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European Journal of Cultural

and Political Sociology
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A world without why

a
Dan Fairbrother
a
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
Published online: 30 May 2014.

To cite this article: Dan Fairbrother (2014) A world without why, European Journal of
Cultural and Political Sociology, 1:1, 114-117, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2014.914853

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.914853

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 114 Book Reviews
man of the ‘famous dirty secrets’ (pp. 363–364). But, he seems to believe more in
the first, although he recognizes that George himself remains a mystery. Many
readers may be mystified by several of the names that appear in Raulff’s book
(perhaps a glossary of names would be helpful). And some readers may get disor-
iented by his jumping around in time, especially in the second half of the book. In
one passage Raulff writes of the 1950s; in the next he returns to the 1930s. But
every reader ought to appreciate Raulff’s ability to set out the lengthy and
complex history of the Stefan George Circle. Max Weber defined charisma as
the extraordinary power that a person may have to command authority and
loyalty, but he also maintained that it tended to disappear over time. Weber
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knew Stefan George personally and he believed that George possessed such char-
isma. In his Kreis ohne Meister Ulrich Raulff does not examine Weber’s con-
ception of charisma, but he does discuss George’s posthumous charisma with
impressive breadth and depth.

Christopher Adair-Toteff
University of South Florida, USA/University of Kent, UK
csa-t@web.de
© 2014, Christopher Adair-Toteff
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.909735

A world without why, by Raymond Geuss, Oxford and Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 2014, xvi + 264 pp., £27.95 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-691-15588-3

High hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

Raymond Geuss, who retired from teaching philosophy at Cambridge last year,
explains that these lines from the Iliad were part of the speech given by Glaukos
as he ‘stood out’ from the line of battle to fight Diomedes (‘son of Tydeus’).
The two warriors were previously unknown to each other, and Glaukos’ recounting
his generation serves as a greeting (of sorts) and introduction. Yet, as sociologists
will suspect already, this is no mere exchange of information, for it serves both as a
threat to Diomedes (‘Don’t you know who I am?’) and a kind of extroversion
which makes backing down ‘without loss of face’ impossible (pp. 4–5). As it
turns out, the genealogy reveals a forgotten relationship between Glaukos and Dio-
medes – their grandfathers were friends – and this discovery educes an exchange of
gifts instead of blows (p. 6). Part of the point of this kind of information about ‘gen-
eration’ (to answer Glaukos’ question) was to emphasise the naturalness of origins
and assert their continuing influence – the opposite of Geuss’ use of genealogy in
the thirteen essays of A World without Why.
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 115
The many topics receiving individual treatment – disciplines (Essay 1), clarity
(2), Marxism (3), criticism (4), the Left (5), authority (6), lying (7), politics and archi-
tecture (8), theological ethics (9), Bernard Williams (10), Weltanschauung (11), the
origin of philosophy (12), culture and subversion (13) – are held together by
Geuss’ critical voice, not by a theoretical system. This is as one would expect
from someone steeped in Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault. The closest he comes
to offering a summary of his position is in the preface, where his old bête noire,
Kantian metaphysics, is invoked as a representative of the principal critical target
(p. xiii). After Foucault, he thinks Kant reveals in a particularly pernicious guise
‘the dogma of the Enlightenment’ that the world is given in a way that is
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congenial to human forms of order, knowledge, and freedom (p. xvi; cf. Essay 11,
esp. p. 212). Against this, he raises the possibility that the Enlightenment project
of criticism can be detached – as Foucault’s ‘ethos of the Enlightenment’ would
have it – from this puritanical commitment to the existence of a final and discoverable
order. But beyond this kind of unsystematic, roughly orienting commentary, the only
way to grasp his intentions is to follow in detail his lines of questioning.
The collection begins strongly with a discussion of the causes of disciplinary
distinctions, culminating in the thought that the self-evidence of the unity of particu-
lar disciplines is relative to historically contingent purposes and institutional
arrangements. In one of Geuss’ examples, Vitruvius takes music to be an essential
subject for aspiring architects (p. 18). This is not because of any Wagnerian (or
indeed Platonic) aspiration to awaken in their souls a sense of nation or culture
which, it might be hoped, will manifest itself in their buildings, but rather for the
more ‘instrumentalist’ reason that a sense of pitch will enable them to set the
tension of the catapults that architects in this period would be expected to design
and build. The historical nexus (architecture/military engineering/music/catapults/
dodgy rope) underpinning this is demonstrably subject to change. But in the
present, Geuss says, ‘the humanities’ are even more tenuously connected, relying
on little more than the survival of certain kinds of cultural predilection amongst uni-
versity staff (p. 21). He explains the moral he wishes to draw from this:

Foucault closes his study of what he calls the human sciences, Les mots et les choses,
by comparing their central organizing conception, ‘man’, with a face drawn in the
sand that is about to be washed away by the incoming tide. The face may be
gone, but provided the sand remains, we have no reason for more than transitory
twinges of grief, and certainly no reason for deep melancholy. (p. 20)

Here, then, historical inquiry is supposed to release us from an unnecessary

attachment (‘the humanities’), reconciling us to the contingency of our situation.
Elsewhere it serves actively to undermine a concept others present as unhistorical
and necessary, but which Geuss thinks is politically suspect (as in Essay 6,
‘Authority: Some Fables’). ‘[P]rovided the sand remains’, then, genealogy does
not function for him as a mere mechanism of pure destruction, as Phillip Rieff
thought it did for Foucault.
 116 Book Reviews
However, there is a question about how historical inquiry really functions in
Geuss’ thought. He wants to push on past the ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently
documentary’ (Foucault) aspects – what would be substantive history and
sociology – to the philosophical and cultural colour. There is a sense in which
this should serve as a kind of recommendation, but not an unqualified one. No ‘sec-
ondary’ literature is mentioned at all, but even those readers seeing this as admirable
independence may wonder whether some important ‘primary’ materials have been
neglected. Where is Eric Voeglin’s Order & History in Geuss’ discussions of – well
– order and history? Where is Heidegger in his musings on buildings, words, and
human purposes? And sometimes the intellectual excitement gets lost in the loosen-
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ess of the essay form. From someone who can write ‘I don’t think finally that this
realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by
power relations that would otherwise express themselves with even greater and
more dramatic directness’ (p. 231), Geuss’ careful etymologies of what Raymond
Williams called ‘keywords’ can seem a little inert.
Consider ‘Politics and Architecture’ (Essay 8), one of the pieces where Geuss
strays furthest from a framework of supporting literature. He begins with a brief –
and colourful – historical story about the various occupants of the Poelzig-Bau
buildings in Frankfurt. ‘What this means’ – the significance of the ‘history’ is
extracted by the ninth line of the first paragraph – ‘is that in 2009 a student
could find that he or she was taking a seminar on Descartes, or Rimbaud, or on
early church history in the very rooms in which in the early 1940s gas chambers
and crematoria for extermination camps were designed’ (p. 144). What follows is a
series of explanations of different senses of the words ‘architecture’, ‘architect’,
‘politics’, and ‘justice’, with due reference to Aristotle. This is meticulous and a
little grey. The upshot is that ‘justice’ means more than distributive justice, and
that buildings, as large forms that shape public behaviour, need to be designed
according to an atheist version of the standard ‘a dwelling fit for God’ (p. 161)
– a dwelling, that is, which can accommodate the full range of social virtues
and not just narrowly utilitarian ends. None of the senses of ‘architecture’
seems to contribute to this conclusion, and the discussion of the Poelzig-Bau is
fifteen pages distant. Doesn’t one get here less by history proper than by the
more impatient practice of what John Burrow called ‘conjectural history’? This
is all very well if the discussion is playful enough, but we find in Geuss’
weaker passages a form of rhetorical excitation best left to dictionaries.
These, however, are the exceptions. Geuss’ final piece, which lends its title to
the collection, reads like a retirement speech modelled on Adorno’s ‘reflections
from damaged life’ in Minima Moralia. His job is ‘mildly discreditable’
because most of his ‘self-satisfied’ students end up using their education in ‘the
glib manipulation of words’ to protect the commercial and political status quo
(p. 231); his Cambridge Philosophy colleagues create ‘a conformist, claustropho-
bic, and repressive verbal universe’, with ‘endlessly repeated shouts of “Why?”’,
all of which leaves him suffering from ‘repeated bouts of nausea’ and feeling ‘an
urgent need to exit it altogether’ (p. 232). To where? If anywhere, to an intellectual
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 117
world modelled on poetry and art, best understood along the lines of an ‘invitation’
rather than a theory or proposition (pp. 234–235). Unlike Glaukos’ ‘genealogy’,
an invitation ‘makes no claim’. Geuss is trying to cultivate a fullness of thought
inaccessible to those navigating life in straight lines; turning aside to read his
often superb history-fed ruminations might help us avoid stumbling, as Conrad
put it, over the bones of the wise.

Dan Fairbrother
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
d.j.fairbrother@warwick.ac.uk
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© 2014, Dan Fairbrother

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.914853