The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 13, Number 2, 2005, pp. 113–134
What Should the ‘Political’ in Political
Theory Explore?*
Michael Freeden
Politics, Mansfield College, Oxford
I. THE GAP IN POLITICAL THEORY
I
T is now commonplace among ever-increasing numbers of political theorists
to query the state of the art of the sub-discipline, in particular the
epistemological and ideal-type disposition of contemporary political philosophy.
But it is less common to detail research agenda that attempt to redress the
balance and reconnect political theory to the domain of politics. Prior to
accomplishing that, a lacuna has to be identified—a gap that exists prominently
between the main schools that currently occupy centre stage in the study of
political thought.
Political philosophy, the history of political thought and, more recently, what
could be very loosely called ‘post-structural’ or ‘continental’1 political theory
have virtually monopolized the analysis of political thinking; yet, as I shall claim,
they do not cover the field of what constitutes political thought. Political
philosophy brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with
either or both of the following: the logical validity and argumentative coherence
of the political philosophy in question, or the moral rightness of the prescriptions
it contains. Many of its versions display a flight from the political, the crowding
out of diversity and the shrinking of the political to an area of constructed
consensus guided by a vision of the good life; while its methods rely heavily on
thought experiments and frequently inapplicable modelling. The history of
political thought brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern
with the genealogy of arguments, with the conditions for their stability and the
causes for their transformation, with contexts, reconstructions of intentions, and
changing horizons of interpretation but, with a few notable exceptions, sacrifices
synchrony for diachrony. Much post-structuralist thought regards politics as
obfuscating reality through the articulation of illusions and false categories,
while expressing deep distrust towards politics as it is, and is overridingly
*This article is part of an ESRC-funded research programme on ‘the political theory of politics’
on which I am engaged.
1
‘Continental’ refers less to a geographical entity than to a school, much as the label ‘AngloAmerican’ does.
© Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 238 Main Street,
Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
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MICHAEL FREEDEN
concerned with reformulating the political through alternative radical ethical
discourses that emphasize transparency, the recognition of identity, equality
and diversity, and empowering. All three schools perform crucial roles in our
understanding of political theories and in the uses to which we can put them.
But their very success papers over an undeniable lack: how do we study political
thought from within the discipline of politics? On what kind of political theory
ought we to focus, as students of politics and political phenomena, bearing in
mind some central characteristics of political concepts and language? In this
article I offer some exploratory thoughts on the subject.
Much has been written about the shortcomings of current political theory on
the metapractical and metatheoretical levels. Thus, John Gunnell’s seminal books
have exposed glaring weaknesses in the methods and issues pursued by Western
political theorists.2 Other instances are offered by theorists such as Benjamin
Barber and Bonnie Honig.3 Nor do I wish to belittle the extraordinary work
done by philosophers and historians—I count myself as a member of both camps.
But the fact is that most political theory employs methodological paradigms
‘imported’ from disciplines external to politics: philosophy and history. They are
consequently bound to treat political theory as a sub-set of a larger enterprise,
philosophical or historical, however illuminating those perspectives are to the
appreciation of political thought, and however crystallized the respective subenterprises have been in the grand traditions and discourses of political thought.
II. THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POLITICS
This article puts the case for a fourth approach to the study of political theory:
the political theory of politics. It is not intended to replace its illustrious and
central predecessors, but to offer another dimension: to supply the kind of
political theory designed to make immediate, rather than indirect, sense of
political thought phenomena, and to equip political theorists with tools they
might wish to employ as students of politics simpliciter—through the political
features embedded in thinking about politics. And it is not, as many alternative
attempts to reconnect theory and practice have been, primarily another form of
normative political theory. Instead, while recognizing the fundamental ethical
concerns of political theorists, it points out that the scholarly study of politics—
as is common among political scientists—engages notably in understanding and
in interpretative mapping. That task should not be abandoned by political
theorists who are, after all, crucially focused on the meaning of political thinking;
indeed, exploring that meaning should therefore also be located empirically in
2
Recently, John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
1998).
3
B. Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); B. Honig,
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Both
emphasise the malady rather than the cure, or see the cure in terms of new ethical dimensions.
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
115
concrete societies. The consequent analysis will fashion a significant branch of
political theory dedicated to identifying the ‘political’ and making sense of it.
In turn, that appreciation will offer a vital tool—and welcome limiting
framework—for ethicists and philosophers engaged in constructing their
exercises in normative improvement.
The challenge for political theorists, then, is to distinguish an area they wish
to term the ‘political’ and then to develop strategies that enable them to address
directly issues of political thought. In part, this may require the inclusion of new
source-material that qualifies as thinking about politics.4 But for the most part,
it involves asking a new set of questions of existing texts, utterances, discourses,
and practices, reassessing the relative importance of their diverse messages, and
preparing different methodologies through which to interpret them. That is,
incidentally, what I understand by the study of ideology in its broadest sense. It
is not a specialized study of certain doctrines, but a particular approach to the
study of political thinking as such. It views access to our understanding of
political thinking as always mediated through its spatially and temporally
contextualized instances; it regards political thinking as a ubiquitous and normal
aspect of social life; and it insists that political theory must also (though not
only) encompass these phenomena.
Politics consists centrally of the area of collective social life that involves
decision-making, the ranking of policy options, the regulation of dissent, the
mobilization of support for those activities, and the construction of political
visions. That is not intended as a definition, nor am I unaware of competing and
different perspectives on politics relating to the legal standing of states, or to the
good life or, conversely, to a state of dehumanizing subjugation. But we need to
make a start, and that is one kind of beginning. It enlists three postulates: First,
thinking about politics significantly relates to the above political issues. Second,
thinking about politics relates importantly to the political thinking actually
taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in
their political capacity as decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conflict
regulators, support mobilizers, and vision creators; and the thinking consumed
by them in that capacity. Politics may have been termed the art of the possible,
but it is a ‘possible’ based on the ‘feasible’ and its study has always focused on
the here and now,5 whether in complacent or critical mode. Third, inasmuch as
politics is a social and not merely an individual activity, so too is political
4
This point is persuasively made by Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Towards a Philosophical History of the
Political’, The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. D. Castiglione and I. HampsherMonk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 189–203, although he also relates this
to the French focus on mentalités. The study of concrete political thought and the study of mentalités
is similar, but the differences lie mainly in the equal emphasis the latter assigns to a broad range of
political culture, while the former foregrounds political thought and concepts against a backdrop of
political culture.
5
By which I mean not on the immediate present but on current and recent politics, with
ramifications to more distant paths and beckoning futures. Comparative politics extends the ‘here’
to various parts of the globe but follows roughly the same temporal pattern.
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MICHAEL FREEDEN
thinking. Therefore the latter, too, has to be examined as a series of interactions,
of collective conduct, of loosely patterned human thought-practices.6
Of course, the notions of decision, conflict and support—and even the
production of political visions, as attempts to control the future or to give vent
to political emotion—revolve around the concept of power. There is no escaping
that politics is about power and there is consequently no escaping that good
political theory needs to give plausible accounts of what is entailed, in the
broadest sense, by political thinking relevant to power. All this is hardly made
easier by the fact that so many political theorists, as distinct from institutional
and behavioural analysts, shy away from exploring and understanding power.7
As a tradition, Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, informed by
liberalism, is deeply embarrassed by power and tends to ignore it. As a tradition,
continental political thought and discourse, to the contrary, sees power as
pervading and distorting the networks of human interaction, but offers no clear
ways of eliminating that unfortunate by-product of oppressive and invasive
human relationships. Both cannot deal with power as a normal, indeed pivotal,
political phenomenon and as a potential resource to be harnessed to the
attainment of human and social ends. While Anglo-American political
philosophy is manic about the feasibility of socio-political relationships without
power, the continental tradition is depressive about their saturation with power.
If that seems to return us to what may initially appear to be conventional
issues that characterize politics, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that.
Psychology still revolves around human personality and economics around
scarcity, no matter which complex intellectual constructs shape their elaboration.
Far more significant is, first, that the approach we need to foster towards those
issues be innovative, not one employed by most existing schools and, second,
that we also include more ‘esoteric’ terms and problems, esoteric only in the
sense that they are not saliently on the agenda of philosophical students of
justice, or on the curriculum of undergraduate courses on political theory.
Political thinking requires analysis as a fluid set of conceptual and discursive
encounters with issues such as the following: manufacturing stability, handling
coercion, the conceptual control of political space and political time, the
management of diversity, ambiguity as controlled indeterminacy, ranking
and
prioritizing
(or
rationing)
demands
and
values,
political
commitment/allegiance—in addition to political obligation—as mobilizing
concepts, and the conceptualization and rhetorical marketing of political failure.
All those are some of the most typical and central issues on which societies focus
when they think consciously—at any level of articulation and sophistication—
6
By a thought-practice I mean an identifiable, patterned and recurrent sequence of thinking, not
a physical activity that can be observed directly in the world.
7
The introduction of the notion of ‘empowering’, mainly in late 20th century feminist discourse,
attempts to relate power to theories of autonomy and self-development, and functions primarily as
a code for the latter concepts.
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
117
about politics and which, further, are reflected unconsciously in their practices.
They are the everyday flesh and blood of political debate and discourse and
through them we can put our finger on the pulse of the body politic.
In short, we need to find new ways through which to make political thought,
and its study, work for us. In so doing we must rely heavily on the wisdom and
understandings derived from the fields of political philosophy and the history of
political thought. But we may also realize why some of the methods designed to
satisfy the intellectual concerns of those two disciplines will produce wrong
results for the purposes set out above.
III. DECISIONS IN THE LIGHT OF AMBIGUITY, INDETERMINACY,
INCONCLUSIVENESS AND VAGUENESS
I can only briefly illustrate some topics and ways of discussing them as part of
a larger research project I am undertaking. Let me begin with political decisionmaking. A decision involves a choice among options, and a political decision
involves making such choices for, and/or shaped by, a collectivity. Implicit in the
concept of choice is the notion of pluralism, at the very least in the sense that
more than one option is possible (arguably necessary) when a decision is made.
To that are added two further assumptions, namely, that it is normal and
unavoidable in any society for more than one voice to exist (even if other voices
are suppressed, they are never quite eliminated); and that making choices is
necessarily an exercise in ranking. Political theory offers us one highly useful
instrument for understanding the nature of decision-making: the notion of
essential contestability. In its advanced formulations, it suggests, first, that
political concepts are composed of multiple components, not all of which can
be contained in any given formulation of the concept; and, second, that the
relative weight of each component is itself variable and the ranking of values
is hence inconclusive.8 Consequently there can be no unequivocal way of
choosing among the various conceptions of a concept and arriving at a conclusive
definition, of which more below.
In order to appreciate the linguistic and semantic features that guide the
operation of political concepts, and that have immediate bearing on the
structuring of political debate, theory, and action, we need to unpack further
some of the attributes of those concepts, with particular regard to the manner
through which they impart, or fail to impart, meaning. In political science
literature, policies are often depicted as being ambiguous.9 Ambiguity relates to
8
See M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), pp. 55–60. For my most recent thoughts on the subject see M. Freeden, ‘Essential
contestability and effective contestability’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), 3–11, 225.
9
See, e.g., James G. Marsh and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen:
Universitetsvorlaget, 1976); William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
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more than one reading of a practice, image or text by its consumer. As Empson
suggested in his classic work, ambiguity is ‘any verbal nuance, however slight,
which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’.10 But
implicit in ambiguity is the possibility of there being clear choices among fixed
and finite meanings, meanings obfuscated through semantic duality (‘bank’) or
through structural and lexical fluidity (‘I saw the man with my binoculars’), or
through insufficient information-cum-context (Wittgenstein’s duck-hare). The
multiple interpretations of an ambiguous message are potentially dealt with
through disambiguation: a rephrasing aimed at removing all meanings but one.
Crucially for politics, ambiguity may be intentional as well as unintentional.
Ambiguity is often confused with indeterminacy. But indeterminacy is a
different attribute of political concepts. First, it is a function of their far greater
complexity. We can create a world in which ambiguities are removed, but that
would be one based on exceedingly simple premises. ‘The prime minister is the
leader of the Labour party’ is a statement where the office, its holder and the
official status of leadership are subject to clear and generally accepted semantic
rules and, contextually, party does not denote some kind of festive celebration.
‘This state is democratic’ allows for no such disambiguation, because
‘democracy’ is not ambiguous; it is indeterminate. Indeed, it would be impossible
to construct a sentence in which all the components of democracy would be
sufficiently disambiguated for an uncontroversial meaning to emerge. Second,
indeterminacy refers to an inevitable and ineliminable contingency of meaning.
It is a prior ontological standpoint about the impossibility of arriving at fixed,
determinate interpretations of certain concepts and about the logical (though not
cultural) arbitrariness of meaning. It is a fundamental hermeneutical issue.11
Epistemologically, the uncertainty engendered by ambiguity does not rule out
certainty (say if information improves), because uncertainty itself is deemed to
be the contingent feature. Much rational choice theory follows that line. But
indeterminacy rules out determinacy. It can offer merely spurious and temporary
‘determinacy’, engineered (1) by the suspension of disbelief in the possibility of
determinacy, and (2) by the political awkwardness of belief in the necessity of
indeterminacy, a belief that could encourage political paralysis.12
The indeterminacy from which decisions—those political Ur-acts—emanate is
a structural corollary of the notion of essential contestability, a notion that also
underpins pluralism. Decisions create the illusion—often through style, rhetoric
or self-persuasion—that indeterminacy does not exist. Given indeterminacy,
decisions are ‘closures’ that permit policies to be formulated or justified against
a multiple path background. If we accept that position, we will regard the
political thinking occurring in a political community as an explicit or implicit
10
W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 1.
Cp. T. Bahti, ‘Ambiguity and indeterminacy: the juncture’, Comparative Literature, 38 (1986),
209–23.
12
On this specific point see Freeden, ‘Essential contestability and effective contestability’.
11
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
119
competition over the control of political language, and will identify that area as
the characteristic domain of ideologies. That control is attempted through the
most necessary feature of the ideological act: the decontestation of the essentially
contestable, through which a decision is both made possible (accorded an aura
of finiteness) and justified (accorded an aura of authority). Within the internal
logic of politics that is both a heuristic necessity and a practical one, as decisions
must be taken and they then need to be either legitimated or enforced. The
control over language is an endeavour to monopolize the meanings concepts
carry. Legitimation and coercion are two methods of establishing monopolies of
meaning, however fleeting they may be. That control—that ideological act of
assertive selection—is a basic feature of political thinking.
Decontestation, though central to political argument, is never conclusive. Here
we add inconclusiveness to ambiguity and indeterminacy as attributes of political
concepts. Inconclusiveness relates to the point where competing appraisals
of arguments or of policies cannot knock each other out and no further
improvement can be made on that situation. It relates to the persuasive or
emotional strength of different claims made by various assertions, whether or
not through the assembling of evidence. It is a failure of assessment and of
weighting; not, as with ambiguity, of the clarification of definitional meaning.
But there is another sense of ‘inconclusive’—lacking a conclusion. It is also tied
to the impossibility of reaching an end point in an argumentative chain or string.
Say I am an egalitarian who favours greater equalization of wealth, from which
I deduce a scheme of public transfers such as graduated taxation, and then have
to consider whether to permit voluntary transfers from one member of a family
to another, and then ask whether the use of such transfers should be controlled
in terms of the goods they purchase, all down to the case of whether Mrs.
Appleton of Hyacinth Avenue, Bolton, a widowed ex-terrorist awaiting a hip
replacement, whose neighbour is playing very loud music on Saturday nights
when she wants to sleep, is a disadvantaged individual who requires occasional
compensation from a cash-strapped municipality, even though in the not-distant
future she will inherit a large sum of money from her aged uncle, etc. There
comes a point where, due to argumentative overload, to the inability to
conceptualize, to the inefficiency of policy-producing results, or to sheer
boredom, such a chain needs to be stopped (or, more likely, it peters out) even
though it can still produce endless variations. Those stoppage points may be
conditioned by moral paradigms, by conventions of argument, by demands of
efficacy, or by other cultural practices. Here the sequence and detailed path of
an argument, rather than the internal components of its parts, are curtailed by
complexity and the limited resources of mental and emotional energy in the face
of infinity!
Now, political philosophers may perceive many acts of decontestation as
examples of poor thinking that, consequently, do not merit serious scholarly
examination. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of decontestation muddies
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the waters of logical imperatives beloved by philosophers by introducing cultural
constraints on the logical options contained in an argument. Cultural constraints
are inevitable in a system of thinking when the path-structure of logical trees
invariably offers a number of entailed solutions, the choice among which would
otherwise be arbitrary.13 The very arbitrariness of the logical choices as to which
path to follow is a sharp reminder that logic is the coat hanger, not the coat,
and that philosophical obsession with logic alone will actually result in
substantive indeterminacy unless cultural constraints are factored in.
However, there is another argument political philosophers could bring against
decontestations. When effected by non-experts—i.e. non-philosophers—they
may be taken sloppily, and with insufficient justification. That is often true, but
it is not a good reason for ignoring them. First, the study of political thought
(and here one finds common ground with historians of political thought) must
leave room for theorizing about the bad and the inadequate side by side with
the good or the ideal. That is standard practice among political comparativists,
for example. This point was captured almost a century ago by Graham Wallas,
in response to James Bryce. Bryce had written about the ideal democracy in
which every citizen is ‘intelligent, patriotic, disinterested’, seeking the right side
in each contested issue by using his common sense. What, riposted Wallas—in
language as pertinent today as it was then—did Bryce mean by common sense?
If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent with
the facts of human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr.
Bryce means by these words the kind of democracy which might be possible if
human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxford
to think that it was. If so, the passage is a good instance of the effect of our
traditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin a medical
treatise by saying, ‘the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action
of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known
population.’14
Second, if politics is centrally about decision-making for collectivities, the
political theorist needs to theorize about the kind of thinking that goes into the
act of decontestation. Decontestative thinking, and its study, themselves become
central to political theory. They have to do different work for us in our capacity
as political theorists of politics than in our capacity as political philosophers. We
thus need to investigate the methods, arguments, presentations and devices that
enable successful decontestation in the political arena. The argument here is
loosely parallel to that directed against vulgar Marxist views of ideology, views
that summarily dismissed ideology as distorted consciousness instead of
exploring those forms of ‘distortion’ and why they mattered, not only to those
13
See M Freeden, A Very Short Introduction to Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
pp. 57–60.
14
G. Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1948; originally published 1908),
pp. 126–7.
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
121
who thought them, but also to those who studied ideology. Whether or not we
like what we find, as students of society we need to know.
Two forms of decontestation are well-known, even if not analysed as
decontestations. The one is the attempt to attach very precise allocations of
meanings to indeterminate concepts. Characteristic are the carefully-argued
conceptual clarifications, occasionally definition-constructing, that political
philosophers attempt as thought-exercises for the recommended handling
of concepts and arguments. Even here these are predicated on the acts of
manipulating, limiting, ranking and excluding fields of meaning so as to optimize
clarity, acts that themselves are of course saliently political. The second is the
stipulative ascription of meaning to a term, often associated with ideologues (in
extreme cases totalitarian, caricatured in Orwell’s 1984 slogans ‘war is peace;
freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength’; but in fact common to all ideologists,
as in ‘equality can only be understood as equality of opportunity’). This second
form of decontestation may be underpinned by rhetoric, by invoking extrahuman sanctification, or by force. Typically, the closure attempted here is
buttressed by the conclusive manner in which meaning is attached to the
contested term, accompanied by sleight of mouth, by the harnessing of science,
God, nature, personal vision, or by threats. One reason for this perceived and
intended conceptual confidence lies in the nature of authoritativeness, a property
that political systems need to generate with respect to their elites and prospective
power-wielders, if those elites are to compete successfully over the control
of political language. In effect, the two forms of decontestation are not
dichotomous but represent two points on a continuum, and the distance between
philosophers and ideologues is not as great as some scholars would have it.
Stipulative ascription, frequently supported by an appeal to reason, is well within
the domain of the political theorist and philosopher (‘justice is the first virtue of
a society’), and the elusive end of authoritativeness is no less sought by scholars
of political thought when promoting their own theories.
But the closure of debate does not necessarily ensue from the accuracy of the
conceptual definition or argumentative solution, or solely from the marketing of
dominant meanings. There exists a third and equally significant form of closure.
It could be called simulated decontestation, in which the semblance of
decontestation is created by ambiguity and by vagueness. Political philosophers
often label the kinds of political thinking emanating from non-professional
thinkers, say politicians and the disseminators of popular ideologies—as elusive,
if not duplicitous. That is, for instance, an accusation levelled at the phrase ‘the
third way’ and, from the viewpoint of analytical purists, it is a justified one.
Ambiguity in that case relates, for instance, to the lack of clarity concerning the
first and second ways—both in terms of their substance (e.g., capitalism versus
communism? Free-market versus welfare state?), and in terms of the location of
‘third’—on a continuum defined by first and second, that is to say ‘middle’; or
a ‘Hegelian’ synthesis of first and second; or outside that frame: an ordinal
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number distinguished simply by its location on a temporal sequence? Ambiguity
is, however, also a form of handling political language that is vital to the central
political aim of mobilizing support. The generation of support is, in terms of
political theory, significantly dependent on linguistic formulations that are openended, that carry multiple meanings, and that can be consumed differentially.
That also connects to the rather different category of vagueness, pertaining to
the boundary problems of concepts (to their intension) and to movement across
categories. Are both communism and the welfare state, for the purposes of a
specific political argument, simply two instances of excessive state control? Is the
free-market a sub-set of capitalism or can it be detached from the latter and
reattached to forms of democratic socialism? And does that then begin to vitiate
the distinction between capitalism and democratic socialism, or are we looking
instead at a plethora of ideological configurations as characteristic of real world
political discourse, many of which shade off into others? The blurring of
boundaries of meaning is often inescapable, but it may also be intentional.
Controlled and delimited indeterminacy is a typical and indispensable aspect of
political thinking among decision-making elites, especially if in a particular
instance the requirement to generate support overrides the requirement for
authoritative semantic pronouncements. Decision-making may generate support
from admirers of decisiveness, but it is also a loss-maker in terms of the
ideational groups it alienates. Accuracy of language (to the extent that it is
possible) is an advantage only if ‘precision’ is needed to corner a particular
market of ideological support. Whereas ideological specialization should
produce strong decontestation, it also entails a limiting of ambition with regard
to potential support or, alternatively, a reliance on coercion.
The point is that both ambiguous and vague expressions of political thinking
cannot just be dismissed as inferior thought-products. If they are, we miss out—
as interpreters of the domain of the political—on identifying major political
phenomena and impoverish our understanding of the variety and subtlety of
political thinking at the disposal of a society. They are, rather, frequently
intentional and importantly functional forms of political thought. And although
the general public may see them as confirmation of the bad name given to
politics, their elusiveness is not simply dissimulation, trickery or slack thinking—
though it may be any of these—but often the deliberate harnessing of political
language in order to achieve one of the main ends of politics, quite apart from
being an existential feature of political language.
From the perspective of analyzing political thought, the indeterminacy of
political concepts associated with further properties such as ambiguity (which
may allow for answers through disambiguation) and vagueness (which cannot
generate specific answers)15 marks out the inevitable tension between the desire
15
112.
R. Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 23,
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
123
for decontestation and its impossibility, due to the ‘surplus of meaning’ any act
of linguistic closure carries. Even strong decontestation (‘The only freedom
which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’16)
cannot endow political language with precision, and will be open to many
interpretations, unanticipated as well as anticipated. Particularly for ideologies,
competing as they do over political power in societies, certainty as well as
elusiveness are two required features, and fundamental to the political process.
Both are preliminaries to producing decisions. Liberal polities, especially, are
positioned between the need of politicians to deliver confidence-generating
results, and the requirement of liberal ideologies to be flexible in reassessing the
meanings and applications of polysemic political vocabulary, as well as to
mobilize the pluralist support believed to be structurally distinctive of modern,
multiple-identity societies. Sometimes certainty can pay, if a very specific policy
is in the making; and the rhetoric and style of certainty are themselves the
wielding of political power. At other times, and more typically, elusiveness of
meaning is the key to generating consent.
Let’s put this slightly differently, in the context of recent attempts by political
philosophers to attain overlapping consensus and undistorted communication in
a society. Devices to attain consensus, whether of the Rawlsian thin type or the
Habermasian thicker type, are proffered by those philosophers as a solution to
the existence of political disagreement, or as the framework within which only
reasonable disagreement can persist and be controlled. Perfect harmony may be
posited through utopian thought experiments, and overlapping consensus
through an appeal to free-standing shared intuitions and moral capacities. But
politics, we might argue, based on past and present observation, is the site of
durable dissent as a structural inevitability. Articulatory and augmentative
precision therefore exacerbate the destructive potential of dissent, as positions
are sharply marked out not only methodologically but substantively. Here I offer
one evaluative standpoint from a disciplinary perspective habitually accused of
eschewing normative evaluation in favour of interpretation and—usually
employed in a derogatory manner—description. Vagueness and ambiguity are
not only the inevitable by-product of indeterminacy, but a recipe for political coexistence. The much-vaunted 1950s consensus on the post WW2 welfare state
in the UK was the product of such ambiguity. It allowed for co-operation
between very diverse ideological frameworks with the concomitant political
stability this engendered. It did that through playing down the different
ideological ends welfare measures serviced: political order and economic
productivity for the Conservatives, social justice and greater social solidarity for
Labour. Imprecision and the elision of meaning are advantageous and desirable,
when different priorities among political values would otherwise lead to strife.
The tolerance of words in containing multiple, connected but not identical
16
J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Dent, 1910), p. 75.
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meanings, is important to the adequate functioning of political and ideological
orders. The precision so highly sought by some philosophers may signal the kiss
of death for political processes.
IV. STRUCTURAL PLURALISMS AND
CONCEPTUAL INTERDEPENDENCIES
So far, the word ‘ideology’ has crept into this article, but not predominantly
so. In effect, the political theory of politics is closely related to the study
of ideologies, but I am very conscious of the contrary and contradictory
associations of the concept of ideology. The approach advocated here regards
ideologies as synonymous with the political thinking actually occurring in a
society, inasmuch as the product is identifiable in patterns (or morphological
arrangements) and is produced and consumed by politically significant
collectivities. That is not to suggest that the meaning of ‘ideology’ can now be
stretched to take over as the preponderant object of political theory, but rather
that political theory must avail itself of the methods and techniques that recent
analyses of ideology have developed, in order to gain access to the vast realm of
concrete and politically relevant thinking that exists at the heart of the political.
It also suggests, as noted above, that we almost always encounter political
thought in the form of ideological discourses.
What, then, are the understandings and devices we need to bring into play
if we wish to do justice as political theorists to this under-researched and
underconceptualized area? First, if it makes sense to regard the concept as the
basic semantic unit of political thinking, political theory needs to investigate the
presentation, interrelationships and internal structure of its concepts. While
competition over the control of language should remain pivotal to political
theory, its emphasis should lie in the analysis of the product—the configurations
of concepts that constitute a political idea and, at more general levels, an instance
of political discourse, or an ideology. Second, and I shall return to this below,
given indeterminacy, ambiguity, vagueness, and inconclusiveness as fundamental
to political argument and its conceptual components, political theory needs to
explore the characteristics that these attributes bestow on the political process.
How do they structure political discourse? How should that knowledge of the
nature of political language shape our understanding of the political and of
political thinking?
Importantly, this genre of political theory must be sensitive to change, as it is
predicated on the impermanence of conceptual content, and is sensitive to the
fluctuating interchange of conceptual structures with the world of practices,
embracing Skinner’s observation that ‘acts are also texts’.17 But it is not centrally
17
Q. Skinner, ‘The rise of, challenge to, and prospects for a Collingwoodian approach to the
history of political thought’, The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Castiglione
and Hampsher-Monk, p. 186.
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
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concerned with the reasons or conditions for change as with its manifestations
and consequences—the varied conceptions of key concepts that come together
to form patterned yet plastic theories and understandings. Its epistemological
underpinning in indeterminacy does not signify a flaw in our conception of the
world or a temporary stage en route to truth and knowledge, but singles out
the very locus of human choice (and hence conceptual flexibility) itself.
Indeterminacy is not synonymous with chaos or with extreme relativism, but it
holds out the promise of infinitely rich combinations of ideas from which
societies may draw. Methodologically, it underpins the pluralism that guarantees
that neither political theory nor ideology will ever die out. It is also far more in
tune with the view of human nature that recent welfare theory has identified—
not one based on a nineteenth century belief in the certainties proffered by
human reason and in the forcefulness of practical entrepreneurship, but based
on an awareness of human frailty and vulnerability, and hence normally
susceptible to unpredictable as well as planned change.18 Does building on the
existence of pluralism signify that political theory can only deal with liberal
premises and frameworks? Not at all, as the pluralism that is the result of
essential contestability is a necessary but not sufficient condition of liberalism,
and because political theorists have to entertain the assumption that the
ostensible absence of more than one voice, in any ideological system, is achieved
not through utopian reasonableness and harmony but only through force or
manipulation.
Another feature of structural pluralism directs us to a further insight germane
to the political theory of politics. Politics focuses, among others, on the study of
interrelated individuals and groups, recently rephrased through terms such as
‘networks’.19 That existential interdependence is matched by the conceptual
interdependence evident in the thought products of political thinkers. In the ‘real
world’ of texts and utterances—as any linguist knows—words come in
combinations, and so it is with concepts. Despite the proclivity of analytical
philosophers to explore concepts in isolation—a necessary exercise when the
tolerance and range of a concept is, quite reasonably, subjected to logical and
argumentative testing—concepts always appear in clusters that are mutually
defining, sustaining and, for that matter, constraining. Those patterns
are established through empirical evidence, mediated via the interpretative
facilities of the researcher, but superimposed on a spinal conceptual structure
that reveals the options available to political thinkers in a given time and space
frame.
18
See M. Freeden, ‘The coming of the welfare state’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century
Political Thought, ed. T. Ball and R. Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 7–44.
19
See, e.g., R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy, Networks, Governance,
Reflexivity and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997); Martin A. Hajer and
Hendrik Wagenaar, eds, Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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Take Mill’s On Liberty, an essay that is not on liberty alone, not even on
liberty as a super-value. As Mill makes abundantly clear, he is arguing for the
free development of individuality—a cluster of concepts that elicit out of
each other specific conceptions and that form a particular cultural package
chosen from a number of logical possibilities.20 Thus, the conception of liberty
is one that contributes to the development of individuals; other conceptions of
liberty are structurally ruled out by the proximity engineered to the adjacent
concepts; while the conception of development is made to include selfdevelopment, as development not undertaken by free individuals is excluded.21
We thus encounter a virtuous circle, an instance of complex holistic relationships,
bearing three features. First, any concept is a means to any other (the circle may
be entered into at any point on the conceptual compass). Second, some
conceptions of any concept may also intersect with, or constitute, part of another
concept: here complex boundary problems emerge. Third—a normative
apparel—the configuration of concepts has been constructed so as to constitute
collectively a desirable, or attractive, set of human and social circumstances.22
Those are typical ways in which political language and thinking present
themselves.
Interdependence, applied to the political world, is not tantamount to an allembracing wholeness. In a world of conflicting and competing conceptual
arrangements, it appears as competing holisms. One salient shape these
competing holisms adopt is that of ideologies, which are now to be viewed as
all the concrete forms of political thinking in a society that feature either some
grand conceptual configuration or, more modestly, a partial one. For each
ideology offers a prevailing pattern of the conceptions of many concepts, bound
together as a particular discourse. Such holisms are of course not really complete,
for two reasons. First, the issue of inconclusiveness noted above: arguments
have no clear endpoints. Second, in a holistic structure ideas and policies are
interconnected at many points and on many dimensions. Those nodal linkages
reflect cultural understandings of how and why these connections are, and should
be, made. But no holistic political structure can host all possible linkages and
paths. The interdependence of any given cluster of political thought lies rather
in its particular choice, or presentation, of certain sequential conceptual paths
and in some configuration of mutually-sustaining circularity. Disparate nodal
linkages vie with each other in giving different holistic readings (i.e. alternative
ideological interpretations) of the political practices that are being signified.
To recapitulate, the sphere of politics is a major arena in which collective
enterprises take place, and ideologies most typically represent the political
20
Mill, On Liberty, p. 115.
I have argued this in greater detail in Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 145–7.
These possibilities do not exhaust Mill’s text. The umbrella concept of well-being acts—on this
interpretation—as a collective name for the cluster of named goods, but may also, as Mill implies,
contain further goods, or further ‘leading essentials’.
21
22
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
127
thought equivalents of these collective ventures. They are both collectively
produced, and designed to be consumed, by collectivities. Hence any political
theory aiming at understanding this aspect of the political cannot overlook the
fundamental claim that the study of ideologies offers the most immediate and
relevant access to the clustered political thinking of collectivities.
V. THE ATTRIBUTES OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND
THE SHAPE OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Once we are prepared to forgo the presupposition that collectivities ought to act
in unison, or that they can leave their differences at the hermetically sealed gate
of politics, our focus necessarily readjusts to what happens inside the space
occupied by such collectivities and the sub-groups inside them. Here we may
borrow an idea from institutional analysts: the notion of multi-level governance.
Comparative political scientists have largely abandoned the unitary assumptions
about the relationship between politics and the state, and students of political
thought need to do the same. Multi-level governance assumes that political
systems harbour variable origins of decision-making. That raises the immediate
problem of co-ordination. The reflection of that structural requirement is
negotiation—one mechanism for the regulation of any conflict that may emerge.
The centrality of negotiation to the study of political thought commences with
the pluralism and dissent generated by conceptual indeterminacy, and follows
them through the political requirement to make decisions. The focal area of the
political theory of politics lies thus not in the sphere that Rawls called political
liberalism, but expressly in the spheres of comprehensive doctrines that Rawls
banished from politics. One of the cores of the political—dissent and its
attempted regulation through negotiation—is sited in the relationship between
these so-called comprehensive doctrines.
Negotiation and compromise are political activities that can prevent the
eruption of uncontrollable disorder. The fluid structure of political concepts itself
holds the potential for negotiation, though not all features of political thinking—
for instance, oversimplification or excessive competitive zeal—are amenable to
such compromise. Nor can we rule out the many instances of zero-sum
relationships among core values, against which Rawlsian-type enterprises are
helpless. ‘Pro-choicers’ and ‘pro-lifers’ with regard to the deliberate termination
of pregnancies constitute one such case, and ambiguity—or coercion—may be
the only way out. Most political theories and ideologies possess non-negotiable
components—red lines they will never cross.
As an aspect of political thought, negotiation normally accompanies
decontestation. Negotiation can occur with regard to past conversations within
a particular political discourse, or between political discourses. The decontested
forms in which we encounter political concepts do not descend from a conceptual
heaven but are the product of complex historical and political processes, of
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inching one’s way towards positions that are the result of many adaptive
conversations. They eventually reach the point where negotiation temporarily
stops, due to the exigencies of decision-making, or the tolerance and endurance
levels of the ideological producers. That process is parallel to imposing an
ephemeral conclusion on inconclusiveness, and it helps us to understand why
decisions are, from the point of view of political thinking, quasi-arbitrary and
temporary stoppage points in potentially interminable sequences, and why,
therefore, a decision is an act of rerouting rather than one of permanently
halting.
Equipped with the attributes of political concepts, and taking on board the
crucial art of political negotiation, how might they be translated into the terms
of political discourse? As political theorists we need to explore the impact of
conceptual features, and the leeway of conceptual interpretation possible in a
conceptual arrangement, before it begins to affect core positions critically.
Assume, for example, that we are assessing two policies concerning traffic
congestion. Behind them lies a general conception of the public interest involving
physical mobility and the quality of urban life. For some, that public interest
entails the reduction of pollution in the service of sustainable life on the planet
(cars are a public bad). For others, it involves an efficient and consumer-oriented
lifestyle necessitating speed of access to places of work, shopping and
entertainment. This group could be further divided into those who wish to build
additional access roads for private vehicles (cars are a public good because they
advance social mobility and accessibility; rather than a private good because they
advance individual desires) and those who wish to prioritize public transport
(buses are a public rather than private good for the same reasons). For others
again, non-intervention in private choices is the relevant conception of the public
interest (this is not identical to the aggregate of private interests but a competing
evaluation of the good life) and congestion is one of the prices we pay for a free
society (the goodness or badness of cars is irrelevant, and the quality of urban
life is a consequence of the free choices available to residents). Already, the
political terrain is constructed on the indeterminacy of the public good and of
the relative weighting of its components, and the vagueness of the boundary
relationship between private and public transport (say, between a privately hired
school bus and a school bus operated by a private company under licence of the
local authority).
The town, however, is clogged up and for most people that cost is too high.
Can the different conceptions of the good life allow a solution? The municipality
decides to assess two options, taking into account the prevalence of those
different beliefs concerning the good life and the inevitability of dissent on
those matters. The one proposal is to forgo regulation and to anticipate that
congestion will make travel so unattractive that individuals will find it easier to
leave their cars at home rather than face gridlock. The other is to impose a
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
129
congestion charge. In decoding these perimeter practices23 we must first try to
set them within the ideological environment that best makes sense of them. The
two options offer at least three possible strategies of argument for the rationing
of public road space. The first sees self-rationing as an inevitable consequence
of excessive private demand for geographical mobility, and when individuals
are penalized by gridlock it relies on private, rational choices. As a market
mechanism it is self-regulatory: motorists will despair and vote with their wheels;
those who nevertheless insist on driving in city centres will pay the price in time
and nerves. The second justifies centralized rationing by invoking environmental
concerns to trump individual choice, and imposes regulations irrespective of
democratic soundings—for example, the opening of space only to public
transport. The third invokes efficiency of movement in terms of time and space.
However, as happened in London, it combines market practices—leasing public
space—and a regressive tax that penalizes the worse-off while still enabling
the wealthy to swan around town centre, with an alternative concern for
redistributive justice: namely, the proceeds of the congestion charge are
channelled to a considerable extent towards subsidising public transport.
The attractiveness of this solution—for those to whom it may be attractive in
the first place—is that it relies on the ambiguity of the conception of the public
good it is intended to satisfy. Whose interests is it serving? Whose view of the
good life can it claim to benefit? It is not a case of zero-sum ambiguity, where
one interpretation may rule out the other (e.g. the desirability of experimenting
on animals) but of compatible ambiguity, utilizing the possibility that all parties
may—with some tweaking—read their preferred, or at least an acceptable,
position into the proffered solution. In effect, it illustrates a struggle over a
particular cashing out of the public interest, stretched indeterminately between
three positions: 1. The predominance of private interests, and freedom from the
nuisance of physical intervention by others in my relatively efficient free
movement through town (assisted by an ability to pay that itself is a product of
market forces). 2. The ‘objective’ interest of human and extra-human entities,
underpinned by a scientific, expert and non-democratic decontestation of
(environmental) values. 3. The postulation of a ‘communal’, electorally popular,
interest best served within current cultural constraints by charging for free
choice, and addressing the consequent inequality of opportunity for movement
by compensating those unable to avail themselves of it. If conceptual flexibility
allows for a sustainable overlapping area to elide ideological differences and to
reach a policy-decision, then negotiation over the content of political concepts
is possible and may result in a compromise—each side can go back to its
supporters and claim reasonable success. Political consensus, to repeat, is
23
For an explanation of perimeter practices see Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory,
pp. 78–80.
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predicated on ambiguity, not precision, and as political theorists we must
understand both how the construction of ambiguity works, and how to produce
it when necessary.
Nevertheless, unanticipated strains in that coalition of conceptions may cause
it to unravel at any future point, or to react violently back on the stability of
conceptual cores. Decontestation is itself subject to continuous reformulation
over time and space. Essential contestability engenders slippage as a consequence
of the internal flexibility of positions and the impossibility (and political
undesirability) of holding linguistic meaning constant. There always exists a
decontestation continuum, in which subtle reformulations (negotiated or
unprompted) are marshalled in order to remain in the competition over the
control of political language. That is where inconclusiveness emerges, for the
imposition of a congestion charge will effectively be, as argued above, an
unavoidably temporary decision. The solution may have to be extended in future,
it may be abolished as electorally unsustainable, or its success may create other
harms that have to be addressed.
VI. RANKING AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SIGNIFICANCE
There is at least one further vital feature of political discourse that assists in
engendering support and enabling political decisions. If politics still is, in Harold
Lasswell’s famous phrase, about ‘who gets what, when, how’ then its discursive
equivalent in political theory is the distribution of significance to open fields of
meaning: endowing this meaning of a concept, of an argument, of a practice
with greater significance than that meaning. At the heart of politics are acts of
ranking, of expressing preferences, of establishing a pecking order of importance,
in a world where there are finite material, intellectual and emotional resources
that can be called on to construct, or support, or justify policy. That ranking is
a prerequisite of political decision-making, without which decision-makers
cannot know what to deal with next. Ranking attempts to transform the
essentially indeterminate weighting and sequencing of priority claims into a
determinate one. Unlike the notion of hierarchy, it does not necessarily denote
a durable institutional structure, nor the bestowal of superior consideration on
people and offices, but rather a process central to political judgment, assessment
and choice.
How does political thought handle this issue? Notably, some political concepts
and some forms of political language are primarily dedicated to ranking. To
illustrate, we need to reconsider a well-known concept in political theory from
a political, not ethical, perspective. A right, from that viewpoint, is a linguistic
device that discharges the function of crucially prioritizing and protecting values
and desired objects. It is a concept that shoots other valued concepts to the
top of the queue and accords them greater weight and durability—i.e. it
(re)distributes their significance. Rights are always a protective capsule for other
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
131
values—rights are not substantive values themselves—and that very act of
linguistic protection and ring-fencing is a pristine political act. Rights regulate
conflict through attempted demarcations of boundaries of human action and
expectation. The very language of rights endeavours to render those boundaries
impermeable, through adjectival contrivances such as ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’,24
and that is a major form of coping with essential contestability. Rights are often
accompanied by the concepts of legitimacy and authority. These mobilize
political support through manufacturing consent and obedience—two
indispensable political goods, irrespective of any ethical worth they may carry,
that confer durability on ranking. All these concepts embody the conceptual
polysemy and indeterminacy that necessitate ranking exercises in order for
political activity to be possible.
Ranking is also abetted by persuasiveness—an aspect of (political) power
pertaining to the assembling of cogent, effective, or attractive arrangements of
political concepts and conceptions incorporated in political argument. Here the
focus is on utilizing the cultural tools that are best geared to changing people’s
opinions or to securing them: rational argument, an appeal to the past, the
summoning up of God’s will, or nationalist fervour are some of the options. That
too is a major consideration in constructing a political theory of politics, because
it examines which devices aid one argument to gain salience over another.
VII. REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF POLITICAL THEORISTS
Ethicists might have a point when they ask: How does this kind of political
analysis further the goals of providing a critique of existing practices and
principles, and of prescribing better ones? Simply to argue that the political
theory of politics focuses on different aspects of politics is only partially correct.
Nor is it quite enough to claim that morality is no more than an attractive way
through which to shape legitimacy discourses, and that morality tests are weighty
tests of the actions of governments and the ends of regimes. That assigns morality
an instrumental value. The greater challenge is to demonstrate that the political
theory of politics can provide tools to ethico-political philosophers
(conventionally referred to as normative philosophers). True, if we assume that
individuals as a rule appreciate good or moral reasons for acting, then legitimacy
claims and understandings have to be couched in moral terms. But as analysts
of political language and concepts we will want to know which conceptions of
which concepts generate and enable arguments about the intrinsic good
of political morality. We need to know how political visions are constructed.
Does a cocktail of transparency, pluralism and legitimacy offer the winning
combination? Or one of loyalty, nationhood and sacrifice? Which conceptions
24
I initially developed that approach to rights in M. Freeden, Rights (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 1991).
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of these concepts are likely to be permanently available for moral arguments
and which are context-dependent? Are there other, parallel combinations?
Nevertheless, ethical arguments do not always act as trumps. Lloyd George was
not the only politician who felt the need to supplement the ethical case for
national health and unemployment insurance with the argument that it made
good business sense.
In addition, political criticism is—in its reflective mode—a consequence and
correlate of political pluralism. Only when discursive recognition is accorded to
a multiplicity of voices is efficient criticism possible and socially transmissible.
Thus the function of critique, from which morality draws its lifeblood, is
enhanced when ontological social pluralism is acknowledged. To attain idealtype consensus is, ultimately, to silence criticism by disabling it. In parallel, the
notion of indeterminacy should keep political theorists on their toes. They could,
of course, retreat into defeatism, fatalism, or some of the less fertile forms of
deconstruction. But the alternative is to lay out a world in which intelligent
choosing becomes an act of both intellectual and practical survival, in the sense
of assigning a variety of meanings—and hence purposes and structures—to
socio-political life. Political philosophy, too, may emerge with new refinement
equipped with that Weltanschauung. Now all these are assumptions that might
be queried. They all constitute forks in a road that might lead elsewhere with
the switch of a signpost. But if morality entails the capacity for choice, it must
also pay attention to a political theory of politics that sees political language
itself as suspended between indeterminate meanings and their precarious
decontestation, engendering choices that are intended to provide a plausible,
intellectually robust, and ethically illuminating, rather than permanent, let alone
correct, route towards understanding social phenomena.
As noted above, many eminent scholars are aware of the disjuncture between
theory and practice in political theory. Rogers Smith has recently and rightly
lamented the irrelevance of much political theorizing to understanding political
practice.25 The approach adumbrated in this paper takes on board the
fundamental centrality of concrete political issues, but rather than calling for the
increased impact of existing mainstream political thinking on political practices,
makes the case for two additional steps: 1. The empirical analysis of political
thinking itself—thinking that is spread across a society as a significant empirical
phenomenon deserving of close attention—as a form of human thoughtbehaviour, or thought-practices, that define, constrain and enable options open
to actors as a consequence of their morphological combinatory features. 2. The
development of such investigation not through the conventional methods of
statistical aggregation and numerical categorization within a framework of
simple matrices (the left-right dimension is a representative example) but through
25
Rogers M. Smith, ‘Reconnecting political theory to empirical inquiry, or, a return to the cave?’
The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics, ed. Edward D.
Mansfield and Richard Sissons (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 60–88.
WHAT SHOULD ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE?
133
theorizing that employs conceptual analyses and interpretative tools pertaining
to political ideas and language, and that should stem directly from our training
as political theorists. Not the least of the benefits might be that political theorists
and political scientists start talking to each other again.
It is not the past abstractness of political theory that is at fault (as Smith
agrees26) but its extreme reluctance to enter the ‘muddied’ waters of regular
political discourse on the one hand, and to illuminate the kinds of core political
issues that political theorists have heavily underplayed on the other hand. It is
not the lack of relevance to current political issues that is at stake but the lack
of relevance to understanding the nature of theorizing and thinking about
politics, an enterprise that has largely been abandoned by political theorists, but
that has been resurrected and developed by students of ideology. It is not so
much a question about which events and practices we ought to focus on. Rather,
what needs to be rethought is: what should we be doing as political theorists
engaged in understanding and exploring political phenomena? In order to do
theory—to analyse and construct new abstractions—what do we need to know
about the political thought produced by the members of a society, and what
should we ask about it?
Ten years ago I was writing about the gap between political philosophy and
the history of ideas, and arguing that the study of ideology filled that gap. Now
I am arguing that the space between theory and practice in political studies needs
to be filled not just by a convergence between theory and empirical studies, but
by developing an approach that fills another gap: between apolitical and
political, distanced and immediate, theorizing about politics. That gap, I claim,
can be filled through acknowledging that generalized political thinking—namely,
concrete and ubiquitous forms of discourse and debate that shape and reflect the
political domain, for better or for worse—is a major concern of political theory,
and then enabling political theory to utilize and develop a vocabulary that will
translate that concern into scholarship. If we do not pay attention to those
phenomena, we will overlook a vital aspect of politics and of its incarnation in
patterns of human thought. Moreover, we shall be deflected from what is
centrally political in our thought-patterns. True, we also need to be engaged—
but that is in our role as social ethicists and as citizens. As students of political
thinking we need to emulate the practices of anthropologists—donning the
mantle of conceptologists—in order to map and interpret the strange, wonderful
and occasionally repulsive world of political ideas on which we all feed and that
permeates the conscious and unconscious assumptions incorporated in the
activity of thinking about politics.
Put differently, there are two types of engagement: the one is with the
immediate pressing social, moral and economic issues and movements that
require addressing by the intellectuals and decision-makers of the day—that is,
26
Ibid., p. 75.
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the urgent ethical and psychological imperative of expressing outrage or hope,
of trying to make a difference in the world. This flirtation with missionary zeal
has tempted many scholars out of their ivory towers, and so it should be, but
such virtuous conduct is often acquired through short-term reactions to what
is politically and ethically fashionable. Ironically, such activities could be
categorized just as persuasively as ideological rather than as philosophical. The
other engagement is with the relevance of the approaches and methods that
political theorists, as scholars, employ in order to shed light on their subjectmatter, to understand and interpret it. The first is more dramatic and would seem
to produce more compelling results; but the second is more effective, more
carefully self-reflexive, more in line with our responsibilities to our profession as
academics rather than public intellectuals, and it should produce sturdier
frameworks within which longer-term workable results are possible. One cannot
discuss ‘real world’ political issues without having a method that identifies the
features of ‘real world’ political thinking.
There is still a Rubicon to be crossed: How can this approach gain intellectual
and academic respectability in comparison with the heavy-weight and established
disciplines of political philosophy and the history of political thought? Well,
there is no need for competition if the aims and methods of each are clearly
understood and if, most importantly, the boundaries between them are not
conceived of as impermeable but may be regularly traversed to mutual benefit.
All are eminently important, because they discharge such different yet
intellectually necessary tasks. But there certainly exists a challenge, one that the
political theory of politics can only meet by demonstrating the complexity and
rigour of its analysis—for which it must be indebted to philosophy—and the
interpretative significance of its findings. It will do so through establishing the
empirical and evidential investigation of political thinking, through developing
the analytical categories best suited to the tasks in hand, through the meticulous
insistence on discerning both distinctions and the configurations in which they
occur, through the micro-analysis of political language as conceptual as well as
symbolic, through the sensitivity to political practices as containing ideational
import and to political thinking itself as a social practice, through the recognition
that intentionality and unintentionality, agency and culture, reason and emotion,
interact and inform each other mutually in the political sphere, and through the
incorporation of temporal and spatial flexibilities and shifts as part and parcel
of the fluid processes of the formation of political meaning.