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Political Imagination and Literature This distinction between what present-day scholars could call the practical and the systematic aspects of political science has been drawn repeatedly throughout the history of the discipline. Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses urge an appreciation of history, the study and emulation of exemplary leaders or great founders, and recognition of the role chance (Fortuna) can play in frustrating even the best-laid plans. In contrast to these books, Hobbes's Leviathan, at least officially, repudiates historical inquiry as a form of hearsay, posits a series of simple and parsimonious assumptions about human motivation, and offers a single and universal formula. Today, the conflicting tendencies within political science have come very much into the open. Academics have followed the architectonic path of turning the study of politics into a theoretical pursuit unconcerned with the needs of and far removed from the understanding of the ordinary citizen or political leader. No one reading the last dozen issues of the American Political Science Review would find much that would provide an answer to the most fundamental of all political questions: What is to be done?
In part as a response to the increased schematization of the discipline, policy scholars now produce little more than studies of current events almost completely devoid of historical perspective or theoretical underpinning. The political science section of the Yale Book Store, as in most university hook stores I have visited, is full of books that will have no conceivable shelf life beyond the current political season. Currently, political scientists are forced to choose between one of two identities: laboratory workers dedicated to model building and hypothesis testing or policy analysts whose work is governed by only the narrowest presentation and concern for the needs of the moment. This division affects the kinds of students who opt to major in political science and end up entering the profession. They are divided between the nerds who increasingly regard political science, like economics, as a branch of applied mathematics and the wonks who are often driven by an idealistic desire to make the world better but whose sense of the world only extends as far as the headlines of yesterdays newspaper. In what follows I propose a way Out of this deplorable state of affairs.
Political science has within it the resources to move beyond the current impasse and this is where political philosophy comes in. Political scientists, unlike economists, sociologists, and psychologists, have never completely abandoned the history of their discipline. Whatever some may think, political science is not a field like microeconomics or computer science for which the past is studied as simply a prolegomenon to the present. The history of political thought is not an antiquarian appendage to the real business of research. Rather, it is a repository and a resource of the fundamental problems of political research. Political philosophy is not a methodology, a doctrine, or a worldview, but an assemblage of problems that can help to deepen, enliven, and guide our investigations.
The study of the history of political thought alone cannot provide answers to todays questions, but it can lead one to the necessary starting points from which investigations should begin. These starting points present themselves as a set of questions or problems that are important because they have stood the test of time, because they have been treated by different political thinkers writing in different contexts at different times. The study of the history of these problems - like the relation between liberty and authority, the struggle between the need for justice and the recognition of constraints, and the theological or political dilemma-are useful insofar as they add depth to the investigation of, say, authoritarian regimes, the modernization of political and economic institutions, and the challenge to secular authority posed by the rise of fundamentalist religious movements. Without a sense of the history of these problems, one cannot develop an appreciation of their continual resurfacing or the limited ingenuity of traditional solutions to them. The best political science is, then, a political science deeply informed by the history of political philosophy. The advantage of approaching problems in political science from this perspective is twofold.
First, it can deepen the work of current investigators by bringing it into conversation with that of the best theoretical and political minds of the past. And second, such an approach should help to induce in researchers a useful skepticism regarding the uniqueness of the problems of their age since they will have ample evidence that contemporary problems are not unlike those confronted by thoughtful observers in previous times and places. On the negative side, studying the history of political thought may lead one to conclude that many of the deepest and most intractable political problems may simply not have solutions. This has always seemed to me to represent the highpoint of Enlightenment optimism. While Marx's assessment may be true of a limited range of technical or scientific problems, it is almost completely false about politics. Regarding social phenomena, human beings typically pose for themselves only the questions they cannot solve.
Certain problems are simply coterminous with political life and will continue to be so as long as people remain social and political animals. The debate about civil society and literature was sparked largely by Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work and his now famous Bowling Alone article. Although this literature often makes a perfunctory nod in the direction of Tocqueville's account of civic associations in Democracy in America, the whole history of the concept of civil society is left virtually untouched. The current discussion over the reemergence of civil society in the former Soviet Union as well as the alleged decline of civic associations in America would be immensely enriched by a consideration of Locke's Civil Government, Montesquieu's account of the mediating role of institutions in L Esprit des Lois, or Hegel's theory of civil society as a training ground of the modern virtues. Even the realization that the term civil society was coined by Adam Ferguson in his Essay on the History of Civil Society frequently goes unacknowledged. Recent work on ethnic and cultural conflict both within and between cultures has been given powerful empirical expression in Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.
The empirical investigations of the causes of such conflicts could be immeasurably strengthened by reference to Isaiah Berlins or Stuart Hampshires theories of moral pluralism and the necessary, if tragic, clash of competing goods and values. The view that different cultures foster the expression of competing and even contradictory claims about justice and the human good has found powerful theoretical support in works from Vicos New Science to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In fact, one could do no better than to return to Herodotus's History, the first and, in many respects, still the best account of the clash of civilizations ever written. The democratic peace literature characteristically invokes the name of Immanuel Kant as the godfather of the belief that democratic nations do not fight with one another. That a republican constitution under cosmopolitan law will secure peace is the premise of Bruce Russets excellent grasping the Democratic Peace. But the relation between democracy and peace -- a long-standing issue among political theorists -- tends mainly to be explored only in the most recent contexts and often with only the most selective definitions of what marks a country as a democracy.
Theorists like Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, who all thought deeply about the relation between institutional design and the propensity for war, could all be referenced productively in the current debates about conflict resolution and attaining a just and lasting peace among nations. The history of political philosophy deserves to stand at the center, rather than the periphery, of its parent discipline. In my department, all graduate students take a required course in statistics. They are not required to take a course that would provide them with a common vocabulary or set of concepts that would enable them to make sense of and interpret politics.
Perhaps this is because statistics and other methodologies are now regarded as the common language of political scientists everywhere. An advanced course in methodology now satisfies my departments foreign language requirement. The fact that facility with regression analysis is considered equally as valuable as and substitutable for fluency in French or Greek or German is an indication of just how parochial individual political scientists have become. Have two countries ever gone to war because of their conflicting views on methods of data gathering?
Politics is about ideas. No one will ever be able to understand fundamental political phenomena like war or revolution without first understanding the ideas that motivate the central political actors. I do not believe that the current breach between political philosophy and the rest of the political science discipline will be easily repaired. The forces of academic specialization and the division of labor are simply too entrenched to overcome or resist.
The sense of historically minded skepticism I am advocating is too far removed from the confident certainties peddled by todays political economists to appeal to many. Further alienating the formal theorists and their acolytes from philosophy are political theorists who produce either antiquarian studies of little conceivable interest to anyone but themselves or who embrace a postmodernist, feminist, and multicultural agenda that compels and justifies their isolation in self- sustaining academic ghettos. If the political science of the future is able to adopt the approach to fundamental problems I have been suggesting here, it may yet succeed in restoring coherence to a ruptured field. May this come quickly and in our time? Bibliography: Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty.
Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1969 Hampshire, Stuart. 2000. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Marx, Karl. Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Selected Works. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973. Putnam, Robert.
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1993
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