Philosophy and Real Politics by Raymond Geuss

Author:Raymond Geuss
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

Failures of Realism

One might worry that the form of “realism” described in the foregoing is so broadly construed as to be vacuous, excluding nothing. As with Reason, Mother’s Love, the Internet, or The Idea of the Good, it is hard to be against “being realistic.” The preliminary sketch given in Part I of this book might usefully be further clarified through a contrast between it and two influential contemporary views that represent almost the direct opposite of “realism” in the sense in which I wish to understand the term. One fashionable way of failing to be realistic is to try to construct a society along the lines of an idealised legal system structured around a set of rights. Another way is to develop a full political theory by picking a single purported political “virtue” from among the many human excellences and aspects of politics or society that are admirable; one tries to give an abstract “conceptual analysis” of “our” conception of that virtue without taking account of the social context in which it is instantiated or its history, and then constructs an idealised theory of what a society would have to look like if it were to instantiate that virtue fully. A “realist” in the sense in which I am using the term will, contrary to this, start from an account of our existing motivations and our political and social institutions (not from a set of abstract “rights” or from our intuitions). The full and illuminating description of these institutions and practices will require use of an evaluative vocabulary with a certain history. Then one can go on from there. The two examples of nonrealistic approaches are merely examples and are not intended to exhaust the possible ways in which a theory can fail to be appropriately realistic. Each of the two examples fails, among other reasons, because each tries to ignore or blank out history, sociology, and the particularities that constitute the substance of any recognisable form of human life. Each has an unreflective and uncritical relation to “our” concepts or “our (moral) intuitions,” and this turns out to result in serious cognitive deficiencies.

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