Words Will Be of No Help: Xunzi and the Limits of Strategic Political Theory

Abstract Shmuel Nili’s strategic political theory opposes indefensible policies by showing they fail even on their defenders’ unreasonable premises. But it rests on an unexamined cognitivist assumption that the “burdens of politics” impeding decent people’s reasoning operate primarily through distorted premises. Drawing on the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, I distinguish reasoning-based burdens from practice-based burdens that operate through habituated dispositions, embodied reactions, and identity-constituting rituals. When policies persist through visceral habits shaped by segregated environments rather than articulated premises, strategic argumentation may be a case where, as Xunzi put it, words “would still be of no help.” Taking elite universities’ legacy admissions as a case study, I show why decades of devastating strategic arguments have failed: the policy is sustained through ritual performance, not premise-based reasoning. Even material self-interest divides along this seam – sometimes strategic theory can engage with an avowable premise, sometimes it cannot reach a practice-formed sense of one’s good. This reveals not a flaw in strategic theory but its scope conditions. The priority of practice is conditional, holding only where a burden is dispositional rather than premise-based; for Xunzi, reasoning and practice are mutually reinforcing. Xunzian attention to practice-restructuring thus complements rather than replaces strategic argumentation.