2009 freeden failures of political thinking

7/31/2019 2009 Freeden Failures of Political Thinking

1/24

Failures of Political Thinking

Michael Freeden

University of Oxford

The article investigates failures of political thinking as a normal and endemic phenomenon, yet one thatis theoretically under-conceptualised. It postulates three criteria for such failure: (1) the failure to deliverideationally what the political theory in question has itself undertaken through its creator(s) to deliver;(2)the failure to take on board the constraints imposed on the initial construction of a theory or argumentby the features and structure of political concepts; and (3) the failure of the specific epistemologies andideologies that underlie political theorising to confer sufficient conclusiveness on the theories that emergefrom them. The underlying causes of those three criteria invoke, in turn, three problems with politicallanguage and argument: first, the impossibility of keeping meaning constant over time; second, theindeterminacy that surrounds the eliciting and defining of the concepts and values a theory desires to

promote;and third,the inevitable ineffectiveness of offering sufficient comprehensive detail in prescribingpaths of political change or reform. Focusing on normatively prescriptive political thinking with regardto the construction of political macro visions and single overarching regulative principles, the articleexamines classical and contemporary instances of political thought. It studies their failures in the forms ofuncontrollable and absent temporal trajectories of argument; conceptual polysemy and decontestation;and the impediments normative thinking encounters when applied to the distinctive circumstances ofevery individual. Finally, it dismisses any necessary connection between theories of failure and conser-vatism, arguing instead that liberal epistemologies can accommodate some salient conceptual failures inthinking about politics. The article concludes that modest failure and temporary success may not be thatdistinct from one another; anything more spectacular in either direction should cause political theoriststo ponder.

In recent years there has been a spate of works on political failure by politicalscientists and economists, relating mainly to institutions and policies, as well asJames Scotts excellent study (Scott, 1998). Much of it concerns failed states andtheir inability to maintain political order. International relations theory, whilebemoaning the inadequacy of studies of failure, has also mainly examined thefailure of states to deliver political goods such as security, wealth, a legal order

or infrastructural requirements that characterise what is loosely referred to as aWeberian state (Milliken and Krause, 2002; Rotberg, 2002). A second type ofliterature concerns the unwillingness of states and their officers to honourstandards of political and ethical probity (Chomsky, 2006). A third genre hasidentified discourse failure in common deviations from the truth requirementsof reliable social science that can nonetheless be explained in terms of rationalchoice; such failures of explanation are regarded as forms of understandable, andoccasionally correctable, error (Pincione and Tesn, 2006). There has, however,been no equivalent literature on failures in political thinking and theorising. This

article contends that (1) political thought displays its own forms of failure; (2)some forms of failure in political thinking are endemic, unlike the institutional

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00732.x

P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 0 9 VO L 5 7 , 1 4 1 1 6 4

2008 The Author. Journal compilation 2008 Political Studies Association
http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


2/24

and policy cases of failure which are mostly portrayed as contingent and reparable;and (3) understanding the reasons for those failures illuminates both the possi-bilities and the permanent constraints that operate on the construction of politicalargument. The article singles out first-order failures in one central sphere of

political thinking: the construction of prescriptive visions of society that aspire tonormative status. In so doing, it draws attention to the second-order failure ofthe discipline of political theory to conceptualise and analyse systematically theproblem of first-order failures, and offers some steps in that direction.1 It also setsaside another common genre of failure in political thinking:the mostly accusatoryways in which general political discourse addresses the failures of individualpoliticians, governments and policies. That topic merits separate discussion.

Failure should be distinguished from fallibility. The latter,as elucidated by Popper,relates to the possibility of error in scientific assertions of knowledge. Prescriptive

and normative political thought are not falsifiable in Poppers sense, yet they canfail. Nor are cases included where uncertainty is consciously factored intotheories. Even that recognition does not eliminate failure, as some theorists whosubscribe to contingency, e.g. post-Marxists, are nevertheless tempted to offsetthat contingency in their substantive thinking by offering prescriptions that fail toprovide a durable formula.

Instead, I posit three specific criteria of failure in political thinking and in thetheories that thinking produces: first, the failure to deliver ideationally what thepolitical theory in question has itself undertaken through its creator(s) to

deliver; second, the failure to take on board the constraints imposed on the initialconstruction of a theory or argument by the features and structure of politicalconcepts; and third, the failure of the specific epistemologies and ideologies thatunderlie political theorising to confer sufficient conclusiveness on the theoriesthat emerge from them. The underlying causes of those three criteria invoke,respectively, three problems with political language and argument: first, theimpossibility of keeping meaning constant over time; second, the indeterminacythat surrounds the eliciting and defining of the concepts and values a theorydesires to promote; and third, the inevitable ineffectiveness of offering sufficient

comprehensive detail in prescribing paths of political change or reform.In this article, the three criteria relate specifically to the construction of grand,or macro, political visions and/or single and overarching regulative principles common, though far from ubiquitous, enterprises among political theorists andphilosophers. Plainly, in the normal course of their activities, political theoristsconsciously and conscientiously grapple with potential defects of coherence,consistency or clarity in their own theories,and they are centrally concerned withimproving and finessing approaches to micro problems. All that is not beingquestioned their theories may pass those tests with flying colours and still fail

the three criteria. Those criteria concern substrata issues that are often ignored by,or seen as beyond the professional responsibility of, those offering politicalvisions. In ignoring the criteria,as will be shown, macro theorists may nonetheless

142 M I C H A E L F R E E D E N


POLITICAL STUDIES: 2009, 57(1)
http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


3/24

announce their awareness of the possible defects and limitations of their theories,but not necessarily in the areas of concern to this study; that is to say, despiteexpressed tentativeness theorists may still overlook major structural and episte-mological barriers that their theories confront. In limiting the scope of their

responsibility, it is significant that the expectations hanging on the delivery ofpolitical visions, and that such macro theorists themselves encourage, are notprimarily those of other political theorists anticipating well-constructed argu-ments but those emanating from various publics professional and lay antici-pating through the received and consumed text the emergence of a new orbettered society, or a fundamentally reformed political system.

Nor are the three criteria a blanket condemnation of political visions andregulative principles. Evoking them does not involve denying that they maynonetheless have looser impacts: in terms of their inspirational effects, their

capacity to mobilise for a cause, their creativity or the way they may occasionallyinfluence in general terms future encounters with political practice and policymaking but those all fall short of delivering what was intended. There areundoubtedly further philosophical or aesthetic standards by which a theory willnot be considered to have failed. The emphasis here, instead, is on analysingpolitical theory itself as a thought artefact with empirically determinable features,and on some of the built-in weaknesses that lead to ideational culs-de-sac in thecentral political practice of thinking about politics. Consequently, this article isnot intended solely to engage the concerns of political theorists but those of

political scientists more broadly. It is part of a larger project that investigates theactual and ubiquitous features of thinking politically and offers a theoreticalapproach to analysing central political thought practices,their range,potential andlimitations.2

The case made in these pages is not simply the vague and common assertion thatthere is a gap between theory and practice. The emphasis here is rather onpre-practice. To borrow a distinction from comparative government literature(Linz and Stepan,1978, p. 18), I am not focusing on the outcomes or consequencesof political thinking in terms of the practices it enables, disables or fails to shape,

but on the outputs of political thinking in terms of the efficacy of their formu-lation as argumentative positions. This relates to the thought practices typical ofsome genres of political thinking and the lacunae they tend to exhibit. Inexamining the ideologies underlying instances of failure in theorising, I shallalso address crucial differences between archetypal conservative and liberalapproaches, though obviously not every member of each family will share all itscore morphological and epistemological attributes (Freeden, 1996, pp. 8991). Iwill argue that postulating such failure does not inevitably lead to endorsingtheories of human imperfection, and will assess the intricate relationship betweenliberalism and failure.

Why should we be interested in failures of political thinking? One compellingresponse is that in politics success, or creating the illusion of success, is the only

FA I L U R E S O F P O L I T I C A L T H I N K I N G 143


http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


4/24

currency in circulation,residually making failure either a taboo or the worst formof political censure. Yet because political failure is ubiquitous and salient, onewould expect its conceptualisation to be developed and complex. That expec-tation is confounded by the paucity of systematic reflection on the possible

interstices between political thinking and failure. Failures of political thinkingoften remain hidden from view in ordinary political language, unless used toberate someone elses inadequacies, and their analysis is even rarer as a tool at thedisposal of political theorists. As political theorists we under-conceptualise failurepartly because we have internalised an ideological framework in which failure isnot an option, in politics as well as in war and business; partly because conven-tional professional standards require us to formulate weighty and convincingarguments that we wish to succeed as arguments; and partly because normativepolitical theory in particular would cut off the branch on which it was sittingwere it to be deliberately wedded to epistemologies and methodologies thatanticipate failure. Those who offer substantive political theories are not noted foraddingthis argument may either succeed or fail,for that would rebound on theirprofessional reputations by undercutting the intellectual persuasiveness of theircase.3 Persuasive effectiveness is a precondition for making a case when prescrib-ing preferences though no guarantee against failure, of course. Moreover assincere political ethicists or ideologists propounders of substantive politicaltheories will normally believe in the rightness, truth or authenticity of theirarguments, thus removing ab initio the possibility that they are dealing with afailed theory or argument. The belief in such truth or rightness is a precondition

for making a case for universalising norms. On the other hand, participants in apolitical discourse they wish to influence agenda pushers and certain ideologues may think to themselves, this argument may either succeed or fail but if Ipresent it as a sure-fire success I may be able to manipulate it to a controllingposition among rival arguments. Some of those techniques are grouped underthe term spin. Even then,one might suggest, political theorists should be curiousabout which rhetorical argumentative devices resorted to by such discourseswork and what might be considered failure on their part.

The Asymmetry of Failure and Success

Failure, I contend, is the default position of prescriptive political theorising political thinking intended to make a difference in the ways political processes andarrangements are conducted.While failures will occur at many levels of articu-lation and political discourse, the following discussion is restricted mainly, thoughnot solely, to recognised prescriptive political theorists and the complex politicalvisions they produce.Not all of the failures in question are catastrophic;hence thisis not a counsel of despair about the futility of political thinking, but simply a

comment on one of the features of the politically normal the normality offailure. Indeed, the ability to distinguish between minor and major forms offailure in political theory may protect theorists from certain pitfalls and reconcile





5/24

us to reasonable rather than inflated expectations from the practice of politicaltheory. Such inflation comes not with a particular ideology but more generallywith the territory of the political a domain of human practices particularlyconcerned with establishing finalities for group conduct and organisation. In

parallel,political discourse as well as political theory is saliently permeated with thelanguage of finality: sovereignty, authority or legitimacy are concepts that imme-diately come to mind; and many normative or ideal-type theories postulateteleological and/or revolutionary end states. The normal political logic of politi-cal actors and theorists is therefore all too frequently at loggerheads with theconstraining features that operate on the practices of political thinking. Some ofthose practices, though ubiquitous, are avoidable in principle. Others, however,clash irreconcilably with the features of linguistic indeterminacy as well as withthe ideational terrain within which political thought operates. The specific claimthat the features of political concepts and arguments are particularly unsuited tothe political language of finality pertains to the three forms of failure in politicalthinking on which I focus: flaws of temporal durability, of the definiteness androbustness of decision making (the ending of contestation) and of control over thepolitical space which a political theory penetrates (universalisation and the thor-ough embracing of particular cases).

To claim that failure is the default position of prescriptive political theory mayrightly be seen as a tautology. For to default means to fail. Here, rather, defaultis employed in a computer-speak sense the preset position from which one

proceeds and to which one reverts. A default position is not always maintained,but lurks as a background magnet, and politics, including political thinking, isnotably a continual set of attempts to move away from that position. Political willand political imagination are two routes through which those endeavours atalternative futures are established, either as targets or as consoling and reassuringvisions. Indeed, we have come to appreciate and admire such exercises in argu-mentative and imaginative ingenuity as the nub of analytic and prescriptivepolitical thought, but they are flawed nevertheless. Failures in political thinkingmay involve only partial slippage, not necessarily a return to square one.We arenot focusing on reactionary ultramontanism, or on a conservatism that proclaimsthe futility of change and human agency.

One clue to the analysis of failure is found in the different conventional usages ofits ostensible opposite, success. A prominent dictionary currently defines successas the prosperous achievement of something attempted; the attainment of anobject according to ones desire (Oxford English Dictionary, online). But in thepast, success has not always been the opposite of failure. Success once meant thatwhich happens in the sequel, the termination, issue, upshot, result and it couldeither be good or ill success. Crucially, it operates on a future time dimension.

Hence, in order to explore the first criterion of failure the failure to deliverwhat a theory undertakes to deliver it is instructive to proceed from the initialobservation that, if success is future oriented and purposive, failure is the





6/24

unattainability or blocking of future orientation and purposiveness. That wouldlink success importantly to intentions and to agency, to a willed and realisableplan,4 and failure to the impossibility or the unavoidable obstruction of agency,orto misguided future orientation and purposiveness. That said, a distinction

between two kinds of failure to deliver must be made.The one relates to contingent failures of expectation both on the part of theproducers and the consumers of the political text or utterance. Expectations inpolitical thinking, and of political theorising, may be based on promises, calcu-lations or manipulative power, any of which can fail. Promises and, more specifi-cally, contracts which involve a formal commitment to future action may bebreached. The formal scenario will then not happen, because of the reactivated,and now negatively inclined, will of the agents. That contingency may alsoaccount for the foundering of calculations that certain values will be realised,

because of the mis-estimation of risk or probability, including intervening factorssuch as the absence of human support. Manipulative discursive power aiming tosecure the triumph of particular thought patterns may encounter resistance, ordisplay persuasive weaknesses. Although all such failures are common, and manyare difficult to avoid, there is nothing inevitable about them.

The other form of failure relating to the first criterion accompanies politicalvisions, or the offering of general political theories that include single or over-riding regulative principles. These are in a different class of relationship betweenintent and goal.Whereas promises, calculations or manipulative power are tech-

niques of delivering expectations,political visions are broad,often comprehensive,views of a well-functioning, or a good, society (though occasionally dystopias aswell). To remove any misunderstanding, this is not to claim that all politicalthinking is utopian, or to deny that the concept of utopia has been extended bypolitical theorists to encompass various forms of change. Rather, the claim is thatonevery widespread and salient form of thinking politically is the construction ofvisions and regulative principles, and it is one particularly prone to failure in theterms discussed here. Nor is it to claim that all visions and future-orientatedprinciples are utopian in the simple sense of being other-worldly; nevertheless,

they may be elusive and improbable in their endeavour to proffer long-term orpermanent solutions to everyday issues.

To avoid failure in what such visions claim to deliver ideationally there has to bean astonishing indeed impossible degree of control over possible futuretrajectories of an argument or discourse. The more complex, or the moreimaginatively distanced,the political theory or ideology carrying that vision tendsto be, the more will certain aspects of it be disabled, due to the radical contin-gency of the future (Scott, 1998, p. 343). Put differently, contingent control overtime leads to non-contingent failure in political thinking.We are not talking of

thinking about short-term policy objectives but about the typical macro visionsof political thinking. For example, short-term concrete intentions to recogniseand mitigate the personal distress of the unwell, to endorse the pooling of risks



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


7/24

and to underline mutual social responsibility through specific policies attached toa national health service as long as those goals are defined in modest terms arenot the same as the visionary macro intent to create social arrangements that areneutral among different conceptions of the good. That neutrality is both prac-

tically unattainable and conceptually impossible,on the overriding strength of theargument that there is no view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986).Or at another level,the intent to improve the quality of life by reducing the consumption of fossilfuels through taxation is not the same as the visionary intent to eradicate povertyby eliminating not only absolute but relative scarcity. As the latter scarcity is aproduct of constantly competing perceptions and malleable expectations, thepsychological and cultural control over such factors in an imagined future isinconceivable.

Uncontrollable and Absent Temporal Trajectories

Let us examine instances of the frequent and certain failure of political thinkingto deliver what it has undertaken. It occurs when a given type or level ofexpectation superimposed on an initial discursive position cannot be met becauseof the nature of the argument its atemporality, its perfectionism or the postu-lation of a hypothetical and unrealisable model. This category relates partially toagency and intent, but mainly to real-world inapplicability. It is an output thatensures the total absence of an outcome, a feature less prevalent in policyrecommendations than in grand theorising. How do we actually recogniseMarxs species-being? Can we really imagine a non-competitive society?

In many utopian and Idealist theories Robert Berki refers to the idealism ofimagination (Berki, 1981, p. 232) future trajectories are spelt out with a greatlucidity whose remoteness, however, secures them from being put to the doubletest of realisation (outcome) and of realisability (initial plausibility of conceptu-alisation). Idealist future may unfold in ostensible historical time; utopian futuremay leap into discontinuous time. In the inception and present status of thosetheories, success can only be anticipated through removing subsequent choice

and agency from their projections and trajectories, or through controlling thatagency.5 In the latter instance, the anticipated normative transformations of asociety assume, and are dependent on, the harnessing of a malleable and unifiedfuture human will as the means for their realisation. The author of the politicaltheory attempts to exercise ultimate control over the will and agency of theindividuals whose social and political arrangements are envisaged, by effectivelyreplacing their will with his or hers. An agentically produced normativity basedon channelling the agency of others, however, is either self-contradictory or, atleast, precarious.

Thus, Fouriers the destinies are the past, present and future results of Godsmathematical laws of universal movement (Fourier, 1996, p. 36) eliminateshuman agency. Alternatively, the controlling agent was the utopias entrepreneur.



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


8/24

Robert Owens own assessment of his paternalist influence on a predeterminedutopia was driven by his custodianship of the Great Truth:It is of all the truthsthe most important, that the character of man is formed FOR not BY himself(quoted in Pitzer, 1997, p. 100). Hegels the State consists in the march of God

in the world (Hegel, 1991, p. 279) is far more complex. It operates not throughbypassing human agency but through co-opting human ethical will into a largerdesign and rhythm (OBrien, 1975, p. 31), in which the cunning of reasonnotwithstanding the idea of the modern state sets the standards of self-consciousness, recognition and freedom that expose all existing states as imper-fect. Hegels employment of speculative reason underpins those moves. Hisexploration of the limits of subjectivism and empirical intuition leads to hispromotion of the philosophy of reason, totality, the whole. As he maintained,speculation is the activity of the one universal reason directed upon itself(Pippin, 1989, pp. 689, p. 79). But that ambitious, non-sceptical overreach of thepower of thought, when worked out in the actuality of the historical arena,produces a heavily constraining retrospective movement.While with Fourier andOwen, human agency is pre-constrained by a given future or a knowledgeableindividual that serves as the context in which agency can be exercised, in Hegelscase since he refuses to set up a world beyond (Hegel, 1991, p. 20) analternative present is located at the culmination of a selective and sanitisedtrajectory that contains the immanent, true, one and unified reason. The subjec-tivity of agency is caught up in a momentous, singular, historical flow and iserhoben to an objective plane. That present is a chimerical regulative ideal not least

because Hegel detaches that which he identifies as rational in history from therest:The present has cast off its barbarism and unjust arbitrariness, and truth hascast off its otherworldliness and contingent force, so that the true reconciliation,which reveals the stateas the image and actuality of reason, has become objective(Hegel, 1991, p. 380, emphasis in original).

In William Morris reflections on his own imaginative creations, utopia was aspeculation (though not in Hegels sense) about a promised land and a matterof temperament. He saw it partly as an intellectual conviction deduced from thestudy of philosophy or from that of politics and economics in the abstract.

Revealingly, Morris wrote: the logical sequence of events is sometimes inter-rupted and turned aside by the historical; and my hope is, that now we know ...we shall consciously resist the reversal of the process, which to some seemsinevitable(Morris, 1889). That refers to the characteristic socialist utopianargument that human agency is activated in order to ensure a necessary process,underplaying the tensions between inevitability, historical contingency and con-sciousness. Tellingly, and unlike many forms of cooperative social Darwinism atthe time, Morris did not resolve those contradictions by locating the emergenceof human agency in the inevitability of the historical process itself.Rather,he saw

a danger that utopias would be accepted by their readership with all theirnecessary errors and fallacies ... as conclusive statements of facts and rules ofaction (Morris, 1936, p. 502). Similar criticisms have been applied to anarchist



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


9/24

theories, which are vulnerable to what Stuart White, following Molnar, hastermed an impossibility theorem. Inasmuch as the vision of anarchy requiresuniversal consent, and repudiates force in the attempt to gain and maintain it, ananarchist society is an impossibility (White, 2007, p. 14).

In sum, single-minded certainty, or purity of conviction, in managing temporaltrajectories relies on initially detecting laws, rhythms and logical inevitabilities the well-known problem of exercises in teleology or on wishing away allpossible impediments to the free play of the human imagination and will, and ofrecommended human practices. Instead of path dependency a term politicalscientists employ concerning the hold that past occurrences have on presentdecisions we encounter future-path determination. As Dewey perceptivelywrote,the philosophies of flux also indicate the intensity of craving for the sureand fixed. They have deified change by making it universal, regular, sure (Dewey,

1929, p. 50). The impossible prognosis of an as yet non-existing future is the only(silent) guarantee against the immediate perception of failure of the projection;hence in the short term it may be exhilarating and motivating. Paradoxically,utopian and anarchist discourses are frequently inspired by what they see ascurrent political failures, and their thought patterns are conscious or unconsciousdiversionary strategies to transcend the awfulness of those experienced failureswhile presenting themselves as genuine desires for (lasting) human and socialimprovement.Much,though not all,utopian thinking addresses what ChristopherHood terms the continual dethroning of orthodoxy (Hood, 1998, p. 190) by

sidestepping human fragility and thus ostensibly disconnecting the vision fromthe factors that will erode it. But in insisting on full success, such theories setthemselves up for inevitable failure. They re-embed failure in the very vision ofa world of unattainable perfection that some utopias crave, or at least a worldpermanently removed from the more oppressive one of existing social ills. 6 Suchfuture-path determination could only be achieved by removing or guiding futurereflective and critical agency, by blocking off all routes but one when arriving ata conceptual, logical or ideological intersection. Of course, the intentions ofutopian and anarchist thinkers may also be located in the realm of political tactics futuristic visions designed to mobilise immediate support for contentiouspolitics in which case they may be contingently successful. The success here,however, is not that of a visionary political theory but of short-term rhetoricalmanipulation. Utopians and anarchists may also engineer the success of increas-ing awareness of current social defects, but that relates to the identification of aproblem, not to its ideational solution.

The scientific garb in which Marx and Engels dressed their historical laws, incontrast to the arbitrary imagination of individual thinkers, replicated theproblem of failure while charging the utopians with that very shortcoming. But

even as they accused utopians of excessive detail in their visions of perfection,their own alternative macro visions floundered on the conviction that determi-nate capitalist development would in future produce socialist solutions hence





10/24


11/24

they incorporate a reasonably just constitutional regime; that is, unless theysubscribe to a constitutional consensus. Rawls is not prepared to accept a con-sensus based on compromises among comprehensive doctrines actually existingin societybecause that isthe wrong kind of consensus,grounded not on his ideal

of a reasonable overlapping consensus but on existing interests (Rawls, 1996, p.lx, p. xlvii, p. 389). That ideal is extra-political, but not in Rawls highly restrictedsense of political. It is extra-political because it is worked out first as afreestanding view that can be justified pro tanto without looking to, or trying tofit, or even knowing what are, the existing comprehensive doctrines (Rawls,1996, p. 389). The famous veil of ignorance now applied to comprehensivedoctrines honours us with a return visit. That is hardly compatible with Rawlsclaim to reflect the political culture of a democratic society (Rawls, 1996, p. 3) a concrete and specific culture that has been worked out through continuous(non-Rawlsian) political struggle over time.

Second,Rawls runs up against the serious problem that non-liberal political beliefsystems may not be prepared to endorse the boundary distinction between Rawlsdomains of the political and the comprehensive because of their very differentunderstandings of the political. Rawls makes no concessions to what a compara-tive political theory might reveal, or to the reception of his later phrase realisticutopias outside liberal democracy indeed, those utopias only provide justice forliberal and decent Peoples in a Society of Peoples (Rawls, 1999, p. 6). Thatclosed-circle utopianism projects a sobering light on the purported achievability

of Political Liberalism, vacillating as it does between willed probability and moralnecessity. Even within liberalism, as I have argued elsewhere, there can be no clearboundary between the political and the comprehensive (Freeden, 1996, pp.22677). Liberalisms internal pluralism cannot be isolated in comprehensivespheres, nor be satisfied with acknowledging that there are different and incom-patible liberal political conceptions which Rawls then relates only to thedistribution of goods (Rawls, 1996, p. xlix) but must be able to challenge bothexisting and prospective constitutional consensus.7

Third, the rhythm of argument proceeds rigorously from a constitutional con-

sensus to an overlapping consensus that beckons in the future,over time (Rawls,1996, p. 168). Rawls, however, does not think that a challenge to the formerwould be likely, because he assumes that constitutional essentials are always, ornearly always reasonably decidable and because he assumes that what constitutesthe domain of the political is not up for dispute: Public reason ... specifies thepublic reasons in terms of which such questions are to be politically decided(Rawls, 1996, p. liii). Such public reasons are not as flexible as Rawls suggestswhen allowing for constitutional amendments,because a constitutional consensusbased on the liberal principles of justice advocated by Rawls needs to meet the

urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certainpolitical basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority (Rawls,1996, p. 161). If public reasoning may be fallacious, public reason is by definition



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


12/24

always reasonable (Rawls, 1996, p. lvi). The possibility that a future generationmight entertain a very different view of rights both adding and subtractingrights as has been the case throughout the history of rights, is not mentioned.Moreover, when Rawls then moves to an overlapping consensus, it encompasses

some essential needs as well as some basic rights, thus broadening the unity hepostulates. That broader unity relies on a conjecture that liberal differences canbe narrowed and that they can be correctly based on fundamental political ideasin a democratic public culture (Rawls, 1996, p. 167). Rawls faith in the outcomedoes not falter. As he concludes,

We must start with the assumption that a reasonable just political society is possible,and for it to be possible, human beings must have a moral nature, not of course aperfect such nature, yet one that can understand, act on, and be sufficiently movedby a reasonable political conception of right and justice to support a society guided

by its ideals and principles (Rawls, 1996, pp. lxilxii).The firstmustis indeed possible,but not necessarily on Rawlsterms;the secondmust is contestable. Rawls mixing of imperatives with permissives is unsettling.But then, creating the illusion that the blocking off of alternatives has notoccurred, or asserting that the internal consistency, the ethical force or therhetorical passion of a theory are sufficient reason for its acceptance and imple-mentation, are among the most distinctive characteristics of political ideologies.

The Limits of Determinacy

The second criterion of failure identifies it in terms of lacunae already evident inconceptualisation or in argumentational epistemology many of which relate tothe issue of indeterminacy as it applies to the initial theory or argument. Thatensures a priori contestation of what might constitute success. Here the policy-formation stage, and the preliminary postulation of values, include too manyimponderables for specific goals to be attached to them.It is the problem of failingto determine unquestionably what we want to happen a different problem fromnot being able to ascertain what actually will happen. There are in fact multiple

things we assume can, may or should happen the pliable presuppositions havemanifold successions but no clear route to success. What is democracy? boilsdown to what internal weighting within democracy should be accorded toequality, to self-determination, to participation and to representation?. What iscommunity? requires a decision on is community about cooperation, identity orcontrol?. The expressed intent to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq ismeaningless unless accompanied by a conceptual decision on what is meant byfreedom and democracy that is, the unavoidability of having to choose amongthe competing conceptions of a concept in order to arrive at a successful

though invariably temporary decontestation of the terms that also ensures theircompatibility, which is by no means a given (Freeden, 1996, pp. 4795).While themacro structure of the theory may be clear in the eyes of its formulators, the



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


13/24

micro connections within that (holistic) structure are too legion to count, letalone predict. In this case the complexity of the search for success overlooks theinfinite mutations of its conceptual components.8 The chances of the right that is to say consensual and uncontested conceptual permutation coming along

and ensuring the clear-cut realisation of a theory are miniscule.The impression of success can only be ensured,and failure apparently avoided, bythe dual yet fallible processes of strict conceptual decontestation and the delib-erate or unintentional disregard for the developmental elusiveness of morpho-logical complexity. That would involve discounting the indeterminate propertiesof concepts, and superimposing a map of so large a magnification that entire areasof conceptual meaning would remain uncharted, covering up the failure of thetheory to give polysemy its due. That is not to argue that no principles generalenough to be comprehensible exist. The right to life, even with slight modifi-

cations (the deliberate termination of pregnancy is one grey area), is one suchprinciple. But the thicker,more intricate and more comprehensive the theory, theslighter the possibility of bringing it out in sufficiently sharp focus to permit anuncontested lucid formulation. And a theory that remains seriously and substan-tively contested cannot be seen as a success of political thinking.

Typical failures to appreciate the rich but invariably contestable conceptualstructure in any political argument are evident in competing ideologies. Thatfailure is not ordinarily identified by those who hold the decontested positionsthemselves to the contrary, they seem assured of their own success but bythose sitting on the sidelines. Take the dispute between Burke and Paine over thestatus of rights, in which each fails to offer a conceptually compelling rebuttal oftheir opponent or to state their own case irrefutably. As is well known, indistinguishing between real and false rights, Burke decontests rights as located incivil society and its conventions, as distinct from natural rights that are extra-socialand perfect in metaphysical abstraction. On the latter he writes,The pretendedrights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysi-cally true, they are morally and politically false (Burke,1968,p. 153).In particular,he includes restraints and liberties among the rights of men; they concern virtue

and prudence in a communal and governmental context, and they are a contract-cum-partnership linking the dead, the living and those to be born. Paine, to thecontrary, locates rights in the unbound reason of individuals, not in a temporallyindefinite contract but in the temporal present of those exercising the right liberating future rights exercisers from the restraints of past rights exercisers.Rights are not culture and space specific but universal and equal.While Burkefinds rights in the cumulative wisdom of a society, Paine associates them with thewisdom of a creator (Paine, 1969, pp. 878). Both are metaphysical or non-empirical assertions located in assumed pasts on which the subsequent decon-

testation of rights rests. Despite these two scholarly interventions, a theory ofrights remains as open as before. The definition of a right is suspended betweenindeterminate questions such as:are rights invented,discovered or do they evolve?



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


14/24

Are they universal and/or particular? What is the basis of the validity thattransforms a claim or entitlement into a right: reason, human nature, the capacityto suffer, the capacity to choose, a vital need? The multiple determinate, decon-tested answers to those always ignore,or fail to override decisively, other plausible

responses and therefore fall short of offering durable conceptual solutions.Current contestations over rights fare no better. Disputes between pro-life andpro-choice groups over abortion flounder ultimately over the technical definitionof the beginning of life.Were the moment of life to be decisively established, thequestion of its sanctity and of the morality of its extinction would shift to anotherethical or legal domain. Selecting the moment of conception would remove theground from under pro-choice contenders; selecting the moment of birth or ofindependent sustenance would undermine pro-lifers. Absent definitional preci-sion, the debate possesses limitless durability. The permanent impossibility, in all

likelihood, of arriving at such a definition ensures its essential contestability. Toreturn to the Iraq example, what exactly has to happen in Iraq for us to sayunequivocally: freedom and democracy have finally arrived!? Success heredepends on the clear articulation of goals, but that feature is not the naturalproperty of concepts and language,as it is impossible to hold decontestation downagainst the fluidity of conceptual meaning that all political concepts display. Toreiterate, those kinds of failure are not catastrophic but normal. Because decon-testation is inevitable if meaning is to be conveyed, the failure of politicalconceptualisation is built into the permanent fragility of decontestation itself.

Acknowledging that is the privilege of political theory; denying it is the pre-rogative of ideologies. Yet political theorists, perhaps inevitably, regularly assumethe mantle of ideologists.

Once we accept the essential contestability of concepts (Collier et al., 2006;Freeden, 2004) we are in a position to understand why a dual failure is built intodecontested choice. First, the decontested choice of a conception among thosecontained in a given concept will be regarded as a failure by other decontesterswho are pushing different conceptions of the same concept, and occasionally asan impoverished choice even for the choosing agent. The exercise of choice in

a pluralist world necessitates the curtailment of many reasonable conceptions of aconcept, and hence always disappointing some points of view, failing to do themjustice. Agentic control over meaning turns out to be too limited to deliver robustphilosophical underpinning. Second, the failure relates to the goal of precising a common goal, as has been critically noted (Collier and Levitsky, 1997), ofpolitical scientists with regard to the notion of democracy,but also an aspirationof political philosophers bent on conceptual clarity, as well as a central aspect ofthe act of decontestation itself. A famous instance is Mills dictum: The onlyfreedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own

way (Mill, 1977a, p. 226), an attempt at precision that typically generates newimprecision. But, as H. S. Becker observed,Unfortunately, we cannot make ourconcepts precise and at the same time keep the full range of evocative meaning





15/24

they have acquired in ordinary discourse (Becker, 1960, p. 40). The conceptualprecision of abstract prescriptive politico-philosophical debate appears to signalthe kiss of death for actual political processes (Freeden, 2005), but the parallelimaginative precision of much utopian and regulative discourse also signals the

kiss of death for obtainable futures. The same conclusion applies to theorisingabout such discourse. In sum, although decontestation with its attempted strictcurtailment of meaning is crucially important for decision making, the vitality oflanguage ensures that decontestation will fail to hold meanings constant, due tocontinuous shifts in word usage and in the meanings a word signifies. Decontes-tation obscures a world of synchronic multiple options that further mutate overtime and across cultures. Some political scientists lament the ambiguity of con-cepts as a serious handicap, obstructing theory formation (Rosenthal, 1978, p.217, p. 224). But if ambiguity and indeterminacy are normal that lament is amisunderstanding, for then failure in conceptualisation the failure of HumptyDumptys famous insistence on making a word mean just what I choose it tomean is structurally ineliminable.

The Elusiveness of Inclusiveness

The third criterion of failure concerns the cases when features of politicalthought, and the manifold peripheral components of political concepts, do notenable us to specify adequately what actually should happen. The failure relates tocomprehensiveness and completeness, to tying up the innumerable loose ends a

complex argument produces; in short, it is a failure of argumentational exhaus-tiveness and conclusiveness.9 This category relates to the difficulty ofassessingthesuccess of certain exercises in agency, intentionality and purposiveness howevercommon they may be. It is not about the existential absence of the outcome, norabout the terminological confusion that essential contestability enjoins in settingout a robust conceptual content for what the output might be, but about theelusive embrace of the output once it is thought through. Do our best theoriesof justice really create a fair society? Is liberalism the winning ideology?

The central issue at stake with the third criterion is this. The formulation of

designs for desired political arrangements creates the illusion of argumentativeand deliberative success by means of chains that link premise to conclusion, andother chains that link one moral argument harmoniously with another, througha process of withdrawal from the real world of political thinking with its diverseconstraints.In the case of ideal-type visions,the first set of chains offers a spuriouslogical sequence while the second set of chains offers a spurious compatibility.The spurious compatibility is mainly a question of finding the right decontestedconceptions of various concepts that can exist adjacent to each other, whileexcluding others. The spurious logical sequence is the problem here. Its force

supposedly does not diminish as it proceeds from premise to conclusion yet itis superimposed on a set of arguments that tapers off, that loses force, specificityand clarity as it proceeds.





16/24

Put differently, future-path determination masks the inevitable inconclusivenessof paths of political argument and replaces it with its illusory opposite, conclu-siveness in its now rare but relevant meaning of forming the end (OxfordEnglish Dictionary,online). The more intricate the political theory the more,say,

it wishes to take into account factors of merit, need and luck in allocating scarceresources the more intractable are potential solutions when attempting to dojustice to the millions of individual cases in a society. Hence visions of a goodsociety necessarily have a cut-off point, imposed by the growing uniqueness andspecificity of detail when they begin to diverge from abstract generalities. Forexample, the allocation of distributive justice to individuals simply does not workbeyond a certain point; nor can such theories assign conclusive weight to therelative claims of merit, need and luck, or identify the concrete occupant of abroad category such as the least advantaged. The arbitrary cut-off points arenecessary in order to contain and process meaning, but arbitrary they are. Thealternative is to invoke the phrase regulative principle, which all too frequentlyembraces the meaning of a regulative ideal. But the notion of a regulative idealconceals the inconclusiveness and vagueness of political concepts that, in turn,dictate the unavoidable imprecision of distributive measures. Thus RonaldDworkin asserts that we want to treat ourselves ... as a community governed bya single and coherent vision of justice and fairness, given that justice ... is amatter of the right outcome of the political system. This evokes a purifiedinterpretation, offering the best justification of law as seen from the perspectiveof no institution in particular and thus abstracting from all the constraints of

fairness and process that inclusive integrity requires. Tellingly, he then concedes,the argument must now move towards arguments of utopian theory (Dworkin,1986,p.404,pp.4078).Some philosophers,in other words,focus on right actionrather than on the inexhaustibly messy details of such action.

From the viewpoint of the individuals who comprise a society, systems of justiceare incapable of taking into account the fine print of personal circumstances. Asystem of distributive justice must fail in principle when even one member isthe victim of injustice consequent upon the failure of the theory to cater forintractable complexity. That failure is no marginal hiccup but something acutely

perceived by all individuals at the receiving end. For example, the broad con-straints of a regulative ideal cannot offer the detailed decontestation that isnecessary when micro components of that ideal are in zero-sum value relation-ships,which consequently elude the harmony among concepts that many ethicistsanticipate, and whose imposed solution will unavoidably frustrate one of theparties. Regulative ideals also fail, as with political obligation, when their claimedgenerality cannot satisfy all reasonable approaches (Klosko, 2004, p. 3). Regulativeideals introduce the simplicity that undercuts philosophical conventions ofcomplexity and discursive experiences of conceptual pluralism, but that sim-

plicity is redolent of ideological discourse, through which failures often seem lessobvious. When instead we reasonably pursue complexity we end up withinconclusiveness.



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


17/24

Failures, gentle or harsh, cannot be avoided in visions of distributive justice, norwhen constructing theories of human rights. There the move from major tominor to minute rights raises boundary problems of vagueness concerning thespelling out of the general categories of liberty, well-being and even life, as in the

contested area of abortion. Or it applies to the political satisfaction of humanneeds, caught between objective and subjective understandings, between physi-cal and emotional categories and between basic and insatiable optional needsthat permeate thinking about the welfare state. Merely unpacking the notion ofequality of opportunity reveals an overwhelming list of barriers to be removed(physical, economic, cultural,emotional,gender, ethnic, age),and the struggle overspelling out their prioritisation for each individual would end in stalemate, oncethe most salient inequalities were identified. As Charles Anderson points out, ina discussion already only focused on liberal conceptions of distributive justice,

The pragmatic liberal approach to welfare policy cannot readily be reduced to atight, formal theory. To base welfare on the universalization of essential servicesentails a constantly open estimate of the engagements and opportunities that arecrucial to the good life. Thus, the problem of welfare is never settled. It is open tocontinuing debate. ... Liberalism has failed to secure the more fundamental justdistributions (Anderson, 1990, pp. 1401).

In our terminology, it is faced with the inconclusiveness of relevant information a problem shared with all other ideologies.

The difficulty with general political visions that require the recognition ofindividual claims is that their logical paths branch out into innumerable andinterminable byways as a direct result of two factors:conceptual polysemy and themove from the general to the particular. The polysemy of political concepts always carrying more meanings than any given instance of the concept cancapture requires choice and agency in order to negotiate among the plurality ofmeanings and the infinite range of paths that such meanings open up.Withoutsuch negotiation the decisions central to politics are corrupted. Semantic abso-lutism silences all agency but that of the philosopher or ideologue, which gives

short shrift to the pluralistic (if you wish, democratic) opening up of meaningformation to a multitude of idea choosers. Ultimately, however, the real-worldconstraints of political thinking catch up with the absolutists and the universa-lisers, re-imposing failure on their inevitably flawed ontologies and epistemolo-gies, let alone on their good intentions. Even the political philosophers ortheorists who act as the sole agents that choose meaning cannot control thelogical paths of their theories as they stretch beyond the horizon of capture.Tellingly, Burke makes a comment on simplified constitutional and governmentalproposals that mirrors the problem of inconclusiveness:it is better that the whole

should be imperfectly and anomalously answered, than that, while some parts areprovided for with great exactness,others might be totally neglected(Burke,1968,p. 153).



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


18/24

As the possible meanings of concepts multiply, and conceptual intersection createsa tangle of intermeshing as well as contradictory possibilities, the efficacy ofargumentation grinds to a halt, abandoning details as insoluble and leaving thevision without a possible endpoint. Particulars are too numerous to be contained

in any one scheme, not least because any political theory requires some stream-lining in order to be intelligible and communicable (Freeden, 2005, p. 119). Ina hypothetical world where each political concept had only one meaning, ameaning also compatible with those carried by other political concepts, wherevagueness did not reign, such failures would be avoidable. That, however,does notconstitute any known world of human thought and language.

Normalising Failure: From Conservative Fatalism toLiberal Epistemology

How should one react to the common charge that to endorse failure as normalis a profoundly conservative viewpoint? To begin with, the identification offailure as a default position needs contextualising. It is an observation, rather thanthe desideratum it almost seems to be in some conservative doctrines that espousetheories of innate human imperfection. Nor does it reject the significance ofhuman agency and the continuous presence of agency-induced change. Manyplanned changes may still have achieved something without arriving at theirpre-announced destination. In fact, the appreciation of human vulnerabilityalongside a modicum of human agency is a composite that distinguishes left-wing

welfare thinking, requiring both socially planned cooperation and individualinitiative. Moreover, theories of semantic indeterminacy are linked to the impos-sibility of strong control and robust order. Thus the theory of failure enunciatedhere dilutes the conservative faith in the possibility and desirability of prioritisingsocial order. Even subscribing to the idea of imperfectibility, or to the normalityof failure,does not in itself indicate a conservative Weltanschauung. One belief dothnot an ideology make; the normalisation of failure does not alone make conser-vatism what it is, nor would its inclusion in other ideologies render themconservative. Ideational overlap is a distinctive feature of ideologies.

As participants in the political world, we observe incessant failures and flaws inpolitical thinking. But can we, as political theorists, live with the permanence ofsuch failure? More specifically, are there any recognisable political thought frame-works that embrace the normality of failure as presented in these pages? Couldliberals be the most promising candidate for that niche? To begin with, liberalshave always been undecided about the inevitability of progress and about the roleof human agency in that process. That uncertainty is particularly pronounced andconvoluted in the writings of L. T. Hobhouse. The evolution towards internalharmony and consistency was at the heart of Hobhouses understanding of

liberalism. The ideal [liberal] society is conceived as a whole which lives andflourishes by the harmonious growth of its parts. However,true harmony is anideal which it is perhaps beyond the power of man to realize, but which serves to



http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/http://www.politicalstudies.org/


19/24

indicate the line of advance (Hobhouse, 1911, pp. 1367). That is a typical liberaluniversalist approach, but the perhaps indicates that the ideal may just about beattainable an article of faith some liberals were loath to abandon. Note also thatthe regulative ideal of harmony determines, again in teleological fashion, the

route of progress. And note that harmony offers the assurance that internalcontradictions can be ironed out. The device of a remote and possibly unreach-able ideal,while nevertheless implying a route to this nowhere, is one of the mosttypical in the arsenal of progressive thinkers and could be assimilated into acommon utopian genre of thinking. Nevertheless, Hobhouses was not an exer-cise in liberal utopianism. He allowed for different lines of progress to emerge,thus acknowledging liberal pluralism and anticipating possible failure: There aremany possibilities, and the course that will in the end make for social harmony isonly one among them, while the possibilities of disharmony and conflict aremany. The vacillation continues, however. The progress of society depended onchoice, as the expression of deep-seated forces of human nature which come totheir own only by an infinitely slow and cumbersome process of mutual adjust-ment(Hobhouse, 1911,pp. 1367). In this stumbling dance, will and grand designwere locked in a mutually faltering embrace. Trial and error, success and failurethemselves, were incorporated into a movement inspired by the evolutionarydoctrines of the period that would ultimately lead to harmony. When later,riddled with pessimism, Hobhouse confronted the enormity of the First WorldWar, he rhetorically asked:are we to agree ... that struggle is really the law of life... ? Or did humanitarianism represent a living movement which, though

thwarted and arrested by new forces that it has failed to control, has in it theundying spirit which will in the longer run prevail?. His response was to offerthe conception of a common humanity, not as the dream of a philosopher, butas a popular emotion which has tested and proved itself in the hardest of schools(Hobhouse, 1915, p. 19, p. 104).

That ultimate closure of liberal theory may seem surprising to many of itsadherents, though on closer inspection it is integral to its belief in the civilisingof humanity. That closure occurs not just by postulating the rational progressionof individual and society, or through the weaker method of spelling out the

formal possibility of a good end-state (albeit in a dynamic equilibrium) whilerefusing to anticipate its content. Rather, the very act of an agents choicesuperimposes decontestation on the indeterminate structure of any politicalconcept. Choice, we assume, is a liberal

2009 freeden failures of political thinking

Documents