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American Political Thought and the Study of Politics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert G. McCloskey
Robert G. McCloskey
Affiliation:
Harvard Univertity
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Extract

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 115 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1957

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References

1 Wiltse, C. M., The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy (Chapel Hill, 1935)Google Scholar.

2 The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953), p. 169Google Scholar.

3 347 U.S. 522, 531 (1954).

4 Shaughnessy v. United States, 345 U.S. 206, 224 (1953).

5 Essays on Freedom and Power (Boston, 1948), p. 199Google Scholar.

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