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Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6.1 (2003) 181-183



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History and Illusion in Politics. By Raymond Geuss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp vii + 169. $37.50 cloth.

If there is still merit in the gesture, we can christen Raymond Geuss's new book, History and Illusion in Politics, a member of what Dilip Gaonkar has called the "implicit turn." Geuss is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge who operates in the fields of political philosophy and the history of Continental philosophy. He has never published a work on rhetoric, nor does he consciously invoke rhetorical precepts in his writing. Yet Geuss's primary concern in History and Illusion is with the socially, conceptually, and materially unhinged nature of political master terms, and in this respect his is an implicitly rhetorical inquiry. He writes in the introduction, for instance, "human words and human institutions are [End Page 181] interlaced. Words arise and develop through actual human uses of them in contexts in which power is being exercised in one way or another" (7). This emphasis on the intersections between language, sociality, institutions, and power is both Geuss's argumentative starting point and a rhetoric audience's point of entrance. Ultimately the book takes neither its argument nor its audience much further, but instead provides a brilliant excavation of three ideographs: State, Liberalism, and Human Rights. The value of History and Illusion for rhetorical scholars lies in its dexterous handling of these dominant political concepts.

Geuss positions the book against what he calls "prevailing assumptions" about the coherence of political life. He writes, "one of the most important of these is an assumption that there is a single ideal model for thinking about politics" (3). This model is the Democratic Liberal State driven by a capitalist economy and committed to a set of Human Rights. Because each of these terms, democracy, liberalism, the state, and human rights, are historically contingent, Geuss wants to argue that this ideal model is a fiction, an illusion, and a potentially hazardous one at that. "I see it as no objection to our current political views," he asserts, "that they are a historical jumble. It is, however, an 'objection' if we suffer from the illusion that it is not a jumble" (8). So Geuss advocates, and the book itself is an effort to achieve, terminological, conceptual—and by implication behavioral—coherence. It is to the author's credit that he acknowledges the relationship between politics, language, history, and action; that he seeks to untangle some of the terminological confusions wrought by this grouping; and that he recognizes the indeterminacy of his task. He writes, "we can never absolutely free ourselves from history and attain an absolutely clear and coherent set of action-orienting views about our political world" (10). Geuss devotes himself to the cause nonetheless, and 152 pages later he concludes by stating, "it may turn out that in retrospect historical agents are always conceptually confused, but that is no reason to embrace visible incoherence" (162).

Whether this final note is a bang or a whimper will largely depend on the reader. We can note with more assurance, however, that History and Illusion is to a degree bound by contrary impulses. The book's conceptual impulse wants to centralize the mutually constitutive relationship between history, beliefs, language, politics, and social action, but its procedural impulse marginalizes history and social action at the expense of conceptual analytics. Thus, while the author lucidly exclaims that "concepts . . . at any rate those which refer to human phenomena, are usually historically accumulated constellations of rather heterogeneous elements" (8), his treatment of the dominant contemporary political concepts—the state, liberalism, and human rights—is homogeneously analytical and even ahistorical. Some parts of the book offer proportionally larger doses of history than others, as in the section "History and the Concept of the State" (47-52) and "Democracy: Description and Interpretation" (110-19), but in the main Geuss treats history as yet another [End Page 182] concept rather than an "accumulation of heterogeneous elements." The author writes, for instance, "the basic model...

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