The political and political theory; the need for political theory

Introduction

The political names a field of human activity, the making of binding collective decisions in conditions of disagreement; political theory names the disciplined reflection on that activity. The question asks how the two differ and why such reflection is needed. The syllabus puts the topic at the start of the course as the theorising of the political.

Meaning of the political

Politics is the activity through which a group whose members disagree arrives at decisions that bind all of them. Three things must be present. There must be disagreement to begin with, whether over what to aim at or only over how to get there; there must be a way of settling it by talk and persuasion rather than by bare force; and the disagreement must arise among people who see themselves as bound together in one group, for politics is always a collective affair. The word descends from the Greek polis, the city that was also the state, and Aristotle's remark that the human being is by nature a political animal means that taking part in a political community is where people realise their capacity for reason and virtue. No group can escape such decisions: it has to plan for what lies ahead, deal with neighbouring groups and divide what it holds, so politics belongs to the human condition and is not a hobby that some people choose to take up.

Two ways of drawing the boundary of the political compete. The broad one, which follows Max Weber's first description of politics as independent leadership in action, finds politics wherever some people are subject to the power of others, so that it is not confined to government or to politicians; on this view the election of a housing society's committee or a quarrel over who decides in a family is as political as a cabinet meeting. The narrow one, which Weber went on to adopt, keeps the word for leading or influencing a political association, which in modern conditions means the state; a question is political, on this view, when it concerns the control of state power, the ends that power is made to serve and what follows from its use. The state should not be mistaken for the government, which is only one of its parts: it also takes in the courts, elected assemblies, the armed forces and police, the civil service and local bodies. Theorising the political is the task of deciding where this boundary should run and what follows from drawing it in one place rather than another.

Meaning and nature of theory in politics

In everyday speech a theory is a guess. In political enquiry it is more demanding: a set of connected propositions organised around an explanatory idea and dealing with one class of political phenomena. Unlike loose political thought, which is time-bound and gathers the views of a whole community, a theory cannot take on every phenomenon at once and must concentrate on a class or type of issue. Sabine's well-known account says that political theory contains the factual, the causal and the valuational. Hecker calls it a dispassionate, disinterested body of philosophical and scientific knowledge whose understanding of the world outlasts the time and place of its writing.

Three features follow. A theory describes and explains (it is the scientific side), evaluates and prescribes (the philosophical side), and tries to hold both together; a political theorist has the dual role of scientist and philosopher. A theory is open to revision, because the meaning of an event is always open to new interpretations from new viewpoints. And it is critical, for it gives an account of politics that rises above the opinions of ordinary people. Theories are often grouped by approach, as historical, normative or empirical.

The difference. The political is the object of study: the events, relationships and decisions through which power is used and collective choices are made. Political theory is the study of that object: its concepts, explanations and standards. A strike, an election or a court order belongs to the political; the account of why people obey, what makes a government legitimate or what justice requires belongs to political theory. The first can be met in life without being understood; the second is an organised, critical attempt to understand it.

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

The political is unavoidable because people live in groups that must decide together; political theory is needed because those decisions affect all and need to be justified by reasons. It clarifies the concepts of public life, tests practice against ethical standards and helps a society answer its own failures.