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Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice

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... Political realism by contrast insists that the first political question is how to secure order, and therefore the conditions of co-operation under which social norms can be negotiated (Williams 2005). These are explicitly political negotiations (Sleat 2018): norms cannot be identified prior to this. It is these two distinctions: the prioritisation of order within a wider understanding of value diversity; and the political nature of the temporary and contingent agreements that follow, that distinguish this perspective from value pluralism and the 'coping strategies' of public values scholarship, and from the alternative moral structure suggested by ethics of care scholars. ...
... Rather, it seeks to underline their enduring nature. Taking a political realist approach involves arguing for the inevitability of disagreement, even on foundational principles (Sleat 2018). This is not to suggest that shared values are irrelevant to legitimacy, but to argue for the 'situational and cultural contingency of fairness 'rules'' (Radburn and Stott 2018, p. 2): what is seen as just, fair and legitimate may not be the same in one time and place as in another. ...
... From this perspective, normswhether societal or localare negotiated, not derived from moral principles. There is no 'right' set of values by which we should liveor policethat we can settle upon prior to this negotiation (Sleat 2018). Crucially, this negotiation is political, and relies on the establishment of sufficient order to allow conditions of co-operation (Williams 2005). ...
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Research on police legitimacy and public confidence underlines the importance of the police demonstrating moral alignment with the communities they serve. However, less attention is given to conflict between values, either within communities or between communities and the police. This study explores value conflicts in community or neighbourhood policing from a perspective of political realism, which suggests that such conflicts are inevitable and can only be resolved in temporary and contingent ways. It does so through a case study of neighbourhood policing, seen through local ward panel meetings, in one London borough. In total, 33 semi-structured interviews with 43 participants were undertaken, and seven hours of observations. This paper identifies four value-based conflicts that emerged through the meetings, and shows how neighbourhood police officers were able to provisionally resolve them, thus supporting confidence and legitimacy. However, it also shows how austerity has put this capacity at risk, both operationally, and through a receding of confidence as an organisational priority, with potential long-term consequences for public confidence in the police. With global protests such as Black Lives Matters, and anti-lockdown demonstrations, underlining the importance of public confidence and legitimacy to police organisations across the world, this paper adds to the evidence on the capacity of community policing to support this, offers a new perspective to understand the role of values in policing, and discusses the policy implications.
... Further, we do not wish to suggest that contemporary realist thought in toto fails to distinguish between these two conceptions of reality and succumbs to Platonist temptations we identify (see Prinz and Rossi 2017, Rossi 2019, Honig and Stears 2011, Freeden 2012. Finally, though most realists fail to pay sufficient attention to the distinction between these two styles of realism, our discussion uncovers an overlooked schism within realist thought which casts further doubt on the tendency to portray realism as a coherent tradition which promotes a 'common perspective' (pace Sigwart 2013, 409;Galston 2010;Philp 2012;Sleat 2018, see also Rossi 2019, Cross, 2021: between contemporary realists whose accounts comprise a melange of contradictory elements (e.g. Raymond Geuss, Hans-Jörg Sigwart, Duncan Bell, and William Scheuerman) and which are prone to the problems we highlight, and philosophers who, by virtue of their rejection of monism, can be labelled as realists 6 (e.g. ...
... The unmasking criticism, Alison McQueen (2018) notes, is not limited within the confines of Geuss's work, but has a prominent place in certain strands or treatments of realism 20 (see also Valentini 2012, Sleat 2018. For instance, Bell (2010, 104) suggests that realism bears a 'critical dimension … generated by its ability to unmask the existing dynamics of power relations'. ...
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The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies within contemporary realism and go some way towards untangling and addressing these. Specifically, we enrich the realist charge and highlight two directions which realist scholarship can pursue in its endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to moralism: an emphasis on i) Vichian fantasia – a kind of knowledge which entails historical awareness but also sensitivity to philology; and ii) suffering and injustice as a basis for critique and for developing a suitable political sphere.
... The second debate to which the article contributes is the nascent field of realist democratic theory. The literature on political realism has exploded in recent years (see, e.g., Galston 2010;Hall 2020;Horton 2017;McQueen 2017;Prinz and Rossi 2017;Rossi 2019;Sleat 2018;Westphal and Willems 2023), but contributions by realists to democratic theory are still rare. By taking up and developing the idea of a plebeian tribunate, we argue that pushing realism into the direction of democratic theory need not mean limiting the promise of democracy (Achen and Bartels 2016;Frega 2020). ...
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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.
... It is associated with, and has benefitted from, genealogical critiques of the practice of political theory, especially in the hands of one of its most prominent theorists, Raymond Geuss (Geuss, 2008(Geuss, , 2020. Its most important element is the refusal to make the conception of the political subordinate to the claims of morality and however much political realists differ, and they differ in significant ways, they all reject the foundational role of ethics in political theory (Sleat 2018). ...
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This essay seeks to characterise and explain a specific pattern in professional political theorising over the last five decades. The paper does not seek to offer a stipulative or philosophical definition of the activity and nor can it offer a full historical or political sociological analysis of the activity in the context of academic institutions in the Anglophone world. Instead it provides a high-level overview of a particular pattern of development in the activity of political theory as exemplified in core outputs such as monographs, journal articles and essays as a way of explicating some perennial dynamics in the discipline that could be given a more extended historical and sociological explanation. That pattern is illustrated in the initial quest for professionalisation and institutional normalisation which has a tendency towards presenting the subject of study as converging on a broadly liberal agenda. This dominant liberal paradigm in turn has been challenged by the recent development of genealogical analyses of the contemporary intellectual history of political theory and the rise of political realism as attempts to sustain a common subject of enquiry that does not collapse into the endorsement of a liberal vision of ‘the political’. This dialectic, which centres on the problem of liberalism, is the key to understanding the fundamental dynamic of Anglophone political theory as an institutional practice as well as a body of ideas, principles and values.
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In this essay, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the various stances in the contemporary debate on the sources of political normativity. Besides, we describe some consequences of this debate for several related areas of philosophical discussion. We believe this overview may help readers navigate and connect the numerous works within the expanding literature on political normativity, as well as the controversies between advocates of political realism and so-called political moralists, including the articles featured in Topoi’s collection Political Normativity and Ethics.
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What is it that one fundamentally rejects when one criticizes a way of thinking as moralistic? Taking my cue from the principal leveller of this charge in philosophy, I argue that the root problem of moralism is the dualism that underlies it. I begin by distinguishing the rejection of moralism from the rejection of the moral/nonmoral distinction: far from being something one should jettison along with moralism, that distinction is something that any human society is bound to develop. But this valuable distinction is transformed into a problematic dualism when it casts the two sides of the distinction as contrasting sharply in nature, value, and structure. In ethics, the resulting dichotomy takes the form of a dualism of morality and prudence. In politics, it takes the form of a dualism of principle and interest. I explain the enduring appeal of such dualisms before laying out the costs of moralism thus conceived: moralism erodes our sensibility to the moral and political costs of value conflicts; it projects an unrealistic conception of agency that sets up scepticism about responsibility; and it limits our ability to appreciate and realize the wider variety of nonmoral values that sustain us, our achievements, and morality itself.
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Focusing on ‘real actions’ of ‘real people’, normative behaviourism turns facts about observable patterns of behaviour into grounds for specific normative political principles. For this reason, this way of doing normative political theory has strong political realist credentials, given its methods, values and ambitions. In fact, according to its supporters, normative behaviourism is an improvement of political realism since it solves two problems that allegedly face many realists, namely, the ‘legitimacy problem’, i.e., how we should distinguish genuine acceptance of a political system from false acceptance, and ‘the institutional problem’, i.e., how we should translate political principles into viable political institutions. In this paper, we make two claims. First, normative behaviourism does not solve the legitimacy problem encountered by realists, because its solution rests on a flawed distinction between foundational principles and ‘principles that matter’, together with a problematic use of a Humean internal reasons approach. Second, normative behaviourism does not solve the institutional problem encountered by realists, because its solution is in fact much more unfeasible than realist prescriptions, since feasibility is interpreted as mere possibility. We wind up our analysis by showing that normative behaviourism encounters new problems that realist approaches typically do not face.
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John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples has typically been read as an intervention in the field of ‘global justice’. In this paper, I offer a different and widely overlooked interpretation. I argue that The Law of Peoples is a secular theodicy. Rawls wants to show that the 'great evils' of history do not condemn humankind by using a secularised form of moral faith to search for signs that the social world allows for the possibility of perfect justice. There are, I show, striking homologies between this argument and the Christian theodicy that Rawls wrote in 1942, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. Perhaps more significantly, I draw out how there is, as Rawls himself appears to acknowledge, an intimate relationship between this redemptive project and Rawls' idealistic and moralistic approach to political philosophy.
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Esta nota de investigación presenta algunos de los problemas y argumentos para la formulación de un modelo teórico de estabilidad política y democracia desde una perspectiva realista. El problema de investigación concierne al tipo de democracia requerida para la estabilidad de un modus vivendi en un régimen liberal considerando una concepción realista de la política. La hipótesis que se postula es que la democracia agonista es la concepción de democracia adecuada para la estabilidad política de un modus vivendi si se toman en cuenta los postulados del realismo político contemporáneo. La metodología propuesta consiste en definir las relaciones conceptuales entre democracia y modus vivendi con el realismo político
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This volume argues that feminist theory can provide distinctive and potent resources to confront and take on post-truth. By ‘post-truth’, we refer to a variety of discourses and practices that subvert the sense that we share a common world. Because post-truth undermines the norms and conditions that make possible shared political practices and institutions, post-truth politics is fundamentally anti-democratic. The most common response to post-truth has, however, come from those who call for reinstating truth and rationality, with special emphasis on returning to the facts and fact-checking. From a feminist perspective, this approach is worrisome as it risks idealizing the connection between democracy and truth, disowning the tensions within and between them, and suppressing contestation tout court. Diagnosing the post-truth moment we face two challenges: on the one hand, there is too much contestation (of the post-truth variety); on the other hand, there is too much depoliticization (of the technocratic or rationalist variety). This binary effectively limits the space within which critiques of post-truth can meaningfully intervene. Feminist takes on post-truth must take seriously this dual challenge at the crossroads of depoliticization and hyper-politicization, acknowledging the anti-democratic dangers of post-truth while keeping open the possibility and necessity of contestation. Our gambit is that effective rejoinders to post-truth can be found in practices that affirm rather than repudiate a plural world. Rather than simply condemning or dismissing post-truth as mad or irrational, the feminist theorists in this volume move closer to what we’re up against in order to see how encounters with reality provide opportunities to radicalize and politicize our relation to it in ways that do not undermine the conditions for others to do the same. This volume is an attempt to open new, and emphasize existing, feminist modes of response that might break the deadlock in the post-truth discourse.
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This introductory chapter gives an overview of the debate on realism in political theory and sets out two themes that are particularly important for this debate: the role of practice in realist political theory and the nature and place of normativity in realist political theory. These two themes are not only among the most discussed topics in the debate on possibilities to do realist political theory. Answers to the question of what more applied forms of realist political theory might look like will also depend significantly on how realists specify the role of practice in political theory and the meaning of realist normative argumentation. We outline some of the main positions in the field and highlight questions that have been insufficiently addressed. Finally, we give an overview of the arguments of the articles assembled in this collection and how they contribute to the ongoing debates on the two themes.
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What happens when we vote? What are we counting when we count ballots? Who decides what an election should look like and what it should mean? And why do so many people believe that some or all elections are rigged? Moving between intellectual history, literary criticism, and political theory, The Electoral Imagination offers a critical account of the decisions before the decision, of the aesthetic and imaginative choices that inform and, in some cases, determine the nature and course of democratic elections. Drawing on original interpretations of George Eliot and Ralph Ellison, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Arrow, Anthony Trollope and Arthur Koestler, Richard Nixon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot and the Single Transferable Vote, The Electoral Imagination works both to understand the systems we use to move between the one and the many and to offer an alternative to the 'myth of rigging.'
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When interest in political realism started to resurge a few years ago, it was not uncommon to interpret realist political theory as a form of non-ideal theorising. This reading has been subjected to extensive criticism. First, realists have argued that political realism cannot be interpreted as merely a form of applied political theory. Second, realists have explained that political realism can defend a role for unfeasible normative prescriptions in political theory. I explain that these developments, besides allowing us to reject interpretations of political realism as a form of non-ideal theory, have given us reason to think of political realism as a form of ideal theory. Yet, when ideal theory enters the picture, a series of methodological questions arise regarding the proper use of ideals. In this paper, I clarify how the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory ought to be conceptualised in realist political theory. I examine the two major interpretations of the role of ideals that have been provided so far – the target and benchmark interpretations – and I show that neither is compatible with some of the fundamental theoretical commitments of realist political theory. This both allows me to point out the requirements that an interpretation of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory must meet to be defined as properly realist and allows me to emphasise the strengths of the realist approach. Accordingly, I propose a new interpretation of the role of ideals, one consistent with realist theoretical commitments: I suggest that realist political ideals ought to be interpreted as models.
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A growing genre of ‘crisis studies’ traces liberal-democratic instability to technocratic reformism and populist reaction to it. Most contributions recommend restoring economic growth, rebuilding civic culture and eschewing populist ‘us-versus-them’ narratives. This literature relies on a problematic way of thinking we label irenicism, and show to be a contemporary variant of what political realists call progressive moralizing. Irenicism portrays liberal-democracy as the product of voluntary consensus among rational individuals to sustain institutions that, by promoting endless economic growth, support universal interests and values. By way of a synthesis of realist thinking and Dewey’s pragmatic approach to experimental theory-building, irenicism is shown to preserve a lacuna for political interpretation. The task for current political theory should not be to affirm old ideas in the face of new challenges. Rather, it should be to do away with ‘traditionalized’ ideas, to clear the field for experimental responses to democratic political thought and action.
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Many commercial actors in the tech sector publish ethics guidelines as a means to ‘wash away’ concerns raised about their policies. For some academics, this phenomenon is reason to replace ethics with other tools and methods in an attempt to make sure that the tech sector does not cross any moral Rubicons. Others warn against the tendency to reduce a criticism of ‘ethics washing’ into one of ethics simpliciter. In this essay, I argue firstly that the dominant focus on principles, dilemmas, and theory in conventional ethical theories and practices could be an explanation of it lacking resistance to abuse by dominant actors, and hence its rather disappointing capacity to stop, redirect, or at least slow down big tech’s course. Secondly, drawing from research on casuistry and political philosopher Raymond Geuss, this essay will make a case for a question, rather than theory or principle-based ethical data practice. The emphasis of this approach is placed on the acquisition of a thorough understanding of a social-political phenomenon like tech development. This approach should be replenished with one extra component to the picture of the repoliticized data ethics drawn so far: the importance of ‘exemplars,’ or stories. Precisely the fact that one should acquire an in-depth understanding of the problem in practice will also allow one to look in the past, present, or future for similar and comparable stories from which one can learn.
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Many scholars in religious ethics and political theory read Augustine's emphasis on pride as tied to a pessimism about politics and human nature as well as a neutralist vision of politics. Against these views, this essay argues that Augustine's vision of political humility is at once tied to a thick, non‐neutralist vision of the good and a limited view of politics' role in achieving this good on its own. To make this argument, I compare Augustine's largely neglected commentary on Genesis with that of Hobbes, a political pessimist with whom Augustine is often compared. While Hobbes's political combatting of pride adheres to a vision of mere “preservation,” Augustine's instead entails a vision of “re‐creation.” Political re‐creation is aspirational, participating in a re‐instantiation of creation's order, but it is also limited, since (re‐)creation is ultimately the work of God.
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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.
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The aim of the article is to propose and defend a distinctively political reading of the European Convention of Human Rights. Drawing on a range of different sources, my core claim is that realistically construed considerations of political legitimacy, stemming from the institutional context within which ECtHR judges operate, can explain and justify a morally non-ideal understanding of Convention rights on the part of the Court. I call the kind of non-ideal reading of the ECHR that I defend ‘political’ because it results from distinctive concerns regarding the Court’s legitimacy in a wider context marked by the circumstances of politics, broadly understood. These concerns depend on apprehending the ECHR as a distinctive institutional-cum-legal regime or system whose stability has political underpinnings. Tackling them requires resorting to some form of political judgment aimed at working out how various normative parameters, including legitimacy and stability, interact with a morally ideal (or ‘first-best’) understanding of any given ECHR right.
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Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists (mainstream liberals), has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high (first claim), and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it (second claim). Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory.
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There are contrasting interpretations of the Northern Ireland peace process which have competing implications for the lessons to be drawn from the conflict. This article offers a Constructivist Realist critique of three leading perspectives on the peace process: Neoconservative, Cosmopolitan and Conservative Realists (or Consociationalists). The Neoconservative perspective emphasises the importance of security policy in defeating terrorists before negotiations. By contrast, Cosmopolitans and Conservative Realists emphasise the importance of constitutions and tend to ignore security. Constructivist Realists argue that all three accounts are over-generalised, provide inadequate understandings of politics and, therefore, the relative success of the peace process.
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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.
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In Political Self-Deception, Galeotti considers (and rebuts) two ‘realist’ objections. Galeotti’s realist argues that there is no need for the overly complex concept of self-deception, since self-serving lies and manipulation are descriptively and normatively sufficient; and that in any case, deception in democratic politics is sometimes justifiable. In response, Galeotti offers explanatory, moral, and normative reasons why self-deception is a helpful concept in international politics: it helps us better understand the political reality of deception, and guides us in how to avoid or mitigate it. In this comment, I wish to revisit the realist objections, and to provide a more nuanced and more robust version of them. In doing so, I raise questions about the relationship between self-deception and the failure of political judgement, about the moral evaluation of deception in democratic politics, and about the normative implications of Galeotti’s analysis for political responsibility and for prophylactic measures.
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This article challenges ‘agonistic’ readings of Arendt by demonstrating that Arendt’s work can be interpreted as ‘agonistic realism’. It argues that many agonistic readings of Arendt – I will discuss the readings of Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe in particular – miss the central orientation of Arendt’s thought. By ignoring works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, contemporary agonists overlook that her preoccupation with evil forms the basis of Arendt’s agonistic thought. The article suggests that a (re)turn to Arendt’s writings on evil, and a demonstration of their intimate relationship with works such as The Human Condition, reveals the ‘realist’ dimensions of Arendt’s thought: It reveals the picture of a thinker who is deeply concerned with the ever-present possibility of evil and who insists that perpetrators of evil must be treated as ‘enemies’. Furthermore, such a return to Arendt’s works on evil brings to the fore Arendt’s tragic insight that evil is both an expression of and a threat to human plurality and free political action. Arendt, in other words, accepts that while evil – as an expression of our humanity – can never be eradicated, it must – as a threat to our common humanity – be confronted.
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In this piece, I offer an original and fundamental critique of a range of approaches to multiculturalism that have dominated the field of Anglo-American political theory since first-wave debates conducted in the 1990s/2000s. I suggest that the politics of the early twenty-first century, and especially the widespread rise of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments among citizens of liberal democratic states throughout the world, requires political theorists who seek feasible solutions to real-world political problems to reject these theories. I focus on two approaches in particular: political liberalism and the politics of difference. Neither offers a vision of politics that is tenable in the early twenty-first century, I argue, as they both require citizens to deliberate about political matters in ways that they cannot. In discussing these approaches, and finding them wanting, it is revealed that political theorists face a choice. They can present a theory which is realistic in the sense that it takes account of political reality and offers a strategy which might be used to genuinely inform a process of reform. Alternatively, they can abandon realism and also the desire to produce an operational normative theory which can resolve real problems in actually existing states. I lay out the nature and importance of this choice and explain some of its implications for the discipline and for our current political predicament. I suggest that the choice is unavoidable and that making it requires political theorists to make a more fundamental decision about the purposes of normative political theory itself.
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Since the global financial meltdown in 2008, moralizing stereotypes of white working-class citizens have proliferated across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia, and Europe. Both conservatives and liberals use concepts such as the Appalachian hillbilly, the council estate-dwelling chav, and the outer-suburban bogan to allege white working-class citizens' failure to adapt to the demands of the globalizing political economy. As recent commentators on the Appalachia “problem” note, such moralizing obscures more than it explains, and does so in the service of economic privilege and political power. Comparative examination of the actors and actions behind the erosion of citizenship as a political category in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia helps to link contemporary moralizing about the white working class to reaction against the democratic excess that working-class movements directly and indirectly provoked in the mid-twentieth century. Today in Appalachia and beyond, conservative and liberal moralizing about the white working-class “problem” undermines democrats' capacity to recognize and respond to these efforts to displace citizenship as a political category with the moral category of the individual.
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Political trust has become a central focus of political analysis and public lament. Political theorists and philosophers typically think of interpersonal trust in politics as a fragile but valuable resource for a flourishing or stable democratic polity. This article examines what conception of trust is needed in order to play this role. It unpicks two candidate answers, a moral and a responsiveness conception, the latter of which has been central to recent political theory in this area. It goes on to outline a third, commitment conception and to set out how a focus on commitments and their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes. Adopting this conception discloses how trust relies on a contestable public normative space and has significant implications for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgments of trust, the place of distrust, and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and distrust.
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Realists in normative political theory aim to defend the importance of ‘distinctively political thought’ as opposed to the applied ethics they believe characterizes much contemporary political theory and causes it to misunderstand and make mistakes about its subject matter. More conventional political theorists have attempted to respond to realism, including Jonathan Leader Maynard and Alex Worsnip, who have recently criticized five supposedly realist arguments for a distinctive political normativity. However, while Leader Maynard and Worsnip’s arguments are themselves less decisive than they suppose, the problem with their response may lay elsewhere. Their response supposes that more conventional political theory could, in principle, be defended at an abstract general level. This may not be possible though, given the difficulty of arriving at agreed interpretations of the concepts involved and the desiderata for a successful normative political theory. It also risks missing the point of realism, which is to use different forms of normative inquiry to explore questions which have not always been central to conventional normative political theory. Judith Shklar’s excellent work on vices and the liberalism of fear nicely illustrates this problem.
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