Philosophy, Politics and Contestability

Abstract

Recent essays in political philosophy have embraced certain kinds of reflectiveness, while largely ignoring others. One example of the latter comes to the fore when we ask whether the answer to the question just posed is the same as the answer to the question, ‘What makes political philosophy political?’ In post-Rawlsian mode the core project has been taken to be the application of normative arguments to politics — for example, working up intuitions about justice into general distributive principles, while failing to ask how that project itself stands in relation to politics. The issue, roughly, is whether the nature of the philosophical project, as currently conceived within liberalism, is such as to make it no longer recognisably ‘political’.