It’s come up a number of times around here that my approach to questions of normative political theory is not what gets referred to as “ideal theory,” and indeed that I’m very skeptical of that approach. I talked about this kind of thing in my review of John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness as well as in my review of G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality. My reasons for being a bleeding-heart libertarian (note here my continued but futile objection to the phrase) aren’t much like Tomasi’s simultaneous celebration of the ideal of individual self-authorship through the creative use of academic freedom and of collective self-authorship through deliberation as citizens. And they often differ from the reasons offered by my more philosophy-minded colleagues around here. They’re more like a combination of Hayekian skepticism about state power combined with a belief that state power, whether justified or not, carries with it important consequentialist responsibilities for the welfare of those who are subject to it (along with a political concern about the toxic effects of the long entanglement of libertarian rhetoric with the racist use of state power in the United States). (Footnote here: “those subject to” state coercive power aren’t only those who live under a particular state; they’re also, as my colleague Arash Abizadeh has long argued, those coercively turned away at the border are also so subject; and I mean to include them in that claim.) And this is all continuous with the methodological commitment I first learned by reading Judith Shklar many years ago, to “put injustice first.”

Anyway, rather than continuing to develop my methodological argument here through reviews and critical pieces, I’m finally working on developing the account in its own paper. I’ve posted an initial draft of it at SSRN: “There Is No Such Thing As Ideal Theory.” Exercises in practical reasonabout politics always involve some degree of idealization from the status quo, but there is no uniquely intellectually privileged point of idealization (and, in particular, not one whose idealizations consist of full compliance, consensus, and the publicity principle) which uniquely generates an account of justice free from compromises with human flaws and frailties.