Against the status quo: the social as a resource of critique in realist political theory

Abstract

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.

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Against the status quo: the social as a resource of
critique in realist political theory
Manon Westphal
To cite this article: Manon Westphal (2022): Against the status quo: the social as a resource of
critique in realist political theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy,
DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2022.2120660
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Against the status quo: the social as a resource of
critique in realist political theory
Manon Westphal
Department of Political Science, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
ABSTRACT
The forms of status quo critique that current approaches to realist political
theory enable are unsatisfactory. They either formulate standards of construc-
tive critique, but remain uncritical of a great range of political situations, or they
oer means for criticising basically all political situations, but neglect construc-
tive 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 dierently 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 argumenta-
tion, but such argumentation can be grounded in the actual to an extent that
safeguards its realist nature.
KEYWORDS Context; critique; political change; realism; social practices; status quo
Introduction
Realists seek to do normative political theory in a way that takes seriously the
reality of politics. Realists view politics as a ‘distinctive mode of human
activity’ (Galston, 2010, p. 390) whose characteristics, such as power, self-
interest and an orientation towards political order, imply that politics ‘cannot
be exhaustively determined by moral considerations from outside politics’
(Hall, 2017, p. 284). There are strong and weak versions of the realist claim
about the ‘autonomy of the political’ (Rossi & Sleat, 2014, p. 690). While strong
versions assume that ‘it is possible to derive normative political judgements
from specically political values’, weak versions assume that political theorists
should ‘explicate “an approach which gives greater autonomy to distinctively
political thought”’ (Rossi & Sleat, 2014, p. 690). Some commentators have
argued that the claim that politics contains its own values is dicult to
defend if it means that political values are entirely separate from morality
CONTACT Manon Westphal manon.westphal@uni-muenster.de
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2120660
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
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transformed, or built upon in any way.

(Erman & Möller, 2015; Leader Maynard & Worsnip, 2018). That argument
lends support to weak interpretations of the autonomy of the political,
according to which the point of realism ‘is not to draw a sharp distinction
between moral values and political values, but to say that the phenomenon
of politics itself provides conditions against which any value – including but
not limited to moral values – must be consistent if it is to be a value for the
political domain’ (Sleat, 2016, p. 253).
It is a widely shared perception that realists – independent of whether they
interpret the autonomy of the political in a weak or in a strong sense –
undermine the critical potentials of political theory by demanding that
normative arguments must be consistent with real politics. It is one of the
most common objections against realism that its willingness to recognise
power, self-interest and coercion as ‘natural’ features of politics endows it
with a status quo bias, i.e. an inability to criticise existing political forms
(Finlayson, 2017, p. 265; McQueen, 2019, pp. 141–142; Philp, 2010, p. 467;
Prinz & Rossi, 2017, p. 348; Rossi, 2016, p. 517; Sleat, 2013, p. 5). Critics of
realism often overlook that realists have resources at their disposal to criticise
the status quo (Rossi, 2019). However, I agree with the critical diagnosis in so
far as current strands of realist political theory lack a satisfactory account of
critique. In the case of Williams’s realism, the capacity to criticise a status quo
is at least severely limited. In the case of Geuss’s realism, critique is discon-
nected from the theorising of alternatives to the status quo. I argue that
realists can undertake a form of critique that is potentially radical and con-
structive if they apply the normative resources of context dierently than
realists have done to date.
Context of course already plays a central role in realism. Bernard Williams,
for instance, delivers a contextual justication of liberalism when he argues
that the basic legitimation demand (BLD), which requires that power holders
justify their rule to those who live under their rule, renders liberal legitimation
stories under modern circumstances mandatory (Williams, 2005, pp. 9–10).
Criteria of legitimacy are dened in accordance with what makes sense to
people ‘in the light of the historical and cultural circumstances’ (Williams,
2005, p. 11). Rob Jubb points out that this line of argument resembles
practice-dependent political theory which, according to Andrea
Sangiovanni’s seminal denition, assumes that the ‘content, scope, and jus-
tication of a conception of [a given value] depends on the structure and
form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern’ (Sangiovanni,
2008, as cited in Jubb, 2016, p. 78). This form of realist/practice-dependent
political theorising does not dene standards of legitimacy abstractly, but in
view of what makes sense to people in actual contexts. However, I want to
draw attention to another and so far neglected possibility for realists to refer
to context: they can identify non-standard social practices in a given context
and employ them for a critique of the status quo. Doing so increases the
2M. WESTPHAL

capacity of realist political theory to distance itself from the status quo if
compared to Williams’s realism, and it enables realists to engage in construc-
tive critique and describe possible alternatives to the status quo.
My aim in this article is to show what it might mean to use non-standard
social practices for critical realist political theorising and to pre-empt the
potential objection that such uses would make political theorising collapse
into the ‘ethics-rst’ (Geuss, 2008, p. 9) sort of reasoning that realists seek to
abandon. This objection might arise because the view that the status quo
should give way to alternatives inspired by non-standard social practices
cannot simply be read from the context. Although that means that the
theorist must engage in normative argumentation and cannot retreat to
the role of an impartial observer, they can make such normative arguments
in a genuinely realist spirit by grounding them on contextual normative and
practical resources.
The structure of the article is as follows. In the rst part, I address realism’s
alleged status quo bias and specify in what sense I consider the status quo
bias objection an apt criticism of current forms of realist political theory, as
well as how the means of realist political theory to criticise the status quo
should be developed. In the second part, I describe the embeddedness of
politics with social practices, which is an important yet under-theorised
feature of politics. In the third part, I outline a methodological procedure
that exploits the social embeddedness of politics for political theorising by
using non-standard social practices as resources of a critique that is oriented
to the description of alternatives to the status quo. In the fourth and nal part,
I defend the realist nature of the proposed procedure by showing how its
reliance on context keeps it distant from moralism.
Realism’s (alleged) status quo bias
As a general assessment, the objection that realism has a status quo bias is
clearly inaccurate. Realist political theories have means at their disposal for
criticising the status quo, even if these means and the extent of critique that
they enable dier signicantly. This section describes how the two main
strands of realist political theory, which build on work by Williams and
Geuss, contain resources for criticising the status quo, and on that basis
species in what sense realism’s capacities for critique should be further
developed.
Williams’s BLD, which denes that a regime is legitimate only if it provides
a response to the rst political question that makes sense to the citizens who
live under that order (Williams, 2005), obviously deems certain political
situations illegitimate. Where power holders refuse to justify their rule, or
oer legitimation stories that do not make sense to the citizens, they fail the
standards of the BLD and act on the basis of illegitimate rule. In addition,
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 3

Williams advances the critical theory principle, which enables a critique of
situations in which the acceptance of a legitimation story on the part of the
ruled is solely a product of coercion or manipulation (Williams, 2005, p. 6).
However, the capacities of Williams’s realism to guide a critical evaluation of
political situations are severely limited, because it makes assessments of what
counts as a successful legitimation story dependent on the acceptance of
a substantial part of the citizenry in a relevant context.
Ed Hall has shown that some clarications of Williams’s argument are in
order to defend the theory against an objection that is often raised against it,
which is that it lacks a distance from moralism. Williams’s theory neither
prioritises the moral idea of an equal worth of all persons nor a consensus
view of politics,
1
because it only demands a justication of coercive political
rule to those who are recognised as political subjects (Hall, 2015, p. 471). In
addition, it only requires that ‘a sucient number’ of political subjects and
not necessarily all political subjects accept a legitimation story (Hall, 2015,
p. 473). These specications are powerful in rebutting the concern that
Williams remains too close to moralism, but they also signicantly limit the
range of political scenarios that can be criticised by means of the BLD.
Situations in which some groups who live in the territory of a state but are
not recognised as full political subjects are ignored or disadvantaged still
meet the BLD if ‘a sucient number’ of citizens sanctions such situations.
2
Because Williams does not determine what exactly a sucient number is, and
because understandings of what sucient means are likely to dier from
context to context, the number of those whose grievances count for the
determination of a state’s (il)legitimacy may be smaller or bigger. However,
the very fact that Williams’s theory limits the group of those whose accep-
tance counts to a subgroup of recognised subjects means that it denes the
category of potentially legitimate situations broadly rather than narrowly,
and potentially includes situations that are exclusionary, unjust or otherwise
discriminatory into this category.
To some extent, the contextualist component of Williams’s argument
works against this tendency. If modern circumstances imply that only liberal
legitimation stories are convincing legitimation stories today, obvious
instances of discrimination might be excluded because a legitimation
story that seeks to justify such situations will simply not make sense to ‘a
sucient number’ of citizens. However, even if that argument holds,
3
Williams oers no resources for criticising situations that do not violate
the premises of liberal legitimation stories in ways that most citizens who
are committed to liberal legitimation stories – or at least a substantial part
of them – consider beyond the pale. This is unsatisfactory because it means
that the theory neglects what has been a manifest experience throughout
the history of liberal societies, namely that the sole fact of broad accep-
tance is a somewhat unreliable basis for dening the acceptable. The
4M. WESTPHAL

examples of women’s surage and the abandonment of criminal liability of
homosexuality vividly demonstrate that what is considered commonplace
and even a moral necessity in liberal societies today was not seen as such in
earlier times. Policies that would now be widely seen as gross violations of
core liberal values were once widely accepted. Realists would ignore this if
they limited their capacities to criticise the status quo to criteria that
depend on the acceptance of ‘a sucient number’ of recognised political
subjects.
In contrast with Williams, Geuss demands a critical interrogation of poli-
tical forms that is explicitly sceptical of dominant views in a society. The
reason why Geuss’s interpretation of realism as ideology critique nevertheless
oers no fully satisfying account of a realist critique of the status quo is that it
does not deliver considerations on what alternatives to the status quo might
look like.
Geuss argues that realists should be aware of the manifold operations of
power in politics. Power exists not only where it is used ‘to overcome some
kind of distinct visible resistance’, but also where it is ‘used indirectly to shape
opinions, attitudes, and desires, and thus to manufacture what looks like
“consent”’ (Geuss, 2008, pp. 50–51). Ideological distortions are in place wher-
ever ‘beliefs, attitudes, preferences’ are presented ‘as inherently connected
with some universal interest, when in fact they are subservient to particular
interests’ (Geuss, 2008, p. 52). Geuss argues that a vital task of political
philosophy is to combat ‘ideological illusion’ by demonstrating how preva-
lent beliefs, attitudes and preferences rely ‘on the continued existence of
particular congurations of power that would otherwise remain hidden’
(Geuss, 2008, p. 53). Janosch Prinz has shown how these considerations
amount to the view that ‘negative criticism’ (Prinz, 2016, p. 778) should be
the primary objective of political theory. Negative criticism combines geneal-
ogy with a criticism of ideology to expose the ‘historical (genealogy) and
sociological (criticism of ideology [. . .]) limitations of the perspectives that
people can have on themselves and their specic contexts’ (Prinz, 2016,
p. 783). While Foucault’s work oers a toolkit for methods of genealogy
(Prinz, 2016, p. 783), Prinz and Rossi propose an account of ideology critique
that examines to what extent beliefs ‘are problematically resistant to rational
revision’ when faced with empirical evidence that challenges these beliefs
(Prinz & Rossi, 2017, p. 357).
This cursory portrayal shows that realism as ideology critique has extensive
potential to guide a critique of the status quo: no particular belief and no
practice that is stabilised by a particular belief is exempt from critique. If
anything, beliefs and practices that are supported by large parts of a citizenry
are especially obvious objects of critique, because they represent nodes of
power that tend to operate in ways that disguise the partiality of the under-
lying interests.
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 5

The weakness of this strand of realist political theory lies in its exclusive
focus on debunking the status quo, which means it avoids describing possi-
ble alternatives to the status quo. To be sure, proponents of this form of
realism do not view that as a weakness at all. Geuss even considers ‘the
constructiveness condition of criticism’ as detrimental because it would imply
an undue ‘domestication’ of criticism (Prinz, 2016, p. 779). Prinz and Rossi
argue that ideology critique contributes to transformations of the status quo
by changing ‘the perception of a political or social reality and at the same
time this reality, too’ (Prinz & Rossi, 2017, p. 361). Rossi nicely illustrates this
idea with a metaphor: like a sculptor who works on a block of marble, realism
as ideology critique ‘removes epistemically suspect legitimation stories’ and
thereby enables the creation of something new, but it does not have ‘a
preparatory study of the planned sculpture’ (Rossi, 2019, p. 646).
It is certainly true that a criticism of the existing is a prerequisite for
thinking about possible alternatives. Making descriptions of alternatives
a requirement of critical engagements with the status quo in each and
every case would mean neglecting the importance of critical interrogations
of dominant beliefs and practices. However, realism should have the means at
its disposal to theorise alternatives to the status quo. Alison McQueen argues
that an exclusive focus on unmasking a basically unlimited range of beliefs
and practices might actually undermine the objective of enabling revisions to
the status quo. Where all arguments are under suspicion of being ‘corrupted
by interest’, it remains unclear what the ‘grounds for pursuing political action’
could be, to the eect that ‘the status quo is likely to continue by default’
(McQueen, 2019, p. 154), i.e. not because the existing is justied but because
nothing better is in sight. I want to give that consideration a positive twist: if
realists not only debunk the status quo, but also show what sorts of mod-
ications could bring about improvements, they make a better contribution
to making political change a realistic option. Where political actors who have
an interest in changing the status quo lack a clear vision of what they want to
achieve and how they might achieve such change, realists could provide such
ideas, not as prescriptions but as inspirations and impulses to political
debates that usually precede political change.
Summing up, neither of the two current strands of realist political theory
oers a fully satisfying answer to the question how realists might engage
critically with the status quo. While Williams’s theory contains only limited
resources for critique, because it makes assessments of the status quo
dependent on what a substantial part of the citizenry accepts in a given
situation, realism as ideology critique neglects the task of theorising possible
alternatives to the status quo. In the following, I outline a possibility to do
realist political theory in a way that could overcome both weaknesses in the
sense that it enables realists to distance themselves more radically from the
status quo and describe possible alternatives to the status quo.
6M. WESTPHAL

The social embeddedness of politics
When realists speak of the status quo, they usually have in mind the set of
political institutions and practices that exist in a given situation, including, for
instance, laws, policies, or the rules and practices of political participation.
According to that understanding of the status quo, which I adopt in this
article, political change happens wherever political institutions and practices
are modied. The range of practices that characterises the context of a society
at a given time, however, is much broader: it also includes manifold social
practices. Political practices are of course part of the social, if by the social we
understand the whole of ‘collective human behaviour’ (Runciman, 1969, p. 1),
but the social also includes many practices that do not directly contribute to
the generation or application of collectively binding decisions with political
authority. Participating in economic, educational or religious practices, for
instance, or interacting at work or with families, friends and neighbours, is not
the same as doing politics or taking the role of a politician or political activist.
4
My proposal for how realist political theory might be done dierently builds
on the observation that social practices so understood often play an impor-
tant role for political change, i.e. for modications of the status quo.
The important role that social practices play for political change is implied
by what I call the social embeddedness of politics: social practices constrain,
enable or promote political practices and institutions in various ways. That is
not to say that social practices create political necessities – they do not
determine specic forms of political practices and institutions, but they do
create a realm of political possibilities that is to some signicant extent
inuenced by the characteristics of these practices. Although social practices
sometimes create patterns that are relatively stable over time, ‘social orders
are inherently unstable, and frequently de- and restabilized’ (Schatzki, 2002,
p. 16). In situations in which the patterns of existing social practices destabi-
lise, for instance, because their previous forms proved unable to deal with
new societal tasks or challenges, the dynamics of such destabilisations also
recongure the realm of political possibilities. Thus, modications of social
practices often enable political change because they create a changed social
reality that involves new perceptions, interests, and needs, which actors make
the basis of demands for the creation of new political forms that better match
that changed social reality than the status quo.
Two examples can help illustrate this consideration. The rst is the French
Revolution, as one of the most drastic moments of political change in the
history of modern democracies. The emergence of an eective political
opposition to the absolute monarchy had at least two important conditions.
First, it required the emergence of the modern understanding of the social
order as something that is not naturally given (Eckstein, 1988, pp. 798–799).
The revolution only became possible after people had begun ‘to doubt that
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 7

poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction
between the few [. . .] and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevi-
table and eternal’ (Arendt, 1963, p. 15). Second, the development of the
bourgeoisie as an economically and socially inuential actor in the pre-
revolutionary phase was an essential factor contributing to the revolutionary
activity of the bourgeoisie, which played a central role for the success of the
revolution. As an eect of their increased economic and social signicance,
the bourgeoisie perceived the discrepancy between their social status and
their minor political and legal status as awed, which gave rise to their
demands for political reform that eventually amounted to the founding of
the republic (Grimm, 1991, p. 41).
A current example that illustrates the social embeddedness of politics is
the electoral success of populist parties. The causes of that success are of
course multifaceted and also dier to some important extent in the cases of
right-wing populism and left-wing populism. Some observers describe poli-
tical factors, such as the current condition of representative institutions or the
lack of political dispute over fundamental political questions, as the main
causes of populism (e.g. Canovan, 1999; Moue, 2005, 2018). However,
numerous studies indicate that an increasingly precarious working class and
an insecure middle class, whose social status and condence in a prosperous
future have deteriorated in the face of economic transformations, are the
biggest support bases of populists. Right-wing populism can also count on
the support of conservative citizens who oppose an alleged triumph of
progressive values (e.g. Betz, 2017; Galston, 2017; Kriesi & Pappas, 2016;
Norris & Inglehart, 2019). That means that the current electoral success of
populist parties is at least partly a product of how the perceptions and
interests of many people have changed in response to social and economic
transformations. To what extent that development will cause changes to the
status quo in western democracies is still a rather open question that will
probably nd dierent answers in dierent contexts. However, as a political
phenomenon, the electoral success of populist parties vividly illustrates the
social embeddedness of politics, because it became possible after changes of
social practices and related interests and perceptions of social reality had
altered the realm of political possibilities in ways that populists knew how to
exploit.
Non-standard social practices as resources of critique
Realists can exploit the social embeddedness of politics for doing political
theory as a critical undertaking if they focus on the enabling function of social
practices and consider how it might be possible to activate a potential for
political change that exists with non-standard social practices. Any given
situation in contemporary societies is usually characterised by a diversity of
8M. WESTPHAL

social practices, some of which are in tension with existing political institu-
tions and practices. Such non-standard social practices contain a latent
potential for political change in the sense that actors might politicise that
tension and demand modications to the status quo that would accommo-
date the perceptions, needs and interests of those who are involved in the
relevant social practices. I submit that realists could exploit the observation
that non-standard social practices often precede demands for political
change and determine to some important extent the direction of political
change by making a forward-looking argument, both showing why it would
be desirable to activate the potential for change that sits with certain non-
standard social practices and describing alternatives to the status quo that
these practices might inspire.
Such an argument, which would thus be critical and constructive, would
contain three steps. First, the theorist looks to the diverse landscape of social
practices in a given situation to identify instances of a tension between social
practices and the status quo, i.e. instances where people act and relate to
each other in ways that dier from the stipulations of existing political
institutions and practices. Such a tension was in place, for instance, in the
times before the French Revolution, or, to give a less dramatic and more
recent example, in the times before the introduction of same sex marriage,
when homosexual couples were excluded from the institution of marriage
although they had partnerships and led family lives with all the relevant
characteristics that the institution of marriage means to support. While
these are retrospective examples of tensions between social practices and
the status quo that already led to changes to the status quo, the task of
a theorist who wants to use non-standard social practices as resources for
a forward-looking argument would be to identify, possibly with the help of
empirical social research, instances of a tension between social practices and
existing political forms where political change has not yet happened.
Second, the theorist evaluates the political forms and the non-standard
social practices that they identify in their review of a given situation. The
identication of a tension between social practices and political forms alone
only demonstrates that there is a discrepancy between (fragments of) social
reality and the status quo – it does not by itself show why that discrepancy
should be taken as a reason to think about alternatives to the status quo. In
many cases, there might be good reasons to make sure non-standard social
practices remain at the margins of society. Hence, the theorist must take an
evaluative stance and assess whether it would be worthwhile to politicise the
identied discrepancies. More specically, it must be shown why the existing
political forms, whose limited capacity to integrate a given diversity of social
practices the tension-oriented review of a situation exposes, deserve mod-
ication, and why certain non-standard social practices are worthwhile start-
ing points for the project of theorising possible alternatives to the status quo.
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 9

Regarding both tasks, realists can draw on normative resources that are
operative in the relevant context. As far as the critique of the status quo is
concerned, they can, for instance, demonstrate how political forms perform
poorly if assessed in view of the values that they are expected to realise in the
relevant context. If it can be shown that the considered political forms do not
to deliver what they are supposed to deliver, they deserve modication. Non-
standard social practices, on the other hand, count as worthwhile starting
points for a description of potential alternatives to the status quo if they can
be shown to contribute positively to the realisation of values that play
a central role in the relevant context.
In order to illustrate what such a two-tiered evaluation might look like,
I refer to Hardt and Negri’s (2017) discussion of the institution of private
property, which the authors confront with social and economic practices that
treat property as a collective and democratic institution and fall into my
category of non-standard social practices.
In their evaluation of the institution of private property, Hardt and Negri
focus on the positive qualities that are usually ascribed to private property
and point out how social eects of that institution fall short of those qualities.
By protecting an individual’s exclusive use of goods that it has acquired
through its own labour, private property, throughout the history of capitalist
societies, has been meant to guarantee the values of security, prosperity and
freedom. Private property is supposed to ‘protect you from hunger, home-
lessness, subordination, and economic crisis, and even protect your ospring
via inheritance’ (p. 101). However, in many parts of the world today, large
parts of the population fear ‘prospects of poverty and destitution’ and share
a feeling of insecurity that is exacerbated by the eects of the nancial crisis
which, ‘through a cycle of debt and austerity, [have] destroy[ed] the property
and la[id] waste to the savings of the middle classes that thought they were
protected’ (pp. 101–102). Private property is also supposed to protect indivi-
duals from state coercion. However, because it requires a protection of the
monopoly of use through state action, it in fact imposes coercion ‘against all
who are excluded from its use’ (p. 104). Hardt and Negri thus demonstrate
that private property in many respects fails to realise the values that usually
serve its justication.
In approaching the question of what potential alternatives to private
property might look like, Hardt and Negri zoom in on the non-standard social
practices of local communities whereby individuals share access to the goods
that they jointly produce and decide collectively how they want to use these
goods ‘through systems of democratic participation’ (p. 99). In particular, the
authors point to forms of ‘solidarity economics’ that emerged in the after-
math of the nancial crisis in dierent countries (p. 102). Although they
remain vague about what sorts of political change these practices could
inspire, Hardt and Negri point out that these practices could be attractive
10 M. WESTPHAL

starting points for dealing with this issue because they show how it is possible
to ‘open property to the common’ (p. 85) and to organise ownership relation-
ships in ways that realise values of inclusiveness, reciprocity, democratic
participation and solidarity.
The third step of the proposed procedure would achieve what Hardt and
Negri only do in a rudimentary form, which is to develop considerations on
how the non-standard social practices in question could be retrieved from the
niches of society and inspire modications of the status quo. This is the
constructive part of the argument that probes how the features of the
considered social practices that are central to the positive evaluation of
these practices might be translated into more general political forms. As
regards possible alternatives to private property, this would mean consider-
ing, for instance, how local forms of democratic decision-making on uses of
collectively owned goods, or settings that guarantee each participant
a proportionate use of collectively owned goods, could nd an equivalent
on a larger scale.
Whether or not modications of the status quo happen at all and, if so,
what the created alternatives will look like, of course depends entirely on the
dynamics of politics. However, descriptions of political alternatives that are
developed through the outlined procedure at least have a realistic chance of
inuencing political debates on possible modications of the status quo,
because they are based on properties of social practices that already exist
in the relevant context and because they can be defended as attractive
political options against the background of a critique of the status quo that
capitalises on evaluative resources internal to that context.
On the basis of the outlined procedure, realists might take an important
step towards overcoming the described shortcomings of the two dominant
strands of realist political theory. A realist political theory that uses non-
standard social practices as described would be less wedded to the status
quo than Williams’s realism because, by making tensions between non-
standard social practices and existing political forms the starting point of an
evaluation of the status quo, it includes into the range of potential objects of
critique elements of the status quo that might appear legitimate if assessed
solely on the basis of widely shared understandings of what makes sense as
a justication of political rule. To the extent that it is set up for constructive
critique, the approach is also more fully equipped to provide orientation for
political change than realism as ideology critique.
I could only provide a rough outline of the intended procedure here, but
the basic idea of what it may mean to use non-standard social practices as
resources of critical political theorising should have become clear. In the
remainder of the article, I want to defend the idea that a political theory
that uses non-standard social practices as described would still be a realist
political theory. A critic might argue that the proposed procedure commits
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 11

theorists to moralist argumentation. Modern societies are characterised by
a great diversity of social practices, and the range of non-standard social
practices that exists at a certain point in time in a given context might be
broad. Theorists thus face the task of deciding which social practices are
suitable bases for critique, and which ones should be ignored. For example,
the practices of a community of right-wing extremists that refuses contact
with people of a dierent cultural origin and does not send their girls to
school in order to make them focused housewives and breeders of an
allegedly superior race, are certainly in tension with the existing political
institutions and practices, but they would be an unattractive starting point
for a critical evaluation of the status quo, to say the least. Does the exclusion
of such practices, the critic might ask, not commit theorists to moralist
argumentation? In the remainder of the article, I want to counter this concern.
Although the task of selecting certain social practices as the bases for critique
requires theorists to take a normative standpoint, this does not render their
argument moralist, irrespective of which out of three common denitions of
moralism is applied to assess whether it has a moralist quality.
The non-moralist nature of contextual normative argument
In an overview of realists’ critique of mainstream political theory, Hall and
Sleat identify three common denitions of moralism. Sometimes moralism is
understood as (i) implying too much idealisation, ‘creating an unbridgeable
gap between theory and practice’, and sometimes it is seen as (ii) unduly
applying ‘personal morality to the political sphere’ (Hall & Sleat, 2017, p. 279).
Williams and Geuss criticise philosophers whom they call moralists mainly for
(iii) seeking an ‘impartial application of rational principles’, which makes them
neglect the ‘untidiness and complexity of our lived ethical experiences’ and
the entanglement of ethical experiences with social practices (Hall & Sleat,
2017, pp. 281–282). In the following, I will rst specify in what sense the
procedure that I proposed requires theorists to take a normative standpoint
and then point out why this does not mean they succumb to moralism,
irrespective of which of these common denitions of what might render
a political theory moralist is made the basis of the moralism test.
The task of excluding certain social practices from the range of potentially
suitable non-standard practices is not even the main challenge for a defence
of the non-moralist nature of the proposed procedure. To deal with this task,
one might apply Williams’s strategy of referring to views that are widely
shared ‘[n]ow and around here’ (Williams, 2005, p. 8): at least in today’s
democratic contexts, there is a broad consensus that the practices and
views of groups like racists are repellent and must remain excluded.
However, this strategy does not suce, because theorists who apply the
proposed procedure must not only exclude certain social practices, but also
12 M. WESTPHAL

decide which social practices represent particularly apt starting points for the
described undertaking. Clearly, there might be multiple non-standard social
practices that are not considered beyond the pale ‘now and around here’ –
and the question then is which ones should be selected.
In the above example, Hardt and Negri criticise the status quo and vindi-
cate their focus on communal ownership practices by assessing the capacity
of private property to protect the liberty and security of individuals. However,
their analysis might have looked dierent if they had centred on, say, eco-
nomic eciency, which is another value that is operative in capitalist socie-
ties. The described procedure requires theorists to prioritise certain values
from the more diverse set of normative resources that characterises a given
context and, in addition, to deliver interpretations of these values when they
evaluate the status quo as well as the considered non-standard social prac-
tices. That means that they take sides with normative views that are likely to
be matters of controversy in the relevant context. For instance, coming back
to the example once again, there is obviously no consensus in capitalist
societies that individual liberty and security are threatened rather than pro-
tected by private property, which means that Hardt and Negri base their
argument on an interpretation of these values over which those who live in
the relevant context are divided rather than united.
What this shows is that the proposed procedure abandons normative
abstinence as a strategy to avoid moralism. Independent of their dierences,
both Williams’s realist theory and realism as ideology critique pursue that
strategy to ensure a distance from moralism, either by reading dominant
normative views from the relevant context (Williams) or by restricting itself to
debunking the status quo (ideology critique). The proposed procedure uses
a dierent yet – at least as I argue – genuinely realist strategy, which is
a strategy of normative involvement: normative arguments are made within
the connes of the normative resources that are internal to a given context
and on the basis of social practices that exist in that context, which renders
respective arguments as contributions to processes of normative self-
reection of a given political community rather than products of detached
ethical theorising.
Theorists who (a) treat actual social practices as starting points of a critical
evaluation of the status quo, (b) refer to values that are attributed to institu-
tions in the relevant context in their evaluation of the status quo and the
considered practices, and (c) draw on social practices to describe potential
alternatives to the status quo, take the perspective of participants in the
relevant context. They might highlight tensions between social practices
and existing political forms that have not received much attention by political
actors, and they might provide novel ideas for potential directions of political
change. In that sense they do not just replicate the debates of a political
community but actively contribute to them. Due to the choices and
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 13

interpretations of contextual normative resources made along the way, such
contributions are non-neutral and contestable, and yet rmly anchored in the
actual. All proposals for political change that can be constructed through the
proposed procedure are products of a combined consideration of values that
people in the relevant context share and of practices that people in the
relevant context live. Thus, they represent speculative yet socially grounded
anticipations of how participants in that context might translate positive
perceptions of non-standard social practices into demands for political
change that at least have the potential to be appealing to other participants
in that context.
To further substantiate my claim that such a strategy of normative involve-
ment is a realist alternative to the strategy of normative abstinence, I want to
point out that the proposed procedure cannot be accused of collapsing into
moralism, irrespective of which of the three common denitions of moralism
is made the basis of the test.
Idealisation is avoided because proposals for political change are con-
structed through considerations of the properties of existing social practices.
In view of the marginal status of non-standard social practices and the central
role of power in politics, it can of course be very dicult to actually realise
respective proposals, especially if they aim at more fundamental modica-
tions of the status quo rather than just smaller reforms. However, developing
proposals for political change by translating features of social practices into
more general political forms means to closely interlink theory and practice.
Such proposals are based on (fragments of) the actual, not on the idealised
conditions of a hypothetical choice situation constructed by means of
abstraction from the actual.
Clearly, the proposed procedure does not apply personal morality to
politics. Because it undertakes a critical evaluation of the status quo by
referring to values that are widely shared reference points for assessments
of political institutions and practices in the relevant context, and because it
develops proposals for political change from a consideration of the properties
of social practices, its argumentation is guided by collectively shared values
and collectively lived practices rather than by norms of a personal morality.
Finally, the complexity of lived ethical experiences and the entanglement
of ethical thinking and argument with social practices are acknowledged. By
addressing the tensions between non-standard social practices and existing
political forms, the proposed procedure exposes the plurality of perceptions,
needs and interests that relate to diverse social practices in a given context.
However, the approach does more than expose the complexity of ethical
experiences. By beginning the evaluation of the status quo with a diagnosis
of non-standard social practices and by criticising existing political forms in
view of the eects that these forms have on social practices in the relevant
context, it also acknowledges that ethical arguments, or other sorts of
14 M. WESTPHAL

normative argument, only have a realistic chance of appealing to people and
inspiring political actions if they speak to the reality of lived social practices.
Another potential concern might be that the contextual nature of the
proposed procedure unduly limits its capacities for critique. Its reliance
on actual social practices may rescue it from the charge of moralism, but
it also leaves theorists without possibilities to criticise the status quo
wherever non-standard social practices are absent. This observation
about the dependency of critique is correct but unproblematic, because
only in a hypothetical and highly unrealistic scenario would this depen-
dency translate into a dramatic limitation of possibilities for critique. Even
if one believes that homogenous societies existed at some point in time,
which might be a problematic assumption to begin with, contemporary
societies at least are characterised by a dynamic plurality of social,
cultural and religious identities, which bring with them diverse social
practices. Under such circumstances, it is very unlikely that a political
theory whose capacity for critique depends on the presence of non-
standard social practices will nd itself without resources to exercise
a critique of the status quo.
The contextual nature of the proposed procedure also does not mean
that it is limited to only mild forms of critique or insignicant proposals
for political change. Hardt and Negri’s discussion of private property
again helps demonstrate this. By showing that some social eects of
private property are actually detrimental to values that are central to
positive views of that institution in the context at hand, and by arguing
that it might therefore be worthwhile retrieving economic relationships
based on collective forms of ownership from the niches of society, Hardt
and Negri argue for a form of political change that might amount to
a fundamental transformation of capitalist societies. An important ques-
tion that I have not dealt with in this article is how distant from the here
and now radical proposals for change might be without becoming uto-
pian in the wrong, non-realist way (for an interesting view on this
question, see, Raekstad, 2021). Any more detailed assessment of the
proposal that Hardt and Negri make will be inuenced by the answer
that realists give to this question. However, irrespective of what that
answer looks like, the example illustrates that the use of non-standard
social practices that I have proposed in this article enables realists to
deliver radically transformative proposals for political change, even if this
capacity is conditional to the extent that it depends on the existence of
social practices with properties that enable the construction of such
transformative proposals.
CRITICAL REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 15

Conclusion
I began the article with the observation that realist political theory must
be done dierently than to date if it wants to take a considerable
distance from the status quo and deliver constructive critique. I argued
that realists could take a contextual perspective to do so and draw on
social practices that are in tension with existing political institutions and
practices. I outlined a three-step procedure that includes a diagnosis of
such tensions in a given context, an evaluation of the relevant political
forms as well as non-standard social practices, and a translation of
positively evaluated properties of the non-standard social practices into
alternative political forms. I described and illustrated the procedure with
the help of an example, namely Hardt and Negri’s discussion of private
property, and defended it against the potential objection that it collapses
into moralist argumentation. Theorists who use social practices as
described engage in normative argumentation in ways that cannot sim-
ply be read from a given context. However, because they argue on the
basis of, and within the connes of the normative and practical resources
of a given context, their arguments are interlinked with the actual to an
extent that marks a clear distance from moralism. For realists who sym-
pathise with the critical impetus of Geuss’s realism but want to develop
the constructive potentials of realist political theory, exploiting the capa-
city of non-standard social practices to serve as resources of critique
along the lines of what the article proposed might be a real alternative.
Notes
1. For criticisms that identify such a prioritisation in Williams’s theory, see, (Floyd,
2011; Sleat, 2010, 2014).
2. This implication of Williams’s argument is also acknowledged by Ben Cross
(2020), who argues that the status quo bias of Williams’s theory is often
exaggerated. ‘I[f] the state were to begin to treat the disadvantaged with
brute coercion like the Spartan state treated Helots, it might retain more or
less full legitimacy as long as this treatment of the disadvantaged is widely
accepted by those whom it treats as citizens’ (Cross, 2020, p. 375).
3. While Hall has convincingly shown that the BLD does not mean that
a legitimation story must be accepted by all those who are subject to political
rule, the question remains if conditions of modernity indeed render liberal
legitimation stories as unchallenged as Williams suggests.
4. This does not mean that social practices are not political in the sense that they
have political implications and can become objects of political controversies
and collective decision-making. However, in the debate among political realists,
‘the political’ is less taken to be a potential than a certain sphere of human
interaction that aims at preserving or creating political order. It is this under-
standing that I presuppose here and on the basis of which I make the distinction
between political and social practices.
16 M. WESTPHAL

Acknowledgments
I presented earlier drafts of this paper at the ASPP 2018 Annual Conference at the
Sapienza University of Rome and at the “Doing Realist Political Theory” conference
at the University of Münster in July 2018. I would like to thank the participants of
these events for very helpful feedback. I also thank the participants of the Political
Theory Colloquium in Münster, and Ulrich Willems and John Horton for invaluable
comments on later versions of the paper. The research for this paper was partly
funded by the Centre for Advanced Study in Bioethics (DFG Kolleg-Forschergruppe
1209).
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Manon Westphal is a postdoctoral researcher in political theory at the University of
Münster. She is a research fellow in the joint research project ‘Cultures of Compromise’
and works mainly in the elds of democratic theory, agonism and political realism. Her
research has recently been published in Social Theory and Practice, Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice and Res Publica.
ORCID
Manon Westphal http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5481-2862
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