The Nature of Political Theory

We Have a Firm Foundation 37

been partly reclaimed, during the 1990s, within some recent normative political
theory, in the context of ‘institutional design’.^14

Historical Political Theory

This third section focuses on historical political theory. The gist of this approach is
that the study of political theory is unavoidably historical.Prima facie, theory is viewed
as a sequence of related theoretical contributions. Theory might thus be described as
an extended dialogue or conversation over what is important in politics. Therefore,
to be aware and educated, one needs to be conscious of the canon of theorists, from
the Greeks to the present day, and be prepared to engage in that ongoing critical
dialogue or multilogue. Although the history of political theory is a familiar idea to
many generations of students, nonetheless, this particular conception of theory is
one of the more complex ideas within the whole foundational scenario outlined in
Part One.
The reasons for this complexity are not hard to find: first, the concept of ‘history’
itself is as contested as the concept politics. We often take the existence of disciplines
and areas of intellectual expertise for granted, but this can often blind us to certain
important issues concerning the genealogy of such ideas. The formation of disciplines
and sub-disciplines, although creating more manageable bodies of knowledge, none-
theless can create the appearance of overly coherent autonomous bodies of thought,
where none actually exists. Like most disciplines, the origin of history outside the
university environment is hard to pin down. As Michael Oakeshott commented,
‘activities emerge naively, like games that children invent themselves. Each appears,
first, not in response to a premeditated achievement, but as a direction of attention
pursued without premonition of what it will lead to. How should our artless ancestor
have known what (as it has turned out) it is to be an astronomer, an accountant,
or an historian’ (Oakeshott 1991: 151). History, in its broadest sense, is concerned
with our beliefs and attitudes to the past, however, there are a number of different
ways in which the past can be conceived. There are also many methods through
which this past can be understood or recovered—which are essentially the domain of
historiography.^15 There are also diverse domains in which history is written—church
history, war, economics, science, philosophy, or social history, and so forth. In fact,
the notion of history, as in most disciplines, has been subject to extremes of mitosis
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^16
Second, certain forms of political theory are, intrinsically, historically orientated.
History, in other words, is part of theirsubstantivestructure. The most obvious
examples of this are Hegel and Marx. History can also be related to theory as an
essential academic ‘method’ of study or mode of human understanding. The prob-
lem is that these two dimensions often overlap in intricate and confusing ways.
Thus, the method can, for example, become a norm of research and even of polit-
ical thought, and the norm can be perceived as academic method, as, for example,
in Marxist history. A historical study of theory can also be perceived as a way of