In The Practical Turn in Political Theory, Eva Erman and Niklas Möller seek to defend what they call “mainstream liberal theory” against the charge that it engages in “armchair theorizing and therefore is too detached from reality to guide political action and have any practical import” (p. 3). As they note, the criticism arises from “disparate quarters”: they focus on complaints leveled by non-ideal theorists, practice-dependence theorists, political realists, and pragmatist political and epistemological theorists (p. 1). But many others—including postcolonial theorists, feminists and queer theorists, critical race theorists, and many historians of political thought— have also inveighed against what they regard as the shortcomings and distortions of mainstream liberalism, or what I call “ideal moral theory” in my book, Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World. Erman and Möller thus join a roiling controversy within contemporary political theory.

The book is concise and tightly argued, drawing heavily on the authors’ previously published work, and it offers numerous valuable insights into the timely and important topics it addresses. But it fails, perhaps inevitably, to deliver the resolution and progress to which they aspire. Erman and Möller seek a “philosophically rigorous” answer to the question of “how practices may condition normative principles,” hoping to “bring the field forward without an ideological superstructure” (p. 7). Yet it is precisely to ideal moral theory’s problematic notion of “philosophical rigor” and to the ideological character of that approach itself that many of the aforementioned critics, myself included, object.

The book cannot deliver on its broader aims because its argument is reductionist in two related senses. First, in seeking a common denominator among the critics they categorize as “practice-based theorists,” Erman and Möller miss or mischaracterize the distinctive claims of some of the critics they consider, the realists in particular. Second, by reducing the important challenges raised by these critics to a series of analytic questions about the substantive and methodological constraints that practices place on the theorization and justification of normative political principles, the authors miss what is really at issue in this debate—namely, the purported objectivity and neutrality of the style of reasoning on which mainstream liberals engaged in ideal moral theorizing rely.

Although Erman and Möller acknowledge that the practice-based theorists “have different aims… and work from different theoretical perspectives,” they nonetheless insist that these theorists “are all concerned with the same fundamental question: what is the proper role of social and political practices in the justification of normative political principles?” (p. 15, my emphasis). Rather than engage with each critical approach on its own terms and with attention to the main thrust of its critique, they instead explore this fundamental question through inquiries into four possible ways that practices might constrain the content, justification, and methodology of normative political theory: linguistically (chap. 3), methodologically (chap. 4), epistemologically (chap. 5), and politically (chap. 6). They find that “the conclusions drawn in these debates about how practices constrain principles are either flawed or too strong” (p. 5).

This is the first sense in which the argument is reductionist: the different and sometimes divergent positions and arguments of realists, pragmatists, non-ideal theorists, and practice-dependence theorists get problematically collapsed into a set of propositions regarding “practice-based” theorists. This is particularly problematic in the case of the realists. Erman and Möller recount realists’ disdain for ideal moral theory’s “ethics-first” approach, which they complain “gives priority to morality over politics and regards the political domain as subordinate to the moral domain, mainly as an arena for the application of moral principles” (p. 12). Realists worry, they observe, that the ethics-first approach focuses too much on consensus and becomes depoliticizing; that is, it conceives of the political domain as devoid of real politics (p. 12). Yet somehow, despite accurately reporting these concerns, the authors miss that these are not obviously about how practice constrains principles—and are not really about anything that can meaningfully be construed as a practice. Indeed, few realists would probably accept as a fair or even adequate account of their critique of mainstream liberal theory one that reduced it to questions about the proper role of social and political practices in justifying normative political principles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Erman and Möller’s replies to realist arguments do not really answer or even engage the realists’ fundamental objections. For example, the authors interpret the objection to the priority of morality in politics—as they do each of the objections raised by the critics with whom they engage—as a technical question, one to be resolved through the application of analytical reasoning. This is the second reductionist tendency, as a result of which the authors engage in a style and level of argumentation that often seem inapposite to the critiques they are addressing. Consider their response to the alleged priority of morality in politics. It cannot, they argue, be an epistemological claim because it is possible to understand and gain knowledge about politics without a prior knowledge of morality. It cannot be a conceptual claim, they continue, because there is little to suggest that political concepts presuppose moral ones. It cannot be a temporal or causal claim because such a claim would imply “that morality always comes first and somehow causes politics to occur” (pp. 107–8). “Hence,” the authors conclude, “while it is primarily the alleged falsity of the ethics-first premise that leads realists to reject mainstream (moralist) accounts…it is difficult to grasp what the ethics-first premise is supposed to entail on their reading” (p. 108). Thus the realists’ fundamental complaint against ideal moral theory is dismissed without ever being substantively engaged.

Likewise, Erman and Möller’s reply to the realists’ insistence that political principles should be compatible with constitutive features of politics, such as disagreement, simply seems to miss the point: “It seems premature to think that we have established that disagreement is a constitutive feature of politics until we have a convincing account of the impossibility of agreement. For sure, we have not yet witnessed a very large group of people reach full agreement after due deliberation. But this does not establish the impossibility of such an agreement (pp. 109–10).

Again, the problem is that, despite rehearsing the realists’ arguments, Erman and Möller never directly engage them, insisting instead on reading them as analytical claims. What the realists primarily object to, however, is the disposition of ideal moral theory to treat political considerations as inferior or subordinate to moral ones—to theorize justice, for example, as first, a question of identifying the correct ideal moral principle, and second, of applying it in non-ideal circumstances.

There is a double irony here. First, the tendency to transmogrify political questions into philosophical (analytical) ones is among the things to which critics object most vociferously in their denunciations of mainstream theorizing. Second, Erman and Möller themselves frequently abjure us to recognize that many of the disputes between the rival camps are “first-order” or substantive in nature (e.g., pp. 129, 131, 135, 136, 144); yet they repeatedly rely on analytic arguments in addressing the critics, arguments that do more to dismiss than to genuinely engage with the spirit of their objections. I return to this point in a moment.

Erman and Möller suggest throughout the book that, when suitably weakened and modified, the practice-based argument becomes indistinguishable from wide reflective equilibrium (pp. 137–38), which essentially requires “taking the best viable philosophical arguments into consideration” and refraining from or rejecting “implausible premises and arguments” (p. 138). In their view, all the fuss about practice-based theorizing arises from three “overarching misunderstandings”—that is, mistakes—on the part of the critics, which are related to “justificatory direction, ontological and epistemological aspects, and feasibility constraints in normative theorising” (p. 125). With respect to justification, they call it a logical fallacy to think that if practices constrain principles, then it must be “wrong to start out from some moral principle and simply apply it to the practice in question” (p. 24). With respect to ontological and epistemological concerns, they insist that a principle’s (ontological) dependence on a practice does not require a theorist to know or carefully interpret the practice (p. 24). With respect to feasibility, they maintain that there should be no categorical constraint on theorizing (p. 25). Once these “misunderstandings” are rectified, it becomes clear that “the theorist has much more leeway in constructing normative political principles” than the critics suggest (p. 5), resulting in a kind of “justificatory freedom” (p. 137) limited only by weak “fitness” and “functional” constraints. The former requires a kind of coherence among arguments, something like wide reflective equilibrium (p. 133). The latter requires that principles be applicable to the practices that they regulate (p. 145).

All of this seems quite ecumenical. Erman and Möller even side with the anti-foundationalists, arguing that “we cannot think of any interesting, and thus substantial, claims in political theory which are not to some extent controversial and whose justification is fully certain” (p. 135). Again, they insist that “the proper level for debating the pros and cons of normative accounts in political theory is on the level of first-order theorizing” and enjoin us, as a matter of principle, to avoid metatheoretical debate and to refrain from calling for pretheoretical “bans” on certain approaches (p. 136).

Again, there is an irony here—perhaps a performative contradiction—in that most of the book could be read as an effort to banish practice-based arguments. That this irony is lost on the authors brings me back to the point about the disposition of ideal moral theory. I doubt that Erman and Möller see any tension or irony because, like most mainstream liberals, they regard the kind of analytic argument on which they rely as impartial or objective. To them, “the best viable philosophical arguments” are, definitionally, those that have survived the highfalutin’ nit-picking that analytic philosophers often equate with rigor. They miss the spirit of the realist critique because they cannot understand it other than as a set of (inferred) logical propositions to be subjected to analytic scrutiny. Put differently, like most mainstream liberals, they do not see liberalism itself as ideological and thus do not see how the arguments to which they subject their opponent’s criticisms are themselves among the targets of the criticism.

This is why Erman and Möller’s ambition to “bring the field forward without an ideological superstructure” necessarily fails. The analytic liberalism to which they adhere is an ideological superstructure, one camouflaged by the ostensible neutrality of “analytic rigor.” Thus, although other liberals might find the arguments here decisive, the critics from disparate quarters will—with considerable justification—feel that their arguments have been deflected or dismissed rather than engaged on their own terms.