Raymond Geuss's Tracks in Chaos: in praise of philosophy without a map

Most contemporary political philosophy works with a single question: what would a just society be like?

Raymond Geuss has spent forty years objecting to the question itself.

Geuss, who taught for many years at Cambridge, is the most persistent critic of the moralising of political philosophy. His thought comes out of a reckoning conducted with Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and the Frankfurt School.

His new collection from Polity, Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection, is the latest form of that objection.

The image in the title#

The book's title alludes to Heidegger: Holzwege — forest paths.

In German, auf dem Holzweg sein means to be on the wrong track. Heidegger preserved the double meaning when he used the image: forest paths are the tracks cut by woodcutters, running into the woods and, more often than not, leading nowhere. Yet they are paths because they have been walked.

Geuss's thesis is gathered in that image: philosophical orientation is established not by a map drawn in advance but by walking the ground.

What the objection is aimed at#

Geuss's target is a way of working that has been dominant since Rawls.

On that model, political philosophy proceeds as follows. First the principles of justice are settled — under ideal conditions, from an impartial point of view. Then the real world is assessed against those principles.

For Geuss the order is wrong, and for three reasons.

First, political questions cannot be reduced to moral ones. What is decisive in politics is not what is right but who is able to do what. A theory that leaves relations of power out of account cannot see its own partiality either.

Second, there is no such place as “ideal conditions” to look from. Every theory is written from a particular historical position, and takes the problems of that position for universal ones.

Third, in politics moral language is usually a covering. Defending a policy in the name of justice can render invisible the interest of the person defending it.

The approach Geuss proposes is therefore a realist one: attention to historical understanding and to the way power actually works in social life.

What the book covers#

The collection gathers essays on philosophy, politics and social theory. Among its subjects are political realism, reflection in politics, universalism, solidarity, utopian longings and the part fear plays in sustaining censorship.

That last is particularly timely. The case for censorship is generally made in moral language: protection, respect, safety. Geuss's question is this. If the affect beneath those justifications is fear, how seriously should we take the moral justification?

The question intersects directly with the case of the removal of Plato's Symposium from the curriculum at Texas A&M, which we reported this month.

Conclusion: accepting incompleteness#

Where the book arrives is not a programme but a disposition.

In the search for orientation, Geuss argues, one has to learn to accept incompleteness, contingency and plurality. Which is to say: there will be no complete map. There will be no coherent, closed system. There will be no single right answer to every question.

At first sight that looks pessimistic. But Geuss's own description is different: a critical theory without illusions yet animated by hope.

The publisher's own formulation is that these essays aim to open a way of reconnecting philosophy to real human struggle.

Where Geuss stands#

Geuss occupies an uncomfortable position in contemporary political philosophy.

Analytic political philosophy finds him too historicist; the continental tradition finds him too analytic. He works in a place neither side quite claims — and that is probably a deliberate choice.

Philosophy and Real Politics (2008) and Outside Ethics (2005) are his most widely read books. Read alongside our files this month on Axel Honneth and Lea Ypi, they bring out the lines of division in contemporary political philosophy: Honneth defends normative reconstruction and Ypi a Kantian universalism, while Geuss keeps his distance from both.

Publication details#

• Author: Raymond Geuss
• Title: Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection
• Publisher: Polity, 2026
• ISBN: 9781509573431

Geuss's Philosophy and Real Politics is available in Turkish. No translation of Tracks in Chaos has yet been announced.