A companion rather than a sequel to Elisabeth Ellis's rightly celebrated Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (2005), this slimmer volume is an initial payment on the promise of that earlier book. Kant's Politics argued that Kantian political theorists should not strive to establish conclusive political principles, but rather to establish the conditions under which “actually existing publics” might determine and apply their own principles. The point was to refute the familiar claim that Kantianism promotes abstract principles divorced from the messy realities of political life or, more broadly, to deny that Kant's politics can be derived from his ethics.
Provisional Politics, however, “is not a book about Kant” (p. 4). Instead, this book responds to the common complaint that liberal theory writ large begins with lofty ideals and conclusive principles (like property rights) instead of the concrete realities and specific dilemmas of particular political contexts. Ellis situates her work between an abstract moralism that derives political judgment from such principles and a cynical realpolitik that refuses moral arguments outright. Provisional theory, she explains, admits the inconclusiveness and the unavoidability of moral claims in politics (p. 20); it does not ask whether any policy tends toward justice or any other abstract political ideal, but whether it might “multiply rather than foreclose political possibilities” (p. 20). Ellis proposes three basic structural arrangements that can multiply these possibilities: protected enclaves for citizen interaction, overlapping authoritative institutions that can be appealed to and be mobilized, and citizen empowerment to effect real political change. These arrangements are themselves provisional, she claims, as she presents them as “likely candidates” for increasing political agency rather than abstract panaceas to be promoted in all contexts.
Provisional Politics, then, occupies a difficult position, rejecting both the ideal pursuit of abstract principles and the potentially paternalistic drive to come up with specific solutions to actual dilemmas. The project rejects the overwhelming ambitions of so much political theory in which the social contract, class consciousness, or a cosmopolitan ethics offer the solution to the world's problems. As a result, the book offers some concrete proposals that are, in a word, underwhelming: “[P]roperty rights have no conclusive authority” but they are “often provisionally useful” (p. 54); voting rights should be allocated differently across different contexts depending on what allocation will “promote the conditions of political agency and plurality” in any particular time or place (p. 112). But indeed, the point is precisely that the overwhelming alternatives operate at a level of abstraction that cannot but prove antidemocratic.
In this sense, her argument for Kantian provisionality is of a piece with George Klosko's work on Plato (which she discusses) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's work on Marx (which she does not). More generally, it is consistent with the turn toward “contingency” or “irony” in political thought of the past few decades. Indeed, her basic argument for provisionality in democratic theory (Chapter 2) will be unsurprising to those familiar with Sheldon Wolin's claim that democratic decision making is always “partial and provisional.” But in the closing pages of the book, Ellis even invokes Thomas Jefferson's warning about letting a constitution bind future generations as an example of provisional politics. This reflects her belief, stated much earlier in the book, that though provisionality has animated various strains of political thought, it has been largely absent from the history of social contract theory (pp. 15, 20).
The book comprises a series of exercises in provisional theorizing, beginning from the pathological position of entrenched political controversies and considering what policies might promote greater political agency and plurality. Ellis notes that some of these exercises are more encouraging than others; provisional theory offers clear benefits to the understandings of public reason (Chapter 2) and voting (Chapter 4), but is more ambivalent in the case of property rights among Kenyan widows (Chapter 3), and positively discouraging to a campaign for species preservation in Southern California (Chapter 5). The cases prove more difficult as they get more specific. But Ellis sticks to her provisional guns, demonstrating the difficulty of maintaining a commitment to democratic politics above any particular outcome. Ellis admits that she is far less optimistic than Kant himself, describing a series of provisionally useful interventions instead of, as she sees in Kant, an “asymptotic” progression toward peace. Notably, of course, her “muted pessimism” is anything but fatalism; in rejecting teleology, she envisions persistent, rather than episodic, opportunities for political engagement.
Provisional theory makes its strongest case in the chapter on deliberative democracy, where Ellis posits a virtuous cycle of democratic participation in which each opportunity for meaningful political engagement ends provisionally and thus serves as an invitation to more engagement. This cycle, however, meets its polar opposite in the final substantive chapter focusing on environmental politics, where Ellis describes a “ratchet effect” (p. 116) resulting from the specific dynamics of species extinction. Because any decision to protect a species is always subject to reversal, whereas every decision to let a species go extinct is necessarily irreversible, Ellis admits that endorsing provisional rather than conclusive policies in the environmental realm “amounts to a preemptive, substantive decision against species preservation” (p. 144), and that “species extinction on a large scale is the overwhelmingly likely outcome” (p. 146). Even in the face of this bleak realization, however, Ellis proves reluctant to abandon provisionalism for a “paternalistic” embrace of substantive outcomes, surely because such paternalism carries its own frightening ratchet effect.
Provisional politics is not merely inconclusive; it endeavors to reconcile morality and politics by offering judgments that are declarative, open about their groundings, and admittedly fallible. Provisionalism is not a refusal to take a stand (or a denial of the ultimately contentious grounds of one's stand), but a willingness to take a stand that invites, rather than seeks to forestall, disagreement. By the end of the book, Ellis has replaced Kant's edict “Let justice reign, even if the world should perish” with her own: “Let there be provisional right, so that the possibility of politics in the world remains” (p. 158). Ellis makes no guarantees, and no promise of redemption. But then, what democrat would?
