The politics of John Rawls

Alternative 'social contracts'

A general objection to any fictional assembly is its inherent unreality and impossibility. If the participants are removed from physical existence as a human being, to facilitate reasoning and deliberation, then they will no longer be sick or hungry. (For Rawls, strictly speaking, they are agents of the humans, rather than some ethereal form of human). Presumably they participants are also immortal, since the deliberations might take a very long time. So why should anyone leave the assembly? Why should they return to their human lives, as the philosopher-designer insists? It would not be rational or self-interested: the rational thing to do, in such circumstances, is to refuse to leave. For the model to be logical, there must be a more powerful force, to throw them out of the 'paradise'. The fictive assembly model parallels - even in its hypothetical and abstract form - the real historical coercion into nation states.

In any case, all fictional assembly models - in fact all social contract theories - are open to alternative outcomes. Rawls derives his two principles of justice from his fictive assembly - but only by saying they would be accepted. That's all. He does not explain exactly why the participants in the Original Position would choose these principles. He can not explain why: social contract theories never explain exactly why the social contract takes a particular form. Few include a list of possible alternatives, let alone reasons for rejecting these alternatives. The reader of the theory is simply asked to assume, that the social contract would take this form. Nevertheless, even starting from the type of fictional assembly proposed by Rawls, with the 'veil of ignorance' it is possible to give alternatives which are at least equally plausible. The participants might choose these options, rather than Rawls liberalism. They might choose them even under Rawls' assumptions - to minimise the harm that they might suffer, if they were transported back to a real historical human society, without knowing what their position in that society would be.

The first, most obvious, option is simply to have no society - to agree to live as hermits, or to create a 'society' approximating that ideal. A hermit culture is an extreme form of contact-minimising arrangement, not even a 'society' in the standard sense, but other less extreme forms of contact minimalisation are possible. The point is, that present liberal societies have no such goal of contact minimalisation: introducing it would in itself create a different form of society, with very few historical precedents.

A second option concerns removal or withdrawal. A hypothetical assembly of rational agents might decide, that any person may be removed, on their request, from the circumstances they experience, by an agency established for that purpose. You could say this socially institutionalises the science fiction device of teleportation. You could call it a 'mutual rescue contract' instead of a social contract. It might be difficult to implement - but no more difficult than, for instance, human rights. It is as rational, and historically as viable, as Rawls two principles of justice (which include basic equal rights and liberties). Unlike liberalism, it suggests a powerful, rather than a minimal, state. An agency which can rescue any citizens, at any time, will approximate to The State.

Perhaps no effective rescue agency is possible. In that case, a third option is to structure society, so as to facilitate withdrawal from society. This does not mean it is any less of a society: it simply means that the implied social contract has different priorities - not the rights and liberties suggested by liberals. Instead, the constitutional, legal, and social structures would give 'exit from society' priority over its own internal structures. Emigration has always been a real-world answer to injustice, oppression and inequality. However, apart from the work of Albert Hirschman, it has not been taken seriously, in political and social theory. A real constitutional priority for emigration is the institutionalisation of a hypothetical opt-out clause, in a hypothetical social contract.

A fourth option which also alters the structure of the hypothetical social contract, is to allow for 'recall' of the hypothetical assembly which formulated it. In the real world, this would be operationalised by a constitutional priority for revision of the constitution on demand - without any civil obligation to accept this revision. Remember, the hypothetical fictional assembly is supposed to act rationally: that is the whole point of liberal social contract theory. It is certainly rational to allow for revision of any contract, under changed circumstances. It is the infinite-duration social contract, proposed by contractarian theorists, which is irrational.

In the real world the 'recall option' would require a political culture, which emphasised its own temporary nature. It would include generous provisions for the recall of assemblies, review of their decisions, recall of representatives, and revision of laws and constitution, all at short notice and with minimum procedural requirements. There are few real-world examples. The nation state, by definition, is the expression of a transgenerational entity: it does not expect to suddenly disappear. The DDR (East Germany), in the year before its dissolution, did have a political culture based on the assumption that the state itself would soon disappear. However, there was no open-ended future: everyone knew that the dissolution would take the form of incorporation into the BRD (West Germany). A limited-term social contract implies that the future options are open - not that it wil be replaced on schedule by a known replacement. It implies a general recognition, that the bond between members of a society is tenuous, that it may soon dissolve, and that consequently the state may also dissolve. To have full effect, the 'recall option' should be available to all members of society. Those who suffer injustice today could, in principle, call for a referendum on the states's existence tomorrow. Again this is just as 'rational' a response to injustice, as John Rawls two principles of justice, or any other contractarian proposal.

Ernest Rénan, a 19th-century theorist of nationalism, once defined the nation as a 'daily plebiscite'. It is true that nation states will collapse, if citizens cease to identify with the titular nation, but there is no formal equivalent of Rénan's metaphor. In reality there is no recurring plebiscite: many nation states never held any plebiscite on their existence, values, or constitutional structure. In reality, most citizens of nation states will never even vote on a complete constitution, in their lifetime. Citizens of some former colonies had a chance to vote on independence - although by the time the referendum was held, the colonial power had already decided to leave. Certainly, only a small minority of the global population have ever freely decided to change their citizenship, and deliberately swear allegiance to a new Constitution. Consent to the state is almost always implied, and not real. States, and their constitutional structure, are indeed assumed to be quasi-infinite in duration. They have a political culture opposite to the culture of impermanence suggested by the 'recall option'. The Constitution especially is a dead weight on most societies: it can only be changed by slow and expensive procedures. This is not a good political climate for the quick rectification of structural injustice.

A related fifth option is the use of the veto. That implies that society should be structured, so that those who suffer from the actions of others can generally veto those actions. In political theory, there is a general hostility to the use of the veto, even on a limited scale. The liberum veto in the Polish Sejm (the assembly of nobles) is considered an notorious example of ineffective government, even though its use was limited to the aristocracy. Every member had an absolute veto over any decision of the whole assembly: the results were widely known in Europe. (In German, the expression polnische Landtag still refers to a chaotic meeting or organisation). However, the theorists' hostility to the veto is suspect. They write for the privileged and the powerful, while the veto is an effective defence for the weak - if the veto is extended to them.

A 'veto society' could have a full veto - of any person over any act of any other person. More likely, the veto would be limited: one form of limit is territorial. The force of the veto could be greatest at the local scale, weaker at intermediate scales, and weakest at the highest territorial level - a mirror image of the principle of subsidiarity. In effect, the force of the veto would diminish with distance. On the assumption that most harm is done in proximity, this would allow individuals to defend themselves against harm, but prevent them using the veto as an instrument of conservatism. (Note that all liberal systems incorporate some form of conservative veto anyway. In a market society, for instance, no innovation can occur in contradiction of market forces: in a democracy no innovation can occur against the expressed will of the people. However, liberals do not erect as many barriers for injustice, as they do for innovation). In combination with high rates of internal migration, a spatially limited liberum veto would probably lead to a segregation of the population into conservative and innovative zones. At the same time it would reduce injustice, especially the oppression of minorities. I think that is a not a bad arrangement.

A sixth option does not differ so radically from existing societies, but adds a specific characteristic to them. Society could be structured to facilitate the recognition, and avoidance of injustice by the victims, and self-defence against it, by labelling the unjust. In other words, they would be compelled to carry some form of 'mark of injustice'. This would make injustice more transparent. Liberals generally value 'transparency' in democratic and market processes, so why should it not be a part of justice theory? The tagging or labelling could apply to geographical locations, or specific institutions, and warnings against injustice could be institutionalised. However it would be primarily a labelling of individuals - and that is the root of the liberal distrust. Most liberals would be horrified at the idea, that unjust people have the word UNJUST tattooed on their forehead. They would be only slightly less horrified at more advanced methods, such as electronic tagging of the unjust, or implants. Almost certainly liberal propagandists would compare this to the yellow star worn by Jews in Nazi Germany. But that would be hypocrisy. It is the liberal democracies, which lead the world in the electronic tagging of criminals, in the collection of personal data on citizens, and in registration of biometric data. Liberal-democratic America - not a dictatorship - reintroduced the old-fashioned prison uniform, and installed webcams in cells, so that the public can permanently observe prisoners. Why is it then unacceptable to compel, for instance, racist employers to wear a uniform - with the words RACIST EMPLOYER in large fluorescent letters?

The labelling of the unjust could be conditional: it is not necessary to wait until they commit an injustice. Certain persons could be conditionally defined as injustice risks. Again this is an existing feature of liberal societies with respect to criminals. The traditional publication of verdicts in criminal cases is intended to warn possible future victims. Computers and the internet have facilitated an expansion of this principle, so that the registration of possible criminals is almost as comprehensive as the registration of past criminals. This applies especially to terrorism and sex offences. In Britain there are serious proposals to imprison potential child sex offenders, without trial, purely on the grounds of future risk to others, even if they have no criminal record. Already, personal data of convicted sex offenders is registered, including their DNA profile, and they are subject to police surveillance. If this is acceptable for a liberal democracy, why not apply the same standards and procedures to - for instance - importers of clothing from low-income countries? Other people are certainly at risk from their behaviour: risk of starvation wages, risk of child labour. Identifying the importers, registering them, placing them under police surveillance, monitoring their travel patterns: all this can all help to minimise the risk.

There are often more specific indicators of injustice risk. In countries with oligarchic and aristocratic ruling elites, the people who commit injustice are usually the children of those, who committed injustices in the previous generation. Perhaps simply because few others are in a position to do the same: nevertheless they are an identifiable risk category. The group may be even more specific. In the South American military dictatorships of the 1970's, many of the military officers responsible for torture, murder, and repression, had attended the same anti-subversion courses in the United States. In retrospect they were a high-risk group for extreme injustice. If that had been widely known at the time - if General Pinochet had been publicly registered as a 'potential torturer' - history might have been different. It is possible for a state to compile such registers, it is possible for a society to have a 'culture of registration' with respect to the unjust. All of these things are rational - at least as rational as the rights and liberties proposed by liberal social contract theory. It is an option for a hypothetical assembly to decide to structure society in this way: to maximise the collection and dissemination of information on risks of injustice from, and existing unjust practices by, categories of persons.

From all these options together, a seventh option arises. Since all of them differ from the conventional idea of society, it is an option to choose between them and conventional society. All of them restrict human social cooperation in the anthropological sense. Unlike John Rawls, they do not assume that "we must all live together". The seventh option is that society be so structured, that individuals may choose for themselves whether to accept a greater injustice, or greater risk of injustice. With using too much of an economic metaphor, it is clear that some people may be prepared to accept losses in return for benefits - because they see social co-operation, in Rawls' sense, as positive. This is a graded choice, rather than a choice between two distinct alternatives. The problem is how to structure society so as to make this gradation available in the real world. Again the logical solution is territorial segregation: a plurality of zones offers a plurality of degrees of social cooperation, a plurality of models derived from the plurality of hypothetical contracts described above. This territorial arrangement, in combination with free migration, would transfer to the real world the underlying choice about the 'social contract', which is available to any hypothetical assembly. It is this choice which is concealed by Rawls' model: like all contractarian theorists, he has designed his fictive contract to produce the result he wants. In particular, he has designed it to produce single-society outcomes. Once again, the similarity between contractarianism and nationalism is apparent. The plurality of zones, the seventh option, contradicts the single-society model inherent in the nation state. It contradicts the principle of national unity, a central tenet of nationalism.

The options presented above, as alternatives to traditional social contracts, are themselves only part of a wider range of alternatives to contractarianism. It has many defects, and listing the remedies for these defects of contractarianism generates many alternatives to it. The social contract, for instance, models a non-technological society. Technology is not an issue for contractarian theorists, but it is for the real world: in the long term, technological change has altered human societies more than any social issue. Technology is not something that can be left to a small group of specialist philosophers: it should be central to all social and moral philosophy. Rawls ignores the issue, at least explicitly, but his social and political thought is so conservative, that it would obviously limit technological change. That seems to be a general defect of social contract theory. There are not only alternative social contracts, there is a complete alternative 'social-technological contract' theory, waiting to be discussed. The question of how (and why) to facilitate technological change raises issues for social philosophy, beyond the limits of social contract theory.

What is injustice?

What happens if, instead of the Galactic Avengers, a philosopher storms into the torture cell? Will he stop the torture? No, even if he did have a ray-gun. That is not what social philosophy is about. He will note that the woman complains, that she is being subjected to injustice. Then he will go out to buy a copy of the Constitution, and examine the structure of the society. If he is a liberal-democratic philosopher, he will look at the guarantees of civil and political rights in the Constitution, and the structure of government. Is there freedom of opinion? Is the country under the rule of law? Is there a separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Is there political plurality, and can political parties compete for power? Are there free and fair elections? Non-liberal social philosophers might have different criteria, but they too will look at the structure of society.

If the liberal-democratic social philosopher is satisfied with the society he finds, he would then go back to the cell, and inform the woman that the society was just. If she complained that she was still being tortured, and that she found that unjust, the philosopher would explain that social philosophy is not about individual cases. He would point out, that she could apply to an independent judiciary to be released. If she was tortured to death first, her friends or family could file later criminal charges against the torturers, and that complaint would be assessed by a fair and independent tribunal. And after explaining to the woman that she lived in a just society, the philosopher would leave.

Social and political philosophy, in other words, is not concerned with ending a specific injustice. There is no branch of ethics which is concerned with specific injustices, although they may be used as examples. For philosophers, 'justice' is primarily a term which describes a society and its social structures. If the society possesses certain qualities, then it is 'just'. The fact that individuals in that 'just society' claim that they are victims of injustice is not seen as ethically relevant - no matter what is being done to them.

In the dominant liberal tradition in ethics, the "justice" of a society is assessed largely in procedural terms. Liberal philosophy always places great emphasis on procedure, fair procedure. The ability of citizens to present a complaint to an independent tribunal, is a typical example of a procedure, which is valued by liberals. If the judges reject the complaint, that is simply not relevant for the liberal assessment of that society or state. For them, the specific outcome of any fair process is not relevant. Indeed, the slogan "process legitimises outcome" is probably the shortest summary of liberal philosophy. When the procedures are absolutely fair and comprehensive, then for the liberal the society is just. This is certainly one of the underlying principles in the work of John Rawls, although he is rarely concerned with procedural details. Nevertheless it is also probably true, that for every injustice, a procedure can be devised of which it is the outcome.

So in the dominant liberal tradition, the existence of injustice is considered a non-relevant background factor, like the weather. People might complain that it is raining, but for the liberal philosopher, a "just society" does not mean that the rain stops. Equally, people might complain that they are being subjected to injustice, but for the liberal philosopher, a "just society" does not mean that the injustice stops.

It is easy to see, that this can be a licence for all forms of injustice. The philosopher - in stating that the society is "just" - becomes a propagandist for the regime. This is clearly the role played by liberal political philosophers, when confronted with the extreme inequalities typical of liberal market democracies. It is the philosophers who explain to the poor that poverty is not unjust, and that inequality is not tyranny. This propagandist role is a defect of liberal justice theory in general, rather than of the individual philosophers - although they bear personal guilt for having chosen to play the role.

The alternative is simple: ethics should not concern itself with 'justice', but with injustice - and how to end it. Some social philosophers have taken this approach. They try to define injustice, but this in itself carries the risk of 'defining away' other peoples claims of injustice. Iris Marion Young, for instance, listed five 'categories of oppression' - exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Her book Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990) was part of the communitarian critique of liberalism, and treats the ethnic minorities in the United States as a paradigm for 'the oppressed'. Any definition of injustice will probably be culturally and politically specific to the society in which it was written. So I will simply list some criteria or characteristics here, which can be used to identify injustice.

To begin with, an injustice is a harm. It is however a self-defined harm. If people say they are suffering harm, then they are. If you abandon the self-definition, you might as well abandon the word 'harm' anyway.

Secondly, injustice is the result of human action. People suffer harm from natural disasters, but they are not in themselves considered unjust. However, many so-called 'natural disasters' result when poor people are forced by economic necessity to live in zones of known high risk - volcanic slopes, flood plains, geologically unstable hillsides in cities. As I first wrote this section, mudslides killed 34 people in hillside slums in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The fact that the poor are forced to live there, while the rich are free to avoid the risk, is an injustice. It is a result of conscious human decisions, in this case a failure to take action. The rich failed to invite the hillside slum dwellers into their safe homes, the government failed to resettle them, and they can not afford to resettle themselves. The Associated Press report commented: "Mudslides in hillside shantytowns unfit for the construction of houses kill dozens of Brazilians every year. Local authorities usually are unable to persuade slum dwellers to leave danger areas as they are too cash-strapped to offer alternative housing." Neither the rich, nor the government, decided that there should be a landslide which kills slum residents - but nevertheless they act unjustly toward them. It is a characteristic of injustice, that at some point, some person consciously acted (or consciously failed to act), and that this action or inaction is a contributory cause of the subsequent harm.

A third criterion for identifying injustice is that there is no remedy. If a harm can simply be turned off like a tap by the victim, then it seems less of an injustice. If I am sitting watching TV and I don't like the programme, I can simply zap to another programme. It would not be right to claim, that the makers of the programme treated me unjustly. However, poor people have no device, which they can point at rich people, to instantly redistribute their wealth. Certainly in liberal societies there is no remedy for inequality of wealth. The behaviour of elites is often offensive: they display their wealth and status in public as if there was no moral issue involved. However there is nothing I can do about it: there is no legal procedure by which I can prevent an arrogant snob driving around in a Rolls Royce. The behaviour is acceptable for the criminal and civil law, there is no basis for any legal claim on the issue, and I can not apply to any institution for compensation. In general, these characteristics are also typical of injustice.

Injustice is usually systematic and repeated, and this is a fourth identifying characteristic. Discrimination in employment is a good example: its social effect derives from the fact that there are thousands, millions, of cases. Discriminated individuals can also expect to be discriminated repeatedly. There is no such thing as a one-racist society. If discrimination was something which only happened to one person, once in history, it could be treated as a bizarre incident, rather than as injustice.

A fifth characteristic of injustices is some form of forced inclusion. If you could run away from every harm, then you would suffer no injustice. In most cases, the inclusion is within a 'society' - and its general modern form is the nation state. The poor are not a a nation, and can never secede. However forced inclusion also occurs at a smaller scale, within a family for instance.

A sixth characteristic of injustice is that it is often visible and open. You can see that the poor are poor, and certainly you can see that they are not as well dressed as the rich. Not being 'well dressed' by the local standards can be a cause of shame, and can directly limit social contacts. Clothes confer status, and usually the more expensive the brand, the higher the status. It is not just an aspect of youth culture: the social class of individuals in most societies can be assessed by their appearance. The disadvantaged are not legally obliged to wear a sign reading "Disadvantaged" - but the effect is often the same.

A seventh related characteristic is that the victim of injustice acquires a specific status derived from the injustice. To begin with, the status of 'victim' itself. The most obvious and pervasive derivative status is a lower social class. All modern societies have social classes, and all societies group them in a vertical hierarchy. There is always an upper class and a lower class, they are not equal neighbours, in the way that friendly nations are. It is true that there are class-specific cultures - valued by the members of the class - and that not everyone seeks social mobility. Nevertheless, in general, membership of the lower class is a disadvantage maintained by injustice. The working class child in Britain will generally be refused a place at the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge - that is the way their selection procedures work. The point is, that this kind of selection procedures help to create the lower class. Certainly, if rigorous and repeated, they can sharpen class divisions, and produce hereditary elites within a few generations.

This indicates an eighth characteristic of injustice, namely that it is cumulative. The person disadvantaged by an injustice, will probably be further disadvantaged as a result. A traumatised victim of war, displacement, rape and torture, in Britain as a refugee, will probably never be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge. These universities would not "lower their standards" simply because a candidate had suffered terribly. A meritocracy is always harsh: the weak always suffer. In suffering they become weaker, and therefore - in the logic of a meritocracy - deserving of furthering suffering. It is typical of liberal-democratic societies - which are largely meritocracies - that the people at the bottom of the social ladder are trapped in a downward spiral. The existence of such cumulative disadvantage, and downward spirals, is itself an indicator that injustice is prevalent in a society.

These eight criteria, again, are not intended to be exclusive. They help to identify injustice, particularly social injustice, but I would not deny a justice claim simply because none of them are present. Similarly there are certain processes which are associated with injustice. Again this is not an exclusive list, but they include: selection, competition (including economic competition among nations) stigmatising individuals or groups, the deliberate possession of distributable advantage, and the blocking of redress or remedy for earlier injustice. They also include political and intellectual action to propagate, advocate, defend or replicate injustice. The justice theories of philosophers such as John Rawls are themselves unjust. Certainly their application is unjust, and presumably the authors intend that they should be taken seriously by governments and policy-makers.

These lists of criteria and process also allow an answer to the question: who is unjust? The unjust are often clearly identifiable, a fact which justice theory usually ignores. Although it is not said explicitly, I think that theorists want to avoid a 'list of the unjust' - because it could become a death list. If all injustice is indeed committed by a relatively small group of people, then a quick bloodbath will produce a just world. Even the implicit suggestion of this form of 'justice' is a horror for liberal-democratic theorists.

Nevertheless the list exists: injustice does seem to be concentrated in a relatively small group of people. To start with the family: almost all abuse of children is committed by the child's own parents. A second category is employers, and in modern economies the personnel managers who act as their agents. Employers discriminate in employment, but the employee usually has no opportunity to discriminate in reverse. Another large group of unjust people in modern western societies is, without doubt, teachers: the educational system transfers inequality from one generation to the next. Research has repeatedly shown that parents education, social class, and income largely determine the educational achievement of the child.

The rich are another identifiable category of unjust people - not so much because they are rich, but because they failed to give their money to the poor. Other privileged groups, if they can renounce privilege, are also unjust - the aristocracy is the prime example. Even in a nominally egalitarian society such as the Netherlands, aristocratic birth confers enormous advantage, especially in upper-class professions such as the diplomatic service. Nevertheless, only one Dutch aristocrat has ever renounced the privileged status, since that became legally possible. It is not a fault to be born into an aristocratic family - but it is an unjust act for someone who knows it is a privilege, not to renounce the privileged status when they can.

In a more general sense, that applies to anyone who finds themselves in a closed privileged group, and certainly to those who deliberately join them. The members of the elite social and business clubs, which exist in all western societies, are unjust people. They posses privilege, which they could end simply by cancelling their membership. Another specific category of the unjust is formed by those in powerful western countries who seek to impose (or maintain) unjust conditions in foreign societies. During the Cold War, the United States regularly sustained cruel foreign regimes in power, so long as they were pro-American: it seems that this policy is again in force. Those who campaign for the infliction of political regimes on others, which they would not accept in their own country, are an unjust but clearly identifiable lobby. They are privileged in the sense of being citizens of rich and powerful states. They were perhaps born into this privilege, and it is not easy to renounce it, but they could stop using their democratic rights in this way.

The task of political philosophy

There has been a great increase in the productivity of machines and equipment since the Second World War. Not just computers - computing power and memory increase tenfold every few years - but in most production technologies. However Gross National Product in western countries did not increase so fast: it doubled or tripled since the 1930's. Why can western economies, despite the spectacular advances in technology, achieve no more than 2% average growth each year? And why is it so difficult to implement any large-scale technical innovation? In the 1970's, a comprehensive plan for a European network of high-speed rail lines was approved. It should have been completed in 30 years. It was not, and they are still talking about new versions of the plan. The time-scale for completion is still 30 years, but that now means 2030, and there is no reason to expect completion then either. There are other historical examples of extremely long lead times: the idea of a 'picture telegraph' was well known by 1900, but mass television first arrived in the 1950's. The general fate of proposals for innovation is at best delay, and often abandonment.

There is evidently something in human society which is resistant to change, and it is probably the humans themselves. There are good biological grounds to conclude that. Change causes stress, and there are evolutionary avoidance reactions to change. The phenomenon is known as homeostasis, specifically, behavioural homeostasis: the organism tries to maintain itself in a constant relationship to its environment. In higher animals by deliberate behaviour: when the grass around them is eaten, grazing animals move on. If there is a drought, then they will 'automatically' move to wetter areas with more food. If this is not possible, the animal is not only hungry, it is stressed - and this can directly worsen its health. Humans adapt their own environment to maintain stability: when this fails, and they too are under threat or insecurity, they suffer stress. That is not sociobiological speculation: it is a fact backed by medical research and experience. Extreme changes can cause shock, and be directly fatal.

The biological reality is, that humans are genetically programmed to avoid innovation. Political theory should concern itself with overcoming this biological reality. For John Rawls the central issue of political philosophy is: "How can we maintain stable society in the face of reasonable pluralism?". For me it is: "How can there be change in the face of innate human conservatism?" Political philosophy is in this sense an inhuman, anti-human, or at least anti-humanist, exercise.

Innovation, when it affects individuals, is by definition an interference with their lives. It is a negation of the negative liberty so valued by liberals, especially if the state is the innovator, against the will of the people. The introduction of the Euro in Britain - where the majority is deeply suspicious of the new currency - would be a classic example of state-driven innovation, and deeply offensive to liberals. It would be an interference with their 'traditional and much-loved' currency. (In reality, the currency was imposed on Britain by force, when the Anglo-Norman kingdom of southern England conquered the rest of the island). The point is, that innovation in itself is often abhorrent to liberals.

Liberalism and innovation are usually enemies, intrinsically and inherently, but this issue is rarely even considered in assessments of liberal thought. Innovation makes unfree, in the liberal sense. It destroys the freedom of humans to live in a stable and unchanging world - which is what they innately need. When the state innovates, the state itself is inhuman. However, 'inhuman' is not necessarily a synonym for 'evil', as you would think from the general use of the word. Trees are not human, therefore they are by definition 'inhuman', but that does not make trees evil - although some radical neo-humanists might think so. These are issues which political philosophy should address: whether innovation is in fact evil, the ethics of imposed innovation, the supposed ethical primacy of humans over innovation, the claimed equivalence of 'human' and 'good', and the contra-innovative nature of much political philosophy itself.

The issues are especially relevant for liberal philosophy. Liberals often start from the premise of the innate goodness of human beings. They contrast their attitude to the mediaeval Church - which regarded humans as potential evil-doers, and justified its own power in this way. However, the inherent conservatism of human beings is not in dispute: it is a biological fact, and historically evidenced. Innovation requires social structures which take a negative view of this human nature - unpleasant but true. Liberals would see this as a return to a powerful paternalistic institution, such as the mediaeval Church in Europe - so they would resist such social structures. In their curious logic, social innovation can be presented as a return to the Middle Ages. To analyse and understand this type of belief seems a useful task for political philosophy.

Conservative strategies

Accretive conservatism is characterised by hostility to abolition: it is common in liberal-democratic societies. A good example comes from the atheist campaign in Albania under Hoxha: Dürres was proclaimed the first fully atheist city, after all religious activities there were suppressed. To most European liberal-democrats this is an example of tyranny, even if they are themselves atheists. They would rather see religion continue for a thousand years, than suppress it officially. But if nothing may be terminated, then everything will continue.The general principle of accretive conservative strategies is that nothing may be abolished: only that which does not damage or contradict the existing may be added. This is such a restriction on innovation, that it is justifiable to describe it as a conservatism.

Accretive conservatism is often associated with historicism, and linear visions of history. In a strict accretive version, history is a series of things added, but never subtracted: first A, then A+B, then A+B+C, but never A+C-B. This vision of history underlies the 'clock argument' against innovative abolitions, for instance, "It would be wrong to abolish the free market in Russia, because that would be a return to the Communist past" or "It is wrong to oppose liberalism, because then you would return to mediaeval society and the power of the Church". In the Russian case the clock argument is inconsistent, since the re-introduction of the free market was itself a return to the pre-1917 economy. But nevertheless, it is possible to argue against any social innovation in this way, since the present society did not exist for ever. There was indeed a 'time before it', and conservatives can claim that any reform or change is a 'return' to that past. Ultimately, this is a permanence ethic, and it can best be rejected on the grounds that there is no general moral obligation, to grant permanence to any entity. Historical accretion closes off future possibilities. Just as future events may be conditional on the presence of some event or entity, future events can also be conditional on their absence or abolition.

Variative conservatism is the insistence that only variants of the existing world are acceptable (morally, politically and socially). There is a good metaphor in architectural history: in Europe, tens of thousands of churches have been built in the last 18 centuries, almost all with a unique design. Yet all of them were, and are, churches - with liturgical requirements which limit the range of architectural possibilities. There is a theoretical multi-dimensional graph, which includes all possible variants of churches: it is very large, and internally diverse, and architects could 'expand into' this multi-dimensional space for many centuries more, creating many new styles and types of churches. Yet all their new churches will still be churches: even quasi-infinite diversity does not guarantee innovation.