Democracy and Realism

Abstract

Recent years have seen a flourishing of a realist alternative to the dominant modes of political theorising in the Anglophone academy. Crudely, realism’s main break with those conventions consists in the thought that normative political theory should not try to silence, circumvent, contain, or ignore the forces that shape politics. A typical target of the realist critique (as it emerges in the work of theorists such as John Gray and Raymond Geuss) is the attempt, on the part of many contemporary liberals, to temper the coercive nature of the exercise of power by presenting it as legitimated by some sort of consensus—a move most realists would denounce as contemptibly ideological, or hopelessly idealistic, or guided by misplaced moralism. Realists would rather counsel to theorize within the inescapably gritty realm of politics, and nonetheless seek to understand how power may be both genuinely coercive and normatively legitimate. Such an approach, of course, contains contestable presumptions of its own. It also highlights deep, important questions about the justificatory status of liberal democratic institutions. This workshop will offer a critical exploration of the nature of the realist challenge, with particular reference to contemporary theories of (liberal) democracy. It will offer five papers addressing the relationship between (i) key issues in democratic theory—deliberation, public justification, legitimacy, power, inclusion—and (ii) ideal versus non-ideal, and realist versus moralist understandings of the nature and scope of political theory itself. Thus the panel as a whole will address relations between, e.g., 'ideal' models and the 'real world', between facts and norms, between justice and alternative focal points of political theory, between accounts of 'the political' and wider explanations of social processes, between conflict and the appeal to consensus, and between reason and social action.

Title	Details
The Democratic Rechtsstaat and the Problem of Self-grounding	View Paper Details
Conflict, Power and Real Politics: The Challenges Ahead for a New Realist Democratic Theory	View Paper Details
The Contexts of Public Discourse in Democratic Societies	View Paper Details
A Pluralist Critique of Sen''s Constructive Argument for Democracy	View Paper Details
The Ancient Quarrel Between Political Philosophy and Politics	View Paper Details
Some Questions for a ‘Realist Political Theory’	View Paper Details