Review article: Liberalism and the politics of compulsion

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 533-553

  Stears, Marc ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250013164     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123407000270     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. John Stuart Mill, 'On Liberty', in Mary Warnock, ed., Utilitarianism (London: Fontana, 1987), pp. 126-250, at p. 135.
2. For excellent introductions to this issue, see Bernard Manin, 'On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation', Political Theory, 15 (1987), 338-68; and Thomas Nagel, 'Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16 (1987), 215-40.
3. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).
4. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 173.
5. See, for example, Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed., F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 21-2.
6. For examples of this recent trend, see Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2003); Jan Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).
7. For a fuller account of the notion of 'family resemblances' and the way in which the idea may be put to work in mapping contributions to political thought, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
8. There is some ambiguity of terminology in this regard. For some, liberalism aims at a politics 'without coercion', for others it aims to ensure that all coercion that is employed is 'legitimate'. Within liberalism, however, the difference is only semantic. The first usage is intended to imply that the legitimate or acceptable use of political power is by definition not coercive, whilst the second usage defines political power of all sorts as inherently 'coercive' and insists that the crucial distinction rests between whether such coercion as is employed is 'legitimate' or not. This article adopts the first usage for reasons of clarity but the argument would be unaffected by the adoption of the second. For examples of each and for a demonstration of their interchangeability compare the uses of 'coercion' in John Rawls, 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited' in his The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 131-80, at pp. 136- 40, with John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 68-71.
9. The question as to whether early forms of thinking now appropriated by liberals should themselves be described as liberal or are better known as proto-liberal is taken up in Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 141-2.
10. For an overview, see Manin, 'On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation', esp. pp. 342-4.
11. For a brief introduction to this form of resistance to the social contract tradition, see Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. pp. 67-72. See too Ross Harrison, ed., Jeremy Bentham: A Fragment on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 3-32; and John Stuart Mill, 'Utilitarianism' in Warnock, ed., Utilitarianism, pp. 288-95.
12. For examples and discussion, see John Stuart Mill, 'Bentham' in Warnock, ed., Utilitarianism, pp. 78-125, esp. at pp. 99-107.
13. For a more thorough overview, see the account in John Gray, Mill On Liberty; A Defence (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 70-89.
14. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 37. Further excellent discussions of the critique can be found in John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
15. See Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice, p. 3.
16. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 137.
17. That does not mean, of course, that all citizens would self-consciously accept the precise terms of every single action of the liberal state at every single moment, but it does imply that when a state constructed on agreed principles nonetheless compels citizens to act in accordance with its wishes not theirs, they do not have to understand its commands as coercive because they could appreciate that they have emerged from a political process and a political order to which they have, in some meaningful sense, agreed. I thank Andrew Sabl for this point.
18. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 3-46.
19. On the move from idealized standards of justification to actual citizen practices of reasonable persuasion, see Nagel, 'Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy', esp. pp. 232-4.
20. See too Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 253.
21. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 217.
22. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 370.
23. For an overview, see Thomas M. Scanlon, 'Rawls on Justification' in S. Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 139-67.
24. For the connections between Rawls's position and deliberative democracy, see Rawls, 'Idea of Public Reason Revisited', esp. pp. 135-9.
25. For an excellent guide to this disagreement, see Jonathan Quong, 'The Scope of Public Reason', Political Studies, 52 (2004), pp. 233-50.
26. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 93
27. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, p. 93.
28. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, p. v. See also, David Miller, Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 159.
29. On which, see John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: Harper Collins, 2000).
30. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 140.
31. Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 158. For other statements of a similar position, see Jane Mansbridge, 'Using Power/Fighting Power', in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 46-66, esp. at p. 54, and Glen Newey, After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2001).
32. Waldron, Law and Disagreement, p. 157.
33. In 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', Rawls himself addresses this concern by arguing that his version of public reason is immune to the charge that it 'mistakenly tries to settle political questions in advance' as it does not presume broad agreement on matters of political controversy in modern societies prior to discussion (p. 142). He does, however, contend that 'public justification' of the sort he demands from citizens is a form of 'argument addressed to others' which 'proceeds correctly from premises we accept and think others could reasonably accept to conclusions we think they could also reasonably accept' (p. 155). Put in these terms, there is still a difference between the Rawlsian and the theorist of compulsion, as the latter rejects the idea that such shared 'premises' can exist in contemporary societies.
34. William Connolly, 'Democracy and Territoriality', in Frederick Dolan and Thomas Dumm, eds, Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representation in American Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 249-67, at p. 251.
35. See, for example, James Tully, 'The Agonic Freedom of Citizens', Economy and Society, 28 (1999), 161-82.
36. See, for variants on this frequent theme, Michael Walzer, 'Deliberation, and What Else?' in Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 58-69; and C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
37. See Newey, After Politics, esp. pp. 5-15.
38. David Runciman, 'The Concept of the State', in Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath, eds, States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 28-38, at p. 29.
39. James Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott proposes a solution to these difficulties similar to that propounded by 'agonists' such as Honig, Mouffe and Tully: a solution grounded in maintaining spirited resistances to state authorities. Whether such a suggestion is itself likely to achieve the ends he desires is, of course, itself moot.
40. This dispute is best captured in the early twentieth-century argument between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey on the status of 'public opinion' in democratic societies, for which see the masterful contributions of Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: The Free Press, 1997), and John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, Ga.: Swallow Press, 1991).
41. Tully, 'Agonic Freedom of Citizens', p. 171.
42. Robert Lieberman, 'Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change', American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 691-712, at p. 109.
43. Lieberman, 'Ideas', p. 709.
44. See Manin, 'On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation', esp. p. 363.
45. A point well noted in Simone Chambers' s insightful review of After Politics in American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 808-9.
46. Tully, 'Agonic Freedom of Citizens', p. 162.
47. Mouffe, Return of the Political, p. 153. See also, Honig, Political Theory, p. 14, and Tully, 'Agonic Freedom of Citizens', esp. pp. 170-1.
48. See Geoffrey Hawthorn, 'The Promise of "Civil Society" in the South', in S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani, eds, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 269-86. John Dryzek appears to have some sympathy for this position, arguing that it is 'very hard for deliberation to reach' state officials and that, as such, deliberative practices should be encouraged outside of the state at least in the first instance. See Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, p. 29, and pp. 81-114. See also, Mark Warren, 'What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?' Political Theory, 30 (2002), 677-701.
49. Waldron, Law and Disagreement, p. 111.
50. Waldron, Law and Disagreement, p. 102.
51. Honig, Political Theory, p. 14.
52. Honig, Political Theory, p. 13.
53. See Chantal Mouffe, Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy (London: Centre for the Study of Democracy, 2002), esp. pp. 8-9.
54. See, for examples of this critique, Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (London: Granta Press, 2001); and David Runciman, The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). The historical emergence of this argument is sketched in Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
55. See Adam Pzeworski, 'The Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defence', in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, eds, Democracy's Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23-55.
56. Waldron, Law and Disagreement, p. 205.
57. See Waldron, Law and Disagreement, p. 205.
58. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 213 (emphasis added).
59. Amy Gutmann, 'Deliberative Democracy and Majority Rule', in Harold Hongju and Ronald Slye, eds, Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 227-34, at p. 230.
60. See Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 1-4.
61. Miller, Citizenship, p. 159. For a less dramatic example along similar lines, see Archon Fung, 'Deliberation Before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World'. Political Theory, 33 (2005), 397-419.
62. John Medearis, 'Social Movements and Deliberative Democratic Theory', British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2004), 53-75, p. 55.
63. See John Dryzek, 'Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies: Alternatives to Agonism and Analgesia", Political Theory, 33 (2005), 218-42, at p. 224. See also Lynn M. Sanders, 'Against Deliberation', Political Theory, 25 (1997), 347-76; and Iris Marion Young, 'Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy', Political Theory. 29 (2001), 670-90.
64. See Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, esp. pp. 68-71.
65. Medearis, 'Social Movements and Deliberative Democratic Theory', p. 69. See also, Mansbridge, 'Using Power/Fighting Power', esp. p. 66.
66. Jeremy Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism', Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1987), 127-59, p. 128. I think Andrew Sabl again for persuading me of the importance of this article in the development of contemporary liberal thought.
67. Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations', p. 150.