Review Article

Neither Rawls Nor Adorno: Raymond Geuss’

Programme for a ‘Realist’ Political Philosophy
Outside Ethics, by Raymond Geuss. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 320 pp.
ISBN 13: 978-0-691-12342-4 pb $30.95
Philosophy and Real Politics, by Raymond Geuss. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008, 126 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-691-13788-9 hb $19.95

In his most recent book, Philosophy and Real Politics (PRP), Raymond Geuss gives his
considerations on the theory of politics the programmatic label of ‘realism’. Political
philosophy, he urges, must once more become capable of grasping political reality. It must
stop conceiving of itself as a branch of applied ethics, as does ‘the mainstream of
contemporary analytic political philosophy’ (PRP: 18). According to Geuss, ‘the best-
known instance of this approach is Kantianism’ (PRP: 7), and his examples of non-realist
political philosophy are drawn above all from those forms of Kantian liberalism that
dominate the analytical side of the bisected philosophical universe: theories of rights,
justice, equality, fairness, and impartiality. What all of these have in common, and what
according to Geuss reveals them as instances of ‘applied ethics’, is that they conceive of
their subject matter—politics—as the mere application of normative principles that can be
determined in advance. Instead of looking at the reality of politics, these theories look at
politics as the realm of the realization of norms. The world of political philosophy is an
inverted world. The aim is to regain the real world.

1.

The first part of Philosophy and Real Politics delineates the shape of a realistic theory of
politics by way of three questions. All three questions are based on Hobbes’ fundamental
insight that social interaction, the coordination of individual actions, is an achievement,
not a given; it is not guaranteed to occur but must be brought about. This is the task of
politics. But not only does politics aim to co-ordinate actions; it consists itself of nothing
but actions, which are equally in need of co-ordination. A first question to be addressed by
any attempt at understanding politics is therefore that posed by Lenin: ‘Who whom?’; who
does what to whom? And who, in a given situation, is in fact capable, i.e. has the power, of
doing what to whom? Since power is always limited, the second question of political
theory, suggested by Nietzsche, is the question when a political agent does what; the
question, that is, of the order of importance or urgency, which translates into an order of
temporal priority. Since, thirdly, power consists not in mere violence but rather in the
extent to which some agent has the ‘chance’ to enforce his or her will, the third question—
stemming from Max Weber—is on what grounds anyone is provided with such chances.
What is it, both in a political actor’s own view and in the view of others, that legitimizes
the former’s activity of coordinating the actions of those others?

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Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
140 Christoph Menke

Realist political philosophy, writes Geuss, is concerned with ‘the way the social,
economic, political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some given time,
and what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances’ (PRP: 9). Realist
political philosophy knows ‘that politics is in the first instance about action and the context
of action’ (PRP: 11). The triad of questions just mentioned, which Geuss emphasizes is
preliminary and moreover subject to variations in priority, aims to enable an under-
standing of political actions by identifying three basic parameters for their analysis: power
relations, plural normative orientations, and acquiescence in purported legitimacy. This
framework helps explain Geuss’ objection to the ‘applied ethics’ model of political
philosophy. The target of his objection is that model’s assumption that political action can
be understood as an application of antecedently established normative standards. If
political action is fundamentally influenced by existing power structures, by the
heterogeneity of agents’ evaluative rankings, and by historically and geographically
diverse criteria of legitimacy, then it is not possible to understand such action simply or
largely as a transparent implementation of normative principles.
What makes this more than just an ‘empirical’ objection? In other words, why would it
be misleading to qualify the argument of a realist political philosophy by the very
category of ‘the empirical’, which normativists are always quick to invoke when naming
that which must escape their methods? Empiricism claims that political action is in fact
determined not by norms like the ones that the ‘applied ethics’ model tries to establish
and prescribe to it, but instead by entirely different factors: generally, the ‘interests’ or
‘preferences’ of agents, which are thought to be largely egoistical in nature. The debate
between empiricists and normativists then revolves around the question of whether
people are in fact motivated mostly by selfish interests or rather by their appreciation of
valid normative principles. But this is not a dispute that Geuss wishes to join. Geuss
attacks normativism not by deploying empiricism against it, but instead juxtaposes
realism to normativism and empiricism alike. The forced alternative between selfish
interests and normative principles is unsuitable for comprehending the reality of political
action.
The second part of Philosophy and Real Politics aims to show why this is so. While the
first part develops a realist alternative to normativism, the second part provides the
outlines of a critique of normativism. Geuss’ more specific examples are the liberal theory
of natural or human rights and Rawls’ theory of justice. His fundamental objection to those
theories is that, at the outset, their very attempt to establish the validity of normative
principles prior to the analysis of the actual conditions of political action is fallacious. This
shows in Rawls’ failure to acknowledge how much is already presupposed by the starting
points of his argument: for instance, when he simply takes for granted that justice must be
understood in terms of equality (PRP: 73 ff.). By ignoring how contentious the basic
assumptions of his theory are, Rawls deprives himself of a proper understanding of the
status of that theory. He claims to articulate the deep normative consensus of a society in
such a way that he can then derive from it standards for the critical evaluation of the real
conditions in that society. Both ambitions are misguided: Neither are the normative
principles advanced by Rawls the essence of an underlying social consensus—rather, they
constitute a specific and contentious proposal for its interpretation—nor does his theory
lead to anything other than ‘an unreflective and uncritical relation to ‘‘our’’ concepts or
‘‘our (moral) intuitions’’’ (PRP: 60). Moreover, these two failures are interrelated: precisely
because Rawls does not recognize that he occupies a specific position within a political
struggle, he is unable to achieve a critical stance against the political status quo.
Normativism lapses into mere affirmation—not accidentally but for methodological

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reasons, on account of its failure to reflect on the fact that the articulation of a normative
theory of politics is itself a political act.
This self-misunderstanding of normativist theories is a consequence of their
misunderstanding of normativity itself. Normativist theories fail to understand that their
normative claims are political acts because they fail to understand that normative claims in
general are put forth only in the context of political action and are thus subject to its
specific mechanisms. Geuss’ critique of political normativism does not, therefore, deny the
normativity of politics; the turn of the gaze towards ‘real politics’ should not be
understood as a case for Realpolitik. ‘Der Mensch ist ein abschätzendes Tier’ (‘man is an
evaluative animal’), as Geuss quotes Nietzsche (PRP: 39), and it is the reality of that animal
that a realist view aims to comprehend. If, as Geuss argues in his critique of Rawls, the
activity of evaluating is not antecedent to political action but internal to it, then it follows
that the three questions that realism uses to understand political action must be applied to
the process of evaluation itself. The three factors revealed by realist analysis—power,
plurality, and legitimacy—do not refer to the (empirical) other of normativity by which it is
confined but are indeed constitutive of it.
If this is how to understand the relation between the two parts of Geuss’ book, then the
outlines of an anti-normativist conception of political normativity begin to emerge:

(1) Political evaluation is perspectival: it is always carried out by somebody, and

in view of his possibilities of action with respect to somebody else.
(2) Political evaluation is deliberative: it consists in ranking a plurality of values
in some specific situation.
(3) Political evaluation is contextual: it relies on standards of legitimacy specific
to some particular time and place.

Instead of calling this conception of normativity anti-normativist, one might as well call it
political. A political conception thinks of evaluation as disclosed by Lenin’s question about
power, Nietzsche’s question about ranking, and Weber’s question about legitimacy. If
normativism is about the evaluation of politics, realism investigates the politics of
evaluation.

2.

Philosophy and Real Politics exemplifies in its first part what it could mean to take a realist
view of politics, and then, in the second part, supplements this with a critique of
normativism—ostensibly as an additional elucidation or even a crutch for all of those who
have not yet quite succeeded in emancipating themselves from the normativist
‘mainstream of contemporary analytic political philosophy’. Instead of discussing ‘at
great length and to no clear purpose’ the binary opposition between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ with
which normativists operate, Geuss, he writes, ‘would like to proceed indirectly by inviting
the reader to see how much more interesting the political world seems to be, and how
much more one can come to learn and understand about it, if one relaxes the straightjacket
and simply ignores this purported distinction’ (PRP: 17). This is a considerable shift not
only in voice but also in philosophical outlook when compared to the predecessor of
Philosophy and Real Politics, the voluminous essay collection Outside Ethics (OE). The latter
ends by programmatically introducing the idea of just the sort of philosophical realism
that the former sets out to elaborate at the beginning: in one of last essays of Outside Ethics,

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142 Christoph Menke

Geuss draws on Bernard Williams’ re-formulation of the contrast between Thucydides’

historia and Plato’s philosophy in order to show what it might mean to introduce
‘‘‘Tatsachen-Sinn’’’ [Nietzsche], a ‘‘sense for the facts’’’, into the analysis of human action
and agency (OE: 220). In Outside Ethics, this step towards philosophical realism is
accomplished only at the very end. The almost playful nonchalance with which Philosophy
and Real Politics sets aside philosophical controversies like that between normativism and
empiricism thus stands in marked contrast to the dialectical work that Geuss undertakes in
Outside Ethics, where it is only in concluding that he casts a glance ahead at the real facts of
politics.
Indeed, the critical labour in Outside Ethics can be properly described as ‘dialectical’,
since it takes the form of working through a false dualism. The book does not merely
assemble fourteen illuminating and influential pieces by Geuss, but arranges them in such
a way that together they present one argument. The first half of the essays is devoted to a
critique of several concepts and models that are at the heart of contemporary normative
theory. The first target is furnished by the shortcomings of liberal and Kantian positions,
and the critique of Rawls of which Philosophy and Real Politics provides only a rough sketch
is here elaborated in detail (chapters 1–2). In the central third chapter, whose title is that of
the book, Geuss shows from which perspective this critique is levelled: namely on the
basis of conceptions of human life and agency that have been developed in highly diverse
ways by the ‘main line of philosophic writing in nineteenth-century Europe’ from Hegel to
Nietzsche, with its continuations in Heidegger and Adorno, through the consideration of
social, political, aesthetic, and religious practices. The historical recollection of this
alternative tradition serves a genealogical purpose. Its aim is to show that and how there
have been, and hence that and how there can be, ways of thinking that sharply contrast
with contemporary normative philosophical approaches. This is followed by three pieces
that lay out the internal complexity of three alternative candidates for the foundation of
normative thought: freedom, virtue, and happiness (chapters 4–6). As it turns out, the
difficulties of the normativist model cannot be resolved by appealing to any of these
concepts: due to their respective irreducible plurality of meanings, neither ‘freedom’ nor
‘virtue’ nor ‘happiness’ can be appealed to as the ultimate principle of a unified and
comprehensive normative conception.
The second half of the book leads to its final upshot, the programmatic outline of a
‘realist’ philosophy. Geuss arrives at this conclusion by two different routes: on the one
hand, by presenting philosophical positions that lend themselves to his own realist
purposes—especially those of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Williams (chapters 9 and 13); and
on the other hand, through repeated engagements with one alternative position—that of
Adorno, to whom Geuss devotes three chapters (7, 10, and 14). Geuss shares Adorno’s
critique of liberal, Kantian normativism. But in his view, Adorno draws the wrong
conclusion from his own good critique. While Thucydides and his modern philosophical
heirs—Nietzsche, Foucault, and Williams—use realism to fight against Plato’s normati-
vism, Adorno’s negative dialectics, like the unhappy consciousness of the Romantics,
remain beholden to their Platonic opponent. Adorno, too, is ‘still playing Plato’s game by
the rules he had set up’ (OE: 185). Hence the allusive title of the final piece of the collection:
‘Adorno’s Gaps’ (‘Gaps’ is the title of an aphorism by Adorno discussed in that chapter).
The idea of a ‘realist’ philosophy that Geuss develops following Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s,
and Williams’ project of rehabilitating Tatsachen-Sinn stands in opposition to both Rawls’
normativism and Adorno’s negativism.
I will not trace here the details of Geuss’ critique, in the first half of the book, of the
normativistic or ‘applied ethics’ conception of political philosophy. That critique appears

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to me convincing, even compelling. Instead, I would like to consider more closely the way
in which the essays from the second half of Outside Ethics proceed to develop a ‘realist’
counter-conception by constructing a dialectical exchange between Nietzsche, Foucault,
and Williams on one side and Adorno on the other, and how this way of proceeding at the
same time complicates and refines Geuss’ own programme.

3.

Philosophy and Real Politics, I pointed out above, pursues a realist investigation of politics
and is thus located beyond the sort of critical engagement with philosophical alternatives
that characterizes Outside Ethics. A straightforward way to account for this difference
would be to read the earlier volume as a (inevitably somewhat laborious) methodological
propaedeutic to the realist experiments of the later one. But this would be to take too
lightly the question of why Geuss makes things so hard for himself in Outside Ethics, and to
fail to understand why he there takes great pains both to deliver a critique of normativism
and to offer a methodological reflection on this critique, by distinguishing between
different ways of carrying it out. Geuss explains these efforts by pointing to the specific
target of the critique in question. His name for that target is ‘ethics’, and he characterizes it,
just as he did in Philosophy and Real Politics, as the particular form of philosophical
theorizing that arose from the (historically quite improbable and hence surprising) recent
confluence of Kantianism and liberalism (OE: 11–28). The doctrinal core of this type of
theory is the claim that there are only ‘three broad categories of things’ that can be
considered ‘unproblematically important’: (1) useful, mostly empirical knowledge; (2)
‘individual subjective human preferences’ that ‘are generally construed as prima facie
hard, brassy, externally opaque, and atomistic’, and (3) ‘a restrictive set of demands on
action that could affect other people and that are usually construed as some set of
universal laws or rules or principles’ (OE: 3). So the target of Geuss’ critique is a mode of
thinking that pits selfish interests against moral principles in such a way that both can be
used to fuel endless debates between normativists and empiricists. It is crucial for Geuss’
argument that this mode of thinking is much more than just a philosophical doctrine, even
much more than a dominant one. For it is a dominant philosophical doctrine only because
it is at the same time ‘the dominant world view in contemporary Western societies’ (OE: 3).
This transforms the critique of a false philosophy into a critique of a false society.
The implications of this move for Geuss’ philosophical self-understanding are nowhere
more apparent than at the end of the essay that lends the book its title. There Geuss rejects
the dominant notion of ‘ethics’ by way of a recollection of ‘forms of radical practical
thinking that descend from Paul and Augustine through Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger
(and Badiou)’, while cautioning that these positions themselves

. . . may turn out to be nothing more than self-imposed illusions, and [that]
settling back into our cosy world of cultivating the tiny garden of our own
welfare and our ‘human rights’ and those of other members of the global village,
incoherent as the concept of a ‘human right’ is, may well turn out to be in fact the
final word for us. That would be extremely unfortunate—we would have become
the creatures Nietzsche calls the ‘last humans’. I would like to think that my
continuing to tell the story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German practical
philosophy in this way would have some potentially self-fulfilling effect in
preventing that from being the case. (OE: 65)

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This passage makes explicit the practical intent of Geuss’ philosophical critique. One of its
most powerful motivations is the dread (or is it disgust?) inspired by the prospect of a
world in which the currently dominant philosophical ethics would have become true. At
the same time the passage explains why a critique of this ethics is an urgent, indeed a
necessary task: its target is not merely a philosophical theory but the ideological
reduplication of a real social tendency. In this passage more than anywhere else Geuss is
close to the basic motive of Adorno’s philosophy.
These observations cast a new light on Geuss’ program, in Philosophy and Real Politics, of
‘relaxing the straightjacket’ of traditional philosophical oppositions and controversies and
of proceeding directly to an investigation of ‘real politics’. For if the realm of real politics
lies outside the province of philosophical ethics, and if at the same time ‘the dominant
world view in contemporary Western societies’ comes increasingly to be restricted to that
province, then it can no longer be taken for granted that there still remains any social
reality outside ethics.1 The reality of ‘real politics’ is itself called into question: it may not
(or no longer) exist. This is no objection against any of the considerations that Geuss has
suggested for the realist investigation of politics. Rather, it raises a question about the
status of the ‘reality’ to which Geuss’ philosophical realism appeals: In what sense does
real politics ‘exist’? And, by extension, what is the relation between a realist investigation
of politics (which Geuss sketches in Philosophy and Real Politics) and a critique of
philosophical ethics (which he provides in Outside Ethics)? If the continued existence of
real politics requires the limitation or subversion of the social hegemony of ethical theory,
then the critique of ethics is not merely a propaedeutic to a realist philosophy but rather a
necessary precondition for it. Philosophical realism cannot simply take the reality of its
subject matter for granted; it must first reclaim and ensure that reality, or even produce it,
through the very act of critique.
What we encounter here is a fundamental complication in the relation between
ideology and reality. On a simple understanding, the tradition of philosophical ethics from
Plato to Rawls is the ‘ideology’ whose ‘deceitful, hypermoralized views’ must be bypassed
in order to ‘exhibit what really moves people to act and what then happens to them and to
others as a consequence of how they act’ (OE: 230, 226). Thucydides’ (and Williams’) ‘keen
interest in understanding clearly and exactly . . . the real, causal details of human
motivation, the contingencies of particular political situations, the historically and
geographically specific structure of existing human institutions’, serves as a guide to a
realism that intends to replace ‘abstract philosophical accounts’ by the ‘history, sociology
and politics of the [particular] case’ (OE: 232). But why, then, in analogy with Nietzsche’s
ideal of a Socrates who makes music, put forward ‘the ideal of what one might call ‘‘a
Thucydides who philosophizes’’’ (OE: 233)? Why not ‘early Greek ‘‘Wissenschaftlichkeit’’’
(OE: 229) instead of philosophy? Because philosophy is still needed for ‘the project of
criticizing the Platonic-Aristotelian-Kantian tradition in ethics’ (OE: 232). The need for this
critical project, in turn, is due not simply to the philosophical predominance of the
tradition in question—a predominance which in itself may not cause too much concern to
a realist—but rather to its social predominance: to the social reality of the ethical ideology.
The ideology has become reality, so that reality itself has become ideology. Therefore
neither ideology critique nor a realist ‘sense for the facts’ is sufficient by itself. Only their
combination can dissolve the intertwinement of ideology and reality.
But is this not precisely Adorno’s ‘dialectical’ conception of philosophical interpreta-
tion? After all, the basic thesis of that conception, as Geuss explains clearly (OE: 122 ff.), is
that the reality of any particular phenomenon can be approached only by way of a critique
of the predominant, ‘ideological’ understanding or concept of that phenomenon. Any

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attempt to grasp the phenomenon directly will fail to understand its reality. This is because
that reality is already obscured by ideology within the phenomenon itself: the
phenomenon is its own ideology, so that ideology has become the real phenomenon.
Geuss invokes Foucault—whom he ranks along with Nietzsche and Williams as one of the
modern heirs of Thucydides—as a ‘good example’ of his claim that philosophy need not
be ‘dialectical’ in Adorno’s sense in order to be able to articulate a radical critique of
society. But this, it seems, could be true only if it were in fact possible to clearly separate
reality and ideology. In the essay from which his book derives its title, Geuss has disputed
this possibility, and with good reason.

4.

The preceding considerations point to an internal connection between critique (of the
ideology of philosophical ‘ethics’) and realism (in the investigation of ‘real politics’). This
connection complicates Geuss’ realist program in a way that brings it close to Adorno’s
conception of philosophy. In another respect, however, there remains a sharp difference
between Geuss and Adorno. It is this difference to which I will turn in conclusion, since it
helps us to further understand Geuss’ program of a realist philosophy.
So far I have presented Geuss’ critique of ethical theory mainly as a critique of its
‘moralism’. So understood, its target is a certain tradition of understanding human action
as essentially consisting in the realization of antecedent moral principles. But a second
aspect, which surfaces in Geuss’ discussion of Williams’ juxtaposition of Thucydides and
Plato, is the critique of ethical ‘optimism’ (OE: 223–7). Already the aforementioned basic
assumption of normativism, that actions consist in nothing but the transparent application
of the agent’s moral principles, can be called ‘optimistic’; for this view presupposes that
we are in principle in control of what happens when we act. Geuss makes this point in a
more general way in the context of his critical discussion of virtue ethics (chapter 5, ‘Virtue
and the Good Life’). While virtue theories do share a number of Geuss’ criticisms of the
‘applied ethics’ model of human action, they remain committed to the ‘optimism’ that
defines normativistic theories on their most fundamental level. Not only do they neglect to
consider how virtue, understood as the ‘effective excellent participation in given social
practices’ (OE: 87), is always at the same time an instrument for achieving social
conformity. They also share the optimist assumption that if an agent possesses certain
virtues or abilities this entails that she is capable of exercising them successfully, i.e. of
bringing about the ‘good’ result. Virtue theories regard this as a mere tautology, but
according to Geuss ‘to argue in this way is to adopt a kind of verbal immunization strategy
rather than to tell us anything of substance about ‘‘virtue’’’ (OE: 96). On the virtue ethical
view, when some course of action leads to the wrong result, that just shows that the action
cannot count as the exercise of the relevant virtue. The ‘optimism’ of this view becomes
clear once it takes the further step of tracing each bad, unsuccessful action back to some
deficiency or vice in the agent, attributing the failure for instance to the agent’s lack of care
or insight. All badness, all failure is laid at the door of the acting subject, who by the same
token also becomes the guarantor of the good. This is just another variety of the ‘wishful
thinking associated with Platonic optimism’ against which Geuss, following Williams,
offers the ‘tragical’ insight found in Thucydides (and in Sophocles) that ‘good men suffer
undeserved, irremediable, definitive catastrophic failure’ (OE: 224 ff.).
Geuss shares with Adorno the critical objection against optimism that the attempt of
ethical theory to eliminate failure and miscarriage, and thus suffering as such, is itself

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bound to fail. His criticism of Adorno concerns the role that Adorno grants to suffering
in his philosophy. According to Geuss, this distinguishes Adorno from the tragic
realism of the ancients: the ancients ‘in no sense glorified failure per se, nor indeed
attributed any special positive value to it’ (OE: 239). Adorno, on the other hand, is
‘fascinated by deficiency, imperfection, and failure’ (OE: 238). In Adorno’s thought, the
insistence on the irresolvable reality of failure and suffering does not just serve as an
objection to normativism. Instead, it becomes the distinctive mark of truth beyond (or
‘outside’) normativism: it is only through failure and suffering that truth is fully
disclosed (cf. chapter 7, ‘Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno’). This is Adorno’s
negativism: in ‘false life’, knowledge is inextricably tied to suffering. But for Geuss,
that idea of the ‘false life’ (or social ‘condition’) risks falling back into ‘the tired, diffuse
Romantic religiosity from which it was one of the glories of the twentieth century to
have freed us’ (OE: 247).
This criticism points to the decisive methodological disagreement between Geuss and
Adorno. The reason why Adorno considers failure an indispensable condition for the
emergence of truth is his belief that there is, for us, no other way of gaining knowledge
than through the critical destruction of the normativist, optimist, rationalist conceptions
that Geuss subsumes under the heading of ‘ethics’. The moment of truth is solely the
moment of the failure of these conceptions. But the failure of these conceptions is for
Adorno at the same time our failure—the failure of successful acting as such.
Geuss and Adorno both agree that the ethical theory that is the target of their critiques
is not mere philosophy but a socially produced, hegemonic worldview, an adequate
expression of the existing form of society. Therefore it is impossible to proceed to a ‘realist’
understanding of social reality simply by circumventing a false philosophical theory:
social reality itself is constituted, at least in part, in just the way that philosophical ethics
claims it is. A realist understanding of social reality must necessarily contain a critique of
the false ethical theory because that ethical theory is itself socially realized. For Geuss as
for Adorno, what makes the critique of the false ethical theory necessary is its social and
cultural power. In Adorno, however, this motive is joined by a second one: what ties
knowledge to the critique of (false) ethics is not just its social hegemony but its very
rationality. Adorno’s conviction that truth occurs only in the experience of failure is
grounded in a further specification of what it is whose failure is being experienced:
namely, a way of thinking that is false (which is why its failure is the index of truth) but at
the same time necessary, because rational. Adorno claims that insofar as we are thinking at
all, we cannot but reproduce just those false ways of thinking whose failure first discloses
the truth. And this is not just because of the social or cultural power of those ways of
thinking. Rather those ways of thinking have gained social or cultural power because they
are the result of the project of rationalization of our self-understanding: the attempt at
arriving at a rational self-understanding necessarily leads to the false ways of thinking that
are represented by normativist, optimist, rationalist ethical theories.
Adorno, of course, developed this idea of a lapse from rationalization into rationalism
in an extensive philosophy of history called ‘dialectics of enlightenment’. But my concern
here is not that philosophy of history in its own right but rather the one aspect which sets
Adorno apart from Geuss. Adorno attributes to modes of thinking like the one that Geuss
calls ‘ethics’ not just social power but rationality; they are necessary results of an equally
necessary attempt to rationalize thought and living. Paradoxical as it may appear, Adorno
considers the contemporary false ways of thinking and living to be rational. For Geuss,
this, if nothing else, seems to be the one decisive ‘thought too many’ that sends critical
theory down the wrong track.

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For it is clear that Adorno’s claim will have far-reaching consequences for the
methodological self-understanding of critical theory. If it is the development of rationality
itself that results in the emergence of normativist, optimist, rationalist ‘ethics’, both as a
type of theory and as a form of life, then the work of immanent critical dissolution of ethics
becomes the central, if not the only task of critical theory. (In this, Adorno’s negative
dialectics resembles Derrida’s deconstruction, which is why Geuss does not consider the
latter.) Behind Geuss’ program of a realist philosophy, on the other hand, stands the
conviction that such a critique has only limited value—a value that is as limited as that of
the normativist ethical theories with which the critique deals. Adorno shares the view of
the young Marx that there are philosophical theories (and the view of the young Lukács
that there are works of art)2 in which an entire historical moment is contained, with all its
internal tensions and contradictions. By reflecting, in their very form, the currently
existing form of society, these theories (or works of art) first make that social form visible.
This is why, according to Adorno, only a critical reading that scrutinizes the immanent
failure of those theories (and artworks) can yield a critical knowledge of social reality.
Geuss does not believe that Rawls, Habermas, Dworkin, or any other present-day ethical
theorist can still play the role of supplying the material for such a critical reading. The
kinds of grand theory and great art whose immanent critique could yield insights into
social reality itself do not (or no longer) exist. This indicates Geuss’ methodological break
with Adorno’s conception of critical theory as ‘negative dialectics’: the program of a
‘realist’ philosophy is the program of a critical theory that no longer unfolds in the
medium of reading, the reading of philosophy and art.

Christoph Menke
Institut für Philosophie
J. W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Germany
Christoph.Menke@normativeorders.net Translated by Felix Koch

NOTES
1
The lower right corner of the book cover of Outside Ethics shows a white circle
against a black background. The title is positioned in such a way that the second word,
‘Ethics’, occupies (in black letters) the white circle. The cover of Philosophy and Real Politics,
on the other hand, depicts a scene from a civil war: on the front, we see a person who has
presumably just been shot—his eyes are still open, his body has not yet quite sunk down to
the ground—whereas the back cover shows a man in a long coat resolutely reloading his
gun. Is this an illustration of ‘real politics’? What is the source of the light that illuminates
the black space ‘outside ethics’ and thus suddenly makes this scene visible?
2
For Geuss’ critique of this way of approaching works of art see Outside Ethics,
chapter 10 (‘Art and Criticism in Adorno’s Aesthetics’) and chapter 11 (‘Poetry and
Knowledge’)

r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.