Why Don’t Political Philosophers Generate New Ideas For Governance?

It’s remarkable how unoriginal most political philosophers are. In a design space that offers a multitude of possibilities, we find a lot of conflict over a handful of shopworn issues. Many purportedly respectable philosophers spend whole careers on adding the tenth decimal place to already existing views. How come there are so few bold philosophers? And how come so many tow the line rather predictably?

The philosopher John Rawls is perhaps the most famous political philosopher of the last century. And yet his most well-known ideas offer nothing new in the way of design. Indeed, they are the most elaborate and sophisticated post-hoc rationalization for the welfare state to date. His philosophy–and all its accoutrements, the “veil” and the “difference principle“–are nothing but an echo of the institutions and policies already put in place in the U.S. and elsewhere (most notably, Sweden, the geographic lodestone for Rawls’s disciples). First came the New Deal, then came a Theory of Justice. Not vice-versa. This is odd to me–he is famous for offering a justification for old models, not for innovation. It’s as if Harvard decided to honor Walter Mossberg over Steve Jobs.

On the other hand, uneducated, illiterate pirates of the 18th and 17th century were better constitutional innovators than any of the philosophers of that period. Why are we, as Nassim Taleb said in an EconTalk, better at acting and doing outside the box, rather than thinking outside of it? Take a look at this list of unsolved problems in philosophy. You’ll notice an absence. Evidently all the hard problems in political philosophy have been answered.

The truth is that academic political philosophy is not about political philosophy. It is about pleasing superiors. Like other academics, political philosophers start out as undergraduates grubbing for grades. Without creative thinking or ingenuity, they are rewarded for how well they can parrot and please their professors, the gatekeepers whose “recommendations” carry more weight than any other item in their grad school application. As a career progresses, the filters of ideological conformity only strengthen, particularly all the worse for political philosophy, since there is no empirical check on its practitioner’s biases. Why propose an idea that might undermine your career? Better to discuss footnote 124 in the Theory of Justice. Like the cops in the Wire, your overwhelming concern is the chain of command. Instead of generating ideas about how to design better political systems that people may actually want to live in, you live year after year in peer review servility, obtaining credentialist pats on the head.

Writing on Elena Kagan’s SCOTUS nomination, David Brooks similarly laments:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities. If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic… I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

Universities are uni-bot replicators, even more so at their highest levels. Political philosophers write and think to gain membership in an institution, not to design government rule-sets that people want to live under. Academic political philosophy is so useless because it rarely creates something people want. Which is why we should expect a market in governance to provide more innovation, more bold and new ideas in governance, than any university department could. Markets are good at giving people what they want–a thought philosophers by nature will all recoil at. But so much the worse for them!

HT IOZ