Social and Political Philosophy – Page 26

In Nicole Hassoun's NDPR review of Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Ashgate, 2008, we read:

Anarchism should be of interest [to social liberals] because it plays the role in political philosophy that skepticism plays in epistemology — raising the question of what, if anything, could justify a state in the way that brains in vats, etc. raise the question of what, if anything, could justify beliefs. The debate between anarchists and libertarians should be of interest because if the anarchists are right then libertarianism commits one to anarchism. So, social liberals who take libertarianism seriously may have to take anarchism seriously too.

I was struck by the notion that anarchism is as it were political philosophy's skepticism. A fruitful analogy. The anarchist is skeptical about the moral justifiability of the state in the way in which the epistemological skeptic is skeptical about whether what we take to be knowledge really is knowledge. There is a strong temptation, one I feel, to revert to a double insistence: first, that we have knowledge of the external world whether or not we can answer every conceivable objection to the possibility of such knowledge; and second, that some states are morally justified whether or not we we can explain to everyone's statisfaction what it is that confers moral justifiability on them.

Perhaps the right atitude is as follows. Provisionally, we should just accept that some beliefs about the external world amount to knowledge and that some states are morally justified. Ultimately, however, this is not a philosophically satisfactory attitude. One wants rational insight in both cases. And so we should keep working on the problems. But lacking as we do proof of the impossibility of knowledge and of the moral unjustifiability of the state, we have no good reason to abandon our commonsense views about the existence of knowledge and the moral justifiability of some states. You cannot be a philosopher without being a procedural skeptic; but if your skepticism hardens into dogmatic denial of the commonsensical, then the burden of proof is on you.

Since I tend to beat up on Nietzsche quite a bit, and in consideration of my being one fair and balanced hombre, I thought I would quote a passage in which old Fritz is 'spot on':

A delusion in the theory of revolution. — There are political and social fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then rise up at once as though of its own accord. In these perilous dreams there is still an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society, state and education. The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately, that every such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of energy in a mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of human nature….(Human, All Too Human, vol. I, sec. 463, tr. Hollingdale)

This unambiguous take-down of Rousseau's conceit according to which man is by nature good but corrupted by society and the state is something the Nietzsche-lovers on the Left should carefully consider.