Realists are highly critical of the liberal project of political philosophy. They argue that we need to rethink the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy not making the latter the handmaiden of the former. They argue that we need to take politics seriously as a field human endeavour, and make stability not justice the centrepiece of political theory. They argue that political philosophy ought to be more concerned with institutions. In this paper, I unpack these different claims. I demarcate the methodological claims from the normative ones, and show that political realism can be developed in different directions whilst distancing it from the ideal—non-ideal debate. I also argue that our understanding of the relationship between formal institutions and human behaviour is a key element of our understanding of how different political realism really is from standard liberal political theory.
