Synthetic Political Philosophy: A Manifesto

There is increasing discussion and debate about the methods and subject matter of political philosophy. The fundamental way in which we go about doing political philosophy has been questioned – the status of intuitions, the use of fantastic counter-examples, and the usefulness off conceptual analysis for example. The subject matter has also been questioned – should we engaging grand theoretical debates about the nature of social justice or concentrate more upon specific questions that are more immediate public concern? Ranging across both these sets of debates are issues about the nature of political philosophy itself – should we engage in ideal or non-ideal theory; constructivism versus intuitionism; when should feasibility queries enter; moralism versus political realism. In this paper I want to introduce a new dimension, one I see as orthogonal to but that can shed further light upon these debates. It introduces and defends synthetic political philosophy juxtaposed to the analytic tradition. Analytic political theorizing is the attempt to provide coherence to our political concepts and our political theories. It is the attempt to demonstrate via rational thought alone about the design of our constitution, the nature of our cherished concepts and ways in which we can manage the plurality of values in society. It tries to discover necessary truths. Synthetic political philosophy engages much sooner with mechanisms and generalisations that we know a good deal about empirically. It engages with problems of society in less general and more focussed way and uses our synthetic knowledge in building our analysis. Technically, as Kripke showed, some necessary truths can only be discovered empirically, so even if our project is part of an ideal theory, we cannot ignore synthetic knowledge. Having said that synthetic political philosophy is not meant to fully replace analytic theorizing as such, empirical researchers engage in model-building and conceptual analysis, but normative model-building needs to be done alongside our empirical knowledge Synthetic political philosophy is not identical to political realism, nor to issues of feasibility and so on. Rather it suggests building our normative political philosophy alongside our empirical knowledge. It is about method, in the sense that it implies that we should not simply do conceptual analysis, or create grand theories about the just state, but need to combine those tasks with the knowledge we have about mechanisms which operate in social and political life. But it is also about topic. Rather than starting from metaphysical issues such as ‘what is freedom’ or ‘what should be equalized’ we look to the issues that affect human welfare in our societies now. To be sure, if people demand more liberty, or demand more equality, there is a sense in which we need to consider what liberty consists of, or what it is that people are demanding should be equalised. But the second way of putting the issue is important – what are people demanding when the want more liberty. What is it they want? What are they demanding when they demand more equality?