What is Political About Political Feasibility?

What, if anything, is distinctively political about political feasibility? While feasibility has attracted increasing attention in political philosophy over the past two decades, the specifically political dimension of feasibility remains undertheorized. In the existing literature, political feasibility is either treated as an umbrella notion encompassing all practical constraints, or as a singular constraint alongside others such as economic or psychological feasibility. This paper argues that both views obscure the distinctive structure of the political domain. We sketch a pathway account of political feasibility that identifies its structural core: the interrelation between agent capacity, enactment, power configuration, and compliance. On this basis, we propose a working definition of political feasibility as the existence of a politically mediated pathway between present conditions and a desired outcome, and situate this account within a broader metatheoretical framework requiring that it satisfies both a functional constraint (i.e., that it serves the appropriate theoretical role) and a fitness constraint (i.e., that it captures the empirical character of political life).