Bleached Foundations 109side. What was needed was a modified analytical emphasis—a tempered essential
contestability—which recovered, in a more fulsome manner, what Berlin and others
referred to as the normative and justificatory sphere. The question is what would such
a recovery entail?
There were two subtle moves in this normative direction. The first signalled that
normative concepts were crucial to humans as self-interpreting creatures, and that
these concepts could be evaluated, improved, and sharpened by political theorists.
This also had some loose connections to the idea of ‘tidying up’ concepts. This path
had been recognized within ordinary language and essential contestability theory.
There had even been a number of hesitant moves to ‘improve’ political concepts. The
fertile words here weresharpening,clarifying, andimproving. As emphasized, they
were distinct from an explicitconstructionof a justificatory theory, which purports to
show why we should adopt one structure of norms or values rather than another. This
latter point, however, constituted the second subtle move. If the theorist could show
that the original form of essential contestability is hopelessly caught in a relativist loop,
and that it did not adequately account for the manner in which normative arguments
were deployed, then it was a very short step to modify or adjust the essential contest-
ability argument. This modification suggested that rigorous conceptual analysis was
needed, to a degree, since political concepts often embodied deep internal divisions
that required elucidation. However, once the analysis was completed, an aspect of the
concept could be shown to be more in accord with our everyday intuitions than other
forms. This aspect was more in accord with an ‘essential use’ by humanity. A norm-
ative theory could then show us—at a very abstract, sophisticated, and systematic
level—the skeletal structure of the deep intuitive values held by all humans. An aspect
of the concept could be shown to approximate to this deep structure. A normative
political theory therefore showed the basic concrete human values stripped down
to their basic form. This, in essence, provided the basis for a reasoned normative
and justificatory theory, which in effect, supplied a final resolution for the essen-
tially contestable concepts. Essential contestability was thus thehors d’oeuvresto the
substantial main course of the concept, which although initially internally contested,
could be finally resolved within a normative theory. Thus, classical normative theory
returnedagain anointed with analytical oil. For others, nothing actually returned, but,
conversely, a new conception of political theory developed, which contained some
familiar resonances with a past structure. It is in this general scenario that we see the
growth of normative theory in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing particularly on justice.
The Concept of Justice
Normative-based justice theory was one of the main preoccupations of the last three
decades of the twentieth century, although the movement began to falter in the 1990s.
The key work was Rawls’Theory of Justice, published originally in 1971. The reason
why justice was singled out for normative theory was simply because it was seen,
quite literally, as the basic or most central concept of politics. It became a form of