In her doctoral dissertation (Between Anarchy and Leviathan, UCLA, 2013, p. 80), Emily Hallock notes that liberal accounts of politics differ from “postmodern and pluralist” theories in the virtues they believe citizens must possess. The former posit tolerance; the latter, “openness.” While gracious and irenic towards liberalism, Mark Button’s Political Vices stands firmly in the latter tradition. The political vices that he canvasses and analyzes—hubris, moral blindness, and political recalcitrance—derive, in his view, from “anti-political dispositions” (p. 140). These dispositions render it impossible for citizens to heed “the voices of others” and “the alterity they represent” (p. 47), or else, relatedly, make citizens long for political fixity, whereas a truly just and democratic politics open to new situations, actors, and demands is “always in a state of becoming” (p. 17). Button believes that the only democracy in which each citizen can claim to treat others as free and equal is one based on universal engagement and self-questioning, whose citizens all have a Weberian vocation for politics (p. 106, p. 127), and are willing to lay open their deepest political convictions to public debate and challenge.

The book’s first, theoretical chapter presents a general theory of the specifically political vices, a theory intended to spur not moralistic denunciation but “public concern, collective deliberation, and presumptive responsibility” (p. 3). Button’s respect for liberal and deliberative-democratic theories, while clearly sincere, cuts so far against those theories’ usual reformist and rationalistic grain as to amount to an immanent critique: against theories that posit a mere moral duty to treat others as free and equal, Button stresses at length the deep structural barriers—political, social, and psychological—to our doing so.

Button’s own allegiance is to a synthesis of ancient Athenian models and postmodernism (or, as he calls it, “democratic post-Nietzschean” thought [p. 78; see similarly p. 26]). The book essentially proposes Athenian solutions to postmodernist problems. Confronted with the tendency of citizens—privileged citizens in particular—to “ignore, dominate, marginalize, or exclude” those whom we should treat as equals worthy of dignity and respect (p. 27), Button calls for a thorough and common re-imagining of public educational and cultural institutions so that they can serve, as drama did for the Athenians, to call out our vices and to shock us into dispositions more consistent with equal dignity.

The succeeding chapters, accordingly, combine social analysis with literary interpretation. They include both social-scientific analyses of failures of attention and perception, exploring our tendency to close our senses and minds to others, and readings of Greek drama and philosophy as public, civic exercises in opening them. Chapter 2 treats hubris, as portrayed in Antigone, as a tyrannical offense against political equality and the free, equal speech that embodies it. To be hubristic is to practice “monologism—the domination of one voice, one will, one modality of reason” (p. 34). The hallmark of hubris is not excessive ambition (the popular meaning) but aggressive or violent political self-assertion, an arrogation of the prerogative to dominate and humiliate others. In particular, hubris lies in the practice of distinguishing friends from enemies so sharply as to take active pleasure in ignoring the latter’s interests and concerns, glorying in one’s ability to mistreat them cruelly. Button portrays Creon’s monologism, his determination to close his ears to counsel, as closely bound up with his cruelty: hubris involves a (fearful, insecure) assertion of superiority that renders Creon determined to reject others’ dignity and their opinions alike. On Button’s innovative and perceptive reading, Creon is tempted to hubris by his power; Button takes “sovereign” power (a term he might have defined more precisely) to court this temptation more generally.

Chapter 3, on moral blindness, takes Oedipus as the exemplar—though not for the obvious, literal reason. Drawing on social psychology, Button analyzes moral blindness as a form of second-order bias: we realize that others’ moral perceptions are partial, but systematically and wrongly believe that ours are not. Social psychology calls this the “bias blind spot”; Button explains how this blind spot ensures that those who consider themselves the most realistic, the most gifted with self-knowledge, are often (like Oedipus) the least so. This chapter is less clear than the previous one—which mentions as instances of hubris U.S. foreign policy and torture in particular—about which contemporary political phenomena Button takes to exemplify the vice in question. He probably assumes an audience that takes for granted that cultural and academic projects of disrupting our complacent attitudes and identities are themselves quintessentially political. He certainly believes that resistance to such projects is an active and political vice, a rejection of crucial preconditions for equality.

Chapter 4, the longest and most involved chapter, treats political recalcitrance: “settled indifference to the morally valid claims of others.” While hubris consists in an “excess of voice” and moral blindness in a “deficiency of vision,” recalcitrance represents a “closing of one’s ears or mind” (p. 87). Unlike the other thematic chapters, this one adduces as an Athenian remedy not a lesson from drama but the example of Socratic philosophy. Button treats Socrates’ gadfly philosophizing as not only a challenge to citizens’ social and political complacency but also an “exemplar” of democratic citizenship. We are all to be “relentlessly deliberative” in our openness to others’ claims, and we must combat the tendency of the privileged to the opposite, “insufficiently political” orientation (p. 88).

Button argues that the widesprad yearning for stable moral principles, perhaps acceptable in private and social life, is illegitimate in politics because it requires recalcitrance in the face of others’ claims. If they hope to do justice to others, in all their diversity (and presumptive equality), all citizens must embrace a “politics of becoming” (p. 88, p. 113; see similarly pp. 94–5). He freely adduces Socrates as an exemplar in this respect by portraying him, in my view a bit naïvely and despite an absence of textual examples, as having been continually willing to revise his own moral and social views if they lost out in public argument. On this reading, Socratic philosophizing becomes an unambiguous aid to wise and egalitarian political judgment, to a democratized form of the phronēsis that in Aristotle was, famously, the virtue only of a specific, restricted, political class.

As social criticism, Political Vices is acute, learned, and judicious: no one interested in the moral psychology of democracy will fail to learn from it. The same cannot be said, alas, for its proposed remedies. Throughout the book, and culminating in his final, programmatic Chapter 5, Button calls it not only desirable but necessary (if we are to achieve democratic ideals that he upholds in rather uncompromising terms; the word “maximize” appears frequently) that educational and cultural institutions all expand their missions radically, alter them drastically, and pull together all but unanimously. Chapter 5 envisions political salvation through the arts: re-cast as “macro-public” institutions (like the Athenian theater), they are to provide the “esthetic-critical education” that can overcome our political blindness and complacency (pp. 148–49). Indeed, each political vice is to be vanquished by a cultural counterforce. Against recalcitrance, “art, philosophy, literature and the sciences” must strive for a political culture “capable of cultivating and sustaining attentiveness and responsiveness” (p. 124). Against moral blindness, “schools, organizations, and the media” along with “diverse artistic forms (like drama, music, literature and film),” as well as “the comparative study of history, philosophy, and religion . . . critical historical genealogy, tragedy, satire, and irony” must facilitate “a disciplined and principled exercise of momentary detachment from the sources of one’s first-order convictions” (p. 81). Against hubris, we need an “alternative civic paideia”: “public institutions (associations, parties, the media, and the academy) . . . must actively and reciprocally work to maximize good counsel, deliberation, and mutual listening” (p. 57).

To wish for this degree of political-cultural consensus, under modern conditions of diversity and disagreement that Button not only recognizes but insistently celebrates, is, to put it mildly, ambitious. Citizens are to differ vastly in morality, ideology, religion, and lifestyle, but unite in support of cultural, educational, and journalistic institutions that have not only a common mission but a universally uncomfortable mission: the mission of spurring us to do the opposite of what we would normally feel like doing. If we allow ourselves to wish for that state of affairs, considering it a serious proposal, we may just as well allow ourselves simply to wish that our political vices (and the moral psychology that grounds them) would disappear, instantly and spontaneously. One is as likely as the other. Nor does Button pause to consider, much less address, the obvious hazards of teaching citizens to consider the arts, culture, journalism and education not only as political institutions but as institutions whose purpose should be settled collectively (through a “democratic” discussion that somehow transcends democracy’s actual, vice-ridden functioning).

Thus, Political Vices is in effect two books: a careful, keen, often deep work of social criticism, and a regrettably unserious program of political cum cultural reform. Athenian visions are dazzling in the original sense of the word: they prevent us from properly assessing what’s in front of us. Unsatisfying though it may be, the wisest counsel a book on the political vices can usefully provide is that each citizen do her best to speak up within, and work for reform of, the modern institutions that embody our liberty and diversity. Those institutions enable individuals and groups to call out, and work against, the civic vices and social evils we perceive—in the knowledge, admittedly frustrating but unavoidable, that other individuals and groups will predictably and permanently perceive them differently (or may even devote themselves to personal goals: pace Button, not everyone has, or aspires to, a political vocation). In other words: modernity indeed allows for, perhaps even fosters, a certain degree of political vice. That is the price of letting citizens pursue a variety—not a civic unity—of dreams.