Jeremy Fortier

Jeremy Fortier’s research examines the tradition of "realism" in the history of political thought; that is to say, the attempt at defining political morality as a sphere distinct from - or, at least, more limited than - morality in the fullest sense.

Recent interest in the tradition of realism is driven by a dissatisfaction with both the "idealist" tendency of the classical liberal tradition to "make the moral prior to the political" (that is, to view politics as constrained by, or instrumental to, supra-political moral claims) and of contemporary liberalism's attempt at making politics "morally neutral" (in order to minimize the potential for conflict). Contemporary realists (e.g., Bernard Williams or Richard Posner) have therefore turned to the tradition of political realism as an alternative to the whole spectrum of liberal approaches to the relation between morals and politics. In doing so, they have often explicitly followed Friedrich Nietzsche's sympathetic "reevaluation" of that tradition, and Jeremy’s research therefore lays out what is original, and what is most challenging, in Nietzsche's understanding of morality and politics.

Jeremy wishes to clarify the dominant (liberal) conception of the relationship between morality and politics, and delineate a series of influential challenges to that conception, thereby drawing out the presuppositions and implications (and, thus, the strengths and weaknesses) of both.