Because theorizing about sets of stable and changing human practices is not
particularly precise, these political theorists do not set out to impose coherent
rational orderings on those practices or to produce consistent sets of argu-
ments for their own sake. Discovering no universalist theories or abstract
essences, they aim instead ‘‘to enrich our moral vocabulary and so our moral
lives; to re-enchant the world by respecting contradiction and paradox; to
undermine the triumph of especially those experts and that expertise that
reduce political and social life to problem solving and eYciency management;
and to recapture [a] sense of mortality and mutability’’ (Euben 1986 , 16 ). For
this reason they borrow from the social sciences and humanities, drawing not
only on analytic philosophy but also on the work of continental thinkers like
Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre
Hadot, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jac-
ques Rancie`re, and Leo Strauss. Sharing with these thinkers an interest in
exposing and analyzing tensions and inconsistencies and the commitment to
treating these as purposive rather than as sites of unintended philosophical
failures, these political theorists also depart from some of those continental
thinkers in seeing tension and contradiction not as stymying the possibilities
for political action nor as making moot frameworks of falsity and truth, but
rather as opening the way to less binary ways of thinking about age-old
problems and dilemmas.
II. TheWrst commitment, to political theorizing as ‘‘practical philosophy’’
(Salkever 1990 a, 4 ), produces, and is also guided by, a second commitment, to
an expansive classical canon. Because the world of human thought, character,
actions, and institutions is seen no less fully by poets, historians, and play-
wrights than it is by philosophers (and often more so), these political theorists
do not limit their studies to the political writings of Plato and Aristotle, the most
famous philosophers of the classical Greek world. Additionally, the poetry of
Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and Theognis, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydi-
des, the tragedies and comedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aris-
tophanes, the speeches of Lysias, Demosthenes, and Aeschines, the less famous
political works of Xenophon and Isocrates, and the less explicitly political
writings of Plato and Aristotle, including their works on rhetoric and poetry,
the soul and the senses, nature and beauty, friendship and virtue, are all treated
as fertile resources for the excavation of political phenomena.
Owing to the diVerences among these classical genres, the political theorists
under consideration attend closely to the literary form of the materials they
178 jill frank