Two Contemporary Approaches to Political Theory

Abstract

Broadly speaking, the form that contemporary Anglo-American political theory has taken since the 1970s, with its reinvigoration in the seminal work of John Rawls, can largely be described as Platonic and Kantian, focusing on the formulation, comparison, and evaluation of abstract principles of justice, and only subsequently looking to their application in the real world. Concerned about this, a number of critics of the contemporary paradigm in political theory have emerged to offer their own alternatives. This article will discuss two of them: Raymond Geuss and Amartya Sen. This article does three things. Its first section lays out the realist approach to political theory advocated by Raymond Geuss and the comparative approach advocated by Amartya Sen, respectively. Here I argue that Sen's comparative approach can best be understood as a kind of realism. In the second section of this article, I explore what I take to be an underlying concern behind the work of both Sen and Geuss, and which, although it is rarely explicitly mentioned (and certainly never fully developed), I think we should bear in mind: namely, a strand of anti-Platonism in political theory. Third and finally, I present three arguments for why a realist approach to political theory is likely to be superior to those of their contemporary adversaries: the argument from efficacy claims that realist approaches are more likely to impact real politics; the argument from cognitive distortions claims that realist approaches are better equipped to notice and critically evaluate and revise undue assumptions and distortions of various kinds; and the argument from abstractness claims that since such distortions are likely to increase with a theory's degree of abstractness, and since realist theories tend to be less abstract than their competitors, a realist approach will likely be less susceptible to such distortions to begin with.

Keywords:

• political theory
• political philosophy
• political realism
• Raymond Geuss
• Amartya Sen

Notes on Contributor

Paul Raekstad is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the intersection of methodological debates in political theory, conceptions of human development and flourishing, and the impact of social movements, institutions and relations thereon. He has published many essays in these areas. He is currently working on a thesis exploring the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx's approach to political theory and critique of capitalism.

Notes

¹It is well-established and acknowledged by Rawls himself that he is a Kantian. I will not labour this point here. On the other hand, the accusation of Platonism is one which is less common, and one to which I will return below.

²I thus leave the other most influential realist, namely, Bernard Williams (2008). For discussion of his work, see Sleat (2010), Forrester (2012), Bavister-Gould (2013), Hall (2013), and Larmore (2013). I leave aside other clearly realist work as well, such as Wright (2010), Wolff (2011), and Mészáros (2011).

³Note that I use the term “realist” to refer to approaches in line with realism in political theory as introduced by Raymond Geuss, rather than “realistic,” which I use in its regular, everyday sense.

⁴Note that, for Geuss, questions of timing are notably less important than the others.

⁵Geuss himself has often clarified these points and others, but somehow many readers still manage to confuse his position.

⁶For a more critical discussion of Sen's critique of the Rawlsian approach, see especially Valentini (2011), Thomas (2014), and Gilabert (2012).

⁷For one example of this, see Geuss (2003). Geuss also mentions the genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault as paradigmatic examples of this approach.

⁸For more discussion of related themes, see Newey (2010).

⁹On the issue of realism and ideology, see Williams ([1980] 2006, 2002, 2008), along with Williams, Newey (2010), Bavister-Gould (2013), Rossi (2014), and Rossi and Sleat (2014). Geuss (e.g., in his 2014), of course, focuses much more on opposing realism to wishful thinking.