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Reflecting on the Barry Prize: political philosophy before and after Brian Barry
Abstract
Last year, the British Academy celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Brian Barry Prize. This paper reflects on how the essays that have won the Prize and contemporary political philosophy more generally, compare to works in political philosophy immediately before and during Brian Barry’s career. The Prize-winning essays, and the discipline more generally, continue to produce a prescriptive and engaged form of political philosophy that Barry and others in his generation (in particular, John Rawls) were so instrumental in reviving. I celebrate this but also express the worry that the discipline is sliding too far towards applied political philosophy. Political philosophers must not lose sight of foundational principles that should govern a just society.
Keywords
Brian Barry PrizeBrian BarryJohn Rawlsfoundational principlesapplied political philosophyI
A familiar story political philosophers tell about the evolution of their discipline over the last 100 years is one of demise and revival. The discipline had become very unwell by the 1950s. ‘It is one of the assumptions of intellectual life in our country that there should be amongst us men whom we think of as political philosophers’, wrote Peter Laslett in the introduction to the 1956 collection of essays by British writers, Philosophy, Politics and Society.1 ‘Today’, he continued, ‘it would seem we have them no longer. … For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ This all changed by 1971, when John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, the most ambitious and systematic piece of work in political philosophy since Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Stimulated by Rawls’ monumental book, political philosophy came back. It is still very much alive today.
One puzzling detail in that story is how Laslett could declare political philosophy dead while introducing a collection of relatively new essays in the discipline. The answer is that he did not see the essays in his collection as engaging in what is essential to political philosophy (which involves providing an account of our political obligations). The essays rather illustrated how writers now struggled to do this. As Laslett put it, they were ‘examples of what can still be done in the light of the new philosophical attitude’—the new ‘attitude’ being that of logical positivism, or the doctrine that nothing true or meaningful can be said about moral values or justice. One of the essays in the Laslett collection—‘Political Principles’ by T.D. Weldon—argued that, when writers offer reasons for political principles, the practice they engage in does not generate any real claim to our assent. Appeals to political principles are mere ‘conversation stoppers’, Weldon said—ways of asserting authority over others without any actual warrant. Other essays in Laslett’s collection were not quite so sceptical. Michael Oakeshott’s essay is a deep and interesting defence of conservatism. However, Oakeshott’s essay does not make a case for conservativism in any direct or straightforward manner. The other authors in the collection are even less explicit in defending political principles of one kind or another. The authors write about political philosophy mainly as observers of a language game others play.
Laslett’s diagnosis about the state of political philosophy in his time was a little too clear-cut. It overlooked, for example, the defences of the free market in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945)—two works that could hardly be described as uncommitted. Laslett’s diagnosis was also short lived. Rawls had already begun to publish articles in the 1950s and 1960s that anticipate the arguments of A Theory of Justice; others also published works during those decades whose effect was to reverse the decline Laslett had observed.2 One such writer was the British political philosopher, Brian Barry (1936–2009). In his first book, Political Argument (2010 [1965]: 26, fn. 2.), Barry criticised Weldon’s idea that political principles were irreconcilably ‘my principles’ versus ‘your principles’—or the tendency to ‘exaggerate the idiosyncratic aspect of political beliefs and to underestimate the significance of widely shared ultimate considerations’. Political Argument was mainly an extended exercise in clarifying concepts and arguments that enabled meaningful debate about ideals such as ‘conservatism’, ‘majoritarianism’, and ‘liberalism’. Although it did not offer the grand architectural plan for a just society that would make A Theory of Justice so significant, it did, in that vital respect, play a crucial part in the discipline’s revival.
A significant portion of Barry’s work over the subsequent decades involved organising ideas about a just society into types of ‘theories of justice’. In an originally planned three-volume treatise on justice, he argued that theories of justice could be usefully divided into those that aimed at ‘mutual advantage’ and those that aimed at ‘impartiality’. Barry criticised the former and defended the latter. In the end, he published only two of the three volumes (in 1986 and 1995). Instead of the third volume, which would have set out principles of justice implied by impartiality, Barry published two other, more polemical, works in political philosophy: Culture and Equality (2001) and Why Social Justice Matters (2005). Each can be read as applications of his theory of justice as impartiality. The former is a critique of multiculturalism and defence of the idea that all citizens must enjoy a single, unitary set of common citizenship rights. The latter is a critique of the over-emphasis, as Barry saw it, on ‘personal responsibility’ in accounts of social justice. In addition to developing his own theory of justice, Barry also wrote extensive critical commentary on Rawls’ theory of justice. Along with other key figures in political philosophy from the 1970s onwards (for example, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Matha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Iris Marion Young), Barry’s contribution is an essential part of the story of the discipline’s revival.
II
Last July, the British Academy awarded the tenth Brian Barry Prize for an outstanding essay (the prize is awarded in association with Cambridge University Press and published in the British Journal of Political Science). The winning essay, by Faik Kurtulmuş, provides a novel defence of freedom of expression as a necessary condition for common knowledge and collective power for disadvantaged and oppressed groups. In exploring the moral status of a particular institution, policy, or right, Kurtulmuş’ essay follows a trend set by other winners of the Brian Barry prize (Kurtulmuş 2025). The first essay to be awarded the Prize in 2014 examines one facet of a legitimate immigration regime: Helder De Schutter and Lea Ypi argue that immigrants have not only a right, but an obligation, to acquire the citizenship of their host state (De Schutter & Ypi 2015). Other winning essays have similarly focused on a fairly specific issue. Zeynep Pamuk, in the essay that won the 2018 prize, provides an original rationale for the public funding of scientific research (Pamuk 2018). Andre Santos Campos’ essay, the following year, explores the question of how we can represent the interests of future people in political decision-making (Campos 2021). In 2020, Jonathan Havercroft won the prize with an essay that explores the criteria for a justifiable riot (Havercroft 2021). Chiara Cordelli’s winning essay, in 2022, argues that the international movement of capital should be restricted to a greater degree than the international movement of people (Cordelli 2023). The essay that was awarded the prize in 2023, by Göran Duus-Otterström, explores ‘emissions sufficientarianism’, the view that states may emit greenhouse gases only to the extent necessary for a minimally decent quality of life (Duus-Otterström 2024).
There is a striking contrast between these essays and those of Laslett’s 1956 collection mentioned earlier. The authors of the prize-winning essays display no reticence about appealing to political principles when making their arguments. They are wholeheartedly embroiled in the game that the authors in the Laslett collection mainly prefer to observe. This reflects a broader trend in mainstream political philosophy today. Most writers in political philosophy would find questions about whether political principles can ultimately command our rational assent as being of merely philosophical interest, and certainly, not as something that should detain them from making a case for the practical conclusions they wish to defend. If political philosophy had its own ‘Overton window’ of acceptable modes of writing, the window has shifted dramatically from disengaged scrutiny to committed prescription about the kind of politics we should have.
Now this is a very good thing. It is good if lots of academics think carefully about which public institutions and policies are most justified, or about how best to construe one or another right we all enjoy, and it is enormously helpful that they can do this without having to discuss whether their statements about moral values are ultimately meaningless. The prize-winning essays are excellent examples of what gets produced in such circumstances. The shift, since Laslett’s day, towards accepting and pursuing the prescriptive ambitions of political philosophy, has now fully taken place.
In this regard, the prize-winning essays—and political philosophy today, more generally—could be seen as bringing forward the work done by Rawls, Barry, and other leading political philosophers in the decades after the discipline’s revival. But there is also a contrast between that earlier work and political philosophy as it is mainly done today. The Overton window in political philosophy has shifted not only towards the prescriptive, but towards the specific. Much political philosophy today consists in applied political philosophy. The puzzles political philosophers try to resolve are now more similar to practical challenges faced by policymakers or institution-designers (‘who should pay for higher education?’). Back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, political philosophers had bigger fish to fry: ‘How should the basic structure of a society be arranged?’, ‘What is equality?’, ‘What is republicanism?’
I do not want to oversimply or overstate these various shifts in political philosophy over the last hundred years. Some of the political philosophy around the time of the Laslett collection was very applied in nature. In 1956, Elizabeth Anscombe wrote against the honorary degree Oxford University granted to President Harry Truman. She argued that Truman had killed innocent people as a means to his war ends when he ordered the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1981: 62–71). The Hart–Devlin debate around the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the early 1960s is another example of excellent applied political philosophy during this period.3 And the 1970s saw the establishment of Philosophy & Public Affairs, a journal that would publish many influential articles in applied political philosophy (on affirmative action and abortion, for example).4 It is also not true that ‘big questions’ entirely disappear from the scene after Barry’s career. Today, political philosophers explore the nature of ‘global justice’ (justice beyond the confines of the nation-state), what we owe to future generations, race and equality, the regulation of the family, and the gendered division of labour.5
So it is not true that the discipline was entirely disengaged and is now entirely prescriptive, or that it was exclusively interested in big questions and is now exclusively interested in applied ones. Neither have these shifts happened at any one moment. What we have seen is a gradual change from a discipline that was, around Laslett’s time, predominantly disengaged, to one that is predominantly committed and applied today, although there have been step-changes along the way.
Still, this might be a trend we need to keep an eye, at least if it continues towards the specific. Applied political philosophy necessarily spends less time thinking about the nature and defensibility of political principles themselves—of what each principle holds and of how various principles jointly form a coherent and plausible ideal. It spends more time thinking about how to apply one or another principle to particular controversies. As well as yielding specific prescriptions, applied political philosophy does, at its most interesting, cast light on one or another of our political principles. It does this by showing us that applying that principle yields a counter-intuitive result and that we must therefore refine or revise it in some way. But applied political philosophy cannot spend too much doing that. It is oriented, after all, towards the practical—its main point is to defend a conclusion about how we should understand a particular institution or policy or right.
III
Why worry about being too specific in political philosophy? The reason has to do with one of the most significant contributions Rawls made in reviving political philosophy, a contribution that Barry and others reinforced. This was to propose a distinctive way in which we should justify political principles. The logical positivism prevalent in the decades immediately preceding the Laslett collection assumed that statements about political principles can be justified only if they can be empirically or logically demonstrated to be true. But neither of these criteria can be satisfied by statements about principles. ‘The rich ought to pay more in taxes than the poor’ does not correspond to any empirical fact (‘the rich’, ‘taxes’, and ‘the poor’ do, but saying that the rich ‘ought to’ pay more in tax, does not.) Neither is that statement true as a matter of logic.
Rawls’ proposal, which he began to make in the 1950s, is that we should justify political principles in a different way. Most of us have intuitions about whether decisions, actions, or policies are right or wrong—about whether slavery is wrong, for example, or whether the state must ensure that all children receive a basic education (Rawls called these intuitions, ‘considered judgements’). Rawls’ idea is that political principles can be justified inductively, to the extent that they explicate our intuitions. If a proposed set of principles fails to justify one or another of our deep-seated intuitions (for example, slavery is wrong), it needs revision until it does. In working through this process, we should not assume that our intuitions are fixed. If, after arriving at a set of political principles, we find that it cannot explain one of our intuitions, we may lose confidence in that set of principles and, on reflection, revise it. Justifying political principles is a process that moves back and forth between formulating principles that explicate our intuitions, on the one hand, and our reassessment of those intuitions themselves. The more comprehensive the range of deep-seated intuitions a proposed set of principles explicate, the more justified it is. Rawls called the condition in which our political principles explicate our strongest intuitions, ‘reflective equilibrium’.
Now, one concern about this way of justifying political principles is that it dresses our biases up as principles. A skilled person, for example, might have the unsurprising intuition that a fair wage should match a person’s level of skill and might proceed to articulate a principle to that effect (let’s call this the ‘reward skills’ principle). An orthodox Catholic might have the intuition that abortion is wrong and articulate a principle prohibiting it. That these principles resonate with their intuitions hardly lends them any credibility.
So, while the process of justifying political principles involves showing that those principles explicate our intuitions, those principles must not wrap themselves too tightly around our intuitions. We must ask the skilled person whether there is a more general principle in light of which the ‘reward skills’ principle is itself justified. If there is not, we should dismiss the ‘reward skills’ principle as a manifestation of his self-interested bias. However, if he can point to a still more general principle from which the ‘reward skills’ principle follows, and if that more general principle explicates many other deep-seated intuitions we have, we should be open to endorsing the ‘reward skills’ principle. This is like climbing to a higher vantage point from which we can see more of what matters. The revival of political philosophy owes itself to Rawls’ insight that the discipline can and should aim, in this way, to ascend to more general principles.6
The concern I wish to highlight about political philosophy’s shifting too much towards the specific—about its doing too exclusively applied work—is not this first concern about bias. Applied political philosophy does mainly involve taking certain principles for granted and then applying them, but at its best, and as is evident in the prize-winning essays, it draws on widely accepted principles. The concern I have about a continuing shift to the specific in political philosophy is about a different risk we face when we pursue reflective equilibrium between our principles and intuitions, namely that of incoherence.
To see what I have in mind, consider yet a different approach to justifying our political principles. This is the approach adopted by utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which is simply to posit a single ‘master’ principle and then work out all other political principles as implications of it. The master principle of the utilitarian tradition is that there should be as much ‘utility’ (or happiness) in the world as possible. All other political principles can be identified on the basis of empirical research about how to maximise utility (or happiness). Does rewarding skilled people with higher wages maximise utility (perhaps because it encourages economic growth that can be redistributed to the worst off)? If our best social science says ‘yes’, then that political principle is justified. Notice that there is no need, here, to ask whether rewarding skilled with wages resonates with our intuitions. In fact, we can just forget about our intuitions. Having posited the master principle as our guide, the only thing left to do is figure out what maximises utility.
An attractive feature of this approach is that it prevents incoherence amongst our lower-level political principles. It does seem plausible that people should be paid wages according to their level of skill. But it also seems plausible that they should paid wages according to the effort they put into their work. These principles pull in different directions. What do we do? Easy. Adopt whichever of these two principles, or indeed some third principle, that maximises utility. Which principle is that? The social scientists will tell us.
The problem, of course, is that it is arbitrary simply to posit one or another master principle as our guide. Why is it utility that needs to be maximised? Why should we not maximise something else? Why even maximise something? Maybe we should just respect each other instead. To avoid arbitrarily positing a principle, we need to start at the other end—with our intuitions, and from there, inductively infer the principles we should live by.
That, however, makes incoherence amongst our political principles harder to deal with. Without positing some master principle as a guide, how do we know whether people should be paid wages according to their skills or their effort? Both principles seem intuitive. Here we must do the same thing we do to avoid bias. We must search for—not simply posit—some more general principle that explicates our intuitions about fair wages. The more general principle that Rawls endorses, incidentally, is a procedural principle. He dismisses the idea that people should be paid either according to their skills or their effort per se. Their just wages are whatever wages they can negotiate for themselves in a context where they enjoy a fair equality of opportunity to develop their skills, and where the state redistributes income through the tax system to pay for everyone’s healthcare and other important needs. Rawls’ proposal is that this procedural principle for identifying a just wage resonates better with our intuitions than a principle that tells us to evaluate each person’s wages according to some measure of their skills or effort.
The shift to the specific in political philosophy leaves us less able to resolve incoherence amongst our political principles. This is not because applied political philosophy is less skilful or insightful, but because of what it directs its attention to. An excellent essay in applied political philosophy will examine a fair system for funding higher education by exploring what certain key political principles imply about this issue. But the answer it comes up with needs to be consistent with defensible views about what counts as a fair wage, not to mention a fair system regulating inheritance, the fair provision of state support for child-rearing, and a host of other socio-economic regulations. We can work out what our principles tell us to do in each of these areas. But if we want coherent answers across these areas, we need an idea of a just society as our vantage point. One of the enduring legacies of Rawls, Barry, and others in their generation was to discuss that idea in great depth.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors, three anonymous reviewers and Serena Olsaretti for helpful comments.
References
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BrighouseH. & SwiftA. (2016), Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).
CamposA.S. (2021), ‘Representing the Future: The Interests of Future Persons in Representative Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 51(1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341900067X
CaneyS. (2005), Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press). https://doi.org/10.1093/019829350X.001.0001
CordelliC. (2023), ‘Freeing people; restricting capital’, British Journal of Political Science, 53(4): 1093–1107. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123423000054
De SchutterH. & YpiL. (2015), ‘Mandatory citizenship for immigrants’, British Journal of Political Science, 45(2): 235–251. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123414000568
DevlinP. (1965), The Enforcement of Morals (London, Oxford University Press).
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2
3
The debate between H. L. A. Hart and Patrick Devlin revolved around the extent to which the law ought to enforce morality. The debate was triggered by the UK Parliament’s 1957 Wolfenden Report on ‘Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’, which famously stated that there ‘must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’. Hart defended this proposition in Law, Liberty and Morality (1963), Devlin criticised it in The Enforcement of Morals (1965).
4
According to Barry, the establishment of this journal was a key factor in the revival of political philosophy See Barry (1980).
5
For a key text in each of these areas, see Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (2005), Axel Gosseries, What is Intergenerational Justice? (2023), Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships (2016) and Gina Schouten, Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labour (2019).
6
Note that while the process Rawls uses to justify our political principles (that is, the process of reflective equilibrium) requires us to continuously test those principles at the bar of our intuitions, the aim of that process is to furnish ourselves with as comprehensive a set of political principles as possible. One of Rawls’ key objectives in developing his theory of justice was to present an alternative to ‘intuitionism’ or the doctrine that, while we can directly discern, via intuition, a plurality of lower-level principles, we cannot reconcile them by appeal to principles of a more general character. See A Theory of Justice (Revised edition) (1999: Sections 7 and 47).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a21
Published on: 30 May 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 268
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Bou-Habib, P. (2025), ‘Reflecting on the Barry Prize: political philosophy before and after Brian Barry’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a21 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a21Crossref
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Received
October 2022
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May 2023
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July 2023
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