Editor Matt Sleat has gathered together 15 excellent political theorists and historians of political thought to debate the distinctiveness and the persuasiveness of political realism as an approach to normative theorizing. The essays are, on the whole, fascinating, engaging, and illuminating, and taken together, this volume offers a wealth of important insights on the nature of the political realist challenge to other, more mainstream, approaches to normative theory. It is essential reading for anyone interested in what an emerging political realist form of normative theorizing might look like, and why the development of such a thing is important and necessary.
Politics Recovered is thus successful in its central aim, which is to cement political realism as a major and emerging approach to understanding the political and its study. However, it is perhaps less successful in presenting political realism in quite the way that the editor intended. I think this is important, as the reasons for it have more to do with political realism itself than the strengths or weaknesses of this volume.
In his excellent introduction, Sleat urges us to understand political realism “not as a homogenous theoretical perspective on politics . . . but as a family of different approaches to how we ought to understand, theorise, and normatively assess politics” (p. 2). Political realism, he says, is an approach to normative political theory which is philosophically rich and characterised by internal diversity. We can see as much, he says, by observing the “diversity of topics addressed and approaches represented” in this volume.
Except we can't. Or, at least, it is not clear that we can, because the scope of the essays here is actually rather narrow. For all their strengths, very few of these essays are on what might be generally understood as “real world” political topics: the appropriate structure of political institutions, for example, or practical questions about how to deal with real and enduring social problems like poverty or inequality, or many of the other issues focused on by nonrealists working in the Anglo-American tradition. Some are. John Medearis’s chapter provides an interesting discussion of the problem of democratic deficits and political ignorance among citizens. Mark Philp discusses the application of political realist insights to the study of political corruption. Rahul Sagar confronts the thorny philosophical question of how transparent—and also how secretive—democratic states should be. Both Duncan Bell’s essay on global justice and Elizabeth Frazer’s essay on feminism and realism examine “real world” issues through a realist lens.
The rest, however, discuss political realism in the abstract: they explain how and why we should approach political problems as realists, rather than actually doing so. These essays are also interesting and make a good case. But what they reveal is that political realism is not actually very internally diverse in terms of its intellectual precursors or its approach to political problems at all. Its philosophical bases are actually quite narrowly defined, which leads to some overlap and, hence, some redundancy among the contributions. Thus, while readers will not learn much about what political realism has to say about many of the most pressing questions facing liberal democratic states in the contemporary era, they will learn a lot about Bernard Williams’s ideas on political ethics (which are discussed in some detail in seven of the 15 essays here), as well as the reasons why it is important that we reject the kind of political philosophy championed by John Rawls and his many followers, and draw instead on an alternative canon comprising, variously, David Hume, Adam Smith, Raymond Geuss, and John Dunn.
This is really the heart of it. Once we boil it down, the story we are offered in these essays about the philosophical bases of political realism is actually quite limited and familiar. Political realism emerges out of a critique of Anglo-American analytical political theorizing. It is more easily understood in terms of what it is not than what it is. Contemporary political philosophy has for too long been in the shadow of Rawls, who, along with other notable figures like Ronald Dworkin and G. A. Cohen, viewed political philosophy as a branch of moral philosophy, or as applied ethics, realists say. The earliest philosophers of what would evolve into the analytic tradition, thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes, were united in believing that in order to determine the truth, one first needed to strip away the experiential clutter that occluded it. Consequently, the role of the political philosopher in what came to be the Anglo-American tradition was to put aside contingency and the lived experience of politics in order to grasp its underlying truth. The goal was to derive regulative first principles that are action guiding and which gain their legitimacy independently of the shared values of the community, or historical traditions, or other “subjectivist” sources. By putting aside one’s own particular values along with other facts about political reality, as Rawls did, it became possible to derive principles that could be justified according to standards of practical reason that were accessible by all, regardless of people’s wider religious, cultural, or ethical values and, hence, could be understood as universal. The job of the political philosopher, in essence, was to produce a blueprint for the ideal society, which could then be used to build a just society, one which all members would find legitimate.
Political realism is, in essence, a rejection of all this and, hence, of the aims and ambitions of analytic political philosophy more broadly. The problem with putting aside the lived reality of politics in the service of deriving first principles of justice is that it eviscerates normative political theory of its central subject matter: it takes the politics out of political philosophy. In doing so, it produces outcomes that are infeasible and miss the point, and offers a vision of politics as a managerial process of allocating scarce resources among citizens understood in abstract terms. Political realism tries to put the politics back in. But politics is messy and complex, laden with historically entrenched understandings and ideas, characterized by intersecting relations of power and inequality. Citizens are not free-floating bundles of rights or liberties; they are people with interests and motivations and frailties. The theories we build about them need to take this seriously; the societies we seek to design for them need to speak to their lived experience. Renouncing the analytic approach in favor of a more realistic one will require our normative prescriptions to be more measured, less optimistic, political realists argue. Analytic utopianism cannot explain or change the world as it is, and so we need to be more grounded.
The essays in this volume make an excellent case for doing so. What they do not really do, on the whole, is do it. As I say, judged as a contribution to the burgeoning literature on the case for political realism, and a source on the intellectual foundations of such an approach, the collection is very successful. By the end, readers will be clear on what the approach is, where it came from, and why it arose. What they will be less clear on, ironically, is what political realism has to say about real world problems.
Rawlsian political theorists no doubt get a lot of things wrong. They certainly annoy many realists for their utopianism and their blue-sky thinking. But at least Rawlsian philosophers try to come up with normative solutions to social and political problems. Sure, they may be the wrong problems. And they might be bad solutions. Their normative conclusions may be infeasible, or unrealistic, or just mistaken. But at least we know what they are. What do the political realists offer in their place over and above a Geussian “don’t ask me” shrug? It is not so clear. These essays notwithstanding, political realism still exists as a critical project rather than a positive one. Just as Dunn and Geuss are better at challenging the work of liberal theorists and the political status quo, so the political realists that have followed them seem most comfortable doing the same. Even Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, who in their latest (excellent) book urge us to adopt a realist approach to democracy admit to not having worked out what a realistic model of democracy would look like (Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016).
By now, I think, political realists have convincingly carved a space for themselves, and made clear what they believe the weaknesses of Rawlsian and analytic normative theory are. The time is now right, then, to more effectively operationalize political realism, and to use it to yield concrete solutions to the policy issues that concern real citizens living in real states. Some of the essays in this volume do just that. We need more like them.
