Carlo Burelli

• Professor
• Assistant Professor at University of Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro

In this paper I argue that more solidarity, realistically conceived, is in the long-term enlightened self-interest of all European member states. I will first argue that the concept of solidarity combines two intuitions: solidarity is a set of feelings that supports group cohesion, and a set of transfers from the most advantaged to the most disadva...

In this paper I unpack a realistic conception of politics by tightly defining its constitutive features: conflict and order. A conflict emerges when an actor is disposed to impose his/her views against the resistance of others. Conflicts are more problematic than moralists realize because they emerge unilaterally, are potentially violent, impermeab...

This paper argues for a new interpretation of the realist claim that politics is autonomous from morality and should be assessed based on political values. First, this article defends an original normative source: functional normativity. Secondly, it advocates a substantive functional standard: political institutions ought to be assessed by their c...

This article argues that political realists have at least two strategies to provide distinctively political normative judgments that have nothing to do with morality. The first ground is instrumental normativity, which states that if we believe that something is a necessary means to a goal we have, we have a reason to do it. In politics, certain me...

In Western democracies, people harbor feelings of disgust or hatred for politics. Populists and technocrats even seemingly question the value of politics. Populists cry that they are not politicians and that politics is necessarily corrupt. From the opposite side, technocrats view politics as a pointless constraint on enacting the obviously right p...

My response to Eva Erman & Niklas Möller's reply paper "The Problem of Political Normativity Understood as Functional Normativity"

This paper aims to offer a critique of a rigidly moralistic temperament in public discourse from the perspective of political realism. It unpacks three types of moralism in public discourse, and for each, it explains why it is normatively problematic from a realist perspective: ‘Moralist Causalism’ is the belief that moral preaching is an apt way t...

For political realists, legitimacy is a central requirement for the desirability of political institutions. Their detractors contend that it is either descriptive, and thus devoid of critical potential, or it relies on some moralist value that realists reject. We defend a functionalist reading of realist legitimacy: descriptive legitimacy, i.e., th...

Many lament that solidarity is declining, implying there is something good about it; but what is solidarity and why should we want it? Here, we defend an original functionalist re-interpretation of solidarity. Political solidarity plays a key functional role in a polity's persistence through time. Thus, we should want institutions that foster solid...

Is democracy a realistic political ideal? This paper historically recovers and normatively assesses Machiavelli's intuition that democratic institutions are realistically desirable in virtue of their resilience. The paper takes inspiration from Machiavelli's work in two ways. Methodologically, it argues that there is a distinctive realist normativi...

This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a dist...

A growing body of literature is pointing towards the lack of solidarity in the European Union as a crucial functional deficit. But what is EU solidarity and why do we need it? First, we reconstruct the role of solidarity in the neo-functionalist and post-functionalist accounts of European Integration, highlighting how solidarity is required by func...

Nel dibattito pubblico si sente spesso invocare maggiore realismo. Ma che cosa vuol dire essere realisti? E per quale motivo dovremmo esserlo? Questo libro distilla il pensiero della tradizione realista in quattro tesi fondamentali per comprendere la politica attuale. Primo, la realtà esterna è dolorosamente indipendente dai nostri desideri, e bis...

When we say that the function of a knife is cutting, we open the door to evaluating knives based on how well they cut. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether functions ground normative standards. This is an exciting question, as it would highlight the important existence of one instance of non-moral normativity and investigate to what degre...

I worked as a writer and narrative designer for The King's Dilemma, a board game about tragic political choices. Players sit at the royal council and have to balance what they think is right with the interests of their house and the stability of the kingdom. Through negotiations and betrayals, the council's rulings shape the future of the realm. Th...

The recent economic shocks have severely tested the EU's political sustainability. The deep-rooted and unending succession of existential crises demonstrates the sharp misalignment between the high degree of integration reached by the EU, its authority structure, and the absence of solidarity to sustain this structure. The paper unfolds as follows:...

The very existence of the European Union is today under attack by an increasingly virulent Euroscepticism. In our view, the prime root of this "deep" political crisis is the sharp misalignment between the new nature of the EU after the establishment of EMU, its authority structure, and the normative order which underpins cooperation and the "sharin...

Too often calls for utopian social change serve as a device for conserving the status quo, because they pose objectives that are beyond what is feasible to implement and devalue reachable marginal improvement. As Voltaire famously remarked: 'the best is the enemy of the good'. In this paper I suggest that being realistic about social change means s...

Nell’articolo argomento che la politica è una funzione delle società che consiste nella presa di decisioni collettive vincolanti. Tale funzione è vitale per i gruppi umani, che sono caratterizzati dall’inevitabilità del conflitto e dal conseguente bisogno di ordine. Le istituzioni politiche dunque non vanno valutate solo sulla base di criteri moral...

Much controversy surrounding Hobbes's interpretations springs from a puzzle - how can subjectivist assumptions lead to an objective theory of morality and politics? Two different strands coexist in the history of philosophy: the first emphasizes his moral psychology, while the other stresses the universality of the laws of nature. My hypothesis is...

Many will feel uncomfortable with Tamar Meisels' conclusion that killing terrorists with drones is permissible. Yet, there is little to criticise in this paper, because the most contentious parts of the argument are presupposed and understandably fall outside its scope. I will briefly sum up the argument, and then suggest two minor internal objecti...

The Strains of Commitments is an interesting attempt to deal with the perceived tension between solidarity and diversity in modern societies. There is an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between the intuition that a just society cannot survive without a shared belief in some ‘we’, and the belief that such disposition could have oppressive effects...

This paper has two aims: first, to discuss the concept of conflict within the field of political philosophy, and second, to clarify how conflict, appropriately defined, is a necessary and inevitable feature of politics. While this concept is often brought up in the literature, it has rarely been analytically defined. I define conflict as the situat...

Il confine tra realismo politico e liberalismo non è teoricamente così chiaro come l’asprezza del dibattito sembrerebbe suggerire. Tra le due tradizioni non c’è una forte distinzione né sul piano metodologico né su quello sostanziale. Il dibattito sul metodo, che ruota attorno alle condizioni di realizzabilità dei propri ideali, non basta a qualifi...

This paper tackles the notion of solidarity in the EU from a realistic perspective and aims at clarifying two common flaws in the arguments of many who invoke it: vagueness and utopianism. I have two aims: to clarify the concept of solidarity, and to offer a realistic justification for its application to the EU. To make sense of the heterogeneous h...

Sul pensiero di Hobbes convivono nella tradizione filosofica due inter-pretazioni molto diverse. La prima lo considera un difensore del sogget-tivismo, enfatizzandone la psicologia morale e la teoria soggettivistica del valore. La seconda, al contrario, lo ritiene un sostenitore dell'oggettivismo, sottolineando l'universalità e immutabilità delle l...