Against Political Chmess

I’m really happy to publish this guest essay by Paul Sagar. Paul is a Reader in Political Theory at King’s College London and writes the ‘Diary of a Punter’ Substack, which I *highly* recommend. In this essay, he argues that much of modern political philosophy is the equivalent of studying 'chmess'—a game like chess, but with different rules that nobody actually plays. He argues that by theorising about this imagined world, many philosophers fail to address the messy, real-world political realities we actually confront. I couldn’t agree more! - Dan.

In a typically punchy piece, Daniel Dennett cautioned against the philosophical equivalent of pursuing higher-order truths about chmess. Chmess – as opposed to chess – is a (hypothetical) game in which the king may move two spaces instead of one. Like chess, it is therefore amenable to an (infinite) number of a priori truths. An appropriately programmed computer (or, indeed, a very clever human with too much time on her hands) could come up with them. But this in turn means that it is possible for there to be higher-order truths about chmess:

1. Jones’ (1989) proof that p is a truth of chmess is flawed: he overlooks the following possibility ...

2. Smith’s (2002) claim that Jones’ (1989) proof is flawed presupposes the truth of Brown’s lemma (1975), which has recently been challenged by Garfinkle (2002) ...

The challenge Dennett issues is that pursuing such second-order truths risks being to a significant degree worthless (or so I read him). It is not that doing so is incoherent, or mistaken, and certainly not that it is (too) easy; on the contrary, it might be extremely difficult. It is rather an instantiation of the dictum “if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing well”. And why is it not worth doing? Because the brute fact is that nobody plays chmess.

Dennett’s primary goal in his paper was to warn philosophers against falling into the trap of pursuing careers in the philosophical equivalents of chmess. It seems to me very good advice, that ought to be widely heeded. But one area in which it has not been widely heeded, at least over the last 50 or so years, is Anglophone political philosophy. A remarkable amount of what now passes for political philosophy is roughly the equivalent of chmess. It is