Slouching Toward Realpolitik: Public Reason as Political Morality

Abstract

The paper presents an account of public reason that differs from the versions assembled in the long history of political philosophy. I argue that a freestanding or detached political language is identifiable through the natural complexities introduced to practical reasoning by numerical magnitudes. The argument begins with an inspection of two grand theories of power and morality. One is the proposition that can be drawn from Machiavelli’s Prince that the exercise of political power can legitimately invert moral rules and principles, an experience that can occasionally produce a political morality discontinuous with conventional morality. The other theory is the argument developed by Hobbes in the Leviathan that political power is the only effective instrument to guarantee security and security is the necessary enabling good that makes it rational to be moral. The salient terms in both theories of governance are security (as an enabling good), stability, equity, efficiency mediated by moral maxims – a set of generalizable terms that each in different ways refers to collective orderings. This assembly of terms just is the mutable vocabulary that yields a freestanding public language that can function as an indigenous morality, one internal to politics and providing the grounds on which public reason can be a form of political morality. The irony is that the type of public reason emerging from this freestanding language can be free of liberal values but more sharply rendered in pluralist democracies than in the autocratic conditions marking its historical origins in realpolitik.