Is There a Distinctively Political

Normativity?

Jonathan Leader Maynard

and Alex Worsnip

A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writ-

ings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is

its own kind of normativity, distinct from moral normativity. In this article, we

first attempt to clarify what this claim amounts to and then reconstruct and in-

terrogate five major arguments for it. We contend that all these arguments are

unconvincing and fail to establish a sense in which political normativity is genu-

inely separate from moral