Part 4 Contemporary ideas
What do we mean
by a new idea?
In the last part of this book we discuss five concepts: human rights, civil disobe-
dience, political violence, difference and global justice. What distinguishes these five
concepts from those discussed in Part 1 – state, freedom, equality, justice, democracy,
citizenship and punishment – is their relatively recent emergence within political
theory. Of course, the ‘classical’ ideas themselves have undergone change and much
of our discussion in Part 1 focused on contemporary debates, but those debates
revolved around ‘problems’ that emerged in the earlierphases of modernity. For
example, the problem of state legitimacy and political obligation, the justification
of property rights, arguments over the nature of the human agent, conflicts between
freedom and equality, and the debate about the nature of political authority and
collective decision-making.
The term problem is used here in a precise, philosophical sense as a puzzle that
requires a solution, rather than as in everyday usage, which roughly defines a
problem as a fault, weakness or contradiction. An analogy from the world of music
will illustrate what we mean: one of the ‘great revolutions’ in Western music took
place in the first decade of the twentieth century. Although anticipated by nineteenth-
century composers, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is normally credited with the
first atonal composition (that is, a work not composed in a key). Schoenberg did
not set out to be a musical revolutionary, but rather he sought to save the tonal
system; it was recognition that developments within tonality (such as chromaticism)
had generated irreparable incoherences which led him to take those developments
to their conclusion. In this sense Schoenberg had inherited musical problems – or
puzzles – from his predecessors, such as Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler. To some
extent political theory can be understood as an attempt to address problems inherited
from preceding theorists, and the treatment by contemporary thinkers of classical
concepts, or problems, is analogous to Schoenberg’s engagement with tonality. The
analogy should not be taken too far: music is a relatively self-contained art form,
whereas political theory, by its nature, is an engagement with the empirical world,
a world it cannot control but that it must interpret.
Political theory can best be thought of as involving two tracks: there is a body
of theory, parallel to musical forms, which later theorists engage with and which
newcomers to the discipline may find strange and distant from the everyday world
of politics, but there is also necessarily an engagement with that world of politics.
We would argue that the two tracks are related, for changes in society will eventually
work their way through to theoretical reflection, and this process is clear in the
emergence of the new ideologies discussed in Part 3. However, theorists must also