Vol. 15 No.2 (February 2005), pp.114-117

THICK MORALITIES, THIN POLITICS: SOCIAL INTEGRATION ACROSS COMMUNITIES OF BELIEF, by Benjamin Gregg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 256pp.  Cloth. $59.95. ISBN: 0-8223-3081-4. Paper. $19.95. ISBN: 0-8223-3093-8.

Reviewed by Thomas F. Powers, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota Duluth.  Email: tpowers@d.umn.edu

As a result of the refinement of his argument in POLITICAL LIBERALISM (1993) and in the famous 1985 essay, “Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical,” John Rawls has been criticized in some quarters for failing to provide contemporary liberalism with a solid (i.e., “metaphysical” or ahistorical) moral foundation. Benjamin Gregg’s recent book points in the opposite direction, toward reconsideration of the basic outlines of many of the framing features of liberal politics – often following the path of POLITICAL LIBERALISM fairly directly – but now on explicitly pragmatist grounds.

Gregg (an associate professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin) begins, like Rawls, from the problem of social diversity in the modern world. His task is to find a way for different “thick” communal, religious, and philosophic perspectives to be able to come together on shared “thin” political grounds – or, more precisely, a way to combine normatively thin politics with normatively thick private or communal beliefs. This is in a way familiar ground for liberal political theory (and not just in recent years), but Gregg’s contribution is to provide “a pragmatist model of how competing worldviews might understand one another” (p.2).

Gregg’s pragmatism is partly, but not primarily, a matter of epistemological claims. His main concern is to de-moralize political life, to find “ways of reducing overall levels of normativity in the public sphere” (p.22, emphasis in original). Indeed, his main criticism of Rawls is that his is an account of liberalism presupposing a level of moral agreement that is problematic because “it presupposes what cannot be shown,” namely, that such “principles actually exist at some universal, perhaps ultimately anthropological level” (p.5).

In his pragmatism, Gregg follows Americans like Stanley Fish, Richard Posner, and Richard Rorty, but his work is more closely connected to that of Jurgen Habermas. Gregg follows Habermas in seeking to move away from reliance upon substantive (moral) principles and to turn instead to seemingly neutral procedural norms (norms that Gregg admits are historically tied to modern societies). “Proceduralism is normatively thin, because its validity is tied not to the outcomes of a procedure but to its formulation; if the procedure is correctly formulated, the outcome should be acceptable to the participants” (p.31).

Gregg’s project is in a way quite ambitious: to provide a general framework for thinking about modern [*115] liberal democratic politics from a pragmatist point of view. In the first half of his book he lays out (in four chapters) an account of the place of morality in the public and private worlds, a series of practical procedural devices to bolster a minimally moralistic politics, a new articulation of the outlines of pluralism, and an account of the “person” in a world outlined on pragmatist liberal grounds. In the second half of the book he takes up three much narrower issues (judicial thinking; the social scientific study of religion; feminist critiques of the modern family) in order to flesh out how his pragmatist account of liberal politics can help us think about specific concrete questions of political practice.

The core of the book is the idea that a thin public realm, constituted by agreement to basic rights on the one hand and certain procedures on the other, can create a world where deeper (“thick”) attachments to communal values can simultaneously thrive and coexist peacefully with others who differ. For this to work, thinking must take place on two levels. Gregg does not predominantly use the language of public and private, but what he has in mind is roughly an extension of the liberal religion teaching to all areas of life: in one’s private sphere of communal values and beliefs, thick morality may well direct life, but in the public sphere, groups and individuals should see themselves and others from a thin political point of view. What is to be avoided above all are thick interpretations of one group by another – that way leads to conflict, especially in a world of social, cultural, and religious diversity.

If what one wants is a non-moral (or at least minimally moral) account of modern liberal politics, Gregg’s is complex and in many ways attractive. The point of thinness is to make room for what is best in thickness while minimizing its harmful potential. Moreover, Gregg is honest enough to see the inescapable moral character of even a thin politics of toleration and proceduralism: the greatest sin for him is dogmatism. He admits that “a thin core is not entirely consensual or free of internal tensions or inconstancies” (p.31). While rejecting reason with a capital “R” (which can become a tool of domination, subtle or overt), Gregg goes out of his way to make an important place for at least the dialectical rationality of critique (an adaptation of Marx’s ideology critique of hidden interests). While his project holds out the promise of not just coexistence but cooperation among different groups, he also wants to make possible a politics of (limited) “agonistic” struggle and debate. The place of minorities is secured in a system asking only for “thin assimilation.” Finally, he consistently returns at key points to the question of equality, and shows that his framework is friendly to egalitarian interpretations of liberalism. This may well be too good to be true, but the complexity of Gregg’s discussion makes his more than a two-dimensional application of narrowly-conceived principles, at the very least.

Gregg’s most controversial claim – concerning the need to minimize as much as possible the role of morality in politics – is also the most interesting line of argument in the work. Moral dogmatism, Gregg’s nemesis, is problematic in politics, to begin with, on simple practical grounds. Gregg does not [*116] deny that if what one wants is a society where a strong or thick private morality controls and infuses public morality, his pragmatist account of liberal norms is not the way to go. But we live in a world where that would be impossible. Ours is a world of fairly deep social diversity and “moral heterogeneity” and for this “modern societies might better cope . . . by making as few appeals to morality as possible” (p.20). Normatively thin politics “requires no ‘soulcraft,’ molding hearts and minds in thick normative agreement” (p.31).

Not only does modern social diversity make a normatively thin politics useful, but in Gregg’s perspective the trajectory of modern life is increasingly hospitable to such a conception of politics. “[M]odern society has no moral or structural center” (p.44). In modernity, law becomes separated from morality and works to take its place. Social bonds short of moral connections – in the workplace, or the neighborhood, for example – provide another replacement for moral beliefs alone. The market and a world of increasingly fragmented social roles also serve to take the place of morality, simultaneously contributing to the increasing fragmentation of values. Non-moral but nevertheless governing standards in a variety of areas of increasingly complex modern life – in the economy, the professions, science – replace general, overarching moral standards. In the modern world “normativity withdraws” (p.45).

The account of pluralism that completes his general outline of thin politics is modeled on a radically decentralized conception of social groups. Gregg adopts the process of socialization for individuals as a model for understanding the relations of groups to the whole (following George Herbert Mead’s account of the socialization process). These are groups with loose structures and relatively weak connections to other groups. Here he makes a distinction between general community (the realm of thin politics) and concrete communities (the realm of thick beliefs). Concrete communities must be made in such a way so that they see others, and their own relations to others, through thin eyes. They can do this above all by relying on the language of legal rights—i.e., the basic language of the general community of liberal democratic politics. Gregg’s system offers up a “normatively thin assimilation” that, precisely because of its thinness, can serve to protect “endangered” concrete communities in their quest to preserve their cultural life (an argument that echoes Will Kymlicka’s work) (p.78).

The limits of pluralism in Gregg’s system reflect his concern for the practical dangers of moral zealotry. “I shall call ‘dogmatic’ any concrete community that rejects generalized community in the sense of relating to other concrete communities exclusively in terms of its own thick normativity” (p.86). Dogmatic communities are problematic partly from a practical point of view, since they make life in diverse communities more challenging. But they also violate Gregg’s pragmatist imperative. “Dogmatism’s normative exclusiveness . . . signals a belief by the dogmatic that they are right and that they are justified in believing that they are right” (p.87).

Gregg’s book is in a way radical because it tries to reframe our general political and cultural practices without reference [*117] to overarching moral arguments other than thin ones. The thin politics Gregg posits is no more than the basic outline of liberalism. But the great question would seem to be the question of the moral status of liberalism’s (pre-existing) framework. This Gregg simply takes for granted – as thin normativity. But then what exactly has been accomplished besides going half-way down the pragmatist road of questioning morality? As Gregg himself shows, liberalism minimizes morality all on its own, thank you very much.

And if all the radical firepower of pragmatism is going to be invoked, why stop with liberalism’s thin morality? Why not turn the critical scrutiny Gregg applies to the patriarchal family (in his chapter on ideology critique) and elsewhere toward the thin morality he champions?

The answer has to do, I believe, with the current state of political theory. Gregg’s work fits perfectly within an ongoing conversation that begins from 1) unquestioning adherence to the basic outlines of liberal democratic politics; 2) skepticism about morality. Gregg certainly deserves to be ranked highly within that conversation, and this book will be very useful to those already participating in it and to anyone wishing to be introduced to its fundamental questions.

But I prefer my pragmatism straight, no chaser. Stanley Fish’s distinction between a pragmatist account (or understanding) of social life and a pragmatist program (which he states in reference to the work of Richard Posner) seems to me to be an important one for understanding this book. Fish: “A pragmatist program asks the question ‘what follows from the pragmatist account?’ and then gives an answer, but by giving an answer pragmatism is unfaithful to its own first principle (which is to have none) and turns unwittingly into the foundationalism and essentialism it rejects” (Fish 1994, 209).

REFERENCES:

Fish, Stanley. 1994. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FREE SPEECH AND IT’S A GOOD THING, TOO. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, John. 1993. POLITICAL LIBERALISM. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____. 1985. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical.” 14 PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS 223-251

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Thomas F. Powers.