Political Realism and the Status Quo

Given the urgency of a positive understanding of political realism, scholars have recently begun to provide some constructive interpretations of it. My paper aims at contributing to the debate by addressing a specific issue: I intend to clarify what is the relationship between a realist political theory and its context of application. Ultimately, I will argue that political realism must be interpreted as a form of reformist conservatism which demands the political order for a certain context to reflect its subjects’ beliefs about politics, but which also encourages a revision of those same beliefs. By defending a similar interpretation, I mean to take a distance from the positive reconstructions of realism that the literature has offered so far. Indeed, the most recent contributions appear neatly polarised. On the one hand, some contributors interpret political realism as an approach to politics which leads to an affirmation of the status quo (Hall 2015, Jubb 2017, McQueen 2016). On the other hand, it has been suggested that political realism, if correctly understood, might (and perhaps ought to) lead to radical transformations of the status quo (Finlayson 2015, Rossi 2015, Rossi and Prinz 2017). To a certain extent, a similar scenario is understandable and wholly expected. As I will explain, the fundamental theoretical tenets of political realism, when considered together, appear to be hardly reconcilable. Those who defend the conservative tendencies of political realism usually attribute crucial importance to the realist emphasis on the need of order and stability. On the contrary, those who interpret political realism as a progressive approach to politics tend to develop their interpretation starting from the realist warnings against the power of political institutions to oppress, often in subtle and unrecognised ways. However, as I will discuss, struggling to preserve order comes at the price of undermining the attempts of analysing and revealing the structures of power that sustain political institutions, and vice-versa. I believe that forcing us into a choice between the said alternatives is a mistake, both for interpretive and for theoretical reasons. I will show that it is possible to reconcile all the basic tenets of political realism in a unique theoretical framework. To do so, I will propose an interpretation of political realist theories as tripartite theoretical structures composed by a prescriptive theory, an internal critical theory and an external critical theory. My strategy will be that of explaining political realist theories as structures in which the critical momentum does not entirely overlap to the prescriptive one. I will defend the idea that there are two different ways of criticising reality for political realists: an internal critique (which criticises existing political arrangements in light of what the prescriptive theory prescribes) and an external critique (which challenges subjects’ beliefs about politics and that does not have a direct impact on what ought to be done). I will argue that such a partial overlap between political normativity and critique allows to consistently abide by the fundamental tenets that inspire political realism, and to overcome the tension between preserving order and unmasking oppression.