The Art and Craft of Political Theory

Leslie Paul Thiele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138616776
• eBook ISBN: 9780429867958
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Art and Craft of Political Theory provides a critical overview of the discipline's core concepts and concerns and highlights its development of critical thinking and practical judgment. The field's interdisciplinary strengths are deployed to grapple with emerging issues and engage afresh enduring ideals and quandaries. While conventional definitions of key concepts are provided, original and controversial perspectives are also explored, revealing continuity in a tradition of thought while emphasizing its diversity and innovations. The Art and Craft of Political Theory illustrates the analytic and interpretive skills, the moral and philosophic discernment, and the historical knowledge needed to appreciate a tradition of thought, to contest its claims, and to make good use of its insights.

Topics include:

• science, ideology and normative theory
• biology, culture, human nature, power and violence
• ancient, modern and postmodern political thought
• liberty, equality, justice, reason and democracy
• racial, religious, gender and economic identities
• liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, anarchism, feminism and environmentalism
• social media, automation, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

This concise, lively and accessibly written book is essential reading for all students of political theory.

Chapter 1

Theory, Ideology and Irony

Political theory is an art and craft that cultivates and employs critical thinking and practical judgment. The chapter distinguishes political theory from scientific theory while underlining their shared concern for parsimony, accuracy and significance. The discipline’s interpretive, intersubjective, normative, conceptual and historical nature is explored, as well as its fraught relationship with ideology. In turn, the chapter introduces the notion of irony, a kind of skeptical reserve that serves political theorists as a countervailing force to ideology.

Setting Our Sights

We all have lenses in our eyes that focus light on our retinas. Many people also wear optical lenses made of glass or plastic to correct poor vision. In turn, microscopes and telescopes have magnifying lenses that bend light in specific ways, allowing one to see very small or very distant objects. Lenses focus light to produce clear images.

Theories are best understood as conceptual lenses. Theories help us put the world in focus. What optical lenses do for our vision, theories do for our understanding. Whereas optical lenses improve our sight, theories improve our insight. Theories help us produce clear mental images.

Most of us can see quite well without artificial lenses. Our unaided vision suffices. Likewise, most of us can get along quite well without engaging in formal theorizing. Our unaided intellect, common sense, and traditional cultural viewpoints prove adequate. Nevertheless, like the lenses we make out of glass or plastic to see more clearly, the theories we fashion out of concepts allow us to understand the world more thoroughly and profoundly. They provide magnified views of various features of the world that otherwise would go unnoticed. By allowing us greater insight, theories take us beyond superficial overviews. They enable radical insight. The word “radical” derives from the Latin word for “root.” Theories help us dig beneath the surface, getting to the roots of things.

We could certainly survive without theories. But science would end, as would philosophy, and cultural life would become greatly impoverished. Many practical affairs, such as agriculture and education would revert to quite primitive levels. A world without theory would be very different from the world we now inhabit.

Theory stands in contrast to practice, and that distinction is often employed to undercut the status of the former. “Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to ‘live up’ to our ideals typically founder on the gap between theory and practice,” Michael Sandel acknowledges. Still, theory and practice are engaged in a cyclical rather than hierarchical relationship. There is much more to theory than meets the eye, and much more theory behind practices than we might realize. As Sandel adds, “our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory. To engage in a political practice is already to stand in relation to theory. For all our uncertainties about ultimate questions of political philosophy—of justice and value and the nature of the good life—the one thing we know is that we live some answer all the time.”¹ Theory, in one form or other, undergirds our practices, channeling and enabling perceptions, attitudes, opinions, values, judgments and actions.

The French thinker Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was perhaps the first modern social scientist to insist that “no real observation of any kind of phenomenon is possible, except in as far as it is first directed, and finally interpreted, by some theory.”² To say that our most basic perceptions are directed and interpreted by theory is not to suggest that there is no reality out there apart from our theoretical musings about it. Indeed, the problem theorists face is not an absence of facts but an overabundance of them. Theories are the conceptual lenses that allow us to sort through a plethora of data and distill it into something useful. Theories organize the innumerable features and facets of reality. Without theories, we would not be able to tell which bits of reality are most relevant, and how they might be put into order.

As anyone who has worked with optical lenses knows, bringing specific things into clear view means that other things, which lie closer or further away, necessarily remain out of focus. The same principle holds for the lenses in our eyes. After gazing for a time upon some distant object, quickly glance back at the pages of this book. A moment of blurry vision occurs. Muscles in your eyes then rapidly alter the shape of your lens to adjust its focal distance, making the written words legible. Lenses allow us to focus on specific things. The rest of the world remains a blur.

Theories likewise focus our attention on specific clumps of reality, causing us to lose sight of other things that lie nearer or farther away. An economic theory that seeks to explain present levels of unemployment may focus expansively on the history of industrial cycles over large time scales. To do so, however, it would have to forego an in-depth psychological investigation of whether there has been a breakdown of the work ethic in recent generations. Likewise, a biological theory might suggest the inevitability of war based on an analysis of human hormones that induce aggression. In doing so, it might ignore evidence that collective violence may be decreased if not eliminated through the creation of political institutions. By organizing ideas, principles, and facts in specific ways, theories give us insight into parts of the world that otherwise would remain too complex and too chaotic to comprehend. In producing such focused images, however, theories necessarily leave a good deal out of the picture.

Lenses bend light to create focused images. But not all available light is used. The apertures of cameras and the irises perforated by the pupils in our eyes restrict the amount of light that passes through the lens. Too much light leads to overexposure, with much detail lost in the glare. Too little light leads to underexposure, with much detail lost in the gloom. As anyone knows who has walked into a dark theater from a well-lit lobby or out of a matinee performance into the brilliant afternoon sunshine, one can be blinded not only by darkness but by light.

Theories have analogous characteristics. They effectively regulate the amount of information we receive and the conceptual networks we form. Too little data or a dearth of conceptual linkages lead to dim, underexposed and impoverished images of the world. Yet too much data and a glut of conceptual linkages are no better. They produce overexposed images, a confusing hodgepodge of phenomena that is difficult to decipher. To produce a clear image, shadows are as necessary as well-lit surfaces.

Theories, like optical lenses, also direct our vision. They determine not only how we perceive but where we look. Those armed with telescopes do not point their lenses at bacteria, just as those equipped with microscopes do not chart planetary motion. Our conceptual lenses likewise influence what parts of the world we engage. Theories not only focus vision, they determine its direction.

Like photographers, theorists choose different lenses to do different jobs. In turn, they select the correct aperture, avoiding both underexposed and overexposed images. And the themes and topics they explore are largely products of the sorts of lenses theorists have at hand. Like optical lenses, theories are tools that help us better perceive and navigate the world. To best refract light and produce clear images, optical lenses must be carefully designed and manufactured to minimize distortions or aberrations. Likewise, to develop a good theory, three qualities must be in evidence.

Parsimony, Accuracy and Significance

There are no hard and fast rules for what makes a good theory. Still, three qualities are widely recognized to be crucial. The first is parsimony. To be parsimonious is to be sparing or frugal. To be theoretically parsimonious is to forgo all unnecessary speculation and detail. A good theory is thrifty: its descriptions, interpretations, explanations, and predictions are not cluttered with unnecessary facts or assumptions.

Theorizing, in this sense, is like mapmaking. Maps offer us outlines. The more details included in these outlines, the better they represent the actual geography. But too much detail is a problem. Lewis Carroll, the whimsical author of Alice in Wonderland, once told of a map of the German countryside that had a scale of one to one. It was, of course, a wonderfully detailed representation. But it could not be used because when unfolded it covered all the crops.

The pursuit of parsimony goes too far if it makes a theory not only simple but simplistic. If the map we create is simplified to the point where crucial details are lost, it will not help us find our way about. A map that reveals mountain ranges and major bodies of water but leaves out all highways and thoroughfares might be wonderfully simple and compact, but it will not help us travel from city to city. Accordingly, the second quality that makes for a good theory is accuracy. An accurate theory reveals those parts of the world it is targeting with precision and without distortion. Theories should be sufficiently accurate to allow for fine-grained analysis.

If a theory is both parsimonious and accurate, it is deemed elegant. An elegant theory concisely and precisely interprets, describes, explains, or predicts. It simplifies reality enough to make it comprehensible but remains detailed enough to avoid ambiguity.

The third quality for which theorists strive is significance. Significant theories illuminate an important part of the world. If we create maps of places no one ever visits, wants to visit, or ever will visit, we theorize in vain. If we do not point our conceptual lenses at interesting and important things, there is not much point in looking through them. However parsimonious and accurate they might be, if our theories fail to offer significant insights, they fail as theories.

There are two key threats to significance. The first is tautology. To say that all bachelors are unmarried is to speak tautologically. It is simply to utter a definition. A theory becomes tautological when it offers nothing more than a reiteration of accepted terms. The important work of reasoning is foregone. A theory that predicts that all political science majors will, at some point during their college careers, enroll in political science courses is tautological. By “political science major” we mean a student taking courses in political science. This theory does not interpret, describe, explain, or predict. It simply (re)defines.

Tautological theories cannot be falsified. No evidence could be presented that would repudiate their claims. No gathering of new facts, no elucidation of principles or ideas, and no subsequent reasoning could undermine it. A tautological theory may provide a set of useful definitions that simply and accurately label features of the world. But its definitions do not challenge or reorganize our common understandings or illuminate the world in an original way.

To avoid tautology, a set of propositions must make itself vulnerable to refutation or falsification. Good theories are open to challenge, either from argument or evidence. One should be able to construct or at least imagine a set of reasons or an empirical test that would disconfirm it. Far from constituting a shortcoming, being susceptible to refutation or falsification is a prerequisite for good theory. If a set of propositions is not open to contestation by reasoned argument or gathered evidence then it is not a theory but a dogma, which is to say, an article of faith wrapped up in a circular series of definitions.

The second threat to significance occurs if our theories become trite. Something is trite when it is commonplace or self-evident. Trite propositions or theories affirm the obvious. To suggest that every student of political theory, regardless of race, gender or class, will take a breath at least once every five minutes is to say something trite. Because the statement could be falsified by a very determined student with excellent lung capacity, it is not a tautology. But we do not need a sophisticated theory to make such a banal statement. Simple observation and common sense tells us as much. To avoid triteness, theories must help us better understand a complex world. They must be insightful.

Scientific Theory and Social Science

Parsimony, accuracy and significance are qualities of any good theory. But they are typically identified as qualities of scientific theories. Scientific theories expound the laws or regularities that describe the behavior of things. Originally, the word science, from the Latin scientia, simply meant knowledge. Eventually, science came to mean knowledge of a certain sort, namely, a body of related physical laws combined with trusted methods for obtaining and testing such laws. These laws pertain to the regular, recurrent, and ideally invariant associations between and among events and things within the natural world.

A scientific theory is a set of hypotheses with robust explanatory force. It elucidates the way things behave with such parsimony and accuracy that a thorough explanation of the past and prediction of the future becomes possible. Still, scientific theories are never proven true. Their explanations and predictions might always be falsified based on further evidence or experimentation. While a scientific theory is never proven, it can be validated. Indeed, it is validated every time it survives an attempt to refute it. After many such validations, a scientific theory comes to be accepted as provisionally confirmed.

The typical method of confirmation in the natural sciences is the methodologically rigorous replication of the experimental process. This entails very precise forms of measurement. To the extent that human beings may be studied as mechanical objects or biological organisms, they are subject to scientific theorizing, rigorous experimentation, and the precise measurement this entails. Much modern medical research, for example, proceeds under these conditions. After all, the laws of physics, chemistry and biology apply to human beings no less than to rocks, trees, and other animals. Nevertheless, the farther one moves from the purely physical aspects of human life, the more difficult it becomes to study it scientifically.

Employing physiological and evolutionary theories, one may with great accuracy explain why and predict how a person will cry out and pull away suddenly if jabbed with a sharp pencil. With somewhat less accuracy, employing economic theories and accounting for cultural traits, one may be able to explain why and predict how a person will react if offered $1,000 to break a pencil in two. In this case, the laws of physiology find an approximate analog in the demands of economic life that stimulate peop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Theory, Ideology and Irony
• 2. Human Nature, Power and Politics
• 3. Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Political Thought
• 4. The Politics of Identity and Difference
• 5. Enduring Challenges in a Changing World
• 6. Technology and the Human Prospect
• Index