looking over the history of thinking about metaphors to describe a good
society I felt that they were tude you know metaphors that dominated with which
I was unhappy one is a very old metaphor what you find in Plato's Republic and
this is the the metaphor of the ship of state the way to think about a society
Plato suggest is to think of it as a ship it's it's on the ocean it's got to
navigate difficult waters it's got to find a destination but on the open sea
you know people don't really have much choice but to you know put their their
lives into the hands of those who know how to navigate to know how to run a
ship it means putting their lives in the hands of of a captain you know or a
commander now this particular metaphor for for a society the ship of
state suggests that what we have in the real world in every society is a kind of
a closed society okay with a purpose or a direction to go everybody there is
somehow there you know without any possibility of escape or any possibility
of anybody joining that society and they're you know in precarious
circumstances so they need somehow a system of authority okay so this
metaphor really depends upon there being a closed society before we can start
thinking about you know how to how to manage it and diversity has no place in
this other than the fact that people have different skills which all have to
be coordinated to to a single end the other prominent metaphor in history
of thought is a slightly different one and this is found in in Hobbes is
Leviathan which conceives of political society on the analogy of a body okay
the Leviathan is the term Hobbes used to describe the state and the state is made
up of all the parts which go to form the single hole that single hole is made up
of all the different persons who live essentially as a as a collective to
authorize the exercise of power by this single entity once again the conception
of the society here is of a kind of unitary structure okay and what I wanted
to do was think about how we understand society without our assuming a closed
structure or a closed society because in the real world people come and go not
only because they they are born there are succeeding generations but also
because people move from one jurisdiction to another but also
jurisdictional boundaries change I mean if you look at the borders of the world
over its history or even over the last century you can see how dramatically
these borders have changed very very few countries have not had their borders
change I mean think about Europe for example in in 1900 there were 20 states
in Europe now they're I think 55 and in between there were so many variations
but if you go back 500 years you will see that there are about 700 different
principalities so the boundaries are always changing and there's always
movement across boundaries so if you're theorizing about how one should live to
assume a closed society seems to me a very limiting assumption so what I
wanted to suggest was that a good society is
in which what you see is a diversity of people's living across jurisdictions
that that change all the time and those moving across boundaries themselves will
be people with different ethical commitments as well as the capacity
changed those commitments and so what you needed was a metaphor that describes
this this kind of a society so my thought was that what we see really is a
kind of archipelago which is collection of islands that are in some sort of
proximity to one another across the seas of which you know people move all the
time and the the archipelago itself as I understand it is one that's made of a
violence which themselves come into existence and go out of existence
depending on a whole range of things from tides to to climate change so this
is I think a way of understanding the world which is which is quite different
from that I think of much of of of classical philosophy and I think even
within the liberal tradition the norm has been to think about society by
trying to theorize it as a as a kind of closed and fixed entity and I've wanted
to say no it's really something quite different and this I think is something
that strengthens reasons for thinking about it in terms of norms of toleration
rather than norms of justice because norms of justice basically say we figure
out what is right and then we enforce it whereas the norm of toleration says we
disagree about what's right let's continue to debate this may be from time
to time we'll have to settle the question but let's not think in terms of
finding the one right answer so that I think is the reason for my
thinking about things you know according to the model of the archipelago and the
reason for calling the liberal archipelago is partly because when I
imagine its opposite I think of salt in its ins idea of the
Gulag Archipelago maybe it's something that people aren't so familiar with
nowadays but in the 1970s Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his his great
masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago to describe the system of labour camps to
which political prisoners were sent across the the Soviet Union and in these
special camps people had no freedom to leave they were simply constrained or
confined into these camps and they were ruled from above this was very much the
model of a kind of closed society and what I wanted to say was that the
opposite of this is you know it's still an archipelago of different communities
but it's a liberal one because people are free to move across from one to
another to find the place which most suits them which most accommodates their
their own way of living