Giles has recently been relaying excerpts from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen’s take on Phillip Blond and his “Res Publica” project. Yesterday Giles indicated he’d be interested to hear my take.

I’ve been known to profess a belief that Blond is something of a philosophical charlatan, spouting gibberish and gobbledegook. But I’ve yet to properly substantiate such claims. So if I’m going to take-up Giles’ request, I should put that right.

Accordingly this is a (very) long blog. Here’s a roadmap: I start with a gripe about the fact Blond has called his Tory think-tank “Res Publica”. Then I analyse two pieces (one a write-up of a Blond talk, the other a co-authored Op Ed). Finally I address the question Giles is interested in about rights, and Blond’s statements about their relationship to power.

Brew yourself a cup of tea and get some biscuits, this is a long ‘un.

–
I

It irritates me that Blond has called his think tank “Res Publica”. Translating from the Latin, “Res Publica” becomes (roughly) “the public thing/issue”. It is from this that we (more or less) get the modern words “republic” and “republican”. In the history of political thought, republicans typically (though I’m simplifying) advocated the self-rule of citizens, the avoiding of dependency on arbitrary powers, and systems of government that constrained the balanced competing sections of society through constitutional and institutional structures. “Republicanism” arguably goes back as far as Aristotle – at least in one strand of its history – and also to the Roman Republic before it fell to Caesar’s triumvirate. Hence, the great Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher Marcus Cicero penned a work entitled De Re Publica, which is ordinarily translated as “On the Commonwealth”, now regarded as a classic work of republican political theory (even though it was lost until the mid-19^th Century and we only have fragments of it today). The model of a perfect commonwealth laid-out by Cicero (roughly, though with important differences) tracks both the features listed above, and the actual constitution of the Roman Republic.

In modern Western European history, republicanism was mostly identified with small self-governing states  – such as those in Italy during the 15-16^th Centuries – and republican modes of self-government were appealed to by thinkers such as James Harrington in 17^th Century England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 18^th Century Europe. These thinkers advocated – though in very diverse ways – checks on arbitrary power, the importance of citizen participation, self-government, and being free from domination by others.

More recently, 20^th Century scholarship has focused on “reviving” the lost republican tradition. Contemporary political theorists and historians like David Miller, Phillip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli, Stuart White and Cecile Laborde have sought to carve out a contemporary political theory of republicanism, partly drawing upon the ideas of the past but also starting anew. These theorists are left-leaning, usually trying to carve out a leftist alternative to the dominant liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls and his disciples followers, who have dominated the discourse in contemporary political theory.

So, as a historian of political thought and part-time political philosopher, I find Blond’s appropriation of the term “Res Publica” profoundly annoying. What he’s effectively done is realise that “Res Publica” may loosely refer to concepts like community, the common good, the public weal, sociability and so forth, and appropriated the label. Blond owes a great debt to communitarian thinking – particularly that of Alasdair MacIntyre – and has simply grabbed two fancy-sounding words that sort of imply “community”. The long legacy of republicanism frankly stands in tension with the politics of the Conservative Party, who are a party of hierarchy, established power, support for monarchy, tradition and the safeguarding of the interests of the already privileged few at the expense of the many, who are economically and politically disenfranchised. That contemporary “republicanism” has recently been advanced as a new and vibrant approach to political theoretic issues from a leftist perspective – and one that I am increasingly drawn to – only makes it more irritating that the conservative, reactionary, traditionalist, communitarian Blond is using the label “Res Publica” to help decontaminate the Tory Party brand.

But ultimately politics is about appropriation of words and labels for your own ends. That Blond’s appropriation of “Res Publica” irritates me is just tough luck. Even if I think it stinks intellectually, we’re playing politics now – so let’s leave the philosophical gripes to one side.

II

Or maybe not. Because the “Res Publica” project looks, to the untrained eye, like an unusually philosophical one. In particular, Blond is forever prattling about virtue. But it’s far from clear that he has any coherent idea of what this is, or what it might mean.

Let’s start with this write-up of Blond’s appearance at Hay-on-Wye literary festival last June. Assuming it’s a fairly faithful report, one is tempted towards cruelty: that Blond’s argument is of the standard we’d expect from a low-ability first year undergraduate who’s doing a presentation on Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue having only read the Wikipedia entry.

The first paragraphs are uninteresting dross about the bankers and MPs over-claiming expenses. But we then we get a display of what can only be described as Ultra Silliness:

“However, neither bankers nor politicians have broken any ethical codes because by consent on both right and left, no such ethic exists.”

Excuse me? Why then was there – and has there continued to be – an enormous outpouring of anger directed at both bankers and MPs? More precisely, despite the fact that both bankers and MPs “stayed within the rules” in the vast majority of cases, why was the overwhelming public response that being within the rules was not the point; that what happened was morally wrong regardless? Blond’s claim that no ethical codes exist on left and right is so utterly idiotic that we don’t need to do any philosophy here – we just need a basic awareness of what has happened in the past 18 months.

It gets better (or rather, very much worse):

“Left-wing culture adores social and cultural relativism as it allows a personal libertarianism that since the late 1960s has captured the affluent and decadent middle class while fragmenting and destroying working class culture. The trouble is the progressive subjectivisation of objective value prevents one from condemning anything, least of all the self-interest of bankers or MPs.”

The idea that the left has descended into a moral relativism of claiming that everything is “just your opinion, maaaaan” is a popular meme for saloon bar philosophers. It’s also patently wrong. To repeat: people across the political spectrum were outraged about MP’s expenses. They did not say “hey dude, it’s just your opinion if you think what MPs did was wrong, and all opinions are equal so chillll”. They said “sack the bastards for this is a moral outrage”.

Furthermore, one leftist who was certainly not a moral relativist favouring “the progressive subjectivisation of objective value” was the great liberal egalitarian American philosopher John Rawls. According to sensible and erudite political theorist Jonathon Wolff, Rawls was both the greatest political philosopher of the 20^th Century and the most influential for subsequent policy-makers. Granting that this is anything like the truth (personally I think Mr von Hayek was rather important too), it makes a mockery of Blond’s claim that the left has descended into cultural relativism incurring an inability to condemn what is perceived as wrong. Note, again, that I’ve had to do no substantial philosophy. Blond’s philosophy is so bad that you can see that it’s wrong just by looking at the world around you.

But Blond is not just gunning for the left:

“right-wing culture has either surrendered all of its values to some Darwinian variant of the market, where it thinks that whatever wins is right, a situation that licenses both Hitler and the freedom of high finance.”

Very few people on the right think that the market is good because it promotes the survival of the fittest (or some other caricature of Darwinism). They generally think that it is good because it is the most efficient resource-allocation mechanism, reduces the role of the state and promotes freedom, or whatever. They may be wrong about such things – but very few people on the right are so utterly narrow in their morality that they think that absolutely anything produced by the market is right just because it was produced by the market. The comparison with Hitler is laughably ridiculous. And one has to assume it was indeed Blond’s, for surely no reporter would inject such a controversial – and obviously stupid – claim.

But there’s more:

“Or if it asserts ethical value, as many rightly do, it somehow thinks that morals are either innately there or not: there are, according to this view, simply bad and good people. This conservatism ignores the social affect of civilisation and tends to concentrate morality and piety in a self-aggrandising elite.”

To this, you are justly entitled to respond with a well-considered WTF!?!?!!?

Apparently, it’s ok to assert ethical value – but not to say that such values are innate. Whatever that might mean, we’ve yet to find out. Apparently, those on the right who think moral values are innate also think that people are just good and bad. Funny; I would have thought most moral realists could find a position nuanced enough to recognise that human beings come in complex packages, that individuals may be good in some ways yet bad in others. Apparently, conservatism – the preserve of those who believe there are innate moral values, presumably? – ignores the social affect of civilisation. Such people must therefore believe that (the proper sort of) stone-age man was as civilised and mannered as the nice chaps down at the Carlton Club. Oh, and apparently this all leads elitism.  No, I’m not sure how we got there either.

But never fear! There is an answer…

“Clearly a new moral code is required We need the concept of virtue. This ancient Greek and Christian notion transcends the current malaise and calls us to debate and discern the common civic good that alone is the basis for society. While contemporary morals abandon any notion of education and validate us and our “opinions” whatever they may be, virtue approaches humans on the basis of what they ought to be. Since virtue theory accepts the mediation of truth by time and context, it avoids the slide into exculpatory left-wing relativism. And it endorses culture and transformation. It takes moral conservatism out of the hands of an established elite and transfers it to us all.”

Pffffff….where to even begin?

First off, let’s remember that the ethical codes of the Greeks were very different to ours. Just read Homer’s Iliad, or Sophocles, for crying out loud. That was a different world, and they did things very differently back there. But anyway, when Blond says “Greeks” he means “Aristotle”, and when he says “Christian”, he means “Thomas Aquinas”. This is because Aristotle’s “virtue ethics” (as it is often termed), focusing on the function of man as a rational being able to perfect his faculties through ethical and social habituation in order to obtain an objectively superior state of human flourishing, is radically different from the resentful, self-loathing ressentiment of the Pauline Christian ethical doctrine that came to dominate the early Christian Church (and according to Nietzsche, remained its most important undercurrent). It was the genius of Aquinas that brought these things together, by managing to fuse Aristotle’s ethics with a version of Christian dogma, radically altering the direction of Catholic ethical teaching.

That little summary should give you a glimpse of how much complexity and history is built into the term “virtue” – which Blond is chucking around willy nilly. But anyway, two important points.

Firstly, Blond is in trouble. He has chastised the left for its alleged “relativism”, but then also tut-tutted the right for its belief in “innate moral values”. So what’s Blond’s position? Er, apparently “virtue theory accepts the mediation of truth by time and context”. Now excuse me, but if truth is mediated by context then it looks to be…relative. You know, because it’s relative to its context. So which is it? Relativism of absolutism? (Sure, Aristotle allowed for context as an important factor – but that didn’t alter the fact that there were ethical truths underlying this – so there’s no escape that way). Blond has set up two straw men dichotomies of popular ethical positions – yet appears to be reduced to hand-waving unconvincingly between them when it comes to explaining what his own position is about.

Secondly – and more substantively – what does a politics of virtue consist in, and how is that different to what people already want? For consider: we might like our politicians to possess and exhibit the virtues of “honesty” and of “integrity”. If they have these virtues, they are less likely to fiddle their expenses. Bingo. We all want that. What we don’t need is some highfalutin’ jibberish about the Ancient Greeks and virtue ethics and Christianity and stuff. One might think we need such rhetoric, if one has constructed straw-man edifices of moral relativism and absolutism, and attributed them to a real world that doesn’t display them at all. But then, that’s just another reason not to play with straw men. Virtue theory is very interesting – what it has to do with politics is far from clear, especially in Blond’s hands.

Of course, if one pushes things and goes so far as to say (as Blond appears to be implying) “No! We need a virtue ethics based on ‘what people ought to be’!” the rest of us are entitled to reply “And what is that, Mr Blond? The whacky Aristotelian conception of humans as flourishing creatures with objective ends of proper development resulting in psychological harmony most attained through abstract contemplation? Or some other conception advanced and deduced by, er, Phillip Blond?”

Either way, we’re entitled to ask Blond to get off the bus and stop disturbing the other passengers.

III

“But Paul!” – I hear you cry – “it’ hardly fair to attack Blond for a write-up. Perhaps he never meant or said those things!” Perhaps. Unfortunately, that write-up demonstrates more coherence than our next exhibit, a co-authored Op Ed from Blond and John Milbank in The Guardian.

Stuart White and Sunder Katwala at Next Left have previously targeted some of the obvious failings of Blond’s piece, so I’ll not repeat what they say (and this blog is going on for too long as it is).  For the most part, Blond is simply utterly confused about what equality of outcome and opportunity are, and what “the left’s” relation to these concepts is and has been (see especially Stuart’s blog).

But towards the end, Blond (and Milbank) chuck around some pure philosophical jibberish:

“…by embracing the “old Tory” view that privilege is not just reward for success, but also a way of providing the appropriate resources for the wielding of power linked to virtue. By virtue we mean here a combination of talent, fitness for a specific social role, and a moral exercise of that role for the benefit of wider society.”

You are completely entitled to WTF!?!?! at this, too. As Stuart says in his piece, that passage is simply incomprehensible. If you read it and don’t get it, it’s not because of a failing at your end – it’s because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a bunch of impressive sounding words shoved together.

Normally (but to simplify) “virtue” in moral philosophy refers to some character trait possessed by an agent, which issues in actions deemed on some metric good or desirable. Despite – as we saw above – Blond’s apparent affinity for the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, and via MacIntyre, Aristotle and Aquinas, Blond seems to be departing from that conception and employing a wholly new one. But frankly, I’ve no idea what that new conception is. What does Blond mean by “talent”? For what, and to what end, exactly? And what sorts of “specific social roles” does Blond have in mind, specifically? How is this “fitness” determined? And what exactly does “moral exercise” of that role consist in? For presumably the role and its moral exercise are connected. Presumably.

“If we could conceptualise justifiable inequality, the results would ironically be more egalitarian than a vague and hypocritical hostility to any inequality whatsoever.”

Eh? EH? I think I can get a handle on what is meant here: that somehow it’s more egalitarian to favour some inequality than to be hostile to any inequality because the consequences of favouring the former viewpoint actually result in less inequality (though surely this relies on the straw men positions about equality of outcome that Sunder and Stuart destroy). But it’s hardly a convincing position:

“Why so? First, because many current inequalities would turn out to be unjustifiable and so a proper politics for their removal would emerge. Second, because the more we seek to link social and economic prestige with virtue, then the more we can hope for good financial and political leaders ­possessed of compassion and integrity.”

I’ll confess, I just don’t see how Blond and Milbank have substantiated their claim about how to bring about less inequality. All they have is a vague, empirically-unverified (and unverifiable) claim about how certain policies will emerge if we all think in a certain way. But more annoyingly, “virtue” proceeds to pop back into our picture – and again we are still in the dark about what on earth it is supposed to be and how it is supposed to operate. Why will linking “social and economic prestige” (undefined) with “virtue” (defined via jibberish) lead to us being able to “hope” for “good financial and political leaders”, possessed of “common passion and integrity”? Please, somebody, tell me why!

And anyway, I thought we were talking about equality? When did virtue and compassion and integrity enter the story? I’m confused…but the fault isn’t at my end.

“The politics of equality of opportunity has licensed ever greater inequality; we need instead a more radical ­economic egalitarianism coupled with the ­recognition of a difference of roles and a hierarchy of excellence.”

Again, I don’t really know what any of this means either. But this “hierarchy of excellence”, I’d like to know more about that. Does it mean that people who are the best get to the top? Like a meritocracy? Which is predicated upon equality of opportunity? The same thing that Blond and Milbank have been complaining about throughout the article, saying we need to get rid of? Oh dear.

IV

Having now fulfilled my debt of conscience and substantiated my previous claims that Blond’s output is characterised by pseudo-philosophical gobbledegook, on to the blog I was supposed to write.

From what I gather, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen are US Libertarians and they’ve recently been discussing Blond’s ideas. The blog Giles was interested in yesterday contained a lot of stuff about John Locke (which I’m going to side-step today, though I think some of the readings are dubious) and eventually cuts to a critique of Blond’s view of rights and power:

“It’s therefore entirely backwards for Blond to claim, as he does, that ‘as soon as you have a rights-based society, you have a society based on power.’ On the contrary, a society that respects individual rights has agreed to renounce power whenever possible, to force power to justify itself, again and again, by something more than mere tradition or appeal to authority.”

Unfortunately, the word “power” is being chucked around rather too sloppily here. But let’s ignore that for now. Instead – fanfare and drumroll please – I’m happy to say I’m broadly with the libertarians.

Blond’s claim (assuming it’s accurately reported – I can’t suffer listening to his lecture all the way through) that “as soon as you have a rights-based society, you have a society based on power” is either dumb or banal.

All societies are based on power. Power is what governments wield; for example, power to make you obey the laws or to punish you if you don’t. So if Blond is observing that rights-based societies are based on power, it’s a banal observation about all societies and it therefore tells us nothing interesting.

But if Blond thinks he is saying something unique about rights-based societies, then this is spectacularly dumb. The Ancient Greeks – whom Blond likes to cite, remember – had no concept of rights, but to say that their’s weren’t societies based upon power is idiotic. Were the Spartan Ephors powerless? Did Pericles not exercise power when he had the democracy behind him? Did Socrates not feel the painful point of power when Athens put him to death for corrupting its youth? What silliness. All societies are based on power – what’s interesting about “rights-based” (i.e. modern western) societies is how they distribute, control and manipulate power between competing actors and institutions.

Societies that treat citizens as rights-holders typically view exercises of power against those rights holders – let’s be more specific, and say “employ coercion against those rights holders” – as being prima facie in need of justification. So, if I have a right of free speech in a society that privileges the rights of citizens, then the onus is on the state to justify any use of coercion in attempting to restrict my speech. Furthermore – and crucially – a rights-based society is likely to have legal safeguarding mechanisms to prevent arbitrary interference with my rights, and in turn to allow me to gain ex post facto redress should my rights be infringed or violated (by the state, as well as other private actors).

Now there are some deep waters to be aware of here. I’m likely to disagree with the League about what “rights” actually “are”. Although it’s not wise (or healthy for one’s comments thread) to write about What Libertarians Think (they come in many shapes and sizes, but they’re almost always angry and pedantic), let’s assume that the League are “deontological” libertarians who think that human beings have “natural” rights simply by virtue of being human beings. Something like Robert Nozick’s famous claim – arguably derived from Locke’s Two Treatises on Government – that “individuals have rights, and there are certain things no person or group may do to them (without violating those rights)”. Personally I think that’s bat-shit crazy if it’s a metaphysical claim about the ultimate status of rights. Rights are social and legal constructs; the idea of innate natural rights should be left in the 17^th Century where it belongs.

But that’s irrelevant for present purposes. What I can certainly agree with the League about is that a society that prioritises the rights of citizens is, all other things being equal, a very desirable one indeed. (Again, an important difference to be aware of: I want governments to do things like intervene socially and economically to make the rights of citizens meaningful in a way they can’t be if rights-holders suffer from destitution, poverty and lack of opportunity. Libertarians are apt to think such state action is ultimately freedom-restricting, and that the best way the state can respect people’s rights is to get out of their lives. But again, let’s put that disagreement to one side having now noted it).

What rights do (amongst other things) is give citizens certain guarantees – even if not always upheld in practice, and not even always redressed after the fact of violation by legal mechanisms – that they are not subject to arbitrary power, interference and coercion. As the League put it, the use of power (or coercion) has to be justified with respect to citizens. This is manifestly desirable: not only does it provide citizens with legal safeguards against interference, but it privileges them as the primary locus of moral action with regards to state activity. Rather than citizens being reduced to the instruments of the governing power or of the demands of the dominant traditional ethos, they are given pride of place. Thus, the lives of citizens go better: they enjoy greater security, have legal protection via the rule of law (rights-based societies enshrine those rights in laws, at least most of the time), and enjoy the ability to plan their lives knowing their rights (and hence, persons) are safeguarded. To put it simply, this enables human beings to pursue independent, happy and fulfilled lives.

By contrast, in the sort of (vague, fluffy, ill-defined and ill-determined) “non-rights based society” that Blond apparently advocates, citizens would not have the legal safeguards, guarantees and security that legally-backed rights ensure. Presumably, decisions would be made with reference to what the dominant power (and perhaps the dominant morality) of the day desired. We can only assume that such a power would be answerable solely to its own (collective?) conscience – without a legal mechanism of redress based on the rights of citizens, what other court of appeal could there be? For sure, if the power-wielders were nice guys then this might not be a problem. But what if they weren’t? Or what if they were only nice to certain privileged groups? And what about the general security of citizens who might justifiably want to know what guarantees (if any) they posses should the power-wielders get nasty?

For all his fluff about rights, power and the general implication (frequently vomited-out by organs like the Daily Mail and garden variety unthinking conservatives) that people have “too many rights”, and that this has destroyed “the fabric of society”, such waffle is unconvincing and irritating when we think about what “non-rights based” society look like. Who’s up for emigrating to Burma, or Zimbabwe? Who’d like to time-travel back to 16th Century Spain and try publicly disbelieving the Catholic faith? Those are extreme examples – but you get my point.

It really is worth remembering why Western societies increasingly developed and incorporated systems of rights into their legal systems: to cut a long story short, it’s because privileging rights is good for ordinary people and generally makes society a better place in which to live. Does privileging rights lead to “atomisation”, “social breakdown” and the Nasty Things that Mr Blond is Against? Maybe (though the story is going to be very complex). Does it therefore follow that we must move away from a rights-based society? I shouldn’t need to explain why that’s a rather over-hasty and silly thing to advocate.

No vague guff about rights’ based societies being based upon power is going to change the fact that all societies are based upon power. What’s preferable about rights-based ones is how they organise power to the good of citizens.

Rights are important. Don’t let a snake-oil merchants peddling cod philosophy tell you otherwise.

V

Thus concludes a far-too-long blog. Ultimately, however, you may have been wasting your time getting this far. Blond is not a serious intellectual thinker, as I’ve tried to show (regardless of whether he knows this himself or not). His function is to decontaminate the Conservative Party brand by providing an alternative gloss to the ugly, nasty, deeply-embedded Thatcherite core. As a result, what a friend recently quipped to me in private may be spot-on: that the only thing that’s remotely interesting about Blond is who is bankrolling him.