Politics Recovered, edited by Matt Sleat (introduction)

POLITICS RECOVERED

Realist Thought in Theory and Practice

EDITED BY MATT

SLEAT

Introduction Politics Recovered—on the Revival of Realism in Contemporary Political Theory M AT T S L E AT

The Ambitions of Realist Thought

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hen Socrates announces to Callicles in the Gorgias that “I am the only one practicing politics among people today,” it is hard to imagine that the reader is supposed to take this claim as anything other than ironic—though it is irony with a critical sting.

Socrates wants his audience to accept that even those politicians credited with making Athens great, such as the revered Pericles, succeeded only in turning the city into “a swollen, festering sore” filled “with harbors and dockyards and walls and tributes and rubbish of that kind, without a thought for restraint or justice.”1 Politics, properly understood, should be directed not toward giving citizens what they want but toward helping them become better people. And it is in this sense that Socrates, who assures us that “I say the things I say on any occasion not out of any desire to please, but with a view to what is best rather than what is most pleasant,” was claiming to practice the true science of politics.2 But Callicles’s initial point was that philosophers such as Socrates are “without experience of the laws of the city, of the language required in dealings with people, whether public or private, of human pleasures and desires—in fact, altogether ignorant of the ways of the world.”3 At best, this ignorance makes “laughing stocks” of philosophers who attempt to enter into the business of politics; at worst, the failure to recognize that what Socrates calls “politics” bears no relation [1]

to politics as it really is will leave Socrates himself unable to negotiate the realities of political life (and, of course, it is in light of our knowledge that Athens eventually put Socrates to death that we are invited to evaluate his resolve). Where, Callicles asks, is the wisdom in that?

In recent years, something akin to the dialogue between Callicles and Socrates has begun to play itself out once more. The modern Callicles is represented by a renewed interest in political realism. To call a theory “realist” is to identify a quality of that theory rather than to signify any particular distinguishing content. A realistic theory claims a certain sort of truthfulness or fidelity in relation to its subject matter. One can therefore adopt a realistic position on almost anything—art, morality, literature, science, psychology, and so forth—though the demands of realism will differ according to the subject matter. In political philosophy, these demands are given by the character of politics itself. Unsurprisingly, this means that there are different ways in which one can be realistic about politics. This understanding follows quite naturally from the fact that politics is a deeply complex sphere of human activity, involving a plurality of psychologically complex individual and collective agents with a plethora of shifting and often competing interests, beliefs, values, motivations, and goals; counting among its materials power and coercion, on the one hand, and authority and legitimacy, on the other; and standing in a series of multifaceted relationships to other domains of human life such as morality, economics, religion, and technology. We disagree, of course, about what politics is “really like,” and, indeed, such disagreements are themselves a part of politics that any realistic analysis needs to take seriously (and is an issue that several chapters in this volume reflect upon, most notably those by Newey, McQueen, Frazer, and Freeden). But it is at least clear what these disagreements are about, and it is in this claim to have a more truthful or complete account of politics that the assertion of being “realistic” is substantiated.

Yet we also differ as to what it would be to respond appropriately to the realities of politics. Together, these disagreements explain why realism is best conceived not as an homogenous theoretical perspective on politics— even less a substantive political position within politics—but as a family of different approaches to how we ought to understand, theorize, and normatively assess politics. The diversity of topics addressed and approaches represented in this volume attests to the fact that the commitments of a realist can and have been expressed in different and not always compatible

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ways. And it might prove illuminative to think of these differences in terms of the appropriate ambitions of realist political thought.

A common and in many ways quite natural way of thinking about the aspirations of realism is in terms of its having either descriptive or prescriptive objectives: it wishes to provide either theories that aim at a certain sort of superior descriptive adequacy of the political realm or theories that are in some sense more appropriate guides for agents acting in the political sphere.4 This approach is mistaken only if it takes these options as mutually exclusive alternatives. It is certainly the case that realistic theories aim to help us better understand politics and make sense of our political experience. The now familiar realist charge against much contemporary political theory is that through inappropriate idealizations, abstraction, and moralization it presents a misleading, if not outright false, account of politics that sits at too great a distance from reality to offer us much that can help us comprehend or get any meaningful intellectual grasp of our political lives. At least insofar as political theory has failed to help in this regard, it is because political theorists have in recent years too often treated politics as if it were merely a form of “applied ethics” or “a branch of moral philosophy” and in doing so have conceived of politics as little more than the instrument for the application and realization of some antecedent moral values, principles, or ideals.5 The result has been to lose sight of too much of what is specific, unique, and indeed valuable about politics. There is clearly value in understanding for its own sake. Yet, as William Galston pithily puts it in his chapter in this volume, “Description precedes and constrains prescription. Political realism must begin with and rest on an adequate description of political life.” We seek to better understand politics also because we want our theories to do better in terms of helping guide us in practice.

It might be more useful, therefore, to think about the ambitions of realist thought slightly differently, in terms of widening the scope of contemporary political theory, of changing its focus, and of developing an appropriately political normative theory, though recognizing that these ambitions, too, are far from mutually exclusive (as is again well demonstrated in this volume).

One of the least contentious claims of realism has been that AngloAmerican political theory over the past several decades has been excessively narrow in the topics it has deemed worthy of exploration. It is only

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a slight exaggeration to say that the concept of justice has dominated the subdiscipline and that theoretical reflection on almost every political issue of interest has been either funneled through that concept (not necessarily always appropriately) or overlooked because they are not clearly related to it. This situation is both hard to deny and easy to rectify. Realist theory therefore aims to expand the range of topics or questions that theorists address to include those that have either been obscured or wholly overlooked in recent years—such as questions about political possibility, political agency, compromise, political judgment, political institutions, and political responsibility—as well as some that are discussed in this volume— such as corruption (Philp), secrecy (Rahul Sagar), leadership (Bellamy), and the role of the emotions in political life (Galston). Importantly, the claim that political theorists ought to widen the scope of their inquiries is not a claim that they ought to amend how they go about those inquiries (unless, of course, the complaint is specifically about inappropriately interpreting certain issues as issues of justice) but rather a claim that they have focused their attention on too narrow a part of the spectrum of issues that constitute our political experience.

A related but qualitatively stronger realist claim is that the focus of contemporary political theory has been aimed in the wrong directions. Whereas John Rawls famously asserted that justice is the “first virtue” of political societies, realism insists that political theory needs to turn its attention back to the sine quibus non of politics—order, stability, security, and the conditions of cooperation. Realism tends to be more appreciative of the magnitude of the achievement that stability represents and of its inherent fragility and precariousness, in part because it so often takes politics to be a way of achieving order in but without ever fully overcoming conditions of conflict and disagreement. This is not to say, as Galston illuminatingly discusses in his chapter, that realism needs to be committed to the psychologically implausible view that peaceful order satisfies all human needs or, indeed, to deny that other human motivations and interests can lead to the undermining of stability in the pursuit of other (more dignified) ends. And, from the other direction, it is of course true that few would deny that order and stability are important political goods or that without them little (but maybe not everything) else that we value will likely be achievable. Nevertheless, realism is going to have little patience with sentiments such as those expressed by Immanuel Kant (and affirmed later by Rawls) that “if justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to [4]

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live upon the earth.”6 In many places and for many people, both throughout human history and across the world today, a fragile order, no matter how unjust, is not only the most but also the best one can hope for. Order is not nothing, but then justice is not everything. Our theories need to help us make sense of that experience and to better understand the conditions in which order can flourish or decay.

Though realism often wears its Hobbesian heritage on its sleeve— Bernard Williams defines the “ ‘first’ political question in recognizable terms as the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation”7—no political realist has followed Hobbes in thinking that the provision of such order is a sufficient condition of its legitimacy. It matters whether the solution to the first political question is “acceptable” to those subject to it—or, as Williams put it, whether the political association satisfies what he called the “basic legitimation demand” (BLD). As is evident in several of the chapters in this volume, Williams’s work generally and his notion of the BLD specifically have become central and highly influential features of contemporary realist theory (for a variety of perspectives— some more sympathetic than others—see in particular the chapters by Larmore, Owen, Paul Sagar, Bellamy, Scheuerman, and Freeden). Because this topic is covered in more detail in various chapters of this volume, there is no need to say too much about it here. What is crucial, however, is Williams’s claim that the BLD is “inherent in there being such a thing as politics.”8 His reasoning is that it is an axiomatic truth that might is not right, and, hence, if we are to make a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable answers to the first political question, then we will be asking whether our political association can make sense to us as a form of legitimate authority. That there is, in this sense, a distinction between successful domination (rule via might) and politics (rule via right) is therefore a fundamental conceptual claim about the nature of politics itself. As such and again contrary to Rawls’s insistence that justice is the first virtue of political societies, many realists have followed Williams in thinking that questions of political legitimacy ought to be prior to those of justice and hence that the focus of so much contemporary theory has been misplaced.9 These claims essentially contend that political theory needs to pay more attention to the specificities of politics, but they go beyond the ambition of increasing the scope of what theorists address insofar as such an increase is anticipated to have important ramifications for how we understand and theorize politics. It is therefore not hard to see how such claims bleed I N T RO D U C T I O N

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into the more ambitious objective of developing a distinctively political normativity.

The thought that there might be a particular form of normativity suitable for the political realm is often met with consternation, as if to make that claim is equivalent to saying that there are no normative standards to politics at all. Two quick and related thoughts: A useful but not wholly satisfactory slogan for realist theory (see the chapters by Larmore, Owen, Philp, McQueen, and Scheuerman) has been that it wishes to restore or reassert the “autonomy of politics,” the spirit of which should probably best be interpreted as insisting that we ought to develop ways of thinking about politics better suited to the nature of the political itself. In normative terms, there might be a temptation to think that a realist theory will therefore be dominated by the concepts of power and self-interest, leaving little, if any, place for moral considerations, ideals, or values (except maybe as cynical justifications that try to put a moral gloss on the pursuit of our self-interest).

A political normativity is therefore one in which the only pertinent questions lie in identifying our interests and deciding how power can best be employed to achieve them. Although such a theory—one we rightly associate with realpolitik—is reasonably enough taken to be part of the realist family, it is not one that has any advocates in the contemporary debates, for good reasons. First, what realism rejects are particular and distorting accounts of the way in which morality and moral considerations do or should function in politics—or what has come to be called “moralism,” of which more is said in the final section of this introduction (see the chapter

by Owen for an interesting discussion of political moralism). Second, we do not have as much trouble accepting that there might be forms of normativity that are specifically suited for other areas of human activity, such as economics and aesthetics. This does not mean that, for instance, we cannot ask questions of art that go beyond those of its beauty, and, indeed, we regularly evaluate pieces of art according to moral and political standards (or even economic ones: “Is this painting really worth that?”). Yet we seem quite at ease with thinking that there are standards—of taste and beauty— that are internal to aesthetics and that ought to play a significant role in our judgments as to the merits of a piece of work, without denying that other standards might also be highly pertinent in our assessments. The realist claim is probably best understood in a similar manner: the ambition is not to develop a political normativity in which all other considerations are absent and only properly political considerations (whatever they might be) [6]

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are deemed salient, but rather one in which the nuanced and complex relationship between politics and morality is better understood, discussed in several of the chapters here (see those by Larmore, Owen, Paul Sagar, Scheuerman, and Freeden), as is the relationship between politics and other realms such as economics, law, religion, technology, and aesthetics. And all of this would be done to make possible a form of practical reason better suited to political agents acting in the political realm.

The sorts of considerations that need to be taken into account here are clearly numerous, and, hence, the ways in which political theories might respond to them are equally diverse. One idea is that thinking realistically about politics must include taking seriously how political institutions actually work or the sort of beliefs, values, and motivations that people actually have, precisely because ignoring such questions may lead to counterproductive, possibly catastrophic, consequences if we try and pursue ideals that are not appropriately sensitive to those realities. As Rahul Sagar puts it in his chapter, “Realism . . . requires a normative theory to undertake a kind of due diligence: that is, to evaluate the plausibility of its assumptions and the feasibility of its prescriptions” (see also the contributions by Frazer and Freeden).10 With a more radical twist usually supplied by critical theory, the pursuit of understanding the realities of politics can also be put in the service of a form of ideological critique that seeks to unmask and potentially normatively indict patterns of social and political power without having to adopt a critical standpoint external to politics itself (see the chapter by Paul Sagar).11 A more controversial thesis has been that there are standards of evaluation and assessment, maybe even values and concepts, inherent to politics itself (what William Scheuerman calls in his chapter the possibility of an immanent morality grounded in politics). We have already encountered Williams’s claim that the BLD is one that arises from within the political sphere. In this sense, the demand for legitimacy is not to be thought of in terms of politics being called to account for itself according to some extrapolitical morality but rather as a standard of evaluation internal to the activity of politics. Williams goes further: if politics is not the same as successful domination, then we might also be able to provide a political justification for certain basic human rights—such as the rights to life, freedom from torture, free speech even—that are associated with unmediated coercion and to provide that justification in ways that do not depend on familiar moral accounts of the dignity of humanity or the autonomy of the person.12 I N T RO D U C T I O N

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A further line of thought that some realists have pursued, also influenced

by Williams, is that to construct political ideals or values in ways that do not take certain central features of politics as given will inevitably deliver theories that either are unable to tell us very much about how we ought to arrange our political societies or cannot meaningfully be understood as political theories at all (which is to say they are theories neither of nor for politics). As such, it is misleading to think that realism is set against normative theorizing per se but rather is critical of a particular way of doing normative “political” theory that, it turns out, is actually deeply unpolitical. Realism seeks a way of thinking normatively about politics that is suitably sensitive to the conditions and features of the political sphere, with the hope that doing so will provide us with theories befitting the actual practice of politics. Any appropriately political political philosophy will need to take certain facts about politics as necessary and ineliminable parts of the very practice that we seek to theorize and ought therefore to provide the context in which we construct our political ideals and values. This means that we should not aim to develop philosophical accounts in which fundamental aspects of politics are either absent or can, through philosophical argument, be rationalized away.13 Political philosophy, if it is to be realistic—which just means if it is to be about politics—should therefore aim to help us understand what it is political values such as justice, freedom, rights, equality, toleration, democracy, and so on can mean given the character and constraints of politics as it really is.14 The ambitions of realist thought are therefore varied and underline the fact that realism is better understood as a family of theories than as a unified theoretical position. That being said, one thing that unites realistic theories—whether their ambitions be to provide largely friendly corrections to the dominant positions in contemporary political theory or to alter more radically what it is to theorize politics at all—is the sense that the reality of politics ought to play some significant role in directing the theorist’s activity.

The Revival of Political Realism (and Its Problems) One of the notable features of the reemergence of realism in political theory is that it began as a reinterpretation of existing work going back, in some cases, several decades. This was not a youthful energetic movement [8]

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fired by the discovery of new truths or novel ways of doing things but more a recognition that something interesting had been going on relatively unnoticed for some time. This “something” was not in any sense part of some furtive counterculture either: its main figures were, after all, taken to include pillars of the philosophical establishment such as Bernard Williams, Raymond Geuss, Judith Shklar, John Dunn, Jeremy Waldron, John Gray, and Stuart Hampshire. But what came to be appreciated was that these figures shared certain themes or positions in common that not only pressed against the “high liberalism” that so dominated the subdiscipline in the Anglo-American world (exemplified by the work of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas) in a series of connected critiques but also did so in a way that could plausibly be understood as realist. That is not to say that these thinkers self-identified as realists; Williams and Geuss were the only ones to do so. Yet if In the Beginning Was the Deed (2005) by Williams and Philosophy and Real Politics (2008) by Geuss rightly garnered great interest at the time due to their authors’ status as significant contemporary philosophers, they did not do so as part—let alone as the key texts—of any unified countermovement in political philosophy.

It was William Galston’s survey article “Realism in Political Theory,” published in 2010, that identified and gave form to “this dissenting movement in political theory.” 15 This movement mixed together not only the thinkers already mentioned but several who are a generation or so younger also—such as Bonnie Honig, Glen Newey, Richard Bellamy, Mark Philp, and Chantal Mouffe—into what Galston admitted was something of a “community stew” given their diverse philosophical perspectives that could nevertheless be united around themes that seemed recognizable as forms of realism. What “Realism in Political Theory” did was therefore provide a compelling new interpretation of a substantial body of existing work that galvanized a candidly realist way of thinking about politics that had been absent from contemporary political theory for some significant period of time.

The (very recent) history of realism helps explains several striking—and possibly problematic—features of contemporary realist thought as well as the background against which the aims of this collection were devised.

First of all, much of the realist literature hitherto tended to take the form of either analyses of those thinkers Galston listed as the pioneers of realism, most notably Williams and Geuss, or competing accounts of the topography of the realist landscape, such as the nature of their critique of ideal theory, I N T RO D U C T I O N

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utopianism, and political moralism (including, indeed, discussions as to which of these topics ought to be the proper target of realism’s critical ire).16 There is nothing illegitimate about such inquiries, and it is quite understandable that theorists needed to spend much time not only getting to grips with a series of complex and nuanced thinkers but also arranging them in such a way that the general contours of realist thought could become clear. The fact that critiques of realism have often been based on misunderstandings of its character and ambitions point to the ongoing importance of such work. Yet it is a consequence of this focus that much realist theory has tended toward either being very methodological in nature or being engaged in the analysis of the work of Williams and Geuss in such a way that seems quite out of kilter with the professed ambitions of realist thought.

That realism reemerged in the form of a critique of contemporary liberal theory, specifically of the work of John Rawls, which so dominated the discipline after the publication of his magnum opus A Theory of Justice in 1971,17 makes it little different from almost every other interesting development in Anglo-American political theory over the past few decades, such as communitarianism, global justice, multiculturalism, the politics of difference, and deliberative democracy. Yet unlike these developments and probably because realism did not offer an alternative normative theory (a point I return to in the following section), there developed a strong impression that realism is a purely critical mode of political philosophy whose raison d’être is merely to tame the wilder moralist or idealist excesses of the neo-Kantianism that Rawls and his followers represented. On this account, the value of realism depends on the validity of its criticisms of Rawlsian philosophy and hence is completely parasitic on the theory that it critiques. This impression was strengthened by the fact already commented upon that a significant proportion of the initial realist literature focused on clarifying or assessing the success of realism’s critical dimension rather than on exploring its more positive potential. But the ongoing ramification of this impression has been a general skepticism that realism can make the transition from a critical to a more constructive or productive form of political thought.

Although these two features of the realist literature are understandable in the context of how the interest in realism reemerged, combined they have had the effect of creating a certain sort of disciplinary insularity to this realism. There are several ways in which this insularity has manifested [ 10 ]

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itself. In part, it has taken the form of a reluctance to place what has been called “new” realism in the wider context of the tradition of realist thinking in Western political theory.18 This tradition includes such figures as Thucydides, Augustine, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt, though several other thinkers have recently been subject to realist interpretations and hence may warrant inclusion in the canon also, including Herodotus,19 David Hume,20 Jeremy Bentham,21 Immanuel Kant,22 Vladimir Lenin,23 Mohandas Gandhi,24 Hannah Arendt, 25 Leo Strauss, 26 Michael Oakeshott, 27 and Isaiah Berlin.28 Put in that context, there is very little “new” about realism other than our interest in it. Nevertheless, there have been limited attempts at trying to bridge the realisms that stand on either side of the neo-Kantianism of the late twentieth century. Insofar as realism has a history, any full understanding of it as a position within political theory is going to require an understanding of that history.29 Furthermore, it goes without saying that an ignorance of the history of realism gratuitously denies us access to the insights that will inevitably be contained in such a significant body of philosophical work.

This is a mistake that Scheuerman rightly claims has also been made in relation to realism in international relations (IR) theory (IR realism), dooming realists to “unwittingly reproduce conceptual ambiguities plaguing mid-century international realism.”30 (Indeed, as Scheuerman argues in his chapter in this volume, there might be good reason to think that political realism is less satisfactory in crucial regards. See also the chapters

by McQueen and Freeden.) Realism not only has been one of the dominant theoretical paradigms in international relations but has also become a complex and highly sophisticated tradition in its own right, boasting impressive nuanced thinkers such as Hans J. Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John H. Herz, and has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years. As with the historical tradition of realism (with which the tradition of IR realism overlaps significantly), neither Williams nor Geuss nor indeed Galston in his popularization of the term realism thought it necessary to comment on the choice of that term to describe their theories or its possible connotations in light of its prominence in IR. Apart from some dismissive remarks that erroneously equate realism in IR with a form of amoralism—which characterizes IR realism no better than it does political realism—realists have had little to say about realism in IR, and hence not much work has been undertaken to explore the potential connections I N T RO D U C T I O N

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and opportunities for engagement between the two.31 In part, the absence of such work reflects the strong but unwarranted disciplinary divide between political and IR theory that seems to be observed by most theorists, not just by realists. Even so, realists should have more reason than most to want to break through this artificial partition, not least because any realistic account of politics today as it actually is, though this might be true of all times, will need to take into account politics’ international dimensions (a point well made by David Owen and Duncan Bell in their chapters).

As the chapter by John Medearis attests, a rich tradition of “democratic realism� throughout the twentieth century reflected upon the shortcomings of the ideals of democracy in the face of the brute facts of reality. Some of these themes have been revisited again recently, for example, in discussions regarding the actual capacities, limitations, and motivations of voters and the ways in which these factors undermine the aspirations of representative democratic systems, as well as regarding the implications of the concentration of power in the executive branches of government.32 Yet, again, we find that democratic realism has had little resonance in contemporary realist political theory and vice versa.

All this means that it is wrong to think that there is one realism, even as an approach to thinking about politics. Variants of realist thought are to be found both throughout history and in the concomitant fields of IR and democratic theory. However, the manner in which interest in realism in political theory reemerged, understandably though unfortunately, has hitherto led to a certain intellectual narrowness and hesitancy to engage with these other forms of realist political thinking.

These comments as to the origins and nature of contemporary political realism help illuminate the intellectual backdrop against which the aims of this collection have been conceived, of which there are three. The first is to continue the exploration of the general character of political realism, the work of specific realist thinkers, and the limits or shortcomings of contemporary realist thought (see the chapters by Bellamy, Freeden, Larmore, Medearis, McQueen, Newey, Owen, Philp, and Scheuerman).

The second is to broaden the focus of realism into new areas as a way of demonstrating how realist analysis can enhance our political understanding as well as to develop the more constructive potential of political realism through discussions of the role of human emotions in political theory (Galston), corruption (Philp), secrecy and transparency (Rahul Sagar), [ 12 ]

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global justice and security (Bell), legitimacy and domination (Paul Sagar), and feminism (Frazer). Finally, several of the chapters hope to open up dialogues between the different forms of realism in order both to bring to light insights from these other fields and to show the mutual benefits that might accrue from the further exchange of ideas (Medearis, Bellamy, McQueen, Scheuerman, Frazer).

Politics, Philosophy, and Morality A few thoughts on the relationship between politics, philosophy, and morality in realist thought are in order here because it is a theme that several of the chapters address implicitly or explicitly.

It is common to realistic theories that they take power, disagreement, and conflict to be among the ineradicable and constitutive features of politics. An important implication of this is a deep skepticism not that there are right answers to moral and philosophical questions about how we should live together but rather that politics can be fully governed by reason or morality precisely because we disagree about what reason dictates or morality demands. This skepticism rules out the possibility of grounding politics in some prepolitical or hypothetical consensus on justice, certain moral principles, or standards of deliberations, for instance. There might be a concern that this limitation dooms politics to a certain irrationalism and amoralism. Realists certainly reject the thought that politics can be understood in terms of the application of abstract rational or moral principles that authoritatively settle the question of what we ought to do (and the further but distinct question of what we ought to do when we disagree about what we ought to do).33 This is because politics is always historically located, and any proper understanding of politics and the contexts in which political agents act has to reflect this (a point picked up by Charles Larmore and Mark Philp in their chapters). Political action and practical reason are therefore badly conceived if we think of them in terms of applying an abstract theory to a concrete reality. Politics is, to use the ancient metaphor, much more like an art or a craft in which political actors have to employ their judgment in considering what they should do.34 Such judgments will not completely eschew all evaluative considerations of what might be morally desirable. Yet they must also take into account the “wider nexus of actions and action-related attitudes, habits and institutional I N T RO D U C T I O N

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arrangements, within which alone the judgment (finally) makes sense,”35 all of which quite obviously change over time and differ between societies. Moreover, in our assessments of the political actions of other individuals or societies, we need to be cognizant of these contextual considerations as opposed to simply judging them against a set of universal principles. All of this does not banish morality or reason from politics. There still might be the right—rationally or morally—thing to do. But discovering what that thing might be cannot be something we arrive at prepolitically via philosophical reflection.

On the one hand, realists tend to think that there are universal truths about politics—that politics takes place in and is a response to conditions of deep disagreement and conflict; that politics is not warfare (“might is not right”); that political rule necessarily requires the wielding of power in its various forms; and so on. On the other hand, they insist that any adequate understanding of politics must also attend to its more contextual and contingent features. It may be that the former are the sort of conceptual insights about politics that philosophy is particularly well placed to help us comprehend and analyze, but we need not think that only philosophy can help us here. And where philosophy is either silent or unenlightening (all approaches have their limits), there our understanding most certainly will need to be supplemented with resources from elsewhere—from the social sciences, history, and psychology, for instance.36 As Raymond Geuss has put it, “Political philosophy . . . must start from and be concerned in the first instance not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act, what they ought to desire, or value, the kind of people they ought to be, etc., but, rather, with the way social, economic, political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some given time, and what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances.”37 Of course, all of these issues are the subject of much dispute, and it would be amiss to think that in appealing to the social sciences, for instance, theorists will hit upon a body of unquestionable findings from which political philosophy can then proceed; that disputability is both understandable from an epistemological point of view but also quite as it should be. The point is that political philosophy cannot simply help itself to a vision of politics that seems most amenable to the realization of the theorist’s preferred ideals but must rather be guided by the best accounts of actual political life available to us, even if that guidance comes at the expense of introducing what might be viewed as empirical “impurities” into the philosophical enterprise. [ 14 ]

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Here we come up against a question that arises several times throughout this volume regarding the extent to which a realistic political philosophy is possible or, more moderately, whether there are significant limits to philosophical approaches to the study of politics insofar as the familiar analytical and conceptual tools employed by philosophers might be ill suited to shedding much light on its political subject matter (see the chapters by Freeden, Frazer, Owen, Newey, and Scheuerman). That the study of political theory has largely been “colonized” by philosophy, to the detriment of a fuller understanding of the political realm and all that falls in it, will be a point familiar to readers of Michael Freeden’s important and influential work in this area, and it is a point that he stresses forcefully again in his chapter for this volume. And as David Owen playfully suggests at the end of his contribution, this skepticism might be well captured by a slight reworking of the title of probably Williams’s most famous book: “politics and the limits of philosophy.”38 Glen Newey even goes so far as to state that realism is best conceived as a particular view of the appropriate relationship between philosophy and politics (which, presumably, is intended to incorporate moral philosophy and so might include some of the more familiar worries associated with moralistic approaches to politics but is also broader than that). In contrast, Elizabeth Frazer insists that because feminism “begins” in “philosophical realism,” then that is where realism ought to begin also (given that feminism is, she argues, inherently realist). So the relationship between politics and philosophy is one of the areas where realists disagree, though what is more significant is the fact that they want to emphasize and problematize this relationship as a topic deserving reconsideration in the first place rather than merely accepting the dominant view of how the relationship ought to be conceived.

Any claim that reality must play some role—however considerable—in our political theories, such as in the construction of political values or in our normative assessments of political regimes, is always going to find itself open to charges that realism fails to sufficiently distance itself from the status quo—injustices, inequities, and all—and hence cannot avoid replicating justifications for it (a theme picked up in different ways in the chapters by Bell, Freeden, Frazer, McQueen, and Paul Sagar). It is certainly the case that realism cannot countenance the thought that political critique ought to take the form of comparing the actual with fully abstract ideals that have paid absolutely no heed to political realities. But the alternative to Plato is not Burke. Although any realistic theory will accept that I N T RO D U C T I O N

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we ought to give some weight to reality in our theories, it does not do so because it has a normative preference for what exists merely because it exists. It is not conservative in that sense. Indeed, a realist might genuinely lament that people are morally imperfect, that they sometimes let the darker emotions of hate and anger get the better of them, that human values and interests conflict, that politics necessarily involves the use of violence, and so on, and, indeed, the realist might wish people and the human condition were better than they are. The conditions that make politics indispensable are not necessarily to be celebrated, but neither should they be ignored or wished away when we make our best efforts to try and understand political life. And it hardly seems appropriate to think that all critical positions other than the full abstraction offered by Platonism or Kantianism are necessarily conservative. It is true that the attempt to ensure that theory maintains some link with reality means realism cannot adopt such critical extremes, but then realists are going to doubt that these extremes are appropriate places from which to engage in political critique in the first place (even if a “view from nowhere” is available to us, which is, of course, philosophically controversial).

Such concerns about whether realism must—or cannot but—affirm the status quo is exacerbated by its critique of moralism. Yet, and again it is worth stressing, realism rejects the thought that the political domain can effectively be regulated by moral principles precisely because we disagree about such moral matters; it does not insist that morality has no place in political life. What realism rejects is moralism understood as a specific (and mistaken) way of comprehending the role of morality in politics. Moralism fails either insofar as it threatens to reduce politics to morality or because it cannot satisfactorily account for the place of morality in a proper understanding of political life. Political moralism, according to Williams, assumes that it is the role of theory either to develop the principles, concepts, ideals, and values that politics ought then to express “through persuasion, the use of power, and so forth” (what he calls the “enactment model”) or to lay down “moral conditions of co-existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised” (the “structural model”).39 Both models “represent the priority of the moral over the political” insofar as they portray fundamental political questions—of the ends of politics and the rightful conditions of political power—as moral questions that can be given determinate answers by moral philosophy prior to politics. Geuss

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shares that concern but makes a further complaint about moralism, calling it “a kind of moralized preaching and an associated assumption about the causal efficacy and cognitive significance of making moral judgments.”40 Moralism assumes too much explanatory value for moral arguments about absolute good and evil in politics, and in doing so it leaves little space for other considerations that are highly pertinent in the making of political decisions. Yet, importantly, this is not an argument against the making of moral judgments in politics per se but rather against the inappropriateness of certain sorts of moral judgments. (Geuss regularly uses as his bête noire Tony Blair’s decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003, considering it an example of moralism in politics: despite the plethora of considerations for and against the invasion, the incredible complexities of the situation, and the deep uncertainties regarding the consequences of an attack, Blair’s decision making seemed determined by his conviction that Saddam Hussein was evil.41) Ultimately and for reasons illustrated in several chapters here, it has probably not been too helpful that the discussion of the relationship between morality and politics has been cast in terms of their “autonomy” or the “priority” of one over the other. The idea of fully autonomous spheres of human life is a deeply implausible one. And it is never quite clear exactly what is meant by saying that morality has priority over politics or vice versa.

What seems more credible is the thought—discussed in different ways by David Owen and Alison McQueen—that politics and morality are best conceived not as separate but as deeply entwined and in such a way that we can neither understand one without the other nor reduce one to the other. Politics cannot be “applied ethics” because our moral frameworks and discourses have a history, at least part of which is going to be political.

And so morality does not ground politics because morality is itself partly the result of past politics and political battles. And so any form of realism must likely reject the possibility of moral reasoning as fully autonomous in ways that we might usually associate with Platonic and Kantian traditions.

Yet it would equally seem a mistake to agree with Geuss that “ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future.”42 It may well be that there are some moral concepts and values that we have no good reason to continue to endorse once we realize that the only reason we do so is that they proved victorious as part of previous political struggles. Yet it is unlikely

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that many of our values can be described in that way, and, more importantly, even when they can, it seems excessive to think that there really is nothing else—nothing that we properly associate with the realm and demands of morality—that can be said for our moral values and our commitment to them other than that they have succeeded politically.

When realism does profess to have ambitions to provide action guidance, it is often criticized that it does not provide the sort of determinate guidance we need. And it certainly does not provide such guidance in the form that so much contemporary normative political theory has done, by constructing comprehensive conceptions of values such as justice, which are then used to inform public-policy issues, matters of institutional design, and questions of individual or collective action. Realists are always going to be very dubious of claims that human beings are unable to know how they should act in the absence of regulative ideals toward which to orientate their actions, and they have instead stressed the ways in which relative comparisons and the avoidance of familiar evils can provide such guidance without the need to appeal to ideals (and, indeed, might do a better job of providing such guidance). The guidance that realism offers is more cautionary in character—warning us against the perils of thinking about politics in particular ways or of overlooking particular aspects of our political experience. Where it may seek to be more constructive, it is never conclusive. And so realism does not always appear to provide the sort of guidance that we look to political theory to provide. Yet realism does not conceive of the task of political theory (or philosophy) in straightforward terms equivalent to those assumed in the more dominant normative forms of neo-Kantianism. As may be becoming clear here, this is because realists are likely to have a more modest understanding of the significance of the findings of political theory/philosophy and moral philosophy for our deliberations as to what we should do. Indeed, the question “What should we do?” is ultimately one that has to be answered via the processes of politics themselves. That is part of what it means to say that something is a political question. This understanding might not seem satisfactory to those who want more from their political philosophy, who think that philosophy should be able to provide determinate answers to the most fundamental political questions (“Which tax arrangement is most just?” “What is the correct balance between freedom and security?” “Does toleration require us to allow hate speech?” and so on). But that assumption about

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philosophy misses the point that realism does not straightforwardly accept that the provision of determinate answers is what we should want from our political theories. Even when realism does have normative ambitions, it nevertheless sets these ambitions in the context of a different and necessarily more limited account of the appropriate role of theory in our reflections on political life and deliberations as to how we should act.

This limitation might be perceived as denigrating the significance of political philosophy (without prejudging what significance it ought to have, which is, anyway, a question we should not expect political philosophy to be well placed to answer). But really it is better understood as making sure our theories can accommodate the fact that it is ultimately through politics— not through philosophy—that human beings collectively decide what they shall do and hence as giving politics the significance it deserves in any properly political theory.

One final and more speculative thought to end on, one that also might point to further areas where realists may—or should—have something important to contribute. The turn to realism throughout the history of political theory has often (though not always) been accompanied by or seen as a response to a crisis of politics. A “crisis of politics” is not the same as a “political crisis” but in a more general and deeper sense means that there is something problematic about politics as it is being practiced and at the extreme a sense that politics has failed us and that alternatives to political forms of coexistence must be sought. To some degree, all political theories are motivated by a dissatisfaction of some sort. The turn to realism, however, is less likely to be motivated by a substantive concern that our society may be too unjust, unequal, undemocratic, or so on but that politics as a particular human practice has gone awry or that our theories of politics may have become too divorced from the actual political world that they are supposed to help us understand. This is not to say that worries about the injustices of a society cannot lead in a realist direction: there is much to be said for the thought that the growing chasm between the egalitarianism that large swathes of Anglo-American political theory has advocated since the 1970s and the growing levels of inequality that Western democracies have actively pursued as a matter of policy has played a significant role in stimulating some deep reflection upon the relationship between political philosophy and the political practice of which realism has been part. Yet such substantive concerns need not and often have not led to

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deeper anxieties about politics other than to reinforce a sense in which political power has simply yet to be put in the service of the right ends.

The spur to realism often comes from somewhere else, some more profound worries about the nature of politics itself.

That there is today widespread political disaffection in most Western liberal democratic societies is more than just a prevailing cynicism about politicians and their trade. It is driven also by an increasing sense that politics has failed to get a grip on many of the biggest challenges of our day (climate change, the rise of religious fundamentalism and violence, mass immigration, inequality, the power and influence of unaccountable supranational institutions, global economic security). Possibly worse, there is also a deep pessimism that political power can be a force for progressive change but is instead doomed to be the arena of sheer folly and the pursuit of sectional interests (a worry that for many is exemplified by recent events in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as by wider developments in places such as India, Turkey, and Hungary). From a different perspective, politics has come to be seen as an overweening obstruction to the pursuit of the common good, so that the latter objective would be better served by leaving the market to provide our public goods or by using technology to bypass the normal political processes. Such disaffection and pessimism have led to a significant diminishment of politics in the Western world. If political theory has anything to say about these attitudes (and that “if ” needs to be taken seriously), then it is going to need to put the practice of politics back at the center of its inquiry. This means reexamining many of the most basic questions of political theory, questions that have been little attended to in recent decades, such as “What is politics?” “What, if anything, is the value of or in political activity?” (or “Why should we value specifically political forms of rule?”), and “What is the place of politics in the human condition?” There is a real danger that at a time when politics as a practice is losing widespread support, we find ourselves unable to provide meaningful, comprehensive, and compelling answers to these questions, the practical ramifications of which may actually be quite devastating.

Because these questions are also central to the realist endeavor, this area is one where realism ought to have something significant to say.

It should not be a surprise and certainly cannot be a criticism that thinkers have different ideas of what realism is and of what a realistic political theory might look like. The same is true of, for instance, idealism and utopianism [ 20 ]

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as well as of ideological positions such as liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and so on. If anything, such internal discussions should be seen as evidence of the vibrancy of the tradition rather than of any fundamental fault within realist thought. The chapters in this collection are purposefully diverse in order to reflect the intellectually dynamic state of realism today. The authors do not always agree, often hold opposing opinions as to the potential of realist thinking for political theory, and may see the value of realism as located in different places or to be understood in different ways. So much the better for realism.

Above all else, what this collection attempts to do is demonstrate why realism is interesting, why it represents one of the more exciting developments in contemporary political thought, and draw attention to the significant questions that are currently occupying realist scholars as well as the spaces where important work has yet to be undertaken. As this introduction has sought to highlight, realism is best understood not simply as a methodological move within existing paradigms or as motivated by the concern that theory must have more “impact” or “relevance” in the real world (realism may have that thought, but it cannot be realism’s first thought). Realism is rather an attempt to recast how we think about politics itself, to recover politics, and to put it back at the heart of our political thinking. In many ways, it reflects a return to a set of very basic but fundamental questions about the very nature of politics and political theory itself. That theorists are now returning to these questions reflects the fact that considerable doubt has been thrown on the cogency and possibilities of our current political theories and practices and that a step back needs to be taken so that we can move forward once more.

Realism’s own answers to these questions tend toward a complex attempt to focus simultaneously on the universalities of politics, power, conflict, authority, and the moral difficulties of political rule, combined with an appreciation of the local, the contextual, the facts of the actual situation.

Unlike the dialogue between Plato and Aristotle depicted in Raphael’s frescoe The School of Athens, realists urge us not to look either to the heavens of abstract theories, ideals, and utopias or to the earth of concrete particulars, empirical knowledge, and practical ethics. That dichotomy, at least in politics, is a false one. Real politics always takes place somewhere near the horizon. And it is in this precarious suspended setting—rejecting moralism but not morality in politics, affirming reality but not the status quo— that a realistic political theory must situate itself.

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Notes 1. Plato, “Gorgias,” in Plato—Gorgias, Meexenus, Protagoras, ed. Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104.

2. Ibid., 107.

3. Ibid., 59.

4. Michael Freeden, “Interpretative Realism and Prescriptive Realism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 17, no. 1 (2012): 1–11.

5. John Dunn, “Reconceiving Modern Political Community,” in Interpreting Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 195; Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 6; Mark Philp, “Realism Without Illusions,” Political Theory 40, no. 5 (2012): 629–49; Bernard Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 77.

6. Quoted in John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), lxii.

7. Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, 3.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. See John Horton, “Political Legitimacy, Justice, and Consent,” Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy 15, no. 2 (2012): 129–48; Enzo Rossi, “Justice, Legitimacy, and (Normative) Authority for Political Realists,” Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy 15, no. 2 (2012): 149–64; Matt Sleat, “Justice and Legitimacy in Contemporary Liberal Thought: A Critique,” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 2 (2015): 230–52; Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory.”

10. See also David Schmidtz, “A Realistic Political Ideal,” Social Philosophy and Policy 33, nos. 1–2 (2016): 1–10.

11. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics; Janosch Prinz, “Raymond Geuss’ Radicalization of Realism in Political Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 42, no. 8 (2016): 777–96; Janosch Prinz and Enzo Rossi, “Political Realism as Ideology Critique,” Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy 20, no. 3 (2017): 348–65.

12. Bernard Williams, “Human Rights and Relativism,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, 62–74.

13. Jeremy Waldron, “Political Political Theory: An Inaugural Lecture,” Journal of Political Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2013): 1–23.

14. For work that discusses the nature of these constraints on normative theory, see Edward Hall, “Skepticism About Unconstrained Utopianism,” Social Philosophy [ 22 ]

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

and Policy 33, nos. 1–2 (2016): 76–95, and “How to Do Realistic Political Theory (and Why You Might Want To),” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 3 (2017): 283–303; Matt Sleat, “What Is a Political Value? Political Philosophy and Fidelity to Reality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 33, nos. 1–2 (2017): 252–72; Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, esp. chaps. 7 and 9; Bernard Williams, “Saint-Just’s Illusion,” in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135–50.

William Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 385–411. This article was published as part of a special issue of the European Journal of Political Theory on political realism to which some of those co-opted by Galston as realists also contributed.

See, for example, Alice Baderin, “Two Forms of Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 13, no. 2 (2014): 132–53; Freeden, “Interpretative Realism and Prescriptive Realism”; Adrian Little, Alan Finlayson, and Simon Tormey, “Reconstituting Realism: Feasibility, Utopia, and Epistemological Imperfection,” Contemporary Political Theory 14, no. 3 (2015): 276–313; Philp, “Realism Without Illusions”; Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, “Realism in Normative Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 10 (2014): 689–701; David Runciman, “What Is Realistic Political Philosophy?” Metaphilosophy 43, nos. 1–2 (2012): 58–70.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Bonnie Honig and Marc Stears, “The New Realism: From Modus Vivendi to Justice,” in Political Philosophy Versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, ed. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 177–205.

Joel Alden Schlosser, “Herodotean Realism,” Political Theory 42, no. 3 (2014): 239–61.

Andrew Sabl, Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

David Runciman, “Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet,” Journal of Political Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2017): 3–21.

Terry Nardin, “Realism and Right: Sketch for a Theory of Global Justice,” in Ethical Reasoning in International Affairs: Arguments from the Middle Ground, ed. Cornelia Navari (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 43–63.

Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics.

Karuna Mantena, “Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 455–70.

Patricia Owens, “The Ethic of Reality in Hannah Arendt,” in Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. Duncan Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105–21.

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26. Nicholas Rengger, “Realism’s ‘Hidden Dialogue’: Leo Strauss, War, and Politics,” in Political Thought and International Relations, ed. Bell, 143–58.

27. Terry Nardin, “Oakeshott on Theory and Practice,” Global Discourse 5, no. 2 (2015): 310–22.

28. Paul Kelly, “Political Philosophy and the Attraction of Realism,” Global Discourse 5, no. 2 (2015): 191–203.

29. Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 75. For an interesting discussion of the difficulties involved in realism’s appeal to a “realist tradition,” see Alison McQueen, “Political Realism and the Realist ‘Tradition,’ ” Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy 20, no. 3 (2017): 296–313.

30. William E. Scheuerman, “The Realist Revival in Political Philosophy, or: Why New Is Not Always Improved,” International Politics 50, no. 6 (2013): 799.

31. See Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55. For the (very recent) exceptions, see Duncan Bell, “Political Realism and International Relations,” Philosophy Compass 12, no. 2 (2017): 1–12; Raymond Geuss, “Realism and the Relativity of Judgment,” International Relations 29, no. 1 (2015): 3–22; McQueen, “Political Realism and the Realist ‘Tradition’ ”; Alison McQueen, “Political Realism and Moral Corruption,” European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming); Scheuerman, “The Realist Revival in Political Philosophy”; Matt Sleat, Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

32. See, for instance, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

33. This distinction is made by Jeremy Waldron, cited in Alice Baderin, “Political Theory and Public Opinion: Against Democratic Restraint,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 15, no. 3 (2016): 216.

34. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 15.

35. Raymond Geuss, “What Is Political Judgment?” in Political Judgment, ed.

Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37.

36. Bernard Williams, “Political Philosophy and the Analytical Tradition,” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 155–68.

37. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 9.

38. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985; reprint, London: Routledge, 2011). [ 24 ]

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39. Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” 1.

40. Geuss, “Realism and the Relativity of Judgment,” 4.

41. See, for example, ibid., and Raymond Geuss, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 1 and 3 42. Geuss, Politics and the Imagination, 42.

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PRAISE FOR

POLITICS RECOVERED

“An outstanding collection, brimming with intelligence and insight.

Politics Recovered brings scholars of the new realist political thought into dialogue with fellow travelers, outright skeptics, and interestingly dubious allies who salute ‘realism’ while redeďŹ ning or subverting what it means. This will be a perfect resource for students and researchers, a better guide to realism (and its discontents) than any single article or monograph.â€?

ANDREW SABL, YALE UNIVERSITY

“Politics Recovered is an impressive collection of original essays that constitutes a major contribution to the growing literature on political realism; an important and increasingly inuential development in contemporary political theory.â€?

JOHN HORTON, KEELE UNIVERSITY

CONTRIBUTORS

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