Matt Sleat

Contemporary political discourse is awash with concerns about truthfulness, understood as the virtue of making sure that our beliefs are true, in political life. The central argument of this paper is that it is not only possible for us to be self-deceived as to our own truthfulness but that there is good reason to suspect certain aspects of the way we understand and value truthfulness make it something which we may be particularly prone to being self-deceived about. If that is correct, then not only do we have further reason for thinking that self-deception in politics may be more common than we might like to think, it also (a) helps us understand why claims about truthfulness seem more likely to perpetuate and intensify conflicts in politics; (b) suggests that the possibility of our being self-deceived about our truthfulness stands sufficiently independent of our first- order beliefs, be they true or false, such that it is likely to appear across the various political divides rather than being exclusive to one group; and (c) requires us to reconsider the problem represented by “post-truth” politics and the responses that might be appropriate to it.

Does the advent of cyber-war require us to abandon the traditional ethical framework for thinking about the morality of warfare - just war theory - and develop principles specific to the unique nature of cyber-attacks? Or can just war theory still provide an appropriate basis for thinking through the ethical issues raised by cyber-weapons? This article explores these questions via the issue of whether a cyber-attack can constitute a casus belli. The first half of the paper critically engages with recent attempts to provide a new theory of just information warfare (JIW) that is supposedly better suited to the unique character of cyber war insofar as it is grounded the broader meta-ethical framework of information ethics (IE). Yet the paper argues that not only is JIW fundamentally unsuitable as a way of thinking about cyber-war, but (in the second half) that it is possible to develop a different account of how we can understand a cyber-attack as constituting a casus belli  in a way that is in keeping with traditional just war theory. In short, there is no need to reinvent just war theory for the digital age.

This is the introduction for the edited collection 'Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice' forthcoming with Columbia University Press. Contributors include Duncan Bell (Cambridge), Richard Bellamy (UCL), Elizabeth Frazer (Oxford), Michael Freeden (Oxford), William Galston (Brookings Institute), Charles Larmore (Brown), Alison McQueen (Stanford), Glen Newey (Leiden), David Owen (Southampton), Mark Philp (Warwick), Paul Sagar (Cambridge), Rahul Sagar (Princeton), and William Scheuerman (Indiana)

This paper seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain it has to be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human activity. The following section then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realisation of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these sections as responding to two related questions, respectively: 'is this a political value at all?' which is to say, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm, and then 'is this a political value for us?'. The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorisation of politics (and not something else). Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere.

It is a noticeable feature of the contemporary revival of interest in realist political thought that it has very much hesitated from exploring its implications for international political theory. This is interesting both because realism is one of the dominant intellectual traditions in international relations, but also as much of the recent debates surrounding global justice have engaged with themes that are at least germane to those of realism. This paper will therefore try and extend some of the themes of realist political thought into the realm of global justice. While there might be several areas worth exploring, the focus here shall be on the realist emphasis on making sense of politics as a sphere of activity that has internal sources of normativity which cannot be reduced to moral first principles, the relationship between politics and legitimacy, and how these pose fundamental questions for the political nature of global justice. It ends by arguing that, viewed through the realist lens, the question of the legitimacy of international institutions should take greater priority in global justice debates insofar as this is fundamental to enabling us to understand justice in political and not exclusively moral terms.

This article explores and critiques the relationship between justice and legitimacy in contemporary liberal thought. The first half sets out the extent to which liberalism denies that justice and legitimacy are distinct concepts, and criticises it on that basis. It then seeks to offer an interpretation of some of the deeper theoretical assumptions that result in this unsatisfactory conflation, arguing that the primacy that liberal theory has given to justice, understood as a moral concept, has resulted in a failure to appreciate the deeply multifaceted political nature of legitimacy. The suggestion is then made that it is only through recognising this nature, including the different (political) circumstances in which the demand for legitimation arises and the needs to which it responds, that this theoretical impasse can be overcome. The article ends on the more radical thought that this may require liberal theory to displace justice as the first (moral) virtue of political systems and replace it with the (political) virtue of legitimacy.

This paper offers a new approach to thinking about the ethics and politics of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP): It grounds the RtoP in a understanding of politics that recognises the specificity of the political, including its own internal sources of normativity, while also appreciating the plethora of ways in which morality features in political life. What emerges is a way of making sense of the RtoP in distinctively political terms - not as the attempt to put some universal moral project into practice, but as concrete responses to specifically political problems employing legitimate authority and power - but which must draw upon moral values (of humanity) in order to legitimate interventions. This view has the advantage of overcoming the realist/liberal dichotomy by enabling us to see morality as not prior to or having antecedent authority over politics, yet as nevertheless an integral part of politics vital to achieving a complete understanding of the RtoP.

The charge that contemporary political theory has lost touch with the realities of politics is common to both the recent ideal/non-ideal theory debate and the revival of interest in realist thought. However a tendency has arisen to subsume political realism within the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, or to elide realism with non-ideal theorising. This paper argues that this is a mistake. The ideal/non-ideal theory discussion is a methodological debate that takes place within the framework of liberal theory. Realism, contrary to several interpretations, is a distinct and competing conception of politics in its own right that stands in contrast to that of liberal theory and its ambitions. While the two debates are united in a sense that contemporary liberal theory needs to be more realistic, they differ significantly in both what this critique amounts to and, more importantly, what it is to do more realistic political theory.

This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political, and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice, and from the nature of political judgment. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position, and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought.

The central contention of this paper is that contemporary liberal theory is without an account of what legitimates coercing those who reject liberalism that is consistent with its own stipulations of the conditions of political legitimacy. After exploring the nature of the liberal principle of legitimacy, and in particular how it is intended to function as a way of protecting individuals from domination and oppression by reconciling freedom and public law, the paper considers five different possible accounts of what might legitimate coercing non-liberals. While some of them have independent plausibility, the paper argues that none of them are consistent with the liberal understanding of legitimacy. The final section of the paper considers the implications of this theoretical gap for liberal theory more widely. The argument is made that liberalism must accept that even liberal politics requires the oppressive use of coercive power, i.e. compelling people to live according to wills other than their own, and that insofar as this is a position central to the recent burgeoning literature on political realism, liberalism ought therefore to be more realist.

Disappointment is a familiar experience of political life and often blame is rightly attributed to the failures of our politicians or the political system. The aim of this paper, however, is to provide a view on disappointment in politics that draws upon the recent resurgence of interest in realist thought insofar as it takes disappointment to be an inevitable feature of politics because of limitations and constraints that are intrinsic to the political sphere. With this in mind the paper explores some of the ways in which political conflict unavoidably generates disappointment, how it shapes the specific manner in which its corollary of hope and the discourse of hope operates in the political sphere, and how disappointment relates to questions of political unity.  Appreciating the inevitability of disappointment should both help overcome some of the prevalent illusions regarding political possibility, as well as calm our discontent with politics by adapting our expectations and assessment of political life accordingly.

This article seeks to make two signifi cant contributions to the debate surrounding the asymmetry objection to political liberalism. The fi rst is to distinguish between and explicate moderate and radical versions of the asymmetry objection as two discrete forms that this criticism can take. The second contribution is to defend the radical version of the asymmetry objection as a serious challenge to political liberalism. It does this by arguing that the commitment to reciprocity that underpins the principle of legitimacy can be the subject of reasonable disagreement, which therefore undermines the asymmetry central to political liberalism between the legitimacy of being able to coerce compliance with principles of right but not principles of the good on the grounds that the latter can be the subject of reasonable disagreement whereas the former cannot. The asymmetry objection has proven to be one of the most serious challenges to the political liberalism of John Rawls and his followers, and remains the subject of much controversy and debate. The objection essentially questions the asymmetry between justice and the good that is a fundamental and distinct characteristic of political conceptions of liberalism; specifi cally that it is legitimate to use state power to enforce compliance with principles of the right, such as constitutional essentials or a conception of justice, but not with principles of the good because the latter can be the subject of reasonable disagreement whereas the former cannot. The aim of this paper is twofold: Firstly I want to distinguish between two different forms of the asymmetry objection, what I call the moderate and the radical versions, which are differentiated by where they understand the source of the asymmetry to be located. The

In recent years a powerful body of literature has emerged that challenges contemporary liberal thought on a series of related fronts and which can usefully be described as “realist.” This article focuses on the realist criticism of the dominant liberal account of legitimacy and explores the possibility of developing a political theory which can overcome this challenge while remaining distinctively liberal, hence liberal realism. Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers who fall outside of the standard Rawlsian tradition in contemporary liberal thinking, it pursues three different directions in which a theory of liberal realism might be developed, which it calls negative, minimal, and partisan, and explores the advantages and shortcomings of each. The article attempts to further demonstrate the salience and force of the realist challenge to liberal legitimacy, the need for liberalism to develop an adequate response to it, and offers some proposals as to the appropriate theoretical framework for doing so.

This article explores the possibility and prospects of developing a realist political theory via an analysis of the work of Bernard Williams. It begins by setting out Williams’ theory of political realism and placing it in the wider context of a realist challenge in the literature that rightly identifies several deficiencies in the liberal view of politics and legitimacy. The central argument of the article is, however, that Williams’ political realism shares common features with liberal theory, including familiar normative concerns and a consensus view of the political and political legitimacy, which results in it replicating rather than overcoming the weaknesses that other realists have recognized in liberalism, thereby making it vulnerable to the same criticisms. Though these are taken to be significant problems for Williams’ theory the purpose of making this argument is not to undermine the prospects for a realist political theory but to indicate obstacles and difficulties that any compelling account will need to address.

In this article I examine the relationship between truth and liberalism via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. While Rorty has consistently argued that liberal politics would benefit from abandoning the notion of objective truth, Williams has recently argued in his Truth and Truthfulness that such a move would be fatal to liberalism as it would render impossible the politically vital virtues of accuracy and sincerity. In the first part of the article I argue that Williams is wrong to think that Rorty’s abandonment of objective truth undermines the possibility for sincerity though right in relation to accuracy. In the second part of the article I accept and build upon Williams’ argument that accuracy is a virtue essential to liberal politics by exploring the way in which the abandonment of objectivity makes possible the manipulation of truth by power. Given the significance of accuracy for the survival of liberal politics I argue that it is a virtue that Rorty should, on his own terms, want to possess and in the final part of the article I suggest that it is possible to endorse a form of ‘humdrum realism’ which delivers the political benefits of accuracy without requiring us to accept thick realist metaphysics, a form of realism that should therefore be acceptable to Rorty.

This article explores the relationships between Bernard Williams’ ideas about the nature of philosophy, of political philosophy and the foundations of his own political thinking. Williams’ understanding of philosophy as a humanistic discipline is shown to inform what he takes to be the appropriate aims and concerns of political philosophy. However, he also took political philosophy to be philosophising about a subject matter sufficiently distinct that it requires a set of concerns broader than those derived from its status as a sub-branch of philosophy. Thus, the foundations of Williams’ political philosophy relate both to the aims and concerns of philosophy generally and political philosophy more specifically.

One way in which we may be tempted to understand the distinction we make in practice between liberals and fundamentalists is via the issue of truth. Liberals are generally more sceptical about truth while fundamentalists tend to be more objectivist, believing not only that objective truth exists but also that they know it. I call this interpretation the ‘truth interpretation’. In this paper I attempt to undermine the ‘truth interpretation’ by showing that it does not map onto adequately to the sorts of distinctions that we actually do make in practice. We will see that thinking that the distinction between liberals and fundamentalists revolves around the philosophical issue of truth, such that the ‘good guys’ are sceptics and the ‘bad guys’ objectivists, fails to connect with our practical distinctions. The second half of the paper then addresses the question of what role, if any, truth does play in distinguishing between liberals and fundamentalists, arguing that if truth does play a role we should see it as a very narrow and political, rather, than philosophical one.

The central claim of this paper is that while modus vivendi does an important service in re-orientating contemporary political theory back to many features of actual political life that have often been overlooked, it is nevertheless too narrow a theory insofar as it is unable to ask many of the questions of politics that need to be asked. The paper critiques the notion that modus vivendi might be understood as an alternative answer to the broadly liberal endeavour of offering a justification for a political order that is justifiable to all those subject to it on the grounds that that project only makes sense within a moralistic framework that modus vivendi as a theory of politics must avoid. Furthermore, though modus vivendi theories are right to draw attention to some of the preconditions of politics that have often gone ignored in contemporary political theory - specifically the primacy of the question of providing order and stability in conditions of deep disagreement and the need for compromise among final ends - nevertheless they far from exhaust what it is that we need a theory of politics to help us make sense of. Indeed modus vivendi theories are continuous with the Enlightenment search for reasons that can universally satisfy the demands of legitimation. Hence everything that is contextual and specific is filtered through the concepts of peace and stability so as to make the universal question of politics whether a given association represents a form of legitimate order in which all can live a minimally decent life (which the criterion of compromise is supposed to track). But, so the paper argues, there is good reason to doubt that the concepts of modus vivendi can bear the sort of justificatory weight that this assumes. And, moreover, we need to ask whether that universalist project might not obscure more about politics than it illuminates.

This is the first draft of the introduction for a collection of essays on political realism which is due to come out next year with Columbia University of Press. This formed part of the original proposal submitted to CUP and since then I have decided to take a very different approach. Nevertheless it might be of some interest as (yet another) survey of the realist literature.

This is an unpublished paper setting out some of my initial thoughts on a new research project on post-truth and politics. Please do not cite without permission. Earlier versions of this paper have been given at Kings College London, the University of Reading, and Muenster University.