Beyond Feasibility: Toward a Constructive Relationship Between Utopian Political Philosophy and Empirical Political Science

This paper dissects the relationship between utopian political thought and empirical constraints that are useful for it. It first develops a conception of utopian thinking that distinguishes it both from mere fantasy and from ideal theories that employ the language of utopia but remain conventional in scope, such as Rawls’s notion of a ‘realistic utopia’ or Estlund’s (2019) defence of ‘unrealistic justice’. In this account, utopian reasoning is understood as a style of theorising animated by an ethos of imaginative and creative exploration, rather than as a substantively prescriptive blueprint for a fully articulated ‘unrealistic’ or ‘ideal’ political order. The paper then outlines why, and in what ways, a utopian style of imaginative reasoning is indispensable to normative political theory. The second part surveys different kinds of empirical data in order to distinguish between permanent and contingent constraints. It clarifies how the descriptive, explanatory, and predictive aims of empirical political science that seek to identify regularities in the social world may themselves be shaped by historically situated contexts, and thus risk not only reproducing the status quo but also reifying socio-political patterns as permanent features of life. Drawing primarily on Levitas’s (1990, 2013) utopian method and Cohen’s (2008) defence of fact-insensitive principles, the paper argues that overly strict feasibility constraints suppress political imagination and unnecessarily foreclose valuable normative possibilities. It concludes by identifying which forms of empirical knowledge add appropriate rigour to ambitious utopian theorising, and which instead function to limit or distort it.