Topoi https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10142-8 angle from which to diagnose moral ills whose amelioration would improve the current order, rather than overthrow it (Haslanger 2012; Stanley 2015). Radical realism, as we will see, modifies the descriptive agenda of 20th century Western Marxism by pivoting from explaining social stability to revealing power structures. And it also takes on the diagnostic and evaluative aims of the new ideology critique (Kreutz 2023; Prinz & Rossi 2017), yet it does so while eschewing moral commitments because, like classical Marxism, it considers them a prime candidate for the very ideological distortions it seeks to overcome (Rossi 2019; Cross 2022; Aytac & Rossi 2023). The normative foundations of radical realist critique are rather to be found in epistemic normativity. In a nutshell, the idea is to empirically uncover patterns of power self-jus- tification that negatively affect the epistemic position from which we make political decisions. To use a toy example, in a patriarchal society the belief that “father knows best” can be traced back to paternal inculcation, which makes it epistemically circular, and so not a reliable guide to politi- cal decision-making. But what is the epistemic fault here, exactly? And how can we identify less obvious cases? As in some readings of classical Marxism (e.g. Miller 1984), the challenge is to answer those questions so as to show how a social-scientific description of the world can yield 1 Introduction Ideology critique, like the Marxism of which it was originally a part, traditionally eschewed moral commitments, consid- ering them the purview of bourgeois philosophising. Admit- tedly this approach was easier to sustain so long as the main target of the critique was bourgeois philosophising itself, as in Marx and Engels’ most extensive writings on ideology. But over the last century or so ideology critique has been taking on heavier burdens. In the early 20th century, West- ern Marxism notably turned the study of ideology into a tool to understand the failure of revolutionary socialism against fascism (Gramsci 1971). In the second half of that century, Marxists and post-Marxists turned to a notion of culture to explain the stability of liberal-democratic orders and the decline of mass left politics (Hall 1986). More recently still, what has been called the “new” ideology critique (Sankaran 2020) has largely dropped that explanatory aspiration, and it has been added to the toolbox of liberalism, as yet another  Enzo Rossi e.rossi@uva.nl 1 Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Postbus 15578, 1011NB, The Netherlands Abstract This paper examines how radical realism, a form of ideology critique grounded in epistemic rather than moral normativity, can illuminate the relationship between ideology and political power. The paper argues that radical realism can have both an evaluative and a diagnostic function. Drawing on reliabilist epistemology, the evaluative function shows how beliefs shaped by power differentials are often epistemically unwarranted, e.g. due to the influence of motivated reasoning and the suppression of critical scrutiny. The paper clarifies those mechanisms in order to address some recent critiques of radi- cal realism. The paper then builds on those clarifications to explore the how tracing the genealogy of legitimation stories can diagnose the distribution of power in society, even if ideology does not play a direct stabilising role. This diagnostic function creates a third position in the debate on ideology between culturalists and classical Marxists, and it can help reconciling aspects of structural and relational theories of power. Keywords Political realism · Political epistemology · Power · Ideology Accepted: 18 November 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 What Can Epistemic Normativity Tell us About Politics? Ideology, Power, and the Epistemology of Radical Realism Enzo Rossi 1 1 3