4 Bleached Foundations
The upshot of Chapter Three is that logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy,
and the essential contestability thesis had an important impact on political theory.
Although there are dimensions of this general approach which have been abandoned,
others have been retained. Essential contestability, for example, has not so much been
rejected or refuted as subsumed into the subconscious of political studies. It now
simply ‘crops up’ as a relative background commonplace of vocabulary that students
of politics are expected to know something about. A second point is that despite
all the above theories’ rejection of metaphysics (with varying degrees of intensity),
nonetheless, all saw the philosophical method, implicit in conceptual and analytical
political theory, as both foundational and universal. Although scepticism prevailed
on most other issues, there was little reflexivity or doubt about its own validity. The
foundations were thin but firm. Thus, the approach to political theory, although
critical and sceptical, remained secure.
Political theory was supported in the 1950s and early 1960s by twin pillars: first,
the secure ‘second-order’ activity of rigorous and morally serious conceptual analysis
(or what I referred to as linguistic phenomenology), and second, the ‘first-order’
knowledge of empirical social science, namely political theory in empirical practice.
The foundations that were shaken were those of traditional or classical normative
and the history of political theory. Political theory survived and flourished in a new
shape. It had wriggled hard and shifted focus. This ‘twin pillar’ approach rested very
securely with logical positivism, but became discomforted with ordinary language
and essential contestability theory. The discomfort was however alleviated by the fact
that ordinary language theory retained (latently) the underlying empiricist and realist
foundationalist standpoint. It also repudiated comprehensive metaphysics, which was
still seen as either utterly innocuous or noxious empty speculation. If one blinked
hard, both ordinary language and essential contestability theory (in one form) could
survive harmoniously with the empirical social science perspective.
However, there were major problems with the essential contestability thesis. The
reactions to essential contestability, canvassed in Chapter Three, often focused on
the more problematic issue of the potentially deep relativism and incommensurab-
ility implicit in such argument. Some theorists, of a postmodern persuasion, later
found this relativism totally congenial, others wanted to pacify the relativism within
a historical framework, others again sought to abandon it altogether. However, for
a generation of political theorists educated in ordinary language, conceptual ana-
lysis, and analytical theory, such movements of ideas could not simply be put to one