Abstract

This essay discusses the theoretical challenge of critical realism by comparing it with a critique of violence. By drawing on the assumption, purported by critical realism, that it is necessary to overcome both the adaptive perspective of traditional political realism and the excessive abstractness of critical normativism, this essay proposes to enlarge the notion of ’realism’ so as to include instances of both sociability and relationality. By so doing it also aims at proposing a dynamic notion of critique, one that is employed - by a marginal 20th current of political thought, whose key figure is￿ the Russian-Italian political thinker Andrea Caffi - in opposing the traditional coupling of politics (even revolutionary politics) with violence.