Philosophy and Real Politics
Abstract
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.
... Esto es cierto no obstante el innegable hecho de que, la mayor parte del tiempo, casi todos los agentes humanos son débiles, distraídos, conflictivos, y están confundidos, y por lo tanto no siempre hacen únicamente las cosas que les son permisibles. Nunca entenderemos lo que hacemos a menos que consideremos seriamente la dimensión ética de nuestras acciones en el sentido más amplio del término: nuestros diversos juicios acerca de lo bueno, lo permisible, lo atractivo, lo preferible, y aquello que ha de evitarse a toda costa (Geuss, 2008: 1-2; la traducción es mía). 8 Para Williams, el utilitarismo es el paradigma teórico del modelo de la promulgación y la teoría de la justicia de Rawls es el paradigma teórico del modelo estructural. ...
... Esto es totalmente intencional y, de hecho, parte del punto que intento hacer. Quiero, precisamente, intentar arrojar tantas dudas como pueda acerca de la utilidad universal de llevar a cabo estas distinciones (Geuss, 2008: 16; la traducción es mía). 18 18 Inmediatamente después de estas líneas, Geuss asume que los kantianos le achacarían que, por no llevar a cabo las distinciones entre el ser y el deber, entre los hechos y los valores, o entre lo descriptivo y lo normativo, sólo puede surgir confusión (Geuss, 2008: 16). ...
... 45 Para esta concepción de postura empírica, véase Van Fraassen (2002). 46 Y nos quedamos sin una filosofía política en más de una tradición filosófica (mejor dicho: en más de una tradición de hacer filosofía), pues, bajo los criterios de Geuss, Emilio Méndez Pinto Creo que llegamos a una conclusión similar si consideramos no aquello de lo que, según Geuss (2008), la filosofía política ha de carecer, sino aquello que debe poseer: un interés primario por cómo operan realmente las instituciones, un interés primario por nuestras acciones (en detrimento de las creencias y proposiciones relacionadas con nuestras acciones), y un interés primario por las contingencias históricas del quehacer político. Estas tareas ya están cubiertas por otras disciplinas en las que cualquier elucubración filosófica es gratuita. ...
En este artículo discuto las principales tesis de la filosofía política realista desarrollada en los últimos años por Raymond Geuss y plasmada en su célebre Philosophy and Real Politics (2008). Una vez identificadas las motivaciones detrás del proyecto de Geuss y señaladas sus semejanzas y diferencias con el otro gran proyecto filosófico-político realista de nuestros días, el de Bernard Williams, expongo críticamente sus tesis y sus objeciones a las formas kantiana y rawlsiana de hacer filosofía política. Además de discutir los puntos centrales de su propuesta, expongo dos réplicas generales a la misma, una doctrinaria y otra metodológica.
... Another strand of critical thought comes from political theorists who instead wish to ground political theory in epistemic normativity (and thus epistemic norms). Theorists identifying as 'radical realists' have insisted that political theorists do not need any moral normativity (and thus moral norms) to conduct ideology critique, because epistemic normativity may provide action-guidance for political theory (Geuss 2008;Aytac 2022;Aytac and Rossi 2022;Cross 2022Cross , 2023Prinz 2016;Prinz andRossi 2017, 2021;Raekstad 2021;Rossi 2019Rossi , 2023Burelli 2022;Burelli and Destri 2022). 3 As will be discussed below, ideology critique for radical realists is an epistemic method of unmasking illusions and unwarranted belief. ...
... 7 A fundamental intuition guiding defenders of the radical realist view is the belief that many, if not most, of our normative ideas in the political sphere are distorted by illusions. Prior and existing power relations, wishful thinking and various ideologies have made our normative values defunct and formed normative intuitions that are based on beliefs we take to be demonstrably factual but which are actually unwarranted (Geuss 2008;Prinz and Rossi 2017). However, through empirically-informed genealogical analyses and historical reconstructions of the origin and development of salient political concepts, we can reveal these intuitions as mistaken or illusory and thus guide our future-oriented actions toward legitimate narratives where our justiCications are based on warranted beliefs (Prinz and Rossi 2017;Rossi and Argenton 2021). ...
... As mentioned above, the large bulk of radical realists' action-guiding claims seem to be weak rather than strong: although they may not select a unique action as the normatively preferred (e.g., legitimate) one, they claim that epistemic norms provide action-guidance in the sense that they may point us in the direction of a set of endorsed or evaluatively preferrable actions, and away from others (rejected or debunked). That is, rather than prescribing a speciCic action, epistemic norms provide, to use a term oft-used by realists, "orientation" (e.g., Geuss 2008: 40-42, Prinz 2016: 781, Prinz and Rossi 2017: 357, Cross 2022: 1118. ...
One recent debate in political theory centers on the question of whether there is a distinctively political normativity. According to an influential view, there is a distinctive set of norms that applies specifically to political actions and decisions, which are not grounded in moral normativity. On one version of this non-moral view, political theory is grounded in epistemic normativity (and thus epistemic norms). Theorists identifying as “radical realists” insist that political theorists do not need any moral normativity (and thus moral norms), because epistemic normativity may provide action-guidance for political theory. In this article, we take our point of departure in a critical analysis of this epistemic version of the non-moral view, with the overall aim of analyzing the importance and limitation of epistemic norms in political theory. We argue that epistemic norms are necessary—since a political theory should not rely on empirical falsities—but not sufficient for a successful account in the political domain. Two claims are made: moral norms are essential in the process of political theorizing, both in the form of pre-epistemic norms and in the form of post-epistemic norms. More specifically, we contend, first, that we need moral norms to identify and justify which practices to study when conducting political theorizing, and second, that we need moral norms to tell us how to act in light of our investigation of warranted and unwarranted beliefs.
... 21-22). While indebted to earlier realists, selfconscious realist political theory emerged in the noughties as a critique of political theory's sustained faith in a moral order, and stands in contradistinction to a tradition in political theory termed the 'ethics-first' approach by Geuss (2008) and 'political moralism' by Bernard Williams (2007). ...
... The most solid positive characteristic of the realistic approach is respect for the autonomy of the political (Finlayson, 2017, p. 267;Geuss, 2008;Rossi, 2010, p. 504;Rossi & Sleat, 2014, p. 690). This principle dictates that 'political phenomena and political judgement are not reducible to something else (in particular, they are not reducible to ethics)' (Finlayson, 2017, pp. ...
... But it does indicate, I think, a central point of contention that will have to be resolved for that to happen most fruitfully. NOTES 1. Geuss is unflinchingly skeptical of the idea that anything very useful can be said about politics at the level of theory (e.g., Geuss 2008). Though he and Bernard Williams are perhaps the most prominent realist critics, it's revealing that Williams' work is often cited with strong approval by those who position themselves within the modus vivendi camp, while Geuss' voice does not loom large in those debates. ...
... The surge of interest around realism in political theory (e.g. Williams, 2005;Geuss, 2008;Galston, 2010;Horton, 2010;Philp, 2010;Sleat, 2010 andRossi, 2012; see also Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012;Larmore, 2013;Baderin, 2014;Aytac and Rossi, 2023) further advances the thought that there is something distinctive about the political realm, so that political philosophy and theory cannot simply be applied ethics. ...
Consider a seemingly fruitful ordering of our intellectual labours: think in ideal terms about justice and legitimacy, then bring our ideas and arguments to bear upon messy (and very much nonideal) real-world complications. This ordering is most often associated with John Rawls, but this was not his actual practice. That is no vice: Rawls took wide reflective equilibrium seriously as a philosophical method, moving back and forth from ideal to nonideal considerations in ways that belie the usefulness of any priority claims. We do not gain much insight by asserting the priority of either ideal or nonideal theorizing. Indeed, we could stop using those terms altogether, and theory might be none the worse, if we embrace something like Rawls' constructivist method. Normative political theory should, then, reject certain methodological conceits lurking in some of the philosophical work we otherwise embrace.
... In the absence of parties structuring political conflicts and decisions, there is a more important risk to see political processes operating on non-ideological bases. Ideology is understood here not in the pejorative sense of a power-distorted set of beliefs (Geuss 2008: 52) or a closed system of thought meant to justify the status quo (Ricoeur 1997), but in the sense of a set of ideas reflecting an understanding and an evaluation of the existing world and of its alternatives. The value of parties, in this respect, comes from the fact that they have the capacity to make ideological debates centre stage, while mobilising and politicising citizens around these ideologies (Disch 2021). ...
It is received wisdom in political science that parties are indispensable in a large-scale democracy. However, one might think that this belief reflects path dependency or a lack of imagination of alternative democratic systems. The recent theoretical development of new alternatives to traditional forms of representative government such as lottocracy or liquid democracy therefore offers an ideal context for questioning the assumption more thoroughly. The functions usually performed by parties are well-known, but it is less clear which of them could not be taken up by a different institution or body under an alternative arrangement. What would be the deep normative reasons to preserve the party form even in a completely reformed democracy? This is the question addressed in this article by bringing together recent pieces of literature on democratic innovations and the political theory of political parties. We argue that parties allow to mobilise and politicise citizens around a positive ideology, make it easier for citizens to follow political processes, thereby facilitating popular control and accountability, and give more visibility and strength to the opposition. These extremely valuable functions should be put in the balance with their flaws and with the benefits of alternative democratic systems.
... In short, political realism in most recent years has become the view that normative political judgements ought to draw from or, at the least, consider non-moral sources of normativity in political theorising, such as epistemic or prudential normativity. Stronger articulations of this contention are found in Geuss's (2008) "ethics-first" critique of normativity and in Williams's departure from "political moralism" (2008) which he saw stemming from the predominant Anglophone political philosophy, his mission being to revisit concepts such as freedom and equality strictly as political values. This paper opens a debate between political liberalism and political realism and critically reflects on some of the central claims of political realism, with the hope of preparing the ground for arguing a consensus view of realist legitimacy. ...
This paper casts light on the dialogue between political realism and John Rawls’s political liberalism. I describe political realism on the basis of contemporary realist currents that attempt to render politics an autonomous sphere of human activity, largely through an investigation of sources of normativity apt for guiding political action. I elaborate on what points realists suggest they conflict with political liberalism, and identify three foundational similarities between the two approaches to the legitimation of political authority which should suggest that political realism ought to consider a consensus view of political legitimacy. First, both approaches to normative political theory emerged from the broader tradition of liberal philosophy. Second, both rest on the premise of a pluralistic society, which has certain normative implications. Third, both are attempts to justify the primacy of the political over the metaphysical. When considered together, these assumptions point to a demand for a theoretical inquiry into a consensus view of realist legitimacy.
... As Bernard Williams (2005) represented this debate in the political philosophy of his time, the alternatives were either an enactment model that assumes that political obligation is a form of moral obligation, or a structural model that accounts for political normativity in terms of the moral constraints to which political action would be subject. For its part, political realism challenged such moralist theses, seeking to show either that the political is orthogonal to the moral, as radical realists like Geuss (2008) hold, or that moral normativity underdetermines political normativity, as Williams himself argued, among others. ...
The main goal of this paper is to show that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. To this, a concept of political value that explains why the politically good provides reasons for actions is indispensable. I shape this concept by adopting the framework of political minimalism and developing one of its central tenets, namely, that politics, as a constitutively normative practice, specifies objective standards for evaluating political phenomena. I characterize the notion of political value in these terms to offer a non-moralist foundation for political normativity. In this endeavor, the work of Bernard Williams plays two opposing roles: while his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of substantialist accounts of political normativity, his criticism of the morality system and his conception of practical rationality as all-things-considered practical deliberation are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of Williams’ ideas on normativity in general. Finally, I draw some consequences from this account of political minimalism to show that this conception of political normativity can hardly be considered a variety of political realism.
... This myth is furthered by the Cynics, who in their quest for autarky reject all material possessions and social battles for recognition. Raymond Geuss notes that the Platonic doctrine of forms employs a rhetorical strategy that ethically elevates Socrates' persona (Geuss, 2008). To depict Socratesa man primarily engaged in private dialoguesas a figure who dies a 'heroic' death due to his devotion to reason and contemplation, a certain level of artistic structuring of his real life is required. ...
This article delves into the foundational philosophy of money, exploring its pervasive influence on the conceptual framework of the global financial and monetary systems. Tracing philosophical attitudes towards money from ancient to modern times, it critically examines the moral and ethical tensions inherent in the relationship between money and truth. The analysis begins with classical antiquity, where philosophers like Plato and Aristotle juxtaposed the pursuit of truth with the economic functions of money, viewing it as a morally corrupting influence that impedes the genuine search for wisdom. The narrative progresses through history, highlighting how subsequent philosophers have consistently mirrored this scepticism towards the monetisation of human values. The discussion extends into modern philosophical interpretations, notably Georg Simmel’s “Philosophy of Money,” which articulates money’s dual role as both a disruptor and an integrator within society. Simmel’s analysis portrays money as a fundamental mediator in social relations, yet also a catalyst for alienation and reification, reflecting a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of value and the ethical implications of economic interactions. By engaging with these philosophical discourses, the article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how money has been perceived and theorised as a force that shapes societal structures and human interactions. It invites readers to reconsider the ethical dimensions of economic practices and the profound impact of monetary philosophy on the fabric of modern society, advocating for a critical reassessment of the values that govern our financial and social systems. Through this exploration, the article contributes to a deeper intellectual discourse on the role of money in shaping not only economic but also cultural and ethical landscapes.
... Coined by Bernard Williams [26], political moralism consists of deriving political prescriptions from pre-political moral ideals such as autonomy, fairness, equality, happiness, or justice. As Rossi and Sleat (20,8 The claim that politics is a distinct and autonomous sphere that cannot be reduced to ethics comes in different varieties. Realism harbours strong Machiavellian claims insisting that moral values, unlike political values, are illsuited to derive normative political judgements from, as well as weaker claims that may accommodate morality as a normative source in politics but nevertheless assert that the political is a distinct realm and therefore irreducible to it. ...
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.
... While 'moralistic' has a meaning in lay discourse, 'moralism' was not a prominent methodological term in political theory until coined by realists to label approaches they reject. Partly in consequence, the realist-moralist debate has largely comprised (a) realist critiques of so-called moralism (Williams 2005;Geuss 2008;Jubb and Rossi 2015), (b) critiques of realism by theorists who might be identified as moralists Möller 2015b2015a;Leader Maynard and Worsnip 2018;Estlund 2017), or (c) positive efforts to flesh out realism (Prinz and Rossi 2017;Hall 2017;Sleat 2018b;Rossi and Argenton 2021;Hall 2020). What is missing is any positive statement of political moralism itself. 1 Such a statement is necessary, because while realists have presented moralism as the "mainstream" (Rossi and Sleat 2014, 690;Hall 2020, 2) and "dominant" (Jubb 2015, 919) paradigm of contemporary political theory, the substance of the moralist approach remains unclear (Erman and Möller 2015b, 2). ...
In discussions about the possibly ideological character of ideal theory in liberal political philosophy, one worry concerns the underlying social ontology and how it can serve to make important structural injustices less visible. More recently, similar concerns have begun to appear within social ontology itself, with several authors arguing for a shift from more traditional models to different forms of nonideal or critical social ontology instead. This article develops a conception of ideal theory applicable to both social ontology and political theory, and it is then argued we should take seriously worries about ideal theory playing an ideological role. One consequence of how the ideal/nonideal distinction is understood here, however, is that the line between ideal and nonideal theory is not sharp. What we have is rather a continuum ranging from the strongly ideal to the strongly nonideal, and where the balance then needs to shift away from the former.
This article engages with Jonathan Floyd’s normative behaviorism, and Simon Stevens’ recent criticism of this approach. Its objectives are two: First, the article challenges normative behaviorism’s reliance on crime and insurrection rates as measures of political discontent. I raise three distinct objections against using crime and insurrection rates for this purpose, and argue that these undermine normative behaviorism’s justificatory strategy. Second, the article rebuts Stevens’ suggestion that the flaws of normative behaviorism can be fixed by adding political ethnography to the picture. Rather than remedying the flaws, I argue that supplementing normative behaviorism with an ethnographic sensibility will deprive it of the very features that rendered it attractive in the first place. I conclude that if fixing the flaws of normative behaviorism requires us to transform it beyond recognition, we should rather reject it in the first place.
This chapter focuses on some of the tropes and underpinning assumptions and epistemic positions embedded in the current practices and writing of the sociology of education. We will consider the sociology of education as a modern human science mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, enlightenment rationalities, and the concomitant and messy relationships the sociology has with education, or more specifically schooling. We argue that the sociology of education has consistently failed to distance itself from the metaphysics, cruel optimism, and oppressions of modern schooling.
According to the obscuring objection against mainstream political philosophy, there has been a long‐standing dominant research paradigm focusing on distributive justice. This has made it difficult to call attention to important social facts, such as discrimination and oppression. The purpose of this article is not to defend the claim that mainstream political philosophy obscures important social facts. We instead focus on how obscuring arises. There are undoubtedly several different forces at play in the development of a research field, but the focus here is to spell out mechanisms that enforce obscuring which draw from influential theories in pragmatics. The account starts with the assumption that conversations are structured around mutual assumptions among interlocutors. We argue that the contents of these mutual assumptions represent certain general norms for efficient conversation and unequal social power among interlocutors, both of which constitute an important part of how obscuring arises.
The concept of the person is ubiquitously used in international theory, most prominently to attribute a certain character to human beings and states. While it features in discussions of how best to analyze state behavior, as well as being essential in characterizing human beings and states as subjects of international law, it is also used to answer one of international theory’s core normative questions: who in the world of international relations deserves moral consideration? This article highlights a central problem with how this concept is used in normative international theory. It argues that, since it is used to ground the moral standing of both human beings and states, it becomes remarkably difficult to deny that they should be recognized as one another’s equals, which means that normative international theorists will also find it exceedingly challenging to defend the moral priority of one over the other. The main upshot of this argument is twofold. Demonstrating the flaws of the main attempts to escape this impasse, the article establishes a serious problem with one of the main conceptual tools in the toolkit of normative international theory. But since the normatively untenable state of the equality between human beings and states only follows from the dependence upon this concept, the article also showcases where an escape route should more plausibly begin. The article thus ends by suggesting how normative international theory can free itself from its dependence on the concept of the person.
In his last finished work, The Law of Peoples (1999b), John Rawls wrote repeatedly of “our hope for the future.” In recent decades hope has become a recurrent trope in the politics of Anglo-American liberal democracies. Yet its appearance in a major work by the most influential political theorist of the postwar era has attracted little notice. Rawls’s discovery of the need for hope in liberal society represents a major development in his thought and a little-noticed departure from his previous thinking about moral psychology, stability, and theodicy. Situating this episode in the evolution of Rawls’s thought and the context of intellectual history sheds light on the wider issue of the ambivalent relationship between hope and liberalism.
This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Drawing on political realism, it reconstructs the idea and function of refugeehood in international politics. Refugees are not the agencyless victims merely in search of rescue by states of the Global North, as the idea of climate refugeehood as a form of humanitarian refugeehood would have it. Nor are they simply a function of reparative justice, or of defending international state legitimacy. To liberal democracies, refugees are those fleeing political oppression. They hold an important political function in inter-state relations in undermining rival political systems and strengthening liberal democratic regimes, both ideally and materially. The idea of climate refugeehood collides with the role refugeehood plays in international politics, the reasons for their admission, and the conceptualization of their plight and function. It ought, hence, to be rejected.
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.
Is it possible to do ideology critique without morality? In recent years a small group of theorists has attempted to develop such an account and, in doing so, makes claim to a certain sort of “radical realism” distinguished by the ambition to ground political judgments and prescriptions in nonmoral values, principles, or concepts. This essay presents a twofold critique of this realist ideology critique (RIC) by first offering an internal critique of the approach and then arguing that the very attempt to do political theory generally—and ideology critique more specifically—in a way that abjures morality is misguided. In doing so, I contribute both to current debates around “new” ideology critiques and to contested questions about what it means to do political theory realistically.
This article presents a novel perspective, arguing for a virtue-based weak version of political realism in Ottoman political thought (OPT). By recognizing realist elements in human nature and poli- tics in OPT tradition, we can gain a deeper understanding of the place of morality in politics. Challeng- ing the common sense understanding of morality that pervades all areas of politics, this paper provides compelling evidence to show how the understanding of the nature of politics in OPT was ever-chang- ing, singular, and, to a certain extent, free of morality. This unique framing of politics and human na- ture in the OPT tradition makes it a realist one. Finally, I delve into the role of universals in explaining the intricate relationship between politics and morality through various analytical distinctions.
In this essay, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the various stances in the contemporary debate on the sources of political normativity. Besides, we describe some consequences of this debate for several related areas of philosophical discussion. We believe this overview may help readers navigate and connect the numerous works within the expanding literature on political normativity, as well as the controversies between advocates of political realism and so-called political moralists, including the articles featured in Topoi’s collection Political Normativity and Ethics.
Building on recent work in the field of sociology of rights which emphasizes the ‘social life of rights’ and the interaction between micro-level social constructions via social movement action, and macro-level systemic forces, this paper constructs a counter-hegemonic theory of human rights. By drawing on both Gramscian theories and a Social Reproduction Theory framework, a novel view of neoliberal hegemony is described. The role of human rights as part of this hegemony is then clarified as an essential element of the production of consent to hegemony. This hegemonic form of human rights is contrasted against a counter-hegemonic construction which is grounded in data generated from 10 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with social movement activists in the UK. Three findings generated from the data are described. The activists interviewed 1) consistently rejected hegemonic, legal/non-governmental organization human rights structures; 2) used human rights as an introduction to their activism and a base upon which further critiques are built; and 3) frequently used human rights to contest the commodification of socially reproductive goods. Considering these findings, the role of contesting hegemonic constructions of human rights in resisting wider neoliberal hegemony is considered. While counter-hegemonic rights are not considered to have produced the level of social movement action required to overcome deeply embedded neoliberalism, counter-hegemonic human rights hold the potential to contribute to challenging the production of both consent and coercion to neoliberalism in the UK.
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.
This paper aims to offer a critique of a rigidly moralistic temperament in public discourse from the perspective of political realism. It unpacks three types of moralism in public discourse, and for each, it explains why it is normatively problematic from a realist perspective: ‘Moralist Causalism’ is the belief that moral preaching is an apt way to affect the world for the better; ‘Moralist Manicheism’ is a dichotomous division of the world between good and evil; ‘Moralist Absolutism’ is the conviction that only morality matters when we answer the question, ‘What should we do?’. The paper then turns these negative criticisms into a positive recipe for how to look realistically at what is valuable in the world. First, there are not only multiple values in the world but also different sources of values (epistemic, instrumental, aesthetic…) which may conflict with one another. We call this requirement ‘Meta-Normative Pluralism’. Second, politics is pivotal because it is the sphere where the clashes among all other spheres of value are authoritatively resolved—a role which moralists usurp for morality.
This article explores causes and consequences of the declining funding chances of political theorizing with the aim of advancing measures to offset them. Major national and international research programmes growingly present challenges that require problem-solving strategies. Applied research disciplines are better fitted to tackle them than basic research disciplines to which political theorizing belongs. Drawing on the enlightening contribution of theory to political research and politics, it argues that the knowledge it produces can be shared across disciplinary boundaries if its scientific reliability is secured. With that aim, the article submits two practical suggestions: enriching normative accounts of politics with research historically and institutionally informed, and streamlining its enquiring capacity by exploring standard, modular and integrated interdisciplinary approaches.
This paper is a defence of the view that, contrary to a recent trend in the literature, there is a distinctively political kind of normativity. Four steps are taken to establish that conclusion. First, I introduce a constructivist methodology for practical philosophy, one that is focused on the problem-solving nature of normative concepts. Second, I propose to understand the political as constituted by political problems, that is, by problems that concern members of a collective as members of that collective. Third, I claim that there is a kind of collective obligations, which I call political collective obligations, that do not provide direct and clear action guidance to those subject to them, but that are rather best conceived of as thin obligations. Such thin obligations stemming from properly conceived political problems constitute a distinctive kind of normativity, the normativity of politics. Because political collective obligations typically lack action guidance, what they mandate is that each obliged agent contribute their share to what they normatively regard as the best collective solution to the political problem. The paper concludes with some considerations about the so-called inefficacy problem in light of the previously established conclusions.
Political epistemology has become a popular field of research in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the relationships between truth and politics, or reason and power. Yet many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. The former approach (prominent, e.g., in the epistemic injustice debate) leads to an epistemisation of political phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐politicization, the latter approach (prominent, e.g., in Frankfurt School critical theory) leads to a politicization of epistemic phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐epistemisation. Instead, it is argued that political epistemology requires reworking even basic concepts, due to its three foundational commitments: It is committed to the claim that socio‐material conditions of existence matter epistemically (minimal materialism), to the self‐reflection of the socio‐material conditions of political epistemology's own arguments and theories (radical self‐reflexivity), and to a specific form of epistemic humility (epistemic non‐sovereignty). Using the notion of normativity as an exemplary problem, the article closes by highlighting the difficulty of maintaining these three commitments.
Modern society has long been a spectacle. As defined by Guy Debord, a spectacle is not a collection of images but rather a social relationship mediated by images in a consumer economy. Whereas the spectacle offers the illusion of consumer choice, behind each manifestation is to be found the same alienation. Such aimless, persistent consumption does not lead to personal fulfillment but to drudgery. Breaking free of the spectacle is facilitated by an awareness of the symbiotic relationship between ideology and revolution. As such, it is useful to those who are exhausted and disillusioned by rampant consumerism to examine how variants of the terms ideology and revolution were employed by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, and to use that understanding as a basis for individual and collective liberation. To that end, this study examined variants of the terms ideology and revolution at the sentence level of usage. The results provide a comprehensive comparison of the themes and sentiments of those variants. Revolutionary freedom from the spectacle can only be achieved by overcoming the consumerist ideology embedded at the core of the capitalist regime of power.
In answering the question, ‘What is a conspiracy theory?’ scholars typically take an epistemological view, with many asking whether the term’s pejorative use as a marker of obvious falsehood is justified. Especially among philosophers, a consensus has emerged that conspiracy theories should not be dismissed as prima facie false, that each should be judged on its own merits. However, while some philosophers have encouraged social scientists to embrace this epistemological view of conspiracy theories, this article argues that it is less useful for those of us working in political studies. We are right to worry about being too dismissive of all charges of conspiracy, but conspiracy theorising involves more than just making truth claims; it is about politics, history and culture too. In approaching it through the narrow lens of epistemology, we miss much of what is happening in conspiracy theorising. My aim in this article is to offer a new framework for analysing conspiracy theorising as a practice, rather than as a category of explanation. This framework builds on Michael Billig and Jovan Byford’s idea of the conspiracy theory tradition, showing conspiracy theorising to involve the recycling and adaptation of pre-existing ideas, themes and texts to fit new situations.
The debate on bottom-up approaches in political theory has been recently enriched by Jonathan Floyd’s “normative behaviourism”, an approach that starts from and refers to actual behaviours so as to let normative concerns emerge and political responses be found. Despite its merits, I argue that normative behaviourism suffers from three weaknesses: the tip of the iceberg, the invisibility, and the over-inclusive justification problems. These problems emerge because behaviours can be normatively significant only when the beliefs behind those behaviours are known. To overcome these problems, I suggest a “revised” version of normative behaviourism, which makes use of focus groups to reach two objectives: first, to understand the beliefs driving behaviours; and, second, to filter out unacceptable beliefs that might lead to inappropriate political solutions when their corresponding behaviour is considered normatively relevant for institutional reform. While revised normative behaviourism is still at the stage of a drafted proposal, it has the potential to pave a way for data collection to contribute to the very formulation of normative standards rather than just to the identification of practical constraints to the application of normative standards.
In this article, we argue that a progressive approach to normative political theorizing should incorporate a conception of meaningful political change that is nonutopian (it conceives of advancements as gradual stages), large-scale (it involves the largest possible numbers of organized and unorganized social movements), and democratically emancipatory (it displays a commitment to breaking down the barriers that prevent individuals from feeling responsible for the direction of society). Bearing this in mind, such an approach should be organized around a cooperative effort between theorists and agents of change and should be oriented toward the collective construction of large-scale actionable proposals for social and political change here and now.
Hayek and Buchanan endorsed Böhm's “private law society” as expressive of the ideal of a government of laws, and not of men . But they also acknowledged that among the many, the enforceability of legal custom, adjudication, and legislation must be politically guaranteed by a state. Due to unavoidable state‐involvement, risks of excessive rent‐seeking and authoritarian arbitrary government loom large once “rules of rule change” enable sophisticated forms of ruling by law. Even if in WEIRDS (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Societies) legal rules are enacted, modified, and derogated exclusively according to legal “rules of rule change,” the prevalence of the key attributes of “generality, certainty, and equality of enforcement” of the Rule of Law is in no way guaranteed. — The paper addresses this and the role, nature, and significance of constraining ruling by law through practicing the “political ideal of the Rule of Law”.
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.
The chapter argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation and exclusion within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Using Foucault’s strategy of reversal and the commons approach as a critical mirror, we propose the urgency of creating times and spaces of discomfort as a commoning activity in education. We thus ask fundamental questions of both the modern episteme and prevailing truths of education; ourselves as modern educators; and schools as places of persistent failure and irredeemable injustices. The reversal strategy and the commons as critical tools are used to create discomforts and to re-politicise, question and unlearn the current ethics of extinction. This opens up new possibilities for the ethics of continuance; a new order of things that can allow for new grammars of living, new subjectivities, new forms of educating. Finally, the chapter offers some sketches of what a new education could look like. That is, an education understood as self-formation, as the care of the self, others and the world as a political activity more related to ethics than to truth.
This chapter presents key arguments made in my book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, Justice and Morality. It examines how people with severe intellectual disabilities (PSID) fare within the social contract tradition. More specifically, it contends that even strategies that attempt to integrate disability within the realm of contractual justice and morality are not entirely successful. These strategies cannot ground a robust moral status for PSID; or, if they do so, it is at the cost of making this status merely derivative or contingent. The failure of social contract theory to bring PSID within its purview is significant. At best, it reveals a gap that should impel moral and political theorists to give fiduciary and caring ideals due weight next to contractual ideals. At worst, the tradition is not only incomplete, but necessarily creates and oppresses the “disabled subject.”
Although Jürgen Habermas is one of postwar Europe’s leading philosophers and public intellectuals, the secondary literature often portrays him as an apolitical thinker with little interest in “real politics.” This article demonstrates that from the beginning of his career Habermas was an intensely political thinker, who tried to mediate his political convictions and philosophical interests. Drawing on articles he produced as a freelance journalist before arriving at the Institute for Social Research in 1956—as well as the correspondence contained in the Habermas archives at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main—the article shows that Habermas sought to combine his political and philosophical interests from the start. It argues that these relatively unknown and understudied texts highlight the development of Habermas’s understanding of the relationship of theory to practice and also help explain his attraction to the Frankfurt School in general, as well as to Theodor Adorno specifically.
Focusing on ‘real actions’ of ‘real people’, normative behaviourism turns facts about observable patterns of behaviour into grounds for specific normative political principles. For this reason, this way of doing normative political theory has strong political realist credentials, given its methods, values and ambitions. In fact, according to its supporters, normative behaviourism is an improvement of political realism since it solves two problems that allegedly face many realists, namely, the ‘legitimacy problem’, i.e., how we should distinguish genuine acceptance of a political system from false acceptance, and ‘the institutional problem’, i.e., how we should translate political principles into viable political institutions. In this paper, we make two claims. First, normative behaviourism does not solve the legitimacy problem encountered by realists, because its solution rests on a flawed distinction between foundational principles and ‘principles that matter’, together with a problematic use of a Humean internal reasons approach. Second, normative behaviourism does not solve the institutional problem encountered by realists, because its solution is in fact much more unfeasible than realist prescriptions, since feasibility is interpreted as mere possibility. We wind up our analysis by showing that normative behaviourism encounters new problems that realist approaches typically do not face.
This article presents a critique of the contemporary realist political theory developed as an antithesis to the Rawlsian normative political philosophy. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) fosters a colossal influence on the current Anglo-American political thought which defends that political philosophy ought to be an applied moral philosophy. It offers a normative standpoint. Political realists, on the other hand, argue that political philosophy should be independent of moral philosophy. It offers a realist standpoint. The core contention between these two standpoints is that whether political philosophy is (in)dependent to moral philosophy. The normative standpoint places ethics at the centre of politics while the realist standpoint places sociology and history at the centre of politics. In this paper, I examine the central contours of political realism to understand whether it can be consistent with political moralism. I conclude that reverence as a moral and political ideal could be a common foundation for political realism and moralism.
This essay seeks to reconsider the place of ethics within the framework of political realism through an engagement of the politico-theological ideas of Max Stirner. Instead of considering ethics as part of the contexts of action in which prudent political decision-making takes place, Stirner's critique of traditional religious frameworks as inadequate in addressing existential questions lays the groundwork for his conceptualization of politics as an arena for the pursuit of metaphysical meaning. Subsequently, Stirner contends that the absence of objective ethical foundations compels individuals to imbue political concepts with quasi-religious significance, thereby transforming them into sources of metaphysical security. By extension, even though this essay agrees with the realist premise that political decision is never principally based on ethics, the self-induced illusion of ethical realism creates an ever-emerging political force that decision-makers cannot simply navigate with prudence, but must contend with substantively. Yet this very same force allows political mobilization on the basis of framing any political issue as an ethical issue.
Born as an attempt to move beyond the models of democracy which dominated public and academic discourses during the second postwar period, the deliberative turn has over the years promoted several other turnings, yielding a highly complex and disorienting theoretical landscape—a conceptual spaghetti junction. Following the main deliberative turn we can also count: an ‘epistemic’ turn (Jörke. Critical Policy Studies, 3(3–4), 440–446, 2010), and an ‘empirical’ turn (Thompson. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 497–520, 2008), a ‘systemic’ turn (Parkinson & Mansbridge. Deliberative systems. Cambridge University Press, 2012) and even a ‘democratic’ turn (Barker et al. Democratizing deliberation: a political theory anthology. Kettering Foundation Press, 2012). The end result of these twists and turns is a plurality of deliberative democratic models reproposing many analytical features which used to characterise those employed in the past (i.e. procedural, aggregative and participatory models of democracy), and which deliberative theorists wanted to transcend. The revitalisation of democracy theory promoted by the deliberative turn has thus made the theoretical landscape extremely intricate and impervious, making even those acquainted with it likely to lose their way. The present work aims to be a rough analytical guide to deliberative democracy (DD) for those who are keen to explore this uneven terrain on their own. As a guide, its goal is twofold: to single out some landmarks to follow along the way, and to indicate which dwelling stations to use in order to make the journey worthwhile. However, its main substantive goal is to understand what practical solutions this speculative activity is envisaging as possible remedies for the legitimacy crisis affecting existing liberal democracies. In keeping with the first goal, this introduction follows a topographical approach, intending to arrive at a conceptual map of DD models. A general assessment of DD’s contribution to the revitalisation of democratic politics will be carried out in Chap. 6.
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