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In the lead article of the first issue of The Journal of Politics in 1939, George H. Sabine posed the question, “What is political theory?” This subject has, to this day, remained persistently contentious. The difficulty is, in part, that while political theory is professionally attached to the discipline of political science, it has, intellectually, since at least the early 1970s, evolved as a relatively autonomous interdisciplinary field of study allied more closely to academic practices such as philosophy and history.

When Sabine’s article was published, the domain of political theory, as exemplified in Sabine’s own work, consisted primarily of the study of the history of political thought, that is, the exegesis of, and commentary on, a classic canon extending from Plato to Marx, which, in turn, was still an integral dimension of American political science. As a generic form of discourse conducted in diverse ways and settings by university scholars as well as by political actors, political theory is apt to be conceived as a relatively universal endeavor. However, as a self-ascribed and institutionally differentiated academic field, political theory refers to a form of discourse that was a nineteenth-century American invention. Although it is possible, and common, to identify, in various countries and eras, what might be considered as functional equivalents and prototypes of this academic practice, it was largely a creation of American political science.

Political Theory And The Origins Of The American Science Of Politics

The work of authors such as Aristotle, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau were already important texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American college curriculum in moral philosophy. A Scottish Enlightenment perspective dominated this course of studies, which included practical ethics and was taught by Protestant clergy. This iconic literature, which became the core of a classic canon, was viewed not only as the progenitor of the ideas embodied in American institutions but also as containing principles that should be inculcated in citizens and political leaders.

Although political science, as a particular discipline, was, as Bernard Crick so notoriously put it in 1959, a distinctly “American science of politics,” this United States setting did not entail a lack of European influences. The person most reasonably credited as the discipline’s “founder” is the German émigré Francis Lieber (ca. 1798–1872), who grafted German philosophical history onto the political dimension of American moral philosophy and made the concept of the state the subject and domain of political science. From the point of his earliest writing on the study of politics (Manual of Political Ethics, 1838), Lieber also situated the already canonical authors, from Plato onward, as central actors in a Kantian and Hegelian vision of history, which was the story of the state and its evolution toward institutions of civil liberty. Lieber believed these institutions were most fully manifest in the American nation state. Lieber designated the classic authors, beginning with the ancient Greeks, as the predecessors of the field of study that he was attempting to institutionalize, and the history of politics culminated in American self-government where the existence of a sovereign people overrode diversity. The emerging discipline, as a whole, was devoted to justifying American government as the ultimate realization of popular sovereignty, and the study of the history of political thought validated that putative body of knowledge by attaching it to an illustrious lineage. The history of political ideas was conceived as, at once, the history of political science and the history of the theory and practice of the state, and thus as providing a provenance for both the discipline and its subject matter.

Lieber’s successor at Columbia, John W. Burgess, and the latter’s colleagues and students, most fully institutionalized the discipline of political science as part of the American academy, and this included both the theory of the state and the attending study of the history of political ideas. More than any other work, it was Archibald Dunning’s three volumes on A History of Political Theories, written over a period of two decades (1903–1920), that established the history of political theory as a consciously recognized academic literature and a defined element of the university curriculum. Although Dunning broadened the perspective beyond the earlier Germanic accounts, he continued to stress the claims that the history of political theory was the past of contemporary political science, that politics were the subject of history, and that political change was a product of a dialectical relationship between political ideas and their social context.

The work of W. W. Willoughby at Johns Hopkins University paralleled that of Dunning. Willoughby emphasized the importance of theory in political life and, even more than Dunning, the immanence of political ideas in the context of political fact in his Political Theories of the Ancient World (1903), but he also stressed the difference between political thought in politics and political theory as an element of political science. He was one of the principal actors in founding the American Political Science Association and in designating political theory as a recognized subfield, and he claimed that the history of political theory should also be viewed as a repository of concepts for scientific political inquiry.

Political Theory As The History Of Liberalism

For early exponents of a more naturalistic scientific study of politics, such as Charles E. Merriam, who along with his colleagues in the Chicago school fundamentally changed the character of the discipline during the course of the 1920s, the history of political theory remained an important element of political science. Despite the new emphasis on political theory as an element of an empirical science of politics, the history of political thought continued to dominate the subfield of political theory. The history functioned as both the story of democracy and an account of the development of political science. What had also taken place, however, beginning in the mid-1920s, was an Americanization, and Anglicanization, of the literature. This was in part a consequence of the turn away from German philosophy after World War I (1914– 1918), and there was also greater intercourse with England and the influence of a number of British scholars. But although the more strictly Hegelian elements that had characterized the American adaptation faded, the essential characteristics of the form, such as the relativity of ideas leavened by an idealist image of progress, persisted.

The crisis of democratic theory in political science during the 1920s ended with the demise of the theory of the state as an account of democracy based on the belief in the existence of a homogeneous American public. However, the history of political theory continued to flourish as a justification for the new theory of democratic pluralism, as well as for the changing image of political science. The political polarization of the globe in the 1930s and an inferiority complex about the articulation of democracy, or liberalism, as an ideology provided incentives for moving that history yet further in the direction of justifying American democracy. The image of a great tradition political thought became, more than ever, the past of both American politics and political science. Works such as C. H. McIlwain’s The Growth of Political Thought in the West (1932) did much to solidify the assumption that the classic works were pivotal elements of an actual historical tradition, but, among the proliferating number of texts during the 1930s and 1940s, which served to underwrite liberal democracy as well as the discipline devoted to studying it, Sabine’s A History of Political Theory (1937) became the most paradigmatic. Although Sabine claimed that political ideas were relative to their context, depreciated the assumption that political theory had anything to do with ultimate truth, and stressed the danger of all transcendental perspectives from natural law to Marxism, he sustained the image of progress in both ideas and institutions. He claimed that the logic of the experimental method, which lay at the heart of both science and liberalism, ultimately ensured their survival and doomed the aberrational absolutist lapses of totalitarianism.

Although it is often assumed that the behavioral revolution in political science, which defined the discipline during the 1950s and 1960s, involved a rejection of the history of political theory in favor of what it characterized as the emulation of the methods of the natural sciences and the development of scientific theory, a radical change in the literature associated with the history of political theory instigated, in part, the behavioral movement. Behavioralism was in many respects a reaffirmation of and a recommitment to both the account of liberal democracy and the methods of studying politics that had dominated the discipline for a generation.

The Transformation Of Political Theory

Between the late 1930s and early 1940s, a significant number of German émigré scholars arrived in the United States and, for various reasons, gravitated toward the field of political theory. By the mid-1950s, these scholars had brought about a fundamental sea change in the discipline. This group included, most notably, individuals such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Herbert Marcuse. They were, in several respects, a philosophically and ideologically diverse group, but despite their differences, ranging from Marxism to conservatism, they embraced some common principles and assumptions.

For Americans, who had for a generation been relatively insulated from foreign influences, their arguments appeared both similar and unfamiliar. There were some American partisans who aided in the penetration of the genre, and, by the early 1960s, with the publication of what many saw as the principal successors to Sabine’s book—Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (1960) and Strauss and Joseph Cropsey’s edited History of Political Philosophy (1963)—a basic intellectual shift had occurred. The quite sudden behavioralist depreciation of the study of the history of political theory was in large measure a consequence of this literature increasingly becoming a rhetoric now devoted to undermining, rather than defending, mainstream political science and the pluralist vision of democracy that had become emblematic of political science as well as of American public philosophy. The classic articulation of this alienation was Wolin’s account of “Political Theory as a Vocation” (1969), which he advocated as an alternative to the “methodism” he ascribed to the behavioral program in mainstream political science. Wolin claimed that this calling, represented in the texts comprising the classic canon, was one to which academic theorists should and could aspire, even if only by interpreting and teaching this literature.

The antimodernist work of individuals such as Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Stephan George, and Carl Schmitt influenced many of the émigré theorists, as well as others who followed their lead. Political theorists began to propagate images of a crisis of the West and the decline of political thought. Since they all saw relativism in its various manifestations as a precursor of philosophical and political nihilism, they reacted negatively to American pragmatism and subscribed to some version of transcendental and foundationalist philosophy. In short, they could not, in most respects, have been more at odds with the substantive content and purpose of the field of political theory as it had heretofore been conceived in the United States.

The form of this intellectual vessel was, however, more congenial and familiar. The tale of the tradition, as told by political philosophers such as Strauss, became a much more dramatic and structured trope.Authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli were cast as romantic or demonic protagonists in a plot containing distinct points of beginning, transformation, and, even, end. Although the new literature was addressed, at least obliquely, to contemporary society, issues surrounding the cold war, and the viability of democratic institutions, it represented a kind of philosophical politics in which actual events resonated more as exemplars than objects of investigation. Also, finally, the subfield became increasingly alienated from the very discipline in which it was professionally situated. The new synoptic account of the tradition that took shape after World War II still told the story of political science and liberalism, but it was now a tragic story of their entwined flaws and irrelevance. At the same time, however, the narrative singled out the “vocation” of political theory as surviving the defects of modernity and recovering a lost remnant of truth.

By the late 1960s, the estrangement between the subfield of political theory and mainstream political science resulted in a partition of political theory into what were designated as empirical, historical, and normative domains, with the latter categories becoming the principal property of the emerging interdisciplinary field of political theory and its professional outpost in political science. The appearance of the journal Political Theory in 1971 exemplified the relative autonomy of political theory that increasingly became defined by a series of conversations, such as those surrounding the work of both foreign scholars such as Jürgen Habermas (Knowledge and Human Interest, 1971) and Americans such as John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) and Robert Nozick (State, Anarchy, and Utopia, 1974).There was also a significant shift in the study of the history of political thought.

Debates in the 1960s about such matters as whether the whole tradition had been based on a logical mistake, and consequently whether political theory was “dead,” were largely manifestations of philosophical controversies about the implications of philosophical positivism for normative claims about politics. Even this discussion, however, continued to assume the existence of the tradition as a piece of historical reality. The invocation of the great tradition, now as the past of contemporary academic political theory rather than mainstream political science, was in many ways the last gasp of the history of political theory as an epic story encompassing two millennia.

The New Historicism

By the 1970s, the study of the history of political theory had become simply another element in a highly pluralized world of academic specialization, but the genre was vulnerable at the core of its self-ascribed identity—history. It was, at this point, quite thoroughly criticized on the g rounds that it was a discourse about the past that was inadequately “historical” with respect to both method and substance. Several scholars, although hardly agreeing completely either about alternatives or the criteria of historicity and interpretation, advanced quite extended critiques arguing that an analytically and retrospectively constituted canon had, for a century, masqueraded as an actual tradition. As much as this literature had been studied, it had been approached in terms of, and encased in, a framework that often obscured the meaning and significance of both texts and contexts, as well as their actual political character and potential relevance for the present. The attachment to the idea of the sole tradition had also inhibited the capacity to recognize and study a variety of actual historical traditions.

The study of the history of political thought originated as a rhetorical discourse devoted both to vouchsafing the identity of political science and to establishing it as a body of knowledge with practical significance, and, for a century, it functioned as such a discourse. The principal goal of the “revolution” in the theory and practice of the study of the history of political thought initiated, more than a generation ago, was devoted to transforming this literature into a more credible body of historical research. Scholars exemplifying this goal include Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, who, among their cohorts, rejected what they characterized as philosophical and ideological renditions of past political thought in favor of what they claimed was an authentic historical recovery of the meaning of past texts. This task was to be accomplished in part by a careful reconstruction of the political context and form of discourse in which the authors were situated.

If the transformation initiated by the émigrés had not alienated political theory from mainstream political science, some speculate whether the study of the history of political theory would have remained a rhetorical adjunct. Isolated from the discipline, however, it became increasingly exposed and susceptible to criticism. Despite the growing popularity of arguments, such as those of H. G. Gadamer, that challenged the idea of objective accounts of history as well as somewhat similar conclusions advanced by various strains of post-structuralism and postmodernism, the new historicism associated with the Cambridge school claimed that there was something beyond varieties of rhetorical and “presentist” history. Those who embraced this approach claimed that it was preferable to earlier work because it deployed a method that yielded an objective recovery of the past, and an authentic understanding of the texts and their authors.

The Search For Identity

Seeking some general identity for political theory as well as considering how it relates to political science has, during the past quarter century, remained a significant concern. Simply charting this now highly pluralized discursive realm is a formidable task. Its foundations are often still assumed to be in some manner historical, but the field today tends to reflect a variety of philosophical perspectives and political concerns. Mainstream political scientists tend to emphasize their scientific and empirical approach, whereas political theorists stress their commitment to normative claims. However, the distinction is, in practice, not so easily parsed. Nevertheless, although political theorists sometimes direct critical attention toward the discipline of political science, and although issues relating to the nature and status of democracy occasionally prompt an intersection of these once closely allied domains, the contemporary intellectual distance between political science and political theory is quite pronounced.

Bibliography:

Ball,Terence. “Discordant Voices: American Histories of Political Thought.” In The History of Political Thought in National Context, edited by Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Crick, Bernard. The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
Finifter, Ada, ed. Political Science: The State of the Discipline II. Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1993.
Galston,William. “Political Theory in the 1980s: Perplexity and Diversity.” In Finifter, Political Science:The State of the Discipline II, 27–53.
Gunnell, John G. The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004.
Political Theory:Tradition and Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1979.
Nelson, John, ed. What Should Political Theory Be Now? Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1986.
Pocock, J. G. A. “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Inquiry.” In Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd ser ies, edited by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman. New York: Bar nes and Noble, 1962.
Saxonhouse, Arlene W. “Texts and Canons: The Status of the ‘Great Books’ in Political Science.” In Finifter, Political Science: The State of the Discipline II, 3–26.
Tully, James, ed. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Vincent, Andrew. The Nature of Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
White, Stephen K., and J. Donald Moon, eds. What Is Political Theory? Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2004.

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