Conclusion - Thinking big: the political imagination

Summary

Our aim in editing this collection was to be provocative and to open up a debate, and we appear to have succeeded. Specifically, we seem to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, who makes several abject criticisms of the collection. He is uninspired by Bob Jessop’s ‘neologistic’ approach to the topic, exhausted by the myriad of attempts at conceptual re-formulation, and somewhat aghast at the potential implications of our own discussion of Carl Schmitt's work. In this very short concluding chapter, we respond to Hay's critique of our own pieces, and of the broader purpose of this collection, in three senses.

First, we defend our invocation of Carl Schmitt's political theory. Our discussion was only intended to historically and theoretically contextualise the collection, not to adopt Schmitt's approach. We defend our attempt to broaden out the conceptual terrain of politicisation and depoliticisation. The wider literature we identify does indeed pose problems for how theorists like Burnham define depoliticisation (as important as his seminal contribution is), and if we are to accept the need for broader analysis, then further conceptual work is sorely needed. Last, and relatedly, we defend the need to ‘think big’ in terms of generating broad, cross-disciplinary frameworks in an increasingly hermetic and segmented academic context. While Hay is right that conceptual rethinking is of no value in and of itself, and that empirical analysis is greatly needed, he is wrong to suggest that scholars simply abandon attempts at ‘thinking big’, and settle for more empirical case studies (as important as they are). In this regard, we acknowledge a huge intellectual debt to the work of C. Wright Mills, and in particular his The sociological imagination (1959). Of great significance was Mills’ criticism of what he labelled ‘abstracted empiricism’ – the practice of confining social science to small studies or specific domains without drawing them together in broad generalisations about society as a whole. Stanley Aronowitz's Taking it big: C. Wright Mills and the making of political intellectuals (2012) traces ‘the scaffolding’ of this approach and its contemporary relevance in ways that dovetail with the aims of this collection.