An Eclectic Subject 9Aristotelianism, Platonism, Cartesianism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, phenomeno-
logy, Marxism, pragmatism, poststructuralism, or analytic philosophy, all can attract,
unselfconsciously, the designation ‘theory’. Thus, political theory, whatever detractors
or critics may say, tracks the fragmented terrain of philosophical thought. In this
sense, there is a direct and obvious overlap in the usage of both theory and philo-
sophy. Yet the issue is not quite as clear-cut as one might hope. Whereas all philosophy
implies theory, not all political theory necessarily implies philosophy. This is borne
out in the general pattern of political theorizing. If, for example, one considers the
work of thinkers such as Bodin, Machiavelli, or Burke, then this point is more obvious.
None appear to write in what might be considered a philosophical manner, although
their ideas are undoubtedly both political and theoretical. Even in their own terms,
it would be odd to class, say, Burke and Machiavelli,simpliciter, as political philo-
sophers. In addition, much political theorizing during the twentieth century, would
not be classed conventionally as philosophy—this would especially be the case with
empirical or institutional political theory, and much of what goes under the rubric
of political ideology. One additional problem is that the notion of what philosophy
is also continues to mutate. Philosophy itself is not a stable or consistent practice.
Consequently, political theory is not clearly distinguishable from political philosophy
inallcircumstances. At most, one could conclude that political philosophy is a con-
testable species within an even broader and even more contestable genus of political
theory. In summary, the term ‘theory’ is not a straightforward concept.^5 It has a
continuing multifaceted relation with philosophy—however, on occasion it can also
be considered to be broader than the term ‘philosophy’.
Finally, how does theory relate to the term ‘politics’? My own supposition is that
politics is not an independent ‘thing’ which we theorizeabout. This judgement is
more thepathologyof one modern conception of theory. The self-consciousness of
politics is not written into the nature of the world; it is rather the outcome of a com-
plex series of reflective critical vocabularies, which have become intertwined with
and constitutive of practices. In this sense, politics is a rich ‘world of experience’,
which already embodies the solidified forms of past conceptual artifice. Thus, when
thinking about politics, we do not come to an unmediated natural entity or social
object, which needs external explanation. Conversely, politics is itself a richly-textured
artefact of reflective languages. The modernist separation of the ‘fact-orientation’ of
politics from ‘abstracted’ theory is itself tied in this case to the growth of forms of
philosophical materialism, naturalism, empiricism, and positivism in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, and its consequent seepage into common sense.
The ‘factual-orientation’ view of politics is thus the product of certain comparat-
ively recent historical developments in the understanding of political theory and
philosophy.
In summary, politics is not one simple thing to which we refer. It is the site of a
multiplicity of vocabularies. Theory is therefore more ambiguously linked to practice.
We are often in a double-bind here. In a premodern sense, we still expect to see polit-
ical theory as intimately linked, almost mimetically, with a consensual conception
of politics. Yet, in a modernist and postmodernist frame, theories often constitute,