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Justice as Conflict: The Question of Stuart Hampshire

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Abstract

The reception of Stuart Hampshire's political philosophy has been remarkably subdued and negative. His defence of procedural justice has been roundly rejected as logically incoherent and his conclusions have been dismissed as unduly pessimistic and inconsequential. But the critics are guilty of a quite fundamental misapprehension of Hampshire's enterprise. Properly understood, his defence of procedural justice is entirely coherent. Moreover, Hampshire provides an extremely rich and distinctive account of the place of conflict in human life that has potentially dramatic and far-reaching implications for the discipline of political theory. This account forms the radical core of Hampshire's originality, an originality that is consistently neglected by his opponents.

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Notes

  1. This article arises from research kindly funded by the British Academy. I thank John Horton, Matt Matravers, Susan Mendus, Tim Stanton, Raia Prokhovnik and two anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive suggestions. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the University of York, and I am grateful to all of the participants for their feedback.

  2. A notable exception here may be found in the work of Richard Flathman, who has engaged with Hampshire's political thought in quite considerable detail (see Flathman, 2003, 2005).

  3. Hampshire does not, as far as I am aware, offer a sustained account of his views on ethical naturalism, although a picture can be constructed from a number of fragmentary remarks (see, in particular, Hampshire, 1983, 99).

  4. It is worth emphasizing that by ‘recognized’ I do mean institutionally recognized and not merely ‘identified’. Of course, this means that it is entirely possible for procedural justice to be done in contexts where the claims of unrecognized parties (like women, the poor, slaves or non-nationals) are ignored. Hampshire discusses the question of those who have been denied the minimum decencies of procedural justice in Innocence and Experience (Hampshire, 1989, 183–186).

  5. I have not discussed Hampshire's views on the idea of evil, which form a very significant element of his political thought. Drawing on his own experiences of total war and Nazism in the 20th century, Hampshire insists that a primary concern of political theory should be for the resistance of ‘the perennial evils of human life’ (JC, 9). This is an important and contentious aspect of Hampshire's thought, but I shall not pursue it here. Instead, I shall restrict my discussion to his positive account of procedural justice.

  6. Different versions of much the same criticism may be found in Archard (2001, 209–211) and Haldane (2001, 92–93).

  7. Of course, Hampshire's thesis involves a number of other controversial claims and suppositions that my argument has not addressed. Two in particular are worth mentioning. First, the claim that the soul can reliably be regarded as a reflection of the city is an extremely contentious claim. Hampshire explains that the thesis is ‘indebted to the whole system of philosophy which [Ryle's] The Concept of Mind was part of — of which I suppose, the major figure was Wittgenstein — which held that we could only learn these phrases that we have for mental processes in social exchanges. That's an independent thesis which seems to be certainly true’ (Hampshire, 2000b). Hampshire seeks to defend the position in his Thought and Action (Hampshire, 1959), but it would go far beyond the scope of this paper to examine that defence here. Secondly, one might be inclined to challenge the validity of the empirical claim upon which the thesis rests — that the force of procedural rationality is (almost) universally recognized. Hampshire addresses that sort of objection in his Innocence and Experience (Hampshire, 1989, 142–146), but I do not pursue the debate here. My overriding concern in this section has been to vindicate the logical coherence of Hampshire's thesis.

  8. Incidentally, this is to highlight the error of those who read Hampshire's appeal to proceduralism as an appeal to procedural democracy (a prominent example of this is Joshua Cohen, 1994, 589–618).

  9. It may be worth noting here that Hampshire thought something similar of Spinoza, writing that ‘Spinoza believed that his contemporaries could not even try to understand his thought, because its conclusions were evidently incompatible with their deepest religious loyalties and moral prejudices’ (Hampshire, 2005b, vii).

  10. The oddity of Rawls's suggestion that the burdens of judgement lead to reasonable pluralism about the good, but not to reasonable pluralism about the right is discussed by Jeremy Waldron (Waldron, 1999).

  11. Rawls might well respond that he is concerned only with ‘reasonable citizens’. Those who find themselves unable to participate in the overlapping consensus are adjudged unreasonable and beyond the remit of the theory. I take it that Hampshire's response to this would be that we are now talking about a relatively small contingent of ‘reasonable citizens’. This is harmony, ‘but harmony within the liberal stockade’. The objection is that Rawls has secured a harmony only by bypassing all of the most difficult and pressing political problems of our time (JC, 32).

  12. Compare these reflections with Hampshire's (approving) characterization of Diderot's view of human identity: ‘Diderot took it to be evident that the soul, or self, was in constant flux, transforming itself just as the cells of the body are constantly changing within a constant structure. His favorite image of identity, and particularly of personal identity, was a swarm of bees, which holds together and preserves its identity in the way that a human personality, with its myriad thoughts and sensations, still holds together. We can distinguish within the swarm of any individual's memories and passions the contrary desires and conflicting beliefs that keep the swarm alive and in motion. The integrity of a person was like the integrity of the swarm, and not that of a block of marble’ (Hampshire, 1993b).

  13. There is a reason to think that this may be the right interpretation of Hampshire's own view, partly because, as I have noted, he is eager to emphasize that his aim is to persuade and not to prove, and partly because he says something rather similar of Spinoza's account of freedom, that any confirmation of the thesis will not be such as to leave ‘one with no reasonable alternative other than to accept the hypothesis as true’. The hope, rather, is that some of us ‘may at least pause and consider the possibility that much of our habitual moralizing about the ends of action is altogether mistaken’ (Hampshire, 2005b, 193–194; see also Hampshire, 1996, xv–xvi).

  14. Such a reading is suggested by Joshua Cohen's claim that Hampshire rejects the idea of an overlapping consensus on fundamental political values ‘not as intrinsically unattractive, but as incompatible with moral pluralism’ (Cohen, 1994, 593).

  15. Richard Flathman emphasizes the importance to Hampshire's thought of the ideas of ‘stepping back’ and ‘brooding’ (see Flathman, 2003, 136–138).

  16. This is part of the point of Hampshire's discussion of Spinoza's political thought in ‘Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom’ (Hampshire, 2005a). While Hampshire's philosophy diverges very importantly from Spinoza's (the key point of rupture relating to the status of imagination), something of the therapeutic focus of Spinoza's argument seems to persist in Hampshire's thought.

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Edyvane, D. Justice as Conflict: The Question of Stuart Hampshire. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 317–340 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.19

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