Methods in Political Philosophy

Debates about ‘method’ in political theory/philosophy have expanded and diversified in recent years. Political philosophy has also felt the full of the pull of the methodological turn in political science, further putting the post-Rawlsian consensus under pressure. Well-known examples of such debates on methods in political philosophy includes the ideal/non-ideal theory debate (O’Neill, Stemplowska, Valentini), the moralism/realism debate (Williams, Geuss, Sleat & Rossi), the facts/principles debate (Cohen, Miller, Ronzoni), and the practice dependence/independence debate (James, Sangiovanni). All of these debates revolve around methodological concerns about justification in political philosophy. But methodological questions are also central to many other debates in political philosophy, including debates about feminism, the relations between history of political thought and systematic political philosophy, and the relation between political philosophy and empirical disciplines. The Methods in Political Philosophy section at the ECPR general conference has been a central venue for discussion of these and related questions in a number of years, previously at the ECPR conferences in Prague (2016), Oslo (2017), Hamburg (2018), Wroclaw (2019) and virtually in both 2020 and 2021. We are proposing another year of this section in 2022, which accompanies the application for a permanent standing group Methods of Normative Political Theory, which has been submitted to the ECPR Executive Committee.