This week we discuss social contract theory and the illustrious career of Professor Albert Weale.
Our guest this week is Professor Albert Weale, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL. Following an event honouring his career on his retirement, in this episode, we’re exploring Albert’s life and work as an academic.
Over his career, Albert has published 20 books and more than 150 articles and book chapters on a diverse and impressive array of topics, from the politics of pollution, political legitimacy in the European Union and healthcare, to social contract theory and democracy. He has held faculty positions at Newcastle, York, UEA, Essex and, of course, for more than a decade, here at UCL.
The event held in his honour had an impressive 28 speakers, discussing the prospects for practical public reason, priority setting in healthcare and the best form of social contract theory, and motivating our tackling of climate change, among many other issues. It highlighted the sheer range, depth and importance of the contributions that he has made to the field, both as a political theorist and, above all, as perhaps the leading scholar of the intersection between political theory and public policy.
In this episode we’re exploring some of these contributions, looking back on a long and successful career.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
E.U., social contract theory, public goods, albert, idea, people, reasoning, public, rawls, sense, reason, welfare state, thought, society, theory, contracts, career, issues, terms, veil
SPEAKERS
Albert Weale, Emily McTernan
Emily McTernan 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we're discussing the career and ideas of Professor Albert Weale.
Hello. My name is Emily McTernan and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Our guest today is Professor Albert Weale, Emiratis Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL. Following an event honouring his career on his retirement, today we will be exploring his life and work as an academic.
Over his career, Albert has published 20 books, more than 150 articles and book chapters on a diverse and impressive array of topics from the politics of pollution, political legitimacy in the European Union and healthcare, to social contract theory and democracy. He has held faculty positions at Newcastle, York, East Anglia, Essex, and of course, for more than a decade, here at UCL.
The event in his honour had an impressive 28 speakers discussing the prospects for practical public reason, priority setting in healthcare and the best form of social contract theory and motivating our tackling of climate change amongst many other issues. It highlighted the sheer range, depth and importance of the contributions that he has made to the field, both as a political theorist and, as above all, as perhaps the leading scholar of the intersection between political theory and public policy. So today we'll be exploring some of these contributions, looking back on a long and successful career.
Welcome back, Albert, to the podcast.
Albert Weale 01:45
Thank you very much. It's always a delight to be here. And thank you very much for this opportunity, of which I must say I'm slightly fearful. But there we go.
Emily McTernan 01:53
Well, I'm looking forward to our discussion.
I think we should dive straight in and get to grips with an issue that combines real world issues with deep philosophical questions as sort of a defining feature of your work I think. So two central issues of the event in your honour were the ideal of public reason and public reason in practice.
So maybe let's start with the ideal. Would you mind explaining to our listeners the idea of public reason?
Albert Weale 02:17
So let me just step back from the specific idea of public reason to talk about reasoning in general and to talk about practical reasoning. And I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about practical reasoning. I mean we do it all the time. The train's late, do I have time for a cup of coffee? That's a piece of practical reasoning. So practical reasoning, in that sense, I think is just what we do as human beings.
Public reasoning, of course, as the name suggests, is what we do collectively, what we do together. And what we're trying to do in processes of public reasoning is to decide what our government should do, how our society should look, what should be the practices that characterise the people, who we are.
Now, John Rawls – a very, very important figure in social contract theory and in this field of public reasoning – was concerned with public reasoning in a much more specific sense and in a much more definite context. And his problem was: there's a multiplicity of religious and philosophical views in society, so how can we collectively reason together such that we can define the constitutional essentials of our society in a way that's successful?
And his particular idea of public reason, which has been developed and modified and so on by various political theorists, but his particular idea of public reason was that we should try and not use the doctrines of specific religions or philosophies in our process of public reasoning.
So I'll give you I'll give you an example. So let's say we're trying to think as a society about assisted dying. And let's suppose that somebody who is religiously committed says: Well, life is a gift of God, and people are not entitled to take away the gift of God. Now, somebody who doesn't share that religious belief, that just wouldn't seem a reason for them, at least on this Rawlsian understanding of reason.
So what Rawls was concerned about is that when we reason about issues like assisted dying, we try and avoid invoking these very specific religious or philosophical premises in our reasoning.
And the driving thought there is, I think, quite an important one really, although I think there are problems with it. The driving thought there is that respecting each other as citizens means that we want to be able to offer reasons that our fellow citizens can accept from their own point of view.
Emily McTernan 04:38
So your very first degree was in theology, and the assisted dying case is perhaps a nice one for this question. So the question is: are we losing something, though, by excluding those religious reasons from our public reasoning? I mean is it fully translatable into public reason, the importance of thinking of life as a kind of gift?
Albert Weale 04:57
Well, I think so. And I think that even if you do not share the particular religious conviction about life being a gift of God, I think if you make an imaginative effort, you can try and understand what precisely is going on there, which is the sense that human beings should not necessarily arrogate to themselves control over the lives of others.
You can also I think, if one tries to be imaginatively sensitive to religious views with which one disagrees, you can also try and explore that view and maybe press in a constructive way on the religious view. For example, I mean let's just stick with the assisted dying case for a minute, it's widely accepted from all parts of the spectrum of people who've thought about that process that, for example, patients have a right to deny themselves life-saving treatment. Nobody could be forced to have life-saving treatment. And so, you know, from a secular perspective you might say to the religious person: Well, if life is a gift of God, why might it be that people can refuse life-saving treatment?
And I think if one approaches it in this attempt not to tell people are not interested in that premise of yours, but to say to them: Well, look, can we just explore that premise a bit more and see the extent to which we can share it and modify it and so on.
And I think this becomes particularly important when we're thinking about environmental protection. A term that's often used in environmental protection is that human beings are the 'stewards of the earth'. That's very common in discourse. Now, if you think about it, that's actually got quite a rich religious background. I mean to be a steward is to be the steward of a Lord who governs the manner. Now, again, in literal terms that really does not make sense, I think, for all sorts of reasons. But on the other hand, again, if one imaginatively and sympathetically seeks to try and explore what's going on there, again, I think there is this sense that human beings cannot simply arrogate to themselves the power and control over other species and over the environment.
Emily McTernan 06:55
And at what level do you see this ideal of public reasoning best functioning? Is it only when we're just deciding the very basics of our society behind some kind of veil? Is it when we're detailing particular concrete policy decisions we need to make here and now? In your view, where does it fit?
Albert Weale 07:11
Well, again, I think deliberation, practical deliberation, practical reasoning just is a feature of any action that we undertake. So if you're actually thinking about a practical piece of public policy.
I mean let's take proposals for basic income, for example. Now, a lot of people – I don't particularly, but a lot of people – share the view that there should be a basic income. But even if you share that view, exactly how you do it is something that you've got to deliberate about – you've got to think about how you do it.
If say – and this is something to which I'm rather sympathetic – if you said, for example, that we ought to renationalise water supply in this country, again, that doesn't happen on its own: you have to think about how to do it, you have to think about the level of compensation to be paid, who actually takes the managerial decisions, and so on.
So I think this idea of practical public reasoning occurs at all levels. But I think it's probably most difficult, not so much on the constitutional questions – I mean, I think it can be difficult on constitutional questions – but on these questions that touch on what you might think of as the sentiments that we might have about the very basis upon which we live together in a society. So things like assisted dying, and so on, which is not a constitutional question, at least not in our society, it's not. But on the other hand I think it's the sort of question where we need to think about the character of the public reasoning that goes on.
Emily McTernan 08:32
And so a central and lasting focus of your research has been social contract theory as an answer for how to think about justice and its requirements on us and indeed democracy. And I think it's this that makes our reasoning together as we've just been discussing such an important matter.
So I wonder if we can turn now to social contract theory, about what initially drew you to social contract theory.
Albert Weale 08:52
Well it's tempting to say that I was a research student when John Rawls' A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. And that certainly is a large part of it.
So I've had this sort of idea, you know, somewhere in the back of my mind for some time, and I mean to my way of thinking it just makes a great deal of sense for the following reason: that as individuals, the condition of our being able to flourish as individuals is that we can enjoy public goods – security, clean water, breathable atmosphere, unlike the ones that they're experiencing in New York City at present. We need to be able to enjoy those: a flourishing education system, public information systems and so on. And we can't enjoy those as individuals unless they're in some sense supplied collectively. I don't necessarily mean by that supplied by the state, but they've got to be supplied by some cooperative activity in which we engage.
However, I do remember even at school when I was trying to develop a criticism of the government at the time – it must have been the Conservative government I think – saying that I thought they had broken the social contract. And somebody who was a bit senior to be at school said: Oh, there's no such thing as a social contract. And I thought: Well, that's not true, because I mean after all we need to be able to think about the fundamental terms on which we live together.
And once you say that – in order to supply public goods, we need cooperation of citizens in paying taxes or collaborate clearing up their streets, doing a litter collection of whatever, we need cooperation in that sense – you're immediately driven to the question, of which is central social contract theory, well on what terms do we cooperate? Who does the work? Who has responsibility, if anybody, for determining priorities? Is it right, for example, to exempt certain people from obligations associated with the provision of those public goods? So to my way of thinking once you realise that – it sounds paradoxical, but I don't think it is – once you realise that collective provision is the precondition for individualism, then I think you're driven towards social contract theory.
Emily McTernan 10:53
And is this the respect in which your work is diverging from Rawls? So Rawls takes us behind the veil where we don't know about each other and we don't know about ourselves and we come up with these principles that are going to guide our lives together. And in your account we're very much starting from the practical life of a democracy and going from there. Is that right as a-?
Albert Weale 11:11
Yeah. So I think that that thought experiment of Rawls is extremely interesting and it was one of the things when A Theory of Justice was published that really drew me towards it.
And I think the important element of Rawls' theory at the time was that it seemed to address the question of: what could be the rational basis for a theory of justice? And the answer that Rawls gave is: well, you would subscribe to a theory of justice that you would agree to if you were going to be ignorant of your own future position in society – you didn't know whether you're going to be male or female, you didn't know what ethnic group you would belong to, you didn't know what religion you would have, and so on, whether you'd be rich or poor. And I think that's a very attractive thought because, as a theory of justice, there is a certain sort of impersonality that's at work which is trying to capture, so to speak, the common equality that people share, and therefore the circumstances under which they can live together.
There's another way of thinking about contracts here which I suppose I'm really partisan on. And that's as follows: that what you've really got to look at are circumstances in which people bargain together through a mutual advantage, producing public goods like secure water supplies, or harvesting areas and so on. And there you can ask the question: well what is the corresponding condition to the veil of ignorance that is going to give you just contracts rather than unjust contracts? Because lots of unjust contracts are social contracts in the world [e.g.] contracts of slavery. And I think they're the idea is that it's bargaining under equal power.
And so the theoretical problem that I've tried to think about a little bit is: what's the relationship between these two ideas? What's the relationship between the idea that justice emerges from behind a veil of ignorance in which you're ignorant of your own future position in society on the one hand, and the idea that people bargain together on the other, under conditions of equality of power?
Roughly speaking I think they come out in the same place. But what I would claim is that where we can understand by social science observation how people bargain under conditions of equal power, we don't really have a clear theoretical understanding of what decisions they would make behind the veil of ignorance. If you believed in the expected utility theory of the sort that economists favoured at one time, what constituted the essential requirements of rationality, you might be able to do that. But I think there are lots of arguments to say that expected utility theory and the axioms that characterise it do not constitute the essential requirements of rationality. So mine is ultimately an argument about how we might know what type of contracts people could justly agree to among themselves.
Emily McTernan 13:55
So Rawls' picture is unknowable. Yours is knowable because there are cases where we are bargaining under equal conditions of power. And some people might wonder whether we ever really do see in actual societies conditions of bargaining with equal power. It seems like there's always deep inequalities of power when we reach these agreements about what to do about these communal matters together.
Albert Weale 14:16
I think that's right. I mean I think that it would be naive to think that we could observe situations in which there was complete equality of power. Now I'll give you an example. So it's an elementary theorem of bargaining theory that if you have a short time horizon – I mean, you're the sort of person who doesn't think very much after today or tomorrow – you're got less power in a bargaining situation than somebody with a long time horizon because they can afford to hold out. And people vary in their time horizons. And so naturally it's going to be the case that some people are going to be more powerful than others.
On the other hand, there's enough variation empirically in the relative power that people enjoy in societies – there's enough variation for us to have a sense about where equal power would lead us to in terms of just arrangement. And sometimes that variation can emerge in what you might think of as Rawls-like situations.
So it's sometimes said: well what are the conditions under which relatively incorrupt electoral systems emerge, as happened at the end of the 19th century in the UK? Well there the argument might be: well, the parties who are extending the franchise do not know how they will do under the new franchise, and therefore they've got an interest in institutionalising fair accounting procedures so they don't get marginalised by parties that happen to be successful in the next election.
So again we can think of situations in which people face uncertainty, not complete uncertainty of the veil of ignorance, but some degree of uncertainty. And we can think about the way in which they would institutionalise... I mean, in the case of electoral systems, they're accounting, in the case of water supply, rotational systems of access, and so on. The specifics vary but I think we've got a sense about what it would mean for people to enjoy equality of standing in the provision of these public goods.
Emily McTernan 16:07
So one [inaudible] of social contract theory has been the spare wheel objection, that all of this is just somehow displacing the questions we have about what justice demands – might be something like conditions of equal power – onto getting the design of how we're going to do this reasoning and come to these social contracts together right. Can we overcome this worry? Do you think that's getting the order of the right and the good the right way round or...?
Albert Weale 16:07
Well a confession, really. This is a view held often by people who these days are called 'intuitionists' of some sort or another who believes that we can perceive what the right thing to do is. And I do confess at one stage I went through an intuitionist phase.
My trouble with intuitionism, I think, is that people just disagree. I mean, take the issue about income inequality and the extent to which income inequality is unjust in itself, or income inequalities that are not tied to productive effort and so on are unjust, and those sorts of things. I think we're genuinely, you know, if you're trying to think about that issue in a serious way, it's not at all clear intuitively what you would agree. Whereas I think if we think about societies in which there's been relative bargaining power say between social and economic groups, we can get a sense about what people would tolerate and what they wouldn't tolerate in terms of income inequalities.
Emily McTernan 17:30
That's really helpful. Thank you, Albert.
Emily McTernan 17:32
Perhaps we could turn to a couple of the more applied areas that you've been working on through your career. I thought we might start with the EU because, of course, one of your recent books has been on Brexit and the notion of the will of the people. But you've also done work on questions around whether there is political legitimacy in the EU and how we should think about its apparent democratic deficit.
So how do these two parts of your thinking line up? So you've got this worry that leaving the EU wasn't done in the right way, but you've also got worries about the EU itself and how it's being run. Maybe you could talk us through those ideas.
Albert Weale 18:08
Yeah, sure. I mean let me just say something about how I got drawn into EU politics, which was really working on the politics of pollution back in the 1980s when there was controversy between Germany and the UK, mediated through the European communities that there was, about various issues of pollution control, acid emissions from stationary sources, for example. And I got drawn into... And the EU became a very important sort of forum of exchange and political conflict in relation to those issues. And I got drawn into it.
And curiously, I mean, the more I got drawn into the EU, the more sense I saw. I was never opposed to the EU. I mean I did actually vote to remain in 1975 in the referendum. So I was never opposed. But I didn't really sort of fully understand the point and I thought it was rather technical issues about trade harmonisation and so on.
And that did, of course, coincide with the take-off of real interest in increasing and extending the competencies of the EU. And certainly in the 1990s and an early part of 21st century, my sort of instincts were federalist in quite a quite a strong way
Then I began to think: well, life's a bit more complicated than that because, first of all, there are various types of federalism and, secondly, you just don't create a federation out of nothing – you've got pre-existing states with their own commitments, particularly in areas of public spending, social security, healthcare, and so on which the EU didn't have a role in. So if you're going to think about the EU, you needed to think about it with pre-existing states and so on, and the concept that you really needed was the ability to get agreement from a status quo point, a prevailing set of constitutional competencies and so on within the EU, to something that would enable the EU to do the job that I think it would do best, which is to provide or reinforce the supply of public goods that can only be achieved at a continental level.
And so that led me back to contract theory in a way. But it led me back to a two-level version, which was to say: well, the contract's got to be between states as representatives of their peoples, but it's also got to be a contract that's going to be intelligible for the people themselves.
And I actually think by and large the EU has managed that process quite well. I think the difficulties came after the economic financial crash 2008 and in particular circumstances of Greece, to some extent of Portugal and so on, where they were very large public deficits, and they ran into problems of breaching EU fiscal rules. It wasn't, I think, a pleasant situation at the time. But I don't think that the wrong, so to speak, were all on the EU side or on the Greek side; I think it was a very complicated, rather messy situation.
So you've got to distinguish here, I think, between what one thinks the EU is doing and is it doing it well or badly. And I think all too often where it's done things badly it's because it's been a bit late to the party. And the reason it's been a bit late to the party is that it's very difficult to get the competences out of the nation states. I mean, that's part of difficulty.
On the other hand, if you ask the question: well, does the EU act, in general, legitimately? I mean, I would say yes because it derives its legitimacy from the treaties; it's important in supplying public goods; and I think it does represent perhaps a rather more noble idea, so to speak, that there is this thing called Europe and its values – to the extent to which they're values of democracy, rule of law and so on – really need to be promoted and extended. And of course we've seen that dramatically in the case of Ukraine.
So I don't think one wants to get into the position of saying the EU is wonderful. I don't think one wants to get into the position of saying it's a super state. I think one wants to [inaudible] that's going to take away and grab the powers of the nation state. I think one wants to get into the position actually of being fairly hard headed and practical about it and saying: well, what can it do well because of its scale and organisation; what is it likely not to be able to do so well, partly because of its scale but partly because of the existing competencies at the nation state; and how might we have a sensible discussion about how to allocate those competencies?
One final thing then on Brexit. It will come as no surprise to hear that I think the Brexit debate was appallingly badly conducted in in the UK – very little understanding about what the EU did and didn't do. And I'm not surprised in a way that the EU became the repository of a number of grievances, some of them justified some of the perhaps not so justified, that people had about what was going on wrong in the UK at the time.
Emily McTernan 22:47
And another area – yet another area – in which your social contract theory has offered a lot of light has been healthcare and the welfare system.
So very briefly, before we turn to some reflections on your career, I wonder if we could maybe elaborate a little bit on the work that you've done in the health context and how you think social contract theory can help us think through these complex questions of what we owe to each other in this respect as well.
Albert Weale 23:11
So here I think I really do depart from people like Rawls and others. I do not think that the welfare state is primarily about the vertical redistribution of income from rich to poor. I don't think that's what the welfare state is about.
There's some of that and you need some of that. But primarily, the welfare state is about coping with variations of fortune across the lifecycle; basically, when you're born and are educated, when you give birth and your children need looking after, and when you're ill, elderly and you need looking after. I mean that's what the welfare state is about. It's about smoothing out those income fluctuations over the course of the lifetime. Very important childcare, for example, very important public goods drastically under supplied in our society.
So that's the starting point. It's not about Robin Hood; it's about some form of collective insurance.
Now there are different ways in health care, there are different ways of doing that. But human beings are not that imaginative. There are only broadly speaking two ways of doing it: you do it the German way, which is that you require citizens to have some form of social insurance which then finances the healthcare, or you do it the British way and the Scandinavian way, which is you finance it out of taxes. But I think in terms of the functions they perform, they're essentially the same functions, which is creating a situation in which you're providing comprehensive, high quality health care without financial barriers to access. That's what you're really concerned about.
Now in those circumstances – and you'll begin to see social contract theory waiting to come in from the wings at this point – in those circumstances you've got the question about: well, what should be included in the collective insurance package and excluded. Now excluding something from the collective insurance package doesn't mean to say that it's not supplied in your society. I mean you might take a decision for example to exclude homoeopathy – you don't finance that out of social insurance or taxes. On the other hand, that's perfectly freely available in a society through some private contract.
So the question you're deciding here is: what is the public coverage? What is the collective public coverage that you're seeking to achieve? And there I think the proper way to think about it is: what does it make sense for us collectively to insure ourselves against? And what I think it makes sense for us to collectively insure ourselves against is very high-cost therapies that deliver some benefit. Interestingly, there's some resistance to that. There's some resistance to the thought that you ought to be able to finance very high-cost therapies. But to my mind that's what the welfare state is about.
The very good economist at LSE, Nicholas Barr, had a very nice phrase actually in a book he published many years ago, which is he said: look, even if we were all middle class, we would still need a welfare state. And I think he's absolutely, I think he's absolutely right. It's got nothing to do so to speak with whether you're rich or poor; it has to do with the conditions under which you can collectively insure yourself against some of the contingencies to which we're all subject.
Emily McTernan 25:50
We will now turn from highlighting just a few of these fascinating and important aspects of your work over the years to some personal reflections before we wrap up. So Albert which of your many, many contributions so far do you feel most proud of?
Albert Weale 26:30
That's a terrible question to answer. Everybody is the worst judge of their work. So I'm going to sidestep that question by saying in some ways what I'm most proud about is not the work I've done myself but the work that, as an editor, I've managed to bring to fruition in others.
So I've been very fortunate. I co-edited two book series, one with Peter Jones on issues in political theory, one with Tim O'Riordan on environmental politics. And I think in both of those book series we managed to capture some very good people writing for those series. And it was their first monograph. And I'm very, very pleased about that.
I was editor of British Journal of Political Science for 17 years. And there – it's not always easy to do as an editor, but I tried never to be mechanistic. So the principal was always to regard referees as advisors and not judges. If you came across a paper that you thought really had potential but the referees for some reason or another didn't like it, you could then have two actions. You could say: well, look, it's not for us – try somewhere else. Or what I tried to do in some cases – and I think, in cases of papers that I think could really work well – is to say to the author: look, you've got a really good idea here but actually you're not doing yourself justice and you need to really bring out this feature and not worry about that feature. I mean any editor will tell you that with most papers you can delete the first three pages without loss.
So I think if I look back on my career, you know, what can I take some pride in? Well, I like to take pride in the fact that some papers and some monographs have seen the world that might not have otherwise. In terms of the papers, I should also add, not always the most highly cited papers either. I mean one of the reasons why I'm rather sceptical about citation measures is that I've seen very good papers that are only rarely cited and other papers which are highly cited which I think are not terribly good. So as an editor, that's always an interesting question as to how far you can bring out the value of others' work.
Emily McTernan 28:37
For those who aren't familiar with Albert listening, that was a very elegant answer in that it revealed a facet of Albert's wonderful career that we haven't touched on, which is just how much enabling and support Albert has done of other academics and of the many hundreds of students you've taught over the years, many of whom have gone on to very impressive careers in academia and in public policy. So we didn't get to those things in the podcast but those are very important and I think somewhat revealed by Albert's lovely answer there.
Couple more questions, if I may, Albert. One is: how has being an academic changed over the course of your career? And is it still a career that you would recommend to people?
Albert Weale 29:14
Well it's interesting, isn't it? I mean I've always been an academic, so to speak. I mean I'm not capable of doing any other job really.
And I've also taught in Tanzania, I've visited Yale, I've visited Australia, I've taught in France. And one of the nice things about universities is that they have their local colour but actually basically there are certain constants. I mean, again, human beings not being very imaginative, there's certain ways of organising, teaching and research and so on.
What have I lost? What's been lost during the time in my career? So my first paid job was in 1974. So that's some time ago. And I would say a number of things.
One of the things I do not do very much now, which I used to do a lot in the '70s and '80s, is what I call 'inefficient reading'. You just follow up something – oh, this might be interesting – and then it turns out to be a dead end and so on. You can't afford to do that; you've got to be much more focused. And that's where the pressure is. And I think that's a loss, actually, because I think that cuts down on creativity in some ways.
I started my teaching career at York, which was a wonderful institution in the 1970s and '80s. I mean, three and a half thousand students, genuine sense of a scholarly community, that had been able to attract very, very able people indeed. I learnt a lot there. I went to seminars in other departments and so on. And I learnt a great deal. And of course York was a wonderful place to live.
And I've been very fortunate in the universities I've worked at. I mean I've tended to work at so to speak the campus universities: York, East Anglia, Essex. I grew up in Brighton, so Sussex, I came to Brighton when I was when I was young, so I know about campus universities, and I liked them. Although I liked Newcastle as well as a civic university and, of course, I love UCL for various reasons.
I think what's improved... I think, first of all, I think teaching has gotten much better. And I think it's got much better for a number of reasons.
First of all, despite the pressures against teaching, the things that enable you to teach well – good textbooks, available library facilities, and so on – are so much more freely available. I mean to the point where I mean the courses I teach I often use as sort of preliminary essential reading handbook entries. And there are now so many handbooks in political science that I think there ought to be a handbook of handbooks in political science just to be able to guide you around them. So I think the teaching resources are much better.
I think there is a genuine attempt to support people through such things like British Academy, postdoctoral fellowships, and so on, which are highly competitive, of course.
But it is, of course, a much more highly competitive place than it was when I started. I think that does make it much more difficult for people. And I'm particularly worried by the fact that it's very difficult, I think, to see in the modern UK system that a career structure is being opened up which is sufficiently open, so to speak, to those who've got the talent to fill it, because I think too many people end up on a sequence of short-term jobs.
I desperately miss the fact that I do not think that we have in this country what you find in the United States, which is the equivalent of the liberal arts college. That in effect was what York was in the 1970s.
And I think all the pressures of league tables and so on, some extent finance, some extent I think the vanity of vice chancellors, is towards moving towards larger institutions. And I think there's a genuine loss in that.
So I think it's, you know, some things lost and some things gained. I mean I think that it is a different system. I do miss elements of the system in which I was formed and had my first professional experience and so on.
Emily McTernan 33:02
And what's next for you now that you're retired?
Albert Weale 33:04
Ah, well I'm not going to start pruning the roses if that's what you have in mind. No, I've got one, I think I've got one last project inside me so to speak – a project as sort of an overarching name for a sort of series of thing which is on the idea of prudence and the precautionary state. So I mean I was saying, you know, a fundamental theme of my work is the provision of public goods and so on. I think that's something that we've really lost sight of in the last 40 years or so.
I've been writing on public health. I have a short manifesto book coming out – we're due to finish it at the end of this month – with some colleagues, called Making Health Public, which is a manifesto for public health and a new social contract. I have a little project on water reuse.
But I want to do some bit of fundamental thinking about the idea of prudence, which in one point of view I think of as a very specific virtue that emerges at a particular time when essentially the idea of providence disappears from cultural life, and you get the emergence of the annuities market in in the Netherlands in the 17th century and so on. And this idea, as Hume put it, that the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence and that life is about the management of probabilistic relations and how do you behave prudently in that context.
And then the thought that it can't be that specific because, after all, if you look at things like Aesop's fable I mean they're full of advice as to how to behave prudently. I mean my favourite is the crow in the tree with the nice cheese in its mouth, and the fox comes along and says: crow, how beautiful you sing, sing for me. And the crow, of course, opens its mouth and drops the cheese and the fox takes it away.
So I mean this this idea of prudence is a very basic idea. So the way I think about this is that justice emerges as a contract among prudent individuals. And the prudent social contract that they would create would be a precautionary state that enabled security for people to flourish individually. Now whether I shall do that or not, it will be in the great Tao somehow.
Emily McTernan 35:04
Thank you, Albert, for joining us today and giving us just a flavour of the many important parts of your research and contributions to the field. We wish you the happiest of retirements and hope that you'll come back onto the podcast to discuss your new work on the precautionary state, and soon.
Albert Weale 35:18
I certainly will. Thank you.
Emily McTernan 35:20
Next week we will be having a panel discussion for once to explore colonialism, neocolonialism and resistance.
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I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.
Works cited
Littlejohns, P., Hunter, D.J., Weale, A., Johnson, J. and Khatun, T. (2023). Making Health Public. Policy Press.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.