Three Failed Charges against Ideal Theory

Erman, Eva; Möller, Niklas

doi:10.5840/soctheorpract20133912

Cited by 30 publications

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“…And in the literature on political legitimacy, political realists have asserted that principles of political legitimacy are delimited by political constraints, such as the constitutive features of politics (Rossi and Sleat 2014;Rossi 2013;Jubb and Rossi 2015;Jubb 2015a). We have tried to show elsewhere that the constraints suggested in these debates are often flawed or too strong (Erman and Möller 2013, 2015a, b, 2017, 2018. However, this does not take away the initial concern that pointed the above critics of mainstream political theory to a larger focus on social and political practices in the first place, namely, the idea that normative political principles should be feasible to be useful.…”

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A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory

Erman

Möller

2019

Res Publica

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Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates-such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and political moralism and political realism-are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called 'fitness constraint' and the 'functional constraint', through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory.

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A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory

Erman

Möller

2019

Res Publica

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“…5. For literature on ideal and non-ideal theory, (see for example Simmons, 2010;Mills, 2005;Farrelly 2007;Valentini, 2012;Sen, 2009;Schmidtz, 2011;Erman & Möller, 2013). 6.…”

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Global democracy and feasibility

Erman

Kuyper

2019

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosoph

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While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy, as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest as intuitively plausible two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizingthe 'fitness constraint' and the 'functional constraint'which elucidate a number of aspects relevant in determining proper feasibility constraints for an account in political theory. Secondly, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice.

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“…First, it is otherwise difficult to make sense of the manifold misrepresentations. Second, the book offers few new insights that the authors have not previously published (Erman and Möller 2013, 2015a-d, 2016a-b, 2017a-b, 2018. Finally, why would the authors otherwise devote more than two thirds of its pages of a monograph aimed at explaining "what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative political principles" (9) to criticizing the efforts of theorists whom the authors portray as either relying on flawed arguments or collapsing into mainstream political theory?…”

Section: Disciplinary Power Struggle and The State Of The Debates In mentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles, practices and disciplinary power struggles in political theory

Prinz

2019

European Journal of Political Theory

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The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the promise and limits of this uniting theme for the future of political theory. However, The Practical Turn is driven by selective portrayals, omissions and misrepresentation, and hence is not a good source to turn to for understanding the debates it surveys or whether they manifest a ‘practical turn in political theory’ or not; rather, it serves as a warning of how struggles over power can influence and even structure seemingly the most purely intentioned of practices.

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Three Failed Charges against Ideal Theory

Cited by 30 publications

References 0 publications

A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory

A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory

Global democracy and feasibility

Principles, practices and disciplinary power struggles in political theory

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