Theoria

This edition of Theoria brings contributions that engage, provocatively, with an unusually wide range of issues. They include reflections on Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics, an exploration of the concept of trust in Locke’s thought, an account of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s pioneering contribution to the recasting of political thought, and an essay concerned to revisit and re-assert the importance of Noam Chomsky’s thought with respect to the articulation of a principled socialist politics. They include, too, reflections on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, a critical examination of aspects of Nancy Cartwright’s seminal contributions to the philosophy of science, and conclude with a critique of the case made for ‘illiberal democracy’ in the context of economic modernisation.

The phrase which commences the title of this essay occurs among the concluding sentences of a paper which Wittgenstein presented to Cambridge’s Heretics Society in November of 1929, the momentous year in which he returned to academic philosophy and (in writing the paper, ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’), began to make public his doubts about the viability of some of the logico-semantic doctrines of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His offering to the ‘Heretics’ is generally known as his Lecture on Ethics (henceforth LE),1 although the typescript on which it was presumably based bears no title. The Lecture consists of a careful elaboration of the laconic statements in the Tractatus concerning the transcendental status of ethical and aesthetic values (TLP 6.42 – 6.423). Although Wittgenstein avoids any reference to his first great work, he, nonetheless, argues for the same position set out in the Tractatus, which is that there can be no propositions concerning such values, so that any attempt to say anything about what is absolutely good or beautiful transgresses the limits of language and results in nonsensical utterances.

One of the problems that has dominated Western political thought for the past four hundred years is the tension within the body politic between the ‘will of the collective’, as it is expressed by those vested with authority and power, and the ‘will of the individual’. Among political theorists who have examined this problem, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) viewed this potentially ruinous tension in radically different ways. In his famous work Leviathan (1651), Hobbes presents the problem of how we are to socially conduct ourselves as a society, an apparent dilemma whose horns are none other than anarchy and servile absolutism. Either we submit to the constraints imposed upon us by government, or we accept the dire consequences of his infamous state of nature. Since he was well acquainted with the strife of war-torn seventeenth-century Europe (including the Thirty Years War [1618-48] in Central Europe, the Scottish Revolt [1638-40], and the First Civil War [1642-46] as well as the Second Civil War [1648] in England), the choice was an easy one for Hobbes. He leaves no doubt that the dissolution of government is the single worst misfortune that could beset man, resulting in an anarchic condition in which ‘the life of man, [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.1 It is therefore to man’s advantage to leave this state by accepting absolute sovereignty as the only rational alternative.

For most of its existence, the academic study of politics has been based on the reading of the texts of a recognised number of great thinkers from Greek and Roman antiquity through the European middle ages to modern Europe. In the English-speaking world, the example of ‘Greats’ at Oxford – and ‘Modern Greats’ (philosophy, politics and economics) after 1920 – has been crucial in establishing this approach. In 1928, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Science at Cambridge, Ernest Barker (1930:204) still saw the central role of the history of political thought as uncontroversial: ‘The more the development of political ideas is studied, the richer will be the development of political theory’.

You might think that British socialists have cause for rejoicing, given the 1997 landslide Labour victory and the end of nearly two decades of corrupt, divisive, and morally repugnant Conservative rule. However, there are clear signs already that the Blair ‘administration’ – note the shift to U.S. policyspeak – is in the process of dumping what little remained of its socialist values and principles. On a whole range of issues – taxation, education, social welfare, health care, union laws, market deregulation, the supply of British arms to repressive regimes – it is now plain to see that the government has decided to adopt the maxim ‘business as before’, with just a few minor face-saving adjustments. What we are getting, for the most part, is a fashionable strain of communitarian talk (‘social markets’, ‘ethical investment’, ‘welfare to work’, ‘tough on crime and on the causes of crime’, etc.) as a cover for policies that have scarcely changed since the heyday of Thatcherite orthodoxy.

Nancy Cartwright has a reputation as an opponent of realism, a reputation which is based on her notorious claim that the way in which the fundamental laws of physics are used in explanation argues for their falsehood (Cartwright 1983). In a recent paper, Cartwright has made it clear that she no longer sees the principal arguments in the book in which she presented that claim, How the Laws of Physics Lie (henceforth How the Laws) as objections to realism itself, but as objections to a doctrine that she understands to be a common fellow-traveller with realism, which she refers to as fundamentalism.

Chinua Achebe’s novel, Anthills of the Savannah, is about history and its many models; and especially about national histories and their realisation.1 It asks how history is to be understood and consummated especially for a people without a canonical narrative.2 A recurrent, though not the exclusive, example that stands behind the answers offered in that novel is that of Biblical history.

In Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, K stays on the plot of land on which he believes his grandmother raised his mother. His appropriation of this land affords him control of space, a control he could not have acquired in apartheid-riven Cape Town. His sojourn in the garden, however, takes him out of historical time, and stunts his capacity to narrate his story and thus to take control over historical time. In the garden of his foremothers, K inhabits time measured by the growth of plants. Isolated on his pumpkin-patch, K learns to cultivate and protect his plants; when he is hauled to the medical clinic, he retains this knowledge, while he also begins to learn that narrative skills can permit him to inhabit human history.

The emergence of an ‘Asian’ form of democracy in distinction to a liberal Western one has called into question longstanding assumptions that economic development leads to democracy, which was a mainstay of modernisation theory from the early 1960s to the present day (i.e. Lipset 1959; Diamond 1992).2 This article will examine some of the assumptions behind Asian democracy (sometimes called ‘illiberal democracy’), its relationship with economic development and the difficulties and tensions between these propositions in Southeast Asia in relation to modernisation and political change.

Notes on contributors to Theoria 91