FOR THE PANEL 'CONTEXTUALISM IN NORMATIVE POLITICAL THEORY'
In recent years we have witnessed an intensified discussion in political philosophy about the usefulness of normative political theories. Doubt has been thrown against traditional or mainstream political theory, which is accused of being useless since it recommends normative political principles that do not guide action in the real world. While different kinds of theories have been subject to this criticism, a shared concern is that these theories are useless because they have not taken sufficiently seriously the many different ways that our current social and political practices constrain our normative political principles, such as methodological constraints but forward by practice-dependent theorists and non-ideal theorists, and political constraints put forward by political realists. We have tried to show elsewhere that the constraints suggested in the debates are often flawed or too strong. However, this does not take away the initial concern raised by these critics, namely, the idea that normative political principles should be feasible to be useful. Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. This paper attempts to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theorizing. Our aim is twofold. First, we identify the feasibility space for normative political theory by suggesting two constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called 'fitness constraint' and the 'functional constraint'. Second, we demonstrate how this space opens the door for a flexible notion of feasibility, by which we mean that it leaves more leeway for the theorist in construing normative political principles than currently existing accounts.
