Raymond Geuss is one of the most inventive and distinctive voices in contemporary political philosophy and a trenchant critic of the field's dominant assumptions. In Reality and Its Dreams, he challenges the "normative turn" in political philosophy-the idea that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking abstractly about our own normative views and then, when they have been clarified and systematized, apply them to judging political structures, decisions, and events. Rather, the study of politics should be focused on the sphere of real politics, not least because normative judgments always arise from concrete historical configurations of power, including ideological power.

It is possible to do this without succumbing to a numbing or toxic form of relativism or abandoning utopianism, although utopianism needs to be reunderstood. The utopian impulse is not an attempt to describe a perfect society but an impulse to think the impossible in politics, to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be realized under current conditions, and to imagine how conditions that seem invariant can be changed.

Geuss ranges widely across philosophy, literature, and art, exploring past and present ideas about such subjects as envy, love, satire, and evil and the work of figures as diverse as John Rawls, St. Augustine, Rabelais, and Russell Brand. His essays provide a bracing critique of ideas, too often unexamined, that shape and misshape our intellectual and political worlds.

About the Author
Raymond Geuss is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books include Changing the Subject, Reality and Its Dreams, and Who Needs a World View?

Reviews
These essays are exhilarating evidence of their author's wide, thoughtful, and sharply perceptive reading of the signs and signals of our culture. -- Hans Sluga, University of California, Berkeley



Book Information
ISBN 9780674504950
Author Raymond Geuss
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press