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Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), viii + 107 pp.
Raymond Geuss' s Philosophy and Real Politics, an expansion of a 2007 lecture he gave under the title "(Lenin), Rawls, and Political Philosophy," is a broadside on political philosophy as it has been articulated since the publication of Rawls's seminal A Theory of Justice. Even when placed in parentheses, the appearance of Lenin's name is usually enough to convince hardheaded political philosophers that they need not read further, but this would be a mistake on a number of levels. Geuss, a professor of moral and political philosophy at Cambridge University, is as hardheaded as they come, and his objective, "to suggest the possibility that there might be a viable way of thinking about politics that is orthogonal to the mainstream of contemporary analytic philosophy" (18), is one that must be taken seriously, for it credibly calls into question just how hardheaded contemporary political philosophy actually is.
Philosophy and Real Politics is a sequel to Geuss' s preceding book, Outside Ethics, a collection of essays published in 2005. In Outside Ethics, Geuss draws primarily on Adorno and Nietzsche (but also, more generally, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Foucault) to question what he refers to as "philosophical ethics," which is defined by a rather truncated set of questions that unjustifiably assume an all-encompassing universality in regard to practical considerations. These questions, essentially reformulations of Kant's "What can I know?" (metaphysics), "What ought I to do?" (ethics), and "What may I hope for?" (religion), presuppose useful knowledge, a restrictive set of demands on actions that can affect other people, and individual subjective preferences (in place of religion). These presuppositions, Geuss asserts, are even more basic than our explicitly held values, for they are the unarticulated assumptions that underlie them. Getting outside ethics, at least understood in a somewhat more modest sense, means getting outside the framework that is formed by these assumptions and, in some sense, reconsidering ethics from a more expansive point of view that is antipositivist, antiliberal, and antireligious (in a fairly broad sense, which includes the deification of subjective preference as "the Good").
There is, accordingly, good reason to think that Geuss remains inside ethics, even as he rejects its dominant...