Alternatives to moralism Political realist essays on power and legitimation

Where should we derive political norms from? The methodological debate between moralism and realism in political theory is largely shaped around this meta-normative question. While moralists suggest that political theory is a branch of moral philosophy, realists argue that there are sources of political normativity that are not reducible to moral considerations. However, what these non-moral sources are remains to be clarified. This thesis offers an account of political realism that answers the question of normativity in a pluralist manner. My main contention is that there are different sources of political normativity that we need to utilize for distinct tasks and contexts of legitimation. I characterize three different types of non-moral political normativity: the inner normativity of politics, epistemic normativity, and linguistic normativity. I propose that we employ these normative sources in three different contexts of legitimation: state power, socio-political order, and imposing limits on the boundaries of the political. First, the inner normativity of politics focuses on state power and identifying the conditions of political legitimacy that are derived from the point and purpose of state institutions. Its task is basically to set out a minimalistic conception of political legitimacy that concentrates on the danger of tyrannical states. Second, epistemic strategies such as the critique of flawed ideological beliefs and empirically informed conceptual innovation are employed to develop a more expansive criticism of the socio-political order: a complex ensemble of institutions including the state, culture, and the economy. These types of evaluations shift the focus from state institutions to the broader power structures that shape and determine the functioning of state power. The scope of social criticism expands in this approach. Third, the Wittgensteinian idea of linguistic normativity is offered to evaluate relatively invisible and informal power relations, namely depoliticizing and excluding certain views from public debate. In the absence of adequate moral and epistemic common ground, I show that linguistic normativity can be useful in criticizing excessive politicization in the political community, e.g., science denialists’ politicization of science.