Between cynicism and idiocy: deflationary realism and grubby fingernails in politics

Abstract

This article is intended as a deflationary contribution to the well-known debate on politics and dirty hands. Drawing on the work of Bernard Williams, the paper argues that representative and democratic kinds of politics typically impose particular kinds of ethical demands and challenges on those agents who pursue them. Rather than over-dramatising this situation, however, this political predicament might be regarded as being in some continuity with problems of strategic action and agency in general, entailing for instance various kinds of necessity to do with pressures of time, the interactive and strategic aspects of action, the demand for promises under circumstances of publicity and so on. This is not to say that there are no differences between political and other forms of agency; it is rather that, in a spirit of deflationary realism, we need to find ways of developing more realistic and workable expectations as to the conduct and efficacy of politics in a liberal representative democracy.