The Nature of Political Theory

50 The Nature of Political Theory

character development. It was also, by the early twentieth century, perceived to be
an important aspect of training in civic awareness and national consciousness. The
history of political theory thus embodied the narrative of the nation.
Internally, the value of the history of political philosophy was seen to be its embodi-
ment of the fundamental ideas of political science from the Greeks to the present day.
This was also integral to the metier ofStaatslehre. The conceptual separation between
institutional state theory, classical normative political theory, and the history of polit-
ical theory was not significant in the early decades of the twentieth century. The
importance of history, qua the history of thought, was also reinforced by philosoph-
ical Idealist thinkers. For many such thinkers, the history of theory either embodied a
teleological concern with the realization of certain ideas like freedom or human self-
realization, or, alternatively, an exemplification of the importance of the historical
mode of understanding in itself. Thus, the history of theory had a form of philo-
sophical imprimatur. The crises of the 1930s and 1940s focused historians of political
theory on the values implicit in the apparent embattled Western liberal ‘tradition’.
The practice of the discipline was seen to enable intelligent citizens to understand the
deep operative ideas implicit within liberal democratic institutions and thus confront
the menace of totalitarianism. This was particularly the case in much of the political
thought literature produced during this period. By the 1950s, the discipline moved
into what I have called, the ‘first wave’ of anxiety. Partly as a result of internal criticism
from empirical science, and partly as a result of anxieties over a perceived crisis of
confidence in the West, the history of political theory emphasized the theme that
it was concerned with a search for the ultimate knowledge of the right order. The
history of theory was thus seen experiencing a process of decline through modernity.
For Arendtians and Straussians, particularly, the need was to rediscover the universal
virtues of the classics by careful attention to texts, contexts, and authorial intentions,
but avoiding, at the same time, the trap of historicism. This entailed opening old
questions like that between the ancients and the moderns.
By the 1960s and early 1970s, the discipline settled for a short period. However,
potential divisions and problems were only under the surface. There were roughly
three perceptions of its role during this period, which continued until the end of the
century. The first, retained ideas from earlier periods, and saw the history of political
theory as a continuous canonical tradition, which addressed the ‘great questions’,
and could even therapeutically diagnose and address the modern ills. Straussians
and Arendtians have maintained their own views on this issue. Analytic-minded
philosophers enunciated a second response (which was also largely the view of many
political scientists during the 1950s and 1960s), that is, the history of political theory
could be viewed as a useful resource of testable hypotheses and conceptual conun-
drums. We could therefore pick up Machiavelli or Hobbes and debate with them and
consider whether they were offering sound arguments. In this sense, the historical side
was largely sloughed off and the analytic aspect moved to the fore. Hobbes became a
proto-rational choice theorist, Machiavelli a proto-realist on power, Kant became the
godfather of human rights or the friendly uncle of cosmopolitan ethics, and so forth.
This was lineage characteristic of more analytic-inclined histories of political theory