1 - Introduction

Summary

ANALYTICAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

The converging currents of Anglo-American political theory have swept away much of English political theory's distinctiveness including the latter's greater sensitiveness to its own historical past. For all its many virtues, contemporary Anglo-American political theory has become an impoverished history of ideas, having substituted a truncated eulogized canon for the richness of its predominantly English historical tradition.

This historical amnesia stems, in large part, from the legacy of logico-positivism, which discredited normative political theorizing as just another variety of emotivist venting and unmeaning metaphysical gibberish. Fortunately, Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) and Barry's Political Argument (1965) resurrected normative political theory. Rawls followed with A Theory of Justice (1971), which, in turn, unleashed an industry of criticism that shows no signs of abating. Ironically, then, English analytical philosophy eviscerated English-speaking political theory early on in the last century only to redeem it fifty years later. And what it redeemed quickly spread elsewhere, becoming what we now know as Anglo-American political theory.

Whereas English political theory may have lost much of its identity in its confluence with Anglo-American political theory, the latter remains robustly at odds with the continental philosophical tradition. Whatever English political theory has become, its analytical rigor and empiricism extensively immunized it from the counter-Enlightenment preoccupations of continental theory. This is not to say that Anglo-American political theory has been uninfluenced by continental theorizing, especially recently.