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Political Legitimacy in the Real Normative World: The Priority of Morality and the Autonomy of the Political

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2013

Eva Erman  and
Niklas Möller
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Abstract

According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 215 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Government, Uppsala University (email: [email protected]) and Department of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology (email: [email protected]). We owe special thanks to Richard North, Thomas Christiano, Terry Macdonald, Bob Goodin, Andrew Williams, Laura Valentini, Rainer Forst, John Cantwell and Christine Chwaszcza for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to the journal's editors and anonymous reviewers. In addition, Eva Erman wishes to thank the participants at the Authority of Global Institutions workshop in Barcelona (June 2012), and Samantha Besson, José Luis Martí and Andrew Williams for inviting her; as well as the participants at the How Can International Political Theory Get “Real”? workshop in Melbourne (March 2012) and the Critical Theory Roundtable in Prague (May 2012). Moreover, she wishes to thank Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) for financing the Transdemos Programme. Niklas Möller thanks the Swedish Research Council Formas for its generous funding of this research.

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