On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is

Abstract

Realists in normative political theory aim to defend the importance of ‘distinctively political thought’ as opposed to the applied ethics they believe characterizes much contemporary political theory and causes it to misunderstand and make mistakes about its subject matter. More conventional political theorists have attempted to respond to realism, including Jonathan Leader Maynard and Alex Worsnip, who have recently criticized five supposedly realist arguments for a distinctive political normativity. However, while Leader Maynard and Worsnip’s arguments are themselves less decisive than they suppose, the problem with their response may lay elsewhere. Their response supposes that more conventional political theory could, in principle, be defended at an abstract general level. This may not be possible though, given the difficulty of arriving at agreed interpretations of the concepts involved and the desiderata for a successful normative political theory. It also risks missing the point of realism, which is to use different forms of normative inquiry to explore questions which have not always been central to conventional normative political theory. Judith Shklar’s excellent work on vices and the liberalism of fear nicely illustrates this problem.

Deliberative Systems Theory and Citizens’ Use of Online Media: Testing a Critical Theory of Democracy on a High Achiever

“…Yet, our article does not offer a full theoretical assessment of this approach, its pros and cons, and its merits relative to other contributions to normative, non-ideal democratic theory. There is also an ongoing debate on the merits of democratic and ‘political realism’ (for the most recent round, see Maynard and Worsnip, 2018, with a reply by Jubb, 2019; for a recent overview, see Rossi and Sleat, 2014) a programme for doing normative political theory with the stated aim of developing a way of doing ‘empirically informed critique of social and political phenomena’ (Prinz and Rossi, 2017: 348) that better addresses ‘the issue of feasibility’, but that at the same time take political theorizing beyond the confines of non-ideal theory as standardly conceived (Rossi and Sleat, 2014: 692). Given our concerns in this article, a review of this debate would be worthwhile, but has to be left for another time.…”

Principles, practices and disciplinary power struggles in political theory

“…Erman and M€ oller certainly should be aware of these lines of argument, since Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi twice pointed them out to them in a pair of exchanges they quote in The Practical Turn (pp. 22-23, 67, 113, 143; see M€ oller, 2015a, 2015d;Jubb andRossi, 2015a, 2015b).…”

“…This seems to be one of the reasons that productive dialogue has been so difficult between the mainstream and its critics. As Jubb (2019: 2) has suggested in the context of debates about realism:attempting to adjudicate between realism and moralism at the level of precise and perfectly generalizable methodological prescriptions is in the end unsatisfactory because there is not sufficient common ground to agree on the prescriptions at stake, their meaning or their connections to each other.Part of the way forward for both sides might be to stop talking about first-order theorizing from a methodological and meta-theoretical point of view and to instead engage in it.…”

Being realistic and demanding the impossible

“…For a lively debate on this issue see Jubb and Rossi () versus Erman and Möller (), and Leader‐Maynard and Worsnip () versus Jubb (). I will not take issue on the technicalities of this sometimes semantics‐dominated debate, but I will attempt to bypass it by showing how realists can make normative claims without relying on pre‐political moral commitments.…”