In his review of our book, Michael Goodhart raises two main concerns. The first is an accusation of “reductionism” in two (unorthodox) senses. We are reductionist in that we seek a common denominator among critics of mainstream liberal theory by focusing on the different ways in which practices are said to constrain normative principles. By doing so, we allegedly miss some important differences between, for example, political realists and non-ideal theorists. However, we cannot see how any political theorist can avoid reductionism in this sense. Also Goodhart inevitably picks out some aspects in discussing realism in light of the project he pursues.

The second “reductionism” seems to be that we do not substantially deal with the fundamental objections of the realists, because we treat their claims as “analytical,” “technical,” and “philosophical.” By doing so, we “transmogrify political questions into philosophical (analytical) ones” and fail to treat “the spirit of the realist critique.”

It is hard to make sense of this argumentation strategy, which is all too common in the debate. We obviously do not treat realist claims as analytical in the Kantian sense and are rarely technical in the formal sense, so the objection seems to be simply that we engage in philosophical analysis: we look at what we take to be key claims of theorists and analyze whether these claims hold under different interpretations. Rather than speculating about “the spirit” of the realist critique, as Goodhart suggests, we think that this is what taking realist arguments seriously amounts to. Moreover, it is difficult to see how realists can remain convinced that they are engaged in something else than a philosophical argument. We do not transmogrify political questions into philosophical ones: whatever else they may also be, normative political questions are philosophical ones. So we are all “reductionist” in this sense.

Goodhart’s second concern is that although we argue that the disputes between mainstream liberal theory and its critics should be held on the substantive, first-order level rather than on the metatheoretical level, our own analysis focuses on the latter. He finds an irony in this, especially because “most of the book could be read as an effort to banish practice-based arguments,” but thinks that this irony would be lost on us since we see our arguments as impartial and objective.

Here Goodhart misreads both the dialectics and the conclusion. The dialectics, crudely put, is that one camp is developing first-order theories while another camp is complaining that these theories are flawed by providing metatheoretical charges about “idealized” ways of theorizing. When we meet these metatheoretical objections, we are of course conducting arguments on a metatheoretical level. Our recommendation to critics is to seek support by first-order argumentation and aim at developing better normative principles. In a very important sense, it is not how a piece of argument originated—for example, by oppressed people or middle-aged white men—that is central, but how well it stands up in the space of reasons once it has been formulated. So we are definitely not placing a ban on practice-based reasoning. We merely say that, whatever the methodology, we are all in the same boat when it comes to justification: in arguing for a principle or an account, we give what we take to be the most convincing reasons for it. Naturally, such reasons, be they factual or evaluative, are in turn based on assumptions, and somewhere we hit rock bottom where we say, with Wittgenstein, “this is simply what I do.” But this anti-foundationalist idea of justification is in perfect alignment with the view of mainstream liberal theorists, like Rawls, who do not believe there to be an Archimedean point of reference on which we may rely.