The new realism and the old

Abstract

The tradition of political realism denies the relevance of morality to politics and asserts the value of prudence. The new realists in political theory repeat these claims in the context of criticising a style of political theorising they identify with Rawls and Kant. Some affirm the importance of experience and judgment, echoing an earlier generation of political theorists, including Oakeshott and Arendt. Others locate the distinctive character of politics in the problem of establishing order and legitimising it, and because they are moral sceptics they treat legitimacy as contextual and plural. But arguments about legitimacy must address the difference between governing people and dominating them. The new realists therefore find themselves encountering the question of justice, from which their tradition has tried without success to distance itself. To show that questions of order and justice are related, I briefly consider Kant’s political thought. Like the new realists, Kant treats politics as distinct from ethics and looks for principles of legitimacy that are internal to political order. Instead of making Kant a target for criticism, the new realists could draw on his insights to strengthen their own account of the autonomy of politics. Doing so would also strengthen their case against the simplistic moralising of academic political philosophy and further illuminate the contribution of realism to political thought.

Keywords:

• Political realism
• political moralism
• moral scepticism
• reason of state
• Kant
• Arendt
• Oakeshott
• Williams
• Geuss

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at a symposium on Realism in Contemporary Political Theory sponsored by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore. I want to thank Rahul Sagar for his leadership of the project and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS for supporting my work on it. I have learned from conversations with the symposium participants and subsequently with Christina Tarnopolsky and other colleagues in the Social Sciences Division at Yale-NUS, and from comments by an anonymous referee.