Agent-Based Political Theory

If, as Otto van Bismarck once suggested, “politics is the art of the possible,” then political theory studies how agents navigate possibilities with the aim of improving their ability to do so. The idea that the study of politics is concerned with both understanding and informing action is not new; Aristotle viewed it as a branch of practical philosophy. Since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), however, Anglo-American or “analytical” political theory has turned to focus on abstract principles of justice, right, and good, weakening the connection between political theory and the endeavour to study so as to be able to guide practical action. In recent decades, the discipline has taken a notable turn towards more contextualised and non-ideal forms of inquiry, which recognise the importance of taking various facts into account in non-ideal political theorising. Still, “analytical” political theory remains centred on the derivation and elaboration of abstract principles, with David Estlund (2020) defending a conception of political theory as primarily concerned with offering “normative standards for the evaluation of political arrangements” rather than practical “[p]roposals for political action or change”. Among critics advocating what they call realist approaches to political theory, many have advocated a return to focusing on concrete agents of political action and the once-traditional focus of political theory being one of informing such agents and in so doing improving their actions. Realists in particular have been refocusing on questions of political agency for a number of purposes, like how to bridge contextualism with ambitions for social transformation; reconstructing historical arguments and their implications for today; and making sense of different forms of resistance and activism both within and outside of established social movements. Yet more can be done, we think, to present a general model of agent-based political theory that can make sense of how specific forms of political agency and their contexts can and should shape political theorising. Thus, the aim of this paper is to recover a conception of normative political theory as centred on action, agency, and practice. It does so by constructing a model of what agent-based political theory looks like and uses this model to determine which kinds of facts are relevant for shaping which forms of political theorising. This allows us to distinguish between those forms of utopianism that are and are not helpful for political theorising; reconstruct realist critiques of certain forms of utopianism; and offer guidance for how other forms of utopianism can and should inform current political theory and practice.