Tony blair says that he regrets not having studied political philosophy at university. He is said to be influenced by the communitarian Christian socialism of John MacMurray. He has made some intriguing remarks about utilitarianism (which he used to find attractive) and natural law theory (which he now prefers). He has stressed the continuities between New Labour and the New Liberalism of the early 20th century. Accused of opportunism and pragmatism, he counters that, while not conforming to traditional political stereotypes, he is none the less radical and principled. "We are not crypto-Thatcherites. We are not old-style socialists. We are what we believe in. We are meritocrats... We have started to put this philosophy into practice in government..."
It's easy to be cynical about all this. Politicians like to think that they are intellectually serious, but not as much as they like others to think it. It can be hard to tell how much of what they say has been supplied by minions paid to construct ad hoc intellectual scaffolding. A few years ago, an ex-student of mine, then working in No 10, rang to say that the prime minister was thinking about the way in which New Labour drew on ideas from the liberal tradition. Could I suggest anything that they might read? I mentioned the first couple of books that came into my head. A week or so later, I was amused to wake up to a radio report of a speech by Blair which seemed to owe quite a bit to my rather arbitrary recommendations. I still don't know what to think about this episode. Was this as it should be-judicious consultation of the academic in quest of theoretical clarity? Or the opportunistic pursuit of intellectual window-dressing?
I have felt the same misgivings on other occasions. At seminars bringing together philosophers and politicians, it's hard to resist the suspicion that the politicians are there not to think but to cherry-pick whichever phrases suit their current purposes. You can see their eyes glazing over until someone says something that sounds like something they already believe. Having spent a morning at a seminar discussing the relation between the individual and the community, it was depressing to hear a participant, now a Labour minister, conclude: "so, it's just what we've been saying. It's all about individuals in communities." An Oxford gathering organised by Nexus ended bizarrely with us going round the table suggesting T-shirt slogans. More recently, at a meeting of the Social Market Foundation considering whether liberty could be given a central role in progressive thinking, a participant urged us to think in terms of logos. (That's logos the plural of logo, not logos the Greek root of logic.) Liberty wouldn't do, because those we disagreed with also believed in it. We should brand ourselves more distinctively, so equality must be the key. I'm all for rescuing equality, but I'm not sure that's the right way to go about it.
Blair himself seems more serious about ideas, and not only about the kind of Big Idea that provides soundbite-sized rhetorical unity. Unlike most politicians, you can imagine him trying genuinely to get his head round the philosophical views of those he disagrees with. None the less, Blair is a politician. He can't also be a philosopher-he's too busy, and what makes a good politician is different from what makes a good philosopher. Plato thought that only philosophers were equipped with the wisdom needed to steer the ship of state safely into harbour. Because many philosophers have problems remembering where they left their bicycle, the thought of a philosopher king in Downing Street rightly fills us with horror.
The pursuit of truth and the pursuit of votes are very different enterprises. Philosophical rumination and political leadership require not just different but incompatible virtues. We shouldn't be surprised, then, that relations between philosophers and politicians are characterised by feelings which range from frustration through suspicion to downright hostility.
I'm talking about political philosophy. There's no reason to suspect any particular antagonism between politicians and the kind of philosophy that everybody knows to be useless. I assume that politicians are as exasperated as the rest of us with people who spend their time worrying about how we know whether the external world exists. But special problems arise when practitioners and philosophers of politics try to talk to one another. Apparently interested in the same kind of thing, hopes are raised that there might be useful interaction. Philosophers can help politicians think clearly-perhaps even think rightly. Politicians can develop coherent philosophical positions which inform their policies and which they can in turn convey to the electorate. These aspirations make the sense of disappointment and grievance all the greater.
Politicians fudge, evade and won't say "I don't know." Their interest in abstract ideas-community or social justice or freedom-or intellectual traditions-liberalism or social democracy-is short-term and strategic. Relying on them rhetorically, for their feelgood factor and useful branding, politicians aren't usually interested in what they mean and, when they are, want only inoffensive, bowdlerised versions. Their concern to stay "on message" prevents the honesty and freedom of thought without which serious discussion is impossible. They concentrate on the defects in opponents' arguments, ignoring the parts most likely to lead to intellectual progress. Obsessed with soundbites and focus groups, they won't follow ideas to the point where they become complicated or controversial. Reluctant to accept that they cannot be all things to all voters, that all good things do not go together, they shy away from the hard choices they talk about.
Political philosophers, meanwhile, are unintelligible, pedantic and utopian. Overvaluing precision and rigour, they underestimate the importance of a clear, simple, popular message. Get them to explain, in plain terms, what they mean and why it matters and-if anything survives that process-it turns out to be useless. It's so abstract and idealistic, so far removed from the real world, that it often has no clear relevance to policy. Where their arguments do yield policy implications, the policies implied would be electoral suicide. Political philosophy is intellectual masturbation-adolescent and fruitless, a failure to engage with the world as it really is. In refusing to take seriously the feasibility constraints which are the stuff of real politics, philosophers refuse to grow up.
The case against politicians scarcely needs elaboration. You hardly need to be a philosopher to be maddened by politicians' tendency not to answer questions. But let's distinguish between sliding and being slippery. To slide is to shift from one issue to another without realising it. Sliding is an intellectual failing, a sign of inadequate precision or clarity. Those who slide need to think more carefully-to see that issue A, though related to issue B, is distinct and cannot be addressed by talking about B. To be slippery, on the other hand, is deliberately to refuse to engage with the question. It is not a failure of the intellect. Indeed, quickness is required to see the problem and (try to) slip away from it. It is a kind of dishonesty. The slippery should see the importance of confronting good objections, rather than trying to sidestep them with fancy footwork.
Sometimes politicians just slide. They haven't thought enough about their current enthusiasm to see that what they have to say careers all over the place. More often, they are slippery. They prefer not to take on the challenge presented, so they start talking about something else, typically reverting to a favoured mantra ("opportunity for the many not the few," and so on). Though slipperiness should be worse, I find sliding more irritating. If these people are going to talk about social justice or meritocracy, why can't they think more clearly, read more, sort out their confusions?
Sometimes slipping and sliding combine: amorphous concepts are favoured here because they leave plenty of room for manoeuvre. "Community" is the obvious example. Politicians mainly use the word to express the elementary thought that people should care about one another rather than merely looking out for themselves. Typically, the contrast here is with the selfish individualism conveniently attributable to Thatcherism and the new right. Here, community-talk is code for talk about morality. Sometimes, however, community is given more specific content. Suddenly we're talking about local communities, the kind which go in for Neighbourhood Watch schemes. Then we are on to the family, the "building-block of community," perhaps by way of civil society and Burke's "little platoons." So it goes. These communities have little in common beyond the fact that they're not individuals.
According to the conventional wisdom, philosophers are obsessed with words. That's not right: it is politicians who worry about words. Philosophers care about what words mean. Conceptual analysis is a fancy name for the job of working out what people mean when they say things. (Asked, at a party, what he actually did, a philosopher replied: "You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It's a living.") Philosophers try to get beyond words to assess the propositions framed in their terms. Politicians like words which sound good, however ambiguous.
Consider equality of opportunity. You won't find a politician who is against equality of opportunity. So all politicians agree about something? No. The same words stand for a range of different things. There may be a common concept but there are very different conceptions of it-the concept is contested. Equality of opportunity ranges all the way from preventing discrimination on grounds of race or gender to Sure Start initiatives aiming to help toddlers from disadvantaged backgrounds-although curiously it bypasses measures designed to prevent privileged parents passing their advantages on to their children.
The vagueness of grand concepts is convenient for those who want to make the right noises, saying nothing with which others might disagree. Philosophers hate this. They hassle one another to clarify exactly what is and is not being said, until as much indeterminacy as possible has been eliminated.
Talk about "U-turns" has a lot to answer for. Changing your mind-the right thing to do if someone gives you a better argument or the evidence shows that you were wrong-has long been a problem for politicians; worse even than confessing ignorance. How often do you hear politicians say that they don't know the answer-that they'll have to think about it, perhaps consult others better informed? Philosophers may be arrogant, but at least they have the confidence to accept their limits.
Politicians are loath to admit that their goals might involve anything other than the complete and harmonious realisation of all good things. They won't say: "I believe in this conception of social justice. I accept that it involves significant restrictions on individual freedom and democratic choice. None the less, here are my reasons for believing in it." Why not? Because their opponents would make a big fuss about loss of freedom and democracy-which would be described in terms much more shocking than intended. Politicians have to worry about how their statements will be taken out of context, twisted, and presented to an electorate brought up to be wary of anything that strays too far from the familiar. Philosophers have it easy. They can say precisely what they mean, fairly confident that they will be taken to mean precisely what they say.
This, of course, is politicians' best defence. Sliding is excusable because they are busy people, with more important things to do than to work out rigorous theoretical positions. Slipperiness and sloganising are justified by the context. The electorate is not interested in political ideas. Of course politicians have to talk in soundbites. Of course they have to repeat them ad nauseam. How otherwise can there be any chance of them sticking in people's minds? Of course politicians cannot admit that they have made mistakes, or that the policies they favour will make some people worse off. The enemy has teams trained to sniff out any utterance which might be spun into ammunition. Philosophers may be engaged in the collaborative pursuit of clarity and truth. Politicians compete for votes in a hostile environment. Get real.
The deep problem, then, is a political culture which makes serious, adult discussion impossible-at least in public. Political debate cannot be conducted honestly, with open acknowledgement that values conflict, that predictions about the effects of different policies are hazardous, that some policies are justified precisely because they are compromises with people's baser instincts. That is where politics gets interesting. We know that. They know that. But, aided and abetted by the media, politicians have imprisoned themselves in the dull, artificial world of evasion and soundbites. No wonder people get turned off. For a while, it looked as if Blair might be the person brave enough to lead a break out. But not for long.
From politicians' perspective, philosophers are doubly useless, deficient in both form and content. The trouble with form is not just that philosophers won't come up with T-shirt slogans. The bigger problem is that it is so hard to work out what their ideas are in the first place. Philosophers criticise politicians for being sloppy, vague, and rhetorical but at least you get the general idea. Politicians reading the work of political philosophers often have no sense of what they are on about. Locked by academic specialisation into a technical and artificial discourse remote from the world it seeks to illuminate, political philosophy has lost the plot.
The bad version of this objection holds that political philosophy should not be conducted in ways too far removed from those in which ordinary people experience and think about politics. On this view, the development of a distinctively academic idiom is itself a betrayal of its subject matter. But the precise, technical discourse developed by philosophers is essential to intellectual progress. Though unintelligibility and inaccessibility are real problems, they are not more than translation problems. The science journals are full of technicalities beyond the comprehension of most of us, yet writers like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and (allegedly) Stephen Hawking have managed to make demanding ideas available to a wide readership. Indeed, it's my impression that readers of Prospect are expected to know, and be interested in, much more science than political philosophy.
This is only partly because we have yet to find our Dawkins. There remains the problem of content. Two problems in fact. In the first place, philosophers tend not to see their task as that of devising or proposing concrete policies. They are concerned with the values and principles which policies should seek to promote. Deciding which policy is most likely to realise the desired ends will involve empirical information that philosophers are not competent to assess. One of the principles of justice in John Rawls' original position is that inequalities are justified only if they serve to maximise the wellbeing of the worst-off members of society. Fine. Let us suppose that we buy that. Which inequalities are justified on these grounds? What institutions and policies satisfy that principle? Search me, I'm a philosopher. The answer depends on empirical stuff about the motivational effects of different tax regimes. Indeed, Rawls himself says that his principle is indeterminate between capitalist and socialist ways of organising the economy.
Of course some philosophical arguments do yield direct policy prescriptions and some philosophers work hard to advertise these to policy-makers. Some travel the world advising governments. Our considered convictions about abstract principles do often allow us to reject a policy as morally unacceptable, even where it is not obvious what the ideal policy would be. So political philosophy can have practical implications. But much of it is "ideal theory." It is interested in what it would be for a society to be just, or truly democratic. You can know that without knowing how best to get there.
The fact that principles of justice don't immediately imply particular tax regimes does not mean that such principles are useless. Politicians impatient with philosophers not telling them what to do should adjust their expectations. Getting people to agree about what justifies inequality would be a big deal-even if they continued to disagree about how much inequality was thereby justified and how to go about getting rid of the inequality that wasn't.
The second content problem is that the people who matter to politicians-voters-tend not to agree with the principles endorsed by political philosophers. Few philosophers find that their attempts to follow reason lead them to the position endorsed by the median voter of Middle England. Many philosophers reject the idea that those who are born naturally talented deserve to earn more than those who are not. If David Beckham is lucky to have his footballing ability, and others are unlucky enough to command only the minimum wage, they should be no better or worse off than one another. Some inequality may be justified on incentive grounds-as per Rawls-but that is not a matter of people deserving differently. This so-called "luck egalitarianism" is far removed from public opinion, which holds that people do deserve to be rewarded in ways which reflect their contribution to social welfare.
Of course there are exceptions, but political philosophers are generally more egalitarian than the voters-hence more so than politicians, part of whose job is to reflect voters' views. When they come together, politicians don't want to hear philosophers' radical arguments. They want the innocuous bits which will play well with focus groups. Politicians come away frustrated by philosophers' utopianism, their failure to understand political constraints.
What is to be done? We can rule out the idea of the philosopher king, and not just because of all those mislaid bikes. Even philosophers think that there are good reasons to favour democracy over the imposition, by philosophical fiat, of right answers. (Although, because it is hard to believe that the popular will should prevail on all matters, the conflict between democracy and truth certainly generates deep problems.)
Politics is not a wholly rational activity. No one supposes that the careful exposition of clear arguments will simply triumph over emotion and prejudice. There may well be good reasons for politicians to do some pandering to the confusions and false beliefs of those they want to vote for them. Given the ways in which their words get spun by opponents and amplified in the media, some evasion and fudging are doubtless justified. If that's how to get elected and make the world a better place, these strategic reasons may also be moral reasons. So sliding and slipperiness are not always bad.
But reasons for saying vague and mistaken things are not reasons for holding vague and mistaken beliefs. When it comes to thinking, clarity, precision and truth have to be better than the alternatives. Perhaps political strategy requires politicians not to be too clear in the positions they present to voters. But that's no reason for them to be unclear about what they really believe, about what values they expect such a strategy to realise, and why they endorse those values. You can't expect them to think as systematically as philosophers. They have other things to be getting on with. But they could do better.
Perhaps I am misled by appearances. Not privy to their inner thoughts, I infer what politicians believe from what they say and write. Maybe they do indeed hold coherent and clear philosophical positions. Maybe what they present to the world reflects a careful judgement about the optimal long-term strategy for realising those positions, given the context in which they operate. This is the charitable reading of New Labour. Those seminars have not been a waste of time. Blair and Brown do really share our radical views about justice, equality and community. Unlike us, however, they can't say so. Where their policies seem to point in other directions, they result from real-world hard choices that philosophers never confront. So, for example, increasing diversity in state education will indeed create a multi-tiered system which threatens equality of opportunity and social solidarity. But it is justified, because that's the only way of keeping the well-off in the state system at all.
Philosophers can help. We may draw the line at logos and slogans, but that leaves plenty of room for attempts to make our ideas available to a wider public. It is not easy. It takes courage for those accustomed to the rarefied discourse of academia to leave behind the careful qualifications, the dealing with every objection, the familiarity of the arcane. Also, they have to handle the snootiness of those for whom only cutting-edge research is worthwhile. Still, scientists have managed to create a reading public for a genre which is entertaining and difficult. The intelligibility problem can be overcome.
What about content? It is hard not to be sympathetic to politicians' impatience with the utopianism of much academic political philosophy. Those same meetings which leave me frustrated by politicians' lack of intellectual clarity leave me also humbled by philosophers' inability to say anything useful. The obvious answer is for philosophers to engage with political constraints, to spend less time and energy on ideal theory, to work harder on what economists call theories of the second best.
By all means let's develop a philosophically informed approach which takes feasibility constraints more seriously, a third way, occupying the clear blue water between unworldly political philosophy and grubby electoral politics. We should indeed think hard about how to tailor our proposals to the realities we seek to improve. But let's be clear about what exactly is being tailored, and why. Philosophers must not allow practical constraints to infect their ultimate principles. What social justice requires of us, or what it would mean to take community seriously, are questions which cannot be answered by considering how far Middle England will go along with them.
Those realists who keep controversial views under wraps lest they frighten voters away, offering only proposals which are feasible in the current political climate, are in danger of believing their own rhetoric. Something like that seems to have happened in New Labour circles. That is surely more plausible than the charitable view that they are playing a long and secretive game in pursuit of a more radical vision. Politicians can be relied on to dilute the truth about justice if feasibility constraints require it. Philosophers must prevent that truth from slipping out of sight altogether. Our job is not to accommodate public opinion, but to change it. Politicians have been known to do some of that, too. n
