Rationalism in Politics

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3570944
AutoresPeter J Steinberger (0000-0001-9497-5965, Reed College, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume109
Fascículo4
Páginas750-763
Data de publicação2015-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0003055415000489
OpenAlexW2339543101
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas42

Much recent political thought has been devoted to the proposition that neither political endeavor properly understood nor theorizing about such endeavor is or could ever be a kind of rational activity. I examine three broad approaches that celebrate, respectively, rhetorical practices of political persuasion, agonistic conceptions of democracy, and, more generally, a kind of hard-headed critical realism rooted in the plain facts of political life. I argue that criticisms of rationalism in politics associated with these approaches systematically ignore central tenets of what might be called a post-Kantian convergence of recent and important philosophical perspectives and that such perspectives can be enormously useful in addressing and critically evaluating the underlying intellectual structures of political life

Critical rationalism · Democracy · Economics · Epistemology · Persuasion · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Proposition · Rationalism · Realism · Rhetorical question · Social science · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theory and Influence · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought