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UTS Politik
UTS Politik
In the light of our discussion, it is clear that for the first time in nearly a
century, political philosophy is in a reasonably good health. It has survived some
of the fiercest attacks, and built up an impressive tradition of inquiry. That is
hospitable to new experiential material and disciplinary alliances. Although the
triumphalist 1980s displayed unjustified arrogance towards their predecessors in
the 1950s and 1960s, and although some of the latter in turn have sometimes
taken an uncharitable view of the achievements of their successors, there is now a
better appreciation of the coherence and continuity of political philosophy sonce
1945. If the discipline is to continue its progress, it should be ready to meet new
challenges and suitably to reappraise its theoretical tools. Of the many challenges
facing it today and likely to grow with time, two deserve particular attention.
There are also several others, such as the increasing dissolution of the nation-state
into both larger and narrower units, changes in the nature and content of the
political, both the repressive and the emancipatory potential of the increasing plea
for state intervention in social issues that have hitherto belonged to the private
realm, and the restructuring of civil society, all of which affect the subject-matter
of political philosophy as it has been defined for the past four centuries, but I will
ignore these aand related challenges.
First, as we saw earlier, contemporary political philosophy is characterized
by at least four different views on its nature and scopre. Some of these are deeply
mistaken and in need of reconsideration. Political philosophy can never be merely
municipal and interpretive, the former because one cannot philosophize about
political life without some conception of what it is to be human and thereby
introducing an inescapable universal dimension, the latter because a society’s
moral and political structure is never homogeneous and therefore every
interpretation of it necessarily involves criticims and choice which, if they are not
to be based on the political philosopher’s personal preferences with all their
attendant difficulties, require clearly stated and defended moral and political
principles. A comunity’s self-understanding is not our there waiting for to be
discovered and elucidated; it is necessarily constructed from a specific standpoint.
It is striking that the thought of Michael Walzer, the ablest current advocate of the
municipal and interpretive conception of political philosophy, is undergirded by a
host of universalist and prescriptive claims (Carens 1995; Barry 1991). As for the
postmodernist view of political philosophy, especially the version familiarized by
Rorty, it is underpinned by a municipal and interpretive conception of political
philosophy, and open to the same objections. Since it cannot rise above the
prevailing form of communal self-understanding, this view of political philosophy
also lacks the capacity to probe the latter’s ambiguities, tensions and partiality,
and contains a deep positivist bias.
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Tantangan Baru