POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition: The Politics of Individuality. By. University of Toronto Press, 2000. vii + ...
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition: The Politics of Individuality By University of Toronto Press, 2000. vii + 278 pp. $60.00 Fairfield’s book is aimed at providing contemporary liberals with a sound reply to the main criticisms moved against the liberal tradition during the second half of the twentieth century. Communitarians, socialists, postmodernists, and feminists have all variously accused liberalism of endorsing uncritically a number of tacit theoretical assumptions regarding the essential features of human nature. Among these assumptions, two are the most commonly cited: selfhood and rationality. Combined together, these two assumptions give shape to a philosophical anthropology where autonomous individuals do or ought to act in a self-interested way—in fact, rationally. The accent of liberalism on values such as personal freedom, privacy, civil rights, self-determination, entrepreneurial virtue, is the logical outcome of the combination of these two concepts. Fairfield’s book tackles these critical considerations in order to verify their validity. Ten ‘fathers’ of liberalism, from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Nozick, are thus scrutinised to put the accusations to the test. Additionally, Fairfield sketches a chronicle of the birth and growth of liberalism in the West: moving beyond the merely theoretical analysis of the ten ‘fathers’ of liberalism, Fairfield shows how liberalism developed as a bourgeois reaction to diverse authorities—political, religious, economic—that tried to control, and often oppressed, individuals’ attempts to achieve maximal self-determination. At the end of his inquiry, Fairfield’s reply is positive: communitarians, socialists, postmodernists, and feminists are right. A “metaphysical embarrassment” (p. 114) lies at the heart of the liberal tradition: an accurate historical and theoretical analysis of the liberal tradition confirms the reliance on the presupposition of ‘selfhood’ and ‘self-centred rationality’ as paramount. However, even if “no Archimedean point for practical reasoning, or indeed for philosophical inquiry in general” can be found (p. 116), Fairfield claims that the reconsideration of the contingent, historical ties of liberalism must not worry the liberal. The scenery of a community of self-interested selves resists through, and persists beyond, these ties, for modern history has largely embraced liberal theory as a tool to shape societies and has enforced the constitution of liberal ‘selves’ and the cultivation of liberal ‘self-interest’ in the actual world. As to the reasons that we have to preserve this historical given, Fairfield presents a brief account of the alternatives to liberalism, which have always been forms of authoritarianism. Indeed, according to Fairfield, even today’s liberalism fights against an authoritarian menace: welfare democracy. Fairfield accuses contemporary democracies of working within the cultural paradigm of science-technology and instrumental rationality, whose “seeming impartiality and quasi-scientific exactitude” is considered capable of offering 78 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
a way to determine “the general welfare” (p. 11). This general welfare is, for Fairfield, a highly ambiguous notion, which is likely to be placed before any other value, even before individual rights and freedoms. As a consequence, we are at risk of seeing the sphere of private liberty being reduced in the name of the common good. After all, if “scientific knowledge” (ibid.) can give us all the answers we need, and if “technical expertise” (ibid.) can derive from these answers the most efficient connection between means and ends, and if “administrative authority” (p. 201) can enforce the operative systems provided by the experts, then the individual has nothing else to do but to adhere gladly to the State’s plans. Eventually, the individual’s rational evaluation, her critical insights, her subjective preferences, and her autonomous acts of self-determination are to become superfluous. Fairfield’s Moral Selfhood must be praised as a highly learned and most intriguing study in the complex theoretical and historical facets of the liberal tradition, which are examined with a careful scholarly eye. Also, along a parallel line of analysis, Fairfield shows most compellingly the unifying tenets of liberalism, which can be envisaged in a distinctive kernel of values that have always accompanied its development, whether explicitly or not. All this is accomplished without any oversimplification, as the liberal tradition has known many an expression and many a difficult issue to deal with. Its inner articulation is so composite that “more plausible is the suggestion that liberalism should be viewed in terms of a Wittgensteinean family resemblance, linking in a nonobvious manner [all] such [liberal] thinkers” (p. 87). What is puzzling about Fairfield’s book is the choice of today’s villain. The authoritarianism that Fairfield condemns, namely welfare democracy, sounds rather dubious and belittling of the existing threats to the liberal values that he cherishes. Welfare democracies represent a minority among the world’s states, and, especially after the fall of Soviet Union, they appear to be on the path of decline. Instead, the systemic takeover of public institutions by corporate financial and military-industrial elites seems to be the emerging paradigm, particularly in some of the countries where liberalism originally developed. There, the shell of welfare democracy may have been kept for pragmatic reasons, but its substance is different, for the interests served are not those of the ‘general welfare’. Also, instrumental rationality and sciencetechnology are equally (if not more) linked to another historical expression of the same bourgeoisie that initiated liberal politics: the market economy. Then, if there is an authoritarian threat, it is the combination of these elites’ interests with the subjugation of most spheres of individual and collective agency to an omni-pervasive and supra-nationally regulated global market. Corporate global economy, and not welfare democracy, is the most urgent menace, as we witness liberticidal phenomena such as: juridical asymmetries in legal protection and liability between common citizens and corporate subjects (the latter enjoying human rights and yet having ‘limited’ responsibility); political lobbying of the most effective type (from bribing and sponsoring to providing/notproviding media coverage); private financial control of national economies; worldwide, binding commercial regulation of what can be produced, sold, 79 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
labelled and bought; promotion of wealth-dependent access to higher education and public office; and limitation of the information available to the general public by private ownership of the media. As early as in the 1950s Hannah Arendt warned us about excessive concentration of resources, which makes small groups of people capable of directing policy-making and of limiting the conditions for the possibility of existence of actual individual autonomy. On Fairfield’s side, his unfortunate choice of the villain is a troublesome sign of myopia in contemporary issues, particularly as his book wants to be an instrument for political guidance, or, as the title suggests, a useful tool to understand and to shape ‘the politics of individuality’.
Concepts of Justice By .. Clarendon Press, 2001. viii + 256 pp. £25.00 This study of concepts of justice deals mainly with individual thinkers, considered in chronological order. Part I goes back to ancient sources and begins, interestingly, with short chapters on justice in the Bible and Aeschylus’s Oresteia. There are chapters then on justice in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, followed by a brief discussion of Roman law and Christian thought to the mediaeval period as a bridge of sorts to the modern era. Part II sets out from the seventeenth century with chapters on Hobbes and Leibniz, moving on to Hume in the eighteenth century, along with his critics Kames and Reid, and his friend Adam Smith. For the nineteenth century there are chapters on Mill, Sidgwick, Rashdall, and Kropotkin, and in more recent times, on Perelman, David Miller, Rawls, Nozick, and Barry. Part III seeks to draw out the fruits of the historical survey in a chapter that comments on the main themes, especially the idea of fairness, and the study ends with a discussion of the developing role of justice in relation to rights, relief of need, and concern for the individual. Each of the essays provides a measured blend of exposition and critical argument and the work builds up an informative, analytic study of justice around the themes of merit, equality, and need. In welcoming it, one might think nonetheless that it contains too many chapters, or not enough. Too many, in the sense that the focus on individual thinkers, chapter by chapter, is not the most compendious way of dealing with the basic themes historically and philosophically (even if it is useful in its own right). Alternatively, there are not enough chapters, in the sense that there are notable omissions. Raphael disarms this criticism to an extent by acknowledging limitations in his survey, notably its restriction to Western thought, the absence of natural law theory, the scanty treatment of mediaeval accounts, and the emphasis in the modern period on thinkers writing in English. The discussion of justice as a virtue is limited, and there is little about the sphere of justice, with nothing, for example, about the idea of international justice. The focus on 80 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
Western thought might be satisfied by an appropriate sub-title; the other absences, being part of that tradition, affect the inquiry more directly. This comes out, for example, in the recurring question whether relief of need is a matter of justice or an obligation of another kind. The requital of desert and the practice of impartiality (linked eventually with equality) are taken as original elements of justice, with relief of need (also linked with an egalitarian theme) arriving much later as a controversial addition. While noting that there are ancient sources for the latter association, Raphael links its emergence with Kropotkin—around the slogan ‘to each according to his needs’—and worries about it in comment on other philosophers (Rawls and Miller for example). In the end he decides, hesitantly, that its status as an element of justice has to be conceded now, specifically in the context “of public action in the welfare state” (p. 246). This discussion would surely have proceeded differently had a study of Aquinas been included. There would then have been occasion to consider the view that generosity is a part of justice, that those with more than enough are bound by natural law to support the poor, that necessity provides a moral and lawful claim to what belongs to others. There would also have been need to consider an account of the common good that is not conceived in terms of an opposition between self-interest and altruism. Part Two constitutes the heart of the book and contains the best essays. The chapters on Hobbes, Hume, and Rawls are particularly substantial. There is also close scrutiny of Utilitarian views in a series of chapters. Raphael praises Utilitarianism in general, but argues that it fails the test of justice in not giving enough consideration to desert and the reasonable interests of the individual. Here, as in all of the twenty-two essays, the study seeks to be fair in setting out and assessing different ways of thinking about justice over the centuries.
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW On Law and Legal Reasoning By Hart, 2001. xii + 240 pp. £35.00 Imagine that there is a statute forbidding bringing vehicles into a park. Does this apply to an army truck that a group of veterans wishes to place on a pedestal in the park as a memorial? If the statute is applied literally (or “formally”, to use this book’s terminology), it does, but a less formal application of the statute might give a contrary answer. The book argues that legal systems may be more or less formal in applying the rules of law and that contemporary positivistic accounts of law cannot properly account for the less formal applications of law. The book begins by refining a distinction found (confusedly, the book claims) in other writers between what the book calls autonomous and regulative 81 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
