The Irrationality of the Political (Pt. 2)
Historicism, Mysticism, and Nihilism
Very short summary: This is a two-part essay on the crisis of contemporary liberalism. I argue that this crisis reflects the growing influence of a conception of the political as a praxis that is beyond human rationality and reason. The first part addressed one of the most important symptoms of the growing attraction of this conception, namely the appeal to the “exception” to justify the infringement of rules of social and political morality. The second part goes deeper into the underlying cause of this symptom, which is the idea that the political is the domain of the mystical rather than the rational.
I ended the first part of this essay by suggesting that the attractiveness of Schmittian-like conceptions of the political is tied, among other things, to the recognition of the inescapable conflict between values, a conflict that cannot be resolved by rational adjudication. This second part defends this claim and explores some of its implications.
This claim may seem surprising, if not counterintuitive, at first sight. Isn't value pluralism a feature of the social and moral world that supports liberal political and economic institutions? Philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Raz, or (less systematically) John Rawls have explicitly tied the justification of liberal principles and institutions to the fact that a plurality of values can be endorsed but at the same time never be fully realized concurrently. Hayek’s argument regarding the incompatibility of economic planning with democracy is also grounded in the presupposition that there is no objective and comprehensible scale of values that could legitimately be imposed on everyone:[1]
“Not only do we not possess such an all-inclusive scale of values: it would be impossible for any mind to comprehend the variety of different needs of different people which compete for the available resources and to attach a definite weight to each.”
In this specific sense, value pluralism is the foundation of what Hayek calls “individualism.” It forces the conclusion that “the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s; that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to the dictation of others.” On the other hand, planning creates situations where people are “forced to produce agreement on everything in order that any action can be taken at all.” Because of that, a society relying on planning creates a form of social control by a minority over the majority and opens the door to dictatorship “because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”[2]
Finally, commentators sometimes view populism as the very negation of value pluralism, beyond academic circles. Populist politics seems indeed to be rooted in a hierarchy of values that puts (depending on the kind of populism), the tradition, the nation, the family, economic and social equality, or the promotion of various granular social identities at its top, trumping any other considerations, including the rule of law.
There is no doubt that an uncompromisingly monist stance about values carries the risk of justifying, in the eyes of those holding it, any action deemed to promote the overarching ends that are judged more important than any other considerations. Obliviousness toward the plurality and incommensurability of values that ground both our understanding of history and the justification of our political actions can easily lead to what the French sociologist and philosopher Raymond Aron called “historical fanaticism.”[3] Fanaticism finds its expression in a politics that only recognizes absolute ends and in the absolute certainty that the fanatic’s ideals are the only ones to be pursued.
Arnold Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead: Third version” (1883)
While all this is true, it would be a mistake to think that the sole fact of taking value pluralism seriously is enough to protect society from illiberal temptations. Not only can value pluralism accommodate illiberal worldviews, it may also be at the roots of personalistic conceptions of sovereignty and conceptions of the political, discarding the liberal view that legitimacy is grounded in general rules. The point is that the border between value pluralism on the one hand and historicism, relativism, and even nihilism is blurred. In his study of Isaiah Berlin’s thought, the philosopher John Gray provides a powerful argument to the effect that value pluralism doesn’t lead to liberalism but rather to a Neo-Hobbesian political philosophy that makes the discovery and maintenance of a peaceful modus vivendi between incommensurable and eventually conflicting ways of life as the best possible outcome of political thought and practice.[4]
Gray’s Neo-Hobbesian conclusion comes from the assumption that the manifestation of value pluralism occurs not only at the level of individual values, both within a single value (e.g., between different forms of equality or of freedom) and between values, but also at the higher level of cultural forms of life. Forms of life themselves are incommensurable. Even more importantly, the justification of the ranking of values that is constitutive of any given form of life, as well as the justification of actions and institutions in light of this ranking, are both relative to this form of life. In other words, forms of life, their values, institutions, and practices, cannot be assessed from outside.
This argument breaks the relationship (defended by Berlin) between pluralism and liberalism. If we accept Gray’s understanding of value pluralism, he notes, “[w]here liberal values come into conflict with others which depend for their existence on non-liberal social or political structures and forms of life, and where these values are truly incommensurables, there can —if pluralism is true— be no argument according priority to liberal values.”[5] In particular, the values of autonomy, individuality, and choice-making that liberal pluralists like Berlin or Raz view as prominent in liberal societies lose their privileged status. Their realization in institutions and practices is valuable only insofar as we live in forms of life that give them such a place. But there is no argument that establishes their importance outside liberal societies.
Gray’s argument proceeds from a form of radical historicism that contends that value judgments are necessarily relative to a historical perspective and the cultural stratum in which they take place. Radical historicism, as characterized by Leo Strauss, argues that the possibility of knowledge and understanding depends on a “frame of reference,” a “comprehensive view” that “we have to choose without rational guidance.”[6] For historicists, the choice of the comprehensive view that grounds all the value judgments that are made to assess institutions, practices, and actions is necessarily arbitrary. It’s not even a choice, actually, but the product of historical events that, from the perspective of the historical individual, could as well be the result of fate.
Strauss, like Karl Popper,[7] observes that radical historicism is at the bottom self-contradictory because it presupposes a trans-historical principle. However, more important is that, even when historicism is reformulated to get rid of any self-contradicting aspect, what remains of it directly leads to nihilism. Strauss defends this claim in the second chapter of Natural Right and History, where he thoroughly examines Max Weber’s account of the distinction between facts and values. Weber famously argues that social sciences can aim at objectivity because values do not enter directly into the inquiry, but only play a role upstream by determining the relevance of issues addressed by it. As Strauss notes, Weber’s insistence on establishing the objectivity of social sciences by demonstrating that the scientific inquiry itself is not dependent on values follows from “the allegedly demonstrable premise that the conflict between ultimate values cannot be resolved by human reason.”[8]
What is a premise of Weber’s epistemological writings becomes a fundamental claim of his political writings, especially in his vocation lectures.[9] In them, Weber makes it clear that the social world, as perceived through its history, is fundamentally irrational. This makes human life a permanent and inescapable conflict that is ultimately adjudicated by arbitrary commitments and, inescapably, political power.
Let’s set aside the question of whether Weber provides a convincing defense of his value pluralism and Strauss’s claim that it’s not the case. Instead, let’s focus on the implications of the “power politics” that results from Weber’s comprehensive view. In a world where reason is helpless to solve conflicts between values, political decision-making is groundless. Institutions and established practices that have evolved are themselves the arbitrary results of capricious historical events. Rules of general conduct only reflect comprehensive views that nobody has rationally chosen but that have rather been imposed by “fate.” Not only does reason have nothing to say about the choice between rules. We have no more reason to follow established rules than mere expediency.
The realization of our historical condition could lead to the kind of political moderation and skepticism that is constitutive of liberal thought. This is actually what Aron and other Cold War liberals have done with Weberian value pluralism.[10] However, it can be turned into a different, more nihilistic conclusion. From the perspective of power politics, persons rather than rules are the ultimate claimants of authority. The only reason to follow constitutional rules, and more generally to endorse constitutionalism, is a matter of expediency. Therefore, there is no principled restriction to the state of exception. Because the exception is necessarily outside the constitutional set of rules, authority is in the hands of the persons who can successfully claim political power, irrespective of their views.
This naturally evokes the Weberian ideal type of charismatic authority. While value pluralism seems to imply that charismatic authority is neither more nor less rational than rule-based authority, it acquires, however, a privileged status as soon as we endorse the nihilist version of value pluralism. Charismatic authority naturally leads to a personalistic conception of sovereignty and, as I argued in the first part, the latter is tied to the Schmittian conception of the political as a war between friends and enemies. This shows that value pluralism can easily be turned against liberalism and its conception of the political (as Gray contends), but also as a strong positive argument for the kind of Schmittian power politics that locates authority and legitimacy in force —something that Gray considerably underestimates.
All this is, of course, connected to the rise of populism and the debates around it. Consider the discussion between New York Times columnists Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein, in a recent podcast. Klein refers to a previous Douthat’s article (written after Trump’s failed assassination) where the latter wrote about “Trump as a man of destiny,” “a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rule of politics.” In the discussion that follows, Douthat observes that while “there are forces that move through history that are hard to predict and assess,” he thinks that “often they are connected to specific personalities.” Therefore, “the idea of a man of destiny, a great man of history is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order and so on.”
I picked this excerpt of what is a very rich conversation because it precisely reveals the kind of comprehensive view of history that is friendly to a conception of the political that puts emphasis on the exception, on a personalistic understanding of sovereignty, on charismatic authority, and ultimately on sheer power as a source of legitimacy. My point is not to argue that Douthat is wrong or even genuinely entertain this view, but to point out that it illustrates what is increasingly compelling for many. As Klein notes in the conversation, this quasi-mystic interpretation of Trump has explanatory value. It has value, however, precisely because it echoes genuine perceptions that are increasingly shared in populations that reject liberalism and its politics.
To conclude, we may wonder whether and how the conception of the political as a nihilistic radical conflict between values incarnated in charismatic (wo)men is related to the so-called “post-truth era.” They undoubtedly go well together. In his commentary on Weber’s distinction between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of absolute ends, Strauss notes that Weberian value pluralism puts truth on the same par as other values.[11] Truth clearly has a special status within the practice of science. But science and politics are two different domains of social life —the main theme of Weber’s vocation lectures. The question of whether it’s good to search for the truth cannot be answered by the former and is left to the non-rational choice of the latter. On this view, politics doesn’t have any particular affinity with truth. It seems to license the practice of what Harry Frankfurt called “bull-shitting,”[12] i.e., a complete disregard for truth.
However, it should be acknowledged that even from the perspective of liberal politics, truth is not the only relevant value. The fact that truth doesn’t systematically trump other considerations is not enough to justify taking it as completely irrelevant. So, there is something that connects the kind of politics and its underlying conception of the political that I’ve been discussing in this essay with the contempt for truth. I think that it is precisely the fascination with naked power and force that explains why truth is regarded as utterly irrelevant. In an irrational world where rules are no longer the source of legitimacy, might is right. The ruler becomes a leader. And truth matters only insofar as it helps one to achieve its aims.
[1] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text And Documents--The Definitive Edition, New edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944 [2007]), p. 102.
[2] Ibid., p. 102, p. 104, p. 110.
[3] Raymond Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 1955 [2010]).
[4] John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, Revised edition (Princeton University Press, 1996 [2020]). See also John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
[5] Gray, Isaiah Berlin, p. 189.
[6] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1953 [2013]), pp. 26-7.
[7] Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 2nd edition (Routledge, 1944 [2015]).
[8] Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 64.
[9] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 1919 [2004]).
[10] Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On `Cold War Liberalism’,” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 45–64.
[11] Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 69-71.
[12] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 [2009]).