All normative political principles are both shaped in and applied to social and political practices. How we best understand the relationship between practices and principles is a question of paramount importance that has always puzzled political theorists. Today, few would deny that current social and political practices play a role in deciding how best to realise, for example, a principle of justice or a principle of democracy. The presumption that the kind of political institution and the context in which the principle operates matter significantly for how we implement it largely permeates all areas of policy-making. In development assistance policy, for example, it is stressed time and again that the aid-giving country should avoid taking its own democratic system as an exportable blueprint when building democratic institutions in the receiving country.

Much more contested is whether social and political practices also should play a role in the very justification of normative political principles. To return to the aid example, it is heavily disputed whether and to what extent principles of democracy in the receiving country should be local and context bound. In the last couple of years, this question has received renewed attention in several debates in political theory. From disparate quarters, criticism has been directed at mainstream political theory for neglecting the importance of practices for theorising proper principles and for being too detached from realworld circumstances to be of any use. Several current debates bear witness to this discontent, taking the form of a criticism of so-called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non-ideal theory’, of ‘practice-independent theory’ from ‘practice-dependent theory’, of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’, and of mainstream liberal theory from ‘pragmatist political theory’ and ‘pragmatist epistemic theory’.

These five debates focus on different values (e.g. justice, democracy and political legitimacy) and on different aspects of how social and political practices matter for normative theorising (e.g. for methodological reasons, epistemological reasons and political reasons), and have largely taken place in isolation from each other. The latter is unfortunate given that they not only address the same fundamental question of how social and political practices relate to normative political principles, but also share the assumption that practices in different ways constrain principles.