80 The Nature of Political Theory
Geoffrey Brennan, view Thomas Hobbes as a more viable predecessor, see Gauthier (1986:
186) and Brennan (1997: 92).
- The APSR personnel newsletter incorporates adverts for rational choice posts in Universit-
ies in North Americawithinthe political theory section, under the title ‘positive political
theory’.
- ‘rational choice theorists generally agree on an instrumental conception of individual
rationality, by reference to which people are thought to maximize their expected utilities
in formally predictable ways. In empirical applications, the further assumption is generally
shared that rationality is homogeneous across the individuals under study’, Green and
Schapiro (1994: 17).
- As has been noted, ‘In their efforts to explain political outcomes, rational choice theor-
ists appeal to deductive accounts of incentives, constraints, and calculations that confront
individuals. Systematic analytic inquiry into the strategic behaviour of individuals has led
rational choice theorists to approach traditional questions of political science in novel
ways’, Green and Schapiro (1994: 3).
- In the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, on a different theoretical basis, anticipated a new end
of ideology (or end of history in his case), with the triumph of global liberalism, see
Fukuyama (1992).
- This might be described as one of the better examples of conceptual anachronism.
- ‘the path from the empirical observability for us of an ensemble to its historical acceptab-
ility, to the very epoch when it is effectively observable, passes through an analysis of the
knowledge-power nexus that supports it, see Foucault in Schmidt (ed.) (1996: 394).
- As T. D. Weldon remarked ‘It is not the job of philosophy to provide new information
about politics...or any other matters of fact. Philosophical problems are entirely second
order problems. They are problems, that is, which are generated by the language in which
facts are described and explained by those whose function it is to construct and defend
scientific, historical, or other types of theory’, Weldon (1957: 22).
