The Moral Foundations of Politics

I have to say in all honesty that of the hundreds of political science books I've read in my life, this little number is one of the best. Shapiro is so fair, so sharp, so insightful, so spot on with his evaluations, and amazingly, so concise and thorough at the same time, that I think it is a shame this book hasn't made a bigger splash. It manages at the same time to be a great introduction to the great political philosophies AND a profound meditation and evaluation of, and critique on, each. I know I sound like a sap raving over this thing, but let me just include one more comment. This will sound a bit weird, but here goes. I found Shapiro's last chapter on democracy really, really moving. I've never really felt that way before reading a book about politics, and I can't really do his discussion justice here. I should just mention that among other things, he raises the question of how solid the traditional rationale for democracy really is, resting as it does on the absolute knowledge claims of early enlightenment thinkers. He points to Popperian epistemology, or fallibilism, as a surer basis for it, and then from there goes on to flesh out a series of arguments vindicating democracy's current status as, really, the sole legitimate political arrangement. These include explanations of how democracy institutionalizes truth detection mechanisms, how those mechanisms operate and why they are so important to human welfare, and ventures to suggest a few improvements to our current set-up for consideration. I'm going to order his book on democratic theory next. Really a brilliant little book. T.

"As Ian Shapiro makes clear in the preface, his Moral Foundations of Politics grew out a lecture course of the same name that he has been offering at Yale University since the early 1980s. The central question in both the course and the book is, `What kind of government is morally legitimate and why?' Different theories of the sources of political legitimacy in Western political thought from the Enlightenment down to the present are canvassed in the book's six central chapters. The presentation is fair -- and fairly standard -- though Shapiro has his own views on these theories, which he does not attempt to hide."Chapters 2 and 3 constitute a clear and concise overview of utilitarianism, conceived of as a political philosophy. For classical utilitarianism (that is, Jeremy Bentham's version), government's main purpose is to create a stable framework within which people can pursue their own self-interest. Bentham's apparent attachment to small government, however, never went very deep. Like many nineteenth-century reformers, he had enormous confidence in the power of science, informed by the Principle of Utility, to guide public policy. This attitude would seem to license government intervention potentially in a wide range of human affairs. For example, Shapiro notes that classical utilitarianism, together with the principle of diminishing marginal utility, appears to justify substantial redistribution of wealth. (I say `appears to justify' because in fact it does not. For a clear refutation of this standard utilitarian justification of redistribution, see David Schmidtz, `Diminishing Marginal Utility and Egalitarian Redistribution,' Journal of Value Inquiry 34 [spring 2000]: 263-72.) Bentham accepted this idea, although he believed the redistributive impulse had to be tempered by a consideration of the incentive effects of confiscatory tax rates. The modern preoccupation with figuring out the tax rate that will strike the appropriate balance between efficiency and `equity' seems to have its roots here (as does the benevolent-dictator model of government)...."Following the two chapters on utilitarianism are chapters on Marx and on social contract theory. Shapiro stresses Marx's commitment to the Enlightenment project of applying the scientific method to the study of human behavior, which issued in Marx's theory of history (Historical Materialism) and his political economy. Marx does not develop his ethical ideas in any detail, and Shapiro must twist the old communist's arm to get him to speak to normative issues in general and to the question of political legitimacy that frames the book in particular. Although Marx presents his theory of exploitation as purely descriptive, Shapiro interprets it in a moralized way so that the labor theory of value takes on normative significance. On that reading, the labor theory is a variant of the Lockean idea that people are entitled to the fruits of their labor and that exploitation occurs to the extent that the