Beyond the nonideal: Why critical theory needs a utopian dimension

John Rawls famously argues that in order to arrive at a plausible conception of what justice requires politically, we ought to proceed in two steps (Rawls, 1971, pp. 245–246). First, we ought to develop an “ideal theory of justice” that lays out what principles of justice can be justified if we imagine them to govern a society that is unlike ours in that certain limitations are removed. Developing such a theory, Rawls argues, is necessary to allow us to grasp the correct conception of justice. In a second step, we can then use this conception to find out what we must do in our actual, nonideal circumstances. The idea that we need to refer to a utopian, ideal state of affairs in order to understand which conception of our most basic political concepts we ought to endorse is one of the features of Rawls's thought that has attracted the most commentary (see Robeyns, 2008; Simmons, 2010; Valentini, 2012). Realist opponents of ideal theory in this sense sometimes argue that ideal theory pays too little attention to questions of feasibility, that it does not take the limitations of human nature seriously enough, and that it is ill-equipped to guide us when thinking about necessary trade-offs (Farrelly, 2007; Galston, 2010; Nagel, 1995). In this article, I will examine arguments of a different nature that have historically emerged from the tradition of radical social thought and critical theory. These arguments do not object to ideal theorizing on the grounds that it leads to unrealistic demands or that it is insufficiently constrained by a realistic conception of human nature. Rather, these arguments assume that, given the nonideal circumstances in which current political theorists find themselves, they face limitations to their epistemic, imaginative, and conceptual capacities that distort the ideals they formulate and thereby take them in a direction that accommodates the status quo too much. Received: 7 December 2022 Revised: 6 April 2023 Accepted: 7 July 2023