ABSTRACT
Politics asks “What is to be done?” and proposes a profusion of answers. Philosophy, when set to contend with politics, asks “when can one sensibly say that something, or for that matter anything, is to be done?”1 That answers to this question are neither wholly formal, logical, and semantic, nor wholly empirical and technological, but both, and more than either, is, I think, plain enough. Isaiah Berlin’s grand sweep through our Geistesgeschichte is a salutary reminder that this was not always plain to all; that political theory is a discipline in its own right; and that it feeds on both rationality and morality.2 In a recent essay, Vincent Descombes argues that some currents of modern philosophy have concocted poor dishes from such rich ingredients.3 Thin gruel does not take them far: “justificationist” philosophy (Begründungsphilosophie) reduces politics to a problem of individual morality,4 while the “decisionist,” who will not willingly concede either rationality or morality to his political ends, leaves partis pris, commitments to whim and sheer accident.5 If political philosophy had real content, Descombes claims that it could prove to any rational person that, say, being a Nazi is the same kind of gross mistake as to hold that 2+2=5. But this it patently fails to prove.6 However, these and other intricate arguments of his seem to support no identifiable proposition about what reason does, could do, or ought to do in politics.
