Recent years have seen a revival of “political realism” (PR) in political theory. As Edward Hall notes in this superb new book, proponents of PR argue that politics is a distinctive domain of action, with its own goods and exigencies—above all, goods of order and security, and exigencies of power and passion. Politics is fundamentally conflictual; the political art is to channel conflict constructively through institutions. Attaining and preserving security and order is the fundamental precondition for the pursuit of any further good (justice, community, freedom, personal flourishing). Given the intensity of conflict in the political realm, order will rest on the exercise of coercive authority. But to count as political, this coercion must be accepted as legitimate; otherwise there will be a condition, not of political rule, but of civil war or slavery. Political realists demand legitimacy and aspire to peace; they reject, as one of the greatest threats to the pursuit of this project, wishful thinking or inordinate demands. They call for political theory to forsake utopian visions of a harmonious, virtuous, contented society free of deep disagreement, dissatisfaction, and vice, and instead “concentrate on what people are actually like and what is actually likely to move them to act” (175).
Articulations of PR in contemporary political theory have tended to be directed against the “high liberalism” or “moralism” attributed to John Rawls and his followers. Some scholars have also sought to use PR as a lens for exploring the history of political thought, focusing on classic authors (Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, Weber). Hall looks elsewhere, to the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams (to whom I will refer collectively as BHW). This is not a work of intellectual history: Hall's purpose is to use these thinkers to think about politics and political theory. The results justify this approach: without making these thinkers more systematic or consistent than they really were, he pursues the most cogent reading of each and synthesizes their ideas into a perspective that can be appreciated and appropriated by contemporary political theorists.
While Hall's book is concise, his accounts of the three thinkers are too rich to summarize or evaluate in this short space. Suffice to say, he lucidly navigates seemingly intractable debates over the relationship between ethical pluralism and political liberalism in Berlin's thought, to arrive at the plausible conclusion that Berlin's combination of pluralism with a minimalist, empiricist reconceptualization of natural law does not entail, but does encourage, an embrace of liberalism. He recovers Hampshire's much-neglected, fertile work, which emphasizes the vitality of conflict as a reflection of the richness of human moral imagination, our intuitive recognition of basic political evils as a negative foundation for political morality, and the development of a minimalist account of justice as procedural fairness. And he brings unity and clarity to Williams's (often gnomic) thought, offering a careful defense of Williams against charges of conservatism or lack of critical leverage. In the remainder of this review I will consider some features that make BHW's brand of PR both “idiosyncratic” (8) and especially fruitful.
A major contribution of Hall's book is to refine the characterization of PR as rejecting an “ethics first” approach to political theory (1–2). Since “ethical or moral considerations inevitably play a role” in political judgments, realists should “be realistic about the fact that politics is replete with ethical judgments” (171, 173). BHW's “political realism” rested on an ethical theory: ethical pluralism, which recognizes that human beings are committed to a plurality of independently valid ideals that cannot be reconciled or ordered within a single moral system; disagreement and conflict over questions of how to live are thus ineluctable features of human life. While such conflict is painful, and may become destructive, it is also valuable, reflecting “the healthy operation of human thought and the moral imagination” (71). BHW thus rejected not “moralism” simpliciter, but moral monism. They also objected to the theoretical aspirations of much moral philosophy: the view that moral (and political) theory should aim at a type of knowledge, expressible in universally valid propositions, rules, or commands, which can be applied, in the form of some “supreme value or rationalistic decision procedure” (3), to identify ethically correct or just political arrangements and conduct. Such “theory,” they insisted, is a poorer guide to practice than “judgment,” which is necessarily contextual and particularizing. Political (and ethical) decision-making cannot be made “completely algorithmic” (55, quoting Berlin and Williams).
Skeptical of “theory,” these “Oxford pessimists” actually evinced considerable faith in “ordinary rational argument, founded on empirical observation and common reasoning” as an antidote to the “evil fictions” that derange politics and pervert values (35, quoting Berlin). On the other hand, they did not share (some) other realists’ faith that human behavior and interests are sufficiently uniform and predictable to be dependably managed or predicted. Thus Williams (echoing Berlin) charged Hume with “a somewhat terminal degree of optimism” insofar as he failed to confront the depth of human diversity (209). This may have implications for contemporary debates, as suggested by Hall's linkage of this critique to the “optimistic rendering” of a “Humean ethical position” in Andrew Sabl's “realist liberalism” (173–74).
Hall nicely brings out the way that BHW rejected the abstractly universal and impersonal tone of moral philosophy in favor of a more vivid, personal, and emotive as well as historically situated mode of evaluation. This is reflected in the language that they used to discuss morality and politics. Thus Hampshire suggested that we should seek to “construct and maintain a way of life of which we are not ashamed and which we shall not, on reflection, regret or despise”; similarly, he calls certain acts not merely unjust or wrong, but “morally repugnant, shocking, indefensible, inhuman, vicious, disgraceful,” or “squalid, or mean, or disloyal, or dishonorable” (quoted at 65, 74, 83). Williams likewise labels a man who fails to care about his wife not irrational or unjust, but “ungrateful, inconsiderate, hard, sexist, nasty, selfish, brutal” (quoted at 125). Berlin, too, excelled at using evocative evaluative language.
Not only does the “realism” of Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams involve bringing a thicker evaluative language to bear; it reflects an ethical vision of what values and dispositions are to be praised or cultivated in thinking about politics. Hall indeed suggests that PR may be best understood not as a method or metatheory but as a feature of “sensibility” (13) which allows one to perceive reality correctly, think soberly but creatively about practical problems, and judge and act responsibly. Perhaps ironically, this dispositional “realism” seems largely defined by intellectual rather than political virtues: clarity, honesty or truthfulness, self-awareness, and a preference for “curiosity” over “salvation.” As BHW acknowledged, these were qualities conducive to the correct perception of (political and moral) reality—but not necessarily to political success, which might be achieved by visionary passion and willfulness as much as by sobriety and prudence. Similarly, Hall seems preoccupied more with questions about how to engage in political theorizing than with first-order questions of political action. PR emerges more as an ethic for intellectuals than an art for politicians.
Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams's “political realism” offers neither the certainty of systematic morality or political science, nor a guarantee of political success. There is little consolation in this philosophy—save perhaps the reassurance, for humanists who cannot bring themselves to be utopians or cynics, that their doubts and anxieties are valid. There is, however, considerable intellectual illumination to be derived from accompanying Hall on his journey through the ideas of these idiosyncratic, imperfect, but wise thinkers.
