The use and misuse of ideal institutional description

The history of philosophy is strewn with ideal societies and imagined political futures. Nevertheless, one might wonder what, if anything, makes philosophy particularly suited to the task of imagining societies. On the one hand, there is the question whether political philosophy has a genuinely emancipatory vocation. Certainly, philosophy may promote particular values, but ordinary people learn more about the desirable and the normative from historical exemplars and the arts than from philosophical papers or treatises. On the other hand, there is the worry that political philosophy can sometimes become technocratic. After all, philosophers may formulate responses to particular political problems, yet they most often lack the social science background and empirical training to project human behavior under existing or counterfactual circumstances with any reliability. In this paper, I chart a middling course between these difficulties by scrutinizing the conditions under which philosophers may meaningfully imagine ideal societies. Though outwardly quite different, these societies conceived by philosophers are most often developed along the same lines. The philosopher defines certain desirable features, imagines a society wherein these features are realized to the fullest, and projects what life would be like under the relevant institutions and practices. Sometimes, these projections are only meant to yield substantive or procedural principles or patterns which can be applied as a normative yardstick across a wide range of contexts. Other times, they may also be intended as coarse-grained simulations of life under different though feasible institutions and practices, such that one may assess whether a society comprising such institutions and practices would be stable. Under this latter category, one finds the methodological tool of “ideal institutional descriptions” (Rawls 2001: 137), i.e. an account of how a regime’s typical institutions and practices work together when they work as intended. I contend that these descriptions may play a distinct twofold role in the division of epistemic labor, a role which the arts or sciences occlude for disciplinary reasons. First, ideal institutional description can test whether an ideal society’s desirable features are in fact consistent with one another. Second, such description may help us assess whether and to what extent an ideal society is self-sustaining or self-undermining. To illustrate how ideal institutional description can generate diagnoses of consistency or self-sustainability, I imagine two ideal deliberative democratic regimes – the Deliberative Containment Regime and the Deliberative Irritant Regime – and show that such description deems the former inconsistent and the latter self-undermining. That said, from this illustration emerge two important limits to the use of ideal institutional description: completeness (one is describing and evaluating a complete political regime); complexity (one is describing and evaluating a system of feedback loops and network effects). On these grounds, I conclude not only that ideal institutional description may be a valuable methodological tool for evaluating societies when properly used, but also that contemporary philosophy still has a role to play, alongside the arts and sciences, in imagining ideal societies and projecting political futures.