From a philosopher’s eye-view one remarkable feature of the excellent GODZONE series on the state of the Australian union is that none of the articles was written by a philosopher. I am not privy to the secret thoughts and plans of Meanjin Quarterly‘s editor (whom God preserve!) and I do not know whether he solicited a philosopher for the GODZONE series and was rebuffed, or whether on the other hand he deemed a priori that no Australian philosopher would have anything very useful to say on the condition of Australian society. If it were in fact the latter I must say that I can only sympathize with Meanjin‘s master, for (with the profoundest of bows to my philosophical colleagues) most Australian philosophers have, alas, abjured any interest or concern (at least qua philosophers) in political and social issues. Following their British philosophical brothers in the analytical tradition, most of them take the view that political philosophy is dead and that theorizing about politics in general is a slightly disreputable business that no respectable philosopher should be seen dead doing.

In an article in Partisan Review some years ago, Iris Murdoch traced the enervation of the English socialist movement to the decline in England of political theorizing and this latter in turn to the climate engendered by contemporary British analytical philosophy. For the analytical philosopher the only properly philosophical points of interest in politics are the purely logical ones (what kind of a judgment is a political judgment? what kind of theory is a political theory? or as an Oxford examination paper once put it, what kind of a question is a question in political philosophy?). In this view political recommendations or judgments, or the construction of political ideals and utopias such as the classical political theorists went in for, are simply not the business of the philosopher. For the follower of Wittgenstein the philosopher is no longer a sage dispensing world-views and pronouncing on any and every political and social issue; he is rather a therapeutic analyst (like the psychoanalyst) dissolving the logical and conceptual puzzlements that prevent us from seeing straight So it is that in England philosophers have opted out of any concern with political theory and criticism. On the continent of Europe, of course, the philosopher still plays the part of the public sage, and thinkers such as Sartre are actively concerned in the business of political criticism. In the English-speaking world, however, the socially concerned sages are historians, psychologists, literary critics-in other words, of the ilk of the present GODZONE writers.