Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it. Michelangelo Buonarroti Fidelity to the facts in political theory is often associated with a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. Political realism—both in its classical manifestations and its contemporary revival1—is frequently linked to that tendency. For instance, in recent works we read that realism can lead to a “collapsing of the space for serious challenges to major social and political institutions (Markell, 2010, p. 176), that “the closer political theorists are to politics the more their own judgment and frailties will be tested” (Philp, 2012, p. 646), and that “realism will inevitably tend to nudge us towards a greater acceptance of the status quo, towards more modesty in the change that we are prepared to propose or demand” (Finlayson, 2017, p. 271). In this article I resist those claims, and contribute to the project of reclaiming the radical potential of political realism (Brinn, 2019; Cross, 2019; Honig & Stears, 2011; McKean, 2016; McQueen, 2016; Prinz, 2016; Raekstad, 2016; Prinz & Rossi, 2017). I develop a form of realism as genealogy–both debunking and vindicatory–and show how it can be more radical than both ideal and nonideal approaches to normative political theory. I arrive at this conclusion by addressing two related, partly methodological and partly substantive challenges facing realism. The first challenge concerns the very possibility of a realist normative political theory: if characterizing realism by contrasting it with moralism means that political judgment is not to be derived from pre-political moral commitments, what other sources of political normativity are available? The second challenge is status quo bias: does realism's fidelity to the facts condemn it to some form of conservative complacency? I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change—one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante-huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterize realism by contrasting it with both nonideal theory and utopianism (in a pejorative sense of the term, as I shall clarify). In a nutshell, realism differs from nonideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews plans of the perfect polity or for the correct course of political action. Utopianism, realism and nonideal theory are all technical terms, so my definitions will by necessity be stipulative, though, it is to be hoped, not overly controversial. With those distinctions in place it will become clear that moralism is at greater risk of status quo bias than realism because of its relative blindness to ideological bias. Whereas realism, I argue, is an approach grounded in our best social-scientific accounts of politics, but not in such a way as to jeopardize the transformative potential of our political imagination. The upshot is that, if we set aside the quasi-technocratic aspirations of a political theory geared to generate immediate policy guidance, realism (rather than nonideal theory) emerges as the best bet for those sympathetic to many of the concerns about fidelity to the facts of real politics raised in current methodological debates (e.g., Estlund, 2014, 2017; Freeden, 2012; Hamlin & Stemplowska, 2012; Horton, 2017; Miller, 2016; Mills, 2005; Rossi, 2016; Valentini, 2012; Wiens, 2012). That, however, this not true of all forms of realism. In fact, after briefly characterizing realism in the next section, I move on to distinguishing between ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism. I then show how each approach draws on different sources of normativity and, relatedly, exhibits fidelity to a different set of facts about politics. I associate ordorealism with the prioritization of peace and stability, contextual realism with practice-dependent norms, and radical realism with a form of ideology critique. I then contrast realism with nonideal theory and discuss utopianism and the prospects for a radical realism. I characterize a version of radical realism with a distinctive epistemic normativity, which has radical potential that surpasses what is found in moralist political theory and also opens a new option in the debate on the status of normativity in Marxism. That is because, while radical realism avoids potentially ideological moralizing, it can inform open-ended social critique as well as lend support to concrete forms of prefigurative politics. To be sure, that is not sufficient to establish the superiority of realism to moralism, and not even to identify the all-things-considered best form of realism. My aim here is more modest: I want to show that, pace some critics (Erman & Möller, 2015a; Estlund, 2017; Leader-Maynard & Worsnip, 2018; Scheuerman, 2013), contemporary realism is a distinctive and consistent position in normative political theory, and that at least one of its variants does not suffer from a status quo bias—rather, it is as radical as it gets. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and the boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus. (Nozick, 1974, p. 6) While that approach remains prevalent in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy, realists claim that no overarching principles that span personal morality and politics are plausible. That may appear to fly in the face of simple consistency requirements: if there are true overarching moral principles (“bring about the greatest good for the greatest number,” or “never lie,” say),—where “overarching” means that they apply to any agent regardless of whether the context of action is politics or not—then shouldn't we just apply them to our political predicament, in a categorical or even just pro tanto way? The realist contention is that moralists beg the question of whether there are any such principles spanning the personal and the political—a fraught distinction we will discuss in the next subsection—or at least whether they are good guides to political action or judgment. That is not to say that non-overarching principles are just role ethics principles for political office-holders (Estlund, 2017, p. 366), for non-overarching principles are not just a context-specific application of overarching principles. More precisely, non-overarching, properly political principles don't draw on the same sources of normativity as moral principles. That is why realists believe that there are no overarching principles. If such overarching moral principles existed, then at least a significant portion of normative political theory would be a branch of applied ethics. If realists can show that they can make normative political judgments that don't draw on overarching principles and so don't share the sources of normativity of moral principles, then they will have made room for their view. One may reply that the lack of overarching moral principles doesn't preclude the notion that politics should be governed by moral principles, albeit moral principles that apply only to the political domain (Estlund, 2017, p. 367). That is a point realists who are not overly concerned with semantics are ready to concede (Williams, 2005, p. 5). What matters is that realist normative standards—however one may wish to call them—are not inferred from overarching, pre-political values or principles.2 The main arguments in favor of the rejection of overarching moral principles, i.e., the realist thesis about the normative autonomy of the political, could be crudely summarized by this slogan: if morality could solve political problems, we wouldn't have politics. I want to distinguish between three argumentative strategies in support of this claim, each of which leads to a different strand of realism: ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism. Three caveats about that taxonomy are in order. First, my task here isn't to show how these arguments defeat moralism, but simply to articulate the positions realists may take. Second, those are Weberian ideal types; most worked out positions incorporate elements from more than one of the three approaches. Third, I make no consequential hermeneutical claims about any of the canonical figures I mention to fix ideas, nor about their reception. Ordorealism has a familiar Hobbesian starting point, which Bernard Williams calls ‘the first political question’: “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation” (Williams, 2005, p. 3). The basic thought is that, left to their own devices, including their own ethical judgments, people conflict, with highly undesirable results—so much so that ethical judgment itself may be reduced to a dead letter. Morality or justice are not in themselves a way out of this problem but, as Hobbes saw, they may be instruments through which political power enables us to solve that problem. So we need a freestanding sphere of political normativity if there is to be scope for personal morality, let alone most other trappings of human sociality. Note how leaving (or not falling into) the state of nature is considered desirable not out of some moral commitment to the desirability of political association,3 but simply because it is a precondition for the enjoyment of most of what we happen to take to be valuable, morally or otherwise (Williams, 2005, p. 3). This is a modest point about the instrumental value of political association. As such it is an empirical claim, and one that probably wouldn't hold true in the few remaining small-scale stateless societies (Widerquist & McCall, 2015). But a certain contingency even of its basic claims is characteristic of the empiricist roots of this strand of realism. The contextual strategy's starting point can also be understood as beginning empirically, through an observation of the phenomenological difference between the political and the personal. One doesn't need to invoke Carl Schmitt to note that something is amiss in the thought that lying to my friends is bad for the same reasons that lying in a political campaign is bad, if indeed it is. This approach may remind us of Machiavelli's claims about the tensions between personal and political values and so of the unlikeliness of a unified source for both. Yet realists need not endorse the more radical and old-fashioned readings of Machiavelli, according to which there is no salient difference between legitimate authority and effective power. Indeed some realists elevate such a distinction to a foundational principle (Sagar, 2018). The important point is just that the normative standards that apply to the exercise of political power are different from those that apply to personal relationships. Here, however, one may worry that contextual realists have failed to learn the feminist lesson encapsulated in the slogan, “the personal is political.” To assuage that worry, one may distinguish the personal/political boundary from the public/private one. Many liberal theorists consider them to be equivalent, or in any case focus solely on the latter, as their main concern is to identify the appropriate sphere of legitimate state intervention. So they tend to accommodate feminist concerns by acknowledging that, while the public/private line may have been drawn in the wrong place, the distinction remains viable and important (Gavison, 1992). Liberal realists, qua liberals, will be unable to accommodate the radical position of feminists who reject the public/private distinction altogether (MacKinnon, 1989). But realists need not be liberals, and if they aren't they can focus on the personal/political line instead, which in turn may allow for kinship with quite radical feminist positions (Frazer, 2015). That is because the personal/political distinction is not about a narrow liberal concern with the limits of state action. When the slogan was coined in the 1960s, feminists wanted to point out that, even in movements uninterested in the state or antagonistic towards it, the sphere of appropriately political action was conceived too narrowly, often in ways that marginalized issues of concern to women (Finlayson, 2016, pp. 125–128). That is not to say that the line cannot be drawn. Rather, the slogan reminds us to look with suspicion at any established, ossified way of drawing the line between the personal and the political. The point about questioning the received wisdom about issues like the political/personal divide—critiquing them as ideology, if you will—leads to the third and final strategy at the realist's disposal, the radical one whose guiding thought is that “ethics is usually dead politics; the hand of a victor in a past conflict reaching out to extend its grip to the present and the future,” as Raymond Geuss puts it (2010, p. 42). Insofar as morality is influenced by political power, moral advocacy for political actions and institutions should be the object of critical suspicion—more so than most mainstream, ethics-first political theory allows. That point highlights a connection between the radical and ordorealist approaches. For ordorealists morality and justice are instrumenta regni. The radical approach shares that insight. However, on the ordorealist view the priority remains to establish order by whatever means necessary and so the insight is not problematized. The radical approach tries to establish criteria for making qualitative distinctions between the moral (and other) beliefs that support political authority. Different strands of realism assign different relative weights to stability and ideology, and resolve the trade-off accordingly. As I will show in a moment, the insistence on meeting the basic legitimation demand is ordorealist, the references to a form of legitimation specifically suited for modernity are contextual, and the litmus test for the admissibility of beliefs in legitimacy is radical. The basic legitimation demand exemplifies the ordorealist approach insofar as it requires the provision of order and stability, so relative success in meeting the demand becomes the basis of normative judgments. Importantly, though, the coercive provision of order is conceptually distinguishable from raw domination, which is suspended warfare rather than a political relationship (Hall, 2015)—all politics is coercive, but not all coercion is political. While it is possible to say of any regime whether it meets the basic legitimation demand, the notions of order and stability here can be filled in in context-dependent ways: what might have been acceptable politics in feudal Europe would not pass muster now. Politics versus raw domination is a conceptual distinction, but ordorealists can accommodate conceptual change. Yet a prudent attitude towards change prevails among realists who emphasize those concerns. So, simplifying somewhat, in the work of Matt Sleat (2013a) and Andrew Sabl (2011, 2017) we find defenses of relatively conservative versions of liberalism, with an emphasis on providing a stable outlet for the management of diversity social conflict while renouncing the neo-Kantian project of neutral arbitration. Contextual realism can be associated with a practice-dependent approach to the sources of normativity (Sangiovanni, 2008; Rossi, 2012). The rough idea is that normative political principles are grounded in an interpretation of the point and purpose of particular political practices. The contextual realist, then, constructs her normative standards by asking whether the point and purpose of a particular set of institutions is genuinely political (i.e., whether it addresses the right questions about the provision of order, etc.), and whether those institutions are suited to their purpose. In Williams's theory this is exemplified by the connection between modernity and liberalism: an analysis of the historical context yields an account of the most suitable regime. This is a different level of evaluation from that which a pure ordorealist approach would warrant. For it allows us to rank alternative legitimate regimes on the basis of their fitness for purpose. Robert Jubb's recent defense of non-intrinsic egalitarianism exemplifies this approach (Jubb, 2015). Crudely, on Jubb's view an egalitarian standard turns out to be required for legitimacy on the basis of a reading of what may be expected of political institutions under contemporary conditions. New realist work on the legitimacy and justice of the EU similarly draws on Williams-inspired practice dependence (Beetz, 2017). The radical approach, on the other hand, acquires its normativity by contesting what one may call legitimation stories. Williams's critical theory principle provides a good illustration. The distinction between necessary political coercion and raw domination partly depends on whether the exercise of political power makes sense to those over whom it is exercised (Williams, 2005, pp. 4–6), but this perception can be manipulated by ideology. For Williams this happens when a belief in the legitimacy of a coercive order is caused by the very power it supports and is in the interest of that power (Williams, 2002, pp. 230–234; 2005, p. 6; Sagar, 2018). One may not find that account of ideological distortion persuasive, but radical-minded realists must have one in order to make good the idea that there is more to legitimacy than a belief in it. And, importantly, the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable legitimation stories is not moral but epistemic: ideological legitimation stories just aren't what they purport to be, so epistemic caution requires us to disregard them, as we will see in 3.2 below (Prinz & Rossi, 2017).4 Recent realist work in this of the ideology of political (Finlayson, as well as of policy or normative (Prinz & Rossi, Rossi, 2017; & 2017; & Prinz, critique of the ideological nature of political may also be read in this That of realism should some way towards why realism is from nonideal theory, even though it is frequently with it by the many theorists who it to an approach on “the concrete among made by with (Markell, 2010, p. or on the that politics is by 2017, p. realism and nonideal theory are about “the more than most contemporary political theory but here I will show that, at least for some variants of realism, we are about different of that has for the level of to each Crudely, nonideal theory is a set of for how best to our normative political in the This can be to point to a of between ideal and nonideal theory, much as or to a need to with political as to the ideal polity Wiens, out of about the or because one the ideal as an ideological from concrete for social change us these I just want to show that there is a consequential distinction between nonideal theory and realism. our account of nonideal theory, a of facts is to a role in facts about feasibility the of an ideal theory a desirable and the or unachievable political state of nonideal theory will us what is the best way to the what is If we reject the of and that normative should rank political one another as to some ideal then nonideal theory will of a between the values in alternative way nonideal theory is a or a set of criteria for the of of the three realist strategies for political will a role in each but they don't have to be facts about feasibility for all of realism. the in to be the a of that point The third the difference between and nonideal theory. we may say that the to the status quo become as we through the the right is to contain facts about ordorealists will have to identify political that can order in the This of realism is indeed most often associated with the conservative or figures in the also an important role in versions of contemporary liberal realism 2017; 2012; that are on or about social change than liberal theory. in that is to from the status As we have that realism and nonideal theory one we may say that, insofar as they have to take feasibility ordorealists are nonideal theorists of realism. The contextual realist will have scope for radical social through a of the and institutions at hand A practice-dependent approach is by to but the to which that a status quo bias on the of the is in a addressing this (Erman & Möller, so I cannot do justice to its it to say that, even if critics on the left are correct that the most radical are out to practice-dependent there are of transformative by that Many are not realist, but some realist methodological (e.g., 2017; & 2019; 2015). the radical realist will be to the from to transformative This work will be by an of how power beliefs in and so it will draw on the best social-scientific accounts of those but that no limits on our to critique and our to those beliefs any and for our the radical realist has no need for feasibility That is not to say that all status quo bias from feasibility constraints, but all status quo bias to fidelity to the facts So realists can demand the is in but not by status quo bias. that that radical realists can that is with no to and us that it is and even to do so 2008; Estlund, would be an if radical realism found itself with positions one may call (or in My view is that realists can make that do not take feasibility but other to the of political two forms of which we may call and ideological cannot that in the any state of of which the has no For the of a even in its there a of of of with which no principles will radical realism is and so while it can let the political of feasibility constraints, it is of it the of that an of The realist can be and but must be modest to those to there are of politics not to The of ideological moralism is the way of the on their status quo bias is to from its on like and, to a that the best for thought from facts from the of our normative the we on the more we on moral judgments alone But do these the that To see a potential for bias there one doesn't have to with on the of are not to often ideology with an of the true of our conceptual and our 2012, p. it to that, as many and our moral and moral must in some way to our present if only because, whatever it may be, morality is one of the we are in & In which case there is at least a debate to be as to the relative of as to status quo bias. The two forms of are radical realism must But they are what room is left for radical normative The I wish to here its from an in the which may be to or The of the moralist and the to moral of the ideological moralist are realism is in the sense that its normativity is it just us that, its the we should to for the a with the that we shall even if there are no on what basis can we make those normative drawing on pre-political moral our of the sources of normativity for the radical approach to realism: normative judgments from a critical of legitimation and the is on epistemic rather than moral If a legitimation isn't what it to be, it becomes and so should be and the it supports should be a critical of other legitimation stories may the they would rather to notions of autonomy to those and even Williams to “the most basic sense of which us that we should to the power of to critical theory but it is important for a realist to resist the call of even such pre-political moral (Williams, 2002, p. such in normative political theory does so at the risk of them at a we should not pre-political moral whose turns out to be with the very political or institutions they are to The rough idea that move can be the of it would be to an as a for her own if it turns out that a role in our current notion of then it is to the notion of to the legitimacy of another to of this of realist in are and often for that This should but it does not the of whether the arguments can be (Estlund, 2017, p. to the the point here is not one about the of but about whether some arguments are even may be that some may be but it cannot be made to in favor of a for the case of for instance, that a radical realist wanted to the legitimation status of coercive, forms of political of
Source: Constellations
Author: Enzo Rossi
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,500
OpenAlex ID: W3124350133