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13-04-2022 | Symposium: The State of Analytic Political Theory

Statehood and Justice

Author: Philip Pettit

Published in: Society | Issue 2/2022

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Abstract

Does the state have a characteristic role in the lives of its subjects, assuming officials are not utterly corrupt? And is that role consistent with its being a potential force for justice? The question is important if, as realists hold, the state is ineliminable. The paper sketches a genealogical way of approaching the issue and gestures at an answer: that whether it is actually just or not, the state’s role is to entrench laws that give at least an elite citizenry a range of rights, however limited. This fits with Kant’s notion of the civil as distinct from the rightful condition: the ideal of statehood as distinct from justice.

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For that to which it is a prolegomenon see my forthcoming book, The State (Pettit 2023).

He may have been following Bernard Mandeville (1731, 332) who had earlier written that the best sort of constitution is the one which “remains unshaken though most men should prove knaves.”

For a very useful overview and discussion of the methodology, see (Queloz 2021). Note that genealogy in this sense is distinct from a purely historical genealogy, as for example in Quentin Skinner’s (2009) account of the state.

An alternative methodology that might be employed to a broadly similar effect in developing an account of the state is that of constructive interpretation, as advanced by Ronald Dworkin (1986). This would have us identify the institution targeted, seek the best interpretation of the purposes it serves and then explore how the institution might be reformed to do even better by those goals. For more on the use of this methodology, see (James 2005; Sangiovanni 2008).

For a classic source of the genealogy of money that the text elaborates here and at greater length in Chapter 6, see (Menger 1892). That the barter society imagined really is imaginary is argued by (Graeber 2011).

For this notion of a function, and for an argument that the great social scientists in the functionalist tradition may have been looking for functions in this sense—features that promise to give institutions an enduring rather than an ephemeral presence—see (Pettit 1996).

Notice that the economist’s genealogy of money will work to explain the appearance of money even if, in an analogous fashion, only a privileged class figure among those who generate it.

This is a point at which there is a clear analogy with the method of constructive interpretation mentioned in an earlier footnote. Qua interpretive, that methodology would identify the purposes of that state, at its best; and qua constructive, it would seek out changes that might enable the state to serve them better (Dworkin 1986). The genealogy employed here corresponds to the interpretive stage in identifying the function of the state and corresponds to the constructive when it looks at the further demands that that function supports.

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Title: Statehood and Justice
Author: Philip Pettit
Publication date: 13-04-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 2/2022
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00704-0

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