Virtues and Vices of Politics

Political Virtues and Vices

Dr Elizabeth Frazer, Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics, New College
Michaelmas Term, 2004

Liz Frazer argued that we ought to recognise and affirm the political virtues in the discourse of politics. The 'political', regardless of whether it be democracy or not, is an infinitely better route to achieve ethical aims than any other, which often seek eliminate the political itself. There is something to be cherised in the public contestation of ideas which should not be abandoned to communitarianism or technocracy.
This page is for those who wish to find out more. The transcript of her talk is below, with related readings above. I hope these readings are interesting and useful!

Readings

Democracy - Richard Wollheim
Journal of the History of Ideas, (vol 19 (2)), April 1958

The Problems of Communitarian Politics
An extract from Liz Frazer's book. Read pages 58-60 (to the bottom of the non-distinctiveness of politics

What kind of a leader can a democratic woman be? (speech)
Women’s Leadership Conference, Oxford, July 2004It's about leadership, not necessarily about women.

Citizenship Education: Anti-political Culture and Political Education in Britain - Elizabeth Frazer
Political Studies (Vol 48 Issue 1 Page 88), March 2000

Introduction: The Idea of Political Education - Elizabeth Frazer
Oxford Review of Education (Vol 25, No. 1/2, Political Education, pp 5-22) March-June 1999

Speech Transcript: Virtues and Vices of Politics

What are the good things about politics? - politics as a process, the political show that we observe in the daily news, the political activities we ourselves are engaged in? When I ask this question to groups of students, or business people, or aspiring leaders, it is usually easier to compile a list of "bads" than goods.
Typical "bads" that are elicited in this exercise include:
politics is just talk, talk, talk, and what we need is action
party politics distorts public policy making
politics always involves bureaucracy
politics gets your hands dirty
The "goods" of politics come more sharply into focus when we consider the alternatives to political rule, or "the political way". For example,
military power often overruns politics, and in some cases there is a measure of "legitimacy" of military rule
it is frequently thought that the political power should not be separate from religious power and hence in many systems the clergy rule
closer to home, it is frequently claimed that the state should be run along business like or corporate lines or that decisions about the allocation of goods should be left to the market in order to avoid the distortions and inefficiencies of political allocation or that people and groups should be able to run their own affairs in their local settings, as is repeatedly argued by communitarians
All of these are canvassed as serious alternatives to politics. Their virtues, it is argued, are
that the party system is avoided - that decisions can be made by the consensus of all concerned deciding on the merits of the policy itself, or by some established decision making hierarchy, or according to rational, or professional, criteria. In political processes decision makers have more of an eye on longer term political advantage than on the problem in hand.
The political process of decision making polarises participants: in an alternative system an established "culture" or set of values can be a stable background for people's personal lives, endless wrangling about what kind of society we have and what we want could be settled.
enhanced (domestic) security is promised by military rule, market rule, and community rule alike; instead of the endlessness of political argument we could have decisiveness and stability, a stable framework within which citizens could just get on with their lives.
But consideration of these "virtues" focusses our attention on the alternative virtues of political rule.
The disadvantages from the point of view of social justice, and legitimacy, of the market allocation of goods, is very familiar - quite apart from inequalities there are numerous outright market failures for which the only redress is political allocation
The same problem arises in connection with communitarian projects - stability and justice may be achievable within communities if members are left to organise their own affairs; but we know that there will be dramatic inequalities between communities - and for this the only redress is political reallocation. The promise of community, in general, is harmony, and relations in which people come together as people, not in partial social roles. But what happens to people who don't fit?
The military, the clergy, the chief executive officers may all be worthy people but the principle of accountability is absent from their callings - insofar as they are challengeable by those whose lives they affect their authority (the authority of weapons of violence, of access to the divine, of rationality) is politicised - that is to say, challenge, holding authority to account, seems to be in essence a political phenomenon.
Perhaps military, clergy or CEOs could be "benign" rulers who have the pursuit of justice at the forefront of their minds: but the "justice" they pursue is incontestable absent full blown public debate, deliberation, and the possibility of decision in light of that debate and deliberation.
In each of these cases, the centrality of authority, and the nature of its legitimation, makes the fate of the outsiders, the dissenters, the awkward and the deviant very precarious
In sum the virtues of political rule seem to include at least the following:
public debate
contestation of rule
accountability
the inclusion of the awkward
contestations about justice (and the common good, public interest, public welfare etc)
This analysis of the goods of politics, or political virtues, is quite consistent with the observation that economic power, sexual power, military power, religious power and so forth are all frequently imbricated with political power and the power to govern more generally; these forms of power are used by politicians to shore up their position or as levers to attain dominance.
The point I am committed to is that we can distinguish the political process of public contestation, speech, and deliberate decision making and the power involved therein with these "non-civil" forms of power. Indeed, most intuitive ideas about "political corruption" involve the idea that politics is corrupted when political power is winnable by money, or religion, or sex, or military violence....
The analysis is also consistent with the view that politics is not appropriate in every area of life: some decisions (such as the price of those goods that it is agreed should be traded as commodities) are better left to the market; some decision are better left to "the community"; others to military expertise and effort, and so on. Nevertheless, there are some areas of life where political decision making is necessary; and perhaps which areas of life those are is also a properly political decision.
Reclamation of the political way
It is my contention that our public culture is lamentably ignorant of the virtues of the political way as such. The project of citizenship education is hampered not just by the fact that levels of political literacy - understanding of the formalities of political decision making processes and of the possibilities of political action - are low, but also by a lack of understanding of the virtues of political decision making over market, community, military, theological, or other authoritarian rule.
The virtues of politics are not completely eclipsed in public discourse - it is a commonplace that the only solution to the problems in the north of Ireland, or in Palestine, is a political one (not military, not leaving it to the gangsters, not community). Yet, apart from vague references to "getting round the table" rather than using violence, and a vague aspiration to constitution, assemblies, executives and bureaucracies as a mode of organising public goods and services, the normative and ethical nature of this "political solution" is hardly articulated in press and broadcast media, or indeed in political speech.
Political theory and political philosophy, as much as public culture, have eclipsed the nature of politics. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries political theory was dominated by the contest between conservative, liberal and socialist visions of public policy, later joined by multiculturalism, feminism, etc, and never free of the criticism from anarchism and individualism. The point of political theory, in these projects, was to constrain governments and citizens to a particular public policy path, on ethical grounds, on grounds of justice and so on. The hope of political theorists in this vein was to command assent to their particular vision of the relationship between state and citizens, of the policy that governments should pursue and that citizens should support. Implicit, sometimes more clearly articulated, and sometimes less clearly, in such public policy programmes is a concern about the distorting effects of the political process - a fear that ethics is compromised by politics. In some programmes - for instance Rawls' design for a liberal constitution with justice at its centre, or the marxist desire to eliminate the public political power and to replace it by administration - there is a desire to eliminate politics as such. Hence the view that a benign dictator could deliver justice to a society; or that we could leave matters to planners.
Yet there is, in the complex tradition of political philosophy, a celebration of politics as such. For Hannah Arendt, politics, freedom, plurality and the encounter with our different fellows, public speech, deliberation and judgement are all bound together, and constitute a set of virtues - the virtues of public life as such.The conduct of the political actor, whether leader, participant in debate, or one who is caught up in the maelstrom of public events, should be guided by these virtues: we must be prepared to speak publicly, to act freely, to encounter others, to exercise our judgement, and to take responsibility for our actions. These are the political virtues, the virtues appropriate to us in our political roles.
Max Weber celebrates politics as such. For him to be opppressed by a political power that at least one can see and understand is infinitely preferable to succumbing to the silent and bleak struggle for everyday economic existence, as he puts it. Politics is just better than economics, in this sense. But also the politician&pos;s virtues are to be critically evaluated in comparison with the virtues of the capitalist business man, or the so-called aristocrat, or the bureaucrat. Although we can point to virtues proper that are relevant to these roles - learning and cultivation, entrepreneurial flair, efficiency and loyalty - they do not approach the quality of the political virtues: responsibility, passion, judgement. The politician (and, it is suggested, he alone among this cast of characters) must take full responsibility for the outcome of his actions. The bureaucrat's job is to carry out the government&pos;s policy, not to resign if it all goes wrong, not to take responsibility. The market actor acts in his own interests and that of his shareholders and immediate associates - the kind of farsightedness that goes with this level of responsibility is quite out of place in market transactions. The politician needs passion - otherwise he simply will not have the equipment and the motivation to fight, and fighting is what politics is all about, it is how it is structured. Fighting is, as we might put it, the logic of politics. The passion, together with the imperative of responsibility, mean that judgement means something in the political context that it does not mean in the market place (where if one's judgement is poor the worst that can happen is bankruptcy and material ruin), nor even in legal settings - where at worst the wrong person or party is punished. In politics the stakes are inifinitely higher - the subjects in question are whole societies, whole states, whole communities, and their fates and welfare.
Other political philosophers - Aristotle, Machiavelli, J S Mill - think about political virtue. The philosophers who do this are vastly outnumbered, especially in the current politics curriculum by philosophers for whom politics, broadly speaking, is a threat to justice. My argument is that if justice is not pursued politically it can never be realised.
My other argument is that this debate about political virtues must be propelled into our public discourse. At present journalists and other opinion makers deride not only politicians and their personal and professional failings and difficulties, but deride the political process as such (at the very same time as they acknowledge that only politics can really make the decisive difference in Iraq). Politicians themselves are not very effective defenders of their own calling. The recent debates about "standards in public life" and "the public interest" focus on values such as freedom of expression, and vices such as venality, but not on the virtues of encounter, judgement, passion, speech and representation. I do not think the range of virtues I have presented here is complete, or final, and it should always be contested - indeed contestation (Weber's fight) should probably be added to the list of virtues, in a form that reflects Foucault's insight that wherever there is power there will be resistance and here lies the possibility of liberation.