ABSTRACT
Faced with the question ‘what is reality?’ one is sorely tempted to give up on the search for realism. Thankfully, the nature of reality as such is a philosophical question which is no barrier to the explication of political realism and political idealism. First, the referent for political realism is not the nature of reality as a metaphysical whole. As Mannheim notes:
inasmuch as man is a creature living primarily in history and society, the ‘existence’ that surrounds him is never ‘existence as such’, but is always a concrete historical form of social existence…a functioning social order, which does not exist only in the imagination of certain individuals but according to which people really act.1
