Conceptualizing Politics

3.   For and against ideal theory
What is ideal theory? Why are we discussing its justification and usefulness?
According to John Rawls, ideal theory ‘develops the conception of perfectly just 
basic structure and the corresponding duties and obligations of persons under the 
fixed constraints of human life and favourable circumstances’ (Rawls 1999a, 216). 
Non-ideal theory deals with the principles that are to be adopted ‘under less happy 
conditions’ and in the case of non-compliance to the norms issued by ideal theory, 
which assumes instead strict compliance with the principles of justice.
This sounds like a commonsensical stance, but Hegel warned us that what is 
called common sense contains plenty of metaphysical assumptions. In this case, it 
is the assumption that life, political life in a democracy in particular, will be better 
if we redesign it thinking that people have in mind high values that are rationally 
established and can build institutions perfectly adequate to them, except that the 
latter are to be reconciled with people not always compliant with the models, or 
with circumstances that are not exactly favourable to them. We know, however, that 
those perfect people never existed in history or were a tiny minority of losers or 
fanatics, sometimes with blood on their hands. We also know that models of justice 
or liberty or solidarity are effective only inasmuch as they are born from conflicts 
and movements in a particular country or area at a particular time, hence they are 
very much marked by history and anthropology; not as specification or readapta-
tion of a systematic ideal honed by philosophers. Also, to become politically effec-
tive, the values we pursue, the concrete models of better institutions we may have 
in mind must be to a certain extent able to accommodate the less ideal and rather 
self-centred interests of the groups who are to support the movement aspiring to 
realise the model. Innovative policy shifts can be performed not by a company of 
the stainless, but rather by coalitions in which angels are ready to walk for a while 
hand-in-hand with less noble creatures, if not with devils.
The idea that political philosophy deals with perfect institutions that all citizens 
are loyal to, while non-compliance with those institutions is a matter for non-ideal 
theory as a sort of B-theory goes against this book’s basic view that politics is first 
of all about conflicts, in which by no means the parties are a priori on the right 
or the wrong side, because a perfectly just solution rarely exists, while the first and 
foremost problem is to develop institutions and policies that prevent conflicts from 
degenerating into war and disruption. The notion of ideal theory does not lack a 
certain naiveté paired with the philosopher’s arrogance: on the one hand, the belief 
that possessing the perfect model is prior and conditional to redesigning reality 
ignores how the reality of political and social life comes about, in a way very distant 
from conceptual engineering. A whiff of arrogance is, on the other hand, undeni-
able in the pretence to find criteria capable of reordering to the best problem-laden 
areas of human life by philosophical deduction from principles, doing better than 

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194  Ethics and politics
the actors themselves and ignoring other types of knowledge, collaboration with 
which, rather, should be attempted. This unhappy complex is what makes ‘norma-
tive political philosophy’, both in general and applied to a specific sector, futile and 
boring every single time it does not even attempt at preserving in the theory the 
fullness of the stuff it pretends to ideally regulate.
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 What is missing in this mental 
attitude is the sense of the obstacle one should keep alive and bring to bear when 
looking for theoretical formulas concerned with human life in politics and society; 
otherwise those formulas seem to be borne by solipsistic parthenogenesis.
Another trouble with ideal theory is that its very idea fails to recognise politics 
as the sphere in which ideas matter, but only do so if they can find cultural, social 
and political forces endorsing them and translating them into policy decisions. The 
great ideas that in the far or recent past moved the world had each a bearer or 
protagonist, whom theorists identified as the principal agent of their ideas: the 
monarchy for absolutism, the bourgeoisie for constitutionalism and liberalism, the 
working class and sections of the middle class for European socialism and the New 
Deal, peasants and intellectuals in the liberation movements of the ‘Third World’. 
The attempt at locating this agent is lacking in the recent, pale appearances of ideal 
theory; the need to provide, along with speculative formulas, a Zeitdiagnose/diagno-
sis of the times as their complement is disregarded and possibly felt as unphilosophi-
cal. With its two foci – ideal theory of communication and democracy as well as