Impure theorizing in an imperfect world: Politics, utopophobia and critical theory in Geuss’s realism

An “impure” realism that draws extensively on non-philosophical sources challenged mainstream political theory in recent years. These “new realists” reject the “political moralism” of “ethics-first” approaches, holding that theory should start from and conflict. My basic thesis is that its focus on “the political” and its prevent realism from developing normative foundations that can ground criticism. Many realists, including one of its primary progenitors, Raymond Geuss, this problem. Interestingly, Geuss turns to critical theory to address this . While I welcome realism’s desire to make political theory more relevant to , I argue that Geuss’s attempt to address the status quo bias by importing ideology from the Frankfurt School is ultimately unsuccessful. In my reading the critical of the Frankfurt School thus emerges as a more plausible approach to grounding of the pathologies of the present.