What Incentive Structures Do to Political Philosophy: Epistemic Pathologies and Institutional Design

Abstract

Political philosophers increasingly work within institutional environments shaped by metrified evaluation, hypercompetition, and publish-or-perish expectations. This article does not argue that political philosophy has empirically declined or become uniformly conservative. On the contrary, contemporary political theory shows significant pluralisation, including greater visibility for feminist, decolonial, ethnographic, and public-facing approaches. The central claim is instead that prevailing incentive structures generate predictable epistemic pathologies. By systematically rewarding work that is strategically legible, rapidly publishable, and easily refereed, they discourage slower, riskier, and more conceptually ambitious inquiry – especially among early-career scholars whose professional survival depends on repeated publication in a narrow set of high-status venues. Drawing on analyses of perverse incentives in the sciences, the article shows how analogous dynamics operate within political philosophy. It concludes by arguing that reforms to hiring, publishing, and evaluation practices could better align professional incentives with the epistemic goods political philosophy has reason to value.

Introduction

Richard Rorty once claimed that moral insight is often achieved by seeing how experiments work out (2022 [1992], 45). In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, he went further, suggesting that ‘when there is no longer an audience outside the discipline that displays interest in a philosophical problem, that problem should be viewed with suspicion’ (2007, 151). Similarly, in ‘Pūrākau as Philosophy’, Krushil Watene argues that many Indigenous scholars understand their work as ‘being in the service of community’ (2025, 99). These perspectives highlight a shared intuition: political philosophy is not merely an internal, professionalised practice, but a form of inquiry that is answerable to publics, communities, and political conditions beyond the academy.

Yet contemporary political philosophy and normative political theory are increasingly produced within institutional environments that reward rapid, continuous, and strategically targeted publication. Metrified evaluation systems—linking research assessment, hiring, promotion, and funding to quantifiable outputs and prestige signals – shape not only how political philosophers work, but what kinds of work they regard as professionally viable. The central claim of this article is not that political philosophy has empirically declined, nor that it has become uniformly conservative or less pluralistic than it once was. On the contrary, compared to the discipline of 50 years ago, political philosophy today exhibits greater visibility for feminist theory, decolonial approaches, ethnographic political theory, and public-facing work. Rather, the argument advanced here is that current incentive structures generate predictable epistemic risks: they systematically privilege forms of scholarship that are strategically legible, easily refereed, and rapidly publishable, while disincentivising slower, riskier, and more experimentally oriented work – especially for early-career scholars whose professional survival depends on repeated publication in a small set of high-status venues.

This is best understood as a claim about institutional epistemic pathology. Incentive structures do not merely influence productivity, they shape the economy of inquiry: the system of competition, exchange, and reward through which scholars learn what kinds of work are professionally viable and worth pursuing. Similar dynamics have been extensively documented in the sciences, where ‘publish-or-perish’ environments encourage hyperproduction, salami-slicing, and the strategic optimisation of outputs. My purpose in drawing on this literature is not to suggest that political philosophy mirrors the replication crises of biomedical research, nor to offer a sociological measurement of publication effects within political theory. It is to illuminate a more general mechanism: when professional survival is tethered to quantifiable proxies – counts, rankings, prestige signals – researchers rationally optimise for the proxy, and the proxy begins to reorganise intellectual life. The effects are ecological as well as economic: such arrangements reshape the wider environment of inquiry, influencing which questions are selected, which topics are treated as serious, which methods and styles are sustained, and which intellectual risks become more or less bearable. The problem, then, is not only that scholars adapt strategically to evaluative incentives, but that those incentives begin to distort the conditions under which knowledge is produced, circulated, and taken seriously.

This matters, especially in political philosophy, where judgments of significance, salience, and public relevance cannot be reduced to the kinds of proxy measures that increasingly organise academic evaluation. Political philosophy has particular reasons to be troubled about such distortions. As a discipline centrally concerned with public reason, democratic legitimacy, and the conditions under which judgement can be formed and contested, it cannot treat the organisation of its own epistemic practices as a merely internal professional matter. If the dominant incentives of the field reliably favour micro-contributions that are safe, incremental, and inward-facing, the costs are not only disciplinary. They include a narrowing of conceptual imagination, an internalisation of risk-aversion as ‘rigour’, and a growing gap between what the discipline claims to be for and what it is structurally rewarded for producing. These pathologies can coexist with genuine pluralisation and important innovation; the point is that they make such innovation harder, less typical, and more professionally hazardous – particularly for those without institutional security.

The argument proceeds in five stages. First, I outline how metrified incentive regimes generate epistemic pathologies, drawing on work in the sciences to clarify the mechanisms through which publication pressures reshape inquiry. Second, I show how analogous dynamics operate within political philosophy, not by rendering the discipline closed, but by channelling research toward strategically publishable micro-contributions and by encouraging both excessive conservatism and superficial novelty. Third, I argue that these dynamics are especially troubling in a political context marked by epistemic fragmentation, democratic instability, and overlapping crises – conditions that demand conceptual experimentation and forms of theorising capable of speaking beyond specialist audiences. Fourth, I examine recent calls for public political philosophy, arguing that the sharp distinction between academic and public-facing work is itself symptomatic of distorted incentives. Finally, I develop the institutional implications of this diagnosis by considering how reforms to hiring practices, publishing norms, and evaluative criteria might better align professional reward with the epistemic goods political philosophy has reason to value, without simply replacing existing distortions with new ones.

The aim throughout is neither to romanticise a past discipline nor to denigrate incremental scholarship. Incremental work is indispensable to any intellectual tradition. The claim, rather, is that an epistemic economy shaped by publish-or-perish tends to misidentify what is valuable, crowding out precisely the slower, deeper, and more publicly answerable forms of political philosophy that ‘crisis-laden’ times make newly urgent (McKeown 2022, 99). To write less and say more is not to abdicate academic responsibility. It is to reclaim it.

Publish or Perish, Perverse Incentives and Metrification

Across academia, the conditions under which research is produced are increasingly shaped by metrification, hypercompetition, and precarity. These forces have been most extensively documented in the sciences, where scholars warn of a structural shift in which quantitative performance indicators – publication counts, citation metrics, journal rankings – begin to determine not only how research is evaluated but also how it is conducted (Edwards and Roy 2017; Rawat and Meena 2014). Although political philosophy is situated differently, this literature is useful not because the disciplines are identical, but because it illuminates a more general mechanism: when professional success is tied to quantifiable proxies, researchers are incentivised to optimise for those proxies. These analyses therefore provide a conceptual foundation for understanding how incentive regimes can distort academic practice across disciplines, including within the social sciences and humanities. The problem with proxies is not simply that they are imperfect measures of quality. It is that they begin to stand in for judgment itself. Once that happens, scholars are pushed to optimise for what can be counted, signalled, and rewarded, rather than for what is most important, difficult, or worth saying.

The contemporary academic landscape in the UK illustrates how such incentives operate in practice. Universities face ‘deteriorating conditions, receding opportunities for sustainable academic work and strong potential of sector contraction’ (Watermeyer et al. 2024, 3), with media reporting nearly a quarter anticipating job losses (Adams 2025). Those who remain experience intensified workloads and managerial oversight; similar patterns are documented in the United States, where bureaucratic ‘taskmasters’ are charged with maximising productivity (Delucchi et al. 2024, 10). Importantly, this expansion of administrative and teaching burdens has not been accompanied by a relaxation of publication expectations. Instead, publication has increasingly become a dominant proxy for talent, institutional value, and career security. The result is not simply a pressure to produce more work, but a restructuring of the practical conditions under which academic judgement is exercised, including decisions about what projects to pursue, what risks to take, and what forms of scholarship appear professionally viable.

This would be unproblematic if publication metrics reliably tracked scholarly quality. The difficulty, as the scientific literature repeatedly demonstrates, is that they often do not. When quantity becomes a primary basis of evaluation, researchers rationally adapt their behaviour to maximise outputs. Rawat and Meena describe an ‘immense pressure to publish’ that generates a range of dysfunctional responses, including ‘salami slicing’ (where the same research is divided into multiple fragments in order to increase publication counts), strategic citation practices, and the fragmentation of research agendas in ways that risk undermining both coherence and depth (2014, 87). Edwards and Roy describe these dynamics collectively as ‘perverse incentives’ (2017, 51) and identify three characteristic features of such regimes. First, intended and actual effects systematically diverge: evaluation systems designed to reward excellence end up incentivising strategic optimisation. Second, the relevant metrics are relatively easy to game, encouraging behaviour that is oriented toward the appearance of productivity rather than its substance. Third, widespread awareness of this manipulability corrodes collegiality and trust, both by generating suspicion about others’ motivations and by encouraging scholars to anticipate how their work will be strategically interpreted rather than intellectually engaged with.

The empirical consequences of these dynamics have begun to be documented within the sciences. Scientific publishing has, it is claimed, accelerated at extraordinary speed: in 2006 alone there were 1.3 million peer-reviewed articles, and the number of journals expanded from 16,000 in 2001 to 23,750 in 2006. Of articles published in 4,500 journals, only 45 percent were cited within 5 years, a figure that has been declining over time (Rawat and Meena 2014, 87). For Rawat and Meena, this proliferation of journals and articles does not indicate a flourishing of intellectual life, but rather a system strained by incentive structures that reward the appearance of contribution over its substance. Whether or not one accepts the strongest version of this diagnosis, the underlying mechanism is clear: where evaluation systems privilege quantity, speed, and strategic visibility, they reshape the practical conditions under which judgement, risk-taking, and intellectual ambition are exercised.

The mechanism linking incentives to epistemic outcomes becomes clearer when we consider wider concerns about research integrity. The rate of retractions in biomedical and life sciences has increased tenfold since 1975, with 67 percent attributed to misconduct (Fang et al. 2012). This trend could partly reflect the development of more robust checking and correction mechanisms rather than a simple increase in wrongdoing. Nevertheless, Edwards and Roy warn that if untrustworthy practices were to become sufficiently widespread, a ‘tipping point’ could emerge in which the credibility of the scientific enterprise itself is undermined, risking a loss of public trust and, in their deliberately stark formulation, even a ‘new dark age’ for humanity (2017, 51). While this language is intentionally dramatic, it captures an important underlying concern. Distorted incentive structures do not merely shape individual behaviour; they can alter professional norms over time, influencing what kinds of practices come to be regarded as acceptable, what kinds of claims are trusted, and how epistemic authority is distributed. In this sense, the stakes of incentive design are not merely internal to academic communities but extend to the epistemic foundations on which public knowledge depends – a point that takes on particular urgency in political contexts already marked by populism, post-truth discourse, and climate denial.

These dynamics also generate selection effects within the academy. Institutions are themselves subject to wider ‘perverse incentives’, or what Watermeyer, Bolden, Knight, and Crick describe as a ‘cavalcade of neoliberal logic’ (2024, 2), including pressures associated with student recruitment, league tables, and university rankings. These institutional incentives in turn shape the environments within which individual academics work. In the UK, for example, government approaches to higher education increasingly emphasise the delivery of measurable performance outcomes, while paying comparatively less attention to questions of legitimacy or the substantive quality of impact (Watermeyer et al. 2024, 7). Related patterns can be observed elsewhere: some universities in North America, Edwards and Roy note, have engaged in the strategic manipulation of metrics in order to influence their ranking positions (2017, 54).

If institutions themselves are embedded within incentive regimes that reward strategic optimisation, it is unsurprising that similar logics begin to shape expectations at the level of individual academic practice. Some academics report leaving the profession in response to these conditions (Watermeyer et al. 2024), while those who remain often find themselves adapting to an environment in which career survival appears to depend upon rapid and continuous publication. These pressures are especially acute for early-career scholars. Short-term contracts, heavy teaching loads, time-consuming peer review processes, and lengthy delays following rejection and resubmission together create conditions under which the imperative to accumulate publications can become existential. The resulting behaviours are therefore best understood not as matters of individual failure, but as rational responses to structurally induced conditions of insecurity and evaluation.

There are also disciplinary spillover effects. Incentive structures intended to free senior scholars for grant acquisition may contribute to the proliferation of teaching-only posts, thereby generating a cohort of academics who struggle to develop sustained research identities (Edwards and Roy 2017). At the same time, systems that reward publication quantity have been described as producing an ‘avalanche’ of incremental papers (Edwards and Roy 2017, 52; Smaldino and McElreath 2016), while also fostering frustration among colleagues who believe – often with good reason – that evaluation systems are vulnerable to strategic gaming (Abbott et al. 2010). These dynamics can reshape the normative orientation of academic life: competition becomes structurally incentivised over collaboration, CV-building over inquiry, and defensive or strategically calibrated writing over intellectual risk-taking.

Empirical work on academic morale provides further support for this diagnosis. In a recent survey-based study, Watermeyer, Bolden, Knight, and Crick report that many academics experience contemporary academic environments as alienating and describe being subjected to what they characterise as a ‘toxic’ work culture lacking shared purpose and values (2024, 1). The significance of such findings is not merely affective. When professional environments systematically reward strategic optimisation and induce insecurity, they also reshape the epistemic character of disciplines over time, influencing what kinds of work feel possible, what kinds of commitments are sustainable, and what forms of scholarly identity are likely to flourish.

These patterns are not confined to the Global North. Tibelius Amutuhaire offers a powerful critique of how ‘publish or perish’ cultures disadvantage African scholars, not only by imposing Western publication norms but by diverting academic labour away from community service and locally meaningful knowledge production (2022). Such regimes, Amutuhaire argues, often ignore ‘African realities’ (p. 281), including scholars whose work is shaped by urgent community need, political instability, war, or public health crises (p. 291). The requirement to publish in high-impact journals – frequently inaccessible to local audiences, located behind paywalls, and accompanied by high publication fees – can function as a form of epistemic neo-colonialism (p. 282), distorting the inquiry by rewarding outputs that neither reach nor serve the communities to which the work is most immediately accountable.

In some cases, these pressures push scholars towards predatory journals or incentivise publication primarily for the purposes of promotion rather than communication (p. 291). What this illustrates, once again, is the underlying mechanism at issue throughout this article: when publication count becomes the dominant currency of academic worth, the metric displaces the purpose. The result is not merely a shift in professional behaviour, but a reconfiguration of epistemic priorities – one in which the relationship between scholarship, community, and political responsibility is systematically strained.

The sciences thus help us see what is at stake not only empirically but conceptually. They show how incentive structures, once entrenched, reshape disciplines from within: defining what counts as valuable research, how scholars allocate their time, how knowledge circulates, and which epistemic practices flourish or wither. They also illustrate how metrification interacts with wider political forces – neoliberal governance, managerialism, and the erosion of epistemic authority in populist contexts – in ways that place pressure on the social standing of academic expertise. In political environments already marked by fake news, climate denial, and post-truth discourse, the academy can ill afford incentive systems that risk weakening the credibility of its own knowledge-producing practices.

The scientific literature therefore does not merely warn that bad incentives produce bad papers. It illuminates a more general epistemic principle: when institutional success is tied to quantifiable proxies, scholars are incentivised to optimise for the proxy rather than for knowledge. This principle provides the conceptual bridge to political philosophy. Like other disciplines, political philosophy is shaped by evaluation systems that reward strategically legible, incremental, and institutionally recognisable forms of work. The next section considers how these mechanisms operate within political philosophy, and how they risk narrowing the field’s imaginative horizons and weakening its orientation toward publics beyond the academy.

Excessive Conservatism, Micro-Contributions, and Superficial Novelty

The mechanisms outlined in the sciences – where metrified incentives reward quantity, predictability, and strategic legibility – suggest parallel dynamics within political philosophy. Although political philosophy does not face the same replication crises or patterns of misconduct documented in biomedical research, it nonetheless operates within an incentive regime that can reshape the conditions of inquiry in comparable ways. The risk is not that the discipline becomes closed or uniformly conservative, but that certain forms of work become systematically easier to pursue and to reward than others. In this section, I examine how these pressures manifest within political philosophy, drawing in particular on Maeve McKeown’s analysis of strategic publication practices, and argue that they encourage a form of epistemic conservatism: one that structurally favours cautious, incremental, and inward-facing work, while making more ambitious, experimental, or publicly oriented projects harder to sustain – especially for scholars in precarious positions.

McKeown describes contemporary political theory as marked by the ‘gamification’ of academic life (2022, 100). Her argument is not that political theorists necessarily produce an avalanche of incremental papers – the concern more explicitly documented in the sciences – but that employment and promotion disproportionately depend on publication in a small number of ‘top journals’. These journals, as Wolff notes, tend to concentrate attention on a relatively narrow range of topics and thinkers (2025, 60). McKeown argues that this institutional configuration shapes the discipline’s research agenda by functioning as a set of narrow gateways of perceived quality (2022, 100). Because political theorists in precarious positions must signal excellence quickly and legibly, they are rationally incentivised to gravitate towards topics, styles, and argumentative strategies that align with the expectations of such journals. The result, McKeown suggests, is not simply a change in output volume but a change in orientation: a professional environment in which ‘cautious, regurgitative’ work that seeks to ‘spot and fill a gap in the Anglo-American literature’ is systematically safer than work that pursues more ambitious or disruptive ideas (p. 106).

This diagnosis closely parallels the mechanisms identified in the sciences, despite important differences in disciplinary structure. In both contexts, metrified evaluation encourages scholars to prioritise strategic optimisation over exploratory inquiry. In the sciences, this often manifests as salami slicing or hyperproduction; in political theory, McKeown argues, it manifests as the careful tailoring of arguments to the perceived sensibilities of a small circle of high-status journals. Yet the underlying mechanism is the same. Where career survival is tethered to metrics or prestige signals, scholars are incentivised to optimise for legibility, safety, and predictability. The resulting pattern risks a tendency toward micro-contributions: fine-tuned interventions within existing debates that are comparatively easy to position and to referee, but less likely to challenge conceptual boundaries or reframe the political questions that animate the field. The concern, then, is not that incremental work is inherently problematic, but that structural incentives disproportionately favour it, thereby reshaping the epistemic ecology of the discipline. The problem is not only that scholars feel they must adapt strategically to these incentives. It is that the incentives begin to shape inquiry itself: some questions become harder to pursue, some kinds of ambition become less viable, and the circulation of work reflects what is easiest to publish rather than what most needs to be said.

It is important to distinguish between incremental work as a normal and valuable part of disciplinary life, and incremental work as a dominant response to distorted incentives. The former contributes to the gradual development of shared literatures; the latter can become a substitute for intellectual risk-taking, particularly when the professional costs of failure are disproportionately borne by early-career scholars. In political philosophy, where conceptual breakthroughs are rare and interpretive disagreement is pervasive, the familiar injunction to ‘find a gap and fill it’ can easily crowd out more ambitious or experimentally oriented projects. Where reward structures overwhelmingly favour strategically positioned incremental contributions, epistemic conservatism is not an accidental by-product but a predictable structural outcome.

This conservatism is not merely methodological; it also has consequences for the discipline’s public orientation. As the range of topics, styles, and approaches that appear professionally viable narrows, political philosophy risks becoming increasingly specialised and inward-facing. Papers that refine a conceptual distinction or offer a minor adjustment to an established theory may be valuable within specialist debates, yet often have limited resonance beyond them. Moreover, when publication becomes an anxiety-inducing condition of professional survival, scholars’ capacity to undertake slower, more exploratory, or more creative work is correspondingly reduced. McKeown notes the anxiety produced by constant evaluation and the persistent need to prove oneself (2022, 100), conditions that undermine the intellectual confidence and security on which innovation depends.

As Berg and Seeber argue in The Slow Professor, the accelerating tempo of academic life erodes the very conditions under which reflective scholarship becomes possible. They suggest that genuine intellectual productivity is compromised by the sheer volume of publication expected of academics (2025 [2016], 16). Writing frequently can be intellectually valuable: it enables exploration, experimentation, and the gradual refinement of ideas. Yet when writing is governed primarily by the instrumental demand to produce publishable outputs, its exploratory function is curtailed. Writing becomes oriented toward strategic viability rather than intellectual curiosity. Berg and Seeber’s analysis helps clarify why, in political philosophy, the dominance of strategic and incremental publication is not only a matter of incentive structure but also of tempo: a fast-paced academic culture systematically undermines the slow, uncertain, and speculative modes of thinking upon which ambitious theorising depends.

In this respect, the sciences again provide analytic clarity. As Edwards and Roy argue, perverse incentives do not merely alter scholarly behaviour; they also shape scholarly identity, influencing what researchers come to regard as legitimate work and how they understand the purpose of their own intellectual labour (2017). The same mechanism can be observed within political philosophy. Where strategic publication becomes a precondition for employment and professional survival, early-career scholars are incentivised to internalise its norms, gradually shaping their sense of what political philosophy is, what it is for, and what kinds of work are worth pursuing. The result is a generational effect: junior scholars come to expect of themselves a steady stream of highly polished, tightly argued outputs, even when such work sits uneasily with their broader intellectual aspirations or with the kinds of political engagement that initially motivated their research.

The connection between metrification and epistemic conservatism is further illuminated by Amutuhaire’s critique of how publish-or-perish cultures operate in African academic contexts. As discussed above, Amutuhaire argues that metrified evaluation disproportionately penalises scholars whose work is oriented toward the practical needs of their communities (2022). The pressure to publish in high-impact Western journals – often inaccessible or irrelevant to local publics – can constitute a form of epistemic neo-colonialism, imposing standards that sever academic labour from social purpose (pp. 282, 291). While the geopolitical dynamics differ, the underlying mechanism has wider relevance. A system that structurally rewards strategically positioned micro-contributions over community-facing or publicly embedded scholarship risks weakening the discipline’s democratic orientation and public responsibilities. If, as Amutuhaire suggests, meaningful scholarship frequently resides outside formal publication metrics, then a publish-or-perish culture not only misidentifies excellence but systematically misdirects scholarly energy.

This concern is echoed by Rorty and Watene, both of whom foreground the importance of audiences beyond the academy. Rorty argues that when no external audience finds a philosophical problem interesting, that problem should be treated with suspicion (2007, 151). Watene similarly notes that many Indigenous scholars understand their work as ‘being in the service of community’ (2025, 99). Together, these perspectives bring into focus a tension central to this article: the gap between political philosophy’s self-understanding as a public-facing discipline and the orientation encouraged by prevailing incentive structures. Perverse incentives encourage political philosophers to write primarily for gatekeepers rather than publics – to address ‘Reviewer #2’ (McKeown 2022, 99) rather than the communities whose political lives, institutions, and challenges ostensibly motivate the field.

Finally, because the pressure to publish is disproportionately concentrated early in academic careers, it also compounds existing inequalities. Scholars working in non-dominant traditions – such as Global South, feminist, or decolonial approaches – often face a double bind: either reshape their work to conform to the expectations of mainstream journals or accept a heightened risk of marginalisation (McKeown 2022, 102). This is not merely a question of representation but of epistemic diversity. When institutional incentives systematically reward familiarity, legibility, and conservatism, they constrain the range of perspectives and modes of inquiry that can flourish, thereby limiting the discipline’s capacity to engage adequately with complex and contested political realities.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that publish-or-perish cultures in political philosophy encourage a patterned orientation toward micro-contributions that reshapes the epistemic ecology of the field. The concern is not that incremental work is itself problematic – such work is indispensable to any healthy intellectual tradition – but that structural imbalances can elevate it into a disproportionately dominant mode of scholarly production, crowding out more ambitious, risky, or publicly resonant forms of theorising. Prestigious journals could, in principle, broaden their criteria to create greater space for experimental or publicly engaged work, and there are signs that some are beginning to do so. Yet such developments are likely to remain partial without wider institutional reforms that reduce the professional risks associated with ambitious scholarship. Under prevailing incentive structures, the kinds of innovative, transgressive, and outward-facing work that many political philosophers regard as normatively urgent often remain professionally precarious.

A further and related pathology, which complicates rather than contradicts the preceding analysis, is not epistemic conservatism but its apparent opposite: the pursuit of superficial or strategically fashionable novelty, which can embed false critiques (Blau 2024). Distorted incentive structures do not only reward caution; they can also reward scholars who align their work with emerging intellectual trends, fashionable vocabularies, or currently valorised topics in ways that maximise visibility and publishability. This form of band-wagoning is often mistaken for experimentalism or pluralisation. Yet it is sometimes better understood as another mode of strategic optimisation. Rather than pursuing questions because they are intellectually urgent, difficult, or conceptually disruptive, scholars may be incentivised to frame their work in ways that signal topicality, relevance, or alignment with prevailing discourses. The result is not genuine risk-taking but a proliferation of work that is novel in appearance while remaining structurally conservative in its orientation toward gatekeepers, journals, and evaluative expectations.

Seen in this light, apparent increases in thematic diversity do not necessarily undermine the diagnosis developed here. They may instead confirm it. A discipline shaped by incentive structures that reward visibility and legibility will predictably generate both cautious micro-contributions and strategically novel interventions, while continuing to marginalise slower, deeper, and more independently motivated forms of inquiry. Both dynamics reflect the same underlying problem: the displacement of intellectual purpose by professional optimisation.

Crisis-Laden Times

The pressures described above do not operate in an intellectual vacuum. They shape political philosophy at a moment when the political world is increasingly marked by overlapping crises: climate catastrophe, populist mobilisation, epistemic fragmentation and ‘post-truth’ discourse, mass displacement, AI-driven transformations, and the erosion of democratic norms. These conditions alter what political philosophy is plausibly for, and what kinds of intellectual resources it is called upon to provide. Yet prevailing incentive structures tend to reward forms of scholarship that are often poorly aligned with these demands, privileging work that is strategically legible and safely incremental over work that grapples directly with urgent political realities. The language of crisis here is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a convergence of political, epistemic, and institutional pressures that reshape both the stakes of political theorising and the conditions under which it is conducted.

Rorty provides a useful point of departure. In A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism, he writes that the most effective response to Nozick is not more canonical argumentation – ‘Aristotle or Augustine or Kant’ – but engagement with stories of lived experience: ‘the writings of William Julius Wilson, and the autobiographies of kids who grew up in urban ghettos’ (1998, 6). The insight here is not that political philosophy should abandon argument, but that moral and political imagination often develops experimentally, through shifts in sensibility, the reframing of questions, and attention to experiences that unsettle inherited categories. As Rorty puts it elsewhere, ‘moral insight is not like a jigsaw puzzle’; it is a ‘matter of imagining a better future’ and is ‘mostly the result of making experiments and seeing how they work out’ (2022 [1992], 42, 45).

This experimental orientation becomes harder to sustain when prevailing incentive structures reward strategic, incremental refinement rather than exploratory thinking. Political philosophers learn to anticipate objections, satisfy reviewers, and write within the established idioms of the field. Defensive writing becomes second nature. Yet defensive writing is often poorly matched to the character of many contemporary political problems, which are less like puzzles with missing pieces and more like what Rittel and Webber famously described as ‘wicked problems’: problems with no determinate solutions and where each attempted remedy generates further dilemmas (1973). Responding to such problems plausibly requires intellectual risk-taking—reimagining concepts, developing unorthodox methods, and producing work capable of speaking across disciplinary and public boundaries (Stevens, 2025). These are precisely the kinds of intellectual practices that incentive structures oriented toward safety, legibility, and rapid publication tend to discourage.

Related disciplines have begun to articulate this tension explicitly. Rhys Crilley asks, with palpable frustration, what it means to ‘carry on as usual by writing papers, publishing them, teaching students, applying for grants and conferencing’ while ‘the world burns and wars rage’. For Crilley, proceeding as though academic routines are self-evidently valuable under such conditions resembles the cartoon dog meme calmly declaring ‘this is fine’ as the room around him catches fire (2024, 3–4). He goes on to argue for a radical overhaul of political science and international relations – disciplines he regards as deeply entangled with colonial, racial, and patriarchal structures (p. 5). Whether or not one accepts Crilley’s call for abolition, his provocation captures a wider concern: intellectual traditions do not exist in isolation from the crises that surround them. A discipline unable to reflect critically on its own practices, or to adapt its modes of inquiry in light of changing political conditions, risks becoming increasingly detached from the realities it seeks to interpret.

McKeown articulates a closely related concern within political theory. At a moment when ‘bold new ideas and vision are needed for our crisis-laden world’, she observes, political theorists are often preoccupied not with pressing political questions but with the anticipated reactions of ‘Reviewer #2’ (2022, 99). The issue here is not individual timidity but structural constraint. When professional survival depends on securing publication in a narrow set of gatekeeping journals, theoretical ambition becomes professionally hazardous. This helps to explain why even scholars who are temperamentally inclined toward ambitious or transgressive work may find themselves channelling their research into safer, more strategically viable forms. The result is not simply a shift in tone, but a systematic misalignment between what many scholars take to be intellectually and politically urgent, and what prevailing incentive structures reward.

It is striking that some of the most direct challenges to disciplinary conventions have emerged outside the most metrified publication environments. Simon Springer’s Fuck Neoliberalism, published in ACME, is a case in point. The journal explicitly rejects impact factor rankings, thereby creating space for forms of stylistic and political transgression that Springer regards as essential to conveying the moral urgency of neoliberal harm (2016, 286). His choice of language is not merely rhetorical provocation. It reflects a substantive argument about form: that established academic conventions can blunt political critique, as he argues in relation to his own earlier work (2010), and that disrupting those conventions can disclose dimensions of political reality that more cautious or ‘proper’ prose often obscures. Yet even Springer – well established in his field – reports concern that the title might jeopardise future career prospects (2016, 286). For an early-career scholar, such a piece might never leave the desk. This is not simply regrettable; it illustrates how incentive structures can constrain the range of intellectual and stylistic experimentation that is able to appear within mainstream academic venues. Even when one disagrees with Springer’s substantive claims about form, the presence of such arguments plays an important role in exposing and interrogating the limits of disciplinary convention.

The relationship between form, experimentation, and epistemic authority becomes even clearer through Black feminist thought. bell hooks’ use of Black vernacular serves as a reminder that intellectual innovation is not only conceptual but also linguistic. Academic English, as Patricia Hill Collins argues, emerged from social contexts in which wealthy white men were positioned as neutral observers, and its stylistic conventions therefore encode particular histories of authority and exclusion – distinguishing what counts as canonical from what does not (2000 [1990], 255). By introducing Black vernacular into her academic writing, hooks sought not to abandon rigour but to communicate political insight in a language attuned to lived experience, intimacy, and resistance (1994, 170, 175), a strategy echoed more recently by Lester K. Spence (2020). Yet, as hooks notes, reviewers routinely returned such manuscripts requesting the use of ‘proper’ academic English. This resistance to linguistic experimentation exemplifies the broader epistemic conservatism fostered by metrified academic environments: unconventional forms are treated as professionally risky, and risk is structurally disincentivised.

A similar dynamic can be observed beyond the academy. Consider Michael Gove’s 2019 tweet to London rapper Stormzy following Stormzy’s public criticism of the Conservative government at Glastonbury: ‘I set trends dem man copy’ (Neale 2019). The attempted imitation of Stormzy’s vernacular was widely interpreted as mocking and dismissive. As Stormzy later explained in an interview, such responses reflect a broader pattern: ‘They do it to young people, they do it to black people, they do it to rappers, they do it to entertainers: “Just shut up and rap. Stay in your lane”’ (Neale 2019). What is at issue here is not merely tone but authority: whose voice is treated as legitimate in political discourse, and whose is dismissed as improper. Gove’s response, by ridiculing vernacular expression as inappropriate for politics, exemplifies the policing of linguistic legitimacy that also operates within academic contexts.

These examples illustrate a deeper epistemic point. Political philosophy’s established norms of tone, format, and conceptual framing are not neutral. They are themselves shaped by the incentive structures that govern academic life. What comes to count as ‘rigorous’, ‘serious’, or ‘proper’ is often bound up with what is strategically publishable within high-status journals. The result is not an intentional closing of the discipline, but a structural narrowing of its expressive range – precisely at a moment when political crises arguably demand greater openness to experimentation in both form and content.

To be clear, the claim is not that political philosophy must always be experimental, activist, or stylistically transgressive. Incremental work remains valuable and necessary, and canonical argumentation continues to have an important place within the discipline. The concern is instead that prevailing institutional pressures distort the balance between these modes of scholarship. In ‘crisis-laden’ times, we plausibly require more intellectual risk-taking rather than less; greater methodological and stylistic diversity rather than increasing uniformity; and closer engagement with public-facing problems rather than further inward specialisation. Yet publish-or-perish incentive structures tend to generate a misalignment between what many take the discipline to need and what its institutional environment actually rewards. Political philosophy thus confronts a structural tension: the problems shaping contemporary political life demand imaginative conceptual experimentation, while the prevailing academic incentive structure makes such experimentation professionally difficult to sustain. As Crilley puts the point starkly, contemporary modes of academic knowledge production are not necessarily aligned with emancipatory political aims (2024, 5).

In the final section, I turn to recent calls for public political philosophy and argue that the very distinction between academic and public-facing work is itself symptomatic of these distorted incentives. Rather than treating public philosophy as an optional extension of academic research, we should instead ask how our core scholarly practices might be reoriented so as to speak more directly – and more responsibly – to the political crises within which they are embedded.

Public Political Philosophy, or a Public, Political Philosophy?

The pressures toward strategic, incremental publication not only reshape the internal epistemic character of political philosophy; they also transform the discipline’s relationship to the publics it often claims to address. Increasingly, political philosophers are encouraged to articulate impact agendas or to translate their work into more accessible forms of public communication. On the surface, such initiatives appear to counteract the narrowing tendencies described above. Yet as Amutuhaire observes, the fact that scholars are often able to produce significant societal impact independently of formal academic publication suggests that current systems of recognition remain too tightly tethered to metrified outputs (2022, 283). The risk is that public engagement itself becomes folded into the same evaluative logic: assessed, audited, and rewarded through new proxies rather than understood as part of the core purpose of scholarly inquiry.

Unless carefully rethought, the contemporary emphasis on ‘impact’ risks reproducing the very dynamics that underlie publish-or-perish cultures. It can generate an ‘exchange or expire’ environment in which public engagement is valued primarily insofar as it can be demonstrated, documented, and strategically leveraged within professional evaluation systems. The result is not necessarily a more public-facing political philosophy, but a further extension of metrified rationality into yet another domain of academic life – one that risks distorting both the form and the meaning of engagement with publics.

Calls for public political philosophy have grown in recent years, partly in response to intensifying political crises and partly in response to dissatisfaction with the perceived insularity of academic discourse. Jonathan Floyd, for example, argues that in a context marked by post-truth, polarisation, and populism, political philosophers should intervene in public life in ways that ‘illuminate’ rather than berate, offering conceptual clarity without condescension (2022, 138). He characterises post-truth as a cultural condition in which factual disagreement becomes epistemologically entrenched, and polarisation as a political dynamic driven by grievance, identity, cynicism, and digitally amplified antagonism. Under such conditions, Floyd suggests, political philosophy must be sufficiently analytical to challenge falsehoods, sufficiently imaginative to reframe debates, and sufficiently accessible to reach non-academic audiences (2024, 9).

Jeffrey R. Wilson makes a closely related case for public writing. In a world saturated with information, he argues, citizens require tools of interpretation, and academic writing can inadvertently draw scholars away from the human experiences that initially motivated their intellectual work. Public writing, by contrast, can reconnect scholarly inquiry with those experiences and audiences (2025, 1). More experimental proposals extend this logic further. One recent example suggests that political philosophers design live-action role-play exercises that allow participants to inhabit political dilemmas, cultivate moral sentiments, and explore concepts such as solidarity, justice, and identity (Stevens, 2025). Such approaches expand the expressive repertoire of political philosophy, offering modes of public engagement that move beyond conventional formats such as op-eds or media commentary.

It is not that public writing is wholly invisible to contemporary universities. In some cases, it can be recognised under the language of impact. The problem is that this recognition is often selective and conditional. What counts most readily as impact is usually work that can be evidenced, attributed, and narrated in institutionally legible ways. But much public writing matters differently: by informing public judgment, widening access to political argument, clarifying concepts, or reshaping the terms of debate in ways that are real but difficult to audit. The risk, then, is not simple neglect, but a narrower institutional recognition that privileges some forms of public engagement while marginalising others. Wilson’s framing recognises public writing as a valuable scholarly practice in its own right, rather than only when it can be translated into short-cycle, evidencable impact. This could mean treating public writing as a genuine scholarly contribution in hiring, promotion, and research evaluation, rather than valuing it only when it can be shown to generate auditable impact.

These proposals are valuable, yet they also reveal an underlying conceptual tension. They risk reinforcing a sharp division between ‘academic’ political philosophy – carefully argued, densely referenced, and written primarily for specialists – and ‘public’ political philosophy – simplified, translated, or repackaged for wider audiences. The very fact that additional labour is often required to render academic work public suggests that the core research itself is not generally conceived as inherently public-facing. This bifurcation mirrors the broader effects of publish-or-perish incentives: academic writing becomes increasingly inward-oriented, such that engagement with publics must occur as a secondary act of translation rather than as an integral feature of the work itself.

My argument is that while this division is sometimes necessary and even desirable, it should not be treated as natural or inevitable. It is itself a symptom of incentive structures that prioritise specialist novelty, strategic legibility, and professional gatekeeping. Instead of treating public political philosophy as a supplement to academic research, we might instead ask how more of our academic work could already be meaningful, usable, and resonant beyond the academy.

Experimental forms – such as those modelled by hooks and Springer – offer one possible pathway. They demonstrate that innovation in style and language can itself serve substantive political ends, and that the modes of expression familiar within particular communities may communicate political insight more effectively than conventional academic prose. Hooks’ insistence that Black vernacular expresses forms of intimacy, resistance, and recovery unavailable in ‘proper’ academic English (hooks 1994, 170, 175) illustrates how style can be integral to substance. As previously noted, academic linguistic norms emerged within particular social hierarchies (Collins 2000 [1990], 255); disrupting those norms can therefore also disrupt the forms of epistemic authority they encode.

Reconceiving academic work in this way aligns with Keith Dowding’s argument that political philosophy is, in important respects, closer to political science than to moral philosophy. Political philosophy, he suggests, ought to ‘evaluate our politics, our political behaviour and institutions, and prescribe superior ones’ (Dowding 2020, 433). Whereas moral philosophy often centres on the perspective of the individual ‘I’, political philosophy addresses institutional decision-making, collective action, and shared dilemmas – questions that are already public in both subject matter and significance. Dowding’s reframing therefore supports the claim that political theorising need not retreat into specialist abstraction in order to remain rigorous. On the contrary, the public character of its subject matter makes it particularly well suited to outward-facing modes of inquiry, including forms of engagement that draw on empirical, interpretive, and ethnographic methods (Floyd 2020; Herzog and Zacka 2017; Longo and Zacka 2019; Perez 2020).

One might object that this argument misunderstands the nature of political philosophy by assessing its worth, at least in part, in relation to ‘wider publics’, thereby implying that political philosophers possess a kind of moral expertise. Robert Lamb develops this concern explicitly. He distinguishes between the political philosopher and the philosopher-citizen, arguing that political philosophers should not assume that their professional expertise grants them special authority in public moral or political debate (2018). A doctoral student may reasonably defer to a supervisor’s expertise when discussing Rawls, but there is no reason why a taxi driver ought to recognise that expertise, or even know who Rawls is, in order to hold an informed view about questions of redistribution. On this view, expectations that political philosophers should address wider publics risk mischaracterising both the nature and the scope of their expertise.

Yet Lamb’s argument does not undermine the position defended here; in important respects, it supports it. If political philosophers do not possess distinctive moral authority, then whatever contribution they can make to public life must rest elsewhere: in their capacity to analyse political structures, articulate conceptual possibilities, clarify normative tensions, and contribute to democratic reasoning. These are not activities that can be meaningfully confined to specialist audiences alone. Rather, they concern matters – institutions, practices, collective dilemmas – that are already public in their substance. Lamb’s critique therefore reinforces the point, also developed by Dowding, that political philosophy’s orientation toward public questions is not an optional add-on but flows from the character of its subject matter.

The examples of hooks, Collins, Springer, and others illustrate how expanding the expressive possibilities of the discipline can enable a more integrated form of political philosophy – one that remains rigorous while also being innovative and publicly resonant. This does not imply that all academic work must adopt vernacular language or experimental form. It suggests, instead, that the boundary between academic and public political philosophy is far more permeable than current incentive structures encourage us to recognise. A system that rewards only strategic incrementalism will tend to produce work that requires subsequent translation. By contrast, a system that values conceptual ambition, methodological diversity, and responsiveness to political context is more likely to foster work that is already intelligible, meaningful, and engaging beyond the academy.

Rorty’s insistence that the ‘autobiographies of kids who grew up in urban ghettos’ can illuminate political questions more effectively than canonical argument captures this broader point (1998, 6). His provocation is not a call to abandon philosophical analysis, but a reminder that political philosophy flourishes when it remains attentive to lived experience and when it communicates in registers that resonate beyond the academy. Incremental scholarship retains its value, but only when embedded within an intellectual ecosystem that also permits slower, deeper, and more conceptually daring forms of inquiry. Publish-or-perish cultures tend to distort this ecosystem, systematically narrowing both the imaginative range and the public orientation of the discipline.

If political philosophy is to remain democratically meaningful, the implication is not merely that scholars should do more public engagement, but that the discipline must reflect critically on how it understands its own core practices. Public political philosophy cannot plausibly be treated as an optional extension of academic work; rather, the conditions under which academic work itself is produced must be assessed in light of the discipline’s public purposes. The final section therefore turns to the institutional implications of this diagnosis, considering what kinds of reforms to publishing, evaluation, and professional norms might support a healthier economy of inquiry and, in turn, a healthier epistemic ecology.

Institutional Implications: Reforming Incentive Structures

One might worry, however, that calls for more ‘holistic’ evaluation are vague, unworkable, or vulnerable to abuse. The concern is familiar: if we move away from quantifiable proxies such as publication counts or journal rankings, do we simply replace them with opaque judgements that increase the risk of nepotism, bias, or arbitrariness? This is a serious objection, and one that any plausible alternative must address.

Yet holistic evaluation need not mean unstructured discretion. In many areas of academic life, assessment already relies on qualitative judgement rather than metrics: peer review, doctoral examination, external assessment of grant proposals, and the evaluation of teaching portfolios all depend on structured but non-quantitative forms of evaluation. The question, then, is not whether judgement can be exercised responsibly, but how it might be better structured. For hiring committees, this could involve shifting attention from aggregate publication volume toward a candidate’s research trajectory: the coherence of their intellectual programme, the risks they have taken, the conceptual ambitions of their work, the kinds of questions they are pursuing, and the audiences they seek to address. Instead of asking ‘How many publications?’, committees might ask: What is this person trying to do intellectually? What kinds of contributions do they appear capable of making over time? What forms of inquiry does their work open up?

I do not mean to suggest that qualitative judgment is free from bias, exclusion, or opacity. Nor do I mean to deny that some structured or quantitative criteria can serve a useful purpose, including by limiting arbitrariness or reducing the scope for cronyism. The problem arises when such measures cease to guide judgment and begin to replace it. Because no set of metrics can fully capture intellectual significance, evaluative processes need to retain space for reasoned judgments about forms of value that were not, and perhaps could not be, fully specified in advance. In that sense, the relevant contrast is not between flawed judgment and unflawed measurement. It is between evaluative systems that allow criteria, reasons, and priorities to remain open to contestation and revision, and systems that increasingly present those priorities as settled through numbers. If judgment in this sphere is inevitably limited and flawed, that is a reason to democratise and pluralise it, not to displace it with metrics that conceal their own normative assumptions behind an appearance of neutrality.

One way to operationalise this shift would be through changes to how candidates are asked to present their work and how committees are encouraged to assess it. Rather than relying primarily on exhaustive publication lists, hiring processes could place greater weight on a small number of representative pieces accompanied by reflective statements about a candidate’s intellectual trajectory, aims, and developing programme of research. Applicants might be invited to explain how their work fits together, what kinds of questions animate it, what risks they have taken, and how they understand the contribution they are trying to make. Committees, in turn, could be encouraged to evaluate candidates in light of these trajectories rather than treating publication volume or journal prestige as primary indicators of merit.

Such practices would not eliminate judgement; on the contrary, they would make the exercise of judgement more explicit – and that is precisely the point. Instead of allowing evaluative decisions to be tacitly driven by crude proxies, they would require committees to articulate and defend their criteria. This would shift assessment away from easily gamed metrics and toward the kinds of qualities – intellectual coherence, conceptual ambition, independence of thought, and capacity for sustained inquiry – that this article suggests political philosophy has particular reason to value.

The epistemic rationale for such a shift follows directly from the broader argument. If publish-or-perish incentives predictably encourage strategic optimisation, then evaluation systems that rely heavily on easily optimised proxies will tend to select for precisely the pathologies the discipline ought to resist. By contrast, assessment practices that attend to trajectory, ambition, and intellectual risk are more likely to identify and support forms of work that are currently disincentivised: slow-developing projects, unconventional methods, and research oriented toward publics rather than gatekeepers. The point is not that such systems would be immune to distortion, but that they would more closely align professional reward with the epistemic goods political philosophy has reason to value.

Conclusion

If political philosophy is to remain meaningful in an era marked by populism, epistemic fragmentation, rising authoritarianism, and democratic fragility, it must reflect critically on the institutional conditions under which it is produced. This article has argued that publish-or-perish cultures generate predictable epistemic pathologies within the discipline. By privileging strategic legibility over conceptual ambition, speed over depth, and professional optimisation over intellectual risk, prevailing incentive structures reshape not only how political philosophy is practiced but also what kinds of work come to seem viable, serious, and worth pursuing. The result is not disciplinary decline, but structural misalignment: between the epistemic goods political philosophy claims to value and the professional conditions under which it is increasingly produced.

It is therefore insufficient simply to call for more public political philosophy while leaving prevailing academic practices untouched. As this article has argued, the sharp division between ‘academic’ and ‘public-facing’ work is itself a symptom of distorted incentives. If political philosophy were less narrowly shaped by strategic publication norms – if it permitted greater diversity of form, tempo, and audience – it would already be more capable of speaking beyond the academy. Rorty’s insistence that the ‘autobiographies of kids who grew up in urban ghettos’ may offer more illuminating responses to Nozick than Aristotle does (1998, 6) underscores that public resonance need not dilute philosophical seriousness; it can instead disclose new forms of philosophical insight. Similarly, the work of hooks, Collins, Springer, and others illustrates that stylistic experimentation is not opposed to rigour but can deepen it.

What is ultimately at stake is the discipline’s democratic and epistemic purpose. Political philosophy cannot plausibly contribute to public understanding, democratic deliberation, or imaginative political possibility if its dominant outputs are shaped by precarity, hypercompetition, and strategic conformity. Nor can it respond adequately to complex and ‘wicked’ political problems if the institutional conditions under which it is practiced systematically discourage conceptual risk, slow thinking, and experimentation in form. As Meijer and Webster argue in their editorial rejecting ‘metrics-driven academic processes’, the proliferation of submissions has begun to overwhelm peer review and hinder intellectual depth, making it increasingly difficult for journals to publish work that is genuinely thoughtful (2025). ‘Deep thinking over fast production’ is not an indulgence but a condition for producing political philosophy that matters. The claim is not that scholars ought simply to publish less, but that the discipline requires conditions under which publishing less can sometimes be the intellectually responsible choice.

To write less and say more is not to abdicate academic responsibility. It is to reclaim it.