Negative Normativity?

The old joke that if there are 10 political theorists in one room, you will get 11 different opinions holds, sadly, a grain of truth. This is not only the case because of healthy disagreements in a pluralist discipline, but, as I shall argue, the result of approaching normative political philosophy as a venture of making narrow positive prescriptions for the real-world. What does this mean? This paper argues, first, that political philosophy often engages in making both narrow arguments that entail a host of conditions that, if not agreed to, exhaust and dissolve the entire argument, leading to pervasive disagreement between theorists. Second, this is the case because political philosophers often want to offer one positive prescription for the real world. They want to paint only one picture of how the world ought to look like. The paper argues that this does not work when it comes to making normative prescriptions. It leads to a variety of problems. The resulting statements are sometimes decried non-democratic, depriving those at whom these prescriptions are aimed of agency. They are context insensitive and require exact, or close to exact, conditions as the one envisaged in these normative prescriptions. But is there an alternative to a world within which political philosophers tell others what is right? This paper proposes a negative turn in normative thought. Drawing on critical and structuralist thought, it asks whether normative political theory should not be fundamentally negative: not offering narrow positive prescriptions of the world, but approximating what should be done by highlighting what should not.