Table Of ContentOther Titles of Interest
FITZGERALD, R.
Human Needs and Politics
MYERS, R.
A Dictionary of Literature in the English Language from Chaucer to 1940
A Dictionary of Literature in the English Language from 1940 to 1970
RICHARDS, T.J.
The Language of Reason
SCHAFF, A.
History and Truth
Structuralism and Marxism
Mind
and
Political Concepts
by
EZRA TALMOR
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1979 Ezra Talmor
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic,
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First edition 1979
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Talmor, Ezra
Mind and political concepts. - (Pergamon
international library).
1. Political science
I. Title
320'.01 JA17 78-41096
ISBN 0 08 023737 1 (hardcover)
ISBN 0 08 024269 3 (flexicover)
In order to make this volume available as economically
and as rapidly as possible the author's typescripts have
been reproduced in their original forms. This method
unfortunately has its typographical limitations but it is
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Printed and bound at William Clowes & Sons Limited
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To
Sascha
Preface
MIND AND POLITICAL CONCEPTS
The object of our enquiry is to find and formulate a descriptive
account of the Conceptual Method as applied to Political Philosophy,
Such an account is of great importance for all those who persist in
emphasizing the superiority of the conceptual method over the scient-
ific approach in the social sciences in general and in political theory
in particular.
We could not content ourselves while examining classical political
theories with the too general assertion that these theories owe their
greatness and importance to their philosophical or to their rational
character. As against a more or less unitary conception of the em-
pirical approach with its hypothetico-deductive methods, we would be
opposing a multitude of philosophical methods each characterised by
its own notion of rationality. We have started with a hypothetical
guess that what in fact characterises a political theory is the est-
ablishing by the philosopher of a correlation between a pattern of
human behaviour and a political structure. The starting point being
the analysis of the notions of psychological coercion and of social
coercion and on the basis of this analysis to evolve a notion of pol-
itical obligation. A special function was attributed to the philos-
opher's conception of what constitutes a self-coercive form of dis-
cursive argument. With the help of the latter, the philosopher would
point out the contradictions implied in the concepts of mind and of
the state assumed by common moral beliefs.
Besides this working hypothesis we have assumed at the start that
modern analytical philosophy and especially its methods of conceptual
analysis could be of great help in the formulation of the conceptual
method as used by political philosophers. Unlike others who have also
sought to use recent contributions in analytical philosophy in the
social sciences, we have assumed that it is not the general method
of analytical philosophy but rather its contributions to the philosophy
of mind which could be of great help in our grasp of the conceptual
IX
X Preface
method in political theory.
We have chosen to analyse - in the light of our assumptions - three
classical works: Plato's Republic, Hobbes ' Leviathan and Rousseau's Social
Contract. We were guided in our choice - by the following points:
a) The obvious lack of unanimity in the arguments of those critics
who consider these theories important.
b) The no less obvious great differences both in the methods and
in the programmes advocated by Plato, Hobbes and Rousseau.
c) The great influence these philosophers have exercised on other
political theorists.
Since we did not intend to write yet another book on the history of
political theory, our account of these three philosophers is naturally
incomplete. We have justified our omissions by the restricted aim
pursued by our enquiry: the attempt to find the common feature char-
acterising the conceptual method in political philosophy.
In our account of Plato's Republic, we have stressed how political phil-
osophy was founded by the philosopher's moral intentions leading him
to conceive his own participation in the political continuum. Plato
describes Socrates using his maieutic method in order to force his
interlocutors to admit the absurdities of their assumptions about
human nature and about political authority. In re-mapping the known
facts of human nature and of the state, Plato offers us a thesis which,
when confronted with those of Thrasymachus and Glaucon, claims to be
free of the contradictions he has pointed out in the Sophists' thesis.
Plato builds up on the Tripartite division of the soul a philosophy
of mind corresponding to his philosophy of the state. He assumed a
common element of order pervading the human pattern of behaviour,
the organization of the state and the argument, seeking intellectual
certainty. But already in the Republic, we have seen the signs of the
philosopher's estrangement from the political life of the city. With
the idea of a political philosopher acting as a super-statesman and
guiding the city from above, came a distortion in the conceptual
method. A thesis about how to match concepts with political concepts
was transformed into a theory by which the philosopher deduces a
mental structure from a political structure or vice versa or even both
from some ultimate self-evident principles.
This kind of transformation in the conceptual method was carried even
further By Hobbes. In the Leviathan he fuses together the ultimate
principle, motion, with his mechanistic theory of mind and pretends
that he derives geometrically from them his theorems about the Laws
of Nature. In Hobbes1 case, the adoption of an openly mechanist and
geometrical method was intended to give the philosopher the required
authority in order to put an end to all the controversies raging in
England before and during the Civil War.
However, side by side with Hobbes' geometrico-mechanical model, we
can easily point out in the Leviathan Hobbes' analysis of the concepts
of human nature in relation to the concepts of political obligation.
Thrasymachus' cynical thesis is made by Hobbes much more explicit by
positing as a correlate to the idea of a man characterised mainly by
aversions and desires, the idea of a political vacuum which he called
the State of Nature. For Hobbes, reason, though it can advise and
counsel, can never be a motive for action. Nevertheless, it can show
man the absurdity of desiring to continue to live in the State of
Nature and that there cannot be any conscience without a strong pol-
Preface xi
itical authority instituted by contract. Reason in relation to the
human pattern of behaviour, as much as the Sovereign in relation to
the civil body, is relegated by Hobbes to the task of structuring
the passions, namely by placing the fear of violent death at the
centre of man's concern.
Rousseau uses the same concepts of natural man, state of nature, and
social contract, but his distrust of reason as the instrument for the
accumulation of factual knowledge is so great that he is moved to
locate the element of order in human behaviour in feeling. He con-
siders conscience as the development of self-love in the human soul
with the growing interdependence among men. In the intermediate stage
between the state of nature and civil society, human conscience and
human reason begin to develop. Conscience as love of order and of
beauty is the ultimate guide for man in distinguishing between the un-
iversal quality of his human nature (reminiscent of the absolute and
independent whole which he was in the state of nature), and the par-
ticular qualities imposed on him by society. It is feeling, i.e.
conscience, which reveals to man the basic contradiction between the
motion of 'slave' and that of 'right'. Reason enlarges man's natural
feeling of pity into compassion for his fellow-men living with him in
a state of interdependence.
Nevertheless, in spite of his criticism of the way his predecessors
have endowed natural man with the qualities and defects of man living
already in society, Rousseau has to admit that the legislator cannot
talk in his own language to men. Thus, even though he warns us at
the beginning of the Social Contract that he is not writing as a
legislator or as a Prince but as a citizen, he cannot but put at the
start of his theory what he should have left to be corroborated at
the end by his conceptual analysis. We are referring to his thesis
of man being naturally good and born free.
Three factors have contributed to give the conceptual method used by
great political philosophers the appearance of being a method for the
establishment of a correlation of strict dependency:
a) The remoteness of the philosopher from the activity of which
his theory is a natural part.
b) The need to write for more specialised people.
c) The didactic aim of the philosopher.
Limited as it is, the influence of a political theory is meant to be
exerted in debates and discussions in whatever form they take place,
whether in parliament, on the radio or television or in newspapers,
and in so far as they are relevant to politics. Political theory
hooks itself on to politics by unfolding the assumptions implied in
moral beliefs into a set of matching concepts of mind and of the state.
It is not at all a super-deductive theory but rather a super-form of
argumentation confronting these two theses about human nature and
political organization. The political philosopher does not prove his
thesis as much as he shows that it is free of the absurdities which
the opposed thesis leads to.
The distortion of the method has led people to misinterpret the real
function of the philosopher and the influence of his theory. Forgett-
ing that the aim of the theorist is to show the superiority of his thesis
and hence of his prograrrme by an argument though highly sophisticated yet
fundamentally of the same nature as that used in actual life, some
xii Preface
interpreters have concentrated their attention on the programme,
while others have maintained that it is the argument which should be
stressed· This dichotomy between the method and the programme of a
political philosopher is, moreover, considered as the natural prolong-
ation of two distinctive political activities: that of the practical
politician or administrator mainly interested in the blue-print of
the philosopher and that of the student of philosophy whose main act-
ivity is to analyse the language so as to understand its coherence,
its intelligibility.
Modern conceptual analysis is rightly considered by Mr Peter Winch
as not fatally limited to a barren analysis of the language of a
theory regardless of its content. However, his brilliant defence of
the philosophical method and his arguments for its superiority over
the empirical approach are based on a too easy identification of social
relations with logical relations of ideas. The notion of internal
relations is his magic key, giving the social scientist using the
conceptual method a direct access to the real nature of society.
The conceptual method does not reveal any reality, it only re-arranges
the facts already known about reality into intelligible wholes. It
is rather in its development as a philosophical psychology that modern
conceptual method becomes highly important for the understanding of
the nature of a political theory.
Indeed, the struggle of philosophers to distinguish the realm of their
enquiry from that of scientists, logicians and mathematicians, is im-
portant for political philosophers because it has attempted to est-
ablish a philosophy of mind as superior to empiricist psychology in
the study of human mental capacities. We have tried to show that the
path towards an autonomous philosophical discipline had necessarily
to pass through the stage of removing the conceptual confusion of sci-
entific empiricist psychology. But the relinquishing of the dream of
philosophy to participate from above in all intellectual activities
by exploring the nature of mind meant also the relinquishing of the
distortion of political philosophy as a deduction of political structure
from a so-called scientific study of human nature.
In the last chapter we have examined some modern political theories and
show that, however different their methods and their programmes, their
notion of the philosopher's participation in political life was depen-
dent on their concept of reason. Whether as scientific reason or as
a sort of superior reason, its use was limited to the few. On the
other hand, we have found Ryle's conception of theory-building activity
as an activity in which the common man can participate, highly illum-
inating for political philosophy. According to such a concept of
reason a political theory would not have to be imposed by the authority
of its deductive method or by the use of a superior reason, but by its
confrontation with other theories implicitly assumed by people holding
moral beliefs and opinions.
Lastly, we have contended that political philosophy can also contrib-
ute something to philosophical psychology. If in the analysis of con-
cepts of mind philosophical psychology has to avoid reductionism of
any sort and cease to look for the 'authentic object', whether as a
mental or a physical substance, i.e. to eschew both physical monism
or metaphysical dualism, philosophers have to admit that in so far as
mind is concerned, the only authentic object is the human activity
Preface xiii
constructing theories of mind correlated with theories of society.
In such a case we could use more freely political analogies in our
descriptions of mind, and reciprocally mental analogies in our de-
scriptions of the state, since anyhow we would be free of any fear
of reducing one to the other.
Introduction
The persistence of some social philosophers in proclaiming the sup-
eriority of traditional philosophical methods in dealing with polit-
ical and social reality - over modern scientific and empirical methods -
calls for some clarification about the nature of this traditional
philosophical method. Obviously it is not enough to define the method,
it is imperative to show the results one can or could obtain by apply-
ing it. More often than not, an enquiry about the way of tackling
political and social problems ends up by the assertion that the method
is determined by the aim of political theory. Are there any objective
and intelligible general truths in matters political which are dis-
covered by political theory? What is the nature of these truths? Are
they similar to scientific truths of dissimilar?
Methods and aims are closely interconnected. It would be quite im-
possible for a philosopher who accepts the view that his discipline
does not deal with facts to speak of "truths" as an end product of a
political theory. He would be more inclined to think in terms of
"values" and to formulate the aim of political theory as the study of
the fundamental values governing a particular society. This distinct-
ion between "facts" and "values", between objective truths and norm-
ative truths, would be rejected by social philosophers who contend
that their aim is the discovery of a truth that exists regardless of
time and place.
In a way a discussion about the method of political theory turns ult-
imately to be a discussion about the general nature of philosophy.
Perhaps the reduction of any enquiry about the method and aim of pol-
itical philosophy to an enquiry about the first principles of its
general philosophy, is unavoidable and should not be deplored. It
could be argued that the general consistency of a particular philosophy
is its greatest virtue. However, if such a view is accepted, it would
be quite difficult to oppose the Philosophical to the Scientific method in
political theory, and in fact this is exactly what happens. We witness
a number of political philosophies incompatible among themselves, try-
ing to show the superiority of the philosophical method over the sci-
entific and empirical approach.
Political theory is ultimately concerned with practical problems.
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