The Ethical Control of PoliticsPolitical Theory. Arnold Brecht

Abstract

CONFRONTED with a book like Arnold Brecht's Political Theory,1 a philosopher of my sort feels like a fox face-to-face, not with a hedgehog, but with a hippopotamus. It is big; it is inordinately big; it is clumsy; it is misnamed. Brecht's subject is more general than politics or political theory; though he draws as much on writers in jurisprudence as on philosophers, his subject is really foundations of ethics; and conceiving that he is dealing with a crisis of unprecedented magnitude, in which the rise of theoretical opinion that no scientific choice between ultimate values can be made has rendered political science tragically unable condemn Bolshevism, Fascism, or National Socialism in unconditional terms,2 Brecht undertakes to establish scope of relativism and to show how ethics can be founded on moral truths outside its scope. The basic plan of Brecht's argument is to begin by dividing field of possible knowledge into two parts: first containing those items of knowledge that can be established by public, intersubjective tests like those of scientific method; second, those truths that can be reached only by some other means, for instance, by comparing intuitions. So far as knowledge of first kind goes, Brecht means to make out a stout case for Scientific Value Relativism, a doctrine which he sums up in following words.