Nagel on Williams

Thomas Nagel has an interesting survey of the philosophy of Bernard Williams, The View from Here and Now, in the London Review of Books.

An old saw has it that all politics is local. Williams believed that political theory, too, should be in a sense local, rather than universal, because it must be addressed to individuals in a particular place and time, and must offer them a justification for the exercise of political power that has persuasive force in the light of standards that are accessible to them.

Williams believed that the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate states depends on whether their exercise of power over their subjects is sheer coercion or not. But whether a society can meet this ‘Basic Legitimation Demand’ depends on whether its justification for the exercise of power will be morally persuasive in that historical situation. The requirement cannot be for justification sub specie aeternitatis. What is legitimate at one time may not be so at another. This is the meaning of Williams’s title, ‘In the Beginning Was the Deed’, taken from Goethe’s Faust: ‘No political theory, liberal or other, can determine by itself its own application. The conditions in which the theory or any given interpretation of it makes sense to intelligent people are determined by an opaque aggregation of many actions and forces.’