Abstract

A recent thought-provoking attempt to make critique more realistic and at once to make realism more critical is so-called critical realism. Its aspiration is to combine realism and critique for the former to provide the latter with novel intellectual resources. The present article casts a few doubts on how this objective is being pursued. By examining Carl Schmitt’s peculiar kind of institutional realism, the article argues that it jibes with critical realism, at least in the way critical realism is advocated by Dimitri D’Andrea. This is not meant to debase critical realism as a fruitful theoretical project, but to contribute to it by bringing to light some of the issues it must unravel before it gets off the ground.