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Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and (...) |
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Habermas’ theory of popular sovereignty has received comparatively little sustained critical attention in the Anglo-American literature since initial responses to Between Facts and Norms. In light of subsequent work on group agency, this paper argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty—in its denial of the normative force of collective citizen action—is best understood as a renunciation of the doctrine. The paper is structured in three sections. Section 1 examines Habermas’ treatment of popular sovereignty prior to Between Facts and Norms as (...) |
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The accusation that contemporary political philosophy is carried out in too ahistorical a fashion depends upon it being possible for historical facts to ground normative political principles. This they cannot do. Each of the seven ways in which it might be thought possible for them to do so fails for one or more of four reasons: History yields no timeless set of universal moral values; it displays no convergence upon such a set; it reveals no univocal moral or cultural context (...) |
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This paper shows an alternative way in which compatriot partiality could be justified within the framework of global distributive justice. Philosophers who argue that compatriot partiality is similar to racial partiality capture something correct about compatriot partiality. However, the analogy should not lead us to comprehensively reject compatriot partiality. We can justify compatriot partiality on the same grounds that liberation movements and affirmative action have been justified. Hence, given cosmopolitan demands of justice, special consideration for the economic well-being of your (...) |
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The paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule). Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides people with sufficient reason for complying with those (...) |
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How should political theorists go about their work if they are democrats? Given their democratic commitments, should they develop theories that are responsive to the views and concerns of their fellow citizens at large? Is there a balance to be struck, within political theory, between truth seeking and democratic responsiveness? The article addresses this question about the relationship between political theory, public opinion and democracy. I criticize the way in which some political theorists have appealed to the value of democratic (...) |
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This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Drawing on political realism, it reconstructs the idea and function of refugeehood in international politics. Refugees are not the agencyless victims merely in search of rescue by states of the Global North, as the idea of climate refugeehood as a form of humanitarian refugeehood would have it. Nor are they simply a function of reparative justice, or of defending international state legitimacy. To liberal democracies, refugees are those fleeing political oppression. (...) |
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This article clarifies and resituates Althusser’s materialist philosophical project in relation not only to such predecessors as V.I. Lenin and Jean-Toussaint Desanti but also to such successors as Pierre Macherey and Pierre Raymond. The thesis of the article is that Althusser’s project to establish a philosophical practice that would be appropriate for Marxism did not simply consist of identifying and defending a ‘materialist’ position in philosophy against external ‘idealist’ challenges or threats. On the contrary, it recognised that there exists an (...) |
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Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking. |
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A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative, but that is in fact normative. The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as (...) |
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In the UK, higher education and health care providers share responsibility for educating the workforce. The challenges facing health practice also face health education and as educators we are implicated, by the way we design curricula and through students’ experiences and their stories. |
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It is conventional wisdom among political philosophers that ideal principles of justice must guide our attempts to design institutions to avert actual injustice. Call this the ideal guidance approach. I argue that this view is misguided— ideal principles of justice are not appropriate "guiding principles" that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable. In this paper, I develop an alternative approach to institutional design, which I call institutional failure analysis. The (...) |
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This article shows how Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort try to explain the relationship between universality and particularity in modern democratic societies, politics and civil society. It will demonstrate that Habermas defends a substantive kind of universality that is opposed to particular positions and thus to real politics. This article further argues that Lefort’s lesser known theory of negative universality is better at combining a universal and a particular perspective. It claims that where Habermas requires citizens to transform their particular (...) |
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Realist political theory is often confronted with the objection that it is biased towards the status quo. Although this criticism overlooks the fact that realist political theories contain various resources for critique, a realist approach that is strong in status quo critique and contributes, constructively, to the theorising of alternatives to the status quo is a desideratum. The article argues that contextual realism, which sources its normativity from particular contexts, harbours an underexploited potential to establish such a form of political (...) |
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This introductory chapter gives an overview of the debate on realism in political theory and sets out two themes that are particularly important for this debate: the role of practice in realist political theory and the nature and place of normativity in realist political theory. These two themes are not only among the most discussed topics in the debate on possibilities to do realist political theory. Answers to the question of what more applied forms of realist political theory might look (...) |
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The forms of status quo critique that current approaches to realist political theory enable are unsatisfactory. They either formulate standards of constructive critique, but remain uncritical of a great range of political situations, or they offer means for criticising basically all political situations, but neglect constructive critique. As part of the endeavour to develop a status quo critique that is potentially radical and constructive, realists might consider possibilities to use non-standard social practices – social practices that function differently than stipulated (...) |
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In the last ten or fifteen years, realism has emerged as a distinct approach in political theory. Realists are skeptical about the merits of abstract theories of justice. They regard peace, order, and stability as the primary goals of politics. One of the more concrete aims of realists is to develop a realist perspective on legitimacy. I argue that realist accounts of legitimacy are unconvincing, because they do not solve what I call the “puzzle of legitimacy”: the puzzle of how (...) |
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Although Amy Allen’s critique of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory has been widely discussed, her concern for an adequate conceptualization of reason’s intertwinement with power has not received the attention it deserves. The article shows that the diagnosis of a too idealistic account of reason forms the backbone of Allen’s charges against Habermas, Honneth and Forst, before it discusses her criteria for an adequate conceptualization of the intertwinement of reason and power. It demonstrates that Allen’s attempt to formulate such a (...) |
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This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s thought can offer significant insights on political judgement for realism in political theory. We identify a realist position which emphasises the need to account for how humans judge politically, contra moralist tendencies to limit its exercise to rational standards, but which fails to provide a sufficient conception of its structure and potential. Limited appeals to political judgement render the realist defence of the political elusive and compromise the endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to (...) |
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This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s thought can offer significant insights on political judgement for realism in political theory. We identify a realist position which emphasises the need to account for how humans judge politically, contra moralist tendencies to limit its exercise to rational standards, but which fails to provide a sufficient conception of its structure and potential. Limited appeals to political judgement render the realist defence of the political elusive and compromise the endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to (...) |
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Jeremy Bentham is usually seen as an anti-realist political thinker, or a proponent of what Bernard Williams has termed ‘political moralism’. This article questions that prevalent view and suggests instead that there are good grounds for considering Bentham a political realist. Bentham’s political thought has considerable commonalities with that of the sociologist and political realist Max Weber: both agree that politics is a unique domain of human activity defined by its association with power; that consequently, ethical conduct is unavoidably inflected (...) |
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Jeremy Bentham is usually seen as an anti-realist political thinker, or a proponent of what Bernard Williams has termed ‘political moralism’. This article questions that prevalent view and suggests instead that there are good grounds for considering Bentham a political realist. Bentham’s political thought has considerable commonalities with that of the sociologist and political realist Max Weber: both agree that politics is a unique domain of human activity defined by its association with power; that consequently, ethical conduct is unavoidably inflected (...) |
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Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving (...) |
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Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022. |
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In this article we investigate the value and utility of Machiavelli’s work for Community-Based Natural Resource Management. We made a selection of five topics derived from literature on NRM and CBNRM: Law and Policy, Justice, Participation, Transparency, and Leadership and management. We use Machiavelli’s work to analyze these topics and embed the results in a narrative intended to lead into the final conclusions, where the overarching theme of natural resource management for the common good is considered. Machiavelli’s focus on practical (...) |
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This article provides a conceptual map of the debate on ideal and non‐ideal theory. It argues that this debate encompasses a number of different questions, which have not been kept sufficiently separate in the literature. In particular, the article distinguishes between the following three interpretations of the ‘ideal vs. non‐ideal theory’ contrast: (i) full compliance vs. partial compliance theory; (ii) utopian vs. realistic theory; (iii) end‐state vs. transitional theory. The article advances critical reflections on each of these sub‐debates, and highlights (...) |
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Various political realists claim the superior ‘action-guiding’ qualities of their way of approaching normative political theory, as compared to ‘liberal moralism’. This paper subjects that claim to critique. I first clarify the general idea of action-guidance, and identify two types of guidance that a political theory might try to offer – ‘prescriptive action-guidance’ and ‘orienting action-guidance’ – together with the conditions that must be met before we can understand such guidance as having been successfully offered. I then go on to (...) |
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The article joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats in contemporary democratic theory and aims to put epistemic democracy on a more secure footing. Yet, unlike those who... |
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This paper draws on the underappreciated realist thought of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Judith Shklar, rehearses their critique of moralism and extends it to a position which seems far from obvious a target: the dirty hands thesis, which is mostly owed to Michael Walzer, and which a number of contemporary realists have recently appealed to in their endeavour to challenge moralism and/or tackle the insufficiently addressed question of what a more affirmative, realist public ethic might involve. In illustrating that (...) |
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The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies within contemporary (...) |
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Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1277-1301, November 2022. The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We (...) |
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The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies within contemporary (...) |
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Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic dimension of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls s specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as (...) |
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Should we be concerned with, or alarmed or outraged by, the insincerity and hypocrisy of politicians who apologize for historical injustice? This paper argues that the correct reply to this question is: sometimes, but not always. In order to establish what types of insincerity must be avoided, Judith Shklar?s hierarchy of ordinary vices is critically revisited. Against Shklar?s overly benign account of hypocrisy, the paper then tries to demonstrate that only institutional and harmful forms of hypocrisy must be rejected in (...) |
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In lieu of Abstract: With inequality of various sorts ballooning worldwide, a critique of democracy has come of age, and a change of political ethos is underway. Against this background, the critique of democracy becomes not only possible but also popular, and examples in China and many Western democracies abound. It is no exaggeration to say, in this context, that sufficient momentum has gathered to qualify the situation as "democratic recession," despite people may have different understandings as to the exact (...) |
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This article offers a realist interpretation of Tacitus’s analysis of political failure. Tacitus described the early Roman Empire as a balance between the conflicting and irreconcilable values and interests of the emperor, the army, and the senate. For him Stoic-republican morality in itself—without the intervention of a political standard demanding political agency in every circumstance—cannot provide an all-purpose guide to action. He provides a fine-grained analysis of types of political failure, such as failing to act, or to realize one’s limited (...) |
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The article examines whether realist theory should adopt a philosophical anarchist position concerning political obligation. The conclusions are mixed. Drawing on a distinction between strong and weak theories of political obligation (in the terminology of the paper, strong theories are committed to morality-based theorizing while weak theories depart from it), the article argues that philosophical anarchism and realist theory are natural allies against strong theories of political obligation but they must part company when it comes to weak theories because it (...) |
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The paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of political obligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism, theories of associative obligations and political realism. Second, the paper aims to offer a normative theoretical framework to examine political obligations in contemporary non-democratic contexts that does not vindicate non-democratic regimes and that does not exclude political obligations from the terrain of moral normativity. The theory of (...) |
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The ambition of this article is threefold. First, it is to offer a realist reading of Aristotle’s regime theory as it is laid out mostly in Books IV–VI of his Politics. The author argues that Arist... |
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The term “social world” is increasingly familiar in philosophy and political theory. Rawls uses it quite often, especially in his later works. But there has been little explicit discussion of the term and the idea of social worlds. My aim in this paper is to show that political philosophers, Rawlsian or not, should think seriously about social worlds and the roles these things play and ought to play in their work. The idea of social worlds can help political philosophers think (...) |
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It is sometimes argued that ideal theories in political philosophy are a form of ideology. This article examines arguments building on the work of Charles Mills and Raymond Geuss for the claim that ideal theories are cognitively distorting belief systems that have the effect of stabilizing unjust social arrangements. I argue that Mills and Geuss neither succeed in establishing that the content of ideal theories is necessarily cognitively defective in the way characteristic for ideologies, nor can they make plausible which (...) |
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Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. However, even the models of immanent critique developed in the Frankfurt School tradition seem to privilege principles over particular moral experiences. Discussing the place that particular moral experience has in the models of Honneth, Ferrara and Adorno, the article argues that experience can play an important negative role even for a critical theory that is (...) |
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Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 244-258, June 2022. |
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A prevailing understanding of realism, chiefly among its critics, casts realists as those who seek a ‘distinctively political normativity’, where this is interpreted as meaning nonmoral in kind. Moralists, on this account, are those who reject this and believe that political normativity remains moral. Critics have then focused much of their attention on demonstrating that the search for a nonmoral political normativity is doomed to fail which, if right, would then seem to fatally undermine the realist endeavour. This paper makes (...) |
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