Southern Political Science Association

Dislocated Rhetoric: The Anomaly of Political Theory Author(s): John G. Gunnell Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Nov., 2006), pp. 771-782 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4639908 . Accessed: 09/03/2012 10:33
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Dislocated Theory

Rhetoric:

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Anomaly of

Political

JohnG.Gunnell State Universityof New Yorkat Albany

mainstream science much thesubfield political and the between relationship political of of theory Although estranged
attributedto developments the has beenproperly duringthe last half of the twentiethcentury, rootsof thisalienation are theprogenyof a discursive arehistorically theconversations deeper. ofpoliticaltheory Manyof form thatattended

social rhetoric situated theinterstices social in thebirth modern science. genre a legitimating This was science, of of
and and philosophy, politics.Thestudyof the historyof politicalthoughtoriginatedas sucha rhetoric, it constitutes can into a paradigmcasefor examiningtheextentto whichsucha discourse be transformed a practiceof knowledge. Thisfield has succeeded a greaterextent than certainotherelementsof political theorywhich,transfixed the to by and academiccontext,havebecomeanomalousappendages the social to tensionbetweentheirpracticalaspirations

studyofpolitics. scientific

to recent bookshaveattested the persis- as these volumes prominently stress, to be raised at

tently ambiguous, characterof Swopluralistic,andacademicenterprise.One political theory as an volume (White and Moon 2004) was a reprise of a special issue of PoliticalTheory(2002) marking both of the 30th anniversary the journal and the 40th anniversaryof IsaiahBerlin'sessay"Does PoliticalTheory The editors claimed that the initiation of Still Exist?" the journal had representedthe "revival" political of theory whose demise or decline had, for many,seemed imminent in the 1950s but which Berlin avowed would never expirein a pluralisticsociety where"ends The book valorizedboth the ethic of pluralcollided." ism and the diversityof politicaltheory,but the essays comprising it tended, as a whole, less to address the than to evoke Gerquestion What is PoliticalTheory? trude Stein's assessmentof Oakland.AndrewVincent (2004) also stressedthe eclectic,and even fragmented, characterof the conversationsconstituting the field. Although he presented an acute systematic synoptic account and analysis of these elements and emphasized a family resemblanceamong them with respect to a search for foundations, which he suggested yielded ecumenicalpossibilities,what he posited as the "The Nature of Political Theory" was, in effect, its pluralityand contestedidentity.Questions about what politicaltheory is or shouldbe (e.g., Nelson 1986) tend,
The Journal of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 4, November 2006, pp. 771-782 ? 2006 SouthernPoliticalScienceAssociation

junctureswhen its relationshipboth to the discipline of political science and to politics are matters of concern and contention. This was the case when George Sabine posed the question "Whatis Political Theory?"in the lead article of the first issue of the Journal of Politics (1939), and it was again the case when, in 1957, from diverging perspectives, Leo asked "Whatis Strauss,eschewing the term "theory,"' Political Philosophy?"and G. E. G. Catlin inquired "PoliticalTheory:What Is It?" Noting the attributeof pluralityis neither a sufficient markerof the identity of political theory nor an automatic justification of its endeavors. Understanding what political theory is requires, in part, illuminating what it has been. When Sabine'sarticle was published, the study of the history of political theory, that is, the exegesis of, and commentary on, the classic canon, constituted the domain of political theory which, in turn, was still an integraldimension of political science. Todayit is an anomalous element of the literatureof the discipline,and the same might be said of a number of other areas of academic political theory. Although this situation is in part a consequence of scholarly specialization,there is no other social science in which such a numericallyand qualitatively significant professional subfield, and

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particularlyone that has been so influential in the evolution of the discipline, is so intellectually estranged.There is a disposition to affirm that there should be reciprocitybetween empiricalresearchand political theory, but these increasinglyrepresenttwo distinctly different endeavors.There may be notable instances in which the respectiveconversationsconverge, particularlyin the case of discussions about democracy, but such exceptions do not prove the rule. The classic articulation of this alienation was SheldonWolin's (1969) image of political theory as a which he advocatedas an alternative the "vocation" to he "methodism" ascribedto the behavioralprogramin science.Wolin claimed that this calling,parapolitical digmaticallyrepresentedin the texts comprising the classic canon, was one to which academic theorists should and could aspire even if only by interpreting and teaching this literature. There were, however, several ironies attaching to this manifesto of the autonomy of political theory.The very idea of such a tradition of political thought, from, as Wolin put it, "Plato to Marx,"' had been a creation of political science and, for nearly a century,had largelydefined what political scientists meant by "politicaltheory." Despite Wolin's plea for recapturingthe concern for political relevancethat, he argued,had animated the great tradition, but had been relinquishedby mainstreampoliticalscience,the subfieldof politicaltheory did not extricate itself from professional political science and achieve a more significantrelationshipto political life but only intellectuallydisengaged from the conversations that definedthe discipline.Although this estrangement became most prominentin the later part of the twentieth centuryand althoughthere are a varietyof contemporaryprofessionaland disciplinary factorsthat contributeto its perpetuation,it is rooted in structuralfactorswhich belong to the more remote and past of the discipline.To understandthe "nature" condition of much of political theory today,it is necessaryto clarifythe extent to which it is the residueof a form of discoursethat attendedthe institutionalization of modern social science.

Political Theory: Genotype and Phenotype

The emerging social sciences, in the nineteenth century,were primarilythe confluenceof two intellectual tributaries:elements of academicmoral philosophy devoted to purposes such as civic education;and social reformmovements such as those represented in

the American Social Science Association which had invoked the cognitive authority of science in their pursuit of practicalpurchase.As these tributariescoalesced and were institutionalizedin the context of the modern universityand became the basis of increasingly differentiated disciplines and professions of social science, certain fundamentaland relatedproblems emerged.There were the problems of demarcation and of establishingthe identity of these nascent disciplines, but there was also the problem of their practical relationship to their subject matter. These of problemspromptedthe appearance a rhetoricaldiscourse which functioned at two levels. It addressed internal issues regardingthe identity of these fields, but it was also devoted to justifyingthe role of social science to the world from which these fields had in part sprung-and about, and to, which they still intended to speak. A classic example of this basic genre was Max Weber'sessay on "The 'Objectivity'of Knowledgein the Social Science and Social Policy" ([1903] 2004) which was a worklocatedin an intersticeamong social science, philosophy, and politics. Weber pointedly noted the "political" origins of the social sciences,and he was speaking not only to social scientists but addressingpolitical actors and attemptingto validate the cognitive authorityof social science as a basis for intervention in matters of public policy (Gunnell 1993). Such rhetoricaldiscoursesbecame characteristic features of these emerging fields, but they also increasingly became distributarieswhich were displaced from their originalfunction and purpose. This dislocation was in part a consequence of increased within the academy,but it was also the differentiation result of growing distancebetween the academy and public life. These discoursesdid not, however,atrophy and disappearbut rather took on new forms which constituted,and have continuedto inform, significant dimensions of academicpoliticaltheory.Forexample, epistemologicalargumentsabout the nature of social scientific explanation, such as that of Weber, were, even through the 1960s, still closely tied to justifying contestingpersuasionsin social science and to sorting out the relationshipbetween social science and politics, but by the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury, such argumentshave,to a largeextent,been abstracted and detached from their original context. Although these discussionsmay occasionallystill featurein vestigial disputes about the character and purpose of social science, they have for the most part been relegated to the ancillary province of "scope and method"or parceledout to narrowspecializedphilosophical venues such as the philosophy of social

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science. And the assumption that they speak to an audience outside the academyhas all but vanished. The question inherentin this situation is whether what began as, what may be called,a rhetoric inquiry of can be transformedinto a practiceof knowledge, is, that an academicpracticewith relativelywell-defined criteriaof scholarlyjudgment.The study of the historyof political thought originated as a rhetoricaldiscourse devoted both to vouchsafing the identity of political science and to establishingit as a body of knowledge with practicalsignificance,and, for a century,it functioned as such a discourse.The principal goal of the in "revolution" the theory and practiceof the study of the history of political thought initiated,more than a generation ago, by scholars such as Quentin Skinner (e.g., 1969, 1978; see also Tully 1988) and J. G. A. Pocock (e.g., 1962, 1971, 1975) was devoted to transforming this literatureinto a more credible body of historicalresearch.They rejectedwhat they characterized as philosophicaland ideologicalrenditionsof past politicalthought in favorof what they claimedwas an authentic historical recoveryof the meaning of texts which was to be accomplished in part by a careful reconstruction of their political context. Although there are groundsfor suggestingthat this programdid not fully cast off the imprint of its rhetoricalpast, it has been considerably more successful in doing so than many other dimensions of political theory.This however,is not without its problems. "success;' There are many who would deem the more recent scholarlyachievementsof the social sciences as entailing a relinquishmentof the very purpose that gaverise to these fields, that is, to have a practical impact on their subject matter.Similarly,one might reasonably ask if the turn in the study of the history of political theory from a rhetoricof history to a history of rhetoric and ideology has not carriedwith it a loss of political relevance.The pursuit of a more "historical" study of the history of political thought was, however, in part motivatedby the Weberianassumptionthat only a more "objective" history could carry authoritywith respectto speakingabout and to politics. It might not be surprising that once its scholarly authority was established, the political motif tended to resurface (e.g., Skinner1998),but at the same time, as in the case of social science as a whole, increasedacademization often means "beingdeprivedof its political character" (Hampsher-Monk2001, 159, 168; Hampsher-Monk and Castiglione2001, 8). My purpose, however,is not to describe,evaluate,and make judgments about the present state of the study of the history of political thought (e.g., Hampsher-Monk2001) but rather to reflecton certainelements of its pedigree.But neither

is the goal to present a detailed account of the evolution of this field of study in the United States(e.g., Ball 2001; Gunnell 1993), let alone in other countries. I only seek to recall, emphasize,and interpretsome of the basic contours of what by now is a relativelywelldocumented development and thereby illuminate certain aspects of contemporarypolitical theory and its relationshipsto political science and politics.

The Politics of History and the History of Politics

Rendering the history of political theory was originally, and in several respects, more a "politics of history"than a history of politics. One sense of what we might think of as the politics of the history of political theory was reflected in Immanuel Kant's claim that the principal events of human history are politically caused and manifested.This, as he noted, was an "a priori"assumption that preceded and was meant "to supersedethe task of historyproper,that of empiricalcomposition."Kantclaimed that the human past was an organicwhole which was not only rooted in politics as a form of life but could only be known and authenticatedby a "public"that was the emanation of that form (Kant1970,52-53). Hegel,and many of those influenced by Hegel's work, produced variations on this theme which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, found its way into a variety of academicpractices.One such practicewas the study of the history of political theory which embodied the assumptions that the past has a political essence and that the study of the past is, therefore, inherently politicallyrelevant.A second dimension of the "politics"of this history was the extent to which it reflected and consciously embodied political attitudes and agendas.Third,this body of work was very much part of the "politicsof theory"in that it servedto affirmthe identity and autonomy of political science among the social sciences and, within political science, to underwrite certain forms of scholarship and conceptions of political phenomena. Finally, this literature was involved with justifying political science to society at large and with providing grounds for the discipline's claim to practicalauthority. Stefan Collini has noted that "thereis no single enterpriseor entity correspondingto what in Englishspeaking countries has most often been called 'the history of political thought'," and that in order to understandthis genre, it is necessaryto look at parand ticular"intellectual academiccultures." More specifically,he suggested that "if one is interestedin the

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historical development of the 'history of political thought,'one is interestedin an aspect or episode of the intellectualand institutional history of academic disciplines"(2001, 281, 283). If we think of the study of the history of political thought generically as a "form of discourse"conducted in diverse ways and settings by university scholars, it is difficult not to conceive it as a relativelyuniversalendeavor,but if we think of it as a self-ascribedand institutionallydifferwe entiated"academicdiscipline," are talking about a that was largelya nineteenth-centuryAmeripractice can invention.For example,RobertWokler(2001) has noted that in England,"thebirth and rise of the study of political thought as a genuinely academic discipline"was largelya "twentiethcentury"development. Although it is possible, and common, to identify, in various countries,what might be consideredas functional equivalents and prototypes of the academic practiceof writing the history of politicalthought,this practice was largely a creation of American political science. The worksof authorssuch as Aristotle,Locke,and Rousseaus were already central texts in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryAmerican college curriculum in moral philosophy.This course of studieswas dominatedby a ScottishEnlightenment perspectivewhich included practicalethics and which was taught by Protestantministers.This iconic literature, which became the core of the classic canon, was presented not only as the progenitor of the ideas embodied in American institutions but as containing principles that should be inculcated in citizens and political leaders.Although political science, as a distinct discipline,was, as BernardCrick(1959) so notoscienceof politics," is this riously put it, the "American not to say that its American locus entailed a lack of European influences. The person most reasonably credited as its "founder"was the German emigre Francis Lieber, who grafted German philosophical history onto the political dimension of American moral philosophy and made the concept of the State the subjectand domain of political science. From the point of his earliest writing on the study of politics (1835a, 1835b), he also situated the alreadycanonical authors, from Plato onward, as central actors in a Kantian/Hegelianvision of history which was the story of the State and its search for freedom. Lieber designatedthese luminariesas the predecessorsof the field of study that he was attemptingto institutionalize, and the historyof politicswas presentedas moving toward culmination in American self-government (1853). The emerging discipline, as a whole, was devoted to justifyingAmericaninstitutionsas the real-

ization of popular sovereignty,and the study of the historyof politicalthought servedthe function of validating that putativebody of knowledgeby attachingit to an illustriouslineage.The history of political ideas was conceivedas, at once, the historyofpoliticalscience and the historyof the theoryand practiceof the State and thus as providing a provenancefor both the discipline and its subjectmatter. Lieberwas deeply involved in the politics of his time with respect to issues ranging from slavery to polygamy,and his story of the evolution of political thought reflected and supported his views. This embryonic account of the history of political theory was very much part of academic strugglesinvolving issues of disciplinaryidentity and status, but it was also in the service of demonstratingthe field's pedagogic and epistemic authority.By the late nineteenth century,however,it had become increasinglydistant, from the practiceof policonceptuallyand practically, of tics. The elite character both politics and university education and the ease with which an intellectual entrepreneur such as Lieber moved between the worlds of academeand politics had contributedto the permeabilityof the membranes separatingscholarly and political discourse.The situation changedsignificantly with the professionalizationof social science and with democratizingtransformationsin the world vision of politicalscience of politics.AlthoughLieber's was adopted,adapted,and perpetuatedby individuals such as TheodoreWoolseyat Yaleand HerbertBaxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, the connection to politics became increasingly attenuated. This academic formalization of the American democratic metanarrativewas prompted by a political purpose, but once it had become a specialized property of the academy,there was the problem of maintaining its political significance. It was Lieber'ssuccessor at Columbia, John W. Burgess,and the latter'scolleaguesand students,who most fully institutionalizedthe discipline of political science,includingboth the theory of the state and the attending study of the history of political ideas. The goal of influencing politics still deeply informed the positions of Burgessand others,but, as in the case of Weber,the strategyfor doing so began to change in a world where political power was becoming diverse and dispersed. Although Burgess claimed moral authority,he sought to ground it in science. For these first-and second-generation politicaltheorists,history was conceived and advertised as a science, and the story they told was once again a democratic metanarrativewhich supplemented but transcended that within the world of politics itself. They were avowing

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more than the idea of a political interpretation of history. They were subscribing to the notion that writing history was politically and philosophically salient,but they also believedthat in a societyin which the grounds of social knowledge and authority were changing,it must be perceivedas scientificif it were to be politically effective.In this context, the history of political theory was explicitlypresentedas the history of political science (e.g., Pollock 1890). Despite the ideological shift that characterizedmuch of the next generation,the strategyof seeking practicaleffect on the basis of a claim to scientific neutrality played a large part in the transformation of political science into a professionin 1903and to its separationfrom the field of history and from the increasinglyconservative discipline of economics. It is ironic that, in the last quarterof the twentiethcentury,it would be the ethos of guild history that would attempt to reclaim the study of the history of political theory. Whatevermay have been the actual status of the German professoriateof the nineteenth century, its role and stature were perceivedas models by a wide range of ideologically disparate American scholars who went abroadto imbibe the theory of the Stateand its attending history. These perceptions of the influence of Germanacademiciansshaped profoundlythe image of whatAmericanscholarsbelievedcould be the relationship between the academy and public policy in the United States. Despite Burgess's conservative political commitments,the constitution of his School of Political Science, which he claimed was best describedas a "School of Political Thought,"with its emphasis on combining history and political science, reflected his image of the German academy and his generaloptimism regardingthe possibilitiesof theory informing practice through the medium of exchange between academic and political elites. Although Burgess himself was an unremitting Hegelian and viewed the course of Americanhistory and the history of political thought in these terms, those, such as the philosopher Archibald Alexander and the historian William A. Dunning, to whom Burgess allotted the task of teaching the history of political theory, were more broadlygrounded.They drew from Englishand French as well as German sources as they sought to establishthe ancestryand identity of the study of the history of political theory as a yet more distinct intellectual endeavoras well as subfieldof politicalscience. But this period also markedthe furtherdislocationof this rhetoricalhistory.Its form, content, and purpose persisted, but its actual relationship to politics, and even, in some degree,to political science,changedas it became a more specific field of study.

More than any other work, it was Dunning's three volumes on A HistoryofPoliticalTheories, written over a period of two decades (1902, 1905, 1920),that established the history of political theory as a consciously recognizedacademicliteratureand a defined element of the university curriculum. Dunning continued to emphasizethe unity of theory and practiceby stressing and elaborating the assumption that political theory was in politics as well as an academichistorical discourseaboutpolitics, and he continuedto pressthe points that the history of political theory was the past of contemporarypoliticalscience,that politics was the subject of history, and that political change was a product of a dialecticbetweenpoliticalideas and their social context. Although Dunning depreciated attemptsto bring scholarshipto bear on political life, or at least was wary of the efficacyand propriety of academic political advocacy,he continued to stress that the historyof politicaltheorywas, on the whole, a story of the progressof democraticideas and institutions as well as of the history of political science. Dunning's work was paralleled,and mildly challenged, by WestelWoodburyWilloughbyat Hopkins. Willoughby emphasizedthe importanceof theory in politicallife and, even more than Dunning, the immanence of political ideas in the context of political fact (1903). He was one of the principalactorsin founding the APSAand in designatingpolitical theory as a recognized subfield,and he explicitlyadopted a position similarto that of Weber.He claimedthat the historyof politicaltheory was a repositoryof conceptsfor scientific political inquiry, and he maintained that only by establishing a scientific professional identity, and detachingthe discipline from the kind of overt partisanship that he noted in the work of individualssuch as Burgess,could political science become politically effective.A perspectivesimilar to that of Willoughby was embraced, and elaborated,by Charles Merriam who had cut his academic teeth by teaching and writing, from the perspectives of Burgess and Dunning, about the history of politicaltheory,in both Europe and the United States (Merriam 1900, 1903). He, and his student Harold Lasswell,believed that political science and political practice could be bridgedby citizen education and by gainingthe ear of political elites and that these goals could be accomplished only if political science achieved a scientific status. For Merriam,however,the history of political theory remainedboth the story of democracyand an account of the evolution of political science, and he held on to the idea that it spoke both to the academy and the public. For the first quarterof the twentieth century, political theory, as a distinct element of

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political science, continued, despite the new empiricism, to be dominated by studies of the history of politicalthought (e.g., Carlyleand Carlyle1903;Figgis 1907; Gettell 1924;Merriamand Barnes 1924). What had also taken place, however,by the mid-1920s, was an Americanization, Anglicanization, the literaand of ture. This was in part a function of the turn awayfrom German philosophy and political ideas after WWI, and there was also greaterintercoursewith England and the influence of scholars such as Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, and A. D. Lindsay.But although the more strictlyHegelianelementsthat had characterized the American adaptation faded away, the essential characteristicsof the form, such as the relativity of ideas leavened by an idealist image of progress, persisted. Althoughthe crisis of democratictheory in political science,duringthe 1920s,ended with the demise of the theory of the state as an account of popularsovereignty based on the existence of a homogeneous American"people,"' history of politicaltheory conthe tinued to flourish as a justificationfor the new theory of democraticpluralismand the attendingimage of a science of politics that came to dominate the field by the end of the 1920s. The political polarizationof the globe in the 1930s and an inferiority complex about the articulationof democracy,or liberalism,as an ideology provided incentives for moving that history yet further in this direction.The idea of a greattradition, reachingfrom Plato to the present,became,more than ever, the past of both Americanpolitics and political science.Workssuch as C. H. McIlwain'sTheGrowth of Political Thought in the West (1932) did much to solidify the assumption that the classic works were pivotal elements of an actualhistoricaltradition,but, among the proliferatingnumber of texts, during the 1930s and 1940s, which served to underwriteliberal democracyas well as the disciplinedevotedto studying it, Sabine'sA Historyof PoliticalTheory(1937) became the most paradigmatic. Although Sabineclaimed that political ideas were relativeto their context, depreciated the assumptionthat politicaltheoryhad anything and to do with ultimate"truth," stressedthe dangerof all transcendentalperspectives from natural law to Marxism,he sustained the image of progressin both ideas and institutions.He claimedthat the logic of the experimentalmethod, which lay at the heart of both science and liberalism, ultimately ensured their survival and doomed the aberrational absolutistlapses of totalitarianism. Sabine's work could, at that point, hardly have fitted better into the general Weltbildof American political science and its ostensiblecommitment to the separationof fact and value.

The pluralistimage of social reality and the attendingdemocratic theory,althoughprecipitated and anticipated theoristsas diverseas Arthur by and had Bentley Laski, beenmostfullyandoriginally formulated a nowlargely by forgotten groupof scholars includingHarryElmerBarnes, WalterShepard, PeterOdegard, JohnDickinson(Gunnell2004). and a and They elaborated generalimageof democracy, the methodsof scienceappropriate studyingit, for that pervaded dominated and discourse disciplinary the 1930s and 1940s.This theory,and the during doctrineof scientismassociated with it, was more in rearticulated the late 1940s and schematically the 1950sand 1960sby scholars such as throughout Pendleton DavidTruman (1940), (1951),and Herring RobertDahl (1956).The theoryof pluralist democandthe emergence the behavioral of movement racy, in whichit wasembedded, werein parta response to the growingsentiment that politicalsciencehad not realized promise-in eitherthe cognitive practiits or calsense.This,in turn,wastiedto a renewed concern, in the midstof the ColdWar, withproviding alteran nativeto alienideologies withdemonstrating and that the theoryof democracy scientifically was grounded and indeedinherent whatDanielBoorstin(1953) in claimedwas the "genius" American of politicalpractice. It was,however, moreinternal the to something thatmost significantly both this discipline prompted and a new defenseof political repriseof pluralism scienceas trulyscientific. Thesewere,most directly, a to an assault thebasicvaluesandpractice on response of mainstream politicalscience,an assaultthat was it because wasmounted within particularly unsettling the very heartof the disciplineand its legitimating rhetoric-the studyof the historyof political theory. it thatthe behavioral Although is oftenassumed a revolution involved rejection the history politiof of caltheoryin favor whatit characterized scientific of as it in theory, wasin parta radical change the literature associated with historyof politicaltheorythat instimovement.Betweenthe late gated the behavioral a 1930sandearly1940s, significant number dmigrd of in scholars arrived the UnitedStatesand,for various toward fieldof political the reasons, gravitated theory in which,by the mid-1950s, a fundathey produced sea This mental change. groupincluded, mostnotably, Leo Strauss,Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin,and HerbertMarcuse. They were, in severalrespects,a and ideologically diversegroup,but philosophically theirdifferences, embraced somecommon despite they and and who principles assumptions, to Americans, had for a generation been relatively insulatedfrom foreign influences,their argumentsappearedquite

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similar.There were some Americanpartisanssuch as John Hallowell who aided in the penetration of the genre,and, by the early 1960s,with the publicationof what many saw as the principalsuccessorsto Sabine's book-Sheldon Wolin'sPoliticsand Vision(1960) and Strauss and Cropsey'sHistory of Political Philosophy (1963)-a basic intellectual shift had occurred. The quite suddenbehavioralist depreciationof the study of the historyof politicaltheory (Easton1951),whichhad taken place during the 1950s, was in large measure a preparationof this literature increasinglybecoming a rhetoric which was now devoted to undermining ratherthan defending mainstreampolitical science as well as the idea of democracy that had now become emblematicof political science as well as of American public philosophy. Even though the political aspirations of the 6migresin their own countrymay to some degreehave been as utopian as the imagesthat nineteenth-century American scholars carried home from Europe,there was a more pronounced intersection between academic and public discourse in a country such as Germany than in United States. The emigrds had strong political or para-political commitments and were dedicated, in one way or another, to the goals of theoretical intervention in politics and cultural change.Most had confrontedpolitics in its most concrete and ineluctable form, but they were nearly all in deeply suspicious of liberaldemocracy,particularly its pluralist version, which they tended to view as a Both becauseof potentialthresholdof totalitarianism. their experience in the German educational system and because of their political and theoreticalassumptions, they depreciated empirical science and perceived it as in opposition to philosophy and history which they believedwas the basis of a criticaltheory of politics. Many were influenced by the work of individuals such as Martin Heidegger,Oswald Spengler, StefanGeorge,CarlSchmitt,and other antimodernist persuasionswhich informed their images of the crisis of the West and the decline of political thought. Since they all saw relativismin its various manifestationsas a precursor of philosophical and political nihilism, they reactednegativelyto American pragmatismand subscribed to some version of transcendental and foundational philosophy. In short, they could not, in most respects, have been more at odds with the substantivecontent and purpose of the field of political theory in the United States.The form of this intellectual vessel was, however, more congenial and familiar. The tale of the tradition, as told by political philosophers such as Arendt, Strauss, and Voegelin,

became a much more dramatic and structuredtrope which in manyrespectsmirroredthe holistic imagesof the nineteenth century.Authors such as Machiavelli were cast as romantic or demonic protagonists in a plot containingdistinct points of beginning,transformation, and, even, end. Although the emigr6sviewed their work as political in both characterand purpose, it was actuallya triply dislocatedrhetoric.The history of political theory, like the discipline'sbuilt-in Whig history of itself, had alreadybecome distanced from the particularitiesof politics. Second, the new rendition of the history of political thought was relevant almost exclusivelyto an academicaudienceand hardly intelligibleto a more generalpublic.Althoughthe new literaturewas addressed,at least obliquely,to contemporary society,issues surroundingthe Cold War,and the viabilityof democraticinstitutions,it was a kind of philosophicalpolitics in which actualeventsresonated more as exemplarsthan actualobjectsof investigation. alienatedfrom the very And, finally,it was increasingly in which it was professionallysituated.The discipline new synoptic account of the traditionthat took shape afterWWII still told the story of political science,but it was now a tragicstoryof its flawsand irrelevance. At the same time, however,the narrativesingled out the of enterprisethat Wolin would label as the "vocation" which survivedmodernity and stood political theory, in opposition to political science, and provided an account of the lost remnant of truth which this vocation might recover.The various senses of the politics of history were still very apparent in the genre, but now more than ever it was a kind of virtual politics that was at issue. Debates in the 1960s about such matters as whether the whole tradition had been based on a logical mistake and consequently whether political theory was "dead"(e.g., Laslett 1956), debates that in retrospect might seem much like the famous Monty Python parrotskit,were largelysecondaryeffusionsof philosophicalcontroversiesabout positivism,but even this discussion assumed the existence of the tradition as a piece of historical reality.The field had moved from A History of Political Theoriesto A History of Political Theoryto the StraussianHistory of Political Philosophyand Wolin's organic image of "continuity and change." While the "tradition" took on a greater auraof realityand significancewithin the increasingly self-contained literature of political theory, it was often increasinglyforeignto both politicalscience and Americanpolitics. Wolin had hoped to speakto a publicworld as well as to the discipline of political science, but his claims had, in effect, become compressed into providing an

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identity for an emerging professional enclave. His image of the vocation was as mythical as the idea of the scientificexplanationconjuredup and propagated by behavioral political science, and neither of these hegemonic legitimatingmyths could ultimatelywithstand critical scrutiny within the academy let alone reacha wider audience.Wolin'sinvocationof the great tradition, now as the past of contemporaryacademic political theory rather than mainstream political science, but once again as a way of bridging the gap between academicand public discourse,was in many waysthe last gasp of the history of politicaltheory as a rhetoricof inquiry.The study of the history of political theory had become simply another element in a highly pluralized world of academic specialization with its own scholarly outlets but supplemented by token appearancesin mainstreamjournalswhich did not want to offend any element of their professional constituency.For those who invented the paradigma century earlier and for those who transformed it a half-centurylater,therewas still, despiteall the waysin which it was a dislocated rhetoric, something"political" about it. For those who came later,however,and were initiatedinto these forms as part of a graduateschool education,it was much like the situationof those who enter a fraternityand adopt, often with greatenthusiasm, arcane rites which they practice without quite ever graspingfrom whence they came.

The New Historicism

By the early 1970s,the genre was, indeed, anomalous, and it was most vulnerable at the core of its selfascribedidentity-history. It was, at this point, quite thoroughlybroughtto task on the groundsthat it was a discourse about the past that was in various ways with respectto both method "historical" inadequately and substance.Detached from its roots and exposed, it was, simply, recognizedfor what it was and always had been-a rhetorical medium. Several scholars, although hardly agreeing completely either about alternativesor the criteriaof historicity and interpretation, advancedquite extended critiques arguing,in effect, that not all talk about the past is history and (Gunnell 1979). They claimedthat an analytically retrospectivelyconstituted canon had, for a century, masqueradedas an actual tradition. As much as this literaturehad been studied,it had been approachedin terms of, and encased in, a framework that often obscuredboth texts and contextsas well as their actual political character and potential relevance for the present. And the attachment to the idea of "great"

to had the and tradition inhibited capacity recognize a varietyof actualhistoricaltraditions.The study that a question wasposedwas,in effect,whether discouldbe transformed an autonointo rhetoric placed mousscholarly practice. and that if the ideological One might speculate transformation effected the emigres by philosophical from mainstream had not alienated politicaltheory behavioral politicalscience,the studyof the history a of politicaltheorywouldhaveremained rhetorical Isolatedfrom the discipline,however,it adjunct. to becameincreasingly exposedand susceptible critithe cism. Thereis no need to rehearse tenets and but evolutionof the "newhistoricism," it assumed, of such as popularity arguments despitethe growing and those of H. G. Gadamer variousstrainsof postand postmodernism, that there was structuralism varietiesof "presentist" history. somethingbeyond whichsomewouldreferto as a scholThisliterature, precipitated the "Cambridge arly "revolution" by wasaccompanied its own epistemological school," by that and of It agenda rhetoric inquiry. claimed it was to a preferable its rivalsbecauseit deployed method that yielded an objectiverecoveryof the past and of an authenticunderstanding the texts and their of authors. One of the problems the newhistoricism, was of however, thatit wasforgedin the crucible the old historicism, whosepurpose senses, was,in several for as To did, political. suggest, example, Skinner that for "realhistory" wouldin the end be relevant such of theconasa better theoretical understanding things or and nectionbetween thought action, thatit wasnot textsphilosophically unless to address classic possible that historically, is, in terms theywerefirstunderstood was of theiractualcontextand intention, eminently reasonable. The very subject matter, however, the muchexpanded literature, beyond classic although was still largelydefined by works that had been was The selected therhetorical genre. question why, by was fromthe thismaterial beingstudied apart exactly, factthatit wasthere.
There is, as alreadynoted, reason to suggest that the new historicism was not simply the outgrowth of ideological and philosophical abstemiousnessbut rather in some respects yet another version of the Weberianclaim that it is possibleto be most effectively political by being apolitical and the assumption that in a time of historical self-consciousness, historical claims that arebased on defensiblecriteriaof scholarship are more practically effective than mythical history. It is difficult to read this literature and not sense that its renunciation of philosophical history and its emphasis on a truly historical method was,

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much like Weber's claims about value-freedom, designed to undercut adversariesand accrue its own authority as well as, in at least some attenuated manner, speak to public life. One cannot fail to see, for example, that Skinner's early work reflected his antipathyfor argumentssuch as that of C. B. Macpherson and Strauss and that his concerns extended Pocock'sThe beyond methodologicalissues. Similarly, Machiavellian a Moment(1975) represented "political" agendaeven though the politics involvedmay not have extended much beyond the para-politics associated with issues such as those involved in the seemingly interminabledebate about whether the origins of the American founding were republican or liberal. The concern was hardly that those criticized were simply poor historians.Many embracedthe new historicism and practiced it paradigmatically, but in a manner coloredby variouspolitical inclinations.Whateverthe commitmentsof its founders,the new historicism,like the old historicism,was, in the end and in many ways, an ideologicallyequal opportunity employer. The program of the Cambridgeschool (Skinner et al. 2002) is hardlysecurefrom criticism.Manyhave pointed to problemssuch as the gap between methodological promise and practice and a tendency to emphasizecontext over text (e.g., Gunnell 1998;Tully 1988), but there can be little doubt that, if judged on the basis of generallyaccepted scholarly criteria,the new historicism, broadly construed in terms of the work of both its founders and those who have shared its goals, representsa greatercontribution to knowledge than the old historicism. One obvious benchmark might be a comparison of the scholarshipon authors such as Machiavelliand Hobbes before and after 1960 (e.g., Skinner 1996;Strauss1936). It would be difficultto deny that in the last quarterof the twentieth century there was a measurableincrease in our understandingof both the contexts and texts of what has been conventionallydesignated as past political thought. Both the initiatorsof this persuasionand the second generationof scholarswho might reasonably be associatedwith it have produced significant substantivework as well as methodologicalsophistication in the study of conceptual development (e.g., Ball, Farr,and Hanson 1989), and the attitude engendered has spilled over into various other aspects of history and historiography. Evenmany of those committed to furtheringthe perspectiveof Strausshave both weakened and expanded the philosophical agenda and takenmore literallyStrauss's claim about the necessity of understandingauthors as they understood themselves.This is not at all to suggest that there is something inherently invalid about using texts belonging

to the classic canon as vehicles of commentary (Baumgold 1981), but only that it is no longer convincing to present instrumentaluses as "history:" As the study of the history of political theory moves into the new century,we are left with the question that Weberposed a hundredyearsago;that is, can an activitysuch as social science,which had its origins in the cauldronof politics, extricateitself and become a practiceof knowledgethat at the same time is politically significant?But further,can an element of social science such as the study of the history of political theory, which began as a rhetoric of inquiry, detach and transfigure itself and become a functioning dimension of such a practice? Whateverthe extent to which its rhetoricalorigins may still shape,or burden, the study of the history of political theory,the verdict must be that it has establisheda reasonableclaim to scholarlyautonomy and thereforeto the kind of cognitive authority that Weberhad sought. Yet,given its original purpose of speaking to political life, there remainsthe question of its contemporaryrelevancein terms of both principleand practice.Socialscience,as well as the study of the history of political theory, originatedin a very differentcontext, and the discursive shadow of that context continues to constrain their evolution.

What, Indeed, Is Political Theory?

The career of the study of the history of political theory providesa benchmarkfor examiningthe fate of other dimensions of political theory whose contemporary situation is considerably more ambiguous. During the lastyearsof the behavioralera in American political science, that is, the late 1960s, the growing intellectual split between the mainstream discipline and much of political theory resulted in somewhat contrived"official" institutional and professionaldistinctions among historical, empirical,and normative theory, or, less officially,between traditionaland scientific theory. Although this development was often accepted and applaudedby both sides of the controversy about behavioralism,the rhetorics attachingto the controversy,regardingsuch mattersas the nature of social scientific explanation and the historical career of political theory, were dislodged as these "vocations"went their separate ways and became respectively internally further differentiated. In a somewhat similar manner, the so-called enterprise of normative political theory became increasingly anomalous,but this developmentwas also prefigured in the past of the social sciences.

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For Merriam and Willoughby,as well as for the subsequent generation of political scientists,the goal had not been, any more than in the case of Weber's distinction between science and politics, to dislodge social sciencefrom a position where it could influence politics but ratherto provide a new, that is, scientific, basis for such influence. What this in effect entailed was that normativity became sublimated in "scientific"claims,just as it had been previouslyembedded in historical claims. From its inception, American political science had been devoted to specifying the criteria of democracy and demonstrating the conformance,or lack of conformance,of institutionsand political practicesto that concept.With the demise of the theory of the state and its account of democracy, the pluralisttheory of democracythat emergedin the 1920s was implanted in a descriptive analysis of Americanpolitical practice.This literaturereachedits apotheosis in the empirical theory of democracy advanced,duringthe 1950s,by politicalscientistssuch as Trumanand Dahl. The mutuallyagreedupon professional division of labor,which emergedduring the last quarterof the twentieth century,createda situation where normativity tended to remain "underground"in empiricalpolitical science,while what was officially designatedas normative political theory, or sometimes value-theory, had no clearly specifiable parentage.It was in part a categoryspringingfrom the positivist claim, and from even earlierimages in the discipline,that all judgmentscould be parsedas either factualor evaluative,and it was in part a classification designed to cover modes of discoursethat did not fit the behavioral image of theory. Despite its professional connection to political science, what was considered as belonging to normative political theory consisted of a diverse interdisciplinary literature without a concretehome, subjectmatter,purpose,and audience.Releasedfrom the normal professionalconstraints,which had perpetuatedthe idea of the unity of political theory, the two already estrangedvoices began to break into distinct discourseswith minimal mutual contact. By the end of the 1960s, those who found themselves attached,or attachedthemselves,to the proliferating "vocations" of normative political theory wished to speak about and to the practiceof politics, but they rejected the authority of science on which political science had previouslypredicatedits normative judgments.Instead,they sought a varietyof philosophical and historical grounds, but they often conveyed a message that was neither directedtoward nor comprehensible to a distinct political constituency. Seeking an identity for normativetheory in the

work of thinkers such as John Rawls,JiirgenHabermas, and MichelFoucaulthad little resonancebeyond the academy. This is not to saythattherehavenot been instancesof significantintersectionbetween academic and public discourse,but these are isolated and complicated events and are neither indicative of the general structural relationship between political theory and Americanpolitics nor necessarilyevidence of why such intersectionshouldoccur (Gunnell 1998). The question of exactly why the claims of academic political theorists should be heeded, particularlyin a democraticsociety,is seldom confronted. Significantelements of the literatureof political theory consist today less of distinct scholarlycontributions than of varieties of abstractmoralism propounded by individuals who lack the location and status of moralistsbut seek to function as public ethicists and spokespersonsfor an increasinglyphantom audience. Although claims about matters such as justice and democracyonce had a greatdealto do with both the agenda of social science and its relationship to politicallife, they now arelargelypart of a disjoined self-containedconversation.Those who identify with this field, however,are often possessed of a sense that, abandonedby politicalscience,it represented activan ity that had been chosen as the promulgatorof political values and that it somehow had accrued the authority to speak, in varying degrees of specificity, about a varietyof issues relatingto public life. A generationafterits invention,normativepolitical theory,which is largelythe descendantof the preWWII genre of the history of political theory, is still unclear about how it relates not only to political science but to the other fields such as philosophy whose practitionersoften sharein this somewhatanalytically constructed field. And how it relates, and should relate,to politics is even less clear.Many theorists affecta stance,and speakin an idiom, not unlike that of the clergywho dominatedmoral philosophyin the American academy during the first half of the nineteenth century,and it is important to recognize the extent to which the contemporary discourse is genealogicallyanchored in an unreflectiveperpetuation of motives and motifs of that enterprise. The fundamental difference is that, unlike Lieber or Woolsey,the moralists of the current era are neither appointed by nor seldom speaking to any distinct communityand in most instanceshaveneverventured from the academyinto the worlds of practicethat they profess to advise and admonish. It was, ironically,the very failure of moral philosophy as a public voice in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries that prompted the turn to science as a new basis of intel-

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while in the last generation,the belief lectualauthority, that has dominated political theory is that scientism must be replacedby moralism.Some today suggest,as others have since the 1950s, that the answer to the problem is to overcome these dichotomous commitments and find a way to bring empiricismand normativity into a complementary relationship,but while such analyticalsolutions may be aestheticallysatisfying, they do not take adequateaccount of either professional and institutional inertia or of the extent to which the problemof theory and practicehas no theoretical solution and is ultimately,itself, the practical problem of the relationship between academic and public discourse.The paradoxinherentin the study of the history of political thought is that while it may have to some degreeescapedits rhetoricalorigins and achievedan independentscholarlyauthoritybased on its contributionto knowledgeof the past, that authority has little practicalrelevance.The paradox of normative political theory is simply that the "knowledge" it professes is not knowledge about anything unless that knowledge is practically manifested or acknowledged. These remarks are not intended to suggest that political theorists either should or should not speak prescriptively about political issues. The academic voice is as legitimate and credible as many others in the political arena. It is, however,to suggest that the politics about which many do speak is often a philosophical construction and that in many instances scholarship has been replaced by pronouncements grounded in claims to various forms of epistemic privilegewhich do not fit comfortablywith the typical expressionsof democraticsentiment. 2005 Manuscriptsubmitted1 September Manuscriptaccepted publication3 January2006 for

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John G. Gunnell is Distinguished Professor of political science,StateUniversityof New York, Albany, NY 12222.