the last decades of the twentieth century and opening years of the twenty-Wrst.
The selection is not, of course, meant to sum up what political theory has been
about over that period: if it did that, there would be little need for the remaining
essays in theHandbook. We have included threeWgures—Rawls, Habermas, and
Foucault—whose work has so shaped theWeld that it became possible for a time
to label (although somewhat misleadingly) other political theorists by their
adherence to one of the three. We have also included three thematic styles of
theory—feminism, pluralism, and linguistic approaches—that have
sought (successfully or not) to refocus debate in a diVerent direction. The
theorists and themes addressed in this section are ones that have particularly
marked out this moment in political theory, and the chapters assess their
continuing inXuence.
Part III, ‘‘The Legacy of the Past,’’ focuses on historical work in political
thought. As James Farr notes in his chapter, the history of political thought
has been a staple of university instruction since the end of the nineteenth
century, long recognized as a branch of political theory. But the role and
object of historical inquiry has been much debated in recent decades, and the
idea that one should search the classical texts for answers to the perennial
problems of political life has been subjected to especially searching critique.
Some theorists have been happy to jettison any study of historical traditions,
regarding it as a merely antiquarian exercise. But the greater attention now
given to context—to what can and cannot be thought at any given period in
history—has also enabled radically new readings of political thought. The
essays in this section can give only a taste of the wealth of scholarship in this
Weld, and have been selected with an eye to that continuing discussion about
the legacy of the past and its relationship with the present. They include a
meta-level discussion of the relationship between political theory and the
discipline of history; a disciplinary history of the history of political thought;
and essays on a number of historical traditions that have been subject to
signiWcant re-evaluation and reinterpretation in the recent literature.
Questions of context are spatial as well as temporal, for even the most
abstract of political theories cannot transcend its location, and the issues
with which theorists become preoccupied reXect the histories and concerns
of the worlds in which they live. The chapters in Part IV, ‘‘Political Theory in
the World,’’ make matters of location more explicit. They explore diVerences,
misconceptions, and mutual inXuences between Western and non-Western
political traditions, with the latter represented here by Confucianism and
Islam, and look at how ideas of America on the one hand and Europe on the
introduction 31