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26 Res Publica 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/respub26 and id is 1 raw text is: Res Publica (2020) 26:1-23 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/s 11158-018-09415-y CrossMark A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory Eva Erman' - Niklas M11er2 Published online: 9 January 2019 © The Author(s) 2019 Abstract Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our under- standing. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates-such as that between practice-independ- ence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and political moralism and political realism-are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this fea- sibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called 'fitness constraint' and the 'functional constraint', through which we elucidate five central aspects for determin- ing proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. Keywords Feasibility - Functional constraint - Fitness constraint - Possibility In recent years we have witnessed an intensified discussion in political philoso- phy about the usefulness of normative political theories. Doubt has been thrown against traditional or mainstream political theory, which is accused of being use- less since it recommends normative political principles that do not guide action in the real world. While different kinds of theories have been subject to this criti- cism-ranging from theories of global justice to theories of political legitimacy and democracy-a shared concern is that these theories are useless because they have E Eva Erman eva.erman @ statsvet.su.se https://www.statsvet.su.se/evaerman Niklas Moller niklas.moller@philosophy.su.se Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 2 Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden I_) Springer

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