After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy. By Glen Newey. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 253p. $68.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a very smart book that comes to some very questionable conclusions. Glen Newey takes issue with contemporary liberal philosophy on two counts: Not only does it fail to address the “real world of politics,” but it actually aims at the suppression of politics. Included in the list of those guilty of suppressing politics and failing to provide “philosophical reflection on politics—at least not on politics as it is” (p. 15) are John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Joseph Raz, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Will Kymlicka, Amy Gutmann, and others. Clearly, a great deal hangs on what Newey means by “politics as it is,” and I will say at the outset that I found his definition wholly unconvincing. But along the way, Newey says some very intelligent things about the leading lights of liberal political philosophy. The book has two layers. In the first, Newey takes up particular philosophical arguments embedded in various liberal theories. At this level he shows us his considerable analytic skills in carefully argued, if somewhat technical, investigations of philosophical weaknesses. So, for example, his discussion of moral internalism and its problems is very good, as is the discussion of neutralist side-constraint as an insufficient reason requirement. Anyone interested in really looking under the hood of contemporary liberal philosophy can get something out of this book. But when Newey moves to the second layer, he tries to tie all his various arguments together under one big claim: the rejection of politics claim, and this is problematic.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".