research paper political theory

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 )

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Eileen M. Hunt 1

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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.

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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.

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The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

Eileen m. hunt.

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN USA

Introduction

Political Theory in/of Political Science Present

Political Theory in/of Political Science Past

Political Theory in/of the Future

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

Toward a Political Theory/Political Science for the Future

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.

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

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43 Political Theory and Political Economy

Stephen L. Elkin is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, and a Principal of the Democracy Collaborative.

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article describes the connection between political theory and political economy. It argues that political theorists need to take account of political economy in theorizing about the contemporary world because capitalism is the most powerful force at work in shaping the modern sociopolitical world. It also explains that economic questions concerning economic growth, the distribution of wealth and income, and role of markets are at the core of the political life in democratic societies.

Political theorists neglect at their peril the relation of political theory to political economy. With such neglect comes the implication that it matters little for political life how the productive apparatus of the society is organized. 1 This is unlikely to be so. In theorizing about the contemporary world, political theorists especially need to take account of political economy because, as Marx noted, capitalism is the most powerful force at work in shaping the modern sociopolitical world. More specifically, for those living in democracies, political theory should, in significant part, be a theory of political economy because, at the core of the political life of these polities, are economic questions concerning economic growth, the distribution of wealth and income, the political power of large business corporations, the role of markets, and the rights of property. 2

A fundamental concern of political theory, at least if it is concerned with the actual world in which we carry on our lives, should then be the relation between capitalism and democracy. This is even more so the case because there are few, if any, strong arguments in favor of something other than democracy, at least for the long haul and even for places where it is presently more or less completely absent. Moreover, the world's experience with forms of economic life other than capitalism has not been a happy one (Kaminski 1991 ; Kornai 1992 ). And while we do have outlines of alternative economic systems that may well be more attractive than either some form of capitalism or state ownership, they are largely “economies in speech.” 3 Thus, the question of the relation between capitalism and democracy is unlikely to go away any time soon. Friends of a full democracy need to understand in some detail the marriage of capitalism and democracy because they should care about improving the democracy we have while we wait for the democracy they prefer. The same should be the case for advocates of new forms of economic organization. They too should think about what might be done with the economic life we have while we wait for their preferred economic life to put in an appearance.

1 Capitalist Democracies as They Are

A common account given in contemporary political theory and political science is that capitalism undercuts democracy (Lindblom 1977 ). For those who believe in any real measure of democracy, the most troubling form of the argument is that capitalism inevitably produces a class of owners of large‐scale capital who form a ruling class that directs the political life of the society. Any claims to democratic control are largely window dressing (Marx and Engels 1955 ; Lenin 1949 ; Domhoff 1986 ). Much ink has been spilt over this question of capitalist control of democratic political life. Perhaps the clearest result of this discussion is to make it apparent that any strong form of the ruling class thesis is impossible to sustain since it requires Herculean rationality on the part of capitalists, which they do not even display in economic life, and it disregards the significant political resources that other actors are able to deploy. Much defense of the ruling class argument indeed shades into a more easily defensible claim that a truncated pluralism is at work (Elkin 1985 ).

A contrasting account, held especially by American political scientists, is that the core of the relation between capitalism and democracy rests on the powerful interest groups that business forms. Most of those who share this view argue that business groups are the most powerful type of interest organization but that the political regimes being considered can still be called “pluralist” and broadly democratic (Dahl 1961 ; Truman 1993 ). There are two fundamental difficulties with this view. One is whether pluralism is itself a sufficient account of how an attractive and long‐lived form of democracy should or can operate. There are reasons to doubt this, not the least of which is that competing groups are unlikely to pay any serious attention to maintaining the rules and institutions that make pluralism and democracy possible. The second difficulty is simply that pluralism requires that all the major interests that compose a society be organized, and there is reason to doubt whether anything like this is or can be at work in an existing democracy.

A more compelling view of the relation between capital and public officials can be built around the proposition that in any form of democratic capitalism those who control large‐scale productive assets—big businessmen—will have a privileged political position (Lindblom 1977 ; Offe 1984 ; Block 1988 ). This politically privileged position results from the fact that:

given property rights, the state cannot command 4 property holders to do its bidding;

controllers of productive assets need discretion if there is to be economic prosperity: It is unlikely that government officials possess the requisite information or skill to direct economic decisions (Hayek 1944 );

the political calculus of public officials includes that they will be penalized for poor economic performance and will be rewarded for good performance; 5

most businessmen—having discretion in how they will deploy their assets—will not, without inducement, make the kinds of long‐term significant investments that are needed for high levels of economic performance.

Among the most important inducements is that public officials will not, except in the most pressing circumstances, raise issues that deeply affect what might be called the prerogatives of property. Three are of the greatest importance: the large returns in the form of profits and salary to those controlling productive property, and concomitantly the significantly unequal distribution of wealth and income; the power to move capital from one locality to another at will; and the control of productive assets to remain largely in private hands. There are also specific inducements in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and various kinds of legal permissions.

Business privilege, at its most general, means that businessmen have special access to public officials. They are consulted as a matter of course on all major economic issues, and more so than any other interest in other matters. The extent of large‐scale business's privileged position is greater than that of other interests because of the kinds of choices they have. To take an obvious possibility, workers need to work if they are to eat, since even government provision of employment and strike benefits are limited in size and duration. Large‐scale controllers of productive assets do not need to invest to any great extent or even at all. They can consume their capital. They can, moreover, also employ their capital abroad, depriving their home countries of its use.

If businessmen have a common view on a policy matter—or, at least, if a large number of them do—their privileged position makes their views especially weighty. But public officials are not ciphers. Still, because of electoral considerations, most officials will see the need to induce economic performance. This special access by controllers of productive assets does not depend on businessmen being an especially powerful interest group, better organized and with greater resources than their competitors. They have such organization and resources, but their special political access depends on the privileged position itself. Even given these two kinds of advantages—a privileged position and significant political resources—businessmen, of course, do not win all battles. In conflicts with businessmen, public officials, when they need it, have the resources of law and popular will to set against the former's control of capital and of substantial political resources.

Much of what we need to know about business–state relations within contemporary capitalist democracies can be captured by the following formulation: controllers of productive assets will, must, and ought to have substantial discretion in how these assets are to be employed. They will have such discretion since, if all else fails, they will succeed in taking it because they control vital resources. They must have it if there are to be reasonable levels of economic efficiency and high economic performance. Even if their actions could be carefully controlled—which they cannot—it would be counterproductive to do so. And finally, controllers of productive assets ought to have such discretion because, given the reasonable concern of citizens for at least moderately high levels of economic well‐being, there appears to be no other way to secure it other than giving asset‐controllers considerable discretion. The result of this discretion is also inevitable: the privileged political voice of large‐scale controllers of capital. That it is inevitable, however, does not entail that the privileged voice be a dominating one nor that the interests for which it speaks be narrow or adverse to broad public interests.

It is worth emphasizing here that in any complex political economy those who control the day‐to‐day operation of productive assets will have a privileged political position. This will be as true for state officials under state socialism as for worker‐owners under market socialism. To be sure, state managers can be commanded to invest but there are real limits to such commands. After all, shooting the present group of managers will make it harder to find competent people to take on the task of planning investment. As for worker‐owners, since they will usually have little wealth, they may be even more risk averse than private owners, and may thus require even greater inducements from public officials (Miller 1990 , ch. 3). This pervasiveness of the politically privileged position of large‐scale asset‐controllers reinforces the point made earlier that political theorists should give their principal attention to democratic capitalism. Looking elsewhere will not change the major questions as much as is often supposed.

2 Capitalist Democracies as They Might Be

Political theorists can take one of two tacks once they accept that controllers of large‐scale productive assets will, must, and ought to have a privileged position in any form of democratic capitalism. They can join with political economists and try to devise forms for the control of productive resources other than private ownership. But, as noted, if they go down this road, it cannot be because such forms of control will obviate the need for democratically elected officials to offer inducements to invest and the political privilege that flows from it. The more promising alternative, however, is to consider whether anything significant can be done with regard to how capitalist democracies now work—proposals that take due account of the privileged position of business but do not allow that privilege to undercut significantly the kind of extensive popular control of authority that is part of democracy's value.

A strategy is needed if we are to discuss in brief compass the broad question of whether a democratically supportable relation between capitalism and democracy is possible. Given that capitalist democracies have in common that business has a privileged position, we can focus on a particular case, a particularly useful one being the United States. It poses in the clearest fashion the question of how to accommodate the privileged position of capital since in this case the privilege is difficult to miss. By contrast, in what might be called party‐corporatist regimes the political privilege of capital is partly disguised by the presence of disciplined political parties that make it possible to carry out programs aimed at securing a significant measure of economic equality. Hence the designation “party.” The regimes are “corporatist” in that labor is sufficiently organized to enforce a system of peak organization bargaining with business leaders. Moreover, much state policy is shaped by a civil service with a strong sense of its corporate prerogatives. Thus, the politics of these regimes—which are broadly social democratic in orientation—revolve around the interaction of parties, peak organizations, and senior civil servants (Esping‐Anderson 1990 ; Goodin et al. 1999 ; Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1975 ). Proposals for reform of the relation between capital and democracy which emerge from the American case will therefore need to be modified to fit these and other broadly democratic political systems. 6

A useful starting proposition for analyzing the United States, as well as other democracies, is that the broader the politically expressed interests of capital, the greater the justification for its privileged position. In understanding this proposition for the United States, the political theory of James Madison, one of the founders of the American republic, is particularly useful. While Madison did not see that controllers of large‐scale productive assets must have a privileged political position—this came with the advent of advanced capitalism—he did argue that in the new broadly democratic regime, the interests of the propertied must be given special attention. While the political economy that came into being did not, in fact, work in the fashion he hoped for, Madison did see the importance of how the special political position of the propertied might be handled in a political order built on popular sovereignty. 7 Madison also shows us that to think effectively about the position of large‐scale asset‐controllers, we must think about the design of the whole political economy, what Aristotle called the political regime (Aristotle 1962 ).

Madison believed that the fully realized commercial republic that he hoped the United States would become could not rest solely on institutional design. He understood himself as presenting a theory of political constitution—and that required not just a design for the framework of government, including how its major political institutions are to work and what will make them work that way. Such a theory, he thought, also needs to specify the sociological foundation of the regime, its basis in the dominant strata of the political community. More generally, Madison understood that a regime is a set of institutions harnessed to the realization of a certain conception of justice—and that conception must at least be consistent with the one held by the powerful political strata of the regime. He himself looked to the propertied class to provide the foundation in self‐interest for the regime's operation, in particular by increasing the likelihood that the rights of the citizenry and the permanent interests of the regime would be given due attention. 8

There were thus to be two principal sources of energy in this new government: non‐factional majorities 9 and a propertied class with broad interests. Men of property were to be given political advantages—political influence greater than their proportion in the population would call for—in order to increase the odds that they would be a significant portion of those elected to office. It was likely, thought Madison, that they would predominate in those offices filled by indirect election. Additionally, large electoral districts would mean that most of the people widely known in a given electoral district would be major property‐holders whose holdings would allow them to engage in a wide variety of civic and political affairs, and whose resources would allow them to take the time to run for office (Farrand 1911 , III, 454). Moreover, popular government itself would confer an advantage on the propertied class. Those with economic resources are more able to get their views disseminated; they will be opinion leaders.

Men of property would naturally be drawn to protecting the rights of property, Madison thought, and he believed that property rights were essential to republican government. Without such rights, the commerce that produced the economic prosperity that the new government promised, and on which it rested, would be impossible to achieve. Moreover, if property rights were eviscerated, other rights would soon follow. Additionally, a government that regularly was the scene of intense struggles over property could not long survive, and thus keeping such struggles off the public agenda by making the right to property secure was crucial to the success of republican government. The propertied would also be drawn to the limited government that Madison believed was a fundamental feature of an attractive regime of popular sovereignty since such limits would make it likely that their property rights would be respected. Although Madison was clear that men of property might be drawn to deeply flawed versions of these matters—versions built around their immediate and narrowly defined self‐interest—he believed that protection of property rights was necessary for republican government, that limited government was its very essence, and that promotion of commerce was a part of the republican public interest, what he termed the permanent interests of the community. 10 Madison thus believed that there was a providential overlap between the interests of the propertied and the security of a right to property and the permanent interests of the community.

Still, even if the interests of the propertied did, to some degree, overlap with the rights the regime was to secure and the permanent interests of the community it was to serve, the overlap in private and public interests, Madison believed, was unlikely to be sufficient. The same political advantages that the constitutional design gave to the propertied in order to protect property rights and serve the permanent interests of the community could, and plausibly would, be used to serve narrow versions of these. Moreover, the propertied would be in a position to prevent the serving of other rights than to property, and aspects of the permanent interests of the community other than the promotion of commerce. If the political sociology of the regime was to do its job, the regime's institutional design must increase the odds that the interests the propertied promoted were not of the narrowest kind.

There are several features of the Madisonian design that were meant to promote an enlargement of the interests of the propertied. The first is simply elections. After all, men of property in seeking public office would be unlikely to say to voters that politics is a business and they themselves are in it to fatten their bank accounts. The impact of deliberation in law‐making that Madison supposed would characterize the new republic would work in much the same fashion. Those who advocate narrow interests would need instead to provide reasons why their concerns should receive attention from their fellow law‐makers, and in making such arguments they would inevitably be drawn to a formulation of their interests that emphasizes the broad nature of the benefits to be gained.

This tendency for legislative deliberation to enlarge interests would be reinforced by the separation of powers. The separation is janus‐faced: It both inhibits factional government 11 and promotes a broadening of the interests of those at work in the several branches of government. Madison likely supposed that different kinds of property holders would, in seeking political influence, be drawn to the different branches of government depending on the manner of selection that characterizes each of them. If this occurred, then various parts of the propertied class would each have a measure of legal authority, and they would need to find common ground if they were to act in concert. In itself, this would broaden their interests. Moreover, the separation of powers—because it is a representative form of government—would force disagreements among the propertied to be played out publicly, as the protagonists would seek public support to induce the cooperation of other holders of political authority. The need to address the citizenry would again broaden interests.

How far might this broadening of the interests of the propertied go? Madison certainly thought that the propertied could be induced to rise above indifference to the fate of their propertyless fellow citizens. If they saw clearly, the propertied could not be indifferent in this fashion, nor would they behave factionally, stripping the propertyless of their civil and political rights in an effort to contain them—not if they valued free government, even if it was confined to men like themselves. Democratic government could not withstand such conflict, and the propertied would need to be and could be induced to see that they had a substantial interest in its maintenance.

Madison believed, therefore, that the political advantages given to the propertied would be legitimated by the breadth of their interests. He understood that an essential problem of securing democratic government in the context of a commercial society is that there will inevitably be a division between the propertied and the propertyless. But commerce is valuable. Indeed, a commercial society offered the best hope for the have‐nots (Nedelsky 1990 ). The desideratum was republican government, the essential difficulty was class division. At bottom, the problem was how to get the propertied to serve in a government that would not be an exercise in class rule, while at the same time getting the propertyless to accept a regime that was not constructed with the express intent of alleviating their distress.

3 Broadening the Interests of the Propertied

Madison's approach to the role of the propertied in a political order built around popular sovereignty is part of his general analysis of how to constitute a republican form of government in which the people rule but not as they please. If Madison's design would actually work as described, it would be a very attractive solution to the problem of how, in a regime where the people are to rule, property rights can be protected, other rights secured, and the permanent interests of the community served. Even if men of property proved to be as self‐interested as the ordinary run of human beings, their private interest would be harnessed to securing rights and serving the public interest, and majoritarian electoral controls would constrain any factional behavior on their part. However, there are serious flaws in Madison's political theory that become apparent once we look at how the American political economy has, in fact, come to work. To the political advantages given to the propertied, as Madison argued should be done, has been added the privileged position of business. Together, these have resulted in large‐scale controllers of productive assets having a very powerful role indeed in the political life of the society. At the same time, however, the interests of the propertied have remained relatively narrow. The result is a politics of narrow interests with controllers of productive assets at its center, and with little political energy directed to serving larger public interests. 12 Madison's account of how to broaden the interests of the propertied is then deficient, and a principal source of that deficiency is the insufficient attention he paid to how to foster the attentive citizenry his design requires. Two fundamental questions for the political theory of democratic capitalism are therefore: how to broaden these interests and how to foster an attentive citizenry.

There are at least two ways to broaden the interests of the propertied. One is to alter the ownership and control of capital so that the interests pursued by those who control capital through their privileged position will be broader than is now the case. This is an effort to broaden the interests of the propertied directly by altering its composition. The other method is indirect and aims to make effective the Madisonian effort to use the separation of powers to broaden interests.

There have been various proposals to enlarge the ownership of capital through a wider distribution of stock. It has been argued 13 that if a large number of ordinary citizens own significant amounts of stock, they may succeed in pushing business corporations to take a broad view of business interests. Corporations would be more likely than at present to worry, for example, about the impact of their decisions on local communities because ordinary citizens are vulnerable to what large corporations do there, and citizen‐owners will take this into account in exercising their authority.

There are several problems here. First, the extent of stock ownership by ordinary citizens would have to be significant if they are to have any noticeable impact on corporate policy given how corporations are now governed. Widely distributed stock ownership is not now the case in the United States where its extent is very likely greater than elsewhere. Moreover, most ownership of stock in the United States is in small amounts (Wolff 1996 ), even though Americans have a larger proportion of their wealth in stock compared to other industrial democracies (Bertaut 2002 ). Second, the argument assumes that ordinary citizens would not have as their primary concern the return on their investment. If they in fact do, they will presumably vote in much the same way as present shareholders do. Perhaps most important of all, it has long been clear that corporations are not run by their shareholders but by their chief executives (Berle and Means 1933 ). It is their interpretation of their duties to shareholders, their self‐interest, and the impact of competition that are the sources of the narrow interests of corporations. Broadening ownership and doing nothing else is unlikely to change significantly any of these.

Another compositional alternative here is to change the character of capital ownership itself in a way that is consistent with the basic principles of a capitalist democracy. The possibilities run from various kinds of publicly constituted investment funds, in which all citizens own stock, to forms of worker ownership. In the first, most investment capital in the economy would be provided by such funds, and business firms would be run by much the same sort of people as at present. In the second, some, or even all, of the business organizations that compose the economy would be owned by those who work within them, and professional managers would typically be hired to run the firms. At the risk of oversimplification, in these schemes ownership is cooperative. That is, each person owns property but can only dispose of it in ways consistent with cooperative ownership. Thus, shares in the funds and firms cannot be bought and sold at will. Worker‐owners, for example, may only be able to sell them either to incoming workers or to existing workers; that is, back to the firm (Simon 1991 ). Similarly, in some versions of investment funds, the shares cannot be converted to cash but only into shares of other funds. These restrictions are meant to ensure that cooperative ownership continues.

It is not possible here to do more than make one essential point about these alternative forms of ownership. In all of them capital is held “privately,” that is, not by the state in any of its guises. To this degree, the proposals are consistent with democratic capitalism. Moreover, such decentralized forms of ownership provide a counterweight to the state as does, it is widely argued, the usual form of private ownership. These alternative forms also provide the independent sources of income that is probably necessary for the individual liberty that democracy promises. Moreover, they all use the market system, and to the degree that the market is central to securing a high degree of economic well‐being, they promise the high levels of prosperity that democracy seems to require. In short, these cooperative forms will plausibly provide much the same benefits as the present form of private ownership. Moreover, these forms can and likely would make use of the same large‐scale business organization that may also be necessary for high levels of economic well‐being.

The fundamental question, however, is whether such forms of widespread ownership would broaden the interests of those who control capital. Robert Dahl, for one, thinks so, at least with regard to worker ownership, and his arguments are difficult to dismiss (Dahl 1985 ). The case for investment funds is less clear, since those who run them will presumably act as fiduciaries for their citizen‐owners, and they are likely to interpret this as meaning that they should focus on increasing the value of the fund's holdings. In short, they are likely to act much like present providers of capital.

As to indirectly broadening the interests of the propertied, Madison, we have said, looked to the effects of the separation of powers. As noted, crucial to the separation of powers doing its work is the presence of an attentive citizenry. This will prompt controllers of different kinds of productive assets to look to a version of their common interests that would be broad enough to attract significant support from such a citizenry. The rise of the administrative state increases the importance of such a citizenry. An attentive citizenry is needed to prompt legislators to engage in oversight of the administrative branch sufficient to prevent components of the business class from successfully serving their particular interests by concentrating their efforts inside this branch (Lowi 1979 ).

This leaves us with the very difficult question of how an attentive citizenry might be fostered, since few will claim that one is presently at work in most if any existing democracies. Moreover, the engendering of such a citizenry is a substantial and complex undertaking. We cannot here pursue the question very far (Elkin 1999 , 2006 ). But we can point to a piece of the puzzle that does not require any great feats of citizenship from a citizenry that, on the basis of much evidence (Miller and Shanks 1996 ), is not greatly inclined to be very attentive. The separation of powers can work to broaden the interests of capital, as Madison hoped it would, if there is a secure and confident middle class. Why is this so?

The principal source of income for the middle class comes not from controlling large‐scale productive assets; nor does it come from selling muscle power in the manner of much of the traditional working class. Most members of the middle class will be salaried, and the skills they exchange for a salary are in greater demand than for relatively simple bodily exertion. This position, in between asset‐controllers and those who rely on exchanging unskilled labor for a wage, is likely to make the middle class both skeptical of some of the claims of the other classes and sympathetic to others. Thus, a middle class secure in its political views and confident in its political power is likely to argue that a markedly unequal distribution of income in which controllers of productive assets routinely get paid twenty or even thirty times more than the middle class is unjust. They are likely to be at least moderately suspicious of those who do work that bears some relation to their own but that garners vastly greater rewards. Very great political influence on the part of large asset‐controllers will likely also make such a middle class uneasy. Many middle‐class people are also likely to share the view of America's greatest exponent of the dignity of work and free labor, Abraham Lincoln, that idleness is to be discouraged and high regard given to those who work for a living (Shklar 1995 , 81–2). All able‐bodied people should work for their keep they will think. After all, most middle‐class people do, and they likely believe that their own class status is the consequence of hard work. And, although it does not necessarily follow, many such middle‐class people will at least find plausible the idea that reasonably paid work should be widely available. The result of such a policy, many are likely to think, will be to reduce substantially the extent of poverty and thus the number of people who lack the self‐respect and proud independence necessary to be democratic citizens. With regard to secure work, the point is likely to be much the same: most middle‐class people can understand the importance of economic security since it plays a substantial role in their own well‐being. For similar reasons, they are likely to be skeptical of the value of governmental agencies giving great benefactions, that is, favors, to particular business interests. This smacks too much of not playing by the rule that we all ought to work for a living and thus deserve what we get.

The argument might be further embroidered but the essential point has already been made: A secure and confident middle class will seek to build coalitions that, in the context of a separation of powers system, will increase the likelihood that the definition large asset‐controllers give of their interests will, at least, not be hostile to efforts to strengthen democracy, and may well support them. In particular, controllers of such assets will, as a result of the political efforts of such a middle class, at least be likely to acquiesce in policies aimed at securing a modest measure of economic equality and a substantial measure of political equality, both of which democracy requires. If this is so, a key to constituting an attractive form of democratic capitalism is the state of the middle class. This conclusion supports a proposition to which many have been drawn: For there to be a well‐ordered democratic capitalism, there must be a well‐ordered middle class. It is worth noting here that a strong labor movement will help to foster a secure and confident middle class because many of its members work in occupations that are unionized or that present no overwhelming obstacles to being so, most notably in the public sector (Pierson 1991 ; Greenberg 1995 ). How, in turn, to secure such a class looks to be a, perhaps the, crucial question for a political theory of capitalist democracy that meets the minimum standards of popular self‐government.

It is worth adding here that, in addition to efforts to broaden the interests of the propertied, we might also look to an institutional design that gives them fewer political advantages than they now possess. In particular, we might look to diluting Madisonian‐style advantages. If we can do so, it will matter less to the success of democratic government that the propertied have narrow interests.

4 Conclusion

The problem of the relation between capital and democracy cannot be understood by any of the following simplicities: That capitalists control an ostensibly democratic politics; that controllers of large‐scale capital present no special problem for democratic polities since they are part of a pluralist political order; that the problem of the political privilege of those who control large‐scale productive assets can be solved by ending private ownership of the means of production; that the task of democrats is to rein in as much as possible the political activities of those who control capital; and that there is little of value that can be done to harness better the political energies of large asset‐controllers in democratic political orders. Instead, it is both possible and necessary to harness the political energy of capital and the key to that is to broaden their interests. Such a broadening, in turn, requires a secure and confident middle class. Otherwise said, the question of the political role of capital is a problem in regime analysis. We will understand more about what is possible and desirable if we think through how a democratic regime can be best constituted. 14 An essential point in this regard is that democratic theorists are mistaken when they argue that the more direct citizen political participation in governing there is the better. As Walter Lippmann argued, that the people will rule has long been settled, at least in the West (Lippmann 1937 ). The essential question is no longer whether they should rule but how they shall do so. In the case of the control and use of the political energies of capital, the problem for democratic practice is how to organize the rule of the people so that it promotes broad interests on the part of capital. It is unlikely that any sort of increase in the political participation of the people will increase the likelihood of this occuring. In a well‐ordered democratic regime, the people must attend to particular matters which it is the task of democratic theory to help define through an account of the political constitution of democracies.

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For an example that comes perilously close to saying this explicitly, see Barber ( 1984 ), preface to the fourth printing, where Barber says “if democracy is made to work politically, the American people will be positioned to choose the economy they deem compatible with their liberties and with prosperity” (see also Barber 1986 ).

On the interconnections between other kinds of political and economic orders see Kaminski ( 1991 ) and Kornai ( 1992 ).

For some examples of these economies in speech, see Roemer ( 1994 ) and Dahl ( 1985 ). For the original, focusing on polities in speech, see Plato ( 1968 ).

Except in wartime.

Harold Wilson, a British prime minister in the last half of the twentieth century, said that “all political history shows that the standing of a government and its ability to hold the confidence of the electorate at a general election depend on the success of its economic policy.” Quoted in the New York Times , 10 August, 1990.

See footnote 14 below.

For an extended discussion of Madison's political theory, see Nedelsky ( 1990 ); Banning ( 1995 ); McCoy ( 1989 ); Elkin ( 1996 , 2001 ).

For a very useful discussion on this point—a discussion I have learned much from—see Jennifer Nedelsky ( 1990 ).

On faction, see below.

I have elsewhere discussed in some detail the content of the public interest. See Elkin ( 2001 , 2006 ).

Following Madison, we may say that a faction is a group of people united by “some common impulse of passion, or of interest adverse” to the rights of the citizenry and the permanent interests of the community (Madison 1987 , no. 10).

For some evidence, see Lowi ( 1979 ) and Elkin ( 1987 ).

This is the implication of the original argument for broadening stock ownership by Kelso and Adler ( 1958 ).

Note here that the problem in party‐corporatist regimes of how to broaden the interests of capital will differ from how this can be done in the United States and in other commercial republican regimes. In party‐corporatist regimes, there are at least two reform paths to take: (1) attempt to increase the ability and interest of senior civil servants to resist narrow definitions of the interests of capital; and (2) attempt to increase the likelihood that parties of both the left and the right will believe that significant private ownership of the means of production is acceptable but that big business' conception of how to run such a system should not be taken at face value.

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Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

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.

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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.

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Political Theory

Submission Guidelines

The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory

Introduction

Political Theory in/of Political Science Present

Political Theory in/of Political Science Past

Political Theory in/of the Future

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

Toward a Political Theory/Political Science for the Future

43 Political Theory and Political Economy

1 Capitalist Democracies as They Are

2 Capitalist Democracies as They Might Be

3 Broadening the Interests of the Propertied

4 Conclusion

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Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

100 Political Philosophy Research Paper Topics

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