ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the main criticisms of political or liberal moralism. It describes that consideration of the attempts by Machiavelli and Pareto to establish political realism can shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. The aim of political theory, for Jürgen Habermas as for other political moralists, is to arrive at a set of ideal prescriptions rather than to justify preferences in the context of existing values and political constraints. In Machiavellian fashion, the critics draw attention to the paradox that virtues can become vices in a political context. Vilfredo Pareto, for his part, insisted on the inevitability of historical and cultural variation in the normative content of political concepts. While Pareto focuses on social equilibrium, it is a dynamic equilibrium, analogous to that of a living organism, not one defined by coexisting properties in a static system.
