Political Realism and Utopianism

I present two senses in which a political philosophy may be an ideal theory. They are not identified by Laura Valentini, in her much-cited paper. The paper is written as a pastiche of the writing style of the distinguished legal and political philosopher Joseph Raz, who recently passed away, with my notes at the foot of the page within square brackets.

The dilemma I present for Laura Valentini’s paradox of ideal theory concerns a theory which includes idealizations but also an account of how you apply the theory to less ideal reality. If this does not count as an ideal theory, then theories of justice need not be ideal. If it does, then ideal theories can be action guiding.

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

Realists in normative political theory aim to defend the importance of “distinctively political thought” as opposed to the applied ethics they believe characterizes much contemporary political theory and causes it to misunderstand and make mistakes about its subject matter. More conventional political theorists have attempted to respond to realism, including Jonathan Leader Maynard and Alex Worsnip, who have recently criticized five supposedly realist arguments for a distinctive political normativity. However, while Leader Maynard and Worsnip's arguments are themselves less decisive than (...) they suppose, the problem with their response may lay elsewhere. Their response supposes that more conventional political theory could, in principle, be defended at an abstract general level. This may not be possible though, given the difficulty of arriving at agreed interpretations of the concepts involved and the desiderata for a successful normative political theory. It also risks missing the point of realism, which is to use different forms of normative inquiry to explore questions which have not always been central to conventional normative political theory. Judith Shklar's excellent work on vices and the liberalism of fear nicely illustrates this problem. (shrink)

Samuel Bagg's The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is an excellent book. It lays out and defends, in detail, an ambitious new account of the significance of democratic institutions and practices, which it sees as centrally concerned with avoiding state capture. That account powerfully illuminates many important topics in democratic theory, responding in persuasive and novel ways to old questions as well as offering new areas to explore. However, its near-exclusive focus on domination by the very (...) wealthy may limit the insights it can provide. The idea of state capture's full power may only be made available though by adopting a more varied account of the common good that it stymies, and of the interests that may mobilize against those shared interests. (shrink)

Charles W. Mills developed an argument against ideal theorizing that is inspired by the early writings of Marx and Engels. He argues that the development and refinement of non-ideal theories contributes more to ending oppressive power structures than the development and refinement of ideal theories. For this reason, he concludes that ideal theories play the role of an ideology. In this article, I expose a yet undiagnosed weakness of this argument: I point out that history is rife with examples of (...) political organizations that struggle to identify an effective political practice because they find themselves in a situation of theoretical crisis. Thus, contra Mills, it turns out that ideal theorizing is sometimes a more viable strategy to end oppressive power structures than non-ideal theorizing. So, if we accept the basic premises of Mills’s argument, it turns out that non-ideal theorizing should be classified as an ideology as well. To further corroborate this claim, I point out some problems for Mills’s interpretation of Marx and Engels. If my assessment is right, then it turns out to be unclear if the intellectual authorities that Mills invokes actually lend support to his critique of ideal theorizing. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)

In his influential 1949 essay, The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek prophesied that the “revival of liberalism” must coincide with the resurgence of “the courage to be Utopian.” Today, at a time when liberalism is under attack from multiple fronts, we need courage more than ever. Indeed, the rediscovery of the Utopian potential of liberalism coincides with going back to its roots. My paper shows that liberalism, especially in its so-called “epistemic” or "evolutionary" branch whose notable theorists include Adam Smith, (...) J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and F.A. Hayek, provides a framework for “real Utopian” theory and practice. However, I argue that evolutionary liberalism should be enriched with the insights of contemporary evolutionary theory and complexity theory to properly account for the downsides of social evolution and to overcome the understandable charge of social Darwinism. Only then can it robustly realise its emancipatory aspirations and real Utopian promise. (shrink)

According to epistemic ideology critics, a belief or set of beliefs is ideological when it: (a) empowers those responsible for disseminating these beliefs and (b) lacks compelling independent justification. In their view, beliefs satisfying these criteria are defective and ought to be debunked. I contest this claim by showing how, under conditions of political crisis, it is often both epistemically unwarranted and pragmatically inadvisable to debunk seemingly ideological beliefs. I examine the types of beliefs that constitute what are commonly called (...) “emergency frames.” An emergency frame is a system of beliefs concerning the nature of a severe collective threat and the best way to combat that threat. I argue that, due to the uncertainty inherent in many crisis situations, emergency frames often lack independent justification. Because this lack stems from unavoidable epistemic constraints, it should not be seen as a flaw warranting the debunking of any given emergency frame. I begin by outlining the notion of epistemic ideology critique (Section 1). In Section 2, I explore how, when this notion is applied to emergency frames, they often appear ideological and thus seem to warrant debunking. In Section 3, however, I show why it is sometimes epistemically unwarranted and pragmatically inadvisable to debunk such frames. I conclude that, in certain cases, when confronted with ostensibly ideological emergency frames, an attitude of political trust is more suitable than one of radical critique. (shrink)

In the last two decades Anglophone political theory witnessed a renewed interest in social-scientific empirical findings—partly as a reaction against normative theorizing centred on the formulation of abstract, intuition-driven moral principles. This brief paper begins by showing how this turn has taken two distinct forms: (i) a non-ideal theoretical orientation, which seeks to balance the emphasis on moral principles with feasibility and urgency considerations, and (ii) a fact-centric orientation, which seeks to ground normative conclusions in empirical results. The core of (...) the paper then compares and contrast three variants of fact-centric political theory: normative behaviourism, grounded normative theory, and radical realism. The upshot: normative behaviourism achieves focus on observable behaviour at the cost of status quo bias, grounded normative theory achieves radicalism at the cost of endorsing an activist orientation to theorising, and radical realism combines a non-activist orientation with the potential for far-reaching critique of the status quo. (shrink)

This paper examines how radical realism, a form of ideology critique grounded in epistemic rather than moral normativity, can illuminate the relationship between ideology and political power. The paper argues that radical realism can has both an evaluative and a diagnostic function. Drawing on reliabilist epistemology, the evaluative function shows how beliefs shaped by power differentials are often epistemically unwarranted, e.g. due to the influence of motivated reasoning and the suppression of critical scrutiny. The paper clarifies those mechanisms in order (...) to address some recent critiques of radical realism. The paper then builds on those clarifications to explore the how tracing the genealogy of legitimation stories can diagnose the distribution of power in society, even if ideology does not play a direct stabilising role. This diagnostic function creates a third position in the debate on ideology between culturalists and classical Marxists, and it can help reconciling aspects of structural and relational theories of power. (shrink)

... Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks 1. The Pragmatics of Utopian Studies1 1.1. ... The detour is apparent because, as argued above, pragmatics subsumes?but also needs to be based upon?not only syntactics but also semantics (in this case, of Utopian studies). 2.1. ... \n.

The article challenges the notion that political realism necessarily requires a distinctively political normativity. Drawing on the works of Weber and Nietzsche, it offers an alternative reading of political realism. The article uncovers in Williams’ scholarship a dual-layered legitimacy framework, displaying three inherent demands (namely, discursive, intelligibility, and reflective vindication demand) in his idea of legitimacy. In so doing, the article demonstrates how political realism employs its own prescriptive resources to critically scrutinize politics, while highlighting the crucial distinction between political (...) realism and applied ethics. The article finally contends that political realism can, through immanent critique, maintain its evaluative standards and critical potency without necessarily engaging with political normativity. (shrink)

Jules Lequyer (Lequier) (1814—1862) Like Kierkegaard, Jules Lequyer (Luh-key-eh) resisted, with every philosophical and literary tool at his disposal, the monistic philosophies that attempt to weave human choice into the seamless cloth of the absolute. Although haunted by the suspicion that freedom is an illusion fostered by an ignorance of the causes working within us, he […].

From Plato to the present day, political theorists have used models of idealistic societies to think about politics. How can these idealistic models inform our thinking about political life in our non-ideal world? Not, as many political theorists have hoped, by providing normative guidance -- by showing us how things should be or where we should go. Even still, we can use these models to interpret the concepts we depend on to explain and evaluate political behavior and institutions, thereby sharpening (...) our explanations of how things work and our estimations of how to make things better. Seeing idealistic models in this light reveals a promising route to a form of political inquiry that integrates our explanatory aims and our normative aspirations. -/- (Updated: October 2024. The book is in production for publication by Oxford University Press, to appear in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics series. I have uploaded the table of contents, chapter 1, and the bibliography.). (shrink)

Contributors to Utopian Studies and members of various utopian studies networks have acknowledged that Black utopias—in all the faces that utopianism can take—are still largely neglected and underrepresented in our publications, meetings, and theorizations (this also goes for utopias outside of White, Western normativity in general). Studies from within our field that sought to take the first steps to address this exclusion convincingly argue that, in the wake of Antiblackness (to use Christina Sharpe's term), utopianism takes on different forms—spatial and (...) temporal—than that from a position of White privilege. Irvin J. Hunt's Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, a study on... Read More. (shrink)

Scholars of utopian studies commonly note the recent surge in dystopian representations in written and visual narratives, reflecting the crisis-ridden dynamics of the contemporary moment. They investigate the meanings and significance of this phenomenon within literary, historical, and cultural frameworks. Patricia McManus's Critical Theory and Dystopia is one such notable contribution to the field, with its insightful comparisons among a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century dystopias. Her main concern is the form of dystopia, which, she explains, contains utopia as its (...) "sedimented content" (1), as well as figurations of "things which are not even named by the dystopian texts themselves but the absence... Read More. (shrink)

If we take a look at the main generalist books on utopian or dystopian literature, we can note the absence of a body of works that would constitute a utopian literary tradition written in Spanish. In a quick review, we may note that Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel acknowledge in Utopian Thought in the Western World that "the absence of a sustained utopian tradition in Spain is peculiar, though free-floating utopian affect may have somehow attached itself to the figure of (...) Don Quixote." To this comment they add that although "the manuscript of an Enlightenment utopia, Descripción de la Sinapia península en la terra austral, has recently been published," it does not alter their opinion that "Spain was relatively... Read More. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Felix Bender (2024) argues that we should reject the notion of climate refugeehood because existing defenses of climate refugeehood cannot be squared with political realism, according to which refugees fulfill a specific function and possess a specific value for admitting states. On this view, refugees serve admitting states’ self-interest by allowing admitting states to undermine rival regimes whose illegitimate practices render their citizens refugees, thus enhancing admitting states’ domestic and international perceptions of legitimacy. This article argues (...) that the political autonomy account of refugeehood, an account of refugeehood Bender never examines, can accommodate climate refugees in a way that satisfies Bender’s political realist concerns. The broader implications of this argument are twofold: 1) such an account of refugeehood would limit the number of people who would count as climate refugees substantially more than most accounts that admit of the possibility of climate refugees; and 2) the fact that such an account of refugeehood can simultaneously accommodate the possibility of climate refugees while not being subject to Bender’s criticisms renders the political autonomy account especially plausible as a theory of refugeehood, whether one is a political realist or not. (shrink)

Amid current global crises, the international conference "The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times," jointly organized by the University of Huelva (Spain) and the University of Calgary (Canada) on May 21–24, 2023, at the University of Huelva, provided a forum for reflecting upon the role played by speculative fiction in (re)imagining better futures, while remaining vigilant to possible threats and dangers. The title of the conference, borrowed from philosopher John Rajchman,1 is intentionally ambiguous. Lying behind that door (...) could be total liberation for all—or it could be secret police who lead us toward genocides, deportation, rapes, and mass graves. Taking this dichotomous trope, "the knock at... Read More. (shrink)

What do we see when we imagine the year 2200? Where do we see humanity? How has the environment changed and how can we imagine a creative climate solution for a community-centered future? Questions such as those are addressed in the short-story collection Afterglow, published in 2023 in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit online media organization dedicated to publishing environmental news and commentary. The twelve published short stories, finalists of the climate fiction contest from Fix, Grist's solution lab, are diverse (...) narratives inspired by progressive literary movements, such as Indigenous and Afrofuturism as well as solarpunk and hopepunk, and envision a future full of hope and compassion, a future of... Read More. (shrink)

In her conversation with critic Sherryl Vint and scholars Rocío Carrasco and Irene López Rodríguez, Chinese Canadian author Larissa Lai points out that "the future can only come out of the past, but we have many pasts to access." I take my cue from this perspicacious comment on what I believe is one of the outstanding features of utopian/dystopian fiction of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the substantial contribution of authors from the Global South and from diasporan communities (...) in the Global North to a growing corpus of dreams for a better future, or else of nightmarish accounts of our present. In line with Caroline Edwards (2023), I see these narratives as so many stepping stones in a... Read More. (shrink)

Utopian Imaginaries, the 23rd annual conference of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe (USS/E) that took place in July 2023 in Cluj, Romania, offered a wide array of academic topics and insights on utopianism. Four areas of inquiry emerged persistently over the course of three days: the role of feminism in utopian studies; utopia/dystopia(nism) as theoretical and philosophical frameworks; utopianism and the climate crisis; and Central and Eastern European utopias. Given the location of the conference, this last area was of particular interest (...) to conferencegoers, who discussed the importance of non-Western utopian thought, the regional challenges of climate and environmental degradation, and the connections between... Read More. (shrink)

The twenty-first century's shifting intellectual framework is accompanied by shifts in the character of current dystopian fiction. Contemporary society is now characterized by globalization in which privatization, consumerism, and neoliberal politics prevail. We are witness to a faltering Western progressivism, massive economic recessions, the expansion of alt-right ideologies, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian incursion into Ukraine, and the war in Gaza. Thus, neoliberalism plays a key role in the depiction of current fictional dystopias that commonly reflect society and are known (...) to instill authority through ideological and social domination.In their interview with Rocío Carrasco, Larissa Lai and Sherryl Vint... Read More. (shrink)

For nearly a century outsiders have remarked the interesting developments in the Nordic countries. Norway, Finland, and Iceland achieved full independence early in the twentieth century. All five countries became parliamentary democracies, but what foreign journalists, scholars, and politicians noticed was their generally successful responses to the challenges of modernity. All but Finland had avoided World War I and had introduced democratic government and universal suffrage without significant violence. Finland broke free of the collapsing Russian Empire in 1917, but suffered (...) a short but bloody civil war. Iceland had progressed from Danish possession to full independence between 1872 and 1944. By the 1920s... Read More. (shrink)

Even when something has completely ceased to be, it does not immediately disappear. A gap remains one that retains the form of its previous fullness. The house which has been torn down and has become a thing of the past still clearly occupies the space in which it once stood.Science fiction (SF) frequently invites us to step into realms other than our own and observe what happens within these new conditions. Philip K. Dick defines the genre as one that builds (...) on the possibilities opened by "conceptual dislocation," or degrees of estrangement from one's familiar experience(s).1 Contemporary post-anthropocentric inquiries from across the humanities and social sciences often combine science-fictional thought with... Read More. (shrink)

In 1870, _Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly_ published the first number of Annie Denton Cridge's utopian novel entitled "Man's Rights; or, How Would You Like It?" Scholars have traditionally characterized Cridge's story as a work of early feminist writing. However, they have overlooked Cridge's connection to the American Associationist movement, a utopian-socialist movement inspired by the writings of French philosopher, Charles Fourier. Cridge and her husband were inspired by Fourier and the work of American Associationists as early as the 1850s. While (...) many scholars argue that the Associative movement crumbled in the 1850s, Cridge's story demonstrates that the movement's ideas and converts persisted even after the Civil War. Furthermore, Cridge's story appeared decades before Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ (1888) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's _Herland_ (1915) and featured aspects of communal life that became mainstays in later utopian literature such as cooperative housekeeping. This article's characterization of Cridge's story as an Associative work of fiction encourages us to consider the myriad ways in which Americans took part in utopian-socialist movements, and urges further investigation into the influence that the Associative movement had on the utopian literary tradition in America. (shrink)

What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner's "Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk," the feature article of this Critical Forum on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk's "dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope," the way that it couples scrutiny (...) of historical material conditions with the insistence that other ways of living, other social formations, remain possible. Solarpunk dedicates itself to action; it wants to incite political action, of course, but also the more... Read More. (shrink)

Dex escapes the city: "Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city." They change careers, become a tea monk, a vocation blending botanical remedy with therapeutic conversation. Dex embraces a new form of life; they learn to occupy time and attune to nature in a different way. They also repeat the foundational reconciliation between civilization and nature that is the signature of solarpunk and of Becky Chambers's (...) "Monk and Robot" novellas, exemplars of that sci-fi subgenre: Dex put trailer to hitch and foot to pedal. The ox-bike responded with an electric boost, its electric motor humming mildly as both machine and rider worked to get the... Read More. (shrink)

Thomas Whitmarsh's Writing Our Extinction and Anne Stewart's Angry Planet engage the utopian within the literary to offer new temporal and material framings that resist ecopessimism and its reinforcement of the neoliberal status quo. I cannot imagine a more consequential topic for utopian studies, or for cultural theory more broadly, as both Whitmarsh and Stewart connect the conceptualization and representation of the Anthropocene to questions of identity, solidarity, and social justice. Whitmarsh maps the vertical topologies of post-1960s fiction, which are (...) in dialogue with the technological developments of the post–World War II area (e.g., the space race and atomic testing), to make the case that worst-case... Read More. (shrink)

We are living in a time crisis—one of selective care and empathy. Many of our hearts are broken. As I enter into this discussion, I want to leave space for those who are being directly targeted and attacked. Harms compound by the day. And toxic, or what I call normative, masculinity—as the air we breathe—actively curates this selective care and empathy.However, the stories, films, poems, and performances in my book, Masculinity in Transition, show that there is also creative power in (...) the masculine, and potential for what queer/transgender Tamil-Sri Lankan artist D'Lo calls "beautiful masculinity."1 Exuberant, utopic possibilities exist for masculinities that reject sexual domination, nationalism, and this more... Read More. (shrink)

Ask the average adult whether they like science fiction, and the answer will usually be "no." But ask them whether they appreciate Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or remember Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey, or enjoy watching the TV series Black Mirror, and watch them perk up. As it is still most commonly perceived, science fiction (hereafter SF) is a term that remains tainted by its perceived association with childish interests: shiny spaceships, goofy aliens, laser swords, and action (...) figures. And even as the broader genre of fantastic fiction has come to dominate twenty-first-century Hollywood, this mainstream visibility and commercial might has done little to diminish this stigma.... Read More. (shrink)