Glen Newey

Two dogmas of liberalism

This article is on political normativity. It urges scepticism about attempts to reduce political normativity to morality. Modern liberalism leaves a question about how far morality can be accommodated by the form of normativity characteristic of politics. The article casts doubt on whether individual moral norms carry over to collective, for example, political, action, and whether the former ‘trump’ other kinds of reasons in politics. It then sketches an alternative view of politics as an irreducibly collective enterprise. Reasons for acting politically, including the understandings on which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are largely artefacts of the political culture and thus only marginally subject to generic conditions of validity: this is true in particular of liberal acceptability-conditions. Thus legitimacy, though not a redundant notion, must be geared to local political norms.

Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project

Abstract Through its numerous changes of course, John Gray’s political theory has continued to grapple with pessimism – the failure of ideals of human betterment. The movements in Gray’s thought – from neo‐liberalism to conservatism, and thence via value‐pluralism and modus vivendi liberalism to radical anti‐humanism – can in each case be understood as responding to failure by attempts to find a new and more modest role for theory. Gray does this by navigating between persistence, the refusal to accept the failure of ideals, and surrendering to their failure by retreating into resignation, which responds to the failure of ideals by the wholesale abandonment of political engagement. I argue that Gray’s pessimism continually propels him away from political engagement but that he has found it impossible, even in the anti‐humanism of his recent books, to give up entirely on politics. In conclusion I argue that naturalism, which has become ever more significant in his work, can provide a via media between utopianism and despair once we see politics as the arena which determines the ideals which are liveable for us.

How Not to Tolerate Religion

This chapter argues that the contrast in attitudes among the political classes towards religious freedom and multiculturalism, as witnessed by the recent backlash against multiculturalism, is hard to justify. Those who accept religious toleration but reject multiculturalism deny that the liberal state should permit the formation of self-sufficient cultural groups within society. If there is a relevant and valid distinction to be drawn here, it must rest on the view that minority cultures’ relation to the state is qualitatively different from that of religious groups, amounting to a state within the state – hence the incendiary effect of the claim that certain groups might be able to make law for themselves. Via a re-examination of Locke’s and Hobbes’s arguments for religious toleration, I question the basis for this distinction, arguing that there is no reason why religion, as a comprehensive world-view, should accept that churches must yield to law made by the secular magistrate. This fact poses a fundamental dilemma for the state in dealing with religious malcontents.

What is important in theorizing tolerance today

if one wants to grasp tolerance politically, that is, as a problem of power and as organizing relations among citizens, subjects, peoples or states, then it must be understood, inter alia, as being enacted through contingent, historically specific discourses - linguistically organized norms operating as common sense. [...]any political discourse of tolerance - from that developed for handling Protestant sectarianism in seventeenth-century England to that used by the G.W. Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 to distinguish the West from the rest, to that used by the Israeli state for describing (only) its policies toward homosexuals - is embedded within other discourses articulating the qualities and meanings of the religious, cultural, social or political order that the discourse of tolerance purports to pacify. [...]tolerance, correctly understood, is a virtue of the public use of reason.

Toleration as sedition

This paper examines and criticizes the defence of toleration due to John Rawls in Political Liberalism, and similar strategies mobilized in defence of toleration. It argues that the notion of the burdens of judgement, used by Rawls to defend his doctrine of reasonable pluralism, faces incoherence: schematically, either disagreement succumbs to reason, or vice versa. On similar grounds, reasonable disagreement defences of neutrality fail because of a double-mindedness about the relation between private judgements and public reason. This problem arises, it is argued, from an attempt to make private judgements determinative in the formation of political and legal outcomes, even while subjecting the latter’s justification to norms of public reason. Deference to private judgements in political justification tends to countenance sedition, and this applies also to modern liberal attempts such as Rawls’s to ground toleration in private judgements.

John Gray: A Political Theorist Of and Against Our Times

John Gray is one of the most challenging and controversial political theorists in the English-speaking world. He is currently Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, having previously been for more than 20 years Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. A prolific writer, whose output now stands at more than 15 volumes, including monographs, polemical tracts and collections of papers, essays and articles, his reputation rests in part on his status as a public intellectual, a rare breed in England. He is an iconoclastic thinker, who has consistently challenged orthodoxies in academic political theory and wider political debate, having produced distinctive work inter alia on social justice, globalisation and progress, liberalism and conservatism, and on the nature of value in general, and liberty in particular. Gray is also a leading interpreter of thinkers like J.S. Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. Probably his deepest and most sustained engagement has been with his former mentor, Isaiah Berlin, whose influential doctrine of value-pluralism he has radically reoriented (Gray 1995a). He shares Berlin’s historical literacy and essayistic style, as well as his disinclination to join or found any identifiable school. Outside the scholarly community Gray has remained politically involved. He has been active in policy forums and informally advised politicians, though his early enthusiasm for the Thatcherite project and his subsequent warm but brief relationship with New Labour have been superseded by coruscating criticism of both. Gray has communicated to a broader public through his columns in the Guardian , New Statesman (Gray 2004) and elsewhere; and he has written pamphlets on public policy, some of which are reprinted in his collection Beyond the New Right (Gray 1993). In his more popular writings he has amplified the critique of the theory and practice of Anglo-American liberalism developed in his academic work, as well as contributing more ephemeral political commentary. Recently, he has moved beyond political theory, and indeed beyond politics, to what, for want of a better term, might be called ‘cultural critique’, and in particular a concern with ecology (Gray 2002).

What is important in theorizing tolerance today|[quest]|

if one wants to grasp tolerance politically, that is, as a problem of power and as organizing relations among citizens, subjects, peoples or states, then it must be understood, inter alia, as being enacted through contingent, historically specific discourses - linguistically organized norms operating as common sense. [...]any political discourse of tolerance - from that developed for handling Protestant sectarianism in seventeenth-century England to that used by the G.W. Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 to distinguish the West from the rest, to that used by the Israeli state for describing (only) its policies toward homosexuals - is embedded within other discourses articulating the qualities and meanings of the religious, cultural, social or political order that the discourse of tolerance purports to pacify. [...]tolerance, correctly understood, is a virtue of the public use of reason.

Tolerance as such does not exist

if one wants to grasp tolerance politically, that is, as a problem of power and as organizing relations among citizens, subjects, peoples or states, then it must be understood, inter alia, as being enacted through contingent, historically specific discourses - linguistically organized norms operating as common sense. [...]any political discourse of tolerance - from that developed for handling Protestant sectarianism in seventeenth-century England to that used by the G.W. Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 to distinguish the West from the rest, to that used by the Israeli state for describing (only) its policies toward homosexuals - is embedded within other discourses articulating the qualities and meanings of the religious, cultural, social or political order that the discourse of tolerance purports to pacify. [...]tolerance, correctly understood, is a virtue of the public use of reason.