Realism recurs across historiography, political theory, literary criticism, and socialscience methodology, yet no existing account identifies what generates it as anintellectual attitude across these domains. This paper proposes a unified definition:realism is the acceptance of the absence of divine will in the causal explanation ofempirical events. So defined, realism is not a set of claims about the world but atransformation applied to explanatory structures—one that simultaneously producestwo conditions: the explicability of outcomes (because immanent causes can beanalyzed) and the possibility of intervention (because immanent causes can be actedupon). The definition is not atheism; it brackets divine intention from empiricalcausation while leaving the metaphysical question of God's existence untouched. Theverb "acceptance" rather than "exclusion" marks a crucial distinction: the realist doesnot expel the gods but recognizes that they were never present in the causal chain. Thepaper demonstrates this operation across four canonical cases—Thucydides,Machiavelli, Flaubert, and Weber—and derives from the definition a diagnosticreversal test: any explanatory structure that is transcendent, opaque, and foreclosesintervention reinstates fate under a secular name. General equilibrium in economics,the p-value threshold in statistics, and the anthropic principle in cosmology are shownto exhibit this structure. Realism, on this account, is not a doctrine of resignation butthe structural precondition for intervention—a permanent task rather than a completedachievement.
Franny Philos Sophia (Thu,) studied this question.