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Normativity and Radical Disadvantage in Bernard Williams’ Realist Theory of Legitimacy

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Notes

  1. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1–3. Note that throughout this article, I refer to ‘political institutions’ rather than ‘states’ in order to avoid prejudicing Williams’ theory of legitimacy in favour of nation-states. Although Williams evidently believed that, now and around here, only nation-states can satisfy the requirements of political legitimacy, we can reject this claim without rejecting his theory of legitimacy. See Paul Raekstad, “Realism, Utopianism, and Radical Values,” European Journal of Philosophy 26(1): 145–168.

  2. Jonathan leader Maynard and Alex Worsnip, “Is there a Distinctively Political Normativity?”, Ethics 128(4) (2018): 756–787 at 766–767.

  3. See Williams, in the Beginning Was the Deed, 11; Edward Hall, “Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand: A Defence,” Political Studies 66(2) (2015): 466–480 at 476–477.

  4. Alice Baderin, “Two Forms of Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 13(2) (2014): 132–153 at 140.

  5. David Miller, “In What Sense Must Political Philosophy Be Political?” Social Philosophy and Policy 33(1) (2016): 155–174 at 164–165.

  6. Eva Erman and Niklas Möller, “Practices and Principles: On the Methodological Turn in Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass 10(8) (2015): 533–546; Fabian Wendt, “On Realist Legitimacy”, Social Philosophy and Policy 32(2) (2016): 227–245; Leader Maynard and Worsnip, “Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?”

  7. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 4.

  8. Erman and Möller, “Practices and Principles,” 540–541; Wendt, “On Realist Legitimacy”, 241–245; Leader Maynard and Worsnip, “Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?”, 784.

  9. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 4.

  10. See Hall, “Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand” and “Contingency, Confidence, and Liberalism in the Political Thought of Bernard Williams”, Social Theory and Practice 40(5) (2014): 545–569; Paul Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism? Bernard Williams, The Foundations of Liberalism, and Political Realism”, Political Studies 64(2) (2016): 368–384; Matt Sleat, “What is a Political Value? Political Philosophy and Fidelity to Reality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 33(1–2) (2016): 252–272; Robert Jubb, “On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is”, Political Studies Review 17(4) (2019): 360–369.

  11. See especially Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism?”

  12. “What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is”, 362; see also Sleat, “What is a Political Value?”, 253.

  13. Ben Cross, “Normativity in Realist Legitimacy,” Political Studies Review, early view. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920917834

  14. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 3.

  15. Ibid., 4.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 10.

  18. Ibid., 5; Hall, “Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand”, 470–471.

  19. Ibid., 10.

  20. Ben Cross, “Radicalizing Realist Legitimacy”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(4) (2020): 369–389 at 373.

  21. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 135–146.

  22. Hall, “Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand”, 473.

  23. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 6; see also Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), chapter 9.

  24. Shklar and Williams evidently believed that there are historical reasons for thinking that liberal states are best capable of preventing these kinds of abuses of power than alternatives. However, it is possible to reject this further claim without rejecting Williams theory of legitimacy itself. See Cross, “Radicalizing Realist Legitimacy”, 377–382.

  25. Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy Rosenblaum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38; Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 54–55; Truth and Truthfulness, 207–208.

  26. In using this term, I don’t rule out the possibility that there may be certain types of authoritarianism that do not violate the Critical Theory Principle.

  27. My focus on China is not unproblematic since it may give the misleading impression that Western governments do not rely on coercive power to generate acceptance. See for example Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (London: Pluto Press, 1989). Still, China is a useful example because of how closely it ties its legitimation to its performance – that is, its ability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. On this, se Jiwei Ci, Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), chapter 1.

  28. See Daniel Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 147.

  29. Bell, The China Model, 260 n172.

  30. Ci, Democracy in China, chapter 2.

  31. Ci, Democracy in China, chapter 4.

  32. Raekstad, “Realism, Utopianism, and Radical Values”

  33. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 2.

  34. Ibid., 8.

  35. Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 11.

  36. George Crowder, “Value Pluralism vs Realism in the Political Thought of Bernard Williams,” Journal of Value Inquiry 53(4) (2019): 529–550 at 548.

  37. One might still dispute Crowder’s further claim that ‘it is only a short step from Rawls to Williams’. There may be other important fault-lines between Rawls and Williams-type realists, particularly concerning the role of historical reflection in orienting us towards politics. See Enzo Rossi, “The Twilight of the Liberal Social Contract: On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism,” in Kelly Becker and Ian Thomson, eds., The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 297–309 at 307–309.

  38. David Owen, “Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, Political Theory and the Critique of Morality,” in Matt Sleat, ed., Politics Recovered: Essays in Realist Political Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 73–92 at 83; Edward Hall and Matt Sleat, “Ethics, Morality, and the Case for a Realist Political Theory”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20(3) (2017): 278–295.

  39. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxon England: Routledge, 2011), 189.

  40. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, chapter 8.

  41. Owen, “Realism in Ethics and Politics”, 81; Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), 110.

  42. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 59.

  43. Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism?”, 378.

  44. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 37.

  45. Ibid., 227.

  46. For a fuller discussion of Williams’ critique of the morality system, see Robert Louden, “The Critique of the Morality System”, in Alan Thomas, ed., Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 104–134.

  47. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 214–215.

  48. Williams, Moral Luck, chapter 2; Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 217.

  49. This seems to come down to how we understand “morality”. If we say that the moral/non-moral is equivalent to the distinction between cognitive principles and desires, then fear does not invoke any kind of morality, because it is a desire. But if we say that it is equivalent to the distinction between other-regarding and self-regarding desires, then fear is a form of morality, albeit unrelated to the morality system.

  50. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  51. Lorna Finlayson, An Introduction to Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 133.

  52. Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism?”, 374–379.

  53. David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), chapter 4.

  54. Graeber, Debt, 96.

  55. For example, proponents of punitive refugee policies sometimes attempt to blend ‘sympathy-talk’ into their otherwise more blatantly anti-refugee rhetoric. See Scott Hanson-Easey and Martha Augoustinos, “Complaining about Refugees: the Role of Sympathy Talk in the Design of Complaints on Talkback Radio,” Discourse and Communication 5(3) (2011): 247–271.

  56. Raymond Geuss, A World Without Why (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 184.

  57. Raymond Geuss, “A Republic of Discussion: Habermas at Ninety,” The Point. URL: https://thepointmag.com/2019/politics/republic-of-discussion-habermas-at-ninety

  58. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15–19.

  59. Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 25.

  60. Enzo Rossi also suggests that Williams’ BLD might fit neatly with Geuss’s brand of radical realism. See “Reality and the Imagination in Political Theory and Practice: On Raymond Geuss’s Realism,” European Journal of Political Theory 9(4) (2010): 504–512 at 509.

  61. Raekstad, “Realism, Utopianism, and Radical Values”

  62. Cross, “Radicalising Realist Legitimacy”, 377–382.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewever for valuable feedback on this article. I would also like to thank Robbie Arrell, Peter Finocchiaro, Samuel Kahn, Michael Longenecker, Matthew Lutz, Timothy Perrine and Ru Ye for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Cross, B. Normativity and Radical Disadvantage in Bernard Williams’ Realist Theory of Legitimacy. J Value Inquiry 56, 379–393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09780-z

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