In a stimulating exploration of the landscape of normative political theory, the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory recently curated a compelling array of panels and presentations under during the ECPR General Conference 2023, held in Prague from September 4th to September 8th, 2023.
The credit for arranging this thought-provoking section goes to Sune Lægaard and Nahshon Perez, whose dedication and effort deserve heartfelt appreciation for bringing together seven enlightening panels and a total of 24 engaging presentations.
For more information about the panels and presentations featured in this event, please visit: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/SectionDetails/1290
Section abstract
Debates about ‘method’ in political theory/philosophy have expanded and diversified in recent years. Political philosophy has also felt the pull of the methodological turn in political science, putting the post-Rawlsian consensus under even greater pressure.
Well-known examples of such debates on methods in political philosophy include the ideal/non-ideal theory debate (O’Neill, Stemplowska, Valentini), the moralism/realism debate (Williams, Geuss, Sleat & Rossi), the facts/principles debate (Cohen, Miller, Ronzoni), the practice dependence/independence debate (James, Sangiovanni), the measure of adopting political science methods and research output within political theory (Dowding, Floyd, Blau and Perez), the ethnographic approach to political theory (Herzog, Zacka and Longo); and finally debates regarding contextualism (Laegaard, Moodod and Thompson, Carens).
All of these debates revolve around methodological concerns in political philosophy:
▪️ What is a justified inference?
▪️ How do you construct a given research?
▪️ What tools of investigation do political theorists use, and how can one use them correctly?
▪️ How do political theorists evaluate research?
Methodological questions are also central to many other debates in political philosophy, including debates about feminism, the relations between history of political thought and systematic political philosophy, and the relation between political philosophy and empirical disciplines.
This Section has been a central venue for discussion of these and related questions over a number of years, at ECPR conferences in Prague (2016), Oslo (2017), Hamburg (2018), Wroclaw (2019), virtually in both 2020 and 2021, and in Innsbruck (2022).
This sequence of successful Sections provided the foundation for the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory, approved by the ECPR Executive Committee in 2022.
