“Without Any Hope of Progress”: Nussbaum and Williams on Tragedy and Politics

• In Event: Democracy, Race, Education, Resistance (Virtual Session)

Abstract

This paper reexamines the years-long debate between Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams on the relationship between moral and political philosophy and tragedy. Nussbaum alleges that Williams’ embrace of tragedy as an antidote to philosophic optimism, and his broader rejection of systematic moral philosophy, act as veneers for a quietist political fatalism, incongruent with the liberal democratic values Williams claims to affirm. By interrogating Nussbaum’s criticisms of Williams, I reconstruct a distinctively Williamsian account of tragedy that can be deployed for the purposes of social and political critique, especially to defend liberal democratic values in our age of democratic backsliding. In so doing I challenge the claim that Williams’ account of tragedy is discontinuous with his affirmation of the importance of “a respect for freedom and social justice and a critique of oppressive and deceitful institutions” (Williams 1985) in modern liberal democracies. Tragedy that meets the Williamsian criteria to serve as an effective critique ought to simultaneously highlight the historically embedded obstacles to systematic social change and the ongoing precarity of democratic self-government, while also vividly displaying the discrepancy between certain accepted “institutions, conceptions, prejudices and powers,” (Williams 2005) and ethically significant core values held by democratic citizens. I conclude by reviewing two tragic works that meet these criteria, the Parable novels of Octavia Butler and Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, and show how they can serve, in the American context, as a form of realist political and social critique. This paper therefore contributes to debates about the legacy of Williams’ work within the discipline of political theory while offering a novel account of how tragedy can be used as a form of political theory.

Author

• Benjamin James Hoyt, UC Irvine