Patriotism and Politics

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed sustained discussion exploring the morality of patriotism, with some defending patriotism as a legitimate moral virtue, others casting it as the unfortunate holdover of a clan-like morality that fails to register moral equality. While most contributors to this debate advance their arguments through a familiar form of moral inquiry that takes generic human subjects as its starting point, this chapter explores the status of patriotism from a standpoint that accords great weight to what we might call the fact of politics, i.e., to the fact that the world is divided into distinct political entities, that these entities make distinct claims on persons, and that everyday men and women register these claims powerfully and see them as reasonable. In so doing, this chapter constitutes an effort to bring to the assessment of patriotism some of the lessons of the so-called realist turn in recent political theory.