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On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

John Gray
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Extract

The argument of this paper, which is conducted at two distinct levels of abstraction, has four parts. First, I consider how the disputed character of the concept of freedom bears on the definition of liberalism. This will be done by examining the contrasting accounts of the concept of freedom advanced by Felix Oppenheim and Sir Isaiah Berlin: my conclusion is that the contestability of the concept of freedom does not constitute an insuperable obstacle to formulating a working definition of liberalism. Secondly, I consider the general thesis that some, if not all, of the central concepts of social and political thought have an essentially contestable character, and look in particular at the application of this thesis to the concept of the ‘political’. Thirdly, I consider some aspects of the theories of distributive justice advanced by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, concluding that the supposedly contractarian mode of argument adopted by each of these writers is insufficient to yield the distributive principles specified, which must rather rest upon definite normative commitments and quasi-empirical assumptions about man and society. Fourthly, I explore the prospects of a procedural approach to questions of distributive justice, and I claim for such an approach a special congruence with basic liberal principles regarding equality and freedom. The substantive result of these arguments is that, within the conceptual framework of the liberal tradition, a just distribution is any that emerges from background economic and political institutions protecting equal freedom. The methodological or metatheoretical result is that, in virtue of the contestability and indeterminacy of the constitutive concepts and regulative principles of political discourse, my arguments fail to be demonstrative, having a persuasive and dialectical rather than a deductive form. If my arguments can be sustained, these are features of the paper it shares with every other essay in social philosophy.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 385 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 Cranston, Maurice, ‘Liberalism’, in Edwards, Paul, ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1972), Vol. 4, p. 458.Google Scholar I am indebted to Hillel Steiner for directing me to this quotation.

2 See Hayek, F. A., Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), Chap. 4.Google Scholar

3 Oppenheim, Felix, ‘“Facts” and “Values” in Politics’, Political Theory, 1 (1973), 54–78, p. 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 I owe this colourful metaphor to Hillel Steiner, who employs it in an (as yet unpublished) paper on ‘Liberty, Liberalism and Justice’, delivered to the Edinburgh IPSA Congress of August, 1976.

5 Hart, H. L. A., ‘Are there any natural rights?’ Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955), 177–91.Google Scholar

6 Hart, H. L. A., ‘Rawls on liberty and its priority’, University of Chicago Law Review, XL (1973), 534–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Gallie's paper is reprinted in Black, Max, ed., The Importance of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962).Google Scholar A very similar account of the contestability of many of our concepts was elaborated by Stuart Hampshire, when he asserted in his book Thought and Action (New York: Viking Press, 1959)Google Scholar that there are ‘some concepts that are permanently and essentially subject to question and dispute and are recognized to be at all times questionable’ (p. 230). Among these ‘essentially questionable and corrigible concepts’ Hampshire places the concepts of morality and politics and of mind and action. The distinction between a term's meaning and the criteria of its correct application, which Hampshire draws upon in his account, is one that R. M. Hare was largely responsible for bringing into moral philosophy in Chap. 6 of his The Language of Morals (London: Oxford University Press, 1952)Google Scholar, and it is likely that Rawls owes a debt to Hare when he makes his well-known distinction between the concept of justice and rival conceptions of it in A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 5–6, 9–10.Google Scholar

Other important treatments of essential contestability include: Connolly, W. E., Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1974)Google Scholar, and MacIntyre's, Alasdair ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’, Ethics, LXXXIV (1973–1974), 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A brief (in many respects inadequate) statement of my own view of essential contestability may be found in my paper ‘On the Essential Contestability of Some Social and Political Concepts’, Political Theory, V (1977), 331–48.Google Scholar I owe my understanding of some of the defects of Gallie's approach to Ernest Gellner's review of Gallie's book in Ratio, IX (1967), 49–66Google Scholar, reprinted as ‘The Concept of a Story’ in Gellner, 's Contemporary Thought and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974)Google Scholar, and I have profited from reading David Miller's unpublished paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Political Theory’.

8 Connolly, , Terms of Political Discourse, pp. 9–14.Google Scholar The quoted sentence occurs on p. 14.

9 Quoted in Gellner, , Contemporary Thought and Politics, p. 99.Google Scholar

10 Steiner, , ‘Liberty, Liberalism and Justice’, p. 1.Google Scholar

11 Maclntyre, A., ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ in Wilson, B. R., ed., Rationality (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), p. 62.Google Scholar

12 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), Part 1, Section 242.Google Scholar

13 The quotation occurs on p. 100 of Feinberg's, JoelSocial Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar, where Katzner's arguments are also discussed.

14 See Berlin', s ‘Equality as an ideal’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LVI (1955–1956), 301–26Google Scholar, for a development of this claim.

15 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 22.Google Scholar I am indebted to Hillel Steiner for much of my understanding of some of the defects in Nozick's argument, which are explored in Steiner's paper, ‘Can an Invisible Hand Sign a Social Contract?’ published in Birnbaum, P., Lively, J., Parry, G., eds., Democracy, Consensus and Social Conflict (London: Sage Publications, 1978).Google Scholar

16 See Nozick', s paper, ‘Moral Complications and Moral Structure’, Natural Law Forum, XIII (1968), 1–50Google Scholar, and Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 45–7.Google Scholar

17 MacIntyre, A. C., A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 266, 268.Google Scholar