What's the Point of Political Philosophy?

A simple answer to the question above is this: The point of political philosophy is to tell us how politics should be organised. Not how it is organised, or how it has been organised in the past - we can leave that to political science. Not how my personal life ought to be organised - we can leave that to moral philosophy. But how something called 'politics' should or ought to be organised. This ambition leaves us with several questions, including the obvious one of how we define 'politics', but also the less obvious ones of what we mean by 'should' or 'organised'. Those, however, are not the questions I want to focus on here, in part because each of the major positions in political philosophy has its own view on just what we ought to mean when using each of these three terms. Instead, I want to focus on three questions that connect more to the other concerns of this panel: (1) How utopian or abstract should political philosophy be?; (2) How abstract or concrete should its recommendations be?; and (3) Who should it be written for or presented to? I will focus in particular on the third question - the question of our audience and how we speak to it - as I believe this has been less well attended to than the other two issues in recent times. In doing so, I'll build in particular on some of the arguments developed in my recent book: Is Political Philosophy Impossible? (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in late 2017).