Political Normativity

NKFIH project number: FK-138367

Summary

Political issues cannot be solved through abstract moral theorizing, exclusively. Such theorizing needs to be supplemented with a distinctively ‘political’ approach. This means taking into account the specificities of politics. But what does that mean, precisely? The objective of the project is to answer this question in an analytic, theoretical manner. In other words, the objective is to uncover whether there even is such a thing as a distinctly ‘political’ sort of normativity in political theory, thus, one that is not derived from pre-political principles. And if there is such a thing, how should it be conceptualized? In attempting to provide answers to such questions, the project builds strongly on the ‘political turn’, or the so-called realist revival in recent theoretical discourse. There is a lively debate on realism today, to which the project aims to provide a contribution with a broad range of loosely interconnected topics, and a special emphasis on some of the local, specifically East Central European, implications.

Research objectives:

  1. To explore the intrinsic value of politics. (Attila Gyulai)
  2. To identify so-called regime-dependent political obligation. (Zoltán Gábor Szűcs)
  3. To explore whether virtues have intrinsic value in politics and how they can constrain political action. (Zoltán Balázs)
  4. To determine the role of a distinctly political form of normativity in current global challenges such as migration and climate change (Anna Ujlaki)
  5. To explore possible ’political’ solutions to the puzzle concerning the so-called boundary problem in normative political theory. (Szilárd Tóth)
  6. To uncover how political practice conflicts with universal moral principles in East Central Europe since the democratic transition.

 

Research period: 2021 – 2024

Principal investigator: Attila Gyulai

Contributing research fellows: Zoltán Balázs, Zoltán Gábor Szűcs, Szilárd Tóth, Anna Ujlaki