No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
After Politics, The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy
... Realitas itu berkembang bersamaan dengan minimnya pemahaman banyak pihak akan risiko penggunaan media sosial (Newey, 2001). Karena itu, ketika pemicu yang disebut politik kekuasaan masuk di dalamnya, hoaks terjadi dengan amat banal. ...
Indonesia’s social space in the past year has been filled with the phenomenon of hoax. The phenomenon of hoax develops alongwith the strengthening and thickening of the national political axis. Society is not treated by true news but it is filled withvarious emotional outbursts. The implication is that the community is divided into small groups based on interests. This causesthe social and cultural space to be rigid and inflexible. By Ulrich Beck, such phenomena are called risk society. Risks arise notonly because of technological developments in physical reason but also because of erroneous social and political practices. In itsdevelopment, Indonesian politics follows the trend of thickening into groups. A society divided into groups has the potential tostrengthen internal integration. As a result, the level of external adaptation is low. Politics is called the most vulnerable regionand is therefore responsible for social divisions. Because of politics, elements of society make social media not only a tool butalso their ultimate goal. There, the people practice various news provocation movements the truth of which cannot be verified.Such reality demands state responsibility in managing the media. Media management is not the same as controlling media.Managing the media is providing literacy education not only to the media and the political elite but also to the general public.Consequently, the logical reasoning for the existence of a civilized Indonesian society should be honed contiously.
... "involves the agency side of policy work", being in this context the result of different minds, demonstrating "why policy processes are inherently messy, ambiguous, unpredictable and conflict-provoking" (Henry, 1993). Another author relates 'policy' to 'academic systembuilding', contrasting with the "political realities of conflict and power" (Newey, 2001). Confronting text (i.e., POLICY), the discourse is forged by the circumstances -in other words, political (POLITICS). ...
About the theme: Public design policies can be explained as sets of principles established by a government intending to apply design into leveraging social, economical, industrial, and regional development. Design policy is an emerging theme in the field of design, and one that has been raising concerns from governments globally. Two aspects drive this interest: the extraordinary growth rates of the creative industries in the past decades; and the ability of Design to be a link between technology, creativity and the user, being a potential unique tool to help innovate and foster economic growth. About the research: The research was proposed responding an observed demand of governments in emerging countries to structure policies to use design to promote industrial and social development. It was structured to analyse current national and regional Design Policies within the framework of common aspects, effective practices and trends; external factors influencing their implementation; general causes of failures; assessment methods; and the influence of coexisting design definitions and trends. The focus is on Brazil, whose government is funding the research, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. In this context the research aims to generate a rationale for planning and assessment of Design Policies based on a review of current effective practices and identified future trends relevant to emerging markets. The main objective of the research is the identification and analysis of the constituent elements, driving forces, impacting factors, expected consequences, assessment methodologies and common failures of design policies. The intended goal is to respond to a demand for new knowledge, data, and tools that could contribute to reduce the current level of uncertainty regarding design policies. Methodology: To acknowledge the established objectives and goal, a comprehensive review of literature was initially carried out, including many reports and other documents from governments and from the EU. Emerging issues from the review informed a two-stage study developed in Brazil. For the first stage, in 2011, thirteen stakeholders were interviewed, from key active governmental programmes and departments. The choice of programmes and departments was validated by questions from the interview itself. The second stage, in 2012, focused on the only currently active design support programme aimed at SMEs in Brazil. During this phase, it was collected archival data and three interviews conducted. Collected data was analysed using descriptive statistic tools. The findings were then filtered using documents and archival data about European effective practices to inform the discussion and recommendations, and further used to generate a modelling framework for design policies. Contribution: The research contribution can be acknowledged in four different levels of outcomes: a comprehensive review of literature (1), combining an assortment of very significant documents and discussing their connections and specific contributions to the field; the application of an interview and archive based case study (2) about design policies in Brazil, corroborating Case Studies as a leading research tool for the area; a discussion on the impacting factors and effective practices of design policies (3); and finally the conceptual model and framework named respectively Compass Model and Create DP (4) that set together a framework intended to reduce levels of uncertainty in planning design policies.
... In Reasonably Radical, Laden endorses the political approach for two main reasons (2001,(5)(6). First, building on Bonnie Honig's (1993) and Glen Newey's (2001) charge that liberal political theory displaces politics by aiming at a post-political order, he distinguishes the conditions of political deliberation from its results. Political philosophy ought to focus on "conditions under which political deliberation can be legitimacy-conferring," not on the "results of political deliberation." ...
In Western democracies, people harbor feelings of disgust or hatred for politics. Populists and technocrats even seemingly question the value of politics. Populists cry that they are not politicians and that politics is necessarily corrupt. From the opposite side, technocrats view politics as a pointless constraint on enacting the obviously right policies. Are Western democracies facing a rejection of politics? And is politics worth defending? This paper offers a vindicatory genealogy of politics, vindicating the need human beings have for this practice and clarifying the extent of its contemporary rejections. To achieve these contributions, the paper connects the literatures on pragmatic genealogy and on political realism, revealing how they can complement each other. Following pragmatic genealogy, the practice of politics is vindicated, because it meets an inevitable functional need for collectively binding decision-making. However, and importantly, political realism allows us to see that the functional mechanisms through which politics fulfills this need vary contextually and thus require careful empirical scrutiny. The paper thus dispels confusion about seeming rejections of politics by clarifying what is unavoidable, and what is revisable about politics.
Realist thinkers in political philosophy often criticize ideal theorists for neglecting or eliminating the fact of politics in their work. This is supposed to be problematic because we should never expect to overcome politics. Any theory that attempts to do so is said to be unrealistic, naïve, and impractical. Although much has been said in the dispute between realists and ideal theorists in recent years, this particular line of criticism, which should be distinguished from other criticisms of ideal theory, has not been clearly or explicitly addressed by ideal theorists in the literature. I deal with this issue by examining the ideal theory of John Rawls, which has been a prominent target of realist criticisms. My aim is to see where politics exists, or might exist, in Rawls’s theory, and whether this politics satisfactorily answers to the various aspects of the realist’s critique. My analysis suggests that there may be no inherent or necessary conflict between ideal theory and real politics, after all.
Is democracy a realistic political ideal? This paper historically recovers and normatively assesses Machiavelli's intuition that democratic institutions are realistically desirable in virtue of their resilience. The paper takes inspiration from Machiavelli's work in two ways. Methodologically, it argues that there is a distinctive realist normativity based on political virtues, i.e., those skills that are instrumentally required to thrive in politics. Substantively, it probes Machiavelli's idea that the most important political virtue, for both individuals and institutions, is resilience: the ability to continuously adapt to new circumstances. Machiavelli observes that democratic regimes are very resilient because, while individuals cannot change their character to adapt to new circumstances, democracies can just change the individual in charge. The paper then refines Machiavelli's intuition by building on the contemporary distinction between stability and resilience. It claims that authoritarian regimes are more stable, and yet less resilient. Democracies are instead characterized by a continuous flux of political outputs, which makes them seemingly wavering, and yet better equipped to experiment with unconventional adaptations that allow societies to survive extraordinary challenges. The two different literatures thus complement each other. The debate on resilience usefully clarifies and systematizes Machiavelli's intuition. Conversely, Machiavelli's work reveals the salience of resilience in politics, and shows why it counts as a realist political value.
This is a preprint of my new book on deliberative democracy. Feedback will be much appreciated
An important branch of environmental theory frames the climate crisis as a moral problem in need of a moral solution: human hubris is responsible for environmental degradation and must be atoned for through humility. Politically indeterminate, however, such argumentation is vulnerable to de-politicizing and mal-politicizing capture. In an effort to fend off the threat of either, this paper turns to the history of political thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who theorized the environment as both a moral and a political domain. I examine how Rousseau understood the availability of republican self-rule to be contingent both on the natural environment and on the relationship we construct with it such that freedom, in his words, is not automatically ‘a fruit of every Clime.’ This is the case, he suggests, because of the environment’s intersection with political economy and political culture. At the same time, Rousseau contends, republican self-rule is also a moral practice; republican polities afford citizens a public means of achieving and exercising moral agency. Triangulating the relationship between polity, morality, and environment, Rousseau’s thought offers an integrative logic through which to imbue the environment with both moral and political salience, thereby circumventing the dangers of mere moralization alone.
Tekst stanowi próbę pomyślenia instytucji stanu wyjątkowego w ramach logiki monistycznej, która by nie naruszała podstaw demokracji liberalnej: jako instrumentu prawnego do zwalczenia zagrożenia, przed którym stoi państwo, przy użyciu narzędzi z porządku norm sprzed wystąpienia sytuacji ekstraordynaryjnej. Autor analizuje trzy możliwości takiej logiki, wywodząc ją z koncepcji m. in. libertarianizmu Roberta Nozicka, instytucjonalizmu Nomi Claire Lazar czy liberalnego realizmu Jeremy’ego Waldrona i aplikując do zapisów Konstytucji RP z 1997 r.
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.
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.
This article argues that political realists have at least two strategies to provide distinctively political normative judgments that have nothing to do with morality. The first ground is instrumental normativity, which states that if we believe that something is a necessary means to a goal we have, we have a reason to do it. In politics, certain means are required by any ends we may intend to purse. The second ground is epistemic normativity, stating that if something is (empirically) true, this gives us a reason to believe it. In politics, there are certain empirical regularities that ought to be acknowledged for what they are. Both sources are flawed. Instrumental normativity only requires coherence between attitudes and beliefs, and one can hang on to false beliefs to preserve attitudes incompatible with reality. I may desire to eschew power relations, and as such imagine politics to be like a camping trip. Epistemic normativity, on the other hand, operates critically, striking down existing normative claims. It shows us that politics is nothing like a camping trip, but it doesn't tell us what we should do about it (beyond abandoning some false beliefs). We conclude by showing that if the two are taken together, they remedy each other flaws.
The article shows the extent to which recent populist movements challenge both liberal practice and liberal theory, and require a deeper reflection based on a history of ideas. To this end, I will first outline the current state of debate and name Carl Schmitt’s politically intervening thinking as a theoretical challenge. With reference to Hans Kelsen’s fundamental criticism of Schmitt, I will illustrate that the underlying political ontology becomes questionable in this debate. This ontology gains contour through the historical circumstances of the 1930s and the influence of Martin Heidegger’s neo-antique thinking. Against this background, a historically oriented analysis of Plato offers a way out of Heidegger’s metaphysical appropriation of the ancients, at the same time providing a way of overcoming the narrowness of current liberal discourse.
This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have gone awry in increasingly centring their approach around a metaethical claim: that political theory should be rooted in a political form of normativity that is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics of realism have argued that this claim is unconvincing. But I suggest that it is also a counterintuitive starting point for realism, and one unnecessary to avoid the ‘applied morality’ approach to political theory that realists oppose. Instead, realism should be methodologically orientated around what I term ‘empirically constitutive political realities’ - enduring features of real political contexts that are systematically consequential in their normative implications. Realists can persuasively argue that such empirically constitutive political realities must be attended to in political theory-building, and not merely treated as a context in which independently formulated moral theories are simply applied. This framing of realism accords real politics a genuinely foundational theoretical role, but without requiring any contentious metaethical stance about a non-moral political normativity. I explain some methodological implications that follow for realism – in particular the need to prioritise empirically grounded theorisation of real political contexts over abstract and rather essentialist claims about ‘the political’. I also argue that such a framing of realism helps engender a more accurate, less divisive, and more pluralist conception of methodological debates within political theory.
Although often cast by realists as an exemplar of moralist or rationalist thinking, Jürgen Habermas and certain commentators on his work reject this characterisation, highlighting elements of his thought that conflict with it. This article will examine dimensions of Habermas’s work that relate to many realist concerns in political theory. I argue that while he escapes the commonplace caricature of an abstract thinker who is inattentive to real world affairs, Habermas’s claims in relation to communication, historical and empirical context, and the development of rights in history, reveal a narrow consideration of what defines context and a progressivist narrative of history that fails to address seemingly outdated beliefs and political forces. An analysis of these issues can serve to inform understandings of these topics in realist thought and in political theory more broadly.
In this paper we investigate ways to comply with justice in a liberal democracy. In order to do that, we sketch Rawls’s account of moral-consensus stability and discuss the alternative idea of stability reached through a modus vivendi. We defend modus vivendi as a way to achieve stability backed by a variety of reasons and even by ‘non-reasons’. By ‘non-reasons’ we mean alternative sources of motivation for compliance as a precondition of a stable coexistence. We focus on such sources, which differ from reasons and beliefs, that are practices, shared values, and value experiences, in light of both a theoretical-political and a qualitative social-ontological perspective. We argue that individuals who experience the same values become collectives and even stable ones: the sharing of values creates social unity and makes collectives solid and resistant to individualistically centrifugal tendencies.
Religious toleration theory has often worked under the assumption that the nature of objections is unproblematic: it is easy to tell whether an objection is religious or not. In this chapter I dispute that assumption and argue that it is sometimes politically plausible to describe an objection as having a dual nature. An objection can be religious for some and secular for others, without drawing us to the conclusion that it is in itself both or neither. Thus, I argue that the nature of objections is sometimes irreducibly disputed. The reason is that political descriptions must be realist and thus work from within the agents’ perspectives, which cannot be made consistent with each other. Finally, I discuss the consequences of that duality for religious toleration.
Charakterystyczny dla współczesnego dyskursu o konstytucjonalizmie zabieg etykietowania (labelling) doprowadził do powstania gęstej dżungli "przymiotni-kowych konstytucjonalizmów", wykraczających poza klasyczny liberalny para-dygmat. Tworzone koncepcje zmierzają do sprecyzowania zmian zachodzących w prawie publicznym oraz jego otoczeniu politycznym. Dyskurs dotyczący poj-mowania konstytucjonalizmu wpisuje się w szerszy problem polityczności (the political). Celem niniejszego artykułu jest skonfrontowanie ze sobą dwóch tytuło-wych pojęć: konstytucjonalizmu i polityczności. W pierwszej części tekstu został poruszony problem metodologicznych niespójności we współczesnej analizie koncepcji konstytucjonalizmu. Druga część porusza kontrowersje wokół istoty konstytucjonalizmu i ich fundamentalne znaczenie dla teoretycznej legitymizacji koncepcji alternatywnych wobec konstytucjonalizmu prawnego i liberalnego
Various political realists claim the superior 'action guiding' qualities of their way of approaching normative political theory, as compared to 'liberal moralism'. This paper subjects that claim to critique. I first clarify the general idea of action guidance, and identify two types of guidance that a political theory might try to offer - 'prescriptive action-guidance' and 'orienting action-guidance' - together with the conditions that must be met before we can understand such guidance as having been successfully offered. I then go on to argue that if we take realist understandings of political psychology seriously, then realist attempts to offer action guidance appear to fail by realism’s own lights. I demonstrate this by means of engagement with a variety of different realist theorists.
In this paper I seek to explore how the idea of modus vivendi might help us to understand political legitimacy. A suitable conception of modus vivendi, I suggest, can represent a way of underpinning a viable and attractive account of political legitimacy. On my account a modus vivendi is basically a set of arrangements that are accepted as basis for conducting affairs by those who are party to them. Political legitimacy, I argue, is ultimately rooted in the judgements of those subject to it, but is mediated through a language in which claims to it are argued and assessed. The thought is that the web of operative beliefs and values in any given society, which constitute the grounds of judgements about political legitimacy, are what sustains a modus vivendi around the basic political institutions and practices. On this view, legitimate political institutions and practices incline towards a modus vivendi in that they are the outcome of an historical and ongoing conglomeration of settlements reflecting shifting and conflicting values and interests, as well relative balances of power, both currently and in the past. The marriage of modus vivendi and political legitimacy, therefore, seeks to reflect the contingent and ‘negotiated’ character of basic political institutions and practices and an understanding of political legitimacy that sees it as mediated through an ongoing and emergent discourse of argument and judgement, which remains nonetheless always vulnerable to challenge and change.
Not only against particularly Jürgen Habermas’ writings about the EU and the public sphere, but also against the recent reflections by Anthony Giddens and Claus Offe on the same topic, this chapter argues for a ‘secularisation’ of the notion of communicative rationality in public opinion. This position leads to a nonideal concept of communication that views political rationality as political reflection. Within this frame of reference, the role of digital media (blogs, microblogs, social media, comments on digital news media) is not to enhance argumentative quality, but to provide opinionated expression and attachment to formal power. While this kind of political rationality works fairly well in a nation-state context, on a supranational level, communication rationality loses power and the European constellation of nation-states surrender to a constellation of empire.
This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political, and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice, and from the nature of political judgment. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position, and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought.
This paper explores two different versions of ‘the realist turn’ in recent political theory. It begins by setting out two principal realist criticisms of liberal moralism: that it is both descriptively and normatively inadequate. It then pursues the second criticism by arguing that there are two fundamentally different responses among realists to the alleged normative inadequacy of ideal theory. First, prescriptive realists argue that the aim of realism is to make political theory more normatively adequate by making it more realistic. Interpretative realists, on the other hand, argue that realist theorising should detach itself from such an aspiration, and instead aim at theoretical understanding rather than normative prescription. After some further elaboration of what interpretative realism might look like, it is acknowledged that both approaches still need to address the question of political normativity.
The paper is an intervention in the dispute about the moralism of the recent realist trend in political philosophy. It is particularly focused on analysing the debate on this subject between Niklas Erman and Eva Möller (2015a; 2015b) and Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi (2015a; 2015b). Examining the main arguments of both parties, I argue that realists (i.e., Jubb and Rossi) lost the debate, that realism is, in fact, moralism in disguise, and that its main methodological request – giving up „pre-political” moral principles and values in political philosophy – is „unrealistic” (i.e., unfeasible).
Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legitimacy over justice, the relation between ethics and politics, and the place of imagination in politics. The thread uniting these themes is the importance Hobbes placed on achieving a moral consensus around peaceful coexistence, a point which distances him from realists who view the two as competing goals of politics. The article maintains that only a qualified version of the autonomy of the political position can be attributed to Hobbes, while arguing more generally that attending to the relation between ethics and politics is central to assessing his liberal credentials from a realist perspective. Against the prevalent reading of Hobbes as a hypothetical contract theorist, the article proceeds to show that the place of consent in his theory is better understood as part of his wider goal of transforming the imagination of his audience: a goal which is animated by concerns that realists share.
In the field of political theory, few authors have spurred intellectual tirades and triggered collective fantasy as much as the sixteenth-century Florentine Secretary Niccoló Machiavelli. Despite all controversies, in the discipline of International Relations (IR) Machiavelli and his The Prince have been almost exclusively associated with classical realism. This largely unchallenged association contributed to the edification of the myth of The Prince as the ruthless symbol of raison d’état, carrying transcendental lessons about the nature of politics and a set of prescriptions on how helmsmen should behave to seize, maintain, and reinforce their power. The realist hijacking of Machiavelli is at the core of the foundation of classical realism as an IR theory and its location at the very epicentre of IR as a discipline. This appropriation has, in turn, obscured alternative myths of The Prince, which depart from Machiavelli’s reflections on the Principati nuovi to read The Prince as a radical manifesto for political change. The opening of the semantic space in the field of IR – spurred by the so-called interpretive turn – offers an opportunity to break this monochromatic reading. This article delves into two competing myths of The Prince: the classical realist myth and Gramsci’s ‘progressive’ one to demonstrate its contested nature.
In this chapter, Wendt discusses whether compromising for peace and public justification tends to establish liberal institutions (or even liberal institutions of a specific kind). There is some plausibility to the claim that liberal institutions, broadly conceived, form well-working modus vivendi arrangements. But modus vivendi arrangements need not take the form of liberal institutions, and hence compromises made for peace cannot always establish liberal institutions. It is also plausible that public justification rules out deeply illiberal institutions. But compromises made for public justification can lead to many different sorts of liberal institutions.
„The problem of normative diversity is the original problem of modern politics […]“ (Macedo 2000: 28).
„We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency“ (Monod 1971: 44).
„[…] contingency is something no political theory can avoid“ (Gray 2006: 336).
„Sich der bedingten Gültigkeit der eigenen Überzeugungen bewußt zu sein und dennoch entschlossen für sie einzustehen, unterscheidet den zivilisierten Menschen vom Barbaren“ (Schumpeter 1946: 385).
Pragmatism is often seen as an unpolitical doctrine. This article argues that it is shares important commitments with realist political theory, which stresses the distinctive character of the political and the difficulty of viewing political theory simply as applied ethics, and that many of its key arguments support realism. Having outlined the elective affinities between realism and pragmatism, this paper goes on to consider this relationship by looking at two recent elaborations of a pragmatist argument in contemporary political theory, which pull in different directions, depending on the use to which a pragmatist account of doxastic commitments is put. In one version, the argument finds in these commitments a set of pre-political principles, of the sort that realists reject. In the other version, the account given of these commitments more closely tracks the concerns of realists and tries to dispense with the need for knowledge of such principles.
The only way to make discernible progress in political philosophy is by studying history, social and economic institutions and the real world of politics in a reflective way. This is notincompatible with “doing philosophy”; rather, in this area, it is the only sensible wayto proceed. After all, a major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed in merely generalising one’s own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help us to counteract this natural human bias. Raymond Geuss’s warning against excessive abstraction in political philosophy is well taken and familiar. Similarly, the claim that attention to history is also important for progress in political theoryand philosophy is also eminently sensible (as far as it goes), and unlikely to be denied by any but the most uncompromising of rationalists: the late Robert Nozick and more recently the late Gerry Cohenmight perhaps come to mind. Most contemporary political philosophers acknowledge the importance of history and contingent circumstances in thinking about politics and moral life. What is at issue is howfar we should push this acknowledgement of the claims of history for any viable political philosophy.This is the issue I wish to address in this chapter. For despite the superficial good sense of Geuss’s claims in the opening epigraph, he goes on in most of his work to make a much stronger assault on the possibility of a political philosophy that does not give pride of place to history, and he uses an appeal to history to support his scepticism about the claims of reason in political theory.
How should political theorists go about their work if they are democrats? Given their democratic commitments, should they develop theories that are responsive to the views and concerns of their fellow citizens at large? Is there a balance to be struck, within political theory, between truth seeking and democratic responsiveness? The article addresses this question about the relationship between political theory, public opinion and democracy. I criticize the way in which some political theorists have appealed to the value of democratic legitimacy in an attempt to justify a more opinion-sensitive approach to their work. Specifically, I identify a problematic model in the existing literature, which I term ‘democratic restraint’: an approach on which the theorist moderates her normative principles in response to evidence about public attitudes in order to enhance the legitimacy of her account. This model renders the discipline newly vulnerable to an otherwise misguided objection that political theory seeks to pre-empt democratic politics. I trace the problem with the democratic restraint model to its flawed underlying conception of democratic legitimacy. The article then outlines a more appealing ‘democratic underlabourer’ view of the status of political theory and draws out the implications of this alternative account for the role of public opinion.
The progressive abstraction and professionalisation of political philosophy over the last few decades has invited a ‘realist’ backlash. This turn to realism has been promoted and defended by various philosophers for a variety of reasons. This article distinguishes the components of the realist challenge to contemporary normative political theory by contrasting the typology of realist theories developed by Michael Doyle with another set out by Raymond Geuss. The resulting categorisation of ‘realisms’ allows for an indirect critique of a univocal realist challenge to normative political philosophy because many of the claims upon which these ‘realisms’ rely are as abstract and theory-laden as the position they challenge.
Recent years have witnessed the growing prominence of a “realist” challenge to the prevailing paradigm of normative political philosophy. It is argued that “ideal theory” is fact-insensitive and presupposes conditions that are at odds with the realities of politics. While the “non-ideal” approach to political philosophy presents itself as something new, this article demonstrates, to the contrary, that it originated in the work of Machiavelli, and that it was - in more recent times - developed by Pareto. The cogency of the realist critique of abstract speculation is also demonstrated. Still, political realism remains susceptible to the objection that it rationalises the status quo and offers no basis for systemic change. In response, this article argues that Machiavelli and - especially - Pareto provided the intellectual tools to deal with this objection. Social and political change, in their analysis, can be justified on functional rather than ideal grounds.
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.
: A central component of Bernard Williams' political realism is the articulation of a standard of legitimacy from within politics itself: LEG. This standard is presented as basic, inherent in all political orders and the best way to underwrite fundamental liberal principles particular to the modern state, including basic human rights. It does not require, according to Williams, a wider set of liberal values. In the following, I show that where Williams restricts LEG to generating only minimal political protections, seeking to isolate his account of political legitimacy from a range of liberal principles, this is neither internal to, nor necessarily demanded by, the specifically political account of LEG. Instead, the limitation depends upon his wider ethical thought.
Although Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks to demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised on a form of political realism, specifically a contextual, consequentialist, and moral-psychological analysis of a political world understood to be marked by inherent tendencies toward conflict, domination, and violence. By treating nonviolence as the essential analog and correlative response to a realist theory of politics, one can better register the novelty of satyagraha (nonviolent action) as a practical orientation in politics as opposed to a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment. The singularity of satyagraha lays in its self-limiting character as a form of political action that seeks to constrain the negative consequences of politics while working toward progressive social and political reform. Gandhian nonviolence thereby points toward a transformational realism that need not begin and end in conservatism, moral equivocation, or pure instrumentalism.
Political realists complain that much contemporary political philosophy is insufficiently attentive to various facts about politics yet some political philosophers insist that any critique of normative claims on grounds of unrealism is misplaced. In this paper I focus on the methodological position G.A. Cohen champions in order assess the extent to which this retort succeeds in nullifying the realist critique of contemporary political philosophy. I argue that Cohen’s work does not succeed in doing so because the political principles that we are prepared to endorse are hostage to various fact-sensitive judgements about how they apply to the political domain. I then argue that this discredits various philosophical approaches to political theorising which begin by utilising non-political thought-experiments, such as Cohen’s own Why Not Socialism?
Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us moving beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’ on the one side, ‘salus populi suprema lex’ on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse.
This paper asks whether political justice can be encapsulated by procedures. It examines John Rawls’s tripartite distinction between perfect, pure and imperfect procedural justice, concluding that none gives a satisfactory account of procedural justice. Imperfect procedural justice assumes that there could be an authoritative source of justice other than procedures, while perfect procedural justice takes a double-minded view of procedure-independent standards of justice. That leaves pure procedural justice as an apparently decisionistic mode of deciding which outcomes are just. This at least avoids the confusion between having authoritative procedures and procedure-independent standards that are also purportedly authoritative. However, it is argued that even a political procedure that defines the extension of a term such a ‘justice’ will lack authority over it once its reference is fixed. Since Rawls’s categories of procedural justice are jointly exhaustive, the problem of determining justice via political procedures appears insoluble.
One of the main challenges faced by realists in political philosophy is that of offering an account of authority that is genuinely normative and yet does not consist of a moralistic application of general, abstract ethical principles to the practice of politics. Political moralists typically start by devising a conception of justice based on their pre-political moral commitments; authority would then be legitimate only if political power is exercised in accordance with justice. As an alternative to that dominant approach I put forward the idea that upturning the relationship between justice and legitimacy affords a normative notion of authority that does not depend on a pre-political account of morality, and thus avoids some serious problems faced by mainstream theories of justice. I then argue that the appropriate purpose of justice is simply to specify the implementation of an independently grounded conception of legitimacy, which in turn rests on a context- and practice-sensitive understanding of the purpose of political power.
This article sets out some of the key features of a realist critique of liberal moralism, identifying descriptive inadequacy and normative irrelevance as the two fundamental lines of criticism. It then sketches an outline of a political theory of modus vivendi as an alternative, realist approach to political theory. On this account a modus vivendi should be understood as any political settlement that involves the preservation of peace and security and is generally acceptable to those who are party to it. In conclusion, some problems with this conception of modus vivendi and with a realist political theory more generally are discussed. In particular, the question is raised of whether a realist political theory should be understood as an alternative to liberal moralism or only a better way of doing basically the same kind of thing.
This article is on political normativity. It urges scepticism about attempts to reduce political normativity to morality. Modern liberalism leaves a question about how far morality can be accommodated by the form of normativity characteristic of politics. The article casts doubt on whether individual moral norms carry over to collective, for example, political, action, and whether the former ‘trump’ other kinds of reasons in politics. It then sketches an alternative view of politics as an irreducibly collective enterprise. Reasons for acting politically, including the understandings on which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are largely artefacts of the political culture and thus only marginally subject to generic conditions of validity: this is true in particular of liberal acceptability-conditions. Thus legitimacy, though not a redundant notion, must be geared to local political norms.
This paper explains and advocates a political theory of modus vivendi, and specifically explores how it might work in the context of problems arising from religious conflicts. The account of modus vivendi that is defended is distinguished both from that of John Rawls and that of John Gray, and is conceived primarily as a matter of bargaining, negotiation and compromise. It is not merely to be understood as a simple reflection of the balance of political forces but a 'pragmatic' approach that mobilises whatever resources are available to effect a workable political settlement that is broadly acceptable to the contending parties. In the final part of the paper the merits of this conception are considered in the context of religious conflicts, with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland taken as one exemplar of a political theory of modus vivendi in action.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.