'Pure politics' in twentieth-century liberal thought

My MPhil thesis

Background

One thing I intended to do during my Masters degree was write lots of blog posts. As long-suffering subscribers know, I failed in this, largely for the boring reason that I ended up spending most of my time writing my thesis instead. So in a belated attempt to compensate for my inability to multitask, I thought I should at least upload what I handed in.

In retrospect, I think what I was really trying to argue in what follows was that by the late-ish 20th century, liberalism, in both its left (Rawlsian) and right (public choice) guises that I write about here, came to express itself primarily in legalistic or juridical terms, which reflects not the eradication of politics at the hands of philosophy, as is sometimes thought, but the opposite: an excessively ‘political’ kind of theory. What these 20th century liberals had lost was the form of liberal argument derived from social theory, in which what mattered was not law or politics but the ethics of human action in general — a subject that largely precedes the political domain. That kind of liberal thought was, I think, a dominant feature of liberalism once upon a time — in Hume, Smith, and Weber, at least — but it has now been reduced to the margins, present in Foucault or Shklar, but in few others. For various reasons, I think the loss of a social theory of liberalism at the hands of juridical reasoning has turned much liberal thought sterile, undemanding, and unfulfilling. So in the last sections of my thesis, I tried to look at what it might take to put society before politics in the liberal imagination once more.

The warning I think I should provide beforehand, however, is that this work was, I think correctly, described by one of my examiners as ‘inside baseball’. My MPhil was in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge; Cambridge has a very specific, maybe even idiosyncratic, way of thinking about those subjects, and a lot of what follows represents me trying to argue within that context, rather than venture too far beyond it. (If I’d continued studying, one of the things I’d have liked to do would’ve been to try to make this argument in much plainer language.) Nevertheless, it scored pretty well — 84 and 80, numbers that sound good to Brits and terrible to Americans — and I’m still quite pleased with it. Since the course of my life seems to be leading me ever-further away from a PhD, and I’m not sure when I would next find the time to do something more with this, I thought uploading it here might be the next best option. If you’re in the camp of the roughly 5 people seriously interested in this topic, perhaps you’ll find it something other than tedious.

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Note on formatting: I’ve made a few changes to make this more readable in Substack form, e.g. unabbreviating book titles and reorganising my footnotes, which does mean this now comes in at slightly over 20,000 words. Beyond that I haven’t changed anything, despite the enormous temptation to start tinkering.

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‘Pure politics’ in twentieth-century liberal thought

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Contents

Introduction

I. Hume, Smith, and Foucault

§1. Reference points

§2. Putting society first

§3. Political judgement

§4. The ‘conduct of conduct’ 

II. Smith, Weber, and Robbins

§5. From Smith to Weber

§6. Politics in capitalist society

§7. After Weber

III. Buchanan, Rawls, and Hobbes

§8. Two contractarians

§9. Positive-sum political thought

§10. Rawls and Hobbes

IV. Liberalism, ethics, and history

§11. Liberal political reason

§12. Realism reconsidered

Conclusion

Bibliography

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Introduction

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Istvan Hont began his Jealousy of Trade by distinguishing between three kinds of political theory. Karl Marx represented one form, Thomas Hobbes another, and David Hume and Adam Smith a third. Marx, Hont wrote, ‘had no use for politics’.¹ He believed the exchange economy could transcend it. Hobbes had chosen the opposite approach. In Hont’s view, his theory represented ‘pure politics’.² It offered ‘stability and peace without any consensus or pre-political social integration’.³ But neither Marx’s post-politics nor Hobbes’s pure politics really animated Hont’s project. The Jealousy of Trade revolved around that third kind of political theory, Hume and Smith’s. Their innovation was to merge Hobbes’s ‘innovative theory of representative popular sovereignty’ with contemporary ‘ideas of commerce’.⁴ This gave us the ‘modern representative republic’, and before long, liberalism.⁵ We live, Hont thought, in the political world the Scottish Enlightenment built – not those of Marx or Hobbes.

There is something unusual about this story. Hont claimed that liberalism could ‘never be understood simply in political and moral terms’.⁶ By tracing modern politics back to Hume and Smith, liberalism became, instead, ‘a product of the peculiarly modern strain between politics and the economy’.⁷ But in Anglophone political theory today these are scarcely the terms of our enquiry. Rather the history of twentieth-century liberalism is often told by reference to those very categories, politics and morality, that Hont believed were incomplete. My task in this essay is to show what we are missing out on.

My claim is that if we start with Hont’s terms, we can identify a caesura in twentieth-century liberal thought: a moment when one kind of political reasoning gave way to something very different. That caesura was the moment that liberal theory began to think about politics in relation to a new form of economic conduct: when Smith’s commercial society was replaced by Max Weber’s capitalism. The term ‘society’ is important. I argue in Part I that for Smith, the personal relationships that constituted commercial society gave rise to a very specific kind of political order. Political economy revealed that politics lacked the dexterity to deal with society’s extraordinary constellation of mutable and transitory interests. This meant politics was a matter of judgement, not of calculation. And as Michel Foucault saw so clearly, it gave a remarkable ethical depth to politics and civil society alike.

Weber shared far more with Smith than their distinct intellectual contexts might lead us to expect. Above all, Weber was concerned with ethical vitality. But he understood commerce very differently. Capitalism, as he now called it, was characterised by the ascendancy of impersonal relationships. As I show in §5 and §6, for Weber this meant ethical meaning had become far harder to find. The effects of this diagnosis are the focus of my essay. It presented liberalism with a highly significant choice. 

Weber’s response to the historical trend he identified was to defend ethics. But others chose not to. Early twentieth-century economists, most notably Lionel Robbins, accepted the idea that capitalism was ethically opaque. Individuals’ ends thus became a purely private concern, and economics began to approach the status of positive science. In §8 and §9, I argue it was this response that came to reshape Anglophone liberal political theory, too: this ethical neutrality underpinned the work of both James Buchanan and John Rawls. The economists’ assumptions ultimately reduced liberal theory to a form of ‘pure politics’ – only now, a politics of rule-making and calculation; a politics without ethics.

Reading Rawls as a theorist of pure politics and Smith and Weber as theorists of pre-political ethics is, perhaps, to offer an account alien to conventional political realism. But this essay is certainly not hostile to realists. Rather, it seeks to show that realists’ politics-and-morality terms of reference are not the only, nor perhaps the best, way of understanding what is distinctive about the ‘moralism’ to which they focus their ire.⁸ In §10 and §12, I argue that viewing Rawls as the product of a specific set of assumptions about capitalism might also set realism a considerably broader task: that of reviving earlier, ethical accounts of commerce and social relations, rather than that of restoring what is supposedly distinctive about politics.

The other normative purpose of my story is rather different. Foucault is my guide throughout much of this essay, for reasons I begin to discuss in §1 and §4. But although his own, understudied assessment of liberal political reason began with Hume and Smith, it ended, more famously, with neoliberalism, not Rawls.⁹ This essay aims to begin filling in this gap, assessing in §11 what Rawls’s distinctively twentieth-century form of ‘pure politics’ might be taken to represent in Foucauldian terms. In this respect, my essay represents an attempt to bring Foucault into closer dialogue with both contextualist intellectual history and political realism, and to show what the fruits of that connection might be.

In all, then, this is a broad argument, one that moves between its subjects quickly. For reasons of space, I assume from the outset that my reader is familiar with at least the basics of each theorist I discuss, and I am certainly conscious that my argument leaves plenty more remaining to be said. I hope, however, that it manages to convey something interesting nonetheless.

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I. Hume, Smith, and Foucault

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§1. Reference points

To understand the trajectory of liberalism in terms of ‘politics and the economy’, then, we must begin from where Hont argued liberal reasoning began: with Hume and Smith, who provide us a reference point from which the nature of later liberal thought may be understood.¹⁰ As we saw, for Hont the pair were best distinguished by comparison with Hobbes.¹¹ It was the Scots’ ‘insertion of commerce into politics’ that meant Hobbes was ‘not the first of the moderns’, but rather ‘either premodern or antimodern’.¹² Hume and Smith’s ‘new idiom’, which ‘suggested legal and political equality could coexist with economic inequality’, represented the beginning of political modernity.¹³

Hobbes can help us understand Hume and Smith in other ways, too. For Paul Sagar, Hont’s former student, not only did Hume and Smith’s ‘commercial sociability’ – Hont’s phrase – represent ‘the basis of modern society’, but there is a further important contrast to be drawn: in offering ‘a vision of the modern state without a theory of sovereignty’, Hume and Smith ‘resisted Hobbes’s vision at a fundamental level’, placing ‘the actual practice of political rule’ in its ‘deeply historically conditioned forms’ above Hobbes’s ‘totalizing theory of decision-making unity’.¹⁴ For Sagar, as we will see in §3, this contrast provides Hume and Smith their contemporary relevance, aligning them against the ‘obviously ineffectual’ and ‘parochial’ logic of ‘the majority of normative political theorizing today’, which follows Hobbes in the ‘misidentification’ of the state as what matters most.¹⁵

Others, however, have looked at Hume, Smith, and Hobbes, and seen something very different. Sheldon Wolin, writing in 1960 from a very different tradition, felt that the comparison to Hobbes showed ‘us what we have lost’ in the age of liberal modernity: Hobbes’s ‘sense of the political’, following ‘the rediscovery of society’, for which Hume and Smith were significantly to blame.¹⁶ Wolin claimed that by emphasising the natural harmony of economic relations, the pair facilitated ‘an alternative to the older conception of a politically directed system’.¹⁷ We still lived, Wolin thought, in the aftermath of that de-politicising transition – and were worse off for it.

In viewing Hume and Smith in this sociological light, Wolin was joined by John Dunn.¹⁸ Dunn’s reference point for making sense of Hume and Smith was John Locke, not Hobbes.¹⁹ But his ultimate assessment was much the same. Critiquing an assumption that Wolin himself was guilty of making – that Locke, Hume, and Smith were part of a contiguous liberal tradition – Dunn argued the latter pair stood ‘very directly in contrast’ with Locke’s ambitions.²⁰ Locke had chosen ‘to devote his intellectual energies to shoring up human practical reason against the contingencies of sociology’, vesting authority, ultimately, in God.²¹ By contrast, Hume and Smith sought ‘to establish that the bonds of human society, human moral sentiments, neither depended nor needed to depend’ upon any ‘authority external to human society’.²² For them, civilisation was nothing more than the product of ‘the internal reasons with which history has furnished’ us.²³ Dunn shared Wolin’s pessimism about the consequences of this sociological politics. It left us ‘devoid of rational direction in social or political action, prisoners in games of self-destruction’, in a state of listlessness that Locke had both foreseen and endeavoured, in vain, to prevent.²⁴

Thinking about Hume and Smith in terms of Hobbes or Locke, then, allows us to capture some of the distinctive aspects of their contributions. But it is still not clear how, or whether, these contrasts can connect. For Dunn and Wolin, the pair had subordinated politics to society; for Sagar, they elevated political judgement. For Hont, they had created the modern commercial republic; for the others, they minimised the role of the state. I think each of these claims reflect something important about the character of their thought, which can inform our history of liberal political reason after Smith. But to reconcile them, we will require a further point of reference: not Hobbes or Locke, but raison d’état.

This was the approach Michel Foucault took in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics.²⁵ Foucault argued that under raison d’état, in roughly the seventeenth century, the state was contained by the ‘oppositional’ or ‘external’ forces of ‘juridical reflection, legal rules, and legal authority’, which functioned ‘in a purely restrictive, dramatic way’, demarcating particular government actions as illegitimate, and threatening ‘to release subjects from their duty of obedience’ in response.²⁶ From the middle of the next century, however, this framework was gradually abandoned, in favour of a ‘modern governmental reason’ articulated above all by Smith.²⁷ Under this new reason, the ‘principle of limitation’ was ‘internal’.²⁸ Rather than law, it was political economy. This was ‘internal’ because it shared the sovereign’s objective of state enrichment. But it remained a critique: the market, which it viewed as ‘something like a truth’, became a means by which one could ‘discern which governmental practices are correct and which are erroneous’.²⁹ Political economy, then, considered governmental practices ‘in terms of their effects rather than their origins’.³⁰ To that extent, Smith’s political reason was principally concerned with the effects of sovereign decision-making – or political judgement, in Sagar’s terms, bringing their analyses onto similar terrain. Moreover, Foucault shared with Hont a sense of the philosophical consequences: ‘this new type of calculation … is broadly what is called “liberalism”’.³¹

But what is really interesting about Foucault’s account is that it neatly integrates Wolin and Dunn’s sociological comments, too. For Foucault, the form of political reflection crystallised in Smith did not represent a primacy of ‘politics’, even if political judgement was extremely important. Smith’s governmental reason gave primacy to civil society. It dealt, Foucault said, with ‘the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests’.³² But here ‘interests’ took on two meanings. The very activity of politics implied competing interests. But our interests were not limited to, and certainly did not begin with, political life. Rather, political competition was tasked with mapping onto the original font of those interests – which was the ‘more or less automatic functioning of civil society’, as Burchell puts it.³³ In Foucault’s words, relative to raison d’état, the question of political authority was ‘reversed’: it became, ‘what can the state do and how can it function in relation to something, society, which is already given?’³⁴

Foucault’s account of the Scottish Enlightenment, then, brings together the features I mentioned in Hont, Sagar, Wolin, and Dunn: an identification of liberalism with commercial society, an emphasis on political judgement, and a sociological imagination that seemed to confine political order. I take these to represent the basic premises of an outlook that I argue mainstream Anglophone liberal political theory eventually left behind. Above all, the emphasis on political judgement and the primacy of civil society now appears a contradiction in terms. From §5, I argue this has something to do with the ethics of capitalism, which led to Buchanan and Rawls losing sight of both aspects of that dualism, as we will see from §8. In §12, I argue political realists have recovered only one of the two.

Having outlined Hume and Smith’s thought in these terms, I now want to assess the mechanics of this outlook in greater detail. What form, exactly, did the relationship between politics, commerce, and society take? What did it mean to reject ‘pure politics’? I take these questions on over the next two sections, with particular attention to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. 

§2. Putting society first

The clearest expression of Foucault’s thesis is, as we saw, in Smith, not Hume. Not only does Smith receive the bulk of the references in Biopolitics, but, as Sagar has highlighted, there is a consequential difference between the two on the origins of political order, concerning the role of utility.³⁵ Hume believed that our ‘inadvertently destabilizing pursuit of utility’, as Sagar puts it, led to the construction of justice and political authority, which would regulate social relations.³⁶ But Smith’s analysis was different. Humans certainly sought utility. But Hume, Smith wrote, ‘has been so struck with this view of things, as to resolve our whole approbation of virtue’ in utility’s terms.³⁷ In reality, usefulness ‘is seldom the first ground of our approbation’.³⁸ Rather, the ‘happy contrivance of any production of art, should often be more valued, than the very end for which it was intended’.³⁹ In our relationships, ‘we approve of another man’s judgment, not as something useful, but as right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality’, and we did so only when their judgement ‘agrees with our own’.⁴⁰ There were no underlying foundations for our beliefs: for Smith, our internal, subjective standards were all we had. As he put it:

I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.⁴¹

This did not just mean that our ends were irreducible to our assessment of their usefulness to us. Since Smith also believed that ‘the great objects of ambition and emulation’ were ‘to deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind’, our choice of ends did not just depend upon the full range of our moral sentiments, but upon the full range of others’ sentiments, too.⁴² For Smith, though we might be self-interested, our sense what was in our interest was inseparable from, and configured by, the social environment we inhabited – how it judged us and what it sought from us. It was, for instance, ‘chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty’.⁴³ The efforts we made to pursue riches would exceed the utility we derived from them, Smith believed – but that did not stop us. We attached too much importance to others’ views to act otherwise. In commercial society, neither self-interest, utility, nor morality operated in isolation. We will see in §7 and §9 that this view did not survive the twentieth century.

Social judgements came prior not only to our own ends, but to politics, too – in three different ways. First, when we made such judgements, we did so without any direct obligation to a common good: ‘our regard for the multitude’ was simply ‘made up of the particular regards which we feel for the different individuals of which it is composed’.⁴⁴ When we sought punishment, then, we did so ‘not so much from a concern for the general interest’, but ‘from a concern for that very individual who has been injured’.⁴⁵ Second, political authority was no guide to our thinking: in evaluating others’ behaviour, ‘it is scarce possible that we should make use of any other rule or canon but the correspondent affection in ourselves’.⁴⁶ Finally, it was from these social judgements, made without reference to a common good or political authority, that political order itself emerged.

This final point is evident in the account of justice that Smith offers in place of Hume’s. In §9, we will see that for Rawls and Buchanan, ‘justice’ was produced by a process of political reason. But Smith’s view was the opposite. ‘Antecedent to the institution of civil government’, Smith wrote, each person ‘naturally’ possesses ‘a right both to defend himself from injuries, and to exact a certain degree of punishment for those which have been done to him’.⁴⁷ It was this ‘great law’ of retaliation that we came to understand as justice.⁴⁸ Such a view was self-consciously minimal: ‘mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue’, which ‘only hinders us from hurting our neighbour’.⁴⁹ ‘We may’, then, ‘often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing’.⁵⁰

We will discuss negative virtues again in §11, when we discuss Judith Shklar. I raise it here to show that for Smith, political order sprung from social interactions that had no deliberate origin. Nature’s inheritance, the right of retaliation, meant that we would choose to ‘go along with, and approve of the violence employed to avenge’ injustice, and soon ‘approve of, that which is employed to prevent’ future injustices.⁵¹ That latter desire, to forestall social conflict, ultimately necessitated political life. Thus for Smith justice was ‘the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice’: ‘removed, the great, immense fabric of human society’, would ‘in a moment crumble into atoms’.⁵²

A plausible question at this stage, from the standpoint of political realism, might be whether this justice, in spite of its minimality, represents a moral principle that is prior to politics. But a more revealing question is whether it represents an epistemological principle that is prior to politics. For what Smith denied was that politics had a rational or conscious foundation: it resulted simply from the inheritance of an opaque ‘Nature’ and its consequences for our other-regarding conduct. That politics was not only an unintended, but an unintendable consequence of an ultimately directionless process is hard to visualise: hence Smith believed most of us would remain blind to ‘the necessity of justice to the existence of society’.⁵³

Not only were we blind, we were self-deceived. We are usually familiar with Smith’s discussion of this in a commercial context. In Moral Sentiments, Smith explained how ‘deception’ helped us ‘advance the interest of the society’.⁵⁴ We overlooked ‘the real satisfaction’ of riches relative to the effort we exerted pursuing it, as we ‘confound it in our imagination’ with the ‘the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which’ our satisfaction derived.⁵⁵ This deception ‘rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind’, leaving us all, eventually, better off.⁵⁶ In the section immediately after this discussion, however, Smith granted self-deception another application. ‘The same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order’ not only left us better off in ‘the necessaries of life’: it also motivated our ‘public spirit’.⁵⁷ For Smith our inclination to political life was not driven by concern with ‘the happiness of our fellow-creatures’.⁵⁸ We ‘value the means more than the end’: we sought to ‘perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system’, rather than act ‘from any immediate sense or feeling of what’ the public ‘either suffer or enjoy’.⁵⁹ We engaged in politics under illusions about its purposes.  

Why did Smith not believe that public spirit was motivated by the happiness of others? It could have been that we were simply too narrowly self-interested. But our self-interest, I have argued, was precisely conditioned by others’ opinions of us. We had reason to be attentive to others’ happiness. In my view a better answer follows from the fact this discussion arose within Smith’s criticism of Hume’s emphasis on utility. It is, I hope, no great interpretative leap to claim that, in light of what Smith had just established about the ways that utility was subordinated to a range of opaque and personal moral judgements, and about the nature of political order as resting on a society constituting simply of those judgements, public happiness was simply bound to be an ineffectual motivator.⁶⁰ The ‘sole use and end’ of ‘all constitutions of government’ may have been to ‘promote the happiness of those who live under them’, but Smith believed this happiness depended on a complex interaction of social relations that were irreducible to a single measure, like utility or narrow self-interest.⁶¹ Thus our understanding of, and ability to provide for, public happiness lay beyond the bounds of political knowledge: it lay within the natural processes of society itself, which were impossible to visualise in political terms. This did not give politics nothing to do, but rather made it unclear what politics should do – where it should be directed in light of the underlying epistemological problem posed by Smith’s emphasis on the primacy of social interactions. The only alternative, then, was to develop public spirit by learning how ‘the several wheels of the machine of government be made to move with more harmony’.⁶² The ends of politics were opaque, so the perfection of its means would have to suffice.

Smith first published Moral Sentiments in 1759, but in 1790, pointedly amidst the French Revolution, he added a chapter that gave this matter greater bite. Here, Smith returned to the ‘love of system’ that he had previously credited with producing ‘public spirit’.⁶³ Now, however, he claimed that if unchecked, this ‘spirit of system’ could inflame ‘that more gentle public spirit’ ‘to the madness of fanaticism’.⁶⁴ ‘The imaginary beauty of this ideal system’, earlier lauded for its stirring effects, now generated ‘delusion’.⁶⁵ As I read it, these new remarks opened up what now became a fundamental anxiety at the heart of Smith’s political theory.

This was as follows. For Smith, politics could only achieve its true ends – to ‘secure the internal tranquillity and happiness’ of one’s ‘fellow-citizens for many succeeding generations’ – indirectly, since happiness was fundamentally a matter for citizens in their relations to one-another.⁶⁶ The difficulties associated with securing such ends meant that political discussion couched in these terms ‘will commonly make no great impression’ among those who might otherwise work in the public interest.⁶⁷ Attention turned, therefore, to a proxy end: one that was more legible, and more exciting – the perfection of the political system as a mechanical object. But this proxy ambition, for all its distance from the real ends of politics, could so easily be mistaken for its true purpose: and thus whilst ‘some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary’, the systematical view nevertheless created perverse incentives and room for political misconduct. The subordination of politics to commercial society made the spirit of system necessary, but it also posed politics a major vulnerability. I elaborate on this dilemma below.⁶⁸

§3. Political judgement

The tension that I have just spelled out gets to the heart of why Smith gave the question of political judgement greater rather than lesser emphasis, despite having rendered individuals’ mutable self-interest as borne of social interaction and therefore largely illegible to politics. I now want to consider this account of political judgement in greater detail.

As we have seen, for Smith, the risk was that political actors might become blind to the limits of their own discipline. In another now-famous metaphor, Smith complained that the ‘man of system’ believed in arranging ‘the different members of a great society’ as if they were ‘different pieces upon a chess-board’.⁶⁹ This was to forget that ‘in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own’, regardless of ‘that which the legislature might chuse to impress’.⁷⁰ The ‘man of system’ sought to use politics to shape society. But, as we saw, for Smith politics was the outcome, not the driver, of social relations. This fundamentally limited what any sovereign could do. As Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations, in ‘attempting to perform … the duty of superintending the industry of private people’, a sovereign ‘must always be exposed to innumerable delusions’.⁷¹ ‘No human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient’ for the task.⁷²

Foucault thought that Smith’s now-famous ‘invisible hand’ metaphor served ‘to disqualify the political sovereign’.⁷³ As Schliesser has shown, that metaphor actually carried a slightly different meaning.⁷⁴ But the discussion above nonetheless supports Foucault’s conclusion that:

Liberalism acquired its modern shape precisely with the formulation of this essential incompatibility between the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign.⁷⁵

Along not dissimilar lines, in 1964, Buchanan wrote that Smith criticised ‘computational’ thinking, in which all an individual needed to solve problems was ‘the built-in computer that he has in his mind’.⁷⁶ These remarks were directed towards Smith’s view of economic exchange, rather than politics: as we will see in §9, Smith’s chess-board analogy did not make the impression on Buchanan’s political thought that his theory of exchange made on his economics. Nevertheless, adapted to politics, this too might offer a way of thinking about the above. Both Foucault and Buchanan’s expressions captured that Smith’s theory posed politics a fundamental challenge, in its elevation of the dynamic, mutable, and conflicting interests generated within commercial society. With the advent of political economy, these interests could be seen in far greater resolution than before, in turn revealing that politics lacked sufficient dexterity required to deal with them. The idea of a totalising authority or computational method implied a common foundation from which these competing interests might be addressed, but as we identified at the beginning of §2, this is precisely what Smith strenuously denied.

In light of this, there is another reason to take Buchanan’s metaphor seriously. Lacking rational solution, politics was bound to be a frustrating enterprise. For this reason a sovereign required not the skills of algorithmic calculation, but above all the skill of dispassionate judgement. ‘To act with proper temper and moderation’, Smith wrote, ‘may sometimes render to his country a service much more essential and important than the greatest victories and the most extensive conquests’.⁷⁷ ‘Self-command’ was of such importance that ‘to act with cool deliberation in the midst of the greatest dangers and difficulties’ was to Smith ‘the character of the most exalted wisdom and virtue’.⁷⁸

Sagar recognises, rightly, that in this respect Smith shares significant ground with Weber, to whom we will return in §5.⁷⁹ But in Sagar’s recent monograph, the paramount importance of judgement for Smith is deemed sufficient to warrant the claim that Smith was concerned with ‘the political, rather than the moral, dangers’ of commercial society.⁸⁰ ‘Much of the recent scholarship on Smith’, Sagar argues, ‘has erred by failing to appreciate how political Smith’s political thought really is’.⁸¹ Smith, he claims, warned against ‘indulging anxieties’ over ‘the status of morality’, believing morality would ‘mostly look after itself’, but ‘politics will not’.⁸² Morality here encompasses what Sagar previously called ‘philosophy’: in earlier work, Sagar argues Smith ‘came up against the limits of philosophy’, which could not ‘settle such matters’: ‘the onus must be placed not on theory, but on practice’.⁸³

To some extent my disagreement with Sagar is fairly superficial. I certainly agree that for Smith there were limits to philosophy, and that political judgement mattered. But I fear Sagar has presented only half of the picture. If we view Smith through a zero-sum lens in which theory gives ground either to politics or morality, we might align Smith with the former camp. Anachronistically, in Williams’s terms, we could argue Smith opposed both the ‘enactment’ and the ‘structural’ models of morality in politics.⁸⁴ But if we did so, we would be missing what really remains important about Smith’s work.

Smith emphasised political judgement not because of the limits of theory in relation to practice, or because moral anxiety would ‘look after itself’.⁸⁵ Rather he emphasised political judgement because he lacked faith in politics. In the politics-or-morality binary in which so much political thinking now operates, the importance of political judgement becomes coterminous with the importance of politics itself. But I hope I have shown it is a mistake to think that Smith thought in the same terms. For Smith, political judgement mattered because we could only ever be drawn to politics for the wrong reasons: we were attracted to the beauty of its operation rather than to any clear conception of how the mechanisms of political life produced real-world improvement. That was unavoidably the case, for real-world change was simply too complex for any individual to ever understand. Commercial societies were built upon nothing but mutual social judgements that themselves lacked rational foundation. There could be no computational answers to social questions. Therefore politics had to engage in shadow-boxing, addressing only the appearance of imperfection. This gave politics huge scope for doing harm. So the activity required intellectual humility, and a rare, moderate disposition. If politics had been a better fit for commercial societies, then political judgement would have mattered less. But it was the ‘essential incompatibility’ between them, in Foucault’s words, that made this such an important – and scarce – resource. It was by diminishing politics, then, that to return to §1, we can see how Smith combined his sociological imagination with his appreciation of political judgement.

§4. The ‘conduct of conduct’  

Foucault’s study of eighteenth-century liberalism became an important guide to his own thinking. By way of rounding out my discussion, I want to briefly turn to the form this took. This will serve as a further point of reference for what follows in this essay, as to my mind, despite its idiosyncrasies, Foucault’s adaptation and development of Smith’s thought offers clear view of a route that twentieth-century liberal theorists, in losing sight of civil society, otherwise chose not to take. In this brief discussion I will leave aside some more speculative affinities between the pair – such as their shared interest in shepherding – and instead focus on how Foucault connected Smith’s liberalism to his account of political activity as a form of ethical reflection.⁸⁶

For Foucault, the transformation of political reason from raison d’état to liberalism presented an opportunity to challenge a major criticism of his work: his neglect of the state.⁸⁷ ‘The overvaluation of the problem of the state’, Foucault responded, arose from the assumption of a ‘unity, individuality, and rigorous functionality’ that the state in fact lacked. The state was a mere ‘composite reality and a mythicized abstraction’: what actually mattered was the logic by which it operated.⁸⁸ Raison d’état and political economy worked along entirely different lines. But we would miss this if we focussed on the ‘puppet show policeman’, the ‘cold monster’ – the state itself.⁸⁹

In its place, Foucault proposed undertaking the history of ‘governmentality’, a portmanteau of ‘government’ and ‘rationality’.⁹⁰ Foucault credited ‘the eighteenth century’, that is, Smith, among others, with its invention.⁹¹ This rational basis of government held ‘population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge’.⁹² But it also entailed a particular analytical point of view. The study of governmentality meant the study of the ‘conduct of conduct’.⁹³ Foucault believed the ‘analysis of micro-powers’ applied just as well at governmental scale as it did for his better-known subject-matter, ‘ways of conducting the conduct of mad people, patients, delinquents, and children’.⁹⁴ By the end of Foucault’s life, ‘conduct’ had become the most important concept in his thought, owing to the flexibility of its meaning:

Conduct is the activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction (la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts oneself (se conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire), is conducted (est conduit), and finally, in which one behaves (se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the action of conducting or of conduction (conduction).⁹⁵

Making use of the full ambiguity of the term, Foucault showed that Smith’s liberal mode of governing could be analysed as a symbiotic relationship. Citizens were, of course, subject to being governed, but as Gordon summarised, ‘the relation between government and the governed passes, to a perhaps ever-increasing extent, through the manner in which governed individuals are willing to exist as subjects’.⁹⁶ There was, in Foucault’s words, a ‘versatile equilibrium’ between the demands of government on citizen, and citizen on government.⁹⁷ For Foucault and for Smith alike, citizens’ own behaviour thereby set the parameters for politics. 

To explore the full potential of this position, towards his final lectures Foucault turned to ancient Greek ethics. Against those who believed he had articulated a purely pessimistic politics, Foucault argued that the construction of an ethos for oneself provided an altogether superior means of political engagement than, implicitly, the traditional strategies of the left.⁹⁸ But I think Foucault’s turn to ethics achieved much more than outline a form of political resistance. To my mind, in The Government of Self and Others Foucault helped make explicit one of the most important philosophical implications of Smith’s work.

Smith believed that we could analyse the political domain in the same terms that we could analyse ‘the middling and interior stations of life’.⁹⁹ As we have seen, just as individual conduct was what mattered in social relationships, so was individual conduct the decisive factor in political rule. Foucault’s discussion of Plato in Self and Others made it clear that this gave philosophy a very specific character and task. Foucault believed the lesson of Plato was that philosophy ‘must not define for politics what it has to do’.¹⁰⁰ Philosophy was never going to be precise or contextual enough to serve as a guide for practical politics in a given moment of decision – it was not for ‘giving men laws’ or ‘telling them what the ideal city is’.¹⁰¹ (Note here that both practical politics and ideal theory were dismissed simultaneously.) Instead, in political life, philosophy ‘has to define for the governor, the politician, what he has to be’.¹⁰² It was responsible for ‘the Prince’s soul’.¹⁰³ In other words, ‘political philosophy’ was something of a misnomer. That would be to imply the existence of distinctly political concepts that could not themselves be reduced down to, or thought in terms of, the fundamental problem of individual conduct. But for Foucault, Plato, and Smith, that was ultimately all there is. At every level, politics is about conduct: the conduct of the governing, the response or ‘counter-conduct’ of the governed.¹⁰⁴ One could discuss this in terms of ‘legitimacy’, for instance, but for Foucault, as for Hume, excessive concern with the origins of power risked obscuring the fact that present opinion was all that politics rested upon.¹⁰⁵ Ethics, then, and its ability to reshape the way societies perceived and responded to the actions of those in power, was political theory. But we will now see that Foucault’s vision of ‘politics as an ethics’ was not the path that liberalism took.¹⁰⁶

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II. Smith, Weber, and Robbins

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§5. From Smith to Weber

Switching our attention to Weber might feel rather abrupt. After all, this is supposed to be a historical essay, and we have little reason to think that Smith was a particularly important influence on Weber’s work. Weber included The Wealth of Nations in one of his economics teaching syllabi, and as we discussed in §3, there seems to be a loose similarity between his ‘ethic of responsibility’ and Smith’s conception of political leadership.¹⁰⁷ But plenty else sets them apart. More than a century had passed between the final version of Moral Sentiments in 1790 and the first version of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-05; their intellectual contexts were remarkably different. Whilst Smith thought political authorities should ‘promote the happiness’ of their citizens, Weber rejected the goal of ‘well-being’, desiring instead ‘those characteristics we think constitute the greatness and nobility of our human nature’.¹⁰⁸

Most pertinently, the two appear to have differed markedly on the ethical significance of commerce. Smith’s vision was, of course, of a commercial society. What mattered, as I argued in §2, were social relationships, our personal conduct, and the fact of mutually-beneficial exchange. Our interactions with, and judgements of, one another provided a social basis from which prosperity and political order could spring. But Weber seemed to hold nothing like this view. ‘The leading characteristic of modern development is the demise of personal relationships’, he wrote near the start of his career, in 1894.¹⁰⁹ Capitalism ‘puts purely commercial relationships in place of personal ones, and payments of tribute to an unknown, unseen and intangible power in place of personal subordination’.¹¹⁰ Weber remained consistent on this: his later Intermediate Reflections described money as ‘the most abstract and “impersonal” element that exists in human life’, and exemplified the changes he attributed to capitalism by claiming that whilst it was once ‘possible to regulate ethically the personal relations between master and slave’, it was not possible to do so ‘between shifting holders of mortgages and the shifting debtors of the banks’.¹¹¹ Weber identified capitalism with the end of ‘every purely personal relationship of man to man’, or, as Hennis put it, with ‘the absence of ethics’.¹¹² A tempting conclusion, perhaps, is that for Smith, commerce was the age of personality; for Weber, it was its demise.

But we need to be careful, for such a superficial treatment obscures the reasons I think we must, despite all this, see Weber’s work on capitalism as fundamentally contiguous with Smith’s. After all, the previous paragraph used ‘commercial society’ and ‘capitalism’ interchangeably. But that is too straightforward. As Sonenscher reminds us, commercial society was ‘an earlier concept’, defined by the division of labour, rather than by capital.¹¹³ The distinction matters because the division of labour is prone to being understood in a very different light to the dominance of capital – as, indeed, Smith and Weber typify. But this itself presents a difficulty. Sonenscher believes the distinction matters for an additional reason: in his view, commercial society was a better term. It ‘recognised something more fundamental’ than ‘capitalism has been able to grasp’.¹¹⁴

Since Sonenscher blames Weber, among others, for the fact ‘thinking about the division of labour came to an end’, his argument might be taken to imply that Weber was a less interesting theorist of economic relations in society than Smith.¹¹⁵ But there is a curious anachronism here. Our terminology did not change in a vacuum. As Sonenscher is certainly aware, the role and influence of capital itself changed markedly between 1790 and 1904-05. Weber was attentive to this, discussing the gradual depletion of charisma from the seventeenth-century ‘epoch of capitalism’ onwards.¹¹⁶ But that makes it strange, I think, to think of either term as better: Smith and Weber were describing different periods of economic relations. It seems perfectly legitimate for the latter to have emphasised something new.

What matters, I argue here, is simply that they had a view of economic relations and their ethical consequences. Conceived in different ways, for both Smith and Weber, these relations provided a common starting point. Look beyond the real, historical differences between commercial society and capitalism, and one can identify two theorists who gave primacy to the ethical permutations of the social interactions they believed characteristic of their times. Like Smith, Weber saw personal conduct as an object of normative evaluation, and believed it was from this that politics followed.

The point of my essay is to assert that political theory should begin here again – with human conduct and the social environment and economic processes that shape it. Whether we adopt the commercial society lens of Smith or the capitalism lens of Weber is profoundly important, but it is a matter of contextual historical judgement: there is no timeless answer. In this essay I focus instead on the task of depicting this broader approach to political reflection, and tracing the consequences, for it, of this discursive shift from commercial society to capitalism. As we assess in §7, it was after Weber that the commercial frame of reference for political theory began to look antiquated. Economists followed Weber as far as noting the ‘absence of ethics’ in capitalist relations, but moved away from him by viewing this in a positive, not normative, light. For them, capitalism could no longer inform politics, since capitalist relations had no moral content. Politics, alone, was to fill the void. To understand how even self-professed admirers of Smith thus came to contradict him here, we must understand Weber’s ideas, their reception, and their fundamental overlap with Smith.

The personal consequences of commercial society for Smith are perhaps best exemplified by a famous passage in The Wealth of Nations, which in §9 we will see was later deployed for a very different purpose. Individuals were not, Smith supposed, nearly as naturally unequally talented as they seemed. Rather, ‘the difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example’, was an effect, much more than a cause, of the division of labour.¹¹⁷ In developing market specialisms, we also developed unique skillsets – which the logic of commercial society ensured would prove useful to all. ‘The different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter and exchange’, were brought ‘into a common stock’, which we could access through the market.¹¹⁸ For Smith, then, commercial society exacerbated the breadth of human action, and in doing so it helped us fulfil an ever-wider pool of our own wants. In shaping our relationship to the activities of the rest of society and broadening our conception of our desires, for Smith, commercial society thereby carried a deep cultural significance. 

‘The general cultural significance of the development of capitalism’ was, its incoming editors Weber, Sombart, and Jaffé announced, the new topic of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.¹¹⁹ In an essay accompanying their declaration, Weber elaborated on what this meant. In Weber’s view, economic incentives had ‘everywhere influenced and transformed, not only the form in which even the innermost cultural needs have been satisfied, but also the substance of those needs’.¹²⁰ The ‘pressure of “material” interests’ affected ‘social relationships, institutions and human groupings’, and in turn influenced ‘all fields of culture without exception’.¹²¹ This was the Archiv’s subject, one which Weber himself helped the journal fulfil. The Archiv published the Protestant Ethic, which, as Weber later clarified, sought to investigate how ‘the various ascetic Protestant movements’ had ‘influenced the conduct of life’.¹²² In §6 we will assess the form this influence took, since it produced what Hennis famously took to be the ‘theme’ that united Weber’s seemingly disparate works.¹²³ For now, however, the important point is that Weber’s express focus – the cultural ramifications of capitalist modernity – was, but for one word, entirely compatible with that of Smith’s.

This similarity is underpinned by something more fundamental. For both Smith and Weber, our judgements were inescapably personal and subjective – in Smith’s words, we reached opinions by ‘bringing the case home to our own breast’, as we saw in §2.¹²⁴ For his part, Weber asserted that academics inevitably approached their work from ‘special and “one-sided” points of view’, since only ‘personal belief, the refraction of values in the prism of his soul’, could ‘give direction’ to one’s study.¹²⁵ Only the ‘tiny part’ of reality that was ‘coloured by our interest’ had ‘significance for us’.¹²⁶ Similarly, in political economy, entertaining the ‘special kind of illusion’ that we could ‘refrain entirely from making conscious value judgements’ meant we would ‘fall prey to unexamined instincts’.¹²⁷ Nothing lay beneath these, bar the role of history in conditioning our judgement.

But even history was ultimately comprised of others’ evaluations. Weber’s Protestant Ethic showed that individual conduct was, in point of fact, an object of spontaneous normative reflection. As Skinner wrote, Weber demonstrated that ‘the distinctive moral vocabulary of Protestantism’ allowed early entrepreneurs, in an ‘atmosphere of hostility’, to ‘override the widespread accusation that they were behaving avariciously’.¹²⁸ The rise of capitalism, then, occurred not through political action or a conception of a common good, but through societies’ independent (and ‘fatherless’) moral re-assessment of capitalists’ conduct.¹²⁹ The enormous political consequences of this would follow on later. Drawing the wider implication, Skinner argued it was by ‘rhetorical manipulation’ that ‘any society succeeds in establishing, upholding, questioning or altering its moral identity’.¹³⁰ Or, again: our ‘regard for the multitude’ followed from the ‘particular regards which we feel for the different individuals’.¹³¹ Rhetoric was one way these regards could be reshaped.

This, then, was where Weber began: not with politics, but with social conduct. As we will now see, Weber’s political reflections must be understood as one part of his much broader concern with the ethical significance of our turn to a modern, capitalist, rationalised existence, and with the forms of behaviour this both legitimised and demanded. For Weber, as for Smith and indeed Foucault, politics was to be understood in terms of its human relationships, exactly like the rest of social life.

§6. Politics in capitalist society

For Weber, capitalist modernity was defined by an inescapable problem. Religions used to give us ‘cultural values with the dignity of unconditionally valid ethical imperatives’.¹³² But today, in a post-religious age, there were no such things: ‘the most lofty ideals, those that move us most profoundly, will forever only be realized in a struggle against other ideals’.¹³³ The age of harmony and ‘brotherliness’ had been shattered by capitalism and by bureaucratisation, themselves bound up with a fundamental rationalisation of conduct.¹³⁴ Ethics was opaque to us in a manner it had never been before. This was partly epistemological: absolute certainty in our ultimate values was now impossible. It was also because we relied ever less on our own beliefs. In modernity we followed ‘rational rules’, rather than our own conscience. Our conduct was therefore far less ethically revealing than it used to be. ‘In politics, as in economics’, Weber wrote, the modern individual acts ‘in a matter-of-fact manner “without regard to the person”, sine ira et studio, without hate and therefore without love’.¹³⁵

This much is well-known, since it informs Weber’s famous Profession and Vocation of Politics. But what is important, and perhaps lesser-known, is that it also provided a critical point of departure for twentieth-century liberal theory. For one route forwards from here was to accept Weber’s case as a fait accompli. To think that in the twentieth century our conduct was, indeed, no longer ethically significant. That in a capitalist world, what mattered was that we played by the rules and pursued our own best interests – but that in doing so we would do nothing, ordinarily, that should be of any ethical concern to anyone else. The problem of ethics, so to speak, had been solved. This, as I discuss in §7, was the view of capitalism that the profession of economics chose to take, entirely self-consciously. It then became a background assumption in the most influential works of twentieth-century liberalism, to which I will turn from §8. But this was not how Weber himself chose to respond. Rather, as I argue here, Weber’s body of work represented an elaborate attempt to keep ethics alive, in face of the magnitude of the challenge he had identified. And it was this that led him, particularly later in his life, to politics, and to the task of ensuring the state remained ‘accessible to substantive moralization’.¹³⁶

As Ghosh has written, Weber categorically refused to see his assessment of modernity in the same manner as many of his readers – as a tragedy. Rather, Weber’s modern individual ‘would undoubtedly have preferred to be in possession of universal meaning’, but ‘announces an emphatic intention to confront and engage with that fallen and fragmented world’ regardless.¹³⁷ Indeed, Weber embodied this very response. In his obituary, Schumpeter attributed Weber’s ‘zeal’ to his death at 56: ‘faced with the choice between slackening and collapse, a man of his nature could choose only the latter’.¹³⁸

Modernity might have been a tragedy if ethics had completely vanished. But it had not. Capitalism had an ethical quality of its own. At first this took the form of a narrow, ‘middle-class vocational ethos’.¹³⁹ In the era in which capitalism was still evaluated in religious terms, so long as someone ‘stayed within the bounds of formal correctness, if his moral conduct remained blameless, and if the use he made of his wealth was not offensive’, their ‘economic gain’ was legitimate.¹⁴⁰ Such a person was ‘ultimately concerned only with himself’ and thought ‘only of his own salvation’.¹⁴¹ ‘The complete elimination’ of ‘all those questions concerning the “meaning” of the world’ was, to them, ‘completely unproblematic’.¹⁴² But this constituted a ‘conception of the calling’ all the same.¹⁴³

Over time religion fell away. Weber believed capitalism ‘came to rest on a mechanical foundation’.¹⁴⁴ ‘The pursuit of gain’ was then ‘associated with purely competitive passions’, ‘the ghost of beliefs no longer anchored in the substance of religion’.¹⁴⁵ But that still did not mean ethics had vanished. Entrepreneurialism represented, Weber argued outside the Protestant Ethic, ‘a crucial residue of freedom’, in Ghosh’s terms.¹⁴⁶ Ghosh shows that for Weber the market was a domain of struggle; a proving-ground for talent that the bureaucratised political order lacked.¹⁴⁷ In post-religious society, the market was one of the few remaining pockets of activity that transcended rationalisation.

For Hennis, this represented one aspect of the common thread of Weber’s writings: the ‘life order’ or Lebensführung – meaning a particular role with particular demands within rationalising capitalist society – and its relationship to ‘the development of personality’.¹⁴⁸ This was ‘a question concerning the destiny of the human species; the question of living a life in a manner’ that could ‘be interpreted ethically’.¹⁴⁹ (Note here the link between the preservation of ethics and destiny.) Weber’s question, Hennis argued, was ‘what becomes of the person who enters one such order’ – ‘what “fate” do the orders dictate, open up, or deny to the person?’¹⁵⁰ These orders collectively represented the last preserve of ethical reflection under capitalism. They were Weber’s means of avoiding the response to his dilemma that the later liberals took.

This brings us to the political Lebensfürung. Since I have little space here, I will avoid repeating important but commonly-discussed aspects, like the politician’s need for charisma or responsibility.¹⁵¹ On these subjects, all I will emphasise is that, returning to Ghosh once more, responsibility mattered to Weber because it took responsibility to recognise that the demise of religiosity was a social and historical phenomenon that lay beyond the realm of political control – just as Smith deplored the ‘man of system’ for overstating the power and agency of political authority.¹⁵² Politics as ‘protest against the injustice of the social order’ was futile.¹⁵³ Seeking to fundamentally alter the nature of history was irresponsible; making the best of modernity was not.

More importantly, Weber’s concern with life orders affected politics in a perhaps less obvious way: in his theory, or lack thereof, of the state. The Vocation was elliptical on the topic, proposing a definition, repeated in the Intermediate Reflections, in terms of the control of violence – but then quickly moving on.¹⁵⁴ Economy and Society was no more conclusive.¹⁵⁵ The reason for this, I would suggest, is inherent in his term Staatssoziologie.¹⁵⁶ In Tribe’s words, for Weber the state was ‘constructed from social action, defined as the action of individuals’.¹⁵⁷ The state was an assortment of people – a ‘human community’, per his Vocation definition – not an apparatus.¹⁵⁸ The fullest account of his conception came in Weber’s crucial Archiv essay. Here Weber described the state as nothing more than a ‘complex of human relationships, norms, and normatively determined circumstances’.¹⁵⁹ The state was:

An infinite number of diffuse and discrete human actions and acts of acquiescence, and of relationships regulated in practice and legally … held together by an idea, namely, the belief in norms and relations of authority of some human beings over others.¹⁶⁰

This was crucial, for it meant that the state could be analysed, consistent with the political vocation itself, in terms of the ethics and conduct of the individuals who constituted it: there was no need for a separate form of ‘political’ normativity, nor did the state sit above or outside his fundamental concern with ethical vitality. As Hennis wrote, ‘the form of the state’ was ‘known to be of no interest to him’; rather, what mattered was the ‘“moulding”, “forming” and “substantive” elements’ of ‘belonging to a particular association’.¹⁶¹ The state mattered because it shaped our conduct; and it could be analysed, indirectly, by the analysis of the conduct of the people who constituted it. But the closer one looked at it, the less ‘political’ and more ‘social’ it therefore appeared – and in turn, the more dependent it was upon the ethical norms and the manner of conduct that history generated.

Here we are glaringly close to Foucault. In the 1980s Gordon wrote that ‘Foucault’s work moves in directions markedly consonant with those taken by Hennis’s commentaries’, in the narrow sense that Foucault’s theory of conduct presupposed a form of Lebensfürung, too.¹⁶² But with Weber’s Staatssoziologie in mind, we can see their affinity runs deeper: for Foucault, as we saw in §4, the state similarly lacked the ‘unity’ his critics imagined or pretended. In both cases, this realisation enabled a unity of ethical and political reflection, precluding an elevated, autonomous ‘political’ domain.

Weber is often thought of as a political realist, and some forms of realism see ‘civil order’ as ‘the sine qua non for every other political good’.¹⁶³ On some level this is axiomatic. Nothing very good comes from civil disorder. In a stronger sense, this might imply that order comes ‘first’ for realists, in the sense that it should be the explicit prior commitment that motivates their political thought – a belief sometimes attributed to Shklar, whose views we will discuss in §11 and §12. But if this is necessary for realism, then Weber was not a realist. What motivated his work was not order, but ethics. Order may have been instrumentally necessary for the preservation of ethical life, but that was trivially true. Weber’s theory sprung, instead, from his conviction that we sought, above all, to ‘adopt a deliberate position with respect to the world’ and ‘bestow meaning upon it’.¹⁶⁴ In the face of everything that changed around us, like rationalisation and the end of religiosity, this was our one timeless wish:

Belief in the supra-empirical validity of those fundamental and sublime value ideas in which we anchor the meaning of our existence … includes the constant change in the concrete points of view from which the empirical reality derives its significance: the irrational reality of life, and its store of possible meanings, are inexhaustible; the concrete configuration of the value relation therefore remains fluid and subject to change far into the dim future of human culture. The light shed by those sublime value ideas falls on a constantly changing, finite part of the immense, chaotic stream of occurrences churning its way through the ages.¹⁶⁵

To give up on ethics, in light of the vast cultural transformations of the capitalist order, may have been tempting. But it would represent giving up on life itself.

§7. After Weber

Weber’s commitment to ethics was lost. For this I think there is a historical explanation, one which begins with Weber’s relationship to economics. At the beginning of §6, we discussed Weber’s assessment that capitalist modernity had made ethical reflection extremely difficult. I added that there were two routes forward from the new reference-point of capitalism: Weber’s defence of ethics, and the polar opposite response of the early twentieth-century economists who followed him. It is this latter response I now want to turn to. In what is a deep irony from Weber’s perspective, the economists’ acceptance of ethical opacity proved to be the enduring upshot of the historical transformation that he had best diagnosed. To my mind, this de-ethicised view of capitalism came not only to define modern economics, but as we will see from the end of this section, to hand Anglophone liberal political theory a new set of assumptions. Ethical opacity meant a transition to the ‘political and moral terms’ of reference that Hont believed were so deficient.¹⁶⁶ Liberalism turned its attention away from the ethics of conduct and towards an autonomous ‘political’ domain, all-but-unconcerned with private action. I discuss this body of theory in Part III. For now I will focus on the economists.

The chief instigator of this turn was Lionel Robbins, whose 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, ironically, cited and leant upon Weber’s authority at numerous points.¹⁶⁷ Nature became a core part of economists’ self-understanding, since it offered a definition of the subject – which precluded economic ethics – that quickly became standard. Robbins was not alone: Mises and Knight, both of whom also learned a great deal from Weber, extended Robbins’s thesis in important ways.¹⁶⁸ It was from all three that those who would redefine political theory along contractarian lines drew inspiration. There is an important historical thread, therefore, between Weber and Rawls, but one that got twisted and contorted along the way.

The rejection of Weber originated in the nature of Weber’s own economic work. For much of his life Weber considered himself an economist rather than a sociologist.¹⁶⁹ Lots has been written about his awkward and ambivalent place within the Methodenstreit that defined nineteenth-century German-language economics – a bitter row between Schmoller’s Historical School and Menger’s abstract and deductive Austrian School.¹⁷⁰ The awkwardness owes itself, I think, to the fact Weber only ever saw economics as an instrumental and subordinate part of his wider ethical-political project. As he put it, his concern was with ‘the cultural significance’ of the ‘fact that exchange is today a mass phenomenon’ – not exchange in itself.¹⁷¹ He could not ‘bear it’ when ‘those ultimate questions capable of stirring the human soul’ were ‘transformed into a technical economic question of productivity and rendered into an object of discussion for an academic discipline, which is what economics is’.¹⁷² His horizons, in other words, were simply broader than Schmoller or Menger’s.¹⁷³

But Weber held nothing against modern economic methods, and was perfectly up-to-date with the discipline. The best way to illustrate this is to point out that although Robbins’s definition of economics – as the study of ‘human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’ – was seen as a breakthrough in 1932, Weber had produced something eerily similar before his death in 1920.¹⁷⁴ In Economy and Society, Weber defined economy as ‘the careful choice between ends; albeit oriented to the scarcity of means that appear to be available’.¹⁷⁵

After 1920, however, Weber was retrospectively expunged from the economic discipline. Mises claimed that Weber was ‘too much under the sway of historicism’ to grasp ‘the fundamentals of economic thought’.¹⁷⁶ Schumpeter, representing received wisdom, said that Weber ‘was not really an economist at all’.¹⁷⁷ To understand why, we may begin with John Neville Keynes, and his 1891 methodological treatise The Scope and Method of Political Economy.¹⁷⁸ Robbins, as Tribe shows, included this as recommended reading in his lecture courses, but Weber made no mention of it in his.¹⁷⁹ This was revealing of Weber’s distinctive priorities. Keynes’s innovation was his distinction between economics and ethics: ‘it is not’, he wrote, the purpose of economic science ‘to pass ethical judgments’.¹⁸⁰ As Schliesser observes, this was a view that Robbins smoothly adopted in his own mantra that ‘economics deals with ascertainable facts, ethics with valuations and obligations’.¹⁸¹

But for Weber, this could not do. It was almost right: economics, Weber wrote, was a ‘preliminary investigation’, which was helpful to, but did not answer, the question of ‘cultural significance’.¹⁸² But Robbins went wrong, by Weber’s standards, in thinking that economic enquiry could be completed in total ignorance of the latter aspect. For Weber, all analysis had to be related back to our personal ‘value ideas’; there was no point studying economics otherwise. Economic conduct must therefore always carry ethical significance. As we have seen, it both produced and represented the process of historical cultural transformation; it generated political order. The increasing elusiveness of ethical activity was therefore itself an ethical problem. Our behaviour was what mattered.

But Robbins did not see the emergence of capitalism in those ethical terms. This meant that a genuinely impartial analysis of economic activity was not only possible but desirable. Faced with the ethical opacity of capitalism, Robbins accepted that opacity as a given, not a problem, and defined an academic discipline on top of it. ‘Economics is entirely neutral between ends’, he wrote.¹⁸³ ‘It assumes that human beings have ends in the sense that they have tendencies to conduct which can be defined and understood’, but economists’ sole interest in them was to ask ‘how their progress towards their objectives is conditioned by the scarcity of means’.¹⁸⁴ An economist might, for example, ‘regard the services of prostitutes as conducive to no “good” in the ultimate ethical sense’, but ‘to deny that such services are scarce’, and ‘that there is therefore an economic aspect of hired love’, was not ‘in accordance with the facts’.¹⁸⁵ In Robbins’s view, the content of our self-interest was beyond the limits of enquiry. It was a fact to be reckoned with. Economists’ task was a purely positive one: that of helping us meet it. This view rapidly became widespread, as Schliesser among others has shown.¹⁸⁶ And it is by virtue of that, I think, that we can see why Mises and Schumpeter no longer saw Weber as amongst their kind. He was up to something quite fundamentally different.

To give Robbins his due, his conception of economics did not eliminate ethics entirely. Economics was not to subsume normative matters: rather ‘the two fields of enquiry’ were simply on a different ‘plane of discourse’.¹⁸⁷ Yet one can also identify, in even this text, the seeds of what would become the near-complete elimination of ethics as a focus of enquiry. Blatantly foreshadowing a development we will assess from §8, Robbins claimed it was not ‘differences as regards ultimate ends’ from which ‘many of our most pressing difficulties arise’.¹⁸⁸ Instead, difficulties arose because ‘our aims are not co-ordinated’.¹⁸⁹ To this, he added, ‘economics brings the solvent of knowledge’, making it ‘possible for us to bring our different choices into harmony’.¹⁹⁰

The political-theoretical potential of this view was soon expanded upon further. Knight, who ran a seminar on Economy and Society in the mid-1930s, had his own issues with Robbins, whose conception seemed too close to engineering for his liking.¹⁹¹ But his additions, ironically, pushed in the same direction. Economics, he argued in 1935, put too much emphasis on individuals as a means of social improvement. Instead, he proposed, ‘ethical-social change must come about through a genuine moral consensus’.¹⁹² This required ‘genuine equality and mutuality’.¹⁹³ What Knight did not change from Robbins was his disinterest in individual behaviour: ‘morality’, he felt, was a matter only for ‘self-legislation’.¹⁹⁴ Crystallising the view these theorists shared, Mises declared in 1949 that economists must hold ‘real man as a datum’: economics ‘deals with the real actions of real men’ and it took these on face value; ‘ultimate goals themselves are beyond and above any criticism’.¹⁹⁵ Economics should form part of a ‘science of given relations, no longer a normative discipline’, just ‘as the physicist studies the laws of nature’.¹⁹⁶ As with Knight, one can see that Mises’s view affected more than just economics: this was a ‘science of every kind of human action’, since ‘choosing’ drives ‘all human values’.¹⁹⁷ Mises’s conduct-as-datum represents, I would suggest, the completion of the inversion of Weber’s response to capitalism – and with it, grounds for the near-total suffocation of ethical reflection. That Mises and Weber were ‘good friends’ in 1918 is simply one final irony.¹⁹⁸

This section began with Smith and Weber and has ended with Knight and Mises. In that time the ethics of human behaviour has shifted from the fundamental basis of social and political life to a non-concern. But for the latter theorists, we could afford to adopt a position of neutrality on such matters, since the assumption of conduct-as-datum facilitated purely calculative solutions to public concerns, through a consensus of equals. It should, I hope, be relatively obvious where I want to turn next.

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III. Buchanan, Rawls, and Hobbes

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§8. Two contractarians

Buchanan thought Rawls was like Smith. This was partly, he said, because Smith was ‘a long distance’ from the libertarians with whom he had sometimes become associated.¹⁹⁹ But it was also because Rawls was ‘a long distance from the position which has been attributed to him’.²⁰⁰ In Buchanan’s view, he, Smith, and Rawls were part of one tribe, since ‘only a “system of natural liberty”, a regime of effectively operating free markets’ could, he thought, deliver on Rawls’s requirements for justice.²⁰¹ ‘Although our two efforts have been interpreted quite differently’, he said retrospectively, he had, ‘from the 1960s, felt a strong affinity’ with Rawls’s work.²⁰² Of course, given Buchanan’s reputation as a zealous free-marketeer, one might expect Rawls to have distanced himself from this support. But as recent historical work has shown, Rawls saw Buchanan as a close ally.²⁰³ He was deeply enamoured with The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan’s co-authored work that provided an early outline of public choice economics. In their correspondence, Rawls wrote that ‘some of the things you say, and say very well, anticipated what I want to say’ on the topic of constitutional design.²⁰⁴

But perhaps we should find this affinity less surprising than we often do. As Rawls immediately noticed on reading Calculus, the pair began in much the same place, following ‘the main idea of the contractarian tradition, i.e., some kind of unanimity principle’.²⁰⁵ They started from ‘the problem of choosing a system of basic institutions – a constitution’, rather than ‘specifying criteria for specific allocations’.²⁰⁶ The pair were, in other words, not only both contractarians, but both theorists of ‘pure procedural justice’, which sought to pre-determine fair rules for human activity and then accept what followed from them.²⁰⁷ (This, as Brooke has discussed, also links Rawls and Hayek.²⁰⁸)

This fundamental overlap was no accident. The theorists with whom I ended §7 – Robbins, Knight, and at least in Buchanan’s case, Mises – exercised a deep influence on both. For his part, Knight taught Buchanan at Chicago; a lengthy quote from the 1935 text we discussed in §7 re-appeared as the epigraph of Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty.²⁰⁹ Rawls, meanwhile, cited Knight on three occasions in A Theory of Justice, and identified him, as Levy and Peart discuss, as one of ‘two names’ behind ‘the foundation of economics itself’.²¹⁰ The second of these names was Robbins. Buchanan and Rawls both followed Knight in believing themselves to have rejected Robbins’s framework. Buchanan criticised Robbins’s definition of economics in 1964, and Rawls studied Nature closely, considering him among the best of those utilitarians he sought to supplant.²¹¹ Yet as I will argue in §9, Buchanan and Rawls succeeded only in expanding upon the aspects of his work we assessed in §7.

With all this in mind, it is little wonder Buchanan and Rawls saw each other as allies. Amidst all the research into these evident commonalities, however, as yet no-one seems to have noticed an awkward interpretative problem this overlap might be thought to create. Rawls’s Theory is considered an arch-idealist text among political realists, in its elevation of morality above distinctively political thought.²¹² With his commonalities with Rawls in mind, then, it might seem strange that in discussing the proposals of the Calculus, Buchanan wrote:

This proposed separation of politics from morals does not suggest that the political theorist remain purely positivist. There remain normative aspects of political theory, quite apart from morals. These aspects relate to proposed "improvements" in the political order, in the institutions of politics.²¹³

In other words, a problem raised by the conscious affinity between Buchanan and Rawls is this: how could Buchanan have believed that the Calculus, a work so clearly similar in its starting points to Rawls’s Theory, was, in fact, a work of non-moral, political normativity? Was he self-deceived? Were the Calculus and Theory simply different in this one respect? Or, instead, does the very distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘political’ say much less about political theory than we sometimes think? Ans if so, might it be the case that what is troubling about Rawls and Buchanan’s work – from a Smithian or Weberian perspective, if not a ‘realist’ perspective as realism is currently conceived – is not the place of morality in politics, but something else entirely?

Saving the topic of realism for §12, in §9 and §10 I push the comparison between Buchanan’s 1960s work and Theory further, to claim that it is the inversion of Weber’s ethical dilemma, identified in §6 and §7, that in fact lies behind what seems troublesome about both Buchanan and Rawls. The pair went wrong, this is to say, because they adopted a form political reason that substituted ethical reflection for a theory of constitutional politics built upon ethical opacity. In this, however, Buchanan was correct to think they moved towards pure politics, not away from it. That frame simply tells us less than we sometimes think.

§9. Positive-sum political thought

The de-ethicised view of conduct and self-interest taken by Robbins and Knight facilitated a contractarian or constitutional answer to political questions. We saw in §7 that Knight’s emphasis on ‘moral consensus’ through a society characterised by ‘genuine equality’ was clearly germane to Rawls’s approach, even if we should be careful to avoid prolepsis in reading Rawls into Knight.²¹⁴ Both Buchanan and Rawls were able to thicken this notion out into complete works of political theory by beginning from Knight’s underlying ethical assumptions – consciously or otherwise.

For Buchanan this was especially explicit. In the Calculus, he and co-author Tullock began from ‘the calculus of the rational utility-maximizing individual’.²¹⁵ In their view, this did ‘not properly introduce an ethical question’, since ‘there is nothing moral or ethical about an analytical assumption’.²¹⁶ To you, I, or Weber, this might seem strange, since a society of disenchanted utility-maximisers would seem to have extremely broad ethical permutations. But Buchanan believed that ‘those characteristics which are “desirable" in the behaviour of a person’ must be kept ‘wholly independent’ from the analysis of social questions.²¹⁷ In other words, as he added in his solo-authored appendix, matters of ‘personal morality’ were ‘data to the political theorist’; ‘along with the economist’, clearly echoing Robbins and Mises, ‘the political theorist should take his human actors as he finds them’.²¹⁸

For Rawls things are slightly more difficult. It would be an elementary error to read Rawls as a simple game theorist, whose veil of ignorance helped us escape a prisoner’s dilemma. And it is true that Kant and Aristotle played extremely important roles in Rawls’s sense of the relationship between rationality, the pursuit of the good, and ethics. There is, therefore, a risk of asserting too much too straightforwardly here. Nevertheless, in light of Rawls’s clear interest in Robbins and Knight, I think it is entirely defensible to suggest that their view of the ethical opacity of self-interest proved to be at least readily reconcilable with Rawls’s Kantian and Aristotelian predilections. Whilst the non-game-theoretic elements of Theory require further assessment – as we will cover shortly – Rawls echoed Robbins, Knight, and now Buchanan in claiming there was ‘no urgency to reach a publicly accepted judgment as to what is the good of particular individuals’.²¹⁹ ‘In a well-ordered society’, he added, ‘persons are left free to determine their good’.²²⁰ For this, Rawls offered an extreme case. His ‘definition of good’ held that even ‘someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various geometrically shaped areas’ was indeed pursuing the good, and that ‘a rational plan for him will center around this’.²²¹ Prior to politics – more on that shortly – someone’s good was simply their good; we must be neutral between these conceptions. In Robbins’s language, Rawls ‘is not concerned with ends as such’; he ‘assumes that human beings have ends’, but was concerned with ‘their progress towards their objectives’ – initially, no more.²²² To this extent, Buchanan and Rawls began from a similar place. They diverged in the ways they incorporated this ethical neutrality into political theory.

Buchanan thought his assumptions about human nature were ‘skeptical or pessimistic’.²²³ Fortunately, however, history revealed a way of turning private vices into public benefits: the market. Markets were ‘based on the idea’ that individuals sought ‘their own interest’.²²⁴ Their ingenuity was in showing how ‘this sort of behavior can be channeled in such a direction that it becomes beneficial rather than detrimental to the interests of all members of the community’.²²⁵ This provided a template. ‘The question that we have posed’, Buchanan and Tullock wrote, ‘concerns the possibility of extending a similar approach to political organization’.²²⁶ Politics would be designed such ‘that the “immoral” actor can gain little, if at all’ from anti-social behaviour.²²⁷ This made politics ‘a genuinely co-operative endeavour in which all parties, conceptually, stand to gain’.²²⁸

Specifically, Buchanan and Tullock envisaged a ‘discussion process conducted by free individuals attempting to formulate generally acceptable rules in their own long-term interest’.²²⁹ Through the ‘rigorous application of the unanimity rule’, changes to political rules would be deemed an ‘improvement’ if, and only if, all could rationally agree to them.²³⁰ This was like the market, insofar as it required no altruism or public-mindedness amongst the choosers; it did not depend on whether others would ‘follow the moral rules agreed on by the philosophers’.²³¹ Buchanan and Tullock advanced a political theory, then, of mitigation. Our flaws were taken for granted. Politics was to be designed around them. It would minimise our capacity for harm. 

In Buchanan’s view, not only this was what Smith would have wanted, it also represented pushback against Robbins. Elsewhere, Buchanan took ‘on Lord Robbins as an adversary’, attacking his view of economics as a ‘set of problems’ to do with scarcity.²³² Under Robbins’s definition, ‘if the utility function of the choosing agent is fully defined in advance’, then economic choice ‘becomes purely mechanical’.²³³ It was here that Buchanan criticised ‘computational’ approaches to economics, as I mentioned in §3. In contrast, Buchanan saw Smith as having concentrated on ‘the uniquely symbiotic aspects of behaviour’ that came from exchange, and advocated returning to his approach.²³⁴ Yet this claimed affiliation with Smith on economics made no dent on Buchanan’s politics. For Buchanan, what followed from an understanding of economics as symbiosis was merely that it would be easier to grasp that ‘the proper role of the economist is not in providing the means of making “better” choices’, since such advice could only occur when computation was possible.²³⁵ Buchanan distanced himself from Robbins’s utilitarianism, but not from his neutrality.

It followed that Buchanan’s view of politics was not, as he thought, like Smith’s. In Buchanan’s view, a constitutional deliberation process required underlying political equality, just as Smith had refused to ‘postulate significant differentials in capacities among human beings’.²³⁶ In the abstract, this was hardly absurd: Hont, as we discussed in §1, viewed liberalism as the combination of economic inequality with political equality. But to align Buchanan’s political equality with Smith’s was a gross misunderstanding. Chiefly, it overlooked history. For Smith, as we saw in §5, the philosopher and street porter were hypothetically equal, but had since become different: the division of labour created vastly divergent skillsets and capabilities, and these were all we knew. We might be naturally equal, but hardly anyone would recognise that now. Thus for Smith our long-term interest would depend on questions of social development: on how our ambitions changed as commercial society itself and our place within it evolved.²³⁷ Evaluating this required a broad, non-neutral, theory of what the good is, or at least what historical change meant. But Buchanan implied that we had long-term interests that could be abstracted from the historical evolution of social questions. His assertion that such interests were unknown to us did not make them any less real. Buchanan therefore ended up thinking that politics could organise social life; that it had a rationality and purity that Smith or Weber denied it. He was far closer to Robbins than he thought.

There was another problem with Buchanan’s account. Rawls, with some justification, noted in the margins of his copy of the Calculus that it resulted in status-quo bias.²³⁸ If everyone had to agree to changes, then very few changes would be made, and in Rawls’s view we were more than a few changes away from a just society. Indeed, if individuals really were knaves, then ‘no system of constitutional checks and balances’ could succeed ‘in setting up an invisible hand’ that guided ‘the process to a just outcome’.²³⁹ Constitutional deliberation required ‘a public sense of justice’.²⁴⁰ The politics of mitigation were insufficient.

This, however, placed Rawls in an awkward position. He rejected the view of morality as ‘a pact between rational egoists’ – even Buchanan’s version of it.²⁴¹ He was quick to distance himself from any straightforward contractarian ‘game’.²⁴² Yet, as we saw, he also began from a position of neutrality between conceptions of the good. Famously, he bridged this tension by arguing that the best and fairest way to secure each of our interests was to establish ‘the concept of right’ as ‘prior to that of the good’.²⁴³ The priority of right gave us conditions under which neutrality could be abandoned: ‘something is good only if it fits into ways of life consistent with the principles of right already on hand’.²⁴⁴ There is, of course, much to be said about the theoretical moves of justice as fairness. For reasons of space, however, I will assume my reader is familiar with the broad scope of Rawls’s argument, and focus squarely on his defence of its practicality in part III of Theory. It is here, I think, that we can see most clearly how Rawls’s strategy fits in with the theme of my essay.

In his chapter VIII, Rawls argued that justice as fairness was a stable ideal because of ‘the major steps whereby a person would acquire an understanding of and an attachment to the principles of justice’.²⁴⁵ This involved progression through three stages of ‘moral development’: the ‘moralities of authority, of association, and of principles’.²⁴⁶ The former was mainly ‘that of the child’.²⁴⁷ But as children grew up, they would find themselves belonging to a number of associations, and the ‘moral standards appropriate’ to these, as determined by their ‘aims and purposes’, would produce ‘the content of the morality of association’.²⁴⁸ Morality, here, was a matter of social position. But this contextualised approach was to be transcended. As the morality of associations advanced, it would reach the stage whereby ‘the members of society view one another as equals’, ‘joined together in a system of cooperation known to be for the advantage of all and governed by a common conception of justice’.²⁴⁹ From here it was a short leap to the morality of principles. The leap was made once we anchored our faith in this system not from ‘ties of friendship and fellow feeling for others’, but from ‘a conception of right chosen irrespective of these contingencies’.²⁵⁰ Yet crucially, this remained a move of self-interest: we would ‘desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice once we realize how social arrangements answering to them have promoted our good’.²⁵¹ ‘A perfectly just society’ would be what ‘rational human beings could desire more than anything else once they had full knowledge and experience of what it was’.²⁵²

I have quoted from this passage at length because I think it encapsulates Rawls’s answer to the problem of the ethical opacity of self-interest. Buchanan’s strategy was mitigation. Rawls’s strategy was dissolution. For Rawls, moral development provided something analogous to what the market represented for Buchanan: a way of channelling the data of self-interest for good use. But it was also considerably more ambitious: in Rawls’s view, what was truly in our interest was what was in others’ interests: we could, in point of fact, reach a stage whereby the very normative problem of partial and personal ‘interests’ could be dissolved entirely. Under the morality of principles, we would want what was just; and what was just was what proved to be the fairest way to accommodate others’ interests.

This account is an over-simplification, for Rawls accepted that some might choose to behave unjustly, and in these cases, the priority of right provided ‘certain limits on the conception of the good’.²⁵³ Rawls, then, would seem to be making self-interest an ethical matter after all: does this not contradict what I have argued? On the contrary, it is here I think we can return to the question of ‘moral’ and ‘political’ normativity. Though prominent realists assert that theories like Rawls’s ‘make the moral prior to the political’, on my reading, what is historically distinctive about Rawls is that here, moral judgements are possible only after the establishment of political rules.²⁵⁴ We discussed in §2 and §5 that for Smith and Weber, moral sentiments were necessarily prior to politics. Political order received its shape precisely from the accumulation of subjective, social judgements. Rawls straightforwardly inverted this. In the very limited cases in which he sought to transcend the assumed ethical opacity of self-interest, itself alien to Smith or Weber, he could do so only by virtue of the fact his political system required it – by the fact some actions threatened the stability of the just political order, the ‘full knowledge and experience’ of which conditioned us to judge others’ conduct accordingly.²⁵⁵ It was politics, not the ‘correspondent affection in ourselves’, that for Rawls would determine our sense of ethics and morality.²⁵⁶ What determined our politics, then, was not morality, but that initial conception of self-interest as ethically opaque, and the need to find a political theory to overcome it. By this standard, the conventional realist interpretation of Rawls has the tail wagging the dog.

I now want to bring Buchanan and Rawls back together, and bring this discussion to a close. The pair were consistent in one final, revealing respect: they both believed their theory had something to do with Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’.²⁵⁷ For Buchanan, though Smith ‘did not recognize the possible value in using a conceptualized social contract as a benchmark’, the impartial spectator ‘serves this function’ instead.²⁵⁸ And for Rawls, there was ‘nothing characteristically idealist about the supposition of unanimity’, since ‘Hume and Adam Smith likewise assume’ that taking up ‘a certain point of view, that of the impartial spectator’ would lead people ‘to similar convictions’.²⁵⁹ As I see it, this was a category error. For Smith, the impartial spectator provided a means of scrutinising ‘the propriety of our own conduct’.²⁶⁰ The upshot of ‘placing ourselves in his situation’ was not to create one, uniform moral standard.²⁶¹ It was to create many different individual impressions of what an impartial moral standard could be. Those impressions would be shaped by social position and plenty besides. If this had a parallel in Rawls’s thought, it was with his morality of associations. But it did not represent its transcendence.

But the attempted transcendence of direct ethical approbation is exactly how we should view Buchanan and Rawls’s political theory, and how we can make sense of Buchanan’s claim to an interest in ‘normative aspects of political theory, quite apart from morals’.²⁶² Indeed, in the first instance it also shows us what must once have seemed so promising about their approach. We saw that for Robbins and Knight, capitalism had made ethical reflection simply too difficult. Accepting this gave economics a defined purpose, but it left other normative disciplines in an uncertain, impotent position. (How much this contributed to the feeling of an ‘end of ideology’ in the years between Knight and Rawls as a matter for another time.²⁶³) From this perspective, Buchanan and Rawls seemed to offer a remarkable hope. They had found a new clarity of purpose for normative theorising in a de-ethicised world. They required only ‘a minimum of ethical premises’; their work was, in fact, built upon the idea that ‘unanimity is possible’ following the demise of direct social judgement.²⁶⁴ Yet for them this proved no limitation. In fact, in clearing the path of thorny ethical dilemmas that presupposed limits to the political imagination, political theory could become far more ambitious. We could develop more elaborate, and more precise, political constructs than ever before.

Moreover, by their very nature, these constructs offered the hope of perpetual improvement. Neutralising ethical questions led to a form of positive-sum political reason. As the Calculus put it, this view held politics to be ‘a means through which the “power” of all participants may be increased, if we define “power” as the ability to command things that are desired’.²⁶⁵ Implicitly, existing political orders were leaving goods on the table. Better rules or constitutions could allow us to take them. That these theories thus portrayed disagreement as irrational is anathema to political realists.²⁶⁶ But it was hardly un-political. As Hobbes supposed, the very purpose of politics is to deliver a form of order that is incontrovertibly better than the counterfactual. The possibility of reading Rawls in this vein – as closer to Hobbes than realism is – I explore next, in §10. In light of it, however, I will finish here by suggesting this: that what is distinctive about Buchanan and Rawls is not that they gave priority to morality. It is that they saw politics as a form of juridical calculation, in which positive-sum outcomes were possible, and the ‘rules of the game’ were to be tweaked until those optimal results were found.²⁶⁷ This was what was truly new. For Smith, as we saw in §3, it had been a great error to think of politics as a game. By Smith’s standard, this pure, juridical political reason had forgotten that in ‘the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own’.²⁶⁸

§10. Rawls and Hobbes

We saw in §1 that Hobbes sometimes serves as a point of contrast to Smith. To make the distance between mine and a more conventional realist approach evident, I now want to assess how Hobbes might look as a point of contrast to Rawls. Any such endeavour should, of course, proceed in full awareness of the fact that Rawls’s contract theory departed self-consciously from Hobbes’s own.²⁶⁹ Indeed, Rawls stressed in 2001 that he had been wrong to call Theory ‘part of the theory of rational choice, since that ‘would imply that justice as fairness is at bottom Hobbesian (as Hobbes is often interpreted) rather than Kantian’.²⁷⁰ But to claim an affiliation with Kant over Hobbes is not necessarily to claim very much; it is well-established that Kant’s political theory and his understanding of human nature share much with Hobbes, giving us reason from the outset to be unsurprised by potential parallels between Hobbes and Rawls.²⁷¹

Yet the notion that Rawls and Hobbes sit on opposing sides on the question of politics is a commonplace in political realism.²⁷² Williams’s foundational text, after all, identified ‘the “first” political question in Hobbesian terms’, precisely to argue against Rawls’s supposed primacy of morality.²⁷³ On Williams’s account, the problem with Hobbes was that he was too minimally political: the need for the ‘Basic Legitimation Demand’ arose because Hobbes’s solution to disorder might allow a not-dissimilarly violent politics.²⁷⁴ In other canonical realist work, Hobbes is said to have ‘a fundamentally different conception of politics’ to Rawls, since, like realists, Hobbes thought ‘politics takes place in conditions of ineradicable conflict’.²⁷⁵ What is realistic about Hobbes, then, is that he had a theory of legitimacy – an account of what gives a sovereign the right to rule – and, further, that this involved ‘power and dominance’.²⁷⁶ Hobbes held that ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’: order relied upon ‘feare of punishment’.²⁷⁷ If there were limits to Hobbes’s realism, they were simply that he held the ‘pre-political moral premise’ that people ‘have the natural right’ to ‘preserve themselves’, and that he thought ‘peace’ was ‘morally good’.²⁷⁸

My intention here is not to claim that Hobbes has been misread. Rather, I merely propose that these criteria give a misleading picture of his thought in relation to Rawls, and that we might be better off viewing the two as aligned on fundamental questions about the purpose and role of politics. Indeed, the framing above encounters immediate trouble, in that Rawls’s theory of moral development, discussed in §9, could plausibly be considered a theory of legitimacy: after all, it explains why Rawls thought we would rationally choose to obey the principles of justice. But I think what is more significant, at least for my essay, are those aspects of Hobbes and Rawls that are not considered here: those that might begin to dissolve the traditional delineation between the realist and moralist camps. By way of concluding Part III, I would like to suggest three such aspects.

First, both Hobbes and Rawls sought to purify the problem of politics. We have seen that for Rawls, the politics of juridical calculation required the assumption of initial neutrality between goods, reflecting an assumption of ethical opacity, as per §7 and §8. These assumptions meant that what were once social questions – for the reasons we discussed in §2 and §5 – could now become political ones, since what mattered was designing rules such that individuals’ goals were fulfilled in a fair manner, whatever these goals were. This introduced a post-historical quality to Rawls’s thought: with such rules, ‘the long range aim of society is settled’, Rawls wrote.²⁷⁹ Similarly, Hobbes created an account of political obligation on the basis of both a non-ethical and non-social account of self-interest. He took what he deemed to be our fundamental objectives – our ‘perpetual and restless desire of power after power’ and our ‘fear of death’, for instance – as data, and tasked politics both with mitigating the harms they caused, and with fulfilling that ultimate need to stay alive.²⁸⁰ Towards these ends, Hobbes ‘expressly denied that man was a naturally social or political being’, as Hont has written; ‘for him, natural sociability had no role to play either outside or inside the state’.²⁸¹ Society and its judgements risked introducing potential failure points in his account of political obligation, jeopardising his eirenic project.²⁸² For Hobbes, then, as for Rawls, the important relation was between the individual and a political order. Society was pushed to the margins. 

Second, both Hobbes and Rawls saw politics as positive-sum, as we mentioned at the end of §9. Clearly Rawls took this further than Hobbes, believing that politics could be asked to do much more than merely secure order. But both shared the underlying view that political activity was to be defended on the grounds it provided something recognisably better than anything that could be achieved in its absence – be that order or justice. This allowed for the dissolution of the problem of partial or sectional interests, since the benefits of co-operation inevitably far outweighed those of defection. Thus consensual politics became possible: just as the multitude ‘reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, into one Will’, creating a commonwealth that for Hobbes was a ‘reall unitie’, Rawls’s political order represented a ‘social union of social unions’.²⁸³

Finally, whilst both Hobbes and Rawls placed great emphasis on pure politics, neither had nearly so much to say about political judgement. In this respect, they represented the inverse of what we said about Smith in §3: Smith identified clear limits to politics, yet believed that these made political judgement vital. Though there are certainly reasons why Hobbes and Rawls would have wanted to focus their attention away from discretionary judgement – for Hobbes, because, again, the account of political obligation came first; for Rawls, because the rationality of justice implied we would create the conditions for it of our own accord – it is also true, I would venture, that they had to marginalise the issue, such that for Hobbes the ‘making and maintaining of Commonwealths’ consisted merely ‘in certain rules as doth arithmetic and geometry’.²⁸⁴ For once any political theory chooses to accept that the ethics of one’s conduct is merely data to be processed, it is bound to have immense difficulty reconciling itself to the innately, inescapably ethical problem of political judgement, where calculus cannot reach. Reconciling judgement with calculative politics would require the normative evaluation of conduct in the case of political leadership, but nowhere else. And such a position could not hold for long. As I argued in §3, §4, and §6, the ethical method of political theory implies there is nothing distinctively ‘political’ about politics – that on closer inspection the state is a ‘complex of human relationships’.²⁸⁵ Thus the ethical dilemma of political leadership quickly requires the ethical evaluation of an ever-widening circle of other individuals. And once this is granted, political theories that were built upon the act of sweeping aside those ethical problems in a push to vindicate juridical calculation no longer seem quite so plausible. Political sums, be they Hobbes’s arithmetic or Rawls’s games, place a greater weight on politics, that is to say, than it can possibly be asked to bear.

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IV. Liberalism, ethics, and history

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§11. Liberal political reason

I have now spent three-quarters of my essay telling a historical story about the decline of a particular set of assumptions in liberal political theory, regarding ethics, the role of politics, and the importance of society and its economic relationships. With my story now in place, it is time to reflect on what its consequences might be. 

It seems to me that is one of its consequences is broadly Foucauldian. In §4, we discussed the fact that Foucault sought to replace analyses of fixed political concepts, like the state, with the analysis of the particular rationalities by which they were governed. In other words, Foucault focussed on the conduct of conduct, and on the moments, like the transition between raison d’état and liberalism, when conduct became organised by a new mode of reason. In our comparison between Smith and Weber and Buchanan and Rawls, I think we have likewise been tracing the demise of one approach to conducting conduct, and the emergence of an alternative to it. In stronger terms, we have been focussed on the significance of the moment in which, at least within mainstream Anglophone political theory, the governing rationality of liberalism switched, as early twentieth-century economic thought set liberal theory fundamentally new parameters, locating new ways to shape and direct behaviour.

To make this more tractable, in this section I will follow Weber in discussing these two rationalities in ideal-typical terms. This means describing something that, as Weber put it, ‘cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality’, but which nonetheless represents ‘a clear and unambiguous idea of the significance of a cultural phenomenon’ as a benchmark for the analysis of reality.²⁸⁶ In these terms, the two forms of governmental reason I have in mind might be described as the liberalism of personality, and the liberalism of procedure.

In the liberalism of personality, conduct is to be governed by people – by ethical judgements in both politics and society, and by individuals whose motives and actions are themselves subject to being evaluated in ethical terms. These ethical judgements occur without reference to any ‘rule or canon’ but our own interior assessments or right or wrong, whatever may cause them.²⁸⁷ Thus they are prior to political authority. The shape of our legal order is determined by the accumulation of moral attitudes across time. Politics is in control only insofar as political action affects these opinions on the margin. Because of this, the liberalism of personality holds that political action should be evaluated the same terms as society at large – which we will return to in §12. Politics shares with society the burden of shaping others’ conduct, and in both domains, decision-making is an innately personal and subjective task. Politics involves unique ethical imperatives, granted, but it is far from alone in that: other social roles demand particular forms of conduct, too. Taken together, the liberalism of personality’s governmentality rests on nothing but the exchange of opinions within society. That this is all there is to it makes Weber’s diagnosis of growing ethical inaccessibility an existential concern.

We might ask briefly what the liberalism of personality has to do with Shklar’s liberalism of fear. Smith, after all, saw justice as a negative virtue, as we mentioned in §2, and Shklar likewise sought ‘self-reliant and active citizens’, discussed politics in terms of the behaviour of our ‘set of officials’, and in Ordinary Vices rejected the view of liberalism as ‘a project for the perfectibility of mankind’.²⁸⁸ There is, then, certainly an affinity between Shklar and the liberalism of personality, which we will return to again in §12. But this affinity must not be overstated. The liberalism of fear is fundamentally different, in that offers a statement of a particular set of liberal priorities, rather than an approach to the conduct of conduct. It is no criticism of Shklar to say that the liberalism of fear is closer to a theory of what Foucault called ‘counter-conduct’ than it is a theory of governmental rationality.²⁸⁹ Its task is to redress the imbalances between ‘the weak and the powerful’ – to secure ‘freedom from the abuse of power and the intimidation of the defenceless’.²⁹⁰ It is concerned with the conduct of those in power, but Shklar’s fear of the misuse of power meant she had much less to say about the means by which citizens’ conduct was to be regulated. That does not make Shklar’s work any less valuable, but merely illustrates that this essay is focussed on something slightly different. The liberalism of personality holds that conduct is governed by others’ opinions.

The liberalism of procedure is distinct again. It suggests that conduct is governed by laws – by what in §9 I called the ‘politics of juridical calculation’. The liberalism of procedure seeks to diminish the role of personality, since personality distracts from the optimal selection procedure for these impartial rules. As Buchanan wrote, if politics was ‘nothing other than a continuing embodiment of the sovereign will’, then ‘any “improvement” or “reform” can only come through some change in the behaviour of individuals’.²⁹¹ Conceiving of politics in such terms gave sovereigns too much control. We could never expect their judgement to align with what was truly best. Thus we needed ‘a second or “higher order” kind of collective decision-making’, from which personality was abstracted away.²⁹²

In 1964, between the Calculus and Theory, Shklar wrote about an ideology she called ‘legalism’, a clearly related if not coterminous phenomenon, which she called ‘the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following’.²⁹³ Intentionally or otherwise, this captures something important about the liberalism of procedure. So long as our conduct accords with the rules set by an impersonal authority, it is beyond reproach – it is ‘datum’. We think of ourselves as playing by a set of rules – and we judge others only when they break them. The liberalism of procedure does not deny ethics entirely, then, but it denies ethical thinking made without reference to the prior standards of collective political choice.

On the face of it, there is much to commend about this form of rationality. It is not wrong to expect that we will modify our conduct according to political rules, nor that there is scope for rules to improve. If there was no such room, it would be hard to explain why we engaged in politics at all. Moreover, when we view the liberalism of procedure as the product of a very specific set of circumstances – with its origins above all in Robbins, Knight, and Mises, and their acceptance of the ethical opacity of capitalist modernity – then we are in a position to understand why it once seemed so appealing, as we discussed at the end of §9. Yet we must remember what its promise rests upon: the idea that a juridical politics can govern without reference to society, or at least by reference only to a society subordinated to political imperatives. Thus the liberalism of procedure is vulnerable to the oldest critique of this essay – that as we saw §2 and §3, perfecting ‘the regular and harmonious movement of the system’ may be all-too-easily confused with the act of securing the ends to which that system should be designed – the inhabitants of society itself.²⁹⁴

Contrasted in this way, we can view these rationalities as divided, above all, by their understanding of what we might call ‘Weber’s question’, that of the continuing viability of direct ethical interpretations of conduct in a secularised, capitalist economy. That question is this essay’s inflection-point. Above all, it threw the liberalism of personality into doubt. Ghosh’s scholarship reminds us that Weber was not simply defeatist.²⁹⁵ But there certainly was a tragic quality to his thought. His attentiveness to history showed him that ethical meaning had become ever harder to find. Yet he was adamant that politics could not seriously alter the slow transformation of society’s ethical relations. It was irresponsible to even try. In the long-run, therefore, our fate lay outside conscious hands.

By contrast, the liberalism of procedure has learned to thrive in a disenchanted world. Armed with the freedom granted by the methodological assumptions of the early professional economists, Rawls and Buchanan asked politics to take over the responsibility of governing conduct, which it could do only by becoming impartial. In this respect their work must also be understood alongside theorists I have not had space to discuss, such as Hayek and the German Ordoliberals, who, as Foucault discussed, adopted ‘the principles of l’État de droit, or of the rule of law’, exemplified by the Rechtsstaat.²⁹⁶ The liberalism of personality had sat in a perpetual, awkward tension with political practice. But the liberalism of procedure represented a search for pure politics.

This brings us to a final consequence of my narrative. Although my scepticism towards the liberalism of procedure gives me an evident affinity with political realists, the historical story I have presented is not quite the one they choose to tell. In much realist writing, the problem with Rawls seems to begin with Rawls, and his decision to resuscitate an otherwise dormant contractarian tradition. By contrast, I have argued that the problem of Rawls begins with the diagnosis of Weber – with a fundamental difficulty about capitalist modernity that makes Rawls’s turn to procedural politics much easier to sympathise with than realists imply. And if we begin here, I think the task of political realism begins to look somewhat different. In the next section, therefore, I explore what this understanding of the divide in Anglophone political theory might offer that realism currently does not.

§12. Realism reconsidered

Any discussion of political realism is quickly bound to encounter the problem of clarity. Not only are there many forms of realism, but we all seem to have different things in mind when we mention it. As Hall and Sleat have summarised, some, like Galston, take realism to mean that political theory should become more concerned with political feasibility, whilst others adopt the label in the belief that ‘politics has a character that cannot be sufficiently subsumed by morality’.²⁹⁷ In Hall and Sleat’s view, however, neither of these represent the most sophisticated form of realist thought. Instead they defend the version they derive from both Geuss and Williams. I frame my discussion around this form of realism not only because I agree that it is the most compelling, but because at first glance it would seem to have pre-empted much of what I have tried to say. It would seem useful, then, to set out in what ways my understanding differs from theirs.

The liberalism of procedure is, I have argued, defined by its acceptance of ethical opacity, and thus by the assumption that politics can determine rules of conduct by reference to the fair fulfilment of ends, rather than to history, social position, or economic relations. On the face of it, Hall and Sleat’s realism makes very similar criticisms of Rawls, even if it gets there without the specific historical story I have outlined here. In their words, realism constitutes an ‘attempt to think philosophically about politics from a particular ethical standpoint’.²⁹⁸ It recognises that both ethics and ‘moral thinking’ are ‘socially embedded’, and thus ‘no longer’ offer us ‘permanence and stability’.²⁹⁹ Leaning into Weber’s language, ‘what is at stake’ for realists, they suggest, is how or whether ‘reality might help stabilise our ethical and political beliefs in a disenchanted world’.³⁰⁰ In short, we must reject what Williams called the ‘basic relation of morality to politics’, though, to be clear, our task is not to decide upon any hierarchy or priority between moral and political claims.³⁰¹ At first glance, my argument might be thought different to this only rhetorically: whilst I have described Rawls as a ‘political’ thinker, which realists tend not to, Hall, Sleat and I would appear to have fundamentally the same sense that what is missing from Rawls a sense of the contextual nature of our political thinking.

But a rhetorical objection is not an unrevealing way to begin. Hall and Sleat criticise ‘the permanence and stability of morality’ on the grounds that morality cannot provide ‘for an escape from the contingencies of politics’.³⁰² But ‘politics’ is an exceptionally slippery term. Sleat is clear that realism holds ‘a fundamentally different conception of politics’ to Rawls’s idealism: one with ‘very distinct notions’ of its ‘purpose and limits’.³⁰³ He has also spent a long time painstakingly trying to eliminate misunderstandings about the realist viewpoint.³⁰⁴ But it seems to me that identifying politics as contingent, and morality as stable, is language that contributes to the confusion. My essay has tried to show that in truth we require a rhetorical distinction here: between political judgement, on the one hand, and political knowledge, on the other. Realists, from Sagar in §1 to Hall and Sleat here, are, to my mind, emphasising the former. But political judgement, as I have tried to show, matters most when politics understands itself to know least. Rawls’s politics was epistemically confident: he believed it was within the power of politics to engineer optimal outcomes by setting rules. But by Smith’s standard, this grossly overstated its true epistemic position. In his view, political economy had revealed that there was much critical information that politics could not know. Politics, therefore, could never be a matter of rule-perfecting; we had little recourse but to our own judgement, the effects of which we would never fully understand. If realists align themselves with this latter view, then their commendation of ‘politics’ tout court means we may easily interpret them backwards. Insofar as realists see politics as a matter of ‘contingencies’, they are sceptics about political knowledge. They believe that politics knows less than many think, and contains the power to do less than many hope.

This leads to an objection that is not simply rhetorical, after all. It is that realists’ emphasis on politics is misplaced. It is not just that ‘politics’ itself is a confusing term. It is that once we choose to concern ourselves with political judgement more precisely, we will soon find that we must go beyond political judgement altogether. Sleat argued that against Rawls’s ‘“basic relationship” between morality and political practice’, realism seeks ‘a more complex account’ that ‘gives appropriate space and weight to that which is distinctive about political practice in our theories’.³⁰⁵ But to this we may apply one of Shklar’s thoughts. ‘That which is distinctive about political practice’ was, in her view, far less than we usually imagined.³⁰⁶ The ‘choices that occur in public regularly are not so different from those that have to be made by every single person who is responsible for other people and not just to them’.³⁰⁷ ‘The division of public and private imperatives is not so clear’, she added; ‘most politics’ involved ‘bargains, incremental decisions, adaptations, rituals, display, argument, persuasion, and the like’.³⁰⁸ It was ‘impossible to think of vices as simply either private or public’.³⁰⁹

Shklar saw these comments as critical of Weber, whom she believed viewed politics as a ‘stark choice’ between ‘Christ and Caesar’.³¹⁰ In Forrester’s view, this represented a criticism of forms of realism that ‘are themselves unrealistic’ in failing ‘to capture the uncertainty and mundanity of politics’ and falling ‘into the trap of glorifying conflict’.³¹¹ But I think if Shklar had read Weber as more than a theorist of political leadership, these comments might have been understood to say much more than that. Weber, after all, thought that modernity had made it increasingly difficult to directly evaluate everyday conduct in ethical terms; for him our sense of meaning came not from the social judgements of others, as it had done for Smith, but increasingly from purely vertical relationships: Weber’s Puritan, after all, thought ‘only of his own salvation’.³¹² And in the years after Weber, his diagnosis was proactively furthered, at first by economics and soon in politics. We came to ask political theory to define rules for our conduct, in the belief that we could no longer assess others’ ends for ourselves. Politics became the answer to the problem of disenchantment.

I read Shklar as reminding us that politics cannot provide such an answer, no matter how it is conceived. It is not good enough, that is to say, to give political life ethical significance again – to adopt, in Sleat’s words, ‘a fundamentally different conception of politics’, as a domain of judgement rather than a domain of calculation.³¹³ Weber’s idealised political leader, after all, serves as the totemic representative of politics as an arena of judgements. But for Shklar the ‘politics of the great gesture’ were not enough.³¹⁴ Moving beyond her own meaning, I would suggest that by Shklar’s standard, emphasising ‘that which is distinctive about political practice’ both misattributes the cause and undersells the magnitude of the realist task.³¹⁵

The underlying problem that realists must concern themselves with is not the absence of political ethics. It is the much more fundamental problem that capitalist modernity has made ethical judgement of any kind more difficult. What is under threat is not simply the role of political leadership, but the ‘ethical regulation’ of ‘every purely personal relationship of man to man’.³¹⁶ That, as I argued in §10, was what made political judgement such an awkward fit with Rawls’s theory. Once one adopts a position of neutrality between individual ends, politics becomes a calculative task, and individual initiative is seen to hinder rather than help. Either all conduct is a legitimate object of direct ethical evaluation, or none of it is. Thus it is Rawls’s intellectual inheritance from early economic theory that represents the underlying source of the most significant tension between his approach and that of realism. The realist’s task, therefore, should have less to do with Rawls, and more to do with both unpicking the ethical assumptions of his forebears, and reversing their impact on the near-century of political thought since.

Realism, in other words, must defend the evaluation of conduct in general. Weber’s tool for this was, as we saw in §6, the Lebensführung. Smith’s was to offer a psychologically rich moral theory that showed ethical judgements to be at the very basis of social order. As these examples indicate, this task entails a very specific emphasis. Realists ought not see themselves as offering a ‘defence’ of politics. A focus on ethics implies that civil society precedes and shapes politics; the political domain may, as a result of all this, diminish in importance. What matters is that our behaviour is shown to carry genuine ethical significance, in public as in private, and that our views to this effect shape others’ conduct, as well as political activity. In Foucauldian language, realism should concern itself with the interplay between ‘the way in which one conducts oneself’, the way ‘one behaves as an effect of a form of conduct’, and the ‘activity of conducting’ itself.³¹⁷

To begin to bring my discussion to a close, I want to outline what I think this might mean in practice. As I see it, the realist’s task can be pursued at both the level of theory and the level of history. Of the two, the former is perhaps simplest. Since what needs to be stressed here is that we have grounds for evaluating others’ conduct directly, without reference to a set of political rules or norms, realist theory should begin from the viewpoints of real individuals, and seek to offer the piecemeal evaluation of conduct and positional moralities that this perspective implies. (In Rawlsian terms, it should focus on the ‘morality of associations’, not the ‘morality of principles’.³¹⁸) To return to Shklar, it should take its purpose as ‘the elucidation of common experience’, giving ‘coherent form’ to ‘common encounters’.³¹⁹ It should emphasise the ‘contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom’ inherent in liberal society; it should consider ‘the dispositions required for a good character’, alongside the ‘extraordinary ethical difficulties’ this involves, such as the need ‘to live with contradictions, unresolvable conflicts’.³²⁰ In Dunn’s language, it should render politics ‘more transparently intelligible than everyday life has already made them for workers or managers, consumers or bureaucrats, politicians or policemen’.³²¹ But it should not follow Dunn in thinking that ‘the best criterion’ for doing so is ‘a practical improvement in political judgement’.³²² The judgements we should concern ourselves with are, first of all, the judgements we make of each other.

This does not mean that realists should surrender an interest in political life. In §4, I said that Foucault collapsed the distinction between conduct and politics; in §6, I argued Weber’s theory of the state was contiguous with his view of society. For all of Smith, Weber, and Foucault, an understanding of the ethics of individual conduct precisely opened up the possibility of reflecting upon political behaviour. As we said in §11, each shared Shklar’s later view that there is little that is truly distinctive about politics: it entails a specific set of ethical imperatives, but the same is true of many other roles in society. Yet the very fact we analyse those other roles in ethical terms means that we possess a way of beginning to think about what we might expect and demand of those in political power. 

In fact, taking a serious interest in psychologically-textured moral theory might also mean that we find renewed use for idealism and a sense of collective moral purpose. Despite its association with moralism, the liberalism of procedure ultimately denied thick, public moral visions, since individuals’ interests and ambitions were taken to be both pre-existing and fundamentally private. But if there is, in fact, no such neat division between public and private activity, then there is no reason why political visions cannot be understood to motivate private behaviour, nor why this would be illegitimate in and of itself. Without wishing to digress onto some of the risks involved here, along either Shklarian lines or Williams’s ‘critical theory principle’, to my mind this offers one means by which liberalism might become more assertive, in light of criticism it is now too shy or defeatist.³²³

Such an approach to politics may also help remind us what is so difficult about politics. Beyond the traditional problems of order, disagreement, and legitimacy, I would suggest this approach emphasises three further challenges. First, that politics faces a positional problem: it cannot get above or outside the social processes that it seeks to control or direct, so there is no space for pure political reflection untainted by the evolving norms of society itself. Second, it faces a tractability problem: to return to Smith once more, political levers never quite map onto political problems, leaving politics far more impotent than it would like to be. Third, it faces a historical problem: contemporary politics exists on the far side of the Weberian diagnosis that we have referenced so often, meaning that the very ethical vitality politics requires is becoming ever less accessible to it.

This brings us onto the second, historical aspect of the realist’s task. Realists ought to be concerned not only that ethical political theory has become less popular, but that there are real historical processes that explain why it has become less popular. Ethical reflection is increasingly difficult: that is why so much Anglophone political theory has looked to start from different assumptions, and why realists continue to find themselves on the margins of normative theorising today.³²⁴ This problem will not simply disappear: if politics and social life are indeed contiguous, then as society seemingly moves ever-closer towards some form of rationalised, utilitarian morality system, it is bound to produce political reflection that thinks in much the same terms, marginalising ethical theory further.

Realists should be concerned, then, with understanding the ways that the processes of rationalisation have continued in the years after Weber’s death, and with locating those aspects of society that remind us there is, in Williams’s terms, more to ethics than the ‘morality system’ alone.³²⁵ That is why, to return to Sonenscher’s defence of ‘commercial society’, finding precise terms to describe our social and economic relationships matters.³²⁶ The question of whether ours is a society defined by the division of labour or by the impersonality of capital is a question that should fundamentally affect our view of the prospects of realist thought. Indeed, once realists adopt the frame of politics and economy, they will see that their tussle with moralism has never been conducted on level historical terms.

Eventually, then, the theoretical and historical aspects of the realist’s task must merge together. If what governs our conduct is not a system of ever-more perfect laws, but the slow accumulation of society’s moral judgements, then realist theory ought to aim at shifting the course of that accumulation, from a drift towards opaque, privatised ethics, to an understanding of the humane, complex, contradictory and demanding nature of ethical life, as supposed by each of Smith, Weber, Shklar and Foucault. Weber was emphatic that political practice could not shift opinion like this. But political ideas can and do. Foucault was no less adamant that the purpose of theory was to be found in ‘using philosophy, in bringing it into play even in everyday life’.³²⁷ For him, philosophy and reality were to become one and the same. To keep ethical reflection alive is an exceptionally difficult practical challenge, as Weber has shown us. But in light of that, we ought to recall Schumpeter’s obituary, and its description of Weber as a man who saw that challenge utterly soberly, yet faced it with unsparing commitment. Moral character, after all, is where our judgements ought to begin.

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Conclusion

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We may now finally return to Hont, and to liberalism’s origins as a merger of politics and commerce. On my retelling, with Hont’s reference-point in mind, we can judge the twentieth century to have seen a profound winnowing of the liberal imagination. The modern representative republic receded from view. It was replaced by something akin to a much older vision, that of pure politics. This time, pure politics appeared not in the form of an anti-commercial state, but in the form of processes. Rawls and Buchanan imposed a procedural vision on politics itself – a process of deliberation, a process of moral formation. And these processes generated rules, which we were asked to consider ‘just’.

Perhaps morality can be reconciled to a politics of procedure. But in this essay I have argued that commercial society could not be, and that we must refuse to accept the notion capitalism has been. Economic and social relations are certainly not beyond politics. But they have lives of their own. No procedure, no matter how pure, can adequately make sense of the perpetual churn of civil society. The liberalism of procedure is anchored to the wrong imperatives.

Yet so are its critics. Antagonism towards Rawls and Buchanan is common, but an appreciation of the ethical problems that lie behind their views is not. Rawls and Buchanan must be understood as the willing theorists of a consciously disenchanted age. It is, therefore, by addressing that disenchantment that a more effective response must begin.

As Weber said, our desire for ethical resonance is utterly fundamental to meaningful human life. It is an unfortunate quirk of history that this has been so deeply affected by historical change. Given its significance, however, we have nothing to do but return to thinking in Hont’s terms once more.

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(Note: while the convention within the History faculty is to divide sources by whether they come from the period studied or later, since my ‘period’ ranges up to the present, I have instead taken my primary sources as work by the theorists I discuss in detail, and my secondary sources as the rest.)

1. Istvan Hont (2005) Jealousy of trade: International competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 2.

2. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 2.

3. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 20.

4. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 21; Ibid., p. 21.

5. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 21.

6. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 155.

7. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 155.

8. See Bernard Williams (2005) ‘Realism and moralism in political theory’, in In the beginning was the deed: Realism and moralism in political argument, ed. G. Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 1-17.

9. Michel Foucault (2008) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

10. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 155. Here I am awkwardly trying to avoid calling Hume and Smith ‘liberals’ directly, given my desire to keep to a contextualist account of what liberalism is. On this, see Duncan Bell (2014) ‘What is liberalism?’, Political Theory, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 682-715.

11. Hont, of course, drew plenty of other comparisons with Smith too, including with Rousseau throughout Istvan Hont (2015) Politics in commercial society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, ed. B. Kapossy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). But I focus on his comparison with Hobbes here for several reasons. I discuss Hobbes later on in this essay myself, whilst Hont’s reading of Smith and Rousseau not only focusses more on their similarities than their dissimilarities, it is also contentious in itself: see, for example, Paul Sagar (2022) Adam Smith reconsidered: History, liberty, and the foundations of modern politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 113-142.

12. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 21; Ibid., p. 21.

13. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 92; Ibid., p. 92; Ibid., p. 92.

14. Hont coins the phrase ‘commercial sociability’ in, and uses it throughout, Hont, ‘Politics in commercial society’. (This has since been the subject of some criticism: see Robin Douglass (2018) ‘Theorising commercial society: Rousseau, Smith and Hont’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 501-511.) Sagar’s quotations here are in Paul Sagar (2018a) The opinion of mankind: Sociability and the theory of the state from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 219; Ibid., p. 38; Ibid., p. 38; Ibid., p. 39; Ibid, p. 39; Ibid., p. 39.

15. Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, p. 222; Ibid., p. 222; Ibid., p. 218; Ibid., p. 222.

16. Sheldon Wolin (2014) Politics and vision: Continuity and innovation in Western political thought – expanded edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 259; Ibid., p. 259; Ibid., p. 260.

17. Wolin, ‘Politics and vision’, p. 261.

18. I am not suggesting Dunn explicitly aligns himself with Wolin in the piece I discuss here, but the overlap between the two does not appear to be wholly incidental: of the 1960 edition of Politics and Vision, Dunn wrote that it ‘provided the most impressive synoptic interpretation of politics by any recent Western thinker’, in John Dunn (2005) ‘The dark vision of a small-town US democrat: Politics and Vision’, Times Higher Education, 11 February 2005. Online edn, accessed 9 June 2023: link.

19. I am not suggesting that Dunn is unique in this respect: Sagar, for example, discusses Hume and Locke in Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, pp. 103-138. Sagar also discusses Dunn’s comparison later on in his book: see Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, pp. 236-240.

20. John Dunn (1983) ‘From applied theology to social analysis: The break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Wealth and virtue: The shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. I Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 121.

21. Dunn, ‘From applied theology’, p. 122.

22. Dunn, ‘From applied theology’, p. 120; Ibid., p. 120.

23. Dunn, ‘From applied theology’, p. 121.

24. Dunn, ‘From applied theology’, p. 134.

25. These lectures, of course, ranged much more broadly than that, but in this essay I concentrate on Foucault’s discussion of liberalism and raison d’état in particular.

26. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 9; Ibid., p. 9; Ibid., p. 9; Ibid, p. 10; Ibid, p. 10.

27. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 10.

28. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 10; Ibid., p. 10.

29. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 32; Ibid., p. 32.

30. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 15.

31. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 20. For more on the overlap between Foucault and contextualist history, this time in reference to the strikingly similar research interests of Foucault and J. G. A. Pocock, see Graham Burchell (1991) ‘Peculiar interests: Civil society and governing “the system of natural liberty”’, in The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality: Two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 119-150. On this theme, it may also be interesting to note that Pasquale Pasquino, one of Foucault’s research assistants and a participant in Foucault’s 1980 Paris seminars on nineteenth-century liberal thought, not only visited Cambridge on several occasions, but organised a seminar series at King’s College in 1989-1990, which Michael Sonenscher credits for his interest in Emmanuel Sieyès in Michael Sonenscher (2003) ‘Acknowledgements’, in Sieyès: Political writings, ed. M. Sonenscher, p. vi. Pasquino’s presence in the Paris seminar is mentioned in Stuart Elden (2016) Foucault’s last decade (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), p. 110. Clearly there is much more to be said on this another time.

32. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 45.

33. Burchell, ‘Peculiar interests’, p. 140.

34. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 308; Ibid., p. 309.

35. The index to The Birth of Biopolitics, for example, contains 22 references to Smith, but only four to Hume. See Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 334 and p. 336.

36. Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, p. 61.

37. Smith (2002) The theory of moral sentiments, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 219.

38. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 220.

39. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 210.

40. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 25; Ibid., p. 25.

41. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 23.

42. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 73, Ibid., p. 73.

43. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 61.

44. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 105; Ibid., p. 105.

45. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 105; Ibid., p. 105.

46. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 23.

47. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 94; Ibid., p. 94; Ibid., p. 94.

48. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 96.

49. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 95; Ibid., p. 95.

50. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 96; Ibid., p. 96.

51. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 93; Ibid., p. 93.

52. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 101; Ibid., p. 101; Ibid., p. 101.

53. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 105.

54. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 214; Ibid., p. 215.

55. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 214; Ibid., p. 214; Ibid., p. 214.

56. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 214.

57. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 216; Ibid., p. 215; Ibid., p. 217.

58. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 216.

59. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 216; Ibid., pp. 216-217; Ibid., p. 217; Ibid., p. 217.

60. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 217.

61. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 216; Ibid., p. 216; Ibid., p. 216.

62. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 218.

63. To be clear, my essay has consistently taken quotes from a republication of the 1790 edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, rather than the 1759 edition. This is because I take the later version to offer the most complete statement of Smith’s ideas. For the avoidance of doubt, however, the quotations I use in my discussion of deception are substantially the same in both editions. For the 1759 edition of the book, see Adam Smith (1759) The theory of moral sentiments (first edn) (London: A. Millar, and Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell). Online edn, accessed 9 June 2023: link.

64. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 274; Ibid., p. 274; Ibid., p. 274.

65. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 274; Ibid., p. 274.

66. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, pp. 273-274; Ibid., p. 274.

67. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 217.

68. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 276.

69. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 275; Ibid., p. 275; Ibid., p. 275.

70. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 275; Ibid., p. 275.

71. Adam Smith (1975) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, vol. 1, ed. W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 687; Ibid., p. 687.

72. Smith, ‘Wealth of nations’, p. 687.

73. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 215; Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 283.

74. Eric Schliesser (2017) Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and public thinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 249.

75. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 282. Schliesser endorses Foucault’s reading here in Schliesser, ‘Systematic philosopher’, p. 250.

76. James Buchanan (1964) ‘What should economists do?’ Southern Economic Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, p. 217; Ibid., p. 217.

77. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 273; Ibid., p. 273.

78. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 284; Ibid., p. 284; Ibid., p. 284.

79. Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, pp. 227-228.

80. Sagar, ‘Adam Smith reconsidered’, p. 5.

81. Sagar, ‘Adam Smith reconsidered’, p. 211.

82. Sagar, ‘Adam Smith reconsidered’, p. 211; Ibid., p. 211; Ibid., p. 211.

83. Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, p. 209; Ibid., p. 228.

84. Williams, ‘Realism and moralism’, p. 1.

85. Sagar, ‘Adam Smith reconsidered’, p. 211.

86. This would involve discussing Smith’s historical stages theory, which was, as Hont discussed, rediscovered only in the twentieth century. See Hont, ‘Jealousy of Trade’, pp. 101-102. Foucault, meanwhile, integrates shepherding into the history of governmentality he offers in Michel Foucault (2009) Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). This could present an opportunity to push the comparison further than I have space for here.

87. Detail of this criticism can be found in Elden, ‘Foucault’s last decade’, p. 108.

88. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 109.

89. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 6; Ibid., p. 6.

90. See especially Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, pp. 87-114.

91. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 109.

92. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 108.

93. This famous phrase offers slightly more difficulties than one might expect. It is offered as a direct quote in a number of famous pieces of secondary literature, such as Thomas Lemke (2002) ‘Foucault, governmentality, and critique’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14, no. 3., p. 50, and perhaps most famously of all in Colin Gordon (1991) ‘Governmental rationality: An introduction’, in The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 2. But, rather surprisingly, the phrase does not appear in any of Foucault’s English-translated lectures, as this blog discusses: Jeremy Crampton (2007) ‘Key term: conduct of conduct’, Foucault Blog, 15 May 2007. Online edn, accessed 9 June 2023: link. Per the discussion on that page, however, Foucault is translated as using it in Michel Foucault (1984a) ‘The subject and power’, in Power: The essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. J. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al. (London: Penguin), p. 337. I therefore offer that citation here.

94. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 186; Ibid., p. 186.

95. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 193.

96. Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, p. 48.

97. Michel Foucault (1993) ‘About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: Two lectures at Dartmouth’, ed. M. Blasius, Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 2, p. 204. 

98. The implication here is drawn out clearly in Daniele Lorenzini (2023) ‘Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self’, in Handbook on governmentality, eds. W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing), pp. 22-37. 

99. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 74.

100. Michel Foucault (2010) The government of self and others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-83, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 295.

101. Foucault, ‘Government of self’, p. 255; Ibid., p. 255.

102. Foucault, ‘Government of self’, p. 295.

103. Foucault, ‘Government of self’, p. 292.

104. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 201.

105. For a discussion of Foucault on legitimacy, see Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, p. 7.

106. Michel Foucault (1984b), ‘Politics and ethics: An interview,’ in The Foucault reader, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. C. Porter (New York: Pantheon Books), p. 375.

107. The finding that Weber taught The Wealth of Nations is in Keith Tribe (2008) ‘The composition of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Erster Teil and the influence of Austrian economics’, unpublished draft paper, Political Thought and Intellectual History Research Seminar, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, p. 18. The ‘ethic of responsibility’ is set out in Max Weber (1994) ‘The profession and vocation of politics’, in Weber: Political writings, ed. P. Lassman, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 359.

108. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 216; Max Weber (1994) ‘The nation state and economic policy (inaugural lecture)’ in Weber: Political writings, ed. P. Lassman, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 15. Hennis argues Weber’s view here remains consistent throughout his lifetime, in Wilhelm Hennis (1983) ‘Max Weber’s “central question”, trans. K. Tribe, Economy and Society, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 163-164.

109. The original article from which I quote here is only, so far as I know, available in German, in Max Weber (1894) ‘Was heißt Christlich-Sozial?’ Die christliche Welt. Evang.-Luth. Gemeindeblatt für Gebildete aller Stände, vol. 8, no. 20, pp. 472-477. However, this was quoted at length by Hennis, in a 1987 chapter that was then translated into English by Keith Tribe. The wording here, then, is taken from Tribe’s translation of the passage Hennis quotes in Wilhelm Hennis (1987) ‘Personality and life orders: Max Weber’s theme’, trans. K. Tribe, in Max Weber, rationality and modernity, eds. S. Lash and S. Whimster (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 64.

110. See my previous note. This quote is in Weber, ‘Was heißt Christlich-Sozial?’, pp. 472-477, but the actual wording here is taken from Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’, p. 65.

111. Max Weber (2009) ‘Religious rejections of the world and their directions’, in From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Herth and C. Wright Mills (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 331.

112. Max Weber (1978) Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology, trans. and eds. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 585; Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’, p. 65.

113. Michael Sonenscher (2022) Capitalism: The story behind the word (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 3.

114. Sonenscher, ‘Capitalism’, p. 14; Ibid., p. 14.

115. Sonenscher, ‘Capitalism’, p. 16.

116. Max Weber (2001) The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, trans. S. Kalberg (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 112.

117. Smith, ‘Wealth of nations’, p. 28.

118. Smith, ‘Wealth of nations’, p. 30.

119. Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Edgar Jaffé (2012) ‘Accompanying remarks’, in Max Weber: Collected methodological writings, eds. H. H. Bruun and S. Whimster, trans. H. H. Bruun (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 97. Note that, as the editors point out, Peter Ghosh has found that these remarks were likely written by Sombart. See Peter Ghosh (2010) ‘Max Weber, Werner Sombart and the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft: The authorship of the “Geleitwort” (1904)’, History of European Ideas, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 71-100.

120. Max Weber (2012) ‘The “objectivity” of knowledge in social science and social policy’ in Max Weber: Collected methodological writings, eds. H. H. Bruun and S. Whimster, trans. H. H. Bruun (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 109.

121. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 109; Ibid., p. 109; Ibid., p. 110.

122. Max Weber (2001) ‘Weber’s second reply to Fischer, 1908’, in The Protestant Ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907-1910, eds. D. Chalcraft and A. Harrington, trans. A. Harrington and M. Shields (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 45; Ibid., p. 45.

123. This view is spelled out in Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’.  

124. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 23.

125. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 113; Ibid., p. 120; Ibid., p. 120.

126. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 116; Ibid, p. 116; Ibid., p. 116.

127. Weber, ‘The nation state’, p. 19; Ibid., p. 19; Ibid., p. 19.

128. Quentin Skinner (2002) ‘Moral principles and social change’, in Visions of politics: Volume 1: Regarding method (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 157; Ibid., p. 147; Ibid., p. 147.

129. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 277. I quote Smith here simply to emphasise, again, his similarity to Weber.

130. Skinner, ‘Moral principles’, p. 149; Ibid., p. 149.

131. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 105; Ibid., p. 105. We spoke about this quotation in §2.

132. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 104.

133. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 105.

134. Weber, ‘Religious rejections’, p. 331.

135. Weber, ‘Religious rejections’, p. 333; Ibid., p. 334.

136. Weber, ‘Religious rejections’, p. 334.

137. Peter Ghosh (2014) Max Weber and ‘The Protestant Ethic’: Twin histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 280; Ibid., p. 281.

138. Joseph Schumpeter (1991) ‘Max Weber’s work’, in Joseph A. Schumpeter: The economics and sociology of capitalism, ed. R. Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 226; Ibid., p. 227.

139. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 120.

140. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 120; Ibid., p. 120.

141. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 62; Ibid., p. 62. This involves a jump in the text relative to the previous quotations, but in both cases Weber is discussing the ethics of the Puritans.

142. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 63.

143. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 64.

144. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 124.

145. Weber, ‘Protestant ethic’, p. 124.; Ibid., p. 124; Ibid., p. 124.

146. Ghosh, ‘Twin histories’, p. 331.

147. In Ghosh’s words: ‘the testing or proving mechanism of the market operated almost instantly in penalizing or rewarding leadership failure, and so entrepreneurial or leadership presence was required at all times’. Ghosh, ‘Twin histories’, p. 314.

148. Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’, p. 71; Ibid., p. 71.

149. Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’, p. 71; Ibid., p. 71.

150. Hennis, ‘Personality and life orders’, p. 55; Ibid., p. 55.

151. For Weber’s views on this, see Weber, ‘Profession and vocation of politics’.

152. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 275.

153. Weber, ‘Profession and vocation of politics’, p. 360.

154. The definition Weber offers in the former case is, ‘A state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this ‘territory’ being another of the defining characteristics of the state’. See Weber, ‘Profession and vocation of politics’, pp. 310-311. The definition Weber offers in his Intermediate Reflections is, ‘The state is an association that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.’ See Weber, ‘Religious rejections’, p. 334.

155. As Ghosh puts it, in Economy and Society ‘the state remains conceptually marginal and primitive as always. Even when used as a heading, it is simply a heading and no more’. See Ghosh, ‘Twin histories’, p. 338.

156. For detail on Weber’s use of this term, see Ghosh, ‘Twin histories’, p. 338.

157. Keith Tribe (2014) ‘What is social economics?’, History of European Ideas, vol. 40, no. 5, p. 716.

158. Weber, ‘Profession and vocation of politics’, p. 310.

159. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 109.

160. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 130.

161. Hennis, ‘Weber’s “central question”’, p. 167; Ibid., p. 167; Ibid., p. 167; Ibid., p. 167.

162. Colin Gordon (1987) ‘The soul of the citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on rationality and government’, in Max Weber, rationality and modernity, eds. S. Lash and S. Whimster (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 295.

163. William Galston (2010) ‘Realism in political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 4, p. 408; Ibid., p. 408. I pick this quotation because it recurs elsewhere, for example in Robin Douglass (2020) ‘Hobbes and political realism’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, p. 252. However, in §12 I will return to Galston’s definition, and suggest there are better ways of thinking about what realism might mean.

164. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 119.

165. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 137.

166. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 155.

167. Lionel Robbins (1932) An essay on the nature and significance of economic science (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited). Mentions of Weber appear on p. 2, p. 74, p. 85, p. 96, and p. 133. They are always positive, though Tribe discusses that the possibility that these references were added in later, under Hayek’s influence.

168. We will discuss Knight’s connection to Weber shortly. Mises was one of Weber’s students in Vienna: see Ludwig von Mises (2013) Notes and recollections: With the historical setting of the Austrian School of Economics, ed. B. B. Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), p. 47. This discovery is not mine: rather I owe it to Fiona Machlachlan (2017) ‘Max Weber within the Methodenstreit’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 41, no. 4, p. 1166.

169. This claim appears in Wilhelm Hennis (1991) ‘The pitiless “sobriety of judgement”: Max Weber between Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller – the academic politics of value freedom’, trans. K. Tribe, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 28. The importance of economics for Weber is also emphasised in Keith Tribe (2006) ‘Max Weber and the economic sciences: A lost connection’, in Das Faszinosum Max Weber: Die Geschichte seiner Geltung, eds. K-L. Ay and K. Borchardt (Munich: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft), pp. 313-314.

170. See, for example, Hennis, ‘Pitiless sobriety’; Maclachlan, ‘Within the Methodenstreit’; and Keith Tribe (1995) ‘Historical Economics, the Methodenstreit, and the economics of Max Weber’, in Strategies of economic order: German economic discourse, 1750-1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 66-94.

171. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 117.

172. As with two quotations above, the original text from which I quote here is only, so far as I know, available in German, in Max Weber (1924) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr), p. 419. However, again, this was quoted at length by Hennis, this time in a 1991 article that was then translated into English by Keith Tribe. The wording here is taken thus trom Tribe’s translation of the passage Hennis quotes: see Hennis, ‘Pitiless sobriety’, p. 33.

173. Tribe makes this point with respect to Schmoller in Tribe, ‘Historical Economics’, p. 94; Hennis makes this point with respect to Menger in Hennis, ‘Pitiless sobriety’, p. 31.

174. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 15.

175. Max Weber (2019) Economy and society, ed. and trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 146.

176. Ludwig von Mises (1996) Human action: A treatise on economics – fourth revised edition (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes), p. 126; Ibid., p. 126.

177. Joseph Schumpeter (2006) History of economic analysis, ed. E. B. Schumpeter (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 787.

178. John Neville Keynes (1891) The scope and method of political economy (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited).

179. Robbins’s inclusion is mentioned in Keith Tribe (2021) ‘The scientisation of economics’ in Constructing economic science: The invention of a discipline, 1850-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 336; on Weber’s omission, see Tribe, ‘Historical Economics’, p. 90.

180. Keynes, ‘Scope and method’, p. 59.

181. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 132; Schliesser discusses the Robbins—Keynes connection in Eric Schliesser, ‘The separation of economics from virtue: A historical-conceptual introduction’, in Economics and the virtues: Building a new moral foundation, eds. J. Baker and M. White (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 150.

182. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 117.

183. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 23.

184. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 23; Ibid, pp. 23-24.

185. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 27; Ibid, p. 27; Ibid., p. 27; Ibid. p. 27.

186. Schliesser writes that Robbins’s ‘understanding of economics carried the day within economics after World War II’. See Schliesser, ‘Separation of economics’, p. 151.

187. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 132; Ibid., p. 132.

188. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 139; Ibid., p. 139.

189. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 139.

190. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 140; Ibid., p. 140.

191. Knight’s seminar is discussed in Tribe, ‘A lost connection’, p. 315; Schliesser briefly discusses Knight’s issues with Robbins in Schliesser, ‘Separation of economics’, p. 151.

192. Frank Knight (1935) ‘Intellectual confusion on morals and economics’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 45, no. 2, p. 218.

193. Knight, ‘Intellectual confusion’, p. 218.

194. Knight, ‘Intellectual confusion’, p. 218; Ibid., p. 218.

195. Mises, ‘Human action’, p. 651; Ibid., p. 651; Ibid., p. 651.

196. Mises, ‘Human action’, p. 2; Ibid., p. 2.

197. Mises, ‘Human action’, p. 3; Ibid., p. 3; Ibid., p. 3.

198. Mises, ‘Notes and recollections’, p. 47.

199. James Buchanan (1976) ‘The justice of natural liberty’ The Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 1. For more on Smith’s reception in the US, see Glory Liu (2022) Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish philosopher became an icon of American capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

200. Buchanan, ‘Justice of natural liberty’, pp. 1-2.

201. Buchanan, ‘Justice of natural liberty’, p. 11.

202. James Buchanan (2005) Why I, too, am not a conservative: The normative vision of classical liberalism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing), pp. 99-100.

203. Above all, see David Levy and Sandra Peart (2020) ‘James Buchanan and the return to an economics of natural equals’, in Towards an economics of natural equals: A documentary history of the Virginia School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 22-40. The connection between Buchanan and Rawls is also drawn out in Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska (2021) ‘“A quite similar enterprise … interpreted quite differently”? James Buchanan, John Rawls and the politics of the social contract’, Modern Intellectual History, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1010-1033.

204. John Rawls (2020) ‘The early John Rawls—James Buchanan Correspondence’, in Towards an economics of natural equals: A documentary history of the Virginia School, eds. D. Levy and S. Peart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 36.

205. Rawls, ‘Correspondence’, p. 37.

206. Rawls, ‘Correspondence’, p. 36.

207. John Rawls (1971) A theory of justice (original edn) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press). I use the original edition in what follows because I am concerned with what Rawls said at the time in relation to many of the events under discussion here, rather than what, retrospectively, he regarded the definitive statement of his views.  

208. Christopher Brooke (2010) ‘Distributive justice, from Sidgwick to Rawls (and Hayek)’, talk at LUC The Hague, 15 December 2010. Online edn, accessed 9 June 2023: link.

209. That Knight taught Buchanan is mentioned in Jackson and Stemplowska, ‘A quite similar enterprise’, p. 1015; the epigraph appears in James Buchanan (2000) The limits of liberty: Between anarchy and leviathan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), shortly before the Contents page.

210. David Levy and Sandra Peart (2007) ‘Efficiency or a “fair” game: John Rawls contra Lionel Robbins’, unpublished paper, p. 2. Online edn, accessed 9 June 2023: link.

211. Levy and Peart ‘Efficiency’, p. 1. For Buchanan’s criticism of Robbins, see Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’.

212. A classic example of this would be Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat (2014) ‘Realism in normative political theory’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 689-701. 

213. James Buchanan (1999) ‘Appendix: Marginal notes on reading political philosophy’ in J. Buchanan and G. Tullock, The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), p. 309.

214. Knight, ‘Intellectual confusion’, p. 218; Ibid., p. 218.

215. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1999) The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), p. 265. For the avoidance of doubt, note that I sometimes take this text to describe ‘Buchanan’s view’, rather than ‘Buchanan and Tullock’s view’ each time, for ease of readability.

216. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 266.

217. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 300; Ibid., p. 300.

218. Buchanan, ‘Marginal notes’, p. 309; Ibid., p. 309; Ibid., p. 309; Ibid., p. 309.

219. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 448.

220. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 448; Ibid., p. 448.

221. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 433; Ibid., p. 432; Ibid., pp. 432-433.

222. Robbins, ‘Essay’, p. 23; Ibid., p. 23; Ibid., p. 24.

223. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 27.

224. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 301; Ibid., p. 302.

225. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 302.

226. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 302.

227. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 301.

228. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 266.

229. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 7.

230. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 14; Ibid., p. 14.

231. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 301.

232. Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’, p. 214; Ibid., p. 214.

233. Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’, p. 217; Ibid., p. 217.

234. Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’, p. 217.

235. Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’, p. 221.

236. Buchanan, ‘Justice of natural liberty’, p. 3.

237. This quotation was used a few paragraphs ago: Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 7.

238. This I owe to Jackson and Stemplowska, ‘A quite different enterprise’, p. 1022.

239. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 493; Ibid., p. 493; Ibid., p. 493.

240. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 493.

241. John Rawls (1958) ‘Justice as fairness’ The Philosophical Review, vol. 67, no. 2, p. 174.

242. Rawls, ‘Justice as fairness’, p. 176.

243. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 31; Ibid., p. 31.

244. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 396.

245. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 461.

246. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 461; Ibid., p. 461.

247. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 462.

248. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 467; Ibid., p. 468; Ibid., p. 467.

249. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 472.

250. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 473; Ibid., p. 475.

251. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 474.

252. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 477; Ibid., p. 477.

253. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 261.

254. Matt Sleat (2014) ‘Realism, liberalism and non-ideal theory: Or, are there two ways to do realistic political theory?’, Political Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, p. 34.

255. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 477.

256. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 23. We discussed this quotation in §2.

257. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 129.

258. Buchanan, ‘Justice of natural liberty’, p. 6; Ibid., p. 6.

259. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 263; Ibid., p. 263; Ibid., p. 263; Ibid., p. 263.

260. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 131.

261. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 129.

262. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 309.

263. Daniel Bell (1960) The end of ideology: On the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties (New York: Free Press).

264. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 309; Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 263.

265. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 23.

266. Sleat, ‘Realism, liberalism’, p. 34.

267. Buchanan and Tullock, ‘Calculus’, p. 252.

268. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 275. We spoke about this quotation in §3.

269. For discussion of this, see Richard Bourke (2022) ‘History and normativity in political theory: The case of Rawls’, in History in the humanities and social sciences, eds. R. Bourke and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 165-193.

270. John Rawls (2001) Justice as fairness: A restatement, ed. E. Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 82.

271. The Hobbesian nature of Kant’s political thought is discussed in Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, p. 223.

272. This claim is made in Douglass, ‘Hobbes and political realism’, p. 251.

273. Williams, ‘Realism and moralism’, p. 3.

274. Williams, ‘Realism and moralism’, p. 4.

275. Sleat, ‘Realism, liberalism’, p. 31.

276. Sleat, ‘Realism, liberalism’, p. 31.

277. Thomas Hobbes (1996) Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 117; Ibid., p. 117.

278. Douglass, ‘Hobbes and political realism’, p. 256; Ibid., p. 256; Ibid., p. 265; Ibid., p. 256; Ibid., p. 256.

279. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 261.

280. Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, p. 70; Ibid., p. 70.

281. Hont, ‘Jealousy of trade’, p. 20.

282. The notion that Hobbes’s project is an eirenic one I owe to Quentin Skinner (2008) Hobbes and republican liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 179.

283. Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, p. 120; Ibid., p. 120; Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 527.

284. Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, p. 145; Ibid., p. 145.

285. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 109.

286. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 125; Ibid., p. 126.

287. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 23.

288. Judith Shklar (2023) ‘Rights in the liberal tradition’ Political Studies, vol. 71, no. 2., p 287; Judith Shklar (1984) Ordinary vices (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press), p. 3; Ibid., p. 4.

289. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 201.

290. Judith Shklar (1989) ‘The liberalism of fear’ in Liberalism and the moral life, ed. N. Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 27; Ibid., p. 27.

291. Buchanan, ‘Marginal notes’, p. 309; Ibid., p. 309.

292. Buchanan, ‘Marginal notes’, p. 310.

293. Judith Shklar (1964) Legalism: An essay on law, moral and politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 1.

294. Smith, ‘Moral sentiments’, p. 214.

295. We discussed this earlier, in §6.

296. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, p. 172.

297. Edward Hall and Matt Sleat (2017) ‘Ethics, morality and the case for realist political theory’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 3, p. 279; see Galston, ‘Realism in political theory’.

298. Hall and Sleat, ‘Ethics, morality’, p. 280.

299. Hall and Sleat, ‘Ethics, morality’, p. 283; Ibid., p. 283; Ibid., p. 287; Ibid., p. 287.

300. Hall and Sleat, ‘Ethics, morality’, p. 290.

301. Williams, ‘Realism and moralism’, p. 8.

302. Hall and Sleat, ‘Ethics, morality’, p. 287.

303. Sleat, ‘Realism, liberalism’, p. 31; Ibid., p. 31.

304. See, for example, Matt Sleat (2021) ‘Realism and political normativity’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 25, pp. 465-478. I will refer to this work again shortly.

305. Sleat, ‘Realism and political normativity’, p. 474; Ibid, p. 474.

306. Sleat, ‘Realism and political normativity’, p. 474.

307. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 243.

308. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 242; Ibid., p. 242; Ibid., p. 242.

309. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 243.

310. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 243; Ibid., p. 245.

311. Katrina Forrester (2012) ‘Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and political realism’ European Journal of Political Theory vol. 12, no. 3, p. 255; Ibid., p. 255; Ibid., p. 255.

312. For the avoidance of any doubt, Smith and Weber’s timelines do not quite align, in that Weber clearly thought capitalism had begun to deprive us of universal meanings prior to and during the period that I have said commercial society was so ethically meaningful for Smith. But, as I mentioned in §5, I take questions like these to be legitimate matters for interpretative disagreement, and therefore do not see this as consequential for my argument. I will return to the importance of such historical interpretation shortly.

313. Sleat, ‘Realism, liberalism’, p. 31.

314. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 243.

315. Sleat, ‘Realism and political normativity’, p. 474.

316. Weber, ‘Economy and society: an outline’, p. 585.

317. Foucault, ‘Security, territory’, p. 193; Ibid., p. 193; Ibid., p. 193.

318. Rawls, ‘Theory of justice’, p. 467; Ibid., p. 472.

319. Shklar, ‘Legalism’, p. 28; Ibid., p. 28; Ibid., p. 28.

320. Shklar, ‘Ordinary vices’, p. 5; Ibid., pp. 248-249; Ibid., p. 249, Ibid., p. 249.

321. John Dunn (1990) ‘Introduction’, in The economic limits to modern politics, ed. J. Dunn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 6.

322. Dunn, ‘Economic limits’, p. 7.

323. For a discussion of Williams’s ‘critical theory principle’ that raises a number of pertinent issues here, see Paul Sagar (2018b) ‘Legitimacy and domination’ in Politics recovered: Realist thought in theory and practice, ed. M. Sleat (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 114-139. For a criticism of liberalism as defeatist, see Samuel Moyn (2022) The Cold War and the canon of liberalism: The Carlyle Lectures 2022, University of Oxford. Online edn, accessed 9 June 2022: link.

324. For the claim that realists find themselves on the periphery, see Sagar, ‘Opinion of mankind’, p. 218.

325. Bernard Williams (2011) Ethics and the limits of philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge Classics), p. 194.

326. We discussed this in §5.

327. Foucault, ‘Government of self’, p. 240.