Panel 2A: Perspectives on the History of Political Thought -- friday, 17 October 2003, 3:15-5:15 p.m.
Chair: Joyce Mullan, Philosophy, Saint Xavier University
Discussant: Amy McCready, Political Science, Bucknell University
Abstracts:
Geoff Kennedy, “State Formation and the History of Political Thought”
The rise of post-modernist and other forms of textualist approaches to the history of political thought have resulted in a corresponding neglect of the significance of the state in political theory. While the issue of historical contextualisation has been raised , the state as an institutional locus of political power and domination has rarely been a component of the process of historical contextualisation. It is almost as if the current crisis of the state in terms of its dismissal by the extra-parliamentary left as well as the neo-liberal right has found its corollary in the increased neglect of the state in the history of political thought. In its stead we find increased emphasis being placed on the political uses of language: rhetoric, discourse and other forms of symbolic signification. Increasingly, linguistic historicism finding its convergence in such divergent schools as the new historicism of the 1990s and the historical revisionism of the 70s and 80s has supplanted political and social historical approaches to the study of political thought. Conventional political and social approaches to the history of political thought were often perceived to treat political theory in purely instrumental terms namely, as rationalizations for narrow political and social interests. Subsequent linguistic approaches to contextualisation, as responses to the reductionism of prevailing social and political approaches to political theory, have gone too are in the opposite direction by treating political theorising as a form of language game. In all cases, the process of establishing a context within which to interpret political theory is problematic. Political approaches conceived of politics in narrow institutional terms, abstracting the state from its social bases; social approaches tended to neglect the state by reducing it to narrowly defined social or economic concerns; and the more recent intellectual approaches once again treat political theory in terms of a discourse divorced or at least isolated from social reality altogether. This paper will argue that an historical contextualist approach to political theory must incorporate the process of state formation into any attempt to establish an historical context. State formation, in this sense, is distinct from institutionalist conceptions of state building in that it embeds the development of states within long term processes of social and economic change. Relating political theory to the historical process of state formation therefore entails more than merely relating it to contingent political debates within a particular time or to episodic political events. Rather, it entails relating the practice of political theorizing to the longer term processes of state formation that consist of a complex interrelationship between social and political developments.
Gayil Talshir, “Political Science between Theory and Praxis: The Objects of Ideology”
The debate over the nature of political research is as old as political research itself. One method of mapping the various approaches used in political studies is by applying the nexus of praxis-theory. The article critically examines this nexus in the context of non-empirical disciplinary approaches by exploring the case of 'Ideology'. The concept of ideology has been studied in-depth, generating internal theoretical discourse with little reference to empirical research. Once the discussion turns to the objects of ideology, however, we can discern a strong interconnection between political praxis and analytical approaches. The present discussion offers a diachronic analysis of three stages in the study of ideology: ideology as a function of class (mid-nineteenth century), ideology as a function of (totalitarian) regimes (early 20th century), and the fragmentation of ideological studies since the 'end of ideology' debate (1968 onward). The inevitable embeddedness of political theory in the changing political praxis calls for a rethinking of political theory and urges a new dialogue between empirical and theoretical political scientists.
Darren Walhof, “Political Theory as Practical Philosophy: Gadamer on Practice, Solidarity, and Tradition”
In his 1998 essay on Heidegger's
Nazism, entitled On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer
argues that philosophers possess no particular insight into politics and should
not be assigned any heightened responsibility in commenting on them. If this is
the case if philosophy is politically incompetent what is the fate of political
theory? What should the practice of political theory look like? Can and should
it include reflections on contemporary political events, and if so, how? Or
should it remain focused primarily on the history of political ideas for its own
sake?
This paper addresses these questions by turning to Gadamer's own work. In recent
decades, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics have been widely employed to
demonstrate the inadequacies of an empiricist approach to the social sciences.
In our discipline, this effort has largely involved political theorists standing
apart from researchers in other subdisciplines and criticizing their work.
Rarely, however, have political theorists thought through the implications of
Gadamer's hermeneutics for political theory itself. I argue that we can best
understand the nature of political theory and the vocation of the political
theorist in terms of Gadamer's appropriation of Aristotle's ideal of practical
philosophy.
I make this case by concentrating on three key concepts in Gadamer's thought:
practice, solidarity, and tradition. Gadamer rejects the modern scientific
approach that distinguishes theory, understood in terms of the distance achieved
through a particular methodology, from practice, understood as the application
of theory. He instead wants to reconceptualize theory and practice in
Aristotelian terms, in which our reflections on the good are not merely
theoretical and, thus, divorced from and prior to practice. Instead these
reflections are a form of participation; they arise from within practice, which
for Gadamer means that they arise fundamentally out of the solidarity that
underlies our political and social practices and binds us to each other. This
reflection or practical philosophy, as he calls it in his later essays works to
call forth and transform of our prejudices, thereby allowing us to see what is
and to see what is possible in ways that we could not before.
I argue that for political theorists, this kind of embedded reflection is at its
best when done in conversation with past thinkers. Here is where Gadamer's notion
of tradition becomes important. Although his emphasis on tradition has been
interpreted as mere conservatism, I argue that in fact it provides the means for
gaining the distance that makes reflection on practice possible. By engaging
historical texts through a fusion of horizons, one is able to see possibilities
that otherwise are unavailable.