In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument

"Bernard Williams, who died just over twenty years ago, was one of the very top late-20th-century moral philosophers . Towards the end of his truncated life, he started writing political philosophy . It’s a great pity for all of us that he didn’t have time to write more. He was mostly focused on the state but with a realism that does not junk morality, and in ways I think important for international political theory. He does something tremendously important. For half a century, most political philosophy has started from John Rawls’s famous question about what conception of justice we should have. Williams says that we can’t start off with any off-the-shelf external conception of moral obligation, be it Utilitarian or the Kantian theories that Rawls and his followers adapt. Instead, we ought to start by recognising that basic order—what he calls the First Political Question of how to establish and maintain order, safety, protection, degrees of trust—is a precondition for cooperation of almost any kind, including debating and pursuing justice. Since basic order is today invariably established via the state having a monopoly over coercive powers, we need to start with how that can be legitimised to the people in their particular circumstances. This means the hierarchy of authority being broadly accepted on the basis of reasons and justifications that make sense to people. Otherwise—and I don’t think Williams says enough about this—there will be resistance, which could be either passive or active. “Part of the attraction of this for me is that it avoids problems in the standard schools of international relations” Going back to your question, although Williams writes about the state in the context of the challenge of achieving domestic order, his approach can be—and I think needs to be—applied to international relations and cooperation. What does maintain order in the world as a whole? And, for a given order, what are the legitimation norms that powerful states—superpowers, great powers—go along with in accepting each other’s power, or in living in the presence of a leading, hegemonic power, such as the United States over recent decades? How is any order justified to states that cannot project power? Why should they go along with the order they find themselves in (or under) rather than quietly resist it? So, Williams’s way of thinking about the question of domestic order and the legitimation of domestic authority, can be taken to international relations. As you said, for Williams, and I agree, this doesn’t eject morality because the legitimation norms that hold any kind of order together, domestically or internationally, have moral content, and also some moral force to the extent that they are internalised by people and states. But they emerge from the circumstances of politics rather than off a pre-political morality shelf. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Part of the attraction of this for me is that it avoids problems in the standard schools of international relations. Caricaturing somewhat, for realists everything is about power, with the focus on war and peace. At the other end of the spectrum, for idealists, everything is ultimately about values, with the focus on human rights, poverty and development. And for a group in between, everything is about how interdependence affects interests, with the focus on economic regimes, especially trade. By starting with both order and legitimacy, Williams helps us step around a rather stale ‘realism vs. idealism’ debate, and so is more realistic in the ordinary sense of the word. For some years now, there have been active debates about Williams’s realist political theory, but not much actual application of his ideas and framework to particular fields. He would have hated the word ‘framework’, but he’s certainly laid out things that can be applied fruitfully, and that yield tangible insights. Both my books are basically attempts to do that. It’s true that he was especially focused on the role of liberalism in modernity—now and around here, as he liked to say—but I think he would have been very interested in what the Chinese people feel about their own system, and whether they feel free to discuss it among themselves. He wasn’t keen on our reaching judgments about the legitimacy of historical regimes (such as medieval feudalism or the Athenian regime with its slavery) even though questions of legitimacy would have been just as relevant to them, within their circumstances and the norms that had some grip in their circumstances. But, for states today, I think he would have thought that, as well as being curious about local legitimacy in China, we should reach our own view as China presents itself to the world as a realistic alternative. In a sense, commercial society brings those confrontations, as well as potentially promoting the convergence we discussed earlier. Essentially, that’s what’s going on geopolitically now. People aren’t worried about whether or not China thrives for itself as such, and China, presumably, isn’t worried about whether we thrive for ourselves, but each is worried about whether one set of powers will press or even force the other to be like them when they don’t want to be."