A Plague on Both your Houses: Beyond Realism and Moralism in Political Philosophy

Political realists have been at pains to differentiate the debate between political moralism and political realism from that between ideal theory and nonideal theory. As they have rightly emphasised, realist complaints go far beyond simply the need to focus on the feasibility constraints that face a theory of justice. And yet much realist theorising fails to move beyond a ‘prescriptive realism’ (Michael Freeden) in which demanding normative theories of justice are replaced by less demanding theories of legitimacy, without thereby moving beyond the conventional parameters of normative theorising. Thus, while realists have sought to distinguish political normativity from morality tout court, this commonly takes the form of urging that theorists attend to the circumstances of politics in formulating and applying their political prescriptions. What form could an alternative approach take that resists a dichotomy of realism and moralism and that seeks to understand the ideals implicit within the real processes through which constitutional democracies reproduce themselves over time? In this paper I argue for a juridical turn in political theorising, a turn to the tradition of public law and the concept of political right. In place of a conception of political normativity, this focuses on an interpretive understanding of the normativity of the domain of the political. I will focus in particular on clarifying and defending the idea of a ‘philosophical science of right’ that forms Hegel’s starting point in the Philosophy of Right. I begin in section 1 by reviewing the current state of play in the debate between realism and moralism and I diagnose a recurrent displacement of the idea of the political. This is evident in the approach of political moralists who bypass the idea of the political in seeking to apply moral principles to political behaviour. But it is also evident in the work of realists for whom ‘the political is political’ (Lorna Finlayson). This alternative kind of displacement attempts to unmask the ideological function of the putative normativity of the domain of the political and reduces it to the operation of power. In section 2, I provide an interpretation of Hegel’s aspiration for a philosophical science of right. Drawing on recent work on Rawls’s early idea of a ‘science of ethics’ and on Rawls’s relationship to Hegel, I argue in section 3 that this provides an appropriate framework within which to make sense of the historical significance of Rawls’s project. I argue in section 4, though, that Rawls’s theory is vulnerable to similar criticisms to those that Marx made of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and indeed that this is just the line of criticism that Habermas make of Rawls in Between Facts and Norms. I draw two lessons from this comparison. First, in contrast to what realists sometimes insinuate, realism is not antithetical to abstract philosophical reflection. However, second, the attempt to maintain the idea of a philosophical science of right under contemporary conditions requires a fundamental rethinking of the discipline of political philosophy and its relationship to social science.