Foundations Shaken but Not Stirred 91of his book: ‘To show that the questions put by the traditional political philosophers
are wrongly posed...In the light of these discussions to show that the theoretical
foundations of political thinking...are all equally worthless...To show that this
conclusion is in no way devastating or even alarming...All that is discarded is some
metaphysical lumber’ (Weldon 1953: 14–15).
The logical positivist demeanour in Weldon comes out strongly under the rubric of
facts and values. Here we see logical positivism and ordinary language theory falling
in line with an open positivist mentality. Weldon solves the fact/value issue with verve.
He conjures an imaginary party, remarking, ‘suppose we are looking at the dog of our
hostess. I say “Fluffy is a Peke”, and you reply “No, he is an Aberdeen”. We know what
we are disagreeing about and how to settle the issue. If [however] I say “The Athens of
Pericles was a democracy”, and you reply “No, it was an oligarchy” the matter is rather
more complicated because of the vague and conflicting uses of “democracy” and
“oligarchy” ’ (Weldon 1953: 85). For Weldon, the answer to this party conundrum
focuses on the distinction between facts and values. The issue of ‘Fluffy: Peke or
Aberdeen’ can be sorted out empirically with unassailable and testable facts. The
fact that Fluffy is a Peke is thus empirically verifiable (unless of course someone
had renamed the Peke ‘Pericles’). However, the proposition concerning Periclean
democracy (as in any metaphysical or ethical statements) involves values, which are
not verifiable. For Weldon, therefore, the whole problem is solved!
A Digression on Death and Putrefaction
I wish to pause the argument here for a moment to reflect on one moment in political
theory, which connects up with Weldon’s views. This is the oft-noted ‘death of political
theory’. Many assume that the corpse of political theory was discovered by Peter
Laslett. Famously, in an introduction in 1956, to the first volume of thePhilosophy
Politics and Societyseries, Laslett commented,
It is one of the assumptions of intellectual life...that there should be amongst us men whom we
think of as political philosophers. Philosophers themselves are sensitive to philosophic change,
they are to concern themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level
of generality...For three hundred years...there have been such men writing in English, from
the early 17th century to the 20th century, from Hobbes to Bosanquet. Today, it would seem we
have them no longer. The tradition has been broken and our assumption is misplaced...For
the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead. (Laslett introduction, series 1, 1956: vii)
Why did it happen for Laslett? The gulf, between thinkers such as Bosanquet and the
1950s generation of political philosophers, was caused, in large part, by the manner in
whichlogicalpositivismcalledintoquestion‘thelogicalstatusofallethicalstatements,
and set up rigorous criteria of intelligibility which at one time threatened to reduce the
traditional systems to assemblages of nonsense’ (Laslett introduction, series 1, 1956:
ix). Laslett thus blamed the logical positivists for the demise of political philosophy,
although he did lump a somewhat disparate group under its label, who should not
be there—including Ryle, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Ordinary language philosophy