First, let me thank Charlotte Epstein for her thorough, fair, and insightful review of Leviathan on a Leash. Because I cannot do justice to the many interesting issues she raises, I focus on the one that I think has the broadest implications for political theory: the issue of theory’s purpose.
Epstein sees a glimmer of continental thought in my book, in that “it makes past texts speak adroitly to the present.” However, invoking Robert Cox’s distinction between “problem-solving” and “critical” approaches, she places me decidedly on the problem-solving side—with all the blind spots and biases that this implies. Epstein is right to place Leviathan on a Leash in the tradition of analytic political theory (though, I would add, on the “realist” rather than the “idealist” branch). Yet, not all theory in the analytic tradition is problem-solving theory. Cox’s binary omits and obscures many other modes of theorizing, including mine.
Leviathan on a Leash develops a kind of theory that stands somewhere between critical theory and problem-solving theory. I will call this “counterfoil” theory, because it has a lot in common with what Ivan Illich calls “counterfoil research” (Tools for Conviviality, [1973] 2009, pp. 77–99). Illich’s mode of theorizing was, in part, “critical” in Cox’s sense. Most famously, Illich sought to expose the power relations embedded in the institution of education and to denaturalize the idea of “school.” But Illich also argued that concepts from the dominant culture could be “recovered,” “inverted,” and turned against established power structures. For instance, although he saw “the courts and the legal system” as “tools made for the service of an industrial state” (p. 92), he argued that some parts of the common law, such as the concept of due process, could be used to construct more egalitarian and decentralized modes of governance. Counterfoil theorizing is reconstructive as well as deconstructive.
Much as Illich used concepts from the common law in his critique of industrial society, Leviathan on a Leash uses the familiar concepts of authorization, representation, and personhood to develop a critique of state responsibility. Epstein is right that I take these concepts, along with many others, “out of the present.” I develop a new theory of state responsibility precisely by recovering and reworking ideas from the dominant political culture.
From Epstein’s perspective, counterfoil theory does not go far enough, because it stops short of “denaturalizing” the taken-for-granted concepts of modern politics. But counterfoil theory goes far beyond mere problem-solving, because it involves recasting and redefining problems. The aim of Leviathan on a Leash is not just to figure out how best to hold a state responsible, but also to rethink what it means to assign responsibility (rather than accountability, liability, or culpability) to a state (rather than a government, a nation, or a people) in the first place. The purpose of the theory I develop is more to define and illuminate ethical problems than to generate solutions or “fixes.”
In the spirit of Illich, I consider critical theory and counterfoil theory—Epstein’s approach and mine—to be complementary. While critical theory exposes the power relations embedded in our concepts, counterfoil theory challenges existing power structures by using their own concepts against them.
