What Is Realism?

Abstract There have been two main traditions of theorizing about society, politics, and law in Western thought: on one side, realists (like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Marx, and Nietzsche); on the other, moralists (like Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rawls, Habermas, and Dworkin). “Realists” are generally committed to the following ideas: (1) human beings, throughout history and across cultures, are motivated primarily by their passions and interests; (2) many important human passions and interests are antisocial or “immoral” (people are, for example, frequently selfish, cruel, self-aggrandizing, avaricious, self-deceived, lustful, envious, etc.); (3) given what human beings are like (whether by nature or in virtue of the conditions existing in human societies to date), theories devoted to articulating and discursively justifying people’s supposed moral obligations and duties are irrelevant to changing people’s behavior—rational arguments do not change passions and interests; (4) since there are no objective moral requirements (as most realists believe), arguing about them is a scholastic exercise, more akin to codifying and quibbling about conventional etiquette norms at some place and time; and (5) theories of society, politics, and law should try to explain what is really going on (e.g., the actual patterns and causes of human behavior, both individual and social), without assuming their subject makes moral sense. “Moralists” themselves concern themselves, first and foremost, with rationally discursive theories about the right and the good for institutions and individuals. I develop both “realism” and “moralism” as ideal types in legal and political theory and argue against moralism on both epistemic and practical grounds.