The rationalist tradition and the problem of induction: Karl Popper's rejection of epistemological optimism

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper's thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper's ever present fear of anti-Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper's positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.     

Rational economics and the public sphere: An essay in retrieval

This article considers the current debate about economic rationalism in Australia which has in large part been generated by the work of Michael Pusey. It draws on contemporary political philosophy and argues for a more encompassing approach. It argues, first, the merits of preferring discourses of prudent deliberation over discourses of rationality; second, it criticises Pusey's grounding in the thought of Habermas; third, it considers the relevance of contemporary reassessments of Machiavelli's thought; and fourth, it concludes that wise government requires a public space for lively and prudent deliberation of many policy alternatives for dealing with the endless contingencies of political life.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

Benjamin Constant and the politics of reason

This paper makes a claim about Constant’s intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant’s views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors’ desire to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant’s liberalism either in terms of ‘scepticism’ or ‘pluralism.’ It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu.     

The Bible and Leo Strauss

According to Leo Strauss, the Hebrew Bible is to be regarded as being in “radical opposition” to philosophy and as its “antagonist.” This is an influential view, which has contributed much to the ongoing omission of the Bible from most accounts of the history of political philosophy or political theory. In this article, I examine Strauss's arguments for the exclusion of the Bible from the Western tradition of political philosophy (i) because it possesses no concept of nature; (ii) because it prescribes a “life of obedient love” rather than truth-seeking; and (iii) because it depicts God as “absolutely free” and unpredictable, and so without a place in the philosophers' order of “necessary and therefore eternal” things. I suggest that Strauss's views on these points cannot be accepted without amendment. I propose a revised view of the history of political philosophy that preserves Strauss's most important insights, while recognizing the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text in the Western tradition of political philosophy.     

Ferdinand Tönnies and Enlightenment: A Friend or Foe of Reason?

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment.     

DECONSTRUCTING HISTORICIST TIME,OR TIME'S SCRIBE

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism” that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. I am less interested in what draws these varying definitions of Historicism apart and instead investigate a point of intersection in their understanding of time and temporality. Both strains serve politics via a concept of time as a neutral, uniform, and apolitical scale upon which any political or ideological agenda is enacted. Time here serves as the basis for historical explanation, but its neutrality, homogeneity, and extra-historicality are a trick. I employ Gérard Genette's analytic of the palimpsest, with the help of Nancy Partner, to expose the ways that Historicism allows the past to be rewritten and overwritten to political and ideological ends that the temporal construct conceals. This then enables me to work through the politics of Historicism and ultimately deconstruct Historicist time, demonstrating how the universal or eternal claims of Enlightenment or pre-Historicist thought are actually maintained in Historicism as the mechanism to advance political and ideological positions under the cloak of neutrality. In what follows, I make the temporal mechanism of Historicism explicit in order to expose the ethical failings that this mechanism conceals.     

An Apologia for Theoretical History

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. One can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of long-term historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

Unsociable Sociability and the Crisis of Natural Law: Michael Hissmann (1752–1784) on the State of Nature

Summary

This article studies the impact of the debate about human sociability on the crisis of natural law in the later eighteenth century examining the Untersuchungen über den Stand der Natur of 1780 by the Göttingen scholar Michael Hissmann. It makes the case that this crisis ensued from Rousseau's Discours sur l‘inégalité and a revival of neo-Epicurean trends in moral philosophy more generally. The sociability debate revolved around the question to what extent society was natural or artificial to man. This had important implications for the problem of whether distinctions between right and wrong or just and unjust were natural and inborn, or had developed at a much later stage of mankind's history, reflecting merely the respective needs and utility of different societies and cultures. Hissmann's essay summarises this European debate concisely. His point of departure is Rousseauian premises, yet his political conclusions turn Rousseau upside down. Here, Hissmann's essay opens up several questions regarding the allegedly radical political character of one-substance theories in philosophy.     

Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism,Republicanism and Democracy

Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.     

Nationality in the open society: Popper versus Hayes and Kohn

Popper's attitude to nationalism can be analysed by comparison with the position taken by Hayes and Kohn, who distinguished between a communal, malevolent form of nationalism, and a civic and constitutional variant that could coexist with liberalism. By contrast, Popper welcomes communal affiliations whose diversity he perceives as essential to liberalism, while rejecting sovereignty, whether or not invested in a representative body, as a threat to the liberal open society. This perspective reverses the normative priorities that Hayes and Kohn attribute to liberalism. Its basis is Popper's adherence to a pluralist liberalism, which centres on protecting social ties rather than on representation and state organs. This denotation of liberalism competes with the legalist individualism that Hayes and Kohn identify with liberalism and therefore accommodates nationalism differently.     

Rhetoric and communication in Joseph Conrad

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.     

Theory and the analysis of Australian politics

Sharman's 1989 APSA Presidential Address is a welcome critique of the interpretation of Australian politics, but the questions that it raises need to be taken further. The importance of Australian political experience in the formation of an indigenous political tradition is recognised, but it is misleading to see it as stemming from the desire to limit executive power. This article explores the nature of this indigenous governmental tradition, and goes on to consider what we learn from this debate about the nature of constitutional theory, and the relationship of academic debate to constitutional models.     

‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats,J.G. Herder and the imperfection of tradition

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder's theories of the Volk and the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation. Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into Yeats's early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.     

What's the good of post-analytic philosophy?

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moore's critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradley's identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essay's second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyre's account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophy's dilemma about the human good.     

Yoram Hazony and Leo Strauss on the Relation between Philosophy and Revelation

This essay challenges Yoram Hazony's ostensible correction of Leo Strauss's account of the tension between philosophy and revelation in Hazony's book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. While Hazony persuasively demonstrates the value of the Hebrew Bible, notably the half that he calls the “History of Israel,” as a work of rational political theory, emphasizing the difference in function between the Torah and the Christian “New Testament” (which serves chiefly to “bear witness” to particular events, rather than account for the permanent character of human and political life), he wrongly accuses Strauss of sharing the position of the radically antiphilosophic Christian theologian Tertullian that the Bible and classical philosophy are “absolutely oppos[ed],” even though Strauss, unlike Tertullian, takes the side of philosophy rather than the Bible in this conflict. Contrary to the impression Hazony conveys, Strauss readily acknowledged that the believer, no less than the philosopher, is obliged to make use of reason in his quest for truth and noted the critical areas of agreement between the Torah and classical philosophy. He simply emphasized the conflict between philosophy's reliance on reason as the ultimate guide to truth and the dependence of the Bible on belief in divine revelation, a dependence that Hazony implausibly seems to deny. And Hazony's challenge to the very distinction between reason and revelation threatens to weaken our appreciation of both sides of this tension, which Strauss identified as the source of the West's “vitality.”