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Political Theory, Political Science, and Politics

Forty years ago, Isaiah Berlin published an essay in which he argued that political theory would never become a science because of the character of the questions with which it is concerned. Normative questions are among those “that remain obstinately philosophical.” And what is “characteristic of specifically philosophical questions is that they do not . . . satisfy conditions required by an independent science, the principal among which is that the path to their solution must be implicit in their very formulation.” According to Berlin, both formal and empirical sciences satisfy these conditions, whereas political theory does not. During the past forty years, political theory has grown considerably faster within political science departments than within philosophy departments in the United States, and today 81 percent of professional political theorists find themselves housed in departments of political science. Far from indicating that Berlin had it wrong, this accident of academic history merely sharpens the issue that he so cogently explicated. Political theory as a field remains “obstinately philosophical.” On a practical level, of course, this is a source of considerable frustration for political scientists and political theorists alike. To political scientists, the perpetual disagreements among political theorists and the repeated reconsiderations of the same issues and texts are indications that political theorists lack meaningful standards for assessing what constitutes good research. And