The Nature of Political Theory

94 The Nature of Political Theory

R. G. Collingwood, Jacques Maritain, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Karl Popper,
Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, and Friedrich
Hayek. However, to consider that the longer period from 1870 to the 1970s as
bereft of theory is utterly cranky. The much longer perspective, going back to the
1870s, also encompasses diverse brands of utilitarianism, the extensive flowering of
neo-Kantianism across Europe, the spectacular rise and dominance of forms of neo-
Hegelian idealism (which dominated British and much American philosophy up to
the 1920s), the colossal impact of evolutionary and biologically-influenced theories
(Herbert Spencer et al.), legal and ethical pluralism, and so forth. The list could go on.
Alternatively, in the same period, we can see a massive amount of material written on
Marxism, Leninism, reformist and pluralistic socialisms, conservative and corporat-
ist theories, diverse forms of anarchy, syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism, different
forms of liberalism, conservatism, early feminism, fascism, nationalism, or indeed
the enormous volume of material on state theory (Staatslehre) in Europe and America
from 1870 to 1930. One should also be aware that this apparently moribund period
covers the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, two World Wars, the rise of fascism and
communism, decolonization, the creation of the United Nations and human rights
documentations, and massive changes in conceptions of statehood, citizenship and
sovereignty, and so forth. But, apparently, for perceptive theorists such as Brian Barry,
Philip Pettit, and Richard Tuck, nothing happened for the whole of the twentieth
century in political philosophy until Rawls published hisTheory of Justicein 1971.
In this context, one can sympathize with John Gray’s judgements, commenting on
the aboveCompanionvolume, although it is equally applicable to Brian Barry’s views.
Gray locates it as ‘belonging to a sub-genre in fantastic literature’, redolent of the
Jorges Luis Borges imaginary world of Thön. He also notes the total absence of any
discussion of fascism, nationalism, monarchism, or theism. Further, there seems to
be no awareness of the significance of what was, at the time of its publication, taking
place in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and most other societies in the world.
He comments that the editorial methodology appears to accord political reality only
to those theories which are of interest in a limited area of mainly North American
academic discourse. TheCompanionshould therefore be read as a ‘mirror of the
subject as we find it today and not of the world in which we live’ (Gray 1995: 15).
It is a distorting mirror, expressing the hegemony ‘of an unhistorical and culturally
parochial species of liberal theory [which] disables the understanding when it is
confronted by the most powerful political forces of our age’. One could come away
from the book in complete ignorance of ‘every world-historical transformation of our
age’ (Gray 1995: 16–17).
Leaving Gray’s criticism to one side, what it also disturbing in the above reflections
on the ‘death of political theory’, is, first, the level of ignorance and myopia in the
various commentaries; and yet the same vague bogus claims go on being repeated up
to the end of the century. The most accessible reason for this kind of total weirdness
is that there are those who still believe that their own immensely parochial and
historically contingent understanding of philosophy is the only possible and correct
understanding of the subject. This contains again all the hubris of Weldon, without