The Nature of Political Theory

102 The Nature of Political Theory

The important point here is that these concepts that constitute our political lives
are both contestableandhistorically mutable. Language games thus have histories
that are deeply relevant for their current usage. As Ball notes, ‘Every concept is
the repository of earlier associations and uses’ (Ball 1988: 5). They trail ‘clouds of
etymology’. Language is also the medium of memory and shared experiences. Ball
comments that ‘To remember our language...may enable us to gain a degree of
critical purchase on the present. By the same token, of course, our language serves to
distance us from the past by enabling us to appreciate the vast differences between past
people’s conceptually constituted practices and our own. To encounter and attempt to
understand them in all their strangeness requires the stretching of our own concepts
and categories’ (Ball 1988: 3). Discourse is not though autonomous from speakers.
Practical action cannot be separated from the intentionality of the concepts we use.
We do not have discourses, in one sense they have us. Yet, Ball is quick to remind
his readers that we can get tangled in misleading metaphors here—such as the idea
that language speaks us (qua Foucault), which for Ball is a deceptive ‘caricature’ (Ball
1988: 11).
For Ball, it is the critical conceptual historian who charts these complex conceptual
changes. He is keying directly here into the work of theBegriffsgeschichtehistorians
(briefly mentioned in Part One under historical political theory). He uses their ideas
to emphasize the historical dimension to essential contestability and tries to make
it mutate it into conceptual history (Ball 1988: 14–15, see also the introduction to
Ball, Farr, and Hanson (eds.) 1989). In fact, Ball takes one of the key themes of the
Begriffsgeschichtegroup, particularly from the writings of Rheinhart Koselleck, that
concepts can experience, what he calls, a dramaticSattelzeitperiod (Kosellek 1985).
This is a time of unprecedented conceptual change or mutation. The period that
Koselleck focused on was 1750–1850. This period saw, for example, the rise of the
major political ideology-based ‘isms’, which, as Ball remarks, ‘by supplying speakers
with a new means of locating themselves in social and political space, actually recon-
stituted that very space. Political conflict accordingly became overtly ideological’ (Ball
1988: 9–10). Ball suspected that the closing decades of the twentieth century might
be part of another significantSattelzeitperiod. Consequently, a historically informed
essential contestability argument takes on an immensely important function for Ball.
The firstnegativereading of essential contestability can be found in thereconstruct-
ive thesisof Felix Oppenheim (Oppenheim 1981). In general, Oppenheim regards
language in a very particular manner. There may well be ordinary language, but there
are also specialized technical languages. The former type of language is far too blunt
and crude a tool. It embodies diverse and often contradictory usage, but this invites
linguistic correction. As Oppenheim comments ‘It is necessary to construct language
as free as possible of the imperfections of ordinary usage’ (Oppenheim 1981: 177).
In other words, the theorists needs to ‘reconstruct basic concepts’ to avoid ambiguity
and confusion. Essential contestability, however, wallows in the confusion of ordinary
language. It encourages, as Oppenheim notes, ‘vagueness, open-endedness and ambi-
guity’ (Oppenheim 1981: 194). These are not assets for political theory to cultivate,
but obstacles to be overcome. Real political theory sees the confusion of ordinary