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Politics and the Critical Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

David Spitz
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Extract

The enterprise called political theory is very old; so old that to some it seems to have outlived its time. At long last — 13 years ago to be precise — it was pronounced dead. Since that pronouncement seems not to have been widely heard, or sufficiently heeded, a second certificate testifying to its demise was issued two years later.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 419 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1970

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References

1 Read at a luncheon meeting sponsored jointly by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York City, September 5, 1969.

2 By Laslett, Peter in Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

3 By Dahl, Robert A. in “Political Theory: Truth and Consequences,” World Politics, XI (1958), 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 It is sometimes contended that while political science is value-free, it is not value-free in the sense that it values nothing. It values, so it is said, a knowledge of politics, and consequently can properly condemn political theorists for not adding to that knowledge. But what constitutes “political knowledge,” what contributes to it, and what inquiries or sorts of inquiries are relevant to it, are of course the very value questions at issue.

5 Whether those teachings that have been incorporated within the political theory tradition merit inclusion, whether some should be deleted and others added, is a question that must go unexamined here. On this theme cf. the suggestive remarks of Sanderson, J. B., “The Historian and the ‘Masters’ of Political Thought,” Political Studies, XVI (1968), 43–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 In dwelling here on the utility of historical political theory I do not mean to impugn or even to minimize the value of reconstructing the past simply to satisfy one's curiosity about the past, or about some contemporary problem which cannot be understood apart from the past. No one but a philistine would today abjure “useless” history; regrettably, if we are to take seriously the opinions of many behavioral political scientists, we are not without philistines.

7 For the issues and some of the formulations in this and the preceding paragraphs, see Laski, Harold J., “On the Study of Politics,” in his The Danger of Being a Gentleman (New York, 1940), pp. 33–60Google Scholar; MacIver, R. M., “The Backwardness of Social Theory,” Mémoire du XIXe Congrès International de Sociologie, III (1961), 241–248Google Scholar; Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936)Google Scholar, especially Chap. 3; Pocock, J. G. A., “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Inquiry,” in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G. (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series (Oxford, 1964), pp. 183–202Google Scholar; and Wolin, Sheldon S., “Political Theory: Trends and Goals,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), XII, 318–329Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, the important essay by Michael Oakeshott, “Political Education,” reprinted in his Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962), pp. 111–136.

9 It is not easy for one who abhors student “takeovers,” violent or nearviolent disruptions and like manifestations of student misconduct that have jeopardized the very idea of a university, to defend the action of these black students. But when this story is someday fully related, it will make clear the extraordinary character of the situation at Ohio State, and why this particular action was in crucial respects different from those taken at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Hunter and other colleges and universities.

10 Though I admire the work of those who have made this attempt. See, for example, Berlin, Isaiah, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Laslett, and Runciman, , op. cit., pp. 1–33Google Scholar; Wolin, Sheldon S., “Paradigms and Political Theories,” in King, Preston and Parekh, B. C. (eds.), Politics and Experience (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 125–152Google Scholar; the essays by Mulford Q. Sibley, “The Limitations of Behavioralism,” and Hacker, Andrew, “The Utility of Quantitative Methods in Political Science,” in Charlesworth, James C. (ed.), Contemporary Political Analysis (New York, 1967), pp. 51–71 and 134–149Google Scholar respectively; and Wormuth's, Francis D. wide-ranging and brilliant paper, “Matched-Dependent Behavioralism: The Cargo Cult in Political Science,” Western Political Quarterly, XX (1967), 809–840Google Scholar. For convenient collections of essays critical of behavioralism see Connolly, W. E. (ed.), The Bias of Pluralism (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, and McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John (eds.), Apolitical Politics (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.