Over 2024, I had three articles connected to my secondary research project on the methodology of political theory and engagement with 'real politics' published, all connected with different aspects of ongoing debates within political theory and political philosophy about how we should go about building and justifying normative or ethical arguments about politics.
All three articles are available for free through open access agreements with the journals in question, and can be found through the links below. The first of these articles, 'The logic of idealization in political theory' was published in the American Journal of Political Science, one of the preeminent scholarly journals of politics research. The article addresses a long-standing debate in political theory over the place of 'ideal theory', 'idealization' and 'idealized models' in normative political theory - in short, debates over how far appeals to imaginary, somewhat idealized situations can play a role in how we justify arguments about what to do in our real, unideal political world. I argue that this debate has been clouded by an ambiguity between two very different kinds of appeal to idealized models in political argument - what I refer to as a 'telic' understanding of idealization and a 'heuristic' understanding of idealization. Telic idealization, I suggest, is rightly controversial and dubious, but shifting our focus to heuristic idealization provides a strong basis for thinking that idealized models have an important role to play in our thinking about politics. The second article, 'What is political moralism?, has been published in Topoi, and is the last of three papers I have written on the methodological debate between 'political realists' and 'political moralists' within political theory (following on from 'Is there a distinctive political normativity?', published in Ethics and co-authored with Alex Worsnip, and 'Political Realism as Methods not Metaethics,' published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice). All three of these articles have sought to critique the way many (though not all) political realists have portrayed and constructed the basic terms of this debate. Overall, I have tried to articulate a position that is sympathetic to realists' goals (to create greater space within political theory for attention to real politics and the distinctive context of political action) but that rejects realists' suggestion that such goals need to be pursued by some kind of curtailment of the place of morality or moral normativity in political theory. 'What is political moralism?' argues more specifically that realists have tended to rely on an inaccurate picture of what most of their putative opponents - 'political moralists' - actually believe and argue, and tries to offer a more accurate account of what political moralism (if it is really the 'mainstream view' of political theory in the way realists suggest) actually consists of. The third article, 'Comparative Historical Analysis in Political Theory,' has just been published by Res Publica, and makes the case for adapting a classic methodological approach in political science - Comparative Historical Analysis - for more normative research projects in political theory. Like my other articles, my argument here seeks to find ways to allow political theory to ground itself more effectively in real world cases and real world politics, but in ways compatible with more traditional methods of philosophical inquiry, outlining three specific uses (deductive, inductive, and casuistic) that of comparative analysis of historical cases for political theory research. Comments are closed.
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