"The Role of the Political Philosopher": Ben Laurence in conversation with Amogh Sahu

What should we want from political philosophy? On the one hand, we want political philosophy to be a place where we get to think big. We want it to address the most fundamental questions about justice and to articulate the idea of a just society. On the other hand, we want political philosophy to matter. We want it to help us to think about the problems of injustice that confound us in the real world. It’s natural to think these desires are in tension and we have to choose between them.

In conversation with Amogh Sahu, political philosopher Ben Laurence develops an approach to political philosophy that lets us have it all. The key, he argues, is to adopt a practical understanding. Political philosophy begins with our engaged sense of justice. While it must reach out to big picture questions about the nature of a just society, it must also connect this big picture with practice. To do this, the political philosopher must shed a commitment to neutrality, orienting themselves instead to agents of change, political actors with whom they stand in deliberative solidarity. For Laurence, the task of political philosophy is not complete until it asks the question “What is to be done?” and deliberates actionable answers.

Ben Laurence is Associate Instructional Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and a member of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. His research focuses on big-picture questions about the relation of political philosophy to agency, history, and change. He is author of Agents of Change: Political Philosophy in Practice (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Website: https://benlaurence.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BenLaurence9
Book: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674258419

Amogh Sahu is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University. He works on issues concerning the unity of theory and practice in ethics, meta-ethics, and social/political areas. He is currently writing a dissertation on the methodological foundations of critical theory, focused on a logical reconstruction of the work of Max Horkheimer.
Academic homepage: https://philosophy.columbia.edu/content/amogha-binayaka-sahu

Essay by Andrew Stewart on “The Roles of the Political Philosopher”: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/the-roles-of-the-political-philosopher

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