In defence of a liberal realism and a realist political ethics: On Edward Hall’s Value, Conflict, and Order

This review argues that Edward Hall’s outstanding new book on the political thought of three outstanding 20th-century thinkers – Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams – has three major substantial contributions to contemporary realism: it offers convincing realist interpretations of their oeuvres, extracts inspiring new ideas from their works for future theorizing and provides powerful arguments in defence of a liberal realist position. However, given Hall’s expertise in Williams’ thought, it might be surprising that the chapters about Hampshire seem the most interesting and most convincing parts of the book because they address some of the most fundamental issues of realism in an especially concise and well-written form.

'Richly Imaginative Barbarism'

By way of an engagement with the thought of Stuart Hampshire and his account of the ‘normality of conflict’, this article articulates a novel distinction between two models of value pluralism. The first model identifies social and political conflict as the consequence of pluralism, whereas the second identifies pluralism as the consequence of social and political conflict. Failure to recognise this distinction leads to confusion about the implications of value pluralism for contemporary public ethics. The article illustrates this by considering the case of toleration. It contends that Hampshire’s model of pluralism offers a new perspective on the problem of toleration and illuminates a new way of thinking about the accommodation of diversity as ‘civility within conflict’.

Value Pluralism and Public Ethics

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. -Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’ (Hampshire 1989a: 177).

Appreciating Conflict: Lessons from J.T. Fraser’s Theory of Time

Conflict is both a creative force in the establishment and a necessary condition for the sustenance of all higher modes of being. This, in short, I find to be one of the most ground-breaking insights of J. T. Fraser’s theory of “Time as a Hierarchy of Creative Conflicts.” As a consequence of this insight, I argue that to understand, with Fraser, the constitutive and creative function of some kinds of conflict will help us to accept, and even embrace, conflict not merely as a perpetual fact, as suggested by Stuart Hampshire, but as a necessary condition that makes possible whatever is of specific value in human culture. I go on to propose to distinguish between accidental and constitutive conflicts, and show how assessing conflicts accordingly can help to better manage them and avoid some destructive paths of action. The paper closes with some reflections on the limitations of the insight and its application.