Why Political Philosophy?

What is international order, what kind of thing is it? Can we understand what international political order is without raising the question about what politics itself is, what it’s for? Is it about human flourishing, and what would that mean? Is there just one way of understanding what freedom and justice (etc.) are, or, with Alasdair MacIntyre, don’t we also have to ask the further question: Whose Justice? Which (as in what sort of) Freedom?  

The purpose of our Center is to engage the questions of our day about international order and politics from a perspective that includes the kinds of questions that philosophers ask. As the above examples illustrate, such questions often involve asking what something is and should be – not simply how it works or how we know it

We have already engaged in a series of conversations with scholars from many different countries, and these conversations have launched us on a number of productive lines of questioning. 

Our conversations in Moscow and in Washington, D.C. have made clear the importance of the unit, or category of analysis, in international relations. For IR realists (John J. Mearsheimer for example), the best unit of analysis is the nation state. Other analysts (Michael Lind) have suggested that we would be better served studying not states, but blocs (e.g., the American-led, Chinese, Russian, etc. blocs).  Still others (Samuel Huntington, Boris Mezhuev) suggest we are best served by trying to balance and/or reconcile not blocs, but different civilizations. Each of these approaches raises its own set of problems and possibilities.

What is the source of international disorder today? Is it the moral perfidy of certain leaders? Is it the inherently anarchic structure of international relations? The failure of some states to modernize properly into liberal democracies?  Or something else altogether?

An emerging, and, for many of us, promising analytic perspective has suggested that liberal democracy in its present form may be both self-undermining in the domestic political sphere (as, for example, Patrick Deneen has forcibly argued) and destabilizing in the international political sphere. Much remains to be done to unpack and concretize this thesis, however.

The word ‘civilization’ itself represents an important area for reflection. For many decades a controversy has raged over the notion of civilization(s).  Is it plural or singular? Is there one Western civilization? For that matter, is it necessarily ‘orientalizing’ (Edward Said) to affirm civilizational differences, or, to the contrary, is the denial of difference itself a sort of imperialism of misplaced universalism?

As our colleague Adrian Pabst has noted, we speak of German, French, Russian (etc.) classical music, ballet, literature — and indeed each nation has its own style of music, dance, or literature (no one would a mistake a Herman Melville novel for one written by Fyodor Dostoevsky) — and yet each of these national styles clearly forms part of a single civilizational structure (and, indeed, dialogue) of literature, dance and music. Mutatis mutandi, much the same can be said about philosophy and even religious faith. Does this not suggest a kind of unity of Western civilization ‘from Vancouver to Vladivostok’? And if so, why, on the political level, do we so vociferously deny this unity?

On the other hand, most religious faiths (certainly including Christianity) do not consider themselves geographically bounded. And what of Adam Webb (Deep Cosmopolis: Rethinking World Politics and Globalisation), who holds that the unity of the world is now a given, and for this very reason the preservation of deep traditions and faiths can only be tackled at the level of a deepened dialogue and support between the great world faith traditions? For that matter, are we more likely to solve problems of pressing moment (economic injustice, ecological damage, terrorism, etc.) by acknowledging civilizational difference and unity, or by erasing all deep difference precisely in the name of (democratic) unity? Our colleague Anatol Lieven has argued forcefully that acknowledging local, national attachments can actually facilitate the achievement of international common goods, by joining such goals to proximate political units that evoke enduring emotional attachments.

Some scoff at ‘philosophizing’ as merely of academic interest and too distant from ‘the real world’ to be of much interest. Such critics of philosophy have a certain point. What we need is not only the truth as such, much as we suffer today from its absence.  What we need even more is a reason to care about, about whether anything is true or false. It is precisely here that Simone Weil comes in handy.

Why Simone Weil?

Although Simone Weil is not to everyone’s taste, it is difficult to see how anyone of sound mind who actually takes the trouble to read Weil’s writings —remarkable in their depth and extent for someone who died at the age of 34 — can fail to find there many valuable insights into human conflict, civilization, culture, education, and much else.  

As modern people we often imagine that it speaks of our sophistication when we affirm that politics, when you get right down to it, is nothing more than force and power. That it is at heart simply a technique for holding onto power. Weil rejects this claim. Power is not an end, but a means. If we define politics as nothing more than force and power, then this power can only continue endlessly to grow and expand. After all, how can a means have a limiting principle?  

The modern notion of rights was also the subject of Weil’s critique. For our modern political concept (as Pierre Manent has noted), ‘Man’ is ‘a certain X who has rights.’ The vagueness of this X, its lack of any relation to something beyond itself (whatever that is), we take to be the very form of our freedom. For Weil, this notion involves a basic misunderstanding. Rights cannot be absolutes, because they are a power which can be either used well or abused.  What is absolute, therefore, is not rights, but obligation. And yet, to the extent we focus on rights severed from their source in obligation, we once again find ourselves in the same sphere of power (a right, to be effective, is necessarily an assertion of a power; and any right so asserted will be effective), the same realm that, as we have seen, lacks by its very nature a limiting principle.   

Weil’s central intuitions can be stated simply. First, the absolute centrality and primacy of the good. Second—and this is a corollary of the first—modern man fundamentally misunderstands the place and role of force in this world.  “For the last two or three centuries,” wrote Weil:

people have believed that force rules supreme over all natural phenomena, and at the same time that men can and should base their mutual relations upon justice, recognized as such through the application of reason. This is a flagrant absurdity. It is inconceivable that everything in the universe should be entirely subjected to the rule of force and that Man should be able to escape the effects of this, seeing that he is made of flesh and blood … (The Need for Roots)

It is difficult to avoid noticing this ‘absurdity’ in the realm of international relations. Modern realism accepts that force, not morality, rules supreme in the relations between states. Modern liberalism, for its part, stakes its claim on morality and reason—but this claim hangs in thin air. Weil helps us see why this is the case.

What is characteristic of modern ideology, in its relation to the good, is its a priori rejection of the good as a present actuality (cf. especially D.C. Schindler on this subject). Lacking any real presence, here and now, of the good, ideology proposes to pursue it nonetheless by means of, as Weil terms it, a ‘little mechanism’ which produces out of thin air what it nonetheless wholly lacks. Utilitarianism, classical 19th century liberalism (what we now call ‘laissez-faire’), Marxism—are all, Weil insists, mechanisms of this sort.

In each case, justice (i.e. the good) is allegedly produced automatically by one or another form of force. For laissez-faire, this ‘little mechanism’ operates by pretending that money is not itself a form of force, that it is, instead, an automatic producer of justice. For Marxism, “force is given the name of history; it takes the form of the class struggle … [while] justice is relegated to some future time.”  

How is one to move beyond these delusions and ideologies—delusions, incidentally, which have kept us trapped to this very day between the Scylla of liberalism and the Charybdis of realpolitik? According to Weil, the only bridge beyond this vicious circle is a kind of philosophical liberation from the delusion that brute force, when all is said and done, is what is sovereign in this world, when, in truth “… what is sovereign in this world is determinateness, limit. Eternal Wisdom imprisons this universe in a network, a web of determinations.”

Every visible and palpable force is subject to an invisible limit which it shall never cross. In the sea, a wave mounts higher and higher, but at a certain point, where there is nevertheless only space, it is arrested and forced to redescend. In the same way, the German flood was arrested, without anybody knowing why, on the shores of the Channel.

Weil’s claim here is meant both as scientific truth—she is describing after all a truth about nature, the pervasiveness of limits, the finiteness of waves—and as a poetic truth. This is the key to understanding Weil’s philosophical importance.

Conclusion

So what is the key political philosophical ‘take-away’ here for those of us who are interested in international relations? What does this approach have to add to the calls, already widespread, for limits in the form of ‘realism and restraint’? 

What is key here is the unity of beauty and truth, a unity also on the level of methodology. It is indeed not enough to simply know what is true. One must also care about it. Weil, perhaps unsurprisingly, puts it still more radically:  

The acquisition of knowledge causes us to approach truth when it is a question of knowledge about something we love, and not in any other case.