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Abstract
Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us move beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’, on the one side, and ‘salus populi suprema lex’, on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse.
Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were presented at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Hamburg. I am grateful to Peter Jones and Fabian Wendt, respectively, for the speaking invitations, and to both audiences for their comments. I would also like to thank Chandran Kukathas, Fabian Wendt, and two anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.
Notes
1. John Gray (Citation2000) has put forward the most articulate defence of the centrality of peace – and compromise as a means to peace – within the emerging liberal realist tradition. Roughly, the idea is to view liberalism not as legitimated by the substantive values it instantiates, but rather by its ability to arbitrate conflicts and create compromises between divergent substantive values. Peace itself, then, is not a super-value that confers legitimacy on the liberal order, but rather valued insofar as it indicates that a relatively stable compromise has been reached. The argument I offer here, although focused primarily on Bernard Williams’s views, may also be read as a critical reaction to this reading of Gray’s work. I focus on Williams because I take his view to be the most fully worked out one.
2. This brief overview contrasts with that of Richard Bellamy and Martin Hollis, who see compromise as traditionally conservative territory (Bellamy and Hollis Citation1999, pp. 55–56). Simon Cǎbulea (May Citation2005), on the other hand, has a more nuanced take on this subject: compromise has no political colour per se, however it is necessarily unprincipled.
3. So, of course, the basic distinction still stands even though one may argue the fact that the people believe political power to be legitimate in itself constitutes a reason that justifies the exercise of that power. Relatedly, David Beetham (Citation1991) has convincingly shown that empirical and normative accounts of legitimacy are not easily separable.
4. It is also worth noting that most realists refer to the mainstream mode of contemporary political philosophy as ‘moralism’, whereas here I mostly use the term ‘idealism’, which seems less contentious.
5. However, an idealistic or moralistic reaction against this approach existed well before Rawls. For an example of work of this kind specifically on compromise, see Hallowell (Citation1944). For a recent discussion of how descriptive and normative elements may be integrated, see Sangiovanni (Citation2008). The opposite, arch-idealist view is exemplified by Cohen (Citation2005).
6. This trend may owe more to the sociology of the political theory profession than to its intrinsic merits – a point that, of course, betrays my power-centric and realist perspective.
7. Also note that theorists such as John Dunn (2000) and Patrick Neal (Citation1993) have been arguing along similar lines for much longer.
8. William Galston (Citation2010) portrayed this emerging family of theories along similar lines.
9. I use the word ‘ethics’ to range over the concepts of justice and the good. I have discussed the relationship between justice and teleological values in Rossi (Citation2012).
10. I have defended the priority of legitimacy over justice (and, relatedly, the superiority of realism over idealism) in Rossi (Citation2012).
11. Here one may note that Rawls envisages the overlapping consensus as an actual agreement. But then it becomes an agreement between a subset of the citizenry of variable and questionable size – the reasonable citizens – picked out by reference to a fixed set of substantive values, namely their commitment to upholding fair terms of cooperation among free and equal members of a liberal democracy. In other words, the agreement is hypothetical relative to the whole of the actual citizenry. In Rossi (Citationforthcoming) I elaborate on this point and, by contrasting Rawls’s views with those of Gerald Gaus (Citation1996, Citation2011), I put forward a modal taxonomy of different kinds of hypothetical agreement (the crucial distinction being the one between possible worlds where the relevant agents can or cannot recognize themselves in their consenting counterparts).
12. James Harris (Citation2010) has convincingly shown how Hume’s account of justice is not tied to the virtue ethics that characterizes his moral philosophy.
13. In fact this relational aspect is the main distinguishing feature of voluntarism: the sharpest way to bring out the distinction between voluntarism and substantivism is to point out the gap between the thought that political power is grounded insofar as it enables the protection and promotion of certain goods and the thought that the primary purpose of politics is rather to create a framework that enables certain relations between individuals (e.g. reciprocal independence).
14. Leave aside, for now, the complicated question of what exactly should count as conflict.
15. Think of the classic contractualist account of politics as the way to leave the state of nature.
16. For an attempt to work out the action-theoretic basis of this distinction, see Sevel (Citation2010, chs 2, 3).
17. So this account of compromise rules out ‘everything goes’ theories of modus vivendi, Hobbesian contractarianism like Gauthier’s (Citation1986), and the like. I discussed the (lack of) voluntaristic appeal of modus vivendi (as opposed to Rawlsian consensus) in Rossi (Citation2010b).
18. For instance, Rawls (Citation1993) famously stated that there is a range of conceptions of justice that could be the focus of an overlapping consensus, and that his own preferred conception, justice as fairness, does not have privileged status in that range.
19. Galston (Citation2010) and Sleat (Citation2010) also pointed out the search for agreement in Williams’s realism.
20. George Klosko (Citation2000) conducted empirical research showing something akin to a consensus on the values of constitutional democracy in American public culture. Andrea Sangiovanni (Citation2008) has argued that the most plausible interpretation of Rawls’s political liberalism stresses the practice-dependence of legitimate conceptions of justice.
21. In Rossi (Citation2010b) I have argued that there is no viable middle ground between Rawlsian consensus and Hobbesian ‘anything goes’ agreement – the point being that the former is too moralistic, and the latter too coercive to be of interest to those wanting to ground legitimacy in some form of voluntariness.
22. John Horton (Citation2010) may also be seen as someone who takes such as position; however, it seems to me that he rather wishes to defend a voluntaristic account of modus vivendi as a foundation for liberalism (in some context) – a view I have argued against in Rossi (Citation2010b).
23. Though it has been argued that this brings realists too close to idealism (Sleat Citation2010, Gledhill 2012).
24. Rawls famously pointed out how pluralism, reasonable and otherwise, is the inevitable product of life under free institutions.
25. On practice-dependence, see Sangiovanni (Citation2008) and my own take on that approach in Rossi (Citation2012).
26. As noted above, David Beetham (Citation1991) has convincingly argued that any good account of legitimacy needs to incorporate both descriptive and normative elements: crudely, moral considerations cannot float free of an actual system of norms and of actual beliefs, pace both Weber’s purely descriptive account of legitimation and the fact-independent moralism of much contemporary political philosophy.