38 The Nature of Political Theoryrevealing ‘great universal normative themes’ about human conduct. Alternatively,
some historical-minded theorists would claim that the history of political ideas has
no normative function whatsoever. History is just history and normative theory is
just normative theory. This presupposes a categorical distinction between history and
theory, also echoed in the writings of many normative and analytical theorists during
the twentieth century. In fact, many analytical philosophers—particularly admirers
of the American philosopher W. O. Quine—would see the distinction between history
and philosophy as absolutely categorical (on philosophical grounds).
The appeal of the history of political theory, as the key way of doing theory, is the
outcome of a range of preoccupations. These can be roughly subdivided into those
which areinternalto the practice of political theory itself, and, secondly, those which
form theexternalcontext of the practice of the history of political theory.
In terms of the internal reasons: first, the history of political theory is closely
related to the two previously outlined conceptions of theory. Primarily, the history
of political theory is largely the medium through which the ideas of classical norm-
ative political theory have been transmitted to readers.^17 Second, as stressed in the
previous section on institutional political theory, the state idea can also be seen as
the linchpin of the narrative sequence(s) underpinning classical normative political
theory. The assimilation of classical normative political theory into a ‘statist’ language
actually establishes the sequence. The whole history of political theory can then be
read through the concept of the state. In sum, the history of political theory links
symbiotically with both the perceptions of classical and institutional political theory.
A second internal reason relates to political vocabulary. A number of theorists,
over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, commonly used such terms as
political theory, the history of political thought, and political science, synonymously.
Thus, the legal historian Frederick Pollock, in his 1890 politics textbook,Introduction
to the History of the Science of Politics, defined the history of political theory as simply
the ‘history of the science of politics’ (Pollock 1890). This was a common perspective
taken by most commentators up to the 1930s in Britain, and even the United States.
Ernest Barker, in his 1929 inaugural Cambridge lecture for one of the first politics
chairs, also made this same terminological point. Political science, for Barker, was
simplyequivalentto political theory, understood as ‘a method or form of inquiry,
concerned with the moral phenomena of human behaviour in political studies’, which
could then be studied historically (Barker 1978: 18). Herbert Laski also noted in
his inaugural lecture, in the London School of Economics, ‘nothing in our field
of investigation is capable of being rightly understood save as it is illustrated by the
process of its development...A true politics, in other words, is above all a philosophy
of history’ (Laski in King (ed.) 1978: 4).^18 For Laski, therefore, ‘The past is never
dead, because it is capable of recreation at each moment of time’ (Laski in King
(ed.) 1978: 6). John Gunnell has also commented, with regard to contemporaneous
American politics academics, that ‘nearly everyone agreed that the role of political
theory was to develop the concepts and principles of a scientific political science
and the history of political theory was a central part of this project’ (Gunnell 1987:
16). The intrinsically historical character of politics was, therefore, for a short time,