104 The Nature of Political Theoryautonomy of the discipline of political theory. This latter perspective begins to provide
some insight into the Rawlsian generation, which will be pursued in Chapter 4.
Conclusion
What was the general upshot of these logical positivist, ordinary language, and essen-
tial contestability perspectives? One of the major effects was to give political theory
a predominantly ‘conceptualist focus’ in the second half of the twentieth century.
The general requirement was for a phenomenological description of each political
concept.^18 This constituted what one commentator has perceptively called an ‘issue
orthodoxy’, namely, ‘a general belief that politics can be defined in terms of a finite
range of distinct universal or “basic” issues, encapsulated by such terms aspower,
justice, obligation, state’ (Condren 1985: 44).
Further, the historical situation of these concepts was of little interest. Moral ser-
iousness and argumentative rigour were more significant measures of good theory.
Theory texts (or theorists) from the past appeared selectively, in so far as they made
a critical contribution to the phenomenology of the concept.^19 Concepts, although
debatable and variable in meaning, were not assumed to change too much over time.
The interests were therefore wholly synchronic. The thought that we might not be
dealing with the same concept, or that our own mental world might be alien to the
past, seems not to have been of any concern. Yet the fact that linguistically sensitive
thinkers had little or no appreciation of the problem of history, has struck a number
of commentators as odd. The bland conceptualist synchronic assumption seemed to
be: ‘if we shout loudly enough Plato will reply in English’ (Condren 1985: 50).^20
In addition, this conceptual approach, or issue orthodoxy, spawned a number
of political concepts texts, such as the early Macmillan publications, begun in the
1960s and recovered again in the 1980s. Not everyone moved in unison on the
theme of conceptual analysis, but the crucial point of the enterprise was clear.
For several generations of political theory or political philosophy academics and
postgraduates—outside of the history of political theory domain—conceptual theory
and issue orthodoxy passed as mainstream technical or professional political theory.
Theorists developed intellectually, reading and teaching within the issue orthodoxy
conceptual approach. The idea was presumably that the reader was actually getting
unsullied ‘pristine political theory’, when what they were really getting was a very
focused and occasionally somewhat parochial angle on theory. This is not to demean
the work itself, which was and is often insightful and pedagogically immensely useful,
but the assumptions behind it haveneverbeen seriously addressed. Theorists oddly
seem to favour historical and conceptual blinkers to a more open perspective. The
energy underpinning this issue orthodoxy enterprise appeared to diminish slightly in
the last decade of the century, although it remains very muchtheestablished form.
Further, this ‘issue orthodoxy’ trend underpinned many introductory texts in polit-
ical theory, particularly from the 1950s onwards. Stanley Benn’s and Richard Peters’
Social Principles and the Democratic Statestarted this trend and it carried on till the