Political theory as a subfield of political science

This essay was written in january as part of an exam in a course titled Social Studies of
Science.

My field of study would probably best be described as political theory, and more broadly,
political science. The label of political theory, however, cover a very broad range of intellectual
interests and pursuits, and one may even doubt that there exist enough commonality as to warrant
one to speak of a field in any determinate manner. This vagueness of my field of study, and its
rather insecure institutional place within academia, is actually part of what I would like to
discuss in this paper.

Political theory is not science and the claims its practitioners make are rarely seen as claims to
knowledge or truth. This puts me in difficulties with regard to the present exam question: much
of the course material, concerned as it has been with science proper, will not be straightforwardly
applicable to the field of political theory. But in this paper I will attempt an analysis of political
theory as a field. By this I mean that I will not concern myself with describing prevalent theories
and traditions in political theory and trying to explain them with reference to the social context.
Rather, I will analyze political theory as a discipline that is, its identity and place amongst
other disciplines in academia.

This is not because I find the first set of questions unimportant. Indeed, in my view such
reflections ought to be conducted by theorists themselves, so as to make the field in some sense
more self-reflective. This would be the demand for what Bernard Williams calls reflective
social understanding:

[T]he education of political philosophers should include such epistemological materials as will
help them to get some measure of the varying claims of the sociology of knowledge. As it has
been said that metaphysicians and philosophers of language should not be verificationists, but
should have a verificationist conscience, so political philosophers should have a readiness to be
embarrassed by the possibility of reflexion on the formation and direction of their views
(Williams 2006: 160).
Yet I will not pursue such reflections in the present paper. Partly because I find it difficult that to
do to in as brief a space as this. Partly because very little of the course material seem relevant to
such a task. Choosing instead to analyze political theory more broadly as a discipline it will be
possible to keep this paper more in line with the themes, if not the specific theories, addressed in
the course material.

As I said before, political theory is not a science. Yet it is currently a subfield of political science.
This fact causes some tension within the discipline. It is not surprising, therefore, that calls are
sometimes made for the separation of political theory from political science. I will now point to
one such case of late, and make a suggestion of what kind of institutional or economic logic may
account for such calls for separation.

In 2007 the political science department at Pennsylvania State University decided to no longer
offer political theory as a main field of study for graduate and Phd students. The debate that this
decision sparked recently reached the scholarly journals (Brown 2010; Gunnell 2010; Kasza
2010; Kaufman-Osborn 2010; Rehfeld 2010). I will draw on some of the arguments in this
debate, but first I would like to pick up on some themes of the course that I think may help to
explain the temptation to exclude political theory from the discipline of political science.

(1) There is within science always a struggle for economic resources, and this struggle
determines what kind of research gets done. Thus there is a vital need to position and frame ones
research and discipline as highly important and useful.

(2) The prestige and status of science is unique in contemporary society.

Both these themes have often been subject for discussion in the lectures of this course, and is
also discussed in the course literature (primarily Bucchi 2004; Ravetz 2006). They are of course
the basic starting points that make the social study of science important and interesting. I will
now try to build on these two ideas and analyse political theorys position as a subfield of
political science.

If (1) covers not only the practise of the natural sciences, but also every other kind of intellectual
and academic activity, then, if we combine it with the fact (2) that science is highly esteemed, we
get the formula: (3) There is an incentive for all academic disciplines to present themselves as
constituting science.

Well then, what distinguishes political theory as a subfield in political science? Wendy Brown
supplies an answer: [P]olitical theory is the sole outpost of nonscience in an ever more
scientized field (Brown 2010: 681). While political theory cannot plausible dress itself in the
robes of science, as Brown puts it, the other subfields of political science potentially can. Then,
to the extent that political theory asks the big questions about the study of politics, of its

methodology and of social ontology, political theory makes itself an annoyance to its subfield
neighbours. Not simply because it, through its existence, take up a proportion of the existing
resources allotted to the discipline and therefore annoys those who simply deem it a worthless
practise but because political theory may then be regarded as undermining a key factor
determining the size of those resources, namely the possibility to present the discipline to
policy makers as well as the public as a hard science. (This reaction is quite understandable,
since, after all is said and done, who would wish to suffer the fate of the humanities?)

This partly explains, I think, the existence within social science of quite nave and outdated ideas
about science. If we combine the formula (3) with the fact that in the society at large science is
still generally understood in a rather narrow positivistic fashion, then we need not be surprised
that the very same conception of science is still entertained and propagated by scientists. After
all, they themselves will benefit from presenting their discipline as in accordance with these
conceptions of science. And hence, what Gregory Kasza describes as the marginalization of
political philosophy, ought not to surprise us.

Make no mistake: political philosophy presents a threat to todays mainstream political science.
Contemporary research in the philosophy of science offers little justification for the neopositivist template that still dominates empirical research in political science. To ask graduate
students to probe the basic ontological, episte- mological, and normative questions of philosophy
and apply what they learn to contemporary research in political science is to give away the store.
The only way to stop philosophical inquiry from undermining the status quo is to exorcise it
from graduate education. That is why philosophy requirements have disappeared from the
curriculum. (Kasza 2010: 699)
Naturally, they are opposed to including in their discipline any intellectual enterprise asking the
kind of questions Kasza sees as characteristic of political philosophy (he prefers the term
philosophy over theory but treat them as interchangable):

What is the character of the human being and human society? What is politics and what should
be the proper scope and objectives of political research? What sort of knowledge about politics is
possible? What is science? What is a good society? (Kasza 2010: 697)
On the contrary, these scientists are rather happy in a state of affairs in which most graduate
students are no longer taking courses that would problematize the correspondence between the
social and natural sciences (Kasza 2010: 699).

I will now expand on this issue of the distinctiveness of the social sciences. Kasza speaks of the
neo-positivists. But let us return to the earlier proponents or rather, to one of their critics.
Isaiah Berlin was moving in the circles of British positivist philosophers, but became a staunch

critic. In Does Political Theory Still Exist? he discussed the scientistic ambitions of an even
earlier age, the ambitions of those who, in the wake of Newton, had believed that the monstrous
muddle of social and political doctrines could be cleared away by the strong new broom of
scientific method (Berlin 1999: 162). Here is Berlins estimation of that project:

Nevertheless, attempts made by the philosophes of the eighteenth century to turn philosophy, and
particularly moral and political philosophy, into an empirical science, into individual and social
psychology, did not succeed. They failed over politics because our political notions are part of
our conception of what is to be human, and this is not solely a question of fact, as facts are
conceived by the natural sciences; nor the product of conscious reflection upon the specific
discoveries of anthropology or sociology or psychology, although all these are relevant and
indeed indispensable to an adequate notion of the nature of man in general, or of particular
groups of men in particular circumstances. Our conscious idea of man of how men differ from
other entities, of what is human and what is not human or inhuman involves the use of some
among the basic categories in terms of which we perceive and order and interpret data. To
analyze the concept of man is to recognize these categories for what they are. To do this is to
realize that they are categories, that is, that they are not themselves subjects for scientific
hypothesis about the data which they order. (Berlin 1999: 162-63)
The first part of this paragraph may simply express the thought that there are inevitably
normative questions that can never be solved by greater scientific knowledge in social and
political matters. The second part, however, have more far-reaching consequences. For these
concepts and categories, these models and presupposition of which Berlin speaks, are not simply
something that we use to make sense of our experience, they form that experience. As Bernard
Williams says, the understanding of historically and culturally different concepts and categories,
and the self-understanding of our own, is then a prime task of philosophy (Williams 1999: xv).
And since these models determine the actions and beliefs of individuals, there is a case to be
made that an understanding of the social world depend on understanding such models and modes
of thinking. No amount of careful empirical observation and bold and fruitful hypothesis will
explain to us what those men see who see the state as a divine institution (Berlin 1999: 167-68).
Political theory does exist, Berlin says, and its task is to bring, by an effort of imaginative
insight, understanding of the concepts and categories that have dominated societies; insights
without which these societies will remain opaque to us (1999: 168).

Still, it might be argued that this would be a humanistic enterprise, and that though it may
supplement political science it has no place in that science. In reply to this argument, we may
highlight the question of the self-understanding of our own concepts and categories. Then it
will be seen that political theory, the reflective dimension of political science as Gunnell calls
it (2010: 678), is integral to the discipline. For if there is no reflection on the categories and
concepts in terms of which we perceive and order and interpret data, then we would not be
able to make conscious choices about crucial methodological questions, and we would pursue

our work unconscious of the presuppositions and social ontology that by necessity direct it. One
does not simply by an empirical study discover what kinds of entities exist in the social world.
On the contrary, a social ontology is conceptually prior to the study of that world though the
result of empirical work may then influence us to change our model and basic concepts of
society. My point is: Either you try to be explicit about this ontology and try to understand the
historical and sociological causes of these preconceptions, so as to make informed choices. Or
you dont.

What I am saying here could perhaps be understood as the claim that one task of political
theorists is actually to conduct sociology of knowledge in relation to the field of political science.
And, secondly, that the nature of political science is such that the discipline would fare less well
as a science did it not make room for intellectual work of that kind. But I dont mean to say that
each and every political scientist must spend a whole lot of energy on these issues. As Bernard
Williams told the philosophers: while there ought to be a sensitivity to these issues, this
sensitivity may sometimes rightly take the form of simply looking the difficulty in the face and
getting on with something one actually believes in (Williams 2006: 160). However, at the level
of the whole discipline and the departments (such as Penn State), such an attitude is a different
matter completely.

I have in this paper suggested that a certain amount of political theory and sociology of
knowledge would make political science better off. Better off epistemologically speaking, I must
stress again. For as I have also suggested, there seem to exist a kind of institutional and
economical logic that threaten to make the discipline worse off in terms of resources, if it were to
acknowledge precisely that view. This social analysis explains why my field of study seem to
have an uncertain disciplinary home.[1] As long as the distinctiveness of social science of
which I have spoken is not broadly understood in the rest of society, then this state of affairs is
likely to remain. For the existence of a profession of political science depend on the willingness
of the rest of society to financially support it. And the extent of this willingness is crucially
dependent on whether the profession is regarded as science. So, whether due to an adaption
process, or to a selection effect, it is no surprise that there is tendency in the profession to
propagate the same conception of science as that which is held by its financiers. This perhaps
explains the prevalence of philosophically disreputed neo-positivist views of science, and why
a department of the discipline decided to give an entire subfield the boot.

Notes:

[1] The situation of course varies between different regions. Kasza complains of Americas
overspecialized academic structure, and the ill influence it has had in the United Kingdom

and Germany (Kasza 2010: 698). My view regarding Sweden is that Kasza would have less
cause for concern in this case.