The Nature of Political Theory

34 The Nature of Political Theory

was synonymous with ‘systematic knowledge’. The science of the state could therefore
be summed up in the attempt to both describe, on a comparative level, the empirical
details of forms of state, and, further to indicate how the good life could be attained.
In this sense, the preoccupation with the institution of the state was generated by an
interest in both the actual comparative historical detail of institutional arrangements,
through which humans have tried to organize their social existence (as Aristotle had
done with his well-known typology of constitutions), combined with normative and
ethical theories about the ‘best institutional arrangement’. Political studies, focused
on the state, therefore wove together descriptive and comparative historical detail with
normative ideals. The normative ideals were regarded initially as being as significant
as the empirical components. In summary, the state focus not only allowed the
sequence of classical theory to be unified, combined comparative historical detail with
normative ideal, but also provided a creative intellectual framework for contemporary
research.^11
It would be true to say that the state concept, as a way of studying politics and
political theory, fell into marked decline from the 1920s. This point will also be
examined again in the later section on empirical political theory. However, one should
be careful of simply equating (as is commonly done) the decline of the state, and
the historical comparative method, with the rise of more scientific, positivist, or
behavioural methods. Undoubtedly, in the social sciences in certain countries, North
America being a key example, there was a marked shift towards a more positivistic
agenda. The empirical methods of political study became of much greater interest.
Yet, the idea of the state remained important to American political science, well into
the 1940s. If anything it was the 1950s that saw a more decisive change. In addition, the
state theme never fell into quite the same decline in Britain and Europe, as in North
America. Descriptions of state institutions, woven with theoretical and normative
ideas, were still the stock in trade of a great deal of political studies in Britain up
until the close of the twentieth century. Further, the partial decline of the state theme
coincided with a number of significant events and movements in ideas. There was
a growing interest in forms of ethical and political pluralism, in both Europe and
North America, and a partial shift away from the state. Philosophical Idealism, in
Britain and Europe, also declined rapidly in influence, not least because both it, and
the ‘theory of the state’, were associated obliquely with the horrific events of the First
and later Second World Wars. It is worth reminding ourselves of the fact that the
dominant strains of sophisticated state theory andStaatslehrehad strong links to
German thought and this alone was enough to make them suspect in the 1920s (and
again in the 1940s). In America, this academic suspicion of state theory continued
into the 1950s, ironically through the large number of German academic émigrés,
who had fled from the Nazi ‘total state’, who entered American academic life and
developed their own unique brand of state scepticism.
As suggested, it would still be far from true that the ‘state idea’ simply disappeared
in the 1920s. The situation did, however, become much more complicated. On one
level, the institutional or state focus divided into two broad tendencies, which can be
seen implicitly in the various nineteenth-century accounts of the state. In the classical