Inside Political Principles

Analyses of the relation between political principles and our factual understanding of the world centre on the extent to which real-world facts inform or justify normative theorising but dedicate comparatively little attention to what principles are or how they come to be what they are. This paper suggests that interest in justificatory relations is one-sided and argues for a new 'genetic' approach to understanding the nature of political principles, on which they are social constructions with complex composite grounds rather than maxims holding in virtue of fact-sensitive or fact-insensitive claims. The approach employs a grounding framework and involves mapping the construction schema of principles concerning e.g., normatively optimal actions, institutional design, or distributive arrangements. Its main motivation derives from the insight that understanding the emergence and make-up of principles rather than their justification might shed new light on their relation to how the world happens to be. The proposed view connects recent work in social metaphysics to methodological debates in political theory and has several advantages: a) it offers a more detailed, layered perspective of the sources and character of political principles, in contrast to simply assuming them to reflect primary commitments to values or moral norms; b) it moves past normative vs empirical 'priority' arguments to an explanation of how political principles are grounded in distinctive social patterns, specific conventions, and triggering-facts; c) it complements reflection over realism vs moralism in political theory with an analysis of how human thought and practice construct principles as social kinds; d) it stresses that methodological debates in political theory would benefit from a social metaphysics research programme: the recent methodological turn towards more engagement with the real world (which 'anchors' theory by providing justification, setting feasibility criteria, reviewing key notions, and connecting the conceptual with the practical) should include the study of the nature of social reality. After all, ideal theorising requires further causal and comparative analyses to understand the processes needed to realise proposed 'targets of reform' and the suitability of different states of affairs (Wiens 2016), whilst non-ideal theorising centred on understanding institutions and institutional principles (Waldron 2016) requires a clarification of the emergence, structure, and efficacy of such social kinds.