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Editorial: The ‘political turn’ in political theory
Abstract
The editorial examines the emergence of a political turn that refocuses on what is specifically political about political thinking. It positions that turn as one of a series of attempts to revitalise an interest in the political, but claims that most such attempts have not separated politics from ethics, not have they examined the many core micro-features of thinking politically. Building on the analysis offered in the author's The Political Theory of Political Thinking, the second part of the editorial applies the general features identified there to the various outlets afforded to them by different ideological families. The ubiquity of core features of thinking politically is accompanied by the diversity of their concrete delivery through those families.
... 2. The phrase "political turn" has appeared in a number of articles, most often in relation to ethics and philosophy (e.g., Freeden, 2014). I just mean a shift toward grounding accountability in public/political processes as opposed to private and religious ones. ...
“Violence” and “nonviolence” are, increasingly, misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā—used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for rereading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically, making it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New terminology could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and, thereby, prevent misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: ego-detachment, universal love, and seeking truth by experiment.
... Secondly, the very point of important contributions to these debates is to orient political theory away from the justification of normative principles or at least from being primarily concerned with justifying normative principles. Consider for example interpretive realism (Freeden, 2012(Freeden, , 2014Horton, 2017), Geuss' (2008, 2010 radical realism or Thomas Fossen's (2013 approach to legitimacy. ...
The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the promise and limits of this uniting theme for the future of political theory. However, The Practical Turn is driven by selective portrayals, omissions and misrepresentation, and hence is not a good source to turn to for understanding the debates it surveys or whether they manifest a ‘practical turn in political theory’ or not; rather, it serves as a warning of how struggles over power can influence and even structure seemingly the most purely intentioned of practices.
... The solutions for this dichotomy offered by the revision-and reform-oriented realists are usually a division of labor between critical but abstract philosophizing, responsible for the principles or ideals, which is more or less taken over from liberal-normativist political theory, followed by a separate social science application (Swift and White 2008;Hamlin and Stemplowska 2012). Freeden's interpretive realism can be viewed to suggest a division of labor between the interpretive study of political language and rhetoric and normative philosophizing (Freeden 2005(Freeden , 2008(Freeden , 2012(Freeden , 2014 which follows a similar model. These solutions reinforce the (categorical) schism between the descriptive and the evaluative, either in the working out of principles by liberalnormativist political theory which are then handed over to empirically minded social scientists, who apply them with their social science-toolkit to specific historical contexts, or in the separation between the normatively charged 'ethico-political' philosophizing and the ethically non-evaluative interpretation of political language in order to detect what politics is in a specific context. ...
This thesis intervenes into the current debates about realism in political theory. Realism is a new challenge to the liberal mainstream in political theory. However, the extent to which realism, in its heterogeneity, actually has the potential to pose such a challenge, has thus far remained largely unexplored. The thesis offers the first differentiated assessment of this potential of realism and, finding it limited, embarks on a radicalization of realism. Having established a critical foil through a political reading of Rawls’ Political Liberalism, I divide contributions to realism into those who aim to revise, reform and reject liberal-normative political theory. This ‘ordering perspective’ of realism allows analyzing the thus far neglected similarities between realists and their liberal-normative opponents. This analysis suggests that the less critical subdivisions of realism limit themselves to be internal correctives to the liberal mainstream. However, even the most critical and challenging of the prevalent subdivisions of realism, which I call ‘vision of politics’ realism, remains caught in tensions between realist and liberal-normative commitments. In reaction to this limitation, my re-interpretation of Raymond Geuss’ realism as a modification of early Critical Theory through Foucauldian elements provides the basis for the development of a radical realism. This radical realism departs radically from the prevalent understandings of liberal-normative political theory and transcends the limitations of realism through changing the relationship between political theory and its political context. Radical realism brings the tensions and entanglements between normative and descriptive aspects of political theorizing into view and bases its critical purchase and practical orientation on the diagnostic examination of the political context. A discussion of the criteria for legitimacy in public justification liberalism, realism and radical realism finally ties together the argumentation of the thesis and offers a reflection on its bearing on a key question of contemporary political theory.
Is it possible to do ideology critique without morality? In recent years a small group of theorists has attempted to develop such an account and, in doing so, makes claim to a certain sort of “radical realism” distinguished by the ambition to ground political judgments and prescriptions in nonmoral values, principles, or concepts. This essay presents a twofold critique of this realist ideology critique (RIC) by first offering an internal critique of the approach and then arguing that the very attempt to do political theory generally—and ideology critique more specifically—in a way that abjures morality is misguided. In doing so, I contribute both to current debates around “new” ideology critiques and to contested questions about what it means to do political theory realistically.
The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā -- which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words – associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past -- capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles, better than “violence” and “nonviolence” do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of “violence” reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.
p>The title of the article refers to P. Manent’s essay, describing “the return of political philosophy”. Using the distinction between science and art, suggested by thinkers such as J.S. Mill, an analysis was made of the possible responses of legal theory to the so-called “political turn” in social sciences and humanities. Attempts were made to show that transplanting such terms as “politics”, “the political”, “polity” (in the text they function under more theoretically neutral term: “politicalness”) into the field of legal discourse leads to the rejection of the so far dominant (referring to the ideal of Ch. Montesquieu) image of the activity of lawyers as “artisans” practicing the art of law and to replacing it with the image of a lawyer-artists or lawyer-scientist.</p
This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This framework calls for close interpretive analysis of the ways in which disputes about the crime question are always in part contests between different political ideologies and the meaning and significance of their defining concepts. By revisiting penal developments of recent several decades with these questions in mind, one can get closer to the heart of what is at stake when crime is being discussed and acquire a better sense of why crime and its control are legitimately the subject of politics.
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.
Gaia, the name of the Greek earth goddess which has been applied by the author to his hypothetical cybernetic atmospheric modulatory system, appears to be the only tenable solution to several difficulties inherent in an examination of the chemistry of the earth's atmosphere from the standpoint of classical equilibrium chemistry. The author argues that lif itself has modified the atmosphere and its cyclical processes so that conditions did, and do, not depart significantly from optima. This optimization process is presumably still operating and forces a reappraisal of the concern of some environmentalists over such problems as air pollution, to the neglect of potentially more serious tamperings with Gaian mechanisms, for example increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. - Nick Pinder
The article investigates failures of political thinking as a normal and endemic phenomenon, yet one that is theoretically under-conceptualised. It postulates three criteria for such failure: (1) the failure to deliver ideationally what the political theory in question has itself undertaken through its creator(s) to deliver; (2) the failure to take on board the constraints imposed on the initial construction of a theory or argument by the features and structure of political concepts; and (3) the failure of the specific epistemologies and ideologies that underlie political theorising to confer sufficient conclusiveness on the theories that emerge from them. The underlying causes of those three criteria invoke, in turn, three problems with political language and argument: first, the impossibility of keeping meaning constant over time; second, the indeterminacy that surrounds the eliciting and defining of the concepts and values a theory desires to promote; and third, the inevitable ineffectiveness of offering sufficient comprehensive detail in prescribing paths of political change or reform. Focusing on normatively prescriptive political thinking with regard to the construction of political macro visions and single overarching regulative principles, the article examines classical and contemporary instances of political thought. It studies their failures in the forms of uncontrollable and absent temporal trajectories of argument; conceptual polysemy and decontestation; and the impediments normative thinking encounters when applied to the distinctive circumstances of every individual. Finally, it dismisses any necessary connection between theories of failure and conservatism, arguing instead that liberal epistemologies can accommodate some salient conceptual failures in thinking about politics. The article concludes that modest failure and temporary success may not be that distinct from one another; anything more spectacular in either direction should cause political theorists to ponder.
Public Philosophy in a New Key
- J Tully
J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key. Vol. 1: Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);