Bryan Garsten

"The parties are, and must be, themselves the judges"
--Madison

"Man's tongue is a trumpet to war and sedition"
--Hobbes

I have only dipped into my friend Bryan's book to date. So far (introduction, conclusion) it so entirely in accord with my sympathies that I am not a useful critic. I need to read the Hobbes and Aristotle chapters before saying more. That said, some brief notes/thoughts:

1. A central holding: there is no Hobbesian sovereign, there is no uncontroversial standard of public reason. There is no principled basis for reliable adjudicating between inherently opposed interests (farmers and cowmen, debtors and creditors, etc). The search for such a principled standard is illusory, and leads to an alienating constraint of the public space of rhetoric.
2. Once the quest for this principled standard is seen as illusory, one is left with trying to persuade men as they are -- persuading them as ranchers, debtors, family men, texans, hunters, catholics, Scandinavians, what have you. None of these particularist appeals can be ruled out of the space of debate.
3. Rawls says liberalism results when differences in the conception of the good are viewed as a fundamental of politics (inexact quotation). Well, no. Liberalism is one stopping point on this path, but it itself a) asserts a conception of the good, b) does not resolve the problem. It's just not true that liberalism makes fundamentalists feel they got a fair shake. They didn't get a fair shake. Maybe that's fine, but it's fine only as a matter of prudence, or as a result of an opposed, non-fundamentalist conception of the good; it's not fine as a consequence of liberal neutrality. Madison thought deep differences were fundamental and irreducible, yet he wanted us to engage people as they were. He realized there was no substitute, no 'public reason' to which the concrete person will submit, alienating his particular attachments and interests.
4. So where does persuasion go wrong? In pandering and demagoguery, of course. And these are inherent risks.
5. What would a public choice theorist say, or a libertarian say? Possible angle of criticism: persuasion opens up government to a greater particularism, and thus greater corruption and capture. Public reason, though an illusion, is a constraint on the scope of government activity. Possible Garstenian counter: OK, James Buchanan, you want to convince people to reduce the scope of government. How do you plan to do that? With an economics treatise, with appeals that all can accept as a universal disembodied self, or would another method be licit? If the later, then what is the complaint, exactly?
6. How successful can 'institutional design' be in reducing the risks of pandering and demagoguery? Are the Madisonian solutions (size and diversity of the republic, 'checks and balances', division of powers) a) the solution, b) the beginnings of a solution, c) a red herring?
7. The Hobbesian solution was an answer to a particular question: ruinous wars of religion. Maybe after such wars, religious arguments really don't belong in the public sphere -- it's like Germany banning fascist parties. But we -- so the argument goes -- aren't in that situation.… (mere)