legitimate values collide and vie with each other without being overly fearful that the bonds that
make civil society possible will unravel.
Still, it is sometimes said against justice-seeking theorists that they are more concerned with
having the world reflect their theory than with having their theory reflect the world. According to
critics, a justice-seeking approach in theory elevates persuasion above explanation. Not everyone
considers this a vice however. One who did not agree was John Stuart Mill, for whom, having
“ascertained the form of government which combines the greatest amount of good with the least of
evil,”thought it was necessary“to obtain theconcurrenceof (his) countrymen, or those from whom
the institutions are intended, in the opinion which we have previously arrived at.”^14 Simply stated,
for justice-seeking theorists the aim of political inquiry is not merely to predict the future, but to
influence it.“Up to now,”Marx declared,“philosophy has concerned itself with understanding the
world; henceforth, it will be concerned with transforming it”(a task he assigns to scientific
socialists.) Hence, what makes justice-seeking theories influential is not a mere matter of whether
they are true, but whether they are believed.
In the end, what matters most when considering the justice-seeking approach with students is
whether the values a political theorist champions really are moral or just. Unless one believes that
society,as itis presently conceived and organized,is good enough, or we need not bother examining
moral standards in public and private life, there still is value in this approach to theory. If“we make
our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers,”^15 then justice-
seeking will retain a place in political inquiry, including for those who gravitate to the other
approaches. Few political theorists, including those who prefer a more empirical or analytic
approach to political theory, completely avoid engaging in some form of justice-seeking.
Historical and Scientific Approaches: The Political Theorist
as Knowledge-Seeker
If justice-seeking presupposes a standard that human beings ought to embrace–but, unfortunately,
seldom do–the main emphasis in aknowledge-seekingapproach centers on constructing a political
theory based upon the world as it is and men and women as they are. Rather than pondering abstract
standards of justice and right rule, theorists who adopt this approach are determined to make use of
the materials at hand. They seek to unearth, figuratively and literally, the nature of political auth-
ority and legitimacy, its sources and uses. Like the justice-seeker, they too are interested in political
ends or moral standards, as well as people’s beliefs about them. Unlike those primarily engaged in
justice-seeking, however, the theorist preoccupied with knowledge-seeking appears more con-
cerned withunderstandingthan withjudgingthe values rulers and ruled embrace. For them an
understanding of political principles must take into account, rather than ignoring what people want,
what they value, and how they actually behave. Whereas the justice-seeking theorist hopes to
uncover political truths that will enable us to make value judgments about facts, the knowledge-
seeking theorist aspires to begin with the empirical world, including the worlds others posit.
For the theorist engaged in a knowledge-seeking approach, values–including justice, happiness,
equality, etc.–reflect human interests and desires as well as the social, economic, and/or historical
circumstances people find themselves confronting. To discover the nature of politics, the know-
ledge-seeking theorist is intent on examining the forces that shape us, including“circumstances
directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”^16 In other words, knowledge-seeking theorists
wish to derive their standards or principles of right rule (or justice) from a scientific and/or an
historical investigation of human nature and the polity, moving from what is to what ought to be
instead of the other way around.
Many, if not most, of the political theorists we study adopt this knowledge-seeking approach,
at least some of the time, or would like us to think that this is their approach. Aristotle, Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and Marx, all thought that they, in contrast to their contemporaries, were providing a
156 Ramona June Grey