Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory
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Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory Edward Hall University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2020, pp. 256, ISBN: 9780226718316 Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00449-7
In her back-cover endorsement of Value, Conflict, and Order, Alison McQueen writes that ‘political realism has produced a sharp methodological critique of ‘‘ethics-first’’ theorizing. But that is all this revival has produced so far’. The main virtue of Edward Hall’s book, according to her, is that it offers ‘a substantive alternative to the moralisms it criticizes’. I certainly agree with McQueen’s praise that Hall has written a terrific book on the realist revival in political theory, one that will establish him as one of the leading ‘new political realists’. It is, quite simply Hall’s analytical brilliance, paired with admirable lucidity and creativity, that allows him to develop critical – but remarkably fair – accounts of Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams, and, ultimately, to make a major contribution to the realist revival in political theory. At the same time, though, it is difficult to see how Hall allows us to conceive of political realism as more than a methodological approach; this is a more critical point to which I will return at the end of this review. Hall starts off by sketching out the main tenets of the realist approach. Realists reject a particular style of theorising, a style they dub ‘moralism’, ‘idealism’, or, perhaps most pointedly, the ‘ethics-first’ approach. For moralists such as Rawls, Nozick, Cohen, or Dworkin, politics is a ‘mere arena for applying a set of prior moral values and principles. That political philosophy is not just an especially important form of applied moral standard is the leitmotif of recent realist theorizing’ (p. 1). But Hall is anxious to avoid a potential (and not uncommon) misunderstanding: Most realists do not draw a strict line of separation between ethics and politics, let alone do they reject ethics tout court. Political realism, rather, is grounded in a rejection of moral theory as standardly conceived and emerges from the adoption of a realistic spirit in ethics that problematizes 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
traditional accounts of morality, as well as the assumed view of the relationship between morality and politics that such accounts explicitly or implicitly endorse (p. 3). Realism, therefore, is as much about ethics as it is about politics; what realists insist on, in fact, is that this relationship is inherently complex and that one cannot simplistically be treated as the handmaiden of the other. For Hall, then, realism is based on several closely intertwined ‘correctives to the moralistic character of contemporary political theory’ (pp. 9–11). Most importantly, realists reject the idea that politics is a form of ‘applied ethics’ and emphasise the distinctiveness of politics as a separate domain of acti
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