This is a magisterial exploration of solutions to what Tracy Strong sees as one of the key philosophical and political problems of modernity: the unavailability of authoritative foundations for knowledge and action. Politics without Vision is a frequently surprising treatment of major political thinkers (Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, V. I. Lenin, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt) and an even more surprising argument that this motley crew is united by a Kantianism unrecognizable to anyone whose Kant comes off the shelf of an introductory ethics course.
The title alludes to Sheldon Wolin's 1960 classic Politics and Vision, to which Strong offers his book as a sympathetic but critical alternative: This book focuses on figures “who reject the need for, and the possibility of, a ‘vision’” (p. 7). Rejecting the possibility of a vision is to “think without a banister,” a phrase Strong borrows from Arendt.
The book is about understanding the twentieth-century West through thinkers and actors who themselves tried to understand it and, in many cases, shaped it significantly. Of course, to make sense of the twentieth century, one needs to understand the nineteenth and, well, also much about the eighteenth. Such an attempt also can't ignore the nineteenth-century obsession with antiquity. No surprise, then, that the first quarter of the book is devoted to Kant (Chap. 1) and Nietzsche (Chap. 2), and that much of the discussion of Nietzsche focuses on his treatment of Greek music.
Strong's account is an alternative to liberalism and to those versions of democratic theory that have become most closely associated with postwar, Anglophone, liberal theory. Very few of the target theorists are mentioned explicitly; theories and theorists are seldom engaged (although a comparison of Arendt and John Rawls [pp. 360 ff] is an interesting exception). This is not a problem for the book, but it may be worth teasing out some of the dimensions of Strong's complaint against liberalism to see his contribution in higher relief.
The problem with postwar liberalism is that in seeking to prevent the possibility of the horrors of the twentieth century, it has “narrowed the possibilities for political thought” (p. 5). Liberal thinkers, liberals, and liberalism are preoccupied with coming up with a conception of a just society, principles that regulate it and its members' interactions, and roles in which its members will know just what to do and how to act appropriately. An ideal like this, for Strong's thinkers, is at best a panacea and at worst the very thing that leads modern citizens to “lives of quiet desperation,” as the author frequently puts it, using Henry David Thoreau's famous phrase. For Strong, this confuses ethics with politics.
So “thinking without a banister” is not just rejecting metaphysical first principles as the justification for political judgments; it is rejecting intersubjectively valid arguments as responses to the question “What should be done?” The issue, then, is what political judgments should be all about. The answer is not simple, and to try to put it simply in a short review would do injustice to the book, but the answer begins with aesthetics.
Aesthetic means for Strong, as it meant for Kant, both things that have to do with art (our modern conception) and matters of sensibility in general. And in Strong's reading of Kant, which grounds the thought of the thinkers that follow in the book, an aesthetic judgment is about establishing a political community. To say “This is beautiful” (Chap. 1) or “I am an American” (Conclusion) is to make a claim about a political community that is always explicitly addressed to others, always open, always contestable.
To call a book magisterial, as I did previously, is to praise, justly, its author's erudition, even wisdom. But “magisterial” also invokes the Herr Magister of an old-fashioned classroom, one whose word we must take on his authority alone. Why should we take Strong's word for it? We don't have to, of course. But as his treatment of his authors shows, the question of whom we take to be authoritative is at the central tension of democratic modernity: All can make real political judgments, yet most do not. In reality, the maturity needed for political claims making is the exception.
A reader might bristle at the implication of Strong's argument. After all, instead of just taking the author's word for it, the reader might challenge the book at three levels: Strong's reading of a given theorist, the family resemblance he adduces between his theorists, or, most importantly, the central claim that this particular family resemblance points to a conception of knowledge and political action that is a plausible/meaningful/compelling/appealing/feasible (circle your preferred choice) alternative to the currently dominant modes of liberal and democratic theory. A critical reader might say that the very openness and indeterminacy generated by “thinking without a banister” means that, in a way, the argument is at best suggestive.
As examples, consider two challenges that connect the first and third levels. While Strong takes pains to show that his reading of Kant's third Critique is consistent with Kant's treatment of metaphysics and epistemology in the first Critique, he almost entirely—and by design—avoids discussing Kant's practical philosophy, as developed in the Groundwork, the second Critique, and also in The Metaphysics of Morals, as well as in his political writings. Although many readers (certainly this reviewer) may agree with Strong that interesting questions about knowledge and action come together for Kant in the third Critique, some will find it problematic to ignore what Kant himself took to be his central treatments of action, namely, his practical philosophy.
Shifting now to the third level, this first-level challenge yields a question: Couldn't there be a kind of thinking without a banister that doesn't reject the possibility of intersubjectively valid reasons to accept principles, norms, and conceptions of roles? That kind of thinking doesn't have to result in a “vision,” either. (We do have good reasons to worry about visionaries.) Indeed, one might argue for such a conception and suggest that it is captured in a genealogy that also begins with Kant but which crosses the Atlantic and finds its members around the ideas known as pragmatism.
I don't offer this as an argument against Strong's account, but as an example of an alternative. The general worry is, as I suggested, that Strong's approach might seem to imply that the reader should just take his word for it. Throughout the book, the author himself is aware of the way that almost all of his theorists, not merely those he focuses on primarily but even frequent supporting actors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, flirt with a risky elitism. He doesn't want to deny this risk; it is part of his argument that the risk is unavoidable. Interestingly, though, Strong offers a formulation of what it means to make claims on thoughts arrived at without a banister that does attenuate the worry, but which is very clearly his, not obviously in the framings of his authors. Like a judgment about art, a knowledge claim without a banister is an “invitation—which may be refused, accepted, or questioned—to join me and share, perhaps alter or correct, the experience I have” (p. 97). Politics without Vision itself is such an invitation.
