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Against Realist Ideology Critique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2025
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.
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References
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2 Lest this is mistaken as a common feature of all forms of realist thought, as it often is, it is important to stress immediately that not all realists share this commitment to doing political theory with nonmoral materials. More shall be said about this below; I flag now that I shall take issue with this understanding of realism in the final section of this essay.
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12 Sankaran, “What’s New in the New Ideology Critique?” 1445.
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23 In this and the following three paragraphs I am mainly summarizing the argument of Aytac and Rossi, “Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach.”
24 Aytac and Rossi follow Haslanger in using the broader term “cultural technes,” which includes beliefs, but also other socially generated cognitive mechanisms such as concepts, dispositions, and the like to explain the content of ideologies. However, all the examples they use and discuss tend to be straightforwardly about beliefs rather than anything else. Hence, for the sake of not adding an unnecessary layer of terminological complexity, I shall employ the term “belief” here and throughout, but I do not think anything is lost in the analysis by doing so.
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28 The use of work from the wider social sciences presumably means that whether beliefs have been arrived at through distorted belief-formation processes is intended to be a falsifiable claim.
29 Rossi and Argenton, “Property, Legitimacy, Ideology: A Reality Check.”
30 There is a question, which RIC does not but would need to address, as to how we are to identify who the relevant dominant and oppressed groups are in any situation. After all, one feature of contemporary politics is that there is little consensus about precisely which are the groups with power; accusations and counteraccusations of oppression abound. White males, for instance, might think they are oppressed by the power of the “culture war warriors,” whereas the latter will often point to the former as the source of their own oppression. It would be helpful to know more about how RIC intends to identify which account of where power lies is closer to reality.
31 Aytac and Rossi, “Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach,” 1220.
32 In the language of technê: “Debunking this cultural technê by identifying how it was generated by an epistemically flawed social process of indoctrination shows that the technê lacks epistemic warrant in its specific social context, but it does not directly falsify the technê’s propositional content, so the genetic fallacy is not triggered.” Aytac and Rossi, “Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach,” 1221.
33 Aytac and Rossi, “Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach,” 1223–24.
34 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, 230.
35 I here summarize the argument from Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument.
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40 On Williams’s vindicatory genealogy, see Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering. For radical realists’ discussions of genealogy, see Janosch Prinz and Paul Raekstad, “The Value of Genealogies for Political Philosophy,” Inquiry (2020): 1–20; Rossi and Argenton, “Property, Legitimacy, Ideology: A Reality Check”; Rossi, “Critical Responsiveness: How Epistemic Ideology Critique Can Make Normative Legitimacy Empirical Again.”
41 Sleat, “What Is a Political Value? Political Philosophy and Fidelity to Reality”; Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value.”
42 Aytac and Rossi, “Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach,” 1222.
43 I note that the way in which other realists understand moralism, and hence realist approaches as opposed to moralist approaches, is to say not that moralist political theories employ moral values or concepts, but, crudely put, they do so in ways that are not appropriately sensitive or responsive to what I call the constitutive features of politics or Edward Hall calls the “realist constraint.” Sleat, “What Is a Political Value? Political Philosophy and Fidelity to Reality”; Hall, “How to Do Realistic Political Theory (and Why You Might Want To).” In this regard, the charge is more like moralist political theorists have not adequately considered what it means for a value, including moral values, to be values appropriate for the political sphere; they are not political in the right way.
44 Edward Hall, “Ideological Self-Consciousness: Judith Shklar on Legalism, Liberalism, and the Purposes of Political Theory,” elsewhere in this volume.
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47 One obvious option for the radical realist at this point would be to argue that although we may not be able to free ourselves from ideologies altogether, there are nonetheless more or less distorting forms of ideology and the latter are to be preferred over the former. Something like that may well be right, although making such judgments will require them necessarily to draw upon resources beyond the epistemic.
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