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Hope and Disappointment in Politics
Abstract
Disappointment is a familiar experience of political life and often blame for perceived political failure is rightly attributed to the failures of our politicians or the political system. The aim of this paper, however, is to argue that disappointment is an inevitable feature of politics because of limitations and constraints that are intrinsic to the political sphere. With this in mind the paper explores some of the ways in which political conflict unavoidably generates disappointment, how it shapes the specific manner in which its corollary of hope and the discourse of hope operates in the political sphere, and how disappointment relates to questions of political unity. Appreciating the inevitability of disappointment should both help overcome some of the prevalent illusions regarding political possibility, as well as calm our discontent with politics by adapting our expectations and assessment of political life accordingly.
... However, the intersection between hope and disappointment within activism is insufficiently studied. In studies on hope, disappointment is often described as the feeling of sadness or displeasure when hope remains unfulfilled or expectations are not met (Allam 2018;Bryant and Knight 2019;Jansen 2016Jansen , 2021Sleat 2013). ...
... Furthermore, I have unpacked how the intersection of hope and disappointment helped my interlocutors to deal with the strains of the present, renegotiate expectations of the future, and imagine political alternatives. Previous studies described disappointment often as the feeling of sadness or displeasure when hope remains unfulfilled or expectations are not met (Allam 2018;Bryant and Knight 2019;Jansen 2016Jansen , 2021Sleat 2013). This understanding of disappointment implies an almost passive affective state, while what I encountered among activists in Warsaw was a rather productive and future-oriented side of disappointments. ...
Polish citizens increasingly face ultraconservative anti-gender campaigns and serious
limitations of their reproductive rights. However, they have not silently accepted this populist shift in politics: since 2016, activists have started mass mobilisations in response. This ethnography focuses on the experiences of activists connected to Strajk Kobiet – a feminist grassroots movement – in the wake of the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal Court’s ruling. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, fieldwork illustrations, and additional secondary data, this study provides a deeper understanding of the intersection between hope and disappointment and how it enabled activists to deal with the strains of the present, renegotiate expectations of the future, and imagine political alternatives.
... Subsequently, in this article, we are forced to embark on a clearly inductive way of approaching the phenomenon and reasoning about it. We assume, however, that the underlying mechanism of the increase in disappointment does not differ from those that are well established in the social psychology and political science literature (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002;Russell, 2005;Sleat, 2013;Zeelenberg et al., 2000). ...
Some defenders of democratic rights and the rule of law are becoming increasingly frustrated by the European Union's inadequate response to democratic backsliding in countries like Poland and Hungary. This study focuses on Poland and introduces the concept of ‘Eurodisappointment’ to describe this new group, which is conceptually and empirically distinct from Euroscepticism. Rather than being Eurosceptic, the Eurodisappointed self-limit their Euroenthusiasm without opposing integration. Drawing on original survey data, we demonstrate that Eurodisappointment is particularly prevalent among women, opposition party voters, and those dissatisfied with the state of democracy in Poland. It is yet to be seen whether and how the concept of Eurodisappointment can be applied to studies of attitudes towards the European Union in other member states.
... By attributing hope or hopelessness to specific groups or developments, politicians can, for example, discursively create and strengthen divides within society (Boukala & Dimitrakopoulou, 2017). Moreover, by creating vague hopes of 'greatness' without exactly explicating what this should look like, people can be mobilized towards goals that will hurt them on the long run (Sleat, 2013). Furthermore, if collective hope is systematically disappointed, this can result in 'a widespread sense of affective malaise' or societal disillusionment (Kleist & Jansen, 2016) (Fig. 6). ...
What we hope for has a large impact on how we feel and behave. Research on the determinants and effects of a hopeful disposition is increasing in several academic fields, such as psychology, nursing and organizational studies. However, how hope is defined differs significantly between disciplines, leading to fragmentation in the insights that we can draw from this research. This systematic review aims to provide an extensive overview of the ascribed characteristics of the concept of hope in ten different academic fields. Using phenomenographic research methods, these characterizations are collected and categorized to offer a comprehensive conceptual framework of hope. The resulting framework comprises 7 themes and 41 sub-themes. We show how this framework can be used to obtain a fuller understanding of the concept of hope and of possible blind spots within specific research fields.
... Being overly optimistic might give people a distorted picture of reality and incentivize reckless behavior (Malmendier and Tate 2005). And naïve feelings of optimism without any evidence could be taken advantage of, or leave people apathetic in the face of serious threat or risk (Ojala 2012;Sleat 2013;Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2017). ...
This open access volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing research on hope theory by combining insights from both its long history and its increasing multi-disciplinarity. In the first part, it recognizes the importance of the centuries-old reflection on hope by offering historical perspectives and tracing it back to ancient Greek philosophy. At the same time, it provides novel perspectives on often-overlooked historical theories and developments and challenges established views. The second part of the volume documents the state of the art of current research in hope across eight disciplines, which are philosophy, theology, psychology, economy, sociology, health studies, ecology, and development studies. Taken together, this volume provides an integrated view on hope as a multi-faced phenomenon. It contributes to the further understanding of hope as an essential human capacity, with the possibility of transforming our human societies.
... Being overly optimistic might give people a distorted picture of reality and incentivize reckless behavior (Malmendier and Tate 2005). And naïve feelings of optimism without any evidence could be taken advantage of, or leave people apathetic in the face of serious threat or risk (Ojala 2012;Sleat 2013;Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2017). ...
As a topic of research in economics, hope has not been very prevalent. Following the neo-classical paradigm, economists have tended to focus on rationality, self-interest, and universals. A normative and subjective experience such as hope was not believed to fit well with this perspective. However, the development of several heterodox economic approaches over the past decades, such as behavioral economics, has led to renewed attention being given to emotion, subjectivity, and normativity. Economic research on concepts related to hope, such as anticipatory feelings, (consumer) confidence, expectations and aspirations has consequently increased. In general, these studies find that hopeful feelings have a strong motivating power for (economic) behavior. By and large, the effects of hope seem to be positive, ranging from longevity and health to innovation and well-being. Nonetheless, there have also been indications that prompt caution, for example when it comes to false hopes, disappointment, or possible manipulation of societal hope. The field of economics has gained much valuable insight from existing research but we argue that it could gain from further definitional clarity. We discuss the difference between hope and related concepts such as optimism, in particular when it comes to economic research, and suggest topics for future research that could benefit from a focus on hope.
... References to hope research can also be found in sociology (e.g., Jarymowicz and Bar-Tal 2006;Cohen-Chen, 2014;Petersen and Wilkinson, 2015), economics (e.g. Foster et al. 2012;Frijters et al. 2012;Foster and Frijters 2014;Lybbert and Wydick 2018) philosophy (Webb 2007;Martin 2011), and political science (Bar-Tal 2001;Drahos 2004;Cohen-Chen et al. 2013;Sleat 2013;Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2016), although there are clear differences in the research methodology and definitions used. Specifically, many studies in these fields focus more on expectations of improvement or deterioration of the economic, social or personal situation of a country or individual. ...
How we perceive the future can greatly affect how we feel in the present. Even a currently positive situation is hard to bear when we know the future will be grim. Indeed, previous research has found that more hopeful people are happier. However, both hope and subjective well-being are multidimensional concepts comprising emotion (i.e., anticipation and affect), cognition (expectation and satisfaction) and, to some degree, motivation. Since most studies include only one dimension of hope and subjective well-being, little is known about how different aspects of hope relate to different aspects of subjective well-being. This study aims to gain insight into these relationships by providing an overview of the existing empirical literature on hope and subjective well-being. Subsequently, cross-sectional data of a representative sample of the American population are used to further examine the relationship between hope and subjective well-being. Our findings from both the literature and our empirical analysis show that positive expectations are only weakly associated with all domains of subjective well-being, whereas cognitive and emotional hope are most strongly related to subjective well-being. This finding indicates that the more passive characteristics of positive expectations have less of an impact on subjective well-being than a more agentic hopeful disposition.
... The choice of engaging in prefigurative politics with or even without a pathway towards wholesale revolution, then, reminds us of how radical realist critique is anchored in a sober assessment of our political predicament and of our political imagination: "The stone block must be understood not simply as the material of the sculpture, but as its determining law, from which the figure is never free" (Gilbert, 2003, p. 61). That may be too pessimistic for the most wide-eyed radicals; nonetheless, it does not condemn us to pessimism, nor to the conservatism that is commonly associated with pessimism (Möller & Erman, 2018;Sleat, 2013b). The radical realist contention is that the possibility of eventual disappointment is a price worth paying for a form of critique that is both radical and faithful to the facts. ...
... 112 The prescient political significance of ex-resisters' stories of disappointment then lies not in trying to manage disappointment so that it does not develop "into emotions that more fundamentally challenge the political order." 113 Rather, their potential rests in their ability to revivify the promise of the transitional gap between no-longer and not-yet as an ephemeral opening for reconstituting relationships that govern the political world. The ex-resisters' efforts to come to terms with past losses and failures, I argued, can reveal the possibilities of resisting the pernicious dynamics of systemic violence and disclose forms of political participation that escape the binary between revolutionary violence and status quo as the only possible alternatives. ...
This essay examines how the disappointment of ex-resistance fighters can illuminate the grey zone of founding—the ambiguity of beginning anew against the background of systemic violence that eludes the predominant linear visions of transition. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s insights into the ambiguity of beginning anew as a practice of attunement that takes oppressive practices as points of departure for democratizing political action. I explore how the ex-resisters’ stories of disappointment can invigorate this practice, focusing on their ability to reorient political action towards reframing unjust relationships in a way that guards against systematic exclusions in the future. This essay demonstrates the political relevance of disappointment on the example of a South African ex-resister’s memoir, Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage. Govender’s narrative discloses how experiences of disappointment can orient the ex-resisters’ efforts to confront the complexities of founding obscured from the official story.
... The recognition that compromise, unlike consensus, reveals the existence of deep interpersonal disagreement, unearths the second way in which the idea that ours is an era of moral crisis is expressed. This way of thinking about our malaise also takes issue with our politicians' moral lapses-the compromises which typify 'politics-asusual', and the acts of betrayal and deception which compromises engender-but traces these to a wider moral decay in politics: our crisis stems from our public culture and structures of our political systems which are thought to be 'unfit for purpose', 'broken' and 'fragmented' (Sleat 2013). Despite, or, perhaps, because of popular support for democracy qua ideal (Stocker 2006a;Stocker and Hay 2015), some of the institutions which comprise the fabric of democratic societies have attracted considerable opprobrium. ...
Declining levels of political trust and voter turnout, the shift towards populist politics marked by appeals to ‘the people’ and a rejection of ‘politics-as-usual’, are just some of the commonly cited manifestations of our culture of political disaffection. Democratic politics, it is argued, is in crisis. Whilst considerable energy has been expended on the task of lamenting the status of our politics and pondering over recommendations to tackle this perceived crisis, amid this raft of complaints and solutions lurks confusion. This paper seeks to explore the neglected question of what the precise nature of the crisis with which we are confronted involves, and, in so doing, to go some way towards untangling our confusion. Taking my cue from Machiavelli and his value-pluralist heirs, I argue that there is a rift between a morally admirable and a virtuous political life. Failure to appreciate this possibility causes narrations of crisis to misconstrue the moral messiness of politics in ways that lead us to misunderstand how we should respond to disenchantment. Specifically, I suggest that: (i) we think that there is a moral crisis in politics because we have an unsatisfactorily idealistic understanding of political integrity in the first place; and (ii) it is a mistake to imagine that the moral purification of politics is possible or desirable. Put simply, our crisis is not moral per se but primarily philosophical in nature: it relates to the very concepts we employ—the qualities of character and context we presuppose whilst pondering over political integrity.
This chapter examines how the people of Kosovo responded to the failure of the hopes they held in the wake of the 2008 declaration of independence to materialise, as outlined in Chapter 7. When Kosovo declared independence, the vast majority of Albanians celebrated not just the event itself but the future it ostensibly heralded. As outlined in the previous chapter, this hope did not last. By the time of the 2019 general election in Kosovo, the public mood had changed markedly as illustrated by the election of Vetëvendosje. For many years Vetëvendosje had been portrayed as insignificant radicals; its emergence as the most popular party in Kosovo is remarkable, especially given that state capture was so pronounced in Kosovo, and the Albanian community was so reluctant to criticise the Internationals. In this chapter, I argue that the rise of Vetëvendosje was certainly a function of increased anger but crucially, unlike the rise of anger elsewhere in Eastern Europe—and indeed worldwide—during the same period, anger in Kosovo did not lead to increased support for an illiberal/authoritarian movement; though Vetëvendosje came to power promising major change, it is committed to democracy, liberal values, and international integration. The dashing of hopes in Kosovo thus precipitated a degree of despondency—as evidenced by the emigration and voter apathy discussed in the previous chapter—and some increased support for extremist groups, but overall, the result of hopes being dashed was constructive anger and the attendant rise of Vetëvendosje.
p>Human beings are ambitious and goal-oriented creatures. Many, for example, aim at stable and fulfilling careers, good health, and happy families. Some also pursue broader aims, such as social justice, technological progress, or scientific discovery. But with such ambition comes adversity. When our central aims come under threat, as they inevitably do, we often find ourselves pessimistic or fearful. Despair might threaten to take hold. It is thus tempting to look to hope and optimism as ways of withstanding, or even smothering, these negative emotions. But should we? This review is a detailed examination of the nature and value of hope and optimism.
By and large, American society affirms the value of hope and optimism. A brief glance at your local bookstore’s self-help section is sure to display such bestsellers as Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Live an Awesome Life. In similar fashion, politicians seeking votes regularly promise us hope. Here we are reminded of Barack Obama’s well-known HOPE t-shirts and George W. Bush’s slogan, “A safer world and a more hopeful America” (Stitzlein 2019a, p. 5). But are hope and optimism really all they’re cracked up to be?
There are growing doubts about the value of positive thinking. Speaking about the threat of climate change, Greta Thunberg remarks, “Adults keep saying, ‘we owe it to young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic” (2019, p. 22). In a memorable exchange between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the problem of political polarization, Coates asked, “I wonder how much hope you hold out for curing those institutional ills, those deepseated ills, in a way that we would all find peaceable.” Klein responded, “I’m not here to give you hope.” Coates then replied, “Good, because I don’t want it” (Klein, 18 Feb. 2020).
In these remarks, Thunberg, Coates, and Klein are speaking of hope rather than optimism. This is important because they are distinct phenomena. One of the key tasks of this review will be to pry apart these two forms of positive thinking. Central to the distinction is that while optimism implies confidence in a successful outcome, hope does not. There is thus a possibility of “hoping against hope” even when optimism is lost. Because hope and optimism are distinct, their respective advantages and disadvantages are best explored separately. Here I begin with optimism and move subsequently to hope. It can likewise be misleading to talk about whether hope and optimism are good “on the whole.” Such abstract pronouncements obscure the differing roles that hope and optimism play in distinct aspects of our lives. Consequently, this review focuses on the functions of hope and optimism in different domains, including, for instance, healthcare, education, and politics.
The primary subject of this review is the Hope and Optimism Initiative, a $4.5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation led by researchers at Notre Dame, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. This grant also supported numerous sub-projects for scholars working around the world. </p
Mannheim observed that generational memory is shaped by the prominent public events an age cohort experienced for the first time as young adults. For Jewish-Israeli millennials, born 1980–1995, their political coming of age was shaped by the failure of Oslo, cyclical violence, and Israel's pursuit of policies of population separation from Palestinians. This article draws on a wider, phenomenological study (2014–20) of post-Oslo generational memory of self-described hiloni (‘secular’ in Hebrew) millennials across the political spectrum from left to right. More richly theorizing and nuancing what is popularly assumed about this demographic, it argues that Oslo's legacy is hope-as-waiting behavior. It introduces Rengger's concept of the anti-Pelagian imaginary to discussions of attitudes to Occupation, making a case for more carefully specifying this sensibility by Jewish-Israeli demographic subgroup. To comparatively research hope amid intractable conflict calls for deeper analysis of hope-as-waiting as a category of action.
Narratives of hope are omnipresent in democratic life, but what can they tell us about the structure and orientation of politics? While common, they are often reduced to an all-compassing understanding that overlooks hope's various forms and implications. Democratic theory, however, lacks the theoretical language to attend to these distinctions. The aim of this essay is thus to define a collective and political account of hope and recover the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope. Drawing on the literature on hope and juxtaposing it with extracts from Harvey Milk's ‘The Hope Speech,’ I first distinguish its collective experience before turning to Hannah Arendt. While Arendt rejects a politics of hope that turns away from the world, exploring how she thinks with and against hope provides a theoretically fruitful approach that elevates the in-betweenness of its worldly expression. From that standpoint, I relate the work and experience of hoping with others to her notions of natality, action and promises. These three conceptual touchstones provide the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope and help situate a collective sense of possibility inherent in democratic politics.
‘Imperial overstretch’ and the role played by related ideational issues derived from particular liberal tenets and the United States’ belief in its ‘manifest destiny’ to lead the world have been regularly cited as explanations for why the United States’ ambitious project to transform the world in the post–Cold War era failed. In this article, I argue that these analyses have overlooked a crucial causal factor that also impelled the United States to undertake its ultimately doomed project: hope. I demonstrate that analyses of hope’s influence have found that while hope can exert a positive influence, it can also – if irrational – induce self-destructive behaviour. During the period of unipolarity, the United States repeatedly advanced teleological visions of a bright future for humanity routinely infused with the language of hope. I demonstrate that hope was, however, more than just a discursive device; it was itself a catalyst for the United States’ actions. I argue that a confluence of factors at the end of the Cold War aligned to impel the rapid emergence of a particular variant of hope – defined as ‘wilful hope’ – which inspired the United States to act as it did. I demonstrate how this disposition was evident in the rhetoric employed by both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush but also – more importantly – in the strategies they each implemented. Ultimately, this disposition played a crucial – though not exclusive – role in undermining international support for US leadership and precipitating the end of ‘the unipolar moment’.
The boundary problem in political theory concerns the question of the constitution of the demos, and the principle(s) and/or mechanism(s) that may be permissibly used for its demarcation. But what are the linguistic terms in which such demarcation acts should take place? I contend that the boundary problem is nested within a linguistic boundary problem, and that a normative consideration on the constitution of the demos cannot avoid the need to address the question of its linguistic constitution, particularly on the part of ‘talk-centric’ deliberative approaches to democratic citizenship and inclusion. I argue that conceptualising the demos in pre-linguistic, non-linguistic or otherwise linguistically-unaware terms has substantive and adverse implications for its legitimacy claims. I conclude the interrogation of the boundary problem and its linguistic variant by proposing a shift from an abstracted notion of communicative rationality, towards a more situated communicative linguistic and political culture, grounded in linguistic epistemic humility.
The unjust distribution of poor health outcomes produced via current United States food systems indicates the need for inclusive and innovative policymaking at the local level. Public health and environmental organizers are seeking to improve food environments from the ground up with locally driven policy initiatives but since 2010 have increasingly met resistance via state-government preemption of local policymaking power. This analysis seeks to understand how political actors on both sides of preemption debates use rhetorical argumentation. In doing so, we offer insights to the meaning-making process specific to food systems. We argue that advocates for local food-system innovations are forwarding understandings of food and community that contradict the policy goals they seek. We offer suggestions for local food and environmental advocates for adjusting their arguments.
The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers.
In times of a prevailing sense of crisis and disorder in modern politics, there is a growing sentiment that anger, despair or resignation are more appropriate attitudes to navigate the world than hope. Political philosophers have long shared this suspicion and shied away from theorising hope more systematically. The aim of this article is to resist this tendency by showing that hope constitutes an integral part of democratic politics in particular. In making this argument I draw on Kant’s conceptualisation of hope as a psychological condition on action under circumstances where the chances of making a difference are dim. Given that the Kantian agent avoids the threat of despair in the pursuit of political goals by placing trust in her fellow citizens, hope has the potential to positively transform democratic practices.
Written from the dual perspective of a political philosopher and social
analyst, this book is a rich—in many ways, indispensable—
source of conceptual information about Ukraine, Eastern Europe,
the European Union, and global modernity. Its primary subject is
the dirty, hybrid politics of Eastern Europe but even more so, its
human substance—those traumatized, depressed and awkward
but intrepid, entrepreneurial, and ultimately optimistic women and
men whom Mikhail Minakov aptly calls “Post-Soviet Homo Politicus.”
This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political, and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice, and from the nature of political judgment. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position, and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought.
The place of reconciliation in processes of conflict transformation is a deeply contested political issue. Reconciliation has played differing strategic roles in a variety of conflictual contexts. In some instances, such as Northern Ireland in the 1990s, the demands of reconciliation and the pursuit of truth seemed a step too far in the process of reducing political violence. In others, such as South Africa, it was a pivotal part of the transformative dynamic offering hope for a more unified post-apartheid settlement. Meanwhile in contemporary Australia, the idea of reconciliation continues to provide a rhetorical framing for the renegotiation of indigenous politics. This paper analyses these differing approaches to and uses of reconciliation and contends that they are underpinned by political narratives which invoke emotions of fear, hope and disappointment. This suggests that understanding these sentiments is fundamental to addressing the temporal challenges of the politics of reconciliation and the structural–agential dynamics of conflict transformation.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in language among political philosophers. While being, on the whole, a positive development, the considerable focus of this literature on the issue of linguistic justice paradoxically limits the breadth and depth of that emerging inquiry, by reducing the conceptual vocabulary intrinsic to the much broader notion of ‘language ethics’. The paper examines the general theoretical question of the primacy of justice, and questions the adequacy of its prioritisation of the right (i.e. justice) over the good (i.e. benevolence) with regard to language. Such prioritising, it is suggested, does not only diminish the importance of the good in a moral philosophy of language, but also risks, in certain cases, its challenging and even rejection. The paper then moves on to explore the notion of the ‘dialogical self’ as a preferable alternative for theorising language ethics (including linguistic justice) in a manner that is more commensurable with the simultaneous function of language as both a medium and a message of moral relationality. The intrinsic plurality of a dialogical self-based notion of language ethics, it is proposed, calls for a wider moral vocabulary that, alongside justice, comprises other key elements, such as friendship, empathy and hope.
Disappointment is often identified as a pathology of modern politics; citizens expect much of politicians, yet governments are ill-equipped to deliver outcomes commensurate with those expectations. The net result is said to be a widespread disappointment; a negative balance between what citizens expect of government and what they perceive governments to deliver. Yet little attention has hitherto been paid to which kinds of citizens are particularly disappointed with politics, and why. This article offers one of the first empirical analyses of political disappointment. Drawing on a survey conducted in Britain, it provides a quantitative measure of
political disappointment and explores its prevalence among citizens. It then considers which social groups might be more prone to disappointment than others. In particular, it explores whether certain groups are more disappointed by virtue of holding very high expectations of government or very low perceptions of government
performance. The article concludes by considering what strategies might be open to policy makers to alleviate political disappointment.
This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought.
Can liberal ideals clean up dirty politicians or politics? This article doubts they can. It disputes that a ‘clean’ liberal person might inhabit the dirty clothes of the real politician, or that a clean depoliticised liberal constitution can constrain real world dirty politics. Nevertheless, the need for a democratic Prince to wear clean liberal gloves offers a necessary and effective political restraint. However, it also means that citizens share the hypocrisy and dirt of those who serve them - for we legitimise the dirtiness of politics by requiring politicians to seem cleaner than we know they ever can be in reality.
Many contemporary political thinkers are gripped by the belief that their task is to develop an ideal theory of rights or justice for guiding and judging political actions. But inPhilosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss argues that philosophers should first try to understand why real political actors behave as they actually do. Far from being applied ethics, politics is a skill that allows people to survive and pursue their goals. To understand politics is to understand the powers, motives, and concepts that people have and that shape how they deal with the problems they face in their particular historical situations. Philosophy and Real Politicsboth outlines a historically oriented, realistic political philosophy and criticizes liberal political philosophies based on abstract conceptions of rights and justice. The book is a trenchant critique of established ways of thought and a provocative call for change.
- Niebuhr R.