On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
On the limits of the political: The problem of overly permissive pluralism in Mouffe's agonism
The critique of depoliticization is a central theme in agonistic political theory. As discussed in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (2001), any principled distinction between legitimate political contestations and indisputable requirements of rationality is deemed problematic (Mouffe, 2000, pp. 135–136). This is because, agonistic theorists believe, the boundaries between the political and non-political realms are always constituted by exclusionary acts of power. Such boundaries seem natural or necessary only until conflicting parties renegotiate them, that is, through hegemonic struggles determining what issues are the intelligible subject matter of political disputes (Mouffe, 2005, p. 18). While the critiqueof depoliticizationbears valuable insights byuncovering hidden formsof contestable power relations, its categorical rejection has controversial implications. In its current form, Mouffe’s agonistic political theory does not provide adequate normative criteria to reject potentially problematic instances of politicization such as science denialism observed in the public debates about climate change, antivaccination movements and the AIDS epidemic (Anderson, 2011; Fassin, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 2004). This is because agonistic political theory does not seem to allow for a prepolitical discursive space in which articulations on facts and truth claims bear genuine objectivity. Since social reality is political all the way down, any antagonistic moment could be viewed as a legitimate conflict that needs tobe containedwithin thepolitical process. Theonly constraints onexcessive politicization are that opposingpositions should peacefully coexist within a certain discursive and institutional order that we call politics, and/or they should be subject to the requirements of “the commonsymbolic space,” that is,minimally sharednormative foundationsof liberal democracies (Mouffe, 2000). I contend that these measures offered by Mouffe do not succeed in filtering out instances of politicization based on pseudo-science for two reasons. First, her conception of the common symbolic space, that is, based on the ideals of freedom and equality, is too narrow to properly limit politicization. Much of the political positions that rely on
The Need For A Sacred Science
The meaning of a science rooted in the sacred, its contrast to modern science and its pertinence to us today.