Foundations Shaken but Not Stirred 93(1990), commenting on political philosophy in 1956, notes that Laslett and others
who coined the phrase ‘death of political theory’ were probably right, ‘If this (Politics
Philosophy and Society) was the best work that could be found in 1956 (and it probably
was), then political philosophy was perhaps not dead but at the least moribund’ (Barry
1990: xxxii). The central question that arises here is what conception of political
theory is Barry working with here? Certainly, for Barry, nothing happens in political
philosophy—apart from his ownPolitical Argumentpublished in 1965—until the
publication of Rawls’Theory of Justice(1971), a book which basically discredited, for
Barry, the whole logical positivist and ordinary language perspective once and for all
(Barry 1991: vol. 1, 19).
Equally strange is the issue of the timing of the death, for recent commentators.
Obviously, for Barry, the discipline was moribund during the twentieth century up
to 1971. He mentions writing his doctoral thesis in the early 1960s and having to
‘make the stuff up as one went along’ (Barry 1991: vol. 1, 18). When Laslett noted
in 1950 that no one was writing political philosophy like Bosanquet or Laski, it
should be recalled that the former died in 1928 and the latter in 1950. Thus, Laslett
can have only meant that political philosophy had died for a decade at the most.
It is also interesting that he considered Bosanquet as a political philosopher on par
with Hobbes. However, in a laterCompanion to Contemporary Political Philosophy
(1993) volume, one of the editors, Philip Pettit, comments that ‘from late in the
[nineteenth] century to about the 1950s political philosophy ceased to be an area of
active exploration. There was lots done on the history of the subject...But there was
little or nothing of significance published in political philosophy itself’ (Goodin and
Pettit (eds.) 1993: 8). This locates the demise from the 1870s until the 1950s. An even
firmer dating can be found in Richard Tuck’s essay in the sameCompanionvolume
(and it should be noted that Tuck is drawn into this volume as an apparent specialist
on the historical approach to the discipline). Tuck comments that,
The period from 1870 to 1970 was a very strange one in the history of thinking about politics in
the Anglo-American world (and, to a lesser extent, on the Continent also). There are a number
of alternative ways of characterizing its strangeness. One is to point to the absence of major
works on political philosophy...Another is to remind ourselves that serious commentators in
the 1950s could believe that ‘for the moment...political philosophy is dead’. (Tuck in Goodin
and Pettit (eds.) 1993: 72)
This general drift of judgement is also partly reflected in the rather ambiguous idea
of the ‘return of grand theory’ in the 1970s. Thus, for Tuck, like Barry, Rawls’Theory
of Justicepublication date appears again asthedecisive point.
These general remarks—by no mean academic figures in the discipline of theory—
are none the less deeply perplexing. To characterize the 1920 to 1950s period as
bereft of political philosophy (qua Laslett) is far-fetched and odd. This period covers,
to name but a few, the work of J. P. Sartre, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Leo
Strauss, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Hans Kelsen, Ber-
trand de Jouvenal, Yves Simon, Dante Germino, Giovanni Gentile, Benedetto
Croce, L. T. Hobhouse, G. D. H. Cole, Leon Duguit, Herbert Laski, John Dewey,