The Logic of Idealization in Political Theory

The role of ideals and idealizations in normative reasoning (and, conversely, the importance of empirical realities and realism) represents one of the most vigorously debated methodological questions in contemporary political theory. Yet the debate over the appropriate place of idealizations in political theory appears to be at something of an impasse. Defenders of idealization continue to practice political theory much as they always have, while their critics remain convinced of the wrongheadedness of such an approach and often dismiss idealized arguments out of hand. In this article, I propose a way to fundamentally rethink this debate. My starting contention is that both practitioners and critics of idealization have failed to properly explicate the ‘inferential logics’ by which different kinds of idealization might be thought to contribute to normative knowledge or understanding. This has resulted in a corresponding failure to pull apart two quite different pictures of how idealization might be inferentially helpful: a (dominant) generative account, in which idealization depicts normatively purified settings from which our principles derive, and a (more latent) heuristic account, in which idealization is a form of testing for our principles, wherever they derive from. My argument is that properly distinguishing these different accounts of the inferential logic of idealization in political theory, and shifting from the first to the second, profoundly reshapes debates over ideal and non-ideal theory, idealization, and engagement with empirical political realities.