On the obsolescence of much political philosophy

I strongly suspect that much of political philosophy and political theory and not a little bit of ‘applied,’ policy-salient ethics of the last three to four score years, despite purporting to express eternal propositions that convey what we ought to do, went out of date this week. For, such work presupposes, as a quiet enabling condition, relatively corruption-free bureaucracies and relatively impartial rule of law in which public opinion formation is shaped by social activists, interest groups, and experts in a free press and political parties and in which ‘policy’ is primarily not performative nor aims to divide opposing coalitions but aims to solve social ‘problems.’ (As conservative political theorists and Foucauldians have noted that ‘policy’ aims to solve social ‘problems’ is itself an artifact of the progressive-liberal state.)

By ‘out of date,’ I mean that people literally will stop reading and engaging with it because they cannot imagine why the arguments and distinctions that count as good work are taken to be significant because the underlying puzzles and commitments will seem oddly lifeless and distant in the same way that, say, general equilibrium models simply stopped organizing high theorizing within economics. They will seem neither like models that illuminate foundational problems nor nearby possible worlds that we may wish to achieve.

Such obsoleteness is not just in store for work in liberal political philosophy that has always been a bit uncomfortable to address its own material foundations and existence conditions, but also a lot of writing that understands itself as quite critical of liberal ideology and purports to offer an alternative realist or critical social theory, or even a revolutionary decolonial program. For all such works, which expose hypocrisy and unmask, will seem hopelessly optimistic about their own significance; the truths they indicate will be bagged with wry smiles in generous souls and irritation among the impatient young. The expectation that emancipation and recognition are the natural dynamic of (ahh) social reason will seem hallucinatory.

To avoid confusion, I am not claiming like Descartes or (in some interpretations) Carnap that we are entering an age in which we can simply discard all the philosophy of the past and can start over with secure foundations and new, improved methods. I wouldn’t know of that.

Obviously, I am ‘predicting’ a kind of regime change at the center of Empire that will change how political business is done inside of it and with the rest of world. I suspect the best terms for that will be ‘state capitalism’ and ‘oligarchic mercantilism’ or ‘organized clientelism.’ But I don’t view this as a sudden transformation in which city names and street names are changed or denominations of currencies are switched, or even that major laws will be changed at once.

Rather, I view it is an intensification and expansion of the existing border and security frameworks and practices that allow arbitrary and unaccountable detention, expulsion, torture, and even assassination (I tend to think of the Khashoggi case as trend-setting); that will normalize more shameless grifting for access to the levers of power; that will see the continued erosion of the international human rights framework and the Geneva conventions. And that the pretense of trying to meet ambitious climate goals in coordinated fashion will evaporate altogether—most major political leaders are skipping COP 29 altogether.

With the benefit of hindsight, the ‘war on terror,’ the gigantic bailouts, Brexit, the pandemic lockdowns — all of which have shifted expectations for how the state functions while creating immense profits for well-connected insiders — alongside the inability to create political (and true legal) accountability for January 6 — have created (to speak euphemistically) ‘a demand’ for new kind of political leadership across Pax Americana: in my native Netherlands, the current prime-minister had never been even elected to anything when he was asked to take over by a new ruling coalition. And the examples pile up: after undermining Schengen (which had survived Brexit stronger), an intellectually exhausted German federal government coalition imploded over the budget, and a Franch coalition that is de-jure a minority government and de-facto has given the National Rally an effective veto over policy.

Full disclosure: usually when I make major claims about apparent shifts in the discipline, I don’t have a bone in the fight. (I am not myself a ‘synthetic philosopher’!) But as it happens, I circulated a first draft of a paper on the defense of clientelism among eighteenth century rule of law types; and as 2024 unfolded I don’t view that as only of historical interest anymore. (I also did a lot more research on it since I first circulated, and hope to update the piece soon.)

Spinoza says somewhere that a State is narrowed “when it can’t endure men who act like free men;” in larger context he clearly implies that the political thought of the age is also narrowed. While such narrowing is inevitable that’s compatible with (albeit not deterministically) the horizon of an intellectually fertile period (e.g., Warring states, English civil war, fall of the Roman republic, etc.). For, new intellectual thought leaders that will disdain our recent past will be encouraged and promoted by the institutions that train the ambitious young for leadership positions.

I don’t view the above as a swansong for liberalism. As regular readers know I tend to think of liberalism as a relatively young set of doctrines and commitments. But how to recover its élan as an oppositional and aspirational framework that can aid in thought and collective organization, about that some other time.