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Ethics, morality and the case for realist political theory
Abstract
A common trait of all realistic political theories is the rejection of a conception of political theory as applied moral philosophy and an attempt to preserve some form of distinctively political thinking. Yet the reasons for favouring such an account of political theory can vary, a point that has often been overlooked in recent discussions by realism’s friends and critics alike. While a picture of realism as first-and-foremost an attempt to develop a more practical political theory which does not reduce morality to politics is often cited, in this paper we present an alternative understanding in which the motivation to embrace realism is grounded in a set of critiques of or attitudes towards moral philosophy which then feed into a series of political positions. Political realism, on this account, is driven by a set of philosophical concerns about the nature of ethics and the place of ethical thinking in our lives. This impulse is precisely what motivated Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss to their versions of distinctively realist political thought and is important to emphasise because it demonstrates that realism does not set politics against ethics (a misunderstanding typically endorsed by realism’s critics) but is rather an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse.
... idea of realism by Thucydides, he did not state that what he wrote was a concept of realism, but modern political scientists analyzed that the statements written by Thucydides had many similarities to the idea of realism taught by modern political scientists (Hall & Sleat, 2017;Rossi & Sleat, 2014;Sleat, 2016). In International Relations, realism teaches that the state is the leading actor in the international structure. ...
... Many thinkers can be called realists, such as Heraclitus (535-475 BC), Thucydides (460-395 BC), Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) (Bell, 2017;Donnelly, 2009;Hall & Sleat, 2017;Sleat, 2016). In addition, several politicians show realist attitudes, such as Cardinal de Richelieu, Otto von Bismarck, and Abraham Lincoln (Dugis, 2005;Schwartz, 2011). ...
This article discusses one of the basic concepts in political science and international relations, namely realism. As a perspective often used to analyze various political phenomena, it is essential to re-understand the concept of realism itself as a whole. This article attempts to provide a clear picture of what realism is meant and explain the history of realism from various realism thinkers. This article reviews the realism concept of 4 characters, namely Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau. This article explains that each thinker has their arguments for explaining realism. Hopefully, this article can provide readers with a complete understanding of realism as a concept or perspective often used in political science.
... .]; these principles are taken to be historically invariant, and studying ethics consists essentially in formulating them clearly, investigating the relations that exist between them, perhaps trying to give some kind of 'justification' of at least some of them, and drawing conclusions from them about how people ought to act or live (Geuss, 2008: 6-7). When Geuss is objecting to this, he is objecting to the acceptability and desirability of doing political theory in a particular way -a topic that has recently begun to be explored in depth in the literature (Hall and Sleat, 2017). This notion of 'ethics-first' political theory is very different from McKean's definition of utopianism and the realist opposition thereto. ...
... Of course, this is not to say that realism is not motivated by certain ethical concerns -it is (Hall and Sleat, 2017). It is only to say that there is no incompatibility between Geuss' realism on one hand, and talking about normative values, their ranking and priority, and using them to justify actions and alternatives in familiar ways on the other hand. ...
In a recent article, Benjamin McKean defends utopian political theorising by means of an internal critique of realism, construed as essentially anti-utopian, in order to defend human rights against realist objections thereto. I challenge that argument in three steps, focusing on the realism of Raymond Geuss. First, I show that the realism of Raymond Geuss is not incompatible with utopianism, that Geuss never opposes realism to utopianism and that he frequently argues that political theory should be both more realistic and more utopian. Second, I show that McKean misconstrues Geuss’ opposition to human rights as anti-utopian. Neither Geuss’ opposition to ethics-first political theory nor his objections to human rights can accurately be explicated in terms of McKean’s ‘utopianism’. Finally, I show how this misconstruing of Geuss’ realism renders McKean’s critique of Geuss ineffective, as a result of which his defence of human rights against Geuss’ realist objections fails. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of this for methodological debates in political theory, the value of realistically utopian theorising and the ideological power of contemporary ethics-first approaches to political theory.
... Politics is the non-violent means for resolving these disputes. The primary goals of political solutions are order and stability [44]. Political realism is interested in the mechanism of conflict resolutionin how to govern effectively [45]. ...
Calls for policy changes in matters with bioethical implications have important political and legal ramifications. Beyond bioethical analysis, it is important to ask whether state action is appropriate. This essay addresses this question from a perspective of liberal pluralism. Three principles inform liberal pluralism. First, value pluralism affirms that many controversies cannot be resolved by principled argument. Second, liberalism of fear informs us that limitations on state power are necessary to prevent governmental cruelty. Finally, political realism argues that political decisions in a democracy are based on negotiation between opponents seeking to maximize their interests, with morality being tangential or irrelevant. Government rulemaking should be restricted to situations involving serious harm to individuals or material detriment to the public interest. Beyond this, fairness and preventing the government from wronging vulnerable people require constraints on state exercise of power. These include constitutional checks and recognition of certain legal rights. Even when action seems appropriate prima facie, a formal proportionality analysis should be applied to rules that restrict individuals or groups. Formal constraints, though, are insufficient. Protection of citizens in general, and of minorities in particular, depends upon the willingness of individuals and governments to abide by political and constitutional norms. When addressing bioethical issues, scholars should consider the broader political implications of their recommendations.
... They emphasise that "an ideal, however attractive it may be to contemplate, is utopian if real individuals cannot be motivated to live by it" (Nagel 1989, 904). To actually achieve good I've suggested, moralism is entirely compatible with (Hall and Sleat 2017). Other realists have identified more specific alternatives to morality as a basis for political theory, principally epistemic, instrumental, and functional normativity (Prinz and Rossi 2017; Rossi and Argenton 2021; Burelli and Destri 2021; Burelli 2020). ...
... This is changing. An emerging literature is making normative prescriptions based on political realist grounds with regard to a number of issues ranging from democracy to freedom, global capital, labor market shirking, and sovereign debt (for some examples, see Arlen and Rossi 2021;Aytac 2023a;2023b;Bagg 2022;Cross and Prinz 2023;Hall and Sleat 2017). I will employ what must arguably be a specific understanding of political realism and show not only that it can generate normative statements with regard to my topic here-admitting refugees-but also that it represents a better tool to do so than those offered by moralism. ...
Refugees drown, are beaten, and are pushed back at the borders of the states of the Global North. Moral outrage is understandable in the face of such treatment. But does it constitute a good political theory? Can morality supply us with good normative arguments for a political world? In this article, I argue that they cannot. Drawing on political realism, I show why moral arguments for admitting refugees fail. What we require is not the extrapolation of moral arguments onto a political world, but a new form of political normativity that is derived from how politics works. I show that refugeehood possesses a specific political function in international politics. States do not admit refugees based on humanitarian reasons. This is what moral arguments get wrong. Rather, they fulfill the political function of condemning and embarrassing other states, of building oppositional and military forces to undermine rival political systems both ideologically and materially. In other words, they play an important political role—a role that allows us to build normative arguments from within a political and not a moral understanding of the world.
... The tasks of the tribunate connect to pragmatist conceptions of democracy, which also eschew a moral justification of democracy in favor of stressing the superior conflict management of democratic decision-making (e.g., Bagg 2018; Knight and Johnson 2011). In as far as we conceive of the tribunate as an institutional innovation tasked with enabling societies to address the conflicts that threaten to drive them apart, it could serve as a catalyst for a realist understanding of democracy as primarily a political value, tied to managing conflicts and creating broadly accepted forms of political order, rather than realizing moral ideals (Hall and Sleat 2017;Jubb andRossi 2015a, 2015b). ...
We argue that a reinvention of the plebeian tribunate should play a key role in addressing the challenges stemming from increasing concentrations of, and inequalities in, social, political, economic, and cultural power in liberal democracies. Addressing these challenges, which negatively affect parliamentary representation, requires a form of institutional innovation that gives voice to non-elites who are ruled but do not rule. We propose revisions of the composition and tasks of the tribunate that are tailored to these current challenges. Our fully randomly selected tribunate emerges as a vehicle not only for contesting concentrated power but also for articulating lines of conflict, disruptive agenda-setting, and political experimentation. Our proposal contributes to developing realist democratic theory. We argue that the reinvented tribunate not only meets realist commitments to avoiding moralization and idealization but also demonstrates the underexploited capacity of realism to inform institutional innovation and thus contribute to substantial political analysis.
... Shelby 2003, 170). 2 Though realism's antimoralism needn't be this stark: cf. Hall and Sleat (2017). What we wish to clarify is that for realism to vindicate its central claims it need only show that it can make normative claims about politics while eschewing moral normativity, which isn't the same as claiming that there is a distinctively political normativity-a confusion that has led to a protracted and often unfruitful debate (see, e.g., Aytac 2022a; Burelli and Destri 2022;Erman and Möller 2015;Jubb and Rossi 2015;Leader Maynard and Worsnip 2018;Sleat 2022). ...
What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (a) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power and (b) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa.
... Realist theorists like Raymond Williams and Raymond Guess reject the idea that (moral) philosophy, universal or abstract theories could serve as the foundation for ethical life, a criticism we share. Instead, they argue that "ethics is a deeply socially embedded and practical activity: a matter of acting in accordance with a set of internalised dispositions" (Hall / Sleat 2017). The practical activity of this comes through both the negotiated and communal activity of struggle -producing solidarity and inclusion -and self-reflection or reflexivity. ...
Societies across Western liberal democracies are experiencing overlapping crises: economic, social, political and ecological. The feeling for many, particularly those on the left is, in Gramsci’s terms, that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”, but what is necessary for the birth of a new socio-political order? Why is it that until now, socialists and those on the left have struggled to articulate a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse? In this chapter, we argue that this failing is, at least in part, the result of an ambivalence to making the moral argument for socialist transformation. Both a moral critique of the existing order and the articulation of a socialist future based on a distinct moral order derived from concrete struggles are necessary components of transformative change as they place substantive policy initiatives within a broader vision of how society and the state should function, and for whom.
Morals are important in stabilising otherwise contingent socio-economic orders as they work as cognitive shortcuts for actors, communicating meaning and generating expectations regarding the practices of ourselves and others. While the dominant social
contract revolves around an ethos of individualisation, responsibilisation and competition, the current crisis means that the time is right to challenge this and propose a new moral order centred on justice, inclusivity and collective solidarity.
The first part of this chapter looks at the historical ambivalence of the left to moral critique while also examining its nature and possibilities. The second section sketches out what a new social contract grounded in a moral critique of actually existing capitalism might look like, examining ongoing struggles around austerity, deficit and debt and how they structure and constrain the expectations and preferences of European citizens. The final section looks at possible loci for the development of a leftist moral critique, in particular the emergence of new think tanks which provide robust economic analysis within a broader moral framing that challenges the existing orthodoxies of neoliberal capitalism.
... The "false consciousness" of workers supporting capitalism as well as the (often unconsciously) self-affirming intui- Indeed, it seems sensible to hold that epistemic norms, such that we should strive for our believes to be true, are orthogonal to moral norms (Burelli & Destri, 2021;Hall & Sleat, 2017). Moreover, they are of course highly relevant for political theory, since the majority of our normative political claims rely on factual circumstances. ...
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.
... contemporary realists suggested additional names like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hume, and Schmitt. 3 Over time, an increasing number of past thinkers have come to be recruited to the "realist canon." 4 In its broadest demarcation, the canon has come to encompass "Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, Schmitt, Herodotus, Hume, Bentham, Kant, Lenin, Gandhi, Arendt, Strauss, Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin." 5 Contemporary realists' retrospective efforts to construct a tradition of realism in the history of political thought have received mixed responses. Matt Sleat provides the most charitable reading of these efforts when he urges that "[i]nsofar as realism has a history, any full understanding of it as a position within political theory is going to require an understanding of that history." ...
This essay considers the significance of the sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne for Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Geuss: twentieth century philosophers associated with contemporary political realism, who nevertheless occupy divergent positions on the ideological spectrum. The aim, in doing so, is twofold: to contribute to attempts at uncovering a tradition of realism and realistic thinkers, and to single out Montaigne's potential substantial relevance for some of the contemporary debates in political theory.
... He was not at all interested in strongly demarcating between political and moral normativities. 17 This paragraph draws heavily on the excellent analyses of Williams by Hall and Sagar (Hall, 2014(Hall, , 2015(Hall, , 2020Sagar, 2016;Hall and Sleat, 2017). Of course, all of this can be disputed on its own terms. ...
A prevailing understanding of realism, chiefly among its critics, casts realists as those who seek a ‘distinctively political normativity’, where this is interpreted as meaning nonmoral in kind. Moralists, on this account, are those who reject this and believe that political normativity remains moral. Critics have then focused much of their attention on demonstrating that the search for a nonmoral political normativity is doomed to fail which, if right, would then seem to fatally undermine the realist endeavour. This paper makes the case that casting the difference between realism and moralism in these terms is a mistake, one which overlooks the substantial body of realist work which is clear that it has no such aspirations to develop a nonmoral political normativity. The hope is that in drawing attention to this mistake a line can be drawn under these unhelpful debates, and we can move on to more fruitful constructive and critical discussions between realists and their critics.
... According to the Perry Local School Official Portal (2020), Socrates regarded art as a very important resource for teaching both morality and ethics. Though Plato criticized literature because it could have power and also capable of corrupting morals and undermining religion (More, 1923), he later candidly concluded that an art that doesn't teach morality and ethics is very harmful to the audience (Hall and Sleat, 2017). Aristotle who was a student of Plato concurred with both the Socrates and Plato that an art provides educational and moral insights thus producing what is referred to as catharsis (a way of releasing strong feelings or emotions) (Karim et al., 2012). ...
The practice of instilling morals to individuals has existed in both familial and societal upbringing. These morals are always transmitted from the older people to the younger generation with an intention of initiating both boys and girls to proper manhood and womanhood based on the familial and societal dictates. Transmission of these morals is normally through religious and literary texts, and also continuous conversations amongst the members of the family and the society. These conversations generally tend to exhibit an aspect of speech act theory called illocutionary speech act that signals acts such as directing, advising, requesting and persuading the recipient to embrace the teachings. Though there are many genres of literature, poems have proved to be more effective in passing these morals in both the ancient and modern societies. Therefore, this article analyzed the themes and illocutionary speech act in some selected advisory Biblical and literary texts with poetic style. The study realized various themes such as lavish life and alcoholism, human rights, characteristics of ideal wife, philanthropy, respect, courtesy, faithfulness, avoidance of anger, discipline, religiosity, education, tolerance, integrity, marriage life, cleanliness and love. The study realized common illocutionary speech acts such as expressives, directives, verdictives, representatives and commissives.
... However, not all sceptics are value pluralists. For instance, many of Williams's realist interpreters take on board his scepticism and pay little or no attention to his pluralism (Sagar 2016, p. 368;see also Hall 2014;Hall and Sleat 2017;Philp 2012, p. 634). But does it matter whether sceptics do or do not adopt a pluralist approach to moral conflict? ...
What do the victims of tyranny owe each other? In this paper, I examine whether they can be condemned for betraying their friends, and I do so through a novel interpretation of Judith Shklar’s political thought. Shklar is a widely acknowledged and significant influence on non-ideal theory and political realism. However, there is also a previously unnoticed transformation between her early and mature work, for although she remains a sceptic her approach to moral conflict changes from value pluralism to value monism. In addition, it is only in her mature work, as a monist, she believes tyranny cancels obligations of justice. I argue here that Shklar’s monism fails, and this in turn has important implications for political realism and non-ideal theory. While attention has been focused on developing a sceptical critique of ideal theory, this interpretation of Shklar’s work illustrates that greater awareness is needed of the pitfalls of monist strands of scepticism.
... This interpretation undoubtedly can draw some support from the literature on Williams and his realism. A great analysis of Williams' (and Geuss') realism in the context of his moral philosophy was published recently (Hall -Sleat, 2017) that persuasively argues for the central importance of the relationship between moral and political norms in contemporary realist political theory. It is not surprising at all, therefore, that the critics of realism also often take aim at the so-called anti-moralism of contemporary realist political theory (Estlund, 2017;Cross, 2017;Erman -Möller, 2013). ...
This paper aims to advocate a Williamsian approach to political realism and contends that contemporary realist political theory is built on an ‘a-theoretical core’ that the paper will call ‘political realism’ in the broader sense (for a very different approach to Williams, see Hall, 2013). The central tenet of this thesis is that contemporary realist political theory fundamentally differs from mainstream political theory not only in its political outlook, but also in its views about the tasks and prospects of theorizing. In other words, ‘political realism’ imposes severe constraints on theorizing in a realist key and makes contemporary realist political theory especially vulnerable to criticisms coming from mainstream political theory. This paper contends, however, that the inherent limitedness of contemporary realist political theory is a fair price that is worth paying for a more realistic understanding of politics.
The argument of the paper is built on the Williamsian assumption that mainstream political theory is ultimately a sort of ‘applied morality’ and that the fundamental problem with mainstream political theory as ‘applied morality’ is not so much its strong commitment to pre-political moral principles as its being fundamentally shaped by an ethical theory.
... Despite the widespread claim that political realism is anti-moralist (Estlund, 2017), realism actually seeks for a genuinely political ethics. The real difference between political realism and moralism in this respect is not that moralists advocate a political outlook that includes moral considerations while realists are anti-moralists, but that, according to realists, moralism 9 as 'applied morality' misinterprets the origins and main characteristics of the ethical problems within politics (Hall -Sleat, 2017). ...
The ambition of this article is threefold. First, it is to offer a realist reading of Aristotle’s regime theory as it is laid out mostly in Books IV–VI of his Politics. The author argues that Aristotle’s regime theory has three fundamentally realist claims about the workings of politics: first, the search for a perfect regime is not the only legitimate subject of political theory; second, every regime is built on a delicate balance of a particular understanding of political justice, a variety of sociological factors and the institutional design and political virtues of its politicians; third, there are almost as many different regimes as polities, and although they can be grouped into major regime types, there are many sub-types and mixed and transitory regimes. Second, the article argues that modern democratic theories have an unacceptable ‘moralistic bias’ from a realist point of view. Third, that a neo-Aristotelian regime theory can offer an attractive realist alternative to the predominant contemporary understandings of political regimes.
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.
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.
Realism is conventionally understood as coldly accepting the powerful dominating the weak. Reversing this image, I argue that Realism contains an implicit ethos of resistance. Drawing on a recent scholarship on the historical complexity and diversity of classical Realism in international relations (IR), this article uncovers this ethos by focusing on three shifts of perspective: (1) from an extreme to moderate view of power politics; (2) from naturalizing the status quo to envisaging progressive change; and (3) from a horizontal view of politics among nations (or other horizontally situated entities) to a global image of power politics. I then explore how these shifts exist in a different scholarship, the emergence of a so-called new Realism in political theory. The article builds a conversation between classical Realism in IR and the new Realist philosopher Bernard Williams’ work, finding that both articulate an ethos of legitimate resistance to domination. The significance of the Realist ethos is that it challenges stereotyped images of the tradition justifying domination and injustices, and it inserts and positions a Realist voice in recent debates over human rights to resist in global politics.
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.
Is voting a duty of democratic citizenship? This article advances a new argument for the existence of a duty to vote. It argues that every normative account of electoral representation requires universal turnout to function in line with its own internal normative logic. This generates a special obligation for citizens to vote in electoral representative contexts as a function of the role morality of democratic citizenship. Because voting uniquely authorizes office holding in representative democracies, and because universal turnout contributes powerfully to representation being fair, to be a good citizen of such democracies requires one to vote. Whereas previous arguments for a duty to vote have invoked basic moral principles like fairness or a Samaritan duty of rescue, this account is based on citizens occupying a vital functional role within electoral representative institutions. This institutional duty solves the “specificity problem” of justifying a duty to vote better than competing accounts and also immunizes the duty to objections that there is no duty to vote when there are only bad choices and that there is a no duty to vote but rather duty to vote well. By emphasizing the tight connection between institutions and individual conduct, the role morality approach used here supplies a less abstract and more realistic framework than much previous research on the ethics of democratic citizenship and brings the debate closer to constitutive features of democratic politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Realist political theory is often confronted with the objection that it is biased towards the status quo. Although this criticism overlooks the fact that realist political theories contain various resources for critique, a realist approach that is strong in status quo critique and contributes, constructively, to the theorising of alternatives to the status quo is a desideratum. The article argues that contextual realism, which sources its normativity from particular contexts, harbours an underexploited potential to establish such a form of political theorising. By drawing on ideas and principles that have guided critical engagements with social and political forms in a particular context, and on widely shared views of need for reform, realists can identify deficits of the status quo and contribute to a debate on how these deficits might be addressed. This article describes and illustrates the idea of a transformative contextual realism, and defends it against some potential objections.
Writers have devoted too little attention to the question of the appropriate limits of the state. There seems to be a tacit assumption that wise, well-meaning statesmen will translate philosophers’ insights into good policy. I suggest that it is more likely to find that government leaders in large nations are narcissistic, power-obsessed, and corrupt. The necessity for protecting children’s needs must balanced against the need to maintain the integrity of private spaces against the sorts of governments that are likely to wield authority. I propose seven principles that undergird this balance, and that will be reified in the State Intervention Test in the next chapter. These principles are family primacy, pluralism, political realism, negotiation, limitation of government scope, diffusion of government power, and sufficientarianism. Essentially, I seek a political process with constitutional guarantees of liberty. My vision derives from a contemporary movement in political theory known as political realism. Needs must ultimately be determined politically, and are reified through a political process as guarantees of minimum fulfillment of important interests. The idea that the state should provide such a floor is called sufficientarianism. The levels of sufficiency are established through a modus vivendi. There is no non-controversial principled justification, so I use sentiment to justify my political realist solution. First, it is based on compassion, and possibly solidarity. Second, it encompasses the notion of self-insurance; any of us may fall below a sufficient level without the state providing a floor. Finally, the existence of a social net promotes the legitimacy of societal institutions, including the state, thus promoting social harmony and order.
Radical realism is distinguished in part from other forms of political realism by its more explicit anti-status quo objectives. In particular, radical realists generally reject the legitimacy of liberal political institutions, and often defend some version of Marxism or anarchism. However, critics of radical realism sometimes argue that radical realist's aversion to certain kinds of normative theorising hinders their capacity to criticize the status quo. This objection may therefore be best understood as one of “self-frustration,” rather than “status quo bias.” According to the objection, radical realists want to criticise the status quo, but their own methodological positions prevent them from doing so effectively. I have three aims in this article. First, I will clarify the kinds of normativity which radical realists do (and do not) object. Second, I will then show how this enables us to see that the self-frustration objection fails. Third, I will suggest that it is not radical realism but its critics who may have a problematic relationship with the status quo.
For realists, political theories exhibit an anti‐moralist character when their normativity stems from an appraisal of the value and the specificities of real political practices. While realists agree on such a characterisation of the realist project, they split when it comes to explaining to what extent realist political normativity can provide us with a critical perspective on the status quo. The most recent contributions on this topic are polarised. Some contributors interpret political realism as an approach to politics that leads to an affirmation of the status quo. Others suggest that political realism might lead to radical transformations of the status quo. In this paper, I argue that it is possible to identify a consistent middle ground between these alternative interpretations: the interpretation of political realism as a form of reformist conservatism. Moreover, I defend the reformist‐conservative interpretation of political realism as superior to the extant ones. Contrary to the rival interpretations, I show that the reformist‐conservative interpretation consistently reconciles all the fundamental tenets of political realism. Furthermore, I explain that while the conservatist interpretation risks undermining the normative commitment of realism and the radical interpretation leans towards an irresponsible form of political theorising, the reformist‐conservative reading avoids these pitfalls.
Despite the rapidly growing literature on realism, there’s little discussion of the ideology critique of John Rawls offered by one of its leading lights, Raymond Geuss. There is little understanding of what (most of) this critique consists in and few discussions of how Rawls’ approach to political theorising may be defended against it. To remedy this situation, this article reconstructs the realist ideology critique of Rawls advanced by Raymond Geuss, which has three prongs: (1) Rawls’ political theory offers insufficient tools to uncover and address distortions of our political values, beliefs, and intuitions; (2) it unacceptably reinforces these distortions by unduly legitimating them; and (3) it diverts attention from important features of real politics. With this done, I finish by considering how Rawlsians can respond, chiefly by employing a wide reflective equilibrium that includes different forms of genealogy and ideology critique.
This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.
Political realists reject the view that politics is applied morality. But they also usually claim that judgements about political legitimacy are normative. Where, then, does this normativity come from? So far, realists have given two answers: ‘concessive realism’, which identifies legitimacy as a norm internal to political practice while delegating to morality the task of explaining why this practice is valuable; and ‘naturalist realism’, which holds that alternatives to legitimate politics are not ‘real options’ for anyone. I argue that concessive realism should be rejected because it neglects the importance of the realist critique of morality. I also argue that naturalist realism should be rejected because alternatives to legitimate politics remain ‘real options’ for some people. I conclude with some thoughts on how a plausible account of the normative force of realist legitimacy should proceed.
Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear, a political and philosophical standpoint that emerges in her mature work, has ostensibly two defining characteristics. It is a skeptical approach that puts cruelty first among the vices. For that reason, it is considered to be both set apart from mainstream liberalism, in particular the liberalism of J. S. Mill and John Rawls, but also an important source of influence for political realists and non-ideal theorists. However, I argue here that, in putting cruelty first among the vices, Shklar also offers a value monist approach to political thought, one that she shares with Mill and Rawls as well. Each claims to have identified the general rule for the resolution of moral conflicts, although they disagree about what that rule is. Therefore, Shklar's mature work combines skepticism with value monism. As such, it represents a radical departure from the value pluralist (and skeptical) approach to moral conflict evident in her early work. Her commentators have not noticed either her mature monism, or the move away from her earlier value pluralism, and this is explained by a tendency to see her mature work as offering simply a skeptical alternative to mainstream liberalism.
This article explores the relevance of the work of Cambridge historian of political thought István Hont to contemporary political theory. Specifically, it suggests that Hont’s work can be of great help to the recent realist revival in political theory, in particular via its lending support to the account favoured by Bernard Williams, which has been a major source for recent realist work. The article seeks to make explicit the main political theoretic implications of Hont’s historically-focused work, which in their original formulations are not always easy to discern, as well as itself being a positive contribution to realist theorizing, moving beyond a merely negative critique of dominant moralist positions.
According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.
A new volume of philosophical essays by Bernard Williams. The book is a successor to Problems of the Self, but whereas that volume dealt mainly with questions of personal identity, Moral Luck centres on questions of moral philosophy and the theory of rational action. That whole area has of course been strikingly reinvigorated over the last deacde, and philosophers have both broadened and deepened their concerns in a way that now makes much earlier moral and political philosophy look sterile and trivial. Moral Luck contains a number of essays that have contributed influentially to this development. Among the recurring themes are the moral and philosophical limitations of utilitarianism, the notion of integrity, relativism, and problems of moral conflict and rational choice. The work presented here is marked by a high degree of imagination and acuity, and also conveys a strong sense of psychological reality. The volume will be a stimulating source of ideas and arguments for all philosophers and a wide range of other readers.
Bernard Williams's remarkable essay on morality confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page. Williams explains, analyses and distinguishes a number of key positions, from the purely amoral to notions of subjective or relative morality, testing their coherence before going on to explore the nature of 'goodness' in relation to responsibilities and choice, roles, standards, and human nature. The final chapters make a fascinating enquiry into what morality is about, looking beyond happiness to other human aims and ideals. This re-issue of a classic in moral philosophy includes a new foreword by the author.
In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field.
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.
What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? InPhilosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Disciplineis one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press.In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argumentwas published in the fall of 2005.The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophyis being published shortly after the present volume.
Bernard Williams is remembered as one of the most brilliant and original philosophers of the past fifty years. Widely respected as a moral philosopher, Williams began to write about politics in a sustained way in the early 1980s. There followed a stream of articles, lectures, and other major contributions to issues of public concern--all complemented by his many works on ethics, which have important implications for political theory. This new collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, addresses many of the core subjects of political philosophy: justice, liberty, and equality; the nature and meaning of liberalism; toleration; power and the fear of power; democracy; and the nature of political philosophy itself. A central theme throughout is that political philosophers need to engage more directly with the realities of political life, not simply with the theories of other philosophers. Williams makes this argument in part through a searching examination of where political thinking should originate, to whom it might be addressed, and what it should deliver. Williams had intended to weave these essays into a connected narrative on political philosophy with reflections on his own experience of postwar politics. Sadly he did not live to complete it, but this book brings together many of its components. Geoffrey Hawthorn has arranged the material to resemble as closely as possible Williams's original design and vision. He has provided both an introduction to Williams's political philosophy and a bibliography of his formal and informal writings on politics. Those who know the work of Bernard Williams will find here the familiar hallmarks of his writing--originality, clarity, erudition, and wit. Those who are unfamiliar with, or unconvinced by, a philosophical approach to politics, will find this an engaging introduction. Both will encounter a thoroughly original voice in modern political theory and a searching approach to the shape and direction of liberal political thought in the past thirty-five years.
Before his death in 2003, Bernard Williams planned to publish a collection of historical essays, focusing primarily on the ancient world. This posthumous volume brings together a much wider selection, written over some forty years. His legacy lives on in this masterful work, the first collection ever published of Williams's essays on the history of philosophy. The subjects range from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth A.D., from Homer to Wittgenstein by way of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Sidgwick, Collingwood, and Nietzsche. Often one would be hard put to say which part is history, which philosophy. Both are involved throughout, because this is the history of philosophy written philosophically. Historical exposition goes hand in hand with philosophical scrutiny. Insights into the past counteract blind acceptance of present assumptions. In his touching and illuminating introduction, Myles Burnyeat writes of these essays: "They show a depth of commitment to the history of philosophy seldom to be found nowadays in a thinker so prominent on the contemporary philosophical scene." The result celebrates the interest and importance to philosophy today of its near and distant past.
In recent years, a number of realist thinkers have charged much contemporary political theory with being idealistic and moralistic. While the basic features of the realist counter-movement are reasonably well understood, realism is still considered a critical, primarily negative creed which fails to offer a positive, alternative way of thinking normatively about politics. Aiming to counteract this general perception, in this article I draw on Bernard Williams’s claims about how to construct a politically coherent conception of liberty from the non-political value of freedom. I do this because Williams’s argument provides an illuminating example of the distinctive nature of realist political thinking and its attractions. I argue that Williams’s account of realist political thinking challenges the orthodox moralist claim that normative political arguments must be guided by an ideal ethical theory. I then spell out the repercussions Williams’s claims about the significance of political opposition and non-moralised accounts of motivation have for our understanding of the role and purpose of political theory. I conclude by defending the realist claim that action-guiding political theory should accordingly take certain features of our politics as given, most centrally the reality of political opposition and the passions and experiences that motivate them. On this reading political realism offers a viable way of thinking about political values which cannot be understood in terms of the categories of intellectual separation – ideal/nonideal or fact-insensitive/fact-sensitive – that have marked political theory in recent years.
So-called 'realists' have argued that political philosophers should engage with real politics, but that mainstream 'non-realist' political philosophers fail to do so. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the discussions between realists and their critics have not drawn much on debates in metaethics. In this paper, I argue that this is an oversight. There are important connections between the realism/non-realism debate and certain controversies in metaethics. Both realism and non-realism come with metaethical baggage. By considering several arguments that could be made for and against both positions, each of which rests on contested views about the metaphysics and epistemology of value, I outline exactly which metaethical claims realists and nonrealists must defend in order to make their position tenable.
This paper explores contemporary debates about the meaning and value of realism in political theory. I seek to move beyond the widespread observation that realism encompasses a diverse set of critiques and commitments, by urging that we recognize two key strands in recent realist thought. Detachment realists claim that political theory is excessively abstract and infeasible and thereby fails adequately to inform actual political decision-making. Displacement critics, on the other hand, suggest that political theory threatens or disrespects real politics. Not only are these visions of realism very different, there are also important tensions between them. I focus, in particular, on clarifying and evaluating the more complex charge that political theory displaces politics.
This paper offers a systematic examination of the political thought of Bernard Williams by explaining the relation between his political realism and critical assessment of modern moral philosophy and discussing how his work illuminates the debates about the nature and purpose of political theory. I argue that Williams’s realism is best read as an attempt to make ethical sense of politics, and as an attempt to explain how we can continue to affirm a kind of liberalism, without recourse to the moralized presuppositions that he insists we must jettison. I begin by outlining Williams’s claims about the limits of philosophy and his conception of confidence. I then address his understanding of the relationship between historical and philosophical inquiry and his contention that historical understanding can foster a kind of confidence in some of our contemporary commitments. I conclude by showing how this leads Williams to articulate a defense of liberalism that is compatible with his skepticism about modern moral philosophy and his ancillary critique of political moralism. In this sense, Williams’s work has important implications for political theory and the study of politics more generally because it enables us to articulate a defense of liberalism that has marked advantages over the “high liberalism” that most contemporary liberal political philosophers defend and shows how we might develop a political theory that does not begin by asserting universal moral foundations but which, despite this, avoids reverting to a crude postmodern antifoundationalism.
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.
Bernard Williams was an ethical sceptic, but he was also a proponent of liberalism. To what extent can one finally be both? This article explores this question through a particular emphasis on Williams, but seeks to draw wider lessons regarding what ethical scepticism should and should not amount to. It shows how ethical scepticism can be reconciled with a commitment to what Williams, following Judith Shklar, called ‘the liberalism of fear’, which is revealed as an ecumenical outlook for different stripes of ethical sceptic. The article concludes by drawing some lessons for the recent ‘realist’ turn in political theory.
The charge that contemporary political theory has lost touch with the realities of politics is common to both the recent ideal/non-ideal theory debate and the revival of interest in realist thought. However, a tendency has arisen to subsume political realism within the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, or to elide realism with non-ideal theorising. This article argues that this is a mistake. The ideal/non-ideal theory discussion is a methodological debate that takes place within the framework of liberal theory. Realism, contrary to several interpretations, is a distinct and competing conception of politics in its own right that stands in contrast to that of liberal theory. While the two debates are united in a sense that contemporary liberal theory needs to be more realistic, they differ significantly in their understanding of this shortcoming and, more importantly, what it is to do more realistic political theory.
In this article I discuss Bernard Williams' realist conception of legitimacy. According to his critics Williams tacitly incorporates various moral claims, endorses a philosophically suspect ‘consensus’ view of politics, and employs an unrealistic and moralised conception of political rule. I argue that these criticisms mischaracterise the nature of the basic legitimation demand and the judgements about the acceptability of the state at its core and conclude that political theorists who object to the direction and style of much contemporary political theory should take seriously the possibility of developing an appropriately ‘political’ political theory on Williamsian lines.
This article provides a conceptual map of the debate on ideal and non-ideal theory. It argues that
this debate encompasses a number of different questions, which have not been kept sufficiently separate
in the literature. In particular, the article distinguishes between the following three interpretations
of the ‘ideal vs. non-ideal theory’ contrast: (i) full compliance vs. partial compliance theory;
(ii) utopian vs. realistic theory; (iii) end-state vs. transitional theory. The article advances critical
reflections on each of these sub-debates, and highlights areas for future research in the field.
Realist political philosophy has enjoyed a remarkable revival in recent years, with prominent intellectual figures (for example, Raymond Geuss, Bernard Williams) promoting an identifiably ‘realist’ alternative to neo-Kantianism. Yet contemporary Realists either ignore or caricature mid-century (or classical) international realists (for example, E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr), whose theoretical contributions have also recently generated a substantial revival of interest among international political theorists. However, they have done so at a high cost: recent philosophical-minded realists unwittingly reproduce conceptual ambiguities plaguing mid-century international realist contributions to political ethics. Unlike its mid-century predecessor, realist political philosophy also fails to analyze political ‘realities’ in any but the most abstract fashion. Realist political philosophy still primarily constitutes an anti-Kantian gesture, but by no means a cogent theoretical alternative.
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.
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.
Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard.
Preface. In (pp. vii-xvi)
- R Geuss
Introduction. Outside ethics
- R Geuss
Bourgeois philosophy and criticism
- R Geuss
The loss of meaning on the left
- R Geuss
Nietzsche and morality
- R Geuss
What is realistic political philosophy? Metaphilosophy
- D Runciman
Review of ‘Nietzsche on Tragedy Nietzsche: A Critical Life The Will to Power as Art, by Martin Heidegger in his Essays and Reviews
- B Williams
On the Very idea of a metaphysics of right. Politics and the imagination
- R Geuss
Preface. In Politics and the imagination (pp. vii-xvi)
- R Geuss
The need to be sceptical
- B Williams
History, morality, and the test of reflection
- B Williams
From freedom to liberty: The construction of a political value
- B Williams