Because I have written both analytically (pedantically) and extensively (repetitively) about the nature of “Public Political Philosophy” (PPP) on previous occasions, I would very much like to avoid revisiting those sins here, and instead focus on what is probably the thought that has driven me above all else when it comes to “pushing” this agenda: the thought that if we do not do it, someone else will. Footnote 1 Or, to put that point more precisely, in the way you would expect of someone in my profession, if academic political philosophers do not contribute whatever it is they know about the big ideas at the heart of political life, others will be more than happy to do so on their behalf. This means, roughly speaking, economists, thinktanks, journalists, and politicians, if you are lucky, and influencers, chatbots, and corporate vested interests, if you are not. So, if your first thought as a “serious” philosopher is to stay well away from the “real” world, perhaps because you think your work is too dry or delicate, or even too dangerous for public consumption, then although I commend you on your humility, I also urge you to see its consequence. You are not, as it were, leaving the town square empty. You are leaving it to everyone else.
This is because there are, both inevitably and continuously, big questions at the center of politics concerning, not just who gets what in life but also who decides who gets what.Footnote 2 Every tax change, every institutional reform, every foreign policy, and indeed, every political decision you can think of, all of them involve hard choices between, not just abstract values and principles but also concrete groups of people, to whom you might or might not ever get the chance to fully “justify” your reasoning.Footnote 3 By contrast, in an article or seminar, when you propose, say, a particular thought experiment as an illustration or justification of a particular utopia, well, if somebody disagrees with you then, nothing really happens does it? Nobody, in that scenario, actually has their taxes increased, or school closed down, any more than they get stopped at the border, or sent to war, so again it would be perfectly understandable on your part if you just wanted to stay on the sidelines. Or at least it would be, and this is the key point here, if that were actually a viable option.
The trouble then here for political philosophers, it seems, might best be put as follows: Thinking now purely of the “real” world, when taxes do get raised or lowered, and when schools do get changed or closed, and when those around you are indeed ordered to stop or fight, where exactly will you be standing? Or, if that is a bit too crude, given that I am not trying to push anyone into the firing line here, when the discussions took place about those difficult decisions, perhaps many years before they were actually made, where exactly were you then?
1. Help or hindrance?
You see, I take it, the force of this logic so far, given the expertise you might expect political philosophers to have on such matters, but perhaps also its ambiguity, given that it is clearly one thing to say that we should become more “involved” in public life, yet quite another to say “how.” Or, to put that point more sharply, given not just the skills we have but also those we lack. It is, after all, rather unlikely that a local journalist or politician asks you any time soon for an extensive “literature review” or exhaustive “conceptual framework,” any more than they are likely to ask for a neatly stapled handout or over-stuffed PowerPoint slide, much as I love such things myself. Sure, they might be impressed by your title, or the fact that you have written a book, or even a whole set of books, but even so, they are unlikely to have read them, in which case, once more, what exactly are you meant to be doing here?
One option, I suppose, as exemplified by Bertrand Russell, and presumably admired by many of us, is to simply try and dazzle our fellow citizens with the sheer quality of our reasoning in either public lectures or what are often called public “letters.”Footnote 4 Here, it seems, the trick is to be so clever, or at least sound so clever, that everyone else just has to sit up and listen. Or, if that seems a little implausible these days, perhaps instead we should just take the opposite view, and say that we are ultimately, at least as “public” scholars, no more than a bit of intellectual light-relief, fit for literature festivals, podcasts, and TEDx talks, but not really anything more than that, in which case, great! Not only would that get us off the hook of any real “duty” to get involved, bearing in mind our earlier worries, but also avoid the more serious worry of making things worse.
One could, after all, easily imagine here a group of well-placed philosophers becoming little more than an elite of well-paid “conceptual engineers,” just insofar as they provided the words and phrases used by politicians as window-dressing for things they were already going to do anyway, and I assume nobody in their right mind wants that, no matter how much some of those funding our work might want us to achieve such “impact.”Footnote 5 In that scenario, it seems, we would be not so much inspiring legislators, following Rousseau, but rather idiot legitimators, following our own pride, so again, when all is said and done, maybe things would be much better if we just stayed in our own lane?
2. The trap of Bothsidesism
Here though, I think, is the trap with this kind of reasoning, bearing in mind that what often happens in this kind of discussion—and this is just what you would expect given what I have said so far—is that pretty soon you end up with roughly the following chain of events: First, enlightened scholar that I am, I give you one view, and then, if I am doing my job, another view, and then, if you are lucky, a few more views, before finally showing you the one “true” way forward, which somehow, it just so happens, avoids the pitfalls of all the rest. That, as it were, is what one philosopher expects of another, and it would mean, in the current context, my showing you the single best way of steering the Royal Yacht of political philosophy through the rocky waters of “real politics” in order to both maximize your chances of making the world a better place and, I suppose, also minimize your chances of messing it up. Except of course, and this is what I assume you are already thinking at this point, nobody really needs that here do they?
Instead, it seems to me, the “truth” of the matter here is that there are in “reality” all sorts of ways of plotting a course through those rocks, as shown by the many marvelous articles gathered up in this collection. Or, if you prefer, almost as many good ways of going “public” as there are philosophers trying to do so, in what has now been rightly called a “field alive with experimentation.”Footnote 6 But then, if that really is true, or whatever other term you prefer in this context, what exactly have I got to offer here that you do not already know? Or, to be a bit more blunt about it, what exactly have I got to say here, apart from the usual drivel of “be yourself!,” “make your own path!,” or “have fun with it!.”
3. Get connected
It is, I think, one of the more useful lessons of the non-academic world, including the political world, that when lots of people are talking at once, and lots of people have a say on what happens next, it is often best to focus on just one simple message. I might, for example, say to you at this point: Just look at all the authors in this collection, and then ask yourself, who do I want to copy? Or I might say to you: Just look at these authors, and then ask yourself, which of their methods, in pursuit of your existing concepts and causes, do you want to borrow? Or, instead, and this is the route I do want to take, I could say something like this: Rather than thinking of your “public” work as something to be straightforwardly extrapolated from your “professional” work, which is a rather easy groove to get stuck in, why not try instead starting off with the following question: Who is it, in the world around you, that you can actually connect with, in a way that both helps them and somehow draws on your particular vocation as a professional philosopher?
Are you, for example, like Halldenius and Petersén, who when meeting a homeless woman on the streets of Malmo, soon discovered the distinctive challenges the modern cashless economy posed for her, and in turn a set of moral puzzles, right on their doorstep, that they could not have otherwise grasped?Footnote 7 Or are you like Doughty, who when confronted with a particular statue in London, started to think about how it might be narrated, or even “confabulated,” this way or that, in ways that might make the space defined by that statue a more inclusive one for all involved?Footnote 8 Or are you like Stevens, finding yourself in a particular live-action role-playing community, on a particular weekend, against the backdrop of some or other particular political events, and then asking yourself, how could the “plot” here be reworked, or even transported elsewhere, in order to encourage in those involved a bit more “empathy”?Footnote 9 Or are you like Gonçalves & Lavinas, Reference Leite Gonçalves and Lavinas2026, working both in a particular country—Brazil—and in a particular tradition—“critical leftist thought”—and wondering how you might redirect the latter in order to better serve the former? Or, finally, are you like Baderin, running surveys on citizens, and then having to decide, once that data come in, not just how to frame those answers but also how to respond to the things they apparently tell you they want, or do not want, or love, or hate, or fear, and so on and so forth?Footnote 10
Now, to be clear about these examples, you might quite naturally, when encountering or even experiencing these situations, already have some fairly clear ideas about the issues involved, given your “professional” work to date, but even so, when it comes to genuinely “public” work, and the two-way street it involves, it is unlikely to be a case of your simply telling others what they should now think or do. Instead, and assuming you have not alienated anyone by this point, it is much more likely that you are now in some kind of dialogue, and maybe even collaboration, in which case, like Stitzlein, you might find that some of your best “public” philosophical work comes from either helping others clarify the concepts already at the heart of their causes or, on the basis of those clarifications, helping them imagine new alternatives, in pursuit of what she calls “political hope.”Footnote 11 Or, following the various models neatly set out by Olasov, you might do further work along these lines via distinctive institutional or cultural channels, perhaps as a “participant,” or “organizer,” or even as part of a “bureaucracy.”Footnote 12 Or, more dramatically, and I suspect closer to the heart of most of my colleagues, you might do something more along the lines described by both Hamilton and Brown, by behaving more like their shared hero Socrates, and essentially being much more prepared to piss people off, either by targeting fierce critique at rotten “power relations” or, rather more cautiously, by simply asking, in a suitably public place, a well-chosen series of “good questions.”Footnote 13
4. This is not a solo performance
Either way, the underlying point here, as should by now be clear, is that whatever it is we are doing in public life, we never do it alone. PPP is not a solo performance, and you should not, if you can help it, think of yourself as needing an “audience.” What you need is allies who can work as activists and agitators; strangers who become colleagues and friends; people whose minds you can alter and who in turn might alter yours. The key is recognizing that this is not a situation in which you are designing an ideal state from the comfort of our armchairs, or in which you are being asked by your local Prince to tell them what exactly they should do with their unlimited powers. That is not how politics works, or indeed has ever worked, even in cases that might otherwise have tempted you, like the drafting of the American constitution, or Cicero’s tenure as Roman Consul, or even the conversations we can only imagine between Alexander and Aristotle.
Politics, and thus “PPP” in turn, is always something done in lots of ways and by lots of people, which is why, again, and to give you just two final metaphors, you should never think of yourself as God, or even the player of some top-down computer gamer you loved as a child, but rather as a person who needs to find their “people.”Footnote 14 Who is it that you can connect with? Who will listen to you? Who can you help? And so on and so forth. So, forget grant applications, research outputs, “pathways to impact,” and all the other dross forced upon us by modern academic professionalism, and instead, when it comes to this kind of public work, focus just a little bit more on where you are, how you live, and who you might form a connection with, either online or in your local area. These are the people who need you, but also who you need in turn, if you are to do anything worth doing.
5. Teamwork makes the dream work
I have not told you in this short essay that “PPP” is political philosophy done both “in” and “for” the public, though I do believe that, and have said so elsewhere.Footnote 15 Nor have I told you that, in pursuing such work, you might want to pursue “phacts,” “phiction,” or “philennials,” because again, that has been done before.Footnote 16 Instead, I have tried only to draw inspiration from the wonderful pieces written by the other authors in this collection, and in particular one common theme I see in all of them—the need for such work to be done, not just “in” and “for” the public but also “with” them.Footnote 17
Acknowledgements
Given that the guiding theme of this essay has been the need to work with, and indeed rely upon, others, in order to get done what needs to be done, it should be no surprise at all to learn that there are many people I should thank here for making it possible. First and foremost, that means my co-editor George Boss, to whom really most of the credit for this collection should accrue. Without him there is no collection at all. Second, it means my fellow authors, for the examples and inspiration they provided, and which I hope to have given at least some sense of in the paragraphs above. Third, and finally, it means anyone and everyone who has helped me think and talk through “PPP” in the last few years, including, but not remotely limited to, Svenja Ahlhaus, Alice Baderin, Esma Baycan-Herzog, Eric Brandstedt, Rebecca Buxton, Avner De-Shalit, David Enoch, Eva Erman, Lena Halldenius, Lawrence Hamilton, Lisa Herzog, Elizabeth Kahn, Steven Klein, Sune Lægaard, Matt Longo, Elizabeth Mackintosh, Tariq Modood, David McCabe, Angharad Northam, Onora O’Neill, Nahshon Perez, Philip Pettit, Wendy Salkin, Simon Stevens, Marta Wojciechowska, Manon Westphal, and Jo Wolff.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: J.F.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Open access
