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Legitimacy in Realist Thought: Between Moralism and Realpolitik
Abstract
What, if anything, can realism say about the normative conditions of political legitimacy? Must a realist political theory accept that the ability to successfully employ coercive power is equivalent to the right to rule, or can it incorporate normative criteria for legitimacy but without collapsing into a form of moralism? While several critics argue that realism fails to adequately differentiate itself from moralism or that it cannot coherently appeal to normative values so as to distinguish might from right, this article seeks to help develop a realist account of legitimacy by demonstrating how it can successfully and stably occupy this position between moralism and Realpolitik. Through this discussion, however, the article also argues that political rule necessitates the use of coercive power which is (at best) imperfectly legitimated, and that this blurs the distinction between politics and successful domination which lies at the heart of many recent accounts of political realism. In at least this sense, realism retains important and under-acknowledged affinities to Realpolitik.
... Since Williams, many realists have converged on viewing legitimacy as a promising avenue to ground normative criticism without relying on moral ideals external to the political sphere (e.g. Rossi 2012;Sleat 2014a;Hall 2015;Sagar 2018;Cozzaglio 2020;Cross 2020a). ...
... 4 Though some realists object to this emphasis on legitimacy (for example, Bagg 2022). 5 Starting with the classic work of Bernard Williams on the Basic Legitimation Demand(Williams 2005), the topic was then picked up by the second generation of realists Enzo Rossi(Ceva and Rossi 2013;Rossi 2012; Argenton 2020), Matt Sleat(Sleat 2013;2014a;2015) and John Horton(Horton 2010;2012;. Many other realists subsequently developed and refined this research strand, e.g.(Hall 2015;Sagar 2018;Westphal 2021; Prinz 2022b;2022a;Prinz and Rossi 2021;Cozzaglio 2020; Cross 2020a;2020b;. ...
... 4 Though some realists object to this emphasis on legitimacy (for example, Bagg 2022). 5 Starting with the classic work of Bernard Williams on the Basic Legitimation Demand(Williams 2005), the topic was then picked up by the second generation of realists Enzo Rossi(Ceva and Rossi 2013;Rossi 2012; Argenton 2020), Matt Sleat(Sleat 2013;2014a;2015) and John Horton(Horton 2010;2012;. Many other realists subsequently developed and refined this research strand, e.g.(Hall 2015;Sagar 2018;Westphal 2021; Prinz 2022b;2022a;Prinz and Rossi 2021;Cozzaglio 2020; Cross 2020a;2020b;. ...
For political realists, legitimacy is a central requirement for the desirability of political institutions. Their detractors contend that it is either descriptive, and thus devoid of critical potential, or it relies on some moralist value that realists reject. We defend a functionalist reading of realist legitimacy: descriptive legitimacy, i.e., the capacity of a political institution to generate beliefs in its right to rule as opposed to commanding through coercion alone, is desirable in virtue of its functional role. First, descriptive legitimacy plays an evaluative role: institutions can fail to convince citizens that they have a right to rule and can be ranked by how well they do so. Second, descriptive legitimacy plays a normative role, because if an institution fails to convince subjects of its right to rule, this gives them a reason not to comply with its directives, even if it satisfies philosophers' standards for possessing such right.
... Las características esenciales de la política son el desacuerdo, el conflicto y el poder (Sleat, 2018;Williams, 2005;McQueen, 2017). La normatividad de un régimen político consiste en distinguir si su coerción es aceptable o si gobierna a través de la dominación y el miedo (Sleat, 2014;Williams, 2005). El tema que une a estas tres propuestas es plantear un enlazamiento entre el modus vivendi y la democracia agonista desde una perspectiva realista. ...
... Esto coincide con la "Demanda Básica de Legitimidad" propuesta por Bernard Williams, en la que la legitimidad del poder debe tener sentido según las creencias, intereses y valores de quienes integran la comunidad política (2005). Lo que implica que la legitimidad de un orden político es contextual (Jubb & Rossi, 2015) y que, dada la pluralidad de valores, es gradual y no dicotómica (Sleat, 2014). ...
Esta nota de investigación presenta algunos de los problemas y argumentos para la formulación de un modelo teórico de estabilidad política y democracia desde una perspectiva realista. El problema de investigación concierne al tipo de democracia requerida para la estabilidad de un modus vivendi en un régimen liberal considerando una concepción realista de la política. La hipótesis que se postula es que la democracia agonista es la concepción de democracia adecuada para la estabilidad política de un modus vivendi si se toman en cuenta los postulados del realismo político contemporáneo. La metodología propuesta consiste en definir las relaciones conceptuales entre democracia y modus vivendi con el realismo político
... There are many lists on the market enumerating the criteria of what constitutes the distinctively realist political outlook in political theory (e.g. Galston 2010;McQueen 2018;Sleat 2013). From the perspective of this paper, the single most important issue mentioned in these lists is the dividing line between realism and what realists see moralism ('applied morality', 'the ethics-first view'). ...
... For further details: Cozzaglio 2022; Hall 2020;Horton 2012;Sleat 2014. For a critical discussion seeBavister-Gould 2013. ...
The paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule). Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides people with sufficient reason for complying with those political authority claims whose source is that particular polity. The paper will explain that membership in a polity is constituted not by communitarian identification (Horton), nationhood (Tamir), joined commitment/plural subjectivity (Gilbert), but by the fact that people are stably exposed to political authority claims associated with a particular polity which they find making sense as passing the minimal normative threshold for a distinctively political form of rule (as opposed to the rule of terror or sheer coercion). This political-ethical phenomenon is widely known as political obligation but the paper will argue that the label is in fact a misnomer because it does not refer to a generic obligation. The implications of this account are manifold but two seem especially important: first, the notion of political obligation makes sense even beyond the realm of moralist political theory and, second, realist political theory should pay more attention to the problem of compliance than it used to do.
... Any realist acceptability theory, I argue, will struggle to hold 'acceptability to all' as a necessary condition for legitimacy, because of the notion of acceptability they use. 31 Other accounts which fit into this category, as I have defined it, include Horton's (2012Horton's ( , 2018) and Sleat's (2014) accounts of legitimacy. Beetham's (2013) account also stresses the justifiability of rule in terms of subjects' beliefs and hence appears to fit well into this category -but his account is multifaceted and includes, over and above this kind of 'acceptability', conditions on legality and evidence of consent. ...
... What 'makes sense', in turn, can only be understood by a process of interpretation. Horton (2012Horton ( , 2018 and Sleat (2014) also advance versions of realist acceptability theories which seem to require a degree of interpretation in order to yield judgements of legitimacy. According to Horton, legitimacy depends on the congruence between rule and what he calls the "salient criteria of legitimacy that are practically operative" in the given historical and political circumstances (2012, p. 142). ...
This thesis is an investigation of realist theories of political legitimacy, with a particular focus on two realist accounts of legitimacy – those of Amanda Greene (2019) and Bernard Williams (2005). Many theorists have taken the view that realist accounts of legitimacy clearly provide an insufficient normative standard of legitimacy. This thesis provides a challenge to such critics by offering a partial defence of (some kinds of) realist accounts of legitimacy as providing a viable normative standard of legitimacy. The thesis argues, first, that realist theories of legitimacy have more impressive normative implications than might be thought, and second, that there are good reasons to reject forms of critique of realist legitimacy based on ‘external’ moral standards. This latter argument is based on an understanding of realist legitimacy as offering an ‘internalist’ standard for the moral evaluation of states’ rule.
... Leader-Maynard and Worsnip advocate the strong reading. 32 See also, Philp (2007), Newey (2013), Sleat (2013Sleat ( , 2014, Waldron (1999). ...
... 36 34 In some ways, this is similar to the view that political theory can benefit from an 'ethnographic sensibility' which prompts us to start the process of normative theorizing from the situated experience of ordinary agents, as proposed in Longo and Zacka (2019) and further discussed in Baderin (2021Baderin ( , 1744, who reemphasis 'the value of grounding normative theory in close engagement with everyday lived experience'. 35 Where it is not, it is either strongish realism-as in the radical realist camp-or certain forms of realism that eschew any other overtly metanormative claim (see Hall 2015;Jubb 2017;McQueen 2018;Sleat 2014). 'Realism on this reading does not set politics against ethics per se; instead it is an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse,' say Hall and Sleat (2017, 280). ...
The political psychologists Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith accuse orthodox moral foundations theory of predicting what is already intrinsic to the theory, namely that moral beliefs influence political decision-making. The authors argue that, first, political psychology must start from a position which treats political and moral beliefs as equals so as to avoid self-justificatory theorising, and second, that such an analysis provides stronger evidence for political attitudes predicting moral attitudes than vice versa. I take this empirical result as a starting point to intervene in a debate in contemporary normative political theory which has, to my mind, become largely unwieldy: the political realism controversy. I advise the realists to ‘downplay’ the (thus far) inconclusive debate over realism’s metanormative standing in favour of a non-metanormative inquiry. Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith’s study makes for an excellent backdrop. It affirms the realist hypothesis that politics is in some relevant sense – a causal, psychological sense – prior to morality.
... It retains the descriptive insight that legitimacy depends on the alignment between the rulers' actions and the ruled's beliefs, but does not accept the Weberian view that ruling power necessarily generates its own support. Pace the Weberian inclinations of some 'ordorealist' accounts (Sleat 2014; Cozzaglio & Greene 2019), radical realism introduces a critical dimension by assessing whether beliefs in legitimacy are shaped by ideologically distorted processes. This ensures that empirical accounts of legitimacy are not only about how power is perceived but also critically examine whether such perceptions are epistemically justified. ...
This paper examines how radical realism, a form of ideology critique grounded in epistemic rather than moral normativity, can illuminate the relationship between ideology and political power. The paper argues that radical realism can have both an evaluative and a diagnostic function. Drawing on reliabilist epistemology, the evaluative function shows how beliefs shaped by power differentials are often epistemically unwarranted, e.g. due to the influence of motivated reasoning and the suppression of critical scrutiny. The paper clarifies those mechanisms in order to address some recent critiques of radical realism. The paper then builds on those clarifications to explore the how tracing the genealogy of legitimation stories can diagnose the distribution of power in society, even if ideology does not play a direct stabilising role. This diagnostic function creates a third position in the debate on ideology between culturalists and classical Marxists, and it can help reconciling aspects of structural and relational theories of power.
... 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.
... While realists think about political norms such as prudence, security, and trust, recently Williams' notion of legitimacy seems to have gripped their hearts and minds the most. This is because it provides a novel way of thinking about the justification of political power that is not based on moral pre-commitments; a shift from the predominant focus within political theory on justice to another norm by which we might understand politics [23]. ...
Discussions about artificial intelligence invariably include a nod to ethics. AI ethics has permeated the growing discourse surrounding AI, leading to numerous frameworks and principles intended to guide ethical design. This widespread surge in AI discussions, both academic and public, underscores a significant gap in normative political theory, a gap that urgently needs addressing. Although AI ethics as applied moral philosophy has been criticised as decontextualising AI or as outright useless, there remains a profound lack of understanding the proper political normativity of AI. The critique of AI ethics typically focuses only on feasibility concerns or moral harms, approaches that fail to capture the normative sources from which AI as a political phenomenon draws. The result is a depoliticisation of AI, risking further mystification and giving AI providers the means to justify illegitimate power relations. By leveraging the recent realism-moralism debate in normative political theory, I aim to show that the realist tradition can be the unexpected corner from which we can study these consequences and suggest a substantively different approach to AI in future, moving from AI ethics to AI realism.
... 9-12). He also acknowledges that regimes will be imperfectly legitimated, which means that there is some degree of successful domination involved (see, e.g., Cozzaglio & Greene, 2019;Sleat, 2014a). ...
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.
... When juxtaposed with other IR theories, it comes as no surprise that realism is taken to be the philosophical foundation that enables the legitimization of Weberian violence (Kunz, 2010;Turner & Mazur, 2009;Barkawi, 1998) as a rational action undertaken to prevent the withering away of the state (Sleat, 2014). It can thus be said that the manner in which states rationalize their approach to armed conflict of any kind is foundationally rooted in and informed by realism, and practiced through the method of realpolitik (Dias, 2020). ...
International Relations theory, in spite of having undergone several epistemic iterations, continues to analyze urban warfare via outdated perspectives. This is exemplified in the state-centric analyses that dominate the literature on the history of Israel-Palestine. There is an overwhelming concentration on policy and belligerent behaviors and little to no consideration of anthropocentric perspectives. This results in a near-total exclusion of human suffering from discussions of the conflict and its impacts on everyday civilian life, which in turn heavily alters the socio-political foundations. The academic domains of critical theory and human geography have, however, made good progress in capturing the severity of these discourses, enabling a nuanced understanding of the manner in which conflict management takes place. This paper aims to unify these perspectives and in so doing, expand the grammar of realpolitik – identifying it as a competent domain of IR that primarily focuses on conflict and its modalities. Making use of diffractive reading and analysis, this paper showcases the impact of realpolitik from the perspective of those affected. The aim is to inject empathy into contemporary mainstream discussions that deal with complex geopolitical situations such as Israel-Palestine. To that end, post-structuralist perspectives from continental philosophy, human and critical geography and affect theory are employed. Additionally, the philosophy of realism is theorized to be the epistemic foundation of realpolitik, and is subsequently dissected. The paper concludes by arguing for interdisciplinary approaches into the existing subject matter of realpolitik, a re-evaluation of the epistemic foundations and reflections on practical novelties. Note that this paper in no way aims to suggest political solutions, legal interventions or strategic shifts, but rather interprets the methods of urban warfare used by the Israeli Defense Forces, which defies traditional operational logic.
... That is why his realism can be clearly distinguished from the common (and somewhat misguided) understanding of realism, which can be associated with international relations realism, power politics, self-interest, Realpolitik, 5 Hall and Sleat 2016, 8. 6 Hall 2013, 10. 7 North 2010, 381. 8 Galston 2010, 408. 9 Horton 2010Sleat 2014, 317. 10 North 2010, 384. 11 Bew 2014, 50. ...
Bernard Williams’s “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory” is without question one of the central texts of liberal political realism. The success of the text is due to its influential critique of dominant liberal approaches – primarily that of John Rawls –, and in its distinct approach to the grounding of liberalism itself. Even though Williams’s text had a great impact on contemporary political theory, understanding its philosophical foundations is unfairly neglected in academic discourse. The aim of this paper is to show the fundamental view behind Williams’s rejection of moralism that dominates political thinking. The strength of Williams’s approach is that it makes it clear that rationality has a limited authority in morality as well as in politics, and that it redefines the relation between morality and politics. Williams’s view has its own set of challenges, which come forward expressly in his account of legitimacy. Nevertheless, Williams’s realist arguments are indeed compelling for contemporary theorists.
... We will show that this tradition offers methodological insights that can be brought to bear on the issue of non-participatory attitudes and their implications concerning legitimacy. 8 Similar to the unmediated realist approach, reflective realism, as we construe it, starts with a commitment to a bottom-up, internalist conception of legitimacy according to which citizens' beliefs and preferences (including preferences and beliefs about participation) must be the starting point for questions concerning legitimacy (Williams 2005;Horton 2010Horton , 2012Rossi/Sleat 2014;Sleat 2014;Cozzaglio 2020a). Yet, in contrast to unmediated realism, reflective realism requires critical scrutiny of citizens' expressed beliefs and attitudes before normative conclusions about legitimacy are drawn. ...
In this article, we argue that reflective realism offers a plausible methodology that takes nonparticipatory attitudes and beliefs seriously as candidates for legitimacy while simultaneously offering tools through which a critical distance on these attitudes and beliefs can be obtained. Against unmediated realism, according to which non-participatory attitudes warrant the conclusion that democracy ought to be non-participatory, we emphasize that they cannot serve as inputs for bottom-up legitimacy reconstructions when they are conditional upon detrimental features of the political system. In this context, we distinguish between two types of conditionality, unknown and known, and show how they necessitate two forms of critical engagement: ideology critique and a method of elicitation. Finally, we argue that Landemore’s open democracy paradigm, with some important modifications, offers a solution to the ambiguity (some citizens want to participate, some will be reluctant) that realists may encounter in their bottom-up legitimacy reconstructions since it accommodates participatory and nonparticipatory attitudes alike.
... Political realism tends to foreground politics, its meaning (Williams, 2005b), its point and purpose (Sangiovanni, 2008), or its function (Burelli, 2020). The thought is roughly that no human group can survive the ravages of disagreement and conflict without a legitimate system of adjudicating competing claims about what to do as a collective, i.e., politics (Sleat, 2014). ...
Is democracy a realistic political ideal? This paper historically recovers and normatively assesses Machiavelli's intuition that democratic institutions are realistically desirable in virtue of their resilience. The paper takes inspiration from Machiavelli's work in two ways. Methodologically, it argues that there is a distinctive realist normativity based on political virtues, i.e., those skills that are instrumentally required to thrive in politics. Substantively, it probes Machiavelli's idea that the most important political virtue, for both individuals and institutions, is resilience: the ability to continuously adapt to new circumstances. Machiavelli observes that democratic regimes are very resilient because, while individuals cannot change their character to adapt to new circumstances, democracies can just change the individual in charge. The paper then refines Machiavelli's intuition by building on the contemporary distinction between stability and resilience. It claims that authoritarian regimes are more stable, and yet less resilient. Democracies are instead characterized by a continuous flux of political outputs, which makes them seemingly wavering, and yet better equipped to experiment with unconventional adaptations that allow societies to survive extraordinary challenges. The two different literatures thus complement each other. The debate on resilience usefully clarifies and systematizes Machiavelli's intuition. Conversely, Machiavelli's work reveals the salience of resilience in politics, and shows why it counts as a realist political value.
... Realists have thus far focused on normative theorizing from the axioms through the lens of legitimacy (Cross 2021, Sleat 2014, Rossi 2012, Sigwart 2013, Cozzaglio and Greene 2019. ...
... 10 6 I would like to express my indebtedness to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for bringing this point and associated potential scholarly lacuna to my attention. 7 Contributions to this understanding of political realism are offered in Geuss (2008), Sangiovanni (2008), Galston (2010), Newey (2010Newey ( , 2013, Rossi (2012Rossi ( , 2019, Runciman (2012), Waldron (2013), Rossi and Sleat (2014), Sleat (2014Sleat ( , 2016, and Raekstad (2018), among other places. 8 Rossi (2019, 638). ...
In this contribution, I defend a robust model of political idealism, making the case for such an approach to both the theory and practice of politics. On this view, not only in framing a political philosophy but also in putting forward policy proposals and institutional designs, we need not think about feasibility as an overriding, make-or-break criterion for evaluating the soundness of that theory or proposal, neither of which loses its point simply because it is deemed to be unlikely to be implemented. Feasibility, in other terms, cannot be taken as the only standard, or even as the main standard, on which basis to assess the practical worth of a political strategy.
... The observable features that are constitutive of legitimacy on the second viewpoint will be specified in a normative theory, which an observer may apply to examine whether a particular institution is legitimate or not. The relevant institutional features are debated among scholars but may include, for example, a fair distribution of economic resources (Rawls, 1971), protection of basic human rights (Buchanan and Keohane, 2006), democratic procedures (Christiano, 2008), approval and reflection of the political aims of the public (Sleat, 2014), or good faith attempts to combat extensive resource inequalities (Westergren, 2016). ...
Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.
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... Many of the claims made by critics of mainstream liberal theory fit nicely with this instrumental understanding of political normativity. For example, politics is often seen as a distinct sphere with its own evaluative standards (Rossi, 2013, p. 559) and it is often argued that we do not need any sources of normativity external to a political practice in order to theorize proper normative-political principles for that practice (Jubb & Rossi, 2015;Sleat, 2014). Moreover, their understanding of political values and norms typically refer to the goal, end, or aim of politics. ...
Recent years' literature on distinctively political normativity raises methodological and meta‐theoretical concerns of importance for political theory. The aim of this article is to identify and critically examine the main positions in this debate as well as to analyze problems and promising ways forward. In brief, we argue that the predominant “non‐moral view” of distinctively political normativity (i.e., the view that political normativity is independent of moral normativity), is problematic in all its three versions. Further, we suggest that a reasonable approach to political normativity should adopt a “moral view” (i.e., the view that political normativity is not independent of moral normativity) and investigate two such approaches: the so‐called “filter approach” and the “role approach.” Although still much in need of further development in political theory, both of them bear promise as accounts which preserve the distinctness of the political domain while acknowledging its status as a moral kind.
Contextualist and empirical analyses have recently become important tools in political theory due to a growing ‘methodological turn’ in the discipline. In this article I argue that realism, the ethnographic sensibility in political theory, and comparative political theory should be considered as part of this methodological turn. I show that they share its diagnosis of a gap between political theory and politics and its two principal motivations in closing it. However, I argue that the distinct contribution of realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory is that they highlight a challenge for the methodological turn in that attention to context may widen the distance between political theory and politics. I conclude by suggesting that this is not an insurmountable obstacle and that it in fact bolsters the evaluative function of methodological political theory, keeping it distinct from political science.
One reason why the recently influential “realist” turn in political theory rejects mainstream theoretical approaches is that it views their moralistic orientation as a source of ideological credulity. Like Karl Marx before them, realists complain that “moralizing” social criticism is bound to be imprisoned in the illusions of the epoch. This essay suggests that contemporary political realism may itself invite comparable accusations of ideological complicity insofar as it equates politics and agonistic contestation, as many realists in fact do. The assumption that political interaction is essentially contestatory strikes many as plain common sense, undeniable in the face of any sober and realistic observation of actual politics. This essay suggests, to the contrary, that the seeming self-evidence of this assumption may precisely be a symptom of ideological illusion. To develop this suggestion, this essay contends that contemporary realism is vulnerable to charges of “contest-fetishism” that parallel Marx’s argument that the classical political economists he criticizes in Capital were blind to the “commodity-fetishism” of modern capitalism.
It is increasingly common in the philosophical literature to claim that political legitimacy, normatively understood, comes in degrees. However, most authors fail to specify what talk of degrees means, and the notion remains opaque. Using the Hohfeld schema as a guide, I survey possible accounts, distinguishing them into “width”, “depth”, and “weight” proposals. I argue that each fails to provide a convincing account of scalar legitimacy. Thus, talk of degrees of legitimacy, as currently used, is in serious need of explanation.
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.
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.
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’.
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 ability of political orders to command respect rather than just compliance is one of the most pervasive themes in political theory (Outhwaite 2009, p. 62). The death of god, in the Hegelian sense, means that legitimacy based on some divine ordained right to rule are no longer valid, and modern states must seek fresh rationales for the legitimacy to rule. This chapters argues that the Weberian schemes of legitimacy do not consider the possibility that a regime may be illegitimate. The thicker liberal concepts of legitimacy, for example, John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, however, set the bar too high, and if followed to their logical conclusions, can render all regimes illegitimate. This chapter draws on the writings of Bernard Williams and Jurgen Habermas to arrive at a legitimacy framework based on democratic legitimation and the interchangeability between norms, values and the promise of rewards. This framework makes no normative requirement of a regime except for popular sovereignty, a concept already invoked by almost all modern secular regimes. It is devised to be suitable for the examination of liberal as well as non-liberal orders, and therefore appropriate for the examination of legitimacy of the Chinese state.
The examination of legitimacy in three parts has seen the party-state failed in all three criteria of legitimacy set out in the framework. It was found that the Marxist part of the legitimation story cannot be made sense of without causing cognitive dissonance, the tight control of the discursive space means that the people do not have the information needed to make informed decisions, and the system of democratic centralism denies the people a meaningful choice. Given this, it can be concluded that the present Chinese regime fails the test of legitimacy. The present system of governance in China also denies the people the right to information to be able to make informed decisions, or indeed, any meaningful decisions at all, regarding either the legitimation stories being told or the regime’s right to rule. The tight control on the access to information and the denying of rights for the people to have a voice in the public discourse, combined with a system of democratic centralism which is in fact, not democratic, means that the party-state’s legitimacy is undermined.
Most realist theories of legitimacy are internalist theories, meaning that they regard legitimacy as a function of how subjects view their own rulers. However, some realists seek to qualify their internalism by holding that legitimacy is not simply a matter of whether subjects accept their rulers’ exercise of power. According to one such view, legitimacy requires that rulers’ power be ‘acceptable’ to subjects, in the sense that it can be justified on the basis of values that they accept. Call this acceptability internalism. In this article, I argue that realists should reject acceptability internalism. I first argue that acceptability internalism has the disadvantage of separating the concept of legitimacy from the interests of rulers. I then consider two arguments in favour of acceptability internalism, and argue that both should be rejected.
This article sets out an argument from legitimacy for the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia. The article first sets out an understanding of political legitimacy and of legitimacy deficits and argues that the Australian Government faces a legitimacy deficit with respect to its exercise of political power and authority over Indigenous Australians. The deficit arises, it is argued, because Indigenous Australians face significant structural injustice and there is little hope of redressing this injustice within the prevailing governing conventions. The article then argues that the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament ought to be seen as part of a package to address this legitimacy deficit by resetting the governing conventions of Australian society. The argument from legitimacy is then compared favorably with more familiar arguments from sovereignty and the right to self‐determination.
En este artículo se argumenta que el concepto de política permite formular una teoría normativa que integre elementos descriptivos, trazar un continuo (una relación) entre el concepto descriptivo y el concepto normativo de la legitimidad si el concepto de política se tiene como primera premisa. la política es un concepto que refiere a la actividad por la que los seres humanos con desacuerdos coexisten en sociedades estables por medio de relaciones de poder que configuran el orden social. la pregunta por la legitimidad del poder político interroga si el poder que estructura las relaciones sociales es legítimo, si tiene autoridad. la respuesta a la pregunta pasa por relacionar la justificación del poder con las creencias de los subordinados que coacciona. en otras palabras, en trazar un continuo entre el concepto descriptivo y el concepto normativo de la legitimidad. en este artículo se presentan tres teorías normativas que contienen elementos descriptivos por su conceptualización de la política.
Political realists have devoted much effort to clarifying the methodological specificity of realist theorising and defending its consistency as an approach to political reasoning. Yet the question of how to justify the realist approach has not received the same attention. In this article, I offer a prudential justification of political realism. To do so, I first characterise realism as anti-moralism. I then outline three possible arguments for the realist approach by availing myself of recent inquiries into the metatheoretical basis of realism: The metaethical, the ethical and the prudential arguments. I explain that the prudential argument offers the most solid basis for political realism because it relies on the least controversial premises. Still, I delve into the metaethical and ethical arguments for two reasons: The prudential argument takes advantage of the theses defended by the rival arguments and elaborating the other arguments shows the comparative strengths of the prudential argument.
Using the discriminatory character of Israeli politics as our point of departure, this paper argues that for large numbers of Palestinian Israeli citizens, new realistic terms of collective engagement are attractive and possible. Based on analytical Marxism and writings about realist normative political theory, we contend that politicians can advance strategies that establishing foundations for resolving the minority’s trap. Meanwhile, constructing identities is always delimited by the capacity of politicians to meet material needs and preserve certain distinct elements of the old “trapped identity”. This framework guides elaboration of the recent political discourse and strategies of the Israeli Knesset members Ayman Odeh and Mansour Abbas. While Odeh is a radical realist, Abbas is a realistic realist, excluding arguments based on values that the Israeli state cannot accept. Nonetheless, Abbas’ project is not only fragile but has also demanded the substantial political and moral sacrifice.
Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent. The basic idea starts from the fact that widespread anti-government protests and demonstrations always carry a potent delegitimating force. Political legitimacy is therefore never permanent and unchangeable, regardless of the nature of the regime, and can be undermined at all times by active dissent from the population. Having established the relationship between dissent and delegitimation of political power, even the inverted, stronger claim is defended: the absence of active dissent (i.e., tacit consent) can, under certain circumstances, serve to legitimize political power. The paper sets up and defends several conditions that need to be met for the right normative mandate to be created by the population tacitly accepting the existing power arrangements. If those are fulfilled (especially when full freedom of expression and information is granted), tacit consent can become a vital element of political legitimacy.
This paper considers the genealogy of the “revisionist” approaches to corruption. The core of the approaches is the idea that practices deviating from formal rules or “accepted norms” with the objective of serving private ends may have a positive aggregate-level impact. No less important, the approaches are skeptic about anti-corruption attempts. In interrogating the revisionist approaches, the paper demonstrates that corruption studies have ignored important ideas, causing it to remain intertwined with moralism, despite proclamations otherwise. The paper thus argues that incorporating revisionist ideas might ease the discontent in corruption studies and improve public integrity.
This introductory chapter gives an overview of the debate on realism in political theory and sets out two themes that are particularly important for this debate: the role of practice in realist political theory and the nature and place of normativity in realist political theory. These two themes are not only among the most discussed topics in the debate on possibilities to do realist political theory. Answers to the question of what more applied forms of realist political theory might look like will also depend significantly on how realists specify the role of practice in political theory and the meaning of realist normative argumentation. We outline some of the main positions in the field and highlight questions that have been insufficiently addressed. Finally, we give an overview of the arguments of the articles assembled in this collection and how they contribute to the ongoing debates on the two themes.
The forms of status quo critique that current approaches to realist political theory enable are unsatisfactory. They either formulate standards of constructive critique, but remain uncritical of a great range of political situations, or they offer means for criticising basically all political situations, but neglect constructive critique. As part of the endeavour to develop a status quo critique that is potentially radical and constructive, realists might consider possibilities to use non-standard social practices – social practices that function differently than stipulated by existing political forms – as resources for critique. The article shows how the capacity of non-standard social practices to serve as resources for critique might be exploited. It also defends the proposed procedure against the likely objection that it relies on moralist argumentation. The evaluation of the status quo and the selection of social practices need normative argumentation, but such argumentation can be grounded in the actual to an extent that safeguards its realist nature.
This paper seeks to show that Bernard Williams’ approach to legitimacy falls short of its aspirations in ways that cast doubt on its fitness for guiding the practice of future realist political theory. More precisely, the paper focuses on the shortcomings of Williams’ realism in establishing a connection to (the practices of) politics, and on how to redeem those shortcomings in a way that would render them suitable for guiding future realist political theory. The first substantive section of the paper considers how compatible Williams’ commitments to diagnosis and interpretation are, with how he spells out his realist thought. The second section argues that making good on Williams’ commitments requires realist political theorists to rethink the sources of their insights and the basis of their claims, and sketches pragmatist and ethnographic approaches as promising examples of how realists could match theoretical commitments in practice.
When interest in political realism started to resurge a few years ago, it was not uncommon to interpret realist political theory as a form of non-ideal theorising. This reading has been subjected to extensive criticism. First, realists have argued that political realism cannot be interpreted as merely a form of applied political theory. Second, realists have explained that political realism can defend a role for unfeasible normative prescriptions in political theory. I explain that these developments, besides allowing us to reject interpretations of political realism as a form of non-ideal theory, have given us reason to think of political realism as a form of ideal theory. Yet, when ideal theory enters the picture, a series of methodological questions arise regarding the proper use of ideals. In this paper, I clarify how the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory ought to be conceptualised in realist political theory. I examine the two major interpretations of the role of ideals that have been provided so far – the target and benchmark interpretations – and I show that neither is compatible with some of the fundamental theoretical commitments of realist political theory. This both allows me to point out the requirements that an interpretation of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory must meet to be defined as properly realist and allows me to emphasise the strengths of the realist approach. Accordingly, I propose a new interpretation of the role of ideals, one consistent with realist theoretical commitments: I suggest that realist political ideals ought to be interpreted as models.
In this article I defend a new argument against moralist theories of legitimacy and in favour of realist theories. Moralist theories, I argue, are vulnerable to ideological and wishful thinking because they do not connect the demands of legitimacy with the interests of rulers. Realist theories, however, generally do manage to make this connection. This is because satisfying the usual realist criteria for legitimacy – the creation of a stable political order that transcends brute coercion – is usually necessary for rulers to preserve their rule.
This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a distinctive challenge for global governance. Therefore, it is crucial for normative political theorists to confront this problem. A realist approach offers three distinct advantages, elaborated in the three subsequent sections of the article. First, it relaxes the theoretical burden by starting from the real practice of tax evasion rather than from an abstract theory of equality or justice. Second, this approach recognizes that sheltering is a political harm: a threat to the very maintenance of order, not just a problem of inequality or injustice. If politicians fail at such polity maintenance, realism's ethic of responsibility provides clear political reasons why they should be held accountable. Third, realism's focus on power and its acceptance of coercion open up new strategies for addressing the problem that would not be allowed by theories with a stronger emphasis on consensus.
This article has an analytical and a constructive aim. The former consists in providing a taxonomy of the different ways progress can be defined, according to two variables: whether progress is conceived of in either a teleological or a processual way, and whether it relies on either a realist or a moralist approach to political normativity. After laying out the four resulting combinations, I proceed with the critical aim. This consists in proposing an argument for how political progress should be conceived of. To do so, I first show that some teleological accounts of progress paradoxically risk being conservative, while processual ones are politically progressive and should therefore be privileged over the former. Second, and relatedly, I shed light on which are the standards for a genuinely progressive notion of political progress. Finally, I argue that a processual realist notion of political progress is more able than the rival conceptions to comply with these standards.
This article sets out some of the key features of a realist critique of liberal moralism, identifying descriptive inadequacy and normative irrelevance as the two fundamental lines of criticism. It then sketches an outline of a political theory of modus vivendi as an alternative, realist approach to political theory. On this account a modus vivendi should be understood as any political settlement that involves the preservation of peace and security and is generally acceptable to those who are party to it. In conclusion, some problems with this conception of modus vivendi and with a realist political theory more generally are discussed. In particular, the question is raised of whether a realist political theory should be understood as an alternative to liberal moralism or only a better way of doing basically the same kind of thing.
Can political theory be action-guiding without relying on pre-political normative commitments? I answer that question affirmatively by unpacking two related tenets of Raymond Geuss’ political realism: the view that political philosophy should not be a branch of ethics, and the ensuing empirically-informed conception of legitimacy. I argue that the former idea can be made sense of by reference to Hobbes’ account of authorization, and that realist legitimacy can be normatively salient in so far as it stands in the correct relation to a theory of justice and problematizes its sources of value through what Geuss terms ‘political imagination’.
What is it for a state, constitution or set of governmental institutions to have political legitimacy? This paper raises some doubts about two broadly liberal answers to this question, which can be labelled ‘Kantian’ and ‘libertarian’. The argument focuses in particular on the relationship between legitimacy and principles of justice and on the place of consent. By contrast with these views, I suggest that, without endorsing the kind of voluntarist theory, according to which political legitimacy is simply created by individual consent, an adequate understanding of political legitimacy should take much more account than most philosophical theories tend to do of the attitudes and beliefs of citizens and the social and political context in which they have saliency. This also involves acknowledging the limits of theory in determining criteria of political legitimacy.
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.
What is political philosophy’s relation to moral philosophy? Does it simply form part of moral philosophy, focusing on the proper application of certain moral truths to political reality? Or must it instead form a more autonomous discipline, drawing its bearings from the specifically political problem of determining the bounds of legitimate coercion? In this essay I work out an answer to these questions by examining both some of the classical views on the nature of political philosophy and, more particularly, some recently published writings by Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen.
Soulignant la proximite des conceptions libertaire et autonomiste de la vie politique chez Habermas et Rawls, l'A. montre que les deux philosophes negligent de la meme facon la question du fondement moral de la politique. Mesurant la possibilite d'un accord raisonnable concernant l'organisation de la vie politique en fonction de principes liberaux, l'A. montre que cet engagement constitue le centre moral de la pensee liberale et qu'il incarne le principe du respect des personnes. Se referant aux premiers dialogues entre Habermas et Rawls, l'A. interroge la legitimite de l'association politique qui caracterise la democratie et qui permet de depasser les desaccords sur la question de la nature du bien humain
With the fall of communism, there is a risk that democracy either falls into the pattern of seeking unanimity and a lack of struggle over issues, or into a pattern of seeking conflict based on identity or other non-useful characteristics so easily grapsed by the far right. Mouffe argues instead for a third way - agonistic pluralism. This respects that politics needs adversaries, but not adversaries who consider one another enemies.
This essay engages critically with the recent emergence of “political realism” in political theory (centrally in the work of Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams). While sympathetic to and convinced of the importance of the core of the enterprise which it identifies, the essay is critical of some of the claims made about the independence of politics from morality and the historically contingent character of political values, and suggests that realism may itself succumb to illusion. The final section sketches an account of the nature of evaluative judgment in the study of politics and, in conclusion, defends both the pluralist character of political theory and the pressing importance of the questions that realism raises and that are inadequately attended to by the bulk of post-war political theory.
This paper was given as an "Inaugural Lecture" for the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory" at Oxford University on May 3, 2012. Political theorists study (1) political virtue, (2) political processes and institutions, and (3) political ideals (like justice, liberty, and equality). Since the time of Hume, Madison, and Kant, it has been thought that (2) is more important than (1), because maybe we can set up institutions that work for the general good whatever the state of virtue of the people who administer them. But in the revival of political philosophy heralded by John Rawls's book in 1971, there has been great emphasis on (3) and not nearly enough emphasis on (2). This is particularly true in the UK. Previous holders of the Chichele chair (G.A. Cohen and Isaiah Berlin) focused almost exclusively on (3) -- with Berlin going so far as to announce that political philosophy was really just the study of "the ends of life." The lecture argues that this way of conceiving the subject-matter of the Chichele chair is at best one-sided.The lecture argues for a reorientation of political theory teaching and scholarship back towards institutions -- particularly the normative evaluation of various aspects of the political process and the detailed theoretical exploration of institutional principles like democracy, representation, bicameralism, the rule of law, the separation of powers, federalism and so on. It argues that these issues should not be left to empirical or comparative politcial science, because they raise important and complex questions of evaluation -- including dignitary evaluation -- that may be sold short by the pragmatic and consequentialist emphasis of empirical and comparative work. But political theory should respect the empirical study of institutions more than it does, and it should dovetail the normative and evaluative work that political theory involves with the understanding of institutions, processes, and practices that political science generates.
This article argues for greater realism in political theory with respect to judgements about what politicians ought to do and how they ought to act. It shows that there are major problems in deducing what a given politician should do from the value commitments that are common to liberalism and it makes a case for recognizing the major role played by the context of action and particular agent involved. It distinguishes political virtue from moral virtues and argues that the ‘decisionist’ features of political agency render evaluation a partly post hoc process. The article advocates a version of political realism that is rooted in an understanding of the distinctive character of political rule and that provides the basis for a contextualist but non-relativist account of ‘what is to be done’.
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.
This article is on political normativity. It urges scepticism about attempts to reduce political normativity to morality. Modern liberalism leaves a question about how far morality can be accommodated by the form of normativity characteristic of politics. The article casts doubt on whether individual moral norms carry over to collective, for example, political, action, and whether the former ‘trump’ other kinds of reasons in politics. It then sketches an alternative view of politics as an irreducibly collective enterprise. Reasons for acting politically, including the understandings on which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are largely artefacts of the political culture and thus only marginally subject to generic conditions of validity: this is true in particular of liberal acceptability-conditions. Thus legitimacy, though not a redundant notion, must be geared to local political norms.
Can Rawlsian theory provide us with an adequate response to the practical question of how we should proceed in the face of widespread and intractable disagreement over matters of justice? Recent criticism of ideal theorizing might make us wonder whether this question highlights another way in which ideal theory can be too far removed from our non-ideal circumstances to provide any practical guidance. Further reflection on it does not show that ideal theory is redundant, but it does indicate that there is a need for a nonideal theory that does not consist simply in an account of how to apply the principles which are yielded by ideal theory to non-ideal circumstances in the light of what is feasible and an assessment of the costs of implementation. Indeed any non-ideal theory that can adequately address this question will have to be partially autonomous, drawing on a notion of legitimacy that is rather different to the one which lies at the heart of Rawlsian ideal theory.
Soulignant l'insuffisance de la notion de regle de droit qui manque la dimension transformative du systeme constitutionnel liberal au regard de la diversite normative de la societe americaine, l'A. examine la tension entre l'education civique et la religion catholique aux Etats-Unis, d'une part, et propose une approche du constitutionnalisme liberal fondee sur une hegemonie moderee des valeurs publiques liberales, d'autre part. Dans l'article suivant, intitule «It all depends...on how one understands liberalism. A brief response to S. Macedo», R. E. Flathman reprend la question du pluralisme des valeurs et de la diversite sociale qui se pose a la theorie liberale
In his later writings, the British philosopher Bernard Williams increasingly turned his attentions to issues concerning practical politics and in political theory. He advanced a moderately sceptical and realist liberalism that features distinctive views concerning the appropriate relations among moral, ethical and political theory, and concerning legitimacy, freedom and equality, and democracy. This article examines these and related features of his thinking and locates them in the context of currently influential formulations of liberalism.
This review presents a critical account of the most powerful critique of liberal political thought to have emerged in recent years: a critique it calls the . Drawing on the work of a wide range of critics of contemporary liberalism, this article contends that although those who advance this critique are divided in many ways they are nonetheless held together by a series of powerful descriptive and normative challenges to liberal political philosophy as it has developed since the publication of John Rawls's PoliticalLiberalism. The article further demonstrates that most of these challenges centre on the place of coercive power in modern political life and suggests that, although these challenges should not undermine liberals' commitment to their central normative claims, they do nonetheless provide an essential rejoinder to some of liberalism's more complacent assumptions.
This article explores the prospects for developing a realist political theory via an analysis of the work of Bernard Williams. It begins by setting out Williams’s theory of political realism and placing it in the wider context of a realist challenge in the literature that rightly identifies several deficiencies in the liberal view of politics and legitimacy. The central argument of the article is, however, that Williams’s political realism shares common features with liberal theory, including familiar normative concerns and a consensus view of the political and political legitimacy, which results in it replicating rather than overcoming the weaknesses that other realists have recognized in liberalism, thereby making it vulnerable to the same criticisms. Though these are taken to be significant problems for Williams’s theory, the purpose of making this argument is not to undermine the prospects for a realist political theory but to indicate obstacles and difficulties that any compelling account will need to address.
In recent years a powerful body of literature has emerged that challenges contemporary liberal thought on a series of related fronts, which can usefully be described as “realist.” This article focuses on the realist criticism of the dominant liberal account of legitimacy and explores the possibility of developing a political theory that can overcome this challenge while remaining distinctively liberal (hence “liberal realism”). Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers who fall outside of the standard Rawlsian tradition in contemporary liberal thinking, the article pursues three different directions in which a theory of liberal realism might be developed—negative, minimal, and partisan—and explores the advantages and shortcomings of each. It attempts to further demonstrate the salience and force of the realist challenge to liberal legitimacy and the need for liberalism to develop an adequate response to it, and offers some proposals concerning the appropriate theoretical framework for doing so.
7th ed. Terminologický slovník
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.