only later to ask how the ought applies to the is. That view remains
with us, alive still in such disparate ethical projects as utilitarianism and
theories of practical reasoning. ² (I shall propose below a view of ethics
that rejects this kind of divorce of the ought from the is.) ³ Alternatively,
metaphysics focuses on the pole of what is; its project is to describe our
world. But metaphysics is not entirely separable from considerations
that may broadly be called ethical: it partakes of the normativity inhab-
iting the epistemology that provides its foundation.

Political philosophy, however, has only discussed the ought given
what is. As the social configuration shifts, so must the philosophical ap-
proach.

"Philosophy," wrote Theodor Adorno, "which once seemed obsolete,
lives on because the moment to realize it was missed." ⁴ The obsolescence
Adorno refers to is that predicted by Marx after the communist revolu-
tion, an obsolescence that was to overtake philosophy only by its realiza-
tion--the unity between its concrete existence and its goal. What
Adorno sees correctly here, cast in Hegelian terms, is that without the
discordance between the world as it exists and the world as it is envi-
sioned (and, for Marxism, to envision the world is always to draw its
possibilities from its existence), there is no need for (political) phi-
losophy. Political philosophy is precisely the articulation of that dis-
cordance.

It is fitting, and perhaps even welcome, then, that political philosophy
is now in crisis. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union has reshaped the terrain so that the foundation of exis-
tence upon which was built much of the vision of what could be has
also collapsed. This is the meaning of the slogan that Marxism is dead.
It is not that Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union offered a model for

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