Political Hypocrisy by Runciman David;

Author:Runciman, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Mr Coleridge is made up of cant, that is of mawkish affectation and sensibility; but he has not sincerity enough to be a hypocrite, that is, he has not hearty dislike or contempt enough for anything, to give the lie to his puling professions of admiration and esteem for it.27

Here, cant is viewed as an absence of the deliberate and scheming forms of deception that are taken to be the mark of the true hypocrite (this sort of cant is closer to what Mande-ville might call fashionable hypocrisy than the truly malicious kind). Like fashionable hypocrisy, cant may not be a bad thing—there may be times when the singsong of platitudinous chitchat does not really matter, when it is a mark of harmless social conformity (though it has to be said that for someone like Coleridge, as an arbiter of taste, it’s hard to see when those times would be, and that of course is Hazlitt’s point). But in the law it always is a very bad thing to cant, because it always gives the lie to a pretended commitment, which is the commitment of anyone involved in the law to take the terms in which it is expressed seriously. Canting lawyers are therefore hypocrites.

So it is with lying. I may tell you a lie without necessarily being a hypocrite, because I am not necessarily giving the lie to some other aspect of myself (this is especially likely to be true if lying on a routine basis is just the kind of thing you expect from me). But if I say things that cannot be true, in a context in which I have some prior commitment to upholding meaningful discourse (in a work of philosophy, say), then the “falsehood” (as Hobbes calls it) is also an act of hypocrisy. Bentham, like Hobbes, believes we have a prior commitment to uphold meaningful discourse in matters of law, religion, philosophy, and, by extension from all these, politics.

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