We Have a Firm Foundation 33However, there were also a number of internal reasons for this ‘state focus’, which
relate closely to the discipline of politics itself. These, again, can be subdivided in
termsofthestrategicdemands for disciplinary consolidation, and thecreativepoten-
tial of the state concept. In terms ofstrategicdemands, the state idea provided the
academic discipline of politics with a ready-made and deeply-significant curriculum
and subject matter. If a discipline proposes establishing its own distinctive status,
with its own unique curricula, ‘it will try also to assume a subject matter and tech-
niques of study that aresui generis. And what subject matter can be regarded as
purely political?...If there is any subject matter at all which political scientists can
claim exclusively for their own, a subject matter that does not require acquisition of
the analytical tools of sister-fields...it is, of course, formal-legal political structure’
(Eckstein and Apter 1963: 10–11). In other words, in terms of the contest of the
faculties, politics could not come to the academic bargaining table empty-handed or
reliant upon the vocabulary of law, history, sociology, or philosophy—despite the fact
that it was frequently a refuge for historical-minded philosophers and theoretically-
minded historians or lawyers. Thus, where economics had become progressively more
technical, law validated a powerful public profession, history had become more spe-
cialized, and philosophy more technically focused on logic and epistemology, then,
‘in such company, politics, too, had to make its bid for a place at the table by posing as
the sovereign of a small but technically advanced and entirely independent territory’
(Collini et al. 1983: 374). The sovereign territory which politics claimed to be able to
interpret, and which marked out the unique and singularly important field of political
study, was of course ‘the state’. This provided the fundamental academicraison d’être.
Thecreativepotential of the state concept was singularly important in terms of
its relation to classical normative political theory—discussed in the previous sec-
tion. It is also a key to understanding the background to the next section on the
historical political theory. The state, in effect, became the linchpin of the narrat-
ive sequence underpinning classical normative political theory. This was also partly
facilitated by the classical background of many scholars, well into the early stages
of the twentieth century. It was comparatively easy for such writers to immediately
translate the Greek termPolisinto ‘city-state’, or just ‘state’. Many late nineteenth
and early twentieth century books were written, therefore, on the ‘Greek state’ or
‘Roman state’. Thesuprema potestatisof Roman law became the modern concept of
sovereignty, which was seen to characterize the Roman ‘state’. Political science, qua
Aristotle, was therefore configured as the ‘science of the state’. This assimilation of
classical normative political theory into state language was crucial in establishing a
unified logical sequence or narrative from the ancient Greeks to the present. In effect,
the whole history of political theory could then be read through the concept of the
state. The problems of politics were therefore the problems of the state. The problems
of the Greek, Roman, medieval, sixteenth, or seventeenth century worlds became
familiar problems, because they wereallfocused on the state. The state established
a supervenient narrative over the ancient and modern political worlds.
Thus, classical normative political theory found a unifying theme in the state.
Political science,in toto, was ‘summed up’ in the science of the state. The term ‘science’