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Realism in Political Theory
Abstract
In recent decades, a ‘realist’ alternative to ideal theories of politics has slowly taken shape. Bringing together philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists, this countermovement seeks to reframe inquiry into politics and political norms. Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral psychology that includes the passions and emotions; a robust conception of political possibility and rejection of utopian thinking; the belief that political conflict — of values as well as interests — is both fundamental and ineradicable; a focus on institutions as the arenas within which conflict is mediated and contained; and a conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is distinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be derived from individual morality. For political realists, a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable; a modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility. Not only will ‘full compliance’ never be achieved, but also it is an assumption that yields misleading accounts of political norms. While realists offer a number of compelling criticisms of ideal theory, there are some lacunae in their stance. It is not yet clear whether realism constitutes a coherent affirmative alternative to idealism. Nor have realists clarified the extent of conflict that is consistent with political order as such. And because both sides accept ‘ought implies can’ as a constraint on the validity of political norms, much of the debate between realists and idealists revolves around deep empirical disagreements that are yet to be clarified.
... Notably, the pragmatist commitment to hope or "the belief that, through effort, things can get better" (p. 29), which Stitzlein clearly embraces, is difficult to couple with Williams, Laclau, and Mouffe's "tragic" -some would say "realistic" -understanding of the world (Galston, 2010). In other words, Stitzlein combines meliorism with a deeply anti-utopianist tradition which warns us that we should prepare not only for the better but also for the worse (Galston, 2010). ...
... 29), which Stitzlein clearly embraces, is difficult to couple with Williams, Laclau, and Mouffe's "tragic" -some would say "realistic" -understanding of the world (Galston, 2010). In other words, Stitzlein combines meliorism with a deeply anti-utopianist tradition which warns us that we should prepare not only for the better but also for the worse (Galston, 2010). Indeed, in her latest book, Mouffe (2022) considered the climate change catastrophe and the challenges of technocratic and algorithmic forms of governance to make a call to "protect" democracy and "its material conditions of existence" (p. ...
... Thus, politics is directly aimed at experience and therefore has first principles that could be different. 8 Accordingly, the subject of Aristotle's political research is political practice, with the goal being to analyse the stability of a political order, which is a methodological approach uncommon for the (in the rough sense) idealistic tradition. 9 The entire Politics is imbued with the issue of the stability of different political orders, while the fifth book (Aristotle 1998, 1301a-1317a) is fully and directly dedicated to this: "for a legislator, however, or for those seeking to 7 Which should not be confused with scientific statements that are unchangeable. ...
... Universals are just general claims. 8 On the other hand, he often refers to human nature when reasoning about politics, while in doing so resting on a mixture of empirical and ethical claims (Irwin 1988, 358). 9 Here we mean the usual normativist and universalistic perspectives of politics assumed by authors such as Plato, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, etc. This could also encompass Hobbes' theory of social contract and state, although he shows strong substantive elements of realism. ...
In order to gain a better understanding of contemporary political realism, as well as of the theories of two classical political philosophers, this paper argues that the methodological roots of a contextualist model of realism can be found, among others, in the writings of Aristotle and Machiavelli. It is argued that the methodological assumptions of contextualist political realism can be formulated through two main notions: 1) the experiential basis – analysis of politics through reliance on experience from political practice; and 2) contextualism – avoiding universal claims as much as possible, i.e., making claims about politics always within a socio-historical context. Using those lenses, the paper points out the methodological elements of Aristotle’s and Machiavelli’s political theories that are in line with this version of political realism, claiming both of them could be perceived as forerunners to a certain degree.
... Still, monism enjoys a strong heritage in the history of political theory and can be evaluated in the works of authors such as Aristotle, who believed eudaimonia, or human flourishing, was the one intrinsic good, Bentham (pleasure), Mill (happiness), Kant (the categorical imperative), Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the modern political realists (power), and Ayn Rand (life) (Klocksiem, 2011;Mason, 2023;Mill, 1861Mill, /2001Kant, 1797Kant, /2017Crowder, 2022;Moen, 2012). Value monism likewise finds support from contemporary philosophers like Dworkin (2000) (equality), Rawls (1971Rawls ( /1999 (Fives, 2022), Berlin (Crowder, 2020), Kekes (1995), Crowder (1998), Chang (2004), and Galston (2010), among others (Blum, 2023). Among the distinctive characteristics of pluralism is the concept of incommensurability, which asserts that each of the intrinsic values is a good in itself and cannot be ranked in an objective order. ...
... For this reason, realists find that "a modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility" (Galston, 2010, p. 385). Galston (2010) clarifies that realists do not view morality as having no place in politics, but that moral preferences are only one of many pieces of information politicians should consider when making decisions, rather than morality enforcing political obligations or constraints. In this sense, Newey (2010) contended that politics retains a certain normative function but that this function is internal to politics and not influenced by personal moral norms or precepts. ...
The nature of truth affects beliefs in such a way that all worldviews are left on a level
playing field, each with no more of an objective claim to truth than any other. As a result,
no one worldview has an intrinsic right to dominate the government or, through it, other
worldviews. Furthermore, philosophical secularism’s noble notion of protecting
individual freedoms by limiting the influence of moral values in the government has led
to a loss of intergroup bonding and a value vacuum in public life. At the same time,
because beliefs constitute some of the most profound aspects of a person’s identity, and
every person possesses a worldview, each categorical worldview should have a say in
how the government operates without these worldviews operating the government. Thus,
I contend that a form of consociationalism in which the shared moral values of each
worldview present in America are incorporated into governmental operations is not only
more favorable than the exclusion of such values but rationally necessary. To practically
accomplish this task, I suggest that the federal government convene a temporary
Worldview Council comprised of an equal number of representatives from each major
worldview in American society. These representatives, joined by teams of researchers,
would compromise on a Values Charter detailing the moral values common to all
worldviews in America. These values will serve as a guide to governmental legislation
and institutional operations. I conclude with an initial list of values that I believe are
common to all the worldviews in America and discuss how they might guide future
institutions in a Shared Values Society.
... Next section, I lay out the proposals of agonistic democracy presented by William Connolly, James Tully, and Chantal Mouffe so as to contend that can be integrated into a common view of agonistic democracy. In the fourth section, I argue that agonistic democracy supplies the lack of institutions and processes to deal with 1 Nowadays it can seem tedious to give an overview of political realism because of the wide literature giving introductions about it (Galston, 2010;Rossi & Sleat, 2014;Sabl & Sagar;Sleat, 2018). Here I briefly present it to appreciate the similarities of the realist liberal version with the theories of modus vivendi and agonistic democracy. ...
... Political realism contends that political theory should not pose principles of justice nor political ideals as the ones of democracy and legitimacy coming from moral judgements that do not consider the realities of politics properly (Galston, 2010;Rossi & Sleat, 2014). Political realism does not seek to formulate principles, ideals, or values to then apply them in the political sphere, nor to set the moral conditions by which the power can be properly exercised (Williams, 2005, p. 2). ...
Political realism points out that politics is to create and sustain a legitimate order in a context of persistent disagreement, with the possible surge of conflicts, and where political power inevitably uses coercion. Political realists contend that modus vivendi is a contingent political arrangement at the level of the political constitution that allows diverse groups of people to coexist peacefully. Proposals of modus vivendi do not say enough about how to manage disagreements and conflicts. In this paper, I argue that proposals of agonistic democracy supply this lack. I contend that agonistic democracy proposals share the premises of political realism and contribute to the sustainment of a liberal modus vivendi.
... The surge of interest around realism in political theory (e.g. Williams, 2005;Geuss, 2008;Galston, 2010;Horton, 2010;Philp, 2010;Sleat, 2010 andRossi, 2012; see also Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012;Larmore, 2013;Baderin, 2014;Aytac and Rossi, 2023) further advances the thought that there is something distinctive about the political realm, so that political philosophy and theory cannot simply be applied ethics. ...
Consider a seemingly fruitful ordering of our intellectual labours: think in ideal terms about justice and legitimacy, then bring our ideas and arguments to bear upon messy (and very much nonideal) real-world complications. This ordering is most often associated with John Rawls, but this was not his actual practice. That is no vice: Rawls took wide reflective equilibrium seriously as a philosophical method, moving back and forth from ideal to nonideal considerations in ways that belie the usefulness of any priority claims. We do not gain much insight by asserting the priority of either ideal or nonideal theorizing. Indeed, we could stop using those terms altogether, and theory might be none the worse, if we embrace something like Rawls' constructivist method. Normative political theory should, then, reject certain methodological conceits lurking in some of the philosophical work we otherwise embrace.
... William Galston (2010) outlines an intuition shared by many political realists in rejecting a utopian view, where utopia is understood as the attitude of positing unfeasible ideal principles unrelated to practice. By doing this, Galston seems to side with the old attitude of rejecting what seems practically impossible. ...
In political theory, utopia is traditionally understood as representing a beautiful but impossible state of affairs. By contrast, the majority of scholarly works in utopian studies understand utopia not as a blueprint for a perfect society but as an indirect critique of the contemporary status quo. The aim of this article is to propose a distinction between utopias and ideal theories. To do so, the article adopts a working definition of utopias that emphasises the formal characters of utopian works (detailed narrative), and compares utopias with ideal theories, which are abstract in kind. After articulating this distinction through some paradigmatic examples (Plato, More, Rawls), the article argues that a better understanding of this difference may help us improve the debate. The article also argues that ideal theories, unlike utopias, are less tainted by the objection that ideals are practically irrelevant.
... Political realism separates political activity from morality and justice [40]. The British philosopher, Bernard Williams, has elaborated a contemporary iteration that incorporates at least the first five elements listed in Table 1 [41]. ...
Calls for policy changes in matters with bioethical implications have important political and legal ramifications. Beyond bioethical analysis, it is important to ask whether state action is appropriate. This essay addresses this question from a perspective of liberal pluralism. Three principles inform liberal pluralism. First, value pluralism affirms that many controversies cannot be resolved by principled argument. Second, liberalism of fear informs us that limitations on state power are necessary to prevent governmental cruelty. Finally, political realism argues that political decisions in a democracy are based on negotiation between opponents seeking to maximize their interests, with morality being tangential or irrelevant. Government rulemaking should be restricted to situations involving serious harm to individuals or material detriment to the public interest. Beyond this, fairness and preventing the government from wronging vulnerable people require constraints on state exercise of power. These include constitutional checks and recognition of certain legal rights. Even when action seems appropriate prima facie, a formal proportionality analysis should be applied to rules that restrict individuals or groups. Formal constraints, though, are insufficient. Protection of citizens in general, and of minorities in particular, depends upon the willingness of individuals and governments to abide by political and constitutional norms. When addressing bioethical issues, scholars should consider the broader political implications of their recommendations.
... A much more prominent discussion concerning the difference between moral philosophy and politics developed after the publication of Bernard Williams's posthumous collection of essays In the Beginning Was the Deed (2005) and Raymond Geuss's Philosophy and Real Politics (2008). While there are important points of convergence between the Rawls-Murphy debate and the realism-moralism one, the latter focuses more on the unique tasks and features of "real" politics, especially when it comes to solving the "first political question" of peace and stability (Galston 2010;Rossi and Sleat 2014;Sleat 2014). Yet the extent to which realists are able to carve out the sphere of "distinctively political" considerations is viewed by many as unclear at best (Erman and Möller 2022;Leader Maynard and Worsnip 2018). ...
This paper is guided by two research hypotheses: (1) In contemporary public discourse, many of the most urgent political problems are predominantly framed and understood in moral terms; (2) this shift in framing has far-reaching consequences, impeding our understanding of the underlying problems and their eventual solution. The two hypotheses are demonstrated using multiple examples, with the fight against climate change serving as the main case study. The moral framing (thinking in terms of individual actions, duties and obligations, blame and personal responsibility) is shown to crowd out political considerations (focused on institutions and policy), even when such moral considerations are either out of place or immaterial. Consequently, individual actions and responsibility are shown to be overemphasized in contemporary public discourse to such an extent that the viable political solutions are often discounted or overlooked.
The context of the argument offered here is provided by the realism-moralism debate on the distinction between morality and politics. The ambition of the paper is to show that, regardless of their possible deeper distinction (the “distinctively political normativity”), there is a strong pragmatic case for carefully distinguishing between ethical and political theorizing. Morality and politics provide different frames, distinct interpretive frameworks that consequently give rise to contrasting solutions. Therefore, they need to be kept apart.
... Further, they are generally characteristic, central elements in the normative outlook of socalled 'realist' political theories. Such theories pay particular attention to the competitive nature of political pursuits, and to the diverse -including, emphatically, non-moralmotivations of political actors (Galston, 2010;Rossi and Sleat 2014). The politician-centred perspective is most successful in exploring and describing the nature of the ethical dilemmas that politicians routinely face. ...
This book contains 11 reports from the Horizon 2020 research project Reconstructing Democracy in Times of Crisis: A Voter-Centred Perspective. Their aim is to illuminate the challenges facing advanced democracies from the perspective of voters as moral and political agents, who must decide whether or not to vote and on what criteria they should base their decision. Being a voter in a democracy is a paradoxical situation: collectively they will take part in deciding who governs their country and ‘speaks in their name’ but, as individuals, they have no real power at all. While the justification of democratic government rests on the authorisation provided by voters, simply as voters citizens will have little say on the electoral choices presented to them, the political programmes on offer, or the likely consequences of choosing one rather than another candidate. In short, being a voter is both morally weighty and yet its political consequences are often hard to determine and, for the most part, beyond our control. Not surprisingly, being a voter is a more complicated experience than it first seems, and disenchantment with that experience and alienation from electoral democracy are increasingly common phenomena. These reports aim to articulate that experience, and to respond to its challenges. In so doing, they emphasise the limitations of ideas about democracy, explanations of political behaviour and exhortations to voters that ignore what it is like to be a voter, and the experiences of collective responsibility but, also, of powerlessness that mark that experience for so many.
... We may predict that the so-called "realist turn" (Valentini, 2012) in political theory strengthens the case for expertocracy and less democracy. If normative priority is given to peace, security, order, legitimacy, and so on (Galston, 2010;Williams, 2005), then the real world in which politics occurs will have to be taken more seriously in theorizing democracy. Today, this real world, of course, includes climate change, so one should not be surprised to find theorists who argue that citizen safety and community survival trump justice and democracy as grounds for legitimacy. ...
In response to the claim that democracies are inherently short-termist, this article argues for a new way to understand them as being committed to future generations. If taking turns among rulers and ruled is a normative idea inherent to the concept of democracy, then such turn-taking commits democrats to a fair turn with future generations.
This article explored the political communication environment in Indonesia from 2004 to 2024, which is solely within the reform era. Focusing on how technology shapes democratic engagement, the study examined how the digital media revolution has affected political communication over the last 20 years. A comprehensive literature evaluation was carried out, combining knowledge from 122 scholarly works. Further sources were included to fully substantiate the study's assertions because the initial bibliography only had 28 references. The study examines how digital and traditional media interact in Indonesia, emphasising how social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp are becoming increasingly important in public debate, political campaigns, and grassroots organising. Bypassing conventional gatekeepers, these platforms have allowed voters to communicate directly with political leaders; nevertheless, they have also brought up problems like disinformation and digital inequality. The results show that although digital platforms and big data have chances to improve democratic processes, their use has frequently been flimsy and unduly formalistic, with little effect on systemic political participation. This study also emphasised the necessity for a customised approach to deal with enduring problems such as disinformation, divisive content, and the digital divide. In Indonesia's reform era, these issues remain significant obstacles to widespread political involvement. The conclusion suggests that governments, media outlets, and civil society actors work together to use digital technologies inclusively and morally, ensuring that these instruments support democratic governance rather than exacerbate the already-existing disparities. More studies are needed to close the gap between theoretical frameworks and real-world implementations in Indonesia's dynamic political communication environment.
This article engages with Jonathan Floyd’s normative behaviorism, and Simon Stevens’ recent criticism of this approach. Its objectives are two: First, the article challenges normative behaviorism’s reliance on crime and insurrection rates as measures of political discontent. I raise three distinct objections against using crime and insurrection rates for this purpose, and argue that these undermine normative behaviorism’s justificatory strategy. Second, the article rebuts Stevens’ suggestion that the flaws of normative behaviorism can be fixed by adding political ethnography to the picture. Rather than remedying the flaws, I argue that supplementing normative behaviorism with an ethnographic sensibility will deprive it of the very features that rendered it attractive in the first place. I conclude that if fixing the flaws of normative behaviorism requires us to transform it beyond recognition, we should rather reject it in the first place.
Affirmative action is typically presumed to apply to recruitment but never lay-offs. Policies of affirmative action which only apply to recruitment are known as entry initiatives whilst exit initiatives involve lay-offs. In this paper, I challenge the status quo presumption against mixed exit initiatives which involve both lay-offs and preferential recruitment. Assuming that we have reasons to enact affirmative action initiatives whenever doing so promotes equality of opportunity, I strengthen the case for mixed exit initiatives by showing how, in at least some cases, the relevant initiatives will be likely to provide a greater reduction in inequalities of opportunity both within and across different birth cohorts. I consider various objections to exit initiatives as I construe them and argue that none of them are immediately decisive such that the status quo presumption is justified. I conclude by gesturing towards the plausibility of the initiatives discussed and other policies which merit further consideration.
Recently, empirical political scientists have challenged presuppositions about voter behavior that they take to be widespread in normative democratic theory, charging that democratic theory is unmoored from empirical reality. For their part, many normative democratic theorists have rejected empiricists’ characterizations of their subfield and denied that normative theories are threatened by empirical findings about voter behavior. This article argues that both camps are partly right and partly wrong. Normative democratic theories are more varied than empirical critics recognize, and some avoid grounding their defenses of democracy on an unrealistic “folk theory” of popular control. However, even these more promising normative theories may import “folk theory” assumptions in subtler ways and neglect empirical evidence to their own cost. I focus on social or relational egalitarian theories of democracy as an illustration of this problem, which should be addressed by more productive and dynamic engagement between normative and empirical democratic theory.
This article presents a novel perspective, arguing for a virtue-based weak version of political realism in Ottoman political thought (OPT). By recognizing realist elements in human nature and poli- tics in OPT tradition, we can gain a deeper understanding of the place of morality in politics. Challeng- ing the common sense understanding of morality that pervades all areas of politics, this paper provides compelling evidence to show how the understanding of the nature of politics in OPT was ever-chang- ing, singular, and, to a certain extent, free of morality. This unique framing of politics and human na- ture in the OPT tradition makes it a realist one. Finally, I delve into the role of universals in explaining the intricate relationship between politics and morality through various analytical distinctions.
This paper offers a metaethical analysis of so-called political moralism’s metaethical assumptions and proposes shifting away from them. It does so by taking migration ethics’ methodology as a case study of the field. First, the paper shows political moralism’s commitment to moral monism and moral overridingness. Second, it explains how such commitments are likely to lead to the formulation of toy theories - and, hence, moral regress. Third, it proposes the recognition of prudential normativity and normative pluralism as a way to avoid the toy theory problem. And, fourth, it deals with two objections to this proposal.
The debate on bottom-up approaches in political theory has been recently enriched by Jonathan Floyd’s “normative behaviourism”, an approach that starts from and refers to actual behaviours so as to let normative concerns emerge and political responses be found. Despite its merits, I argue that normative behaviourism suffers from three weaknesses: the tip of the iceberg, the invisibility, and the over-inclusive justification problems. These problems emerge because behaviours can be normatively significant only when the beliefs behind those behaviours are known. To overcome these problems, I suggest a “revised” version of normative behaviourism, which makes use of focus groups to reach two objectives: first, to understand the beliefs driving behaviours; and, second, to filter out unacceptable beliefs that might lead to inappropriate political solutions when their corresponding behaviour is considered normatively relevant for institutional reform. While revised normative behaviourism is still at the stage of a drafted proposal, it has the potential to pave a way for data collection to contribute to the very formulation of normative standards rather than just to the identification of practical constraints to the application of normative standards.
The theory of needs has a political problem. Whilst contemporary theorists largely recognise that politics plays an important part in many of the processes surrounding our needs, they nevertheless hang onto the notion that our most important needs can be determined outside of the political. This article challenges that framing. It does so through a taxonomy and critique of the major contemporary approaches to needs. Considering the works of Len Doyal and Ian Gough, Martha Nussbaum, and Lawrence Hamilton, I divide these into three strands: theories that attempt to avoid, solve, and improve the politics of need. Despite some major differences, these approaches share an understanding of the underlying challenges involved in discerning which needs matter. That framing, I argue, is responsible for certain intractable difficulties that leave needs theorists unable to provide the solutions they demand to the theoretical dilemma they posit. Moreover, in attempting to find those solutions, these theories end up ignoring their partisan implications. The conclusion I reach is that the political theory of needs is not very ‘political’ at all, and that this represents the root of the problem. I thus suggest an alternative, politically realist framing that conceptualises needs as constitutively political.
The main goal of this paper is to show that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. To this, a concept of political value that explains why the politically good provides reasons for actions is indispensable. I shape this concept by adopting the framework of political minimalism and developing one of its central tenets, namely, that politics, as a constitutively normative practice, specifies objective standards for evaluating political phenomena. I characterize the notion of political value in these terms to offer a non-moralist foundation for political normativity. In this endeavor, the work of Bernard Williams plays two opposing roles: while his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of substantialist accounts of political normativity, his criticism of the morality system and his conception of practical rationality as all-things-considered practical deliberation are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of Williams’ ideas on normativity in general. Finally, I draw some consequences from this account of political minimalism to show that this conception of political normativity can hardly be considered a variety of political realism.
Epistemic democrats typically argue that widespread public competence can empower democratic states to produce the correct decisions more effectively than antidemocratic alternatives. In reaction, this paper shows that epistemic democrats are too insensitive to a fundamental fact of representative democracies: the democratic choice of policy is mediated through a democratic choice of politician. Epistemic democrats neglect that party politicians potentially spoil the epistemic benefits of widespread public competence. Firstly, politicians must compete with each other for votes during elections. Secondly, politicians should compromise with each other to protect those they represent from the bad apples in the legislature. Politicians, as elected representatives with democratic integrity, have a profession-specific obligation to resist the bad apples, even if they must sacrifice their personal integrity in the process. They must compromise on promoting the correct decisions to gain critical political alliances and electoral support. Once political theorizing recognizes the significance of party politicians and their obligations more fully, public deliberation can be modelled as a compromise-discovery process: public deliberation can enable politicians to know which moral compromises will gain the alliances and votes necessary to resist the bad apples.
Focusing on ‘real actions’ of ‘real people’, normative behaviourism turns facts about observable patterns of behaviour into grounds for specific normative political principles. For this reason, this way of doing normative political theory has strong political realist credentials, given its methods, values and ambitions. In fact, according to its supporters, normative behaviourism is an improvement of political realism since it solves two problems that allegedly face many realists, namely, the ‘legitimacy problem’, i.e., how we should distinguish genuine acceptance of a political system from false acceptance, and ‘the institutional problem’, i.e., how we should translate political principles into viable political institutions. In this paper, we make two claims. First, normative behaviourism does not solve the legitimacy problem encountered by realists, because its solution rests on a flawed distinction between foundational principles and ‘principles that matter’, together with a problematic use of a Humean internal reasons approach. Second, normative behaviourism does not solve the institutional problem encountered by realists, because its solution is in fact much more unfeasible than realist prescriptions, since feasibility is interpreted as mere possibility. We wind up our analysis by showing that normative behaviourism encounters new problems that realist approaches typically do not face.
In the recent debate on political normativity in political philosophy, two positions have emerged among so-called political realists. On the first ‘non-moral’ view, political normativity is understood as orthogonal to moral normativity. On the second ‘filter view’, moral norms and prescriptions may be ‘filtered through’ the realities of politics such that they are altered by politics’ constitutive features. While the former has been severely criticized, the latter has remained underdeveloped and vague. To take the debate on political normativity forward, the aim in this paper is to explore what it could reasonably mean to claim that moral norms are filtered through politics and are aligned with its constitutive features. More specifically, we explore the role of moral norms in political theory. We take our starting-point in Larmore’s work and make two claims. First, we argue against Larmore’s claim – following political realists – that because political philosophy is concerned with the regulation of basic institutions and legal-political orders, it should primarily focus on political legitimacy rather than justice and always focus on legitimacy before justice. In our view, nothing in the constitutive features of politics supports such a conclusion. Second, we argue that any reasonable political theory relies on at least one moral premise, constituted by foundational principles (or values), which are independent of a society or polity. These are more basic than political principles in the sense that they put up the normative boundary conditions for such principles.
Bu makale, Osmanlı siyaset düşünce geleneğinde fazilet temelli kendine has ılımlı bir siyasî realizmin var olduğunu savunmaktadır. Günümüz siyasî realizm literatürü ve Osmanlı fazilet ahlâkına dayalı karşılaş- tırmalı metotla, siyasetin mahiyeti ve insanın doğasına dair realist unsurları teşhis etmeden Osmanlı siyaset düşüncesinde ahlâkî argümanların siyaseti, devlet fikrini ve kurumları nasıl inşa ettiğini anlayamayacağı- mızı iddia ediyorum. Osmanlı fazilet ahlâkı geleneğinde ahlâkın her şeyi kapsadığına dair kanının aksine siyasetin mahiyeti itibariyle tekil, değişken, ahlâktan bir ölçüde bağımsız bir gerçeklik olarak anlaşıldığını gösteriyorum. Bununla bağlantılı olarak Osmanlı siyaset düşünce geleneğinde fazilet ahlâkından gelen in- sanın acziyeti anlayışının, siyasî aktörleri ve eylemleri değerlendirmede onu realist yapan unsur olduğunu ifade ediyorum. Son olarak ahlâkın kapsamı ve siyasetin mahiyetini (gerek birbirleriyle olan ilişkileri açı- sından gerekse de birbirlerinden bağımsız olarak varlıklarını) açıklamada tümeller probleminin nasıl bir rol oynadığına işaret ediyorum. Tümeller probleminin siyaset ve ahlâk arasındaki karmaşık ilişkiye dair getirdiği analitik ayrımları ılımlı siyasî realizmin kaynağı olarak sunuyorum.
This article surveys three possible ways to assess morality in the Hanfeizi. The first is the “traditional” outlook, according to which Han Fei disregards all moral considerations in politics. The second acknowledges the presence of moral questions in the text but maintains that it ultimately promotes amoralism as an essential feature of the Legalist state. A (less common) third way is to say that there is a moral core to Han Fei's political philosophy. I will defend the third way, which shifts the perception of the Hanfeizi from a mere manual of political manipulation to a comprehensive ideal vision for the world. This interpretation necessitates a recognition of how political morality can coherently exist alongside an apparent divide between private ethics and political action. This is something that those seeking more systematic forms of ethics in the Hanfeizi might overlook.
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 policies. Are Western democracies facing a rejection of politics? And is politics worth defending? This paper offers a vindicatory genealogy of politics, vindicating the need human beings have for this practice and clarifying the extent of its contemporary rejections. To achieve these contributions, the paper connects the literatures on pragmatic genealogy and on political realism, revealing how they can complement each other. Following pragmatic genealogy, the practice of politics is vindicated, because it meets an inevitable functional need for collectively binding decision-making. However, and importantly, political realism allows us to see that the functional mechanisms through which politics fulfills this need vary contextually and thus require careful empirical scrutiny. The paper thus dispels confusion about seeming rejections of politics by clarifying what is unavoidable, and what is revisable about politics.
Realism is conventionally understood as coldly accepting the powerful dominating the weak. Reversing this image, I argue that Realism contains an implicit ethos of resistance. Drawing on a recent scholarship on the historical complexity and diversity of classical Realism in international relations (IR), this article uncovers this ethos by focusing on three shifts of perspective: (1) from an extreme to moderate view of power politics; (2) from naturalizing the status quo to envisaging progressive change; and (3) from a horizontal view of politics among nations (or other horizontally situated entities) to a global image of power politics. I then explore how these shifts exist in a different scholarship, the emergence of a so-called new Realism in political theory. The article builds a conversation between classical Realism in IR and the new Realist philosopher Bernard Williams’ work, finding that both articulate an ethos of legitimate resistance to domination. The significance of the Realist ethos is that it challenges stereotyped images of the tradition justifying domination and injustices, and it inserts and positions a Realist voice in recent debates over human rights to resist in global politics.
Habermas’s notion of communicative action suggests a possible universalism of norms. Communicative action is a cognitive activity that enables us to reflect on and examine existing normative beliefs, insights, and ideas. If we can define communicative action as a democratic procedure of rational participation that every subject can achieve, the norms with universal validity can be concluded without engaging any ideology. This is the main task Habermas hopes discourse ethics can fulfill.
Dünyanın ortalama sıcaklığı artmaktadır. Hızlı nüfus artışı, kentleşme ve sanayileşme sonucunda kirletici gazların atmosfere salınmasıyla sera gazları oluşmaktadır. Ormanlar, beşerî faaliyetler sonucu ortadan kalkmaya devam ettikçe, karbondioksit seviyelerini kontrol altında tutan sistemler çökmektedir. Sonuç olarak, iklim değişikliği dünyanın en acil sorunu haline gelmiştir ve bununla bağlantılı olaylar artık güvenlik açısından da değerlendirilmektedir. Bu açıdan bakıldığında, iklim değişikliği bir çevre güvenliği sorunu haline gelmiştir. Geleneksel, ortak, insani ve ekolojik güvenlik, bu konuyu çeşitli açılardan ele almaktadır. Bu nedenle, bu araştırmanın amacı, küresel ısınmanın ulusal güvenliğe yönelik oluşturduğu tehditleri araştırmak ve bu sorunla mücadele için Avrupa Birliği’nin uygulamış olduğu güvenlik politikalarını güvenlik teorileri kapsamında incelemektir. Bu faktörleri değerlendirmek için kitaplar, dergiler, tezler ve internet kaynaklarını içeren kapsamlı bir literatür araştırması yapılmıştır. Bu çalışma kapsamında, öncelikle güvenlik kavramı detaylı bir şekilde araştırılmıştır. Daha sonra, güvenliğe yönelik teoriler incelenmiştir. Ardından iklim değişikliği ve iklim değişikliğine yönelik imzalanan antlaşmalar incelenmiştir. Son olarak, Avrupa Birliği’nin güvenlik politikaları değerlendirilmiştir.
This Element applies a new version of liberalism to international relations (IR), one that derives from the political theory of John Locke. It begins with a survey of liberal IR theories, showing that the main variants of this approach have all glossed over classical liberalism's core concern: fear of the state's concentrated power and the imperative of establishing institutions to restrain its inevitable abuse. The authors tease out from Locke's work its 'realist' elements: his emphasis on politics, power, and restraints on power (the 'Lockean tripod'). They then show how this Lockean approach (1) complements existing liberal approaches and answers some of the existing critiques directed toward them, (2) offers a broader analytical framework for several very different strands of IR literature, and (3) has broad theoretical and practical implications for international relations.
Many political realists endorse some notion of political normativity. They think that there are certain normative claims about politics that do not depend on moral premises. The most prominent moralist objections to political normativity have been metaethical: specifically, that political normativity is not genuinely normative; and that it is incapable of justifying normative claims. In this article, I criticize the latter metaethical objection. I argue that the objection presupposes a notion of ‘justification’ that renders it something that is no longer necessarily valuable to realists. I then extend this argument to show that all metaethical objections to political normativity are unsuccessful. Furthermore, insofar as these metaethical objections purport to constrain the types of politics that realists endorse, realists should regard them as another expression of what Raymond Geuss calls ‘dead politics’.
How should political leaders address the emerging climate crisis if citizens are reluctant to accept costly but necessary climate action? In this article, I address this question by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. I propose that the realist legitimacy framework provides action guidance by offering two broadly applicable heuristics for political agents: responsibility and responsiveness. These heuristics collide if citizens are unwilling to accept policies designed to secure a nation's long-term stability. Faced with this problem, some authors make the supposedly realist argument that policymakers in liberal democracies should prioritise responsibility over responsiveness and embrace eco-authoritarianism to address the climate emergency. Against this line of argument, I maintain that the realist legitimacy framework entails no such commitment. Instead, realists must emphasise that responsible climate action entails a sufficient degree of responsiveness. I conclude by sketching how this insight may guide democratic leaders and climate activists in the future.
With the essay "Human Rights: Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics", Lilian Bermejo-Luque explores the controversial aspects of the human rights debate, proposing some conditions through which they could represent a positive element of political life. In particular, Bermejo-Luque proposes the thesis of political minimalism, associated, on the one hand, with the idea that the essence of politics does not reside in conflict, and on the other hand, with a conception of political deliberation based on empirical considerations connected to what communities consider of particular importance. This paper intends to offer some food for thought along the line of reasoning proposed by Bermejo-Luque: firstly by presenting some observations on political minimalism, related to the weight of representation in politics and the complexity of certain political phenomena; this is followed by a reflection on conflict and the importance of justifying political choices to citizens, for which it seems difficult to establish boundaries on what is purely concrete and practical and what instead involves ethical considerations.
Der Beitrag versteht die Debatte um die angemessene Abstraktionshöhe von Gerechtigkeitstheorien als eine Diskussion darüber, ob (und an welcher Stelle) empirische Fakten bei der Konstruktion der Theorie berücksichtigt werden sollten. Aber wie lässt sich die Frage entscheiden, welchen Grad an Realismus beziehungsweise Utopismus eine Theorie der Gerechtigkeit haben sollte? Der Beitrag entwickelt hierfür zwei Kriterien: Erstens darf eine Gerechtigkeitstheorie nicht auf unzulässigen Idealisierungen beruhen, das heißt sie darf keine partikularen empirischen Fakten als universell gegebene voraussetzen und so ihren Geltungsbereich auf zu wenige Fälle einschränken. Zweitens darf eine Gerechtigkeitstheorie nicht zu abstrakt werden, indem sie von solchen Fakten abstrahiert, die für die Beschreibung von Gerechtigkeitsproblemen konstitutiv sind. Dieser Vorgang lässt eine Theorie zu stark utopisch werden. Als für Gerechtigkeitsfragen konstitutive empirische Fakten identifiziert der Beitrag, erstens, moralischen Dissens sowie, zweitens, Strukturen sozialer Macht. Als Folge dieser Überlegungen muss Rawls’ Unterscheidung zwischen idealer und nicht-idealer Theorie zugunsten eines kritischen und negativistischen Ansatzes verworfen werden.
Realist ideology critique (RIC) is a strand of political realism recently developed in response to concerns that realism is biased toward the status quo. RIC aims to debunk an individual's belief that a social institution is legitimate by revealing that the belief is caused by that very same institution. Despite its growing prominence, RIC has received little critical attention. In this article, I buck this trend. First, I improve on contemporary accounts of RIC by clarifying its status and the role of motivated reasoning. Second, I show that realist ideology critics face a dilemma: either their account makes deeply implausible epistemological assumptions, or they temper its epistemology at the expense of rendering it toothless. I argue for each horn in turn before revealing the dilemma to be a false one by making a novel distinction between varying strengths of RIC based on their underlying epistemological assumptions. I propose Moderate RIC as a solution: upon discovering that one reason for your belief that a social institution is legitimate is likely malignantly epistemically circular, the belief should undergo further epistemic testing. I respond to three potential objections and suggest that Moderate RIC would make a fruitful addition to political theorists' methodological toolkit.
Populism sets people against elites. Most discussions of populism focus on the dangers that come with assuming too homogenous a vision of a ‘pure’ people against a ‘corrupt’ elite. However, an obvious question to ask is what elites do, or might do, to court populists ire. In this paper, I draw on Michael Saward’s work on representation to construct an account of populism that focuses on the ways in which elites can conceivably corrupt (and have conceivably corrupted) the institutions responsible for generating the representative claims that are central to democratic life. Specifically, I will sketch an account of the way elites have operated, within the American context, to corrupt the representative functions performed by political parties, those centrally important institutions tasked with producing representative claims within contemporary capitalist, liberal, representative democracies. If we are to properly evaluate populism, whether as an ideology, movement or set of tactics, it is necessary to take seriously and evaluate the stories populists tell of how elites have corrupted democracy. To simply assume they are wrong and dismiss populist critiques of democratic failures as wrong is to replace critical analysis with elite apologism.
My response to Eva Erman & Niklas Möller's reply paper "The Problem of Political Normativity Understood as Functional Normativity"
Despite our fascination with dog-whistling, neither dog-whistling itself, nor the relationship between dog-whistling and democracy are well understood. This article separates the content from the technique of dog-whistling and develops a more precise conceptualisation of that phenomenon in order to untangle the ambiguity about it. Dog-whistling, it argues, should not be reduced to racism or verbal communication tactics but can be combined with various different worldviews, and can encompass a multiplicity of verbal and non-verbal communicative means which surreptitiously nudge or wink at a specific subgroup. Contra the prevalent conviction that dog-whistling is antithetical to democracy in toto, the article suggests that some manifestations of that phenomenon constitute a ‘lesser vice’ vis-à-vis a politics of zealous candour, and an ineluctable feature of democratic politics. This recognition has important implications for democratic theory, and recent lamentations that ours is an age of moral crisis, marked by the rise of post-truth politics.
When scholars, commonly classified by International Relations today as classical realists, arrived as refuges in the United States from the mid-1930s onwards, they experienced a Methodenstreit in the social sciences which was similar to the one they had been intellectually socialized in on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, the rise of positivistic science in the United States was partly stimulated by debates that American students and scholars like John Burgess, Talcott Parsons, Charles Merriam, Harold Laswell, and Willard Van Orman Quine had experienced during their sojourns in Central Europe. Most classical realists, by contrast, promoted a hermeneutical scholarship that contextualized knowledge within the (transcendental) contingency, ephemerality, and unknowability of life. Consequently, this kind of scholarship remained suspicious about the promises of modeling social sciences after the natural sciences and cautioned against the possibilities of making absolute truth statements, as argued for by naturalist philosophy. Choosing International Relations (and politics) as their field is, therefore, to be seen as a deliberate move to acknowledge the complexity of human life and the relations between them, as initially the discipline was interdisciplinary. To discuss this argument, this chapter draws on the personal and intellectual cosmos of Hans Morgenthau, arguably until today one of the most well-known classical realists.
This article applies qualitative dynamic content analysis to archival sources to demonstrate that religious identity was the primary motivation for Orthodox Greek Palestinians to join the Communist Party in 1948. Abandoned by the local Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, this sect of Palestinians hoped to gain the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Church. This was also their motive for supporting the plan of the United Nations to divide Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, in contradiction of the national consensus at the time. Marxist theory, depicted as cosmopolitan, multinational, and multisectoral, helped this group camouflage its sectoral organization within the party’s higher echelons. The article stresses the importance of examining time and place when investigating historical decisions of political groups, such as those of the Palestinian communists in Israel, that have a significant impact on the process of shaping collective identity.
‘Religion and politics’, as the old saying goes, ‘should never be discussed in mixed company.’And yet fostering discussions that cross lines of political difference has long been a central concern of political theorists. More recently, it has also become a cause célèbre for pundits and civic-minded citizens wanting to improve the health of American democracy. But only recently have scholars begun empirical investigations of where and with what consequences people interact with those whose political views differ from their own. Hearing the Other Side examines this theme in the context of the contemporary United States. It is unique in its effort to link political theory with empirical research. Drawing on her empirical work, Mutz suggests that it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.
A review of Rawls' last major statement of his position.
The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity. Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government--simply allowing markets to work won't do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life--such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes--and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.
This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.
Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison. By Stephen L. Elkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 416p. $35.00.
In this engaging book, Stephen L. Elkin offers an account of the politics necessary to realize the nation's aspirations for an American commercial republic, in which economic inequality is dramatically reduced, citizens engage in meaningful (and surprisingly powerful) local government, and both they and their representatives deliberate to promote the good of all. The starting point for Elkin's analysis is a familiar list of what ails America: growing economic inequality, declining “civic and political involvement,” economic insecurity particularly among the middle class, as well as weakening family structure. He argues that we will never resolve these problems until we first have a “compelling and comprehensive theory of republican political constitution” (p. 2). Although no clear explanation is given for what it means to have such a theory, Elkin implies that such a theory would be based on the interrelation of the economic and political order.
In all of its varieties, traditional liberalism is a universalist political theory. Its content is a set of principles which prescribe the best regime, the ideally best institutions, for all mankind. It may be acknowledged — as it is, by a proto-liberal such as Spinoza — that the best regime can be attained only rarely, and cannot be expected to endure for long; and that the forms its central institutions will assume in different historical and cultural milieux may vary significantly. It will then be accepted that the liberal regime's role in political thought is as a regulative ideal, which political practice can hope only to approximate, subject to all the vagaries and exigencies of circumstance. Nonetheless, the content of traditional liberalism is a system of principles which function as universal norms for the critical appraisal of human institutions. In this regard, traditional liberalism — the liberalism of Locke and Kant, for example — represents a continuation of classical political rationalism, as it is found in Aristotle and Aquinas, where it also issues in principles having the attribute of universality, in that they apply ideally to all human beings.
A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State. By Pierre Manent. Translated by Marc LePain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. $35.00.
Has the world outgrown politics? The conviction that it has, according to the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, is what animates sophisticated European thought today. The self-understandings of the creature, the parent, and, above all, the citizen have increasingly been displaced by that of the individual. And what an individual is is determined by the individual, and whatever he or she decides for him- or herself is dignified and deserves our respect. The idea of dignity is being liberated from any particular human content, from any particular conception of human goodness or morality. That means, among other things, that the idea of human rights has been liberated from any conception of civic or national obligation. So the idea of compulsory national military service is an affront to the individual's dignity, and in the name of human dignity the Europeans increasingly seem even to believe that they can unilaterally become pro-choice on war.
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Collected essays by Bernard Williams, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 196p. $29.95.
As the editor reminds us, until the early eighties Bernard Williams's very strong reputation was primarily as a moral philosopher (albeit he also contributed valuable work in epistemology). It was clear, however, that his views had important implications for politics and political theory (no more so than in the superb essay “The Idea of Equality,” the one earlier essay reprinted in this collection). And beginning in the eighties, perhaps influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin and the influence of the latter upon his thinking, Williams focused his thinking increasingly both on quite practical politics and on major issues in political theory. His interest in moral questions never waned, but his reflections concerning them almost always made connections to political and/or political theoretical issues.
Philosophy & Public Affairs 31.3 (2003) 211-245
In this article, I argue for a thesis, which I state in section d below, about the relationship between facts and normative principles (or, as I shall call them, for short, "principles"). A normative principle, here, is a general directive that tells agents what (they ought, or ought not) to do, and a fact is, or corresponds to, any truth, other than (if any principles are truths) a principle, of a kind that someone might reasonably think supports a principle. Note that, under the foregoing stipulations, it is not excluded that normative principles might themselves be facts in a different sense of "fact" from that which is here stipulated. Principles might, that is, be facts in the broader sense of "fact" in which all truths, including, therefore, true principles (if there are any), represent facts. I myself believe that there exist true normative principles, but the thesis about principles and facts to be defended here is, as I shall explain at q below, neutral with respect to whether any normative principles are truths.
I shall also explain in q why the very little (almost nothing) that I just said about what constitutes a fact suffices for my demonstrative purposes. I am happy for facts to be whatever my opponents in this debate, whose position I shall presently describe, (reasonably) understand them to be: my argument, so I believe, is robust across permissible variations in the meaning of "fact," and it is also neutral across contrasting conceptions of the relationship of fact and value. Nor does my view about facts and principles, or so I argue at l below, require me to take a position on the famous question of whether an "ought" can follow from an "is." It bears emphasis that the question that my thesis answers is neutral with respect to controversies about the objectivity of principles, the relationship between facts and values, and the "is-ought" question, and, let me add for good measure, the realism/anti-realism/quasi-realism/a-little-bit-of-realism-here-not-so-much-realism-there controversy. The question pursued here is distinct from those that dominate the meta-ethical literature, and, so far as I know, it is hardly discussed in that literature. You will inevitably misunderstand me if you assimilate the thesis I shall state to one within those familiar controversies.
The independent status of the issue canvassed here in relation to long-standing controversies makes the present discussion less interesting than it otherwise might be, in that it has a limited effect on those popular philosophical controversies, but also in one way more interesting than it otherwise might be, in that it addresses a relatively novel and, I think, consequential issue, an issue which philosophers don't argue about much, but about which most of them, either spontaneously or when appropriately provoked, display strongly opposed and unargued views, which each side finds obviously true: that circumstance suggests that there is something of a philosophical problem here, about which most philosophers are at least in part mistaken (because a view is unlikely to be obviously true if a goodly number of reflective thinkers believe it to be obviously false).
The thesis to be defended here contradicts what many people (and, I believe, most moral and political philosophers) are disposed to think, to wit, that our beliefs about matters of normative principle (including our beliefs about the deepest and most general matters of principle) should reflect, or respond to, truths about matters of fact: they should, that is,—this is how I am using "reflect" and "respond to"—include matters of fact among the grounds for affirming them. So, for example, many find it obvious that our beliefs about principles should reflect facts about human nature (such as the fact that human beings are liable to pain, or the fact that they are capable of sympathy for each other) and they also think that our beliefs about principles should reflect facts about human social organization (such as the tendency for people to encounter collective action problems, or for societies to be composed of individuals who have diverse interests, and...
The CharactersDeliberative Judgment of ActivismDeliberative Procedures are ExclusiveFormal Inclusion is not EnoughConstrained AlternativesHegemonic DiscourseNotes
Review of the book "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism" by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy', in Fishkin and Laslett (n. 58), pp. 102-20Against Deliberation
- Iris Marion
Iris Marion Young (2003) 'Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy', in Fishkin
and Laslett (n. 58), pp. 102-20. See also Lynn M. Sanders (1997) 'Against Deliberation',
Political Theory 25(3): 347-76.
Review Article: Liberalism and the Politics of Compulsion
- Marc Stears
Marc Stears (2007) 'Review Article: Liberalism and the Politics of Compulsion', British
Journal of Political Science 37: 543.
Perpetual Peace', appendix 1On the Disagreement between Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace
- I Kant
I. Kant, 'Perpetual Peace', appendix 1, in Kant (1970) 'On the Disagreement between
Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace', in Kant's Political Writings, ed.
n. 2. I return to this point below
- Williams
Williams (n. 4), p. 2, n. 2. I return to this point below.
14. Ibid. p. 135.
15. Ibid. p. 4.
A Theory of Justice, p. 3
- John Rawls
John Rawls (1971) A Theory of Justice, p. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stears (n. 29) is a superb summary of this strand of realism
- Mouffe
Mouffe (n. 42), pp. 17, 51; Philp (n. 6), 189. Stears (n. 29) is a superb summary of this
strand of realism.
See also Mark Philp Political Conduct, p. 1
- Ibid
Ibid. pp. 3, 77. See also Mark Philp (2007) Political Conduct, p. 1. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. Richard Bellamy in Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen (ed.) (2007)
Political Questions: 5 Questions on Political Philosophy, p. 20. London: Automatic Press.
arguing against Dworkin's claim that liberty and equality, rightly understood, cannot conflict
- Williams
Williams (n. 4), pp. 115-27 (arguing against Dworkin's claim that liberty and equality,
rightly understood, cannot conflict).
(n. 4), p. 13; emphasis in the original
- Williams
Williams (n. 4), p. 13; emphasis in the original.
A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State
- Pierre Manent
Pierre Manent (2006) A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, pp. 75,
163-4. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elkin (n.1), p. 255. Mouffe (n. 42), p. 24.
3; see also Raymond Geuss (2009) Philosophy and Real Politics
- Williams
(arguing against Dworkin’s claim that liberty and equality, rightly understood
- Williams