I

What can be said about “realism” as a concept of everyday language holds true also with regard to its recent use as a label for a new (or, better, a renewed) trend within political theory: it comprises a rather complex and manifold, and partly even contradictory, variety of arguments, concepts, texts, and authors. What nonetheless renders this label plausible, however, is, first of all, the fact that it is used as a common self-description by the respective authors themselves—a self-description that is underscored by frequent pertinent references to notoriously “realistic” classical authors such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Regarding their self-perception, the authors at hand (among them Raymond Geuss, John Gray, Bernard Williams, Mark Philp, Richard Lebow, Glen Newey, and othersFootnote ⁴) have to be understood as promoting a common, genuinely realist philosophical perspective that can be clearly located within the context of a distinct and, as one of their interpreters notes, a very “powerful … tradition of reflecting on the character and conditions of political activity”—a tradition that encompasses “the approaches of thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli and Nietzsche, Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron and John Dunn, and Bernard Williams and James Tully, to mention but a few.”Footnote ⁵

There are indeed a number of pertinent aspects of realism that can be gathered from the current debate. William Galston, in his essay “Realism in Political Theory,” in which he reviews the neorealist philosophies we are concerned with here, suggests the following as typical realist assumptions. For Galston, political realism is above all characterized by its awareness of “deep disagreement” as the most fundamental condition of politics and, consequently, by its focus on the most basic conditions of social coordination and on political stability.Footnote ⁶ Given the basic fact of conflict and disagreement as the natural conditions of the social life of human beings whose actions are predominantly driven by self-interest and irrational passions,Footnote ⁷ the “core challenge to politics” from a realist point of view is to establish and maintain order in society. Since this most fundamental task of political action to a certain degree always “require(s) coercion or the threat of coercion,”Footnote ⁸ the art of politics can be summarized as the constant attempt “to overcome anarchy without embracing tyranny.”Footnote ⁹ As a consequence, furthermore, realism pays particular attention to the crucial role of institutions, their various political functions within society, their complex inherent cultural logic, their dynamic development over time, and, above all, their comprehensive integration into the specifically modern institutional patterns of sovereign states.Footnote ¹⁰

In sum, according to Galston, these various realist assumptions about the nature and conditions of political action coincide in the fundamental realist claim of the “autonomy of politics.” Politics or “the political” constitutes a distinct social sphere with its own peculiar logic of action and judgment. And this, most importantly, implies a particular understanding of the significance of morality or ethics within this distinct social sphere of politics. The distinct logic of politics that derives from the necessary conditions of collective political action “often require(s) leaders to employ means that would be forbidden in other contexts,” wherefore “political morality is not the same as individual morality and may often contradict it.”Footnote ¹¹

Consequently, realism asserts that there is a specifically political morality, or that “normativity,” as far as political theory is concerned, rests on a distinct form of ethics that applies only to those moral questions which arise within the sphere of politics and its specific rationale of collective action or “corporate agency.”Footnote ¹² With this question Galston touches upon the most fundamental aspect of the current neorealist philosophical argument, yet without discussing its implications in detail. In order to further clarify these implications, it is helpful first to consider the wider theoretical context of the current realist discourse as seen by the authors themselves. Indeed, with regard to the philosophical self-perception of realism, explicit attempts at theoretical self-contextualization play a crucial role. Some of the references are easy to comprehend, others are rather surprising. Among others the philosophical contextualism and the understanding of historical hermeneutics as articulated by the “Cambridge School” play an important role for most authors,Footnote ¹³ and so does Michael Oakeshott's political theory. In terms of crucial topics, the debate not only involves political as well as epistemological, and even ontological, questions. It also seems to bear some quite exceptional religious (particularly somewhat neopagan) undertones as well as some sort of a revived fin-de-siècle ambience.Footnote ¹⁴ Quite frequent are references to the German philosophical discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Raymond Geuss, for instance, besides his references to classically realist thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Max Weber, emphasizes the crucial influence on his realist perspective of the “nineteenth- and twentieth-century German practical philosophy,”Footnote ¹⁵ particularly of the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School.Footnote ¹⁶ He also praisingly refers to a rather vague tradition “of radical practical thinking that descend[s] from Paul and Augustine through Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger”Footnote ¹⁷ and, finally, supplements these (partly deliberately equivocal and confusing) self-contextualizations with some deliberately provocative references to rather dubious political figures, such as Lenin and his power-oriented and elitist political ideas.Footnote ¹⁸

Summarizing these rather complex and partly contradictory references and undertones, the current realist discourse in its “historical” or “contextual” self-perception predominantly oscillates between a peculiarly neo-Renaissance mindset, on the one hand, and a critical Anglo-American revision and adoption of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Continental philosophy, on the other. Against this background, political realism claims to open up an uncompromisingly skeptical, expressively post-totalitarian and antiutopian theoretical perspective on politics, one that emphasizes the overall significance of power, interests, and the stability of order in politics.

This skeptical and distinctly contextualist perspective is, furthermore, connected with a fundamental critique of certain liberal ideas that can be assumed to represent the dominant mainstream positions both in political philosophy and in the current public discourse of Western societies. Regarding this critical orientation, political realism aims at the philosophical practice of unmasking the various functional “illusions” that form the basis of the dominant self-perception in any given society—the unmasking at least of those illusions that are in danger of becoming dysfunctional or even destructive for certain reasons. This prominence of the critique of liberalism in the current realist discourse is no coincidence. Critique in this sense can indeed be considered as another important, even defining, characteristic feature of political realism's peculiar self-contextualization, insofar as it implies a somewhat marginal self-localization. Since realism aims at the philosophical practice of unmasking certain mainstream convictions as illusions, it by necessity is only possible from a marginal position with regard to the dominant zeitgeist. This marginal, antimainstream character, its nature as a necessarily “dissenting position,”Footnote ¹⁹ not only goes together, in terms of language and theory style, with a genuinely polemical and provocative character of realism as well as with its frequent tendency toward popular forms of philosophizing that deliberately address a wider public. It also implies that the normative claims of realist political philosophy are themselves essentially critical in nature. From a realist point of view, political philosophy, with regard to its normative arguments, has primarily a negative function. As a consequence, the positive or constructive aspects of political realism as an ethical theory are embedded in its primarily critical self-contextualizations and its correspondingly critical theoretical frame of reference. I therefore turn to the realists' critique of liberalism in order to further clarify the theoretical implications of their contextualist perspective.

II

The main objection of the realist critiques against the liberal zeitgeist is that it is based on particular forms of “wishful thinking”Footnote ²⁰ and on (mostly pseudoreligious) moral and political “illusions” that systematically eclipse the actual realities of social and political, and also of intellectual, life. This comes to the fore most clearly in John Gray's critique of the dominant self-perception in Western societies. Gray's critique of what he calls “liberal humanism” and modern “utopianism” provides the indispensable negative background of his argument for a rediscovery of the “lost tradition” of political realism.Footnote ²¹ Gray offers what is perhaps the most radical realist critique of the present philosophical and public discourse in Western societies. The major target of this critique is the modern idea of progress and its underlying understanding of political history. While the idea of progress makes sense and is a real experience in the fields of science and technology, Gray asserts, it does not make any sense, and in fact becomes a dangerous “illusion,” as soon as it is applied to the spheres of politics and ethics:

Against these progressivist illusions of liberal philosophy, Gray not only underscores the practical nature of political rationality. He particularly questions the idea of a linear, overall meaningful structure of history altogether.Footnote ²³ Underscoring the monotheistic, particularly Christian origin of this idea, Gray characterizes progressive humanism as nothing but another political religion of historical salvation:

Liberal humanism, Gray argues, is also such a “secular rendition of a Christian myth” in which the substantial realist “truth in the myth has been lost on the way”: “In many ways humanism is not much more than secular Christianity; but it has suppressed the profound insights into the contradictions of human nature and the ambivalence of knowledge that were preserved in the Christian tradition.”Footnote ²⁵ Against this post-Christian humanist illusionism, but partly also against Christianity itself, Gray argues for a realistic, that is, a Machiavellian, neopagan idea of history: “For the pagans of pre-Christian Europe, history was an unending succession of cycles, no different from those in the natural world,” and it is such a cyclical idea of history that for Gray correctly describes the course of politics and ethics and the crucial role of contingency within the history of human affairs. The fundamental features of political history are constituted by the various life cycles of concrete societies, by their founding, their flourishing, and eventually their inevitable decay and disintegration. In political and ethical terms, history is a story of gain and loss, not of progress:

Finally, this skeptical understanding of history and the very ambivalent perspective on the political role of religion (and particularly of Christianity)Footnote ²⁷—which clearly echo classical realist topoi, albeit in a quite idiosyncratic manner—are supplemented in Gray with the equally idiosyncratic version of a decidedly pessimistic anthropology that he mainly unfolds in his bestselling 2002 monograph Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. The mentioned neopagan and neo-Renaissance underpinnings of his argument are clearly present also in this anthropology,Footnote ²⁸ and Gray's unorthodox and deliberately provocative philosophical essays appear to me to be exemplary for the realist tradition also in this respect.Footnote ²⁹

These reformulations (partly alterations, radicalizations, and modernizations) of a number of classical realist ideas within the context of a radical critique of present liberal philosophy eventually result in a specific understanding of the relation between politics and ethics in general. This is most clearly articulated in Raymond Geuss's essay Philosophy and Real Politics (2008). In this essay, Geuss puts forth a fundamental critique of Rawls's political philosophy as the paradigmatic example of what Geuss describes as a certain neo-Kantian type of political theorizing. In Geuss's representation, the fundamental mistake of neo-Kantianism as the dominant paradigm in present political theory is that it considers politics to be nothing else than the secondary application of abstract moral or ethical principles in given circumstances:

This idea of “politics as applied ethics,” Geuss argues, fundamentally misrepresents the real relation between ethics and politics. Yet although it may seem to be the case at first sight, Geuss does not promote the alternative of a radical emancipation of the latter from the former as it is considered to be the classical realist take of this problem. Rather than arguing for such a radical separation, Geuss stresses the idea of a skeptical and specifically limited conception of political ethics. Against this background, he indicates an important systematic argument that is crucial for the realist discourse in general. Geuss suggests that while the relation between ethics and politics is indeed characterized by an inseparable connectedness, it is a specific implication of this connectedness itself that is disregarded by liberal theory. What for Geuss is implied in this connectedness is that politics does not merely regard the application of ethical principles, but has to be considered as the given premise of such principles. Consequently, Geuss does not suggest a radical separation of ethics and politics, but a reversal of the successive order between the two in the moral reflections pursued in political theory. Consequently, instead of abandoning the role of normative questions in political theory altogether, the realist critique of “ethics first” approaches implicitly argues for a “politics first” type of morality.

A very similar argument for such a reversal, as it were, of the relation between politics and ethics is also crucial for Mark Philp's account of a realist theory of political ethics.Footnote ³¹ Referring to Amartya Sen's critique of Rawls, Philp stresses the severe theoretical problems involved in an attempt to translate “general principles to specific judgments” once the relation between ethics and politics is understood in terms of an “ethics first” approach. Philp argues that on the grounds of liberal theories of justice, the concrete problems of practical application, in particular, are in principle misrepresented, at least as far as problems of political application are concerned. In theories of “applied ethics” (to use Geuss's term), curiously enough,

According to Philp, the peculiar liberal understanding of the relation between politics and ethics and the specific rationale of an ethics-first priority principle derived from this relation renders the political application problem virtually incomprehensible in its full theoretical dimensions. As a consequence, this form of theoretical “prioritarianism” fails to provide criteria for the ethical judgment of concrete political conduct, the question Philp focuses on. In order to find such criteria, for Philp the specific problem of political application has to be taken into account more closely than abstract moral theories allow:

But the reversion of the relation between ethics and politics not only implies a peculiar focus on political application problems. It also, in the first place, is a philosophical priority problem that lies at the heart of the question—a priority problem more complex than liberal political philosophy is ready to concede.Footnote ³⁴ Geuss's critique, in particular, like the classical communitarian critique of Rawls, above all aims at this crucial question, namely, at Rawls's principle of the priority of the right over the good. Geuss, however, extends his critical argument against this priority to a point where it applies not only to Rawls but also to his communitarian critics. From his realistic point of view, liberal moralism (and with respect to this point the communitarian critique is itself a “moralist” position) not only claims the priority of the right over the good, but more generally the priority of morality and ethics in general over political “reality.” The fundamental flaw in mainstream political theory as seen by Geuss is its overall assumption of the priority of the right and the good, as it were, over the political.

Accordingly, the most characteristic feature of this, in Geuss's view, distorted and actually apolitical type of theory and its particular understanding of political action is its axiomatic and decontextualized account of moral philosophy as “an ideal theory of ethics.” This “ideal theory” derives its universal principles of political action from mostly nonempirical, abstract reflections on “historically invariant” first axioms (or intuitions).Footnote ³⁵ It is this peculiar Kantian type of theory—a theory which from a realist point of view eventually represents nothing else than the “desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics”Footnote ³⁶ altogether—against which Geuss argues for a more contextualized and historically based realist type of political theory. Such a realistic theory for Geuss underscores the focus of politics on “action” (not just on principles or even “mere beliefs and propositions”),Footnote ³⁷ it highlights the practical and experiential nature of political rationality,Footnote ³⁸ and, above all, it emphasizes the primacy of the political as a first-rank philosophical problem in the first place. As a consequence, the relation between ethics and politics has to be understood in a substantially different way than the dominant “applied ethics” or “ethics first” political philosophy of “high liberalism” suggests. Moral or ethical questions and considerations in political theory or philosophy for Geuss not only must be empirically grounded and embedded in concrete political practices and social circumstances and be reflected within the horizon of concrete politics and its indispensable premises of power, interest, conflict, and the quest for stability. They must also be reflected on the basis of a priority of the political over right and good.Footnote ³⁹

Although it is not very clearly articulated by Geuss, such a peculiarly realist version of a priority thesis is in my opinion the core argument of his critical account of Rawlsian liberalism. To be sure, not only does his account almost exclusively remain critical and polemical. His critique also seems to exaggerate (partly for the sake of clearness) and to grossly simplify, maybe even misrepresent parts of Rawls' political liberalism. Such simplifications, even misrepresentations, are particularly obvious in light of the fact that Rawls's own “realistic” turn since Political Liberalism and his attempts to constructively intertwine “ideal” and “nonideal” perspectives within his political theorizing is widely ignored in Geuss's critique.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, notwithstanding these apparently partly deliberate simplifications, Geuss's realist interpretation, with the peculiar priority thesis implied in it, indeed provides a genuine and new perspective on certain problems of liberal theory.

Moreover, Geuss therewith also provides an important hint with regard to the positive aspects of a realist political ethics. In order to bring out these positive or constructive aspects, I will in the next section more closely examine the ethical implications of realism's strong emphasis on the concepts of power and self-interest, and, as a consequence, on security and stability. To this purpose I turn to Bernard Williams who is surely one of the most profound and most influential thinkers within the more recent realist discourse. In Williams's political essays the core features of a distinctly realist normative argument most clearly come to the fore.

III

In the case of Williams, too, these constructive aspects of realist political theory are substantially based on a critique of liberal philosophical conceptions of morality. In his critical account of the “system of morality,” most prominently represented by Kant's conception of moral obligation,Footnote ⁴¹ Williams directly addresses the question of “deliberative priority” involved in it. Besides the “philosophical mistake” of taking “obligation” as the only valuable type of ethical consideration and besides a corresponding reductionist exclusivity and “inescapability” underlying the liberal idea of morality, Williams's critique focuses on the specific kind of priority argument for individual rights and respective obligations implied in it, and he confronts this argument with the distinctly practical and contextual concept of “importance.” For Williams, the universalized and decontextualized principle of the priority of individual rights misrepresents this connection between deliberative priority and actual importance as being “straightforward,” hence independent of peculiar contexts and subject matters. This misrepresentation obscures the peculiar premises of “importance” that the liberal priority principle itself implies (if only tacitly):

Williams grants that the liberal idea of “deliberative priority” of certain individual rights is philosophically tenable with regard to certain fundamental issues, particularly with regard to “the basic issue of what people should be able to rely on. People must rely as far as possible on not being killed or used as a resource, and on having some space and objects and relations with other people they can count as their own.”Footnote ⁴³ Here, a pure morality of obligations and its inherent ideas of a merely “notional republic of moral agents”Footnote ⁴⁴ and of moral conduct as consisting of “autonomous voluntary actions” can serve, as it were, as the crucial point of reference in terms of “importance.” This moral sphere and the respective questions of fundamental individual rights, however, are surrounded by a concrete “ethical world” which not only consists of morality in terms of obligations, but also of desires, concrete practices, and “practical necessities”—and of nonobligatory, in the sense of nonmoral, types of ethical considerations, among them questions of a specifically political kind. There are considerations and “actions (also policies, attitudes, and so on) that are either more or less than obligations,”Footnote ⁴⁵ and they have to be considered in a substantially different frame of reference of “importance,” hence with reference to a different deliberative priority. Consequently, it is necessary for Williams “to give up … the attempt to find one set of ideas that will represent the demands of ethics in all the spheres to which ethical experience applies,” and particularly to take into account that “there is a divergence between the requirements of a personal ethic and a public morality, in the sense of the discourse in which it is most natural to discuss the public regulation of ethically sensitive matters.”Footnote ⁴⁶ To enter this peculiar discourse and to place ethical questions within the “public sphere” or, more generally, within “the political,”Footnote ⁴⁷ “importantly alters the nature of … ethical judgment.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Problems of political ethics and of “public justification” have to be discussed within their peculiar “field of application”Footnote ⁴⁹ that constitutes their “own ethical constituency.”Footnote ⁵⁰

What does this imply for political ethics in more concrete terms? Williams concedes that in the public realm of a modern pluralist society there is a certain need to refer to “more abstract, procedural terms, with a ‘thinner’ ethical content.” More important, however, is to discuss problems of political legitimacy with reference to “the distinctive ethical experience of [this] constituency,”Footnote ⁵¹ and to understand this experience in distinctly realistic terms. As has been said before, the vicissitudes, insecurities, and constant conflicts inherent in collective political action for realists demand its clear focus on the basic and fundamental task to sustain political order within society. Consequently, what, in terms of concrete ethical content, distinguishes “political realism” from “political moralism” is the former's clear focus on a specifically political frame of reference in terms of importance, and its focus on what Williams in one of his most interesting political essays calls “the first political question”:

Again, at first sight this argument, too, seems to promote a radical emancipation of power politics from any “unrealistic,” moralistic restraints. And indeed, Williams stresses that any possible solution of the “first political question” in one way or the other demands power and coercion as necessary means. Yet these obvious implications are easily misinterpreted if considered too superficially. Contrary to the reductionist understanding of power politics as “Realpolitik” of which these assertions may remind us, neither the realistic general emphasis on action, power, and self-interest as the real empirical media and motivations of political practice nor Williams's rather logical first-political-question argument is meant to confine political theory to a merely “value-free” and presumably cynical analysis of the powers that be,Footnote ⁵³ consequentially promoting either “an inactive or functionalist conservatism that has to take existing ethical ideas as they stand”Footnote ⁵⁴ or an irrational decisionism that simply follows the individual “demon,” as Max Weber put it, of one's personal conviction without being able to justify it with reasonable arguments. Rather than excluding normative questions from consideration, Williams's argument tries to focus the discussion of ethical problems more clearly on their specifically political significance. Rather than arguing for a merely descriptive theory, Williams suggests a fundamental shift of perspective regarding normative questions.

The crucial concept that sets this political, that is, realist normative focus is “legitimacy” or “legitimation,” the direct “normative relative” to “power,” as Williams puts it.Footnote ⁵⁵ The primary ethical question in politics from a realist point of view regards neither an abstract determination of “ideals” or “principles” of action, nor the liberal category of “rights,” nor, at least not primarily, a comprehensive idea of the (common) “good.” It regards the peculiar problem of the normative basis of politics as the peculiar practice of coordinating human action and social relations and by “realizing” thereby certain ethical values by means of state institutions, including processes of institutional reorganization and political change. Geuss defines legitimacy in this sense (with explicit reference to Max Weber) as follows: “What is at issue in politics” are the various “legitimatory mechanisms available in a given society” and the practical political “attempts to provide legitimacy … for any kinds of collective action … or … for any arrangements that could be seen as capable of being changed, controlled, modified, or influenced by human action. This will include institutions, patterns of distribution of access to resources, and other similar things.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It is the problem of “legitimacy” thus understood, that is, the specific question of the normative foundations or the moral “backup,” as it were, of political, particularly state, institutions and of the “collective” form of action enabled by them, at which the ethical implications of politics coincide and at which therefore also the various questions of “normativity” in political theory have to be focused.

While this realist concept of legitimacy sets a quite narrow focus, at least when assessed from the perspective of a general moral philosophy, it nonetheless does have important normative implications. The concept of legitimacy and “the way it is understood and responded to” is, as Mark Philp argues, “intricately connected with the value we attach to the political domain” and therefore implies an ethical theory regarding political action:

Williams also stresses the normative implications of the question of legitimacy, and he directly connects it with his first-political-question argument. The latter not only states the priority of stability, social coordination, and collective agency in the political sphere of human action, it also sets the particular ethical framework that derives from these priorities. Since on the one hand solving the “first political question” necessarily and always involves power and coercion, and since on the other hand “one thing can be taken as an axiom, that might does not imply right, that power itself does not justify,” politics itself renders “a genuine demand for justification.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This is the case because the most fundamental category inherent in the political logic of collectively organized action in order to establish and maintain order is not mere coercion, but the claim for authority:

Consequently, since it always involves questions of legitimacy and authority in this sense, the practice of politics does have fundamental ethical implications,Footnote ⁶⁰ but these implications are themselves of a specifically political kind, not only in their conceptual focus, but also regarding their logical or semantic structure. Contrary to ethical principles based on abstract moral philosophies (on “ideal theories of ethics,” in Geuss's terms, or on “political moralism” [Williams] or modern “utopianism” and “humanism” [Gray]), the concept of “legitimacy” as put forth by a realist theory of political ethics “does not represent a morality which is prior to politics.” It is instead itself derived from the political realm, or, better, it “is inherent in there being such a thing as politics: in particular … it is inherent in there being a first political question.”Footnote ⁶¹ Legitimacy, as opposed to the abstract normative concepts of liberal morality such as justice, is not an independent principle that can be applied to politics. It rather emerges from politics and its concrete ethical application problems.

Thus, in Williams's first-political-question argument and in the respective realist understanding of legitimacy, Geuss's at first primarily critical priority-thesis is turned into a positive normative argument. In a certain sense, in this positive normative argument the realist emphases on history and context and the critique of abstract liberal rationalism in political ethics is itself connected with a “curiously rationalist”Footnote ⁶² ethical theory. The distinctly realist priority principle it implies not only stresses the limits of rational arguments given the contingencies of ever-changing historical circumstances. More profoundly, it at the same time reverses the successive “rational” structure of normative reflections so that the practical, immediately political problems of application are turned from secondary questions into primary premises of ethics.Footnote ⁶³ “Freedom” or “liberty,” for instance, understood as a concept of a political ethic, rests in its very meaning on its peculiar context of political realization by means of state institutions. The existence of a “state,” however concretely organized, is therefore not merely a second-order ex-post question of how to practically apply liberty as an ethical value already determined in its content. Statehood is rather a premise of the very meaning of liberty as far as it is a political value, that is, as far as it is a value claiming its collectively organized realization. The concepts of liberty or freedom neither denote an abstract moral principle nor, as John Gray asserts in a short essay from 2002 entitled “Back to Hobbes,” the “normal human condition” or even man's “natural condition that develops spontaneously as soon as government repression is removed,” but rather “an extremely complicated and delicate construction that can be maintained only by making continuous adjustments.” According to Gray liberty is an “artifact of state power,” and as such it is not only meant to be “applied” in politics, it is rather, in its very content and meaning, politically constituted in the first place. Rather than being a prepolitical norm, it is substantially determined by and thus only comprehensible under the primary premises and conditions of the collectively organized processes of political action.Footnote ⁶⁴ Or, to put it in Williams's terms, the political value of liberty, since it emerges from politics, is determined in its meaning by the limits constituted by the first political question:

Since the political is the given premise for any form of political ethics, the latter is only meaningful within the equally given premises of its “application” through collective action. Political theory as “applied ethics” is fundamentally mistaken because the problem of political “application” thus understood, instead of constituting a secondary level of merely practical considerations, provides the most fundamental philosophical premises or axioms when it comes to political ethics; it sets the horizon of meaning in which ethical questions can occur at all as far as political theory is concerned. Contrary to mainstream analytical philosophy which “conceives of its activity as that of … proposing and justifying normative principles and standards independently and in advance of the conditions of their application, most basically the conditions of political agency,”Footnote ⁶⁶ political realism claims this relation to be exactly the reverse: political norms of right and wrong, ethical principles of political action, are not prior to but emerge from critical reflections of practical political application problems. They are inherent implications of the fundamental political question of application—or maybe more precisely, they are inherent principles of the practical political given premise of collective “realization.”

This logically or “rationally” reversed perspective indeed renders a substantially different idea of political ethics than the ones promoted by universalistic liberal philosophies. Generally speaking, from this realist point of view it is not abstraction but rather emergence, not Kantian morality but rather Aristotelian ethics, or maybe even more appropriately, it is some sort of a neo-Hegelian idea of “Sittlichkeit”—yet connected with a “curiously rationalist” ingredient and, to be sure, stripped of any progressive undertones and speculations on the meaning and end of world history—which renders the foundation of political legitimacy and political ethics. Consequently, the priority of the political over the moral thus understood not only emphasizes the principally contextual and historical basis of any possible form of political ethic and the fact that any normative political principle, since it emerges from the conditions of political action, is historically embedded, the principle of a concrete society, wherefore it can only render concrete, contextual norms and justifications, as opposed to the supposedly “universal” principles of abstract moral philosophy. More importantly, the realist thesis of the priority of the political underscores the limitations of any political ethics also in terms of scope, that is, regarding the question of what kind of “good” can possibly be achieved with political means at all. It is not only because of merely practical “application” problems that the idea of “salvation,” for instance, or the various versions of modern progressive “illusions” lie outside the possible scope of political, i.e., of collectively organized, action. Moreover, the priority thesis renders these ideas virtually logically or “rationally” unintelligible as components of an authentically political ethic. The most fundamental reason for the clear limitations regarding the possible content of the policy goals and of the “common good” of a politically organized society seems to be virtually epistemological in nature.Footnote ⁶⁷

IV

This plea for the limitations of the ethical goals of politics, however, is not yet the final word of realism on the question of political ethics. Its most profound argument is that the practice of politics necessarily implies not just a limited, but also a somewhat ambivalent, maybe even paradoxical, form of ethics, or at least a form of ethics that is characterized by moral complexities that ultimately cannot be solved. The “vanity of politics”Footnote ⁶⁸ has to be understood not only in practical but also in ethical terms. Politics always deals not only with limited but also with ultimately “unsolvable” problems—and this holds true also with regard to their ethical implications. For the very reason that individual morality and politics sometimes contradict each other, the latter, politics, in its inherent meaningful structure, is not only distinct and relatively autonomous, but also “morally ambiguous.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Not only does “the basic point and structure of politics [create] a qualitatively different set of challenges to which individual morality offers an inadequate guide.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This specific structure of politics, more profoundly, necessarily creates ethical contradictions; it confronts political actors—i.e., anyone who is ready to get involved with the demonic forces of politics, as Max Weber famously put it—with serious moral dilemmas “for which there is no solution.”Footnote ⁷¹

This fundamental moral ambiguity of politics derives not only from the inevitable tension between ideal ends of action and the necessary, possibly problematic means to pursue them under nonideal given circumstances. It rather directly derives from the principal limitations inherent in the normative rationale of political ends and their legitimacy itself. A similar normatively ambivalent trait is also indicated in the concepts of John Rawls's “realistic” understanding of political liberalism. In his theoretical justification of a clear separation of public reason from the more “comprehensive doctrines” that constitute the “background culture” of a democratic society, Rawls, referring to Isaiah Berlin, at least alludes to such ambivalences:

Yet while Rawls asserts that the social necessities of exclusion he indicates “are not to be taken for arbitrary bias or injustice,”Footnote ⁷³ the case seems not to be equally clear from a realist perspective. As opposed to Rawls's normative optimism, for realists these necessary, unavoidable exclusions that derive from the limited rationale of political legitimacy itself reflect a fundamental dilemma inherent in the general conditions human beings are faced with as political actors. For Williams, this dilemma even renders the liberal “ideal that human existence can be ultimately just” ultimately illusory.Footnote ⁷⁴ Consequently, the above-mentioned necessary exclusions do have ambivalent normative consequences. Indeed, what probably most clearly distinguishes realism as an ethical theory is the fact that it claims to clearly bring to the fore this basic and discomforting truth about politics:

In the face of these discomforting basic truths about politics, realism as the uncompromising critique of the functional illusions within social life, pursued for the sake of a rediscovery of the true nature of political reality, turns out to eventually be a heroic enterprise: for the political thinker, because it demands the “intellectual honesty” to seek truth while truth is unsettling and disharmonious; for the politician, because it demands his readiness to bear the personal responsibility for the inevitable moral dilemmas he will face.

While this fundamentally ambivalent trait of a realist account of political ethics is clearly present in the current debate,Footnote ⁷⁶ if mostly only alluded to, it is more expressively articulated in the classical realist discourse, particularly in the twentieth century. The problem is not only most clearly put forth in Max Weber's political theory, notwithstanding its presumably value-free character.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is also present in explicitly normative, yet nonetheless realist, accounts, for instance in the political theory of Hannah Arendt. One of the most interesting passages in this respect is a section in On Revolution in which Arendt reflects on the problematic consequences of the principles of compassion and of the universal idea of “human rights” in the course of the French Revolution. Referring to Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd she argues that it is indeed the problem of the limited normative scope of political ethics which is involved here. In Arendt's interpretation Melville's novel most clearly articulates the necessarily ambivalent role of political virtue that comes to the fore when it gets involved in “absolute” ethical questions, particularly in the fundamental confrontation within human affairs between absolute innocence and absolute evil. The most interesting figure in the novel for Arendt is Captain Vere because he represents the ethics and virtue of political reason. Getting involved in the conflict between absolute innocence or goodness and absolute evil, it turns out that political “virtue” has to defend itself against both:

While there is a “good” to be realized in the sphere of politics, for Arendt it must and can only be a limited good. The common meanings and narratives that constitute the public do have normative, ethical implications, but they imply a somewhat limited, compromised variant of ethics, morality, and justice—compromised, as it were, for the sake of their concrete, common, worldly realization in a relatively stable “public space.” What is more, these limits need to be politically protected and, in extreme cases, enforced even against more comprehensive ethical, humanist claims such as those of pure goodness. Confronted with such a pure, uncompromised conception of “absolute ethics,” the normative implications of politics at least potentially involve ethically ambivalent consequences, even “tragic” consequences in the classical sense of the term.

It seems as if there is “a price to pay” for the political foundation of freedom, as Arendt once obscurely noted.Footnote ⁷⁹ And this holds true also under the most favorable conditions of modern liberal democracies, as Michael Walzer in his classical essay from 1973 on the problem of dirty hands in politics argued.Footnote ⁸⁰ I will close with a glance at this essay where Walzer outlines the ethical basis of a peculiarly democratic version of political realism which in my opinion points out very well the final practical consequences of the realist ethics I sketched here.

In a liberal democracy, the fundamental moral paradoxes and contradictions that are found within any form of political ethics, as Walzer argues with reference to Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Albert Camus, cannot be dissolved; yet they can be rendered legitimate by democratizing the responsibility for their consequences. In a democracy, the community of citizens holds its political leaders responsible for their action—knowing well that any political action involves unsolvable moral dilemmas. Knowing that not only any “good politics is shabby and makeshift,”Footnote ⁸¹ but also that any good policy can only be brought about at the price of “getting one's hands dirty,” and notwithstanding the advantages the society as a whole may gain from such successful political leadership, the public must punish the moral ambiguities by which it is inevitably accompanied. “We would simply honor the man who did bad in order to do good, and at the same time we would punish him. We would honor him for the good he has done, and we would punish him for the bad he has done.” This morally ambiguous execution of the public's control function over political leaders, however, since its logic obviously implies a double moral standard (which for Walzer apparently is nothing else but an echo of the overall paradoxical nature of political ethics), is exactly the crucial process, as Walzer asserts, in which the responsibility for the presumably unsolvable moral dilemmas of politics is democratized: “we [sc. the citizens] won't be able to do that … without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some way of paying the price ourselves.”Footnote ⁸²

Seen from a realist perspective, being a citizen in a democracy seems as well a heroic enterprise—not just because it demands the ability to face the ongoing struggle over competing interests and powers and the ability to compromise even over the most principled questions, but primarily because any attempt to realize ethical principles in this world by the political means of coordinated collective action is morally ambiguous. Being a citizen means to actively participate in politics by one way or another, and this at the same time means to take one's share of responsibility.Footnote ⁸³ To be a morally self-reliant citizen in terms of political ethics, however, above all means to shoulder one's part of the moral guilt that politics necessarily involves—to pay one's share of the moral price, as it were, for the existence of a peaceful, collectively organized order in society.

The ethical theory of this democratic version of realism, so it seems, eventually demands an uncompromisingly anti-illusionist attitude from every citizen, a specifically democratic “discipline of thought” which, however, is neither primarily based on moral relativism nor even cynicism, nor, at least not primarily, on a traditional understanding of common sense or on practical reason in the classical sense of the term, but rather on a peculiar understanding of political and intellectual heroism: vincit mundus or vincit civitas, et pereat veritas!—this seems to be the inevitable final conviction at which any consequent realist political ethic of responsibility rests. This conviction on the one hand may in part entail the most profound and quite unsettling truth which political realism has to offer. On the other hand it also indicates the reason why plain realism cannot be the final word in political philosophy. Realism's ethical profundity and seriousness lies in its very awareness of the ethical ambiguities of any collectively organized efforts to realize moral goals and ambitions. It lies in the fact that it highlights in all clarity the pivotal significance in political ethics of the question of how to deal with these ambiguities. It highlights, finally and above all, the pressing and permanent necessity in politics of drawing a clear line between the political-ethical attitude of accepting and taking responsibility for the inevitably ambiguous political means of collectively realizing moral ends, on the one hand, and the amoral attitude of justifying any means for the sake of political success, on the other. Realism in all clarity raises the question of how to preserve moral integrity on the slippery slope of power politics. Its weakness lies in the fact that it ultimately does not provide clear criteria to answer this question.