In current debates, the most discussed aspect of the relationship between social and political practices and normative political principles has been of a methodological kind. In this chapter, we examine this ‘methodological turn’ in political theory with regard to arguments made about how methodological considerations constrain normative political principles. As we saw in Chapter 2, such arguments have primarily been developed in the justice literature – by practice-dependent theorists against practice-independent principles and by non-ideal theorists against ideal principles – but also to some extent by political realists in the debate on political legitimacy. The problem of action-guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, but these critics also throw suspicion on the methodology used by mainstream political theorists. While coming from different quarters and working in different theoretical contexts, they share a number of methodological commitments. The aim here is to analyse the methodological arguments made in these debates as well as assess what constraints on normative principles are assumed to follow from these methodological commitments.

SHARED METHODOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS

There are a number of methodological assumptions shared by theorists in the different debates treated in this chapter. To begin with, practice-based theorists all stress the importance of starting in ‘the actual’ rather than in some general, higher-order principle when theorising normative political principles. Non-ideal theorists, for example, stress that general and higher-order principles rely on idealisations that exclude or at least marginalise our current world as it is, such as the workings of institutions, which leads to erroneous prescriptions (Mills 2005: 168). Instead of leaning on idealised (false) descriptions, the theorist should rely on facts about society (true descriptions), such as the permanent realities of partial compliance (Mills 2005: 177; Farrelly 2007: 859–60). Also practice-dependent theorists argue that we should take as the point of departure our social and political practices. They claim that practices and institutions fundamentally alter the relations in which people stand, and, consequently, ‘the first principles of justice that are appropriate for them’ (Sangiovanni 2008: 138). The nature of such practically mediated relations is such that it gives rise to principles that would not have existed otherwise (Sangiovanni 2008; Ronzoni 2009; Banai et al. 2011; James 2005, 2012).