The Nature of Political Theory

64 The Nature of Political Theory

to be pessimistic about all government-led initiatives—simply because they are not
generated through market choice. It is deeply cynical of all human motivations, seeing
self-interest and personal utility maximization at the root of all morality and politics.
Essentially its view of human beings is profoundly sterile. It has close connections with
a range of public policies concerning the slimming down of government (rolling back
to the state), the reduction of public expenditure, the movement from progressive to
proportionate taxation regimes, the market-based privatization of government, the
wholesale introduction of competitive market processes into all areas of government,
administration, and public service. It provides ideological succour for ideas such
as cost–benefit analysis, private finance initiatives, value for money policies, cost-
effectiveness measurement, market testing, introducing competition in the delivery
of all public service, and the like, many of which have permeated public policy
debate in Britain and North America (see Peter Self 1993, 2000). As the original
1960s rational choice theorists wanted to model the democratic voter on the market-
based consumer, so rational choice in the 1990s and 2000s has wanted to model
government bureaucracies, health care, education, and the like, on the private firm.
This movement in public policy is not only due to rational choice theory. However,
rational choice is still complicit in a more general ideological shift.
In terms of the general perception of political theory, there are some odd sociolo-
gical parallels with behaviouralism. Like behavioural political theory, rational choice
has mainly been a North American phenomenon, taking up a powerful niche in the
contemporary politics academy. It also shares a basic positivist fideism. However,
there is a key difference to behavioural theory. Behavioural theory, in the 1950s and
1960s, faced a comparatively weak and demoralized profession of political theory.
Apart from the European contingent of émigrés theorists, such as Arendt or Strauss,
the bulk of theory (outside empirical theory) was constituted by forms of logical
positivism and linguistic philosophy (to be examined in Part Two). These forms of
philosophy were rooted (unwittingly in many cases) in an empiricist foundationalism,
which gave immediate credence to empirical claims as genuine first-order knowledge.
Thus, behaviouralism was able, fairly easily, to roll over the opposition, for a time.
However, rational choice—despite its success in the academy—developed during the
1980s. This coincided with the so-called rediscovery of normative political theory, the
early confident halcyon days of the methodological debates around Skinner’s work,
Rawls justice-based argument, postpositivist and many other diverse critiques. In this
sense, it encountered a wide-ranging diverse opposition from within other domains
of political theory. This has considerably (and thankfully) limited its scope.
In conclusion, the dominant aims of political science still remain tied to the
informal and empirical, rather than the formal, institutional, historical, or normative.
Although some of the more extravagant mid-twentieth century claims of empirical
political theory to ‘colonize’ completely the whole of political theory have now con-
tracted, political science is still the far more dominant partner within North American
and European political studies. Empirical political theory, despite the post-empiricist
and post-positivist arguments, still remains committed to the measurable, quanti-
fiable, and testable. However, the aspiration for empirical theory (particularly in