The Audience of Political Philosophy: Theology Without a Church?

In a variety of ways, political philosophy has recently taken up the question of its relationship with the practice of politics, as well as with empirical political research. What lies behind these problematic and contested relationships is a single criterion: normativity. It is the normative ‘vocation’ of political philosophy (as Wolin famously called it) that supposedly distinguishes it from political science, while in turn this vocation necessarily gives rise to risks (or benefits) of utopianism and anxieties about relevance. Yet normativity has remained largely taken for granted in these debates. Neglected thereby is a question that arises as soon as one starts to interrogate normativity directly, for as normativity involves a claim to guide action, we must ask whom the claim reaches. What is the audience of political philosophy? The ramifications of this question become clearer when one considers the history of political philosophy, its (largely postwar) separation from political science and professionalization as a subdiscipline, and the way in which this trajectory relates to the advent and consolidation of liberal democracy. In the democratic era, new social roles have emerged to offer normative guidance: journalists, publicists, activists and, most important of all, professional politicians. These roles cannot exist without attracting a popular audience, so that becomes a principal task. Political philosophy, in contrast, is a professional academic discipline, which in the present era means that its arguments about politics and governance, while addressing matters of potential public concern, reach, and typically can be understood by, only itself. Most academic disciplines are nowadays similarly intramural, of course. But most do not pretend to offer guidance for a major part of human conduct. Their value lies in the production of knowledge, and that it is increasingly recondite is not a problem so long as funding continues to flow. Some disciplines do have a normative dimension: the medical sciences, for example. Yet here we can trace a route from findings to the popular audience. It is not an easy route: science scepticism is a growing problem. Uniquely among the normative disciplines, however, political philosophy encounters not scepticism, but an empty auditorium. Historically, it was not so. Forms of rule had a large ideocratic or epistocratic component, or were indeed more narrowly theocratic (the Founding Fathers read Locke; revolutionaries and revisionists read Marx). Now doubtless ideocracy and epistocracy continue to distort (or redeem) present-day democracy. But political philosophers are not even among the experts of whom ‘people are tired’. The structures connecting political philosophy to political conduct have largely vanished, and political philosophers have been replaced as guides. They are theologians without a church. By addressing directly the meaning of normativity, by situating it within the trajectories of discipline and democracy, and by considering an illustrative selection of programmes in political philosophy, the paper will advance a critique of the normative vocation and its unredeemable promise of political mobilization. It advances, however, an alternative role for political philosophy, as the theoretical component of a broader and reunified form of empirical political research.