Political theory, and its decline and resurgence

Introduction

The question asks what political theory is and then how it came to be called a declining enterprise and, later, to revive. The answer first states what political theory is and then follows its fortunes in the twentieth century.

What political theory is

Political theory is the systematic study of the ideas and principles on which political life rests: the values that shape constitutions, governments and everyday social life, and the arguments by which thinkers defend or criticise them. Its work has three sides. It is constructive, proposing how institutions and policies ought to change to become more democratic; critical, testing whether the institutions we actually deal with live up to the values they profess; and conceptual, clarifying what values such as freedom, equality and justice mean and why they matter. Underneath all three lie the basic questions of collective life: what government is for, how a society should be arranged, and what rulers and citizens owe each other.

It is not the same as the everyday activity called politics. Politics, in its wide sense, is the continuing negotiation by which a society reaches collective decisions in the face of different visions of what is just and desirable; political theory is the reflection on that activity and on the principles that ought to guide it. The DU syllabus places exactly this question at its opening: what is political theory and what is its relevance.

Decline and resurgence of political theory

The syllabus lists Kukathas's essay on the demise and rise of political theory among its suggestive readings. That text is not held; the account below rests on what the IGNOU justice units record about the same change.

The decline. After the Second World War the behavioural approach emerged, with its stress on a value-neutral, fact-based political theory. Normative principles and values, the traditional business of political theory, became scarce in political science as a whole. The study of justice, for instance, had been dominated since the nineteenth century by utilitarian theory, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which Rawls was later to call a morally flawed theory because it lets the good of some be sacrificed for the happiness of the majority.

The resurgence. Interest in normative political philosophy revived from the 1960s. John Rawls is credited with bringing normative principles back into the discipline through his theory of justice, set out in A Theory of Justice (1971), the most influential theory of distributive justice of the last half century. The revival then became a wide debate. Robert Nozick answered Rawls from the libertarian side in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974); communitarians replied with Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983) and Taylor's critique; feminists followed with Okin's Justice, Gender and the Family (1989); Dworkin and Sen reworked the measure of equality, Sen through capabilities. The same revival carried normative theory into new fields: global justice (Beitz, Pogge, Singer) and minority rights in multicultural societies (Kymlicka, 1995).

Assessment. The decline was a turn towards facts at the expense of values, and the resurgence showed that the questions of political theory, how society should be organised and what the state owes its citizens, could not be set aside. Rawls's theory has also shaped how benefits are allotted to deprived groups in liberal democracies, India among them.

Conclusion

Political theory is the reasoned study of the values of political life. Its post-war decline reflected the dominance of a value-neutral, fact-based approach, and its resurgence, led by Rawls, returned questions of liberty, equality and justice to the centre of the discipline; the syllabus's own listing of the theme as a reading shows its present standing.