Raymond Geuss - Social Quotes

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At the end of the last book he published, The Law of Peoples, Rawls sets out the task of reconciling members of liberal democratic societies to their social order, and interprets his own previous work as contributing to that enterprise. Hegel tried to reconcile Prussians in the early 1820s with the Prussian state by showing that, although that state needed some far-reaching reforms, it was nevertheless fundamentally rational and conformed to all the intuitive demands for moral acceptability that its members might impose on it. Similarly, Rawls's work was an attempt to reconcile Americans to an idealised version of their own social order at the end of the twentieth century.

Raymond Geuss
In some central and important cases, … the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action.

Raymond Geuss
If the basic assumption of the theory of ideology is at all tenable, namely, that the general power relations embodied in our social structures can exert a distorting influence on the formation of our beliefs and preferences without our being aware of it, then we are definitely not going to put that kind of influence out of action by asking the agents in the society to imagine that they didn't know their position. To think otherwise is to believe in magic: imagine you are impartial and you will be. In fact, doing that will be more likely to reinforce the power of these entrenched prejudices because it will explicitly present them as universal, warranted by reason, etc.

Raymond Geuss
When we use a tool in everyday life, it usually remains a detached instrument under my control and activated only when, where, and how I decide. … In contrast, conceptual innovations often stick, escape our control and become part of reality itself. Once Hobbes invents the idea of the state this idea can come into contact with real social forces with unforeseeable results. The tool develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself.

Raymond Geuss