Currently Reading: “The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics” by John Dunn

Currently reading this work by John Dunn. It’s another crazy election year, so I figured, why not?

For context, the book was first published in 2000. Mr. Dunn is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and one of the founders of Cambridge School of intellectual history. Definitely not a read for everyone, but one that makes the curious reader think.

Half way through the book, passages surrounding capitalism caught my eye as Mr. Dunn searches for the “right state” pursuing the “right goals”:

If the case against the modern democratic republic is that it is structurally committed to pursuing the wrong goals (whatever the majority of its citizens happen to wish to pursue at the time), then that case presupposes a compelling account of what the right goals are, and a feasible means for ensuring that an alternative state form will pursue them more dependably. There have been many attempts to provide such an account over the last two and a half millennia. But none of them has much residual intellectual cogency. Certainly many contemporary states do pursue goals very different from any which a majority of their subjects can possibly be presumed to desire: the personal wealth and power, for example, of the higher ranks of the Burmese or Nigerian armies. Some even avow their pursuit of very different goals: the preferred interpretation of Allah’s requirements of the people of Iran (Abrahamian 1995) or Saudi Arabia. (Allah’s will, plainly, needs no sanction from the sometimes all too faithless people of Iran.) But even those which claim a genuinely ecumenical legitimacy (as the rulers of Iran or Saudi Arabia quite explicitly do) take care to rest their claim less on the formal properties of the state itself than on the mode of interpretation of the transmission of their own legitimacy. What they claim is that they in particular are entitled to rule, not that a state form which they happen to embody and which could be equally well instantiated in any other set of human beings in any other territories can readily be seen to be entitled to do so. To reject the modern constitutional democratic republic because its avowed goal is the pursuit of the contingent objects of popular desire is a perfectly coherent choice. It shows a certain tasteful fastidiousness. But for the present it is hard to combine such rejection with an open endorsement of any other choice which does not immediately sanction the coercion of a popular majority. Only where the defence of the modern democratic republic collides, as for example in Algeria for much of the 1990s, with the clear preferences of a majority of the citizens does the rational case for defending it collapse into incoherence, and leave the ground free for state rationales of an altogether more cursory and peremptory character.

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He continues in the next paragraph…

There is thus a deep and intrinsic case against the modern democratic republic: that it is the appropriate state form of a profoundly corrupt civilization and does not either hesitate to make explicit this appropriateness or attempt to deny the plain facts of that civilization’s utter corruption. This case is at its most evocative when the state form under attack is identified with overweening foreign power and wealth, and the corruption is seen at its most odious, as in Iran or Algeria, in the intrusion of the culture of that foreign power into the culture of one’s own nation and civilization (cf. Mottahedeh 1987). To defend the modern democratic republic against that case, it is necessary in the end to defend the civilization itself: to challenge the judgment that it is utterly corrupt, or, for that matter, any more corrupt than any other known form of civilization which is more furtive in style or more bashful in acknowledging the range of values which it enables (or even prompts) its inhabitants to pursue (cf., less drily, Huntington 1997).

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He continues:

Here, too, there has been dense, vehement and tangled argument for at least three and a half centuries about the merits of the case. In that argument, the modern republic (or its more shadowy intellectual prototypes) has taken a lot of punishment. But at no point along the way (as history has so far turned out) has it had to confront a challenge which could win, and keep on winning, through the relatively unmolested and open choices of its subjects.

In the end, that comparative advantage has proved extremely strong. It could (and of course still may) be overridden by a more imaginatively conceived and deftly engineered alternative. But for the present we have no real conception of what such an alternative might be, and hence no reason for confidence that any such alternative exists. If it proves true, therefore, as some Western political scientists and political theorists now argue (Huntington 1993 and 1997; Gray 1995), that the viability of this state form depends decisively on the distinctive cultural history of Western Europe, and that it therefore cannot hope to strike deep roots in societies with very different cultures of at least equal antiquity in other areas of the world, that will, for the present, be worse news for those areas of the world than it will for those fortunate enough to live under its authority and within its own cultural heartlands.

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