Ideology Critique Without Moralism

There has been a renaissance of ideology critique in Anglo-American philosophy over the last few years. These philosophers—most notably Sally Haslanger—put the tools of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology in the service of the traditional aims of critical theory. In this paper we offer some constructive criticism of those approaches, and make the case for an alternative form of ideology critique inspired by the realist turn in contemporary political philosophy. While we share a broad commitment to ideology critique as the identification of epistemic faults in beliefs or concepts, we take issue with the grounds on which most philosophers propose to debunk ideologies. We argue that identifying ideological flaws on the basis of moral qualities risks reproducing the very same type of flaws. We then propose our own approach to ideology critique, grounded in empirically-informed genealogies rather than moral commitments. Through a case study of contemporary neo-patriarchal societies in the Middle East, we show how this approach, which we call radical realist social analysis, can debunk the legitimation stories of social practices and political institutions.