Can Realism Move Beyond a Methodenstreit ?

I

At least two methodological debates are under way in contemporary political philosophy: on (non-)ideal theory and on realism (and moralism). Crudely, the debate on ideal and non-ideal theory concerns the role of feasibility constraints in normative theorising. ¹ The debate on realism and moralism concerns the relationship between moral and political normativity. ² One can be a realist and demand the impossible, as it were—ignore feasibility constraints, so long as one’s political norms aren’t grounded in moralistic, pre-political values. ³ The reverse is also an option. That makes the two debates orthogonal to each other, yet they are often lumped together, ⁴ which I take to be a conceptual mistake. Perhaps more importantly, it seems to me that only one debate—the one on realism—has far-reaching transformative aims. Not that I could begin to do it justice here, but I think it is fair to say that the ideal theory debate is primarily intended as a way to make better sense of how to theorise within the still dominant paradigm set out by Rawls and Nozick. ⁵ The proponents of realism think of their position as more of a rupture with the discipline’s mainstream: the issue isn’t just to change the way in which we go from moral beliefs to political norms, but rather to change our starting point altogether.

But is there really more to realism than just a debate on how best to continue doing what we are already doing? In this piece, I use two recent, significant books as a testing ground for realism’s claims about its import on the discipline. I will try to show that the books do go beyond the Methodenstreit, though in different directions: one takes us in the realm of meta-metatheory (section II); the other is a genuine exercise in grounding liberal normative theory in a non-moralistic way (section III). My conclusion will be that realism does open new vistas, though their novelty is to a large extent relative to the last forty years or so, as realism is best thought of as a return to a more traditional way of doing political philosophy (section IV).

II

In The Political Theory of Political Thinking, Michael Freeden takes the Methodenstreit to the next level. He doesn’t do realist theory, but neither does he simply preach about how one should or shouldn’t do it. There’s much more to this erudite book than a discussion of realism, but here I want to analyse the realist undertones of Freeden’s account of the spectrum of possible modes of thinking about politics, normatively and descriptively—a standard dichotomy that Freeden wants to overcome or at least finesse. He berates the relatively recent separation between political science and political theory, and the related colonisation of the latter by ethics-driven philosophy. Freeden’s influential earlier work has largely been devoted to the study of ideology. This is a category broader than the subject matter of mainstream political theory, and devoid of the pejorative sense attached to it by Marxists and others. The study of ideology moves from the thought that essentially contestable political concepts (freedom, justice, equality, and the like) are best studied in the context of the discourses in which they are deployed—including discourses well outside academic political theory. That is because what drives the decontestation is often extra-theoretical: it’s a political ideal and/or a struggle for power that leads us to see freedom as a matter of self-actualisation rather than non-interference, say. So attention to ideology illuminates both the content of political theory and the role of political thought in wider political processes. The descriptive and normative study of politics don’t float free of each other, pace the prevailing division of labour in contemporary academia.

Now Freeden takes this research programme one step further, by introducing a distinction between thinking about politics and thinking politically. We think about politics when we explicitly decontest political terms such as freedom, power, or equality. We think politically when, without resorting to political vocabulary, we articulate our sensitivity or attitude to political issues, even when we remain unaware of the political import of our thoughts. “I’m in a hurry, waiter, can we place our order now?” and “Mind your own business” are some of Freeden’s felicitous examples, ⁶ which he then supplements with an “anatomy” of their recurrent themes of political thinking. ⁷ Freeden identifies three overarching themes of political thinking (directing collective support, ranking states of affairs, and making decisions), and provides a list of six features that allow us to identify a particular instance of social conduct as political (i.e., either of the six is a necessary and sufficient condition of politics), but maintains that there is no single dominant feature shared between all instances of the political. ⁸ This stance leads to the book’s rich patchwork of case studies of instances of political thinking, often juxtaposed with methodological and substantive considerations about the interaction between political thinking and a particular ideology. For instance, Freeden’s discussion of liberal attitudes towards the wider thought-practice of envisioning the future is particularly illuminating, as it brings out the tensions between liberalism’s sceptical and conservative roots and its more progressive aspirations. ⁹

That exemplar shows how Freeden’s approach may bear fruits of interest to political theorists. Yet one may question whether some of the results he obtains may also be obtained through other, more traditional, avenues. One may also wonder whether the sum of those parts—those vignettes featuring the interaction of political thinking and political theory and ideology—amounts to more than the whole. There is no overarching position that emerges from the study of political thinking, at least so far. But then again, it’s not clear why one would expect a firm position from an exploratory foray.

At any rate the main point to consider is the idea that if we want to understand the interaction and mutual feedback between political processes and the ways in which we make sense of them, we shouldn’t restrict our analysis to explicitly political discourse. There is more to political discourse than ideology. Our understanding of the impact of semantic constructions on the political world (and vice versa) remains incomplete until we recognise that the articulation of political claims does not always require the deployment of political terms. The idea of a political theory of political thinking is an attempt to fill this gap. But how does Freeden’s project relate to the realist research programme, and in what sense can we say that it is a meta-metatheoretical project?

The second question may be prompted by the supposition that Freeden has simply identified an understudied empirical aspect of politics. I take it that is indeed part of his programme. But the more central point here concerns the relation between thinking politically and the active articulation of normative political theory. This point is meta-metatheoretical insofar as it does not tells us how to do political theory (that would be the sort of metatheory that characterises the current Methodenstreit); it rather tells us that whatever normative theory and whatever methodological stance we are interested in has ramifications beyond the texts it consists of and the political actions and explicitly political discourses it engenders. What is more, attention to thinking politically bridges the traditional gap between the study of political thought and political behaviour. There’s more to political theory than simply action-guidance and the provision of rhetorical devices, and there’s more to political behaviour than exercises of power and political speech acts.

Questions remain on the extent to which this point is substantially different from the exhortation, familiar especially from feminist and critical theory, to remember that the personal is political, or more broadly that the political encompasses more than just public life. Nonetheless Freeden’s angle retains its originality insofar as it’s meta-metatheoretical: unlike critical theory, it is not tied to a first-order position or even to a methodological current of normative theory. It is a nuanced look at the interactions between the academic study of politics and the real political world.

That leads us to Freeden’s take on realism. He notes the “strong affinity” between his programme and the new realism; yet he insists that his realism is descriptive rather than prescriptive. ¹⁰ The affinity between the study of political thinking and realism, as we just noted, resides in the attention to how politics actually unfolds, as opposed to the idealised accounts of politics found both in political theory and in the study of political behaviour. Attention to thinking politically is attention to a mode of politics that is as central as it is resistant to the methodological straightjackets of mainstream political theory and political science—hence Freeden’s hostility to this sub-disciplinary divide. To be fair to the mainstream, though, one should also acknowledge a trade-off here: Freeden’s self-awovedly fox-like eclecticism comes with the downside of a sophisticated yet occasionally facile intellectual fragmentation, whereas more hedgehog-like traditional approaches deliver firm normative conclusions or—usually and sadly and exclusive disjunction—testable empirical claims.

On the other hand, and despite its name, Freeden’s descriptive realism may take us some way towards recomposing the normative-empirical fracture. The idea here is that the analysis of political thinking affords a more dispassionately realistic account of the relationship between political theory and real politics. This point is predicated upon a two-pronged critique of realism, directed at each of its main exponents, namely, Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams. In both cases Freeden’s contention is that methodological appeals to realism conceal substantive normative positions: a critical-theoretic ethical stance in Geuss’s case, and a marked preference for agonistic rather than consensual democracy in Williams’s case. ¹¹ My impression here is that realists needn’t worry much about those charges. Geuss would have no need to deny that his realism stems, in part, from a first-order hostility to Kantian liberalism. ¹² Likewise, Williams could comfortably own up to the links between his realism, his liberalism, and his metaethical pluralism. ¹³ Those normative—yet not moralistic—commitments don’t detract from the role of descriptive elements in their theories (most notably the role of power in Geuss, and of belief in legitimacy in Williams). So it seems fair to say that Geuss’s and Williams’s realism isn’t merely prescriptive; rather, it emphasises a narrower set of descriptive elements relative to Freeden’s approach. If there is any hope for a political theory that bridges the normative-empirical gap beyond the quasi-algorythmic consideration of feasibility constraints afforded by non-ideal theory, that hope lies with realism. ¹⁴

III

To see whether that hope may be fulfilled, we now turn to a contribution that takes us beyond the Methodenstreit in the opposed direction—first-order theory. Matt Sleat offers the first book-length attempt to ground liberalism on realist commitments. More precisely, Sleat’s project isn’t so much to show that realism leads to liberalism, but rather that there is a form of liberalism that is compatible with realism. And, relatedly, that most mainstream forms of liberalism fall short of realism’s desiderata. In fact, there are really two liberalisms in Sleat’s book (as it were): there’s liberalism in the pejorative sense, that is, Neo-Kantian, post-Rawlsian moralistic liberalism, and then there’s what liberalism might be if erected on the more solid foundation of realism. Liberalism in the pejorative sense and realism are rather more like antithetical dispositions of mind than incompatible first-order positions. The book’s argument, then, is constructed as a dialectic between realism and liberalism in the pejorative sense, with realist liberalism emerging synthesis-like.

What is wrong with moralistic liberalism, and how can realism put liberalism to rights? Sleat’s attack on mainstream liberalism is somewhat narrower than the full-spectrum rejection of moralistic—or “ethics first”—political philosophy. A typical realist charge against moralism is that ethics is not a good guide to politics, because of its ideological content. The hostility to consensus-driven politics is then arguably derived from that wider point: if ethics could generate consensus then we wouldn’t need politics (i.e., structured coercion) to coordinate our activities. Sleat however doesn’t take that route. To simplify his rather nuanced view, we can say that he offers a freestanding argument against the search for liberal consensus. This argument is compatible with the broader realist position I just canvassed, but it has a lighter set of foundational commitments. As I will try to show in what follows, this is a double-edged sword.

Sleat’s argument against consensus oscillates between a critique of its desirability and of its feasibility: the search for consensus is a misunderstanding of the inherently coercive nature of politics, and so is both chimeric and stifling of political identities. ¹⁵ The two prongs of this argument complement each other and weave together strands from classical and recent realist political philosophy and themes from international relations theory—Sleat’s argument is particularly noteworthy for bringing together those traditions. ¹⁶ Besides, insofar as consensus-driven liberalism is often presented as a procedural system for the adjudication of political claims, it is bound to obscure liberal partisanship under a cloak of putative neutrality. So the realist liberalism championed by Sleat does not pretend to be above the political fray. It is explicit about its hegemonic nature. One of Sleat’s important insights, then, is that this hegemony is liberal insofar as it is deliberately moderate and so respects the rights of dissenters. ¹⁷

The focus on conflict and persistent disagreement allows Sleat to bypass some thorny issues familiar to realists, most notably the relationship between ethics and politics and, relatedly, the theory of ideology. Whether this is an advantage may largely depend on one’s foundationalist or antifoundationalist leanings, as Sleat belongs to the latter camp. For instance, he approvingly refers to realists’ tendency “to shy away from making grand claims about human nature.” ¹⁸ Yet it seems to me that there are also arguments internal to realism that could be brought to bear on the issue of whether political theorists need to make such grand claims.

Those of a less foundationalist bent may take the lead from Sleat’s argument and construct further first-order realist theories on the basis of observations about the phenomenology of political life, without delving into the matter of the origin of our normative beliefs. That does rule out consensus-based forms of liberalism; however, realists of a more foundationalist inclination may worry that other forms of moralism are left intact. Forms of liberal moralism that don’t rely on consensus but still generate political prescriptions from pre-political moral commitments, such as the consequentialist positions of J.S. Mill or Joseph Raz, may in the end be quite similar to Sleat’s moderately hegemonic liberalism, insofar as they rely on an explicit, substantive defence of liberal values. ¹⁹ Sleat may retort that those values need not be grounded in pre-political moral beliefs, but then to substantiate that claim he may have to delve into more foundationalist claims about the nature and origin of political normativity. ²⁰ In other words, it is not clear whether realists can disentangle the consensus argument from the ethics-first argument and the theory of ideology.

So we seem to have a choice between a more systematic type of realism that accounts for the foundations of political normativity and a more phenomenological realism that relies on a description of the conflictual dynamics of political life. ²¹ The former realism is more comprehensive in its rejection of political moralism. The latter (Sleat’s) is more ecumenical in the sorts of philosophical commitments it can accommodate.

We have noted that the choice between those two ways of doing realism seems to rest on one’s attitude towards foundationalism, but there may be a further portion of logical space available to realists. We may be able to develop a position such as Williams’s in a way that produces a positive sum between the trade-offs on either side—arguably Sleat’s position may also be read in this light. We may call this systematic (rather than postmodern or Rortyan) antifoundationalism about politics. The rough, vaguely Nietzschean and Humean, idea would be to reject rather than avoid foundational commitments—scepticism rather than neutrality about deep normative commitments: politics just is the creation of normative orders for the solution of a certain class of problems, ²² and that is why we are epistemically entitled to study it as an autonomous sphere.

It remains unclear to what extent Williams had in mind a realism of this sort. His praise of Shklar’s philosophically abstemious “liberalism of fear” points in quite an unsystematic antifoundationalist direction, ²³ yet a look at his wider body of work should make clear that realism fits within a sharp yet sceptical picture of the philosophical underpinnings of moral and political agency—a picture that should at least be compatible with systematic antifoundationalism. ²⁴ That may be the best way to read Williams (and Sleat) and, more importantly, the best way to do first-order realist political theory.

IV

What I have been trying to show is that realist themes can take the discipline either side of a mere Methodenstreit. Freeden shows us how the realist agenda can illuminate the nature of political theory and of its relation to politics regardless of one’s methodological or substantive leanings. Sleat shows us that a realist forma mentis can provide a robust basis for first-order normative political theory—liberal in his case, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to envisage other realist theories of different ideological colour. ²⁵

That is a positive assessment of realism’s prospects. Complaining that such optimism ill befits realism won’t do: we started out with a distinction between non-ideal theory and realism, and noted that only the former is concerned with feasibility. ²⁶ The matter of utopianism may be a separate concern—realists may want to distinguish between utopia as moralistic wishful thinking versus utopia as political vision for radical transformation. ²⁷ In other words, there is a consistent reading of the 1968 exhortation to be realistic and demand the impossible. At any rate, optimism about a theoretical research programme is only moderately politically utopian, despite the sociology of academia.

Those familiar with the evolution of contemporary political theory over the last three decades or so may remain sceptical though. The 1980s saw the heyday of another minority view that promised to transform the discipline: communitarianism. Why did communitarianism peter out, and why shouldn’t we expect the same from realism? We may hypothesise that communitarianism’s failure to make a lasting positive contribution is due to the fact that it tried to establish new values such as community in opposition to hegemonic ones like individual freedom. Communitarianism partly tweaked mainstream liberalism, but that was a paltry result relative to its declared ambitions.

I would suggest that there is reason to hope that realism won’t be the next victim of that process of hegemonic phagocytation. Realism doesn’t clash with values, hegemonic or otherwise. It redescribes or decontests them in its own way. For instance, realist liberals are not against individual freedom or equality, but they’re against moralised understandings of those values. So realism can move itself and the discipline beyond the Methodenstreit. And given the present dominance of “ethics first” political philosophy, realism has the potential to be radically transformative. ²⁸

Yet I should close with a note of caution, or a reality-check of sorts: if we look at political philosophy pre-1971, or perhaps more aptly pre-1974, then realism’s now contentious blend of normative and empirical theory begins to look like a return to a more traditional way of doing political philosophy. Not all transformations are innovations, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Or at least conservative, moderate and radical realists will take their respective sides on that question.