Slouching Toward Realpolitik: Public Reason as Political Morality

Abstract

This paper offers an account of public reason that differs from the versions assembled in the long history of political philosophy. The paper stresses the location of public reason in power settings while bracketing the iconic hostility between the coercive effects of power and the liberty embedded in conventional morality. The arguments here move public reason toward more complex arrangements between the coercive dimensions of power and the components of public reason. One is the turn from direct to oblique power. Another is the acceptance of morality as a proxy for discretion in completing legal and political directives when power falls short of closure. There are also two grand theories of power and morality that can be drawn from Machiavelli’s Prince and Hobbes's Leviathan. Machiavelli suggests that the exercise of political power can legitimately invert moral rules and principles, an experience that occasionally produces a political morality discontinuous with conventional morality. The other theory is based on an argument developed by Hobbes in the Leviathan that overriding power is the only effective instrument to guarantee security and security is the necessary enabling good that makes it rational to be moral. Then there is the reality that some political terms contain moral predicates, indicating a moral naturalism as a rich source of political guidance. Finally, when the landscape has been cleared of external values, a part of the logic of public reason is within indigenous laws of large numbers that complement the moral naturalism of politics.

Keywords: public reason, realpolitik, coherence, rules of composition, power, morality