John Mearsheimer
Why Leaders Lie
Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2011
144 Pages
ISBN 978-0715641569

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The discrepancy between idealist rhetoric and realist practice in international relations was spectacularly illuminated this year by WikiLeaks’s publication of US diplomatic cables. We have long had proof of specific leaders’ duplicity—Nixon on Watergate, Clinton on “that woman”, Blair and Bush on weapons of mass destruction—but the memos released at the cusp of 2011 were novel in their revelation of the extent to which the international system runs on deceit. John Mearsheimer’s study, then, appears especially timely; its subject is both fascinating and urgent. Why Leaders Lie offers two contributions to our understanding of dishonesty in foreign policy. The first is the initially counterintuitive finding that states lie to each other relatively rarely, and that it is democratic leaders who are most likely to lie to their own populations. The second is his typology of the varieties of deception in international affairs, which serves as an explanation of why leaders tell these lies.

Oxford University Press appears to be emulating Princeton’s invigorating range of neatly argued and accessible monographs by academics including Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit and G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? Illustrating his analysis with cases from the Ems Telegram to the Gulf of Tonkin, Mearsheimer’s offering certainly provides a vivid and enlightening tapestry of context to the scandals which currently provoke our outrage. Yet what promises to be an essential and compelling study ultimately fails to capitalise on these observations and yields little further reward. One suspects the format, which leaves space for no more than a succinct argument and a few examples, is better suited to philosophy than to international relations.

Defining a lie as explicitly providing one’s audience with falsehood as fact, Mearsheimer distinguishes between two sorts of international lie based on two potential audiences: lying to other states and lying to one’s own people. He insists that every instance he could find of inter-state lying is contained within the book, and assuming he is correct, this would mean that there have only been a handful or two of cases in the last two centuries. This is surely an interesting observation, and Mearsheimer backs it up with a robustly realist explanation. Lying is parasitic on a community of trust; it is most effective and therefore most rampant where it is least anticipated. The international scene, which in “card-carrying realist” tradition Mearsheimer paints as the Hobbesian state of nature writ large, is in effect vaccinated against lying by the antipathy rife between state leaders. “It seems clear that leaders and their publics believe that lying is an integral part of international relations;” because everyone expects deception, mendacity is an especially ineffective, and therefore rare, strategy.

On the other hand, the democratic state of law thrives and depends on trust, and so is ripe for abuse. Our politicians, more than autocrats, require the oxygen of public support for their policies, and so when it fails to appear, they are tempted to create it artificially. Mearsheimer categorises the lies our leaders tell us according to the effects they seek to achieve. Leaders “fearmonger” in order to amplify a threat they feel the populace would otherwise underestimate; Johnson, for example, fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to stir Congress to declare war on North Vietnam. They perform “strategic cover-ups” of mistakes and policy failures in order to limit the international fall-out; Eisenhower, for example, claimed that the U2 spy plane downed in Soviet airspace was collecting weather data. They engage in “nationalist myth-making”, reinventing the historical record in order to bind their populations with a guiltless national identity; former colonial powers, for example, long denied or downplayed the viciousness of their regimes. Finally, they tell “liberal lies”, embellishing their government’s often illiberal methods with idealistic motives. These are all lies in the perceived national interest; of course, leaders also deceive to advance their class interest, or to save their own skins after a policy failure, but Mearsheimer rightly focuses on the more morally ambiguous realm of lying in the national interest.

It is when the reader seeks more than this “inventory of international lies” that disappointment awaits. Of course we cannot expect Mearsheimer to predict when such lies will fail or succeed, but merely giving the aims of the lies does little to fulfil the title’s promise to explain them. It may be that the penalty for making such lucid and plausible assertions is that one’s argument strikes the reader as simple and repetitive, but the account as a whole feels thin, with its key insight turning out to be its only insight. Need one be told, for example, that “if leaders lie in the service of promoting a flawed policy, they are likely to lose popular support when the public discovers it has been misled…”? At times he approaches deeper analysis, as in his account of why leaders would resort to fearmongering, offering an exercise in empathy that serves to underline the contempt in which such leaders hold their publics. It is however in the book’s preface and not its title that the reader finds its true utility; although it does not explain “why leaders lie”, but it does provide, as he hopes, “a conversation-starter” on the subject.

In evaluating these motives for deception, Mearsheimer insists his approach is “utilitarian”. Aside from the pedantic point that his measure is in fact national interest, rather than “the greatest good for the greatest number”, a more serious problem is how this evaluative perspective undermines his analysis of the disadvantages of lying. One is reminded of T.S. Eliot’s response to Animal Farm; that “what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” Mearsheimer’s identification of the key pitfall of state dishonesty as the corrosion of trust in public debate invites an analogous retort: it suggests that what we need is not more honesty but better cover-ups. If lies are well told and perfectly concealed, trust in public debate would in fact prosper. Of course, this is exactly why leaders are so tempted to lie; although they know that generalised duplicity would pollute the deliberative ecosystem, there is no reason to believe that a particular instance of lying will be discovered.

A deeper problem is the self-fulfilling tendency of his analytic lens, the realist theory of international relations. As mentioned, his emphasis on the absence of a global policeman, with diplomacy as a “self-help world”, works efficiently to explain his observation of the rarity of international lying. However, it is only because he holds this model of international power as exclusively wielded by nation-states that he reaches that observation in the first place; it allows him to gloss over corporate denial of human rights violations, for example. Additionally, Mearsheimer flits between a definition of lying as exclusively verbal, where “a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true”, and a definition including instances of nonverbal deception, where one “purposely lead[s] the listener to a false conclusion without explicitly stating that conclusion.” An example would be Operation Mincemeat, where MI5 subterfuge led German intelligence to believe that the Allied invasion of Italy would focus on Sicily rather than Sardinia. If one includes not only explicit state-to-state insincerity, but also nonverbal deception and the duplicity of non-state actors, international perfidy dramatically reappears.

Lying, it transpires, is the vice of the accountable. Whereas those with the power to flout rules achieve their ends by other means, those constrained by the law must resort to deception. It is also, in the words of La Rochefoucauld, “the tribute vice pays virtue”; unlike threats and coercion, those who lie implicitly reaffirm the value of truth, and those who lie about the principles their actions embody simultaneously reaffirm the value of those principles. The prevalence of lying in our political class emerges as a somewhat perversely comforting thought—it demonstrates that they have no other means of getting what they want, and that at least when we detect it, we can bring its perpetrators to justice.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson detects a rot in the instruction of history. Sixty years ago, courses in Western civilisation offered sweeping narratives that required students to engage with classical texts and study the reasons for Western ascendancy. Today, Ferguson bemoans, students “have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions and Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.” Ferguson’s recently released Civilization: The West and Rest (reviewed by Oliver Cussen in issue 15.6) seeks to return a focus to grand historical narrative, answering what Ferguson considers to be the most interesting question of Western historiography: how 11 empires came to control 58% of the world’s land surface and 79% of economic output. Ferguson enumerates six advantages—or “killer apps”—of the West: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Together, they allowed the West to pull ahead of the “Rest”; however, Ferguson warns, these advantages are no longer the West’s preserve. Just as Westerners are beginning to lose faith in their cultural institutions, Easterners are “downloading” the apps that once created the conditions for Western supremacy. The 21st century, Ferguson concludes, may be defined by the precipitous decline of the West and the ascendancy of the East.

On Saturday, 9 April, Ferguson spoke to the Oxonian Review about Eastern ascendancy, the relationship between Western cultural institutions, and how to improve the instruction of history.

If the West is a set of cultural institutions and practices, why would the downloading of Western apps by the East not constitute an expansion of the West, rather than its decline?

That is an issue I address in the conclusion of the book by asking—particularly with reference to chapter 5—how far the consumer society represents a Westernisation of every society that it touches. At one level, we can celebrate the success of China and India emerging from poverty by using our killer applications. It’s just that the most successful of these consumer societies—China—has not downloaded all six. In particular, it isn’t interested—at least it doesn’t appear to be interested right now—in the idea of the rule of law, private property rights, and representative government: the John Locke app. So if China is going to become the largest economy in the world in the next ten years and increasingly a competitor for strategic dominance with the United States, I don’t think we can call this a triumph of Westernisation. This is a country that is still a one-party state and where, for example, an artist like Ai Weiwei can be simply arrested at Beijing airport after expressing criticism of the regime. I think there is some Westernisation going on in China—that is obvious in the way people dress—but to call this a complete triumph of Western civilisation is highly naïve.

What do you think the consequences are for Eastern ascendancy that all the Western apps haven’t been downloaded, particularly representative government?

The good news is that India has all these institutions. It’s just that they work rather slowly. One way of thinking of it is that India has the software but there are some bugs in the machinery that make it run super slowly. I’m an optimist about India, because I think those problems can be fixed and are being fixed. India is a free society in which you can criticise politicians for being corrupt, and we’ve just seen an enormous surge of public opinion in India about corruption, which is going to have a very [sizable] effect on Indian political life. It’s much harder for the Chinese to cope with the aspirations of their middle class…[because] there is no political channel to express dissent. If you look ahead to the 21st century in which there is an equal in economic terms to the United States and European Union in the form of China, but that this China is very emphatically not a free society, the potential for conflict is very obvious. And we already see it in a whole range of economic areas, and we are seeing it beginning in the scramble for commodities, which is rampant in Africa and South America—not to mention Australia—right now. And ultimately there is more reason to expect a breakdown in relations between the West and China than to expect them to carry on harmoniously.

Do you think there is any link between the apps insofar as having five apps would begin you on the path to acquiring the sixth?

They are presented in the book in a chronological sequence, and I’m implying that there is a causal relationship. The transition to representative institutions and the rule of law was a very important precursor of the successful industrialization of the English-speaking world. The fact that China has gotten as far as becoming an industrial superpower without the creation of free institutions is a cause for concern. It is a likely source of instability. I draw a parallel with Wilhelmine Germany in late 19th and early 20th centuries—a very dynamic economy but with a fundamentally deformed political system, which ultimately resorted to aggressive foreign policy rather than make meaningful concessions to the left. There is an interesting parallel to be drawn there, but one wouldn’t want to take it too far. The big unknown is the timing and nature of institutional change that will come to China. No one denies that some kind of change will come, but the timing of it is very hard to gauge. And my fear is that a regime like the Chinese regime, faced with economic and social challenges, will be quite tempted to resort to nationalism to legitimise itself. We’ve already seen that happen in some degree.

Is it the case that in the West we’ve lost faith in our apps?

I think to some extent we have, although it’s very hard to generalise now because there are so many very profound differences between—say—the United States and Europe. What I see is a mindset in which the last 500 years is primarily understood through the prism of imperialism and the crimes of the West against the Rest. By emphasising empire in the narrative of modern history, we make a major mistake, because the least interesting thing about Western civilisation is that it engaged in imperialism. Everybody did that. All civilisations of any real note have engaged in some kind of imperialist expansion. The original, interesting things about the West are not slavery and not conquest. The interesting things are the innovations in the realm of science or political institutions or economic life. Those are the novel things. My sense is that the way we think about our past now, the way that we teach kids in school, underplays the importance of—to take one other example—the work ethic. So I do think we are in danger of undervaluing our own civilisation and doing the thing that’s fatal: we are failing to transmit its values to the next generation.

You’ve written that this transformation in the instruction of history is rooted in the 1960s. Is there a reason for the de-emphasis of Western values?

I think there is a close link between the political left and a shift in the way in which the content and the form of teaching were conceived. The New History, insofar as it was a movement in this country, was partly a design to transform historical methods and to move away from the idea that history is “one fucking thing after another”—in the famous Allen Bennett phrase. There was a political angle to that because it was supposed to be displacing Our Island Story—a caricatured version of British history that sprung from Macaulay and turned into an early 20th-century textbook. I’m not arguing for going back to Our Island Story. But I think it would help to have some kind of story beyond the wickedness of empire in the way we understand the period from 1500 to the relatively recent past.

I don’t want to make this too simplistic. A lot of what has happened in history education has been the law of unintended consequences. I certainly don’t think Kenneth Baker, when he was education secretary, had any clue what the national curriculum would mutate into after it was created. But I think there’s a problem, and I think the problem is there in a generation that is leaving school with a very, very jumbled and fragmentary knowledge of the past. Very few people would dissent from that despite the attempts of school inspectors like Ofsted to claim that everything is fine.

How do you reconcile reorienting the curriculum to teach an overarching narrative with educating students to examine primary sources?

There is a need for realism about how much in the way of historical methodology you can teach a 12-year-old kid, and I think there is a somewhat disingenuous belief that you can teach the methods of professional historians to preteens who don’t even know whether the Enlightenment came before or after the Renaissance. I think you’ve got to walk and then run. And teaching sources and methods first—in my experience talking to kids—is not a particularly effective way in engaging them. Indeed, if you talk to both teachers and school children doing Key Stage 3 and GCSE, they mostly ridicule the source analysis. And I don’t blame them. If you look at what they are asked to analyse, it is usually one paragraph. It is a parody; a sort of caricature of what we do. And that’s really why, in some way, I am in revolt against that approach. I don’t think they’re in fact really learning historical methods; I think it’s a charade. And it would be far better [teaching] some historical knowledge, facts, and then worrying about the methodology when they’re a little bit older. It’s all about getting people to study history in the long term. Right now you can stop at 13, which is crazy.

How would you change the way history is taught at the university level?

In one fundamental way. In my experience, both at Oxford and at Harvard, far too little of the philosophy of history is taught. And faint runs through historiography are no substitute for a proper grounding in philosophy as a subject. You probably haven’t been asked to read RG Collingwood or Michael Oakeshott or Benedetto Croce or any of the philosophers who grasped and grappled with the issues of historical thought…The thing I would change if I had some control over our graduate programme at Harvard [is to] make every single PhD student do a foundational course in historical philosophy in year one.

William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review. Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

Ken Loach
Route Irish
Sixteen Films, 2011
109 minutes

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Ken Loach has been directing films with a social mission for 50 years. In the 60s he brought the housing crisis to national attention with Cathy Come Home, in the 80s he documented the trade union response to Thatcherism, and recently he has addressed issues as diverse as the Spanish Civil War (Land and Freedom), Los Angeles labour rights (Bread and Roses), and the Irish War of Independence (The Wind That Shakes the Barley).

His latest project, Route Irish, combines his outrage at a war of aggression with his indignation at negligent employment practices. When Frankie, a private security contractor, is killed in Baghdad, his childhood friend Fergus decides to lead his own personal investigation into his death, and in the process brings to light the dubious record of the private security firms involved in the war.

The Oxonian Review spoke with Ken about Route Irish, the film industry, and British politics.

Throughout your career you’ve used film to explore social and political problems. Can film go beyond that and offer actual solutions?

Film is one voice among many. A film can ask questions, it can leave you with a sense that there’s more to be found out, it can leave you with a sense of solidarity with the people you see in the film. It can do all those things, but it’s not a political movement, it’s not an organisation. It’s only a film; it’s just two hours of stories and characters—or it could be a documentary—but it’s information, a perspective, and maybe an argument, maybe a point of view. What you do with what you receive from the film is up to you.

The structure of Route Irish resembles your earlier films Land and Freedom or Carla’s Song; the narrative follows your protagonist’s personal journey of self-discovery and this unravels into wider issues.

It’s not a journey of personal discovery in this case. He’s just finding stuff out, but he’s not discovering himself. His self is pretty well wrecked, really, throughout the film. The film reveals that wreckage, but he doesn’t reveal it to himself, about himself.

He’s a career soldier, who’s been through different war zones; he’s been to Ireland, probably been to Afghanistan, he’s been to Iraq. He’s come to the end of his army life, and he’s found that he can sign up as a contractor and earn money—rather more than he ever did as a soldier, so obviously that’s a good option for a few years. But the effect of being through Iraq in particular has left him, like many others, with post-traumatic stress, and that gap becomes apparent throughout most of the film. He manages to contain his problems, but every now and then the violence flares up. He’s quite obsessive, and he expresses himself through violence. This becomes apparent through his relationship with Rachel, Frankie’s girlfriend. There’s obviously a more complicated relationship between them than just platonic friends. He reveals himself that way, and reveals his despair, and his hollowness, the fact that he is destroyed.

One of the nurses who nurse people with this problem said that these men are in mourning for their former selves. They’re not the men they expected to be and intensely wanted to be. The sense of that former self is shown right at the outset with the two boys on the Mersey Ferry; they’re talking, dreaming of where they might travel when they’re older. The irony is that they do travel, and it kills one and it destroys the other.

Often at the centre of these films is a potentially redeeming romantic or sexual relationship. Is that a way of figuring solidarity?

The story before the film began, we imagined, was that Fergus—I think this is referred to briefly—had introduced [Rachel and Frankie], and he’d known her before that. There was something between them before she became Frankie’s partner. Frankie is an easier guy altogether, he’s more gregarious, he has his feet on the ground more than Fergus, who’s the edgy, driven one. So there was something between Fergus and Rachel, which certainly remains something in Fergus’s eyes. But the only way he can express that is in this violent transgressive way when Frankie’s dead. So it’s not so much a love interest. It’s part of his fractured connection to other people. The normal emotional exchange that happens between people is denied to him because of what he’s been seeing, what he’s been part of, and how it’s left him.

Route Irish is on general release on the 18th March…

It’s quite a limited release actually. One of the problems of cinema now is that you have to struggle for every cinema you can get if you’re an independent film. Films can be made and are being made all around the world that are very interesting and diverse. And that happens to a varying degree depending on the climate in individual countries. Our situation [in Britain] is that the screens are pretty well dominated by American industrial films that take a large percentage of screen time, with British films that the Americans like occasionally getting a look-in. Apart from that, cinema from the rest of the world is by and large excluded, unless you live near art-house cinemas like the Watershed in Bristol or the Phoenix Picturehouse on Walton Street in Oxford. There are a few of those cinemas around, but by and large, independent cinema, or non-American mainstream cinema, doesn’t get a look-in. That is the biggest issue facing cinema at the moment: how do you enable people to see that diverse range of films?

Sixteen Films, your production company, has published several of your earlier films on YouTube, and you’re releasing Route Irish simultaneously on Curzon Demand.

Yes. Otherwise, when there is press coverage of it, however much there is, if the film is only available in maybe 20 cinemas around the country, then although people may read about it and hear about it and want to see it, many will not be able to. So we thought we really needed an alternative approach to this.

What do you think of the Internet as a medium? Some say it has collective potential, but on the other hand, it has a tendency toward atomism…

It exists, so we can’t wish it away. It’s there and people will use it the way their inclination leads them. It does make it easier for people to be in touch with like-minded people. It makes it easier to organise at one level. On the other hand it is probably more difficult to organise at another level. I don’t know how you get democratic organisation into it. I don’t know how you get beyond the word getting out; people get together, and then what? You’ve got to embody some democratic structure or some cohesive sense.

Speaking of people getting together, you once said that Supporters Direct and the football supporters’ trusts movement was perhaps the one good, worthwhile achievement of New Labour.

It was a Labour government achievement, but probably wasn’t a New Labour initiative. They were probably biting their tongues as they did it. It’s a piddling little thing but at least it’s a move in the right direction. And the people involved are very good. I’ve got a lot of respect for Dave Boyle and the others involved there.

Do you think there might be some potential in a renewed alliance between the Labour Party and some of those sorts of movements, given it was in part a creation of a certain wing of the Labour party?

I think people would be deeply suspicious of the Labour Party for all kinds of reasons. The people in the supporters’ trusts would resent being hijacked into a party. The Labour Party itself is a pretty broken organisation now anyway. Their silence on the current situation is deafening. There’s no leadership coming from them to fight the various attacks on the different services, the destruction of so much of what remains of the good collaborative aspects of our society.

The attacks are so trenchant and the Labour Party is so weak that I can’t see that it would work at all. There’s a great possibility for organisations to build an opposition. And out of the experience of the supporters’ trusts, people could be lead to thinking: “we’re a cooperative movement, there are other cooperative movements; maybe we have something in common.” Then you start to link up, but the links have got to be based on lived experience, rather than a main political party.

So would you abandon the Labour Party now?

The Labour Party has already abandoned the Labour movement. That’s the problem. Inevitably there are, and always will be, a few good MPs—John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn—but beyond that, the Blairite cleansing has wiped most of the good people out of the party. But there is great potential on the left because the attacks from the right are so strong.

What sort of organisations do you think there is potential in?

The people who are facing problems in their own affairs. People who work in the health service, people who work in universities, people who work in schools, people who work in housing, particularly with the homeless, disabled people, librarians, people who care for the forests, the police, pensioners. Everybody who’s got a pension is being savaged. Particularly public servants; nowadays public servants are just referred to with contempt as “bureaucrats”.

[The Coalition government] have offended a huge percentage of the population. If all these people got together they could stop it. But because the organisation of places like the TUC is so weak, they’re massively handicapped. That’s the problem. And that’s what the Tories rely on; they rely on there being no coherent alternative.

*Route Irish will have a multi-platform release, opening in cinemas, on Sky Movies Box Office, and on Curzon Demand, March 18 2011.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. They are senior editors at the Oxonian Review.

Richard Watson is a writer and consultant, who specialises in scenario-planning and the analysis of trends. On 27 January, Watson spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about his newest book Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing our Minds, Why this Matters, and What We Can Do about It (2010). Future Minds expresses concern about the pernicious effects of technology on the brain, arguing that the Internet and contemporary multimedia impair the ability to think deeply and creatively. The book enters an ongoing discussion about the Internet’s influence on cognitive ability (see articles by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), but is unique in its focus on ways to curb our addiction to technology. He spoke to the Oxonian Review about the relative rate of contemporary innovation and the relationship between technology and education. For more about Richard Watson, visit What’s Next and Future Files & Future Minds.

You argue that technology can impair the development of important skill sets, namely the ability to think deeply and creatively.

That’s really my focus. What are these technologies doing to our thinking? But we’ve got to be careful because obviously there are different types of technology and equally there are different types of thinking. And I think [technology] is enhancing different types of thinking but it is eroding others.

Should recourse to technology in the classroom be limited?

I think it should. I need more time to think about how that works…But I think fundamentally we need to ask: What kind of thinking are we after? What kind of technology best supports that? I would regard pencils and papers and books as much a technology as a blackboard. So we need to think very hard about what we’re trying to achieve and what are the best tools for the job…There should be periods when technology is switched off. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you are trying to cram information, then by all means use a computer, use a whiteboard. But if you’re trying to do more than that, to understand context—for instance, what was the Battle of Britain and why did it happen?—then I think that needs physical interaction.

You criticise the current emphasis that schools place on quantitative analysis. Do we change the curriculum to give more emphasise to the humanities?

Yes, and this isn’t particularly my view. It is Ken Robinson’s more than anyone else’s. But I think we are only educating one half of our brain: the left logical side…The education system is still producing the same type of person and the world has changed. Bear in mind if you’re 5 years old and starting education, the world when you graduate is going to be an incredibly different place. It seems to me we’re training people for the wrong skills… The thing that has real value is the ability to relate to other people physically and emotionally. We talk about the information economy ad nauseam but we don’t really educate for it, and so creativity is sort of relegated…It’s not a real subject. The real subjects are like law and medicine. But these other things have equal weight…Essentially the education system is set up to say there’s a right answer for everything. Learn it; go and apply it. That’s true if you’re an engineer, and for a lot of scientists, there is one answer. But in a lot of areas, there isn’t. There are lots of different answers…We essentially teach convergent thinking: there’s one right answer. And actually, if you want a culture of innovation, you need to encourage divergent thinking.

In the United States there’s a big scare that the Chinese are out-educating Americans in the maths and sciences. Do you think these fears are missing the point?

Someone sent me an e-mail last night and it’s got a great slogan. They’ve got this campaign called “No right brain left behind”. It’s fabulous; I love that. I read a statistic recently. It said that 90% of PhDs in science and engineering reside in Asia…The issues in America are healthcare, obviously, but also education. The same is true in Britain. We are falling behind…We just don’t know what’s about to hit us. The Chinese take education so seriously. There are certain subjects you can’t teach unless you have a certain grade in that subject. Here, you can fail maths four times and eventually pass and then teach maths. You could not do that in China.

The interesting thing about China [and a few other countries] is that they’ve got a model that’s all about the production of low-cost stuff. The challenge now is to move up the value chain; they’ve got to start not just producing this stuff. They’ve got to start inventing. Now to what extent can they do that? To what extent is Silicon Valley dependent on the American Dream and that political system of freedom, etc.? Some people say you can’t have an innovation economy without freedom, but those people were probably also saying you can’t have capitalism without democracy, and the Chinese have proved that completely wrong. My feeling is that there are issues [correlating] serious innovation and creativity and originality. Unless you have openness and freedom, [innovation] could be quite constrained. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stuff from McKinsey. When they hire Indian and particularly Chinese graduates, there is a sort of groupthink going on there. They’re not going to challenge the teacher in a different direction. And for serious innovation you need that disruptive element; you need the wise ass. And maybe the Chinese system isn’t creating that, but maybe I don’t know enough about it.

In your talk, you said that Alvin Toffler was 30 years ahead of his time. You also invoked phrases of another mid-century analyst of technological change, Marshall McLuhan, such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. To me this suggests that Toffler wasn’t ahead of his time at all, but rather these technological changes have always been with us, and I wonder whether this is merely a change in pace?

There’s a quote I use from William Gibson: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” Change always comes from the fringe…If you want to see the future, there are certain places you can go and you’ll get it. The history of prediction is appalling. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that their timing stinks. They are too optimistic about how quickly change is going to happen. There’s an argument that says change is accelerating; that it’s happening quicker than it used to. A lot of people are [predicting] what’s going to happen in the future, and [their predictions] are probably a decade off. There’s also the classic mistake of saying x will replace y. It’s a sort of binary argument. And actually it’s not like that. [For example] physical newspapers will not die. They may be an exception rather than the rule, and the same with books. There are going to be multiple futures and you can buy into the future you want.

With Toffler, that’s what’s been the case. There’s a really good book called Future Hype, written by an American computer scientist, who tries to put the predictions of technology into some kind of a historical context, and it’s really interesting looking at what people say now versus what they said 100 years ago. To some extent, I think his argument is that compared to the level of change we talk about now, there was actually more change during the Industrial Revolution. It was far more rapid, far more impactful. In a sense, there’s no reason to be anxious—it’s all nothing.

You encourage people to occasionally isolate themselves from technology and offer advice for how to do this: experiencing the outdoors, turning off mobile phones whilst on vacation, etc. But how optimistic are you that people will voluntarily remove technology from their lives?

[Technology] is a bit like drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. It’s rather satisfying if you are involved in social networks; [they] make you feel in control and important…A study was done on cell phone use, and [the researchers] withdrew the cell phone and a few other things, and the physical and emotional symptoms were exactly the same as going cold turkey from serious drug addiction. I don’t think we’re going to acknowledge this as a problem for 5 to 10 years minimum. I then think it will be acknowledged. South Korea and America are the only countries that have Internet addiction clinics at the moment. I think it will become more common 15 to 20 years down the line. Even so, most people will deny that they have a problem.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review. William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

Mary Midgley
The Solitary Self
Acumen, 2010
176 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-1844652532

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Given that The Solitary Self was “written out of intense indignation and exasperation” at the contemporary rendering of Darwin, Mary Midgley has managed to retort with disciplined patience. She is exasperated at the unwarranted rhetorical prominence of conflict and manipulation in The Selfish Gene (1976), and indignant at its consequent encouragement of fatalism about human selfishness. With flair she dissociates the latter from its supposed scientific underpinning by unraveling the superfluity of Richard Dawkins’s recurrent analogy: “The whole message is in the rhetoric.” Midgley invokes Darwin himself to show that the interactions of genes need not be described as selfish, demonstrating that more congenial tropes could illustrate the same scientific reality without indirectly providing an excuse for egoism.

Explaining the interaction of genes in terms of selfishness, with a turn of phrase elevating DNA to the status of an all-controlling yet indifferent god, Dawkins encourages the view that only a miraculous rebellion against nature could break our inborn egoism. He himself often succumbs to his own eloquence, stating for example that “pure, disinterested altruism…has no place in nature…has never existed before in the whole history of the world.” On the assumption that we tend to attribute our character to our genes, Midgley worries that such unnecessarily dramatic language lends unmerited scientific varnish to the worldview that sees egoism as our ineluctable destiny, to be accepted if not celebrated.

The key to neutralising Dawkins’s account lies not in questioning its veracity, for it needs no scientific correction, but in identifying Dawkins’s repeated figure of speech as a tendentious choice of metaphor. As Midgley keenly points out, there can be no such thing as selection without something that is selected: “[N]o filter can be the sole cause of what flows out of it. Strainers strain out coffee grounds; they do not create coffee.” While there is of course competition between different units, these units only exist as organisms in the first place through the cooperation of their constituent parts. Dawkins admitted as much at the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, when he remarked that it “could equally well have been called The Cooperative Gene.” The natural world, then, does not demand to be described as a chaos of competition and manipulation, but equally invites portrayal in the vocabulary of harmony and symbiosis. “Disinterested behaviour is really not unusual at all”, and certainly does not need rationalisation as a conspiracy of self-interest.

Midgley treads a delicate path in arguing from a close reading of Dawkins’s text to vast sociological trends, but she treads it carefully. Her dispute with the author of The Selfish Gene did not start with this book, and she is accustomed to the rejoinder that she is making too much of something which is really “only a metaphor”. As she remarks, though—and she has sharpened this point over the years—“metaphors are never ‘only’.” When used to describe a scientific reality which is commonly seen to determine human behaviour—a reality which, she demonstrates, demands no particular metaphors—inflammatory analogies provide grounds for concern.

In the absence of evidence of a solid link between Dawkins’s popularity and the social atomism which worries her, she risks overstating her case against this particular author. Ultimately, however, her quarrel is not primarily with Dawkins himself but with those who find in his colourful exposition a scientific endorsement of their individualistic view of society. Accordingly, she uses her interrogation of his text tacitly to rebuke those who would derive ethical guidance from his story about genes. Though peculiarly indistinguishable from that of free market economists and Ayn Rand characters, his adversarial imagery would not matter if it did not tempt us to excuse our own weakness of will through the “pernicious myth” of the inevitability of conflict and selfishness.

Midgley finds an alternative approach to morality in the most totemic of sources. Darwin of course established that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” This naturalist explanation of all actions, including clear cases of altruism and self-sacrifice, in terms of our status as animals, rather than, say, as God’s children, can be taken either to disgrace morality, or to ennoble animality. The man known as “Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, delighted in depicting natural life as a “continuous free fight”, and concluded that “ethical nature…is necessarily at enmity with [cosmic nature].” In contrast, Midgley sees Darwin marveling at “how much friendly order and cooperation–how much, indeed, of what we call humanity–there already is in the lives of other social animals.”

Midgley’s grand ambition, then, is to reveal Dawkins’s choice of language to be a revival not so much of Darwin himself, who insisted “I use the term ‘struggle for existence’ in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another…”, but of Huxley, who perceived the animal world as a “gladiators’ show”. Midgley situates Darwin in a long tradition, stretching back to Aristotle, of philosophers who navigate the tightrope of portraying human motivation in natural terms without reducing altruism to some less attractive aspect of our nature. Dawkins’s exposition of natural selection in agonistic language, on the other hand, with its careless slippages between genetics and ethics, places him in the Huxleyan camp, that of the reductionists, whose descent is more Hobbesian than Darwinian. Yet, despite her tremendous respect for Darwin, this is no argument from authority; her appeal to the writings of the great naturalist subverts Dawkins’s monopoly of his legacy, and works as a safeguard against the unfortunate yet foreseeable aspersions on her fidelity to science itself.

Dawkins’s gratuitous emphasis on struggle accentuates our continuity with “ego-bound crocodiles” rather than “extremely sociable great apes”, seemingly depriving us of the lexicon with which to discuss our moral life in all its colour. In portraying Dawkins not so much as a Darwinian who narrates the theory in the vocabulary of selfishness, but rather as a Hobbesian who has chosen molecular biology as his subject matter, Midgley breaks the insidious power of the figurative and invites us to return to Darwin’s The Descent of Man to inspire a richer approach to human behaviour, in all its malignity and benevolence.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Labour as party of the working class has died two deaths in the last 30 years. In 1983, Michael Foot signed a strongly principled manifesto dubbed “the longest suicide note in history” which resulted in a landslide Conservative majority and over a decade in opposition; in 1997, Tony Blair led the party priest-like to power only to reveal that he was nothing but a Tartuffe. Last week’s election was a third death, this time neither tragedy nor farce but a Beckettian non-event.

Jean Baudrillard claimed in 1991 that “the Gulf War did not take place”. It had taken the form of a war, but lacked the substance of a war; smart weapons meant the US-led coalition suffered very few casualities, and a defeated Saddam remained undeposed. It was a non-war. In May 2010, it is clear that the British general election has not taken place. The winner of the televised debates lost ground in the election, and though Gordon Brown’s Labour has been defeated, it lingers on in office. The people have spoken, as Ed Miliband said on Friday morning; but we do not know what they said. We observed a campaign which, though taking the form of an election, turns out to have lacked the substance of an election: it was a non-election.

We woke from the media hallucination when the exit poll revealed the waywardness of the campaign narrative. At this point, what had previously seemed to be one election, a tale of a Liberal Democrat surge and of New Labour’s final spin, revealed itself to be two distinct events running side by side: an unconstrained election-themed game show, and the inescapable logic of the first-past-the-post system.

The two defining stories of the election, so-called Bigotgate and so-called Cleggmania, were proclaimed as the emergence of the real into phoney politics. The media was finally living up to its dual vocation; disclosing the truth and changing opinions. Yet it was precisely in asserting their own authenticity that these stories were actually the exact opposite, the fiction of an election.

The travesty of naming Bigotgate after Watergate, the gold standard of investigative journalism, demonstrates the role it played in the media fantasy. In publicising Brown’s feelings about his maladroit meeting with Labour heartland grandmother Gillian Duffy, Sky News saw itself as revealing the truth behind the political mask. Like a spindoctor in the spotlight, the story went, Brown’s cynical attempt to appear personable had backfired and revealed itself to the nation. Yet the microphone had originally been pinned to Brown’s lapel not for the purpose of uncovering his inner thoughts but in order to broadcast his stage performance to the nation. The sight of Sky reporters pressuring Mrs Duffy for a few soundbites of indignation in order to spin her into Motorway Man’s fiery godmother reminds us that not just her but every voter politicians meet on screen is a mere stand-in for “the ordinary voter”. The revelation did not bring us any closer to truth, for in both the event as originally intended (a fluff piece) and as subsequently spun (an outrage), the journalists involved were consciously constructing a fiction for the public.

Given that Cleggmania was reported as the direct effect of the televised debates, its naming after possibly the greatest ever case of popular acclaim, Beatlemania, served to confirm the media’s pivotal importance to democratic process. The report of Nick Clegg’s nimble rise to the point of prime ministerial possibility seemed to vindicate the incessantly repeated assertion that the televised leaders’ debates were an historic occasion in themselves, an heroic media achievement. The people’s apparent enthusiastic embrace of a hitherto neglected candidate as a direct result of media innovation was welcomed as evidence that the national media is indispensable to proper political discussion. Its intervention had cleared the fog of unawareness to allow the electorate to make up its own mind. The polls of reactions to leaders’ performance on these debates were read as predictions of electoral outcome and Clegg’s strong performance in a debate was translated into expectations at the ballot box. Alex Salmond’s lament was quoted with approval: “These debates haven’t just dominated the election campaign, they are the election campaign.”

Yet the disparity between expectations and outcome is explicable: it is the disparity between the media fantasy and the reality of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The media had been taken in by its own game; it had presumptuously taken its own sensationalised sideshow for the democratic process itself. The British public may enter into the media fantasy when asked whom it would like to see elected, but when faced with safe seats where only one party can win, or marginal seats where at least one party’s supporters must vote tactically, such dreams are replaced with the logic of keeping out one’s least favoured candidate. When the media anointed Clegg “kingmaker” it was anointing itself, and when it registered surprise at Cleggmania’s puncture it was surprised that despite its influence it could not negate the constraints of the electoral system.

The televised debates were historic, but historic more in the history of game shows than in the history of elections. Those who dubbed this the “X-factor election” and compared the debate set-up to Fifteen-To-One got things exactly the wrong way round. This was not an election run according to game show rules, but a general election-themed game show aired to coincide with a real general election. For beside the staged walkabouts and the dramatised electoral sea change, beyond the media election where anything seemed possible, another election quietly was taking place—an election straight jacketed by the strategic realities of the first-past-the-post system.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Frank Furedi
Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating
Continuum, 2009
256 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-01847064165

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Frank Furedi, author of Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, is convinced that we have been lulled into a state of collective delusion by the tailors of contemporary educational policy. Like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale who shouts “the emperor has nothing on”, Furedi sees it as his mission to wake the rest of us from our conformity.

Wasted brings an overwhelming barrage of quotations to support the thesis that we are spoiling the current generation of students by using education to push social objectives and by focus excessively on students’ motivation and happiness. Furedi’s argument, as such, amounts to a full-scale denunciation of what has come to be known as “child-centred pedagogy”. Yet, on closer analysis, his diagnosis appears tenuous, and his suggested alternative of a return to academic subjects fails to convince.

The need to keep pace with technological change, the theory of multiple intelligences, the advent of new curricula for “happiness” and “citizenship”; all are indicted as the sources of educational malaise. In each case, education’s purview is extended beyond academic subjects, and in each case, Furedi argues, this extension is ultimately self-defeating. “When education becomes everything, it ceases to be education.”

Furedi’s argument is implicitly based on two premises. Firstly, education is only effective when the teacher possesses authority, when she is understood to be superior to the child. Secondly, only an academic subject endows the teacher with authority, for without this grounding in the wisdom of generations, the teacher becomes a mere “facilitator” with nothing substantial to contribute to students. Each pedagogical innovation, Furedi shows, robs the teacher of authority, and in doing so, undermines its own effectiveness.

As an example of this erosion of teacherly authority, Furedi cites the use of class time to teach subjects like environmentalism, sexual health, and citizenship, a practice that attempts to solve societal problems by inculcating children with new values their parents might not share. As Furedi observes, “Frequently education is used as the site where the unresolved issues of public life can be pursued.” Yet this involves telling children, as environmentalist Jonathan Porrit has, that “your parents and grandparents have made a mess of looking after the earth.” For Furedi, adult authority is indivisible; undermining the authority of parents in the eyes of children can only result in diminishment of teachers’ authority. Children will grow cynical, and even the values the system teaches them will not take root.

Rather than advocate the use of education as a means to a social end, other theories seek to redefine its merit. The theory of multiple intelligences, for example, proposes that schools should not concentrate exclusively on competence in academic subjects. Similarly, the recent phenomenon of “happiness classes” expands schools’ responsibility beyond the cultivation of students’ intellects to the fostering of their psychological well-being. Furedi fears that this promotion of non-academic curricula will translate into a demotion of academic subjects. Since academic subjects embody the knowledge of past generations, putting them on par with non-academic subjects effectively rejects the authority of existing society. Yet for Furedi this authority is a necessary condition of education in the first place.

Other theorists place great importance on the fact that society is changing rapidly and that we must keep pace. For these theorists, “educational policies can only be justified if they can keep up with or adapt to change”. But Furedi argues that if we ask education to prepare us for a particular technological situation, technology will quickly move on, and the contents of our education will grow outdated. Academic subjects, on the contrary, face no such problem, for they are timeless.

In each of these three cases—the instrumentalisation of education, the attention to non-academic aptitudes, and the emphasis on adaptability—the activity of education is redefined as broader than the transmission of academic knowledge for its own sake. And in each case, Furedi argues that the extra aims loaded onto education destroy not only the possibility of their own fulfilment but also that of the original academic curriculum.

Given the seriousness of Furedi’s indictment of current educational theory, it is surprising that the great majority of his evidence is composed of anecdotes and newspaper stories—if not mere headlines. Though his subject of investigation is one of the most measured sectors of contemporary society, Furedi includes virtually no statistical evidence to support his statements. It is therefore rather difficult to evaluate his narrative. His two implicit premises, to begin with, do not seem self-evident. Yet in basing his arguments upon them, Furedi avoids true confrontation with his opponents, for it is the truth or falsehood of these very premises which is at stake between traditional humanism and child-centred pedagogy.

His assertion that authority is indispensable to teaching, for example, is the subject of deep disagreement. An extended engagement on this issue would have been fascinating and instructive; however, it would also have been based on empirical research. The premise that only academic subjects endow the teacher with authority, too, is asserted without supporting evidence. Furedi leans heavily on the thought that adult authority is indivisible—yet the debate as to whether children can differentiate between parental and pedagogical authority remains open. Given that Furedi portrays himself as the small child who spots the emperor’s nudity, there is an irony in his inability to stomach the thought of letting children realise that adults do not have all the answers.

More disappointing than Furedi’s lack of evidence is his careless conceptual work. He suggests that teaching a child something their parents do not know dangerously undermines the parents’ and, in the long run, the teachers’ authority. Yet taking this charge seriously would reduce schools to repeating the homespun wisdom parents have already taught their offspring—teaching them nothing they do not already know.

At another point, in attacking advocates of teaching the skill of adaptability, Furedi fails to settle the ambiguity between two sorts of “change”. Change can either mean a one-off shift, from the dominance of one technology to the dominance of another, or it can refer to a state of continuous flux, a situation essentially characterised by uncertainty. When advocates of adaptability invoke rapidly changing society as an impetus to revise the curriculum, they refer to the latter sense of change. They do not mean that a specific new technology is arriving, and that schoolchildren must be trained to use it, but that the world constantly sees the arrival of new technologies, and that schoolchildren should be taught to deal with novelty as such. Furedi’s objection to teaching adaptability—that any particular technology will soon fall out of date—rests on a misunderstanding of what sort of change is thought to necessitate adaptability.

The final frustration is Furedi’s “liberal-humanist” solution. He insists that education should be valued for its own sake, but without an account of what education is it is unclear what this entails. He often repeats that it is a “transaction between generations”, but the ramifications of this view are obscure, and its connection with his emphasis on academic subjects underdeveloped. Having held his opponents accountable to the practical implications of their policies, he offers little more than a vague and elusive sketch of his ideals.

Robust and persuasive defences of the academic curriculum do exist. In devoting so much space to showing why current education isn’t educating, however, Furedi suggests merely that non-academic curricula are ultimately unteachable, and fails to persuade that academic subjects are worth teaching. “The experience of the past indicates that the goals assigned to education work best when they correspond to prevailing sentiment and experience”, he writes. But while we may grant that it is easiest to teach according to prevailing sentiment and experience, we are still entitled to ask whether it is worthwhile.

Furedi’s vision recalls the joke where a drunk is looking for his keys late at night under a streetlight—not because he lost them there, but because where he lost them it is too dark to see.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

G. A. Cohen
Why Not Socialism?
Princeton, 2009
92 Pages
£10.95
ISBN 978-0691143613

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As a teenager, Jerry Cohen was a counsellor in the Montreal Jewish socialist summer camp Kinderland, where, in the words of one of his young charges, “the sons and daughters of 1950s leftists spent July and August waging class struggle against mosquitoes and boredom”. These summer expeditions left a lasting impression: decades later, Cohen fondly recalled campfire songs from Kinderland at his inauguration as Chichele Professor in All Souls college chapel; and a camping trip serves as the prime illustration of the virtues of socialism in his latest and last work, a lively discussion of political morality.

While Jerry Cohen made a career out of intellectualising his personal journey from pro-Soviet schoolboy to doyen of Oxford political theory, it is in Why Not Socialism?—more than any other text—that we see as a whole his considered stance on justice. For this life-long socialist, socialism’s infeasibility does not entail its irrelevance, for its most basic merit lies in its encapsulation of an ethic of care for other human life. In a period when we are re-evaluating our economic priorities, this is a timely call for personal integrity—and a reminder that in necessarily compromising with self-interest, we must not lose sight of our ideals.

At the start of this thin book, Cohen outlines a camping trip run along socialist lines, where “people cooperate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish”. Cooking and washing up are distributed to each according to his abilities, and applesauce, apple pie, and apple strudel are distributed to each according to his needs. Cohen contrasts this trip to one run along market capitalist lines; in the capitalist alternative, meal preparation involves renting a potato peeler from a fellow camper and buying potatoes from another before selling the peeled potatoes to a third.

“[I]sn’t this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?” The difference between these two camping trips is that the first, unlike the second, embodies what for Cohen are the two core principles of socialism: radical equality of opportunity and community.

In masterful synthesis of the debates he dominated during the 80s and 90s, Cohen pushes the principle of equal opportunity to its logical conclusion. This principle, which underpins liberal efforts to counteract the effects of bigotry and socioeconomic deprivation, also justifies his claim that even our inborn talent should fall under the compass of redistribution. Cohen’s socialism applies with irresistible consistency the liberal notion that we should be held responsible for our choices, and nothing but our choices; our standard of living should not be affected by unchosen disadvantages, be they other people’s prejudices, deprived social circumstances, or —the socialist adds—a paucity of inborn talent. “When socialist equality of opportunity prevails, differences of outcome reflect nothing but difference of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers”.

Sizeable differences of outcome might still result from choices, however, and this creates the need for community. Cohen argues that one cannot truly associate with someone whose life challenges are very different to one’s own, where those differences result from resource disparities one has not attempted to remedy. Feeling entitlement to one’s easier life and feeling a bond with that person are then mutually incompatible. As early 20th-century socialist Eugene Debs famously asserted, “I do not want to rise above the working class, I want to rise with them”. For Cohen, this sentiment is an essential component of the socialist project.

The self-evident appeal of the small-scale socialist camping trip illustrates that socialist ideals are not inherently unattractive. It remains to be explained, then, why they are currently undesirable on a societal level. Here, Cohen revives a long tradition of Marxist thought: socialism is not ultimately unsuitable for society; society is not yet ready for socialism. Elaborating on this claim (and echoing his early defence of Karl Marx’s theory of history), Cohen suggests that we might think of social organisation—that is, the process of converting individual motives into social outcomes—as a form of technology.

Capitalism, a social technology which harnesses selfish desires to public benefits, is at present unrivalled as the organising spirit of our society. Socialism in Cohen’s sense, where citizens’ interactions are guided by their preference for community over inequality, remains technologically infeasible, for we do not understand how to orchestrate mass interaction and mutual dependence through the more elegant engine of altruism. Socialism might be compared to one of Da Vinci’s inventions: a vision for a splendid contraption which cannot be constructed for lack of tools.

Yet in yielding this, Cohen has already prised from the reader a greater concession: agreement that socialism is morally superior to the current capitalist ethos. When the necessary tools are developed, the vision becomes a blueprint, and the contraption ought to be assembled. Cohen’s strict distinction between desirability and feasibility moves the question from “why not?” to “when?” and “how?”

Readers expecting an answer to these more difficult challenges will be disappointed, however, for the principal limitation of this book is that it remains too faithful to its original question. After a survey of the current state of socialist economics—a discussion the complexity of which confirms the depth and breadth of Cohen’s interests but jars with his otherwise conversational tone—we are offered no assurances: “I do not think that we now know that we will never know how to do these things: I am agnostic on that score”.

Here, Cohen’s willingness to jettison belief in the immediate feasibility of socialism illuminates the core of his concern, expressed elsewhere in his insistence that justice is an ethos. What Cohen has retained of his socialist heritage is his strong commitment to equality, not as an ideal to be achieved in the abstract but rather as a practical principle to preside over everyday actions as a matter of conscience. Cohen’s vision is of justice as a mode of interaction between citizens rather than a state-fashioned framework against which we can act as we please—socialism cannot be delegated to the state, in the way that liberal democracy involves delegating politics to politicians. Even with the appropriate social technology, Cohen’s socialism can exist only if enough of us believe in it, and act on this belief.

In If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, Cohen interrogated himself on the implications of believing in socialism’s desirability while doubting its feasibility. In Why Not Socialism?, it is we his readers who are challenged, and ultimately persuaded that our objections to socialism are practical rather than moral. We in turn must confront the question of how to lead our lives according to these ideals in our less-than-ideal world.

Though certainty of state socialism’s advent has all but melted into air, capitalist society still presents myriad opportunities for incremental progress. Cohen’s achievement is to convince us that we should not take the impracticality of state-wide socialism as an excuse for a sense of entitlement to our talent. Instead, integrity invites us to turn to the socialist value of serving the needs of others, not through expectation of reward, but out of care.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.