Realism, Utopianism and Human Rights

In a recent article, Benjamin McKean defends utopian political theorising by means of an internal critique of realism, construed as essentially anti-utopian, in order to defend human rights against realist objections thereto. I challenge that argument in three steps, focusing on the realism of Raymond Geuss. First, I show that the realism of Raymond Geuss is not incompatible with utopianism, that Geuss never opposes realism to utopianism and that he frequently argues that political theory should be both more realistic and more utopian. Second, I show that McKean misconstrues Geuss’ opposition to human rights as anti-utopian. Neither Geuss’ opposition to ethics-first political theory nor his objections to human rights can accurately be explicated in terms of McKean’s ‘utopianism’. Finally, I show how this misconstruing of Geuss’ realism renders McKean’s critique of Geuss ineffective, as a result of which his defence of human rights against Geuss’ realist objections fails. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of this for methodological debates in political theory, the value of realistically utopian theorising and the ideological power of contemporary ethics-first approaches to political theory.