Political Realism, Crisis Consciousness, and the Priority of Positive Freedom

Over the past decade, “political realism” has emerged as a prominent dissenting voice in political philosophy; at the same time, a lively debate has begun to take shape over what kind of normative commitments and possibilities for intervention come with an allegiance to the realist approach and its critique of “political moralism.” Critics of the approach claim that its emphasis on facts and contexts brings with it a conservative bent and a complacency with regard to the status quo, while advocates purport to develop an approach to politics that elaborates a distinctively political normativity. Our project contributes to this debate by exploring the commitments of a realist position to a conception of *positive freedom*. A cursory look at realist writings of liberty (Williams 2005; Hall 2017) might lead one to conclude that realism shares Isaiah Berlin’s preference for a negative conception of freedom—and, indeed, Williams’s criticism of “the Rousseau outlook” suggests an association of positive freedom with precisely the kind of moralism that realism rejects. But we believe this view simplistic, arguing that not only is realism compatible with a positive conception of freedom, but that a certain kind of positive freedom is a necessary condition of realist political normativity, while also showing how realism is able to reconstruct positive liberty in a way that frees it from the problematic associations for which it has famously drawn criticism in the past. We make our case via a reconstructive reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s _Critique and Crisis_. Like Berlin and Williams, Koselleck harshly criticized the promethean moralism of the Radical Enlightenment; however, he also recognized the unsustainability of any arrangement that tries to banish positive moral agency from the political realm. The inevitability and necessity of such agency comes into even sharper relief when we consider the essentially crisis-ridden character of modernity: modern society is structurally prone to periodic disruptions and breakdowns that call for urgent yet legitimate public action, which in turn must presuppose a capacity of social actors for *crisis consciousness*—that is, a capacity to take action on the basis of normative judgments about how their society ought to be and what has gone wrong. In a related vein, Judith Shklar warns of ever-present threats of regression in moments like these (Shklar 1984; 1989). We argue that, not only must such a capacity for crisis consciousness be described in terms of positive freedom, but any political realism aspiring to vigilance regarding such threats must include a robust conception of positive freedom in its normative repertoire.