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Value Pluralism vs Realism in the Political Thought of Bernard Williams

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Notes

  1. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 2. Surveys of recent realism include William Galston, “Realism in Political Theory”, European Journal of Political Theory 9 (2010): 385–411; Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, “Realism in Normative Political Theory”, Philosophy Compass 9/10 (2014): 689–701; Edward Hall and Matt Sleat, “Ethics, Morality and the Case for Realist Political Theory”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (2017): 278–295.

  2. Hall and Sleat, op. cit., p. 279.

  3. Galston, op. cit. p. 397.

  4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762], trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 49.

  5. References to value pluralism occur throughout Berlin’s work, but see in particular Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); “My Intellectual Path”, in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); “The Originality of Machiavelli”, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, “Pluralism and Liberalism”, in Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). For other treatments of value pluralism see Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997); George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum, 2002); Williams Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  6. Kekes, op. cit., p. 202.

  7. Williams, op. cit., p. 3.

  8. Berlin and Williams, op. cit., p. 326.

  9. On Williams’s ethics in general see J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mark P. Jenkins, Bernard Williams (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); Alan Thomas, ed., Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Daniel Callcut, ed., Reading Bernard Williams (London: Routledge, 2009). Williams’s political realism is examined by Richard Flathman, “In and Out of the Ethical: The Realist Liberalism of Bernard Williams”, Contemporary Political Theory 9 (2010): 77–98; Elizabeth Frazer, “What’s Real in Political Philosophy?” Contemporary Political Theory 9 (2010): 490–507; Galston, “Realism in Political Theory”; Alex Bavister-Gould, “Bernard Williams: Political Realism and the Limits of Legitimacy”, European Journal of Philosophy 21 (2011): 593–610; Katrina Forrester, “Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and Political Realism”, European Journal of Political Theory 11 (2012): 247–272; Michael Freeden, “Editorial: Interpretative Realism and Prescriptive Realism”, Journal of Political Ideologies 17 (2012): 1–11; Charles Larmore, “What is Political Philosophy?” Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (2013): 276–306; Matt Sleat, Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013); Edward Hall, “Contingency, Confidence, and Liberalism in the Political Thought of Bernard Williams”, Social Theory and Practice 40 (2014): 545–569; idem., “Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand: A Defence”, Political Studies 63 (2015): 466–480; Robert Jubb, “Playing Kant at the Court of King Arthur”, Political Studies 63 (2015): 919–934; Paul Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism? Bernard Williams, the Foundations of Liberalism and Political Realism”, Political Studies 64 (2016): 368–384; Alan Thomas, “Rawls and Political Realism: Realistic Utopianism or Judgement in Bad Faith?”, European Journal of Political Theory 16 (2017): 304–324.

  10. Williams’s main treatments of value pluralism are found in Bernard Williams, “Conflicts of Values”, in Alan Ryan, ed, The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985); “Liberalism and Loss”, in Ronald Dworkin, Mark Lilla, and Robert B. Silvers, eds, The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review Books, 2001); “Introduction” to Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Berlin and Williams, op. cit. There are also significant intimations of pluralism in Williams, In the Beginning.

  11. My interpretation of Berlin as a pluralist thinker is presented in greater detail in George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). For a contrasting view see John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, new edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  12. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, p. 212.

  13. Ibid., pp. 213–214.

  14. Williams, “Introduction”, p. xxxv.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Williams, “Conflicts of Values”, p. 227.

  18. Williams, Ethics, p. 140.

  19. Ibid., p. 174.

  20. Ibid., p. 177.

  21. Ibid., p. 180.

  22. Ibid., p. 16.

  23. Ibid., pp. 86, 179.

  24. Ibid., p. 16.

  25. Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, p. 14; “Two Concepts of Liberty”, p. 215.

  26. Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, p. 11.

  27. For Berlin’s sympathy with Hume, see Isaiah Berlin, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism”, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  28. Berlin, “Introduction”, in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 45. See, similarly, “Pursuit of the Ideal”, p. 19.

  29. Kekes, op. cit.; Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); idem, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2011).

  30. Williams, Ethics, pp. 111, 138.

  31. Ibid., p. 111.

  32. Once again, this outside-inside division between the sciences and humanities is closely anticipated by Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History”, in Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  33. Williams, Ethics, p. 153.

  34. Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”, in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 190.

  35. Ibid., pp. 190, 191.

  36. Bernard Williams, “The Truth in Relativism”, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ethics, pp. 160–163; In the Beginning, pp. 68–69. For a critical discussion of the relativism of distance from a value-pluralist perspective, see George Crowder, “Value Pluralism vs Relativism in Bernard Williams’s ‘Relativism of Distance’”, The Pluralist 12 (2017): 114–138.

  37. Williams, In the Beginning, pp. 3, 19, 59.

  38. Williams, Ethics, p. 166.

  39. Bernard Williams, “Saint-Just’s Illusion”, in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 138.

  40. Ibid., p. 143. Williams makes the same point when he distinguishes the notion of “primitive freedom” from the social and political value of “liberty”: Williams, In the Beginning, chapter 7.

  41. Williams, “Saint-Just’s Illusion”, p. 137.

  42. Ibid., p. 141.

  43. Ibid., p. 139.

  44. Williams, “Conflicts of Values”, p. 224.

  45. Ibid., p. 225.

  46. Berlin, “Pursuit of the Ideal”; “Originality of Machiavelli”; Three Critics of the Enlightenment.

  47. Kekes, op. cit.; idem, Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); idem, A Case for Conservatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); John Gray, op. cit.; idem, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1995); idem, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

  48. Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989); Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapter 2; Kekes, Morality of Pluralism; Henry S. Richardson, Practical Reasoning About Final Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles Taylor, “Leading a Life”, in Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  49. Lauren J. Apfel, The Advent of Pluralism: Diversity and Conflict in the Age of Sophocles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, chapter 2, traces the theorization of pluralist practical reasoning to Aristotle, although this is disputed by Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 163–167.

  50. Williams, “Conflicts of Values”, p. 222.

  51. See, for example, Raz, op. cit., chapter 13; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, p. 97; Matthew Moore, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism”, Political Research Quarterly 62 (2009): 244–256; Thomas Mulligan, “The Limits of Liberal Tolerance”, Public Affairs Quarterly 29 (2015): 277–295.

  52. Berlin, “Pursuit of the Ideal”, pp. 18, 19. See also the writers listed in note 48.

  53. Berlin and Williams, op. cit. p. 326.

  54. Bernard Williams, “Liberalism and Loss”, p. 102.

  55. Berlin, “Introduction”, Liberty, p. 42; see also p. 47.

  56. Williams, In the Beginning, p. 17.

  57. Ibid., p. 2.

  58. Ibid., p. 3.

  59. Ibid., p. 59.

  60. Ibid., p. 23.

  61. Ibid., p. 4.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Ibid., p. 6.

  64. Ibid., p. 66.

  65. But see George Tsai, “An Error Theory for Liberal Universalism”, Journal of Political Philosophy 21 (2013): 305–325.

  66. Williams, In the Beginning, p. 8.

  67. This narrow reading of the phrase appears to be endorsed by Jubb, op. cit., p. 922.

  68. Williams, In the Beginning, p. 9.

  69. Ibid., pp. 9, 42.

  70. Ibid., p. 9. If we ask, further, what kind of liberalism fits best with modernity, Williams’s answer refers to Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear”: ibid., chapter 5.

  71. Hall and Sleat, op. cit., p. 281.

  72. Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism”, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 108–118.

  73. Berlin, “Introduction”, Liberty, p. 48. See, similarly, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, p. 172; “Pursuit of the Ideal”, p. 13.

  74. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 3.

  75. Ibid., pp. 3, 4.

  76. Another qualification is that “the circumstances of justice” must apply, that is, questions of justice arise only where there is “moderate scarcity” giving rise to conflict over resources: ibid., p. 128. I discuss further Rawlsian preconditions for justice later.

  77. Williams, In the Beginning, p. 5.

  78. See, e.g., Freeden, op. cit.; Larmore, op. cit.

  79. Larmore, op. cit., p. 291; see also Jubb, op. cit. p. 923.

  80. Hall, “Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand”, pp. 468–9.

  81. Williams, In the Beginning, pp. 14, 24.

  82. For an account of how the classical anarchists believe that social order is possible without the state, see George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

  83. Freeden, op. cit., p. 6.

  84. For one such account, see Christian Welzel, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  85. This “segregation” approach is critically examined from a pluralist perspective by Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a politics of compromise (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 11–12, chapter 3.

  86. Friedrich Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1976).

  87. See Jubb, op. cit., p. 922.

  88. Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 6–12.

  89. Galston, “Realism in Political Theory”, p. 408; endorsed by Jubb, op. cit., p. 921.

  90. Rawls, op. cit., p. 152.

  91. Ibid., p. 62.

  92. See Jubb, op. cit.; Thomas, “Rawls and Political Realism”.

  93. Jubb, op. cit., p. 925.

  94. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 56–57. The value-pluralist elements of the burdens of judgement are identified by Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, pp. 165–171; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, p. 46.

  95. Jubb, op. cit., p. 925.

  96. I am grateful to Henry Hardy and to an anonymous reviewer for the Journal for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Crowder, G. Value Pluralism vs Realism in the Political Thought of Bernard Williams. J Value Inquiry 53, 529–550 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9674-5

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