Against Realist Ideology Critique

Abstract

Is it possible to do ideology critique without morality? In recent years a small group of theorists has attempted to develop such an account and, in doing so, makes claim to a certain sort of “radical realism” distinguished by the ambition to ground political judgments and prescriptions in nonmoral values, principles, or concepts. This essay presents a twofold critique of this realist ideology critique (RIC) by first offering an internal critique of the approach and then arguing that the very attempt to do political theory generally—and ideology critique more specifically—in a way that abjures morality is misguided. In doing so, I contribute both to current debates around “new” ideology critiques and to contested questions about what it means to do political theory realistically.

Introduction

Among the variety of “new” ideology critiques that have appeared over the past few years, there is one that claims a certain sort of realism. ¹ Situating itself within the resurgence of realist political thought that has taken place over the past decade or so, this realist ideology critique (RIC) represents one of the main theoretical developments that aims to make good on what its advocates take to be realism’s fundamental commitment to seek the foundation of political judgments and prescriptions in nonmoral values, principles, or concepts. ² On this understanding, the opposition between moralism and realism is one between theories that are grounded in moral claims and those that are not. As Enzo Rossi puts it, realists believe that “properly political principles don’t draw on the same sources of normativity as moral principles.” ³ Advocates of RIC often take themselves to be espousing a particular variation of realism, however, one they usually label “radical.” This “radical realism” draws inspiration from the work of Raymond Geuss, ⁴ which is similar in many ways to the realism espoused by Bernard Williams. ⁵ Geuss’s work has also proven to be hugely influential in the rejuvenation of realist thought, but it is differentiated mainly in its open hostility to the liberal capitalist status quo. ⁶ The willingness to critique rather than justify the status quo is, of course, familiar to all forms of ideology critique, realist or not. Where RIC may add a novel and valuable perspective is in the attempt to develop a nonmoralist form of ideology critique. ⁷

In this essay I will present a twofold critique of RIC. Having set out the main and distinctive features of RIC in the section on “Realistic ideology critique,” I then provide an internal critique of the theory in the section “Against realist ideology critique.” Finally, in the “Against radical realism” section, I turn to a more general discussion of why the very attempt to do political theory generally—and ideology critique more specifically—in a way that abjures morality is misguided. That final section also speaks to a broader debate within realism today. Whether a realistic political theory requires refraining from employing moral concepts and values, as the radical realists insist, or not is probably the main point of contention between contemporary realists. Those who deny that this is the case, like myself, think that the key insight from realist thought is that we must be attentive to the ways in which our values and concepts, including those we ordinarily think of as moral, need to be somehow appropriate for the political sphere. ⁸ That is, our values and concepts need to be political in the right way, as it might be put. This essay does not further develop that alternative case here, but it does seek to give us further critical reasons for thinking that the position adopted by the radical realists is untenable.

Realistic ideology critique

Any discussion of ideology is fraught with contentious definitional issues. Matters are somewhat easier here because we are interested only in ideology as understood by contemporary ideology critics. While there are “active disputes” between them, Kirun Sankaran rightly and helpfully identifies a common notion of ideology that they all share. For these ideology critics—and here he includes the likes of Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger, Rahel Jaeggi, Charles Mills, Tommie Shelby, and Jason Stanley—an ideology “is a pervasive epistemic distortion that helps maintain and reproduce bad social arrangements in virtue of its distorting character.” ⁹ Three aspects of this definition are worth drawing attention to:

1. (1) Ideologies are a shared understanding or common set of meanings: “Ideologies provide sets of common understandings or interpretative tools that allow us to understand our circumstances and respond appropriately to them.” ¹⁰

2. (2) Ideologies are distortions: “They [ideologies] guide our attention in ways that occlude important and valuable features of the world via mechanisms like moral legitimation, by which immoral social arrangements are portrayed as moral, as well as ‘naturalisation’ or ‘reification’ by which ‘something socially “made” is imagined to be something naturally or irreducibly ‘given’.” ¹¹

3. (3) Ideologies explain the persistence of bad social arrangements: “[I]deology stabilises and reproduces bad social arrangements by providing a distorted set of social meanings and shared understanding.” ¹²

The role of ideology critique is to ameliorate those bad social arrangements by exposing them as ideological. ¹³

While radical realists readily accept the first two aspects of ideology here as well as the general purpose of ideology critique, they disagree in their understanding of the third (explanatory) aspect. The fundamental complaint is that these ideology critics “retain their discipline’s tendency to centre morality in political theorising and so identify ideological flaws based on moral commitments: ultimately, ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice, oppression, and the like.” ¹⁴ The concern is the employment of moral values to explain the “badness” of the social arrangements that ideologies help maintain and reproduce. Ideology critics may not employ the same moral values in their critiques or do so in the same way or to the same extent, but each seeks an explanation for the role of ideology in the persistence of morally objectionable social arrangements. Sally Haslanger, for instance, describes ideology (in its pejorative sense) as “organis[ing] us in ways that are unjust, or ways that skew our understanding of what is valuable.” ¹⁵ Others, including Stanley, Shelby, Hilkje Hänel, and Katherine Jenkins are also said to invoke moral notions in explaining the “badness” of the systems ideologies maintain. ¹⁶ It is not just the new ideology critics, though, who are guilty in this regard. It turns out that Bernard Williams, one of the leading influences on the recent renaissance of realist thought, is said to make a similar mistake. The radical realists laud the central thought of his “critical theory principle,” ¹⁷ namely, that “there is something wrong with trying to justify a sociopolitical system through a normative commitment that is itself a direct product of the coercive power relations within that system.” ¹⁸ However, Williams supposedly takes a wrong turn in saying that his view shares with the tradition of Critical Theory the interest that the disadvantaged have in their own emancipation. As Williams puts it, “the interest of the disadvantaged lies in an aspiration to the most basic sense of freedom, that of not being in the power of another, in particular not in the unrecognised power of another.” ¹⁹

What is wrong with any of this? The charge that radical realists make against ideology critics, including Williams, is one of moralism. Realism, at least in its most recent form, defines itself as anti-moralist, though it should be said that there are increasingly disparate views among realists as to what the vice of moralism consists in. ²⁰ Insofar as different realists pursue different projects, this is often because they have differing views of what a moralistic approach to political theory is and why or how it should be avoided. Radical realists tend to have the most stringent understanding of moralism; a political theory is moralist if it employs moral standards, values, principles, and so on. ²¹ Hence, it is a necessary, if not necessarily sufficient, condition of a political theory being realistic that it refrain from appealing to or employing moral values. Morality is to be avoided because, as Geuss memorably puts it, “Ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future.” ²² What are often taken to be commonsense moral truths are often the result of sedimented power relations, the outcome of prior struggles whose political origins have become obscured to us. If that is the case, then appeals to “prepolitical” moral values cannot be assumed to be free from the sort of distortions that ideology critique is meant to uncover. Concepts and values such as justice and freedom, for instance, have a history and that history is at least in part political. What we think about such values, what they are, what they demand, and so on, is connected to the ways in which they developed in and through political contestations. As such, why assume that our ways of conceiving of justice and freedom do not distort our understanding and be themselves part of the explanation of the persistence of bad social arrangements? Might they not also be ideological? If so, radical realists contend, we need to find a different way of motivating ideology critique.

They find such nonmoral grounds in epistemic considerations. ²³ Their primary concern is with the epistemic defects of self-justifying power. The thought goes as follows. We have good reasons for thinking that people who are judges in their own cases are more likely to reach verdicts that favor their own interests and less likely to reach a verdict that best fits the evidence. This is part of the reason, for instance, why we think it completely inappropriate for authors to be reviewers of their own work. This is not a moral judgment, for we do not need to assume that an author is exceptionally self-interested or particularly over-confident in their own brilliance to think that any judgment they came to should be treated as suspect. The point is that we know human cognition is prone to a variety of biases and prejudices, all of which often fall under the heading of “motivated reasoning” that make it difficult for people to come to appropriate judgments in their own cases.

Now imagine a different case. A dominant group sits at the top of a social hierarchy and is, by virtue of its position within that system, empowered to disseminate beliefs that legitimize existing social practices, political institutions, and power structures more widely across that society. The set of all such beliefs that play this legitimating role is our ideology. ²⁴ We tend to think that it is a bad idea to take an authority at their word when they say they are an authority. Hence, where social hierarchies are such that dominant groups can exploit power asymmetries to spread the ideology that legitimate their rule, potentially leading dominated groups to internalize that ideology, we should be suspicious of such self-justifications. They seem to represent a form of epistemic circularity. The real epistemic concern, though, stems not from the circularity of the justifications of beliefs per se—there can be benign forms of circularity—but rather, that self-justifying power will generate “epistemically suspect” beliefs. This is because of the likely influence of politically motivated reasoning in the belief-formation processes of hierarchical societies. Politically motivated reasoning has been helpfully summarized by Dan Kahan as the following:

When positions on some risk or other policy relevant fact have come to assume a widely recognised social meaning as a marker of membership within identity-defining groups, members of those groups can be expected to conform their assessments of all manner of information—from persuasive advocacy to reports of expert opinion; from empirical data to their own brute sense impressions—to the position associated with the respective groups. ²⁵

A substantial body of empirical work now exists that attests to the prevalence and ubiquity of politically motivated reasoning among individuals and groups. In that regard beliefs that have been reached via politically motivated reasoning are epistemically flawed. They have been reached for reasons other than that they best track the truth, though those who hold politically motivated beliefs are not conscious of that fact and both take their beliefs to be true and to hold them because they are true. Given its pervasiveness and the obvious interest the dominant group has in reproducing and sustaining the ideology that buttresses their social position, we have reason to suspect that politically motivated reasoning has played some role in their support for and promulgation of those beliefs. We should therefore judge politically motivated beliefs to be epistemically flawed, and so continued reliance upon them to be unjustified. Moreover, by virtue of their asymmetrical power and ability successfully to disseminate those epistemically flawed beliefs, the dominant group can effectively shield them from contestation. This makes it much more difficult than it would be in less hierarchical societies, where various groups’ beliefs would be able to compete on a more equal basis to curb the biases within the epistemically flawed beliefs.

The central claim seems to be that we lack epistemic warrant for continuing to hold beliefs in hierarchical societies where the following (jointly sufficient) empirical conditions hold. (1) They have been produced and reproduced by the dominant group within that society (the motivated reasoning concern). (2) The power of that dominant group has protected the beliefs from contestation such that it becomes much more difficult for their biases to be identified and rectified (the rectification concern). In essence, where their prevalence across society can be explained by hierarchical power structures and we judge their persistence as instrumental to the preservation of the social order that relies upon those power structures, then we should consider those beliefs debunked on epistemic grounds. The beliefs are ideological in the pejorative sense; they provide a common set of meanings whose distortion of our understanding of the world explains the persistence of hierarchical social arrangements.

It should be said that RIC is unlikely to identify beliefs as problematic that would not also be recognized as such by other approaches, though their reason for thinking them so is clearly where the meaningful difference is intended to lie. It is no surprise to find, for instance, that justifications of patriarchal orders should be viewed with deep misgivings. It is more original to hear that the problem with those justifications is epistemic, that is, they are likely the result of politically motivated reasoning by the political elites who have an interest in retaining the dominant position in the social order the beliefs justify. “Folk” commitments to a right to private property, of the ilk Robert Nozick famously invokes in his justification of radical libertarian social orders, ²⁶ should be disqualified from playing a role in political justifications by virtue of the fact that they were themselves—as a matter of historical fact, it is claimed—the product of the state and its elites. For “reasons of epistemic caution,” those beliefs “should not feature in arguments about state legitimacy.” ²⁷ Because what realist ideology critics are seeking to identify are beliefs’ epistemic rather than moral flaws, they believe they will be able to draw upon the findings of empirical social sciences to show where self-justifying power has worked to create distortions, ²⁸ as when they employ historical anthropology to account for belief in private property, despite it being the product of the very elites and social systems that it legitimates. ²⁹

Against realist ideology critique

The first simple point to make here that is nevertheless problematic for RIC, is that it is not clear that it follows from the empirical conditions that an agent is no longer justified or warranted in believing p. The thought, as we have seen, is something like:

X is not justified in believing p where p has been produced or reproduced by the dominant group and through their power made it difficult for p to be subjected to critical analysis. ³⁰

In what sense is belief in p “not justified”? What is it about the empirical conditions that are supposed to undermine the justification of p? Advocates of RIC are not as clear as they need to be on this crucial point. The answer that I believe they want to give is that the empirical conditions demonstrate that p is biased in serving the interests of the dominant group. However, there are two significant problems with this answer.

First, at most what follows from the empirical conditions is that it should render belief p suspicious. RIC is improbably strong on this reading, insofar as it seems to rely upon a necessary causal chain along the following lines:

The dominant group has an interest in legitimating its social position.

Those interests trigger various cognitive mechanisms associated with politically motivated reasoning.

This corrupts the belief-formation process, leading the agent to a biased belief p that legitimates their position.

The difficulty is that we cannot say that there is a straightforward, automatic, or inevitable causal connection between the presence of a relevant interest (or desire, wish, and so on) and the triggering of politically motivated reasoning. If there were, then we would implausibly have to say that merely by virtue of a dominant group having the relevant interest in a belief being true, the belief is therefore biased. Moreover, it cannot be true that every belief that serves a significant interest, and therefore could possibly be affected by politically motivated reasoning, necessarily will be. At most we can say that the presence of significant interests in p being true generates a reasonable suspicion that a belief is the result of politically motivated reasoning. Sometimes, radical realists seem content for RIC merely to identify beliefs where such suspicion is appropriate. The trouble here is that it is indeterminate what, if anything, follows from having identified a belief as potentially biased. It certainly seems far too quick to think that such suspicion automatically renders beliefs “untrustworthy” or that we lack epistemic warrant to believe them, as if even reasonable suspicion leads to or is equivalent to the stronger conclusion that p is not justified and x is not justified in believing p.

Second, there is also reason to suspect that if suspicion is intended to do that much work in the theory, it will essentially render the RIC a crude and blunt theoretical instrument. No hierarchical order is going to be justified by ideologies other than those that justify the dominance of the group that sits atop that hierarchy. If they did not, then they would not be justifications of that social order. They would be justifications of different social orders, not necessarily less hierarchical but critical of the status quo and with different groups in positions of dominance. In that sense, all dominant groups will always have an interest in the preservation and dissemination of ideologies that justify their rule. If we accept that that interest is significant enough to trigger politically motivated reasoning, then it seems that the interest in sustaining the status quo is sufficient to raise suspicion. The upshot is that, on RIC’s terms, belief in the ideologies supporting all hierarchical orders will be deemed epistemically unwarranted simply by virtue of justifying a hierarchical order. It is unclear how an ideology could escape such a judgment. As a matter of political preference I imagine that many advocates of RIC would be happy to endorse this outcome, but it further shows how mere suspicion that a belief has been affected by politically motivated reasoning cannot plausibly bear the epistemic weight the argument requires.

It is implausible to think that, as a general epistemic norm, I am not justified in holding a belief if it serves the interests of any group. This is for the obvious reason that there are many such beliefs that will nevertheless turn out to be true and we are warranted in holding beliefs that are true regardless of who they benefit or disadvantage. Is the norm more plausible in the sort of cases RIC is intended to apply to, that is, those where a dominant group enjoys relatively much greater power in hierarchical societies? One natural concern we might have about such power is that it would allow the dominant group to produce and reproduce beliefs that we judge to be unfair, unjust, immoral, corrupt, and so on, by virtue of unduly legitimating the distribution of social goods (including power) to themselves; for those reasons, we could think it justified to reject such beliefs. However, those are not the sort of (moralist) judgments RIC is interested in making and it cannot be bias—in the sense of unduly favoring one’s interests—that is the cause of the radical realists’ concern about power. So we still need to know why the power identified in the empirical conditions undermines the justification for holding the relevant belief. The only way that I can see this can be made coherent is if their concern is that the power of the dominant group taints or corrupts the belief-formation process in such a way that it generates false beliefs that are then disseminated through society more widely by that same power. Put differently, the worry is not that the belief-formation process has been distorted such that it produces biased beliefs that serve the interests of the dominant group, but that it produces beliefs that are false as a result of a belief-formation process corrupted by their biased interests in protecting their position in the social hierarchy. By virtue of being false, we then have an answer as to why we are not warranted in holding those beliefs.

This is an issue for RIC because it is an answer that Ugur Aytac and Rossi want to avoid giving. They want to emphasize justification rather than truth. ³¹ This comes out most clearly in how they believe that their epistemic abstinence avoids the genetic fallacy, for, they remind us, the ways in which beliefs are produced and reproduced rather than their propositional content is the focus of analysis in RIC. Hence, they are not making “the mistake of confusing a blemish in the causal history of a belief, concept or practice with a lack of arguments in its support.” ³² Here, I do not think they quite follow the implications of their own argument—in particular, what it means when we purport politically motivated reasoning to agents. However—and this is why I believe this to be a significant problem—while these implications hold the possibility of making better sense of RIC, it does so at what I think its advocates will deem too high of an epistemic price.

The price is that politically motivated reasoning generates a certain sort of epistemic suspicion, namely, that the belief-formation process has been corrupted in such a way that the resultant belief is untrue. Reasoning motivated at the directional goal of protecting one’s existing political beliefs or identities contrasts with reasoning motivated by accuracy and the desire to arrive at true beliefs. The epistemic worry raised by politically motivated reasoning is that it renders people unable to evaluate information objectively or to arrive at conclusions free from error given the evidence at hand. Such reasoning leads people not just to convenient or self-serving conclusions, but to the wrong conclusion, the conclusion other than that which the evidence best supports. We invoke politically motivated reasoning as a way of explaining why it is someone or some group holds false beliefs, but it is a particular sort of explanation distinct from, say, cognitive errors caused by tiredness, lack of due attention, or selecting the wrong methodology or means of enquiry.

To take a stock example of the motivated reasoning involved in self-deception, when a parent refuses to believe that their child is taking drugs, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are, we readily identify this as an instance of self-deception rather than, for example, stupidity because we can see how they would be (unconsciously) motivated to reach that conclusion (by their desire to think best of their children, and so on). The desire for the world to be other than it is triggers various cognitive mechanisms that result in the self-deceived, false belief. What the appeal to self-deception explains is not just how a person came to believe not-p, but how they came to believe not-p when p is the belief that best fits the evidence. Insofar as we might say that the parent’s belief in not-p is untrustworthy or epistemically unwarranted because of motivated reasoning, what we must mean is not just that the belief-formation process was flawed, but because of that that the resulting belief is false. That is what the appeal to motivated reasoning is supposed to explain. Put differently, when we attribute motivated reasoning to someone, we are saying that they are not justified in holding the relevant belief, because it is false where its falsehood is caused by particular failures in the belief-formation process.

It is true that the presence of politically motivated reasoning in a belief-formation process is not itself a reason to think that a belief is false, but it is an explanation of why someone came to hold a false belief. It only makes sense to attribute politically motivated reasoning to someone in cases where, in some sense that would need greater specification, the evidence speaks in favor of p but they have come to believe not-p. There is a presumption, therefore, that if an agent were to follow the evidence or argument where it leads, it would not lead to where they ended up. That, for sure, does not mean that RIC falls foul of the genetic fallacy, but it does mean that in the process of analysis, RIC is saying something about the propositional value of the belief. The worry is not merely that the dominant group is biased in its own favor, but that such biases lead its members—and then through their power leads others also—to hold false beliefs.

Putting greater emphasis on this dimension of politically motivated reasoning offers one way in which RIC could be amended to make it more plausible and coherent. This is because the epistemic warrant for holding a belief turns not on whether it serves the interest of the dominant group, which is no reason at all, but rather, how the power of the dominant group corrupted the belief-formation process in such a way that renders the ensuing belief false. But it would not necessarily be an easy amendment to make in practice. Recall that advocates of RIC believe that they can draw upon the findings of empirical social science to show where self-justifying power has worked to create epistemic distortions. One of the empirical examples Aytac and Rossi discuss is the authoritarian populist transformation of Turkey over the past decade. We are plausibly told that extensive analysis of President Tayyip Erdoğan’s speeches “identifies patterns of patriarchal framings that marginalize antigovernment opposition by portraying protesters as unruly women and youngsters who do not respect the norms defining roles and behaviour appropriate to their position in a patriarchal hierarchy.” ³³ That the (male) political elites have significant interests at stake means that we readily consider their own belief in and deployment of patriarchal framings and discourses as possible candidates for being the result of politically motivated reasoning. When we purport politically motivated reasoning to them, though, we are not just saying that they have interests in play, so to speak, that explain why they hold such beliefs, but also that they are wrong to hold those beliefs because they are false. To make good on claims regarding politically motivated reasoning, RICs are going to need to do more than indicate alignment between beliefs and interests. They also need to show that when elites portray anti-government opposition as “unruly women” and “tearaways,” they are making the sort of cognitive errors associated with motivated reasoning that has led them not to follow the evidence as they should. It cannot only be that such beliefs are self-serving; they must also be wrong.

This lands RIC in some rather choppy philosophical waters. Substantiating the cognitive mistakes that dominant groups have made is going to require advocates of RIC not only to say something about the propositional value of such normative judgments, which they do not want to do, but to express something like an error theory of moral or normative judgments. This is easier to do with empirical beliefs—such as whether a child is using drugs or not—because we can relatively easily identify where and how cognitive errors have led their parent to the wrong conclusion (for example, the negative or positive misinterpretation of data conducive to the desired conclusion). However, as Williams rightly notes in justifying why his critical theory principle employs only an error theory in relation to how people come to hold their beliefs, there is no agreement over what an error theory for moral or normative judgments would look like. ³⁴ In wrongly coming to see government opposition as caused only by unruly women, what did elites overlook or fail to consider? What factors should they have given more credence or which ones did they give undue significance in their deliberations? Which forms of evidence did they give undue weight—and what even counts as evidence in such matters? Did they apply the wrong methodology? And so on. Maybe advocates of RIC think that such accounts are available to us in such cases, though the onus will be on them to tell us what they are. The point is that without such accounts, all we are left with is the thought that such beliefs are self-serving, but that is not all that is implied by politically motivated reasoning.

To sum up, my argument is that RIC as stated is inadequate insofar as (1) it can only explain why people might be suspicious of certain beliefs, but suspicion does not equate to lacking epistemic warrant in holding a belief, and (2) the justification for holding a belief must make some reference to its propositional value and not just whether it serves the interests of the dominant group. I have suggested that RIC’s use of politically motivated reasoning potentially rectifies these issues by making the judgment turn not merely on whether the belief serves the interests of the dominant group, but rather, in how the interests of the dominant group negatively affect the belief-formation process such that the propositional value of the resulting beliefs is called into question. But doing so undercuts one of the aims of RIC, which is to deliver something like objective normative judgments with a limited and uncontroversial set of epistemic resources.

Against radical realism

The attempt to develop a form of ideology critique that eschews morality and employs only critical tools from epistemology is radical realism’s endeavor to make good on its ambition of developing a nonmoral form of political normativity. Characterizing realism as avidly nonmoral is, I think, unhelpful in a myriad of ways. As we have seen, the radical realists take their cue from Geuss’s comment that “[e]thics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future.” This essentially Nietzschean thought is not identical to, but also not too distant from, Williams’s own realist motivations, captured in his slogan “in the beginning was the deed” that underpins the contrast he seeks to draw between realism and moralism. ³⁵ The key difference for Williams is in how, as forms of doing political theory, they relate morality to political practice. Moralist theories take their tasks to be the construction of moral principles, values, concepts, and so on that are then applied—through what he calls either the enactment or structural model—to political practice. The construction of those moral values is something that takes place prior to politics in the sense that the realities of actual politics do not feature in how those values are constructed. You get the morality right first and then apply it to politics; hence, Geuss prefers describing moralist political theory as “applied ethics.” Williams rejects this moralism because he accepts, with Geuss, that such a view overlooks the extent to which our moral concepts have histories that are themselves, at least in part, political. For example, he encourages us to avoid foundationalist approaches to the justification of the liberal state that give a central role to the autonomy of individuals, because he recognizes how autonomy as a value or concept is a product of the same forces that led to the liberal state. As such, it cannot provide the foundation for the practices that created it.

What this rules out, therefore, is a particular way of conceiving of the relationship between morality and politics. What it does not rule out is the more local application of moral values, including, presumably, in some forms of internal ideology critique. Neither, importantly, does it justify the outright denunciation of all moral values on the basis of being unacceptably tainted by political power. Much of Williams’s oeuvre is an attempt to see what moral values we can and should continue to have confidence in. Not all values make it out of such analysis unscathed, in particular, those associated with the “morality system.” ³⁶ Toward the end of his life, Williams developed a form of vindicatory naturalist genealogy as a way of approaching the question of what can still be said for particular values. ³⁷ When he talks in Truth and Truthfulness of his critical theory principle as speaking to “the most basic sense of freedom, that of not being in the power of another, in particular not in the unrecognised power of another,” this should be read (I believe) in light of his attempt to provide at least the outlines of such a genealogical vindication of freedom as a political value in his synchronously published article “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value.” ³⁸ To dismiss the appeal to freedom in the critical theory principle as simple moralism therefore misses a great deal of what Williams says about how we could construct freedom as a political value that is stable under reflection.

Nothing I have said here, of course, amounts to a defense of Williams’s position against the radical realists. Though I am sympathetic, I raise it as a way of insisting that radical realists owe us more. They need to tell us why the point about ethics being “dead politics” justifies a morally abstentious political theory, granting the possibility (which few would actually accept) that any theory can actually escape being ethically laden. What I say in the previous section also holds true here, namely, that at most, the radical realists’ arguments justify adopting a stance of suspicion toward our moral values, not their wholesale abandonment. ³⁹ Indeed, to think it does would be to give a certain primacy to moral theory over our lived moral lives in which those values may play an important role that we should expect would be anathema to the realist spirit. Those misgivings show that the terms we use deserve careful examination before they can be put to work in our theorizing about politics, but there is no reason to prejudge the outcome of those analyses. They assume what Williams rightly thinks could only possibly be shown through analysis: none of our moral concepts has any chance of being anything like we take them to be. Even Geuss’s caveat that ethics is “usually” dead politics should guard us against such sweeping and indiscriminate assumptions. Radical realists also need to tell us why the sort of vindicatory naturalist genealogy employed by Williams (among others) is not something that they too could endorse and employ in relation to moral values, not least because they have often voiced naturalist aspirations and support for genealogical approaches. ⁴⁰ The necessity of a nonmoral political normativity is, therefore, underdetermined by what radical realists tell us.

Separate from the question of whether we can provide a defense of the values the radical realists reject out of hand as moralist is the further question of why we should consider them moral values at all. Precisely how do radical realists distinguish moral values from all other types of values? We are not really told, but the demarcation is not an obvious one. Is freedom not a political value, for instance, either distinct from being a moral value, in addition to such, or in such a way that renders the distinction between moral and political values unhelpful in the first place? ⁴¹ A case could presumably be made for any of those positions, but then I am inclined to believe that it does not make sense to think that the central concern underpinning RIC is the desire to avoid moralism at all. The worry about morality is that it is, in an important sense, tainted by or the product of the power that it is then used to justify. In principle, there is no reason why that same concern might not be applied to all sorts of domains: legal, aesthetic, technological, and so on. Aytac and Rossi concede the point that epistemic norms might also be “dead politics,” though they insist that (a) this does not threaten our central epistemological notions of objectivity, justification, and the like; and (b) as a matter of (presumably historical) fact, epistemology is less politically compromised than morality, and hence epistemic norms can be considered less controversial than moral ones. ⁴² The issue is essentially one of proximity to power. Morality is closer to power by virtue of including among its materials the concepts and values often used to justify social orders, a consequence of which is that their very meanings are rendered politically suspicious. However, if that is right, then the objection is only contingently related to morality. What radical realists are really against is how power corrupts the justification of social orders through hijacking the meaning of the relevant justificatory concepts to the benefit of the dominant group, whatever those concepts might be. It is not really the use of morality radical realists oppose in the justification of social order as much as the ways in which power politically taints morality as it features in those justifications. Building upon the above, even if one believes freedom to be a political rather than moral value, however that is explained, it would still seem vulnerable to the central charge that it is the product of the very power that it seeks to justify. The same would be true of the concepts justice, equality, and so on. Nothing in essence changes whether the value in question is deemed political or moral (legal, aesthetic, and so on). Put bluntly, the issue is proximity to power, not morality.

This is important in three ways. First, this means that casting realism as anti-moralism cannot be right, even on its own terms. It misidentifies the true worry that must apply, at least in principle, to a broader category of values and concepts than those of morality: any that are used in the self-justification of authority. One thing that might be said in response is that, in practice rather than principle, contemporary political theory is dominated by moralist approaches, and hence casting realism as anti-moralism captures or draws attention to its uniqueness vis-à-vis the status quo. Even according to how radical realists understand moralism, that does not seem correct. For that to be true, it would have to be the case that most theorists understand and employ terms like freedom as if they were exclusively moral and not political values—again, however that distinction is understood. I see no reason to think that is right as a current feature of the discipline. ⁴³

Second, if the central issue is how power taints morality, then that seems not only to leave open the possibility for philosophical projects that aspire to develop universal moral theories free from power (à la Kantian or Habermasian approaches, for instance), but, moreover, posit such theories as the ideal solution to the problem it identifies. That would put radical realism quite at odds with much of the rest of the realist tradition that has, for various reasons, judged such approaches anathema.

Third, there is something peculiar about a theory of politics that makes a claim to being realistic—both in the sense of attentive to the realities of politics and situated within the realist intellectual tradition—viewing power as something that needs to be essentially expunged from political life, at least insofar as power might function in relation to politics’ epistemological dimensions and the ever-central question of the legitimation of coercive orders. A sense of the ubiquity and permanence of power is a familiar, characteristic, maybe even defining feature of realist theories of politics, so that the realist credentials of a theory seeking to diminish power (maybe completely) must be questionable. Issues directly pertinent to the topic—and which you would probably expect an avowedly realist approach at least to recognize—fall completely out of the picture. Perhaps most important is the question of when and the extent to which politics might require or depend upon individuals or groups holding beliefs that from an epistemic perspective they are not warranted in holding. Might the demands of epistemic normativity clash with the demands of politics? In politics is it always good that our beliefs be justified or true? Do we always want or need our beliefs to be true? Might there not be good political reasons for thinking that it is sometimes better or appropriate for people to hold beliefs that are only imperfectly justified or outright false? Are epistemic standards the only relevant criteria for judging beliefs? Nowhere are these issues probably more significant than with the legitimation of political power. The aspiration to an epistemically egalitarian society whose legitimation stories are accepted as the result of belief-formation processes completely uncorrupted by power presupposes answers to a series of questions that not only deserve to be asked, but that you would expect realists to be the ones to raise most forcefully. Not only would they raise them, but they would do so with a presumption toward underscoring the importance of treating with appropriate seriousness that which is distinctive to politics. Having politics bend its knee before the epistemic in this way seems like a profoundly anti-realist act.

There is a related point here. What is the appropriate stance a realistic theory should take to ideology? The radical realist position is that ideology is a distorted understanding of the world that can and should (on epistemic grounds) be overcome. It presumes the possibility, shared with much other ideology critique, of forms of social order devoid of ideologies. These social orders will, almost by definition, be more just and more equal, given that ideologies are represented as one of the main mechanisms via which unjust and unequal social relations reproduce and sustain themselves. This is, as many essays in this volume attest (for example, those of Colin Bird, Brian Leiter, and Molly McGrath), a familiar view of ideology and perfectly in keeping with much ideology critique. However, whereas Marxist-inspired accounts can situate and justify their understanding of ideology within the general Marxist framework, it is not clear on what grounds a realist account can help itself to the same understanding. What is the realist basis for adopting that account of ideology? This question is especially pressing, given alternative accounts that insist ideologies are inevitable and inexorable features of politics—perhaps specifically of politics in modernity—and hence that they must feature somehow in any theory that makes some claim to being realistic. To theorize a nonideological politics, either in descriptive or normative terms, is to engage in the sort of wishing away of important features of politics that realists often accuse moralists of doing.

Edward Hall reports Judith Shklar as holding the view that ideologies are expressive of the emotional reactions people have to their social experiences. ⁴⁴ There is no escaping ideological thinking, so our political theories need to be responsive to that fact. Michael Freeden, who Hall rightly points out shares Shklar’s view as to the inescapability of ideology, strongly critiques realists for either adopting the pejorative distorting view of ideology or of ignoring it altogether. Ideologies play a necessary and fundamental role in political life. In fixing the meaning of contested political concepts and relating them to other similarly decontested concepts, they produce the “specific conceptual patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations” through which humans both interpret and act in the world. ⁴⁵ As such, “thinking ideologically is an inevitable subdivision of thinking politically—that is to say, all thinking politically is embedded in ideological frameworks that showcase thinking about politics.” ⁴⁶ To think about politics without thinking about ideology or, maybe worse, to think about it in such a way that assumes ideology is something necessarily distorting to be overcome, is therefore a mark against any theory that makes a claim to being realistic. But the deeper challenge this poses for radical realists is that if ideologies fix the meaning of our political concepts, it is not clear on an account such as Freeden’s that the very aspiration of a nonideological social order freed of distorted understanding can make sense. The distinction between distorted and clear or accurate views of the world breaks down if all political thinking is ideological. Hence, and to return to the point made above, we are left in need not only of a justification for why radical realists have adopted the pejorative view of ideology, but also of how that account can be made consistent with the plausibly realistic claim that ideologies are permanent, essential, and constructive features of political life. ⁴⁷

Is it right to think that epistemology is quite as distant from power as the radical realists believe? Even if we grant that our epistemic norms are not the products of political power in the manner that problematizes morality as the basis for ideology critique, such direct pedigree is not the only way in which we might think power relates to epistemology. Epistemology’s “political innocence” seems far from self-evident in a political culture in which the most basic notions of facts, expertise, and reality have become heavily politicized in ways that have seeped into those “practical categories” of politics. For example, if Barack Obama was not born in the United States, then his presidency was not legitimate. The same would be true if Biden “stole” the 2020 U.S. presidential election through widespread voter fraud. Who are the cognitive authorities we should consult? Who generates, possesses, and should possess knowledge? What counts as knowledge or facts? What are the limits of what we can know? These issues have, throughout history, been enmeshed in the struggles for power. As Friedrich Nietzsche tells us, the “will to truth” comes from somewhere and its history, whether we buy his particular story or not, is likely to feature power and political interests. ⁴⁸ We should expect that the will to truth expresses itself unevenly across human societies, which is, of course, precisely what we do find. The desire to live in a fully transparent social order—one in which its power relations, distribution of benefits and burdens, and the justification of its main practices and institutions, can and should be known to us individually and not obscured by tradition or religious mystification—aligns itself with certain political projects and against others. ⁴⁹

Even in matters of the hard sciences, following the evidence where it leads rather than finding evidence that gets us to where we want to be makes good epistemic sense, but it is not one that serves all political ends. Bertrand Russell has been far from alone, for example, in thinking that there are deep connections between empiricism or “the scientific outlook,” which encourages the rejection of traditional epistemic authorities and encourages people to think (or look) for themselves, and what he calls “its intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of liberalism.” ⁵⁰ Moreover, our willingness and capacity to sustain our epistemic norms, which are regularly put under significant internal and external strain, is, in large part, a question of how far they can be buttressed by our wider set of moral and political values or how they feature in our modes of individual and collective life. Recognizing any of this does not cast a shadow over the epistemic norms employed by RICs. It does mean, though, that we need to acknowledge how the extent to which those norms generate findings that will have any critical purchase for those within the societies under scrutiny is a question for which their proximity to political power and interests will be directly relevant. It also shows the degree to which the very ambition of attempting a form of external ideology critique that employs only epistemic norms reflects a very particular ethical outlook. Anti-moralism is itself an ethical stance.