Recently, Teresa Bejan sat down to interview Professor Skinner in his London home. Part I of that conversation was published in this journal in November.

Art of Theory: You first arrived in Cambridge as an undergraduate and, apart from a few years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and your recent move to Queen Mary, you’ve spent most of your career at Cambridge. You’re known as the founder of the ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought.

Can you say a bit about the importance of Cambridge to your work? What is it like now being elsewhere?

Skinner: Because I wasn’t asked to resign when I went to the Institute for Advanced Study, I had my career unbroken effectively at Cambridge for 46 years. When I retired, I was the longest serving teaching officer. That now seems very strange and I am more aware now that I’ve left of what I missed through not having moved around more. But it didn’t seem strange at the time.

Cambridge had extraordinary facilities, and you have to remember that in the 1960s the question of whether a university had a good library was really important. It also has quite outstanding students, amongst the best and the most gifted you would encounter, and I always found teaching a great joy there. But it does seem strange now.

As an undergraduate, I went to Gonville and Caius College because my elder brother had been there, so it was fortunate for me that it turned out to be a very good choice for studying history. It was then run by Neil McKendrick, who subsequently became Master and was a very gifted teacher. He was very good at encouraging us and wanting us to succeed, but the course was of little interest.

In those pre-reform days, the history track was almost all high politics, and it was very strongly orientated to Great Britain, so I studied the high politics of Great Britain from the year 1485 to the year 1961, or whenever I was doing it, and there were no very great intellectual challenges. It was also very biographical and not much to my intellectual taste.

I had the very good fortune, however, that in my time there I came upon a special subject about the Scottish Enlightenment, centered on the philosophies of Hume and Smith, which I studied with an intellectual historian called Duncan Forbes.

I can’t say that I felt he had the materials under terrifically good control when he was giving the course because it was the first year he gave it. But he was a very exciting lecturer, and of course, the materials were wonderful. We got to study a great deal of Hume’s moral and religious writings as well as the political theory. So, I got a flying start in intellectual history, even in the midst of what would otherwise have been quite a boring course.

But there had always been a great tradition of intellectual history at Cambridge, and I think institutionally that can be explained by the fact that Cambridge didn’t, until very recently, have a department of Politics. A lot of what would have been done in an American university in Politics—any intellectual history or political theory or history of political thought—was done in History. So History was an extremely large department which harbored a number of intellectual historians.

There were several very good teachers, and I had a number of really brilliant contemporaries who shared many of my intellectual interests. The most important by far was John Dunn, who was my close friend from the time we were undergraduates and remains a friend. I think one probably learns more from one’s peers than from one’s teachers.

Art of Theory: You made a spectacular transition from undergraduate to faculty at Cambridge when you were 21, without a Ph.D. Can you say a bit about that experience?

Skinner: Yes, it was an extraordinary thing to happen, though it wasn’t quite so extraordinary at the time.

When I graduated, something called the Robbins Report on higher education had been adopted by the government, and that had the effect in a very short space of time of turning the percentage of the age cohort who went to university from 4% into nearly 14%.

Six new universities were started, and they got their staff largely from the major research universities—Oxford, Cambridge and London, above all. And as a result, there was quite a clean out from Oxford and Cambridge of people in mid-career, and it left a vacuum in the teaching people of my generation were able to step into. We were a very fortunate generation.

Art of Theory: Were you teaching right off the bat?

Skinner: I was teaching undergraduates, yes. That I had always wanted to do. I had been a schoolteacher for a brief period before I went to Cambridge in an inner-city, secondary modern school. That was a tough experience, but it didn’t mean that I didn’t still want to be a teacher.

As an undergraduate, I’d had a lot of so-called ‘supervisions’ or one-on-one tutorials and was able to form a lot of views about how they should be done. I also listened to a huge number of lectures, but the standard of lecturing—with some honorable, and indeed, some spectacular exceptions—was not high.

And you began to think, why is it not high? And could you do this, and could you even maybe do it better? So I had my eye on them.

I was alright starting by doing one-on-one undergraduate teaching, but I quite quickly became bored. I’d done it for 12 years when I was able to leave Cambridge for Princeton, and I was hugely glad of the break. And because when I came back I came back to a chair, I never did it again. I can’t say I missed it. It’s rather like being in a shop which has got a very short loop on the music they’re playing; it comes around again and again, and if you are in the shop all day, you get bored of it.

I didn’t start graduate teaching until later, and I don’t think I did that at all well. When I came to it, I had no previous experience because I hadn’t done a Ph.D. I think I was not at all skilled at it to start with.

But again, at Cambridge, I had the huge good fortune that the earliest people assigned to me—and this was bound to be true—were extremely gifted young students. One was Mark Goldie, and the other was Richard Tuck, and they both knew what they were doing. It was no grave problem to make sure that they got Ph.D.s; they were going to do that anyway.

Art of Theory: You’ve mentioned elsewhere your frustration that it took a long time to get your own research going.

Skinner: Yes, that was a problem because it was quite a demanding job that I had. John Dunn got off the blocks amazingly fast, much faster than I did. He was a very imaginative scholar, but also he didn’t have the same kind of responsibilities. On the other hand, I did have a tenured job from the outset, and it enabled me to go my own way in the work I was doing. Although I was slow to get going, once I did start I managed to produce the sort of thing I wanted to produce. I wasn’t in any way tied down by the requirements of a Ph.D., which I think helped me.

Art of Theory: One of your major scholarly contributions has been the recovery of a third concept of liberty: the republican or neo-Roman concept of liberty as non-dependence. You’ve traced this concept of liberty back to Roman law and argued that the persistence of a classical rhetorical and juristic culture and curriculum in Western Europe can account for its gradual re-emergence in the humanistic culture of the Renaissance.

Can you speak a bit about your discovery of the particular context of the studia humanitatis? Do you think the history of education has been given its due by intellectual historians?

Skinner: Ah, well, that is a very good question. I’m not, in general, very interested in biography. And I suppose one of my most obvious weaknesses as an historian is that I’m not very interested in people. I mean, I’m very interested in ideas, but what they had for breakfast is not of great interest to me.

The exception is education. I’m constantly astonished by the extent to which the history of education gets sidelined in the history of philosophy. If there’s one thing that we all know from our own experience, it is that what we were made to read and learn in our most formative years is in various ways important to us. Those may be difficult ways to recapture, but it can often be traced in the vocabulary used, a set of questions addressed, preoccupations and so forth.

Often, in any case, it’s the best we have, and I think that it’s always worth asking in the most detail that you can about the education that thinkers went through. At the very least, you’ll get a sense of what they read, and that’s extraordinarily important.

Art of Theory: You’ve noted the importance of certain accidents of the Cambridge curriculum to your own intellectual development.

Skinner: Yes, very true.

Art of Theory: Your recent Clarendon lectures at Oxford were about the importance of the classical theory of rhetorical invention for Shakespeare. Are we to take it then, that you’re shifting away from the history of political thought? Or do you see the work on Shakespeare as part of a continuing project?

Skinner: Well, it’s an installment of a work on rhetoric, of which there have been earlier installments. I’ve been interested in the history and theory of rhetoric for a very long time. In the first volume of the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I tried to excavate the importance of a rhetorical education in the early Italian communes for the production of a kind of neo-Roman political theory.

That was my first attempt to study rhetoric in the Renaissance. The second was when I wrote Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, the background of which was the hegemony of rhetoric in school and university education at the time of his youth. I focused on his repudiation of the rhetoric of commonplace argument as a way of arriving at truth, and his insistence that it simply turns you back upon common opinion. What you have to do is to find an argumentative end point from which to question common opinion—but, of course, he later doubts whether it is as simple as that.

The Shakespeare project, you could say, follows on from these two earlier ones: first, I studied rhetoric and politics, then I studied rhetoric and philosophy, and now I’m studying rhetoric and drama. But of course, it’s a little self-serving to put it that way, because there has been a shift.

I’ve always wanted to write more about literature, but I’ve always felt a certain professional constraint. Now that I’m Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary instead of Professor of History at Cambridge, I have certainly felt liberated to do more of what I want to do, and this is certainly what I want to do. In fact, I’ve been working on these questions for the past four years, and I’ve published several articles about Shakespeare along the way. But now I am trying to write a large-scale piece of work out of which the Clarendon lectures surfaced, something that I hope will be a book.

On the other hand, I hope I won’t give up my interest in questions about freedom and the state. I have a lot of essays on these topics that I’ve been asked to put together into a collection, and which I really would like to rewrite and turn into a book. If I’m spared and if sanity holds, which doesn’t always happen, I will go back to that.

Art of Theory: Does situating Shakespeare and his audience into a particular sort of neo-Roman rhetorical culture have any consequences for our understanding of Elizabethan political culture?

Skinner: Yes, I think it does. It’s not something that I plan to go into, but the extreme prevalence of rhetoric in the elite that is running Elizabethan England certainly helps to explain a good deal of how both legal and Parliamentary discussion is conducted. Parliamentary discussion was deliberately rhetorical, and commonly followed the rules of deliberation, and legal argument is judicial rhetoric and as such invariably follows those rules—that’s to say not rules of evidence, but rules of argument.

So, there would be a great deal of research of this character to be done. I’m just taking the case of the drama, but there would be many other cases one could take. It’s extremely prevalent in the culture, and it’s hard to recapture just how central it was as a way of laying out and organizing arguments.

Art of Theory: Under the influence of your methodology, a number of scholars including some of your former students have sought to put religion back in the picture as a crucial part of the intellectual context in which texts must be understood. You yourself have emphasized the importance of theology in the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Yet you’ve been criticized in your later work for downplaying the importance of religious considerations. What do you make of these criticisms?

Skinner: Yes, a very interesting point to me because I think I’ve been insensitive to it. One of the most extraordinary things to anyone of my age is the re-sacrilizing of the world. If you were brought up on Weberian—to say nothing of Marxist—social philosophy, then the secularization image of modernity was absolutely central to our self-image. And that has gone into reverse in a way that completely mystifies me.

It’s true that in the Foundations of Modern Political Thought book there’s a great deal of theology and a great deal of discussion of religious principles in relation to political change. There are chapters which are entirely about Lutheran, Calvinist, and Scholastic theology, and I try to tell a story in which they are intimately meshed with politics. I can remember, when I was writing that book that my wife, Sue [James], said she began to worry that I was going to become a convert! So I certainly don’t feel that I underplayed the role of religion in that text, although so important has religion become to people’s sensibilities again in our time that that is something that is widely said about it.

As to my more recent work, I am conscious and even self-conscious about the fact that I do try to focus my historical attention on issues in respect of which my feelings about religion and theology don’t have to obtrude.

I am not a religious person. Of course, that doesn’t mean I am not a spiritual person. I really resent the assumption that you are not a spiritual person unless you are a religious person. But I have no religious beliefs and much worse than that, I’m a kind of boring atheist.

I think there are two kinds of interesting atheists. There are those who think like Feuerbach, that religion is the deformation of very deep human feelings and aspirations. Or else, there are those who think that although religion may be false, it may be very useful as a binding force in society, in the way that someone like Hobbes thinks. I just think that, as far as I can see, there is no good reason to espouse any of the tenets of the religious hypothesis in any of the forms that I know of it. For me, it’s nothing but nonsense.

That’s what I mean by being a boring atheist, and in consequence I’m not very interested in the history of religion. It’s difficult to be interested in the history of something that you think is nonsense.

I do try to choose carefully topics in which it won’t matter that that’s what I think. It’s possible that, as a result, I miss some dimensions of what I’m writing about, and that’s been a recent accusation against me that I’ve had to think about. I can’t see that it’s just at all, because in the discussion of republicanism I’ve been interested exclusively in theories of freedom and the constitutionalism that follows, and I can’t see how that’s informed by religious belief. But it is certainly true that I keep off religion.

Art of Theory: You emphasize the importance of political context to interpretation in your work, but the relevant political context of your own works and its political implications can be somewhat obscure. For instance, you’re known to be strongly committed to gender equality and have done a lot practically for the advancement of women at Cambridge, yet issues of gender have never been prominent in your philosophical or historical work. Can you say a bit about the connection between scholarship and political context? And do you see problems of social justice or issues like gender inequality as being primarily practical rather than philosophical issues?

Skinner: This is very interesting. The promotion of gender equality is something which matters very much to me, and I’ve been shocked in my own profession by the extent to which the seeming gains of the women’s movement in the 1970s turned into the merest kind of tokenism in the professions.

Everything remains harder for women, at every stage, and it remains to my mind quite a scandal that at Cambridge when I last counted, there were 54 members of the Faculty of History and only 16 were women. I remember mentioning this in my farewell speech to the Faculty, and Melissa Lane said to me afterwards, “Are you sure it’s only 16? It feels much more.” I said to her, “That’s only because the women are amazing!” Of course it feels more because they have to be that much cleverer, more prominent, more committed, more everything. But 16 out of 54 is really unjust. I feel strongly that we’ve got to keep pushing on these doors that are not open in the way that they should be.

Anyway, that wasn’t quite your point. Your point was, I think, one that Max Weber raises very beautifully in his discussions about vocations.

I’m certainly someone who has very strong views, both political views nationally speaking, and also very strong views within the profession. But it has always been a principle of mine—I’m not sure if I’ve always managed to hold to it—to adopt something of that kind of vision of objectivity of Weber’s and to keep politics, in the sense of party politics, off the professional podium. That seems to me very important. Our scholarship has to have its own integrity. I would be shocked if it were evident to my readers that my way of handling the themes I talk about reflects my political positions.

Of course, the choice of the topics that I talk about cannot fail to reflect my values—who else’s values would they reflect? We’ve all got to accept that when, for example, I spend a lot of time criticizing liberal views about freedom, saying that they let the state off too lightly and that we could do better for the relations between freedom and equality, that is a political position. But it’s a position which I attempt to defend in purely philosophical terms.

The politics enters the choice of topic, but I hope it doesn’t enter the handling of the topic. I hope that that’s handled in a scrupulously philosophical spirit.

Art of Theory: What features of modern political life most puzzle you?

Skinner: Oh! Well, when I see the word puzzle, I always think of the word explanation. What is it that I can’t explain about modern political life?

Well, we all think that we can explain our political leaders and their behavior rather easily. We’ve come to feel that they’re quite frequently not rational people, that they’re driven by a will to power, and that sometimes they’re crazy. It’s quite safe to assume that they have a bottomless cynicism.

It’s an old joke in America that the Congress you have is the best one that money can buy. You see, that shows the kind of cynicism we have. We think we understand it. In this country in particular, politicians are viewed with a remarkable level of contempt, far more than in the United States.

I suppose what most puzzles me about modern political life is the will to power. I cannot imagine not having personal integrity as one of my central values in trying to lead my life.

I don’t mean that I succeed, but that that would be an aspiration. But I can’t see how you could engage for long in modern politics, where party discipline is so strong and where there are necessary lies and unavoidable hypocrisies, and manage at the same time to sustain an image of personal integrity as fundamental.

It sounds rather priggish, but that really is a puzzle to me. I’m not saying that I’m a moral person, but that it would be strange to place yourself in a profession in which you couldn’t be a moral person.

Art of Theory: Can you say a little bit about your work process?

Skinner: When I’m trying to do research, I’m only really happy with intertextuality, working with a text in which I hear the echoes of other texts in a way that helps me to explain it. I suppose that my principles are very like those of certain literary critics who are particularly interested in the phenomenon of allusion, critics like Harold Bloom or Christopher Ricks.

I likewise am very interested in the phenomenon of allusion—or, indeed, of deafening silences. The kind of hermeneutics that I’ve always tried to practice is like that, it’s about setting texts up against other texts to see how they fit, or fail to fit.

If you then ask me about my work processes, about how I come to have those insights—if that’s what they are—and also how that then leads me to write about them, I have to say I find it quite mystifying. It must just be that sometimes you’re reading and it sparks something off in your mind and it looks as if that’s going to be interesting to follow up. Sometimes it is, but usually you do find that you’ve come to a dead end quite quickly. That’s in the nature of doing research in the humanities.

Art of Theory: You’re known as a great teacher and as a remarkably engaging lecturer. Do you have any advice for new teachers?

Skinner: I think that in my older age I’ve become really prone to give advice. I used to be very nervous about giving advice but now I give it all the time!

I think the fundamental advice I want to give teachers is to recognize that the most important thing in being a successful teacher is having an enthusiasm for your subject. That’s what communicates itself in the lecture hall. And if I think back to the lecturers I can remember as an undergraduate, that was the most important quality.

Now, you can’t exactly acquire a passion for a subject if you don’t already have it, but there is a very strong implication that since our teaching comes out of our research, you must never engage in any piece of research because it’s fashionable. Fashions change very fast. If you do it not because you actually care, but because it’s fashionable to care about it, then first of all you’re going to get bored very quickly, and second you’re going to be lost when it becomes unfashionable. Whereas if you stick to what you think matters, you’ll find fashions whizz round and round.

I’ve been out of fashion and in fashion several times, and the reason for keeping going with what interests you, is that it interests you. That is what will keep you interesting as a teacher, if anything does.

I’ve come to feel strongly about teaching that trying to guard standards by making it clear to young scholars that what they’re trying to do is almost impossible to do and that they probably won’t manage, is all wrong. The right way to guard standards is to encourage them as much as you possibly can, to do as best as they can. If you don’t encourage them, you can very easily kill off their interest.

I think the consequence is—at least this is what’s been said to me when I co-examine—is that I over-praise young scholars. Well, I certainly hope I do! It’s a very difficult thing we’re all trying to do, and if senior colleagues cannot find it in their hearts to encourage young scholars, the whole thing will come to an end. So I feel very strongly that teachers have really got to be encouragers.

But I do have another piece of advice, which I’ve come to think very important as I listen to young scholars at conferences presenting their work. Of course, our work is inherently patricidal. The profession only advances by way of changing the questions that an older generation has asked, or else giving new answers to their questions. In either case, it’s going to involve polemics and it’s going to be underpinned by a kind of aggression.

My advice is that you’ve really got to keep that under the tightest possible control. No audience likes to hear scholars simply being slagged off. It never looks good, although it sounds good to oneself. I think I was a big culprit in my youth. If you’re criticizing someone, it must be because you think their work is some good. I mean, if you don’t think it’s any good, why would you bother to criticize it?

If you think it is some good, you’ve got to make that clear. I find that my own work is always far more polemical than I expect, and it receives a great deal of criticism. Some of this criticism is really disgraceful, because it can’t be that bad. If it was that bad, why have they spent all this time reading it?

There is one other thing. It’s true that high modernism often made a virtue of difficulty, but postmodernism has gone further and has made a virtue of a kind of hermetic way of writing in the humanistic disciplines. I cannot think that this is to the benefit of anyone, and certainly not to the benefit of lecture audiences.

If you are a teacher in a university, I feel that you cannot be too clear. It will be lovely if you’re subtle and nuanced as well, and if you write a beautiful ironic prose, and if you’re deep and everything else, but the fundamental duty is to try to make complex things clear.

That’s the task. Not to leave them complex; they are complex.

Art of Theory: In recent years various scholars have offered their own accounts as to what they consider to be the relevant context for understanding your work, and that of the Cambridge School more generally. As a champion of contextualism, what is it like to have to patiently withstand your own contextualization? And, if the measure of an interpretation is whether an author could have recognized it, how have the various contextualizations to which you’ve been subjected in recent years measured up?

Skinner: Wonderful to end on that. This means some very good work. Mark Goldie’s contextualization of my Foundations of Modern Political Thought is very thought-provoking and, on reflection, it seems to me right.

But I have to add that those of my commentators who purport to tell me where my ideas come from just remind one how impoverished a genre intellectual biography is almost bound to be, unless it’s in the hands of someone who has access to the kind of private papers that really can enable you to turn the private into the public.

Although intentions are not private entities in the mind, there are some private entities in the mind, and they may be absolutely fundamental to explaining one’s intellectual performances. These will be the kinds of ambitions and anxieties and aggressions that will not appear upon the textual surface and which it would be very stupid for the writer to confess, but which may nevertheless be determinative. And so I think the project of contextualization will never satisfy the person who is made its object.

This is Part II of a two-part series. You can read Part I, “Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method,” by clicking here.

Recently, Teresa Bejan sat down to interview Professor Skinner in his London home. What follows is Part I of that conversation. You can read the continuation, “Quentin Skinner’s Context,” by clicking here.

Art of Theory: What brought you to the study of history, specifically intellectual history and the history of political thought? Did it arise out of any particular political engagement when you were younger?

Skinner: Well, at school, when we specialized—and of course English schoolboys and girls specialized very early—I studied three subjects. I studied the classics—a great deal of Latin and some Greek—history, and English literature. So, the first question in going to university was which of those subjects I would continue with, and history was the very obvious answer.

I wasn’t a gifted classicist, and as to the study of literature, at that point it would have seemed obvious to schoolteachers who were advising you that the study of literature at an advanced level was a kind of dilettante subject. It didn’t have the kind of high seriousness that people of that generation would have associated with the study of history, which was meant to be, after all, a nursery of statesmen. So, there was no contest as it were, I was going to study history.

What turned me on to the history of ideas is harder to say, but I have a very particular adolescent memory of coming upon Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I remember, as I was a bookish adolescent, thinking that this was just the most exciting book I had ever come across. Dazzlingly written and with an extraordinary scale and scope. I remember settling down to read it and then beginning to take notes, which more or less consisted of copying the book out. It seemed to me a marvel, and if there’s one work that really made me feel I want to know more about this subject, it was that one.

As to why, if I was interested in the history of philosophy, it turned out to be the history of political philosophy, I suspect the answer to that is simply that it was an artifact of the Cambridge syllabus. That is what was taught.

When I became a professional historian, I did at various times try to burst out of those bounds because, obviously, they’re arbitrary. And one wants to study the history of moral theory and social theory as well as political theory, and also other kinds of philosophy. So, I think that although political theory was an important engagement of mine, that’s probably the answer to it.

But I was very politically engaged as a teenager and as a student. That was commonplace of course, at the time. Especially in Great Britain, practically everyone of my generation was politicized by that final gasp of empire in the [1956] Suez expedition, its calamitous collapse, and the parting of the ways between Foster Dulles and the American regime, on the one hand, and Eden with dreams of glory, on the other. That was both a great national humiliation and a great moment of national crisis. Almost immediately after that came the complete divestment by the British of their empire. So to have lived through that was to be politicized.

Art of Theory: “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, your major methodological essay, was published over 40 years ago and it remains your most cited work. What do you think accounted for its impact?

Skinner: Yes, it’s a bit humiliating that something that I wrote in my mid 20′s should turn out to be my only piece of work that people read. But I think that [“Meaning and Understanding”], in retrospect, turns out to have been part of a kind of cultural movement of the mid- to late ’60s in which people became less interested in the idea that we studied the history of philosophy in order to winnow the true things they said from the false things they said and to focus on the true things and became more interested—in a kind of anthropological spirit—in the question of whether what they said might have been interesting, although we might not ourselves be disposed to affirm it. And, in the idea more generally that there are many cultural worlds that differ radically from each other, but they each have their own internal logic and our aspiration should be to try to recapture them on their own terms.

It’s hard to remember how central anthropology was as a humanistic discipline at that time. I suppose it was in ’73 when Clifford Geertz’s classic text, The Interpretation of Cultures, was published, but that collected essays that he had been writing over the last ten years.

The other person—who was a close friend of [Geertz]—who emerges from that period saying something similar was Thomas Kuhn, especially in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; the idea that when Galileo debated with Bellarmine, that this was a collision of world systems in which both were able to produce a rational and strongly defensible account of the positions they held. Although it took Richard Rorty later to say that when we chose Galileo over Bellarmine, that was what he calls the ‘rhetoric of science’.

Well, that was the pure relativistic story that emerged a decade later. But my essay was part of a kind of mild relativism. What I was attacking in that essay essentially was the view that unless the forebears whom we study can be shown to be asking our questions than it would be pure antiquarianism to study them, and that must have seemed at the time to have been part of a wider movement.

Art of Theory: That piece is notable not only for its argument, it’s also quite passionate in the way you take on what you see as the prevailing orthodoxies.

Skinner: Yes, well [“Meaning and Understanding”] was sort of fierce. I would never write like that now. That may well be because I had to re-read it. I try never to re-read my works but I had to when I collected my papers about ten years ago, and I hadn’t in the intervening 30 years. And I was struck, if I may say this, that it was very funny. I thought it had a lot of quite good jokes in it. And yes, maybe that had a certain shock value, because it was a satire amongst other things.

Art of Theory: Did any of the people that you wrote about respond?

Skinner: Oh yes, oh yes, it caused some hurt. But it was intended to.

Art of Theory: Did you have difficulty in getting it published?

Skinner: I did, yes. If you know the essay, which was published in the end in History and Theory, which is a large format journal, it occupied nearly 60 pages of that journal. So, the important thing to say, over the fact that it was turned down by two journals, is that it was an extremely long essay to be asking any journal to publish uncut. And one journal did accept it but with the condition that it was cut down to 10,000 words, I don’t know how long it was but I think it was easily twice that length.

What I probably should have done is to have published it as a little book. But at that time, I had a very deferential view of books. I was quite shocked by some of the books that my contemporaries published, plus I felt in those days you shouldn’t really publish a book unless it was something definitive. And this was actually a kind of polemical squib, that’s all it was. So I had no such ambition for it, but it is true that it wasn’t simply its length that got it into trouble.

It did shock the referees for the two journals I sent it to. And I did get some remarkably hostile reactions to it. And this is the sort of thing that Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions tells us about, that if there is a strongly established paradigm and you challenge it, the first attempt that will be made is to sideline you, and I certainly had that experience.

On the other hand, and this is something that Kuhn is not sufficiently sensitive to in that book I think, is that there isn’t ever just one paradigm—in the humanities, at least—there are going to be several, and this article in the end had the good fortune to come into the hand of Maurice Mandelbaum, who was a German-trained historicist on the editorial board of History and Theory, and he was a very major thinker at that time in the subject, and he simply commanded them to publish it, which they did. He had great authority, and also he deeply believed in some of the things that I was saying. So there wasn’t one paradigm. For all of the people who were hostile to what I was saying, there were also people who were very happy to have it said.

Art of Theory: In “Meaning and Understanding”, you made the case for a kind of third way in the history of political thought, between an ahistorical textualism on the one hand and a reductive, mostly Marxian, contextualism on the other. You argued that the relevant context in which to situate texts were intellectual and discursive as opposed to socioeconomic.

Yet people seem to have lost sight of that latter target and the attempt to claim the middle ground and instead associate that piece—and the Cambridge school more generally—with a strict contextualism and antiquarianism. Why do you think that is, and can you reflect a bit on the reception of the argument?

Skinner: Yes, well I think that’s extremely perceptive.

I was disappointed that nobody much picked up on what I thought was the most important, or at least the most novel thing I was trying to say, which was that it was meant to be a critique of the then very prevalent Marxist theories of ideology. And I wanted to make the anti-Marxist point that there is a causal role of ideas in relation to the explanation of social and political action, but that causal role does not have to run through the assumption that an avowed principle can help causally to explain a course of action if and only if the principle is the motive for the action.

Now that had been the position which it was assumed would be taken by anyone who was adopting a non-Marxist stance. Then, of course, it was easy to make it seem intolerably naive to imagine that people’s professed principles are generally—or even ever—the actual motives for their behavior. What I wanted to say was, “Let’s concede that case. Let’s suppose that my avowed principles are never the motives of my conduct.”

It’s nevertheless the case, because of the importance of being able to legitimize what I’m doing, that what I do should be compatible with the claim that it was motivated by some avowed principle. That requirement of legitimation, which generates the requirement of compatibility in turn, places very strong restrictions upon what you can do. Because if what you can do is only what you can both do and legitimize, then some reference to the legitimizing principles will have to enter into the causal account of why this particular course of action was undertaken.

Now, that’s not a completely straightforward argument, and I don’t think I put it very well in the article. I restated it later, in a 1974 article called “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action” in Political Theory, and there I think I managed to get it more or less exactly as I would want to put it. But it was there in the 1969 article, as you rightly say, as an attempt to question the idea that the context that would have to be explanatory of social and political principles and actions would have to be socioeconomic, and that wasn’t taken up at all.

Very recently, Professor [David] d’Avray, in his book Rationalities in History, has quite explicitly made your point and has said that this seems to him the most original thing that I said, and that he wants to make it more widely accepted, but it’s true that it wasn’t much taken up. So one was left with the idea that what I defended was a kind of contextualism so strict that it was just antiquarian.

Now, that was always a philistine argument because I had wanted, quite explicitly, to say that the fact that the texts I was studying did not necessarily share our questions, let alone our answers to those questions, didn’t mean that they weren’t worth studying.

So to call that antiquarian is almost doubly philistine. I mean, maybe there would be other reasons for studying these texts, for one thing. But for another thing the point I earlier made about how we might learn from looking at worlds very alien to our world and its belief systems and practices. That point was one that the accusation of antiquarianism, it seems to me, also failed to get to grips with.

Art of Theory: Education as a process of alienation.

Skinner: That’s nicely put. Yes, exactly. Finding out about something other than yourself. Getting lost in something other than yourself. That’s very important.

Art of Theory: Some of your early polemical targets seemed to approach historical texts with the presumption of their own infallibility and to fault past authors for failing to conform to present sensibilities (e.g. why didn’t Locke talk about race or universal suffrage?). On the other hand, Leo Strauss, who is often regarded as a key antagonist of the Cambridge School, recommended approaching great texts with a presumption of their infallibility and the author’s superior intelligence.

How would you characterize your own mindset when approaching a text in the history of political thought?

Skinner: Well, one doesn’t want to be too prescriptive because there is much to be said for Gadamer’s hermeneutics here—that is to say, the view that essentially you must just lie down in front of the text and let it roll over you.

But I would want to say two things. One is that, for me, the unit is always the text, and I think it is a great mistake to presume that what one should be looking for is a unified set of beliefs across an oeuvre. We all experience changing our minds. It would be extraordinary if thinking people over their lifetime didn’t radically change their minds about important aspects of what they thought and said.

I am very often criticized for having changed my mind, but that really is an extremely strange criticism to make of someone who is a professional thinker. I mean, suppose the evidence was such that you felt you had to change your mind. It would be irrational not to, wouldn’t it? So, I feel that if we apply those very obvious thoughts to an oeuvre, we would want to say that if there is any unit it cannot be a larger unit than a single text in which we are looking for coherence or a particular viewpoint.

My second thought would be that, yes, I think we should do something rather along the lines of what you describe Strauss as saying. That is to say, assume that these thoughts hang together, assume that they are rationally grounded, assume that we are dealing with someone upon whose thinking processes a good deal of weight can be placed so that you find yourself saying, “Well here they say this, so they’re going to have to say that, or they can’t say the other”.

But the injunction has to stop short of any kind of belief in their infallibility, of course. Again, it is a very common experience that we reach the limits of our intelligence and we get confused and we say things that don’t fit together, and that is going to be true of the greatest thinkers as well, so be ready for your assumptions about rationality and coherence not to work.

Art of Theory: You mentioned elsewhere your love of Bertrand Russell and his History of Western Philosophy, and in that book he describes his mindset as one of “hypothetical sympathy”.

Skinner: Very good, yes. One of the extraordinary achievements in that text, which simply reveals his remarkable literary skills is that he is brilliant at paraphrase, and you can read a paraphrase of his which is very accurate and yet is full of ridicule at the same time. And it would be wonderful to know how to do that—it’s quite unfair, of course. His sympathies are very easily engaged at the level of wanting to reproduce what someone has said, and he’s brilliant at doing that. But of course, at another level his sympathies may not be engaged at all.

Art of Theory: Yes, and the difficulties of paraphrase are…

Skinner: Endless.

Art of Theory: “Meaning and Understanding” started out as a conference paper called “The Unimportance of the Great Texts”, and you’ve acknowledge that it was intended as an attack on the idea and importance of a canon. You have continued to affirm your 1969 position that because the questions asked in texts in the history of political thought are not our questions, we must learn to do our thinking for ourselves.

But in recent years, it seems that your friend and early methodological ally, John Dunn, has moved more towards the position that we should read the canonical authors in particular because of their intellectual power and insight in addressing some of the same problems we confront in contemporary political life. Is there a genuine tension here between your positions?

Skinner: Yes, I think there is.

I haven’t very much talked to John about this of late times, but I wrote an essay that was published in his Festschrift in which I went back over the evolution of his thinking about John Locke, and it’s very striking that he began by wanting, as it were, to alienate himself from Locke’s questions and to reconstitute the work in purely historical terms. And that later, what he wanted to tell us, was that it was a text to be read to solve some of our current problems, especially about the role of trust and representation in government.

I have always preferred a not very brilliant metaphor of mine about buried treasure, but I suppose that arises out of thinking in Foucauldian terms about archaeology. For me, what has always been more of a guiding light is the idea that if you begin by alienating yourself from the past, seeing it as strange, and trying to see things their way, seeing things their way would be trying to reconstitute answers to questions that we do not ask, and trying to make coherent concepts the readings of which are for us completely different readings.

Nevertheless what you might find is that that operation turns out to carry with it some very interesting implications for our current thought, and that has been the direction of my thinking in all of the work that I’ve done in the last two decades about the theory of freedom and of the state. I got interested in the latter as a kind of pre- or, if you like, anti-Weberian way of thinking about the state as a moral person and trying to make sense of the very unfamiliar idea that the state is not just the name of the government, but a distinct, if fictional person and trying to make sense of that.

But, once I had to my satisfaction made sense of it through working on questions about authorization and representation, I came to the conclusion that the setting aside of this idea of the moral personality of the state within liberalism—in some way either confused, or sinister or both—was a great mistake and has lost us something extremely valuable in our political discourse.

Likewise, and even more important to me, has been the work I’ve been doing on the theory of freedom, which began with my essay in a volume that Richard Rorty and I edited in 1984, trying to show that there was a negative view of freedom which was not the view that freedom is simply the absence of interference with our powers.

I was greatly helped in the ’90s by Philip Pettit’s wonderful work on this topic, and I don’t think I would have got as far as I eventually did without his help, but I ended up as Philip did in a slightly different way, with a picture of negative freedom seen as something completely other than absence of interference, and thus completely opposed to contemporary liberal ways of thinking about what un-freedom consists of.

Now I’ve come to feel that this alternative view, which sees freedom essentially as the absence of arbitrary power and hence as absence of dependence, is a more interesting way of thinking about freedom, more valuable for us here and now and something that gives us a better way of getting into what goes wrong with relations between government and the governed, and how we should be thinking about citizenship and the state. Now all of that emerged precisely from not going to the past texts in the hope that they had a better account of freedom than we had, but finding that they had a very different view—which at first I couldn’t make much sense of—but which, when I thought I had made sense of it, suddenly seemed to me much more illuminating than our own ways of thinking.

Art of Theory: In your early work, you emphasized the importance of recovering an author’s intention in any particular intervention to an interpretation of their work. More recently, it seems that you’ve shifted away from this focus on authors as human agents in favor of an almost anti-humanistic emphasis on the text as the unit of analysis. The meaning of a text is to be discovered not in the author’s intentions but intertextually, as in your recent book, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Has there been a shift, and if so, why?

Skinner: Yes, there has been a shift. I made the shift in the name of protecting and trying to strengthen my original and basic argument.

What I originally tried to argue has been much misunderstood. I didn’t want to say that the meaning of the text is whatever the author meant. That was a complete misunderstanding. I wasn’t talking about the meanings of texts, I was talking about speech acts.

The sense of ‘meaning’ in which I was interested was the sense of somebody meaning something by doing something. That’s to say, with what intentions did they do them? Then it was objected against me, and it was objected still against the recent book on Hobbes that you mention, that I did not succeed in establishing that Hobbes intended his analysis of freedom and subjection in Leviathan as a criticism of, and an attempt to discredit (notice all those speech acts) the republican theory of freedom and government.

Now the reason, as it turns out, why these critics think that I haven’t established that this was Hobbes’s intention, is that they believe that intentions are irrecoverable mental entities, and that in order to establish that this was Hobbes’s intention you would have to get inside Hobbes’s head at the moment that he picked up the pen and started to write.

This is philosophically primitive to a shocking degree. If you look at a review of my book like the one by Blair Worden, it makes no sense when he says this is all in my mind and not in Hobbes’s at all, except on the hypothesis that this is what he must suppose it would be to recover someone’s intentions. But of course that’s a mistake about intentionality.

Intentions are ways of describing actions. The intention with which I did something identifies the act as being an act of a certain kind. The intentionality is in the action. An act of waving your arms in greeting is different than the act of waving your arms in warning, although the gesture might be identical. But that’s to say that if we’re going to be able to discriminate which it is, it must be because of a context and an assumption about what this person is doing, that’s to say intentionally doing, in waving.

So once you see that that’s the way I’m thinking about intentions, there’s no objection to my putting it as I originally put it, except of course that I then get vulgarly misunderstood as making a point about intentionality and meaning, which I’m not.

However, I think it was due to conversations with Annabel Brett and certainly through reading her beautiful essay on intellectual history in the collection What is History Now? that I came to see that a good way of protecting my position would be to say, “Well, you may think I haven’t shown that it was Hobbes’s intention in Leviathan to repudiate republican theories of government, but the Leviathan constitutes such a repudiation.”

That is without question the case. We may say that that’s true about the text and forget about the author, or if you were going to go back to Wittgensteinian and Austinian terminology, you would want to say maybe I haven’t shown the illocutionary act that was performed, namely the act of discrediting, but I’ve shown the force of the actions. The actions have the force of repudiating just as my wave may have had the force of a warning.

So it was an attempt to protect my basic position, but of course I still want to say that the idea that intentionality has no place in interpretation is a really quite primitive misunderstanding of intentionality, or else is a mistake about the two admittedly and unfortunately easily confused senses of the word ‘meaning’ that we use in this context.

I’m not saying that intentions give you meaning, I’m saying intentions give you action. Well, everybody thinks that intentions give you action. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as criminal responsibility. I think, although I don’t like to put it quite like this, that although I decided to protect my position by retreating in exactly the way you have identified, I did so in the face of arguments against my position which are not good arguments.

Art of Theory: In an earlier answer you also talked about beginning with the text as a way to avoid the temptation of imposing coherence on an author. Is that also a consideration here? Is beginning with the text as opposed to the author a safeguard against that?

Skinner: Yes, because then you might find as I did find in writing a book about Hobbes, that if you begin with Leviathan, there’s a completely clear and coherent understanding of the theory of freedom in government and obligation to government. But it’s not the same as you would find if you read the De Cive. And if you go back from the De Cive to The Elements of Law, it’s not the same there.

So there’s an evolution of his thinking here, and one that I find it very interesting to trace. But once you’ve started to talk like that, you’re back in traditional humanistic terms talking about the evolution of somebody’s thinking, and there’s no reason not to do that.

Art of Theory: You have frequently compared the task interpreting Leviathan to that of interpreting a speech in Parliament. Is there a problem with approaching a text like Hamlet or All’s Well that Ends Well in a similar way? How do you approach these texts as opposed to texts in the history of political thought?

Skinner: Well, of course, there’s a difference. The point of that observation was to try to say that what may appear at first sight a completely abstract work of philosophy like Hobbes’s Leviathan may nevertheless be a political and a highly polemical political intervention, so that understanding it would require you to understand not merely the character of the philosophy but the character of the intervention. So that was my point there.

Now, the obvious point I would therefore have to add is that I’m by no means saying that all of our references constitute polemical interventions. And maybe the idea of a lyric poem or a sonnet as a polemical intervention is simply ludicrous, so that you would want to say that this just doesn’t apply.

Now, that is often going to be so, but the caution I would want to say—and I can’t really get away from my own hermeneutics very readily—is that this claim that the idea of a contextual hermeneutics centered on the idea of speech acts just wouldn’t apply to poetry, for example, that can’t be right. It cannot be a point about genre. So, for example, Jonathan Bate in his recent book on Shakespeare has a brilliant chapter in which he shows that Shakespeare’s sonnets were intensely polemical about the conventions of sonneteering and that many of those sonnets can only be understood if you recognize that he’s satirizing a number of these conventions.

So, there we are back to the kind of hermeneutics that I’m most comfortable with, but we’re talking about a sonnet sequence. So it’s not a point about genre, but of course, there may be utterances in respect to which the application of this kind of hermeneutics would not be very fruitful.

Art of Theory: If we turn to the particular authors to whom you’ve devoted much of your scholarly attention, Machiavelli and Hobbes, both are often lumped together in a sort of rogues’ gallery in political theory, and they’re renowned among other things for their reputed atheism or more or less explicit anti-Christianity.

But for you, it seems one is a kind of Neo-Roman hero, and the other you’ve described as a nemesis. Can you say a bit about what in particular inspired your choice of subjects, and what they might have to do with each other?

Skinner: My early interest in both of these writers, was philosophical and methodological rather than historical. I wanted to argue the kind of case that we’ve just been talking about as a general way of thinking about hermeneutics.

And Machiavelli and Hobbes are both wonderful examples, because if you read Machiavelli’s Prince, you find if you know enough about the tradition of writing advice for princes and ruling classes and if you go right back into classical humanism, that much of what he’s doing in that text is satirizing those assumptions, quoting Cicero and mocking him by reversing what he wanted to say about the lion and the fox.

Of course, you’d have to know that he was quoting Cicero’s De Officiis, and as far as I can see commentators haven’t noticed that. But once you see what he’s doing, you understand the direction of his thinking, that it’s a satire.

So, for me that was perfect: What is he doing? He’s challenging, he’s satirizing, he’s repudiating some of the central tenets of classical humanism. So there’s a moment where it’s very hard to get away from the idea of the author… but likewise with Hobbes, my very earliest historical work was on Hobbes’s theory of obligation, and I tried to show that what motivated this, as Hobbes himself says at the end of Leviathan, was a wish to come to terms with the fact that the English had abolished the monarchy and set up a republic—should you obey this newly established power?

I wanted to say that to understand why Hobbes yokes obligation not to the concept of right, but to the idea of protection so strongly would be to understand that he is trying to defend and validate the new arrangements and give you reasons for accepting them. So that’s what he’s doing, and that’s what it is to understand the direction of his thinking. In both cases, they were very dramatic examples for me of what I wanted to state in general terms.

Art of Theory: One of the great things about your work on Hobbes is the attention to his dripping sarcasm and irony, which people sometimes seem determined to overlook.

Skinner: It’s full of jokes that book isn’t it? Yes, he’s a notable satirist. I sometimes thought that the mistake in the wider conspectus of Hobbes studies was to think that the person we most need to read in order to understand Hobbes is Descartes, when the person you most need to read to understand Hobbes might be Rabalais….

Art of Theory: You’ve insisted before that you’re not a political theorist and that your intention has always been to make the history of political thought a properly historical subject, and yet The Art of Theory is a political theory journal. How do you account for the persistence of political theorists’ interest in your work?

Skinner: Well, if I say I’m not a political theorist, I’m just insisting on a professional identity.

What’s been very important for me is that political theory when I was first studying and teaching was the kind of subject that had a canonical set of questions, a particular analytical idiom for addressing them, and an accompanying contempt for the historical. And I’ve wanted to challenge that. But, I’m not an antiquarian. The reason for studying the past is that, as my great mentor in Princeton, [Clifford] Geertz always used to say, “These guys are meant to be working for us!”

I think that’s a really fine remark. We are trying to find out what these guys think and we’re trying to take it on their terms. We’re trying to reconstitute their world. But of course we hope that that will illuminate our world, and if it doesn’t we’re not going to publish our results because they’re not going to be important. So where you have to be willing to spend a lot of time when it doesn’t work, and where you’ve got to be willing to press your luck where it does, is where you find that you have come upon a configuration, a theory, a way of viewing the world in the past which we have lost sight of, but which is well worth recapturing.

So there’s the Foucauldian image of buried treasure once again. And, I do think that that is a way of doing political theory. It’s rather labor intensive, and it doesn’t always work. But if it works, as for example in Philip Pettit’s writings on the theory of freedom, the payoff can be absolutely colossal. I mean Philip has single-handedly reconstituted a central feature of the discipline of political theory by making people think again about what’s wrong with both Aristotelian—that’s to say perfectionist—and liberal or individualist ways of thinking about freedom.

If he’s right, we’ve got to think again about several core concepts of our political theory and how they fit together. I certainly hope that I have made some contributions to political theory, especially with my own work about freedom, and my own work about the concept of the state.

I don’t say that these are important contributions but they’re definitely contributions to political theory. But they are the contributions of an historian.

This is Part I of a two-part series. You can read the continuation, “Quentin Skinner’s Context,” by clicking here.

I. Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Betty Benevolence wants to save the world. Yet she has crazy ideas about how to do it.

When she sees a starving child, she steals his remaining food. When she sees someone in pain, she kicks him in the shins. When she sees a drowning man, she pours water on his face. When she sees a burning house, she douses it with gasoline. Betty always intends to help people, but she always harms them.

Few people act like Betty in their daily lives. Yet, at the polls, most citizens act just like Betty Benevolence. They vote with good intentions, but they don’t know what they’re doing. They do more harm than good.

In The Ethics of Voting, I ask: How dare they do that?

II. Voting is an Ethical Issue
How we vote matters. When we vote, we can make government better or worse, and in turn, make people’s lives go better or worse. Bad choices at the polls can destroy economic opportunities, produce crises that lower everyone’s standards of living, lead to unjust and unnecessary wars (and thus to millions of deaths), lead to sexist, racist, and homophobic legislation, help reinforce poverty, produce overly punitive criminal legislation, and worse.

Voting is not like choosing what to eat off a restaurant’s menu. If a person makes bad choices at a restaurant, at least only she bears the consequences of her actions. Yet when voters make bad choices at the polls, everyone suffers. Irresponsible voting can harm innocent people.

How other people vote is my business. After all, they make it my business. Electoral decisions are imposed upon all through force, that is, through violence and threats of violence. When it comes to politics, we are not free to walk away from bad decisions. Voters impose externalities upon others.

We would never say to everyone, “Who cares if you know anything about surgery or medicine? The important thing is that you make your cut.” Yet for some reason, we do say, “It doesn’t matter if you know much about politics. The important thing is to vote.” In both cases, incompetent decision-making can hurt innocent people.

Commonsense morality tells us to treat the two cases differently. Commonsense morality is wrong.

In The Ethics of Voting, I argue that citizens have no standing moral obligation to vote. Voting is just one of many ways one can pay a debt to society, serve other citizens, promote the common good, exercise civic virtue, and avoid free-riding off the efforts of others. Participating in politics is nothing special, morally speaking.

However, I argue that if citizens do decide to vote, they have very strict moral obligations regarding how they vote. I argue that citizens must vote for what they justifiedly believe will promote the common good, or otherwise they must abstain.

That is, voters should vote on the basis of sound evidence. They must put in heavy work to make sure their reasons for voting as they do are morally and epistemically justified. In general, they must vote for the common good rather than for narrow self-interest. Citizens who are unwilling or unable to put in the hard work of becoming good voters should not vote at all. They should stay home on election day rather than pollute the polls with their bad votes.

III. What Does It Mean to Vote Well?
In my view, a voter votes well when she votes for a person or policy that she justifiedly believes will promote the common good. In this section, I will offer a brief overview of what it means to vote well. In the next few sections, I will explain why voters should vote this way.

I will argue that citizens should justifiedly believe that they are voting for candidates or policies that will promote the common good. It is not sufficient for them to believe they are voting in a public-spirited way. Rather, they should be epistemically justified in believing they are voting for the common good.

A belief is epistemically justified when a person has sufficiently strong evidence to warrant the belief. So, for instance, suppose Bob and Charlie both believe that the president is named Obama. Their beliefs are true. However, imagine they have different grounds for this belief. Bob believes Obama is president because he read it in numerous news reports. In contrast, Charles has been living as an isolated hermit in a mountain retreat for the past five years. He has not read or seen the news, or talked to another person since the last election. Charles believes the president is named Obama because he asked his Ouija board, and coincidentally, it spelled “Obama”. Bob’s belief is justified—he has good grounds for his belief. Charlie’s belief is unjustified—he has bad grounds for belief. Bob rationally believes Obama is president, but Charlie irrationally believes Obama is president.

Voters should have good grounds for thinking that they are voting for policies or candidates that will promote the common good. In general, there are three ways that voters will violate this norm. Bad voters might vote out of 1) ignorance, 2) irrational beliefs, or 3) immoral beliefs. In contrast, good voters not only know what policies candidates will try to implement, but also know whether those policies would tend to promote or harm the common good.

Voters should aim to promote the common good rather than narrow self-interest. Here, I just mean to give an overview of what “the common good” means.

As individuals, we have our particular interests, and sometimes our interests conflict. (For instance, you and I both might want the job, but at most one of us will get it.) This leads some people to be skeptical about whether we can meaningfully speak of “the common good”. This skepticism is misplaced.

Though we have different particular needs and goals, we also share many interests in common. We all need personal and physical integrity, mental and physical health, some wealth, some degree of education, opportunities for economic and social advancement, some ability to influence others, etc. It would be unusual to find someone who did not need these things at all. So, there are certain kinds of goods that are instrumentally valuable to each of us.

There are certain background conditions and institutions needed for each of us to pursue and achieve our conceptions of the good. Certain background institutions and policies tend to promote the private interests of all or at least most citizens. A well-functioning social order is part of the good for everyone, because without it we cannot pursue and achieve our various ends. Some institutions, such as well-functioning markets, liberal democratic government, the rule of law, and a culture of tolerance and respect, tend to promote greater wealth, longer and healthier lives, and lives with more cultural, social, and economic opportunities. Other institutions tend to demote these things. It is in the common good to promote the first kind of institutions rather than the second. Institutions, policies, and practices that are generally to everyone’s advantage can be said to be in the common good.

IV. Why Should We Vote Well?
Imagine a jury is about to decide a murder case. The jury’s decision will be imposed involuntarily (through violence or threats of violence) upon a potentially innocent person. The decision is high stakes. The jury has a clear obligation to try the case competently. They should not decide the case selfishly, capriciously, irrationally, or from ignorance. They should take proper care, weigh the evidence carefully, overcome their biases, and decide the case from a concern for justice.

What’s true of juries is also true of the electorate. An electorate’s decision is imposed involuntarily upon the innocent. The decision is high stakes. The electorate should also take proper care.

The electorate has an obligation to the governed not to expose them to undue risk in the selection of policy or of rulers who will make policy. The governed have a right not to be exposed to undue risk. When elections are decided on the basis of unreliable epistemic procedures or on the basis of unreasonable moral attitudes, this exposes the governed to undue risk of serious harm. Since the governed are forced to comply with the decisions of the electorate, negligent decision-making is intolerable.

The reasoning above explains why it is morally important that the electorate as a whole makes decisions in a competent and reasonable way. However, there’s a problem. It might be clear why the electorate as a whole should vote well. But it’s not clear why I should vote well. After all, how we vote has serious consequences. But how I vote does not.

In a large-scale election, such as a congressional election in the United States, the probability that an individual vote will decide the outcome of the election is vanishingly small. You are much more likely to win Powerball multiple times in a row than to cast a vote that changes the outcome of a presidential or congressional election.

So, why should we think one person’s vote is morally consequential, if a single vote can never be expected to make a difference? If the majority of other voters are voting badly, why think there is any reason for me not to vote badly as well? In light of how little individual votes matter, one might be tempted to conclude that one may vote however one pleases.

V. Why Should I Vote Well?
This conclusion is not warranted. There are moral norms governing what we may or may not do when participating in collective activities, even when our individual actions make no difference.

Consider an analogy. Suppose a 100-member firing squad is about to shoot an innocent child. They will fire all at once. Each bullet will hit the child at the same time, and each shot would, on its own, be sufficient to kill her. You can’t stop them, so the child will die regardless of what you do. Now, suppose they offer you the opportunity to join in and fire with them. You can make the 101st shot. Again, the child will die regardless of what you do. Is it permissible for you join the firing squad?

Most people have a strong intuition that it is wrong to join the squad and shoot the child. Here’s one plausible explanation of why it’s wrong: there is a general moral prohibition against participating in these kinds of activities, even if one’s individual inputs do not make a decisive difference. In these kinds of cases, you should try to keep your hands clean, at least if there is no significant cost to your doing so. Suppose the firing squad threatens to kill you, too, if you do not shoot the child. In that case, it might be excusable for you to shoot. But if you suffer no significant loss by not participating, then you should not participate. Only a bad person would be willing to do so.

When the firing squad kills the child, this is a collectively harmful activity. A collectively harmful activity is an activity where a group causes harm, but individual inputs into the group’s activity make no difference. In cases where we have the opportunity to engage in such collectively harmful activities, we should abide by what I call the “Clean Hands Principle”:

One should not participate in collectively harmful activities when the cost of refraining from such activities is low.

The Clean Hands Principle is a moral principle governing whether participating in certain collective activities is permissible. It turns out that this principle can be derived from a number of plausible background moral theories, such as Kantianism, rule consequentialism, and eudaimonism, though I will not discuss the details here. The principle is plausible enough on its own.

This firing squad example is analogous to voting in an election. Adding or subtracting a shooter to the firing squad makes no difference—the girl will die anyways. Similarly, with elections, individual votes do not make a difference. In both cases, the outcome is causally overdetermined. The irresponsible voter is much like a person who volunteers to shoot in the firing squad. Her individual bad vote is of no consequence—just as an individual shot is of no consequence—but she is participating in a collectively harmful activity when she could easily keep her hands clean.

VI. There Is No Invisible Hand of Politics
Government ought to promote the common good rather than exploit some citizens for the sake of others. Everyone subject to coercive rules and who is expected to conform with and maintain social institutions should have a stake in those rules and institutions. It is unjust to expect people to comply with social rules unless those rules are sufficiently to their benefit. To the extent that the rules tend to benefit some groups at the expense of others, these others groups lack reasons to comply. To force them to comply with such rules, when they lack sufficient reasons to do so, is to subjugate them. Subjugating reasonable, responsible people is unjust. To vote for self-interest at the expense of the common good is to vote in favor of subjugating others. It’s that simple.

One might object that one is under no obligation to vote for the common good. After all, other people vote selfishly. They attempt to exploit me through government for their own benefit. If so, then it is unfair for me to have to vote for the common good when they do not.

This objection fails for a number of reasons. First, it rests on a false empirical claim—that voters tend to vote selfishly. The consensus among political scientists who study voter behavior is that voters do not vote selfishly, but instead vote for what they perceive to be the common good. (This does not imply that they are responsible voters, though, since many of them are not justified in these beliefs.)

Second, even if many other people do vote selfishly, that does not automatically make it permissible for me to do so as well. When I vote for narrow self-interest at the expense of the common good, it is not as if I am only trying to exploit other people who are trying to exploit me in turn. Rather, I am voting to exploit innocent third parties, including people who cannot vote, those who abstain from voting, and those who voted responsibly. It is one thing to try to have government rob Peter for my benefit, when Peter is trying to have the government rob me. But it is another to try to have the government rob everyone for my benefit just because Peter tries to rob me.

The best way to defend selfish voting would be to show, if possible, that democratic procedures somehow transforms self-interested votes into publicly beneficial outcomes. Some people think that democracies can take self-interested votes as inputs and yield, as outputs, policies that benefit the common good.

Something like this occurs in markets. Markets can lead self-interested behavior to promote the common good as if “by an invisible hand”. The market makes it so that people’s best shot at promoting their own interests is to make products that other people want at prices they can afford to pay. To get bread from the baker, I must provide him with something he wants. So long as negative externalities are adequately eliminated, and so long as people are free to walk away from bad deals, the individual pursuit of profit tends to help others rather than harm them. Self-interested behavior leads to publicly beneficial outcomes. Might something like this be true of democracy as well?

Alas, self-interested behavior in politics is less likely to promote the common good than self-interested behavior in markets. There is no invisible hand of politics. To see why, we need to note some disanalogies between markets and politics.

First, in markets, deals are voluntary. Both parties expect to benefit from a deal, or otherwise a deal will not be made. While individual parties might sometimes be mistaken, in general both parties will profit from a transaction. In contrast, in politics, deals are not voluntary. If the majority decides that no one may smoke marijuana, then this affects everyone. People are not free to walk away from bad bargains in politics like they are free to walk away from bad bargains in the market.

A second disanalogy between markets and politics concerns externalities. In markets, people generally choose for themselves. If you choose to eat peanut butter for lunch, this has no effect on me. In contrast, in politics, whatever the majority decides, everyone must abide by. Governments are monopolies and only offer one set of rules for everyone.

While markets will allow you to have peanut butter and me to have spinach, politics gives everyone the same meal.

Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Ethics of Voting (Princeton 2011) and co-author of A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell 2010) with David Schmidtz.

It is worthwhile to try to recover a tradition of thinking about justice which, since the eighteenth century, has largely disappeared from view: the tradition which defines justice as positive love and benevolence and “charity” and generosity, not as merely following authoritative sovereign law (as in Hobbes’ “legal positivism”)^† or negatively “refraining from harm” (as in Roman law).

There is (or rather was) a tradition which one can roughly call “Christian-Platonic,” which is to be found in Augustine, Shakespeare, and Leibniz, which claims that justice should not content itself with mere law-observance (since law can be unjust) or with avoiding injury, and that love and charity as the first of the social virtues should be “ascended” to and embraced in a completely adequate theory of justice.

This Platonic-Christian tradition comes out in its first full form in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, with its notion that the “just” man will feel ordered or measured love which is proportional to the moral perfection of fellow men.^† Here St. Paul (I Corinthians xiii, “the greatest of these is charity”) supplies the element of love, and Plato supplies the geometrizing notions of order, measure, and proportion.^†

The tradition carries on in Dante’s idea of “higher” Roman justice (“by love possessed”) in Canto VI of Paradiso.^† It continues in Portia’s great speech in Merchant of Venice, Act IV (“though [legal] justice be thy plea, consider this, that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation; we do therefore plead for mercy”), and in Isabella’s speeches in Measure for Measure privileging charity and mercy and generosity over sovereignty and the letter of the law;^† it culminates in Leibniz’s great effort, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, to say that justice rightly understood is caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis (“the charity/love of the wise, that is universal benevolence”).

Though this Platonic-Christian tradition was greatly weakened by Hume, Voltaire, and above all Kant—who invariably defined justice as “public legal justice” (“if public legal justice perishes it is no longer worthwhile for men to remain alive on this earth”)^†—vestiges of the tradition are to be found in Wagner’s libretti (for example in Brünnhilde’s giving primacy to “higher” love at the expense of Fricka’s narrow legalism or Wotan’s sovereign caprice in Die Walküre),^† and still more in Freud’s demi-Platonic argument in Civilization and Its Discontents that we can and must “sublimate” our attachment to “genital eros” into benevolent love of civilization, even if we must thereby pay an almost intolerable psychological price.^†

The importance of this tradition is evident. Justice has been understood as the first of the social virtues since Greek antiquity—seconded by Aquinas, who agreed with Aristotle that justice is “the morning and the evening star,”^† and in our time by John Rawls^†—and love (charity) has always been ranked highest among human feelings and emotions. The ingeniousness of the Christian-Platonic tradition is that it makes justice and love both “first”—by saying, with Augustine, that justice is “measured” or “ordered” love (proportional to moral perfection), or by saying, with Leibniz, that justice is “the charity of the wise, that is universal benevolence.”

This tradition, largely eclipsed since the Enlightenment, is too important to let go: one can hope, indeed, that the intuitive moral attractiveness of the idea of “justice as love and benevolence” can receive a new lease of life through a sympathetic re-examination of a view which was powerful enough to prevail from Plato to Leibniz, and whose vestiges still glimmer in Wagner and Freud.

II: Ecumenism and Religious Re-unification

Leibniz’s central practical idea is that “universal” justice is a positive, other-aiding caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis (“the charity of the wise, that is, universal benevolence”).^† This justice “contains” or encloses all of the moral virtues,^† and relates to “the common good” or “the perfection of the universe” or “the glory of God.” These three distinct things are morally equivalent in the sense that in working with wise charity for the common good of humanity one is following the “presumptive will” of God as just monarch of the best of all possible worlds.^†

Leibniz’s first published defense of justice as caritas sapientis appears in the Codex Iuris Gentium (1693):

A good man is one who loves everybody, so far as reason permits. Justice, then, which is the virtue which regulates that affection which the Greeks call philanthropy, will be most conveniently defined . . . as the charity of the wise man, that is, charity which follows the dictates of wisdom . . . . Charity is a universal benevolence, and benevolence the habit of loving or of willing the good. Love then signifies rejoicing in the happiness [or perfection] of another . . . the happiness of those whose happiness pleases us turns into our own happiness, since things which please us are desired for their own sake.^†

And then slightly later, in La véritable piété—from 1710, the year of the Théodicée, “the justice of God”—Leibniz indicated what his view of justice entails:

[T]hose who . . . reduce justice to [legal] rigor, and who fail altogether to understand that one cannot be just without being benevolent . . . in a word, not only those who look for their profit, pleasure, and glory in the misery of others, but also those who are not at all anxious to procure the common good and to lift out of misery those who are in their care, and generally those who show themselves to be without enlightenment and without charity, boast in vain of piety which they do not know at all, whatever appearance they create.^†

For Leibniz perhaps the highest or widest form of caritas sapientis or benevolentia universalis is to be found in religious reconciliation, unity, and concord within three ever-outward-expanding spheres or circles: (1) reconciliation of Protestants (“Lutherans” and “Calvinists”) in Germany,^† (2) reconciliation of Protestants and Roman Catholics in Europe,^† and (3) reconciliation of Christians with all other rational beings (for example the Chinese, as recommended in Novissima Sinica [1697]).^†

In the period from May to December 1699, Leibniz was at work on the great irenical treatise called “Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken” (“Unprejudiced Thoughts”) on Lutheran-Calvinist rapprochement which he had begun early in 1698 with his friend and colleague the Lutheran Abbot of Loccum, Gerhard Wolter Molanus.^† While collaborating on the “Unprejudiced Thoughts,” Leibniz and Molanus exchanged a number of important letters; and a crowning glory of their correspondence is Leibniz’s remarkable letter of October 1699 urging that hyper-Calvinist notions of groundless, extra-reasonable “election” and “salvation” (regardless or merit and desert) can degenerate unto unjust, uncharitable “tyranny.”^†

To conciliate the Evangelical and the Reformed churches (Leibniz refused to use the names “Lutheran” and “Calvinist,” which he considered too personal and partisan, and too inimical to charitable transcending of “schism”^†), it would be sufficient to find minimal acceptable common ground between those churches.^† Leibniz, however, pursues not the prudent minimum but the radical maximum in the “Unprejudiced Thoughts”.

He bases his argument not on a narrow common ground acceptable only to (closely related) Protestant sects, but on the notion of that which is necessarily, universally true and/or right for all rational beings in the universe. And that is why he closely paraphrases Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro (without naming it) in the key paragraph of the “Unprejudiced Thoughts”, for the point of the Euthyphro is that even the gods themselves see and know and chastely love the “eternal verities” (mathematical and moral) which are valid for all “minds” in the cosmos, and thus don’t cause or make eternal truth by decree or a so-called “absolute” will.^†

This Platonizing moral universalism, which Leibniz was to turn against both radical Cartesian voluntarism and Calvinist “absolute decrees” (as will be seen shortly), was the basis of his jurisprudence universelle of “wise charity” and “universal benevolence”, which urges that “the whole of practical theology is indeed nothing other than a species of the highest jurisprudence, that is the right of God [de jure Dei]”.

While each earthly respublica “has its own jurisprudence, so to speak,” these individual justice-systems are subordinate to “the jurisprudence of the greatest city of all minds under the monarchy of God,” which is the “optima Respublica.”^† And in a letter to the Florentine scholar Antonio Magliabechi from June 1698, Leibniz makes it clear that this universal justice in the “best commonwealth” has everything to do with “the nature of true love” or finding one’s own pleasure “in the felicity of others”. Universal caritas requires the wise love of God and of one’s neighbor.^†

It is not surprising that a professional law-expert with a doctorate in jurisprudence should view practical theology as a “species” of “the highest jurisprudence,” and that the same legal expert should write a theodicy [theos-dike, “the justice of God”], saying “it is the cause of God I plead.”^†

Indeed, Leibniz the “universal” jurisconsult finds objectionable in a Calvinist “absolute” God the same things that a practicing lawyer would condemn in a court of law: “the damnation of an innocent, the taking back of divine promises, and the like, which would not be an actus conformis justitiae”—for it would be incongruent with “the goodness and the wisdom of God.”^†

One doesn’t really “need” Platonism simply to bridge the differences between Calvinists and Lutherans. Leibniz uses Platonism, which goes well beyond his immediate, limited irenical needs, precisely because of his “global Platonism” (as René Sève has aptly called it).^† It is revealing, indeed, that Leibniz should fall back on Plato’s Euthyphro when something more modest, less radical, would be sufficient.

The theological fine-points of the “Unprejudiced Thoughts” are of greater interest to the history of theology than to the history of philosophy, but it is philosophically interesting that Leibniz should use Platonic rationalism to draw together two modern, north-European Christian sects. Tertullian had famously asked, “if we have Jerusalem, what need have we of Athens?”^† Leibniz uses “Athens” to bridge quarreling sides of a divided “Jerusalem.” He enlists Plato to mediate between Luther and Calvin—not surprisingly, given his view that “the doctrine of Plato concerning metaphysics and morality is holy and just . . . and everything he says about truth and the eternal ideas is truly admirable.”^†

In the history of philosophy the idea that the concept of justice, as an “eternal verity,” is not a mere adjunct of power, that it is an idea whose necessary truth is at least analogous to the truths of mathematics and logic, is commonly associated with Plato. Now while it is not true that Leibniz was a Platonist in any doctrinaire sense—his clinging to Pauline “charity” and to Augustinian “good will” (bona voluntas) would have made that difficult—nonetheless he did agree with Plato on many points of fundamental importance. “I have always been quite content, since my youth,” he wrote to Remand in 1715, “with the moral philosophy of Plato, and even in a way with his metaphysics; for those two sciences accompany each other, like mathematics and physics.” ^†

The Platonic work which Leibniz admired most—at least for use in moral and political philosophy and in theology—was clearly the Euthyphro, which he paraphrased again, almost literally in his most important work on justice, the “Meditation on the Common Notion of Justice.” In the Euthyphro, which deals with the question whether “the rules of goodness and of justice are anterior to the decrees of God” (in Leibniz’s words), Plato “makes Socrates uphold the truth on that point.”^† And that truth is, as Ernst Cassirer puts it, that the good and the just are “not the product but the objective aim and the motive of his will.” ^†

The opening lines of Leibniz’s “Meditation” on justice merely convert Platonic dialogue into straightforward prose:

It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just: in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary, or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions.^†

Leibniz then goes on, in the “Meditation,” to equate Hobbes with the Thrasymachus (Republic I, 338c) who had viewed justice not as geometrically “eternal,” but as the product of the will of the powerful.

Leibniz’s devotion to the doctrine of Plato’s Euthyphro is also clear in the slightly earlier “Unvorgreiff1iches Bedencken”, a work he wrote partly to counter the extreme Calvinist view that God creates everything ex nihilo through his “fullness of power” and creative “will” alone. One must consider, Leibniz now says, “whether the will of God really makes right, and whether something is good and right simply because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and right in itself.” The radical voluntarist view of justice as a divine “product” Leibniz ascribes to a number of now-obscure Calvinist theologians, but also to those “strange Cartesians” who teach that that two times two makes four and three times three makes nine, for no other reason than that God wills it.^†

But such a radically voluntarist position, for Leibniz, is as calamitous morally and theologically as it is mathematically: for on such a view “the aeternae veritates would have no certainty in themselves, and even the bonitas et justitia dei would be only extrinsic denominations, and in fact would be groundless, if their truth derived from God’s will alone.” Those who say, Leibniz adds, that “God wills the evil of punishment without regard to the evil of sin,” that he wills to “eternally damn” men even before “any of their sins come into play,” forget that such a view “in no way abides with God’s justice, goodness, and charity.”^† (The last clause is a conscious re-working of I Corinthians 13, “Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three;” Leibniz replaces “faith” and “hope” with two additional moral virtues.)

Leibniz’s insistence on God’s justice, goodness and charity as an antidote to “absolutism” and “tyranny” is brought out in a crucial paragraph of the “Unprejudiced Thoughts” in which Leibniz urges that:

the divine attributes must necessarily be compatible, or as it is explained by our theologians, harmoniously united [harmonica]. God, though he is not only charitable [barmherzig] but charity itself, can nonetheless undertake no exercise of it which goes against his justice—and also no exercise of his justice through which his charity would be left behind.^†

Any exercise of divine omnipotence [Allmacht], Leibniz goes on to say, must be limited by God’s “goodness” and “wisdom”—leading finally to “justice” [Gerechtigkeit]. This same Gerechtigkeit is insisted on by Leibniz, over and over, in his long and important letter to Molanus of July 18, 1698—especially in the paragraph in which Leibniz treats Christ as “a just judge” for charitably saving “the woman taken in adultery” (John VIII, 15) from the legal penalty of death by stoning, for benevolently saying, “Go, and sin no more.”^†

Leibniz argues in the Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken that “the eternal truths of goodness and justice, or ratio and proportion,” as well as all other “necessary truths,” have “their ground in the eternal being of God himself: not, however, in his free decree.” (“Now consist justice, goodness, beauty, no less than mathematical things, in equality and proportion, and are therefore no less aeternae et necessariae veritatis.”)^†

He adds that “true justice, as it is grasped by all understanding and honor-loving people, consists not in impunity, but means a universal good-willingness, in which wisdom is included.”^† And finally he plays the “ontological proof’ trump card: if all truths were divinely caused ex nihilo, then the truth about the necessary existence of God himself (as revealed by St. Anselm) would be “a product of the free will of God, which is absurd in the highest degree [absurdissimum].”^†

Leibniz did not write in vain when he insisted that the just person will be “wisely loving” and universally benevolent: in that he eloquently re-stated a tradition founded by Plato, Cicero, St. John, the young Augustine, and Dante and agreed with what is best in his Christian-Platonist contemporaries Pascal, Malebranche, and Fénelon. But he also looked forward: “[I]n the world of justice and love . . . . [l]et us never subordinate to a duty which is abstruse, remote and uncertain, an explicit and immediate duty to deal justly and to love mercy.” That is Marcel Proust, writing in 1900 in a language at once neo-Leibnizian and proto-Freudian.^† The continuity between Plato and Proust, in making caritas and philia “wise” through sentiments de perfection and affection, places Leibniz on an infinitely graded continuum, which stretches spatially from Athens to Rome to Hannover to Proust’s Paris and to Freud’s Vienna, and temporally from the death of Socrates to the end-of-life triumph of Freud over cruelty and malevolentia.

Patrick Riley is a lecturer at Harvard University specializing in the political-moral philosophy of Kant, Rousseau, and Leibniz. His previous books include Will and Political Legitimacy and Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence.

Art of Theory: What brought you to study political theory?

Danielle Allen: The truth of the matter, I suppose, is that it’s a family business. My father is a political philosopher, and a significant number of family dinner conversations consisted of discussions between him and my mother, for instance, about whether Socrates was right that no one does wrong knowingly, or among my father, his colleagues and students, about the founders, Lincoln, and so on.

Add to this that a passion for democratic politics runs on both sides of my family. My mother’s grandfather served in the administration of the governor of Michigan. My father’s father helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida. The belief that politics matters fundamentally for the life prospects of each one of us runs pretty deep in me.

Art of Theory: You have doctoral degrees in both Classics (from Cambridge) and Government (from Harvard). How do these two disciplines inform your work, and what are the challenges with working at the borders of two fields?

Danielle Allen: Studying classics generally gave me powerful tools for understanding language, text, and historical contingency.

Specializing in ancient Athens, in particular, also gives one a remarkable opportunity to hone one’s skills for analyzing democracy. It’s a closed case. Its archive is, at the end of the day, relatively small, certainly compared to the caches of evidence available for thinking about modern democracies. Its philosophers identified and framed powerful questions about some of the most challenging features of democratic life. And important theoretical inroads for understanding democracy have already been made, for instance in the work of Moses Finley and Josiah Ober.

Political science—and here I mean both the theoretical and the empirical sides—has, as you might expect, given me access to analysis of fundamental questions about democracy as transformed by the pressures of modernity. One needs additional tools for analyzing politics on the scale of contemporary nation states and global associations. Statistics, survey methods, modeling: these are all valuable tools for anyone who believes, as I do, in uniting sociological understanding with normative argument.

But, let me be clear, the student of language, text, and historical contingency is also contributing to sociological understanding, which I take to be a necessary basis for normative theorizing. The resources of the two disciplines are complementary.

Art of Theory: In your most recent book, Why Plato Wrote, you argue that Plato was not only a systematic philosopher but also a political activist determined to use the power of language to intervene in Athenian politics.

What is the most important lesson that contemporary public philosophers can draw from Plato’s rhetorical method? What drew you to offer this reinterpretation of Plato?

Danielle Allen: Nothing particularly strategic drew me to offer this reinterpretation of Plato. The story was just staring at me out of the evidence. This was one of those cases where you just feel compelled to tell people what you see because it’s so dramatic, as when you say to a friend, ‘‘Can you believe what I just saw?’’

But what lessons are there in seeing how cannily Plato crafted his language and with what self-consciousness about the role of language in politics? I suppose I wish that contemporary public philosophers had, like Plato, a bit more of the poet in them, a somewhat deeper understanding of metaphor and its power to transform imaginative landscapes. This is not to say that political philosophers or public philosophers should be casting aside argument, not at all. The point rather is that metaphor can help clear a field for argument to plow and sow.

Art of Theory: If you could recommend two works of political theory to a modern statesman—say, Barack Obama—one contemporary work, and one work from the history of political thought, what would they be and why?

Danielle Allen: There are different answers depending on the reader to whom one’s making the recommendations, no? So your question could be: if all the libraries in the world were destroyed and you could save only two books of political theory, which would they be. There my answer would have to be Plato’s Republic and the Federalist Papers.

Plato’s Republic and the Federalist Papers make two very different cases for how human beings can frame their collective lives so that they can flourish individually and collectively. To make sense of these two texts in relation to one another, one would have to dream up the missing stream of texts between them.

But if you wanted me to recommend two books to Barack Obama, they would be Herodotus’ Histories and Ralph Ellison’s Collected Essays. Both of these books explore how an egalitarian vision (Solon’s in the Histories, an American inheritance in Ellison) can be brought into concrete existence, as well as laying bare the obstacles to such a development. And the Herodotus provides a dose of Machiavellian insight as well.

Art of Theory: You’ve suggested in Talking to Strangers that democratic citizens should treat one another as friends. Do you think there are systemic features of our modern societies that impede this way of relating to one another?

Danielle Allen: I’d like to stress that the emphasis in the phrase ‘‘treat one another as friends’’ is really on the ‘‘as.’’ One doesn’t have to like another citizen to treat that person ‘‘as’’ a friend. Rather, the ideal means using the habits of friendship in one’s interaction with that fellow citizen: expecting that there will be turn-taking in the acceptance of loss, recognizing and honoring contributions made by the other to collective well-being, proving one’s trustworthiness to the other.

Clearly, the systemic feature of all societies (pre-modern as well as modern) that inhibits this is differential power relations. Treating other citizens ‘‘as’’ friends requires forthrightness that is difficult from a position of vulnerability and malleability that is difficult from a position of power. One hopes, therefore, to generate an animating ideal that puts pressure on situations of domination—both by encouraging the dominated to resist and by engaging the dominating in moral self-reflection—so that power differentials can be reduced to the greatest extent possible.

Art of Theory: You emphasize in Talking to Strangers that citizenship, friendship, and justice—among the ‘‘most complex, and also rewarding, of human activities’’ (p. 137)—all concern themselves with translating rivalrous self-interest into the equitable self-interest of civic friendship.

How well are we doing today in cultivating equitable self-interest? What institutions encourage its development? What more could be done?

Danielle Allen: The financial crisis of 2008 provides a good example of the excessive growth of rivalrous self-interest at the expense of equitable self-interest. In several of the leading financial institutions, we saw cases where important personnel pursued their own betterment even at the expense of their own firms. This has been much discussed in the press as a misalignment of incentives, where financiers were rewarded for behavior that, again, wasn’t even to the benefit of their immediate collectivity—the firm—let alone the benefit of a national or global collectivity.¹ It’s not only the finance industry that provides evidence of this; at present, one can find examples in the insurance industry too.² And I’m sure there are many other examples beyond these two quite specific cases.

My hypothesis is that some features of economic theory can be held accountable here: particularly, the reliance on stripped down conceptions of rationality and interest. Economists have begun to recognize weaknesses in their theories that come from the absolute monetization of interest, but I wonder if the rest of us can understand their work well enough to help them toward conceptions of interest that, for instance, might take account of the distinction between rivalrous and equitable self-interest?

Art of Theory: What do you take to be the greatest deficiency in our understanding of democracy today? What sorts of questions should democratic theorists be asking that they have so far failed to ask?

Danielle Allen: I think we have removed ourselves too far from the ideal of political equality and that we would have much to gain from turning our attention in this direction again. Issues of income inequality are of supreme importance to questions of political equality, so to turn to analysis of the latter is not to turn away from important questions of social justice that have been the focus of debate for the last thirty years or so.

Art of Theory: What feature of our political life most puzzles you?

Danielle Allen: How best to revivify the ideal of equality in a context where its necessary companion, liberty, has come to dominate our public discourse and collective understandings of politics.

Art of Theory: In 2007, you accepted an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Could you talk about why the atmosphere at the Institute is uniquely conducive to academic scholarship generally, and scholarship in political theory specifically?

Danielle Allen: In the School of Social Sciences at IAS, scholars from all the fields of the social sciences and often some disciplines in the humanities assemble each year to share their work. This is an extremely challenging environment in which to read, write, and talk because after years of specializing in one’s own discipline one is obliged to explain, to a lot of smart, tough-minded people and in a language that is not anchored to one’s own discipline, why one’s research question matters. In a sense, one is obliged to get back to the basic human ground of one’s work. This, I think, actually rejuvenates each scholar’s intellectual life, and has certainly had that effect for me.

Art of Theory: You previously served as Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago, and currently serve as a trustee of both Amherst College and Princeton University. What insights do you think political theory can bring to university administration? Conversely, how has your experience in university administration informed your current scholarship?

Danielle Allen: My interest in political equality has led me to an emphatic focus on questions of education—about the content of education, access to education, and the relation between the research enterprise and the kind of knowledge culture that is disseminated to the citizenry as a whole. Serving as an administrator and on the boards of Amherst and Princeton, and also the Mellon Foundation, has given me the opportunity to develop a clearer understanding of the evolutionary processes by which colleges and universities come to embody one set of ideals or another.

Does being a political theorist help one in this administrative work? To some extent it helps; to some extent it hurts. It hurts, I think, in that we political theorists can be overly oriented toward ideals so that we are sometimes too slow to see the careful, slow, pains-taking cultivation required to move toward them. Yet being a political theorist helps as well because in general members of our tribe are highly attentive to institutional form and to how institutional structures do or do not enable human flourishing.

Art of Theory: What characterizes the best theory writing? What makes a piece of theory or philosophy excellent in your mind?

Danielle Allen: The work I admire most generally begins with a clear-eyed analysis of sociological realities. This is not to say that description of those realities necessarily enters the text but rather that beneath the structure of a text’s questions one can discern a sense of an urgent need to respond to lived realities, which have been astutely analyzed. In other words, good theory writing begins, in my view, in good sociology. And then I think good theory writing depends on honesty: the goal is to search out the best possible answers to those urgent questions, and one’s own conscience is the stern presiding judge whose standard one hopes above all to meet.

Art of Theory: Describe your workspace and writing habits. When you sit down to write, what’s your process?

Danielle Allen: I wish I had one workspace and one set of writing habits. I am far too peripatetic. I have a fantasy writing space: in various ways those in which I really work approximate it. That fantasy space consists of a very large, completely flat work top (without drawers, etc., so a table not a desk) set right up against a very large window looking out at trees, or through the branches of trees, with good light. I generally manage to have the wide, flat work top.

As to writing habits, I am not one of those people who does fifteen minutes or an hour a day. Either I am not writing or I am writing non-stop. I have done a ridiculous amount of my most valuable writing staying up all night in hotel rooms while in the wrong time zone.

Art of Theory: Where do you see your work going in coming years? What’s on your horizon?

Danielle Allen: I’ve just finished a book on the Declaration of Independence which is presently seeking a publisher, so I am now turning to other projects. I am working on a book called E-publics which is meant to be an answer to a question I regularly got about Talking to Strangers: how does the internet affect your argument? And I am working on a book called Education and Equality, in which I hope to lay out my arguments about political equality. These should keep me busy for a while. Beyond that I cannot say.

Danielle Allen is UPS Foundation Professor of political theory at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. A 2002 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, her books include Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (University Of Chicago Press, 2004) and Why Plato Wrote (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Neither of these alternatives, however, makes much contact with the distinct American political experience that includes both law and sacrifice–a civil religion that connects law to popular sovereignty, Constitution to Revolution.

While our law models the free act on consent—as in the social contract—our civil religion models the free act on sacrifice. The narrative of sacrifice begins with the Revolution, continues through the Civil War, and includes most recently the attack of 9/11. Lincoln gives voice to this narrative at Gettysburg when he speaks of a nation “dedicated to a proposition.”

The proposition is law, but the measure of dedication is sacrifice. This same imaginative structure of sacrifice and law grounds the exceptional character of the recent American response to terror. Political identity is imagined as a matter of life and death, even as law promises individual well-being. Political theology is, accordingly, a critique of liberal political theory because that theory tends to reduce politics to law; it has no way to understand the violent, sacrificial act.

Schmitt begins his Political Theology with the sovereign’s decision for the exception. In American political theology, this is the decision of the popular sovereign for Revolution. That sacrificial act marks the presence of the transcendent value of the nation as a historical project.

Schmitt expresses the meaning of this act through an analogy to the miracle. There is something miraculous about the possibility of revolution, but we should not be captured by this idea of exceptionality. The freedom that is at stake – freedom as an act in relation to, but not determined by, principle – also operates in legal judgment, discourse, and philosophy.

Exploring these as sites of decision, in my recent book Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty I attempt to redirect political theorizing toward our imaginative capacities for creation.¹ The free act occupies a space between physical causes and rational deduction. This is the space of the imagination.

Freedom and Reason
For Kant, and most of those who followed him, moral reasons for action are those that apply equally to everyone. When we act morally, we do not favor ourselves, but take up an “objective” or “neutral” position, asking what any rational agent should do under the circumstances. A moral principle, accordingly, has the same compelling quality as a logical proposition. Both present themselves to us as necessarily true. Indeed, each carries the indicia of its truth in its formal structure. Thus, Kant’s famous categorical imperative: “ Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Kant stands here in a long philosophical tradition that thinks freedom is realized in the power of reason to compel assent – whether in thought or practice. This suggests the lingering presence of a theological ideal: we realize the truth of ourselves only when we transcend the finite character of the body. Ideas of the body as a “prison,” and of the senses as offering a merely “perspectival” view of the real, or of the material world as one of illusion are all quite familiar. They illustrate the way in which the idea of freedom brings with it a special kind of fear – the fear of an irresponsible use of that freedom. The response is to identify freedom with truth, and truth with reason. The cost of freedom, on this view, is literally the abandonment of the particularity of the individual.

God is the anchor of this entire idea, for he is perfectly free and perfectly ordered. There is a complete overlap of His will and His reason: “In the beginning was the word.” We are an “image of God” and must, therefore, strive for a similar overlap of reason and will. He wills the regularity of nature into existence; we must will the regularity of the moral order into existence. This theological background continues not just in moral theory, but also in contemporary political theory. When, for example, John Rawls argues that the basic order of a political community must be founded on an imagined contract formed behind a veil of ignorance, he is imagining the overlap of reason and will. Behind the veil, we can rely only on reason, which is the same for everyone.

However, it is strikingly odd to think that we are most free when we are convinced by reason alone. Missing is the experience of decision. The only moment of decision seems to be the turn to reason itself. That, however, looks more like an act of submission than of freedom, for there is only the singular truth of reason to which we must conform our will.

Acknowledging a moral principle, however, is hardly the same as accepting the premises of a deductive proof. Little follows from an argument deploying a moral principle, because it is not self-contained in the same way as a proof. A moral principle is one norm among many that I might maintain simultaneously, any two of which might resolve a situation differently. Just as there is disagreement among norms, there is disagreement on how they apply to any set of facts.

The steps of a moral argument are as contestable as the principles from which we begin. Even if we could agree on starting points and on application, there is still no reason to believe that we will reach agreement on what to do. That reason alone should be the source of action is not an essential truth of human nature. Instead, it is a proposition that we either do or do not find persuasive given everything else we believe about ourselves and our relationships to others under particular circumstances.

Proof and Persuasion
We may have no answer to a moral argument, but still we may be convinced that the right way to act lies in another direction. We may, for example, decide that, under the circumstances, the particularity of love is more important than the universality of a moral rule. We may even acknowledge that what we are doing is morally wrong, but still believe that it is what we should do.

Moral reasons are not the only reasons; particular relationships may be more important than universal norms. I may have no proof to offer, but proof is not the only sort of reason to which we respond. If to act for a reason is to be persuaded, we must keep in mind the whole range of arguments, examples, intuitions, beliefs and relationships that can be deployed in order to persuade someone. My reasons for acting refer to more than reason alone.

No principle will tell me whether I should act on care or justice when they point in different directions. That hardly means that I am the passive observer of the diverse causes of my own behavior. I must decide what to do. The possibility of decision in a causal world may be mysterious, but that does not mean that the experience of decision is mysterious. Just the opposite: we are entirely familiar with our own freedom and thus with the process of deciding.

When asked to explain a decision, I don’t respond that it is simply a mystery. I will speak of what I found persuasive and what I did not. Principles will be mixed with analogies; examples with proofs; personal relationships with universal norms. The more dense the reasons, the more I feel that a whole world is at stake in the decision. It always is, even if we are using short-hand expressions, heuristics, and rules of thumb.

I cannot explain myself without entering into a free space of discourse. Offering an explanation of a decision, I implicitly open myself up to a reconsideration of those reasons. I may be persuaded otherwise. I may worry that I have acted for the wrong reasons, but I answer that worry by examining my reasons: I either affirm them or I change my mind. In either case, I take responsibility for the reasons that persuade me.

I decide when I have been persuaded, and I am properly persuaded when I have considered arguments for and against a decision, and come to see the world a certain way. At that point, the way forward seems clear enough to me. I have constructed a web of meaning by seeing the world one way rather than another. Because the construction of this web is a matter of persuasion, people always exist in a state of pluralism. We simply don’t agree about what we should do or how we should live. We don’t see the world the same way.

Freedom first appears to us as a political idea because we discover it not in an inward turning from body to soul, but in the discursive engagement with others. It is something that we do with others, not something we find in ourselves. We ask a question or respond to another person’s proposition. We try to find out what it is that we should think about a problem by actually thinking it.

The Athenian agora was not coincidentally the original space of both democratic politics and philosophy – free action and free thought. They differ from each other not so much in the role of persuasion and critique, but in the circumstances of decision. A political decision, including a legal decision, may be required before the conversation is over. We must decide now, even under conditions of uncertainty. We call the vote; we poll the jury. Philosophy is without such external constraints. There is no vote to be called, only an openness to renew the debate.

Precisely because persuasion is not logic, it is difficult to persuade and to be persuaded. We talk until we are persuaded or until we have persuaded our interlocutor. At that point, I know what to do. I might still fail to act, but that does not create a new kind of problem. All I can do is again take up the question of what I am doing by examining my reasons, that is, by opening myself up to persuasion. If my beliefs are really not capable of determining my action, then I am not free. It may well be that we all lack freedom in some respects: no matter what we say to ourselves, we cannot get ourselves to change our patterns of behavior.

Narrative and What Might Have Been
When we carry on a conversation, we listen and we respond. The conversation shapes a world in which we are both participants and observers. My next sentence is not something I plan in advance. It is not the realization of an abstract possibility. It is rather my contribution to and acknowledgment of this world. Before I got to this point, I could not predict what I would say because it is the actual conversation that creates the possibility. When we critically examine our reasons for speaking as we do, we bring into awareness a world of meaning. We do so by offering a narrative.

Of the natural world, there is no category of “what might have been.” A natural history is actually not a history at all: it is a description of causes and effects. We cannot look back to the time before man and speak intelligibly of the possible: there is only what happened. When we say, “what if the meteorite had not hit the earth and the dinosaurs had continued,” we are placing a human perspective inside a natural history. We are close to science fiction.

On the other hand, in a person’s life – as in a political community – the most important tense is that of what might have been. We cannot write a human history without invoking the possible, because that history is an account of decisions. Decisions rest on reasons and reasons imagine the world one way rather than another. We cannot understand what has happened without imagining what might have been. We construct the possible, in other words, when we describe the actual.

In a causal world, whatever will be is already determined by what is. A world of reason alone similarly has no dimension of possibility. A mathematical proposition is true or false; it is not one possibility among others. Because we know ourselves as free, however, we never appear to ourselves without possibilities. I understand my present situation by placing it in relationship to what might have been. Only so can I understand my present as the product of my own decisions. Without this thought, I could not believe myself free. A condition in which we cannot give such an account is one that we characterize as slavery – whether real or metaphorical. Slavery is the null point of the human condition, and just for that reason it is never an absolute condition. Even the slave engages in conversation, explains himself to others, imagines the possible, and makes choices – across some range.

To say that our world always exists in relationship to the possible is to recognize the deep relationship between the human world and the imagination. What might have been and what might be exist only for the imagination. Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial, for example, portrays him saying that the outcome might have been different had he, Socrates, been a bit more persuasive. The point is no different in our practice of recording judicial dissents. The dissent represents what might have been. It tells us that law is not a matter of causes but of reasons. It might have been different. Indeed, it might still become different. To understand the decision as a decision, we must imagine the possible. Imagining the possible is the construction of narrative.

When we produce a narrative of our own reasons, we understand our world as the product of our own freedom. Those reasons are the beliefs and practices of which we have been persuaded. I hold to this account, not some other possible account. Asked to explain myself, this is what I say and this is what I will defend – forcefully if necessary. When we no longer can identify our world with our freedom, we suffer from anomie, depression and ultimately a sense of meaninglessness. We seem to have no possibilities apart from what is; we are subject to causes.

The loss of freedom that comes from penal incarceration is less about a bounded space – the jail cell – than about the failure of the world any longer to be the product of our freedom. Without possibilities, I am no longer an agent. The free subject, on the other hand, is always writing the narrative of his or her own life. Doing so, he is creating his own possibilities retrospectively and prospectively.

Freedom and Contingency
The forms of persuasion change across fields and across time. Once, it was enough to say that one had been persuaded by the presence of Christ; more recently, one might say that one was persuaded by a course of psychoanalytic therapy. The character of a persuasive argument is not the same in politics as in the family. A political truth is not a scientific truth, and neither is a religious truth. When one applies the same standard of truth to different kinds of questions, one ends up with the creationist in place of the scientist or the ideologue in place of the democrat.

In political life, the forms of persuasion are rhetorical. For example, the meaning of the American Constitution is not something apart from the set of arguments that persuade us at any particular moment. That meaning is not something to be discovered; it is not timeless. It is not a matter of political science, and not a matter of recovering a past intention. It is the set of beliefs in circulation and to which we – or more importantly the courts – appeal in explaining what the law is. Arguments about the Constitution are right, when they persuade. We know that they have persuaded when individual citizens and government institutions organize their activities to align with these representations. At that point, we see the Constitution as the product of our freedom.

There is no escaping this. If I ask what the Constitution means, I cannot simply assert that we are bound to the plain meaning of the text, or to the intent of the framers, or to the latest precedents of the Court. That is, I cannot say this without offering an argument as to why this is the correct approach. I must persuade my interlocutor that I am correct.

If I claim that I have reached my own understanding of the meaning of the Constitution, regardless of what anyone else thinks, that no longer counts as a political argument. No one has any reason to pay attention to my claim of truth, until and unless I try to persuade them. I can only persuade by entering into a dialogue, which means to offer reasons that make sense in light of our common world of beliefs and practices. I cannot short-circuit this conversation by claiming a privileged point of truth, for the truth of the Constitution is exactly what is at issue. A political theory does not carry its own warrant; it must persuade.

Persuasion is contingent, but it is not arbitrary, for it is embedded in an entire world of meaning. I am persuaded when I see my way forward. That is neither an interior nor an exterior experience. Deciding, I bring myself and my world into a sort of alignment. That alignment can be, but is not necessarily, the application of a general rule to the particular. The relationship can just as easily run in the other direction: through the particular, I come to understand the general in a new way.

We make arguments in both directions all of the time. I might, for example, decide what is just under particular circumstances by applying a general rule of non-discrimination. On the other hand, I might learn what non-discrimination entails by deciding that affirmative action on behalf of a particular claimant is unjust to others. Indeed, we may not know in a particular case which way the argument ran. This is why judges will always accuse each other of “result oriented” jurisprudence.

Persuasion is always bound to context, but that hardly means that we are not capable of taking up a critical attitude toward our beliefs and practices. It does mean that we go wrong if we think that we can subject the whole of our beliefs and practices to a single, simultaneous critique. Then, we are back at the traditional Cartesian project of trying to find an Archimedean point from which we can reason with certainty. There is no such point from which we can build our entire world anew.

What we can do, however, is pause with respect to any particular belief or practice and ask whether it survives a critical examination. We ask ourselves whether we remain persuaded. We must answer the question honestly. If we fail to say what we actually think, then we will not see ourselves in the discourse. We will not be persuaded, because we are not there. To be there is to make of philosophy a practice of freedom.

Paul Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. He is author of many books, including The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship and, most recently, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.

The Rousseau chapter is titled “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right” and begins: “The first crisis of modernity occurred in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (252). The crisis initiated by Rousseau, ironically, took the form of a return to antiquity.

Rousseau, Strauss tells us, attacked modernity in the name of two classical ideas: virtue and the city, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. Rousseau appealed to the polis and the ancient conception of the citizen (as opposed to the modern state and its characteristic inhabitant, the bourgeois) and at the same time he appealed to the classical conception of natural right, however attenuated, as the standard by which society should be judged. Strauss notes that later thinkers – Kant, Fichte, Hegel – may have “clarified” Rousseau’s vision, but “one must wonder whether they preserved [its] breadth” (252).

Whether consciously intended or not, Rousseau’s movement of return had the effect of producing an even more advanced or radicalized form of modernity, its so-called “second wave”. Strauss affirms that Rousseau was not a “reactionary”. He carried out his critique of modernity on the platform that earlier modern thinkers had already created, but “jettisoned important elements of classical thought that his modern predecessors had still preserved” (252).

Among these discarded views was the claim that man is naturally social and that consequently reason and virtue are natural to humanity. For Rousseau, these were instead historical acquisitions. He was thus the first to make the decisive step toward the historicist negation of philosophy that would achieve fruition in the philosophy of history and the view that “man’s humanity is the product of the historical process” (274). This form of historicism would come to a head in Nietzsche, who was the first to apply historicism to itself, which in turn ushered in “the second crisis of modernity – the crisis of our time” (253).

Strauss recognizes that his interpretation of Rousseau faces a grave difficulty. There is an “obvious tension” in Rousseau’s thought between Rousseau, the classical citizen who accepts the complete subordination of the individual to society, and Rousseau, the promeneur solitaire who regards all authority and hence all social restraint as necessarily illegitimate.

Is freedom to be found in voluntary submission to the dictates of the general will or by listening to the voice of one’s conscience in the stillness of the passions? “He presents to his readers,” Strauss avers, “the confusing spectacle of a man who perpetually shifts back and forth between two diametrically opposed positions” (254).

How is one to make sense of this “spectacle”? Moreover, how can one reconcile Rousseau’s praise of natural man in the Second Discourse with the Rousseau who proudly signs his name “Citoyen de Genève” in the Social Contract, and how to reconcile both with the man who self-consciously rejects the claims of society in the name of the solitary life in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker? What is Strauss’s answer?

Rousseau’s Historicism
The central discussion of Strauss’s Rousseau chapter deals with the Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (or the Second Discourse), which is described as “Rousseau’s most philosophic work” containing his “fundamental reflections.” The Second Discourse is presented as the work of a “philosopher” by which Strauss means that morality is regarded not as “an unquestioned or unquestionable presupposition” but as a “problem” (264). Unlike the First Discourse, which was written in part to defend morality from the dangers of the Enlightenment, the Second Discourse presents morality as an expression of the problem of man’s transition from nature to society.

It is not immediately obvious why Strauss should consider the Second Discourse as representing a crisis of natural right. The work seems to stand firmly within the tradition of modern natural right and the state of nature as elaborated by Hobbes and Locke. “Rousseau,” Strauss writes, “accepts Hobbes’s premise” and “takes it for granted that in order to establish natural right, one must return to the state of nature” (266). This premise is based upon a rejection of classical natural right.

According to the classical view, natural right is to be found in human reason that prescribes to man certain perfect duties that can only be fulfilled in society. For Hobbes, by contrast, natural right is rooted in principles prior to reason, in the passions, and these prescribe not duties but certain rights or liberties, most importantly the right to self-preservation. Strauss points to Rousseau’s transformation of the biblical Golden Rule as evidence of his acceptance of Hobbes’s thesis: not “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but “do your good with the least possible harm to others.”³

For Strauss, the genius of Rousseau was to draw radically un-Hobbesian conclusions from consistent Hobbesian premises. If the principles of natural right are truly to be found in an asocial state of nature, then it follows that the laws of nature cannot be rooted in human reason because reason, like the passions, is a product of society.

This insight forms the basis of Rousseau’s teaching of the natural goodness of man (271). Our natural goodness consists not so much in the presence of certain positive qualities but in the absence of negative ones. We are born almost completely cipher. Strauss observes in a note that Rousseau’s contention of the natural goodness of man expresses “two incompatible views.” On the one hand, while man may be born good his faults are entirely due to him alone through civilization, and civilization has its origin in pride, which is a misuse of freedom. On the other hand, our departure from the state of nature could not be the result of a misuse of freedom because man in the state of nature lacks freedom (271, note 38).

Rousseau replaces freedom with perfectibilité as the chief characteristic of natural man. Our perfectibility, which is an “almost unlimited capacity for change,” is the source not only of our “almost unlimited progress” but of our “almost unlimited degradation.” Most importantly, the idea of perfectibility lays the basis for the historicist thesis that man has no nature “which would set a limit to what he can make out of himself,” but only a history (271).

It is in the thesis of virtually limitless perfectibility that Strauss finds Rousseau’s radical subversion of previous natural right theories. Hobbes had “erroneously assumed” that natural man was a being capable of exercising choice and making contracts, but the capacity to make and keep promises cannot be at the foundation of society because it already presupposes society. The social order for Rousseau was not the result of choice but of “accidental causation.” The mind and everything specifically human developed as a response to certain wants, and as our wants developed, so did our humanity.

The Second Discourse resulted paradoxically in turning the modern natural right teaching on its head. Rousseau discovered that the natural condition of man must be one lacking virtually all recognizably human characteristics. But if this is so, it makes no sense to go back to it in order to find norms for society. Nature has become so far removed from the way in which we now live that it has become irrelevant for all practical purposes. Like the statue of Glaucus to which Rousseau refers at the beginning of the Second Discourse, mankind has become so disfigured that our natural state is all but unrecognizable.⁴ But if we can no longer take our bearings from nature, perhaps we can find them in history. “For a moment – [which] lasted longer than a century,” Strauss writes, “it seemed possible to seek the standards of human action in the historical process” (274).

Rousseau’s “Kantian” Turn
Rousseau’s break with the ancient and modern conceptions of natural right in turn led to an unprecedented understanding of freedom as self-legislative autonomy, a doctrine associated mostly with Kant and the German philosophy of freedom.⁵ Strauss cites a passage from Hegel claiming a kinship between Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism and the “anti-socialistic systems of natural right” found in the works of Hobbes and Rousseau (279). By “anti-socialistic” Hegel meant that their theories denied the crucial premise of the natural sociality of man. If man is not a social or political animal by nature, then it is not natural right but the will that forms the true bond of society.

Strauss’s reconstruction of Rousseau’s idea of freedom begins from the lowly premises of the state of nature. In Hobbes’s formulation, everyone in the state of nature is bound by a law of nature that mandates self-preservation as the highest end. All subsequent social relations are an inference from this first and primary passion. On Rousseau’s reformulation, the first and fundamental desire is something that precedes even self-preservation; it is the desire for freedom itself, the desire not to be controlled or dominated by another. It is in the desire for independence and not self-preservation that the “spirituality” of the soul can be found. “According to Rousseau,” Strauss writes, “freedom is a higher good than life” (278). Thus, it is freedom – not life, property, or security – that becomes the foundation of the social contract.

The task of the Social Contract was to find a form of society whose members obey only themselves, leaving them as free as they were in the state of nature, which was characterized by radical independence. Whereas earlier for Rousseau it was “absurd” to find a standard for man in nature, he now maintains that the state of nature can still function as a “positive standard” for society. The general will “consists in the closest approximation to the state of nature which is possible on the level of humanity” (282).⁶

Rousseau endowed freedom with a sacred dignity and moral absoluteness that it had previously lacked (282). No longer would freedom be regarded as subordinate to happiness or to virtue but would be conceived as an end in itself, a “creative act” that would form the basis of unconditional duties. True freedom is to be understood not as blind appetite or mere choice, but as obedience to the laws that one prescribes for oneself, and only a law that can be “generalized” and applied equally and impartially to all can be considered rational or just.⁷

Strauss points out that Rousseau did not take the final step of substituting the law of reason for the law of nature. The rational society would not be immediately applicable in all times and places and remains constrained by external factors, such as climate, population, and geography. This, Strauss suggests, helps to explain “the moderate character of most of Rousseau’s proposals” (277, note 44).

Strauss remains skeptical whether the purely formal mechanism of “generalization” could provide an adequate standard for justice. If consistency in willing is the measure of a law, then any policy, however extreme, could pass the test of justice so long as it is willed with sufficient resoluteness. On this account, “cannibalism is as just as its opposite.”⁸

The general will marks “a decisive step in the secular movement” that seeks to replace the transcendent standard of natural right with the will of society. It therefore represents the substitution of natural law with positive law. Accordingly, there can be no appeal against the popular will of society once it has acquired the aura of infallibility. “Every institution hallowed by a folk-mind,” Strauss affirms, “has to be regarded as sacred.”⁹ (This forms the philosophic basis of what today is called multiculturalism.)

Rousseau’s “Individualism”
The democratic state may be the closest approximation to the natural state at the level of society, but it is not the closest approximation at the level of humanity. It is the solitary – not the citizen, and not the lover – who most perfectly captures the independence of humanity in the state of nature.

Strauss is careful to distinguish between Rousseau’s solitary and the philosopher. The solitary has withdrawn from society not to think but to feel. It is not through contemplation but through sentiment that the “civilized man completes the return to the primitive state on the level of humanity” (292). Rousseau’s solitary is not a Socrates, discussing virtue every day in the agora, but is more like a Thoreau or a Tolstoy, who has retreated to the margins and thinks of himself as the conscience of society. He is like the “artist” or the “bohemian”, characterized not by philosophy or wisdom but by a superior aesthetic sense.

For Rousseau, this kind of individualism was a rare and precious human achievement, scarcely the property of the democratic everyman. Strauss strikes a Rousseauean chord in “What is Political Philosophy?” when he notes that by educating people to co-operate with one another, democracies neglect “those virtues which mature, if they do not flourish in privacy, not to say in solitude.”

In this way Rousseau seems to have reconstituted the classical distinction between the few and the many. “Only very few men are capable of finding their way back to nature,” Strauss writes. “The tension between the desire for preservation of existence and the feeling of existence expresses itself . . . in the insoluble antagonism between the large majority who in the best case will be good citizens and the minority of solitary dreamers who are the salt of the earth.”¹⁰

Strauss clearly prefers Rousseau’s frank assertion of the superiority of those few genuine individualists (“the salt of the earth”) to later efforts to democratize this ideal. But even here he expresses grave doubts about the philosophic coherence of Rousseau’s individualism. It is a freedom from society, but a freedom with no direction or no content. Rousseau’s freedom is at the source of modern complaints about anomie, alienation, and egoism.¹¹

Rousseau’s Ambiguous Legacies
Rousseau occupies a central place in Strauss’s famous “wave hypothesis” about the development of modernity, yet his legacy cuts in different and contradictory directions. He stands as a bridge between Machiavelli and Hobbes who inaugurated the “first wave” of modernity and Nietzsche and Heidegger who brought the “third wave” to its tragic completion. As the founder of modernity’s second wave, Rousseau’s concept of perfectibilité stands at that crucial moment when modern philosophy had begun to disentangle itself entirely from the older tradition of natural right and move in the direction of historicism.

The second wave of modernity is inseparable from the philosophy of history, that is, the belief that only the “spirit of a people,” as discovered in its particular laws, mores, and institutions, can provide a concrete or “realistic” foundation for right. But what for early members of the historical school – thinkers like Burke and Herder – presented itself as a pleasing variety of “folk-minds” or national cultures was turned by later thinkers into a doctrine of unalloyed historical progress. It is the idea of history as a “meaningful process” that stands at the basis of modernity’s second wave and found expression in the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The legitimate or just society came to be seen as the outcome of a historical process that took the place of the natural or moral law. ¹²

Strauss argued that the idea of a philosophy of history would later prove to be incoherent in its own terms. Belief in the progressive realization of the just order presupposed an “absolute moment” – “the end of history” – at which point the meaning of the historical process would be realized. On this account, the right political order—whether the Kantian federation of republics, the Hegelian Vernunftstaat, or the Marxian classless society—will be realized through actions that are only incidentally directed toward those ends. In Schiller’s famous formula, copied later by Hegel, Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht or, put simply, history will judge. This deferral of reason to history is at the core of those modern ideologies according to which the just political order is an inevitable consequence of the historical process.¹³

Rousseau’s second wave of modernity was not only responsible for the philosophy of history, but for the philosophy of freedom. Strauss’s reading of Rousseau culminates in a doctrine of radical individualism. While at least superficially Strauss seems more concerned with the dangers of historicism and the rise of the “historical consciousness,” it is the problems associated with individualism that he claims represent Rousseau’s most important legacy for modernity. “The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality’” (323).

Strauss presents modern individualism as the most corrosive solvent of the restraints imposed by natural right. It is the decision to opt for individuality in all its dimensions that is at the root of “liberal relativism” and the inability to distinguish between the educated and the uneducated uses of freedom.

Strauss traces the philosophic foundation of the idea of individuality back to the separation of nature from the will, or the Is from the Ought. This separation in turn made possible the distinctively modern emphasis on self-legislation as the essence of freedom. Henceforth the law governing society would no longer be a natural law that determines our ends, but a rational or moral law determined by its form alone. The attempt to replace “vertical limitations” set from above with “horizontal limitations” set from within (or between) rational wills is ultimately unable to maintain a principled ground for the distinction between liberty and license.¹⁴

For Strauss, the inability of reason alone to set limits to freedom is the Achilles’ heel that gave rise to the second crisis of modernity. This second crisis, “the crisis of our time,” was inaugurated by Nietzsche, who took the Rousseauean-Kantian arguments about self-legislative reason in an even more radical direction. Freedom is the possession of creative geniuses, who are the bringers of “values” based entirely on their own will. Rather than losing themselves in Rousseau’s dreamy “sentiment of existence,” these legislative founders must learn to adopt an attitude of Redlichkeit or ruthless honesty in a world void of metaphysical comfort.¹⁵

The failure of the second wave of modernity is ultimately rooted in its belief that reason or the will can provide its own foundations for justice without reference to nature. The belief that principles of right could be derived from the will was no more plausible than the belief that they could be derived from history. Neither history nor the will can provide an adequate ground for justice.

To be sure, Strauss did not so much demonstrate this claim as assert it. His belief that second wave modernity inevitably gave rise to the third wave prevented him from engaging directly with such major figures as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, or Marx. Indeed, Strauss’s confidence that the second wave had been overtaken by the third prevented him from even considering the possibility of the current revival of theories of the rational will and human agency.

Thus, we must turn to his treatment of Rousseau, the sole representative of the second wave with whom he did engage in any depth. If Strauss was correct in this, then contemporary neo-Kantian theories of autonomy, no less than neo-Hegelian theories of mutual recognition, have built their castles on foundations of sand.¹⁶

Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including Spinoza’s Book of Life (Yale, 2003) and Reading Leo Strauss (University of Chicago, 2006), and he recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009). His latest book, on the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, is forthcoming in 2012 from Yale University Press.

Art of Theory: What brought you to study political theory?

Michael Sandel: I began with an interest in politics. I was a political junkie as a kid, and still am. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I became interested in political philosophy as such. That’s where I first read Kant, and Kant I found terribly challenging and intriguing. I began graduate school in 1975. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice had come out four years earlier, so I read that for the first time in graduate school.

In fact, the first winter vacation in graduate school at Oxford—they had these six-week breaks between terms—I went with some friends to the south of Spain and took along a bunch of books and sat and read them: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Somehow Spain, which was a little less cold and damp than Oxford, was more conducive to reading.

Art of Theory: Describe your arrival at Harvard in 1980.

Sandel: Political theory had a strong tradition here, represented by the then-senior figures, who were Judith Shklar, Harvey Mansfield, and Michael Walzer, and in the philosophy department John Rawls and Robert Nozick were teaching. And so there was great ferment, great interest in political theory and political philosophy.

I was introduced to Rawls through Judith Shklar, who was a friend of his. She told him my dissertation was largely about his book and that I was coming to be an Assistant Professor in political theory in the Government Department. And shortly after I arrived the phone rang in my office and the voice at the other end said, “This is John Rawls; R-A-W-L-S…” as if I might not recognize the name. [Laughter] He was inviting me to lunch; that’s when I first met him. He was very kind and generous. Nozick and I also spoke on occasion and were on friendly terms.

Art of Theory: You mentioned your dissertation, which became Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. The so-called “liberal-communitarian” debate became a staple in philosophy courses all over the world. How do you see that debate today?

Sandel: I think there are two versions of the debate, one of which has stalled and is not so interesting, and another that is more interesting and continues to animate discussion. The stalled, uninteresting version sees the debate being between those who place more weight on individual rights and those who place more weight on community, as if it’s a matter of competing values.

That’s not a very interesting version of the debate, though that’s the way many people cast it, as if the critics of Kantian/Rawlsian Liberalism were against rights, or favored defining rights simply by whatever values prevailed in a given community at a given time.

I think that was the misunderstanding of what the critique was about, and it led to a very narrow and uninteresting debate about rights vs. community. I think that’s lost its steam and rightly so.

But the other strand of the debate that was always of greater interest to me was the broader question of political philosophy, which is this: is it possible to define and to defend rights without presupposing any particular conception of the good life?

So the debate about the priority of the right over the good can be understood in these two ways: at the level of rights vs. communities (the uninteresting way, to my mind) or at the level of how rights are defended, how justice is defined, and whether it’s possible to do so in a way that avoids taking sides among competing conceptions of the good life.

That second version is the more important debate, and the term “communitarian” doesn’t quite capture it because it isn’t a matter of whether you’re for or against rights or community. It’s a matter of how theories of justice are argued and whether those arguments can be detached from contested moral and spiritual conceptions, conceptions of the best way to live.

That strand of the debate is alive and well, and very much at stake in our public life, and has led to a lot of interesting work within political theory.

Art of Theory: Tell us about your “Justice” course, which is an institution at Harvard now and has been seen by millions on PBS and online.

Sandel: I taught “Justice” for the first time the first year I came here in 1980 and initially it was a bit more focused on contemporary thinkers. Since then I’ve incorporated more of the classical thinkers, but it always involved moving back and forth between philosophical texts and contemporary issues, legal and political issues that raise philosophical questions.

I was drawn to that style of teaching because, when I started teaching, it was fresh in my mind what it was like to be a student. I think that is the heart of good teaching, having or summoning that memory.

I was not taken with political theory when I was an undergraduate. I found it abstract, distant, remote, and difficult just looking at the texts. I wasn’t quite up to it then. So, when I began to teach I had vividly in my mind this question: What would have kept my attention as a student? This was what was behind the design of the course.

The first year I think there were 100 students, then maybe 300 the second year, then 400, and then it leveled off around 800 to 1000.

Art of Theory: Now that you’ve reached an even wider audience through the public television series and the Internet, what have you learned about the relationship of the political theorist to the wider world? What responsibilities go along with that?

Sandel: I’ve always been drawn to political theory and political philosophy as a way of informing politics and the debates that go on in public life; I’ve always wanted to connect philosophical ideas with the public life we live and the arguments we have. This experiment was a way of pushing that idea further. We decided to make it available on public television and free online around the globe, and see what would happen.

And it’s been a fascinating experiment. I’ve been especially intrigued to see the reception in other parts of the world, and I was wondering to what degree they come at these questions from different cultural perspectives. What struck me, as I’ve done some traveling in connection since the book has been out, is that there seems to be an enormous interest in other parts of the world and, in particular, East Asia, in Western political theory and in this way of arguing about political theory and public questions. What interests me now is to explore these themes across cultures, and to explore the similarities and the differences.

I’ve been struck at the level of interest and even hunger for engagement with these questions. I think there’s a sense in many societies that public life and public discourse are impoverished, that they don’t often address the big questions of justice and rights and the common good that lie just beneath the surface of our political debate. There’s a great hunger everywhere for more direct engagement with these big questions in public.

Art of Theory: What have you learned pedagogically, in “Justice” and other courses you’ve taught, that professors new to the classroom should know?

Sandel: It’s very hard to hold students’ attention for 50 minutes. Especially on challenging material like political theory.

It’s certainly beyond what I could do to hold student’s attention if I read from a text. So, being able to lecture, to put across material without a text, is very important. There are small numbers of people who can read from a written text and hold the attention of students, but they are very few and I’m not among them.

I think the first thing is to learn the material well enough so that you could put it across without having to read any of it. And then having some kind of opportunity for students to argue back, not only to ask questions but to respond to the texts or to the professor’s view.

I think that adds a tremendous amount. It mobilizes students’ own imaginations and argumentative powers. And if the questions are good and the challenges are strong then other students learn by listening to that exchange.

Art of Theory: What features of our political life most puzzle you?

Sandel: I would say the largely arid terms of political discourse, the thinness of public discourse in the world’s leading democracies. That’s the single most striking and worrisome thing.

It’s partly the tendency, over the past three decades, of economics to crowd out politics. This has been an age of market triumphalism. We’ve come to the assumption that markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. I think that is a mistaken notion and people are now beginning to question that.

It also has led to political discourse being preoccupied with technocratic, managerial, economic concerns. The broader public questions and ethical questions have been crowded to the side.

I think that this has been reinforced by a certain idea of toleration, a well-intentioned idea of toleration that says, “Given the disagreements we have on moral and spiritual questions, we should try to conduct our political debate without reference to them.” I think that’s also contributed to an emptying out of substantive moral discourse in politics, an emptiness people are eager to fill.

Such emptiness often provokes a backlash, so that narrow, intolerant and sometimes fundamentalist voices fill that void and have a persuasive force they wouldn’t otherwise have, if public discourse included open and direct engagement with rival moral views and moral conceptions.

Art of Theory: What remedies could be offered for that problem of thin political discourse?

Sandel: There are remedies at two levels.

At the level of political theory (and this is what I’ve tried to do in some of my work), we need to challenge the premise that a pluralist society, or a society based on mutual respect, must avoid or set aside substantive moral and spiritual questions or questions of the good life.

Also at the level of political theory, I think there needs to be a challenge to economistic visions of democracy.

At the level of political practice, I think we have to find ways of encouraging and nurturing the ability of citizens to engage more directly and in a morally robust public discourse. That requires a civic education that the political parties are not providing and that the media is not providing.

I also think educational institutions can be sites for civic education. Colleges and universities have a responsibility to provide students with an opportunity to develop their skills in public discourse and in moral and political argument.

Art of Theory: You’ve defended the place of religion in that discourse. Why?

Sandel: Well, I’m in favor of a more faith-friendly form of public discourse and public reason than is advanced by some versions of liberal political theory.

So, for example, one account of public reason that’s prominent is advanced by Rawls in one way and by Habermas in another. Both, despite their disagreements, share the idea that public reason should not depend on trying to persuade our fellow citizens of our preferred conception of the good life. I think that’s too narrow an account of public reason, because it requires people to leave their spiritual convictions or their secular, substantive moral convictions, at the door when they enter the public square.

I think that’s a mistake. I would favor a more expansive idea of public reason that welcomes all comers. That doesn’t mean that everyone can or will carry the day. But I’m not in favor of excluding arguments that may draw on faith traditions, for those who want to bring them to bear in politics.

There’s a tendency to think that this invites dogma into politics; that’s one of the reasons people think we should leave religious reasons outside of public discourse. I agree that dogmatic assertions typically are not valuable contributions to democratic discourse, but I don’t think religious communities have a monopoly of dogmatic assertions. There are plenty of dogmatic claims that are brought to bear by people coming from secular traditions.

So I’m in favor of reasoned public discourse, but I wouldn’t rule out in advance reasons that may reflect faith traditions or other substantive conceptions of the good life.

We can’t know what types of arguments can be accepted until we try.

This may be the main point of disagreement I have with Rawls and Habermas. We can’t stipulate in advance those reasons which could, in principle, be accepted or agreed to by everyone. We can’t specify criteria for possible acceptance by everyone without delving into some of the substantive moral disagreements. I would not use that requirement to prevent certain kinds of reasons or arguments from being brought to bear in politics.

Art of Theory: Tell us a little bit about your work process.

Sandel: At the moment I’m working on a book project that I’ve been working on for a long time, with many detours, on the moral limits of markets.

I have developed and tried out the broad philosophical ideas in teaching and in papers, but at the same time I want to relate the question of markets to actual examples of contested commodification. I have gathered from newspapers and other sources over many years intriguing examples of contested commodification today.

So the process by which I work includes working-out philosophical ideas in discussion with students and colleagues, and gathering concrete illustrations to connect the themes and to illustrate them. I have great file boxes full of clippings and examples. Bouncing philosophical ideas against a novel controversy can prompt important questions.

Art of Theory: Do you do you find yourself returning to canonical thinkers, whether ancient or modern, in the course of your work?

Sandel: All the time. I’m constantly finding that the contemporary debates raise philosophical questions that go all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, and that’s part of the fun of doing political theory: being attuned to the arguments that take place around the world, reading newspapers alongside old books.

Art of Theory: What does excellent political theory look like to you? What sets it apart from the merely mediocre?

Sandel: Excellent political theory is determined by how interesting the question is.

I have found, over the years, in looking at Ph.D. dissertations that the single best predictor of what will be an excellent dissertation is the question it addresses. In political theory, more than in other academic subjects, the quality and interest of the work depends on the ability to identify an interesting and important question.

If you get it wrong then you can be very smart and conscientious and logical and a great researcher but it won’t be terribly interesting or even worthwhile. The single most important consideration is finding and choosing the right question, or the right set of questions.

If you put dissertations aside and look at the history of political thought and the lasting texts, they are the works that have taken on big, interesting, important questions; that’s what sets apart good, or even great political theory, from merely ordinary work.

After the question is chosen I am a methodological pluralist—a radical methodological pluralist—to the point where I don’t even think we could lay down any meaningful criteria for the right research method.

Now this may be different in other parts of political science (I doubt it), but choosing the right questions matters far more than the methodology. I think there’s a tendency today in political science generally, maybe to a lesser degree in political theory, for people to get it backwards: to let the choice of method determine the subject. I do think that has it radically wrong, and a lot of political science goes astray that way.

Art of Theory: How optimistic are you about the future of political theory as a field of study?

Sandel: I think there have always been, at least for the last forty years or so, attempts by some political scientists to claim that political inquiry could be put on so scientific and rigorous a footing that there would be no more need for political theory. But those attempts haven’t succeeded even remotely, and I don’t expect that they will.

I think the attempt to make political inquiry over in the image of the sciences is bound to fail. So I’m confident about the future of political theory as an academic subject, and what strengthens that confidence, apart from the intellectual conviction that normative questions persist and will persist, is that students persist.

Students of politics, whether undergraduates or graduate students, are drawn to the subject (for the most part) not because they’re intrigued and passionate about this or that method, but because they’re intrigued or troubled or worried or passionate about some political question or other: about how countries get along or fail to get along, about questions of war and peace, or globalization, or the role of markets, or about equality and inequality, or about what makes for successful democracies, or what enables people of different cultures and ethnic backgrounds to get along or find themselves in conflict.

It’s impossible to address any of these questions without taking up big themes in political theory. What keeps universities and academic communities full of energy and curiosity and ferment and inquiry is the passion that students have for actual political questions. That means that, for them, political theory is indispensable.

Adam Smith calls “duties of gratitude” the “most sacred” of the duties derived from beneficence (TMS 3.6.9), and I’m compelled to admit that in composing this reply I feel these duties keenly. I’m very grateful to the editors of the Art of Theory for sponsoring this forum and for their interest in my work. I’m also deeply grateful to our five commentators who have traveled so far – from departments of history, theology, philosophy, political science and English – to be part of this roundtable on Smith’s ethics. Their participation testifies to their own generosity and to Smith’s cross-disciplinary attraction.

The reply that follows addresses our five discussants serially. Doing so, I hope, will keep it as short as possible and also reflect the organization of the book. Its second half begins with Smith’s study of prudence and commercial virtue, then turns to his study of magnanimity and classical virtue, and concludes with his study of beneficence and Christian virtue. A similar division can be seen in the themes on which three of the commentators have chosen to focus – perhaps proof positive that a division of labor can work spontaneously! (WN 1.2.1) In that spirit in what follows I focus on Catherine Labio’s comments on prudence, Fredrik Albritton-Jonsson’s on magnanimity, and Gordon Graham’s on beneficence, before concluding with a reply to Fonna Forman-Barzilai’s comments on perfectionism.

Let me begin though with Aaron Garrett’s comments. Garrett, somewhat differently from the other four commentators, focuses on a theme that is more a focus of the first part of the book than the second. As Garrett notes, there I argue that seen from the familiar tripartite division of contemporary moral philosophy into deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, Smith is better understood as a representative of the latter rather than the two former camps. Now that claim, I think, isn’t in disaccord with Garrett’s claim that Smith’s virtue ethics is something quite different from the virtue ethics of either Aristotle or Hursthouse. That seems wholly right to me – and indeed one of my hopes for the book is that those attracted to virtue ethics but not fully satisfied by either ancient or contemporary versions of such might be moved to engage Smith’s eighteenth-century alternative.

Garrett’s comments thus remind us of the need to be cautious in applying contemporary labels to historical thinkers. Yet they also illuminate the benefits of a different sort of label. Smith scholars have long debated how best to define his substantive ethical positions. Many have inclined to see him through the lens of Stoicism, and in response others have argued that this label does more to obscure than to clarify his many debts, which much excellent scholarship has shown to have included ancient Epicureanism and Aristotelianism and modern Newtonianism and Humeanism. Smith’s synthesis, we can now say with reasonable assurance, was thus broad – and it is precisely for this reason that if we must have a label for Smith, we do best simply to adopt that of “eclectic” as invoked in Garrett’s conclusion.

In the first place, the term recalls another ancient school remarkably influential in the eighteenth century but largely forgotten today: the ancient Eclectics, who flourished in Alexandria in the period between Augustus’ rise and Rome’s fall, and who are the subject of one of the longest and most striking entries on the history of philosophy in the Encyclopédie. Smith himself invokes the Eclectics in a key passage in TMS, introducing them as the ancient counterpart to none other than Francis Hutcheson. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, the “eclectic” approach to moral theory – in which elements of one school are synthesized with elements of another – seems to me to capture the heart of Smith’s own ethics, dedicated as it is to an attempt to synthesize commercial, classical and Christian virtues.

Catherine Labio begins by noting that she identifies less with the optimism I find in Smith than the “hard-nosed pessimism” of certain of his critics. This position of course has much to commend it and deserves forthright engagement. Smith himself testifies to the value of such engagement in his own generous engagement with the pessimism of Rousseau, among others, which enabled him to conceive a means of transcending pessimism and legitimating the sober optimism to which he inclined. That said, I think that there are further resources in Smith that can help to mitigate “melancholy realism.” Smith’s study of prudence is a case in point.

Labio herself wonders whether prudence might be “of greater consequence to agricultural or pre-commercial societies” than to commercial ones. Many would argue just the opposite, however; as Deirdre McCloskey has suggested recently and compellingly, a principal failing of the economic science of which Smith is so often heralded as a founding father is its celebration of “Prudence Only,” leading to a view of man as a mere rational utility-maximizing machine.¹ The worry on this front is that the champions of commercial modernity not only reduce the whole of virtue to prudence, but they also reduce prudence itself to a mere tool of instrumentality – an attenuated virtue that little resembles Aristotle’s view of phronesis as an individual’s capacity “to deliberate beautifully about things that are good and advantageous for himself, not in part, such as the sort of things that are conducive to health or to strength, but the sort of things that are conducive to living well as a whole.”²

Smith, I think, was well aware of the temptations that might lead us to turn away from such a vision, and his own study of prudence – and particularly his distinction between superior and inferior prudence – aims to restore within commercial modernity the emphasis on “living well as a whole” characteristic of the Aristotelian perspective. And while attending to this may not alone be sufficient to cure the melancholy realism of the pessimist, it can, I think, absolve Smith of the charge that it was his conscious intention, as Labio suggests, to define “an ethical system that is only applicable to commercial societies and thus makes it difficult to distinguish morality from expediency.”

Fredrik Albritton-Jonsson’s comments are equally stimulating and deserving of greater elaboration. I found especially valuable his reminder of the “material foundation of moral corruption” that lies beyond the psychological concerns on which my book is largely focused. In this vein I was particularly struck by his suggestive comments on the way in which these material attractions attract the “wandering eye” – indeed it strikes me that there is an excellent paper (at least) to be written on the way in which material attractions corrupt not simply our moral psychologies, but the perspicuity of the very eye of the spectator.

But for now I focus on the question of magnanimity. Jonsson rightly raises a crucial question: how exactly are Smith’s concerns regarding magnanimity to be instituted in practice? In response, he suggests further attending to Smith’s political context. This seems to me exactly right, and my reasons for so thinking are perhaps best introduced by the prescient observation of another commentator on my work. At last year’s APSA, Iain McLean noted that in his study of Robert Burns’ physical copy of the 5th edition of TMS, currently housed at Glasgow University Library, he discovered only a single annotation: next to the key passage in which Smith insists that the affairs of all governments tend to be directed by those who have worked their way up the ranks from lower station (TMS 1.3.2.5), an unknown hand wrote the single word “Dundas.”

It is a prescient and clever remark, one that suggests an intimate connection between the normative moral theory of the Scottish Enlightenment and its efforts to shape the sensibilities of the political and landed elites. In this sense, Smith’s perspective accords with a more general, widespread conviction concerning the properly civic function of education which was central to the Scottish Enlightenment – and particularly evident in the unjustly neglected educational treatises of George Turnbull, David Fordyce, and Henry Home, Lord Kames – and which deserves more attention than it has received.

I’m also deeply grateful to Gordon Graham for his stimulating comments on Smith and Christian beneficence. His allusions to certain parallels between Kant and Smith are extremely suggestive, and while some excellent work has been done on this front (especially by Sam Fleischacker), much more remains to be said about this engagement. But here I concentrate on Graham’s main claim: namely that the fundamental difference between Smith’s “wise and virtuous man” and the “devout Christian” is the former’s “antipathy to certain religious practices.” This is hardly a claim I’d dispute; Smith’s well-known antipathies to the “futile mortifications of a monastery” more than prove Graham’s point (TMS 3.2.35).

At the same time, there may well be a danger in allowing Smith’s antipathy to one type of religious practice to stand for his understanding of religion as a whole. Smith scholars have long tended to focus more on his critiques of orthodox practice rather than his more positive treatment of what he calls “the natural principles of religion” (TMS 3.5.13). Yet attending to such, I think, is crucial to understanding both Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole. Smith’s reference to religion’s natural principles locates him in a largely overlooked but central debate within the Scottish Enlightenment over the nature of what they were prone to call “true religion,” the meaning of which deserves more careful scrutiny than it has thus far received. Like Graham, I suspect in the end that such an inquiry will not lead us back to Christian orthodoxy. Yet it may be valuable insofar as it may well lead us to something quite distinct from both the empty deism or ostensible atheism that has for so long been associated with the Enlightenment’s engagement with religion.

Finally, it’s a great pleasure to have a chance to respond to Fonna Forman-Barzilai. I’ve benefited tremendously from both our long-standing friendship and her own excellent recent book on Smith, and the connections between it and her comments here will be evident to those who have had the pleasure of reading both. The most important of these is her emphasis on “perfectionism.” This isn’t a term that I myself much use, but I imagine it could mean at least two different things. On one hand it might refer to a system dedicated to the achievement of perfection. Or it might refer to a system founded on an image of perfection. Smith would have to be seen as an advocate of only this second sort of “perfectionism.” I couldn’t agree more that he “never expected the mass of mankind to become wise and virtuous” (and indeed I can’t think of any serious thinker from Aristotle to Nietzsche who did!). And I’d even go further: not only does he reject the possibility that everyone might achieve perfection, he also rejects the possibility that anyone might achieve perfection; perfection, after all, is a standard which “no human conduct ever did, or ever can come up to” (TMS 1.1.5.9; cf. 6.2.3.2).

So exactly what work is perfection then doing in Smith’s ethics? Perfection is important to Smith, I think, not because he sees it as an end state to be achieved, but because it provides an ideal with which we can each dialectically engage in our own efforts at self-improvement. This seems to me to be the reason why he consistently refers to perfection not as a state but as an “idea” (TMS 1.1.1.9; cf. 6.3.25-26) – and one, moreover, chiefly valuable for the guidance it gives to those who are “are most sincerely labouring after perfection, and endevaouring to act according to the best principle which can possibly direct us” (TMS 3.6.12).

Appreciating this may also help us on another front. If perfection in practice isn’t the end of Smith’s ethics, what is? As Forman-Barzilai notes, the peak figure in Smith’s ethics is the wise and virtuous man. But who is this wise and virtuous man, and in what exactly does his excellence consist? Smith’s claim is that his excellence lies in his capacity to balance his awareness of his excellence with a full embrace of the decency and dignity of others – a balance that preserves him from temptations toward “insolence” to others and ensures that he is “at all times willing to promote their further advancement” (TMS 6.3.25). Elsewhere Smith is even more explicit in fleshing out what this might look like, telling us that wisdom and virtue are chiefly valuable in their capacity to promote “providing meat, drink, rayment, and lodging for men, which are commonly reckoned the meanest of employments and fit for the pursuit of none but the lowest and meanest of the people” (LJA 6.20-21).

Now this is a rather remarkable redefinition of wisdom and virtue. In the first place, I would think it exonerates Smith from the charge that his ethical peak aspires to stand “somehow outside and above the tangle of the human drama,” or that Smith championed “perfectionist virtue…at the expense of practical morality.” In sharp contrast, Smith’s vision of virtue is important precisely because it aspires to synthesize these two categories. Indeed in Smith’s virtue ethics, “moral perfection” and “practical morality” are neither two categories in tension nor even two different things, as it is precisely the reconciliation of “moral perfection” and what Forman-Barzilai here calls “social coordination” that Smith aims to effect in claiming that it is precisely that which “constitutes the perfection of human nature” which “can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions” (TMS 1.1.5.5). Indeed if we were to swap the coordinating conjunction “and” for the coordinating conjunction “or” in Forman-Barzilai’s title, I think we’d have Smith exactly right!

Now some – especially those invested in the distinction between “ancients” and “moderns” – might still not be satisfied. Forman-Barzilai nods in this direction at times, calling Smith a “quintessentially modern thinker” who sought to cultivate a “modern, practical morality,” so that “moderns could get along reasonably well.” But I confess that I find this heuristic unsatisfying for a number of reasons. Some are theoretical; in the end I’m not sure that the ancient-modern dichotomy doesn’t do more to obscure than to illuminate what makes either antiquity or modernity worthy objects of study for contemporary political theorists.

Other reasons are historical. I couldn’t agree more that we should aim to provide “a faithful, historical interpretation of Smith.” But that such a reconstruction would point away from “perfectionism” and towards “bourgeois virtue” is to my mind by no means obvious. I think a careful survey of eighteenth-century Scottish moral and political thought would in fact reveal almost exactly the opposite, and show that so far from rejecting perfectionism, the language of the pursuit of the beautiful and noble conceived teleologically constitutes a (if not the) principal strain of moral discourse in the Scottish Enlightenment. The lines of transmission of this discourse are, to be sure, complex; one would want to begin by disaggregating the line that begins in Glasgow with Hutcheson’s “New Light” synthesis of ancient Stoicism and Ciceronianism with moderate Presbyterianism, from the line that that begins contemporaneously in Edinburgh with the Rankenian Club’s embrace of Shaftesbury and culminates in Aberdeen with Thomas Reid.

Yet as a matter of history it ultimately seems more accurate to say that Hume’s antipathy to perfectionism was more the outlier than the norm in the Scottish Enlightenment. And while a great deal remains to be done to uncover this discourse and Smith’s connections with it, those who aspire to trace these connections couldn’t do better than to begin with Forman-Barzilai’s important book, which is sure to become an essential point of departure for those aspiring to understand Smith’s ideas in context.

Adam Smith’s friend Ben Franklin once counseled against replying to critics on the grounds that precious time is better spent “making new Experiments, than in Disputing about those already made.”³ There’s much to commend such a view! Yet the two ends might not be necessarily exclusive, as a critical look back can often help to propel a useful step forwards. Such, at any rate, has been my hope, and I’m deeply grateful to our commentators for generous and stimulating comments that do so much to remind us of all the work still to be done on Smith and the Scots.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. He is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, 2009), the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin, 2010), and current President of the International Adam Smith Society.

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue is a gem – original and timely, meticulously researched and documented, richly attuned to the subtlety of Smith’s thought and beautifully written. The book presents a serious and challenging intervention in Smith scholarship, by directing our attention to Smith’s thoughts about the virtuous character, and the way this formulation navigates various tensions in Smith’s often conflicted views of modern commercial life.

Rigorously engaged in scholarly debates, the book is nevertheless admirably accessible to non-specialists interested more generally in the morals of modernity. It opens with lively prose on the contradictions – the “hopes and despairs”, the “benefits and challenges” — of capitalism and throughout confines its masterful and astonishingly complete and useful research apparatus to footnotes.

Hanley has offered perhaps the richest account to date of Smith’s views on the corruptions of commercial society, contributing to the wave of revisionist scholarship on Smith in recent decades that has sought to rehabilitate Smith as a moral philosopher worthy of serious consideration by those interested in more than small states and the limitless pursuit of wealth.

Drawing explicitly on Smith’s affinities with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (an underappreciated subject on which Hanley has already written much), he is especially illuminating on Smith’s response to the psychological ills of commercial life — such as “restlessness, anxiety, inauthenticity, duplicity, mediocrity, alienation, and indifference to others” — and the various “solutions” he posited to “ameliorate” these ills. It is this normative project of “amelioration” or “palliation” that Hanley characterizes as a three-stage “virtue ethics” – comprised, we are told, of an amalgam of virtues that draw on ancient, Christian and commercial sources — an agenda that Smith pursued most fully and vigorously at the end of his life, in Part VI of the final, sixth edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1790.

The three stages of Smith’s virtue ethics provide the architecture of Hanley’s presentation. Chapter four explores the first stage, the well-established place of commercial prudence in Smith’s thought, as a method for ameliorating modern restlessness, anxiety and deceit. The second stage, in chapter five, is the classical virtue of magnanimity, which helps to mitigate the effects of mediocrity and individualism endemic to commercial pursuit. The capstone for Hanley is the third virtue in chapter six — Christian beneficence — which serves to tamp down the self-preference and indifference of modern commercial people. The reason I call Christian virtue a capstone for Hanley is not only because it concludes his presentation of the virtues, but because it culminates in discussion of Smith’s “wise and virtuous man,” who for Hanley serves as the very embodiment of the perfection of these virtues.

For an account of Smith’s ambivalence about commercial life, and his attempts to render the benefits of commerce (“maximizing opulence and freedom”) safe for human flourishing (“nobility and greatness”), one can do no better than Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue. In my comments here, I’d like to address Hanley’s focus on Smith’s perfectionism, which I believe is closely related to his very deliberate choice not to engage Smith’s central account of sympathy and the impartial spectator in the Moral Sentiments.

I appreciate his eagerness to explore the understudied place of virtue in Smith’s thought, and to avoid unnecessary redundancy “in light of the excellent treatments these concepts have already received in studies by others,” but I suspect that an emphasis on the undeniable place of virtue in Smith’s thought, without the context of his more central pursuits in moral philosophy, may lead to a distorted view of Smith’s overall project, and what I will characterize here as his overarching commitment to cultivating a modern, practical morality, released from any sort of perfectionist expectation, classical or Christian, that ordinary people should pursue nobility and greatness.

A foundational assumption in my own interpretation of Smith is that he was a quintessentially modern thinker, primarily preoccupied with social order, with identifying the cement, the foundation, of modern society in the wake of declining forms of authority that had situated lives in times long past.¹ The Theory of Moral Sentiments presented a lighter, freer, self-regulating description of social coordination perfectly suited to modern commercial people. Sympathy was a social practice for Smith, through which people who share physical space participate together in exchanges of approbation and shame, and through infinite repetitions over time learn to become social, learn to adjust their passions to a pitch commensurate with living in a society with others, without ideological or religious foundations, and without being coerced. A post-metaphysical foundation you might say.

Hanley takes Smith’s perfectionist turn and his talk about God far more seriously than I think a faithful, historical interpretation of Smith should. Scottish practical moralism sustained a preoccupation with the tolerable decency of the many, the middle-class, and not the aspirations of the few. Smith comes down rather decisively against the Christian ascetic and the Stoic sage as models for modern moral conduct.² I believe Smith focused primarily on ordinary morality, and articulated a modern theory that insisted on taking men as they are, resisting moral rigorism in any form, be it Christian or Stoic.

Smith was concerned primarily with describing the origins of what Deirdre McCloskey has called “the bourgeois virtues”. In an astonishingly parochial tone, Smith directed our energies to local cares and pursuits, which are a more efficient use of our limited love, knowledge and capacity. In the final sixth editions of the Moral Sentiments he did offer up a robust portrait of the wise and virtuous man, as a sort of model or ideal type, and he undoubtably described conscience as a “vicegerent” in the soul guiding our actions as if we are participating in God’s plan, and so forth – and this is all a beautiful and compelling portrait from the perspective of the ancient virtues than animate Ryan’s interpretation. But my real point -– and this really is the main point — Smith never expected the mass of mankind to become wise and virtuous. And I don’t simply mean achieving the end of wisdom and virtue, for only the very few ever do that. He never even expected them to begin the process of attuning themselves to higher models, to feel compelled to perfect themselves. But the point is: that is ok! The point for Smith was that moderns could get on reasonably well without contentious abstractions about what’s right and good and true.

This is where my own recent book, and Ryan Hanley’s book, most dramatically depart. It’s ultimately a matter of emphasis. I don’t deny the perfectionist language is there – my own book contains an entire chapter on Smith’s perfectionism and why I believe he articulated it in a treatise devoted primarily to an empirical description of the moral sentiments that arise among ordinary people through their worldly interactions. But Hanley focuses on the wise and virtuous man standing somehow outside and above the tangle of the human drama, and insists that Smith was primarily concerned with the cultivation of virtue – not moral sentiment or even propriety, mind you, but virtue of the Aristotelian and Thomist perfectionist variants.

I on the other hand emphasize that Smith was always looking at the world, describing actual human behavior in rich and vibrant vignettes that so captivated his eighteenth-century readers. Smith was a Scottish practical moralist concerned, as his Scottish Enlightenment contemporaries were, with the tendencies and capacities of ordinary people, the “coarse clay of mankind” as he often called them. He never expected more than that of which he believed they were capable – which for Smith, was efficient local action, driven by affective connections with specific others – self, family, friends, neighbors, and more weakly communities and nations – everything “which Nature has prescribed to us as the proper business and occupation of our lives.”

And yet, despite my worries about an interpretation that emphasizes perfectionist virtue in Smith’s thought at the expense of practical morality, about an interpretation that focuses on philosophical abstractions rather than what I would characterize as Smith’s greatest contribution to the history of moral philosophy: the very earthy dynamics of sympathy and the impartial spectator – despite all this, I find myself returning to the book again and again, for its subtle interpretation of text, for its biting critique of the effects of commercial culture; and for its rigorous engagement with Smith scholarship (Hanley’s footnotes are, hands down, the best survey available on contemporary debates in Smith studies – unobtrusive to general readers who won’t care, but an irresistible beckon to those who do).

Hanley’s talents as an historian of political philosophy, and as a political theorist, shine in this fine interpretation that is sure to inspire students of Smith’s thought for years to come. It seems fitting to conclude by thanking Ryan for so many years of friendship and collegial dialogue on Smith since our days together in graduate school at the University of Chicago. It is a great joy to continue learning from him, and evolving as a scholar in dialogue with him.

Fonna Forman-Barzilai is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She is author of Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge 2010)