No secret agents: A liberal theory of political action.

Abstract

Liberalism is a theory of social order according to which political institutions are legitimate insofar as they (1) protect and facilitate citizens' private pursuits and (2) are justified with reasons intelligible and acceptable to all. Critics of liberalism argue that these principles render the idea of political action meaningless in a liberal polity: First, the notion of liberal citizenship becomes an oxymoron since citizenship is a political notion. In practical terms, liberal theory offers no guidance to citizens as to why they should conceive of themselves as members of a political community and how they should relate to one another. Second, the requirement for public justification paralyzes politics and misunderstands the nature of political action; according to the critics, it makes politics all talk and no action. An exegetical study of two 18th-century liberals, Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant, shows that the charges are mistaken at the theoretical level. Contrasting the two thinkers to the anti-liberal Jean-Jacques Rousseau illustrates that a liberal theory need not assume that politics is solely about the pursuit of private ends out of self interest. Montesquieu and Kant offer robust accounts of political action which are sensitive to the contingencies of social life and to the fact that politics can't only be 'all talk.' At the same time, particularly the Kantian account of politics shows that action divorced from talk, that is, from practices that link it with social meanings, is unintelligible. A scrutiny of a variety of contemporary environmental politics as a philosophical case study reveals, further, that the theoretical model of political action--the 'scholar' committed to a reasoned exchange in a community of equals--is applicable in practice. While allowing for diversity in political action, it serves as a standard by which legitimate liberal political action can be distinguished from illegitimate action. At micro-level, legitimate political action is identified as essentially committed to justification to other agents. This entails that the tendency of liberal politics to 'piecemeal' reformism, as opposed to profound attempts at changing the human nature, at the macro-level is a principled aspect of a liberal theory, not a contingent feature.