A Speaker Series előadássorozat következő vendége Manon Westphal (University of Münster/University of Amsterdam) az alábbi előadással:

Political Realism and the Theorising of Alternatives to the Status Quo

The question whether realist political theorising contains resources to engage critically with the status quo is one of the most discussed questions in debates on realism in political theory. Especially those realists who build on Raymond Geuss’s political realism have shown that a realist political theory need not take an affirmative stance towards the status quo. For example, Prinz and Rossi (2017) argue that ideology critique, which uses epistemic instead of moral standards, enables realists to produce potentially radical criticisms of the status quo. However, it is less clear how realists might go beyond negative critique and engage in the positive theorising of alternatives to the status quo. In my presentation, I will zoom in on this question and argue that there are at least two sorts of resources that political theorists who seek to do radical realism in constructive ways can tap into: social practices that embody possibilities of living and acting differently and people’s ideas about what would be desirable ways of changing the status quo. The basic idea that I will propose, and illustrate by means of examples, is that political theorists can exploit the diversity of social practices and the often critical orientation of people’s political views for the theorising of potential directions of political change. Subsequently, I will address the tricky question of whether political theorists who not merely describe social practices or people’s views on desirable directions of political change, but employ such resources to theorise ways of transforming the status quo contradict realists’ commitment to non-moralist argumentation. To answer this question, I will distinguish between different interpretations of that commitment and consider in some more detail the relationship between real world practices and the radical realist’s theorising of political change.