84 The Nature of Political Theoryimportance of certain philosophical methods and the universality of their application
to issues such as politics or morality. Thus, although, in the early stages, the philo-
sophical structures led to a thinned down (virtually skeletal at times) perception of
political theory, nonetheless, there was still an unwavering sense of the universality
of philosophical theory, with little or no initial self-doubt about its own method. In
fact, one might hazard the judgement that, if anything, it suffered from intellectual
hubris, an almost overweening sense of its own rightness and appropriateness as the
only universally-applicable philosophical approach. The second qualification is that
many of the formulations of this notion of theory also blended well, at times for-
tuitously, with other conceptions of theory already discussed in Part One. This was
particularly the case with empirical political theory. There was therefore a founda-
tional blending of concerns here (particularly with logical positivism), where some
of these newer conceptions of theory appeared to give philosophical and founda-
tional support to the empirical enterprise. The third qualification relates to the new
developments of theory in the 1970s. The advent of this was the publication of
Rawls’Theory of Justice, in 1971, which initiated a veritable industry of comment-
ary, as well as a new found confidence in the whole enterprise of political theory.
A number of commentators have even postulated the beginnings of political the-
ory in this period. At first glance, this appeared either to be a break again from
what had already been taking place in theory (qua logical positivism or linguistic
philosophy), or, for others, it was a return to a grand, older tradition of normative
theory. There is some sense to both of these judgements, however the stress in this
discussion will be laid on the continuity of certain philosophical or theoretical con-
cerns and the manner in which there was internal sequence to be observed within
the Rawlsian setting. This point underpins the overall assessment of theory, in this
context, namely that universal foundations were shaken by critique but never really
stirred.
Logical Positivism
The 1930s and 1940s saw radical changes in the philosophical climate in the English-
speaking world. Initially, the most significant of these was the advent of logical
positivism, a concentration on conceptual analysis and a more general interest in
Wittgensteinian-inspired linguistic philosophy. The general ambience was one of
analysing and clarifying political concepts. Philosophy was seen increasingly as a
‘second order activity’ concerned with ‘tidying up’ the logic and sense of political
speech. A loose description of this general style would be ‘analytic philosophy’. The
style of analytic philosophy was born largely out of a reaction to earlier philosophical
styles, particularly philosophical idealism, which had largely dominated philosoph-
ical discussion in the 1870–1920s period (see Vincent and Plant 1984; Boucher and
Vincent 2001). Analytic philosophy was, on one level, very different to idealism.
It was a much more pared down and sparse form of philosophical thinking which
paid inordinately close attention to the logic, semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics