has happened accidentally; the theorist happens to have read this text, and it
happens that its language lends itself to this theoretical purpose. The circum-
stance that the author had similar intentions, or alternatively that his or her
language can be so interpreted, is itself accidental; we are in a situation where
history is accidental, or incidental, to theory. These hypothetical circumstan-
ces, however, entail diVerent historical statements; the former is about the
author acting in her or his moment in history, the latter about the action and
moment of the theorist. The latter claims to be acting now, making a
statement whose validity does not depend upon the historical context in
which it is performed. It may be called positivist in the sense that it oVers its
own conditions of validation and appeals only to them.
This is of course wholly justiWable; it is valuable to set up laboratories and
construct hypotheses subject to validation under rigorously controlled con-
ditions. A common consequence of falsiWcation, however, is the discovery
that something was present which the experiment did not foresee or succeed
in excluding, and here our theorist’s enterprise may be the better for knowing
its own history; what exactly are the conditions it speciWes, and why does it
specify these and not others? This question becomes all the more pressing as
we enter the realms of practice and history, where the conditions under
which, and the contexts in which, we operate can never be deWned with
Wnality. Here we pass beyond the simple dialogue between theorist and
historian, beyond the problem of congruence between a text’s meaning in
the present and those it has borne in pasts. The historian has begun to
resemble a post-Burkean moderate conservative, reminding us that there is
always more going on than we can comprehend at any one moment and
convert into either theory or practice. One has become something of a
political theorist in one’s own right, advancing, and inviting others to ex-
plore, the proposition that political action and political society are always to
be understood in a context of historical narrative. There is room therefore for
consideration of historiography as itself a branch of political thought and
theory, literature and discourse.
The theorist, however, may be imagined using historical information,
making historical assumptions either explicit or implicit, or reXecting
upon historical processes as these appear relevant to the enterprise in political
theory being conducted. 5 The question now arises whether these operations
are entailed by the method of framing and validating statements in which the
5 Schochet ( 1994 ).172 j. g. a. pocock