. See also Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 28-34.
45 44 43

20 on the idea of attitudes to conflict. And given that conflicts can be very different as well as change, it makes no sense to demand that people situate themselves on this spectrum in any permanent way. I have long thought it odd that so many, so often, choose to declare themselves lifelong members of the left or inherently right -wing and so on, as though where they are with respect to both time and place is somehow irrelevant to their politics. I suspect that vastly overreaching conceptions of rationality or human nature are at work here or, less intellectually grandiose, simply that people are letting their relatively rigid personal sensibilities interfere with their judgment. Regardless, the basic point I want to make is that ones decision about how best to respond to a given conflict should depend on that conflict and nothing else. Of course one source of those relatively rigid personal sensibilities is ideological thinking. The problem, we might say, is that people often turn to their preferred ideologies for guidance too soon. For ideology is helpful only after the conversation has unavoidably broken down; prior to this one should be willing to listen and so to be open to transforming oneself on the basis of what one hears. Ideologies interfere with that since, as the historian Lewis Namier once noted, there is a certain fixity to them: the less, therefore, man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma, the better for his thinking. 46 But when the time for negotiation has come, patriots will indeed invoke the ideology that they believe best expresses the common good of their political community. And it should be noted that this by no means has to be conservatism. For while conservatives are often said to exhibit the greatest love for their country, patriotism is in no sense biased in favour of their ideology. This is because patriots love what they believe is the true identity of their country (or countries if they feel loyalty to more than one) and whether its current practices best express that identity is something that must remain an open question. It is always possible that radical reforms to those practices will be necessary if citizens are to be truer to their ideals. At least as regards such cases, then, Hannah Arendt is quite right to point out that intense discontent [is] the hallmark of true patrio tism and true devotion to ones people. 47 Put differently, we might say that true patriot love can require criticism.

46 47

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

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

21 Although it is not biased in favour of any particular ideology, patriotism does rule out all of the antipolitical ones, those which consistently reject dialogical responses to conflict in favour of nondialogical forms of talk or other, more overt forms of force. This is something explicit in the case of fascism or revolutionary Marxism, implicit with the legalism of neutralist liberalism, and inevitable when it comes to one-dimensional ideologies such as libertarianism. Such doctrines should, in consequence, be considered so far to the right that we might question whether they even merit a place on the political spectrum as I have been defining it. For it is, after all, a political spectrum, hence one upon which are to be found positions which assume that there will be at least some occasions when dialogue can serve as a viable alternative to force. Note that, regarding those ideologies that can be considered genuinely political, there is no call for situating them on the spectrum in any permanent sense. True, conservatives will, for example, generally be found somewhere on the right, but there will be cases when even they are optimistic about the prospects of negotiating a given conflict and at such times they can be described as having moved closer to the centre. Indeed because each country claims its own political culture each may be said to have its own home ideology at a given point in time, it being the one that most of its citizens affirm, and this, too, is something that can change. One constant, however, is that those political parties whose foremost aim is electoral success will always be found competing over their countrys home ideology (which may also, it should be said, consist of a mixture of ideologies). That is why American Republicans and Democrats have, since the mid-1970s, been right-wing and centrist conservatives respectively (there being, admittedly, a few liberals remaining among the Democrats I am still unclear as to whether President Obama should be counted among them). And it also explains why any Canadian party that genuinely wishes to form the government whether it be the Conservatives, Liberals, or the New Democrats has for a very long time now needed to present itself to the electorate as the best representative of Canadian liberalism. 48 Of course not all countries have had the luxury to develop their political cultures to the point where their home ideologies are as sophisticated as conservatism or liberalism, not to
John Wiley & Sons, 1950), 107-8. See, for example, H.W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and William Christian and Colin Campbell, Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990, 3rd ed.).
48

22 mention socialism or the somewhat less developed relative newcomers feminism and green ideology.49 Modern Israel is a case in point. Since its creation in 1948 its citizens fundamentally existential concern with security has, understandably, been given a virtually overriding place in its politics. Its home ideology, in consequence, has remained that of the nationalisms of its two national communities, the majority Jewish and the minority Arab. In more mature political cultures, nationalism is an ideology that tends to exist only as an adjunct to the other, more sophisticated ideologies. 50 One can only hope that the day will come when Israelis will be able to affirm it in this way.

III There are, it seems to me, a number of advantages that come from interpreting the relations between political philosophies and political ideologies in the way I propose. For one thing, it helps us to overcome the inherently misleading terms of what has been called the liberalcommunitarian debate within contemporary political philosophy. 51 One reason they are misleading is that Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, two of the debates major communitarian representatives, are actually liberals of a sort.52 Even Alasdair MacIntyre, who clearly is a nonliberal participant in the debate (he affirms a premodern form of politics) has vehemently rejected the communitarian label. 53 It also has not helped that those such as

For an authoritative study of these five, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
50 51

49

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

See, for example, Adam Swift and Stephen Mulhall, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 2nd ed.). This is surely one reason why neither has been comfortable with the label communitarian. Walzer lumps himself in with the liberals in Walzer, Liberalism and the Art of Separation; and in Walzer, The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism, Political Theory 18, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 6-23. And Taylor gives one of the many reasons why he is unhappy with the term communitarian, in his Charles Taylor Replies, in James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 250. Alasdair MacIntyre, The Spectre of Communitarianism, Radical Philosophy, no. 70 (Mar.-Apr. 1995): 3435, 34: I have myself strenuously disowned this label, but to little effect. Daniel A. Bell is, to my knowledge, the only nonliberal who has embraced it; see his Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Amitai Etzioni, who has also done so, is better described as a pluralist liberal (though one who also occasionally voices patriotic concerns). See, for example, Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
53 52

23 Michael Sandel continue to equate liberalism with the various forms of neutralist liberalism,54 thus perpetuating the misrepresentation of an ideology that, as Michael Freeden has shown, has long exhibited much richer forms than are compatible with neutralism. 55 This leads me to recommend that we drop the term communitarian altogether. Doing so would also help us to acknowledge such realities as that Isaiah Berlin, universally recognized as a liberal, is more open to compromising the liberty of the individual, liberalisms core good, than is a so-called communitarian such as Walzer.56 And it would also make room for the fact that ostensibly anticommunitarian neutralist liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin actually embrace a strong (though I would claim misconstrued) conception of the common good, something that Taylor, for one, has acknowledged. 57 All this should help us to appreciate that liberalism is but one modern political ideology among many, even if it is the most popular among Western political thinkers today. Still, we should eschew the misleading description of the West as the home of liberal democracy, since this only obfuscates the fact that democratic socialism, conservatism, feminism, and green ideology, to name just a few, still claim places as respectable ideologies among the diversity of Western democratic political cultures. The relevant distinction should not be between liberal democracies and other regimes but between regimes that are political and those that are not. Finally, the spectrum I have been proposing could help us to account for the tendency of many of those of us on the left to exhibit a unique form of bitterness towards our opponents. This is something that we do in addition to the natural aversion that all who take their politics seriously feel towards fellow citizens who are sympathetic to ideologies different from our own.

See the following by Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 2nd ed.); Introduction, in Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); and Democracys Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 1. See Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, chs. 4-7; and his Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Walzers (weak) pluralist liberalism upholds a political scheme that aims wholly to shelter that liberty from compromise. This is implied, for example, by his declaration in Spheres of Justice, 279, that the autonomous person [is] . . . the ideal subject of the theory of justice. See Taylor, Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate, in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 172, 179-80. For more on the aftermath of the debate, see my Li beralism after Communitarianism available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ?abstract_id=2233844.
57 56 55

54

24 I want to suggest that the lefts feelings here are born of the frustration of thinking that one has found a reconciliatory, noncompromising solution to a given political conflict, a solution that contributes to the common good of all, and yet for whatever reason those to the right refuse to go along. Think of that old proverb about leading a horse to water but not being able to make it drink; then imagine how annoying it would be if one felt that the horses obstinacy was preventing many others from drinking as well. That said, there are also those who, while claiming to be members of the left, are annoyed for a reason that has little if anything to do with an interest in reconciliation. These are the fascist left, as they are sometimes called, and they are not really on the left as I have been defining it at all. Because, to them, words are not the carriers of dialogue but weapons in disguise, arrows that, tinged with self-righteousness and what Nietzsche called ressentiment, they aim at all who they perceive to be self-serving enemies of equality. More often than not, however, the reality is that the opposition to equality is an ideologically legitimate one. Such leftists, we should t hus recognize, are actually as antipolitical as the soldiers of realpolitik; their place, in consequence, is on the far right.

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

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

58

25 nuclear Armageddon.59 Our world, in other words, is far more secure than it has been in a very long time. And with security comes the ability to listen that conversation requires. Moreover, it also makes sense today to invoke what Geoff Mulgan has identified as the rise of four new unleashings of energy as regards politics and its possibilities. First and most important are the sweeping democratization movements that have arisen throughout the world, from China to Brazil, Kazakhstan to Turkey. Every time an antipolitical regime falls or is challenged ones hopes for the possibilities of dialogue as conversation and not only as negotiation should grow. Second is the transition towards an era of human capital, one that follows the previous shifts from merchant to industrial and then finance capital. When it is human capital that is valued, organizations tend to give resources such as skill and ingenuity greater prominence, and this can only help in developing the reconciliatory solutions for which conversations aim. Third is the growing demand on states, public bodies, and in particular global organizations to evolve and often extend their responsibilities. This requires reforms that are sure to produce new contexts and so, once again, new possibilities. Finally, there is the fact that, at least when it comes to the prosperous societies of the developed world, many have found that consumer consumption cannot fulfil their needs for self-realization and this has meant that the questions and languages of ethics as distinct from economics have come to the forefront.60 The result of these four? The terms employed in dialogue are becoming richer and so its potential much greater. To accept this interpretation of world politics today is to acknowledge the generally leftist orientation that comes from endorsing the tenets of patriotic political philosophy at this time. The fact is that there are significant opportunities for conversation, or for making room for conversation, that simply were not there before. Acknowledging this does not, to repeat, dictate an adherence to any particular political ideology; rather, it requires only that we strive to listen, rather than fight, for justice. The irony, then, is that while many have pointed to the demise of the Soviet Union as the largest factor contributing to the current fragmentation and decline of the left, its fall may ultimately have the opposite effect. For we are now, as sentimental as this unavoidably sounds, living in a time when it is genuinely possible to make a better world. Patriots of the world, converse!
59 60

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

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