Ethics and war Political realism Political essay
In the history of political thought, calls for “realism” are as frequent as they are diverse in their means and ends. For example, an increasingly 'realistic' assessment of human desires has been accompanied by the break with religious moralism, which has brought about a tendency – from Hobbes to eighteenth-century liberals – to seek political institutions that: represent a form of 'moral consensus' about the value of it as a system. Classical realism is also the position usually associated with Machiavelli and Hobbes, the position that power is the driving factor inherent in all social interactions, and that equilibrium is achieved through states', ISBN: 978-0231175289. In the Anglo-American world, political theory did not take the form it has today until the 1950s. Recently, “realism” has emerged, claiming that this project rests on a fundamental error: it confuses the proper relationship between politics and ethics. It requires what Raymond Geuss calls an “ethics first” approach. Political realism is often thought of as a reductive rationalist framework that describes politics purely in terms of empirically observable interests and power, but realism, as Galston 2010: 408 puts it, rather calls it 'for a more complex moral and political psychology' - a psychology sensitive to the non-rational and fictional as well as the rational. The recent revival of realism and in particular the rediscovery of its ethical dimension generally involves an explicit contrast between neorealism and realism, the former reportedly having 'stripped' the latter of its 'complexity and subtlety' Lebow, 2010, p. 26. While neorealism's place within the broader realist tradition is determined by that of Waltz, I discuss how scholarship on this topic draws from two different fields, international relations and political philosophy, and argue that there are good arguments for greater involvement between the two. I begin by delineating different types of realism, showing that the term encompasses a wide range of methodological and political approaches. Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, Political Theory, and the Critique of Morality by David S. Owen. This article argues for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have made the mistake of increasingly centering their approach, Expand. 10. PDF.