'ARTISAN RlVIIW
divided from
it!
"content." It is impossible not to regard political
philosophy in an historical manner; and it is very difficult to extract
from it the type of compact philosophical problem whose statement
and attempted solution now alone count as really "doing philosophy."
Exercises in political philosophy consist usually in carefully restricted
discussion of a well-known concept (such as the General Will),
attempting with brief and undetailed historical reference to illustrate
the nature and "function" of the concept. These discussions are
often valuable; but they are not popular because they necessarily
lack precision of a logical or near-logical variety, and their atmo–
~phere
is such as to suggest that "political concepts" are
things
of
the past. They are, after all, metaphysical beliefs, or, to be more
exact, they are personal evaluations and social recommendations
disguised as truths about the nature of man. It is the (logical and
morally neutral) task of the philosopher to pierce this disguise,
and to separate the solid recommendation from the conceptual
mask which comes away, as it were, empty. The giving of actual
political advice and the suggestion of moves in definite political
dilemmas are, of course, not the business of philosophy. Here again,
political activity, like moral activity, is thought of as the making
of empirical choices, and not as itself an activity of theorizing. The
most consistent exposition of this generally favored view is in T. D.
Weldon's
The Vocabulary of Politics.
A curious result of this develop–
ment is that liberal and progressive thinkers who are touched by
modem philosophy come on what they take to be logical grounds
to the same conclusions about political theorizing to which con–
servative thinkers come on frankly moral grounds. Berlin and
Weldon and Popper agree with T. S. Eliot and Michael Oakeshott
that systematic political theorizing
is
a bad thing.
2
The former
think
2. Mr. Eliot forms in fact a curious counterpart in this respect to Bertrand
Russell. Both share the view that
real
thinking is highly systematic (for Russell,
mathematics, for Eliot, Thomist theology) and accept the implication that
thinking about society is another matter. Russell, when acting as a social critic,
drops his rigorous philosophical
persona
and is clearly engaged in a quite
different kind of activity. Mr. Eliot, who reserves a unique pinnacle for Dante
because (unlike Shakespeare) he combined literary ability with a background
of real (i.e. systematic theological) thought denies the name of "thinking"
to social analysis such as that practiced by D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Eliot's the–
ology is, however, more relevant to his social criticism than Lord Russell's
mathematics is to his, and this in itself is an advantage. Right-wing thinkers
may be shy of system at the political level but they are not shy of moralizing.
