This piece contains an overview of the argument I present in the three book manuscripts that I will complete in the spring of 2005, The Trouble with Liberalism, Discovery or Invention? and Reason, the Good, and Rights.. These books are based upon a long manuscript I completed in August of 1994. That manuscript was, in turn, a major expansion and revision of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 1989. I hope to see the three manuscripts published by the end of 2006.

 What follows was written in 1996 and is based on the preface of  my 1994 manuscript. This essay does not present the argument of these three books in any detail. Rather it provides a summary of my approach and of the claims I defend.

Since 1996, my ideas have developed in many ways. In particular, I have tried to show how my ideas are a response to problems I see in some new theories of liberalism, which  can be grouped under the headings of perfectionist liberalism and political liberalism. And I have revised my account of distributive justice. But the most important change is that I now give greater emphasis to the way in which my work calls for a transformation in the goals of political philosophy. This theme was implicit in my earlier work. By making it more explicit, especially in the first volume, The Trouble with Liberalism, I hope to avoid not just misunderstanding but misplaced criticism. (An earlier version of these new ideas about the nature and goal of political philosophy can be found in a paper I hope to post on my web site soon, Three Ends and a Beginning: Theory, Ideology, History and Politics.)

I have not made any changes in this paper over the years except to change the names of the three volumes to match their current names.

The chapters of these three manuscripts are complete and available to interested readers.

I. Introduction

One way to see the history of the last 400 years or so of Western philosophy and political and moral theory is as a conflict between the partisans of discovery and the partisans of invention. The partisans of discovery argue that thought can and must be constrained by confrontation with the world outside us, as it is in itself. The partisans of invention argue that, if thought can be constrained at all, it is only by the social or cultural conventions of our own time and place. The partisans of discovery hold that all knowledge worthy of the name consists of general and abstract theories. The partisans of invention hold that such theories blind us to the particular and concrete features of things. The partisans of discovery look to fixed and certain rules to guide us, in thought and action. The partisans of invention look to the rules which define our own practices of thought and action and claim that even these rules can be changed at will. The partisans of discovery hope that thought will give us the power to control and manipulate the world around us. The partisans of invention hope that thought will enable us to re-create ourselves in exciting and beneficial ways. The partisans of discovery believe in abstract rights that enable us to protect our freedom from external interference. The partisans of invention believe in our internal freedom to adopt new ends. The partisans of discovery would like to distinguish themselves by transcending their own time and place. Their ideal of community is one that is oriented to things as they really are. The partisans of invention would like to distinguish themselves by becoming new and different. Though they sometimes call  for radical revolution, their ideal of community is, paradoxically, often one that is oriented to solidarity with their time and place. The partisans of discovery are characterized by hardness—in their sciences, hearts and, if we are to take certain of their contemporary critics seriously, in other parts of their anatomy. The partisans of invention are characterized by softness.[1]

My aim in Politics and Reason is to show how this conflict can be overcome and why it should be.[2] The impetus for my work is, in the first instance, political and moral in nature. For all of their strengths, liberal democracies are troubled today by seemingly intractable conflicts and problems. These difficulties derive in part from a lack of focus or direction. As in other such times, men and women have turned to philosophers, intellectuals and other scribblers for sustained reflection about politics and morality. And, in recent years, they have been rewarded by an extraordinary variety of serious writing about politics and a renewal of political and moral philosophy. Still, much political and moral philosophy, and writing about politics and morality in general, has not been successful either on its own terms or in coming to grips with the difficulties of our time. The reason for this, I believe, is that even the most radical analyses of our situation have failed to break with our philosophical assumptions about what political and moral philosophy can be. Most serious thinking about politics and society explicitly or implicitly works within the bounds set by the partisans of discovery or the partisans of invention. To be limited in this way, however, is both mistaken on philosophic grounds and a barrier to the most profound and possibly helpful reflections about how we should live with one another. Moreover, these bounds are not just on thought. Given that our ideas about political and moral life are partly constitutive of that life, barriers to new forms of thought are also barriers to political and social renewal and transformation. This is not to say that our conflicts and problems are solely the result of a failure to radically re-think our political and moral lives. But it is to say that we will not be able to address these conflicts and problems seriously unless we adopt new forms of thought about our political and social life.

II. Liberalism

In the first volume of Politics and Reason, The Trouble with Liberalism, I defend this broad indictment of contemporary political and moral thought by criticizing the leading conceptions of the nature of political and moral thought found today, liberalism and historicism. I should immediately add that the liberalism I criticize in Part One of  The Trouble with Liberalism is primarily a particular conception of the nature of political philosophy, rather than a substantive conception of the proper aims of a polity and society.[3] I am primarily concerned with three features of the liberal view of political and moral philosophy. The first is the liberal view of the proper form of a political and moral theory, that is, its conception of what kinds of moral principles and precepts a political and moral theory should give us. I call this “liberal generalism.” The second is the liberal claim that these moral principles and precepts are valid in all times and places. I call this “liberal universalism.” The third is the liberal belief that such a political and moral theory can be rationally compelling to all people. I call this “liberal rationalism.” None of these features of the liberal understanding of the nature of political and moral philosophy should be confused with the liberal view of how a good polity and society should be organized, which I call “substantive liberalism.” (When I talk about the liberal rationalism, universalism or generalism or the package of these three doctrines taken together, I will use the terms “liberalism” or “the liberal conception” unless the kind of liberalism I am discussing is not likely to be clear. When I am talking about the substantive principles of liberalism I am about to identify, I will always use the term “substantive liberalism” or will talk about “liberal democracy”) Similarly, the historicism I criticize in Part Two is another conception of the nature of political philosophy. And, again, when considering historicism I examine three issues, the various historicist accounts of the goals of political and moral philosophy, the different historicist views of where and when moral principles and precepts are valid and the historicist view of how and to what extent we can defend our political and moral views.

In one substantive sense of liberalism, we are (almost) all liberals now. For most of us have learned some important lessons from the liberal tradition, whatever we think of liberal generalism, universalism and rationalism. I, like most of the liberals and the historicists I quarrel with, believe that, in this first substantive sense, liberalism is responsible for most of what is admirable in our public life: the protection of our rights, especially to civil liberty; tolerance for ways different from our own; the rule of law; and the economic prosperity that is due to intellectual and technological progress and to the use of markets to organize economic life. And, like them, I am skeptical about the pursuit of utopia because I am well aware of how easily the human potentiality for evil seems to be realized. Thus, like all substantive liberals, I distrust concentrated power whether it is found in the state, the large corporation or in the people assembled. In this first substantive sense of liberalism, even those we call conservatives can be said to be liberals today, so long as we recognize that their commitment to civil liberty is attenuated when dealing with some matters mainly sexual in nature. There is another substantive sense of liberalism, one which is concerned with minimizing poverty and dependence and reducing inequality in the distribution of the good things life has to offer and, especially, the opportunities to qualify for those good things. Unfortunately, we are not all liberals in this second sense. Still, most of the liberals and  historicists criticize are also liberals in this second substantive sense as well. What, then, is this quarrel about? As I said, it is about the nature of political philosophy. My rejection of the liberal conception of political and moral philosophy should not be taken as a rejection of the substantive political and moral claims of liberals. We can attempt to defend (most of) these substantive claims in terms of a conception of political philosophy that embraces liberal generalism, universalism and rationalism, or in terms of an historicist conception of political and moral philosophy or in terms of other conceptions of political and moral philosophy as well.[4] My view is that those aspects of substantive liberalism that make up (part of) an attractive view of political and moral life cannot be defended satisfactorily in terms of the liberal or the historicist conceptions of political philosophy. The liberal understanding of the nature of political philosophy has clearly failed. And the historicist conception is so unambitious as to leave political and moral thought unhelpful when we need it most. Moreover, the defense of substantive liberalism in terms of liberal generalism, universalism and rationalism and, to a lesser extent, historicism often ties these attractive political and moral ideals to some others that are extremely unattractive.

Liberal generalism, which I focus on in Part One of The Trouble with Liberalism, seeks to discover principles to guide our political life that have a very special form. These principles are supposed to be independent of and neutral between different conceptions of the human good. Central to this liberal generalist conception is the claim that there is no possibility of reasoning about the human nature or human good, that is, about the natural and universal ends of human beings and about what a fulfilling human life would be. This has the theoretical consequence that liberal principles must be formal in that they abstract from any general conception of the good, let alone the particular concerns and ideals of the members of any particular polity. And it leads to the conclusion that there can be no rational justification for the state to enforce or support any particular conception of the good. Political and moral principles must, in other words, be neutral between different conceptions of the good. A state that is not neutral is both unfair and an instigator of political conflict. That a non-neutral state will generate political conflict is particularly serious. For another feature of liberalism is that it is an anti-political political theory.[5] Liberalism hopes to minimize and constrain the role of politics in four ways. First, it sees politics in instrumental terms: Politics is meant to be an instrument to secure extra-political goods such as life, liberty and property, rather than an activity in which human beings can realize the good life or one kind of good life. Second, liberalism looks for fixed and formal principles of political right that can determine the ends politics is meant to serve prior to our actual engagement in politics. Liberal principles of civil liberty, equality of opportunity and distributive justice set external standards which politics is to meet. Ideally, after we delineate these principles, little room is left for our own deliberations and judgments about what goods we ought to attain in politics. Some liberals have even hoped that these principles can be applied in a technical and non-controversial manner. Third, liberals hope to minimize political decision-making by replacing the authority relationships of politics with the exchange relationships of the market.[6] And finally, where authority cannot be avoided, many liberals hope to minimize politics by turning decisions over to those who, by virtue of their technical training, can make neutral and thus presumably fair decisions.

The principles of liberal generalism have traditionally been held to be universally valid. And they have been defended in a particular way that I call liberal rationalism. Liberal rationalists argue that reason can discover that one or another form of liberalism is, without any doubt, true. For some liberal rationalists, reason works by providing an analysis of the origins of political life in a social contract; for others, by finding the principles of morality in pure practical reason itself; for a third group, by identifying pleasure and relief from pain as the sole good; for a fourth, by giving an analysis of the meaning of moral terms; and, for still others, by some combination of these various views. All of these approaches seek to rationally defend a set of universally true and general political and moral principles.

While the earliest liberals sought moral principles that are general, universally valid, and rationally defensible, generalism has turned out to be separable from universalism and rationalism. Many contemporary liberal historicists have tried to defend general, formal and anti-political political and moral principles while rejecting rationalism. Still, there is good reason to wonder whether liberalism in practice can survive the historicization or relativization of its principles.

III. Historicism

In the most general sense, historicism, which I discuss in Part Two of Discovery and Invention, is more a theory of how political and moral principles and judgments can be defended than a theory of the proper form of the principles of political and moral philosophy. Historicism holds that moral reasoning begins and ends with the elucidation and interpretation of the explicit and implicit moral standards of a polity and society. And thus it insists that political and moral ideals are ultimately invented by human beings rather than discovered. From this beginning, historicists draw different conclusions on a number of other issues. Historicists differ, for example, on the issue of universalism and relativism. Some are relativists, who argue that what is good and bad, just or unjust varies from one time and place to another. Others adopt an ethnocentric perspective and are universalists. They claim that what is universally good and bad, just and unjust is determined by what we think here and now. The implications of historicism for the proper form of political and moral principles can also vary. As I have remarked, some contemporary historicists are liberal generalists. They hold that political and moral principles must be general and formal and must constrain the role of politics in our lives. More interesting, however, are the historicists who have tried to break with the liberal generalist conception of the proper form for political philosophy.[7] These particularist historicists give up the search for formal and general political and moral principles that put politics in its place. They are more concerned with the precepts and practices that govern different spheres of life than with overarching principles that determine how all spheres should be arranged. They hold that a wide range of political and social institutions and practices can be legitimate in different times and places. Some go so far as to encourage the acceptance or proliferation of different ways of life within the larger political community. In taking this approach, particularist historicists do not claim that political and moral philosophy must avoid questions of the good. Instead they believe that our political and social practices should reflect our conception of what a good life would be, and our view of the importance of different goods for our lives. And finally these historicists do not share the liberal aversion to politics. They hold that government may legitimately take a wide range of roles, depending upon our political and moral traditions. And they make an important place for active political and moral debate about these traditions and the institutions and practices they support.[8]

IV. Dilemmas of Contemporary Political and Moral Philosophy: Rights

Liberalism and historicism have many defenders. And there is much we can learn from them. But neither of them can give us what we need or should seek from political and moral thought.

First, liberals and historicists cannot provide an adequate defense of the substantive liberal principles we all share. While liberal political ideals have accomplished a great deal, liberal political philosophy has never met its own goals. Liberal generalism, universalism and rationalism, taken together, promise agreed standards by which to evaluate political life. But, they have delivered unending ideological conflict that is only more bitter because each side makes claims to a principled and unquestionable moral truth. After all these years, a fully satisfactory argument for the priority of civil liberty is still hard to come by. We do, thankfully, have a rough consensus about a central range of civil liberties. But we do not have a consensus on the principles by which to resolve disputes about what civil liberty should and should not protect. As a result,, conflict continues about such matters as pornography, hate speech, libel, commercial speech and other issues. Moreover, not only does conflict about these issues appear to be endless but there seems to be no hope of making any rational progress in our debates about them.  Contemporary liberals all support representative democracy. But they do so while averting their eyes from the liberal failure to make the reasons to prefer representative democracy as convincing as they should be. And this theoretical problem is often reflected in the most common barriers to democratic government today, the all too powerful role of state and corporate bureaucracies in our political life. When it comes to distributive justice, the difficulties of liberalism become even more apparent. Here liberals cannot count on a political consensus to hide their philosophic failure, as they do with regard to civil liberty and representative democracy. The basic stance of liberal generalism leaves it incapable of generating anything more than extremely formal and abstract principles of distributive justice of no great plausibility. Even worse, there is more than one such standard: no one, not contractarians, not utilitarians and not libertarians can find the knock-down drag-out argument by which to convince the others. Finally, the liberal generalist search for a form of political and social life that is neutral between different conceptions of the good is a failure in both theoretical and practical terms. The best liberal arguments in favor of civil liberty, representative democracy and a conception of distributive justice smuggle in an unacknowledged account of the human good. Moreover, although liberals are opposed to government programs that provide non-neutral common goods, liberal democracies violate that principle every day. Most of us cannot conceive of a satisfactory form of political and social life that does not provide non-neutral common goods. In addition, while liberal principles lead us to reject the provision of non-neutral goods in theory, in practice they lead us to be biased in favor of certain common goods rather than others. Those common goods that can plausibly be said to lead to economic growth are welcomed in liberal democracies. Those that cannot, such as support for the arts, are always subject to question.

There are a variety of reasons for the failure of liberal political philosophy to defend substantive liberal principles. But the liberal denial of the possibility of reasoning about the human good plays a role in all of the problems I have just mentioned. So long as we deny the possibility of reasoning about the human good, we will not be able to develop a satisfactory defense of civil liberty and democracy. Nor will we find plausible principles of distributive justice. For the best way to defend civil liberty and representative democracy is to insist that they are a pre-requisite for reasoning about the good. And formal principles of distributive of justice can only make sense if we take them to require completion by means of a conception of the good. However, once we begin to think about these issues in light of reasoning about the human good, we will have broken almost entirely with liberal form of political and moral philosophy.

If only because of its modesty, historicist forms of political philosophy sometimes offer better support for substantive liberal ideals than liberal forms of political philosophy. Historicists tell us to forget about the search for unquestionable principles with which to defend substantive liberalism and to rest content with the consensus on our political ideals.[9] Historicism, especially in its particularist form, can also generate a way of looking at questions of distributive justice that better fits our common judgments than the more formal and abstract principles of liberalism. But, historicism does not have the resources to resolve or even to suggest ways in which to resolve the moral disputes about liberty, democracy and distributive justice that continue in the liberal democracies. And a large part of the problem is that, while historicism recognizes the importance of a view of the human good in political and moral thought, it denies that we can transcend or radically criticize the conceptions of the good found in our own polity or society. Thus it gives us only the most limited means by which to resolve disputes about the good. Moreover, there are reasons to be concerned about the ability of historicism to preserve our consensus on liberal principles or to protect and defend it against the challenges that are likely to arise in the future. If we support the principles of civil liberty and democracy solely because they are our own, it is not clear that we will continue to make sacrifices to defend them when it becomes difficult or inconvenient for us to do so. Once we begin to see the protection of civil liberty not as an absolute moral requirement but as a set of restraints we place on ourselves, we will soon ask whether our purposes are always served by living within these restraints. And it is evident that our answer to this question will often be no. The ease with which ideologues on both the left and right have called our liberties into question in recent years is one indication of where an historicist defense of civil liberty soon leads.

V. Dilemmas of Contemporary Political and Moral Philosophy: the Good

The second problem with liberalism and historicism is that they do not show us how rational thought can help us deal with some of the central political and social concerns of our time. Many contempo­rary political and social conflicts revolve around issues of the human good. This is not entirely evident if all one means by political conflict is the latest battle between Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But even in Washington, political disputes that center, either explicitly or implic­itly, on deep questions about the human good have become common. Consider debates about our relation to the environment;  the character of work; the best form of community life; the proper relationship be­tween men and women or how our children should be educated. Political philosophers may deny that reasoning about the human good is possi­ble and defenders of liberalism and historicism may say that claims about the human good have no justifiable place in public debate or policy. But our public policies, and the arguments we make about them, still reflect our view of the human good.

When liberals try to deal with these questions, the results are often painful to see. Since they deny that reasoning about the human good is possible, liberals usually retreat into silence when faced with questions about the human good. Even worse is the liberal tendency to incessantly invoke rights and call for a government that is neutral with regard to different conceptions of the good. The multiplication of rights is more a hindrance than a help in thinking about the matters I mentioned in the last paragraph. We are not thinking seriously about our environmental problems if our efforts are devoted to working up a liberal theory of the rights of plants. Moreover, with the vast expansion of government in this century, the call for neutral government is thoroughly dishonest. And yet, to the extent we still believe in it, the desire for neutral government stands in the way of attaining many important common goods.

Historicism can be somewhat more helpful, provided that historicists put aside the liberal generalist form of political philosophy. But historicism is faced with a serious difficulty when it comes to questions of the good. We have too many conflicting conceptions of the good in our pluralistic polity and society. Think, for example, of all the different views in our political community about the proper roles for men and women. No interpretation of these different views can show them all to be mere variants of the same basic ideals. Historicists deny that there is any human nature or set of universal human wants that underlie the variety of views found in different polities and societies, in our own pluralistic polity and society and, in many cases, in ourselves. Thus historicism can provide no reasons to prefer one view or another. But that leaves us adrift, both as individuals who must choose how to live our lives and as members of a polity and society who must make political choices that will necessarily reflect some view of the human good. Some historicists say we must live with radical choices of this sort. But this response forecloses the possibility of making discoveries about human nature or ourselves that might help us live better lives. And it certainly prevents us from engaging in rational debate with those who disagree with us. Historicism promises to respect the traditions of our own polity and society. But it denies that reason has any power to heal the divisions within our polity and society nor justify our choices to pursue one of view of the good rather than another.

Seen against the many serious and, in some cases, enlightening attempts to raise questions about the human good in our time, liberal and historicist strictures may seem rather besides the point. Conservatives have raised concerns about the decline of moral authority. Egalitarians point out that the lives of the poor are blocked and impoverished, and not just in monetary terms. Communitarians have called our attention to the untoward consequences of individualism on our own individual and common lives. Environmentalists have made us aware of the costs to ourselves and the world around us of our efforts to conquer nature. Socialists point out that alienation is still too plausible a description of the work lives of most people in the West. Participatory democrats claim that a sense of social solidarity and control over our work is impossible without a democratization of every day life, particularly in the corporation and local community. Minority groups including African Americans and Gay and Lesbian activists have shown how discrimination remains a pervasive feature of our lives, not least in cultural practices that substitute prejudice for rational debate. Feminists have challenged assumptions about the place of men and women that have gone unquestioned for millennia. And practically everyone recognizes that the political life of the liberal democracies is marred by a troubling mixture: on the one hand, unending and unsatisfiable demands from special interest groups and, on the other, an extraordinary lack of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics among the citizenry at large.

When our descendants look back at our time, I think they will marvel at this explosion of new perspectives about the human good and the good polity and society. But they will also wonder why all of this ardent reflection has not really invigorated our political and social life. They will wonder why these new points of view have so often been expressed in an extreme and irrational form. They will regret the many missed opportunities for true dialogue and debate among and between these various groups. And they will be disturbed at the failure of so many intelligent and well educated people to question their own dogmas, especially about the best way to live. My guess is that these failures of political and moral reflection will be blamed to a large extent on the philosophical strictures of liberalism and historicism. It should come as no surprise that the field left open by the failures of liberalism and historicism to address questions of the human good have so often been filled by extreme and irrational views. Nor should we wonder why people educated to believe that reasoning about the human good is impossible are unwilling to examine seriously points of view that explicitly or implicitly question this premise. Given the barriers to thought found in liberalism and historicism, we can understand why it is so difficult for most of us to articulate our sense of the main tasks facing the liberal democracies today. Again, there are other reasons, rooted in the nature of our political and social practices, for this failure. But the denial of the possibility of reasoning about the human good found in liberalism and historicism is implicit in our political and social practices. To question them, we must re-open avenues of thought that are now closed.

VI. Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Political and Moral Thought

To think in depth about our political and moral lives, then, we must break with the barriers placed on such thought by liberalism and historicism. But this is no easy task. For standing behind both liberalism and historicism are large edifices of philosophic thought. The liberal and historicist denials of the possibility of reasoning about the human good however are rooted in particular philosophical psychologies, or understandings of the nature of human ends and actions. Most liberals accept one or another of the naturalist philosophical psychologies while most historicists accept the interpretavist view. These philosophical psychologies are, in turn, tied to the broad metaphysical and epistemological positions I call naturalism and historicism.

These are large claims, not necessarily evident at first glance. In The Trouble with Liberalism I can only sketch the connections between the political and moral theories I discuss and the larger philosophical perspectives of naturalism and interpretavism. I try to make good on these claims in chapters 1 and 2 Discovery or Invention?, which focus on questions of philosophical psychology and philosophy of political and social science seen against the background of the broader philosophical tendencies of naturalism and interpretavism.

VII. Naturalism

In chapter 1 of Discovery or Invention? I discuss and criticize the view I call naturalism. Naturalism offers a path by which human beings can presumably discover the truth about the world around them and about themselves. It is both so complicated, and so dominant in our time, that it is hard to see the fundamental presuppositions that underlie the many varieties of contemporary naturalism. On the interpretation I offer, there are three central elements of naturalist philosophy.

First, naturalists share with the entire philosophical tradition a metaphysical aim, to discover the truth about the world as it is in itself. Second, naturalists hold that all thought or language consists in representations of the world that are prior to and independent of our other transactions with the world or the things in it. These representations stand apart from the world as it is in itself. Our task is to link our representations to the world. And, we accomplish this task in large part by reflexively examining our processes of representation. On the basis of the first two elements, naturalists conclude that we can best understand the world as it is in itself by means of the methods and/or the results of the natural sciences. The natural sciences thus provide the very model of a modern intellectual inquiry. Naturalists disagree about how to defend this third claim. Some hold that we can find an epistemological framework that gives us the certain and fixed criteria by which we can evaluate any belief or theory about the world. This framework constrains our representations by telling us that the only legitimate form of inquiry is one that is scientific in nature, that discovers the general laws that govern the processes of mechanistic causation. Other naturalists insist that metaphysics comes first. They take it that the fundamental natural science, physics, has discovered the nature of the world is as it is in itself. Still other naturalists avail themselves of both lines of thought. And all naturalists argue that the proof of their epistemological or metaphysical doctrines lies in the power natural science gives us to manipulate and control the world around us.

However one defends it, the scientism of naturalism has important consequences for dealing with the phenomena of human action, political and social life and morality. For our usual way of understanding these things is, to use the common philosophical term, intentional in nature. We cannot explain human action unless we interpret the desires and beliefs of human beings and show how they are more or less rationally connected to human actions. At the same time, we must understand these actions in the context of the political and social practices that give them meaning. But, to put it mildly, it is not obvious that this usual way of understanding intentional phenomena is compatible with the scientific emphasis on general laws and mechanistic causation.

VIII. Naturalist Philosophical Psychology

Over the course of a long history, naturalists have put forward three conceptions of human action that are meant to reconcile the intentional understanding of human action with their metaphysical or epistemological understanding of natural science. I call these views subjectivism, behaviorism and centralism. Subjectivism, the view invented by Descartes, says that we can look inside ourselves to discover our ends and beliefs. Behaviorism says that our ends and beliefs can be reduced to our propensity to engage in certain movements. And, in its most prominent formulation today, centralism says that our ends and beliefs consist of computational states in an formal-logical language of  thought. But, despite their enormous differences, these three conceptions share some very basic elements. On all three views, our final ends or wants—those we seek for their own sake—are not chosen by us but are taken as given. [10] We simply have these wants and act on them. In addition, these wants are constraining—to have an unsatisfied want is to be unsatisfied, distressed, unhappy. And these wants are independent of our representations or thoughts about of them. Because they share these three presuppositions, subjectivism, behaviorism and centralism all deny that reasoning about the human good is possible. For if our ends are given, constraining, and independent of our representations, there is no possibility of choosing different ends and thus no role for reason in determining what our final ends should be.

By showing that reasoning about the good is impossible, naturalism undergirds one of the central claims of liberal political philosophy. The liberal desire for unchanging and formal moral rules is also supported by the epistemological naturalist insistence that thought must be constrained by fixed criteria of justified belief. Yet, while naturalism provides some support for liberalism, I also show that it can be used to justify technocratic conceptions of politics that often burst the constraints of liberalism. Moreover, certain features of naturalism ultimately call into question the very possibility of political and moral reasoning entirely.

I criticize these various aspects of naturalism in both The Trouble with Liberalism and Discovery or Invention?.  At the end of chapter 1 of Discovery or Invention?, I focus on the inadequacies of the three naturalist philosophical psychologies. I show that because of their common elements, none of these philosophical psychologies can explain important phenomena of human life—uncertainty and mistakes about our ends, self-deception and prudential action—or important phenomena of political and social life—mass irrationality and political and social transformation.

IX. Historicism and Interpretavism

In chapter 2 of Discovery or Invention? I discuss the antithesis to the naturalist philosophical psychologies, interpretavism. My own philosophical psychology accepts much of the interpretavist point of view. So, rather than start with broader metaphysical and epistemological themes, I begin this chapter with an account of the main features of human action and political and social life. Central to the interpretavist critique of naturalism is the claim that these phenomena must be understood in intentional terms. Human action must be interpreted in a holistic manner that exhibits the essential rationality of what we do and that places our actions in the context of our political and social practices and constitutive meanings. And the way in which the phenomena of human life are partly constituted by language—by our concepts, beliefs, and theories—must be grasped. Such an account of human phenomena is not reducible to the non-intentional natural sciences, as some contemporary naturalists have finally recognized. However, these naturalists believe that there is no room for legitimate inquiry into anything having to do with human beings other than the physical sources of human movements. Interpretavists rightly reject the ultimately self-defeating and incoherent claim that we can dispense with our practice of attributing beliefs and desires to others and ourselves.

X. Interpretavist Philosophical Psychology

The interpretavist account of our understanding of human action and political and social life eventuates in a profound critique of naturalism. Reflection on the nature of language and its role in human thought shows that the hope of epistemological naturalists to find a framework for knowledge is forlorn. The claim that the methods or results of the natural sciences are universal is undermined by the existence of indispensable forms of knowledge that need not rely on general laws and that are non-scientific in nature, that is, the intentional understanding of human ends and action. The interpretavist claim that explicit, formal-logical thought rests upon implicit know-how casts doubt on representationalism. Representations of the world are only possible for a creature that has a wide range of non-representational interactions with the world. And the notion of a world as it is in itself is called into question by the possibility of alternate, non-reducible and irreplaceable descriptions of what are, in a sense, the same phenomena.  We can see the movements of human bodies as merely movements to be explained in neurophysiological (and ultimately physical) terms or as human actions to be explained in intentional terms. The latter description is not reducible to the former, nor is it eliminable. And thus there is no reason to suppose that either one of these descriptions—or any possible descriptions—somehow gets at the world as it is in itself.

 Whereas I reject naturalism root and branch, this much of the interpretavist view I accept. The difficulties for interpretavism arise when we ask whether there are any grounds for choosing between one or another conception of our final desires, that is, the desires we seek to satisfy for their own sake. Interpretavism opens a large space for human invention in developing new conceptions of our ends. The key question is whether, on the interpretavist conception, that space is in any way constrained by the possibility of discovery. Most contemporary interpretavists hold that it is not. They insist that we are interpretation “all the way down.”[11] On this view, there are no natural and universal human ends that underlie our own self-interpretations. 

This conclusion has extremely important implications, and not just for philosophical psychology or political and moral thought. In ways I briefly discuss in chapter 2 of Discovery or Invention? and then return to in chapter 5 of that book, interpretavism leads to historicism not just about political and moral matters but about everything else as well. Historicists holds that our views about the natural and social worlds are not independent of the ends we pursue when developing our beliefs and theories about these things. As a result, if there can be no discovery about our ends, then there can be no discovery about the natural world around us.

While naturalist philosophical psychology holds that human ends are discovered, interpretavism holds that they are invented, by us or our ancestors. On this view, our ends are, in the first place, the result of socialization. To have a certain end is to have been brought up to seek certain goods rather than others. We also have the capacity to reflect on our ends and conclude that they should be modified. Because our ends go no deeper than our conception of our ends, we can always choose to revise them. Thus, whereas naturalism holds that our ends always constrain us, interpretavism holds that they constrain us only so long as we let them—which is to say that they really do not constrain us at all. And whereas naturalism holds that our ends are given, interpretavism claims that we can choose our ends. For interpretavism, however, our grounds for choice are limited. We can evaluate some of our ends in light of others. But when our ends are deeply in conflict, we can have no reason for choosing one or the other. Our choices are, in this sense, partly radical in nature. We must choose without reasons. Moreover, we ultimately have no reasons for choosing the ends we have been socialized to pursue. If no ends necessarily constrain us, then our choices are, in the last place, entirely radical in nature. We can choose anything but can have no reason for our choice.

Some interpretavists understand this situation in what I call an existentialist manner, and revel in the radical freedom of human beings. Others adopt what I call a constitutive understanding of radical choice and claim that we have reasons to act on the desires we find ourselves with, even though we can give no reasons for choosing these desires. Thus, the interpretavist philosophical psychology, like the naturalist one, can support a variety of political and moral conclusions. The existentialist version of interpretavism leads to the Nietzsche’s glorification of the will to power or Sartre’s apotheosis of authenticity. The more plausible and attractive constitutive version lends support to historicist political and moral thought. And it is also the source of the difficulties of this form of political philosophy. Because historicists cannot give us any rational guidance about what to do when we find ourselves with ends that are deeply in conflict, it holds that there are no discoveries we can make about which path will best lead us to individual or collective fulfillment.

At the end of chapter 2 of Discovery or Invention? I show that the interpretavist philosophical psychology is inadequate. Because it denies that our ends constrain us, interpretavism cannot account for the phenomena of individual and political and social life that also elude the grasp of naturalism. Mistakes and uncertainty about our ends, self-deception, weakness of will, mass irrationality and political and social transformation are inexplicable if human ends are ultimately invented.

XI. Getting off the Merry-go-round of Modern Thought

So, in The Trouble with Liberalism and the first two chapters of Discovery or Invention?, I hope to have established two claims: First, that the barriers to political thought erected by liberalism and historicism rest on the philosophical claims of, respectively, naturalism and interpretavism.[12] And second, that the programs of the partisans of discovery and the partisans of invention, taken by themselves, are bankrupt. Neither tendency can give us a remotely satisfactory account of the nature of human ends and of how some important phenomena of individual and political and social life are even possible. And neither one provides us with a plausible view of the human capacity to come to reasoned conclusions about natural and political and social phenomena or about how we should evaluate our own lives or our polity and society. The partisans of discovery have not been able to find abstract rules by which to evaluate political and social life. They have not been able to establish a framework for the pursuit of knowledge that can tell us when our beliefs are rationally justified beliefs.  And they have not given us good reasons to think that the basic natural sciences, and only them, tell us about the world as it is in itself. The partisans of invention have held that evaluative and explanatory reasoning works only within certain traditions of discourse, invented by men and women and constituted by particular standards and criteria of good and bad argument. And thus they claim that there is no possibility of rational argument between those who adhere to different traditions. This result leaves pluralistic polities and societies—and those of us who have been socialized to find more than one moral tradition plausible—lacking any rational basis for choosing to live or think one way or another.

Modern philosophical and political thought has for too long been on a self-propelled merry-go-round like the ones we see in playgrounds. As partisans of The Trouble with Liberalism, we fight over the direction the merry-go-round turns. But so long as we remain on it, we can only keep going around and around in a circle. It is past time to get off. What jumping off involves is, in general, not hard to discern. Isn’t it plain to see that there is something right about both views? Isn’t it almost evident that there is an element of discovery and an element of invention in all spheres of life? To deny one or the other of these elements you have to be willful or scared. You have to be so caught up in a philosophical or ideological position that you are blind to the arguments of the other side. Or you have to be frightened by the possibilities opened up by a view that combines invention and discovery.

To  know that we should jump off the merry-go-round is not to know how to go about doing so, however. To prepare to jump, we have to do two things. First, we need to start looking not inwards towards our opponents but outwards towards the base upon which the merry-go-round rests. We have to find philosophical reasons for overcoming this seemingly endless conflict. And, as usual in the history of philosophy, we will only be able to do this if we identify and then reject or modify the presuppositions shared by the two contending positions. Naturalism and historicism share three central ideas that stand in the way of reconciling discovery and invention: a conception of rationality, a rejection of possibility of reasoning about the human good and a set of expectations about how principles of political right should regulate political and social life.

Second, we will have to recognize that we always look inwards when we are on a merry-go-round because looking outwards makes us dizzy. We have to understand the human aspirations or fears that make us cling to one tendency or another. And we have to learn how to combine discovery and invention in a way that allows us to satisfy most of these aspirations. Only then we will have the courage to look outwards and jump.

I say something in these three books about the aspirations and fears that keep us on the merry-go-round and how to find new ways of meeting them. But the last half of Discovery or Invention? and all of Reason, the Good and Rights are aimed primarily at the first task, of overcoming the philosophical dispute between the partisans of discovery and the partisans of invention.

XII. Critical Interpretavism and Human Wants

Although some more general view of rationality is presupposed by any account of reasoning about the human good, I turn my attention to the latter issue first. Certain features of human action and ends are indisputable on any larger conception of rationality. And, as we shall see, a satisfactory view of rationality also presupposes a view of reasoning about the human good. So, in chapter 3 of Discovery or Invention?, I put forward a new conception of human ends and action that, I show in Reason, the Good and Rights, enables us to understand how reasoning about the human good is possible.

While there are important new elements in critical interpretavism, it has been constructed in light of the work of the great philosophers—and especially Aristotle—who have held that political and moral philosophy must center on around questions of the human good.[13] Political philosophers concerned about the human good have always argued that, given human nature, a good life for human beings is inseparable from a life which aims at a telos, or some end (or ends ordered in a particular way). That is to say that human beings would not be fulfilled if we don’t attain certain ends, whether we recognize their importance to us or not. Such a claim, however, makes no sense for the naturalist and interpretavist philosophical psychologies. How can one argue that we have an end that we might not recognize or might misunderstand? The answer, which is implicit or explicit in much political philosophy that focuses on the good, has always been along these lines: in satisfy­ing the ends to which we have been socialized we do not satisfy some universal, natural ends. But, how can we understand the contributions of both natural human ends and the ends we have been socialized to have in bringing about our actions? How, that is, do nature and history combine to result in human beings who have the ends they do have? My suggestion is that we can find a solution if we realize that when we talk about our ends, we are referring to two phenomena which have never been clearly distinguished. I call these phenomena wants and desires. Our wants are the natural, and more or less universal ends found in all human beings. As naturalists would have it, our wants are given and constraining. But we do not have any unmediated or certain knowledge of these wants. Nor do our wants directly lead to our actions. Rather our actions are the result of the desires we are socialized to have. The interpretavist account of our desires, I argue, is more or less correct. However, our experiences of satisfaction and fulfillment, on the one hand, and disappointment, on the other, largely depend upon whether our acting on our desires enables us to satisfy our wants. It is the experience of emotional reactions—feelings, agitations and symptoms—that indicate when our wants are satisfied or not. But, because we have no unmediated knowledge of our wants, they must be interpreted. Thus our desires can be seen as implicit or explicit interpretations of our underlying wants. Or, to use my term of art, our desires are articulations of our wants. If, as a result of acting on our desires we satisfy our wants, we will be satisfied, enjoy our activities, be happy and so on. And if not, we won't. Instead we will have various emotional reactions that both distress us and alert us to our failure to articulate our wants in a satisfactory manner. When we are surprised to have these emotional reactions, we begin a process of reflection that eventuates in new desires that constitute a new articulation of our wants. To put this series of arguments most broadly: the reasons we have for acting may or may not be in accord with the reasons we are satisfied or dissatisfied, fulfilled or not. The reasons we have for acting rest upon our desires. But the reason for our fulfillment or misery is that our actions have satisfied or frustrated our wants.

This new philosophical psychology makes room for an integrated account of both discovery and invention about our ends. When we conclude that the best way to articulate our wants is to adopt new desires we are partially reinventing ourselves, on the basis of a discovery about our wants. Similarly, when we invent new forms of political and social life we are doing so on the basis of what we have discovered about human nature. There are not two processes at work here. It is not that first we make a discovery and then we make an invention to suit the discovery. Rather the process by which we reflect on and transform our individual lives and our form of political and social life involves discovery and invention at the very same time. Our sense of what we have discovered and what we have invented can even change over time, as our views about human nature and our own articulations of it develop.

Critical interpretavism is an account of the nature of our ends—our wants and desires—and of how we come to understand them. It is not an account of our more or less universal, natural human wants. No philosophical psychology can tell us what these wants are, or even if we have any beyond our bodily wants. We test and defend a theory of human wants by means of two kinds of empirical investigation. First, we compare and contrast human actions and emotions in different times and places. We support our claim to have identified some human wants if the most plausible interpretation of why human beings in widely divergent polities and societies have certain desires, and are fulfilled when their desires are satisfied, is that their desires articulate the wants that, according to our hypotheses, all human beings have. By the same token, evidence of emotional reactions or distress when these wants are left unsatisfied also supports our claim. Of course, any theory that identifies human wants is only another articulation of them. But, the result of this process of comparison and contrast will be a more general interpretation of the wants that human beings articulate in a particular way in different times and places. The second way in which we test a theory of human wants is through our reflection on our own lives. We can try to understand what underlying wants account for our own experiences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. We typically do this when these experiences surprise us, particularly when we find ourselves unfulfilled even though our desires have been satisfied. Then we try to develop a new articulation of our wants and test this theory by means of our own practical activity. A good account of our wants is one that helps us live a more fulfilling life.

Critical interpretavism, then, does not guarantee that there are more or less universal and natural human wants, beyond the obvious bodily wants. Still, critical interpretavism is a more plausible philosophical psychology than those provided by naturalism and interpretavism. For naturalist and interpretavist philosophical psychologies cannot even account for how we come to recognize and act on our bodily wants.

XIII. Critical Interpretavist Philosophy of Political and Social Science

After delineating this new account of human action and ends, I put it to work. In chapter 4 of Discovery or Invention? I give an overview of different kinds of political and social explanation that shows when and how a conception of human wants—if we can develop one—can be used to further our understanding of political and social life. My ac­count is, in a sense, eclectic. I do not think that the philosophy of po­litical and social science can or should be used to settle disputes about the explanation of some particular political and social phenomena. There are many modes of political and social explanation, most of which have some legitimate place. Political and social scientists too often justify their use of one of these modes to the exclusion of others by trying to undermine the epistemological standing of the alternatives to their own view. This may be a successful strategy in academic combat or a salve to the anxious conscience of the scholar who has too much to read in too short a time. However, it is usually not a legitimate form of argument. Some modes of explanation are better than others for some purposes. But this is only for the mundane reason that they better explain what needs explaining. My aim is to elucidate the most general structures of political and social theory—and the possible role for a conception of human wants in various types of inquiry—not to lay down a foundation for all future research. I try to show how different forms of explanation re­late to one another and how they can be combined in various ways. And I suggest one (though probably not the only) way in which a compre­hensive theoretical account of political and social life could be developed. Along the way I demonstrate that my new account of human action enables us to understand the individual and political and social phenomena that are inexplicable in naturalist or interpretavist terms.

By the end of chapter 4 of Discovery or Invention?, I have developed a new philosophical psychology and philosophy of political and social science. And I have shown that there are no philosophical reasons to deny that human beings might have some natural and more or less universal wants. This provides the beginning of an argument for the possibility of reasoning about the human good. But I do not complete that argument until Reason, the Good and Rights. Instead, in the last chapter of Discovery or Invention? I consider the metaphysical and epistemological implications of the philosophical psychology and philosophy of social science I have developed. I argue that it is possible to develop an account of rationality that breaks with the view upheld by both naturalists and historicists. This view of rationality, that I call it pragmatic rationalism, is influenced mainly by the work of Hilary Putnam. I call this account pragmatic rationalism because it insists, first, that rationality is not independent of the human good, and, second, that our actions and beliefs can and, indeed, must be regulated by rational debate and argument.

XIV. Pragmatic Rationalism

Given the differences between naturalists and historicists about the potential for reason, it might seem strange to say that they share a view of the nature of rationality. But, historicists do not really have a view of rationality they can call their own. Rather, they accept the naturalist standard for what a rationally justified belief would be, only to say that our practices of inquiry can not possibly meet this standard.

Pragmatic rationalism rejects four assumptions found in the naturalist and historicist views of rationality. First, pragmatic rationalism is a non-criterial conception of rationality.[14] Naturalists—and in particular naturalists who want to defend scientism in epistemological terms—argue that we can only be said to be rational if we have explicit criteria to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate explanations and rational and irrationally held beliefs and theories. Historicists agree with this, but point out that the criteria for rational belief vary from one time and place to another. That is why they insist that rational justification is always a culture bound phenomena. Pragmatic rationalism does not deny that we evaluate our beliefs and theories in terms of certain criteria. And, it also agrees that our criteria for justified belief change over time. Moreover, pragmatic rationalism goes further and points out that even within a tradition of inquiry, we can find a number of criteria for justified belief that have different implications in any particular case. We do not apply these criteria and determine their relative importance on the basis of further criteria. However, that does not mean inquiry is at base arational or irrational in nature. Rational thought is not, and cannot be, a criteria, and more generally, rule-bound phenomena. Rational thought is always a matter of practical and revisable judgments about the meaning and importance of our criteria for rational belief and about the other elements of the substantive conditions of rationality as well. These judgments do not rest on explicit rules but on an implicit sense of how things are. And that, in turn, is tied to our training in some practice of inquiry. Not everyone who investigates some phenomena will necessarily come to the same conclusion. Scholars and scientists educated in the same tradition of inquiry will usually come to agree. But, when these traditions are themselves the subject of controversy, then agreement is much more difficult. This is especially the case when we are considering debates between members of different cultures. In such disputes, what is often at issue is not just the criteria for knowledge in some area, the appropriate form or forms of explanation, and the nature of the phenomena in question but also the point or purpose of a form of inquiry. Pragmatic rationalism holds that reasons can be advanced about all four issues and some consensus can thus be reached. However, a new consensus might not be formed for years or decades. And, for reasons I will mention below, in some areas of inquiry, consensus might never be attained. But that does not mean that the proponents of different views are clinging to them on irrational or arational grounds. To have reasons for our views, even if these include contestable judgments, is worlds apart from prejudice, bias, unreason and the like. And this is particularly the case if we recognize that our opponents also have reasons for their views and if we acknowledge their right to raise questions about our own. Rational disagreement of this sort leads to dialogue and a continued search for new arguments and evidence. To think that such disagreement shows the limits of reason only makes sense if, with naturalists and historicists, we expect what Imre Lakatos called “instant rationality.”[15] Pragmatic rationalism denies that, on the most important issues, we can always settle our disputes here and now. But it also holds that this does not make our disputes something less than rational in nature. Pragmatic rationalism offer no guarantees that rational agreement on all issues will always be possible. But, by the same token, it sees no philosophical grounds for believing that there are limits to the kinds of rational consensus we can reach. We might find that, in one area or another, rational consensus is hard or seemingly impossible to attain. But conclusions of this sort can only come after, not before we have engaged in our investigations. And they, too, are revisable.

A corollary to this first claim is a second: Pragmatic rationalism denies that the substantive conditions of ideal rationality can be known in advance of inquiry. Pragmatic rationalism decisively rejects the epistemological naturalist’s search for a first philosophy or a framework for all claims to rationally justified belief. And it gives up the idea that we determine the criteria for the rationality of our beliefs by reflexively examining our own processes of reasoning, in abstraction from what we are reasoning about. Our understanding of what I call the conditions of rationality—of the ways in which we rationally evaluate different beliefs and theories—comes, instead, from two sources. Our substantive ideas arise from reflection about what we are already doing when we inquire into some area. We reflexively examine the sort of explanations we are prepared to accept, the criteria we apply to our theories and beliefs, our presuppositions about the object of our inquiry, and the point or purpose of our inquiry. Thus, pragmatic rationalism recognizes that the appropriate forms and criteria of knowledge can vary from one sphere of inquiry to another. Our formal ideas about what constitutes rational as opposed to irrational inquiry in all spheres flow from reflection on the conception of reason implicit in all our practical and theoretical activities. And the result is not criteria for our beliefs but a procedural account of what it means to come to a conclusion on the basis of reasoned argument and that alone. Thus with regard to both our formal and substantive understanding of rationality, pragmatic rationalists agree with historicists, who say that we always start from where we are, that is, from our inherited practices and conclusions. But pragmatic rationalism denies that we must end up where we begin. To explicitly reflect on our practices of inquiry is always to shape and change them. Such reflection raises normative questions and provides answers that manifest themselves in further inquiry. As we engage in such reflection and attempt to attain some balance among the substantive conditions of rationality, we can be lead to drastically to reject our previous views and find reasons to accept both radical innovations and, also, what others, in a different time and place, have thought. Reflection about the formal conditions of rationality can also shape our investigations when we recognize that, in one way or another, we have inappropriately blocked off lines of inquiry by ignoring or repressing those with ideas different from our own.

Third, pragmatic rationalism denies the metaphysical naturalist claim that rational inquiry is only possible if our aim is to discover the world is as it is in itself. And it breaks with the epistemological naturalist claim that our beliefs are only rational if somehow the world as it is in itself can confront us and thereby constrain what we say about it. Pragmatic rationalism agrees with the historicist notion that we can describe the world in many different ways and that no one description tells how the world is as it is in itself. And it recognizes an element of invention in any of these descriptions. But pragmatic rationalism does not lead to the conclusion that inquiry is all invention and no discovery. We invent our descriptions of the world, but we discover whether these descriptions meet the conditions of rationality. An historicist can, of course, say roughly the same thing. But, for the historicist, the conditions of rationality are themselves wholly a matter of invention not discovery. Historicists do, of course, recognize that, by and large, the world is not malleable to our will. We can insist on describing the world in some particular way, but always at the cost of having to make some adjustment to our other descriptions of the world. A critic of historicism might point out that these costs are often to our own happiness and fulfillment. Historicists respond, however, that what we take to be happiness or fulfillment is always malleable to our will. And thus, if we are willing to adjust our ends sufficiently, there are no constraints to what we can say about anything. For pragmatic rationalism, however, our ideas of human happiness and fulfillment are not just a matter of invention. That we can make discoveries about human nature means that there can be reasons for having one or another view of any phenomena.

This brings us to the fourth and, in some ways, most radical feature of pragmatic rationalism. For naturalists, the rational justification of our beliefs about the world must be entirely independent of the human perspective or human concerns. For them, rational beliefs aim to tell us how things are from a viewpoint that transcends human concerns—from what Thomas Nagel calls the view from nowhere.[16] And they are regulated not by our purposes in forming them, but by the world as it is in itself, or our framework for knowledge or both. Historicism rightly denies that our beliefs can be regulated in this way or can attain the view from nowhere. And it recognizes the central role that our view of human ends plays in shaping our understanding of everything else. But historicists point to the variety of human purposes in different times and places. They deny that reason can adjudicate disputes between different views of the human good. As a result, they conclude that reason is sharply limited in its capacity to evaluate different conceptions of the world around us. While pragmatic rationalism offers no guarantee that reason can enable us to defend a conception of the human good, it sees no justification for insisting that it cannot do so. For pragmatic rationalism holds that discovery as well as invention is possible here. And that is why this conception of rationality rationalism rests on the possibility of reasoning about the human good. For we can only defend reason by defending the pursuit of rational agreement across the whole spectrum of practical and theoretical pursuits. To accept the centrality of the human perspective in all of these areas is not, for pragmatic rationalism, to undermine the possibility of reason. Rather it is to return, in a rather different way, to something like the Ancient claim that knowledge of the world around us is not independent of knowledge of the human good.

This is not to say that a conception of the human good provides the foundation for our beliefs and theories of everything else. Pragmatic rationalism offers no foundations of any kind. Our view of the human good is not just shaped by our conception of human wants, but by our understanding of the possible forms of political and social life. And that, in turn, is tied to our understanding of the natural world around us.[17] So our broadest understanding of our place in the world must reach some reflective equilibrium on all of these matters. I have emphasized the implications of a conception of human wants for our beliefs and theories about other matters because my target is the historicist who holds that, because no discoveries are possible about our wants, no discoveries are possible anywhere else.

To this point, I have presented the pragmatic rationalist critique of naturalism and historicism as a philosophical dispute that can be settled in philosophical terms. But, it is not just that. Indeed, given the pragmatic rationalist view of where our understanding of rationality comes from, the critique of naturalism and historicism could not be solely a philosophical struggle. The problems with the philosophical psychologies of naturalism and interpretavism are not just that they cannot account for certain phenomena of individual and political and social life. Nor are the difficulties of naturalist and historicist metaphysics and epistemology philosophical matters alone. The most important difficulties with these views, and the main reason to challenge them, is that they stand in the way of the kind of political and moral philosophy that we need right now.

The importance of political and moral issues in these philosophical debates is particularly evident with regard to the pragmatic rationalist dispute with historicism. Arguments for historicism primarily rest on a critique of the claims of naturalists. Historicists suggest that, if we are going to have some basis for rational dispute between people in different intellectual or moral traditions, reason must work more or less the way the naturalists have supposed. And then they argue that there is no reason to think that the naturalist conception of reason can be defended. Pragmatic rationalism accept much of the historicist critique of naturalism, but points out that historicists fail to fully acknowledge the importance of non-criterial rationality and the implicit role of a conception of human wants and the human good in all rational inquiry. But then historicists respond that there is no reason to believe that we can find some conception of universal human wants upon which to rest a view of the human good.

The negative claims of historicists can be taken in a strong and a weak way. The strong form of historicism is primarily philosophical in nature. It claims to have some argument to show that rational debate between people who hold different views of the human good is impossible. And thus it asserts that the there is no possibility of coming to some rational judgment about the conditions of rationality found in different cultures. The trouble with this defense of historicism, however, is that one cannot make such a strong claim without lapsing into incoherence. How can we find a trans-cultural rational justification of the claim that no such trans-cultural rationality is possible?

The weak form of historicism—which is more or less Richard Rorty’s—does not make the stark and incoherent claim I just mentioned.[18] It can accept that critical interpretavism gives the best account of human action and ends and thus that reasoning about the human good is, in principle, possible. From the standpoint of this weaker historicism, the problem with such reasoning is not philosophical but empirical and moral. The empirical claim central to weak historicism is this: as far as we know, there is no plausible conception of universal human wants. The moral claim is that we have no need to engage in such reasoning in order to attain our own purposes and goals. As Rorty might put it, the search for rational convergence in belief is an optional human practice, one that at the moment engenders little confidence in us. Moreover, it is one which we might just as well forget about since we do not need any rational convergence of belief to attain our own ethnocentric aims, whether they are eudamonic or moral in nature.

This argument demonstrates that, ultimately, our choice of a conception of rationality is as much a moral as a philosophical issue. To accept pragmatic rationalism and reject weak historicism we need some reason to think that our own goals and purposes cannot be met by the latter doctrine. My criticisms of historicist forms of political philosophy in part II of The Trouble with Liberalism gives us these reasons. We also need some reason to think that reasoning about the human good is possible if we are to reject weak historicism. I provide the beginnings of such an argument in chapters 3 and 4 of Discovery or Invention?. But the full story is only told in Reason, the Good and Rights.

XV. Critical Interpretavism and Reasoning about the Human Good

After three chapters that sum up the argument of the first two volumes in the series, chapters 4 to 6 of Reason, the Good and Rights show how a conception of human wants, taken together with the kinds of political and social theories I elucidate in Discovery or Invention? would enable us to engage in reasoning about the human good and the best form or forms of political and social life. In these chapters I outline the structure of such reasoning, which I call substantive rationality. Here I discuss the important implications of critical interpretavism for the possibility of human beings living a fulfilled life.[19] I point out that, while it may be possible to delineate some basic elements of a fulfilling human life, it is also possible that people are somewhat different from one another not just by culture, but, by nature. And thus there might be different and incompatible good lives. I also show how a conception of a good human life or good human lives is connected to a defense of the virtues. And I pay particular attention to the importance of our understanding the best form of politi­cal and social life for us, that is, for the members of our own polity and society, as well as the best for anyone. This distinction requires us to acknowledge the limits as well as the importance of political and social theory in reason­ing about the human good. And it helps in my defense of substantive rationality against the charge that tyranny is a likely result of claims to know how men and women might best live fulfilling lives. This is the main subject of the chapter 6 of Reason, the Good and Rights.

XVI. The Good and the Right

That I must claim that reasoning about the human good does not threaten our civil liberties is, of course, no accident. In The Trouble with Liberalism I argue that liberalism and historicism are flawed because they deny that reasoning about the human good is possible. But, for many substantive liberals, this  is perhaps the greatest virtue of these conceptions of political philosophy. The liberal de­fense of civil rights and liberties has always been predicated upon the denial of reasoning about the human good. Liberals have argued that if there is no right or wrong about the path to human fulfillment, then no one has the right to tell anyone else how to live their lives. Thus any project, like my own, aimed at rehabilitating reasoning about the human good is bound to seem dangerous to many people today. For a philosophical defense of reasoning about the human good might seem to be the harbinger of political philosophies that aim to convince, and if this is not possible, coerce everyone into pursuing a particular vision of the good life.

This charge is, I think, the most serious that can be raised against the arguments of Politics and Reason. One way to reject it is to point out, as I do in chapter 6 of Reason, the Good and Rights, that, on my view of substantive rationality, civil liberty is the most important prerequisite of reasoning about the good. For critical interpretavism, reasoning about the human good is an empirical and experimental matter. We cannot pull a conception of the human good out of our heads, nor out of any of the classic texts of the past, no matter how much we revere them. We can learn from these books, and we must think hard about any conception of the good, but the proof of any view of the good is in the living of it. And that is why the greatest possible freedom, not just of thought but of action, is a pre-requisite of substantive rationality.

This is a powerful argument. But it is not an absolute defense of civil liberty and such a defense would certainly be welcome. The West is the heir to two moral traditions. Human fulfillment is the central notion of the first, which has its origins in Athens. Human obligations to God and to the human beings he created, is the central notion of the second, which has it origins in Jerusalem. In calling us to take up again the concern for the human good found in the first tradition, I do not mean to downplay the importance of the second tradition, especially in the formulations of it hold that we should respect the rights of others. Indeed, my first complaint against both philosophical liberalism and historicism is that they do not provide a sound defense of human rights, in large part because they reject the possibility of reasoning about the human good. Part of my reason for seeking to put questions of the human good back in the center of political thought is my belief that, until we do so, we will not find a good defense of our rights. That is to say, one of the central tasks of this work is to show how these two moral traditions can be brought together.[20] So, in chapter 7 through 12 of Reason, the Good and Rights I present a new conception of the principles of political right that is based upon critical interpretavism and a pragmatic rationalist account of ideal rationality.

XVII. Ideal Rationality: Formal and Substantive

In chapter 7 of Reason, the Good and Rights, I develop an account of ideal rationality that brings together some of the central ideas of Hilary Putnam’s internal realism with the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. I then combine them with my defense of reasoning about the human good.[21]

An account of ideal rationality tells us the conditions under which we could say that human agreement is not the product of this or that set of conventional ideas but, rather of reasoned argument and that alone. To have a conception of ideal rationality is to assert that the aim of reason and language is not just to convince others of what we believe but to discover what, ideally, we should believe. For pragmatic rationalism, this account is ideal in two senses. It formulates a set of conditions that is both impossible to fully attain and, also, cannot be specified in any detail. Thus we can never be certain that we are moving closer or farther from this ideal. And yet these conditions are ideal in another sense as well. In a general way, they guide the manner in which we conduct rational inquiry.

Putnam has elucidated what I call the substantive conditions of ideal rationality.[22] As we have seen, his work leads to the conclusion that our view of rational inquiry into some phenomena involves a number of elements including: criteria for the rational evaluation of our theories in this field; a view of the forms of explanation appropriate to understanding the phenomena in question; a conception of the nature of what we are trying to study; and an understanding of the human purposes for investigating it. These four elements (and possibly others as well) are inextricably linked to one another. In the circumstances of what Thomas Kuhn called normal science we hold all of these elements more or less constant except for some of our particular theories or beliefs about the phenomena in question.[23] But, in principle, no one element has any priority. When the more fundamental questions are raised about some matter, our aim is to reach a reflective equilibrium in which each element—our criteria for knowledge, our view of the proper form of explanation, our substantive conclusions, and our grasp of the point of inquiry—come into balance. To attain the ideal conditions of inquiry into some phenomena would be to have achieved a stable and unchanging balance among these elements.

Habermas and Apel have clarified what I call the formal conditions of ideal rationality.[24] These conditions do not, by themselves, determine what we should think about some matter. Rather, they set out the procedures which we must explicitly or implicitly follow if we are to be guided by the force of rational argument and that alone. To be guided by the best argument is only possible under conditions that allow everyone the freedom and equality to take part in rational discussion and debate and in which debate continues until the agreement of all is reached. Thus, to spell out the formal conditions of rationality is to describe a form of communal life in moral terms.

These two accounts of rationality, at first look, do not seem to be made for each other.[25] But I believe that they can be combined in a fruitful manner. Moreover, the partial incompatibility between them, which I discuss in chapters 8 and 9, reveals something important about the points of tension in our attempts to create rational forms of inquiry and political decisionmaking.

XVIII. Rationality and Rights

My defense of human rights begins with the account of the formal conditions of ideal rationality that I have adapted from Habermas and Apel. There has been much debate about what, if anything, these formal conditions imply for how political and social life should be organized. I argue that, under the circumstances of pluralism, they require us to arrange our political and social practices so as to maximize our opportunities for rational debate and decision-making about the ends and means of our communal life. However I do not follow some interpreters of Habermas and Apel in drawing the conclusion that only a radical democracy can be considered a rational form of political and social life.[26] For, first, the formal conditions of ideal rationality can never be fully met in our political and social life. And second, a rational polity would have to meet substantive conditions of ideal rationality as well. In politics, as in other areas, we cannot specify the substantive conditions of rational debate and decision apart from our view of the matter under discussion. Thus our view of the substantive conditions of ideal rationality in politics is tied to a conception of human wants and the human good, as well as our view of the likely consequences of different political and social institutions.

That we must take into account both the formal and substantive conditions of ideal rationality in thinking about how to organize our political and social life does not leave us with nothing to say about these matters in advance of the actual debates of men and women.[27] Rather, I argue that we can show that a rational form of political and social life is obligated to obey certain human rights. But the principles of political right I defend break with the central expectations that liberals and historicists have for such a theory. Liberals, particularly of the deontological variety, have sought a theory of rights that is rooted in the nature of reason. These principles are supposed to give us unchanging answers to the question of how to organize our political and social life. And they are supposed to be formal in that they do not rely on any conception of the good. All historicists have denied that a defense of the principles of political right could be tied to an account of reason. Some have tried to defend formal and unchanging principles of right in historicist terms. Others have, more plausibly, held that it is impossible to develop unchanging principles of political right that are also formal as well. The principles of political right I defend are formal and are defended in terms of pragmatic rationalism. They avoid the difficulties of liberal principles of political right by mostly giving up the expectation that any such principles can, by themselves, tell us what to do in concrete circumstances. With the exception of the principles that defend civil liberty and consent to government, the principles of right that I defend must be completed by an account of the human good or our own good in order to give us any guidance about how to order our political and social life. That is to say, on my view, principles of political right do not answer the fundamental questions of political and social life by themselves. Rather, they give us a formal framework for these answers, a framework that must be completed by substantive reasoning about the good.

I defend three kinds of rights. The first are formal procedural rights which include the right to consent to government and the right to freedom of thought and action. Formal procedural rights presuppose that reasoning about the human good is possible. But they can be justified apart from any conception of the human good. I defend them in chapters 8 to 10 by bringing the formal conditions of ideal rationality—which requires the consent of all to every political and social decision—together with the realities of political and social life. The consent of all to each political decision or to a form of government is impossible. Moreover, trying to meet this condition in so far as possible might be a barrier to a form of political and social life that meets the substantive conditions of ideal rationality. But not only can a majority consent to a  form of government, one cannot plausibly that the human good is served by a form of government that does not eventually receive such consent. By the same token, though everyone cannot agree to each political decision, we can recognize the right of everyone to dissent and disagree. This right to freedom of speech and action allows us to call political decisions into question and, with the support of others,  try to have them overturned. And it allows us to pursue a different path in our own lives.

There are other limits on legitimate political institutions that flow from the conditions of ideal rationality. Substantive procedural rights set out further guidelines for the processes by which political decisions should be made. Among those which I discuss in chapter 9 are: a right to republican government; a right to decentralized government; a right to consent to the forms of government in all organizations that provide common goods such as corporations; and a right is to an equal opportunity to participate in political and social life. These are substantive procedural rights because we cannot determine precisely what they require in any particular case apart from a substantive understanding of the good of the members of a polity and society. Thus the manner in which these rights must be protected—and, in some cases, the extent to which these rights must be protected—cannot be settled in advance of argument about and within a particular political community.

Finally, end-state rights do not define procedures for decision-making but delineate (some of) the proper ends of politics. Among these rights are: a right to public policies that meet the rule of law and serve the common good and a right to distributive justice, which I discuss in chapter 11 of Reason, the Good and Rights. Like the substantive procedural rights, end-state rights cannot be set out in very much detail apart from substantive considerations of the human good and our good. We can delineate some formal standards that define each of these rights. But what is required to meet this abstract standard in a polity and society cannot be determined in this way. Moreover, the manner and extent to which these formal standards become important in political and social life will vary as well. Thus, I consider the recent proposals about distributive justice offered by Rawls and Walzer and suggest that the appropriate approach will vary depending upon the conception of the good found in some polity and society. And I also argue that considerations of equity and care will sometimes justify us in going beyond these standards of justice.

So, the conception of human rights I present breaks in important ways from that defended by philosophic liberals. Except for the formal procedural rights of consent and civil liberty, these principles of political right have no policy consequences when taken apart from a conception of the good. Political philosophers can set out certain formal principles of right. But these must be filled by a concrete conception of the human good and our own good.

XIX. The Right, the Good and Pluralism

Though I present what I think is a more powerful defense of civil liberty than that available to philosophical liberals, critics might still worry that a view of political and moral philosophy that so emphasizes the human good is bound to conflict with the pluralism about the good found in contemporary liberal democracies. Or they will be quick to point out that, under conditions of freedom, there is no reason to expect that a consensus about the human good can be created in any polity and society. The critics might then conclude that the kind of political philosophy I call for is faced with a dilemma: consensus about the good is possible only if civil liberties are violated. And without consensus about the good, we cannot come to fixed conclusions about the goals of political and social life or the nature of our rights.

I would agree that, under conditions of civil liberty, pluralism about the good will always be found. Moreover, some of our difficulties in attaining consensus about the human good can be best understood once we acknowledge that substantive rationality is possible. On the view of reasoning about the human good I put forward in this work, it is possible that there will be many different and more or less equally satisfactory ways to articulate our wants in general. Human wants are undoubtedly broad, and the possibilities for different sorts of political and social organizations great. And, even if that is not the case, there is every reason to expect that people who articulate their wants in the same general way will have very different particular desires. So even if reasoning about the human good were not blocked in any way, we should not expect it to lead to complete consensus about our individual lives or public policy. However, we also have good reason to think that even in the best polity and society, such reasoning will be blocked by, if nothing else, our lack of time and energy to survey and explore all of the possibilities open to us. In addition, even in free polities and societies, there are political and social pressures to conform that only a few can overcome. Moreover, as Aristotle was well aware, reasoning about the human good is a test of our character as well as our intellect. People with a flawed character of a certain sort find it impossible to recognize either that alternate ways of being are possible or that their own character might be, to some extent, a misfortune. In reasoning about the good it sometimes “takes one to know one.”

Thus I grant that consensus in the absence of coercion is impossible and I am resolutely opposed to coercion. Why then should we think that reasoning about the human good can have any beneficial influence on our political and social life at all?

XX. Reason, the Good and Contemporary Political Life

To think that political philosophy is nugatory if it does not inspire consensus betrays a liberal and naturalist cast of mind that we would do well to be rid of. Political philosophy that focuses on the good can help us live better lives even if we remain in disagreement with others about the good. Earlier in this overview, I mentioned various critics of liberal democracy: conservatives, communitarians, socialists, participatory democrats, and feminists. With all their differences, these critics frequently make a similar sort of complaint about liberal democracy. The main source of our difficulties, they argue, is that we no longer believe that there are any final goods that we must pursue if we are to live fulfilling individual and common lives. These social critics do not necessarily agree about which final goods articulate our wants. But they all complain that we devote too much attention, resources and time to the instrumental goods of money, fame and power, with devastating consequences for our ability to attain the truly important things in life. And when, out of exhaustion or frustration, we do, momentarily, turn from these instrumental goods, we are likely as not to be caught up in low and only momentarily satisfying pursuits. Again, these social critics offer different explanations of this unhappy pattern of behavior. Some blame a culture too influenced by historicism and relativism to take reasoning about the human good seriously. Others blame the demands of the capitalist market economy or the bureaucratic structures found in the government and large corporations. Still others blame human nature itself, saying we have an inherent propensity to go wrong in this way. But whichever cause of this tendency in modern life is most important, we will not turn ourselves around unless we begin to take reasoning about the human good seriously. For we cannot change our social structures or learn to constrain the worst aspects of our nature unless we first recognize that this is necessary to living a fulfilling life as individuals and in common.

To take reasoning about the human good seriously, however, we do not need everyone to agree with us about human wants or the best way to articulate them. Rather, our own lives can be improved if thinking about the good is something we can do with our friends, families and books. And important political and social transformations do not require consensus but just enough support to generate political movements that aim at creating new forms of political and social life within the general framework of the rights protected by the state. It does not matter much if there are more than one such movement. Indeed, if one thinks, as I do, that a strong element of diversity makes for a better life, at least for certain sorts of people, then a variety of articulations of the good are to be encouraged even, in our own polity and society, to the point of welcoming multiculturalism. What we do not need, however, is the kind of historicist and relativist multiculturalism that takes no culture seriously because it denies that any way of life and thought could embody, in perhaps different ways, better or worse answers to the fundamental questions of how we should live. Historicist and relativist multiculturalism is made for Madison Avenue. It can only give us a glitzy, frenetic, dilettantish, and ultimately meaningless veneer on our already too shallow way of life.

Political and social movements of the kind I am calling for can be legitimately brought to bear on political and social decisions even in the absence of a broad consensus. One of the best features of liberalism is that it has lead to the invention of various institutional devices that enable different groups of people to pursue their own conception of the good in concert with others: pluralism; decentralization and regionalism; market relationships; ethno-national, producer and consumer organizations; and many others. A real concern with enhancing not just reasoning about but pursuing the human good in contemporary politics would, I think, make the most of these devices and practices. In doing so, we would challenge the dominance of large bureaucracies, be they governmental or corporate. Of course, it may be that some controversial goods cannot be provided at any level lower than that of the state. But that is not a reason, by itself, to avoid a common decision to seek these goods. For reasons I present in chapter 9 of Reason, the Good and Rights, it is not contrary to people’s rights for a government to tax them to pay for goods they do not desire, so long as civil liberty is maintained and these people can protest and try to change the government’s course. Philosophic liberalism has always denied that governments should provide goods that are non-neutral in nature. But out of necessity, the liberal democracies have long since accepted the practice. Of course, as liberals have also reminded us, there are prudential reasons for avoiding extreme conflict about the good and particularly about religious conceptions of the good. With this I agree. But unconvincing and ignored liberal principles of right cannot take the place of prudence. And a conception of human nature can help us decide when conflict about some good is likely to reach dangerous proportions.

So, to pursue a political philosophy that focuses on the human good is not to threaten the pluralism and diversity that characterizes contemporary liberal democracies. Nor is the kind of political philosophy I am calling for predicated on the creation of some consensus about the good. For some empirical evidence of what political philosophy of this sort can do, just look at the impact of feminism on our polity and society. Liberal feminism aims mainly at extending the rights of man to women. But the most important arguments of radical feminists challenge our conception of the proper role of men and women in a much deeper way. These radical arguments hold that the separate spheres of the traditional household and the accepted conceptions of masculinity and femininity stand in the way of the fulfillment of both men and women. While no consensus about these issues exists, it would be difficult to argue that these radical claims have not changed our polity and society in striking, indeed in revolutionary, ways. And it is impossible, for me at least, to deny that political and social life has been changed for the better by the political movements these radical feminist claims inspired. No doubt some problems have also been caused by some of the wilder and less plausible versions of these radical arguments. And much greater problems in our political and social lives have arisen from our continued failure to change the institutions and practices that make it difficult for men and women to break from traditional roles. Impatience about these problems is often politically useful. But anyone with the least historical perspective can recognize the enormous positive strides that have been made, in part, due to radical feminist views of the human good. Those strides have not been made without conflict between feminists and their opponents as well as among feminists themselves. But that is precisely my point. We can learn from and change our individual and political and social lives in response to theoretical works about the human good. And we can do this while allowing different people to hold and act on very different views of the good.

As these and the others examples I have given suggest, the conception of political philosophy I present in this work does have important implications for substantive accounts of human nature, morality and the best form of political and social life. And, as I have suggested, this work has been written in light of a larger notion of the political, social and ethical dilemmas we in the liberal democratic countries of the West find ourselves in today. In various places in all three books I say something about these matters. And I surely say a great deal about the kinds of political and moral arguments that, if my views are correct, we should reject. I would have liked to say more about how this work is meant as a response to the problems I see around us. I have refrained from doing so, however. Partly, this is an effort to avoid making an already lengthy work impossibly long. But I have also wanted to emphasize my conviction that the fairly abstract philosophical argument of the kind of conduct in this work will not, by itself, provide us with answers to our political, social or ethical dilemmas. Rather, we need to work cooperatively at developing, testing and applying different accounts of human nature and the human good. Nor does work at the abstract level found in these three books set narrow constraints on the most plausible conception of human nature and the human good. In that respect, the argument of this work is meant to be non-partisan in nature. I could imagine that both a certain kind of rightist and a certain kind of leftist could find much to applaud in my account of reasoning about the human good and perhaps even in my account of human rights.[28] Though I think feminism provides the best recent example of the kind of reasoning about the human good I am talking about, it is not even necessary to be a feminist to find my account of such reasoning plausible.

These three volumes, then, takes a seemingly paradoxical stand. They contain an abstract work of philosophy that tries to show how we can and why we should move beyond work at this level of abstraction. The paradox is removed when we recognize that most abstract works of this type aim to constrain, confine and limit political philosophy. These books aim, instead, to encourage the broadest and most far reaching kind of political and moral theory. While I was writing these books, I many times wondered if I could contribute more by doing the kind of political philosophy called for here rather than writing a philosophical defense of it. Such thoughts usually came to mind when, after I described my aims to someone, they told me that there was no point in calling for a political philosophy that focused on the human good since Plato or Aristotle or Rousseau or Marx or Freud or Lasch or Dinnerstein had already created one. Or they pointed to the many works which apply these theories in analyses of contemporary politics and society. These critics were right to say that debates about the human good still exist. But confusions about the nature of human ends and action and about how we should go about discovering and inventing a fulfilling form of human life are often found, even in the great books I just mentioned. Moreover, for every theorist who talks about the human good today, there are 1000 liberals who argue that such talk makes no sense, that the sole aim of morality is to define and protect our rights and that therefore politics must be neutral between different conceptions of the good. At least half of that 1000 go on to defend a vision of politics that explicitly or implicitly supports the centralization of power in the state and the corporation; endorses the evisceration of democratic politics and the replacement of it with the rule of experts and judges; and calls all public goods into question except for those that enhance economic growth. That this vision is meant to be neutral about the human good is supposed to make us feel better about it. On the other side, it has lately seemed that for every theorist who says that our political and social life should be organized so that human beings live fulfilling lives, there are 333 historicists who argue that talk about human nature and the human good is not only nonsense but tantamount to intolerance for the diversity of human aims. Half of that 333—the post-modern half—then incoherently go on to make proposals for radical reforms in our political and social life, many of which would undermine the barriers in principle, in constitutional structure, and in our self-understanding that actually do preserve liberty, tolerance and diversity. That these proposals are meant to be merely expressions of will rather than reason is also supposed to make us feel better about them. These liberal and historicist arguments against reasoning about the human good are, I believe, deeply mistaken. And the political views that follow from these arguments—the views to which I have just alluded—not only stand in the way of better forms of political and social life but also threaten the achievements of liberal democracy. I hope to present the detailed analysis that stands behind my own substantive conclusions about the difficulties of and possibilities for our political and social life on another occasion. But I have little doubt that any such work I do, like that of the writers I mentioned at the head of this paragraph, stands little chance of gaining a full hearing if we do not first remove some of the barriers to thought that liberalism and historicism, and the naturalism and interpretavism that stand behind them, have generated. The arguments of liberals and historicists flow in large part from abstract philosophical arguments and need to be rejected at that level. If this work leads people to think again about the conceptions of rationality, knowledge and human action that lies behind the rejection of reasoning about the human good and human rights, it will have more than served its purpose.

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