discipline possessing its own rules: that is to say, the statements it aims to
construct acknowledge certain procedures according to which they are con-
structed and may be validated and criticized. There will instantly arise, how-
ever, a further activity of questioning how such procedures have been and are
being constructed, to what capacities of the mind they make appeal, whether
their claims to validity are or have been justiWable, and in short whether, and
how, it is possible to construct a discipline called ‘‘political theory’’ at all. This
activity of the second order may be called ‘‘political philosophy’’—although
this term has borne other meanings—and distinguished from ‘‘political the-
ory’’ as carried on at levels conWdent enough of its procedures to dispense, at
least provisionally, with the questioning of them at the levels called ‘‘philoso-
phy.’’ Having made this distinction, of course, we observe that the two activ-
ities continually intersect, although the distinction does not disappear.
It is valuable to imagine the ‘‘political theorist’’—given that this term may
have more than one meaning—confronted by a ‘‘historian of political thought,’’
who regards ‘‘political theory,’’ in any of its meanings, as one of many ways in
which ‘‘thought,’’ or rather ‘‘discourse,’’ about ‘‘politics’’ has been going on. Even
if we suppose our agonists to agree on a deWnition of the activity to be called
‘‘political theory,’’ and to agree that this activity has had a continuous history of
some duration, there will remain many senses in which they do not and perhaps
should not have much to say to one another. The ‘‘theorist’’ is interested in the
making of statements (hypotheses?) obedient to certain modes of validation; the
‘‘philosopher’’ in the question of how (and whether) it is possible to construct
these (or any) modes of validation (or evaluation). The historian is not inter-
ested primarily, although perhaps secondarily, in any of these questions, but
in the question ‘‘what happened?’’ (or was happening)—more broadly still,
‘‘what was it that was happening?’’—when events or processes occurred in the
past under study. One aims to characterize, to evaluate, to explicate (rather than
explain), and therefore in the last analysis to narrate, actions performed in the
recorded past; and if they were performed according to, or even in search
of, certain modes of validation, one is interested in their performance rather
than their validity, and in the validations to which they appealed as the context
that renders them the happenings they were. The questions ‘‘is this statement
valid?’’ and ‘‘what has happened when it is made?’’ are not identical, unless—
and this is the issue—the theorist who asks the former can oblige the historian
who asks the latter to admit that nothing has been going on except the practice of
a certain mode of validation; and this the questions asked by the ‘‘philosopher’’
have already rendered somewhat uncertain.
166 j. g. a. pocock