Raymond Geuss is an influential political philosopher, and I hope to review his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal,(Harvard, 2022) on another occasion. Geuss is a confirmed enemy of liberalism, both classical and modern, He dislikes both Rawls and Nozick; in fact, his attitude toward Rawls falls little short of hatred. This interferes with his ability to read these thinkers with care. He says that one feature he dislikes of the way philosophy has come to be done ”is the one which Robert Nozick described in the preface to one of his books. He says he wanted to give an argument so powerful that it would fuse the brain of those who heard and understood it and force them to accept it. Even apart from the visibly sadomasochistic element in this, it does not seem to me that an approach that conceptualizes discussion in this way, as the search for this kind of argument or refutation, is the most likely way to attain any kind of understanding of the world.” (p.9. Amazon Kindle edition) Guess hasn’t noticed that the point of Nozick’s discussion is to oppose this way of doing philosophy in favor of a non-coercive form of discussion. Because Nozick is an enemy, he cannot recognize that he and Nozick are for once on the same side.
