We Have a Firm Foundation 23Further, because of this potential vulnerability and contingency, it makes moral and
political behaviour potentially more suspect, unreliable, and particular. Morality
can simply become prudence and expediency. Contractarian arguments flourish in
this setting. Reason of state, sovereignty, and political order also become important.
Order needs to be guaranteed in the context of diverse individual interests. Further,
the way individual preferences and wants can be coordinated also becomes significant.
Force or coercion is one path. However, doctrines, such as liberalism, have usually
favoured—in the twentieth century—education, self-regulating markets, welfare and
the encouragement to consent, contract, and public reasoning as more acceptable
ways of coordinating differences.
The third tradition is historical reason. This concentrates on the contention that all
human life is subject to the contingency of sociological and historical circumstance.
In many ways this is also integral to the sociological and historical perspectives (qua
Marx, Weber, Tönnies, Durkheim, or Duguit). Every human being is thus seen as a
child of their own time. They cannot escape from this destiny. Human nature is there-
fore contingent, mutable, and with no fixed essence. Humans do not have universal
interests. Ethics are dependent upon the communal circumstances of individuals.
Moral rules can be rich and determinative, but often at the cost of any universality.
Many modern day conventionalists, communitarians, multiculturalists, and nation-
alists appear to have their roots in this general perspective. However, a great deal
depends in this tradition as to whether a teleology of emancipation, or the like, is
attached to historical contingency. In writers such as Burke, Hegel, or Marx an under-
lying teleology can make overall sense of historical changes in terms of a sequence
of events with an underlying purpose. However, if one abstracts the teleology, then
history becomes more a matter of random chance, with no aim, purpose, or sense.
This is largely the position of many postmodern writers. Genealogy, in Foucault for
example, can be considered as a form of analysis utilizing strong accounts of historical
mutation and sociological reduction without any teleology.
The above three traditions should be seen as largely-contemporary artifice. Certain
political thinkers overlap a number of these traditions. Thus, they should be taken as
indicative cartographical references, which will be referred back to during the course
of the mapping of political theory—they are a way of orientating understanding. They
do not indicate a past reality.
Turning briefly now to the perception of classical normative political theory in the
twentieth century, there is a pervasive assumption of a long, continuous, and coher-
ent dialogue (or series of dialogues between and within traditions) about politics,
going back to the Greeks. Normative theory is envisaged as a generic category, which
covers all theories whose primary focus has been concerned with setting standards,
prescribing forms of conduct and recommending certain forms of life and institu-
tional structures. Therefore, normative theory covers—as a general category—the
wholeof the classical conception of political theory. This tradition was, for some,
lost in part of the twentieth century, and then recovered from the 1970s. It therefore
embodies what some modern commentators have called ‘the return of grand the-
ory’. The significance of the idea of ‘return’ is due to the fact that (in one important