Democratic Legitimacy despite climate Emergency
An Analysis of Political Realism, Fact-Centricity, and the Case Against Authoritarian Rule
1 Introduction
In a high-profile contribution, Mittiga (2022) makes a daring claim. He argues that the harsh reality of the climate crisis might render authoritarian politics legitimate. Discussions of authoritarianism in ecopolitics have so far tended to focus on the expected policy performance (Shahar 2015). In contrast, Mittiga (2022) brackets “questions about the relative efficacy of democratic and authoritarian regimes” and focuses exclusively on the matter of (normative) legitimacy. Developing a political realist framework, he argues in favour of a “foundational legitimacy” (FL) lying solely in the provision of a minimum of safety. While other factors, such as inclusive authority or individual rights, may be essential components of legitimacy under normal conditions, Mittiga argues that their relevance depends on the satisfaction of FL and subsumes them under the headline of “contingent legitimacy” (CL). His core point is that if democratic or liberal standards stand in the way of effective climate mitigation, this would violate FL in the long run, which is why such norms may have to be curtailed. In the present essay, I intend to express my disagreement with this proposal.
Admittedly, eco-authoritarianism, understood as ambitious efforts of mitigation by authoritarian means, may not seem to be a realistic prospect. There may not currently be a relevant anti-democratic faction within the climate movement, and governments around the world seem unable (or unwilling) to take measures that would sufficiently reduce emissions in the first place, let alone become eco-authoritarian (IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2023). However, there is some intuitive appeal to the proposal that needs to be addressed. The data on climate change is so unequivocally clear that talk of a “climate emergency” has become ubiquitous. A striking example is the “World Scientist’s Warning of a Climate Emergency”, signed by over 11,000 scientists (Ripple et al. 2020). While I strongly assume that such statements are justified, they raise questions about the extent to which this might entail more authoritarian forms of governance. Some worry that because “[d]eclarations of emergencies create ‘states of exception’”, they can “threaten constitutional rights and justify the suspension of normal politics” (Hulme 2019). In the case of the climate emergency, this would virtually mean an indefinite suspension (ibid.) If those who speak of a climate emergency want to avoid such potential misunderstandings, they should clarify how they envisage legitimacy under conditions of climate emergency. The present essay will, I hope, contribute to such a clarification.
In a Nutshell
Poscharsky's essay critiques Ross Mittiga's argument that the climate emergency may legitimize authoritarian governance.
Mittiga's justification relies on a political realist framework, prioritizing "foundational legitimacy" (safety) over "contingent legitimacy" (e.g., democracy).
Poscharsky argues that Mittiga's view is a narrow interpretation of political realism and that ensuring safety depends on prior epistemic conditions (access to information).
The essay contends that inclusive authority is crucial for addressing the climate crisis, particularly regarding adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Poscharsky concludes that authoritarianism is not a valid inference from political realism and calls for a deeper methodological reflection in normative political theory.
Another aspect of Mittiga’s proposal that makes it worth discussing lies in the framework of political realism. On his account, the programme seems inherently prone to authoritarianism. This would probably not be shocking to many, but it is not obvious that such an affinity exists, given that, more recently, it has been popularized to reconcile political realism with democratic theory (e.g. Arlen and Rossi 2021, 2022; Bagg 2023; Austrup 2024a). On top of that, Mittiga offers a defense of authoritarianism that is remarkably deep-seated. Instead of simply saying, for example, that authoritarian governance might at times be a necessary evil, given non-ideal conditions in the real world, he includes authoritarianism in his very conception of legitimacy. If it turns out that this conception indeed follows from core commitments of political realism, this would cast the programme in a new and potentially bad light. In any case, discussing the implications of political realism will advance methodological disputes within the discipline of normative political theory. For this reason, while keeping in mind the more general motivation indicated above, my focus in the present essay will be rather narrow: I will, for the most part, bracket the more general question of how well-suited political realism and other programmes in normative political theory respectively are for discussing legitimacy in times of the climate emergency. Overall, I am guided by the question:
Does Mittiga provide a case for inferring an authoritarian construal of legitimacy from political realism as a metanormative premise?
Denying the plausibility of Mittiga’s conception of FL, the discussion will result in a resounding “No”. I will make two main points: First, the account is limited in scope, as it is not representative of much political realist scholarship. This is due to a narrow focus on Bernard Williams (2005) notion of “the first political question”. In brief, Mittiga’s interpretation controversially indicates that foundational standards in normative political theory can only be derived from empirical stipulations about what enables such judgements in the first place. Second, even under the assumption of this metanormative premise, Mittiga’s authoritarian construal of legitimacy does not hold. While “ensuring survival” may seem as an ultimate cause, it depends on the prior condition of political rulers possessing the relevant information to be able to do so. Thus, Mittiga cannot plausibly limit his notion of a foundational legitimacy to the provision of safety.
I will proceed as follows: In the next section, I show how Mittiga’s argument epitomizes deep-seated authoritarianism by providing a summary of his argument (2.1), specifying my reading of the argument as authoritarian (2.2), and defending this reading against another one which appears to associate Mittiga’s account with effective action-guidance (2.3). The third section marks an effort to further clarify my reading by identifying the key metanormative commitment underlying Mittiga’s construal of legitimacy. I begin by asserting, in broad terms, that his metanormative orientation is better characterized as fact-centricity than as non moralism (3.1). I proceed by showing that, more precisely, the metanormative assumption that the argument is built on should be characterized as strict fact-centricity—relying on a controversially narrow reading of Williams (3.2). The section will be concluded by considering some hints that Mittiga offers as to how he would defend strict fact-centricity (3.3). I thus provide motivation for the internal critique in the subsequent fourth section. Therein, I show that assuming strict fact-centricity should lead to a construal of legitimacy different from Mittiga’s, because “ensuring survival” cannot function as a foundational principle (4.1); not even if one would understand the categories of FL and CL in a more heuristic way and limit the argument to the context of the climate crisis (4.2). A further section will provide additional considerations on legitimacy in times of the climate crisis (5.), and the conclusion will summarize my findings and provide reflection (6.).
3 Mittiga’s strict fact-centricity
Building upon the characterization of Mittiga’s authoritarianism as deep-seated, I now proceed by carving out the key underlying metanormative assumption of fact-centricity. This way, I show that Mittiga’s case is limited in scope, as it is not representative of much political realist scholarship, and provide the grounds for the subsequent internal critique. I start by arguing why it is more productive to consider Mittiga’s political realism as an instance of fact-centricity than as an instance of non-moralism. Then, I argue that his account of fact-centricity should be considered particularly strict, meaning that the connection he draws between political realism and authoritarianism, if it would hold at all, only would for a certain variety of political realism. Finally, I highlight that Mittiga provides a case in favour of strict fact-centricity which can be considered strong enough to justify the subsequent internal critique.
3.1 Non-moralism or fact-centricity?
There appears to be a default option in how to start in a characterization of political realism: Most efforts to define the programme begin with Williams’ distinction of political realism from political “moralism” (Williams 2005, 1–3; cf. Galston 2010, 387; Rossi and Sleat 2014a , p. 689; Jubb 2017, p 112). From the political realist critique of “moralism” follows a popular understanding of the basic metanormative commitment in political realism. It relates to the relative importance of different types of normativity in political theory. Political realists, in varying degrees, call into doubt the straightforward applicability of moral philosophy to the realm of politics. Often, this applicability objection goes along with the positive claim that there exists a “distinctively political normativity” (Williams 2005, 3; cf. Rossi and Sleat 2014a, 691). Burelli and Destri (2022) provide the further observation that this can either mean that there exists a “distinctively political source of normativity” or that there are “specifically political normative judgements”, drawing their normativity from other non moral sources, such as epistemic and instrumental normativity (ibid.).
I assume that such discussions about the “ontology of the normative” (Kreutz 2023, 1) are productive. However, the understanding of political realism as non-moralism is not straightforward enough to provide a clear understanding of what exactly it is that determines Mittiga’s status as a political realist. What kinds of theoretical commitments should count as which type of normativity, if they are to be considered normative at all, is a complicated matter, where no common ground has emerged so far. A lot of the disagreement between political realists and “moralists” on this matter could turn out to be “merely verbal”, as the critics of political realism, Leader Maynard and Worsnip (2018) point out. It seems that it is not clear how morality is construed by each party and that they may actually agree in substance, while giving different names to the normativity that is relevant in politics. Maynard and Worsnip note that “[r]ealists sometimes […] implicitly characterize the moral domain as including only the principles that govern private interactions between individuals”, while “[f]ew moralists […] contend that political normativity is truly nothing more than private morality writ large” (ibid.).
Although they are confident that there is a substantive disagreement about the sources of normativity between “moralists” and political realists, Leader Maynard and Worsnip note that, so far, no consensus on how to construe morality is in sight (ibid., p. 763). This would not be a problem, if Mittiga himself offered any specification of how he 9 distinguishes political normative judgements from moral ones. He clearly indicates a critical perspective on grounding political value judgements in moral philosophy (Mittiga 2022, 1002), but he does not get more specific. Fortunately, there is a second way of understanding political realism as a metanormative orientation that is clearly intelligible and clearly appears to grasp Mittiga’s premises. It is well summarized by the statement that “[a political realist’s] endorsement of a set of political principles will be sensitive to facts about the political” (Hall 2013, 180, my emphasis). The point is a more general questioning of the role that pre-political standards play in political theory, be they moral in nature or not: “[t]he legitimation of political power is always a contextual question regarding what stands in need of justification, to whom, and what reasons are going to be normatively salient in those conditions” (Rossi and Sleat 2014a , p. 693).
It would not, correspondingly, be considered precise to characterise the key target of political realist critique as an understanding of normative political theory as “applied morality” (Williams 2005, 2). Rather, political realism would be defined by the opposition to a “methodological attitude in political philosophy of disregarding real politics – relying instead on abstract reasoning and aiming at formalising sets of general principles that are supposed to be valid cross-contextually” (Favara 2023, 377). To put it positively, political judgements should be grounded in facts about the context of politics they are meant to apply to. Rossi (2023) proposes to call this orientation “fact-centric”, meaning that “normative – prescriptive or evaluative – conclusions [are drawn] by pointing out the normatively salient features of an empirical description of a state of affairs”, instead of “modulat[ing] pre-existing abstract moral commitments” (ibid., p. 484). This commitment can clearly be found in Mittiga’s notion of FL, which is well illustrated by the following statement:
Unless we adopt a Whiggish view of history—believing that, although only “discovered” recently, contemporary CL standards are nonetheless universal constants, then we must conclude that what is often regarded as axiomatically true today—that only rights-respecting/consent based/democratic states are legitimate appears to be only contingently so—that is, true for those living in secular, postindustrial states. (Mittiga 2022, 1003)
In short, the validity of normative standards is grounded in their empirical prevalence. This way, one can also understand what a distinctively political normativity might be, without needing to have a clear account of different types of normativity. Note that this understanding is not at odds with non-moralism. The difference is that it is more clear and likely also broader, since it also motivates an avoidance of antecedent standards that are not rooted in moral normativity1. If this was all there is to political realism, it would, as (in that hypothetical case) unabashed relativism, hardly be a distinctive normative programme, if it would be normative at all. Thus, political realists reflect upon potential groundings for their theorizing, by means of overcoming “[t]he accusation of status quo bias” (Prinz and Rossi 2018). Some—most notably Rossi (2019, 2023, 2024) —discuss at length the “Critical Theory Principle” which is the idea that “the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified” (Williams 2005, 6) . Mittiga does not make use of this idea. Instead, in his grounding, he relies solely on the idea of “the first political question”, which, as seen, can be understood as an empirical stipulation about the enabling conditions of further value judgements about politics. His account should therefore be considered strictly fact-centric, that is, to him normative reasoning about politics is exclusively grounded in the fundamental empirical conditions enabling such reasoning.
3.2 Loose or strict fact-centricity?
This would put Mittiga’s account at odds with other, more loosely fact-centric approaches to “grounding” in political realism. Latter are preserving an overall fact-centric outlook while also allowing some thin grounding of normative political theorizing independent facts about politics. Mittiga’s argument could therefore not be considered representative of such scholarship. Accordingly, if there would be a solid case to draw authoritarian conclusions from political realist meta- normative premises, this would only hold for a specific variety of political realism. Given that Mittiga does not explicitly endorse any specific interpretation of political realism, the only way to become clear about this is to consider more loose varieties fact-centricity in turn; and to assess whether any of them could in principle provide an angle from which to interpret the argument. The following paragraphs introduce: semantic grounding, moral grounding and epistemic grounding.
To begin with semantic grounding, it is based on the idea that a “basic legitimation demand” (Williams 2005, 4) arises from the concept of politics itself. The emphasis here is not so much put on the idea that the provision of order and security is an empirical precondition for raising further demands, but rather on another aspect raised by Williams, namely that the securing of order is semantically entailed in the concept of politics. Notably, a further demand is argued to be also entailed in the concept of politics, namely that rulers should provide some form of justification to those ruled over (Sleat 2014, 320; cf. Williams 2005, 5). This reading represents a clear weakening of the fact-centricity condition since arguing via reference to semantic entailment is a form of a priori reasoning (cf. Cohen 2008, 249).
While Mittiga provides no reference to the entailments of the concept of politics, it might seem possible, at first glance, to reformulate his argument accordingly. After all, he acknowledges that some form of CL-demands will necessarily arise at any time, which fits in with the general demand that rulers should provide some form of justification to those ruled over. Yet, while semantic entailment might or might not provide a case for a distinctively political normativity, it surely does not tell us something about whether there is any type of normative claim that trumps all others. To be sure, one type of claim might be more durable than the other, as Mittiga (2022) points out himself:
“[Factors associated with CL] are the products of long and contentious historical processes. FL, on the other hand, does not vary between societies, generations, or circumstances”.
It is just hard to see how this serves as more than illustration, itself having clear implications regarding an order of priority. Moving on to moral grounding, efforts to overcome the divide between political realism and “moralism” acknowledge that, at least to some degree, political normativity must be grounded in morals (cf. Larmore 2013) . Such a reading thus only allows for a partial grounding of normative reasoning about politics in facts about the political. The argument here is that while one should acknowledge politics as a distinctive sphere, where morals only offer limited guidance, political normativity is not intelligible without reference to prior standards, which are partly moral in nature. It is unclear, according to this understanding, what gives a political authority its status “without justifying its rules, or its power to make them, by appeal to principles of justice it must present as having a validity independent of the political order itself” (ibid., p. 290). It is most obvious that Mittiga must disagree with a moral grounding: If a legitimacy demand is explicitly deemed foundational, it cannot be grounded in prior moral considerations.
The last option, epistemic grounding, is currently being popularized by Rossi (2023, 2024). He argues that empirical facts underdetermine normativity. Recall again Williams (2005) explanation of his notion of the “first political question”, namely that “’solving it is the condition of solving, indeed posing, any others”. Here, Rossi (2024) highlights the aspect that the “first political question” itself needs to be “solved”—that it can thus not stand for itself, in providing normative guidance. This is where the “critical theory principle” becomes relevant, as “[t]he first political question remains unsolved unless we are in a position to properly judge whether it has been solved” (ibid.). Rossi argues that while there need not exist any antecedent moral standards guiding the judgements of normative political theorists, there do need to be epistemological standards: “We need an epistemic filter that tells us when actual belief in legitimacy is justified, and so normatively salient. This filter can be created by applying a form of ideology critique grounded in epistemic normativity to empirical measures of legitimacy” (ibid., p. 3).
Thus, according to the understanding that Rossi provides, “[t]he first political question” would be understood as, “in part but irreducibly, an epistemic question” (ibid., p. 16).2 The case of epistemic grounding requires a (slightly) closer look, in order to see that it cannot be aligned with Mittiga’s argument. It is not immediately obvious that FL cannot entail epistemological commitments, that are—at least to a certain degree (Rossi 2024, 21))—extra political, next to empirical stipulations. The problem with such a hypothetical amendment to Mittiga’s argument is that the case for authoritarianism would, at the very least, be harder to make if one were to take into account the “critical theory principle” as part of the idea of FL itself. One would have to deal with stronger limits to the permissible exercise of power than Mittiga acknowledges. Relatedly, this would give rise to a conceptual problem by blurring the distinction between FL and CL: The notion that “the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified” (Williams 2005, 6) would clearly be correctly described as being a principle about the “acceptable use of political power” and thus, on Mittiga’s account, as an example for CL.
Epistemic grounding can therefore not be considered compatible with his authoritarian construal of political legitimacy. Instead, one should understand Mittiga’s argument to be strictly fact-centric. To sum it up once more: Normative judgements about politics should be grounded in facts about politics. In most cases, this will lead to an apparent normative relativism: Normative judgements will, without further qualification, vary depending on the respective prevailing conceptions of legitimacy in different historical and geographical contexts. The only exception is based on the finding that, out of all the legitimacy factors, the satisfaction of the requirement that “citizens’ essential safety needs are met” (Mittiga 2022, 999) is, empirically, the prior condition to raising a demand regarding any legitimacy claim. The conclusion is a construal of legitimacy, where an order of priority between thus identified “foundational” and “contingent” legitimacy factors is defined. Inclusive authority, in this image, belongs to the latter, while in contrast “a capacity for authoritarian governance, as well as a means for expeditiously adopting it in dire circumstances, constitute essential [that is, foundational] components of political legitimacy” (ibid., p. 1005).
3.3 Could strict fact-centricity possibly hold as a premise?
One might wonder if Mittiga’s variety of political realism is not clearly subordinate to the others. At least, the cases for epistemic and moral grounding seem to provide significant challenges for strict fact-centricity. Both, in different ways, highlight that it is unclear if a claim to authority and thus to secure safety is actually legitimate. It is, in other words is unclear, who should be entitled to secure safety. The authority to provide order, trust and the conditions of cooperation quite obviously needs prior justification and thus the “first political question”, as Williams put it, can not provide an ultimate normative principle. At the same time, if one singles out the aspect of bare survival, the case becomes less clear; and this is exactly what Mittiga does. He does it implicitly, by characterizing the climate crisis as a life-and-death scenario and he does it more or less explicitly, when stating that “[c]rudely put, FL is about living, CL about living well” (ibid., p. 1004).
One could, in principle, make the following argument in Mittiga’s defense: The physical existence of human beings must be given in order for them to raise any normative claims. In that sense, there are no claims prior to survival, not even claims about the means of doing so— or indeed about who is entitled to do so. Such claims do, in fact, only arise under the prior condition of life. This brief defense of Mittiga is not intended to be conclusive. What it should show, however, is that it is productive to engage in internal criticism. Some might indeed be tempted by the idea that “bare survival” trumps democracy. It is thus important to assess the validity of such a case, which is what I am going to do now.
4 The invalidity of Mittiga’s proposal
More precisely put, I am providing an internal critique, based on the findings of the preceding section. I first argue that providing safety always depends on the prior condition of sufficient information. This refutes the conceptual distinction between FL and CL as I understood it so far, judging from an attempt to uphold Mittiga’s strict commitment to fact-centricity. Second, I add grounds for refuting the distinction if it is understood more heuristically, by arguing that sufficient information is not given in the case of the climate crisis. The latter point is informed by basic findings on how to characterize the climate crisis which are, in my view, of general import, beyond the rather narrow discussion held so far.
4.1 A prior condition to the provision of safety
Provisionally accepting the premise that empirical stipulations about “fundamental enabling conditions” provide ultimate normative principles, it, rather quickly, becomes clear that the provision of safety can still not provide the grounding that Mittiga claims it does. There is a grave internal problem to his argument, related to the one-sided focus on the behaviour of citizens. Recall that Mittiga’s concrete policy proposals have the exclusive purpose to control the individual behaviour of citizens that adversely affects efforts of climate mitigation. In this image it is presupposed that the respective political rulers already know what to do—or, to put it in more empirical terms, it is presupposed that the mental states of the leaders correspond to the problem at hand. If rulers were indeed able to “solve” the climate emergency given that citizens would comply, this would only be possible due to the prior work of climate scientists providing the necessary information about the causal relation between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
If it was indeed possible to identify something like a foundational legitimacy, solely based on empirical stipulations, you would somehow need to provide a general account of the conditions in which rulers have the optimal access to information about safety threats and their resolution. Such an account might then be similar to Rossi’s, in this case providing epistemic grounding not to the conditions under which citizens form a belief in authority, but to the conditions under which leaders form a belief about how to provide safety. This would violate strict fact-centricity. Of course, this, alone does not yet provide a conclusive refutation. One could still try to adapt Mittiga’s argument such that it would include an epistemological account of foundational legitimacy. Such an attempt would successfully defend authoritarianism if it were able to show that a non-inclusive exercise of authority does not contradict such epistemic conditions to be realized (whatever the specific characteristics of these conditions may be).
In other words, considerations about what Mittiga calls “contingent legitimacy”—that is, about how to “[exercise] power in acceptable ways” (Mittiga 2022, 1001)—could still be considered logically subordinate to the provision of safety. Hence, it would still be plausible to make the case that the provision of safety trumps inclusive authority, arguing that the former is the precondition for the latter and not the other way around. The distinction between FL and CL could still hold, even though there would be a more ultimate, epistemic aspect to FL. Such an adaption would mean giving up on the strong notion that “a capacity for authoritarian governance, as well as a means for expeditiously adopting it in dire circumstances, constitute 15 essential components of political legitimacy” (ibid., p. 1005, my emphasis). This is due to the obvious point that it cannot be (quasi-)universally ruled out that authority may need to be inclusive in order to provide safety.
Remarkably, this brings back in the issue of “provid[ing] more reliable practical guidance” (Bagg 2022, 29) through the back-door. Those who wish to defend eco authoritarianism might concede that authoritarianism is not an essential component of legitimacy, but still cherish the idea that authoritarian governance is legitimate under specific conditions under which there is no need for inclusive authority in order to enable an effective provision of safety. Mittiga’s distinction between FL and CL could then still be upheld provisionally, based on practical considerations about the character of the climate crisis. This is not even so far-fetched: Since the most relevant geophysical knowledge is already there, the issue of whether or not power “exercised in acceptable ways” could be regarded as not presently being part of the basic enabling conditions of providing safety. Therefore, for the context of the climate emergency, an authoritarian distinction analogous to the one between FL and CL would still hold, although just provisionally.
4.2 “The first political question” under climate emergency
To lay these last doubts to rest, I want to highlight the complexity of the climate crisis, making two distinct points, one about adaptation and one about mitigation. In both cases “the facts” are far from clear if you do not narrow the view to the natural sciences. This renders even a provisional distinction between FL and CL implausible. Showing this will lead to some initial, more far reaching claims about the degree of inclusiveness that should be considered essential to legitimacy under climate emergency. While these claims are important to me, they fulfil more of an illustrative function with regard to the refutation of Mittiga’s defense of eco-authoritarianism.
Concerning the issue of climate adaptation (which is completely neglected by Mittiga) a large part of the relevant information can only be acquired by listening to the many. There are no “one size fits all” solutions. Due to the variation, complexity and uncertainty in socio ecological systems, climate adaptation will require political action sensible to local knowledge and practices (Hilde 2012, 896–97) . Providing food security, for example, must rely on the insights of local farmers, familiar with their respective land (ibid.). Even more clearly, the adaptation to distinctively social effects of the climate crisis must be informed by considering the insights of those affected: For contributing to a solution of a violent conflict, you will need to listen carefully to the conflict parties.
In general, it can safely be deemed indispensable for rulers to be “responsive”, in order to be “responsible” under climate emergency (Austrup 2024b , p. 1), not just to ensure compliance with climate mitigation, but also and especially to enable responsible policymaking for adaptation. To quote a famous line by John Dewey (2016): “[T]he man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches.” Even if one was to bracket the issue of adaptation and solely focused on mitigation, one could not plausibly argue—at least not based on Mittiga’s contribution—that there is but the slightest and most provisional of cases for authoritarianism under climate emergency. This is due to the fact that “reducing CO2 emissions” requires more than just natural science (or engineering) information. What we are dealing with is, to a large degree, a crisis of the contemporary form of life, where it is currently unclear, what a solution could look like. Consider the following passage from Fraser (2022):
Present-day ecopolitics unfolds within, and is marked by, an epochal crisis. It is a crisis of ecology, to be sure, but also one of economy, society, politics, and public health […]. The result is a crisis of hegemony—and a wilding of public space. No longer tamed by a ruling common sense that forecloses out-of-the-box options, the political sphere is now the site of a frantic search not just for better policies, but for new political projects and ways of living. […] In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counterhegemony. What is needed, in other words, is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an ecopolitical common sense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a common sense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the sociohistorical drivers of climate change.
To put the point a bit differently: There is still a lack of secure social-scientific knowledge, meaning that political rulers might in principle be compelled to “do whatever is necessary”, but it is still unclear what exactly this means. Does capitalism need to be overcome, as Fraser herself argues? If so, what does this mean in practice? While there are compelling answers (such as Fraser’s) to these questions, it is more than doubtful that they have a legitimate claim to the truth about how to even characterize the problem if they cannot even convince the majority of social scientists. There needs to be some effective and inclusive way of pooling transformative knowledge, in order to account for the diverse perspectives, which arguably points in the direction of a democratic renewal of the science system (cf. Schneidewind et al. 2016) .
Both highlighted aspects suggest more far-reaching, indeed radical democratic, conclusions about legitimacy under climate emergency. While I am convinced about these points, please note that more modest legitimacy demands would pose the same problems to Mittiga. What should be clear is that even if normative reasoning about politics can be grounded according to fundamental empirical necessities enabling such reasoning—which would require an ultimate grounding in epistemology— there is still no valid case for an eco-authoritarian construal of legitimacy. The distinction between FL and CL does not even hold provisionally in times of the climate crisis, because it cannot be plausibly denied that inclusive authority can be excluded from the epistemic conditions enabling the provision of safety. To be clear, this does not strictly rule out the possibility that there could be different circumstances, under which Mittiga’s defense of authoritarianism could still be coherent. In the case of the climate crisis, the necessary information to provide safety is not yet available, but it is—at least remotely— conceivable that there are other instances where this is clearly the case. Under such conditions you could indeed argue that providing safety can, heuristically, be identified as an essential element of legitimacy. The burden would now lie with authoritarians to provide an example for such a case. I doubt that they could find one.
5 Some further remarks
I am confident to have provided conclusive results, regarding the scope and the validity of the connection between political realism and eco-authoritarianism, as it is drawn by Mittiga (See next section). Likewise, I am convinced that such a refutation is important, given the intuitive appeal of the claim that “survival trumps democracy”. That being said, providing negative arguments can hardly be satisfactory in the longer term. The overarching questions remain, how, under climate emergency, one should positively account for legitimacy and how normative political theory should be positioned methodologically. More specifically, one might ask, what role, if any, political realism should play in looking for answers. Allow me to sketch some initial thoughts on the latter question.
What unites the diverse field of political realism is well described as the commitment to be adequately “sensitive to the realities of politics” (Rossi and Sleat 2014b, 742) . One might want to ask how such a sensitivity might help to improve systematic reflection about politics in times of the climate crisis. Robert Jubb (2022) makes a point regarding this general question that may provide for an interesting discussion. According to him, “the political philosophy of climate change” has up to now been “comparatively untouched by realism” and instead “dominated by highly moralised questions about the just distribution of the burdens of addressing anthropogenic warming” (ibid., concluding section, para 3). From a political realist perspective, this must be deemed insufficient, given how detached these “moralist” approaches appear from the practical challenge at hand: “[T]he politics of climate change […] are after all no more likely than any others to achieve justice […].” (ibid.) From this can arise, very roughly, two different strategies towards a political realist conception of legitimacy for adequately taking account of climate change.
Firstly, realists could use a legitimacy framework with the aim to provide heuristics for more immediate action-guidance. Secondly, realists could try to provide more principled, albeit more indirect guidance by developing normative benchmarks that are better suited to address the climate crisis than the “moralist” ones. The first strategy is exemplified by Austrup while the second one is exemplified by Mittiga. I would like to point one general problem with respect to Austrup’s (a) and one with respect to Mittiga’s (b) strategy. The points that I raise should be understood as an expression of caution, regarding the merit of political realism, not, by any means, as a general dismissal.
a) One may be, in principle, sympathetic towards the idea that normative political philosophy should, ideally, be able to provide immediate action-guidance and also acknowledge that such guidance would be direly needed, given the emergency situation we are in. Abstract philosophizing for its own sake, if it is a relevant phenomenon at all, should be the exception rather than the rule in humanities and social science departments. John Dewey, among others, taught this lesson. Thereby he argued for situating subjectivity within objectivity and theory within lived practice (Jörke 2003, 52, 72) . For this reason, some note an affinity between political realism and Deweyan pragmatism (Bagg 2016; Festenstein 2016) . However, Dewey also taught us that there are situations where,
inside primary experience, an irritation arises and adaptation to the environment can no longer follow familiar patterns. In such cases, according to Dewey, a ‘problematic situation’ arises, and the achievement of human intelligence consists precisely in wanting to resolve this tension-filled state by searching for solutions to the problem. In this process of finding solutions to problems, the directly experienced unity of experience is separated, subject and object diverge for analytical purposes. (Jörke 2003, 52, my translation)
Likewise, theory can be distinguished from immediate practice, as a form of”secondary experience”, aimed at overcoming problems arising from lived experience (ibid., p. 72). As such, it is implausible to impose limits on theory, concerning the level of abstraction, it may assume. Indeed, Dewey himself provided an abstract account of “inquiry”, as a benchmark for “successful thinking”, which is closely related to his theory of democracy (ibid, p. 79). One may find such antecedent benchmarks indispensable, not despite, but precisely because of a commitment to be oriented towards practice: Successfully overcoming obstacles to action often requires giving up on finding immediate solutions and first reflecting upon how solutions could effectively be sought in the first place. Even if time is painfully short, with regard to the climate crisis, we gain nothing by running harder against the wall.
b) “Foundationalist” realists would per definition not deny this (cf. Jubb 2022, third section, para 1). Instead they would, in many cases argue that antecedent standards in normative political theory should not be “moral”, but instead distinctively political, epistemological or instrumental.3 There is at least one problem with this view that I want to point out, which I could not raise before, since it potentially requires a vantage point external to political realism: Mittiga presumes a national context, while the climate crisis is a global problem. This indicates that a crucial issue is left unaddressed, which is also prior to the provision of safety: Who’s safety should be considered? Only considering residents and/or citizens by default would lead to the problem that there would be no reason to consider those suffering from your emissions elsewhere in the world. In a hypothetical country, where climate change is no grave threat to the safety of its residents, there would accordingly be no necessary reason for reducing CO2 emissions at all. This discussion, which is closely related to the “democratic boundary problem” would thus have to be held.4 Political realists would have to explain how it is not a “moralist” discussion, in their own terms.
6 Conclusion
On this note, I want to move towards the end of the present essay. The last paragraphs sum up the results and provide some final reflection.
At the outset I asked, if Mittiga provides a case for inferring an authoritarian construal of legitimacy from political realism as a metanormative premise. The second to fourth sections developed an answer to this question. In the second section I established my overall reading of Mittiga’s authoritarianism. I argued that Mittiga’s authoritarianism does not lie in the concrete measures he suggests, but in his stance that concerns about inclusive authority may generally be overridden by concerns about the provision of safety, because the former is a contingent legitimacy concern while the latter is about foundational legitimacy. I further held that this should be understood as an attempt to thoroughly integrate authoritarianism in the very conception of legitimacy, rather than to provide more effective action-guidance. In the third section, I developed an understanding of the metanormative commitments that I thus found must underly Mittiga’s construal of legitimacy.
I argued that it is most instructive in this regard to understand political realism as a commitment to fact-centricity, and that Mittiga’s is at odds with different approaches to grounding such fact-centric reasoning. Considering these approaches provided a clearer understanding of Mittiga’s case, as strictly fact-centric, and showed how it is limited in its representation of the programme of political realism. I concluded the section by highlighting that Mittiga provides a case that does, at least at first glance, not seem unreasonable, by emphasising that when “brute survival” is at stake, other concerns step into the background. This led me to an internal critique, taking serious Mittiga’s commitment to strict fact-centricity. I highlighted the problems that arise in trying to argue in favour of authoritarian legitimacy, from such a metanormative assumption. The key point is that ensuring survival cannot be an ultimate cause, since it depends on prior epistemic conditions on the side of political rulers. Further, I argued that the climate crisis does not constitute a case in which the relevant knowledge is already available to rulers and that the acquisition of such knowledge would require some degree of inclusive authority. My guiding question can thus be answered in the following way: Mittiga’s case for drawing a connection between political realism and authoritarianism is limited to a specific variety of political realism and as such it is invalid.
In the fifth section, I added a further consideration, indicating that, while this shows that the programme of political realism is not to blame for deeply unfortunate contributions like Mittiga’s, this does not mean that it represents the right way of reflecting on legitimacy in times of the climate crisis. While I expressed that I found it, in the longer run, unsatisfactory to only negatively assert how not to construe legitimacy, the section left me with a further one of such negative remarks, that political realism might not be able to provide final answers.
The overall aim that I would like to encourage normative political theorists to strive for is much more ambitious. I believe that one should not “move beyond a Methodenstreit” (Rossi 2016) too fast, but rather pool even more resources in an effort to reflect about the character of the discipline. Such deliberations are closely related to the question of which societal role it should play. Consider the following: Regarding the current “epochal crisis” (Fraser 2022, 77), it is not even remotely clear, what could enable societies to take their fate in their own hands. It thus appears that systematic reflection about feasible and legitimate ways forward is especially needed. Normative political theory, then, is the discipline predestined to provide such reflection. Political theorists should, therefore, regard it as a primary goal to work towards a common understanding of what it is, precisely, that they want to contribute to society.
7 Acknowledgements
I thank Palle Bech-Pedersen, Jesko Hennig and Luca Tielke for fruitful discussions based on earlier versions of this essay, helping me to clarify my ideas. For her invaluable help at the final stages, I want to thank Janna Koop.
8 References
Footnotes
Except moral normativity, one might also consider “epistemic normativity, prudential normativity, ‘aim-given’ normativity, and aesthetic normativity” (Leader Maynard, Worsnip 2018, p. 756)↩︎
Rossi’s view has similarities to the abovementioned proposal by Burelli and Destri (2022) who argue that epistemic and instrumental normativity together constitute political normativity.↩︎
Except, of course, for Larmore and likeminded scholars.↩︎
For a state-of-the-art discussion of the democratic boundary problem see Goodin and Arrhenius (2024).↩︎