The Game of Justice: A Theory of Individual Self-Government

Epilogue: Politics, Strategy, and the Game of Justice

Closing the Circle The inquiry into the game of justice has led along diverse paths and has arrived at sometimes unexpected locations: Boston bowling alleys with William Whyte; the politics of everyday life with Foucault, Garfinkel, and Schelling; through the backwoods of Concord with Henry Thoreau; along the faint trails left by the participants across Wittgenstein’s open fields; into the intricacies of everyday sorted-out and local justices with Walzer and Elster; and back to eighteenth-century France for Rousseau’s late thoughts on self-knowledge as a central requirement for and a central component of justice. Now, in conclusion, it is appropriate to consider whether these varied strains can be summarized, brought together under a single roof, made part of a single model. The basic themes should be by now familiar. The precondition for the whole exercise that has defined the game of justice is the universality of the political connection between all human beings, the expanded scope of politics that makes the state seem not the center of the political world but a minor aspect only. Politics, as has been repeatedly emphasized, can be both high and low, or anywhere in between. The ubiquity of politics does not mean we are all in constant battle with one another, for our alliances may be many and affectionate, but it does mean that in our daily interactions we allocate important values, for ourselves and for others. Sometimes these allocations are grand and self-sacrificing, sometimes low and mean. The understanding that all human actions are inherently political phenomena, components in an ongoing and sometimes dangerous game, places on everyone a sovereign opportunity and responsibility. If no actions are casual, idle, or unimportant, but potentially change or maintain an Epilogue Politics, Strategy, and the Game of Justice 141 existing self and a social structure, this fact creates individually defined but nonetheless exacting standards for the evaluation of such behavior. Within the basic premise that the everyday world is infused with political significance, the central theme of this work has been that of individualism and individual self-government. Individualism is often seen as a license for selfindulgence , bestowing rights that it is claimed the individual is entitled to exercise in complete liberty, without reference to any limits or constraints. The interpretation offered here takes a different direction, defining individualism as an opportunity for self-government, amplifying the thin political experience offered to women and men as citizens of a distant state, where the pleasures of voting are brief and often hollow, with a complete range of political life, from constitution-building, to legislation, to administration, all within the daily life of the self as a participant in multiple human interactions, including those within the self. The concept of personal politics, within which everyone has a major role, and within which individual self-government is a positive challenge, restores real politics to the people from whom it was originally abstracted.1 The game of justice is intimately connected with a third theme, beyond the universality of politics and the importance of individual self-government. This third theme is self-knowledge, and while it has been advocated by thoughtful individuals from Socrates to the present, the practical difficulties of knowing one’s self have not always been sufficiently appreciated. It is sometimes thought that a few moments of contemplation will reveal the self, or that a good humanist education, built on the liberal arts curriculum, will elicit selfknowledge , but this is rarely the case. If social science is correct that human beings are born with no innate ideas but have the ability to learn what their cultures teach them, then each individual is, as a maturing adult, faced with the question of just what the self is, coated and covered with all the socialized habits and procedures that have been laid by society, layer upon layer, on the surface of the self. Scraping away these cultural residues, to reveal the components of the self that the individual wishes to affirm and uphold, and discarding those that are best defined as unnecessary baggage, is a complicated process that takes time and a full engagement with the games of justice of which each individual willingly or unwillingly forms a part. The central difficulty is the circularity of the exercise: to know oneself, one needs to know the world; to know the world, one needs to know one’s self. Selfknowledge is therefore not a...