12 The Nature of Political Theorydifferent epistemologies and ontologies embodied in the discipline. Thus, there is a
play between these various understandings of foundations. Virtually all the elements
discussed in this volume coexisted at the close of the twentieth century. In addition,
when I use the term ‘political theory’, understood as a self-conscious disciplinary
practice, it is considered to be a comparatively recent enterprise. Although this may
sound odd, political theory is understood, in this book, to be a creature of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although carrying a long tail of antecedents and
ancestors. This is not to undermine the practice in any way, or to diminish its role, it
is rather to be critically aware of its genealogy and not to overdo talk of its antiquity.
The pattern of the book adopts the following sequence. Part One explores the
prima faciegeneric foundations of political theory in the twentieth century. This is an
attempt to sort and analyse the overarching perceptions of political theory, at a broad
level of generality, during the bulk of the century. The five positions outlined are:
classical normative theory, institutional theory, historical political theory, empirical
political theory, and ideological theory. Some of these components—particularly the
classical normative, institutional, and aspects of historical and empirical theory—
have a far stronger contextual resonance; that is to say, they are more closely tied to
a historical periodization, approximately from 1900 to the 1940s. Other components
contain a much more currently recognizable patina. The way this discussion is initially
formulated may appear idiosyncratic: however, it is my contention that the idea of
political theory, despite being open to wide-ranging debate during the twentieth
century, was nonetheless in a state of internal flux until, in effect, the early 1970s.
Part One summarizes and provides a systematic overview of this state of flux. It is
also important to underline the point that the categories outlined (those used as
organizing pedagogic devices) are not necessarily-self-enclosed or discrete fields of
theorizing; conversely, there are complex overlaps between them. There is, as such,
no pristine essence to political theory. Political theory is and always has been rather
an uneasy combination of different modes of thought.
Part Two focuses on a dominant Anglo-American perception of political theory,
whose halcyon days were from the 1940s until the early 1990s. There are two chapters
in Part Two. The first, ‘Foundations Shaken but Not Stirred’, covers the advent of
logical positivism, the development of conceptual analysis, the so-called death of
political theory, linguistic philosophy, and the impact of Wittgenstein’s thought, and
particularly the idea of ‘essential contestability’. The second, ‘Bleached Foundations’,
focuses on the development of justice-based theory, predominantly after the publica-
tion of John Rawls’Theory of Justicein 1971. Part Two, in general terms, alludes to the
point that political theory at this stage actually did begin with an overt and systematic
challenge to the more comprehensive metaphysical foundationalism of particularly-
classical normative theory. In fact, at one point, the challenge involved a denial that
political theory even existed, or a claim that what had existed had just expired. How-
ever, its challenge to comprehensive foundationalism was deeply evasive and still
embodied a veiled and somewhat unstructured commitment to certain core founda-
tions. In addition, early justice-inspired theory, although also anti-foundational (in
that it also opposed comprehensive metaphysical foundationalism), actually went