Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: I'm not sure anyone else might take this position, but I tend to think of Jeremy Waldron as the political theorist's political philosopher,* in the sense that he does what I think can reasonably be considered analytic political/legal philosophy in (but not entirely of) the positivist tradition, and yet he thinks that the careful reading of historical texts can be illuminating for the shape of argument as it might proceed today. He also comes off as very reflective on what it is the theorist or philosopher ought to be doing while producing philosophy or theory. Thus, from Law and Disagreement:

"It is striking, however, that today when a philosopher forms a view about justice and talks about 'What I would do' (about immigration, for example, or school prayer, or welfare provision), he usually means not what he would do as an individual agent, but what he would do in the unlikely event that he were in charge of the whole society and his conscience could mobilize us all. And we say the same about political philosophers: what Plato would do about gender inequality; what Hobbes would do about religion; what Mill would do about prostitution; etc.** Is this a valuable way of proceeding in political theory? I am not sure. Perhaps we should hesitate before substituting the individual thinker for the society in these manifestos--the 'I' for the 'we' who in the end constitute the only possible agent of social change. When we do this, are we in fact despairing of collective action, and imaging instead that each of us can make a difference--and this time the right difference--on his own? Do we think of ourselves or of the philosophers we read as prophets or lawgivers? Or do we accept that they are citizens, each of them one citizen among millions?"


*I recognize there's something crude in opposing political theory to political philosophy in this way; I've been taught by at least two political philosophers who are not, largely, of this tendency, and one sleeps on the philosophical acumen of Duke's political theory faculty at one's own risk

**Incidentally, as I've been reading the secondary literature on Grotius, I have run across a number of readings that propose something like this (one could also think of it as the difference between Grotius' position and the 'Grotian' position). Sometimes the claim will be advanced that there is a certain incoherence or fuzziness in Grotius' argumentation, and this provides a cover for the author to extract what they wish (Hersch Lauterpacht does this in "The Grotian Tradition in International Law." The first half of the argument says that it's very difficult to follow what Grotius means; the second half is a good distillation of what he actually says (with a few points that are more Lauterpacht's)).