History and Illusion in Politics, and: Public Goods, Private Goods (review)

One illusion is to take our own particular, historically contingent concatenation of governing concepts and practices as ordained by nature or, for that matter, by any other transcendent source. Another related illusion is to underestimate the deeply conflictual nature of political and social interactions. Geuss's genealogical approach seeks to dispel illusion by displaying our conceptions and practices—like those of everyone else across time and place—as a more or less arbitrary "jumble." Not only do our common, contested commitments to liberalism, democracy, rights, the state, and capitalism coexist only pretty precariously, they are each, in turn, a complex amalgam worked out on terrains of power and sometimes sincere, sometimes self-serving discord and disagreement. The genealogical enterprise Geuss pursues is less deconstructive than pragmatist, however. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that, rather than fashionably counting pragmatism as simply one more variety of postmodern skepticism, he initiates genealogical examinations as one crucial way of discharging the action guiding aims of political theory. Thus, Geuss concedes that there may be good reasons to defend a distinction between public and private as liberals commonly draw it, but he also demonstrates that this dichotomous formulation hardly captures all or everything that we have used, or might in the future want to use, the distinction for. We have, as Geuss establishes, "a welter of various kinds of goods" with no commonly accepted way to compare or categorize them. So, when we try to differentiate public from private goods, we need to ask first what we want to use the distinction for. Illusion—exemplified by the mistake of claiming that there is such a thing as "the public/private distinction"—is politically dangerous, not because illusion obscures some underlying and in principle discernible reality, but because it interferes with our practical ability to articulate and pursue our collective aims.