the second edition is much better than the first. It’s nearly three times as long (146 pages vs the original edition’s 54), and more importantly gets the ideas across better. And that’s important because this is a very important idea, one that — if read by everyone — would lead to much more understanding all around.
Nonetheless, the second edition of The Three Languages of Politics landed with a thud on Amazon. It’s a book geared toward political peace. But no one is interested in peace when they think they are winning the war.
It’s an interesting question of when peace is palatable. Perceptions of winning, or the threat of annihilation, both discourage peace seeking – yes?
There is a whole “game theory and social science” literature on this issue. Peace has to be perceived by both sides as preferable to the likely alternative, and any uncertainty in expectations makes it hard to come to such a shared consensus.
I hope Arnold writes a post of his thoughts on this question. He has written an outstanding update to an already excellent book. However, it is by no means clear to me that greater mutual understanding necessarily leads to political peace or some kind of stable, tacit modus vivendi, and indeed, it seems highly plausible to me that it could undermine the necessary presumptions of a minimal amount of reciprocal goodwill.
Agree! I’m yet another very satisfied customer.
Note:
For the NL-EU situation I would maybe add more axes:
– for the “greens” (they don’t fit in the liberal or progressive mold),
– for the “anti immigration nationalist parties” (they don’t fit in the conservative mold).
It think there is a possibility of peace as the battles of 1995 -2005 seem incredibly mild based with modern times. The problem is everybody was excited by this new internet thing and getting into bigger houses with even larger mortgage payments. At the time it felt like the Free Market was working for everybody at the time. (Whereas the last 10 years everybody feels the Free Market working against them.)
Or maybe we have to compare to the realities of the Great Recession to the last period of the Recessionary times, the 1970s. And some far things were a lot worse in 1974 – 1982 than today.
The new edition which I just finished is excellent. However Arnold does not try to evaluate the “languages,” only to describe them.
As he notes, Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism. Progressives see it as a structure of oppression. The former is a broad framework that allows for realism about human nature and the human condition. The latter is a very partial and tendentious characterization that can’t begin to do justice to reality. It reductive and simplistic. It fails to allow for moral complexity. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
For Progressives the appeal of the oppression narrative is that it allows them to virtue signal by taking up the cause of the putatively oppressed, and to distinguish themselves as morally superior to those less ostentatious about their indiscriminate benevolence. But as what Arnold would call an “interpretive framework,” it is childishly simplistic in its all-good versus all-bad vision of human affairs.
“Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?”, Megadeath, 1986