Reflections on the relationship between political theory and political practice: assessing realist challenge to liberal-normative political theory

Abstract

Cataloged from PDF version of article.

Thesis (Ph.D.): Bilkent University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2017.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-173).

This thesis is a study of value of theorizing for the practical world of politics. It
 addresses the question of how it is advisable to conceive the relationship between
 political theory and political practice. It does so by focusing on contemporary
 discussions about realism and moralism in political theory. Realism is a
 contemporary theoretical approach that poses a challenge to the dominant liberal
 paradigm, which allegedly bases its understanding of politics on the primacy of the
 moral over the political. The meaning and implications of such moralized
 understanding are explored, in this dissertation, in relation to John Rawls. After
 presenting a reading of Rawls’s major works in relation to the relationship between
 political theory and political practice, I specify general principles guiding the recent
 realist revival in political theory. This account suggests that realism encompasses a
 wide variety of non-moralizing positions whose critical purchase on dominant
 political theory varies. More critically, it illustrates how some varieties of realism invite moralism through the back door, primarily due to their insistence on some
 form of foundationalism for a political theory to be action-guiding. I single out John
 Dunn’s sceptical activist realism and Raymond Geuss’s critical activist realism as
 two alternative candidates that exhibit the possibility of political theory, centred on
 the notion of political judgment, to be action-guiding without having foundational
 commitments of the kind typically presupposed. This account essentially presents an
 alternative conceptualization of the relationship between political theory and political
 practice to that of mainstream liberal political theory.

by Gülşen Seven.

Ph. D.