Clayton Chin

Beyond analytic and continental in contemporary political thought: Pragmatic methodological pluralism and the situated turn

In the division between analytic and continental thought, pragmatism has often been cast as a middle way. Fundamentally critical of each, it also shares resonances with both of these traditions. However, while this observation is common, remarkably little has been done to examine its truth in contemporary political thought. Drawing on recent trends in political theory, including ‘New Realism’, critical genealogical methods and a surge in pragmatic approaches, this article identifies an emerging situated turn in political thought. Emerging from several major traditions in contemporary political thinking, this trend has pragmatic themes at its centre. Having identified this as a fertile opportunity for inter-methodological work across the analytic/continental divide, it then turns to the late work of Richard Rorty in order to expose his productive framework for such cross-border exchanges. Arguing for its fundamentally democratic and pluralistic nature, this analysis also exposes this framework’s weaknesses before illustrating how recent methodological exchanges between genealogy and pragmatism rectify these deficiencies while providing a viable model for future work across traditional philosophical boundaries.

Contemporary Pragmatist Political Theory: Aims and Practices

Among traditions of political theory, pragmatism has experienced an especially tumultuous history. Lauded by some for the advantages they see in its robustly non-metaphysical approach to political thinking, it has more often suffered under the accusation that it entails a naive form of instrumentalism which yields only a complacent understanding of politics. And yet as a voice within nineteenth-, twentiethand twenty-first-century AngloAmerican social and political thinking, it persists and continues to make new contributions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatism and its relation to the central questions in political theory. It is to the task of illustrating and examining the diversity of trends of this discussion that this special issue is turned. The return to pragmatism in political theory has confounded the critical consensus that emerged out of the 1990s. The dominant view there had pushed aside pragmatists as apologists for the status quo, whose work (often paradigmatically taken to be Richard Rorty’s) was understood to amount to a ‘politics of acquiescence’ (Festenstein, 2003; MacGilvray, 2000). The current interest rejects this characterisation by explicitly politicising pragmatism. Multiple in its aims and approaches, this ‘third wave’ as it has been dubbed (Koopman, 2009), turns to pragmatism as a resource for thinking critically about politics in the contemporary world. Unlike previous discussions of pragmatism which have often limited themselves to examining the fidelity of a given interpretation of Peirce, James or Dewey (the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’), this revival is turned outwards to wider debates and other traditions within political theory. This focus constitutes an important opportunity to examine and assess how pragmatism can contribute to a variety of ongoing discussions. The potential significance of pragmatism for political theory is multiple and complex. This owes both to the difficulty in systematising a tradition as diverse as pragmatism, and to the number of different trends central to contemporary political thought. Pragmatism’s overarching relevance is its reconstruction of the task of providing critical and normative guidance within liberal democracies. Much current political thought is animated by the

Normative engagement across difference: Pragmatism, dialogic inclusion, and social practices

This article addresses the problem of inter-normative engagement, of constructing dialogical interaction across substantive normative difference. Focusing on how this affects democratic and pluralistic contexts, it argues that a social-practice-based approach to normativity and reasoning offers unique resources to understand and frame such encounters. It specifically draws on pragmatism and the work of Richard Rorty to reframe normativity, authority, identity, and reason, linking these understandings to recent trends to deliberative political inclusivism in democratic theory. The upshot is that framing inter-normative engagement as calls to responsive engagement between diverse systems of normative authority offers real insights for constructing and maintaining ongoing democratic engagements in a non-hierarchical manner. This, the article argues, extends emerging methodological trends in the broader literature while overcoming the morass between conflict- and consensus-oriented approaches in democratic theory.

Book Review: William Curtis, Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal VirtueDefending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue by CurtisWilliam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 300pp., £64.99 (h/b), ISBN 9781107109858

There are three key distinctions at the core of Finlay’s thesis. First, between resistance and armed resistance: only some forms of injustice merit armed resistance, which means that a right to resistance does not necessarily imply a right to armed resistance. Second, between a ‘right to resist oppression’ and a ‘right of resistance to oppression’. This may appear as splitting hairs, and perhaps a more reader-friendly terminology would have helped; nevertheless the distinction is significant and consequential. The right of resistance to oppression is a claim to the right that we have against a state that can no longer be relied on to perform its principal duties. This is not a human right, although human rights specify the chief kinds of value with reference to which resistance may be justified in certain circumstances. The third distinction is between the conditions triggering just cause for resistance and the goals that resisters can reasonably seek to secure once there is just cause for resisting. Armed with this theoretical framework, Finlay goes on to discuss a number of key issues concerning political violence: standard versus partisan jus in bello, proportionality, prospect of success, necessity, legitimacy of resistance movements, asymmetric wars and terrorist wars. Finlay’s book is priceless to anyone working on just war theory, and political violence in general. Having said that, the actual price of the hardback is prohibitive, and since the book deserves wide readership, we live in hope that Cambridge will issue a paperback edition soon.

Book Review: Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political PhilosophyThe Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy by FinlaysonLorna. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 222pp., £24.95 (p/b), ISBN 9781783482870

Lorna Finlayson’s The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy casts itself as a radical, holistic critique of the practice of contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. To do this, it employs the now dominant strategy within critiques of the analytic mainstream: the analysis of the ‘political’. As in other versions of this argument, the criticism here is that contemporary political philosophy contains an unacknowledged circumscription of the purview of political thought, and of politics itself, in a series of assumptions that it then naturalises while delegitimising dissent. The imperative, for Finlayson, is to politicise political thought, opening up debates to a plurality of other potential contributions. As a result of this strategy, the first half of the book examines how theoretical norms in relation to ‘constructivism’ (chapter 1) and ‘charity’ (chapter 3), as well as Rawls’ own criteria of ‘reasonableness’ (chapter 2), reinforce a series of assumptions and dispositions that establish the horizons of political thought as liberal, capitalist and analytic. All of this is inimical to the ‘deep dissent’ the author presents as an alternative normative standard. There are several strengths in the story Finlayson weaves. Throughout the noted chapters, her capacity to identify common arguments (e.g. the imperative to be constructive with any criticism and the constraints this then places on thinking and legitimation) in a diverse literature is impressive. Furthermore, her accounts of contemporary feminist theory, and its critique of silencing (chapter 4), and her connection of the non-ideal and realist trends in contemporary debates (chapter 5) are masterful. Of particular note also, the chapter on the various self-conceptions of the role of political theory in the world is original and important for the growing methodological discussions in the sub-discipline (chapter 6). Contrariwise, Finlayson’s principal criticism and its assumptions are deeply problematic. This makes the claim that contemporary political thought delegitimises ‘deep dissent’, that is, the further you get from the mainstream, the more your claims are excluded by a series of assumptions deep in contemporary practice. Quite simply, this is a feature of all academic literatures and human vocabularies. The further you get from the established set of claims and meanings, the larger and more difficult the justificatory task. Finlayson would have done better to focus more on rigorously undermining the specific mechanisms rather than lamenting this reality. In fact, the deep desire in her own work, which motivates this and other similar criticisms, seems to be a form of thinking in which all possibilities are enabled, for a truly laissezfaire intellectual system. The improbability of this proves the real drawback here, stultifying an otherwise insightful and impressive work.

Democratic epistemology and democratic morality: the appeal and challenges of Peircean pragmatism

Abstract Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question, we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, we conclude that the differences between an epistemic conception of democracy and an epistemic justification of democracy are fundamental to determining the relative attractions of different arguments for democracy, and their implications for actual forms of government.

Introduction: Analytic, Continental and the question of a bridge

In philosophy and political theory, divisions come and go, but some persist despite being obviously problematic. The analytic and Continental divide is one such division. In political philosophy and political theory, the division has been particularly pronounced. Analytic and Continental thinkers are divided not only over substantial issues but also over the very nature of political theorising. In spite of this fundamental nature, theorists often seem to assume that, as a division, the analytic/Continental divide requires no explanation. We suggest that, as a central division within political theory, and despite being acknowledged as problematic for quite some time, it has persisted because it has not been adequately examined. Once examined, the division turns out to be operationally weaker than it once was. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in engaging thinkers from the other side. This has been accompanied by a corresponding tendency, among both analytic and Continental philosophers and political thinkers, to reflect on the nature of their own tradition and ‘philosophy’. Both traditions have entered a self-conscious period of meta-reflection. Such questioning indicates the possibility of transformation within both groups, in the absence of settled frameworks and divisions. However, it is also clear that such signs are the beginning of the possibility of a new relation rather than a sign of the eclipse of the division. The continued institutional separation and the space between their respective philosophical vocabularies suggest that, while the time is ripe for work here, there is still much to be done.

Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalisation by Mark Wenman . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 . 348pp., £65.00, ISBN 978 1107003729

ing supermajority requirements to constrain their future selves? Of course, this only applies intragenerationally (i.e. when supermajority rules only apply to those who adopted them). Since generations overlap and new members continuously join the electorate, this distinction may seem pointless.Yet, if the provisions subject to supermajority rules are submitted to mandatory revision every generation, as Jefferson championed, the problem of overlapping generations is fixed, and supermajorities need not trump epistemic equality any longer.