The Place of 'Methods' in Political Philosophy

Over the last decade or so, political philosophy has been animated by several ‘methodological’ debates, including the ‘ideal/nonideal theory’ debate, the ‘moralism/realism’ debate, the ‘facts and principles’ debate, and the ‘comparative/transcendental theory’ debate. Each of these is widely recognised as ‘methodological’ in the sense that they concern what political philosophy is and how to do it, yet there is something missing in all of them: They do not have much to say about ‘methods’. They do not, for example, consider what a method is, what methods are for, how many methods there might be, and how they might work. Instead we have a rather loose language surrounding methods, in which we refer to, say, the scientific method, realism as a method, or the method of reflective equilibrium. Here I try to improve that situation by both (1) suggesting a new definition of ‘method’ and (2) considering the place of several methods, thus defined, within the wider project of political philosophy. In short, my suggestion is that a ‘method’ is a general way of producing reasons for or against a particular position. Sometimes we describe such ways as ‘techniques’, but they are more aptly labelled ‘forms of reasoning’, given the generality required. For example, calling Jeremy Corbyn a ‘communist fool’ is not a method, whereas ‘insulting’ is. Saying that nationalism ‘violates our intuition to save others when we can’ is not a method, whereas ‘checking for compatibility with deeply held moral intuitions’ is. Our methods, in turn, then vary according to the particular kind of political philosophy we are engaged with. I have suggested elsewhere that our subject can be usefully divided into three complementary tasks – ‘analysis’, ‘critique’, and ‘ordering’ (Floyd, 2019) – and if that is right, then we can organise our methods accordingly under each. These three tasks are as follows. First, we ‘analyse’ when isolating and illuminating all the concepts we are interested in within political philosophy, such as equality or justice. Second, we ‘critique’ when saying that particular concepts are problematic in some or other way, leading us to circumscribe their place in politics, or just reject them altogether. Third, we ‘order’ when organising our concepts into a set of principles capable of defining a political order, such as ‘justice as fairness’. Our methods can then be organised under each of these tasks. For example, ‘critique’ is divisible into ‘problematic implications’, ‘inconsistency’, and ‘suspicious roots’. We use the first method when saying that a particular position has dangerous consequences, the second when saying that it holds incompatible elements, and the third when saying that our attraction to it has sources of a kind that discredit it upon reflection. Isaiah Berlin’s view on ‘positive liberty’ is an example of the first whilst Charles Taylor’s critique of Berlin on ‘negative liberty’ is an example of the second. An example of the third is the Marxist view that both Berlin’s and Taylor’s positions are products of an exploitative and ephemeral mode of production – capitalism.