What Is a Political Value? Political Philosophy and Fidelity to Reality

Abstract

Most of us have at best a hazy understanding of what politics is. Even those who 'do' politics in the sense of either living 'for' or 'from' it (to employ Max Weber's distinction), journalists, politicians, civil servants, party officials and volunteers, campaigners, lobbyists and so on, are unlikely to have anything more that an indistinct view of what the activity is that they are engaged in. Among this list we might add contemporary political philosophers also, who, at least in the analytical Anglo-American tradition, have in recent decades given relatively little consideration to the question of the nature of the phenomenon they study, preferring to focus instead on normative questions about the values and ends that political activity should be oriented towards achieving.1 These are important questions: how societies answer them matters and political philosophy certainly has something to contribute to those inquiries. But we might think that political philosophy ought not to concern itself with the nature of actual political practice anyhow, that to do so would be to contaminate the purity of philosophical reflection with the messiness and contingency of real politics. This paper shall argue the opposite: the actual practice of politics places particular constraints on political philosophy which theorists ought to be sensitive to. Put differently, political philosophy should be appropriately guided by the practice of politics to which it seeks to speak about and to. This is not, as we will see, driven by the now familiar concern (of non-ideal theory) that contemporary political philosophy has become overly abstract and hence cannot offer action-guiding recommendations for us here and now.2 The central claim is rather more in keeping with the realist vein of contemporary political philosophy: that despite the inevitable need for abstraction and idealisation, any theory has to retain an appropriate degree of fidelity to the phenomenon that it theorises in order to be a theory of and for that phenomenon.

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

“…The concept of legitimacy is simply not compatible with such an illegitimate order. Similarly, they argue that the fact that a principle of legitimacy should be understood as a political principle entails several feasibility constraints, notably that the context in which the suggested principles are justified must not assume agreement, since there is no political community in which the members are in agreement (Jubb 2015b;Sleat 2016).…”

Distinctively Political Normativity in Political Realism: Unattractive or Redundant

“…Moreover, political norms and values are taken to be justified through a number of key features of the political reality. These features, often referred to as the 'constitutive features' or 'general conditions' of politics (Sleat 2016a(Sleat , 2016c(Sleat , 2018, are said to include conditions such as deep disagreement and conflict of interest (Jubb 2015b: 679), coercion, authority, and the monopoly of organized violence (Jubb 2015a: 919;Sleat 2016c: 255). In addition, the necessity of power struggles is often taken to have normative import for political norms.…”

“…According to the second view, to which realists often retreat when pressed on what exactly the distinctness of political normativity entails, moral norms and prescriptions are aligned with or filtered through politics as a category (Sleat 2016c), in case of which political normativity is distinct from moral normativity "in the sense that the weight, direction and relevance of different considerations would all systematically be altered by politics' constitutive features" (Jubb 2019: 362). Indeed, realists often point out that the political domain is distinct in that it involves special considerations that make political norms different from moral norms.…”

On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is

“…Relatedly, defining the realist view as ‘that political principles are of a different, non moral normative kind altogether’ (Maynard and Worsnip, 2018: 762), as Leader Maynard and Worsnip do, appears to ignore, for example, Williams’ (2005: 5) description of his basic legitimation demand as distinct from moralist approaches because it arises from within politics and so does ‘not represent a morality which is prior to politics’. Like many other realists, Williams here does not require that normativity avoid morality altogether, but that prescriptions are in some way filtered through or aligned to politics as a category (Sleat, 2016: 253). This would still leave political normativity distinct from moral normativity, in the sense that the weight, direction and relevance of different considerations would all systematically be altered by politics’ constitutive features.…”