Review Article

Glyn Morgan: The Realism of Raymond Geuss

Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2001, viii + 175 pp., hardback £37.50, ISBN 0-521-80596-1;
paperback £13.99, ISBN 0-521-00053-2.
Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods, Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 2001, xxiii + 148 pp., hardback £21.50, ISBN 0-691-08903-5; paperback
(with a new preface 2003) £9.95, ISBN 0-691-11720-9.

Political theorists have always been fond of stark, counter-factual concep-

tions of the human condition. For Plato, it was the cave; for Hobbes, it was
the state of nature; for Rawls, it was the original position. And now for
Raymond Geuss, it is three people clinging to a plank. Let Geuss speak for
himself:
Three persons struggling to stay afloat on a plank that will only bear the weight of one have no
common good or, at any rate, no practically feasible common good, although, of course, one can
say that it would be better for all concerned if the situation were different from what it is, and one
can fantasize about what their common good would be if they were not in the situation they are
in (Public Goods, Private Goods – PG – p. 95).

The three persons struggling to keep afloat illustrate for Geuss the real world
of politics, a world of ineliminable conflict, value disagreement and imbal-
ances of power. Any political theory that ignores these features is worthless,
a repository of illusions and fairy-dust rather than a genuine contribution to
political understanding. Geuss believes that most contemporary political
theory – modern academic liberal political theory, in particular – suffers
from this failing. Liberal political theorists assume that their core values are
coherent; and that these values can be instantiated in the world that we
inhabit. For Geuss, neither assumption is warranted. The basic elements of
liberalism are themselves hopelessly confused; and any attempt to make the
world conform to these values will founder on the rocks of ineliminable con-
flict. Rather than confront this tension between how the world irremediably
is and how it ought to be, liberal political theorists resort, so Geuss believes,
to fantasy:
One can, of course, say and imagine various things about a ‘common’ or ‘public’ good . . . This is
a bit like saying of the three people clinging to the plank that the public good would require that
they be in a lifeboat or that each of them have a flotation vest; true enough, and if each were a
fish, they could all swim happily away (PG, p. 100).

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This is the voice of a realist: someone who understands the centrality of con-
flict, disagreement and power to the real world of politics; someone who has
learned the lessons taught by Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault.
Yet if the real world of politics is as Geuss describes it, then one might ask
why anyone would even bother with normative political theory. Geuss’s
recent writings suggest three different answers to this query.1 First, norma-
tive political theories play an important role in constituting our world.
Underpinning this view is the assumption – rejected by some realists but not
by Geuss himself – that normative beliefs have an important impact on politi-
cal action (PG, p. 55). To act successfully in the real world, it thus becomes
important that we understand the causal properties of even the false politi-
cal beliefs of others. Secondly, in so far as normative political theories
contain falsehoods and illusions – as is demonstrably the case, so Geuss main-
tains, with liberalism – then these theories act as ideologies that prevent a
clear understanding of the world. The assumption here is that we will act
more successfully in the world only if we can resist embracing normative
political theories that are ideological in nature. Thirdly, a normative politi-
cal theory might identify the conditions for flourishing in a fallen world of
conflict, disagreement, and power. Here the central contribution of any
worthwhile normative political theory is to underscore the importance of
acquiring and maintaining power.
These three different approaches to normative political theory might all
be described as forms of realism: respectively, ideational realism (at least some
normative political theories possess socially significant causal properties);
anti-ideological realism (at least some normative political theories are merely
ideological); and ethical realism (values must be affirmed in the face of
conflict). Where precisely Geuss stands with respect to each of these three
different forms of realism is far from obvious. Nonetheless, these three forms
of realism provide useful perspectives from which to review Geuss’s highly
original and deeply unsettling contributions to our understanding of
politics.

1
In addition to the two books under review, these recent writings include:
Raymond Geuss, ‘Liberalism and Its Discontents’, Political Theory, 30 (2002), pp.
320–38; ‘Neither History nor Praxis’, European Journal, 11 (2003), pp. 281–92; see also
Geuss’s contributions to Quentin Skinner et al., ‘Political Philosophy: The View from
Cambridge’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 10 (2002), pp. 1–19; and his earlier collec-
tion of essays, Morality, Culture, and History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1999. Geuss’s writings have attracted far less critical attention than they deserve. The
most useful discussions of his work – from which I have learned a great deal – include
Colin Bird, ‘Book Review: “History and Illusion in Politics” ’, Ethics, 113 (2003),
pp. 879–82; and Leif Wenar, ‘Book Review, “Public Goods and Private Goods” ’, Ethics,
112 (2002), pp. 149–54.

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IDEATIONAL REALISM

For some realist theorists of international relations, the behaviour of politi-

cal actors (primarily states and statesmen) is essentially a function of their
power and interests.2 The normative political beliefs of political actors are,
from the perspective of these realists, irrelevant. It does not matter what
political actors deem acceptable or desirable, because the political con-
straints they confront make the pursuit of power their only option. Not all
self-described realists follow these strategic realists in dismissing normative
beliefs as irrelevant. For some realist philosophers of social science, norma-
tive beliefs are ‘part and parcel of the causal processes that produce and
reproduce the social world’.3 This form of realism – ideational realism, as it
might be termed – treats both normative beliefs and material factors as
causally-significant features of the social world. The ideational realist thus
rejects both crude materialist accounts of the social world and crude ideal-
ist accounts that see the social world solely in terms of the ideas, conceptions
and normative beliefs of social actors. For the ideational realist, the task is
to explain when and how the beliefs of social actors interact with material
factors to define our political world. Here the ideational realist can allow
that in some circumstances, such as those that preoccupy realist theorists of
international relations, the scope for normative beliefs is more constrained
than in other circumstances.
Although Geuss himself does not use this terminology, his methodologi-
cal approach to political ideas might be described as a form of ideational
realism. Thus he begins his analysis of politics from the perspective of social
actors (individuals or groups) who can advance their goals only when they
can persuade others of the merits of these goals. Social actors cannot, in
other words, simply treat each other as mere physical bodies. Rather they
must deploy a given set of moral and political concepts – a ‘historically exist-
ing language’, as Geuss puts it – that marks out some projects as feasible and
desirable, and others as impossible and unworthy. Geuss mentions an inter-
esting example here:

2
For examples of realist approaches to international relations, see Hans
Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, New York, Knopf, 1948; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory
of International Politics, New York, Wiley, 1979; and John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy
of Great Power Politics, New York, Norton, 2001.
3
Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California
Press, 1990, p. 235. Rather than employing the term ‘ideational realism’, Shapiro
prefers ‘critical realism’.

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 REVIEW ARTICLE 113

When I use ‘undemocratic’ as a reproach, part of the reason I do so is that I have been subject
to a barrage of speech and writing about ‘democracy’ and its virtues during all my conscious
life. . . . [I]f I had lived two hundred years ago, I would almost certainly have followed the
then virtually universal use of ‘democratic’ as a term of reproach (History and Illusion in Politics –
HIP – p. 2).

Given this account of our ‘practical situation’, the history of political thought
assumes an especially important place. Social actors are thrown into a world
where certain values and institutional forms possess a powerful normative
force. Just how much scope social actors have in resisting this normative
force remains an unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) question. But it
remains an important intellectual task to inquire into the historical origin
and trajectory of the concepts that social actors can and must employ to
further their social and political projects.
In his efforts to contribute to our understanding of our own ‘historical
existing language’, Geuss makes interesting use of a version of Nietzsche’s
and Foucault’s genealogical approaches. In earlier work, Geuss has written
with great insight about these two theorists.4 For Geuss, a genealogical
approach – best exemplified by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals – involves an
historical account of some commonly held assumption, practice, or institu-
tion that ‘presents itself as unitary and coherent . . . [and] as having a clear
unitary rationale’ (PG, pp. 8–9). The aim of a genealogical approach is to
show, through a tracing of a complex historical process, how this assump-
tion, practice, or institution lacks its claimed coherence or has achieved what
passes for coherence through distortion or violence. Ideally, a genealogical
approach to some of our political concepts and practices might help free us
from certain illusions about the real world. In doing so, this type of histori-
cal approach might help us to act more successfully and even ‘change our
political practice for the better’ (HIP, p. 9).
The best example of Geuss’s use of a genealogical approach is to be found
in his Public Goods, Private Goods, a small gem of a book that can be recom-
mended to both students and seasoned scholars alike. In this brief, readable
and often very funny book, Geuss takes us on a delightful intellectual journey
from the Greek agora – where we encounter Diogenes masturbating in public
– through to the Roman world – where we encounter both Caesar and
Augustine worrying away at the meaning of res publica – and onwards to
modern liberal conceptions of anti-paternalism. The upshot of Geuss’s inquiry
is to lay bare the errors of those who still think in terms of a single, unitary dis-
tinction between the public and the private. As becomes increasingly clear as
one proceeds through Public Goods, Private Goods, Geuss is not interested in

4
See Geuss, Morality, Culture and History, op. cit., esp. ch. 1.

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merely contrasting different historical usages of the terms public and private;
he has a particular axe to grind: modern academic liberalism. In Public Goods,
Private Goods, Geuss confines himself to some hard-hitting remarks about what
he believes to be the naive and incoherent nature of modern academic liber-
alism. Yet, in his History and Illusion in Politics this criticism takes the form of an
attack on the contemporary ‘ideal model’ of politics. This ‘ideal model’ con-
tains, so he argues, five different components – democracy, the state, capital-
ism, liberalism and human rights. Advocates of this ‘ideal model’ – including
modern academic liberals – believe that these elements are, whether con-
strued individually or combined together, minimally consistent and practically
coherent. Geuss spends the bulk of History and Illusion in Politics trying to per-
suade us that these elements are neither. Since this ‘ideal model’ serves to
obscure the real nature of politics and society, Geuss’s critique of this model
might be thought of as a form of anti-ideological realism.

ANTI-IDEOLOGICAL REALISM

Before examining Geuss’s rather explosive claims concerning the ideological

nature of modern academic liberalism (my term for his modern ‘ideal model’
of politics), it is worth noting that Geuss affirms the pervasive importance of
two general necessities: one, ‘the necessity of acting coherently in the political
world’; and two, ‘the necessity of historical understanding of our situation’
(HIP, p. vii). We have already discussed Geuss’s views about our ‘historically
existing language’. But his emphasis – reiterated throughout these two books
– upon ‘coherence’ and ‘acting coherently’ deserves further attention, not
least because these terms appear to do a great deal of work in Geuss’s writings.
In claiming that the concepts that constitute modern academic liberalism are
incoherent, Geuss might be taken to mean one or all of the following:
(i) These terms, which are now so central to our ‘historically existing lan-
guage’, prevent us from perceiving our real situation.
(ii) These terms are, either singly or jointly, philosophically incoherent,
and thus incapable of generating an effective political programme or
movement.
(iii) These terms are, either singly or jointly, philosophically incoherent, and
thus are unworthy of our support or endorsement.
(iv) These terms are, when measured against some alternative conception
of society and politics, inferior.
In sense (i), our contemporary ‘ideal model’ – modern academic liberalism,
in other words – functions as an ideology that prevents us from recognizing
the extent to which our social and political life is one of conflict and dis-
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agreement. Viewed from this perspective, Geuss might be seen as an anti-

ideological realist, a proponent of ideologiekritik. He certainly does have a lot
to say about the way that elements of our ‘ideal model’ prevent us from
seeing how the real world of politics operates. This line of argument does,
however, prompt the Klugscheißers’ retort: ‘if this ideal model is so obfuscat-
ing, how did you manage to see your way through it?’ Presumably, Geuss is
able to penetrate the ideological mists because he can call upon his
genealogical approach. His argument in History and Illusion in Politics tends,
however, to rely primarily on standard techniques of analytical philosophy
rather than genealogy. Geuss, to be sure, is a brilliant analytical philosopher;
his critique of the elements of modern academic liberalism is an intellectual
tour de force. But this critique, aspects of which I discuss in more detail below,
does invite a broader question regarding his claims concerning the philo-
sophical incoherence of our current political language and his professed
desire for an action-oriented political programme suitable for the real world
of conflict and disagreement.
This leads us to proposition (ii), according to which the philosophical
coherence of a political programme is a precondition of its ability to moti-
vate action and support. The obvious difficulty with this claim is that modern
history is full of examples of incoherent theories generating successful politi-
cal programmes and movements. Geuss himself is well aware of this. Thus
in a rather undermining conclusion to History and Illusion in Politics, he allows
that not only is incoherence sometimes consistent with successful action-
oriented political programmes – Christianity is his apt example, Marxism
would be another – but coherence is itself a question-begging criterion of
evaluation. Geuss acknowledges the relevance here of theorists such as
Burke, Oakeshott and Rorty, all of whom recognize a tension between what
might crudely be termed ‘philosophy’ and ‘politics’. Unfortunately Geuss
does not pursue this line of argument very far. Nor does he fully come to
terms with the tension between his attacks on the ‘incoherence’ of various
political theories and his reluctance to defend the claim that theoretical
coherence constitutes a minimum requirement of any acceptable political
programme. Yet even if he does not fully defend the claim, he clearly remains
committed to some version of proposition (iii). Viewed in this light, no polit-
ical programme is worthy of our support unless it can meet some threshold
standard of philosophical or theoretical coherence. This proposition lies
behind Geuss’s blistering attack on modern academic liberalism, which he
holds to be both internally incoherent and wilfully ignorant of the real
nature of social and political relations. A striking feature of this critique is
that it extends to all major schools of modern academic liberalism, includ-
ing Millian comprehensive liberalism, Rawlsian political liberalism and the
various versions of rights-based liberalism. Indeed, the very idea of a uni-
versalistic subjective moral right – a human right, in other words – becomes

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a controversial casualty of Geuss’s attack on liberalism. Anyone who still

thinks that human rights can easily be defended would do well to read the
later sections of History and Illusion in Politics, where Geuss develops a vigor-
ous challenge to the language and practice of human rights. This challenge
merits further discussion because it reveals some of the grounds for his
disdain for modern academic liberalism in general.
If we think of rights as peremptory claims on others (duty bearers)
grounded on (and partially justified by) the interests of the right holder,
then we might be led to believe that we possess a useful political vocabulary
and – when these rights are effectively protected – a valuable set of institu-
tional practices.5 Indeed, it seems to me – admittedly, an unreconstructed
liberal – that any modern society that lacked this vocabulary and these insti-
tutional practices would be correspondingly impoverished. Geuss thinks
otherwise for at least three reasons. First, he thinks that rights introduce an
illusory element of stability and predictability into our political systems. In
the real world, ‘rights’ are frequently abridged and – in the case of crimi-
nals – simply overridden. Secondly, he thinks that the language of rights –
particularly when this language takes the form of universalistic human (or
natural) rights – suggests that all of the most urgent interests of human
beings can be respected. Yet ‘our real world does not seem to have sufficient
resources to ensure for each human being a life in which even some minimal
set of purported “natural” rights is realized’ (HIP, p. 149). And thirdly, Geuss
maintains that subjective moral rights are only meaningful when they are
enforced by a legal system. To speak of human rights thus entails ‘a recog-
nized legal and political system with effective jurisdiction and control over
the whole world’ (HIP, p. 146).
This case against rights will not be unfamiliar to rights-based liberals.
Similar criticisms can be found in the writings of Bentham, Marx and various
conservative thinkers.6 Yet there is nothing in this case that need embarrass
a sophisticated form of rights-based liberalism. True, rights are often
abridged, abrogated and overridden. But this is hardly a sufficient reason
for thinking that the language of rights is therefore an inconvenient fiction.
Rights serve to identify urgent interests of the right-holder that merit special
societal protection. When these rights are ignored, we possess a useful way
of voicing our concern. Rights are, in short, a valuable component of our

5
For versions of this so-called interest theory of rights, see Joseph Raz, The Moral-
ity of Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, ch. 6; and Jeremy Waldron, The
Right of Private Property, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988, ch. 2.
6
See, for a useful compendium, Jeremy Waldron, Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham,
Burke, Marx on the Rights of Man, London, Methuen, 1988.

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‘historically existing language’. Where this language has taken hold, gov-
ernments must go to great lengths to explain and justify any laws or special
measures that violate the rights of the individual. Far better to live in such
a society than one where arbitrary governmental action is the norm, or
where the interests of some corporate entity (‘the nation’, ‘the people’s
republic’ or whatever) routinely trump those of the individual.7 Geuss’s
second argument against rights applies more specifically to human rights.
He is quite correct to complain that some human rights charters are often
ludicrously over-ambitious. But there is no reason to accept his stronger
claim that the most basic interests of all human beings cannot, due to limi-
tations of natural resources, be guaranteed. The language of human rights
serves, in one of its roles, to register a set of urgent global priorities. Ideally,
the list of human rights should cover only a minimal set of basic human
interests. The language of human rights (if defined in this minimal way)
would then serve to remind (and embarrass) affluent Western governments
about their own public commitment – and, in some cases, founding consti-
tutional commitment – to the universal rights of all. In the absence of a
human rights discourse, the prosperous West, both governments and people,
would likely prove even more stony-hearted to the plight of the impover-
ished. The fact that even the most minimal human rights now go unpro-
tected owes less to the constraints of natural resources than to the constraints
of the West’s imagination and sympathy. Geuss’s final argument against
human rights turns on the alleged incoherence of any set of rights that are
not instantiated in a legal system backed up by a sovereign political author-
ity. Geuss seems to think that anyone committed to human rights is ipso facto
committed to a world state. This argument is clearly false. Even if one were
to allow that human rights will remain ineffectual unless embodied in a sov-
ereign legal system, this does not mean that human rights require a world
state. The proponent of human rights need only think that all legal systems
– whether located in a few or many states – must, at a minimum, protect
basic human rights. Nor does this claim entail (as Geuss further suggests)
that proponents of human rights must be in favour of ‘speedy regular armed
intervention’ (HIP, p. 145) in those states that fail to protect human rights.
Any number of non-military options might be taken in support of human
rights.
Pervading Geuss’s critique of human rights – and his critique of modern
academic liberalism in general – is an assumption of ineliminable moral and

7
In a rather alarming comment (HIP, p. 135), Geuss notes that for thousands of
years China has done ‘very nicely’ without the language of subjective rights. This sug-
gests only that Geuss possesses a very eccentric understanding of what it is for a society
to do ‘very nicely’.

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political disagreement. Thus in his critique of human rights, he notes that

there is no general agreement on even the most basic human interests. In
advancing this argument, Geuss shares some common ground with radical
pluralists such as John Gray and Stuart Hampshire.8 Yet there remains an
important difference between Guess and these pluralists. Whereas pluralists
claim to be able to identify at least some universal authoritative values –
cultural diversity, physical security and rational adjudication of conflict, for
instance – Geuss believes that even these values will remain the subject of
disagreement and conflict.9 This point calls into question proposition (iv),
according to which Geuss might be interpreted as arguing that modern aca-
demic liberalism remains inferior when measured against some alternative
more coherent conception of politics and society. Clearly, Geuss believes that
modern academic liberalism is a failure. But is there some conception of pol-
itics and society that is any better? Here we need to say something about
Geuss’s relationship to ethical realism.

ETHICAL REALISM

Ethical realism might be thought of as a political theory that recognizes that

human values must be affirmed in the face of conflict and disagreement. To
this end, power is a necessary attribute of human flourishing. Ethical realism,
so defined, does not entail any particular set of values. In allowing, however,
that there are at least some human values worth affirming, the ethical realist
is very different from the nihilist. While some ethical realists – Max Weber
comes to mind – have argued that the choice of ultimate values cannot be
grounded on reason, ethical realists can (and typically do) go to great
lengths to explain which values matter and why. Thus for Weber ‘individual
freedom’ and ‘the German Nation’ were, at various stages of his life, ulti-
mate values.
This crude ideal typical description of ethical realism provides a useful
point of comparison to the position articulated in Geuss’s recent writings.
Some readers have expressed puzzlement as to what Geuss’s position actu-
ally is in these works.10 Part of the puzzle arises, I think, from Geuss’s inten-

8
See, for instance, John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, London, Routledge, 1998; and
Stuart Hampshire, Justice as Conflict, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.
9
Thus in contrast to Gray and Hampshire, both of whom attempt to resolve con-
flicts on the basis of a minimal Hobbesian peace, Geuss believes that: ‘To arrive at a
realistic assessment of the modern predicament, one must add to Hobbes’s view a
Nietzschean skepticism about “reason” ’ (PG, p. 102).
10
For a similar comment, see Wenar, ‘Book Review’, op. cit., p. 154. Geuss himself
notes that he contributed a new preface to the paperback edition of PG, partly because

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tion to confine himself to a critique of the coherence of a dominant feature

of our ‘historically existing language’. For the most part, Geuss does so
confine himself. Thus at one point, Geuss notes that ‘to demand that think-
ing whatever the circumstances, always be affirmative is itself a form of
repression that should be avoided’ (PG, p. xix). Yet throughout these two
books, aspects of a more affirmative position do emerge. Ethical realism is
the term that best captures this affirmative position, even if it is a curiously
truncated form of ethical realism. In contrast to most ethical realists, Geuss
appears to have no ultimate values, no cause or creed about which to be real-
istic. We know he doesn’t like modern academic liberalism. We also know
that he perceives the world as riven with conflict. No political creed is worthy
of our consideration that refuses to take seriously this conflict or that denies
the importance of power. But this still leaves a lot of possible values, causes
and creeds. Hobbes was animated by a concern for individual security;
Machiavelli was animated by a concern for the safety of the republic. It is
not, however, clear, what specific values animate Geuss’s ethical realism. In
some passages, however, Geuss does reveal more of his hand. He clearly
believes that liberalism protects the wealthy at the expense of the poor (PG,
pp. 102–3). Yet if this is where Geuss’s allegiances lie, then it would have
been helpful to hear more about his views of capitalism, a topic that he does
not discuss in any detail nor with any great insight.
Geuss’s failure to discuss the nature of capitalism is perhaps the greatest
weakness of these recent writings. Although capitalism figures as one of the
five elements in the now dominant ‘ideal model’, it is the only element of the
five that gets no systematic attention in his book. This omission is revealing,
not least because it runs against the grain of Geuss’s constant admonitions to
focus on the real world. For better or worse, the real world has been created
by the capitalist mode of production. It is difficult to get very far in under-
standing the trajectory of modern history without recognizing this fact.
Clearly, Geuss knows this. But were he to incorporate an account of capitalism
into his writings, he would need to modify his argument in at least two areas.
First, he would have to allow that capitalism has created its own distinc-
tive set of values. The idea of individual wealth through entrepreneurial
activity now occupies in many parts of the world a very high place on the
scale of human values. Furthermore, this is a value that fits very nicely within
the framework of ethical realism. Entrepreneurs are usually fully aware that
they can secure their goals only through conflict and struggle. Many people
in Western society – although fewer now than in the past – view entrepre-
neurial activity as a modern form of pleonexia. Indeed, only relatively recently

some readers expressed ‘a certain puzzlement about . . . the final implications of the
argument’ (PG, p. i).

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has entrepreneurial activity become fashionable and even cool. Doubtless,

Geuss, given what he has to say about the wealthy, will find it difficult to
endorse entrepreneurial activity as an ultimate value. But this is a form of
activity that otherwise fulfils all of his desiderata: it is a coherent project in
the modern world; it makes no rosy-eyed assumptions about human nature;
it recognizes the importance of power, and so on. More to the point, entre-
preneurial activity plays a crucial role in the reproduction of the capitalist
model of society. For Joseph Schumpeter, this type of activity was the very
life-blood of the capitalist order.11 If Schumpeter is right, then many of the
other elements of the contemporary ‘ideal model’ – individual property
rights, the state, competitive elite democracy, personal liberty – can all be
viewed as interlocking elements of a successful capitalist society. Far from
being incoherent, the components of the so-called ‘ideal model’ fit together
very nicely. They provide a framework for entrepreneurial activity and thus
the survival of a successful capitalist society from which we are all in a posi-
tion to benefit. Geuss would doubtless reject the notion that capitalism lends
the ‘ideal model’ a coherence that it otherwise might lack. He prefers to
think of capitalist society in terms of winners and losers fighting over ever-
diminishing resources. Yet it is here that his evocative metaphor of ‘the
plank’ tends to lead him astray. The capitalist model of society is wedded to
a conception of increasing returns; it hopes, in other words, to allow ever
more people to stand on that plank, to enter the lifeboat. True, capitalist
societies have their own pathologies: extreme forms of inequality, environ-
mental destruction, meaningless forms of work. But since its emergence in
the eighteenth century, the capitalist model of society has vastly enhanced
the actuarial prospects of the human race. To be poor in a successful capi-
talist society is typically to occupy a vastly more advantageous position than
to occupy almost any position in a non-capitalist society. In the real world,
no one now can seriously entertain views of replacing the capitalist model
of society with an alternative. In most parts of the world, the intellectual task
now is to understand how, not whether, to adopt a capitalist model. This is
then the second area where Geuss’s critique of the contemporary ‘ideal
model’ is in need of some revision. By ignoring the positive features of cap-
italist society, Geuss is led to believe that the liberal ‘ideal model’ is consid-
erably less coherent and successful than it actually is.

11
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, London, Allen and
Unwin, 1943.

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