Conceptualizing Politics

Zeitdiagnose – Habermas’s work displays a refreshing difference in perspective from 
this attitude. On the other hand, all this is not to deny the heuristic value of ideal 
theory whenever it contributes to defining concepts and alternatives without fully 
renouncing a more or less explicit tie to real political phenomena and anthropo-
logical or cultural components.
All of this can also be looked at from an evolutionary point of view. European 
modernity has already experienced a powerful endeavour to rethink the polity in 
the light of a morality shaped by the idea of Reason. This happened in the Enlight-
enment up to its philosophical culmination in Kant’s thought, but had hardly any 
influence on real politics, which continued to be better understood and managed 
on a realist path. Even the timid and for a long while (until the creation of the 
United Nations in 1945) ineffective efforts to build a collective security system 
were due to the reaction to the unprecedented bloodletting of 1914–1918 rather 
than to the teachings of the idealist tradition, though this helped formulate the 
theory of a new international order.
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 After this evolution, something different from 
an updated and refined rerunning of Kant’s normativism, such as Rawls’s work in 
the substance is, was to be expected, for example a normative theory capable of 
integrating into its method the awareness of the real behaviour of actors and the 
role of the historical context, rather than throwing all that differs from the specula-
tion called ‘ideal theory’ into the dustbin of ‘non-ideal theory’. All of this with full 
knowledge of the obsolescence of the ossified counterposition idealism vs. realism, 
as discussed above. Yet things have, so far, not moved forward in this direction.
Another notion that may seem to have some similarity with ideal theory, though it 
should by no means be mistaken for it, must be discussed here: utopia. Rawls himself 

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Ethics, philosophy and politics  195
resorted to this term when he spoke of the “Society of liberal and decent
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 Peoples as 
a ‘realistic utopia’ ” (Rawls 1999b, 5–9); he did, not, however specify the meaning of 
‘utopia’. This word comes from Greek 
οὐ-τόπος (no place), indicating the venue for 
an ideal polity as the one described by Thomas More (1478–1535) and located on 
the island of Utopia (More 1516). In the English pronunciation, this word is indis-
tinguishable from Eutopia, which derives from 
εὖ-τόπος (good place), while in other 
languages one is able to distinguish eutopia and utopia. A further member of this word 
family is dystopia, which means a bad place that is better to be avoided, or a negative 
utopia such as the Brave  New World described by Aldous Huxley (Huxley 1932) and 
the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four depicted by George Orwell (Orwell 1949).
The utopian current in political philosophy is rich and can be said to culminate 
in the work of the French writer Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Marx and Engels 
intended their socialism to be based on scientific knowledge, in opposition to the 
rather literary or rhetorical ‘utopian socialism’ of their predecessors and contempo-
raries; but critics maintain that Marx’s own theory is not free from ties to utopian 
elements of the Jewish tradition. ‘Utopian’ has very often been the damning word 
thrown at socialist and communist reform projects by conservative adversaries. As 
a reaction, the protest movement of the 1960s reloaded this term with a positive 
value, as for example in the writings of Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse 1967). In the 
warm and fuzzy version of ‘whatever is against the existing state-of-affairs and in 
favour of a better world’ this is still the (now rather seldom) use of the word in 
Western political rhetoric, yet it is deprived of any theoretical foundation, and 
found on the mouth of ideologues and literati rather than on that of the people 
who really need a change for the better. They – the poor of any age, destitute fami-
lies, low-wage workers, migrants and more – do indeed deserve better than appeals 
to believing in utopia: well-carved programmes of economic and social reform, 
political strategies for gathering consensus behind them and implementing them, 
the upsurge of an appropriate leadership.