Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible

• In Event: Radical, Utopian and Transformative Thought in Political Realism

Abstract

Political realism is characterised by fidelity to the facts of politics and a refusal to derive political judgments from pre-political moral commitments. Even when they are not taken to make normative theorising impossible or futile, those characteristics are often thought to engender a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. I resist those claims by distinguishing between three variants of realism—ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism—and contrasting them with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. I then characterise a version of radical realism that eschews both feasibility constraints (unlike non-ideal theory) and prescriptions about the ideal society (unlike utopianism). I show how the resulting novel form of genealogical normative theory has more radical potential than morality-driven (and hence often ideological) political theory, and how it can support both open-ended, radical social critique and concrete forms of prefigurative political action.

Author

• Enzo Rossi, University of Amsterdam