Politics and the Search for the Common Good by Hans Sluga (PDF)

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Rethinking politics in a new vocabulary, Hans Sluga challenges the firmly held assumption that there exists a single common good which politics is meant to realize. He argues that politics is not a natural but a historical phenomenon, and not a single thing but a multiplicity of political forms and values only loosely related. He contrasts two traditions in political philosophy: a ‘normative theorizing’ that extends from Plato to John Rawls and a newer ‘diagnostic practice’ that emerged with Marx and Nietzsche and has found its three most prominent twentieth-century practitioners in Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. He then examines the sources of diagnostic political thinking, analyzes its achievements, and offers a critical assessment of its limitations. His important book will be of interest to a wide range of upper-level students and scholars in political philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas.

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⭐This is both a work in the history of philosophy and a work of original thought. The crux of Sluga’s argument is a distinction between “normative political philosophy” and “diagnosis”.Normative political philosophy, like traditional philosophical theorizing in general, presumes a position external to the reality it theorizes about, with the ability to fully understand (or “survey”, a term adopted from Wittgenstein) that reality. Normative political philosophy carries with it the generality, timelessness, and abstraction of traditional philosophical theories.Rawls’ Theory of Justice is a good example of what Sluga means by “normative political philosophy”. Rawls’ theory is constructed from a hypothetical “original position” in which principles of justice are decided upon in abstraction from historical or personal situations.Diagnosis by contrast is self-consciously situated. In shedding the claims of traditional theory, it is inherently contextual, historical, and constrained by and to the here and now. Diagnosis acknowledges that there is no external position from which to survey the entirety of political reality. There are only situated perspectives within it, from which we operate with incomplete knowledge and make judgements without certainty.Sluga traces the development of the diagnostic turn away from traditional theorizing through historical studies, seeing the emergence of diagnosis in the nineteenth century, especially with Nietzsche and Marx, and flourishing in the twentieth century with Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Despite the apparent turn in those later figures, we still see traditional theorizing, for example, in Rawls (although Sluga notes a later turn toward diagnosis in Rawls’ last writings).The emergence of diagnosis fits a larger pattern in the history of philosophy. Sluga’s thinking is Wittgensteinian, and his treatment of politics reflects Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical bent. That external position from which traditional philosophers viewed reality turned out, historically, to be chimerical. There is no such position — there are only positions within reality, from perspectives. There is no total picture or “survey”, always a view limited by the perspectives we occupy. Perspective is a condition of knowledge and understanding.Understandings of the political world are perspectival in the same way. The relations among individual human beings, among groups and organizations, the relations between people and corporations, the environment, technology, . . . make the kind of theory we would like to have, as traditional political thinkers, unattainable. As Sluga argues, this political world comprises a complex system — one in which it becomes impossible to confidently predict that y will happen if we take political action x, or that z will happen if we do not take action x.In fact, the system is “hyper-complex” in that political actors are themselves part of that complex system, in which their understandings and views of the system become relevant variables in the workings of the system, as do others’ views of their views, and so on.We are thrown back upon “judgment” — judgment in the sense that Hannah Arendt found in Kant’s third Critique — contextualized, creative, and inherently uncertain.Diagnosis and political judgment proceed then from this unavoidable situatedness. In the final chapters, Sluga sets out some of the conditions and requirements of diagnosis and judgment in our here and now, emphasizing the roles of technology (both in the economic sense and in its role as enabler of dispersed terrorism), population, and the environment — roles missing in the diagnostic approaches of Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault.In this final part of the book Sluga allows himself, as many philosophers don’t, to “go big”. He doesn’t limit himself to technical arguments, critiques, and small conclusions. He raises and addresses big questions about the future of political thought and the dimensions he believes necessary to current political diagnosis.Sluga’s critique of normative political theorizing may extend beyond professional political philosophy. He distinguishes the “plain” from the “philosophical” in much the same way that other critical treatments of distinctively philosophical contexts have done, with the onus on the “philosophical” to find relevance in the “plain”.But there may well be a continuity between the philosophical and the plain, one that is more evident in political matters than in other areas studied by philosophers. The distinction between philosophical and plain has always been a troubling one — after all, the philosophical must in some way have been born from the plain. In everyday political discussion, the philosophical seems to make its way into the plain in the form of ideological stances taken in response to practical problems (e.g., income inequality) with the result being not solutions but ideological “answers” that take the characteristic form of normative political philosophy. What may otherwise be valid insights and perspectives (whether egalitarian, libertarian, or otherwise) are presented as definitive and absolute rather than uncertain and perspectival.There’s a lot to this book. True to its claims regarding perspectivism, it’s not “just” philosophical.

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