Being realistic and demanding the impossible

The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it. Michelangelo Buonarroti Fidelity to the facts in political theory is often associated with a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. Political realism—both in its classical manifestations and its contemporary revival1—is frequently linked to that tendency. For instance, in recent works we read that realism can lead to a “collapsing of the space for serious challenges to major social and political institutions (Markell, 2010, p. 176), that “the closer political theorists are to politics the more their own judgment and frailties will be tested” (Philp, 2012, p. 646), and that “realism will inevitably tend to nudge us towards a greater acceptance of the status quo, towards more modesty in the change that we are prepared to propose or demand” (Finlayson, 2017, p. 271). In this article I resist those claims, and contribute to the project of reclaiming the radical potential of political realism (Brinn, 2019; Cross, 2019; Honig & Stears, 2011; McKean, 2016; McQueen, 2016; Prinz, 2016; Raekstad, 2016; Prinz & Rossi, 2017). I develop a form of realism as genealogy–both debunking and vindicatory–and show how it can be more radical than both ideal and nonideal approaches to normative political theory. I arrive at this conclusion by addressing two related, partly methodological and partly substantive challenges facing realism. The first challenge concerns the very possibility of a realist normative political theory: if characterizing realism by contrasting it with moralism means that political judgment is not to be derived from pre-political moral commitments, what other sources of political normativity are available? The second challenge is status quo bias: does realism's fidelity to the facts condemn it to some form of conservative complacency? I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change—one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante-huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterize realism by contrasting it with both nonideal theory and utopianism (in a pejorative sense of the term, as I shall clarify). In a nutshell, realism differs from nonideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews plans of the perfect polity or for the correct course of political action. Utopianism, realism and nonideal theory are all technical terms, so my definitions will by necessity be stipulative, though, it is to be hoped, not overly controversial. With those distinctions in place it will become clear that moralism is at greater risk of status quo bias than realism because of its relative blindness to ideological bias. Whereas realism, I argue, is an approach grounded in our best social-scientific accounts of politics, but not in such a way as to jeopardize the transformative potential of our political imagination. The upshot is that, if we set aside the quasi-technocratic aspirations of a political theory geared to generate immediate policy guidance, realism (rather than nonideal theory) emerges as the best bet for those sympathetic to many of the concerns about fidelity to the facts of real politics raised in current methodological debates (e.g., Estlund, 2014, 2017; Freeden, 2012; Hamlin & Stemplowska, 2012; Horton, 2017; Miller, 2016; Mills, 2005; Rossi, 2016; Valentini, 2012; Wiens, 2012). That, however, this not true of all forms of realism. In fact, after briefly characterizing realism in the next section, I move on to distinguishing between ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism. I then show how each approach draws on different sources of normativity and, relatedly, exhibits fidelity to a different set of facts about politics. I associate ordorealism with the prioritization of peace and stability, contextual realism with practice-dependent norms, and radical realism with a form of ideology critique. I then contrast realism with nonideal theory and discuss utopianism and the prospects for a radical realism. I characterize a version of radical realism with a distinctive epistemic normativity, which has radical potential that surpasses what is found in moralist political theory and also opens a new option in the debate on the status of normativity in Marxism. That is because, while radical realism avoids potentially ideological moralizing, it can inform open-ended social critique as well as lend support to concrete forms of prefigurative politics. To be sure, that is not sufficient to establish the superiority of realism to moralism, and not even to identify the all-things-considered best form of realism. My aim here is more modest: I want to show that, pace some critics (Erman & Möller, 2015a; Estlund, 2017; Leader-Maynard & Worsnip, 2018; Scheuerman, 2013), contemporary realism is a distinctive and consistent position in normative political theory, and that at least one of its variants does not suffer from a status quo bias—rather, it is as radical as it gets. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and the boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus. 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