Did you say wicked philosophy? Advantages and limitations of a research current for political education in a problematic world

This paper retraces the epistemological history of an English-language research tradition stemming from political planning and management, from the 1970s to the present day. This school of thought has developed notions such as “ill-structured problems,” “fuzzy problems,” “wicked problems,” and even “super-wicked problems,” which aim to account for the difficulty of political problems and question the Cartesian image of the problem as fully definable and soluble. We seek to evaluate the epistemological content of these concepts, describe the debates they provoke over their definition, their operationality, and their possible uses for political science. But the main question is whether this research tradition, which gives rise to a philosophy of education and to pedagogical proposals, is capable of fertilizing an education in politics, within the framework of the socially acute questions now introduced in school curricula and in relation to the problems that worry us most today, such as climate change or pandemics.