The Model of the Legislator: Political Theory, Public Policy, and Realist Utopianism

Realism and non-ideal theory are often argued to be overly negative claims and to be incompatible with utopianism in all its forms. It’s often unclear what each of them should look like in practice and how they connect or diverge from one another. Although I believe realism and non-ideal theory to be distinct, there are a number of historically influential and interesting cases of political theorists who do both – cases which have much to teach us about how to do realist and non-ideal political theory today. To do this, my paper begins by reconstructing the model of the statesman or legislator found in the work of Adam Smith, along with its conception of how political theory can and ought to inform it. I show how this is an instance of agent-centred political theory that is clearly both realist and non-ideal in nature. I go on to update this model for the realities of contemporary representative states, and argue that this updated version continues to be relevant today by showing that it can make coherent and unified sense of some of the important lessons that contemporary political theorists, such as Jonathan Wolff, draw about the role of political theory in contemporary legislation and policy-formation. Building on this model of political agency, I argue that utopianism is not incompatible with realism and non-deal theory in general, since it is possible for a utopian vision of the correct kind to successfully guide political agents such as contemporary politicians in ways which are both epistemically defensible and practically feasible. As such, certain limited forms of utopian vision are shown to be compatible with, even fruitful for, realist and non-ideal political theory. Finally, I consider some of the limitations of this particular model of realist political theorising, and argue that there are other approaches based on different, but not incompatible, models of political agency, such as that of social movements, to explore the possibility of even more ambitious forms of realist and non-ideal utopianism.