U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

  • Publications
  • Account settings
  • Advanced Search
  • Journal List
  • Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Logo of phenaturepg

The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

Eileen m. hunt.

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN USA

Beginning with a historical perspective on the long and short past of political theory, I argue for three priorities for the field’s future: (1) theorizing why and how constitutional democracies corrode and die, and what might be done to stop rising authoritarianism and fascism, as well as racism and misogyny, in liberal egalitarian political systems; (2) the advancement of more predictive and future-oriented forms of political theory to address democratic corruption, democratic backsliding into authoritarianism, and other urgent political problems; and (3) the need to diversify the field and the wider discipline of political science by advancing women and people of color. To stay true to its own history, political theory should lend a helping hand to politics and society when democracy is in crisis.

Introduction

In 1999, I took my first trip to the American Political Science Association Meeting to present a paper, based on my dissertation on Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft’s theories of the relationship between the family and the state. I flew to Atlanta with one of my female friends from Yale who was presenting her work on the Scottish Enlightenment on the same panel. As we navigated the packed corridors of the conference hotel, we stood out. Sometimes it felt as if we were the lone women in political science, drifting in a sea of men’s blue suits. I joked to my friend that I thought we had gone into academia, not joined IBM.

In the twenty-two years since, I have attended most of the APSA meetings, and have organized divisions, panels, roundtables, and mini-conferences at them. I have recently served as a co-president of the association’s Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section with leading scholars from the fields of American Politics (Shauna Shames, Nadia Brown), Comparative Politics (Merike Blofield), and International Relations (Louise Davidson-Schmich), and represented the section on the committee for the Okin-Young Award for the best article in feminist political theory (which honors the work of two of the leading feminist political theorists of the turn of the twenty-first century, Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young). I was honored to be recently elected to the council of the APSA. Perhaps because of these experiences, I no longer find the conference as intimidating and overwhelming as I once did: I even look forward to the event as an opportunity to see friends, and to network to make more friends in the profession. Likewise, I no longer find the field of political theory as daunting as I did those jam-packed, blue-suited corridors of the conference hotel on the eve of Y2K.

After an inauspicious beginning, political theory has become my professional home. What keeps me coming back is that this place is not so much an office as a labyrinth. The field unfolds a capacious and seemingly limitless space. Like Borges’s library of Babel, it is equipped with too many doors, rooms, bookshelves, books, manuscripts, and articles to count, let alone read or map them as a whole (Borges 2007 ). The aporetic quality of political theory as an expansive and interdisciplinary field of study allows for a range of approaches to, and perspectives on, the theoretical and philosophical study of politics as it can be most broadly conceived.

Political Theory in/of Political Science Present

To read the 2021 APSA program is to immerse yourself in the disciplinary “matrix” of political science (Kuhn 2012 ). Filled with interminable hyperlinks that seductively gesture toward panels or persons or papers you need to know to stay in touch with what’s happening at the cutting edge of scholarship, the online program is a virtual reality or model that affords a meta-perspective on what the discipline itself is meant to represent (“The Matrix ( 1999 ) Transcript” n.d.). To add to the virtual vertigo triggered by reading the abstracts of every theory panel in the online program for APSA’s first-ever hybrid conference during year two of the Covid pandemic, I chose to do so in real time while I tuned into some video presentations of interest on my laptop.

The annual meeting of the APSA might be used as an imperfect, though pragmatic, gauge of the current state of the field of political theory (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ”). Although many other conferences support political theory and the history of political thought, the APSA annual meeting is the only major international conference that supports political theory in all of its forms. The first four divisions of the conference are (1) Political Thought and Philosophy (focusing on historical approaches to the study of political theory); (2) Foundations of Political Theory (run by the primary organized section for political theorists in the discipline of political science, and featuring normative, analytical, critical, historical, and literary approaches to the field); (3) Normative Theory (promoting contemporary political theorizing on normative questions and practical issues, with a strong analytical orientation in approach); and (4) Formal Political Theory (using game theory and other formal models as a basis for explaining empirical political phenomena).

Out of the fifty-nine divisions of the annual meeting, there are an additional six divisions that regularly host political theory in relation to other fields in the discipline of political science: (1) Women, Gender, and Politics Research (profiling feminist theory and intersectional approaches); (2) Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (emphasizing critical race theory and intersectional approaches); (3) Sexuality and Politics (drawing from queer theory, feminist theory, and intersectional approaches); (4) Politics, Literature, and Film (treating a range of literary approaches to the study of political questions); (5) Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics (a new section devoted to the history of ideas, epistemology, and philosophy of social science); and (6) American Political Thought (another new section that offers historical, philosophical, and literary approaches to the study of American political and legal ideas).

My (or any) attempt to derive a typology of the field of political theory from the latest APSA program cannot be comprehensive. Arguably every one of the fifty-nine divisions of the APSA meeting is rooted in political theory, in the sense that all political science takes a four-point path of inquiry: (1) it begins by asking abstract questions about some aspect of politics, (2) defining the terms of the debate on the problem at hand, (3) setting forth hypotheses or probable answers to the questions that guide the inquiry, and (4) defending those answers by way of systematic argumentation. It is in this fourth stage of analysis that the varieties of political theory—analytical, formal, empirically grounded, normative, historical, literary, critical, psychoanalytic, postmodern, poststructuralist, feminist, intersectional, and so on—diverge and distinguish themselves against the background of the broader discipline of political science.

Political Theory in/of Political Science Past

While other dominant fields of the discipline (International Relations, Comparative, American politics and other nation-state centered political studies) tend to treat theory as a tool for conceptualizing and explaining what has been discovered through a rigorous social scientific method for the empirical study of politics, political theory treats theory as valuable in itself. Indeed, political theorists tend to think of political theory as worthy of study in its own right: so much so that writing (and rewriting) its intellectual history is a foundational part of the work of the contemporary field (Strauss and Cropsey 1963 ; Skinner 1978a , 1978b ; Minogue 2000 ; Brett and Tully 2006 ; Armitage 2012a ; S. B. Smith 2012 ; Ryan 2012 ; Whatmore 2016 ; S. B. Smith 2018 ; Skinner 2018 ; Whatmore 2022 ). Despite varying timelines, terminologies, and foci, intellectual histories tend to divide the field into two main currents: theoretical , or oriented toward understanding the empirical political world (Minogue 2000 ; Shapiro et al. 2004 ), and philosophical , or raising abstract questions about politics for logical analysis and rigorous argumentation, and generating ongoing debate on moral, social, and political puzzles and problems that defy easy resolution or benefit from creative engagement from new perspectives (S. B. Smith 2012 ; Shapiro 2012 ).

Given the historical orientation of the field of political theory (and the broader discipline of political science) toward understanding its own abstractions, questions, and problems as they have developed over time, it is not surprising that the first division of the APSA conference is “Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches.” This division of the field is most strongly associated with the work of Quentin Skinner and the “Cambridge School” on the contextually oriented and linguistically attuned approach to tracing the uses and meanings of concepts and ideas in the “history of political thought” and “intellectual history” of the West and increasingly, far beyond it. It is also associated with the competing esoteric hermeneutics and close readings of canonical texts by Leo Strauss and the various camps of “Straussians” in developing a Western-centered history of political philosophy grounded in the classical Greek tradition.

Since the famous philosophical and methodological confrontation of the young Quentin Skinner with the much older “Professor Strauss” in the late 1960s, there have been various permutations and conglomerations of these two predominant schools in the history of political theory (Skinner 1969 ). What became increasingly common in the 1990s and 2000s were attempts to bridge the rigorous contextual approach of the Cambridge School with the philosophically oriented, interpretive, text-driven approach of the Straussians, often in combination with alternative theoretical and philosophical perspectives as found in feminism (Okin 1979 ; Okin 1989 ; Pateman 1989 ; Hirschmann 2009a , 2009b , 2018a , 2018b ; Arneil 1999 ; S. Smith 2017 , 2021 ), critical theory (McCormick 2007 ; Villa 2020 ), democratic theory (Allen 2009 ; Locke 2016 ; Pineda 2021 ), liberal theory (Levy 2000 ; Pitts 2009 ; Ryan 2014 ; Bejan 2017 ), poststructuralism and psychoanalytic theory (Wingrove 2000 ), international law and global history (Armitage 2000 , 2009 , 2012a ; Pitts 2018 ), disability studies (Arneil and Hirschmann 2016 ), critical race theory (Mills 2014 ; Pateman and Mills 2013 ; Ikuta and Latimer 2021 ; Rogers and Turner 2021 ), intersectionality (Locke and Botting 2010 ; Hancock 2016 ), post-colonial and indigenous political thought (Tully 1995 ; Ivison et al. 2000 ; Cordova 2007 ; Simpson 2017 ; Borrows 2019 ; Burkhart 2019 ; Allard-Tremblay and Coburn 2021 ), comparative political thought (Dallmayr 1999 ; Euben 2007 ; Lee 2018 ; Idris 2018 ), and so on.

Whatever their particular normative commitments or topical interests, historical approaches to political thought and philosophy assume that political theory, in all of its forms, is best understood in retrospect. One might say that they enact in practice the Hegelian metaphor of watching the “owl of Minerva” flying at dusk (Hegel 1991 ). Historians of political thought assume that political theory and philosophy can only know themselves when they are done, or close to done, their work in a given era.

Paradoxically, however, historians of political thought can never be truly done their work of writing and rewriting the history of ideas. Situated in the present, they look back on the past—both the short and the long term—in order to grasp what has been done by other political thinkers. Thus, the Hegelian owl cannot in practice be the historian: the bird in flight must be philosophy itself. The historian must take the short-term view afforded by the present (the “petite durée”) as she studies the flight of the owl toward an as yet unknown future, and yet she can elucidate the arc of owl’s path against the background of the long-term view of the past (the “longue durée”) (Guldi and Armitage 2014 ).

This “rear-view mirror” approach to studying political theory and philosophy animates much of the work in the wider field. Such a retrospective method—broadly construed—bridges analytical, critical, literary, normative, formal, feminist, intersectional, and other approaches to political theory in that they all depend in different ways on established models and methods of reasoning and interpretation, drawn from the short- and the long-term history of the field and wider discipline. Political theorists depend on these inherited models and methods (and their iterative updates) in order to make their systematic arguments, whether they are oriented toward empirical explanation of politics, philosophical reflection on its problems, or predictions of its future patterns or impacts. Indeed, looking into the “rear-view mirror” in the present to understand political theory in the past generates a paradoxically futuristic outlook: for it pushes the whole field in new directions by unearthing new topics and issues for contemporary scholarship to tackle.

A good example of how the history of political theory can help push the field toward new frontiers can be found in the 2021 APSA conference program: the virtual “author meets critics” roundtable on Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Forrester 2019 ). Forrester’s award-winning book offers a rethinking of John Rawls’s political philosophy of liberal justice by situating it in the broader currents of post-World War II politics and academic life. Forrester leads readers to consider Rawls not in mythic terms as the much-vaunted reviver of the fields of political theory and political philosophy in the post-war era, but rather in historical terms as the architect of the most influential philosophical model of liberal egalitarianism in the late twentieth century. She shows that Rawls and his followers’ approach to defending a liberal egalitarian theory of justice was fatally flawed by their myopic attempt to construct a systematic political philosophy in relatively abstract isolation from the contingencies and injustices of real-world politics. As a result, Rawlsianism developed blind spots to deep-seated issues of racism, poverty, disability, and gender inequality that continue to compromise the just (or fairly balanced) realization of equality and liberty for each and all in liberal constitutional democracies, which Rawls and his followers strove to justify as ideal regimes.

Responding to Forrester’s book, Jacob Levy alluded to the pioneering work of the recently deceased Charles Mills, the Jamaican philosopher whose critical analysis of the racial blind spot in Rawls’s “original position” has become a vital theoretical tool for both critical race theory and intersectional feminist theory (Mills 2009 , 2014 ; Gordon-Roth and Weinberg 2021 ). Levy argued for the continuing need to de-center our historical understanding of what constitutes political theory, Rawlsian and otherwise, before any hegemonic and limiting conception of the field ossifies in the curricula of elite but vastly influential (primarily East Coast) universities. Levy also highlighted the ways that Rawls’s first principle of justice (equal rights for each and all) lost play relative to the lively debates over his second principle of justice (the distribution of goods across an unequal population such that it would be to the advantage of the worst off).

In Levy’s view, this neglect of Rawls’s first principle of justice was to the detriment of understanding how Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism differed from both utilitarianism and socialism. Levy pushed for future scholarship to underscore the priority of equal rights in Rawls’s political thought, as well as the first principle’s ongoing relevance for theorizing the problem of racial injustice, in the spirit of Charles Mills’s work.

Erin Pineda then pivoted the discussion to take up a sharper version of a question that Levy had raised earlier: might we productively strive to take an agnostic approach to the question of what “counts” as political theory at all? Shifting toward a more neutral, pluralistic, and open-ended perspective on the recent history of approaches to our field, Pineda argued, would continue the ongoing resistance within the field to the re-inscription of Rawls and liberal egalitarianism as the font and model of normative political theories of justice.

Forrester replied to Pineda, Levy, and her other critics on the panel by affirming her general view of the “remarkable parochialism” of Rawls and Rawlsianism with regard to real-world politics, especially imperialism and territorial expansion of states, in the post-war era. At the same time, she provocatively asserted that she expected Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism to effectively serve as a “handmaiden” to public policy on distributive justice going forward, even as its philosophical limitations are widely dissected in the academy. If her prediction proves true, it will prove to be an ironic turn of events for the Rawls industry in academia: for real-world economic policy, not abstruse philosophy, would be Rawlsianism’s greatest long-range contribution to resolving problems of social justice.

Taking a longer rear-view-mirror perspective on the field, I would counter that political theory has insisted on its usefulness to both the broader discipline of political science and to politics itself, even when it is not heard. From the time of Plato and Aristotle, political theorists have aimed to provide foundational systems of thought to frame the study of politics (Lane 2016 ). Aristotle modeled how political theorizing could be applied to a dizzying array of subjects in order to glean insights into the world around us that would otherwise be missed. He applied his scientific (historical and empirically grounded) approach to understanding human political life to study everything from the aesthetic and ethical implications of Attic tragedy for the wider human condition (Aristotle 1961 ), to the crafting of an influential philosophical typology of the best and worst regimes (Aristotle 1996 ). Aristotle’s Politics inspired many typologies of ideal versus non-ideal regimes, such as in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu 1989 ), Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics (Dahl 1989 ), and Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999 ). These and other typologies of regimes legitimate and illegitimate—or, in the later Rawls’s more neutral terms, ideal and non-ideal (Rawls 1999 )—have shaped schools of thought in political science that continue to have resonance in multiple fields of study, and in the real world of politics, law, and policy.

Political Theory in/of the Future

With the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol still looming large in my political rear-view mirror, I would argue that the most important “real world” or applied work to be done by political scientists and political theorists is on democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism (Nalepa 2021 , 2022a ; Shapiro 2010 ; Meng 2020 ). In particular, the field of political theory should be diagnosing, conceptualizing, and critiquing the ways that corruption takes hold of a democracy, governed by and for the citizenry, and changes it into a tyrannical, authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist form of government, governed by a ruler or rulers’ fiat and force. This is an ancient problem that Aristotle, and his teacher Plato before him, made prominent in the history of Western political thought, with their famous typologies of how a democracy can evolve into a tyranny due to the decay of the principles and practices that enable rule by and for the people (Plato and Lane 2007 ; Aristotle 1996 ). If political theory fails to address this truly urgent problem in our own time, we risk losing the liberal democratic constitutional protections that ensure the equal rights upon which a free society—characterized by freedom of speech, association, thought, academic work, religion, and the press—depends.

Contemporary empirical political science has admirably persisted in this theoretical vein. In 2018, comparativists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published the book How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). They theorized how the rise of the Trump administration was as symptom of a larger problem in American politics: the steep degradation of norms and institutions of democratic governance since the 1980s and 1990s. Since the contested U.S. presidential election of 2000, in which Gore won the popular vote but the Supreme Court upheld Bush as the winner, there has been steady erosion of the representation of the majority will of the American citizenry. The erosion has beset the formal electoral system, due to strategic gerrymandering, and burdensome voter registration rules. It has also corroded the egalitarian spirit and letter of legislative-based representative government, due to the making and upholding of laws and policies that seek to undermine equal rights. During the Trump administration from 2016 to 2020, the rights of women, LGBTQ, immigrant, Black, and other racial and ethnic minority citizens have been under sustained attack by conservative leaders, legislators, judges, and bureaucrats (Gould 2021 ).

Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that the 2016 election of Trump to the U.S. presidency paved the way for further democratic backsliding in the oldest standing republic with a written constitution (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). They predicted that this trend might push the U.S. to shift from a global model of democracy toward its antithesis: a form of “competitive authoritarianism.” Associated with Russia under Putin, competitive authoritarianism features strong-armed executives who manipulate the electoral system to remain in office, and thereby undermine foundational principles of democracy itself: free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power to the rightful winners.

Levitsky and Ziblatt also contended that the authoritarian tendencies of Trumpian politics broke down a culture of liberal “forebearance” that had underwritten the legitimacy of American democracy in practice (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). Historically, elected representatives would forebear from the opportunity to tyrannically deploy power even when the separation of the three branches of U.S. government and the capitalistic market economy opened many doors for such abuse, from partisan blocking of Supreme Court appointees to the dissemination of ideology and misinformation through social media. Their arguments proved prophetic.

After the January 6th insurrection, Republicans loyal to Trump worked to block the former president’s (unprecedented) second impeachment from being confirmed by the Senate. The ultimate failure of the Republicans to forbear from a brute partisan show of loyalty to Trump manifested three forms of democratic corruption: (1) they squelched formal public scrutiny of the presidential administration’s shocking involvement in stoking violent insurrection at the Capitol while the legislative power was in session, (2) they contributed to the losing candidate’s undermining of public confidence in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, and (3) they threatened—for a tense few weeks in American history—the peaceful transfer of power to the rightful winner of the presidency.

In the 2021 APSA program—which was finalized during President Biden’s first four months in office—there were seventeen mentions of insurrection, with fifteen referring to the events of January 6th (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ” n.d.). Six of the latter were in the political theory divisions. In a panel co-sponsored by the American Political Thought and Race, Ethnicity, and Politics divisions, Elizabeth Beaumont highlighted “the violent insurrection” as an example of the long-standing problems of “white nationalism and white supremacy, and their recurring influence on politics.” In a panel on “Resistance Culture as a Remedy for Epistemic Justice” sponsored by the Foundations of Political Theory division, Mona Lena Crook and James M. Glass each offered systematic philosophical papers on the politics of the insurrection. Glass treated the psychological origins of the insurrectionists’ rage through the lens of Hobbes’s political theory of how “phantasy pushes the passions of hate, vengeance, and rebellion.” Crook analyzed the insurrectionists’ “semiotic violence”—the public performance of disrespect toward women, blacks, and other politically marginalized groups—as “attacking not only democracy—but also the principle of equality itself.”

Meanwhile, other divisions of the 2021 APSA conference, such as Democracy and Autocracy, were doing the heavy lifting in theorizing the causes and effects of the January 6th insurrection, and how it differed from other forms of political violence that threaten democracy, such as military-driven usurpations of power or coup d’etats (Singh 2021 ). Given that political theory typically begins with a retrospective perspective, the time is ripe for the field to theorize how the Trump presidency, patriarchal forms of populism, electoral corruption, and the unchecked technological influence of social media have compounded to erode three pillars of modern representative democracy: free and fair elections, protection of equal rights through legislative government, and peaceful transfers of power to newly elected representatives. Political theorists should follow the lead of Bonnie Honig (Honig 2018 , 2021 ), Lorna Bracewell (Bracewell 2021 ), Nancy Love (Love 2020 ), and Anthony DiMaggio (DiMaggio 2021 ) in picking up the pace of responding to current fascist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and authoritarian political behaviors and cultural trends in the U.S., especially post-2016, and incorporating them into philosophical and historical work on protest, conflict, and democratic citizenship (Locke 2016 ; Cohen and Ghosh 2019 ; Pineda 2021 ) and the causes of domination, inequality, and corruption (Sen 1995 ; Pateman and Mills 2013 ; Shapiro 2016 ; Sparling 2019 ).

As the complex lives and work of Socrates, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Truth, and hooks attest, engaging recent history and contemporary politics is as relevant to doing innovative political theory as studying issues and arguments from centuries ago. The thoughtful comparison of past and present issues is one way that political theorists and historians of political thought have long succeeded, over the centuries, in making their field’s work relevant to the future (Lane 2016 ).

Political theory, however, does not always make itself heard beyond its own cottage industries and echo chambers—and this may be its own fault. Though we strive to be practitioners in the field, we usually do not make it out of our own (home) offices (especially during the pandemic), unless it is to find coffee. Despite our dependency on email and social media to network with friends, we do not try hard enough to intellectually connect with other fields in the discipline or with other disciplines altogether. Rather we tend to get lost in an ever-narrowing labyrinth of our own making. The irony is that we are often led to a dead end, when we had hoped to find an outlet for our latest conceptual innovation.

There have been important exceptions to this “hedgehog” tendency to burrow into a one-way tunnel in the field of political theory (Berlin 2013 ). A number of scholars have insisted on building intellectual “corridors” to connect political theory and the history of political thought with the other fields of political science (Armitage 2012b ). Robert Dahl developed his theory of the most practicable form of modern democracy as polyarchy (rule by the many, instead of rule by the elite or rule by the whole people) in dialogue with the work of his comparativist colleague Juan Linz on democratic breakdown (Dahl 1989 ; Linz 1978 ). Linz’s work has since been inspirational for Levitsky and Ziglatt’s typology of the authoritarian signs of the death of democracy (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). Rogers Smith led the way for the incorporation of intersectional (race-, ethnicity-, nation-, class-, and gender-overlaid) approaches to the study of citizenship and community in the fields of American politics, constitutional law, and comparative politics of citizenship and migration (R. M. Smith 1997 ). Duncan Bell (D. S. A. Bell 2003 ; D. Bell 2010 ) and Alison McQueen (McQueen 2018 ) have shown how international relations, especially realist theories of international politics, could and should benefit from stronger and richer ties to the fields of political theory and the history of political thought.

Bell’s current work on H.G. Wells, the history of science fiction (sf), and their relevance for thinking about the future in modern political science represents a productive path forward for several fields in the discipline (D. Bell 2020 ). The APSA was founded in 1903, just at the time that Wells’s sf gained steam. His stories like War of the Worlds (1897) and “The Land Ironclads” (1903) quickly came to be seen as predictive of dystopian political futures, including the rise of the technologies—especially “big guns” and “machines” that can “walk”—that motored the two world wars of his lifetime (Hunt Botting 2020 ). Contemporary political science might benefit from periodically returning, in a time machine as it were, to its cultural roots at the turn of the twentieth century, when “modern political science fiction” took off with the literary success of Wells (Hunt Botting 2020 ).

Rooted in the influential and prescient sf novels of Mary Shelley, modern political science fiction has spawned a legion of dark predictions about the future that warn of the disasters that lie ahead if we fail to make critical changes to our political systems in the present. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) envisioned the use of science, medicine, and technology to make human children or humanoid Ais (Hunt Botting 2020 ). She also foretold the injustices and tragedies that would result if these creatures were bereft of love and care by their makers.

In The Last Man (1826), the predictive powers of Shelley’s gothic imagination were in full display (Shelley 2006 ). She foresaw with remarkable accuracy the national and international politics that would exacerbate a local plague into a lethal global pandemic. The pestilence shuts down countries and economies in the 2090s, much like SARS-CoV-2 did in early 2020. But Shelley’s ecological insight goes deeper and darker, much like contemporary thought on the existential threat of climate change. Her fictional global plague nearly wipes out the human species that unleashed it through international war, travel, and trade (Hunt Botting 2020 ).

The prophetic dimensions of Frankenstein and The Last Man are not due to any supernatural powers of the author, but rather to her serious study of history, politics, and science from the short and the long past. She paid close attention to the works of her parents, the revolutionary-era political philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. From her mother she learned the value of direct political engagement with the most pressing issues of her time. Wollstonecraft wrote about her experiences of the French Revolution in a variety of genres: the political treatise, journalism, history, letters, and the novel (Wollstonecraft 2014 ). Shelley, in turn, engaged the politics of the post-revolutionary period and the Napoleonic Wars in her own epistolary, journalistic, literary, and historical writings on conflict, peace, rights, and justice. She then applied the ideas she gleaned from her studies, her life, and her family to craft the riveting counterfactual plots of her two greatest novels.

Shelley used her historically and scientifically informed poliscifi to explore futuristic questions about humanity’s responsibility for their own creations and disasters. These stories have become modern myths that resonate with readers in an age of high-tech and pandemics. Of particular interest to contemporary political science should be The Last Man , in which Shelley theorized how the breakdown of republican or democratic government would exacerbate the political conflicts and economic crises that drive the spread of contagion (Hunt Botting 2021 ).

As devoted readers of Shelley and Wells, dystopian political thinkers from George Orwell to Octavia Butler to Margaret Atwood have also immersed themselves in philosophical and political ideas of the short and long past. In now-legendary works of modern poliscifi , they transformed these ideas into stories that everyone recognizes—even if they have not read their books—due to their prescient critiques of the worst forms of domination that politics can bring to the world (Hunt Botting 2020 ; Shames and Atchison 2019 ).

Political theorists and political scientists need not write their own political science fictions in order to philosophically benefit from reading them. Literature and history—perhaps especially when they are synthesized in “political science fiction”—can inspire political scientists and political theorists to chart new vistas of creative thought on the future and what can be done to make it better than what has transpired with tragic injustice in the past (Hassler and Wilcox 1997 ; Wilcox and Hassler 2008 ). Since the shocking result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there has been rising public interest in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , Butler’s Earthseed series, and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale series as predicting the death of American democracy at the hands of authoritarians, demagogues, fascists, totalitarian surveillance technologists, and racist religious patriarchs (Orwell 2021 ; Butler 2017 ; Atwood 2020 ). Dystopian poliscifi thus has a special potential in our political moment to inspire new and compelling theoretical work on why and how liberal constitutional democracies (such as the U.S.) corrode and die, and what might be done to stop rising authoritarianism and fascism, as well as racism and misogyny, in historically liberal egalitarian political systems (Shames and Atchison 2019 ; Hunt Botting 2021 ).

While turning to political science fiction to analyze our contemporary political crisis might seem laughable to some, we might recall that George Orwell wrote Animal Farm (1945) during the blitz in London. He salvaged the manuscript for publication after a bomb hit his and his wife’s apartment (Solnit 2021 ). Sadly, his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair—who proposed the form of a fable and helped him with editing—died before it was published, due to health complications exacerbated by wartime grief and anxiety (Topp 2020 ). The rest is history: Animal Farm continues to be taught in middle and secondary school curricula as a devastating allegory of the disasters that ensue when democracy and liberalism fail to stand up to the machinations of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism.

Redrawing the Boundaries of the Field: Gender, Race, Democracy

I began this essay on “the state of the field” of political theory on a personal note, because I think it helps to illustrate both how far the field has come in recent decades, and how far it needs to go, especially on issues of gender, race, and democratic inclusion, both in advancing new theories of politics and in shaping practices of professional development within the discipline. Although APSA no longer feels quite like a blue-suited matrix of the late 90s tech boom, the field of political theory still needs reform in order to realize its potential for promoting social justice for each and all, rather than reinforcing the biases that keep women and people of color out of curricula, high-profile platforms, and public debates that might, with them included, effect a sea-change away from a rising culture of patriarchal and racist authoritarianism toward stronger rights-based democracies around the globe.

We have reasons to hope for this philosophical and political shift. Over the past two decades and more, I have witnessed (and been part of) three wider changes in the field of political theory: (1) the increased representation of women, especially women of color, as authors and/or presenters in major events and/or journals; (2) greater attention to women of all cultures and eras as subjects of study in the history of political thought and normative political theory; and (3) organized movements to better incorporate women and other marginalized groups into political theory and cognate fields in the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy, literature, history, gender studies, and critical race studies. Although I am more at home in the field than ever before, I am aware of how fragile a victory this outcome is for the full range of historical minorities in the field: especially people of color and all people who identify as women.

At the 2021 American Political Science Association Meeting, the three major divisions devoted to political theory and the history of political thought had only two “manels” (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ” n.d.; Else 2019 ). If we include the fourth division, Formal Political Theory, there were only a handful more, in a branch of the field that has been traditionally men-dominant. This pattern is changing. Monika Nalepa, a comparativist whose work employs game theory and formal models to explain democratic corruption and transitional justice in democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian regimes, is the first chair of the new Formal Political Theory Section of the APSA, founded in 2020 (“Formal Theory – American Political Science Association” n.d. ).

The greater inclusion of people of color and other historically marginalized groups in the profession will make it possible, over time, to rethink how political theory is done from the inside out. As Amy Atchison points out in the introduction to her textbook, Political Science is for Everybody (2021), people of color are presently only 8.7% of the people in Anglo-American political science, while women of all backgrounds represent only 34.4% of the profession in the Anglo-American part of the discipline (Atchison 2021 ).

Atchison’s textbook represents a gestalt-shift on the field of political theory within the discipline of political science. Divided into three main sections, Political Science is for Everybody treats the discipline as having three overlapping fields: foundational political theories and philosophies, comparative approaches to politics, and international relations (Atchison 2021 ). The contributors treat national-level political systems as part of comparative politics, just as the APSA conference has evolved to do. Atchison and her colleagues highlight intersectional political theory—grounded in the work of Black feminists in the late twentieth century such as bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw (hooks 2014 ; Crenshaw 2022 )—as foundational to the field as ancient works by Plato and Aristotle.

On this inclusive model, what makes a political theory foundational is its ability to open up new and fruitful perspectives on the study of politics and political science itself. Intersectionality theorizes how gender, race, class, and other social statuses compound to create differing experiences of disadvantage in society for individuals and groups (Crenshaw 2022 ). Given the rise of racism, racist violence, ableism, misogyny, and sexual and class-based discrimination during the Trump administration and the present pandemic, there is no political theory that deserves more to be understood and used as a foundational tool for analyzing and resolving pressing problems of inequality and injustice. Intersectionality is the political theory of the future.

Toward a Political Theory/Political Science for the Future

With these critical political issues in mind, I strongly support “intersectional” practical reform efforts of the APSA to elevate the status of women, people of color, first-generation citizens and college students, and other historically marginalized groups more visibly in the profession. I also applaud efforts by colleagues to strive to be more inclusive and open-minded in the ways that they design curricula, admit graduate students, build panels, make editorial and grant decisions, shape reviewer pools and editorial boards, and grow networks or scholarly communities in the profession.

I also push political theorists as a profession to confront head-on the biggest problems and issues of our time, such as why the January 6th insurrection happened and how such acute threats to democracy and justice can be averted (Nalepa 2022b ; Singh 2021 ). So far, it has been mainly comparativists, not political theorists, who have risen to the occasion to theorize the causes, consequences, and political implications of this startling challenge to the stability of the world’s longest standing constitutional democracy. Political theorists ought to be at the fore of these vital matters, bringing conceptual clarity and argumentative rigor to murky and chaotic present-day debates on democracy’s future. Political theory should not settle for being a moral bystander to the attempted violent takeover of the U.S. capitol by racist, patriarchal, populist supporters of Trump and the consequent undermining of the perceived legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The greatest of political thinkers and writers—from Plato and Aristotle, to Wollstonecraft and Shelley, to Orwell, Butler, and Atwood—have not shied away from theorizing the causes and effects of democratic corruption. Nor should we, if we stay true to the history of our own field. The time to act, and to theorize, is now. In the present and near future, the only subject for political theory is and can be the preservation of modern democracy. For without democracy, and the equal rights it protects through contemporary systems of constitutional law, there will be no space to do political theory at all.

is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author or editor of nine books, most recently, Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Penn Press, 2020) and Portraits of Wollstonecraft (a two-volume reference set for Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2021). She is writing the concluding volume in her trilogy on Mary Shelley and political philosophy for Penn Press, titled The Specter of Pandemic: Mary Shelley and Post-Apocalyptic Political Thought.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

  • Allard-Tremblay, Yann, and Elaine Coburn. 2021. ‘The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing’, Political Studies , June, 10.1177/00323217211018127.
  • Allen D. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v . Board of Education: University of Chicago Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
  • ‘APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021’. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa21/#selected_tag .
  • Aristotle . Aristotle’s Poetics . 1961. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Aristotle . Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens . Cambridge University Press; 1996. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Armitage D. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire . Cambridge University Press; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Armitage D. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History . Harvard University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Armitage D. Foundations of Modern International Thought . Cambridge University Press; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Armitage D. What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée. History of European Ideas. 2012; 38 (4):493–507. doi: 10.1080/01916599.2012.714635. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Arneil B. Politics and Feminism . Wiley; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Arneil B, Hirschmann NJ, editors. Disability and Political Theory . Cambridge University Press; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Atchison AL. Political Science Is for Everybody: An Introduction to Political Science . University of Toronto Press; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Atwood M. The Handmaid’s Tale and the Testaments Box Set . 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bejan TM. Mere Civility . Harvard University Press; 2017. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bell D. Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme . Oxford University Press; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bell D. Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America . Princeton University Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bell DSA. Political Theory and the Functions of Intellectual History: A Response to Emmanuel Navon. Review of International Studies. 2003; 29 (1):151–60. doi: 10.1017/S026021050300010X. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Berlin, Isaiah. 2013. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History - Second Edition . Princeton University Press.
  • Borges JL. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings . New York: New Directions Publishing; 2007. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Borrows J. Law’s Indigenous Ethics . University of Toronto Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bracewell, Lorna. 2021. ‘Gender, Populism, and the QAnon Conspiracy Movement’. Frontiers in Sociology 5. 10.3389/fsoc.2020.615727. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ]
  • Brett A, Tully J, editors. Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought . Cambridge University Press; 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Burkhart B. Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures . Michigan State University Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Butler OE. Earthseed: The Complete Series . 2017. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Cohen EF, Ghosh C. Citizenship . John Wiley & Sons; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Cordova, Viola Faye. 2007. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova . University of Arizona Press.
  • Crenshaw K. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings . The New Press; 2022. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Dahl RA. Democracy and Its Critics . Yale University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Dallmayr FR, editor. Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory . Lexington Books; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
  • DiMaggio AR. Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here . Taylor & Francis Group: Routledge; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Else H. How to Banish Manels and Manferences from Scientific Meetings. Nature. 2019; 573 (7773):184–86. doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02658-6. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Euben R. Journeys to the Other Shore . Princeton University Press; 2007. [ Google Scholar ]
  • ‘Formal Theory – American Political Science Association’. n.d. Accessed October 15, 2021. https://formaltheorysociety.com/ .
  • Forrester K. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy . Princeton University Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Gordon-Roth J, Weinberg S, editors. The Lockean Mind . Routledge; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Gould CC. Editorial: Patriarchy and Populism During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Sociology. 2021; 6 (August):722393. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.722393. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Guldi J, Armitage D. The History Manifesto . Cambridge University Press; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hancock A-M. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History . Oxford University Press; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hassler DM, Wilcox C, editors. Political Science Fiction . Univ of South Carolina Press; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hegel GWF. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right . Cambridge University Press; 1991. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hirschmann NJ. The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom . Princeton University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hirschmann NJ. Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory . Princeton University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hirschmann N. Revisioning The Political: Feminist Reconstructions Of Traditional Concepts In Western Political Theory . Routledge; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hirschmann N. Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory . Cornell University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Honig B. The Trump Doctrine and the Gender Politics of Power. Text. Boston Review. July. 2018; 17 :2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Honig B. Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump . Fordham University Press; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • hooks, bell. 2014. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism . Routledge.
  • Hunt Botting E. Artificial Life After Frankenstein . University of Pennsylvania Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Hunt Botting E. Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to COVID-19. Frontiers in Sociology. 2021; 6 (March):624909. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.624909. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Idris M. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought . Oxford University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Ikuta JC, Latimer T. Aristocracy in America: Tocqueville on White Supremacy. The Journal of Politics. 2021; 83 (2):547–59. doi: 10.1086/709861. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Ivison D, Patton P, Sanders W, editors. Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples . Cambridge University Press; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kuhn TS. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th . Anniversary Edition. University of Chicago Press; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Lane M. The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter . Princeton University Press; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Lee F. Contours of Asian American Political Theory: Introductions and Polemics. Politics, Groups, and Identities. 2018; 6 (3):506–16. doi: 10.1080/21565503.2018.1494007. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Levitsky S, Ziblatt D. How Democracies Die . 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Levy JT. The Multiculturalism of Fear . Oxford University Press; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Linz JJ. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration . An Introduction: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1978. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Locke J. Democracy and the Death of Shame . Cambridge University Press; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Locke J, Botting EH, editors. Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville . Penn State Press; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Love, Nancy S. 2020. ‘Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, Patriarchy, and Right-Wing Populism’. Frontiers in Sociology 5 (December): 10.3389/fsoc.2020.619572. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ]
  • ‘The Matrix (1999) Transcript - Screenplays for You’. n.d. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://sfy.ru/transcript/matrix_ts .
  • McCormick JP. Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supranational Democracy . Cambridge University Press; 2007. [ Google Scholar ]
  • McQueen A. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times . Cambridge University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Meng A. Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes . Cambridge University Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Mills CW. Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls. The Southern Journal of Philosophy. 2009; 47 (S1):161–84. doi: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2009.tb00147.x. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Mills CW. The Racial Contract . Cornell University Press; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Minogue K. Politics: A Very Short Introduction . 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Montesquieu C d. The Spirit of the Laws . Cambridge University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Nalepa M. Transitional Justice and Authoritarian Backsliding. Constitutional Political Economy. 2021; 32 (3):278–300. doi: 10.1007/s10602-020-09315-5. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Nalepa M. After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming; 2022. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Nalepa M. ‘Regimes and Transitions’ Forthcoming in Political Science Experiment , edited by Joshua Tucker. 2022. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Okin SM. Justice, Gender, and the Family . Basic Books; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Okin SM. Women in Western Political Thought . Princeton University Press; 1979. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Orwell G. Nineteen Eighty-Four . Oxford University Press; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Pateman C. The Sexual Contract . Stanford University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Pateman C, Mills C. Contract and Domination . John Wiley & Sons; 2013. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Pineda ER. Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement . Oxford University Press; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Pitts J. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France . Princeton University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Pitts J. Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire . Harvard University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Plato, and Melissa Lane, tr. 2007. The Republic . Penguin Books Limited.
  • Rawls J. The Law of Peoples: With, the Idea of Public Reason Revisited . Harvard University Press; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Rogers ML, Turner J, editors. African American Political Thought: A Collected History . University of Chicago Press; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Ryan A. On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present . Norton & Company: W. W; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Ryan A. The Making of Modern Liberalism . Princeton University Press; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Sen A. Inequality Reexamined . Harvard University Press; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shames SL, Atchison AL. Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics . Columbia University Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shapiro I. The Real World of Democratic Theory . Princeton University Press; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shapiro I. The Moral Foundations of Politics . Yale University Press; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shapiro I. Politics against Domination . Harvard University Press; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shapiro I, Smith RM, Masoud TE, editors. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics . Cambridge University Press; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 2006. The Last Man . http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18247 .
  • Simpson LB. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance . U of Minnesota Press; 2017. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Singh, Naunihal. 2021. ‘Analysis | Was the U.S. Capitol Riot Really a Coup? Here’s Why Definitions Matter’. Washington Post , January 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/09/was-us-capitol-riot-really-coup-heres-why-definitions-matter/ .
  • Skinner Q. Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. History and Theory. 1969; 8 (1):3–53. doi: 10.2307/2504188. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Skinner Q. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 1 . The Renaissance: Cambridge University Press; 1978. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Skinner Q. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2 . The Age of Reformation: Cambridge University Press; 1978. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Skinner Q. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics . Cambridge University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History . Yale University Press.
  • Smith, Sophie. 2017. ‘Okin, Rawls, and the Politics of Political Theory’. In . https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/sophie-smith-wins-apsa-award.html .
  • Smith S. A Just Theory? Okin, Rawls, and the Politics of Political Philosophy. 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Smith SB. Political Philosophy . Yale University Press; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Smith SB. Modernity and Its Discontents . Yale University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Solnit R. Orwell’s Roses . New York: Random House; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Sparling RA. Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality . University of Pennsylvania Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Strauss L, Cropsey J, editors. History of Political Philosophy . 1963. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Topp S. Eileen: The Making of George Orwell . Unbound Publishing; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Tully J. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity . Cambridge University Press; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Villa D. Socratic Citizenship . Princeton University Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Whatmore R. What Is Intellectual History? Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons; 2016. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Whatmore R. The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press; 2022. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Wilcox, Clyde and Donald Hassler, eds. 2008. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction . Univ of South Carolina Press.
  • Wingrove ER. Rousseau’s Republican Romance . Princeton University Press; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Wollstonecraft M. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting: Yale University Press; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]

Advertisement

Advertisement

The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

  • Symposium: The State of Analytic Political Theory
  • Published: 24 March 2022
  • Volume 59 , pages 119–128, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

  • Eileen M. Hunt 1  

7737 Accesses

2 Citations

7 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Beginning with a historical perspective on the long and short past of political theory, I argue for three priorities for the field’s future: (1) theorizing why and how constitutional democracies corrode and die, and what might be done to stop rising authoritarianism and fascism, as well as racism and misogyny, in liberal egalitarian political systems; (2) the advancement of more predictive and future-oriented forms of political theory to address democratic corruption, democratic backsliding into authoritarianism, and other urgent political problems; and (3) the need to diversify the field and the wider discipline of political science by advancing women and people of color. To stay true to its own history, political theory should lend a helping hand to politics and society when democracy is in crisis.

Similar content being viewed by others

research paper political theory

A genealogy of political theory: a polemic

James Alexander

research paper political theory

Introduction: Theory’s Landscapes

Democratic imagination at the brink.

Jason Frank

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

In 1999, I took my first trip to the American Political Science Association Meeting to present a paper, based on my dissertation on Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft’s theories of the relationship between the family and the state. I flew to Atlanta with one of my female friends from Yale who was presenting her work on the Scottish Enlightenment on the same panel. As we navigated the packed corridors of the conference hotel, we stood out. Sometimes it felt as if we were the lone women in political science, drifting in a sea of men’s blue suits. I joked to my friend that I thought we had gone into academia, not joined IBM.

In the twenty-two years since, I have attended most of the APSA meetings, and have organized divisions, panels, roundtables, and mini-conferences at them. I have recently served as a co-president of the association’s Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section with leading scholars from the fields of American Politics (Shauna Shames, Nadia Brown), Comparative Politics (Merike Blofield), and International Relations (Louise Davidson-Schmich), and represented the section on the committee for the Okin-Young Award for the best article in feminist political theory (which honors the work of two of the leading feminist political theorists of the turn of the twenty-first century, Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young). I was honored to be recently elected to the council of the APSA. Perhaps because of these experiences, I no longer find the conference as intimidating and overwhelming as I once did: I even look forward to the event as an opportunity to see friends, and to network to make more friends in the profession. Likewise, I no longer find the field of political theory as daunting as I did those jam-packed, blue-suited corridors of the conference hotel on the eve of Y2K.

After an inauspicious beginning, political theory has become my professional home. What keeps me coming back is that this place is not so much an office as a labyrinth. The field unfolds a capacious and seemingly limitless space. Like Borges’s library of Babel, it is equipped with too many doors, rooms, bookshelves, books, manuscripts, and articles to count, let alone read or map them as a whole (Borges 2007 ). The aporetic quality of political theory as an expansive and interdisciplinary field of study allows for a range of approaches to, and perspectives on, the theoretical and philosophical study of politics as it can be most broadly conceived.

Political Theory in/of Political Science Present

To read the 2021 APSA program is to immerse yourself in the disciplinary “matrix” of political science (Kuhn 2012 ). Filled with interminable hyperlinks that seductively gesture toward panels or persons or papers you need to know to stay in touch with what’s happening at the cutting edge of scholarship, the online program is a virtual reality or model that affords a meta-perspective on what the discipline itself is meant to represent (“The Matrix ( 1999 ) Transcript” n.d.). To add to the virtual vertigo triggered by reading the abstracts of every theory panel in the online program for APSA’s first-ever hybrid conference during year two of the Covid pandemic, I chose to do so in real time while I tuned into some video presentations of interest on my laptop.

The annual meeting of the APSA might be used as an imperfect, though pragmatic, gauge of the current state of the field of political theory (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ”). Although many other conferences support political theory and the history of political thought, the APSA annual meeting is the only major international conference that supports political theory in all of its forms. The first four divisions of the conference are (1) Political Thought and Philosophy (focusing on historical approaches to the study of political theory); (2) Foundations of Political Theory (run by the primary organized section for political theorists in the discipline of political science, and featuring normative, analytical, critical, historical, and literary approaches to the field); (3) Normative Theory (promoting contemporary political theorizing on normative questions and practical issues, with a strong analytical orientation in approach); and (4) Formal Political Theory (using game theory and other formal models as a basis for explaining empirical political phenomena).

Out of the fifty-nine divisions of the annual meeting, there are an additional six divisions that regularly host political theory in relation to other fields in the discipline of political science: (1) Women, Gender, and Politics Research (profiling feminist theory and intersectional approaches); (2) Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (emphasizing critical race theory and intersectional approaches); (3) Sexuality and Politics (drawing from queer theory, feminist theory, and intersectional approaches); (4) Politics, Literature, and Film (treating a range of literary approaches to the study of political questions); (5) Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics (a new section devoted to the history of ideas, epistemology, and philosophy of social science); and (6) American Political Thought (another new section that offers historical, philosophical, and literary approaches to the study of American political and legal ideas).

My (or any) attempt to derive a typology of the field of political theory from the latest APSA program cannot be comprehensive. Arguably every one of the fifty-nine divisions of the APSA meeting is rooted in political theory, in the sense that all political science takes a four-point path of inquiry: (1) it begins by asking abstract questions about some aspect of politics, (2) defining the terms of the debate on the problem at hand, (3) setting forth hypotheses or probable answers to the questions that guide the inquiry, and (4) defending those answers by way of systematic argumentation. It is in this fourth stage of analysis that the varieties of political theory—analytical, formal, empirically grounded, normative, historical, literary, critical, psychoanalytic, postmodern, poststructuralist, feminist, intersectional, and so on—diverge and distinguish themselves against the background of the broader discipline of political science.

Political Theory in/of Political Science Past

While other dominant fields of the discipline (International Relations, Comparative, American politics and other nation-state centered political studies) tend to treat theory as a tool for conceptualizing and explaining what has been discovered through a rigorous social scientific method for the empirical study of politics, political theory treats theory as valuable in itself. Indeed, political theorists tend to think of political theory as worthy of study in its own right: so much so that writing (and rewriting) its intellectual history is a foundational part of the work of the contemporary field (Strauss and Cropsey 1963 ; Skinner 1978a , 1978b ; Minogue 2000 ; Brett and Tully 2006 ; Armitage 2012a ; S. B. Smith 2012 ; Ryan 2012 ; Whatmore 2016 ; S. B. Smith 2018 ; Skinner 2018 ; Whatmore 2022 ). Despite varying timelines, terminologies, and foci, intellectual histories tend to divide the field into two main currents: theoretical , or oriented toward understanding the empirical political world (Minogue 2000 ; Shapiro et al. 2004 ), and philosophical , or raising abstract questions about politics for logical analysis and rigorous argumentation, and generating ongoing debate on moral, social, and political puzzles and problems that defy easy resolution or benefit from creative engagement from new perspectives (S. B. Smith 2012 ; Shapiro 2012 ).

Given the historical orientation of the field of political theory (and the broader discipline of political science) toward understanding its own abstractions, questions, and problems as they have developed over time, it is not surprising that the first division of the APSA conference is “Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches.” This division of the field is most strongly associated with the work of Quentin Skinner and the “Cambridge School” on the contextually oriented and linguistically attuned approach to tracing the uses and meanings of concepts and ideas in the “history of political thought” and “intellectual history” of the West and increasingly, far beyond it. It is also associated with the competing esoteric hermeneutics and close readings of canonical texts by Leo Strauss and the various camps of “Straussians” in developing a Western-centered history of political philosophy grounded in the classical Greek tradition.

Since the famous philosophical and methodological confrontation of the young Quentin Skinner with the much older “Professor Strauss” in the late 1960s, there have been various permutations and conglomerations of these two predominant schools in the history of political theory (Skinner 1969 ). What became increasingly common in the 1990s and 2000s were attempts to bridge the rigorous contextual approach of the Cambridge School with the philosophically oriented, interpretive, text-driven approach of the Straussians, often in combination with alternative theoretical and philosophical perspectives as found in feminism (Okin 1979 ; Okin 1989 ; Pateman 1989 ; Hirschmann 2009a , 2009b , 2018a , 2018b ; Arneil 1999 ; S. Smith 2017 , 2021 ), critical theory (McCormick 2007 ; Villa 2020 ), democratic theory (Allen 2009 ; Locke 2016 ; Pineda 2021 ), liberal theory (Levy 2000 ; Pitts 2009 ; Ryan 2014 ; Bejan 2017 ), poststructuralism and psychoanalytic theory (Wingrove 2000 ), international law and global history (Armitage 2000 , 2009 , 2012a ; Pitts 2018 ), disability studies (Arneil and Hirschmann 2016 ), critical race theory (Mills 2014 ; Pateman and Mills 2013 ; Ikuta and Latimer 2021 ; Rogers and Turner 2021 ), intersectionality (Locke and Botting 2010 ; Hancock 2016 ), post-colonial and indigenous political thought (Tully 1995 ; Ivison et al. 2000 ; Cordova 2007 ; Simpson 2017 ; Borrows 2019 ; Burkhart 2019 ; Allard-Tremblay and Coburn 2021 ), comparative political thought (Dallmayr 1999 ; Euben 2007 ; Lee 2018 ; Idris 2018 ), and so on.

Whatever their particular normative commitments or topical interests, historical approaches to political thought and philosophy assume that political theory, in all of its forms, is best understood in retrospect. One might say that they enact in practice the Hegelian metaphor of watching the “owl of Minerva” flying at dusk (Hegel 1991 ). Historians of political thought assume that political theory and philosophy can only know themselves when they are done, or close to done, their work in a given era.

Paradoxically, however, historians of political thought can never be truly done their work of writing and rewriting the history of ideas. Situated in the present, they look back on the past—both the short and the long term—in order to grasp what has been done by other political thinkers. Thus, the Hegelian owl cannot in practice be the historian: the bird in flight must be philosophy itself. The historian must take the short-term view afforded by the present (the “petite durée”) as she studies the flight of the owl toward an as yet unknown future, and yet she can elucidate the arc of owl’s path against the background of the long-term view of the past (the “longue durée”) (Guldi and Armitage 2014 ).

This “rear-view mirror” approach to studying political theory and philosophy animates much of the work in the wider field. Such a retrospective method—broadly construed—bridges analytical, critical, literary, normative, formal, feminist, intersectional, and other approaches to political theory in that they all depend in different ways on established models and methods of reasoning and interpretation, drawn from the short- and the long-term history of the field and wider discipline. Political theorists depend on these inherited models and methods (and their iterative updates) in order to make their systematic arguments, whether they are oriented toward empirical explanation of politics, philosophical reflection on its problems, or predictions of its future patterns or impacts. Indeed, looking into the “rear-view mirror” in the present to understand political theory in the past generates a paradoxically futuristic outlook: for it pushes the whole field in new directions by unearthing new topics and issues for contemporary scholarship to tackle.

A good example of how the history of political theory can help push the field toward new frontiers can be found in the 2021 APSA conference program: the virtual “author meets critics” roundtable on Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Forrester 2019 ). Forrester’s award-winning book offers a rethinking of John Rawls’s political philosophy of liberal justice by situating it in the broader currents of post-World War II politics and academic life. Forrester leads readers to consider Rawls not in mythic terms as the much-vaunted reviver of the fields of political theory and political philosophy in the post-war era, but rather in historical terms as the architect of the most influential philosophical model of liberal egalitarianism in the late twentieth century. She shows that Rawls and his followers’ approach to defending a liberal egalitarian theory of justice was fatally flawed by their myopic attempt to construct a systematic political philosophy in relatively abstract isolation from the contingencies and injustices of real-world politics. As a result, Rawlsianism developed blind spots to deep-seated issues of racism, poverty, disability, and gender inequality that continue to compromise the just (or fairly balanced) realization of equality and liberty for each and all in liberal constitutional democracies, which Rawls and his followers strove to justify as ideal regimes.

Responding to Forrester’s book, Jacob Levy alluded to the pioneering work of the recently deceased Charles Mills, the Jamaican philosopher whose critical analysis of the racial blind spot in Rawls’s “original position” has become a vital theoretical tool for both critical race theory and intersectional feminist theory (Mills 2009 , 2014 ; Gordon-Roth and Weinberg 2021 ). Levy argued for the continuing need to de-center our historical understanding of what constitutes political theory, Rawlsian and otherwise, before any hegemonic and limiting conception of the field ossifies in the curricula of elite but vastly influential (primarily East Coast) universities. Levy also highlighted the ways that Rawls’s first principle of justice (equal rights for each and all) lost play relative to the lively debates over his second principle of justice (the distribution of goods across an unequal population such that it would be to the advantage of the worst off).

In Levy’s view, this neglect of Rawls’s first principle of justice was to the detriment of understanding how Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism differed from both utilitarianism and socialism. Levy pushed for future scholarship to underscore the priority of equal rights in Rawls’s political thought, as well as the first principle’s ongoing relevance for theorizing the problem of racial injustice, in the spirit of Charles Mills’s work.

Erin Pineda then pivoted the discussion to take up a sharper version of a question that Levy had raised earlier: might we productively strive to take an agnostic approach to the question of what “counts” as political theory at all? Shifting toward a more neutral, pluralistic, and open-ended perspective on the recent history of approaches to our field, Pineda argued, would continue the ongoing resistance within the field to the re-inscription of Rawls and liberal egalitarianism as the font and model of normative political theories of justice.

Forrester replied to Pineda, Levy, and her other critics on the panel by affirming her general view of the “remarkable parochialism” of Rawls and Rawlsianism with regard to real-world politics, especially imperialism and territorial expansion of states, in the post-war era. At the same time, she provocatively asserted that she expected Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism to effectively serve as a “handmaiden” to public policy on distributive justice going forward, even as its philosophical limitations are widely dissected in the academy. If her prediction proves true, it will prove to be an ironic turn of events for the Rawls industry in academia: for real-world economic policy, not abstruse philosophy, would be Rawlsianism’s greatest long-range contribution to resolving problems of social justice.

Taking a longer rear-view-mirror perspective on the field, I would counter that political theory has insisted on its usefulness to both the broader discipline of political science and to politics itself, even when it is not heard. From the time of Plato and Aristotle, political theorists have aimed to provide foundational systems of thought to frame the study of politics (Lane 2016 ). Aristotle modeled how political theorizing could be applied to a dizzying array of subjects in order to glean insights into the world around us that would otherwise be missed. He applied his scientific (historical and empirically grounded) approach to understanding human political life to study everything from the aesthetic and ethical implications of Attic tragedy for the wider human condition (Aristotle 1961 ), to the crafting of an influential philosophical typology of the best and worst regimes (Aristotle 1996 ). Aristotle’s Politics inspired many typologies of ideal versus non-ideal regimes, such as in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu 1989 ), Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics (Dahl 1989 ), and Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999 ). These and other typologies of regimes legitimate and illegitimate—or, in the later Rawls’s more neutral terms, ideal and non-ideal (Rawls 1999 )—have shaped schools of thought in political science that continue to have resonance in multiple fields of study, and in the real world of politics, law, and policy.

Political Theory in/of the Future

With the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol still looming large in my political rear-view mirror, I would argue that the most important “real world” or applied work to be done by political scientists and political theorists is on democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism (Nalepa 2021 , 2022a ; Shapiro 2010 ; Meng 2020 ). In particular, the field of political theory should be diagnosing, conceptualizing, and critiquing the ways that corruption takes hold of a democracy, governed by and for the citizenry, and changes it into a tyrannical, authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist form of government, governed by a ruler or rulers’ fiat and force. This is an ancient problem that Aristotle, and his teacher Plato before him, made prominent in the history of Western political thought, with their famous typologies of how a democracy can evolve into a tyranny due to the decay of the principles and practices that enable rule by and for the people (Plato and Lane 2007 ; Aristotle 1996 ). If political theory fails to address this truly urgent problem in our own time, we risk losing the liberal democratic constitutional protections that ensure the equal rights upon which a free society—characterized by freedom of speech, association, thought, academic work, religion, and the press—depends.

Contemporary empirical political science has admirably persisted in this theoretical vein. In 2018, comparativists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published the book How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). They theorized how the rise of the Trump administration was as symptom of a larger problem in American politics: the steep degradation of norms and institutions of democratic governance since the 1980s and 1990s. Since the contested U.S. presidential election of 2000, in which Gore won the popular vote but the Supreme Court upheld Bush as the winner, there has been steady erosion of the representation of the majority will of the American citizenry. The erosion has beset the formal electoral system, due to strategic gerrymandering, and burdensome voter registration rules. It has also corroded the egalitarian spirit and letter of legislative-based representative government, due to the making and upholding of laws and policies that seek to undermine equal rights. During the Trump administration from 2016 to 2020, the rights of women, LGBTQ, immigrant, Black, and other racial and ethnic minority citizens have been under sustained attack by conservative leaders, legislators, judges, and bureaucrats (Gould 2021 ).

Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that the 2016 election of Trump to the U.S. presidency paved the way for further democratic backsliding in the oldest standing republic with a written constitution (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). They predicted that this trend might push the U.S. to shift from a global model of democracy toward its antithesis: a form of “competitive authoritarianism.” Associated with Russia under Putin, competitive authoritarianism features strong-armed executives who manipulate the electoral system to remain in office, and thereby undermine foundational principles of democracy itself: free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power to the rightful winners.

Levitsky and Ziblatt also contended that the authoritarian tendencies of Trumpian politics broke down a culture of liberal “forebearance” that had underwritten the legitimacy of American democracy in practice (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). Historically, elected representatives would forebear from the opportunity to tyrannically deploy power even when the separation of the three branches of U.S. government and the capitalistic market economy opened many doors for such abuse, from partisan blocking of Supreme Court appointees to the dissemination of ideology and misinformation through social media. Their arguments proved prophetic.

After the January 6th insurrection, Republicans loyal to Trump worked to block the former president’s (unprecedented) second impeachment from being confirmed by the Senate. The ultimate failure of the Republicans to forbear from a brute partisan show of loyalty to Trump manifested three forms of democratic corruption: (1) they squelched formal public scrutiny of the presidential administration’s shocking involvement in stoking violent insurrection at the Capitol while the legislative power was in session, (2) they contributed to the losing candidate’s undermining of public confidence in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, and (3) they threatened—for a tense few weeks in American history—the peaceful transfer of power to the rightful winner of the presidency.

In the 2021 APSA program—which was finalized during President Biden’s first four months in office—there were seventeen mentions of insurrection, with fifteen referring to the events of January 6th (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ” n.d.). Six of the latter were in the political theory divisions. In a panel co-sponsored by the American Political Thought and Race, Ethnicity, and Politics divisions, Elizabeth Beaumont highlighted “the violent insurrection” as an example of the long-standing problems of “white nationalism and white supremacy, and their recurring influence on politics.” In a panel on “Resistance Culture as a Remedy for Epistemic Justice” sponsored by the Foundations of Political Theory division, Mona Lena Crook and James M. Glass each offered systematic philosophical papers on the politics of the insurrection. Glass treated the psychological origins of the insurrectionists’ rage through the lens of Hobbes’s political theory of how “phantasy pushes the passions of hate, vengeance, and rebellion.” Crook analyzed the insurrectionists’ “semiotic violence”—the public performance of disrespect toward women, blacks, and other politically marginalized groups—as “attacking not only democracy—but also the principle of equality itself.”

Meanwhile, other divisions of the 2021 APSA conference, such as Democracy and Autocracy, were doing the heavy lifting in theorizing the causes and effects of the January 6th insurrection, and how it differed from other forms of political violence that threaten democracy, such as military-driven usurpations of power or coup d’etats (Singh 2021 ). Given that political theory typically begins with a retrospective perspective, the time is ripe for the field to theorize how the Trump presidency, patriarchal forms of populism, electoral corruption, and the unchecked technological influence of social media have compounded to erode three pillars of modern representative democracy: free and fair elections, protection of equal rights through legislative government, and peaceful transfers of power to newly elected representatives. Political theorists should follow the lead of Bonnie Honig (Honig 2018 , 2021 ), Lorna Bracewell (Bracewell 2021 ), Nancy Love (Love 2020 ), and Anthony DiMaggio (DiMaggio 2021 ) in picking up the pace of responding to current fascist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and authoritarian political behaviors and cultural trends in the U.S., especially post-2016, and incorporating them into philosophical and historical work on protest, conflict, and democratic citizenship (Locke 2016 ; Cohen and Ghosh 2019 ; Pineda 2021 ) and the causes of domination, inequality, and corruption (Sen 1995 ; Pateman and Mills 2013 ; Shapiro 2016 ; Sparling 2019 ).

As the complex lives and work of Socrates, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Truth, and hooks attest, engaging recent history and contemporary politics is as relevant to doing innovative political theory as studying issues and arguments from centuries ago. The thoughtful comparison of past and present issues is one way that political theorists and historians of political thought have long succeeded, over the centuries, in making their field’s work relevant to the future (Lane 2016 ).

Political theory, however, does not always make itself heard beyond its own cottage industries and echo chambers—and this may be its own fault. Though we strive to be practitioners in the field, we usually do not make it out of our own (home) offices (especially during the pandemic), unless it is to find coffee. Despite our dependency on email and social media to network with friends, we do not try hard enough to intellectually connect with other fields in the discipline or with other disciplines altogether. Rather we tend to get lost in an ever-narrowing labyrinth of our own making. The irony is that we are often led to a dead end, when we had hoped to find an outlet for our latest conceptual innovation.

There have been important exceptions to this “hedgehog” tendency to burrow into a one-way tunnel in the field of political theory (Berlin 2013 ). A number of scholars have insisted on building intellectual “corridors” to connect political theory and the history of political thought with the other fields of political science (Armitage 2012b ). Robert Dahl developed his theory of the most practicable form of modern democracy as polyarchy (rule by the many, instead of rule by the elite or rule by the whole people) in dialogue with the work of his comparativist colleague Juan Linz on democratic breakdown (Dahl 1989 ; Linz 1978 ). Linz’s work has since been inspirational for Levitsky and Ziglatt’s typology of the authoritarian signs of the death of democracy (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 ). Rogers Smith led the way for the incorporation of intersectional (race-, ethnicity-, nation-, class-, and gender-overlaid) approaches to the study of citizenship and community in the fields of American politics, constitutional law, and comparative politics of citizenship and migration (R. M. Smith 1997 ). Duncan Bell (D. S. A. Bell 2003 ; D. Bell 2010 ) and Alison McQueen (McQueen 2018 ) have shown how international relations, especially realist theories of international politics, could and should benefit from stronger and richer ties to the fields of political theory and the history of political thought.

Bell’s current work on H.G. Wells, the history of science fiction (sf), and their relevance for thinking about the future in modern political science represents a productive path forward for several fields in the discipline (D. Bell 2020 ). The APSA was founded in 1903, just at the time that Wells’s sf gained steam. His stories like War of the Worlds (1897) and “The Land Ironclads” (1903) quickly came to be seen as predictive of dystopian political futures, including the rise of the technologies—especially “big guns” and “machines” that can “walk”—that motored the two world wars of his lifetime (Hunt Botting 2020 ). Contemporary political science might benefit from periodically returning, in a time machine as it were, to its cultural roots at the turn of the twentieth century, when “modern political science fiction” took off with the literary success of Wells (Hunt Botting 2020 ).

Rooted in the influential and prescient sf novels of Mary Shelley, modern political science fiction has spawned a legion of dark predictions about the future that warn of the disasters that lie ahead if we fail to make critical changes to our political systems in the present. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) envisioned the use of science, medicine, and technology to make human children or humanoid Ais (Hunt Botting 2020 ). She also foretold the injustices and tragedies that would result if these creatures were bereft of love and care by their makers.

In The Last Man (1826), the predictive powers of Shelley’s gothic imagination were in full display (Shelley 2006 ). She foresaw with remarkable accuracy the national and international politics that would exacerbate a local plague into a lethal global pandemic. The pestilence shuts down countries and economies in the 2090s, much like SARS-CoV-2 did in early 2020. But Shelley’s ecological insight goes deeper and darker, much like contemporary thought on the existential threat of climate change. Her fictional global plague nearly wipes out the human species that unleashed it through international war, travel, and trade (Hunt Botting 2020 ).

The prophetic dimensions of Frankenstein and The Last Man are not due to any supernatural powers of the author, but rather to her serious study of history, politics, and science from the short and the long past. She paid close attention to the works of her parents, the revolutionary-era political philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. From her mother she learned the value of direct political engagement with the most pressing issues of her time. Wollstonecraft wrote about her experiences of the French Revolution in a variety of genres: the political treatise, journalism, history, letters, and the novel (Wollstonecraft 2014 ). Shelley, in turn, engaged the politics of the post-revolutionary period and the Napoleonic Wars in her own epistolary, journalistic, literary, and historical writings on conflict, peace, rights, and justice. She then applied the ideas she gleaned from her studies, her life, and her family to craft the riveting counterfactual plots of her two greatest novels.

Shelley used her historically and scientifically informed poliscifi to explore futuristic questions about humanity’s responsibility for their own creations and disasters. These stories have become modern myths that resonate with readers in an age of high-tech and pandemics. Of particular interest to contemporary political science should be The Last Man , in which Shelley theorized how the breakdown of republican or democratic government would exacerbate the political conflicts and economic crises that drive the spread of contagion (Hunt Botting 2021 ).

As devoted readers of Shelley and Wells, dystopian political thinkers from George Orwell to Octavia Butler to Margaret Atwood have also immersed themselves in philosophical and political ideas of the short and long past. In now-legendary works of modern poliscifi , they transformed these ideas into stories that everyone recognizes—even if they have not read their books—due to their prescient critiques of the worst forms of domination that politics can bring to the world (Hunt Botting 2020 ; Shames and Atchison 2019 ).

Political theorists and political scientists need not write their own political science fictions in order to philosophically benefit from reading them. Literature and history—perhaps especially when they are synthesized in “political science fiction”—can inspire political scientists and political theorists to chart new vistas of creative thought on the future and what can be done to make it better than what has transpired with tragic injustice in the past (Hassler and Wilcox 1997 ; Wilcox and Hassler 2008 ). Since the shocking result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there has been rising public interest in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , Butler’s Earthseed series, and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale series as predicting the death of American democracy at the hands of authoritarians, demagogues, fascists, totalitarian surveillance technologists, and racist religious patriarchs (Orwell 2021 ; Butler 2017 ; Atwood 2020 ). Dystopian poliscifi thus has a special potential in our political moment to inspire new and compelling theoretical work on why and how liberal constitutional democracies (such as the U.S.) corrode and die, and what might be done to stop rising authoritarianism and fascism, as well as racism and misogyny, in historically liberal egalitarian political systems (Shames and Atchison 2019 ; Hunt Botting 2021 ).

While turning to political science fiction to analyze our contemporary political crisis might seem laughable to some, we might recall that George Orwell wrote Animal Farm (1945) during the blitz in London. He salvaged the manuscript for publication after a bomb hit his and his wife’s apartment (Solnit 2021 ). Sadly, his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair—who proposed the form of a fable and helped him with editing—died before it was published, due to health complications exacerbated by wartime grief and anxiety (Topp 2020 ). The rest is history: Animal Farm continues to be taught in middle and secondary school curricula as a devastating allegory of the disasters that ensue when democracy and liberalism fail to stand up to the machinations of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism.

Redrawing the Boundaries of the Field: Gender, Race, Democracy

I began this essay on “the state of the field” of political theory on a personal note, because I think it helps to illustrate both how far the field has come in recent decades, and how far it needs to go, especially on issues of gender, race, and democratic inclusion, both in advancing new theories of politics and in shaping practices of professional development within the discipline. Although APSA no longer feels quite like a blue-suited matrix of the late 90s tech boom, the field of political theory still needs reform in order to realize its potential for promoting social justice for each and all, rather than reinforcing the biases that keep women and people of color out of curricula, high-profile platforms, and public debates that might, with them included, effect a sea-change away from a rising culture of patriarchal and racist authoritarianism toward stronger rights-based democracies around the globe.

We have reasons to hope for this philosophical and political shift. Over the past two decades and more, I have witnessed (and been part of) three wider changes in the field of political theory: (1) the increased representation of women, especially women of color, as authors and/or presenters in major events and/or journals; (2) greater attention to women of all cultures and eras as subjects of study in the history of political thought and normative political theory; and (3) organized movements to better incorporate women and other marginalized groups into political theory and cognate fields in the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy, literature, history, gender studies, and critical race studies. Although I am more at home in the field than ever before, I am aware of how fragile a victory this outcome is for the full range of historical minorities in the field: especially people of color and all people who identify as women.

At the 2021 American Political Science Association Meeting, the three major divisions devoted to political theory and the history of political thought had only two “manels” (“APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021 ” n.d.; Else 2019 ). If we include the fourth division, Formal Political Theory, there were only a handful more, in a branch of the field that has been traditionally men-dominant. This pattern is changing. Monika Nalepa, a comparativist whose work employs game theory and formal models to explain democratic corruption and transitional justice in democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian regimes, is the first chair of the new Formal Political Theory Section of the APSA, founded in 2020 (“Formal Theory – American Political Science Association” n.d. ).

The greater inclusion of people of color and other historically marginalized groups in the profession will make it possible, over time, to rethink how political theory is done from the inside out. As Amy Atchison points out in the introduction to her textbook, Political Science is for Everybody (2021), people of color are presently only 8.7% of the people in Anglo-American political science, while women of all backgrounds represent only 34.4% of the profession in the Anglo-American part of the discipline (Atchison 2021 ).

Atchison’s textbook represents a gestalt-shift on the field of political theory within the discipline of political science. Divided into three main sections, Political Science is for Everybody treats the discipline as having three overlapping fields: foundational political theories and philosophies, comparative approaches to politics, and international relations (Atchison 2021 ). The contributors treat national-level political systems as part of comparative politics, just as the APSA conference has evolved to do. Atchison and her colleagues highlight intersectional political theory—grounded in the work of Black feminists in the late twentieth century such as bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw (hooks 2014 ; Crenshaw 2022 )—as foundational to the field as ancient works by Plato and Aristotle.

On this inclusive model, what makes a political theory foundational is its ability to open up new and fruitful perspectives on the study of politics and political science itself. Intersectionality theorizes how gender, race, class, and other social statuses compound to create differing experiences of disadvantage in society for individuals and groups (Crenshaw 2022 ). Given the rise of racism, racist violence, ableism, misogyny, and sexual and class-based discrimination during the Trump administration and the present pandemic, there is no political theory that deserves more to be understood and used as a foundational tool for analyzing and resolving pressing problems of inequality and injustice. Intersectionality is the political theory of the future.

Toward a Political Theory/Political Science for the Future

With these critical political issues in mind, I strongly support “intersectional” practical reform efforts of the APSA to elevate the status of women, people of color, first-generation citizens and college students, and other historically marginalized groups more visibly in the profession. I also applaud efforts by colleagues to strive to be more inclusive and open-minded in the ways that they design curricula, admit graduate students, build panels, make editorial and grant decisions, shape reviewer pools and editorial boards, and grow networks or scholarly communities in the profession.

I also push political theorists as a profession to confront head-on the biggest problems and issues of our time, such as why the January 6th insurrection happened and how such acute threats to democracy and justice can be averted (Nalepa 2022b ; Singh 2021 ). So far, it has been mainly comparativists, not political theorists, who have risen to the occasion to theorize the causes, consequences, and political implications of this startling challenge to the stability of the world’s longest standing constitutional democracy. Political theorists ought to be at the fore of these vital matters, bringing conceptual clarity and argumentative rigor to murky and chaotic present-day debates on democracy’s future. Political theory should not settle for being a moral bystander to the attempted violent takeover of the U.S. capitol by racist, patriarchal, populist supporters of Trump and the consequent undermining of the perceived legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The greatest of political thinkers and writers—from Plato and Aristotle, to Wollstonecraft and Shelley, to Orwell, Butler, and Atwood—have not shied away from theorizing the causes and effects of democratic corruption. Nor should we, if we stay true to the history of our own field. The time to act, and to theorize, is now. In the present and near future, the only subject for political theory is and can be the preservation of modern democracy. For without democracy, and the equal rights it protects through contemporary systems of constitutional law, there will be no space to do political theory at all.

Allard-Tremblay, Yann, and Elaine Coburn. 2021. ‘The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing’, Political Studies , June, https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211018127 .

Allen, Danielle. 2009. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education . University of Chicago Press.

Google Scholar  

‘APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2021’. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa21/#selected_tag .

Aristotle. 1961. Aristotle’s Poetics . Macmillan.

Aristotle. 1996. Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens . Cambridge University Press.

Armitage, David. 2000. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire . Cambridge University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Armitage, David. 2009. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History . Harvard University Press.

Armitage, David. 2012a. Foundations of Modern International Thought . Cambridge University Press.

Armitage, David. 2012b. ‘What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée’. History of European Ideas 38 (4): 493–507.

Article   Google Scholar  

Arneil, Barbara. 1999. Politics and Feminism . Wiley.

Arneil, Barbara, and Nancy J. Hirschmann, eds. 2016. Disability and Political Theory . Cambridge University Press.

Atchison, Amy L. 2021. Political Science Is for Everybody: An Introduction to Political Science . University of Toronto Press.

Atwood, Margaret. 2020. The Handmaid’s Tale and the Testaments Box Set . McClelland & Stewart.

Bejan, Teresa M. 2017. Mere Civility . Harvard University Press.

Bell, Duncan. 2010. Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme . Oxford University Press.

Bell, Duncan. 2020. Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America . Princeton University Press.

Bell, Duncan S. A. 2003. ‘Political Theory and the Functions of Intellectual History: A Response to Emmanuel Navon’. Review of International Studies 29 (1): 151–60.

Berlin, Isaiah. 2013. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History - Second Edition . Princeton University Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 2007. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings . New York: New Directions Publishing.

Borrows, John. 2019. Law’s Indigenous Ethics . University of Toronto Press.

Bracewell, Lorna. 2021. ‘Gender, Populism, and the QAnon Conspiracy Movement’. Frontiers in Sociology 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.615727 .

Brett, Annabel, and James Tully, eds. 2006. Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought . Cambridge University Press.

Burkhart, Brian. 2019. Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures . Michigan State University Press.

Butler, Octavia E. 2017. Earthseed: The Complete Series . Open Road Media.

Cohen, Elizabeth F., and Cyril Ghosh. 2019. Citizenship . John Wiley & Sons.

Cordova, Viola Faye. 2007. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova . University of Arizona Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2022. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings . The New Press.

Dahl, Robert Alan. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics . Yale University Press.

Dallmayr, Fred Reinhard, ed. 1999. Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory . Lexington Books.

DiMaggio, Anthony R. 2021. Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Else, Holly. 2019. ‘How to Banish Manels and Manferences from Scientific Meetings’. Nature 573 (7773): 184–86.

Euben, Roxanne. 2007. Journeys to the Other Shore . Princeton University Press.

‘Formal Theory – American Political Science Association’. n.d. Accessed October 15, 2021. https://formaltheorysociety.com/ .

Forrester, Katrina. 2019. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy . Princeton University Press.

Gordon-Roth, Jessica, and Shelley Weinberg, eds. 2021. The Lockean Mind . Routledge.

Gould, Carol C. 2021. ‘Editorial: Patriarchy and Populism During the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Frontiers in Sociology 6 (August): 722393. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.722393

Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. 2014. The History Manifesto . Cambridge University Press.

Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History . Oxford University Press.

Hassler, Donald M., and Clyde Wilcox, eds. 1997. Political Science Fiction . Univ of South Carolina Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. 1991. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right . Cambridge University Press.

Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2009a. The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom . Princeton University Press.

Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2009b. Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory . Princeton University Press.

Hirschmann, Nancy. 2018a. Revisioning The Political: Feminist Reconstructions Of Traditional Concepts In Western Political Theory . Routledge.

Hirschmann, Nancy. 2018b. Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory . Cornell University Press.

Honig, Bonnie. 2018. ‘The Trump Doctrine and the Gender Politics of Power’. Text. Boston Review. July 17, 2018. http://bostonreview.net/politics/bonnie-honig-trump-doctrine-and-gender-politics-power

Honig, Bonnie. 2021. Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump . Fordham University Press.

hooks, bell. 2014. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism . Routledge.

Hunt Botting, Eileen. 2020. Artificial Life After Frankenstein . University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hunt Botting, Eileen. 2021. ‘Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to COVID-19’. Frontiers in Sociology 6 (March): 624909. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.624909

Idris, Murad. 2018. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought . Oxford University Press.

Ikuta, Jennie C., and Trevor Latimer. 2021. ‘Aristocracy in America: Tocqueville on White Supremacy’. The Journal of Politics 83 (2): 547–59.

Ivison, Duncan, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, eds. 2000. Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples . Cambridge University Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition . University of Chicago Press.

Lane, Melissa. 2016. The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter . Princeton University Press.

Lee, Fred. 2018. ‘Contours of Asian American Political Theory: Introductions and Polemics’. Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 (3): 506–16.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die . Crown.

Levy, Jacob T. 2000. The Multiculturalism of Fear . Oxford University Press.

Linz, Juan J. 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration. An Introduction . Johns Hopkins University Press.

Locke, Jill. 2016. Democracy and the Death of Shame . Cambridge University Press.

Locke, Jill, and Eileen Hunt Botting, eds. 2010. Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville . Penn State Press.

Love, Nancy S. 2020. ‘Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, Patriarchy, and Right-Wing Populism’. Frontiers in Sociology 5 (December): https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.619572 .

‘The Matrix (1999) Transcript - Screenplays for You’. n.d. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://sfy.ru/transcript/matrix_ts .

McCormick, John P. 2007. Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supranational Democracy . Cambridge University Press.

McQueen, Alison. 2018. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times . Cambridge University Press.

Meng, Anne. 2020. Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes . Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2009. ‘Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls’. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (S1): 161–84.

Mills, Charles W. 2014. The Racial Contract . Cornell University Press.

Minogue, Kenneth. 2000. Politics: A Very Short Introduction . OUP Oxford.

Montesquieu, Charles de. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws . Cambridge University Press.

Nalepa, Monika. 2021. ‘Transitional Justice and Authoritarian Backsliding’. Constitutional Political Economy 32 (3): 278–300.

Nalepa, Monika. 2022a. After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Nalepa, Monika. 2022b. ‘Regimes and Transitions’ Forthcoming in Political Science Experiment , edited by Joshua Tucker.

Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family . Basic Books.

Okin, Susan Moller. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought . Princeton University Press.

Orwell, George. 2021. Nineteen Eighty-Four . Oxford University Press.

Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Sexual Contract . Stanford University Press.

Pateman, Carole, and Charles Mills. 2013. Contract and Domination . John Wiley & Sons.

Pineda, Erin R. 2021. Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement . Oxford University Press.

Pitts, Jennifer. 2009. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France . Princeton University Press.

Pitts, Jennifer. 2018. Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire . Harvard University Press.

Plato, and Melissa Lane, tr. 2007. The Republic . Penguin Books Limited.

Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples: With, the Idea of Public Reason Revisited . Harvard University Press.

Rogers, Melvin L., and Jack Turner, eds. 2021. African American Political Thought: A Collected History . University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, Alan. 2012. On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present . W. W. Norton & Company.

Ryan, Alan. 2014. The Making of Modern Liberalism . Princeton University Press.

Sen, Amartya. 1995. Inequality Reexamined . Harvard University Press.

Shames, Shauna L., and Amy L. Atchison. 2019. Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics . Columbia University Press.

Shapiro, Ian. 2010. The Real World of Democratic Theory . Princeton University Press.

Shapiro, Ian. 2012. The Moral Foundations of Politics . Yale University Press.

Shapiro, Ian. 2016. Politics against Domination . Harvard University Press.

Shapiro, Ian, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. 2004. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics . Cambridge University Press.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 2006. The Last Man . http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18247 .

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance . U of Minnesota Press.

Singh, Naunihal. 2021. ‘Analysis | Was the U.S. Capitol Riot Really a Coup? Here’s Why Definitions Matter’. Washington Post , January 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/09/was-us-capitol-riot-really-coup-heres-why-definitions-matter/ .

Skinner, Quentin. 1969. ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’. History and Theory 8 (1): 3–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504188 .

Skinner, Quentin. 1978a. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 1, The Renaissance . Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1978b. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2, The Age of Reformation . Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 2018. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics . Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History . Yale University Press.

Smith, Sophie. 2017. ‘Okin, Rawls, and the Politics of Political Theory’. In . https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/sophie-smith-wins-apsa-award.html .

Smith, Sophie. 2021. ‘A Just Theory? Okin, Rawls, and the Politics of Political Philosophy’.

Smith, Steven B. 2012. Political Philosophy . Yale University Press.

Smith, Steven B. 2018. Modernity and Its Discontents . Yale University Press.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2021. Orwell’s Roses . New York: Random House.

Sparling, Robert Alan. 2019. Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality . University of Pennsylvania Press.

Strauss, Leo, and Joseph Cropsey, eds. 1963. History of Political Philosophy . Rand McNally.

Topp, Sylvia. 2020. Eileen: The Making of George Orwell . Unbound Publishing.

Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity . Cambridge University Press.

Villa, Dana. 2020. Socratic Citizenship . Princeton University Press.

Whatmore, Richard. 2016. What Is Intellectual History? Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons.

Whatmore, Richard. 2022. The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press.

Wilcox, Clyde and Donald Hassler, eds. 2008. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction . Univ of South Carolina Press.

Wingrove, Elizabeth Rose. 2000. Rousseau’s Republican Romance . Princeton University Press.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2014. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting. Yale University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Eileen M. Hunt

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eileen M. Hunt .

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Hunt, E.M. The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory. Soc 59 , 119–128 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00703-1

Download citation

Published : 24 March 2022

Issue Date : April 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00703-1

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

  • Authoritarianism
  • Intersectionality
  • Political science
  • Science fiction
  • Political theory
  • Find a journal
  • Publish with us
  • Track your research
  • Search Menu
  • Browse content in Arts and Humanities
  • Browse content in Archaeology
  • Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
  • Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
  • Archaeology by Region
  • Archaeology of Religion
  • Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
  • Biblical Archaeology
  • Contemporary and Public Archaeology
  • Environmental Archaeology
  • Historical Archaeology
  • History and Theory of Archaeology
  • Industrial Archaeology
  • Landscape Archaeology
  • Mortuary Archaeology
  • Prehistoric Archaeology
  • Underwater Archaeology
  • Zooarchaeology
  • Browse content in Architecture
  • Architectural Structure and Design
  • History of Architecture
  • Residential and Domestic Buildings
  • Theory of Architecture
  • Browse content in Art
  • Art Subjects and Themes
  • History of Art
  • Industrial and Commercial Art
  • Theory of Art
  • Biographical Studies
  • Byzantine Studies
  • Browse content in Classical Studies
  • Classical History
  • Classical Philosophy
  • Classical Mythology
  • Classical Literature
  • Classical Reception
  • Classical Art and Architecture
  • Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
  • Greek and Roman Epigraphy
  • Greek and Roman Law
  • Greek and Roman Papyrology
  • Greek and Roman Archaeology
  • Late Antiquity
  • Religion in the Ancient World
  • Digital Humanities
  • Browse content in History
  • Colonialism and Imperialism
  • Diplomatic History
  • Environmental History
  • Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
  • Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
  • Historical Geography
  • History by Period
  • History of Emotions
  • History of Agriculture
  • History of Education
  • History of Gender and Sexuality
  • Industrial History
  • Intellectual History
  • International History
  • Labour History
  • Legal and Constitutional History
  • Local and Family History
  • Maritime History
  • Military History
  • National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
  • Oral History
  • Political History
  • Public History
  • Regional and National History
  • Revolutions and Rebellions
  • Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
  • Social and Cultural History
  • Theory, Methods, and Historiography
  • Urban History
  • World History
  • Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
  • Language Learning (Specific Skills)
  • Language Teaching Theory and Methods
  • Browse content in Linguistics
  • Applied Linguistics
  • Cognitive Linguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Forensic Linguistics
  • Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
  • Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
  • History of English
  • Language Acquisition
  • Language Evolution
  • Language Reference
  • Language Variation
  • Language Families
  • Lexicography
  • Linguistic Anthropology
  • Linguistic Theories
  • Linguistic Typology
  • Phonetics and Phonology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Translation and Interpretation
  • Writing Systems
  • Browse content in Literature
  • Bibliography
  • Children's Literature Studies
  • Literary Studies (Asian)
  • Literary Studies (European)
  • Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
  • Literary Studies (Romanticism)
  • Literary Studies (American)
  • Literary Studies (Modernism)
  • Literary Studies - World
  • Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
  • Literary Studies (19th Century)
  • Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
  • Literary Studies (African American Literature)
  • Literary Studies (British and Irish)
  • Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
  • Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
  • Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
  • Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
  • Literary Studies (History of the Book)
  • Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
  • Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
  • Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
  • Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
  • Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
  • Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
  • Literary Studies (War Literature)
  • Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
  • Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
  • Mythology and Folklore
  • Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
  • Browse content in Media Studies
  • Browse content in Music
  • Applied Music
  • Dance and Music
  • Ethics in Music
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Gender and Sexuality in Music
  • Medicine and Music
  • Music Cultures
  • Music and Religion
  • Music and Media
  • Music and Culture
  • Music Education and Pedagogy
  • Music Theory and Analysis
  • Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
  • Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
  • Musicology and Music History
  • Performance Practice and Studies
  • Race and Ethnicity in Music
  • Sound Studies
  • Browse content in Performing Arts
  • Browse content in Philosophy
  • Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
  • Epistemology
  • Feminist Philosophy
  • History of Western Philosophy
  • Metaphysics
  • Moral Philosophy
  • Non-Western Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Philosophy of Language
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Philosophy of Perception
  • Philosophy of Action
  • Philosophy of Law
  • Philosophy of Religion
  • Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
  • Practical Ethics
  • Social and Political Philosophy
  • Browse content in Religion
  • Biblical Studies
  • Christianity
  • East Asian Religions
  • History of Religion
  • Judaism and Jewish Studies
  • Qumran Studies
  • Religion and Education
  • Religion and Health
  • Religion and Politics
  • Religion and Science
  • Religion and Law
  • Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
  • Religious Studies
  • Browse content in Society and Culture
  • Cookery, Food, and Drink
  • Cultural Studies
  • Customs and Traditions
  • Ethical Issues and Debates
  • Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
  • Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
  • Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
  • Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
  • Sports and Outdoor Recreation
  • Technology and Society
  • Travel and Holiday
  • Visual Culture
  • Browse content in Law
  • Arbitration
  • Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
  • Commercial Law
  • Company Law
  • Browse content in Comparative Law
  • Systems of Law
  • Competition Law
  • Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
  • Government Powers
  • Judicial Review
  • Local Government Law
  • Military and Defence Law
  • Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
  • Construction Law
  • Contract Law
  • Browse content in Criminal Law
  • Criminal Procedure
  • Criminal Evidence Law
  • Sentencing and Punishment
  • Employment and Labour Law
  • Environment and Energy Law
  • Browse content in Financial Law
  • Banking Law
  • Insolvency Law
  • History of Law
  • Human Rights and Immigration
  • Intellectual Property Law
  • Browse content in International Law
  • Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
  • Public International Law
  • IT and Communications Law
  • Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
  • Law and Politics
  • Law and Society
  • Browse content in Legal System and Practice
  • Courts and Procedure
  • Legal Skills and Practice
  • Primary Sources of Law
  • Regulation of Legal Profession
  • Medical and Healthcare Law
  • Browse content in Policing
  • Criminal Investigation and Detection
  • Police and Security Services
  • Police Procedure and Law
  • Police Regional Planning
  • Browse content in Property Law
  • Personal Property Law
  • Study and Revision
  • Terrorism and National Security Law
  • Browse content in Trusts Law
  • Wills and Probate or Succession
  • Browse content in Medicine and Health
  • Browse content in Allied Health Professions
  • Arts Therapies
  • Clinical Science
  • Dietetics and Nutrition
  • Occupational Therapy
  • Operating Department Practice
  • Physiotherapy
  • Radiography
  • Speech and Language Therapy
  • Browse content in Anaesthetics
  • General Anaesthesia
  • Neuroanaesthesia
  • Browse content in Clinical Medicine
  • Acute Medicine
  • Cardiovascular Medicine
  • Clinical Genetics
  • Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
  • Dermatology
  • Endocrinology and Diabetes
  • Gastroenterology
  • Genito-urinary Medicine
  • Geriatric Medicine
  • Infectious Diseases
  • Medical Toxicology
  • Medical Oncology
  • Pain Medicine
  • Palliative Medicine
  • Rehabilitation Medicine
  • Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
  • Rheumatology
  • Sleep Medicine
  • Sports and Exercise Medicine
  • Clinical Neuroscience
  • Community Medical Services
  • Critical Care
  • Emergency Medicine
  • Forensic Medicine
  • Haematology
  • History of Medicine
  • Browse content in Medical Dentistry
  • Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
  • Paediatric Dentistry
  • Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
  • Surgical Dentistry
  • Browse content in Medical Skills
  • Clinical Skills
  • Communication Skills
  • Nursing Skills
  • Surgical Skills
  • Medical Ethics
  • Medical Statistics and Methodology
  • Browse content in Neurology
  • Clinical Neurophysiology
  • Neuropathology
  • Nursing Studies
  • Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
  • Gynaecology
  • Occupational Medicine
  • Ophthalmology
  • Otolaryngology (ENT)
  • Browse content in Paediatrics
  • Neonatology
  • Browse content in Pathology
  • Chemical Pathology
  • Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
  • Histopathology
  • Medical Microbiology and Virology
  • Patient Education and Information
  • Browse content in Pharmacology
  • Psychopharmacology
  • Browse content in Popular Health
  • Caring for Others
  • Complementary and Alternative Medicine
  • Self-help and Personal Development
  • Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
  • Cell Biology
  • Molecular Biology and Genetics
  • Reproduction, Growth and Development
  • Primary Care
  • Professional Development in Medicine
  • Browse content in Psychiatry
  • Addiction Medicine
  • Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
  • Forensic Psychiatry
  • Learning Disabilities
  • Old Age Psychiatry
  • Psychotherapy
  • Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
  • Epidemiology
  • Public Health
  • Browse content in Radiology
  • Clinical Radiology
  • Interventional Radiology
  • Nuclear Medicine
  • Radiation Oncology
  • Reproductive Medicine
  • Browse content in Surgery
  • Cardiothoracic Surgery
  • Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
  • General Surgery
  • Neurosurgery
  • Paediatric Surgery
  • Peri-operative Care
  • Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
  • Surgical Oncology
  • Transplant Surgery
  • Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
  • Vascular Surgery
  • Browse content in Science and Mathematics
  • Browse content in Biological Sciences
  • Aquatic Biology
  • Biochemistry
  • Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
  • Developmental Biology
  • Ecology and Conservation
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Genetics and Genomics
  • Microbiology
  • Molecular and Cell Biology
  • Natural History
  • Plant Sciences and Forestry
  • Research Methods in Life Sciences
  • Structural Biology
  • Systems Biology
  • Zoology and Animal Sciences
  • Browse content in Chemistry
  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Computational Chemistry
  • Crystallography
  • Environmental Chemistry
  • Industrial Chemistry
  • Inorganic Chemistry
  • Materials Chemistry
  • Medicinal Chemistry
  • Mineralogy and Gems
  • Organic Chemistry
  • Physical Chemistry
  • Polymer Chemistry
  • Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
  • Theoretical Chemistry
  • Browse content in Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Architecture and Logic Design
  • Game Studies
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Mathematical Theory of Computation
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Virtual Reality
  • Browse content in Computing
  • Business Applications
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Games
  • Computer Networking and Communications
  • Digital Lifestyle
  • Graphical and Digital Media Applications
  • Operating Systems
  • Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
  • Atmospheric Sciences
  • Environmental Geography
  • Geology and the Lithosphere
  • Maps and Map-making
  • Meteorology and Climatology
  • Oceanography and Hydrology
  • Palaeontology
  • Physical Geography and Topography
  • Regional Geography
  • Soil Science
  • Urban Geography
  • Browse content in Engineering and Technology
  • Agriculture and Farming
  • Biological Engineering
  • Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
  • Electronics and Communications Engineering
  • Energy Technology
  • Engineering (General)
  • Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
  • History of Engineering and Technology
  • Mechanical Engineering and Materials
  • Technology of Industrial Chemistry
  • Transport Technology and Trades
  • Browse content in Environmental Science
  • Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
  • Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
  • Environmental Sustainability
  • Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
  • Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
  • Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
  • Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
  • Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
  • Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
  • History of Science and Technology
  • Browse content in Materials Science
  • Ceramics and Glasses
  • Composite Materials
  • Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
  • Nanotechnology
  • Browse content in Mathematics
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Biomathematics and Statistics
  • History of Mathematics
  • Mathematical Education
  • Mathematical Finance
  • Mathematical Analysis
  • Numerical and Computational Mathematics
  • Probability and Statistics
  • Pure Mathematics
  • Browse content in Neuroscience
  • Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
  • Development of the Nervous System
  • Disorders of the Nervous System
  • History of Neuroscience
  • Invertebrate Neurobiology
  • Molecular and Cellular Systems
  • Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
  • Neuroscientific Techniques
  • Sensory and Motor Systems
  • Browse content in Physics
  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
  • Biological and Medical Physics
  • Classical Mechanics
  • Computational Physics
  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
  • History of Physics
  • Mathematical and Statistical Physics
  • Measurement Science
  • Nuclear Physics
  • Particles and Fields
  • Plasma Physics
  • Quantum Physics
  • Relativity and Gravitation
  • Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
  • Browse content in Psychology
  • Affective Sciences
  • Clinical Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Criminal and Forensic Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Educational Psychology
  • Evolutionary Psychology
  • Health Psychology
  • History and Systems in Psychology
  • Music Psychology
  • Neuropsychology
  • Organizational Psychology
  • Psychological Assessment and Testing
  • Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
  • Psychology Professional Development and Training
  • Research Methods in Psychology
  • Social Psychology
  • Browse content in Social Sciences
  • Browse content in Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Religion
  • Human Evolution
  • Medical Anthropology
  • Physical Anthropology
  • Regional Anthropology
  • Social and Cultural Anthropology
  • Theory and Practice of Anthropology
  • Browse content in Business and Management
  • Business Strategy
  • Business Ethics
  • Business History
  • Business and Government
  • Business and Technology
  • Business and the Environment
  • Comparative Management
  • Corporate Governance
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health Management
  • Human Resource Management
  • Industrial and Employment Relations
  • Industry Studies
  • Information and Communication Technologies
  • International Business
  • Knowledge Management
  • Management and Management Techniques
  • Operations Management
  • Organizational Theory and Behaviour
  • Pensions and Pension Management
  • Public and Nonprofit Management
  • Strategic Management
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
  • Criminal Justice
  • Criminology
  • Forms of Crime
  • International and Comparative Criminology
  • Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
  • Development Studies
  • Browse content in Economics
  • Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
  • Asian Economics
  • Behavioural Finance
  • Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
  • Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
  • Economic Systems
  • Economic History
  • Economic Methodology
  • Economic Development and Growth
  • Financial Markets
  • Financial Institutions and Services
  • General Economics and Teaching
  • Health, Education, and Welfare
  • History of Economic Thought
  • International Economics
  • Labour and Demographic Economics
  • Law and Economics
  • Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
  • Microeconomics
  • Public Economics
  • Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
  • Welfare Economics
  • Browse content in Education
  • Adult Education and Continuous Learning
  • Care and Counselling of Students
  • Early Childhood and Elementary Education
  • Educational Equipment and Technology
  • Educational Strategies and Policy
  • Higher and Further Education
  • Organization and Management of Education
  • Philosophy and Theory of Education
  • Schools Studies
  • Secondary Education
  • Teaching of a Specific Subject
  • Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
  • Teaching Skills and Techniques
  • Browse content in Environment
  • Applied Ecology (Social Science)
  • Climate Change
  • Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
  • Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
  • Natural Disasters (Environment)
  • Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
  • Browse content in Human Geography
  • Cultural Geography
  • Economic Geography
  • Political Geography
  • Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
  • Communication Studies
  • Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
  • Browse content in Politics
  • African Politics
  • Asian Politics
  • Chinese Politics
  • Comparative Politics
  • Conflict Politics
  • Elections and Electoral Studies
  • Environmental Politics
  • European Union
  • Foreign Policy
  • Gender and Politics
  • Human Rights and Politics
  • Indian Politics
  • International Relations
  • International Organization (Politics)
  • International Political Economy
  • Irish Politics
  • Latin American Politics
  • Middle Eastern Politics
  • Political Methodology
  • Political Communication
  • Political Philosophy
  • Political Sociology
  • Political Behaviour
  • Political Economy
  • Political Institutions
  • Political Theory
  • Politics and Law
  • Public Administration
  • Public Policy
  • Quantitative Political Methodology
  • Regional Political Studies
  • Russian Politics
  • Security Studies
  • State and Local Government
  • UK Politics
  • US Politics
  • Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
  • African Studies
  • Asian Studies
  • East Asian Studies
  • Japanese Studies
  • Latin American Studies
  • Middle Eastern Studies
  • Native American Studies
  • Scottish Studies
  • Browse content in Research and Information
  • Research Methods
  • Browse content in Social Work
  • Addictions and Substance Misuse
  • Adoption and Fostering
  • Care of the Elderly
  • Child and Adolescent Social Work
  • Couple and Family Social Work
  • Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
  • Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
  • Emergency Services
  • Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
  • International and Global Issues in Social Work
  • Mental and Behavioural Health
  • Social Justice and Human Rights
  • Social Policy and Advocacy
  • Social Work and Crime and Justice
  • Social Work Macro Practice
  • Social Work Practice Settings
  • Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
  • Welfare and Benefit Systems
  • Browse content in Sociology
  • Childhood Studies
  • Community Development
  • Comparative and Historical Sociology
  • Economic Sociology
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Gerontology and Ageing
  • Health, Illness, and Medicine
  • Marriage and the Family
  • Migration Studies
  • Occupations, Professions, and Work
  • Organizations
  • Population and Demography
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Social Theory
  • Social Movements and Social Change
  • Social Research and Statistics
  • Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
  • Sociology of Religion
  • Sociology of Education
  • Sport and Leisure
  • Urban and Rural Studies
  • Browse content in Warfare and Defence
  • Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
  • Land Forces and Warfare
  • Military Administration
  • Military Life and Institutions
  • Naval Forces and Warfare
  • Other Warfare and Defence Issues
  • Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
  • Weapons and Equipment

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory

John S. Dryzek Centenary Professor, ARC Laureate Fellow, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra

Bonnie Honig is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation.

Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics.

  • Cite Icon Cite
  • Permissions Icon Permissions

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory. Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. In this book forty-five articles by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes. The Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science — a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

  • GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
  • Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

  • Sign in with email/username & password
  • Get email alerts
  • Save searches
  • Purchase content
  • Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

  • Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
  • Institutional account management
  • Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

  • Click Sign in through your institution.
  • Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
  • When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
  • Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

  • Click Sign in through society site.
  • When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

  • View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
  • View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

  • About Oxford Academic
  • Publish journals with us
  • University press partners
  • What we publish
  • New features  
  • Open access
  • Rights and permissions
  • Accessibility
  • Advertising
  • Media enquiries
  • Oxford University Press
  • Oxford Languages
  • University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

  • Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
  • Cookie settings
  • Cookie policy
  • Privacy policy
  • Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

  • Technical Support
  • Find My Rep

You are here

Political Theory

Political Theory

Preview this book.

  • Description
  • Aims and Scope
  • Editorial Board
  • Abstracting / Indexing

Submission Guidelines

About This Title Political Theory ( PT ), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, serves as the leading forum for the development and exchange of political ideas. Broad in scope and international in coverage, PT publishes articles on political theory from a wide range of philosophical, ideological and methodological perspectives. Articles address contemporary and historical political thought, normative and cultural theory, the history of ideas, and critical assessments of current work. The journal encourages essays that address pressing political and ethical issues or events. Broad Scope Political Theory serves as the leading forum for the development and exchange of political ideas. The journal is broad in scope and international in coverage, with no single affiliation or orientation. Political Theory 's carefully refereed articles discuss current political problematics and cast new light on historical ones. Acknowledging the emergent nature of political thought, the journal engages both major and minor figures in and about the canon of political theory, such as: Plato, Qutb, Locke, Marx, Thoreau, Arendt, and Du Bois. A partial list of areas of study includes issues such as:

  • Liberalism and neoliberalism
  • Ecophilosophy
  • Cultural politics
  • Politics and aesthetics
  • Deliberative, agonistic, and ancient democracy

Regular Features Political Theory brings you the latest research on political theory. Its international editorial board is dedicated to offering thought-provoking and stimulating scholarship in a variety of forms, including:

  • Feature Articles
  • Critical Responses
  • Books in Review
  • Review Essays
  • Special-Topic Symposia

Political Theory is an international journal of political thought open to contributions from a wide range of methodological, philosophical, and ideological perspectives. Essays in contemporary and historical political thought, normative and cultural theory, history of ideas, and assessments of current work are welcome. The journal encourages essays that address pressing political and ethical issues or events.

  • Academic Abstracts
  • CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
  • Clarivate Analytics: Current Contents - Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences
  • Corporate ResourceNET - Ebsco
  • Current Citations Express
  • EBSCO: Vocational & Career Collection
  • FRANCIS Database
  • Gale: Diversity Studies Collection
  • ISI Basic Social Sciences Index
  • International Political Science Abstracts
  • MasterFILE - Ebsco
  • OmniFile: Full Text Mega Edition (H.W. Wilson)
  • Political Science Abstracts
  • ProQuest: Applied Social Science Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)
  • ProQuest: CSA Sociological Abstracts
  • ProQuest: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
  • Public Library FullTEXT
  • Social SciSearch
  • Social Science Source
  • Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science)
  • Social Sciences Index Full Text
  • Standard Periodical Directory (SPD)
  • TOPICsearch - Ebsco
  • The Philosopher's Index
  • Wilson Social Sciences Index Retrospective

Winter break: The Political Theory office will be closed from December 18 - January 8.

Political Theory is an international journal of political thought open to contributions from a wide range of methodological, philosophical, and ideological perspectives. Essays in contemporary or historical political thought, normative and cultural theory, history of ideas, and assessments of current work are welcome.

Manuscripts Information

Preparation

Manuscripts should be no longer than 10,000 words total, including text, notes and bibliography (abstract excluded). The entire paper must be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and 12-point font. Text and notes should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Simple citations should appear in-text using the author-date system described in chapter 15 of CMS and refer to a bibliography that appears at the end of the manuscript. Bibliographies should not include material beyond what is cited in the article. Longer notes should appear as footnotes and should also be double-spaced in 12-point font; any citations in such notes should use the same style as in-text citations. All identifying information should be removed from the manuscript. Manuscripts that do not meet the submission standards will be returned to the author(s) for correction before being considered.

Critical responses to essays published in Political Theory will be considered on an ad hoc basis. Submissions of critical responses must be made no later than three months after the publication of the original essay. They should be no longer than 2,500 words in length, including notes and references.

How to Submit Authors must prepare and submit two separate files to Political Theory via our website ( http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pt ): (1) One 'Main Document' which contains only your manuscript; (2) One 'Supplementary File' that includes a title page with full contact information; a brief biographical paragraph noting current affiliation, research interests, and recent publications; an abstract of no more than 250 words; and at least four, but not more than six,  keywords to facilitate electronic access. A cover letter is not required. Contact the editorial office at  [email protected] if you encounter difficulties with your online submission.

Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal. Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content. Queries concerning what constitutes prior publication should be addressed to the editor.

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID . ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.

The collection of ORCID iDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID iD please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

Reviewing Our review period averages three months, except during the summer, when the offices are open on a more limited basis.

Announcements and correspondence regarding conferences, panels, papers, and other news of interest should be sent to:

Political Theory University of California, Santa Cruz HAS - Humanities One 1156 High St. Santa Cruz, CA 95064

Publishers should contact [email protected]  regarding books to be reviewed.

  • Read Online
  • Sample Issues
  • Current Issue
  • Email Alert
  • Permissions
  • Foreign rights
  • Reprints and sponsorship
  • Advertising

Individual Subscription, Print Only

Institutional Subscription, E-access

Institutional Subscription & Backfile Lease, E-access Plus Backfile (All Online Content)

Institutional Subscription, Print Only

Institutional Subscription, Combined (Print & E-access)

Institutional Subscription & Backfile Lease, Combined Plus Backfile (Current Volume Print & All Online Content)

Institutional Backfile Purchase, E-access (Content through 1998)

Individual, Single Print Issue

Institutional, Single Print Issue

To order single issues of this journal, please contact SAGE Customer Services at 1-800-818-7243 / 1-805-583-9774 with details of the volume and issue you would like to purchase.

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Political Science

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you to recognize and to follow writing standards in political science. The first step toward accomplishing this goal is to develop a basic understanding of political science and the kind of work political scientists do.

Defining politics and political science

Political scientist Harold Laswell said it best: at its most basic level, politics is the struggle of “who gets what, when, how.” This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers. Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works. Think about the title of your course or re-read the course description in your syllabus. You’ll find that your course covers a particular sector of the large world of “politics” and brings with it a set of topics, issues, and approaches to information that may be helpful to consider as you begin a writing assignment. The diverse structure of political science reflects the diverse kinds of problems the discipline attempts to analyze and explain. In fact, political science includes at least eight major sub-fields:

  • American politics examines political behavior and institutions in the United States.
  • Comparative politics analyzes and compares political systems within and across different geographic regions.
  • International relations investigates relations among nation states and the activities of international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as international actors such as terrorists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multi-national corporations (MNCs).
  • Political theory analyzes fundamental political concepts such as power and democracy and foundational questions, like “How should the individual and the state relate?”
  • Political methodology deals with the ways that political scientists ask and investigate questions.
  • Public policy examines the process by which governments make public decisions.
  • Public administration studies the ways that government policies are implemented.
  • Public law focuses on the role of law and courts in the political process.

What is scientific about political science?

Investigating relationships.

Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called “hard” sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves as engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. Based on these revelations, they attempt to state general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists’ writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it.

Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach. You can learn more about writing for political theory classes in the section “Writing in Political Theory” below.

Building theories

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know whether presidential elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis:

“When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, presidential incumbents are not reelected.”

Collecting data

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable (the phenomenon that is affected by other variables) would be the reelection of incumbent presidents; the independent variable (the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable) would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent presidents and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a presidential election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

However, research in political science seldom yields immediately conclusive results. In this case, for example, although in most recent presidential elections our hypothesis holds true, President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 despite the fact that the national unemployment rate was 17%. To explain this important exception and to make certain that other factors besides high unemployment rates were not primarily responsible for the defeat of incumbent presidents in other election years, you would need to do further research. So you can see how political scientists use the scientific method to build ever more precise and persuasive theories and how you might begin to think about the topics that interest you as you write your paper.

Clear, consistent, objective writing

Since political scientists construct and assess theories in accordance with the principles of the scientific method, writing in the field conveys the rigor, objectivity, and logical consistency that characterize this method. Thus political scientists avoid the use of impressionistic or metaphorical language, or language which appeals primarily to our senses, emotions, or moral beliefs. In other words, rather than persuade you with the elegance of their prose or the moral virtue of their beliefs, political scientists persuade through their command of the facts and their ability to relate those facts to theories that can withstand the test of empirical investigation. In writing of this sort, clarity and concision are at a premium. To achieve such clarity and concision, political scientists precisely define any terms or concepts that are important to the arguments that they make. This precision often requires that they “operationalize” key terms or concepts. “Operationalizing” simply means that important—but possibly vague or abstract—concepts like “justice” are defined in ways that allow them to be measured or tested through scientific investigation.

Fortunately, you will generally not be expected to devise or operationalize key concepts entirely on your own. In most cases, your professor or the authors of assigned readings will already have defined and/or operationalized concepts that are important to your research. And in the event that someone hasn’t already come up with precisely the definition you need, other political scientists will in all likelihood have written enough on the topic that you’re investigating to give you some clear guidance on how to proceed. For this reason, it is always a good idea to explore what research has already been done on your topic before you begin to construct your own argument. See our handout on making an academic argument .

Example of an operationalized term

To give you an example of the kind of rigor and objectivity political scientists aim for in their writing, let’s examine how someone might operationalize a term. Reading through this example should clarify the level of analysis and precision that you will be expected to employ in your writing. Here’s how you might define key concepts in a way that allows us to measure them.

We are all familiar with the term “democracy.” If you were asked to define this term, you might make a statement like the following:

“Democracy is government by the people.”

You would, of course, be correct—democracy is government by the people. But, in order to evaluate whether or not a particular government is fully democratic or is more or less democratic when compared with other governments, we would need to have more precise criteria with which to measure or assess democracy. For example, here are some criteria that political scientists have suggested are indicators of democracy:

  • Freedom to form and join organizations
  • Freedom of expression
  • Right to vote
  • Eligibility for public office
  • Right of political leaders to compete for support
  • Right of political leaders to compete for votes
  • Alternative sources of information
  • Free and fair elections
  • Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference

If we adopt these nine criteria, we now have a definition that will allow us to measure democracy empirically. Thus, if you want to determine whether Brazil is more democratic than Sweden, you can evaluate each country in terms of the degree to which it fulfills the above criteria.

What counts as good writing in political science?

While rigor, clarity, and concision will be valued in any piece of writing in political science, knowing the kind of writing task you’ve been assigned will help you to write a good paper. Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper.

Writing political science research papers

Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a persuasive argument in favor of your perspective. In order for you to successfully meet this challenge, your research paper should include the following components:

  • An introduction
  • A problem statement
  • A discussion of methodology
  • A literature review
  • A description and evaluation of your research findings
  • A summary of your findings

Here’s a brief description of each component.

In the introduction of your research paper, you need to give the reader some basic background information on your topic that suggests why the question you are investigating is interesting and important. You will also need to provide the reader with a statement of the research problem you are attempting to address and a basic outline of your paper as a whole. The problem statement presents not only the general research problem you will address but also the hypotheses that you will consider. In the methodology section, you will explain to the reader the research methods you used to investigate your research topic and to test the hypotheses that you have formulated. For example, did you conduct interviews, use statistical analysis, rely upon previous research studies, or some combination of all of these methodological approaches?

Before you can develop each of the above components of your research paper, you will need to conduct a literature review. A literature review involves reading and analyzing what other researchers have written on your topic before going on to do research of your own. There are some very pragmatic reasons for doing this work. First, as insightful as your ideas may be, someone else may have had similar ideas and have already done research to test them. By reading what they have written on your topic, you can ensure that you don’t repeat, but rather learn from, work that has already been done. Second, to demonstrate the soundness of your hypotheses and methodology, you will need to indicate how you have borrowed from and/or improved upon the ideas of others.

By referring to what other researchers have found on your topic, you will have established a frame of reference that enables the reader to understand the full significance of your research results. Thus, once you have conducted your literature review, you will be in a position to present your research findings. In presenting these findings, you will need to refer back to your original hypotheses and explain the manner and degree to which your results fit with what you anticipated you would find. If you see strong support for your argument or perhaps some unexpected results that your original hypotheses cannot account for, this section is the place to convey such important information to your reader. This is also the place to suggest further lines of research that will help refine, clarify inconsistencies with, or provide additional support for your hypotheses. Finally, in the summary section of your paper, reiterate the significance of your research and your research findings and speculate upon the path that future research efforts should take.

Writing in political theory

Political theory differs from other subfields in political science in that it deals primarily with historical and normative, rather than empirical, analysis. In other words, political theorists are less concerned with the scientific measurement of political phenomena than with understanding how important political ideas develop over time. And they are less concerned with evaluating how things are than in debating how they should be. A return to our democracy example will make these distinctions clearer and give you some clues about how to write well in political theory.

Earlier, we talked about how to define democracy empirically so that it can be measured and tested in accordance with scientific principles. Political theorists also define democracy, but they use a different standard of measurement. Their definitions of democracy reflect their interest in political ideals—for example, liberty, equality, and citizenship—rather than scientific measurement. So, when writing about democracy from the perspective of a political theorist, you may be asked to make an argument about the proper way to define citizenship in a democratic society. Should citizens of a democratic society be expected to engage in decision-making and administration of government, or should they be satisfied with casting votes every couple of years?

In order to substantiate your position on such questions, you will need to pay special attention to two interrelated components of your writing: (1) the logical consistency of your ideas and (2) the manner in which you use the arguments of other theorists to support your own. First, you need to make sure that your conclusion and all points leading up to it follow from your original premises or assumptions. If, for example, you argue that democracy is a system of government through which citizens develop their full capacities as human beings, then your notion of citizenship will somehow need to support this broad definition of democracy. A narrow view of citizenship based exclusively or primarily on voting probably will not do. Whatever you argue, however, you will need to be sure to demonstrate in your analysis that you have considered the arguments of other theorists who have written about these issues. In some cases, their arguments will provide support for your own; in others, they will raise criticisms and concerns that you will need to address if you are going to make a convincing case for your point of view.

Drafting your paper

If you have used material from outside sources in your paper, be sure to cite them appropriately in your paper. In political science, writers most often use the APA or Turabian (a version of the Chicago Manual of Style) style guides when formatting references. Check with your instructor if they have not specified a citation style in the assignment. For more information on constructing citations, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Although all assignments are different, the preceding outlines provide a clear and simple guide that should help you in writing papers in any sub-field of political science. If you find that you need more assistance than this short guide provides, refer to the list of additional resources below or make an appointment to see a tutor at the Writing Center.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Becker, Howard S. 2007. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article , 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cuba, Lee. 2002. A Short Guide to Writing About Social Science , 4th ed. New York: Longman.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Scott, Gregory M., and Stephen M. Garrison. 1998. The Political Science Student Writer’s Manual , 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Turabian, Kate. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, Dissertations , 9th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Make a Gift

research paper political theory

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

  •  We're Hiring!
  •  Help Center

Political Theory

  • Most Cited Papers
  • Most Downloaded Papers
  • Newest Papers
  • Save to Library
  • Last »
  • Political Philosophy Follow Following
  • History of Political Thought Follow Following
  • Democratic Theory Follow Following
  • Liberalism Follow Following
  • Critical Theory Follow Following
  • Social and Political Philosophy Follow Following
  • Political Science Follow Following
  • John Rawls Follow Following
  • Global Justice Follow Following
  • Marxism Follow Following

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

  • Academia.edu Publishing
  •   We're Hiring!
  •   Help Center
  • Find new research papers in:
  • Health Sciences
  • Earth Sciences
  • Cognitive Science
  • Mathematics
  • Computer Science
  • Academia ©2024

Your browser does not support HTML5 or CSS3

To best view this site, you need to update your browser to the latest version, or download a HTML5 friendly browser. Download: Firefox // Download: Chrome

Pages may display incorrectly.

How to Study Political Theory

Download PDF Study Guide

A Student Companion to Graham and Hoffman, Introduction to Political Theory

Intended learning outcomes – developing your transferable skills.

University courses have what are called ‘intended learning outcomes’ (ILOs). An intended learning outcome is what a student should be able to achieve on the completion of a course and can be tested through, for example, tutorial/seminar participation, unseen written exams, seen exams (‘takeaway papers’), multiple choice questions, and course essays. There are at least four different kinds of ILO: transferable skills; generic academic skills; cognate academic skills; and, subject-specific skills. This guide concentrates on the last of these: the skills specific to the understanding of political theory (the ‘10 rules’). However, it is worth saying something about the other three kinds of ILO:

Transferable skills

These are skills useful in employment situations. Specifically, the study of political theory should strengthen the following:

  • General reasoning abilities – recognising valid and invalid arguments.
  • Capacity to make valid conceptual distinctions – the consistent use of concepts.
  • Writing skills.
  • Oral skills – the ability to argue a case through, for example: (a) defending your own position; or (b) playing ‘devil’s advocate’.
  • A deeper understanding of social relations, including the ability to abstract from everyday situations – reflection on ‘case studies’ is particularly important here.
  • Ethical reasoning.
  • Empathy – the ability to recognise other people’s points of view.

Generic academic skills

These are skills which can be ‘transferred’ to other university subjects, especially in the arts (or humanities) and social sciences. They include the skills listed above under ‘transferable skills’, but additionally:

  • The ability to write grammatically and syntactically correct and properly referenced academic essays.
  • The capacity to construct arguments under examination conditions – that is, in a specified time and without notes.
  • The framing of an oral argument and ability to defend it in group discussion.

Cognate - subject academic skills

Political theory ‘interfaces’ with a number of other disciplines, or sub-disciplines, and skills gained in the study of political theory are ‘transferable’ to these other sub-disciplines. Cognate disciplines and sub-disciplines include:

  • History, especially the history of ideas.
  • Economics – e.g., welfare economics and rational choice.
  • Law – e.g., legal philosophy and legal theory.
  • Sociology and anthropology.
  • Social and public policy.
  • Literature – e.g., textual analysis.
  • Biology – e.g., sociobiology.

It is important to recognise that different disciplines pose different questions and these should not be confused. However, it is also important to avoid arbitrary distinctions between disciplines – knowledge, understanding, and skills acquired in one discipline can be transferred to another.

Ten rules for studying political theory

Rule 1: think for yourself.

So long as you acknowledge alternative positions, it is better to present your own arguments rather than a boring list of alternative claims. Have confidence in your own position! There is, however, a difference between presenting your own argument and engaging in a polemic: you must provide a reasoned defence of a particular position. Furthermore, while political theorists disagree, it does not follow that political values are ‘subjective’ – you are giving other people reasons for accepting a certain claim and not simply banging the table and saying (in effect) I feel strongly about something (you can, of course, communicate reasons and feel strongly, but the reasons are crucial).

Rule 2: Use concepts with precision

Concepts are central to all academic disciplines, but especially the humanities and social sciences. Some political theorists claim we can agree on the meaning of concepts, such as (say) freedom or democracy while disagreeing about the value attached to each, or how we settle conflicts between values. Other political theorists argue that disagreement pertains to the meaning, as well as the value, of concepts. Whichever view you take, it is important to define your concepts, even if other people may disagree with your definition. You must also be consistent in your definition and application of concepts.

Rule 3: Recognise the importance of everyday experience

Even before you began studying political theory you had engaged in ‘political theory’: reflections on the fairness or unfairness of wealth distribution, or the legitimacy or illegitimacy of restrictions on freedom, involve theorising about politics and morality. Although few politicians read works of political theory (or philosophy), they often (implicitly) make moral judgements about ‘political issues’. Case studies are a particularly good way of drawing out the moral implications of everyday experience. These contrast with artificial thought experiments, where the aim is quite deliberately to remove contingent elements or to force you to think in a certain way – both case studies and thought-experiments can be useful.

Rule 4: Be critical of everyday assumptions

While everyday experience is valuable – because it demonstrates the relevance of political theory – it is also important to be critical of everyday assumptions. The ‘person in the street’ might say ‘it’s just common sense that such and such is (ought to be) the case’. It may be that after critical reflection you come to endorse the ‘common sense’ view, but then in defending the view you would not be appealing to common sense.

Rule 5: Read texts critically

There is a great deal of published work in political theory, some good and some bad. Even the work of the greatest and most respected political theorists are open to challenge. In studying political theory think of a building. Buildings have ‘stress points’ and ‘loadbearing’ elements, and so do theories – but the precise location of these will vary from one theory to another. When you read a work of a great theorist, such as Hobbes or Locke or Marx, you need to identify the stress points, because these are the points that are most open to attack.

Rule 6: Learn to analyse texts

Continuing with the building analogy, just as a building can be deconstructed so can texts. While it is important to respect the text as a whole rather than pick out the supposedly ‘good bits’ from what may appear to be a great deal of ‘padding’, nonetheless, some sentences carry greater weight than others, and the more you engage with texts the better will be your ability to identify the central arguments.

Rule 7: Engage with the argument

Some theories will appeal to you, others will not – indeed, you may even find some arguments obnoxious. While there is nothing wrong with disliking a theory (see rule 1), it is important to engage with it, which means trying to put the most credible interpretation on it. It is also important to avoid ‘naming’ an argument as a substitute to criticising it: for example, some people might regard the term ‘classical liberal’ as derogatory. They then identify a particular thinker’s work as ‘classical liberal’ as if that were a sufficient ground for rejection. Genuine criticism involves drawing out the truth of an argument – it is not simple rejection

Rule 8: Employ lateral thinking

It may be quite challenging to employ lateral thinking at an introductory level, but some moral problems in politics look intractable because we make false assumptions, or because there are considerations at play which are not obvious from the way the problem is explained (a ‘problem’ is here defined as a puzzle). Lateral thinking involves looking at a problem from new and possibly strange angles. In political theory, the term is rarely used, but nonetheless, there is much lateral thinking, and it often takes the form of analogical thinking – using something from outside politics to explain a political problem. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic example, for it helps elucidate the problem of why people who are in profound conflict with one another might cooperate.

Rule 9: Argue cogently and coherently

Arguments in political theory do not always depend on ‘logic’ in the strict sense of the word – that is, conclusions do not follow in a linear manner from a set of premises. There is reliance on empirical claims about the nature of human beings and society, which can reasonably be challenged. Nonetheless, there are standards of cogency and coherence, and while an argument will always be open to challenge, it is usually obvious when a person has advanced obviously contradictory claims.

Rule 10: Form matters

Writing grammatically and syntactically correct sentences is not only an important transferable skill, but can be indicative of cogent and coherent argumentation – form (good writing) and substance (good arguments) are not independent of one another. Writing comes more easily to some students than others, but it is important to take pride in what you write.

Using the Graham & Hoffman resources

This part of the guide explains the various features of the textbook and the Companion Website and how to use them most effectively.

Case studies

Each chapter begins with a case study. Your tutor/instructor will provide further guidance on how to approach them, but there are some general points to be made about the case studies:

  • Tackle the case study before you read the rest of the chapter.
  • Engage in a ‘brainstorming’ exercise: write down anything relevant to the case under consideration, then:
  • Go through the list, deleting what, on reflection, you think is unimportant, and put the remaining points in categories according to the type of argument or claim being made (e.g., factual versus normative, or ‘evaluative’), and then rank the points in order of importance.
  • When you have read the chapter, return to the case study and consider whether your views have changed (it may be that your conclusion has not changed, but that you have revised the arguments which lead you to that conclusion).

There are further case studies on this website.

Web resources

Web resources can be found on this website. Obviously the idea of the web is that one website leads to another and your journey through the web may take you to some weird and wacky places. Some academics are quite dismissive of websites, and although this may be partly a reflection of age and generation, there are some dangers with web resources:

  • Although a great deal of rubbish appears in print, there is greater ‘quality control’ on books and journal articles than on web-based material. After all, it takes no more than ten minutes to start a blog. On the other hand, there are many intelligent blogs, often with links to interesting articles and websites. Be discerning in your use of web-based materials.
  • Arguments should be assessed on their merits rather than ad hominem from their source, but given limited time, there are some tests which can help you discriminate useful and useless websites:
  • How well-established is a website? The longer, the better. How many ‘hits’ has it got? The more, the better. How many other websites link to it? The more the better.
  • What is the quality of the backlinks (that is, links from the website)? High status web extensions are .edu and .ac.uk.
  • Is the material available in published form? Some websites, such as www.jstor.org are, in effect, online libraries, where everything on the website is available in hard copy in university libraries. Other websites contain legal documents, which, likewise, are available published in hard copy.
  • You should avoid excessive reliance on websites in writing course essays (see section on writing essays).
  • You should not break any laws or regulations in your web search. Some of the topics discussed in the Graham & Hoffman textbooks are controversial, and using certain keywords, such as ‘pornography’, will produce web pages which contravene your college or university regulations, if not laws. The same issue may apply to ‘guns’. If you have any concerns, you should contact your course tutors/instructors.

Further Reading

At the end of each chapter is a guide to further reading. Practices vary between countries, but in Britain lecturers tend to put more items on their reading lists than they expect students to read, with the intention being that students can choose what to read. Items may be more or less relevant depending upon what essay question you are answering. (Furthermore, there can be intense pressure on libraries, so that having a fairly long reading list to some extent reduces that pressure).

In other countries, students assume that everything on a reading list must be read. We have followed the British practice.

Finally: note-taking

Note-taking in lectures and from books is an important skill. Lecturers’ styles and approaches vary greatly – some lecture without notes and/or PowerPoint, while others have detailed notes and overheads which are made available to students. Do not be obsessed with overheads – many lecturers use them simply to give some visual structure to the lecture and it is not intended that students write everything down. It is important to listen to lectures. If you do take notes then consider whether or not a ‘linear’ technique is the best – sometimes ‘trees’ with branches leading from one point to another is better than writing sentences.

Taking notes from books is quite different to note-taking in lectures. Try to avoid writing very long notes – try to condense the argument. If you photocopy from books then avoid underlining or highlighting large chunks – when you come back to the text you want to be able quickly to identify key arguments (do not write in or mark library books!).

Writing essays (papers) in political theory

In this section, we provide guidance specific to writing essays (papers) in political theory.

Some important general points:

  • There are no ‘model answers’ to essay questions – two students can answer the same essay question and both get A grades, but their essays may be very different in style and argument.
  • Answer the question asked and not a question you would like to have been asked – be relevant!
  • You should express your own reasoned views.
  • You should develop your own style of writing, but pay attention to grammar, syntax and spelling.
  • Think about the structure of the essay.
  • Read carefully and with discrimination – develop note-taking skills. Do not read too much.
  • Organise your time – there may be many students on your course and a great deal of pressure on library and computing services.
  • Be aware that plagiarism is a serious offence.

Essays should have a beginning, middle, and end. Very roughly speaking, the beginning, or opening part, should constitute about 10-15% of the essay and tell the reader what the essay is going to say. The middle part, or ‘core’, should be about 70% of the essay and contain the central arguments and discussion, while the end, or concluding part, should provide a strong conclusion, and may be slightly longer than the opening part (say, about 20% of the essay).

Here is an example, but please note this is not presented as a ‘model answer’, but rather is intended to be an illustration of a well-structured essay:

Question: Should the state prevent people harming themselves?

• Introduction and Core:

  • Define the concepts in the question: state (= coercive); prevention (= interference); harm to self.
  • Introduce the concept of paternalism.
  • Discuss ‘extreme cases’ of harm to self. Pose the question: could anyone reasonably argue that the state should not intervene?
  • Is there a danger of a ‘slippery slope’ from extreme to ‘moderate’ cases of harm to self? Discuss the ‘moderate’ cases.
  • Could we consent to paternalism?

• Closing part: tell the reader what you think – but the conclusion must follow from the arguments set out in the 'core'.

Referencing – house style

Different academic departments recommend different forms of referencing (‘house styles’). A relatively easy one to use is the Harvard System, which is the one adopted in the Graham & Hoffman textbooks.

Whatever style you adopt, you should:

  • Use a house correctly and consistently – if you are unsure look at a book on the Further Reading lists and follow its style of referencing.
  • Always reference – failure to reference may open you to the charge of plagiarism.

Other style issues include:

  • Margins and spacing – always give the marker space to write comments. There should be reasonably sized margins and at least 1.5 spacing, if not double spacing.
  • Font – use a clear and attractive font. Arial, Calibri and Times New Roman are good fonts.
  • Use a reasonable font size – the size will depend on the font used, but anything smaller than 11 point is probably too small.
  • Avoid excessive use of bullet points.
  • Depending on the length of the essay, it may be appropriate to divide the essay into sections with section headings. A section should run for at least a couple of pages.

Grammar, syntax and spelling

Do not assume spelling and grammar checks are infallible – there are many mistakes which they will not identify. There is no alternative to checking the essay yourself. Below are listed some common errors made in politics and political theory essays:

  • English, like any other language, has different ‘registers’: using English in an academic essay is quite different to using it in a bar. This is obvious. However, sometimes there is a slippage between levels. For example, in lower registers, such as conversation, we contract: I am becomes I’m ; they are becomes they’re . In higher registers, such as essay writing, we avoid such contractions. Likewise, colloquialisms should be avoided.
  • Use of the ‘first person’: I and we . There is a division of opinion here – in political theory it is common to write in the first person (single or plural), whereas in political science it is not regarded as good practice. So long as the use of the first person does not lead to a lazy spouting of unjustified claims it is acceptable.
  • Confusion of possessive and plural – this arises because both use the s. The possessive uses apostrophe + s: Mill's argument not Mills argument . The plural does not use an apostrophe: workers of the world unite not worker’s of the world unite. Regular plural + possessive is expressed with an apostrophe after the s: workers’ rights (but not with irregular plurals: women’s rights not womens’ rights ).
  • Its and it’s : its is a possessive pronoun – the government’s policies = its policies. An apostrophe is not necessary because there can be no plural of it and hence no confusion of plural and possessive. It’s is simply a contraction of it is .
  • Latin and Greek endings: the standard ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ending is with s but as well as Anglo-Saxon irregulars, such as women, children, mice, geese, there are also Latin and Greek endings: criter ion > criter ia ; strat um > strat a ; spectr um > spectr a . However, there is a tendency to standardise: referend um > either referend a or referend ums (both are now acceptable, although the Oxford English Dictionary argues that referendums is the correct plural). If unsure, check the plural in the dictionary.
  • Principle and principal are often confused.
  • Some people write loose , when they mean lose .
  • There and their are sometimes confused.
  • A normal sentence should have a verb (in the indicative): Mill attempts to reconcile utilitarianism and individual rights.
  • Number agreement. A subject in the singular should correspond to ('govern') other elements (verbs, pronouns) in the sentence – so a singular subject should be complemented by a verb and pronoun in the singular.
  • Subjunctive: this is a mood of the verb which expresses an unreal condition. It has virtually disappeared from the English language but is retained in the verb to be: if I were a woman not if I was a woman.

Paul Graham

Revised July 2022

POLSC101: Introduction to Political Science

Research in political science.

This handout is designed to teach you how to conduct original political science research. While you won't be asked to write a research paper, this handout provides important information on the "scientific" approach used by political scientists. Pay particularly close attention to the section that answers the question "what is scientific about political science?"

If you were going to conduct research in biology or chemistry, what would you do? You would probably create a hypothesis, and then design an experiment to test your hypothesis. Based on the results of your experiment, you would draw conclusions. Political scientists follow similar procedures. Like a scientist who researches biology or chemistry, political scientists rely on objectivity, data, and procedure to draw conclusions. This article explains the process of operationalizing variables. Why is that an important step in social science research?

Defining politics and political science

Political scientist Harold Laswell said it best: at its most basic level, politics is the struggle of "who gets what, when, how". This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers. Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works. Think about the title of your course or re-read the course description in your syllabus. You'll find that your course covers a particular sector of the large world of "politics" and brings with it a set of topics, issues, and approaches to information that may be helpful to consider as you begin a writing assignment. The diverse structure of political science reflects the diverse kinds of problems the discipline attempts to analyze and explain. In fact, political science includes at least eight major sub-fields:

  • American politics examines political behavior and institutions in the United States.
  • Comparative politics analyzes and compares political systems within and across different geographic regions.
  • International relations investigates relations among nation-states and the activities of international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as international actors such as terrorists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multi-national corporations (MNCs).
  • Political theory analyzes fundamental political concepts such as power and democracy and foundational questions, like "How should the individual and the state relate?"
  • Political methodology deals with the ways that political scientists ask and investigate questions.
  • Public policy examines the process by which governments make public decisions.
  • Public administration studies the ways that government policies are implemented.
  • Public law focuses on the role of law and courts in the political process.

What is scientific about political science?

Investigating relationships

Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called "hard" sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves as engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. Based on these revelations, they attempt to state general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists' writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it.

Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach. You can learn more about writing for political theory classes in the section "Writing in Political Theory" below.

Building theories

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know whether presidential elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis: "When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, presidential incumbents are not reelected".

Collecting data

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable (the phenomenon that is affected by other variables) would be the reelection of incumbent presidents; the independent variable (the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable) would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent presidents and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a presidential election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

However, research in political science seldom yields immediately conclusive results. In this case, for example, although in most recent presidential elections our hypothesis holds true, President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 despite the fact that the national unemployment rate was 17%. To explain this important exception and to make certain that other factors besides high unemployment rates were not primarily responsible for the defeat of incumbent presidents in other election years, you would need to do further research. So you can see how political scientists use the scientific method to build ever more precise and persuasive theories and how you might begin to think about the topics that interest you as you write your paper.

Clear, consistent, objective writing

Since political scientists construct and assess theories in accordance with the principles of the scientific method, writing in the field conveys the rigor, objectivity, and logical consistency that characterize this method. Thus political scientists avoid the use of impressionistic or metaphorical language, or language which appeals primarily to our senses, emotions, or moral beliefs. In other words, rather than persuade you with the elegance of their prose or the moral virtue of their beliefs, political scientists persuade through their command of the facts and their ability to relate those facts to theories that can withstand the test of empirical investigation. In writing of this sort, clarity and concision are at a premium. To achieve such clarity and concision, political scientists precisely define any terms or concepts that are important to the arguments that they make. This precision often requires that they "operationalize" key terms or concepts. "Operationalizing" simply means that important – but possibly vague or abstract – concepts like "justice" are defined in ways that allow them to be measured or tested through scientific investigation.

Fortunately, you will generally not be expected to devise or operationalize key concepts entirely on your own. In most cases, your professor or the authors of assigned readings will already have defined and/or operationalized concepts that are important to your research. And in the event that someone hasn't already come up with precisely the definition you need, other political scientists will in all likelihood have written enough on the topic that you're investigating to give you some clear guidance on how to proceed. For this reason, it is always a good idea to explore what research has already been done on your topic before you begin to construct your own argument. (See our handout on making an academic argument.)

Example of an operationalized term

To give you an example of the kind of "rigor" and "objectivity" political scientists aim for in their writing, let's examine how someone might operationalize a term. Reading through this example should clarify the level of analysis and precision that you will be expected to employ in your writing. Here's how you might define key concepts in a way that allows us to measure them.

We are all familiar with the term "democracy". If you were asked to define this term, you might make a statement like the following: "Democracy is government by the people". You would, of course, be correct – democracy is government by the people. But, in order to evaluate whether or not a particular government is fully democratic or is more or less democratic when compared with other governments, we would need to have more precise criteria with which to measure or assess democracy. Most political scientists agree that these criteria should include the following rights and freedoms for citizens:

  • Freedom to form and join organizations
  • Freedom of expression
  • Right to vote
  • Eligibility for public office
  • Right of political leaders to compete for support
  • Right of political leaders to compete for votes
  • Alternative sources of information
  • Free and fair elections
  • Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference

By adopting these nine criteria, we now have a definition that will allow us to measure democracy. Thus, if you want to determine whether Brazil is more democratic than Sweden, you can evaluate each country in terms of the degree to which it fulfills the above criteria.

What counts as good writing in political science?

While rigor, clarity, and concision will be valued in any piece of writing in political science, knowing the kind of writing task you've been assigned will help you to write a good paper. Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper.

Writing political science research papers

Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a persuasive argument in favor of your perspective. In order for you to successfully meet this challenge, your research paper should include the following components: (1) an introduction, (2) a problem statement, (3) a discussion of methodology, (4) a literature review, (5) a description and evaluation of your research findings, and (6) a summary of your findings. Here's a brief description of each component.

In the introduction of your research paper, you need to give the reader some basic background information on your topic that suggests why the question you are investigating is interesting and important. You will also need to provide the reader with a statement of the research problem you are attempting to address and a basic outline of your paper as a whole. The problem statement presents not only the general research problem you will address but also the hypotheses that you will consider. In the methodology section, you will explain to the reader the research methods you used to investigate your research topic and to test the hypotheses that you have formulated. For example, did you conduct interviews, use statistical analysis, rely upon previous research studies, or some combination of all of these methodological approaches?

Before you can develop each of the above components of your research paper, you will need to conduct a literature review. A literature review involves reading and analyzing what other researchers have written on your topic before going on to do research of your own. There are some very pragmatic reasons for doing this work. First, as insightful as your ideas may be, someone else may have had similar ideas and have already done research to test them. By reading what they have written on your topic, you can ensure that you don't repeat, but rather learn from, work that has already been done. Second, to demonstrate the soundness of your hypotheses and methodology, you will need to indicate how you have borrowed from and/or improved upon the ideas of others.

By referring to what other researchers have found on your topic, you will have established a frame of reference that enables the reader to understand the full significance of your research results. Thus, once you have conducted your literature review, you will be in a position to present your research findings. In presenting these findings, you will need to refer back to your original hypotheses and explain the manner and degree to which your results fit with what you anticipated you would find. If you see strong support for your argument or perhaps some unexpected results that your original hypotheses cannot account for, this section is the place to convey such important information to your reader. This is also the place to suggest further lines of research that will help refine, clarify inconsistencies with, or provide additional support for your hypotheses. Finally, in the summary section of your paper, reiterate the significance of your research and your research findings and speculate upon the path that future research efforts should take.

Writing in political theory

Political theory differs from other subfields in political science in that it deals primarily with historical and normative, rather than empirical, analysis. In other words, political theorists are less concerned with the scientific measurement of political phenomena than with understanding how important political ideas develop over time. And they are less concerned with evaluating how things are than in debating how they should be. A return to our democracy example will make these distinctions clearer and give you some clues about how to write well in political theory.

Earlier, we talked about how to define democracy empirically so that it can be measured and tested in accordance with scientific principles. Political theorists also define democracy, but they use a different standard of measurement. Their definitions of democracy reflect their interest in political ideals – for example, liberty, equality, and citizenship – rather than scientific measurement. So, when writing about democracy from the perspective of a political theorist, you may be asked to make an argument about the proper way to define citizenship in a democratic society. Should citizens of a democratic society be expected to engage in decision-making and administration of government, or should they be satisfied with casting votes every couple of years?

In order to substantiate your position on such questions, you will need to pay special attention to two interrelated components of your writing: (1) the logical consistency of your ideas and (2) the manner in which you use the arguments of other theorists to support your own. First, you need to make sure that your conclusion and all points leading up to it follow from your original premises or assumptions. If, for example, you argue that democracy is a system of government through which citizens develop their full capacities as human beings, then your notion of citizenship will somehow need to support this broad definition of democracy. A narrow view of citizenship based exclusively or primarily on voting probably will not do. Whatever you argue, however, you will need to be sure to demonstrate in your analysis that you have considered the arguments of other theorists who have written about these issues. In some cases, their arguments will provide support for your own; in others, they will raise criticisms and concerns that you will need to address if you are going to make a convincing case for your point of view.

Drafting your paper

If you have used material from outside sources in your paper, be sure to cite them appropriately in your paper. In political science, writers most often use the APA or Turabian (a version of the Chicago Manual of Style) style guides when formatting references. Check with your instructor if he or she has not specified a citation style in the assignment. For more information on constructing citations, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Although all assignments are different, the preceding outlines provide a clear and simple guide that should help you in writing papers in any sub-field of political science. If you find that you need more assistance than this short guide provides, refer to the list of additional resources below or make an appointment to see a tutor at the Writing Center.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Becker, Howard S. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cuba, Lee. 2002. A Short Guide to Writing about Social Science , Fourth Edition. New York: Longman.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How . New York, London: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, inc.

Scott, Gregory M. and Stephen M. Garrison. 1998. The Political Science Student Writer's Manual , Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.

Turabian, Kate L. 1996. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers , Theses, and Dissertations, Sixth Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Creative Commons License

Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

Academic Writing Service

This page provides a comprehensive list of political philosophy research paper topics that aim to guide students through the vast expanse of ideas, theories, and debates that have influenced political thought over the ages. Political philosophy, with its emphasis on societal structures, rights, justice, and governance, offers a rich tapestry of subjects for academic exploration. Navigating these topics is crucial for understanding the foundational principles that have dictated and continue to shape political systems worldwide.

100 Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

Political philosophy holds an esteemed position in the vast realm of philosophical inquiry, examining the fundamental nature of governance, rights, freedom, and societal structures. As societies evolve, so too does the need for a deepened understanding of the principles that guide them. Diving into political philosophy research paper topics is more than an academic exercise; it’s an exploration into the fabric of our collective societal heritage and a forecast of future trajectories.

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% off with 24start discount code.

  • Origin and evolution of political thought.
  • Natural rights and their influence on politics.
  • The role of reason in political decision-making.
  • The concept of the common good.
  • Pluralism and its implications.
  • Classical vs. modern political philosophies.
  • The notion of political obligation.
  • Autonomy and its role in politics.
  • Political philosophy and the question of human nature.
  • Liberty, equality, and their tensions.
  • Rousseau’s Social Contract and the general will.
  • Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and property rights.
  • Hobbes’ Leviathan and the necessity of a strong sovereign.
  • Rawls’ theory of justice and the veil of ignorance.
  • Scanlon’s contractualism.
  • Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement.
  • Contemporary criticisms of social contract theories.
  • The role of trust in social contracts.
  • Feminist perspectives on the social contract.
  • The social contract and non-Western philosophies.
  • Classical principles of Athenian democracy.
  • Modern representative democracies.
  • Merits and criticisms of autocratic governance.
  • The rise and implications of technocratic governance.
  • Participatory vs. deliberative democracy.
  • The challenges of direct democracy.
  • Monarchies and their evolving roles.
  • Theocracy and its place in modern politics.
  • Tribal and indigenous governance structures.
  • Supranational entities and global governance.
  • The philosophical foundations of human rights.
  • Balancing individual freedom and collective responsibility.
  • Limitations and responsibilities of free speech.
  • Rights to privacy in the digital age.
  • Economic rights and their implications.
  • Rights of marginalized and indigenous groups.
  • Environmental rights and intergenerational justice.
  • Philosophical debates on freedom vs. security.
  • The right to revolt and civil disobedience.
  • Duties and the scope of global responsibilities.
  • Socratic views on governance and society.
  • Medieval political thought and the divine right.
  • Enlightenment thinkers and the rise of republicanism.
  • Fascist and Nazi political philosophies.
  • Post-colonial political thought.
  • Marxism and its global implications.
  • Feminist political philosophies through history.
  • Confucianism and East Asian political thought.
  • African Ubuntu philosophy and politics.
  • The political thought of the American Founding Fathers.
  • Rawls’ Theory of Justice.
  • Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
  • Distributive vs. commutative justice.
  • The gendered perspective on justice.
  • Restorative and retributive justice.
  • The philosophy of social and economic equality.
  • Capability approach to justice.
  • The philosophical foundations of affirmative action.
  • Intersecting oppressions and justice.
  • The role of luck in justice and fairness debates.
  • Classical conceptions of political power.
  • Weber’s tripartite classification of authority.
  • The problem of political obligation.
  • Foucault’s power/knowledge thesis.
  • Challenges to political legitimacy.
  • The philosophical underpinnings of civil resistance.
  • Power dynamics in international relations.
  • The concept of soft power.
  • Critical theory and power structures.
  • The philosophy behind sovereign immunity.
  • Just War theory and its critiques.
  • Philosophical perspectives on nuclear deterrence.
  • Humanitarian interventions and their ethical implications.
  • Realism vs. liberalism in international politics.
  • Kant’s Perpetual Peace and modern peace theories.
  • The politics and philosophy of global institutions.
  • Philosophical underpinnings of international law.
  • Terrorism, radicalism, and their challenges to political philosophy.
  • The ethics of drone warfare.
  • Philosophical discussions on global migration and borders.
  • Philosophical defenses and critiques of capitalism.
  • Marxist theory and its contemporary relevance.
  • The evolution and varieties of socialism.
  • Anarchist philosophies and critiques of the state.
  • Fascism and its ideological roots.
  • Libertarianism: principles and criticisms.
  • Environmental political philosophies.
  • Feminist political ideologies.
  • Postmodern political thought.
  • The future of neoliberalism.
  • Contemporary Issues and Challenges in Political Philosophy.
  • The philosophical implications of populism.
  • Identity politics and its critiques.
  • Political philosophy in the age of information.
  • Climate change and political responsibilities.
  • Bioethics, technology, and governance.
  • Challenges and opportunities of globalism.
  • Philosophical perspectives on nationalism.
  • The future of democracy in a digital age.
  • The rights and roles of AI in politics.
  • The political implications of post-truth.

As we delve into the labyrinth of political philosophy research paper topics, we find ourselves confronted with a vast array of ideas, theories, and questions that have shaped societies for millennia. The dynamic interplay of power, rights, governance, and ethics remains as relevant today as it did in the days of Plato and Aristotle. Engaging with these topics is more than an academic endeavor—it’s a journey into the heart of what it means to be human, to be a citizen, and to be a part of the ever-evolving story of civilization. The timeless value of political philosophy serves as a testament to its enduring influence and the essential role it plays in our collective narrative.

The Range of Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

Introduction

The annals of Western thought have been significantly shaped by the enduring influence of political philosophy. From the early musings of Socratic dialogues to the nuanced debates in contemporary think tanks, political philosophy provides a compass by which societies navigate the turbulent waters of governance, rights, and justice.

Overview of the Historical Evolution of Political Philosophy

Political philosophy, as a distinct discipline, has its roots in ancient civilizations. Early Greek thinkers, notably Plato and Aristotle, laid the groundwork for many debates that persist today. Their considerations of the ideal state, justice, and the nature of leadership set the stage for millennia of discourse. This classical foundation was built upon during the Roman era by philosophers like Cicero and later during the Enlightenment by figures such as Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Their discussions on social contracts, individual rights, and the separation of powers have left an indelible mark on Western political systems.

The 19th and 20th centuries ushered in a plethora of new ideologies, spurred by industrialization, wars, and revolutions. Thinkers like Marx and Engels critiqued capitalism and introduced revolutionary socialist ideals. Concurrently, the horrors of war led to reflections on nationalism, imperialism, and the ethics of conflict, with philosophers like Hannah Arendt dissecting the roots of totalitarianism and the banality of evil.

Relevance of Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

A venture into political philosophy research paper topics offers a unique prism through which one can comprehend the evolution and diversity of human governance. Every political system, from monarchies to democracies, springs from a foundational philosophical rationale. For instance, understanding the American Revolution and its aftermath is enriched by a grasp of Lockean principles of life, liberty, and property. Similarly, dissecting the rise and fall of Soviet communism is more insightful when one considers Marxist-Leninist tenets.

Moreover, as globalization melds East and West, there’s an increasing importance in understanding non-Western political philosophies. Confucianism’s influence on East Asian governance models, or the Ubuntu philosophy’s impact on African communal values, are testament to the vast expanse of political philosophical thought.

Contemporary Significance and Challenges Addressed by Political Philosophy

Today, the world is no less complex than it was for our philosophical forebears. We grapple with issues of globalism vs. nationalism, the role of AI in governance, and the sociopolitical ramifications of climate change. These challenges necessitate a philosophical lens. For instance, debates on global migration are enriched by applying Rawlsian principles of justice. Similarly, the ethical implications of surveillance in our digital age can be assessed through Foucauldian concepts of power dynamics.

Political philosophy research paper topics also offer avenues to dissect newer ideologies and movements. The rise of populism in various parts of the world, debates surrounding identity politics, and the philosophical underpinnings of the alt-right or antifa movements provide rich grounds for exploration.

The Role of Political Philosophy in Shaping Public Opinion, Policy-making, and Societal Norms

While often regarded as a high-brow academic pursuit, political philosophy is intrinsically tied to the pulse of the street. The philosophical convictions of thinkers often trickle down to shape public opinion and, by extension, influence policy-making. For instance, the principles articulated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty inform contemporary discussions on free speech and societal limits.

Additionally, societal norms, like our collective views on privacy, freedom, or equality, are continually shaped by ongoing philosophical discourses. The feminist philosophical movement, for example, has had tangible impacts, reshaping societal norms and pushing for policy changes in areas like workplace rights, reproductive health, and representation.

As the global landscape undergoes rapid and unpredictable shifts, the significance of political philosophy research paper topics becomes ever more pronounced. These topics, rooted in age-old debates yet adaptable to contemporary quandaries, provide invaluable tools for dissecting, understanding, and ultimately shaping the world around us. In a globalized, digitized age, political philosophy remains a beacon, illuminating the path for governance, societal values, and human rights. Its timeless relevance stands as a testament to the depth and breadth of issues it addresses, guiding societies past, present, and future.

Custom Writing Services by iResearchNet

Diving deep into the intricacies of political philosophy demands meticulous research, keen analytical skills, and a nuanced writing touch. Recognizing these requirements, iResearchNet has emerged as a leading authority, offering unparalleled expertise in crafting political philosophy research papers that resonate with clarity, depth, and academic rigor.

  • Expert Degree-Holding Writers: At the heart of iResearchNet’s prowess lies a team of seasoned writers, each holding advanced degrees in philosophy and its related disciplines. Their rich academic background ensures that each research paper is an exemplar of scholarly excellence.
  • Custom Written Works: Eschewing cookie-cutter templates, iResearchNet takes pride in delivering unique papers tailored to each student’s specific requirements and academic level.
  • In-depth Research: A hallmark of any commendable research paper is the depth of investigation. iResearchNet’s writers delve into reputable sources, ensuring every paper is informed by authoritative voices in the field of political philosophy.
  • Custom Formatting: Recognizing the varied formatting demands of different institutions, iResearchNet offers custom formatting options across popular styles including APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, and Harvard.
  • Top Quality: Quality is the bedrock of iResearchNet’s services. Each paper undergoes rigorous quality checks, ensuring it meets the highest academic standards and is free from errors or inconsistencies.
  • Customized Solutions: Whether it’s a specific philosophical perspective, a unique thesis argument, or integrating certain key texts, iResearchNet provides bespoke solutions tailored to meet each student’s unique needs.
  • Flexible Pricing: High-quality doesn’t necessarily equate to high prices. iResearchNet offers a range of flexible pricing options designed to cater to students’ diverse budgetary needs without compromising on quality.
  • Short Deadlines: Procrastinated a bit too long? iResearchNet understands. That’s why they offer expedited writing services, capable of delivering top-tier papers in as little as three hours.
  • Timely Delivery: Punctuality is a virtue that iResearchNet holds in high regard. They ensure that every paper is delivered well within the stipulated deadline, granting students ample time for review.
  • 24/7 Support: Questions, concerns, or last-minute instructions? iResearchNet’s dedicated support team is available round the clock, ready to assist at any hour.
  • Absolute Privacy: iResearchNet champions the importance of privacy. Clients can rest assured that their personal and transactional information remains confidential, protected by robust data security measures.
  • Easy Order Tracking: Gone are the days of anxious waiting. With iResearchNet’s intuitive order tracking system, students can effortlessly monitor the progress of their papers in real-time.
  • Money-Back Guarantee: Confidence in the quality of service translates to a robust money-back guarantee. If, for any reason, a paper doesn’t meet the client’s expectations, iResearchNet stands ready to offer a full refund.

As you stand at the precipice of your academic journey into political philosophy, wouldn’t you want the best tools at your disposal? iResearchNet beckons. Harness their unmatched services and ensure your political philosophy research paper topics are explored with the depth, precision, and scholarly flair they deserve.

Treading the pathways of political philosophy can be daunting. However, with iResearchNet by your side, you’re not alone. Their unique blend of expertise, dedication, and academic excellence ensures that your foray into the realm of political philosophy is both rewarding and enlightening. iResearchNet is more than just a writing service; it’s a trusted academic companion for all your endeavors in political philosophy.

Unlock New Horizons with iResearchNet!

Navigating the vast seas of political philosophy can be both an exhilarating and challenging endeavor. It’s a domain where thought meets action, theory intertwines with practice, and age-old wisdom interacts with contemporary quandaries. At such pivotal moments, having a guiding hand can make all the difference, transforming an arduous journey into a voyage of discovery.

iResearchNet stands out as that beacon of guidance. With their unmatched depth and expertise in political philosophy, they offer students not just a paper, but a map to intellectual treasures. Their team’s profound knowledge ensures that every topic is explored from multiple angles, fostering a comprehensive understanding and igniting a passion for the subject.

But the magic of iResearchNet doesn’t just end with exceptional research papers. It’s the assurance of having a steadfast partner, one that understands the nuances of political philosophy, and is committed to helping you achieve academic excellence. Their dedicated team works tirelessly, ensuring that every student’s voice is heard, every query addressed, and every academic ambition nurtured.

As you stand on the cusp of new academic endeavors, remember that with iResearchNet, you’re not merely submitting a paper; you’re embarking on a transformative journey in the world of political philosophy. A journey where every challenge becomes an opportunity, every question leads to deeper understanding, and every research topic transforms into a stepping stone towards academic greatness.

So, why wait? Seize this unparalleled chance for in-depth exploration. Let iResearchNet be your compass in the enthralling world of political philosophy, guiding you towards horizons yet uncharted and potentials yet unlocked. Your quest for knowledge deserves nothing but the best, and with iResearchNet, that’s precisely what you get. Dive in, explore, and let the journey begin!

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER

research paper political theory

Grad Coach

Research Topics & Ideas: Politics

100+ Politics-Related Research Ideas To Fast-Track Your Project

Political science research topics and ideas

Finding and choosing a strong research topic is the critical first step when it comes to crafting a high-quality dissertation or thesis. If you’ve landed on this post, chances are you’re looking for a politics-related research topic , but aren’t sure where to start. Here, we’ll explore a variety of politically-related research ideas across a range of disciplines, including political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, public administration and policy.

NB – This is just the start…

The topic ideation and evaluation process has multiple steps . In this post, we’ll kickstart the process by sharing some research topic ideas. This is the starting point, but to develop a well-defined research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , along with a well-justified plan of action to fill that gap.

If you’re new to the oftentimes perplexing world of research, or if this is your first time undertaking a formal academic research project, be sure to check out our free dissertation mini-course. Also, be sure to sign up for our free webinar that explores how to find a high-quality research topic from scratch.

Overview: Politics-Related Topics

  • Political theory and philosophy
  • Comparative politics
  • International relations
  • Public administration
  • Public policy
  • Examples of politics-related dissertations

Topics & Ideas: Political Theory

  • An analysis of the impact of feminism on political theory and the concept of citizenship in Saudi Arabia in the context of Vision 2030
  • A comparative study of the political philosophies of Marxism and liberalism and their influence on modern politics
  • An examination of how the Covid-19 pandemic affected the relationship between individual freedom and collective responsibility in political philosophy
  • A study of the impact of race and ethnicity on French political philosophy and the concept of justice
  • An exploration of the role of religion in political theory and its impact on secular democracy in the Middle East
  • A Review of Social contract theory, comparative analysis of the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
  • A study of the concept of the common good in political philosophy and its relevance to the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe
  • An examination of the relationship between political power and the rule of law in developing African countries
  • A study of the impact of postmodernism on political theory and the concept of truth, a case study of the US
  • An exploration of the role of virtue in political philosophy and its impact on the assessment of moral character in political leaders

Research topic idea mega list

Topics & Ideas: Comparative Politics

  • A comparative study of different models of federalism and their impact on democratic governance: A case Study of South American federalist states
  • The impact of ethnic and religious diversity on political stability and democracy in developing countries, a review of literature from Africa
  • An analysis of the role of civil society in promoting democratic change in autocratic regimes: A case study in Sweden
  • A comparative examination of the impact of globalization on political institutions and processes in South America and Africa.
  • A study of the factors that contribute to successful democratization in authoritarian regimes, a review of the role of Elite-driven democratization
  • A comparison of the political and economic systems of China and India and their impact on social development
  • The impact of corruption on political institutions and democracy in South East Asia, a critical review
  • A comparative examination of the impact of majoritarian representation (winner-take-all) vs proportional representation on political representation and governance
  • An exploration of Multi-party systems in democratic countries and their impact on minority representation and policy-making.
  • A study of the factors that contribute to successful decentralization and regional autonomy, a case study of Spain

Research Topic Kickstarter - Need Help Finding A Research Topic?

Topics & Ideas: International Relations

  • A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of diplomacy and military force in resolving international conflicts in Central Africa.
  • The impact of globalization on the sovereignty of nation-states and the changing nature of international politics, a review of the role of Multinational Corporations
  • An examination of the role of international aid organizations in promoting peace, security, and development in the Middle East.
  • A study of the impact of economic interdependence on the likelihood of conflict in international relations: A critical review of weaponized interdependence
  • A comparative analysis of the foreign policies of the EU and the US and their impact on international stability in Africa
  • An exploration of the relationship between international human rights and national sovereignty during the Covid 19 pandemic
  • A study of the role of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)s in international politics and their impact on state behaviour
  • A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of international regimes in addressing global challenges such as climate change, arms control, and terrorism in Brazil
  • An examination of the impact of the rise of BRICS on the international system and global governance
  • A study of the role of ideology in shaping the foreign policies of states and the dynamics of international relations in the US

Free Webinar: How To Find A Dissertation Research Topic

Tops & Ideas: Public Administration

  • An analysis of the impact of digital technology on public administration and the delivery of public services in Estonia
  • A review of models of public-private partnerships and their impact on the delivery of public services in Ghana
  • An examination of the role of civil society organizations in monitoring and accountability of public administration in Papua New Guinea
  • A study of the impact of environmentalism as a political ideology on public administration and policy implementation in Germany
  • An exploration of the relationship between public administration and citizen engagement in the policy-making process, an exploration of gender identity concerns in schools
  • A comparative analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of public administration, decentralisation and pay and employment reform in developing countries
  • A study of the role of collaborative leadership in public administration and its impact on organizational performance
  • A systematic review of the challenges and opportunities related to diversity and inclusion in police services
  • A study of the impact of corrupt public administration on economic development and regional growth in Eastern Europe
  • An exploration of the relationship between public administration and civil rights and liberties, including issues related to privacy and surveillance, a case study in South Korea

Research topic evaluator

Topics & Ideas: Public Policy

  • An analysis of the impacts of public policy on income inequality and poverty reduction in South Sudan
  • A comparative study of the effectiveness of legal and regulatory, economic and financial, and social and cultural instruments for addressing climate change in South Korea
  • An examination of the role of interest groups in shaping public policy and the policy-making process regarding land-use claims
  • A study of the impact of globalization on the development of public policies and programs for mitigating climate change in Singapore
  • An exploration of the relationship between public policy and social justice in tertiary education in the UAE
  • A comparative analysis of the impact of health policies for the management of diabetes on access to healthcare and health outcomes in developing countries
  • Exploring the role of evidence-based policymaking in the design and implementation of public policies for the management of invasive invertebrates in Australia
  • An examination of the challenges and opportunities of implementing educational dietary public policies in developing multicultural countries
  • A study of the impact of public policies on urbanization and urban development in rural Indonesia
  • An exploration of the role of media and public opinion in shaping public policy and the policy-making process in the transport industry of Malaysia

Examples: Politics Dissertations & Theses

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a politics-related research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses to see how this all comes together.

Below, we’ve included a selection of research projects from various politics-related degree programs to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

  • We, the Righteous Few: Immoral Actions of Fellow Partisans are Judged as Less Possible (Varnam, 2020)
  • Civilizing the State: Civil Society and the Politics of Primary Public Health Care Provision in Urban Brazil (Gibson, 2012)
  • Political regimes and minority language policies: evidence from Taiwan and southeast Asia (Wu, 2021)
  • The Feminist Third Wave: Social Reproduction, Feminism as Class Struggle, and Contemporary Women’s Movements (Angulo, 2019)
  • The Politics of Immigration under Authoritarianism (Joo, 2019)
  • The politics of digital platforms: Sour Dictionary, activist subjectivities, and contemporary cultures of resistance (Okten, 2019)
  • Vote choice and support for diverse candidates on the Boston City Council At-Large (Dolcimascolo, 2022)
  • The city agenda: local governance and national influence in the policy agenda, 1900-2020 (Shannon, 2022)
  • Turf wars: who supported measures to criminalize homelessness in Austin, Texas? (Bompiedi, 2021)
  • Do BITs Cause Opposition Between Investor Rights and Environmental Protection? (Xiong, 2022)
  • Revealed corruption and electoral accountability in Brazil: How politicians anticipate voting behavior (Diaz, 2021)
  • Intersectional Solidarity: The Political Consequences of a Consciousness of Race, Gender and Sexuality (Crowder, 2020)
  • The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Coalitional Representation of Latinxs in the U.S. House of Representatives (Munoz, 2019)

Looking at these titles, you can probably pick up that the research topics here are quite specific and narrowly-focused , compared to the generic ones presented earlier. In other words, to create a top-notch research topic, you must be precise and target a specific context with specific variables of interest . In other words, you need to identify a clear, well-justified research gap.

Get 1:1 Help

If you’re still feeling a bit unsure about how to find a research topic for your dissertation or research project, check out our Topic Kickstarter service below.

You Might Also Like:

Business/management/MBA research topics

Interesting thesis.

Manu Adamu

I really appreciate your work which will greatly help me rethink on my topic

Ibrahim Abdullahi

Please how can I get the full thesis?

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

  • Print Friendly
  • Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

A Grainy Photo and a Dilemma: How U.K. Papers Are Covering Princess Catherine

In a country where the health struggles of even public figures are generally viewed as out of bounds, journalists are trying to balance the right to privacy with a thirst for royal stories.

Catherine, Princess of Wales, smiles while facing a small group of people.

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

After a week of often hysterical speculation about her well-being, there were suddenly two plausible pieces of evidence that Catherine, Princess of Wales, was on the mend : a photo of her in a car driven by her mother and a confirmation by the British Army that she would attend a military ceremony in June.

But as with almost everything surrounding the health of Prince William’s 42-year-old wife in recent weeks, any sense of certainty quickly melted away.

A palace official said on Tuesday that the army had jumped the gun in announcing Catherine’s participation in Trooping the Color, an annual ritual that celebrates the birthday of the sovereign. And while British newspapers reported the existence of paparazzi shots, purportedly of Catherine, that were posted on social media on Monday, none of them published the images.

At the end of another hothouse news cycle, consumers of royal news were back where they started: in the dark about the princess, who had abdominal surgery in January and has not been seen during her lengthy convalescence.

The only certainty in the saga of Catherine is the appearance of her freewheeling, unfiltered uncle, Gary Goldsmith , on a British reality-TV show, “Celebrity Big Brother,” which aired on Monday evening. At any other time, Mr. Goldsmith’s appearance might have been an embarrassment for Catherine, who has tried to cultivate a dignified, disciplined image as a senior member of the royal family.

In the vacuum of news about her, however, experts say Mr. Goldsmith’s reality-TV antics may provide a welcome distraction for Britain’s tabloid papers. Their editors have struggled to balance their zeal for covering the royals — an almost boundless enthusiasm, in the case of a future queen once known as Kate Middleton — with a recognition that even most public figures in Britain are generally entitled to privacy in matters of health.

“The media is, unusually, lagging behind,” said Sarah Sands, a former senior editor at the BBC and former editor of The Sunday Telegraph. “They are left scratching their heads. Did they love her too much and pile too much pressure on her? Is the new role of the media to provide reassurance?

“Coming to the aid of the tabloids is the friendly pantomime figure of Kate’s wicked uncle, Gary Goldsmith,” Ms. Sands continued. Mr. Goldsmith, she said, “is likely to be the only inside commentary we are going to get for the next few weeks.”

If that’s true, it could spare the papers and broadcasters from having to make decisions like the one they faced on Monday, when the American celebrity gossip site TMZ posted what it claimed were the first images of Catherine since before she was hospitalized. The long-lens photos, which are grainy and show a woman in sunglasses who resembles Catherine, were taken near Windsor Castle, according to the site.

The Daily Mail said the pictures were not published in Britain because Kensington Palace, where William and Catherine have their offices, “appealed for her to be able to recuperate in private.” But The Mail went on to speculate that they were taken on Monday morning shortly after Catherine dropped off her children at school, helped by her mother, Carole Middleton.

Chris Ship, the royal editor of ITV News, referred to the images on social media but said, “We are not running them out of respect for her privacy whilst she recovers from her operation on the time scale we were given.”

Kensington Palace has said Catherine will not go back to her royal duties until after Easter. Last week, caught up in a swirl of conjecture and conspiracy theories after William abruptly pulled out of a function, it reiterated that statement and said it would provide only “significant updates.” The princess, an official said, was still doing well.

On Tuesday, the palace refused to comment on the photos, saying it did not want to give TMZ publicity. British newspapers have treated paparazzi photos gingerly since the death of Princess Diana, William’s mother, in a car crash in Paris in 1997, after a high-speed pursuit by photographers.

“The memory for the British press is still sharp,” said Ms. Sands, who was deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph at the time of Diana’s death. “It was full of dry-mouth remorse. Rules on privacy and duty of care changed profoundly.”

British courts have ruled that the right to privacy extends to members of the royal family, and the Editors’ Code of Practice , under which much of the British press operates, protects all individuals against unjustified intrusion into matters of physical and mental health.

Some critics were less generous about the media’s motives, particularly given that the images are easily accessible to anyone with a few swipes on an iPhone.

“What’s fascinating is how the nonsense on social media about Kate gives the papers a chance to write about something that there’s nothing to write about, while being judgmental about what’s out there on the web,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC.

This is the second time in four months that the British media has declined to publish details about the royal family even after they had circulated on social media. In November, papers did not print the names of Catherine and King Charles III after they were identified, in the Dutch edition of a new book, as family members who had allegedly asked about the skin color of the unborn child of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.

The floodgates broke only after Piers Morgan, a prominent TV host, disclosed the names on his program. Buckingham Palace said at the time it would contemplate legal action, but it did not act.

The mixed messages over Catherine’s attendance at Trooping the Color may end up being a simple case of bureaucratic bungling. The army said on its website that Catherine, in her capacity as colonel of the Irish guards, would review soldiers who are to parade in the ceremony on June 8.

But a Kensington Palace official said it was the palace’s job to confirm the schedule of the princess, and it has not yet done so. It has also not commented on the decision of Mr. Goldsmith, who is Carole Middleton’s younger brother, to join the cast of “Celebrity Big Brother.”

Mr. Goldsmith, 58, a former technology entrepreneur, pleaded guilty in 2017 to assaulting his wife, Julie-Ann Goldsmith.

In a promotional video for the show, a gleeful Mr. Goldsmith said: “Winding people up is probably my favorite hobby. Every part of me is just riddled with mischief and danger.”

Then he added, “I’m an absolute nightmare to live with. There’s a reason why I’ve had four wives.”

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler

Morning Rundown: John Cena sort of streaks during the Oscars, Speaker Mike Johnson faces GOP backlash, and two pilots are accused of falling asleep mid flight

Prosecutors say Hunter Biden invented 'a conspiracy theory' in effort to dismiss tax charges

Hunter Biden speaks at a news conference.

Federal prosecutors on Friday filed their opposition to efforts by Hunter Biden ’s attorneys to dismiss tax-related charges filed against the president’s son last year.

Lawyers from special counsel David Weiss’ office forcefully rejected Biden’s assertion that the case against him was politically motivated and that prosecutors sought to appease congressional Republicans in bringing additional charges after a plea deal fell apart last year.

“The defendant concocts a conspiracy theory that the prosecution has ‘upped the ante’ to appease politicians who have absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution and are not even members of the current Executive Branch,” prosecutors wrote.

The filing came in a series of documents filed in federal court in California, with Weiss’ team hitting back at various motions to dismiss the indictment.

In response to Biden’s arguments that the additional charges came amid pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, Weiss’ team said that prosecutors had signed proposed agreements for Biden’s plea “weeks after politicians had railed against them,” and highlighted the prosecution’s actions urging the court to accept the proposed agreements.

“To state an obvious fact that the defendant continues to ignore, former President Trump is not the President of the United States,” they wrote.

“The defendant fails to explain how President Biden or the Attorney General, to whom the Special Counsel reports, or the Special Counsel himself, or his team of prosecutors, are acting at the direction of former President Trump or Congressional Republicans, or how this current Executive Branch approved allegedly discriminatory charges against the President’s son at the direction of former President Trump and Congressional Republicans,” they added.

Biden’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s filings. The special counsel’s office declined to comment.

The judge overseeing the case told Biden’s attorneys to respond to the special counsel’s filings later this month.

Attorneys for Biden had also argued last month that Weiss’ appointment as special counsel was unlawful.

Prosecutors disputed those claims Friday, writing “these arguments are meritless and should be denied,” and arguing that Weiss’ appointment “conforms to the law in all respects.”

Biden pleaded not guilty to nine tax-related charges when he was  arraigned  in January.

In addition to the tax charges, Biden also faces federal  gun charges that include an allegation that he possessed a firearm while using a narcotic. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges as well.

House Republicans have targeted Biden in their impeachment inquiry into his father. Their probe took a major hit last month when former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, whose claims played a prominent role in sparking the GOP investigation, was indicted  and accused of feeding false information to the FBI about Joe Biden and his son during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Hunter Biden appeared for a closed-door deposition  with the House Oversight and Judiciary committees last month as part of the impeachment inquiry, and blasted the probe , which has yet to provide any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, as a “baseless and destructive political charade” based on “MAGA-motivated conspiracies.”

Hunter Biden’s more than six hours of testimony — in which he emphatically denied GOP allegations against him and notably did not at any point invoke his Fifth Amendment rights —  appears to have weakened support for an impeachment  among House Republicans, NBC News has reported. Republicans have since invited Hunter Biden to testify publicly, on March 20, but he has yet to say whether he will attend the hearing.

Sarah Fitzpatrick is a senior investigative producer and story editor for NBC News. She previously worked for CBS News and "60 Minutes." 

Zoë Richards is the evening politics reporter for NBC News.

New York Post

The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive critical race theory

Schools are just teaching honest history.

That’s been the lie educators, teachers unions and the mainstream media have parroted for three years in response to the growing chorus of parents of all political stripes asserting schools are indoctrinating the nation’s children in critical race theory and leftist politics.

Now the paper of record concedes we parents were right.

In a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times, “Ethnic Studies Collides With Israel-Hamas War,” education reporter Dana Goldstein exposes the truth about K-12 education.

The article is ostensibly about the blatant antisemitism embedded in California’s ethnic-studies curriculum, which must be in all public high schools by 2025 and a graduation requirement by 2030.

The legislation was pushed, of course, by the 310,000-member-strong California Teachers Association, the largest affiliate of our country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.

As Goldstein reports, pro-Palestinian activism is a core component of the ethnic-studies discipline.

California’s curriculum likens Palestinians to Native Americans, refers to Israel’s founding as “settler colonialism,” categorizes Israeli Jews as “European settlers” and oppressors and harps on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.

Goldstein quotes University of California, Riverside, professor Dylan Rodriguez equating teaching Zionism to teaching creationism and climate-change denialism; he “would analogize” learning about Israel’s creation to “learning the history of slavery.”

While the antisemitism embedded in ethnic studies is newsworthy enough, it’s not the big story here.

In a 2022 white paper, “The Very Foundation of Good Citizenship: The Legal and Pedagogical Case for Culturally Responsive and Racially Inclusive Public Education for All Students,” the NEA defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of the United States’ diverse racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic studies helps foster cross-cultural understanding among both students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”

Goldstein exposes this as a lie.

Ethnic studies, Rodriguez explains, is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences.”

It’s “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”

Goldstein herself confesses ethnic studies is indeed “ideological” and California’s 700-page model curriculum “retains the discipline’s leftist, activist bent,” asking: “How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?”

And now the kicker: Critical race theory and systemic racism are “key concepts in the discipline,” and California’s curriculum includes “gender expression.”

The New York Times — on its cover no less — just confirmed everything parents have been ridiculed, shamed, silenced and labeled domestic terrorists by our own federal government for saying.

Lest one think the discipline is confined to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s progressive paradise and its 1.9 million public high-school students, the Times reports that states across the country are planning legislation to introduce K-12 ethnic studies.

Nor is ethnic studies confined to a single class.

California schools can “incorporate ethnic studies either as a stand-along course or by adding an ethnic studies lens to subjects such as history or literature.” This is key.

American education has been thoroughly corrupted.

Schools say they teach English and history, but they don’t.

They use these subjects as props to promote a political agenda.

Math and science aren’t unaffected.

Uber-prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy offers a course on Mathematics of Social Justice.

Rice University, often called the Harvard of the South, recently made headlines for its new offering, Afrochemistry.

Ethnic studies’ ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country.

It’s the foundation of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion regime implanted in our corporations, military and federal government.

It took the horrific events of Oct. 7 and the explosion of antisemitism in its aftermath for many to wake up to the toxic progressive ideology that’s corrupted our institutions and education system.

Even The New York Times has spoken.

Just as it finally gave us permission to question lab leaks and masks’ utility, acknowledge the harms of school closures and gender-transition surgeries and discuss President Biden’s mental acuity, we now have clearance to talk about our kids’ political indoctrination in polite company.

Let’s hope this spurs more of us to find the courage to speak up and join the fight to take back our schools.

Our country’s survival depends on it.

Andrew Gutmann is a congressional candidate in Palm Beach County, Fla., and co-host of the podcast Take Back Our Schools .

The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive critical race theory

IMAGES

  1. (DOC) Contemporary Political Theory Essay 2

    research paper political theory

  2. ️ Political theory paper example. Ancient Political Theory Essay Sample

    research paper political theory

  3. Essay: Political Analysis: Research Design and Data Analysis Second

    research paper political theory

  4. Question Paper

    research paper political theory

  5. (PDF) The methodology of political theory

    research paper political theory

  6. Writing About Political Science

    research paper political theory

VIDEO

  1. Theory and Practice of Democracy Question Paper BA Program Third Semester DU SOL Ncweb

  2. B.A political science paper:c-1(understanding political theory)2022

  3. Modern Political philosophy 6th Semester pol sc hon paper review

  4. #politicalscience #online #advance #level

  5. INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL ANALYSIS I

  6. Introduction to Political Theory Question Paper 1st Semester BA PROG SOL Introduction to Political

COMMENTS

  1. Political Theory: Sage Journals

    Political Theory (PT), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, serves as the leading forum for the development and exchange of political ideas.Broad in scope and international in coverage, PT publishes articles on political theory from a wide range of philosophical, ideological and methodological perspectives. Articles address contemporary and historical political thought, normative and ...

  2. PDF Writing Political Theory Papers

    Writing Political Theory Papers. Political theory is a little bit different than political science. Here are some important differences. 1) It's more like philosophy than social science: it is more concerned with theoretical issues. • It is crucial to make a logical argument rather than causal or empirical claim.

  3. PDF ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL THEORY PAPER

    Architecture and argument are not the only things we look for in good papers, crucial though they are. The other main elements of a successful theory paper are the quality of the writing (2.1), attention to citations (2.2) and originality of thought (2.3). ! 2.1 Writing ! Good, clean writing goes along way. The main things you should keep in ...

  4. 2 Overview of Political Theory

    Political theory is an interdisciplinary endeavor whose center of gravity lies at the humanities end of the happily still undisciplined discipline of political science. Its traditions, approaches, and styles vary, but the field is united by a commitment to theorize, critique, and diagnose the norms, practices, and organization of political ...

  5. PDF Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Politics Political Analysis

    Linda Zerilli, 'Feminist Theory and the Canon of Political Thought', in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (2008) Fred Dallmayr, 'Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory', Perspectives on Politics 2 (2004), 249-57. bell hooks, 'Theory as Liberatory Practice', Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 1 ...

  6. Political Theory on JSTOR

    Political Theory (PT), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, serves as the leading forum for the development and exchange of political ideas.Broad in scope and international in coverage, PT publishes articles on political theory from a wide range of philosophical, ideological and methodological perspectives. Articles address contemporary and historical political thought, normative and ...

  7. The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

    Political Theory in/of Political Science Present. To read the 2021 APSA program is to immerse yourself in the disciplinary "matrix" of political science (Kuhn 2012).Filled with interminable hyperlinks that seductively gesture toward panels or persons or papers you need to know to stay in touch with what's happening at the cutting edge of scholarship, the online program is a virtual ...

  8. The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

    With the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol still looming large in my political rear-view mirror, I would argue that the most important "real world" or applied work to be done by political scientists and political theorists is on democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism (Nalepa 2021, 2022a; Shapiro 2010; Meng 2020).In particular, the field of political theory should be ...

  9. The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory

    They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes. The Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science — a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state ...

  10. Full article: Doing Realist Political Theory: Introduction

    The role of practice in realist political theory. Rossi and Sleat (Citation 2014) describe what probably counts as a widely agreed understanding of what the role of practice in realist political theory should be."Broadly, realists maintain that political theory should begin (in a justificatory rather than temporal sense) not with the explication of moral ideals (of justice, freedom, rights ...

  11. PDF Strategies for Writing a Successful Political Theory Paper

    Unlike Political Science papers, Political Theory papers are far less interested in quantifiable data and empirical statistic and far more interested in analyzing and interpreting Political Theorists' writings. To write a political theory paper, start by crafting a thesis statement about a particular theory or theorist.

  12. Political Theory

    Submission Guidelines. Winter break: The Political Theory office will be closed from December 18 - January 8.. Political Theory is an international journal of political thought open to contributions from a wide range of methodological, philosophical, and ideological perspectives. Essays in contemporary or historical political thought, normative and cultural theory, history of ideas, and ...

  13. Full article: Ideology and political theory

    Ideology and political theory. Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations.

  14. Political Science

    Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper. Writing political science research papers Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a ...

  15. [PDF] Governance as political theory

    Governance as political theory. B. Peters. Published 27 April 2011. Political Science. Critical Policy Studies. Political science has had a continuing debate over the need for, and existence of, a paradigm for the discipline. This paper examines the potential utility of governance as an organizing framework for political science, and especially ...

  16. PDF Writing in Political Science

    fields: American politics, comparative politics, international relations, and political theory/philosophy. Increasingly, some political scientists focus exclusively on research methodologies. Regardless of the ... What follows is a description of the steps to take in writing a research paper. (If your assignment is a

  17. Realism in political theory

    Abstract. In recent decades, a 'realist' alternative to ideal theories of politics has slowly taken shape. Bringing together philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists, this countermovement seeks to reframe inquiry into politics and political norms. Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral psychology that includes ...

  18. PDF The Methodology of Political Theory

    To demarcate the scope of political theory, it is helpful to distinguish it from its most closely related neighbouring fields: political science, moral philosophy, legal theory, normative economics, and social ontology. We also offer some comments on the use of the label "political theory", as opposed to "political philosophy".

  19. Political Theory Research Papers

    Download. by Lucas Pohl. 13. Psychoanalysis , Political Theory , Lacan , Jacques Lacan. "Rejection of Reason and the Fall of Empire" (A) The fall of the Muslim civilization resulted from the rejection of reason. The rejection of reason was a result of the characterization of the use of reason to know revelation as kufr.

  20. Introduction to Political Theory

    Political theory 'interfaces' with a number of other disciplines, or sub-disciplines, and skills gained in the study of political theory are 'transferable' to these other sub-disciplines. Cognate disciplines and sub-disciplines include: History, especially the history of ideas. Economics - e.g., welfare economics and rational choice.

  21. POLSC101: Research in Political Science

    Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper. Writing political science research papers. Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make ...

  22. Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

    100 Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics. Political philosophy holds an esteemed position in the vast realm of philosophical inquiry, examining the fundamental nature of governance, rights, freedom, and societal structures. As societies evolve, so too does the need for a deepened understanding of the principles that guide them.

  23. 100+ Research Topics In Politics (+ Free Webinar)

    Topics & Ideas: Political Theory. An analysis of the impact of feminism on political theory and the concept of citizenship in Saudi Arabia in the context of Vision 2030. A comparative study of the political philosophies of Marxism and liberalism and their influence on modern politics. An examination of how the Covid-19 pandemic affected the ...

  24. The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping: A Grisly Theory and a Renewed Debate

    Charles Lindbergh Jr. was 20 months old when he disappeared from his bedroom in East Amwell, N.J., on March 1, 1932. A wooden ladder, a chisel and the first of more than a dozen ransom notes were ...

  25. Statistical practice as scientific exploration (my talk for the

    The whole thing is kind of mysterious to me. In the email invitation it was called the UPenn Philosophy of Computation and Data Workshop, but then they sent me a flyer where it was called the Philosophy of A.I., Data Science, & Society Workshop in the Quantitative Theory and Methods Department at Emory University.

  26. Quanta Magazine

    Quanta Magazine. A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus. nuclear physics. A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus. By Katie McCormick. June 12, 2023. By measuring inflated helium nuclei, physicists have challenged our best understanding of the force that binds protons and neutrons.

  27. Journalist who covered Trump's finances has theory about if ...

    CNN legal analyst Ryan Goodman and Jonathan Greenberg, who has reported on Donald Trump's finances for Forbes, discuss what would happen if Donald Trump can't pay the $454M in the New York ...

  28. How U.K. Media Is Covering Kate, Princess of Wales, After Her Abdominal

    Chris Ship, the royal editor of ITV News, referred to the images on social media but said, "We are not running them out of respect for her privacy whilst she recovers from her operation on the ...

  29. Prosecutors say Hunter Biden invented 'a conspiracy theory' in effort

    Attorneys for Hunter Biden last month urged a federal judge to dismiss the nine tax-related charges against him, arguing political pressure played a role in his prosecution. IE 11 is not supported.

  30. The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive ...

    Ethnic studies' ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country.