A HISTORY OF POLITICAL THEORY

This history of political theory is written in the light of the hypothesis that theories of politics are themselves a part of politics. In other words, they do not refer to an external reality but are produced as a normal part of the social milieu in which politics itself has its being. Reflection upon the ends of political action, upon the means of achieving them, upon the possibilities and necessities of political situations, and upon the obligations that political purposes impose is an intrinsic element of the whole political process. Such thought evolves along with the institutions, the agencies of government, the moral and physical stresses to which it refers and which, one likes at least to believe, it in some degree controls. Thus conceived, the theory of politics no more reaches an end than politics itself, and its history has no concluding chapter. If there is a divine, far-off event toward which human history moves, the author of this book makes no pretense of knowing what it is. Taken as a whole a political theory can hardly be said to be true. It contains among its elements certain judgments of fact, or estimates of probability, which time proves perhaps to be objectively right or wrong. It involves also certain questions of logical compatibility respecting the elements which it tries to combine. Invariably, however, it includes valuations and predilections, personal or collective, which distort the perception of fact, the estimate of probability, and the weighing of compatibilities. The most that criticism can do is to keep these three factors as much as possible distinct : to prevent preferences from claiming the inevitableness of logic or the certainty of fact. The author believes that the attempt to fuse these three operations, whether in Hegelian idealism or in its Marxian variant, merely perpetuated an intellectual confusion inherent in the system of natural law. The substitution of the belief that there is a determinate order of evolution or historical progress for the belief in rational self-evidence displaced an unverifiable idea with one still less verifiable. So far as there is any such thing as historical “necessity,” it seems to belong to the calculation of probabilities, and in application this calculation is usually impossible and always highly uncertain. As for values, they appear to the author to be always the reaction of human preference to some state of social and physical fact; in the concrete they are too complicated to be generally described even with so loose a word as utility. Nevertheless, the idea of economic causation was probably the most fertile suggestion added to social studies in the nineteenth century. The author is painfully aware that he does not possess. For, on the one hand, political theory has always been a part of philosophy and science, an application to politics of the relevant intellectual and critical apparantuis which is at the moment available. And, on the other hand, it is a reflection upon morals, economics, government, religion, and law–whatever there may be in the historical and institutional situation that sets a problem to be solved. It is of the essence of the point of view here adopted that neither factor should be neglected. The intellectual apparatus is important, at least for political theory, only in so far as it is really applied to some state of the facts, and the institutional realties are important only so far as they evoke and control reflection. Ideally both should be conceived and presented by a historian with equal clearness; political theory in books. The demand thus made on the historian’s scholarship is impossibly heavy.

Write a review

Your Name:

Your Review:

Note: HTML is not translated!

Rating: Bad Good

Enter the code in the box below: