Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do About it

Abstract

Our mandate is to engage in navel-gazing about the condition of political theory. I confess that I find myself uncomfortable with this charge because I think political theorists have become altogether too narcissistic over the past half-century. Increasingly, they have come to see themselves as engaged in a specialized activity distinct from the rest of political science-either a bounded subdiscipline within it or an alternative to it. Political theorists are scarcely unusual in this regard; advancing specialization has been a hallmark of most academic disciplines in recent decades. When warranted, it facilitates the accumulation of knowledge in ways that would not otherwise be achieved. In many physical, biomedical, and informational sciences, the benefits are visible in expanding bodies of knowledge that were scarcely conceivable a generation ago. Specialization has also proceeded apace in the human sciences, seen in the proliferation of dedicated journals, professional organizations and suborganizations, and esoteric discourses notable for their high entry costs to the uninitiated. Here tangible advances in knowledge are less easily identified, however. In political science, even when the new subfields fly interdisciplinary banners (as with the new political economy in much American and comparative politics, the turn to social theory in international relations, or to approaches from moral philosophy in theorizing about justice), those who have not paid the entry costs would be hard-pressed to