Note on the relevance of political theory

Why political theory is needed

A theorist is not content with a stopgap settlement of a dispute; the aim is to find what lies at the bottom of a problem and to offer a different set of principles in answer, and that requires a vision reaching past the case in hand. Such work tends to begin in a crisis. Theory grows out of a society's difficulties, prompted by some breakdown and by the belief that clearer understanding can put things right, which is the sense of Hegel's image of the owl of Minerva taking flight only as darkness falls. Artists and poets share the theorist's imagination; what marks theory off is that its search is deliberate and planned, where poetry springs up of itself.

Its uses can be grouped under four heads. (1) Concepts: institutions differ from society to society because they rest on different sets of ideas, so liberty, equality, justice and authority have to be examined and not taken for granted. (2) Criticism: it holds actual practice up to ethical standards, which is how arguments for constitutional rights, for the reform of institutions or for the limits of state power are made. (3) Order and orientation: it asks what a good political order is and gives citizens reasons for choosing among competing political programmes. (4) Method: it supplies the ideas and concepts that political science incorporates for analysis, description, explanation and criticism.

The need has been questioned. Easton listed four causes of what he saw as a decline: historicism, moral relativism, hyper-factualism and positivism. Behind the charge lay the complaint that the classical tradition is full of value judgements no empirical test can check, a complaint pressed first by logical positivists in the 1930s and then by behaviouralists; some went as far as to announce that political theory had declined or even died. The revival answered this. Strauss argued that a science which refuses normative questions is left helpless before totalitarianism, unable to tell the just from the unjust or right from wrong; Arendt and others likewise restated the worth of the classical tradition; and as early as the 1930s, scholars had turned to the history of ideas to defend liberal democracy against the totalitarian creeds of Nazism, fascism and communism. The verdict is that a society that stops theorising politics loses the language in which it can criticise itself.

Conclusion

Political theory remains relevant because every society must keep asking what it values and why. It cannot be replaced by data alone, but it also has to stay close to evidence if it is to be believed.