§1.
I start with two problems that I have spent quite a lot of time struggling with. What they have in common is that they are simultaneously problems of psychology and problems of first-order politics; and, further, that I believe an old paper by Quentin Skinner can help us make progress towards solving them, at least at the theoretical level.1
Supporting development and housebuilding requires, at least at some level, having an understanding of what NIMBYism is. Knowing why opponents to development are so numerous, what motivates them, and what their political tactics are, is (I would argue) necessary to defeat them. I have previously argued that NIMBYism is just the political expression of the material interests of homeowners; but apart from the many young leftists who are anti-development but don’t own their homes, there is also the case that many homeowning NIMBYs seem genuinely sincere when presenting arguments from neighbourhood character or affordability or environmentalism. Does this contradict my claim?
I think Contrapoints puts the point succinctly and correctly when she says that the foundation of ‘gender-critical feminism’ is “pure disgust”. And there are unquestionably some very prominent terf activists who are provably dishonest about what they believe, and who are clearly just motivated by disgust felt towards trans people and nothing more. But there are also people who seem to be motivated by a combination of anti-trans sentiment and worries about women’s rights, people who genuinely just think certain terf arguments are reasonable, and—most concerningly—people who think certain terf arguments are reasonable and are at least partially correct.2 How are we to understand, and respond to, terf rhetoric given these conditions?
Of course, these are just the cases I have spent most time thinking about, and there are many other examples that fit the same schema. A political argument or mindset seems (at some level) to be grounded in something cruder, a basic prejudice or material interest. But many of the people who employ the argument or have the mindset lack the relevant prejudice or material interest, or at least have it to a lesser degree without correspondingly less conviction. In such a case, there are three questions:
Can these two claims be made consistent?
If so, how?
What implications do the answers to 1. and 2. have for our political responses to these issues?
I’ll note that I’m not attempting to solve the general problem of ‘ideas and interests’ (insofar as it even is a real problem, and not just the result of people giving undeserved credence to bad Marxist arguments). I’m just focussing on the case of where an idea does seem to be grounded in some other motivation, not saying that all ideas are like this. You might not be convinced by my analysis of these specific examples (if, for example, you think material interests play no role in principled anti-development arguments), but almost everyone can think up an example of their own where they want to say that some political argument is just a cover for something cruder. It’s these cases that I will use Skinner’s ideas to analyse.3
§2.
Quentin Skinner, for those who don’t know him, is an intellectual historian who is famous in the field both for his first-order work on early modern political thought and for his methodological statements about how to practice intellectual history. But in this post, I’m interested in a less well-known (though by no means obscure) article from 1974, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’.
This paper was primarily a reply to his critics: in it, Skinner defends his study of the history of ideas against the charge that “the principles professed in political life are commonly the merest rationalisations of quite different motives and impulse”. In other words, human beings are motivated not by principle or philosophy, but by power, interests, prejudice, and money—”untoward” motivations, to use Skinner’s term. The critics who raised this point—including, but not limited to, Marxists who believed that ideas just reflect the economic structure of society—argued that it meant political arguments and principles couldn’t explain anything about history, and so tended to attack the study of these ideas.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Skinner grants for the sake of argument that political principles are typically just rationalisations, and that political motivations are generally untoward. But he notes that, in politics, what you are able to do is typically a function of what you are able to legitimate: for example, a politician’s ability to pass a tax cut for the wealthy often relies on middle class support, which requires that the middle class believe it is (in some sense) a legitimate policy. Obviously, legitimation often has to go beyond simply citing material benefits—otherwise, middle-class voters would never support tax cuts that they wouldn’t benefit from. This is where principles come in: libertarian ideas about small government and freedom are used to legitimate the policy to voters, and in turn they make it possible for the politician to pass a tax cut that they couldn’t have otherwise.
And in turn, these principles constrain the actions that can be taken by the politician. Even if the politician doesn’t believe any of the libertarian principles he cites in public, and is looking to pass the bill just to increase his take-home pay, his action must now be consistent with these principles. If he is to be able to legitimate the tax cut on libertarian grounds, he can’t also tack on a government subsidy for supersized yachts to the bill no matter how much it would benefit him (unless he can, in turn, provide another legitimation for this—and thus the cycle begins anew). In this way, the ideas that are proposed as rationalisations of a policy are actually able to constrain and shape the form of that policy.
Thus, against the materialist claims of his critics, Skinner showed that even if political principles are nothing more than mere rationalisations, they can still “make a difference” in history in two ways: first, political actions are limited by the legitimations it is possible to provide for them; second, the choice of legitimation alters the form of the action. Thus, studying these ideas is an important aspect of history.
§3.
If it is supposed to be providing a purely negative argument, giving a model to refute crude materialism and defend his discipline’s existence, Skinner’s article succeeds splendidly. But the man himself clearly thought that his argument could be made more general: Skinner describes the analysis of legitimation as an integral part of “my general approach to the study of political theory”, a belief reiterated in the Preface to his Foundations of Modern Political Thought and in chapter three of Liberty before Liberalism.
We might read this claim as follows: in general, political actions are grounded primarily in untoward motivations, but the job of intellectual history is to study the legitimations that are offered for actions and the difference that these ideas make. This is generalising Skinner’s model from a description of how ideas sometimes make a difference in history to an account of the only way they make a difference. This is how Richard Bourke reads Skinner, and he pushes back. According to Bourke, because this model involves political actors using principles to justify the actions they were going to do anyway, Skinner “narrows the activity of the intellectual historian to the analysis of moral subterfuge”.
I’m not completely sure if Bourke’s reading of Skinner is correct,4 but then again Bourke knows Skinner personally so I’m not really in a position to argue. But whatever Skinner actually meant, I think we can generalise Skinner’s model in a different way, one that is incredibly productive. Bourke thinks that Skinner provided a model of political ideas in general, and how they relate to untoward motivations; but I want to read him as providing a model of untoward motivations in general, and how they generate ideas.
How does this work? Start, as Skinner does, with someone who has already decided on a particular political course of action: let’s call him Jim, and suppose he’s a backbench MP who has written a bill and is trying to get it passed by Parliament. This could be out of pure material interest (the bill will make them Jim load of money), but it’s important that this model is general enough to encompass other untoward motivations like prejudice (the bill will hurt black people and Jim is a racist) or in-group loyalty (the bill will entrench Jim’s political party’s advantages) or a combination of different motives.
Now, if Jim just came out and said that he wanted to pass the bill because it would make him money, it’s very unlikely he’d find enough support to pass it. He needs to legitimate it: first to his fellow MPs, but also to the public, whose support could push other MPs over to Jim’s side (MPs are highly motivated by the threat of losing their seat) and whose opposition could get Jim himself booted at the next election. So Jim comes up with a principled argument in favour of the bill, which references political ideals and moral values instead of his personal benefit. He might not even believe in this argument, and (like all arguments in politics) it is probably not strictly formally valid; but if it is to work it will have to be grounded in the moral and political culture of the country, and thus it is able to be accepted by other people and shape their beliefs. In this way, Jim’s untoward motivation has generated a principled political idea.
Note that, while the argument is grounded in Jim’s untoward motivations, nonetheless it has been picked up by people who don’t share those motivations. In this case, we can reasonably say both that the argument is just a cover for untoward motivations and that it is sincerely believed by people who don’t have these motivations—we’ve provided a model to show how both of these things can be true at once. This is precisely the answer we were looking for to my first two questions.
§4.
We can generalise this basic model in a couple of directions. First: I assumed that Jim was consciously trying to come up with some legitimation for his action, but we can eliminate the need to posit such overt dishonesty. We just need to be able to say that the process of coming up with a principle to justify your action on can happen entirely subconsciously. Given a Jonathan Haidt–esque account of how our moral reasoning works, we can say that humans are constantly looking for reasons that legitimate our own actions to ourselves, even if we are not motivated by reason in the first instance. Haidt uses the metaphor of reason-as–press secretary: a press secretary has no say over what decisions the president makes, but just has to come up with arguments for whatever decision gets made no matter what it is. From this perspective, it becomes clear that Jim does not have to lie to anyone: the argument he produces in favour of the bill can look like his real motivation even to himself, because his own psychology has hidden the more fundamental reason he’s pursuing it.
At this level, the model does not involve any overt lying. But we might still want to say that there’s still some kind of dishonesty at play here—or better (to use Bernard Williams’ very useful concept), a lack of truthfulness. (Jim might not be lying to others, but perhaps he is lying to himself about why he believes what he believes.) But this is exactly what characterises the cases under discussion! I started off looking for an analysis of arguments that I thought weren’t actually about what they were said to be about; in other words, arguments that are in some sense untruthful. Bourke objected to Skinner’s model on the grounds that it reduced the history of ideas to the analysis of duplicity; but when we’re actually trying to analyse duplicity, Skinner’s model is exactly what we want.
The second direction of generalisation is to decentralise the model. I assumed Jim was acting alone, but this does not have to be the case. Political ideas are rarely the product of just one person’s thinking: they are produced by movements, parties, coalitions, committees, etc. This is especially true because political actions are typically a joint undertaking, involving not just a single MP but a whole swathe of politicians and campaigners working together. Many people can contribute to the legitimation of the same action, or even provide multiple overlapping legitimations of closely related actions that together add up into an entire discourse. My personal favourite case study of this is the political thinking of white southern Americans in the 1840s and 1850s, in which the legitimation of various pro-slavery policies was constantly evolving as different figures contributed different forms of racist ideology and moved in and out of the political spotlight; the consensus philosophy that the Confederacy eventually embraced as the legitimation of its actions was in many ways not much older than the Confederacy itself.
When we combine these two generalisations—decentralise the model and move it from the conscious level to the subconscious—we arrive at a picture of how these kind of ideas are generated that does not rely on anyone to be actually thinking of the crude motivations in question. For example, a large and disparate group of homeowners, dispersed throughout the entire country and perhaps rarely explicitly thinking of their house prices, can together generate a whole way of thinking that spreads even beyond homeowners. And yet, we can and should say that these ideas are fundamentally grounded in untoward motivations, that NIMBYism is really just about homeowners trying to keep their house prices high; this is an important part of understanding these ideas.
§5.
This Skinnerian model thus tells us that untoward motivations produce principled arguments and ideas, through a process of legitimation-seeking. But further—and crucially for my purposes—if we think some principled idea is rooted in an untoward motivation, we can use the model to better understand the politics that the idea produces. This is crucial to answering my third question, about the implications of the model for political practice.
I cannot more than begin to sketch an answer; ultimately, the problem of political practice can only be resolved through political practice, and a blog post can hardly solve the housing crisis. But I will make a few observations. As seen above, the nature of legitimation creates a constraint on political action: political action must (in general) be consistent with its own legitimation. There are obviously exceptions when, for example, a politician is lying about what they’re actually doing; but in general, the ideas that are produced to legitimate a decision actually shape the form of that decision.
What this means in practice is that people who use these post hoc rationalisations act in much the same way whether they are genuinely motivated by the force of the argument or whether their real motivation is more untoward. No matter what the politician’s real motivation is, he has to “behave in such a way that his actions remain compatible with the claim that [the legitimation] genuinely motivated them” (in Skinner’s words). So even if some idea is merely a rationalisation of an untoward motivation, the people who expound it will act as if it isn’t just a rationalisation.
This is a crucially important point, because it means taking these ideas seriously in practice (if not necessarily in theory). No matter how easy it might be to dismiss some arguments as “just” cover for prejudice—no matter how many times I myself have done this!—the arguments will shape the ways that prejudice gets expressed in politics, and will actively make a difference. They must be approached with this in mind. Crucially, this can often involve treating these ideas with more respect and openness than you think they might deserve, because even if the person you’re arguing with is actually a bigot, to an onlooker they won’t look like it; thus, refusing to engage with them can make you look unjustifiably intolerant, or worse, like you just don’t have any good arguments.
To make one very important clarification, none of this means treating these ideas as if they were not grounded in untoward motivations, ignoring the fact that (e.g.) terf ideas are rooted in hatred of trans people. There are two reasons for this:
Political action and political thought evolve over time, as arguments, concepts, slogans, and words are accepted, rejected, or reinterpreted. In many cases it can be reasonable to think of this as a quasi-random process, because there is no teleology at play. But in the specific case of post hoc legitimations, because these ideas are grounded in more fundamental social factors, they will change in ways that reflect these factors. Forgetting that terf ideas are grounded in disgust at trans people could lead you to think that they might eventually dissolve or take on a different emphasis; you will miss that the descendants of these ideas will completely predictably continue to be used to exclude and harm trans people, until the underlying disgust becomes a weaker force.
In-group dynamics are always at work in politics, and can push people towards the most extreme form of a claim. If a given argument is grounded in prejudice, those who accept the argument can end up constituting an in-group or political tribe, and the prejudice can become a marker of group identity. In such a case, the legitimation can become less necessary and thus relied upon less. Even those terfs who start out motivated just by a (confused but understandable) worry about sexual assault in toilets can, over time spent surrounded by other terfs, come to be fully motivated by disgust towards trans people and begin to express this disgust more explicitly and more harmfully.
These points are perfectly general: the forces of intellectual change and in-group dynamics mean untoward ideas function in predictably different ways from other kinds of ideas. We need to always remember where they come from, because even though at any one time the difference between post hoc legitimations and actual principled beliefs is minimal, as the system evolves over time these pressures come into play and make a difference.
But at the same time, we cannot engage with terfs as if they were the same as openly transphobic social conservatives, or with NIMBYs as if they were explicitly announcing that they were acting to boost their house prices. I don’t have a complete answer to the question of how we should engage with these people; but I have argued that any answer, no matter how incomplete, should start with Skinner’s ideas.
It would be very nice if reading Quentin Skinner would solve these political problems for me in practice—it would definitely justify me doing a Cambridge MPhil in intellectual history, in which I am reading a lot of Skinner. But alas.
I think it’s important to admit that this group exist, not just for the purposes of being truthful (which are important and should not be ignored) but also for narrow pragmatic political purposes. I have wanted to write a post about this for a while but have struggled to find the right path through the intellectual thicket; perhaps it will come out some day.
A brief word on the ‘genetic fallacy’, before we get started. I don’t think that any of this constitutes an argument against NIMBYism or terf ideas; such arguments are important—see the links given in the bullet points if you are looking for these—but are not the focus of this post. This post is for those who want to analyse a given position using a lens that’s more historical or political than philosophical.
See the paragraph on pp.292–293 of Skinner’s article, which I think is textual evidence that Skinner does not think of his model in these terms.